{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS: } {S - } QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES & Q-C TEST PART 1: Introduction to the series PART 2: The Q-C Test C-Test Instructions: Fifteen Propositions 01. Gradualism 02. Independent Effects. 03. Terrestrial Isolation. 04. Gravitational Accumulations. 05. Elaborative Polymorphism. 06. Lunar Capture. 07. Perennial Geological Flux. 08. Uniformitarianism. 09. Evolution. 10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. 11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness. 12. Cultural and Institutional Invention. 13. Religious Sophistication. 14. Macrochronism. 15. Cross-validation of Time and Events. Q-Test Instructions: 15 Propositions 01. Quantavolution. 02. Holospherics. 03. Exoterrestrial Genesis. 04. Solaria Binaria. 05. Poly-episodic Catastrophes. 06. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture. 07. Disturbed Geological Columns. 08.Exponential Apocalypses. 09. Species Mass Changes and Extinction. 10. Schizoid Humanization. 11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation. 12. Cultural Hologenesis. 13. Divine Succession. 14. Microchronism. 15. Consonant Paradigmatics. PART 3: A Comment on the Q-C Test and Its Individual Items A ] C-TEST B ] Instructions: C ] ---- D ] ---- Fifteen Propositions E ] 01. Gradualism. F ] 02. Independent Effects. G ] 03. Terrestrial Isolation. H ] 04. Gravitational Accumulations. I ] 05. Elaborative Polymorphism. J ] 06. Lunar Capture. K ] 07. Perennial Geological Flux. L ] 08. Uniformitarianism. M ] 09. Evolution. N ] 10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. O ] 11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness. P ] 12. Cultural and Institutional Invention. Q ] 13. Religious Sophistication. R ] 14. Macrochronism. S ] 15. Cross-validation of Time and Events. T ] SCORE U ] Q-TEST Fifteen Propositions V ] 01. Quantavolution. W ] 02. Holospherics. X ] 03. Exoterrestrial Genesis. Y ] 04. Solaria Binaria. Z ] 05. Poly-episodic Catastrophes. AA ] 06. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture. BB ] 07. Disturbed Geological Columns. CC ] 08. Exponential Apocalypses. DD ] 09. Species Mass Changes and Extinction. EE ] 10. Schizoid Humanization. FF ] 11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation. GG ] 12. Cultural Hologenesis. HH ] 13. Divine Succession. II ] 14. Microchronism. JJ ] 15. Consonant Paradigmatics. KK ] SCORE PART 4: PROSPECTIVE CHANGES IN THE Q-C TEST 1. Placebos: 2. Religious Dimension: 3. Additional Items: 4. Merging: 5. Validation: 6. Randomizing and Cross-sectioning the Sample: 7. Extending the number of special disciplines implicated in the results: 8. Uses: a) Abetting theoretical studies. b) Discovery of trends in public awareness of science. c) Discovering relationship between creationist belief and quantavolutionary belief. d) Q-C scores as a function of age, occupation, religion, formal schooling. e) Discovery of trends in ideology of scientists. f) Discovery of deficiencies and contradictions of belief brought on by specialization. g) Enumerating the varieties of conventional and quantavolutionary thought. h) Fostering interdisciplinary communication. PART 5: The Scope of Quantavolution ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE: } {P PART 1: } {Q Introduction to the series } {C - } {T - } {S - } QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE PART ONE by ALFRED DE GRAZIA INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES Charles Darwin said in 1869 in the "Origin of Species" that "anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory." For a long time it seemed unwise to weigh too heavily the anomalies. Now the time has arrived when "unexplained difficulties" have become indeed too many for the Darwinian model of gradual incremental Evolution by natural selection to support. It should be replaced by a theory of Quantavolution. Or, at least, it should be placed up against a contrasting model. Quantavolution theory maintains that the world from its beginnings, including the world of life and humanity, has changed largely by quantum leaps, rather than by tiny increments over great stretches of time. The over two million words of this collection of works by the author and collaborators present the full range of ideas and phenomena that pertain to this theory. It may be well to warn promptly against claiming any relationship to quantum field theory in physics, although dire consequences to gravitation concepts may inhere, because of the seeming all- sufficiency of new electromagnetic theory. Such a global change of perspective requires a search for new evidence, a reformulation of old evidence, a reconsideration of anomalies, changes in meanings of words and phrases, explorations of etymologies of words and concepts, and a reexamination of assumptions, often when they are so accepted as to be trite and so trite as to be ignored -- removed, indeed, from our very cognitive structures. For example, there is an immense idea that persists in the literature to the effect that the Moon was torn from the Earth; this story is told not only by scientists such as George Darwin and George Fisher but also by myths of various cultures. Invariably, if a discussion of the matter is allowed at all, the posited event is positioned in time billions of years ago in the conventionally agreed upon youth of the Earth. Such an event, if it were to be treated seriously in an encyclopedia, would invade hundreds of articles with its causes and effects, changing practically every discipline in ways great and small. This set of works does not treat this idea alone as the true theory; but it considers it properly so serious as to warrant consideration under many headings. Such theories of "quantavolution" play a part in all discussions as to the origin of the other bodies of the solar system; one needs to explain the considerations that have led serious scholars to ask whether and how the planets originated from the Sun or, if not, then from one or another of themselves (such as Jupiter). Furthermore, the universal belief of ancient cultures and legends, that the gods were born, and were members of the same family, would begin to stir our interest. In many cultures, there is said to have been an original chaos or world vapor and a catastrophic event from which the father of the gods was born and from him (or her) was born the succession of gods. Why "born" instead of having always been in existence? It is not enough to say that these phrases are only analogies with the birth of animals in nature, or only fairy tales based on the analogies. Why should this be? Many analogies cover realities: might this be such a case? When one says, "Babies are born like puppies," one certainly is not denying that babies are born. And why were all of these gods identified, if of any importance, with the planets and other sky bodies? Most, if not all, cultures, have insisted that the planets and other sky bodies are divinities. Does this not lend support to the hypothesis of a true succession of birth throes in the heavens? Would this be evidence of a marvellous early philosophical synthesis connecting the birth of the cosmos to that of the members of an earthly family? No matter if the alarming thought should arise: the members of the solar system arose somehow from one another in a series of catastrophes that somehow early humankind had some knowledge or theory about. This is the kind of reasoning that unsettles many scientists and ordinary people who are content to rest with their ordinary perspectives on the universe; it is a "whistle-blower" on the prevailing paradigm of the sciences and the humanities, calling back the play to the line of scrimmage. The catastrophes responsible for the development of the theory of quantavolution were immensely greater than these, to be sure, but the elemental forces at work, the chemistry, the electricity, the psychic reactions are typical and homologous. As with a host of experiences of the past and present, the individual person must learn about catastrophes of the world --past, present, and future -- from the testimony of the rocks, the skies, the fossils, the carvings, the ruins, and then from recorded history and logical thought. The theory of Quantavolution deals with the behavior of substances of the real world so far as one can sense them. It proposes that change in nature and life occur largely as the result of catastrophic events; the events originate in the skies, which contain forces that are immeasurably greater than any in man or Earth and that are especially electrical. There are numerous "catastrophists" who have contributed to Q.. It is vital to appreciate that in Quantavolution, the word "catastrophe" loses its completely bad connotation; for what the world is today is an effect of catastrophe or, better, of Quantavolution, whose goodness and badness are intertwined and to be judged by the philosophy of good and bad consequences. The underlying philosophy of Quantavolution inclines toward a phenomenological instrumentalism. It regards a "truth" as a fitting and useful part of a system of such truths that constitute as a whole a possible tolerable outlook upon existence. The terms pragmatism, logical positivism, and operationism come to mind when reaching out for related perspectives. As with catastrophists, many philosophers might be cited. Among them would be Plato, Ockham, Bruno, Locke, Berkeley, Vico, Husserl, Freud, Dewey, Mead, Wittgenstein, and Bridgman. The day may not be far off when a new philosopher will draw upon the applicable contributions of such thinkers and the fast-growing body of quantavolutionary literature to produce a new philosophy of science. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE: } {P PART 2: } {Q THE Q-C TEST } {C - } {T - } {S - } QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE PART TWO by ALFRED DE GRAZIA THE Q-C TEST [Note: this letter was attached to the first experimental copies of the Q-C Test, July 1997.] ARE YOU CONVENTIONAL OR QUANTAVOLUTIONARY IN YOUR SCIENTIFIC OUTLOOK?? TEST YOURSELF HERE!!! Dear Student of Cosmic Affairs: It appears that the time may be right for a test to distinguish more or less conventional and evolutionary scientists and scholars from what, for lack of better, can be called quantavolutionary scientists and scholars. I have accordingly devised a test in two parts of 15 items each, to determine the relative position of a person in regard to these two paradigms. Your apparent interest in 'C'& 'Q' sugests that your self-analysis would be most helpful in observing trends in science. I would be much obliged if you would take a few minutes to circle the 30 items of the C-Q Test and remand it to me by e-mail, or otherwise. Although it would be wonderful to obtain a number of individualized replies to publish on http://www.grazian-archive.com I shall withhold your identity if you say so, and merely incorporate the results in the statistical analysis. In either event, I would welcome your comments. I shall be improving the test and perhaps merging the two parts with several additional "placebo" items before being done with it. Ought I to proceed with a public discussion of the test and its cumulative findings? Sincerely, Alfred de Grazia Mail: Aldegrazia@ aol. com P. O. BOX 1213, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA C-TEST To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Conventional Science Based on Fifteeen Primary Propositions of Conventional Science respecting natural and human history, and the degree of adherence of an individual to them. Instructions: There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Conventional Science, each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by scoring it from one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around the number or check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or knowledge or commitment one way or another regarding the statement. Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the principles of Conventional Science. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the principles of the version of Conventional Science expressed here. Actually, you would most likely be termed fully Conventional only if you agreed with all fifteen of the propositions. There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated. Fifteen Propositions 1. Gradualism. The world has changed almost entirely by small-scale, incremental transactions of small or large scope from earliest to present times. 1 2 3 4 5 2. Independent Effects. Changes in one field of scientific observation normally are weakly discernible in other areas and transfer into them slowly. 1 2 3 4 5 3. Terrestrial Isolation. From earliest times, Earth has developed its physical and vital forms from internal sources of materials and energy. 1 2 3 4 5 4. Gravitational Accumulations. The solar system originated in gravitational condensations from a gigantic dust cloud surrounding a young Sun. 1 2 3 4 5 5. Elaborative Polymorphism. Great variations of all inorganic and organic forms occurred by lawful, regular processes of nature. 1 2 3 4 5 6. Lunar Capture. The Moon formed during the condensation of gases and dust that originated the solar system and came within the gravitational grasp of the Earth. 1 2 3 4 5 7. Perennial Geological Flux. In due course, the Earth's surface has been altered by the gradual limited and calculable play of natural forces: waters, winds, pressures, and heat. 1 2 3 4 5 8. Uniformitarianism. Inorganic and organic nature have transmuted, with minor exceptions, at low, uniform rates for all of Earth history. 1 2 3 4 5 9. Evolution. The present species of life have unexceptionally developed from ever earlier forms that themselves originated by environmental adaptation in isolation and occasional successive chemical mutations. 1 2 3 4 5 10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In the course of evolution, natural selection, working at every vital level, eventuated in a being of high intelligence, capable of deliberate, rational decisions. 1 2 3 4 5 11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness. Gradually humans developed a sense of history that let them order their lives presently and for their future, and learned to exercise advanced faculties for pleasure. 1 2 3 4 5 12. Cultural and Institutional Invention. Bit by bit, cultural traits were evolved in all of the various aspects of life, and could be placed ever higher upon a ladder of complexity and utility. 1 2 3 4 5 13. Religious Sophistication. From primitive fear and ignorance, gods were imagined, and afforded sacrifices, but eventually higher religions, with a benign, single god and simple rites, prevailed. 1 2 3 4 5 14. Macrochronism. The evolution of the solar system, Earth, and life forms, took up about five billion years, of which the last several million were required to produce human beings with their advanced societies. 1 2 3 4 5 15. Cross-validation of Time and Events. Dozens of distinct measures and correlations have mutually supported macrochronism and, with evolution theory, have proven the singular correctness of the historical path of science. 1 2 3 4 5 TOTAL SCORE = AVERAGE SCORE =TOTAL/ 15= Q-TEST To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Quantavolution Based on fifteen key propositions of quantavolution, and the degree of adherence of a person to them. Instructions: There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Quantavolution, each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by scoring it from one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around the number or check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or knowledge or commitment one way or another regarding the statement. Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the principles of Quantavolution. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the principles of the version of Quantavolution expressed here. Actually, you would most likely be termed a quantavolutionary even if you agreed with one or two of the propositions. There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated. Fifteen Propositions 1. Quantavolution. The world has changed mostly by large-scale and abrupt jumps or saltations or quantavolutions from earliest to present times. 1 2 3 4 5 2. Holospherics. Every quantavolution was holospheric such that, what became in late times human morals and science, were affected in their every branch by its remnant evidence and its contemporary effects. 1 2 3 4 5 3. Exoterrestrial Genesis. The ultimate source of quantavolutions has been exoterrestrial. 1 2 3 4 5 4. Solaria Binaria. The solar system originated and developed to this day as an often violent process of transactions between the Sun and a solar-exploded body. 1 2 3 4 5 5. Poly-episodic Catastrophes. Quantavolutions (usually referred to pejoratively as catastrophes) have been experienced on sundry occasions and have been unequal in intensity. 1 2 3 4 5 6. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture. The explosion of Moon from Earth, and the global fracture accompanying it, produced the present basic volume and morphology of Earth. 1 2 3 4 5 7. Disturbed Geological Columns. Every geological column on Earth is ideosyncratically disturbed. 1 2 3 4 5 8.Exponential Apocalypses. Every quantavolution has taken the form of an exponential catastrophic curve with a sharp ascent and a negatively exponential descent, tailing off toward uniform change. 1 2 3 4 5 9. Species Mass Changes and Extinction. Extant species have simultaneously on occcasion been drastically reduced in numbers and type or extinguished while new species were being generated and old ones modified by holistic mutated gene leadership. 1 2 3 4 5 10. Schizoid Humanization. During a quantavolution, Homo Sapiens originated in a sudden gestalt as a schizoid species controlling multiple selves, and preferably to be called Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis. 1 2 3 4 5 11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation. Primeval Homo Sapiens experienced a traumatic suppression of memory and acquired a sublimatory psychological complex. 1 2 3 4 5 12. Cultural Hologenesis. Homo Sapiens promptly developed a poly-faceted language and full-function culture. 1 2 3 4 5 13. Divine Succession. Originally gods were idealized by the human mind, and their basic traits and functions proceeded through all successive major gods and families of gods. 1 2 3 4 5 14. Microchronism. Quantavolutions, since the solar nova that instituted the solar system, occupied brief periods of time, while intervals between them were also brief, measureable in thousands up to a million years. 1 2 3 4 5 15. Consonant Paradigmatics. Despite a much greater stress upon electromagnetic forces in all natural and vital events, the experiences (including experiments) and logic employed in constructing and proving the quantavolution paradigm are homologous with those of the conventional paradigm of scientific method. 1 2 3 4 5 TOTAL SCORE = AVERAGE SCORE = TOTAL / 15 = {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE: } {P PART 3: } {Q A Comment on the Q-C Test and Its Individual Items} {C - } {T - } {S - } QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE PART THREE by ALFRED DE GRAZIA A Comment on the Q-C Test and Its Individual Items. (Original text of test has a white background. The commentary is on normal font.) A ] C-TEST To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Conventional Science Based on Fifteeen Primary Propositions of Conventional Science respecting natural and human history, and the degree of adherence of an individual to them. The conventional science part of the C-test assumes that a common set of attitudes toward the method and findings of science is possessed by scientists, a correct set which, put into practice, gives a correct view of the real world, inorganic, organic, and human. These attitudes or beliefs are but an intuitive sample of a larger unknown number that would presumably give the same results when administered to the same individuals. The set of attitudes reflects with limited but fair accuracy the paradigm mentally possessed by twentieth century scientists. Since the paradigm is most general and cosmic, all propositions about it are partial, irregular, insufficient, and the individuals taking the test will naturally distribute themselves in different attitudes towards them. B ] Instructions: There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Conventional Science, each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by scoring it from one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around the number or check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or knowledge or commitment one way or another regarding the statement. There are many ways of posing the attitudes as principles. One could attempt to use five propositions as the core of the conventional scientific ideology, or ten, or twenty or fifty. Validity and realiability might be enhanced. Often in test-construction, a large number of test items are chosen and then the invalid and unreliable subsequently discarded, until the smallest number that completes the universe of inquiry is left remaining. Often the salient and valid few are doubled or trebled to be sure that the respondent understands what the inquirer wishes him/ her to understand, especially when the universe of respondents is intellectually, morally, linguistically and otherwise diverse. In the present situation, the Q-trenders may be even more diverse, for once the constraints of conventional scientific ideology or scientism are broken, the escapees and refugees scatter in every direction. Most conventional scientists will largely accept the C-test, scoring high, whereas the quantavolutionaries will score on the C-test in varying degrees of acceptance, or so we surmise. As the test-constructor sees it, a mark of '5' means an item is most likely true, a mark of '4' means the item approaches broadly some truths, a mark of '3' denotes uncertainty, a maybe-yes maybe-no position or a lack of sufficient awareness or knowledge to cast a judgement, or both of these plus a failure to understand what is intended or what is meant by the item. This is the infamous "don't know" category that haunts the pollsters. If the individual's position is important, usually the test-maker provides for an extensive and intensive interview, a depth questioning, to get the nuances of the impasse, whereupon the test-maker places the individual respondent more to theone way or the other. An item marked '2' would be deemed to mean that the statement is wrong-headed and contains little broad truth. A '1' is to inform the test authority that the item is almost surely untrue. Some experts would warn against even an attempt to order the postures and attitudes of people in this most complex region of human thought. Aside from all the technical and straight psychological arguments of the testing discipline, a substantial contribution to the theory of this kind of test must come from works such as those of Karl Mannheim on the sociology of knowledge, Hans Vaihinger on the nature and logic of fictions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on the construction of meaningful statements. C] Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the principles of Conventional Science. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the principles of the version of Conventional Science expressed here. Actually, you would most likely be termed fully Conventional only if you agreed with all fifteen of the propositions. Here it should be made clear that there is no real-world difference of 1 or 5 or whatever between the five phases of each item or between one item and another, and it has already been said that there are different bands of respondents who will settle firmly upon one reply and disdain a number of other items. The scores also say little about the degree of indignation with which rejection of other markings is regarded. The very sight of an item on evolution will elicit not only a mark of 1 or 5 but with the mark a snort of resentment against opposing markings. D] There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated. E] Fifteen Propositions: - 1. Gradualism. The world has changed almost entirely by small-scale, incremental transactions of small or large scope from earliest to present times. That is: one observes everywhere and in all things differences between time A and time B, which are almost always minute in relation to the total shape of things but amount to the vast differences between what was and what is, owing to the accumulation of small changes over long periods of time. F] 2. Independent Effects. Changes in one field of scientific observation normally are weakly discernible in other areas and transfer into them slowly. That is: what happens to one being or existence has a limited scope, affecting others little or not at all, as an avalance will affect whatever is in its path but little more, or the death of one species will hardly affect many species. G] 3. Terrestrial Isolation. From earliest times, Earth has developed its physical and vital forms from internal sources of materials and energy. That is: Practically all that is present on Earth has evolved solely under the influence of combinations of ingredients and forces that preceded it on Earth and which in turn and ultimately go back to the earliest ages of the Earth. H] 4. Gravitational Accumulations. The solar system originated in gravitational condensations from a gigantic dust cloud surrounding a young Sun. That is: little by little, the material that composes the planets gathered in clumps that continued to draw in other material until most of the original outbursts from the Sun were housed in them, while space was vacated. I ] 5. Elaborative Polymorphism. Great variations of all inorganic and organic forms occurred by lawful, regular processes of nature. That is: many shapes and physiologies and systems of being came about as one minor change succeeded another and elaborated differences that were originally minor into major differences. J ] 6.. Lunar Capture. The Moon formed during the condensation of gases and dust that originated the solar system and came within the gravitational grasp of the Earth. That is: the Moon began independently to agglomerate a large mass but lost its independent motion vis-a- vis the Sun, as it was gradually carried into the Earth's orbit by the Earth's gravitational field but maintained an acquired new equilibrium locked at a distance to the Earth. K] 7. Perennial Geological Flux. In due course, the Earth's surface has been altered by the gradual limited and calculable play of natural forces: waters, winds, pressures, and heat. That is: soils and rocks and aquatic channels today can be shown to have been formed by the forces that today uniformly with the past work upon them. L] 8. Uniformitarianism. Inorganic and organic nature have transmuted, with minor exceptions, at low, uniform rates for all of Earth history. That is: on the whole, the past has been like the present, such that the changes in earth and life forms have averaged changes proportionate to elapsed time, each being and existence developing a unique pace owing to infinitely small changes in rate occurring through long ages. M] 9. Evolution. The present species of life have unexceptionally developed from ever earlier forms that themselves originated by environmental adaptation in isolation and occasional successive chemical mutations. That is: accommodating to its environment and multiplying by successfully competing for scarce goods with other species and individuals, a given set of individuals, brought into being as a species by a genetic mutation or related series of mutations, reinforces its identity by separation from otherwise similar species, consciously or accidentally caused. N] 10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In the course of evolution, natural selection, working at every vital level, eventuated in a being of high intelligence, capable of deliberate, rational decisions. That is: evolving like every other life form, an animal related to the great apes and sharing much of their genetic and behavioral constitution, mutated and survived by virtue of an ever-growing brain that could cope ever more successfully with a variety of environments through discoveries prompted by realistic experimental reasoning. O] 11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness. Gradually humans developed a sense of history that let them order their lives presently and for their future, and learned to exercise advanced faculties for pleasure. That is: an orderly memory, which contained readily a great many lessons obtained from experience, and permitted self-examination as well as systematic observation, brought on an accumulation of useful information that could be used for material progress and amusement in many forms. P] 12. Cultural and Institutional Invention. Bit by bit, cultural traits were evolved in all of the various aspects of life, and could be placed ever higher upon a ladder of complexity and utility. That is: cumulative experience in all aspects of life was put to work in the collective memory of the group as the basis for suggestions of improvement in technique and organization, and in the origination of new acceptable behavior and utensils. Q] 13. Religious Sophistication. From primitive fear and ignorance, gods were imagined, and afforded sacrifices, but eventually higher religions, with a benign, single god and simple rites, prevailed. That is: lacking command over himself , his fellows, and his environment, the early human grasped for support at whatever seemed more powerful and possibly helpful, gods who at first imitated his savage qualities but later on gods and finally one God who were culturally advanced in their offerings and demands of humans, to the point of being a large factor, for most unscientific people at least, in inspiring them to virtuous conduct. R] 14. Macrochronism. The evolution of the solar system, Earth, and life forms, took up about five billion years, of which the last several million were required to produce human beings with their advanced societies. That is: although only rough estimates of the age of the Earth and the several periods of its organic and inorganic evolution can be obtained, continued progress in chronometry has moved the age of the earth and its epochs to ever longer times, allowing thus adequate time for all of the observed transformations to have taken place. S] 15. Cross-validation of Time and Events. Dozens of distinct measures and correlations have mutually supported macrochronism and, with evolution theory, have proven the singular correctness of the historical path of science. That is: radioactive decay, occurring at constant rates over enormous periods of time, has been measured in association with its environment, organic and inorganic, and these have been shown to have ages generally much greater than geological measures alone have produced, showing the latter to have been partly conjectural, even if vastly longer than biblical time had been. Different radio chronometries are highly correlated when applied to the same objects, and variations have been successfully accommodated to settle differences. With the development of dendrochronology, dating from layered ice cores, radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence dating, and other chemical, thermal, and historical methods, few lengthy gaps remain in the geological and biological record that are unapproachable scientifically. T] TOTAL SCORE = _____ AVERAGE SCORE =TOTAL/15= ______ Note: two persons with the same average score may differ greatly in their fully described positions. Paired comparisons are recommended, and ultimately also the comparison of individual scores with a universe of hundreds and thousands of scores, not only as to averages but as to matched item correlations and other parameters. U] Q-TEST To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Quantavolution Based on fifteen key propositions of quantavolution, and the degree of adherence of a person to them. Instructions: There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Quantavolution, each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by scoring it from one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around the number or check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or knowledge or commitment one way or another regarding the statement. Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the principles of Quantavolution. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the principles of the version of Quantavolution expressed here. Actually, you would most likely be termed a quantavolutionary even if you agreed with one or two of the propositions. There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated. The above instructions repeat closely those for the Conventional section. Perhaps it should be added here that unmarked items should be scored as 3 on grounds that they are the effect of confusion or unreadiness to commit an attitude. V] Propositions 1: Quantavolution. The world has changed mostly by large-scale and abrupt jumps or saltations or quantavolutions from earliest to present times. The key words behind quantavolution (Q) are change, large-scale, and abrupt. Essentially, change refers to a detectable difference in anything between Time 1 and Time 2 . By the world is meant the universe and all that it may contain, including its motions and events. By most is meant something not much less than entirely, and what is left over consists of changes that are local and gradual. Large-scale applies to spaces and things and behaviors that rather arbitrarily we would envision as at least the size and features of Russia or South America or the Caribbean Sea. The change would occur abruptly, which we define as time durations from an instant to a century in which 50% of the total physical transformation happens. Terms used for quantavolution, "development by packets", include catastrophism, neo-catastrophism, saltation (a jump), revolution, apocalpse and punctuated equilibrium. A salient argument against the use of the term "catastrophism" is that it denotes a total misfortune, whereas a moment's reflection will persuade one that a great part of the fortunate inheritance of the world comes from the same catastrophes -- including the quantavolution or abrupt evolution of the human being. W] 2. Holospherics. Every quantavolution was holospheric such that, what became in late times human morals and science, were affected in their every branch by its remnant evidence and its contemporary effects. Quantavolutions were not contained to a set of rocks, a chosen people, a given language, a particular climatic sector, etc., but within their large limits were all-encompassing. All spheres of nature and humanity were directly affected, and their effects were transmitted to every succeeding generation of rocks, genera, and cultures. Too, a Q employed all forces of nature: if the Q took the form of a meteoroid, water, fire, wind, and exploded earth acted simultaneously and in chains and mutual interactions. X] 3. Exoterrestrial Genesis. The ultimate source of quantavolutions has been exoterrestrial. The Earth was itself formed from exoterrestrial elements, an obvious deduction, but the fact leads to a realization that probably at no time in its existence has the Earth been out of touch with the exosphere. From its beginnings, the Earth had no internal force or energy that was not exoterrestrial in origin. Its volcanism, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods have been compelled by exoterrestrial bodies composed of perhaps every kind of mineral and gas, and of every degree of density. Y] 4. Solaria Binaria. The solar system originated and developed to this day as an often violent process of transactions between the Sun and a solar-exploded body. Explaining the solar system is readily accomplished by introducing a theory of binary stars, ever more frequently observed, in which the explosion of a heavily charged sun expels a mass of debris whose largest portion, though a small fraction of the sun, acts as an electrical pole exchanging charge with the sun along a current of electric fire, which also serves to create a vast electromagnetic plenum in which planets, with their own electrical properties, develop. Conditions for the growth of life forms are often favorable and persist until the electrical axis and the tube around it expire, whereupon the planets are "on their own," so to speak. Although the theory of solaria binaria is unique, it can easily entertain a number of quantavolutionary theories that have been developing in recent years that portray the solar system undergoing a series of explosive and high energy events. Z] 5. Poly-episodic Catastrophes. Quantavolutions (usually referred to pejoratively as catastrophes) have been experienced on sundry occasions and have been unequal in intensity. Geological, astronomical, paleontological, legendary, and archaeological research has settled upon more than one and conjectured up to a score of global catastrophes in natural history, such that it is possible now to hypothesize a quantavolution at the end of and beginning of every major section of the geological column and every cultural period of the brinze and iron age. Among the greatest in effect have been, among geologists, those associated with the global fracture system circling the world, among paleontologists, those associated with the disappearance of the dinosaurs, and the flowering of life forms early in the Permian period, and among ancient historians those deemed by the ancients to be connected to the conduct of the planets and affording evidence in the wholesale destruction of ancient civilizations repeatedly. AA] 6. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture. The explosion of Moon from Earth, and the global fracture accompanying it, produced the present basic volume and morphology of Earth Scientists divide unevenly into a majority who believe that the Moon was captured by the Earth a billion and more years ago, and a minority who believe that the Moon separated from the Earth at an equally early date, most of these expert grant that the event was catastrophic and quantavolutionary. Evidence points to the Pacific Ocean Basin as the source of the crust that was wrenched from the Earth by an electrically attractive passing body, coincidentally with a fracture that shot around the world as the continents-to-be swung in a great gravity slide to fill the basin. Besides the mainly crustal loss of the Moon-gathering, the fully-encrusted Earth lost additional material as debris into farther space and swelled in volume as its charge diminished. BB] 7. Disturbed Geological Columns. Every geological column on Earth is ideosyncratically disturbed. If one were to dig anywhere in the world, one would find practically everywhere an incomplete series of rock types and periods, with no two such drillings being alike. This claim goes counter to the prevailing belief in conventional science that a normal deep drilling to basic rock usually would produce mineral and fossil layers in their proper chronological order with few or no layers or ages missing. CC] 8.Exponential Apocalypses. Every quantavolution has taken the form of an exponential catastrophic curve with a sharp ascent and a negatively exponential descent, tailing off toward uniform change. Apocalypses refer to the catastrophes pictured and popularly revered in the Christian epic of St. John. Here it is a mnemonic nickname for quantavolutions. If charted, a Q occurs with little warning in years, days, and other units of time, except that a repeated threat is historically marked and watched obsessively by special priesthoods and the populace. Despite the warning, the events themselves, of course, are precipitous; what is one day here is gone tomorrow, a civilization, a culture, a great plain, a river, etc. After the peak period of activity, however, the Q at first steeply declines and then ever more slowly diminishes its effects until it establishes a mood of "it will not happen again." Thus, according to Q theory, C continental drift theory, even though its acceptance was a concession to a Q theory, is incorrect in believing that the continents have always been drifting very slowly, but that what is slow now was once a continental cracking and rafting at considerable speed. DD] 9. Species Mass Changes and Extinction. Extant species have simultaneously on occcasion been drastically reduced in numbers and type or extinguished while new species were being generated and old ones modified by holistic mutated gene leadership. The scale and intensity of Q implies the decimation of species and paleontology increasingly locates and admits to the catastrophic ending of species. At the same time, C theory will not admit the sudden creation of new species in the same conditions of catastrophe whereas the Q theorists can claim that the same conditions allowed the springing forth in quick time of new families and species. Q theory accounts for the persistence of species as well as the destruction and creation of species to produce the puzzling array of flora and fauna of today. EE] 10. Schizoid Humanization. During a quantavolution, Homo Sapiens originated in a sudden gestalt as a schizoid species controlling multiple selves, and preferably to be called Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis. Several Q theories of the birth of man are possible. One is indicated here. A gestalt is a sudden complex perception and cognition of a large body of mental material that has hitherto been disassembled and unknowledgeable. In a suddenly new natural environment and atmospheric state and in a minor genetic change from the hominid, a new being emerged with a delayed instinctive apparatus, connected with the bilateralism of brain hemispheres and functioning, such that a microdelay in the transmission of menal oeprations ensued, sufficient to expand the destinations around the brain of stimuli and the awareness of doubt about the meaning of the stimuli and a fearful need to control the multiple selves that were groping "thoughtfully" with the disparate end-locations of the stimuli. The mentation and behavior of the new animal is diagnosable today as a general schizophrenia, with its basic symptoms of shock, aggression, compulsion, and displacement. FF] 11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation. Primeval Homo Sapiens experienced a traumatic suppression of memory and acquired a sublimatory psychological complex. The instinct-delay cerebral system genetically or permanently demanded by a new environmental constant quickly installed a memory blockage or amnesiac system to limit the flood of fears and doubts and contradictory demands on the new person. The amnesiac system allowed, or was compelled by overload problems to bring about, an amorphous unconscious. The unconscious fostered a random, partially controlled, and imaginative surfacing of materials that were the source both of aesthetic creations and hypotheses, which, when subjected to demands to restore the more comfortable if less competent instinctive system of the hominid, also developed logic, calculation, science, and, in a word, rationality. GG] 12. Cultural Hologenesis. Homo Sapiens promptly developed a poly-faceted language and full-function culture. Speech and variegated behaviors emerged promptly and spontaneously with the poly-ego and its talking to itself. Transfer of first epithets, imprecations, and commands to the greatest powers known, the happenings in the sky and the responses of the earth, would impregnate catastrophe in the language as it developed for mundane use. The same would characterize the swiftly developing culture -- with rites, priests, magic, acoustical and electrical performances, fire-control and cuisine, etc. This hologenetic Q-theory stands alone perhaps to contend with conventional theories of linguistic and cultural genesis. HH] 13. Divine Succession. Originally gods were idealized by the human mind, and their basic traits and functions proceeded through all successive major gods and families of gods. Practically all religions, although some exceptional persons will claim the opposite, are in the line of descent from the primordial religiousness. With the illusory establishment of the first gods and of delusory devices to control them, the basic elements of religious practices from then until now were fixed: appeasement, obsessive forms of divine communication, sacrifice, basic artistic forms, authoritative ideologies, institutional imitations of the sky and earth- connected divine illusions. Successive quantavolutions repeated the same types of physical disasters and fell upon peoples that were inclined to fortify their old religions rather than to devise new ones, but at the same time would often rename the old and condemn them to try their fortunes with new, more powerful gods. II] 14. Microchronism. Quantavolutions, since the solar nova that instituted the solar system, occupied brief periods of time, while intervals between them were also brief, measureable in thousands up to a million years. Some Q theorists have attempted to preserve the appearances and save a great many reputations by staging their quantavolutions in accord with the present billions of years of "proven" earth history. Such would be, for instance, the theory of "punctuated equilibrium," an awkward euphemism as well as a scarcely justified faith in the swollen periods given to the past, now approaching 5 billion years. The problem of erasing these billions is easy when it comes to traditional geological measurements of time that employ stratigraphy, that apply uniform erosion rates of today to the past, et al. The problem is more difficult when it comes to measurements by radioactive decay of chemical elements, but here, too, uniformitarian assumptions can be brought into question: electromagnetic conditions of the past, far different than those of today, could eradicate the great stretches of time claimed by conventional scientists. JJ] 15. Consonant Paradigmatics. Despite a much greater stress upon electromagnetic forces in all natural and vital events, the experiences (including experiments) and logic employed in constructing and proving the quantavolution paradigm are homologous with those of the conventional paradigm of scientific method. At least one branch of Q theory questions the roots of so-called rationality, yet accepts the newer logic and linguistics as its only tools for arriving at "truth." It accepts experiments and the scientific method generally and it guards the method by psycho-sociological analysis of the processes. It is not mystic nor magical nor religious nor populist. The Q paradigm reconstructs the historical and scientific world with the historical and scientifically defensible weapons of science. KK] Total Score and Average are calculated in the same way as in the Conventional section of the Test. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE: } {P PART 4: } {Q PROSPECTIVE CHANGES IN THE Q-C TEST} {C - } {T - } {S - } QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE PART FOUR by ALFRED DE GRAZIA PROSPECTIVE CHANGES IN THE Q-C TEST 1. Placebos: Placebos would designate items in the test that indicate nothing valid or useful to know for the purposes of the test. They function to prove a lack of unrelated differences between those who score differently on the test. For instance, it might be useful to add several items such as "Whether fast or slow, evolution by definition must occur in natural history." And, "Conventional science is more a matter of etiquette of science than it is a set of accepted theories." And, "A decline in the productivity of science, noticeable in the late twentieth century, is attributable in part to an increase in the extent of political corruption in advanced nations." It might occur that both C and Q respondents would score similarly on these items, whether by scattered or concentrated agreement. 2. Religious Dimension: Creationism; agnosticism; mysticism; atheism; personal deism; scientific deism. Religious ideologies have been shown to play a considerable role in adhering to scientific propositions of one kind or another. It would be possible to uncover some of these connections either by a couple of questions accompanying the test (such as, "How would you identify yourself in respect to the list of religious positions below: accept, reject, indifferent?" or by including distinguishing items as propositions such as "Quantavolution fortifies logically and evidentially religions that maintain a recent creation of the world and mankind by divine intervention." 3. Additional Items: Adding a number of items would help to validate existing items and at the same time lend reliability to the test as a whole. Thus, proposing that the dinosaurs and most other species were destroyed en masse in a brief time interval by the impact of an extra-terrestrial object, or proposing that the continental crust of the earth has been creeping by tiny increments over most of the global surface over all of Earth's history. 4. Merging: The Q-C Test will be henceforth merged into a mixed set of items, such that the respondent will be encountering items of C, Q and other significance randomly in the course of taking the test. Merging will promote a more independent series of judgements on the part of the respondent, and contribute to the significance of aggregated scores, in part and totality. 5. Validation: Validating a test that seeks to elicit ideological syndromes can be most difficult, depending upon the degree of certainty that the Thing exists in the first place and then the elusive and unconscious ways in which people are disposed to mal-describe and conceal their ideologies. Still, with the improvements already suggested, some approach to defining a Q and a C nuclear ideology, and in the process a Q mind and a C mind, can find credence. 6. Randomizing and Cross-sectioning the Sample: These ordinary problems of test development should present no unusual difficulties when developing the Q-C test. Inasmuch as over half of the adult population cannot read well enough nor are tutored enough to understand any considerable part of the test, either a special test should be constructed for them or they should be passed over in favor of administering the test only to persons who have passed three or more years of college. In the end, the test results most useful would be the results obtained from the professional and managerial classes. Since these are the people running the governmental, corporate, media and educational systems of the modern state, their ideologies are a matter of practical as well as contemplative interest. 7. Extending the number of special disciplines implicated in the results: In Part Five below will be found a list of entries planned for the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe. Every discipline will be found there, and thus a case is made for finding Q relevant to all disciplines. It would not be too difficult to revise the test so as to apply it more directly to each and every major discipline -- geology, anthropology, theology, astronomy, mythology and so forth. 8. Uses: a) Abetting theoretical studies. In this connection, the Q-C test can suggest that a wholesale replacement of received doctrines of science may be useful and possible. b) Discovery of trends in public awareness of science. Are popular notions of what is occurring in science changing? Perhaps the test will give some indication of how and why the contents of the mass media are changing with regard to science and scientists. c) Discovering relationship between creationist belief and quantavolutionary belief. Popular creationist belief is strong and seeks, spearheaded by a small group of intellectuals, to adapt quantavolutionary research and treatises to its own needs. Creationist scientists are inclined to dominate quantavolutionary circles, naturally, and certainly feel comfortable moving in and out of them. Much opposition to Q work by C scientists comes from a fear that Q is merely a front for creationism. d) Q-C scores as a function of age, occupation, religion, formal schooling. The sociology of science and educators would gain by the knowledge of how Q and C ideas have been penetrating various social formations and categories. Psychological applications are suggested: is there a radical and conservative position on C and Q that conforms to political, intellectual, and social radicalism? e) Discovery of trends in ideology of scientists. At a time when it is widely believed that the vast majorityof scientists would be high-scorers on the C-test and low-scorers on the Q-test, the distribution of the component beliefs in the population of scientists would reveal the actual condition in this regard. Too, one may expect to learn whether the scientific elite, the so-called establishment, has moved from the conventional center of gravity more or less than the mass of scientists. f) Discovery of deficiencies and contradictions of belief brought on by specialization. Especially with longer versions of the Q-C test, it may be observed how far and near the various special fields of the scientists stand in relation to the conventional consensus. What medical specialty, for instance, is most radical in acceptance of Q tendencies? How do homeopathic practitioners rate? g) Enumerating the varieties of conventional and quantavolutionary thought. A great many controversies characterize both the conventional and the quantavolutionary camps. From the hi-score C camp, it appears that the conventional scientists are divided and the Q enemy is united, whereas nothing is more obvious to the Q, and angrily regrettable, than the splintering into tiny fragments of the Q outlook. h) Fostering interdisciplinary communication. Scientists and educators who have deplored the lack of sympathy and understanding between the public and politicians on the one side and scientists on the other might regard the results of extensive Q-C testing as indicative of the gravity of the problem, or of improvements occurring. At the same time, tests results of different scientific groups might demonstrate that communication among scientists is as serious a problem as it is between science as a whole and the public. Test results among scientific cohorts might illustrate, too, the togetherness of the scientific fraternity as a whole. Deviations fro consensus might be regarded as deviations of thought or deficiencies in knowledge of sciences other than one's own. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE: } {P PART 5: } {Q The Scope of Quantavolution} {C - } {T - } {S - } QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE PART FIVE by ALFRED DE GRAZIA THE SCOPE OF QUANTAVOLUTION There follows a list of terms to be used as entries in the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophes. Although there is no planned correlation between this list and the contents of the present CD-Rom of 14 volumes of Quantavolution, and although the 14 volumes have an embedded search engine for calling up all references to any idea or person or incident that maybe contained in the volumes, the list here may be suggestive as to subjects that might be present and treated in the 14 volumes, and then searched for and found therein. Scores of scientific and humanistic fields have evolved. Actually every field of knowledge has standing behind it one or more fields of science, and therefore may be considered as a field of applied science, as for instance, architecture or fictional romances. One way of comprehending the extended meaning of general theory of quantavolution is to browse amidst the list of entries that are contemplated for the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe. These number several thousands and another thousand will probably be added before the first edition is finished. It will be recalled that the criteria for including an entry in the Encyclopedia is that at least prima facie the entry directly or indirectly affects the theory of quantavolution. Thus, the abundance of gods carried in the work would be expected if one considers that every known god is connected directly or indirectly with global quantavolution. Every physical law of science is involved. Most concepts of biology and genetics are relevent. Every part of solar system astronomy enters the work, so, too, numerous stars. By small stretch of the imagination, every scientific and humanistic discipline has many concerns to take from and give to the quantavolutionary paradigm. To take a seemingly removed case, political science, in both its historical and contemporary materials, must consider many aspects of quantavolution --legends, distortions of history, movements generated by the belief in the immediacy of catastrophe, the behavior of not only politicians but also seemingly far-removed scientists who are consciously and unconsciously influenced by catastrophic ideas in their belifs and by power manipulations in their collectivities. Many entries, it must be said, are built into the Encyclopedia on a need to understand what conventional science is saying and on a suspicion that there must be some quantavolutionary content to the thing or idea if it were to be more extensively pursued. Excluded from the entry are thousands, and then millions, of things and persons and events, such as are found in general encyclopedias and library catalogs. After all, even a football player might conceivably be included as an entry on the ground that the origin of the game lay in the most ancient religious practices wherein the ball and the players stood for celestial gods and other divine events long remembered. Thus one stands on the brink of declaring that all events are subject to the core events of quantavolution. LIST OF ENTRIES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE (Copyright Metron 1997) A ================================================================== aa Aar Gorge Aaron Aaron's rod abacus Abell, George D. Abell-35 nebula aberrational Earth forces Abery, Jill abiogenesis abiotic compound ablation aboriginal humans aborigine Abraham abrupt transform absolute zero absorption Abydos abyss, oceanic Acadian disturbance acanthode Acapulco Bay acceleration accelerator acclimatization accretion by comet accumulation, precipitate accumulator, bioenergy achondrite acid rain acid-base reaction acoustics acquired immune deficiency syndrome (| aids|) Acropolis actinide elements action at a distance action, unit of actor, acting Adam & Eve Adams, R. M. C Adams, Walker S. Aden, Gulf of adhesion (bonding) adiabatic process Aditi Adityas administration Adonis Adrastus of Cyzicus adrenal gland Adriatic Coast Adriatic Sea Adriatica adsorption Aegea Aegean region aegis Aeneas Aeon aeon, eon aerial photography aersol Aeschylus aesthetics aether, ether Afar Depression affection Afghanistan Africa African Rift African Rift volcanism African veldt afterglow Agassiz, Louis agate Agate, Nebraska Age age determination Age of Discovery Ager, Derek aggression agnatha Agni agnosticism Agricola, Giorgius agriculture Agua, Guatemala Ahaggar mountains Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman Ain ez Zarqa aircraft Airy, G. B. Ajios Jakovos Akhnaton Akkad, Akkadian Alabama Alaca Hyk Aland Islands Alaska Alaskan oriented lakes albedo Alberta Albretton, Claude C. alchemy Alcock, Norman Z. alcohol alcohol, drinking of Alcor Aleutian arc Alfven, Hannes algae algebra Algeria Algonquian, Algonquin Indians alignment Alisar, Alishar Hyk alkali metal alkaline rock Alkman All Saints Day & All Souls Day Allah Allchin, F. R. Allegheny Mountains (| USA|) Allen, F. Allen, Richard Hinkley allergic reaction allocthon allogenic sediment alluvial fan alphabet alpine Alps Mountains Alt, David altar Alter, Dinsmore altiplano altitude Alvarez, Luis Walter AM Herculis Amargorosa fault Amarna Letters Amarna, tell-el amateur Amatitlan, Guatemala Amazon Amazon River, basin Amazon submarine channel Amazonia amber ambivilance Ambrasey, N. N. ambrosia Ameghino, Fiorentino Amelan, Ralph Amen, Amun American cultures, -502 to -9| y| American hemisphere American sign language Amerindians, ancient amino acid amino acid racemization dating Ammizaduga tablets Ammon, Amon amnesia, collective amnesia, individual amoeba Amojjar pass Amos amphibia amphibole, amphibolite amplitude, seasonal Amudar'ya delta, U. S. S. R. amulet Amundsun, Roald Ana, Anat( h) Anafi Island analog logic analytic & linguistic philosophy Ananta anatexis Anatolia anatomy Anaxagoras Anaximander ancient astronauts ancient concensus ancient eclipses ancient knowledge Andean volcanism Anderson, J. L. Andes Mountains andesite Andriessen, Poul androgeny Anemospilia, Crete angel Angel Falls, Venezuela angiosperm Angola Angola anguilliform angular momentum angular velocity anhedonia animal nimal behavior animal breeding animal instinct animism ankh Anluck annelida anniversary annual layer anode anoint anolis anomoly anseriformes Antarctic dryland Antarctic Ocean Antarctica Antelope County, NE Antelope Valley, CA Anthes, Rudolf Anthony and Cleopatra anthropism anthropology anthropomorphism anthropophagy anthroposphere anti-semitism anticline Antillia antiparticle Antofagasta mudslide Anura anvil anxiety apastron apathy Aphek, Caanan aphelion Aphrodite apis apocalypse apogee Apollo and Artemis Apollo, asteroid family Apollo-p Apollo-s Apollodoris Apollonius of Rhodes Apophis apotheosis Appalachian Mountains apparition, comet appearence of species Appenine Range applied science April Apuane Alps Apuseni Mountains Aqaba, Gulf of Aqua Hedionda Creek basins aquatic ape aquatic ecosystem aqueous environment, primordial aquifer Arabia Arabian dunes Arabian Sea arachnida aragonite Arak Gorges, Algeria Aral Sea Aramaic alphabet Ararat, Mount, Turkey Aratus of Soli Araucanian Indians arbitration arc arc welding arc-second arch archaeoastronomy archaeobacteria archaeology archaeomagnetic archaeopteryx archaeozoic, archean archetype archicortex architecture Arctic Ocean, floor Arctic Region, lands Arcturus arcuate structure Ardche marl fossils arecales Arend-Roland, comet Ares Argentina argon Ariadne arid regions, global Arieti Aristotle arithmetic Arizona Ark of the Covenant ark, arch( e) Arkansas Armageddon armed force Armenia armor Arnol'd, V. I. Arnold, James R. aromatic hydrocarbon Arp, Halton C. art artesian well, flowing spring arthropoda artificial aurora artificial intelligence artriodactyla Aryabhataya( m) Aryan As, tell Asakawa, Y. Asama, Mount Ascalon, Ashqelon asceticisim aschelminthes Asgard ash Ashanti crater ashera( h) tree Asia Asimov, Isaac aspartic acid racemization asphalt Assal, Lake Assam earthquakes assemblage, fossil assertion Assyria, Assyrian Astarte, Ashtarat asteroid Astour, M. C. Astra astral concern astral wind astrobleme astrogeology astrolabe astrolabes, Assyrian astrology astron astronaut, cosmonaut astronomer's vision astronomical chronometry astronomical mapping astronomical motif astronomical spectroscopy astronomical transformation astronomical unit astronomy, astronomical astrophysics asymmetry of brain hemispheres Atchana Atharva Veda atheism Athene Athens athletic contest Atlantic Ocean Atlantis Atlantis Nigeria Atlas Atlas Mountains atmosphere atmospheric science atom atomic orbital atomic period atomic structure atomic weight atonement attention Attis attitude Atum (TM) Atwater, Gordon audiovisual aid Aughrabies falls augury Augustine, Saint Auigancan Culture Aurora aurora at ground level Aurora-g auroral form auroral oval auroral storm Australasia Australia Australian Bight Australian glaciation Australian string dunes Australopithicus Austria Austroafrican authority autumn avalanche Avebury aversion, personal awareness of self axe, ax Axel Heiberg Island axial spin and tilt axiom axis Axis Mundi axis of fire, electric Ayala, Francisco J. Ayre's Rock Azerbaijan Azores Azov, Sea of Azovia Aztec B ================================================================== Baal Baalbek, Lebanon Babbage, Charles Babcock, Harold Delos Babel, Tower of (Babilu) Babylon, Babylonia Babylonian exile bacchanalia background radiation Bacon, Edward bacteria Bad-Hora badland Badlands of South Dakota Baffin island Baha Calif. cobblestones Bahamas Baikal lake Bailey, Valentine A. Baity, Elizabeth Chesley Baja California Gulf Coast Baker, Howard, B. Bakersfield sand hills Balaam text Bali Balkan Penninsula ball lightning ballgame, ballcourt Baltic sea Baltica Bam Bam ampitheaters Bamboo Annal Bancroftt, Hubert H. banded rock formation Banff, Alberta Bangladesh Bangladesh cyclone, 1991 Bantu forge baptism barad Barandiarn, JosBarchan dunes, Lima, Peru Barendregt, Ren Barnes, Thomas G. Barnes, Virgil Everett barometric light Barong Barranca del Cobre barrier burst flood barrier island barrier reef Barringer Meteor Crater Barstow sand, CA basin Basque Bass, Robert Bassinger, James Bast( et) Batavia Batk plateaus Bateson, William Batten, Alan H. Bauer, Henry Baume Latrone, France bay Bay of Fundy Bayeux (Queen Matilda's) tapestry be, (to) beach Beals Carleton S. Bear River, Alaska Bearsden, Scotland Beaty, Chester B. Beaumont, William C. Beaver fireball bedrock beds of destruction bedu mask Beehive House (tomb) Beersheba Bego Monte behavioral sciences behaviorism behemoth being Beisan Beit Mirsim Bel, Belos Belgium Belit (Ninlil) Belize Belize Reef bell Bell's paradox Bellamy, Hans Schindler Belorussia, Byelorussia belt series Beltane Ben Hadad Ben Nevis, Scotland Benbulbin, Ireland Beni Basin, Bolivia Bennett, William Harrison Bennu (phoenix) Benten (Benzaiten) Bentley, John bentonite Beppu thermal area Bequerel, Henri Beringea Bermuda Bermuda collision theory Bermuda deep Bermuda triangle Bernal, Ignaco Berosus (Bel-usur) Berthelot, A. beta () decay Beta () Geminorium (Pollux) Beta () Lyrae Beta () Persei (Algol) Beth Mirsim, Palestine Beth She'an, Israel Bhopal Bible, religious interpretation Bible, scientific study of Bible, translations Biblical Deluge bicameral Biela's comet Bifrost Big Bang, theory bilateral symmetry Billings, Montana Bilma, erg of Bimson, John J. binary star binding energy bindu biochemistry bioelectricity biogenesis biography biological ages biological magnetism biological pulsation biological transformation Biological tree biology bion biophysics biosphere Biosphere 2000 bipedalism bird bird migration bird navigation Bird, W. R. Birth-giving Male Bishop gravel, CA Bismark archipelago bison, primative representation Bittersprings Formation, Aust= l black hole Black Sea black shale Black Stone of Mecca Black virgin Blackett, P. M. S. blasphemy Blavatsky, Helena Blegen, Carl blood of the pharoahs blood sacrifice blood type bloodstone blue green algae blue hole Blue Ridge mountains Blummer, Max Blytt, Axel boar Bode's Law bodies, orbiting body, physical Bog Lake, Michigan Boghazkeui Bohemian Massif Bolsena, Lake bombardment Bonneville River and Lake Bora Bora bore hole boreal boreal opening Borrego Valley, CA Bosomtwe crater Bosque de Rocas, Peru Bosumtwi, Lake Boulanger, N. A. boulder boulder field Boulder gravel fan, Sea of Cortez boulder train boundary clay boundary value bow and arrow Boxhole crater, Australian boycott, of q-works Brahma, Brahmanna Brahmaputra River braided stream flow brain Brak, tell Brandon, S. F. G. Brassenpouy Brasseur de Bourbourg Bray forest Brazil Breasted, James Henry breccia, volcanic breeding Brent crater, Ontario (Bubastis, Egypt Bretz, J. H. Breuil, Henri brewing Briareux brick magnetism Briffault, Robert Brigit (Brigantia) brimstone brine bristlecone pine Britain Brittany brontosaur bronze Bronze Ages bronze serpent Brough, James Brouwer, -. -. Brown, E. W. Brown, Hugh A. Bruce, Charles E. R. Bruno, Giordano Bryce Canyon Buckland, W. M. Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Buffon Bug Creek fossil bull worship Bullard, Edward buoyancy bureaucracy Burgess shale burial Burma burning bush Bushmen Byblos Baalat) C ================================================================== Cacahuamilpa caverns Cadmus, Kadmos Callisto-p Calymene (trilobite) Cambrian Period Camp Pendelton shoreline erosion, CA Canuto, V. canyon, submarine canyon, surface capacitor Cape Canaveral, Florida Cape Hatteras, NC Capella rising point carbon carbon cycle carbon dioxide carbon-14 carbonate mineral Carboniferous Period carbonization carcinogenic material Cardona, Dwardu Carey, Warren C. Caribbean Region Caribou Mountains Cadomin conglomerates caduceus Cajon Pass Calaveras man calcareous ooze calcinology calcite caldera Caledonian orogeny calendar Calgary silt California California, gulf of Callanish Campo del Cielo craters Canaan, Canaanite Canada Canadian arctic islands Canadian boulder broadcasts Canadian Rocky mountains Canadian shield Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (| CSIS|) Canary islands Candlemas Cango caves cannibalism Canning basin Canopus stone canopy theory Carli-Rubbi, Giovanni R. Carlsbad crater Carlson, J. B. Carmel, Mount carnival Carolina Bays Carozzi, A. V. Carpenter, Rhys Carquinez strait Carsbad caverns Carson Valley, NV Carthage Caspian Sea Cassini, Jacques cataclastic rock cataclysm cataforms Catal Hayuk catalysis catapulted ice catastrophe catastrophe, mathematics catastrophic dualism catastrophism catastrophist catatonism catechism cathode cattle cattle sacrifice Caucasoid Caucasus Mountains causality cave cave art cave dweller cave, bones found in cave, ice contained in caves, limestone celestial nucleogenesis celestial observation celestial sphere cell division cell, biological cellular necessity Celsius Celt, Celtic cementation, natural Cenozoic Era Cenozoic volcanism Central Australia central fire centrifugal force Cepola fish ceramic cerebral cortex cerebral hemispheres ceremonial & ritual object Ceres, planetoid Cerro Cerro Fitz Roy, Argentina Cetus Chad, lake Chagar Bazar, tell Chaldea, Chaldean chalk cliff Challinor, R. A. Chandler wobble Chandler, S. C. Chang Dynasty, China Chang Jiang (Yangtse River) change in nature change of environment change, attributes of change, cosmic change, human channel, river & stream Channelled Scablands, WA chaos Chardin, Teilhard de charge, electric chariot charisma charlatan Charon Charriere, -. -. chauvanism Chela, serra de Chellean man chemical bond chemical bonding chemical compound chemical element chemical marker, strata chemical reaction chemistry Chernoble cherubim chess Chetwynd, Thomas Cheyenne mounds, WY Chicago Fire chidren's songs & stories childhood children's rhymes chiliasm chimpanzee China Chinese choreography Chinook wind Chipewa indians Chiron chlorophyl Christian, Christianity christmas tree chromosphere chronology chronology, historical chronology, natural history chronometry, techniques Chubb crater, Quebec church architecture Churchill-Sempel, Ellen cinnamon cinnebar circle, stone (lithic) circular logic circular structure circum-Pacific pyric belt circumcision cither, kitharis city planning civilizations cladistic Clark, D. M. Clark, J. D. classification clastic sediment clay Clayton, Robert, N. Clearwater lake, crater cleavage of Earth climate climate, polar climate, temperate climate, tropical climatology clothing cloud club, (wooden) Clube, S. Victor coal coastal feature coastal landforms cobblestone anomaly cocolith code Coe, Michael D. coelacanth Coelus coesite cognition cognitive disorder Cohen, I. Bernard Cohen, J. P. cold fusion collective amnesia collective behavior collective memory colligative property collision, cosmic Colorado Colorado Plateau Colorado River delta Columbia (tidal) Glacier, AK Columbia flood basalts Columbia Icefield Columbia Plateau Columbia/ Frazer Valley system column, rock combat, ceremonial combustion comedy comet comet catastrophe comet composition comet encounter Comet Halley comet impact comet spectrum comet tail comet, core of comet, failed comet, omen comet, orbit decay of cometary injecta commensurable motion Commoner, Barry communication, biological & human communication, theory of companion star compass competition compound comprehension of quantity comptinology compulsion, compulsiveness compulsive repetition concensus conduction, thermal conductivity, accoustic conductivity, electric conference expertise confession, religious conflagration, universal conflict, interpersonal conflicting dates conjunction, planetary Connecticut conscience consciousness conservation principle, in nature conspiracy Constance, Lake constancy constellation contamination continent continent, quantavolution of continental drift (rafting) continental margin continental plate continental shelf continental shield continental tropism, lunagenic contours, topographic contraction of Earth Cantril, Hadley control, of self & others convection convection, atmospheric conventional science Cook, Melvin A. Cook, Mount cooking Copernicus, Nikolas copper copulation copulation, celestial Coral islands coral, atol Corban Karst region cord Cordillera Blanca, Peru Cordilleran megashear core drilling core, deep sea core, ice Coriolis effect Corliss, William corona, solar Corprates Canyon corprolite corpus callosum correlation, stratigraphic cosmic dust cosmic egg Cosmic Heretic cosmic lightning cosmic pillar cosmic pressure cosmic ray cosmogony cosmology cosmos Cosmos-s cotton count countervalancy of high energy forces countervalence Courville, Donovan, A. covenant cow, sacred Cox, Allen Cox, Douglas crater rater lake, Oregon crater ring, South Astralia crater, impact Craters of the Moon, Idaho craters with central mountains craton creation myths & systems creationism, biological creationism, geological creativity Cresswell crags, England Cretaceous Period Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event Crete Crew, Eric crime, criminality crinoid crisis Cro-Magnon man crocodile Croll, J. cross cross-bedding crown of metal Crozier, W. D. crucifiction crust, displacement of Earth's crust, Earth's crustal rebound crustal spreading crustal subsidence crux anasta crystal Cuaretes, -. cuisine cultural change cultural hologenesis cultural relativity cultural synchronism culture culture, dating of Cumberland, MD cure Curetes Curie temperature Curie, unit of radiation current, Earth current, surface & deep sea Cuvier, Georges Cuyama Valley, CA cyanide Cyclades cycle cycle, historical & catastrophical cyclic stratification cyclolith cyclone Cyclops Cypress Hills gravel accumulation Cyprus Cyr, Donald D ================================================================== Dachille, Frank Dades gorges dadophoroi Daedala Daedalus Dagon Dalgacanga crater Dallol salt flats Dan, Lebanon dance Daniken, Erich von Danjon, Andre Danu (dana, anu) Danube River darekh Darius Dark Age( s) darkness Darwin, Charles Robert Darwin, Sir George Howard Darwinian revolution dating method Dating the World dating, absolute dating, relative datum, data Davies, James C. Davies, Paul Davis, Chester Davison, Charles day day length Dayak peoples de Geer, -. de Leonard, Carmen C. de Shaves, G. Dead Sea Dead Sea scrolls death Death Valley, CA decan decay constant Deccan traps, India deccan traps, India Dechend, Hertha von Deep Bay crater Deep Springs valley, CA deformation deGrazia, Alfred degree deification Deimos deity deity Dekkas volcanic formation Delaware Deloria, Vine Delphi delta deluge dema demagnetization Demodocus demon Dendera, Zodiac of dendochronology Denis of Halikarnassos density deoxyribose nucleic acid (| dna|) deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) depolarization deposit, deposition depression, land depression, mental derivation, source desertification dessication, planetary detection detonation detritus Deucalion Flood deus otiosus deuteron deva, daeva devadasi devastation Devi devil Devil's tower Devonian period deVries, -. dew Dewey, John diagenic reaction diamond diapir, diapirism diastrophism diatom Diego-Suarez bay dielectric material Diespiter (Jupiter) diet Dietz, Robert Sinclair diffusion, cultural diffusion, physical Dilmun Dingle, Herbert dinosaur Dionysus Dioskouri dioxin dipole Dirac sea Dirac's equation Dirac, Paul A. M. disaster effects disasterous processes discharge of electricity discipline Disco Island, discontinuity discordant ages disease dismemberment dispersal displacement dissociation dissolved load distillation distortion distribution divine succession divinity, classes of Djamshidi, Tepe Djerid, Chott Dnebi Dobzhansky, -. Doda Fallet, Sweden Dodds, E. R. dog star Dogon tribe dolmen dolomite Dolomite mountains dome mountain domestication of animals Dominican Republic Donnelly, Ignatius Doppler effect Doran, Patrick dormancy double layer, electrical double star Dover, chalk cliffs of dowsing DQ Herculis dragon Drakensberg volcanics drama dramaturgy Dravidian Culture dream Dreamtime dress drift, continental drift, glacial drink drought drug Druid drum drumlin field Dry Falls, Washington Dubrow, -. Dudley, H. C. dumb-bell orbit dune Dunsmuir granite spires, CA Drer, Albrecht dust storm duToit, -. Dyaus E ================================================================== Ea (Enki) early human Earth axis Earth axis change earth charge earth chimney, hoodoos Earth crust Earth dilation Earth energy Earth expansion Earth figure Earth fracture Earth history Earth interior Earth magnetism Earth Mother Earth pole Earth radius Earth size Earth surface Earth's mantle Earth, composition Earth, development Earth, interior Earth, origin Earth, structure Earth-g Earth-p earthquake earthquake light earthquake prediction East African Rift Easter Island Ebla eclipse eclipse cycle ecliptic ecliptic precession ecology, ecological ecosphere ecstasy Ecuador ecumene Edda Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddy, John A. Eden, Garden of education eel Eglinton River Valley, NZ ego Egyed, -. Egypt, Egyptian Egyptian calendar Egyptian Chronology Egyptian Dark Ages Einstein, Albert Eiseley, Loren. Eisley, Loren Eisriesenwelt El Chichon volcano El, Elohim Elam Elbrus, Mount electric electric behavior electric cosmos electrical charge electrical discharge electrical engineering electricity electrification on mountain tops electrolyte electromagnet electromagnetic encounter electromagnetic energy electromagnetic field electromagnetic spectrum electron electron bond electron-antielectron pair electron-deficient atom electronic microscope electrophoresis electrophysical effect electrosphere element element, chemical elephant Eleusis Elgon, Mount Eliade, Mircea Elijah Ellenberger, Charles L. Ellesmere Island elm embryo Emery, G. T. Emi Koussi Emiliani, Cesare emission spectrum empirical method Encke's Comet encounter, cosmic encounter, electromagnetic endocranial cast endocrine system energy energy budget, annual energy level energy source energy, conservation of Engels, -. England English fens Enki Enkomi Enlil Ennedi plateau Enosh entropy environment enzyme Eocene Epoch eolith eon, aeon Eosphaerra tyleri Eoster Etvs torsion balance epoch equation, conceptual equation, mathematical equator equatorial bulge equilibrium equinox equipartition, of energy equipotential surface equivalence principle Er era Erebus, Mount Ericson, David B. Eridu (Abu) Eros erosion erosional debris, missing erratic eruption escape velocity esker espionage in science estimate ether, aether ethics Etna, Mount Etruria, Etruscan Etruscan alphabet euphemism Euphrates River Europa-g Europa-p Evans, Sir Arthur John evening star Everest, Mount Everglades swamp, Florida evidence, rules of evolution evolved star Ewing, Maurice excited state excrement, fossilized exfoliation exile existential fear Exodus, the exosphere exoterrestrial exothermic expansion exothermic process exploding star exploration techniques explosion exponential notation exponential principle extinction( s) extremely low frequency energy, |elf| eye, cosmic Eyre, Lake F ================================================================== fable facies fact facula faggot fail Fairbanks, Alaska fairy faith fall fall of a city fall of gas fall of glass fall of ice fall of metal fall of rock and mineral fall of water and vapor fall, of ash and dust Fall, The falling star fallout Fara Faraday, Michael Farquahar, x. x. fatalism Faul, Henry fault fault-block mountains fauna faunal and floral succession fear feast feast of light feedback feldspar Fell, B. feminism Fennoscandian Rise feral humans ferro-electricity ferromagnetism fertility rite feruginous pigments Fester, R. festival Festival of Light fictional character field of knowledge field, physical Fig Tree rock series fine particle Fingal's cave Finland fire fire ritual fireball fired material firemaking Firsoff, V. A. first born" fish Fisher, Osmund fission dating fission, atomic fission, of large body fissure fjord, origin of flagellation flare, solar flash burn Flathead Valley, BC flight flint flood flood basalts flood gravel anomaly flood plain flood, catastrophic Florida Florida sediments flow of material fluvial pattern fluvial process flux flywheel Foehn wind fold morphology Folgheraiter, Guiseppe Folkin, A. V. folktale food and drink footprint forbidden energy state force, chemical force, electrical force, fundamental force, gravitational force, mechanical force, nuclear forces of Nature Forel, F. forget, forgetting formalism formation forminifera formula Forrest, Bob Forshufvud, Ragnar fort, ancient fossil fossil assemblage fossil imprint fossil record fossil river fossil string dunes fossil, radioactivity in fossilization foundations; philanthropic fourth dimension fractional crystalization fractional distillation fractionation fracture France Franco-Canabrian School Frank landslide Franklin Institute Franklin, Benjamin Frasnian Revolution fraud in science Frazer River Canyon Frazer, James George free will fresh water Freud, Sigmund Freya, Freyja friction fright frog fuel Fuhr, Ilse Fujiyama, Mount fulgurite fundamentalism Fundy, Bay of funeral rite fungi Funkhauser Furies fusain fusion fusion, nuclear future G ================================================================== Gabon Gabriel, Archangel Gaea, Gaia Gaietto, Piettro Galapagos islands galaxy Galilean satellites of Jupiter Galilei, Galileo Galileo-s Gallant, Rene Galton, Sir Francis Gambutis, Maria game gamma ray Gammon, Geoffrey Ganges delta Ganymede-p Garden of Eden gas gastrobleme Gawra, tepe Gaza Geb Geiranger Fjord geiser Geminid progenitor comet gender gene geneology general adaptation syndrome generation genesis genesis and extinction of species genetic realization genetics Geneva, lake Gentry, Robert geocentrism geochemistry geographically isolated population geography, history of geoid geologic column geological age geological ages, duration of geology geomagnetic geometry geomorphology geophysics Georgia, U. S. A. geosphere Gerard, Ralph Germany germination gestalt of creation gesture geyser Ghats, India ghost, spirit giant Giant's causeway giantism Giantopethecus Gibraltar Gilboa Gilgamesh Gimbutas, Maria Ginenthal, Charles Ginzberg, Louis Gisement of Micoque Gisement of Pennon Giyan, tepe glacial ice, origin glacier gland glass Glass, Billy global event global fracture global warming global warming Glomar Challenger gnomon gnosticism goat Gobi desert god God's Day God's fire god, goddess gold Gold, Thomas Golden age Golden fleece Goldfield Summit, NV Goldschmidt, R. Gomorrah Gondwana good and evil Goosen, Doeko Gordion Gordon, Cyrus gorge gorgon Gosselin, Pascal Francois Goetterdaemmerung Gould, Stephen Jay government Gowans, Alan grace gradualism Graf, S. M. grammar Grand Aarrat Grand Canyon Grand Coulee Grand Karroo Grand Teton Range granite granule graphite gravel Graves, Robert gravity, gravitation Great "Nevada" basin Great African rift valley Great barrier reef Great Basin Great Bear Great Bear Lake Great Britain Great flood Great Lakes Great Lakes Basin Great Pyramid Great Red spot Great Salt lake Great Slave Lake great tidal flooding Great Valley deposits Great Western Erg Great Year Greater Melanesia Greater Micronesia Greater Polynesia Greater Tasmania Greece, Greek Greek history Greenberg, Lewis greenhouse effect greenhouse, atmospheric Greenland Greenland crater Greenland ice cores Gregorian calendar Gregory, J. W. Gribbin, John Griffard, David Grinnell, George Gros Brukkaros structure group growth Guatemala guilt Guinea gulf Gulf of Mexico Gulf of Saint Lawrence Gunn, Ross Gunnison, Black Canyon of the Gurr, Ted Guthrie, W. K. C. Guyana Guyot Gwarkuh, (Persian crater) gypsum gypsy moth gyroscope H ================================================================== habit habitability Hadas, Moses Hades Hadrosaurs hail hairy star" half-life halicination Halley's Comet Halloway, -. hallucination Hama, Syria Hamath Hammam-Meskoutine Hammon hand, handedness hand-axe Hapgood, Charles Har Karkom, mount Harakhte Harappa Culture Harkenss, Doug harmonic motion harmony, of the spheres Harper's Ferry Harras Harris papyrus Harrison, E. R. Harrison, Jane Hartung, Jack, B Harz mountains Hathor Hatteras, Cape Hawaii, Hawaiian Hawkes, Jaequetta heat heaven Heavenly host heavens heavens, constancy Hebrades Hebrew, Hebraic Hecate hedonism Heezen, Bruce C. Heinsohn, Gunnar Heiratic writing heiroglyph Hekla volcano Helen of Troy heliocentrism Heliopolis Helios heliosphere helium Heller, Joseph hematite Hemen-g Henbury crater field Hephestus Hera Heracles Heraclid Heraclitus Herakles Herculeneum heresy Hermes Hermes stone Hermist hero Herodotus Herois Hertzler, J. R. Hesiod Hespherus Hess, Harry Hesy, tell-el-Heyrdahl, Thor Hibben, -. Hienghene bay hieroglyph hierophany Hieroplanes high-place Hills, J. G. Himalaya Himmalayan Orogony Hindu Hindu Kush Hindu lunar catastophe hippopotamous Hiroshima Hissarlik, Asia Minor historigraphy historism history Hitler, Adolf Hittite hoax, in science Hoba meteorite hog-back Holbrook, John holism Holister Holleford crater Holmsoland Klit holocaust Holocene hologenesis hologram, brain model holosphere Holy Dreamtime Holy Ghost Holy Mountain" homeland of mankind homeopathy homeostasis Homer Homeric Age Homeric aristocracy Homeric heros Homeric language Hominid hominid reversion Homo erectus Homo sapiens Homo sapiens schizotypicus Homo schizo Homo schizo reformation homo sinemento Homo... homology homosexuality honey Hooker, J. T. hopeful monster" Hopi, people Hoerbiger, Hans horizontal strata hormone horns horse Horseshoe falls Horus-g Hosea Hoskins(-Boisen), R. G. hot spring Howorth, Henry Hoyle, Sir Fred hubris Hudson's Bay Hueyatlaco Huggett, Richard Huitzilopochtli human engineering human evolution human genesis human migration human nature human settlement human survival human variation humanist-scientist division humanization Humbolt, A. von Hume, David humidity humor Hungary hunger hunter, hunting hunter-gatherer hurricane Hutton, James Huxley, Thomas Hwang Ho river hydrocarbons, in manna hydrocarbons, in soil hydrocarbons, on Venus hydrogen bomb hydrolic cataforms hydrologic cycle hydrous meteorite hygene Hyginus Hyksos hymm Hyperborean Hyperion hypothetical construct I ================================================================== Iapetus ice Ice Age termination Ice age( s) ice cap ice cave ice core ice dump ice fall ice-free corridor iceberg Iceland icon iconography id Idaho idealism identification identity ideology iderot, -. idol, idolatry igneous rock Iguanadon Iliad Illimani, Bolivia illo tempore illusion in scripture illusion, spatial illusion, temporal Ilopango, El Salvador image image synthesis imagination, tricks of Imbolc immortality immunological impact impact (shock) metamorphism impact erratic impedance Imperial Valley, CA Inanna inbreeding Inca Indians incantation incarnation incense incest incline inclusion India, Indian Indian Ocean Indiana individuation Indo-Chinese penninsula Indo-European Indo-European language Indo-Iranian subfamily Indonesia Indra induction Indus River Indus Valley civilization inertia infantacide inferiority complex infra-red inheritance initiation rites inner language Inntal, Tyrole Inquisition insanity inscription insect insect, queen inspiration instability instinct instinct delay institution institutions, primeval insulation, electrical integration of ideas integration of ideas intelligence intensity interference intermolecular force interstellar matter introgenesis intrusion invention inversion of strata invertebrate invisibility invisible matter Io, ion torus Io-g ion ionosphere Ions, Veronica Iowa Ipuwer papyrus Iran Iraq Ireland iridium anomalies iron Iron age iron formations irradiance irrational number Irrawddy River Isaac Isaacson, Israel M. Isaiah Isbell, William Isenberg, Aurthur Ishim, Kazakhstan Ishmael Ishtar Isis Islam island arcs Isle-de-France isostacy isotope isotope ratio isotopes, table of Israel Issyk Kul Itabirito, Brazil Italy Ithica, Ithaki ithyphallic ivory Ivory Coast Ivory Island, Siberia Ix Chel J ================================================================== Jacob (Israel) Jacot, L jaguar James, Peter James, William Janet, Pierre Japan, geography Japan, Japanese Japan, mythology Japanese language Jashar, Book of Jaspers, Karl Jastrow, Robert Java man Java trench Java, Island of Jaynes, Julian jazz Jebel-Irhoud Jeferson, Thomas Jefferys, Harrold Jehovah Jehovah's Witnesses Jeremiah Jerico Jeroboam Jerome, Saint Jerusalem Jesus (Christ) jet-rain jet-stream, atmospheric jewelry jewelry, celestial jewelry, motifs jewelry, uses Jewish historiography Jewish history Jewish legends Jewish, calendars and festivals Jewish, cosmic philosopy Jewish, mysticism Jews Jews, early wandering Job Job, Book of Johanson, Donald O. John, Saint, the apostle Johnson, F Jones, J. C. Jordan, Pascual JOS Joseph of Egypt Josephus Flavius Joshua Joule's Law Joule, James Prescott journalism, scientific Jovea, age of Jovian jubilee Jubilee Pass Judah ha-Levi Judaic monotheism Judaism Judaism, catastrophes influencing Judaism, divine entities Judaism, earliest sources and practices Judaism, Mosaism Judeideh, tell judgement of the soul, depiction Judges, Book of Jueneman, Frederick Juergens, Ralph C. juggernaut June Jung, Carl jungle and tropical forests Jupiter effect Jupiter-g, attributes and behaviors Jupiter-g, specific latin legends Jupiter-g, typical effects produced by Jupiter-g, world-wide identification Jupiter-p, composition and appearence Jupiter-p, external transactions Jupiter-p, history and origins Jupiter-p, radio-noises Jupiter-p, satellites of Jupiter-p, typical phenomena associated with Jura Mountains Jurassic Period Justin, the historian K ================================================================== Ka Kadesh Kadmus Kafer-Djarra, necropolis of Kagra River Kaibab formation Kalambo Falls Kalevala Kali Kallen, Horace Kalopsida Kalos, Kalotics Kalpas Kamchatka kames Kansas Kant, Emmanuel Kapitza Kaplan, Lewis kara structure Karakoram, India Karkom, Mount karma karst topography Kas shipwreck Kashmir Kassite Katewe Craters Kazakhstan Keen Camp summit Keewatin Keill, John Keller, Gerta Kellogg, V. L. Kelly, Alan O. Kelvin, Lord (Wm. Thompson) Kennett, J. P. Kentucky Kentucky, Mammoth Cave Kenya Kepler Kern River boulders and cobblestones kerykeion Kesil Kessler Loch Kester kettle Khima Kicking Horse Pass Kilamanjaro Kilauea, Hawaii Kimberlites Kimberly mines kinetic energy kinetic molecular theory king list King shepherd King, Clarence I. King, Henry, C. Kinnekulle, Sweden Kinsborn kinship kitchen midden kitharis Klamath mountain arc Kloosterman, Hans Knossos knowledge Knudtson, J. A. Kobuk Sand Hills, AK Koch, R. H. Koestler, Arthur Kofarh, Robert E. Kogan, Shulamith Kohoutek, Comet Kojiki scripture Koko Nor, China Kola Bore Hole Kola Penninsula, Russia Komarek, Edourd V. Sr. Kondratov, Alexander Kopal, Zdenek Koran Korea kosher kosmos Kosmos-s Kotelnoi island Kotor, Gulf of Koyukok River Krakatoa Kramer, Richard Kramer, Samuel Krishna Kronia Group, publishers of AEON Kronos, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies krypton Kugler, Francis Xavier kuh-i-Namack Kuhn, Thomas Kukla, G. J. Kumar S. Kumara Kurdistan Krten, Bjoeren Kurtz, Paul Kuwait Kwale islands Kweilin karst L ================================================================== La Brea pit, California La Cluna cave La Malbaie crater, Quebec Laacher See Labrador labrynth Lachish lady of Nordic Pantheon carbon laetoli beds Lagrange, restricted solution Lagrangian point lahar Lake Agassiz Lake Bonneville Lake Calgary flood lake dwelling Lake Humbolt Lake Isabella, CA Lake Missoula Lake Pend Oreille, ice dam Lake Wackitupe, NZ lake, origins of Lamark, -. lamina Lammas land bridge landform landform, shaping of landslide Lane, Frank Lang, Andrew Langerie Haute language language, diffusion Laos LaPlace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de Lapland LaPonit, P. I. Laramie formation Larderello hot spring Larry, R. D. Lascaux Caves laser Laskar Lassen Peak Lasswell, Harold D. Late Kingdom latent heat lateral displacement laterate laurel lava laws, in science lead leader gene hypothesis Leaky, Louis B., Mary & Richard least interaction action Lebanon Leclerc, G. L. Lederer, Wolfgang legend Lehmann, -. Leibnitz, Gottfried Leiden papyrus Lemaire, J. Lena river lens Leonardo da Vinci Leroi-Gourhan Les Eyzies de Tayac LeSage, George-Louis Letopolis Levant/ Dead Sea Rift Levi-Strauss, Claude Leviathan Leviathan cave Lexell's Comet Leyden jar Liakhov island Libby, Willard Frank libedo liberalism Liberia liberty Libra library Libya, Libyan lichen life life and entropy life span life, biotic precursors of light light pressure light refraction lightning lignite Lilith limbic system limestone Linear B script Lingua Adamisa linguistic ideology linguistics lion lion, rampant Lisbon earthquake listric fault literature litergy lithic wear analysis lithosphere Lithuania Little Salt spring Littlewood, -. -. loam local neutral Loch Ness loess logic Loham mountain Loma Prieta earthquake London Geologic Society Long, C. H. lost tribe Lot Lotan love low elevation meteor Lowel, Percival Lowery, Malcolm Lucerne, lake Lucifer luck Luckenbill, D. D. Luckerman, Marvin Lucretius, -. Lucy" Lukens luminosity lunagenesis lunar ... lunar calendar lunar fission Luxor Lycia, tombs of Lycosoura Lyell, Charles Lyons, France lyre Lystrosaurus Lyttleton, Raymond M ================================================================== Ma, E. M. Maadin Mabon Maccoby, Hyam MacCrea, W. H. MacDonnel Bay, Australia MacGowan, -. MacGregor, J. machine Mackenzie river Mackie, Evan W. MacMillan Book Co. MacNeish, Richard S. macro-evolution Macrobius Madura, Australia Magdalenian Mage, Shane Magi magic Magiddo magistrate Magna Grecia magnetic decay magnetic mapping magnetic pole magnetic reversal magnetic tube magnetism magnetite magnetization magnetosphere magnitude magnolia Mahabharata Mahemet main sequence star Mainwaring, Bruce Maiori maize Majdalouna, necropolis of Malagasi Malapina Glacier Malay Penninsula Maldeve Islands Mali Malkus, W. V. R. Malta Malthus, David mammal mammoth Mammoth cave, Kentucky Man (early in America) Manavgat River Mandelkehr, Moe Mandraka falls Manetho manganese manic depressive Manitoba mankind manna manna, medicinal properties manna, nutritional properties Manson structure Manson, Lewis A. Manu Maori lore map Maran, S. P. Maranatos, S. Marble Canyon sand deposit, AZ Marcanton, Pierre L. March Marduk Mare Imbrium marfa lights Margolis, Howard Mari marine extinction Mariner-s marriage Mars-g Mars-p Marshak, Alexander marsupial Martia, age of Martin, P. S. Martinatos, Spiridon Marut Marx, Christoph Marx, Karl Marxist paradigm Maryland mascon mass organization mass spectrum mass, physical mass, religious mass-luminosity relation Massif Central, France massive dunes, Somali coast massive ion massive sand-deposit mastaba mastodon materialism mathematics matter Mauna Loa, Hawaii Maunder minimun Mauritania mausoleum Maxwell, James Clerk May Maya, Mayan maypole Mazama mountain Mazda Mazzuroth MBI" people McClintock, Barb McKinnon, Roy McLaren, D. J. meaning measure and test Mecalli scale Mecca mechanics mechanism Mecklenberg Lake medicine, medicinal megalithic monument megalomania Megiddo megolith Meinesz, Venning F. A. meiosis Mekong river melt melting point membrane, cellular memorial generation memory Memphis Mendel, Gregor Mendeleev, D. I. Mendocino, CA menstruation, menstrual mental health/ illness mentation Menzel, Donald mer Merapi, mount Mercalli scale Mercanton, P. L. Mercator projection Mercator, Gerardus Mercuria, Mercurian Period Mercury-g Mercury-p Merovingian period Meservey, R. mesiah, mesianism Meso, ..., Middle... Meso-America, Mesoamerican mesocortex Mesolithic period meson Mesopotamia, Mesapotamian Mesopotamian chronology Mesozoic era Mesquite gravel, NV Messabi Iron Range metabolism metal metalurgy metamorphic rock metamorphosis metaphor metaphysics meteor meteor crater Meteor Crater," AZ meteor shower Meteora, Greece meteorite meteorite, encounter with meteorites from Mars meteoroid meteorology meter, metre methane methodology Methusalah Meton Metonic Cycle metric system Mexico mica Micah Michael, Archangel Michell, John Michelsohn, Irving Michigan Michigan, Lake micro-comets microlithic technique microrganism microscope microwave energy Mid-Atlantic ridge Middle Bronze age Middle East Midgard Midsummer Midsummer Night's Dream migraine migration, animal migration, bird migration, human Milankovitch, M. Milford Sound, N. Z. Milford Sound, NZ Milkom" Milky Way millennialism Miller, Alice Miller, Hugh mima mound Mimas mimicry mind mineral Minerva mining Minnesota Minoa, Minoan Miocene epoch miracle mirage Mireaux, Emile Mishrife missing link missing mass Mississippi River Mississippi, U. S. A. Mississippi-Missouri Basin Missoula, Lake Missouri, U. S. A. Mistaseni (Sask. rock) misteltoe Mitanni Mithra mitosis mixture, chemical mnemonic Moazcas model, scientific Moen Cliffs, Denmark Mogollon Rim river gravel, AZ Mohenjo-daro moho (discontinuity) mohole Moldavite tektites molecule Moloch momentum Monaco Monan monarch money, catastrophic origin Mongolia monolith monotheism monsoon monster Mont Blanc, France Montana Montazuma Hills, CA Monte Bolca Montgomery Creek formation month Monument Valley monumentalism Moon moon worship Moon-g Moon-p Moore, Brian Moorea, French Polynesia morality Morar Loch, Scotland Morgan, Elaine Morgan, Lewis H. Morning Star Morocco Morris, Charles Morris, Henry Morrison, Philip Moses motion motive Motz, Lloyd mound builder Mount Saint Helens Mount Shasta mineral deposits Mount Shasta, CA Mount Sinai Mount Whitney, CA Mount Woodson granite mountain range mouse mouse, cosmic Mousterean culture Mozambique Mt. Pelee Mt. Pinatubo, Phillipines Mu" muck mud Mudies Muir Glacier, Alaska Muldrow Glacier, Alaska Mullen, William (Bill) Mller, Max Muller, William. multiple star system Munk, W. H. Murchison meteorite murmmurings, of crowd museum music music of the spheres mutagenic agent mutation mutual repulsion Mycenea, Mycenean Myres, John mysticism myth interpretation myth, mythology mythical and celestial movement mytho-linguistic mythology N ================================================================== Nabonnasar Nafud Desert depression Nagasaki names of gods names of planets Namibia Nammu Nampa image Nanga Parbat Nansen, F. Naos of El Arish Napier, William M. naptha narcissism Narmada River, India Narryer, mount Nasca, Peru nastic National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) natural force natural history natural law natural rights natural scientist natural selection naturalism nature Nature, periodical Naughton Navajo sandstone navigation, primitive Naxos, Greece Nazis, Nazism Neanderthal man Near East Nebo Nebraska Nebraska Sand Hills Nebuchadnezzar nebula nebular cosmogony Nectanebo nectar Needham, -. needs, human negative electrical charge negative exponentialism negro race Nelson, John H. Nemesis Nemi Lake Neo..., New... neocortex Neolithic age Nepal Neptune-g Neptune-p Nergal nervous system nest Nestor, Palace of Netherlands Neugebauer, Otto neurons neurosis neurotic neutral, neutrality; electric neutrino neutron star neutron transformation Nevada Nevadan Revolution Neville, -. New Brunswick, Canada New Hampshire New Jersey New Madrid earthquake New Mexico New River, CA New Scientist, periodical New Testament New Year's Day New York New Zealand Newcomb, Simon Newfoundland Newgrosh, Bernard Newham, -. Newton, Sir Isaac Newtonian definitions Newtonian formulations Ngorongoro Crater Niagra falls Nibelungen Nicaragua Nichmed nickel Niederberger, Chistine Niemann, V. D. Nieto, M. M. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. Niger Republic Niger river Nigeria nihillism Nile river Nilsson, Herbert nimbus Nimrod Nineveh Ninninger, H. H. Ninurta Nipponia Nippur Nirvana Nishapur mines Nitovikla nitrate nitrite nitrogen nitrogen cycle nitrogen oxides Nix Olympia Noah's flood Noah, Noachian noble savage" node Noga noise pollution noise, accoustic noise, cosmic noise, electrical nonconformity, geological Nonnos Nordic myth Nordic, Norse normal normality, abnormality Norman, John North America North American Flood North American Lacustrian Rift North American tektite field North Carolina North Dakota North Pole North Sea North Star North, Robert G. Northern Kingdom of Israel Northwest Territories, Canada Norway nova Nova Komenei Nova Scotia Novaya Zemlya, Siberia novel November nuclear energy nuclear missile nuclear physics nuclear reaction nuclear synthesis nucleic acid nucleon nucleotide nucleus, atomic nucleus, cell nuclidic masses Numa Pompilius number numbers, sequences and series numen nursery rhyme Nut nutrition O ================================================================== O'Geoghan, Brendon O'Keefe, John A. O. K. Oahu, Hawaii Oannes oasis Ob-Irtysh Basin obliquity obliquity, changes oblisk observatory obsession obsidian Occam, William of occultism ocean ocean basin Oceana, cultures of oceanic flood gravel Oceanic plate subduction oceanogrophy ocher October Odessa Odin Odysseus Odyssey Oedipus Oesel island Oestrus Ogden, J. G. III Ogyges Ohio oil oilfield Okeanos Oklahoma Okotoks erratic Old Crow Basin, Yukon Old Faithful geyser Old Man of Hoy Old One of the Sea" old red sandstone Old Testament Olgas, the olive oil Olivet, mount Olmec world Olympia Olympic games Olympus Mt., Mars Olympus, Mt., Greece Oman omen Ometepe Island and volcanoes omnipotence of thought Omo River Omoroca Ontario Oort cloud of comets Oosterhout, G. van ooze Oparin, A. I. ophiolite Ophiolites Optimkist's Cave, U. S. S. R. oracle orbit orbit transition (solar system) Orbiter-s order Ordovician hammer ore deposit Oregon organic geochemistry organic illness organic sediment organization orgy, orgiastic orientation oriented lakes origin of life original horizontality" concept original man Ormuzd Ornstein orogeny Orontius Fineus Orphic hymns Orphic mysteries orthogenesis oscillator Osiris Osmaniye osmium Othus Otto, Walter F. Ouadi es Seboua ought" ought-is" problem Ouranos Ouroboros outcropping outwash Ovendon, Michael W. overfold overturned strata Ovid Owens Valley aprons owl ox-bow lake Oxnard, Charles oxygen oxygen isotope ratio oxygen, transmutation of oxygenation of the atmosphere oyster ozone P ================================================================== Pacific ring of fire Pacific rise Pacifica Padagonian man paean pagan Page, Denys Paine-Gaposchkin, Celia Pakicetus fossil Pakistan palaeo-anthropology palaeo-biochemistry palaeo-climate palaeontology Palenque paleography Paleokoutella Paleolithic Age, Palaeolithic paleomagnetism paleontology Paleozoic Era Palestine palladium Pallas Palmer Paluxy footprints Pamir range Panama pandemonium Pangea, Pangaea pangenesis panic Panku pantheism pantomine papurus parable paradigm Paraguay parallax paranatellonta paranoia parapsychology Paricutin, Mexico Paris, France Paris-g Parry, Alan parthenogenesis Parthenon particle particle physics particle/ wave duality parturition Pascal, Blaise Passover Patagonia, fjords of patriachy Patroni, Giovanni Patten, Donald Patterson, Clair paucity of evidence Pausanias, -. Payne-Gaposhkin, Cecilia peace peat pebble pediment peer review Peirce, Charles Peking man Pelasgians Pelean volcano Peleg Peloponnesian Penninsula Peltier, Jean penance pendulum peneplain Penniston, G. B. Pennsylvania Pennsylvanian Period Pensee Pentecost penumbra Peoples of the sea Pepi peptide percept perception periastron pericentron perigee perihelion period period, geologic period, resonant period, sidereal period, synodic Periodic table permafrost Permean period Permian Period Persia, ancient Persia, Persian Persian Gulf personality personification perspective perturbation Peru Peruvian gravel anomalies Pestigo fire pestilence Petrie, W. M. S. petrifaction, petrification petrified forest Petrified Forest, AZ petroglyph petroleum Petrona skull Petterson, Hans Pfeiffer, John Pfeiffer, Robert H. Phaeacia Phaeton phallic Pharoah Ramses phase phenol phenomenology phenomenon philanthropy Philippine Islands Philistine pick philosophy phlogiston Phobos Phoebe Phoebus Phoenicia, Phoenician Phoenix, AZ phonetic, phonemic phosphate phosphoresence phosphorous photochemistry photoelectricity photography photometry photon photosphere photosynthesis phylogenic inheritance physical binary system physics physiology Phystos Phythian oracle pi Pi-ha-kiroth Pickering, William pictograph piezoelectricity pigmentation Pikaia Pikering, William Pilat dunes pilgrim pillar pillar of fire" Pillars of Hercules Piltdown man Piltdown, England Pindar, -. pingo Pioneer-s Piri Reis map placebo plague Plagues of Egypt plain planaria planarian Planck, Max plane, ecliptic planet planetarium planetary gods planetary motion planetary nebula planetary tide planetary, transaction planets and human directives planets, in language plant plasma plasma, cosmic plastic flow Plata, rio de la plate tectonics plateau Plato pleasure Pleiades Pleione pleisiosaurus Pleistocene Epoch Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary plenum Plinian eruption Pliny Pliocene epoch plot Plotinus plural environment plural selves Plutarch Pluto-g, god Pluto-p, planet plutonic rock plutonium plutonium, toxicity Pobitite Kamani poetic meter Poincare, Jules Henri Point Loma erratics poison Polaki, Lake Poland Polanyi, Michael polar icecap, shift polarization political control political science politics politics of science pollen polluted sediment pollution Polonium poly-ego Polybius polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAC) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAH polymerase chain reaction polymorphism Polynesia polyploidism polytheism Pont d'Ambon Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean Ponway gravel Popocatepetl Popol Vuh Epic popular science population porosity Porphyrion Portugal Poseidon positivism Postojna Cave potassium-argon dating potential energy potential, electric pottery poultry Poverty Point, Louisiana power, intellectual power, physical power, political Poznansky, Arthur pragmatics of legend Pratt, J. H. prayer Pre-Cambrian Era precession of equinoxes precident, need for precipitation predestination Predmost, Moravia prehistory preservation pressure group, lobby pressure of light pressure, biological pressure, environmental pressure, physical Prestley, Joseph Prestwich, Joseph prevailing wind Priam, T. priapic wand Pribriam, Carl Price, George McCready priest primary primate primeval sculpture primevalogy primordial soup" principal star in binary system priority in scientific discovery pro-human ape pro-selenes pro-Selenian probability process Proclus professionalism progress projection Prometheus promised land" proof prophecy of doom prophet propoganda protein protoplasm protozoa Prouty, W. F. Psyche psychiatry psychic mechanism psychoanalysis psychobiographical psychological therapy psychology psychoneurosis, psychosis psychosomatic genetics psychosomatism Ptah Pterosaur Ptolemy, Claudius public policy publishing pulsar pumice punctuated equilibrium punishment punition punt Puys volcanic chain Pylos pyramid Pyrannes, mountain range Pysanky Pythagoras python Q ================================================================== q, charge on electron q-quantavolution Q-series Qalaat-er-Rouss Qraye, necropolis of quackery quadrant quadrature quantavolution quantification quantity quantum quantum relativity quantum sedimentation quantum-mechanics, theory of quark quartz quasar Quaternary Period Quebec Queen of Heaven" Queen of Sheba Queenstown, NZ Quetzelquotl Quiche Mayans quicksand quintessence R ================================================================== Ra, Re Raabjerg mile dunes Rabbitkettle hot springs Rabinowitz, Eugene race radar Radhakrishnah, V. radiant genesis radiation radiation chemistry radiation detector radiation sickness radiation storm radiation therapy radiation, biological effects of radical, chemical radient genesis radio radio-halo radioactive dating, (RAD) radioactive decay radioactive halo radioactive isotope radioactive waste radioactive, radioactivity radioastronomy radiochemistry radiochronometry radiogenic helium radiometry radium radon rafting rafting of land masses Raikes, Robert J. rainbow Rainbow Bridge, Utah rainmaking raised sealevel Rakha Ralph, Elizabeth Rama Ramadan Ramapithicus Ramayana Ramesses II Ramona cobbles, CA Rampino, M. R. Ramses II Ramses III Ramses VI Rank, Otto Raphael Rapp, George Ras Shamra Ras-el-Ain rational rationalism rationality Raup, David M. Rawanda Rawlinson, Gerald rayed crater reading backwards realism reasonable reasoning recall recency recent time reception system, science Reck, H. recombination, genetic red colored environmental substances Red Deer badlands red dwarf star Red Sea red shift red tide reductionism reef refining, metal refining, natural refraction refrigeration, natural Rehoboam Reich, Theodor Reich, Willhelm Reid, G. C. relative density relativity in physics relativity, social relief religion religion, reformation religion, sociology of REM, unit remains, human & animal remanence, magnetic remission remnant, celestial renaissance repetitiveness reproduction, exponential rates reproductive system reptile reservoir, natural Reshetov, Yuri resistance resonance resonance, physical resonant ratio respiration retired god reversed magnetism reversion to hominidae revolution, intellectual revolution, political revolution, scientific revolution, social Rezanov, I. A. Rhaecus Rhea rheology Rhine river Rhine River valley Rhodesia Rhone glacier Rhone River rhyme Rhys-Carpenter rhythm rhythm, biological Ricci Richat structure ridge Ries Crater Rift, African Rift, Mid Atlantic rifting Rig Veda right handedness right hemisphere Riley, C. J. rille rille, lunar Rilli, Nicola ring of fire" ring, planetary ring-around-the-rosey" Rio de Janeiro ripple mark ripple marking in rock rising land rite of passage Rittmann, A. ritual river river delta Rivers, W. H. R. Rix, Ziv Roche Limit" Rochenbach rock rock art rock chimney rock salt Rock, Fritz Rocky Mountain structures Rocky Mountains rod Rodabaugh, David rodent Roheim, Geza role-playing Roman religion Rome, Roman Rommulus, Remmus Rooser, R. G. Rose, Lynn Rosetta stone Ross ice shelf rotation Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Roussel, Rene routine rubble hill Rubezahl Ruffignac Rugus, Carl W. rulers runaway" star Runcorn, S. .K Russell, Bertrand Russell, D. A. Russell, Henry Norris Russia Rutherford scatter Ryan, W. B. F. S ================================================================== Sabbat Sacral man sacrament sacred sacrifice sacrifice ritual saga Sagan, Carl Saguenay river Sahara Sahara, Saharan Sea Sahul Saint-Hilaire, Geoffrey Salinas Valley alluvial fan, CA Salop, L. J. salt salt dome, salt plug salt flat, salt pan salt lake Salt Lake crater Salt pans, S Australia salt, evaporation of brine saltation Salton Sea, California Salzkammergut, Austria Sammer, Jan Samoa Samson San Andreas Fault San Diego Hills, CA San Felipe ocean flood apron San Francisco earthquakes San Jacinto Mountains sanctification sand sand barrier sand dune sandstone sandstorm Sanhain sanity Santa Klaus Santillana, Giorgio di Santorini remnant Sardinia Sargasso Sea Sargon Saskatchewan Saskatchewan gravels Satan satellite satellite, artificial satellite, celestial satrap Saturn symbol Saturn's rings Saturn, binary Saturn-g Saturn-p Saturnalia Saturnia, Saturnian Age Saturnian Deluge Saturnian nova satyr Saudia Arabia Saul Saul, John Saussure, F de scabland scale-m scale-w Scaligar, J. J. scanning electron microscope scarab Scarisora Cave Schaeffer, Claude Schindewolf, Otto H. schist schizophrenia, schizophrenic schizotypicality Schliemann, Heinrich Schorr, Edward Schramm, David Sciaparelli science science fiction Science, Organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science scientific espionage Scotia Sea scripture Scrope, George Poulett sculpture, ancient sea feature sea level Sea level changes in seafloor exploration seafloor, spreading seamount season, seasonal Second Millennium BC secret word secularism sediment sedimentary meteorite sedimentation sedition & science seed seismic discontinuity seismic sea wave seismism seismology Selene self awareness self control self destructiveness self fulfillment self-rule Selimiye Selye, Hans semantics Semele semiconductor Semiotics semite Seneca Senegal Senmut Sennacherib sense( s) separation of heaven & earth serpent Serpent mound serpentine Servan, lake Set, Seth settlement, primeval Seuss, H. E. Sewa Sewalich Hills sex sexual selection sexuality Seychelles shadow Shakespeare shale Shaman Shamash Shamayim Shansi Loess region Shapley, Harlow sheath, electric Sheldrake, R. Shelton, John S. Sherman Glacier, AK Shiaparelli, Giovanni V. shield volcano Shimkunas Shinto Ship rock Shishak Shiva Shklovskii, I. S. shock shock metamophism shock therapy Shocked quartz shoreline sial Siberia Siberian craters Sicily Sieff, Martin Sierra foothills sand blanket, CA Sierra Leone sign sign language Sigri, petrefied forest Sihkism silica, silicate silicon silification silt silver Simiriyan, tell simple harmonic motion, SHM Simpson, George G. Simpson, John, A. simultaneous havoc sin Sinai Sinanthrupus Singer, Fred sink sinkhole sinking land Sinn Sirius Sisthrus Sithylemenkat, lake Siwalik hills size Sizemore, Warner Skidi Pawnee sky sky mimicry sky movement sky-gods Slabinsky, Victor slavery Slavs sleep Sleeping Bear dunes slip fault Slovensky Raj Smart, W. M. smelting smite Smith, William Smokey Valley, NV snake Snake River Canyon social imprinting social invention social science socialism Society For Interdisciplinary Studies (London), SIS society over time sociology Socrates Soda Lake, Chad sodium chloride Sodom soft landing soil solar antapex solar flare Solar magnetic field solar mansion" Solar motion solar power solar prominence solar radar solar size solar storm Solar System solar wind Solaria Binaria solid Solinus Solomon Solomon's temple Solon solstice solution, chemical Somaliland songs, sacred sonic boom Soos Springs, Czechoslovakia soot in sediments Sophist Sorenson, I. Sorokin, Pitrim Sothic dating Soufriere volcano sound, catastrophic South Africa South America South Carolina South China Sea South Dakota South Pole South Sea Islands South-East Asia Soviet Union space exploration space infra-charge space medicine space plasma space science space, concept of space-charge sheath space-time Spain Spangler, George W. Spanish Sahara Spanos spark, electrical Sparkling Goat" Sparta, Spartan specialization species specific charge ratio specific gravity spectre spectroscopy spectrum spectrum class of stars spectrum measurement speech speech disorders speleothem Spencer, Herbert sperm Sphinx Spinden spirituality Spitzbergen Spokane Flood sport spring Spring Equinox Sri Lanka St. Elmo's Fire St. Gervais, France St. Lawrence River stability, constancy Stag dance stalactite stalagmite Stalinism stampede standard atmosphere standard geologic column Stanley, Steven M. star star as pointed emblem star dunes, W Algeria star emblem statics statistics statitc electrification Stecchini, Livio Steibing, Wm. Steinhaur, Loren C. stellar evolution stellar population stellar structure Stengler, William Steno, Nicholas Surinam Stenson, Niels Stephanos, Robert stereotyping Stetson, -. Stevanson, ?. ?. Still, Elmer G. stimulus-responce stoicism stone Stone Age Stone calendar stone circle Stone Mountain, Georgia Stonehenge stones, falling strata, statification stratigraphy stratographic column stratosphere stream channel striation strike string dunes, Arabia Stromboli, volcano strontium structure structure of nature Stube, -. styx subatomic particle subduction sublimation submarine canyon submarine mountain submarine seep subsidence succession of gods Sudbury, Ontario Suess, Eduard Sugarloaf mountain Suhr, E. George suicide sulfur compound Sullivan, Walter sulphur Sumer, Sumerian Sumner, William Graham sun worship Sun, James Sun, myths & dances Sun, Sol Sunda Arc sundial sunken land sunspot super ego Super Saturn Super Uranus superconductivity supernatural supernova superstition supression, devices of supression, techniques of Surabhi Surtsey, Iceland Surveyor-s survival survival of the fittest" survivor Sutherland Falls, NZ Sutter Buttes, Marysville, CA Swaddle, T. W. Swanscombe Man swastika Sweden Swift-Tuttle, Comet Switzerland Sybil syllogism symbol symbolic logic symmetry of form symptom Synagogue synapse synchronization of history syncline synodos, synodic period synthetic Q-theory Syria Syrian-Palastinian Rift Valley Syro-Palestine systemic mutation Szasz, Thomas T ================================================================== T'ien Ta-hsueh Mountains Taal Lake & Volcano Taannek, tell tabernacle Tabernacle of Moses Table Mountain taboo tail Talbott, David N. Talbott, George Talbott, Stephen L. Talmud & Midrash talos Talyche Tamboro Volcano Tamil Tammuz Taoism tar sand Tarse tarsier taxonomy Taylor, Thomas Teays River Tecate Summit technology, development of technology, origin Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Teishebaini tektite teleology teleostei telescope, optical telescope, radio tell Temecula Valley temperature temple Temple of Jerusalem temple, archetecture temple, origin Temple, Robert Ten Commandments Tenerife, Canary Islands tensile strength Teotihuacan tera-ampere Terminal Cretaceous Catastrophe Ternifine fossils terra-cotta relief Terrace, H. S. terrestrial ecosystem terrestrial methane territory as claimed habitat terror Tertiary Period Tesla, Nikola test test of time test, general test, of matter test, philosophical testing, mental Tethyan Sea Tethys belt tetrapyrrole pigment Teutonic religion textual critiscism texture & structure of rock Tey Gawra Tezcatlipoca Thackrey, Ted Thailand Thales of Miletus Thamud Thanatos Thenus theology theomachy theophobia theory theotrophic theotropy Thera, Thira therapsids therapy thermal energy thermal expansion thermal metamorphism thermocline thermodynamics, laws of thermoluminescence in dating thermonuclear reaction, fusion thermosphere Theseus Thira tholos Thom, Rene Thomson, Sir William Thor thorium series Thoth thought thought disorder thought process, thinking Thoum, Pharaoh Thao Three Valley Gap gravels throne thrust thrusting, rock Thule thunderstorm Thutmose I Thutmose II Thutmose III Tiahuanaco Tiamat-Apsu Tibet tidal bore tidal flat tidal friction tide Tiglath Pileser III Tigris River Tikal till, glacial tilting, axial Timaeus time time of humanization time, current measurements of time, disclosure in rocks time, disclosure in statigraphy time, perception of time, physiological clock time, psychology of timescale Timna tin Tiryns Titan titanotheres Tithonius Lacus Titicaca, Lake Tiubergen, Nickolaos Tlachtli Tlaloc Tlazolteotl Toba lake, Indonesia tohu-bohu tomb Tompkins, Peter tool topography Torah tornado, whirlwind & waterspout torque torus totem, totemism toungues, speaking in Tower of Babel" town plan toxicity, plutonium trace element tradition tragedy Trainor, Lynn transactive matrix Transarctic Mountains translation transmission of brain messages transmutation transmutation of chemical elements transparency of water trap, petroleum trauma tree tree, cosmic tree-ring dating trenche, submarine trepidation Tresman, Harold Triassic Period Triassic-Jurassic Boundary tribe, tribal tribology Trinil faunal zone tripod cauldron Triton Triton, Lake Trojan asteroids Trojan Wars tropics tropism troposphere trough Troy truth truth, in science & sociology Tsaidan Basin tsunami Tsunoda, Tadanobu Tuba, Lake Tucson Mountains, AZ Tula Tunguska Explosion turbidity current turbulance, aquatic turbulence, atmosphere turbulence, lithic Turfan Depression Turin Papyrus Turkey Turkistan Turkmenian Turman, B. W. turpentine Twelve Tribes of Israel Two Creeks Interglacial Stage Tycho's nova Tyndal, John Typhon typhoon typology Tyr Tyrannosaurus Tyrrhenia U ================================================================== U. S. Northeast Coast Ubeidiya Ugarit Uke-mochi-no-kami Ukko ultramafic chemistry ultrasonic ultraviolet Ulysses Umbgrove, J. H. F. uncertainty principle unconformity, cartographical unconformity, classificatory unconformity, geological unconscious undersea exploration unidentified flying objects, UFO unified field theory unified science uniformitarian, uniformitarianism universal language Universe, development of Universe, dynamics of Universe, origin Universe, structure of unseen body Upham, Warren uplift Ur Uralian Geosyncline Urania, age of uranium uranium-thorium-lead dating Uranus Minor Uranus-g, as god Uranus-p, as planet Uranus-p, satellites of Urartu urban revolution Urey, Harold C. Ursa Major constellation utopia Uweinat Uxmal V ================================================================== vacuum Vail, Isaac Vajrapani Van Allan radiation belts van Andel, Tjeerd van Flandern, Thomas C. van Oosterhout, G. W. Van, Lake Vanderpool, Eugene, Sr. vapor pressure vaporization variation, biological Varuna varve varve, dating by varve, deposits in Vaucluse, Fontaine de Vaughn, Raymond Veda, Vedic Vedism Velikovsky, Immanuel velocity velocity of light Venezuela Venus, comet Venus-g Venus-g, mythology Venus-p Venusia, Age of Venuturi Harbor, Tijuana River Veracruz erratics, Mexico Verdon Gorge, France vermin Vernal Equinox Vesuvius Vico, Giambattista Victoria, Australia, Lake Nyanza Victoria, Lake, Africa Vietnam Vijin, mexican bullcart Vilks, -. Villanovan violence virgin birth Virgin River, NV virus viscosity Vishnu, Visnu Vissidhi-Maggia visual agnosia visual binary Vita-Finzi, Claudio Vitaliano, Dorothy vitrified structures Vitryas vocalization void volatility volcanic surge cloud volcanism, explosive volcano light voltage voluntarism von Buch, Leonard Von Fange, Eric Vredefort Structure Vsekhsviatskii, Sergi K. vulcanism W ================================================================== Wabar craters Waddenzee, Netherlands Wadjak fossils Walker Pass impact cones, CA Wallace, Alfred Russel Wanlesa, Harold R. warfare Warlow, Peter Warner's Ranch sand hills Warwick, James, W. wassail water water depositions, UT water transport water, effects water, origin of water, World resources of Watson, Alan wave, in physics wave, seismic wave, tidal wavelength Wealden Series weather weather dynamics weathering, rocks Weaver, Warren Webb, Willis L. Weber, Max Wegener, Alfred weight weights & measures Weiner, J. S. welding well welt West Frisian Islands West Indies Westcott, Roger Western cordilleras Westfall, Richard S. Whakarewarewa Thermal Area, NZ whale whammy Wheeler, Mortimer, R. F. Whelton, Clark Whipple, Fred whirl wind whistling atmospheric Whiston, William White, J. P. Whitney, J. D. Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whyte, Martin A. Wickenberg flood gravel, AZ Wickramasinghe, D. T. Willamette Valley Willis, B. Wilson, Colin & A. T. Wilson, J. Tuzo Winchell, Alexander wind wind and water anomalies wind tunnel wine-making Winsconsin glacial stage Wise, D. U. wiseman witch Wituratersrand system Witwatersrand formation Wolf of Rome" Wolfe, Irving Wollin, Goesta women Wondjina pictures Wong, Kee Kuong Wonguri Wonguri ceremonies wood, preserved Wood, Robert Muir Woodmoappe, John Woodward, John Wooley, Leonard word work world government World Order World Tree World, celestial archetypes Worrad worship Worzel, J. Lamar Wotan Wreschener, Ernst Wright, Frederick G. writing Wyoming X ================================================================== x-ray burst x-ray source x-ray style, in Art xenophobia Y ================================================================== Yahweh Yamato mountains Yangtze River, Yellow River Yayanos, Aristes year, calendar year, cermonies of year, concept & calendar Year, Great Yellowstone National Park YHWH yin-yang yoga Yosemite National Park Yosemite Valley Yuba River, CA Yucatan karst yuga Yugoslavia Yukatan Yukon Territory, Canada Yule Z ================================================================== Zagros Mountains zedec Zeus Ziegler, Jerry L. ziggurat zinc Zinjanthropus Zion zodiac zodiacal light Zoroaster Zysman, Milton {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: by Alfred de Grazia A Personal History of Attempts to Establish and Resist Theories of Quantavolution and Catastrophe in the Natural and Human Sciences, 1963 to 1983. by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, N. J. Notes on first printed version of this book ISBN: 0-940268-08-6 Copyright (c) 1984 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved Printed in the U. S. A. Limited first edition of 300 copies. Address: Metron Publications, P. O. Box 1213, Princeton, N. J., 08542, U. S. A. Cosmic Heretics was processed by the Princeton University Computing Center, using the processing language called Script. Photocomposition, printing, and binding were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services. The text is set in 10 and 9 point Times Roman. The Author thanks Rick Bender, Steve Pearson, and Skip Plank for managing ably and considerately the production of this and other works of the Quantavolution Series, and also thanks Marion Carty for her contributions to the designs and formatting of the books. On the cover, Isodensitometer tracing of comet Morehouse 1908 III, in J. Rahe et al., Atlas of Cometary Forms (Washington: NASA, 1962), 63-4. This book is dedicated to whoever figures in it, whether or not by name. The most elementary books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought. Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in older literature: "The cause of this phenomenon is not understood;" "science no longer ventures to explain causes;" "the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to be taken;" "opinions are very much divided;" "in spite of the contradictions involved;" "science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimes contradictory." Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law. To educate -- one's self to begin with -- had been the effort of one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of waiting another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of complexities, allured one's imagination but slightly. From : The Education of Henry Adams : An Autobiography. Privately published in 1906, in 100 copies, and sent to interested persons for comment. General publication ensued in 1918. In 1975 republished by Berg: Dunwoody, Georgia. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS by ALFRED DE GRAZIA TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD: IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST PART ONE 1. ROYAL INCEST 2. THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE 3. CHEERS AND HISSES 4. A PROPER RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY 5. THE BRITISH CONNECTION PART TWO 6. HOLOCAUST AND AMNESIA 7. FROM VENUS WITH LOVE 8. HOMO SCHIZO MEETS GOD PART THREE 9. NEW FASHIONS IN CATASTROPHISM 10. ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS 11. CLOCKWORK PART FOUR 12. THE THIRD WORLD OF SCIENCE 13. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 14. THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS PART FIVE 15. THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY 16. PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION 17. THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE EPILOGUE {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD: } {S : IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST } COSMIC HERETICS: by Alfred de Grazia FOREWORD IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST I did not obtain Alfred de Grazia's materials for this book without remonstrance and persiflage. I had thought that he would be pleased to have someone writing about his activities, especially someone like myself who could be counted upon for sympathy, and indeed intended to do so, in several volumes, no less. Strange, for Immanuel Velikovsky had responded to me in the same way! When I muttered something about reminiscence and the consolations of old age, he was primed for the retort, and I learned that Leonard Woolf had written his autobiography in his eighties, in five volumes, and Woolf was then old enough to be his father, and Bertrand Russell at the same age in three volumes. And I had better read them. Furthermore, said he, I have a lot to recount, think of it, a boyhood spent sniffing the stench of the Chicago stockyards, shivering in the icy blasts off the prairies, a small critter's glance up the skirts of the Roaring Twenties. Then the University of Chicago in the heyday of Robert Maynard Hutchins. And more, seven campaigns of World War II, and still more, an island of the Aegean Sea, an experimental college in the Swiss Alps, intelligent women, singular, even beautiful, women, even beautiful men, for that matter. No, I can't let you take it away, there's too much to say. Let me try, I said, there'll be no conflict of interest. I'll hew to the line of the Cosmic Heretics as they tried to break into the halls of science. It's got to be dull. It'll save you doing the chore. I can't take in your enfants terribles or your politicking, your love affairs or your friends who escaped your involvement in cosmic heresies. Or your poetry or attempts at educational revolution. No Naxos, not the beautiful ideas by half. No grueling trips, failures, pains, unless they're cosmical. No Vietnam, no University life. Then Deg began to reproach me for taking a person's life out of its context, arguing that you have to talk about everything to say the truth about anything, whereupon I argued that no field of science could exist if most of everything weren't left out of the investigation of single thing. Well certainly, he granted, you'll have a better chance of excising the insignificant details of life. Yes, exactly, I said, but I thought there's the problem and the genius of biography, fixing upon the details which may be the fulcrum of a change of life, precisely the sort of thing that is often lost in sociology and history. Where will it start, where will it end, he wondered. I'll start, I said, at the time when you met Immanuel Velikovsky, the beginning of 1963, and carry it down to the publication of your Quantavolution Series, that is, the beginning of 1984. Not in chronological order of course. The story will lurch from side to side and pitch and roll. Using your iconoclastic word "quantavolution" will help to define the dramatis personae. If a person's been observed by you amidst the melee provoked by the claim that nature and mankind have been fashioned by disaster, then that person belongs to the cast of characters. Deg told me that the cosmic heretics were many, and their number would grow with the acceptance of the heresy. But, he warned me, if the heresy were to fail, I would be guilty of slandering decent citizens by inclusion. In either event, he said, history will be rewritten; it always is. To whom will you dedicate your book, he asked, which was tantamount to giving his blessing to the project. To the Cosmic Heretics, naturally, I answered Anyhow, I have already taken care of Velikovsky with the dedication of my first book in the field. V. died four years ago, seventeen years after we met, and before we met had done almost all of his writing. For my own part, previously I had done a lot in political behavior and methodology, but nothing that might be called quantavolution. It was a sociological problem that brought us together in the first instance -- the reception system of science I called it afterwards. Although I might have known better, I almost immediately entered into the substantive theory of catastrophe; I couldn't resist the challenge. And I am just about finished now. (I grinned, and so did he.) I'm beginning to repeat myself, too, so it's not a bad time to end with your book. By the way, have you read everything that I've ever written? Yes, of course. Just wondering, he mused, because V. tried never to talk to a person about his works who hadn't read the pertinent volumes. It makes sense and saved his time. I don't feel strongly about it: my books are children who have gone off somewhere, on their own responsibility. I don't possess them, though I ask that they not be mistreated -- the same as I would for other people's children. Who is entirely read, anyhow, he asked of me almost angrily, as if I had raised the subject. I said I didn't know. Once I had met a psychologist who had read the 24 volumes of Freud's collected works. Still, commented Deg, some of his pieces escaped the Hogarth Press. William Yeats dedicated his autobiography "to those few people mainly personal friends who had read all that I have written," but probably no one qualified. It's good that nobody has read everything of anybody. It might abet the idea that where the pen stops the person vanishes. Rather, although the powers of expression tower above life, life rampages uncontrollably below. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T ROYAL INCEST } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE ROYAL INCEST Alfred de Grazia was entering his forty-fourth year when he met a self-styled cosmic heretic, Immanuel Velikovsky, who was already sixty-seven, and for the next twenty years a wide band of life's spectrum was colored by their relationship. As with a love affair, all that happened in the beginning presaged what would happen later, stretched out on the scale of time, themes doubling back upon themselves, attractions and reservations never to be erased, continuing accumulations. The men changed, the world of science changed, too, and also the political world, yet this latter less; for, after all, one man died and the other grew old, whereas science and politics, those statistical behemoths of collective behavior, go on forever, compounded of many millions of individuals whose average age hardly varies, exhibiting trends whose progress, if it could be called such, is hardly discernible and might indeed have constituted a regression. At least so it seemed to these two men who were trying to affect the science and politics of their time. Velikovsky died a heretic, with scattered generally unfavorable press, while his friend de Grazia moved on with a spirit that could be called existential, convinced as before that politics (and he insisted upon regarding science, too, as politics and often included politics in psychopathology) -- that politics, although probably irredeemable, was the elemental hydrogen of human behavior, no matter how compounded into life styles. As the winter days of 1962 became 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, 08540 U. S. A., families and friends gathered into clusters like the last of the leaves, so the half-consciously and driven by eddies of customs and calendar, de Grazia saw more of his friends like Livio Catullus Stecchini and of his brother Sebastian. He did not know Velikovsky, and if he had been asked about him, he would have replied that he had never heard of him. This may appear strange, considering that Deg was to be numbered, by whatever scales a social psychologist might invent to distinguish the "informed and involved" from the "ignorant and apathetic," as a high-scorer on information and involvement. He had enough children in the Princeton school system, a half-dozen, to catch the sound of names from all quarters. He spent part of each week in New York City and at Greenwich village where, of all places, the name of Velikovsky might have been brutted about. He had since 1957 published and edited a magazine, the American Behavioral Scientist, which pretended to cover those matters that were or should be the concern of social scientists. He personally scanned a hundred and fifty magazines in the social sciences and current affairs each month. He had many students, several of them close friends. His parents and the families of two brothers were living most of the time at Princeton. He was not socially pretentious, nor a prideful man, not a University snob, and had had to pawn his professional reputation several times on behalf of scholarly and political iconoclasm. Withal, when it came down to it, he claimed that he had never heard of a man about whom a million or more Americans could have delivered him a rancorous account. One feature that makes mass society a horror-show is the actual anonymity of the famous. (However, the mass scatoma of social realities may be a worse feature.) This he confessed when Livio Stecchini, as they walked a along Nassau street on that cold day, brought up the matter, disjointedly, as happens with men walking down the street to no end, intellectuals with minds chock-full of oddly related and far-off affairs, old friends whose thoughts needed no introduction nor conclusion. Knowing the two men, I imagine that their conversation would have gone something like this: There is a man in Princeton with good material on the scientific establishment... Cosmogonist... They suppressed his books." "What do you mean, suppressed his books ?" "They smeared him." "Like Reich? Like Semmelweis?" "Yes." "What does he do?" "He lives here. He writes." "About what?" "Mythology, astronomy, the Bible, ancient catastrophes." "What does he live on?" "His books. They are very well sold." "That's not our topic." "No. The ABS could take up the sociological side. It's rich. Deg was skeptical. Although his American Behavioral Scientist would stop at nothing, every scientist had his one or two little scandals of defamation, every professor his Dean's crime, his edgy paranoia, and you had to take his word for it. It was the same in politics, dirty tricks everywhere and defamation as a matter of course. As for the juggernaut of science, it rolled along smashing unconscionably the god's celebrants who crowded in upon it from all sides with fresh ideas and reputations. His materials are rich." Again that remark. "Really?" "I can introduce you. We can go to his house. He lives on Hartley Avenue." "Down near the Lake." "To take a look at his stuff." "Maybe... What's his name?" "Velikovsky." "Never heard of him. A few days later Stecchini received a phone call from Deg. Deg had been to dinner at Sebastian's home. There was the usual babble and movement afterwards. He circled around the front room with its piles of papers and open bookshelves, pausing at the one where books of high mobility and heterogeneity sunned themselves for a few days. He picked out a forcefully jacketed book, Oedipus and Akhnaton, the author: Velikovsky. First the large photograph of the author, then the flyleaf, then the , then the index -- he is grasping now for the thesis: the ill-fated incestuous Oedipus was none other than the Egyptian monotheistic pharaoh Akhnaton --more riffling of pages -- the small definite sparking of the book browser. "What's this?" He poked the book at Sebastian. "Any good ?" Sebastian was non-committal: probably he had not read it. "Mind if I borrow it ?" He began to read it that evening. It was "True Detective," connecting two eminent figures never before joined. He finished it the next day. How did he find the time to read it so promptly? A man who attends to a wife, a passel of kids, a dog, a cat, a station wagon, a large house with many doors and windows to mind, fireplaces to dampen, a busy telephone, a fat folder marked "action now", with half a dozen jobs, including a professorship and an editorship, with a propensity to daydream, and in that American society which tries in a hundred ways to pry into one's time and makes life tough for readers, and needing seven hours of sleep -- how does he read a book? They say, "When you want something done, go to a busy man." His urges are compelling. This act of devouring the book was typical of Deg. He would seize things out of his life-stream like a bear grabbing fish and do something with them, a compulsion to undertake and a compulsion to complete, not unlike Velikovsky, and the tie between the two men had something to do with V.'s recognition of this similarity, and perhaps with his growing problem of completion after the compulsion to take on matters lingered: but both men too sometimes had to drop affairs that needed completion or stuck to them beyond their point of pay-off, beyond hope also, so I would not stress the trait, and I even think that it may be so common as to be undistinguished. Velikovsky had made wide turns in his life too, architecture, medical practice, psychoanalysis, politics, and now all this catastrophism which had something of everything. Outwardly, they differed most apparently. Deg of medium height and compact build, V. tall and spare, the one with a midwestern back ground and accent, the other with a heavy Russian accent, Jewish above all. To V outrage was a simple, direct emotion; Deg had the youngness of Americans that comes from promiscuous outrage and wide dispersal of feelings inimical to authorities. Pablo Picasso used to tell Gertrude Stein: "They are not men; they are not women; they are Americans." So how could Deg become outraged at the enemies of V.? Living was parceled among sporadic outrages; indignation cropped out all over the American landscape. While I am at it, I might say something, too, about Deg's attitude to his own writing because this also explains how he might view V.'s troubles. It is also about Gertrude Stein: " In those days she never asked anyone what they thought of her work, but were they interested enough to read it. Now she says if they bring themselves to read it they will be interested." Victim of the Rule of Three, Deg added a first phrase: at first he thought what he wrote was interesting and everyone should be required to read it. Then, after he had passed most of his life in Gertrude Stein's second stage, he postulated a final stage, a nirvana where what he wrote was objectively of interest but neither he nor anyone else should be interested to read it. This is too early to be analyzing character, but I cannot refrain from another comparison, a fatal difference. Whatever V. completed, he fiercely possessed; whatever Deg completed he relinquished. This made their cash flows, you might say, very different. And their advice to each other very different. Deg was saying to V.. "Give it away. Let it go !" and V. to Deg, baffled; "Why didn't you hold on to that?" Moreover V. overvalued whatever he gave, and undervalued what he received. Halfway through the book -- before Akhnaton had espoused his own mother. Queen Ty, Deg was committed to V., the author. A literary tour de force of the rarest kind, it succeeds in making a single person out of two of the most famous heroes of antiquity. Nor are they of the so numerous type of military heroes. They are the active substances of the raging intellect, flourishing amongst squirmy snakes of psychology and religion. Should the temporal sequence be right, then the book would be valid, that Moses preceded Akhnaton and Akhnaton came before Oedipus. The legendary, historical, psychological and archaeological evidence marched in brilliant composition and concordance on behalf of V.'s thesis. That Moses had come first follows from V.'s book, Ages in Chaos, already a decade old, which was to be read and to convince Deg in a matter of weeks. That the Oedipus legend developed after the history of Akhnaton was established in the book itself to Deg's satisfaction, and he confirmed it once again when it came time to write The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, years later. By then he was convinced of V.'s theory that Greek Dark Ages were in fact several centuries that had never existed, and then, within a couple of years, the masterful work of young Eddie Schorr effectively closed up the gap in two articles on Mycenae, Pylos, Troy, Gordion, and other sites. Velikovsky himself here speculated that Nikmed of Ugarit became Cadmus the founder of Thebes and carried the Oedipus legend from the East to the North. V. 's reconstructed chronology closed the centuries like a vise, to where Akhnaton could readily reach to Nikmed and Nikmed to Cadmus and out of it all came the Oedipus Rex of Thebes, the fabled character who gave name to the most popular concept of Sigmund Freud, and it was Freud who had brought on all of this work by his psychoanalytic disciple, but had himself missed both the precession of Moses and the identity of Oedipus as Akhnaton, although he had written directly about all three figures. The book was the best produced of V.'s which were ordinarily drab. Oedipus and Akhnaton carried many fine illustrations, a superior jacket, an excellent typeface, and good printing paper. Still, it did not sell as well as any of a dozen detective novels of the day, and, vibrant and valid, was marked by its publisher for abandonment in 1984. Deg could be sure that practically none of his hundreds of friends and colleagues, students and acquaintances had yet read the book or would ever do so... But then he, too, had written books of which none but the textbooks had sold over a thousand copies. And he could recite the names of many distinguished scholars whose books had sold less. The dream of best-selling great books nevertheless carries on, a myth, deadly to most and profitable to a very few. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE The other book, that which won Velikovsky fame, income, and scientific disgrace, was a happy accident of publishing. It could hardly have become a best-seller on its merits; very few books do, and this one was not easy to read or flamboyant. Worlds in Collision was reluctantly published, deceptively publicized, and foolishly attacked. It was written in the 1940's, after Ages in Chaos had been completed and had been circulating among publishers and collecting one rejection after another. Evidently the later work had the better chance, because of its larger, more explosive message. But Worlds in Collision, too, was rejected time after time, this all during a period of high prosperity when publishing company shares boomed on the stock market and practically anything might be brought out. Velikovsky was desperate. One evening he walked the Upper West Side of Manhattan with Elisheva, telling her of how he would buy a typesetting machine and they would compose the book at home and he would sell it himself. He would have done so. All of his publications before then -- there were not many -- had been in some sense subsidized, the articles appearing in psychoanalytic journals, supported by small intellectual circles, the pamphlets appearing under the shadowy imprint of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when this was only a few dedicated utopians enjoying an impetus from Simon Velikovsky's purse. V. knew something about publishing, as he did about many things. V. would never have been "himself", a revered image to countless readers and a buffoon to scientists and scholars, had he not fallen into the crazy typical pattern of a popular author. He was able to catch the attention of John J. O'Neill, Science Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who was thrilled by the manuscript and wrote about it in an article of August 11, 1946. James Putnam, an Editor of Macmillan Company, took it up, praised it among his acquaintances, processed it through several readers, and achieved a favorable vote. A chapter of the book was sold to the Reader's Digest and other selections to Collier's Magazine. Collier's, struggling for circulation, took a large ad in the Herald Tribune, headlining that modern science had now proved the Bible correct, while the Reader's Digest carried the story of the Sun's standing still at Beth-Horon by the command of Joshua, so as to let the Israelites finish off their enemies. Both stories and the publicity attendant upon them played directly to a large audience of bemused Jews and "Old Testament" Christians, including what would be called creationists and millennialists. Then, even before its readers could discover that it was not quite what they had expected, the wrath of scientists descended upon the book. Velikovsky's figure, until then only that of a minor personage in psychoanalytic reading circles, was elevated to a pyre of fame and burned to the ground. Macmillan hastily sold its rights to Doubleday publishers. Of all this that occurred between 1950 and 1962, Deg learned upon his first meetings with V. "I want you to read everything," he said and handed over to him two monumental manuscripts entitled Stargazers and Gravediggers. "Everything" meant also Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. Deg complimented him upon the Oedipus book and wondered at the documentation piled upon the living floor for examination. Velikovsky wondered, too for none came to him as innocently as his new acquaintance. He was thankful but also dismayed at this walking effect of the suppression of his books. (It hardly occurred to him that his book might have sold under a thousand copies if it had been published by a university press without the publicity that he himself found rather obnoxious, in which case practically everyone might have been expected to be ignorant of it, but the ilk of Deg might have known it). V.'s correspondence was still heavy after a dozen years. His readers sent him every scrap of publicity that they found and he kept it all and tried to reply, far more so than any other author of Deg's acquaintance. A large public was out there somewhere, a heterogeneous network of bright students, people suspicious of the scientific and academic establishments, Bible believers in profusion. Mrs. V. was present; she tried always to be on hand when visitors came and to Deg at least, hers was always a welcome presence. V. kept nothing from Elisheva that he was not also keeping from his visitors. Sheva's grand piano stood in the next room, between a desk loaded with papers and a great cabinet stuffed with books. In the front room were couches and chairs, none too comfortable, and a large coffee table accommodating the tea, crackers and cheese, cakes and dry Israeli white wine that would be brought forth. There were ashtrays, too, for then many were smokers, not V., for he had quit years before after he had suffered a stomach cancer, whose removal had forced a lightened diet as well. Oriental rugs stretched across the floors. The ponderous front porch let in little light, nor did the rooms have much place for an elegant style; or perhaps they reflected an empiricist, not a philosopher. Their charm depended upon the objects in themselves: Sheva's piano and the music resting on it, her strong marble sculptures, several handsome and less useful books on art and archaeology that had entered lately, like those at Sebastian's from which Deg had plucked Oedipus and Akhnaton. From the porch, one penetrated into the sitting room through heavy gray stone walls in five stages: first up the flagstone walk through thick bushes, then up the stairs, then through the first heavy door into a tiny hall, then another heavy door, then an anteroom with a mail- cluttered table and clothes-closet, and finally into the front room. Elisheva, like her husband, had a strong character and great energy. She had large hands and a solid body, maintained a direct and friendly stare through thick glasses, and was perhaps of his age. She had mastered the arts of music and sculpture. Perhaps all the laborious functionalism of its occupants gave the rooms a lack-luster belying the considerable value of their contents. Poor cooks have dazzling automated kitchens; disemployed people have smart interiors. Much later on, when he finally released his books to Dell Publishers for publication in paperback and received a hundred thousand dollars, V. went into a fit of remodeling, building a garage and new airy light-struck rooms, redistributing books and papers for greater efficiency, buying flashy cars for himself and his grandchildren, reminding Deg of Parkinson's "Law", that, as an Empire enters upon its finale, it builds extravagantly. Deg had often to consider, when he taught courses on leadership and creativity, whether a person's appearance correlated with his mind and effectiveness. The stereotype is, of course, "Yes, it does." A great general has a martial air, a scholar looks like a parsnip, an athlete is muscle-bound, and so on. Deg had arrived at the all-answering concept of sociology -- the mutual interaction of physique and role. Little Napoleon looked more imperial than tall de Gaulle, who was an obstinate dumb- bell. But de Gaulle thought he looked like a Great Leader and worthy husband to La Belle France, and played the part and became a great leader. (" France is a widow," Pompidou orated when De Gaulle died.) "The Russian Jews are the handsomest of all," Stephanie Neuman told Deg, and he, looking at her, had of course to agree. The best explanation of the phenomenon comes in a note by V. himself, published posthumously. The "lost Tribes of Israel" had been moved North, and passed through the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas into the lower Volga River Basin. There they mingled genetically with the ever-changing population, with always at least a critical fraction maintaining the Judaic culture-core. Deg had won a piece of the action; his wife's family, with its cluster of Teutonic cognomens - Oppenheim, Lauterbach, Weinstein, Fleishacker, etc. - had managed some handsome blonde alternatives in the aftermath of the Diaspora. "But see here..." to use a common interjection of V. Velikovsky stretched his large spare frame a full two meters, his face will all its big bones and high forehead was clean-shaven and forceful, his large brown eyes open and direct behind his reading glasses, his movements from his favorite low chair, up and down, across the room, were untiring and easy, not graceful but neither awkward. His voice was sure, slow, deep, his words marvelously well-chosen, uttered in the language that he knew least well of Russian, Hebrew, and German, while Arabic and French came after. He couldn't match Stecchini, who had these, plus Italian, Latin, Greek and Arabic, plus the dead languages of Babylon and Egypt, while Deg with his modest portions of French and Italian and smattering of German, Latin, and Spanish was in a pitiable state. V.'s English was formal, never Americanized; his dignity forbade slang or the vernacular, though it amused him to have the vernacular explained. Deg was fond of H. L. Mencken and played loose with the language when let off the field of science. "Sand-bag them," he remarked when V was expostulating over the attempts of a panel of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to get hold of his finalized paper without revealing to him their final replies to it. "What does 'sand-bag' mean?" V asked. "It's what thugs use to hit people with from behind. Let them have the paper; let them rewrite their papers; then withdraw your paper." Then he explained how in some impolite poker games, if you have a good hand, you sometimes pass on it, enticing the other players to bet on their own hands, then double their bets. That's sand-bagging, too. V. wrote well, better than Deg, I think, although he denied it and had to make liberal use of copy-editors. For he explained his every step carefully and was rarely abstract or harsh, whereas Deg usually wrote condensedly, abstractly, and stridently. Looking at V. in these first meetings in a more analytic way. Deg questioned whether a person so physically modeled to the ideal expectation of a heroic figure could nevertheless be a genius and not an actor, an honest victim and not a charlatan. Of what could V complain; he was famous; his books sold by the tens of thousands; his messages had carried throughout the English- speaking world, into several language-areas of the western world besides. Deg flipped through the loose-leaf volumes as they talked. He could read fast and V. was alternately suspicious and admiring of this facility. "I am a slow reader," he announced on occasion. "Yes, but I don't have your memory," grumbled Deg. V. had a superb memory for details. Deg gulped down batches of material, retained their forms, and excreted the details. This is what happened when he read; the stuff was gobbled up by pre-existing forms. Every detail of the volumes before them was remembered by V., though he could hardly have seen most of it for some years. Every few pages contained another foolish review, comment or letter by a scientist or historian or archaeologist. Just to be preserved and collected, side by side, they damned themselves and each other as envious, illogical, irrelevant, ignorant, narrow, and incompetent. Why haven't you published this, it's great? he asked V. V. had strung together a large and complicated story with only rare descriptions and without editorial comment; it was not vainglorious or egotistic; the documents marched along by themselves, calling out their message in turn. V. blew hot and cold on the idea of their publication. Mainly he feared legal action were he to reprint letters several of which had come to him deviously. Of these Deg could not feel sure, but he argued that persons in a public controversy in which their reputations were at stake might publish private correspondence. A menacing letter from Professor Fred Whipple to the Macmillan Company might be published, because it injured and defamed the author and was associated with letters of the same type from other academicians. His publishers, Doubleday, were unsure, said V. In fact the volumes were not published until after his death. By then the whole Macmillan archive of those years had been given to the New York Public Library and Warner Sizemore, who knew the case as well as anyone alive, located them there, with all the papers that had been so guarded for a few years. When Leroy Ellenberger reviewed them in 1983, he noted especially Brett's account of the final interview with Velikovsky when the President of Macmillan informed Velikovsky that Worlds in Collision could no longer be tolerated on the Macmillan list, but had to be transferred out, and luckily Doubleday was ready to assume the risk. When asked how the two versions of the meeting compared, Velikovsky's and Brett's, Ellenberger, who was by then most sensitive to contradictions in the Velikovsky story, granted that substantially they agreed, save that V had understandably portrayed himself as less shaken and more in command of the situation than Brett had viewed him to be. The materials that V. showed Deg were a sociologist's wishful dream. Deg decided immediately to publish in the American Behavioral Scientist the story of science vs. scientism, as he put it. He carried home the manuscripts and Worlds in Collision, which Velikovsky carefully autographed, a little touch that Deg was unused to; books were books: he was never into first editions or autographed copies, and in those days had to be reminded by his publishers that a page was reserved for a dedication if he wished to use it. The journalistic papers he hurried through and put aside. They would give an example here and another there. Some readers no doubt would be astonished at the behavior of their sacred scientists, but the case was mere basic social psychology. The scientists and their coterie of publicists were behaving very much as might be expected in the face of disturbing theories, like politicians, like administrators, bishops, and all other elites of organized networks. He decided to take upon himself the most difficult task, the theoretical analysis of the system that exuded injustice normally. The historical section would go to Stecchini and deal with scientific precedents to V.'s catastrophism, an approach quite new to the discussions of a decade earlier, and one which Stecchini, using the principle of contradictions, executed beautifully, calling up Whiston, Boulanger, La Place and Kugler as unexpected witnesses on behalf of the defendant. The straight history of the affair went to Ralph Juergens, who had been introduced to Deg by V. as a mechanical engineer, much interested in electrical theory, who had moved his family down from Ohio in order to be near to where V. was working; he was now a scientific editor working in New York for McGraw Hill. Juergens had published nothing; he knew the facts, however; he was a careful worker, Deg was quick to note; he worked very hard; he held V.'s confidence (not easy to achieve) and won Deg's sympathy and respect. No one else could have done the job without a year's study; even then it would have had to be a historian of science, who would risk his career if he accepted the challenge of the facts, or a publicist, such as Eric Larrabee, who would have produced a recital much like Ralph's but probably too late for publication. As a matter of fact, his name came up and V. reported that he had been under contract for years with Doubleday to do a book on the controversy. No sooner had Deg's ABS decided to publish the story than V. got in touch with Larrabee and prevailed upon him to sell the idea of an article to Harper's Magazine, which Larrabee did, by virtue of an old connection there, and so wrote a piece that actually appeared several weeks before the special issue of the ABS. After examining the files on the case, Deg turned to reading Worlds in Collision, telling himself that it might be wrong, harmful, mythical, distorted, and incompetent; still his intuition was prompted by all that he had learned thus far: V. could not do a bad job on anything. So he found the book was none of these things, and was not surprised. Then he worried and never ceased to worry that his taking up the cause of V. came about because he thought V. to be correct in his theories rather than because his rights were violated. Worlds in Collision is a book in two parts, one on the Venus catastrophes, the second on the Mars catastrophes. These conform to two sets of events that are claimed to have befallen the world in the years around 1450 and 700 B. C., about seven hundred years apart. The planet Venus, argued Velikovsky, began its career as a comet that probably exploded from the giant planet Jupiter sometime, whether a few years or thousands of years before its disastrous encounters with Earth. (V. never used B. C. preferring BCE, "Before the Common Era" or a simple negative [as -1450], begrudging the calendar of world history to the Christians, which Deg agreed to in principle but thought was only quibbling, given the huge contortions history has suffered. Better he thought to settle on the year 2000 as the present, use B. P. back from this date, thus to give us some standardization for a generation or so, or perhaps to settle upon 1919, the year when the first association of the nations of all the world was formed, the League of Nations). Flaming Venus passed with its huge cometary tail close by the Earth occasioning general disaster by flood, fire, pestilence, electric shock, and fallouts of various materials, and incited a horrendous fear that affected all areas of culture everywhere down to the present day. Mankind lived virtually in a Venusian world for seven centuries, for other near passes occurred at 52- year intervals, until the comet disturbed Mars, sent Mars to molest the Earth and Moon, and brought a Martian period that endured for rather less than a century. All of this had severe and prolonged after-affects geologically, biologically, and culturally. V. endeavored to be exact, allowing the series of Mars incidents to occur between the years -776 and -687 on the basis of legends and historical-archaeological evidence from around the Mediterranean and wherever else in the world it cropped up. For example, an incident of the year -776 would be the founding of the Olympic Games, those sacred manifestations of aggressive competitive sport that brought the Greek communities together and were said to have been founded by Hercules, who has been identified by several scholars with the god Mars or Ares; an instance of the year -687 would be the destruction by natural disaster of the army of the Assyrian emperor Sennacherib while besieging Jerusalem. Thus the bare plot. Its importance derives from the shock it gave to conventional natural science and history, its extension of the use of legendary materials to reconstruct history, and the excitement it caused among many people eager to escape the toils of modern science. The most disturbing claim of Worlds in Collision was that the planet Venus as a comet approached and devastated Earth. Several excellent writers, as I shall explain later, had claimed that comets had devastated the Earth, and mathematical exercises on the putative effects of comets in passages and collisions with Earth are conventionally acceptable. Not so planets, that are believed to be fully and nicely bound to their present orbits. The sequence of thoughts occurred to V: first, the Egyptian, accepted chronology is wrong and Moses preceded Akhnaton; next, at the time of Exodus, there was heavy natural turbulence; third, the turbulence was incited from the skies, and took numerous forms well recounted in legend and sacred scriptures; finally, evidence came in rapidly from all parts of the world to support the idea that the planet Venus was involved as prime cause. A mosaic of legends from the Near East, Greece, Italy, China, and the Americas could be fashioned, and enough geological evidence might be assembled to tolerate the suppositions of the legends. V. was not as rooted in Newtonian and Darwinian prejudices as the typical Anglo-American scholar. He could also contemplate ancient evidence without contempt. (A psychiatrist might recall, "Ah yes, he loved and respected his father Simon who worked long for the revival of Israel.") V. knew also that natural laws must rest upon evidence, not dogma; if evidence contradicts the laws, the laws must change. The immensity of the topic; the difficulties in finding and handling the data; the roundabout way in which the books were published; and many other intervening and confusing variables concealed the essentially proper progression of V.'s mind, which behaved in ways both psychologically understandable and logically proper. (Often, private motives lead men scientifically astray; here, as sometimes happens, V.'s private motives led him along the path to significant scientific theses and discoveries.) To Deg's view, from the beginning, the ethical duty of science was clear. Confronted with V.'s claims, the scientist should weigh the evidence, first, for the chronology, second for the Exodus disasters, third for the exoterrestrial involvement, and finally for the identity of the forces. In each case, there is, then, a probability, low or high, of validity. Actually the only policy problem for science here is how much additional scientific energies should be directed at the intriguing hypotheses. This implies the possibility of proving (disproving) them; and the efforts required to raise the probabilities of valid answers to a respectable level. In American politics and law, case after case had imprinted upon all concerned the notion of a right to due process of law and to certain basic freedoms as distinct from the desirability or correctness of a position. There is a religious right, when forbidden by one's religion, to not salute the national flag; there is a right to not confess to a criminal act. And so on. Scientific behavior is not so clearly mannered. It is not governed by the coercive physical force that gives more distinct form to the organs of the state. Also a general belief in individualism among scientists, amounting to a kind of philosophical anarchism, makes each scientist both judge and executor of his beliefs. Deg was enough of a philosopher and practitioner of science to perceive a widespread belief, that a truth exists upon a subject and that no consideration needs be given untruth or antitruth. There was, on the other hand, the reputable principle that all scientific positions are basically hypothetical; nothing is proven now and forever. And there was even the principle, espoused by many contemporaries, that there are as many scientific truths as may be useful in solving a practical problem; in other words, never mind the principle: perform the operation, and the principle, if the operation is successful, will come trailing after. But the vulgar and predominant belief is a belief in truth and antitruth, especially when dealing with outsiders, and V., by this view, deserved no more than he received, there being numbers of established truths violated by his assertions. He should have banked his receipts and joined the outcaste company of the von Danikens. However, according to the other views, all of which merge in this regard, nothing that V could possibly say should deprive him of a hearing, save that he should present his views in a format suitable for passing judgment upon them. Deg had to make up his mind whether the basic offering was appropriate for judgment and whether a hearing was provided. Still he could not but feel that the organization of science would fall apart if no advantage were given to the accepted "truth," just as the state would become defenseless if everyone refused to serve in the armed forces on constitutional grounds. What happens ordinarily, he observed often, is that the more "obviously untrue" a proposition with its proof appear to be, the less due process of law is used and needed in dealing with it. We have to reconcile ourselves to the "miscarriage of justice", at least in science and probably in every area of conflict, the "Bill of Rights" notwithstanding. If for no other reason, the burden of treating every statement with all the respect due and owing to the best and most correct-seeming statements would be impossible for the economy of science to bear. In return, Deg told himself, we can ask for some minimal formatting of a case prior to processing it through the reception system of science. This, it appeared to him, V. had done, and much more, and some scientists had nevertheless pilloried him and ruined his chances of obtaining scientific respectability -- not affirmative agreement, but just simple honest respect for a remarkable job. V. had approached the altars of science with the assiduous ritual of Aaron before the Holies of Holies. And, when, like the drunken sons of Aaron, his books were struck by the Lord's Fire, he was stunned. "What sacrilege have I committed?" he asked himself repeatedly. And the answer, from all sides, if not from heaven, was "None." It is true that he had won literary fame and supported his family meanwhile, a rare success among non-academic writers in America. So what? Have the rich no right to complain? Who else can send the steak back to the kitchen? The scene was familiar and the opportunity presented: the establishments of academia had offended a man who was a fighter and had his evidence in hand. Something rare and good in the history of science might be achieved. With the contaminants of politics and religion absent from the mixture, and the publishers acting as catalysts, it was as clean a case of pure science in action as one might ever hope to come upon. The work on the special Velikovsky issue of the American Behavioral Scientist had been mostly done when Deg addressed a letter to his Advisory Board explaining Velikovsky's position and justifying a special issue in support of him. March 8, 1963 To: ABS Advisory Board Subject: Notes on several current matters I. We plan to devote a major portion of our June issue [actually it came out in September] to a topic called: "The Politics of Science: The Velikovsky Case." Immanuel Velikovsky, as you probably know, is a highly controversial figure whose book Worlds in Collision incited the wrath of a number of astronomers and geologists twelve years ago. Several other works dealt with similar themes of prehistoric catastrophe, social upheavals, and the origins of myth. Another book, somewhat distinct, is Oedipus and Akhnaton. I believe him to be a brilliant theorist and am not persuaded that his criticisms of various astronomical principles are as wrong as Shapley and others have made them out to be. The recent Venus probe has brought some surprising information in accord with his views, for example. However, our main interest in the topic lies in its relation to numbers 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, and 16 of the ABS program. A basic question is the canons which science uses to appraise work that is offered. As we move into the Velikovsky case, we observe that both the normal and the peculiar features of the criticism of this work throw much light on the workings of the scientific establishment. Additionally the evidence of boycott of a publisher in the case leads one into the question of the relation of scientists to freedom of the press. The proposed would include first a history of the Velikovsky case, a comparison of the case with various episodes in the history of science by Stecchini, a content analysis of the reviews of Velikovsky's book, an article by Velikovsky reciting ten important instances in which his theorizing led him to correct or at least now respectable statements about natural events (this one to give a flavor of the substance of the case), and an appraisal of the operations of the scientific establishment. We have abundant material. We lack funds, as usual, for the kind of content analysis and investigation that should be engaged in. If any of you can find a few dollars to lend to this enterprise, it will be helpful in improving the product (especially in the reliability of coding the book reviews, and increasing the number sampled from 100 up to 500)... The "good will and advice" were there: as for the money, the Board knew Deg was bluffing: the magazine would continue, one way or another. Also, to attack frontally an array of scientists, Deg thought to assemble a special committee of notables that would protect his flanks. He sent the manuscript of the ABS issue to his friends Harold D. Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and Luther Evans, all three well-known, distinguished and innovative social scientists. He also contacted. at Velikovsky's suggestion, Salvador de Madariaga, Moses Hadas, Horace Kallen, Harold Latham, R. H. Hillenkoetter, and Philip Wittenberg. Madariaga and Hillenkoetter admired V. 's work: Hadas respected the learning evidenced in it: Kallen was a grand liberal educator who had run interference for V. when V. was trying to obtain a reading from Harlow Shapley; Latham had shepherded Worlds in Collision through Macmillan; and Wittenberg was an expert on libel law. Deg also invited Harry H. Hess, Chairman of the Geology Department a Princeton, who had given V. a forum, and was helpful on several later occasions; V. counted him as a friend; Deg had met him and found him simpatico and every inch what an Admiral in the U. S. Navy (Reserve) should be. He was a top leader in the wartime and post-war revolution in oceanography. Hess replied by hand: June 4, 1963, Washington. D. C. Dear Editor de Grazia : The manuscripts you sent me reached me at particularly bad time: Ph. D. exams, department budget construction, a request to appear before a committee of congress and finally orders to two weeks of active duty in the Navy starting yesterday. I have spent two days reading the material and trying to analyze my own thoughts. I can't urge you to publish it. Velikovsky is a friend of mine. You will reopen old wounds and create more antagonism against him, though at the same time you will support his position and bring out the injustices. I am not sure that this is a net gain. Why were scientists outraged by Velikovsky's books? This is the question I have been asking myself because I too felt a sense of outrage even though I have a kindly feeling towards him as a friend. The reasons given by Stecchini are plausible and perhaps true with respect to some scientists. The real reason is something much more fundamental -- at least the reason why I rebel is, and I am a fairly good guinea pig example of an ordinary scientist. I haven't time to write the essay that might be written to explain the phenomenon correctly. Velikovsky is partly to blame because of the way he handles his data. This is no excuse for most of those who criticize him. Nor is it an excuse for the manner in which they have treated him. Thank you for sending me the manuscripts. I wish I could do more for you than I have. Sincerely, H. H. Hess Deg was not surprised nor did he feel Hess's refusal at all unworthy. Hess was not the Admiral Nelson to violate Admiralty orders and take his fleet into battle: still, as Deg remarked to me, we already had an admiral (referring to Admiral Hillenkoetter), we certainly could have used a geologist on the team. Years later, Deg was able to persuade Hess to join the Board of Trustees of a foundation for studies of catastrophe. A problem of concern to me was that, in the years following, there was no evident opposition to V., whether as to his treatment or his ideas, carried in the ABS files and the later book, The Velikovsky Affair, and I badgered Deg on this point repeatedly. He puts up a kind of general defense that has some merit: "Under the circumstances, we did what we could to excite an opposition. We had no money to conduct research. Everyone was unpaid and working at other things for a living. The issue on V. was itself only one of ten issues to appear that year, each on different topics. Mainly the expressions of disagreement were directed at the substance of V.'s theories, which were, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the discussion. Juergens went farther in explaining these and defending them than I would have gone. It was like pulling teeth to get a scientist to enter upon the politics and sociology or even the methodology of the case. One received simply arguments on the stability of the solar system and the unreliability of legends and ancient history." Deg talked on, as the tape spun on its roll: I wrote Otto Neugebauer, a hostile critic of V. and renowned expert on Babylonian astronomy, but he did not reply for a long time, for years. In fact, I met with Harold Lasswell, who was a psychologist, political scientist and professor of Law at Yale: he was favorable to the issue, which he read, but concerned that the bridge he perceived as building between the natural and human scientists might be damaged. (There was then the well-publicized thesis of C. P. Snow, physicist and novelist, who decried the existence of these two uncommunicative worlds.) I visited Freeman Dyson, the mathematician, who was at the institute for Advanced Studies and had been President of the Federation of American Scientists, of which I was member, and which was agitating against the "Cold War." Dyson was lukewarm about the matter: he had been approached by V. some time before, and had no desire to enter the lists; furthermore he found the scenario of V.'s work unacceptable. There was none, it seemed, on the first call for debate, and very few ever, who were ready to defend what had happened, as there was none ready to defend V.'s substantive views on exoterrestrially-produced disasters. Worse, there was hardly a notable scientist of the Establishment of physics, geology, astronomy who was willing publicly to acknowledge the legitimacy of the discussion. I approached Tom Kuhn, a neighbor, who was beginning to win fame as a historian of science. He shied away. I will say more. You have been presenting my analogy of this case with cases in the law and courts. Actually, this is only one side of the coin. Just as the law and courts are utterly inadequate to their tasks when a society is failing, so too in science the reception system is inadequate when the institutions and politics of science are failing to begin with. That is, unless you have a liberal, open-minded republic of science, you'll have too many cases of injustice in the reception system. I spent some time developing the problem of the institutions that are needed in science as in politics to back up a proper reception system, but no one of competence has come around to discuss the subject, which is as critical today as it was then. Criminality in science, if I may use the word, or misbehavior, is common throughout the sciences and ultimately its origins dissolve into the background of an illiberal, non-pragmatic, materialistically competitive, and philosophically ignorant environment where scientists are bred. I felt that Deg's tone was becoming strident. I still doubted that he had exhausted the possibilities of a debate, and later on I will tell of other forensic episodes. He might have talked to Dr. Normal Newell, of the New York Natural History Museum; Ted McNulty, one of his aides and squash-playing friends had learned that Newell had something to say; he might at least have tried to speak to the king-pin Harlow Shapely, who was old but still feisty: he might have approached George Brett, President of Macmillan, to corroborate that he had "dumped" V. and explain why. Further, Deg might well have been more rigid, and might have excluded all substantive comment of V.'s theories, admittedly to the point of losing some of the excitement of his story. It is true however, that copies of the issue were sent to potential opponents among natural scientists, inviting and expecting comment. There were none. Nor did the thousands of normal readers produce from among their number calls or letters of protest. Nor, with one or two exceptions, did any evidence appear for decades that would affect the statements made on the affair by the three authors. In May of 1983, Leroy Ellenberger, told me that he had found at least one bit of evidence in the Macmillan files giving scientists reason to attack Macmillan for advertising the book as work in science. A regular catalogue of Macmillan books in science carried Worlds in Collision as a possible supplementary reading in general courses. This was a trifle, to be sure, but a red cloth is no trifle to a goaded bull. Still the annoying question once more arises: why should not the book have been advertised as a contribution to science, even if it were ultimately to go into oblivion with most other books that tried to make contributions to science? so again I prodded Deg on the matter and this time got what amounted to a lecture. Formal law has the strongest means to avoid consideration of the merits of a case in judging whether the case properly belongs in a certain court and has been properly heard in that court. It insists that the accused be given his day in court, with defense lawyer, an unprejudiced jury in most cases, and a full account of the testimony against him and the right to confront his accusers. Formal law of course often falls short of its expectations. Formal science has roughly similar rules for judging every work coming before it. The book is the defendant, you might say. It should be penalized, that is, dismissed, reproached, vilified, sentenced to non-reading and non-propagation only after it has had its day in court. And, it should come up for a parole hearing almost on demand. This too, often does not happen. Anybody but V would have taken his lumps --I would -- and cry all the way to the bank. When the law or science does not live up to its rules, then one appeals to a higher court or authority that created the institution in the first place. In the matter of a book, intelligent readers form themselves into a kind of court of consensus on the matter. That is actually what happened in the Velikovsky Affair, but still the court refused to remand the case for trial to the numerous special fields. The closest thing to this was the AAAS panel a decade after my book and two decades after the events. Now when the court or scientific establishment finds the defendant 'crazy' or 'delinquent' or 'fraudulent' or 'concealing the truth' or 'non-co-operative', but there is still evidence that the court or science is wrong, then the higher court -- that is, those institutions sponsoring the establishment, including the reading public, may call the lower court to order, reprimand it, force the remand for a re-hearing, or transfer the case to another jurisdiction. In order to face down the court or science, the higher court or critics must look as far as necessary into the facts of the case to determine whether the defendant is indeed frivolous, delinquent, fraudulent, concealing the truth or non-cooperative. For these purposes, some degree of substantive worthiness of the defendant must be present to justify the intervention. This was indeed the situation here; the content and presentation of the theories were therefore legitimately at issue and part of the presentation of his full legal case. We therefore had to judge the defendant in a sense on his merits and let him speak briefly on his own behalf. Scientists are understandably annoyed by ungovernable antics and criticism, none more than us political scientists, who must suffer the most abusive, crazy and unscientific ideas and behavior every day in the newspapers, in legislative halls, and in political meetings, indeed wherever politics and public opinion generate, even at the dinner-table. They still must operate a clean shop, a decent court, which in the end serves best themselves... He had more to say, but this is more than enough for now. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 3: } {T CHEERS AND HISSES } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE CHEERS AND HISSES Deg found himself losing status in the eyes of his children, who had through their earlier years seen and heard much of important personages, partly because all of them went through a rebellious adolescence during years when he was respectful, helpful, and obviously orienting his thoughts toward V., so that they found a weakness in their father -- his rare complaisance -- and could, through being critical and slightly disdainful of V., get at him twice, directly in himself and indirectly through rejection of V. It was not, as it had been put from time to time at home, that he gave too much of his crowded time to his venerable friend. Indeed, the children could have done well in their troubled group life at school by carrying the banner of Velikovsky (and their father) for V. could easily be fit (no one knowing his character) into the mold of anti-authoritarian ideas and leadership exceedingly popular among those in that era, town, and age group. On a summer day in 1963 Deg ushered his family of eight persons aboard the U. S. ocean liner "Atlantic" bound for Lisbon, Naples and Genoa. The boat was a slow last effort of the collapsing merchant marine but, he thought, just as several years earlier they had crossed the American continent on a railroad train from California to Chicago, they ought to have the experience of an ocean voyage. He then returned to Princeton and moved the family's possessions and his office from Queenston Place to Linden Lane, from a large old house to a small old house, aided by daughter Jessica's lovesick young boyfriend. His magazine was left in the custody of Ted Gurr. Then he flew to Lisbon, joined his family on the boat, and all sailed for Italy. Deg made final corrections to the ABS Velikovsky issue at Marjorie Ferguson's villa in Marina di Massa, fuming at his four boys on the beach across the street who, instead of swimming out to sea like little Shelleys, had transferred with insouciance from the pinball machines of Princeton to soccer machines in Italy. "Dear Ted," he wrote, You will be pleased to note that I have incorporated most of the suggested changes... I could not accept the idea that the political network paragraphs were irrelevant and unnecessary.( This referred to intimations that the furious attacks against Velikovsky were prompted in part by frustrations of Shapley and other scientists at being attacked for "red" affiliations by Joe McCarthy and his during these years.) I felt forced to deal with them and did all I could to make them objective. What is 'innuendo', after all, is a question of motive. There is no innuendo here therefore. If a trace of poison is found in a deceased's blood, do you ban its reporting on grounds that it constitutes an innuendo? Every generalization of science implies a stereotype, to take another case. Must we then never generalize? Later, Norman Storer and others picked up the theme, which social psychologists might best appreciate, most historians of science being too narrowly educated for such subtleties, or too constrained to deal with them. By the way, Lucca Cavazzo [an Italian supporter of the ABS] and wife had a baby. He was dining with me just before it happened. He calls his Federico Julio, two emperors yet! [Ted had begun his family.] Now the special issue of September 1963 appeared and before long was reprinted. The response was strong, but within the ABS orbit was almost entirely of social scientists and humanists. Prompted by free copies and alerted by word of mouth, natural scientists nevertheless played deaf and dumb, and so did those dependent upon them directly. In the files of Deg no new voice from a natural scientist comes forth amidst the many letters of a type to warm the cockles of an editor's heart. The scientists simply stooped low to avoid the flying bullets and returned the silent message, "Science is truth; truth is one; who defies the truth is no scientist; whatever happens to him he deserves." A few ducked because they had no recourse and feared the collective or public opinion of science, perhaps retaliation. It was a small step, which the sociologically untrained scientific mind can easily take, from witnessing a fellow supporting the case of Velikovsky to disdaining him erroneously for supporting his theories. Some would have been just normally lazy. Dr. Robert Jastrow, Director of the Institute for Space Studies, wrote Deg on October 20, 1980: "I had, of course, read your earlier very fine pieces on Velikovsky and his theories and had drawn on them in preparing my own article." But maybe this was later. The New York Times ignored the American Behavioral Scientist and did not review the book when it later appeared. A brave letter came from an editor of the Christian Science Monitor (This newspaper, you may appreciate, is one of the world's finest, and has a disproportionate scientific audience.) "May I say," wrote G. Wiley Mitchell to Deg, on December 12, 1966, "that I have read your book through, consider it a real contribution and am very regretful that neither my efforts, nor those of some of my colleagues who agree with me, have been successful in getting my paper to publish a review. The Velikovsky smearers have been effective! (Mind you, I am not at all sure I endorse his theories in toto. But I think his method is sound and his theories are certainly no weaker than others that gain a hearing simply because they come with the right 'credentials. ')" An attorney at NASA (and I must point out that he was Dan, the son of David Arons, a Gimbel Bros. executive and an acquaintance of V.) wrote happily to his father that he had "received a call from Dr. Newell [head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] this morning bright and early who told him that .... he had read the articles in the American Behavioral Scientist which I sent him and was 'aghast at the inquisition' to which the Velikovsky books have been submitted. He said he had noted some of the comments made back in the 50's but these articles place them all in a pattern. He particularly noted a remark of Fred Whipple to the effect that scientists ought to send back the postage paid postcards to publishers who use them to advertise such books as Velikovsky's. Dr. Newell thought this was very 'vindictive' and 'uncalled-for. ' While Velikovsky 'might be wrong' he is entitled to 'dispassionate review and criticism. ' Dr. Newell said that he had already discussed this matter with some of the 'leading lights' at NASA including Arnold Frutkin, Director of International Programs. He requested that he be permitted to keep the copy he has and be provided with additional copies. I wouldn't be surprised if someone here makes a statement on Velikovsky in the near future.... But of course, there were no actions taken. Involve NASA in such a demonstration? Impossible! There was another case, which V. pinned his hopes upon for a time, pathetically, a President of the grand University of Southern California, Murphy by name, who had indirectly voiced sympathy for the Velikovsky problem and V. had barged in to suggest that he appoint a commission of inquiry. The response: polite, and routinely cordial; but no interest, the matter being out of bonds. No University was going to dirty its hands with the nitty-gritty of scientific conflicts. If V. had been more of a sociologist, he could draw the appropriate parallels with the Catholic Church at the time of Galileo, reluctantly drawn to support his enemies, a case V. knew well -- up to a point. There came Peter Tompkins to Princeton and Jill and Deg had him to lunch, along with their neighbor, Thomas Kuhn. Peter had published the story of his wartime escapade in German-occupied Rome, a feat which Deg, a few miles away at the time, thought to do but had not done, and Peter had written The Eunuch and the Virgin, which Stecchini had shown to V. and which he had rejected, even though Tompkins could throw light on two points of importance: the sexual derivations from cosmic disaster (which V. had recognized) and the descent of great bureaucratic institutions from the same obsessional terror (which Deg but not V. was attending to). His Secrets of the Great Pyramid was ultimately to achieve fame. Tom Kuhn's book on scientific revolutions was beginning to gather kudos for himself as a historian of science. Deg had footnoted it in his study of the reception system, for old time's sake, since the book hadn't come to hand until the manuscript was ready to print, and praised it in the ABS. Deg had wondered why so little attention was paid to the materials of politics and sociology on revolutions. When the ABS was publishing its Velikovsky Issue, Kuhn was publishing an essay on the function of dogma in scientific research, in a book edited by A. C. Crombie; there he argued that science is and must be dogmatic and the present balance between dogmatism and open- mindedness appeared to be a healthy one. Kuhn and Tompkins got into a bristling argument over parascience. They were such formidable- looking men, especially at the moment. Deg felt embarrassed, as their host. Neither had the energy to spare for Dr. V. Tompkins was rebuffed because of V.'s heavy anxiety over associating with the scientific fringe, especially if sex reared its head. Tom volunteered no support, not then, not later. The presence of the great Velikovsky archive went unnoticed by him, too. Deg thought, well, Kuhn is in the grip of the Princetonian academia and is an historian of science, a field of nitpickers, excepting a few like Kuhn, ignorant of the springs of human ingenuity, clumsy handmaidens of the technical scientists. Deg could see continually in science the ghosts of politics concealed by their shrouds. One of his old-time acquaintances was Don Price, an epiphenomenal career man of the public service, who launched from the pioneering Public Administration Clearing House alongside the University of Chicago to Washington, to the headship of the John F. Kennedy Center at Harvard, to the Presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Deg wrote him concerning the Velikovsky affair, seeking moral support. The answer: bland, perfectly unobjectionable, priceless. Not having gotten his support for the report of 1963, Deg wrote Price again in 1966 asking him to intervene to get a communication of V. into Science. He repeated the pledge and passed the buck. Thus, on December 22, 1966, with "a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" Price writes: I am glad of course to have the opportunity to read it and will forward it immediately to the Editor of Science. It is the general policy of the Officers and Board of Directors of AAAS not to interfere with the editorial judgment of the Editor and his editorial advisers. Since I believe that the Editor should be aware of your opinion, and that of Mr. Wigner, I am sending a copy of your letter as well as the note itself on to Dr. Abelson, and I am sure that they will be useful to him. For many years, Deg had preached that science could be regarded as a branch of administration and administration, the huge corpus of civilized routines, as the outward expression of human habits, largely unconscious, and therefore excusably termed obsessions. Journal, Undated, Spring 1963 Science, and all that goes by the name in discourse and actions is almost entirely a process of administering deductions in the name of an ideology. [Actually, this is a paraphrase of what Deg had written for the Administrative Science Quarterly a decade earlier. I am trying to exclude from this book whatever he has printed elsewhere, as I promised him, but I am like the oaf who quit his job grading potatoes because all the choices between big and little made his head hurt: at times I find such distinctions imperceptible.] On December 9, 1966, not long after the publication of the Velikovsky Affair in book form, Dr. Douglas Shanklin delivered an address on child-bed fever at the College of Medicine, University of Florida, applying Deg's model of the reception system to J. P. Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They had independently proposed infection as the source of the often fatal puerperal fever, and are famous therefore. But Charles White of Manchester, England, had insisted upon absolute cleanliness in the lying-in hospital in 1773 and Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen, Scotland, stated the theory of infection in 1795. Holmes was an illustrious poet before he published in 1843 his theory of infection as the source of the fever that killed so many women in the hospitals of the nineteenth century; he did not hold an academic position at the time, but later became Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School. The dogmatic opposition persisted until the science of bacteriology of the next generation overwhelmed it. Holmes died at 85, highly regarded. Semmelweis was a Hungarian Jew practicing medicine at the Maternity Department of the Vienna General Hospital when, in 1847, he introduced the practice of washing hands with chlorinated water before examining women in labor. Although the results were a five-fold decrease in the mortality rate, he was attacked and forced out of his position, and took a new post in his native Hungary. There he published a massive book on the etiology, concept, and prophylaxis of childbed fever (1861). Four years later he cut himself during a post-mortem examination, became infected, was mentally deranged, and died soon after, at 47 years. Holmes' essay was well-written and without first-hand experience. Semmelweis' work was intimidating, ponderously written and he was fully experienced. Holmes republished his own essay a dozen years after its first publication in a medical journal, declaring: "When, by the permission of providence, I held up to the professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from one young mother's chamber to another, for doing which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else should ever come to my life, I had to hear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins." Semmelweis was persecuted for his heresy. Shanklin writes of Semmelweis' tragedy: A few people acted with bold imagination and foresight, accepting the data at its face value and effectively saving many lives... the overwhelming majority dealt either from a power base or a dogmatic base, steeped in the irrational. The net effect for an interval was described in the indeterminacy model. Truth was accepted here and rejected there and by gradual exchange assimilation was finally achieved. Additional proofs with the evolution of a new technique wrote the final chapter of the saga of Semmelweis. It took about a century from White's obsessive insistence upon cleanliness in Manchester's lying-in wards to consensus about a matter that should have been simple enough to grasp, if one recalled that peasants used salt, alcohol, and herbs on wounds and they isolated persons associated with plague by the most cruel means. That the use of hospitals for parturition increased and that the doctors and their students increased their post-mortem dissections in this environment escalated the puerperal fever mortality rate. These two "advances" confused the issue, just as "advances" in agriculture, particularly in the U. S. A., have caused devastation of the soil, water resource depletion, and new chemical diseases. In the middle of advances, regressions are minimized or even denied scornfully. Obviously the scientific process is largely understandable by sociological and psychological analysis. Deg did not enjoy any illusion that there would be a direct rational line from publicizing V.'s poor reception in the sciences to the acceptance of his views and their incorporation into science. For one thing, he felt certain that if V.'s ideas, or anyone else's including his own, would succeed, they had to be first disassembled, torn to shreds, and then reassembled by thousands of people from the nearly unrecognizable shreds. Only much later might some historians recognize the many truths and even the valid general theories in their work. Nonetheless, the exposition of such large ideas and the controversy over them would perform the first major task of any revolution, namely the refocusing of attention and the conditioning of the minds of scientists and teachers to the new frame of thought. In these very days of the 1960's, the leaders of the movement for women's liberation were stressing "consciousness- raising;" many blacks were doing the same by stressing "negritude" (as the French blacks called it) and accusing pro-black liberal whites, "their best friends," of necessarily being racially prejudiced; radical students caught on also to the effectiveness of "irrational," often destructive, behavior as a way of getting the attention of the civil and educational authorities. Adverse publicity is a shock to the generally sheltered scientists and effectively alters their perceptions. The demoralization of a supreme power such as the scientific establishment with its credo and foci can occur by the exposure of weaknesses among a few leaders and heroes and proceed with the underlying economic forces that limit rewards and positions; demoralization then moves to the rank-and-file individuals who pay less respect, work less hard, ask more money and benefits, and pay attention to supernatural or heretical interests. In a democracy, the withdrawal of any substantial amount of public support for the ideas and position of any institution, including science, results in some demoralization. A perfectly normal remark, if publicized, can invite latent opposition to take form. When the renowned astronomer and public scientist par excellence, Harlow Shapley, declared "If Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy," what would appear to be a humorous truism set up, when publicized, a rallying point for all who were even slightly concerned about this or that fallacy of science; what many scientists believed to be only an absurd contrast gave to many a premonition that, yes, all scientists are crazy. Although Deg believed that he had substantially accounted for the scientific behavior witnessed in the Velikovsky case, one of the most common questions asked of him in discussions and at lectures over the following years was "Why did the scientists make such a fuss?" It did not seem to matter that often the people assembled had come because they already knew the answer. There would, of course, always be on hand for analysis new cases of idiotic name-calling and denigration of V., but the causes agitating the scientists remained essentially the same: dogmatism (fueled by the need for respect), expressions of power (agitated by personal ambitions and feelings of insufficient influence), indeterminacy (the frustrated wish to know, and the denial of confusion and uncertainty) and rationalism (narrowly defined, and therefore inadequate against ideas of quantavolution, which seem so easy to refute and dismiss but turn out to be remarkably rich and resilient). Exposing the mental and social operations of science produced an effect almost entirely favorable. Some addressed Deg for bringing justice to V. Others praised him for introducing the issue of justice into the scientific process. Some others commented upon the novelty of the approach. Mentions of unusual courage were frequent. Social scientists recognized the phenomena of establishment defensiveness and crowd behavior; they expressed little surprise. The letters of surprise came from persons who had undergone a conversion experience; they professed humiliation and disenchantment because of scientific conduct. Several urged that Deg turn his attention to cases which they believed to be similar. Deg objected, when I thought to print some of the encomia that his magazine (1963) and book (1966) evoked, saying that rehearing old praise can be bittersweet, to editors as to the aged of stage and screen. To most it is a bore, old or new. Blurbs are the medium of exchange between producer, salesman, and customer. If it is necessary, if it's never been printed, OK, let it be brief. So this is brief -- but it's important, because it shows that the message was intelligible, and got through in the larger intellectual world. A comparison may be pertinent: it was widely believed that scientists took up their pens en masse to castigate Macmillan Company when it published Worlds in Collision. In 1983, when Leroy Ellenberger delved into the appropriate files he found only twenty-one of such letters. The favorable correspondence received by Deg and the ABS in 1963 and 1966 exceeded the unfavorable mail received by Macmillan Company in what the Company regarded as a massive assault upon its integrity and its ability to do business with scientists. The gutless behavior of well-intentioned institutions is proverbial; Senator Joe McCarthy and a few assistants reduced the mammoth State Department and other agencies of the Federal Government to terrorized submission around the same time. Some figures in the forefront of scientific method in the social sciences, then or later, responded to the issue forcibly, a "most interesting" from Herbert Simon; "used to very good teaching purposes" from Bernard Barber; "both fascinating... and important... a splendid account," from Hadley Cantril; "beautifully makes the point about the psychology of scientists... grateful" from James C. Davies, a "signal service" from Arthur S. Miller; "a superb example of the sociology of knowledge," from Wendell Bell; "sobering and helpful," from Renato Tagiuri; "an outstanding contribution on so vital an issue... not only the matter of methodology but also one of political toleration and scientific craftsmanship" from Ralph M. Goldman; "fascinating... excellent..." from Wayne A. R. Leys; "splendid... outstanding... personal congratulations" from George A. Lundberg; and a grumpy reassessment by Stuart Chase, "I can see your point." Sociologist George Lundberg's letter to Deg pointed to a different type of reception system problem in science, one in which he had once been personally involved: The question has a great many aspects. In the first place, there is the problem all editors face in discriminating between work of a crackpot and the work of a genius. As has often been pointed out, they are hard to distinguish, especially on the more advanced levels. A very different problem (not involved in the Velikovsky case) faces the conscientious editor when he gets a paper the validity of which he does not question, but which, if published, will in the editor's opinion give aid and comfort to a group hostile to a viewpoint which the editor personally shares, on grounds reflecting the most creditable public spirit. Lundberg also noted, "It appears that Velikovsky's ideas have been widely circulated in spite of the hostility of the Establishment... Is it possible that the enormous growth in communication technology has made it practically impossible to suppress new ideas for long?" Stuart Dodd wrote from the University of Washington: I think you have done a magnificent job of l'affaire Velikovsky in the September ABS. The care with which you worked up and presented the complete case in the three articles, with excellent refereeing throughout, was a historic achievement in challenging and improving methodology in the Behavioral Sciences. I particularly admire the way you did not go into the controversy of the correctness of Velikovsky's theories, leaving that to the specialists concerned. Your editorial statement of the issues involving the mores of both the physical scientists and the social scientists as scientists in accepting and sifting new scientific work is a skillfully done job. On the humanities side Mose Hadas, Horace Kallen, William T. Couch, Jacques Barzun, William Sloane and August Heckscher wrote Deg supportively. Medicine, social work, psychiatry, and law were among the fields of applied science reporting interest and conveying congratulations. Several ABS readers arranged meetings for Dr. V. at their campuses. Articles based on the ABS issue originated in Italy, England, Australia, and elsewhere during the 1960's. Reviews of the book when it appeared two years later were favorable; however, no scientific journal dealing with the natural sciences reviewed it. Ultimately, the book was republished in England, and translated and published by Bertelsman-Goldman in Germany. Deg introduced the second, English Edition of the Velikovsky Affair in 1977. Brain Moore, the librarian of Hartlepool and a cosmic heretic, reviewed the work in the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review, III: 2 (1978), 38. Crediting the book "a 'classic' in its field" with "the renaissance of scholarly interest in Velikovsky" he quoted its preface: We dedicate this book to people who are concerned about the ways in which scientists behave and how science develops. It deals especially with the freedoms that scientists grant or withhold from one another. The book is also for people who are interested in new theories of cosmogony -- the causes of the skies, the earth, and humankind as we see them. It is, finally, a book for people who are fascinated by human conflict, in this case a struggle among some of the most educated, elevated, and civilized characters of our times. The area to which the ABS addressed itself was apparently much in need of attention. Sociologist Lundberg thought "that the AAAS, not to mention individual scientists and groups, must now prepare a detailed answer," and he added, as did others, various matters of investigation in the reception system of science. David Wallace wrote happily, "I hope you get sued." The American Political Science Review, which had carried negative reviews of, or ignored, Deg's iconoclastic or deceptively simple works in political science sprang to attention with the Velikovsky Affair. John Orbell opined that "it represents a most significant contribution to the sociology of science." He applauded Deg's most valuable chapter on the scientific reception system and concluded: "Behavioral scientists might be expected this time to have been on the side of the angels; they were, after all, nearly alone among scientists in not having some fundamental notions challenged by Velikovsky." Stecchini wrote to Deg, then in Italy, on Oct. 2, 1963: "There has just appeared a manifesto by [Robert Maynard] Hutchins and others of his coterie on Science, Scientists, and Politics. It says in general what the ABS has said, but it does not give any evidence. Hutchins begins by saying that in his experience the scientists are the most unscrupulous and power-motivated members of the academic community. The concluding paper by Lynn White, Jr. [historian of science] declares that scientists do not understand philosophical issues and often have philosophical prejudices." One sponsor of this manifesto was Harrison Brown, a renowned scientist whose reviews of V.'s books were madly mediocre, which goes to say something of the significance of works of the Hutchins kind that do not name names, and makes recommendations that are not specific. Deg liked and admired Hutchins, even when strongly critical of him, ever since he had attended a seminar of that handsome, brave, relatively intellectual, self-contained, and slightly phony cavalier, then President of the University of Chicago. There came shortly afterwards to Deg another letter from Albert Schenkman, Publisher of Cambridge, Mass., breaking a lance against the ABS. Ted Gurr, minding the ABS, wished to publish it and Deg replied "Dear Ted: It is cruel of you to hound me across the Big Pond with Mr. Schenkman's letter with a request that I reply. He is in a state of awful confusion. Print it if you will, with or without my comments," and he suggested that Gurr put the comments alongside the appropriate paragraphs of the letter. Gurr did not print the comments. Philip Converse, who at this writing is President of the American Political Science Association, on Oct. 9, 1963 congratulated Deg on "a superb document." Unlike most, he had followed the case from its inception in the early 1950's. Unlike most, too, he directed his thoughts to measures of policy and control. ... In accordance with the principle of open public challenge and rebuttal, why not publicly invite those of the principals on the other side (certainly Shapley, Gaposhkin, Harrison Brown, perhaps Abelson, etc.) who are still active to respond to this issue in an ensuing number? I assume they would be willing actually to read the whole issue before writing rejoinders. I trust such an invitation could be handled without devolving into a Counter-Inquisition. That is, the profound ignorance in some coupled with the arrogance of success, has had material consequences for the development of the behavioral sciences, and I am sure leaves many social scientists in a counter-inquisitional frame of mind. On the other hand, it is we who purport to understand the psychology of the inquisition, and we contend among other things that they are unlikely to. I think it is fair game to make the basic points and make them vigorously, while a classic case is still fresh. Yet if our claimed perspective on such matters has any merit at all, it should both permit us and require us to handle the matter with some noblesse oblige, out of respect for the gross differences between the two camps in comprehended information concerning these social and psychological processes. This is true not only because of the negative consequences of the unfettered inquisition spirit, but also because of our beliefs that the problems are principally system-level ones, not good-guys and bad-guys, and ones moreover that social scientists have not to date resolved operationally themselves. So a personal vote for increased discussion and allocation of resources toward remedy, but not the pillory or the witch hunt. Deg at Florence was sent a copy of the New York Times of August 16, 1963 about "the first definitive list of books assembled for the White House Library," John F. Kennedy being President and Jacqueline, his wife, being interested in such matters as the White House decor and French poetry. Professor James Babb, librarian of Yale University, directed the task. "Those on the arduous project included the best brains of the Library of Congress, the editor of the Adams and Jefferson papers, members of the White House Fine Arts Advisory Committee and a host of distinguished scholars, librarians, publishers and experts in many fields throughout the nation." Deg's book, Public and Republic, was on the list, his father said, and in response to a plea from the allegedly poverty-stricken White House for donations, his father had sent in the autographed copy Deg had given him years before. Deg examined the list and wrote a brief essay about it. In his usual way, he managed to scold everybody, the pretentiousness of the scheme, the great works left out, the silly books entered, the illiteracy of Presidents, and the antiquated view of the methodology of politics and history evidenced by the list. Most pertinent here are his remarks on the treatment of science in this super-list: Nor do we understand why the natural sciences are excluded. Certainly there is room for some principal articles and books. If readability is the criterion, they are as likely to be read as several hundred other works in the collection. Besides the originals, there should be present at least Sarton, Conant, Whitehead, and Santillana. It is as important that the mythical President who reads should read science as that he should read "Little Women." This is probably another aspect of the escapism which shuns the future. The immense and fertile American planning community is scarcely heeded. The best predictions and estimates of what can be done in the natural sciences in the next century are absent. The best proposals for the control of war are not available. If indeed the President were to read randomly in this collection, we should fear for the nation. The tools with which an active presidential mind might work are not dominant here. The incident displays Deg as something of a misanthrope, but what meaning has this word -- a hater of one's fellow humans or, like Le Misanthrope of Moliere's drama, an idealist and severe critic of others? It is clear that he was the latter; he had the two tell-tale signs of this Misanthrope: he was a harsh judge of himself, subjecting himself to daily Augustinian interrogations of his activities, his use of time, his ideas, his conduct towards others, his intellectual and logical rigor, and his failures. Second, he had an inflated hope for others: for educating the uneducable, giving to the undeserving, organizing the unorganizable, loving the unlovable, bringing peace to the world; worse, he could see good in everyone: his opponents, madmen, silly women, gangsters, wicked politicians. Even at the moment of judging harshly, he was sympathizing secretly. One reason why he was attracted to V. was V.'s simple unidimensional moral quality: there were enemies and friends; the friend of your enemy is your enemy; the enemy of your enemy is your friend; the friend of your friend is your friend. The fourth category -- the enemy of your friend is your enemy was not so well accepted by V., or to most others who went so far as to accept the first three propositions. So it is not all simple, but nothing is, and all generalizations are false to a degree. Let us move to Deg's Journal. Princeton, April 7, 1966 I was abruptly pulled out of the relaxation of homecoming when I visited Velikovsky. He was haranguing me about Livio's misspelling of the Pharaoh's name and I was sipping tea and listening respectfully but comfortably and even amusedly when the telephone rang and he answered it. I could hear him asking who it was and then "jail," and "marijuana," and "most regrettable," and "I am in full agreement," but then "I am not the man for you. I have here with me Professor de Grazia, Professor Alfred De Grazia," and "Let me have him speak with you... He is better qualified to deal with this subject." He lumbered in and explained that a gentleman on the phone wished to have a Dr. Timothy Leary introduced. This Dr. Leary had been sentenced to thirty years in prison for possessing marijuana. He was a psychologist... I began to recall Leary... Harvard... experiments with LSD... and reluctantly but with some interest I picked up the receiver and received an invitation to come to Town Hall on Tuesday (this was Monday) at 8 p. m. and introduce Dr. Leary to the audience. The caller, Mr. Bogart, stated that under the circumstances of the sentencing, it would be helpful if Dr. Leary were not to go 'cold' on stage but be preceded by some supportive words. I replied that I might do so but wished to look into the matter and call him back the same afternoon. I hung up and V. said, "You should do it, Alfred, it is a very good and useful thing to do." I felt that I should probably do it, but did not finally decide until I had read a little of the background of the case and an article of alarmist nature in Life magazine regarding LSD. Sizemore joined us at V. 's and we examined some of the long-sought-for Macmillan correspondence on V. 's case. Miraculously, after it had appeared first that Macmillan would never let us see what they had in their files from the days of the crisis over the publication of Worlds in Collision, and then later they said that they had destroyed the files, Sizemore learned that the files had actually gone with many other files over to the New York Public Library for some future literary historian. Well, history had already begun. Sizemore requested the materials and they were brought up for him. He was not supposed to remove them, but he did so temporarily, reproduced them by Xerox, and returned them immediately. So now we might read the full texts of the letters of the scientists Shapley, McLaughlin and the rest to Macmillan, the notes of Mr. Brett of Macmillan agitating the question of whether or not to ditch V. 's book, and related letters and papers. We were now in position to back up what some people regarded as exaggerated statements concerning the dispute with actual quotations corroborating our charges. The matter of introducing Leary bothered me a bit. V. and Jill both spoke of my acceptance as an act of courage. So did Eddie [Deg's brother] when I called him that evening for information. So also several others in the next day or two. I feel uneasy when people say I am generous, kind, understanding or courageous. Partly I doubt that I am any of these things. Or if I think I am, it is upon occasions when nobody in the world notices; but then when I act normally and naturally, it seems to me, as in the case of Dr. Leary, I am explicitly informed of my virtues. I have long been convinced intellectually of the absolute lack of coordination between good deeds and rewards but their lack of coincidence in practice never ceases to bother me and unsettle me. I don't know how to put it: it seems that I do praiseworthy things in quiet, boldly, but when a public approves my conduct, far from plunging forward even more enthusiastically, I tend to pull up a bit and examine my conduct: am I being rash; what am I doing that is extraordinary? I almost never find that I am fully in accord with the applause. Eddie told me on the telephone from Washington that Leary's case had several legal possibilities, that it was worth trying in court. He urged me to talk to Allen Ginsberg about Leary, since he recalled Ginsberg having an interest in the matter. He then spoke with A. G., I believe, the next morning, for G. phoned me at my office, speaking unexpectedly in a smooth, organized way, and we arranged to meet at the Faculty Club at 3: 45 that afternoon for the first time. At the appointed time, having speedily dispatched a batch of phone calls, letters, papers, and other miscellany from the piles of homecoming mail, I was at the Faculty Club and Ginsberg came in soon thereafter. The apparition is nothing to dismiss, especially if it occurs in the framework of the old Federal architecture and furnishings of Washington Square North. He was more completely uncouth than I thought possible. Full grown hair and beard flying in every direction, disheveled attire of ditch, barn, and beach. He said Peter was parking the car and would be in, so we began to talk while we waited and after twenty minutes Peter came in with his tam, long red braids, and grimy gym suit and tennis shoes, bringing along also his brother. By then Allen and I had come to terms and he could introduce Peter's brother nonchalantly as "Julius, Peter's brother. We've taken him out of the insane asylum where he's been for thirteen years. He's become our ward." Peter said, "Sit here, Julius!" and Julius staring far far out of this world, sat straight and mechanical on a chair and said nothing nor scarcely moved a muscle for the hour or more that we talked thereafter. The trio was spectacularly disgusting. Several professors and the manager poked their heads inquiringly our way and I gave them a polite "hello!" My own feeling was of warmth and fondness. They were completely reversed characters. All the evil in them was in their appearance, while inwardly they revealed a beauty and kindness that was holy. They are in the great tradition of the blessed spirits -- the hermits who live in caves and on poles, the beggars of St. Francis, Ginsberg is an man of surpassing intelligence, aside from all else, and Peter a kind of saintly inquirer. They are not more celibates, or even better-than-ordinary men. They stand on the other side of Evil, having passed through it or flown over it. I invited them to the bar downstairs for a drink, but they took me instead to their party, where they were tardy. Present when we arrived was the hostess, Miss Beach, daughter of the first publisher of Joyce, a Frenchman who has just translated Ferlinghetti, a Solomon who had just been freed from nine years in a mental hospital (this must be Allen's great early friend) and a pretty young man who looks like Edgar Allen Poe and publishes Fuck you: a Magazine of the Arts. I stayed for a while, then left despite their invitation to dinner, because I had to put down some words for my Introduction. I signed into the Stanford hotel for the night, scribbled hastily for half an hour and then walked to Town Hall (taking a cab the last couple of blocks, since I turned E rather than W) and arrived a little late to spend time with Leary before the address. It was as well for he was busy with the press and TV until the moment he had to appear. He welcomed me and we went on stage to a house three-fourths filled. A young crowd, I observed. My introduction went off well, and Leary's small strange eyes lit up warmly when I finished and he shook my hand cordially. He rambled on nicely for over an hour under painful white lights. They bothered me more than him but he had indicated he wished me to sit on stage alongside the rostrum and I complied. (Now I must see what mode of exploitation there will be of the films that were made. If I am on display I shall want to be sure of the context and qualifications.) Leary's message was simple and harmless. He spoke of the levels of consciousness and asserted that the deepest was provoked by LSD. He argued that the knowledge one gained thereby was to the good (automatically, I suppose, as the naturalist fallacy has it that all fact and truth is good and wreaks good, no matter the context or the controls). It wasn't much. Leary has been the patient amicus adolescensis of boys and girls seeking self-awareness and thrills of sensation, and is adulated for this and for his troubles and for his pursuit of a vague set of psychological and theological ideas that hover in the experiences of drug-taking. I bid him goodnight afterwards, ate a poor solitary meal at a late diner, and slept well, Princeton, October 6, 1966 Bad headache. Hot flashes, apparent heart palpitations after lunch. Query: alcohol? Alcohol plus fine crop of my garden mushrooms "coprinus" for dinner last evening? barometric pressures possibly related to hurricane Inez? something more functionally severe? Poor mood, anyhow, Louise S --- our house guest again. A beautiful woman, so well turned out, and 52 years old. She had a torrid affair with a young Greek and spent weeks with him on a primitive island in the Aegean this summer. Walked with Franny [their shepherd dog] along the streets in the balmy night air. Stopped by Velikovsky to give him an article on "Magnetic Pressures" that describes the newest successes in building up tremendous magnetic charges. What artifice can do, nature may have done and may do. Hence V. 's theories about the possible role of electromagnetic charges in cosmic events and catastrophes may be supported or considered in new light. He insisted I stay and despite my headache, we talked for nearly two hours. He had me read his latest correspondence and advise him on letters to Sullivan of the NYT and others. We spoke of his archives and I repeated my thoughts about a foundation to take over his home and archives. He is very anxious about his many remaining tasks. Fifteen they were, he said. I said "I have fifteen not counting you as a project." He joked about the peasant pushing the old ass and saying, in response to a remark of a by-stander: "Between us we are 100 years old." Deg's Journal, Princeton, October 9, 1966 It is as difficult to make a little change as a big change in politics. Or is it? I sometimes think the former and usually act upon it. But I am a radical by temper and I resent being involved in little changes when bigger ones are needed. I wonder: can it be that in the measurement NOT of the difficulty of change, but whether the changes brought are big or little, that the conservatism of a society should be determined? Deg's Journal, Princeton, October 9, 1966, 11 P. M. At 9 am Edward de G. calls and we discuss his problems in finishing "Congressional Liaison." At 10 V. calls and tells me we should publish his Brown University speech and the accompanying talks of his critics, together with the Neugebauer reviews and correspondence, as a book. I agree, but he takes a half-hour to unload his early morning thoughts upon me. I should charge the old psychoanalyst a psychiatrist's fee (professional discount, of course). At the end he says "I feel better now. We have this straightened out. Now I will go back to the miserable German translation of my book." I feel compassionate. At every turn of the road, a further obstacle to communicating one's ideas arises -- when nothing else, there will always be the damnable errors of a typist, a translator, or an editor. Deg's Journal, Princeton, 1967 The afternoon of Sunday, December 17, Jill and I bicycled down the hill to the Velikovsky house for a tea party, with Francesca, our German Shepherd dog, loping along nicely beside us. When we arrived she insisted upon coming in, or rather, behaved in such a confused fashion that we finally brought her in with us, and she finally discovered her place under the grand piano, where she had lain on prior occasions. Present were the Ralph Juergens, Dr. Kogan, Vielikovsky's son-in-law and a Professor and Research Scientist from Israel, with whom I had met on his previous trips to the United States. So were the Bigelows, he from the Institute for Advanced Study and she a psychologist. I had not met them before although Velikovsky spoke of Bigelow from time to time. He is one of the few natural scientists who has lent sympathy to Velikovsky in recent years. A newly met acquaintance of Velikovsky, Spelman Waxman, was in the company with his wife. He is retired now from the Center for Antibiotics Research, that he had established at Rutgers University on the basis of the returns from his discovery of certain antibiotics, especially streptomyocin, for which he had received the Nobel Prize some years ago. The Waxmans had scarcely heard of Velikovsky. I had only vaguely recollected them as well. The Juergens didn't know the others. The Bigelows did not either, so all in all, except for Velikovsky, who has a great memory for everybody and everything, it was a typical gathering of specialized intellectuals who had heard little or nothing of one another despite the feeling that some of those present had that they might have met or that they were worthy of being known to others. Jill later told me that Mrs. Waxman seemed offended when Jill did not recognize her name, and of course Mrs. Waxman and Dr. Waxman were probably surprised when I asked him how he spelled it later on when he was asking me to send him a copy of "The Velikovsky Affair" which I of course felt that he should have known about, and I am far too aware of the networks of acquaintanceship in The Great Society to expect anybody to know me before meeting, unless they come from certain circles the existence of which I am well aware of. Under the circumstances, it is easy to see why there is so much trouble in gathering together a public opinion among scientists except at the most superficial level of the top associations and those who agitate among them and in the mass media, denoted by prizes and the like. I learned about Kogan's work in desalinization of sea water. He is now constructing a model in Israel that is supposed to be a great improvement over existing distillation types that require much expensive copper alloy tubing. His method is a kind of open channel way that cuts down a considerable proportion of cost of the installation that comes from tubing. He has also worked in physics and astronomy. He is a large man, wall-eyed, pleasant and highly intelligent, persuaded, I believe, of the validity of Velikovsky's general theory. We discussed the force fields that could have been operative during the encounter of Venus and Earth about 1500 B. C. He explained in answer to my questioning that it might be possible to set up a model to duplicate the forces involved, but it would be a very costly affair. Natural forces are not easy to set up in a natural state. He felt that the force of electromagnetism exerted presently among the planetary bodies and the sun might be enormously modified because its cube principle follows gravitational force very quickly and provides a very different relationship between the two bodies. Hence, one cannot say that the force between Earth and Venus would be negligible at all. Furthermore, we could venture a number of different positions, charges, currents, axial coordinates and the like that would determine a very wide range of possible forces between Earth and Venus during the period in question. And of course the present slow retrograde motion of Venus does not at all indicate what might have been the position and rotation of Venus at the time of the encounter. Unless someone comes up with a brilliant scheme, it will be difficult to reconstruct the historical incident with details more specific than those rather general ones provided already by Velikovsky. (However, I feel that there is some possibility that we might be able to use a more intensive and exhaustive scrutiny of ancient documents to discover somewhat more details about the motions of the heavenly bodies during the encounter period.) Dr. Waxman is an old Russian Jew of about the same age as Velikovsky, and they were able to recall passing by one another at different points in their early wandering lives. Dr. Waxman began to recollect his experiences in the years following his discovery of antibiotics and his naming of the field. I asked especially, "How long would you say it was from the time you made your discovery until the time you finally had a full research institute set up and operative with the people you wanted?" He replied, after much clarification of the question, partly because he, like other natural scientists, do not think in sociological process terms, that ten years was the period from the time that he made his discovery until the pharmaceutical industry purchased rights to use them, to the payment of royalties back to the University, to the voting by the Trustees of a new Center for Antibiotic Research at Rutgers to be set up by Dr. Waxman, to the construction of the building and then the hiring of a first group of deliberately temporary people who were space occupiers to prevent other ill-housed faculty of the University from taking over Waxman's facilities before he had a chance to bring in the permanent first- rate men that he was seeking. Finally, at the end of ten years the cycle concluded. I commented that this was a very short cycle of this type. It had to do with the nature of the discovery, of the fact that a market was present, and a few unique factors, including, of course, the shrewdness of Dr. Waxman himself throughout the total operation. A much more thorough study of this experience would be very worthwhile from the standpoint of the history of science and the sociology of science, as well as comparable studies of other experiences. The tea itself was only a small part of a rather elaborate Russian type of menu that Elisheva Velikovsky provided --sweet pickled herring, cheeses, hams, several kinds of cake, and the company enjoyed itself at table, Franny having lodged herself below the table and under the feet of everyone, somewhat to the embarrassment of Jill who was never really embarrassed about this sort of thing but thought that poor Elisheva had enough to do without concerning herself with the physical presence of a large bitch. Numerous stories were recounted.. Velikovsky told of the legend of Solomon in which was apparently involved a bit of radium that had been picked up somewhere and was carried in a lead box and was used from time to time for performing miracles, and finally after generations was exhausted. I thought the story showed very well the terrific power of Velikovsky's mind in looking at stories and seeing beyond the simple words facts at an entirely different level. He is unquestionably a great detective. Juergens caught me aside as we were leaving the table and the dining room to show me a long letter he had just received from John Lear, the Science Editor of the Saturday Review. In this letter, Lear was defending himself against Juergens' assertion in his essay on the history of the Velikovsky controversy that Lear and Stuart McClintock of Collier's Magazine had attempted to go beyond Velikovsky's wishes in jazzing up and popularizing Worlds in Collision, something that we have felt contributed to the original hostility to the Velikovsky book on the part of the scientists. Nothing in my experience would make me surprised at a popular magazine's handling of a scientific issue. It is almost impossible, given the rules of journalism, to do justice by science. Among many other reasons, the journals themselves are unequipped to handle distinctions between fact statements and scandalous exaggerations. However, in this letter, Lear again said that he had a most difficult time in working with Velikovsky; he disputes that there was ever any intention of serializing the book itself instead of condensing it (something that Velikovsky himself later confirmed and said that he had misremembered this fact when he looked up his agreement), and went on at great length quoting copiously from a letter written by McClintock to him a few months before McClintock's death last year, in which McClintock gave the most harrowing account of an evening spent at Velikovsky's home when he and Lear and later he alone, after Lear went out to wait for him, had tried to escape the wrath of Velikovsky and to appease him and at the same time to try to present an article that they thought would be printed by the magazine. In fact, McClintock accused Velikovsky at one point in his ranting and raving of bringing out a gun from the cabinet, putting it on the table and saying "Let this settle the matter right now." McClintock wrote, if Lear is correct in having such a letter, that he McClintock left the place shaking and with an eruption of the ulcers that he had thought once cured and after a year felt poorly as a result of the meeting. I laughed rather grimly when I heard the story. Of course one would have to check the reliability of both Lear and McClintock in respect to the incident at which Mrs. Velikovsky was supposed to be present. But again I would not put it past Velikovsky. I could see that a man coming out of a dozen years of every day in the stacks all day long and with his whole life work and magnificent set of theories at stake, and with all the driving power and determination that was required for that effort, being confronted by what had to be a shallow, glancing misrepresentation of what he was trying to say, and considering also the enormous domineering quality of Velikovsky and of how he wants to control every single thing that has to do with himself, he would be most intemperate, disagreeable and could even have pulled out the pistol. Juergens wondered whether he should show the letter to Velikovsky or Mrs. Velikovsky. I said hold it another day or two until I could look at it more thoroughly, and then we went into further conversation with the group, the Waxmans having departed and Jill having gone onto the subject of forming a foundation for the study of some of the theories in which Velikovsky was interested. He would like me to organize it. I am thinking strongly of it but I would like a much more clear definition of our respective roles. I arranged to see Juergens several days later and did on Thursday afternoon. Then I read through the letter again, we joked about it some more, and I said to Juergens that I saw no reason why it should not be shown to Velikovsky. I believed it worked out all right because the next day Velikovsky called me on another pretext and raised the subject again just to hear my response. He didn't mind my treating it in a jocular way. And he certainly did not express the right amount of indignation, I thought, at the fact that I appeared to believe the story. But he denied it and said that he had never owned a pistol since he had one many years ago in Russia or was it Israel. He weakened my belief in the letter a little, but it would seem hard for McClintock to make up the story completely, so specific was it. He also claimed that Lear was not there at all during the meeting. Juergens and I then discussed the foundation, and he agreed completely with me that prior to the establishment of the foundation it should be determined that it would carry a full range of objective studies of the many types of problems in numerous disciplines that we had come upon in the course of the Velikovsky experience. Furthermore, he agreed that we should ask for the rights to almost all of the Velikovsky archive because it is from his voluminous notes and the total collection of commentary that we could fashion many a first-rate hypothesis for our colleagues to research, both in the history of science and the substantive areas of concern. I am now drafting such a letter to Velikovsky explaining the conditions under which we would have to work. It is impossible to be in any dependent position with respect to Velikovsky and get out any kind of regular journal, or series of publications, or systematic argument in opposition to his theories. I could not work otherwise; I would find, as would everyone else concerned with the foundation and its publications, that he would gobble up all of our time whether it was necessary or not in the affairs of the foundation and we would be able to do nothing with our lives otherwise. The pretext I referred to above that Velikovsky called me about had to do with Professor Neugebauer. Neugebauer had apparently accused me of "dishonesty" in some letter to Delaplaine, a science writer, because I did not print or acknowledge a letter that he had written me (the ABS) in 1963. But I don't recall having received such a letter until 1965, at which time, O. N., probably feeling threatened by an imminent visit of Velikovsky to Brown University, N's own school, sent me an explanation of why he had distributed "only one hundred" copies of his review of Velikovsky's book containing a serious error that would make Velikovsky appear foolish or treacherous with facts. Every month of the decades of 60's and 70's there would be an alarm raised to rally to V.'s cause, and the volunteer firemen would rush to the scene. For persistent devotion to duty over the whole period Warner Sizemore gets the prize. He was out of Georgia originally, became a Presbyterian minister, studied for his doctorate at Temple University. He never completed his dissertation, which he might have written ten times over if he had not given so much time to Velikovsky. Sizemore was an artist as well, a modest painter who would not stretch himself to create. He devised, too, a method of reproducing in wood a painting, whether classical or banal, and sold his productions at fairs in shopping centers and fairgrounds. I must not give the impression that V. would not help his supporters. When it was sage to do so, and would not compromise himself, he would write letters; since almost always the cosmic heretics needed letters that would recommend them to academic foes of V. and cover up their friendliness to V., there were not many of such letters. In Sizemore's case, V. guaranteed a mortgage on a house in Trenton, so that Sizemore and his family might settle down. They did and found their life-paths successfully. The interventions of Sizemore on V.'s behalf were to be numbered in the hundreds. A minister of the many, he became a minister of the one. Hardly a week would go by without some assistance. He gave counsel, wrote letters to the media, made phone calls, solicited support, attended every related public assembly, taped miles of discussions and lectures, gave his own funds to publish the magazine Kronos, kept hostilities to a minimum, and maintained a good-natured concern through thick and thin and down the years. He became Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Glassboro State College and persuaded the authorities to authorize a Velikovsky Center, which began to collect items of interest and which served as a background screen for Kronos magazine. There was little gain here except the prestige of an academic address. V. never did consign a copy of his archive to the "Center." Friends like Sizemore come mostly in fairy tales and epic poetry. V. took him for granted, as indeed he took everyone for granted who did not hold some prestigious place or manage a power center. He bequeathed Sizemore nothing -- nor anything to anyone else except his wife, and then by descent through her to his family. It is continuously remarkable how gratitude in life, where it exists, is typically decapitated in the performance of a last testament. It was disgraceful, after having taken up so much time over decades talking about making his archives available and helping others carry on his work, that V. did nothing to that effect nor did his wife and daughters, and in fact his books and materials and funds were held more tightly than ever after his death. I have already said that V. undervalued what he received from others and overvalued what he gave them. Lewis Greenberg, to take another case, had for a decade edited Kronos without compensation (unless his profligate telephoning were to be counted as such) and could only wrench a few articles out of V. and his heiresses. Very late, Jan Sammer, the family's assistant, helped to pry loose some pieces. As we shall see, Mankind in Amnesia is not much as a book, but would have appeared gracefully and appropriately as articles in Kronos. Meanwhile Kronos was weakened by its top-heavy reliance upon Velikovsky's case. When the magazine was very young, Deg had proposed, in a fateful meeting of several cosmic heretics in a Chinese restaurant of Philadelphia, that the magazine "go public." It should define its mission in general terms and seek a wider audience. Greenberg, whose paranoiac outlook he was the first to confess, felt threatened and drew back. Deg, who should have pursued his aim more gently and privately, let it drop, and hardly had personal contact with Greenberg in the years that followed. But this is true, that V. would have been outraged if any of his circle, and certainly Kronos, would have essayed to count him as only a leading figure among cosmic heretics, other than as their raison d'etre. Those who thought such "evils" were evicted, like the Talbotts, or dropped out, like Stecchini and Bill Mullen. Only Deg, I must say, pushed over the years for an opening up to the world, and only once did what seemed like an awful break occur, which lasted for a couple of days. Then the British began to skirmish, and opened up frontally with the Glasgow revisionism; Deg began circulating his own manuscripts and coining doubly heretical terms like "revolutionary primevalogy;" and ultimately Kronos began to carry non-Velikovskian material and theory. Withal Deg could note with interest how in published articles of Kronos and the British Review and wherever else a piece might appear, the writer would be sure to interject a mention or quotation from V. in the first paragraphs, as over the years, in American political science journals, one felt he must refer to the latest book of the "hit parade," one year being the year to cite V. O. Key on political parties, next year David Truman on political processes, then Robert Dahl on democratic theory, and so on, or, in a more stable setting, the communist scientific writers who seem hardly able to put a pen to paper without promptly keying in a reference to Marx or Engels, no matter what the subject and "the state of the art;" and the Chinese for a while with Mao, and so on. The issue was not "giving credit where credit is due" but of political-social game-playing. When a man writes much, he must ultimately mention everything from sex to the weather, and every phrase can become Biblical in its marvelous "perceptiveness" and "prophecy." Deg was not of course alone in detecting this in-gathering effect of fame, as I discerned in reading the Journal of Andr‚ Gide for 4 February, 1922: Freud. Freudianism... For the last ten years, or fifteen, I have been indulging in it without knowing it. Many an idea of mine, taken singly and set forth or developed at length in a thick book, would have made a great hit -- if only it were the only child of my brain. I cannot supply the initial outlay and the upkeep for each one of them nor even for any one in particular. "Here is something that, I fear, will bring grist to your mill," Riviere said to me the other day, speaking of Freud's little book on sexual development. I should say! It would be impossible to carry in any interesting manner an account of Deg's interventions on V.'s behalf, just as it would be to list Sizemore's multitude of favors. Instances would include: setting up with John Bell a meeting for V. to address at New York University (Mar. 1, 1968); offering to the President of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia (Feb. 20, 1967) to take the platform with V., if it was the presentation of "another side" that was truly wanted; dealing with publishers (Dell, Feb 27, 1968, Simon and Schuster, et al..) to publish more of V.'s rebuttals of the "establishment;" writing letters to the Editor of Newsweek (May 29, 1968) and to other media directors; appearing on radio discussions; helping to arrange television programs; addressing a "Social Order in Science Study Group" at the George Washington University (Jan. 18, 1965), meanwhile conducting general research in the field and carrying on another complicated life. On occasion (rare because his obduracy was known) intimates remonstrated with Deg for spending too much energy upon V. 's problems. His attitude was typical: give me a better cause in the intellectual world, a more worthwhile victim; a better archive; most victims are dull, or psychotic, or trivial... "Think of your own interests," they would say. But that only confused Deg. He didn't feel actually that he was giving V. so much. His "own interests" were for affection, good food, good company, sex, beauty, travel, and there seemed a good supply of all these to be had. As for "other people's interests," he would gladly save the world and did make a couple of literary stabs in that direction, nor was there any world movement worthwhile; he tried to save higher education by starting a school. He jumped into the Vietnam vortex but could do little. He took initiatives to advance his field of learning by inventing a computerized information retrieval system. Other things as well, such as a stint to help erase anti-semitic elements in the Catholic rite, offers to reorganize his New York University department, etc. It was not so easy, I conclude, for him to have found a better cause. Recall it was the "richness" of V.'s materials that attracted Deg, and allowed the science of sociology and the history of science to progress. Let me dip into his journal to see what was up otherwise. On March 8, 1968 is an entry that combines food, presidential politics, Vietnam, economic development, the arts, and religion: Lunched 1-3 pm with Rod Rockefeller at "Pireaus, My Love," rolled lamb and stuffed flounder in a second floor saloon lined with portholes. Decided: 1) We might set up a company to study possibilities of large-scale condominium conversions of slum properties. I'll form a committee. 2) It would be well to set up a committee of ten for Nelson R. for President among scholars and from that I might send a larger mailing to the 15,000 political scientists of the country, and then all the other fields. 3) IBEC would be interested in VN if United Fruit could come along and develop the economic output of a new city. [Deg was pushing to create a new city in Vietnam.] We'll see what Julian Turner [U. S. Army Colonel, formerly logistics chief in Vietnam] has to say next week when he comes from Fort Lewis. 4) The fine arts corporation and antique properties holding corporation can be gotten to whenever the means and times are right. 5) We'll try to get the National Council of Churches to do a practical and strong job of handling its 3-year program on the social responsibilities of corporations. I scarcely need say that none of this succeeded, but perhaps it goes to show how Greek cuisine can help to vent hopeful dreams. Every now and then the two men would lunch together and concoct schemes that didn't seem to go far beyond the lunch table. Deg stopped seeing Rod without saying anything because when the big crunch descended with the school in Switzerland, Rod gave a mere $100 to the cause. They were used to dividing their lunch bills; this Swiss fare was too exotic for Rod to share. The same night, he was writing a poem on the train: How many Fridays we thanked for not being Mondays, wish we life away so. Draw back all those weeks, dear breath, into the fresh lungs of youth and fill them with the best of life, skimmed of complications, Humpty Dumpty splatted where he fell and tra la la la for him. Just a dog lying in the sun Waters creeping up a beach A long walk to nowhere An enthusiastic argument A book on the wide harmless world. No riotous shocks and jolts but sweet time, soft time fall stilly, pass gently around our retracements drink long and cool wet and stretch these cords from Monday to Friday. Will the little god to rest and give the big one a chance to work. Some of the life he was leading in these years is reflected in the following letter from Naxos to Dr. Zvi Rix of Jerusalem, dated July 19, 1976: Dear Dr. Rix: Greetings! I hope my letter finds you well -- and not too impatient with your friends and colleagues of the field of revolutionary primevalogy. I have settled down in Naxos for a few weeks (until August 15), after visits in London, Amsterdam, Delft, Dusseldorf, Dornach (the Rudolf Steiner Center), Athens, and Thera Santorini. On the 15th of August, I go to Athens, the Dordogne (to spend two weeks around the caves and digs), Nice for the IX International Congress of the Union of Pre-and Proto-Historical Sciences, and then probably straight back to NYC and Princeton. I have been carrying your letter of April 2 (terrible!) with me for months. Let me "respond" to it. 1) As I have said, you only need a) to be able to come and b) to find out whether I am here, to come to Naxos as my guest any time. 2) If you ask him, Sizemore will probably duplicate for you a set of the Glassboro papers, which I see are beginning to appear in Kronos. 3) Did I send you the "Jupiter and Saturn" piece? No! I have searched my folders here and, alas, I must have given the copy I had carried with me for you to somebody in the English group (I become generous and present-oriented under the influence of good company and whiskey). I will send it to you when I return; it is only a brief piece with a well-phrased hypothetical formula. 4) Did your piece not appear or is it not promised for publication in Kronos? (I have no copy of the Birthday Symposium myself.) 5) Your "psycho-politics" was gratefully received and read by my seminar at NYU. 6) I wish it were as easy (cf. your compliment re my article on Michelson's Moonshine) to set up our own elaborated time frame and scheme for myth analysis as it is to knock down those set up by others. 7) The model for the new Holocene that I set up views it as an age of the "Unsettling of Heaven and Birth of Man," the age of catastrophes, using Greco-Roman terminology: Urania, 14,000- 11,500 (BP 2000 AD); Lunia, 11,500-8000; Saturnia, 8000-5700; Jovea, 5700-4400; Mercuria 4400- 3450; Venusia, 3450-2750; Martia, 2750-1600; Solaria, 1600-0. The greatest catastrophes occurred with the birth of the Moon from the Pacific Ocean ca 11500 for much crust was lost as the larger element of outer planets (Uranus-Neptune, etc. possibly) passed closely and the water canopies fell cataclysmically. The scheme appears too radical at first sight, but in hundreds of pages of working back and forth logically and with the scraps of available evidence, it seems to hold together. I propose it in order that we may begin to fit in all of the scattered pieces of myth, evolution, paleontology, behavior. Whenever the exposition is ready I shall send it to you. 7a) as for the dynamics of the birth of Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis, I have at least a pamphlet nearing reproduction on the subject and will send you that too. I shall try to find H. Gunkel's book; thank you. 8) I do have access to the sourcebooks that Corliss is publishing on ancient riddles and reports. I agree with you that St. Brendan-Quetzalcoatl follows a universal pattern; the ultimate problem is to fix the first age (Urania?) of the practice of these rites and to show how they emerged from the brain (double-brain?) of the new homo sapiens schizotypicalis cum geo-celestial terrors. In the sourcebooks that you mention (Corliss') did you remark upon the vitrified Scottish forts? I am going into this matter now. This seems to be lightning, and on a grand scale, i. e. the protracted withdrawal or rush of charge from the Earth via the most convenient modes of exit towards an accumulated and approaching extraterrestrial charge (opposite). Hypothesis: at a certain point in time (Mercuria?), thousands of points of Earth were mobilized to discharge electricity (cf. my article on Troy IIg, which might be synchronized with the vitrification found in many places). Query: does the Tower of Babel case belong here? Did the languages of man disperse in shocked amnesiac behavior? Do the ziggurats and pyramids evidence Vitrification or an intent to facilitate (ex post facto) future current-flows? (Troy IIg is in pyramid- building times.) Note Mercurial qualities? When did Hermes flourish as a god? (under overall aegis of Zeus, perhaps). If people on an eminence feel current starting to flow, they get out before the heavy scorching from the heavier flow occurs. Are there vitrified eminences and walls, mid-3rd millennium, in the ruins of your area ? Perhaps, and even probably, this phenomenon, like quakes, flood fire, whirlwinds, occurs whenever a major extra-terrestrial approach or major planet disruption occurs. A young Dutch geologist, Poul Andriessen, is here in Naxos drawing samples for 40K-40A tests, that he performs himself. We've spent many hours discussing the validity of the technique. There are serious questions that he admits, although he defends the results of his other radiochronometries. It is all so difficult, a seemingly endless set of important problems concerning which one must make up his mind. But enough for now. The sea is too rough for swimming -- or at least it is not inviting, so I shall drive my motorcycle into town and see what the tavernas are offering by way of food and company. With best wishes, I remain, sincerely, Alfred de Grazia Then years later, he lies in Stylida with a broken leg (the motorcycle, of course): June 7, 1978 Foot swollen and aching this morning. Big discussion with A. M. as to cause of this "relapse." she saying my walking upon it caused it, I saying that it may be the normal effects of stressing the foot in order to get the cartilage, foot bones, muscles, tendons articulating properly. I confess, though, to a certain worry from the beginning of the case: that everything inside was thoroughly disarranged, apart from the broken bones, and may be difficult to reorder functionally. But, too, I took a long swim and that, plus walking, has markedly tightened the muscles of the calf. Wouldn't the stretch pain the tendons? Reading in Velikovsky's Peoples of the Sea to recheck whether he had separated sufficiently the Egyptians' "Peoples of the Sea" from those "Peoples" alleged to be destructive elsewhere at the same time, I find that he has not and I should one day pursue the idea that "Peoples" fiction served to cover up the Martian catastrophes of the 8th and 7th century, 3-400 years before the time of which Velikovsky writes. But the force of his arguments makes me yearn to circularize a brief questionnaire among all Egyptologists asking whether they have read the book and whether the hypothesis of Ramses III being of the 4th century is at all useful or defensible. I believe that the results would be scandalous. Stylida evening 17 June 1978 A Swede dropped in unexpectedly. His friend is interested in buying into my land. He stayed a few minutes and left. Ami rode into town with him and brought back food and mail and news. Then we swam. I continued to hack my way with a hand ax down the bluff and back up again, as I had begun the other day. It was easier, the footholes more prominent. I slung a rope around the bush and dangled it down to steady me on the crawl up. There were 30 pieces of mail of which 2 were for Ami, one rejecting "nicely" her second novel (really the fourth she has written) and the other from a journalist who compares her in a review with Anais Nin. I received a rejection of my elaborate request for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; for various reasons, I don't mind this. It's already an article or two on the "Ballroom of the Unconscious." [It is carried in The Burning of Troy.] I wanted the money to live on and to employ Ami who knows the literature so well, supposing that other means of subsistence don't come in. Of the force that moves this varied activity through the years, there is more than a hint in a note of Deg's Journal, undated but apparently of 1973, the more interesting in view of the massive narcissism that has been ascribed to V. Ten years ago I was induced by L. Stecchini to gaze upon the writings of I. V., catalyzed by an accidental reading of Oedipus and Akhnaton. This led up many different paths of philosophy and science, which I would not have had the courage or confidence to undertake, if I had not been a victim of the magnificent arrogance of R. M. Hutchins whose New Plan and own spirit of it had pervaded the University of Chicago with an idea that man, even in this age of specialization and seemingly endless data banks, could and must master a survey of all knowledge to be educated. This happened twenty-four years beforehand. But this would not have been enough if there had not been sixteen years before a narcissistic bending of my character in infancy and childhood, a fierce desire to keep the world in all its forms within me (to own the world) and a fierce competitiveness toward all others to enter it upon my own terms. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 4: } {T A PROPER RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR A PROPER RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY In the summer of 1971, Deg led a party of 300 persons, with many camp followers, up the Swiss Alps to found a college and V. came later to teach. It did not take V. long to perceive that Deg was continually in danger of falling victim to a human landslide that Deg's own explosive force had set into motion. When it came to V.'s turn to speak to the representative assembly, a beautiful contrivance of Deg which, like the French revolutionary assembly of 1789, had gone wild, V. called up Freud's Totem and Taboo and gravely admonished the respectful group of the danger that lay in killing their father. Deg felt embarrassed while dutifully thanking V. for his remarks, for he was a staunch republican who had always disbelieved in patriarchal leadership systems and because many of the college crowd would be all the more delighted if they could rid themselves of their father as well as a leader, killing two birds with one stone. "I, an octogenarian," said V., "stride with the young of mind. There is no cult of Velikovsky: there is only the cult of scientific and historical truth. The youths sense this, and the rebellion against the pseudoscience taught from the cathedrals of the universities is not for away." V. to Princeton Graduate Forum (Oct. 18, 1972): "Nineteen years ago I called the young... to look for new vistas, not to be afraid of calumny and name-calling. Today I repeat my call; it's a new generation. I call you to cross the barriers between sciences... My work is not finished ... It is in your hands. It is up to you to decide if you wish to repeat what the authorities told you or to become authorities yourselves --to grow and to be non-conformists and to take abuse and to be exonerated some day. So be courageous and don't be afraid." If V. had been given a son, he would have wanted him to be like the astronomer, Carl Sagan, but of course, in agreement with his ideas. Being what he was and the times being what they were, he was probably lucky to have no son. Rare these days is the child who adopts the father's views or even defends him. When V. and Sagan were appearing on the same platform at a AAAS meeting in San Francisco, V invited Sagan to his room, and there sought, if not to persuade him of his ideas, to influence and neutralize him, perhaps in a way to hypnotize him. Sagan only redoubled his criticisms as a result; the attempt to make a son of him back-fired. Sagan regularly lectured against Velikovsky in his classes and published repeatedly his essay that was said to finish him off. Still Sagan could invest himself with V.'s claims, and probably (though he would not meet with me to talk about such matters) he was convinced that the father was well dead and gone and was terrified at the feeling that V. now wished to be patriarch to him. Interviewed by Richard Baker on BBC 4 (radio) "Start the Week," 30 March 1983, he was asked, along with other guests, "the moment in your life that you've been most pleased about?" Sagan talked of the, "delightful moments" when his predictions about planets were borne out by space vehicles on the spot. Pressed for a "particular discovery," he replied "Well, the discovery that the surface of Venus is extremely hot, about 380 deg-C, [Actually it is much higher] and produced by a massive atmosphere Greenhouse Effect that keeps the heat in..." The second is a dubious theory, not at all original with him. That he could claim the first can most charitably be regarded as a slip of the tongue, such as Sigmund Freud describes; inadvertent and often embarrassing utterances, they are usually prompted by a strong suppressed desire of the speaker to make a point otherwise prohibited by rules, morals, or truth. Sagan, one might surmise, let the claim slip out as an expression of general megalomania, but the particular claim, out of all those he might have thought of, strikes at V.'s well-established claim of predicting the high heat of Venus. There is here a hint of psychological pressure working to take for his own specifically the property of the father. V. was fixated on authority, the higher the better: he sought out acquaintances and enemies on high levels. But he did not gather intelligent up-coming young people until late in life; he has written a book on his conversations with Einstein, yet he would never have dreamed of writing a book of his immensely richer conversations with Juergens about electricity and Stecchini on ancient languages and the history of science. Why? Because they were unknown. His idea of arrival was naive. The great ones would recognize him on the basis of his books. The young would come along, following what their teachers say. Until late in life, he had no idea of the striking fact of intellectual history, that most geniuses and heretics start out young. At any given moment in time, Harvard University is likely to have a couple of pets of the communists. It's a gimcrack impeccability. Harlow Shapely was one of these -- and, of course, a great deal more, too much more, member and officer of dozens of scientific associations, Director of the Lowell observatory, and more still. In poking about, Deg discovered that he had even once invoked exoterrestrial forces to explain terrestrial phenomena. Well, V. had thought, a man so broad in his interests and tastes would welcome a helping hand to apply legends to astronomy. V. was anticommunist and had been so since the earliest successes of the Russian Bolshevist movement had not gone so far as to efface anti-semitism in Russia. The authoritarian aspects of communism, or statism in general, did not faze him. Principles of government were foreign to him, a sharp contrast to Deg, who was continuously seeking better designs for human institutions. To V., governments and men were bad or good. The Soviet leaders were bad because they acted badly. Nor should persons be forgiven evil because of the pressure of circumstances. How he would love to live quite without compromises! The only dispute in connection with Deg's article on "The Reception System of Science" of the ABS issue occurred over his mentioning V.'s "respect for authority." Deg told him of the expression, "the Cabots speak only to the Lodges and the Lodges speak only to God." His response was not to reform, but to try more of it: he writes Deg a few months later that he knows that he is speaking like a Cabot but would Deg support him in his efforts to bring the prestigious figure of Lord Bertrand Russell over to his side? V. was on a collision course with himself. He practiced on Aristotle, Newton and Darwin, numerous 19th century writers and then on current authorities, but impersonally and only with the slightest irony, in a situation calling for broad sarcasm. He thought of himself as an authority but did not realize that he was undermining present authorities and that they would react as authorities invariably do, by putting him down. But, then, he was a poor sociologist. Like many a psychoanalyst (and most scientists for that matter) he barely realized that the field existed. He was flabbergasted when his Worlds in Collision was attacked so vigorously and then each succeeding book was treated the same, dismissed, or ignored. It was all the more shocking because Worlds was a best-seller, which brought popular authority into play as well. Here both V. and many of his followers showed themselves unwitting victims of the market place in ideas. They did not suspect success. Deg whose life had begun early to forge a chain of successes, had contempt for success. The concatenation of any man's successes was but a motley cluster of medals on the breast of the generalissimo of a banana republic. V. was unhappy with the support he received. It seemed that he would get agreement and aid from exactly those sources that he did not himself respect while being rebuffed by those who should flock to his banner. One had to be an anti-authoritarian to support him, but such were rarely to be found in physics, biology, astronomy and geology. Passive anti-authoritarians, yes, often erupting in personal eccentricity. Anthropology - but he knew little besides Freud's work on anthropology. Psychology -- again the psychoanalytic approach, not tight empirical psychology. So he got support from people who usually were just plain folks, intelligent (and therefore I say rare) readers, and a great many confused believers, or at least people who V. at bottom thought had no right to pass judgment on him. Like Moses, V spent a lot of private time disliking his People. Like the barons of the Magna Carta, he wanted judgment by his peers, meaning not the worthy or those not yet ennobled, but "the peers of the realm." Perhaps Oedipus and Akhnaton should have been entitled "The Oedipus Complex Unmasked," or "The Jews were First with God," V. enjoyed thinking about title and slogans. Deg and he would spent some off-track moments in such half-serious play. V.'s titles were exceptionally effective: Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, Earth in Upheaval, and so were most of the titles of sections of his works: thus in Oedipus and Akhnaton there were "The Sphinx," "The Seven-Gated Thebes and the Hundred-Gated Thebes," "A Stranger on the Throne," "King living in Truth," "The King's Mother and Wife," and so on. When Deg, six years after they had met, presented him with The Torrid Love Affair of Moon and Mars, he had to have explained to him the Hollywood Americanism of "Torrid Love Affair" and liked the double entendre with the heat of a cosmic encounter, but then eventually preferred The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, which denoted, if not heat, a cosmic event and catastrophe. Later on, still, he could let himself like Chaos and Creation, and even Homo Schizo, but would not let himself contemplate Moses and His Electric God, but this was part of another matter, his taboo of Moses. "You will damage me with this book." he declared solemnly to Deg, Since Deg made no reference to V.'s idea of Moses in God's Fire, which V. had not seen anyhow, and since V. had damaged the reputation of thousands of scholars "in the line of duty," he must have been gripped by an illusion that referred to an entirely personal problem of his own in regard to Moses. What could it have been? Martin Sieff, a Belfast Anglo-Irish-Jewish journalist and historian --one of the cosmic heretics -- spoke out in 1981 about the taboo: "The role of Moses is strangely muted in Worlds in Collision. Moses is mentioned only in connection with the voice of Yahweh at the flaming bush and the trumpet blasts of Sinai." Further, "in Ages in Chaos, one major figure who is obvious in his absence from the same historical canvas, is that same Moses." Again significantly, the ideas behind -- not up front -- in Oedipus and Akhnaton were instrumental in the creation of works. V. admitted, "This study carried me into the larger field of Egyptian history and to the concept of Ages in Chaos, a reconstruction of 1200 years of ancient history... More than eighteen years passed from the conception of the work and the first draft of its re-writing and preparation for the printer." Moses was taboo to V., a subject to be turned from and skirted around, except to show that Moses came before Akhnaton and that Freud was fearful yet adulatory of Moses. Even while railing against Freud's problem with his father, V. may have seen himself as Moses and son of Moses, down the line of succession that began with Joshua. "Velikovsky," said Livio to Deg, as they walked down the street after their first meeting with him, "will be the only man who can play Moses when they make a movie of his book." And he guffawed in his basso profondo. We have, that is, two plots in Oedipus and Akhnaton. One is the classic scientific method and detective work. The other is the intensely private psychic world of a man whose biological father was a strong and beloved figure, Simon, and whose intellectual father, Freud, had weaknesses that must be exposed, offenses against his people for wishing to abandon them for the gentile world and for taking away and making an Egyptian of their common ancestor, Moses. Before coming to America, V. had, in one of his few published articles, reanalyzed the dreams of Freud that were available and concluded that Freud was torn by a desire to assimilate to the gentile world. V. would have none of this. While Freud would make the Jews into gentiles, V would make the gentiles into Jews. Here I would quote Martin Sieff who is talking about V.'s article "The Dreams Freud Dreamed" (1941). Velikovsky was now using the psychoanalytic weapon his intellectual father had forged against his own creator, against Freud himself... Velikovsky went further. The initial aim of his research finally to emerge over twenty years later as Oedipus and Akhnaton, was to kill the Freudian father dragon in its lair. Akhnaton, the first monotheist in history, stood revealed as Oedipus. Freud's arch-saint turns out also to be his arch-sinner... Velikovsky dedicated Ages in Chaos to his physical father, but sought to erase the name of Freud, his intellectual father, with his Oedipus and Akhnaton. At the same time, V. could not go to great lengths in redeeming Moses, the father, without incurring the danger of displaying that he himself felt the strength and mission of Moses, and that he resembled Michelangelo's "Moses" more than the other son Freud did, who went to Rome to worship the statue. Worse yet, he, too, like Freud, would have to dispossess Moses if he wrote about him, for how could a psychoanalyst have perceived Moses except as a hallucinator and manipulator of crowds? And then what of Yahweh? Au revoir, Adonis. That V. was not Moses, did not pretend to be, and even denied it by refusing the question of "Who was Moses?" are not superfluous remarks. To many of his readers and followers he was a Moses of modern science and history. To himself he was one who had all that Moses possessed except the opportunity. Deg tended to agree and he had studied many men, but he was not the most devout of followers. Aside from possessing his own conceits, he did not like Moses' theocracy, nor his ambitions, nor his ruthlessness, nor his religious deception even if it was founded upon self-deception. V. differed from his secret idol by more than he himself realized and Deg liked him better for it. If a friend, like Mel Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton University, would say to him, as he did on the train to New York one time, I can't stand him, he's an arrogant, egomaniac bastard, Deg would grin tolerantly and say: "I understand what you mean, but he's not all that bad, and where do you find such minds?" Come to think of it, this was more or less what Einstein said to an antagonist, Bernard Cohen, when asked about Velikovsky. Referring to Worlds in Collision, he laughed and said, "It's crazy, but it's not bad." V. could be riled up invariably by the mention of this story, and he explains carefully in Stargazers and Gravediggers how it was wrongly told and was used to destroy his precious relationship with Einstein, and what he conceived to be Einstein's true view and mood, and I agree with him, and so does Deg. In this connection, a private note that Deg made in May of 1972 may be offered for what it is worth: I have been present on numerous occasions when V. was under pressure to be intellectually and politically dishonest. I would say he passed practically all of these tests with flying colors. The rare exceptions have practically all to do with pretending to have supporters among the authorities who did not support him so strongly. Explain. When you compare his conduct with that of scientists who had no reason to be unscrupulous, because they were already entrenched or in process of achieving established rank, he stands out like a rose from a manure pile. Because his manner and figure were impressive and imperative, V. seems to have encouraged subconsciously the awesome stupidity of attacks upon himself. Opponents became reckless out of threat, losing their capacity to reason precisely at the moment when they were being called upon to be reasonable. This is a behavioral pattern that I take pride in having newly discovered, because Deg nor anyone else to my knowledge has ever mentioned it. Let me give an example: In Ages in Chaos, V. took away five centuries that did not belong to Egyptian history, whereas in Peoples of the Sea V. took away three centuries that did belong to Egypt, at least according to Deg, who was siding with the "Glasgow Revisionists." One could not follow this important development from a reading of the great newspapers or the scholarly journals. The New York Times did carry a review of the latter work, antagonistic as expected, but quite irrelevant to the issue. Arthur Isenberg, an Israeli writer, addressed a reproach to the Times editor, containing inter alia a neat statistical reprimand for Thomsen's snide remark about V. 's supposed overdoing of "the first person perpendicular." 17 July 1977 The Editor, New York Times Book Review Section The New York Times 229 West 43rd street New York, N. Y. 10036 (U. S. A.) To the Editor: In his reply to his critics, Dietrick Thomsen is ever more unconvincing then in his (highly!) original review of Dr. Velikovsky's "Peoples of the Sea". He begins by patronizingly awarding unsolicited certificates to some of those who take Velikovsky's book more seriously than he does: They are "fine and intelligent people, and they raise cogent points" which --alas! -- "lack of space" prevents Thomsen from refuting. Next, he concedes that "in many points" Velikovsky "may be correct", an acknowledgment which he repeats (in spite of space limitations) a paragraph later. But then he dilutes the concession by means of a peculiar definition of science as a "set of mind" which, he implies, Velikovsky does not exhibit. His major objection it seems, is to the tone of Velikovsky's book --as if scientific theories should be judged by connoisseurs of tone and style to determine their adequacy. Tone apart, he faults Velikovsky for overdoing the use of the pronoun "I" (the "first person perpendicular" as Thomsen quaintly calls it.). This prompted a little research on my own part, with the following results: No. of Times I is used in 100 Author Short Title consecutive pages Darwin Origin of Species 153 Hoyle Nature of the Universe 116 Einstein Relativity 60 Eddington New Pathways in Science 191 Tinbergen Herring Gull's World 161 Von Frisch Bees, Their Vision, etc. 132 Velikovsky Peoples of the Sea 8 (total "I" count for the entire book, xvi-261 page: 32) (My counting was done hurriedly: the actual figures are likely to be somewhat larger in all cases: Thomsen is welcome to a recount.) A grand egotist like V. rarely lets his third person slip uncontrolled into the first person, whatever the provocation. In fact, he slips into the third person, as V. sometimes did, talking of himself as "Velikovsky." Later on, Thomsen, the reviewer, defended himself in a letter to Clark Whelton. He was furious at the impossible task set for him by the Times, and for bizarre editorial cuts. What I have tried to express here is that somehow the figure of V made people lose their senses and self-control; rages collected and rushed about like the winds when released from the bag of Aeolus. V. moved to Princeton from Upper Manhattan in 1952; Deg moved there from Stanford, California, in 1957. Five blocks apart, it took five years to meet, a block a year, so to speak. Deg was deeply involved in New York City and travelled sometimes to Washington. V. spent these years in secluded study, with his wife and his daughter's family for company, his wife's musical ensemble to listen to, several meetings with Harry H. Hess, and some conversations with Albert Einstein. He did not attend conventions, or review other people's books; he did not join the network of science, but then how could he? There was no science of neo-catastrophism. He might have joined associations of ancient history, anthropology, philosophy and history of science, though; he did not, wisely, for he was interested in a peculiar combination, unrecognizable, except in its bits and pieces, in conventional programs of the associations. He was a special case; he would have it no other way; he wanted to sit above all of them and receive their respect. But the ideas of an authority and heretic may be contradictory. To be a heretic is to be opposed to established authority. If V. could not be an authority, he would be a heretic. His true heroes were top authorities; his professed heroes were heretics. There were three of these, he would say to Deg. One was Diego Pirez, also known as Schlmo Molcho. A second was Giordano Bruno. A third was Miguel Serveto (or Michael Servetus). Deg's heroes were many; he was more polytheistic, so to speak, or even antireligious. They ranged from Jesus of Nazareth to Benjamin Franklin. They would include in the Church-dominated Middle Ages William of Occam, for he was an empiricist, nominalist, anti-Aristotelian libertarian who believed that words signified only real things and events, who taught also that reason could only arrive at valid comment when talking of the real world, not the divine, which only faith could attain (thus non-religious matters were freed from church control). Occam's principle, Occam's Razor, prefers to cope with problem using the fewest possible functions and terms, so therefore Deg would feel that his simple quantavolutionary model, Solaria Binaria to begin with, and all that spewed therefrom, was in the great tradition of the Razor. But William was beset by the authorities, convicted of heresy, and so fled to the safety of the Emperor's jurisdiction. His influence carried down the years, and of course all who were tinged with his notions felt the hostility of authority, such as the Sorbonne Professor Jean Buridan who around 1358 was drowned (not burned) and was celebrated by the allegory of "Buridan's Ass," that starved to death because it could not decide which of two bundles of wheat to eat; the same Buridan, too, revived in the song of the student-brigand-poet FranHois Villon, who in turn should have been "sanctified" as heretical hero by the student radicals of the 1960's, but was somehow overlooked. But Deg found heroes wherever he had gone throughout life, in India, Turkey, Italy, England, Hawaii and so on -- never mind the war heroes who were glosses on the immense rainbow of heroes --and heroines, because he found that heroism came more naturally and frequently to women. Whenever one studies leadership -- the movement of events, whether political or intellectual, one must first carefully dissever fame from achievement. He wrote about heroes in one of his poems, contained in Passage of the Year, the poetry which he published in 1967, where he said ... I shall never never understand why famous names are worshipped and writers wear their pens to nubbins on them. When they are nothing while the great ones bump our elbows and disappear in the crowd. "Wait!" "Hold on!" I call after them and they don't even turn around. They are vanished, they are dust. No cast of bronze contains them. One of Deg's unsung heroes would have been the man whose name I forget (naturally), the English amateur of eoliths whose protests, if harkened to rather than ridiculed, would have made the Piltdown hoax impossible. But I would not detract one whit from V.'s heroes. Schlmo Molcho was a Kabbalist and pseudo-messiah, a Catholic convert who reverted to Judaism. Around 1529 he began to believe he was the Messiah, and Pope Clement VII granted him protection. In 1531 he was denounced, tried and condemned to burn; he was saved by the Pope and another man burned in his place. He began to counsel the Emperor Charles V but was denounced and burned at the stake in 1532 after refusing to recant and reconvert to Christianity. Miguel Serveto (Michael Servetus) was a true Renaissance figure who discovered the pulmonary circulation system, was the originator of the science of comparative geography, and was a defender of free thought and free speech. He intimated that Christ was only human, and in his writings on Christianity preserved nothing that was merely traditional and dogmatic. Arrested in Vienne, France, and condemned for heresy, he escaped but strangely entered Geneva, heading for Italy, and was caught. All the Swiss protestant cantons were consulted and returned a recommendation that he be punished for blasphemy. Calvin, however, hated him and insisted that he be burned at the stake for heresy, for he refused to retract his dislocation of the elements of the Trinity, his argument against the validity of infant baptism, and his denial of original sin. He died on October 27, 1553. Giordano Bruno began his career as Dominican philosopher but was accused of heresy. He managed to teach at universities of several nations and wrote copiously in metaphysics, with excursions into satire and poetry. Finally, after fifteen years of work and wandering, he came into Venice, where he was seized, convicted of heresy, sent to Rome, and, after prolonged imprisonment, burned at the stake in 1600. Intensely anti-dogmatic, he propounded the infinity of worlds, the pantheism of matter, and the relativity of man's position in the universe. V. seems to have put the cart before the horse: one did not need to be burned at the stake to be a heretic or a hero. And a great many heretics of history escaped the fate intended for them. Often there are ages where heretics are ignored and tolerated, as in North America and Western Europe, when practically all forms of dissent, even against the heads of state and the forms of government, except when expressed as deadly terrorism, escape severe physical sanctions. The relativity of values and practices in the "advanced" democracies of today is such that almost no definition of heresy is operative. Notably, V.'s heretical heroes were long dead. He said once, in criticizing the magazine Pens‚e and a foundation that were working to help him, and speaking to Milton, Rose, and Wolfe, that he did not "wish, well, to carry the banners for all heretics." Waiting as he was for designation to the top rank of authorities, he meant to be wary of association with any contemporary heretic. Deg only half listened to V.'s litany of his heroes' lives and virtues. V. would never say what really fascinated him in the human characters of these men. His was hardly the depth analysis that one might expect from a psychoanalyst. Indeed -- and this must seem exceedingly strange to those who did not know him -- he almost never analyzed public figures of even those who were in controversy with him. He accepted them, as if they were rational creatures and their justness or unjustness was simply a matter of fact. So it was almost always Deg who was suggesting and proposing motivations and characteristics while V. seemed to regard his opponents (and friends) as unidimensional, almost as automatons. In this way, and others, V.'s mind and character were Mosaic and Old Testament. He did not even consider himself a member of the British Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, founded to pursue work very much along his lines. Nor did he regard his tamer organ, Kronos magazine, as part of himself. He consented to lecture at Deg's college in the Valaisan Alps of Switzerland one summer, but he would not go and return with the chartered aircraft carrying students and faculty, so that Deg had to authorize expensive tickets by way of Swissair. (But possibly it was not out of snobbery or comfort, but rather that the airline was Germany's Lufthansa.) He was absolutely unwilling to give anyone the slightest authority over himself. He never worked for anyone; he could barely tolerate cooperating with anyone. He had a striking inability to identify with people. He did not like to be compared with anyone alive and once exploded publicly in cutting anger when Professor Warwick, in an attempt at a supportive speech, not only seemed to make light of his claims to discovery, but dared to compare his own treatment as a doctoral student by V.'s foes of the Harvard Astronomy faculty with V.'s treatment by the same people. This continual insistence upon treating any offensive or belittling gesture towards himself as a major event, a casus belli, was the facade of his immense egocentrism, perhaps of the very narcissism which, in psychoanalytic practice, he claimed, must be the first region of the unconscious to be plumbed. Again one thinks of Moses, who looked upon all opposing thoughts and practices as actions against Yahweh. But V. never called in God as lawgiver, witness, judge, or executioner. He was all of these, or all of these except the last, which he left to his supporters, and was so in the name of the rational authority of the system of science, an abstract authority, not people so much as principles, not realistic principles, but ideal principles. He expected nothing less than ideal justice. The kind of offenses that were committed against him were commonplace in science, as in every other field of human activity. But none dared tell him so for if such were proclaimed, the game would be up and all the cosmic heretics of the Velikovsky camp would have to strike camp and retire. Friends left him from time to time, tiring of the game. Even if one brought up an equally nasty case, he would become suspicious that his own demand-level might be threatened. This is certainly narcissistic behavior. Often V. would protest that he had never behaved ad hominem towards his critics. How could they be so personal, aggressive and vile? He said that they were incorrect, wrong, and at worst, uniformitarian in their thinking. Hardly the invective of a mighty warrior -- which he was. But there was many another to do this job for him, and no strong or foolish critic ever escaped the lash of letters and articles from his supporters. This would be done at his urging or with his blessing. They were usually appropriate, to the point, deserved -- but excessive. None could recall an instance when V. pulled back the reins on his steeds. He usually was playing out the reins, and slapping them; many could recall instances when V. felt that a case being made on his behalf was not forceful enough. But why did V. maintain personally so proper a language and bearing towards scientists and publicists who were terming him a charlatan, a crackpot, a novice, and more? Partly, it was strategy: to be above the battle, to be insulted without descending to their level of retaliation. He was also restrained by his ultimate conservatism with regard to authority. Authorities might, unfairly, unjustly, without provocation, drag him through the mire, but he could not let himself do the same to them. He could unleash his minions to do so, however, and they did. This is an achievement of a great leader -- to be above the battle and yet direct it, to not lose one's dignity in a thicket of passionate verbiage, to be excommunicated and martyred without descending to the level of his opponents. At Lethbridge University, in the prairie of the oil-rich province of Alberta, Canada, a conference on V.'s ideas was held in 1974 and Deg flew in for the event. There turned up a local professor, a German named Muller, who came down heavily upon V. in the local newspaper, and V. was outraged. He turned to his largest artillery piece to blast Muller. He would not appear at the next meeting. "You can do it," he said to Deg as he lay sulking in his tent like Achilles, "no one else is strong enough." So Deg departed from the hotel room where V. and Elisheva rested, and, when the appropriate moment came, took the floor, Muller at the rostrum, and denounced the newspaper article and impugned Muller's general competence. Deg was not especially happy at becoming a petty hero. Muller was unlikeable, true enough, and had the temerity to imply that V. was converting ethnic pride into an historical reconstruction, the type of remark that Germans had been scrupulously and correctly leaving non-Germans to make since World War II. Yet, when it appeared that Muller was excessively disliked, and on his way to becoming a whipping-boy, Deg felt sorry for the person, a feeling that returned a couple of years later when the same Muller was murdered by a jealous colleague on a matter of adultery. I doubt that Deg bothered to tell V. half the horror-stories he knew of recent academic and publishing crimes, let alone the sixteenth century heretics. In one case -- it happened to be his own -- Deg went off to World War II as a co-author and came back to find the book, half of it his composition, published under a single name, this not his own. "Well I'll be damned!" he said, when sent a copy of the book, and was soon busy with other matters, nor was his friendship with his co-author more than temporarily bruised. More annoying, Deg believed, was a case when his Politics for Better or Worse was published in 1973. Three young women instructors from different universities did a study of textbooks on American politics to prove how demeaning were their authors toward women, how indifferent, how ignorant. Then, at the last minute, Deg's book appeared on the market, was snatched up and thrown into the bonfire in an appendix to the report that they caused to be distributed widely at the national convention of the American Political Science Association. That is, they flagrantly lied about, distorted, ignored or did not read the book which, had they known, he had deliberately planned and executed as a radical exposure of the situation of women and of the need for reforms leading to sexual equality. When he composed an indignant letter to the culprits, weeks after the damage was done, he showed it to his learned daughters, Victoria and Jessica. Their advice: don't get so excited, Daddy! ( How willing are children to sacrifice their parents!) He wrote a note of gentle chiding and that was the last heard of the matter; not one of the three responded. I wonder whether he should have introduced a thunderous denunciatory resolution on the floor of the Convention. After all, his book might have sold tens of thousands more of copies had it been properly contrasted with other textbooks. V. could never understand that the crime against him was not horrendous nor uncommon. It was remarkable in the evidence being so clear and the subject being in principle so important. It was especially remarkable because he was his own biographer. Every slip of paper -- every insult and complaint -- was treasured. Since he succeeded in finding a great audience, in publishing his other works without difficulty, and in attracting to his areas of interest several dozen excellent scholars (a most rare achievement for even the most famous and successful scientists) he might just as well have been amused, scornful, and satisfied. Albert Einstein actually wrote him just this, after reading an account of the insulting opposition to his work: "I would be happy if you, too, could enjoy the whole episode from its humorous side." That was asking too much, especially from V. For him only the respectful conversion of heads of science would suffice. He respected authority and power: therefore only authority could legitimately crown him. Crowds were fine, because they were pleasing in themselves but always, too, they were used by him as a measure, such as of the pressure that his views must be exerting on the experts and unbelievers. Crowds were not authoritative in themselves. Deg often hinted, remonstrated, and harangued: "You must not pin your hopes on conversion of the leaders," and would list the reasons why the leader would not budge, the "sunk costs" of their lives, the unavailability of heavy sanctions against their retaining conventional views, etc. and sometimes Deg would say: "Tell me if there is a single reason why an establishment leader should side with you on any controversial point of yours. What's in it for him?" V. would rather not answer. He realized that he could not say. "Because I am right," although that is what he would have liked to say. This would betray narcissism. For over thirty years, V. suffered this situation, in which he was inextricably trapped. Not in full awareness, not as a strategy --because they could not be fully acknowledged as such -- he adapted in several way to the implacability of the scholars. He claimed the understanding and sympathy of the young; uncorrupted by old ideas, they would see his ideas without prejudice or jealousy. Becoming a champion of youth did not come easily to him, but it was an acceptable line of public argument, a stereotype of the culture. He was never an active advocate of the young, certainly not during the critical years of student rebellions. He diagnosed the problem of the established authorities as "collective amnesia." Again, this argument came later. Deg does not recall V. having advanced it when in 1963 they had long conversations on the motivations of his opponents, but the argument is prominent in Mankind in Amnesia, posthumously published. As we shall see, the concept itself falls into doubt when it is used without specific valid tests to label or unlabel the behavior of persons or groups. He watched for, sought to encounter, and carefully tended any maverick from the respectable herd of scientists. When he learned that an Australian astrophysicist, Bailey, had announced calculations showing the sun to carry an immense electrical charge, V. corresponded with him, and hosted him on a visit to Princeton; Bailey received acclaim from the heretic circle that he could not receive from the scientific world. V. corresponded with and visited Claude Schaeffer in Europe when he came to read Schaeffer's Stratigraphie Compar‚e, but, as in the case of Bailey, there was a warmth of shared sentiments without noticeable movements of these men to the Velikovsky camp. Trainor, Michelson, Santillana, Hadas, Kallen, M. Cook, Sagan, Einstein, Dyson, Bigelow, Hess, Kaufman, and others were approached, responded in greater or lesser extent and sympathy, then withdrew to their proper spheres. Robert H. Pfeiffer, Harvard Semitic Scholar, appears to have accepted V.'s Ages in Chaos, without carrying out substantial work that his approval might logically have entailed. There was also in the seventies the category of scholars who were outside of academia, or young, or still unfulfilled who had, like Deg, entered the full stream of V.'s work, men like Ransom, Milton, Juergens, Cardona, Sieff, Greenberg, Dave Talbott, Reade, Crew, Rose, James, Lowery, and Gammon. C. J. Ransom was, V. confided to several supporters, "for a while the only physicist who saw something in my work and followed it." The ideal supporter, to V.'s mind, would have been a fully accepting astronomer of renown, who could announce the success of an indisputable test of a near-encounter of Venus and Earth 3500 years ago. Astrophysicist Robert Bass made an effective sally in the seventies. When two British astronomers, Clube and Napier, entered wholesale upon V.'s terrain with a model of recent cometary encounters, they hardly mentioned him. Yet they possessed foreknowledge of his work and they could have used it legitimately as a foil, contrasting his planetary theory with their own cometary theory, and accepting openly much of his historical and legendary reconstruction in place of their own, which was weak. Once more we have an authority problem: though expecting a spanking, they hoped to avoid a trouncing. They received two spankings, one conventional, the other heretical; are two spanks less than one trounce? Actually, when one goes to the heart of the matter, Deg was the only scholar of considerable previous reputation who accepted most of Velikovsky's work in the natural and historical sciences, absorbed it, and carried on with it. Most friendly or tolerant scholars of established reputation acted like a trapeze artist who pauses for a moment on his swing to watch an especially neat trick being executed by a tightrope walker in the next ring of the circus. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 5: } {T THE BRITISH CONNECTION } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE THE BRITISH CONNECTION For many years Velikovsky's books had been popular in Britain but his supporters were out of touch. Recalling the early days. Librarian Brian Moore wrote: The popular science writers occupy an important place in the communications system which links the scientist and the public, and they have played a major role in propagating the unfavorable image of Velikovsky. Having been officially declared a heretic by the scientific Inquisition, Velikovsky has been handed over to the secular arm of the scientific popularisers for public torment. Some readers may think this an extravagant metaphor, but any objective examination of the available evidence on the "Affair" will lead to this conclusion. My own interest in Velikovsky stemmed in part from the hysterical scientific reaction to his ideas -- a reaction unique in this century when books proposing unorthodox ideas swarm, are ignored and sink without a trace. I am led once more to remark upon how vulnerable the public opponents of quantavolution, particularly of Velikovsky, are made by their arrogant certainty. A full generation of repetitive experiences has hardly affected their effrontery nor hence mitigated their discomfiture. I would point out a feature of the ridicule not elsewhere commented upon. The scientific community will have its jokes: enough to say "Velikovsky" in a group of scientists and there would arise that ineffable combination of good humor, snarls, titters, knowing glances, and intellectual nudging that tie people together, like mention of a joke would other groups: "Remember the story of Pat and Mike at the wake?" (laughter in the tavern) or "They're reprinting the Bible in a plain wrapper for the Alabama schools," (giggles), or "Did you see where Ronald Reagan has gotten the Nobel Peace Prize?" (laughter and snarls). There is comfort, mutual solace, malice, subconscious fear, a bonding of spirits in possessing a few names to which phrases and epithets can acceptably be applied. In these times Deg visited England without knowing Brian Moore or the many others who came together ultimately and with whom he later associated happily. He would visit old friends from the Eighth Army of World War II like Rayburn Heycock of the BBC or of politics, like Michael Fraser, and go about his business. In London on June 16, 1968, he is writing in his journal: Russell Square is green in the cool of morning and the fountain may be heard to play now that Sunday has stopped the motors. Four small boys have come out early to play a frightening game with the taxicabs. They run out in front of them just as the signal light is about to turn green. They put their faith in accurate timing of machines, just as their elders. Last night I dreamed that Velikovsky died, and was much disturbed. I wept. I felt there was terrible loss. He died suddenly, as an old man will. I confessed that I knew nothing, that I could reconstruct nothing of his work. Just bits and pieces that meant nothing. It must have come from my walk through the British Museum yesterday afternoon. I read so many inscriptions, all flatly against his ideas of dates. One bore the suspicious rendering that I have remarked before -- "Pharaoh 'A' name borne both by 'Q' in the 12th century and 'R' of the sixth century." The same man with the centuries so wrong? I searched for Greeks and Assyrians with horned helmets to correspond with those of the 'Peoples of the Sea' whom Velikovsky places with the fourth century Greeks and noticed several features on statues and vases. Braids that look like horns, short plumes (?); Athena of Pergamon with two horned projections towards the front of her helmet (baby wings out of a crown?) The airplane ride from N. Y. had seemed short to me. Nothing had been fully solved by departure time -- I left several highly important matters in the hands of other -- collecting my debt from Simulmatics, the merger of our company PIT with "3is", the contract for my American government textbooks, the fate on the exhibition to El Arish (permission for which has been denied by Israel), John's case at court conveniently and perhaps forever postponed and summer itinerary awry, my contract with Simon and Schuster for both "Republic in Crisis" and "Velikovsky and his Critics" pending -- but in all cases the formula of the execution is assigned to someone. [Little did he know, alas, that all would proceed according to Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will."] The early 1970's witnessed the founding in England of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS), conceived by a gang of four, and on a Halloween night. The first issue of their Review, later to be attractively printed, was in mimeography and, at that, barely readable, but its contents were of excellent quality. The founders, and those who signed up, many of them American, settled into a flexible oligarchy. The dominant members have been, on the whole, Brian Moore, Malcolm Lowery, Peter James, Harold Tresman, Martin Sieff, Euan McKie, Ralph Amelan, Geoffrey Gammon, John J. Bimson, Eric Crew, Hyam Maccoby, Michael Reade, Bernard Newgrosh, and Bernard Prescott, with possibly others, but obviously enough in number to forbid an easy sociometric diagram of the networks of cross-influencing, not to mention the differentiation between those who were primarily organizers and those who were intellectual contributors. With two exceptions, they never met or heard Velikovsky in person, although his work inspired their organization: by contrast, all of the involved Americans knew him personally. The Constitution of the Society adopted in 1978 declared as its principal objectives: (a) to promote a multi-disciplinary approach to scientific and scholarly problems and in particular to promote the active consideration by scientists, scholars, and students of alternatives to the theory of uniformity in astronomy and earth history: (b) to promote a better understanding of the nature of the earth, the solar system and human history, through the combined use of historical and contemporary evidence of all kinds, and to encourage a continuous reassessment of the validity of the basic assumptions of the discipline concerned by testing these against evidence; (c) to promote better co-operation between workers in specialized fields of learning in the belief that isolated study is sterile; (d) to foster research among scientists and scholars towards achieving these aims. It was not at all the American condition, where years before, following only upon occasional bulletins that supporters of V. issued in the 1960's, there came Pens‚e, a production of the young Talbott brothers, Stephen and David, whose enthusiasm for his work crystallized into a conversion of their small magazine on human rights into a forum on the Velikovsky Affair, at least for ten issues. Stephen Talbott was a brilliant editor and organizer, bent upon opening the world to quantavolutionary ideas, but also to criticism of them. After spectacular successes, Pens‚e collapsed under a load of debt and overwork. As it was ending, it promised to broaden its interests beyond Velikovsky and to discuss ideas irreconcilable with his. V. would have no part of this, and several of his Eastern supporters -- with Lewis Greenberg and Warner Sizemore leading -- issued the first number of Kronos. Kronos became editorially the child of Lewis Greenberg, a young art historian of the faculty of Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. He recruited a group of convinced supporters of V. who contributed articles and evaluations, and who, being the closest to a prestigious academic group that he could put together, he should have called "Board of Advisors," but whom he called "Staff," and he set up grades of Senior Editors, Associate Editors, Contributing Editors, and Staff, hoping to build a respectable latticework of authority such as is conventional among scientific journals. Financing, production, and management fell to Warner Sizemore, who, by virtue of his faculty status at Glassboro State College, was enabled to establish an academic connection for the journal, a public relations device of no small value for a new review with a disreputable and controversial perspective in science. Kronos remained essentially and in many details under V.'s thumb until his death, performing very much the function of Imago for Freud. This is not to say that the directors of Kronos were uncritical; in the very first issue, Zvi Rix ventured ominously upon weak points in an article upon the origins of anti-semitism and the Ankh. They simply had to acknowledge V.'s power, his help, his thesaurus of notes and materials, even on occasion his financial aid, and above all --what men such as Stecchini, Motz, Jastrow, Sagan, Hadas, Gordon, and Deg, especially, had in their own way to bow to -- his well-nigh complete erudition and orderly mental inventory on the matters at issue. Early in 1976, Deg appeared at the British Library Association in London to speak to the Society; first contact between the Americans and British was made. About a hundred persons were present and Deg talked informally but to good effect on subjects both sociological and quantavolutionary. Questions from the floor were numerous and only a sense of decorum brought the meeting to close. Afterwards the ringleaders adjourned to an English approximation of a caf‚ and carried on a conversation for hours. The high competence of the British group was manifest; if they were strongest and at "state of the art" level in history, they evidenced also in abundance the imprecisely defined general background in the sciences and humanities which is so necessary in facing up to questions excited from all quarters of knowledge when exoterrestrial encounters are at issue. I wish that I might now introduce some of the many letters that the heretics exchanged over the years: they would display the interweaving of ideas, the reportage, the delicate personal relations, and the ramified research and life activities that inevitably and essentially occur in an intellectual movement. Even a single instance -- a letter from Deg to Malcolm Lowery -- may lend the flavor of it all. Naxos, July 16, 1976 Dear Malcolm: Thank you so much for your letter and the transcript. It was excellent work and my best compliment is to edit it immediately and return it to you. So here it is. I probably have been imprudent in letting everything stand, as you hoped I might. But it is fair. I think, and fairness is one up on prudence. I have made a number of technical corrections, clarified words, and introduced a euphemism or two. I understand that you intend to split the presentation and leave the operation to your discretion... Your article on Kugler was most intriguing. Have you sent Stecchini a copy? (...) The material is rich and your commentaries and presentations of the source matter referred to by Kugler valuable. I would expect the whole, amplified even to the extent of a complete translation, would constitute a welcome book. Perhaps one for Kronos Press... Was the Atlantis item really August '61, as you write? I'd like to see it: perhaps you can confirm the citation next time around. The Tuareg are a mysterious people, you know, of undefined race and origins. The Fabrizio Mori reports, if locatable, would be more valuable... You do bring up surprises re Velikovsky. No, I've only heard of original work he's done in electroencephalography, that he may have been the first to propound it. What you quote is fascinating. It does relate to the suppression of instincts, of which I make much in the transition from hominid to man... It gives us time to think, but heightens general anxiety at not being able to respond. My general theory of the subject is being prepared for limited distribution prior to the long haul on publishing the book, so I shall hope to send you a copy. Meanwhile, I would suppose you could readily do the translation yourself. Rix has a lot of trouble with English. (I try not to distinguish 'lower' from 'higher' species. In my present lonely spot, I am compelled to admit the many superiorities of the ants)... I haven't received the T. L. S. review of Velikovsky Reconsidered. I've gone through Temple's work on Sirius hurriedly. He moves into his theme backwards -- first the Africans, then the Egyptians, then spacemen. Dr. V. in his "Chronology and Astronomy" found Sirius (Sothis) a yardstick for measuring the Venus-cycle. The one item (well-known) of the tribal recognition of the invisible star goes along with other ancient knowledge of the skies that was lost and recently recaptured by telescope (cf. my brief article -- Did I leave a copy with you? -- on the rings of Saturn and bonds of Jupiter). Better eyes, magnifying atmosphere, closer proximity, ancient telescopes? -- we'll have to make up our minds in the light of a total well-developed theory of Revolutionary Primevalogy... I wish that we had transcripts of the many additional hours that we spent in discussion. Which leads me to say how much I enjoyed the whole of my visit with you all. I'm due to fly back in haste... So went the messages, back and forth and around. In the States, Deg worked closely now with Earl Milton of Lethbridge, Canada on Solaria Binaria. He saw Sizemore regularly in Princeton. He visited with Velikovsky. Most of the American network communications in these days funneled into Greenberg, with whom Deg had only an annual telephone conversation but about whom he received information from Sizemore. Kronos magazine sponsored two meetings at a Motel in the Princeton area; Sizemore exhausted himself to pull them off successfully. One was before V. died in November, 1979, the second later on, and Elisheva dropped in upon it. Deg missed both meeting for being abroad. The second was unexciting, save for wrangling between Greenberg and Whelton. So far as I can understand the causes, there were none of substance. Clark Whelton spoke up in general criticism of the proceedings as lackluster and Lewis Greenberg tore into him from the Chair with ad personam indignation which was incomprehensible unless, as I was told, "You know Lew..." Few friendly heretics -- never mind the unfriendly larger participation -- had no occasion over the years to receive his uncomplimentary remarks and the consoling words from others, "You know Lew..." Greenberg's correspondence with the British was equally a mixture of rationality, abuse, and threats, and since he never would fly, he did not appear in England and only Peter James had a pleasant encounter with him. But that was once. When Greenberg invited James to become of the "Staff" of Kronos, Peter accepted. He was almost bumped from it when he wrote an early piece of criticism of V. and V., in a fit of anger, told Sizemore and Greenberg that they had to get rid of him or else he would withdraw his support from Kronos. Then, according to Sizemore, V. reconsidered, recalling no doubt his own reputation as a champion of freedom of speech and press, and called up to withdraw his demand. Nevertheless, not too long afterwards, what V. had wished came about, when Greenberg and James quarreled and James resigned, as will be explained later. In the Spring of 1980 Deg reappeared in London to address the Society. By this time his agenda was full of friends of catastrophist persuasion. The Velikovsky Affair had appeared in a British edition in paperback with a new preface. Earl Milton was coming in from Alberta, Canada, to speak, after which, with his wife Joan and his little son Davin, he was to join up with Deg for a heavy workout on Solaria Binaria at the Island of Naxos on the Aegean Sea. On Deg's list of telephone numbers in London for the occasion we find Peter James, his primary host, informant, and contact man, a slender scintillating young and blonde man who seemed to be everywhere and into everything in London, who lived on vegetables and beer in a collectivity, and who had surpassed intellectually the university degree he was arranging to pick up. He supplied Deg and Ami with an apartment, perfect in every regard save its price and lack of telephone, of which the latter was the more serious. Hotel prices were prohibitive. Food was expensive and as always bad, except in the oriental and European restaurants. Luckily down the street was the Baeck Hebrew center, school and library, tended over by Hyam Maccoby who took to reading Deg's Moses manuscript while Deg stuck heavy coins in unending numbers into the hallway telephone. For, on the aforesaid phone list were all those he wished he might see: Geoffrey Gammon, Malcolm Lowery, Brian Moore, Peter Warlow, Harold Tresman, John Bimson, Martin Sieff, Eric Crew, Robert Temple, Fred Freeman, Redmond Mullin. Rayburn Heycock, Margaret Willes, Nick Austin, and Cloe and Mike Fraser. There were thereupon added in a confused network the names and numbers of all the people who were contacted in order to contact others and the temporary, supplementary, changed disconnected and "try-him-at" numbers. And on his "to-do" list for the two week were to write his paper for delivery to the Society, to have his novel Ronald's Norm typed up and copied, to read the latest exchanges on Solaria Binaria and discuss them with Milton, to discuss with Sphere Books the Velikovsky Affair and his manuscripts (the same with Margaret Willes of Sidgwick and Jackson), to discuss "Aphrodite's true identity" with James and explain the ideas of an Encyclopedia and the possibility of a Quantavolution Institute, to open a bank account at Barclay's, to edit finally and send Chaos and Creation to the Indian printers, to visit the headquarters of Amnesty International, to visit the Temples in the countryside to see how their garden was growing and where Robert's mind was in the aftermath of his book on the Sirius Mystery, to write his son Chris in Rotterdam and send him some money, to meet Fred Freeman of Liverpool whose ideas on independent welfare action and tax reforms were simpatico. And much more, but of course, much was not done, bogged down in conflicts of time and logistical difficulties like the telephone and vainly-searched-for typist. When his plane took off from London, he entered some lines in his journal, captioned Failures of a trip to England -- England in the Spring -- "Oh, to be in England when... "A book yet to be published jests at my ability to concoct surprising numbers. Here are more [on time expenditures]: Trying to find a good place to eat 12.5% Discussing the food and service 12.0% Writing the talk that should have been written beforehand 23.9% Futile Communications with Publishers 4.0% Walks and visits: external sociability 29.0% Management and commuting 10.5% Eyeball-to-eyeball discussion about quantavolution 5.6% Listen to other perform and performing 8.0% All others 9.4% 114.9% Adds to over 100% because of doing more than one thing at one time, e. g. "No, I think we passed the restaurant; that was a good piece you did with O'Geoghan," or "Carter's foray into Iran was foredoomed; why did Dayton [author of a magnificent book on ancient ceramics and minerals] waste so much time decrying the mentality of archaeologists?" Now what more would I have wanted to do? Talk to Bimson re opinion of natural disasters at Megiddo Dolby re ice ages Moore re poetry Lowery re linguistics Sieff re... James re... etc. etc. I am diverging and must return and repeat: the British and their magazine were more of a free association and farther removed from V.'s hulking figure. Hence it would be more likely that opposition should arise successfully there. First it happened when Euam Mackie, a proverbial tall dour Scot, a Glasgow Museum curator and co-founder of SIS, began to place monuments that were seemingly oriented to the present directions of the compass, such as Stonehenge, in the period before the Venusian catastrophe of around -1450 BC when the Earth was said by the V. scenario to have changed its axis of rotation and orbit, hence its orientations and its calendar. Further, when Deg appeared in England in 1976 and presented his thesis of "the Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars," he found that the English view, led by Peter James, rejected his, and V. 's, and Robert Graves' identification of Homer's Aphrodite with Moon, insisting that the goddess stood for the planet Venus, not Moon. James published more criticism, and Deg was given to understand that he had been worsted -- Rix, Cardona, Gordon and others espoused the James thesis and Deg was driven back to the stack shelves. V. said to Deg that he had more material for the defense somewhere in his files, but he never produced it. But then the heavy onslaught came with the long-awaited publication of Peoples of the Sea and Ramses II and His Times. After intimating dissent for some time, the British now mobilized at a conference in Glasgow in April, 1978, and delivered a set of papers that confirmed V.'s worst fears. The British -- or let me say, the historical fraction of the SIS elite -- while affirming their support of V.'s reconstruction of Egyptian (and hence total Mediterranean and Near East) chronology until the end of the 18th Dynasty said in effect "Stop! Disposing of 500 years is enough." The rest of the Egyptian historical sequence is in respectable order: Ramses III was not 4th century, he was also moved back to the 8 th Century. The Hittites did have their Empire before the Chaldeans and were not a side-show or a double for them. The end result was to cut V.'s immense loaf in half and to reassure him that "Half a loaf is better than none at all." One might see the pattern emerging. By 1983, when Brian Moore had been elected President and Peter James Editor, much more emphatically than in 1978, might it be said that the "essential purpose" of the Society was "to promote active consideration by scientist, scholars and students, of alternatives to the theory of uniformity in astronomy and Earth history." This could only mean the general approach of revolutionary primevalogy and quantavolution. The lines of advance would move outward from Velikovsky but SIS would deny that it "is committed to any specific catastrophic theory." The Review would not become involved ad hominem and in emotionally charged wrangling but "will concentrate on the real issues at stake, as for example the occurrence of exoterrestrial catastrophes and the reconstruction of ancient chronology." The "SIS Review offers the broadest spectrum of opinion and the most objective approach..." By this time, however, signs of a wider movement were also emanating from its elder, Kronos, triennially printed in America, and the younger Catastrophism and Ancient History, a biennial magazine founded and published by Marvin Luckerman at Los Angles, California. There was still no broad monthly of the type of Science 83 (an AAAS publication) which Deg had been advocating on both sides of the ocean. He would have liked to see a published magazine "Quanta" and an Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe, so he caused to be sent around to hundreds of persons interested in the field a circular describing the projects as follows: PLEASE GIVE US YOUR VALUED OPINIONS ON TWO QUESTIONS. Project I. Quanta. A monthly magazine, large format dedicated to presenting to a wider public all current news and developments in the sciences and the humanities related to the theory of quantavolution: the theory that the major sources of change in the history of the world, both in the natural sciences (all fields) and in the humanities (all fields) and including human nature and behavior, have come from sudden, high-powered, and large-scale events. It is an idea with a rich past, of famous writers, but, of writers whose works have long submerged beneath the conventional tides of uniformitarian, evolutionary, and gradualist thought. We must pull out and bring forward into contemporary review the greatest of these ancient, medieval and early modern writings from all over the world, ranging through legend, through religion, through literature, through science, in all their diversity and format, so that once again they become part of our civilized heritage. Simultaneously, we must select, from the enormous volume of indifferent but carefully prepared scientific and humanistic work that is oblivious to the quantavolutionary idea, the remarkable findings, the nuggets, the truths and reality that are buried there. Finally. Quanta should publish the best of the new generation of writers who are ready to tackle and overthrow old images of science and philosophy, the old idols of though, and to discover in the world of nature and life, including human conduct and behavior, the validity of the quantavolutionary vision of the world. Quanta will preach and practice objectivity. We are presently in most disorderly state of publishing, whether of books or magazines. In this confusion of the age, there must be a place for a modest but forthright publication, and that is what Quanta seeks to be, that publishes for a certain critical mass of readers the facts, theories and news about a general and liberal approach to the phenomena of geology, psychology, astronomy, biology, and other science. Project 2. The Encyclopedia of Quantavolution. A person who is interested in the quantavolutionary modes of change in natural and life history is often frustrated when he searches for information about a writer, a river, an animal, a myth, a phenomenon, a period of time, a place, an excavation, a planet, a concept, or a philosophy; indeed, just about anything that one looks up becomes a source of frustration. Why? Because practically every subject treated in conventional reference books has been passed through two centuries of suppression of the quantavolutionary, of the sudden, intense jumps that have been responsible for the largest proportion of change in the universe. What has been written has not been referred to and has been actively lost. Begin with the letter "alpha", go to "Aaron", and proceed; every article has a missing slant, a missing theory, absent evidence. But so much is left out, and so many useless things are included for the quantavolutionary scholar, student, active reader, whatever the realm of inquiry, that there is a pressing need for a new encyclopedia, so new indeed that one has to go back to the Encyclopedia of Diderot in the Eighteen Century to conceive of such an innovation and advance in the history of science and the humanities. The present tight capital situation is not favorable to investments in publishing projects. Orthodox foundation channels are clearly closed. Nevertheless, given that the shortage of financial aid has not impeded thought and progress in quantavolution, the initiative and participation of scores of competent scholars in all fields of learning can be counted on to carry the project along. A cooperative organization, headed by an international editorial committee, can produce alphabetically a series of fascicles that would in three years range from A to Z. Then the total product would be bound in cloth and paper for public sale. During the interim, individuals, libraries and institutions would subscribe to the fascicles to provide operating capital, receiving in the end a sizable discount on the final Encyclopedia, which would cost at present prices about $90.00. The returns were not encouraging. It appeared that the costs of finding a sufficient market for the magazine and encyclopedia would exceed the costs of production. That is, if a quarter of a million dollars were to be spent in development and first publication, not counting contributed and compensated time, at least that much money would be required to carry the message through the dense thicket of mass book and magazine advertising. The competition among the National Geographic magazine, Science 83, Discovery, Museum, Geo, Science Digest, the Smithsonian Magazine, and other journals was so severe, their struggle for survival and expansion so costly, that a small voice, no matter how sharply contrasting, would be overwhelmed. The situation of an encyclopedia could be different. Here Deg discussed with Jeremiah Kaplan, an acquaintance of some 35 years and Chairman of the Board of Macmillan Company, a possible participation of Macmillan. Kaplan had put through the great International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and was now directing the preparation of an Encyclopedia of Religion. The question of the controversial nature of the Encyclopedia arose not directly but indirectly. With Charley Smith, the appropriate Macmillan editor, they put together a scenario, a typical setting for the use of the Encyclopedia. A high school girl walks into her school library and asks the Librarian where she can find material for a short theme on evolution. The librarian advises her to consult the Britannica and the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe. The "Ev" volume of the first is being used by another student, so the girl studies the article on "Evolution" in the new Encyclopedia, writes her paper, gets a failing grade from her teacher, complains, embroils the librarian, and the librarian is told by the science teacher never to refer anyone to that book again. The librarians, it is concluded, want or must buy encyclopedias that provide "unbiased" conventional articles in the name of prominent authorities; there is only one truth in science. Deg thanks his host for the fine lunch and walks out whistling upon windy Third Avenue thinking "Macmillan has changed since 1950. The customers now exercise precensorship." He did not, of course, agree, and could offer other scenarios -- but what was the use? The great one-world society was a handicap for the movement. Creative workers were spread around the world. Far from each other, their communications were poor, and relatively expensive, given that at least half of them had disposable incomes at the official U. S. A. poverty boundary; few were well-to-do. Deg made Peter James an offer of a subsistence and "pie in the sky" if he would collaborate, but James was working and studying in a combination of a job and studies designed to extract a higher degree from the University of London. Deg talked also to Martin Sieff, who from time to time, like most Northern Irish, wondered whether he should move out before he was blown out by a bomb. On May 18, 1981, he was writing to Sieff at the "Belfast Telegraph": Dear Martin, I do regret that I cannot plot some position for you that would enable you to carry on your valuable work in quantavolution and history, both social and natural. We have, I believe, the phenomenon of an emergent new general paradigm for science and philosophy, and you should be on hand as parent and midwife (the parthenogenetic simile is not amiss in ancient age-breaking and age-making, as you know). We need to publish many books. We need a magazine building upon the extant ones -- Quanta, I call it. We need an Encyclopedia of Quantavolution. We need an information storage and retrieval system that is set for quick production and dissemination of old and new materials. When done, our progress will be rapid, and we will generate a much larger supporting group from scientists, public, and science reporters. I cannot be blamed if I see you highly productive and influential in this state of affairs. Your journalistic experience adds to your potential. Besides yourself are the others and I feel strongly sympathetic, too, towards James, Lowery, and a dozen more. But visions without resources may be blameworthy. The great research centers are situated where costs of living are high and life complicated -- New York, Princeton, Washington, London, Paris, Israel, Amsterdam, the hope for large donors or, these times, a university that would accept a new institute in its budget, much less one such as ours in spirit. I tried indeed with the University of Maryland, New York University, and elsewhere; the answer, even when friendly, is "Bring in your own funds." Velikovsky's resources went into a family shop, supporting additionally Jan [Sammer] and Richard [Heinberg] for the time being, whence all products carry the brand name "made by Velikovsky." What Elisheva is doing is wonderful. Greenberg is hopelessly guarded in his Kronos den. None, however, can say it is the beginning and end of quantavolution in science, history and philosophy. So what can be done? We are frustrated. My own income is cut deliberately to the subsistence level in order to pursue my studies, precisely at the time in life when I could be enjoying the highest earnings. But if not Quantavolution, then Kalos, the World Order movement, would occupy me ungainfully. Only a bonanza of some type, whose chance is perhaps one in ten, would let us set up some type of communal operation or institute on Quantavolution. A five year lease on an appropriate property near a good library; subsistence for perhaps eight persons, about $20,000 for materials, expenses, and initial publications: we are approaching $100,000 a year of minimal costs. Sources of funds: grants, donations, side earnings, correspondence courses, conferences, publications. Should you have any ideas, I would be eager to receive them. Meanwhile I shall brood and watch, like a demiurge, grasp at whatever creativity I can, and pounce upon any larger opportunity... On Dec. 21, 1981, as it seems that Sieff may be enticed onto Yankee territory, Deg writes again: Dear Martin: There is small occasion for cheering you on to these shores, except for my wish that you might come and succeed and be nearby. Several major dailies have folded up recently. The New York Daily News is on the block. There is a new market for papers and talents in suburbia around the land, catering to shopping centers and a semi-literate public. Magazines are plentiful, unprofitable and short-lived. The economy is in a recession, whose end I do not see because it is shrouded in an apparently bottomless pit of world and domestic problems into which politics refuses even to peer much less descend. Book publishing, too, is floundering in the muck. Great talents, such as your own, are of little advantage; mediocrity, with unflagging snuffling in all corners, would stand you better. I don't doubt that you'll get along; that you'll be at home with your dreams, I doubt. With all this, ought I to say, also, that the teaching field is in poor shape? The lower schools are emptying and entering into their biggest crisis since the dawn of free schooling. College and university budgets are all in poor shape. There are scores of applicants for every small opening. That still does not mean that very fine candidates are being hired for the few jobs available. Back to coda: you may find something, but you won't like it very much. May I suggest this: If you come, come to stay; choose the spot where you want to live beyond all other; once there take on any kind of work to make ends meet and begin the aforesaid snuffling around; sooner or later, you'll find something better than most, which will give you a little freedom and cash. If you don't have friends to begin with, you'll find them everywhere at about the same level of intercourse. No matter whether Tampa or San Francisco, not any more. If we had the kind of society we wished for, I wouldn't need to write this letter because there would be a community of persons digging our sort of interest and you would make your way here naturally, and there would be a place for you without saying. The University of Chicago was that sort of area in the 1930's; almost everyone was a genius or considered himself such, and most were broke, and most were into what they thought might be the new world. Here in Trenton, I'm isolated in a way. I have to go long distances to see people and they to see me. My little old house bears no resemblance to the fine and spacious house I once had in Princeton. The Princeton libraries are only twenty-minutes drive from here, but you cannot afford the car and gasoline, were you to crowd in with us. We'll probably be leaving for Greece in March for several months, so there is a possibility of arranging for you to stay here while we're gone. But I can see no advantage to this, since you'll be having to travel by train or by car to wherever you might be needing to go to seek a position, or to get together with people. No, it would make no sense to stay here unless I were here and then only for so long as a couple of days for an exchange of views. Even for this, I'd try to find some friend around here who could accommodate you comfortably while we visit together. I'll give you all the names I can think of, with all the compliments to accompany them, anywhere in the country you may wish to go. I'm not optimistic about this procedure, but I'll be glad to oblige. Do you remember how costly it is to travel? And wherever you go, the way Americans live in their far-flung warrens, you'll not be where you want to be even for the moment. The distances are an enemy, especially for the poor. How, by the way, do you expect to get a job without a work visa? I think you have to find an employer who will make a special request before coming. Or else, come, find a job, return and be called back. Isn't that the way it works, unless you come as an independent writer without a wage or salary paid you here. If I had even a little money to pay expenses, I would invite you here to join in preparing the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution, a project that I think would move our cause forward greatly and sooner or later pay off financially. My idea would be to provide alphabetic fascicles every month or two until the job would be complete, financing the venture largely from subscriptions to these (with a large discount on the ultimate bound volumes), do it all in 2000 pages, all fields, half written by five editors (e. g. besides myself and you, say Brian, Bimson, Milton, Lowery and other good colleagues who might want to come aboard) and half by about 100 other contributors, taking three years in all, appearing in three volumes in 2,000,000 words and selling at a low $89. I think Princeton would be a good place to center it, but I wonder about Cambridge, Eng. (with occasional editorial conferences in Naxos.) I would readily contemplate a move to Cambridge if there were a few enthusiastic souls about and a minimal cooperation by the Cambridge Library authorities. Couldn't we lease an old house big enough to barrack visitors for a reasonably small sum for three years and have a go at it? The production should be done in-house on a word-processing system that would provide print-out for the fascicles during the whole creative period and then feed floppy discs to the automatic typesetter for the final production of the bound volumes. We would attach a newsletter, perhaps the Newsletter of "Workshop," to the fascicles and when the Encyclopedia comes out continue the publication of a wide-public magazine Quanta. I was going into Manhattan today, but am glad that I changed my mind and could therefore get this letter off to you, among other things. Holidays don't turn me on; I make my own, as often as possible. Concluding, let me not give the impression that I have ceased to think about what you might do and where, but give me feedback and encouragement and I'll do better next time. Cordially yours, Alfred Martin Sieff came like a whirlwind, and came again not much later, a short, dark counterpart of Peter James, a comic book buff, friendly and grateful, darting brown eyes through heavy glasses, missing nothing, spewing out accounts of college days at Oxford, the dire internal politics of Israel, the latest bombing of his Belfast newspaper, the psychology of Velikovsky, the girls of Long Island-Belfast-Jerusalem, the personalities of the cosmic heretics of Britain, the confusion of the British Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (" Nothing at all like the big way you do things here, no support..." "What do you mean? We are disaster- stricken. Out of touch, nasty little arguments and all of that..." "Not really, I thought that was us!" "Not so, I thought that was us!") Martin wants to see Clark Whelton and he and Deg hear of Clark's longing for an Association where we can all get together on a regular basis. Alas, Clark is assistant to Mayor Koch, on 24-hour alert; he is writing a novel; he is going through the trauma of kids readying for college. How, when, with what means and who? Everyone looks blank and slightly pained. But the outer world must have something in mind when they speak of the "underground" the "well- organized tactics" of the catastrophists, the invariable sharp attacks greeting an offensive remark about Velikovsky or against short chronology or for exoterrestrial eternal peace, as, for instance the London Times Literary Supplement of 26 June 1967 murmuring about "a powerful force in the underground of academe." Not long afterwards, dodging about the streets of Belfast (he has spent most of his thirty years in two civil emergencies, of Belfast and of Israel), Martin rifles a letter to Clark Whelton at the Mayor's Office in New York, expressing fear of the collapse of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies journal. Belfast, 9 August 1983 (...) "There is only one solution that I can see -- the appointment of an Editor-in-Chief with full authority over production, and over all SIS copy -- both Workshop and Review, able to appoint and fire editorial staff at his discretion, responsible for deadlines, and responsible himself directly to the SIS Chairman, creating a workable Publisher-Editor relationship. Should you succeed in launching a U. S. version of the Society, this is the only way to get the thing done. Government by committee is a wash out. As long as Lowery was on form it served as a useful camouflage for him to operate under, while he actually put out a high quality product. But once he pulled out, the wholes cumbersome system of referees and editorial committee responsible in its turn to Council, another committee under a mini-Lowery in its turn, just fell apart. Peter James is an outstanding scholar. But he doesn't know the meaning of the word "deadline". Brian Moore put an immense amount of effort into the Review's production -- and had nothing to show for it at the end of the day... There was of course no money to pay an Editor. Sieff feared a collapse of the Society, and could only pray that its membership would be patient with the leadership a little longer. [In a letter to Deg later on he expresses surprise that the phoenix is arising from its ashes.] And then horror of horrors, Martin announces re-re-revisionism of ancient Egyptian chronology: I am becoming convinced that everything that happened in the Exodus and in the crisis of the Ipuwer Papyrus may well have been at the end of the Old Kingdom. At this point Deg's mental vision shutters down like a toad's eyelids. When the revolution comes, nothing is spared, and then it feeds upon itself. No, you don't, Martin! That's too much! Here is how Sieff declared the consensus again to Whelton: "Ages in Chaos, Vol. I still stands. Minor corrections and improvements, yes" -- but the Hyksos are the Amalekites; El Amarna tablets fall in the time of the prophet Elisha; Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt is the Queen of Sheba; Thutmose III is biblical Shishak. "To which I will add the correlation -- Ramses III in Jeroboam II's time; Merneptah kicked out by Azru = Uzziah/ Azariah; Ramses II = Late Bronze- Iron interchange." In these words, 30 years after Ages in Chaos first appeared, Sieff is pronouncing the validating results of thirty years' work, practically none of which was done by anti-heretics, and which, whatever else happens, in cosmology and chronology, are sufficient to bring the rewriting of much of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Syrian, Anatolian, Greek, and Roman history. But Martin is part of "whatever else happens" and so are Peter James, David Rohl, John Bimson, and Jim Clarke who are energetically taking V. apart and putting him together again. The old chronology is gone but there is yet no tongue-in-groove replacement. In April 1983, Deg and Ami, after two months in France to promote her just published novel, Le Pigeon d'Argile, go to London from Paris and he speaks on Homo Schizo, on the gestalt of creation that in short order makes a cultured person out of hominid. This time they have the apartment (and telephone) of Stimson, Peter James' friend, with a monster bed embracing its room, from which everything is reachable with levers and buttons and on which all is do-able, apparently including dining, for there is no dining space. There is a fine celebration after the meeting, proverbial homemade English pastry playing a nostalgic part; drink flows freely and the survivors end up at the pub nearby. Deg meets Jill Abery so can tell her that he admires her snippets on fossil assemblages and many other mini- reviews of the quantavolutionary literature. Again he misses John Bimson and, too, Bernard Newgrosh, the medical doctor who edits Workshop for the SIS. He does a fast trip to Brian Moore's Cleveland haunts and the two of them ascend the Observatory hill in Edinburgh to spend hours with Victor Clube and William Napier who have published their Cosmic Serpent, which Deg had read, but they have not read Chaos and Creation so he gives them that and they give him a reprint and all are full of talk and trying for a common ground while sniffling about a bit doggishly. Clube and Napier call their quantavolutionary scenario "the disintegrating comet theory." They set themselves to showing that at great intervals of time the Solar System encounters galactic clouds of cometary material and suffers heavy destruction from collisions. Residual comets accompany the Solar System, and their periodic visitations, on rare occasion, end in disaster. Like many others working on catastrophism, the two Edinburgh astronomers find themselves isolated, both because of the extremity of their ideas and because they need much material from fields like mythology and linguistics that they cannot grasp themselves nor command expert consultants to provide for them. The crux of the matter is that, while both groups grant catastrophes in human times, the Scottish astronomers want to read "comets" where the Deg-V. contingent read "planets" and they bring out reams of calculations on Encke's Halley's and more to come, while Deg is confident by now of Solaria Binaria and cannot wait for the book, which, if not calculation-full, is calculation-proofed, and he feels good about some tag-wrestling matches to come, where with much better historical reconstruction and with Milton at his side, well, we shall see, he thought happily, as they stepped out upon the Observatory site overlooking beautifully the fine somber city with the sea beyond, and they took their jovial leave. Deg was pondering, wasn't this setting where Comyns Beaumont placed the world of the Bible and was Edinburgh Jerusalem, and it was all transferred to the New Palestine after the comet struck? Nonsense, of course -- to what lengths will not subconscious ethnocentricity lead one, but how far and how near was Beaumont to William Blake the mystic poet and painter who envisioned Jerusalem as England, pathetic genius, lost soul amidst the steam and soot of his century. Time had come to leave England for New York, but two matters had to be settled. After much thinking and talking, Deg decided he could entrust the manuscript of Solaria Binaria, which he had been hoarding all the while, to Rosemary Burnard of the Society for composition on the IBM type-setting machine that the Society had scraped up the funds to buy and use for its publications. A type-font was chosen, the format designed. Within three months all would be done and the pasted-up camera-ready copy would be sent to Milton and Deg for final correction and printing. Not so: July stretched to January before the job was done. Shall I stop to explain the six months delay, Deg's fortnightly fury, the sweet, bold abstracted character of Rosemary, the trials of the intellectual underground in Britain, speaking of how things don't get done and finally maybe do get done in the perennial bohemia of generation after generation of the Western World intelligentsia? Of course not. I cannot allow myself a Proustian self- indulgence in prose. If there is a page to spare, it must go to the heroic efforts of it seemed everybody to penetrate the U. S. Immigration Service just enough to get Ami aboard a plane to New York. Excepting the several millions of Indians who already were on hand, the vast majority of individuals (and I use this term significantly) who came to the shores of the New World were driven away from their old haunts-by the Old World authorities, by famine, by failure of one kind or another -- and half of them came within the past century. And they are coming now, in vast numbers, such that the system of restraints has broken down, and the question now is how to legitimize millions of persons as Americans without setting into motion a similar advent of millions more. At work, of course, is the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service which, you must understand, is separate and distinct from the Department of State, but shares this with the Department of State: that they live a life out of Kafka's Castle, full of resounding laws, rules and regulations, and of textbook principles of administration. Now, as in Kafka's books, the people most removed from the intent of the laws are bedeviled by them. So it is that an apolitical, well-behaved French writer, who is married to an American, unrecognized for the troublemaker he is, can have more difficulty getting in and out of the country than anyone of the mob of persons whom the agencies are instructed and exhorted to screen, examine, and order into various categories. So it happened, that the aforesaid French novelist, female, law-abiding, with a stamp on her passport letting her in but stuck with a paper not letting her out beyond a certain time, can be prevented from coming in and must begin at the beginning -- lines, forms, physical examinations, faceless officials, and time without apparent end. Here then enters Professor de Grazia, professionally, fully, skeptically, ironically, indignantly aware of what imbecility ad infinitum bureaucracies historically display, whether in science or in travel, yet who still imagines that a minor delay in the return of his wife, for good reason (for the good of the U. S. A., too) will not cause much of a problem, if he addresses the Immigration Service in London properly and in good time. One week of good time goes by, and a second week. Ordinary communications, cables, phone calls are not enough. Interchangeable faceless beings turn on and off. The system cannot cope with the request to reenter; a ping-pong game is set up, with the US offices on the one side and on the other side of the Big pond reluctantly striking the ball, after resting in-between shots. I cannot be sure of what finally happened, except that at a certain point Deg stopped acting like a proper ordinary citizen trying go get his wife back home and began acting like a politician and a border-runner. Ultimately are mobilized the good offices of a U. S. Minister, a Consul, a U. S. Senator, several U. S. lawyers, and a politically prominent British Lord, coupled with a partially blocked presumptuous entry upon a British Airways plane with the baggage flying solo, until somehow something cracks in the system at the New York Airport, and the message gets through to the airline that if Anne-Marie de Grazia were to be aboard a certain plane no objection to her coming home to America would be raised by the Inspector at the immigration counter. Nor was there. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 2: } {Q - } {C Chapter 6: } {T HOLOCAUST AND AMNESIA } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX HOLOCAUST AND AMNESIA As his last year begins, Dr Zvi Rix is writing to Deg from Rechovot, Israel. It is January 9, 1980 and he sends New Year's greetings, and hopes that they might meet before long. "I am very cut off at the place where I am living now. This does not only concern libraries, but other matters too..." for the mails are slow and books arrive late in the shops. He is in touch with Christoph Marx. They travelled together to Glasgow... "He was quite obliging... So far I have not formed a final opinion of him." I would nominate Zvi Rix to be the hero of this chapter, but it is up to the reader to find his own heroes in this book. Rix was a man who Velikovsky would have liked to write Mankind in Amnesia in his place. He was a medical man, deep into psychiatry, and a refugee from Nazi Germany. Deg knew him only through their correspondence. Deg was glad to get a description of him from his widow, whom he met shortly afterwards at the home of Christoph Marx near Basle. She wrote to Deg on January 23, 1981: Dear Prof. de Grazia, My husband died very recently; as is customary for Jews, even not practising religious commandments, we stay at home at least a week. In this time I went through his many letters and found also yours. I have the impression that you were very friendly and very much appreciating his work. Therefore I write to you that I am very thankful to you. He was a very lonely man and every encouragement was a help to him. Here he had nobody to talk to, I myself am much too obtuse to understand half of what he was talking about and as he was also very shy he had no contacts; besides that, his ideas were not exactly what people here would like to hear. It is a semi- theocratic world. Ruled by a conglomeration of Zealots (...) they call themselves socialists or rightwingers, its all the same. Our dreams went awry. Yours very respectfully, Melitta Rix Rix, whose scrambled writings are being kept by Christoph Marx, was hard in pursuit of evidence that the cometary destruction of civilizations around 3500 years ago had warped the human mind in the Near East, inciting human destructiveness, religious excesses, and sexual deviations. Christoph Marx was a computer expert from Basle, and an amateur of Velikovsky's work and all that it connected with. He circulated an invitation to whomever he knew to meet in Iceland, a typical groping, logical yet mad, of cosmic heretics for a way of expressing themselves and their message. Logical: let us assemble in Iceland between America and Europe, a catastrophically threatened land even now, set athwart the great catastrophic Atlantic Rider; mad: Marx was teetering on the edge of interdiction by everyone, the British, the Americans the Europeans, Deg included, a heretic practically excommunicated from the heretics. The conference did not materialize. Marx tried again in 1980, this in his home city, and found a few communicants. The minimum consensus of all people positively involved with the work of Immanuel Velikovsky may well be characterized as an interest in the true reconstruction of mankind's genetic history, and thus also of geologic and, in part, cosmic history... Developing Velikovsky's psychological inceptions, the goal -- of bringing home to collective consciousness the realistic conception of the world, as opposed by the present mania holding sway over cultural evolution -- would include nothing less than safeguarding mankind's life on earth, imperiled by (1) by the acute danger of self-destruction, and (2) by not attempting to prepare against some future chaos in the solar system. However, whether some of us are attributing such healing powers to the recognition of true history, or whether others would simply consider it as a value in itself, does not seem all-important: both parties will equally perform a supporting function in repelling collective irrationality and fanaticism, the worst effects of which are mass killings through war and murder. We know that Velikovsky comprehended his own striving for the true picture of history in this perspective... The consensus among cosmic heretics of which Marx spoke in his announcement did not really exist; however, it is certain that V. 's unique and original way of searching for the roots of anti-semitism was a revelation to many thousands of people who would otherwise have not even considered the problem or would have lived with a few, often anti-semitic, stereotypes. Measuring such influences is impossible, but, by any standard, V. was a great Jew who disabused the minds of many incipient anti-semites. Deg's Journal Paris, August 19, 1968 V. keeps two secrets, or doctrines half-hidden. He has expressed himself to me so often that the "secrets" are apparent. He would perhaps deny them. I am sure of them. He does not believe in God. He is a Hebrew, therefore Israeli, imperialist. Both doctrines, if publicized or known, would involve him in a whole new line of controversies, would make new enemies and unwanted new friends. Evidence, examples: Of 1: direct statements; writings; philosophy of psychoanalysis; his theory of "great fear" as bringing religion; belief that Jews were even in Biblical times polytheistic. Of 2: works of his life -- Zionism; gift of income from his property to Israel in June 67; written works analysis; conversations; hatred of antizionism even at cost of other values (e. g. El-Arish incident and Brandeis professor). After a long trip following V.'s death, Deg returned to 78 Hartley Avenue( he could never remember the house number, but would send his letters to 34 or 85 or another number, any number, and V. was puzzled -- What significance could forgetting it have for Deg? "You can address me just at Naxos, Greece and I get you alright at Hartley Avenue, Princeton!" "I have gotten letters just to 'Princeton, NJ'" -- So there you are!) to see Elisheva. The parlor was little changed. V.'s unimpressive chair stood facing the two stiff couches and the coffee table between. Deg thought, "Should the chair be sat in, moved, replaced, bound across with a museum belt, what?" It struck one with incompleteness, an uncertain quaver. He would slip some books and papers upon it. Elisheva and her assistants Jan and Richard lined up with Deg on the couches. Like a cordial committee they sat, drank tea, and reported to each other: health, manuscripts in progress, people seen; and they passed papers and books around. Thus went the meetings in the years thereafter. Sheva would at some point ask: "Did you see Marx?" and Deg would say no or yes, and she would say "How can you see him when you know how bad I feel about him," but she was curious nevertheless, while Deg tried to evade the subject and one time she said "I will not speak to you again if you see Marx" and Deg threw his arms around her jovially and said, I tell you what, if you don't see Greenberg, I won't see Marx, and she was taken aback and all laughed because she had mixed feelings on that subject too and knew that Greenberg was not his favorite among the cosmic heretics, but setting up proscription lists in the Roman style was pointless. It was on one of his earlier returns from abroad, in 1977, that Deg heard about Christoph Marx. V. spoke of a visitor, almost in religious tones, who had lifted weighty burdens from his shoulders, and would establish his rightful fame in Central Europe. He gave Deg a copy of a well-executed chart of his reconstructed chronology of Egypt, in color, which Marx had drawn. "Good, good," commented Deg, who was surprised, bemused, and skeptical at the same time. "What's happened?" he asked Sizemore and others when he met them aside. They seemed confused and uneasy. What happened is this. A Christoph Marx had telephoned Velikovsky to pledge his allegiance to his ideas and to offer support. There was much he could do: he could help with the translation of V.'s books into German, working out of his more respectable (in V.'s eyes) Switzerland; he could launch a campaign to bring the Germans to their senses, so that they would remember the horrible Nazi past and thus cleanse themselves of the pest of comfortable oblivion, with its eventual compulsion to repeat the past again; he could organize study circles to confront the establishment with Velikovsky's ideas. On April 14, 1977, V. wrote Marx, confirming in most cordial terms an invitation to visit. For ten days, Marx settled into Princeton. Professor Lynn Rose, who V. said at various times would be his literary executor, came down from Buffalo for some of the discussions. Marx departed on Mayday. V. writes him: "Dear Marx: you left on Sunday, you called from home on Monday, and today is Friday -- and very many things did happen in those few days... Earl Milton from Lethbridge, Canada, is with us since yesterday and leaves tomorrow morning together with Alfred de Grazia - who just now spent with us some time - and left copies of letters he wrote to Enc[ cyclopedia] Br[ itannica] and to NY Times. Sagan sent me a new book of his inscribed with all good wishes and a day apart arrived the tape of this year's lecture on the yearly theme -- Venus and V. -- in which he indoctrinates future astronomers in their first year with derision toward me and my work..." Three days later V. is writing about turning over rights to the royalties from various foreign translations to members of his family. He says he is turning over the management of worldwide Spanish language rights to his recently acquired agents, Scott Meredith. He says "I reconsidered and wish to suggest the following plan: your share is one eighth (12 1/ 2%); but you retain countries not 'gifted' an additional 7 1/ 2% for work that furthers our goals -- at our common discretion (such will be the case with Germany),..." V. writes also to Lynn Rose on May 11 that "I let him [Marx] have broad powers to act, and have already the first report from him. He will take over most of the European Continent for contracting my books with publishers, and be a rather central figure in organizing groups of interdisciplinary synthesis, and in opposition to the Establishment." He mentions other rights to be bestowed upon individuals and adds "Christoph Marx will be in charge of these and many other activities." On May 16, Marx replies that he will proceed as desired. He wonders whether the gifting of "income" rather than "rights" is not the better procedure, and suggests that the literary estate should be kept centralized and managed efficiently. His idea is of a Velikovsky Institute, a foundation not-for-profit, with an office in Switzerland and another in America. V. seems to be in a manic phase. He sends off sundry "Notes to my Collaborators," a newsletter in fact. Inter alia he mentions lending Marx his unpublished manuscripts and writes that "I gave him wide powers to represent me in academic contacts and arrange for the publication of translations of my books" In August, V. visited the office of Scott-Meredith Literary Agency in New York and met the head of their foreign rights department, Mr. Vicinanza, who "showed great eagerness to represent me on a broader basis." An offer was made to enter the greater European market. Vicinanza estimated that $750,000.00 could be obtained in advances worldwide for Worlds in Collision in 18 months: so V. reported to Marx, adding, "Against such figures the offers made to you appear minuscule,..." A month later Marx reports to V. with several offers and expresses doubts (as did V.) about the high figures. Marx would like to sign in the name of the "Velikovsky Institute." In any event, he would like to draw upon the expected advances to begin microfilming and indexing V.'s archives. Then suddenly, V. telegraphs "Please don't sign agreement with Umschau. Wait my explanatory letter. Greetings." Something has happened. There is a flurry of letters and telegram. In a telegram, V. says that his books are being returned by the thousands due to the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky (by Asimov, Sagan and others) and "other adverse publicity." Marx appeals by telegram for confidence and trust, to no avail. They also talk on the telephone. Marx is seeking to give "rational" answers to all objections, but says "I have legally signed the agreement as your proxy within the frame of German and Swiss law. At this point I again wish to thank you for the powers you have entrusted to me, which I consider as a wide obligation toward you and your family." I suspect that around this moment, Marx had been hit by the inevitable reaction to the Grand Vision. V., always a procrastinator in decision-making, facing opposition from his family and the lack of enthusiasm of friends such as Rose and Sizemore, could not overcome his profound aversion to things German, including now spending resources "to help reeducate them." Marx might as well proceed; V. would never have returned to the Great Vision; his idea of therapy would have to be applied by others, if at all. Marx has signed the contract on November 22; the Umschau Verlag signs on November 29. He reports that he is putting the money in a special account in German Marks, which are moving upwards against the dollar. He continues to report editorial activities. Now young Jan Sammer, who has come from Canada to live and work with the Velikovsky's, writes to Marx. Without expressing his authorization, he relates that V. is upset with the disapproved signing, that Doubleday Company will probably insist upon 25% of the proceeds, that V. does not favor the Velikovsky Institute idea, that Marx has "overstepped the powers that V. granted" him, and that he could negotiate but not sign an agreement without the author's approval. Marx is told to stay out of affairs in Holland. Marx replies both to Jan and to V., avoiding a confrontation. Jan writes again repeating himself more forcibly, adding a warning to Marx not to pretend to represent V. in speaking to any scholars. He repeats words written earlier by Marx: "Umschau in due course will wish to have proper signatures to the contract. You would have to empower me accordingly." How, asks V., through Jan, can you now say you had power to sign. Marx argues at length to this point: V. had orally and even in writing granted the power to sign. Marx speaks of a further consideration being "my understanding of how distasteful Dr. Velikovsky would regard a duty to sign a German contract personally." (Deg remembered that V. had considered even not permitting his books to appear in German.) Marx states that V. had told him not to worry about any claim of Doubleday to the subsidiary rights. Finally on March 1, 1978, Mrs. Elisheva Velikovsky writes to Marx, repeating that Marx had himself said that further empowering authority was needed, insisting that he not present himself anymore as V.'s agent, and condemning the idea of an Institute. Marx rebuts this, and indicates a desire to visit Princeton to settle matters. The visit is declined by Mrs. V. Marx inquires about V.'s health. His letters continue to carry news of books and meetings. Jan says in the middle of a letter May 17, regarding Marx's expenses of purchasing books, that "in any case, they would have to be paid by you from the 7 1/ 2% designated for expenses connected with your efforts to arrange for translations." More reports. V. telegraphs for an accounting twice in the same month, the second message being misaddressed to "Immanuel Marx." And a third cable demands the transfer of funds to America. Marx sidesteps these and writes of his work on the Dutch contract, which he had been called away from, and of his dislike of entitling the German translation of The Velikovsky Affair (Deg's Book) Immanuel Velikovsky, Die Theorie der Kosmischen Katastrophen, a publisher's presumptuousness that one might find annoying. On August 15 goes to Marx the first letter by V. in two years. It asks the transfer of money, and that V. be informed of all negotiations from the beginning and that no contract be signed without written approval; if not, any authority will be revoked. Marx on August 24 refuses the "fundamental change," acknowledges the end of the agreement is inevitable therefore, and suggests he be allowed his 20% of receipts from books signed up and be given all German language rights. '.... Such German monies are not going toward an enrichment of myself.... no other people in the world need your works as urgently than the German speaking peoples. ' On September 5, V. signs a handwritten message, witnessed by his lawyer; it "terminates our business relationship." Further, Marx is accused of having been in California and Washington, D. C., "but did not give a ring to Princeton." Marx retorted that he had too many rebuffs to continue telephoning. He protests that, in V.'s name, the Kronos magazine group was denying him permission to publish in German various of its articles. He also received in due course damning letters from Lynn Rose and Warner Sizemore. Rose adds a postscript calling "a deliberate misrepresentation" a letter from Marx to the Times which asserted that "Velikovsky saw the Holocaust in terms of collective amnesia." Matters had been sliding into the hands of Robert Pinto, Velikovsky's attorney and, with V.'s death, attorney for his Executor, Elisheva Velikovsky. The ensuing fol-de-rol among Estate, Publishers and Marx went on and on and is of little interest here. So a kind of love affair ended, brutally, with injury to all concerned. Sizemore wrote to Marx April 3, 1980 that "the last year of Dr. Velikovsky's life was almost totally taken up with the question of how to put a stop to your activities. He rued the day he ever met you." This may be so, but is it rightfully so, and is it all? Velikovsky was not working well for years. Further in the last week of his life, Deg had him smartly discussing substantive topics of quantavolution. (Marx went unmentioned.) Yes, in a way, Marx was V.'s Waterloo, his last grandiose effort to launch himself against an opposing world. He loved Marx for the vision, even if Sheva and Warner and Rose and Deg and all the others could not share the vision nor needed it. Deg had not yet met Marx. On May 9, 1980 Deg is writing to Mrs. Velikovsky: Naxos, Kyklades, Greece, 9 May 1980 Dear Sheva: When I called to say 'good-bye' before going to Greece, you had already gone to Israel. I hope that you enjoyed your visit and are well at home now. Ami and I spent a month here and then three weeks in Western Europe, two in London. The Society held a day of meetings on April 26. Talks were given by Dayton, Warlow, Milton, and myself -- I spoke on "Ten Propositions concerning the Quantavolution of around 1450 BC," or something like that. About 150 persons were present. There seems to be a continuing high interest Immanuel's work. C. Marx came from Switzerland for the occasion. Somehow he had learned of my coming and had written Sizemore to pass along any messages via myself. Isn't that interesting --implying that I was in contact with him. Furthermore, he had been sending to the British group letters presenting his case to represent Velikovsky, including even Immanuel's will, which I therefore had occasion to read, and which fortunately is simple and clear and free of any embarrassing detail. After my talk, which was the last, Marx introduced himself. I exchanged a few words with him. As you say, he is disarmingly mild and inspires immediate sympathy, to the point of affection. I advised him first (after commenting that he should not have tried to give an essay by himself a ride on my book of the Velikovsky Affair without consulting me, by trying to put it in through the publisher) that he was all wrong about you and that you had been kindly disposed towards him in the beginning and that he should write you a letter of apology. Second, I advised him not to perpetuate a controversy that would only damage him and cause everyone great costs, and rather to put his case up for arbitration by three persons, not including myself, to determine what, if anything, was and is due to him for his work and achievements. He didn't seem to care for the advice, but my last words to him were to think it all over. Probably you have heard that he is hoping to gather a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, soon. I have no idea who will come. While in London, I stayed at an apartment only a few meters away from the Jewish Synagogue and college where Hyam Maccoby works, and we had several meetings and a lunch at the best Jewish restaurant in London, Ruben's. He read most of my book on Moses and His Electric God and found it plausible and interesting. He knows the sources very well. I have heard nothing from Charles Lieber in New York, who is supposed to be finding a publisher for the book. We shall probably be leaving Naxos for Athens and New York at the end of June and thus be mainly in Princeton during the summer. Is Richard still with you? -- I suppose so. Please give him our regards -- also Ruth, and Warner when you see him. I look forward, then, to seeing you again before too long. Best wishes meanwhile. Affectionately, Alfred On May 11, Marx addresses Deg, expressing pleasure at their brief meeting: 14 years ago you pointed to the Velikovsky affair and its implications, and still good scientific form seems to require that even Velikovsky's main theses together with the principal view whether the reconstruction gives a true picture of mankind's past cannot be considered as fact, from which to proceed to new work. In spite of all the experiences of these 14 years a rather naive opinion also seems to persevere, that if only one persistently kept to so-called scientific method, in the final analysis everything will turn out just fine. For the disastrous non-success of Velikovsky's ideas in science a Scientific Mafia is found responsible, but science itself, the field that many Velikovskians are employed in or would like to be part of (if just for status only), and which from its beginning has allowed the most irrational large- scale delusions to grow (Grosswahnbildungen I call them in German), is glorified by naming our hero one of her greatest representatives. After I've seen science destroy the more important of these delusions, such as ancient history or some myths of physics, by its own methods, perhaps I'll be ready to call Velikovsky a scientist: until that time, which I don't really expect to really come true, I prefer to know Velikovsky, along with Freud, as the brilliant analyst he was; to withdraw him and his work from the clutch of science; and thus remain free to expose science wherever necessary or as a whole as one of the great systems of thought (after classical philosophy and religion) shielding the collective from its memories. He complains of "the most unfortunate job Mrs. Velikovsky is doing in ordering an about-face of her husband's approach to the Nazi Holocaust." He thanks Deg for suggesting arbitration and will, he says, essay a move in that direction. On June 4, Deg replies: Dear Mr. Marx: Thank you for your letter. The Breasted citation and pages are welcome. I will seek the hieroglyphics, now. Concerning your last paragraph on the 'arbitration, ' I have already written to Mrs. V. of my suggestions to you, so certainly you may refer to them if you wish. I am glad that I was never part of your complicated and difficult relationship with the Velikovsky's, else I would feel responsible at least in part and therefore more sad than I am. Any impression that the whole story has been told would be incorrect. The major issue is hardly reflected in it. The more one considers the affair, the more one senses an underlying tension. Would it be the pronounced incapacity of either V. or Marx to work with others? Certainly Deg's original skepticism of the relationship was based upon his acute awareness of V. 's tendencies to call his troops forward, only to have them halt before commitment and forever be frozen there. V. called himself a procrastinator. But Marx was a patient and loyal and demonstrative person. He could have gone along indefinitely and, given the neat bind trapping both parties, the relationship, hot or frozen, would have persisted. The crux was the holocaust. It was deeply disturbing. The matter could be put syllogistically: Historic catastrophes resulted in severe collective amnesia; the world's peoples, having suppressed their memories of catastrophe, are compelled psychologically to recreate the conditions for reliving them; thus emerge warfare, massacre, self-destruction and the destruction of others, man-made holocausts. Whereupon one reasons: the Germans, like all peoples, have suppressed the memories of them; like all other peoples, they are prone to recapitulate them and do so on occasion, as during the Nazi period. Now the process implies a therapy. To cure the penchant for human destruction, the victims of collective amnesia (practically everyone) must be led to confront and appreciate the extent to which their minds contain the experience of past catastrophe and hence the seeds of future ones; once this is done, the human will realize the meaning of his conduct and control it so as to break the endless chain of disaster. What is good for all peoples must therefore be good for the Germans. Hence any effort to cure the Germans of their collective amnesia is to be commended and supported. This, in brief and with such defects as I shall point out, was Velikovsky's social philosophy, and this everyone who paid any attention to V. knew to be his philosophy, and Marx clearly saw this, too, and was fully persuaded of it from his reading and from his early communications with V. He was deadly serious about it. Long before all of this, on December 18, 1963, we find V. writing to Dr. Zvi Rix in Jerusalem: "I found two of your ideas magnificent, the hatred of the Jews because they claim of having the upheaval made for their benefit (the Hyksos actually profited) and the words of the Gospels about the fiery furnaces and Hitler's accomplishing such vision and doom (by expolarizing his own hateful traits)." Again in a letter of January 7, 1964, he calls the idea "stupendous." He "wished that somebody else should write "The Great Fear," because he is so busy, but suggests a cooperative book, to which he might also contribute. Nothing came of this highly unusual disposition to engage in collaborative work. In 1947, V. journeyed to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, to receive an honorary doctorate. The Conference in which he starred was devoted to the topic of collective amnesia. His own address was subtitled "The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence." There he commented that "the inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression... Warfare has its origin in the same terror." Leaders imitate what they perceive to be the gods in action. Nobel Peace Prizes have been futile. Freud, V.'s predecessor, first developed the theory that each individual desires subconsciously to repeat the catastrophe or trauma, which he believed to be the murder of the father, the Oedipus Complex. In place of collective amnesia from the murder of the father, V. substituted collective amnesia from the trauma of natural disaster. His therapy, like Freud's, was to get the patient to realize the origin of his trauma. With Freud, the aim was not to realize the primordial murder, but to realize the oedipal complex operative in infancy. With V. it could not be this easy; catastrophes do not occur with every generation; therefore natural and human history required exposition in the light of catastrophism. Velikovsky accused many scientists of functional blindness, psychic scatoma, which he would probably assign in large part to collective functional amnesia of the anciently experienced disorders of the solar system. Thus, on November 2, 1974, he was saying at a Philosophy of Science Conference at Notre-Dame: Astronomers do not like interference from other sciences, and certainly not from what could be called 'legends and old wives tales... ' The ancients tried desperately to tell us what was going on... We wish not to know anything of this. We wish to believe we are living in a peaceful world. As a psychoanalyst, he was professionally unable then to accuse them of sin. They could not help themselves. He could not denounce them even if they refused to see when the truth was explained to them. He had simply to grant that their therapy was incomplete. The excesses of their attacks upon the analyst were to be expected and treated by inducing self-understanding. But he was personally involved, which is an impropriety, He became a kind of Catholic psychiatrist, who has to tell his patients that they are sinners. Worse, since he is sinned against, he became inevitably angry with the sinners. There was no "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." The German national case of psychic scatoma was, of course, much more deadly than the case of the scientists. V. writes, "You cannot put the human race on the couch." And then he looks at his own fate. "Without preparation, without giving the patient a chance to prepare himself, you cannot slowly release from his subconscious mind the necessary recognition of the traumatic past, and so, the patient has experienced great paroxysms and has rebelled against my revelations." But now, by patients, V. means specifically the scientific community that opposed his ideas, which like humanity as a whole, rejects bringing to the surface memories of natural catastrophe. Many of V.'s supporters agreed with these propositions, Christoph Marx certainly did, and some, like Marx, wanted to devote themselves to its application. Not so Deg, who found both the theory and the therapy grossly simplistic. Having spent most of his life in examining human ideologies and devising techniques of changing, controlling, and accommodating them, Deg had long since abandoned hope of finding a quick fix for human destructiveness. V. hardly recognized in his psychological theory what was so obvious in his history and in the reception of his book, that over all of history and today, the vast majority of humans and their religions actually demands that we recognize, denominate, and respond in every sphere of life to the occurrence of ancient catastrophes of fire flood, wind and earthquake. Destructiveness seemed to Deg "normal," "intrinsically human," ineradicable without genetic engineering and breeding. It could only, by known political means, be diverted, shaped, made to play games with itself, rendered innocuous, and displaced in a hundred ways. Destructiveness was neither more not less created by natural catastrophe than human nature in its other behaviors, including an abstract active concern for the human race as a whole. Further there was probably a genetic switch, prompted by catastrophe as were most mutations and primary behaviors, that had changed a primate quickly into a human. These ideas were developing in his mind throughout the seventies, as the theory of Homo Schizo. When, after V.'s death, I passed along to Deg a copy of the posthumously edited work, Mankind in Amnesia, that Jan had given to me, widely advertised as V.'s great testament, called by himself his most important work, Deg was prepared to be disappointed. When I said "How did you like it?" he said "Even more disappointing than I had expected it to be. Simplism is still the hallmark of the theory. Systematic development is entirely absent. The evidence is second-hand and commonsensical for the greater part. The recommendation for social therapy is nil." Deg felt a deep chagrin. "The work is true only on the most general level, and therefore unoperational and inoperative. It contains jottings and exclamations. It reads like a string of notes. Its publication could only have been justified as 'notes and stories, ' or 'Velikovsky's Lament. ' Dr. V.'s claim to be a 'citizen of the world' is unacceptable, unless any person's declared wish that the world not be blown up by nuclear bombs makes the person a 'citizen of the world'." Nor was V., in fact, for all his high qualities, ever such. The work is too brief for its purported task. Still it wanders; it contains extraneous matter. Too, the work had been long in the making; on July 2, 1967, V. had written Deg that he had "decided to concentrate upon it," at the urging of his publisher. He concluded the same letter: "Keep well, write again, and infuse yourself with impressions that will make out of you a ringing advocate of a need to understand the racial hidden springs of hatred." No need for exhortation: Deg had been such a resounding advocate since childhood. In reading the new book, Deg had to reflect upon the fact that V. and he had never discussed the work, whether because there was nothing to discuss or because V. wanted to talk of less important matters or because Deg was uninterested in the theory beyond the basic fact, with which he accredited V., the fact that ancient natural catastrophes have played a large role in human and natural history. As much as he believed in the high value of introspection and of the deep interplay of honest minds, Deg had long before meeting V. assigned only a limited potential for good in a knowledge of true history. "Psychological revelation" would help the world, commented Deg. "Philosophy and anthropology well insist upon this point, but the means for such are not given by V. (see p. 207 of Mankind and Amnesia) and therefore the statement will hardly perform the miracle. I can hardly believe that he says psychology and sociology had nothing to say about the Jonestown (Guyana) massacre and mass suicide, yet he does say so, whereas the dynamics of this event were crystal clear to the ordinary social psychologist." Where is his evidence of a 'racial inheritance' of an experienced fear, an attitude, no less. This is a Lamarckian genetics that I cannot accept. I asked V. once, in the 1960's, for his idea of what physiological process memories could use to ensconce themselves in the racial soma, to which he gave no response. He didn't show me what, if anything, he was writing. I would have been most critical. He read my Lethbridge lecture on fear and memory. I give him my first sketch of Homo Schizo theory, but I doubt he paid any attention to it, although there I made explicit the only dynamic by which Freud and Lamarck might be married, through psychosomatism. Yet V., who was repelled by Jung's complaisance with the Nazis, would not admit to being a Jungian. Moreover, his ethnocentrism is again apparent. He attributes significance to the presence of the five-pointed star of Venus on the helmets of American, Soviet and Chinese soldiers (only an American general officer is in fact authorized to wear the emblem), but he does not mention the ubiquity of the Star of David in the ancient Israeli army (p. 201); did V. or his editors delete the "Mogen David of ancient Israel or even of Israel of today" that he had joined with the others in his Lethbridge lecture (p. 27 of Recollections of Fallen Sky)? He indulges freely in anti-Arab statements (p. 150 et passim). In his vagaries, he does not however mention any of his close associates; Stecchini is found in a footnote (p. 67) also A. M. Paterson (p. 66), and the mention of Rose was a post-mortem insertion. He mentions several correspondents; a temporary assistant, Cathy Guido; a New York City teacher; a jail inmate; a man from Topeka, Kansas, writing on tornadoes, and a conversation with St. Clair Drake, which meeting he placed in the Swiss Alps without acknowledging that the two were there at Deg's invitation as part of a revolutionary experiment in higher education aimed at diminishing destructiveness and creating a beneficent and benevolent world order (p. 111). But the most striking omission in the rambling work is that it sidles past the Nazi Holocaust. Of the purest, and best-documented case in history of the working of his theory of aggression and amnesia, not a word is said! [Actually there were a very few words alluding to the German case, and these were excised by Mrs. V. before publication.] And Deg wanted to go on, but I stopped him. The question of anti-semitism interested me more, so I got him into this track. In Deg's opinion anti-semites define Jews and Jews define anti- semitism, both in their many forms. As to how many types of Jews there are, I know of no classification. First you have to grade Jewishness as a subjective feeling, an intensity, say of five grades. Then these are role- operative, transactional, that is. If I feel somewhat Jewish, this is fully or moderately or little sensed, depending upon whether I am transacting socially and psychologically in a setting dominated by the perspective: much, some or little of my ordinary moderate Jewish sentiment by the objectification of Jews that the gentile setting exudes. So at any point in time or space, I am liable to be in any one of hundreds of states of Jewishness. Moreover, my character possesses 'X' degree of stability, but is never so stable that my sense of Jewishness cannot be stepped up or stepped down by my hormonal balance, or some other physiological or sensory balance, as, for instance, when depressed, I may feel more Jewish, and so, too, when manic, but less so in between. And of course, all that I say about my type and other type of Jews are averages of quantities. But now you must go farther. The historical knowledge and life experiences of Jews differ greatly, hence the symbols and references to which we respond, which are so varied. The physical signals of Jewishness are of course symbols, too. To some Jews I "look Jewish," to others rather so, to some not at all, and so to gentiles. There is a Jewish look, which is a combination of a culture-look and a genetic-look. It has a set of grades of attractiveness and repulsion, one set among Jews, another among gentiles, depending of course upon which Jewish or gentile culture and sub-culture you are using as the standard. And with all of these possibilities the area of Jewishness and gentile-ness and their interrelations is most complex and varied. This very state of complexity, in which no Jewish race, or culture, or religion, or nationality, or historicity, can be said to aggregate more than a small fraction of those who think themselves some kind of Jew or are regarded as a Jew, fosters anti-semitism, because among strongly authoritarian and dogmatic characters, perhaps 10% of any population, the tolerance of ambiguity and variation is low. Objects and people must be pigeonholed; they cannot help themselves; that's the way they are and they are eager for any distinction that will discriminate, any line that can be drawn, "a drop of Jewish blood" or "a Jewish grandparent," or, on the other hand (and this is often forgotten), sometimes, a thoroughly rigid character will accept as such any person who says "I am a Jew" and then also any person who says "I am not a Jew," like not questioning a person who says "I am a Chicago Cubs fan." or "I am a Dallas Cowboys fan." Since the same authoritarian or discriminating character is also inclined to penalize ambiguities, he is at one and the same time eager to define a Jew and to penalize the Jews for being so difficult to define. Velikovsky, I should say, and even more so Mrs. Velikovsky, perceived the world strongly as Jew and gentile. Mrs. V. was a fine artist, a fully acculturated Judeo-Christian as a musician and a sculptor, but voted the straight party line, so to speak, when it came to Jewishness on most other matters, including holidays, diet, and intimacy. The big chasm in V.'s tradition of Jewishness was opened up by modern western science; he lacked belief in the substance of Judaism, whatever his participation in its rites and routines and despite his refusal to discuss religious preference with any one. The Velikovskys were among the "most Jewish Jews" whom Deg had known, even though he had from childhood held Jews among his closest friends and, while he had something of the heart of a Catholic and the culture of a Protestant, he had the mind of a Jew, a twentieth century "assimilated" midwestern American Jew, that is. That was what his wife of thirty years was too, except that she originated in New York. He was more a Jew than an Italian, although his descent was purely Italian, even of certain Sicilians who had been the most nationalist of Italians, but this line had practically stopped at birth with a father who was chauvinistically determined upon the Americanization of everyone (except musicians, it sometimes seemed). V. couldn't comprehend this very well. He tended to stereotypes and would conspire up an ethnic image of everyone. When once he wrote to Matthew Harris of Doubleday Publishers, upon his own insistence, a letter advancing a book scheme of Deg, he said, "You know, of course, who Professor Alfred de Grazia is. He is fierce fighter for causes he thinks just; thus he fought for my cause but occasionally we disagree. I would think that born in a different place and time he would have become a Sicilian captain roaming the seas; then Medicean Florence put an aura around him even before he first visited the country of his ancestors..."( Dec. 28, 1968). Perhaps so, but Deg's great dream as a boy of the prairies was "riding off into the Golden West." Stecchini was Italian by birth and upbringing, but that was not all of it. He had studied in Germany for one of his several degrees and picked up another at Harvard. "Did you know that Stecchini was of a Jewish father?" Deg asked V. one time, to observe his reaction. "No." "His father was a prominent Italian anti-Fascist named Levi who had finally to flee the country. And his mother was a countess." V. was surprised, and Deg was surprised at his surprise, for V. had now known Stecchini for some years, and they had been together scores of hours. V. was certainly able to work well with gentiles. With Freud, who was an assimilationist, there had been concerns and crises over the role of gentiles in psychoanalytic circles; nothing could be observed of a tension of conflict along such lines in V.'s circle, no more than there had ever been in Deg's circles. Time after time, Deg was asked about V.'s religious beliefs by members of an audience, but remarkably, there was no hint of antisemitism in the question, nor did he ever perceive any among V.'s many acquaintances. Deg surmised that Christoph Marx was a Jew for various reasons (despite his Christian name, which was not heard in the Velikovsky household or correspondence) for V. had a tendency, in matters familial and financial, to draw into Jewishness. Deliberately one day, when Elisheva was remonstrating against Marx, Deg said he supposed that Immanuel thought he might have confidence in a Jewish representative when dealing with Germans. She was astonished -- Marx Jewish? -- not at all. Nor did Immanuel ever think so. Deg convinced her he was so, or perhaps of Jewish and Christian parentage, and she said, "That must be it. They are the worst." And then she telephoned Deg who had been laughing at her to say of course she didn't mean that, meaning of course that she recalled that Deg's children were all of mixed Jewish-Christian parentage. As it turned out, when Deg told him the story, Marx confirmed that he was not Jewish. When after V.'s death, Warner Sizemore (" to get money for the cause") ventured into Amway consumer-business circles and into the formation of a "far-out" protestant church, he told Deg how surprised he was at the manifestations of anti-semitism among folk in such circles. That's to be expected, Deg advised, for the world of the aspiring small businessmen and millennialists, with its rural, radical protestant, and poorer base, held large contingents of anti-semites in America and Europe. Yet, also, this same base provided, at least among its more educated elements, many enthusiastic readers of Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. Since the first Puritans, America has attracted the "true Israelites," the Christian who had been persecuted by the Jews and Romans. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 2: } {Q - } {C Chapter 7: } {T FROM VENUS WITH LOVE } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN FROM VENUS WITH LOVE When Deg was proofreading Chaos and Creation in 1981, he recalled a half-century earlier overhearing Bob, his Scoutmaster, confide to a deacon of St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, "Sex rears its ugly head everywhere." The recollection was triggered because among innumerable problems foreseen and unforeseen there occurred in remote India the castration of Geb. As illustrated in the book (p. 125) Nut the Egyptian Sky Goddess reaches down to embrace pronouncedly ithyphallic Geb the Earth God. But the printer's proof of the illustration that was sent back by Popular Prakishan Pvt. Ltd. reached Deg sans phallus. I quote now Deg's admirably restrained letter of January 29, 1981, p. 2, point 3: I note that the phallus of the god of earth on figure 15a has been removed. This drawing is a famous archaeological figure and should not be tampered with. Was the excision made for fear of censorship or customs and prolonged controversy? I had no idea that there would be a problem. I don't want to delay the books by even a day. But it takes two sexes to mate, even Sky and Earth in mythology, so a semblance of masculinity has to be restored. I will be criticized as an unreliable author by many people as matters stand (unless directly beneath the caption 15a on page 125 there is printed in parentheses -- "Earth's exaggerated phallus has been removed- reduced? - by the printer to conform to Indian government censorship regulations"). Back comes the reply of Mr. M. G. Shirali, Production Manager, dated February 2, p. 1: Re: 'the mystery of the missing phallus' - figure 15a, page 125 - let me explain. You will recall this drawing was traced out by our artist from the original Xeroxed sheet you had sent, which you will remember, contained a lot of other things such as minute specks. This being possibly photographed from a stone mural or some such thing. So while tracing out just bare out lines, as you desired, this somehow just got lost in the maze of specks. Believe me, never for a moment did we think of tampering with, nor was the excision made in deference to the customs, nor for fear of censorship. Pure and simple it was an unintentional slip. Please accept my sincere apology for the lapse on our side and also my thanks to you for pointing it out. And now it has been 'arranged to be restored to the rightful place'!!!, as you will see when the final proofs come to you. The new proof returns. The phallus was restored-by half. Persisting, and because he fears that the original has been mutilated beyond use, Deg writes on March 28,1981: Enclosed is a copy of the famous Nut and Geb picture. It occurs to me that, without any redrawing, a cut should be made of this as it is leaving the shading, which is from the original papyrus, and thus the picture will not appear so prominent. I think this would indeed be an improvement. It is, after all, only a detail in an immense work. To repeat, photograph the new drawing exactly as it is here, and thus keep the shading in the final cut. Indeed sex does pop out of all corners in the material of human history and is especially illuminating in regard to catastrophic events. It remarkable how V. managed to suppress sexuality from becoming a major theme of this circles. It would have been easy to follow a path similar to the one of Wilhelm Reich who found in a kind of electromagnetic life force, expressible in sexuality, the beginning of an answer to all things, including a kind of communism for which he was evicted from the communist party in Germany. Elsewhere, in The Burning of Troy and in related pages of the SISR, a story is told of how V., following Cicero, claimed the root of Venus to be the word venire, meaning 'to come', and therefore the planet must be newly arrived, but Lowery, analyzing the words, finds them unrelated, nor is this the first time Lowery and the tribe of linguists dashed cold water against the heated claims of catastrophists. Christoph Marx and Deg independently found a subtle connection that Lowery missed and I take leave to quote from a paper circulated by Marx dated May 8, 1982: Easy to see now how Venus from 'venire' is quite equal to Venus standing for 'love' because to love -- if successful -- is the same as to come (as anybody past adolescence may experience). The dream-like efficiency of the term 'ven' may easily be judged by those with the faculty of imagination and an analytical turn of mind. To make visible the tradition of violence embedded in the term I would only add the example of a French porno movie, in which 'to come' produces "The End of the World" (the film title). It shows, of course, the love-making while the atomic rockets are on their way, but only in the end we see how they were released in the first place. Merrily, the president of the United States and the General Secretary in the Kremlin over the Hot Line are exchanging their experiences while being serviced by their beautiful private secretaries: the President of God's Own Country comes, and in his ecstasy hits the red button, leaving mankind with a movie's length of final lovemaking = coming. Etymology must begin with the study of Arno Schmidt and James Joyce who purposefully used and analyzed etym addressing. Etymology is not at all the successful tool Lowery makes it out to be when, e. g., he points to the reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian language: the decipherment of the hieroglyphs was not an achievement of etymology, and whoever has read a translation, say, of a literary text such as the Book of the Dead can not but agree that there is hardly anything more senseless in the way of expensive books --understandable perhaps to the translator's analyst, but certainly not the ancient author. Etymology for the present is not more than a systematized part of established science, the mechanism for the continued repression of the past. Electricity has in folklore been connected with sexuality, just as has the coinage and usage of words. Jerry Ziegler, a physicist, in the 1970's circulated his work on ancient knowledge of electrostatics and a copy come to Deg who got in touch with Ziegler and recommended his study to V. who ignored it, but Deg began to develop it in a number of ways. This was not uncommon; V. 's closest associates moved in their own way; Sizemore was aware of a world of marginal sciences that he would not discuss with V.; so Stephanos, as will be seen; so Juergens who moved toward it, because of V., first to be near him, then to be away from him; so Bill Mullen; and the British heretics, so devoted yet so independent of thought. Ziegler found many associations of ancient religion with electrical practices, and persuasively in his YHWH informs us of what interested so persistently and for so long the ancient sects in their mountaintop ceremonies. To be near to the gods, yes, but to be near the sources of enhanced electrical stimulation, too. The people, led by priests, went up the mountains for ecstatic purposes where religious rites and sexual experience were joined. Electrical discharge was supposed to enhance the sexual libido. Significantly, when in modern times there began many experiments with electricity, following the invention of the Leyden Jar, the scientist Sigaud tried to pass an electric shock through a company of grounded men, a trick that others had achieved, and when the attempt failed, he suspected that one of the company was "less than a man," a eunuch or castrato, that is; but then, as Heilbron's history tells the story, it developed that these, too, jumped where discharge was passed, and were electrically conductive. But Zvi Rix, of all the cosmic heretics, went farthest into the exploration of correlations among ancient religious practices, sexuality, and commentary disasters. Marx took over his manuscripts from his widow, but the task of disentangling them and reformulating them into fairly conventional prose proved to be arduous. When he was a boy, Deg believed that sex was a simple function: a male found a female, like an arrow shot from a bow pierces the bulls-eye of a target. For the several years that he was confined to autoeroticism, his fantasies and exercises, occurring privately, aimed at real female acquaintances and attractive female images in equal proportions. By increments of experience and learning, before he was forty, he could publish the article of a friend in Psychology at the University of Minnesota, arguing that sample surveys might be improved if they solicited information that would place the respondent on scales of masculinity-femininity, allowing sex to be a finer variable, capable of more meaningful correlations with other behavioral variables like "political candidate preferences." By the time he was sixty, though still an active heterosexual, the image of the arrow and the bulls-eye had resolved into the image of a fragmentation bomb, striking promiscuously and erratically in all directions. Homo Schizo, it seemed, from his beginnings and forever after, had lost, sexually as with all drives, close instinctual guidance and gained an uncontrollable but vast world. The modern theory is that if you don't find indications of homosexuality in a man and lesbianism in a women, you have an unusual person who is rigid and lacking in affect. Roger Peyrefitte, a French writer, ex-diplomat and professed homosexual, discussed and wrote about what he regarded as the homosexuality of Jesus and his apostles. He was challenged to a duel by a fiery Spanish psychiatrist, but refused the test. The same understandably underground theory was shared by V., but Deg was unimpressed, not needing V.'s innuendoes, meaningful glance and obvious reluctance to say so, but still V. had to let the cat out of the bag, like "you know, there is much to be said in this regard about Jesus." But Deg had no doubt that the tradition went back to the nasty cirumstancs surrounding the trial of Jesus. I'm sure they called him everything, he said, not disagreeing but not caring at the time to plumb V.'s data base on the question. There was little Deg could not find a place for in his mind, ranging from Jean Genet to Don Juan, and all the ambiguous feelings, attitudes and practices in between. The closest V. comes to offering a theory of sexuality occurs in Mankind in Amnesia. There he asserts that neurosis is based upon narcissism, ultimately, the autistic libido that has to be located and treated first of all (p. 162). This done, the therapist must move to the treatment of homosexual problems and then into alleviation of the Oedipus complex. The theory is rather directly one of Freud's many, and V. generally arrived at these several stages quickly with his psychiatric patients. Fifteen minutes is often enough, he said to Deg, to understand what is going on with a patient. Repeated visits and phonecalls were to be expected, of course. V. was remarkably prudish. Over the years, he gave Deg the impression which actually was obvious at first but scarcely believable in a psychiatrist, that he operated on the idea that "men are men" and "women are women," a simplistic notion. He seemed not to notice that several of his most brilliant and active supporters might have been homosexuals of one kind or another. Fight off the homosexual urge, he seemed to be saying, and stamp out the narcissism that stands beneath it. Laius, father of Oedipus, had introduced, according to legend, the practice of "unnatural love" (V.'s term) in Ancient Greece (which, insists V., is at the origin of the terrible curse upon his house). Onetime in America and once in England, Deg was asked with a certain wonder about homosexuals in the movement. Their participation was not surprising, he answered; no movement is a rational and random selection from the population, no more than the establishment it stems from; homosexuals are more active in innovative and intellectual movements; all that we know of the sources of creativity and cultural change would be contradicted if they were not. New movements, whether scientific, cultural, political, religious, or social do not come from the average norms and normals of a culture. Deg ought to have explained fully, right out of his reading of Oedipus and Akhnaton, which so impressed him. There, on pages 48 to 50, is told the story of Amenhotep III, father of Akhnaton, and of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and of the Greek's and Oriental's indulgence of homosexuality, and the Hebrews' condemnation of it. In a delicate lacework of widesweeping history V. manages the following pejoratives regarding homosexuality: "Greek love," "invert," "iniquity," "spoiled by," "contemptible," "work their will (on Lot's guests)," "horrible retribution" (Laius' descendant at Thebes): throughout the passage, luxury, splendor, power, idleness, extravagance, high culture and civic freedom are dwelt upon as the ambiance of homosexual inversion. No wonder, thinks the innocent reader, that Akhnaton was so queer. But Akhnaton is not the issue here. Three features emerge from the passage: V. absolutely rejects homosexuality; homosexuality is portrayed as an exotic and attractive luxury of high cultures; V. does not, here or elsewhere, appear outwardly punitive to homosexuality. Deg could name a half-dozen of his acquaintances, all of V. 