Velikovsky's Question: Why Isn't Planetary Catastrophe Remembered?

[Brigit]

My husband's boss comes from a family of four children. Their parents were happily married until their father began drinking. He drank to such excess that I don't want to repeat the trauma that they experienced as a young family. By the time they were teenagers his father became so angry one night that he burned the house down. One of the sons began drinking early in his own life and is now in prison for the second time. My husband's boss is the other brother. He has never taken a drop of alcohol in his entire life, and today is a trusted manager who everyone essentially confides in about any problem they are having. His management style is one of listening and understanding first, then of problem solving. In other words, he is a stable and cheerful and reliable pillar for those under him within the company, without allowing any of the numbers or objectives to come up short. His family is grown now with children and professions of their own.

This is not such a unique outcome. People's responses to the problems within their own upbringing are not predictable through psychoanalytical theory. And it may be put forward that there were more than two outcomes possible. Between one reaction, "to help (a humanitarian reaction), and the other reaction...to harm (a destructive reaction)" there may be an entire spectrum of responses to the same past trauma.

Therefore, psychoanalytical theory, although thankfully informing Velikovsky's particular intuitions and inspiring his search by other means, is not a respectful approach to understanding the uniqueness of each culture, of each nation. To approach the real story of the past it is necessary to actually listen to each individual nation, tribe and tongue, and crucially, to make note of the vast differences between their material cultures and their laws.

The search for commonalities between myths, legends, and folk tales is the route that Dave Talbott and others took to continue the psychoanalytical experiment on humanity that Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky began. The archetypes, although heavily weighted towards Greek and Roman culture, are incredibly useful tools in finding the common themes of world catastrophes found in the legends and sacred stories of the people. It gives a more objective standard to what can be a subjective pursuit. This approach has been highly successful, although it is limited to certain past cataclysms, and does not tell us anything about the actual day-to-day lives of any of these ancient people, nor does it tell us that all scivilizations are monumental, or centralized, or caste systems. Those kinds of questions are outside of the domain of applicability, if you will, of the commonalities of the mythical archetypes.

I want to compare two competely different American cultures from the Western Hemisphere, whose ancestors clearly experienced the same cataclysms, and we'll see the extent of the differences between their practices and material culture that I think show that generalizations of "repressed trauma/desire to revisit harm" are not helpful. The experiences of global catastrophes are there, shown in their legends, and retrieved enchantingly and masterfully by Velikovsky and Talbott and others. But the response is simply nothing alike.

[Brigit]

In the linked-above lecture, "Cultural Amnesia", Velikovsky has this to say about American myths and legends "from the North-Pacific Coast of North America all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America":

• "When I read Brasseur’s books on the ancient history of Mexico...[h]e reported that cataclysmic events had been found in Mexican lore, events also described by several Spanish historians of the sixteenth century. These were events of great violence.
  
  Mountains rose and moved; many volcanoes erupted from the North-Pacific Coast of North America all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. The ocean rose like a wall and moved, accompanied by terrific winds.
  
  Fiery bodies were seen fighting in the sky. Stones descended from above, followed by rains of naphtha. Men were maddened by the din and the paramount danger. Houses collapsed and were carried away, hurricanes tore out great trees of whole forests with their roots. If such a great catastrophe occurred today, what impression would it leave in the survivors?"

I can say that in my collection and reading of North American Indian legends over the years, in particular those associated with a local land formation like a mountain or rivercourse, often enough there are elements within the story which include lightning bolts, or huge heads being thrown around in the sky, or moons coming close, or arrow chains, or other plasma formations.

As has been widely covered and advanced by the Thunderbolts Project and the Electric Universe, the petroglyphs which are found all over the world closely resemble plasma formations as they progress in the lab in incredibly high-energy discharge experiments.

When scaling these phenomena up to sky-spanning events, they would have lasted for hours, days, or weeks. It is for this reason that I feel Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky can be affirmed in his conclusion: the tribes of South, Central, and North America are the descendants of survivors of interplanetary discharges, and these are preserved -- in various stages of clarity and detail -- in their myths and legends.

Yet their cultures and practices are as different as those of the Navajo/Dine are from the Aztecs and Toltecs.

It is instead as Velikovsky partially concedes concerning psychoanalytic theory: there is no way to predict whether the response to a catastrophic period of trauma will be "to help (a humanitarian reaction), and the other reaction...to harm (a destructive reaction)."

[nick c]

Yet their cultures and practices are as different as those of the Navajo/Dine are from the Aztecs and Toltecs.

If there were not differences than they would not be different cultures, they would be the same. The process of analysis should be directed toward finding commonalities between cultures, especially things that are unusual or out of the ordinary.

