Ever since 1950, ‘Velikovsky’ has been a household name, associated with a set of adventurous but highly unorthodox claims that remain contested today.

In his writings, Immanuel Velikovsky documented his ideas with copious references, but gave the impression that the ideas themselves were the spontaneous fruits of his own creative mind. As it happens, however, almost every generation since the Enlightenment had its own ‘Velikovsky’, advancing remarkably similar ideas. This is true to the extent that virtually none of Velikovsky’s core hypotheses were original.

Who were these earlier ‘Velikovskys’?

In 1655, the French lawyer and theologian Isaac de la Peyrère (1596-1676) departed from Christian consensus with his ‘pre-Adamite’ thesis. Taking a cue from earlier Jewish discourse, de la Peyrère reasoned that a race of humans had existed long before Adam and the ‘creation of the world’ as narrated in Genesis really concerned only the latest episode in a continuous cycle of cosmic destruction and creation. Velikovsky opened Worlds in Collision with a discussion of such ‘world ages’ and wrote a chapter entitled ‘The Pre-Adamite Age’ that remains unpublished today.

In the 1680s, the English theologian Thomas Burnet (c. 1635? – 1715) argued that the earth’s rotational axis had originally been perpendicular to the ecliptic plane, producing a uniform season and climate on earth, until the deluge precipitated the tilting of the axis: ‘… the Position of the primæval Earth was strait, its Axis being always placed and retained in a parallel Line to the Axis of the Ecliptick, whence all the Motions of the Heavens were uniform, and the Course of the Year was pure and unmixed, without Differences of Seasons’. Changes in the inclination of the earth’s rotational axis were a staple of Velikovsky’s theories.............................