Ancient Catastrophes Caused By Heavenly Bodies, Testing The Velikovsky Chronology

Immanuel Velikovsky at the 1974 American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in San Francisco

His books use comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (including the Old Testament) to argue that Earth has suffered catastrophic close-contacts with other planets (principally Venus and Mars) in ancient times. In positioning Velikovsky among catastrophists including Hans Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and Johann Gottlieb Radlof, the British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier noted “… Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists …; he is the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times and probably earlier.”

Trevor Palmer illustrates half a century of Catastrophism study, with those who contributed to its development. Starting with the founder of interdisciplinary thought, Immanuel Velikovsky, he covers many of the conflicting theories of how our world has been shaped. Against and above conventional wisdom, many of Velikovsky’s predictions have been proven by modern space research.

Sadly those who promote the Standard Model refuse to respond to obvious discrepancies and what might be considered better alternatives. We can only hope the next generation is inspired by those in Trevor’s talk who dared to be different.

Producer: Trevor Palmer

Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology for ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel and other cultures of the ancient Near East. The revised chronology aimed at explaining the so-called “dark age” of the eastern Mediterranean (ca. 1100 – 750 BCE) and reconciling biblical history with mainstream archaeology and Egyptian chronology.

In general, Velikovsky’s theories have been ignored or vigorously rejected by the academic community. Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained an enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment for Velikovsky by orthodox academia. The controversy surrounding his work and its reception is often referred to as “the Velikovsky affair” 

Daphne Chappell uses her well-illustrated talk to assess methodology used by revisionists to resolve the ‘problems’ with Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory. She analyses the assumptions about reign-length, alter egos and looks at sources of reference material. The SIS-published chronologies are compared for overlaps and incompatibilities.

Velikovskyism

Velikovsky inspired numerous followers during the 1960s and 1970s. Alfred de Grazia dedicated a 1963 issue of his journal, American Behavioral Scientist to Velikovsky, published in an expanded version as a book, The Velikovsky Affair, in 1966. The Skeptical Inquirer in a review of a later book by de Grazia, Cosmic Heretics (1984), suggests that de Grazia’s efforts may be responsible for Velikovsky’s continuing notability during the 1970s.

The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) was “formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr Immanuel Velikovsky”. The Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences (ISIS) is a 1985 spin off the SIS, founded under the directorship of David Rohl, who had come to reject Velikovsky’s Revised Chronology in favour of his own “New Chronology”.

Kronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis was founded in 1975 explicitly “to deal with Velikovsky’s work”. Ten issues of Pensée: Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered appeared in 1972 to 1975. The controversy surrounding Velikovsky peaked in the mid 1970s and public interest declined in the 1980s, and by 1984, erstwhile Velikovskyist C. Leroy Ellenberger had become a vocal critic of Velikovskian catastrophism. Some Velikovskyist publications and authors such as David Talbott remain active into the 2000s.

Velikovsky’s ideas have been almost entirely rejected by mainstream academia (often vociferously so) and his work is generally regarded as erroneous in all its detailed conclusions. Moreover, scholars view his unorthodox methodology (for example, using comparative mythology to derive scenarios in celestial mechanics) as an unacceptable way to arrive at conclusions. The late Stephen Jay Gouldbo offered a synopsis of the mainstream response to Velikovsky, writing, “Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan — although, to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong … Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends.”

Velikovsky’s bestselling and, as a consequence, most-criticized book is Worlds in Collision. Astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with others such as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, were highly critical of Macmillan’s decision to publish the work. The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were physically impossible, requiring planetary orbits that do not conform with the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum.

Velikovsky relates in his book Stargazers & Gravediggers how he tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However, this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s — and they had regarded the physics within it as absurd.[citation needed]

By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky’s work had permeated US society to the point where the American Association for the Advancement of Science felt obliged to address the situation, as they had previously done in relation to UFOs, and devoted a scientific session to Velikovsky, featuring (among others) Velikovsky himself and Professor Carl Sagan. Sagan gave a critique of Velikovsky’s ideas (the book version of Sagan’s critique is much longer than that presented in the talk; see below). His criticisms are available in Scientists Confront Velikovsky and as a corrected and revised version in the book Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. Sagan’s arguments were aimed at a popular audience and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that were used by Velikovsky’s followers to attempt to discredit his analysis. Sagan rebutted these charges, and further attacked Velikovsky’s ideas in his PBS television series Cosmos, though not without reprimanding scientists who had attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s ideas.

It was not until the 1980s that a very detailed critique of Worlds in Collision was made in terms of its use of mythical and literary sources, when Bob Forrest published a highly critical examination of them (see below). Earlier in 1974, James Fitton published a brief critique of Velikovsky’s interpretation of myth (ignored by Velikovsky and his defenders), whose indictment began: “In at least three important ways Velikovsky’s use of mythology is unsound. The first of these is his proclivity to treat all myths as having independent value; the second is the tendency to treat only such material as is consistent with his thesis; and the third is his very unsystematic method.” A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky’s ex-associate, and Kronos editor, C. Leroy Ellenberger, in his A Lesson from Velikovsky.

More recently, the absence of supporting material in ice-core studies (such as the Greenland Dye-3 and Vostok cores) has removed any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the later Holocene period. However, tree-ring expert Mike Baillie would give credit to Velikovsky after disallowing the impossible aspects of Worlds in Collision: “However, I would not disagree with all aspects of Velikovsky’s work. Velikovsky was almost certainly correct in his assertion that ancient texts hold clues to catastrophic events in the relatively recent past, within the span of human civilization, which involve the effects of comets, meteorites and cometary dust. . . . But fundamentally, Velikovsky did not understand anything about comets; . . . . He did not know about the hazard posed by relatively small objects . . . . This failure to recognize the power of comets and asteroids means that it is reasonable to go back to Velikovsky and delete all the physically impossible text about Venus and Mars passing close to the earth. . . . In other words, we can get down to his main thesis, which is that the Earth experienced dramatic events from heavenly bodies particularly in the second millennium BC.”

Velikovsky’s revised chronology has been rejected by nearly all mainstream historians and Egyptologists. It was claimed, starting with early reviewers, that Velikovsky’s usage of material for proof is often very selective. In 1965 the leading cuneiformist Abraham Sachs, in a forum at Brown University, discredited Velikovsky’s use of Mesopotamian cuneiform sources. Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs’ attack. In 1978, following the much-postponed publication of further volumes in Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos series, the United Kingdom-based Society for Interdisciplinary Studies organised a conference in Glasgow specifically to debate the revised chronology. The ultimate conclusion of this work, by scholars including Peter James, John Bimson, Geoffrey Gammonn, and David Rohl, was that the Revised Chronology was untenable. The SIS has continued to publish updates of this ongoing discussion, in particular the work of historian Emmet Sweeney.

While James credits Velikovsky with “pointing the way to a solution by challenging Egyptian chronology”, he severely criticized the contents of Velikovsky’s chronology as “disastrously extreme”, producing “a rash of new problems far more severe than those it hoped to solve” and claiming that “Velikovsky understood little of archaeology and nothing of stratigraphy.”

Bauer accuses Velikovsky of dogmatically asserting interpretations which are at best possible, and gives several examples from Ages in Chaos