Just to be brief, I will off the top of my head cite one commonality between Central American and Mexican cultures to North American native tribes, they both conducted human sacrifices directed or inspired by celestial positions and often times - the planet Venus.
Venus In Mesoamerica: Rain, Maize, Warfare, and Sacrifice

Pawnee mythology The Skidi Pawnee continued these practices well into the 19th C, much to the horror of the US government.


A more detailed comparison would no doubt yield more parallels.

Another example: monstrous creatures, dragons or demons throwing thunderbolts or fire. in the sky and threatening to destroy the world. I inquired of AI for some examples:

Gaasyendietha:
This Seneca sea serpent is described as a fire-breathing, flying, and swimming creature.
Uktena:
A horned serpent in Cherokee mythology, the Uktena is often portrayed as a powerful, fearsome being that Cherokee heroes must battle.
Piasa Bird:
This Illini dragon is depicted in murals painted by Native Americans on bluffs above the Mississippi River.
Thunderbird:
While not a dragon, the Thunderbird, a giant, colorful bird, is a common and powerful figure in many Native American cultures and can be seen as a mythical equivalent to a dragon.
Quetzalcoatl:
While an Aztec god, not specifically a dragon, Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, is a powerful figure associated with wind, air, and learning, and can be seen as a similar mythical entity.

[Brigit]

inre: a.i. results

I like spaceweather's statement: "This is an AI Free Zone: Text created by Large Language Models is spreading across the Internet. It's well-written, but frequently inaccurate. If you find a mistake on Spaceweather.com, rest assured it was made by a real human being."

[nick c]

inre: a.i. results

Despite the fears of a future Cylon takeover, I think that AI is a convenient research tool like an encyclopedia or Wikipedia, keeping in mind that it has limitations and is subject to the usual biases. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Brigit]

nick c says "Despite the fears of a future Cylon takeover, I think that AI is a convenient research tool like an encyclopedia or Wikipedia, keeping in mind that it has limitations and is subject to the usual biases. Nothing more, nothing less."

So true. The wild speculations and constant claims of future capabilities are all around us right now, so naturally are the "fears of future Cylon takeover." We seem to be in the middle of the most intensive, wall-to-wall marketing cycles I have ever seen in my entire life. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being promised in order to roll out new data centers for NVDIA products. All the while, a.i. has never made a profit, but in fact actually loses money. Also, as we all know, these data centers will require as much or more electrical power than is generated in any given region/state.

Anyway, while it may be convenient to have an a.i. app. aggregate normal search engine results, I think what Spaceweather.com is saying is that these summaries often have inaccuracies, and it is still necessary to check everything produced by a Large Language Model or a.i., whether it's coding, translations, or search result summaries.

I may not always provide references for statements, but if I am ever asked I can always do that. I have always felt that anyone here posting can be asked to give references. I have wondered about this -- Nick c, will you as a moderator continue to ask for references, even if someone is quoting what a Large Language Model has published ? Has Thunderbolts had any discussions about that, that you can share with me ?

[Brigit]

nickc says, "If there were not differences than they would not be different cultures, they would be the same. The process of analysis should be directed toward finding commonalities between cultures, especially things that are unusual or out of the ordinary." emphasis added

If it's alright I would love to clarify something: The process of analysis of the myths, legends, and folk tales of the ethnic peoples from the various regions of the world yeild extraordinary similarities. It is from those points of agreement in the legends that past catastrophic events can be recognized, as the work of Velikovsky and later that of Dave Talbott, et al shows. However the Material Cultures, laws, ceremonies, celebrations, holidays, marriages, units of measurements, mint or currency, private property, burials, types of dwellings and meeting places, and all of the other distinctive traits of an individual society cannot be reliably predicted on the basis of the survival of traumatic global events, in my view.

And Velikovsky in the above linked essay**, in my opinion, seems to have acknowledged this distinction between trauma survivors.



**ref: https://www.varchive.org/lec/lethbridge/amnesia.htm
"The recognition of past cataclysms opens new vistas in all fields of inquiry, even in morals and ethics. I wish to draw your attention to a book by Pitirim Sorokin9 in which he discussed calamities like world wars and famine. He discovered that two reactions occur. One reaction is to help (a humanitarian reaction), and the other reaction is to harm (a destructive reaction); he saw evidence for this in the excesses of the Russian Revolution." ~Dr Immanuel Velikovsky

[Brigit]

The themes and leitmotifs within the myths of the Americas converge in astonishing ways around planets, thunderbolts and lightning, as shown by Velikovsky, later as thoroughly developed by Talbott, et al, and physically demonstrated by the Electric Universe work with high energy plasma phenomena. I only wish to suggest, with gratitude for your patient forebearance, that it may not be justified to entirely leave aside the vast differences between the Material Cultures of the North American Indian tribes and those of Central and South American Indian tribes.

