Lew Rockwell site headlines Velikovsky Story today

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It's nice to see such a well-read site direct people to these areas. Nothing but increased awareness of these sciences will come of it--

Immanuel Velikovsky's Introduction to His 'In the Beginning'


An excerpt of the article:

This volume carries the name In the Beginning – the words with which the book of Genesis starts. The name seems appropriate because it describes the cosmic events which are narrated in the first book of the Hebrew Bible; but also because in it I speak of events that preceded those described by me in Worlds in Collision – thus the name of the book conveys to the reader the notion that here is an earlier history of the world compared with the story of Worlds in Collision; although it is the second volume in that series, in some sense it is the first volume, being the earlier story.

When the manuscript of Worlds in Collision was first offered to the publisher (Macmillan Company, New York) it contained a brief story of the Deluge and of the cataclysm that terminated the Old Kingdom in Egypt. But after one of the publisher’s readers suggested that the book should concentrate on one event, we compromised in presenting in the published volume two series of cataclysms – those that took place in the fifteenth century before the present era and were caused by the near-approaches of Venus, and those that occurred in the eighth century before this era and were caused by the near-approaches of Mars. The unused material was left for elaboration in a separate work on “Saturn and the Flood” and “Jupiter of the Thunderbolt.” The reception of Worlds in Collision, however, made me understand that I had already offered more than was palatable. And so I did not hurry with what I consider to be the heritage of our common ancestors, an inheritance of which my contemporaries in the scientific circles preferred not to partake.

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And another this weekend--


from the article:

The Earth Without the Moon

by Immanuel Velikovsky
The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive




The period when the Earth was Moonless is probably the most remote recollection of mankind. Democritus and Anaxagoras taught that there was a time when the Earth was without the Moon.(1) Aristotle wrote that Arcadia in Greece, before being inhabited by the Hellenes, had a population of Pelasgians, and that these aborigines occupied the land already before there was a moon in the sky above the Earth; for this reason they were called Proselenes.(2)

Apollonius of Rhodes mentioned the time “when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens, before the Danai and Deukalion races came into existence, and only the Arcadians lived, of whom it is said that they dwelt on mountains and fed on acorns, before there was a moon.” (3)

Plutarch wrote in The Roman Questions: “There were Arcadians of Evander’s following, the so-called pre-Lunar people.”(4) Similarly wrote Ovid: “The Arcadians are said to have possessed their land before the birth of Jove, and the folk is older than the Moon.” (5) Hippolytus refers to a legend that “Arcadia brought forth Pelasgus, of greater antiquity than the moon.”(6) Lucian in his Astrology says that “the Arcadians affirm in their folly that they are older than the moon.”(7)

Censorinus also alludes to the time in the past when there was no moon in the sky.(8)

I think there is increasing interest about these topics from the editors. It's the third one I'm aware of in just a few months. Having frequented the site for many years, it's nice to see a cross-threading of these concepts with their audience--

[JohnMT]

It seems to me that there is far, far too much evidence concerning the Moon's origins that bespeaks of comparative 'recentness' as opposed to the currently accepted 'Mars Crunch' conjecture that apparently occurred some 3.5 Billion years ago.

With respect to Velikovsky...'The Centre Holds'

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A third article makes the front page this weekend- this time regarding The Deluge


from the article

The scriptural deluge is regarded by historians and critical exegetes as a legendary product. “The legend of a universal deluge is in itself a myth and cannot be anything else.” (1) It is “most nakedly and unreservedly mythological.”

The tradition of a universal deluge is told by all ancient civilizations, and also by races that never reached the ability to express themselves in the written symbols of a language. It is found all over the world, on all continents, on the islands of the Pacific and Atlantic, everywhere. Usually it is explained as a local experience carried from race to race by word of mouth. The work of collating such material has repeatedly been done, and it would only fatigue the reader were I to repeat these stories as told in all parts of the world, even in places never visited by missionaries.(2)

The rest of the collected traditions are also not identical in detail, and are sometimes very different in their setting from the Noah story, but all agree that the earth was covered to the mountain tops by the water of the deluge coming from above, and that only a few human beings escaped death in the flood. The stories are often accompanied by details about a simultaneous cleavage of the earth.(3)

In pre-Columbian America the story of a universal flood was very persistent; the first world-age was called Atonatiuh, or the age that was brought to its end by a universal deluge. This is written and illustrated in the ancient codices of the Mexicans and was narrated to the Spaniards who came to the New Continent.(4) The natives of Australia, Polynesia, and Tasmania, discovered in the seventeenth century, related almost identical traditions.(5)

Clay tablets with inscriptions concerning the early ages and the deluge were found in Mesopotamia. Their similarity to the biblical account, and to the story of the Chaldean priest Berosus(6) who lived in the Hellenistic age, caused a great sensation at the end of the last century and the beginning of the current one. On this sensational discovery was based the sensational pamphlet Babel und Bibel by Friedrich Delitsch (1902) who tried to show in it that the Hebrews had simply borrowed this story, along with many others, from the Babylonian store of legends.