's circle and on at least three sides of any argument that came up --not a clique, that is -- who were homosexuals, but he never thought of what might be the seductiveness of V. both at close hand and at a distance. For my part, being more distant from the scene, I would guess that V. subtly presented the image which homosexuals in those years (not the present liberationist gays) could best accommodate to: a stern attitude exuding a luxuriant bath of guilt and a seeming tolerance, delicacy and understanding precluding any but the most "delicious" punition, which was necessary for the enjoyment of their homosexual feelings. (Nor to be fully aware, have we of Western culture quite learned to enjoy heterosexuality without guilt and fear of punition.) V. liked Nina, Deg's second wife, who was at the Swiss college on and off. Deg recalls an especially vivid image of the two of them silhouetted in the sunshine and snow against the Alps on the road to Haute-Nendez, talking volubly in Russian. Long after, Deg was reporting to him that Nina had gone to Berlin to marry Peter Bockelmann -- a fine musicologist said Deg, and a fine man. Whereupon V. began to speak of Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata," a story in which a husband, according to V., enjoys sexuality homosexually by turning his wife over to another man. Deg was amused at this. He had been happy that she had found so good a friend after their separation. What were V.'s motives for the story --his liking for Nina, his dislike of Germans, his need to carry a dubious theory into every human relation, a jealousy of Deg's philandering, a homosexual impulse of his own? That is to say, when it came to conjecturing and examing motives, Deg was unwilling to let others escape. Or perhaps V. just had not gotten the story straight; the couple separated, but they were still friends: it was a plot not to be found in V.'s manual. One of the sillier passages in V.'s Mankind in Amnesia propounds the idea that nations have a masculine or feminine character, Germany and France being among his examples (pp. 140-2). This kind of social psychology is not only unproductive, but also false (like Mussolini once in anger calling the Germans a "nation of barbarians and pederasts") and only made Deg more irritated at V.'s pretentiously published book. For the infant college in the Alps, Deg had invented a concept which he called, "rapport psychology" that was intended to be a form of group encounter usable for the "Kalotic" world order. He wrote in the Bulletin of the School: The basic rapport group usually consists of eight to fourteen members and the leader or facilitator. The group uses verbal and non-verbal exercises and encounters, and typically has no set agenda. It uses the feelings and interactions of group members as the focus of attention. This allows for maximum of freedom for personal expression, the getting in touch with feelings, and interpersonal communication. Emphasis is on open, honest and direct interactions among members in an atmosphere that supports the dropping of defenses and social masks characteristic of normal academic relationships. Rapport group members come to know themselves and each other more quickly, deeply, and fully than is possible in the usual academic situations; ordinarily, a strong feeling of group solidarity develops. The resulting climate of openness, risk-taking, honesty, and trust displaces feelings of defensiveness, rigidity, and mistrust. Members can identify and alter self-defeating attitudes and behavior patterns, and explore and adopt more innovative and constructive ones. In the end, most members can experience daily life and work more pleasurably than before, on campus and off. Deg was trying to connect the personal to the universal without the usual intervening madness. Amidst the continual hubbub of hand-to-hand struggle at the new school, he could not operationalize the theory of the Rapport Center. He left it to the attention of his brother Edward and B. J., a group leader whom Ed had recruited from his experience at the famed center for group therapy at Esalen, and to the students, aged 18 to 28. At one moment in a group session, on the way to the brave new world, two men decided that they would make love to each other and went off, after which one, a virgin in such matters, "tossed his cookies" in a rush of shame and disgust. The word got to Deg and to V. as well, who accosted Deg on an alpine pathway and denounced such conduct nor, said he, will I stay on these mountains with this going on. Deg solemnly and reassuringly listened, and told Ed "What the hell happened there anyhow?" He didn't expect much of an answer, nor got one. The Rapport Center remained popular and undirected to the new world order, whence I remind my readers of two axioms: few truly wish and are psychically prepared to address themselves to the necessary new world, and "bringing life into the classroom" is a beloved pedagogical expression with absurd possibilities. V. stuck it out on the mountains -- actually he enjoyed his stay -- but he could not help but slip a reminder of the incident, camouflaged, into his notes and ultimately into Mankind in Amnesia, where, in a diatribe against both the old and the new, he says( p. 185): The rebellion of the young was full of hope -- the millennium was about to begin. The hair was grown long. John the Baptist was imitated in appearance, but the rebellion was against asceticism as well as against materialism; regulations were to be violated, young and not-so- young flocked to 'rapport-psychology' which struck out Freud and the rest of the 'schools'; orgies were practiced as curriculum in some campus classrooms as the call came for tearing down all inhibitions. But V. did not pursue sexual investigations of Jung or Marx, contenting himself with stressing the obvious resentment of Jung at being regarded as a son. Bronson Feldman, a Velikovsky acquaintance and supporter, introduced sexual analysis to back up V.'s claims, but we must remember how chary was V. to let anyone claim to represent his several views, with every excellent reason. Feldman, who became understandably mad and confused when dealing with Central European anti-semitism, added little to historical reconstruction. He did point out, for instance, that V. had misstated a famous report of Freud's swooning in the presence of Jung and others. V. forgot to mention that not only had Jung been defending the efforts of Akhnaton to erase his father's memory but had just been hotly accused by Freud of the great academic crime of non-citation of authority -- namely himself, Freud -- in his writings. Thus Freud had taken two blows from his disciple and son, Jung, and probably a third unmentioned blow, a Christian effort (at least a suspicion thereof) to bury a Jew's contribution to knowledge; of this suspicion we have ample evidence, and of the fact, too, whether in Jung or in Nazism, that the contributions of Heine, Mendelssohn, Einstein and many another Jew to German high culture were buried. And, incidentally, Deg spoke in Politics for Better or Worse of the recent era in America, "of those highly skilled and creative people who had built the arts and sciences, half of them Jews," for he was irritated that in whatsoever history book or sociological work on America no such statement, even the approximation of such a statement, is to be found. But Jews are divided in their minds and amongst themselves whether to lay claim to their achievements or to play them down to avoid envy and resentment. The sexual verges upon the political, and the political, I must now make the point, verges upon the sexual. I mentioned that V. was a prude -- or was he canny, realizing that scientists and scholars are sexually repressed and in our civilization will not respect an authority who ties in the sexual link too closely with the processes of the intellect? I would say V. was publicly rather priggish, and privately more so. He did not like at all Stechini's introducing Peter Tompkins to his circle, nor did Peter visit more than once, although a war hero, a man of some fame then ( and more to come), of great personal attractiveness, and a potentially influential supporter: why? Because Tompkins had written on cults and practices of eunuchs and virgins and saw in the history of the planet Venus, which he credited to V., the mad unfolding of the human mind into sexualized institutions. With perhaps more reason, V was exceedingly wary of a "hippy bookman" in Manhattan, Theodore Lazar, adorative of V.'s books, who wrote a pamphlet about Venusian-derived phallicism, the commentary image as it entered so many ways into the brain and behavior of mankind. V. was wrought up at Robert Stephanos, a Philadelphia school system psychologist, the most faithful, pleasant and helpful of disciples, for pushing favorably the work of the New Yorker. And, later on, he was angry to hear that Stephanos had been flirtatiously corresponding with a Southern devotee and, not long afterwards, in a paranoiac mood, came to suspect that Stephanos might even be purloining papers of his. You must remove him from the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Studies of Modern Science, he told Deg, the President, and others. "Politics makes strange bedfellows," but so does science when it strikes out in new directions. Whoever wants to sleep with the partner of his choice or to sleep alone must give up creative dreams. V. sought hard to deny his bedfellows, but they were with him from the moment his book struck a popular chord, attracting many who were looking for bedfellows. Not so strange, he or his fellows, I hasten to stress. Just variegated. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 2: } {Q - } {C Chapter 8: } {T HOMO SCHIZO MEETS GOD} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHT HOMO SCHIZO MEETS GOD Great mysteries of existence such as human nature, divinity, time and governance are intimidating. The ordinary person is content with a few slogans about them, a kind of catechism, and to be allowed to make off with a piece of one of them -- so small as to be indistinguishable, therefore safe to play with for life. There are also those few persons who, emboldened by a successful encounter with a great mystery, become drunk with the genre and go on a rampage, knocking over distinctions and laying claim to new territory extravagantly. You can tell the type, if by no other sign, then by the way they have of looking upon the universe as a cabbage patch and treating great historical figures as their neighbors. One could see it long ago in Deg, who after taking the worst and the best of the army for four years, came back finally and managed a Chicago election where, introducing his distinguished professor Charles E. Merriam to a mass meeting (luckily the Fifth ward had the greatest concentration of intellectuals in the world) he said enthusiastically that he had studied with Merriam 'like Aristotle at the feet of Plato' and then was ribbed by friends and poignantly embarrassed, so that as you see, even now he can remember to tell me about it. Therefore it is no surprise that thirty five years later he can be treating Charles Darwin and everyone else familiarly, even arrogantly, "What is your opinion of Darwin?" was, of course, the question. The tape spun; Deg picked up his notes and spoke at the machine: Charles Darwin was an apt hero for nineteenth century biology and the public and scientific mentalities of the nineteenth century. He came from an expanding empire, did his "field work" young; he lived for many years quietly, gestating his ideas; he published at the right moment for coalescing the views of the scientific and cultural world; his theory of natural selection was simple, vague, and in line with what the secular person thought was his own idea. Now that his ideas are wearing out, the psychiatrists, methodologists, and philosophers have picked him to pieces. He was an uncertain person, never a fully convinced Darwinist. In the contemporary vein, R. C. Lewontin writes that "Darwin's work is filled with ambiguities, contradictions, and theoretical revisions." Velikovsky once pointed out that if Darwin had followed some of his own observations while on the voyage of the Beagle he would have become a catastrophist. He almost became a Lamarckian at one point, so fetching is it when one's own theory is indefinite, to imagine that the soma can be changed permanently by a forceful environment. "Darwin was ambitious, courted success and successful men, and cared for their approval:" again these are Lewontin's words. So too was Velikovsky. In 1858, just before Darwin published the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, he wrote that he did not yet feel set on the truth of any point of his theory, and was in this state of mind when Alfred Wallace wrote from far away to tell him about his own theory of natural selection. When he consulted his friends, their solution was to hustle him into publishing his manuscripts along with the essay of Wallace. What else could they do? Otherwise, Wallace would have priority. As Darwin said, "All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed ... It seems hard on me that I should be thus compelled to lose my priority of many years standing." But let us be clear... Ignoring the machine, Deg produced a statement out of his drawer of epigrams; "I used to hate epigrams," he said, but now I collect a few, "especially my own." He read: "Priority in science is a political claim. It is of no interest to scientific advancement that A or B captured a strong point first, so long as it was taken. A proposition is denuded of its generator. It ends life as it began, in anonymity." He spoke feelingly, because a continual annoyance of a generation of the Velikovsky affair was the bickering about claims and predictions. The lead was unfortunately provided by Princeton physicist Valentine Bargmann and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz when they assigned V. a priority on the heat of Venus and the radio noises of Jupiter (upon his instigation) and recommended reading his work for further clues as to what to expect. Such words from an astronomer and a physicist were naughty; they excited V. and his followers and angered other scientists, all the more because they were involved themselves in this racket. The ideas of 'priority', 'prediction, ' and 'claim' are more political than scientific. The word 'claim' connotes possessiveness -- not a happy human quality. V. liked the term; the press liked it; ambitious scientists like it. and long years of struggle have gone on is such fields as physics and psychology to try to assure people's claims to discovery, as if all of knowledge is of little bits, ever-diminishing bits as well, that are owned by an individual forever. Darwin need not have worried; his location, his friends, and the ample, ambiguous, diffident qualities of his writing, pitched at the consensus of all-who-mattered, the 'happy few' of the day, would assure his work 'priority. ' Velikovsky's work found no such consensus. Perhaps it deserved no such consensus. Perhaps it earned at that point precisely what it deserved, and what Darwin's work deserved -- an audience, a hearing, a turning of minds, a refurbishing of hypotheses, some of the patient, indulgent, reflective, detailed processing that is supposed to characterize science but does not markedly do so. Deg's un-darwinian Homo Schizo was present for many years and began with the conviction that man was essentially non-rational. When Deg first joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1952, he was working on the phrasing of Lasswell's law: political man displaces private motives onto public objects and rationalizes them in terms of the public advantage. This conception had burst upon political science in the 1930's, joined with pragmatism and neo-machiavellism, and overran the 2300-year-old positions of rational-legal-institutional political science. Deg radicalized the concept. He could not see anything extraordinary about Lasswell's political man except in the intensity of his involvement with power. Too, he was critical of the notion of rationalization, for since boyhood he had found everybody doing nothing but rationalization. Therefore he suspected that reason and rationalism and rationality were really processes of rationalization. When he came in the seventies to ponder the nature of man, he could now perceive a brain structure and personality altogether of the schizoid type. His newer concept was of instinct-delay, blocking, and displacement of the response to a stimulus, forcing terrible self-reflection, and in the control of response to stimulus, forcing terrible self- reflection, and in the control of these reflections -- the polyego -- there occurred the human character. The essential polyego assured an eternal existential fear, whose high level, being constant, goes generally unnoticed. Homo sapiens, whom he finally termed homo sapiens schizotypus, is most rational when he is acting (thinking being a form of acting) pragmatically, that is, calculating and adjusting to the consequences of his behavior while transacting with an environment, both human and natural. Logic, and hence science, and hence most of what is ordinarily called reason, develops as a means of most efficiently connecting an entering stimulus with an effective response. In this sense, man seemingly farthest removed from the animal kingdom, finds his triumph in emulating instinctive response. He aims at reducing his high level of existential few by logical, "rational", and scientific conduct. But as the underlaid instinctual apparatus of the animal does not guarantee it against the multiform assaults of nature, whether represented intraspecies or in the transaction with other species and inorganic nature and whether uniformitarian or disastrous, so too man's efforts at reconstructing and reinforcing his less genetic, delayed instinctual apparatus, are continuously ineffective. All the achievements of the calculating and even scientific Homo Schizo cannot win control over the self, others, and the natural world. As in the beginning and even in the most rationalistic technical ages, Homo Schizo continues to rely upon the organization of his far-flung displacements for adjustment and control of himself and the world, so that religion, culture, and the arts are, if not preponderantly his road to "happiness," most useful and welcome companions of pragmatic scientific conduct. Alone or together, the sciences and the arts cannot create a creature other than Homo Schizo. Even if they could, the monsters would be limited to some portion of their own envisioned ideal that they could agree upon, and they would promptly regret having made such a substitute for the unrealized larger portion of their ideal. I should not try to explain the full theory here, not when two volumes about it are available elsewhere. However, it is appropriate to comment that Deg began his development of the model of Homo Schizo to test the Freud-V. theory that historical traumas produced a character who simply had memory problems but was otherwise "rational" by nature. As I said, Deg was already prejudiced against this idea, and it was no accident that he almost immediately placed the idea of the intelligent evolving savage into a restricted enclosure. He searched instead for the larger meaning of catastrophe, now quantavolution, that formed a different creature to begin with. Primordial man was now catastrophized in two senses, first genetically and second in the sense of reinforcement through repeated catastrophic experiences. The latter, the reinforcement process, gave Deg no trouble; there was ample evidence of a "law" operating whereby the intensity and duration of an experience (read "catastrophe") determined and varied directly with the amnesia and compulsive sublimated recapitulations of the experience. Further, therapy of such a condition (control over it, that is) was exceedingly difficult, whether of the individual or of the collectivity. More difficult was the establishment of the genetic basis of human nature. Here Deg found his way, first by undermining the case for gradualist darwinian and anthropological evolution, and second by discovering uniquely human variances in current research on the structure and operation of the central nervous system. He came to attribute humanness to a brief glitch in the stimulus-response system, which I mentioned above. How he visualized it becomes crudely clear in a note from his files, entitled "Making a Chimp Talk: a Suggested Research Project on a key element of Homo Schizo." MAKING A CHIMP TALK Premises 1. Homo Schizo theory says that mankind became human and is human today in connection with a millisecond delay interfering with instinctive response. 2. The delay a) diffuses (displaces) percepts, concepts, and memories widely because of lack of immediate response, b) forces the being to sense itself, that is, at least two selves, c) activates existential fear mechanisms because of lack of control of a) and terror from lack of control of b). 3. To tie itself (itselves) together, the being communicates with itself and the result of this communication is inner language, the basis for external language. 4. External or social language occurs as the being continues its inner operations by external means, employing whatever it can, such as gestures, utterances, and other signs and signals. 5. All of 1. to 4. above occurs with little relation to the size of the brain, with some relation to hemispheric symmetry, and with relation to other possible delaying mechanisms. A person can be raised to behave normally in speech and behavior with 1/ 10 of the brain matter normally encased in the cranium provided that all elements of the brain are represented by proportional fractions. 6. A chimpanzee brain is within the human functional limits so far as size is concerned. Its vocal apparatus and other symbolizing mechanism are adequate. It is highly sociable animal, so "presumably would like to communicate." Chimpanzees and other non-humans can learn many isolated symbols... "but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational, semantic, or syntactic organization of language." (H. S. Terrace et al. 206 Science 23 Nov. 1979,891). Thesis: Chimpanzees do not speak because they do not undergo an internal electro-mechanical compulsion to speak. Corollary: Chimpanzees would speak if their instinctive brain operations were continuously and unconsciously blocked for milliseconds. [thus supplying the compulsion] Experiment Baby chimpanzee Abel is subjected to partial commissurectomy; insulin injections to arrive at constant 10% higher blood level; and background human videotape television plus human handling as of normal babies of up to 26 months of age. Hypothesis : Abel will at the age of 26 months emit 50% (rather than 20%) of the expansive adjacent utterances of human infants of the same age (and proportionately more than chimpanzee 'Nein' of that age -- in the Terrace et al. experiment). Corollary hypothesis: Availability of the conditioned animal will permit application of a full range of tests of humanism, including intelligence, self-awareness, self-images, artistry, aggressiveness, persistency (obsession) in task performances, memory and recall, with special attention to the generation of the several components of schizotypicality, including various tests of insanity. Here I think that Deg is downright ignorant regarding the possibilities of Dr. Frankenstein's experimentation with apes. The ape is a massive system of unique organic connections and resultant behaviors: unless you get into the gene system and perform a systemic mutation there, you will get nowhere by monkeying (excuse the expression) with the post-natal resultant. He proposes to cause artificially a totally ramifying system of displacements, fear, and ego split when all the settings of the ape's organism are deadset against alteration. The animal will simply die. That is a much more logical and simple response than to undertake the enormous burden of behaving like a human. Deg's archive carries many another note of different kinds --sketches, designs, critiques. They begin as a broadly spread-out and miscellaneous aggregate, and then come together as the book is written, but many of them are locked out in the end. Here are three of the excluded ones, let to view: Deg's Journal, December 20, 1968 In pregnancy, especially during the last three months, when the placenta is largest, the placenta manufactures a large amount of blood ceruloplasmin. 1. Ceruloplasmin alleviates many cases of schizophrenia 2. Women with schizophrenia are alleviated towards end of pregnancy 3. Relapses and initiation into schizophrenia may occur following pregnancy, i. e. post-natal schizophrenia is common. 4. Schizophrenia is 'split personality' disease traditionally, although Hoffer and Osmond deny this definition, saying there are not two persons, despite hallucinations and feelings of persecution. They are in a major sense right. 5. The correspondence of high C production with the period at which a woman faces the traumatic need to split her baby from herself makes me think that the body protects itself (or the 'mind') from the effects of this traumatic experience by exuding into the blood a specific defense against schizophrenia. About this time there occur also various petulant scribbles on his readings viz.: Glancing through The Scientific American's handsome volume on Human Variations and Origins, I see many errors behind the skillful graphics. There is Eiseley's idiotic article on Lyell, for example. The 'distinguished' academician knows much about his man's surface and nothing about his dynamics, nor does he understand the real conflict between uniformitarian and catastrophic evolution. Eiseley's reputation comes from a deadhead riding the commonplace, uttering mystic words. Later in the book I see all manner of speculations treated as facts, simply because they come from scientists. Man's spotty history is given a coherence by rhetoric, not data or even good theory. I see a picture. I read a caption. It shows an extremely tall negro and a short, chunky Eskimo. The first's height is supposed to be an adaptation to heat, more surface per pound; the latter's chunkiness is supposed to conserve heat. But whence the Swede? Whence the many fleshy Africa Negroes? The Ibos, Pygmies, etc. Doesn't moisture and dryness of the air matter, etc.? I have seen pictures of chunky short Indians of the Amazon and Orinoco tropical jungles. The theory of evolution is full of hopeful guesses. I am working with a sample survey of attitudes and experiences of the U. S. population right now. I am, as always, acutely impressed by how the first relating of variables can mean nothing and always means nothing unless one is satisfied that all the other factors are interpreted and counted. Women have the same accident incidence as men: fine, but that's the end; afterwards all manner of crosscutting forces changes the character of their accidents and incidence when compared in sub-groups. The defensive scientist retorts irritably: 'But this is only popular science! We don't make such errors in our real inside work. Nonsense. Every specialist is carried along on these so- called popular currents, not to mention that he likes to call 'popular' anything that he doesn't find agreeable or true. There is the beautiful image Merton and other students of science, who are admirers of the image, employ: 'We are but pygmies, standing on the shoulders of giants. ' We should also say, 'We are giants standing on the shoulders of pygmies, ' Or better, 'We are monkeys, swinging carelessly along a dizzying network of vines mysteriously placed and oriented. ' Sometime in 1970, Deg met biologist Dr. Karl Schildkraut of the Albert Einstein Medical School through Dr. Annette Tobia. He was interested in Deg's University scheme and they talked a couple of times about heredity. Perhaps these contacts brought about a note foreshadowing some of his passages on evolution: ... Unless one resorts to an immense number of mutations (practically begging the question whether uniformitarian or catastrophic), it impossible to conceive of the complex intra- organism adjustments (changes) that must accompany an organic innovation, that is, 2n where n = affected parts: if brain convolutes by mutation, then how many elements of the body must adapt immediately ? If all chromosomes and genes are linked, then there must be a chemical 'universal element, ' bringing about a total viable system change. Note, too, the received evolutionary doctrine offers in evidence the numerous similarities of all living cells. The same fact of universal similarity is applicable to the doctrine of simultaneous systemic mutation, both regressive and progressive. Deg sent an early version of the theory of Homo Schizo to Lawrence Zelic Freedman of the Institute of Social and Behavioral Pathology at the University of Chicago at the suggestion of Harold Lasswell. Freedman raised two issues with the theory, issues that Deg addressed in the final work: Could man have been catastrophized other than by natural disaster and could a catastrophe strike into the hominids en masse. Freedman wrote: ... The notion of contemporary man as a schizotypicalis is one which I find easy to accept, and your adumbration of the contemporary social and psychological dilemmas of knowing --if not understanding -- man, magnificently expressed... the elemental catastrophe of separation and confrontation with hostile elements during the process of birth might be the individual equivalent of the massive conformation with overwhelming stress which the model catastrophe hypothesis demands. Deg considered that human birth is not much more traumatic than anthropoid birth, hence, if it has a greater psychic effect, that is because of a prior genetic constitution which has to be explained. Freedman raised a second major issue: "the high probability that significant elements in the general population would escape the pathogenic influences of the hypothesized catastrophe." Deg worked out of his dilemma by devising a primordial scenario in which a radiation turbulence, causing millions of mutations, altered the physiology of a given hominid such that full schizophrenic behavior was promptly induced in its descendent and, by virtue of the powerful capabilities of the individual, within a thousand years produced a multitude of operative humans spread over a large territory. Alternatively, owing to a catastrophic turbulence, a changed atmospheric constant might have constituted in effect a genetic change by continuously, "ever after," conditioning a new hormonal state in a pre-potentiated hominid species, in which event, the humanization process would have been speedier. That both processes, genetic mutation and a changed critical gaseous constant, could operate sympathetically was also foreseen. Deg sent the same early booklet to his friend at the University of Haifa in Israel. Professor Ernst Wreschner, who found the Homo Schizo theory especially vulnerable in regards to its catastrophic scenario and the short time allowed for humanization: I accept that Pleistocene upheavals, cosmic tektonic -- a combination of fire and water -- must have been for generations of homo erectus, Acheulean man, Ante-neanderthals, Neanderthals as well as for some Cromagnon, and whatever names archaeologists give to them, an experience of realities that were outside their powers of coping with mentally. It is feasible that by these very experiences mechanisms could have been developed which enabled men to survive more or less sane during times of the twilight of the gods. But I also believe that the very principle of natural selection could and did cope with the possible influences of catastrophes or cosmic radiation escalations. Either in the mutational sense or in the mentally adaptive or both. Which would mean in biological and cultural fields. (...) The postulation that catastrophes were always global and had overall consequences is untenable, as is the date expounded for a decisive point in human history such as 13,000 B. C. (...) The deep dualism in the human make up developed and existed in their "animal context" becoming mentally or psychologically pronounced when selfawareness could fathom them. But this happened in a process of culturisation and this forced men to deal with them, even without catastrophic catalysts. (...) And language is also not a sudden creation. Many factors worked towards it, biological (anatomical and cultural ones). Man is by nature an experimenter, based on the mammalian trait of curiosity. It was 400,000 years ago that he experimented with fire and limonite to get a result which was the red color mineral hematite. Many others after him, either independently or by diffusion, hit on the same. Many thousands of years passed between these experiments. And those with the developed brains put the red color to symbolic use, when other beliefs needed a carrier for associations connected with life and death. Thus with the first burials the red color in the form of ochre appears and afterwards red color symbolism in many forms spread and you find it ever since in variegated ideational meanings, in burial practices, myths, rituals, legends and ceremonials. In reply, Deg seeks to explain their basically different ways of looking at human evolution: 25 December 1977 Dear Ernst: Don't look now, but it's Christmas Day, It's cold and rainy. Saturn has come down with his disastrous reindeer from the North pole. I am hiding out, for a couple of hours, nursing my cold, which is true, but also releasing my soul from the desperate festivities, which I shall rejoin soon enough, and my appetite for turkey will be sated. I shall try to behave with the appropriate jollity. I shall try not to be ironic, and not to make too many anti-materialistic or even learned remarks. I have become incapable of joy "on order" though I am quite eager for joy when I am in the mood. The holidays in our current world have become twistings and turnings of human relations in an attempt to find some traditional form that is quite alien to the form that they assume during the rest of the year. Ah, well, for the moment it looks as if we might have peace in the Near East this next year, owing to that remarkable Sadat who is neither Jew nor Christian, and probably not even a member of the CIA. Both Kronos and the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (England) have asked me to publish my Homo Sapiens Schizotyicalis and I think it will be done. I am suggesting to them that they ask you to prepare a commentary from your letters and other thoughts, if your time permits, thinking that you will have half done the job already. Strangely, I think you have understood my theory very well but you have not understood the weaknesses of your own conventional flooring quite as well. If you will permit me to say so, I would assert that time after time you (and that means a flock of learned gentry of evolutionary persuasion) will employ sloganized concepts and terms to bridge whatever has to be crossed. Like the word "cope" as "the principle of natural selection could and did cope with the possible influences of catastrophes and cosmic radiation escalations." or employ the phrase "decisively influence" in place of "created" to deal with the change in mind. That is, you have no mechanism for the changes that occurred, but rather words that are accepted and unquestioned. And you say that symbolism is created by the adequate faculties of man -- then and now -- to explaining things rationally. But why does he have to explain? Why doesn't he just let the matter go by? None demands that he explain, except himself, and this he does because he must control himself, and thence the gods and others. That is, the reason for human reason is not reasonable, that is, functional in the sense you put it, but he is compelled to a certain kind of reason by his very being that has been changed, and the change is not reasonable but is simply the kind of change that produced the new kind of being. I have been reading the book by Walter Fairservis, called The Threshold of Civilization, as I have thought about your letters, and I can see him to be unconsciously evading all of my major points. He systemically lays out the division of societies into hunting gathering, agricultural, and civilized (using useless terms), prettying up the old evolutionary sequence. But how much hard evidence exists that hunting came before agriculture? I think that they came together and that later on perhaps when a society became strikingly one or the other, secondary differences occurred. To me, it seems logical that the earliest Homo Schizo went on for a moment of time grabbing at all the bugs, carrion, and plants he would find, but discovering right away that by escalated sign behavior and organization he could do immeasurably better than before. That is, the gestalt of the certain permitted breakthroughs culturally along the whole front of life. Think of what the Renaissance in Tuscany did with a few ideas; it penetrated every shore of culture and did it within a few years. This was the Renaissance Gestalt. From time to time, too, you mention long temporal periods as elapsing between events and I can see that unless one frees himself mentally from the long-term evolutionary fame of mind, the aggregate of events that I say happened almost simultaneously cannot by definition have happened. So one must hypothesize the collapse of time, understand the dynamic that would then be possible, and thereafter go back and look at time to see whether it is conceivable that we are wrong in believing it to have been so stretched out. I realize that the odds seem impossibly great against a short-time measuring rod. All I can say at this stage is that I have spent some time with every method of measuring time that exists and in every case maybe found some Achilles Heel. To give one instance, it is possible to make a case for Olduvai events to have been contemporaneous with the destruction of the Cities of the Plain -- geophysically, anthropologically and in legend. Not a good case, to be sure, but there has never been a study with this hypothesis in mind. And what I have discovered is that the whole world of rocks, skies, nature, and culture can be twisted into a short-term frame, hypothetically, scientifically, to where a whole series of studies could without fantastic efforts give the "yea" or "nay" to the general theories at stake... Given so heretical an idea of man's origins and nature, we cannot expect less heresy in Deg's religious views. I think that Deg's troubles with religion and his carping at gods was because God is a Hero. Deg did not like heroes, saying "Heroes are foreseeable accidents that befall a following." Let us say that at the least he wanted a hero he should control, which is at least an ambivalence if not a contradiction. This in turn had something to do with his early childhood, when there was a benevolent, authoritative father and a brother older by a couple of years who was always excelling, frustrating, lending help diffidently. Harold Lasswell in an impromptu speech at a banquet one time, when both brothers were present, referred to 'Al' as generated out of 'sibling rivalry. ' I suppose that Deg had tried to manage Lasswell, that great god of many social scientists, over the years and did the same with Velikovsky. There were other gods as well, and probably he escaped being some great man's Boswell or Harry Hopkins because of his persisting ambivalence or simple bivalence; it is not an uncommon trait, especially among women, with whom Deg always felt at ease and in touch. At one time he made the following note: It should be an offense for anyone to speak in the name of gods, or to say that gods speak to him, or to call upon gods to intervene in the world, or to treat anyone in the name of gods, or to assign to gods human traits. V. and Deg talked little about, and hardly searched for, religion and god. V. had no religion and had never intended to possess one. Deg had no religion, always intended to discover one, but seemed never fully to get down to the search; meanwhile he was forever peering into the crevices where people kept their sacred idols and their firm or faltering notions, and he acknowledged the value of religious discussions. V.'s indifference to religion annoyed him. "God is an open question" was Deg's saying, and he stuck it into lectures and books and conversation, meaning not only that God is in doubt but that God was in essence an Open Question. In November 1972, he makes a note to himself: "Reconcile V. 's intense jealousy of God as a Jewish invention and V.'s expression to me of his belief in plural gods, and Yahweh as Saturn." [ Actually V. thought Yahweh was Zeus, and Elohim was Saturn.] "I do reconcile them by saying that V. changed too. His original belief changed even though the momentum of his original routine drove him on. Compare him with the creationists, for example, Bass, Ransom, and others not known except through writings (e. g. Donald Patten) who became quite good and imaginative in scientific and humanistic work on a new secular plane." Here Deg is saying in effect that he was sympathetic to and enjoyed the creationists, whereas V. thought that they were wasting their time. Judaism was the tool of Zionism, so far as V. was concerned. It had little other value but to claim additional authority for Isreal skywards as well as landwards. Martin Sieff, studying V. from a distance, came to the same conclusions, which he expounded at an SIS meeting: Velikovsky's life's record clearly identifies him as a Jewish cultural nationalist, his youthful experience in the Moscow Free University, his great work in producing the Scripta Universitatis in Jerusalem and in Berlin, his pioneering in the settlement of Palestine in the 1920's all fit firmly into this pattern. It is likely that he was early influenced by the Russian Jewish Zionist writer Ahad Ha'am, who died in Tel Aviv in 1925, shortly after Velikovsky himself had moved to Palestine. It is important to note here that such a cultural nationalist identity stood very well clear of any religious commitment. Believers may search Velikovsky's published works in vain for any mention or acknowledgment of God. The most they will come up with is in the Theophany section of Worlds in Collision, a carefully oblique reference which may be taken different ways, to "the great architect of the universe" This is what makes the pseudo-scientific attacks on Velikovsky, by people who have not troubled to read his books, so ironic. Velikovsky himself is in no sense a fundamentalist. His tampering with the biblical texts as they stand and his antipathy to several of the major biblical heroes, as well as major stands of the Hebraic religion, testify to that. Did Velikovsky believe in god? In his very revealing 1967 interview with the Yale Scientific Magazine, one of the few occasions when Velikovsky really lets has hair down, he stayed very well clear of this issue, stating: "people are looking for something in my works, and they cannot find it." It is doubtful, I would speculate, that Velikovsky was an agnostic, and I very much doubt that he was an atheist. The sense of moral destiny, or right and wrong is too strong in his books for that. At the same time, however, just as Freud quailed before Moses, Velikovsky gives us the imagery of Ahab and Saul quaking before the prophets of God, and his sympathies are clearly with the sinner kings.... Velikovsky kept some orthodox Jewish practices rigorously, but insisted that he only did so for the sake of his wife. As they enjoyed 57 years of sympathetic accord in their marriage, this may seem somewhat spurious rationalization... as George Orwell wrote of Tolstoy, for both men, Freud and the later figure who was so influenced by him, their attitude towards God was rather that of two birds in a cage, suspicious of God as posing a rivalry to their own dominance. Psychoanalysis was God, cast for Freud in the image of Oedipus, and the devil -- reflection of his own repressed frustrations. For Velikovsky, God was in the image of the planet god that brought purpose and terror, judgment and fire, to the peoples of the earth. Deg recollected, when he read a copy of Sieff's speech, a remark that V. had made at Lethbridge. He found that it had been kept through several revisions that delayed its publication for several years. "The noises caused by the folding and twisting of strata. Noises of the screeching Earth described also by Hesiod -- the Israelites heard in them a voice giving ethical commands." There can be little doubt on the matter. In this work, which Milton happily entitled "Recollections of a Fallen Sky" (V. did not like the title, but Deg ran interference for Milton on its behalf), V. speaks from his view of all manifestations of divinity, that they are natural, material, and that they promote delusions. His few passages on religion in the posthumously published Stargazers and Gravediggers are scarcely revealing. He lumps together religious and scientific dogmatists; melodramatically, he writes "were it possible to burn my books and their author publicly, then most probably the councils of the church and of the scientific collegium would have fought for the privilege of taking hold of me and would have dragged me, each out of the grasp of the other, to its own stake." In the same work, he declares that "to my way thinking, these books of the old Testament are of human origin: though inspired, they are not infallible and must be handled in a scientific manner as other literary documents of great antiquity." Well, one man's 'inspiration' is another man's delusion. His public stance on religion is disclosed in an interview for Science and Mechanics magazine (July 1968) : ... I answered only once when a group from prison in Illinois wrote to me that this occupies their minds very much and they debated and would like to know how I stand. To men in such a distressful situation, I felt that I owed an answer and I wrote to them. But generally, I keep such things to myself because it's just the same as asking whether William Conrad Roentgen, who discovered X-rays, believed that X-rays were created by God or not. The problem is not whether he was a churchgoer or an atheist; this is not the question at all. The fact is that he discovered X-rays. Now you can approach it from the philosophical viewpoint and say "this is the creation of the Lord," and you would be perfectly right. If you are a disbeliever and claim that X-rays are the result of a soulless Nature, you are consequently correct. But you should not confuse historical and scientific questions with theological considerations. There was incidentally, little of moment in the letter to the prisoners. Try as he would, Deg could not remember anything in it. When I checked with the Velikovsky Estate to verify the letter, Sammer and Heinberg denied its existence. They agreed that it was written in longhand and no copy was preserved. Possibly Deg remembered V. telling him what was in it, and there being nothing tangible, forgot what it was. We can be sure that V. did not send the prisoners to the Bible, and one of the most persistent and risible of canards raised against V., especially by the humanist movement, was that he was an anti-scientific Biblical revivalist. Many scientists picked up this idea, too. That he was often used by evangelists cannot be disputed, but in such cases Velikovsky was not a Velikovskian. V. could not be pinned down on God (as Deg noted in 1972 "I am certain that he does not believe in God.") but he would use the Hebrew Lord to belay others. The most revealing passages of V. 's view came at the end of Oedipus and Akhnaton at the expense of Freud, whose book on Moses and Monotheism he denounced; Freud, he declared, had done his people a great disservice by taking monotheism from them as an original invention (again the idea of a "claim"), making of Moses an Egyptian, and of Yahwism a primitive cult; Freud, he actually wrote, was neurotic. His anger at Freud overflowed onto Akhnaton so that this magnificent free-thinking Pharaoh, who tried to liberate a great culture from priestly and traditional thralldom, became now psychotic, deformed, a nudist, monolatrous (not monotheistic), incestuous, homosexual (bisexual), a pacific bungler of his country's affairs, and, if not a wife-beater, a wife- banisher. V. harbored the thought that Moses was not a monotheist, that true monotheism did not come to the Jews until the time of Jeremiah, whom he regarded as the first to formulate the idea. He never expressed himself publicly, for the same reason that he had criticized Freud for publishing Moses and Monotheism. Too many Jews would be upset, he said onetime privately to Wolfe, Milton, and Rose. He believed that late editors of the Bible and Jewish rulers had refashioned Moses into a monotheist, and that not until a few years before the Babylonian Captivity did the Jews become officially and fully committed as a group to monotheism. V.'s secret can be deciphered in Worlds in Collision, however, where, although he mentions the facts behind his theory, he gilds them by speaking of a striving to attain monotheism from the time of Moses onwards. Like other honest scholars, and ordinary people too, V. could not conceal his discoveries of "truth" even though he felt morally justified in doing so, and actually believed, with some guilt feelings, that he had succeeded. Still, his attempts at concealment had also a political angle, for he was enabled to deny that Akhnaton was a monotheist, and to call him an idolator of the sun, while letting stand the convenient notion that Moses, who came before Akhnaton in his reconstructed chronology, was monotheist. The reader will readily recognize in the Illinois prisoner incident that V. had picked up the typical American pose to avoid trouble: keep religion out of discussion -- separation of church and state carried to ridiculous lengths. Elisheva was telling Deg proudly of V.'s position; evidently she, too, not only used the excuse, but was self-congratulatory about it. She was taken aback when Deg said that it was irresponsible: how can a person write so much about religion, realizing full well that defenseless people are being affected by what he is saying, and then shut up like a clam when the consequences of his statements are under inquiry? This is especially the case in a free country, where unlike in police states, one loses little by honesty. I agree, and it is proper to say that V. lacked original ideas about contemporary religion. He was materialist. a Proto-marxist (rebuffed by persistent anti-semitism ), a Jewish nationalist who had to reconcile himself to the powerful Judaic orthodoxy within the state of Israel and within his family, an orthodox freudian believer that psychoanalysis can free the mind, a believer in science as a realistic and rational ordering of the universe, and a shrewd evader of religious controversy, which, if he had entered upon it, would have alienated half of his public support. Deg's position was quite different. He was pro-Jewish anti-Moses, even though a profound sympathy for Moses is apparent in his book on God's Fire, and, I might add, he felt, too, profound sympathy for Karl Marx as a mind bursting with social reality and grim wild hopes, even while being a life-long antimarxist. He felt dreadfully sorry (remember what I said earlier about his empathy with historical figures) for those Jews, often in the majority, who tried to wrest human and civil rights from Moses-Aaron, Miriam, the Golden Calf worshippers, the wanderers who heard "the call of Egypt." the Scouts, and the intercultural revelers of Beth Peor. Deg's idea of religion could not develop fully until he had successfully framed the problem of historical religions and satisfied himself of the essence of human nature. You have to find these two keys to the history of religion and man. The first key he discovered by pursuing man's interest in things sacred back as far as possible, back to humanization or creation it seemed. It appeared that all gods were alike, that all men were religious even when atheist, that all religions were alike, that all religions were psychologically at least polytheistic, and that a succession of changing gods was a reflection of catastrophic cycles of nature and culture. All religions were basically similar: they ritualized celestial and natural phenomena in human terms; they sacrificed, they slaughtered people; and they secured and protected them. Their historical behavior was basically schizoid. There were two ways of finding the divine, both almost inaccessible to Homo Schizo; one was to open up oneself to one's innermost depths in order to know whether some part of oneself is divine. The other was to examine the universe outside to see whether the divine must exist there and whether it is manifesting itself. This was a futuristic theology, to be sure. It was anti-rationalistic, that is, anti-Aristotelian. If more words need be applied, it was a phenomenological pragmatic, existential approach. In 1965, there occurs a mention of the idea of entropy, and Deg's view of religion may be said to have emerged from his reaction to this "law of nature." The world of the second law thermodynamics -- the dying world -- is the product of a dying mind. When the mind ceases to die and begins to live, the second law of thermodynamics will be replaced by an equally valid and scientifically acceptable law of creative evolution or creative condensation or creative intensification of specialized activity. [This ultimately ended in the theory of theotropy thirteen years later.] He remembers, of course, the aura of publicity that had attended the work of Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, and a kind of gloominess associated with the notion of entropy, merged with the character of Wiener who, he thought, might have committed suicide in Stockholm. Not long afterwards he came upon a book of Melvin Cook in the New York University library stacks: published in 1966, this difficult technical work on geophysics was by all odds the most competent and confident assault upon the premises of long-time geochronometry to be found. Cook's model of crashing ice caps and slitting continents set up the basis for Deg's geology. The main problem was to reconcile his own exoterrestrial first causes with Cook's Earth-based scenario. Beside this, Cook, in a few paragraphs on negative entropy, rendered Deg sensitive to a possible place in theology for a new process. As the time approached to write The Divine Succession, the negativism inherent in his destruction of history was unexpectedly counteracted by a positivism from this source. Deg's Journal, July 10, 1979 End of my generation begins. [I cannot deduce what he means by this.] NEW PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD If our model of the solar system is correct, with therefore a time 1 to 15 million years and if the universe is large and populated as it presently seems to be, the manufacture of negative entropic features of short duration should be occurring with much greater frequency than now conceived (although if time is infinitely regressive then the speed of their creation is inconsequential). However, in either case, the probability of say 1020 intelligent (negatively entropic) worlds is very high. Now there is no reason to use mankind as the measure of the 1020 intelligent world. Whereupon I postulate an X number of worlds where the creative dynamics of negative entropy produce beings of such intelligence and power that they may be called 'gods. ' If these are defined as 'beings with n times the intelligence and power of mankind (and they may be aggregates as well as individuals), one of them may be considered to be of such Intelligence as well as individuals), one of them may be considered to be of such Intelligence and Power that it may establish control over the universal process. In that case, we have the traditional concept of god exercised in new form of proof of omniscience and omnipotence -- that is, one who is created by the universe working towards that goal (by its essence) and who ultimately turns around and controls the Universe. If the chances of such a One having appeared. If the chances of such a One having appeared are low, and such a One surviving temporally in addition to all his other powers (i. e. 'God is external') sets up a chance that One existed but no longer does, then the Universe may still go on and on in the expectation that sooner or later it will create its eternal, omniscient and omnipotent master, where upon truly he universe will be intelligently (as vs. the present chaos) ordered and in which the far-flung parts will be compelled to cooperate. However, ideas were converging from all quarters. The theories of Homo Schizo and Divine Succession went along together and interlocked without difficulty or even awareness. September 9, 1972 I am going to Princeton today, expect to see Velikovsky. Have continued to probe his work though I have a mountain of tasks before me for the Fall. Am continuously tempted to rewrite his theories in my own language, to test them, to add to them if they test out, to explain their importance, and to put them into a logical psychological historical framework that cannot be ignored. I am scarcely prepared for the task, in time, resources, information, so keep nibbling at the edges (one would hope like the Martian rats that destroyed the army of Sennacherib, according to the Egyptians). At this moment, am reading the scarifying Babylonian poem to Ishtar (W. in C. p. 200). I note the line 'O furious Ishtar, summoner of armies, ' that concludes the poem. Again this works two ways: Ishtar causes the people to wander and fight: V. says catastrophes engender migrations, flight, armies clashing in the dark. Agreed. Many corresponding events in Greece, Near East, etc. ca. 1500 and 8th-7th century. But comes another reason for the armies and the clashes. When people are fearful, they assemble. In numbers there is strength and comfort. They do not disperse as 'logic' would tell them to. Any combat officer will tell you how difficult it is to get men to scatter for cover when under attack; they want to huddle together, even though the collective 'good' lies in spreading out. The rationalization of huddling; the assembly of armies, the summoning, is that the enemy is One, its intentions are unknown, the collective judgment of the tribe or people is needed (the greater the roll-call the better, the more secure the judgment) and the enemy may be the friend, who, it is desperately hoped, will be impressed by one's forces or lead one's forces against our enemies, indeed, demand to lead them. "I am your god, your leader. Why are you not gathered to greet me. Why do you run away; your running is suspicious. I demand that you assemble for My Coming!" All of this is not withstanding that in some places and areas people would in fact scatter to the caves and clefts, as the premonition of disaster came to them.( cf. W. in C. 212-3). Deg's Journal, Oct. 10, 1972 I showed Sebastian several pages of V. dealing with ancient China. He was moderately impressed. I asked about Tao. Sebastian holds the unconventional belief that the Chinese notion of 'heaven' is animated. It is a Being. I have that hook to hold on to. What set me to thinking was this: Tao seems like a refutation of catastrophism; no bloody gods. But in the beginning it relates the stories of heavenly conflicts. I was baffled. Tao seems so benign, calm, apathetic. Then the thought came: but perhaps Tao became Chinese uniformitarianism! Centuries ahead of the West. Perhaps Tao came to soothe mind and restore calm to the heavens. Really it wasn't long after Mars-Ares-Huizilopochtli-Nergal that Plato clamored for laws vs. disbelievers in celestial harmony. But now see: the West remained unsettled of mind. The gods did not go away carrying catastrophic theory with them. Humanists, historians and scientists interrupted the movement towards uniformity and celestial serenity until the 19th century and then the latter triumphed for only a century. Is it that Judaic Christianity carried the Bible, whose catastrophism would not be denied or effaced, right down through the centuries in the face of all amnesiac needs in religion, society, and science? Is this why the Western world (including the Muslim) has been so turbulent and aggressive? What is behind Tao? Do we now have a third amnesiac development out of catastrophe: Greek pantheons, Judaic chosen tribe and monotheism, and Tao calm reflectiveness? Deg's Journal, New York City, 1 A. M., 24, 1973 Just awakened by a call from Jack Martin, Baptist Missionary in Bangkok, regarding Paul. You cannot give up hope for man or woman, knowing that, if you do, the next moment will bring you a person who will reveal that you are wrong. EPILOGUE TO THE SETTLING OF HEAVEN If one has stood amidst a burning city, been shaken in an earthquake, or watched the throes of death, or looked down yawning chasms or into the ocean depths, or heard artillery shells scream and strike, each 'with my name written on it, '--then one can better ponder the awful predicament of our ancestors who over thousands of years suffered disaster manifold and many times over. They cannot be gainsaid their fears and plaints, and the qualities of their gods, those deeply involved companions of humans who became ever more human as they took the gods into themselves and ever more diabolic as they sought to master the games of the gods. The gods have retired into new forms. But they still operate through the busy humans whom the poet Rilke called 'the bees of the invisible. ' They are everywhere and scarcely as remote as our scientific texts would have us believe. They are in astrology, in fortune-telling, in magic. They fly to the scenes of disaster. They augment the forces of authority. They heal and console. They scare. They make anxious. They set the rituals for many as they have done since the age of Ouranos. They assume their own negations: for they argue with themselves in Natural Law, in Bureaucracy, in Dogmatic Materialism, in Reified Words, in Mummified Heroes, in Time and Worlds without end. They let themselves be molded into One, and the One obliges his necessities by becoming Many, Beyond all, they stand at ease waiting for Armageddon and the Day of Judgment. Then they will don their armor and rally their hosts. The gods have retired, yes, but it still takes rare courage to contemplate all of their continuing manifestations and to resist the invention of their negations. There is yet nowhere else to go. And few who would follow. By skating along on the ice of the cerebral cortex, mathematical astrophysics or another such exercise may sublimate the gods. Dumb bestiality may be equally functional in sublimating them. We think that of all ways of facing them, the best is to look at them everywhere, contemplate their every manifestation, anticipate their reappearance, but do no more. If there is any question of human madness, it is erased when one pretends to be divine. Our human destiny is an open question. We deny our humanity if we try to close it. We belittle ourselves if we plead with the gods to answer it at any cost. Here we shall have to leave the matter rest. Deg's Journal, Stylida, Naxos, July 3, 1978 The Old Testament of the Bible has been much on my mind this summer, because of my study of Moses and the Exodus, because of several interesting articles dealing with it by Sizemore, Greenberg, et al. that have come to hand, and because Ami reveals herself in a new light as once a child who has remembered prodigious amounts of the Bible from the nuns' school in Mulhouse that she attended. I have come to look upon the Old Testament as a great mountain range that has yet to be explored in regards to its effects upon the human mind, history, education, and anti-semitism, politics and society in general. Just as there is no good book on the Jews -- sociological psychological, and behavioral -- so there is none on the Bible. The early scientific rationalists of the Enlightenment (and their socialist successors) thought that merely to expose the Bible as a typical unscientific and superstitious document would be enough to put it onto the shelves of dead religions, anthropology, myth. They treated it as a discrete entity that could be taken off like a suit of clothes. What did our homo schizo Deg do socially with his polyego while inventing it? Personal affairs were not easy with him over much of the seventies. The daughters peeled off the family stalk into Bryn Mawr, Smith, and the University of Chicago. The four boys broke off prematurely. They split in every direction. Only Carl went through a university, held on at the Peabody School of Johns Hopkins University by a devotion to music and a character too irritable to knock about abroad. He did spend a while on Naxos, composing extemporaneously at all hours on a piano in the middle of the OldMarket section. The others went here and there in the world: wherever the newspapers were speaking of "endless Summer," of places where the action was, of Denver, Bangkok, Florence, Amsterdam, Australia, Cuba, Morocco, Istanbul and San Francisco, word would also come from them. Jill decided upon a separation or, perhaps more accurately, redefined her relationship with Deg around 1970 and Deg came thereafter as a visitor to Linden Lane in Princeton and then to his mother, on which occasions he would also see Velikovsky and Sebastian and maybe Tom and Rosalyn Frelinghuysen. The split was not abrupt or devastating; it was a drifting away that he felt less distressing because he was immersed in tides of preoccupation. It was like a pattern that stretched until unrecognizable, and then tore, or like the string tricks people do with their fingers, when with a single movement of the fingers the strings slip into a new form. Following upon his relatively flushed income of the sixties, when what he wanted to do coincided with what agencies with money wanted him todo -- investment brokers, publishers, Bill Baroody's American Enterprise Institute, the war establishment -- his finances fell into poor shape during the seventies. Despite ordinary and extraordinary family expense, and his contributions to his mother's welfare, he took leave from his University and spent all of his savings and gave his library to the Alpine college. He gave up trying to publish his works on world government in America and published them in Bombay, where his friend, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, was building an Institute. Deg was insisting that a Kalotic World Order movement should come out of Bombay or Istanbul, not the United States. He stayed at Washington Square when in New York, became intimate friends with Nina Mavridis who lived in his building, he taught his courses, wrote steadily, and put together the college in Switzerland with the help of several students. Nina was generous, but could hold her professorship at La Guardia College for only a year. They married after a time but separated after several years of being together, and she moved to Berlin. He moved from Washington Square Village to 110 Bleecker Street, where he spent little time. He stayed with Dick Cornuelle, he moved into Ken Olson's loft in Little Italy, and he visited happily with Donna Welensky for a while. In Europe he lived in Switzerland and in Naxos. He was close to many people during the seventies. Although a gypsy he gave the impression of being fixed somewhere and of soberly pursuing a reasonable plan -- people knew not exactly where -- except that the where was not where they were. One month he would be in Vietnam, then he would be staying for a week at a little hotel in Sion where the barmaid and he became fast friends and at odd hours he would tell her of many things and she would tell him of her Algerian mother and what the people of Valais were like and how they regarded her. Then he would be in Naxos, buildings without the means to build, fixing with crude tools, and writing. Friendship would be struck up with those who came by his isolated place and people would come from town and he would go to town. Sandy came from Australia and might even have swum from there, a blond eel, and he heard of culture and society "Down Under," and they traveled together to America; he laughed to watch her tapdance. Sigrid Schwartz came from the Black Forest with her little boy who carved the surface of his marble table with a neolithic flint while Sigrid told of her mother who asked to be carried to the grave with a jazz band playing "The Saints Come Marching Home," and so it was done. He spent a good deal of time underwater in a diving mask and knew the bottom like his own land, and could pluck a bit of pottery out of its rock fastenings any time and give it to a pleased Hamburgian, Londoner, or Trondheimer. Wherever he went in the world, he never truly wandered, but was always bent upon something to do with study, business, politics, education, and everything else seemed to be related. He was sometimes impatient, pressed by perceived obligations, but never at odds with himself. And wherever he went, half of his baggage consisted of folders, full of reprints, chapters in progress, manuscripts, proofs, correspondence and notes, never less than thirty pounds of these, including the folders that dealt with the job he was on. Hence he was never bored, nor even idle when he wanted to be idle, for he could hardly wait for the day to dawn in New York, London, Tokyo, Saigon, Bangkok, Bombay, Cochin, or Paris so that he could write and read in order to write. Many were the occasions, though, when the needed piece of paper had been left behind or a needed book was on a faraway shelf. Nor could he half control the crazy-quilt appearance of his work in progress, paper of different sizes and quality made in different countries; handwriting altered by different writing surfaces, some on vehicles in motion; writing in pencils and pens of blue, black, red and green. His psychological counterpart, Jean-Yves Beigbeder, would turn up or he would find Jean in Paris or at Nevis in the West Indies, and they would celebrate life and make great plans, until one day Jean slipped into the sea from a stalled motorboat off St. Kitts to swim ashore for help and was lost into the night and forever. So he had many friends, good friends, he thought, most of them going unnamed, like Carl Stover, Rashmi Mayur, Kevin Cleary and his gang who hated their enemies more than they loved him and wounded the college, Jay Hall, Barbara Schmidt, Christine Ressa, Peter and Annette Tobia, Charles Billings, Carl Martinson, Phil Jacob, Ken Olson, Levi Fournier, Dick Cornuelle, Jay Hall, Savvas Camvissis, Stephanie Neuman. Even to mention them is not fair to his wishes, for he will complain bitterly that each person means everything to him when they are together so that he cannot stand seeing them on a list, where they may seem like numbers of the days on the calendar of a long-gone year, deprived of all the riches that they presented to each day. Life carved its channel more narrowly after Anne Marie Hueber came upon the Naxos scene. They lived in comfortable poverty, traveling irregularly and eccentrically, along the path of Washington, New York, London Paris, Alsace, Florence, Athens, and Naxos. Great energy now went into the Quantavolution Series, while she wrote her novels and lent him a hand. All this I wanted to say, though briefly; creativity is always in context -- whether Marco polo in his vast Asia or Immanuel Kant in his little garden -- and I fear not so much being irrelevant as that I will convey neither the context nor the created substance, whether in themselves or as they meshed together. Whatever he was up to and wherever he was, by the late sixties, Deg, like many another but in his personal style, was radicalized. He not longer believed in small solutions -- whether laissez-faire in economics, gradualism in politics, or incrementalism in biological and cultural development. Pursuant to many early signs, holospheric quantavolution took possession of him. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 3: } {Q - } {C Chapter 9: } {T NEW FASHIONS IN CATASTROPHISM} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER NINE NEW FASHIONS IN CATASTROPHISM Deg's Journal, November 24, 1967 Rereading carefully V.'s Earth in Upheaval, I read the sections on the age of waterfalls this morning and, as I poured coffee beans into the coffee grinder just now I wondered at the marvelous parallelisms or analogies of force -- an old observation of course -- cascades great and small, all the same --what makes them "different"? Man's size? -- which separates everything in the world into big and small? Time is such too. Easy to see and believe the existence of gods who pour Victoria Falls as I pour coffee beans. Think if all the world would be reduced to the same proportion, Would we then get a marvelous set of insights into hitherto baffling problems ? Would suddenly the rich world become dross and dull? Another entry, several days later : Velikovsky came by for a few minutes, left a couple of items, and loped off saying "I have left too much for the last mile." Too many interruptions, many of his own causing: too many projects, too. At least he has gotten reliable Juergens to edit his "Ten Trials" for publication [it never happened]. We talked of Livio Stecchini who is working on ancient measures and geography. His writing may never see the light. Why? "He cannot bring things to fruition," I said. "The idea is hard," said V., the inception." I added "The conception." "The conception is a pleasure, the birth is painful," said V. and he left it at that. He went to the library. He loves it and works unceasingly and effectively there. The sky in Princeton is low and the air smells of snow. Scholar's weather. Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval assembles "the testimony of stone and bone." "Wherever we investigate the geological and paleontological records of this earth we find signs of catastrophes and upheavals, old and recent." It gives an old-fashioned sense of the geology of the last century, before jargon swamped its literature. The feeling is deceptive. The plain speech was deliberate, both because little technical language was required to make his case and because his large audience could not be embraced if jargon intervened between the writer and reader. He also avoided exoterrestrialism, so as to show that you do not need to introduce comets in order to prove that catastrophes had befallen earth. However, he allowed many implications to be drawn from geological data pointing to astronomical reorientation of the Earth. And in his conclusion, he made the point forcefully that "The earth repeatedly went through cataclysmic events on a global scale, that the cause of these events was an extraterrestrial agent." He did not deal with electrical phenomena, a strange omission for one who preached an electrified cosmos. (It entered into a supplementary paper that was printed with the book itself.) That much material on electricity could have been considered was shown by William Corliss, who began compiling it during the 1970's; and by V.'s friends, especially Ralph Juergens in the 1960's then too Eric Crew in England, Milton, and Deg. Nor did V. take a radical position on geochronometry. He refused close combat with the giant, Time. To defeat macrochronic arguments he carried forward the order of catastrophic topics, still valid, with new evidence from biostratigraphy. Although he advanced catastrophic evidence into prehistorical and even historical times, he hardly advanced the theory and methodology of time determination. He did not attack the long-time conventional view of Earth history. The best work on short-time geology or microchronism was done by Melvin Cook. V. rejected continental drift and his arguments against Darwinism were those well-elaborated by creationists and scientists of "saltationist" persuasion long before. Nonetheless, the work has solid merits; Harry H. Hess knew it well; he could find no falsehood or factual errors in it, only a theory which he could not accept or announce ex cathedra; and he recommended the book to his students in geology at Princeton. There was much to be learned from it that a student could otherwise obtain from no single source. It was controversial; the geologists dismissed not only its style but also its catastrophist ideas. V.'s scheme to make headway among geologists by presenting a "clean" book, without assistance from legend or astronomy, failed. Yet, today, after 27 years, his book can hardly be called controversial. It is advanced, not avant-garde. Still it is more complete, logical, exact, clear, and secular than any other work in geology that considers catastrophism. The comparable next best work, privately published and quite unknown, was completed at the same time by geologists Allan Kelly and Frank Dachille. That is: Target Earth: The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science. Also more daring and provocative, and also highly professional in method, is geophysicist Melvin Cook's work that I already mentioned, Prehistory and Earth Models, published obscurely in England a decade later, which employed purely terrestrial forces in explaining Earth's features. Both books are superior in method to Velikovsksy's book, more complex and more original. Both books. I hardly need add, are practically unknown and not cited among geologists and general scientists; indeed, they were not common currency among cosmic heretics because V. neglected to admit them. When a true believer is excommunicated or goes apostate from a charismatic cult he is, if let go scot-free, inclined to start his own cult, and in science or art, there is every reason to wish the apostate or excommunicant well. Robert Stephanos left V.'s circle and found a new interest, another cosmic heretic, by then deceased. William Comyns Beaumont is hardly known today but was a top-ranking English editor and a brilliant catastrophist. His work turned ever more to the -- quite mad -- idea that the Egyptian dynasties up to the 13th century B. C. ruled in South Wales and that Jerusalem was originally located in Edinburgh; this plunged him into obscurity, even among catastrophists ! Stephanos resurrected Beaumont, located what was left of his materials, and formed a committee to promote his work. He prepared a list of his ideas, culled from Riddle of the Earth (1925), The Mysterious Comet (1932), and The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain (1946); he sent them to Deg who verified the list. Beaumont, on evidence not at all execrable, positioned Atlantis on the British platform and accepted what the Egyptian priests told Solon, that their ancestors had been at battle with his Athenian forebears when the great Island sank amidst frightful tumult. Here were Beaumont's more "reasonable" propositions: 1. The geology of the world's surface is largely catastrophic. 2. The catastrophe was caused by a cometary collision. 3. All geological formations were shifted as result. 4. Cosmic lightning played a major role. 5. Hydrocarbons were present in cometary tails. 6. Ancient chronology was several hundred years too old. 7. The Ancient calendars had to be revised because of the catastrophe. 8. Many species were extinguished catastrophically. 9. Religion was born in cometary worship and tied to phallic forms because of the shape of comets. 10. Fear of cometary collisions is inherited by mankind. 11. Vermin were deposited by comets, which also provoked plagues. 12. Deities from Egypt, Greece, Meso-America, and elsewhere were identified with planets. 13. Pyramids were both astronomical observatories and "air-raid shelters" for nobility and kings. 14. Planet Saturn, as a comet, caused the Noachian Deluge. 15. The Atlantis date (ca 9500 B. C.) given by Plato had to be shortened. 16. Extensive legendary evidence pictures the "hairy," "bearded," "blazing star" symbolizing comets. 17. Stonehenge, Avebury Circle and similar monuments were astronomical instruments. 18. Central American legends (and cultures) were contemporaneous with those of the Old World. 19. The intercalary "five evil days" were cursed because they coincided with a world disaster and the ending of an age. 20. The serpent, dragon, winged-globe, caduceus, and other ancient symbols are traceable to cometary catastrophes. 21. Religious festival are dated by cometary catastrophes. 22. Cometary conflagrations are the origin of coal deposits. 23. The ancients had a true 360 day year. 24. The planet Venus underwent great changes in color, diameter, figure, and orbit in the time of Ogyges. 25. Quetzalcoatl (Coculkan-Hurakan) commemorated the cometary dragon for the Meso-Americans. One significant thesis that V. could not have gotten from Beaumont was that the disturbing comet was Venus, although both identified Quetzalcoatl with the comet. The list appears to be defensible by the criteria of quantavolution. But once one goes into the books behind the list one enters a jungle of brilliant entangled foliage. Beaumont find innumerable bewildering geographical, geological, theological, and historical analogies between the regions of Great Britain and the Near East, particularly Palestine, such that the history of the two can be merged into one from the time of the Golden Age of Saturn until the Emperor Constantine (312 A. D.) of the Roman Empire. "The history of the Old Testament is the history of Atlantis," he writes. "Constantine (" born in York") had definite motive for transferring the arena of Jewish history and that of Christ to another region altogether." (Britain: Key to World History) Obviously, to enter Beaumont's world is a pleasure allowed to few. The reader may have noted that most of the theses occur in Velikovsky's, and also de Grazia's books. It is easy enough to explain the similarities in the case of de Grazia for he drew heavily upon Velikovsky, and cites all of his sources. It is not so easy to explain the parallels between Velikovsky and Beaumont. Velikovsky never mentioned or cited Beaumont. Could Velikovsky have read and forgotten Beaumont's books? His method of proof is entirely different; practically everything -- style, format, language, method, and evidence -- is different; only the conclusions are the same. And I should stress that when Deg came into possession of the Beaumont materials, he found them mostly unusable for methodological and theoretical reasons; Beaumont's stress upon Thoth, however, helped convince Deg that a catastrophic age ought to be assigned to the god Hermes and the Planet Mercury. Moreover, with regard to both Velikovsky and de Grazia, too many of Beaumont's conclusions are the same as theirs to explain them as sheer coincidence. I guess that either in the 1920's or 1930's when V. was in Palestine, the books, published in England and dealing with matters of interest to the Near East, made an appearance in the bookstores and were seen by V. A second possibility is that during the 1940's V. met with the books at the Columbia University Library where he spent thousands of hours in research on his own books. The Columbia University Library possessed of Beaumont's relevant works only The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain which was published in 1946, By this time Worlds in Collision had been written. V.'s library time during which he achieved his major beliefs relating history and geology to exoterrestrialism had been spent in the Columbia University Libraries. However, a note exists in his archive, mentioning having read Beaumont's 1932 book; the note dismisses the work. Yet V. expresses his wonder whether Beaumont had gotten his (V. 's) ideas by telepathy. V.'s memory was prodigious. Could there have been a 'Bridie Murphy Effect? ' This case, it will be recalled, involved a Colorado woman whose accounts of "another life" in Ireland were substantiated by investigations of her "home family and neighborhood" in Ireland; it developed that she had been unwittingly retailing material conveyed to her by her Irish nurse in early childhood and duly registered in her memory. V. had an unusual interest in mnemonic phenomena. One time Deg was visited by a nurse from India accompanied by a high official of the Indian Foreign Ministry. She possessed a rare factual and numerological memory. Given any long set of numbers, she could recall them and reorder them. She could also do tricks such as supplying a person's year of birth, knowing the day and month. When younger, she had possessed only an ordinary mind, then had global amnesia following her mother's death, and afterwards had been led slowly by her father to relearn everything. Despite her prodigious abilities, she was a modest person of ordinary intelligence. V. came to meet her and a seance was held. Deg's term for the type was "idiot savant." V. did not use the term, and he was unusually taciturn, leaving Deg wondering whether V.'s mind possessed a similar competency. V. one day confides in Deg that he has discovered in the course of his research certain geographical locations where oil and gas were exuding in ancient times. It might be profitable to explore there. They talk again and again about the information, and Deg draws up an agreement which they both sign. If they can interest an oil company in purchasing their knowledge, they will divide the proceeds. V. chooses a location. It turns our to be in Turkey. Deg buys maps of oil concessions and wells for the area and finds that the spot mentioned stands seemingly outside the boundaries of existing rights to drill, although quite surrounded by concessions. Better Turkey than Syria, certainly, they think. However, Deg knows the problems of Turkey, political and bureaucratic, the tangle of laws, the high cost of concessions. All that they have to sell is a dozen words. Given away without guarantees, and the project explodes. So Deg talks to friends, and telephones to experts. He speaks to his friend Robin Farkas, who is Treasurer of Alexander's Department Stores and who has friends engaged in oil speculations. The situation is ridiculous: there is no way to proceed, except by trusting strangers; give them the information and if they can persuade the most appropriate corporation or government agency to spend half-a-million dollars drilling, and if they strike oil they might be counted on someday to compensate the "owner" of the magic words. V. writes Deg, who is somewhere is the Near East, on August 12, 1968: Dear Alfred: Enclosed is the contract [for a book, never signed]... Ralph left on a cross-country trip... As to oil in Italy, I shall write you separately but I would also like to know how would you like to proceed if we come to an agreement as I hope we will...[ Is] the Italian monopoly holding oil company entitled also to off-shore exploration and exploitation?... And what is new concerning Turkey?... a concession there? In the matters of Cosmos and Chronos [etc.]... I assume you have received my former letter (or letters), last to Samos. I wish to think that you have achieved many goals during his trip as also piece of mind and serenity that usually eludes very active minds -- though you may be an exception. I look forward to a letter from you and shall answer speedily. With warm regards. Yours, Immanuel Deg is nonplussed, and heavily occupied. He cannot figure out an easy way to get in and out of an oil arrangement. He had the same kind of difficulty once before when he wished to engage the Xerox corporation in a system of information retrieval. There seemed to be no assured way of handing over useful knowledge. Perhaps it would be best to publish the information for the benefit to all those interests that might want to scramble to profit from it. Or give it to a friendly government, or to a friendly corporate officer. Or hire someone to run around among the oil companies and venture to the historical locations; such a person would need funds, must be made a partner, and had to be trustworthy. Nothing more was done, and the several indications of petroleum rest in their ancient sources. In recent years, oil explorers have come to hire dowsers, several of whom claim to be able to sense oil locations simply from maps. Deg asked an Exxon official whether the company might not profitably set up or contract for an office, which for a million dollars could carefully read every ancient document that exists to discover relevant references. After all, to dig a hole costs half a million dollars. Deg wrote a memo about it. The idea seemed to Exxon rather odd. (They hadn't yet heard about dowsing.) So Deg quit trying to sell information from ancient sources. By 1970 there are intimations that Deg would be moving into the field of geology. Typically, he notes some striking fact and then reviews his life experience to weigh its significance. Then he moves out in a number of forays, both intellectual and operational, some of which lead nowhere, others foolish, still others abandoned midway, one or two coming to a conclusion. But meanwhile, like a beaver's dam, the sticks begin to make a frame, the holes are plugged up, the waters are stemmed and a structure manifest itself. Folders begin to collect notes and ideas. Years may pass, during which time little that is directly relevant and purposeful happens in the field, for he is occupied with other writing, or with education, politics, war, and personal concerns. Still, a cluster of opinions begin to form and he is infected by the specific ambition. He has fantasies of a message to be conveyed with fierce logic and compelling force but is already telling himself in a small closet of the mind that he must be respectful and persuasive. Then he foresees an opening of Time and feels inspired to create a book. He recorders his ideas and notes in a dozen successive outline; several introductions appear and vanish; meanwhile he writes one after another the chapters. A bad chapter is washed out. A bulky chapter is broken into two, and a section of it is floated into a new position somewhere else. The writing is heavy labor and becomes increasingly furious and fluent. What ends up as The Lately Tortured Earth, written in seven months of 1982, began as a note on strange ashes, following a reading of passages from Schliemann's report of his discovery of "Troy." Deg's Journal, Stylida, July 7, 1970 Early in World war II, the Germans air-bombed Rotterdam as a terrible 'object-lesson' to the Dutch to obtain their surrender. Then late in World War II, the British and Americans bombed Hamburg, Dresden, and other cities, using many thousands of incendiary missiles. In no case, despite high buildings, much wood construction, and inflammable objects, did the immense fire leave thick layers of ashes. How do we explain, then, the heavy compressed layers of ashes that cover so many ancient cities. I cannot go along with the many experts who casually assigning these remains to an invasion, the loss of a battle, or accidents. They are really "playing with fire." Schliemann's pretty little story of his discovery of "the treasure of Priam" is a case in point. He implies that somebody carrying a large casket of good objects and other precious goods had to abandon it suddenly during the final stage of the siege because he or they were pursued hotly. Over a copper shield "lay a stratum of red and calcined ruins, from 4 3/ 4 to 5 1/ 4 feet thick, as hard as stone." He nevertheless could extricate the shield and the casket of articles associated with it by employing 'a large knife. ' He [Schliemann] writes, "It is probable that some member of the family of Priam hurriedly packed the Treasure into the chest and carried it off without having time to pull out the key [whose wooden handle was gone]; that when he reached the wall, however, the hand of an enemy or the fire overtook him, and he was obliged to abandon the chest, which was immediately covered to a height of from 5 to 6 feet with the red ashes and stones of the adjoining palace." How remarkable that this kind of reading of the ruins has prevailed to this day! And I have noted others from stories of the Near East, Etruria, and Meso-America. All references to ash layers in ancient times need to be collected. The levels should be recorded, along with the normal data on what is above, below, and the site location. Of course, C. Schaeffer has done something like this in the Middle East and Velikovsky had added some other reports. A special study, however, is lacking. It should also be noted that the original layer must invariably have been much thicker than the final layer as discovered by archaeologists. This was mentioned by Nicola Rilli in his book on Etruria; yet he persisted in speaking of a Ligurian invasion and other mishaps, not associating the ashes with natural catastrophes or the deluge that he believes overcame Tyrrhenian civilization. The Pompeiian, Herculaneum, Krakatoan ashes should also be measured. Ultimately, we should sample the ashes to determine whether their origins were local or distant, terrestrial or celestial (this may be possible now that we are beginning to know the geological composition of Moon's surface and perhaps soon of Venus and Mars; they must, or course, be dissimilar; if similar, we may be stuck). In 1973 he goes to work seriously on the case of the Trojan ashes. The literature of what he calls paleocalcinology is nil. He prepares a memorandum and sends it to several experts, asking them for citations and an opinion about the possible sources of the heavy calcinated debris of the "Burnt City" of Schliemann. They give him other names, until he has a score of informants, practically all of whom are curious and helpful insofar as they have something to offer. Graig C. Chandler, Director of Forest Fire and Atmospheric Sciences Research for the Federal government, wrote him a letter that might serve as a model of scientific altruism. I quote it at length, for that reason alone, even though its contents are in themselves fascinating: Dear Dr. Grazia: Forgive me for taking a whole month to "reflect briefly" on your letter of February 8. The delay is even less excusable since I have come up relatively blank on the citations you requested. I do however have a contact who I know is quite interested, and deeply involved in archaeological investigations of past natural fire history. You should contact: Dr. Edwin V. Komarek, Sr. Tall Timbers Research Station Route I, Box 160 Tallahassee, Florida 32301 All the half dozen references I have been able to unearth that deal directly with prehistoric charcoal and ash deposits stem from Ed Komarek, so you will undoubtedly get them, and more, directly from him. I found your manuscript fascinating. However, there are some points you should understand before going too far with a theory that credits wood fuels, either forest stands or urban constructions, as a source for 15 to 20 feet of ash fall. A natural forest can easily meet or exceed the 200 ton biomass figure quoted by Kelly and Danchille. However, in a living forest, only the material less then one-half inch or so in diameter is ever consumed by fire, regardless of the fire's intensity. This practically never exceeds 30 tons per acre unless the fire has been preceded by some other catastrophic event such as massive insect kill, logging, or exceptional weather anomaly. The "ash" residue from the complete combustion of wood ranges from 0.1 percent for white pine to 2.2 percent for western hemlock. Actual residues from naturally occurring fire are much higher, ranging from about 10 percent in low intensity fires down to the proximate analysis value in firestorms. Thus, there would be less than 3 tons per acre of "ashes" produced by the burning of the densest forest. This is an amount about 10 times as great as the fertilizer you spread on your lawn in the spring. There is an abundance of practical experience on distribution of ash from large forest fires. The Peshtigo Fire of 1871 burned more than 300,000 acres completely surrounding the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Contemporary accounts mention "ashes piled nearly an inch deep in the streets." I have been in several forest fire where newspaper accounts played up "ashes falling like rain." In every instance with which I am personally familiar, the resulting deposit could be measured in millimeters. Cities, of course, have much heavier fuel loadings than do forest. But again, ash residue from the burning of a city is measured in inches, rather than feet. The accounts from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire are good evidence on this point. In firestorms, forest or city, there are no ashes left. Firestorm winds scour the burned area clean. Although it is completely out of my field, I would theorize that the only possible way in which a deposit of wood ash many feet thick could be produced in a single event would be to mechanically reduce the wood to rubble (earthquake), cover it with an inert material at high temperature so that the combustion could not occur (volcanic ash fall), and reduce the wood to charcoal and "ash" through distillation. I have never seen "red ashes of wood" in natural fires, and the term spunds much more like a distillation residue than a combustion residue. I hope the above discussion is helpful. Please don't hesitate to write if I can be of further service. Deg's exchange with Ed Komarek may also be worth quotation: Dear Dr. Komarek: In an endeavor to pursue a number of baffling contradictions in ancient and pre-historical times, involving the life and death of ancient settlements and the development of various human traits and customs, I have come upon indications of huge conflagrations involving layers of ash deposits that to my mind could never have originated, as the archaeological community tends to believe, from the ravages inflicted upon the settlements by conquerors with torch in hand. Several Strata of the city of Troy (Hisarlik) in ancient Anatolia give evidence of inordinate destruction, sometimes by earthquakes, sometimes by both. Yet there appears to be no great volcano that might have exploded or collapsed nearby. Although perhaps none has done so, it appears to me that a chemical examination of these beds of ashes of the different centers of exploration in Asia Minor and the Middle East might tell us whether hand-set flames, volcanic fall-out or some other less familiar element may have been involved. May I ask about the nature of your studies and work in this field, and whether you could put me on to some literature in it, and further whether you know others besides ourselves who might be interested in it? I would be most obliged for your advice. April 29, 1974 Dear Prof. de Grazia: I am much interested in some of the comments you make. If the sample of the ash could be examined under an electron scanning microscope we might be able to tell a little bit about where it came from. In fact, if you could ship me a small package of it, I will certainly put it under an electron scanning microscope and see what I can determine. Under separate cover I am sending you several of our publications, particularly one in connection with particulates from forest and grassland fires. With this technique it might be possible to pinpoint what type of ash you have found. Of course many of these early cities had a tremendous amount of woodwork inside of them and of course, these would burn even inside of stone buildings. We certainly should be able to tell the difference between volcanic particulate matter and that from wood or grass. [He goes on to describe the work he has been doing on natural fires and the origin of cereals in Anatolia, and expresses interest in the continuation of the Trojan project.] May 28, 1974 Dear Mr. Komarek: Thanks for your letter of April 29 and for the many materials that arrived subsequently. I have been having a field day with them. The enclosed paper on "Calcination in Pre-historic and Ancient Times" carries some of the logic that has led me to my present interest in the testing of ashes (and, I may add, mega-lightning or Jovian lightning, which, I think, may have been almost qualitatively different and/ or vastly more frequent and destructive at some periods than during recent times). I wish that I had samples of ancient settlement ashes to forward to you so that the testing might begin. But I am afraid that their collection awaits a field expedition of some complexity. I am going to Greece and Turkey this summer, leaving June 23, and may be able to arrange some permissions and even to scrounge some samples. I am seeking support for the research as well, although I fear that the novelty of the approach, its threat to conventional theories, and the fact that my qualifications for the work, whatever the distinction I may hold in other fields, are not specific to the problem, will all handicap my efforts. Apropos of this, may I say, in asking for help, that you will give aid and consultation in the analysis of the obtained material? Thank you again. Incidentally, I note that we did not miss one another by much at the University of Chicago. I began my studies there in 1935 with $50 that my father borrowed for me and a trumpet that sounded a lot better to people then it would now.... On Naxos, Deg had met Professor Georg Keller, geologist of the University of Freiburg, and sought his advice as well. Keller knew Aegean geology and assured Deg that there were no volcanos near Troy, neither now or anciently. He doubted any possible source of ash from Thera or elsewhere. Ash falls are not uniform, even on a small island like Kos, where in one place he found 40 cm of Thera ash while in many other cuts on the island nothing at all was visible. Deg's Journal, June 3, 1973 Everything is understandable when it is simple and it is simple when only or two things happen to it at given time -- and the longer the time without their changing the even more simple is the scheme. Thus the mechanics of the earth seem understandable when a presumed history's is said to permit only a couple of motions and even these are under severe constraints. However, when in fact, the real history of earth is shown to have involved large changes in not only a couple but in many motions, then an exact explanation of what happened may be impossible, especially so since no reliable observers reported most the events. One reason why uniformitarianism evolved rapidly and persisted is that it created a simplistic history, evening out things over time and subjecting them "normal" changes. One reason why there are so many theories explaining natural history is that each man can barely cope with possible effects of his one favorable type of motion and change. He ruminated about oil, about tectonism, about the Thera explosion of 3,000 years ago, about the earthquakes that long ago shook the now seemingly stable earth beneath Athens. Here he is at New York University, noting a meeting with Professor Charmatz of the geology faculty on Oct., 9, 1973: Deg's Journal Lunch with Prof. Charmatz of the Geology Department. Nina came along we ate at the Faculty Club. I worked to minimize threat, arrogance, conviction re our subject, the question of how ashes of ancient times are laid down and composed, in relation to Velikovsky's theories. I needed all grace and tact to do so, for young Charmatz was ready to lecture me on my foolish dilettantism. I could see; he was nervous and prepared to give and receive aggression. He had hardly ordered lunch before he blurted out that V. cited sources that could only be found in some exotic library, that one good guess did not make a theory right (he cited the surface heat of Venus), and that V. was an astrologer. I let it all go by with sympathetic murmurs and a soupHon of rebuttal. Then he smoothened out, and began to talk to the point. As usual, what seems simple is difficult to bring about in experimental science. I did discover that no sure blocks confront a set of distinctions among ash -- heaps of varying chemistry, origins, duration, quantity. A crucial test is possible. We need an interdisciplinary team -- archaeologists, chemists, geologists, zoologists, geographer, engineer, mythographer, and maybe even a social theorist or methodologist. Then we need to find sites around the world where these ancient ashes lay, analyze them, and try to explain their presence in depths varying up to an original 12 feet. Charmatz became quite involved and is willing to go along with me into the possibility of such a project. When he loosened up, he began to release particular information of much value. We talked also of magnetism, of what is to be found in the bottoms of old lakes, and of petroleum. He declared that all (' not one exception, ' at my prompting) petroleum had been found in sedimentary rocks from ancient seas. 'But not all sedimentary strata have oil? ' No 'And if we found one non-sedimentary pocket of oil, the theory would be blasted? ' 'Probably. ' 'Tell me: is it possible that only in sedimentary rocks where oil has been found can oil collect? Or are there other formations that could hold oil over time? ' He seemed puzzled by this query. I repeated it twice more, in between answers that were not direct. I still do not know the answer, but it may be important. For if oil can only be held in one kind of rock pouch, then it is indefensible logically to claim that the oil and the rock are generically related. If all my pockets have holes in them except one and my money can be kept only there, it is incorrect to reason that this pocket coined the money or witnessed its coinage. How helpful it is when scholars of different fields come together on a problem. That is what a university community should be. There is so little of it, however. P. S. He began to ponder the fact that oil would decompose everywhere; that ashes would decompose, geology cannot tell. Now again he is searching for anomalies in archaeological reports of ancient times, and writes in his Journal of January 21, 1973: I am dismayed by the material that I must digest. This morning I scanned Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. a fat little encyclopedia edited by Robert W. Ehrich. I search for evidence of clear breaks between cultures. The authors do not give them. They classify but do not explain a multitude of changes in strata and objects. In a couple of instances 'sudden' stoppages are mentioned. Done in 1965, none mentions Velikovsky, one mentions Schaeffer (he could hardly miss him since Schaeffer appeared in 1948 and the author is specialized in Northern Syria and Northern Mesopotamia.) All are using R-C dating (adjusted) and grumbling about it. It is difficult to say whether the dates given reflect a sampling of possibilities, e. g.: If all the dates are put into a frequency table, would gaps show up and would these point to a destruction over part or whole areas? Is this statistically inferable? Look up possible catalogue of all R-C and P-A dates for the world and make a frequency table from them. If there is 1) any consistency of cluster or gaps? 2) any consistency in parts of the world; i. e. axis tilt or even another disaster would hit certain parts of the world worse than others. Later, the whole picture could be slid into a true chronological space. All dates seem to be later than 10,000 B. C. Then he is in Athens and has looked up Professor G. Marinos of the University of Athens Geology Department: Dear Professor Marinos: The Doxiades Organization informed me that you were supervising the analysis of the core drillings being made at a number of sites in Athens in connection with the proposed subway route.... I am interested in any evidences that your drillings may show of levels of calcination in the historical and pre historical stratigraphy of the area. By calcination I mean burnt debris, ash coverings, and earth subjected to heavy thermal stress. At the same time I would be interested in concurrent evidence of flooding on a large scale, associated with or independent of the burning. Professor Marinos is happy to oblige and introduces him to the engineer who is drilling beneath the city. The engineer takes Deg on a tour of the drilling sites, and shows him profiles of many cores. The drilling is too crude to tell him what he wants to know: what comes up is an already infinitely fractured Athens schist; no way of showing thin or scattered ashes. Athens must have shaken a great deal in ancient time, he thinks, but no indications of flooding or ash falls. Could the surface of Attica have been shaken, washed away and blown away? Possibly. The Acropolis was originally part of a larger mass, according to Plato, and to have been well- watered. He sails for Naxos, whence he writes to his old friend, Richard C. Cornuelle, in Manhattan: ... I have nearly concluded that the ocean basins were created about 15,000 years ago, and promptly filled with the waters of heaven. And I bought a beach ball, painted it white, and, with much effort and complication, finally succeeded yesterday in drawing upon it in crayon, a map of the all-land (Pangea) earth, the old poles, the old ice caps, and the fractures that split and drove apart the continents by an expansion of the globe. I had hoped to sketch the book this summer but the problems have come so hot and heavy that maybe another six months will be needed just to outline the work so that people like you can look at it and see that I'm not all that crazy. There's a good little foreign crowed here this summer, writers, artists, sculptors, teachers, drifters, even two (not one) belly dancers (American). Wish you might visit. Can give you the absolutely isolated stone cottage away from town where you can dwell stark naked on the land and in the sea. Or send someone you love. I meant to go to Turkey to get a sample of Trojan ashes, but the crisis, the out-of-pocket expenses, and other risk of the adventure made me put the trip aside and I may get a friend to do the job in the fall or come back in the spring, hopefully with a small grant in hand, to do it myself.... It is clear that Deg was working to explain global morphology by earth expansion. He had yet to achieve the idea that a lunar eruption from the Earth would cause the oceanic fracturing and rafting of continents, and explain many other mysteries at the same time. Deg's Journal, Naxos, August 15, 1974 New war crisis. Turks are going too far. People around me disturbed. How do I proceed with my strange far-away thoughts and study? Met with Gerhardt Rosler for two hours today, three hours yesterday. He wants to talk politics, I geology. We talk mostly geology. Today we figured out together the parallel faults between Paros and Naxos. May be important. Whole strait between may have collapsed recently. Very 'recent' fault, 'fresh, ' according to Gerhard. Stylida is an everyday sight, by geological standards. The area is not such as to excite the torpid theoretical tempers of geologists. If I can say something about recent changes here, it will show that one can go anywhere in the world with the aid of catastrophic theory, properly framed, and find 'potential support, ' at a minimum. Gerhardt dug up a note he made on a broadcast in Germany when he was a high school student. It said x m 3 of hydrogen per second struck the earth. Where did it go? Hydrogen is not part of the atmosphere. Does it combine with O to drop into the ocean as H2O? He had made some rough calculations. It is enough to account for all the oceans at 2 x 10 25 grams, we discovered, if E = 4.6 b. y. old Cf this with canopy theory. This held rings derived aboriginally, therefore there is no need for the continuous flow. But if hydrogen and oxygen met in a different gravitational situation -- when Earth was in Uranus-Gigans [later designated by Deg as Super-Uranus] complex and orbit -- they could compose the rings. Then, relieved from Uranus-Gigans, the rings fell and the stored H2O deposits with them. Now, since then, water would be building up with them directly! Is this so? Continental shelves -- have they been filling and dropping ? Back in America to teach for the Fall Semester, on November 11, 1974 he telephones Dorothy Vitaliano, who, with her husband Charles, worked as a geological team. Indiana University press had recently published her Legends of the Earth, the aim of which was to establish uniformitarian interpretations of both catastrophic folklore and of geological sites assertedly catastrophic. Her book's sales were disappointing. It is not so easy to sell anti- quantavolution books; although well-received by editors and professors, they lack an enthusiastic audience. As an example of her method, she presents an Arancanian Indian legend according to which in ancestral times two serpents made the sea rise. Earthquake and volcanism were followed by a universal flood. The survivors took refuge on a mountaintop which floated up close to the sun. Ever thereafter, the Indians repeated their climb up the mountains, carrying bowls (to protect their heads from the sun, they say), whenever an earth-quake occurs. There must have been numerous similar earthquakes and tsunamis, claims Vitaliano, to perpetuate the legend and its associated behavior. The myth and associated actions are, in fact, rather clear examples of universal responses to a universal flood, preceded by violent quakes and volcanism. The "Sun" was probably Saturn gone nova (the infant Horus and Jupiter). The twin serpents were twin comets either from a second confused catastrophe or debris from the nova. The bowls are means as protection from fall-out of all kinds. The continual repetition of the behavior is a form of compulsion, whether it occurs during "normal disasters" or in celebration of the anniversaries of the primordial disaster. The concept of illud tempus (the First Great Day, so to speak) that Mircea Eliade, the famed comparative ethnologist of the University of Chicago, employs, explains the psychic nature of such events. Deg's Homo Schizo I transfers the concept from a solely psychic complex to a complex based upon primeval experience. Now, at this point in time, Deg and the Vitalianos' should have gotten together to discuss their findings and differences. Not at all. Scientific development seems at times to proceed as a series of missed encounters and perpetuated misunderstandings. A small problem in business -- say a sentence in an annual report -- as Deg could observe among his friends in government and corporations, will arouse a rich system of conference telephoning, airplane rides, Xerox fireworks, and overnight express mail. Not that the scientists need to have agreed, but they might have erased 50% of the differences and retire, both enlightened. Often impatient of delays, and often pushing things to conclusion --conscious of the defects in scientific and intellectual business: Talk about Pop and Mom grocery stores! The intelligentsia is driven to work at the lowest support level of technology and economy. And is brainwashed besides to accept its lowly status. There is a mythical complex of incompetence and insufficiency which are inextricably rationalized and justified as a single process usually called creative or scientific, and worshipped as a whole. Yet how can you be sure that they would not waste the technology if you gave it to them. Every other occupation does, the military, the bureaucracy, the corporations, everybody except Mom and Pop. There's the paradox: the least efficient is the most efficient, the least costly is the most effective. We can't all be Mom and Pop, but everything else is worse in its own way! The Vitalianos were part of the Thera volcano study group, a combined geological-archaeological effort at understanding the explosion that tore apart a thriving island in the Aegean. The peculiar shape of the remaining land excited suspicions as to its history but no historical reference to it occurs. At first, therefore, modern volcanologists assigned it an old age. Then Spiridon Marinatos excavated cultural remains of the Bronze Ages; finally a town of Late Minoan Age was uncovered, Akrotiri. The geologists followed Marinatos in assigning the destruction to about 1500 B. C. and tying it into both the Exodus and the sinking of Atlantis. Eddie Schorr, a graduate student of the University of Cincinnati, working for Velikovsky, showed (contra-Velikovsky and all concerned) that the event could not be of 1500 B. C., but rather must have occurred around 1100 B. C. or later, and also that it could not be Atlantis. Deg adopted Schorr's view, even though he would have liked to see it dated at 1500 B. C., when there was a felt need to discover universal destruction surrounding the major Venus disaster. The others went merrily along writing books and articles to profit from the glamorous Atlantis and Exodus connections, which I think shows how readily 'hard' scientists will buy meretricious goods. V. was silent, though his voice, correcting his error and endorsing Schorr, would have carried weight. Schorr should have been granted his doctorate promptly upon the publication of this brief piece and his two articles disposing of the Greek Dark Ages (hence 500 years of supposed time) that appeared at the same time. Such was not to be. Indeed, he published the articles under the pseudonym of Isaac Isaacson, so fearful was he of being evicted from the Ph. D. program of his University. V. was disposed to support his fear; movements are made of martyrs. Deg could not figure out how justified was their fear, but was concerned with the self- destructive aspects of it. V. had paranoiac tendencies which fueled even stronger and similar suspicions on Schorr's part. Good for one another intellectually, they were bad for each other emotionally. Schorr was highly regarded at Cincinnati. Yet he finally left the University and retired to his family's business in Houston. His research continued privately, and he remained in touch with several other heretics if only through letters that are extremely long, brilliantly correct on Aegean history, and malevolently critical of practically everyone, including his correspondents. In one of these letters to Greenberg he attacked Deg's articles on Troy first for not crediting him enough for his advice and counsel (in what name he should have received credit was not made clear), secondly, for small errors that could and should have been corrected in a letter to Deg or to the publishing magazine, Kronos. Greenberg passed the letter to Deg saying, you see, here is what I have to deal with (for the rest of the letter was furious on other matters as well), or perhaps he was saying, see here, I am not the worst of the Furies. Efforts were made by Elisheva and others, following V.'s death, to consolidate Schorr's unpublished work on the Dark Ages into V.'s lean manuscript on the subject, to no avail. Deg offered to speak to the Cincinnati authorities on Schorr's behalf, but he was warned against doing so; the prophecy went on to fulfill itself. I cannot say, however, that word of the pseudonymous scholar did not leak to the Cincinnati network, for Deg told his daughter, Dr. Catherine Vanderpool, who dwelled in association with the Athens terminus of the network, of Eddie's predicament; and when Eddie put Deg in touch with Professor Cadogan of the University of Cincinnati, surely he must have been tempting, or even admitting, self-disclosure. Deg, we recall, was on the trail of Trojan ashes. One day he was working at the library of the American school of Classical Studies in Athens, and found in one of the volumes a remarkable sentence to the effect that samples from numerous levels of Trojan debris had been collected by Blegen's team in the 1930's. Yes -- Jerry Sperling, a visiting scholar from Cincinnati told him, who had worked on Troy and was at the Library at the same moment -- this showed the thoroughness of Blegen; no, he said, I do not know what they are or where they are. Deg had friendly access to James Caskey, head of the archaeology department at Cincinnati, through Cathy's father-in-law, Professor Eugene Vanderpool, a friend, and highly reputed as the "Grand Old man" of the School of Athens. Yes, the samples were in bags still, and were about to be analyzed by a geologist, Professor Bullard. So said Caskey. And Deg spoke to Caskey of his interest in the calcinology of the debris. On September 18, 1974, Deg called Reuben G. Bullard who, it developed, had left the University to join the faculty of the Cincinnati Bible Seminary. Deg found him well-disposed and even willing to undertake the work from his new position. The sample were contained in about 400 cloth bags in the attic of McMicken Hall. Deg wrote to Caskey and meanwhile reported to his friend Bruce Mainwaring, another cosmic heretic who also on occasion dug into his purse to help move along a publication, "very enthusiastic about your idea for an 'ash' project... and hoping to try to organize a program which embodies some of Eddie's ideas as well..." Then Caskey decides the same action should be taken; he writes Deg: 3 Nov. 74 Dear Professor de Grazia, Thank you for your letter of October 22. I am interested in the project, but must ask for a bit of time to inform myself further. It was a shock to me to hear that Bullard is no longer at the university. I shall be leaving Greece soon but shall be in Cincinnati only shortly before the Christmas holidays. Therefore I'll take up the question -- as soon as possible --after the opening of the winter quarter in January. It is important. My colleagues and I shall give it careful and serious consideration. With apologies for the delay and, again, thanks, I am Yours Sincerely, John L. Caskey There is no recognition, here or otherwise, that Deg might render theoretical or operational assistance. Deg sent a copy of his manuscript on paleocalcinology and Trojan ashes to George Rapp, whom Dorothy Vitaliano had recommended as having had an interest in Trojan geology. Deg now applies to the National Science Foundation and is turned down. Time passes. On May 12, 1976, Deg called George Rapp, who is at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and notes down the substance of their discussion: Conversation with Prof. George Rapp Department of Geology University of Minnesota at Duluth 1200 hrs. May 12, 1976 Has rec'd NEH and NSF grants to study the 350 sample bags from Troy. Is applying a range of chemical analyses to all bags. Has found some pollen and wood that can be 14C analysed. No reports yet and possibly for another year or two. (Students asst is going away for summer on job.) He is expecting to look at the terrain himself in December. No signs of vitrification in the samples. Visual inspection cannot often reveal ashes, but he will know whether there has been fall-out from volcanism or local incineration from torch or accident. I asked him about the scottish vitrified forts. He never heard of them. I described the findings of a century ago and said that the theory called for brush or log fires set outside the walls to harden them. He questioned the temperatures, as did I. 1000 degrees needed well focused,[ sic] as is done in ceramic baking (with help of venting.) When I told him that the fusing had entered a couple of feet into the crevices, he dismissed any brush fire. So one more important detail is cleared away. The vitrified towers are definitely of unusual origin. I asked him whether the soil of Hisarlik contained the same kind of ferruginous clay that we were talking about and he said he did not know but would look see when he visited the site. (He had been there before but had not noticed.) He said that the vitrification would be noticed by the archaeologists at Troy but none mentioned it. I am not so sure they didn't. What was the calcination if not vitrification? But the copper and lead deposits would have performed the same lightning attractive functions as the ferruginous clay. Hislarlik is a lonely tell and promontory, also attractive. I told Rapp that I would rap with him come fall to see if anything new had happened. He said he doubts if anything new will have happened. He said he doubts that he will ever have final answers. On June 15, 1977 Eugene Vanderpool writes to Deg: Dear Al, Here is Caskey's reply about the Troy samples, written from Kea. About the Thera conference sponsored by Galaopoulos and scheduled for July, I am told by Jerry Sperling that it has been postponed until next year. He heard this from George Rapp. All well in Pikermi, Yours, Gene J. L. Caskey to E. Vanderpool June 14, 1977 Work on the Troy samples is proceeding, very thorough, under George Rapp of University of Minnesota at Duluth, progress satisfactory. I am told. The results are to be put together in 1978, with the plan that they be submitted then as a supplementary Monograph in the Cincinnati TROY-Series (Princeton U. Press) [actually the results were published in 1982] Slow, but I trust worth the time and effort (and money). If you are in touch, tell Prof. De G. I'll try to write to him one day but am not sure just when. I haven't got the facts, and probably could not understand them if I had. Nothing definite has been reported yet, in any case. In 1982 the report finally appears, dedicated to Caskey who had deceased, extravagantly published by the Princeton University Press, and offered at a price of $52.00. Deg who has been following closely its production calls his friend Jerry Sherwood of the Press. She invites him to sit down in their offices and go through the book. He is disappointed. There are no findings of consequence from tests of the debris. The only organic elements of significance are from the straw used in making bricks. There is no indication that any of Deg's hypotheses was considered, even if to refute them. What could be concluded from this study that occupied several years and cost a hundred thousand dollars? Either nothing unusual had occurred beyond the man-caused or accidental burning and earthquakes, or the proper tests were not employed, or the samples were defective to begin with. Schliemann's burnt City remained a mystery, so far as Deg was concerned. Only some of the samples were used. He argues that the remainder stand for future investigation. Regardless of the sinister hypotheses of strange fall-outs or electrical-thermal emanations from underground, there are other more conventional hypotheses that would be worth further study. An outside team, say, such as Blumer of Woods Hole Oceanographic Center led when he was alive, might be asked to evaluate the samples on a much wider range of tests, seeking gases, polycyclic hydrocarbons, lightning residues, and volcanic tephra. On the one hand this may seem to be the suggestion of a crank who is never satisfied by proofs against his pet theory; on the other hand this may be one of those cases (so well-known in the record of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration, for instance) where decades of one-sided proof turn out to be bad and new theories and tests bring about retraction of the "proofs" and significant new discoveries. At Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Deg was visiting fire-dance expert and archaeoastronomer Elizabeth Chesley-Baity, and paid a courtesy call to the Political Science department. Professor Andrew Scott was cued in to Deg's quantavolution and suggested he get in touch with his relative, John William Firor by name, who was Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. An exchange of letters followed. One notes that the inquiry strikes into two lines of study: the possibly catastrophic origins of mankind and geophysical catastrophism. Firor's letter stuck in Deg's mind as he wrote the chapters on exoterrestrialism and the atmosphere in Lately Tortured Earth. June 3, 1976 Dear Dr. Firor: As I was explaining my present studies in the origins of human nature to Andy Scott recently, he came up with the suggestion that I address you on one type of problem which I've encountered. In my scenario of practically instant creation of the psychocultural human from a closely similar homo sapiens anatomy, I have had to set up models of genetic change, cultural traumas, and atmosphere change (plus combinations). In the atmospheric context, one major question is whether there occurred a radical change in some atmospheric constant, which then assumed a uniformitarian guise and which is not observable presently therefore, but yet is producing distinctively human behavior. For instance, what are the limitations (low-high) of the gases and particles or combinations thereof that an essentially human physical type can absorb or endure without expiring and secondly what mental and anatomical operations would be continuously altered by the different possible mixes? High altitude deoxygenation, nitrogen bends, oxygen poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, x-ray and ultra-violet effects are some cases of relevance. I wonder whether certain gases can affect the endocrines continuously; I postulate this because a constant heightening of endocrinal output will result in pathological exaggerations of typical behavior. Among the hypothetical constructs for abrupt change in atmospheric constants might be included increase or decrease in oxygen; CO2; ambiant ionization; x-ray; solar particles; heavy volcanism and gases over centuries. I have not mentioned changes in barometric or in atmosphere mass weight, nor of the effects of high, heavy ice-water rings or canopies that were removed in a series of cataclysms. The chain of causation may be complex, e. g., a life span increase (decrease) brought on by changed gas mixture promotes longer training and group memory and skills. Perhaps I haven't provided enough detail even to permit considering the subject. If so, please tell me. If this suggests to you some ideas of studies that you would care to relate to me, I would be most grateful. I call my field revolutionary primevalogy; the atmosphere which may be the most delicate of all ecological factors, is part of it. 8 July 1976 Dear Professor de Grazia: I have given considerable though to your June 3 letter asking whether there has occurred any radical change in some atmospheric constant. There are three areas that I can comment on: atmospheric composition, climate, and ultraviolet radiation. The present notions concerning atmospheric composition do not suggest that there have been sudden changes. Those who have thought about the history of the atmosphere take as a starting point a gradually cooling earth which has exhaled a good deal of carbon dioxide. In this situation, some sort of primitive plant life begins and the plants themselves begin to produce oxygen. When the oxygen content reaches some particular level, then animal life becomes possible and it too begins its long evolutionary chain. I am not an authority in this area, but my reading tells me that no one has yet proposed any cataclysmic changes in composition. There is some notion that we have reached an oxygen content which is self-regulating, that if plants produce enough oxygen that the atmospheric content tends to increase, the likelihood of lightning -- starting forest fires and other events would increase enough to burn up the extra oxygen and bring it back up to its regulated level. I do not know how accepted this notion is, but if anything, it works against what you are looking for, that is a sudden change. There are sudden changes known in the dust content of the atmosphere as a result of major volcanic eruptions. When the Agung Volcano erupted in the early 60s, it's well established that the dust in the stratosphere went all over the world and stratospheric temperatures changed for a year or two afterwards as the dust only gradually washed out. However, no ground-level effects of this process were measured and, hence, nothing that might easily fit into impacting a Homo sapiens anatomy. The climate does change. The northern hemisphere warned up between 1890 and 1950 and has cooled off since that time by a similar amount. The changes are larger in some parts of the northern hemisphere than in others. This particular change is not particularly large and perhaps not cataclysmic enough for what you are looking for. There are suggestions, however, in the paleoclimate record that larger changes have occurred more rapidly. Around 500 B. C., evidently, in the space of a day, or a month, or a year (after this long a time, it's hard to tell the difference) the climate of Europe cooled strikingly, clogging certain well-known mountain passes with snow, changing the dates of which harbors were free of ice, and producing dramatic effects on the trade arrangements, travel patterns and so forth of the time. There are other tantalizing bits of evidence of sudden changes in climate -- a rodent in Canada found frozen in thousands-of-year-old ice-covered terrain. Climate change and climate theory is a very active area of study just now and I would suspect a rapid accumulation of new information in this area in the next few years. Finally, ultraviolet light. Recently, we have found that a sudden stream of fast particles from the sun on one occasion struck the high atmosphere of the earth, produced nitrogen compounds that in turn destroyed some of the ozone and suddenly admitted more ultraviolet light to the surface than before. The effect went away fairly quickly as the ozone layer healed itself and indeed the effect was rather small. But it suggests that if during the changing patterns of the earth's magnetic field there occurred a moment when there was no general field of the earth, hence, no magnetosphere to protect us from solar particles, we might have an era in which the atmosphere would have much less ozone and, hence, the ultraviolet radiation at the surface would be considerably larger than today. It is hard to say how rapidly such a situation might begin. I suppose one could also not rule out the possibility of a major and sustained emission of particles from the sun which would begin essentially instantaneously and diminish the ozone layer for weeks or months, but we have never observed that much solar activity. Very recently you may have seen an article in Science magazine written by a scientist here at NCAR in which he pulled together many lines of evidence to indicate that during a 70-year period in the late 17th century, the sun seemed to be free of sun spots and the character of solar activity was very different from anything we have known in modern times. This fact at least holds out the possibility that sustained changes in solar activity was very different from anything we have known in modern times. This fact at least holds out the possibility that sustained changes in solar activity can occur and I would suppose if they can occur negatively, that is the vanishing of sun spots of solar activity, one might have eras of higher than normal solar activity. The carbon-14 record, which was used in the Science article as corroborating evidence, suggests that the changes in cosmic rays producing carbon-14 and controlled by the sun were of the same relative size of that occurring during the sun-spot-free period in the 17th century. I hope these rather crude thoughts are some help to you in thinking about revolutionary primevalogy. Sincerely Yours, John W. Firor The ancient Roman Encyclopedist Pliny mentions that the Etruscan city of Volsinium had been destroyed long before him by a thunderbolt from the sky. None paid serious attention to the remark, except the cosmic heretics. Deg, who had campaigned during the War in the region, would have liked to investigate Pliny's claim, a pleasant location for a critical test of the veracity of legend and the activity of Zeus the Thunderbolter or another god. After he had become aquainted with an authoritative figure of Italian geology, Professor Piero Leonardi of the University of Ferrara and the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, he wrote Leonardi about Bolsena and received a disappointingly assured reply: 10 March 1977 ... I read with interest what you said in your letter about the Lake of Bolsena and the publications of your friend Juergens on the possible attribution of the craters and 'sinuous rilles' of the Moon and Mars to enormous electrical discharges, but I must confess to you that the arguments of your friend do not convince me, for a complex of considerations shared by almost all planetologists. I am sending you separately a work of mine on the origin of the 'sinuous rilles' in which you can discern my opinion on the matter... He voices, too, his opinion that meteoroid impacts and volcanism can account for the craters. So far as concerns the Lake of Bolsena, one is dealing undoubtedly with a normal volcanic structure, and I do not believe at all that its origin can be attributed to extratellurian phenomena. He goes on to address himself to a query of Deg concerning a nineteenth century report of human bones and pottery found in Pliocene deposits and deposited at the Museum in Florence, and says that the report was probably made before proper stratigraphy was carried on, thus permitting a mixture of materials of different epochs. Naturally Deg was not satisfied. Comyns Beaumont had written many year earlier of the erratic nature of volcanic eruptions and suspected that meteors and volcanos transacted electromagnetically. Stephanos found a striking instance of this reported by the noted oceanographer Beebe on the ship "Arcturus" approaching a volcano at Albermarle Sound. In one day, two brilliant meteors came out of the sky and shot into the crater of the volcano. Noting that Flaugergue's Comet preceded the frightful New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake in 1811-1812, Deg figured that a correlation between comets and meteors on the one side and volcanos and earthquakes on the other side might well be significantly positive. Deg is also corresponding with Professor Ernst Wreschner at this time, inquiring whether he has news of the discoveries at Ebla. Wreschner on March 30, 1977 responds: ... On the Italian digs and tablets. There are two possibilities for the destruction of the town, 1) A natural catastrophe, 2) A man-made one. The time: ca 2200 B. C. I do not think that a natural catastrophe destroyed the town and left the tablets intact. The short-lived semitic (Jewish?) Kingdom of Eber had powerful neighbors in what is now Iraq. The time is also known as the beginning of the Hittite expansion... Other cosmic heretics are alert to the fate of Ebla. Its destruction occurs in Deg's Mercurian period, a highly electrical period. The nations are in turmoil; the natural forces of the Earth -- volcanic, seismic, aquatic, atmospheric -- respond to exoterrestrial forces, attributed often to the planet Mercury and his identities as Thoth, Hermes, et al. Deg laid down the challenge: that no exceptions will be found to the catastrophic destruction of settlements of this period. Concurrently, radar engineer M. M. Mandelkehr published his first study, this "An Integrated Model for an Earthwide Event at 2300 B. C." that extended Schaeffer's Near East investigations to demonstrate on all continents "a global catastrophe caused by an extraterrestrial body." He worked quite alone, contentedly so, apparently; Deg and Sizemore visited him on one occasion, inasmuch as he lived not far from Trenton. Philip Clapham made his debut as a cosmic heretic in 1983 with two articles in Catastrophism and Ancient History on Ebla, fitting it into the catastrophic chronology of the Near East. One of the most promising ventures of the mid-seventies was the little magazine that Hans Kloosterman, a Dutch geologist, put out from Rio de Janeiro. The Catastrophist Geologist went on for two years and subsided, but not before it had brought to light materials of German and Russian catastrophists quite unknown to the English-speaking heretics, and of a high degree of sophistication. Noteworthy especially was Otto Schindewolf, a paleontologist who had begun his publications in 1950. He favored the hypothesis that fluctuations in high-energy cosmic radiation caused the periodic extermination of most species. He contributed the essential concept of anastrophism, the positive side of catastrophism, attributing the birth as well as the death of species to radiation disasters. Deg heard first from Kloosterman in May of 1977 and replied to congratulate him. He absorbed material from at least half of the contents of the journal into Lately Tortured Earth. Kloosterman removed himself a priori from an association with Velikovsky, a step sincerely taken which would perhaps help to bring a new line of contributors to the field; however, it also put him out of touch with devotees of Velikovsky and actually incited antagonism to his work. He knew that catastrophists were few, without realizing perhaps how very few. He and Deg never met, and Deg would get snippets of news about him from Dutch heretics. The journal, which could have matched Kronos and SISR had it continued, brought in professional geologists, an element conspicuously absent in quantavolutionary circles. What Deg meant by ideological features of geology and science generally was amply explained in a note later on: As I moved from the theory of human behavior into the study of Nature, my intellectual baggage included the concept of a "scientific fiction" which had given me good use for many years and which may be hypothesized when encountering phenomena that are unproven or lead too far afield to explain, yet are needed to move ahead with an exposition. I discovered surprisingly that most natural scientists are not skeptical about some major guiding concepts, conceding to them the 'hardness' of reality (reality itself being a fiction of undeniable universal utility). Several scientific fictions can be named, however, that may be losing some of their utility and therefore should when employed should be watched for what they are doing to one's mind and the facts being ordered. Practical fictions of Science: a) the Ice Ages b) Natural Selection c) Continental Drift d) "In the Beginning," "primordial melt," the primitive solar system," "as the Earth was being formed," "illud tempus." Such a fiction includes: a) the indexing function b) the classifying of material c) an explanation of phenomena d) defense mechanism phenomena e) license to work (freedom) f) acceptance (reward) g) allows one to conjecture freely All may have in common defense mechanisms vs. catastrophism. May be analyze with similar concepts articles in Nature before 1970 and several Sci. encyclopedias' usages of these terms. Cf. Hans Vaihinger Philosophy of 'As If' When no longer functional, these may and should be reviewed to pass muster. All the while the cosmic heretics were sure that the planets and the Moon would display catastrophic effects along with the Earth. Planetary and satellite geology was carried on actively in the pages of Pens‚e and subsequent media of the heretics. The high heat of Venus was the central topic of the debate, but V. kept extending his list of claims to other planets and the Moon. For instance, in a letter to H. H. Hess, July 2, 1969, he wrote: Some nine thousand years ago water was showered on Earth and Moon alike (deluge). But on the Moon all of it dissociated, hydrogen escaping; the rocks will be found rich in oxygen, chlorine, sulfur and iron. Velikovsky had not then or later a fixed idea of when the Noachian Flood, which he is talking about, occurred. Here it was 9000 B. P. Sometimes he said 4000 B. P., at other times 6000 B. P., and it was this last date that Deg also chose when the time came to postulate a catastrophic calendar. Unlike V. and other heretics, Deg accepted the theory of "continental drift" that triumphed in geology during the postwar generation. He went far beyond it, pulling the Moon from the Earth at the beginning of the continental movements, in proposing that then the drift was a rapid "trot," assigning the total quantavolution to a large passing sky body which he called Uranus Minor. 24 December 1981 A Merry Christmas and Happy New year to SIS and yourself! The Editor, SISR Dear Sir. Dr. Peter Smith's "Open Earth" (V SISR I 1980-I 30-2) is not open enough to some tastes. If, as he rightly says, "The only certainties are that our sphere of ignorance is huge...," then he should let some quantavolutionary theory squeeze through along with the gang of speculations about continental drift. I do not call if "drift" but "rafting." (See Chaos and Creation, 155) In fact, I considered calling it a "trot." Its course has followed a negative exponential curve since its catastrophic beginning. The simplest explanation of the mosaic of jostling crustal pieces is an initial set of heavy shocks from a passing body that wrenched away half of the crust, cracking the remainder and sending it sliding hither and yon toward the great basin exposed by the lost material. For the moment, geophysicists are enchanted by the shivers of movement and the designation of the creeping pieces as major and minor plates. I have seen the most marvelous reconstructions of the Earth going back "half a billion" years; one is published by a University of Chicago paleographic project under Alfred Ziegler. In my view, the original plate until a few millennia ago was the whole earth covering the globe. What we can chart now are the millimeters of creep of the long uniformitarian tail of the exponential curve of decline from the original precipitous outburst of crust. To accomplish their uniformitarian infinitesimalism, most geophysicists have taken refuge in billions of years; thus can the curve be smoothened out. This imaginary flat curve they then prove by elaborating geological and radiometric tests of time, the very foundations of which were destroyed by quantavolutions. But, too, tests of time aside, if Dr. Smith would provide us with a single study proving subduction of frozen mantle back into the molten depths -- carrying with it light crystal material or, worse, where is all the stuff dumped along the shores? -- or if he can supply any other type of hard proof that the continental plates move under an Earth power that is sui generis and not originally extra-terrestrial, we should be most obliged. On the other hand, I do not intend to support Dr. Velikovsky's view of continental drift, which was always to my mind a non-view, "fence-straddling" (to allow an American political expression). As he says, "My position on continental drift was (and is ) intermediary between..." Between what -- an orange and a banana? Maybe he did not want to hurt Harry Hess' feelings, Hess having fathered the plate theory, for Hess was one of the few establishment leaders who treated him with a full hearing. Had Wegener's life not been cut short, he might finally have come upon the best explanation of continental drift, for he already had unblinded himself of major geological theses and had the basic components of continental rafting mechanisms in mind. I hope that Dr. Smith's youthful journal, which you advertise, will open up to articles employing condensed time scales and depicting external forces playing upon the terrestrial globe. Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia Deg's theory of recent lunar fission began in long fits of staring at the physiography of the globe. He was attracted by Carey's advocacy of a considerable global expansion as the basis for the globe-girdling fractures, but then put off by M. Cook's comments that the heat of such an expansion would have dissolved the Earth. Still, invoking exoterrestrieal help, he worked up first an expansion model, as is related in his letter to Cornuelle of August 1, 1974; then, after a year of worrying that expansion great or small could not explain the actual disposition of the continents, he decided upon an explosion-expansion model. Only Milton actively endorsed the concept. The cosmic heretics, who could visualize Venus flying by the Earth 3500 years ago, balked at picturing the crust of the Earth exploding into space to form the Moon a few thousands years earlier. But Deg found that the model, proposed in Chaos and Creation, of a binary solar system, recently disintegrating, could accommodate lunar fission along with every major features and dynamic of the natural and biological sciences, together with the earliest grand legendary themes of mankind. When he finally got down to writing at length about geology in The Lately Tortured Earth, the work came easily. It was simply a matter of taking up in turn the elements of the biosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere and applying to them all the material that he could gather about exoterrestrial forces playing upon the Earth. The more he wrote, the better he felt about the possibility of adapting conventional gradualism to quantavolution. It seemed to him that the scientific fields were still far behind, needlessly so, even when they were boldly led. After he had completed the book and sent it off to India for production, he became aware that a striking conference had been held at the resort town of Snowbird, Utah on October 19-22, 1981. Sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and funded liberally by several foundations and institutions, scores of experts gathered to report upon their separately supported and conducted researches in "Geological Implications of Impacts of Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth." Deg was of course unknown and uninvited; he recognized having met personally only one of the participants! Their papers were published a year later by the Geological Society of America. The conference would have been a practical impossibility a generation earlier. It displayed contemporary geology doing what it could do best, technical variations on a theme: given unmistakable traces of the occurrence of certain meteoritic falls, how might these be distinguished and measured, what excavations could they have caused, what chemicals could have been scattered about, what animals and planets would have died -- all of this tightly bound up with uniformitarian experience and highly mathematicized. One searches hopelessly in the volume for an enlarged philosophical and cosmogonical inquiry. Many topics went unaddressed, among them the possibility that important exoterrestrial transactions of the Earth involved pass-bys of large bodies without impacting; that planets might have played a role in cosmic disasters; that the measures of time employed might not be infallible; that the Earth's tortured crustal morphology might in its most general features be an exoterrestrial effect; and that heavy fall-outs of non-exotic material such as water and gravel might have occurred. When Deg examined the papers, he felt keenly the ambivalence and loneliness of a front-runner in the course of thought. The elation of being far ahead was countered by the fear of being disoriented and by the longing to be moving forward amidst a body of kindred spirits. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 3: } {Q - } {C Chapter 10: } {T ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TEN ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS In his journal of January 12, 1968, Deg writes of a conversation with Professor Lloyd Motz of Columbia University, the same who had called the attention of scientists to Velikovsky's successful predictions of Jupiter's radio noises and Venus' high heat: Motz turned out to be a cheerful sort, full of admiration for Velikovsky, but of course entirely convinced that the laws of gravitation and thermodynamics are much more positive proof against Velikovsky than are some historical events of which Velikovsky may have proof positive. (...) Motz is going, obviously, by deduction from laws that he regards as immutable. He feels simply that, whatever the historical evidence may be, it would be impossible for enough energy to the generated on Jupiter to launch Venus by eruption into the heavens. He wonders whether there might not be some third body that had appeared in space and constituted a counter force that have drawn off or helped draw off Venus from Jupiter or whether Venus had come from somewhere else in space. I pointed out that Velikovsky is firm at this time that Venus must have come out of Jupiter by eruption (But not volcanic eruption -- rather from disequilibrium owing to Saturn) and that we have no knowledge of a strange third body that may have been in space at that time within the planetary system, else we might have heard the name given this body in the records of the times. Still it is worth keeping an eye out for such an intruder. Motz says the same problem besets those who think of quasars as a high-intensity explosion, an eruption from larger bodies. Where can the energy come from, he says, and how could it gather together? With Director of Antiquities Spiridon Marinatos in 1968, Deg met astronomer Constantinos Chassapis who had studied the Orphic Hymns and derived certain conclusions about Greek astronomy in the second millennium B. C. The Hymns, he asserted, had originated between -1841 and -1382, but probably in the 17th century. They showed the Greeks to understand heliocentricity and the sphericity and rotation of the Earth, and spoke of the attraction of the Sun as the source of orbital movement, and named the planets, the seasons, the atmosphere, and the ether beyond. Their calendar was of twelve lunar months; they identified Saturn with time; and they referred to a universal law that regulated the universe and stabilized the Earth. Stecchini, Santillana, and Von Dechend, among historians of science known to Deg, were quite persuaded of the advanced state of the most ancient known science, so Deg was rather more impressed by the indications of modernity in Orphism, which Chassapis was exhibiting at the same time. If the hymns had originated so early, though, they went to prove a uniformitarian history of the heavens. Incompetent to challenge Chassapis' readings, Deg could but question the definitiveness of the poetic lines, which seemed indeed vague, and the technique of retrojecting the present celestial motions unjustifiably. The Orphic Hymns, Chassapis also maintained, evidenced an early knowledge to lenses. This, too, rankled with Deg. He had worried over a mention of a lens-like object found in Ninevah's earliest levels, and had discussed the general question with Stecchini. If the Bronze Age peoples had been able to magnify the stars, meteors, planets, sun and moon, they might also have derived proportions and distances among the planets, this making Jupiter the King and Saturn the retired king. Too they might thus have perceived the rings of Saturn and bands of Jupiter. They might then for religious reasons, and because humans are anxious animals, have created a body of legends ascribing to the heavenly bodies the various adventures, including approaches to the Earth, that the revolutionaries said were historical occurrences. Stecchini believed that the ancients had lenses, or at least would have built concave disks of copper alloys polished to a high reflectivity. He wavered often in his basic position about cosmic encounters. Always quite happy to play the game of catastrophic models, he might still be readily influenced by Santillana or another colleague to believe that other solutions might be found in the messages sent down through the ages by the earliest voices. Deg, on the other hand, even when he postulated ancient telescopes, could not explain away the concordance among ancient voices; did they have telescopes everywhere? Moreover the explosive speech of the modern skies and terrestrial crust were seeming to make a point. Not until 1980 did a space vehicle confirm the great and incessant electrical discharges of Jupiter, but then he had for fifteen years been persuaded that the legendary electrical behavior was real, and on a much large scale than anything that might be observed today. The same concordance on many other matters was consistent, too, with ancient legend. If the ancients had telescopes, they would have previewed the catastrophes but could only have modestly exaggerated them in their mythology. A possibility existed, he thought, that the theocratic elites, here and there, using telescopes, would purvey to the masses distorted history, where legends survive and where are perpetuated some happenings and forecasts; but there would be no compelling reason for widely divergent cultures to achieve consensus on these. Why, let us ask, would the priests of the Jupiter (Yahweh, Zeus) age, using telescopes upon calm heavens, invent catastrophic heavens of the time of the birth of Jupiter, and of the earlier times of Saturn? For that matter, the great telescopes of the past century have not induced uniformitarian astronomers to alter their dogma of a calm celestial history. However, they have made an increasing number of observers proto-catastrophists. So telescopes, even if the ancients possessed them, could not impress catastrophes upon men who had not experienced such. If Venus simply seemed big and beautiful enlarged 50 times, why would men go berserk, catatonic, orgiastic at her regular, safe, distant approach? Fossil telescopes could not affect quantavolutionary theory. They might even support the notion of cultural hologenesis that Deg espoused. The great Book of Venus was of course Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. In Deg's long acquaintanceship with the book there developed practically no significant errors of astronomy or geology, errors or omission of sources, or misreporting of legends. There is some exaggeration and "purple prose", as in the title that suggests explosive impacts between the planets Venus, Mars, Earth, and Moon, which he does not claim in the book itself. The style is less timid, hesitant, than might be deemed appropriate. There are hints of arrogance as he warns of the dire fate awaiting the theses of Darwin and Newton (less unseemly today than in 1950, however). There are no appeals to religion, only rare confusions of "ought" and "must" with the factual "is". A certain repetitiveness occurs that may be impossible to avoid, but which nevertheless tends to overstress and amplify some catastrophic occurrences. He avoids scientific and pseudoscientific jargon and the coinage of terms. I cannot here defend all of this, of which the first statement is already shocking: that "there are practically no errors of astronomy?" How can a book that enraged many astronomers commit no errors of astronomy? Apart from the main reasons, which are sociological and psychological, there occur two substantive reasons: Velikovsky established his natural history by assertions of fact; certain events either happened or did not happen and we weigh the evidence tending to the one and the other to arrive at a judgment about planetary behavior. Second, after this is done, Velikovsky asks how can the laws of astronomy permit such happenings. He understands the laws. But when the behavior of the heavens does not conform to the demands of the laws, he offers briefly some ideas as to what may improve the laws, such as the introduction of a larger measure of electrical transactions into solar system behavior. He reasons the same in respect to geology. In legendary matters, he follows Euphemeris the Sicilian (fl. 300 B. C.) who established the scientific canon that a myth is to be explained by natural causes. And when Dorothy Vitaliano years later attacked Velikovsky while espousing euphemerism herself, she failed to realize that she was merely reducing Velikovsky, not supplanting his method, which was the same as her own. By the standards that Cook, Bruce, Juergens, Milton and Deg came to set for sky-body conduct, Velikovsky was actually conservative and conciliatory to the establishment. He was heretical but not a full-scale quantavolutionary. Deg came to feel almost perfunctory when he argued for the middle-road quantavolutionaries like Velikovsky. If a mini-microphone had been implanted in one of Deg's large ears, we would be entertained by a litany of quantavolution over the years, emerging from an analysis of his stream of discourse whenever the subject occurred, whether it would be in Greece, Manhattan, or Washington, Princeton, London, Thailand, or India. What happens is this: most educated people are unaware of the case for quantavolution; the subject is perennially interesting; it is impossible to state or argue a full case; certain sloganized propositions are proven over time to have an enlightening and convincing effect; these slogans are packaged and delivered in personal and group conversations, with a couple left out where unnecessary or deemed inappropriate. I have not had the advantage of an elaborate study, but I notice the frequency of these statements, prefaced by something like: "more has happened to change the world by catastrophe than by gradual evolution." Religions are obsessed with primeval disasters." "Mankind has always been fearful of the skies, such that terrible events must have happened there." "Venus is hellishly hot and locked to the Earth." "Mercury now is believed to have been recently relocated." "Cosmic disasters destroy time measurements." "Big changes in the biosphere are connected with general catastrophes." "Ancient legends from around the world confirm each other." "The surfaces of Earth and its neighbors have been torn up recently." "The world is electrified from universe to atom with potentials that can overwhelm gravitational forces when exercised." "You can't determine what happened in natural history by natural processes nowadays." "Science is as non-rational as any other kind of behavior. And other such simplicities occur more or less frequently. Whether tossed out in defense or in exposition, the expressions collide with a variety of phrases with which the well-educated person is equipped, such as: Gravitation accounts for the solar system." "All methods of chronology give very old ages." "The solar system has been functioning as it is for billions of years." "You can't trust legends: they say everything and nothing." "Evolution is a fact: it look millions of years to change the horse's foot to a hoof." "The oldest features on Earth are hundreds of millions of years old." "No imaginable force can move the Earth without exploding it." "Venus' thick clouds work to make it like a greenhouse." "First came myths, then religion, then magic, then rational science." "Any local disaster can be exaggerated to huge proportions. After the clash of these sets of slogans is amplified somewhat, the discussion is usually turned off or diverted. Book reviews and scientific table-talk infrequently go even as far. Once in a while a foray in strength is launched by one or the other side. Even so, rational discussion or exposition does not ensue, but rather an elaboration of one of these slogans with the citation of authorities, or with dogmas more elegantly stated. Rarely does the exposition break out of the brush into the clearing. It would not be an exaggeration to state that in the two decades about which this book talks, no more than a dozen public presentations have occurred in which a systematic attempt has been made by a practiced and specialized scientist in the face of opposition to destroy and bury one or another facet of quantavolution, such as the capacity of moving the Earth without destroying it. If this condition appears incredible, it is because so few people understand the sociology of scientific communication, or human discourse of any kind. Scientists can answer questions that they pose for themselves, and spend most of their time doing so, and encourage their "stooges" to ask these questions; but they cannot well answer questions that are asked by others, true others, who come out of a different mentality and have different purposes in mind. Take an example from Deg's experience in these years from a quite distant field, political science, where in parts of three different books he proposed a single equal tax on every living soul: that the annual budget be divided by the population to figure the tax of each one. The shocks, reverberations, incomprehension, suspicions, reservations, indignation and flustered unmediated ejaculations assailing the idea make it practically impossible to present or discuss, even to the point of starting up research in the subject. Yet when he captured an honors seminar at New York University and forced the students to expel all their preconceptions and prejudices, and to dig up fresh facts, the single equal tax was not only understood by the small group, but was also preferred by them, as one after another of the terms were defined, the data researched, a sample of people interrogated, and the idea drafted into the common and understandable form of a legislative bill. On the proposition: "Venus is a young planet," first reactions tend to be equally obstreperous and incredulous. The attack builds up rapidly: The solar system is very old and stable, Venus included." "The heat of Venus is an effect of its great cloud banks." "A planet cannot be moved by any force without exploding." "No force capable of moving a planet exists actively or potentially." "Existing records reveal at least 4000 years of Venus observations." "Bode's law of planetary spacing forbids its moving from elsewhere or being elsewhere." "Planets cannot move from ellipses to circles, and to move they must take up elliptical orbits for a time. Against these, the quantavolutionary argument, as it was developed by Velikovsky and his friends, asserts: The arrangement of the solar system is only stable by our recent historical observations." "Venus is an exceptional planet in its dense atmosphere and with its great heat of 900 degrees F." "The heat of Venus is an interior heat moving upwards to the surface and into the clouds." "The hot planet Jupiter could have contained Venus, expelled it by fission (nova), and given it its great heat." "Venus rotates retrogradely, unlike the other planets." "Venus is locked to the Earth (not to the 10 4 times larger Sun's tidal force) in two ways: each inferior conjunction (243.16 days) finds it presenting the same hemisphere to Earth; and its axis of rotation is perpendicular (within one degree) to the Earth's orbital plane (even while 3 degrees off its own orbital plane)." "The postulation of historically active electrical forces allows a planet-sized body to move orbitally, axially, and rotationally without destruction, as an effect of the distribution of charges throughout the solar system and of the near passage of a large body." "Sacred and secular legends from around the world allude to the deviant behavior of Venus in vicinity of Earth." "The Venusian atmosphere, compared with the Earth's, contains 300 to 500 times more Argon-36, a gas thought to have been dissipated from the planets shortly after they were formed." "Venus practically lacks a magnetic field, it being 10 -4 of Earth's." "Venus possesses a comet-like blowing away from the Sun that is much longer than the Earth's relative to their respective magnetosphere radii." "The Venusian surface is heavily featured, despite its great eroding heat and eroding wind turbulence, but has no ocean basins." "Fires seem to be burning on the surface of Venus, which may be caused by burning methane or hydrocarbons." "Chemical composition of the clouds indicates no hydrocarbons (or components) yet, but the question is not closed." "Slight indications are present that Venus may be cooling off. The idea of a double sun, the system of Solaria Binaria, as Deg named it, came with shocking suddenness. It was a monster that came leaping at him even before he had a name for it, and before he conceived of a dynamic for it. On April 28, 1963, shortly after becoming concerned with cosmogony, his journal reads: Discussions with Velikovsky and Livio have not cleared up the phenomenon of the similar planes of the planets in solar revolution (maximum of 7% off) or even of why they rotate. Velikovsky and Stecchini are not very concerned, since Velikovsky's theories hold anyway. But I wonder whether the nebular hypothesis that has the sun throwing off the planets in an initial series of explosions is true and ask: Could the Sun have cast off the planets at different times, or more importantly, could the planets be created on their common plane by the pull between the Sun and a second sun or planet revolving around and near (a twin). Then from time to time a planet would be released from one or the other... While the people of his camp were arguing with conventional scientists over the origins of the heat of Venus and the chronology of Egypt, he took the time to wander about the cosmogonical fields and ponder what his friends might have known better than he, that is that changed motions of large celestial bodies signified not aberrations but somewhere back in time a basically different order. The old order must have functioned on some basic principle, probably a simple principle. What could it have been? He knew next to nothing about formal astronomy or palaeontology or chemistry. What he was picking up might be scornfully and legitimately called static, a buzzing of voices, weak signals from many directions, from alleys and haunted houses of science, disreputable astrologies, occult references, stern and orgiastic religious cults and sects, ancient poetry, restless cemeteries of legends, the rage for science fiction, anomalies, contradictions overlooked and brushed aside. Probably if he had not experienced the hubbub of politics and warfare, where all is said and done and almost nothing is true, he would have avoided all of this, shut his eyes, clapped his hands over his ears. Even earlier, the presumptuous liberal education at the University of Chicago, which combined in a nettlesome but hardfast marriage with skeptical sociological pragmatism, had irrevocably attuned him to ideological quarrels. Perhaps, too, had he not been pummeled by contradictory and obstreperous personalities among his friends and family, his neighborhood and his schools, he would have been quick to settle upon a regular line of thought. And, to be sure, the din was pierced by his immoderate ambition, which clamored louder than all else for solutions. He did not wait upon his betters. He asked himself what he could contribute, and in line with his character it had to be "the bigger, the better." It had to avoid competition with superior heretics, not to mention superior conventional scholars, whenever there appeared a well-worn path --solar chemistry, celestial mechanics, the fossil record, and so on. His head contained a large quantity of whispers and scratches telling him what to avoid and what might be chosen. He disagreed with most of Teilhard de Chardin's work, for instance but in reading The Appearance of Man, he caught a fine phrase that would describe his own mental set: "On the cosmic scale (as all modern Physics teaches us) only the fantastic has a chance of being true." Chardin followed this course by continuing as a Catholic priest; Deg followed it more specifically. It was strange that an old, different order of the heavens did not suggest itself much earlier. However, going through the hundreds of titles that Earl Milton and he had compiled for the research on Solaria Binaria, Deg could find no statement that the solar system had been anything but a great sun which had cast off its planets in its early history. The history had been stretched greatly over the past century, from some millions of years to several billion years. A rotating hot ball of gases, interrupted by its own violence, perhaps, had operated as a centrifuge. An alternative theory had predicted a passing body which by gravitational attraction had pulled off the planets and gone its own way. Perhaps somewhere in the literature, as there always seems to be precedents, an obscure passage or writing would suggest that the Sun had a companion that had withered away, or, who knows, even Jupiter may have somewhere been called such a companion. If so, it remained hidden to contemporary discussion. How did it happen that a few minds adventured in new directions? Let us extract some of the ideas that seem to have influenced the turning of thought. Legends were gaining respect. After two centuries of general neglect, the idea of Giambattista Vico that behind legends stood a substantial truth began once more to pick up support. It is not without significance that Giorgio Tagliacozzo, an economist and employee of the Voice of America conceived a lush Tree of Knowledge whose fruit was of all the sciences and schools of philosophy and brought it to Deg publication in the 1950's. Then Tagliacozzo went on a one-man crusade to resurrect the figure of Vico and Deg became the recipient of a continuous flow of material, which, however irrelevant to Solaria Binaria, carried a message of the validity of ancient materials. There were others to come, the historians of science, Stecchini, de Santillana, von Dechend, and of course V. But, going back, too, some twenty-five years, there were the anthropologists and sociologists whom Deg knew at Chicago, who respected the customs and ideas of so-called primitive peoples. By his simple and radical logic, it seemed always that if these people were so smart about the present, what they said about the past could not be more stupid than what the great religions said. And, if the two -- the "civilized" and "primitive" -- agreed that a great god blew a great wind over the Earth, burned it and flooded it, here might be the beginning of a historical truth. Perhaps this was not all so easy. The anthropologists hardly went farther. Nor did the historians of religion: Mircea Eliade went a great distance to establish the obsession of peoples everywhere with their traumatic beginnings, and the beginnings generally correlated; Eliade just failed to take the step, enveloped as he was in the uniformitarian song of science, to say that these earliest peoples spoke some universal truths. Nor was it a simple matter to detour around Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other psycho- historians. Freud had his own basis for reality, a primeval cultural event establishing the oedipal complex, guilt, obsession, recapitulation and, for the cosmogonies and catastrophes, nothing but uniformitarian principles. Jung had archetypes, primeval to be sure, cosmic also, but purely psychic in origin. Velikovsky's was a different story. He generated a formidable sometimes caricatured obsession out of ancient catastrophes, and, further, had attached to the beliefs-cum-faith of mankind an original series of skies that carried two explosive bodies the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, then later Venus that looked like a Sun in its approaches to Earth. To my mind, there is but little doubt that if Velikovsky had been able to focus upon the general cosmological problem of the solar system, in the last decades of his life, he would have provided an ingenious explanation of the behavior of Saturn and Jupiter within a dynamic system. He understood that Jupiter's behavior was akin to a "dark star" it being "cold" (i. e. non-luminous) but with turbulent gases, and suggested that it sends out radio noises; his unpublished talk on the subject preceded by less than a year the actual announcement of the detection of the radio signals by Burke and Franklin (1955). In the same paper containing the bold surmise, he had been arguing on the solar system and, just before mentioning Jupiter's radio noises, he had used the analogy of a close binary or double star to illustrate the presence of electromagnetic effects between stars. He had also brought forward late studies demonstrating a correlation between the positions of the planets and electrical effect detected upon Earth. He had argued in Pens‚e and in conversations that Saturn must have gone nova to eject immense waters some of which flooded the Earth during the Noachian Deluge. Then X-ray emissions were discovered to emanate from Saturn, a possible sign of recent nova. On 4 November 1976, Milton was asking Deg's advice about mentioning this in a Foreword to Recollections of a Fallen Sky. "Ransom suggests that I not draw attention to this claim until Sagan et al. make some claims about Saturn's heat, magnetosphere, and X-ray emission. The point is relevant to Velikovsky's talks, but Ransom may be right, 'don't give them any points to avoid, let them commit themselves first. '" In no case, however, did Velikovsky venture the concept of the solar system having a full binary history. In several passages here and there he broaches the idea that Jupiter and Saturn may have encountered the solar system and wreaked havoc from a distance, and he appears to have favored the idea that collisions between Jupiter and Saturn may have caused the Deluge and later on made Venus erupt from Jupiter. It was difficult to try to discuss such matters with him, and when, in his last years, Deg mentioned to him working upon a theory of Solaria Binaria he let the subject pass like a report on the local weather. Meanwhile, most cosmic heretics who followed Velikovsky were devising schemes by which the major encounters among the planets occurred incidental to their clustering as satellites around the two giant planets, a kind of independent Olympian system interacting at a great distance from the Sun. They believed that the present solar system was occasioned by the forcible ejection of the planets into their present positions in consequence of disruptive encounters of Saturn and Jupiter, after which these large planets spaced out. What may exist in the way of specific scenarios for these occurrences rests still in private files unpublished. When Deg and then Deg and Milton came out with the model of Solaria Binaria in detail, they met with an initial refusal within V.'s circle to consider it; it was lamented that these two had "made up their minds;" the existence of Ouranos as a sky god was denied and other key assertions were denigrated. The respect and patience of Ralph Juergens towards Velikovsky assumed proverbial proportions. Juergens devoted most of his professional life to establishing a fully electrical theory of the solar system, including especially the explanation of solar radiance as the reflection of an accumulation and dissipation of electric charge from the galaxies. When Deg asked Velikovsky, more than once, whether he could accept Juergens' theory, he would reply with a definite negative. He adhered to internal thermo-nuclear fusion as the secret of the Sun's radiation. Because Deg respected Juergens, and then came upon Melvin Cook and then Bruce and Milton, he was never of this opinion. And now, looking backwards, one must wonder whether Velikovsky should have spent with Juergens the many hours that he spent instead, and writes a book about, with Einstein. In introducing a posthumous paper of Juergens, a "pioneer in the study of electric stars," in 1982, Milton comments that Juergens perceived the astronomical bodies as inherently charged objects immersed in a universe which could be described as an electrified fabric. "The Sun," writes Juergens, "is the anode end of a cathodeless discharge extending from the perimeter of the solar system." The solar photosphere is comparable to the "tufted anode glow" in an electric discharge tube. The Sun gathers electrons from galactic bodies and plasma, and sends out an ion current, the solar wind, to the galaxy. Juergens dismissed the thermonuclear explanation of the Sun's heat in favor of a galaxy-solar electric exchange. The thermonuclear theory, recently developed, sought to explain the Sun's properties of luminosity, temperature and stability by its essential chemical composition, mass and size, assuming that the Sun and its behavior are effects of the conditions in galactic space, not in its interior. So, much of his time went into seeking ways of detecting and measuring the suspected inflow, capable of reflecting a continuous output of electrical power amounting to 4 x 10 26 watts, or 6.5 x 10 7 watts per square meter; this, it happens, registers 0.137 watts per square centimeter at the Earth's position in space. The searched-for input must amount to 4 x 10 26 watts as well. Now whereas scientists have for a long time accepted the invisible source of power known as gravitation, they have largely ignored and disdained the possibility of an invisible source known as electrical discharge in a gas. "Electric discharge is a known and observable phenomenon, yet we might live immersed in a cosmic discharge and know nothing its existence." V. A. Bailey of Australia published in Nature (1961) his calculations, based on the data of Pioneer space probes, that the Sun must possess a net negative charge with the potential of the order of 10 19 volts. Bailey visited Princeton to meet V. and there Juergens and Deg became acquainted with him as well. V. was always excited by indications of unforeseen electrical forces playing about the universe. Still he never accepted Juergens' theory, possibly, as he told Deg, because the thermonuclear theory seemed solid to him, and it is indeed regarded as fact by physicists, astronomers, science publicists, and of course the educated public. Since V. never read or discussed Deg's theory of Solaria Binaria, which accepted Juergens' theory and satisfied so many requirements of V.'s own reading of natural and astronomical history, it can be surmised that Juergens' theory was not working for him, V., and should be tolerated because of the usefulness of Juergen's ideas and work, whether as an ever-respectful historian of the V. Affair or as indefatigable discoverer of electrical forces and effects on Earth, Moon. Mars, Venus, and in planetary encounters. Long after Juergens pulled up stakes from the Princeton area to find a new life in Flagstaff, Arizona, partly to be "his own man," V. tried to coax him into returning to collaborate on one or another of his books. Juergens persisted in developing his theory, while repeatedly coming to V.'s aid in the astrophysical exchanges in which V. engaged. Never was the issue of the origins and prior shape of the solar system introduced to systematic discussion. V. generally reacted negatively, even harshly, when material which he objected to or deemed irrelevant sought its way into the magazine Pens‚e. Ultimately the magazine was discontinued in part because of a disagreement between V. and the Talbott brothers on the question of broadening the magazine's scope. However, he behaved gently towards Juergen's material, and Juergens' ideas did receive their initial publication in Pens‚e where Deg could study them, along with the rebuttal of them by Princeton Physicist Martin Kruskal, to learn something about the Sun. The date was 1972. Juergens had already moved from Hightstown, New Jersey, to Flagstaff, Arizona. Deg was by now knocking the planets around like billiard balls, looking for the right pockets. He came to realize in the legendary succession of Greek gods, which might be afforded backup from divine successions in other parts of the world, a possible sequence of real cosmic events. His basic god became Ouranos (Uranus), generally ignored by V. and the other heretics. And, reading in the century-old esoteric papers of Isaac Vail, and elsewhere, he found an original divine Heaven, which eventually produced a Sun-like figure which was still called by the name of Heaven. Thence the succession, of events took shape: Ouranos-Heaven, Ouranos-Sun, Kronos (Saturn) Sun, Zeus (Jupiter) Sun, and the antics of the Olympian family of planets -- Earth, Ares (Mars), Hermes (Mercury), Apollo, Poseidon (Neptune), Uranus-Minor and Venus. Each and every one of these had been a principal in catastrophes upon Earth, and victim of catastrophes itself. Deg thought that these might be interacting meaningfully and in a series or succession, ending at the beginning of the present historical period, when Greek philosophy was born, which could be regarded as the Solarian Age. From that time onwards, the Sun (and Moon) seem to have been the dominating bodies of the sky and no intruder -- planetary, cometary, or meteoroidal -- appears to have played a major role in the sight of mankind, excepting always in the beliefs of astrologers that carry down to us their fossil memories. Deg speculated as follows: there were three legendary Fathers --Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus. Hence only these three major bodies had to be accounted for as the basis of the earlier solar system. But, since Zeus was the son of Kronos, and Kronos was the Son of Ouranos, only one body had to be accounted for, that is, Ouranos. Now, since Ouranos was originally a thick cloud enveloping the Earth when mankind's legends began and was the first subject of creation legends, this canopy-sky must have been an atmosphere thicker than any in historical experience, thicker even than those provoked by known catastrophes such as the temporary darknesses of Exodus and other legendary or pre-historic episodes and the recent volcanic explosion of Krakatoa. But finally Ouranos emerged and exposed himself, enveloped in clouds. To some, he was the Cosmic Egg. The birth of Kronos and his revolt against his father was readily pictured as successive explosions of a super-Uranus and the establishment of the new body, Kronos. The birth of Zeus out of Saturn was analogous. The planetary children of Zeus, of different mothers, remained under his nudging regime until the settled skies eroded his rule and, indeed, all planetary rulership, except in myth and astrology. Deg imagined that electricity might do what seemed impossible for gravitation, although he clung to both powers until Earl Milton persuaded him that all the problems could be solved without gravitation, letting Deg cling only to the inertia which he had cherished all along as the vital element in "gravitational" behavior. In 1976, he was in touch with Milton, who was coaxing a key paper from V. for his book, Recollections of a Fallen Sky. He was also in correspondence with Juergens, and he told both of them what he was up to in Chaos and Creation. Both were sympathetic. On April 22, 1976 he wrote to Milton a memorandum of "Alternate scenarios for the shift of planets, including Earth, from a proposed binary system to the unitary solar system." He conceived of the planetary system as strung out between Sun and Super-Uranus and rotating around the common electrical axis while the axis, carrying the whole set, wheeled in revolution around the Sun. He is becoming enthusiastic: I am beginning to feel my oats, Earl. I can visualize as neat and elegant a model as anyone might wish, replete with formulas. What great blooper have I made, cher colleague? Are you still holding to your generous offer to collaborate? Is scenario II our preferred kick-off? We are having a thunderstorm with lightning. Perhaps Jupiter knows! Further exchanges took place: then came a week's discussions in New York in 1977, ten days together in Washington, D. C. in early 1978, the same in Princeton in early Fall of 1978, the months on the lonely promontory at Stylida, Naxos, by the Aegean Sea in the Spring of 1980, where most of Solaria Binaria was written in its final from. On May 26 1980, Deg notes in his journal 'Finished 1st draft of chaps II and III of Solaria Binaria with Earl Milton 1230 hours. ' He tells how they would discuss heatedly from early morning until early afternoon, sometimes arguing stridently, their voices echoing over the rocks of Stylida, putting their only competitors, the crows and seagulls, to flight. Afternoons and evenings they would write in their separate rooms. In the early summer of 1981 they met again in Princeton and New York, and again in late 1981, spending a strenuous ten days at Edward de Grazia's beach house at Rehoboth, Delaware to complete a manuscript of the full work. Leroy Ellenberger, not far away, called repeatedly but was not invited to come, for a visitor would have disrupted the relentless pace through the manuscript. (This incident may have triggered Leroy's animosity, who before had been deferential and complaisant.) Pages of notes and reprints lay in piles about the large room, on the floor, the chairs, the tables. Upstairs Ami worked quietly at her novel. Outside the low sun beat weakly upon the great beach and roaring waves. They drove to Annapolis to visit St. John's College where Bill Mullen and Joe de Grazia were now teaching. Deg and Ami dropped Milton off at the Washington Airport amidst a howling blizzard for his long flight back to Alberta. The notes and manuscripts had traversed the continent and the Atlantic Ocean several times, punctuated by messages and phone calls, and by "Did you receive....?" letters, with chapters and cassettes chasing the men like heat-homing missiles. By the Spring of 1982 the book was completed and stood in line for publication. So ambitious a work should have been created under ideal conditions, with at least a solid year of side-by-side collaboration and next to a giant library. If they had waited for this setting, the book would never have been written. Milton had been troubled by asthma most of his life. He was placed under great pressure in the writing of Solaria Binaria. The discussions were heated, the environment often strange, yet he was less troubled by poor health when they were exerting themselves upon their creation to the point of exhaustion. Milton worked steadily over the years to make a respected place for V. and quantavolution in Canadian thought. He was a popular teacher and, at some risks to his career, he systematically introduced the new ideas into his courses. Canadian higher education employs outside evaluators whose word goes far on matters of curriculum and promotion. He was able successfully to fight off professional criticism of his innovations in teaching and writing, and ultimately achieved an influential role as spokesman for quantavolution. He was a principal agent in persuading his faculty to offer an honorary doctorate to V., the only one ever given him, and within a decade he was once more agitating at the University for the same honor on behalf of Deg. He held meetings, journeyed to contact potential supporters, wrote reviews, spoke on the radio, and was an organizer of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. He was the principal Canadian representative in England and the United States. Only Irving Wolfe, at the University of Montreal, and Dwardu Cardona, living in Vancouver, approached him in effectiveness and productivity. Two papers of Milton, written at the turn of the decade, one erasing gravitation as a necessary concept in celestial mechanics, the second dealing with Earth-Venus close transactions, are among the classic expositions of astronomical quantavolution. Ralph Juergens was struck down by a heart attack in 1979, a few weeks after Stecchini expired, and a few weeks before V. died. He was gearing up to participate in the writing of Solaria Binaria. I doubt that the final manuscript would have been much changed if Juergens had taken an active hand. Milton thinks not. He had gone over the general theory with him, and Juergens had received in 1976 and 1977 Deg's skeleton of the book and chapters from Chaos and Creation. In Juergens' home, Deg's accumulated manuscripts were used as a raised seating facility for Milton's little son Davin, when they were visiting. Afterwards Milton examined Juergens' rigorously organized archive of materials and manuscripts; Solaria Binaria would have been improved, but no contradiction would have ensued, given Juergens' outlook. Deg and Milton dedicated the work to Juergens, for his electromagnetic theory was deeply implicated in it. To the dedication the ancient fragment 64 of Heraclitus was appended: "Lighting steers the universe." Deg wrote a poem to his memory and sent it to his widow. It was printed in The Burning of Troy, along with an oratorio to Stecchini and a memorial to V. On December 8, 1980, Deg writes to Milton: My Chaos and Creation is due for March 1 publication, already outdated in certain respects by what you and I are doing in Solaria Binaria. It makes me uncomfortable to know this, but then it helps to recall that Galileo had already committed worse "crimes" in science and philosophy by the time he was brought to trial for heliocentrism. It will bring pleasure to admit errors in Chaos and Creation if the truth is measured by what appears in Solaria Binaria. I don't think that we need to fear competent appraisal and criticism. Apathy is a more real problem. Physicists and astronomers are ordinarily paid to go about their work without making waves. They are not philosophers, or even interested in philosophy. Nor are they competent in more than their specialized areas; it doesn't pay them to be so. That is why remarks like, "It isn't physics," or "If that's astronomy, then I'm King Tut," often carry weight. Phrases like these are the shock troops of reaction in science. If they fail, then somebody -- hopefully someone else -- is awaited, to bring up the heavy artillery. But then maybe the heavy artillery is not there; maybe it is rusted from disease; or maybe there is mutiny among the cannoneers. We shall see. In 1979 he was beginning a friendship with geology Professor Frank Dachille at Pennsylvania State University to whom he sent Chaos and Creation, and who engaged himself in the new astrophysics. Dachille wrote to Deg: ... In the earlier letter I indicated that I have browsed through your mss; since then I have read it completely through, but not with hypercritical attention. I expect to read it again, but I doubt this will be done before we leave for Africa. Frankly, I am quite shaken and taken by the intensive physical processes described, generally fitting well the human recordings of the time. However, I still feel that I would have to understand the processes analytically before I could accept them without reservation. Shaken, too, I was by the views that the Moon was not always up there; also Venus. So, I went back to Velikovsky, am now reading Worlds in Collision -- really the first time. My first contact with V. was in a magazine article about 1950, when I browsed through Worlds in Collision, but was turned away by what I felt was his cavalier treatment of I. Donnelly, and the too easy flip-flopping of planets. Kelly and I were already working on Target: Earth -- that is, I was going over his original manuscript, started by him about 1947 or so. I was deeply involved trying to quantify the mechanics of the collision process, including axis change, orbit changes, figure of rotation, inertial response of water, slippage of shells, atmosphere... My contributions were just intended as suggestions to Kelly, but he asked me to come aboard as co-author. I think you can identify my work by the diagrams, calculations, chemistry, white bills, dry points, epilogue. In all this time, while I was, or we were aware of V., his work did not contribute to ours in any way. I did feel however that his work strongly supported Kelly's historical presentation, that is, the ancient records were, in fact, describing horrendous events touched off by what Kelly called Cosmic Collisions. As I said before, I quantified the collisions, based on impact processes, and found that sub- planetary, or small asteroid bodies would be necessary agents. I did not consider electric fields between bodies at a distance. To me the very clear evidence of impacts on the moon provided the simplest, continuous, mechanically sufficient process or mechanism -- collisions involving objects up to 600 miles in diameter. Combining the size-frequency distribution of collisions with the erratic records in the geologic and evolutionary columns, I found support for the impact processes; it was not necessary to involve planetary approaches. However, after reading your book, and going into V., I think that occasional close passages of large (but not quite planetary) bodies will have left their marks on the Earth. So, it appears to me now, massive collisions by the hundreds of thousands have forged the earth in its ca 4 1/ 2 BY history; by the tens or hundreds close passes by generally larger bodies will also have left their marks. As you know, Kelly has been suggesting close passes as a process operative on the geology of Mars, perhaps even Venus. It seems that Bob Stephanos has a fly-by process. Beaumont too. And, of course, Donnelly. It was Donnelly's work (Ragnarok, Atlantis) that got me thinking in this area, plus my activity as an amateur astronomer.... thinking about electrical charging of the "spheres." I do not know enough EM theory at this time to quantify the mutual interactions of two oppositely or identically charged planetary bodies. Then there is the problem of conservation of momentum and the scale of energies involved. The energy in the earth's magnetic field is many, many orders of magnitude less than that of its rotation and orbiting. How a flip-flop can be affected by magnetic or electric coupling I cannot understand at this time. Well, you can see that I am thinking along with you. The Cosmic Collision, in all its variants, must be of utmost importance in the history of the earth and life. Last winter term I introduced the subject to my students in the Geology of the Solar System. The coming winter term I intend to intensify my presentation... On August 3, Deg replied from Naxos: Dear Frank, Thanks for the excerpts and clippings. Io is full of surprises. Purely sulphur volcanoes, someone writes now. But note the pulsing electric arc between Jupiter and Io. It compares with my postulated arc between the Sun and its binary partner, Super-uranus. Your work on collision-electricity interests me. Also sphere-charging, and passby-electricity. Regarding the last, you should certainly know Ralph Juergens. Eric Crew has done some thinking, and an article on the funneling effect in meteoroid and lighting strikes. I hope to get a chance to read your full articles when they are available. I can give you the Juergens and Crew stuff when I return. Juergens, you know, would say, in reply to your query as to how a million craters could strike the moon in a few thousand years, that a great many of these are the marks of lightning bolts, not of meteoroid falls. Further I imagine that after the major passbys, and a couple of collisions (" Apollo") and fissions (novas) as conceived in Chaos and Creation, the space would be jammed with a great many millions of pieces of debris. Ovenden sees the asteroid belt as remnants of an exploded planet many times the size of Earth, not too many millions of years ago. I call it Apollo, set it in human times, and can readily imagine the debris of Apollo and its Destroyer. We have a big gap to close between our solar system time scales; if you grant the conceivability of what I say in my chapter on the subject, I'd like very much to discuss with you the seemingly impossible obstacles to it. I guess you won't see Olduvai George; there's a fine place (the African Rift) to test the theories of chronology given the hominid and hominid finds on various levels... It is depressing to many to think that the planets may have once undergone displacement; it is much more depressing to think that they may have changed motions recently. Of course we must admit that displacements must have occurred to bring the planets into existence, and to place them where they are now. But very few astronomers and philosophers have let the planets shift thereafter, and practically none allowed this within the time span allotted to mankind. Malcolm Lowery, in a letter to the London Times Literary Supplement August 27, 1976, named several latter-day movers. In 1960 W. H. MacCrea -- then president of the Royal Astronomical Society -- calculated that no planet could have formed inside the orbit of Jupiter. In 1965 T. Gold concluded that the planet Mercury could not have been in its present orbit for more than 400,000 years, as it is still rotating with respect to the sun. J. G. Hill's 1969 model indicated that Jupiter and Saturn were originally the outermost planets to form, and that Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were displaced into their present orbits by planetary encounters. Robert Bass in 1974 exposed the prevailing common misunderstanding of the mathematics describing planetary stability, even when based upon present recorded behaviors, such that planetary orbits could not be proven stable for more than a few centuries or millennia. W. M. Smart, wrote Bass, "demonstrated unquestionably that the interval of assured reliability of the La Place-Lagrange perturbation equations is at most some interval 'small' relative to 300 years; Prof. W. M. Smart's exact words are 'one or two centuries." Bass went on to apply to astronomers the kind of pragmatic critique that impresses experts in propaganda analysis: "... Whenever these authoritative statements about time intervals of validity have been made, they are without exception accompanied by words like 'supposed, ' 'appeared, ' 'hope, ' 'seems' 'might, ' and 'think, ' revealing clearly that the writer was relying on his personal intuition rather than quantitative evidence." Bass repeated his findings at a Glasgow (Scotland) conference held by the S. I. S. in April 1978, where there appeared to speak also Astronomy Professor A. E. Roy. Roy agreed with Bass, saying that "even under Newton's law of gravitation, we have not changed by more than 1 or 2 percent over a period of more than, say, 50,000 years." This figure allows humanly witnessed perturbations, but is not enough for the wilder of the cosmic heretics, who want to bring changing planetary orbits within memory of myth-making man and even historical mankind. Thus it occurred that when Melvin Cook, Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Eric Crew, Deg and others -- and V. in principle -- wanted to move the planets more, and recently, they turned to electromagnetics, and Bass once more, now in 1978, applauded their heretical stance, affirming that "if planets approached closely, there would be electrostatic and electromagnetic interactions not predicted on the basis of orthodox theory." This was not enough. The solar system had to operate as a electromagnetic system, and, though Bass produced an awareness of the sources of such theory, in Juergens and Cook, it was Milton who, with Deg cheering from the sidelines, took the fatal leap onto the plane of non- gravitational fully electromagnetic operation of the solar system. In a paper circulated in 1979, called "10 -36 =0" to connote the vastly superior forces at the disposal of electricity by contrast with gravitation, Milton wrote that the phenomenon of gravitation implies "an interaction of slightly unequal strong electrical repulsions between distantly separable objects (or centers) that yield a weak net attraction." Thus masses vary when determined gravitationally insofar as they represent an electrical transaction between two bodies of unequal negative charges. In close encounter masses undergo polarization and transact strongly as dipolar bodies. Rapid and forceful exchange of charge then occurs which can modify motions significantly and suddenly. Hence the absolute level of electric charge on a body is indeterminate, as is, for example, absolute motion under relativity theory. Deg's image of the whole solar system as consisting of bodies lined up between Super-Uranus and Sun within a tube of gases and rotating with the gases around a discharging electrical current, with the whole system falling apart recently into its present configuration, proved to be just the mechanism to display a non-gravitational system, and Deg, who had never quite understood gravitational mechanics in the first place was happy to observe his model work nicely within the systems of permissions and restraints belonging to electromagnetic theory. He was doubly pleased because he had been so fond of Juergens and found Milton so congenial: one should not dismiss compatibility in scientific achievement; any scientific (or social group) manager will be glad to elaborate the proposition: compatibility is as important as computability. An eloquent instance of this proposition suffuses James Watson's autobiographical account of the construction of the DNA molecule in his book, The Double Helix (1968). V. was the Great Hostess, in the earlier time, of this whole business; he took no active part at all in it, and the heretics dutifully thanked him at every opportunity in their writings. It will be remembered that Juergens left the Princeton area in flight from the domineering proximity of V. Milton was too far away to be captured intellectually, though he was continually active in defending V.'s views. What Deg received from V. in the theory of Solaria Binaria was nil; all he got from V. was the useful dogma that electricity had been neglected by scientists and was an essential factor in cosmic encounters. Whether V. discussed much of importance with Einstein will not be known until the manuscript devoted to this subject is made available. My hunch is that Einstein retarded V.'s growth in electromagnetics just as V. retarded the growth of some heretics in this regard. V. made no attempt to relate his work to that of Charles E. R. Bruce of the Electrical Research Association of England, whose seminal work of 1944 on electrical discharges in astrophysics had been the basis for correspondence initiated by Juergens in 1965, and whose work was introduced by Juergens in Pens‚e in 1973. Bruce was a cosmic heretic whose ideas made little or no impression upon British astronomy. They were carried into the British quantavolutionary circle by Eric Crew when it was organized. To this day his one hundred and more articles and notes have not been published in assembled form. Milton caught on to Bruce in the early seventies, Deg after his meeting with Crew in London in 1976. Bruce observed the first identity between the velocity of propagation of a solar prominence and an electrical discharge in 1941, when at a lecture he heard of Evershed's photograph of a solar prominence that had reached a height of a million miles in an hour. He writes, "I thought, 'If that isn't about 3 x 107 cm sec-1, I'll eat my hat. ' It was, as a little mental arithmetic, confirmed on an envelope when the lights went up, established -- and I was in business as an astrophysicist." He thereupon published privately A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony, copies of which several cosmic heretics came ultimately to possess. Galaxies were seen by him to be structurally determined as electrical fields. Magnetic fields spring up around cosmic flares and bolts. In cosmic discharges, matter aggregates along the discharge channel, and in this process of electrical breakdown "one can forget about the force of gravitation, as every arc welder knows." This discovery Bruce attributed to Bellaschi of the American Westinghouse Company in 1937. Jets and balls of hot gases are formed in the process. Bruce also applied the notion of pinched-off discharges under extreme pressures to the extinction of novas. Juergens and Milton pushed Bruce's electrical interactions between stars and atmospheres into stellar interiors, the greatest step in obviating the need for gravitational theory. V. lacked the capacity to give and take; he would disrupt any on-going thought processes to call all hands to shoo the chickens out of his backyard. Those heretics, like Rose and Vaughan, who opted to exercise their intellects in his garden, found themselves becoming over- specialized in certain crops, interpreting Venus tablets and calculating conceivable orbits under conventional restraints. This is only to say that such heretics became unfortunately limited despite their eminent suitability for larger tasks; they were also diligently occupied, as was the solaria binaria trio, in developing the larger network of heretics and playing firemen for V.'s fires (some of which were arson). The progress of quantavolution in the astrosphere required an electrical model. Fortunately it could profit from a considerable advance along the whole front of electromagnetic studies which was occurring in conventional science, as well as from the work of the heretics themselves. But one ought not forget that the theory of quantavolution in the atmosphere was sustained too by heavy inputs from faraway field: myth analysis, paleontology, and critical geochronology. Deg's assurances that the fossil voices of myth and legend were speaking truths of the skies kept the theory from flying off to join the conventional dogma that change could only happen hundreds of millions of year ago. They also blocked the hopeful theory that comets and meteors could take the place of the planets. In paleontology we have this remarkable logical position, perhaps exposed for the first time by Professor Roy in explaining why astronomers should prefer a longer rather than a shorter period of celestial stability: Most celestial mechanics -- orthodox and informed -- would say that we suspect (it's probably no more than a hunch) that the solar system is stable over hundreds if not thousands of millions of years, but we cannot prove it by the methods of celestial mechanics that are available to us today. We have to go to geophysical, astrophysical and selenological evidence - -and there, of course, we are again on ground which has been disputed by those who advocate the very short time scale. The fossil record would appear to have been laid down in the rocks over the past two thousand million years, and in those fossils we have very complicated animals. If the orbit of the Earth had changed drastically in that time, then conditions on the orbit of the Earth would, it seems to me, have been such that those creatures could not have existed. In addition, one could say that, even if the orbit of the Earth had not changed in that time, but the Sun's output of radiation had changed dramatically, then again the fossil record as we know it could appear to be 4 1/ 2 thousand million years; similar methods appear to make the oldest lunar samples of that order of magnitude in age. Theories of the energy output of the Sun make it appear, from a consideration of the helium/ hydrogen ratio, that the Sun has been operating with much the same output as it does today for something like five thousand million years. And so on.. What Roy is saying here is that, for no other reason, a long term stability of the solar system is acceptable because it has taken so long, according to the fossil record, to evolve life and its peculiar, complex structures. Further the rocks are datable by radiochronometry and the Sun is datable by its self-burnup rate. This is nice: here we have the queen of sciences, to which the other sciences had looked for their assurance, abandoning its throne and asking for refuge among the fossils of the rocks and the furnaces of the Sun. Effectively, however, the quantavolutionists had spotted this cross disciplinary mutual rescue society, and had begun to launch assaults against the positions of the other disciplines as well. Juergens had fully disestablished the thermonuclear theory of the Sun, so far as some heretics were concerned, and substituted (with Cook) a galactic electric-collecting model. So far as the fossil record is concerned, Bass in 1978 accords Cook the honor of having achieved the main victory over radiochronometry. (The old catastrophists, such as Price and V., had done the job on conventional stratigraphy and erosional gradualism in geology.) In a footnote that should be a placard Bass writes: ... If I believed those long-term radioactive dates in the fossil record and elsewhere, I probably would also believe that the Earth has not changed its position for thousands of millions of years. However, in another book, Prehistory and Earth Models (London, Marx Parrish, 1966), Dr. Cook has had the audacity and temerity to take on the entire historical, geological and geophysical establishments, and has reviewed in great depth and detail every radioactive dating method, short-term and long-term. After several years making up my mind, I have come to the conclusion that Melvin Cook is right and has established that there are enormous and inescapable fallacies in the uranium, thorium and lead dating methods; and I don't think it can be maintained that the surface features of the Earth have been in their present form for more than 30,000 years. Deg had supported Juergens in several works, and had relied heavily upon Cook in attacking the full range of dating tests offered in support of great ages of time. I have not yet introduced the several other contributors to the demolition of time measures. They appeared in the pages of Pens‚e, the Creation Research Society Quarterly and the SISR for the most part. The attack requires hundreds, not a dozen, writers, however. But still there must be a elite, leaders of the republic of science, like Robert Bass. Everyone got a lift in spirits with his appearance upon the scene, a stocky dark man, bespectacled, a convert to Mormonism it appeared, with a weakness for women which, Deg reflected, was in keeping with history and not incompatible with his experiences of Mormon friends who came out of the West to the University of Chicago in the 1930's. Bass was associated with Brigham Young University, where, paradoxically, catastrophists were unwelcome in the sciences; a story goes that Bass forgot to sign and return his contract, lost his tenure, and, in order to retrieve it, was asked to agree to submit to pre-censorship of his publications, which he refused. Bass was covered with the medals of scholarships and degrees and when he showed up, it was like a troop pinned down by continuous fire greeting a marksman with just the right gun. Bass took aim at the brain center of the opposition, the reliability of planetary motions, and fired. The shot was on target. Blasted was the astrophysics of orderliness. His troops cheered. The opposing line continued firm; hardly a surrender or desertion. It seemed that the facing army lacked a brain center. It operated just as well by rote. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 3: } {Q - } {C Chapter 11: } {T CLOCKWORK} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ELEVEN CLOCKWORK Deg's Journal, Naxos, July 3, 1973 The animation of the night skies is both poetic and heuristic. Each meaning enhances the other and creates a third set of meanings that are beliefs. These beliefs join the stream of myth, color, and shape it, change its direction somewhat, make its fundamentals more difficult to understand. Cosmopoeia is the imagined form of stars, a guide for students and navigators by sea and land, the astrologer's subject of story, the marking of the passage of bodies and the occasion for anniversaries of related events, be they births, deaths, or disasters. All of these functions are important to humanity. But that they flourish should not be pretext for diminishing or denying the occurrence and greater importance of erratic for diminishing or denying the occurrence and greater importance of erratic and special heavenly changes. Similarly, the world as we see it in the "normal" processes of constancy and incremental change is a true and real world. The tides flow, the sea suddenly beats the shore, the rains wash down soil and the winds abrade rocks. This everyday vision lulls us into somnolence about natural forces, or when aroused, to a discrete excitement about tornados, volcanoes and earthquakes. Like the animation of the skies, the ordinary experience of nature is a reality that is also a screen and a censor, concealing and prohibiting the colossal, historical and potential behavior of nature. As it is with the skies and earth, so it is with life. The recent fixation of species, based ultimately upon an operational definition involving interreproducibility, gives a truth that must always have been real: gradual changes occur; species can develop in isolation, by occasional mutation. But all the time that biology can beg, borrow, or steal is not nearly enough to present us with the fantastically organized and behaving conglomeration of animals and plants of 1973. The validity of received evolutionary theory must become minor, while the heavier reality of catastrophic change and origin of species by potentiation comes forward. It was inevitable that Deg should end up in defiance of billions of years of time. He could hardly lie on a beach unless he was exhausted from swimming and diving. He knew and disliked the stereotype of the American as restless and impatient, so he cultivated various devices and appearances that would let him seem to be casual and unconcerned with waiting upon the world. Since he was raised without the time-consuming liturgies of religion, religious routines were not a common means for stopping his time or feeling it. Sports, smoking, drinking, eating time. More than all of this, he played games against time. He wanted quick results in everything he did; but the world is not constructed to provide results, much less to provide them quickly. The same urge to quick results inclines one toward intellectualism, because so much can be solved in the mind and the world of the imagination can be rich and malleable; fat gobs of time can be reduced to frizzled specks, and one can leap over far spaces and epochs. However, intellectualism is also opposed to both physiological and mental time-control in that it forces one to be physically inactive over long stretches of time; research and writing are termite mounds of time and a single footnote, a single bad line, can drive one to despair. Sometimes I think that Deg was one of Alfred Adler's pure compensatory characters, who set himself very often to do precisely what he was unfit to do because of his unfitness. If under such circumstances he was not destroyed by the contradiction, it was because he often escaped into the activities already noted but also into sex, travel, brief adventures, commitments to thing extraneous. Most of all, and too important to call an escape, was his taking on two or more large tasks at the same time, so that while to the outside world he appeared to be proceeding carefully along one line, at a measured pace, he was in fact speeding along other lines and then doubling back to the first line of engagement. Paradoxically, the intellectual who is so fretful of time's arrow hastens but to sit and stare upon dead written pages, to pitch his nervous system and organs upon his several moving digits, gaze at the stars, watch the rats run, listen, observe, and discuss only that world that his mind will accept for consideration -- all of this consuming such enormous amounts of time that those who in turn observe the intellectual cannot be blamed for thinking him mad for his dissociation and hatred of reality, his obsession, his wrestling with details, his fear and guarding of his own thoughts, his ruthless hunting down of words and meanings, amounting in the end to the squandering of the very object of his anxiety, time itself, time in the thousands of hours of which every minute, he insists, counts dear, and if this lunacy is not sufficiently oxymoronic, the time-saving time-waster can dedicate himself to time-studies. Perhaps one-fourth of all Deg's work on quantavolution over the year dealt with time. Perhaps a quarter of the three thousand pages that he wrote were concerned with or governed by calculations of time. Before he had entered the field he had been possessed by problems of time and had written but not finished what was supposed to be a lengthy philosophical and psychological poem on the subject. By virtue of the tricks I have already alluded to, he would escape the psychiatrist's verdict of obsession, but in fact he was obsessed and his impatient and striving character often led to pitched battles against time; it was the most uncontrollable element in life. He beat time as a child by being precocious, stripping off three years of schooling, and he became the youngest member of his graduating class at the University. But then time reacted smartly at war and he felt the full poignant irony of "Hurry up and wait" the life of the soldier. He nosed his jeep into many destroyed towns where clocks were stopped; hanging crazily, sober and still, or startled faces starting from the rubble -- they were all wrong. Are all clocks wrong? Madness about time was a disease of the poets, literati and humanists; turn to scientists, and 99 out of 100 are perfectly satisfied that they are measuring an absolute, an ever-so-old process; they are like the bureaucrat who is content to keep the entrepreneur waiting, because his check comes in regularly no matter what, while for the businessman time is money. For these scientists, there was something called the relativity of time, which was reserved for their Sunday outings. All of this joins in with Deg's anti-authoritarianism and republicanism (which goes back to sibling rivalry) and gave him his ideological stance confronting time . If authorities would say time was long, well then he would be pleased to discover time to be short, and thus more containable and controllable. There was a contradiction here, however, but it can be explained away. Deg had always been a darwinian, but might this not have been because Darwin was anti- authoritarian, anti-theologian, too, while trying to be nice to the traditional believers? Deg was exactly like this, against the scriptures as authority, against church authority as such, but then respectful and even loving towards the many "nice" and "gentle" believers he met. How could he join the theologians, the short-time creationists? Well, he didn't really. He found them to be the most active critics of macrochronism. They were experienced microchronists, who knew the history of the defeat of microchronism well because it was their history. The problems of time came in two batches. First there was the historical batch, epitomized in V.'s Ages in Chaos. Second, there was the geological batch, which could also be epitomized in V. 's Earth in Upheaval. Let us see what V. did with time in both regards. V. aligned and connected Jewish and Egyptian history which had hitherto gone along on separate tracks. The alignment settled upon the Exodus at about 1450 B. C., the Biblical date tied it into the end of the 13th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt with Hyksos invaders as the Amalekite enemies of the Biblical Hebrews. He begins the splendid 18th Dynasty of Egypt at the time of Saul and David. King Solomon he places alongside Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, and has her, as Queen of Sheba, visiting his court. And so on. The reconstruction attempted in his volumes on later time, as I have already indicated, fell victim to the scholars of the "British Connection." Dropping by 500 years the accepted chronology of Egypt after the Exodus, and holding the Exodus at -1450 meant that all dates elsewhere, whether of the Near East, Greece, or finally Italy, which had been set by coordination with Egyptian artefacts and occurrences, required resetting by 500 years as well. In Greece, a gap which had been closed only by creating a barbaric "five hundred years of the Dark Ages," was promptly nominated for elimination. A grateful rush of scholars to profit from the new chronology did not occur; the Greek scholars were frozen to their Positions until the Egyptologists (all 30 of them) would admit the loss of the five centuries. Then they would follow suit. Similar scientific lags continued in the other ages affected by V. 's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology. When did the mistaken chronology begin? V. traced the major error to Manetho of the third century, B. C. as reported and adopted later by scholars. Manetho was eager to prove to the Greeks and Asians the superior antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Berosus followed suit, exaggerating for his Assyro-Babylonian country by tens of thousands of years. Eratosthenes, soon afterwards, took up the cudgels for his Greek compatriots and moved Greek dates backwards by approximately the length of the "Dark Age." The motive of ethnocentrism thus played a large part in the beginnings of modern chronology, as it did in V.'s stupendous reconstruction itself. But it was not at all clear that the ancient chronographers following Manetho were wrong, for their errors were covered up by a heavy burden of refinements and rationalizations up to the present time. If V. had written nothing else in his life he would have deserved the highest accolades for his essay on "Astronomy and Chronology." Soon after his first attack upon Egyptian chronology was published, V. sent a copy to Etienne Drioton, Director General of the Service for Antiquities of Egypt and received shortly one of the most nearly prefect replies an author could wish for, and, for that reason alone, as a model for my readers, I reprint it here. (My translation is from the French original.) Cairo, May 29, 1952 Dear Doctor, You were kind to have had me sent your beautiful book, Ages in Chaos, which I received this morning, and which I have read nearly in entirely, so exciting and interesting is it. You have certainly jostled -- and with what vigor! -- many historical tenets of ours which we regarded as firmly established. But you do it with a total absence of prejudice and with an impartial and complete documentation, which is most sympathetic. Your conclusions might be argued at every step: whether they are allowed or not, they will have posed anew the problems and compelled a fundamental discussion of them in the light of your new hypotheses. Your beautiful book will have been, in every way, very useful to science. I thank you warmly for having sent it to me and I pray you accept, Dear Doctor, the assurance of my sentiments of cordial devotion. Etienne Drioton V. received few such letters concerning Age in Chaos. Actually, a number of archaeological discoveries were made in the years following Ages in Chaos which tended to corroborate V. 's reconstruction of time. One of the most important of his priorities for testing was at the town of El-Arish, between Egypt and Israel, where he believed might be uncovered the capital of the Hyksos, Avaris, and, if so, then there might be demonstrated the further correspondence of Biblical and Egyptian history in revealing that the city fell to a join Egyptian-Judean army, one led by an Egyptian Prince (Ahmose?) and the other by King Saul. This excavation has not been accomplished. V. paid attention closely to developments in carbondating, for here was one of the places which he thought might give him a quick and decisive victory. He corresponded with experts, beginning with Libby, founder of the C14 system of dating. His pathetic and persistent efforts to achieve a dating of 18th dynasty objects were put into a manuscript called "Ash," selections from which were published in 1974. To Libby he writes (October 7, 1953), "I also assume that if analyses of organic objects dating from the time of Hatshepsut, Thutmose II, III, or Amenhotep II, Akhnaton were made, the results will indicate a reduction by as much as 500 years from the conventional figures; and over 650 years for objects of Seti or Ramses II or Merneptah." At the same time, he suggests the dating of Pleistocene fossil beds and petroleum deposits, predicting a late date. Libby was unhelpful, but said petroleum datings by Cl4 had shown "great antiquity." Now V. begins a circuit of frustration. Finally a German admirer, Ilse Fuhr, who was later to publish a fine work dealing with comets in early times, with courage and persistence obtained 25 grams of three different bits of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen. V. was delighted and expected the results to show -820, not the conventional -1350. In another letter he did worry over the effects of original atmospheric contamination of the samples owing to a catastrophe. The University of Pennsylvania laboratory performed the tests and came up on the middle, between the conventional and heretical dating. Bruce Mainwaring had used his strong ties with the University to help arrange the tests. Seven years later the British Museum tested reed and palm nut kernels of Tutankhamen's tomb and emerged with dates of about 846 and 899 B. C., both of which dates were never published and then seemingly lost or misplaced them. Other dates of the 18th Dynasty appeared in time, not so definite and reliable as to dismiss V.'s claims, but not such as to please him. By this time, Deg had read Melvin Cook's article of 1970 in which, retrocalculating the Cl4 in the atmosphere, using the rates of Libby, Cook figured that the atmosphere would have had to have been constituted (or reconstituted) some 13,000 years ago. Deg's deduction was that a series of catastrophes would have created the same effect. Further, Deg observed increasingly wild fluctuations as well as a secular swing of the C14 dates from "known" dating and bristlecone pine dates as time marched backwards, and, without straining the discrepancies overly much, he could conclude that carbonating would be both invalid and unreliable before 3000 years ago, which ushered in the Venusian Age (in his terminology). Deg was further impressed by the studies of John Lynde Anderson and George Spangler, which he read in 1974, not long after their publication, that challenged the very constancy of the radiocarbon component of the atmosphere. Thenceforth he paid small heed to earlier radiocarbon readings, whether they seemed to support or oppose his theories. On the other hand, V. who had expected salvation in Cl4, could not readily denounce the system afterwards, and played on occasion the game of using Cl4 dates when convenient to do so, nor did he ever renounce Cl4 in principle. To this day, Deg has not been able to understand how V., having succeeded in restructuring the chronology of Egypt to the end of the 18th Dynasty, could then have made further drastic changes needlessly, displacing forwards the great Kings Ramses II and III. Deg had so much confidence in V.'s ability and so little knowledge of later Egyptian history that he accepted the new chronology in toto as it came to him by word of mouth, by hasty readings of manuscript pages, and by the published volume of Peoples of the Sea when it appeared in 1977, after many years in manuscript and printer' proofs. Very soon thereafter doubts were heard coming out of the "British Connection," from persons whom Deg had come to respect. None of the Americans around V., nor V. himself, had met any of the British and were inclined to put on airs or to rant against them. Deg did not try to follow the controversy, which was based upon close historical analysis. He thought to wait until the dust would settle. He was made uneasy by a lurking contradiction in V. 's position. The great catastrophist seemed to be putting aside catastrophism in ordering the centuries. In early 1972, William Mullen had written in Pens‚e that Two assumptions from Worlds in Collision are taken as fundamental: first that no chronology using retrograde calculation of the positions of heavenly bodies is reliable earlier than -687; second, that the principle clue for synchronizing histories of ancient nations should be the break caused in all of them by the catastrophic events. The second point is at issue here. Deg agreed with Mullen. For example, he made the following note : It is interesting that in one of his articles Isaacson, doubtful perhaps of the strong basis for celestial connection, ventures that V.'s reconstruction of chronology can be separated from catastrophism. This I think not to be so. First, V. would never had revised chronology so boldly if he had not discovered the key to chronology in two parallel accounts of the same disaster -- one in the papyrus Ipuwer at the end of the Middle Bronze Age of Egypt, the other in Exodus. Second, the evidence of catastrophe is what explains the end of the Mycenaean civilization and ties it directly into the Archaic Greek culture that succeeds it, both in the 8th-7th centuries, and then ties both of these into the Biblical accounts and many other accounts of the same disaster at the same time. In short, it is catastrophic theory that sired the revised chronology of V. and if the genius of that reconstruction is extraordinary, it is the effect of hereditary genius, a "fall-out" of genius from a single elemental key idea, as Juergens has written. I say this while reminding myself that the Exodus disaster was the key, but the motive came in the desire to reverse the order of Moses and Akhnaton: to recapture Moses and monotheism for Israel. Not that V. cared for monotheism in itself. But since the world regarded it as an invention of paramount importance, he was ready to fight for it. Not until 22 December 1981, do we find Deg at the denouement of his doubts; writing to Derek Shelley-Pearce (S. I. S.) in England, Deg says: The Glasgow Chronology is in full swing, it appears, with John Bimson (SISR 5: 1) and Martin Sieff (Workshop 4: 2) pushing it mightily. And the readers, no doubt, a bit giddy.(....) I am glad to see that Claude Schaeffer's work has come into its own with Geoffrey Gammon's article in SISR 4: 4. It is one of only several general studies of value in cultural quantavolution. Gammon approached two points that he might have developed more fully. First, the best benchmarks of past ages are catastrophes: cultural quantavolutions coincide with natural quantavolutions. For a century scholars have been playing at quantavolutionary theory unwittingly by using catastrophic age-breakers. It reminds me of how some early geologists tried to dismiss the word "strata" because that implied discontinuities, and discontinuities implied you know what... The other point to stress is that the end of so many settlements around -1200 (conventional dating) indicates that this date actually falls between -780 and -680, that is, the Martian period. Gammon seems to shunt aside this evidence when, with his mind perhaps upon Egypt, he says, regarding the destructions that ended the Late Bronze Age, "the evidence that these may have been due to natural causes rather than the agency of man remains scanty." (p. 107) Perhaps Velikovsky did the same, in order to progress with his idea of further shortening Egyptian chronology; that is, he abandoned his fix on the Martian episodes. To me, the term "Peoples of the Sea" is a euphemism for the Martian-Moon-Venus disturbances, a kind of reductionism. Wars, movements of people, and social turmoil are expectable in natural disasters and are a concomitant and effect of them. To show that they happened certainly does not prove that extraterrestrial events and general catastrophes did not happen, but the contrary. Applying the term "Peoples of the Sea" to a construction of a fourth century Ramses III is already a warning sign of trouble ahead; one cannot move Martian events to the fourth century; one may not give Ramses III a special "Peoples of the Sea" of his own. The Glasgow chronology may find its clincher by research of Martian period disasters in Egypt, possibly finding the evidence around the time of Merneptah or Ramses III (...) He goes on to write: As Sieff says, "By placing the 19th Dynasty so late, Velikovsky ironically obscured the cause for these destructions which he himself had found." The reasons why he did so are also obscure. Granted that my offhand remarks should carry little weight, surely some scholar who understood the catastrophe-culture-history interfaces must have read and disputed this part of the reconstruction of history. When Velikovsky was writing this book with the others still to appear, was he by-passing his own catastrophic benchmarks to complete a descriptive history postulated on different grounds? When the Glasgow Chronology began to surface after his relevant book, soon two books, were in print, I heard recriminations and ducked out. I should have given more attention to this breakup of the consensus around him, but there were too many intimations of the "Love me, love my dog." kind, for which science has no place. I am going to have trouble with this matter when I come to it in the course of writing "The Cosmic Heretics." There were to be four volumes of Ages in Chaos. The first scored a large success with a group of competent heretics. The second and third volumes, not treating of catastrophe, but of chronology and archaeology, failed to persuade most of the heretics and their dates were soon replaced by a new reconstruction that tied into the first volume very well. The reviews in the orthodox media were bad, usually attacking V. for the wrong reasons. The fourth volume was held up indefinitely by Elisheva and her daughters. Deg advised that it be printed, even if it held a basic flaw, because V., though increasingly doubtful, intended that it be ultimately published, and because V., though increasingly doubtful, intended that it be ultimately published, and because V., even when he was wrong, was more instructive than most people when right. None, among the anti-heretics, seemed to notice that V. 's supporters, supposedly so slavish, had quickly and thoroughly analysed and rejected two thirds of his general theory of Egyptian chronology. Indeed the opponents would still proceed as before, talking of his cult and his claque. There was restraint among the heretics in attacking V.'s newer books, and Kronos hardly attended to them at all. Evidently, the heretics could also ignore books that they didn't like. Or is this what one ought to do with books that are neither catastrophic nor correct? For a catastrophist to limit his concerns is difficult. Once you have the planets misbehaving, you must acknowledge that it may have been their wont in earlier times as well. V. decided that he had better investigate the earthly effects of prior cosmic disasters; if prehistoric catastrophes could be demonstrated to have occurred, then historical ones might become more believable. So he wrote Earth in Upheaval. V. did not set up a timetable of catastrophes. However, he adduced more evidence that the -1450 to -687 periods suffered grand natural disasters, and he introduced doubts ranging backwards. He paid little attention to the burgeoning science of radiochronometry aside from carbonating, nor did he ever exert his powers in this area. To strengthen the case for late catastrophism, he brought forward instead the studies of others on glacial melting rates, sudden ocean level drops, very recent alpine orogeny, rapidly drying lakes, waterfall cutbacks, late fossil assemblages, surprisingly recent Cl4 datings, the simultaneous devastations of civilization (using Schaeffer), excavations of warm-weather life forms and human settlements in impossibly cold zones of today, Indian traditions of orogeny and other quantavolutionary events, changes in magnetic orientations, and the large-scale ash levels on ocean bottoms. He did not know Otto Schindewolf's work, then appearing, which tied the great periods of biosphere destruction to cosmic events and consequent radiation storms. He followed Dunbar's Historical Geology in examples of very early disastrous effects. He advanced the idea that coal was formed from biosphere masses propelled and dumped by huge tidal waves, without specifying which waves and when, and used Heribert Nilsson's studies of German coals to prove his case. He relied heavily, too, upon the early English catastrophists. He used also the work of American creationists. In a few lines, he expressed his feeling that the uneven lengths given to the ages were "basically wrong;" The remark is strange, cryptic, confused. He "does not suggest either a lengthening or a shortening of the estimated age of the earth or the universe," and then adds irrelevantly and naively that a religious mind should not be upset by great ages. It was all rather humanistic and old-fashioned. Deg found that the accretion of evidence of catastrophes was much easier than the application of a time scale to them. V. had not set himself to demolishing the new techniques of radiochronometry, possibly because he believed them valid, possibly, too, because he felt that he could obtain the right to his catastrophes down to Noah (6000-9000 years ago) without contending with radiochronometry, which does not begin to operate, except for Cl4 and certain tests still in the realm of the exotic, until 100,000 years back. Also V. had done practically all of his writing before the issues of radiochronometry came forward, before several of his supporters engaged in its study on their own accord, and before the creationists had worked to discredit it. Deg set himself two tasks. One was to set up a model of past catastrophes, hence of the ages. The second was to classify and survey all existing techniques of measuring geological time, and to state the grounds for believing them invalid. He had always to bear in mind that one of them -- he ultimately included over fifty measures -- might be valid, even if grossly valid, and thereupon would seriously damage his model of natural history and at the worst render the model only an intriguing metaphor. He was surprised repeatedly as he went from one test to another to discover that none existed without a flaw or a question, either of which might be fatal to its validity or reliability. His major teacher was a man he had not met, Melvin Cook, who went on a rampage among the uranium-lead, potassium-argon, and other tests, pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions, incompatibilities, and arbitrary assumptions. Cook was not an exoterrestrialist. His attacks are almost all from the materials of geology and chemistry. His exoterrestrialism, such as it is, comes in estimating intakes and outputs of gaseous elements from the earth's atmosphere. Perhaps the valuable critics of radiochronometry number no more than a score. Deg could name a half-dozen besides Cook whose work he regarded as heroic and essential to establishing and maintaining his perilous stance. I mentioned Anderson and Spangler on Cl4. There was reliable Juergens who showed theoretically that the electrical environment could effect enormous changes in radiation rates, such as to annihilate time. There was N. J. G. Sykes who, in a simple test published in the S. I. S. R., gave grounds for believing that a changing magnetic field would augment or diminish radioactive decay rates. Then, too, there came Roy Mckinnon, also writing in the S. I. S. R, and Thomas G. Barnes, writing in 1977 on the recent origin and decay of the earth's magnetic field. R. V. Gentry and his team repeatedly showed, to everyone's astonishment, that extremely short- lived polonium halos occur in the absence of parent uranium, evidencing that the host rock was formed very quickly. Coal was examined that seemed to have formed in days instead of millions of years. Deg began to treat the longer-range radioclocks as he did radiocarbon dating, an indicator at best of relative time, and vulnerable to the kind of electro-chemical turbulence that is inherent in natural catastrophes that begin with disorders in the sky. Essentially this freed him to consider together all factors that could have left some indicator of time upon or around a specimen rock or site. Since no technique appeared by itself to be a tamper-proof, independently set, and auto-operative clock, every technique or test had to take its place in the group of indicators of time, some of which were carried into the setting to measure its time and others of which were inherent in the geology and circumstance of the setting. All too often, geophysicists came to believe that there is scientific validity in what is a purely administrative and industrial axiom --that tools and products should be standardized in as few forms as possible -- and therefore they assumed that there must be some true superiority in a tool like potassium 40-argon 40 radiochronometry because it can physically be applied to any strange igneous (and now metamorphic) rock that is carried into the laboratory. Deg came to rely, too, upon some very general ideas in concluding that the time of the world and of the ages may have been very short. These had an air of philosophy or, worse, homespun reasoning about them that is infuriating to technicians intercepted on their way to their laboratories and machines. For example, Woodmorappe's painstaking survey, published in the Creation Research Quarterly, of the successive occurrences of the earth's several eras, as denoted by its surface rocks, shows a preponderance of discontinuities through the series of eras. Also, the macrogeography of the Earth seems to call for a giant micro-chronic integrated episode. Inevitably, then, the mind was jostled to close up time radically in the period between hominid and man in the face of evidence that the hominids were human-like, and very little time was required to achieve a culture. Thus, microchronism lent itself to Deg's theory of Homo Schizo. Then, upon arriving at the notion that the earth had been recently ravaged, Deg began to wonder how the earth could have survived for very long if it had begun to suffer one after another disaster through four billion years; this led two ways; first, to shorten time in order to admit the fact that the earth still exists and has a biosphere even if, like the old grey mare of the song, "she ain't what she used to be," and, second, to postulate, even then, some backward limit in earth history to a beginning of the period of disasters, and thereupon he asked himself what might have been the first great catastrophe to threaten the world, and what started it -- giving him Super-Uranus, and a binary system in throes of disintegration, a baseline of perhaps 14,000 years for the first great destruction, and an initial electrical explosion arising naturally from a pre-existing electromagnetic system. When Milton and he sat down to discuss the system before the age of catastrophes (now compressed into the Holocene of 14,000 years), they found no need in their binary system, with its highly productive, enormous, magnetic tube, for more than a million years to accomplish all that was new under the sun. Their model of the solar system probably included errors of great magnitude; it might have major system failures; and it might even be basically wrong: both he and Milton freely acknowledged this; but they were ready to race it against any other model in the field. Having spent much of his life in building (not inheriting) a science, that of the study of political behavior, Deg did not take kindly to inference or statements that he did not know what science was all about. He replied sarcastically on occasion that indeed he did know what science was about and it was up to no good. When Chaos and Creation appeared, he sent a copy of it to the University of California physicist, Walter Alvarez, in appreciation of the study his team had published, exhibiting the existence of an iridium layer that might have fallen out from a meteoroid explosion, contributing to the demise of the dinosaurs. He took the occasion to ask "whether you remain convinced of the validity of radiometric dating, granted the possibility of catastrophic radiation and heavy subterranean heating." Alvarez replied, "In answer to your question: I consider radiometric dating to be an excellent tool that gives reliable dates. The systematics are well understood in all except the current frontier areas, and serious practitioners are well aware of the possible sources of problems and how to avoid them." From which answer, we may all take heart. In accepting kindly the book, Alvarez wrote "It helped me appreciate clearly the difference between the basically anti-scientific, Velikovskian approach and the way a scientist would seek to understand nature." Need I say more? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 4: } {Q - } {C Chapter 12: } {T THE THIRD WORLD OF SCIENCE} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWELVE THE THIRD WORLD OF SCIENCE For a decade from the appearance of Worlds in Collision, no quantavolutionary circle existed in the world. V.'s correspondence with his readers was voluminous. Immanuel and Elisheva were socially active for several years, but no scholar who could be said to be of catastrophist persuasion was a frequent correspondent or friend. In July 1956, Claude Schaeffer, author of the monumental comparative study of archaeological levels of destruction wrote Velikovsky his appreciation of receiving from him a copy of Earth in Upheaval. V. had used Schaeffer's work in preparing the book. In 1957, Immanuel and Elisheva visited with the Schaeffers for a week at Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland. Schaeffer did not agree with any part of Velikovsky's ideas except what Schaeffer himself had printed before V.'s work had appeared, that periods of sudden destruction had befallen Bronze Age Civilizations. Two decades later, Deg and Anne-Marie Hueber visited Schaeffer at his home near Paris. Deg wanted to update Schaeffer's inventory of sites, and they had corresponded briefly on the matter. Schaeffer had offered Deg the materials of his files about which he had written to V. many years before. Then he had spoken of "new confirmations of the reality of these crises on a continental scale which I have tried to analyze. I would be glad if I could write now immediately the contemplated second edition of Stratigraphie Compar‚e in two volumes, for with the new confirmations these Crises could no longer be questioned... so striking are proofs and so accurate the dates established by the new discoveries..." V. had not told Deg of his correspondence or of Schaeffer's intention of moving forward. V. had passed up a rare chance at statistically demonstrating his theses. Nor had he exhorted others to undertake work with Schaeffer. Deg had to suggest the idea to Schaeffer as if Schaeffer had never been aware of the possibility. Schaeffer was ready to collaborate. It was clear to both men that V.'s reconstructed chronology was not be at issue. Their aim was to confirm the ubiquity and internal cohesion of Schaeffer's set of catastrophes. Deg was made aware of Schaeffer's doubts of V. 's chronology, especially that coming after the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, doubts that were even stronger with Madame Schaeffer, who at one moment was with the group and at the next was out of the room tending to her visiting family. Deg conveyed his belief that the catastrophic sequence of Schaefer could slip forward nicely, using the same intervals, to fit the scale that he had drawn back to the neolithic age, which included V.'s fifteenth and eight century disasters. Thus Schaeffer's sequence could serve both the conventional and the quantavolutionary calendar. Deg sought funds for the research from the American Geographical society, without success. [The proposal is carried in The Burning of Troy.] He tried to reach Schaeffer in Paris in 1983. Schaeffer had just died. With the appearance of Stargazers and Gravediggers in 1983, a reader might see how barren was Velikovsky's personal and scholarly life during the 1950's of the very people who were capable of or were independently pursuing studies in quantavolution. The characters in the book are mostly his opponents; few friends and supporters appear. The only persons of catastrophist persuasion mentioned were Alan Kelly (but on nothing to do with his catastrophism) and Claude Schaeffer. Alan Kelly, and Frank Dachille who was his collaborator in Target Earth (1953), lived far apart and they worked alone. In American biology, Goldschmidt and Simpson knew there had been quantum jumps in paleontology and presumably their students acquired some inkling of the anomalies. In circles espousing Biblical literalism, the work of Price and others was discussed. There must have been other catastrophist scientists of the 1950's in America and England, but to this day Deg has not been able to name any. The existence of perhaps half a million readers of V. 's books meant little so far as research and writing were concerned. Some bootleg teaching of catastrophism was occurring, especially among fundamentalist Christians. In Germany there were Schindewolf and Nilssen in paleontology, as I noted elsewhere in these pages. Significant differences came with the sixties. The civil engineer Ralph Juergens left his business in the Midwest and moved to Hightstown, near Princeton, so as to be near Velikovsky and to use the libraries of the University. Warner Sizemore, a minister and graduate student of philosophy appeared on the scene at the same time. Stecchini, historian of science and unemployed professor, was already there, indulged by his wife Catherine, a star teacher of young writers at Princeton High school. While teaching at the University of Chicago in 1950, Stecchini had signed a letter of protest to Macmillan against the treatment given Velikovsky's book. When Deg met V. and decided to publish his story, there was none else in sight. They thought of Eric Larrabee, but none would be paid to write, and Larrabee was busy with unrelated affairs. Since Deg could not do the whole job himself, Velikovsky recommended Juergens, then working for McGraw-Hill as a scientific editor, and Deg and V. persuaded Stecchini to do an historical portion. Thus, all the effective resources of V. amounted to three men who could and would write about his case in depth. This was the first time any cooperative group had engaged itself in the study of V.'s problems. It was also the first time that V. realized the values and capacities of voluntarism in America. He was, however, cunning about the media. For instance, as soon as the American Behavioral Scientist was in the mill, V. could persuade Larrabee to write an article for Harper's Magazine. Larrabee was spurred into action and the article came out two months before he ABS issue appeared. V. was inspired and a new outlook, that of a movement, of helpers, even of collaborators, dawned upon him. Before then he had been a lone wolf in his field of study. Now he had friends who talked his language. Sizemore began to organize locally and to suggest that others organize in other places clubs or study circles under the name of "Cosmos and Chronos." V. referred often to these ghost legions. Sometimes they sprang to life to extend invitations to V. to speak at various places, or they were used as a letterhead denomination when rebuking critics. It was, for example, on 'Cosmos and Chronos' stationery that the Philadelphia disciple and high school teacher of psychology, Robert Stephanos, addressed the Franklin Society in seeking to arrange a lecture invitation to Velikovsky. When the Society reconsidered and hastily closed its gates to V., it brought a certain public disgrace upon itself. Inspired though he was by his association with new and competent men, V. himself could not be organized by them; he could seek only to determine all of their activity, without becoming controlled by them. Time and time again, spurts of organization occurred, with excellent initial results, but thereafter the efforts would slump and expire. The most successful organizing and activity was done out of his reach, in Canada, England, and in Oregon, He was too immense to allow himself even to be the leader; for a leader implies followers who are assigned responsibilities, are allowed judgment, employ initiative, and can be trusted. V. allowed none of these. There was to be no control over this leader; he was superman, distinct from the following, distinct even from a field of science for he refused to call it by a name, such as catastrophism. He would deny such allegations and not even perceive the distinctions. Nor would others, because it was unbelievable. It was nonetheless true of him. Among the types of activists of a movement there may be distinguished: the theorist, the researcher, the publicist, the agitator, the organizer, and the fund-raiser. A movement is oligarchic to the degree that the functions are concentrated in a few hands; it is bureaucratic to the degree to which the oligarchy assigns and restricts these tasks to specialists; it is democratic to the degree to which anyone can do whatever one pleases. Pens‚e was an oligarchy, Kronos developed beyond oligarchy into autocracy. The S. I. S. was an oligarchy with high turnover and open access. The cosmic heretics as a total aggregate were anarchic, and formed and transformed plastically, so that one could perceive the aforesaid stable organizations, then glimpse pairs, trios, bands, circles, and groups in process of becoming (such as C. Marx's small Basel group that embraced Professor Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen, and Milton Zysman's Toronto band, and Luckerman's small Los Angeles operation). The attentive public shaped itself over the period into ad hoc opponents and task forces (such as the AAAS panel), into members, supportive audiences, subscribers, book buyers, gossipers, fund-donors, materials-copiers-and- circulators --reflections indeed of the several functions, anarchically undertaken. An instance of the highest type of voluntarism came with Alice Miller, a San Francisco librarian, who put to herself uninvited and uncompensated the task of indexing intensively the works of V., and V. made the necessary arrangements to publish the book. The few scholars who obtained this work could now search to their heart's content for the fullest play and nuances of ideas (where such fullness existed) and for contradictions and errors. The first operation to be performed in serious criticism in as index; the memory of a reading or two rarely sets up written material adequately for analysis. Would that every high school student who today is being hastily introduced to a computer would be instructed in the philosophical logic underlying the indexing of content. Deg longed for an Alice Miller for his Q Series; his indexes were inadequate, even more than V. 's, because his work contained a larger proportion of abstract materials, which are harder to index. He found, for instance, that searching for "monotheism" in V. 's own indexes was useless; in Alice Miller's the idea came forth nicely, even beyond what V. might have wished to expose. We return to Deg's favorite pastime of counting, listing, and categorizing, and to his figures of the numbers involved. They are impressive for they may be exponential. Despite the casualties, the deaths, the desertions, the languishing, and the waywardness, and counting parallel little groupings and isolated active scholars, by the end of the decade of the sixties there were perhaps thirty true scientific catastrophists who had come up by the non- establishment route into the field of quantavolution, and by the end of another decade, there were fifty more creative workers in the field. Shadowing these, watching intently, and supporting them were several hundreds of others, close in. Shadowing the cosmic heretics, too, were a new group, union-card holders of the establishment, who are distinguished most readily by their denial that they are or ever were sympathetic to Velikovsky or any other quantavolutionist, or that they have ever sought or do now seek any ties with cosmic heretics. And these were equal and greater in numbers, carrying out the revolution by partial incorporation, the process whereby a revolutionary movements, as it advances, meets an opposition that has already been infected by and has adopted in part the principles of the revolution. It is at this point that most successful movements subside or are destroyed; their heirs are their enemies. As one can see, if workers number, say, 15 in 1 decade, 30 in another, and 80 in the next, a doubling process may be occurring, against all predictions that might be based upon resources available, unchanged state of the opposition, and so on. At this rate, with 150 to 200 in the 80's and 400 in the 90's taken with the activists who lend support to their views, the quantavolution viewpoint should enter the millennium primed for a large role in scientific thought. At the same time, it should be borne in mind, there will be attrition and desertions, doubling, and trebling the numbers of quantavolutionists outside of (but beginning to merge with) the establishment. But the threat of nuclear warfare to all civilization overshadows projections of science. One is tempted, in all of this speculation, to recite Keynes' ironic words, not about short-term economic policy but about short-sighted world politics: "In the long term, we'll all be dead." Be it admitted that Deg, publishing a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, had a perfect subject and extraordinary materials in the Velikovsky affair. But why should he stick with Velikovsky? Let Velikovsky say his piece and then be done with it. What of next month's issue of the magazine, and the month after? The journal needed continuous attention. What of the state of political science, and of higher education, if which he had always been so critical? What of the state of the nation, ibid? What of his family staggering into adolescence in the disturbed and unruly Princeton atmosphere? What of his meager fortune, skating on a thin monthly bank balance and a home mortgage? And his friends, the women and men who had been no more conversant with Velikovsky than he himself? And his book contracts: especially the American Way of Government, a good textbook in need of revision, whose care would lift his finances from year to year and carry his name around to hundreds of college communities. And the radical book on behalf of congressional supremacy that he was writing? What of his reputation, that, in line with the customary in academic careers, should now begin to rise to a peak, abetted by the constant "mending of fences" and "nursing of the constituency" ordinarily pursued among scholars in his circumstances? Or should he not now throw in his fortunes with a political party, Democrat or Republican, it mattered not, for in both he had "friends in high places." Close friends welcomed his participation in Barry Goldwater's camp and in Hubert Humphrey's; this would appear strange unless one understood that subjectively Deg was confident that he was his own man, and that he could find equal opportunities in both camps to exercise his skills and ideals, which, to put them in several words, were: decentralization, basic income guarantees, voluntarism, legislative rule at home, and representative government for the world. The American party system, however, no wise shared his bent for change. In all of this and through it all, why did Deg continue to involve himself with Velikovsky's problems? Did not he have enough problems of his own -- larger and more serious and worse? Did he not have as grand and earth-shaking ideas himself? Most of all, if he was to spend a great deal of time in promoting somebody, and it was not to be "the next President of the United States" then why didn't he build up his own reputation? He had had mean reviewers, scornful ones, too. His books had not sold very well, he had not yet won any considerable prize, no Pulitzer, no National Book Award. Still he could drum up audiences at colleges around the world. Bill Baroody wished that he might tour the country on behalf of the reconceptualized American Enterprise Institute, addressing public issues and garnering funds in the end. He was in mind as a political campaign manager here and there in the nation. He was offered the job of heading the social sciences division of UNESCO in Paris (and refused). Why should he waste his time on a political campaign in science, especially one that had already been victorious in principle (Jastrow, Polanyi, Sagan, Motz, Neugebauer, Kurtz, Hadas, and dozens of other personages had sooner or later pronounced themselves against the ill treatment of Velikovsky). Did not Elisheva insist to the end that he had opened up the final phase of Velikovsky's public appreciation? Was the establishment of the motions of Venus so important? Or the evidence of ancient catastrophes on Earth? Or the likelihood of collective amnesia, a common enough idea of wise men of all ages? Must the world of science sign line by line in agreement with Velikovsky's book --the ultimate wish of a cult? No, none of this was so important. Well, what then? Was he sexually deprived? Did he identify Velikovsky with his own father? Many more motives offer themselves. Can one ever know? Why bother to ask, too? Yet it is a question that was asked at scores of lectures, receptions, meeting, and in personal discussions, a question that came out of the interest that people felt in their own motives, out of curiosity about what might be construed as altruism or some other form of abnormal behavior. It's Alfred's halva, Nina would say, meaning the joke about the man who loved sweet "Turkish Delight" and would turn the conversation to it at the slightest cue. Deg behaved as he did partly because he had enjoyed enough successes in other matters and success bored him. Deg did not attend to promoting his academic career because he was already a tenured professor, "heavily published" as they say, and where was there anything further to be gained; universities and colleges seemed ready to succumb to stupidity or insane revolts, but not to total self-evaluation and reform. They were, with governmental help, becoming ever more bureaucratized and inane. Besides he found self-promotion an embarrassment, all the more as he watched his acquaintances climb the rows of ladders inclined against decrepit edifices where committees and trustees held sway, and important research was kept in a corner like a bastard. He was not adverse to fame. To the contrary, he expected it to be "handed to him on a silver platter," to use one of his mother's expressions. Subjectively, he desired glory; objectively, externally, he had to scorn it. He was having his last words on Congress and the executive force, an appeal for the preservation of republican government that went against every major political and economic interest in America (and that communists and socialist when in power also and even more rampantly suppressed). He was, as I said, uninspired by the political movements of the moment, and even more so as they developed through the sixties and seventies of the century. The kindling problems of his family would burst into flame but he had no intention of becoming party to a decade of adolescent rebellion of the kind that ruins the best years of many Americans' lives. Besides, did he not have such splendid plans for going en masse to Europe for a year to teach the children foreign languages and escape the menacing youth and drug culture of Princeton? But look particularly to the controversy surrounding the Velikovsky matter: was it not exciting? The ideas at stake were of the highest order. Not only in sociology: for what sociology is more important than the sociology of knowledge (Sozialwissenschaft) that he had cut his eyes teeth on with Mannheim, Wirth, Shils, and Leites, and which was really the theme underlying his first book, Public and Republic, where ideas of representation were shown to be unconsciously operative and externally effective over hundreds of years and many different political generations? Also there was excitement in the substance of this strange new kind of science. Scattered about but eager to stay in touch were dozens of intelligent people interested in one or more of the hundred fields upon which quantavolution impinged. More exciting and elevating than yachting, the horseraces, gambling, cocktail parties, tourist travel, religious routines, better than the eviscerated or wrongheaded politics of the times. In the final analysis it was the unlimited firing of sky rockets in all directions that held Deg to the course of quantavolution and bound him to his friend Velikovsky. There was the intransigent personality of Velikovsky. Even some opponents, Robert Jastrow, Walter Sullivan and Motz, for instance, found him fascinating. He was always there, the tallest mountain in Princeton and anywhere else, so far as Deg could observe. A series of entries from Deg's Journal, most of them from the year 1968, show what I mean. But first a letter from Velikovsky to Deg, before the ABS issue of September 1963 had made its impact, to show that V. had no intention of letting his new friend escape his camp by crossing the ocean: August 16, 1963 Dear Professor de Grazia: It was very good to have a letter from you in Paris. I like to hear that you may come to the States in October. No old castles here, no ancient arenas, but you will be most certainly engaged in some skirmishes in the tournament for which the scene is being set. Larrabee's article produced certain effect (I assume it was mailed to you) and the foundations of the establishment are being loosened. (...) A few papers started to comment on the issue, one or two colleges invited me to speak before their students, much discussions going on without reaching the printed page, and I am emerging from the "shadow of darkness." (...) I wish I could bring to our side a few prominent scholars and scientists. I write to de Madariaga about Lord Russell whom he knows. You may say again, 'Cabot', but visualize the effect on the closed scientific ring of one such renegade. I wish to think that Mrs. de Grazia and your children are enjoying their many new impressions, and the old villa makes them feel that theirs is part of an old heritage. Turgeniev wrote someplace that two urges live in a human soul -- a striving for far away lands and a longing for the homeland and home. Mrs. Velikovsky joins me in wishing all of you good health and animated months ahead. Cordially Yours, Immanuel Velikovsky PS The mail brings an envelope with copies of letters received by Harper's. Menzel of Harvard Observatory writes a 17 pages letter, unfair, emotional: he exposes himself to embarrassing statements of fact. A battle of letters started. At the present, the response runs 50% against 50%. Therefore any articulate supporter -- or opponent -- should enter the fracas, the earlier the better. Mobilize your friends! -- I. V. A year later, Deg was not only still in the camp, no matter where he was, but he was suffering privately the annoyances of the camp. His journal of September 1st, 1964 from London is relevant. He is on his way to the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, to lecture on American politics and will from there go to Marina di Massa where his daughter Catherine will be wedded to the best-looking boy on the beach, Dante Matelli. Left for London at 10 AM. On way to airport penciled a crude note to Velikovsky, finally telling him bluntly of my feelings towards him. I said, "Dear Immanuel, I am writing this on the bus to the plane. Last night I went again over the letters and material for Rabinovitch, to the detriment of many pressing affairs. I finally decided to send out nothing at the moment. "You will receive the page proofs on the Margolis critique. Please make only absolutely necessary corrections (I do not care if you offer to pay for them.) Issue is already late. Please do not call my office or the printers. Your inability to let go of anything will be the ruin of our friendship and of the magazine. Sincerely, Alfred". I handed the letter to a passenger agent just before stepping aboard the PanAm Clipper. It culminated a day of annoyance and desperation that began when I courteously called Velikovsky to say goodbye. To those who know him well, the history of the next 24 hours was to be clear. He wanted to rewrite letters, call lawyers, discuss imbroglios, in short, utterly and without conscience disrupt my carefully measured out and urgent last hours before departure. And worse, he succeeded. This hardly matters. The friendship, the campaign, continues, and V. is still the mastermind. When Deg goes abroad in 1966, V. has ideas of how he should spend his time in Israel and Egypt: Feb. 14, 1966 Dear Mrs. de Grazia: Please do not send this letter to Alfred if he already left Italy. Im. Velikovsky. Dear Alfred: I received your note written before leaving for airport. Should you visit Jerusalem you may wish to give personal regards to President Zaluccan Shazar -- our friend, especially of Elisheva, of many years. He will be glad to hear that Elsheva is active as sculptor and as a chamber-musician (as good as ever); and Elisheva wishes him to know of the change in the attitude of the scientific world to my book with many discoveries of the Space Age; the fact that I am invited to speak at Yale, Princeton, Duke, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Oberlin, Brandeis, etc., is an indication. I wish you good weather (pleasant driving, good new friends, and many invigorating experience). Regards from Elisheva and my regards for Paul and John. Yours, Immanuel. [P. S.] It would be good if at the Cairo Museum you could obtain some organic object of the time of Ramses II or Ramses II (or of both) for radiocarbon test( better seed, mummy swathing, leather, papyrus, linen -- and not wood, if possible) at the lab of the University of Pennsylvania (Dr. Elizabeth Ralph.) To apply to Dr. Isnander Hanna (Director at the Lab at the Museum). The material needs to be sent from museum to museum with all the precautions. By far better not to mention my name. If any difficulty, I shall try to obtain the samples by asking Dr. Ralph to write to Dr. Hanna. Deg's Journal, January 18, 1967 Phoned Velikovsky tonight. Elisheva came on the wire too, at his request. I told them what I was doing to institute a Foundation. He was quite subdued. He is not used to having anything taken out of his hands. Both were happy, I could tell, at the thought of something they had talked so much about moving so quickly to a climax. Anti-Velikovskianism's first line of defense is the impossibility of his theories. Then, I suppose, if proved right, it will be said that he was a simple scribe: he read an inscription which told what happened. That position will not endure, either, for he worked in a superhuman way to piece together the shattered mosaic. Deg's Journal, November 15, 1967 9 P. M. Immanuel called met at twilight to tell me Stephanos had called his attention to the Nov. 3 issue of Science magazine wherein Professor R. Eshleman of Stanford University, Electrical Engineer and Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Radar Astronomy had raised briefly the question whether the baffling puzzle of Venus being 'locked-in' to Earth might be answered by the Velikovskian hypothesis of an historical collision of the two bodies. A year ago Science refused to accept an advertisement for one of his books. "who knows, Alfred, whether the Nobel prize, which has had a poor record very often, might not come." I said, "Immanuel, your biography is your triumph. You do not need these foolish prizes." Deg's Journal, 1/ 4/ 68 [Providence] At 2: 30 I left the ribald company of Mike N., N., Jim Kane, Al Saglio, Tom Yatman, and Edwin Safford at the Spaghetti House to visit Prof. Otto Neugebauer at Brown University. His office is in an old red brick house next to the new Library and has an entrancing scholarly air to it, closed into the basement, holding several tables, everything with a century old appearance that I too should find a perfect atmosphere for quiet study and work. O. N. was somewhat suspicious of me, as well he might be, knowing that I sponsored a special defense of Velikovsky's work. However, like most true intellectuals, once engaged, his defenses were down and he spoke vociferously, indignantly, said he couldn't waste time on the foolishness and trickery of V. but proceeded to amplify at great length, his little blue eyes peering directly into mine and his slight but determined German voice carrying effectively, even colloquially, his arguments. He disputed hotly the idea that there had been or was any conspiracy against V., (I stated that I too disagreed with V. on this point), and he felt that V. was employing the tools of propaganda and sophistry against him and others. Who can deny this, too? But there seemed to be little reason to go into the political aspects of the controversy, inasmuch as O. N. could not know, more than V., the dynamics of this process, and I essayed questioning him upon several critical issues concerning Babylonian tablets. He declared twice that he had "no investment" in the words of the tablets and could take or refuse any interpretation, depending only upon its truth. They were only a minor interest with him, not even "minor," less than minor. He said he had not read Stecchini's interpretations of Kugler's work (and declared offhandedly but vigorously that much had been learned since Kugler's time anyhow). He declared that the observations in the Venusian tablets of Ammizaduga came from erroneous reportings of lunar movements that, in turn, had been used by the Babylonians to measure the movement of Venus. An amateur, he said, would transfer his ignorance of the ancient reports into a wrong interpretation that it was Venus, not the Moon, that was moving erratically. He declared emphatically that from their beginnings around 700 B. C. there were no unexplainable irregularities. (He kept reasserting, and I had to stave off as not relevant to the argument, which was the empirical facts re the tablets, that the whole V. thesis was mechanically impossible, that any 10-year old schoolboy would know how the Earth would be destroyed by anything approaching a collision with Venus, and so forth). He said further that there was little or no reporting of any planetary behavior in a scientific way priot to about 700 B. C. ( I didn't press for the exact date) that, for instance, there was no reporting of Saturn before 400 B. C. Earlier records are largely the oracles which deal with sun, moon, and a bright star (which could have been Venus, since it is the brightest and hence would oppose V.'s theories of the non-existence of Venus before ca. 1500 B. C. ) He asserted further that Egyptian chronology was perfectly established, on the basis of the Egyptian lunar calendar (based on a thirty-year cycle) that carried back to the very earliest times. He claimed that the whole V. affair showed the basically anti-intellectual atmosphere of the population. I asked whether it did not show also the failing of the establishment of science to perceive its "public problems," and offered the opinion that if he, and others such as Harrison Brown, had dealt with V.'s work more seriously, there would have been no prolonged vicious aftermath, to which he grudgingly acceded. Then he added that there should not be such an accent on "going to the moon" so that billions were being largely wasted, for which sums the whole of Mesopotamia could be dug up down to its virgin soil. Then said he, we should have all of these problem solved. To which I agreed. I asked whether someone should not set forth the thirty or sixty principal factual theses of V. and find specialists on each topic to criticize V. He had mixed feelings about the idea (first taking it personally, of course, "I don't have time for that!") holding that V.'s ideas were too vague to discuss, that this would prove that the "conspiracy" actually did exist: that there would be too few to undertake the job in certain areas (such as his own of Assyriology and Babylonia); but that it might be a proper way to get to the heart of the matter. He was, on the whole, quite negative re the general problem and hostile to V. As I was leaving, he said: "I just received a letter from Chandrasekhar of the University of Chicago. He is the physicist. He asks whether we shouldn't do something about the Yale Scientific Magazine issue of V. I replied that there was no use to it." I walked out into the winter snow-threatening afternoon and down the streets of exquisite old structures of Providence's East Side to Mike's house, thinking of what I had learned and of the beauties of this old part of town. 1. N [eugebauer] is convinced V. plays a tricky game: "He couldn't answer my colleague's questions at a Brown University meeting, but said he would reply to them the next day. Then he didn't appear." 2. He believes V. to be a foolish and wicked amateur. 3. His direct assertions concerning the Venusian tablets should be worked into a direct encounter with V.'s words (...) 4. N appeared uncertain about Kugler, and unconvincingly dismissed him. 5. N is persuaded that V. is arguing in a great circle, using established theories as grounds for criticizing deviations and unknowns and for proving the deviations accord with his theories, then destroying the established framework without perceiving that his interpretation of the deviations is itself dependent upon and sponsored by the established theories. N. did not say so, but this kind of problem is fundamental to all theoretical change: man is dependent for what he sees on what he has been taught to perceive, so how can be prove wrong what he has been taught, if his new vision is wholly dependent upon being preceded by the old one ? 6. I feel the need to organize an 'Anti-Velikovsky' symposium where highly reputed scholars are asked to address themselves to a meaningful segment of a carefully prepared set of questions that test the whole fabric of V.'s theories. Logically V. cannot dispute this procedure. It would, I think, cause him to be angry with me. So be it. Deg's Journal, January 20,1968 I have been visiting with Velikovsky once or twice a week since November, and have reread Earth in Upheaval and Ages in Chaos. Since I have been heavily occupied with the theory of activities of the federal government, the American Government text revision, a plan for a business company should I decide to leave the academic world, and so forth, I indicated to V. ten days ago that I could not organize the magazine that we had always talked of publishing. Then, for some reason, a week ago, I thought "We must start a foundation for V. and his work." I asked Richard Kramer to initiate the papers for organization of a corporation not-for-profit in N. J... settled on PO Box 294 and my home as the address, and decided to ask Juergens, Stecchini, Kramer, and Herb Neuman to join me in the first Board of Directors. I called each man to invite them aboard and received their prompt acceptances. Deg's Journal, March 2, 1968 This morning I am resolving to withdraw myself as much as possible from Immanuel's campaign for honors and recognition. A full eight hours went to him yesterday; it is too much, considering what I must, do for my own work. In its way, it deserves the same kind of attention V. gives to his and I give to his. My intellectual children may be scrawnier but I cannot turn them out to starve in the cold. I give up lectures that, just like his, might explain my ideas and bring me income, as for example one that I turned down today for $100 and expenses before an audience of civil service officials in Washington. My ideas go undefended, many aspects of them go unexpressed. I do not give them the tender, fierce, loving care that every man's respectable notions deserve. Let's see whether I can behave by this resolve. Deg's Journal, March 3, 1968 March is come cold and blustering. Jill and I rode our bikes to Mom's where Ed and his young friend, Margaret C... were visiting. We arrived frozen. M. C. has just returned from 2 weeks in Boston, under the tutelage of a Yoga guru. I say to Ed, in greeting, 'Ah, here is the "slim, elegant Sicilian!" ', quoting Norman Mailer's autobiographical novella of the "March on the Pentagon" that is printed in the current Harper's Magazine. [Edward organized the legal defense of the arrested protesters.] Jill says, of Margaret, 'Girls who have had trouble with their fathers work it off well. Girls who have had difficulties with their mothers do not. ' She cites Jung on the point. And we string out many examples. It is probably true, even as an unrefined statement. I ruminate: so important, so simple are basic truths. What conceals it and them? Great truths and discoveries are not hidden by their complexity but by jamming of our ideological cognitive, and perceptive machinery. Velikovsky, the other night, quoted me Butterfield's comment that the very young can understand principles of science and nature that have baffled the greatest minds of history. I think V., who is in essence a philosophical realist, uses this idea in only a limited way. He means that the young haven't had their tender minds distorted by unfact. It is more importantly to be understood that the mind is structured in each generation to receive some truths and reject others, or better, some half-truths. Both V. and perhaps Butterfield unjustifiably abstract the mind from its context. It has, for instance, been pointed out by numerous defenders of classicism, such as neo-Thomists, that we believe the ancients foolish or unperceptive of truth because of our partial and current truth-idolatry; freed from contemporary ideology, we can understand truth as the ancients discovered it and agree with them. Deg's Journal, April 30, 1968 A. M., en route to NYC Half of this past warm flowering weekend in Princeton has been spent with Velikovsky or on matters related to him. We spent Saturday afternoon going over materials that might be suited for the proposed book "V. and his Critics" that I am discussing with Kluger of Simon and Schuster. We spoke also of the foundation for Studies in Modern Science, which I have organized. He named eight major problems that are critical to his theories, and I am taking them into consideration in the memorandum which I am preparing on the program of the Foundation. Bob Stephanos called me on Friday night upon my return from NY to tell me that Mr. Mainwaring of Philadelphia, an admirer of V., intended to help financially. Both V. and I had written letters to M., who runs a family manufacturing firm and is, I hear, a person of some intellectual stature. V. was naturally pleased. He talked on and on, I edging him back to a subject from time to time. Sunday evening, V seized the initiative and called Prof. Philip Hammond of Brandeis U. to ask about his possible interest in excavating at El Arish for signs of the siege of the Hyksos fortress by the allied armies of Saul and Thutmose, about 1050 B. C. in V.'s chronology. The digging would be a crucial test of the V. theory of ancient history. Hammond, who had given indications of sympathy years ago, appeared enthusiastic. He offered to go El Arish with two assistants if we could organize the expedition. After learning this from V., I called David Dietz to ask whether he would still be interested in taking part in the expedition. He was. Yesterday, Monday, I asked Harry Hess of Princeton University Geological Department to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Foundation. After some demurral (later, V. would be mystified by his hesitation since 'Hess definitely agreed to join. ' but I was not mystified.) Poor Hess who is one of the busiest man alive with his Space Board, Mohole and other activities, couldn't take the leap into the cold water without encouragement. So I purred gently, sympathetically, and finally he said with a hopeless smile "Aw hell, OK, put me on"! (...) Deg's Journal, May, 1968 N [ina] and I met at the Museum of Modern Art at six yesterday after discussion with Kluger, of Simon and Schuster. A surrealist exhibition was on. Max Ernst, Nadelman, Matisse, Ram bear up very well. Picasso rarely becomes human enough to excite me. His lines are cold and cruel. De Chirico's colors seem shabby now. It was a brave moment and said a lot. We drank beer and ate cheese and crackers in the garden of the Museum, which filled with grey rosy lights as the sun set. Rodin's Balzac, seen from above, is stern and emotionally stirring. A Picasso She-goat is my great love. Back at Washington Square, N. prepared a light supper at her place and accompanied me to my work. I talked to Velikovsky at length, recounting my conversation with Richard Kluger and explaining my plans and hopes for the expedition. As usual, he was difficult to converse with but excited more than I've ever felt him to be before. I told him that I thought we should film the El Arish episode from beginning to end. and he was fully agreed. I wonder, or course, continuously, whether we shall find what we are after beneath the town -- the siege evidence and artifacts of Saul's army, the Egyptians, the Hyksos. I hung up the phone and went to work sorting out materials to be used in my Reader on American Government N. said "Velikovsky can never finish his work." "Nor can I!" I replied. "He has thirteen books to go, when we last counted them. I am as badly off." She asked me what I had to finish: "You have done so much." "Not at all," I said, impatiently. "We do not measure ourselves by other men, but by an absolute criterion of what we might conceivably do." And then I ticked off what I imagined I might yet do: the publication of my collected papers of the past the American Government books another book of poetry several novels, mostly autobiographical a philosophy of science "the new political order" and whatever would intervene, such as the El Arish story and the government operations study, and who knows what else: editing the Velikovsky and His Critics book, for example (...) I spoke to Sebastian about other matters on the telephone during the day. We are concerned about the troubles that Eddie is having over the custody of the children in divorcing Ellen (...) Bus told me of a quarrel between Renzo Sereno and his wife one time over a lady, possibly a mistress, of Renzo. "The only reason you like her is because she thinks you're great," declared the wife. Bus and I breathed reverently over this gem for a minute of ATT long-distance time and charges. What has come over womankind? What do they imagine to be the foundation for a man's love and devotion, even charm, even presence? After a day of labor selecting readings for my American Government Reader in the company of Eric Weise and John Appel, I entrained for Princeton, snoozing aboard, and arriving happily into the fresh air of the countryside. John, Carl, and Chris were all in excellent mood, the one fixing things on the old Cadillac, Carl playing his Beethoven pieces, and Chris shooting baskets. Mom came to dinner, bringing some freshly picked and cooked wild cardoons. At nine I biked to Velikovsky's home, Francie loping alongside and for two hours, while she stretched comfortably in the middle of his parlor, we talked and argued over who should do what about books, magazines, and the ever-growing prospect of the expedition to El Arish. Prof. Philip Hammond caught me by telephone soon after I arrived from N. Y. C. to reaffirm his interest. I asked him whether he would, in addition to his usual excavation reports, accept co- authoring of a popular book on El Arish that I was proposing to Simon and Schuster and he accepted promptly. I like the sound of him, though we have not yet met. V. was difficult. He holds out things and then pulls them back. He wants to do too much himself. I try to take responsibilities off his shoulders and he fights to keep them and even to take new ones. He wishes to discuss every small decision, to control every document. He is elated over our plans but becomes more demanding and even a little more paranoid as events speed up. He has a poor sense of organization and scheduling where other human beings are involved. His own immense mental world can grab and hold everything and shake it out in marvelous patterns, but the world of affairs has its own ruthless laws, that treat all men equally, and that make their own patterns. Now came time for the Foundation to form and the incorporators met to elect themselves and additional members to the Board of Trustees, and to transact business. R. P. Kramer, L. Stecchini, R. Juergens and Deg coopted Horace Kallen, Harry H. Hess, A. Bruce Mainwaring, John Holbrook Jr., Robert C. Stephanos, and Warner Sizemore. The date was June 2, 1968, a day that would not go down in history. Deg was chosen President and other preliminaries were disposed of. Then the ill-fated excursion to El Arish, where the capital of the Hyksos supposedly lay buried, was taken up. Everyone knew already that Mainwaring and Holbrook had put up some funds, that a Dr. Hammond had been approached to lead the group, and a contract had been drawn up. Deg set forth a budget, even the minimal costs of which were well beyond the pledged resources of group. Besides the preliminary soundings at El Arish, papers on the "hydrocarbons" of Venus and its temperature changes were to be commissioned, a publication was to be prepared, preparations to receive and use V.'s archives were in order, a magazine was to be inaugurated, and besides there were provisions for work on collective amnesia, dating systems, magnetic polarity, evolutionary theory, the psychology of catastrophe, electromagnetic cosmic models, and the reception system of science. A happy set of prospects indeed, every one of which the foundation was to fail to inaugurate, much less carry on to any extent. The case of El Arish will suffice as an exemplum horribilis. In June, A. Biran of the Israeli Department of Antiquities wrote to Deg saying: Indeed there is much interest in the archaeology and history of the area but unfortunately it is not always possible to satisfy this curiosity. Even I with all my interest and curiosity have not yet been either to Kadesh Barbea, Mons Cassius, or Qantara... July found Deg in Naxos, ready to go to Israel if needed, and John Holbrook had gone to Israel to seek permission to begin a site survey at El Arish. Deg is getting a variety of inputs from his assistant: July 10, 1968 ... I spoke with Velikovsky today. He told me that Holbrook had arrived here yesterday. A copy of all the correspondence is on its way to us. The gist of it is that Holbrook saw Biran and Dotan, the chief archaeologist, and that the Israelis would like to see more solid support from Americans. Biran said that FOSMOS seems a bit fly-by-night to them. Another problem is that they don't want to grant foreigners the right to dig in occupied territory. But apparently they have softened a little, and if they could see something more established in support of the dig, well then... So Holbrook is going to ask somebody at Yale about it, a Professor Popo. I read your report of the Natural Museum with interest. I will probably get to the Met sometime this week. The figure you described on the one vase are usually interpreted as Amazons, and I am going to compare the costumes with those of the Busiris vase, out of curiosity. I think there is also a book on Greek arms, with should have something in it about helmets. I am sure you are enjoying Greece -- it's so wild, beautiful, clean and clear... Meanwhile John Holbrook is grinding his gears in Israel and is addressing a set of marvelously detailed letters to V., a copy of which he then sent to Deg. Holbrook writes to V. on July 10, 1968: Now I am in a bit of a quandry. First, I have no reason to doubt Biran's word that the military situation in the Sinai area prohibits any extended work at El Arish at this time. Second, although I shall certainly see Dothan when he returns from the field at the end of the week, I cannot pledge the support of the foundation to the extent of $50,000. Although we have great hopes for it, the treasury of the foundation is still a bit empty. That being the case, I can only explore the possibility of organizing an expedition to El Arish at some indefinite time in the future (when military situation permits) on the most tentative basis. Much will depend upon what I learn from Dothan. At the very least, I hope that I shall be able to get a look at the site before I leave. One other matter deserves mention. There is no way of telling the extent to which opposition to your work played a role in the rejection of our proposal. There were other reasons for rejecting it. Latter Holbrook ventures an opinion on the actual site: Quite frankly, although I am sure that a complete archaeological survey of the Wadi El Arish and its vicinity might be extremely useful, I am willing to bet that the first trench which is dug in the area which I have described above, the northern quarter of town, will not be found empty or unrewarding. Little could be done with the El Arish party, upon which V. had set the highest priority (and did for the rest of his life and rightly so, says Deg). The failure was bad enough, but to Deg the most disagreeable part of the episode was the way in which V. began to find grounds for opposing Hammond after he had agreed on his competence and leadership qualities, and had invited him to lead the operation. V. soon convinced himself, and then Holbrook, that Hammond was pro-Arab and would be persona non grata to the Israeli authorities, until they were actually approaching the Israeli saying in effect "We know how you must feel about Hammond, but we are aware of this situation and are taking care of it," whereupon the Israeli, in the case of President Shazar, said, "What are you talking about, who is Hammond?" Deg's Journal, October 20,1968 Velikovsky and I talked for the first time in a week yesterday afternoon and again last night. He leaves for a grand lecture tour of Texas today. We have counseled him not to go to California to talk, a little later on, because he would become tired and he absolutely should finish Peoples of the Sea. He continues to add new data to the work, which is slender still though, like a stick of dynamite. We argued over the final contract details of Velikovsky and His Critics, which I am not keen to do anyway, given my poor financial state and other projects of greater personal importance. He wanted us to guarantee mutually that we would not submit the final manuscript without his approval, in effect. It is of course a perilous idea, for he hangs onto everything and cannot suffer any criticism. I drew up an appropriate missive, but added words to the effect that we would also be jointly responsible if Simon & Schuster publishers sought damages from us for non-delivery of the manuscript. As I suspected, he balked, and talked of legal formalism. I laughed and expostulated "But you want everything, complete authority and no responsibility!" It is the same with the Foundation we are creating: he wants it to follow his every wish, but does not think that he should be identified with it. He then said, "All right, Alfred, we will agree just among ourselves, without a paper. You will not submit it without my approval." "O. K." And then we went on to argue over the student strike movement, which he fears will undermine authority and disrupt education. "A tiny minority has no right to interfere with the majority who want to study." I told him that minorities are the media of change in any field. I asked whether, if the French students had not rioted in May, there ever would have been the Faure reforms of last week, "No matter!" He would change his mind. I can always win a argument with him on politics, by citing his own case and the history of modern Israel. On these two great contradictions of order, stability, and authority, much of his life is built; they make all of his defenses of authority and majorities vulnerable. "What do you think of Onassis?" I asked to change the subject. "Who?" Onassis, and Jackie Kennedy. "Oh! I tell you that I think it is a second assassination of Kennedy." Beautiful, I thought, either way. His idea is the same as that of all the maudlin sentimentalists, Kennedy- dead worshippers, the sanctimonious, the suttee-ists. My way, it is revenge for a not too great love, followed by the maddening experience of suffering all of this cant and sick reverence. All of these mass-media addicts were hoping she would end up with a crew-cut college sophomore from Princeton. So she picks the ugly old Greek pirate, and I am personally pleased. The Hollywood and Madison Avenue brainwashed crowds have their fairy tale exploded once again. I know that people live off of these fairy tales; that is what makes valid history and rational politics impossible for them. Perhaps I should feel sorry for the great boobery, but I am diabolically pleased with Jackie's revenge upon them. And upon JFK too, with his harrowing political life and difficult character and mistresses. What is there to insult in his memory, I ask myself, and what business is it of old ladies and shopgirls to define her husband. "Onassis, I don't know the gentleman. Probably they like each other. I wish them happiness." Basta. We returned to majorities and here is how he defined the Jewish majority in Palestine. "Over history, the dead of the Jews are a majority in that country. They live in that tradition wherever they are," Voting the dead to make a majority, like the Confederate southerners do, or the bosses of "rotten boroughs" in the northern cities. Grussgott! What would V. say to these majorities and so many others that are alive, as well. But Israel is the id‚e fixe; facts are the dependent variable. Indeed, as I have known for as long as I have known him, the id‚e fixe, the highly conventional, traditional literal interpretation of and respect for the Biblical passages: from this conservative position spewed forth in all directions the most radical theories. Deg's Journal, October 25, 1968 Reflecting upon the failure of our infant foundation to launch an archaeological expedition at El Arish last summer, I think it may be well to set down my view, which contrasts somwhat with that of Velikovsky and Holbrook. V. was too willing to accept rumors about Prof. Philip Hammond and placed too strong a weight upon adverse facts. V. had no right, as I told him bluntly, to destroy Hammond's possible role as leader of the expedition on grounds that Hammond was pro- Arab and that he had a mistress who would accompany him. Holbrook, whom I regard highly and even warmly, with all his youthful arrogance, was too ready to accept V.'s evaluations and then afterwards the position expressed by the Israeli authorities, to wit, that we could not afford to support the diggings and that the political situation was dangerous. I felt that we had gone so far in our adventure that we ought to have let Hammond himself battle with the Israeli. He might, I think, have outfaced them and dragged in his crew and equipment over their grumpy dispositions. I doubt that we would have uncovered anything of great significance in a few weeks, but we would have planted our flag. We would have moved on from there. Deg's Journal, November 2, 1968 Met with Velikovsky this afternoon. He is back from a triumphal tour of lectures in Texas. We argued over plans for the foundation. Juergens was present. I asked him pointblank to pull out any materials he might have that others had sent him and might be used as articles for the proposed journal. He did so. [There was almost nothing.] I asked him also to pull together all his address lists and to let us place a man in his house to built up a list of friends with whom we might communicate. He agreed. I was most pleased. I borrowed V. 's manuscript on Peoples of the Sea to read again, and left with everyone in cordial spirits. What a difficult man but what an enormous grasp of everything, intellectually and physically! I must set some probability theorist to work on some of V. 's proofs. They are strong as they stand in their conventional historiographical form. But an application of mathematics would do much more, e. g. the chances that the Greek letter on the backs of Ramses III's tiles might be some 'flowing' or shorthand hieroglyphics. The Foundation spent the fall of the year, following the El Arish fiasco, in some small constructive matters and in self-destructive self-appraisals prompted by V.'s misgivings, Ralph Juergens addressed the Board of Trustees extensively on November 13, writing inter alia: 1. ... He [Velikovsky] is concerned that funds collected, as it were, in his name, as gifts intended to further his own researches, will be diverted to other purposes. Among such other purposes he includes such FOSMOS projects as the Institute in Connecticut, the journal Cosmology (...) To the doctor's way of thinking, only two projects thus far discussed would be legitimate applications of such donated funds: a) the El Arish dig, and b) the hiring of Princeton graduate students to carry out library and/ or laboratory research under his direction. 2. Dr. Velikovsky is aware of our plans to launch a direct-mail campaign early in January and he is offended at not having been consulted in the preparation of mailing pieces. (...) He insists, at the very least, that literature sent out make absolutely clear to the reader that he is not the power behind the foundation and that he will not be a recipient, direct or indirect, of any funds collected by the foundation.(...) It seems to me... that some rather fundamental misunderstandings remain to be cleared up, not only between Dr. Velikovsky and the Board of Directors, but perhaps also among members of the Board. In the first place, there is confusion as to the purposes of the foundation. It may be that Dr. Velikovsky has never seen a copy of our by-laws, which seem to make the point that the foundation is to serve as a clearinghouse for a variety of information, not all of it necessarily related in any obvious way to Dr. Velikovsky's work. This would appear to leave us free to tread ways not yet probed by the Doctor. And of course we thus face the danger of becoming what Dr. Velikovsky would call a clearinghouse for cranks. But our statement of purpose at least broadens our horizons to the extent that we cannot think of our organization as a 'Velikovsky' foundation. Or can we? The confusion seem rooted in the fact that we members of the Board, almost to a man, have been brought together through our common desire to see his work get a fair hearing. Do we really intend to operate a "Velikovsky" foundation in spite of our more abstractly stated purpose? If so, we must accept certain consequences, e. g., foregoing a tax-exempt status and placing absolute veto-power -- quite properly --in the hands of the Doctor. If not, I suggest that we make haste to disillusion ourselves and Dr. Velikovsky. On November 22, Deg writes a harsh letter to V.: November 22, 1968 Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky 78 Hartley Avenue Princeton, New Jersey 08540 Dear Immanuel, As you have no doubt expected, your succession of favorable and unfavorable comments concerning the progress of the Foundation has created a crisis of morale among the Trustees. For years you longed for just such an organization to dedicate itself to the testing and propagation of your theories, and now that we have constructed it you are undermining it. You trust nobody, delegate nothing, and have, partly therefore, no capacity for administration. You also do not wish anyone to speak in your name but wish help to drift down like manna to dispose of as you desire. Actually, we shall be trying to do both things -- administration and help in spite of you, if you do not disrupt the process. The Board of Trustees has unanimously pledged itself to an independent course. Whatever the Board of Trustees believes to be useful to the advancement of science, it will seek to foster. It cannot bargain with anybody. If it chooses to do one thing rather than another, it does so, not out of friendship to you but out of respect for the work that you and others like you have done. In order to make demands of others, both inside and outside of the Foundation, I have to make demands of you. You should cease making accusations against the Board, even if only among the inner circle. You should cease bargaining over your Archive and the materials that you do not intend to personally use, and let the Foundation work with a copy of them as soon as it can arrange to do so. You should accept what we can offer you (or reject it) in good spirits, knowing that we are doing our best in a complicated setting over which we do not have complete control and that some times we must obtain indirectly what we cannot gain directly. The men on the Board are your friends. If you have better ones, let them step forward and we shall welcome them. The men on the Board are not the best scientists in the world and, if you know better ones, we shall welcome them too. The Board has to finance the Foundation's activities in whatever ways it deems appropriate. If you have the names of persons who, you believe, might contribute to its work, we shall be happy to receive them. If you wish to reserve the names of certain individuals or groups for your personal solicitations, please let us have their names and we shall not approach them, whether in your name or in the name of the Foundation. If you disagree with the policies of the Foundation, we would value your opinions. But you cannot have a veto over anything that the Foundation does. If you do not wish to relate to the Foundation in all of these ways and want to dissociate yourself from the Foundation, I believe that you should do so, either by a personal advertisement in a journal or by letter to all those of your acquaintances who matter. I shall then put a resolution to the Board to the effect that the Foundation will go ahead with its philosophy and plans. If the vote is positive, we shall go ahead with its philosophy and plans. If the vote is positive, we shall go ahead; if not, we shall dissolve the Foundation, an action which will disappoint me and give me immense relief at the same time. Of course, if you do not desire to take any such measures, I would assume that you are basically pleased with our work and will work in tandem with us. With warm personal regards, as always, Sincerely, Alfred de Grazia V., Deg learned from Elisheva and Ruth, was upset. Then he proceeded to put some of the blame upon Juergens, where it most certainly did not belong. Dear Ralph: Yesterday morning, as you know, I received a rude letter from de Grazia with unfounded accusations and it shocked me. Suspecting some provocation, I called you. You disclosed to me that already on November 13 you have sent a memo to him and to the members of the Board of FOSMOS. Next I was surprised to read the memo and its content being your interpretation of a discussion we had at one of our meetings. I wonder why you have not checked with me on the correct presentation of my views or at least mailed me a copy of the memo. Giving it yesterday to me, you gave me also a covering letter. Your intent was good -- you must have suffered observing that I am under wrong impression based on oral declarations made to me, whereas the Board assumes a different policy; and it is good that you brought the situation into the open. Your memo, however, is full of inexactitudes; knowing you for pedantically accurate, I wonder at your rendition of our conversation. The only explanation I would know, is psychological: your opposition to the idea of the Foundation --or only to the dichotomy (you use the term 'duplicity'), and that can be a subconscious urge during your writing. (...) The sentence in your memo that obviously outraged de Grazia who repeats it is "veto power." Nothing of the kind was spoken between us or between anybody else. There is a wide gulf between a "veto power" and being kept in the darkness, as several instances in this letter testify. (...) If time permits, I shall also put in writing what I exactly expect from the Foundation. As to yourself, you know how I value you; you are also at this time the closest. To you I always opened all my files. I wish you would be the one to organize my archive. I never promised Alfred anything concerning the disposition of it, though we discussed its lodging at Princeton University. Most offensive to me is his reference to my "bargaining" I never responded to his many approaches... Juergens then writes to Deg and passes along a never-sent but typed letter to Deg from V. with the hand-written notation "This transcript of a letter drafted was not mailed nor typed -- it dates from probably 1967. I. V. November 26, 1968." Dear Alfred: Yesterday evening when I was already preparing for sleep I had your telephone call. Elisheva listened too. You told us of your plan to incorporate a foundation for studies in modern science. At your last visit about a week ago you first mentioned of some step taken by a partner of yours to charter a search along the lines pioneered in my books, thus to exploit possibilities now neglected because of the inertia or ever opposition of scientific groups or the entire scientific establishment to new approaches and especially those embodied in my work. You told me yesterday of the founding committee that you intend to convoke in a few days -- two names out of the business world, unknown to me, but also Livio and Ralph, and a few more. You indicated that I should at some point assume honorary presidency of the new venture. A new publication should be one of the projected activities. Organizing of my archive, another project. I was through with my sleep at 3 a. m. when Elisheva that did not yet fall asleep came to discuss the project. Her thoughts and mine (crystallized by the sleep) were very similar. The positive in your plan needs not be recapitulated by me for you. But here are the adverse conditions. For over a quarter century, since 1939, when I came to this country and dedicated my time to research in ancient history, I carried the material load of existence and study and writing with their concurrent expenses entirely by myself. This, at the end, gave me great satisfaction since alone and a stranger in the land facing since 1950 the concerted opposition of faculties, scientific societies, and scientific publications, I now find myself in a changing climate, even though animosity in some circles, or among some individual is even more vitriolic than before, but this can be recognized as defense mechanism. Should your Foundation and money drives be instituted, the following will occur: 1. My adversaries who tried to present me as a charlatan but could not point to any unproper action on my part, would be supplied with ammunition -- a money collection [sentence unfinished] 2. Scientific organization like American Philosophical Society or scientific publications, like Science of AAAS show recently some change of heart; this mimosa-like attitude would be very sensitive to any activities [sentence unfinished] 3. Also many of my friends and followers would experience some shock if they should feel that a monetary pursuit under whatever guise accompanies my work and I would feel embarrassed. 4. I am most averse, even afraid of being made affiliated with other, so numerous, unorthodoxies. Through these years I am under an incessant barrage of such proposals to study the works of others, and in some instances what is known as lunatic fringe. The Yale Scientific issue caused a flow of letters to the editors from various individuals with appeals to have their theories given similar handing to that given to mine. I found often in letters given claims that the writer is in the possession [of ways] to prove me right (as if I failed in this) or to improve my work by modifying it. There are, no question, other worthy unorthodoxies. But I wish to continue my progress not burdened with the defense of others, like say, the organon theory of the late W. Reich. A foundation for studies in new [word missing] cannot close door to new ideas; I, however, cannot and wish not to become a pope all malcontent. 5. Organizations, like foundations, from the start or after a while, institute salaries, incur liabilities, oblige itself [sic] for grants etc., and should the organization be intimately connected with my name, it may disband under conditions of insolvency, after a promising start, causing an irreparable damage to my cause. 6. The small organization of Cosmos and Chronos groups is given to my close supervision and I fell quite comfortable in separating my scholarly pursuits from the work assigned to Cosmos and Chronos extending it to [sentence unfinished]. I know that S. Freud and to even greater extent C. Jung made use of donations, usually by their ex-patients, to establish schools of their respective modes of psychoanalysis or for publishing magazines. But their activities were not in the form of solicitation of funds. In the morning after your call I drafted this letter to let you know how I feel. Deg's Journal, November, 30 1968 Yesterday was one of those fine mornings when most things seems to go wrong, but I didn't much mind. The mail brought a batch of documents from Ralph Juergens -- the gist of which was that Velikovsky was deeply perturbed by my ascerbic letter to him of ten days ago. V. had promptly asked to see Ralph's memo describing V.'s thoughts. Then V. wrote a letter indirectly answering mine, and implying that Ralph has misstated his position, etc. V. added a newly typed version of a letter that he said he had once written me but never mailed, full of forebodings concerning my establishment of the foundation, together with a letter from Arens of Gimbel's of Philadelphia, also full of doubts about the wisdom of proceeding with a foundation. All of this was to justify V. in the face of my attack. I know V.'s pattern of responses so well now that I could tell there was nothing new about the whole business. He writes everything down to have it on paper for some future strategm. He warns against everything to be ready to be proven a prophet should things go badly. He cannot let go of any power over things or people, but plays upon every means of entrapping and embroiling them, sucking them in and pushing them off as he feels the one way or the other in his succession of mobilizing-for-action and trust-nobody moods. I phoned him and visited him in the afternoon. I brought him the copy of Etruscan Tombs at Sesto Fiorentino which Prof. Nicola Rilli had inscribed to him, and he surlily carped at every point of Rilli's development that I brought out. 'Very risky, ' 'I don't think much of him from what you tell me. ' 'He does not seem to be a scholar. ' 'He has very little evidence for what he is saying. ' We finally got to the sensitive subjects of the flurry of documents. He claims his position has never changed. I said, 'Very well, you need not have anything to do with the Foundation, but if you wish to write articles for it or refer people to it, or receive support from it, you are welcome. ' He agreed. (He will of course not keep his agreement, but will intervene at every opportunity.) I offered also to turn the Foundation over to him completely and let him designate someone to carry it on, but he refused that. I said, 'Please name those men and foundations whom you do now wish us to approach for support. ' He would not do that. I promised that his name would not be used in support of the Foundation, which satisfied him. I know what he would like to see happen: the Foundation helping him in every possible way, but he criticizing it constantly for its faults. And provided it does not demoralize others, I do not mind. I have from my first meeting with him concluded that I should do what I thought he basically would want and weather as best as possible the glooms, the negativism, the wounded shouts, the suspicions, and the ingratitude. We drank a glass of dry white wine (the Israeli wines are becoming excellent), and he showed me a few late letters, as he usually does. With some emotion he declared that, for all I have done for him he was going to give me sooner or later the whole history of the case -- the reception of his ideas by science and the public. I didn't fell as grateful as I should, for I need nothing so little as another pile of documents and a book to write, though it be the richest such case archive in history, and I thanked him. I prepared to leave, bidding Elisheva goodbye, and he stepped into the next room to get something. When he came out. I stepped close to him and said 'You know, there is nothing that you can do that will drive me away. ' He said 'I will read you a line of poetry that you wrote' and quoted "the most opposed I will most believing be." 'Not a bad line, ' I said, smiling, and bid them goodbye again. Deg's Journal, December 1, 1968 The Foundation Trustees met today and perused the volume of recent correspondence relating Dr. V. to FOSMOS. They agreed that his conduct was sick. Still Juergens and Stephanos are under his thumb. I pointed this out and questioned whether the Foundation should not slow down its program for a year until everyone clarified their position, especially Dr. V. But we decided to move ahead anyhow, and suffer V.'s conduct as well as possible. The more I think of his behavior, the more indignant I become. Every kind of evidence comes out in his letters, actions, and the experiences of others. Today he told Juergens that the Foundation should get another box number, because he wishes to go ahead with his absurd, presumptions, and self-glorifying Cosmos and Chronos 'Clubs' (of which, in truth, none exist). Day before yesterday, he tried to buy my loyalty by the gift of his papers and documents on how science received his work. 'only for you, not for the Foundation. ' A great collection, but I wish it for others to use, not myself. He is incredibly obtuse on some matters, I try to love him for his faults, but they are too numerous and large to embrace. On Dec. I, the Board of Trustees met in Princeton at Deg's home, without the important presence of Mainwaring and Holbrook. Nor were Kallen and Hess, who played no part in these proceedings anyhow, present. Juergens carried a new letter from V, to the Board, divorcing himself from the Foundation, which, as he asserts, he had never been married to in the first place but with which he is hoping for good relations nevertheless. I repeat the following from the Minutes of the Meeting: An extensive discussion developed around the subject of the Foundation's relations with Dr. Velikovsky. Juergens reported that Dr. Velikovsky was of the opinion that FOSMOS' aims and activity were to deal only with such work as concerned him directly and as he might approve, and that FOSMOS was changing its direction since its inception. The President moved that, after examining the record, the Board resolve that the Foundation had not deviated from its original aims, which remain unchanged and are reflected in the following description offered by Stecchini, plus the subjects of 'Communications of Science' and 'Science of Science': The Foundation is concerned with conducting and aiding in the investigation of theories A. That the geophysical and astronomical history of the planet Earth has been characterized by sudden changes; B. That these changes have taken place in historical times and, as such are documented by historical records, archaeological findings, mythological traditions, religious practices, and scriptures; and D. That these changes have affected the human psyche and Affect contemporary social behavior. Afterward, Deg addresses V. once more, to tell him that the Foundation agreed with him and had always pursued the course that he now was advocating. And then Deg receives a rather surprising letter from Stephanos who now becomes the instrument of V. in a new way; he lists his benefactions from V. as if he were under hypnosis, and declares: ... I must state that I find your letter to him [Velikovsky] misdirected (it should, perhaps, have been addressed to another), and in its tone, totally unjust and unwarranted. I believe it could be damaging to the interest we all claim to share, the acceptance of Dr. Velikovsky's work, and capable of great personal harm to him and to his good name. Since I was privileged to receive a copy of that letter (...) I want and do here deny its content as my experiences allow, and respectfully request, as a member of the Board, that you write a retraction to Dr. Velikovsky as soon as possible... Deg replies to him: Dear Bob: I am afraid that your letter to me of December 5 and the circumstances of its preparation tend to confirm the contents of my letter of November 22 to Dr. Velikovsky. It also indicates that Dr. Velikovsky should probably not have circulated a personal letter. But thank you for your concern. I am sure that all will end well. Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia It did end well enough, except for poor Stephanos. The Foundation moved along cautiously, doing only small projects such as disseminating materials on the Velikovsky Affair, supporting Eddie Schorr's work on the Greek Dark Ages, and soliciting memberships. It was disturbed by a new attitude that V. had taken toward Stephanos, hitherto his most faithful and welcome disciple. He seemed to believe that Stephanos had encouraged persons from the lunatic fringe to become followers of V. and was giving them inside information of V.'s activities and archives. V. wished to dissociate himself from Stephanos and expected the Foundation to do so, too. Sizemore stuck up for Stephanos in private conversation with Deg, who sensed no great loss should Stephanos resign. Then he saw Sizemore's point -- Stephanos should not be sacrificed to V. -- and did nothing. Stephanos resigned anyhow. By the following Spring, Deg was withdrawing, too, as this Journal entry of April 19 seems to indicate. On occasion Dr. V and I have discussed a biography in dialogue form. But the three occasions on which we went to work with a tape recorder were disappointing to me. He becomes stiff, even more aware of his role and audience, and though I try to break through with my informal comment, he remains fixed like a peasant before a camera. I have not seem him in several weeks. My own problems with women and children are many and my book Kalos cries for completion. Immanuel's magnificent self-centering is not consoling or even rational, under the circumstance. I have ceased completely to work on FOSMOS, in part because of the foregoing, but also because the members of the Board were not up to editing a Bulletin, or raising funds. Bill Dix [Director of the Princeton University Libraries] told me, too, that the Velikovsky's during V.'s illness of December, had sought to give (with tax deductions well in mind) V.'s archive to Princeton University. Yet FOSMOS was to have been the beneficiary. Holbrook took over active management of the Foundation, working out of his new office in Washington. He did not succeed in developing it well, and, by general agreement, it was dissolved several years later. V. was doing well enough as his own majordomo as we discover when we read Deg's Journal of October 7, 1972 in Princeton: I borrowed Jill's bicycle and rode it to the Velikovsky's. Francie, whose memory of me hardly dims with my long absence, loped alongside. Velikovsky was issuing directions to a University representative on how to set up the stage for a forthcoming lecture to the Graduate School Residence Hall Club. He spared the man no detail, prescribing publicity releases, and his desire to have his full first name spelled out rather than I. Velikovsky (is there a wish here to conceal the I, egoist, or the normal desire to spread out one's own name, as he said?). He requested that all his books and even a copy of Pens‚e dedicated to his work be on sale at the University Store beforehand; asked that two parking spaces be kept for his car and that of his daughter; wondered, since the British Broadcasting Company would be video-taping the show, whether the President of Princeton might not come if invited; denied a suggestion that a local radio station broadcast the speech but insisted that provisions for a televised relay into an adjoining hall be provided for people who could not crowd into the banquet hall. He stipulated that some announcements reach New York and Philadelphia so that disciples might come from those places to hear him. The young bald impresario left the Presence dizzy with details V. is many things but he is also a master impresario. He has had to be; his overwhelming need to be recognized for what he is can only be satisfied by mobs of admirers under instructions which, given his detachment from the Establishment machinery, only he can provide, or by some wonderful stroke of recognition, a great prize like the Nobel Prize, the Fermi Prize, or an invitation from a head of state to deliver a series of lectures. I believe that he would then retire from his promotional labors and give himself over to finishing several important books. I thought so yesterday as I watched him masterfully, but yet exhaustingly, promoting himself and his work, and later privately conveyed this thought to Sheva, when he had gone up to nap. For when the door closed on the graduate club representatives, he sat back, listened to me for a few minutes, ate an apple, and began to doze. I enjoyed the chance to talk to Sheva; she can tell me less flamboyantly all that has happened on their trips and where all the characters of the drama of recognition are at the moment -- Mullen and Schorr and Bucaloe and so on. I borrowed a book and biked home to Mom. After dinner, Immanuel called to apologize for falling away from our conversation and I assured him that I was delighted that he could sleep well and hoped that he would always behave in exactly the same way. I had mentioned to him that I contemplated a little book of forays into myth, science and our adventures over the past decade of our friendship; he wondered how I could write it without his archives. I can imagine how I might, but if he would dig into them a little, my work would be greatly improved; I did not, however, suggest that he give me materials. I shall show him the when it is sufficiently elaborated. Then, if he wishes, he may find some material that would help me. Deg is living in New York City, and only visits Princeton on occasion now. Deg's Journal, October 23, 1972 I telephoned Velikovsky at 10 PM to see how he was. He was well. We talked of the book I intended to write. When I said that I was investigating Hermes he warned me against starting to repeat his work of 20 years. I guess he'd like me to ask for his files and then trap me into an endless affair. I said, don't worry: I have only in mind making several penetrations in depth, at widespread points, to show the method that should be followed to mine the ore. He said that he couldn't "approve" my book unless he read it. Of course. And no doubt there are some bouts ahead. In general, he likes the idea that I will write the book. Then I gave him some firm advice. I said "you must finish Peoples of the Sea and the Ramses II volume promptly and publish them. You must not lecture and run around. Ten people can go around lecturing about you but only you can finish these books. Furthermore, you must not work on the Einstein book, or Stargazers and Gravediggers, or Ash. These can be finished by someone else. You must write something, if only 30 pages, on your theories of what happened in the skies before Venus in 1500 B. C." He agreed, "You are right!" He added, however, that he must write his autobiography because nobody knows him really or how he did his work. He only let out a few facts here and there. Alright, I responded, add that to your required list, following the ante- Venusian article. But that's all. "You're right!" he said again, with unusual accord. And so we left the matter, saying good-night. P. S. V. told me that Harlow Shapley had just died at a nursing home in Colorado. After reading the extensive obituary in the New York Times, V. concludes that Shapley, always a great self-promoter, had seen to it that the Times possessed his own account of his life. Thus Shapley hurls his last insult to V. from the grave. Again on November 9. Deg exhorts him: Had long telephone conversation with Velikovsky. He was in a grim mood, I tried to cheer him up. I also read him the list of chapter titles for my projected book. He said a few approving things but generally he was critical, full of admonitions. careful of his own sources of information, making no generous or even modest offer of assistance, wondering how I could have any new idea (though he did not say this explicitly) when he had them all, and in some manner had published them all. I don't know how he expects ever to encourage serious efforts to follow or parallel him. He beseeches this from the world but then denies in advance that they can either be original or important. I tell him to move rapidly on his theory of the pre-1500 catastrophes -- to publish at least a synopsis of it, lest he accuse even his supporters of plagiarizing him. All I know of this work are a few remarks of John Holbrook relating essentially the truth of the Greek theogony -- Uranus, Chronos (Saturn) Jupiter. I am telling V. that if he doesn't do something soon here instead of parading around the country he will become a successor instead of a predecessor of someone else, Further, his predecessor will probably do a poor job because V. has withheld his information and assistance. And he is concerned whether V. will be elected to greatness: Deg's Journal, November 72 I. V. is running for election. The office he wishes to achieve is premier of 20th Century Science. I believe that he has as good a chance as anyone up to this time of winning the election. However, I am not a campaign manager. And though an election in science is unfortunately like a political election -- in that a campaign biography should be written that will show the candidate in gorgeous lights -- I feel I must pass up the chance to win glory as a publicist. My interest in biography is as Conant [President of Harvard University and chemist] once put it: to find the full meaning of science through its means of creation. Immanuel V. as I see and know him is here, and you must understand to begin with the fact that no person can fully know another one. Problems of health depressed V.: Deg's Journal, December 22, 1972 Called V. He is gloomy, The doctors told him that he must go away to rest. His days are full of calls, visits, correspondence --too much to handle; his writing lags. I invited him and Elisheva to New York for a day of rest and walking around the museums. Maybe. I also suggested he might go to Yucatan and see the ruins there. He doesn't "want to be carried around by the tour buses." "Let the buses go without you. Stay at hotels. Then provide and make your own daytime itinerary." He wondered when I would be in Princeton. I didn't know, I told him I would think of what he should do and would call him back . The "Apollo" Program suffers severe cutbacks; Deg's Journal, December 23, 1972 Called Stecchini. He is feeling better after a gradual six months' recovery from an old back injury. He said V. may be depressed by the closing down of the Apollo Moon project which, whatever its premises and procedures, had brought forward some support of his views. The signs of volcanic activity are still being reported, though their time of occurrence is naturally placed conveniently far away -- 100,00 years, 500,000 years, their freshness suggesting "recency," but recency being defined arbitrarily on the lengthy geographical scale. If 100,000, why not 3000? No answer. No question, in fact, by anybody, save the Velikovskians. Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) is already being dismantled. The scientific community did not rise to the occasion, said S. "I didn't rise, either," I said. "It was a great waste of world resources." He half agreed. Deg worries both about V.'s health and his attitude towards a friend: Deg's Journal, December 26, 1972 Called V. again yesterday. He is more cheerful, but says his diabetes is moderate, not light. He is grumpy over the stricter diet he must follow. He asked me about all my children and I recited their whereabouts and conditions of life. He asked whether he could help me. I should have said, "Yes, let me read your pre-Venus notes and correspondence." I didn't. He wouldn't; not now. He would ask me to show that him all of my ideas. I would do so, but he might well not reciprocate and even though his materials must be better than mine on the whole, he might very well absorb them and simply look the gate on me by putting me onto this or that matter stretching on endlessly. He cannot help himself. He is authoritarian. And he finds it difficult to think that anyone in the world but himself can supply anything but a few details nor indeed should until he has breathed his last word. This kind of game seems bizarre between friends, but the reason I am perhaps vulnerable to shock by its exposition. As certainly as the sun shines (sic!) he would reject my work repeatedly, absorb all that he had not known, and accuse me in the end of plagiarism. V. begins to exhibit alarming symptoms: Deg's Journal, February 10, 1973 Velikovsky Visit - V. not well at all. Extremely nervous, thin, paranoid cryptic references, taciturn jerky movements from time to time. Is diabetic. Asked him whether 10 years of good work might reconstruct 10,000-600 B. C. He didn't have an opinion. He said he doesn't know whether deluge was 4000 or 9000 BCE. Deg's Journal, February 1973 Called Velikovsky at 5 P. M. Says he is felling better, but is having troubles with "people." Has matter of importance (ominous tone) to talk over with me. If I want to hear it, I must come to Princeton tonight. I tell him it is difficult. Won't tomorrow night do. Maybe. "Who is it?" I ask. "Can't I help." "You come." etc. All remote, intimations of disaster, confusion of personal and the world and of all past with the present. I try to talk of article about Mars. 'The author believes in all miracles except yours. ' He's not sure he read it. But uninterested really. He is involved in his personal huge caravan of suspicions, lawsuits on his house in Israel (so Ruth tells me to make clear his references), forebodings of catastrophes, possible suicidal impulses (my enemies wanted their martyr; now they have it.) Nina hands me a note as she overhears me. "Do not try to get abstract conversation. He is trying to talk about himself." But he is uncommunicative. Finally, I leave it that I may come tonight or in the next couple of days. He is reluctant to close but finally I end the call. Called Ruth Sharon. Father not feeling well. Diabetes out of control. She tells me not to go to Princeton. He will be better and there is nothing I can do. I tell her I fear he will regress irretrievably. She cannot answer to that. She says he may even resent me later if see him in weakness. I tell her I am more concerned with whether he will be helped now if his situation is serious. Maybe she and her mother cannot suffice to pull him out. I ask her to call her mother and if they want me to come to call me. 8. p. m. Ruth calls me back. She has talked to her mother but her father hung onto another phone throughout the conversation. She says, however, that he was feeling a little better and was thinking of driving out to purchase several articles. So I should call and give my regrets for not coming. 8.15 I called V. Sheva came on the extension phone. I said I had not finished my proofs that had to go to India and asked him to excuse me if I did not come this night. He assented. I said further that I did not wish to see him before I could show him an outline of my work on pre- history. He replied that he would have no time to read it, for he was so behind in his reading. Sheva interrupted gracefully to say that it was short piece and I hastily agreed, saying that it was only a page or so. He said nothing then; I uttered a few additional inanities and hung up with the promise to see him soon. He sounded at a bit stronger of voice. V. then recovers: Deg's Journal, April 4, 1973 I phoned V. this morning and found him much improved since my last call before leaving the country. Three weeks in the hospital had somehow restored him. I said, "Life without a telephone to bother you was good for you." "No I had telephone. I took my calls." Anyway, he is better and will drive perhaps to Youngstown, Ohio, for a speech next week. He is working of Ramses II again. He is pleased that Carl Sagan is writing an article for Pens‚e on Venus. He agrees that I shouldn't bother with book reviews for Pens‚e but should present a significant paper. Maybe I shall get down to preparing one. He is hopeful. He speaks of Particular tasks. He has even begun rearranging some files. It is a great relief. Bill Mullen is getting ready to move from Princeton University to a new appointment at Boston University. He is glad to be away from V.'s moods. He writes to Deg: August 12, 1974 ... The summer has been curiously unproductive and jammed as far as Velikovsky is concerned. He has spent virtually all his hours talking about what he is not accomplishing and bewailing the magnitude of the battle against his enemies on all sides. I've contributed only bits of help here and there, otherwise being forced to concentrate on preparation of this fall's course. Eddie [Shorr] has been of tremendous help, spending day after day in the library going through The People of the Sea with a fine-tooth comb. But here too the result has not been of the kind to cheer Velikovsky up since Eddie has found many minor errors which need correction. Nothing that shakes the reconstruction, just a lot more nitpicking work that really has to be done if the book is to be spared the dismissals by Egyptologists on the grounds of inaccuracy which are feared. In short, be thankful for the serenity of Naxos. Al, since little would have been gained by being close to Princeton this particular summer (...) But V. reorganizes his forces and this time calls upon Irving Wolfe, who graciously responds by addressing Mullen, C. J. Ransom, Juergens, Rose, Steve Talbott and Milton: Dear Alfred, I visited Velikovsky last week, along with Lynn Rose and Earl Milton. We discussed several matters with him, among which were - the number of books he's working on at once - his archives and related issues - he wants people to submit and keep submitting articles on or arising from his work to scientific journals, whether they will be accepted or not -- setting up a Newsletter, about which several steps are being taken -- public recognition for advance claims and theories. You will be familiar with most of these matters already, but I've drawn your attention to them because I think we need to get a number of people thinking about them and coming up with solutions because Velikovsky can use help in all these areas. With regard to the last item above, here is an example -- the recent discovery of substantial quantities of argon and neon on Mars seem to puzzle scientists, as an article in Science, June 21, 1975 indicates. Yet Velikovsky predicted argon and neon on Mars as far back as 1946. Key scientists must be given the facts -- dates of original advance claims, letters, confirmations, etc. -- and urged to write the major scientific journals. Velikovsky feels he's too busy to do this himself each time, and so I've offered to handle it for him, telling him, telling him that, wherever a case like this arises, he's to send the relevant document to me and I'll compose a covering letter and send it all out to the right people. This is where I need your help -- I want to make up a master list of key people, perhaps divided into two or three categories, to whom such things can be sent as each occasion arises... Deg could imagine the huddle at 78 Hartley Avenue, planning the counterpropaganda campaign, the "truth squads" as the Republicans and Democrats had come to call their counterpropaganda teams. Next year, Wolfe was calling for an "alarm system" which he had worked out with Milton in Canada. It was to be a network, highly sophisticated, with members divided into generalists and specialists, with squad leaders who would call upon their assignees to respond to the alarm. Wolfe had been called by V. to activate the system, as he had promised the year before, and V. nominated as a test alarm the publication by Doubleday of Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, which should exercise the network to produce reviews, letters, and public discussion. This meant helping the Talbotts who were otherwise blacklisted by V. and several of his circle. "Regardless of what any of us feel about the Talbotts," wrote Wolfe, "I agreed because Velikovsky asked." (Actually, I doubt that Wolfe ever felt antagonistic towards the Talbotts himself; the plea was for others.) "He (V.) may feel that he wants to aid the success of that book because it will affect his own case." So the Talbotts and the inner circle were momentarily in bed together again, an event that had not occurred since the Talbotts' Pens‚e had collapsed. The results were not remarkable, and after a time they got out of bed. There came a lull in attempts at general organization; V. continued to turn his attention and the minds of his several collaborating followers to the AAAS affair, a story to be told later. It is noteworthy how much time was taken up with all the maneuvering, research, writing, and wrangling connected with a single sitting of an AAAS panel in San Francisco, much of five years of V.'s time and of the time of several others, the time too of Elisheva, but who counted that? -- more hundreds of hours blanked out; there the tragedy is marked, for she was a sculptress and musician of consequence. She never complained, so I am reporting Deg's complaints on her behalf, unsolicited. Moses would have been pleased with her self-sacrifice; Deg was no Mosaist. When she lay dying after a long illness, and he had not seen her for months, he thought to write a poem for her. Then came the infatuation of V. with Christoph Marx, and following upon Marx' return to Switzerland, V. addressed Lynn Rose, who was perhaps feeling both grumpy about the affair and pleased that suddenly V.'s attention was turned elsewhere. However, V. was writing in a euphoric mood, and one could see the alarm bells ringing around the world. The letter to Lynn Rose is dated May 11, 1977, and I summarize it. Marx was to be "a central figure" on the European continent: Isenberg sends a paper he gave to a conference of science editors and V. urges him to send it to the major hostile magazines --Nature, Science, New Scientist and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, "as coming from the convention" ... A letter from Langenbach, a supporting attorney working in the Harvard scene... A call to William Safire of the New York Times, a self-designated "great fan" to get advice... An announcement that Juergens has resigned his engineering job and would probably now work for him, V... A hope to teach a course in Egyptology at Princeton University... A report of Deg's taking issue with Lustig of the Encyclopedia Britanica Yearbook... Last minute changes to the English edition of Ramses II... A carpenter-mason is building a room for guests and Elisheva's music... A letter from the widow of maligned Harvard supporter, Professor Pfeiffer... Mainwaring will be sending a complete file of all C14 communications with the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania museum... A conversation with Holbrook, once more in Washington... A gift of Czech rights to Jan Sammer who helped so well with Ramses II... Some minor foreign rights also to his early copy editor Marion Kuhn, now ailing... Reporting plans to sponsor publication of Alice Miller's Index to his works... Detailing the distribution of 1000 free copies of Kronos to College libraries, financed by Jerry Rosenthal... Denouncing Steve Talbott for recommending in a pamphlet that all subscribe to The Zetetic Scholar which has recently defamed V's Urges that the five former associate editors of the now defunct Pens‚e "should make a common statement and try to teach the subscribers of Network (Talbott's serial pamphlet), deluded into believing that the Network is an organ to defend and protect my work... Dr. Gowans of the University of Victoria "comes back to the fold" after consorting with the likes of Dietrich Muller of Lethbridge... An exchange of letters with Jacques Barzun... Reports that Peoples of the Sea just released had already outsold Earth in Upheaval (11 printings since 1955) and Oedipus and Akhnaton (12 printings since 1960)... He resists Doubleday's efforts at putting Peoples into a book club as an alternate selection... Ramses II is to be delayed once more, this time by the publishers... He is happy that his British publishers, Sidgwick and Jackson, have given full prominence to his Peoples while somewhere in the nether pages "Patrick Moore is modestly displayed for his '1978 Yearbook of Astronomy, ' and has to take this pecking order, he being the author of 'Do you speak Venusian? ' presenting me as a King of Fools"... More letter exchanges... He doesn't want Rose to be distracted from their plan to write together "The Grand Ballroom" dealing with the AAAS affair which was already the subject of several books and many articles... ".... The hammer of the builder sounds like a song... do you know that my real vocation is in architecture, and the years that I visited the Library on 42nd street, I regularly visited also the room with architectural journals, watching for a chance to compete for a plan and construct a public building?"... "Keep well, act strong, Lynn." V. was obviously in fine fettle. The Mastermind was back. He had a great deal going for him on two continents now, it seemed. The euphoria subsided. The resistance to all of his ideas continued unabated. It seems that he could say nothing that would be right in the eyes of his opponents. His growing disenchantment with Christoph Marx was not compensated by new faces. (New ideas were out of the question; proofs were wanted, and defense.) He had now close to himself principally Greenberg and Sizemore; for them Kronos was not fun and games anymore. On June 3, 1979, Sizemore writes Deg, "This issue is going through hell -- trying to get V.'s approval on Lew's article about the latest probes." By now I believe that you and I Know enough of the principal characters here to venture a more fundamental answer to the question which I dealt with unsatisfactorily at the beginning of the chapter: why did Deg stick with V.? It appears that the two men were close to each other even when separated and out of touch. I conclude that there was a familial relationship being reenacted between V. and Deg. It was not father to son, but older to younger brother. In significant ways V. was of the character of Deg's older brother Sebastian, and Deg was relating to him as he had to his brother throughout life but especially from two years to twenty years of age. It was as Lasswell somehow discovered, a sibling rivalry between Deg and Sebastian, more intensely activating for the younger than the elder. No matter what Sebastian did, he couldn't put down his younger brother; and his younger brother, while trying to outdo him, was absolutely fond of him and set him up as a model for others, to be surpassed only by himself, and he was determined all the while that none was going to put down Sebastian so that there was a strong protective impulse going incongruously upwards --material and demanding -- rather than downwards as one might expect. V. had two older brothers, neither of whom he saw after 1921 and with whom communication was rare, if only because the "Iron Curtain" barred East from West and he said once to Deg, speaking of his scientist brother, Alexander, I would not want to jeopardize his position over there by reintroducing myself into his life. And Sebastian and V. were of the same rawboned, tall and handsome physique, unlike Deg's more compacted from and features, both were umbrageous, too Both felt that Deg could do anything he set his hand to, but that he was always off on some wild goose chase when you needed him. There were of course differences. However the song goes: "I want a girl -- just like the girl - - who married dear old Dad," no girl is ever quite like mother: and so with siblings, no two sibling relationships are quite a like. The major differences were two: like Deg, V. was fantasmogenic: he day-dreamed much and often and duelled with the universe of nature and men in his mind. Sebastian was not a dreamer. And, further, V. was there, in place, at home; for seventeen years Deg knew where to find him at Hartley Street whose number he could never remember, and that he would be welcomed like a brother, which, no offense intended, he could not always count on from Sebastian. I think that the crux of the relationship, that which proved its psychogenesis, was the fact that Deg, unlike so many of the cosmic heretics, could be constantly critical of V. without risk to his affection for V. Then, too, while V. would never let Deg take away his toys, nor admit that he was equal, he would not stop him, short of outright usurpation of his position and place, which Deg in any event would never wish to do. Indeed, one of Deg's main virtues and weaknesses in human affairs, if it can be called that, was that he would often win a contest, but could never administer the coup de grace, Neither V. nor Sebastian lacked this capacity except in the case of their younger brother. Sebastian never became friendly with V. but supported him quietly, just as he never committed himself to Deg's efforts on behalf to V. nor to Deg's quantavolutionary ideas. He engaged himself mildly one time in their futile effort to obtain an honorary doctorate for V. at Rutgers University. Another time, when Deg was abroad, Sebastian perhaps prompted by his wife Lucia, thought of getting V. and Elisheva together with the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Carl Kaysen, Ambassador George Kennan, and their wives. Perhaps V. should be invited to join the Institute (which would in fact have been an ideal place for him and ideally in keeping, too, with the Institute's professed aims). Elisheva and Immanuel were irritatingly preoccupied with the menu for dinner, however, and settled finally for a visit during the cocktail hour, which went off nicely. Deg's communication lines generally thinned out in the years 1976 to 1983. Even his lateral communications in quantavolution dwindled as he pressed to break through with the several large studies underway. Here he is writing from Naxos to Professor Ernst Wreschner in Haifa on December 21, 1976: I am returning from three weeks in Mexico as a guest of the government. I attended the inauguration of Jose Portillo as President, gave a paper at a special conference on the 400th anniversary of Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (author of my least favorite doctrine -- absolute sovereignty), and visited a number of Olmec, Maya and Aztec ruins and sites. It has been a good trip and I found a considerable interest in translating my political works and even some surprised involvement in my questions about mythology and catastrophes. I did not find the lost tribes of Israel but perhaps learned something of pre-"Atlantean" survivals. I also had a car wreck (I was not driving), had my wallet stolen by a large fat Indian lady with an overpowering smell that put me to sleep on the bus alongside her, and then later on my little camera as well -- before I could turn around, the pickpocket had dived into the marketplace mass.) C'est la vie. With luck, by late spring I shall have a general manuscript ready on the holocene destructions and human development and will send you a copy. I hope that my present letter finds Ella and yourself very well and in good spirits. I have resigned all teaching at NYU and am now free to give my time to research and perhaps sometime to a visit to Israel, unless you meanwhile visit here. (...) Deg showed his materials on Homo Schizo to Harold Lasswell who approved their significance. Deg wished he might get the famed polymath involved in seeking the origins of the human mind, even in contemplating quantavolution, for Lasswell was as much a fantasmogene as Deg. But not long afterwards, Harold Lasswell climbed into the bathtub of his apartment overlooking Lincoln Center, suffered a stroke, and spent two helpless days in the tub before his apartment was entered. His friends rallied around and attended the cheerful but addlepated great man until he died. Deg hoped he had not been unkindly critical when they had last been sitting at Lasswell's place, drinking whisky and looking down upon Manhattan, for he had been suddenly seized with impatience when Harold spoke of a great new understanding overcoming the medical profession owing (by inference ) partly to the introduction of techniques for better human relations in complex technical situations (in which he was playing a part, as always) inasmuch as Deg felt like raging -- not only against the system of medical care, but also against the world at large for its frightful bungling. When I went back in time for Lasswellian material related to quantavolution and the heretics, the latest was from November 4, 1972, when Deg's Journal reads: I met Harold Lasswell at the University Club 7 and after two Scotches and 'what have you been up to' and 'what are families and friends doing, ' we taxied to Washington Square, where Nina prepared dinner. She pulled out all the stops of her culinary organ and enthralled Harold with poached whitefish and freshly made mayonnaise, stewed hare, spinach and egg salad, Port-Salut, stewed pears in brandy, and a variety of wines and cognac. We talked until after midnight. He is looking as he has for thirty years. Still grey and pink, still ranging all over the world and talking upon every subject; the chasms of unintelligibility when he swings into Lasswellian sentences from time to time still enchant me. It was Nina's first exposure to them and she couldn't decode them. He described his unexpected walk many years ago up a set of 18-inch spikes hammered into the walls of Santa Sophia in Istanbul. He had a hangover from a night of drinking sweet Turkish liquor and could barely save himself from nausea, vertigo and panic. How I know the feeling. He talked too of a ride in a military plane from Paris to Vienna after World War II, where he sat on a metal bucket seat with two other men and watched a cargo of coffins creep through their bonds toward the freedom amidships. We talked of economists and he expressed his pleasure that the social sciences were being recognized for Nobel Prizes, particularly Ken Arrow and Samuelson, but his subtle manner of speaking, which one must watch carefully, indicated he was a little hurt that he who had achieved so much for the social sciences had not been recognized with such a prize. I agreed with him, without mentioning the matter; what a corrupting influence the Nobel Prizes are; they pretended to omniscience, in whose name, on what grounds; what presumptuousness. He is now working on a Policy Sciences Center, promotes a world university, heads a Rand Corporation Board, etc. He was delighted with my stories of the University in Switzerland and would have gone the whole evening on the subject. His mentioning Arrow and Samuelson came when I reflected upon the betrayal of human economics by the economists. I explained my struggle with Scott-Foresman over publishing a chapter on economic policy and especially on a guaranteed income. Harold says that A. & S. and others just published a statement indicating their adherence to such in principle. I should use it to back up my attack on the subject. I mentioned my advice to Velikovsky to publish now instead of awaiting the 'no mistake' nirvana; H. L., who feels a certain competition, insisted that I was right, that V. wanted to be God, that it was unscientific, that no man could expect his work to stand free of error indefinitely, that the courage to err was the glory of a true scientist. Lasswell spoke of a book called Chariots of the Gods by a Swiss, who apparently believed in the depositing of inventions upon Earth by superterrestrial beings. I thought this was a modern version of the gods of the Greeks descending at will upon earth bringing discoveries as well as evil. I added that I am pursuing a theory that the flowering of certain early metal ages came in consequence of the showering of metals upon earth from comets and meteorites. Probably I should add a chapter to my book on the descent of the Metals. If the metals are heavy, they should have sunk to the core of the Earth's molten mass, never to surface again. Why should in theory the earth's crust contain them? For none says that the turbulence of the crust descends to greater depth. Before our last cognacs had been finished, we spoke of the family system, Nina presenting the nostalgic view of the extended family, Harold asserting that the blood family has little to offer any longer, while admitting her argument. He described his early family -- he an only child, but with numerous relatives, now scattered from the Midwest to California and Florida, those graveyards of American families. I had been urging him earlier to write his Autobiography; he is silent about his past to an abnormal degree. He is noncommittal. Perhaps he prefers to remain a Great Man of Mysterious Origins. Very well, but a good autobiography is worth more than a large question mark. Washington, 1979 In Memoriam HAROLD D. LASSWELL (1902-1978) Harold! Greetings! Snifting bubbles, are you, this season, in the land of the tall drinks? Are they pouring you doubles? Come back to Chicago, Vienna, Nanking. Sounding like we know it all, in tones serene as your very own, We slump in low divans and hunch over brown tables Spilling smoothly the news about how you walked upon the Earth once. Welcome back to Washington, New York and New Haven; your train is set to run on time. You said straight what you saw Without hee-haws, oinks, or meows No winks, curtsies, or knotted fists No cow-eyes, or stony gaze. Viel Blitzen, kein Donor, No "Ho-ho-ho." Pleasant, agreeable Hero of our times, "if-then" propositions cornucopiously emitted. Two pounds of value-sharing for all men alive. Mix one pound of deference, a dash of income, well- being and safety added to taste, Be generous with enlightenment. Now that you're not in it. More Seasoning is needed. some of the gusto is gone. In-put, out-go. Hearing the world's secrets and ours nevermore, You heard them all, and those to come that we must explicate ourselves. Thanks for configurating the North pole under your gray hair, behind your glasses, in your midnight coat. You gloves are too thin. Come home again, if you get the chance The New Year is here. So long, Saturn! Deg's Journal, November 18, 1980 It's cold outside. I received a letter from Gilbert Davidowitz' sister telling me that my letter to him arrived but that he had died 'of a heart attack' last July. Poor lonely mad scholar. He was only fortyish. He must have committed suicide. Never an academic appointment. Nothing published. Brilliant worker in the origins of languages. I immediately wrote Charles Lee [Director of the State Archives of South Carolina, one time President of the American Society of Archivists] who will be startled to hear from me after 38 years, explaining my memorandum on the archives of the dying and their total loss to our culture. I feel extra sad about Gilbert, because he was so alone and so incapacitated for everything except the history of languages. But what a fine capacity. If he might only have known when dying how I like and admired him. He must have known. But he needed just then to be told so. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 4: } {Q - } {C Chapter 13: } {T THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK The asininity of the attacks by the science media and conventional scientists upon Velikovsky was consistent with book reviewing and editorial practices generally. Sympathizers of V. had an ample data bank from 1963 onwards from which to demonstrate that V. 's critics were brash, dogmatic, imitative, narrow, selective, unprepared, precipitous, vulnerable, incomplete, pretentious, possessed, unversed, unserious, unselfcritical, prejudiced, unsystematic, inexact, unphilosophical, ideologically scatomatized, vague and irrelevant -- to say the least. Yet withal Velikovsky was said to have been "buried" not once but repeatedly, and all of his supporters with him. In a field so broad, hundreds of major statements and thousands of details offered in over a thousand published pages somehow emerged unscathed. Several scores of statements were indicted for ambiguity or rendered more doubtful. What everyone knew ahead of time could be reasserted: the prevailing theory of celestial mechanics would only make nonsense out of data presented. In addition, planet Venus probably lacks massive clouds of hydrocarbon; if so, either such clouds were never there or they burned off over time, the latter being V.'s second line of defense. All in all, this was so small a bag that V., when it came time to write his address to the San Francisco AAAS meeting, ended it with the words, "None of my critics can erase the magnetosphere, nobody can stop the noises of Jupiter, nobody can cool off Venus and nobody can change a single sentence in my books." He knew that last expression was bravado, but he felt like sticking it in, so unsuccessful did he consider his opposition to have been. He asked Deg's opinion: should it stay? Deg was happy for the swashbuckling septuagenarian. Besides there was enough truth in it to let it go as the last firecracker of a speech that crackled throughout; why not? Fling it in their teeth. And so it stands. Since effectively it says nothing and says all, who can object to it? I have given much thought to what kind of review might be tendered V.'s books, such that his supporters could not assail on substantial or moral grounds but would not please them. I consulted Professor Joseph Grace, a historian of science, and he kindly wrote a review for our pages, holding to a 700 word limit, such as is common. Velikovsky is a highly skilled and erudite scholar, who works comfortably in several major fields of science and the humanities. He has a style, an attack, that is primarily humanistic. By this I mean to exclude social science, which today has a format often resembling natural science, complete with jargon. He writes more like Ignatius Donnelly, a predecessor of a century ago, whose style is even more pleasurable. There can be only mild objections to such a style, considering the undefined and exotic, even occult nature of some of the areas he must venture into and the non-existence of a scientific language covering so broad an area. Of course, we would lose much in clarity and orderly communication if our students were to adopt it in all manner of writing. Velikovsky sees prehistory and protohistory as frequented by stupendous natural catastrophes that call into question the stability of the solar system over long time periods, and therefore the gradualism of darwinism in biology. His evidence is limited and fragmentary, much of it anomalies that puzzle historians both human and natural. Most of his evidence must, and does also, serve conventional approaches, our received knowledge, although he insists upon viewing it as catastrophic. His most radical hypotheses, which he expresses far too confidently, propose drastic erratic movements and changes of planets, particularly the Earth, Mars and Venus, not to mention the lunar satellite and the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. The mechanics, even the electro- mechanics of such allegedly historical events are, if conceivable, quite unknown and undeveloped. Here and there in his works one finds nuggets of valuable ore, some in history, some in legend, some natural history. One finds these days a plenitude of studies of meteorites and comets, a few of which he cites. One finds, too, many goods works on historical and stratigraphic chronology, chronometry, and it takes more than innuendo to shake the solid foundations of radiochronometry. One must be impressed, on the other hand, by Velikovsky's ability to discover anomalies and contradictions, especially in Ancient History. He may well be on the right track in discovering continuities between Pharaoh Akhnaton and Oedipus, and concordances between the Biblical Amalekites and the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and even is stressing a baffling absence of archeological material to fill in centuries of assigned time in Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere. The reader will find many entertaining and suggestive pages as well. As for his general ideas, practically none of them can be fitted into contemporary scientific theory. The more heretical a theory, the more hard evidence must be found to support it, and Velikovsky's ideas of an electrically run universe, which he never develops, and his claims of planetary aberrations in early times to which he gives a great deal of attention, are, to put it mildly, bizarre; there exists, that is, no astrophysical theory to support them. I would not recommend his books to anyone. Their pretensions will enrage the learned and confound the ordinary reader. Every age has books like them. I can mention Donnelly and Mesmer in the nineteenth century, and George M. Price and C. Beaumont in this century, but there were many more, which are best forgotten. The genre is well known to science and historians of the most ancient times, and one can judge the future of the books by what has happened to their predecessors. The fact that a great many people read such works tells us little about their value as science or literature. No doubt, in time, such scientists as can be spared from other tasks or are involved with his specific hypotheses will build up what would amount to a total assessment. It is certainly too early to assert, as Prof. A. de. Grazia did after only a dozen years, that he is one of the great cosmogonists of the century. What can be said for this review is that it gives a general impression of what is talked about in the books and how, and it does not challenge their right to be published, nor dismiss them as anti-scientific, nor berate the author. When researching on the Velikovsky Affair, Deg stimulated V. 's interest in the techniques of suppression, putting into a framework the host of items which protruded from V.'s archives. Deg told V. of a favorite old book, Henry Thouless' Straight and Crooked Thinking and explained how it might be applied to V. 's experience. V. was excited by the idea and prepared a handwritten list of "70 ways of suppressing a theory," which the two men discussed. The list that follows is largely in V.'s words and idiom. It was not included in the published work. Each item is based upon one or more concrete instances that can be documented and dated. Later on V. wished to engage Lynn Rose in fleshing out and publishing the list. Actions of Established Scientists and Cohorts Aimed at I. Velikovsky and his Book Worlds in Collision (1950) 1. Refusal to read or examine the manuscript. 2. Charging it was not presented to specialists before publication. 3. Refusal to help with inexpensive tests through established facilities. 4. Accusation that work was not offered for testing. 5. Assertion that work has been disproved by tests. 6. Efforts to discourage printing. 7. Demands for censorship. 8. Engaging in censorship. 9. Boycott of the book. 10. Boycott of all textbooks of the work's publisher. 11. Threats of reprisal against publisher by not offering manuscripts or withdrawing books. 12. Threat against associated publishers without text books. 13. Appeals to the scientific community. 14. Efforts to influence reviewers in advance. 15. Appeals to mobilize hostile reviewers. 16. Efforts to suppress favorable reviewers. 17. Efforts to supplant regular reviewers with volunteer authoritative writers as reviewers. 18. Checking the allegiance of scientists and officials of scientific organizations. 19. Firing of unaligned scientists and officials. 20. Punishment of book editors and firing. 21. Demand that there be a public recantation by publishers. 22. Refusal to print author's papers about his books in scientific magazines. 23. Return of supplementary papers unceremoniously without reading. 24. Refusal to reprint answers to distortion of facts of reviews. 25. Misquotation from the book, and quotations out of context. 26. Copying of wrong figures into a quotation used in the book. 27. No correction of erroneous statements in reviews by anybody in the scientific community. 28. Use of knowingly false argument. 29. Dogmatic statements and accusations. 30. Setting up and knocking down "strawmen." 31. Dishonest rejoinders. 32. Defamation and discrediting abuse. 33. Promotion of antagonistic critics. 34. Appeal to religious feelings. 35. Guilt by association. 36. Treating work by association with other ridiculed or denounced books. 37. Use of fallacious statistical method to decide whether a genius or crank wrote book. 38. Writing reviews and criticisms without reading the book. 39. Copying from other reviews (even of those who had not read it themselves). 40. Innuendoes that unneeded counterarguments abound. 41. Refusal by scientific periodicals to advertise the work. 42. Warnings against readers' inability to judge work. 43. Assuring the reading (and book- buying) public the book is dull and worthless. 44. Accusing author of using methods not actually used. 45. Denials of acts of suppression, compounding perjury. 46. Omission of credit or of footnoting the work when offering "new" theories elsewhere that are contained in the book. 47. Refusal to give credit for discoveries confirmed ultimately in tests. 48. Refusal of information to author. 49. Refusal to engage in communication with author or allies. 50. Suppression of news of disputes or debates won by author. 51. Deprecating value of crucial tests favoring author's theories. 52. Concocting stories that "1000 wrong predictions" were in book. 53. Defamation in letters and intimidation of potential support. 54. Use of great names (e. g. Nobel Prize winners) for defamation. 55. Whispering campaign; private letters. 56. Intimidation of students, both undergraduates and graduates. 57. Elimination of the name of the heretic from books of reference. 58. Removal of the book from libraries. 59. Demands to place the book on the Register of Forbidden Books. 60. Pressure on scientific supporters by bribing with better jobs to abstain. 61. Grants given to disprove the book (no grants ever given to "prove"). 62. Efforts, include fabrication, to show misuse of sources by author. 63. Damaging statements put in the mouth of deceased persons of influence. 64. Heaping of accusations without substantiation in quantities making any response impossible in the same media. 65. Insinuations of profiteering and other ignoble motives for writing the work. 66. Attempts at organizing character assassination and special meetings to dispose of the challenge. 67. Dissemination of selected damaging reviews. 68. Offering the readers arguments from specialized fields that they are unable to verify. 69. Generalization and complete disapproval on grounds of a single alleged error. 70. Accusation of lack of sources by misrepresenting the term "collective amnesia." A service to the history and science of science would occur in the expansion and testing of the list. Deg wished that he might complete the list concerning V., then move to other cases in science, and then to all occupations to display the universal prevalence of misdemeanor, not so much to scandalize, nor to stop it all (an impossibility), as to expose to light the epidemic predicament. When asked to place them into categories (for Deg was distressed by their stringing out aimlessly) V. divided them into: suppression of publication; punishment and rewards; examination of the theories refused; ostracism of a nonconformist; rewriting of history and scientific finds; control of criticism; unfair criticism; and unfair criticism continued by unfair rejoinders. Deg in his turn divided them into logical errors, moral offenses (cheating and dishonesty); factual errors; illegitimate demands; hyperbole; personal abuse; material sanctions; etc. V. was especially pleased with what Deg called "the absent footnote technique" which with disastrous effectiveness eliminates an undesired line of ancestors, such as V. Stecchini in the 1970's pointed out that Schiaparelli was a leading astronomer but could not get acceptance of his idea that Venus was scarcely rotating in relation to the Sun, showing an "Earth-Lock" as it comes closest to the Earth. The "Earth-Lock" was proven a century later, but although it supported V.'s position was not even mentioned, when, for example, the Encyclopedia Britannica (XIX, 78) connected the phenomenon with "unsolved but very significant celestial mechanical problems connected with the origins and early histories of the planets." Here is a case of partial incorporation of quantavolution with the help of the "absent footnote technique." The tricks used against V. were all commonplace in the scientific world. Since his work was so widely publicized and since he collected evidence so carefully, the tricks were simply more completely displayed. The more basic causes of resistance and opposition, which spawn tricks, have been discussed by Bernard Barber, with a wealth of example. V. was not a sociologist. Allegations of meanness and nonrational thought exhausted his repertoire of analysis, except for his handy notion of collective amnesia of ancient catastrophe, which, he began to think, was the essential cause of the opposition to his theories; people, including scientists, could not bear to admit to open discussion their own suppressed terror of the original events. But, of course, resistance to new ideas occurs whether the new ideas are catastrophist or uniformitarian, and with ideas that are false as well as with true ideas, which Barber has shown in the cases of Helmholtz, Planck, and Lister, among others. As Deg has argued, the great fear of the poly-ego in the normal schizoid human determines memory at the same time as it demands forgetting (or resisting memory), and ancient catastrophes were materially grafted onto this human mechanism; but the resistance to V.'s theories can be only slightly assigned to the peculiarities of his catastrophism. Deg prepared another list in 1978. He was making up this one out of disgust with politics: he was gloomy over the practical impossibility of finding persons in the world who were capable of organizing, agitating and contributing to beneficial and benevolent movements. But he saw that the list applied also to getting support for scientific ideas and movements. "Why Doesn't Somebody Do Something?" Noone wants to follow Helplessness Hopelessness Incompetence Hardheadedness General Disbelief Indifference Too busy, no time Can't afford to, financially Hurts somebody Meets opposition Arrogant to tell someone what to do Timidity Fear Fickleness Inattention and distractedness Leave it to the experts The crazies you have to deal with Hard work Resentment against being ordered about Ignorance of particulars Disbelief in use of force or any form of manipulation Hatred of those to be helped Lack of foresight Interested only in the moment Can't believe a few voices might prevail Things will work themselves out (laissez-faire) Fear of being corrupted Distaste for manners of other activists Have to work with inferiors Suspicious of potential collaborators Fear of physical harm Fear of failure Fear of being responsible for effects No wonder nothing ever gets done! In 1978, Dr. Henry Bauer, later Dean at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, offered the first full- dress anti-Velikovsky manuscript and the Director of the University of Kentucky Press asked Deg to read it with reference to its possible publication. Cutbacks in funds and programming forced the Press into giving up the manuscript or finding $5000 subsidy for its production. The University of Illinois Press was finally to have brought the work out in late 1984. Meanwhile one can have a review of it by way of Deg's Readers Report of January 10, 1979: To: University of Kentucky Press, Attn. Mr. Crouch From: Professor Alfred de Grazia Subject: Reader's report to Henry H. Bauer. Beyond Velikovsky In my opinion, Dean Bauer's manuscript should be published. It is the first generally adverse criticism of the work of Immanuel Velikovsky by a single author. The author has researched practically all available public sources. He is aware of and also adversely critical of the failings of many of the critics of Velikovsky. The book, strangely, is a likable book, which probably reflects the author's character more than the contents, which must prove annoying to a hundred people. The book will be controversial. There is no avoiding this. Feelings run high on the scientific and sociological aspects of Velikovsky's work. The most incisive criticism is bound to come from the supporters of Velikovsky, for they are much better informed on all aspects of the controversy than the opponents of Velikovsky. These latter are usually cut down quickly. Dean Bauer realizes, though, that it is not easy to address the issues, and has the advantage of four hundred pages to explain himself and balance his analysis. Because of the scope of the book, not only Velikovsky but also a number of his supporters will be motivated to respond. And one cannot doubt that they will have good grounds to enter the fray Let me take myself as an example of what may very well happen with others. On p. 236 the author mentions my "utter conviction that Velikovsky is right." Right about what? I am favorable to his general theories, his genius, and his defense against the almost invariably misplaced attacks upon him. Bauer might well stress his distinction between the "True Believers" and the scholarly supporters. Among the latter, there are many differences, the atmosphere is highly critical and, if they seem overprotective of Velikovsky, it is because the enemy outside is so massive and aggressive. It will add greatly to the clarity of the analysis if the author distinguishes the scholarly supporters and the lay supporters. (The word "public" is better but unfortunately has several meanings.) The scientific opponents of Velikovsky have also their scholarly and lay supporters. As for disputes among the scholarly supporters and Velikovsky, contrary to Bauer's statements, there are dozens, beginning with Juergens, Hess, and Stecchini and ending with the young writers in the current (Nov. 1978) issue of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review. At the bottom of p. 237, Bauer shoots from the hip at both Juergens as an absurdity and myself as a political scientist, while favoring physicist Kruskal's scornful attack upon Juergens. This does not accord with Bauer's many comments upon dogmatic remarks and against extolling specialized authority. Apart from whether he understands Juergen's theory, which he does not bother to demonstrate, and whether I understand Juergen's theory as well or better than Kruskal, he takes up a vulnerable position: what qualification, one might ask, does Bauer have for writing a book of sociology, history, ethnology, and political analysis, not to mention meteorology, geology, astronomy, etc.? Does he regard himself as a greater polymath than any of us? Then again, he contradicts my analysis of Margolis and a group of Yale reviewers, claiming that his own count in the first instance is at odds with my own. Perhaps he should reproduce, in a couple of pages, the Margolis article with my comments, adding his own. Such would be the better way to damage my conclusions. The readers might then judge. And so on. To say only of the distinguished group of scholars who passed on the ABS special issue on the Velikovsky Affair that none was a scientist gives a completely misleading idea to the reader. Lasswell was one of the founders of quantitative method in behavioral science. Cantril was a distinguished psychologist and expert on systematic opinion analysis; etc. Nor does he stress that Harry Hess, who is sometimes regarded as having been the leading geologist of the past generation, was a thoroughly sympathetic friend of Velikovsky. Hess and I talked on two or three occasions of Velikovsky, and Hess was as eager as I to see Velikovsky's scientific ability respected. Hess recommended that his students at Princeton read Earth in Upheaval, for example. These are but a few of the hundreds of points of contention in the manuscript and yet I feel it should be published with only modest changes, because it might otherwise take years to redo it and I am not at all sure that the public functions of the book would be greatly assisted. Perhaps I am saying that the book as it stands invites a full rocket display and, in the process, the public, science, and students will become better educated. I doubt that any amount of revision will make it a definitive and conclusive answer to the rapidly developing body of work sympathetically or willy-willy aligned to Velikovsky's books. I have four books in process myself that are more controversial and upsetting to the established doctrines of contemporary science than those of Dr. Velikovsky. But I have the impression that I shall not encounter the same type of opposition as Velikovsky if only because the intellectual atmosphere has changed so much and in part because of the Velikovsky Affair. Readers perhaps will little note the criticism directed at myself and some others in the book, but they will be alert to a number of points respecting Velikovsky, and I would suggest that Dean Bauer reconsider them. He is attacking Velikovsky in 1979 partly on the basis of a pamphlet that Velikovsky published in 1946 (" Cosmos and Gravitation") and which Bauer even appreciates is not pushed by Velikovsky himself or scarcely anyone else. True, Velikovsky hates to recant, but the pamphlet is not a necessary prologomena to the later books. Indeed, Bauer's often insightful views about Velikovsky's character and motives should make him wonder whether the pamphlet was not merely a brash preliminary exercise, which vanity demanded be published as advance claims. Further it has become fashionable now to predict the doom of the concept of gravitation, and Velikovsky's musings were in a way the fashions worn in 1946 for anti-gravitational thought. This might be said also regarding the model of the atom as resembling the solar system. Only lately has that idea become discredited. Are we to dump all scholars who early in their careers exhibited what was currently believed? Then everyone will have to walk the plank. Bauer sometimes abuses Velikovsky, contrary to his professional aim, generally observed, of avoiding inflammatory and ad hominem statements. It should be easy to revise such expressions as "astonishing ignorance" (p. 159), "supreme ignorance" (p. 154), p. 161 etc. I think that he would reap rewards if he, or an editor, were to erase fifty to a hundred non-functional adjectives or phrases. And, in respect to Velikovsky as a knowledgeable scientist, aside from "who is a scientist besides the self-elect," Bauer underestimates Velikovsky totally. Let him ask Burgstahler (chemist), Motz (astrophysicist), someone like myself who knew Hess (geology), Hadas (linguistics), Lasswell (psychiatric psychologist), Cyrus Gordon (Near East Studies), Einstein (physics), Juergens (electricity), et al. Every last one will or would say that Velikovsky is not only a good scientist, but an imaginative one, and at home in a number of fields. I wonder why Bauer did not take the step to include himself in this group by interviewing the subject of his book. Velikovsky may be in error, but he is a scientist. Also, I would recommend dropping the discussion of whether Velikovsky is a crank. Bauer admits that he himself is a crank, about the Loch Ness monsters. It's unworthy of this book to waste itself on this unscientific concept. I would, as Dean Bauer appears to believe, devote only several necessary paragraphs to exposing the term "crank" and kicking it out of bounds. On p. 248, I note a striking contrast between a group of pro-Velikovsky publicists and a group of anti-Velikovsky scholars of distinction. This is a "foul blow." Either let both be publicists or both be scholars. So, I should conclude that off-hand abusive terms ought to be excised since they take away from a book some of its good air of casual and pleasant inquiry. Cut back the section on cranks. Perhaps dispense with the sections on "Cosmos and Gravitation" save for a simple statement of its inappropriateness and its inelegant foreboding of things to come. The admirably clear piece on gases should win Bauer an excellent contract for an elementary textbook in general science, but may not belong here. Perhaps other paragraphs can be removed here and there at the instigation of a generally well-educated lay reader. The style is clear at the college level. Many, many things are said that need to be said about both sides: about how scholars are just (simply) people; about how the general public reacts to controversies in science as to political struggles, baseball games, etc.; and about the foibles of Velikovsky (though perhaps not enough, regrettably, about how these foibles have had something to do with driving him on relentlessly and with good effect). And I think that Dean Bauer might even, in the end, bite the bullet and state that on the whole it were well that Velikovsky's books were published, then bad that they were mishandled by the press, scientists, and disciples, yet good that a million people began to read into history and science. Finally take the word of the author himself (p. 366) that an astronomer's statement that "Velikovsky's scenario was impossible on grounds of celestial mechanics was just not so." That is worth something and will win the author a medal for courage, after all is said and done. To avoid rumor-mongering or a delayed denunciation Deg told V.'s retainers of the existence of the work and of his recommendation that it be published. "Why?" he was asked, meaning why didn't he stomp it. It's not bad, he answered, you'll see, and it will keep the dialogue going, even improving it. Meanwhile, those who were termed by the anti-heretics "devotees," "followers," "disciples," "supporters," "sympathizers," and were consigned to the limbo of science as "benighted," "anti- scientific," "occultists," "astrologers," "fanatics," and so on, unendingly -- from these who were seriously considering his work as well as doing work of their own, came the discovery and reporting of his errors, qualification of his statements, essays at quantification, adduction of contrary materials, tempering, amending, and explaining. We need not go into the question, "Whose mass of supporters is better -- yours or ours ?" We are saying precisely that the effective scientific criticism of Velikovsky came from those who were sympathetic to his work. It was the heretic scholars who designed alternative scenarios, in geology and astronomy, who upset V.'s chronology beyond the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, who pointed out correctly evidence of pro-Biblical bias, who disputed his identification of the astronomical bodies implicated in certain legends, who pinned down the sources of numerous uncertainties, who reduced vagueness, who found and accommodated predecessors in the esoteric and difficult literature of catastrophism, far beyond the sporadic dark hints that "nothing new" was being proposed. To be blunt, if you want to know what's wrong with Velikovsky, ask his friends, as much as his enemies; ask his admirers, as well as his detractors. You must know the literature of quantavolution and catastrophe. It is contained by now in many books and hundreds of correctly postured articles, many old, many new, many forthcoming. One can think no longer, if ever, that by "not believing in Velikovsky" science will proceed on its customary paths; a growing parade of many different kinds of quantavolutionaries is finding its own paths. The parade cannot be dismissed by uttering an imprecation against Velikovsky. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had been established in the triumphant days of nuclear physics following the blast at Hiroshima and was dedicated to voicing the responsibilities felt by scientists. Like the playboy college students who excused his poor grades on grounds that his college was anti-semitic and who persuaded his father that his nose, his curly hair, and his name ought to be changed, whereupon, his grades remaining poor, he had to confess that 'us Gentiles ain't very smart, ' the Bulletin did change its name for awhile and had the same old problem so it changed it back again, but at this time, around 1964, was trying to boost its popularity by exposing what Editor Rabinowitch regarded as scientific impostors, and his chosen weapon, a science publicist named Margolis, settled upon Velikovsky, whence was published a cavalier article entitled "Velikovsky Rides Again." Deg's larger and more detailed refutation of the offensive article is reproduced in The Burning of Troy. So here I may introduce a letter in the same vein from Eric Larrabee, a publicist and early supporter of V., later head of the New York State Arts Council. April 21, 1964 To the Editor: The "Report from Washington" by Howard Margolis in your April number is a mixture of intemperate accusations and misstatements of fact. Margolis dismisses as "hokum" the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, which he has demonstrably read without care and judges without experience. He claims there is "no scientific way to examine" books which abound in references to physical fact. Their author had furnished specific scientific tests of his theory and on all of them to date, according to Professor H. H. Hess of Princeton, he had been vindicated. Margolis brushes off Velikovsky's successful predictions as "science fiction" and offers instead the results of his "few hours" reading in philology and history. He can apparently read neither French nor Hebrew. If he could read. French he would not speak of the "actual" inscription at el-Arish in words from the outdated English translation of 1890 instead of the modern French translation of 1936, which is plainly cited in Velikovsky's footnote. The French translation gives the name Pi-Khirote. Margolis is flatly wrong in stating the Velikovsky "alters" the text, either here or in the case of the biblical pi-ha-hiroth (so spelled by Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos, p. 44). If Margolis had read even the English translation attentively he would have found "King Tum" (The French gives "le roi Toum"). This is the text: "Voici que Geb vit sa mere qui l'aimait beaucoup. Son coeur (de Geb) ‚tait n‚gligent aprŠs elle. La terre -- pour elle en grand affliction." It goes on to describe "upheaval in the residence" and "such a tempest that neither the men nor the gods could see the faces of their next." The inscription is shown to be historical by the fact that the King's name is written with the royal cartouche. Velikovsky's reasons for suggesting that bkhor (firstborn) in the Hebrew text might be a misreading for bchor (chosen) are given at length (Ages in Chaos, p. 32-34) and are not essential to his argument that Exodus and the Egyptian sources refer to the same natural catastrophe. He uses the word "obvious" in proposing that the phrase "to smite the houses" refers to an earthquake in view of the fact that Eusebius, St. Jerome, and the Midrashim all confirm this interpretation. Margolis' sarcastic repetition of the word "obvious" is wholly without justification. Margolis accuses Velikovsky of saying that St. Augustine puts the birth of Minerva at the time of Moses whereas Augustine "says the opposite." This would be a serious charge if true but it is doubly untrue, both as to Augustine and Velikovsky. The relevant passage in The City of God (Book XVIII, Chapter 8) reads that Minerva was born in the time of Ogyges and Velikovsky quotes it (Worlds in Collision, p. 171) in those precise words. In support of the damaging assertion that Velikovsky alters evidence Margolis alters the evidence from both sources. Margolis cannot even read Velikovsky correctly. He says that Velikovsky "can cite no description" of Venus growing larger in the sky despite the fact that on pages 82-83 and 164-65 of Worlds in Collision it is so described from Western (" an immense globe"), Middle Eastern (" a stupendous prodigy in the sky") and Chinese (" rivalled the sun in brightness") sources. The sociological interest of the Velikovsky case lies in the willingness of scientists to dismiss the work of a serious scholar as "hokum" on the basis of slipshod, inaccurate, and abusive criticism. Margolis had proved once again that the interest is justified. Eric Larrabee Deg was in an ornery mood and had threatened the Bulletin with a suit for slander. V. was all for the idea consulted his friend, the libel expert, Philip Wittenberg. Deg also consulted Herbert Simon and adopted Simon's view, as expressed in the letter below: Dear Al, I have read the materials you sent me about the Velikovsky matter. (Incidentally, I lunched with Velikovsky last week, and we are going to have him back to the campus next autumn for a lecture.) I have a few comments to offer on the matter of strategy. As I am sure you know, there is a doctrine in the law of libel known as "invitation to comment." Anyone who performs publicly -- and that includes publishing a book -- invites critical comment, and has no recourse if he gets it unless he can show actual malice. The critic does not, in general, have to sustain the burden of proving truth. (I may have forgotten details, but your lawyer will tell you that that is the general idea.) Two consequences follow from this: (1) one should not publish books -- or issues of the American Behavioral Scientist devoted to the Velikovsky Affair -- unless one has a thick skin; (2) when one is flayed by a critic, one should almost never threaten legal action, however righteous one's feeling. The opponents of Velikovsky are not malicious, they are indignant. Nothing about the Margolis article seems to me libelous, however much I disagree with it. We certainly do not want to imply that we wish to suppress his right to hold, or even publish, these opinions, however much anguish they cause us. Hence, if I were editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, I would politely but firmly reject your request that I "withdraw my support" from the article. He might even point out that to an anti-Velikovskyite, some of the language in the September American Behavioral Scientist might seem quite as offensive as Margolis' language did to you. C'est la vie. When you receive the refusal from the editor -- as I am sure you will -- I would advise that you then request an opportunity to have three pages in BAS to reply to Margolis (perhaps offering the same number of pages in ABS for a rebuttal to the September articles). There is nothing to be lost by a public discussion of the issues, especially the issue of freedom to publish, and nothing to be gained by defending that through threats to suppress it. With best regards, Cordially Yours, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Administration and Psychology After much deliberation and testing of the winds, Rabinowitch wrote to Deg: 25 June 1964 Dear Mr. de Grazia: In answer to your letter of May 12, I do not see why, and in what form, the Bulletin should "withdraw its support from the article of Mr. Margolis." I do not understand what you mean by "your contributors and advisors urging you to take action to remedy the wrong done us." The responsibility for the contents of the articles published in the Bulletin rest (sic) with authors of the articles. It must be obvious, of course, that the magazine cannot disclaim legal responsibility for any defamatory statements, but I do not see in the article by Mr. Margolis any statements of such nature with respect to yourself or to the contributors of your journal. If all polemics over matters of scientific competence would end in court, this would be bad indeed for the climate of free discussion in this country. In our society, the enemies of evolution can call scientists, espousing this theory, ignoramuses, or heretics; the enemies of fluoridation can call the medical authorities supporting it whatever like names they might choose -- short of character assassination -- and the proponents of fluoridation can do the same to their critics. This is as political processes should be in a democratic society. In his article Mr. Margolis, after dealing briefly with the astrophysical difficulties of Velikovsky's theory, expanded on the interpretation of ancient texts. From the point of view of the Bulletin the physical and astronomical evidence is crucial, and the considerations of what Velikovsky calls "experience of humanity," can only be subsidiary. Physical evidence is simpler and more unambiguous; while interpretations of old texts and hieroglyphic inscriptions is an tentative and often controversial matter. Since Mr. Margolis brought up the paleographic evidence in his article, we must in all justice, permit Dr. Velikovsky (or a spokesman for him) to point out the errors, if any, in his argument. This should be done by someone with first-hand experience in the field -- either Dr. Velikovsky himself, or even better, some independent recognized authority in Biblical history and ancient languages. We are willing to publish such a letter in one of the forthcoming issues (giving Mr. Margolis the opportunity of answering it, if he desires); but, we will then terminate the discussion, since Egyptology or Old Testament studies do not represent a field of the Bulletin's major interest. As far as physical possibility of the events suggested by Velikovsky is concerned, I mention the names of Menzel and Shapley because I remembered that they did analyze Velikovsky's theories at the time of their publication. I would be glad to have any other recognized astrophysicist or geophysicist (including the Princeton and Columbia astronomers who have pointed out in Science the correctness of some of Dr. Velikovsky's specific predictions), to present in the Bulletin briefly what they think of Velikovsky's theory as a whole. I believe it is a mistake to accuse modern science of intolerance to the theories which destroy its accustomed frame of reference and force it to revise its foundations. Einstein proposed a revision of Newton's conceptions of time and space; for a few years, there was some resistance of the type suggested by you, but it was silenced by Einstein's explanation of the precession of the perigee of Mercury, and his prediction of the bending of stellar light in the neighborhood of the sun. If the correct predications by Velikovsky, pointed out by Hess and others, do not change the general rejection of Velikovsky's theories by scientists, it is because changes in the laws of celestial mechanics and revisions of well-established facts of earth history, required by Velikovsky, are quite different from the subtle, but logically significant and convincing changes in the scientific world picture suggested by Einstein (as well as by Mac[ sic] Planck, when he postulated the atomic structure of energy, or more recently by Lee and Yang when they postulated a physical difference between a right and left screw, object and mirror image). Modern science has learned to be open-minded to revolutionary suggestion, if they are brought up with strong scientific or logical evidence. Reluctance to go along with Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision is, in my eyes, evidence not of stubborn dogmatism of "official" science but of the physical and logical implausibility of his theories. Your letter and its request misinterprets the position of the Bulletin. To conclude, since Mr. Margolis brought up paleographic evidence, fairness requires the Bulletin to give space to a letter disputing this evidence (provided this letter is not more abusive that Mr. Margolis' criticisms). If Dr. Velikovsky can suggest a recognized authority in astrophysics or geophysics willing to discuss his theory as a whole in the light of recent verification of some of his predictions, I would consider giving space in the Bulletin for a brief discussion of this kind. It is in this spirit of scientific argumentation that the whole problem should be resolved. Sincerely yours. Eugene Rabinowitch Editor During the next few weeks Deg drafted a brutal reply to Margolis's article and prepared a letter to accompany the critique. However and meanwhile, V., ever hopeful of access to and acceptance by the authorities of physics, prevailed upon Harry Hess to submit on his behalf to Rabinowitch an article he had prepared on his Venus theory in the light of new findings. It would serve as a counter weight to the Margolis article, without reference to the libertarian and legal issues involving the Bulletin. In September Rabinowitch wrote to Hess, returning V. 's manuscript without having read it and saying, "the Bulletin is not a magazine for scientific controversies -- except on rare occasions (e. g. in the field of genetic radiation damage) when they are directly related to political or other public issues... Neither is it the function of the Bulletin to provide an outlet for scientific theories not recognized by professional authorities in the field." He explained the Margolis article as an attempt to undo the work of "behavioral scientists" in aid of V. whom, he said, they "championed in the most violent way." In October, the ABS published Deg's critique of Margolis, and Deg sent it to Rabinowitch along with the letter that he had drafted three months earlier. November 12, 1964 Dear Mr. Rabinowitch: Please permit me to answer frankly your letter of June 25, which asks why and in what form your should "withdraw your support from Mr. Margolis's article about us." The why should be apparent in the attached analysis of Mr. Margolis' writing, entitled "Notes on 'Scientific' Reporting." This explains in detail the errors, the malice, and the legal offenses of Mr. Margolis. Unless your can by the use of evidence and reason erase those 54 notes, your are bound scientifically, morally, and legally to "withdraw your support." In what form should your "withdraw your support"? You should "withdraw your support" by expressing in seven columns of space in your magazine (1) your acknowledgment of the excessively large number of factual errors contained in Mr. Margolis' article, and (2) your regret for the incorrect unjustified slurs upon the character and motives of Dr. Velikovsky and the contributors and editors of THE AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, together with your hope that your reader should join you in repairing in the course of time such damages as was caused by this article. My present letter could now end, as might have your own at the same point. However, you go on to make further comments that require answer. You say that it would be "bad indeed for the climate of free discussion in this country" if "all polemics over matters of scientific competence would end in court." I answer that "all polemics" are not at issue, but only one polemical action. (You are of course, at liberty to universalize its meaning.) Moreover, "the climate of free discussion" that you mention has been clouded and cannot be logically cited as a reason for staying our of court. It is precisely to get people out from under this cloud that the law and courts are built. The courts enable an objective determination to be made of a matter in certain cases where free discussion is impossible. They permit and require the calling and interrogating of witnesses under just conditions. They prevent and remedy the abuses that you have presumably endorsed. The law of evidence and the rule of law, Mr. Rabinowitch, are the grandparents of the scientific method. They are not its antithesis. You say that in our society, disbelievers in evolution can call scientists espousing evolution ignoramuses or heretics. You say enemies of fluoridation can call medical authorities supporting it like names and vice versa. You are defending your magazine evidently for assuming the privilege of such name-calling as opponents of fluoridation and evolution employ. Very well. Your reader must judge you for that. "Character assassination", you say, is not permissible, however. The issue here is of course just that. I call to your attention the numerous instances, well-noted in the aforesaid memorandum on "54 ways", in which your magazine is guilty of character assassination, slander, and libel. Your next paragraph is logically queer, for your say that the Bulletin is largely concerned with the astrophysics of Velikovsky and not with the humanistic evidence.( I will not tarry with your incredible distinction between physical and humanistic evidence.) But then you go on to admit that the Bulletin reversed itself and abandoned its chosen field in this case. (Apparently, any and every policy can be reversed to get at Velikovsky. How true we were!) And you say you want to get the historical evidence argued. Argued -- but not too much you state, for you have to get back to your major interest! Like UN affairs? Like scientific freedom? You may go back to your affairs, Mr. Rabinowitch, but not before we are done with the matter. Now you would graciously permit Dr. Velikovsky or an "independent authority" of the classics to answer Mr. Margolis by a letter, to be followed by a reply from Mr. Margolis, and then stop! Two-to-one is bad enough. But how does Mr. Margolis deserve this reply? By his own expertness as a biblical scholar, specialist in ancient languages, and classical historian? I submit that this exchange might be equal and appropriate if I might delegate my daughter who is majoring in archaeology at Bryn Mawr to take up your invitation to reply. A general appraisal of Dr. Velikovsky's theories in your paper would be a good idea, as your suggest, and I think you should find a set of scientists to make such an appraisal. I would not go to Drs. Menzel or Shapley, whose participation in the Velikovsky case, as documented in Harper's and The American Behavioral Scientist, has been most unbecoming Your hazy remembrance of their posture is scarcely a firm basis for risking the reputation of your magazine and colleagues. Besides the balance of evidence has continued to shift between 1950 and 1964. Do read that document; your must take the time : you and your writer cannot decently continue to ignore all the factual record of the case. Still, all of this is not the central point, which is the behavior of scientists, and you do well to return to it in your last two paragraphs. There you first say that modern science is not intolerant of unorthodox theories. This is not so; even the case you cite, Einstein, was in your own words victim of "some resistance" of the type the ABS described. But even if it were so generally, why would you unscientifically and dogmatically refuse to recognize an "unusual" case of resistance when it loomed before you? How can you say that the actions taken concerning Velikovsky and his theories was tolerant? Please state one procedure, whose value your would defend, for that reception and consideration of new scientific material, which was followed by the leadership of science in the Velikovsky case. Show us that he was given one key to the kingdom. I believe, as you seek to do so, you will gradually eliminate from consideration all the decent and rational procedures that are supposed to govern the behavior of scientists. In the end you will either be indignant or a cynic. You will not be the Rabinowitch whose letter I am replying to. I must end in laughter, which I hope you will forgive. For you conclude by permitting Dr. Velikovsky to answer by letter "provided this letter is not more abusive than Mr. Margolis' criticisms!" I am not clear whether you are here defining the outer limits of abuse, or whether you suggest pursuing scientific truth by balancing two sets of slander. Go back to my beginning, sir; you will find our two requests to be generous offers made in the veritable "spirit of scientific argumentation" that you appeal to. Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia Dear Mr. de Grazia: Thank you for your letter of November 12th. I can only add my appreciation that you published the full Margolis article in The American Behavioral Scientist. Your readers may judge. Sincerely, Eugene Rabinowitch Editor December 3, 1964 Dear Mr. Rabinowitch We acknowledge your appreciation of our fairness. Does your appreciation mean that you, too, will be fair to us and present our rebuttal before your readers? Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia The rebuttal was not carried by the Bulletin. A great many scientists had their prejudices reinforced at the expense of V., Deg, and the ABS. In the final analysis and many year later, Deg's indignation seems overdone, and it is doubtful that he ever had the intention of suing, but he was up to his typical game of driving home contradictions and pounding away at the basic homology between legal and scientific procedure. Furthermore, while discounting his rhetoric, I should also call attention to specific instances of the damage caused by irresponsible behavior in scientific circles tied directly to the Bulletin article: one on the matter of fluoridation, on an exchange between Urey and Deg, and two to be treated in chapter 15 on "The Knowledge of Industry" involving the Sloan Foundation, Moses Hadas, and a project of Deg in economics. July 17, 1996 Dear Professor de Grazia: Since writing you earlier in connection with my review of "A Struggle With Titans, " I have been reading the various documents cited in "The Velikovsky Affair." One that particularly "struck" me was the article by Howard Margolis in the April 1964 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that your ably dissected in the October 1964 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist. What came as an even greater surprise, however was the article written by Margolis about fluoridation in the June 1964 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. By failing to take note of published reports of toxic effects from fluoridated drinking water, he constructs a very favorable case for fluoridation and makes his opponents appear to have no scientific grounds on which to oppose it! Since you were able to show that Margolis is not a good philologist, I thought it might be worth pointing out that he also has not read the fluoridation literature very thoroughly. The major documents he cited to support his view are guilty of omission just as he is. The one that was prepared in 1955-1956 is hardly relevant to "current" findings, while the "Select" bibliography is no more that a compilation of proponent research, with virtually no mention of contrary results reported by others, especially in relation to clinical findings. I realize your interests lie primarily in the area of the "sociological" aspects of a subject like fluoridation, but the strong scientific evidence against fluoridation has been kept so heavily suppressed that there is a close parallel to "The Velikovsky Affair." Our own local public library, I might add, has refused to accept or acquire a copy of "A Struggle with Titans" on the grounds that the standard reviewing media have ignored it -- just as they are ignoring "The Velikovsky Affair"! Sincerely yours, Albert W. Burgstahler Professor, of Chemistry The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas June 2, 1964 Dr. Alfred de Grazia The American Behavioral Scientist 80 East 11th Street New York 3, New York Dear Dr. de Grazia: I am sorry to see that you have gotten mixed up in the Velikovsky case. Velikovsky was a charlatan. There is just no doubt about it at all. It is not true that outstanding astronomers would not welcome a truly original man with constructive ideas. We would put him on the staff of the University of California San Diego. I do think that you should try to withdraw from this controversy as gracefully as possible and not continue it. I assure you that every physical scientist of my acquaintance will rise to defend the Bulletin against anything you do. I am terribly concerned at present about the lack of control in scientific publication. Science had always been aristocratic. Not everyone could get his ideas published in effective journals. Articles to the scientific magazines have been carefully edited, and unless they conformed to reasonable scientific standards they were refused. Today anyone can publish anything. In the first place, very second-rate scientists can get jobs somewhere --with industrial companies, government agencies, the space program, etc. They all have their private printing press in the back room, namely a reproduction device, As a result, papers of all sorts are sent out. Also there are new journals springing up with no decent editorial control whatever. The result is an enormous amount of confusion. In fact, as I have stated and I now repeat, there is often so much noise that one cannot hear the signals. With best regards, Very sincerely, Harold C. Urey Deg's Journal, June 29, 1964 ... Velikovsky had palpitations last week. For several days his pulse was irregular. He has gone into a three day period of rest and is taking a little tranquilization by drugs. He has been traveling too much and spending too much time trying to direct strategy in his scientific defense. A letter I received from Harold Urey depressed him greatly. Identifying as he does with authority, V. is hurt when a Noble Prize winner for chemistry refers to him as a charlatan. What can he be expecting? I have not been able to educate him to the sociology and political science of science. He believes in rationalism and that other experts only by odd mistake "because they haven't read his works," treat him so contemptuously and with hostility. V. wrote what he thought should be my reply. (Sometimes his presumption becomes arrogant.) It was a strange letter, full of pathos and humble remonstrance. I could not and would not use it. It is an interesting document about V. himself. It would do him no good even if I were to use it. Yet he was deeply perturbed when I informed him I was sending my own letter of reply. He claimed that his was a perfect letter, which he was proud of, and felt must be sent. It was then I learned of his palpitations. The thought occurred: the strangeness of this letter goes with a nervous disturbance. He desperately wanted me to send his letter; he mailed it by special delivery to New York where I was and phoned to press me about it. In a week or two, when his illness is passed, he may be secretly pleased that I went by own way. I spoke later to his wife. She seemed displeased with me too. She, too, will come around. She confirmed how "hurt" he was by the Urey letter. Urey is a --------! What better could come from him. His letter to me is a disgrace and I mean to call it that. July 8, 1964 Dr. Harold C. Urey School of Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego P. O. Box 109 La Jolla, California 92038 Dear Dr. Urey: Thank you for your letter of June 2. I appreciate your concern that I may "have gotten mixed up in the Velikovsky case." Since everyone whose attention is called to the case has gotten mixed up in it, in one way or another, I guess that I am in good company. Your second sentence is that "Velikovsky was a charlatan." He neither "was" nor is a charlatan. Resort to your nearest dictionary will satisfy you on that score. If you insist that you have not made a linguistic error, then you must give me one, just one, bit of evidence to support your allegation. Indeed, your next sentence is "There is just no doubt about it at all." Since you are a scientist and know the nature of proof, you must have a great many pieces of evidence, adding up to certainty. If you cannot cite such evidence, then you must apologize to Velikovsky, or you become yourself a charlatan and slanderer. Your may refuse this challenge. Very well. We do not usually carry substantive discussions of factual theory in the American Behavioral Scientist, but if you will honor us with one significant error of fact or logical contradiction in Velikovsky's works we will print it and let it go at that, for we are not concerned to solve the problems of physics and astronomy, or politics and economics in our pages. I know that you will have no trouble with this small matter; I could probably manage it myself; that Mr. Margolis could not succeed, nor some others who tried, does not prove that the works are flawless. Then you say, "It is not true that outstanding astronomers would not welcome a truly original man with constructive ideas." I am afraid, Dr. Urey, that you will be hard put, in the light of the history of science, to maintain this statement also, unless you would again resort to evasive semantics, defining the words "truly original" and "constructive" to suit your ends. Your saying that "we would put him on the staff of the University of California, San Diego" could be regarded as an idle threat if it were not for the well-known anxiety of certain California colleges to discover warm bodies wherever they may be. You thereupon urge me to withdraw from the controversy. Actually, I had done so; but the stupid brazenness of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' article brought to me a sharp realization that many of your kind simply will not learn. "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny:" every error of the scientific mind and spirit in the history of the Velikovsky case was by almost preternatural skill recomposed into a few columns of the Bulletin. This you ask me to swallow! The controversy will continue. You say the "every physical scientist of my acquaintance will rise to defend the Bulletin against anything you do." Perhaps you will not have as many acquaintances as you claim and they will not be willing to act as your troop if they, or at least several of them, were to read the pages of the American Behavioral Scientist and compare them with the article of the science correspondent of the Bulletin. (Isn't it interesting that the scientists' Bulletin should have to hire a non-scientist to write about science for them?) You have, it is clear, a rather horrifying vision of science. You gently threaten me, you promise to bring in your gang, and then you begin to reveal the utopia that occupies your mined. "I am terribly concerned at present about the lack of control in scientific publication," you write; "Science has always been aristocratic. Not everyone could get his ideas published in effective journals. Articles in the scientific magazines have been carefully edited, and unless they conformed to reasonable scientific standards they were refused. Today anyone can publish anything." I, too, Dr. Urey, am concerned about scientific publication. I am not, however, concerned about the lack of control by the scientific oligarchy, as you are, but by the lack of communications, the haphazard and chaotic situation that is caused as much as anything by a defective leadership in the sciences. Your kind of scientific aristocracy is precisely the reason why your subsequent claims are laughable: if there is any villainous theme in the history of science, it is the continuing attempt to deny a voice in the organs of science to iconoclasts, outsiders, and just plain kleine Menschen. You will be responsible for retarding the progress of science if you succeed in reestablishing the old system of information controls. You should turn your attention to organizing scientific information rather than to suppressing it. Similarly you should be pleased that more of our working population today are scientists, rather than coalminers or ditchdiggers. Indeed you seem to be angry with them for pretending to perform the same operations as are practiced by you happy few. "... Very second-rate scientists can get somewhere -- with industrial companies, government agencies, the space program, etc. They all have their private printing press in the back room..." Einstein with his patent-office job, Da Vinci doing his civil engineering, Freud setting up his own printing press, Darwin idling on his patrimony -- there certainly are a great number of these second-raters, without university chairs, not content to eat common fodder and let their intellectual ambitions expire peacefully! I am beginning to see your point. You would wish only first-rate scientists such as Howard Margolis, formerly a science writer for The Washington Star and now correspondent for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to have freedom of scientific expression. Your idea would be to have a kind of Empire such as Alice discovered in Wonderland where the knighthood of science is conferred by your power elite and the Sir Margolises can be sent out to harry any peasants who may have the temerity to poach upon the truth. Your conditions for peace are not acceptable, Dr. Urey. Our condition is that science be open and public, and remain so. If you wish to alter your conditions substantially we would be pleased to hear from you again. Meanwhile, with regards to your work on tektites, I remain Respectfully yours, Alfred de Grazia The special magazines given over to reporting and supporting V. 's doings have been Pens‚e, Kronos, and the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. Each of these has carried extensive materials on the preliminaries, proceedings and aftermath of the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention panel dealing with Velikovksy's ideas at San Francisco in February 1974. According to astronomy Professor Ivan King of the University of California at Berkeley, it was Carl Sagan who suggested the confrontation. It was intended that the panel be divided into supporters and opponents of V., but over a period of months, the pro- V. nominees were weeded out. This was suspicious, and I am inclined to cast suspicion on both sides. In the first place, both the establishment (for it can be called such also on these occasions when it puts on a face) and the heretics chose a deceptive yet revealing title: "Velikovsky's Challenge to Science." V. would never allow himself to be called a non-scientist; yet, to have his name in the limelight, he allowed himself to be juxtaposed to science. Simultaneously, the establishment (that is, the government ad rem in charge of the state of science), in order to isolate the heretic, allowed the personalization of the panel, in itself an abuse of the scientific method which addresses itself to ideas, not men. Might not a better title have been "The Validity and Prospects of Neo-catastrophism"? Then with eight papers, four on each side, the topics of the mechanics, the electromagnetics, the historical record, and the reception of neo-catastrophism in science could be taken up. Did V. want to appear without support on the stage, keeping the spotlight, whether for the hero or the martyr, upon himself, and therefore did he not fight hard enough to ensure himself that support? He ended up with two neutral parties, the opposition of a biased chairman, and three convinced antagonists eager for the fray. Surely there must have been some masochistic force at work in him, coupled with an extremely clever Machiavellism: a pro-Velikovsky paper would do nothing for V.'s image as a great scientific loner and martyr. If the one man who knew the Venus historical record best, Lynn Rose, had been present, he could have devastated, on the spot and forever after, the presentation made by Huber. It would have been ineradicable from the book that followed, entitled Scientists Confront Velikovsky. If Juergens had been forced into the panel by V. then Mulholland would have been finished off. If Deg had been invited, he would probably not have gone, but if he had, he might have effectively harried Sagan and Storer, considering what these two ended up by saying. Then V. would have been off and running. Instead, it was a gruesome exercise at V.'s cost, then and thereafter. He behaved magnificently, like Samson dragging down the temple of the Philistines upon himself. He won the crowd. The press, ignoring the crowd, and incapable of reading the papers, pronounced him dead. V. did not really go to San Francisco to have the crowd be with him. He went there to gain scientific recognition. Or did he get mixed up and rely upon the crowd, and hope for a victory against impossible odds while cultivating the fantasy of martyrdom ? The establishment -- and Professors King and Goldsmith, the official sponsors, found themselves irresistibly playing the roles of the establishment -- was quite pleased to let the panel develop into an over-kill of V. It could not even conceal its hope when explaining the public presentation of the symposium. King, who was the Chairman of the panel, explained privately that he was so anxious over the responsibility of presenting V. at a scientific forum that he had to persist in saying that the purpose of the symposium was to refute a set of ideas that science had proven absurd. Actually he said so publicly beforehand: What disturbs the scientists is the persistence of these views, in spite of all the efforts that scientists have spent on educating the public. It is in this context that the AAAS undertakes the Velikovsky symposium. Although the symposium necessarily includes a presentation of opposing views, we do not consider this to be the primary purpose of the symposium. None us in the scientific establishment believes that a debate about Velikovsky's views of the Star system would be remotely justified at a serious scientific meeting. Now I would like to quote the economist Shane Mage's booklet, Velikovsky and His Critics, because of its elegant conciseness. Besides, he was present at the occasion, and neither Deg nor I was there. What took place in San Francisco was... the beginning of a real debate, even if it often seemed to those of us in attendance like a donnybrook. Of the six invited panelists, one, Norman Storer (Prof. of Sociology, Baruch College of CUNY) disavowed competence in any aspect of the subject but nevertheless managed to conclude that the mistreatment of Velikovsky, though abstractly deplorable, was also an "understandable" response of the "scientific community" to a perceived "attack by right-wing forces in American society. Velikovsky himself presented a short paper outlining the basis of, and some of the evidence for, his Challenge to Conventional Views in Science, and often took the floor vehemently to rebut specific criticisms. His views on the importance of electrical forces in celestial mechanics also received strong support from Professor Irving Michelson (Mechanics, Illinois Institute of Technology), who described his paper Mechanics Bears Witness as "an act of objective scholarship," intended to be neither pro or anti-Velikovsky. The polemic against Velikovsky was conducted by two Professors of Astronomy (Carl Sagan, Cornell University, and J. Derral Mulholland, University of Texas) and one Professor of Mathematical Statistics (Peter Huber, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). Almost all the media coverage of the panel consisted of favorable citations of these three contributions, especially Sagan's very long essay entitled An Analysis of Worlds in Collision. In the absence of Sagan, who left before all papers had been read in order to attend a taping of "the Johnny Carson Show," a vigorous discussion, involving audience as well as the remaining panelists, continued for almost two hours after conclusion of the formal presentations. Both sides claimed victory. The logical next step was publication of the symposium proceedings, but of the panelists only Velikovsky was willing to permit publication of an integral transcript of the speeches and the floor discussion. Lengthy negotiations failed to arrive at a mutually agreeable format, and ultimately the two parties decided to publish separately. The anti-Velikovsky case was presented by Cornell University Press under the title Scientists Confront Velikovsky (hereafter referred to as S c. V). In addition to revised versions of the AAAS papers by Sagan, Mulholland, Huber, and Storer, this volume also includes a paper by Prof. David Morrison (Astronomy, University of Hawaii), prepared, in its original form, for a 1974 conference sponsored by the editors of Pens‚e . There is also an introduction by Dr. Donald Goldsmith, editor of S c. V and organizer of the AAAS panel, and a foreword by the novelist and authority on heresiology Isaac Asimov. From the proclaimed standpoint of "scientific orthodoxy" Asimov begins by raising the question "What does one do with a heretic?", with specific reference to Velikovsky; goes on, with unimpeachable orthodoxy, to write that Velikovsky's proposed physical explanation for catastrophic events recorded in the Bible is a "far less satisfactory hypothesis" than is "the hypothesis that divine intervention caused the miracles", and concludes that "Velikovskians" are totally impervious to any amount of "mere logic." (S c. V, pp. 8-15) He does not, however, recommend that they be turned over to the secular arm... The AAAS volume is presented by its sponsors as "a full scale critique" (Goldsmith, S c. V, p. 27) which, according to the review commissioned by the AAAS Journal Science, accomplishes a definitive refutation of Velikovsky's "downright preposterous" heresy. The essays in this book "utterly lay waste his theories." Sagan's paper "is amusing, acrid, and totally devastating... his essay alone is sufficient to reduce the Velikovsky theory to anile fancy," and "Velikovsky is flatly and totally disproven... As far as Velikovskianism is concerned it is dead and buried. The final nail has been driven." (Science, v. l99, Jan. 20, 1978, pp. 288-9) Was this appraisal accurate? Referring to the trial by press, yes. V. was further damaged in the eyes of scientists everywhere. Speaking of substance, whether of the symposium or of the papers, it was not true. The arguments of Sagan, Mulholland, and Morrison were mostly well- known and those of Huber (the surprise amateur of ancient Babylonian tablets) had been long ago considered by Stecchini and Rose. Additions and revisions allowed to the writers did little to bolster their defenses when it came time to publish the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky. An early analysis of the enemy dispositions appeared in Pens‚e ; then, in two issues of Kronos (III2 and IV3), and in pieces appearing elsewhere, supporters of V., forced to waylay the establishment speakers in the alleyways, stripped them of their arguments. The Cornell University Press, a willing captive of circumstances, which might have published a fascinating, meaty volume on the issues, published one poor lopsided volume, and sold paperback rights to W. W. Norton Company. The heretics remained in the alleyways. Scarcely any reviews (except those of the heretics) put the opposing volumes side by side and compared them judiciously, or even savagely. I shall not go into the several dozen points of contention here, and will take Deg's word for it that the substance of the full arguments did more good than harm for a considerable range of quantavolutionary hypotheses, including some precisely attributable to V. Shane Mage, in appraising the speeches against V., uncovered in them several important concessions that had been apparently achieved over the years. First, the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky "disavows and repudiated the entire 'Scientific polemic' of the 1950's and 60's both implicitly and explicitly." Next, both the sponsor, Goldsmith, and Mulholland assert that V. 's ideas and arguments are not "un" nor "anti"-scientific, whatever the press and then the scientific community presumed to draw from the event. Furthermore, the legitimacy of cosmic catastrophic hypotheses in science was acknowledged both by Sagan and Mulholland, but the specific hypotheses of V. were attacked (and obviously the scientists are in confusion as to how they can work historically and empirically with the hypotheses that they admit.) In line with my earlier suggestion, a different and more proper title would have brought these most important areas of agreement to the fore. If these would have been the subjects of the panel, and if Velikovsky had been only one out of eight panel members and authors, four of whom would have adopted positive positions and four adversary positions, then the world of science would have been much impressed and enlightened, and the heretics might have surrendered their weapons with honor. V. himself would have acquired many scientific allies and be better received from then on in discussions among scientists; hundreds of hours of anxious and resentful negotiations and dispute would have been avoided; and many fresh minds might have been inspired to enter the newly opened field of quantavolution. The AAAS affair was a great opportunity lost to quantavolution by V. and the establishment agents. Deg disliked the word "heretic." I mentioned so earlier. Perhaps I should have renamed this book. To him the word was un-American. It was one more useless nuisance for indulging V. 's self-image. True, the dictionaries include it with its modern meaning, "one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine of any kind," but in a modern democracy, he said, the occasions for heresy are innumerable, while, without severe sanctions, the hysterical historical pitch of the word is absent. Whereas V. called himself a heretic both in respect to religion and to science, he chose to stress science as the offending authority. In his day, in Western Europe and America, the idea of heresy hardly held meaning for the larger society, although it could be effective in the ambiance of, say, Catholicism or Presbyterianism; even here one had to lay claim to authority heretically within the group itself. V. was determined to be a heretic from within science but to do so one had to be a scientist in the first place, and one of the childish games played between the scientists and V. had to do with whether he was indeed a scientist and therefore properly within science's jurisdiction to be adjudged heretical. Logically, we are back with Alice in Wonderland and not the least of the skits form never-never land was the massive attack upon V. launched in the name of science and culminating in the book, Scientists Confront Velikovsky. Here, from the beginning, the scientists promoting the event at the AAAS meeting in San Francisco, were befuddled. Yes, they felt, they had to defrock V., but to do so they had to frock him and admit him to their canonical court. But to admit him they had to claim jurisdiction over him; that is, they had to legitimize him by allowing him to debate his ideas with them. One can perceive this strain and stress clearly from beginning to end of the touted confrontation over a period of years. The promoters, King et al., would say, we are not meeting to discuss V. but only to make it clear that he is not speaking as a scientist. And then, of course, they proceed by the only modern way science knows, to refute him as a scientist in public argument. When the time came to publish Scientists Confront Velikovsky the establishment, operating by queer contradiction, obtained the good services of author, Isaac Asimov, the most famous popularizer of science and science fiction to introduce the work, admitting ipso facto that its contents alone would not fulfill the contract put out on V. Then what does Asimov do but fall into the pit of scholasticism by spending his precious few pages as an instant expert on heresy. He accepts the fractured word and further mangles it. He concocts and improperly applies a distinction between two kinds of heretics, those who commit heresies from inside the system and those who do so from the outside. The first type can be sometimes correct, the second never. V. was the never-correct type. Says Asimov, "Public support or no, the exoheretic virtually never proves to be right. (How can he be right when he, quite literally, doesn't know what he is talking about?)" Lest he be pilloried for such bold statements, Asimov has insured himself by the most vulgar kind of verbal trickery: he makes insiders out of outsiders if they have "reached the peak of professional excellence" whatever that is. So naturally -- once again he says it -- "the exoheretic... is virtually never right, and the history of science contains no great advance, to my knowledge, initiated by an exoheretic." There is no arguing with such foolishness. The foolishness, I must add, is compounded by self-contradiction, for is not Asimov's gun hired to introduce this book because he has a large public that buys books? So here is Asimov, the outsider, depending upon the public which, he says, is always wrong, to follow him in his denunciation of heresy. But matters become worse for Isaac Asimov. He says that the scientific establishment (calling it the "scientific orthodoxy") is "completely helpless if the heretic is not a professional scientist -- if he does not depend on grants or appointments, and if he places his views before the world through some medium other than the learned journal." That is, the establishment can withhold grants, appointments, and publication from its own heretical members, but cannot from "exoheretics" or outsiders. That leaves the public as the only outlet for the exoheretic's views, but Asimov says that the public is never right: "the appeal to the public is, of course, valueless form the scientific standpoint." He does not seem to realize that he is condemning himself and science, for he seems to approve this situation while granting that in rare instances an inside heretic is incorrectly punished. I cannot easily believe that the two publishers (Cornell University and W. W. Norton) and the several authors, especially not the clever Carl Sagan -- but how can one watch out for everyone's business? -- did not read carefully the few passages that prefaced their great act. In the years of which we speak, Deg had a part to play in the establishment and it was not a bad life. He turned up in Washington form time to time. He lunched with his friend "Kirk" Kirkpatrick, Executive Director of the Political Science Association, where he was for a time a Council Member, or at the Senate or the Cosmos Club with friends; Bill Baroody was funding some of his writings from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Earl Voss and Tom Johnson there were pleasant companions; it was a smallish show, then, close to the Republican Presidents and Conservative after his direct relations with it ceased. Deg knew a number of Congressmen. He had access to the U. S. Office of Education when Frank Keppel of the Harvard Graduate School of Education had gone to run it, for he had worked with Keppel at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and had been offered appointment there. He consulted with the Department of Defense when "winning the hearts and minds" of Vietnamese was top priority, and went to Vietnam on a panel requested by General Westmoreland, then Commander-in-chief. He had acquaintances who were in the top echelons of half a dozen great companies, and half a dozen of the large foundations, others who were millionaires, UN ambassadors and bureaucrats, New York politicians, and so on. He helped leaders like Nelson Rockefeller on occasion (without compensation). He went as a delegate to UNESCO. He helped the Publisher of Life magazine to help the American Jewish Committee to establish better relations with the Vatican, and was shoved by a wily Spanish Priest for a moment into the ample arms of dear old wobbly-eared reformer, Pope John XXIII. The New York University President, James Hester, also from Princeton, was as friendly as he could be to a faculty troublemaker. The departmental faculty itself was to Deg's ways of thinking too petty, unintellectual and anarchic to launch upon large schemes, and moreover his giant University was always in a state of imminent financial collapse. After his first year there, he had to bring in practically all of the funding for his projects from foundations and gifts, which is no so difficult when one is in the swim of things. His middle-level university income from his tenured appointment was supplemented by consulting fees, honoraria, and grants. He spent all the money that he could spare on his American Behavioral Scientist, which was felt to have a good influence on social science research, and gave him editorial influence, whether critical, or to help friends, or to assist students and up-and-coming scholars to get ahead. Publishers were easy to come by. Advances were generous for textbooks, subsidies for the others. Complimentary books flooded his library. He could stop at practically any university in the world and be invited to lecture, dine, discuss. He traveled abroad often, always with jobs to do, always funded at least in part by some agency (never The Agency) or foundation. To hear him tell the story, he could have gone on and on this way with la dolce vita, spreading his wings of influence over more and more people, things and activities. He could have dawdled more with attractive women, driven a new car, worn new suits, written books with ex-Presidents, etc. Why this was actually his way, his route, his fate, could have been foretold in childhood. I doubt that he fully realized it. But perhaps enough of the reasons become evident in the pages of this book to preserve us from going back to the "Roaring Twenties" of Chicago, Ill., U. S. A. There seems little reason to doubt Deg, however, when he cites his friend Ithiel de Sola Pool's analysis of networks. By a calculus of probability, given an unstructured society, the chances of any person knowing a person who knows another person who knows any other particular singled-out person in the society are very high. Theoretically, given the relatively sharply structured society everywhere, he could be introduced to anyone, even in the worldwide society. Deg, in his old notes on Pool's manuscript, figures that he practically needs know only his own widely differentiated acquaintances to know anybody in the top elite, and needs but jump one more acquaintanceship to meet just about anybody else. He even made a parlor game out of his directory, and proceeding to say who whom he knew would know this person. This occurs because a person who knows 2000 people is in a position to know the, say, 500 acquaintances each, of these, and this million, with its 500 acquaintances each, exceeds that population by far, but since the population is stratified, the number falls short of total success until the chain is extended. There are applications of network theory to the workings of science. Conventional science, we know, is not a juggernaut, a palpable monster, a solid phalanx, a disciplined corps of bureaucrats, a theocracy, or even an organized political party. It is --it must be, in order to avoid its own contradiction -- a subtle, diffuse, often impenetrable, often disguised, often unconsciously composed network of relationships. Marxist scholars would readily comprehend this fact and would tie the whole network to the economic production mechanisms of the capitalist system. The Chicago School of political science would see in it promptly the manifestations of Mosca's "political formula and ruling class" and Deg's "ideological imperative." Discriminated against indifferently in American Society, evangelical Christians such as many Baptists, represented in a growing movement of "Creation Science," but usually acting individually for their nooks and crannies in the system, would also be characteristically alert to the operation of the scientific reception system. So would the large number of individual American and British heretics who compose a disinherited, not formally qualified, keen and occupationally and characterologically diverse "watch and ward" network, ready to suspect the worst of the establishment. Resembling these latter would be many a disenchanted student, not yet amalgamated into the conventional system. All of these together, plus the simply curious, might readily muster the kind of crowd that assembled to witness the Velikovsky panel convoked by the program committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco. The audience, well over one thousand persons, was by far the largest of the Convention. Let me now explain how it happens that the scientific network, or establishment, might in this case, as it has often done in the history of science, be acting against its own presumed interests and hence to repress new correct theories. How does the ruling formula of science triumph over challenging ideas, making them heretical, and chastising their proponents? Every field of knowledge is nowadays organized. It has therefore leaders. Some of these leaders are parochial. Others have connections with relevant social networks and organizations of the other fields and other segments of society. These leaders acquire fame (which already represents the same circular system of the generation past, advancing for instance a Menzel, who inherits for a Harlow Shapley, or a de Grazia, who inherits from a Charles Merriam.) The mass media, though it hardly reports science, seeks out or gives access to fame. Reporters, woefully unprepared, interview the leaders. Educational media, including widespread fund- seeking alumni magazines, turn to their exemplaries of the famous. The occasional television, radio, and magazine concerns about the knowledge industry result in reports that are favorable to the same group. Foundations appoint from the same leaders to their boards of trustees and consulting committees. So do scientific and political government agencies, although other interests can intrude more here. The leaders, and now we are speaking of some five thousand persons, give awards disproportionately to each other, as do generals and admirals. Government foundations, such as the National Science Foundation, are even more susceptible to network influence than private foundations. In the area of book publishing, the ideas of the leaders largely determine what manuscripts shall be published as textbooks, and on what kinds of books the university presses should spend their small resources. Trade book publishers for the general public have almost no viable interest in serious scientific or humanistic work. Usually what they publish in these areas is meant to blossom quickly and die, to challenge no strong interest, and certainly not to offer alternatives to major scientific paradigms unless they would join the ranks of somewhat disreputable and financially insecure publishers. Thus, if Velikovsky had published with Lyle Stuart's firm instead of the Macmillan company originally, the opposition would never have gathered. They had to have as their target a press that would seek to avoid censure for "conduct unbecoming a gentleman." The scientific and professional magazines that report new knowledge are governed by boards and editors, who are acceptable to the leaders and are watched rather carefully by them. Fading away from the specialized periodicals are magazines of popular science, few of which are financially secure and all of which are dependent upon the good will of the leaders. The Scientific American, for example, would never wittingly go beyond the activities of the core elements of a science. When a troublesome or controversial theory surfaces on its pages, evidencing a conflict between two leader-led theories, it seeks to appease both sides by a second article or letters of comment. Its need to seem "original" is fed by lavish illustrations, a feature it shares with the National Geographic Magazine, the Smithsonian, Discovery and other periodicals. By editorial tricks, all such magazines lend their materials a glamour and adventurism that they usually do not in reality possess. The network of leaders extends down through the public secondary and elementary schools from the colleges by way of lesser sheikhs, supervising boards, and hoi polloi of the fields. Not even the threat of teaching "creation science" in some state will excite overly the nabobs. The legal and journalistic techniques of handling anti-Darwinism have long been known, and a legion of educators moves efficiently into battle on this front with little direct participation of the national leadership. Private secular schools -- the Lawrenceville Academies and Grotons -- would never wish their pupils to utter the wrong titles or theories in anticipation of entering the halls of learning hallowed by the leadership. The Catholic schools are deintellectualized; nor has the Catholic Church yet retracted its judgment against Galileo. A word, finally, about the corporate world, where so much applied and some pure research is done, from which, too, funds must flow increasingly into the coffers of the universities. Their corporate images, hence their profits, depend upon the skills people come to believe (via advertising and public relations) that they command and engross. Like university presidents, leaders of science dip into corporate treasuries on occasion as consultants, board members, and officers. Just as retired generals are common in the aerospace and engineering industries, highly placed scientists, even without the need to retire, are frequently positioned in corporate research structures. Immersed in this and in all that has gone before, a leader of the establishment network has almost no incentive to take up a new controversial theory, much less to originate one himself. He is himself subject to disciplinary actions, often quite subtle, should he stray from the fold. The network can be most simply presented as a list of institutions through which the leaders of science operate or upon which they exert influence. The influence is continuous, is intensified on crucial issues and, in my opinion, is generally beneficial and should be enhanced throughout the system. Meanwhile, however, the influence needs consciousness-raising and built-in mechanisms of reform. LEADERS OF SCIENCE extend their influence into: 1. Audio-Visual Media (fame; reportage) a. TV and radio Networks b. Public Broadcasting c. Documentary films 2. Popular Press a. Scientoid Magazines b. Science Fiction c. Publicity (columnists) d. Newspaper and newsmagazines, prizes, etc. 3. Book Publishing a. Trade b. Textbooks c. University Press 4. Scientific Journals 5. Universities a. Secular Schools b. Religious Schools 6. Scientific Associations 7. Foundations (private) 8. Governments a. Executive offices, commissions b. Legislatures c. Government Foundations, Prizes, etc. 9. Corporations a. Research and consultation b. Board of Directors The leaders of science in the English-speaking world can be numbered from 50 to 10,000, depending upon where you wish to draw the line of influence. They are fairly concentrated geographically in the Northeast Megalopolis, Chicago, Washington, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with a small English contingent, fairly closely in touch. An extraordinary fact is that immense scattered network ultimately engaging the whole world is composed of what in business or government would be regarded as absurdly small units. They are like the oldtime Piggly-Wiggly small grocery store, owner-operated network, not fully centralized, bureaucratic establishment. Furthermore, it is largely subconscious or scarcely perceived. Nevertheless, in the end -- and merely to picture the network -- the librarian in Juneau, Alaska, the student at the University of Tampa (Florida), the editors of the Times Literary Supplement, CBS, PBS, NOF, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University Press, the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, the engineers of Western Electric, the science section of the New York Times, the editors of Science Magazine and its popular offshoot Science 84, the National Academy of Sciences, the curators of the Museum of Natural History in New York, and many thousands of other "nerve endings" of the science system of communications and influence respond to cues and jiggles of power from the elite group. Surely, it is one of the most benign elites of the world. It probably rules easier and can rule less than almost all other elites. Its punishments are relatively light. It stupefies people but all forms of rule stupefy their clients or subjects; here, indeed, the science elite is more enlightening, in its double function of stupefying and enlightening, in its S/ E ratio, than most elite or influence networks. But its exists, and it is effective. To evade or avoid or attack the Scientific Establishment, to invade its inner sanctum and transform its Holy of Holes, its ideological center, its paradigms, Weltanschauung, ruling formulas, or whatever one might wish to call its heart, is the work of decades and, at least before, of centuries, and, in the words of Lasswell, almost always involves the process of "partial incorporation," by which is meant that before the revolution is won, the elite changes its behavior to concede the victory and keep out the revolutionary personnel. Thus the monarchical regimes of Europe incorporated in most cases the key ideas of the French Revolution before the republican revolutionaries conquered them, and the capitalist regimes went "welfare state" before the socialists could take power; so that, if the quantavolutionary movement were to seriously threaten the ruling elite of Newtonian stabilitarian and Darwinian gradualist uniformitarians, these would be reacting, as in fact they are acting now, to incorporate the quantavolutionary formulas and outlook. Meanwhile the quantavolutionary movement would be formed out of mistakes of the existing regime, out of apostates and disaffected scientists and engineers, occult publishers, little presses, small personal foundations, religious creations, maverick legislators, fugitive publications sliding out of Xerox machines, and a motley public crowd of dissenting readers and talkers. Sooner or later, according to Roberto Michel's "Iron Law of Oligarchy." the Scientific Establishment would be modified in attitude, beliefs, practices and personnel but would still be the oligarchy, or, let us say, "a better and more enlightened class of leaders." {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 4: } {Q - } {C Chapter 14: } {T THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS For his first half-dozen years on Naxos, Deg stayed in a town apartment the Venetians had built in the 13th Century; then he moved out to his stone house on the isolated promontory of Stylida. In these places, much of the Quantavolution series was written. Deg's permanent encampment at Stylida was of marbled stone and primitively equipped, not a cabin, neither a villa. Antiques jostled useful junk on the marble tables and shelves. He pounded nails into the walls and from them everything dangled. Empty plastic bags were stuffed behind shelves for further use, empty bottles were hoarded. String, cord and rope in odd lengths were saved and hung up. From this frugal perch sloping upwards, he contemplated the serene seascape before him and the battling cats of the world beyond, not excepting the heretics. Saving rope reminded him of Frank Knight, exemplar of the laissez-faire Chicago School of Economics who, in his office at the University of Chicago used to store the string he too saved. According to an eyewitness, he was mounting a train for the East one day when he called out to his waving family, pointing, "There, get that piece of string!" His highly regarded economics, thought Deg, were nicely encompassable by Homo Schizo theory. Knight's colleague, the very liberal U. S. Senator Paul Douglas was dining in Manhattan, another time with Robert Merriam, Assistant to President Eisenhower, and with Deg, and Douglas told of a Republican Senator who had ridiculed the incessant internecine fighting among the Democrats; "like a bunch of alley-cats" they were. Whereupon Paul had risen to add, "That may be true, but what in the end is the result -- many more cats!" And while they were laughing, the waiter handed the distinguished-looking elderly gentleman the bill and they had to laugh more as the Scot, Quaker, economist, and statesman, and foe of loose spending, winced, grumbled, and paid. The cosmic heretics, bereft of resources, collected pieces of string to build bold systems Coming out of nowhere, and without structure or discipline, they fought like alley-cats. Rebuffed by the world of the press and science, they often became morose. Deg's Journal, January 25, 1970 I spoke to Immanual on the telephone. He is feeling poorly and he intimates both a throat ailment and sinister external moves as the source. We are all suffering vague symptoms in the world. For months, I have felt this and the pain and scarcely know to what to attribute them? There are thirty physical and psychical causes all intermingled and the physical uneasiness is appropriately vague. So many millions in the world are, I think, similarly affected. It is as if the germs of diseases were directed by a mastermind, who says to them, "Now man has learned to be specific and special in his therapies, so you must now be as vague as possible, so that he will not know what he is suffering from." Deg might as well have gone on to talk of the generalized "germ" of schizotypus, which suffuses human nature and finds a great many ways of emerging in disease, now specific, now general. It may be no coincidence that in this decade two reciprocal kinds of slogan clashed with each other in the mind of society, the one aimed at pandemic expressing of paranoia, the other at fighting off paranoia, so that everyone was "unavailable" and "by appointment only," and "fill out the form" while people were telling one another "reach out and touch someone." Highly special acts of terrorism increased around the world as highly general public opinion surveys showed the public to be regarding every group of leaders and every special group as untrustworthy, including their own national and world leaders. "The most despicable of all ways of suppression is denying to me the originality and correctness of my predictions." So said Velikovsky at a philosophical panel at Notre Dame on November 2, 1974. He was directing himself at the moment to Professor Michael Friedlander. Friedlander had announced, "One of the things I'm not going to do is to attempt to defend the foolish, and intemperate, and venomous statements that have been made by scientists over the last 25 years." He proceeded then to incite Velikovsky's outburst (which one might also call "foolish, intemperate, and venomous") by addressing himself to V. 's astronomical scenario of the Venus encounter with Earth. To be useful a prediction must be derivable logically and unambiguously from the model. If the prediction bears only a tenuous relation to the model, then the validation of that prediction may in fact say nothing about the model. In rebuttal, V. pointed to the details of his own early claims: that Venus was incandescent in historical times; that the planet had to be very hot to carry the gaseous hydrocarbon clouds that he believed to be there; and that he had declared the first announced temperatures of 600 degrees to have been too low, and in fact they were. What constitutes a prediction gives grounds for incessant quarreling and namecalling. Deg was convinced that scores of his own prognostications in sociology, economics, and politics could be culled from his own books and shown to have been realized. For instance, he had predicted at one time that the achievement of equal population districts (" one man -- one vote"), so stoutly advocated by the cities of America, would result in heavier political weight for the cities' chief frustration, their own suburbs. He was not surprised nor did he put in a claim when the prediction was fulfilled. He never got around to predicating when the world would end, but, should it end, he could in the thereafter cite some highly probable estimates. I did not know when Velikovsky got onto the claims and predictions "kick." I am guessing that the famous letter by Bargmann and Motz got him going. It was the first nice thing ever said about him in a scientific journal. The letter was V.'s idea and he provided much of the contents. It asserted that V. had suggested radio noises were emanating from Jupiter and were discoverable; they were discovered serendipitously by Burke and Franklin over a year later. Further, in 1950, V. said that the surface of Venus must be very hot, and, sure enough, by 1961 the heat had been discovered by reliable instruments. Practically nothing was said of the method employed to arrive at these advance claims. But so guilty are scientists in the matter of "claims" and "priorities" that V. profited greatly from his cryptic and general utterances. And, no doubt, had he been guiding NASA research, these items would have been systematically uncovered. The practice of advancing priorities is childish and the idea of proving a general cosmogony by a race of claims is ludicrous. There can be no crucial test or event. Even if Venus were to slip its moorings and drift toward Earth tomorrow, the historical scenario would not be proven. If the cosmogony is accepted for working purposes, the prediction (or test) will have meaning; if the cosmogony is not accepted, the prediction cannot be stated. This is shown by the resilient way in which the great heat of Venus has been claimed as a greenhouse effect by Sagan and others. A member of the audience at the Notre-Dame panel made the most fitting remarks: Each side has constructed its own version of what would count as a crucial test, and has constructed its own judgment as to how that test has been passed or failed. This is a singularly sterile manner for resolving disputes.... As far as rational dispute is concerned, we have to begin by saying we might be wrong.... to say what would count against us in our own book. It would certainly be appropriate, within every scientific work and in a discussion of it, to confess its weakness, to argue its null-hypotheses. We are bound to do a poor job of attacking ourselves. And, of course, disputation may overburden issues to the harm of clear presentation of the theses. Nevertheless, Deg, in writing Chaos and Creation, was anxious enough about excessive positive argumentation to give over a chapter to the Devil's Advocate. In one sense, the cosmic heretics in the Velikovsky case were a conservative group, asking for law and order in science, demanding even that the letter of the law be followed, all the more because their substantive ideas -- erratic planets, forceful electricity in space, short geological time, etc.-- were deemed untrue. In fact, like the typical heretical group in politics or religion, they had logically to deny that the word "heretic" could apply to themselves; for theirs was the truth. To those who like myself believe that science enjoys only hypothetical and useful "truths," a scientific heresy is logically impossible. Heresy is an excrescence of authorities. Heretics typically are intolerant of other heretics, if only to hold together their highly vulnerable and unruly group within a miasma of ideas. We find a push-pull phenomenon occurring: the heretics are pushed out of conventional science and attract or pull in the religious, the occult, of ESP, "Ancient Astronauts," UFO's and astrology, the eccentric, and the revolutionary types. All of his provides a hustle and bustle on the fringes of science. All scientists are normally neurotic about their fringes. Only the wisest (read "self-aware and self-knowing") and self-loving of them could understand and sympathize with what they saw going on. Onetime, in the fall of 1976, far from the scene of action, Deg heard distant sounds of strife and the name called out of his old friend, Professor Paul Kurtz, a pragmatist philosopher and Editor of the Humanist magazine. Besides many pleasant hours working together, Deg remembered how Kurtz had let him introduce a scatological remark into an article of this well-mannered publication. He wrote Kurtz a tender of good offices, suggesting attention ought to be given to neo-catastrophism, and sending a privately printed essay on Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis. Kurtz replied (in confidence, for he was a careful keeper of the peace) explaining that the fracas had generated out of a single sentence against Velikovsky in an article by Sprague de Camp, a detested figure among Velikovsky's cult. Kurtz said that even if he had wished to do so, he could not censor de Camp. He was startled by the vehement and even menacing letters that he received arising first from publishing the De Camp article and then from a possibly garbled quotation of him in the Washington Post. At the same time, Kurtz acknowledges, "The followers of Velikovsky claim that he was unfairly treated by Shapley, etc. -- with which I fully agree, I remember full well your justifiable concern." He was, he said, open-minded, aware of general disbelief in V.'s theories, but not conversant with them, or with Deg's for that matter, and he wanted to know Deg's theory of evolution: "Your thesis is most creatively provocative. My major question is what does it do to the theory of evolution?" Deg told V. of Kurtz's letter, V. spoke to Greenberg, and Greenberg fired off a letter to Deg, wondering how he had come to be in touch with Kurtz, and retelling the story as he saw it: "Kurtz may be your friend, but we are certainly not enemies." Deg could only wonder once more at how Greenberg could turn any situation into a personal threat and from this into an aggression. The Humanist did publish an article by V., defending himself strongly against the then current voices of his opponents. Possibly the pressure of anger unjustified impelled The Humanist to give V. his say; after all, isn't the lesson of democratic politics that a group needs anger, not justice, to make its point? V. was lucky enough to have a few opponents who made a hobby of him. They kept an eye on the news about him and cast enough aspersions his way to maintain his more diligent supporters in fine fettle. In keeping with the history of ostracized movements, nearly all of the heretics worked part-time at the job. Most were poor, although they did not reveal their poverty like oldentimes Parisian bohemians. They were, too, mostly unreliable, partly because of their busyness and hand-to-mouth existence, and because they were not under the lash of the dollar, but also because they were often afflicted with intense inner struggles. I would quote Nietzsche regarding them, "It takes a chaos within oneself to give birth to a shooting star." "That's it, they're crazy," one might say, which is a fraudulent pretense of those who are crazy-normals. Astronomy professor George O. Abell of U. C. L. A. writing in the Skeptical Inquirer says that the followers of V. " are actually following somebody who may be a bit crazy. For isn't there something psychotic about a person who claims that he alone in a field with which he is unfamiliar, can fathom the pure truth, while hundreds of thousands of specialists with lifetimes of experience behind them are muddling about in the darkness? And doesn't the popular acceptance of such a scientific-religious hero suggest a problem, or at least some kind of an unfilled need, on the part of the follower?" Deg's Journal, Princeton, December 27, 1978 Warner Sizemore here yesterday, 10.45-1.30, discussing many affairs. He reported that not only Greenberg and others were angry at the SIS magazine group in England but that Velikovsky was upset because of their caviling at points and their undermining his theories instead of developing them. Further V. ordered Sizemore and Greenberg to drop Peter James as Senior Editor from the editorial board of Kronos in three months, or else he would give them no further material of his own to print. James is associate editor for the historical content of SISR and also on the Kronos board. Then, says Sizemore, V. reconsidered and told them that he didn't mean what he said. Sizemore did not guess whether this was a conclusion of principle or of expedience. (There are several reasons for expedience: the scandal, the harm to Sizemore and Greenberg, as well as Kronos, etc.) In the later case V. would remain guilty of the very behavior of scientist upon which his own case of persecution is based in part. If his retraction of his order was in principle, then the action may be partially excused because it was withdrawn. It is not the first time that V. has come perilously close to practicing the behavior of his enemies. He is by character domineering, and suppression of the opposition would come easily to him under other circumstances. V. had been called a charlatan but there was nothing to it. Deg asked himself, how could anyone use the word? And that they used it as others use curses and obscenities. At most, on occasion and like most men, he believed suspiciously hard in ideas that were not so firm, but none, thought Deg, in this sense had never written a thoroughly honest book and none ever could, by the very limits of language, for language is fundamentally a compendium of psychic tricks, played upon oneself and others, fraudulent in a sense. But now, I think, reflecting upon the heretics, that fraud is a remote cousin of pretension. To lay claim to something is a human necessity. Yet whoever has any claims must be a fraud. To say "I am alive!" is a pretense and a fraud, a boastful claim to what after all is a delusion about nature, a question begged. We are all such frauds. There is something else, too, another kind of subtle fraud, a fraud in the too delicate sense of being wronged, and this V. had. One who feels that he had been defrauded is a fraud, as, for instance, in criminology, many victims of fraud are engaged in attempted fraud to begin with, making money out of nothing, etc.... And then, persuading others that one has been defrauded, is also a fraud. At such persuasive tactics, V. was a master. He could persuade by overpowering belief and documentation that he had been defrauded on a grand scale. He could persuade the most pathetically defrauded people that he had been defrauded more than they, and the defrauded turned their purses of energy and sympathy over to him. For he had converted his defrauding into the collective conscience, and was collecting retribution and returns on his defrauding because his supporters neglected their own suits in order to pursue his suit but received no more than abstract justice. It was as if all the gas company's customers thought they were cheated and put all their energies into the case of one them, making the case a landmark, but the favorable decision on behalf of the test case resulted only in the vindication and compensation of that person, while the rest could not afford to sue, and the gas company hardly changed its practices. Now the time had come for Deg to print Chaos and Creation. It was 1980. An outsider, innocent of the sociology of heretical groups, would expect the publication of Chaos and Creation to be welcomed. The field would open up further. Fresh material would offer itself for discussion. The implications of the work of V. would be extended. New possibilities would be manifest. There might even be some personal congratulations in order, for no one had yet produced any considerable work in the format of a book that could be readily assimilated to most of what the readers of Kronos were versed in and attentive to. Not at all. When the book was in page proofs, it induced the dormant strain in relations between the directors of Kronos and Deg to rupture into hostilities. The occasion for the hostilities came, as if often does in human relations, whether personal or international, out of a situation promising well. Executive Editor of Kronos Sizemore and Deg were meeting weekly out of friendship. They ate, drank, walked and talked together for hours on end. Sizemore was enthusiastic about Deg's manuscript of Moses, and had also been reading Chaos and Creation as the proofs arrived from India. At the time, Deg and Aim had largely abandoned Manhattan and were living in a tiny apartment in Princeton, writing their books, and spending as little money as possible in order to pay for the production of Chaos and Creation in Bombay. When Warner came to visit, they would huddle their sizable frames together amicably amidst piles of books and papers for a while, until Ami would retreat to the second room to write upon the kitchen table between the sink and the small bed. The Indian production was nightmarish. A thick file of correspondence attests to the pains engendered by cultural and physical distance. A perfect book was out of question. The work was being set in hot type, linotype, which, unlike the word processors of today, lets new errors creep in as rapidly as old mistakes are expunged. For weeks a strike of Indian paper mills stopped supplies to the printer. The quality of the paper, never good, worried Deg, too. The poor Indians were trying to conserve their old machines and paper and ink and Deg could not tell from the proofs whether fonts were broken or the paper was refusing the bad ink, and, worse, whether the final printing impression would be uniform on the pages. The book was loaded with proper names of extreme diversity, with illustrations, and with hundreds of citations, three most common sources of typographical, printing, and formatting mistakes. Deg had known the same printers from a decade before; they had printed Kalos: What is to be done with our World and Kalotics; he had been to their shop; he liked the several owners and workers. But it was a different world, of different standards, and to convert it acceptably to American tastes, while keeping costs down and work within hailing distance of the schedule, was continually frustrating. Warner, believing Deg would be pleased (and no doubt he would have been pleased) to see some portion of the work printed, sent (without Deg's knowledge) a photocopy of the page proofs to Greenberg, then in Florida, and spoke to Greenberg about the progress of the work in the course of their frequent telephone conversations. Greenberg was enraged by errors still in the proofs, or so the issue was presented to Deg by Warner. Deg, already upset by the defects and by the report, asked Greenberg on the phone to be specific about the work being "full of errors." When the letter came, the little that was added to the mistakes transmitted by telephone was rushed off to India for correction. There were mistakes so slight as a compositor's misspelling of Greenberg's name in a footnote crediting him with contributions to quantavolution (his name being mistakenly mispelled by the compositor as "Queenberg," for instance, in itself sufficient cause for paranoiac fury), and a wrong middle initial for Earl R. Milton, who received 'Earl S. ', a complimentary psychological mistake tying him to a dear old professor of Deg, Earl S. Johnson, the same to whom The Divine Succession is dedicated. Writes Greenberg: After going through half of the text of Chaos and Creation, the Citations, and Bibliography, I have decided to enclose a sampling of pages that is symptomatic of the entire work. The kind of repair help that you need goes far beyond any gratis assistance that I could provide. I have already spent the better part of three days reading your book and no relief appears in sight. Typos abound, names are misspelled, publications are improperly cited and dated, many dates are questionable and just plain wrong, not to mention glaring omissions from the published literature. The catastrophic sequence proposed by Velikovsky has been rearranged (Mercuria precedes Jovia) and work by people such as Warlow has been uncritically accepted, etc., etc. He goes on to list various, mostly brief, articles, and certain contributors to Kronos that were not in Deg's bibliography (the longest and most complete that had ever appeared on catastrophism and Quantavolution), concluding "What you have done is downright insulting and I find it hard to believe that it wasn't deliberate." Deg replies on April 2 from Princeton: You agreed to telephone me collect, later on, and to recite your list of such findings into my tape-recorder. You knew that the need for any corrections was immediate. I kept the machine by my telephone for six days more and now here is your letter. Several additional typographical errors are indicated, two of which I wish I might change, along with the aforesaid. Otherwise your letter pullulates with grotesque exaggeration, unsupported allegations, hostility, and vanity. Dealing with paranoia makes one paranoid: could it be that you first promised and then decided not to offer corrections of the proofs because you want to be free to slander the book? Deg was surprised at the rapidity with which the situation deteriorated. Sizemore, father, organizer, producer, financier, executive editor and trouble-shooter for Kronos let Deg understand that a selection from the book would not be printed and that the book would not be reviewed. Deg scoffed at this: how could it not be reviewed? Whose magazine was it? It would be a mockery of the pretenses of Kronos magazine, both substantive and libertarian, to suppress its mention. Warner unhappily suggested that the book need not be reviewed in Kronos. Deg insisted that. Warner do something about the matter, to no avail. Their warm friendship abruptly froze. Many months later, the book arrives from India. A review copy was sent to Greenberg. Other copies were sold respondents from an announcement by way of the mails. One day in April of 1982, Deg received a letter from Stephen Franklin, whom he did not know. [I find that they exchanged letters many years before.] Dear Dr. DeGrazia: I wish to obtain a copy of your book Chaos and Creation. Please let me know whether I may obtain this directly from you, & if so how much, etc. If not, where? I am enclosing a copy of a letter I received from Kronos since I feel you may be interested in how they are handling requests for information about your book... Franklin was referring to a letter from Leroy Ellenberger, who had been promoted from a free- lance gadfly on V.'s opponents to Executive Secretary of Kronos. The letter was written on Kronos letterhead with a Glassboro State College address, and did not oblige Franklin's request for Deg's address. The letter follows: Dear Mr. Franklin: With respect to the book Chaos and Creation which is the subject of your March 25th inquiry, be advised that KRONOS has chosen, after examining it, not to be associated with its promotion or distribution. For your information, the book was published privately in India. Its author is in charge of its commercialization. As a reader of KRONOS, you are no doubt aware that we are not averse to presenting a critical approach to Velikovsky and that we will entertain responsible alternative, and even opposing, views. Given our interest in developing a Velikovsky-based catastrophist alternative to uniformitarianism, we would be more than anxious to inform our readers of new, fruitful sources of information. The book in question leaves too much to be desired to merit, in our opinion, serious attention. If your curiosity gets the better of you, so be it. CAVEAT EMPTOR. Deg called Franklin, received authorization to use his name when raising the issue, and with malice afterthought, sent a letter to the President of the College, reproaching him for letting the College be a party to damaging slander through people who were pretending to connected with the School. Official action and an apology were asked. Expectedly, there came no reply, but Sizemore was aggrieved by the step, calling it ridiculous and a charade. Meanwhile, Deg chose out of the "staff" of Kronos several individuals whom he knew personally. He wrote to ask them their attitude in regard to not reviewing his work. All replied sympathetically; still not one found the issue serious enough to deliver an ultimatum to Kronos, not Frederick Juenemann, not Cardona, not Lynn Rose. Rose aroused Deg's ire for postulating an enmity between Greenberg and Deg which did not exist, and evaded the issue of Ellenberger. (Deg liked ornery characters like Greenberg more than suave types like Rose.) He wished to hurl at Rose a statement in Kronos made by V. against Storer of the AAAS panel: "One who maintains 'neutrality' between a gross offender and the victim of the offense does not give an objective account of the realities; the account is biased in favor of the offender." Even Earl Milton who was so close a friend and collaborator did not take up a strong position. Irving Wolfe at University of Montreal replied that Chaos and Creation should be reviewed and said that he would tell Greenberg so. Greenberg held firm, something he was good at doing; some of the heat was turned against Ellenberger, as if his letter had been a willful rash act, and a decline in his fortunes began, partly accounting for his retirement to his original home base in St. Louis. But Deg regarded Ellenberger and even Sizemore as toys of Greenberg in this instance. Toys for what? For psychiatric play-therapy, he insisted. Many months later, as three of the "Staff" and friends including Deg sprawled about a sunny dock and swam in the August waters of Lake Kashagawigamog near Halliburton, Ontario, they talked of the affair and all seemed to agree (no vote being taken) that Lew Greenberg was acting the dog in the manger, that he acted so habitually, that Ellenberger was irresponsible, that the book should be reviewed, that Deg should cool down his reactor, and that Kronos would collapse if Greenberg resigned, as he frequently threatened to do. And if Kronos collapsed, where would its 2000 readers go, and where would its score of writers go to publish their articles? Dwardu Cordona, a writer and editor of hard opinion but essentially sweet character, asserted he would bring up the matter with Greenberg again. Deg was noncommittal. Later on, he did receive a letter of Cardona from Vancouver mentioning, inter alia, that he talked to Greenberg, who was still without remorse, and even still angry. The past could not be recaptured, despite the restoration of a distant relationship, and the major issue remained (the refusal to review Chaos and Creation). Sizemore sent a note of condolences when Deg's mother died and then another note apologizing for addressing the first note to "Albert" instead of "Alfred." Deg had not noticed the mistake or, more properly, had noticed it and thought nothing of it. Now he apprehended that the printers' errors, which misspelled Greenberg's name in one place, etc., and the personal slips that made Earl R. into Earl S., and so on, might be compared with changing the name of Alfred to Albert, this involving a close friend of many years. Poor Sizemore, thought Deg, caught up in an object lesson; I should have thrown the fit of rage he expected. Sizemore was at this time enormously busy. He had four major occupations, beginning with his professorship in philosophy and theology for one. Secondly, he was, as I said before, a creative artist who had put aside his larger skills to create a singular commodity, friezes in wood, copying in detail great (or lesser) paintings. And these he carried around to sell at fairs on certain weekends, and while sitting by his works he read books and articles and newspapers by the bag-load. Then he entered upon the national Amway corporation, and began to build a network of clients and customers to purchase a wide range of consumer goods; this entailed meeting upon meeting; much of the vast energy that had gone into advancing and promoting Velikovsky was moving into a truly American promotional enterprise -- part crass materialist, part ideological fervor, a hybrid of love-thy-neighbor and get-rich-quick. Deg would not join him; he regretted the diversion of the intelligent energies that had placed Sizemore among the top dozen of no more than a few score active promoters of quantavolution in the world. Yet he understood the figure of the missionary-capitalist, for he was reminded of the time he studied the leading caucasian families of Hawaii, who had emerged from their work at Christian conversion owning a good part of the land, commerce, and industry of the Islands. He believed, unlike others, that Sizemore and his wife, who had never before plunged into an enterprise with him, might well make a fortune. Max Weber, Richard Tawney, Edward Shils, Sebastian de Grazia, Benjamin Nelson and their brethren of economic sociology would instantly recognize the puritan- capitalist nexus in Amway and in Warner Sizemore. Nor, meanwhile, excepting his break with Deg, did Sizemore neglect his primary responsibilities in quantavolution. He still was the mainstay of Greenberg (and I do believe that Sizemore, were he to strike it rich, would generously fund Kronos and set up seminars, publish books, and promote the general development of the field); he still visited and helped Elisheva; he kept up with the field. He aided friends in need, as he did Sigmund Kardas, first when Kardas moved his house, and then when Kardas was nearly killed crashing into a wrong-turning trailer truck one midnight on the highway near Bordentown. In October, 1982, upon returning from Greece, Deg was still needling Sizemore: Dear Warner: I hope that all goes well with your enterprise; I trust that you have known of Kronos' decision last winter to not review Chaos and Creation. After your long history of interest in the book and its writing, this must have come as a surprise to you. Have you spoken to the staff about it? Before leaving for Greece last Spring I submitted a note to Jan Sammer as Associate Editor of Kronos to read and forward for publication. I commented upon Velikovsky's Baalbek article. Sammer has since reported to me that when he told Greenberg about it, Greenberg said that he would not read it or publish it. This appears to be one more step in the recapitulation of the unconscionable techniques which, we say, were employed in regard to Dr. V. Also, out of the blue sky came the enclosed letter from Ellenberger. [Not carried here.] I cannot afford the hours of rebuttal and psychiatric analysis that it calls for. What should I do with it? Are you, or are you not, Executive Editor, father confessor, and angel of this mad show? Sincerely yours, Al P. S. As you may know, we have been denied the privilege of renting Kronos' mailing list to announce the publication of Chaos and Creation. On the other hand, I have received in the mail on more than one occasion postcards advertising Leroy Ellenberger's Velikovsky T-shirts, beer mugs, etc., using Kronos addresses. I fail to appreciate the philosophical principle at work here; should you not consult with Lynn Rose and advise me on it? The letter aroused Sizemore to stiffer opposition. He railed at Deg for trying to separate KRONOS from its Glassboro State College letterhead, and advanced two propositions. This first was that "factual errors" in Chaos and Creation (which apparently he had not discovered in his intensive and enthusiastic reading of the manuscript and page proofs over a period of months) made its mention in the pages of KRONOS impossible: "it would be difficult with such errors as would reflect upon our integrity." Second he rejected any analogy between the treatment which the reviewing media had meted out to Velikovsky and that which was rendered Deg by KRONOS, adding that V. had "not once in forty years of correspondence with his opponents" resorted to "invective or scorn." This is close to the literal truth, just as the fact that General Eisenhower never killed an enemy soldier. Such ruptures of relations among heretics are common. In this instance the main material effect was to suppress attention to Deg's book for three years among a key audience for works on quantavolution, represented by Kronos magazine. By the end of 1983 Greenberg was intimating an interest in advertising and reviewing Deg's books. [Again he renigged.] I have come near to demonstrating that grand principles of morals and science can equally well be extracted from the dross of existence or flare out of imperial trumpets. The phenomenon of "self-destruct" is ever threatening in new movements of all kinds. Yet another phenomenon here deserves mention before passing on to other matters. It has to do with energetics, or more simply laziness. And I am fortunate for having spoken so much of Sizemore for he exemplifies the non-lazy, the antithesis of the phenomenon of limited energetics or laziness. The phenomenon has also to do with the motives of the persons in fringe movements, with what they want to get out of their belonging and in fact do get. The cosmic heretics were fond of reciting the litany, Velikovsky in the lead, that if his new ideas were to be admitted to scientific discussion, the textbooks of most disciplines would have to be revised. Astronomers would have to correct their own lamentable errors, and also they would have to study electricity, geologists astronomy, anthropologists geology, historians mythology, and so on. At the same time, a number of cosmic heretics were solely Velikovsky buffs: they were incompetent and unfamiliar with other quantavolutionists. Some had never had, nor now wished to have, an education broader than that afforded by Worlds in Collision. They derived their political, moral, and intellectual sustenance from a couple of books and a man. They were housed in this comfortable concrete defensive pill-box from which they would sporadically fire and venture forth on forays and to scavenge. To this type of person, the threat of Chaos and Creation was as real as a full-scale attack upon Worlds in Collision. To read another thick book? And more to come? A hobby would have to become a chore. Horrid possibilities in religion, geochronology, and human development had to be confronted. Much reading was required. A "snap-course," with its slogans, became suddenly a curriculum. The format and style of the new book was itself a threat; it read well, but was organized like a text-book. The several hundred readers of its first year found even a chapter in it devoted to negative criticism. The chapter, called "The Devil's Advocate," was written by Deg under his dropped middle name of Joseph and an English translation of "Grazia" into "Grace" for the cognomen. He felt that a full self-critique, carried as he went along, would have been useful but would have doubled the size of the book. So he did his best to demolish his work in a single chapter. That he succeeded with some is evidenced by an editor of Athenaeum Press who, in rejecting the manuscript, claimed to be persuaded by Professor Grace, and by a review in the newsletter of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, whose author wrote that much of what he had to say was well put by Joseph Grace. Deg did not like subterfuge and had foreseen that a reader who liked or disagreed with the chapter would soon enough catch on to the dodge. Still, Elisheva read it and was amazed by its being there and asked Deg who the writer was. That caused a laugh. And Leroy Ellenberger himself, even after hearing the explanation, was so suspicious and perplexed that he wrote to Deg to confirm that the writer was not a professor at Glassboro State College. Deg noted with interest that Leroy, who would not let the readers of Kronos hear of the book, was reading it, presumably having wrapped it in a plain cover after receiving the gift from Deg. On January 17, 1982, Brian Moore is telling Deg about the difficulties the British Society is having with its publications and asking him to come and share a platform with Dr. Don Robins who is to speak on isotopic anomalies in radiochronometry. The Society would also like a talk on the past ten years since Deg published The Velikovsky Affair. Incidentally, mention of the Velikovsky Affair above reminds me of my current fracas with Lewis Greenberg which you may like to include in your comprehensive survey of the history of Velikovsky (when you eventually come to write it). I had received permission from Dr. Hewsen to print in SISR his talk to the last Symposium at Princeton in which he criticized Velikovsky's use of his sources. Lewis, of course, would not print it in Kronos as it was too critical for his taste, but as we advertise ourselves as a forum for the Velikovsky "debate," we felt it could be a useful contribution from an informed Velikovskian. The result was hugely ironical; Greenberg has threatened us with legal action if we publish it as the words were actually spoken at his Symposium. To me it seems the ultimate sin for a Velikovskian to attempt to suppress views which he finds unpalatable, but when I put this point to Greenberg he avoids the question and suggests we terminate the correspondence! There the matter rests for the moment. Rather sad. Deg notes to himself on the margin of Moore's letter. "Shall I send letter to Lew on this with copies to Kronos board?" He does not do so. Instead, he calls Professor Hewsen, and later replies to Moore: I spoke to Hewsen about your fracas with Greenberg, also Sizemore. Neither H nor S is strongly interested in the matter; H confirms the offer to you but thinks G is serious about a suit; S would advise against such an action, which, to my mind, would be only taken up by a lawyer as nutty as G. H. never gave away any rights to publish. And, of course, the attitude of G is disgusting. I find G's polices and behavior frequently irrational and arbitrary, and have not talked to him in some time. S is occupied with a new commercial venture now as well as teaching, so sees into little. Ellenberger and G do the whole bit. I think that G would do battle with all the 1500 Kronos subscribers and all authors and with Mrs. Velikovsky and Shulamith Velikovsky and anyone else who would come into sight, especially all females; he is the most handsome rhinoceros in these parts and generally exhausted from his struggles. And Brian answers: SIS still seems to be persona (prope) non grata with Mrs. Velikovsky. She would not allow us to put slips in the British edn. of M in A drawing attention to the Society. We are also excluded from the book itself though Kronos is listed. Warlow's book of course lists both organizations (though this has not stopped Kronos from berating him in their latest issue. With colleagues like this, who needs the Sagasimov?.) Which reminds me -- I mentioned the Hewsen Affair in my last letter and this obviously prompted you to enquire a little into the matter. I'm afraid this has fueled Leroy's paranoia even more. When I last wrote to him I said I was not going to pursue the matter, but he now thinks that I "asked" you to "intervene" on our behalf and gave me a little homily on hypocrisy to boot! Still, don't lose any sleep over this -- such misunderstandings are endemic in our relations with Kronos. Leroy and I continue to collaborate on other matters, so there is still a positive side to the relationship. Greenberg and Ellenberger manage next to enrage Peter James, who has a sweet disposition but a sharp tongue. He resigns from Kronos' editorial board with a vengeance, and later in London tells Deg, yes, certainly, if you want to publish my letter of resignation, do so. Dear Lewis and Leroy, In view of the present shitty relations between KRONOS and SISR I can't see much good reason to provide Kronos with any further copy... Permission on "Darwinian man" is withdrawn (or at least suspended). The same applies to my BAR and Stiebing correspondence, and to the promised section on Carchemish from my Glasgow Conference paper. Whether this material has been set in type or not, permission is firmly withheld. I had also better tender my resignation from the KRONOS staff as well.. Frankly I don't see why Hewsen's paper has put the wind up you lot so much. On the other hand maybe I do. All Hewsen was saying is that we must not treat Velikovsky as a tin god, and that we would be doing far more service to the man's genius by admitting the weak parts of his work and sorting the wheat from the chaff. The KRONOS staff suppress his paper (yes, suppress), at the same time protesting that they are not Velikovsky cultists. Give me one GOOD REASON why Hewsen's comments should not have the publication that he wanted them to have, apart from the desire of the KRONOS staff to suppress a point of view that doesn't exactly square with their own. I am, to say the least, disgusted. I thought the name of the game was free speech and fair discussion. The "Velikovsky movement" has been crowing for so long about the suppression of Velikovsky's ideas. It makes me sick to see people who pontificate against Velikovsky's enemies do the same to someone who is basically sympathetic to Velikovsky's ideas. Go to the back of the class and join the Shapleys and the Sagans. You should both hang your heads in shame. There was nothing untoward or irregular about Brian's letter to Hewsen. It was not going behind Lewis' back, conniving or in any way deserving the hysterical reaction we got. Hewsen wrote the bloody paper, a fact that seems to have been forgotten in this silly squabble, not Lewis Greenberg or Leroy Ellenberger. Brian quite rightly wrote to Hewsen about it, and asked him to clear things with LMG. There was no intention of "stealing" anything without KRONOS Permission. Hewsen was asked to request KRONOS Permission. Get that straight. Nothing criminal, nothing strange. The reaction? Sheer hysteria, and the usual childish threats of legal action. And why? You tell me why. Ask yourselves, have a good think about your real reasons for trying to suppress someone's thoughts... I also find KRONOS' attitude to Peter Warlow rather weird. Why have you got it in for him? Answer: JEALOUSY, plain and simple. If he lived in the States and was one of your immediate clique you would be breaking your backs to help him find some answers to Slabinski, instead of running him down all the time as you do. Along comes the guy who for the first time produces a model and a mechanism for a Velikovskian event and publishes it in a well established physics journal, and you lot just try and jump on him. Rose, in his comments about Senmut's ceiling, doesn't even seem to be aware of Lowery and Reade's extensive studies, or Reade's later work on the Ramesside star-tables. What are you going to put in place of Warlow's model, which satisfies the mythological and geological evidence so well? Spin reversal? Crustal slipping? Go on then. Provide us with a model that will make Stabinski happy. You know damn well that Slabinski's calculations can't and don't take into account electro-magnetic effects. These are, after all, part and parcel of the Velikovskian view of celestial mechanics. So way do you take such great delight in Slabinski's calculations when they ignore them? Answer: jealousy. I have taken a lot of stick from KRONOS staff for the criticisms I made of Ramses II and His Time in my review. Letters from Greenberg, Rose, and others made an incredible fuss as if my criticisms had come out of the blue, and I was told repeatedly that I was knocking Velikovsky's view of this period without putting anything in its place. On the 19th February 1976 I wrote a 5 page letter to Velikovsky, summarising several years work, pointing out my major objections to his equation of the Hittites and the Chaldeans, and the 19th and 26th dynasties. In February 1977 Velikovsky wrote back pretty well ignoring the points made, except to postulate an ad hoc invention of a second Neriglissar to get around problems in the Neo-Babylonian succession. In 1978 Ramses II appeared, and the major areas of problem which I had pointed out were almost completely ignored. The reader was left totally in the dark about key material that shows Velikovsky's scheme for this period to be impossible. So I l felt perfectly justified in raising this problem for the benefit of SISR readers. It would have been intellectually dishonest not to have done so, particularly since I had raised the main points with Velikovsky two years before... KRONOS no longer strikes me as a "magazine of inter-disciplinary synthesis"; it is rapidly becoming a cross between a Velikovsky fan magazine and an anti-SIS Review... I am very sorry that it has come to this. But when KRONOS is filled over and over again with one-sided ad hominem piffle about Gammon, MacKie and Warlow, three of the most valuable contributors to the Velikovsky debate, and when KRONOS still continues to treat Velikovsky's work in toto as the proverbial sacred cow, then things have gone too far. I am only interested in having honest assessments of Velikovsky's work, to find out what is right and what is wrong. I am not interested in a silly KRONOS vs. SISR struggle which seems to interest you far more than the academic issues involved.... Peter James But this is only part of the letter which I suppose might be summed up in the words of St. Paul to the Phillipians (1: 15): "Of course, some of them preach Christ because they are jealous and quarrelsome, but others preach him with all good will." The explosive discourse among the heretics, we have seen, is often as vituperative as the salvos of heretics against the outside world. It is also more personal and intensely felt. There were times when Deg felt that Greenberg's tiny clique of Kronos was trying to make a sort of Trotsky out of him for advocating world revolution rather than "revolution in Russia" as Stalin would have it. He was consoled to know that the invectives and diatribes were the lot of other heretics and conventional figures venturing into the line of fire. Nor was he without blame; so that he could not but remind himself of the saying, "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword." Or "he who lives by the pen is poisoned by the pen." By contrast with the heretics, the conventional scientists were most gentle among themselves on the subject of the heretics. It was almost unprecedented when once Robert Jastrow mentioned in print a serious statistical misapprehension of Carl Sagan in an attack on Velikovsky; Sagan defended himself vociferously. I do not mean to say that the conventionals are more fair or decent; they are nicer and more polite, and must go to print under institutional barriers against vehement expression. The heretic cries havoc and unleashes the dogs of war, and is often too distraught to tell friend from foe. If all of this seems trivial, that is because the word "trivial" for a dispute is defined by contrast with horrible and bloody conflict. Or, I think, it is all trivial, even when there is horror and bloodshed. Examine the horror and bloodshed of history. Is it not very often over the trivial -- a sentence of Marx, an oath to the King, a remark "against the people," a failure to salute the flag, the greasing of bullets with pork fat, these and a myriad of like trivia -- which manage to bathe mankind in bloodshed and keep people in terror much of the time. One can never tell from a virulent heretical letter or a smooth conventional reasoned critique whether, were the author possessed of the power, he would not exercise violent sanctions. The men and women who run affairs -- in all spheres of life -- are very often like the infant whose rages, so ludicrous, would be regarded with the gravest concern and even panic if abracadabra suddenly the infant sprang up adult and armed. But that is the point of keeping the peace at nearly any cost: if people are kept from destroying themselves and each other, sooner or later they will be happy that they failed in their wishes. They will recognize that their aims are foolish, trivial, misguided, and mistaken, or that they would have been themselves erased, or that their enemies had agreed in principle with them, or that they and their enemies, alone or together, might find a better resolution of their mutual problem. What has been shown here is that the establishment has violated most rules of logic and fair play in literary and scientific intercourse, but, further, I have shown that the heretics, in dealing with the outer world and among themselves, have also violated most rules of logic and fair play in their literary and scientific intercourse. What then can be concluded as a matter of principle? Call down a plague upon both their houses? Go in search of honest men like Diogenes forever carrying a lantern to illuminate any rare finds? Favor the weak against the strong, the heretic against the conventional establishment? Continue to expose such illogical and unjust conduct wherever and whenever it appears? Psychoanalyze, especially in the sense of self-analysis, everybody including ourselves? Reform the scientific reception system by institutional inventions to bring about a rule a law, emplaced as part and parcel of the rules of scientific method? The questions answer themselves. Each implies a herculean task. Yet each implies a remedy of value. The answer to each and all of these questions is a resounding "Yes!" All must be done, no matter that each in itself is, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult, In Homo Schizo I and II, Deg put forward a persuasive, if apparently pessimistic, analysis of human nature. Homo Schizo is incurable, imperfectible, by nature. He can only be modified, constrained, trained, and controlled within limits. But within these limits stand at the one extreme the most horrible conduct and at the other extreme the most charming, endearing, and harmless conduct. The main trouble in the latter case is human unreliability. Meanwhile, work was beginning on The Cosmic Heretics and I wrote Carl Sagan in 1981 asking for a meeting in the line of reporting first-hand something of Sagan's ideas about Velikovsky and about himself. A reply came, dated 9 November, 1981: 9 November, 1981 Belated but very sincere thanks for your letter to Professor Sagan asking if he might meet with you at some point while he is in New York City to discuss Immanuel Velikovsky as part of the background for the book you plan to write about Velikovsky. Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan is now totally immersed in science, having just returned to Cornell after an absence of more than two years. To his regret, he will not be able to accept your invitation. If you have not yet read it, you might wish to have a look at the chapter on Velikovsky in Dr. Sagan's book, Broca's Brain, published in paperback by Ballantine in 1980. With kind regards, Cordially, Shirley J. Arden Executive Assistant to Carl Sagan I had indeed known of the aforesaid chapter, which had already appeared in at least three different publications and which had been mauled and dissected to the point of uselessness, Brian Moore's SISR review being perhaps the most nicely done of the valid commentaries upon the book. Perhaps a rebirth would come with the baptism of being "totally immersed in science" that would impel him to drive his own Cosmos TV series off the airwaves. Or to withdraw his book, The Dragons of Eden, from circulation, of which N. J. Macintosh wrote in Nature (27 April 1978): "It is inaccurate, full of fanciful and unilluminating analogies, infuriatingly unsystematic, and skims hither and yon over the surface of the subject, unerringly concentrating on the superficial and misleading... profoundly unscientific." Sagan was the latter-day Harlow Shapley for many a heretic, though Deg could never quite tell why. Sagan had denounced Velikovsky's suppression, criticized his work publicly, and at worst was slipshod and sophomoric. On Deg's last visit among the English heretics in 1983, and amid some chortling, Deg was told of one Michael "Mike" Saunders, a true-believing Englishman, who was representing interests in the never-never lands of the Gulf States sheikhdoms, and was ringing people up with "great" schemes, one of which was to win over Sagan by setting up for him a professorial Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Cornell University, counting upon him to sing a new song of solar space. After Deg stopped laughing, he opined that such things had happened before (see, e. g. the Morton Prince case, that is described in the next chapter), but that star professors are much too clever and ornery nowadays. Like the time when a large donation to the Psychology Department for the purpose of pursing telepathic research was accepted by Stanford University but diverted to other uses, perhaps to construct bigger and better mazes for running rats. Apropos, unlike rats, professor avoid any mazes built for them and devise their own crooked ways. And some are quite principled, need I say? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 5: } {Q - } {C Chapter 15: } {T THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY Deg detested the new Bobst Library building at New York University from the moment he entered it on 16 December 1972 at 16: 00 hours for a reception to celebrate its opening. The old central library had been in the basements of the Main Building. It was rumored that one could draw a book from there, and he did so from time to time. But now they had obstructed the view of Washington Square from his apartment to put up a casbah-red structure that from the outside seemed transported from the Near East while inside there was a giant space towering to twelve tall stories up, a roofed atrium around which wound narrow bands of shelving areas, obviously inadequate save for a few years of collecting, and already requisitioned on its top floor for the administrative officers of the University. The sensation was vertiginous; the building floated with its books tucked around its waist; how could a scholar study with his ideas precarious on the edge of exposed space? A dance band was playing and he promptly envisioned how the design would permit its use by a Las Vegas concessionaire to bail out the near bankrupt school: a pavilion for dancing on the marble main floor, baths and massage parlors below, a bar on the second floor, social rooms on the third, a bordello for men on the fourth, one for women on the fifth, one for homosexuals on the sixth, then levels of gambling and a sky restaurant. One of the most expensive pieces of land in Manhattan had been used to roof empty space. The spectacle was dazzling. He rarely used the library. When he was there he would ask himself whether it was hyper-critical of him to have such feelings, part of his basic envy of a world that rushed along without his consent, getting things done nevertheless; or was he simply observant of facts and aesthetics that most people, those in power as well as their subjects, could not see or think of. This happened often, that he would no sooner denounce something, privately or aloud, than he would reprimand himself for thinking that he could see truth and value and contradictions thereof that groups of intelligent people working in financial, architectural, legislative, and other task forces could not see. He did not wish to believe only in himself; he would rather enjoy the warmth of consensus, the applause of the crowd, but it would rarely work out so. Everything he did, everything he got, it seemed to him, even under the conditions when he was boss, gave him not a whole loaf, nor even half a loaf, but a thin slice. (I am not speaking of material goods, but of the quality of the product.) The situation regarding money alone was bad enough; the incompetency of the rich society to obtain value with its money was much worse to suffer. Throughout his career, Deg found that it was harder to get money, the better the cause. A wage for oneself was not difficult, a salary slightly more so, commercial money for an imaginative project easier the quicker the turnover and the realization of profit. The trouble with your ideas, Rodman Rockefeller said to him once while they were conspiring about the world, is that they do not involve things that people regularly consume in large quantities, like canned food and cement houses. Not that Rodman was spectacularly successful with his company. IBEC, which went progressively from more romantic to less romantic, from third world to first world projects. In those times, Deg wondered at how year after year Rod could go on administering -- ever so comfortably to be sure -- a business without breaking out more often into some of the more imaginative enterprises and social adventures that he obviously enjoyed visualizing. Deg blamed affable father Nelson for the suppression. To continue on money: then longer-term money became harder, then money for a vulgar or fashionable charity, then money for important research or an extraordinary book. Money came hardest for a cause that one believed to be purely for the public good --unless it was a commonly recognized public good like the Bobst Library or some other building for a respectable university to house respectable and vulgar objects, or unless it was a concealed fraction of a public good (the thin slice of the loaf again), like a significant sociological question slipped into an advertising survey for dog food, or unless it was illegally obtained, wherefore some political radicals have robbed banks and others their families, and still others lived under miserable and dangerous conditions. Deg made a dozen attempts in search of a teaching and study platform for catastrophe and quantavolution. Recall this was a period when all kinds of new courses were being pressed upon universities and colleges; standards were in general decline. Professors were wringing their hands and burying their files for safekeeping. Yet they consistently rejected the advances (never mind seeking the help) of quantavolutionists who had more respect for the traditional research materials of the culture -- in classics, linguistics, foreign languages, history of science, philosophy, etc. and whose attractiveness to students would have erected massive barriers against the anti-intellectual and book-condemning feelings rampant in student bodies everywhere. A score of teaching heretics had managed to insert V.'s materials into their courses under various pretexts and in several cases could even carry his name in the title or subtitle of a course. The Dartmouth Experimental College at Hanover, N. H., invited V. one time for two days of meetings with a seminar; at least six faculty members of as many different disciplines met with the seminar before and after to discuss his books Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. V. was generally unhappy about the educational system, although he was displeased, too, with the student rebellions when they occurred. A dramatic polemic against the system of higher education finally appeared posthumously in three pages of Mankind in Amnesia (182-5). At least this statement is available to save him from reproach for never having attacked on general grounds (as opposed to personalized ground) the foundations of authority or their institutions. Before converting his own social invention course to a course on quantavolution, a one-time unauthorized change to which no official objection was made, Deg tried a frontal appeal. Here, in 1973, he addresses an assistant dean for curriculum, after discussing the matter with Bayly Winder, Dean and friend. He is making as few waves as possible, by placing the course in the summer session (where "imaginative offerings" are encouraged). The proposal went to the Committee of Deans: October 29, 1973 Memo to: Dr. Sylvia Konigsberg From: Professor Alfred de Grazia Subject: A proposal for a summer Institute on Primeval Catastrophe and the Development of Human Nature A large and increasing public is interested in the theory that ancient astrophysical and geophysical disasters caused profound changes in the human environment and human nature. Much of the interest centers around the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and his school of thought. Wherever Velikovsky appears to speak, his supporters and critics assemble by the hundreds and even thousands. His sole talk at NYU drew hundreds of students and professors several years ago. I have worked for a decade on problems raised by Dr. Velikovsky since the publication of my book, "The Velikovsky Affair." in 1963, and am presently going to press with another book on the disasters of the Homeric Age. A heavy flow of written materials and archaeological reports has begun and promises to be practically endless. There is a need for an academic center for presenting and discussing the problems they present to all fields. Excellent scholars are available to participate. I suggest that such an Institute might be held from July 1-20, 1974, at New York University. It would occupy three hours of class time on fifteen days, would allow students not-for-credit, undergraduate students for four credits, and graduate students for the same ( 4-credits). The required readings would amount to 1200 pages and graduate students would prepare a research paper. It is expected that from 80 to 200 students can register for the Institute. Personnel for the course would include: 1. Prof. Alfred de Grazia, Supervising Professor, Full-time; 2. Adjunct Prof. Annette Tobia, Ph. D., Einstein University in microbiology and presently lecturer at NYU, full-time. 3. Prof. William Mullen, Ph. D., Princeton University classicist (one-third-time); 4. Prof. Livio Stecchini, Ph. D., JD, Patterson State College, historian of science (one-third- time); 5. Mr. Ralph Juergens, Engineer and astro-physicist, Associate Editor of Pens‚e magazine, (one- third-time); 6. Visiting Lecturers and Discussants (one day each): Professors I. Velikovsky; (general theory); Lynn Rose, SUNY, (philosophy); Frank Dachille, Pennsylvania State Univ., (geology); Edward Schorr, Fellow, American School of Classical studies (archaeology); and possibly an additional person or substitute; 7. Prof. Nina Mavridis, CUNY, Political Scientist, administrative coordinator, full-time. There would be fifteen primary one-hour lectures and 30 one-hour discussion meetings which would break the lecture audience into small sections of 25 persons. Related lectures and discussions would meet on the same day. The titles of the lectures follow: Primeval Catastrophes and the Development of Human Nature I. Time, Nature, and Human Beings 1. The Theory of Catastrophes De Grazia 2. Origins of Human Nature De Grazia 3. The Geological Record D'Achille or Burgstahler 4. Historiography of the Solar System Stecchini 5. Correlations Of Geology and Astrophysics Juergens 6. The Synchronization of Prehistory Mullen II. Case Studies in Disaster and Development 7. Case I: Atlantis Stechini 8. Case II: The Age of Pyramids Stechini 9. Case III: Exodus Velikovsky 10. Case IV: The Homeric Age De Grazia III. Origins of Behavior and Institutions 11. Theology and Government De Grazia 12. Literature and the Arts De Grazia 13. Sexuality and Aggression Tobia 14. Technology Stechini IV. Final Problems 15. Is Human Nature Governable? De Grazia Discussion leaders: Professors De Grazia, Tobia, Stecchini, Mullen, Juergens, D' Achille, Burgstahler, Mavridis. With 100 students, nine daily section meetings are required. If the number of students exceeds 100, we should add to the faculty. Readings: In addition to several paperback books that will be required the staff will prepare a collection of readings difficult of access, and Xerox them. The basic readings will be Worlds in Collision by I. Velikovsky, the study of Homeric catastrophe and literature by A. de Grazia, and the collection of readings that will represent, among others, the rest of the collection of readings that will represent, among others, the rest of the faculty. A valuable and unique supplementary bibliography will also be provided, and, finally, a set of maps, drawings, and a special lexicon. Continuation of Project: We would like to begin work on the project as soon as it appears probable that we would have 80 students, and to continue research in connection with, and to prepare for, successive Institutes. Therefore, it is suggested that 50% of the gross receipts from student fees (less additional faculty costs) for students in excess of 100 in number be placed in a special project fund in the University for continuing study and development of materials in the subject-area. 27 November 1973 TO: Professor Alfred de Grazia FROM: R. B. Winder The Committee of Deans discussed on Thursday, 15 November the proposal for a summer institute on primeval catastrophes as outlined in your memorandum of 29 October addressed to Dean Konigsberg. The consensus was that although the proposal might very well produce a large enthusiastic audience of paying customers, it probably would not do so from degree candidates. The Committee felt SCE might be interested in sponsoring the program, and I suggest that you take it up with Dean Russell Smith forthwith. I do appreciate the drive you are putting forth for funding of various sorts and am only sorry that we felt this one would not work in the context proposed. Nothing could be worked out in the unprestigious "School for Continuing Education." My academic readers can practice a dry run on this proposal, or another like it as carried in The Burning of Troy: their own committees might well respond similarly. Practically all universities in America capture their students with "credit courses" and find "course anomalies" as distasteful as anomalies in science. The New School for Social Research was not so impeded, although it, too, became divided into "non-credit" and "credit" areas. V. gave a successful series of lectures there in 1964. Clark Whelton also taught there a non-credit course on "the Velikovsky Question" in the Fall of 1979 and significantly some students kept in touch with him afterwards, interested in keeping informed and hoping to form an association. Milton to de Grazia February 15, 1980: Our department is being reviewed, and me with it. Trainor is one of the referees, the other is hostile. Yesterday he said, Milton is not doing physics because Kronos is not include in Physics Abstracts nor Science Citation Index. That remark deserves immortality. Hang in there, Al, we're winning. Milton was a popular professor at Lethbridge University and was teaching and reading quantavolution in his general physics and astronomy classes. He was an intellectual force on the vast Canadian Prairie, in touch with the press and radio systems. He knew the vast skies there like a Polynesian navigator. His lifelong asthma kept him in a lifelong course in advanced nutrition, organic chemistry, and atmospheric science. Then he read into myth and legend, and there was no stopping him. In every picture he discovered fresh signs. Aside from his personal qualities, he could connect with the more than ordinary number of students there who had heard everything good about God and the Bible at home, but nothing at all, if not bad, about these subjects in "education." Even only to hear the Bible being used as a learning tool was exciting to them. One should recall, too, how low the estate of physics had fallen. We find our Dean of science reporters, Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, admonishing us. Physics is the most basic of the sciences, apart perhaps from mathematics. All phenomena, when probed to full depth, are controlled by its laws... Yet physics is in trouble Student enrollments in that science have plummeted... There is a public distrust of physicists that borders on revulsion and the physicists themselves are pursuing lines of research more and more remote from the problems of everyday life... Sullivan's key lines were the juxtaposition of two anomalies --public paranoia and physicists' schizoid remoteness of character, traits that do not marry well. The American Physical Society was discussing the low state of physics, and Sullivan wrote that generally the leaders thought that more money should be spent by the government. The British physicist and astronomer, Fred Hoyle, wanted even greater accelerators. He also wanted scientists to participate in politics. "You see why the world of politics is such an indescribable mess. Think of the opening of the baseball season. Think of the ceremonial first pitch. Think of what the baseball season would be like if that sort of pitching went on right through the summer. Then you have it -- the present state of affairs." Presumably under Hoyle's new-age baseball, physicists would pitch and baseball would become nothing but home-runs as the batters perfect themselves to bang away at the invariable straight-ball coming right down the center. Or perhaps Hoyle was saying that physicists should join the pluralist republic, as the ethnic strain of physics, helping where they could. Deg was not sure this was "according to Hoyle," but he liked the idea. Milton tied together the Eastern and Western Canadians, and the Canadian belt triangulated to the Princeton-Trenton-Philadelphia area where Sizemore, Deg, and Greenberg kept shop. In the Kronos network, besides Greenberg, Sizemore and Ellenberg, might be found Rose, Vaughan, Wolfe, Cardona, and Jueneman. Some say that there should be added Milton, Sherrard, Westcott, Hewsen, Ransom, Talbott and Sammer. It was a unifocal net, with Greenberg as the focus. Deg connected with London, Holland, Paris, Basel. Greenberg, losing Peter James in London, found Bernard Newgrosh as correspondent. Marvin Luckerman, a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles, founded a biennial magazine, Catastrophism and Ancient History; relations with Greenberg were cool, and the British were not much impressed with his first issues, but praised the good try. Still he rounded up a thousand readers and began to improve his journal. The creationist groups stemming out of Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Seattle were quantavolutionary perforce, having been given only a few thousand years by the Bible to produce everything. Here and there were quantavolutionaries of orthodox connections --Gould at Harvard in paleontology, Ager of geology in England, and so on for several countries. The password that could readily cut these out from others was their answer to the question, "Has a planet moved?" A very small group it all was, absurdly so when compared with the network of thousands of periodicals, scores of associations, and the mass media that served orthodox science. It makes one wonder whether the heretics were worth considering: certainly by the usual American standards of great-sized multiplex technology they were not. Deg heard when young from his democratic teachers how smartly the vested interests turned to minister to public needs, and was continually surprised when old to see how reluctant they had become to give themselves away. As his friend Lasswell put it, when writing with Abe Kaplan Power and Society, no ruling class gives up its goods without being forced to do so. This goes pari passu for philanthropoids and publishers, two industries affected with a public interest. The philosopher, artist, composer, author, administrative innovator, and physical inventor, if he is to be creative, typically is driven to become a sneakthief, or revolutionary, or go mad, or all three. So says Deg, who worried only about becoming a revolutionary, because then he would have to spend his time among sneakthiefs and maddies as well. "Of course the heretics would not get support, they did not apply for it. One must play the game by the rules. Apply and apply and apply again." Deg knew more about this than his heretical acquaintances by the time they had encountered one another. He had enjoyed the fleshpots and studied what motivated the foundations, publishers and universities. He could warn the heretics that they need hardly try -- and V. was of this opinion, too -- or, worse, in order to succeed, they must prepare themselves to spend much of their energies in trying, and he was insistent upon a point that few could appreciate, that only a peculiar type of masochistic personality could apply incessantly to the point of success without losing the vigor, freshness, profundity of his ideas and the vital energy needed to pursue them for their own sakes. On a few occasions, the heretics would solicit funds from individuals in small amounts to disseminate a publication about Velikovsky, but efforts at larger funding failed. The Foundation for Studies of Modern Science initiated a series a approaches, of which I have already spoken; still, I shall add one more instance. Murray Rossant, Director of the Twentieth Century Fund, was reported by someone to be attracted to V.'s work. Because Deg and his brother, Sebastian, were already known and had been working with the Fund in very different fields, FOSMOS sent two fresh and handsome faces to meet with Rossant and his colleague Schwartz, Bruce Mainwaring and Coleman Morton, both enlightened businessmen. A friendly encounter ensued, the upshot of which was that, although the Fund had never gone into this area, the two officers were interested personally in seeking other sources of funding, and when all was said and done, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that the Fund itself gave money to Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend for research that they were doing on ancient and primitive myth and legend which, it was believed beforehand, would show that mankind was clever and scientific long before it was credited with being so, but also that there was no need to invoke catastrophism to explain the nature of mankind's early preoccupations. This was recounted to Deg and the others by Stechini, who was well acquainted with Santillana and von Dechend. The product of the research, Hamlet's Mill, was welcomed by the heretics, nevertheless, for its intimations of ancient quantavolutions, but, if the reader wishes to understand the rampant confusion of the book, he may simply apply the hypothesis: here are two great scatomatized experts trying to avoid mention of catastrophism. Though they be liberal or conservative, foundations are unlikely to be creative. They think they are able to judge creativity, of course, and especially if large, "creativity" and the "independent sector" of society are often included in their slogans. Their size and their bureaucracy correlate well. But in any event," writes Deg, who had urged the Ford Foundation to apply this, his scheme, "they are unlikely to make lists of all the people who lay creative claim to their bounty, and dispense it equally among a random sample of them. No they put the applicants and petitioners through the hurdles that they learned in their first course in Business and Public Administration should be set up to employ typists and junior managers. So it happens that if all the people who ever applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship had given the same quantity of intense energy to a story, a painting, a song, or a study as they gave to applying, American culture would be up a notch or two over all its length and breadth. The waste of creative energies going into the national foundations of the sciences, arts and humanities is truly enormous; they use up at least a tenth of the country's creativity, with their stick games between the insiders and the outsiders. I would close them down and give their hundreds of millions to the colleges of the country whatever their defects -- in proportion to their budgets. The cosmic heretics might discern that they were outlaws without going to the trouble of applying for their identity cards. But they could not help themselves: after all, they were educated in a way, bathed regularly, were fluent in the language, and found their interests carried in the index of foundation provenances. So they were tempted from time to time to try for a grant or subsidy. To my knowledge, they invariably failed. (I am not speaking of the occasional hand-outs tendered by friends and other heretics but of the system of lending a hand as institutionalized by the private or government foundations.) Deg had enjoyed many experiences with foundations, small and large. The large were too "responsible" and proper to be bold. The small were generally pets and hobby horses of their founders. Exceptions occurred that were interested in large social issues. A small foundation, the Relm- Earthart group, was a pleasure to deal with. It had a tough board, and was administered by James Kennedy and Richard Ware, both of whom bet on the man, not the institution, and did not try to make useless work for themselves and others. (The Cornuelle brothers, Herb and Dick, were this way, too, when they were in the foundation business. So was Bill Baroody.) Deg did a variety of economic and political studies with their help over the years. They were not occupied with ancient history or natural history. Since they lent you aid, they must be "good," I say to Deg sarcastically. Very well, he says, shall I give you some bad ones that have helped me? Never mind, I said, I'm in enough trouble with you already. Yet the very deprivations and constraints that help Deg in his quantavolutionary trap made him more determined and passionate. Again Deg is writing in his notebook, perhaps to warn himself, like a politician warns himself to refuse favors or an infantryman warns himself to keep his feet clean: There is this in common among a gold miner, a terrorist, and a purveyor of new ideas; they often come to exist in a new moral dimension, called immorality and outrage. Lunacy, lying, cheating, contempt and inconsideratedness for others; misappropriation: the pandora's box of the creator spills these out. Deg never committed such follies -- almost never -- and blamed his frustration correctly or incorrectly upon his own character: he inspired himself but could rarely inspire enough of the all-important others. Society is run by networks and gangs, and you have to join a gang, stick with it, use it and let it use you, and if ultimately you fail or perish with the gang, well, that's the end of the trail, it's a life-term establishment. Most gangs and network fails. Therefore skill and luck in getting into and out of the appropriate gangs is often essential to success. "We're working on an ABS issue about what needs to be done with the science of economics," said Deg to his colleague, Professor Arnold Zurcher, who was also Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Foundation operated in this area and Deg wondered whether they would provided support for the project in the neighborhood of $10,000. His colleague represented an approach to political science that Deg regarded as outmoded and intent upon replacing. He was a jolly fellow and they were friends, and he knew that Deg was carrying the weak finances of the American Behavioral Scientist on his back. Do up the proposal, he said, I think that you have a good chance and I'll support it. Not long afterwards, Deg received an official letter from the Foundation rejecting the proposal. He was surprised -- the request was logical: it was for small money and enjoyed support. His colleague was apologetic. Al, he reported, the proposal passed from one vice-president to another, with Margolis' article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about the Velikovsky affair attached, and a big "No" scribbled on the face of your proposal. (Later on Bill Baroody of the American Enterprise Institute came up with some money to support the issue, and economists were assembled and the issue published.) April 22, 1964 Mr. Ralph E. Juergens 416 South Main Street Hightstown, New jersey Dear Mr. Juergens: I continue to be amazed that sensible persons continue to give attention to the Velikovsky affair. I wonder if you have read the statement by Howard Margolis in the April 1964 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist. Very sincerely yours Warren Weaver Vice President Alfred p. Sloan Foundation. Warren Weaver was a career philanthropist, wrote a good general survey on probability and, like many another, was a nice man. New York University named its Computer Center after him. (For a photo of it, in context, see Deg's Politics for Better or for Worse.) May 4, 1964 Professor Moses Hadas Columbia University New York 27, New York Dear Professor Hadas: As long-time subscriber to Reporter magazine -- actually since it started -- I was very much interested in your excellent review in a recent issue of "Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis." by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai. I did draw a long, deep birth, however, when I read in the first paragraph that "in our own time Immanuel Velikovsky, who was maligned for making myth the basis for a cosmic hypothesis, appears to be approaching vindication." As a scientist, until 1960 a professor of chemistry at Columbia and an admiring colleague of yours in Columbia College, I have always regretted the action of a few misguided souls who reacted 13 years ago to "Worlds in Collision" by attacking Velikovsky's publisher -- I think it was Macmillan. The book, in my opinion, should have been classified as science fiction but, nevertheless, it was unrealistic, and humorless as well, to expect a publisher interested in profits, as they all have to be, to overlook an opportunity to make a few extra bucks. The reaction to "Worlds in Collision" and a subsequent book, the title of which I do not recall, was fairly violent but, as I remember, reviews by Harrison Brown of Caltech and a woman astronomer with a hyphenated name from Harvard pretty well disposed, so far as I was concerned, of Mr. Velikovsky and his theories of cosmology. But now along comes Mr. Howard Margolis to tell us in a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that "Velikovsky rides again." Perhaps you have already seen Margolis article, but if you have not, I think you may find the attached copy of interest and perhaps amusing. With kind regards. Sincerely yours, L. H. Farinholt Vice President Sloan Foundation To all medical psychologists: what is the vagus nerve syndrome that make a man "draw a long, deep breath"? Re Harrison Brown and the "woman astronomer" with a hyphenated name from Harvard, see The Velikovsky Affair, Alfred de Grazia, Editor. 6 May 1964 Mr. L. H. Farinholt Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 630 Fifth Avenue Rockefeller Center New York, NY 10020 Dear Mr. Farinholt, Thank you for your kind letter and its enclosure. I can have no opinion about the validity of Velikovsky's work; his ideas may be wholly misguided, but I know that he is not dishonest. What bothered me was the violence of the attack upon him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another of the reviews misquoted him and then attacked the misquotation. So in the Margolis piece you send me I read "Pi-ha Hiroth which Velikovsky has altered into Pi-ha Khiroth, further enhancing his evidence." But the two are equally acceptable transliterations of the Hebrew, and the latter is the more scientific. For the Egyptian name, Margolis, following old books, writes, Pekharti, but the Egyptian has no vowels, so that the correct from is P-kh-r-t, and of this Ph-khirot is very plausible expansion. The ha in the Hebrew is merely the definite article. It is his critic, not Velikovsky, who is uniformed and rash -- and so elsewhere also. The issue is one of ordinary fair play. Yours sincerely, Moses Hadas May 31,1966 Dr. Warren Weaver Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 630 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10020 Dear Mr. Weaver: I have harbored for many months your critical note concerning the studies of the American Behavioral Scientist on the reactions of scientists to Immanuel Velikovsky, thinking all the while of an appropriate constructive response. We have recently published an enlarged version of the same studies in book form and I have asked the publishers to send you a copy with my compliments. There are, of course, two issues in the Velikovsky affair --one, the conduct of scientist and the press; two, validity and utility of his theories. The issues are separable but an involvement in one naturally inclines one into a stance on the other. I think that you can help many people, including myself, find their way through these issues, granted that you may have neither the time nor the inclination to take on major responsibilities for the problems raised. What I should like to suggest is that we get together for a day's conversation on the two issues in the company of several other men, with the sole end of educating each other. I have in mind persons such as Professor Donald Fleming of the Department of History and Science at Harvard University, Thomas Kuhn, Professor of History and Science at Princeton University, and Professor Harold D. Lasswell at the School of Law at Yale University. I believe that five would be the right number. I have mentioned a reunion to none of the men named, and have an idea only of Lasswell's thinking about the subject at hand. We might spend the morning on the question of validity (not "solving" it, but working to understand it) and the afternoon on the question of treatment of unorthodox ideas in science. I am quite at your disposition on the matter. Hoping to receive your opinion, I remain Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia Editor There was no reply. 4 March 1974 Dr. Eleanor Sheldon, President Social Science Research Council 230 Park Avenue New Your City Dear Dr. Sheldon: I have become increasingly interested over the past few years in the origins of human nature, prompted largely by a growing familiarity with some new ideas that Dr. I. Velikovsky has introduced in the treatment of pre-historic and ancient catastrophes befalling humanity. The field is not new, of course, and several disciplines in the social sciences and humanities currently share it. But a lively set of controversies with a considerable potential for new discoveries and new syntheses has begun to erupt here and there. Hence there may be occasion for the kind of interdisciplinary research --discussion efforts that are appropriate to the SSRC and ACLS or both. Perhaps the eye of the cyclone moves around the question: Did homo sapiens become human and cultured in gradual steps, as received theory would have it. Or was he compelled to think and behave humanly by the effects of natural forces so immense that factors such as sex, commerce, and "normal" invention must take a secondary role in explanation? In preparing a monograph on the effects of disasters in homeric times, I have encountered and had to deal with problems that are central, not related incidentally, to the fields of linguistics, historical chronology, astronomy, physical and cultural anthropology, comparative literature, archaeology (worldwide), geology, fossil paleontology, soil chemistry, electromagnetics, astrophysics, sociology of sex, ecology, climatology, oceanography, theology, chemical and fossil dating, psychology of infancy and of stress, epistemology, the history of science, and political science for the origins of theocracy, bureaucratic system and collective violence. The problem of approaching the field is not as impossible as might appear from the listing. It can be stated as an excellent model for cross-disciplinary investigation and theory. The numerous sciences involved have been shocked and compressed, taken aback, you might say, and the time may be right for a reappraisal of where they all stand in reference to the question. I have felt continually the need for the kind of sounding board, stabilizer, consulting resources and motivator that I once experienced via the establishment of the first Political Behavior Research Committee of the SSRC and its subsequent operations. Should you be of the opinion that the subject might interest the SSRC and be within its jurisdiction, I should appreciate the chance to discuss it with you in some detail Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia April 5, 1974 Dear Professor de Grazia: Thank you for your interesting letter of March 4, in which you suggest a possible role for the Council in exploring human socio-cultural evolution, particularly in the light of an hypothesis that posits discontinuous advances, following a massive challenge and response model, rather than incremental steps. It is true that this kind of problem is inherently cross-disciplinary, is of potentially great interest, and needs strong guidance if it is to make progress. Also, I am aware that Velikovsky's ideas are receiving wide attention again -- or, perhaps, at last. Nevertheless, the topic you outline, which demands a unified approach is too enormous for the SSRC to handle, and even if the ACLS were to be involved (obviously, I cannot speak for the ACLS) it would still be unlikely that we could marshal the appropriate efforts. At the very least, the physical sciences, as you point out, would have to be closely involved. As you know, the Council is now addressing itself to more than a full intellectual and administrative agenda, and I cannot foresee a way in which we could be helpful with this topic. It certainly deserves attention, however, and I wish you success in your capable efforts to bring that about. Sincerely yours, Eleanor Bernert Sheldon In reflecting upon all that happened to V. and to Deg and the others, it would be unfortunate to keep one's eyes on the immediate characters alone. For they are all symbols, too, players in a drama, representing types of our civilization. If V. is subject of a hundred book reviews, these reviews are signs of the times that happened to gather electrostatically like fluff around his work. J. B. S. Haldane, a noted biologist who also wrote on Science and Ethics, found V.'s Worlds in Collision a degradation of both science and religion, a peculiarly enraging combination, apparently, for a marxist and fellow-traveler, whom Deg, with a long nose for hidden political mazes, suspected might be waving the flag (red, that is) for his American colleague, Harlow Shapley; and when Deg, duty-bound to probe wherever necessary, intimated these sensings of political psychology, he was scolded by certain naive and intensely tender liberal consciences, as if political processes of leftist politics, external politics, could never enter scientific processes. So he was amused when, in perusing an edition of Frederick Engels' Dialectics of Nature, a work which many Soviet scientists find it de rigueur to praise highly somewhere in their books and which contributes to biological science roughly in the same measure as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, he had to note that the adulatory introduction to Engels' book was by none other than J. B. S. Haldane, who apparently could see contemporary marvels in the century-old work of a communist that he could not perceive in V.'s book. Furthermore, had not Marx and marxists been universally insistent upon the interconnection of all things with the ownership of the means of production and therefore all things were politicized and relevant subjects for investigation. Indeed, Deg, in his typically optimistic manner (he would pick up a redhot stove), had conceived of the true interests of marxist theory as residing in catastrophism, not uniformitarianism. Why he asked himself, sometime around 1978, did Marx and Engels so strongly endorse Darwin, fashioning the pattern for marxists to follow ever since (the heresy of Lysenko in the 1950's being a significant incident thereto)? Perhaps, he thought, the model of catastrophism did not give them a broad natural inclined plane for the progression of history; it defeats man's greatest works in an instant. It pays hob with the development of the pure but reversed Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in the historical process. It depresses man's will and capacity to build an ultimate utopia. And Marx and Engels, despite their rejection of the Hegelian "will" and ideal, conceived of and nurtured the most fantastically strong human will, one that could overturn social orders and political regimes (of course, with the aid of history). So they needed natural change to back up social change -- Engels waxing polemical on this need --but the change must not overturn catastrophically the works of revolutionary men. Still, Deg thought also that the problem of arousing the masses was immediate and paramount with them, whereas, the problem of nature and history (just mentioned) was less important. Now the masses must see themselves as the symbol or substance for a great tidal wave, storm, explosion, and destroyer. Therefore, the imagery of catastrophe would be more effective than the interminable gradual incremental change of Darwin and bourgeois society. And indeed there are indications the Marx smelled an ideological rat in the theory of evolution. Furthermore, in reading Soviet studies pertinent to quantavolution, Deg could sense a slackness in their basic tie to Lyellism and Darwinism. In the back of Deg's mind there was an ulterior motive, to loosen the anchor of uniformitarianism (or "actualism" as the Europeans call it) in the marxist setting, thus to free up a flow of new quantavolutionary energy. So Deg wanted to address himself to this problem, and he asked his daughter, Victoria, who was a professor by now, eminent on intellectual movements of the past century, and who said, yes, it did seem like a good idea, and she being much better attuned to the marxist mentality and avant-garde currents in the field than he, Deg promptly submitted a proposal to the political science and sociology section of the Natural Science Foundation. When the refusal came, he asked for and received the critiques of the review panel. He was a little dismayed to discover that he was illiterate and ignorant beyond his worst fears, even more so than most scholars must be on the measuring scale that the Foundation had provided conveniently to its panel. But when he thought that he might judge the responses to his proposal better if he knew who were writing them, the request was refused, on grounds of "policy," and, of course, the policy was, as is usual, good for those who were in charge of the policy and working behind the defenses afforded by the policy. Momentarily Deg thought to investigate the law on the subject, and to have introduced a bill for laying open such matters, as an amendment to the federal law on freedom of information, or even to launch a lawsuit, seeking a mandamus to produce the records. He didn't do so, of course, because, as my readers by now amply appreciate, ars lunga, vita breve, Two years later, a postscript to the episode occurs in his journal: January 20, 1980 A famous letter from Marx to Darwin is said to ask Darwin's permission to dedicate a volume of Das Kapital to him. Year before last, the National Science Foundation turned down my proposal to study the question why Marx and Engels, who perhaps should have been ideological quantavolutionists, not evolutionists -- that is, catastrophists, not uniformitarians --would have so warmly accepted Darwin's group. (The anti-religious connection is, of course, obvious, but the Europeans were not so friendly to Darwin and were non-religious too). Then [1976] came the exposure that the famous letter had not been written by Marx at all and the mistake was traced back to its source in early communist revolutionary Russia. Marx could say once more "Je ne suis pas marxiste" (if he ever said it). I wonder whether he would also have said "Evolutionem non fingo." Probably he was content with two of the thrusts of Darwinism: materialism and historical progressivism. But enough of foundations, lest I have no energy left for treating of publishers. The lesson that publishers learned from the Velikovsky Affair was the same as a first-term convict learns in jail, how not to get caught a second time. The unfortunate victim of the lesson was any author who was preparing a book in the field. Macmillan Company dumped Velikovsky's book and Doubleday Publishers made a good deal of it over the years. All the nice people and the pundits and the heretics believed that Macmillan, Doubleday, and other publishers would have "learned their lesson" and a new age in publishing would dawn. Controversial books would not be discriminated against, and so on. To Deg (I hope that I am not giving him too much credit for saying so), this was utopian thinking, and he ought to know, being a utopian, a "realistic utopian," he insisted, by which he meant precisely a person playing a high risk game knowingly, because the game involved some worthy ideal. He said this to those who called his works on world order, "Kalos" and "Kalotics," utopian. Publishers, on the contrary, did not venture into catastrophism, nor make any money out of the "pseudo-science" or "fringe science" of catastrophes. Ransom's Age of Velikovsky was privately published, and when later published commercially, sold only modestly. Patten's works were published privately and did well. Deg's Velikovsky Affair was handled by two small, high-risk publishers and sold under 5,000 copies, and later in England sold another 10,000 copies. David Talbott's Saturn did not repay Doubleday its large author's advance. Melvin Cook's book, Prehistory and Earth Models, published in England, sold very quietly and modestly; it was technically written, but an "acceptance" would have sold many copies in college courses, technological industry, and the Scientific American's public. Hapgood's book on The Path of the Pole sold modestly. Milton's Recollections of a Fallen Sky failed to reach the American market from Canada. Henry Bauer's book on the Velikovsky Affair took six years to be published and a University Press did the job (Illinois); since Bauer found little of substantive value in V.'s work, one need not wonder how a pro-V. work would have fared in the same circles. Dorothy Vitaliano's anti-catastrophic book on disasters in geology (Indiana University Press) enjoyed only a small sale. So it is not being pro - or anti-catastrophism that sells, but books on the subject are either unsellable or the publishers will not bring them out or promote them properly. The most successful publisher attending to quantavolution was William Corliss' Sourcebook Project, a household concern, that culled the history of science and current reviews for worthy material, finding thousands, reprinting hundreds, all the while maintaining a nicely neutral position. What was true for book-publishers held also for magazine publishers. The only magazine with a general readership that gave sympathetic attention to quantavolution was Frontiers of Science, edited by Elizabeth Philips. It failed after several years because it was part of a conglomerate operation that used the bottom line to weed our unprofitable properties. The very small journals, playing to between 300 and 1500 subscribers were fully unprofitable. Yet without them, there would have been no means of advancing a viewpoint attractive to millions. By the rationale of laissez-faire economists this should not have occurred; in fact it is normal in the world of education and science. The contradiction between a society's need for creativity and the resources allocated to creativity is stark. It is further exaggerated in the inner organization of education and science where the more creative the work the less the outlets for it. New journals in the sciences often form out of failures of the reception system. Theoretical Physics was founded because some scholars could not get enough of their material into Physical Review. Deg founded P. R. O. D (Political Research: Organization and Design), to advance new ideas in political science and sociology; it later became the American Behavioral Scientist, which was markedly altered in format, approach, and contents when he gave up its editorship in 1965. One of Deg's students, Howard Smuckler, became editor of magazines of Ancient Astronauts and ESP; from the beginning they were given newsstand circulations of 200,000 copies, with the proviso that wild nonsense be given free rein. The most fortunately situated scholar in the country for communicating occasionally his ideas of quantavolution, sometimes subtly, at times explicitly, was paleontology Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University who wrote a regular feature for the magazine Natural History, published by the New York Museum of Natural History with a popular circulation reaching a million readers. Various publicists such as Sprague de Camp and Theodore Gordon gave chapters over to mocking or explaining Velikovsky, but their books were not greatly affected by these chapters. One of the best of the publicists was Fred Warshawsky who wrote Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe. Picking up Rene Thom's mathematical topological theory of catastrophism, presumably applicable in any field, he applied it nonmathematically, heuristically, in discussing the many works trending toward the quantavolutionary outlook. He undertook with V. a couple of long sessions that curled his hair and set him straight on what to say of V.'s achievements in an article for the Reader's Digest. Having escaped perdition, he went on to write a full book on catastrophes, ancient and modern, which was published by the Reader's Digest Press. This company made a distribution agreement with Harper and Row, which performed so poorly with his book that Warshawsky complained bitterly to everyone and achieved some promotional effort. The company then closed down, and Harper and Row stopped selling the book, returning its very large remaining stock. Then McGraw Hill bought rights to the book for its back list, to no effect. Over 8,000 copies were sold, but 17,000 copies were "remaindered" at a pittance. The New York Times ignored the book. Some favorable reviewing occurred. It went out of print after only several years. And please to note the way in which an author's "property" is kicked around. The situation, as I surveyed it, is that not one major publisher has in print a book on quantavolution, excepting Doubleday, Morrow, and Dell, all with Velikovsky, and excepting, too, the New American Library with a reprint of Francis Hitching's The Neck of the Giraffe, in which the head of the giraffe is quantavolution, the neck is the long disdainful connecting link, and the body is conventional biology. (For those who might think otherwise, I should say that Erich von Daniken is an "ancient astronauts" buff, not a catastrophist, except in mood. I say this because I am often asked what I think of von Daniken and I respond that he is not a quantavolutionary; he blithely propounds mysteries without worthwhile solutions, but he is, alas, a cosmic heretic. On October 31, 1982 (Halloween ) the 15 Paperback Bestsellers (trade) which were listed in the New York Times around the U. S. A. carried six (6) titles dealing with the cat, Garfield. The number one bestseller was "Garfield Takes the Cake," then, number 4 was "Here Comes Garfield," number 10 "Garfield Weighs In," number 13 "Garfield at Large," number 14 "Garfield Bigger than Life," and number 15 "Garfield Gains Weight." If Garfield were missing, Rubik's Cube would occupy several of its places, vying with books on diet. The NYT defines this class of paper backs as "softcover books usually sold in bookstores and priced at average higher than mass market." One cannot read Deg's notes and hear him talk without deriving an apocalyptic view of the publishing industry. "It is a doubly sick industry. It is economically sick and it is functionally sick. By 'functionally' I mean physically, ideologically, and morally. It is dominated by cheap nonpublishing money, coming from extravagant swashbucklers and conglomerates of merged and paralyzed units. Ownership is alienated from editors, editors from producers, editors from authors. It is characterized by some of the worst labor practices, witness to the shadiest deals, and engages in the thoroughgoing degradation or writers." This is the way he often spoke. He wouldn't say much and sometimes in a group or committee be quiet, abstracted, even appearing bored. Then suddenly he would be seized, and as if to make up for lost time and to persuade others that he was only speaking because what he was saying was being torn from his lips, he would hammer out the words, scalding rather than sweetening the atmosphere, so that when he finished, there was neither applause nor babble of dissent, but a pause, until someone evasively spoke around him, and when that happened he didn't insist upon his point but subsided for a good while. Deg could recite a long list of great writers who had put out their own books, he even claimed that most great writers did so. First of all, up until the late Eighteenth Century -- Franklin, Voltaire, the Encyclopedists -- every writer put out his own books, unless, after burying him, friends or relatives printed his work. In a marginal note to one of his late anatomical sketches, Leonardo de Vinci implored his "neighbors" to see to it that his works would be printed. The publishing racket (Deg's word, not mine) developed sweetly out of bookstores and printing shops where it belonged and should have stayed, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century Balzac was excoriating the thieves and profiteers of the business in an excellent novel, Illusions Perdues. Dickens, Dostoevski and Flaubert sweated to carry their novels first as serials in magazines. But where are the magazines, bad as they were, today -- they carry a single chapter, but usually the pain of editing a chapter for a magazine is damaging to both the author and his book. Is it names you wish? (And he would begin.) Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stendhal, Beatrix Potter -- yes, Peter Rabbit -- James Joyce (an angel helped), Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Wolfe, Andre Gide (The Immoralist issued in 300 copies), Sigmund Freud and, if you will, Velikovsky himself published his early pamphlets. Colette was published by her husband Willy who even stole her name as author. America's best autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was put out by the author. The myth of Thomas Wolfe is used continuously by publishers to show the unknown young writer discovered by the great fatherly editor of a conventional publishing company and led carefully to reveal and convey his beautiful achievements to the world of readers. Even this case is mythical, as the editor involved, Maxwell Perkins, tried to explain in a recent edition of Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. But the truth will never catch up with the lie until publishing circles come upon a similar myth to serve them. If Charles Darwin's Origins of Species sold out through a book store in 1859 it was because writing and printing were still for gentlemanly use and the book was not deposited behind a mass of their friends. Dammit -- nowadays you can't even sell a book to a friend! Besides there was a prurient and agnostic public altered to the sensationalism of the book. Surely you must know, too, that Darwin's thesis was already well-worn and agreed upon; he was selling evolution even though he didn't use the word and the book's raison d'‚tre was the silly mechanism of natural selection, which was nothing more than a watered-down Lamarckianism, a slogan for bird- watchers and garden clubs. It was an easy sale. Deg had one arrow in his quiver to fire at the now pathetically wounded publishers. They are frauds, announced he. They pretend to publish the books of the country. Ninety per cent of the serious writing, and I include even novels and poetry here, is put out by government presses of several types, by subsidized university presses, subsidized independent and university institutes, scientific associations, and self-help amateurs like myself. Further, much of the serious writhing put out by so-called independent publishing houses is subsidized, by insider deals, involving mutual back-scratching, agreements to arrange publication of one's editors, promotional devices such that no established book reviewer need fear his shit will go down the drain when there are people who will eat it, [I am sorry, but that is what he said], by quiet subsidies, by guarantees of sales, by tricky deals with film-makers, press agents, television companies, and corporations, and you name it. At this point I intended to escape Deg's diatribes by telling how he came to enter upon his writing campaign and then to publish his own works. Lest you think that such violent opinions as his come out of intense suffering and exploitation, let me once again remind you of Deg's character, acquired in earliest childhood: he could be and was often indignant about a person or an institution or a system, without being hurt by them and even while being helped. In a way, he was rather like his children's generation and the hippies, except that he had the forcefulness and discipline that produce alternatives; he seemed always to have ready a proposal for another way of doing things. In this way, he was more sprung from the nineteenth century utopians: Fourier, Brook Farm, St. Simon, Marx, Henry George, As you will see here, he didn't expect much, he didn't suffer greatly, he didn't mind sacrificing, and he did not dance a jig when he finished the job. I assure you once more of that great difference between Deg and V. Deg did not see himself as a victim; V. saw himself as a victim. Deg moved into the field of quantavolution slowly and then ever faster. This I would attribute to his heavy involvement's between 1962 and 1966 with the American Behavioral Scientist and the design and production of retrieval of bibliographic annotations in the behavioral sciences. During the same time, he was writing heavily in political science, especially on the reform of relations between Congress and the Presidency. After he turned from these in the period 1967 to 1972, he wrote Kalos : What is to be Done with Our World? Hired by Simulmatics Corporation, and given the assimilated rank of a general with "Top Secret" access by the Department of Defense, he spent a few weeks in and out to win over the Vietnamese people and to bolster the morale of their own troops.) The job led him quickly into urging measures that were too radical and diversionary for the forces, civilian and military, that were moving in an irresistible death- dance toward the ignominious withdrawal of the United States presence in Indochina. He was writing poetry and before flying to Vietnam in 1967 he collected his poems and put them to press as the Passage of the Year; some of them he framed in what he called an "eccentric," "super-sprung" rhythm. He gave a copy of the book to Harold Lasswell who said, yes, he had written poetry when young, at which Deg commented that poetry was more accessible to the senile than the juvenile. He gave a copy to Velikovsky who, it appeared, had published a small book of poems under the pseudonym of Immanuel Ram, in Russian, in 1934. V. read Deg's poems and used a quotation from them on one occasion to persuade Deg of a point. Suddenly it seemed that mankind was a secret crowd of poets. He then joined with a University instructor who had not studied directly with him, and had met in the annual Department reception, Nina Mavridis, a tough, emotional, polyglot petite blonde smartly turned out, whom he later married. They went in search of a Greek island house, and he bought a parcel of land on Naxos, which was then a quiet backward island, and there built the stone cottage facing across the straits to Paros. He turned to several of his former students, graduates, and "drop-outs" from the system, and together they organized an experimental college, L'Universite du Nouveau-Monde, and settled in for a hectic year upon the Alps of Valais, Switzerland. All the while, he visited Princeton, coming and going, keeping in touch with the Velikovsky circle there and with whoever of his immediate family happened to be home from schools and wanderings around the world. With the University of Switzerland closed down, the United States withdrawing from Indochina, his work on a new world order totally ignored, his family disassembled, efforts at reforms within New York University ending only in cosmetic changes, and resettled efficiently with Nina in an apartment of Washington Square Village, just across from one of his classrooms, and a block from his office, Deg drove through the resulting energy gap into the field of quantavolution. He completed two books of political science during this period, neither requiring heavy research but both of which, Politics for Better or Worse and the "lectures to the Chinese", Eight Bads, Eight Goods, he considered as "state of the art" philosophically, and innovative in format and perspective. Both were "successes," he thought: neither earned much money $18,000 in the first case, $3,500 in the second. His University teaching had never in his career cut very deeply into his time for study and writing, partly because he did not "pal around" with students and varnish their wasting time. Too, he avoided committee assignments that seemed useless, and had little need for generalized social encounter. During nine months of the year, he gave an average of twenty hours per week to straight pedagogical, work; the rest went into his projects -- editorial, political, pedagogical, consultative -- and writing. Wherever he had taught, including New York University, he was expected to be a "producer," to do research and writing in return usually for a lighter teaching and committee load. He was usually expected "to bring money into the University," which sometimes he did, and to find funds for his research and activities, which sometimes he did. He used his time fully and completely for these latter purposes, working year-round, seven days a week, for three to twelve hours. (obviously, everything did not "come easy to him," as so many acquaintances believed.) His journal slackened off, through the sixties and seventies, entries occurring only every several days on the average and even then deprived of events recited in their fullness. He rarely spent more than ten minutes on the day's newspapers; he watched television several hours a week; he listened little to music and rarely played his trumpet any more, but often was humming and whistling to himself. Except when reading a novel or a poem, he did not read in the conventional way. Reading was an instrument of research and writing. He would pounce upon a book or article and seek directly the point that he was addressing, which had made him pick up the work in the first place. If it wasn't helpful, he would put the work aside. He could rarely be trapped, for instance, by some lurid description of a disaster. At the rate of 100 pages an hour he could tell whether there was anything useful to him in a succession of books or articles. An issue of Science, though it might contain 100 pages, would ordinarily occupy 10 minutes, just enough time to see whether there was something of interest in it. He would however, spend hours on a relevant two-page article in a strange field -- a paleontological article using explicit chronometry, for instance, learning the method used, looking for the expected illogical turn or twist, the weak point in a piece which after all had been fashioned with extreme care, was the darling of the authors' eyes, and had been rigorously criticized by conventional readers. At first both current materials and ancient materials on quantavolution were not so easy to find. Stecchini was alone as supplier of references outside of V.'s works. As the network of scholars like Mullen, Juergens, Milton, Crew, Sizemore, Moore, Lowery, James and several dozen others came into the field the supply of references grew exponentially. Pens‚e, Kronos, The S. I. S. Review and Workshop and Corliss' Sourcebooks and Newsletter brought hundreds of citations to light. I cannot do less than say that the names of the hundred authors of the articles and notes in these magazines is the measure of 90% of the field. If screened for relevance and translated into quantavolutionary terms, several hundred more names would be added -- not that they would gladly accept being added -- from the conventional output of scientific books and journals. In a combination of disgust, impractical judgment, and worthy motive, he decided in 1977 to resign all obligations to teach and supervise dissertations and to be at hand for the various faculty meetings; he found the University ready to pay him a third of his salary to engage solely in research until he would arrive at the age of 63, after which he would be considered as fully retired. The agreement was soon followed by a considerable general inflation of the economy, and a reduction in foundation activities, so that he was constrained to stringent personal economy, not so evident on the surface, but oppressive in reality. He had no illusions about the interests of foundations and government research agencies in quantavolution and in fact received no help. He earned a little money here and there, whatever could be done rapidly without taking his money here and there, whatever could be done rapidly without taking his mind off of his quantavolutionary studies. He sold a piece of land on Naxos. He sold, too, a small house he had bought for his retirement, near Brown University where he had once taught and close friends still lived. These funds and more went into research costs -- typing, Xeroxing, travel -- and to the occasional support of his mother and other family members. Nina, although she finally earned her doctorate, and was a most effective teacher, could not get into and hold onto a position in one of the college systems of the New York area. Whatever money she had, she spent fully and equitably. This is no place to speak of her at length; she was everywhere in those years, but when Deg comes to tell of Naxos, it will be up to him to tell of Nina. By the middle seventies, she and Deg had split, and came finally to see one another as friends only, there on the island where she bought and remodeled two medieval Venetian homes and lived with her husband Peter whenever possible. Deg's first book in the Quantavolution Series, The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars was written in the early seventies. He had thought for several years that he should write a textbook on what he was then calling revolutionary primevalogy, but before he had settled among several outlines of the work and written a few passages, he reached back for a journal entry written while staying at Pythagoreion on the Island of Samos and decided to try out the new field with a case study. Pythagoreion, Island of Samos, July 12, 1968 I have come across and read for the first time closely and consciously the song of Demodocus at the house or Alcinous. How wonderfully it describes what Velikovsky said was the actual set of cosmic events of the Seventh Century before this era, of how bright-crowned Aphrodite loved the god of battle Mars-Ares, and how they repeatedly fucked "in the house of fire," whose master, Hephaistos, finally entrapped them in a net and put them upon a more pious course. The passage must be analyzed Word for Word: the parallelism is beyond coincidence; either Velikovsky wrote the myths of the Greeks, or something like the physical events he describes historically took place. The story referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer. It tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and danced for Ulysses. Deg showed his manuscript to Juergens who was surprised at its coincidence with his own electrical theory of the events, which was to appear ultimately as two articles in the magazine Pens‚e. V. would not read it. Deg wished to dedicate it to him. V. said let Bill Mullen read it and if he likes it, go ahead. Mullen did, very much. Cyrus Gordon liked it, but could not respond to the astrophysical scenario. Further he suspected Aphrodite to be Venus, not Moon. The English acquaintances of Deg got onto the manuscript when he submitted it to the publisher, Sidgwick and Jackson, who had published The Velikovsky Affair in England, and he showed it to them. They liked it, but in all conscience could not accept the identification of Aphrodite with the Moon, for they identified her instead with Athene, Ishtar, and the morning and evening star, Venus. This disagreement meant that the English group was ready to dispute an important point of Velikovsky for, in his application of the Iliad to the Martian disturbances of the seventh century, he had found Aphrodite joining with Ares in the Trojan War to fight against Athene. Whereupon, and for other reasons, Aphrodite was assigned to the Moon. Desertions were numerous on this score. When James published a critique of Deg's identification of the goddess, it stood without rebuttal, and Cardona, Rix and others were convinced of James's case. American publishers were not turned on by the Love Affair. W. W. Norton, through Brockway, said it was well written but not to their tastes. So it went with one publisher after another, Simon and Schuster, Dodd and Mead, Doubleday, Random House, Harcourt Brace, Stein and Day, Princeton University Press, Harper and Row, Atheneum, Sidgwick and Jackson, Free Press, and even the New York University Press (unless a subsidy were paid). Deg thought he should "toot his horn" perhaps, as his mother used to tell her boys, so he prepared a blurb about it. He made the Love Affair sound as if it might attract the masses, but publishers were quick to point out that the book was serious, learned, of dubious validity, and sophisticated: in a word, forget the masses; indeed, betake yourself to a university press. But Deg knew already the university presses were eager for wide publics, undercapitalized, dominated by editorial committees of the more conventional members of their faculties, and slow and painstaking to a fault. He visited Jerry Sherwood of the Princeton University Press. She returned the manuscript in time with the expected advice. Deg stopped peddling the book. He was too busy with the general work, Chaos and Creation, to carry on the sometimes interminable pingpong of serious publishing. Time after time over the next decade, he would pause in his work to recalculate the options of his predicament. Naive friends counseled him: "Any press would be happy to consider your books." A publisher encountered would say, cordially, "Let us see it by all means." Get it down to 160 pages -- less. No footnotes. One only, not really new, idea. The emerging rule seemed to be: "Never underrate the unfitness of readers, media, and publishers." Yet it was like a drug, this pushing one into the marketplace, or like television, One succumbed from time to time, had a bad trip, and came away cursing himself for not having avoided the encounter. The condition of the publishing industry in America was unbelievably bad; would that it were terminal. All that could be said of it was that it was freer than publishing in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, or for that matter in most other countries. It was as bad or worse than the political system of the United State in meeting its obligations, much worse than the educational system with all its weakness. But unhappy thoughts of this kind did not obsess Deg; they occurred often for a moment (as when he examined the book review section of the New York Times, or looked at a publisher's list). Long before, in the days when his work seemed ordinary, when his means of rewarding and insulting were conspicuously in readiness, publishing his books and articles was no problem. The society, however, was enveloped in the myth that the publishing process was a logical affair, constrained tightly by the message between the covers. A writer's fortunes were thought to vary with the quality of his message. So many useless and dangerous myths rule society! Like the myth among scientists of myriad readers perusing their article in a reputable scientific journal -- 10,000? 5000? 500? yes, 50 and feel lucky. Now, all of this jeremiad is preliminary to announcing that at certain point in time, probably it was in 1978, just after he began his final race against dwindling finances, Deg decided that he would, unless intercepted by an angel, proceed to complete his work and then by one means or another publish it himself. Somehow the money would be found, and he thought to publish it in Bombay, where he had connections with friends and a publisher, the Popular Book Depot, which had produced Kalos and Kalotics. One premise he maintained firmly: he would not be finally frustrated and incapacitated by the publishing system. Another premise was his delusionary Paternoster: that what he attempted might be great importance to mankind. It was the best work he could set himself to -- and who else could do it -- none whom he knew of -- and his other great object in life, a new political order of the world, offered at this time no opportunity nor chance of success. The decision was not easy, hardly definite in fact, because like many decisions he made, it was long foreseen and warmed upon a little burner in a recess of the mind. It was not an optimal solution, by any means. The myth, social binding, and conventions of publishing are so pervasive that none of his acquaintances thought this procedure wise, prudent, or even possible. All too poignant was his awareness that the controversial matter that he was writing would combine with its unorthodox publication into a hard prejudice against the books. Under such circumstances, more than a touch of megalomania is needed. He pushed ahead imprudently, erratically, and stubbornly, or so it seemed to others, and they were correct, but they could not see how such failings of character might add up to an achievement. He wrote everywhere and under all conditions on all sizes and kinds of paper with pencils and pens of any type, and now and then on typewriters, electrical, or a portable, mechanical one. He read in several libraries, bought very few books, was sent Xerox copies of many pieces by Sizemore, Milton, and others, corresponded, and ultimately had made notes on some hundreds of books and articles. These were often caught on the wing, and he was often exasperated upon completing a book to have lost a citation, forgotten the spelling of a name, left relevant pieces now in Greece, now again in New York. There is nothing special to recommend in his research and writing procedures except what one cannot anyhow imitate: a wide-cast unerring eye for the salient, the strong background of methodological -- especially epistemological -- thought and theory, a modest skill at writing, a great skill for synthesizing material, an inborn will to let nothing stand in one's way, a lifetime practice in doing much with little. Once in the while he got help; Donna Welensky, whom sometimes he paid for her typing and sometimes not, whom he came to love for her energy, efficiency, and ineffable kindness to the world, never mind her brawny blonde beauty. The latter half of the dozen strenuous years were dominated, physically speaking, by the presence of a quiet deep-voiced dark-haired, brown-eyed, French novelist whom he encountered first at Naxos, where she was joyfully spending a few francs that her publisher had let her have as a consolation for not publishing her latest book, The Paladin. With great difficulty for her assets were almost literally on her back, she obtained a visa to come to America, and thenceforth Deg took care of her, and she took care of him. In 1982, they married. They lived in New York City, at Princeton, in Washington, on Naxos, and in Paris, appearing more affluent than they were or pretended to be. They visited her ancestral village, Habsheim, between Basel and Mulhouse, they traveled to England, Italy, Hungary, and Canada. She loved the journeys and loved Deg and adapted quietly, imposingly, to the net of human ties and implausible projects of Deg with a broad, engaging and ever-ready smile. When Elisheva, sculptress forever, met her for the first time, she was awestruck at bones that made her strong hands ache for a chisel and hammer. "How did you find such beauty?" she asked Deg. She could be happier than anybody whom Deg had ever met, under the poorest conditions of life -- but then, as he often said to her, and she fully agreed, we are much better off than humanity is or has ever been or will be. In more than a decade from 1972 to 1983 Deg gave over perhaps no more than eight months to work outside of quantavolution. Almost all of these few months was spent consulting directly and indirectly with the National Endowment for the Arts with Carl Stover, a friend of thirty years standing. Given a general directive and promoted by Carl before Nancy Hanks and Livingston Biddle, directors of the Endowment, Deg wrote a number of sketches of what might be done to stimulate a broad range of cultural areas, but principally he committed a trenchant irony called "1001 Question on Culture Policy" in which using the format of a book of interrogations, he was able to say all that he wanted to say. The work was an implication that nothing intelligent and basic was being said about public policy on the arts and humanities. Stover even managed to obtain from the Ford Foundation a subsidy with which to send copies of the work to most prominent leaders of the organization and direction of cultural affairs of the United States. Copies were also distributed in Western Europe. The effects, so far as might be perceived, and disregarding the encomia that are easily aroused by techniques of publicity, were nil. Otherwise the quantavolution investigation progressed and enlarged grossly. By 1975 the basic Chaos and Creation was calving. The theory of Homo Schizo emerged and went one way,, ultimately two ways, in two volumes, one on the origins, one on human nature today. A great fragment fell out of Chaos and Creation and became a treatise on exoterrestrial aspects of geology, The Lately Tortured Earth. On a sojourn in Naxos there occurred an idea for an article explaining why the Pharaoh should have pursued the Jews in Exodus; quickly, stimulated by conversations with Anne-Marie, it transformed into a book of exhilarating discoveries and, in the end, God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus. He had already devised a theory of how the solar system might have enacted the set of quantavolutionary dramas which he had been uncovering and classifying. He wrote of it to Ralph Juergens. He found agreement there, and then he achieved the support of Earl Milton, Earl opted to come in on the enterprise of a book; Ralph became engaged, too, but hardly had Earl gone down to Flagstaff, Arizona, to go over their preliminary notes with him, than Juergens died suddenly, of a heart attack. Over several years, in Princeton, Washington, Manhattan, London, and Naxos, and by telephone and correspondence, Milton and Deg worked to complete the book. Its Index, in an unique format, which they named the Omnindex because it merged glossary, bibliography and key words, was finished at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D. C., on February 16, 1984. The Moon and Mars book was standing by for revision. The Burning of Troy, its title taken from its first easy on the calcinology of Troy IIg, was organized to contain studies, reprints, essays, and notes. The Divine Succession was taken up; its central theory, that all gods are of the same family, was put forward; an anthropological and psychological discussion of the major aspects of religion followed. Then, as Deg stood back, gazing anxiously and unproud into the manuscript, there came to him the idea of adding two new proofs of the existence of gods, and also the scheme of a catechism for whosoever might wish to contemplate a possible new religion alongside the old. There was left only The Cosmic Heretics, which I undertook to write. Its origins lay in Deg's intention, growing over some years, to write an autobiography in half-a-dozen volumes. He still nourishes the thought, cowering over the prospect of its passage through the gauntlet of fast- gathering, spiked-leather-fisted knights of time. But perhaps I can also do this job for him. In 1980 he sent off Chaos and Creation to India for production. Delays were many. Stephanie Neuman lent him $3000 to defray some of its costs. He paid her back two years later. Funds came in from the sale of the book through the mails to lists of friends and of purchasers of William Corliss' Sourcebooks. Corliss himself sold copies. But larger sums were needed. They came from an advance of Ben Gingold, a friendly architect who intended to purchase land in Naxos from Deg, from cashing in 10% of the annuities that were to take care of his retirement, from yet another property sale, and from a personal bank loan. Household economies were the rule. The logic was simple: a small saving enabled thirty letters to be sent out, thirty letters might elicit a couple of orders. Deg and Aim moved into a dingy little brick house on an old street of Trenton, in a neighborhood that sociologists call by the menacing term "marginal." Publishing in India was becoming costly. The Indian rupee which should have lost its international value, maintained itself steadily against the dollar, letting India pay its debts at a loss of export, but then it exported little anyhow. Nevertheless, Deg let himself in for a third round with Indian printers, sending off in early 1982 the bulky manuscript of The Lately Tortured Earth. He rationalized his private publishing company in a memo to readers, but then decided not to print it in his book. Here is a better place for it, so I am carrying it: A Note on this Edition The Edition is intended to bring the materials of Lately Tortured Earth to the attention of the small number of scholars and students who are directly involved in research into quantavolution and catastrophe. It has not undergone the ideal processing of several expert readers, critics, and editors. It has been published for the very purpose of arousing comment and criticism. Four major reason occur for this procedure: There are inordinate delays and difficulties in publishing through the natural channels of the trade book and textbook publishers and university presses. This book and others in the quantavolution series have already been in manuscript form for some time. It may be better, therefore, to publish the work promptly in this manner than to let more years slip by until finally some convinced entrepreneur will be bold enough to undertake its publication. Since the work enters upon numerous fields of sciences and humanities, expert readers would be required, a veritable conference of critics, and, logically in each case, a possibly unfavorable critic and a possibly favorable one. Many copies, much time, and thousand of dollars in fees would be needed. Based upon the author's experience with the editorial services of some prestigious publishers, the cost is too high to pay. Publishing the book on the author's responsibly alone will enable hundreds, instead of a score, of experts and students to weight the validity and utility of the work. Third, authors of unusual theories and controversial types of evidence are strangers to specialists of most relevant fields. Foundation support, university backing, and publishers' advances are practically impossible to obtain, all of which might otherwise be used to avoid editorial, factual and linguistic peccadillos and to comb more efficiently the library stacks for materials on "non-fields." Fourth, new high technology has come to publishing, but there is a shameful disparity between the high-level technology abundantly available for the most useless kind of publications and deeper problems of human culture and natural history, most of which necessarily occupy the attention of only a few persons. While university presses, never an ideal solution, deteriorate and while commercial publishers vie for scrapulous material, and while publication technology vies for faster addressing and delivery of junk mail and selling computers for games and word processors to enchant the bored secretary, those to whom consigned the progressive evolution of culture are hard put to survive, assemble, and operate the tools of their trade. We hope, in sum, that our readers will be fully critical, yet tolerant of our not so sleek editorial packaging. Delays loomed up in India with Lately Tortured Earth so he turned to domestic production. Once again he had to review all of the possibilities for cheap book production in America. His initial constraints were several. He needed a secure conventional binding, preferably cloth or sewn. He could not publish in a large format, say 8 1/ 2 x 11 inches, because he wanted to put the book before the reader in a familiar form. He needed a bookish type font, an even right margin, running heads and other "luxuries" that American readers had come to expect and demand. He wished to insert many illustrations; this would be costly if they required redrawing or screening. He observed the rush of new technical systems, computer memory word processing equipment, "perfect" glue binding machines, automatic cameras, small presses of various kinds and alternative Xeroxing machines. None of the products and suppliers with whom he treated had a clear perception of what his needs were and he found himself lecturing them about the greediness and unresponsiveness of industry that is set up to treat deferentially the unconscionable matter of junk mail and the industrial wordage of the culture -- and he would sound off sometimes on the gamut of the intellectual pariahs, the serious writers, artists, and scientists. From time to time he would play with the design of an ideal system of personal and small-group publishing at a cost the humble creators of culture would afford. He put aside consideration of systems of microform production and distribution, because the fast culture was still too slow to accept them. He foresaw in the meanwhile a word processor with software for book-setting; a memory capable of handling a book as a whole; software for intelligent spelling and indexing and storing and addressing networks of acquaintances and potential customers; big readable screen; means of composing tightly and finely; a tape that could be stored and would feed a composer that could be slow but must print out a handsome book font and a generally useful caption font. Then the output, automatically paginated, would be pasted up on cards, the cards then printed in multiple copies on a reliable copying machine that could handle from one to a hundred copies of four pages (11" x 17") at a time, after which a collating machine could fold and merge the pages into a book that would then be placed into a thermal, glue-binding machine, capable of handling up to a 500-page text with its covers, be they cloth or card. Next the book would be trimmed, then, if cloth-bound, jacketed with a paper that had been produced by the same system. The small edition, by which Deg meant from fifty to five hundred copies, would be shelved until sold and shipped. Meanwhile the announcements would be coming out through the same system and would be addressed by the automatic print-out of the stored customer and complimentary lists. Small gadgets and work routines would be devised for the interfaces of the system components. The whole publishing company would fit in a garage or basement comfortably. It should not cost more than $20,000, including initial supplies, and a year's maintenance contract. It should be affordable with a $2000 down payment with the balance plus interest in extended payments over a 36-months period. Facilities for the bookmaking announcements, or its equivalent in magazine and pamphlet production would be provided; actually a much larger output would be possible. The system he envisioned is quite feasible technically. Beginning in 1981, Deg could set forth the named components and locate their suppliers to provide a complete system in the range of $30,000, but the system would have uneconomic, inefficient, superfluous, and flawed elements. The field was moving rapidly. At some moment, it could be brought together and a revolution in publishing accomplished. Or rather, what would happen is that the great majority of thousands of creative groups of the nation would cut themselves off effectively from the commercial and university press publishers, building firmly and at a cost they might afford the printed communication network which they needed if they were to survive. When a company called the Who's Who of Contemporary Authors circularized him, asking the usual information and adding a request for "words from the wise," he wrote (May 18, 1981): SIDELIGHTS: "Two futurisms for the debased and desperate intelligentsia: A) With the decadence and collapse of the publishing business, creative writers should discover how to publish themselves and reach their own special audience; commercial publishing is 95% an exploitative delusional myth. B) With the decline and collapse of the existing world system, the free intelligentsia should cut back on writing just anything for money or prestige and begin to assume responsibility for picturing and propagandizing a revolutionary new world order." He never got around to seeing whether they printed it. Nothing approaching a new full mini- publishing system was achieved by Deg with the Quantavolution Series. The name "Metron" meaning "Measure" was revived from a personal reporting, consulting, and publishing company he had employed mostly in the 1950's and 1960's to put out the American Behavioral Scientist, the Universal Reference System, and books and reports. Now it was to be the name of the first quantavolutionary publisher. The means of publication were only half-new, a melange of all ordinary systems. Word-processing with photo-composition by large machines, Compugraphic composition, and old hot-type linotype systems and by already old-style small offset presses. Bindings ranged from Smyth-sewn cloth-covered board binding to new compact "perfect" thermal binding. Deg designed all the covers and the format, under heavy constraints of format, color, and costs. The printing and publishing industry was in a technological and marketing revolution and it was annihilating the old breeds of manuscript-evaluator, copy-editor, proof-readers, and designer. All of these operation now were more expensive and provided less reliable and competent services. Deg arranged much of the composition, printing, and binding with Rick Bender of the Princeton University computer center and with the University's Printing Services. They became adept at running small editions in the interstices of time that occur with a large computer and photocompositor. In all, the labor of his wife and himself as designers, editors, typist, clerks and managers of production and distribution, would have cost $65,000 to purchase as services on the open market. Direct research and overhead costs (actually paid out or otherwise absorbed) came to about $60,000 over the whole time; direct production costs amounted to $41,500; early mailings and advertising cost $6,000. Without any allowances for the author's time or advances against royalties (he being the author), the total real cost amounted to $172,500. The total number of books produced was only about 6,000, and many of these were not intended for sale. The editions were numbered. The average real (but not cash) cost per book, then, not including any compensation for the author, amounted to $28.80 per copy. When I spoke to him before turning this page over to the printer (taking care not to be seen laughing) the returns had totalled $7,500. He expected receipts to reach $30,000 in a year's time and finish off the balance of immediate direct costs, $17,500, during the second year. This would also exhaust the first edition copies. The main chance of compensating for the $125,000 of other non-monetary but poignantly real costs would be to sell rights for new editions to other publishers As for the royalties of the author, in our simulated account here, these would have to wait until further new editions were issued, and were ticketed for archival expenses. Apparently the avant-garde or heretical author is frustrated whether by the publishing business or in his own efforts to reach out and communicate. Deg was continually irritated by the ignorance of the intelligentsia concerning the engine rooms of the ships carrying them. They are brainwashed by the language of Hollywood, in the markets of best- sellers, and in the display quantities of ads of rich corporations. The intellectuals, with few exceptions, inflict upon their creative brethren the oppressive standards of the rotten rich -- fame, money, connections. Dick Cornuelle and Deg enjoyed examining some of the exquisite typography, color-drenched illustrations, and perfect printing that went into annual reports of companies which had bought dearly Cornuelle's more than ample writing talents. No expense, no technology, no skill was spared to convey to some thousands of barely interested shareholders and stockbrokers how well or badly the managers had run their affairs during the year. The annual report, no matter how expensively published, was but a trifle in their operating costs of the year. Yet it would have covered the costs of publishing beautifully fifty creative works. Where are all these creative works? Is that the objection? Most of them are abortions of a culture of intellectual and science prostitution. They do not appear because they cannot be carried to full term. They do not appear because they expire too in their creator's archives. And this is why Deg, as he came to the end of the Quantavolution Series and I near the end of telling its history, began to harangue his family and intimates to set up an Institute for Creative Archives. A billion dollars a year, he claimed, is the cultural loss to the American nation of the death of the archives of its creative workers. This was a real loss, not registered in the unselective National Economy's Accounting System. He wanted to do something about it. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 5: } {Q - } {C Chapter 16: } {T PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIXTEEN PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION "Life is like an endless procession, long since begun, which we join as it passes by." So comes down to us a saying of Pythagoras. V. didn't mind joining the procession but he wanted to be seen carrying the largest idol of science. This sentiment led him to understate the height of the people walking before him, as well of those walking alongside. The recounting of one's precursors has in it an element of snobbery, like the genealogical research that discovers barons but not brigands, big shots rather than bums. V. was especially careful to admit no disgraceful ancestors and came near to the point of acknowledging no one; pari passu he would not recognize any contemporary descendants of non-existent ancestors. This led him into an awkward position where, on the one hand, he was extolling the observations of ancient catastrophists of religion and natural history but disdaining the multitude of their descendants who were equally impressed by ancient catastrophism; he lost sight of most of the world's people when accusing mankind of a collective amnesia of ancient catastrophes, focusing his mind upon the uniformitarian intelligentsia of modern times. He was loath to draw sustenance from and give thanks to the long line of Christian defenders of the historical and catastrophic accuracy of the Bible, whose works on subjects such as evolution and geology were, for their times, as good as his own in Earth in Upheaval. He was unfriendly to religiously committed writers who pursued parallel paths and sought to ignore them. When Donald Patten, who had published an extensive and substantial scientific work on the Biblical Flood in 1966, was introduced to him at a home reception in Portland around 1972, V.'s first words were spoken angrily: "You are trying to destroy me, but you will fail in the end!" So relates Patten and there is no reason to doubt him, especially when he adds that a while later V. returned to him and apologized. Says Patten: While I view Ron Hatch as both an associate and proteg‚, as we have developed our model of the dynamics of ancient cosmic upheavals, Velikovsky viewed me as an unwanted proteg‚, not to be encouraged. He seems to have resented the fact that I disagreed with his conclusion in part, and he did not acknowledge or consider that I agreed with him in many ways. Often criticized as he was (and many times unfairly), Velikovsky regarded me as yet another critic trying to destroy his work. He was uncomfortable with my evangelical, Christian faith; I was comfortable with his Zionist bias; many evangelical Christians support Israel strongly, and I am one of them. Patten was a geographer, hailing originally from Montana. In 1973, he published a second book, "The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes," all of which events Deg found acceptable in the history of the millennium after -1450 B. C. Deg purchased them in London in 1976 through a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. In them, he found stimulus and information. Before then, he had heard only a few derogatory remarks about the books. Patten and his collaborators, of whom the most prominent were Ronald Hatch and Loren Steinhauer, were fully committed to astral catastrophism and built a complete succession of scenarios around orbital intersections of Mars and Earth, beginning with the deluge of Noah. (At first Mars was exculpated for the Deluge but now Patten would implicate it then and there as well.) Patten's admiration of V.'s work, which he expressed most strongly in an article of 1982, did not extend to accepting the participation of planet Venus. He presented the Deluge in an unusual structural form; generally his work has this geometrical structure of thought. Like Deg, he was prone to set up categories and lists. He developed also a short-term calendar of the ages. His brief but friendly criticisms of V. were threefold: that V. was over --influenced by Freud and prone to accept too many evolutionary and uniformitarian doctrines, that he was unquantitative and unsystematic in his geology, and that V. was overconcerned with his critics. I cannot dispute Patten, because these same several views emerge from our own pages as well. Patten's books, which he himself published, circulated widely and well over the years, and hundreds of thousands in due course watched a 60-minute filmstrip of his ideas presented in English and other languages. He could not be said, however, to have conformed to the ruling formula in Christian Evangelism, which was determined by Henry M. Morris and the leaders of the Creation Research Society, who held to an age of 10,000 years for the world, therefore constraining creationist science greatly. Deg was next in line of constraints, with his 14,000 years for a holocene period full of quantavolutions, including lunar fission, nor could he believe that the Judaeo-Christian God had laid down this constraint; it was miserably self- imposed with full blame unto himself. Still he was grateful for the works tendered him by the creationists and, unlike V., felt no need to disavow them. V. cited with relish ancient predecessors, but when it came to citing modern scientific ones such as Georges Cuvier, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Donnelly, Hoerbiger, and Bellamy, his lines were niggardly, rather derogatory, and somewhat aside from the point of their predecession. When accused in a letter to the New York Times (May 7, 1950) of having taken wholesale from Hans Hoerbiger, an older contemporary, V. rightly answered with details of their divergences and Hoerbiger's failings. But here, as elsewhere, V. held to a narrow view of what constituted the procession of life and science, and precession. V. had come upon Donnelly's Ragnarok in 1940 at the New York Public Library and was depressed by the discovery, according to his own words. Thomas Ferte published in 1981 an account of the numerous fore-shadowings in Donnelly's widely known work of less than a century before. But then V. unsportingly downgraded Donnelly. I have earlier discussed the remarkable case of Beaumont, whose claims were so similar but whose method so differed from V. 's. I mentioned that V. noted to himself that Beaumont must have gotten his ideas from V. by telepathy (though the reverse should be more true, if any credence were to be given telepathy). Discovery of V.'s belief in "telepathy" amused Deg. He was reminded of Hans Kloosterman, the catastrophist geologist leader, whom Deg had joshed for decrying V. as fanciful while himself espousing telepathy. V. might well have agreed with Kloosterman's explanation of the uses of telepathy to Deg, in a letter of May 5, 1976 from Rio de Janeiro: Telepathy is not irrelevant to my main line of investigation, because: a) Telepathy is possibly important in evolution (see p. e. "The Living Stream" of Alister Hardy); b) The biosphere interacts with the lithosphere. And what holds for telepathy holds even more for dowsing, which involves rocks and ground water and ore bodies. When Greenberg published in 1981 a posthumous note of 1948 by V. on precursors, he reacted too strongly "to put the lie to the idiotic and petty criticism of certain people (e. g. James Oberg) who have accused Velikovsky of failing to mention 'his antecedents' --particularly Whiston, Donnelly, Hoerbiger, and Bellamy -- as recently as the Fall issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, a trivial publication with debunking pretensions." Then Greenberg advanced three other works that V. might have mentioned, provided he had come upon them, Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis (1833-60), Comyns Beaumont The Mysterious Comet (1932), Harold T. Wilkins, Mysteries of Ancient South America (1945). Neither Greenberg nor V. mentioned Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, a most important predecessor, as I think V. would have granted. Deg carries this story in his journal: Deg's Journal, November 4, 1972 I then spoke to Livio [Stecchini]. Did Velikovsky know about Boulanger when you brought his name forward? No, he replied. When I gave him my draft paper to read, he said afterwards that that was the one thing he learned from it, because he didn't like the paper. This was in the spring of 1963. I asked L. where he found Boulanger. In the Princeton Library. I probably picked up his name as an Enlightenment scientist. I am relieved. I have been pursuing an unpleasant task. V. does not cite Boulanger, who is a predecessor in that he ascribed a variety of religious beliefs to actual human catastrophes. Yet V. cites an immense number of sources and combed the literature thoroughly. I recollect V. telling me not long ago that Boulanger was a predecessor, the most important one -- not a cause, note well, he didn't say he had read Boulanger. I wondered why he bothered to tell me this. When one is suspicious, of course, one looks hard at any clue. No matter that I admire V. greatly and like him as a friend; one has to chase down a suspicion that he might pull the "silent-footnote" technique on a causal as against a merely chronological predecessor. Another precursor of V. (and of course Deg) was Howard Baker a geologist who first mentioned Venus as a possible intruder into Earth's space sheath, but had much to say concerning the Moon. Again I resort to Deg's Journal: Washington, February 19, 1979 Yesterday Ami and I spent the day at the Library of Congress to clean up the last of the bibliography and footnotes of Chaos and Creation. It is tedious and often unrewarding. Yet I located a copy of Howard Baker's mimeographed book of 1932, another copy of which had been stolen from the Princeton University Library, The Atlantic Rift, and 2 articles by Marcel Baudouin from 1916 on paleolithic astronomical symbols, especially the Pleiades. As a bonus, there was a pamphlet from Baker's hand, of 1954. So far as I know, only the one sentence, by Walter Sullivan in his 1975 book of Continents in Motion, has ever been addressed to Baker's work, and that [was] a breezy reference in passing, obviously intended to show that anybody could be a predecessor of Velikovsky. V. himself said that he had heard of the book, probably from Sullivan, but when he searched for it, it was gone. I must ask Sullivan some day what assistant dug it up for him. Baker's work is professional and brilliant, he says that he was working in the field from 1909 to 1954. I shall try to discover more about him. Apparently only 106 copies of the book were mimeographed, and perhaps less were distributed. He argues that Pangea was an all-land Earth, that the moon was pulled in the Mesozoic from the Pacific by a planet now missing, that prior to this, Venus may have interacted violently with Earth, and that the ocean basins were once empty and are now filled with waters from a late disintegration of the same planet (now probably the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter) that had earlier caused the Earth's crust to erupt the moon. There is, in other words, a marvelous correspondence between Baker's ideas and my own, and his method of reasoning, his very mentality, is close to my own. He sees the same things on the globe. And he saw all of this before the flood of information of the past 50 years from oceanography, and when continental drift theory was held in contempt by American geologists. He does not use legendary material but says reasonably and in measured tones that it can be applied and may support his theories; perhaps had he set a more recent date for the eruption and fissioning of the continents, he would have been able to use the legendary material about which he may have known. V. had found in legend brief evidence that the Moon was young in the sky. He published it in 1973, claiming that the Moon had been captured, a Hoerbiger idea, and showing no awareness of the large quantity of legendary and geophysical evidence that H. S. Bellamy had brought to bear on the capture theory in several books, especially in Moon, Myths, and Man (1936). The main reason why V. dismissed the fission-eruption hypothesis was saying that such a catastrophe would have been too destructive: "since human beings already peopled the Earth, it is improbable that the moon sprang from it; there must have existed a solid lithosphere, not a liquid earth. Thus it is more probable that the moon was captured by the earth." On several occasions Deg would say to V. that he was pursuing affirmatively the theory that the moon was wrenched from the earth in the time of man. V. had no interest in discussing the question. He offered no objection. He would grunt some vague expression like "You are working much, I see..." when Deg would say "Just look at the Pacific Basin...." and then move on the another topic. That he didn't object seemed to Deg a kind of nihil obstat. The mystery of the purloined book of Baker was unsolved. Deg wrote Walter Sullivan one time asking where he had obtained the reference to Baker's work, but received no reply. Deg made a last-minute change in his manuscript to credit Baker's work, not that he believed in credit per se but that he was happy to find like-minded company in the Pythagorean procession of life. The idea of "precursors," believed Deg, was about as slippery, nonsensical, and morally disturbing as the idea of prior claims in science. In this I certainly agree with him. We know little about how a fruitful hypothesis is achieved and developed. Merely applying words will not help; what are the operations? And he goes on to explain: Synonyms for "precursor" might be forerunner, pioneer, predecessor, ancestor, scout, forebears, progenitors, inventor, creator, leader, conductor, pacesetter, guide, steersman, pointer, mercury, bellwether, and pre-centor. Let us keep "precursor" which is an empty enough vessel to fill with what we want. What do we want to say? The relation between writer B. at T1, to writer V. at T2 is such that V. has heard --forgetfully heard -- did not hear of B. V. has arrived at Proposition "M" that is 90% identical (as it operationally describes a set of defined events) with a Proposition "N" of B. V. has arrived at Proposition "M" by employing the same method as B., or did not employ the same method, or did not use any method, or employed a method to arrive at Proposition "M" whereas B reveals no method for arriving at "N". Suppose V. takes "M" from B's "N." Does he get no credit for perceiving it? Yes, some, you say. But who gets the credit as precursor to V. who was the cause of V.'s perceiving "N" or of reading B? His parents, teachers, colleagues; his type of mind, preparation, briefing, search discipline? His wife for driving him to the library, for cooking food that stimulates the imagination? The librarians over the years? And what of the precursor of B who may have directly or indirectly provided him with "N"? We cite Aristotle, knowing he stands for that stimulates the imagination? The librarians over the years? And what of all the people who knew and conveyed "N" between B. at T1, and V. at T2, but whom V. did not know about? Would not V have thought of "M" anyway, and is not the decision to cite "B" as a precursor a socially acceptable choice? Horse thieves are unlikely to appear in genealogies and discredited writers are unlikely to be cited as predecessors. Whether "B" here is Boulanger or Beaumont will make a difference. Deg can testify to this statement; he felt better, and he knew his critics would be more accepting, if he acknowledged Boulanger and did not acknowledge Beaumont as a precursor on one or another point. Boulanger is farther back in time, and more conventional than Beaumont, who seized upon certain quite incredible ideas. I have scarcely begun to discuss the ramifications, doubts, dilemmas, tricks of the mind, and tactics of the writing scholar. We have been talking of a single skimpy proposition "M" and "N". Suppose "M" and "N" represent averages of many propositions, then the way in which they are combined, the theory behind their selection, and the style with which they are conveyed are only several of the numerous conditions that may render even a close correspondence between "M" and "N" whether single or an average of a multiple nearly meaningless. So V. was accident-prone with precursors. It was quite unnecessary. The absurd attempt of critics to pretend that what he said was not only false and anyhow not new could be taken seriously only by fools. But as I have shown here time and time again he seemed to think that knowledge came in gobs, and he had produced some gobs, and had to defend them against theft by others. Who were V.'s precursors, I asked Deg, the truth now, and nothing but the truth. Precursors were many, he replied. All the ancients were precursors. Beginning with Renaissance times, some score of major precursors have worked. Of these, directly, V. took from Whiston, Donnelly, Bellamy, Brasseur de Bourbourg, and perhaps innocently or amnesiacally from Beaumont and Hoerbiger. After 1962 he probably took from many people of his circle, both directly and from their references, like Stecchini with Boulanger and Juergens with Bruce, or Schorr on the Dark Ages and Mullen on the Pyramid Texts, but he was writing little after 1962. On the matter of human psychic origins, he took from Freud directly and from others probably as currents of thought, the psychoanalysts especially. And of course, he was getting a great deal of material from his opponents; we must never forget that. He was a sad man when the Apollo Moon program was cut back. He used Sagan's material on the Venus greenhouse effect to dispute the matter. But I tell you it doesn't matter -- not to science, not to the truth of what he is saying, not to me -- only to the question of how big a hero was V. -- how many scalps on his belt are really his own prizes. Did V. ever use anything of Yours, I asked Deg. Perhaps, but I couldn't say. Yes, definitely, he used me to figure out what was happening sociologically to his interests. He soft-pedaled certain of his views on collective amnesia, on anti-semitism, on the wrongness of others like the English heretics, on the inheritance of acquired traits, and such kinds of matters when I was around, though this cannot be perceived in his writings. I am not speaking of tactical advice in his self-defense, of course. All in all, practically nothing. And you, I asked, what did you take from him? Everything I could, Deg answered. I got very little out of conversations, but a great deal from his writings. But I wish to make one point clear. Although V. was my precursor, predecessor, forerunner, etc. I did not accept V. on anything, except for a time his reconstruction of Egyptian history after, say, 800 B. C., and this because it seemed irrelevant to most of my interests. Not until I realized that V. was destroying his own 8th century catastrophic history by moving kings too far into modern times did I become worried and stop accepting that set of events. What I mean by "accepting," he continued, is taking for granted, and not reconstructing the same structure alongside his structure. "Accepting" is what, say, a paleontologist does who has a fossil ape and gets it dated at 12 million years by a laboratory on potassium-argon dating and accepts this as his date. "Accepting" is taking a cloth made by someone else, before going on to embroider it. Everything I took from V. I examined and took apart and put together again. I guess you could call it "factory rebuilt." I did not deny him, underrate him, or even disagree with him seriously and often. However, I was building a much larger, more systematic, broader, more scientoid model. I tell you frankly, I had in mind to supersede him. Did you succeed? Yes, Deg said. How? Like I told you -- putting all that I could of his machine into a larger, more systematic, and broader model. I swung the whole mass of ideas and evidence into a hypothetical model -- nothing was true; it simply could well be true. Everything is swung into position for testing; logically, empirically, comparatively. V. worked like a detective who is looking for a culprit, there was no crime! And if there were, who is the culprit becomes a sociological question, always plural. And I am always suspicious of the detective, too; maybe he staged the crime! Well, I said, dubiously, how does it happen that your writing often races along breezily and confidently? It's matter of style, he said, and of necessity. I am confident of what I am saying, believing that I have put proper limits on it. There is a characterological element in it; I've always written that way, hammering along like a thumping heart, or the old diesel motor of a caique. There's something else, though, purely for the sake of the reader. There is a limit to how many times you can use the word "tends to" or "may" or "on the average" or "holding all other factors constant" in place of "is" or "does". That's one kind of problem; a writer shouldn't carry his miasma of doubts to the extent that he is never clear; actually, every sentence you utter distorts the reality of which it speaks. Also, when, after having defined Yahweh and Moses and the nature of their "communications," I may be saying "Yahweh then speaks to Moses," I hope that it is understood that this statement of mine is subject to the prior definition of all three keywords, "Yahweh," "speaks," and "Moses." But the total posture of my work is different. V. accomplished marvels of detection in myth and legends. Also in history. He sets up a contradiction or confusion, then puts forward his resolution. Yet ordinarily he is not self-conscious, about his logic, method, and epistemology. He was a practitioner and an empiricist. By contrast, there must be hundreds of pages on the method of myth analysis and anthropological culture analysis in my writings. Onetime, V., in an unusually frank conversation with Wolfe, Milton, and Rose -- at the same set of meetings in fact that produced the euphoric letter that I described in the chapter on Holocaust and Amnesisa -- denounced the coining of words as the tactic of crackpots, and then confessed that he had coined a word; it was "introgenesis." It meant that "everything wishes to make everything else to its own fashion." Existence, whether animal, plant, or even celestial and inorganic bodies, operates by this imperative, to take whatever it encounters, digest it, and reconstitute it with oneself. Introgenesis was marked by him to become the key word in his philosophy. It would have become my philosophical system, he said, if I had not come upon Worlds in Collision. Everything wants to swallow up every other thing. When this burst of philosophical confidences was conveyed to Deg, he wondered at it -- it seemed so meaningless -- and only years later, when he heard a full statement of it, did he appreciate that V., without realizing it, was simply coining a word (typically he credited words with substance) which referred to his own immense narcissism, the same narcissism that he urged all psychiatrists to fish up from their patients at the beginning of analysis. The sole coinage of the realm was to be one's own. This wish seems to go hand in glove with the wish for unassailable proof of the purest assay of gold in the coin. V. as he grew old appeared to be ever more hopeful that some one critical test would occur, some grand fact, that would prove him right. The attitude became at times an obsession in that he would disregard problems or proof that lacked this capability. This explains why he became barely interested in myth while hanging upon every new discovery in space. A fully professional intellectual such as he should have known that there is a) no proof of right, b) no single right, c) little chance that right on a single test would erase wrongs on others, but, too, sociologically, d) one's opponents are not likely to define right in one's own terms, e) they are not inclined to come to grips at one's strongest point (even though ideally this would seem proper), f) they will seek to recognize someone else as the originator or predecessor of the chosen point (creating a new issue and argument of an undefined kind). V. was not alone in this regard; he had supporters who worked hard to establish him as champion predictor of the one right critical test results. Still it didn't work. It seems that all three behaviors join together in an authoritarian character: the ultra- sensitivity to "priorities of claims" to which I referred before, the anxiety over precursors, and the hope for the single critical test. In all of them we discover the intolerance of ambiguity which is a strong trait of the well-researched "authoritarian character" in psychology, and Deg alludes to the research in several of his early writings. There is, too, in all of them, an aversion to the close proximity of others, to a trespass upon one's possessions, a need to define exclusive boundaries. Dislike of ambiguity is not only "authoritarian" but also "scientific" by the way, for which the antidote is pragmatic operationism, a subject for another essay. Perhaps it is time to venture a clearer statement. How did Deg and V. diverge from their basic narcissism, so that V. fiercely defended his claims whereas Deg untypically and diffidently recollected his claims after dispensing them like the money of a drunken sailor? Both men, encouraged by their early models, commanded unusually strong energies that they used to conquer their existential fears by creating an independent self, a self not dependent upon others, that would take in the world and refuse to let the world include them. But then V., to enhance his primary ego clutched, contained, and possessed his aberrant egos, his poly-ego, whereas Deg dispersed his ploy-ego hoping and expecting dividends to return. The result was the formation in V.'s case of an authoritarian character, in Deg's case an anti- authoritarian character. (I trust that you will not be put off by the fact that V. had to attack the scientific establishment and that Deg sometimes liked authoritarian causes(" universal national service") and people (such as V.) The authoritarian character led to predispositions to monolatrous, monarchical, and presidential forms, on V.'s part, while the anti-authoritarian character led to polytheistic and republican forms on Deg's part. On V.'s side, the same character ran continuously the risk of enhanced paranoia; on Deg's part the risk was hypercritical reformism. I shall not elaborate upon the distinctions farther here, but a rough example may suggest the effect. I selected six well-known historical figures (there is no use in comparing the two men with the cop on the beat, their local congressmen, or others whom you have not known): Noah, Moses, Stalin, Trotsky, Theodore Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle. I asked a couple of persons who knew both V. and Deg to assign each famous character to one or the other, on grounds of relative nearness. V. ended up with Moses, Stalin, and de Gaulle; Deg was assigned Noah, Trotsky, and "Teddy" Roosevelt. I had, of course, predicted those assignments. The test works out even better by using a scale of "nearness" from 1 to 10. "Hypercritical" is relative to the standard of evaluation. Deg was uncomfortably aware that by normal practice he was hypercritical, but that by logical and rationally instrumental measures he may have been no more than properly critical. He was elated the first time he saw a sign in a printing shop saying "If things look confused around here, that's because they are." Not only were matters everywhere in worse shape than were admissible, but the only intelligent comment one could make all too often had to begin at least with a negative, and he felt, which I think was true, that he rarely failed to come up with a subsequent constructive resolution. Moreover, the line between critical analysis and hyper-criticalness was often too indefinite to bother with. Furthermore, was he not equally critical of himself whom he liked exceedingly well? Now the same kind of self-justification was possible for V. Was it not true that most conventional scholars and scientists were out to get him? Were they not making of him a target for the release of all too many hostilities toward what he represented, an independent, unprotected proud figure of opposition? Didn't the humanists turn him over to the scientific crowd, and the scientific crowd kick him back among the humanist crowd, each proclaiming that he had no place among them? So he was then, a heretic, stimulated continually along the dimension of paranoia. And a goodly number of his supporters, several of whom were close to him but the majority of whom were out in the public, were also exercised in their paranoid dimension and felt better to be able to attach their paranoias like tentacles to such a strong defensible stone. A great difference between Deg and V. was that whereas V. took the greatest pride in being unbending, determined and assured, Deg was continually seeking knowledge through self- examination and the admission of sins and weaknesses. Thus it came about that V. was a kind of Captain Dreyfuss, every inch of him the reflection of his assailants, whereas Deg was an Emile Zola, vehemently led by the inner necessity to espouse liberty, equality, fraternity and justice. And I have a feeling that V., had he been restored to his commission under the colors of science, would, like Dreyfuss and his family, have begged his supporters to retire from the scene. When he was writing Homo Schizo, Deg came upon the essays of the psychologist Morton Prince, edited by Nathan G. Hale, Jr., where material on multiple personality is contained. What Deg marked in the margin of the Introduction as "terrible" are the following lines: [Morton Prince could not] stand aloof from the Sacco-Vanzetti case [anarchists convicted of robbery and murder and later executed], although his opinion at first flouted that of proper Bostonians. On October 30, 1926, Prince wrote to the Boston Herald, protesting the prejudice of the trial judge and the incompetence of the government's major witness. The judge, like most lawyers, was lamentably ignorant of the "science of modern dynamic psychology" and had glibly interpreted the defendant's motives in a way which discredited the impartiality of the courts. The witness had purported to describe sixteen different details about Sacco, whom she had seen at a distance of sixty feet, for from one and one-half to three seconds, from a car going about fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. Only if Sacco later had been deliberately picked out for her to identify, could she have recalled such details, Prince insisted. Her "memory" of him was produced solely by "suggestion" and was nothing more than an "unconscious falsification." Later Prince agreed with a committee of review, appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts and dominated by A. Lawrence Lowell, that the conviction had been obtained after a fair trial. Prince's protest and charge of mind had come with the authority of his appointment to a new chair of abnormal and dynamic psychology at Harvard's College. Lowell, Harvard's president and [an] old friend, had accepted Prince's offer of $150,000 from an anonymous donor, as well as Prince's services as professor and director of a new psychological clinic that opened in 1927. Prince had insisted that it be attached to the College's Department of Psychology, perhaps as tangible fulfillment of his hope to include psychopathology within that discipline. The clinic was to convey a knowledge of the subject, to conduct fresh research and to treat selected patients. Prince held the chair and headed the clinic for the last two years of his life, with Henry A. Murray as his assistant. He once remarked, "La Salpetriere is a monument to Charcot. I want no other monument than the Psychological Clinic." The sacrifice of principles for prestige and self is an everyday affair in science and academia and the victims of misconduct are legion, nor do they receive the glory of execution or the stake. When on a snow-enveloped January morning in 1965, Deg's father died, V. projected from the depths of his own character and experience and advised Deg that he would enter now upon a highly creative period. The consoling remark was more revealing of V. 