If, as Velikovsky himself even granted, there are different and indeed opposite responses by survivors of trauma, then it is in fact of the highest significance that the North American Indian tribes were not engaged in building monumental structures, nor were they (for the most part) involved in human sacrifice.

It is always possible to find exceptions, as there have been perhaps hundreds of different known tribes in N.A.; but these exceptions will be found to be only a tiny minority. As for monumental structures, we have evidence of the Moundbuilders, but the various studies on the purposes and practices surrounding the mounds appear to me to be quite speculative -- at least in comparison to the clear uses of the step-pyramidal structures in the southern hemisphere, where as many as 80,000 human victims were sacrificed in a single day, and mounds of skulls and pictures of hearts being ripped out are also explicit reminders of the brutal and violent ceremonies of the Aztecs, etc..

Here is something very interesting to consider: there is evidence that the tribes in North America were at times visited by these monumental cultures, and they have memories of having been enslaved to build stone palaces and temples. But they -- and this is according to their own oral records -- resisted these invasions and greatly opposed the practice of human sacrifice. In fact, they saw the Thunderbeings as having struck these kinds of enemies with lightning, delivering them from harm. (Lightning = deliverance from danger/giant creatures/bad guys)

On one continent, the stories of past electrical catastrophes were kept through storytelling between generations around fires in the wintertime, often imbued with spiritual meanings, with wry humor and oft with hilarity, and with guidance for living a good life, while on the other continent, the stories of past planetary catastrophes were re-enacted in extraordinarily gruesome ways in the context of monumental structures and caste systems.





ref: Southern California legend, woops -- will locate
ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1U2Gp2dtN0
347,392 views Jul 10, 2023
dur 15:24
"In this video Navajo Historian, Wally Brown, teaches the traditional Navajo teachings surrounding Chaco Canyon.
It's an ugly history and goes against the popular opinion of anthropologists.
The oral stories surrounding the Anasazi people paint a much different picture.
A violent people whose economy is based on slavery. A people who worshiped the darkness and participated in human sacrifice.
Most of our Navajo people know the stories we have are different than the popular narrative from the anthropologists.
We travel to Chaco and walked through the ruins. Through the "Place of Crying"."

[nick c]

Brigit,
I think to some extent, you are putting emphasis on observations of individual actions and are not seeing the "forest for the trees." The amnesia is a collective phenomena. The manifestations on an individual level will not appear under normal circumstances, in fact, often times individual expressions of the collective amnesia appear in schizophrenics. But we certainly cannot look at an individual who is misbehaving, being selfish, or acting in an antisocial manner and attribute that to "mankind in amnesia". But ritual ceremonies up to and including war, are certainly manifestations of collective amnesia. We now have the ability to use missiles or bombers (with a star painted on them) that have the potential to bring mass destruction from the sky. Are not the victims of war a form of human sacrifice?

It is a trait of the collective mind and results in behaviors that serves to reenact and repeat the original trauma. We see it in rituals, wars, and actions of nations or societies. Many of us erect a conifer tree with a star at its top, and decorated with sparkling lights in late December. This was originally a part of the Saturnalia and was later incorporated by Christians. The star at the top represents the immovable god at the top of the world mountain which was a sparkling plasma formation connecting the stationary god to the Earth's north pole. The removal of that god was a time of great sorrow, the end of the golden age and the beginning of a series of catastrophes.

After the catastrophes, humans were severely traumatized. Wars were fought by Kings who assumed the role of the planetary gods and rained destruction on the enemy who needed to be punished for their transgressions.

The ritual of human sacrifice was the most common reaction to the survivors and their descendants. Virtually all human cultures worldwide originally practiced human sacrifice. Hercules was credited with ending it for the Greeks, while in Egypt it ended during the Old Kingdom, the Babylonians sacrificed on their ziggurats. The Egyptians sacrificed on their mastabas and step pyramids but ended the practice by the time they had built smooth sided pyramids. Abraham ended it for the Hebrews. In the Orient pagodas were originally used for sacrifice. It is highly probable that mounds served the same purpose. In the Americas the slaughtering continued into modern times. The Spanish conquistadors were horrified by the propensity of the Mayans and Aztecs to conduct sacrifices atop their step pyramids. The Pawnee tribe continued human sacrifices to the Morning Star well into the 19th Century, much to the chagrin of the US government. Other North Americans native tribes fought intertribal wars and commonly sacrificed prisoners.