But if here and there the story of the flood could be said to have been borrowed by the scriptural writer from the Babylonians, and by some natives from the missionaries, in other cases no such explanation could be offered. The indigenous character of the stories in many regions of the world makes the borrowing theory seem very fragile.

Geologists see vestiges of diluvial rains all over the world; folklorists hear the story of a universal flood wherever folklore is collected; historians read of a universal flood in American manuscripts, in Babylonian clay tablets and in the annals of practically all cultured peoples. But the climatologists make it very clear that even should the entire water content of the atmosphere pour down as rain, the resulting flood could not have covered even the lowland slopes, far less the peaks of the mountains, as all accounts insist that this deluge did.

References

A. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la genese (Paris, 1901).

R. Andree, Die Flutsagen (1891); Sir J.G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament (London, 1918); M. Winternitz, Die Flutsagen des Alterthums und des Natuervoelker

E.g., the Malaya story in Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 29. s
[Cf. the Vatican Codex, first published by Humboldt, and the accounts of Ixtlilxochitl and Veytia among others.]

[Cf. A. C. Caillot, Mythes, legendes, et traditions des Polynesiens (Paris, 1914); H. H. Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood (London, 1887), pp. 455ff.]

Berosus’ story of the Deluge is quoted in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica Bk. IX, ch. 12, and in Cyril’s Contra Julianum, Bk. I.

Reprinted from the The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive.

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Another story posted for this weekend (12/24/2011):

The Light of the Seven Days

from the article:

...Isaiah in describing the days to come, when great changes in nature will take place, says that the earth will give its increase in abundance, and “the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of the seven days. . . .” (1)

One could think that “the light of the seven days” refers to the seven days of creation – however, the actual explanation appears to me to be different: the expression “the light of the seven days” refers, in my view, to the seven days preceding the Flood that are referred to in the verse: “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth. . . . And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the Flood were upon the earth.” (Genesis 7: 4, 10) It is not explained in the text – after seven days of what? But the rabbinical tradition relates that for seven days before the Deluge “the people heard a great commotion in the heaven,” that signified “the end of the age.”

The Talmudic tradition that often reaches much farther into the past than better known sources, like the books of the Scriptures, reveals in this instance a memory not suspected at the reading of the seventh chapter of Genesis. But in view of what we have brought out until now, and what we intend to illuminate on the following pages, the blinding light preceding the Deluge by seven days is an interesting and important detail. The world was in a dazzling light, sevenfold stronger than the light of the sun; the light was so strong and so brilliant day and night alike, that the sun was entirely overpowered by it; and in the days of Isaiah, thousands of years later, the memory of the light of the seven days was vivid in tradition, so that the prophet could refer to it in desiring to describe the solar light of the messianic age.(2)

Numerous Sanscrit texts assert that seven or even twelve suns shone just before the Deluge. “Being ignited, all of a sudden, the entire terrestrial sphere blazed forth.” Twelve suns shone with “dazzling radiance” and consumed the world. (The Skanda Purana in Shastri, The Flood Legend in Sanscrit Literature, p. 86). Cf. similar accounts in the Matsya Purana, ch. ii, the Padma Purana, ch. xxxvi, the Vishnu Purana, ch. iii, the Kalika Purana, ch. xxv, and in the Mahabharata, chapter “Matsyopakhyana.”

The light of the seven days was not of solar origin. Of what origin was it? Was it caused by brightly illuminated clouds of ionized hydrogen, or protons, hurled throughout the solar system and poured on earth? In the latter case they could have arrived from the present distance of Saturn in about a week, considering that the proton particles – ionized hydrogen – arrive from the sun in the space of twenty-five hours.(3) This is the time which elapses from a flare-up on the sun (protuberance) to the display of the polar lights – the aurora borealis.
The light of the seven days served the population of the world as a warning of some extraordinary events.(4)

References

Isaiah 30:26.

[A memory of the light of the seven days may be preserved in the Babylonian account of “flaming torches, lighting up the land with their brightness” just prior to the arrival of the waters of the Deluge. (The Epic of Gilgamesh, transl. by A. Heidel, tablet XI).]

The distance of Saturn from the Sun is about 9.5 astronomical units. See below, section “Saturn’s Golden Age.”