's paternal relationship than of Deg's. Not since he was twelve had Deg noticed his father weighing upon him. Aside from an oration for a junior High School convocation that he considered too important to let the boy write by himself, and letters that were merely informative and invariably encouraging, Deg's father committed little or nothing of his beliefs to paper. He read and worked upon reams of music as a scholar works upon books and papers. Perhaps only a character, not a philosophy, was needed in copying and orchestrating his musical scores -- now a soulful surge of Wagnerian triumph, then again a sweet and lively Mozart Overture, and another time he would prepare a Verdi chorus for brass instruments. The only expression Deg came upon when he disposed of the music archive to the New Jersey State Prison System was this: "A rebellion is terribly hard to repress when it is born in men's mind. How can intellectual resistance be killed?" It is not known what occasioned the remark, neatly written on a small note pad. The heretics, or rebels if you will, carried on with the procession. Deg is now writing Brian Moore in Hartlepool, England: Princeton, November 17, 1979 Dear Brian: I regret to report to you and to your colleagues and members of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies the deaths, within a month of each other, of our friends and colleagues, Livio Catullus Stecchini and Ralph B. Juergens. Besides the personal grief that their passing has brought to us who might count them as dear friends, the loss to pioneering scholarship and science in their demise is great. Both men left off in the middle of important books and articles, Livio Stecchini on pyramids, on the origin of the gospels, and on ancient measuring systems, and Ralph Juergens on the electrical theory of the cosmos. Professor Earl Milton of Lethbridge University (Canada) has undertaken to review Juergens' manuscripts and I Stecchini's with a mind towards their eventual publication. Other colleagues are concerned as well. Both men were models of honest scholars, of personal modesty, and of helpfulness to all who asked something of them. I know that the thousands of women and men who have become related to them through a common interest in the reconstruction of knowledge about ancient history and nature will wish to think of them in companionship and gratitude. We may hope that the remembrance of their achievements, like a freshly trodden path, will be enlarged now by the usage of the young and bold. Deg was both disturbed and amused when, in the last years of their lives, Stecchini and Velikovsky disputed the attitude of Plato towards catastrophe, the first stressing that Plato would have catastrophists put to death, the latter regarding Plato as the last direct heir of the catastrophist tradition. They did not communicate for some time before Stecchini's death. The issue is germane to political science because it reveals the conditions under which the elitist political philosopher such as Plato will choose raison d'etat over truth. The argument was not resolved, although to Deg it seemed clear enough that Plato was wearing the two caps of scientist and political ruler. When he played wearing the one, he had to recognize the catastrophe of Atlantis and other disasters, and exhibited little confidence in the stability of the heavens. When he played the role of custodian of public morals, he recognized, as few did afterwards, that men behave in imitation of the sky gods. When the gods misbehave, so do men. Hence Plato would severely chastise those who rendered the gods a disorderly mob or perceived disorder as the rule of the heavens. On November 19, Deg writes to Brian Moore again: Dear Brian: Hardly had I posted my letter than the word came that Immanuel Velikovsky was dead. He died on November 17, at 0800 hours. After a restless night, occasioned by a rapid pulse and feelings of weakness, he arose at first light on the Sabbath and showered. He returned to his bed and Elisheva his wife sat beside him. He murmured several indistinguishable words and took her hand. He became quiet and she saw that he had passed away as if to sleep. He was buried in a private ceremony the next day at a small cemetery not far from Princeton. He was in charge of himself until the last hour, working daily on his unpublished manuscripts, discussing proposals to film Worlds in Collision, and worrying over an article that was half- promised to Harper's Magazine. On Monday I had an extended visit with him. We talked of my memorials to Stecchini and Juergens and about the book on Moses that I am completing, and also concerning a brief paper which I proposed to write for Nature magazine, setting forth six challenging hypotheses on the worldwide catastrophe of the mid-second millennium. He urged me to write the article "for tomorrow." I wrote it and talked with him about it on Wednesday. He liked the phrasing of the propositions but disputed my selection of examples and said that he would not become co-author because he had no time to do the necessary research. His powers were fully engaged; he was concerned to advance and defend his ideas; When I left him as darkness fell, he remained seated. He would usually walk with me to the big door and step out for a moment to breathe the season's air. I telephoned on Thursday and he was working. I still sense that he is palpably at work and will continue working for a long time. Then after several years of laboring over Immanuel's archive, his widow, Elisheva, died. Deg wrote a eulogy of her during her last hours. Sheva Whiffs of air, a shot of drug, a tube of soup, a white-breasted meter-maid intruding now and then --intensive care -- to confirm her readings of your organs. Their prognosis for you is poor you must know. You don't speak at all well, though you may perceive, while your intakes and outputs are disordered. Your heart stands brave above it all, like a proud cock refusing the falling night. How I wish you might know of our plan for you: That you shall be forthwith removed herefrom, and placed upon your porch above the greening bushes, overseen by a nervous flitting finch in the beams, there to sit and listen while Immanuel speaks of claims and confirmations in words so deep drawn out that in between them you plan how you will shape a bust in stone, and next time play that passage piu adagio. Fingering the fiddleneck and banging the chisel, just and nice your big hands were that shook my big hands roughly. Your pot of tea is pouring interminably into our china cups and, yes, there was something else -- cold white wine of Canaan --to fetch from the kitchen, but you said "Wait, one moment, I want to hear this, what did you say?" I blush to think of injustices done you, munching buttered cakes and crackers with cheese, boasting of stalking and snaring man's mind as the very quarry was serving the hunter's breakfast. Stroking celestial harmonies from your varnished box and chipping life into becoming, feeding the animals, then taking up the phone protectively, "One moment, one moment, Immanuel is on the line." But I did kiss you, did I not, and hugged you, too, whenever arose the chance in coming or going. Don't get up; sip your own, your own cup of tea. Why should it be yours to close the doors, draw the blinds, bury the dead, argue the law, pay the taxes, comb the archives, fight the battle, placate friends, watch Hector's body being dragged around the Trojan walls? Did you not earn your porch of peace even before the 1950 War began? Sacrifices so many that never to utter the word was your greatest sacrifice. Your modest scoffing will not avail as we burn down the skyscraper for your pyre, each floor a blazing bargain for your first good, next good, and thereafter. The last chord is not yours to sound. When the guests set down their cups and leave, you are to be held close by your loved one while your ghost rises lightly through the thick dusk air of summer. I've told of the three heretics, heroes of V., who were burned at the stake. Do cosmic heretics live long? Plato voluntarily denounced his own catastrophic views; he lived to 80. Whiston was black-balled from the Royal Academy of Science and fired from Cambridge, but lived to 85. Boulanger died in his thirties. Carli-Rubbi ended his career as an economist in good style, as far as my inadequate sources reveal. Vico died at 76, but his friends got to fighting over their relationship with him and left his coffin standing on the street. Bourbourg was ridiculed at the end of his life. Ameghino was dismissed finally and posthumously honored; he believed in Atlantis. Donnelly landed on his feet, a versatile populist-utopian, writer and lecturer, and died at 70. Beaumont's papers were destroyed by bomb and fire; he was still writing when he died in his eighties, and Stephanos was still peddling his manuscript when last heard of. Hans Bellamy passed away old and with him most interest in Hans Hoerbiger's catastrophism, which occurred from the Earth's capture of satellites. Claude Schaeffer died in his eighties full of public honors, but not from his great work on Stratigraphie Compar‚e. Frank Dachille died quietly aboard a PanAm airplane to Rome, on his way to a conference; he was beginning to move back strongly into the study of catastrophism. Of the fate of certain others, I've spoken elsewhere among these pages. The remainder are too many to census. I don't mean to imply anything. No curse attends to the practice of heresy; most heretics seem to live to old ages. Their ideas have been accepted. but no one does so, or he is fooling himself if he thinks so. It is easier to found an empire -- and much more common -- than to found a new model of scientific philosophy, and empire of thought. Christ and his early Christians did so. The Galileo-Newton axis powers did so. John Dewey and his pragmatists did so. I would compare the cosmic heretics with the story of Leonard Woolf's life. His biography reads like a brilliant, long, and useful career, on the margins of heresy, for he was always a reformer, beginning as a Cambridge student, follower of the delightful new philosophy which answered every question by another question: "What do you mean by that?"; proceeding to Ceylon as so efficient a civil servant that he logically arrived at the next step, which was to de- colonize the British Empire; then he became a novelist and a publicist, edited several magazines including especially the Political Quarterly, set up his own publishing company, the Hogarth Press, to put out his books and those of his wife, Virginia, and other friends; helped to organize and bring to ultimate triumph the Labour Party; pushed for international government through the League of Nations; supported pacifist causes and creative writers; and best of all kept Virginia Woolf reasonably happy and at work on her novels and also kept her from committing suicide over many years, until she managed in her sixties to end her career by walking to her death in the sea. Still, when Leonard came to conclude the fifth volume of his autobiography a few years ago, he had decided that the process of life was more important than its imprint upon the world. For in their effects upon the world, most of what he had attempted had failed. Both Ceylon and England had grown more hideous. Peace efforts had failed. International government had failed. Justice had failed. The Labour Party had failed. The publishing industry was much worsened. He had studied hard for twelve years and then labored hard for sixty-four years. So he named his last work, "The Journey Not The Arrival Matters," the reason being that one never arrives. All these excuses and explanations of why I have performed 200,000 hours of useless work are no doubt merely another way of confessing that the magnetic field of my own occupations produced the usual self-deception, the belief that they wee important... in a wider context, though all that I have tried to do politically was completely futile and ineffective and unimportant, for me personally it was right and important that I should do it, even though at the back of my mind I was well aware that it was ineffective and unimportant. To say this is to say that I agree with what Montaigne, the first civilized modern man, says somewhere: "It is not the arrival, it is the journey that matters." Of course, if Woolf had believed this in the beginning of his life he would have undertaken few, if any, of his numerous enterprises. It is absolutely essential to society that the young be such fools. And that some of them remain fools forever. At the end of the third and last volume of his autobiography, Bertrand Russell states what as a boy he wanted to achieve in life and what he discovered in the end. He "wanted, on the one hand, to find out whether anything can be known; and, on the other hand, to do whatever might be possible toward creating a happier world. From an early age I thought of myself as dedicated to great and arduous tasks." Deg had felt precisely the same. It is the narcissistic heroic vision of oneself. In the end Russell could appreciate that both his works on knowledge and his books on social realities were partially achieved. But he confessed that he could not crown them with a synthesis. He had succeeded in that many people were affected by his works and these were acclaimed. So far, so good, but the failures rankled. The external world had refused to cooperate with his efforts and was worse, more evil, if anything. The internal world had failed him, too. "I set out with a more or less religious belief in a Platonic eternal world, in which mathematics shone with a beauty like that of the last Cantos of the Paradiso. I came to the conclusion that the eternal world is trivial, and that mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words." Yet Russell was a tough old optimist and "beneath all this load of failure I am still conscious of something that I feel to be victory." The victory consists of still believing, first that a "theoretical truth" must still exist and "that it deserves our allegiance." Second, "I may have thought that the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that it is worth while to live with a view to bringing it nearer." Although having some miles still to go and a passel of things to do, Deg might be compared. He never believed in absolute Platonic truth from his first reading of Plato at 15, nor before, nor afterwards, and, being poor at mathematics, he decided early to project the blame upon mathematics, asserting that mathematics were a neat way of speaking and necessarily could not be speaking some basic new truth that sprang ex machina linguae; furthermore, there would have to be new mathematics for every important perspective upon the True, requiring therefore many mathematics, whereas mythical and ordinary language, could by its indefiniteness suggest all of these perspectives. In either case, language and mathematics were largely dependent functions of thought, though they might, interacting with thought, also determine it somewhat. It can be seen then, that Deg was a pragmatist, functionalist, and social psychologist. "The truth" remained for him just what it was to the child, a guiding myth which, by much rationalization, was later fashioned into a politics and then a philosophy. Truth functioned existentially, as a hypothesis that worked better that any alternative hypothesis. Turning to the external world, the same philosophical instrumentalism led him to believe, not that the world would be ultimately better, although this would take longer to achieve, but rather that the world might become either better or worse (in its concurrent configurations with future times) and one should not expect more than that, while moving pragmatically and existentially through the process of life. It begins to appear to me that Deg's moods were externally fairly even, with a frequent enthusiasm and hedonism balancing his hyper-criticality. Privately, as with many people, his moods were more grim and irascible. His journal is not a perfectly true barometer, since he seems to express his critical and negative feelings often and his happiness (a word he detested) less. Deg's Journal, 6 A. M. Sunday, Jan. 21, 1979 I derive pleasure from planning the future -- my personal future -- and thousands of pleasant interludes of 5 minutes to hours of large plans are usually interspersed among the other life operations and taken up euphorically as the whim or impulse seizes me. It is partly this childish pleasure, for I have done it from earliest memory, which leads finally to the drive to shape a world future. It is written because I have caught myself escaping from some painstaking work on footnotes of Unsettled Skies into penciling the best possible calendar I can hope for in the year ahead. Connected to this impulse is the listing of "things to do." When oppressed by the many little and large obligations, self-imposed and encountered through our hopelessly complex society, I make a list of all that should be done in the next week, 3 or 6 months, and so on. Whereupon I feel relaxed and confident, as if it were all done. When Deg became anxious enough to draw up one of his lists, he unknowingly let us have a way of guessing the ratio of concerns to total time available. Here is his list of stresses, dated late in the quantavolutionary period; it reveals that the question of chronometry is still plaguing him as well it might, and that the production of his book and the maintenance of a heretical circle are pressing him too. Deg's Journal, January 15, 1982 Especially worrisome problem (stresses) 1. Inexcusable delay of National State Bank in exchanging a German check for 19,000 DM into $. Am broke. 2. Mom's critical illness and need for continuous surveillance. 3. Whereabouts of 1250 copies of Chaos and Creation and their bill of lading. 4. Decrepit and dirty conditions of the house on Centre Street. 5. Seemingly impossible contradiction in short-term dating of natural history and the huge defensive effort accumulated pro long-term dating. 6. Difficulty starting car. 7. Blocked hot water pipe( frozen). 8. Bad weather -- snow, ice, cold. 9. No money. 10. Conflict over debts and title of Clearview house with Sebastian and Edward. 11. Carl's loss of job and pennilessness. 12. Bad domestic and international policies and actions of U. S. Government. Plus normally worrisome problems e. g. abscessed tooth and dental work needed; Cathy's miserable behavior toward me; delays in Anne-Marie's book and her preoccupation with her work; laundry and sewing needs; growing phobia vs. long-distance driving; inability to visit or be visited by men with the same interest, especially those expert on what occupies my writing; lack of intellectual and social circles in the area and inability to take time, money, effort to construct (reconstruct) same, in which I might participate (this has to do with my present life style, and scattered domiciles -- N. Y., Princeton, Trenton, Naxos). As a final favor to me who was much impressed by Woolf's life accounts, Deg prepared a list to end all lists, accounting of his time over the period covered by this book. He skimmed it across my table to me. "I did what you asked," Deg said, "but I forgot the four hours it took me to do so. So the Q series took 29,904 hours instead of 29,900." I scarcely believed the figures anyway. Here they are as he gave them to me: Time Accounting Hours (Lapsed Time: 21 years, 1963-83, total hours: 183,960) 1) 53,655 a) Meals, visiting with family and friends (including telephoning), general correspondence, radio- TV-newspapers; b) Housework and shopping, paying bills and taxes, personal hygiene, car maintenance. 2) 57,487 Sleep 3) 29,900 Research, writing, production and promotion, Quantavolution Series. 4) 10,307 Other research and writing. 5) 8,936 Politicking, consulting, and business affairs. 6) 9,651 Teaching, Committee work, doctoral supervision, NYU, 12 years. 7) 2,400 National Endowment for the Arts (excepting book "1001 Questions.") 8) 4,000 New World University at Valais, Switzerland. 9) 500 Kalotic movement for World Government (plus in Switzerland). 10) 2,000 1 year at hard labor (Naxos). 11) 900 En route somewhere (less project time achieved en route). 12) 1,940 Spent with V. on "the Cause" a) personal: 1190 b) telephone: 750 13) 204 Spent with V. on the substance of Quantavolution (not in 3 above). 14) 400 Spent with V. on personal and general socio-political discussions. 15) 2,800 Spent with other heretics (except with Milton, included under 3 above and does not include group time with V., see 12 above) on the "Cause": 1550 b) on the substance of Q: 1250. 184,080 Total hours accounted for 183,960 Total hours to be accounted for 365 x 24 x 21 - 120 Discrepancy 120 Add 5 days for leap years 0 Total Discrepancy "Do you have any questions?" he said and I said yes, I do : "Why do you include 'personal hygiene' under '1b) ' instead of '1a) '?" His answer was not nice and I see no need to convey it. He went on to explain other matters that he believed to be beyond my comprehension. He begged me to note that at $40 an hour (he certainly had a modest idea of his worth) he had spent $1,200,000.00 on the Quantavolution Series. On the heretical movement as such he had spent the equivalent of $192,000. How did you arrive at the hourly rate, I asked him. It's near to what the University was paying me and about the average for when I operated as a consultant. You see, he said, after you become a tenured professor you can retire on the job, and many do, letting research and writing go by the board. However, such equivalencies don't make sense. If I had gone into business I would have made a great deal more, or a great deal less, because I am a speculator; smooth flows of money do not amuse me. Earlier were mentioned gross disparities in compensation and resources between the conventional established scholars and the heretics. Here another of Deg's computations presents a shocking state of affairs. The typical prominent professor, at a university of the first or second grade of excellence, may be said to receive the following emoluments: $43,000 salary and fringe benefits 30,000 grants (directly applicable for personal support) 60,000 indirect support (government grants for projects foundation support) 40,000 Students who can be put on projects (value of their work) 20 at 2,000 (screened applicants -- admissions, scholarships, fellowships) 15,000 use of University facilities (labs, astronomical, machinery, conveyances, University grants) 22,000 assistants (2) 20,000 overhead 7,000 access by influence to periodicals (7 article $1,000) 20,000 consultation 2,000 personal support to attend conventions 10,000 use of institutional name (mass media, publicity, influence, public relations, legislature) 1,000 life tenure (worth $200,000 or more) $270,000 Real income applicable (except for personal taxes) to carrying one's prestige and influence into the arena of scientific controversy. A total of $ 270,000 annually in emoluments is estimated for a single professor. His tenure is certainly worth thousands per year additionally. Nor have we considered that there must be a cash equivalent for the right to impose upon from 10 to 1000 students a year one's viewpoints, applying sanctions to apparent disbelievers. Because the professor is not selling soap does not mean what he does sell has no cash equivalency. This large sum is some measure, perhaps the best that we can arrive at by speculation, of the annual economic impact of an establishment professor upon his fields of activity. The American public, politicians, and business leaders have only a slight awareness of how great is the influence of professors in society. (sample surveys, however, show that the population does rank professors in the highest echelons of respect.) As for the time Deg had given over to the movement, it was little as you can see, no more than, say, a chairman of the board of a closely-held company would spend on its affairs, much more than, say, V. spent with Einstein, which V. turned into a book (yet unpublished), infinitely more than a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, according to James Joyce, which contained all of the wandering years of Ulysses, ten years in coming home from the Trojan Wars. Then he said something worth repeating, that the time he spent with other heretics on the cause, and with V., the whole 'schmeer' he called it with fine vulgarity, was essential to the Q project. They would all have run around lost, if they hadn't been held by their crazy quilt network. The network was essential for morale and V. was the primary reference point; the game worked so that one had to touch base with him in some way, or utter the password, make some symbolic gesture. Furthermore, working with others on V.'s cause was not like work with a political party or an evangelical sect, where you know what you want and have to believe in it, and there are few surprises, and the question is simply how to achieve them; for V.'s cause excited continually new issues of substantive science -- the argon concentration discovered on Mars, the moonquakes, a radiocarbon date, the examination of King Tut's skull, the excavation of Ebla, the finding of ash levels below the sea bottom, and in these and scores of other cases, the heretics had to figure out their possible significance. As it developed, certain people gave themselves over to agitation and publicity, like Robert Stephanos, who accepted answers for a long time, while others like Mullen and Schorr were best at evaluating truth and significance, and then there were others, like Lewis Greenberg of Kronos, who operated both as agitator and evaluator. Take the discovery of ash levels below the sea bottoms, a set of discoveries beginning with the oceanographer Worzel, which V., Kloosterman, and Deg, among others, were quick to seize upon for their catastrophic significance. What was their extent, their composition, and their age? Did any pertinent facts remain concealed or unsought because of the conventional attitude of the oceanographers? V.'s cause, or let us say, since Kloosterman disavowed V., the quantavolutionary cause was to discover and prove a catastrophe, possibly exoterrestrial. Until they understood the studies, the heretics could not use them. Until they rewrote and extended the logic of the studies, they could not achieve the full use of them. When the Quantavolution Series was completed, Deg could be asked what portions of this systematic and complete model of cosmogony might he confidently expect to be useful to science, and what might come apart soonest. I give here his answers: That the basic principles of quantavolution would hold, he was fairly sure: the world has changed largely by sudden, large-scale, intensely forceful events. Also, that the solar system is a broken-down binary and functioned once within a huge sac and plenum of dense gases. Also, that the solar system was born electrically, changed and changes electrically, and only emulates a "gravitational" system when there is too little change to take note of or build a model upon. Also, that the Earth exploded the Moon one time, and then it was that the continents began their rafting about the globe. That the morphology of the Earth is almost entirely due to exoterrestrial interventions, including aftermath effects extending for long periods of time. That biosphere evolution (and extinction) has occurred in generalized quantum leaps. That the human is genetically and experientially poly-ego and schizoid, and rationality is a pragmatic form of schizoid behavior. That liturgy, language, history, and literature, are schizotypical compensations and sublimations for fear. That quantavolution as a heuristic model of natural and human history is useful for many scientific and human needs involving past time, and environmental and self-controls. That historical religion had a crude reality base. Also that Moses behaved as he is described in God's Fire. Deg was not sure of other parts of the model: That his radical compression of time can stand against the fully array of opposing chronometries. That his microchronic calendar manages to name and divide properly the actual ages of natural and human history. That gods must exist and that as some point in time they must come to affect the world. (But he insisted upon the axiom that what they are like and when they will operate must stand as open questions.) That the planets were as fully responsible for quantavolutionary events as he has made them be. Also he was confident that on many points of detail he would be proven to be in error. Nor did Deg feel at all certain that the quantavolutionary movement would succeed now, although, if human civilization survived, some model much like it would occur again. Furthermore, he thought it unlikely that quantavolution, if it succeeded in the next century in winning over science, would recognize or acknowledge the heretics of today, but would probably, unless otherwise decreed by a political revolution and for then largely irrelevant reasons, be adopted as a great many bits that would form statistical trends that would quantitatively change the existing gradualist and incremental model until it would appear that the scientific revolution was accomplished by a great many people working independently and empirically until driven together by the facts. "How would you feel about that?" I asked him. "It's OK with me," he said, "I'd be so surprised at being right, that I wouldn't think of asking more. Even though it cost me a million dollars." {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 5: } {Q - } {C Chapter 17: } {T THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE Actors in the dramas of science might learn certain precepts such as: There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones. So writes Machiavelli in The Prince, which was posthumously published in 1532. He was speaking about politics but the generalization might be enlarged. Probably all who have had anything to do with creating a new science, or trying to do so, would agree with him. Included, even, would be those who could recognize tangible victories in their lifetimes -- Galileo, Newton, Hume, Darwin, Pasteur, Freud, Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg. The development of science, that is, sustains a branch of sociology: of historical psycho- politico-anthropo-sociology. When this is applied to science, as the science of science, a partial truth such as V.'s concept of collective fear being inherited from the trauma of ancient catastrophes takes its place as a modest useful contribution to the science of science. The more general truth is contained in Deg's model of the gestalt of creation where Homo Schizo emerges out of a catastrophized ambiance as the true and normal human, who invents science as a typically schizoid set of operations for inducing psychic control and uniting the psychic with control of the external world. The science of science discloses in the history of the cosmic heretics the "inadequacies" of the American social system in dealing with the challenges of new science. There are three extensions, unhappily, of this remark. One is that the same types of "inadequacies" are characteristic of all areas of American science. The same kinds of "inadequacies" furthermore characterize all other branches of the American social system -- political, religious, economic, recreational, and educational. Third, the same kinds of "inadequacies" characterize all ethnic or national societies --whether Western European or communist or "Third World." I shall leave my readers to hunt by themselves for confirmation in the non-scientific areas of American life, whether by means of Deg's other works or the works of better teachers. I abandon them also to their own devices and explorations to discover what happens to new science in other nations. And I do little here to arrest their attention upon non-feasance and malfeasance in American society, other than by a few examples cited here and there, as by Burgstahler and Barber. I am tempted into one more example, this from a letter which Deg received from the most noted investigator of supersensory phenomena, Dr. J. B. Rhine. The Paraspsychology Laboratory Duke University December 16, 1963 Dear Dr. De Grazia: It is very good to see the systematic study you have been making of the reception of scientific developments. I am reading with great interest and satisfaction your September number of The American Behavioral Scientist, and I hope this number will become widely known in American science. I have long been convinced that reception is the weakest link in the chain of scientific development in this country, and that the situation has been progressively worsening. I have, in connection with my own studies, been testing the S. R. S., but I became interested in the problem as part of my study and teaching of the history of science, in partial preparation for the work I have been doing in para-psychology. It has seemed to me that what we are up against in the education of the individual, the growth of the university, or the development of a culture is a perfecting of a fixed conceptual ideal which reduces the possibility of free adaptation to new ideas. I am more heartened by seeing this problem of S. R. S. being made the target of a special study than by anything I have seen science the problem first appeared to my mind... I have just finished reading a book that, more than any other I have ever read, cuts across a large section of the struggle of ideas with the reception problem in the area of medical psychology. It is Frank Podmore's FROM MESMER TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, published by University Books in New York. It is a reprinting. The book itself was published in 1909. Such books at this and John Davies' account of phrenology in American have led me to feel more kindly toward earlier periods with regard to their tolerance. I think I would say I am frightened about the small chance of a true revolution occurring in a major scientific field in America today. Western Europe I think is moving in that direction. But this contrast is not a reflection from my own frustrations. It is true we are having plenty of difficulties, but we are progressing, and we are winning our case, slow though the progress is. But how many explorers die every year in the freshmen classes of our universities! Yes, this is a subject of primary importance. My hat is off to you, Sir! In the late 70's Deg began using the term "quantavolution." Not only the increasing number of cosmic heretics, but also restless and probing scientists of the several large fields of geology, astronomy, biology, and the historical sciences had been publishing new materials in which global disasters figured, sometimes mentioning possible exoterrestrial causes, at other times remarking on the shortening of time scales implied in the new discoveries. In paleontology, Stephen Jay Gould, collaborating with Niles Eldredge, was promoting catastrophism in evolution and paleontology as processes of "punctuated equilibria," thus keeping to the fore the gradualist and incremental aspects of natural history and offending as few people as possible. New York University September 26, 1980 De Grazia to the Editor, Discover Magazine (unpublished): In reporting the work of Eldredge and Gould, among others, towards rehabilitating some of the constructive aspects of scientific catastrophism, your author, James Gorman, was suffering understandably from verbophobia. Hardly anyone, and for good reason, wished to advance to the study of sharp breaks and movements in natural and cultural history under the flag of Cuvier. Not only does the term "catastrophism" suggest a long-discredited science, but it ignores the "constructive" and "acceptable" features of the "catastrophic" events. (Our world and ourselves were, willy-nilly, catastrophized over time.) "Punctuated equilibrium" (Gould's term) is admittedly awkward. "Macroevolution" is getting a little closer. I have tried a number of designations in lectures here and abroad, and for awhile "revolutionary primevalogy" seemed the most appropriate. I also tried "saltatory (leaps) theory." Then I began to use "quantavolution" -- the study of large-scale change by quantum jumps and found it the most satisfactory and reasonable. I administered a little preference test to students and friends, and "quantavolution" came out ahead of all these other words. Hence I suggest that we stick to "quantavolution" when we refer to intensive, large-scale, temporally-compressed events or periods in nature. Deg knew he was on a right track with "quantavolution" when he read in Otto Schindewolf the new term "anastrophe" as opposed to "catastrophe" and found in it what he meant, for as Schindewolf had stated in 1961, "faunal discontinuities, as understood by us, involve not just the dying out of the old, but also the more or less sudden emergence of new phyla." Later, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History hosted a conclave of biologists called by Eldredge, an officer of the Museum, and Gould. Well-reported in Science, it did not precipitate an organized movements, even in the single field of paleontology. A different kind of advancement of science is occurring -- could it be the "partial incorporation of revolutions" that I spoke of earlier? In March of 1983, M. J. Benton of Oxford University wrote in Nature magazine on "large-scale replacements in the history of life," whereupon we must add "large- scale replacements" to our list of euphemism. Nearly two centuries after Cuvier, thirty-three years (one Jeffersonian generation) after Schindewolf, 23 years after V. and even a couple of years after the laggard Deg, it is written that "there is increasing evidence that major physical changes caused more large-scale evolutionary changes than has competition," and that competition or natural selection "will rarely be the sole cause, whereas it could be postulated that a catastrophic change in the physical environment is sufficient on its own." Warner Sizemore Richard Nixon and his henchmen were accused of covering up the Watergate Affair, their slogan was "stonewall it"; after a while the message was "we've got to bite the bullet." Warner Sizemore was keen for influences from many fields and was aware of Deg's embracing the term "quantavolution." Deg writes to him: Naxos, January 12, 1981 Dear Warner, After spending Christmas with the relatives congregated in Florence opportunely, Ami and I drove off and were ferried in our Renault 4 across the Adriatic and drove again from Patras to Athens for the New year celebrations with the relatives there. After we arrived in Naxos, a weeklong storm closed the shipping lanes. There at the Postoffice I found the batch of material from you. Many thanks. The experiments on imitating the rampages of nature upon dead animals and the studies of what happens to them are long overdue, bound to be feasible, enlightening and supportive. I read, too, the article -- effusive and popular though it was -- in Brain and Mind, about Ilya Pirogine's work. It's impossible to tell what may be in it for us, but a search into his books is called for. Certainly they are talking of quantavolutionary changes of system-states. But since the mechanism is entirely abstract, i. e. non-existent so far as they say, I presume that a mathematical model is involved, in which statistical states snap into a new alignment by some set of convergences arising at a juncture. Crystallization can perform this transformation under environmental stresses. Perhaps half the plant species are instances of proportional structural explosions. New, bigger Boeings are planned, to double the B-747 capacity with little inventiveness. Like catastrophist topological math, there may be mostly wordage here, from our point of view. The many new ideas that occur to me in my writings appear to emerge from flaws and oversights of science. The philosophy that propagates the point of view that observes these opportunities is largely the pragmatism of James Dewey, Pierce, Mead, and Whitehead, with heavy depth psychology elements out of Freud and Lasswell, these all only being a few, and others like Mannheim on ideological behavior (subtending from Marx) certainly are there as influences. So I guess I'm in the recycling and recomposing business. One has to use new images, like the hologram, of course, and devise new images. But I have not yet felt frustrated by an absent "new kind of reality." I hope that I will applaud its discovery, should it come -- whether signals from outer space or a kind of intra-organismic communication that is materially effective upon all elements of the organism at once, or whatever. I detect in the article on Pirogine the eternal hope that a scientific breakthrough will carry a new insistent and moral order. This sort of hope for a Second Coming always puts me on alert. People who can't receive the right kind of vibrations any longer from Jesus, or Buddha, or communism, yearn often for an authoritarian voice speaking out of science like the Burning Bush. That's asking too much of the scientific enterprise. We can probably achieve a better answered by a sober and complete understanding of what we have already learned about the world and ourselves, call it theology, philosophy, no matter. The universe, including its divinity, will always be an open question, and we shall go on forever, so long as allowed, advancing, defiling, infiltrating, undermining and hovering about the grounds of the question. If there were an answer to the question, we should have to negate all that we think we know about ourselves, the universe, for then we would have to be something other than what we are even in our most megalomanic states. We are already asking too much of ourselves just in order to survive as a species. Again, it is exalting (and arrogant) to play with answers to the question. Anyone for tennis?.... Chesley Baity was trying to extend her great bibliographic labor in paleo-astronomy by incorporating catastrophism, working through conventional channels that she had persuaded to accept her so long as she did not push quantavolution. Deg, I said, I can't use your letter from Dr. Chesley Baity; she won't let me. He said why did you ask her, dummkopf; you're talking about vital public issues; you're not titillating the crowd with private obscenities. It's a great letter: how she's been trying to get a seminar going on catastrophism at a school where ordinarily you're welcome to sell a course on every other known folly. She's forever asking my advice and then sweetly adding you don't mind if I don't mention your name. How many more years is she going to waste on this gambit? I don't know, I said; she's afraid she'll lose the ground she's gained. A few more years and the ground she's gained will be six feet under, he said; and if she has to go, as we all do, at least there'll be her letter on record showing her as a heroine, a wily heretic who knows what she's after, and who knows how she's been led up the garden path by these deans, and university presses, and intolerant astronomers. It'll make sense out of all these years of running around telling people I'm not a heretic, you know, but then oughtn't we consider this and that cosmic disaster. Meanwhile they are laughing at her because she seems a befuddled southern lady, but they wouldn't if they really knew her as I do. The trouble with her is that her husband dominated her for so many years that she still hasn't recaptured the feisty womanhood she inherited from her old Texas stock. I must suggest she read that biography by Sayre of Rosalind Franklin and the British DNA caper. Now this book of hers dealing with aspects of quantavolution; it's a good collection; good authors. Why is she wasting her years looking for a publisher for it. She can put it out; she's not broke. Did you tell her that, I asked. Yes, I did, and of course she said she wouldn't do any such thing. Another victim of the publishing myth. I said give a couple of thousands to a university press then; they'll publish it. Oh no I won't do that. Well, then, bury yourself and your authors. The publishers will shed no tears; they'll puff with pride for having kept a bad book off the market. After he said this, I went and checked the list of contributors to Chesley's anthology of Civilization and Catastrophe. Of the thirty-six approximately half have not been mentioned by me in this book and about a fourth have escaped mention in Deg's Quantavolution Series. As you can see, a lot of "reaching out" occurs among the heretics, each in his own style, Chesley- Baity or, as here, Brian Moore is telling Deg of a new pair of cosmic heretics: Hartlepool, Cleveland England 9 July 1982, Dear Alfred: Thanks for yours of 22 June and I'm glad to hear that the Grecian sunshine is ripening your researches. Great pity you couldn't make our meeting, particularly as I had managed to persuade Victor Clube to come and speak to us about his forthcoming book The Cosmic Serpent. I mentioned the book very briefly in the last review as "a catastrophist view of earth history" but had not then seen a copy. Having now read a review copy and met the author I consider it to be a highly significant contribution to the catastrophic cause. Though Clube (astronomer, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh) is conventional enough not to accept orbital changes amongst the planets, what he does propose -- particularly as it comes from within the establishment -- should be enough to lift the level of debate considerably. To summarize briefly: most of Clube's published work deals with the possibility of extra-terrestrial catastrophes in geological time; the book proposes them continuing into historical times at dates very close to those of Velikovsky. His mechanism (though we might not agree with it) is sufficiently well supported by known astronomical data to make the critics consider the implications for mythology/ religion/ history. He proposes that as the solar system passes through the galactic arms it collects vast quantities of cosmic debris which in the form of comets, interact with the solar system for thousand of years until by collision/ interaction/ integration they are thrown out of the system altogether or turn into asteroids. His statistical calculations show that the last series of interactions should have been dying away throughout the 3rd, 2nd and 1st millennia BC. The present Encke's comet is the remains of a giant comet which was on an earth crossing orbit in those times and was responsible for devastation on the Earth at periodic intervals. He has an ingenious (though I think inadequate) suggestion as to why the agents of destruction were later remembered as Venus and Mars. He also agrees that Ipuwer/ Exodus/ end of Middle Kingdom were synchronous and that Egyptian history needs to be shortened by 400 years! The book is defective in many respects, but for a respectable member of the establishment who had not had the benefit of contact with our circles it is an intellectual supernova (well, nova, anyway). Clube wanted to meet you. If you let me know precise dates for your U. K. visit maybe we can still arrange this... Professor Frank Dachille of Pennsylvania State University had long been a catastrophist in geology; he also was a reader of ancient literature; he piloted airplanes and had been building an airplane in his house at the time of his death in 1983. An acquaintanceship with Deg's work -- they met only by phone and letter -- led him into the reassessment of his own noteworthy work on meteoritics. A letter of July 29, 1979, shows Dachille engaging in the common quantavolutionary tasks of extending the logic of existing science and rereading ancient documents: Dear Dr. de Grazia, (...) I meant to mention in my previous letter that at the American Geophysical Union Convention in Washington a paper detailed the possibility existing in Jupiter of nuclear detonation. This is not new, the idea that Jupiter is in fact a mini-sun, sub-critical, having been about for some time. However, on reviewing the presentation after having read your work and Worlds in Collision, I can understand the probabilities of electromagnetic ejecta, and even massive emissions from that planet, and Saturn. You might want to look for a work by P. M. Kolor and L. E. Wharton on this subject. Both are at P. O. Box 142, Greenbelt, Md 20770. References to Plato in Worlds in Collision have led me to an interesting finding, something you must be quite familiar with from your extensive research. The Jowett translation is far from that of Bury, at least with regard to the astronomical descriptions. Jowett does convey some of the information as to sky reversals etc., but I believe his translation more modified by his own notions. Bury was more direct. My head still swims from my reading of the S. I. S. issue you gave me. The discussions of the Senmut sky maps are captivating but whether from my lack of knowledge or ability, the presentations are most difficult for me to follow. (Is it a British style of writing or is it me?) The electricity paper by Eric Crew is good; I intend to look up his other papers. Some months after Dachille died, Deg suggested to the State University of Pennsylvania that a memorial meeting be held for him that would treat of subjects upon which he worked and that interested him: meteorites, explosion dynamics, catastrophism in ancient translations, etc. The suggestion caused surprise: Dachille was isolated among the some forty professors of geosciences; he was alone in his heresy, which the Chairman referred to charmingly as "extracurricular"; the Department of Astronomy seemed to be likewise uninterested; the name of V. foreshadowed unwelcome controversy; the campus was not near any large metropolitan center where an outside public would be attracted; besides, all the professors were remarkable people, said the Chairman. Yes, Deg agreed, and they were dying all the time. In reviewing the debate over quantavolution and catastrophe over 30 years (for I see no reason to confine this statement to the twenty years of our scope here,) I am impressed by the flaccidity and ignorance of the opponents of the heretics more than by any other single phenomenon. Should full-fashioned quantavolution fall before the "truth," it would not be the effect of the opposition but rather of inadvertent blows and self-examination. The opposition has continually pressed the attack with ill-prepared Volksturm publicists parroting what scientists say, and then with infantry of the science who could only press buttons. The proud creative element of science, the Harrison Browns, Ureys, Neugebauers, Sagans and another score of top-notch scientists and humanists might be court-martialed for their failures, along with those who thought the U. S. Marines in Lebanon had such heavy firepower and such sophisticated gear that they were impregnable to assault and then were penetrated by the simplest of terrorist mechanisms and tactics. This was the "Vietnam Complex," too. Constantly misunderstanding the opposition; refusing to come to the conference table; seeking allies to help put down the guerrillas among publishers, foundations, universities; laying claim to working for the good of all -- are these actions not patent and repetitious on the record? The opponents of quantavolution -- by focusing upon the person of Velikovsky; trying to convert a wide spectrum of interests on the part of hundreds of skilled, intelligent, and creative people into a cosmic strip; raising the spurious cry of "anti-science" just like the government raises the cry of "reds" and "enemies of democracy;" -- ended up heightening the public misunderstanding of science, aroused suspicion against themselves, attracted and promoted the most narrow and bigoted scientists and propagandists to the rank of spokesmen for science; Meanwhile, the humanists and social scientists let themselves be denounced for fools, anti- scientists, and mystics, and be accused of blocking flights to the Moon and wanting to steal jobs from the natural scientists. The anti-heretics have paid no attention to the scores of heretics who have been building a case for quantavolution all these years. They have spoken of them contemptuously as a mad following that showed up to defend V. or to attack them, failing in every case that has come to my knowledge to read the literature of their opposition. Insofar as V. found it inconvenient to advance his own colleagues, he played directly into the hands of the opposition that was engaged in making of his work and mission a caricature. Allowing the issues that have emerged in the past decades of this controversy to be centered upon a caricature of Velikovsky is a way of continuously dampening the fires in the hope that they will die. The issues are much larger, and are important for the advancement of science. Quite apart from Deg's voluminous work (and even if he had never written a line) there are available millions of words , at least thirty volumes of studies on aspects of quantavolution - - and I say nothing of the many distinguished predecessors of V., nor of the hundreds of studies passed as conventional science, that are gems of quantavolution. Nor have I mentioned the mutual teaching and learning going on among hundreds and thousands of students --many of ripened age -- that cost their government and school systems and foundations nothing, and risked nobody's capital. Paying for itself, the movement practically registers as zero in the absurd artifice called the Gross National Product. Files of correspondence and numerous tapes that I hold could be used to demonstrate the level of interaction among the heretics. As they exchange honorary degrees, the eagles of science invariably speak of the need for "interdisciplinary cooperation," of a "melding of the two worlds of science and the humanities." It is mostly pap. They never do it. They cannot do it. But the people they detest and call "anti-scientists" and the "lunatic fringe" do it as a matter of course. They do so because logically their interests and language are unspecialized, because they have slipped their intellectual anchors, and because they must talk to whoever happens to be passing by. In Deg's files I find a brief article about a definition. I mention it to show a kind of particle that floats about unintegrated into a body of science. It is by Walter Federn, an Egyptologist, now deceased, who long ago assisted V. in his research. The piece would be almost unretrievable to an outsider for it appears in Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Sprache und der Altertumskunde (33 Band 1966, 55-6). There he reproaches those who have retranslated the line "Forsooth, the land turns round as does a potter's wheel," which is from the Ipuwer papyrus, placed now by some scholars to the end of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus (by those who follow V. 's chronology). Federn says they must not believe the words mean spinning normally in the same direction, but must mean being spun back and forth, as in testing the wheel, as clockwise then counterclockwise. So, Federn declares, the "point of comparison is the reversal of the social order into its very opposite." A great social upheaval is pictured. Or, possibly, I say, it means that the earth itself is gyrating: "The land reverses like a potter's wheel." It is highly probable that it was V.'s employment of Fedren that ultimately wafted this dry little piece to drift unintroduced and unexplained in the slow backwaters of scholarship. The sociology of science should have field workers auditing conversations at meetings, making tape recordings, too, although Deg, for one, would be annoyed if I spoke of hidden recordings, of "goings-on," and would speak of invasions of privacy. But look you where the raw materials of a developing thought-pattern are to be found. I give you an instance where the sociologist of science should be. Earl Milton was chairman of a symposium on planetary surfaces at McMaster University (Ontario) on June 17, 1974, with astronomer David Morrison, electrician Ralph Juergens and astrophysicist Derek York as speakers. Juergens assigned surface effects to recent transactions between Mars and the Moon. After the chairman called an intermission, the tape recorder was accidentally left spinning, and now a decade later we can eavesdrop upon several people, unknown to us, who spent the intermission by the speaker's table. The tape is not edited. The transcript I give here is partial. The voices are there, but they move so rapidly -- and so different are the voices in immediate hasty conversation -- and so impromptu the means of transmission and mechanisms employed --and so inadequate the resources here for their study that the total episode cannot be captured; it is a soupHon of the full flavor. At issue is not a "lie" of President Nixon, which is worth millions, and which the nation's media will pay anything to capture, but merely a small truth that an isolated historian, me, is trying feebly to pick up. The balance of the accidental taping only adds to the impression, you have to believe, of an enthusiastic rapid mini-symposium, except that it ends with a new voice, obviously female, arranging to meet one of the voices at "a quarter to eight." First Voice.... It's an interesting idea and I don't think it has been explored adequately.... I was very interested in this discussion.... I have done a considerable amount of research in ultra-high current density of discharges, I hope you don't mind my saying that. I think misconceptions, at least as they came out, imply that the conduction went through solid material... Other Voices interrupt. Second Voice: No, no, no, no, you've got to get the charge...[ He begins to draw on the blackboard] you see, if we have a surface here assuming of course that we are dealing with spherical surfaces, let's say we have a circle here, and you are going to get a discharge from this point... Now in order to get a discharge from this point I am going to get a small discharge, I am not going to get any arc, I have got to bleed a lot of charge off the surface into this point and then get it off.... Third Voice: I think from, from... I think I can convert the high density discharge phenomena, as Mr. Juergens describes, you initiate a discharge gradient that would allow this to be discharged through the density of the intervening material. At this point the current density which would occur would initiate locally and would spread out as the breakdown progressed and would continue to build up and continue to expand in current magnitude as long as you have more source available land the implication that this could cover the entire Moon if necessary is not all... Voices agreeing and protesting... First Voice: But don't I have a problem here as I start spreading... Second Voice: You break that down... Third Voice: As long as a discharge is available, and you spread it out and the farther you move out, you are locally vaporizing --as you dissipate energy, you are locally vaporizing solid material which then breaks down and contributes to superconductors, I don't mean superconductive in the terms of superconductivity... Fourth Voice: Sure... Third Voice: I mean.... You are referring to ... what you get essentially is a plasma as a result of... First voice: That's right, current density from these discharges can go to the levels of 108 amperes per square centimeter and can you maintain... Second Voice: As long as there is charge available... As long as it is spreading out it could continue, not over days, but in micro-second discharges... Don't call them sparks... The wire was only the initial source of the plasma. First Voice: Yeah. Second Voice: During the discharge you have your anode and cathode processes of tremendous pressures on those surfaces due to ion and electron bombardments. Your wire lies between what -- between two pieces of metal in this cases -- was intended to be a conductor. First Voice: But can you do this -- explode a wire between two non-conductors. Second Voice: Oh, I think you definitely can. Because the metallic nature has nothing to do with it... Only the initial discharge... Third Voice: Yes, that's the point... You'll have a discharge when the voltage gradient becomes at a particular level with regard to the density of the atmosphere. First Voice: That's the other question... What does the atmosphere have to do with it? Juergens: You have to trigger it with electrons dragged out by the field and once they bridge the gap, they ionize the material...[ One notes a bit of Juergens' character, he speaks rarely and in low quiet tones, and listens much.] Second Voice: If you take a little experiment they perform at the laboratory, if you take a tube here and put on some circuitous track a vacuum tube and come around to here, where the rest of the tube comes around to there, you put a little gap there, say a centimeter across, make the density of the tube at a particular level, you can cause that discharge to come all the way around through there. First Voice: Oh, yeah. Third Voice: But you will not conduct the material into the center, you will not even conduct the heat into the material except to the manner in which you're vaporizing the surface at a tremendous rate (from the impact), you are vaporizing the material from these discharges... First Voice: I agree. Second Voice: But the material is not blasting off everywhere at this time I am saying that at this time it isnot blasting off. It is only to the degree to being charge carriers and to being transmitted inside the arc but the pressure-electron and ion pressure on surface -- will prevent a massive expulsion of matter until the discharge is terminated. After it's done, all the material will be vaporized... First Voice: Now you are getting to an important point... This goes on for a minute or two longer. The craters, rilles and mares of the Moon are discussed as if they might have been electromagnetically created. There are quickly disputed points and then we see a transition occurring from talking about the technology of electrical discharges (from the small crude personal experiment with a piece of wire to catastrophic avalanches of electricity between Moon and Mars). The voices move from the substance of science to the behavior. Let us reproduce this transition, which is important to a science of science. The voices begin to discuss the "great red spot" of Jupiter, in relation to a newly discovered "red spot" on Venus... A New Voice claims the second discovery may be the umbilicus, where Venus spun off... Others exclaim Objections... Second Voice says Jupiter, great magnetic field would not let a body escape, nor would a body fly off the Red Spot which is not equatorial. New Voice says that there is no reason, only presumption, why Jupiter's field and axis would not have changed at the time of, or after the incident... Second Voice: But what of Venus' orbit.... New Voice: That's different, too; Mars is responsible for it in part... First Voice: It may be so when we look at it from Velikovsky's perspective... The arguments against, built on the wrong inclinations and so forth, they are held by uniformitarian but they don't explain anything to a Velikovskyite you see... Third Voice: Of course, there is a built-in psychological problem. I don't know that it's uniformitarian but it's built into our Western logic... Voices of Agreement... New Voice: If that's nature, we should find out. We should overcome that reaction. We've had our Copernicus, We've had our people who came along and said world is different from what everyone thinks. We've had ample evidence that this has happened -- not frequently -- but every five hundred years... And something of this.... and may be one of those times... So that's why I say, we ought to drop our resistance to the idea so much and say, well, holy smokes, you know, we've been confused by what we're doing uniformitarian-wise, let's jump over here and play for a while and see what happens, and that isn't the course that's followed, and I don't understand -- psychological resistance notwithstanding -- the unwillingness of a totally objective person to do that. You see, that's what bothers me. Third Voice: I think it's understandable.... I think if you consider, if you look at scientists and engineers, they spend years and years in universities buying their education and what you're suggesting is the education I've acquired... is so much garbage.. First Voice: I don't find it garbage... It's not a waste... The data stand and the objectivity of these measurements stand. It is their interpretation of these problems.... New Voice: You don't sacrifice your education when you change... First Voice: No, you don't, that's true... You don't have to throw the baby out with the bath. All agree. They speak of the strong psychological bent for orderliness in the scientific mind, "neat orderly chambers," dislike of uncertainty. "It's difficult to say I'm wrong!" "It's easy to say!" "It's very difficult to say!" "I've had so many years in graduate school. It was all bing, bing, bing, this is it..." Then later the very ideas and outlook changed. Second Voice: There are a great many scientists who would never come here to speak or even to listen, they wouldn't even discuss the questions... etc., etc. What triggered the transition was a quickly perceived misstep or retrojecting Jupiter's behavior in a uniformitarian way. A second transition then occurs. First Voice: people are belongers, I belong to this group, you examine an eccentric hypothesis, then one gets into major trouble, your colleagues branding you a crackpot or idiot. New Voice: aren't we suffering from the two-culture problem? Agreements. "Velikovsky's cardinal points were in the humanities." Yes New Voice: "Yes, I think so," New Voice: They were absolutely unquestioning... And then New Voice goes on to argue the factual validity of his proposition, leaving the discussion of the logic of science and humanities behind and also the straight astrophysics and electromagnetics with which the talk began. The voices tend to agree in principle: that a consensus of widespread legends is persuasive as to its basic factuality. Now the voices thank each other and disperse, their few moments of exciting discussion ended. I am afraid that I have lost you, my readers, amidst such a confusion of remarks, but I will regain you if I have merely shown you how the raw materials of this intense human discourse appear. Ultimately we reduce and clarify the process, introducing the logical order on a printed page but losing some of the intense give and take within the human mind and among different human minds. Letters are not so important in scientific discourse as they once were, given the telephone, the Xeroxing machines, the airplane, and the comfortable meeting places to be found everywhere in colleges and hotels. They are more important among the heretics than among conventional scholars because they are the cheapest means of communication. Their effect is multiplied too by Xeroxing them and passing them around. But even then they are an unsatisfactory record, because they are rendered fragmentary by intervening telephone calls and meetings. Greenberg's and Lowery's correspondence in editing Kronos and the S. I. S. R. was heavy but would, especially in Greenberg's case, be enormous were it to include transcripts of the phone conversations. Still, in letters one can follow the kind of internal argumentation that otherwise disappears. Thus Leroy Ellenberg, reconciled with Deg despite his mean attacks upon Chaos and Creation (mentioned earlier), began to use Deg as a postal drop, sending him letters, copies of letters and articles, and memoranda. By 1983 Ellenberger was preparing to abandon much of quantavolution and found now that the story of Velikovsky was not without its shady tones, and more important, that Arctic ice cores and bristlecone pine dating technologies were directly contradicting Holocene quantavolutions by their even pattern of annual regression into time; further, that Gentry's studies of the surprising "instant" polonium halos of creation that came from nowhere -- parentless -- and which threatened the theory of radiochronometry, were probably invalid. You show a total misunderstanding of the Oxygen-18 isotope technique of measuring time in ice varves, he assured Deg, as The Burning of Troy with its critique of ice core studies was about to appear. It seemed that Leroy was on the verge of taking up a macrochronist position in quantavolution, which by 1983 was fast emerging from geophysics and paleontology and which offered respectability to its clientele. One could thereupon dismiss all apparent human experience with catastrophe and get rid of the historical sciences and humanities. Deg contemplated the prospect sourly. I could, he thought, surrender michrochronism in the event of defeat, but I would rather relabel the total construction as a heuristic exercise machine, good for the circulation of the blood and the sharpening of the critical faculties. There were always these honest, upsetting or encouraging, epistolary discussions going on among the heretics, many of them --how many? -- a score at a time. Here is another one from 1978, going into 1979. The cosmic heretic, Dwardu Cardona of Vancouver, is writing to the cosmic heretic, Irving Wolfe of Montreal: Dear Irving, If you don't already, you're going to hate me by the time you finish reading this. I'm afraid that, in your cosmic interpretation of Hamlet, I do not concur with you at all. I should qualify that last statement. I do agree that Hamlet has a cosmic connection but not with the Martian close encounters of the 8th/ 7th centuries B. C... The story of Hamlet is, in its skeletal form, identical to that of Horus. To my knowledge, this is the earliest form of the myth we have so far come across. The Egyptian tale was already well developed during the very first dynasties of Egypt. It is that old -- and older still. So is Hamlet.... This goes on for several pages, one of several letters in the interchange going to show how much of human history and science evolves around the figure of Saturn, the great god of the Neolithic Age and beyond, everywhere in the world. I will not print Wolfe's reply, equally lengthy, also giving and taking. He has published obscurely (save to cosmic heretics) several articles on the catastrophic imagery of Shakespeare, that when published in book form (he collected a number of rejections) will constitute a formidable body of analysis on Shakespeare, by a new approach. But then Cardona is also busy with historical astrophysics, and he perceives in Deg's ideas a competitor to his own. Never mind, he has his reasons, and he writes to Earl Milton: ... The evidence of myth which points to Saturn having once occupied a position above Earth's north polar regions is voluminous. There is not a race on Earth that has not preserved at least one account which states as much. According to this evidence, Saturn occupied a central position in the north celestial regions. It rotated, and rotated widely; but, other than that, it was immovable. It did not rise, it did not set. It merely became brighter and more glorious each night as the Sun set. This state of affairs seems to have lasted for ages. It is the one single dictum of the ancients from which all other beliefs are derived.... But, of course, there are physical problems, and colossal ones, inherent in the tenet. And that is where I hope you will be able to help the cause. The problem, stated succinctly, is this: What force, and in what way, could have kept the Earth locked beneath Saturn's south pole?...[ one of 3 pages]. And Milton replies: ... As you may know, de Grazia and I are developing a new cosmogony for the planets, one which is consistent with extant mythologies and catastrophic historical events. If Al has spoken to you of Solaria Binaria, then you know something of this cosmogony... Here is an outline of our speculations about how Saturn and Earth were once locked together. Consider a gigantic dumbbell with the sun at one end and Super Saturn (Saturn was much larger then) at the other. The original planets, Mars, Earth, Apollo, and Mercury, were locked between the sun and Super Saturn, very close to the latter. The new planets, Uranus and Neptune, orbited beyond this inner group. A now distant fragment from an earlier era, the residue of Super Uranus, was receding from the system. As we see it, the Earth did not rotate on its axis such that the Sun was visible daily. The Earth's axis, at that time, was aimed along the Sun- Super Saturn line. Earth's "Northern Hemisphere" faced Saturn, the "South," now devastated by the recent tearing away of the Moon, faced the Sun... And Cardona writes: I'm glad to see that de Grazia and Wolfe, with whom I corresponded a while back, have not forgotten me. At the time, de Grazia did throw a few crumbs my way concerning his developing new cosmogony and, if I well remember, I cautioned him to be wary of certain mythological identifications. Now I see that de Grazia's Solaria Binaria has been echoed by Tresman and O'Gheoghan. But on all that, a little more later on. (....) 4) De Grazia's super-Uranus needs much evidence. The Uranus of Greek myth seems to be merely an earlier alias of Saturn. This is borne out by Assyro-Babylonian, Sumerian, and Egyptian texts. Annu was the same as Osiris, who was the same as Saturn. 5) There seems to be no mythological evidence that the Moon was torn from the Earth. On the contrary, I have come across evidence which points to Saturn as the parent of the Moon. The Moon commenced its celestial career by orbiting Saturn but when Earth itself was torn from Saturn's gravitational embrace, it managed to carry the Moon with it... (....) When I wrote to you asking for your help, I did not know that de Grazia had already cornered you. I do not wish to "steal" you away from him. I do believe, however, that we can help each other. For that matter, I thank you for the information you supplied me with concerning the Roche limit. And if it is not too much trouble, I really would appreciate it if you could, if only for a day or so, put your own model aside and weigh the possibility of a Saturn-Jupiter dumbbell formation with Earth locked in between. And Milton replies, point by point, in an eight-page letter, concluding: As with you I am not out to convert but help. To use only myth is equally as dangerous as to use only a computer to prove Venus' orbit never intersected Earth's. We both know better... Please keep in touch. I need more data to help you further. Should anything I see in your data be germane to our model I will credit you and I trust you will do the same re my comments and ideas becoming a part of your cosmogony. And so on. Cardona has several sympathizers and is seeking to convert Milton and Deg, who in turn are moving rapidly on their own model. Cardona, meanwhile, begins to publish his rich Saturn materials in Kronos. Clube and Napier come forth with a cometary model, derived without contact with any of them, in Cosmic Serpent, practically simultaneously with Chaos and Creation. A process is here occurring that resembles somewhat the internal competition among the Cambridge, London and California biologists striving to produce the first and most useful model of the structure of DNA, an event of 1953 described by Watson in The Double Helix. By 1984 there were in contention the Cardona-Talbott Saturn model, the Clube-Napier galactic cometary model, and the De Grazia-Milton Solaria Binaria model of cosmic quantavolution. All of these were far ahead of, or let us say distinct from the heavy empirical work beginning to appear concerning meteoritic impacts, clay chemistry, and biological extinctions. Perhaps the tides of particular studies will wash away most of the substance of the models. Such a fate has befallen the model of the victorious biological team, as Stephen Jay Gould tells us: It is a credit to the power of Watson and Crick and to the fruitfulness of good science in general that, thirty year later, this Cartesian view of molecular genetics has been superseded, as a second revolution transmutes our view of inheritance and development. The genome, a cell's compendium of genetic information, is not a stationary set of beads on strings, subject to change by substituting one bead for another. The genome is fluid and mobile, changing constantly in quality, and replete with hierarchical systems of regulation and control... Barbara McClintock is the godparent and instigator of this second revolution. [She published her papers obscurely in her own laboratory newsletter, but, as Gould remarks, she has lived a blessedly long life.] And Gould, whom we have come to perceive as a quantavolutionist, can even discover in this movement from the one model to the other a victory for "repaid and profound rearrangement" over the "implication that evolution proceeds slowly and gradually." Pleased as we may be about this aspect of the change, we are here more directly made aware of the possible short life of even the best of scientific and cosmogonic models. Once more I return to the point that almost nothing of the large number of writings in scientific support of or in modification of quantavolution, particularly as conveyed in V.'s work, has been read by any conventional scholar, including (I stress) those who claimed to have read something by V. prior to attacking him. It is clear that one way of treating with heretics is to go on the principle "Smite the shepherd, and the flock will be scattered." Moreover, anti-heretics lose much of their effectiveness as soon as they discuss work by heretics other than Velikovsky, because they depend so heavily upon a prior inoculation of the public of science with stereotypes against his name. In this regard, the heretics have suffered by their own behavior. If they must constantly acclaim V. on their first page, like others do Einstein, Marx or Engels, and Freud, it's like prefacing every encounter with a "Heil Hitler" at the worst, or at its mildest, forever snapping salutes between the military, a practice devised to confirm a status system, limit originality, and exclude an outer world. It must be apparent by now that V. was not without blame. He did not want even one, much less two or a group of martyrs burning alongside him at the stake. He was loath to adopt the ideas or quote or put forward or support anyone who was about to be credited or discredited by a valid contribution that was not a priori a confirming footnote to his own work. The idea of a roundtable or true seminar was beyond him. After decades in America he became a citizen, but he had always some of the czarism and mosaism of old Russia that would not let one kick ideas around like soccer balls. V.'s prominence absorbed all energies penetrating from outside in addressing him and his claims, diverting attention from all other new work in the field, which was in any event dammed up and had to trickle through his notoriety, whether in magazines of general circulation or in the couple of small magazines, which themselves held back most work not directly concerned with his affairs. Were I to guess the quantity of useful writing appearing as deliberately directed toward quantavolution, I would suggest a statistical figure approaching a Fibonacci series by dodecennial periods, beginning in 1940-1951 at 1000 pages; thus, 2000 pages for 1952-63; 3000 pages for 1964-75; 5000 pages for 1976-87; 8000 pages for 1988-1999; 13,000 pages for 2000- 2011; and so on in time, granted there would be no world war or political revolution. My aim, in quoting heretical correspondence in this chapter at some length (still not one- hundredth of its volume), has been to give evidence of how science proceeds among heretics and non-heretics alike. The published work (which in the case of the heretics has not been read by the non-heretics) is only the tip of the iceberg showing. The same is true in most scientific work. There must be a consensus of sorts between correspondents else they cannot talk: here, with Wolfe, Cardona shares the belief that literature connects with a mainstream of mythology extending to the birth of the human mind; with Milton, (and with Wolfe, too) Cardona shares the premise, arrived at on both sides at the end of years of study, that the planets have moved and changed, even in early human times The behavior of the cosmic heretics corresponds closely to that of conventional scholars in regard to their methods of work, and would be practically indistinguishable were it not for the warping of the processes brought on by the heretics' poverty of resources. Back and forth, the shaping form of new kind of science (like the old) works like a complicated weaving machine, capable of darting up and down and sidewise to pluck its threads, strengthen its seams, and sometimes the machine sticks and threads must be pulled out, sometimes a whole line of thread as some major patterning element has to be rejected. In the 1960's the American Psychological Association, through W. D. Garvey and B. C. Griffith, conducted pioneering studies of the communication network of the field with which some 30,000 persons were connected. Of these 30,000, 2000 or less provided almost all the materials that were being circulated as current psychology. Work published in a psychological journal started on the average 30 to 36 months before publication. Between 18 and 20 months before publication the work was shaped to a point where it might be reported. Usually, between 15 and 18 months before publication, the reporting process began. Initial communications were highly informal and occurred typically at the writer's institution. After several months a formal report was prepared that in about 30% of the cases came to be delivered at a national or regional meeting. Almost always the audience was below 100, sometimes only a dozen. Copies become available at the Convention, and special papers might be distributed now also by the author (s) through their sponsors such as a government agency. Preprints were usually distributed, between 10 and 200. These were often given to close-in co-workers, acquaintances elsewhere, and persons who had heard about the work and asked for copies. The interval between submissions and publication ordinarily took 9 months or more, but the interval would be doubled if an article were rejected. Few articles failed to gain acceptance somewhere else. While the publishing proceeded, additional reports were being made to groups and classes. Aside from textbooks, which amount to compulsory subsidizing by students, practically all scientific (and scholarly), publishing is subsidized by scientists as individuals or groups, directly or through tax money whose appropriation and spending they manage to influence. Exposure of the work by publication is low. The largest journal reaches 30% of the general population of psychologists; specialized psychology journals may reach 1%. The largest journal will expose the title to all; however, one half of the research reports will be expose the title to all; however, one half of the research reports will be read by 1% or less of the readership, none by more than 7%, it appears. Half the articles in the largest journals are read by only some 200 readers. Current journal reading amounts to only about one-third of the journal reading of one group of active psychologist studied. Some months later an article becomes retrievable by being indexed in one of the now well-equipped services such as Psychological Abstracts, thus helping people like Deg, who was trying to find out what work was going on regarding "human nature," only to find nothing because the term was not indexed. The Garvey-Griffith study offered proof of what disciplinary leaders know everywhere, that long before the rank and file, and quite long before the public, learns of a new line of research, the leaders know it from personal acquaintanceship, membership on foundation and government boards, and operating at the nodes of communication where manuscripts come in and criss-cross and where money changes hands. The same process that occurs in psychology occurs on a greatly reduced scale in quantavolution, among the heretical community. The scientific creationists too are loosely organized and operate, also in a small way, like the psychologists. They and the scientific heretics engage in mutual eavesdropping. A somewhat different process occurs among the non-heretical quantavolutionaries, who operate on the fringes of their discipline -- psychology, biology, astronomy, anthropology, etc., and are signaled by terms such as "macroevolution," "punctuated equilibria," and so forth. These for the most part are anti-heretical and cling to their disciplinary centers as much as possible. Thus Walter Alvarez, who is himself under fire for a study showing the "iridium layer" marking an end to the dinosaurs in the rock strata is prompt to refer to Deg's work as "anti-scientific." He cannot have read Deg's work or any other considerable literature of the field; otherwise he must be using some narrow and antiquated definition of science, or worse, using the term science for name-calling. It is widely believed that all astronomers, all geologists, all physicist, all historians, and all archaeologists have for thirty years been close-minded to the arguments continually brought up by the cosmic heretics. This is not so. And this stereotype of the resistant and rigid collective mind continually exacerbated feelings on both sides. (As did the opposite stereotype, that all heretics were foolish and anti-scientific.) To illustrate my point I will turn to Deg again, for he was always concocting hypothetical statistics. (He should have offered a college course on the subject; it is useful for those areas, most areas, where data is trivial or scanty, and the usual resort is to revert to the Aristotelian modes of thought.) Deg's Notes, Princeton, 1980 The grades of opposition among the probable quarter million of scientists who have formed any opinion on the cosmic heretics should be sorted out. And here I assign estimates in percentages only to illustrate my view. They may be, my guess, up to 10% off one way or the other. a) Stereotyped rigid opponents: 19% b) General dissenters: 35% c) Specialized dissenters inattentive to major theories: 20% d) Doubters but interested: 13% e) Interested and acknowledging truthful elements: 10% f) Persuaded of the general truth of quantavolution: 3% g) Persuaded of the general truth and also of some special heretical truths, such as a radical change of planetary motions, or a recent great deluge on Earth: 0.1% If one were to correlate such figures with the prestige of the opinion aggregates in their own fields, using concepts that I have used in studies of political leadership, we might find that the top elite (1%) would be heavily concentrated in classes a, b, and c; the activist productive scientists (3%) would be spread throughout; the ordinary scientists (80%) would be skewed somewhat higher toward elite opinion but spread throughout; the inert scientists (10%) (recalling that most scientists have hardly heard of quantavolution of Velikovsky as an issue and are therefore not tabulated at all, and that inertness mean 'unproductive' ordinary scientists) would be even more skewed toward elite opinion. In consequence of the biases and the gross numbers, we would find the last two categories favoring Quantavolution populated by only a couple of members of the top elite and a few members of the activist productive group. It is understood, of course, that "elite" and "productivity" here may not denote "truth- production" to any great degree: they are terms denoting network and establishment leadership. Thus, if we were placing people, we would shuffle leadership scores like a deck of cards after three aces in a row were drawn. Also, "forming an opinion" does not denote extensive reading in the field of quantavolution. Furthermore, placement of a person does not suggest his "flip-flopability." For instance, Carl Sagan would probably score as "top elite" and full under "general dissenters," but his writing and utterances on occasion signify a suppressed readiness to accept general quantavolution. He would have high "flip-flopability." So would the "activist-productive" e-category geologist Derek Ager, who, however, would not have to execute a vigorous flop, just a tilt. Melvin Cook, a geophysicist of the same ranking, would be found in f, and would probably move restrainedly into g. Robert Jastrow might occur as top elite in the d category of interested doubters, perhaps even in the e category; he, too, might move up readily. On the whole, there is much subconscious ambivalence (produced by anomalous and contradictory material) in science, plus a goodly concentration of influentials near enough to quantavolution theory to accomplish an easy transition. Not one of the top elite of scientists in the country over the past thirty years has read deeply in the literature of quantavolution. That goes without exception for Sagan, although he has been active in the Velikovsky affair. Deg was here counting as scientists those humanists and social scientists who profess a scientific approach to their fields. He knew of none of these of the top elite who had studied deeply the literature. Probably no more than 1000 persons in the world have been seriously engaged in the discovery and study of quantavolutionary literature over the past thirty years. If Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision has been read by a million people, most of the thousand will have read the book, but 99% of the million readers will have read little else of value besides it. Many a well-known figure of science has had an exoterrestrial skeleton in his closet. Plato would deny the citizenry the right to challenge the divine and natural order of the heavens and proposed severe penalties for such. Yet Plato has for over 2000 years afforded support to quantavolutionists in history (the Atlantis report), astronomy (deviations of the planets) and geology (destruction of early Attica by earthquakes), V. was annoyed when Stecchini stressed the anti-quantavolutionist side of Plato's political writings, and urged upon them a consistency that was not there; at least it seemed to Deg that he could not tolerate a double standard for Plato, that what was true should nevertheless be suppressed for the good of the social order. Here was an example of what was forbidden in principle to a psychoanalyst: V. therefore needed to believe that the truth would free man and wished a social policy that would acknowledge ancient traumas of catastrophe so as psychologically to free him in his behavior today. Given V. 's authoritarian bent, a contradiction of feelings arose which was displaced upon Stecchini's innocent and free-wheeling skepticism and attacked unreasonably. It does appear that Plato was deliberately contradictory. He recognized a chaotic universe while officially forbidding its recognition. Stecchini performed a similar service with respect to Newton and Laplace, discovering in both men the inklings of catastrophism. In Newton's case the contradiction between a stable order of the skies of the new science and a biblical literalism ordaining catastrophic belief was explicit, but glossed over by Newtonian science. Stecchini's exposure of the concern of Laplace that destructive cometary visitations were possible, and of his admission that his mathematics, which fixed the modern vision of an impeccable celestial order, simplified reality, was more surprising. Deg met with additional surprises and came to suspect that when the time came to throw off the uniformitarian guise, scientists would rediscover a general exceptionalism and anomalism in geology, paleontology, evolution, and astronomy. He relocated persons such as Pickering and Wegener. He found that Shapely, who had become the anti-hero of the Velikovskian sociological scenario, had posited exoterrestrial encounters one time, and so, too, Harry Hess, who had filed amicus curiae briefs for Velikovsky, and Sagan to whose burst of fame both hypotheses of exoterrestrial communication and rebuttals of Velikovsky contributed. Some of such characters found a place in the geology of Deg's Lately Tortured Earth. Together with the frankly catastrophic writers, such as Melvin Cook and Allan Kelly, they would come to play an important substantiating role, like the dissenting minority opinions in U. S. Supreme Court history, when the moment for revising science would occur. Then some of those who had denounced "backward catastrophism" would become forerunners of quantavolution. But, please note, I have scarcely touched upon the full breadth of the science of science, which would embrace the thousands of cases occurring in the normal operations of conventional science upon conventional offerings to science. Nor can I do so, for I must be done with the case of the cosmic heretics very soon now. Deg's Journal, en route Washington, October 18, 1966. Sundry of the quantitatively directed natural scientist have told me and others that they believe Velikovsky to be unimportant and irrelevant because of his qualitative, subjective approach to events in astronomy, physics, and geology. For instance, the work on electromagnetism, radioactivity, interplanetary exploration, and solar system aberrations is learned, studied, and developed in a mathematical setting. But for what V is saying, the movements of phenomena are so large and influential as to make quantitative assertions about them unnecessary. What matters to us is that oceans of soil descended from the skies, that numerous eruptions and earthquakes occurred, that gross changes in the sky appeared. These happenings were reported. The reports are ample. Neither the ancients nor we ourselves today would have had the tools, under the circumstances of the events, to describe them and present them in sets of equations. Deg's Journal, Princeton, January 18, 1968, 10 P. M. Every physical law states a proposition that is useful to culture, with requirements that are relevant to the practical workings of the law, and derives its "eternal truth" from that fact. The proof, e. g. of Newton's law of inertia, is supposed to lie in the myriad applications of it, in ballistics, industry, and transportation. But one need only think of how many enormous discoveries and inventions occurred before Newton's law to see that the law itself does not create the understanding of nature. It only rephrases that understanding in a slightly better and more useful from. It is a mistake to treat each reformulation as more than a useful temporary rendition. Some natural laws can be made to appear ridiculously simple and indeed they may be such. A body resists changes in its motions. "Nothing changes unless acted upon." Well, why should it? That's the law of inertia. But the opposite of course is true -- nothing becomes what it is without having been something else. Etc. Deg's Journal, October 27, 1972 The revolutionary zeal to refute uniformitarianism and evolution has not considered fully their merits. The doctrine, that solar system has been stable for millions of years, and that biological evolution and geological changes have occurred almost entirely through small incremental changes over billions of years, seems weak enough, in the light of our reassessment of catastrophic evidences in every area. The recency of catastrophe is plain. We have had to explain why uniformitarianism triumphed but have done so only cursorily; one does not pause to strip elaborate armor off the fallen foes until the battle is won. When we can return to consider, we shall find that uniformitarianism has, like the Christianity its allies so disturbed, performed functions that we are not yet ready to provide substitutes for, indeed perhaps are not able to discover and recognize for some time. In Praise of Uniformitarianism We have said -- Stecchini and I, at least -- that uniformitarianism was the beautiful philosophy of the Victorian Age and of all those who wished since ancient times to give stability to human affairs. V. has recognized this and says from time to time, cryptically, even in Worlds in Collision, that the Great Fear remains, and is a cause of war and strife. Uniformitarianism is the culmination of the worldwide amnesia that followed the great catastrophes -- ( I would call the period ca 5000 B. C. to 650 B. C. as the Epoch of Cosmic Catastrophes) [later extended to 12,000 B. C.] in its triumph, uniformitarianism succeeded effectively to reduce to nothingness the catastrophic theories. Great scholars like Eliade breeze over mountains of evidence of the chaos of "the beginning" without asking whether such chaos occurred; they become a manifestation of primitive minds. My position is this: that the effects of the Epoch persist; that Uniformitarianism was a successful myth both psychologically and socially, and was in conformity with many scientific discoveries. But far beyond these functions, uniformitarianism is rooted in the provision of the grand assurance that enabled humanity to: a) Challenge nature b) Control nature c) Set up the idea of History as Linear in Time, destroying the popularity of (and essential conservatism of) cyclical theories of history d) Spawn the idea of progress as the future of man e) Encourage the faith in stability that promoted the exquisite and productive division of labor in all areas (no rushing to the caves or wombs of overall theology needed) f) Simplify religion and produce deism, god as mechanic and great designer g) Give laws immutability h) Promote the idea of a rational bureaucracy and rationalism generally. Deg's Journal, New York City, November 18, 1972 Science is protected by a veil of awe and therefore is not usually thought to respond to sociological laws. It does, however, and even to laws about the vulgar sorts of opinion and leadership. I notice that reforming or revolutionary scientists go back to "discarded," "forgotten" "rejected" sources. (Cf. Velikovsky in "Cosmos without Gravitation" and Earth in Upheaval.) The ordinary supposition is that this is part of the rational system of sciences: viz. a) thorough coverage of sources, b) reexamination of misunderstood writings, etc. Actually the explanation of this behavior is tr‚s ordinaire. Science has only a one-channel mind. It cannot proceed with two theories at the same time. This may seem ridiculous: "What? The most brilliant intellects among humanity and they cannot hold two thoughts at the same time!" The absurd becomes acceptable when we realize the deductive and administrative nature of science (Cf. my "Science and Values of Administration.") An enterprise, which science is, seeks one direction, one consistent set of rules of decision, one comfortable theory (if possible), a hierarchy of access and command, and (like an imperial megalomaniac of any world religion) one world-wide code (without culturally and ideologically distinct competitors) The "old discarded writers" are therefore to be understood as you would view a rabble before it was transformed into an army. Coming early, they did not hear the call, they could not feel the current's strength. Their students, "seeing more clearly, feeling more keenly." rewrote their science to fit the future history of science, that is, to describe the path to be followed. Thus is science administered. Newton and Darwin are celebrated for unconscious reason, more than for conscious ones or scientific ones: to cope with increasing anxiety, and yet change from a prescientific to a scientific age: A) Newton performed a great theological role in the transition from geocentrism to helio- centrism by inventing the clockwork universe, and absolute laws. B) Darwin's great theological service was to give enormous time and minute change (i. e. to reduce Time from quality to quantity) by inventing gradual evolution [by natural selection]. Deg's Journal New York City, January 1973 It is a formidable block to accusations vs. the reception system of science that "you do not know anyone of great merit who has not been recognized." This is fallacious: 1) One can find such: e. g. Boulanger. 2) Relative ratings are important. Change in rank order from 1 to 30 say, or from "best seller" to "out of print." 3) People are "infamous" and regarded as "famous" and vice-versa. 4) Famous people now have passed long periods in which they were unattended to : e. g. Aristotle. 5) Famous people are degraded on grounds that, though they were really great, they were superseded. 6) Who knows who is not known but great. 7) How few scientists on the list are read, and really known, after the first dozen or so. 8) People of great merit may not be able to publish, or they may he without the experimental, research, editorial and critical assistance to make their views plausible or digestible. e. g. if V. had not been able to hire expert editorial assistance, writing as he did in a language only lately and imperfectly come by, he would not have been able to publish any work of consequence. e. g. Deg has on occasion recommended student Abner highly and student Boggs modestly, then to discover the Boggs got a scholarship to go on at a first class establishment university while Abner did not go on, went instead to a less well-equipped and less influential university and was lost sight of in the production and achievement lists. Deg's Journal, New York City, 1974 Sidney Willhelm, who has been one of the keenest sociological observers of the Velikovsky Affair, gave two excellent new reasons why V. should have been both accepted and rejected by influential elements of American Society. First, he says, the American democracy has given over to scientists its power and will to regiment ideas: "Reins remain extremely light upon the creative person through the delegation conferred by the State; by keeping each other in line, scientists avoid direct State censorship." (One thinks, for instance, of how remarkably well the scientific groups have restrained the government from acting forcefully in the scientific groups' volatile area of bioengineering and cloning.) "Thus," says Willhelm, "the forces of resistance find a more difficult time to convince skeptics of the lack of true freedom of inquiry by the absence of an explicit state agency charged with thought control." Willhelm also points to the psychological compatibility of V. 's catastrophic theories with the policies of the political elite. "While it was the longing for peace and tranquillity which apparently nourished notions of harmony in nature, today it is the momentum of militaristic destruction which introduces the greater reception toward Velikovsky's controversial interpretations. Modern science owes its growth to wars and the threats of war." The cosmic heretics, with their wars of the gods, and clashes of the planets and comets, are setting an example, unconsciously, for the prospering of militarism and the military-industrial complex. V. realized these dangers, and coined the idea of' collective amnesia with the purpose of exposing this mentality and thus controlling it, while Deg too realized the danger in the association and went further to explicate the original dynamics of Homo Schizo, to build peace institutions, and to devise peace therapies. Deg's Journal, Washington, D. C., 1979 It may appear shameful that scientists should depend for a new discovery or new perspective upon a lay body of vaguely connected individuals who are interested in an idea. Still, this is not only historically probable; it may be also logically and sociologically necessary deduction. The triumph of the Renaissance outlook and method in the humanities and sciences was a politico-social-economic-ideological effect. So was the victory of uniformitarian geology and, thereafter, biology in the nineteenth century. Scientists and specialists, once they receive their kudos, become prideful and seek to shed their origins, retrojecting their present behavior and methods back to their science. The story of Albert Einstein's success, for example, is told almost always as a rational discovery, a steady progress though appraisals and tests, to applications and finally to total acceptance. The full story of his great lifetime success, however, bespeaks a curious figure who caught the popular imagination and was ballyhooed by the press and newsreels under the misunderstood concept of "relativity" until many scientists, no matter how reluctant, had to deal with his idea. Several early opponents of "relativity" (now only a suppressed whisper is heard of this) saw clearly that a "matinee idol" was being foisted upon them. One does not deny Einstein his greatness in pointing out that he might not have wormed his way through the reception system of science and almost certainly would not have received the lion's share of glory if the public and press had not been behind him or, better, dragging him forward. This is a subject which requires thorough exploration, and has not received such at the hands of science or the history of science. To take up only one point for a moment, few new ideas can penetrate the publications of science; they are pinched capillaries. If they are conveyed, their readership is extremely limited, a few persons, unless they are well-known already, in which event some hundreds read the work. Scientists get little reward from hard reading of anything but items aimed toward their ongoing projects, and they are busy with other affairs. If an idea does penetrate the minds of a very few, the very few must become a group, and must command just enough resources (not so much as to be 'bought off') to become an inescapable pressure against the conventional main front. Then they make a breakthrough, spread out on the flanks, and begin to surround and capture demoralized main body elements. The winners may not even be correct; they may inspire only one of the many fads that overcome disciplines and the scientific outlook as a whole. If what they espouse is effectively 'true' a surge of scientific advances occurs and, among other by-products, arouses historians to write (and rewrite) this history. A public, consisting of persons who have time to read seriously, like love letters, the otherwise unreal material, constitutes a heavy factor in assembling, encouraging, calling attention to, and forcing recognition of a new viewpoint or method. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 5: } {Q - } {C - } {T EPILOGUE} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: by Alfred de Grazia - EPILOGUE Surely, said Deg over the telephone, there must be a better way to write personal histories. He had just read my manuscript. If there is, said I, I don't know it. It irritated me that he was dissatisfied, perhaps because I am dissatisfied myself. I tried. But there is no easy way of presenting the whole truth about people's lives. The threats of self- censorship and distortion must continuously be warded off, and, if not these, then there may come charging in crying "foul" the police, the torts attorneys, the anti-heretics, and some of the cosmic heretics as well. I've used many letters of yours, I told Deg, don't you think I should have a piece of paper from you giving me permission, but he said, no, you have them in hand rightfully and it's quite apparent that you are carrying on a public debate in the public interest on a matter of public concern. How can you do your job without reporting what people say, even if they don't like being quoted? If anything, you've been a softy; you haven't used a hundred items I've given to you about myself and others... Wait now, I said, that's just because they would be redundant... O. K..., he agreed, but bear in mind how important are the freedom of science and freedom of expression -- and truth, and proof of the truth: you couldn't do anything else; ideally you might have printed the whole file and let the documents just march out with fife and drums. I don't intend to hurt anyone, I said, and he saw I was anxious. Buck up, man, dammit, you're doing a public service. And you've got the First Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S. of A. for shield. Nowhere else is the letter of the law so close to the spirit of the law. But weren't you badgering the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist with a suit for slander? Well, he excused himself, yes, but I wanted to open up their pages to discussion, I wanted a chance to reply, and their refusal was damaging to science. It made their scientist readers believe in a phony history and misrepresentations; it was a nasty cover-up. You'd better go back and read what you've said --read the chapter in The Burning of Troy on the matter, too. The conduct and progress of science is public business and wrapping it in a cloak of privacy -- well, I won't go on, just look at Nixon in the White House and, all that he tried to do in the guise of privacy to make off with his papers and tapes. I didn't file suit; I tried to bulldoze them, but they were too smart; it didn't work nor did an appeal to fair play. Now thanks to you we've had a marriage between Miss Liberty of Expression and the scientists -- granted it's a shotgun wedding. You've gotten me way off the subject, I said. I called to tell you the book is ended. "La commedia ‚ finita." All that it needs is a final word from you. Please try to make it positive. I like happy endings. There was a long pause; then his voice came back on the line, carefully stringing out the words: If quantavolution is untrue, it will stand like a monument to edify all who pass on the road of science... Everyone who seeks a new truth in science must become a party to concerns of civil liberty... Science is half psychosociology... Of all movements, scientific movements are the most rewarding to their adherents, win or lose, and of all these the most adventurous is cosmic heresy... He who knows how to tell time will decide the fate of the heretics. "O. K." said I "that's enough." "Is it?" he asked. "You have not remarked in your book that Velikovsky wrote his works on catastrophe and quantavolution in the years 1940 to 1960, aged forty-five to sixty-five, which was precisely my experience between 1963 and 1983 when I was of the same age, a curious coincidence -- or a signal perhaps that my time is up." "Where are they, Sovereign Virgin, But where are the snows of yester-year?" To which I felt the urge to add "Yes where is the Queen Who ordered the scholar Buridan Cast in the Seine in a sack? But where are the snows of yester-year ?" End of Cosmic Heretics {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLEPAGE} {S - } TITLEPAGE CHAOS AND CREATION AN INTRODUCTION TO QUANTAVOLUTION IN HUMAN AND NATURAL HISTORY by ALFRED DE GRAZIA Metron Publications Princeton London Bombay © 1981 by ALFRED DE GRAZIA No reproduction in any form of this book, in whole or in part (except for brief quotation in critical articles or review), may be made without written permission from the author. First Edition 1981 Metron Publications Box 1213 Princeton, N J., U.S.A. 08540 PRINTED IN INDIA BY MANMOHAN S. BHATKAL AT POPULAR BOOK DEPOT PRINTING DIVISION, DR. BHADKAMKAR MARG, BOMBAY 400 007. To Ami Hueber I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it being attributed to natural bodies as a great honour and perfection that they are impassable, immutable, inalterable, etc.: as, conversely, I hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable etc. It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable by reason of the many and different alterations, mutations, generations, etc., which incessantly occur in it...I say the same concerning the Moon, Jupiter and all the other globes of the Universe.... These men who so extol incorruptibility, inalterability, etc., speak thus, I believe, out of the great desire they have to live long and for fear of death.... GALILEO GALILEI Dialogue on the Great World Systems The real actors on the stage of the universe are very few if their adventures are many. The most “ancient treasure” -in Aristotle’s words-that was left to us by our predecessors of the High and Far-Off Times was the idea that the gods are really stars, and that there are no others. The forces reside in the starry heavens, and all the stories, characters and adventures narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among the stars, who are planets. A prodigious assignment it may seem for those planets to account for all those stories and also to run the affairs of the whole universe. GIORGIO DI SANTILLANA HERTHA VON DECHEND Hamlet’s Mill {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } TITLEPAGE FOREWORD INTRODUCTION: Quantavolution vs. Evolution The Uniformitarian Resistance Quantavolution by Catastrophe CHAPTER ONE: Cosmic Instability Impacts on Earth The Cleavage of Mars: A Particular Case CHAPTER TWO: High Energy from Space Electrical Forces Heavy-Body Impacts Seismism and Volcanism Fire and Gases Dense Fall-Out Hurricanes Pandemonium and Darkness The Battle over Time The Quantavolutionary Column The Exponential Principle Revolutionary Integration of the Cosmos CHAPTER THREE: Collapsing Tests of Time Rapid Sedimentation Coral Reefs Radiodating Radiation Turbulence Potassium-Argon Dating The Radio-Halo Problem Radiocarbon (Carbon-14) Dating Tree-Ring Time Magnetism The Fossil Record and Mutating Time Cycles and Anniversaries 58 Tests in Dispute The Dissolution of Time Of Mammonths and Amber Schaeffer and Velikovsky CHAPTER FOUR: A Catastrophic Calendar The Number of Catastrophes Why 14,000 Years? CHAPTER FIVE: Solaria Binaria The Magnetic Tube and Planets The Binary Partner The Stacked Binary System Decline of the Electric System The Break-up of Super-Uranus Planetary Behavior Completion of the Transformation The World of Pangea The Sky-Watches Early Astronomical Ideas Summary Reflections upon the Changing World System CHAPTER SIX: The Uranians The Destruction of Pangea: The First Chaos The Ice Dumps The Creation of Man Religious Beginnings Paleolithic Religion Birth of the Heavenly Host Ejaculative Language Ecumenical Culture The Expansion of Homo Schizo Old and New World Concordances Climate Changes and Time Puzzles of Tihuanacu Signs of Uranian Culture Hand, Rod, and Snake CHAPTER SEVEN: Earth Parturition and Moon Birth The Passage of Uranus Minor Contributing Theories and Eruption Dynamics Lunar Conformities to Eruption The Global Fracture System The Tethyan Welt Global Expansion The Magnetic Field Ocean Development Lunar Worship Sunken Lands Legendary Chaos and the Moon The Moon in Meso-America Western Europe The Near East A Question of Lunar Priority Eliade’s “Lunar Perspective” The Menstrual Cycle The Heavenly Spinner CHAPTER EIGHT: Saturn’s Children The Pleiades The Triumph of Saturn The “Golden Age” The Peoples of Saturnia The Downfall of Saturn: Nova and Deluge The Poseidon Phase Survivors and Saturnalia CHAPTER NINE: The Olympian Rulers The Devil Seth The Bonds of Saturn and Jupiter The Lightning God The Behavior of Planet Jupiter End of the “Golden Age” Monumentalism Repeated Disasters Gods Not Invented Apollo Explosion and Asteroids Mercury Mercury’s Geophysics CHAPTER TEN: Venus and Mars Career of an Androgyne The Heat of Venus Hundres of Identities The Plot of the Iliad Global Ruination and its Perpetrator The Devi and the Mexican Ballplayer A Longer Day The Explosion of Thira Martia Carpenter’s “Soft” Catastrophism Nergal, the “Treacherous Dealer” Worship of Mars The Wounds of Planet Mars The Greek “Dark Ages” CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Devil’s Advocate CHAPTER TWELVE: Victory of The Sun Sun and Science Forebodings The Propensity to Survive BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES The Archetype of the Chinese Dragon (Frontispiece) 1. Prominent Catastrophists since Bruno (Table) 2. The Ripping of the Surface of Mars (Map) 3. Fear of Comets and the Conquest of 1066 4. Some Shapes Taken by Recent Comets 5. Radiocarbon Dating and Ecological Stress 6. Disputed Explanations of the Tests of Time (Table) 7. A Schedule of Holocene Periods (Table) 8. A Quantavolutionary Cycle 9. Solaria Binaria during Pangea 10. Magnetic Field of the Sun 11. Humanization in Catastrophe (with Chart A) 12. Mesolithic Rayed Bodies 13. Typical Depictions of Uranus and Saturn 14. Hieroglyph of Nun, Father of the Gods 15. Mating of the Sky and Earth 16. Celestial Bison 17. The Great Ohio Serpent Mound 18. The Preferred Altitiudes of Earth’s Crust 19. The Earth Today: Cleavages, Welts, Mountain Folds and Volcanism 20. Scheme of the Land Area of Pangea and Urania 21. The Magnetic Poles of the Earth 22. Legendary Sunken Lands and Cultures of the World 23. The Mesoamerican Moon Goddess, Tlazolteotl 24. Aphrodite the Moon Goddess 25. Composition of Saturn Images 26. Saturn Devouring his Children 27. Albrecht Dürer’s “Deluge” 28. Cetus or Seth, the Devil-Dog 29. Jupiter: Lightning and Thunder 30. Disasters from Mercury to Mars (Table) 31. Variants of the Cometary Goddess 32. The Imperial Chinese Dragon Robes 33. Destruction of Bronze Age Cities 34. A Generally Accepted Time-Scale (Table) {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia FOREWORD The scientific community of today is in part a community of myth and ideology. This has always been, and most likely, must always be. Every body of ideas and practices must gather upon a raft in order to float upon the ocean of "absolute reality." When a raft is leaking, construction must begin on a new one. At that moment new designs can be introduced. This book is designed to show that a typical scientist may hold untenable positions on five major issues: the ordering of the solar system; the genesis of God; the fashioning of the surface of the earth; the evolution of mankind; and the origins of culture. The chapters that are to come assert that all of these processes may have occurred in a short interval of time in association with a set of natural catastrophes. The world has changed by great abrupt movements. with far-ranging effects. This story, and the theory used to organize it, are here called "quantavolution" and "revolutionary primevalogy." They contrast with "evolutionary primevalogy." In terms of scientific method, quantavolution is a model or image of what might have happened in natural and human history. As such, it is one way of approaching truth in cosmogony - those remote causes of our real world. It offers a truth that may do better than the next best truth, or it may serve until a better truth is offered, helping to orient other searchers, even to assist in its own replacement. Our so-called "Age of Science" is a patchwork of different mentalities. Most people around the world would dispute the beliefs of science on the above five issues, but do not practice a scientific method. Most scientists of the age share fundamental beliefs on these issues, but too often they do not practice their scientific method with regard to them; they simply carry on at their special tasks. I subscribe to the methods of science, but yet am putting forward a challenge to the beliefs. This sets me among a small minority of scholars, but permits me to draw support from the traditions of a great many people, the specialized studies of many scientists, and the sympathetic efforts of a certain few. Many scientists pay close attention on their leading men who are building upon "realities," but ignore their philosophers of scientific method, who warn them not to arrogate "The Truth" to themselves. When their raft begins to leak, then, they must tolerate the effects of presumption: mistrust, disbelief, and annoying criticism. And they may not solve some problems that they have set their hearts upon solving. ALFRED DE GRAZIA London May 1, 1980 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia INTRODUCTION QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION Some millions of persons have lately begun to read about ancient catastrophes. In this, they have been recapturing a habit of their ancestors who had been schooled, whatever their religion, to believe that once upon a time, in the beginning of mankind, terrible disasters of earth, air, fire and water engulfed the world. As so often happens, what interests the public coincides with what interests scientists. Impelled by an intuition that is common to both the multitude of persons and the body of scholars, the human mind today is moving into an area "where the action is". For perhaps no more exciting and important a set of problems is to be found anywhere in the realms of science and scholarship. Every discipline is implicated in the theory of ancient catastrophes - psychology, sociology, linguistics, archaeology, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology, together with their many subdivisions down to special and new sciences, such as plasma physics, dendrochronology, and mega-vitamin therapy [1] . It has something to say about "the Jupiter Effect," "the Ion Effect," and "the Bermuda Triangle," not to mention "Ancient Astronauts," and the hominids of Olduvai Gorge. Every bite of the archaeologist's spade, every oceanographer's deep coring of the sea bottom, every penetration of outer spaces seems capable of attracting the attention of the catastrophist - that is, the potential quantavolutionist of natural history and human origins. {S : THE UNIFORMITIARIAN RESISTANCE} THE UNIFORMITIARIAN RESISTANCE The history of science took a sharp turn around 150 years ago [2] . Before then it was assumed that life on earth had originated recently and was wracked by natural disasters. Although this was believed largely on the "say-so" of ancient theologians and scientists, fresh evidence was being unearthed by famous scientists such as Georges Cuvier and William Buckland.( Figure 1 gives the names and main positions of some prominent catastrophists.) Cuvier, who is sometimes called "the father of paleontology," divided the history of the world into four epochs, each with its own animals, each ended by great flood. In only the last of these ages, the present epoch, were men and living mammals present, stated Cuvier [3] . He was here mistaken; hardly had he laid down his pen, when human remains were found alongside the bones of extinct mammoths. By contrast, the upcoming scientists of the last century argued that the world's history was long and evolutionary. On their side were those who were to become the treasured ancestors of science today - Charles Lyell (1795-1875) in geology, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in biology, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) in astronomy, and Lewis H. Morgan (1818-1881) as well as the versatile communist, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), in sociology and anthropology. The new group came to dominate scientific circles and scientific thought. The catastrophists disappeared from the scientific mind save as an old enemy. The victors advanced the principle of uniformitarianism. Their minions scorned the catastrophists. In the words of Charles Lyell, "the ancient changes of the animate and inanimate world, of which we find memorials in the Earth's crust, may be similar both in kind and degree to those which are now in progress." [4] Given time, the forces of nature that we experience today would have caused everything in life and nature that greets our senses. The tallest mountains and the most bizarre fish would have come about gradually, over a long time and by small increments of change. Indeed, asserted the uniformitarians, the short span of time demanded by the catastrophists was absurdly incapable of bringing forth the great variety of nature; a reader will sometimes encounter, as a ludicrous target, the date proposed by Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), which set the creation of the world by God at 9 a. m. on October 26, 4004 B. C. Figure 1 PROMINENT CATASTROPHISTS (QUANTAVOLUTIONISTS) SINCE THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SCIENCE* . Significant publication date Requires divine action Short-term for reconstructed earth Intrusion of extra-terrestrial forces Mankind was catastrophized Giordano Bruno 1584 . . x x William Whiston 1719 x x x x Giambattista Vico 1730 . x x x Nich.-Ant. Boulanger 1766 . x x x Giov. R. Carli-Rubbi 1780 . x x x Georges Cuvier 1826 . x . . William Buckland 1824 x x . . Ignatius Donnelly 1883 . x x . Isaac Vail 1905 . x x . Hans Hoerbiger 1913 . x x . George McCr. Price 1926 x x . . W. Comyns Beaumont 1932 . x x . Howard B. Baker 1932 . x x . Hans Bellamy 1936 . x x . Claude Schaeffer 1948 . . . . Immanuel Velikovsky/td> 1950 . x x x A. Kellv & F. Dachille 1953 . x x . Hugh A. Brown 1967 . x . . Melvin Cook 1966 x x . . Donald Patten 1966 . x x . Charles Hapgood 1970 . x . . * The list excludes the work of lesser-known and mostly younger quantavolutionists. I. Velikovsky, Ralph Juergens, Livio Stecchini, Gilbert Davidowitz, and Zvi Rix have recently died, leaving many unpublished manuscripts. A few of the scholars who are currently active are Robert Bass, John Bimson. Dwardu Cardona, William Corliss, Eric Crew, Frank Dachille, Eva Danelius, Ragnar Forshufvud, Brendan O'Gheoghan, Stephen Gould, Lewis Greenberg, George Grinnell. Peter James, Julian Jaynes, Frederic Jueneman. Allan Kelly, Alexander Kondratov, Malcolm Lowery, Christoph Marx. Earl Milton, Brian Moore, William Mullen, G. van Oosterhout, Alan Parry, C. J. Ransom, M. G. Reade, Lynn Rose, Eddie Schorr, Martin Sieff, Warner Sizemore, David Talbott, S. K. Vsekhsvyatskii, Robert Wescott, Irving Wolfe, and Jerry Ziegler; j'en passe et des meilleurs. Also the Creation Research Quarterly group (Ann Arbor, Mich.); the group of the Society for the Study of Interdisciplinary issues (England); the Kronos group (Glassboro College, N. J.); the Lethbridge University, Canada, group (E. R. Milton). and the Catasirophist Geology group (Rio de Janeiro, H. Kloostermann). Nor does the table include the "Ancient Astronaut" school (Robert Temple, Erich von Däneken) or "life on other planets" students (Carl Sagan), or contemporary "flying saucer" discussants, or "biblical literalists." Furthermore, the list does not include many scientists. such as C. E. R. Bruce, D. Ager, H. Urey, J. Lamar Worzel., or C. Emiliani, who use catastrophe to explain important episodes of natural history. It may be of interest to place C. Lyell, C. Darwin, S. Freud, A. Wegener, and A. Einstein in the chart: all would vote "No" on all questions. Yet interesting passages and events in the lives of all of them have to do with catastrophic episodes and anomalies. Actually, when pressed on the matter today, a uniformitarian will say that he is pursuing a method, not assuming an absolute reality [5] . He is saying: I can explain almost everything I see very well by assuming at the start that, whether a mountain or man, it came about gradually, in increments, point by point. That is, he uses a uniformitarian model to frame what be discovers. {S : QUANTAVOLUTION BY CATASTROPHE} QUANTAVOLUTION BY CATASTROPHE By the same token, in this book, I advance a catastrophic model It, too, is a method. By using the idea that great forces can cause great changes in a short time, I am enabled to achieve a fairly consistent and defensible reconstruction of natural history and human history. I use new terms in referring to this point of view. I call it "quantavolution", for in contrast to evolution, it considers "quanta-jumps" to be the main feature of change (volution). "Primeval quantavolution," then, would be the saltatory evolutionary science characterizing the first ages (primeval) of nature and humanity. From time to time, I also use the new term, "revolutionary" primevalogy, to stand for the science of catastrophe. For the theory presented and discussed is much more powerful in its range and effects than is conveyed by the idea of a great flood or fire. "Revolutionary" stands in contrast to "evolutionary" and "uniformitarian"; these last words imply small changes occurring over vast periods of time under conditions that have not basically altered over a billion years and more. By contrast, "revolutionary" means intense, abrupt, large-scale change (the same meaning as it has in politics). "A comet produced the last revolution of our globe," wrote G. R. Carli, an early scientific catastrophist, in his American Letters of 1780 [6] . And it is the meaning that Georges Cuvier had in mind when, a halfcentury afterwards, he used the phrase "revolutions of the globe" in his discussion of fossil paleontology. Much that we admire and respect in this world, including our very being as humans, must logically be thought of as the "good" side of the catastrophes of which we speak. Humanity, art, institutions and science are products of the most ancient catastrophes. So, again, the words "quantavolution" and "revolution" may be preferable, or at least useful to remember, in connection with the wholly negative word "catastrophe". Many quantavolutionists, unlike myself, may refuse to set down a base line of time. Some quantavolutionists may set a single clock of the ages ticking at four billion years ago, and introduce a great leap every million or hundred million years. As one of them, geologist Derek Ager, has concluded, "the history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." [7] Generally, the farther back a quantavolutionary sets his events, the more be is accepted by the scientific community; for the idea that contemporary scientists can least tolerate is the idea that the world has been catastrophized recently. Nevertheless, after years of attempting to bridge the vast chasm between a quantavolution that uses the long time-scale of astronomy and geology and that which adopts the short timescale asserted by the unanimous traditions of humankind, I decided to try to reconcile the two scales to the brief period demanded by the early human voices. Only then could the model of natural and human history be integrated. Consequently, as this book progresses, I shall be suggesting, with some reason, that human accounts provide a baseline for the age of catastrophes at 14,000 years ago. Also, in my opinion, the nature which offers itself to view-including the solar system, earth, and biosphere - may have assumed its present form in a series of recent sudden leaps. The holocene epoch, to which I allot the 14,000 years, has witnessed a connected set of catastrophes, these can be divided into nine periods, each characterized by natural outbursts but containing tranquil passages as well. I shall soon explain this The original source of the saltatory changes of the earth and man has been in the skies, in disorders among the heavenly bodies. The celestial disturbances wrecked and reconstituted the atmosphere, rocks, and waters of the world. All combined to reorder the plant and animal kingdoms. Finally they created and molded modern humankind. In brief, forces of extra- terrestrial origin have recently catastrophized and transformed nature and mankind. Many ways in which nature and life behave today are best understood as tailing-off effects of the catastrophes of ancient times. {S : Notes (Introduction)} Notes (Introduction) 1. A. de Grazia (1975) 2. Gillispie (1951) 3. Cuvier (1831) 4. Lyell (1831-4), quoted by Albritton (1974) 857 5. Ibid., 859 6. Carli (1780) 329 7. Ager (1973) 100 CHAOS AND CREATION: FOREWORD {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 01: } {T COSMIC INSTABILITY} {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE: COSMIC INSTABILITY The once preposterous idea is now a commonplace: worlds have collided. Even the naive image of colliding worlds two huge globes smashing, into one another is realized. The very event may be observed daily in the great telescopes of science. Furthermore, galaxies composed of millions of stars are in collision. Any unfortunate beings dwelling in those regions of the universe would not consider the word "collision" to be an exaggeration. The "discovery of the existence, almost omnipresence of a high-energy, explosive universe" is accredited to the 1960's by the Astronomy Survey Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. "The previously well-organized universe ... exploded into a bewildering universe of new types of objects, large and small, with exotic new names and marvelous new natures." [1] Some thousands of planetesimals of varied shapes and sizes, and much plain dust, orbit between planet Mars and planet Jupiter. These nameless fragments and bits were once part of a planet - , it is scientifically respectable now to think so. Ovenden estimated the mass of the planet to have been ninety times that of the Earth [2] . This implies logically the belief that within our family of planets, a monstrous direct collision once occurred. Ovenden assigns the, explosion to an encounter with a hypothetical intruder passing through the solar system. Even before Ovenden, scientists such as Kuiper, Bobrovnikoff, Whipple, and Tombaugh lent their authority, too, to the idea that comets and planets collided in the asteroid belt. Whipple went so far as to talk of collisions in that area only 4200 and -1500 years ago, in 1950, the same year in which Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision. But Whipple immediately became a dedicated crusader against Velikovsky [3] . {S : IMPACTS ON EARTH} IMPACTS ON EARTH It is also known that comets disappear into the sun, and that comets have hit planets. And that they will continue to strike planets, and that meteoroids, that is, fragments of unknown or eccentric paths, also strike planets, even Earth [4] . They can be, and have been, large. At Ishim, Kazakhstan, U. S. S. R. is a meteoroid impact crater, recently demonstrated and said to be aged 350 million years. The initial impact penetrated to a depth of 12 km and amounted to 350 km in diameter. The rebound explosion and the collapsed rim enlarged the crater to a diameter of 700 km. The estimated kinetic energy of the event was ten billion times greater than that of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Alaska earthquake of 1964 or the Chinese earthquake of 1976 [5] . The fall, in a different time and place, could have obliterated France or Germany. And from the explosion would have emerged a catastrophic typhoon that would have towered into outer space. It would have darkened the globe with dust, caused universal seismism, and brought worldwide floods from the concussion and from the tilting and/ or rotational interruption of the Earth. In the course of its encounters in space, the Earth has gained gases, rocks, metals and minerals, possibly even some forms of life, and mechanical motions and electrical charges. It has lost gases and rocks and life, motions and charges. It has changed greatly its surface, its atmosphere, and its life forms in the encounters. Examples of all of these occurrences will be found in the pages to follow. Many processes that still continue, such as the cutting back of Niagara Falls, the adaptation of species to desert conditions, earthquakes and volcanism, not to mention various mental processes of humans, can be interpreted as dying effects of the encounters. Quantavolutional thought is often said to be unable to explain the fantastic amount of energy that must be present and converted in changing large-body motions [6] . After all, to account for an orbital change in distance between the Sun and the Earth requires a power which, if it were expressed as dynamite, would be sufficient, when properly placed, to blow the Earth to smithereens. However, such images can be unrealistic, balancing forces operate. Warlow (1978) has, exhibited a wide range of data. and mechanisms -- legends, massive faunal destructions, abrupt salinity changes, tektite falls, then spinning top experiments and mathematical calculations -- relating to reversals of the Earth's magnetic field. He argues that the Earth is easily destabilized and can even turn over repeatedly in response to external influences. If the axis of the Earth tilts when an intruder approaches, the Earth's angular moments of rotation and revolution can respond less radically to the strange forces; the total sphere responds and there is less strain on its parts. Or if the Earth's rotation is interrupted, a fracture of the Earth's crust will reduce the energy of the braking and increase the time given to it. Every day thousands of airplanes take off and land that would disintegrate if their acceleration or deceleration were in seconds instead of minutes; the rate of slow-down is all- important in the difference between an explosion and a glide, whatever the ergcount. The damping of the rotation of the Earth from a four-hour to a twenty-four hour cycle would require the disposal of 1. 2 X 10 10 erg/ grams, or a heat equivalent to raising the temperature of the globe 1000 ; but obviously the time factor here is ignored and is therefore instantaneous. Half the Earth gives up some degrees of heat every night, and a slowly decelerating Earth might do the same, night and day. There is literally all the difference in the world between an earth slowing in a day and an earth ceasing abruptly to rotate. Indeed, it is impossible for a sudden stop to occur. Even if an errant great body were to collide with the Earth, days before the explosive moment the Earth's rotation would have come to a halt, and its surface and atmosphere would be erupting in flames and lightning. Finally, electrical adjustments are a form of energy disposal and can change a hot transaction into a cool one, and vice versa. Many a meteor that would scorch the atmosphere and bum itself up, or perhaps explode in great heat, is repelled by a like charge of the upper atmosphere and skips off into outer space. Vast stretches of astronomical and geological time are not required by the delicacy of organized matter. Only small amounts of time may be needed in which to accumulate and dissipate great heat and pressures. From a molten mass, the Earth could have acquired a hard crust in a thousand years (if radioactive internal heating is ignored) [7] . Both electricity and water increase greatly the metamorphosis of rocks and facilitate volcanic activity [8] . That the Moon and Mars and Mercury are devastated and biologically dead, that Venus is rotating backwards and burning hot, that a ghost planet which should perhaps be called "Apollo" is represented by a host of asteroids flying between Mars and Jupiter - all these give one to suspect that the Earth has also suffered, but escaped the worst. {S : THE CLEAVAGE OF MARS: A PARTICULAR CASE} THE CLEAVAGE OF MARS: A PARTICULAR CASE The planet Mars became a horror and great god to the people of 2700 years ago. Mesopotamians might well chant: "Shine of horror, god Nergal, prince of battle, Thy face is glare, thy mouth is fire, Raging flame-god, god Nergal." [9] Nergal is god-Mars and planet-Mars. Only a god could fearlessly assault a god. And that is what Pallas Athene, goddess of the planet Venus, did to Mars-Ares-Nergal. It is the famous scene of the battle of the gods in Homer's Iliad [10] . Athene, with the blessing of Zeus drove her chariot towards Ares, "the bane of mortals," and drove her spear "mightily against his nether- most belly." A great black cloud arose from him, he "bellowed like ten thousand warriors," and fled into the high heavens. Planet Mars is small compared with Venus and Earth, though larger than the Moon. It has a very thin atmosphere. In 1976, American's spacecraft landed upon it, sensing for signs of life, finding neither proof nor disproof, but ambiguous evidence. It is wracked by wind and storms of dust. It has changing polar caps of "dry ice". Most of all it has been bruised and battered [11] . The most revealing feature of Mars is its Coprates canyon complex, photographed by Mariner IX (see Figure 2 with 1997 upgrade). The Coprates complex, as Alan Kelly has related, is a 7500 miles long line of volcanoes and canyon that are the "product of the same event, when some very large comet or other massive intruder from space passed too close to Mars.... This intruder literally sucked the lava from the interior of Mars to form the huge volcanoes.... As it came closer it caused a tremendous bulge, miles high, that burst open along the top and spewed out lava and great chunks of Martian crust, much of this material following the intruder into space." [12] Two million cubic miles of lava disappeared into space within a few hours [13] . Figure 2: THE RIPPING OF THE SURFACE OF MARS. Kelly marks the following: the 2200 miles length of the canyon proper is more that 300 miles wide near its center and over 20,000 feet deep. The disturbed surface, however, marked by great mountain peaks such a Nix Olympica, begins before the rupture and continues far beyond it, giving a total length of 7500 miles, which is over half the equatorial circumference that it follows. Nix Olympica is over 300 miles at its base and over 15 miles high. All but one of the 20 volcano-like structures on Mars are along this same line of destruction. The walls of the canyon are slumped or subsided in a series of stair-steps. No evidence meets the eye of water erosion, sedimentation, delta fans, or eroded stream channels cutting across the surrounding plateaus (the expanded bulge of the gravitational attraction). Hence the canyon is not, nor was it ever a water system, nor ever transported water. Mars or Ares was assaulted and ripped open from space. {S : "ONE OR TWO CENTURIES" OF "ETERNAL ORDER"} "ONE OR TWO CENTURIES" OF "ETERNAL ORDER" The educated public has long held, as an article of faith, that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of planetary movements and that Laplace (1749-1827) mathematically expressed their practically eternal stability [14] . Yet here I have suggested that the planetary movements are not so stable, nor have they been. Lately astronomers have begun to reconsider the dogma of celestial stability. Ransom and Milton have collected studies of instability in the skies [15] . In 1953, W. M. Smart, Professor of Glasgow University, wrote in his book, Celestial Mechanics, that the maximum time-interval over which stability calculations of the type presented by Laplace, Lagrange, and Poisson can be trusted is 300 current solar years [16] . The words "one or two centuries" occur elsewhere as the time limit of validity. Moving back, in 1931, E. W. Brown that the President of the American Astronomical Society, wrote that the mathematical statement of the stability of the mean distances, of the eccentricities, and of the inclinations of the planets "can only be regarded as valid over a limited interval of time of the order of 10 6 or perhaps 10 7 years at most." [17] Thus 10 million to 100 million years of stability. Brown stated elsewhere in the same year that there were no logical or mathematical reasons to doubt that certain of the terrestrial planets might have interchanged their mean distances from the Sun. He felt that this interchange was unlikely, and believed the planets were probably in their initial order, "though the relative magnitudes of some of their distances may have been considerably changed." [18] Back again, in 1961 Arnol'd and before him, in general, Poincar in 1899, proved that Simon Newcomb's 1895 mathematics providing 100 billion years of stability were wrong in form, but especially in not accounting for perturbing (possibly non- gravitational, said Brown) resonances [19] . Newcomb had been attempting to bolster Poisson, Lagrange, and Laplace (1773) in their attempts to show that the mean planetary distance would always stay within bounds and that collisions were nearly impossible. Laplace (1749-1827) in 1784 declared that planetary inclinations and eccentricities must remain small [20] . Laplace had guessed 10 million years as the duration of the present stability, a soothing enough figure to unleash the uniformitarians to pursue time enough on Earth for sedimentation, surface changes, and evolution of life to occur. Or so they thought. With a present Earth-age estimate of some 5 billion years, 500 times greater than his 10 million years, there might have been 500 world collisions in Earth history, and another may be just around the corner. Astrophysicist Robert W. Bass has related this story much more fully elsewhere [21] . If anything can be added to his account, it may be that Laplace, the mathematical godfather of the stability of the heavens (with Newton as father), had himself expressed original doubts on their stability despite his mathematical proofs. Stecchini has published Laplace's doubts [22] . It develops that Laplace was more sinned against than sinner, by those who made a uniformitarian religious dogma out of his mathematics of stability. For the same Laplace had written: "The sky itself, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not inalterable." Further the stability of the present order "is disturbed by various causes that can be ascertained by careful analysis, but which are impossible to frame within a calculation." [23] Laplace warned that he had not taken comets and meteoroids into account, and encouraged the study of history, however brief, for enlightenment on such experiences. He also wondered, Stecchini declares, "whether heavenly bodies might not be affected by forces other than gravitation, such as electric and magnetic forces." [24] And he even presented a cometary collision scenario, following evidence from mechanics, geology, natural and human history. Thus Laplace may be placed in the company of Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, William Whiston, Nicholas Antoine Boulanger, and perhaps even Isaac Newton, when he strongly supported Whiston, his younger colleague. Nevertheless, Bass is correct in his account of how Laplace was used in history by scientists who were fighting for uniformitarianism and against the need for any divine intervention in world affairs. He has shown how the successors of Laplace expressed themselves in intuitive language, supposedly the bane of the conventional astronomers. "Whenever these allegedly authoritative statements about time intervals of validity [of calculations of celestial stability] have been made, they are without exception accompanied by words like 'supposed', 'appeared', 'hope', 'seems', 'might', and 'think', revealing clearly that the writer was relying on his personal intuition rather than quantitative evidence [25] . It is ironic that Harlow Shapley, the famous astronomer, admonished the Macmillan company for considering a venture into the "Black Arts" with the publication of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision [26] . A review of cases such as that the comet Oterma III may be in order, for both the solar system and beyond. A report on Oterma III was presented by A. V. Folcin of the U. S. S. R. in 1958. Before 1938, this comet has an orbit lying entirely between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. In that year, it approached near to Jupiter and then swung around so that it acquired a new orbit entirely between Mars and Jupiter. Bass points out that "for Venus one can, with negligible error substitute any smaller mass." [27] That is, what happened to Oterma could also happen to Venus, to Mars, or to Mercury, for all are of the same minute order in comparison with Jupiter. In sum, this brief chapter has intimated several conclusions. Astronomers often have fallen victim to the myth of the eternal order of the heavens. The mathematics of the classics writers concerning immutable motions are vulnerable. The "guaranteed" stability of the solar system, when recalculated in their own terms, may be uncomfortably short. Recent events such as Oterma III encourage a review of theories of celestial order. As Professor John A. Simpson expressed the new mood, writing while Pioneer XII was speeding towards Jupiter: "Much of the new astrophysics is based on non-equilibrium - even explosive - phenomena, rather than the steady state thermal phenomena which have been the primary concerns of astrophysics in the past. It is the violence of the phenomena discovered in the astrophysics of the past fifteen years that has changed dramatically our current view of the universe." Changing celestial behavior excites great forces to work upon Earth. After assembling the evidence for the quantavolution of life forms, the Russian paleontologist and geologist, L. J. Salop concludes: "The Earth, together with the life it supports, is not a closed self- developing system but constitutes an integral part of the cosmos." [28] {S : Notes (Chapter One: Cosmic Instability)} Notes (Chapter One: Cosmic Instability) 1. Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1970's (1972). 2. Ovenden (1973). 3. Velikovsky (1955) 288-9; Juergens, 30 and de Grazia 212-3 in de Grazia et al (1966). 4. In addition to the older writers, Whiston, Boulanger, Carli, Donnelly, and Beaumont, see Velikovsky (1950); and entries in A. Miller (1977); Ransom (1976) 73-9; Kugler (1927); Patten (1973); Kelly and Dachille; Pensée, nos I-X; Kronos, vol. I-III; Richter; Rix (1975); Vsekhsvyatskii (1976). 5. Dachille (1975) 51. 6. Rose and Vaughan (1974); Michelson (1974). 7. Cook (1966). 8. Kelly and Dachille, 67; Velikovsky (1950) 91-2; (1955) 133. 9. Velikovsky (1950) 261, quoting Böllenrücker, 19. 10. Iliad, Book V; here the quoted words are from the Murray translation. Loeb Classical Library (1925), Cf. Velikovsky (1950) 245 ff. 11. Pollack (1975); Woronow (1972). 12. Kelly (1974). 13. Some of the huge duststorms of Mars may be of this material too. Cf. Vsekhsvyatskii (1967) on loss of material by planets. The solar system envelope contains a great deal of "meteoric" dust (Van Allen, 1975). 14. Stecchini (1966) 80 ff. 15. Ransom (1972); Milton (1975). 16. 4, 94-5, 198 discussed in Bass (1976) 39-40. 17. Ibid., 39. 18. Ibid., 37 quoting from E. W. Brown's Presidential Address; cf. p. 30. 19. Ibid., 31-5 and Bass (1974) 8-20. 20. Ibid. 21. (1974), (1976). 22. (1966) 105-9. 23. Oeuvres Completes, VII, 121, quoted Ibid., 107. 24. Stecchini (1966), 108, citing Laplace VI. 347. 25. Bass (1976). 26. Juergens (1966), 20. 27. (1974), 15. 28. (1977), 40. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 02: } {T HIGH ENERGY FROM SPACE } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO: HIGH ENERGY FROM SPACE In the train of the great deluge that ended the reign of the god Saturn-Osiris, mankind suffered from hideous monster-forces. So said the Egyptians. These were Briareux: loss of serenity; Othus: the succession of seasons; Ephialtes: horrendous clouds; Encelade: ravaging waters; Porphyrion: fracturing of the earth; Mimas: the downpours of water; Rhaecus: the great wing. Horus, son of Osiris, helped his mother as much as he could to restore man to his happier pursuits [1] . The original cause was a huge celestial body. It was an age-breaking period, one of the two worst, but the high energy forces were always the same, in all the periods of chaos and creation. The first chapter offered grounds to doubt the stability of the solar system in the past. The present chapter introduces - but only for recognition and as a prelude to extensive discussion in later chapters and volumes - the heavy, sky - provoked forces that can cause immense changes upon Earth in a short time. If the solar system may have been unstable and if the Earth can be transformed by high energy forces, then all is ready for the third chapter, which radically challenges a long-time history of the present world. Once that is done, a new short-time calendar of the holocene epoch is in order. Thereafter, the goal will be to prove the calendar - or if not to prove it, to establish it upon a basis worthy of intelligent discussion. Comets have been invariably a source of terror to humanity and linked to all manner of evil (see Figure 3). The many apparitions have been accompanied in all too many cases by the reality of collision. Planet Earth may have endured more than a score of space encounters with large bodies during the holocene epoch. The most recent occurred around the founding of Rome. Mars approached on several occasions, at 15-years intervals. Venus also intruded upon the Earth's sphere, then and before then, at least several times, on a half-century cycle. Velikovsky (1950) depicted these latter events. Figure 3. FEAR OF COMETS AND THE CONQUEST OF 1066. The Bayeaux Tapestry on the Comet of 1066. On the eve of The Battle of Hasting, a comet lit up the sky. The crowds gaze up in awe at the comet, and a courtier tells King Harold of this terrible omen. Below are seen the ghostly invasion ships which Harold now fears will follow. The tapestry was produced only decades after the event. Earlier, planet Mercury appears to have been a familiar figure of several pass-bys. Saturn, Jupiter and other heavenly bodies give the impression of having loomed large in the sky during their own great times. The moon has been a continuous interactor with Earth but for long has been in stable relationship; I would only mention here that the original great body to have encountered Earth, which I shall be calling "Uranus-Minor", may have made only a single pass at our globe but that the Moon owes its very existence to it. Large-body encounters bring hundreds of damaging adjustments of short and long duration, when the effects of an initial encounter are being dissipated. It would always take some time for the winds, waters, and land to settle down and for a new electrical balance to be struck throughout the system. An equatorial bulge and flattening of the poles would have to occur after a change in the Earth's geographical axis, that is, after a shift of the location of the poles. The strains of this adjustment would carry over thousands of years. To be added to the bill tendered by catastrophes are some minor disasters. These might be Jovian "bolts from the blue" across immense spatial distances. Or they might be showers of gases, rock, or dust. Or the penetration of the Earth's defenses by a small or heavy meteoroid. I shall be arguing later on that a heavy bombardment of the Earth preceded the pass-by of Uranus Minor from which emerged the Moon. Further, the fall-back of lunar material would have been like a rain of meteoroids. It is difficult in these more stable years of solar dominance, or Solaria, to imagine ancestral conditions. People suffered from catastrophic activity in one way or another during much of the holocene: perhaps one-third of human history, or 5000 out of the 14,000 years that I estimate as the duration of "full human-ness". For one-third of its existence, the human being has been in a struggle against annihilation by nature, or, more exactly, has been caught up in a battle of annihilation among the forces of nature, a "war among the gods". When the Earth and any large intruder approach each other, their motions are affected and surface breakdown occurs on both bodies. The affected motions, such as angle of approach, speed of rotation and orbital speed, may be numerous. Their magnetic fields may be altered and even reversed. The crust or shell of the bodies, affected more directly from "above" tends to slow down or accelerate faster than the denser and hotter mantle and core of the bodies. These continue their speed almost unabated. Heat is generated upwards within the bodies. Explosive exchanges of atmosphere, water, soil, and rock occur. The shells crinkle, raising hills and mountains. One is reminded of the Revolt of the Giants in Greek myth wherein the giants piled mountain upon mountain, "Ossa upon Pelion," in their attempt to assault the heavenly fastnesses of the gods. Great gravitational and electrical forces are levied and act destructively throughout upon air, earth and water. {S : ELECTRICAL FORCES} ELECTRICAL FORCES Entities from the size of an atom to that of a galaxy can hold electrical charges, and carry free positive or negative charges that can move through a field under repulsion or attraction with great energy, depending upon the distances involved. Eric Crew has recently commented that "one of the most striking and yet most neglected aspects of electricity in astronomy is the enormous forces which can be produced by accumulation of electron charges." [2] The potential difference of charges that can be theoretically accumulated on even microscopic particle is describable in millions of tons. For instance, the number of free electrons in 1 cm 3 of copper is 5 x 10 22 , giving a charge of 8000 coulombs. If so charged alike, two cubes of 1 cm that were one meter apart would repel each other with a force of 79 trillion tons. (This earth-cracking force could not really occur because the copper would fly asunder long before it could be charged to 8000 coulombs.) The example serves to alert one to the possible electrical transactions that may occur in astronomical space, where distances between bodies are great but the size of the bodies, too, is great. Planets can be charged to potentials differing from their near space, with catastrophic result should a discharge occur. Furthermore, great electrical exchanges can occur both between bodies of opposite charges, and between bodies of similar charges of different sums, that is, subject to a voltage gradient between them. A nova - and we shall assert that two or more have occurred merely in the time span covered by this book - is largely an electrical phenomenon. Surely it is part of an interacting celestial system, but the form of the interaction occurs internally and in the near space of a body. Stars are prone to nova, not planets, we say, but that only means that a planet is defined as a more stable (dense) arrangement of matter. When a star novas, writes Bruce, the principal event is the dispersion of its atmosphere leaving the nucleus practically unaffected [3] . A nova is the catastrophic electrical neutralization of the entire charged atmosphere of a star. A complicated natural system of sheaths surrounds bodies in space. It grades, balances, and neutralizes charges to keep cosmic bodies in the state which we come to regard as "normal," that is, where time is lengthened and geological and biological processes, such as our very existence, can occur. Ralph Juergens has described the space-sheath system in connection with the encounters of the Earth and Mars [4] , and it will be explained below. In all the "amazing" observations that we make about the "world," surely the continuous series of electrical relations that extend from the universe, through the galaxy and sun and planets and space, through the atmosphere, through the rocks, throughout our bodies down to the extreme interior of every cell, must be among the most astonishing. {S : HEAVY-BODY IMPACTS} HEAVY-BODY IMPACTS Neither Venus nor Moon nor any other large body could actually pass through the Earth's near atmosphere without the annihilation of both bodies. At some 30,000 miles distance, a large body such as Venus would draw up tides of the atmosphere and oceans with 35,000 times the tidal attraction of the Moon, and hump up the rocks in places. The gravitational attraction would be 25 times that between the Sun and Earth. Something like this may have occurred not only with regard to Venus but also during the Uranus Minor and Saturn Flood episodes, soon to be discussed. However, any small extra-terrestrial body, a rock meteoroid, say, of half-mile diameter, would cause great damage in passing through our atmosphere. It would blast, burn, deafen, terrorize and transmute materials over its line of travel, in a tube with a radius of a hundred miles or so. A body of 100,000 tons 3 has a speed at impact anywhere from 5 to 50 miles per second, and its ambient temperatures as it passes through the air rise to 2000 degrees centigrade or more. When it strikes, a crater of several kilometers in diameter would be excavated. Atmospheric shock-waves, capable of blowing down Manhattan, would occur, but if that would not suffice to destroy it, the heat would vitrify the city and the earthquake would shake it down. The remainder would be ravaged several times over by crosscutting tsunamis. The Siberian Tunguska body of 1908 that penetrated the atmosphere and exploded just short of contact would have done this kind of job at St. Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia, if it had continued to travel for a few hours longer. At Tunguska, it killed the biosphere for miles around, blew down 80,000,000 trees, sent blasts of wind and earth tremors over hundreds of squares miles, engendered a flourishing forest growth, and may have mutated and created new plant species [5] . A new Soviet expedition departed in 1976 to investigate the locale. Far greater in destructiveness than either the hypothetical case or the Tunguska incident was the Phaeton (Typhon) explosion of about 1453 B. C. The mythical Phaeton was such a larger meteoroid or was a falling portion of cometary Venus itself. Child of the Sun, he was let drive his father's chariot, but could not control the horses and burned up much of the world. Zeus finally dispatched him with a thunderbolt to save the rest. Many stories are told, too, of a monster Typhon being struck down in the same time period; probably Phaeton and Typhon are identical; they are certainly related [6] . About fifty years after the first great incursion of the comet definitely referred to as Typhon, a second incursion came and was seen as a horse- drawn chariot and driver in the near East [7] ; the image would correspond closely to the Phaeton myth and the time interval would have been small enough that, together with the destruction and confusion, the two encounters would later be treated as one. When Phaeton (Typhon) struck the earth and penetrated the atmosphere the effects were severely destructive. The location of the fall of Typhon is unknown. Kelly and Dachille guessed it might be at Bermuda. The Ishim meteoroid, described in chapter I, may have been implicated, despite the much greater assigned age. The great pass-bys may be more important to history and more thoroughly destructive, but small and medium-sized meteoroid impact explosions, such as the Ishim, Tunguska, and Phaeton, are heavily damaging. Geologists Kelly and Dachille have calculated the effects of an explosion of a 200-mile diameter "Intruder", somewhat smaller than one which they believed fell at "Bermuda" within recent times, possibly in the Jovean or Mercurian period. Approaching tangentially the Intruder would have scorched through 1100 miles of atmospheres at a speed of 20+ miles per second at temperatures (~ 7500 c+) greater than the Sun's surface. From 8 to 60 second seconds' exposure would be suffered below its path. It would occupy at an 80-mile elevation over 100 degrees of the total dome of the sky (180 ). It would theoretically generate then and upon impact biosphere residues enough to produce all of the known coal and oil reserve in the world. The temperature at the moment of impact would rise to over 200,000 C. "An actual collision would raise a column of vapor and debris that easily could measure one thousand miles in diameter at the base, and possibly larger at the top after the fashion of the atom bomb explosions. This column might tower something like five thousand miles above the earth, the higher particles doomed to float out beyond the reach of gravity… This catastrophic column would be "a gigantic chemical laboratory," arranged in levels downwards, outwards and upwards. Its pyrolysis would continue for some time to "add to the generation of coal beds, oil crudes, baked shales, sand-stones, firerock, hard pan, and to many specific, but generally unexplained mineral forms. At 'zero point, ' conditions being so extreme, it is not unreasonable to suppose that actual transformation and the very synthesis of elements would take place." [8] Fundamental dissociation would occur and rearrangements of protons and electrons forced into being. Heavy metals such as uranium and thorium might be formed, with their radioactive properties. In a breathtaking sentence, the authors ask whether we can "see in the radioactive elements one course taken by nature to absorb and store a portion of the high energy of the impact, with the energy escaping gradually due to an imperfect storage structure within the nuclei of these elements." [9] Grading away from "Point Zero" would be ionic and elemental fabricating zones and zones where more stable compounds are generated. Rock salt would descend from intensely heated bodies of water blown from their basins, or it would form soon after the landing and evaporation of the waters. Shearing, folding, fracturing would occur on a large scale in an area of over a thousand miles in diameter. Biosphere mutations at the edges of the catastrophized area would be exceedingly numerous. They may be disregarded for the moment, my purpose here being to stress the probable role of the "catastrophic column" or typhoon among the mega-forces that shorten the time needed to change the world. {S : SEISMISM AND VOLCANISM} SEISMISM AND VOLCANISM Chapter 7 will portray the world-wide cleavage and ramified fracture system originating in the large-body encounter of 11,500 years ago, and the subject of earthquakes will be further treated in a forthcoming volume. Therefore, I need not here dwell upon the seismic effects of celestial encounters. When catastrophic seismism occurs, owing to crustal slippage, the rocks of the Earth move not locally but over long distances. Different layers of the crust may move at different speeds and for some miles down. The Alberta Canadian Rockies are thrusted and folded sedimentary rock propelled from a long distance away and piled up many thousands of feet. These sediments left behind them the basic shield rock [10] . The number of extinct volcanoes far exceeds the number that are active. Iceland has 107 active volcanoes, but thousand of craters, most of them definitely extinct, all young. Of its great network of fissure volcanoes, some have erupted disastrously in recent history. Lava beds not only line the ocean basins but are interlarded among pebble, rock, and sand beds in many parts of the world. The lava beds laid down in the last two thousand years are as nothing compared with those found in all the continents of the world from earlier times. These were laid down mainly by fissure, not cone, eruptions. A large-body encounter would excite such volcanic activity in many places. {S : FIRE AND GASES} FIRE AND GASES When the Earth changes motion, fires break out. When meteoroids fall, fires break out. When lightning strikes, fires erupt. When gases penetrate the atmosphere, fires explode. All of these accompany and occur in the aftermath of large-body encounters and significant meteoric fall-out. Persuasive accounts come down from legends of many peoples concerning the burning of the world. One of the most astonishing groups of legends, set forth by Velikovsky and others, treats of rains of burning oil [11] . It is difficult to put aside these reports, which are associated with the cometary tail of Venus in the fifteenth century B. C. The falling substances are both in flames and unburned, they have the stickiness, the flammability, the noxiousness, the denseness of petroleum and bitumens. They could not have been lofted by volcanoes or exploded by local pressures of oil reservoirs underground. They might be manufactured, however, in the "chemical factory" of a meteoroid impact. The account of the destruction of the army of Sennacherib before Jerusalem in 687 B. C., synchronized as it is with other disastrous events elsewhere, indicates strongly a poisonous gassing of the multitude waiting to assault the eminences of the walled city [12] . Donnelly lays responsibility for the immense Pestigo (Wisconsin) Fire, and the Chicago Fire upon pockets of gas broken away from Biela's Comet that had earlier disintegrated but whose fragments and gases were making an anniversary rendezvous with Earth [13] . Thousands of people were killed and millions of acres burned down in three states [14] . He extends the condition and consequences exponentially in his discussion of the great comet of Ragnarok times. The famous case of the frozen mammoths is related to sudden atmospheric change. To freeze a large mammal so quickly and completely that even the mouth and stomach contents contain half- chewed and undigested plants requires quick-freeze conditions found today only in freezer- factories processing fresh foods for indefinite cold storage [15] . So indeed the mammoths have been preserved up to this time. Quite possibly, the cold front introducing an abrupt climatic change penetrated first as pockets of space gas at temperatures found only in outer space. A related possibility is a vacuum-chill incident; the congested lungs of one mammoth implies this. The most likely time for the death of the great animals would be during the early Jovean age, about 3500 B. C. There, both deluge and temperature conditions were extreme. The several writers who have advocated a sudden axial tilt as the sole and sufficient cause cannot be correct [16] . {S : DENSE FALL-OUT} DENSE FALL-OUT In all large-body encounters and minor extra-terrestrial invasions there will occur fall-outs of dense material. Dust, stones, brimstone, ash, micro-tektites, oils, and other material will descend with or without water. All will bury or devastate the biosphere by poisoning and asphyxiation. A geologic column will reveal some extra-terrestrial or at least catastrophic element of fall-out of one or more of these materials. A recent study, by Woods Hole oceanographers, of American land and shallow sea cores shows the presence in the soil of ancient polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are carcinogenic [17] . Extraterrestrial and explosive fall-out includes radioactive material along with the dense material product. Some of the radioactivity will enter because the bars are let down to the intrusion of "normal" cosmic and solar particles. Much will be "a la carte," produced by the peculiar invading agency and the destruction of its materials in the atmosphere of the Earth. {S : HURRICANES} HURRICANES In the large-body encounters and in many derivative or minor intrusions upon Earth. there will be hurricanes and typhoons of large diameter and immense energies. The hurricanes will be operating at speeds upwards of 200 miles per hour and raising catastrophic columns of all kind of material far into the stratosphere if not into outer space. They can scrape the surface -- clean down to bedrock, eradicating all trace of biosphere and human settlement. They can transport the biosphere over long distances, and drop it or raise it into the skies. They can even make away with rocks of 1000 or more tons; they can suck up or lay down lakes of waters [18] . {S : PANDEMONIUM AND DARKNESS} PANDEMONIUM AND DARKNESS With such forces in operation, the sights and noises are terrible and maddening. When the "dormant" Krakatoa volcano exploded in 1883 (following, incidentally, by a year the passage of the Earth through the tail of a comet), the thunderous noise was heard a thousand miles away. The noise of the eruption of Cosaguena, Nicaragua, on January 30, 1935 was heard in Jamaica 850 miles away. The fright was so severe that in one village "300 of those who lived in a state of concubinage were married at once." [19] Jupiter was the planet of "Thunder", Saturn was called the "Thunderer" too; Mars was called the "god of Noise." The full consequences are reserved for treatment in a subsequent volume, but I would mention here the knowledge that we newly possess -- that sights and sounds can have not only far-reaching psychological effects; they can compete with radio-activity in the production of biological, hence ecological effects [20] . The meteorological, geological and astrophysical sciences are as yet scarcely positioned methodologically to attend to or even discern such effects. Comets, and to a lesser extent meteoroids, can take many shapes. Several illustrations are given on the adjoining page from astronomical drawing and photographs. Many basic human objects and experiences can be obviously symbolized by a comet: violence, instruments such as swords, chariots, boats, wings, birds, cows, sexual organs, heads, hands, flowers, etc. These apparitions are so suggestive, compelling, and terrorizing that whatever on Earth is associated with them will never again be ordinary, and the ways in which these objects and experiences enter culture will be pathologically or at least illogically affected (see Figure 4 on pp. 26- 27). A final effect, when considering the consequence of large-body encounters, whether atmospheric pass-throughs or impact explosions, is that a stygian darkness would occur. A reduction to zero-visibility at night and near-zero visibility in daytime has most formidable psychological and physical consequences [21] . The Jews in Exodus wandered in darkness or gloom for many years. Their survival was only through the fall-out of manna, a sweet tasting starch, whose deposit from the skies is reported from Greece, India, Scandinavia, and Mexico -- from all around the world, it appears [22] . Styx itself was the gloomy hell of the Greeks, whence stygian darkness. Götterdammerung was the twilight of the gods of Nordic mythology, a similar cosmic darkness. After the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, the sunsets of the world were more sombre and beautiful for years. After the Alaskan volcanic eruption of 1912, some 20% of the Sun's radiance was interrupted. There is nothing at all unbelievable in the ancient's accounts of years of darkness. Figure 4. SOME SHAPES TAKEN BY RECENT COMETS. From left to right: (a) Tailed Sun, (b) Widow-Witch, (c) Monster 4 (d) Flying bird 4 (e) Scorpion 4 (f) vulva 4 (g) Phallus 4( h) Quetzalcoatl Bird "Comets are individual objects and .. a truly representative comet does not exist." (Rahe et al., infra. vii). Hundreds of different figures can be (and have been) associated with comet in science, legend, and journalism. See our Figs. iv, 3, 17, 31, 32. Photographs and drawing by astronomers: a. Daniel 1907 IV M. Wolf (photo); b. Morehouse 1908 III (photo); c. Morehouse 1908 III (isodensitometer photo); d. Swift-Tuttle Aug. 29, 1862 (drawing by Secchi); e. Daniel 1907 IV M. Wolf (drawing); f. Swift-Tuttle Aug. 27, 1862 (drawing by Schmidt); g. Tebbutt July 4, 1861 II (drawing by Schmidt); h. Tebbutt July 1, 1861 (drawing by Secchi). Source: Jürgen Rahe, B. Donn, and K. Wurms, Atlas of Cometary Forms (SP-198-NASA, Washington D. C. 1962), pages (in order): (a) 40 Fig. 1; (b) 73 Fig 22a; (c) 63 Fig. 14; (d) 29 Fig. 47; (e) 40 Fig. 2; (f) 25 Fig. 15; (g) 17 Fig. 9; (h) Fig 21. Some day, when the fractures and craters of the Earth are counted and synchronized, even approximately, the most astonishing images will be forced upon us by the calculation of times, not once but often, when mankind had to live for extended periods -- days, months, years, a whole generation -- deprived of light to hunt by or to see even a cloudy sky. These would be times when the natural and human fires would be the living light, and the sky lights would be in memory, yearning, dreams and utmost ritual pleas. {S : THE BATTLE OVER TIME} THE BATTLE OVER TIME No doubt that in the darkness, the human being thought of time. "When will it end...?" and course, "How long has it been going on...?" which means "When did it begin...?" The Veda pleads: "Hide the hideous darkness, make the light which we long for." [23] Time has from its human beginnings been subjective. Still, human capability has stretched to the utmost to objectify time. The aim is to place the world outside of reach of fickle minds and to ask "When did it really begin? What is its real measure?" So that there have become two kinds of time, subjective time and objective time. And neither is clean, pure, separate from the other. But few question the dominating claim of science, which is this: "Never mind how suffering and pleasure and shock affect the human mind. Outside of man, there moves a process quite out of control of his wish or will. That is time. Now how do the two relate to each other?" Scientific time strives to go beyond human time. When we think of a microsecond, we imagine it or we simply calculate it mechanically. We do the same with a billion years. We take a time to which we can relate psychologically -- a solar year -- and reduce or expand it to where we must deal with it mechanically, without feeling it in our guts. We do the same with energy. We feel a heat in some measure and then extend its measures to degrees of cold and heat that are astronomical. But these extremes are also mechanical extensions of ourselves. In both time and energy measurements, therefore, we are working within realms of the human that are extended into the inhuman. Both catastrophists and uniformitarians are human, feeling time and heat; both are working with inhuman extremities. Each looks at a range of "mountain": the one says that it was raised in years by unimaginable forces, the other that it was raised unimaginable millions of years ago. It should be possible to say who is correct. Although both are dealing with absolutes raised out of relatives, both share and understand the relatives. Hence, sooner or later, one will be proven right or wrong in terms that the other must accept. Why, under such circumstances, cannot the quantavolutionist and evolutionist come to terms? One reason is that they need not come to terms. A quantavolutionary can be just as good a geologist, historian, astronomer, biologist, or philosopher as an evolutionary. One will find fewer instructional materials, true, because practically all educational establishments are in the hands of evolutionists. But, if persistent or clever, one will make up one's own materials from those of the opposition. I do not see how pragmatic skills of the kind that earn a livelihood, whether in teaching, research, or professional practice, will be affected adversely. But I can see how such an allegation can be used as a form of invidious discrimination against revolutionaries. Another reason for not coming to terms is already implied. "Nature" likes ambiguity. The historical record of nature is dim, irregular, and requires assumptions that are logically vulnerable in interpreting it. The parties might be forced to come to terms if "nature" offered itself as arbitrator. But time after time, it refuses to arbitrate; now a scientist will approach with a carbon-14 test for precise dating and evolutionaries will exult: "It is all over but the shouting!" Other scholars will claim that the test is not fair, constant, or valid, so the controversy is only beginning. Again a scientist will appear with a "proof" (e. g., Bode's Law) that the planets must occupy their present order and intervals, and another scientist will step up to show that a) another formula will express a different order equally well and b) there is no empirical theory behind the seeming order [24] . Or again, scientists are persuaded of the fact and age of continental drift by the bands of magnetic reversal found on the rocks of the ocean bottom, but they will be told that the magnetic bands could be much younger (and therefore reversals more frequent) if the ocean bottom were being expanded and paved more quickly [25] . Nevertheless, both the quantavolutionary and evolutionary are driven to woo "Nature" for a direct clear reply and perhaps one day someone will succeed. Meanwhile the quantavolutionary will continually step forward to offer the unimaginable forces of ancient times -- the killers of time, the stoppers of clocks. Geologist Derek Ager estimates that 2000 heavily destructive tsunamis have struck the continental coasts during the present era (Solaria) and wonders at their great cumulative effect [26] . The convinced quantavolutionary says that the total effect of these 2000 tsunamis would have been exceeded by a single close passage of planet Mars between 766 and 687 B. C. Or by a meteoritic fall of the same time. "The terrible ones," and "the Maruts" are two of many personalized and divine epithets given to the bursts of meteoroids and thunderbolts from Mars that struck in many places [27] . We find Hindu prayers imploring them to "be far from us and far the stone which you hurl." [28] {S : THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY COLUMN} THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY COLUMN Wherever one stands on earth, there exists some record of history above and below. A fully intelligent mind should be able to observe and write it. Lacking full intelligence, but also in order to generalize, one can still construct a model. Hence we conjure a quantavolutionary column, that by telling of present conditions, gives form to our history. In the memories of the days of chaos and creation, in the annals of pre-Solarian mankind, and in the textbooks of science today are described numerous floods, shocks, and explosions, of dimensions too great for modern measure. Working as causes and effects, and as effects that become causes, they have made of any place on earth a Quantavolutionary Column: Any cube of one kilometer diameter circumscribed anywhere on the surface of the earth, which reaches as high as the end of the magnetosphere hundreds of miles upwards, and as low as the upper mantle some thirty kilometers down, will have endured within the past 14,000 years radical changes in its absolute and relative orientations, its atmosphere, its rocks and its biosphere, including any long-lived human cultures. The revolutionary column is thus about 500 kilometers tall but if the magnetosphere is traced to its farthest reaches, it extends about 4 million miles into space away from the solar windside of earth. The variety of radical changes in this column has been such that every science must be affected by a new knowledge and conception of them. {S : THE EXPONENTIAL PRINCIPLE} THE EXPONENTIAL PRINCIPLE The premise that every spot on earth exists within a quantavolutionary or catastrophic column is basic to primevalogy. A second principle is the exponential behaviour of high energy expressions. The winds, floods, and lightning we have spoken of earlier arise with little warning (it may be seconds or years) rise to a peak swiftly, inflict crushing blows, subside quickly and tail off their effects over a long period of time. The exponential principle needs stressing. Where the evolutionaries say "uniformitarian", the quantavolutionaries say "exponential." Catastrophic events behave exponentially: they typically arise and increase their effects with extreme rapidity and decline in their effects almost as precipitously. Then, of course, the decline trails off and becomes near zero, where the uniformitarian usually picks it out for extrapolating backwards in time. For example, is Mt. Everest, in the Himalayas, the world's highest mountain, still rising? If it were undergoing the kind of uplift measured at Cajon Pass (near Los Angeles) in relation to its surroundings, which amounts to 0.45 feet per century, then, allowing for erosion at the rate of 2 feet for every 3 feet of uplift, Mt. Everest would be produced in 9 million years, by Shelton's estimate [29] . But if this 0.45 feet per century is the trailing effect of a negative exponential curve, Mt. Everest might have evolved in only several thousand years. Everest in 29,000 feet high; the Indian subcontinent rammed up into South Asia and in the collision the two bodies forced up the Himalayan mountains. Let us suppose that this impact, which is accepted widely now to explain the Himalayas, happened in the early Lunarian period of 11,000 years ago. If the collision were forceful enough to raise the land in the first year of contact by a few hundred feet and to continue on at some diminishing rate thereafter, the mountain would be raised to its present height in a couple of thousand years. Taking the present rate of uplift at 0.45 feet per century and increasing it by a factor of 1.1 so that 100 years ago it would presumably be 0.495 feet/ century and 200 years ago 0.544 per century, Everest would have been emplaced before the age ended. Certain lunar heat spots and moonquakes, for example, may be the fossil or ghost remnants of Aphrodite's "love affair" with Mars [30] in the late seventh century B. C. Similarly, volcanism has been declining for a long time in comparison with its incidence in ancient times and prehistory. Too, the measurable inching of the Arabian peninsula towards Asia is the dying impulsion of its recent amputation from Africa: the Red Sea is the surgical scar marking the line of severance [31] . Indeed the phenomenon of "erosion" that is basic to uniformitarian geology is largely derivative. It is an attenuated effect of the catastrophes that carved canyons and raised mountains. All of these statements will be clearer in the light of later chapters. It would appear in passages from Velikovsky and from and inspection of Schaeffer's data that seismism was heavier throughout the Bronze Ages and Iron Age down to the Christian era. Ambraseys has attacked the job of counting earthquakes for the past 2000 years and hesitantly concluded that earthquakes have been uniformly experienced in the Near East over the period [32] . It this study of 3000 quakes in generally accurate, the enormous seismism recorded by Schaeffer for the Bronze Ages marks catastrophic periods. Michael Chinnery and Robert G. North have analyzed the techniques used for reporting seismic events today and warn that earthquakes, exceeding in intensity the present scales, may have quite recently occurred although knowledge of them is lacking [33] . It is well to mark this study, inasmuch as professionals and laymen alike are often of the opinion that the top calibrations of the Mercalli and Richter scales represent the maximum tremors that are today possible. In fact, there exists a dogmatic view that the Earth for a long time has not had within it the means of exceeding these scales. D. Vitaliano [34] and her predecessors have maintained that legends and ancient reports were exaggerated and have to be translated into current scales of events. It is possible to reconcile the two views by opining that earthquakes have been diminishing over time as a tailing-out effect of much greater, earlier upheavals (in accord with the exponential principle). However, records are too few and analysis not theoretically enough advanced to predict that intracyclical fluctuations of the curve of long- time decline will not be of hitherto unregistered high intensity. The exponential principle is crucial to biological quantavolution as well. Exponentialism marks the rise and fall of species. A recent example will help to clarify the point. Muskrats abound in America; ten millions are trapped annually. But muskrats did not exist in the vast Soviet Union, despite a similar potential habitat, the high mobility of the animal, and its aquatic skills. Either recent biological catastrophe is to be suspected, or else the species originated in the past several thousand years: both hypotheses indicate quantavolution. In 1928-33, several thousand muskrats were introduced at hundreds of points in the U. S. S. R. Within forty years, their number was estimated at 100 millions, twice as many as exist in America [35] . Given a niche, a species fills it quickly. {S : REVOLUTIONARY INTEGRATION OF THE COSMOS} REVOLUTIONARY INTEGRATION OF THE COSMOS Everything is connected with everything else: the most ancient people thought so, and modern scientific philosophy agrees. The teachers of natural science to the young repeat interminably, "Inside the atom are locked the secrets of the universe." The microscopic related to the macroscopic, the microscope to the telescope. Yet the mind scuttles for its own hole. It does not want to be part of the infinite interconnected web of reality. It makes isolates of all other persons. It studies the small apart from the large. It stretches out time endlessly so that things do not happen together. Voices assemble and amplify themselves in politics, science, the press, the street-corner hang- outs: "We are spared the fate of the whole. What happened once happened to others. They are not us. What is happening elsewhere is not happening to us. We are spared. What will happen to the future is again not us. Again we are spared." So it goes -- an endless litany to express the feeling, as Einstein wrote ironically to Velikovsky: "Holy St. Florian, spare thee my house. Set fire to the others." [36] The greatest lesson of the unity and interconnection of person and person, and of person and nature, finds its destructive and creative climax in the quantavolutionary explosion. Recall only one recent memory, before we move into the primeval ages of mankind. What was the great lesson of the explosion of Hiroshima? That a new age had broken upon mankind. That in the giant column of fire carrying upwards a Japanese city was the fate of man and nature, inextricably bound. The single act of destruction called forth the essential forces of nature and the amazement of human beings, friends and foes alike, all over the world. Yet this was a small force compared with those being discussed. True, there was no force in earliest times that is unknown today. But modern man must look with sinking heart upon his earliest experience because the forces of nature then expressed themselves in exponentially greater measure than they do today and seemed to have as their target, as their favored creature, and as their responsive audience, the developing human being. The earliest events brought forward the revolutionary calendar. So it came about finally that mankind today experiences by his own hand an imitation of the state of nature that brought about his very existence as the deluded "wise man," homo sapiens. Standing in the Solarian Age, he can for the first time do what only natural forces once do -- bring the curtain of catastrophe crashing down upon the end of an epoch. {S : Notes (Chapter Two: High Energy from Space)} Notes (Chapter Two: High Energy from Space) 1. Boulanger (1794), V. 220 ff. 2. (1977) n 4, 24. 3. Bruce (1944). 4. Juergens (1974-5); In a general statement Piddington (1960) writes: "Magnetic fields are almost ubiquitous and it is rapidly becoming clearer that they play a dominant role in the evolution of the universe. It is likely that without these fields the planets would not have formed and even galaxies or protogalaxies may never have developed from the more tenuous primeval gas." Magnetoplasma makes up practically all of the Universe that is not of rigid or non-conducting bodies. 5. Krinov (1966) 125-65; Glass (1969); Rich (1978). 6. Lowery, Kronos (1977); Velikovsky (1950) 143-5, 148-9, 159-60, 169, 301; Bimson (1977) 9; Ovid, Book II; Fontenrose (1959); and cf. Index below. 7. Velikovsky (1950), 141. 8. Kelly and Dachille, 203; cf. Gallant (1964). 9. Ibid., 204. 10. Cook (1966) 183-4. 11. Velikovsky (1950) 53-8. 12. Ibid., 227-35. 13. (1833), ch. 5. Furneaux (1964) mentions cometary phenomena the year before Krakatoa exploded. 14. Schroeder (1964) 492. 15. Patten (1960) 104-9; Cardona (1976); Velikovsky (1950) 326-9. 16. Cardona (1976) reviews the 14C dates; they extend over thousands of years, impossibly, although they generally fall within the age I suggest. 17. Blumer and Youngblood (1975). 18. Lane (1965), "Hurricanes." 19. Furneaux (1964) 203. 20. Juenemann, 112. 21. Velikovsky (1950), 58-62,126-38 et passim; (1952) 28-9, 46-7; (1964), 175-6. 22. Reade (1977). 23. Velikovsky (1950), 285. 24. Nieto (1974) with Ransom comment, p. 7; Bass (1974) 11-12. 25. Cf. below pp. 155-59, Barnes, Milson (1977) and Cook (1966). 26. See also Coleman (1968). 27. J. Ziegler (1978); Velikovsky (1950) 282-9 28. Velikovsky (1950). 29. 416-8. 30. Cf. Homer's Odyssey, Bk. VIII, the "Song of Demodocus;" Juergens (1974-5). 31. Sullivan (1974) 214. 32. (1971) 379. 33. Chinnery and North (1975). 34. Vitaliano (1973) makes a major thesis of the reduction of legends to the commonplace. 35. Igor Akimushkin, Animal Travellers, Moscow: Mir Publ., 1970, 208-9. 36. Einstein (1955). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 03: } {T COLLAPSING TESTS OF TIME } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE: COLLAPSING TESTS OF TIME It would appear that someone has stolen the rocks of the Earth. In North America, 35 epochs, comprised in 250 rock formations which are formed of a great many less thick and distinct strata, have been recognized as composing the geologic column back to the "beginning of life," the Paleozoic of 570 million years ago [1] . [Lately a billion years.] The Pre-Cambrian before this is thought to have consumed 2,000 or perhaps even 4,000 million years [2] . But the formations are never present for inspection in one place. If every different stratum that was ever labelled were heaped up in its maximum deposited thickness, the pile would tower into the stratosphere. According to the accounts rendered of the world Geologic Column, there should be 400,000 feet or 80 miles thick of sediments [3] . Furthermore, the heap should cover the whole globe, unless somebody else has been digging rock from the oceans and carrying it up the continental shelves For the ocean bottoms are scarcely sedimented [4] . And they are of a different rock than the continents. "In the whole of geophysics there is no other law of such clarity and certainty as... that there exist two preferred levels in the Earth's crust." [5] Or perhaps someone has been burning sediments to make granites for the sial. The origins of granite are mysterious [6] . If this seems to be nonsense, the nonsense may be in the idea, not in the telling. There is no such heap, no complete geologic column. And a geologist would be foolhardy to defend its historical presence. Eighty miles up is 75 miles above Mt. Everest. Eighty miles down probably everywhere on Earth, one has passed through the plutonic rocks, is well beyond the critical Moho discontinuity, and is deep into the molten mantle. To account for all such presumed material, one would have to be an extreme catastrophist. For, allowing that continental land (or sial) covers only 40% of the globe and the sediments lay on the average only 4 miles thick upon the 20 mile thick sial, which is one-fourth of 80 miles, then 4/ 80 of 40/ 100 = two per cent. Ninety-eight per cent of the Earth's sediments have disappeared. There is a kind of saving argument which is, however, self-defeating. The layers added together to reach 80 miles are of known maximum deposits, not average ones. Sheer guessing might halve the maxima, making the total column 40, not 80, miles in height. So the 2% would become 4%. Then 96% of the sediments are missing. Adding abyssal sediment would hardIy matter. These crude estimates are perhaps adequate to solve the mystery of the great land robbery. Half of the stolen sediments were never there. Great forces, operating in short periods of time, have fluxed the crust of the Earth so thoroughly that a great many strata of false identity and false age have been created. The other half of the sediments was stolen by "Uranus Minor" and stashed away on the Moon: the method will be explained in Chapter 7. {S : RAPID SEDIMENTATION} RAPID SEDIMENTATION Rates of sedimentation are usually estimated on the basis of contemporary rates. Allowances are made for demonstrable past events but these are interpreted on gradualist lines. If the Grand Canyon's age is calculated as an eroded river channel, its age is great. But if it is regarded as a transverse branch of the fissure-fracture of the East Pacific followed by deluge and tidal erosion, then it could be of holocene age [7] . Ocean sedimentation recently examined under conventional premises (with the "help" of potassium-argon techniques), have dated the present ocean basins at nowhere more than 200 million years, incomparably younger than by former calculations [8] . The sediments were found to be astonishingly meager. Yet, contrary even to this new dating, the ocean sediments could be provided readily from catastrophic sources in a thousand years after the basins formed, as Chapter Seven will show. Furthermore, the ocean bottom, which is under enormous pressure, contains only unconsolidated sediments, a sign of newness [9] . And if the oceans had once been land and the land ocean, then certainly great rock formations should line the bottoms. In addition, at the rate at which uranium is now flowing into the oceans, the oceans and their sediments have accumulated a supply representing less than 100,000 years of flow, and when the flow off the continents is calculated as a negative exponential curve, the age of the ocean becomes holocene [10] . For most sediments would have been dropped or transported in the earliest years. Sedimentary rocks are given very great ages in part because the "normal" visible rates of deposit are slow. But a single cometary train might lay down a "hundred million years" of till or detritus-clay and gravel-in a day [11] . A coal deposit can be launched by a high-energy "bulldozer" in a matter of hours, covered over the next day by clay and baked until ready; it does not need the "millions" of years of development insisted upon by uniformitarian sedimentary calculations [12] . Petroleum deposits are not proof of long ages, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial [13] . Geologist E. M. Larrabee studied a deposit of maximum thickness of one meter [14] . It was laid down by the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers at Harper's Ferry (Va.) between 1861-64. Over 100 strata could be identified. Historical research suggested that two or three floods, each lasting a few days, produced them. In the history of geology anomalous discoveries in supposedly old sedimentary deposits are numerous: a Roman coin ploughed up from the prairie of Illinois [15] ; a doll sucked from under till and lava in Idaho [16] ; a fossil fish below hundreds of feet of Wyoming shale pirouhetted among many layers of annual varves [17] ; a "4000 year-old" log ensconced in a "billion year-old iron deposit of Labrador;" [18] a fossil 80-foot skeleton whale poised upright amidst some "million years" of diatomaceous (organic) deposits [19] ; a fossilized set of startled extinct "bullheads" in English lower Old Redstone marking millions of years [20] ; a 100-foot diameter boulder nestling in a large pure clay deposit in Timor [21] ; a house-high muck of smashed bones in Alaska [22] ; human bones and sophisticated artifacts amidst extinct animal remains and Tertiary fauna under California lava [23] ; and so on. Each one warns: "Stop the clock!" All together, they say, "Question all deposits as alternatively quantavolved and evolved." Shelton's marvelous, though uniformitarian, photographic book of geology should be quoted here. After remarking that laminated clay deposits (varves) can permit a time estimate of each layer, he says "For the common sediments... we have no accurate knowledge of how long individual beds took to accumulate or of how much time elapsed between the deposition of each... Some thick beds accumulate in a short time, some thin ones take much longer, and in all probability the period of nondeposition that separate most layers represent far more time than is represented by the strata. As Charles Darwin pointed out over a hundred years ago, with far fewer facts to go on than we have today, from the standpoint of time, the sedimentary record is very incomplete - just an entry now and then with long pauses between." [24] How did Darwin know the pauses were long? How long is long? Indeed Darwin's idea of "long" is "short" according to today's scientists. Again I quote Shelton: "Unfortunately most sediments do not contain reliable clues to how fast they were deposited --- or to the duration of intervals between layers... Observed rated of sedimentation range from almost immeasureably small fractions of an inch per century to many feet per hour and make it almost impossible to estimate the average for my large deposit..." [25] {S : CORAL REEFS} CORAL REEFS Among the most complex challenges to quantavolutional geologists, uniquely related to sediments, would appear to be the coral reefs of the world, both living and fossil. An ordinary statement of the conventional case in the following: "Because the coral polyp's existence is tied to that of the algae, coral reefs can grow at depths no greater than around 180 feet -- below this not enough light penetrates to permit algae to carry on the process of photosynthesis. The brittle material we call coral is the polyps' protective external skeleton. The tiny animals absorb calcium salts from the ocean, allowing them to build these calcium carbonate structures around their bodies. New generations of coral polyps attach themselves to the skeletons of dead polyps. In this way the coral reef grow larger - layer upon layer, generation upon generation. Expanding at the rate of only few centimeters a year, some present-day reefs have been developing for 100,000 years and more." [26] The author does not mention fossil coral found at considerable depths beyond 180 feet. One must suppose a land-sinking or that the water level was rising as the coral grew; the lower coral would die, the higher would grow faster. Suppose the water temperatures were higher; the coral might grow faster; Suppose the amount of calcium salts in the water increased; the polyps would flourish. The opaqueness of sea-water is not an absolute, nor, for that matter, is the radiance at the surface. The algae supply has many variables determining it, including species adaptations and mutations that may cause greater or lesser light requirements. Can coral polyps feed upon bluegreen algae? Do shallow warm lava bottoms and new limestone accelerate coral growth? All those questions can make the coral reef an "anomaly" in short-time reckoning, reminding one of the "anomalies" that are similarly handled by uniformitarians in regard to apparently catastrophic phenomena such as vast "river-formed plains" or the "gradual" erosion of the Grand Canyon. Even by conventional dating, long-term and carbondating-assisted, the seas are supposed to have been over 100 meters lower 20,000 years ago, before the "great ice melt", and, before then, the sea-level was abruptly higher and the coral could not have survived [27] . Hence a continuous coral reef vertical development "for 100,000 years" would be highly improbable. Further, the 180-foot live-depth figure may be more nearly half that -- or 80 feet maximum live depth [28] . The vertical growth rate of coral can be from 1 to 12 meters per thousand years. The lower limit is actually zero, depending upon thermal, chemical, nutritional, wave-energy, and pollution conditions. The highest rate, for all we know. may be limited only by the speed with which the sea-level is rising. Fossil coral, not heretofore mentioned whether beneath coral growth of the past eleven thousand years, or separately discoverable, as in the Arctic Circle, or at depths of hundreds of meters elsewhere may have originated in the swamps and shallow seas of Pangea, the wholly continental Earth-crust that we postulate in this book. Some of the fossil coral beds may, like the continents, have been displaced and rafted to new locations. Much of the reasoning employed in the case of coral growth here may also be used to argue the case of limestone caves and their stalactites. That is, subject to discussion in a forthcoming volume, the limestone caves of the world may be taken to be largely new, a product of large- scale electrical discharge of the Earth, water-accelerated. Arguments may be advanced farther, to wit, that the drip-formed stalactites and stalagmites can be grown in short times under non- uniformitarian conditions and yet be strong enough to stand against heavy seismic shock [29] . {S : RADIODATING} RADIODATING William Thomson (Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907) estimated in 1899 that the Earth might be no older than 24 million years if its matter were chemically inert and its heat only the primordial remnant. Other scientists disagreed, opting for longer durations to accomplish evolutionary processes. How uncertain were the stratigraphic estimates of time that geologists relied upon before new radiometric techniques came into use a generation ago is revealed in their quick surrender to radiometry: it is common joke that the earth has aged a billion years per decade for several decades, all owing to new tests of time by radiochronometry [30] . Certain elements, such as potassium-40 and uranium-238, which are to be found in rocks of the crust of the Earth, especially at or near surface levels, are radioactive. They are sometimes called "parent elements" insofar as they decay into "daughter" elements by giving up electrons or by other means [31] . They began their decay as soon as they were formed. One calculates their life-span by figuring backwards from today's rate of decay as witnessed in a sample of the element. A rock matrix presumably will contain the parent element and the daughter element in proportion to its age, unless it had undergone some exceptional experience. The dozen or so transformations used for dating purposes include uranium-238 decaying into lead-206, of potassium-40 decaying into argon-40, and of rubidium-87 decaying into strontium-87 [32] . None of these methods is useful directly for the period since 14,000 B. P. because the decay into daughter elements is too slow to detect over the short time. However, radiodating challenges our model of quantavolution indirectly when it produces long-term dates where short- term dates are expected. For example if, by potassium-40 argon-40 dating, the ocean floor appears to be 100 to 200 million years old, then it cannot have been formed between 13,000 B. P. and 9,000 B. P. Also, when igneous rocks associated with hominid bones of the Olduvai gorge, dated by the same technique, produce an age of about 1.75 million years, then the bones cannot be of the holocene epoch. Major problems occur with radiodating. One is in the setting of a rate of decay and therefore setting a date for "time zero" within a reasonable margin of error. Regarding the "time zero" problem, the radio "clocks" work on vast ages, from one billion to five billion years of age. Adjustments in the so-called decay constant may move all tested rocks up and down the time scale by many millions of years. Although such adjustment never approach a short-term position, they cause doubts as to whether there is in fact a constant rate of decay to be discovered. A second kind of difficulty deals with high-energy events. Radio-chemical methods of determining pre-historic age are extensions of the uniformitarian premise that the chosen chemical elements have remained unchanged in a closed system, save for the decay process, since the clock started to tick. They assume that nothing would affect the parent or daughter element, apart from the expected normal decay from one to the other; nothing could tamper with the clock. Recent studies cast doubt upon this theory; high forces can break and enter the clock. The concept of "half-life" is used in radioactive decay time measurements. The half-life of an aggregate of an element is the length of time required for half the atoms of the aggregate to decay into the new element. The half-life of uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, calculated backwards from presents rates of decay. Can the process of decay be so regular [33] ? Decay is the losing of an electron from an atom that is unstable; it therefore amounts to a transmutation. The occasion of the decay is a force. The force is another particle from another statistical aggregate. This force is regularly and randomly applied to the "A" aggregate causing a regular rate of loss. Each "A" atom has an equal chance of being hit in the bombardment. Hence whatever affects the bombarding aggregate will affect the rate of decay of "A". And all "A's" may not be identical. Some "A's" may be "harder to hit," "resist cleavage," or "repel the projectiles." Still, as an aggregate, "A" might respond uniformly to the force causing is transmutation. Radiation physicist H. C. Dudley [34] has insisted that the equations describing radioactive decay rates were crudely derived long ago: "Bluntly, they are incorrect; but they nonetheless appear in our latest textbooks... Studies have varied the decay characteristics of 12 other radionuclides [besides 7Be and 90Nb] with changes in the energy state of the orbital electrons; by pressure, temperature, electric and magnetic fields, stress in molecular layers etc.," citing G. T. Emery. Dudley further asserts that in certain cases, the "decay event A is causally related to decay event B occurring later, such that the time distributions of all decay events were no longer truly random, as required by current theory. There appears to be a chain type reaction operating... similar to that observed in neutron induced sustained nuclear fission," here citing chemists J. L. Anderson and G. W. Spangler. Dudley asks for the incorporating in decay theory of "the energy state of the entire atom [not just the nucleus] and on parameters of interaction with an energy-rich subquantic medium." The work of Anderson Spangler and Dudley implies this for revolutionary primevalogy: decay rates for radioactive elements are dependent upon high-energy forces in the environment, and may be varied little or much. Radioactive decay can be compared with chain reactions in nuclear fission. Hence, at certain points in time, especially when the phenomenon of the catastrophic tube occurred, time pressures (based on today's retrojections) would have been instantly and completely disrupted. {S : RADIATION TURBULENCE} RADIATION TURBULENCE We are conjecturing further, here, that major disturbances in the parent-daughter relationship may occur as a result of radiation storms and typhonic impact explosions. Lesser and more localized in effect, and often inter-connected with radiation storms are jovian bolts, phaetonic atmospheric penetration, titanic large body encounters, and dense material fall-outs. These operate as follows: Cosmic radiation consists of high-energy particles that bombard the earth sufficiently at the present time to permit the presence in the atmosphere of atoms of all chemical elements. Both the particles striking earth and the transmutations of particles are varied. When, according to quantavolutionary theory, age-making and age-breaking episodes occurred, the earth passed near to heavily radiating bodies and was also subjected to heavy radiation storms from a distance. In fact, every change in the earth's atmosphere lessened or increased the reception of radiation: the cloud canopies, the lowering or dropping of canopies, the rising of exploded vapors, the destruction of biospheres and the loss or gain of atmosphere from comets, meteors and planets. In all of this, the parent and daughter elements involved in radio clocks have experienced a turbulent history. No pair of elements can be granted to have remained locked in their crystallized rock interior since the beginning of its time. There is no way of commencing the history of potassium and argon at the bottom of the sea. The bottom formed in a turbulent atmosphere and hydrosphere, first wet, then drowned shallowly. then deeply submerged but all the while actively spreading. The waters that poured in came directly from the skies, through skies via the sea and earth evaporation, and through runoffs loaded with detritus. Under such circumstances the clocks might be deemed invalid. They were set wrongly to begin with. They have maintained a semblance of agreement of very old ages by first of all having had similar recent experiences within their rocks, and through laboratory fudging of tests and samples back and forth. Yet even "normal" experience of today's solar system presents a severe problem. Nitrogen contained in air and in radioactive mineral undergoes a considerable transmutation of isotropic elements. Lead undergoes the same. The cause is neutron-promoted transmutations. As a result, the decay process of uranium into lead is paralleled by neutron-to-lead activity. When as in certain Katanga and Canadian ore bodies, a neutron-promoted corrective factor is introduced into the uranium-to-lead decay process, the daughter element that isowed to uranium decay is so reduced as to produce a zero age result [35] . This kind of problem is rendered even more difficult under solarian conditions by problems of selecting and sampling rocks, by the fluxing and painting of the surfaces of rocks where trace elements aggregate, and by the need to transfer (with dubious validity) the findings of a test in one part of the lithosphere to conclusions about tests in other parts. Problems of leaching and fluxing are severe. Rivers carry an estimated average of 6 x 10 10 grams per year of uranium down to the oceans. If the lead is left behind in the rocks this escaping uranium is effectively turning back the clock [36] . Parents are leaving their daughters, and the remaining parents are being charged with their existence. The amount of uranium in the ocean, moreover, is so small (10 to the 17the power grams) as to have been produced even under non-exponential solarian conditions within about 10 million years. With quantavolutionary theory, the exponential rate of deposit would eradicate even this time calculation. Helium in the atmosphere is originated radioactively from the uranium and thorium in the lithosphere and from cosmic rays from the galaxy and beyond. Conventional ages of the lithosphere require that 10 20 grams of helium should have been released into the atmosphere whereupon some of it would escape into outer space. However, the rate of escape is too slow under solarian conditions to explain why so little helium exists in the atmosphere. Given the amount of helium present there, it has been calculated that the age of the atmosphere must be only 12,000 years [37] . That is, some 12,000 years ago, the atmosphere was reconstituted. Radioactivity was discovered a century ago but time-measures of radioactivity are largely a post-World War II development. Despite the shortness of its life, changes in the field have been numerous and radical. Its leaders turn quickly in new directions whenever problems are encountered, introducing new half-lives, slicing experimental rocks differently, and giving their favor now to one, and again to another technique. {S : POTASSIUM-ARGON DATING} POTASSIUM-ARGON DATING Potassium-argon dating has become highly favored recently, for reasons too byzantine to develop here. For, the criticisms that can be addressed to uranium-lead dating hold also against 40K/ 40A dating. Indeed, argon (one of the "noble gases" whose exclusiveness or slipperiness gave them their name) is generally to be suspected of vagrancy. Also, the stability of potassium is in question. "Potassium can be made to diverge widely form conventional abundance by countercurrent electromigration." [38] Argon-40 will be present in a rock if potassium-40 is present and has had time to decay. Only igneous, and certain types of once-melted metamorphic rock, can be tested. Sediments cannot. The half-life of 40K is so long (1.3 billion years for half the decay to occur) that almost no argon-40 is to be found in a young rock, and therefore tests are not yet considered valid for less than 100,000 years. Dates produced by related tests are often discordant. Material taken from the Salt Lake Crater on Oahu, Hawaii, dated from 200 to 3,300 million years [39] ; the Moon has been dated as older than the universe [40] ; and 200-year old lavas, that should show zero Argon, produced enough to allow 12 and 20 million-year old dates at Kilauea, Hawaii [41] . I shall only mention that, under such circumstances, in other cases, the problems of full and open reporting may become serious in the field of chronometric science; as in public affairs, there arises a temptation to dismiss, "fudge" or even conceal some of the evidence [42] . Argon, like uranium and radioactive trace elements generally, tends to rise to the surface of the Earth. Hence surface rocks (and these include all that have been measured) will be high in argon content. Argon also can be infused into hot rocks from the air and kept there as the rocks cool. This could have happened to Earth if Mars, thought now to be rich in atmospheric argon, encountered Earth 2,700 years ago; the same Martian argon may be what is making Moon samples, so young in some respects, so old by 40K -40A dating [43] . The U. S. Venus probe of 1978 found astonishing quantities of argon-36 and possibly argon-40 in the burning atmosphere. Argon, being "exclusive," "slippery," and "noble," leaks. It escapes into the atmosphere; it flows horizontally. It prefers rocks of certain types to other rocks. On the Island of Naxos, Greece, Poul Andriessen found side by side metamorphic rocks which, in tests performed in his Dutch laboratory, produced ages of 5 to 15 million, and of 200 million years (amphibolite ultrabasic rock) [44] . Australian tektites have given 700,000 to 860,000 years by the 40K - 40A method in 7 to 20 thousand-year-old strata [45] . Funkhauser and Naughton, faced by the Hawaiian incongruities, speculated that excess argon could be held in crystal irregularities and imperfections such as grain boundaries and dislocations in the rocks. This likely theory would appear to throw the K-A ratio upon the mercy of petrology rather than chronology. Granted argon is more abundant in rocks nearer the surface, a lava flow will erupt melted surface rock first, than lower rock, then still lower rock. This may falsely date a set of lavas, although the law of superposition is correct. As the law demands, the strata of lava on top will be younger (and hold less argon) than the strata below (with more argon); moreover all will be very old for the reasons given above. As matters stand, it would be a grave risk for geology to rearrange the phanerozoic scale according to 40K -40A dating principles. {S : THE RADIO-HALO PROBLEM} THE RADIO-HALO PROBLEM Radio-chronometricians pass restlessly from one measure to another, despite their elaborate equipment, which critics have alleged to be too burdensome to discount and abandon (over 100 laboratories exist today for carbondating alone). While continuously asserting the validity of the great time intervals they have discovered - and indeed imposing this belief upon the geologists and anthropologists - nevertheless they are engaged in a quest for improvements and for new tests that are less vulnerable to complaint. There are at least a dozen parent-daughter, radioactive decay tests, each with its problems of the type already displayed in the discussion of 40K-40A tests. Discordant time readings within and among individual tests, demonstrable leaking and leaching of elements, and proven possibilities of elements being created under catastrophic heats and pressures are vexing problems, even more than the problems of sampling and contamination. If, to this time, the restlessness of chronometricians has been excused as a search for technical perfection, that excuse has now worn out its acceptance. The reduction of the uniformitarian ideology is permitting a clear view that elements in varied isotopic forms can and have been engendered by natural and human forces. The implications of various studies, writes Melvin Cook, are that "apparently all the elements are available in cosmic radiation at very high energies as bombarding particles, and that the synthesis of high mass atoms in large decrements of mass increase is possible. It is therefore only necessary for our earth (or its accretion materials) to come close enough to the source of cosmic radiation to effect a complete equilibrium distribution of atoms. At present, the earth itself is too far away form the source of cosmic radiation (owing possibly only to the protecting influence of its atmosphere and magnetic field) to maintain nuclear equilibrium in respect to U, Th, K 40 , Rb 87 , and other radioactive atoms [46] . These remarks should be taken in connection with the possibilities of catastrophic typhoons or tubes, described in the last chapter, and fluctuations in solar activity recently discovered. The studies of R. V. Gentry are especially threatening to radiochronometry [47] . He examined over 100,000 radiohalos in the decade just ended. A radiohalo (or pleochroic halo) is a spherical colored ring around a radioactive nucleus denoting the escape of an alpha-particle and its ionizing of a surrounding zone. The ring's size is determined by the speed of escape. When uranium (U238) decays, it does not decay immediately into lead (Pb 206) but produces seven other isotopes en route, from thorium, radium, radon and polonium. There occur, then, with decayed U238 eight concentric rings, of which five are distinguishable. Gentry discovered, however, that many halo systems begin with polonium; they exhibit no uranium or other supposedly preceding halos. And polonium 210, the longest lived of the polonium isotopes, has a half-life of 140 days. If some of the oldest rocks of the world contain this isotope, without a uranium-thorium predecessor, it follows that the host rocks must have been formed in days. Promptly, then, one would have to drop a billion years from the history of the Earth, for the original rocks are supposed to have taken a billion years to crystallize. Parentless polonium atoms may be primordial, as are uranium-238 and thorium-232 atoms, but this would imply that polonium halos "represent evidence only a brief period between 'nucleosynthesis' and crystallization of the host rocks." [48] Incredibly, rocks would form immediately upon the synthesis of the elements in them. Reporting upon a telephone interview, Stephen Talbott says that Gentry "finds compelling reasons to question the entire dating scheme which undergirds our concept of geological time." [49] Other studies of coalified wood from the Colorado Plateau, buried in rocks of the Jurassic- transition, evidenced such an abundance of uranium and lack of lead that ages of at most 100,000 years had to be assigned to the coal. Then Gentry, in examining the radiohalos, had to report that the coalification required only days, not millions of years [50] . Sykes has shown by experiment that a magnetic field of the flux density of 0.1 tesla is enough to increase the mean decay count of radioactive cobalt-60 and to skew the distribution of decay incidents from the normal. The "decay constant" was increased by about 2%; correspondingly, the half-life of cobalt-60 decreased [51] . {S : RADIOCARBON (CARBON-14) DATING} RADIOCARBON (CARBON-14) DATING Cosmic rays of the galaxy strike and explode atoms of the atmosphere. These give off neutrons that interact with nitrogen of the air to make carbon-14 or 14C. This passes into carbon dioxide and then into plants and other living organisms through their food supply. Living organisms also ingest carbon-12 which does not decay. When anything that has lived dies, it ceases to ingest radioactive carbon-14, and the carbon-14 within its cells begins to decay into nitrogen-14. Half of it might decay in 5,730 years, the other half in another 85,000 years, according to conventional theory. Thus, any once-living organic substance can be tested for the amount of 14C that it now contains in relation to the amount that was originally ingested. The carbon-12 level can be used as the base of measurement. However, not all species ingest 14C in the same amounts, so that specific rates must be calculated for different species. More importantly, "the amount that was originally ingested" may vary [53] . All that has been said about the effects of high-energy forces upon the atmosphere applies to carbon-14. How much nitrogen was in the primeval atmosphere is unknown and is presumed on today's measure. The carbonization (burning) of the biosphere and the sudden proliferation of flora will directly affect the rate of generation of 14C. Also, if carbon-14 was heavily generated in the atmosphere by electrical phenomena and radio storms, in the times when Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter were worshipped, it was ingested extensively by organisms. Matter of this period would test as "younger" today, provided that several other "constants" remained constant. As disasters diminish in intensity following chaos, relatively less 14C would be created; matter would grow "older." Several disasters involved the desiccation or saline ruination of large areas of the world; this would cause less carbon dioxide to discharge from plants. During short periods of burning, great amounts of non-radioactive carbon are discharged into the air and waters, and therefore contribute to a temporary "aging" of the new life of the time that follows. Whenever both a cosmic brilliancy and a conflagration occurred, today's tests would be contradictory, and averages would mislead. (see Figure 5.) Libby and Lukens have estimated a "perturbation of about 1%" occurring in the production of radiocarbon of tree rings by lightning bolts [54] . This represents a neutron supply added to the supply produced by cosmic rays. The estimates are based upon present-day assumptions, also upon highly varied conditions and inexact knowledge of the extent of lightning or its effects [55] . It does not consider lightning discharges occurring solely in the atmosphere, and especially the mega-bolts that can be a thousand times more powerful than the average earth- striking bolt and were recently discovered by satellites. Aside from what is happening in the biosphere, a fixed 14C component of the atmosphere, upon which the test is based, depends upon a constant encounter rate between cosmic particles and nitrogen that produces 14C. Since radiation storms occurred and long-term radiation levels were diminished and increased from time to time, intervals of the 14C scale must have been rendered invalid, except for mere coincidence. Only in the years from about 500 B. C. TO A. D. 1900 might the amount taken in by organisms have acquired some constancy. Even so, strange aberrations of the 14C/ 12C ratio occur, as with shellfish and coral growths. Figure 5. RADIOCARBON DATINGS AS INDICATORS OF ECOLOGICAL STRESS. The left-hand scale (s) registers the standard deviation of the "true" curve from the trend curve -- the number of years by which the radio carbon dates of each 250 year period deviate from the average of the whole group of dates of that period. The bottom scale represents the years before the present (taken as 1950 A. D.). As the chart shows, the dates begin to be erratic increasingly around the time of the Martian encounters (-2687 B. P. by this book's 2000 B. P. standard). The time scale goes to -6750, and thus carries one through the Martian, Venusian, Mercurian, and Jovean ages. However, even the erratic swings shown here do not portray the true extent of atmosphere and ecological disturbance, because, as the text asserts, a succession of quick changes in the atmosphere is possible, from low to high radiocarbon intake therefore by the biosphere, and this phenomenon would cause an evening-out of still a second and possibly much more serious form of deviation. Within a time of several years, an organism could ingest widely varying amounts of 14 C. Hence I suggest that radiocarbon dating may be useless before about 2500 years ago and there may have been a completely different radiocarbon cycle, as M. Cook maintains, before the Lunarian catastrophes. (Source: Damon et al, extended and applied [47] by G. W. Oosterhout Half-life is 5730 years.) There are many anomalies in C14 dating, a few of which are mentioned elsewhere in this book. Artifact dating has become quite common, with most of the apparent successes occurring on artifacts and substances of the recent historical past. But it is precisely the problem of C14 dating that, by our theory, it is almost surely wrong in the earlier periods when the tests are most needed. A group of scientists recently excavated "Little Salt Spring, Florida: A Unique Underwater Site." Among many remains they found in a lower level a tortoise carapace, which provided a date of 13,450 190 B. P., and a wood stake used to pry open the animal, which gave a date of 12,030 200. Some 1400 years of difference. Yet this is not the only problem. The whole range of time may be in question. For a base of a carved oak mortar was discovered and dated to 9080 B. P. and then declared to be similar in style to a piece recovered at Key Marco, 130 km to the South, and dated at about 1200 years ago [56] . The quantavolutionary hypothesis is disruptive of carbondating, as it has been conceived. An adjusted curve is impossible because the revolutions of the atmosphere in precisely the most critical millenia in primevalogy cannot be positioned and defined sufficiently well for them to be employed in weighing the scale intervals. The 14C method will be useful for dating the past 2,400 years, when allowances are made for short-term atmospheric fluxes owing to extraordinary cosmic, volcanic, solar, industrial, nuclear explosional, or other activity disturbing to the atmosphere. Mysteriously, corroboration of some of our conclusions comes from a retrogressive calculation by Melvin Cook of the amount of 14C in the ancient atmosphere. Granted the present level of carbon-14 and the fact that it is rising slightly, he found that all the 14C would have had to arrive in the atmosphere within the past ten to twelve thousand years [57] . Far from being constant, prior radio-carbon was at this point wiped out statistically and theoretically a new atmospheric accumulation began. This would appear to be about the time of the climactic Lunarian catastrophe. However, this calculation, as Dr. Cook might grant is more useful as a reductio ad absurdum than as a plotting of the true history of atmospheric carbon. {S : TREE-RING TIME} TREE-RING TIME Dendrochronology has discovered only one tree whose rings can be used to date associated events back into periods of interest to primevalogy. Such is the hard bristlecone pine, which may achieve 5,000 years of age by ring count. By matching fossil pine with living pine, the ages may be traced back further; perhaps 8000 years B. P. have been claimed by matching . (if conditions of fossilization were uniform millions of years of matching would be theoretically possible!) It is assumed that rings have always grown on an annual basis. Not surprisingly, quantavolutionists have adversely criticized the technique [58] . "Annual" is a relative standard, presently derived from a revolution of the tilted globe of the Earth around the Sun. Changes in astronomical motions can change the number of rings; if a "year" is shortened, the rings may be increased within the normal lifetime, something that may have caused the Methusalah phenomenon in early reported human ages of the Bible and elsewhere [59] . Also, the rings may increase or decrease if climatic conditions introduce a doubling of seasonal cycles within the same year-time. The tree has to be matched with human or natural objects of known age, or used to calibrate radiocarbon dating. But tests cannot calibrate each other without reference to a third test. This third test is often a historical date, but such dates rarely exceed 3000 years and even before then are hotly disputed. Furthermore, there occur in the cross-matched trees gaps of rings that may correspond to revolutionary incidents in the arboreal environment. Electron microscopes can find exceedingly thin rings, but cannot explain aberrations among them. Despite all of this, if bristlecone pines could be calibrated over a span from 5000 to 8000 years, this would mean that the solar system has existed that long in a form not radically different from its present form. Also, no important element of the atmosphere or climate affecting rather similar biological organisms would have changed. Further no major annual motion of the Earth respecting the Sun must have changed (orbital distance; orbital speed; rotational speed of the Earth); or all three motions, if changed, must have added up to the same total solar-exposure time. {S : MAGNETISM} MAGNETISM When rocks are near melting, they are stamped with the direction of the magnetic pole. When cooled, they keep this directional stamp. If reheated, they lose it and acquire whatever new stamp is indicated by the current magnetic pole. Also, if a rock changes its position, its magnetism will point away from the location of the magnetic pole towards which it was originally oriented. If also it is heated in a new position, the imprint will be oriented differently upon the rock. Paleomagnetism studies the changed magnetic orientation of rocks. It also judges the ages of rocks, but within severe limits [60] . Great belts of ocean basin rocks are imprinted with a polarity that is reversed from today's. Moving away from the great hot ocean ridges, alternating belts of reversed polarity occur. It is believed that these reversals occur at intervals, whether a few thousands or millions of years apart. It has been shown that the belts grow older (by fossil record, by inference from land studies, and by 40K-40A tests), as they move outwards from the ridges. It is believed that many millions of years show up in the magnetic bands. But magnetic reorientation depends upon the last heating of the rocks that contain the imprint and upon their movement. If the ocean bottom is moving much faster than assumed, then the time between reversals is shortened in proportion. And vice versa, if the reversals occur rapidly, then the ocean bottom must be moving much faster then believed. Probably both have occurred: the ocean bottom moved rapidly and magnetic reversals occurred repeatedly, both within a period of several thousand years, probably between ten and thirteen thousand years ago, or so we shall argue in a later chapter. Magnetic reversals occur for reasons unknown. Why they should happen at long intervals of time rather than short intervals is also unknown. Short-time intervals between reversals are probably connected with an impulse towards or an actual change of the axial inclination (now 23 +) of the Earth. Impulses were frequent in revolutionary ages. I shall be proposing later, with the support of legendary and geological evidence that the Earth's axis probably tipped on various occasions, both gradually and sharply. After each abrupt change, the globe may have rocked for a time before stabilizing. The rocking took many years; the multiplex worldwide legends of Hamlet's Mill [61] may reflect this perceived motion. In that case, the belts of differently imprinted rocks would represent rapid growth of ocean basins with a rocks would represent rapid growth of ocean basins, with a slowly wobbling axis of spin and a reversing magnetic field. A prior period of wobbling of the axis could even produce, in a period of accumulating ice, a succession of seeming advances and retreats (or the illusion of the "ice ages"). But also, pluvial intervals would occur, with melting in-between. The penchant of early man and mammals for living near ice-fields is understandable only because the Earth beyond the ice was not cold (since the ice might come from above). However, it is too early here to take up a position on the "ice ages," which are dealt with in the third volume of this work. Two terms are used to discuss magnetized rock: natural remnant magnetism and thermal remnant magnetism. Geophysicist T. Nagata of Tokyo has shown that the two are the same. Remnant magnetism, furthermore, will occur and increase with any temperature increase above 200 C. Magnetism decays. The exact coefficient of decay is unknown. The half-life of paleomagnetism may be only 5,000 to 10,000 years; all magnetism, according to M. Cook, may be less than 70,000 years old [62] . (Nagata guesses 1 million years.) Therefore, paleomagnetic bars of the ocean bottoms or land cannot well be used to measure time. Any considerable intensity must record a young age. A priori paleomagnetic ocean bottom measurements showing millions of years of age must be wrong. The position here taken is that any magnetism of the crust is primordial except where the crust has suffered a melt or welled up as new crust from the interior magma. {S : THE FOSSIL RECORD AND MUTATING TIME} THE FOSSIL RECORD AND MUTATING TIME Organisms that die in a mineralizing setting may become fossils that are recognizable unless subsequently melted or crushed. Fossils are the principal means of dating sedimentary rocks, and, by inference, such igneous and metamorphic rocks as may be connected to them. If two rocks, no matter where they are found, contain the same fossils, the rocks are usually from the same period of time. The more numerous the identical species of the two fossil assemblages, the surer their common age. When the rocks appear to be in superposition, the fossils help to assign them a relative date. Once this is done, if afterwards the same rocks occur in isolation or not in superposition, the fossils which they contain enable their dates to be inferred. A fossil may be wrongly dated. The record of its period and species may be incomplete. Or the fossil assemblage of various species may have been zoned and then have been transported to another area and placed, say, above a younger assemblage. Or the method of dating may be fallacious. For example, at the Schefferville (Canadian) iron mine, fossil wood specimens, radiocarbon dated at 4,000 years and largely unchanged chemically, were found imbedded (but not intrusively) in iron ore of pre Cambrian age (" over a billion years ago" and before trees evolved) at depths of several hundred feet [63] . Attempts at correlating results of radiodating with established fossil dating have not helped. They have thrown the phanerozoic scale into disorder. Acceptance of radiodating provides numerous anomalies in traditional fossil successions. Basic difficulties in both methods come out of high-energy processes that devastate the atmosphere, build sediments and transport life forms quickly. Plant and animal species require time to adapt to environments (life niches), to proliferate and to become extinct. So long as high-energy expressions are absent, it is reasonable to assign long periods to these processes and long life to the species. Originally, evolutionists were composing calendars that were under 100 million years in all. The discovery of natural mutation introduced a dynamic of change, but a successful mutation turned out to be, in theory at least, a most rare event. So more time was needed. Now a billion years or more is allotted for the evolution of species. But quantavolutionary theory permits short mutation intervals, quick and widespread extinction, the opening up of a great many life niches for pre-existing and new species, and the possibility of less restricted and therefore exponential growth of population. Hence all the time may not be needed to explain evolution, even as evolution is understood by neo-Darwinians today. {S : CYCLES AND ANNIVERSARIES} CYCLES AND ANNIVERSARIES That the world was created, destroyed, re-created and destroyed again, repeatedly, has never been doubted by any culture anywhere or anytime, except by the modern uniformitarian culture [64] . Five great ages are found in ancient Greece, India, Tibet, Peru and Mexico. Seven ages are put forth in another Hindu source; in Mazda; in Hebraic sources; in the Sybilline oracles; among the Mayas. The Hawaiians and Icelanders count nine; the Chinese reported ten ages up to Confucius. All may be taken as valid relative to localized definitions and experiences. All may be regarded as authentic challenges to the ages set by geochemistry and radiochronometry thus far. There occurs, nevertheless ,an urge to straighten or blend cycles into a helix, even in mythologies obsessed by repetitive chaos of creation. "The final step in Aztec speculation, as indicated by their great Stone Calendar, is to assign the four earlier world ages to the four world directions, with the satisfying result that the present age belongs to the center of the world, the place where man likes to think of himself existing... The terror of experiencing a derangement of the cardinal points is transmuted by systematization into the comfort of knowing that all resulted in placing man at the center". [65] Very recently, however, it has become clear that the competition for chronological veracity is going to be framed in the ancient cyclical - or, as I have termed it here, helical - mode. Natural scientists are becoming "helicalists". Writes Umbgrove, "What creature is this that breathes so heavily every 250 million years [66] ? He refers to the Earth and to the cycles of "death and resurrection" that characterize so many earth processes. As we have seen, paleontologists, ice age specialists, solar experts, diastrophists, and electromagneticists - each in their own way - are discerning helices of the ages [67] . Also York and Farquahar, radiometricists: "Radiometric dates obtained on rocks from a single continent tend to cluster into definite groups. Ages are not uniformly distributed in time." Furthermore, the timing of the groups seems to be similar over all continents. One can guess from their data that quantavolutions recur and affect the whole Earth [68] . Every cycle began with a kind of creation or rebirth. There was little of regularity on earth. Life was a continuous commotion. An obsessively fearful race projected itself into the sky. When planet Saturn became the great god, he was king of man and destroyer of man, but also bringer of wisdom and bountiful food. The Saturnalia began and have persisted to this day in jubilee days that follow days of sorrow and fasting. The Jovean anniversaries took over the Saturnalian. The Venusian and Martian came then in the spring near the vernal equinox while the old anniversaries centered around the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere). From full moon to full moon gave an easy method of counting in the Age of Saturn and it could usually be observed in the often misty nights. Moon calendars, sun calendars, and planetary calendars were often possible in the periods between changes of motion and place. A lunar month can, and does, change its length, without requiring a major social change except to revive terror and encourage religious ritual and related behaviors. Not until the last of the disasters had ended, in 2687 B. P., did a stable moon or sun calendar that was correct by present standards appear. Long afterwards and even until this day in many parts of the world, nothing in the order of skies is taken for granted, and, for calendar anniversaries, for festivals, and for public policy decisions, expert moon-watchers of the priesthood decide precisely when a moon should be termed full or new. Practically all human constructions that have survived from earliest times are temples, temple-connected, or astronomical. The megaliths, found in many the age of surviving records, that is, the Middle Bronze (Mercurain) and Late Bronze (Venusian) Ages, scientific observations of solar, lunar, stellar, and planetary movements were recorded in several countries; they differ from the observations that scientists today would make of the same movements. The ancients numbered scientific observers among them, and states were sometimes dominated by astronomer-theocrats. Water-clocks, that measured time by the passage of water, and sun-dials were built; specimens have been found; they mark a time, however, which differs from the present day. These early observations were made by dedicated, highly-disciplined corps of observers and are to be trusted. If they were dedicated and disciplined, it was ultimately because the skies could not be trusted; humans, god-driven, harnessed themselves to the observation of the skies, their pragmatic distrust reinforced by the ever-present subconscious illogic: "To watch is to control." {S : 58 TESTS IN DISPUTE} 58 TESTS IN DISPUTE The quantavolutionist offers his tests of time. They usually lack tubes, needles and gauges and require a general vision of history. The quantavolutionist looks amiably upon tests that mix human evidence with natural evidence, joining an ancient legend or an invention with a change in appearance of the Moon or Mars. To the evolutionist, the quantavolutionist appears fuzzy- minded, gullible, and fanciful. But to the quantavolutionist the evolutionist seems narrow- minded, technocratic and historically lame-brained. The quantavolutionists say this: Consider all the great natural forces that operate today. Read the ancient myths and accounts to discover how much greater were the expressions of these forces in the beginning. Extrapolate the effects of these forces as known. Then state what must have been the condition of the skies, the earth, and life in the earliest days of human recollection. Then, if interested, go back even farther, to what might have happened before. The evolutionist offers his tests of time. When these tests are applied, we see time as very long and change as very slow, point-by-point, drop-by-drop. The tests are very many. It would take an encyclopedia to discuss them properly. But on the chart of tests (Figure 6 on pp. 60-67), I have displayed four things: the test itself, a brief phrase on its unique quality, the main position of evolutionists in respect to its validity and the contrasting position of the quantavolutionists. Although it is beyond the capacity of this book to carry explanations and analyses of the fifty-eight listed measures of time, the major objections to their evolutionary interpretation can be set forth. I shall do so, following the categories of the chart, with apologies for the necessary exaggerations and exclusions. The main objection to accepting the evolutionary explanation of the prominent features of the Earth's surface in Category I is that they are all based upon unproven constancies in the forces working to form the surfaces. High heat and pressures, hurricane winds and tides, or movement of the Earth's crust can form all of these features in short intervals of time. One can move over the surface of the Earth and offer an alternative quantavolutionary explanation of all singular features. The main objection to the biological measures of evolutionism is again that they may all occur through quantum jumps under high energy impulsion. Once granted that mass extinctions and arrivals of species occur in correlation with catastrophes, then it is only necessary to point out that "successful" mutations themselves are so rare that large numbers of mutations are required, which implies that atmospheric catastrophes are needed. Biological and geological quantavolutions are the basis of the ecological changes that produce the evolution of species. The third category of radiochronometry almost entirely depends upon a constant radioactivity of certain elements over great stretches of time. Very recent studies have shown, however, that (a) we do not know the original state of the elements and hence the history of their radioactivity, and (b) undecayed and decayed elements have become separated somehow, sometime, and their ratio cannot be now regarded as a measure of time. In the case of item 8, the uranium elements are not found in expected oceanic and atmospheric abundances for a long time record. In the case of item 11, catastrophically produced materials such as water and natural gas are found in an abundance under high pressures that long-term effects should have erased [69] . Of the astronomical motions, the fourth category, it can be said that (a) proof of constancy of motion is only available for a very short time; (b) even if the laws of motion suggested a history of motion, they do not write the history; (c) some motions are mysterious in origin and best explained as fossil motions from some radically different ancient motion; (d) evolutionary science has been loath to consider the history, presence, and effects of electricity in regards to star systems, solar systems, and the Earth (as to both its external and internal force fields). In the fifth category, evolutionists have wrongly, yet persistently, defied a multitude of ancient voices even when these voices are in consensus on events and time sequences, They have blighted the growth of the science of mythology. Moreover, they have not considered catastrophes in the explanation of discontinuities of excavations, whether strata were disrupted or erased entirely. As Claude Schaeffer declared in his monumental survey of Near East excavations, "Our inquiry has often been rendered difficult by the rarity in most reports of observations on beds of destruction.... Some reporters have regarded these beds as a nuisance or of little interest." [70] It should be clear, therefore, that the hints given in Figure 6 can be expanded into major criticisms of each category of tests. In addition, several general criticisms may be directed at off categories. One may object to the frequent unwarranted claim that the skies, air, waters, rocks and biosphere have changed always at the same rate and under the same conditions as we see them charging today. Inconstancy afflicts most gauges of time. The more that the quantavolutionary hypothesis is insisted upon, the more that the past processes seem to deviate from present ones - geological, biological, chemo-physical, astronomical or cultural. The planet Jupiter, for example, has become more and more of an ogre since Velikovsky predicted its radio noises in 1950, and a scientific dragnet is now out to trap all indications of its stormy past, present, and future behavior. A second reproof is that evolutionists have committed often the same scientific misdemeanors that they accuse the quantavolutionists of. Possessed of two results, each based on a common or different debatable assumption, they claim that the results, since they agree, are certainly true. They have concealed anomalies, allowed the contamination of samples, exaggerated the certainty of their observations, generalized from insufficient data, pleaded their premises as proof, selected the evidence, used special cases as proof, and been thoughtless when it comes to larger theories. Moreover, observations are often uncertain and unreliable in the tests of time. Significantly, progress in instrumentation many have the effect of disclosing hitherto unobserved phenomena that tend to nullify the aim of the measurement. For example, C14 dating aimed at using a constancy to establish dates, but it has helped greatly in discovering inconstancies. The brilliant and thorough attempts to perfect radiocarbon dating have already given some needed proof of the Martian and Venusian catastrophes" [71] and may paradoxically end up as a most valuable source of information on the ravaging of the atmosphere before Solarian times. Also, the search for pure samples to test for dates has sometimes shed more light on other problems than upon time. Analysis of Thera( Aegean Sea) explosions ash samples has led to studies distinguishing earlier eruptions of Ischia (Italy) and casts doubt upon various cultural modes of dating for the Eastern Mediterranean [72] . Hydrocarbons from widespread fires have lately been discovered in "normal" land and off-shore cores drilled in the eastern United States [73] . Frequently a lack of data hampers conclusions about time. Whole realms of nature are missing from the annals of times past. Catastrophic events not only compress time but also destroy the evidence of time. Floods, tides, and hurricanes can erase levels of the biosphere completely; it is permissible to argue that all centers of civilization of the Saturnian age to be described later were completely eliminated, that all "neolithic" discoveries are of survivors, especially of peripheries of cultures - just as the Hebrews, Sumerian, East Indian, and other legends declare. Then, too, the subsequent Bronze Ages chronology for the ancient Near East has lately been shown to be awry, largely because catastrophic premises provoked a re-examination of the domestic and international problems of the dynasties of Egypt [74] . Finally, the evolutionary theory has had the services of practically all scientists and scholars of all disciplines for 150 years. By contrast, quantavolutionary theory has survived without media or funds and only enough scholars to make rare guerrilla forays into opposition- held country. From lack of focused case studies, the revolutionary time-tables have been excessively imaginative, including that which is to come in the next chapter. It is fair to say that the five classes of time-tests of Figure 6 include practically all techniques of telling prehistoric and ancient time. One should stress that tests on a given site or material or problem are often multiple, as they should be, to see whether the tests support one another. If they do, of course, the probability of validity is increased. It may seem appropriate to annual or ignore the results of one test on particular or general grounds such as contamination or even general theory; but it is hard to knock out several tests on the same grounds. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind the set of general problems confronting tests of time, the special problems inherent in each category, and the particular problems inherent in each testing technique as indicated in the chart. In the case of several areas - sedimentation, potassium-argon tests, radiocarbon dating, tree-ring dating, paleomagnetism and the fossil record - my comments have been sufficiently extended to show that the debate is generally complex and ramified in respect to all types of time-testing techniques. I have by no means exhausted the range of criticism. For instance, I credit thermoluminesce dating, involving its decay since the last high heat of its matrix, with "promise." Yet the pioneers of the field are commonly frustrated: " There is a gross discordance between the TL age and the radiocarbon age.." of sedimentary samples baked by lava from the Massif Central's Chaine des Puys (France), the one giving 26,000 years, the other about 11,000 years [75] . Still I can sympathize with the person who, after all is said and done, consults the conventional time-tables and reasons as follows: "Thousands of scientists of many fields have worked with one or more of some fifty tests. Even if nobody is an expert in more than a couple of test areas, the scientists all lean on each other. And all agree on the long-range thrust of the many tests. Their agreement should add up to a certainty for either long-range evolutionism or long-range revolutionism. Short-range revolutionism must be wrong." In reply, I can only stress what has already been said above and elsewhere in the book: "Every test has its problems of design, administration, reading, and interpretation. Fifty problems do not make a solution. I could readily declare that ancient catastrophes are absolutely proven because not 50, but 150 or 500 cultures unanimously declare that they survived universal disaster. But more than this proof by agreement of sources is needed, in my view." {S : THE DISSOLUTION OF TIME} THE DISSOLUTION OF TIME The idea of long-range time is the bedrock of present-day intellectualism. It is ideological. It performs a great, but fundamentally non-rational, service. By extending time to inconceivable lengths, one makes of it, in effect, a constant, which need no longer be accounted for in factoring the causes of ancient events. Nevertheless, every ideology or "ism" is at best a model, at worst a blinded mule, pacing a circle endlessly. Of the 58 tests listed, only 1 (one) does not depend upon the empirical experiential proposition that the processes of nature have been proceeding at a constant pace with only minor lapses. The one exception is the principle of superposition of strata (I. 3). It is a logical principle. It can only come into effect when natural and human material is laid down; it is only valid when the material is not overturned or undermined by igneous or over other intrusions. The reluctance of "Nature" to tell her true age is perennially a frustration. In a day when even solar time is not accurate enough for some functions and tests, and when even star-time is introduced, the fact that some people must be wrong by hundreds of millions of years in telling historical time cannot help but make one wonder if the minority, at least, is not mad, or whether the whole of science is a sham. Neither is the case. Knowing how wobbly and weak a grip the human mind has upon time it should come as no surprise that "Nature's" time is disconcerted and disparate. Only by the greatest exertions and mutual discipline and only at the highest peak of group organization are we able to hold a tenuous grip upon a schedule of time; even then, the individual's psychological as well as active deviations from the severely imposed bonds of time are very many and dominant, if one were to be brave enough to count the undisciplined vagaries of time in relation to the ordered ones. If this temporally disordered mind has difficulty in ordering time in relation to the ordered ones time in its immediate contexts of group cooperation, it is not to be expected that its farthest expeditions into space, species, and events could establish a nice clockwork. Historians like to tell a story: God, according to Isaac Newton, had set the machinery of the world to move like a clock, but had to intervene upon occasion to make adjustments in its regularity, (an idea that reminds us forcibly of Plato's God at the tiller of the world ship). Whereupon Leibnitz was prompted to remark that Newton had not only made of God a clock-maker, but a poor one at that. {S : OF MAMMONTHS AND AMBER} OF MAMMONTHS AND AMBER If, as the preceding pages imply, there may be a general failure and collapse of long-term methods of time-reckoning, a need for a radically alternative chronology arises. But where lies the possibility of such ? Quantavolutionism brings to bear on the problem the abilities of great forces to compress astronomical, geological and biological time. By adding human testimony to anomalous current scientific findings, enriching these with new evidence, especially of an electrical nature, and integrating them within a new hypothetical structure, it can propose a new chronology of the holocene period. There is little chance that a single technical device. a test, will calibrate the ages. A holistic method must prevail. A thing to be dated must be evaluated by every technique available, in as broad a context as possible; and, even while it is being tested, it is testing the test. For example, Carbon-14 presents us with dates between 30,000 B. P and 21,000 B. P. on three different frozen mammoths; then, for the carbon-14 dates to be acceptable, Siberia must have remained frozen for the duration of the period, else two of the carcasses would have rotted [76] . But then the mammoths would have suffered three catastrophic time-points of sudden death and sudden preservation, by asphyxiation and deep-freezing. A peculiar repetitive kind of disaster would have to characterize this long period of time. If we believe that the species was exterminated at once, then the carbon-14 method cannot be at all valid here. We must still await a definitive study of this long-discussed puzzle. Its solution is important; the utility of carbondating hangs upon it. Another case involves the fossilized resinous exudation of dead pine forests, amber. The Greeks cherished it for its beauty and its electrical properties; its name was "electron." At Pylos, a Mycenaean city, whose buildings collapsed under intense heat, large stores of amber were found [77] . The substance was in ancient times transported by well-known routes sacred to Apollo from the coastal towns of the Baltic Sea [78] . There it was being washed ashore from vast sunken pine forests. Recent radiocarbon dating of pollen conflicts with conventional belief, according to which the Baltic basin was filled 70 million years ago, and places the flooding of the Baltic Sea in the middle of the second millennium [79] , a catastrophic period that will be described in the tenth chapter story of Venus. Presumably, only after several hundred years was the amber fossilized, exuded, washed ashore, evaluated, and incorporated into international trade. Isaacson has independently established the burning of Pylos in the period of cosmic perturbation involving the newly great god Mars, that is, the eighth and seventh centuries [80] . Fossils themselves tend to be proof of local or general disaster. The abandonment of a precious store of amber also indicates natural disaster, not an aftermath of a battle or accident or ordinary earthquake. Might it not be that no one was left to dig up the treasure? It would appear that all evidence can be put into a mutually supportive context that is much broader and convincing than a set of dates contributed by single technique. Reasoning from the sacred, the commercial, the behavioral elements, one has grounds for disputing the geological theory that assigns millions of years of age to the Baltic inundation; how could amber have been so abundant that it was still washing ashore in quantities sufficient to support a thriving business? The origin of the mysterious amber was carried in Greek myth: the Heliades, sisters of Phaeton, who drove uncontrollably the solar chariot and was sent crashing to Earth by a bolt of Zeus, wept amber tears in grief for their brother [81] . {S : SCHAEFFER AND VELIKOVSKY} SCHAEFFER AND VELIKOVSKY Still another type of reasoning can be shown in relation to Schaeffer's demonstration of widespread concurrent site destructions in the second millennium B. C. [82] . Schaeffer follows conventional Egyptian chronology and dates the periods of destruction by the association of Egyptian artifacts with the site level artifacts under scrutiny, whether at the site or elsewhere [83] . That is, the Egyptian chronology was regarded as absolute, just as the radiocarbon dates were once so regarded, and still are given significant shifts and weights. The revision of Egyptian chronology by Velikovsky, now being completed, shifts whole centuries forward and about, and shifts the whole Greek-Near East chronology with it [84] . For the moment, confusion reigns, and there is bitter resistance. But soon it will become clear that innumerable historical and archaeological problems will be solved simply by switching to the new chronology. Thus, all that Schaeffer "automatically" consigns to the end of the Middle Bronze Age, at around 1750 B. C. I assign to the same time, but dated at about 1450 B. C. The many destructions that he consigns to 1200-1300 B. C., I assign to 800-700 B. C., granting special consideration to exceptional cases. The results are remarkable. Suddenly, the vast "hiatus" between "13th century" destruction and 6th century proto-classical times becomes only a brief hiatus. It is clear that the vast movements of "the peoples of the seas" were a fiction [85] employed by scholars to explain the widespread natural disasters of the 8th and 7th centuries, the Mars disasters of our calendar. It is tempting to conclude this discussion of current problems of chronology with remarks made lately about Lord Kelvin's three methods of arriving at the age of the Earth in the 19th century. "All three methods employed unproved assumptions and very shaky estimates; nevertheless, they conveniently agreed on the age of the earth." Geologists promptly adjusted their figures to his lead and although "it was not a case of 'fudging', it still took a lot of lively imagination for all those different scientists using different dubious methods to come up with the same erroneous result." [86] Since Kelvin's day, chronometricians have overlept one another in their eagerness to add time. Even most catastrophists have been catapulted into the race. Long-term catastrophists heap scorn upon short-time catastrophists in order to keep in the running. They may be warned, however, that long-term catastrophism is thus asking for more and more time to do nothing. L. J. Salop [87] has discussed the effects of a 1% increase in the solar constant which causes an increase of ultra-violet, hard radiation by 100,000 times. There would occur one of the many vast destructions that mark the history of the biosphere. A natural catastrophe may not require as rare a combination of events as is believed even by non-uniformitarians. Hence, the greater the success of the long term catastrophists in proving historical disasters, the more implausible is it that these disasters were separated by hundreds of millions of years of time. The catastrophist theory will itself demand a compression of geological and biological time. Should the moment arrive when the far-flung outposts of time represented by radiochronometry have to be pulled back, they will probably not be able to pause at chronological defenses of the old geology; all the troops of tests would retreat to the confines of short-time chronometry. With this, I think enough has been said in this chapter of the tests of time to obtain permission to try in this book and its successors a radical calendar that largely disregards radio chronometry; that treats carbondating as exponentially erroneous as it moves backward in time; that subjects geological stratigraphy to catastrophic premises; and that regard human legendary reports to be correct and reliable in the large. Since all long-term measures of time have become suspect, we can proceed by using only as much time as we need for the accomplishment of the studied events. Whereupon 14,000 years delimits our temporal structure. {S : Notes (Chapter Three: Collapsing Tests of Time)} Notes (Chapter Three: Collapsing Tests of Time) 1. "Dating" (1974), V Encyclopedia Britannica, 490 ff. 2. Figure 34* A GENERALLY ACCEPTED TIME-SCALE Inapplicable to the present work Age Duration (In Million Years) Cumulative Total From Present to Beginning (in million years) QUATERNARY Recent (Holocene) . 0.015 Pleistocene 1.7 1.715 . TERTIARY Pliocene 13 15 Miocene (oligocene) 13 33 Eocene (paleocene) 9 42 . CRETACEOUS 55 108 JURASSIC 27 135 TRIASSIC 23 155 PERMIAN 33 158 . CARBONIFEROUS Pennsylvanian 41 191 Mississippian 33 232 . DEVONIAN 390 304 SILURIAN 22 326 ORDOVICIAN 57 383 CAMBRIAN 92 475 . PRE-CAMBRIAN (from crustalformation to first life) 2000 2475 *Note: This table appears at the end of the printed version of this book. 3. Shelton (1966) 304. 4. Heezing, Thorp, and Ewing, 1959. 5. Jordan, quoting (chap. III) Defaut. 6. Juergens (Fall 1977), fn. 29, p. 17. 7. Cook (1963); (1966). 8. Heezing and Hallister, 633. 9. Sullivan, 118-9. 10. Cook (1957). 11. This is Donnelly's "Age of fire and gravel" in Ragnarok (1883) cf. Beaumont (1925) 162, 176. 12. Francis (1961) Preface, 14-17, 46,625; Francis (1972); Cook (1966); Velikovsky (1955) 44-6, 119-22, 214-19; Gentry et al, 194 Science (1976) 315. 13. Velikovsky (1950) 54-8, 67-8 et passim; (1955) 218-9, 261-2; Wilson (1962). 14. Larrabee (1962). 15. Corliss (1974) Vol. MI, 104. 16. Wright (1978). 17. Walworth and Sjostrom (1977) 33-4. 18. Cook (1966); (1963) letter Nov. issue, p. 5. 19. "Don't rock the Ark," 68. 20. Miller (1841). 21. Ager, 37. 22. Hibben (1973). 23. Tuolumne (1981). 24. (1966) 70, 72. 25. Ibid., 304. 26. Winchester (1972) c217. 27. Adey (1978) 835, fig. 4. 28. Ibid., 834. 29. Williams and Herdklotz (1977). 30. The joke may be originally Knopf's 85 Sci. Monthly(1957), 225. 31. Cook (1966); York and Farquahar (1972); Wager (1964) for a history. 32. On rubidium-strontium see Wright (1972). 33. Anderson and Spangler (1974); Dudley (1972); Mackinnon (1977). 34. Unpublished paper, delivered at Imperial College (London) and U. Cambridge, November 1977. Cf. Chem & Engineering News, April 1975., "Guest comments: Radioactivity reexamined." 35. Cook (1964) 12-22; (1966) 54-5. The Katanga ore had been dated at 600 m/ y, the Canadian 1650 m/ y. 36. Cook (1964) 3. 37. Cook (1957). 38. Robins (1978), citing Rankama. 39. MacKinnon (1977) 11 citing Funkhauser and Naughton (1968). 40. Velikovsky (1972) 19. 41. Mackinnon (1977) citing Noble and Naughton. 42. E. g. Treash (1972); Ash (1973-4); Ransom (1976) 175-8, 200. 43. Ransom (1976) 134-6; II Kronos 1, 105. 44. Personal conversation, June, 1976, Naxos. 45. Chalmers (1979). 46. (1966) 26; Juergens as quoted in Ransom (1966) 183-4. 47. S. Talbott (1977); Gentry (all); MacKinnon (1977); Juergens (1977). 48. S. Talbott (1977). 49. Gentry (1975) quoted by Talbott (1977) 6. 50. MacKinnon (1976) 15, citing et al (1976). 51. Sykes (1978). 52. Libby (1973), Table 1, p. 8. Sea shells are notably deviant; Cook (1961-2) (1966) (1970). For discordancies, see MacKinnon (1977), fn, 39. 53. Damon (1972); Oosterhout (1976). 54. (1973), 5903. 55. Komarek (1964), (1971); "Lightning Superbolts...." (1977). 56. Clausen et al. (1979), 611. 57. Cook (1970). 58. Ransom (1976) 157-64; Sorenson (1973). 59. Rose (1974). 60. Sullivan (1974), ch. 6; Juergens (1978); Cook (1966), Hapgood (1970) 36. 61. Cf. Hamlet's Mill (Santillana & Von Dechand) where the legend is described and integrated as an ancient view of the precession of the equinoxes and its reversal over a long time, an idea which I find untenable. It does show what high skills are attributed to archaic man by two renowned scholars of ancient science and legend. 62. Cook (1966) 283. 63. Cook (1966) 332-3. 64. Campbell (1949) 261-9. 65. Mullen (1974) 41. 66. (1974). 67. See e. g. Schindewolf (1963). 68. (1972) 116; fig. 9.1. 69. Cook (1966). 70. (1948), 7. 71. Cf. the Oosterhout demonstration above of the indication of radiocarbon disturbances in these periods (p. 50, Fig. 5.). 72. Cadogan et al. (1972); Vitaliano (1969); infra, chap. X, p. 233. 73. Blumer and Youngblood (1975). 74. Velikovsky (1952) (1967) (1968). 75. Huxtable et al. (1978) 208. 76. Cardona (1976a) 82-3. 77. Graves no. 148-11, p. 222. 78. Semple, 224-7. 79. MacKinnon (1977). 80. Isaacson (1973). 81. MacKinnon (1977). 82. See Geoffrey Gammon in IV SISR (Spr. 1980), upcoming. 83. Schaeffer (1948) 19 et passim. 84. Velikovsky (1952); (1977); (1979, in press). 85. Vaihinger (1924). 86. Ransom (1976) 32, quoting 44 Am. J. Physics (May 1970) 495-6. 87. Salop (1977) 35. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 04: } {T A CATASTROPHIC CALENDAR } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR: A CATASTROPHIC CALENDAR If nature and human nature were catastrophized by events of the past 14,000 years, a calendar of the events becomes a practical necessity. Hence we conjecture that from an original primeval chaos to the world of A. D. 2,000, the human race and its natural environment passed through eight phases. They are posted on the adjoining chart, Figure 7. The set of cases is too small for statistical treatment, but, for heuristic purposes, the typical phase may be said to have begun in general natural destruction, passed through a period of recovery and reconstruction, and then entered upon a second catastrophic set of events. Figure 8 depicts the catastrophic cycle, as it might be dealt with by the topological mathematics of catastrophism. Of the first age of Pangea, no beginning is described here; nor is any end foretold to the present age of Solaria, which began about 1,600 years ago. This calendar takes up 14,000 years of time, and corresponds in geology to the holocene epoch. The solar system was transformed; so were in consequence the surface of the earth, the atmosphere, life and humanity. The transformations took the form of cycles, but the transformations of one era were the inheritance of the next one. Hence it might be more exact to speak of a spiral of history. The impulses for the great changes of the world came from the skies. There the greatest forces of the universe abide and interact. In each age, celestial bodies signalled and inaugurated revolutions of the earth and life. Earth forces and life forces reacted. Humans, too, reacted, although from the beginning they dreamt of controlling the skies and earth and themselves as well. Unhappily the control was mostly managed by a set of illusions and delusions. Human arrogance has been a reciprocal of pitiable fear. The ages of the human earth are called, with the exception of earliest "Pangea" (all land), by astronomical names. They are named after their apparent governor in the sky. The calendar is to be construed hypothetically, not dogmatically. It will no doubt be often adjusted in the light of future discoveries. Vita-Finzi, in discussing the boundary between the Pleistocene and Holocene, praised "the one virtue of an arbitrary date, namely, its arbitrariness." [4] I, too have this final plea in mind. In each planetary age there were celestially provoked disasters of water, fire earth and air. Each age except Pangea developed cultures of its own, which it passed over partly to the next age. The gods were different while being the same. The Greek "Aphrodite" had traits of an original moon goddess and had many alternative names in many cultures; furthermore she later become confused with Venus, the goddess, and also the planet Venus, which had its scores of god-names too [5] . Jupiter was himself but partly Saturn too; the Chinese "Saturn" was a thunderer who announced time by great noises, whereas the Greek "Saturn" gave time and was called Kronos (Chronos) and the Greek "Jupiter" was especially Zeus, the Lightning-hurler, who was also called the Thunderer. The Calendar is but a rough path chopped through the dense thicket of early history. {S : THE NUMBER OF CATASTROPHES} THE NUMBER OF CATASTROPHES Plato in his Politicus paints a mythical representation of what he indeed believed to be the historical reality: that a supreme being directly controls the movement of the world ship through boundless space; that the master skipper retires from time to time, leaving the ship to founder in a sea of confusion; but then he returns to the tiller from time to time in order to save the world from complete shipwreck [6] . What can cause one to think that there was a set catastrophes rather than a single disaster, or perhaps two? And why would a baseline for the set be placed at about 14,000 years ago? Figure (Table) Nr. 7 Number of / Suggested Name Years before present Years B.C. to A.D. Duration in years Number of memorial generations** Key events 0. Pangea Before 14,000 Before 12,000 ----Land-covered globe... Canopy clouds ...Greenhouse world... hominids.. full shallow marine and terrestrial biosphere. I. Urania 14,000 to 11,500 12,000 to 9,500 2,500 50 Deluges form ice caps and flood... breakup of sky canopies ...homo sapiens schizotypicalis appears... ecumenical culture... Uranus-Heaven religion. II. Lunaria 11,500 to 8,000 9,500 to 6,000 3,500 70 Global explosion and cleavage... Moon eruption ...ocean basins formed and filled...displaced continents ...biosphere quasi- extermination... peoples isolated and fully traumatized...lunar worship. III. Saturnia 8,000 to 5,700 6,000 to 3,700 2,300 46 Biosphere multiplies...cloudy atmosphere...settled continents..expansion of regional cultures...rich technology...Saturn worship. IV. Jovea 5,700 to 4,400 3,700 to 2,400 1,300 26 Noachian shelf floods and high tides... Lightning and cleared skies ... New ice caps form...severe seasons...dry climates... eastward move ments from “Atlantis” to Egypt and E. Mediterranean...Empires form amidst widespread conflict... Jupiter worship. V. Mercuria 4,400 to 3,450 2,400 to 1,450 950 19 New global tilts...Apollo and Mercury disasters...Pyramid age...large new civilizations in Mediterranean, India, China, and Caribbean... Olympian family worship. VI. Venusia 3,450 to 2,775 1,450 to 775 675 13.5 Devastation of globe by protoplanet Venus...religions and cultures reduced and remodelled... Venus worship...large petroleum fall- out. VII. Martia 2,775 to 1,600 775 to 400 A.D. 1,175 23.5 Mars devastates Earth, Moon, and Venus...warlike cultures promoted...Toltecs, Myceneans and Etruscans reduced...Mars worship. VIII. Solaria 1,600 to 0 400 to 2,000 1,600 32 Settling of present solar system... secularization, philosophy and empirical sciences...synthetic religions. * Present is set at A.D. 2,000 By “years” is meant present solar years. Most of the dates are speculative estimates, as all pre-historic dates must still be. ** Fifty years = One Memorial Generation = the number of present solar years of difference between a presumed elderly story-teller (priest) and youngest members of the group who hear the stories [1] .This is considered a truer measure of the transmission time between generations than the “reproductive generation” which would be in the range of 15 to 30 years. In 14,000 years [2] there have been a total of 280 memorial generations. Figure 8. QUANTAVOLUTIONARY PRIMEVALOGY FITTED TO THOM'S CUSP MODEL OF CATASTROPHE. René Thom has been instrumental in developing a new area of topological mathematics to describe catastrophes. The above model is called the "cusp" model and is suited to portray phenomena as varied as a typical stock market cycle of "boom and bust" and the model of the historical cycle dealt with in this book, as here portrayed. Perhaps from six to twenty or more regional or global cycles will ultimately be found to fit this model. In the drawing, the dotted line pursues the course of human events from one disaster to another. After the disaster the human mind moves against the scale of solarian pragmatism, then proliferates along with the biosphere and grows confident, and enters a period of "blissful amnesia" and sublimation with many practical accomplishments; then there is a short period usually, when the environment is seen to be destabilizing, and finally there is a catastrophe. Afterwards, the survivors begin the cycle once more." [3] Catastrophism on a long-time basis is on its way towards acceptance in paleontology. The work of the late Professor Otto H. Schindewolf of Tubingen University is remarkable in demonstrating widespread generic and geographic destructions of phyla at the boundaries of the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian strata, the Permian-Triassic strata, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary strata [7] . A Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary catastrophe is also apparent [8] , as is increasingly the Pleistocene-Holocene disasters of the "End of the Ice Ages." [9] The 14,000 years boundary that is a major concern of this book is, of course, the last of these - the Pleistocene-Holocene. But as the last chapter would suggest, we shall probably have to collapse the time intervals of earlier catastrophes, perhaps even back to the Permian-Triassic boundary, if we are to use some of the evidence that we think belongs in the past 14,000 years. Further classifications of the age of mankind will need reconsideration. Today scientific conventions are given over to discussions of "Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages," "Early, Middle, and Late Ages of Bronze," and "The Iron Age". These referents are no more sophisticated in their general configuration than those of ancient scholars such as Hesiod and Ovid. These ancients furthermore introduce cycles of creation and destruction within each age and sometimes a long linear or spiral development running through the cycles reflecting "progress" or "degeneration." [10] Although superior in detail, there is no great scientific advantage in the optimistic, linear, evolutionary schemes of Frazer, Morgan, Engels, Spencer and others who perceived a rational technological sequence moving from hominid to contemporary mankind, and whose ideas are dominant in archaeology and paleo-anthropology today. Archaeologists and historians have coined hundreds of local designations that are poorly coordinated, even after strenuous and painstaking field and museum studies. Like geologists, they have produced a surfeit of types in order to make local distinctions, and in the process have hampered theoretical integration. All of the most ancient peoples reported that the world moved through time in a series of creations and destructions. When the Spanish explorers encountered the Aztecs of Mexico, the Aztecs were in their Age of the Fifth Sun; the earlier "suns" had ended in catastrophe [11] . There is no exception; there could be none, until the present age. This age -- which is termed here the Solarian -- combines a seemingly stable solar system with a science that has made great technological progress by following a liner or uniformitarian theory, with a general contempt for the ideas of early men. In dividing historical time, cultural change is the most logical concept to use. Since ages must be arranged, let them be arranged by peaks of change that correlate with peaks of catastrophism. Since ages will be given names, let them perhaps be named after the sequence of great gods - those anthropomorphised expressions of disaster. For when the human race was cast down, it was by natural forces; and the forces of nature originated in the skies; and these forces were called gods and as such invaded the mind and history. But if the scientific community, sensitive to its public image, wishes to stringently avoid any hint of association with astrologers, then an Age of Mars or an Age of Venus may be embarrassing. How to rename the ages is in itself a political and sociological problem. (There is still a U. S. cavalry long after the cavallo has disappeared in favor of machines.) Whereupon we may resort to Roman numerals and speak of Holocene I, Holocene II, and so forth to Holocene VIII. Probably no two catastrophists will agree about the timing of the ages. They will agree that "energy has killed time" Some will then say "If such is granted, I ask no more. It is acceptable to me if millions of years are used to fill in the gaps between catastrophes." No doubt this view prevails among the scientists who are first to leave the fold of uniformitarianism. Of these, certain writers ascribe the catastrophes to extraterrestrial sources, such as Urey and Ager, others to internal stresses of the Earth. At the other extreme of catastrophism would be scientists such as Donald Patten, who holds closely to a time schedule permitted by the Bible. Calculating back from Biblical references, he hypothesizes the Universal Deluge of Noah (caused by a near passing astral body) at 2800 B. C. and then musters as much scientific evidence as he can to show that this is possible and provable. Patten also matches up other catastrophic references in the sacred scriptures to a set of dates involving planets Mercury and Mars between the Deluge and the seventh century B. C. Moreover, he adds a pre-Deluge, astrally caused catastrophe sometime within 100,000 years of the Deluge, that brought coal, oil, and other products and gases into the earth, and refers to the outer planets as their source. Most astral or extra-terrestrial catastrophists, who see the earth as victim of intrusions from outer space, believe that at least one great catastrophe has occurred within the memory of man. Usually, like Patton, they assign this to the Great Deluge of Noah and place the Deluge in the Early Bronze Age. Terrestrially-confined catastrophists, as, in his archaeological works, Claude Schaeffer, rest simply upon the evidence of widespread destruction by fire, flood, and earthquakes during the Bronze Ages. {S : WHY 14,000 YEARS?} WHY 14,000 YEARS? The tentative date of 14,000 years ago is chosen to form the baseline of the holocence calendar because the criteria and evidence of later catastrophes, if accepted and carried back, seem to devolve into a set of catastrophes with a beginning around 14,000 years ago. Many natural disasters seem to have been concentrated around that time, some of which are lumped into a scientific fiction called "the end of the ice-ages." True human activity began to appear in full array at this time, too, and human cultures seem to recall this period of their birth. The calendar began with the evidence that I. Velikovsky brought to bear upon catastrophic events in the first and second millennia B. C. There appeared to be scientific value in considering the planet Mars to have been directly involved in disasters upon Earth in the period from 777 B. C. to 687 B. C. and the planet Venus to have been a direct cause of grave natural and cultural destruction in the period between 1450 and 776 B. C. "One who mounts the tiger cannot dismount," goes the old Chinese saying so one was compelled to reason that 1) other great gods had existed earlier, 2) practically all types of phenomena that had occurred during the Venusian and Martian ages had been reported of the times of those earlier gods, 3) a fully developed human mind and culture was indicated and implicated in these earlier times, and hence 4) a series of catastrophes had occurred. Moreover, the earth had come so close to total destruction in these episodes that the list of earlier episodes could not be indefinitely long. It had to return to a baseline of a time of systematic stability. Therefore, if Uranus by its many names seemed to be the end of the line of gods in all religions, the system from which Uranus had originated had to be stable. this stable age before Urania could be called Pangea, meaning that all the land was together then and all the world was land -- covered [12] . Then I turned my attention to the possible physics of a stable heaven that could have preceded the sky of today. Finally a model of it seemed possible, which is described in the next chapter. In respect to the lives of the gods, multitudinous findings of very recent physics, nuclear chemistry, geophysics, astrophysics, oceanographic and aerospace exploration have exposed an unstable basis of nature that is congenial to the catastrophic view point. These could be correlated with archaeological field work. In the chapters to come, many revolutionary natural events can be shown to have occurred during the periods following the Uranian and Lunarian ; but a heavy and primordial concentration of disasters can be shown to have begun with the advent of the Uranian period around 14,000 B. C. Vital to the establishment of the baseline and subsequent periods is chronometry. Here, as I have shown, various fundamental weaknesses in the new highly touted radiometric dating techniques are being exposed, just when these techniques have dispossessed the old geological dating methods! With respect to the beginnings of human nature the principle offered is one that most psychiatrists are ready to accept: that human behavior is most compulsively regular on matters that were once uncontrollably and disastrously irregular. An obvious signal of this great obsessiveness of the non-instinctual primate called man is the sky-struck calendarizing that seems to have preoccupied humans from the moment of their creation as such. All of these calendars of earliest human cultures were short in years and began with creation episodes. It is too early to assert that any revolutionary primevalogist has succeeded in organizing a system around these perspectives. Indeed, scientific reconstruction is likely to occur first as the failure of the established foundations of science, not as acceptance of a new system. Conventional and uniformitarian scientists are overloading their camel until finally they will add the straw that breaks its back. Obviously, there is no single experiment, no body of science, no pre-existing general theory, by which one could have proposed this schedule of events and, by so doing, could have satisfied the demands of any single science, much less any established religion. A combination of new methodological perspectives engendered the schedule. In all of this work, one is trying to construct a new model of science on the inconsistencies and irregularities of the old. To pragmatists and instrumentalists, it is not only heartening but also easy to accept William James' often quoted remarks to the effects that from the anomalies of an old science spring the theory of a new science. "And when the science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules." [13] {S : Notes (Chapter Four: A Catastrophic Calendar)} Notes (Chapter Four: A Catastrophic Calendar) 1. Temple (1976) adduces evidence of the Dogons carrying "hard" astronomical facts for thousands of years. Similarly, East Africans have distinct knowledge of iron-making techniques that stratigraphy appears to prove go back to the early solarian (present era) or before. 2. C. Wells (1964); Miller (1970); physiological generation was half the present "western" time down to modern times but most statistical studies of burial grounds show "old people" at the extreme of the distribution. 3. For discussion of Thom's theory, see Thom (1977), Steen (1974) and Kolata (1977). 4. (1973) 47. 5. See also below, p. 178. 6. 272: 3, 273: 1. 7. Schindewolf (1963); Salop (1977); Lantzy et al. (1977); D. H. Clark et al.( 1977); Golonetsky, et al. (1977); Newell (1962) (1967); Hatfield (1970). Schindewolf counters the general argument that gaps in the fossil record conceal the fact of uniformitarian changes; "the lowest percentage of gap in the strata in the whole of the history of the Earth would occur precisely on the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic." (p. 20) Thus one of the very earliest of uniformitarian and evolutionary as against quantavolutionary, defenses, proposed by Darwin himself, collapses. Cf. Velikovsky (1955), 237-9. 8. Salop (1977) 30-1; Ericson et al. (1963). 9. Velikovsky (1955); Eiseley (1943) (1946); Flint( 1971). 10. Cf. Eliade (1963) 113 and ch. IX. 11. Mullen (1974) 41; Velikovsky (1950) 34 quoting von Humboldt et al. 12. Continental drift theorists, stemming from Seuss and Wegener, employ the term "Pangaea" to mean the continental crust, when it was intact and surrounded by the existing oceans. Cf. Sullivan. 13. William James (1896) 301. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 05: } {T SOLARIA BINARIA } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE: SOLARIA BINARIA Searching backward for ever older memories of disasters brings one to a point where Uranus is father of the gods and corresponds to a huge heavenly body. But what kind of body is it that is close-in, luminous, draped by clouds after a period of imperceptibility, but nevertheless, from its first perception, a second glowing sun ? Contemplation of this problem leads to a conjecture: the solar system might have been a binary system, which early humans could actually have experienced. "This is the heyday of the cataclysmic binary," declares Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin [1] . Among the earliest products of the human mind are certain legends, statements, and symbols that may be interpreted to support the theory that a binary system occupied the sky. Most important among these is the reported occurrence of a second "sun" that can be distinguished from the present sun, a bright star, a nova, or the moon. As late as five thousand years ago, in Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew and other cosmogonies there is presented a heavenly body in the "North" that is luminescent by day and radiant by night [2] . The body is accorded divine status, and is called by dozens and perhaps hundreds of names around the world. Were it to be granted that the binary system could carry into the time of observant mankind, then much proto-history that would otherwise seem to be nonsense will appear to be probable. The discoverable properties of star systems offer a number of indications that the solar system can be modelled as a binary system. Existing knowledge of the solar system can be regrouped around the concepts necessary to a binary model [3] . If in 14,000 B. P. our solar system was multiple, it would be in the company of perhaps half of the star systems of the universe [4] . Instead of one sun there would have been two or more suns orbiting each other. Of the nearest twelve star-systems four are multiple, three of these are binary, and three of them have dark companions that possess masses of 1% or less of the mass of the sun [5] . In this book, I am not only postulating such a binary system as our own, but also am suggesting that it persisted down to about 14,000 years ago. Alpha Centauri A, a three-star system which, at 4.3 light years' distance, is our nearest neighbor, has nearly the same absolute magnitude as the Sun, 4.8 as against 4.86 for sun. It is in all ways, also, an ordinary medium-sized star system. Binary components frequently have similar separations to the planet-Sun distances within the solar system. "Has the Sun a Companion Star?" asked E. R. Harrison (1977). He wonders whether a slight acceleration of the solar system detected by pulsar observations may be due to an orbiting binary partner. "The companion star is presumably either a faint white or red dwarf in closed orbit around the Sun, or a gas-accreting nearby neutron star or black hole in open orbit." [6] Harrison adduces Oort to say that a cloud of comets extends a distance of about 10 5 A. U. and this, he maintains, could envelop the Sun and its companion star. Besides the Sun, there would have been a body that can be called Super-Uranus [7] . The postulated system is here referred to as Solaria Binaria. Between the Sun and Super-Uranus there would have to be a connection, a great axis of fire, an electrical current discharging its powerful pulses across the axis of the binary. Figure 9 shows this and other features of the system. An excessive charge on the Sun would occasion the current or arc. {S : THE MAGNETIC TUBE AND PLANETS} THE MAGNETIC TUBE AND PLANETS Around this gigantic axial current, a magnetic field would be induced. This field was composed of ionized gases and contained a number of the chemical elements in atomic and molecular form, including especially water in its three forms. The field rotated around the central axis. Within the outer envelope of the rotating gases were a set of planets, including the Earth. They had budded and grown there in the atmosphere of the tube. Binaries can have planets [8] . Several binaries show exchange of significant clouds of ionized gases between the stellar components. These carry both charge and matter. In Solaria Binaria, hydrocarbons may well have been plentiful in the gases that passed from the Sun to Super-Uranus. Nearby binaries contain dwarf companions, a situation similar to Super-Uranus in relation to the Sun. Such dwarf companions have sometimes been seen to flare up, that is, to briefly resemble a small nova [9] . This seems to have happened both to Super-Uranus around 11,500 years ago and later to Super-Saturn around 6000 years ago, when it separated from Jupiter to retire farther into space. The inner planets rotated around the central "axis of fire" along with the gases of the tube, in a motion that remains today as their rotation around their individual axes. The outer planets were all contained in Super-Uranus. Earth, Mercury, and Mars perhaps retain this fossil motion, whereas the rotations of the outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus -- are new rotations, as is the retrograde motion of Venus. Figure 9 pictures Solaria Binaria as a "stacked" system where the planets spin like balls in the gaseous medium that revolves around the central axis between the two binary bodies. The axis itself wheeled around the Sun, on what will become the "plane of the ecliptic." On the other hand, the Sun was losing, and finally lost almost entirely, its tendency to orbit around its binary. Rather, it undulated "as if" it were trying to perform such a motion [10] , and this motion is probably what Harrison, as indicated above, refers to. The observed binaries of our galaxy are engaged in heavy discharge of gases among the members [11] . This type of gaseous exchange is presumed here to have constituted the magnetic tube between Sun and Super-Uranus. Since gaseous exchanges must be electrified and have direction, it may be presumed that a current was discharging between the two binary bodies. This current would be radiant and may even be the mysterious "central fire" referred to by the ancients and specifically by Plato in his dialogue, Timaeus [12] . But, also, the rim of the magnetic tube would alight with cooler, slower gases, admitting a luminescence to the contents of the tube including the planets. Figure 9 has Earth nearest the Sun and the other planets in positions unlike their present ones. The Earth itself is considered to have moved least, and of having been closely passed by other planets in recent history. The total distance between the binary bodies must have been much less in those days. This is suggested not only because observed distance between present binaries vary greatly and can be quite small but also because the ancients appear to have had a knowledge of the planets and to havesuffered from interactions among them that indicate a close ingrouping. The planets would have moved outwards because of changes in the Sun as an accumulator and discharger of electricity. {S : THE BINARY PARTNER} THE BINARY PARTNER Like the Sun Super-Uranus was a charged gas cloud with a high density but volatile core. It might have contained about 4% of the mass of Solaria Binaria. It was not unlike the planet Jupiter of today, save that it was radiant and may have carried much more water in its high clouds. Indeed, on occasion, Jupiter has been termed a defunct or vestigial binary. Super- Uranus could not be seen by the hominids of Earth, or by whatever aware beings may have existed on its other planets if they had merely human vision. Its vast cloudy environment and the intervening atmosphere of the tube disguised its appearance. In Solaria Binaria the Sun had 96% of the total mass and more of the angular momentum than does the presents Sun, mainly because it was rotating or, better, undulating around its partner. The remainder of the mass, 4% in Super-Uranus, accounted for most of the orbital movement within the system. The period of the binary was perhaps months long. (The earliest known calendars in Egypt and Meso-America were of 260 days.) [13] Both the Sun and Super-Uranus exhibited rotation around their axis. In the case of the Sun, the rotation was gradually reduced by intense gaseous discharges and matter flowing from the star's equator. On Super-Uranus, the rotation was increased as the electrified particle stream impinged upon its surface, whipping it like a top. These particles arrived with great energy because they were continuously accelerated as they flowed from the sun to Super-Uranus, whose potential was less negative than that on the Sun. Figure 9. THE ORIGINAL STACKED BINARY SYSTEM (SOLARIA BINARIA) (Click on the picture to view an enlarged version. Caution: Image files are large.) The average separation between binary components is 20 astronomical units [14] (20 times the distance between the Earth and Sun today). However in some binaries, the partners are much further apart, in other much closer together. The division of the total mass among the components shows little pattern. "A mass ratio of about 1 to 20 could occur about 5% of the time, and under such circumstances a solar system might form." [15] The periods that binaries take to rotate about each other extend from the order of a day or less to upwards of thousand years. The period varies inversely with the net interaction between the two bodies. Thus, if the attraction diminishes, the period increases. The planet Jupiter has a composition resembling that of a star much smaller than the Sun. It had more star-like traits in the past, when it was at least twice as massive. From the radiation it emits, Jupiter is thought to have a subsurface temperature somewhere between 12,000 and 50,000 C. Its chemistry resembles more the gaseous Sun than the inner planets, or even its own satellites; it consists largely of hydrogen in various states, and holds some water [16] . Furthermore, the chemistry of planet Saturn resembles Jupiter, lending support to the theory that these two planets were once one. In Proclus, citing the Parmenides of Plato, occurs a statement that Jupiter separated himself from Saturn; interpreted physically, this suggests a fission." [17] There exists, in fact, much literature on the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn, not only in Greek thought but also in other works of Near and Middle East cosmogony [18] . The high density of the inner planets suggests that they have had different careers than Jupiter and the outer planets. Venus is an exception to be discussed later, but the others probably existed long before Solaria Binaria began to disintegrate around 14,000 B. P. They each could have supported many forms of life. The chemical elements were fully represented on all of them, because the axial current of the binary circulated along the center of the gaseous tube, literally an electrico-chemical factory. All of the planets would have had similar climates. Radioactive elements existed in great quantities, but under the electrical and magnetic conditions of the great tube atmosphere, their rates of decay into other elements were high [19] . This rapid decay, which diminished with the general de-electrification of Solaria Binaria, may account for the great ages obtained in tests of radioactive minerals today; their "decay constants" have continually and drastically slowed down. Without recourse to the ancients, contemporary astronomers have come to the question, as D. McNally of the London University Observatory put it, "Are the Jovian Planets 'Failed' Stars?" "If they can be classified in this way." writes Eric Crew, " this means that any deductions about Jupiter are likely to apply to the other gaseous type planets, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. An event in one of these may also be linked to events in others, so the problem of cosmic catastrophes is that much simpler." [20] {S : THE STACKED BINARY SYSTEM} THE STACKED BINARY SYSTEM Up to the moment, catastrophists and uniformitarians have conducted their debate on the premise that the planes have always orbited close to the plane of the ecliptic. Whenever catastrophists have invoked planetary or cometary deviations to explain titanic encounters, they have assumed them to occur on or about the imaginary line that defines the orbit of the planet Earth about the Sun. Thus, Venus is said to have been launched into an elliptical comet-like orbit moving in or near the plane of the ecliptic when it created havoc amongst the inner planets [21] . All the collisional mishaps that might have occurred to other bodies -- the meteoroid impacts upon Mars, Mercury, Moon, and Venue, the creation of asteroids from Apollo -- were also supposedly events of a single plane. A new developmental theory is offered here. It is compatible with quantavolutionary theory and solves simply many important problems, so that I do not hesitate to advance it now. This possibility describes how a binary system reduces to a solar system in the time of humankind. In its primal form it was a stacked binary system where the planets ringed and revolved around the axial electric current that ran between the Sun and Super-Uranus. The magnetic forces circulated around this same axis. The axis is in its present form the plane of the ecliptic. The present planetary rotations are derived from their primeval motions around the old electrical axis. If today the planets are slightly off the axis, and stray slightly around their average position, these are probably ghost motions of their much larger historical rotational orbits. The planetary orbits that ringed the great axis of fire descended to their centers on the axis that once linked the Sun and Super-Uranus. Thus the electrical system was transformed into what appears to us as an inertial system. I say "inertial" because explanations of motions within the solar system of today are described almost entirely as inertia (with electrical forces admixed as circumstances demand them). The laws of gravitation describe the existing motions as if they had come down unchanged from a uniformitarian past. Not "cosmos without gravitation," as Velikovsky once put it [22] , but gravitational laws without gravitation. The axial rotation orbits of the Pangean planets were proportional to their size and to the intensity of the local electromagnetic current density within the axial tube connecting the binary components. The current would everywhere be uniform. The local current density could vary. The farther from the Sun and hence the farther up the tube, the smaller the diameter of planetary rotation. The planets were enveloped in the outer gases of the magnetic tube, which also were their primordial atmospheres. Heat came from the gaseous clouds in which they were enveloped, and indirectly from the axis of fire, as well as from the great binary bodies. The primeval human observers could see the incandescent light produced by the central current. The more dense gases near the axis glowed like a huge interrupting neon arc. The perimeter gases of the magnetic tube were probably also radiant. People could not see the Sun or its binary partner through the clouds. The axis of each planet was aligned parallel to the electrical axis; thus the equators all faced the binary axis. The axes of the Sun and Super- Uranus were perpendicular to the electrical axis; as cathode and anode they exchanged electrical current between the closest points on their equators. {S : DECLINE OF THE ELECTRICAL SYSTEM} DECLINE OF THE ELECTRICAL SYSTEM The source of the electricity of the system was, and is, cosmic, principally galactic, which, using a mechanism described by Juergens [23] , would have charges built up in the corona of the Sun being continuously discharged along the tube to Super-Uranus, which was less negatively charged. The magnetic current whirling around the electrical current was directed oppositely. The planets within the gaseous tube shared its potential which, like Super-Uranus, was lower than that of the Sun. The charge on the Sun had "always" been diminishing, owing to a steadily decreasing input current from the millions of other discharging bodies within the galaxy. Little by little, over a long time, its ability to radiate along the line of current thus diminished. Today the magnetic field of the Sun, carried as the "solar wind" into billions of miles of space, stretching even beyond the planet Pluto, is a greatly diffused relic of the great Pangean binary axis current. It presently covers a wide band that strikes into space far above and below the plane on which the planets orbit, and may even be circumglobal; in any event, the band is wide enough to have at one time encompassed the axially rotating planets [24] .( see Figure 10.) The solar flares that are so important a part of solar behavior, and planetary behavior as well, occur largely between the surface and the corona of the Sun. They develop new sunspots within hours, are immensely energetic, and often penetrate the corona into over 500,000 kilometers of space. The radiation and particles they emit affect the Earth's atmosphere and possibly its motions. Gribbin and Plagemann significantly titled an article in 1973 "Discontinuous Change in Earth's spin rate following great solar storm of August 1972." Often a surge of gas accompanies a flare. Often a single flare, and many occur, has enough energy to provide theoretically a million years of electric power for the whole Earth. "The physical causes of flares are still unknown, though it is believed that the energy released by a flare.. must come from the intense magnetic or electric fields associated with the solar active region." [25] Bruce describes the Sun as sending out arc discharges continually from its photosphere [26] . The arcs fall back, in my understanding, and become the glow discharge of the chromosphere, because there is no longer an anode binary and a great enough voltage gradient to project the arc through interplanetary space. The solar behavior recited here may be sufficient to understand how I have come to construe the present solar system as a fossil binary, viewing the electricity and gases of the solar flares as "attempts" to reestablish the ancient current, transporting the radiation and elements that the original current carried. Figure 10. MAGNETIC FIELD OF THE SUN Finally the motions of Super-Uranus were affected as the charge it was receiving declined. As the central current lessened, the power within the magnetic tube, which depended upon the strength of the current, also began to lessen; the planets began to convert their axial rotation into self-centered rotation. They moved toward the diminishing "central fire." That is, their angular momentum about the central axis was converted into an angular momentum based about their planetary rotational axes. The planetary atmospheres cleared partly because of a general lessening of density of the magnetic gases and because of deluges of water from vapors once more evenly distributed within the magnetic tube. Individual planetary atmospheres became separate. From Earth, Super-Uranus began to be seen in the North and the Sun in the South. Super-Uranus, much nearer to Earth, would, if at some 20 million kilometers distance, appear as a colorful live body twice the size of the sun or moon today. {S : THE BREAK-UP OF SUPER-URANUS} THE BREAK-UP OF SUPER-URANUS Super-Uranus had been rotating rapidly, whipped by the charged central current like a spinning top. Now it began to slow its rotation and break apart. Great electrical disturbances resulted; meteoroids penetrated the gaseous region of the binarian axis even as they exploded into farther space. The planets moved away from the Sun even as they were receiving more direct radiant energy from it. Uranus Minor, a fragment produced as the larger body exploded, arched through the solar system along the plane of the ecliptic. This initiated the first of the set of catastrophes that dominated the recent post-Pangean history of Earth, the Lunarian disaster (about 11,500 B. P.). Uranus-Minor passed the Sun, lunged farther into space, then returned to the system, no longer aligned with the other planets on the axis of the binary, but orbiting along the plane now defined by the present solar system. Super-Uranus (or "Super-Saturn" it should now be called) continued to fragment as it slowed further. In the next great catastrophe (6000 B. P.), it blew off its charged surface shell and fissioned. It became a nova. Vsekhsviatskii, Director of the Kiev Observatory, has described such an event, ascribing it to a time of 100,000 to 500,000 years ago and claiming that some 10 25 grams of material, much of it ice, was erupted into space, bombarding the planets and exciting secondary volcanism everywhere [27] . It is probably significant, that, as Shklovskii and Sagan wrote: "It now seems very possible that all novae occur in close binary systems." [28] When novae occur luminosity increases and the expelled mass is about 10 -4 to 10 -5 of the mass of our Sun. Saturn has .02859% of the mass of the Sun [29] . The expelled minor portion of what was Super-Saturn retreated into farther space, where eventually it became the present planet Saturn [30] . The Earth was deluged with water. The major part of post- explosion Super-Saturn became Jupiter. It maintained its position at the end of the axial current of Solaria Binaria. The new planet Jupiter's rotation was erratic; its temperature cooled; its charging wind was drastically reduced. Yet it was still the most electrified of the planetary bodies. Jupiter attempted to reestablish its electrical line to the Sun. Sometimes discharges from the Sun and Jupiter would actually make contact across the vast spaces, but the lessened potential made the intervening gas a poor conductor. Only upon occasion did the discharge resume; when it did it wrought destruction upon the Earth, which was closing its orbit around the diminished electrical axis. Earthlings viewed these discharges with consternation. {S : PLANETARY BEHAVIOR} PLANETARY BEHAVIOR The Planets reacted to the drop in electrical power in the gaseous magnetic tube by moving inward towards the present plane of the solar system ecliptic. Their axial rotational speed changed into self-rotational motion. The hemisphere of the Earth that faced towards the disintegrating binary was increasingly illuminated as the gas clouds disappeared. When the time came for the Earth and other dense planets to transform their minor orbits into individual rotations, they changed the tilts of their axes. The circum-current orbit of the equator described the circular motion of its minor orbit; thence the Earth's poles were perpendicular to this orbit. But, as the Earth moved in upon the dying central current, its equator slowly shifted to the solar ecliptic. Its poles also shifted until they became nearly perpendicular to this plane, as did the poles of the other planets. Since the guiding reins of the central current were exceedingly loose now, individual axial tilts became possible, and did occur on occasion; a strict rule of perpendicularity could not be enforced. The change from Solaria Binaria would be eased by electrical transitions, which are smoother than mechanical ones and by the quantitatively transforming binary atmosphere; hence the Earth would have been protected against sudden wrenching changes of motion and abrupt temperature changes of an utterly destructive kind. The clearing skies brought the other planets and the binary bodies into view; they became the cynosure of the human eye in its infant self-consciousness [31] . The binary side was the boreal region, the north; there man saw first super-Uranus, then later Saturn; each in his turn ruled the world. The greatest drama of human history was observable; the birth, struggles and deaths of the gods, From the skies came fires, stones, waters, and also winds. Why all the planets, having once lost their original circular orbit around the Sun-Super Uranus axis and having moved back and forth on the solar ecliptic plane, should then have reassumed almost circular orbits around the Sun in a plane now perpendicular to the "old" axial orbits is explainable [32] . Circular orbits, taken alone, are a mystery that conventional astrophysics has not yet considered. Even an original circularity was unexplainable under Newtonian laws of gravitational motions. My answer is speculative but all that has been said here necessitates it. The answer is dictated by electrical behavior which dominated the solar binary. Gravitational forces can maintain stable elliptical orbits because of the interaction between orbital inertia and centripetal attraction. In a closed system electrical forces cannot. Charged bodies in an electrical field will give up to, or take from, the field whatever charges they need for electrical equilibrium, changing all motions necessary in the process. Gravitational fields are conservative. An electrical field does not yield a conservative field. All of the movements depicted here represent the change from a highly charged electrical system to a low-charged largely inertial system. Electricity is still vital to the system and not only because it produces heat for the Earth. If the galactic electrical sources were denied the Sun, it would collapse upon itself, as would the low density planets. Neutralized, bodies of the system would continue to orbit but purely by inertial attraction, not much different from that which we now observe but without excess radiation and interplanetary plasma. Then the solar system would be truly a fossil system. In all of these hypothetical adjustments, the Earth maintained "miraculously" smooth phasing in the transition from Solaria Binaria to the solar system (but, of course, every unpredetermined survival is a miracle). People on Earth would actually have observed all that the ancients claim to have observed and left us as myth. Earth and all other planets would have suffered damage in varying degrees at the times claimed in our analysis. {S : COMPLETION OF THE TRANSFORMATION} COMPLETION OF THE TRANSFORMATION As long ago as 1952, Otto Struve described a fast-moving series of events occurring in the Pleides star-cluster, particularly, Pleione. With unconscious irony, the article was called, "Pleione -- A Story of Cosmic Evolution." [33] By 1905, this star had been observed to lose mass, by minor fissions perhaps. It maintained a very fast rotation, 100 times the rotational speed of the Sun. Then in 1938, Pleione acquired a ring. In 1952, gaseous atoms began to flow with increasing spread outward from the photosphere and reversing layer. They filled an envelope, developed a shell, and then the whole of it disappeared into outer space. The ring had disappeared. Struve conjectured that the observed sequence was common, and that massive material is lost in space thereby. The process is less violent than novae, Wolf-Rayet stars, P Cygni and SS Cygni stars. Payne-Gaposchkin's comments on the nova cycle make clear that although there can be discerned phases of the Pre-outburst, outburst, and decline to "normality," every nova is different. "Novae... cycles (if any) must be reckoned in centuries [34] . Even in the outburst phase, novae have observably varying behaviors. In the present transform model of Solaria Binaria, we are allowing more time; we discern several novas, and we grant the near total disappearance of the huge atmospheric tube that was the birthplace of the planets and biosphere. Only the Earth's atmosphere, the interplanetary plasma, and some vestigial planetary atmosphere remain. There is some coherence between this scenario of events and the writings of Bruce, Velikovsky, Rose, Vaughn, Juergens, Milton, Crew, T. Gold, Eddington, Vsekhsviatskii, Ovenden, Bass, and other modern writers, not all of whom are catastrophists, much less supportive of a short-time scale. It is not of incidental significance that astronomers (for instance, Sagan, Isaacman, and Dole) [35] have calculated and published, seemingly without reason or because "the exercise is thought to be suggestive", sets of profiles for "alternative planetary systems." They line up and distribute groups of planets in altered masses and positions along the plane of the ecliptic, and exercise they are compelled to perform despite no conscious theoretical justification for engaging hours of large-computer time to make the simulations. I would say that their results suggest that the order of planets, their masses and their evolutions vary greatly; there are many simulations to be performed, guided by an appropriate theory. One such theory is the system advanced here: that of a largely electrical binary system, transforming (under the eyes of humanity) into a largely inertial-electrical system and redistributing bodies, motions, gases and charges as it evolves. {S : THE WORLD OF PANGEA} THE WORLD OF PANGEA Life on planet Earth flourished in the binary system. The circumference of the globe was less then. The ocean basins were absent. Mountains were absent as well. The globe was luminescent but not brightly lit, for the Sun was not visible as such. The skies were always cloudy, and the clouds dropped fresh water, usually in condensations. Occasional rains replenished shallow seas, swamps, and ponds. Hundreds of miles above, a canopy of waters diffused the celestial light. This canopy sky became part of the traits of the great god "Heaven" or "Uranus" to the first true humans, as will be detailed in the next chapter. The Moon was absent from the sky. The climate was equable and warm. The atmosphere contained oxygen and supported a nitrogen cycle. Most of the species of today existed. So did dinosaurs and nimble hominids. Ecological development proceeded according to uniformitarian principles of a competition for survival. But the extinction of a species was a rare event. So, too, was the birth of a species. As a condition gradually changed, so changed a ratio between and among species; a biological equilibrium was maintained, without abrupt interruption. The crust of Pangea was sial, heavy in silicon and aluminum elements, as is the crust today. Its depth was uniform; at about 30 kilometers it developed, but very gradually, into heavier silicate magnesium mixtures (sima). Great sedimentation had occurred. It amounts now to 5x10 8 km 3 or 1.3x10 24 gm., [27] but twice as much was on the original crust of Pangea. All the recent vulcanism, seismism, and crustal churning has added little to the sial, for the magma below is not provided with the materials for its manufacture. There is no evidence that the oceans have destroyed and buried continental material, or could have, since the sial and its sediments are lighter than the sima of the ocean floor. In Rittmann's work on volcanoes, we find the following words: "Since the subcrustal magma is not capable of providing sial by differentiation, we must conclude that little has been added to the sial since the beginning of geological history." [36] If this mass of land had been accompanied from the early assigned ages by the oceans and ocean basins, it would not have eroded into the sea, for the sea normally pushes back erosion [37] . An exception is the mouths of rivers, but river deltas explain only a small fraction of the vast continental shelves and slopes. The fossil marine beds that are found upon the land today, even high up in the Himalayas, are once-flooded land-beds or they are Pangean shallow water formations. They are the relics of deluges, tides and certain risings visited upon the world by post-Pangean catastrophes. There are few fossil marine beds laying conformably upon plutonic or basaltic sima. The ocean basins did not have to exist to explain them today. Both the uniform and equable climate and level topography of Pangea were the results of a uniform equable atmosphere and a stable solar electrical system. Both ended suddenly. {S : THE SKY-WATCHERS} THE SKY-WATCHERS That the solar system was originally (in Pangea) a Solaria Binaria seems to be evidenced by the most ancient memories of humanity. First came the high clouds, a canopy system. Then came the "planets", actually first the dark sun primary, Super Uranus, with several nearby bodies. Then appeared the true Sun and the Moon, at roughly the same period. Finally came the stars and constellations, as the skies largely cleared. Earliest homo sapiens or "intelligent human" was a sky-watcher but not a star-watcher. The stars were a later revelation. He watched first the rupture of the canopy, then the heaving off and break-up of the dark, enormous Super-Uranus, then the nearby occasionally lit up Saturn- Jupiter, then the Sun and Moon, then the fiery all-conquering Jupiter and thereafter the stars and the progress of the constellations. The stars developed as creations of the planets and became their creatures, minions, stopping places, and mnemonic markers. If the skies had been always as they are now, the Sun and Moon would be portrayed early and alone, they would have been the chief gods, and they would have been benignly worshipped, if worshipped at all. The Moon, inasmuch as its birth was attendant upon disaster and its presence was obvious, was more significantly worshipped than the Sun. Over time, its worship became less schizophrenic and paranoid, less brutal, than planetary worship. Still, since its origins were more startling and its apparition more varied, it has been a more powerful and disturbing divinity than the Sun. The Sun grew upon the scene gradually. It was wreathed in gas clouds at first. The clouds let it through more and more distinctly. For a long time it could not be seen in the "Northern" hemisphere that pointed its pole at Super-Uranus. Helios, the Greek sun god, was treated familiarly, sometimes almost with contempt. Generally he was respected, well-liked, and rarely gave offense. If the more terrible gods effaced him or displaced him, he resumed his unceasing round as soon as he could or after a period of persuasion by the gods. Unlike the planetary gods, who shone fearfully at night upon many occasions, he shone only by day. He never visibly exploded. He did not throw fits ; he did not frighten people to death. For these reasons, one must doubt the theory that the catastrophes of Earth were owing to solar inconstancies that worked upon an otherwise orderly planetary system. If the stars would have appeared as they now appear in the clear night skies, then earliest calendars would have been sidereal. No primitive time-reckoners used the rising of a star to measure a day and a year. Yet it is easiest of all to calculate under today's bright skies. Some scholars have sought star calendars. The Egyptians, for example, were supposed to have a Sirius calendar; more likely, Velikovsky argues well, this was a Venus calendar. The Egyptians give the earliest indications of understanding sidereal time, but they first used a lunar, then a Venus, and then much afterwards a purely solar calendar. The reasons for a calendar were originally to watch for bad happenings in the sky and celebrate their non-occurrence or their anniversaries as good-evil ambivalent events. Only later and secondarily were calendars applied to pragmatic ends as, for example, saying when to plant seeds or collect tribute. Since the stars appeared dimly and with apparent irregularity, at first and until the Age of Jovea, there was no chance of developing a map of the heavens. The constellations were unknown until about 5000 B. P. Nor, therefore, could the sidereal movements be plotted against time. When, on occasion, observers exclaimed at the movements of the stars, the movements that they referred to were movements of the Earth on which they stood. The ancient late Saturnian analogies in legends of the rocking mill, the rocking churn, the ashwood rotating firestick, referred not to the precession of the ecliptic but to the wobbling to and fro of the polar axis over a short period of years upwards to a century or more, following a catastrophe. When later the Great Pyramid of Ghiza was built (ca. 4500 B. P.), the regular movements of the stars on the celestial plane were known but not necessarily the 26,000 year precession of the equinoxes. Saturn, as god of the North, had been dethroned. The earliest navigation might follow coastal lines, and then the newly emplaced Moon would permit guidance. The stars were later used for geometry and navigation. But they were not worshipped. The Great Pyramid itself was oriented toward an apparently stable star that then marked the boreal opening, by this time correctly regarded as the North Pole. The North Pole, that is, was operationally defined as the earthly point corresponding to the celestial point marked by the stationary star. Any boreal star might serve that did not move, and this would mark the celestial North Pole and correspond to the geographical North Pole at that moment in time. Then a structure oriented to it would change its geographical "true-north" orientation only if the ground on which it stood moved. However, the Earth could (and did) shift afterward; and the Earth might even turn completely reversing "north" and "south"; still the geographical North would remain the same. The Great Pyramid points, within several minutes of error, to the present geographical north pole [38] . Hence, the only possible changes of the ground on which it stands would occur (a) by an improbable sliding from one position at one time and a sliding back into about the same position later, (b) by any amount of longitudinal movement - that is, east and/ or west (which would preserve the north polar orientation), and (c) by the aforesaid several minutes of deviation observable presently in the orientation of the Pyramid, which, if it happened all at one time, would have been a considerable disaster from interrupted rotation and earthquake, or as an earthquake settling the lithosphere after a past catastrophe. Subsumed under the last clause is the possibility that the Earth's shape was not yet accommodated to the approximately 1500-year-old tilt of its axis which would have required an emergence at the old poles and new equatorial region and a flattening at the new poles. However, as stated above, the chances would always be good that, if the Earth's axis tilted, some star would show up to be the "North Star" so far as the orientation of the Great Pyramid was concerned. {S : EARLY ASTRONOMICAL IDEAS} EARLY ASTRONOMICAL IDEAS Evidences of even earlier orientations of the first geometricians to geographical north are important indicators of a boreal hole in the cloud canopy, which centered invariably upon (unless it was somewhat magnetically affected by the magnetic pole) the geographical north pole. Thus, even without stars, the skies encouraged a science of geometry, surveying, and navigation to achieve some development before the skies could be mapped. None of this could happen before mankind had become aware, and employed symbols. The theory of Plato's Timaeus affords significant evidence of the thought processes that might have been employed by early human astronomers. It demonstrates the proper role to be assigned to the development of primeval mankind. As the planets became visible and their effects forcefully experienced, their behavior was studied. It was observed that the planets, gods, that is, visited among the stars. According to the Pythagorean and Platonic theory, each human soul dwelt embodied upon a planet. If a good person, his soul would find its star. Each human should had such a star. If bad, he was reincarnated in a woman's form and successively "lower" forms until he arrived among mere turbulent elements. But, by regaining control of the turbulence through the exercise of rational faculties, he might return to his star. Depending upon its navigational scheme, each planetary boat had its own ports of call among the stars. The stars and constellations became known by the spectacular events that occurred when one or another planet was visiting them. The planets, too, and therefore the gods, were tied in story and myth to the stars. Thus planet Mars, the "Fox star" Era (Alcor), the third deluge, the Pleiades, Ursa Major, Achilles, and the Fall of Troy are all intermingled in Greek and Near Eastern mythology. "There are, indeed, too many traditions connecting Ursa and the Pleiades, with this or that kind of catastrophe to be overlooked." [39] Having ordered the heavens and settled the fate of man in relation to the heavens, so goes the platonic myth, the Demiurge retired and "the time machine was switched on." This would have been Super-Uranus (Ouranos, the god of Heaven) in the first age of splendid light. Then, as Taylor interprets the Timaeus, "the subdivision of the circle of the Other into seven, to correspond to the planetary orbits, is a fresh and subsequent procedure on the part of the Demiurge." [40] This would be the beginnings of individual planetary motions, observable by mankind, and would occur in the age of Saturn. Hundreds of stories of the travels of gods and heroes, although they appear to take place on Earth, "actually" take place among the stars and represent planetary movements, uniform and erratic. Von Dechend learned this lesson after spending a year among 10,000 pages of Polynesian myths [41] . The bloodiest and most terrible stories deal with planetary gods when the planets are misbehaving, acting even more erratically than usual. Myth and legend are almost always anchored in earlier world ages, if not in the dawn of mankind [42] . The contents are elaborated, obscured, even deliberately edited, but their forms and force come from the aboriginal events that they sought to report. The Odyssey of Homer, for example, is sung as a story of heroic travels after the Trojan Wars on an East-West Mediterranean axis. I would place its immediate events at around 695 to 675 B. C., its framework in the two centuries preceding. A second underlying framework, however, may go back to earlier north-south travels from Scandinavia to Nigeria, when the morphology of the area was much different, that is, across low "Alps" and along a "Saharan Sea." [43] The Arcadians, most ancient among the Greeks who had maintained a political community, "pro-Selenians" who had existed before the Moon, came from the areas of the present day Po Valley and Switzerland and may have pursued this axis of commerce. But I have identified Odysseus as an alter ego of Athena, the great goddess, who is also identified with the planet Venus, as will be seen. So he is a celestial traveler too. The routes are employed by real cultures, but at the same moment they correspond to celestial travels of gods among stars. The "cosmic" ancient paths of England and other countries, that do not take short and easy routes, are probably celestially influenced, as well as electromagnetic [44] . {S : SUMMARY REFLECTIONS UPON THE CHANGING WORLD SYSTEM} SUMMARY REFLECTIONS UPON THE CHANGING WORLD SYSTEM Over some ten thousand years the heavy-body motions of Solaria Binaria transformed into those of the present solar system. The composition of interplanetary space also changed. The process was begun as the breakdown of an electrical system that then took on the additional features of a gravitational disruption. Many life-forms may have existed on other planets. But except for the possible continued existence of viral and bacterial forms elsewhere, only on Earth was a rich biosphere preserved and transformed. The "exceptional" unexplained features of the present solar system support a stacked binary system theory - the differently oriented "fossil" axes of planets: rotational differences; binary behaviors of Jupiter; certain qualities common to the group of inner planets and others common to the group of outer planets; the presence of an electrical character of the solar system today which is only partially governing but could have been fully governing; certain "librations" and eccentricities of planetary motions; the futile efforts of solar flares to establish an interplanetary arc-current, except for the solar wind which behaves like an interplanetary gas and reaches to farthest interplanetary space; the varying orbital and rotational speeds of the planets; the very existence of the plane of the ecliptic which resembles a dead wire; the small deviations from the dead wire plane; the fact that the planets do not orbit in conjunction . Comets seem to be of recent origin; so do the bodies of the meteoroid and asteroid belts; so indeed do Mercury, Venus, and Saturn and by extension perhaps all planets - features which are acceptable under the postulated model. Ancient beliefs and observations are compatible with the postulated natural history - ancient knowledge of the physical traits of the planets; legends of the behavior of the gods; confirmation of ancient astrology and of Stoic. Platonic, and other philosophical beliefs. Certain contemporary theories are also compatible: on the sources of and the ravaging of atmospheres; the variety of elements found on the planets; the heating and cooling of the planets; and the order of the inner planets. Reasons are found both for resemblances and differences between the sun and the outer planets in their chemical composition, behavior, and temperatures. They may be rotating as turned-off dynamos in part. Causes of the revolutionary mass extinction and creation of species of flora and fauna become clearer. The history of the solar system appears to be thenceforth more in line with the gross electrical and explosive behavior of the stars, galaxy, and universe. Concepts of gravity can describe a stable system but what disestablishes a system introduces electrical dynamics. One can cope with the evidence that more than one comet, or planet, such as Venus was involved in disruptive behavior. The binary, theory explains why all bodies would have to move. Even the sun would have lost its undulating movement almost entirely following the dispersal of the focused binary mass. There is no ancient comment or legend that describes the solar system a it is; there are many statements as to what it was; the binary system theory is a better reconstruction of the system as it was anciently discussed. The presence of a heavy atmosphere - the magnetized gas tube - up to the end of the Jovian period is seen to have provided an electrified environment for many major events. The planets moved out into space, increasing their orbital diameters gradually, as they moved nearer to the central current (now "the ecliptic," which is a motion in space) and were blown by it towards the Jupiter node. But the movements were spacing out in both directions. The ultimate spacing may not be incomprehensible; the intervals may follow "Bode's Law," or a type of the same, as the result of the expulsion of the outer planets into farther space. Bruce in 1944 asserted that when formed by fission in a nova, the separation of binary stars increases gradually [45] . The process of spacing out had begun with the original supernova of the sun, which has produced the binary system in the first place. The idea that the planets were much more highly charged before than they are today receives support, as do the phenomena (and disasters) that occurred when they were losing their charges to other bodies and to inner and outer space. The break-up of "Apollo" is more explainable under the present theory than before. Ovenden's proposal that a planet of 90 earth masses existed in the present asteroidal belt until some 16 million years ago invoked only a completely conjectural intruder as the cause of its explosion. More of Apollo's fate is described below in Chapter Nine, as is the behavior of Jupiter. Jupiter still gives signs of instability in its surface features, clouds, temperatures, satellites and motions. This is in conformity with the binary theory. Electrical "machines" operate less explosively during phase shifts than mechanical "machines". This may help to explain the transition from one system to another without total explosion except in an outright collision. The "Principle of Least Inter-action Action." recently introduced by Bass and Ovenden to explain planetary spacing movements, has much more the connotations of electrical dynamics than gravitational dynamics in it. (The "principle" is merely definitive, not analytic; it holds that solar system bodies tend to position themselves so as to minimize possibilities of collision.) Solaria binaria as an electromotive system resembles strikingly the human inventions of electrical motors based upon electrical principles [46] . Perhaps the solar system today can also be represented - as an electrified inertial system. Little in existing theory of the solar system and its history stands against a new binary theory. The latest discoveries about solar system behavior, as related in the final chapter of this book, seem, indeed to invite a radical change in conception. {S : Notes (Chapter Five: Solaria Binaria)} Notes (Chapter Five: Solaria Binaria) 1. (1977) 669. 2. D. Talbott (1977); Gibson (1977); D. Cardona (1977); Tresman and O'Gheoghan (1977). 3. The history of the solar system before 14,000 B. P., but including as well as a thorough development of these pages, is being prepared by Earl R. Milton and the present author. 4. Batten (1973); "Binaries" Ency. Brit. (1969) 586-95; Jordan (1971) Appendix; Temple, 225; Ransom (1972) 16 ff; Shklovskii and Sagan, 149-50; Scientific American, "The Solar System" a number by now greatly exceeded. 5. Shklovskii and Sagan, 150. 6. Harrison, 325. 7. Super-Uranus is named for Ouranos (Greek) and Uranus (Latin) father of the gods, and not for Uranus, the present-day planet, accidentally named so (and discovered to have rings in 1977), but the planet Uranus is deemed here to have originated out of Super-Uranus, like the other major outer planets. 8. "Binaries" (1974) Ency. Brit. 9. Liller, 352. This report of the important discoveries concerning the dark primary in relation to AM Herculis (a white dwarf) pictures the gaseous exchange between stars in a way to add plausibility to the model of solaria binaria which I had drawn the year before. 10. Shklovskii and Sagan, 150 and Figure II-6 on the wavy, undulation orbiting of binary components. The Sun's complex sections rotate variously and there seems to be no way of determining whether any parts of these movements are eccentric, anomalous motions of the gravitational-electrical barycenter. Gribbin and Plageman (1974) write (p. 130): "The orbital motions of the planets, in addition to generating tides on the Sun, also move this star in an irregular special orbit about the center of gravity of the entire solar system. This movement has a distance of twice the solar radius; it generates centrifugal or coriolis forces that may disturb convection within the Sun itself." 11. Bruce (1975). 12. Timaeus and cf. L. Rose, in article to be published in Kronos 1980, on Philolaos. 13. Coe (1975) 14-5. 14. Kuiper, quoted Shklovskii and Sagan, 155. But Encyclopedia Britannica "Binaries," (1971) 595e gives 10 A. U. as the average separation. 15. 595e. 16. But see Juergens (1976); "The bulk chemistries of both Jupiter and Venus are now unknown." (15) Its mass could contain a rocky core of some 40 earth-masses or else would have to achieve a metallic hydrogen state in large part. 17. Proclus (1953). 18. See de Santillana and von Dechend, seriatim. The great astronomer-astrologists divided the major epochs of history into 800 year periods, based upon conjunctions of "fiery triplicity" of Saturn and Jupiter (399-400). 19. Sykes (1978). 20. Crew (1976), I S. I. S. R., letter, 24-5. 21. Rose and Vaughan (1972). 22. Velikovsky (1946). 23. (1972). 24. NASA, News release 1977, based on data radioed from Pioneer XI. As predicted by Velikovsky in 1946 and verified by Pioneer XI in 1977, the magnetic field of the Sun extends beyond Pluto. 25. Ency. Brit. v. 17, 807. 26. (1944) 6. 27. (1962) (1967). 28. 149. 29. Ibid. Bruce (1944) 9. 30. Shklovskii and Sagan discuss "runaway stars" that are cast into space with a "slingshot effect" when their primary body supernovas (157-8). Our theory here calls for several such "effects" over several thousand years. Anthropologically and mythically, this would be the likely source of the fundamental psychological and theological "deus otiosus effect," the retired indifferent god. 31. Isaac Vail (1840-1972), at the end of the 19th century, drew the most brilliant picture of the clearing heavens and their effects upon man. His citations are unfortunately incomplete because his original manuscript was destroyed in a fire. 32. Sherrerd (1972); Williams (1971). 33. Struve (1952). 34. (1977) 672. 35. Sagan (1975) 11. 36. 265; 206. 37. Donnelly (1883, 1971) 78-9. 38. Walter Sullivan, "Study of Pyramid hints on Earth" New York Times (February 28, 1974); Tompkins (1976). 39. Santillana and von Dechend, 386. 40. T. Taylor, ed. and trans., The Timaeus of Plato in re 36-d-6 of Timaeus. 41. Santillana and von Dechend, X. 42. Eliade (1954). 43. Research hypothesis recounted to the author by Livio Stecchini. 44. Michell (1969); Underwood (1969). 45. (1944) 13, presenting data from Russell, Dugan and Stewart, II Astronomy (1938) 703-4. 46. The electromagnetic theories of Juergens, Bruce and Crew appear to be consistent with the model of Solaria Binaria, and are to be preferred to the usual history of the solar system as a gravitational model. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 06: } {T THE URANIANS } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX: THE URANIANS The Hindu history of Super-Uranus can be told now, the Greek history later. In the beginning, there was Vritra, a covering and restraint upon the Earth, and later on Vritra had as allies the Vritryas, who were demons of heavenly turbulence. Heaven, who was Varuna, lived with Earth in a common house. Varuna was an enemy of Vritra, his heavenly antagonistic principle. Varuna and Earth gave birth to Indra. At first Indra could not be seen. He was concealed. He was fed soma until he grew so great that he finally blew heaven and earth apart forever, filling the atmosphere with his brilliant self. Indra, with thunderbolting Danavas, and the Adityas of Varuna, defeated the Vritryas. "When the fight was over it became apparent what the Adityas and the Danavas had been quarreling about. For out of the shattered mountains, or out of a cave, or variantly out of Vritra's belly, emerged the cosmic Waters, motherly females who liked to escape confinement. They came out now like lowing cattle, flowing over the body of their former restrainer and lord Vritra, to acknowledge Indra as their new lord. And astonishingly, the Waters were pregnant, and their embryo was the Sun." [1] All took their place; "the systematization and regulation was known as rita (rite), which means etymologically 'set in motion' and has the idea in the Rig Veda of cosmic truth or order." The profound meaning of the word "rite" is suddenly apparent here; religious rite is aimed at rehearsing and repeating the original cosmic order so as to support and control it by physical means. I understand Varuna as the original benign and intimate heaven of Earth. The Vritryas are the dragon-like monsters of the falling skies. The Earth's surface is destroyed in the first struggle of the gods. But Indra appears between Heaven and Earth, the first sun, in an increasingly visible atmospheric space. Waters fall abundantly, running off the new wrinkles of the Earth. The sun arose out of southern waters. Creation was next, but humans were already created, else they would not be watching the chaos. Now we compare this Hindu myth with an analogous but distinct Hindu myth. The world was dark and asleep until the great Demiurge appeared and scattered the shades of darkness. He then laid the seed that became the golden egg, which, when hatched, gave forth himself, Brahma. It is the same creation. The metaphorical history of the Cosmic Egg [2] is not a different or unique event. In a close parallel to the Hindu cosmogony, the Greek heard one version of creation in Hesiod and another version in the Orphic rites. Other cultures also had two versions of creation, one of which was the Cosmic Egg. The Dogons of the Upper Niger region put twin creators within the Egg. Before the Cosmic Egg, a universal chaos is pictured. Translucent mixtures of light and darkness are sensed in the sky; Heaven is close to Earth, if not identical with it, as an eggshell encloses its egg. The human mind sees itself as within the Egg, which is cracked open. The Demiurge who has hatched himself is Super-Uranus who presides over the now opening universe. {S : THE DESTRUCTION OF PANGEA} THE DESTRUCTION OF PANGEA According to the scenario of the last chapters, Solaria Binaria would be transforming at a rapid rate, some fourteen thousand years ago, with grave consequences to the proto-humans of Earth. The cause would have been a reduction in the particles and electrical charging that the Sun had been obtaining from its galaxy, whose expansion was proceeding then as now. The Sun's activity diminished, and with it decreased the Sun's gaseous engagement with its less luminous binary star, Super-Uranus. The ratio of electrical motions to inertial motions working upon Super-Uranus declined. Its rotation was disturbed. Its orbital velocity diminished. It became unstable and began to fission. At least two novas occurred, one to produce Saturn, the second to bring about Jupiter. Fragments constituting of today's Uranus, Neptune and Planet "X" (should it exist) were ballooned out into farther space. By retiring they might remain intact as gaseous cold planets, whereas, if close-in to the Sun , they would have collapsed. In retiring, they disturbed the dense inner planets. On Earth, the first period of these events is called Urania. It would perhaps occupy on the scale of present time the years 14,000 to 11,500 B. P. The geography of the Earth then is diagrammed in Figure 20 and its eventual patterning forms the matter for the accompanying table. There would commence a bombardment of Earth material discharged from Super-Uranus. A regime of Super-energy displays would occur, occasioned by slight interruptions of Earth motions. Hot spots and explosions would develop beneath the land in place; small ranges of mountains and hills would be folded or thrust over other land, creating minor basins and many stream channels. Erratic gaseous discharges would penetrate the atmosphere and extinguish life forms in increasing numbers of localities. Great fires would be set in a world that scarcely knew fire before. We are just at the beginning of a worldwide hunt for signs of meteoroid falls, whether small or large bodies. The amount of cosmic dust on the Earth is now known to be huge. The separation of cosmic fall-out material from volcanic material in the sedimentation of the Earth is a large task that chemical geology is now assuming. V. D. Niemann of the U. S. S. R. has calculated, from present fall-out rates, that the globe must have acquired enormous deposits of cosmic particles since Creataceous times so that its diameter has increased by a factor of 2.6 and gravitational intensity of the Earth increased in proportion [3] . Again, the seductive idea of constancy must be contradicted; under Solaria Binaria, the Earth would have grown at a much faster rate, then the rate would radically diminish to its present state when it is still considerable. However, the cosmic dust is only one type of fall-out and belts of debris around the world may turn out to be largely deposited from catastrophic fall- outs. According to B. Y. Levin. "The hydrocarbons in cometary heads must have played a part in forming petroleum and in the origin of life." [4] Meteoritic material falls in complex patterns, even in the same shower, In one Russian shower, a 343.8 kg stone struck with incomparably greater force and effect than a 440.4 kg stone [5] . A stream of giant meteoroids would probably not set up a linear spaced pattern of impacts with proportionate depths and in circumstances to permit easy discovery and survey. After one calculation, based upon meteorite flux data and relations between meteorite mass and size of crater, it was concluded that the number of craters discovered is far below expectations. Though only 50 to 100 are known, 130,000 "should" exist from the past years. "The gross discrepancy" must be accounted for both " by erosion and by the masking effect of younger sediments and metamorphism of older terranes." [6] Or, one might add, by the admission of many new candidates to the club, such as Hudson Bay, the Bermuda deeps and Carolina bays, just as the great Ishim crater was recently described. Or that great crustal thrusts, floods, and other revolutionary events masked the craters. Or that (a) meteoroids in Pangean time were few, (b) then they were very many in the holocene, and (c) they are now much fewer. By our theory, therefore, Urania witnessed the first chaos of the proto-human environment. As Super-Uranus prepared to fission and to retire, the magnetic tube weakened and the secondary orbits of the dense planets were reduced in diameter around the principal axis of the system. The Earth lost charge, and close-in sky vapors began to condense and fall. Also, holes were chopped in the adamantine heaven - by the creator God, Panku, says the Chinese legend. These would be extensive meteor bombardments, many of them of ice. Great lightning discharges struck between canopies, clouds and land surfaces, with sporadic deluges. The sky waters descended, gathered into clouds, and cooled the near-in atmosphere. The land waters overflowed. Heavy winds blew for the first time. {S : THE ICE DUMPS} THE ICE DUMPS Where were the immense ice caps of the ice ages during this time? It will be recalled that geology is fixated on the gradual advance and decline of ice caps and many glaciers over a period of a million years. The present ice cap is usually regarded as a retreat phase of the ice that descended into the United States and Europe and regressed only some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. However, today, one encounters fairly often the belief that the last ice age ended rapidly with destructive floods and the extermination of some species. In a succeeding volume, I discuss the larger questions of the ice. Here two possibilities are viewed favorably. One is that the ice caps only recently appeared - during Uranian times when the heat of Super-Uranus and the binary electrical axis began to dwindle - but that before the Earth could be covered with ice, Super-Uranus novaed and the Lunarian catastrophe to be discussed soon, dumped most of the ice into the new oceanic basins. As a second theory, the ice was dumped, not formed on the Earth, as a phase of the disintegration of Super-Uranus. It was distributed erratically in the neighborhood of the poles and on the new mountains, whence most of it descended into the hot new ocean basins, directly or from the land. The latter speculation permits the discovery of unexpected ice-free locations. For example, Vilks and Mudies have analyzed a sedimentary core raised off the Labrador coast. In an area that has always been believed to be part of the heavy ice cover of the pleistocene, "an ice- free ocean may have occurred as early as 22,000 years before the present." Hitherto, reports "imply that the Labrador Sea was locked in year-round polar ice." Furthermore, "the pollen spectrum indicates the continuous regional presence of terrestrial vegetation during this time." Sedge, shrub and tundra were growing densely nearby [7] . The C14 dating may, of course, be basically faulty. But then the whole theory of the ice ages needs to be reviewed. Or else, the 22,000 years should be collapsed to a post-Saturnian age after 6000 B. P. Alternatively one wonders whether the ice cap may have been a scattered set of accumulations from sky drops and brief frigid episodes. This would allow a reconciliation to some degree with those who, like Donnelly, argue that the ice ages are a myth and their "remains" are comet- deposited gravel in fact, and also with those scholars such as Cook and Hapgood who envisioned large caps, global tilt, and an avalanche of the ice perhaps ten thousand years ago. {S : THE CREATION OF MAN} THE CREATION OF MAN (see Figure 11 and accompanying chart) Amidst the developing chaos, the hominids were being replaced by the human race. A growing population was being reduced even as the species itself realized its human qualities. Atmospheric conditions and the surface environment were unfavorable to survival. Inconstancies and radical changes in the air accompanied explosive seismism. Most species were greatly reduced in numbers. The evolution of man, which Johanson, White, the Leakeys, and others have contended to occupy four million years, saw little change until it was quantavoluted by disaster [8] . The human species began the period as a stupid hominid but speedily acquired a human nature. The hominid of Pangea entered the first age of gods, the age of Urania, with a pananimistic brain. Given a merely excellent primate capability of categorizing types of reality, it could not do more than regard all the world as more or less alive, judged in relation to its own locomotive and sensory scale. It could feel well or ill, coddle and train its young, heap up protective barriers, judge and even bury its dead, and go through a variety of obsessive and non- instrumental self-appeasing and other-appeasing action, which, if viewed from the perspective of self-aware man, might appear to be spiritual, but, if seen from the zoological standpoint, would be construed in the framework of such animal behaviors as bee dances burying bones chasing one's tail, hallucinatory dreams, or biting oneself in frustration. The human sprang from changed radionics of the atmosphere invading its physiology and from the effects of intense prolonged terror. A split personality was born, essentially a self- awareness. The new humans depended upon delusory projections for survival against grave anxieties. A grasp upon memory and feeling for time erupted with self-awareness. The sign and symbol spread. Systematic recollection developed. Memoria is daughter of Uranus and mother of the muses, including history, who is Cleo: so writes Hesiod. Group history, and therefore collective futures, commenced. Invention, creativity, planning and institutions then grew. All of this frenzied human development and activity occurred in the sight of the great god proclaimed Uranus. The Urbild, as the Germans call the primordial image, was Uranus, the origin of the very word. Figure 11. HUMANIZATION IN CATASTROPHE. A. Hominid under Catastrophe B. Catastrophized Human CHART A. THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH PRE-CREATION MIND ORGANIZATION OF THE WORLD IN HOMINID FORM A. Low-powered environmental forces are operative. B. Hominid is un-self-conscious and has fully-functioning instinctual reactions. C. Individual concentrates its life energies upon physical well-being and sociability. D. Individual possesses simple tools, makes signs, and co-operates with others. E. Perception, cognition and affection are governed strictly by a single coordinated instinctual being. Only rarely and temporarily are they "distorted". No animal (hominid) no matter how bizarre or self-destructive its behavior (induced by disease, chemicals, or trainers) ever thinks to itself: "I can't believe what I am doing!" F. Assume a population of bands, a reign of natural terror (massive traumas), and distraught faunal populations. (Problem now set is: How does a human become created and survive successfully out of this pre- creation setting?) FIRST PHASE: GESTALT OF CREATION A. In a quick circular reaction the following occurs: High-powered environmental forces are unleashed in sky and earth. All senses are bombarded and radionic storms change the atmosphere and invade organisms. Physical well-being and sociability are practically destroyed. B. Instincts are generally blocked in a frozen terror and/ or by microseconds delay in neurological transmissions along brain hemispheres. C. Schism of the self occurs in one or a few hominids. Effective but persistent efforts "to unite the soul". Proto-decisions are required for self-control. D. Memories are intense. Memories are also suppressed in the struggle for self-control (ego versus alter-ago). Selective recall and forgetting spring into being. E. The alter-ego is used to displace terror onto other people and the threatening natural forces. (That is, the primordial being does not know whether he is "talking to himself" or "talking to others.") F. The ego begins to communicate with itself by displacement and projection, and having begun the process, extends it to all subjects of displacement. SECOND PHASE: REORGANIZATION OF THE WORLD IN SCHIZOTYPICAL FORM A. High-powered forces continue and impress senses with destruction, chaos, and imminent return. B. Perception, cognition, and affection are pliable (less instinctive) and are generated under conditions that mix up all kinds of phenomena of the triple-fear and triple control system of the person (fear of self, fear of others, fear of gods-nature). C. Principle imprints on p, c, a (above) are blocking (amnesia, catatonism); compulsive repetitiveness; and orgiasm (destructiveness, wild expressionism). These imprints of the new world order of the schizoid mind operate within the individual, between and among individuals, and between individuals-groups and divine or natural forces. THIRD PHASE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURE A. Persons and groups, so as to control fears of self, others, and the object-world (animated), B. And to obtain subsistence, affection and the reduction of tensions. C. Organize their perceptions, cognitions, affects, and energies, D. Through the mechanisms of memory (amnesia and recall), displacements (associations and ultimately sublimations), compulsive repetition (rites, rituals, rules and routines), orgiasm (aggression and nihilism), and communication (by behavior, signs and symbols), E. To work upon materials and resources of selves, others and the object world, F. To set up all behavior patterns ranging from informal to rigid, including the (1) regime of language, (2) religious rites and structures, (3) compulsive modes of coping with subsistence, sex, and conflict, all of which bear the stamp of the aforesaid needs, fears, and mechanisms, but assume variegated culture-forms depending upon the "mix" of history, no matter how brief the history, G. And exclude or punish, "unaware," "sinful," or "sick" persons or groups who, in relation to a particular culture mix are deviant (i. e., have too much or too little of the key ingredients), H. Which deviants (e. g., "schizophrenics") must fashion "mixes" of mechanisms and displacements, such that the number is great but represents and resembles in every case the peculiarity of the culture where it emerges. The theology of creation everywhere holds that man was created suddenly, as he is, without previous existence. Quantavolution would also maintain that man was created suddenly, as he is, without previous existence as a human, but with a previous existence as a hominid, similar to this present physiognomy in so many respects as to be indistinguishable except for one thing. That thing is what theologians and the human race has always called a soul. But to my thinking, that soul is the inward turning of the new psychology upon itself -- self-awareness. And the link to divinity was historically inescapable. As the soul, or the split person looking at himself or herself, was born, it observed itself as born and in the company of a great active sun that was the most spectacular feature of the whole world. That form became the principle god and creator of the new human. Now here is the enduring connection between the religious world and the factual world and it explains why quantavolution in all of its previous manifestations cannot be so far from traditional religion as evolution and uniformiarianism have always been. {S : RELIGIOUS BEGINNINGS} RELIGIOUS BEGINNINGS All new human nature came forth within a framework of time-based, terror-obsessed, and symbol- stressing behavior. Religion occurred in the human mind as the essential mediator among sky events, Earth events and human events. But if religion was the mediator, the gods were the arbitrators and major actors. The first manifestations of theism must satisfy the following criteria: self-awareness, deliberateness, collective memory, future-control, symbolic connectiveness with the religious object. These are closely implicated in the gestalt of creation that was described above. The manifestations must then reflect and operate upon the condition of creation, namely, uncontrollability and rapidly intensely changing environment, and the ensuing terror brought on by the numerous expressions of high energy forces. In addition, since great environment changes occurred in different patterns, irregularly staggered, and over successive time-periods, the manifestations of theism must follow suit and display these identifiable events by correlated theistic events. We begin the correlations in this book, but the task is beyond our present capacities. Finally, the manifestations, according to the theory of affective results already elaborated, must, in the religious context, as in all others result in striking developments of catatonic, obsessive, ambivalent, aversive, anhedonic, sublimatory, and orgiastic behavior - that is, a delusive schizophrenic psychology of the universe. All of this forms the subject of a volume to come. {S : PALEOLITHIC RELIGION} PALEOLITHIC RELIGION It is a conventional belief, quite disproven by Marshack, that "whereas Paleolithic art provides abundant evidence of primitive man's concern both with his own kind and with the animals which constituted his main source of food, there is apparently a complete absence of interest in the physical environment – no representations are found of the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon or stars." [9] Of course the uniformitarian, evolutionist model of thought would prefer to believe this, but in fact the leap to humanity was for the hominid a leap directly to gods. Marcel Baudouin, in two articles of sixty years ago, joined the paintings and the artifacts of the upper paleolithic caves of France into a convincing demonstration of the "astralism" of their creators. We cannot expect linguistic explicitness in modern terms. As Leroi-Gourhan reminds us, "How would a visitor from another planet distinguish between the Christian lamb pierced by a sword and the bison struck by a lance?... Prehistory is a kind of clay-headed colossus. ever more intangible as one goes up from the ground to the brain." [10] Direct sky imitations -- showing a radiant solar image - are available (see figure 12) from periods that immediately succeed the paleolithic, or perhaps are different cultures of the same time. All the requirements of a religion can be supplied by the earliest humans. Age by age, from Urania to Solaria, the picture emerged, changed in details, and moved into the next great scene. In the middle Saturnian "Golden Age," the later Martian age, and the Solarian age, a considerable world peace occurred, leading to the simultaneous development of humanitarian religion and free, creative and skeptical cultures of considerable extent and duration. Figure 12. RAYED HEAVENLY BODIES. Definitive periodic light appeared in the age of Saturn. Circles are rare in early art. These from the Mesolithic (or Possibly Neolithic) caves of Spain (Source: Marshack, 343-4) are among the earliest that may depict a heavenly body. The heavens had become alive. Beyond the blankets of water that had driven mankind from its vegetable swamps onto the highlands and into the caves, could be dimly perceived the giant body which was menacing the human being. The monster was alternately splendidly colourful and turbulently dark. It would rest ominously and then tear out chunks of its own body and cast them far and wide, some of them into the bowels of the Earth. It would hide itself and then descend like a great blanket upon the trembling Earth whose sounds of dismay and protest would become deafening. Santillana and von Dechend wonder what to make of "the baffling Mesopotamian texts dealing with gods cutting off each other's necks and tearing out each other's eyes." [11] But these sane authorities would agree with all other historians of religion that wars of the gods and self- mutilation by the gods are part of every primordial cosmogony. Our preferred solution is that the high energy expressions of the world in those earliest human days wrote the first scenarios of religion. Brandon writes [12] : "It is surprising... that the earliest recorded cosmogonies seem more concerned with accounting for the origin of the world than for that of mankind or of the animals." To me this is a necessity, not a surprise. The origins of the quantavoluted world were inextricable from human origins. {S : BIRTH OF THE HEAVENLY HOST} BIRTH OF THE HEAVENLY HOST The effects of the breakup of Super-Uranus were felt throughout the globe, but the representations of the events themselves were watched best through the polar openings [13] . The primal scenes of the gods came then from the lands of the Hyperboreans, dwellers of the extreme north. However, the northern direction spoken of refers only to the geographical north, based upon the axis of spin of the Earth. The plane of the ecliptic in early primeval times was drawn between the solar equator and Super-Uranian equator; the poles of the planets-to-be were stretched along the same line. The view through the Boreal Opening revealed, in the north, the bodies of the Super-Uranian complex. At first Super-Uranus appeared casting his cloak of heaven partly aside to reveal himself. And around him were the satellites and stars. His throne was the aura of northern lights and was imitated by earthlings down to the present day; it was also the sacred altar upon which sacrifices were forever to be offered. The altar stood also for the arch, for a four-columned portico holding up the heaven, and for a number of other ideas. The heavenly host of the Boreal Hole gave humans their holy city, Jerusalem, and started utopian planning on earth. Visibility was sufficiently good in the early days to understand that the grotesque occurrences surrounding the throne of Ouranos were connected with the breaking of holes in the solid ceiling of the earth and the crashing explosion and burial of giants and gods upon the Earth. Divine men and women came from these bodies, many the ancestors of the surviving humans. So it seemed. In Greek legend, the children of Ouranos who were known as the Cyclops were probably named after the eye-holes that began to pierce the canopy, letting in the far Sky and each was of monstrous proportions because the holes were often the scene of large intrusions of meteoroids upon Earth. The connection of men and gods could be attested to by the observable physical facts of the sky as dealt with by symbolic projection. It was a psychological mechanism of which much is to be said later on. The fervent wish for order brought forth the goddess Themis eldest child of Ouranos. Themis warned her sire of his approaching end, and he responded by bringing down the canopies to smother Mother Earth and by burying their children in the bowels of the Earth. Themis lived long enough to become the reluctant bride of the master of law and order, Zeus, marrying the order of the canopied age to the order of the bright skies. Urged to revolt by his mother, Gaea, Kronos, last son of Ouranos, seized upon a flint sickle of jagged edge, resembling too the fingered arch of the enlarging boreal opening, and rallied his siblings to dethrone the father. The horrendous revolt splattered the blood of Ouranos around the world. The pillars of heavens toppled, the skies fell, and out of the prolonged explosions that filled the skies for centuries with water and dust, and through the vapory atmosphere that still encircled the globe, appeared Kronos (Saturn in ever-increasing sharpness of detail.) To the end, Saturn remained a god of the northern regions and was supposed always to dwell there in retirement, among the frozen seas that marked the new Jovean ice age. It had been his father's place before him. {S : EJACULATIVE LANGUAGE} EJACULATIVE LANGUAGE To the monster, Ouranos, who seemed to cover all the air above with its body and capes, humanity responded with terrible words seared into memory: names, imprecations, ejaculations, commands. The earliest names must have been the same among the first humans [14] . Ten thousand years later the names varied. The being later on was T'ien (heaven), to the Chinese, an active Heaven, "the Accomplisher." He was Coelus or the Concealer, and, later, also was Uranus, (heaven), to the Latins. In Graeco-Roman myth, he is pictured with a great spreading cape of clouds, as in Figure 13. The ancient Hebrews called him Shamayim (" heaven" or "the there waters") and Elohim. To the Scandinavians, he was Bor; to the Sumerians, Nammu; to the Hindus, Varuna (" the surrounder," "the concealer," the watery and fiery god of day); to the Egyptians, Nun, the primordial watery chaos of the sky (see Figure 14). And so on to other ancient peoples [15] . Carli writes [16] : "Uranus is the same as Uren a name that, divided into the two elements of Ur and En, reminds us of the word man and sky. Actually Ur-en signifies Celestial-man: that is the sense of these two celtic words. That is then how Saturn becomes son of Heaven. But Uran or Uruan has almost the same meaning in America and Ethiopia." That is Saturn may mean "son of Uranus," in accord with the legend. Figure 13. TYPICAL DEPICTIONS OF URANUS AND SATURN. Plato gives to Ouranos the names Kosmos (the "World") and Olymos, and says that this god gave mankind numbers. Ouranos turns about his stars, displaying his jewelry. He is the eighth god "who moves in the opposite direction to all those [the sun, the moon, and the five planets], but not carrying the others with him, as it might seem to men who know little of these matters." [17] How would Super-Uranus have given mankind numbers? First of all, because humanity was created by him and spoke language owing to him. Coeval with words, or at least with drawings, may have been numbering. But I think it may especially be true because the skies opened up directly because of him. With the opening of the skies and the direction of North fixed, and the four pillars of the world defined, the purposeful orientation of humans began. By number, Plato probably means the science of numbers. Stecchini, reflecting upon his studies of ancient measures, commented that "the first problem of man was to organize the space around him." [18] Surveying began; settlements imitated "the heavenly throne and city of Super-Uranus." Paths were drawn on the Earth that traversed routes combining subterranean emanations with heavenly routes of the gods, giants, heroes, and animals [19] . The first god was the living sky and the bodies wrapped in and emerging from it in the perception of newly created humans. Every people had its shining heaven and regent of Solaria Binaria, a combination of rim of the magnetic tube, the central axis of fire, the unseen Sun, and the activated Super-Uranus. As Figure 15 suggests, the myth of the mating of sky and earth excited concrete images in Egyptian tombs and on Magdalenian bones. In the Greek myths of the creation following chaos, Hyperion (" Lights") existed before Helios (" Sun"). Both the Sun and Moon are grandchildren of Ouranos and children of Hyperion and Thea [20] . Also, in genesis, light came before the sun and stars. In the Pyramid texts, the earliest extant mythological account, the moon is not prominent in the already then old cosmogony. The texts originate in the Mercurian period (Thoth is the Egyptian god) probably between 4480-4137 B. P. So we think that the Moon was present but cannot be identified. Figure 14. HIEROGLYPH OF NUN: THE EGYPTIAN FIRST GOD, THE 'ANCIENT ONE, ' 'THE FATHER OF THE GODS'. Figure 15 THE MATING OF THE SKY AND EARTH Figure 15a. The embrace of the Sky and Earth -- Nut and Geb. A widespread and long-lasting myth holds that originally heaven and earth were close lovers and ultimately were separated for various reasons that can be related to the end of an age and catastrophism. Earth is often feminine as in Hesiod's Greek Theogony, but here in the Egyptian version of about 3000 years age (Tamenill Papyrus) is masculine figures (b) and (c) are attributed to the hunters of what is today southwestern France and too some 20,000 and 17,000 years ago. Heaven is perhaps represented by bulls, a common legendary reference. The images are close, exciting the question whether they are closer in time than is believed. In any case, the preoccupation of early thought with the mating of sky and earth is seen here in art, as elsewhere frequently in legend. Figure 15b. Bison and Birdman Composition, Lascaux Cave, Southwest France. A Bison with a spear on or in it hovers about a prostrate semi-human, both with erect phallus; a bird on stick; possibly a broken lance. A Rhinoceros to the left has six dots behind it. Figure 15c. Engraved Reindeer Bone of Bull and Pregnant Female, Langerie Basse, Southwest France. The hind quarters and phallus of a bull hover over a naked pregnant women facing up. Rendering is by Piette, pictured in Marshack. Dated conventionally to Middle Magdelenian (14000 B. P.?). Marshack asks: "Does this composition depict a myth of the pregnant goddess in relation to a horned animal which may be a sky symbol. (p. 320) Chaos itself was everywhere an undifferentiated order preceding the cracking of the heavens and the first self-awareness of humans, at which point "chaos" as it is known today, a world of horrifying disorder, began and was stamped upon the mind of man, its first perceiver on the occasion of its first perceptibility. The Exponential Principle was applied to man. {S : ECUMENICAL CULTURE} ECUMENICAL CULTURE Celestial religion began as intense preoccupation with the behavior of the gods and as the imitation of that behavior as the new humans saw and understood it. Spoken language began immediately in the band and spread quickly by breeding of the human genetic type and imitation of these by close genetic relatives. "As we follow the clues - stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures - a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true edifice...." So do de Santillana and von Dechend generalize the archaic ecumene [21] . There appear now to be a great idea of anthropology and its contradiction. The most ancient humans shared a world view which was too particular to be independently contrived in many places. We watch the first true humans spreading around the world rapidly. Now it is possible for the concept of diffusion to explain the archaic consensus; the original diffusionists were also the first humans. Otherwise we should have to resort like the evolutionists to some theory of independent invention of ideas and practices among humans who had been separated for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Or else we should have to say, with some Jungians, that our rather specific images are genetically transmitted. Furthermore, we would assert that the similar celestial occurrences of later on are seen quasi-universally and interpreted on the basis of the original ecumene. {S : THE EXPANSION OF HOMO SCHIZO} THE EXPANSION OF HOMO SCHIZO Before the age of Urania ended, and despite frequent disasters, the original band had expanded into several millions of individuals. Crude pictographic symbols, capable of naming the objects of the world, were widespread. Sculpture and painting united the gods to humans. Like the gods, the humans were terrible and restless. They moved aggressively about the globe, like evangelists, offering an instrumental memory, symbols, discipline, tools and explanations to all creatures whom they encountered, and death or slavery to all that were incapable of receiving tutelage from the newly created ones. King were designated. (The Pharaoh is born in Nun, says the Pyramid text [22] . Why, we ask, in heaven and not, like Athene, from the brow of Zeus?) Thousands of settlements were founded. Polos (the boreal hole or axis of the cosmos), polus (the end of the Earth) and polis (a city), unite the concept of an original heavenly regime located at the polar opening, the original Heliopolis (" the City of the Sun" to later sublimated Solarians, actually the "City of Super- Uranus") [23] . Rocks and trees were hewn into structures and tools. Animals were trapped and herded. Clothing was fashioned of skins, vines and fibers. Medicine was practiced. All of these processes were connected with religion. The distinction between ritual and pragmatic procedure was rarely made; all that was "useful" or "functional" was made part of religion and indeed, so far as the human was aware of, had never been anything else but religious. The question arises whether the homo sapiens schizotypicalis of Urania quickly invented agriculture or whether our theory must follow the conventional progression of hunting and gathering, domestication of animals, and then after many thousands of years, agriculture. Unequivocally, compelled both by the logic of our quantavolutionary model and by the crescendo of new studies of early farming, we would assert the concurrency of hunting, gathering, and agriculture with the first human times. Let us take only one very recent study for example. Christine Niederberger, basing her conclusions upon deep excavations in the basin of Mexico, on which Mexico City is presently situated, argues that agricultural development was part of the sedentary life of humanity in the highlands as early as or even earlier than it emerged in the coastal area of Mexico [24] . I would say that the contest is a pseudo-competition: humans quickly civilized and agriculturalized both highland and lowland. We have simply been unable yet to unscramble the succession of catastrophes that affected now one, now the other locale. As everywhere else in the world, the Mexican excavations are plagued by the hiatuses that occur at intervals, denoting catastrophes, an inadmissible theory to most contemporary anthropologists and archaeologists. One day, like the Nile of Egypt, the central high basin of Mexico may become a centerpiece for pursuing the fate of Holocene humanity. Even though much of all that is known today became known to these first people, creativity was fearfully and fanatically tied to controls, not liberties. The burst of invention came because it was an age when so many ideas were new - written upon the tabula rasa of human experience - rather than being changes from a settled routine or rite. Almost nothing of the worldwide and prolific activity of earliest Uranian humankind is to be found, or if found, conclusively identified as of this Uranian ecumenical culture. Rather, one is impelled to accept its existence out of a deductive logic - that the human race had to be originally a single band, which created an inventory of myths, inventions, objects, and practices that were shared by people of subsequently different cultures. {S : OLD AND NEW WORLD CONCORDANCES} OLD AND NEW WORLD CONCORDANCES We begin then with a single species homo sapiens schizotypicalis, who is a melange of hominidal races and who develops a single ecumenical culture. It follows that this species found its way to the wide reaches of Pangea, and that the "Old World" and the "New World" as well as Oceania had once their Uranian humans and will, with luck and hard work, exhibit them as fossils. Because of the Lunarian and perhaps subsequent catastrophes, descendants in straight line may not be present everywhere. Still, it is now easier to believe that the people of the Americas are far older, in direct or in intermediate descent, than the 12,000 years that have been conventionally allotted to them. Numerous older dates are now assigned; one authority, MacNeish, would allow 100,000 years to mankind in America [25] . Stone tools dated at 100,00 years were discovered in Western Australia lately [26] . By the quantavolutionary calendar, humans everywhere show indications of having participated in the earliest Uranian culture. We need not argue dates, but only cultures. Furthermore, no matter how complete a catastrophe, every subsequent period of our calendar can encompass both people and interacting cultures everywhere in the world. Regarding the similarities observed between American mythology and classical and Hebrew myth, Max Fauconnet writes: "Does this mean that Humanity was once upon a time reduced to a little group of individuals who later spread over the earth, bringing with them their legends which they altered through the centuries in accordance with new climates and new habits? Or, as seems more probable, are all these legends a confused account of great events on a planetary scale which were beheld in terror simultaneously by the men scattered everywhere over the world?" [27] Thus - in the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology! There would appear to be proof already of a shared culture between old worlds and new, even of cultural divergence from a possible common ecumenical culture. There is a variety of materials indicating prehistoric contact between Asia and America, little of it suggesting the conventional theory that humans arrived in the Western Hemisphere by the Bering Straits passage. For example, C. J. Riley has edited numerous essays dealing with Man Across the Sea, purportedly the latest wisdom on long-distance cultural diffusion to and from the Americas. In it, I. Sorenson presents a long list of probably diffused common or related general and technical traits. Relying also upon Hewes and Kroeber, he counts about 200 features of an "Old World eikoumene" (ecumenical culture of Euro-Asia). He thinks that one in eight is found in Mesoamerica, and that another 20 or so may be added when further investigated. This amounts to about 18%. Sorenson challenges advocates of independent evolution of cultures to prove that an item is independently evolved in two places at once, rather than, as has been the practice, of assuming independent origin, quoting Kroeber that "there is thus as much evidence needed for an assumption of independent origins as of connection: the burden of proof is equal." [28] Our revolutionary model requires not only the confirmation of its thesis of world-wide ecumenical culture but also the placement of the inventory of culture within the framework of the revolutionary calendar. We speculate that there was first the worldwide Uranian culture on the Pangean all-land Earth, followed by almost total destruction from crustal eruption and cleavage Granted beginnings of cultural differentiation in Urania, the Lunarian catastrophes would have drastically reduced and altered the ecumenical elements and promoted rapid, isolated cultural development of the major world geographical regions. Then, in Saturnia, contacts would have been resumed and, then again, chaos, reductionism, and new isolated development in the subsequent period. Then in Mercurian, Venusian, Martian and Solarian times contacts and new types of consensus appear again. The task of segregating and assigning diffused items is not impossible, but requires something like the revolutionary calendar of common world-wide experience to begin with. {S : CLIMATE CHANGES AND TIME} CLIMATE CHANGES AND TIME Some of the problems of assigning cultural event to the Uranian period are attributable to the complexity and confusion of paleo-climatic studies. For example, our quantavolutuionary model of human development calls for a worldwide human race and culture existing prior to "the ice ages" and also (it should be stressed) prior to the widespread desert conditions found in many parts of the world where ice-age theory has said that ice was absent (the Siberian tundra, the Sahara, Australian. and Western American arid zones, the Gobi Desert, etc.). It becomes difficult then to handle statements by anthropologists such as Michael Coe when he writes that "men continued to live throughout the most dessicated zones of North America. Species after species of large game animal perished not long after its [the dessication's] onset - mastodon, mammoth horse, camel, giant bison, ground sloth, deer, wolf, etc. - but the Indian survived." [29] Or the statements of numerous experts to the effect that the Magdalenian hunters of the Late Paleolithic Age flourished next to the ice caps and glaciers but then were driven out by a betterment of climate, from which their food supply, the large cold-weather animals, fled. Climatic change, for better or worse, it seems, can drive out men and animals. Actually, it may be better to try to allocate these self-same persisting Indians and disappearing Europeans to post-catastrophic periods, as survivors of Uranian and Lunarian disasters, most likely the latter, inasmuch as they were already racially and culturally differentiated. At least in the European case, the presence and disappearance of great ice fields is claimed which would require, according to our theory, that the Late Paleolithic survivor-cultures of the caves were Lunarian, because they disappeared with the ice caps. Apparently , the chronology of the so- called Upper Paleolithic may be in serious disarray. The Upper Paleolithic is put at 35,000 B. P. to 10,000 B. P. by Marshack [30] . Variant estimates are common. There are problems of overlapping, too. Neolithic-Mesolithic caves are dated at 19,000 B. P. in Greece [31] . We might well gather Upper-Paleolithic periods between the post-human Uranian and the final Lunarian periods, that is, from about 13,000( B. P) to about 9,500. That would place the Neanderthal Mousterian, and Upper Paleolithic, homo sapiens - with stone and bone kits of 26, 63 and 93 tools (by Francois Bordes' count) [32] - close to each other in time and space. But perhaps they are really so close. Henri Breuil, who brought to light much of paleolithic art, exclaimed at the correspondence of celestial Mesopotamian human-headed "bulls" with the bisons of the Southwestern European caves [33] . (See Figure 16.) He argued that they were deemed anthropomorphic because they were in fact bison-faced, not bullfaced. The bison does look human. "The identity between the 'celestial bull' and the bison is certain." [34] He believed, also, that the source of inspiration for the Chaldeans was a memory of the bison, or perhaps a contemporary experience with surviving types of the animal. In any event, the anthropomorphic trend in representing the bison occurred in both areas: the human-faced buffalo had celestial relevance perhaps less apparently in the West, where I have noted only two possibly celestial manifestations apart from the anthropomorphism that is generally to be viewed. Granted a correspondence of animals, anthropomorphism, and celestialism, we are faced with a question that Breuil did not address: could the similarities have originated some ten thousand years apart in time and thousands of kilometers apart in space? Perhaps, but one may also entertain the hypothesis that the two cultures were much closer in time and space. In this connection, it needs be recalled that the Magdalenian Upper-Paleolithic cavepainters of the West have now been shown to have counterparts as far distant as the Caucasus, Azov, Central Asia, Siberia and Bashkir [35] . If there is a connection, and not a ten-thousand year re- invention, Upper-Paleolithic cultures would be not Lunarian, but post-Saturnian, probably. They would be survivors of the Atlantis and other shelf flooding, according to the theory to be advanced in the coming chapter on Saturn. Figure 16 CELESTIAL BISON The Bison as Real, as Human, and as Divine (Source: H. Breuil, 1909, 250-4.) The renowned Abbe Breuil, speliolgist and anthropologist brought together in 1909 the bison of the Franco-Spanish cave drawings and of archaic and ancient Chaldeans. As the drawings of the Figure demonstrate the Chaldeans knew the bison (a) and depicted it anthropomorphically as "the heavenly bull." (b. c.). The "Upper Paleolithic" hunters appear to have done the same; perfectly capable of painting bisons, as attested by hundreds of examples, they too drew the bison anthropomorphically and, probably, sacredly and celestially (d, e and f). Once more the questions of chronological confusion arises; a gap of eight thousand years or so seems too great to bridge two sets of similar experiences and ideas. {S : PUZZLES OF TIAHUANACU} PUZZLES OF TIAHUANACU It is barely possible that Tiahuanacu, high in the Bolivian-Peruvian Andes, south of Lake Titicaca, is the only known Uranian site that can be called a "central site" as against "survivor sites". Poznansky says that the first period of Tiahuanacu began with "troglodytes" and flourished with large buildings of sandstone adorned with, among other features, many ordered sculptured heads, and snakes. Idols with folded arms, reminiscent of the Cycladic Aegean idols, are found (the dates seem impossibly divergent) [36] . The climate then was rainy and equatorial. The period ended, it appears, in "great tectonic movements" which "in some way or another changed the physical aspect of the continent. These alterations on the Altiplano were perhaps the repercussion of great cataclysms and evolutions which were taking place in other locations. Moreover, the latter were perhaps the cause of the migration to the Altiplano of many tribes of the Arawaks from the East, terrified and fleeing from the places where these phenomena were being produced in all their vigor." [37] Bellamy writes that the first period ended in deluges of salt waters, showing either that the land sank or that the sea rose and that in either event the city must have been at sea level [38] . But what sea? If Uranian there would have been floods from the many disturbances of motion and atmosphere, probably salt-floods, but no great sea basin. If Lunarian, the city would have been raised high and no doubt could have been flooded before the event by the tsunamis of the earth cleavage and lunar eruption, or after the event by continued sky deluges; but then the city is unlikely to have been built during the terrible years of Lunaria. So a third possibility occurs of its having been flooded in the end of Saturnian times and raised up then or during later catastrophes (as during the Venusian interruption). However there were four more periods and then came the Incas, according to Poznansky. Probably all of them ended catastrophically. Conventional dating of Tiahuanacu is actually as late as the present era. Poznansky, who was the most important figure in Tiahuanacu studies, accepted an astronomically retrocalculated dating of 15,000 B. C. for the younger, "classical" period and a much earlier date for the first period. Bellamy, on the basis of his studies of the astonishingly detailed Calendar and Idol of Tiahuanacu assigned 27,000 years to the two and to the Classical period [39] . Bellamy was pursuing the career of a postulated prelunar Satellite and believed the satellite to have collapsed shortly thereafter, with a world-wide catastrophe, and then that after a period without satellite, the Earth captured the Moon about 11,500 to 13,500 years ago this being originally the theory of Hoerbiger (and again world-wide catastrophe occurred upon capture.) The Hoerbiger-Bellamy work is important and masterly, even if quite disbelieved by other scientists. Yet, for reasons that would require another set of chapters to explain, I would seek to collapse the two events (the pre-lunar satellite and moon itself) into the encounters between the Earth and Uranus Minor, with the Moon erupting (not captured) in consequence. Then low-lying Tiahuanacu I would be Uranian; classical Tiahuanacu II (in the high Andes) would be late Lunarian with obsessive studies and calendarizing of a changing and much different moon cycle than the present cycle. The flooding of Tiahuanacu I would have occurred as it slipped into waters at the edge of the sink from which the Moon had erupted, whereupon it would have been lifted from the deeps by the westward shoving of the South American crustal plate. The desolate site would have been occupied by Lunarian survivors and rebuilt. {S : SIGNS OF URANIAN CULTURE} SIGNS OF URANIAN CULTURE From the age of Urania, other signs of human nature that remain today are scarce representations of whole human cultures. Anthropology, supported by psychology, would rebut any attempt to establish a lone trait here, another one there, and so forth, granted that a kind of evolutionism thinks of culture growth like teeth, now one molar appearing, and then another, and so on. Burials containing worked implements as in Shamrikar Caves; cemeteries (as in Palestine); sign-painting of ritual significance, as in the bison and hand drawings of the Dordogne Caves; sacrifices and cannibalism - as in the bearskull hoards of Neanderthals and perhaps even the human bone remnants of the Peking man - these are representations of larger clusters of culture traits. The painstaking labours of Andre Leroi-Gourhan in 66 decorated caves and rock shelters (a large majority of all such sites in Europe) [40] disclosed 2,188 animal figures. Of these 610 were horses, 510 bison, and 205 mammoths. About a dozen of other animals plus 9 monsters constituted the balance. In the central compositions of the caves, 92% of the bovidae (total N= 137), 91% of the bison and 86% of the horses were to be found. Few other animals were to be found with them. Only a few shapes were drawn - the phallus, vulva, naked females, and the human hand - but these in large numbers. The female signs were concentrated in the central composition or in lateral cavities. Male animals and male symbols appeared at the entrance and back of the caves. Both sexes appeared in the central display. The human hand is profusely displayed at entrances and in the central composition. Perhaps the cave art can be explained. The cave stands for the world and womb. It is definitely not earthbound. The animals could be hallucinated from the clouded skies: as in heaven, so on earth, and in the caves. The female bias, both human and animal, of central groupings, binds heaven and earth to procreation. The vaults, below which are found most central compositions, are suggestive of the vault of heaven and the spaciousness of the womb. The caves then were religious and probably for the purpose of communion and initiation. The animals are totemized and preserved in picture; they can be preserved and viewed in a guarded manner; they can be implicated in ritual activities, such as puberty rites. The common straight line probably stood for the male generative organ and also the pillars that supported or reached towards heavens; the triangle, drawn usually with convex sides, stood for the female vulva, or mons veneris, and also for the polar opening that began to occur in the cloud canopies, and appeared to be creating many objects of importance. The obese female statuettes, occurring outside the caves almost entirely, symbolized fertility and Mother Earth pregnant with all living things. The animal and male figures were realistic and ordinary enough to raise a question not of reference but of ability and intent. The will and ability to draw anything is human; therefore these signs and symbols succeeded the creative gestalt. They require drawing tools, of course. Also, fire was fully tamed. (Fire was hominidal, and some primates play with fire. But use of deep caves must be reliable, conveniently managed, and systematic.) The basic signs are worldwide, and suggest an early Uranian period when mankind was one, before the geographical cleavage of the world into parts. They come before others because of their pragmatic importance; destroyed, the secluded place in which they are found indicate a sacred sponsorship. Heterosexuality and fertility were holy self-discoveries; their symbolic representation was a giant step into abstraction and language. {S : HAND, ROD AND SNAKE} HAND, ROD AND SNAKE The hand for instance, is of primary pragmatic importance and therefore a suitable candidate for religious projection and incorporation, when, as happened, it was frequently modeled in the primeval sky at the Boreal opening; there fingers of vapors, colorfully illuminated, would often have appeared, obscuring partially the face of Super-Uranus [41] . The numerous ancient oral legends of the northernmost mountains provide representations similar to those of the hand as were similar suggestions afforded by the Boreal hole. The hand was the hand of God; concurrently the increasingly frequent flights of meteors and comets trailing fingers behind nuclear palms, stressed the symbol as a curse, a demand for solemn attention, and a way of power. Thousands of years later, the boreal and meteoritic hand was carried atop the standards of the Roman legions, along with a rounded bronze object standing for the dome of heaven (the boreal opening) whence can be traced the dome of architecture; humans observed, then invented. Some Australians, reported an English traveller of the 1880's, detached and preserved with sacred care the hands of their chiefs or ancestors. Then, "at the sight of an Aurora Australis, all the Kurnai in the camp began to swing one of these dried hands towards the portent, shouting out, 'send it away! send it away! do not let it burn us up! '" [42] Still, today, the out-thrust hand is a vulgar insult and curse upon a person in Greece. Z. Rix exposes much of the complexity of the rod as a symbol: "The sceptre, in its wider sense the rod, can be traced to a number, perhaps to all deities. In his commentary to 'The Star from Jacob, ' B. Gemser shows why the Hebrew word for rod in Num 24: 17 should actually be read 'comet. '" The sceptre is given to both heavenly and earthly rulers. Horus is called "Lord of the Rod." "Yahweh will send forth the sceptre of thy strength out of Zion" (Ps. 110: 2). Moloch and Typhon signify Lords and have sceptres too. Prehistoric stone age cultures have rods, "batons." carved with animals and occasionally with phallic shapes or as snakes, ultimately achieving the storied fame of the brazen serpent's rod of Moses [43] . Snakes appear everywhere in early human symbolism [44] . Like the rod, the cometary analogy - the writhing form slithering through the sky - is too obvious to be missed. The earliest Chinese Dragon was serpentlike but with feet. Until recently it was taught in Christian schools that the serpent of the Garden of Eden lost its feet when condemned by the Lord to crawl on its belly. Snakes accompany the carved idols of the first Period of Tiahuanacu [45] . In South Africa Bushman drawings carry snakes without precise heads or tails. But at Baume Latrone (France) is found a single giant serpent 9'9" long with small elephants and mammoths around it [46] . In prehistoric Ohio, a long serpent was sculpted in raised dirt; its jaws open wide to embrace a ball, just as the Chinese dragon was anciently pictured. (See Fig 17). Snakes are prominent in the symbolism of all of the great gods. The axis of fire and a multitude of sky apparitions set up the image. In forthcoming volumes of this work, I shall again stress the quantavolutionary view of heavenly events. Such events are not creations of the human mind making analogies from ordinary human animal existence, such as sexuality, building, working. They are independent events imagined to resemble known activities. They are named at the same time as activities are being named. They operate upon these activities to constrain and develop them culturally (humanly); yet simultaneously the heavenly events are portrayed and understood by human minds that can work only from ordinary experiences. Figure 17: THE GREAT OHIO SERPENT MOUND. Source: Corliss MGM-005, M2-46 from S. D. Peet,( 1890) 12 Amer. Antiquarian 211-28. Mound located in Adams Co., O. It cannot be assumed that the great universal myth of Cosmic Parturition of Heaven and Earth derives from the projection of the universal human experience of parturition; they are coeval. The conventional scientific attitude commits a serious error by rigidly viewing the primordial religious experience as a human invention; it would be more correct and historical to say that invention is a creation by the primordial religious experience. Before self-consciousness, neither the primate experience nor the heavenly experience could properly be said to exist; both require the self-observing mind. {S : Notes (Chapter Six: The Uranians)} Notes (Chapter Six: The Uranians) 1. W. N. Brown, 284. 2. Cardona (1978) 37, 42; cf. generally Cardona, pp. 34-54; Long (1963); Campbell (1949) 276, 282-3. 3. 68 Soviet Astronomy. 4. (1968) 178. 5. Giant Meteorites, p. 310. 6. 12 Ency, Brit. (1969) 49. 