Human Sacrifice in Ancient Cultures: A Historical Overview


The Creation of the Gods - Sacrifice as the Origin of Religion

[Brigit]

Thank you for the explanation and the interesting links. You gave me quite a lot to read, and I am still only most of the way through the Archaeologist .org article.

Two things.

• 1. This topic was in the news recently because of a story of human remains which were found in Guatemala. A comment by an expert on the subject "went viral" for fairly obvious reasons:
  • CBS News quotes archaeologist saying ancient child sacrifice wasn’t about violence
    ’It’s not that they were violent,’ an archaeologist said about child-sacrificing pre-Christian cultures of Guatemala. 'It was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.'
  I suppose this subject will cause ears to cock for a while.

• 2.The article on human sacrifice is actually fairly even-handed and does suggest the practice was rare in many regions, or that there is a paucity of actual evidence. For example, the Celts, a very broad Greek slang word for diverse people and languages across a vast region, has no less a historical persona than Julius Caesar to confirm that Celts were ritual takers of human life. The author seems cautious about this. In my view, the actual evidence in caves of human and horse bones sometimes has the sense of archaeologists following the Greek and Roman writers, rather than an actual discovery of ceremonial manstealing and murder. I think the article reflects a circumspection that leaves the questions of past cultures more open. Did Julius Caesar have a vested interest in making his military conquests more acceptable by painting the Barbarians a certain way? Did subsequent archaeologists follow the lead of Greek and Roman authorities, confirming the known writers, so revered during the Enlightenment period? These are questions for another time -- I know we will not come to an actual agreement and I accept the prevailing opinion is different to my own.
  
  I hope that this excellent resource linked by nick c can always provide a grounds for both common interest and for caution on this subject.

Regarding the trauma of the global cataclysms, discussed here, I'd like to share a quote by David Talbott that I find illuminating because it gives an astonishing and unsettling picture of what our forebears actually experienced, and the overwhelming evidence for it.

[Brigit]

This quote is taken from a 2016 Thunderbolts Project video called "Dave Talbott: Carved in Stone -- New Light on the Electric Universe".

This presentation talks about the unforgettable discovery of the convergence between the petroglyphs etched on rock around the world, and the highest energy plasma discharges being studied in Los Alamos Labs.

"The truth is that today's uneventful sky offers no analogy to the profound spectacles in the skies above our early forbearers. Earth-shaking electrical activity recorded on stone around the world and recounted in archetypal myths and symbols provoked a collective response from ancient people as if their lives depended on it. In fact the lives of millions of people did depend on their response to these events, since as Peratt himself acknowledged, the synchrotron radiation would have most likely been deadly."



ref: DAVID TALBOTT: Carved on Stone -- New Light on the Electric Universe | Thunderbolts Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piKuO4YeRFQ

[Brigit]

Just now I found this Thunderbolts Project video by Michael Armstrong. It is a very good overview of the Electric Universe perspective on both the (numerous) planetary catastrophes and the suggested downstream civilizational effects.

• Michael Armstrong: The ‘Culture Shock’ of Planetary Catastrophe | EU2015 talk
  sschirott May 11, 2016
  https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2016/0 ... 2015-talk/
  
  "The two most prominent themes in Electric Universe research are the growing knowledge of the role played by the electric force in nature, from microcosm to macrocosm and the global impact of ancient planetary catastrophe on humankind, affecting every culture on earth. In this presentation, Michael Armstrong will review the broad spectrum of human and cultural effects that followed from solar system instability and episodic catastrophe. These effects include earth’s environment and ecology, physical changes in human biology, striking shifts in collective, cultural orientation, and a profound impact on human thought and behavior.
  
  Michael Armstrong is an original member of the thunderbolts.info editorial staff and has a formal science background in chemistry. He has studied the catastrophism reconstruction model for over 40 years and has lectured on catastrophism material at an international conference sponsored by the province of Milano, Italy and hosted by the University of Milano/Bergamo. Michael is the producer of various related video material and publisher of the books Thunderbolts of the Gods, The Electric Sky, and The Electric Universe."

PS. As for me, Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory seems to be the real point of departure and difference at the moment. I wonder if it would be better to have a separate thread for discussion of Freud's Psychoanalysis. That might be a better place for any further discussion regarding the wide variety of responses to trauma, and what could be gained -- or lost -- when applying Psychoanalytic theory to history. I have never met anyone in my life who actually likes Freud or his theory, but I am from a different generation and these things happen. Perhaps anyone recalling going through the chapters on Skinner's Behaviourism in College might understand the sentiment...