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Velikovsky: The Bonds of the Past
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"Immanuel Velikovsky arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas, which might be summarised as:
Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both before and during humankind's recorded history.
There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record (here Velikovsky was advocating Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions) and archeological record. The extinction of many species had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian means.
The catastrophes that occurred within the memory of humankind are recorded in the myths, legends and written history of all ancient cultures and civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to alleged concordances in the accounts of many cultures and proposed that they referred to the same real events. For instance, the memory of a flood is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek legend of Deucalion, and in the Manu legend of India. Velikovsky put forward the psychoanalytic idea of "Cultural Amnesia" as a mechanism whereby these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.
The causes of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth and other bodies within the solar system — not least what are now the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, these bodies having moved upon different orbits within human memory.
To explain the celestial mechanics necessary to permit these changes to the configuration of the solar system, Velikovsky thought that electromagnetic forces might somehow play a greater role to counteract gravity and orbital mechanics.
Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:
A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" body, before its current solar orbit.
That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn's entering a nova state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel catastrophe.
Jupiter had been the culprit for the catastrophe that saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Periodic close contacts with a cometary Venus (which had been ejected from Jupiter) had caused the Exodus events (c. 1500 BCE) and Joshua's subsequent "sun standing still" (Joshua 10:12 and 13) incident.
Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.
As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the early 1940s. However, within his lifetime, whilst he continued to research, expand and lecture upon the details of his ideas, he released only selected portions of his work to the public in book form:[citation needed]
Worlds in Collision (1950) discussed the literary and mythical records of the "Venus" and "Mars" catastrophes
Portions of his Revised Chronology were published as Ages in Chaos (1952), Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and His Time (1978) (The related monograph Oedipus and Akhenaten, 1960, posited the thesis that pharaoh Akhenaten was the prototype for the Greek mythic figure Oedipus.)
Earth in Upheaval (1955) dealt with geological evidence for global natural catastrophes.
Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never published, and the available archived manuscripts are much less developedOf all the strands of his work,
Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of electromagnetism in astronomy. Although he appears to have retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph Cosmos without Gravitation, no such retreat is apparent in Stargazers and Gravediggers. Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and physicists from its first presentation. However, other Velikovskian enthusiasts such as Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Wal Thornhill, and Donald E. Scott have embraced and developed these themes to propose a scenario where stars are powered not by internal nuclear fusion, but by galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. Such ideas do not find support in the conventional literature."
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