[A warning of seven days’ duration is also a feature of several of the Sanscrit accounts. See S. Shastri, The Flood Legend in Sanscrit Literature (Delhi, 1950), p. 30.]

Reprinted from the The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive.

December 24, 2011

Copyright © 2011 The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive

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The Age of Kronos

Saturn’s Golden Age

by Immanuel Velikovsky
The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive


The age that man later called the Age of Kronos (Saturn) was remembered with nostalgia as an age of bliss. References to the Age of Kronos in the ancient lore are very numerous.(1)

Hesiod tells of

A golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil: miserable age rested not on them . . . The fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things. . . .(2)

Similarly writes Ovid in the sixth book of his Metamorphoses:

In the beginning was the Golden Age, when men of their own accord, without threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right. . . . The earth itself, without compulsion, untouched by the hoe, unfurrowed by any share, produced all things spontaneously. . . . It was a season of everlasting spring.(3)

Rabbinical sources recount that men lived under very favorable conditions before the Deluge, and that these contributed to their sinfulness: “They knew neither toil nor care and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent.” (4)

The dominance of Saturn at some remote period in the history of the life of the peoples on Earth was of such pronounced and all-pervading character that the question arises whether the adventures of the planet going through many exploits could by itself be the full cause of the worship of the planet and the naming of the Golden Age “the Age of Kronos” (Saturn). Saturn exploded and caused the Earth to go through the greatest of its historical catastrophes, and this was completely sufficient to make of Saturn the supreme deity; but it appears that the Age of Saturn is a name for the epoch before the Deluge; after the Deluge Saturn, dismembered, almost ceased to exist as a planetary body and when at length it was reconstituted it was fettered by rings, and was far from being the dominant celestial body that would behoove it as the supreme deity of the epoch. The “Age of Kronos” is so glorious an age that it is hardly thinkable to connect it with the period after the Deluge. The wailing for Adonis, Tammuz of the Babylonians, or Osiris of the Egyptians, deplored the end of its dominance, not the beginning of it.

Then why was Saturn the supreme deity by whose name the great and glorious age before the Deluge was named? Because it removed Uranus from its role of chief deity, and to the onlookers on Earth, emasculated him? If the distances between the Earth and Saturn and Uranus were then what they are now, then such occurrences could scarcely be observable: Uranus is only faintly visible in the night sky over Mesopotamia in a most translucent night. Saturn is clearly visible but is not, for an unaided eye, a spectacle in the sky; it was more voluminous and more luminous before the Deluge, but if it moved on an orbit not too different from the present one, and the Earth were moving approximately in the same quarters where it moves today, then the surprise still persists as to how a body on a 30-years-long orbit could make the inhabitants of the Earth on its one-year-long orbit, regard it the supreme of all celestial bodies in the sky.

The appellative “sun” employed for Saturn could be explained by its unusual brightness when it exploded as a nova for a short time, actually for seven days, before the beginning of the Deluge on Earth. Assuming the length of the day in those times to have been not too dissimilar from its present value, the velocity of the moving masses being on the order of 100 kilometers a second or 8,600,000 kilometers in a 24-hour period, and the Earth and Saturn being on the closest points on their reciprocal orbits, or in conjuction (which is another surmise), in seven days a distance of ca. 60 million kilometers would be covered. On present orbits the distance between Saturn and Earth varies from 1,279 million kilometers at superior conjunction to 1,578 million kilometers at opposition; the lesser of these distances is ca. 21 times greater than that above calculated. This means also that unless the velocity of the ejected water was an order of magnitude greater than 100 km per second, the distance between Saturn and Earth must have been substantially smaller than it is at present.

I have rather arbitrarily selected the figure of 100 kilometers a second for the motion of the exploded material; today the escape velocity, or the speed required for a projectile on the surface of Saturn to leave the gravitational attraction of the planet is but 35 kilometers a second. For Jupiter the escape velocity is 59 kilometers a second. Assuming that Saturn was of a mass equal to that of Jupiter, the same figure would apply to it too. With 100 kilometers a second we have almost double the velocity of escape. The arbitrariness of the assumption of such velocity for our calculations is obvious. But if the set of figures is not too far from what they actually were, the conclusion would be that the distance of the Earth from Saturn was but a twentieth part of what it is now; this would permit us to speculate whether the Earth could at some early period have been a satellite of Saturn. The distance 60 million km is commensurate with the distance of Mercury from the Sun, or 58 million km; Jupiter’s satellites revolve at distances up to 24 million km from the primary. Theoretically Saturn could have satellites as large as the Earth: the Moon is only one-fortieth of the Earth in volume, whereas Saturn is 760 times larger than our planet.(5)

If such was ever the case, the “Age of Saturn” and the very unusual conditions under which mankind lived in it, and Saturn’s worship prior to the Deluge, would gain in meaning. The appellative “sun” used for Saturn would be understood as resulting not only from the great light it emitted for a short period when a nova, but also from its long-standing role of a primary for the revolving Earth.

If there is truth in the surmise, and nothing more it is than a surmise, that the Earth was once a satellite of Saturn, the latter must have revolved closer to the sun in order that the Earth should receive heat from it – Saturn exudes little heat(6) – and if the age of Kronos was a golden age, then it is also proper to assume that the conditions on the satellite Earth were not unfavorable for life. The geological record documents extreme climates for the past of the Earth – times when corals grew in the Arctic, and times when the Earth, partly even on the equator, was fettered by ice. Such climates require definitely abnormal conditions that could be created only by varying positions of our planet as an astronomical body. Therefore surmises as made in this section are not in conflict with geological and paleo-climatological records – yet it is not what could have taken place, but what took place, or the historical record, that is the proper goal for inquest. In the absence of direct indications we may only deal with the problem of the Earth as a satellite of Saturn as with a hypothetical construction, requiring further elucidation.

It is assumed by modern astronomy that the ninth planet, Pluto, was once a satellite of Neptune, which, having collided with Triton, another satellite of the planet, was thrown out of the ring and became an independent planet; the satellite Triton, however, as a consequence of the collision, reversed the direction of its revolution and became a retrograde satellite.(7) Another instance of a postulated conversion of a planetary satellite into an independent planet is discussed by Van Flandern and Harrington in their paper “A Dynamical Investigation of the Conjecture that Mercury is an Escaped Satellite of Venus,” Icarus 28 (1976), pp. 435-440.]. Thus the principle of a conversion of a satellite into a planet in its own right is not a phenomenon that is discussed here for the first time.

The Golden Age of Saturn or Kronos came to its end with the supreme god of that period, the planet Saturn, was broken up. The Age of Kronos was not the earliest age of which man retained some, however dim, memories – but farther into the past the dimness amounts almost to darkness.(8)

References

[On Kronos’ golden age see Plato, The Statesman. cf. P. Vidal-Naquet, “Plato’s Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities of the Golden Age and of History,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 98 (1978), pp. 132-141. Cf. Porphyry, De Abstinentia IV. 2; Teleclides, quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae VI. According to Macrobius, in the reign of Saturn there was no distinction between freedom and slavery (Saturnalia I. 7. 26) and all wealth was held in common (I. 84). Cf. Pompeius Trogus in Justin, bk. 43: “Saturn is said to have been so just that no one under him was a servant, nor did anyone have any private possessions, but all things were held in common and undivided, as if the inheritance of one belonged to all.” On Saturn’s reign in Italy, see Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanorum I. 36. 1; Vergil, Fourth Eclogue also, The Aeneid 11. 252 Silius Italicus 3. 84; 13, 63; 17. 380. Martial, Epigrams 63. Macrobius, Saturnalia VII. 26.].

Hesiod, Works and Days, transl. by Evelyn-White, 110.

Ovid, Metamorphoses Book I, tr. by Innes.

Ginzberg, Legends, I.

[The proportion of the Earth’s mass to that of Saturn is 1:90.]

[Analysis of the data collected by Pioneer 11 has led to an estimate of a temperature of ca. 10,000 degrees Kelvin in the interior of Saturn. There appears to be some net outflow of heat at the top of the atmosphere.]

[R. A. Lyttleton, “On the Possible Results of an Encounter of Pluto with the Neptunian System,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 97, p. 108. Cf. the criticism of Lyttleton’s suggestion of R. S. Harrington and T. C. van flandern in “The Satellites of Neptune and the Origin of Pluto,” Icarus reprinted in KRONOS V. 2. (1979), p. 76. The alternative postulated by the authors involves a near-encounter between Neptune and a hypothetical planet of two to five Earth masses. The authors’ suggestion that Pluto’s newly-discovered moon may once also have been an independent satellite of Neptune could help solve the question of the origin of the Earth’s companion.]

[Similar traditions of a golden age existed among the Sumerians (S. N. Kramer, “Sumerian Myths and Epic Tales” in J. Pritchard ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament [Princeton, 1950], pp. 37ff.), ancient Egyptians (F. Lenormant, Les Origines de l’histoire [Paris, 1880], vol. I, p. 58), Hindus (The Laws of Manu) and Chinese (Les Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien, transl. by E. Chavannes [Paris, 18xx], vol. I, pp. 17ff.) among others.].

Reprinted from the The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive.

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Again, this time with a documentary video--

http://lewrockwell.com/velikovsky/velikovsky11.1.html