7. Vilks (1978) 1181, 1183. 8. Johanson and White (1979). 9. Brandon, 14. 10. (1976) 2. 11. Santillana and von Dechend, 303. 12. Brandon, p. 14. 13. Vail (1972); Talbott (1977A, 1977B); Cardona (1977). 14. Cohane (1969). 15. Vail (1972); Talbott (1977A, 1977B). 16. Carli (1788), 234. 17. Plato, Epinomis, 101, 83. 18. Conversation with author, April 1977. 19. Michell. 20. Vail (1977). 21. Santillana and von Dechend, 8. 22. Mullen (1973), Brandon, 8. 23. Vail, 58. 24. Niederberger (1979) 140. 25. Kennedy (1975); Greenberg (1973-4); and cf. Corliss, Compiler, Ancient Man (1978) 661-8. 26. "Man's Arrival...." (1978). 27. Fauconnet (19680 423-48. 28. J. Sorenson, 391 in Riley (1971); cf. Murdoch (1968). 29. Coe (1975) 43. 30. Marshack p. 109; on Breuil's dating see p. 69. 31. Jacobsen (1976). 32. Marshack, 77. 33. Breuil (1909). 34. Ibid., 251. 35. Bader. 30-1. 36. Poznansky (1945) II, figs. 87a, 86, 87,88. 37. Ibid., I51-2. 38. (1943) 51-2. 39. Bellamy and Allen (1959). ch. 10. Libby, in line with most Americanists, finds (1973) that "in twenty years, the firm radiocarbon dates for human occupation have never exceeded 12,000 years" in America. But Greenberg (1973-4) reports Yukon C14 dates of 70,000 and 25,000 to 35,000 in New York and in California. 40. (1976) 93 ff. 41. Vail, "Celestial Record" 33. 42. Goblet D'Aviella, 27 quoting J. Anthrop. Insti. London (1883-4) 189. 43. Z. Rix (1974). 44. Goblet D'Aviella, 39-43. 45. Poznansky II fig. 87a. 46. Shelley-Pearce citing R.& D. Morris, Men and Snakes (1965) 10, 14 and 15. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 07: } {T EARTH PARTURITION AND MOON BIRTH } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN: EARTH PARTURITION AND MOON BIRTH The Uranian age closed in a crescendo of destruction. The ancient orphic rites of Greece commemorated their remote Uranian origins when they began with the chanting of the myth of the cracking of the cosmic egg. That the world was an egg that had to be broken to begin the human experience is a myth found in all quarters of the globe. We have reported this in the preceding chapter [1] . Heaven burst to produce the great god Ouranos and the turbulent sky. Then Ouranos was dismembered by his son, Saturn, in league with Gaea, his spouse and Earth. Aphrodite Urania, the Moon, was then born, Daughter of Ouranos, she was a product of his dismembered genitalia fallen upon Earth [2] . Moon is worshipped after her father retired, disgruntled and bitter at the revolt of his children and from his injuries. The Moon would have revolved around Mother Earth (Ge or Gaia), who finally controlled her. The age of the Moon was an almost unmitigated disaster. {S : THE PASSAGE OF URANUS MINOR} THE PASSAGE OF URANUS MINOR In the 12th millennium B. P., a major element of the disintegrating Super-Uranus may have fissioned from the larger complex. We can call it "Uranus Minor" and it might have been actually the planet "Uranus" (or Neptune) of today's sky. It passed closely by the Earth, in the shape of a great ball trailing an enormous tail, which it ultimately lost, moving across the ancient axis of Solaria Binaria. It excited an accumulation of opposite electrical charge on the near pole of the Earth and the Earth's axis tilted to present the pole to the intruder. The tilt would permit the Earth to suffer the least interruption of rotation. The sudden movement loosened slightly masses of the Earth's outer shell, and unleashed floods. Great lightning bolts were exchanged between the two bodies. Fire-fragments of the intruder struck the area now called the West Central Pacific, excavating craters of thousands of square kilometers down to the levels of dense hot mantle some 30 kilometers deep [3] . The gravitational and electrical interaction between Earth and the Uranus intruder became more intense. Abetted by the peripheral loosening and cracking occurring in all directions from the path of the encounter, as much as half of the Earth's continental material exploded into the sky down to the same depth, that is, some 30 kilometers. The material thus blown and sucked high into the sky passed through the low and high cloud layers in pursuit of the rapidly retreating intruder. The greater part of it was unable to continue the pursuit and relapsed into an orbit around the globe [4] . For a time it rode around the Earth like a comet; the sky seemed alive with the streaming bodies. Within a few years, they assumed the globular form of the Moon. {S : CONTRIBUTING THEORIES AND ERUPTION DYNAMICS} CONTRIBUTING THEORIES AND ERUPTION DYNAMICS That the Moon erupted from the Earth is not a new idea, but one that received a momentary scientific appreciation in the nineteenth century. Observing the mysterious vastness off the Pacific Basin and calculating from mechanical physics, George Darwin (1879) ventured the theory and was supported by Osmond Fisher and others [5] . Howard B. Baker distributed in 1932 mimeographed copies of a treatise arguing the case. Lately, several scientists have joined in espousing the notion. In all cases except Baker, the time set for the event has been "near the beginning" -- safely removed from the evolution of the biosphere. The "beginning" has moved farther back by a factor of twenty or more, and the Moon is alleged to be four billion years old. However, as will be explained, there is no compelling reason why one cannot argue the contrary: that the Moon is a recent evacuee from the Pacific region, whose basin would otherwise have long ago been invaded by the moving continents. To my limited knowledge, after Fisher, Baker alone realized the connection between the eruption of the Moon and continental drift [6] . Early theory proposed an instability of the Earth as the cause of the fission. A passing body was not considered. Today, when aberrant bodies in space are taken more seriously -- and even the possibility of terrestrial rocks and water being splashed upon the Moon by a cometary impact has been posited by geologist Harold Urey [7] -- the first mechanism to look for is a space intruder. The stripped-down area is today occupied in part by the land that pushed into it. Conventional continental drift theory only lends confusion. But D. V. Wise writes, "Many positions of drifting or accreting continents eliminate any a priori condition to find the scar of separation on our present Earth, although if a 'navel' must be located, the Pacific basin is as good a spot as any." [8] The west coast ranges of Northern America have some formation similar to the east Chinese coast [9] . This would point to a more southerly explosion. The great Nazca Ridge and seamounts off of South America traverse the East Pacific Rise into the Tuamotu and Taburi Islands, an immensely long transverse fracturing and outbursting of magma. This feature would have followed the eruption of the lunar material. The tens of thousands of seamounts following the Great Pacific Rise are indicative of a crust that had been suddenly greatly thinned. The crust would not have been removed so deeply where land masses exist today. They would have sunk as they passed over the chasm, or they would have probably been noticed by now; but no considerable area of the true ocean bottom is of sial material. Possibly the material of the Moon could have been assembled from explosions occurring in numerous weak spots, with many catastrophic typhoons carrying matter into space. S. K. Vsekhsviatskii, Director of the Kiev Observatory (U. S. S. R.). has written that "the moment of inertia of the earth's crust is about 200 times less than that of the planet as a whole." [10] Thus crustal matter is relatively displaceable. He believes that volcanic eruption could eject matter whose moment of force would exceed the moment of inertia. "The amount of matter lost by the proto-earth turns out to be of the order of its present mass. These losses should have occurred not only through direct ejection of fragments of the crust in explosions and of ash and gas during volcanic eruptions, but also through dissipation of the atmosphere into space, which occurred, apparently more often than was thought during five billion years of earth history." [11] He calls his theory "cosmic volcanism". [12] I would categorize his theory as "long-term endogenous eruptive catastrophism." Because of the speedy rate at which comets and planetesimals dissolve into dust, Vsekhsviatskii maintains that these material bodies now moving in space were not long ago erupted (though not so recently as argued here). He does not think that cosmic large-body encounters are even required for the eruption of a planet from a moribund star such as Jupiter, or for the discharge of materials into space from a planet. Escape velocity from Earth for today's space-vehicles is 11.2 km/ sec. This is required by the gravitational attraction of the Earth and does not take account of electrical or atmospheric drag (or push) on the object "taking off" Depending upon its charge, size and distance, Uranus Minor might exert an attraction upon Earth, reducing this present escape velocity. The rotation of the Earth's denser core and mantle would be less retarded by the encounter and would slip past, beneath the surface crust, abetting its disintegration, "weakening its moorings." A high thermal zone would be created between the inner Earth and its crust, which would also help to peel it off. Many factors, quite incalculable as specifics, would determine the motions and masses of the encounter between Earth and Uranus minor. For example, if Uranus Minor had ten times the mass of the Earth and passed it at 100,00 kilometers distance, the vertical tidal displacement at the closest surface would be of the order of 5 kilometers. Not only would the Earth's motion be changed, but a large part of its crust would be stripped off in a set of gigantic swirling typhoons. This is calculated on gravitational laws. If to gravitational attraction were added an electrical potential difference, or attraction, which must have been present, the displacement and loss of crustal material would be enormously greater. The Earth would pause, to let its surface be plucked all the more neatly. The Earth's atmosphere would have been lost if it were as limited as it is today. But at that time it was continuous with the gases of the magnetic tube that stretched from Sun to Super- Uranus. Replacement of atmosphere was immediate. Indeed the Moon was formed in an atmosphere much more voluminous that its present one, which may be remnant [13] . However, typhoons would have been innumerable, intensely hot, and radiative. They would have carried away much of the heat from the explosions of the crust, helping some of the biosphere to survive. The double explosion, inwards and outwards, would have excavated the basin of the Pacific and destroyed other portions of the Earth's crust, even placing explosive strains on the opposite side of the globe, now the Middle Atlantic. Furthermore, the strains that these blows imposed upon the Earth's continental crust were reinforced by a worldwide deep friction as the Earth's rotation was interrupted and the globe was wrenched into a new axial position. The mantle and core heated up and expanded. At a boundary between the continental sial and the upper mantle, now known as the Moho Discontinuity, the Earth's shell began to slide over the mantle. The wide expanse of molten Pacific basin, bereft of continental crust, offered little resistance to other crustal movements and to fracture. A long history of the Earth before the Uranian period requires that a uniform crustal layer of silicate-aluminum rocks (sial) taking the form of granite (or an ancestral source of granite), be deposited all over the globe [14] . Today this sial is found over only 40% of the surface, the balance being ocean bottoms of silicate-magnesium chemistry (sima), typified in an igneous basalt (see Figure 18). The Moon contains 1/ 80 of the Earth's volume, representing the mixture of continental sial and upper mantle magma that was wrenched from the Pacific basin during the encounter with "Uranus Minor". "A uniform layer rather less than 41 miles thick taken off the oceanic areas would be sufficient," wrote Osmond Fisher (1882), "to make the moon." The territory stripped from Earth exceeded the volume of the Moon; much of the surplus plastered the passing body, and the remainder fell back upon Earth as stone and dust. The hot material erupted in a stream that ceased when the head of the stream had reached roughly a half-million kilometers into space. The intruder had moved off far to exert the pull required to break up the rocks and to discharge its remaining electrical potential. Figure 18. PREFERRED ALTITUDES OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE. Figure on the left: The Height and Depth of the Earth's surface (Following Jordan and Defant). Figure on the right: Frequency distribution of altitudes (Following Jordan, Wegener and Bucher). The Moon material, largely molten but beginning to cool, was reshaped hydrostatically (reinforced electrically) into a sphere. It was drawn securely into orbit as the Earth's rotation sped up. Moon's inclination away from the equatorial orbit is under standable as an effect of the direction in which Uranus Minor disappeared into far space. At first the Moon mass rotated. Then its face was fixed toward the Earth as it revolved. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who produced the continental drift theory in the 1920's touched briefly upon the missing sial of the Earth's structure, saying that "the outermost layer, re-presented by the continental blocks, does not cover the whole Earth's surface, or it may be truer to say that it no longer does so." [15] Wegener noted how clearly split and conformable are the Atlantic Ocean's east and west rims, but how the western rim of the Pacific Basin was broken up. He wonders whether "the Pacific Basin should be considered as the remains of the detachment of the moon, following [George] Darwin's idea, for this process would involve the loss of a portion of the sial crust of the earth." [16] Daring theorist as he was, Wegener might have come to the idea of Moon escaping, followed by continental rafting, if he had not believed, erroneously, that the continental sial floats on the oceanic sima and could skate upon it. The sial is deeply embedded in the crust. When it moves, it must be because the sima is molten or missing. Or, as the present prevailing theory believes, and in a coming volume I shall refute this, that the sima approaches a continental block and dives beneath it. All the forces necessary to erupt the Moon would be supplied by the tidal attraction of a great-body near-encounter; by an electrical difference of perhaps 10 18 volts between the Intruder and the Earth; and by an interrupted rotation of the Earth. Assisting the explosion would be the jack-hammer shocks of the preceding heavy meteoroid collisions. Promptly upon lunar material eruption would follow an immense semi-globular gradiant introducing gravitational slide. The continental crust would flow down the lips of the concavity. {S : LUNAR CONFORMITIES TO ERUPTION} LUNAR CONFORMITIES TO ERUPTION The chemical composition of the Moon associates it with the inner planets. However, its surface is a melt to a considerable depth, if not entirely. It lacks the granite cover of the Earth. Moreover, analysis of samples returned by the Apollo expeditions and of the Moon's specific gravity reveal a general composition resembling the crust and upper mantle of the Earth [17] . A core of metal is probably absent. "How does one get a 65-kilometer-thick crust that is 50 to 85 percent plagioclase without melting most of the moon? And if melting occurred, how could the moon's interior be relatively cool today (800 to 1000 degrees C.)? Latham speculates that half the moon would have to be melted (down to about 1000 kilometers) in order for this light stuff to flow up as slag. Gast thinks that the Moon would have to be melted down only to a depth of 200 kilometers, if the composition were homogenous but moderately high in concentrations of aluminum and calcium (about 10 percent).... Wood [Proper name] would have the outer portion of the moon melt from the heat of rapid accretion [18] . Here we are suggesting that the moon must be heterogeneously composed, like a stew of chunks and sauce. Further, subsequent to its overall melting, it has been subjected to additional destruction. It has been pelted with meteors, and exploded and ripped by numerous electrical charges. I assign all of this destruction to later encounters of the newly created moon. The Moon's turbulent history is evidenced in a list of effects recently discovered. These can be catalogued here [19] . An asterisk (*) denotes items that perhaps originated with the original creation of the Moon; in certain cases, there is a reinforcement of an original condition by later catastrophes. 1.* The Moon's surface is one-sixteenth of the surface of the Earth. Its "crust" is igneous anorthosite to a great depth [20] . This crystallization of plagioclase feldspar of 50 to 100 km depth throughout, exhibiting a seismic boundary at about 60 km, where a basaltic lunar "sima" may occur, would be derived from the Earth's crust. The Moon crust is ten to twenty times the crust of the Earth in thickness accounting for nearly half of the Earth's crust. 2.* Gases are escaping from orifices of the Moon [21] . 3. Hundreds of radioactive "hot spots" exist on the Moon [22] . 4. Fluorescence occurs, indicating radioactivity in the rocks [23] and debris. 5. A large part of the soil of tiny glass spherules formed from evaporated, and condensed and fallen, rocks [24] . 6. Traces of hydrocarbons of foreign origin (Venus?) were found in samples of Lunar soil returned to Earth. Carbide rocks were also found [25] . 7.* Rocks revealed a remnant magnetism that could not have been implanted upon cold rocks or by the Moon's present weak magnetic field, but was provided by an external body when the Moon was hot [26] . 8. Argon and neon of external origin is abundant on the surface rocks, indicating contacts with external bodies recently [27] . 9.* Moonquakes, evidencing unadjusted layers and heat in the interior, are frequent [28] . 10.* The crystalline rocks of the surface when cracked open appear extremely fresh to the practiced eye of geologists [29] ; a recent metamorphosis is suggested. 11. There is a general glaze over all surface features [30] indicating exposure to a recent immense radiation flare. 12. Heat flows outward from the subsurface, showing subsurface recent disturbances [31] . 13. Thermo-luminescence tests showed anomalies on close sub-surface rocks resulting from thermal disturbances during the last 10,000 years [32] . 14. The greatest crater, Aristarchus, and many others, are still warm [33] . 15. Aristarchus and many other craters, and the rilles or trenches that run towards and end beneath craters, may have been caused by cosmic lightning [34] . 16. Radon-222 is emanating from Aristarchus. It is the daughter element of radium 226. It has a half life of 1620 years. The radium 226 was probably created by cosmic lightning bolts [35] . 17. A range of anomalous colorful low mountains appears to have been welded onto the Moon as debris from an external body (Mars) [36] . 18.* The Moon's atmosphere is exceedingly thin but is building up [37] , and therefore must have been wiped out recently or began recently at zero pressure. 19.* Samples of lunar solids are "depleted in all substances which boil below about 1300 C, as well as lead, which melts but does not boil below this temperature [38] ." "When the lunar rocks are compared with terrestrial rocks or with meteorites, they are found to be systematically depleted in the more volatile chemical elements." [39] 20.* The rock, breccia and soil samples exhibit a striking structural adsorption of rare gases that implies a great energetic exchange upon the Moon's surface [40] . 21.* Apart from direct evidence of the Moon's body forming from the Earth's crust, any theory of Moon capture must explain how this low density planet happens to "specialize" in non-basic rock. 22.* Anorthosite of the Moon's crust may be formed in only 1000 years [41] . Small particles could accrete into a moon in 1000 years [42] . 23.* Tektites, possibly from the Moon, have isotopic composition much like Earth materials [43] . 24.* The side of the Moon facing Earth is more basaltic (sima) while the dark side is more sialic. This may indicate that the Moon assembled itself under the tidal influence of the Earth, and that the order of escape was preserved. 25.* The energy disposal problem is easier to solve with an eruption theory involving a large 3rd body encounter than with a capture theory, where the internal forces of the Earth would have to do all the work and take all the heat [44] . 26.* The catastrophic tube (typhoon) mechanism disposes of heat into farther space. The single volcano Krakatoa billowed four cubic miles of rock and ash into the stratosphere, some of it shooting 40 to 50 miles high. With a third body, and in the presence of an electrical attraction and an atmosphere that is moving away rather than obstructing escape, escape velocity (11.2 km/ s) could be readily achieved by such material. And, it is important to emphasize, the amount of the material, which is thousands of times the amount sent up by Krakatoa, is not especially relevant; the intensity of the field's attraction affects a single particle no less because it is affecting vast numbers of particles. Moreover, if the lower more dense layers of the globe are retarded either more or less than the crust, the crust will be slung off. 27.* The Moon's "anomalous" inclination in respect to the ecliptic shows the influence of a third body. Theoretically the Moon should be lined up directly between the Earth and Sun, in a position that is modified only by the presumed effects of the Earth's rotation upon the Moon. 28.* The radiogenic helium (He 4 ) of the Moon's rocks that would have appeared in long ages is missing, implying youth or thermal destruction, or both [45] . 29.* A comparison of the number of objects observed colliding with or passing close to the Earth with the number of lunar craters of a given diameter indicates that there are 400 times as many craters in the lunar maria as one would expect [46] . If the Moon is 11,500 years young, this indicates how it has served as an electrical collecting and discharging battery for the Earth and one reason why the Earth has not been utterly devastated recently. 30.* "The moon and the earth were formed in the same general region of the solar system. This conclusion is based on the isotopic composition of oxygen in the lunar samples, which is indistinguishable from the composition of terrestrial oxygen." [47] Moreover both cases are distinguishable from meteoritic matter examined from elsewhere in the solar system. 31.* None of the material of the Moon is of primordial planetary material "by any stretch of the imagination." [48] 32.* An early fission of Moon from Earth would have left the two-part system with much greater angular momentum than it possesses. (This is directed at many who believe in an early fission, without an external body encounter.) [49] 33.* There is no known mechanism for converting a lunar trajectory to its present orbit if it had come close to the Earth from a faraway origin [50] . 34.* The magnetic dipole at the "center" of the Earth is actually 436 kilometers off-center, displaced toward the Pacific Basin. All of these are geophysical and astronomical arguments for Moon eruption, a recent eruption besides, and for more recent disturbances. The list of legendary arguments is to be presented at the end of the chapter, in the light of further geological evidence. {S : THE GLOBAL FRACTURE SYSTEM} THE GLOBAL FRACTURE SYSTEM (See Figures 19 and 20) Heezen and Hollister, in their late work in oceanography, begin by quoting a passage from the Roman Seneca, which, though myth, has an even more modern meaning that they can have guessed : "An age shall come with late years when Ocean shall loosen the chains of things, and the earth be laid open in vastness, and Tethys shall bear new worlds...." Tethys was the legendary original sea of Pangea, girdling the globe. As soon as the Moon material was pulled into space, the globe fractured. A cleavage shot forward northwards and southwards from the center of the then north pole. The fracture started straight but owing to the complex of motions and forces operating simultaneously, it assumed a final form much different from a model fracture of an unmoving globe. The fracture moved rapidly; there is no essential difference between cracking a crystal ball and an immense globe; theory apart, the cuts are fresh, report the oceanographers of the fracture [51] . Figure 19. THE EARTH TODAY : CLEAVAGES, WELTS, MOUNTAIN FOLDS AND VOLCANISM. This map is merely suggestive. Submarine continental shelves are treated here as "land." Many details that indicate recent quantavolutions of the Earth are omitted. Only a globe can represent accurately and vividly the features-fractures, mountain ranges, volcanos, sea mounts, continental shelves, and torques of the crust-that are conceptualized in the text. Volcanos (and earthquakes) by the hundreds follow fracture lines. Sea mounts reach up from the oceanic abyss by the tens of thousands. The Arctic Sea stands mostly on continental shelves. The Ridges marking the major fractures are cut transversely by thousands of smaller fractures, varying greatly in length, all together supporting the idea of sudden explosive cracking and expansion and repeated torques of the surface. The Trans-Asian Ridge refers to a cut that swings North of India, through Lake Baikal and along the Lena River into the Arctic Sea where it connects with the Atlantic Ridge. Antarctica was split away from the unexploded land masses and moved towards the exploded area, as was Australasia; Eastwards, the Americas were likewise thrust (or attracted) towards the raw new basin. For superior comprehension of the totally integrated process of global surface quantavolution this chapter might be read with a Replogle "World Ocean" globe or similar map globe at hand for reference. Figure 20. SCHEME OF THE LAND AREA OF PANGEA AND URANIA. Area sizes are rough and include continental shelves. The outer boundary of the figure outlines the estimated devastated crust and expanded surface of the globe. There is little reason to believe that the fracture system occurred along the lines that it follows today, except in its most general configuration. The original configuration probably followed the model of a globe that is struck, exploded, and cracked. Many types of "wild" movements would develop immediately from internal sources even while the Earth's external force field was changing. The Table below gives the approximate distribution of Sial land among present-day continents, during Pangea. The total ocean surface, less the continental shelves, measures approximately 361 million km 2 . of this 200 had once been sial. The total Pangean globe surface is estimated at 400 million km 2 . The expansion allowed for is 110 km 2 . The surface of the globe increased by 20%. The total volume of the globe is 1083 x 10 9 km 3 . THE LAND SURFACE OF PANGEA USING PRESENT LAND FORM NAMES (approximately, in million km 2 .) Land form Surface Stacking Shelves Total area Asia 45 5 6 56 N. America 24 3 5 32 Africa 30 2 2 34 S. America 18 3 4 25 Antarctica 14 1 3 18 Europe 10 3 4 17 Austrocean 9 2 7 18 TOTAL 150 19 31 200 Destroyed continental sutfaces 200 New Ocean Basin Expansion 110 Total 510 *Note on Table: Continental Slopes are not considered continental, but as flow material subsequent to break-apart. However, where continental shelves are poorly defined, continental slope contributions to true Pangean land mass are estimated and included. The fracture cut down between the land that now became separated into the Americas on the one side and Euro-Africa on the other. Within hours, it neared the "south" pole and promptly forked east and west. Today's map only makes it seem that the rupture circled around Antarctica; it must have cut straight on through Antarctica-Australia, after which the whole "South Pacific" started to move North, pulling or being pushed by the ridge chasm which was then followed by Antarctica which was being carried "south" by the southwest movement of the Americas. The eastwards rupture divided into another double fork, of which one prong moved between Australasia and Antarctica, pushing Australia eastward, and the other between India and Africa, pushing India northwards. Land bridges remained between Australia and India, but New Zealand became an island surrounded by oceanic deeps. All of the Asian mass was rapidly moving east toward the vast hollows that had been created in the crust. The move of Australia was paralleled by this move of the northern lands. The western Indian Ocean basin was bulldozed by the Indian subcontinent as it moved north, leaving behind its giant tracks on the ocean floor. The westward rupture also split into two. One fork joined the southern cleavage proceeding from below Australia. The other moved north above the east flank of the great pit left by the Moon. As soon as it rejoined the north polar cleavage, completing its globe-girdling tour, it was partially overrun by the North American continent which was being pushed southwestward by the expanding Atlantic cleavage and pulled by the gravity incline of the Moon pit. {S : THE TETHYAN WELT} THE TETHYAN WELT Meantime, while the north-south and south-north fractures had raced around the Americas, a perpendicular or transverse fracture had occurred as they passed the old equatorial area of the globe. This area, with its old rotational bulge was straining backwards in the Northern hemisphere and forwards (eastward) in the Southern hemisphere. Its fracture, relieving the strain, moved readily eastwards, along the longitudinal Mediterranean on the east. It is marked by a welt, more than a cut; the welt takes the form of volcanoes, mountains, deeps and fractures. From the Mediterranean this Tethyan welt crossed over the new north-east fork of the Indian fracture at the Aegean area and Red Sea -- Dead Sea axis; it carried through the middle of the Near East and then through the southern borders of the Asian continent. There it was to be over-ridden by the Indian subcontinent moving northwards. But it continued and appears in what was becoming the South Seas Islands. It crosses the Pacific and enters the Caribbean through Central America, finally completing its world circuit at the Atlantic Ridge. Especially in the new Pacific Basin, tens of thousands of molten fingers stretched up toward the continental debris that was escaping into space and then dropped back as blisters upon the ocean basins. These froze into the seamounts, monument to the creation of the ocean. Lava poured forth from the world-circling fracture system, from volcanic fissures along the main ridges, and from a multitude of transverse fissures all along the main lines. The continents moved rapidly from the Atlantic ridge, and the new oceanic surface was paved by lava flows as the land retreated. Ashes rained down heavily; today drills probing the edges of the Northwest Atlantic continental slope penetrate "a succession of ash layers" before striking the basaltic lava of the true ocean bottom [52] . In the Pacific the major fractures appear less profound. Great rises, rather than abrupt ridges, occurred because the surface land shell had already been exploded. It was soft and deeply dug already. The major fracture system there was over-ridden by the North American continent and erupted its lavas underground or on the land through many volcanoes and fissures. Westwards it merged with the teeming seamounts, sending long transverse fractures out over the molten pit of the Moon. {S : GLOBAL EXPANSION} GLOBAL EXPANSION Expansion of the globe occurred as a result of rotational slowdown [53] . Also, throughout the flayed regions where contact was made with interior deep magma directly, some expansion of the globe took place. Loss of electrical charge may also have decreased the density of the Earth. Indeed, the volume of the Earth may be much greater without the Moon than it was before the Moon erupted. Expansion occurred especially where the sphericity of the globe needed to be preserved, that is, in the southern oceans where the lines of fracture girdle the globe latitudinally before moving northwards again. It occurred too, at the new equator and at the old poles, in response to the new direction of spin. Contraction and conservation of form, on the other hand, took place at the new poles, the old equator, and where the extensive thrusts and folds raised up mountains [54] . Thus were the principal features of modern world geography established: the distinct continents, the ocean basins, great oceanic ridges; mountains raised high in the westernmost Americas by the bull-dozing ice and undermass moving on the magma and against the inertial magma and core: Alpine Europe pushed up by Africa moving over the Tethyan welt and then back again; Northern India colliding into Asia; and uncounted thousands of seamounts. If the Earth had not ruptured, it would have exploded, and life would have terminated. The cleavage permitted movement in the shell; the sial rode atop the sima and all of this to a depth of 5 to 10 kilometers (the Moho Discontinuity) rafted to new places carrying the surviving biosphere [55] . The rafting is almost entirely completed now but the Mohorovicic Discontinuity marks throughout the world the level at which the crust exploded and the crust slipped. Osmond Fisher, in the 1880's, can be credited with combining the ideas of the eruption of the Moon from the Pacific Basin with the prompt cleavage of the Americas from Euro-Africa and their rafting by great new convection currents set up by the moon explosion [56] . George Darwin had originated the first idea and placed the event at only 50 million years ago. {S : THE MAGNETIC FIELD} THE MAGNETIC FIELD A recent standard textbook reports that "we know disturbingly little about the interior of our planet... The understanding of planetary magnetism is another source of frustration for our understanding of even the Earth's main field is very poor. In fact, about all that is in reasonably good shape is the description of the field: its origin is still uncertain." [57] Robert Haymes, the author, then gives the basic facts and illustrates them by a figure (adapted here as Figure 21). The small object in the center of the Earth is an approximation of a bar magnet to represent the source of the field. Actually this dipole is "offset 436 kilometers from the center of the Earth, displaced towards the Pacific Ocean. It is tilted with respect to the Earth's rotation axis by approximately 11 ... The dipole axis intersects the surface of the Earth at points far distant from the north and south poles. These intersection points are called the north and south 'geomagnetic poles. ' The north geomagnetic pole is located in Greenland at 81.0 N, 84.7 W, in the geographic system of coordinates. The corresponding south geomagnetic polo lies in Antarctica, at 75.0 S, 120.4 E." Figure 21. THE EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD. "The eccentric-dipole model of the earth's magnetic field (schematic view). The equivalent dipole is -436 km distant from the center of the planet and is closest to the surface in the hemisphere that contains the Pacific. Hence at a given altitude the field is stronger over the Pacific than it is over the Atlantic. The geomagnetic axis is tilted 11.5 with respect to the earth's rotational axis (the N-S line in the figure)." (Haymes, 1971, p. 215). Haymes proceeds to discuss the "dip poles." "The offset of the equivalent dipole from the planetary center results in geomagnetic field lines that are not vertical where the dipole axis intersects the surface of the earth. Thus the field lines are inclined about 3.9 to the vertical at the geomagnetic poles. "The places where the field lines are vertical are known as the 'dip poles. ' These locations are controlled both by the offset and by the substances of the crust. "Some observers believe the dip poles are located near 82.4 N. 137.3 W (Labrador), and at 67.9 S, 130.6 E (Antarctica)... It is ironic that the dip coordinates -- which should not be particularly representative of anything fundamental -- seem to be a better coordinate system for discussion of the cosmic radiation than does the geomagnetic system of coordinates." That is, cosmic rays correlate with dip pole coordinates rather than with either the magnetic or rotational poles. The theory of Solaria Binaria, presented in chapter five, and the theory of its breakdown and the subsequent lunar eruption and earth cleavage as presented here, taken with the critique of magnetic time tests in chapter three, altogether suggest several points that may order the quite confused data of the Earth's magnetic field. 1. The offset of some 436 km of the magnetic center from the geographical center of the Earth would be the consequence of the enormous pull on the heavy old center of the Earth of Uranus Minor that ripped off the crust of the Pacific hemisphere. 2. The magnetic field of the Earth is fixed as it was when the Earth was part of the magnetic tube and oriented to its rotation around the electrical are axis of that tube. 3. The magnetic state of the mass of the Earth, which is remanent and not caused by any contemporary rotation of the globe, describes the fossil position of the elements of the mass in relation to each other. 4. The expansion of the Earth, which occurred with the electrical and chemical heating of the globe at the time of the lunar eruption and global cleavage, may be indicated by the southern bias of the north magnetic pole and the northern bias of the south magnetic pole. The Pacific area swelled more than the globe as a whole but there was a total expansion extending even to the northern and southern extremities. 5. The lava that welled up in countless places around the globe lost its remanent magnetic orientation by heating, and thereupon was imprinted with the old magnetic field that it had just thrown off but in a different orientation. It cooled and moved away from its eruption coordinates to let s new mass well up and take on the same coordinates respecting the magnetic poles. 6. Siderally oriented tilting of the Earth's axis, without change of rotation, cannot cause a change in orientation of the magnetic field of the Earth. 7. The magnetic poles are near to and seemingly related to the north and south rotational poles largely because the latest change in the rotational axis, probably at the time of the passage of Uranus Minor, placed the poles near them. 8. The unpredictable and mysterious instability of the magnetic poles is produced by the isostatic adjustments occurring throughout the globe as a result of the various body cosmic encounters of the past 14,000 years. {S : OCEAN DEVELOPMENT} OCEAN DEVELOPMENT Earth's crust was half erupted into space upon the intrusion of Uranus Minor without Earth's losing its atmosphere; for the atmosphere of Earth was almost identical with and part of the much greater atmosphere consisting of the gases of the magnetic tube. New atmosphere flowed in readily to replace all that was drawn off or destroyed with the crustal material. Moon's atmosphere was barely allowed to form and was almost entirely lost in later destructive encounters. New waters poured off the continents and from the skies into the new basins. Possibly a last great deluge of water came from Uranus Minor as it passed; in 1977, five rings were discovered around the planet Uranus. Like the rings of Saturn they may contain ice. By feeding the fissures and volcanoes, the waters sped up greatly the spread of the oceanic depressions. The world was hot, steaming, and often flooded or on fire. The atmosphere was laden with combustion products and had exchanged components with Uranus Minor. Within a century sizeable basins had been basalted to receive the vast new waters that mingled with the old. The rate of development of the ocean basins was negatively exponential. Within the 3,500 years (11,500 to 8,000 B. P.) of the age of Lunaria (the Moon eruption and Earth cleavage), the full basins were formed and paved. And, as it happened, the waters descended from the skies and poured off the land to partly fill them. At the end of the period, the cataclysms had ceased but the skies were still heavily clouded; the continents were shifting but at an almost negligible rate. The shores were at the edges of today's continental slopes. It is for another volume to say how the world was nearly destroyed and finally saved by the first Uranian deluges and then the creation of the ocean basins to carry them. If the swamps of Pangea and the depression of Tethys were to become the waters of today and the basins filled, approximately 82/ 100 of a cubic kilometer of water per second would have had to fall for 1725 years. This is about the rate of annual rainfall in Vancouver, Canada, where some 200 inches per year occur. The time period would be divided into four periods of accumulation : the Pangean vapor condensation into swamps and ponds, the early Uranian canopy collapses, the passage of Uranus Minor at the time of the Lunar eruption, which not only brought new waters but also removed some water, and finally the great Noachian deluge of the end of the Saturnian age. {S : LUNAR WORSHIP} LUNAR WORSHIP In Lunarian times, vast regions of the Earth disappeared and all others were devastated. Animal and plant species would have been threatened with extinction. The human species was no exception ; from millions, it probably decreased to a few groups, existing far from one another, small family bands accompanied by individual survivors of foreign groups. The collective memories of the groups recalled the vanished age of Urania and the civilizations that had been blasted from the Earth, drowned, or shaken to death by earthquakes at the approach of the Uranian planet. The memories were painful and unbelievable to the psychologically and physically depressed survivors. They were therefore distorted, suppressed, and selectively elaborated. The Moon was watched with fear and trembling the less so as it became regular in its behavior. Its routine and successive phases were marked down and the logic of a calendar moving through time was founded. Coincidentally, the Moon settled into a periodicity that came close to the periodic menstruation of women. (But it may be, as will be discussed soon, that the menstrual cycle was psychosomatically adjusted to the lunar cycle.) The period of menstruation was lent importance as a result. Witchcraft flourished around the feminine mystique. Of course, the consequences were much more manifold. Few, it any, aspects of life were freed to develop without religious connections to what was experienced with the coming of the Moon and with lunar behavior. The ecumenical Uranian culture remained the substraturm of Lunarian culture. However, many Lunarian cultures developed in isolation. Languages revived apart. Probably here now arose the great differences among the major linguistic groups. So also institutions, arts, and crafts. Diffusion was at a minimum. Lunar religion everywhere was based upon Uranian religion. A sun calendar may not have developed anywhere, because the sun was still diffused as "Hyperion", not "Helios" and was relatively remote as a threat. Its regular (or at least slowly changing behavior) permitted it a minor role in influencing human minds and practices. The Moon was related to imprinted fears, more variable, closer to the Earth, and for all these reasons, terribly fascinating. As the lunar cycle became regular, the remaining portion of Super-Uranus, known to us as (super) Saturn, was reestablished as the (new) chief of gods. Already in the age of Lunaria, he was recognized and worshipped in the place of Uranus. But the Moon's chief place in immediate religion was abundantly evidenced. When, by Homer's time, in the aftermath of Martian destruction, the Moon was stereotyped for its lightness of character, it could be said, as did Vico with marvelous intuition, that the fables "were received by Homer in this corrupt and distorted form." [58] {S : SUNKEN LANDS} SUNKEN LANDS Sunken lands are universal in legend. There is also some geophysical evidence for them. Were an explanation not afforded of the eruption of land into space, and, later on, of the deluging of the continental shelves and slopes, there would be little possibility of explaining the legends, because the true ocean bottoms are uniformly of igneous basaltic Sima. Sial cannot be sought in the Sima, either; the two have different origins and do not mix. The widespread evidence of marine life on the land, found at all altitudes, does not prove, as many catastrophists and uniformitarians believe, that the land was once below the sea, and below the sea lies other land. They have not caught up with the new oceanography. The marine beds on the land are the residue of floods, tides, fall-outs from typhoons, and dried-up shallow seas. The reports of sunken lands are important pieces in the great puzzle of the history of the Earth if only because they indicate where the continents were fractured, exploded, and drowned. It is likely that most land-sinking occurred in two great phases: the Lunarian and the Saturnian. Figure 22 LEGENDARY SUNKEN LANDS AND CULTURES OF THE WORLD. The map here presented as Figure 22 calls to mind the main legendary catastrophes. Apparently, if all the legendary claims were accepted, the concept of an all-land Pangean and Uranian world would become practically an established fact. The map highlights another point : peoples from all around the world and all types of culture are obsessed with the idea that masses of neighboring land were deluged or overrun by water and sank forever into the depths. As John Locke said of the "fire of hell" and Vico of the "thunderbolts of Jove," an idea so universal and persistent must refer to an intense experience suffered in the past. The map is extremely schematic, as is the evidence. It merely indicates areas and names them. The size of an area conveys little or no meaning, especially considering that almost the whole globe was land-covered before the floodings and explosions. The location of the center of each culture, too, is almost never agreed upon. As Bellamy once wrote: "So the German ethnologist Frobenius sought Atlantis in Nigeria; the Anglo-Spanish archaeologist Whishaw placed it in Andalusia; the German Schulten found it at Tartessos at the mouth of the Guadalquivir; the Germans Borchardt and Herrmann, and the French Count de Prorok, suggested North Africa; Colonel Fawcett looked for Atlantean vestiges in the Amazon Valley; and Central America and the West Indies have also been mooted". [59] The map does not include vast civilizations thought to have been destroyed by water action (deluges, tides) on land as for instance the Gobi (Desert) Sea Civilization, or the Sahara (Desert) Sea Civilization (both indicated on the map). Nor does it include hundreds of known sites, representing thousands of unknown sites, overrun by water either in localized or general catastrophic action, as for example Lake Issyk Kul (Kirghiz SSR., Lake Polaki (Poland), Mecklenburg Lake (East Germany) Lake Sevan (Armenian SSR), Lake Amatitlan (Guatemala), the Gulf of Taranto (Italy), St. Gervais (France), Tyre (Phoenicia). Chersonesus (Crete), Volga Basin (Russian SSR). and Bab el-Mandeb (Gulf of Aden). The map exaggerates the polar seas. Hence, on the scale of the map, Beringia should be perhaps extended throughout the shallow arctic seas, thus coloring practically the whole width of the map to the extreme North. All continental shelf lands were overwhelmed by water around 6,000 years ago, as the next chapter will argue. Only a few of these areas are listed among the famed legendary places on the map. However, a glance at the chart following Figure 20 will show how extensive the shelves are and therefore how enormous the deluges of the period. Many details not given here are provided in Kondratov's Riddles of Three Oceans. For instance, he writes: "The majority of experts agree that dry land once existed in the Easter Island area. It may have been a large land mass or most probably a group of islands that later sank. [or both in successive phases.] But when did they sink? The same experts say this happened very long ago, before human times or, at the very latest, at the end of the last Ice Age, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago." [60] {S : LEGENDARY CHAOS AND THE MOON} LEGENDARY CHAOS AND THE MOON The Fish-Man, Oannes -- goes the legend -- came ashore among the first and savage people of Babylonia, and he taught them the human arts. He also told them the history of the world from its beginnings. "There was a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous things..." [61] (Another translation of the same passage says: "In the early days, before the Earth was yet made, a number of terrible beasts were the masters of the heavens.") [62] "The person, who was supposed to have presided over them, was a woman named Omoroca; which in the Chaldean language is Thalatth; which the Greeks express as Thalassa, the sea; but according to the true computation, it is equivalent to Selene, the Moon. All things being in this situation, Belus came, and cut the woman asunder : and out of half of her he formed the earth, and of the other half the heavens; and at the same time destroyed the animals in the abyss... This Belus, whom men call Dis, divided the darkness, and separated the Heavens from the Earth, and reduced the universe to order. But the animals so lately created not being able to bear the prevalence of light, died." [63] (Belus then causes new animals and men to be formed from the blood of the godhead and the soil of the earth, and these could bear the light.) [64] "Belus also formed the stars, and the sun, and the moon, together with the five planets." Then a long time passed until the deluge (almost surely the flood of Noah) was announced by the god, Kronos, to the King Xisuthrus (also Sisithrus) [65] . In this account of chaos and creation, we note that the heavens were overcast and loaded with waters. We note, too, the association of the monster queen with the undifferentiated chaos, then with the sea and the moon. Further, she later is divided into heaven and earth amidst the general destruction of the monstrous species. The god Belus acts the part of a manifested Super-Uranus or of the Super-Saturn that succeeded the destruction of Uranus, and thus corresponds to the Elohim (Saturn-Kronos) of Genesis. Nor may one overlook the possible significance of the other name of Belus, "Dis," for it resembles "deus" (god) in Latin. In the beginning, says the Bible, "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit (or wind) of God was moving over the face of the waters." [66] And then Elohim made the light and he separated the heavenly waters from the earthly waters. The Firmament of Heaven was between the two regions of water. Then the earthly waters were collected so that dry land might appear. Plant life then flourished. Whereupon, lights appeared in the Heaven and time-reckoning began. In a passage following shortly, Genesis says that after heaven and earth separated, and before any plants lived, the earth was watered by a mist from the ground and in this setting men was "formed of dust from the ground." "Whence he was placed in the Garden of Eden, which was watered by rivers." [67] We suspect that a watchful ex-hominid, newly possessed of a sense of time, was near to the events of the great days. Elohim may be here interpreted psychologically as a projection of man, the Watcher, already human, already reading himself into the gods, and the gods' "traits" and actions into himself. The watcher could not be impressed by the Sun, which was below, that is, South of the Earth by our model of Solaria Binaria. This Elohim, or Heaven, must be Super- Uranus-and-Saturn. Nor was he impressed by a Moon, for the Moon did not exist. As many commentators have noted, the Bible seems to say so. Many other indications also support the scenario. We wonder whether this is the Lunarian period of chaos. From India comes a similar image, here described by van Buitenen: "After the ultimate conflagration, the Fire of Doomsday, the Ekpyrosis, which Markandeya like another Manu survives, the rain and floods come and render earth one vast ocean, and desolately he roams the vast desolation -- a Manu without the need for an ark, but in search of his fish. He finds if in form of a child sitting in a banyan tree -- a tree to which the fish piloted Manu? -- the tree whose branches are roots. Inside the child Markandeya explores the worlds in all their variety, and these 'worlds' are of course nothing but their own seeds." [68] Distinguishing between accounts of the Lunarian catastrophes and those of Saturn, several thousand year later, is difficult. The legendary accounts usually confused the chaos and creation of the primeval period with the later accounts; although holding to the cyclical ages of disaster, the mind tended to squeeze or reorder universal primeval happenings together as time went on. But note that in neither of the Genesis creation passages is there a human intelligence when it begins; it is created. By Noah's time man was fully intelligent and had a history. In both passages Saturn is the great natural god. He is in the first place the Super-Saturn who presides over the age of Lunaria when the Moon and Earths cleavage occurs. He is also the god, the planet, that fissioned in a nova and retired in favor of Jupiter-Zeus-Jehovah. But long before the deluge of Noah, in the age of Peleg, the earth was divided. So says the Bible. Patten regards this to be referring to the great earth cleavage [69] . In Justin the Historian, one finds another intriguing reference, a hypothesis, "whether the world, which is now divided into parts, was formerly one." [70] Among the people living around the strait of Bad el-Mandeb, that runs between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, it is believed that the strait gets its name, which means the "gate of tears," in memory of the immense number of people who died in the Earth convulsion that separated Africa and Asia and created the Red Sea [71] . Hesiod, in his Genealogy of the Gods, recites that Ocean (Okeanos) was the son of Ouranos (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) Okeanos came down to Earth. But meanwhile Ouranos had thrown all of his sons down into the nether regions and had begun to suffocate his wife, Gaea, the Earth- Goddess. The presence of the father of all the gods became intolerable. Across the world, American Indians tell this story which sounds like the catastrophe of 11,500 B. P.: "Monan, without beginning or end, author of all that is, seeing the ingratitude of men, and their contempt for him who had made them thus joyous, withdrew from them, and sent upon them tata, the divine fire, which burned all that was on the surface of the earth. He swept about the fire in such a way that in places he raised mountains, and in others dug valleys. Of all men, one alone, Irin Mage, was saved, whom Monan carried into the heavens. He, seeing all things destroyed, spoke thus to Monan: 'Wilt thou also destroy the heavens and their garniture? Alas! Henceforth where will be our home? Why should I live, since there is none other of my kind? ' Then Monan was so filled with pity that he poured a deluging rain on the earth, which quenched the fire, and flowed on all sides, forming the ocean, which we call the parana, the great waters." [72] The people of the Pelew Islands in the Pacific say that their ancestors lived in a great land. Divine heroes who were strangers appeared among them but only one woman gave them hospitality. They told her that a great flood would take place when the full moon first appeared in the heavens. And it happened so, and she alone was saved, on a raft [73] . {S : THE MOON IN MESO-AMERICA} THE MOON IN MESO-AMERICA The Popol Vuh, the "Bible" of the Quiche, an ancient and still flourishing people found now in Guatemala claims that their ancestors arrived in Central America from the East when the full moon first appeared [74] . Throughout Meso-America, said Spinden in 1917, there is an archaic culture. It reaches down to the Andes. Coe believes that the end of the Ice Ages brought desiccation and extirpation of many species "but the Indians survived." [75] I would speculate that much of this "archaic culture" belongs to the reconstruction period following Lunaria, that is, the Saturnian period, and ascribe the dessication to the Jovean-Venusian period. Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg's 19th century studies [76] , undeniably great, yet catastrophist, and therefore ridiculed by his very admirers, led him to two sets of disasters; however he decided later that both must be joined. The first, he said, was a sinking of a great crescent of land stretching from Central America to the Canary Islands; seven major islands remained above water. Yucatan itself sank, and then later arose. This was the origin of the Atlantis legend, he thought. It took place 6000 to 7000 years ago. Later Bourbourg discovered the famous Troano Codex of the Mayans, and deciphered it with some success. He thought that the Codex told of the catastrophe of Atlantis, and placed the time now at 9973 B. C (11,973 B. P.), using Mayan time reckoning. If the two times and two events are kept distinct, they would correspond with the great Lunarian disaster (9500 B. C.) and the Saturnian continental-shelf flooding of around 4000 B. C. Bourbourg stressed an important point : the earliest religions in Meso-America, he said, were Lunarian. Lunar myths were the sources of all later rites and symbols. Bancroft in the Native Races of America repeats Bourbourg's theory [77] . It seems proper to repeat that despite the recent surge of interest in it, Meso-American mythology is almost untouched by comparison with the great labors that have gone into Near Eastern and Classical European study over many centuries. The Chibchas and Mozcas of the high eastern plateau of Columbia report that they were once uncouth savages and were visited by Bochica, a foreign teacher with a golden staff who taught them the arts. His beautiful but wicked wife Chia once flew into a rage and caused the whole plateau and Earth to be flooded. Few beings survived. Bochica banished Chia from the Earth and made her into the Moon. Then he opened gorges in the mountains to let the floods out [78] . Humboldt reported 150 years ago a tribe of Guiana (S. A.) that claimed to be proselenian [79] . Bellamy, who so carefully studied the Moon myths, claims that the Peruvians and other Americans drew the Moon as a tiny disc, never in its sickle forms, and attached to it the evil, feared sign of the puma. Bellamy believes the Moon was captured, not erupted, about 11,500 B. C. His search found few capture myths (and less eruption myths, such as I have cited above); this he attributes to the great cultural devastation caused by the tides pulled up in the encounter [80] . It appears that the Moon was the earliest object of adoration among the people who founded Tiahuanacu. Poznansky writes: "With regard to the worship of the Moon, we are familiar with many devices which demonstrate its great importance, its greater transcendence and generalization than in the case of the worship of the sun, at least during the primitive period of Tiahuanacu. For every ten ceramics, more or less, which through their signs depict the worship of the Moon, we find only one or two connected with that of the sun...." [81] The Moon, we have said, was very important to the Mayans. Anthropologist Michael Coe describes the Mesoamerican view of the Moon in a startling parallel to Robert Graves' (and the general) rendition of its worship in archaic Greece. "As a female, the lunar orb was for the Mesoamericans the very embodiment of the fair sex. The young, waxing moon was seen as a beautiful woman, forming part of a complex of youthful goddesses associated with sexual love.... As the Moon waned and gradually slipped back towards the eastern horizon, she became an old and somewhat malevolent deity, with snakes in her hair or on her skirt, or with spindles placed in her headdress as an indication of her role as a patroness of weaving... Again, she apparently formed part of a larger complex of aged goddesses and merged in many ways with some of these. particularly with the female half of the dual Creator God." [82] Later, Coe remarks that "the Moon was felt to exert a powerful influence on terrestrial events." [83] {S : WESTERN EUROPE} WESTERN EUROPE Across the (present) Atlantic, the ancient people of Britain nurtured a legend of the clefting of Earth [84] . And the Edda of the Icelanders tell the story of the primeval giant Ymir, who was formed of ice and water and waged war against all the other races. But the gods Odin, Vili, and Ve overcame him and flung his body into the vast chasm called Ginnungagap, which he had caused to form. From his blood were created the sea and the waters, from his flesh the Earth, from his bones the mountains, from his skull the sky, from his brain the clouds, from his eyebrows Midgarth for the race of men [85] . Alexander Marshack has taken infinite pains to study human signs of the late stone age hunters of Southern France, Spain, and elsewhere. He seems to have discovered a practice of marking off lunar cycles on bones and stones [86] . This would coincide with the model of a Lunarian culture. during the period of recovery following upon the birth of the Moon. If Marshack sees in the upper Paleolithic markings the beginning of an astronomy of the Moon, then the Magdalenians (and others) lived later than other ancient peoples who, not only in the Americas and Asia, but also in Europe, claimed that they flourished before the coming of the Moon. According to Aristotle, and after him to Apollonius of Rhodes, human societies antedated the Moon; they lived when "not all the orbs were yet in heaven." The Arcadians were said to have been in a reduced state, living upon acorns, before the Moon appeared, and later they boasted to the Greeks of this [87] . {S : THE NEAR EAST} THE NEAR EAST The Phrygians of Asia Minor also considered themselves proselenians [88] , So did the Mayans of Mesoamerica and the Indians of the Columbian highlands. "The Assyrians referred to the time of the Moon god as to the oldest period in the memory of the people: before other planetary gods came to dominate the world ages, the Moon was the Supreme Deity. Such references are found in the inscriptions of Sargon II (about -720): 'Since the far-off days of the Moon-god's time (era). '" [89] "An ancient name of the Moon was Aa, A, or Ai, which recalls the Egyptian A‚ h or Ah. The Sumerian moon was Aku, 'the measurer'...." The origin of the Zodiac is attributed to the "Akkad country, probably in almost prehistoric times." This is Griffard quoting Mackenzie and Hinckley-Allen [90] , And might not the Arcadians of the Peloponnesus be of the same root, for their very founding king was named Pro-Selenius, "Before the Moon"? I would question, too, whether Abram, later Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, who was a famous astronomer of Ur, special seat for the worship of the moon-god, combined in his name elements of the Moon, "A," and Mercury' s "ram," living in the third millennium in Mercurian times [91] . Griffard claims that the zodiac, so important in astronomy, navigation and astrology today, was originally a measure of distances using the Moon, and "possibly long antedated the general constellations or even the solar zodiac." [92] Stecchini, too, argues that navigation by the Moon is simple, as the ingenious American businessman, Nathaniel Bowditch, showed at the time of the American Revolution with his book of The American Practical Navigator [93] . The stars and the sun are not needed to navigate, once given the Moon; latitude and longitude can be calculated. Earliest man could have commonsense means, too, of making up a calendar. Babylon, which like perhaps all other early cities, was planned on the scheme of heaven, dedicated many of its pyramidal towers to the moon god [94] . They constitute attempts at warding off a threatening heaven and controlling the gods. Briffault stresses the important place among the Semitic people that was held by the Moon, in the image of the serpent [95] . And now we wonder whether the serpent of the Garden of Eden represented the moon in the period when Jupiter-Jehovah was taking command of the skies. In Mesoamerica, too, the moon-god was associated with serpents, as the remarks of Coe have already disclosed. Hecate, a Greek moon-god form, had tresses of snakes, too. For the strange figure of "Lilith" in Hebrew mythology, one must go to the cabalistic writings of the Zohar (13th century) and other sources. Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was called "the Night Monster." She left Adam because of incompatibility and three angels tried in vain to force her return. I interpret the story as beginning with Adam (who is "Earth") and who is human as is Lilith. She deserted Earth to become the night-monsterish moon, trailing destructive long tresses of snakes. Finally Adam, wanting a woman, was given an earth being Eve by Elohim, this being now the Age of Saturn. (And later came the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the beginning of Jovea.) {S : A QUESTION OF LUNAR PRIORITY} A QUESTION OF LUNAR PRIORITY Perhaps a case can be made, therefore, from legend as from geophysics, of the recent appearance of the Moon, following its eruption and the catastrophic cleavage of the Earth. We have noted a fervent universal worship of, and sacrifices for, the Moon in earliest times. We have associated early pragmatic functions such as calendarizing and navigation with observations of the Moon. Something should be said of the fertility functions as well. It is not enough, of course, to point to prevalent "primitive" tribes who unite the phases of the Moon with lore, probably some of it scientifically verifiable, on hunting, planting, and harvesting. Nor even to deduce that, given the phases of the Moon, we are bound to discover ancient lore and associated rites of the same kind that originated with observing the phases of the Moon, such as are implied in the references above to Coe on Mesoamerica and Graves on archaic Greece. Our problem, much more difficult, is to consider whether true humans existed before the Moon appeared and thereupon attached its phases to human behavior. Even so, the problem is not properly circumscribed for it is conceivable that the hominids might observe and follow moon phases without reflecting upon them just as the Canadian goose instinctively heads South upon certain signs of winter. If it can be shown that humans at some earlier period were religious but "non-lunar" then it will be arguable that a) the Moon did not exist, b) that when it appeared it was an object of terrified worship, its behavior would be reconciled with human behavior in order to exercise control over it. Legends already cited go to support this argument. Also, the undeniable primacy of Uranian Heaven worship, and the proofs of an ecumenical Uranian civilization allude to a pro-selenian religion; the frequent assertion of anthropologists -- especially the older ones like Morgan and Frazer -- that an animistic, magical phase of religion preceded the celestial (which we deny) helps, in a backhanded way, to support a proselenian religion, celestial but not recognizably so full of symbols which seem terrestrial but may be celestial, though not lunar. We might take up another example to aid discussion of the problem. Among the Melanesians of Arnhem's Land (Australia), a cycle of sacred chants and dances commemorates the behavior of the Moon and the dugong (sea cow) [96] . In the beginning, the Moon lived along the swampy shore but found the leeches insufferable. She persuaded the dugong that they should take to the sky. The dugong argued that they would have to die in so doing, but the Moon insisted that she would only drop her bones temporarily and then grow new ones (presumably the phases of the Moon). The presence of the sea-cow in this mythical song and dance cycle points, however, to a possible Venusian origin (around 3400 B. P); the elements indicating a terrestrial origin of the Moon off the edge of Australia (not necessarily the present waters of Australia) may be an archaic element juxtaposed with an explanation of the Moon's phases, and with later contacts between the Moon and the planet Venus (the sea cow, the lotus flower, and the evening star-all are joined together in the chants). Even so, the juxtaposition points to a confusion of history, not of reality: that is, both the Moon and the Evening Star were born in the early memorial generations of the tribe. {S : ELIADE'S "LUNAR PERSPECTIVE"} ELIADE'S "LUNAR PERSPECTIVE" M. Eliade analyzes brilliantly the Moon-cycle complex found all over the world. His interpretation and presentation are totally uniformitarian, reversing cause and effect part of the time and ascribing power to the Moon that it could never have gained by is present smooth behavior. The passage comes from The Myth of the Eternal Return, a most useful work [97] . In the "lunar perspective," the death of the individual and the periodic death of humanity are necessary, even as the three days of darkness preceding the "rebirth" of the moon are necessary. The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued; in other words, it must return to "chaos" (on the cosmic plane), to "orgy" (on the social plane). to "darkness" (for seed), to "water" (baptism on the human plane, Atlantis on the plane of history, and so on). We may note that what predominates all these cosmico-mythological lunar conceptions is the cyclical recurrence of what has been before, in a word, eternal return. Here we again find the motif of the repetition of an archetypal gesture, projected upon all planes -- cosmic, biological, historical, human. But we also discover the cyclical structure of time, which is regenerated at each new "birth" on whatever plane.. Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes; this repetition, by actualizing the mythical moment when the archetypal gesture was revealed, constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings." These passages must be read in a special way. The Lunarian behavior that Eliade describes is, in my estimate, the recapitulation by peoples of the second catastrophe of the holocene age. After all, the phases of the Moon do not demand "chaos." "orgy," darkness," and "water;" catastrophe in which the Moon played a role does demand them. Every great god is the centerpiece of a catastrophic cycle; the moon is one of them. The correlation of human behavior with natural Moon behavior should be interpreted as mankind trying to think like the god, act like the god, and re-enact the cycle of birth, destruction, and resurrection of the god. Each great god has its own peculiarities. That the Moon's later behavior exhibited the three phases in its continuous natural cycle only stressed in the human mind the truth of the universal proposition of the cycles of the gods and of the human ages. But the scientists of today should not confuse this coincidence of the Moon's recapitulating the eternal cycle with the original behavior of the Moon that prompted its dreadful worship -- its birth from the Earth, its flaming, cometary passages around the globe, and its settling into place with routine motions, that lent hopes of a stable world order. The subsequent "victimization" of the Moon by greater gods -- Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Mars -- is also the story of a declining reverence for the Moon among power-worshipping mankind. The very weakness of the Moon as a god in late times (say after 1500 B. C.), despite its prominence in the sky and its impressive cycle of birth, maturity, senescence, death, and again resurrection, suggests that, in the post-Lunarian epoch, new and harsh gods made their weight felt, which, even when they aged into deus otiosus, still commanded the Moon and Earth. In the historical mind and cultures of mankind exists the full set of transferred representations of the natural behaviors and traits of the gods. {S : THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE} THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE Another case in which quantavolutionary logic argues against the evolutionary logic deals with the menstrual cycle of women. The facts are well-known; everywhere menstruation has been the center of taboos, often involving excruciating practices (locking up menstruating women, for instance) and penalties (killing a woman who lets herself be seen in certain places during menstruation). Again, this could seem a grossly exaggerated social response to a "normal animal function." But we note, and many cultures make the connection explicit, that the menstrual cycle is ordinarily quite close to the lunar monthly cycle. The situations is one that psychologically cries out for identification and transfer of affect : from the once terrible and feared moon to the feared and terrible woman. Lederer rightly includes menstrual customs as a key element in the concatenation of behavior that add up to a universal "Fear of Women." [98] Quantavolutionary theory supplies hypotheses here. If the Moon erupts into a disaster that destroys and terrorizes the peoples of Earth, and then afterwards settles into a routine that "points its finger" directly at the universal behavior of women, then that behavior becomes sacred, threatening, and certainly the object of social controls -- just as one would wish to control the Moon, and indeed as part of the extended efforts at controlling the Moon. Nor should we overlook another and even more frightening possibility, that the original Uranian civilized and humanized women, confronted with a god who is assuming a certain periodicity of behavior, would obsessively demand of themselves the emulation of the god's behavior and thereupon, by psychosomatic means, fashion their menstrual cycle to conform to the period of the Moon. Then women would, by this demonstration of a control quite beyond the capacities of men, achieve a relation to the god that would be a constant threat to the males. These, in turn, would "reward by punishment," that is, surround menstruation with taboos and penalties that grant only bitter fruits to female victory. The consequences extend to parturition; birthing is already part of Uranian religion, the parting of the sky and earth. But now in the Lunarian period, birth is also the breaking of the cosmic cycle of lunar menstruation; the cycle ceases upon pregnancy. Fertility then becomes more sacred because (and the male is the agent) it, too, controls the cosmic process. {S : THE HEAVENLY SPINNER} THE HEAVENLY SPINNER The Moon, or at least the Goddess of the Moon, is a spinner. This trait may possess significance. A spinner, to ancient civilization, denotes a raw material to be spun, a distaff to gather it conveniently, and a spindle around which to wind the threads that are drawn out of the material. In Egypt, Tayet, Goddess of Spinning, was a daughter of the great early Sun Re, (probably Super-Uranus) and a daughter of Nut, probbably a moon-goddess, as well as representing the sky. Figure 23 shows the Mesoamerican goddess Tlazolteotl as Moon Goddess, "with spindles placed in her headdress as an indication of her role as patroness of weaving...." [99] Figure 24 shows the Moon in full view behind the Moon Goddess (Aphrodite) with Ares and Eros. Suhr, who pursued the subject with great intensity, writes that "the heavenly Aphrodite... was frequently portrayed as a spinner reaching out into the surrounding air to fleecy clouds to serve as raw material." [100] Her other hand was carried in a position to gather the threads. In earlier times, she was represented with the necessary equipment; later the equipment was dispensed with [101] , and the marvellously graceful posture remained, a "classic pose." She would be bare to the waist and barefooted to avoid collecting threads and lint. Figure 23. THE MESOAMERICAN MOON GODDESS TLAZOLTEOTL. Talzolteotl, the Moon Goddess with Spindles in Her Hair. Source: Codex Boriga, 55; Coe, 16. Among the designs often associated with the very many paintings and sculptures of the Moon Goddess were whirls, whorls, and spirals. Sometimes she carried a mirror as a symbol of the reflections of the Moon; it substituted for the spindle. On her head she wore at times a cap resembling a cone and distaff of raw wool. The headgear is called the "polos," a word we have come to identify with the Boreal pole, of Uranian origins, site of the first heavenly city that inspired all subsequent architecture. The cone is manifested throughout Mesopotamian and Greek cultures [102] . It is the shadow cast by the Moon on the Earth, with a circumference of 50 miles. It is, Suhr surmises, the origin of the mythical Unicorn, which is found in ancient China and Mesopotamia. Figure 24. APHRODITE THE MOON GODDESS (After Suhr, fig. 47, following Verrall and Harrison). In examining another specimen of moon-art, Suhr observes "an eastern divinity... one of those composite deities we recognize as an oriental precursor of the Ouranian Aphrodite; the attributes, a mirror in one hand and what is most likely a distaff in the other, support this assumption... Whether she is Kybele or the Dea Syria, she wears a veil over a conical headdress surmounted by the crescent of the Moon.. A Hittite relief shows up a similar divinity with the same attributer." [103] "In the Vedic hymns Rakha, the full moon, is supposed to make beautiful garments for night and morning, with a needle which can never be broken. She weaves together the roseate hues of morning and the soft mellow tint of evening." [104] In appraising his findings, Suhr concludes that the Moon is a spinning goddess because she may be seen to gather clouds (upon her distaff) and drop (threadlike) rains upon the Earth. She is connected with fertility and love, after all, which appears to be logical. The quantavolutionary logic, however, modifies this explanation. If the Moon is born from the Earth, amidst chaos, in a splatter of "blood and genitals" from the earliest war of the gods, and then must pull itself into a ball, the "clouds" would become the primordial "raw stuff" of the spinner. If the Moon rotated in its earliest times, while gathering itself together, it spins like the distaff gathering wool and ejecting thread. If the Earth is being deluged by cosmic waters and at the same time by waters raised up in great heat and falling back upon the Earth, then the Moon, amidst it all, is the spinner dropping threads, but what impressive gathering of wool, and revolving of distaff and what threads they were! Impressive enough to cause the mind to inaugurate a useful invention. Again, and as usual, we see the "rational" process reversed; the invention and practice of spinning and weaving do not excite the mind to create the god. The "god" excites the mind to create the invention and the practice. Later on, the mind becomes subdued; it pushes into its subconscious recesses the first causes, makes effects out of causes, and ends up with a tolerable mental imagery that conforms to nature as one wishes it were. When this later stage arrives, a confusion of names and identities sets in as well, so that Aphrodite becomes Venus in men's minds, for example, or Zeus becomes Saturn, or Saturn becomes the Sun, and so on. More of this later. The present chapter is done. On evidence from geophysics, mythology, and psychology, the Moon is deemed to be a recently exploded fraction of the Earth, to be newly emplaced, and to have been worshipped heavily and in accord with its original history. Still to be related are later experiences of the Earth's satellite, of when it was flooded by Saturn, cratered by the bolts of Jupiter and Mercury, and pelted, shocked, and melted by Venus and Mars. {S : Notes (Chapter Seven: Earth Parturition and Moon Birth)} Notes (Chapter Seven: Earth Parturition and Moon Birth) 1. See also Long (1974) 240-1. 2. I follow here Suhr's (1969) identification of "foam-born" Aphrodite with moon. 3. See Kelly (1963) on a cometary train striking and excavating the Pacific Basin, 1-8, 76-99 espec. 89. 4. The astronomer Lyttleton once said, regarding the origin of the Moon, "that a distant third body, such as the Sun, might play a major role in rounding out an eccentric orbit in a surprisingly short period of time." Juergens (1974B) 39. 5. Marsden and Cameron (1966). 6. I came upon a copy of Baker's work (1932, 1954) in the Library of Congress as I was checking some last citations for this book. The year before (1978) I had noticed a passing reference to Baker in Sullivan (1974); Sullivan mentioned only Baker's idea that an intruder, possibly Venus, had encountered Earth. The Princeton Libraries listed the 1932 book but when I searched for it, I discovered that it had been lost or otherwise removed from the geology library stacks. I asked Velikovsky whether he knew of it and he told me that he, too, had sought it out but found it missing. Some years ago, someone at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale had made a microfilm of the copy that belongs to the Library of Congress. Baker is completely unknown in geology, a case of unheard genius. 7. (1965); Vsekhsvyatskii (1976) 53. 8. In Marsden and Cameron (1966) 216. 9. Wilson (1968) 316. 10. Vsekhsvyatskii (1976). 11. Ibid., 11. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. Cook (1972). 14. M. Cook (1966) 120 ff., relying upon Alex du Toit's early defense of continental drift and ice cap depression as originating the Atlantic rupture, and upon the Farraud and Gadja Wisconsin Ice Cap studies and the Heiskanen and Vening-Meinisz Fennoscandian studies, reports that both the shape of the depression (now-rebounding) and its rate of rebound and less than 10,000 years ago (our 11,500 B. P.) The present theory does not posit "ice caps" prior to the Saturnian Age finale. Therefore, it calls upon other mechanisms, especially a cosmic lightning exchange. Had there been ice dumps in the first Uranian, proto-human period, Pacific Basin lunagenesis would also be facilitated. 15. Wegener (1924) 21, 202-5. 16. Ibid., 205. 17. D. W. Wise in Marsden and Cameron (1966) 216. 18. Driscoll. 19. Cf. Ransom (1976) 142-54. 20. Driscoll; Ruzic, 51; Wood, 72-3. 21. Cook (1972). 22. Ransom (1976), 153-4. 23. Velikovsky (1972) 20. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 19. 26. Ransom (1976) 143-4; Treash (1972). 27. Ransom (1976) 146-7. 28. Ferté (1972) 13. 29. Velikovsky (1972) 19. 30. Ibid., 19. 31. Ransom (1976) 145-6; Ferte (1972). 32. Velikovsky (19720 21. 33. Juergens (1974D, 1974E). 34. Ibid., 35. Juergens (1974C). 36. Personal communication, Juergens, 1970. 37. Cook (1972). 38. Cook (1972). 39. Wood, 69. 40. Cook (1972). 41. This is reasoned from Cook (1966) 3 who estimates Earth's crust might solidify in 1000 years. 42. Wood, 71. 43. O'Keefe (1966) 224 Cf. O'Keefe, Tektites (1963) on their widespread distribution on Earth. 44. Cf. Bellamy (1936) 35 ff., where the damage to Earth from a Moon capture is estimated. 45. Cook (1972) 18-9. 46. Baldwin 277-8 in Marsden and Cameron (1966). 47. Wood, 69. 48. Ibid., 71. 49. Ibid., 70. 50. Ibid. 51. Cook writes (1966) 152; "There is evidence for the hexagonal structures characteristic of shock fracture, but this evidence is by no means perfect." He is not postulating the moon eruption, and hence would perhaps find his fracture model more evident if he took it into account. Soviet geologists have conceived of the Earth as a 12 and 20 latticed crystal grid, suggesting a correlation between the fracture model and the world cleavage system (Bird, 36 ff). 52. Sullivan (1974) 147. 53. Cook (1966) 103-12; Carey (1958). 54. Cook (1966) 268 ff. 55. Jordan's figure 32 (p. 86) and graph picture the multiple discontinuities of seismic waves below the Earth's surface at 413, 984, 2898. 492 and 5121 km. besides the Moho. They all served historically the same function of allowing the globe to maintain its bodily integrity under distortion and interruption. 56. Besides Fisher see Ma (1955). Harry Hess, says Sullivan (131), believed that the Moho "simply marks a change in molecular structure caused, perhaps, by high temperature at that level, either currently or at some time in the past." 57. Haymes (1971). 58. Vico IV 808; cf. 258., iv 814; 401, 408, 221, 708. 59. Bellamy (1948). 60. Kondratov, 77. 61. Temple (1976) 250-1. 62. Bellamy (1936) 167. 63. Temple (1976) 251. 64. Ibid. Note the quantavolutionary mass species extinction and new creation here. 65. Ibid., 252. 66. Genesis, 1: 2. 67. Ibid., 2: 4, 10. 68. (1975), 12. 69. Patten (1966) 188. 70. BK. II, ch. I, p. 12. Trogus, a Gallic Roman active around 5 A. D., was probably his source. 71. Bellamy (1948) 158-9. 72. Donnelly (1883), 175 quoting Brinton. 73. Bellamy (1936) 271. 74. Ibid., 187; cf. Mullen (1974), 39-44. 75. Coe (1975) 43. 76. Brasseur (1869), Brunhouse (1973) describes the role of Brasseur. 77. Bancroft (1874) V, 112. 78. Bellamy (1936) 269. 79. Wilkins (1956) 87. 80. (1936) 273. 81. Poznansky, II 151. 82. Coe (1975) 14-5, Cf. in India, "The Venus Aphroditus of the western mythologists, and emblematic of the lunisolar year. She is the daughter of Durga, and the Proserpine of the West; and considered as time, she is the same with her mother. Metaphorically, she may sometimes represent the moon." (Bentley 27). 83. Ibid., 17. 84. Donnelly (1883) 155. 85. Bellamy (1936) 178-9. 86. Marshack (1972). 87. Patterson (1973). 88. Carli (1788) 308. 89. Velikovsky (1973). 90. Griffard, (1977) 33. 91. Cf. Westropp and Wake (1875) 53, and Gobler. 92. Griffard 46. 93. Personal communication, April, 1977. 94. Bellamy (1936). 95. Briffault (1927) III 106 ff. 96. Berndt (1948). 97. Eliade (1954) 88-890. 98. Lederer (1968). 99. Coe (1975) 14-5. 100. Suhr (1969) 160-2. 101. J. J. Bernoulli, Aphrodite (Leipzig 1873, p. 80) "states that in the case of Aphrodite, all cosmic attributes that were implastisch must have disappeared from statues at an early date." (Suhr, 173). 102. Ibid., 51. 103. Suhr, 19. 104. Occidens (1888) A1-14. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 08: } {T SATURN'S CHILDREN } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHT: SATURN'S CHILDREN The year 1977 marked the beginning of quantavolutionary publications about Saturn. Three articles appeared, written by David Talbott, by Dwardu Cardona, and jointly by Harold Tresman and B. O'Gheoghan. A few months later, Velikovsky, who had inspired the studies in each case, without participating in them released a fragment of his manuscripts on Saturn [1] . "Two stars erupted from the planet Saturn and caused the Deluge." So states the Talmud, in Velikovsky's translation [2] . This is one of the several principal conclusions reached by the other writers. Saturn was a second sun, shining by day and night upon Earth. The record of the star is preserved in the legends of every ancient people. It was the dominating star of its age and most of the basic mythology of the world is traceable to its varying aspects, behavior, and fate. After leaving its infinitely complex imprint upon Earth and mankind, Saturn exploded in a nova or collision; a deluge fell upon the Earth; and Jupiter became king of the heavenly hosts. From David Talbott we summarize more of the abundant material. For the ancients "it was Saturn who introduced the day... what the Babylonians called Saturn's 'coming forth in splendor' signified the beginning of the archaic 'day. ' Saturn dominated the night and competed with the sunlight during the day. Mythical records are unanimous in saying that Saturn, during his reign, stood in the north.... The Egyptian Ra, Osiris, Horus... the Mesopotamian Ninurta, Enki, Anu, Shamash... the Hebrew, or Ugaritic El... the Hindu Brahma, Vishnu, Varuna, Surya... the Chinese Huang-ti or Shang- ti... the Greek Kronos -- all appear as stationary suns... They are described as fixed at the polar summit... Ra comes forth and diminishes em hetep, which means 'while standing in one place. ' He comes forth and diminishes at the center, which is also the summit -- the celestial Pole." [3] Saturn was also the Babylonian Entil. The points of difference among the several authors and between them and the theses of this book will be subjected in time to elaborate criticism, but the developing consensus amounts to a serious challenge to conventional opinion in the full range of historical and natural sciences. Whether Saturn achieved stardom and kingship by the route delineated in this book or by means of some other cosmogony, we see, in the age of Saturnia, a divine figure of exquisite symbolism. Talbott presents the configuration of Saturn and analyzes its details as they are supplied by comparative mythology and archaeoastronomy. The configuration is presented in Figure 25. I have placed beneath each item of Talbott's Saturnian imagery a sloganized identification of it. The reader, already alerted to what is to come by what has been said in earlier chapters, can promptly grasp the significance of the parts and the whole and move confidently thereafter through the main body of this chapter. The parts of the symbols are used in many ways in all areas of the world. The whole depicts at one time a winged angel, another time a long-robed priest-god, and other symbols as well. Not surprisingly, the Christmas Tree, crowned by a star, traces its descent into the remote past. Figure 25f is taken directly from an Assyrian plaque [4] . It illustrates the full form, containing several of the elements "a" to "e", that represents a real-life imitation of Saturn, the god of the second and dominating sun in the period following the emplacement of the Moon and creation of the oceans. Two half-human, half-bullish figures uphold the Saturn image. The drawing 25g shows an ancient Mayan figure from Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico, and is called a "solar symbol" which it is, but a symbol of the second sun Saturn [5] . Figure "h" is the full composite drawn by Talbott. Figure "i" is a Dogon item of today; Temple has described the astronomy of this remarkable African tribe. Earlier, I expressed an eclectic view of independent invention, diffusion, and common experience, in pre-history. Figure 25 COMPOSITION OF SATURN IMAGES (shown below a to i) . gg h i g. Solar Symbol at Uxmal. (Publications of the Bureau of Ethnography vol. ii., pl. 57, no. 5) from Goblet, p. 226. h. A composite of Saturn imagery (drawn by D. Talbott). In terms of Solaria Binaria, the view is up the Magnetic Tube from Earth i. Pendant called "The Female Sun." *From Fisher H. Mesmith, Jr., (1979) "Dogon Bronzes," XII African Arts, No. 2, (Feb.) 23. These similarities are products of forceful similar experiences, depicting the experiences on the basis of originally derived ecumenical techniques and older experiences; yet, some element of diffusion may also be present, particularly since, in the "golden age of Saturn", great stretches of now sunken continental land were still above the sea, peoples were closer, and the seas were more navigable. {S : THE PLEIADES} THE PLEIADES The same analysis may be applied to the Pleiades constellation. Many places around the world mark the beginning of November as the Day of the Dead; it is All Saints Day; Halloween; All Souls Day; etc. The time is associated with the Pleiades for reasons not clearly understood yet [6] . The coincidences of time, mood, ceremony, and stellar assignation is so great as to exclude independent invention except in particulars and to insist upon a common experience of explicit quality. Only this may be said on behalf of diffusion: if the event "X" that threw the whole world into mourning in regard to the Pleiades occurred before the Moon eruption, then diffusion may be accepted. But if the event occurred in the time of Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury or Venus, then diffusion, like independent invention, must be reduced to particulars, and common experience and common observation must be the cause of the coincidences. Cardona produces evidence to show that Saturn (Khima) is connected with the Pleiades [7] . For one thing their names are often confused, as in the King James and other versions of the Bible where Khima is translated as 'Pleiades' instead of as 'Saturn. ' The Pleiades are connected with the Flood of Noah (Saturn) in many places. Further, two stars from (Super) Saturn caused the deluge. As Ginzberg reports the legend, "the upper water rushed through the space left when god removed two stars out of the constellation Pleiades [Saturn]." [8] The stars, says Cardona, were better called comets; the Earth was deluged when it passed through their tails. (Super) Saturn was in the North polar region prior to its explosion. The Pleiades were presumably behind Saturn. After the Deluge, Saturn had been moved and the Pleiades were observed in his place. Now we recite the Osiris-Saturn legend in Egypt. The great and beloved god, Osiris, is drowned by the devil god, Seth, who then cuts his body to pieces and scatters its fragments. The Pleiades, we surmise, are the fragments and worshipped on the day of Saturn's death. The discrepancy between early November and late December, when Saturn is celebrated and the Saturnalia are held, indicates that the length of the year shifted once again after the deluge, perhaps from 260 to 320 days or so. At least one of the Pleiades has since lost much of its brightness, for many peoples, who can today observe only six stars, cite its true number of seven stars. From the very beginnings in Urania, mankind was impressed by the great eye that appeared in the "northern" opening of the sky. In Talbott's drawings (Figure 25) we see it. In the course of the day, the eye is often lidded with the crescent of the Sun's reflection (the inverted sky- boat). The image also changes into the face of the Heavenly Cow, horned by the crescent. Rudolf Anthes writes : The concept of the Eye of the highest god was mentioned in the story of the heavenly cow. The Eye occurs either as the Eye of Horus or the Eye of Re, though not exclusively : we encountered the Eye of Atum before. The characteristic of the Eye appears to be that its removal from the highest god means disturbance, while its return means pacification and the restitution of order." [9] The great battle when Seth plucked out the Eye of Horus (Jupiter) was one such occasion. The Eye prevailed until the end of Jovean times; it is still found in many occult philosophies and on the face of the American dollar. {S : THE TRIUMPH OF SATURN} THE TRIUMPH OF SATURN Saturn replaced Uranus as binary sun and god some twelve thousand years ago. More correctly, it would be "Super-Saturn", for the birth of Jupiter from Saturn had not yet occurred. The transition from the one god to the other occurred as one more in the series of disasters, the climax of which to Solaria Binaria was the fissioning of the darker binary, Super-Uranus, while the climax to earthlings was the pass-by of the exploded body and the eruption of the Moon. The behavior of the Moon was foremost in human attention for many centuries. Expectedly, the ancients appear to have been sometimes unclear about the succession of events. They were clear in having Saturn descend directly from the heaven-god, not the Moon, and especially from a father, Uranus. They were often confused, however, about the exact form of transmission from Uranus, so that increasingly we find them according the work of creation to Saturn, rather than Uranus. The student today must depend upon scraps of evidence. The distinction between Super-Uranus and Saturn was more apparent to the earliest peoples than to us toady, or even than to the Greeks, many memorial generations later. The Hebrew Genesis credits the work of creation to Elohim or Saturn, but a close reading of its first lines may reveal that the work-week of Elohim traverses the times of Urania and Lunaria. It may be premised that every creation mythology will ultimately afford a predecessor to Saturn. And, "in each case, the successor to the original deity was a Saturn-like god." [10] The beginning of Saturn's kingdom was fashioned by the Greeks into a story of celestial revolt [11] . Mother Earth aroused the giants born of Ouranos and herself. These united behind her son, Kronos, who in the struggle castrated his father. The giants or Titans ascended from the bowels of the Earth into heaven. Ouranos was exiled into farther space, possibly in reality constituting planet Uranus or Neptune, leaving the Earth bloody and battered by his passage. It seemed logical by analogy: He who had overburdened and oppressed Mother Earth, who had buried her children under the Earth, lost his virile member. The perennial connections among astronomy, geology, sex and religion were reinforced (not only in Greek myth but everywhere) [12] . Humans developing from hominids very much like themselves, employed the most obvious and personally salient analogies. The mountain of sexualized religious myths rose like a new volcano. Saturn the god was identified by the Romans with the planet Saturn. As sun and king of gods, Saturn's names were many. Besides those listed by D. Talbott above (p. 179), one might mention as Saturnian Elohim (Hebrews), Odin (norse), Baal (Near East), and Tiamat-Apsu (Assyrian). Many identities are lost or undiscovered; several were once used for Uranus (as Varuna) or are given to later gods (as Baal became Venus). Also god heroes and gods act interchangeably, as Manu and Vishnu (Hindu) [13] . His home is supposed to be in the north where he presided on his throne. An early Egyptian account in the age of Mercury says that "when [Pharaoh] Pepi standeth upon the north of heaven with Ra, he becometh lord of the universe, like unto the king of the gods." [14] Pepi is also called brother of the Moon. A Chaldean oracle called him the companion of Helios, the Titanic Sun [15] . M. Jastrow (1898) states: "... at all events, the fact that Saturn was also called the 'sun' is vouched for, both by explanatory notes attached to the astrological connotations, and by notices in classical writings to that effect." [16] Many peoples of the Age of Saturn could see the planet there; it was huge and becoming more continuously distinct as the boreal heavens cleared of the Uranian canopies and the Lunarian debris. Saturn was the first irradiator of light, wrote Westropp and Wake [17] , but we recognize Super-Uranus in this capacity and Saturn, the son of Uranus, as continuing where he left off. {S : THE "GOLDEN AGE"} THE "GOLDEN AGE" The costly mechanics of the Lunarian period had purchased a reprieve to life upon Earth. The land surface of the Earth included the continental shelves and slopes, for the oceans were lower. The Sun shone feebly from the South. Its Saturnine binary, darkly brooding upon its children, dominated the northern sky, reflecting the Sun with some of its brightness and clarity that the Moon, daughter of Uranus, possessed. The Earth was almost never in full darkness. The climate of Saturnia was even and damp, a tropical greenhouse. The clouds still were much heavier than the skies of today. Language became well-developed and replete with celestial references. Drawing and picture symbols occur. Memories of Uranus were historicized. Memories of the lunar catastrophes were suppressed, but persisted in lunar myth and rites. Literature and music of a liturgical kind developed. "Religious" history was the pretext for music and art. The Romans regarded the most ancient Latin verses as Saturnian music, barbaric, chanted by fauns and augurs The jagged flint sickle with which Saturn was said to have castrated his father became the inspiration and symbol of the useful tools of a golden age of agriculture. It also became the harp or lyre of music, when strung. Women and men, indeed all people, worked in general equality. Rulers merged sacred and sacred ideas. They were something like totem animals, not all-powerful, not gods, but steeped in the divine and used as scapegoats and advocates before the gods. Government by God-kings of the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chinese type evolved later. First a kind of sacred republican rule prevailed. Then the sacred ruler became the God-King. The transition may have been "natural", as aggressive people enslaved others and their kings expanded royal power generally on the basis of their especial powers over slaves. Since the desire to control others, as well as to control the gods, was so strong, there would be no psychological resistance to absolutism in government. There appear to have been no Saturnian monolithic civilizations; Tiahuanacu and Atlantis did not seem to have the kind of state that dynastic Egypt and Sumeria developed in the next age of Jove. Perhaps Saturn was peaceful, the Moon calm now, and mankind generally restrained in behavior. Civilizations, now separated by oceanic waters, entered upon a golden age, supposedly under the benevolent rule of Saturn. The altars addressed his northern polar throne. Saturn is "the generator," "the devourer," and the "vital vortex." [18] His are the virtues of rusticity. Peace was believed to have characterized his reign. Something of the old aggressiveness seems to have absented itself from the human breast. Thousands of years later, the Romans deposited the ensigns of the legions in the temple of Saturnia when at peace. Many place names are of Saturn or his qualities. Latium of the Latins, for instance, was supposedly named for his place of exile, when he hid (latuit). Life appeared generally easy to humanity during the "golden age" of Saturn, with universal warmth, moist conditions, an absence of marked seasons, low atmospheric turbulence, and a suffused golden color from the translucent remaining canopies. Still religion flourished, and with it the practice of human sacrifices to Saturn. Long into the Roman Empire, despite legal suppression, the sacrifices were continued. Baal and Moloch were names for Saturn that endured in the Hebrew world until they came to stand for evil gods. The Phoenicians joined him to Baal and pictured him as a lion whose head was crowned by rays, a solar (binary?) image [19] . Animal representations --among them the snake, bear, lion, and bull continued to assist in worship. In the endless process of transferring gods and names, the names of Saturn descended to Jupiter and then to Venus, who were also called Baal and Moloch. However, the confusion among the ancients has been compounded by the lack of data and by the ideological prejudice of Solarian scholars who, regarding the gods as divinely named anthologies of fiction, were in no condition to distinguish the true identity of the gods to whom sacrifices were made. {S : THE PEOPLES OF SATURNIA} THE PEOPLES OF SATURNIA The multiple kingdoms of Atlantis that Plato described may have been of the political and social order of Saturnia. Atlantis was a set of kingdoms of related cultures [20] . It was perhaps Celtic and in close touch with the Tethyan-Mediterranean culture. Its survivors may have been the Stonehenge and megalithic builders of Western Europe. They remained under the influence of the Minoans, Phoenicians, and Mycenaeans. Atlantis can be best defined by a line enclosing all of the European northwestern continental platform from the Bay of Biscay to Scandinavia on the north, from the western banks of Ireland into Denmark and France. It is difficult to decide whether the Pillars of Hercules that led to the several kingdoms were at Gibraltar, or whether the "Pillars" referred to the innumerable megalithic dolmens that later lined the shores in honor of Hercules, perhaps even in conjunction with a precursor to the English Channel [21] . Saturn taught mankind the arts, possibly after the Lunarian catastrophes. Metals were occasionally worked where they had fallen or erupted; stone and wood construction were fully elaborated. The science of geometry governed temples, roadways, and navigation. The great seas of Lunaria could be crossed for the first time and international commerce flourished. Carli insisted that before the Deluge of Saturn, the inhabitants of the globe might pass readily between Africa, Europe, and America. Maps were probably drawn [22] , considering that the so- called "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" which came to light recently show Antarctic shores as they are today beneath the ice; the area has not been free of ice since the colder climates of Jovea arrived around 6000 years ago. The differentiation of races is a result of ancient catastrophes. The races of hominids had been several in Pangea [23] . The race of mankind sui generis, was agglomerative in Urania. Its near extinction of Lunarian times produced many new breeds in isolated spots of the globe. Saturnia was a time of the multiplication of humans. Still the propagation was not uniform. Rather, isolated pockets of older strain remained, while three fairly distinct races flourished and dominated the world. The three constituted the three major modern races. The areas of the Tethyan welt that runs around the world east and west included the original Caucasian peoples who can be called the Atlanteans and the Tethyans. Even today some evidences of their original occupation of the Tethyan belt are noted in the Caribbean belt and Polynesia. Nor is Northwest Europe devoid of hints of the Atlanteans. Further, the American Indians of the East Southeast were perhaps originally Tethyans [24] . The Sines were split into Asians and American. The Africans were divided into those who remained in North and Central South America and in Africa and those who were transported long distances upon the moving Indian subcontinent and into Australasia [25] . Neanderthal, other "modern" types, and a number of hominid branches were wiped out as breeding groups by ecological disasters and by the new humans who were aggressively schizoid. In each of these three races, the surviving strains that rapidly bred were partly related to some common Uranian ancestors. Although they developed many special features they were still possessed of the basic schizoid humanness that incorporated the methods of survival in its madness. The population of Saturnia was large. It developed religious, political, artistic, and linguistic forms that were to persevere through the ages until the breakthroughs of enlightenment and science in the 6th century B. C. (2,600 B. P.) in China, India, the Near East and Mediterranean; that is, until the end of the Martian terror [26] . The archaic Mesoamerican cultures that Spinden and Coe believe to have stretched from southwestern U. S. A. to the Andes, a full neolithic culture, was Saturnian, and probably at bottom Uranian. {S : THE DOWNFALL OF SATURN : NOVA AND DELUGE} THE DOWNFALL OF SATURN : NOVA AND DELUGE Saturnia ended in disaster. Super-Saturn, the remnant binary of the Sun, underwent the same fate as Super-Uranus. It progressively engorged material from space it could ill digest. Its rotation was interrupted by the meals of "his children," as the Greek myth would have it; Figure 26 is an artistic rendering of the myth. Only Zeus (Jupiter) escaped, by the wiles of his mother and nurses (the Kuretes). Atum, the Egyptian Saturn, means "the One who has been completed by absorbing others." [27] Finally, near the year 6000 B. P., Saturn appeared to be in a frightful fit of rage; it brilliantly exploded much of its shell of gas and waters into space, and fissioned. It was a nova, still marked today by its emission of x-rays. The Earth suffered a deluge of water and salt [28] . In addition to the Saturnian salt waters, the high clouds that blanketed the Earth most of the time were brought down in the ensuing destruction of the world. The "beloved" and "melancholy" old god of time was assaulted, as the Greek myth goes, by his wife in league with Zeus, his son (Jupiter). When he became visible again to human survivors, he was in farther space, bound up forever in his rings. The bonds were known to the ancients who thought them meant to restrain the old god and penalize him in a way for the crime of infant cannibalism [29] . So his last pictures, memorialized commonly in graphic media of classical times, was of a king receiving a wrapped stone in lieu of the infant Zeus. (See Figure 13.) The legerdemain that was to be his undoing, according to Greek legend again, was a fate that was foreseen and foresworn by his own father, Ouranos, when Ouranos was exiled into far space. While the astronomical drama was interpreted and reworked in these terms by some of its human observers, the peoples of Saturnia were practically obliterated. An electrical storm of cosmic dimensions ensued as Jupiter and Saturn separated. Lightning discharges were exchanged even among Jupiter and the planets. The axis of the Earth tilted sharply and quickly. Anaxagoras, the ancient Greek scientist, says that the Earth's pole tilted at the time of the flood [30] . The north pole, instead of pointing towards Saturn, now was nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. The seasons became severe because of the loss of cloud cover and far atmosphere. Ice collected in the polar regions. Earthquakes shook the globe. In the Hebrew story, Adam and Eve, representing all people, were driven from the Garden of Eden by Yahweh, who made them feel intense guilt and shame. They felt their nudity physically, too, and needed warm clothing. Figure 26. SATURN DEVOURING HIS CHILDREN. Not only did a new cold climate come upon Earth. Also, waters of Saturn were blown back along the solar axis, making dense the atmosphere of the thinning magnetic tube. But the great axis of fire, the electrical current of Pangea, was practically gone and the tube could not generate the magnetic field to support a universal atmosphere. The cataclysms began again. A great deluge of Noah (Near East), of Manu (India), and of many names elsewhere swamped the Earth. The waters fell upon continents and oceans. They fell as snow and ice at the polar regions. They ran off the continents into the sea. The great heights reached by the floods according to many ancient myths suggest that tidal forces were operating, as well as deluges. The necessary cause of the tides may have been a large, electrically charged body passing near to the Earth. This could have been Saturn itself as it whirled from Jupiter in a great ellipse before retiring into farther space of its present solar orbit. Certainly in such a case, mountains too would have been further elevated. The tides would have also occurred if the Earth's axis shifted suddenly, with a consequent whirlpool of the Earth's waters and a rebounding of the flattened polar rocks. Hence the high peaks upon which heroes around the world were stranded were probably revealed as the waters receded, but might also have been somewhat raised up at the time. The survivors, such as Noah and his family and animals, and Manu and his wise men, would have found little left of their own cultures. Survivors from the northern belts of the Earth would have migrated towards the center afterwards. They would have suffered devastation by cross-tides, deluges, and the ravaging of the atmosphere by wind, electricity, and fall-out of cosmic debris and particles. The species were again decimated and their populations drastically reduced. The survivors, animal and human, fled together to the caves and highlands. The green world became browner and drier. People had to labor; they survived "by the sweat of their brows." Numerous continental area, shelves and slopes, that had escaped aquatic burial before were now drowned, never to rise again. Great earthquakes accompanied the floods, following upon the primeval but still continuing imbalances and the crustal shock of tilting, the movements of waters, the lithospheric adjustment to the old and new equatorial bulges, and the electrical interruption of the Earth's rotation. Atlantis sank in a day of furious trembling and flood, it was told. Portions of the sialic continents that had remained above the oceans were deluged, not only at Atlantis but throughout the world. Total destruction came upon the large part of the Earth's population which was living on the continental margins. For these suddenly became the vast continental slopes and shelves of the oceans. The ocean basins had not been deliberately designed for water, much less a quota of waters. They were the cups paved with basalt, volcanically transformed, placed where the crust had been removed and between the separating continents. That waters filled them from the beginning was a geological coincidence. That waters now overflowed them was an equally understandable lack of congruence. {S : THE POSEIDON PHASE} THE POSEIDON PHASE Okeanos, the child of Ouranos, was the founder of the ocean: he had begun his descent from heaven in Uranian times. The first phase of the Jovean Age and last great flood of waters from the skies might be called the Poseidon Phase. In Greek myth Poseidon, son of Kronos and brother of Zeus, remained in Heaven after his father retired, but later made an accord with Zeus to descend and rule the seas. The same great god was a ruler of Atlantis and was ambitious to rule the whole Earth as well. He was "greedy of earthly kingdoms," [31] and famed for encroaching upon the Earth, as he did during the Atlantean collapse and flood. F. Guirand provides additional helpful suggestions regarding Poseidon : Poseidon was a very ancient Pelasgian deity, older even than Zeus. His province, later confined to the waters, was in primitive times much wider.... The name Poseidon seems to derive from the root meaning 'to be master'.... It is not impossible that this primitive Poseidon, this sovereign 'master, ' had once been a celestial god, as his attribute, the trident -- probably a symbol for the thunderbolt -- seems to indicate. Though supplanted by Zeus, Poseidon continued to exercise his empire over the entire Earth... [32] At Sparta he was called "the creator." It is possible, then, that Poseidon was mistaken for Jupiter or may have been for a time a visible distinct element in the break-up of Super-Saturn appearing between the time of the nova of Saturn and the great Deluge. {S : SURVIVORS AND SATURNALIA} SURVIVORS AND SATURNALIA Many neolithic sites uncovered in the Eurasian and African region are Saturnian. It was not an age of great temples. A stone age culture, quite decentralized, had existed in the land of Egypt before the first Egyptian dynasties were founded. There, little direct succession can be shown between Saturnia and Jovea. There is a great cultural leap and the physical type of the people changed [33] . The direct ancestors of the Egyptians were probably survivors from Tethyan northwestern Africa, or Indo-Africa. Mullen surmises that the unification of Egypt "might have followed fairly directly after the deluge" from a study of the first king lists. "Most of the gods preceding Menes as divine kings are associated with the Osiris deluge legend. The fact that every king from Menes on identified himself with Horus, the planet Jupiter" suggests a new order under the auspices of a new planet. Before the "Bronze Ages," so called, of Jovea, many surface contours from the Atlantic Ocean to Iran had been altered. The Saturnian centers were often not preferred as sites for the new Bronze Age centers. Most Bronze Age sites of Eurasia are marked by six catastrophes [34] . But to find sites below them is rare. One is led to believe that either an entirely new foundation was laid where none had existed before, or else an original settlement had been completely erased in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter. That the new age of Jupiter was more physically and politically repressive is strongly indicated by the Saturnalia. Persisting to the present day, in one form or another (" the influence of the Saturnalia upon the celebrations of Christmas and the New Year has been direct") [35] the Saturnalian revivals reveal what must have been a long-extant view of life and even social practices. In the Saturnalia, which occupied seven days in Rome, beginning on December 17, the times of chaos and breaking up of an age are repeated ritualistically. Once a year they removed the bonds of linen that wrapped up the god in the ancient Tarquinian temple, only to replace them afterwards [36] . But not only Rome, also in Mesoamerica, the Near East, Europe, and China Saturnalias are discovered [37] . They are days of equality; hierarchy is abolished, slaves are served by kings and masters. Saturn was believed to have dwelt among men. In some ways, Jesus of Nazareth was a Saturnian figure and feared and hated as such; early Christians, too, were suspected by the Roman authorities of conducting year-around Saturnalia. In the medieval "Feast of Fools" the Catholic hierarchy found itself often of two minds, caught up in the Saturnalian spirit and reproving it as pagan and anti-establishmentarian. The destructive-creative orgy was a complex of revolt against the gods succeeding Saturn, a psychologically terrified and disorderly recapitulation of chaos, and an expression of nostalgia for a better life once achieved, long- enjoyed, and irretrievably lost. {S : Notes (Chapter Eight: Saturn's Children)} Notes (Chapter Eight: Saturn's Children) 1. (1978A). 2. ibid. 23; tractate Brakhot, Fol. 59. 3. Gibson (1977); Talbott (1977). 4. Larousse Ency. of Mythology. 5. Goblet (1956) 226. 6. Halliburton (1881). 7. Cardona (1978b). 8. Ginzberg (1909) I, 162. 9. Anthes (1961), 58-9. 10. Tresman and O'Geoghan (1977) 36. 11. Hesiod (1950). 12. Westropp and Wake 82, 84-6; Rix (1975), 58 ff. 13. The fish who pulls Manu (the East Indian Noah or Ut-Napishtim) to safety from the flood is "in the end but the incarnation of Vishnu." (Van Buitenen, 12). 14. Pepi is of the 6th Dynasty (ca 4,200 B. P.) of the Old Kingdom. The kings join the gods. Here the god is Ra or Re, who is regarded as developing stronger in Egyptian history as time goes on and is identified with the Sun. I maintain that, like many other gods around the world who are finally called sun gods, he was another god, to wit, Saturn, King of the North and King of gods. 15. Hild 1084. 16. (1898), 223, n. 58 quoted by Tresman and O'Geoghan (1977) 40, fn 66. 17. Westropp and Wake 64. 18. Hild 1088. 19. Ibid., 1084. 20. Cf. Timaeus and Critias, and Bellamy (1948). 21. Beaumont (1925). 22. Hapgood (1966). 23. Whitehouse (1975) 13-33 describes the world distribution of hominids, without partaking of the theory being developed here and later on. 24. Fox (1976). 25. Kondratov (1975) has the most suggestive materials for the kind of speculative reconstruction continued here. 26. "Enlightenment" (seeming) follows Mars. Since this was the last catastrophe it had a modern air about its ideas and culture. 27. Mullen (1973) 13. 28. Tresman and O'Geoghan (1977) 38-9, citing Martin Sieff's research. 29. A. de Grazia (1977). 30. Beaumont (1932) 228. 31. Graves (1955) ch. 16. 32. Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, 133. 33. Mullen (1973) 12, quoting D. E. Derry. 34. Schaeffer (1948). 35. "Saturn", VIII Encyclopedia Britannica 916. 36. Hild 1087, citing Macrobius. 37. Santillana and von Dechend 222. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 09: } {T THE OLYMPIAN RULERS } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER NINE: THE OLYMPIAN RULERS "When Jupiter was first born, he defeated Saturn and the Sun by his brilliance," reports the Taitiriya Brahmanna [1] . Declares Jupiter-Marduk in a Babylonian epic poem: "When I stood up from my seat and let the flood break in, then the judgement of Earth and Heaven went out of joint.... The gods, which trembled, the stars of heaven-their position changed, and I did not bring them back." [2] The Age of Saturnia ended in the Biblical Deluge. The Age of Jovea (5700 to 4400 B. P.) began. The planets Saturn, Neptune [3] , Uranus [4] , and perhaps a "Planet 'X' " (suspected to exist but not yet discovered) [5] had receded. They were retired gods; mythologists have applied this concept of deus otiosus to Saturn and Uranus. Mankind might have seen all of them recede into the farther reaches of the developing solar system. Jupiter was the new central body of the sky, shining alternately or together with the Sun, while still looming large to Earth. Even in the time of Biblical Abraham, Jupiter was said to make the night-time bright [6] . It was the name of the planet and of the new reigning god who ordained a new phase of celestial stability. Impressionable mankind, eternally grateful for favors tendered by its cruel gods. exalted Jupiter as the god of law and order. To him was attributed a strict righteousness that not only bound up his father Saturn, but bound up himself so that he would obey his own laws. The ancients unmistakably perceived the rings of Saturn and the bands of Jupiter, and gave this explanation of the phenomena. Figure 27 . ALBRECHT DURER'S "DELUGE" (1525). Dürer painted this picture following a nightmare. A most remarkable feature is the cyclone-like form of the cataclysm. The waters are bursting like giant pellets upon the Earth. not in sheets of rain. This physical mechanism is plausibly the way in which waters might be hurled through space, that is, like stone meteoroids, and it may be the only mechanism for supplying the great flood volume in a short period of time. How Durer got this dream is a matter of considerable scientific interest -- was it a Jungian archetype, a Velikovskian buried memory, a product of the Renaissance-connected genius of Durer? In 1515, Durer drew the first star map. Jupiter is a god-name that the Romans took from their Etruscan neighbors. "Jove" was an exclamatory form of Jupiter, whence we take Jovea here to denote the period. Zeus was the Greek equivalent. He was Marduk of Babylon; Shiva of the Hindus; Mazda of the Persians; Thor or Donar of the Teutonic peoples; Amon and Horus of the Egyptians; Zeden and also Yahweh (Jehovah) of the Hebrews. Pausanias gives 47 appellations of Zeus. A most common appellation has to do with his lightning-hurling. Shiva carries the lightning fork; so do Zeus and Jupiter. Sometimes names and traits of Saturn were kept and transferred to the new god. Thus the Great Fish (Saturnian) symbol is associated with Shiva in proto-India. Baal is interchangeably Saturn and Jupiter in Babylon; Odin among the Teutons seems to be Zeus and yet Hermes and even Saturn (who is perhaps better Bor son of Buri, "son" of Ymir); then, too, Ishtar of Mesopotamia is to become the child of Jupiter, planet Venus, and even the Moon. The names of the gods are innumerable, and often overlap. Varro, the Roman scholar, counted 30,000 god-names used in Greece alone, according to Vico. Some of this confusion is in the nature of the events themselves; Saturn emerged from Super-Uranus and in turn bore Jupiter, which may have given birth to Venus, so that there were initial periods of doubt when the planets carried their "father's" names. Confusion has also characterized the minds and desires of theologians and scientists who came afterwards, down to our own day. {S : THE DEVIL SETH} THE DEVIL SETH There appears now with Horus, the hawk-figured Jupiter of Egypt, another divine figure. He is the enemy of Horus and even replaced him briefly in the Second Dynasty, probably as the result of a calamity. He is called Set or Seth. He has a peculiar dog-like appearance that, with his other traits, makes him comet-like. The Romans called a sea-monster whale "cetus", and a cetus appears upon some carved stones of prehistoric Scotland that represent catastrophes [7] . (See the Golspie stone of Figure 28.) The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology [8] carries this description of Seth : "Set is represented as having the features of a fantastic beast with a thin, curved snout, straight, square-cut ears, and a stiff, forked tail. Figure 28 CETUS OR SETH, THE DEVIL-DOG. The Golspie Stone of prehistoric Scotland. The arrow indicates the Cetus beast, the "Devil-Dog" Seth. (Source : Spalding Club). For a complete analysis see Beaumont (1949), 79. This creature cannot with certainty be identified as of a species live or extinct, and is commonly called the 'Typhonian Animal. ' Sometimes Set is depicted as a man with the head of this strange quadruped." To the Greeks this must be Typhon, hence Phaeton; thus Seth also later ties into Venusian events. Perhaps the constellation and Latin word came long after the sky- seas monster called Setesh (Egp.) and Seth. But what was Seth before he was Typhon? He was the leader of a band of conspirators who murdered Osiris. Later, or alternately, in Egypt, he dismembered Osiris. Later, or alternately, he fought with Horus, and was plunged into hell. Later he was adjudged fit only for hell by Hermes-Thoth who was called upon to hear the case of Seth vs Horus, and to hell Seth returned. It is likely that Seth is ultimately the Christian devil conceived originally in the Saturnian disaster. Now again, in Greece, Jupiter destroyed the rule of Kronos and imprisoned him. Jupiter did not wear his new crown easily. For his new order of the world was attacked in earthshaking revolts, first by the Titans, who were Saturnians, and then by the Giants, who were ferocious humanoid dragons. Then later, Typhon came to threaten his rule and was sent crashing to Earth. In all of these battles Jupiter's thunderbolts racked the universe. The Earth was violently convulsed. Seth, then, must somehow supply in Egyptian myth and in the sky the material for the four great battles of Zeus or Jupiter. We therefore make Seth an alter ego for Zeus in the revolt against Saturn in Egyptian legends: he does the dirty work against the old god, whereas Zeus in Greek legend had to do the job personally. Second, Seth in Egypt dismembers Osiris-Saturn; Zeus and his cohorts destroy and scatter the Titans. Astronomically this was a sequence perhaps preceding the great Deluge of Saturn, when enormous electrical and material storms invaded the magnetic tube. The debris of Saturn's fission could be considered either as Saturn's dismemberment or as a clearing of rebellious Saturnians from the skies. Again Seth is taking the onus for Horus' action, while Zeus is doing his own job. The next phase, perhaps upon the occasion of the destruction of planet "Apollo" and the major displacement of Mercury, sees, in Egypt, Seth and Horus battling, and in Greece, a revolt of the giants against the Olympians led by Zeus. This set of events, then, would occur over a thousand years later than the death of Osiris and would mark the appearance of Mercury, Hermes, or Thoth as a new great god -- that is, a god who is threatening the Earth with destruction. The last battle against Typhon will be described below on the occasion of the Venusian catastrophes. There Seth is Typhon. {S : THE BONDS OF SATURN AND JUPITER} THE BONDS OF SATURN AND JUPITER The primeval clouds that had gathered around the pulsing electric axis between Sun and Super- Uranus had furnished atmosphere to the magnetic tube in which the planets grew and moved. The flow and the magnetic field diminished, but the skies were not fully open until Jovean times. Remnant gases from the tubes, when not at last dissipated into space, were distributed as atmospheres among the planets. Not until the nineteenth century were the rings of planet Saturn and the bands of planet Jupiter clearly defined. In both cases, the clouds extend for thousands of kilometers above the planets and are not to be confused with the low-lying clouds that form and dissolve over Earth. The banded clouds of the great planets Jupiter and Saturn are immense, global, and composed of hydrogen, ice, and debris. They remain in indefinite suspension, moving downward into the surface atmosphere, or exploded into space under cataclysmic circumstances. Man's knowledge of clouds in primeval times was considerable and based upon observation. Not only were the Earth's cloud canopy and modern clouds known, but also those of the mantle of clouds (figure 13). The Greek theogony as set forth by Hesiod reported that the great god Saturn-Chronos had swallowed all his children but Zeus, and the infant Zeus was substituted for by a stone, which significantly, was swaddled in cloth (clouds). Saturn, deceived, swallowed the stone. The grown Zeus caused him to disgorge his brothers. They dethroned Saturn, bound him up and consigned him to outer space. Then Zeus became "Lord of the Bright Skies" (ca. 5700 B. P.). Proclus (ca. 410-485 A. D.) in his commentaries on Plato indirectly gives further details of the events in the guise of philosophy. Jupiter, the god of law and order most powerful and supreme intellect and Demiurge, confronts his father, Saturn, also an all-perfect intellect and places his intellect under bonds to control its activity according to Jupiter's new ordering principles. Then, because he is logical and just, he binds himself so that he will be subject to his own laws as well. "In placing bonds about his father, he at the same time binds himself." [9] Proclus repeatedly refers to the "bonds" and the "bonding" of the two gods, and explicitly mentions the "Saturnian sections and bonds." We must take note how philosophy, like myth, has proceeded as a sublimation of catastrophic memory. It is fairly certain, then, that the cloud bands and belts of Jupiter were well-known in the earliest times. {S : THE LIGHTNING GOD} THE LIGHTNING GOD The mythical aegis of Zeus, which was occasionally lent to Pallas Athene (planet Venus), and which is depicted in art and sung of in poetry, was known to be the clouds of Zeus from which lightning came [11] . The lightning, say some scholars, is represented by the eyes of the Gorgon's head on the aegis, but more likely these are the eyes of god, two of them seen when Super-Saturn fissioned. Or perhaps this may be the double-eyed magnetosphere of Jupiter, more dense with particles then, and illuminated. The Gorgon (Phaeton, Lucifer, etc.) was carried by Zeus to symbolize what he had destroyed and what was destructive in himself. Zeus was everywhere the god of the bright skies, and of lightning. His Jovian bolts are pictured in many places (see figures 29). "Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants, and every gentile nation had its Jove," wrote Vico [12] . They are gigantic, not at all to be relegated to normal atmospheric phenomena of today. They helped to dispatch Saturn to far places; they struck the erratic monster, Typhon, that threatened Earth 2400 years later; they cleansed the Earth's atmosphere of much of its mists at the beginning of the Jovean period; they lit up the skies often as they played about the magnetic tube; they reached out to destroy mountain ranges upon Earth on occasion. Late in his divine career, Jupiter was watched with great care at the New Year of the Vernal Equinox [13] . {S : THE BEHAVIOR OF PLANET JUPITER} THE BEHAVIOR OF PLANET JUPITER All that was historically reported of Jupiter is directly or obliquely consistent with the present cosmogony, as are numerous discoveries concerning Jupiter made in recent years. Actions and traits ascribed to Jupiter earlier plus new types of behavior listed here and those to be treated confirm it as the ultimate heir of Super-Uranus. The heat of Jupiter's interior is greater than that of the photosphere of the Sun. Jupiter rotates in nine hours 55 minutes. The composition of Jupiter is of a star. Its outermost layer of atmosphere consists of hydrogen and helium gas with a lacing of ammonia and water-ice clouds. Below is a seething "surface" of liquid hydrogen, then hydrogen compressed into metallic hydrogen, and centrally there may exist a core of rock or iron. [14] Jupiter emits continuously streams of charged particles that penetrate deeply into space. Radio emissions of trapped charged particles of the magnetic field of Jupiter are akin to those launched through space by the stars and received by radio astronomers on Earth. Jupiter's signal emerges at 50 million kilowatts. Super-hurricanes and Jovian lightning discharges, found to reach even its satellite Io, are common [15] . The Great Red Spot in Jupiter's cover may be the great depression still preserved by cyclonic action, whence sprang cometary Venus, or another large body, perhaps of giants in the rebellion described above. The Spot is a surface as well as cloud phenomenon. The radio noises have been audited for a few years but the Red Spot has been observed for centuries. During this longer period, on a number of occasions, the Spot has made dramatic moves [16] . Hence, the rotation of Jupiter has repeatedly suffered marked interruptions even though the force required to change the angular momentum of such a rotating body is far beyond the force imagined to be able to originate in a stable system. Figure 29 JUPITER: LIGHTNING AND THUNDER. a. Greek Zeus-Jupiter, hurling a lightning-bolt Juergens suggests that this "unreal" bolt may be all too real, a plasmoid of electricity of immense power, well beyond the bi-dental fork that represents Jovean lightning in the typical artistic sublimation. b. Zin-Chin, a Chinese Jupiter-God, the Thundermaker, hawk-like [10] . The Egyptian Horus was also hawk-like. The generally turbulent nature of Jupiter shows it to be not only a dark star, but one that may recently have undergone a nova experience. The radio activity marks still dispersing charged gases that would have been exploded and trapped in the nova of 6000 B. P. that it shared with Saturn. The dissolution of Solaria Binaria may be completed now, with the assistance of the novas of Super-Uranus and Super-Saturn. If "membership in a certain type of close-binary system is a necessary condition for a star to become a nova," [17] then a third nova may be beyond the capacity of Jupiter. {S : END OF THE "GOLDEN AGE"} END OF THE "GOLDEN AGE" The Roman poet, Ovid, was probably telling true history when he wrote : After Saturn was driven to the shadowy land of death, and the world was under Jove, the Age of Silver came in... Jove made the springtime shorter, added winter, summer, and autumn, the seasons as we know them... icicles hung down in the winter. And men built houses for themselves... and the oxen struggled, groaning and laboring under the heavy yoke [18] . The Earth's biosphere took on its modern form in Jovea. The seasonal cycle existed with relation to the Sun. The seasons were more severe because the heavy warming and insulating gases of the binary were practically gone. Pastoralism flourished in consequence of the diminution of wild life after the dessication of the land, and helped, also, to supplement a reduced vegetarian product. Komarek remarks upon the succession of forests by grasses in Midwestern America following an orogenic or other climate-transforming event [19] . It is possible, following Ovid again, that during the Saturnian period, before Jovea, humans were not typically carnivores. The eating of animals is then depicted or recounted in the Jovean setting until modern times in the context of sacrifice. The hunters of the "Upper Paleolithic" long regarded their prey as holy. Either, then, the Lunarians were, unlike Saturnians, carnivores but maintaining a holy relationship with their prey, or else the Upper- Paleolithic hunters" were actually of the Age of Jovea and therefore survivors of the Saturnian floods. {S : MONUMENTALISM} MONUMENTALISM The electrical phenomena, the terrors of the end of the Golden Age, the harsher life, and possibly the de-ionization (especially the denegativizing) of the new atmosphere stimulated human aggressiveness. The organized forms of law and order were also enhanced, rules being the reciprocal of lawlessness and resistance to law. As the internal structure of tribes was strengthened, the aggressiveness was turned towards the construction of kingdoms and empires. About the same time as the Unification of Egypt may be placed the founding or resettlement from practically disappeared antecedents of Dilmun on the Persian Gulf, the Indus Valley proto- Indian towns, Tepe Yahya in Iran, the Olmec culture of Meso-America Sumer, and Minoan Crete. These represent discoveries of social systems which certainly existed throughout the habitable world. The physical presence of Saturnian cultures, like the Uranian, had been practically obliterated. Huge stone and brick structures were erected in Middle Americas, Mesopotamia Egypt and elsewhere. These coupled a rapidly redeveloped service of astronomy to the frantic needs of absolute rulers and priesthoods for protection against deluges and for electrical roadways to heaven. Tunnels, mazes, megaliths, ziggurats, and pyramids were built. The time was after 5700 B. P.( 3700 B. C.). Copper was dug, and bronze and brass were made of it, with the help of tin and lead. Euan MacKie's work on megalithic cultures places this immense human effort, that is today exhibited in ruins throughout Europe and the Western Mediterranean, between Jovean and Venusian times [20] . He accepts Euro-Near East communication, but reserves judgment as to whether the West European culture is indigenous or derived. My position is that the megalithic cultures of Spain, France, Ireland, England and Scandinavia are survivors of the larger realms of Atlantis. Painstaking attempts to demonstrate that Stonehenge and other megalithic formations are accurate astronomical indicators by retrocalculations of the present order of the skies have not succeeded. Few doubt that they are sky-oriented, part of the human obsession with the celestial order which is one of our basic principles in this work. In careful analysis of the constructions of Ballochroy and Kintraw in Scotland, by way of the work of MacKie, A. Thom, and others, Dwardu Cardona has disproved the theory that these sites represent celestial conditions unchanged since before 687 B. C.; that is, they cannot be used to contradict quantavolutionary earth movement as late as 2700 years ago. {S : REPEATED DISASTERS} REPEATED DISASTERS Humans worked even while the heavens remained unsettled. The species was repeopling the Earth from a few thousands of survivors to many millions. Mankind was recovering from the Saturnian floods, restoring agriculture where the land had not been devastated by salted water, or dried by the lack of rain and by the brilliant Sun. Menes, the first king of Egypt, found a land of marshes, drained them, and built dikes along the Nile. In the Pyramid texts and related histories, Professor W. Mullen has uncovered evidence of repeated disasters. Herodotus quotes Egyptian priests to the effect that the sun had changed its course four times since Egypt possessed its first king [21] . Notably, these Egyptians came with a distinct language, culture, and a new race or races, perhaps one from the West to the Delta and a second from the South to Upper Egypt, the time being early Jovea. By 3200, dynastic Egypt had begun, with a Deluge myth underlying it [22] . Nearly all of the royal monuments of the First Dynasty were obliterated by fire [23] . Calamities are associated with the Second Dynasty, too. Though the Third Dynasty, builders of Pyramids, appears to have been stable, a great catastrophe "brought down the whole Old Kingdom." [24] The "Old Bronze Age" was succeeded by the "Middle Bronze Age" which we associate with the Age of Mercury. Typical of the mysteries encountered when one attempts to reconstruct the disasters of Jovea is a buried pyramid, described by Zakaria Goneim [25] . It is placed early at 3000 B. C. but not finished. Its builders were supposedly fickle: they "often changed their plans during construction." Both alignment and level were altered. A large wall of it was buried very shortly after being constructed. Clear, crude drawings and marks of the workers are left on its white limestone. Goneim offers no conclusion; to us the circumstances appear to have involved a rampant planet, a belief in the efficacy of pyramids against catastrophes and continual geophysical upsets, during which construction could not be carried out. Probably the pyramid belongs at the end of Jovean times. One may conjecture that the pyramid-building epoch began in the period of transition from Jupiter to Mercury, which probably lasted for centuries. The Great Pyramid of Ghiza (ca. 2100 B. C. and 4th Dynasty) presents a superlative stability. It is oriented only 4 minutes of a degree west of geographical North. Its interior shows signs of enormous stresses. It was probably shifted in a great earthquake [26] . {S : GODS NOT INVENTED} GODS NOT INVENTED The Jovean Binary establishment continued to deteriorate. The deterioration is treated in Greek legend as the story of the Olympian family of Zeus. We make of this, and of similar family histories in Mesopotamia. Egypt, Meso-America, the Teutonic regions and elsewhere, a history of the solar system marked by the transgressions of major gods -- Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The Olympians were nouveaux arrivés, a group who appeared after the Saturnian family had been displaced, and before these the Uranians. The Jovean gods were in some cases new sky objects; in other cases they exchanged names and identities with older gods, partly out of amnesia, partly out of the changed motions and obscured vision of the time of transition. No new sky god has been "invented" in any part of the world since the Martian age, and Mars was part of the Jovean assemblage of Greco-Roman culture. Nor did the Teutonic peoples invent new gods, try as they might, after the "Ragnarok" or "Gotterdammerung." Nor did a new sky god come out of India, China, or America. Whence one concludes that "real gods" cannot be "invented" by the human mind as a pastime, or as a cold decision. Further, the abstract God of the Jews and of Christians and Muslim, and the abstract Heaven of the Chinese, are gods of philosophy. Insofar as a tangible presence is given to them, that presence becomes manifest in the behavior, appearances, visitations, rituals and iconography of the ancient sky gods and their heavenly hosts. {S : APOLLO} APOLLO The most abstract of the ancient great gods might appear to be Apollo [27] . He was regarded anciently, too, as the most mysterious. Pausanias listed 58 different appellations for Apollo, compared with 67 for Zeus. Apollo is Boreal Apollo, who came from the northernmost lands of the Hyperboreans, hence, existed in late Urania and through Saturnia, when the Boreal opening in its half-closed later period was the cynosure of human eyes. The routes of the Baltic amber shores were dotted with shrines of Apollo. Delos, the Aegean Island, where stood the great classical religious center, was devoted to him; also Delphi, greatest prophetic center, for Apollo was the god of prophecy. He was Phoebus Apollo, a shining god, without phases. He was not originally connected with farmers and shepherds, but was a master of animals and the hunt, as was his twin sister Artemis (Diana). He was a healer of sickness, and sender of plagues. He was not a war god. He was wise, as befitted a prophet. He was youthful and a god of youth. He was god of gatherings, assemblies, colonies, and politics. Through his sister and younger brother, Hermes, he was related to the mining of silver; most silver mines of ancient Attica were called by their names. He was god of music. He bore a distant gaze, a kind of vague Mona Lisa expression; he showered arrows from afar. His name suggests an old Greek verb meaning "to repel or set aside" and an ancient form of a verb meaning "to destroy." And, finally, Miller feels that Apollo was not his earliest name. Apollo in Egypt may have been Ammon (Amon, Amen) who is hard to distinguish from Horus-Jupiter and Thoth-Mercury, not to mention the conventional attempts to tie him to the Sun (" a solar deity"). Perhaps Ammon and Apollo both mean "not" (a) "visibly present" (pollomon). Perhaps Mercury and Apollo were close together, with Apollo much the larger. {S : EXPLOSION AND ASTEROIDS} EXPLOSION AND ASTEROIDS To accord with revolutionary theory, Apollo was once important, and then disappeared. He was more probably a planet, I would guess, than a satellite of Uranus, or Saturn, or finally Jupiter, his father. He shone in the Boreal North to human observers, and was helpful in the hunt of day and night. His size and speed as he orbited between Earth and the larger planets may have made him seem young. Perhaps his orbit between Earth and the binary complex carried him across the stringed lines of colored clouds framed by the boreal arch. whereupon the invention of the harp or lyre was attributed to him [29] . Both he and his brother, Hermes, also god of music, were visible to the human eye. (Both were pictured as small suns, as Kerenyi writes.) [30] Among the stretched strings of the heavenly lyre, they moved, plucking the harmonies of the spheres. The fate of planet Apollo was catastrophic. "Shining Apollo" was perhaps the most brilliant member of the Olympian family. Early in the Mercurian period, Apollo either collided with a Saturnian fragment, or was struck by Jovean thunderbolts, and exploded. It was probably behind the Sun at that time and human observers could not report the event. Much of the debris of Apollo may still be orbiting the sun as the asteroidal belt between Jupiter and Mars. Other debris struck Earth, appearing to be and behaving as vast showers arrows and missiles, clouds of fumes that healed or plagued living things, and chunks of precious metal. The material of Apollo is still moving eccentrically and dropping upon Earth. The theory of an exploded planet of the meteoroid belt between Jupiter and Mars was mentioned in Chapter One. "Without such an explosion the fragments would scarcely have been able to deviate from the orbit of the protoplanet." [31] Meteoritic material that has been analyzed shows elements in excess of their proportions on Earth [32] , leading to the surmise that elements have formed at different times in the history of the solar system. Hydrocarbons have been detected on meteorites and durable primitive forms of life are being watched for. Though sometimes advanced, the latter claims are never accepted. The gift of prophecy is closely tied to the gift of disappearance, movement beyond sight into the realms of the mysterious unsighted future. Apollo was like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland; the cat vanished but the grin remained fixed in mid-air. The enigmatic smiles of some sculptures of Apollo are recalled. {S : MERCURY} MERCURY Escaping the fate of Apollo, Mercury fled the neighborhood of Jupiter. We conjecture that it was driven or exploded from its near-in position. After following an erratic career, it settled in its present position near the Sun. Greek myth suggests that it passed close by its "older brother," planet Apollo, much the larger, seizing some of its abundant clouds and electrical charge. The incident is related in the Greek myth of Hermes' theft of the flocks of Apollo; this he did soon after he was born. Hermes was herald and guide to mankind, patron of thieves, gamblers, merchants, and wayfarers. He was the messenger of the Olympian gods, a reckless and careless fellow. He was Thoth, a great, perhaps dominating God of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. "When Horus resigned earthly power Thoth succeeded him to the throne." [33] He guarded the Moon and played games with it. He was a great god of Western Europe where Beaumont, in studies of English and Scottish pre-history, ascribes to him disasters and obsessive worship. The Vedic Hindu Pushan is amazingly close to the Greek Hermes in traits [34] . In Meso-America, he was Xolotl, drawn like a big-eared dog or opossum of human body, who assisted in the deadly ball-games when Venus played against the "Sun." [35] De Leonard tells us so, but I am uncertain and think that this creature may be none other than the cetus-figure or Seth, whom we have earlier described. For Rock has identified the Meso-American god Tezcatlipoca with Mercury and Wotan [36] . Tezcatlipoca is the god of wanderers, of travelling merchants. His cult places are at crossroads. He carries a rod. He is the inventor of ornate speech and knows how to read dead languages. He is god of song and dance, god of magic and witches. He is a god who moves easily into the underworld, and his followers can find themselves in the dark. He is a medical expert who helps women in the throes of childbirth. Perhaps he was called "lucky Mercury" because he avoided the fate of Apollo, but more so because the Earth was lucky to have avoided colliding with him. The small planet came close to Earth, on occasion, and treated the globe to electrical shocks that unsettled the minds of people. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel seems to be saying so. The Greek Hermes puts people to sleep and awakens them; he is an arch-deceiver. wizard, patron of magic. Table 30 attempts to arrange some notable events to help in general orientation. Everywhere, writes Schaeffer of the early Middle Bronze Age, the newcomers were few, weak, and very different. Archaeological excavations give some support to the theory of Mercury's destructive career. The Table that follows names some of the incidents in which the planet seems to have been involved, as well as catastrophes of the succeeding two periods. Figure (table) 30 SOME DISASTERS FROM MERCURY TO MARS (tentatively placed) Periods and Dates Equivalent in Catastrophic Events( y) Reconstructed Conventional Chronology Chronology( x) MERCURIA . . 2400 (2400-2300) Universal destruction[ s], including collapse of Old Kingdom in Egypt [w] and Old Minoan Age in Crete [ma] 2300 . Techuacan [Cave 30] 2200 . Akkadians Fall [fr] Yu begins Hsin Dynasty in China [f] Tepe Yahya (Iran) [k] Fall of Ebla (Syria) [e] 2100 (2100) Great destructions 2000 . Proto-Indian Trouble [r] Neo-Sumerian Period Ends [rf] 1900 . Revolt of the Giants [o] Tower of Babel [st] Abraham's Battle [p] Earthquakes [ot] Sodom and Gomorrah [p] 1800 . Jacob (OT) p 1700 . Job (OT) p 1600 . . 1500 . Joseph Famine (OT) ps VENUSIA (1750-1650) . 1450 . Exodus (OT) ps 1400 . Great Destruction [sv] Indus Valley Ruin [ro] 1300 . . 1200 . . 1100 (1450) Great destruction [s] 1000 (1365) Great destruction Thira-Santorini Explodes 900 . . 800 (1250-1225) Great destruction[ s] MARTIA . Mars Destructions [v] Mycenaean Destruction [l] 700 . . Note to the table: (x) The six conventional dates are the central points of Schaeffer's catastrophic periods for the Near and Middle East, (1948) 563-5. (y) The footnotes refer to the following sources; many dozens of additional sources exist and, of these, many are cited in Schaeffer and Velikovsky, and elsewhere in the present work. (S) Schaeffer, 563-5 Summary. (Many sites). (M) MacNeish 29-37, (Ro) Rowland, 11-2. (G) Goodrich, 3rd (1963) p. 5. (V) Velikovsky, 1950 (Many sites) (F) Fitzgerald, 14. (Fr) Frank-Fort, 47-54. (LK) Lamberg- Karlovsky, 102-11. (R) Rawlinson, 19-21. (P) Patten, 252,255, et passim. (MA) Matz, 73,239, (OT) Old Testament. (PS) Parker and Sieff. (I) Isaacson. (O) Ovid. (W) Bell (1971). (E) "Ebla" Maccoby (1977), (ST) Strickling. Goblet d'Aviella points out that both Thoth and Hermes have the ram as a sacred animals; both were personified by steles, hermata or bethels; both carried the caduceus; both had human figures with wings. Both were guides to the Underworld, teachers, and scribes. Pausanias claims "Par-Ammon is the surname of Hermes," which is not irreconcilable with Ammon as Apollo, "par" meaning "Father". The caduceus or Kerykeion is the famous wand of Mercury (and the emblem of the modern medical profession). It resembles the Hindu trisula, which in turn "bears a singular resemblance to the sign of the planet Mercury...." [37] . Furthermore the caduceus "produced fire and would slay," says Goblet [38] . It is too similar to the serpent-entwined magical staff of Moses for the staff to have been independently contrived by him. In the turbulent electrical atmosphere of the times, wands could be made to produce glowing and crackling discharges with fair reliability. Thus would priests be tied to the gods [39] . It may also be notable that the Hebrew word for "planet" and "luck" mazal, are the same [40] and may refer to Hermes. Beaumont asserts that Thoth is also "Ham" of the Old Testament and Baal (Lord) Hammon of the Carthaginians; further, that the name Abram is from Ram and Ramah was the ancient Hebrew capital city. The King of Tyr was Hiram, or "High Ram." [41] The Ram is associated with Fricka, Frigga, Frye, who is Venus (Venerdi in Italian is Friday in English) and who is said to be the wife of Odin (Wotan) who is the Teutonic Mercury or Hermes. It is Beaumont's theory, which deserves credence, that the pillars of Hercules refer to the large number of stone columns (dolmens) that line the coasts of Southern Britain and Northwestern France leading into the English Channel [42] . However, not Hercules, but Hermes is the god commemorated so strikingly there that the passage was known to the ancients. (Hercules is most clearly identified with the planet Mars.) [43] Beaumont relies partly upon Goblet d'Aviella who relies upon Tacitus [44] . What does Tacitus say? He says that the sacred stone columns found frequently in the region of the lower Rhine are called Pillars of Hercules, but adds that Hercules is given credit for many things that do not belong to him. Could the columns have been erected to Hermes and a thousand years or more later accredited to Hercules- Mars? A comparative study of the stones would answer the question; we know the myriad Hermes stones that marked the roads of Greece. Otto concludes his study of Hermes by telling us not to think that all his later qualities were inconsistent with his earlier ones. "If a single trait actually did come to the fore later than others, it still retains the same basic meaning which has found a new expression". Then naively he says, "Whatever may have been thought of Hermes in primitive times, a splendor out of the depths must once have so struck the eye that it perceived a world in the god and the god in the whole world." [45] We already have pointed out that Hermes was viewed as a sun. {S : MERCURY'S GEOPHYSICS} MERCURY'S GEOPHYSICS The planet Mercury possesses today some features that are less puzzling when viewed in the perspective of quantavolutionary primevalogy. It is a little-known planet and the recent discoveries concerning it are sometimes reported with exclamations of surprise. It is more dense than the Earth; probably it has a huge core of iron. It has no atmosphere. It is covered with a thin dust of silicate, like the Moon. Like the Moon, too, it reflects sunlight and radar pulses, and emits infra-red radiation. Mercury rotates on its axis thrice while circling the sun twice. This very slow spin is attributed to the sun's tidal or gravitational pull. Why this "spin-orbit coupling" in a 3 to 2 ratio has not become a firm lock in the "several billions of years" of revolution is unknown. The Moon, after all, is locked into the Earth, showing always the same face to us. Even were I mistaken in assigning only a couple of thousands of years for the Moon to acquire its earth- lock, and were to accept instead the several billions of years attributed to the satellite's origin, the Moon-to-Earth tidal ratio is not as great as the Mercury-to-Sun tidal ratio. Hence Mercury should be in firm lock. So, for that matter, should be the Earth and possibly Mars. (Venus is retrograde in its rotation and, if anything, locked into or resonant with Earth, so this, too, is an anomaly of excess.) [46] Already disquieting hypotheses are being voiced about how long ago Mercury may have been emplaced; figures in the hundreds of thousands of years are heard. If Mercury, then Venus, pari passu; and then, logically, Earth and Mars must be even more recently emplaced; but of course, the quantavolutionary theory does not rely exclusively upon the conventional theory of what causes rotational and orbital speed. Forces usually uncalculated affect all planetary motions. Mercury's orbit is not a true circle, but is eccentric [47] . This, too, is surprising, considering the supposed ages during which, free from the influence of other planets to all purpose, it might be expected to have developed the elegant Platonic and Galilean form. The axis of Mercury is perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. If the planet has moved, as is claimed here, from one extreme of the binary axis (now the plane of the ecliptic) to the other, this condition is not readily deducible. One may conjecture that so long as there was focussed solar wind heavy enough to constitute some type of electrical axis, a planet descending upon the axis would present its electrically compatible equator to the arc or, in any case, wind and spin with the driving wind. Mercury has magnetic field, stronger than that of Mars and the Moon. This may be largely a remnant of its magnetization, when it was a body immersed in the powerful magnetic tube. An authority declares, on this phenomenon, "That Mercury has a bipole magnetic field aligned with its spin axis very similar to the Earth's field although weaker, is to me particularly unexpected." [48] Conventional theory once posited a dynamo action, whereby a metallic core, rapidly moving, produced a magnetic field, such as with Earth. Venus has a larger and hotter core, and has no magnetic field, and no rotation to speak of. "Perhaps," he says, "the Mercurian magnetic field arises from causes still unimagined." [49] The surface of Mercury appears as revolutionary theory would expect. It is devastated. It has large plains but is heavily cratered. There are long escarpments or "wrinkles" everywhere. A single basin, scene of a horrendous blast, is 1400 kilometers across. This Caloris Basin is apparently filled with smooth debris like the Imbrian Basin of the Moon. There appears to have been little or no change owing to vulcanism or tectonism, or even atmospheric evolution within the large craters following their creation. There is no noticeable distinction between the types of craters found on Moon and Mars and those of Mercury. Again this is a surprising finding, considering how differently placed the three bodies are in relation to the Sun and to the asteroidal belt. A single bombardment -- why it should be "single" is difficult to understand even from a uniformitarian viewpoint-is postulated to have devastated the planet [50] . Again Bruce C. Murray may be quoted, as representing so frankly the puzzles confronting solar system evolutionists : "The bombardment could have originated... with a single object perturbed to pass near the earth or Venus from an initial orbit beyond Jupiter, Tidal disruptions on the earth or Venus might then conceivably have created a shower of bombarding objects that would have been rapidly swept up through collisions with the four minor planets." [51] Indeed, this theory might well have been employed in claiming that the Moon was caused to erupt from the Earth by a passing body from beyond Jupiter that spread Earth and other planetary debris throughout the system. It is appropriate that, some passages later on, the same author should remark : "The debate now developing over the early history of the inner solar system is reminiscent of an earlier debate between the uniformitarians and catastrophists over the causes of the earth's geological features. There the uniformitarians won." [52] {S : Notes (Chapter Nine: The Olympian Rulers)} Notes (Chapter Nine: The Olympian Rulers) 1. 5-1,1 nakshatra pushya is the word for sun and /or Saturn; Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 434. 2. Gossman (1956) quoted in Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 325. 3. Neptune is a modern, artificial name, not the Greek god Poseidon or Roman god Neptunus. One may guess that it had been fissioned from Super-Uranus or was one of the two stars that erupted from Super-Saturn. It is conceivable that the planet may have been the god Poseidon and is therefore well-named. 4. The rings of Uranus, discovered in 1977, indicate recent geophysical and astronomical activity, since rings descend in fairly short periods of time, as may now be occurring with Saturn's rings. 5. "Planet X," Ency. Britannica (1969). 6. Ginzburg (1909) I, 232. Patten sets this incident at about 1900 B. C. 7. Beaumont (1949) 79-81. 8. Lar. Ency. Mytho. 20. 9. Proclus, quoted in A. de Grazia (1977). Cardona (1978B) has made it clear that Saturn, like Jupiter, was a god who binds. Proclus is pursuing one version of the myth. 10. Figure from W. Simpson (1896), The Buddhist Praying Wheel, Macmillan, fig. 41. 11. Hopkins (1965). 12. 30. 13. Ibid., 430-1. 14. Juergens (1976). 15. Time mag. (Sept. 16, 1974) 56. 16. Finney (1964). 17. Kraft, quoted by Payne-Gaposchkin (1977) 669. 18. Metamorphoses, I, lines 112-24. 19. Komarek (1965) 172. 20. MacKie (1977); cf Müller (1970); Bord (1976); W. L. Cook, ed. (1977); Trento (1978). 21. 11-142 cited in Mullen (1973) 12. 22. Mullen (1973) 12. 23. Ibid., 13 citing W. B. Emery 71-3. 24. Ibid., 13 cf. Schaeffer (1948). 25. (1956). 26. Pawley and Abrahamsen (1973); Velikovsky (1973A). 27. Robert D. Miller (1939). 28. Ziegler, 197. 29. Vail (1972) 48-9. 30. (1976) 86. 31. Rittmann 285. 32. Kerr (1978) 203; Crew (1977A) 26; Birgham (1881). 33. Larousse Ency. Mytho. 27. 34. Otto 120-1. 35. De Leonard 271. 36. Röck, 1085-6. 37. Goblet 229 et passim. 38. Ibid., 230. 39. Ziegler (1977). 40. Rose (1974) 35. 41. Beaumont (1949) 72-3. 42. Ibid. 43. Eratosthenes: "Third is the star of Mars, which others have called the star of Hercules." 44. Goblet 106; Tacitus XXIV. 45. Otto 124. 46. Ransom (1976) 117. 47. Murray (1975) 40. 48. Ibid., 46. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 45-6. 52. Ibid., 47. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 10: } {T VENUS AND MARS } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TEN: VENUS AND MARS From the brow of Zeus, sang the Greeks, sprang Pallas Athene --fully armed and with a shout [1] . She was cometary Venus --fiery-faced, owl-eyed, helmeted and horned, with a long gown and hair trailing behind. Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia the Akkadians were also chanting hymns to Venus, going here by the name of Inanna: [2] By night she sends out light like the Moon does. At noonday sends out light like the Sun does. The mistress of Evening whose largeness is until the limit of Heaven... The Holy light that fills the Heavens. Inanna who shines as far as the Sun. These words, along with the symbols of Inanna (Figure 31) part the curtains upon "a lady who needs no introduction to you," as a master of ceremonies would say. Many scholars deny that it could happen; yet no astral event of the ancients was so well reported as the career of the glowing and devastating comet and proto-planet Venus [3] . For nearly a thousand years it raged through the heavens periodically, encountering first Earth, then Mars; then Jupiter; then Mars again. It periodically -- every half century -- threatened the Earth and sometimes repeated, less harshly, its first devastation of the planet. The age of Venusia lasted from about 1450 to 700 B. C. endured, that is, until the comet Venus lost its cometary appendages and became a hot, young planet circling the Sun for all the world like an ordinary planet is supposed to behave. Figure 31. VARIANTS OF THE COMETARY GODDESS INANNA. Twelve Principal Variants of the Cometary Goddess Inanna Symbol, Source: Falkenstein, Archiasche Texte aus Uruk, cf. Rose (1977). {S : CAREER OF AN ANDROGYNE} CAREER OF AN ANDROGYNE The year around 3450 B. P. was the most devastating since the fall of Saturn; 1453 B. C. may be the exact year by present retrospective reckoning; the superb work of Velikovsky guides us in this as it does elsewhere in these pages [4] . It was a year when the plagues struck Egypt, as the Bible recounts, and the exodus of some Hebrew and Egyptian survivors occurred. Every city in the world must have been shaken and damaged. Tidal floods swept over every coastal culture. Volcanoes erupted. The Earth was scorched by lightning, covered with dust, ashes, gravel, obnoxious and noxious gases, struck repeatedly by slow-speed meteorites, and showered with hydrocarbons, some of it burning. The gamut of sounds was dinned into human ears, at deafening amplitudes. The encounter lasted for weeks because of the temporary roughly parallel course of the two bodies and because of the enormous train of the cometary Venus. It began with a worldwide plague of red dust. The experience became increasingly excruciating as the Earth moved deeper through the millions of miles of comet tail. At the height of the disturbances, the incandescent head of the comet penetrated the smoking skies of the globe in all of its ruddy immensity. The Earth's axis shifted in a gravitational-electrical field. Less most of its train, proto-Venus moved on. Now it could not be seem, nor could any other sky object. For some years, the globe was swaddled in smoke. The biosphere hardly survived. Animals often lived upon manna from heaven [5] . Plants withered in the thin light. When the skies reopened to human vision, they presented for contemplation a re-enactment of the encounter. Half a century had passed. The comet returned like a huge blazing chariot driven by a man or angel [6] , raining missiles and spreading terror upon the Earth. Again and again, until the seventh century B. C. Earth was menaced. The most strenuous inventions and applications of magic and religion did not avail against the horrendous god. Other behaviors of cometary Venus can be recited briefly: The comet was a god of many characters -- female, male, and androgynous [7] . Thus, in the Mexican ballgame, to be described below, the Venus is male but nevertheless gives birth. Venus appeared on occasion larger than the Moon and fiercely bright. She caused the Earth to alter it ponderous movements. She brought the Sun on at least two occasions to an apparent standstill. She wore horns and trailed long tresses which, in her male form, were more evidently a phallus. She destroyed countries and people, rendering the land barren, clogged the air and soil with red dust, darkened the day, excited pandemonium and brought general starvation. She sent berserk tribes upon the warpath. She aroused a great religious fervor and claimed sacrificial victims, in great numbers. Her tresses (phallus) were cut off in a passage near Earth and a frenzy of sexual deviance seized many people. (Cults of the virgin and eunuchs.) [8] She sent great tsunamis over the coastal land, tipped over lakes like mere bowls of soup. She is "geologically quite young and was seismically active until recently..." [9] and its surface may be burning. G. Talbott (1978) has proven "in a fully quantitative manner that a massive, molten body -- quantitatively a mass equivalent to Venus and having the Venus surface area, and molten at between 1500 K and 2000 K -- will transfer heat internally by flowing magma, and will radiate its heat in such a way that in exactly 3500 years its temperature is expected to be exactly 750 K, which by measurement it is." She generated many millions of tons of burning pitch and petroleum that fell along a broad swath of the Earth that turned in her path [10] . Countries grow rich today from the oil rains that ruined ancient "Arabia felix." And when she crossed orbits with the planet Mars, a mighty battle of the gods ensued which their human champions emulated. She stimulated new cycles of fear and new prodigies of careful astronomical observations to warn of her coming. Nor did her effects cease, for the Earth and Moon are scarred by flood, fire, quakes, and biosphere disruption that she caused, and she left psychological and cultural marks that could not be erased. {S : THE HEAT OF VENUS} THE HEAT OF VENUS The great heat of Venus is predictable from its recent origin and subsequent collisions and encounters. The theory that its miles-deep clouds set up a "greenhouse effect" on its surface, heating it to over 600 Celsius, will not stand examination; little of the Sun's heat (perhaps 2%) reaches the surface, and the planet rotates upon its axis so slowly that an exceedingly cold mass would prevail on the night side for long periods of time; yet the heat is uniform throughout [11] . No matter how many books and articles may be written on the subject of the heat of planet Venus, disdaining Velikovsky, the fact remains that he had before 1950 read nearly everything that ancient and modern sources said about the planet and decided --indeed, was compelled to decide -- that it was hot, whereas, try as they may, those who have chosen to make an historical issue of the heat of Venus, have been hard-pressed to find any chain of opinions in modern scientific circles which affirmed that Venus was warm. Nor is if far from the truth to claim that the great heat of Venus has been the leading light pointing to the many surprises that the exploration of the solar system has since displayed. The myth of Phaeton is famous: the inexperienced youth, who was let to drive the chariot of the sun across the skies, was burning up the Earth until Zeus, implored to help, dispatched him into the sea with a thunderbolt. Dwardu Cardona puts the case succinctly, citing the originals : "That the myth of Phaeton describes a shifting of heavenly bodies, we know from Plato. That Phaeton was comet or a "blazing star", we know from Cicero. That this "blazing star" became a planet, we know from Hesiod. And that this planet was the planet Venus, we know from both Nonnos and Solinus." [12] Venus was not the first body to appear before astonished humans as a comet. Any body that intrudes upon an atmosphere may look like a comet. It can acquire horns as it brushes through the air, and trail turbulent gases behind it. This was especially yrue before the age of Jovea, for then the magnetic tube of Solaria Binaria was dense. Today, the gross eccentricity of motion of a comet heightens its electrical activity and brings a variety of visual forms even in "near-empty" space Planet Venus even now displays to astronomers a fan-like tail sunwards and a "comet-like tail" swept by solar winds into space [13] . {S : HUNDREDS OF IDENTITIES} HUNDREDS OF IDENTITIES Cometary-Venus and proto-planet Venus was in other guises Pan, Phosphorus, Hesperus, Dionysius, Hephaestus. It was Moloch (the evil god) [14] and the inspirer of the lord-shepherds (moloch- shepherds) or Hyksos who invaded and conquered Egypt as that great nation collapsed and the Hebrews crossed into their "Promised Land." It was Lucifer, who sank finally to the low estate of the morning star. It was Molochset or Seth, the Devil God, and Seth (or Set), who is also Typhon, granting that Seth was a name of older gods, too. Typhon was the name of the first Hyksos king of Egypt; either he took the name of the portion of Venus that fell to Earth, or his name was given to it, since by its help he won Egypt [15] . Typhon was king of the red country, the country pulverized by the red train of the Comet. The red was believed by the brunette peoples to have cursed the frequently semitic red heads and marked them as of the evil god [16] . Typhon was Phaeton; Typhon was the monster struck down by Zeus in a great battle; but some saw Zeus and Typhon while others saw the comet head battling the grip of its monster-like tail. Typhon is the archetype of the typhoon. The Iroquois Indians told a story much like Phaeton and Typhon: Long ago, an immense Serpent bearing horns (encorné) devastated Lake Ontario. The Sun and the Moon witnessed the extinction of the Indians, swallows up one after another by the monster. In the end not a canoe was left on the water, not a lodge on the lake shores. But one day the beast ventured too near the falls (Niagara). The Thunder god slew it with a bolt and left its body floating on the water like a chain of rocky spurs. [17] When the Romans came to name the planet of the morning and evening star, they called it Venus, for reasons little known, since on the one hand Venus is thought to have been a minor Italian goddess and, on the other hand, Cicero was probably wrong in saying the name came from the word venire (to come) [18] . For that matter the Greeks, after calling the planet Hesperos (evening star) and Phosphoros (morning star), came to call it Aphrodite. But in one of its first known usages, Plato says that the name Aphrodite came from "a Syrian lawgiver," a male, when he ascribes it to planet Venus [19] . Whence Aphrodite, goddess of love and of the Moon, became goddess of love, and the planet Venus. {S : THE PLOT OF THE ILIAD} THE PLOT OF THE ILIAD In my view Aphrodite became the planet Venus to the Greeks only after the reality of the catastrophic period was dissipated into a euphoric amnesiac sublimation. In Homer's epics, Aphrodite wears the golden girdle of the full Moon. She provokes the Trojan wars by bribing Paris with possession of beautiful Helen (Selene, the Moon). Paris, identifiable as Ares, or Mars, returns to Troy, where he is pursued by the furious Danaens (Greeks), devotees of Pallas Athene, who seek, then, in effect, to recover the moon (Helen). Aphrodite and Ares, gods and lovers, side with the Trojans, but ultimately, the Athene faction wins and recaptures Helen [20] . The last Trojan war belongs probably in the early 7th century (-687?), as the crises of Mars drew to a close. Aphrodite is still the Moon, reckless, wanton, "weak", (because capturable and preyed upon in the eyes of man), "feminine." Her identity will become more foggy, until, with confusing effects upon art history, science, astrology, and mythological understanding, she will be identified with the planet Venus. Cometary Venus, Pallas Athene was strikingly different from Apollo and Mercury. Her relations with her father, Zeus, were more richly distinctive than those of any other god. Her mastery of the age was unchallenged. If she was not ruler of the gods, she was certainly their field marshal. Only Athene might wear the aegis of Zeus. She was mistress of the arts and sciences as well. At the risk of descending into mere cataloguing, we may return to the myriad identities of this singular goddess and god. We have not yet toured the world for its names, nor can we do so very well until anthropologists have caught up with the historians and humanists in descriptions. Every language, every culture and sub-culture carries one and more names for Venus. Cometary Venus was Minerva of the Latins, it was Hathor (Egypt), but also Isis; it was Fricka, Freyia or Frigga, wife of Odin-Mercury among the Teutons; Durga-Devi and Kali in India; Quetzalcoatl in Meso-America; Ishtar and Inanna in Babylonia (Hebrew "Esther" and Greek "Aster"); Mazzaroth, Noga, Michael, Lucifer, and Baal of the Hebrews; and Uzza of Arabia. The star that aroused and rained down plagues of vermin upon Egypt just before the Hebrew Exodus: was the "dog-fly" (Pallas Athene) to her enemies in Homer's Iliad, and the "wasp-star" of the Meso-Americans [21] . On the cave-walls of Australia, the ancestors of the stone age tribes of today drew figures that appear to describe Venus [22] . One depicts an owl-like creature with hands, feet, feathers, owl-tail, owl-eyes, and owl-head. It is painted in ocher. (It is doubtful that there were owls in pre-colonial Australia.) Figure 32. THE IMPERIAL CHINESE DRAGON ROBES. The Kang Hsi emperor (1662-1722) wearing the traditional dragon robes, (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1942.) Another painting shows a serpent-woman between whose hands is arched what is probably a lightning-bolt. And still another reveals a person called "Thunderman" who holds a lightning bolt in his hands. In China, the classical "Lucky Dragon," which was carried in the most beautiful and ornate fashion on the robes of the Emperor (see Figure 32) has been traced back to around 3500 B. P., to a very unlucky period of Chinese history [23] . The original image was probably of a serpent exploding in lightning and swallowing a great globe, as Cardona's painting in the Frontispiece depicts. Thus there are many parallels, from many cultures, marking the worldwide shift of attention to the behavior of a new and distinctive god in the sky. More than poetic fantasy, or a casual shift of allegiance from one regularly orbiting stone of outer space to another, is needed as a reason for the immense historical obsession with the sky-god and planet Venus. The more insistent and persistent a legendary theme, the more forceful is the reality behind the theme. {S : GLOBAL RUINATION AND ITS PERPETRATOR} GLOBAL RUINATION AND ITS PERPETRATOR In 1948, Claude Schaeffer published his comprehensive review of the field studies of Ancient Near and Middle East civilizations. He concluded that all had been concurrently destroyed by earthquake or other cause on several occasions. The many cities shown on the map of Figure 33 suffered destruction by natural causes, twice or more in the Jovean, Mercurian, Venusian and Martian periods. He goes far towards demonstrating that the conventional divisions of the Bronze ages are in fact divisions by catastrophe. No existing settlement escaped. Rockenbach, a careful collector of ancient materials, published in 1602 a work fixing a great cometary disaster at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, giving the date as 1493 B. C. He alludes to witnesses of the phenomenon as far as India [24] . In 1950, Velikovsky tied in the proto-Indian disasters of around 3500 B. P. to the Venusian catastrophe of Exodus times [25] . Archaeology has produced more evidence since then and the question of the mode of physical destruction has been discussed. Raikes (with the present author dissenting) has argued that great natural dams holding back the Indus River waters upstream collapsed and flooded the many Indus towns [26] ; thus was proto-Indian civilization fatally wounded. I would reject the argument because, first, the destruction was exceedingly widespread, from one end of India to another, and, secondly, in any event, because huge river channel diversions or floods are owing to seismism, and the origins of such seismism must be searched for in an interruption of earth motions, in "cosmic excitement." A third objection to the "burst dam" explanation is the contemporary occurrence of catastrophe far beyond the Indus and even the Indian subcontinent. Robert McC. Adams has recently written: "It is now apparent that there was a major westwards shift of the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during Kassite times." [27] This would probably be the middle of the second millennium B. C. He alludes to a long "dark age" of vastly reduced population and to hundreds of abandoned settlements, newly located. Figure 33. TOWN SITES REPEATEDLY DESTROYED DURING BRONZE AGE. Kondratov reporting upon Soviet archaeological studies, writes : "In the middle of the second millennium B. C. the ancient cities of Southern Turkmenia declined and were abandoned by the inhabitants. The South Turkmenia civilization perished at about the same time as the proto- Indian, and the reasons are still unknown." [28] China did not escape. "We discover between the chronology and the stratigraphy of the sites of the second millennium of China and those of Western Asia a very close parallelism." [29] There appears to have been a hiatus of centuries between the legendary Hia dynasty and the historic Chang dynasty. In the West, this was the Exodus period. The Baltic Sea may have formed now then. Its remarkably fresh waters, fed salt only through narrow currents from the North Sea, would be post-Saturnian. Its depth is mostly less than 100 meters, practically all less than 200. It may have originated from an ice melt in the Venus encounters of the second millennium B. C., with an axial tilt of the Earth southwards, a heating of the atmosphere, and earth movements. Then pollen radiocarbon datings of this period might be explained. The pine forests would be drowned and give up fossil resin for amber, as recounted above, pages 72-3. [30] Southeast Europe and Near Asia were probably devastated at the same time as the Baltic Basin was flooded. At from 20 to 70 centimeters depth, large areas of the Black Sea bottom "consist entirely of cellular fragments and organic remains, well preserved and showing remarkable detail when examined with the electron microscope." Metallic stains are heavy in the 20 to 70 cm levels [31] . Dates of 3500 years ago were indicated. The "Old World,." then appears to have been beset by the celestial encounters of Earth and Venus throughout its length and breadth. The contemporary archaeology of the Americas is only in its beginnings. Ecuador is the current nominee for the Mother culture, and is carried back to 5000 B. P. (Jovea) according to Donald Collier of the University of Chicago. The best-known ancient sites excavated, those of the Olmec civilization of South-Eastern Mexico, do bear the tell-tale marks of fire, ashes and abrupt cessation of activities around 1500 B. C. [32] . In the same area, at the Temple of Monte Negro, heavy combustion is reported for the Martian period (a 649 B. C. average date) "over which nothing was subsequently built." [33] The Americas from Alaska to Bolivia have suffered greatly from pre-historic catastrophes; this much is admitted. The problem is to arrive at acceptable dates for the physical ruins that will match the abundant legendary material. In the "Old World," Geography, archaeology and legend are receiving some coordination. In India, the wreckage of culture can be correlated with the stories of a rampant Venus. Isenberg, for example, has recently added a remarkable piece to the emerging structure. He does so by analyzing the myth of the goddess Devi. {S : THE DEVI AND THE MEXICAN BALLPLAYER} THE DEVI AND THE MEXICAN BALLPLAYER The birth and behavior of Devi is made understandable in the perspective of Venus. She was born from an exploding conflagration of all the great god-lights of the sky and from each of them received her form and equipment. Mounted upon a lion, she went forth [34] . She "gave out a loud roar with a defying laugh again and again. By her unending exceedingly great terrible roar the entire sky was filled, and there was a great reverberation. All the worlds shook. The seas trembled. The earth quaked and all the mountains rocked." [35] The Devi "indented the earth struck by her foot, her crown struck the sky : the sound of her bowstring terrified the whole subterranean world. She grasped all the space of the regions by her one thousand arms; fierce war was raged between the Devi and the enemies of the devas." [36] Many details might be added. The Venus encounter is also mythically portrayed in the "New World," The ball court sculptured panels of Vijin, Mexico, are a most clear and significant depiction of the career of proto-planet Venus. Carmen Cook de Leonard offers a detailed description and analysis of them which carries us within easy reach of the central theory of Venusia. The earliest Meso-American towns thus far uncovered give us ruined ball-courts. The characters are identified as the ballplaying contestants --Venus (as a male sinner and the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl) and the Sun -- plus a body that may be 'Mars' or the "Night Sun," the Moon and Mercury. The Moon is pictured as a skeleton, hanging partly immersed in water. Mercury appears as "a human figure with a mask of a big-eared dog or maybe an opossum, probably representing the god Xolotl who might also be a symbol of the planet Mercury whose revolution around the Sun is probably twice depicted (88 days). He is also leader of the dead to the other world." [37] (Seth?, see p. 210) The ballgame moves as follows : 1. 'Venus' sits on a serpent-mouthed throne, denouncing sin and readying to move down to Earth. The Moon as goddess of love and Mercury stand besides the second central figure of the Sun. 2. 'Venus' is tempted by a bird-musician, and, though "male," is giving birth to a sky monster, product of his sin. 3. The Sun and 'Venus' have played the game and 'Venus' has lost after having enjoyed 236 nights of debauchery. Venus offers Sun a knife with which to kill him and 'Mercury' prepares to lead the dead. 4. The Sun is sacrificing 'Venus' whose spirit oozes out penitentially. (This is the fate meted out to the defeated human ballplayers as well.) Thus this late representation of a 3500-years old scene parallels the Phaeton and the Jupiter- Typhon legends. 'Venus' is sexually well intentioned, goes to Earth, is tempted into sinning, gives birth to a monster, and is sacrificed. The Venus-worship and preoccupation go back to the earliest civilization presently known in Meso-America (and it may be that by Venusian times the American population had been reduced to a survival culture). In the light of our earlier chapters, the existence of cultures in Meso- America that flourished long before Venusia cannot be doubted. The legends all go back before then. So do the calendars. The Mayan calendars begins with the year October 4, 5373 B. P. or August 13, 5113 B. P. according to recent calculations. This would indicate a Jovean base, and before then comes the story of Atlantis and eastern connections. In Meso-America between 1500-1200 B. C., writes, there was a diffusion of the religious idea of the jaguar. Also "the baby face and hollow figures are actually, related to the jaguar. It is amazing that this animal could have been so important in the Valley of Mexico or in the highlands in general, where it was not found in the natural state." [38] In Olmec period III (600-100), continues Bernal, a jaguar mask carries tears, "a clear suggestion of the water god" and a forked tongue, also characteristic of later water gods and obviously a feature of the serpent..... The forked tongue of the serpent. associated with jaguar elements is typical to some classic gods. Both elements form a sort of dragon very characteristic of Meso-American art and religion." [39] A kind of dragon has a body made up of volutes. The volutes are said not to be an "Olmec element." "Volutes. The volutes may have been the origin of the plumed serpent, which is not an Olmec element either." [40] In other words, the jaguar may be merged into the origin of the plumed serpent or Quetzalcoatl, both representing the planet Venus. Venus was also called by Meso-Americans "the star that smokes," although it does not smoke. {S : A LONGER DAY} A LONGER DAY Between 1528 and 1371 B. C., the Hindus plotted their Lunar Mansions [41] . With these marching across the sky, the calendar could be redone and the major actors tracked in the sky. I take this to mean, not as the English astronomer Bentley said in his classic work of 1825 on Indian astronomy, a first-time invention, but a clearing of the fulginaceous chaos of the skies following the worst of the cometary-Venus encounters. The Moon could be well observed again, the various mansions discerned, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter "born again." Not until later is Saturn mentioned and he was said to be born later --revealed later, I would guess [42] . Bentley argues, too, that the Kali Yuga, the longtime cycle of Venus, could not have been recorded before 1425 B. C., "which was only the dawn of astronomy in India." [43] On this point, he engages in vituperous debate with his critics, who claimed that Hindu astronomy goes back to around 3000 B. C. He aims to show by retroactive calculations that the older dates would be impossible. The debate is a forerunner (partly in reverse) of the attacks upon Velikovsky by historians and astronomers, 1950-1979, who insisted both that Venus was known to be an orderly planet before the fifteenth century and at the same time that the Babylonians lacked the ability to make correct observations of Venus before 747 B. C. [44] Again, in my opinion, Bentley is proving that the skies were disorganized by the Venusian incursions, yet he was led by uniformitarian presumptions to believe that Hindu astronomers were incompetent before that time. All over the world, a Venus calendar came into being with the incursions of the goddess. This could only mean that the Earth's motions were sufficiently altered to institute a new order of the years and months. Confirming Velikovsky's circumnavigation of cultures on the calendric changes, the recent writings of Prof. Coe are most emphatic regarding Meso-America. "Perhaps most important of all in their cosmological thinking was the calendar itself. At its heart was the sacred 260-day count, the origin of which was obscure." Again, "... Since it was associated with the color direction concept, with the gods, and with the affairs of men, this ritual count was the most significant mental construct in Meso-America." [45] This year was broken down into thirteen twenty-day intervals. Not the Venus year, this year of 260-days, but the "Jupiter-year," or perhaps a later "Mercury- year." The year was 260 days during some period before the time of Venus. Then came a change to the 360 day year everywhere. This was the Venus year. Writes Coe, "At each appearance with the dawn sun at 584-day intervals, the Venus regent threw his spear at a victim symbolizing an aspect of Meso-American daily life: at a water goddess, signifying impending drought...; at a jaguar throne, symbol of the rulers; at various deities; at the jaguar warriors, i. e. the soldiery; and at the Maize god, indicating starvation...." Coe stresses the "basically malevolent character of this great heavenly body." [46] He insists that "Venus was enormously important in Meso-American religion and mythology. A large body of myth relates to the apotheosis of Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, the Feathered-Serpent, as the Morning Star." A god who produces a new calendar had moved the world; Jupiter and Venus were accordingly so celebrated everywhere. The Venus case is summed up: "All over the world we find that there was at some time the same calendar of 360 days, and that at some later date, about the seventh century before the present era, five days were added at the end of the year, as 'days over the year, ' or 'days of nothing. ' [47] Often they were considered days of ill-omen and danger. These were the work of Mars probably. (An Egyptian myth tells of Mercury-Thoth winning five days from the Moon in a dice game, thus lengthening the lunar year.) Again, Velikovsky introduces extensive proof that the priests, rulers and astronomers were busily engaged in reckoning new calendars in the century following the Mars incursions, that is, after 687 B. C. [48] In Meso-America, to the 360 day year was added a "five days without name," a so-called "vague year." This 365-day year was then matched with the 260-day sacred year to produce a calendar round of 51 vague years (note the probable relation to the recurring visits of Venus as developed by Velikovsky in treating of the Jews' Jubilee Year).[ [49] The resulting span of time of 11,960 days was marvelous to them, for it conjoined the calendars and arrived at 405 Lunations or months of 29.53 days. Calendar upsets mark Mayan records, ca -2840 and -1558. [50] With Meso-American legends fresh in mind, a brief aside may be forgiven. The Near East and Iran are no longer the sole major world areas for the study of ancient religion, history, and science. Rapid progress has been made in the illumination of several great early cultures: the proto-Indian and Hindu, the Chinese, the Northwest European, the Saharan, the Indo-Chinese, and the Meso-American. Discoveries flash out from all of them at an increasing rate; for example, preliminary revelations by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, in 1977, immediately placed in Indo-China a significant "Bronze Age" civilization that appears to predate any known Near- East development. Because of its present geographical separation, Meso-America assumes first-ranking importance. Scholars are agreed in locating a basic civilization, then a widespread later Olmec culture, a Mayan, and a number of derivatives up to the Toltec-Aztec. All except the first, for which symbolic and literary materials are presently lacking, are emphatically catastrophic in outlook. It has been estimated that as many as 200,000 persons per year were being sacrificed as late as A. D. 1500 on the altars of the Aztec Empire before a god resembling Mars, and in order to keep the Sun from stopping its regular rounds. {S : THE EXPLOSION OF THIRA} THE EXPLOSION OF THIRA It may have been during one of the later incursions of Venus that the island of Thira-Santorini exploded. This now arc-shaped island of the southern Aegean Sea harbored a well-developed Bronze Age civilization of the type of Late Minoan I. Late Minoan I is correlated by common artifacts with the New Kingdom and New Bronze Age in Egypt. This would be then long after the Exodus of around 1500 B. C., which date closed down the Middle Kingdom and the Middle Bronze Age everywhere. Hence, as Issacson has pointed out [51] , under the reconstructed chronology of Velikovsky, the event would have befallen about 1000 B. C., and so I have noted it on page 211. Our sources say that German (H. Reck et al) and Greek (Marinatos) scholars established in the 1930's that the Thira explosion created havoc throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Velikovsky tied the explosion into the Exodus. Upon a suggestion of a German scholar [52] Marinatos visited Velikovsky. Both agreed that the explosion occurred at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. But Velikovsky's -1500 meant to Marinatos perhaps about -1750; both tied the Exodus to the event. Velikovsky subtracted a zero from Plato's account of Atlantic making out 900 years instead of 9000 years before Solon for the Thira disaster [53] . Mairnatos followed suit. So did all the archeologists and geologists who pursued the popular study of Thira as the true Atlantis. But they and Velikovsky were using a different absolute age for the date -1500 Radiocarbon dating gave a variety of reading from the 18th to the 10th century [54] , letting everyone rest with the mid-millennium date. Only Isaacson, then, has pointed irrefutably to the circumstances, to wit. Velikovsky must move up to about 1000 B. C. or give up his immense chronological reconstruction. And the rest of the group concerned must follow suit or depend heavily on the conventional chronology of Egypt and Minoan Crete. Thira was only a minor disaster in comparison with the Atlantis catastrophe; the sinking of Atlantic took place in North-western European seas; and the Thira explosion is properly placed as a Venus-induced event of the tenth century. If it were part of what Patten calls the Greater Davidic Catastrophe of 972 B. C., some part of the population of united Israel would have died, mostly by cosmic fall-out, called the "pestilence" of the Lord, and by meteoroids, and earthquakes [55] . If it were the lesser Davidic catastrophe of perhaps 1025 B. C., again in Patten's scheme, celestial specters, darkness, earthquakes, and meteoroids were occurring inland [56] . A third Patten scenario is possible, this around 1080 B. C. called the Samuelic Catastrophe [57] . Here severe earthquakes, great thunder and fierce cosmic lightning took place in the midst of a war between Jews and Philistines. A great stone, probably a fallen meteoroid, was set up by Samuel to commemorate the victory. If the 50 or 52-year cycle, suggested by Velikovsky as denoting the passages of Venus by Earth, is accepted, then the likely years for an encounter between Venus and Earth would be 973, which could have synchronized with the Thira disaster. But Patten's dates are not exact; he too relies upon a cycle, a 54-year cycle of cosmic danger to help him provide a date. Since Israel was inland, tsunamis were not featured in the Bible. Therefore the correlation with Thira is difficult. Cook's revision of the carbon 14 dating formula may be introduced as a final expert witness. He made allowances for the build-up of 14C in the atmosphere and advanced a non-equilibrium calculation which "reduces the computed age.. by amounts increasing in time from about 20% in 1000 years, 30% in 4000 years and finally telescoping all very long ages to 12,500 years or less." [58] Accordingly reduced by about 30%, the mean of Thira 14C dates would approximate 1050 B. C. This would appear then to be an acceptable date. We conclude that Near East indications lend support to the probability of a Thira-type explosion, with cosmic relatedness, around 1050 B. C. Yet the Thira disaster was only a minor feature of 700 years' rule by the "goddess of love." Few writers have sought to trace out the effects of Venusia to this day. Prof. Wolfe has found them in Shakespeare [59] . Profs. Greenberg and Sizemore have found them in the traditions and practices of Judaism and Christianity [60] ; the instructed student can find them indeed everywhere. To this day, the social institutions, religious practices, symbolism, literature, music, sexual practices, and expectations of humanity -- not to mention the very ground beneath our feet -- reflect the centuries under sway of the great comet. {S : MARTIA} MARTIA In a passage that is perilously close to the truth, E. Richardson writes of the ancient Etruscans of present day Tuscany : The last quarter of the eighth and the first half of the seventh centuries were evidently lively times in the Near East... Farther West, in Central Italy, the Oriental style broke like a tidal wave over the simple, if competent, civilization of the Villanovans. Here, it was not a question of occasional Villanovan traders or mercenaries coming home with new goods in a new style, not even a question of Greek traders sailing west.. but there must have been an actual shift of population from the old world of the East to the relatively uncluttered new world of the West. Almost any of the events we have chronicled above, or something we have yet to discover might have caused such a shift during those turbulent seventy-five years [61] . The "something we have yet to discover" was shared by East and West, a state of affairs sometimes unbeknown to the uprooted ones -- the "something" that Rilli found mysterious in the ashes piled upon Etruscan settlements, and the ancient encyclopedist Pliny had reported as a bolt of Jupiter destroying the rich city of Volsinium -- was the work of cosmic forces [62] . Vesuvius exploded in the eighth century and Etna in the seventh century B. C. The Sicani fled Eastern Sicily because of seismism and volcanism. Italy was rent by fissure seismism connecting with volcanoes along its entire length. The number of rivers reported to have disappeared was far beyond the record of later solarian times. (Semple cites some of the cases.) Many Phoenician and Greek colonies were founded in the western Mediterranean, especially in Sicily, during the Martian period. It is possible, too, that the Etruscans settled in Italy not long before the Romans, carrying a highly developed culture from Asia Minor where, traditionally, they had been forced out by a great famine. Their blood type is similar to the Urartu people of Lake Van; their mostly undeciphered language is found upon Lemnos, favorite island of Hephaistos, and is related to the Hittite; and they are distinguishable from their Villanovan predecessors in culture and separated from them by a layer of catastrophic debris [63] . The Etruscans were especial worshippers of Jupiter and lightning par excellence, to the point where they could be mistaken for Yahwah-sect descendants of Noah [64] . Planet Mars, already long known to mankind as a moving star, was precipitated onto its disastrous course lasting nearly a century (-776 B. C. to -687 B. C.) when proto-planet Venus spiralled near to it [65] . Spectacular celestial events were observed from Earth. The unsettled body invaded the orbit of Earth, and repeatedly, roughly at fifteen years intervals, it approached Earth closely, causing new disasters. The highly developed Etruscan and rude Latin civilizations were devastated. Although Rome was born amidst the turmoil (753 B. C.?), it gloried in the planetary god that bore the name Mars. Mycenaean civilization in Greece was largely destroyed through the same agency, there called Ares, God of War and embodiment of sheer destruction. Herakles seem to have represented the planet as well and classicists will recall that the Heraclids were identified with the Dorian invasion of Greece [66] . {S : CARPENTER'S "SOFT" CATASTROPHISM} CARPENTER'S "SOFT" CATASTROPHISM In his study of Discontinuities in Greek Civilization, Carpenter helps one across the dizzying chasm between evolutionary and quantavolutionary though. The Dorians were the Heraclids who were "professed linear descendents of tribal followers of the legendary hero-god Herakles..." [67] They came upon a destroyed civilization, "the greatest still unsolved problem in Mediterranean history. [68] … The calendar time is 1200 B. C." [In fact, it is not, It is around 700 B. C.] "and Mediterranean man has begun to suffer the most severe cultural recession which history records or archaeology can determine. Great kingdoms have collapsed without apparent adequate reason; and the eastern sea shores are overrun by fugitives seeking to force their way into lands less smitten by disaster. In Greece the well-fortified Mycenaean palaces are burned and abandoned; but none seems to know who burned them." [And more and worse, but Carpenter has an answer] "famine... And by famine I do not mean an occasional failure of several consecutive harvests, but such an enduring and disastrous destruction of the annual yield as only a drastic climatic change could have occasioned." He then proves famine, which is usually part of a catastrophe, we have noted. The Edomite bedouin were even then migrating into Egypt "to avoid famine," says Bimson [69] . A change in the prevailing winds is given as a cause : African wet winds changed to African dry winds. But what changes prevailing winds? And around the world? We recognize today a growing belief of meteorologists that great changes in climate originate in the celestial sphere. One Greek civilization was destroyed and another took its place. Climatic change was part of the action, and the transition period probably lasted one century -- 776 to around 650 B. C. -- not five centuries. Carpenter believed in the Dark Ages. {S : NERGAL, THE "TREACHEROUS DEALER"} NERGAL, THE "TREACHEROUS DEALER" Mesopotamia suffered greatly, too; in the typical collective madness, delusion, and psychological projection that gave birth to all astral gods, the Babylonians elevated and celebrated Nergal. Nergal was Era who was Ares who was Mars. The insane human devastator of the Middle East, King Nebuchadnezzar, called himself by its name: "I am Nergal. I destroy, I burn, I demolish, leaving nothing behind me." [70] Again the gods in heaven carry on their wars through their human agents. It was Ares versus Athene again, Mars against Venus, in his march into Palestine. "From the philological, theological, and historical data, there is no question that, in both name and substance, Jerusalem was indeed the 'City of Venus. ' The reign of the 'Queen of Heaven' was an uneasy one, however, and did not go unchallenged. In the end, the Venus Star yielded to a resuscitated Yahwism and relinquished its hierarchical position, but only after centuries of protracted politico-religious struggle and not until Jerusalem itself lay trampled and ruined beneath the Chaldean war-machine of Nebuchadnezzar." [71] The Jews commemorated the new active agency in the cosmos by the appellation Kesil Maadin, and Gabriel, and typically rendered these as inspired by their single divinity [72] . So in the days of Uzziah there was a grand commotion (-747 B. C.) and also when Ahaz was buried in -717 B. C. On the same day the sun dial changed about 10 (ca 40 minutes). According to Velikovsky, the Earth's axis shifted and twilight was hastened. This story, writes Velikovsky, "is related also in the records and told in the traditions of many peoples. It appears that a heavenly body passed very close to the Earth, moving, as it seem, in the same direction as the Earth on its nocturnal side." [73] The prophet Isaiah preached about 701 B. C. It was he who said (22: 13), in the midst of the Martian terrors, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." "According to Isaiah XXI. 8, the heavens were most anxiously scanned at the conjunction times, by day and by night, for the 'grievous vision' of a 'treacherous dealer' and 'destructive spoiler' (Isa XXI. 2) According to Jer. I. 13f, the dreaded phenomenon looked somewhat like a 'seething pot', and when it appeared in the heavens 'an evil broke forth out of the north upon all the inhabitants of the land." These calamities happened periodically. Thus (Jer. L1,146) 'in one year, and after that in another year, and then there was always violence in the land, and ruler fought against ruler. '" [74] In -687 B. C., the restless Earth wobbled on its axis, electrical exchanges occurred, and the army of Sennacherib was destroyed by a great blast of gas. {S : WORSHIP OF MARS} WORSHIP OF MARS Mars appeared as lean, wolfish, foolhardy, hot, fiery, and ardent among widely dispersed people. Mars had many names, newly coined, around the world. It was called the "wolf-star" by the Chinese, Scandinavians, and others [75] . The Mars-obsessed Romans believed that a wolf bitch had suckled the foundling twins, Romulus and Remus, who esablished Rome. Mars was the "sword-star" to the Scythians, and the Romans made their new short swords integral to the equipment and maneuvers of the invincible legion. It was Marut and Rama to the Hindus, and Huitzilopochtli, high god of the Aztecs. In dispersed parts of the world occur myths that the Moon is chased by dogs or wolves and, upon eclipses, they desperately beat drums and raise a tumult to frighten off the devourer of the Moon. [76] The Aztec Huitzilopochtli appears to have held also the names Tetzahuitl and Tezcatlipoca. Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent god, "wise and sympathetic," was "vanquished in the struggle with his contrary and enemy, Tezcatlipoco, the god who carried on his forehead a smoking mirror, who spread discord and transformed mankind into monkeys, just as Quetzalcoatl changed them into birds." "Expelled from his city, he took the road to Yucatan, announcing, however, that he would return to his homeland. Arriving at the shore of the sea, he erected a pyre and offered himself to the flames. A few days later he reappeared transformed into the planet Venus." Thus goes the principal Mexican story pertaining to planet Mars and planet Venus in celestial combat [77] . The Romans worshipped their first ruler, Romulus, for having joined his father, Mars, in heaven on the occasion of a cyclonic outburst. That the Romans had a longer history somewhere, perhaps indeed at Troy, is indicated by their adoration of the whole Olympic family, and the impregnation of their institutions by them. For instance, the Roman consuls served for a Venusian-length year. Greeks who survived the disorders of sky and planet chanted of the battle of the gods, in the language of Homer. Among the principal figures who engaged in conflict at Troy under the aegis of Zeus were Athena-Odysseus-Venus, Ares-Paris-Mars, and Aphrodite-Helen-Moon. Troy was only one of the many cities destroyed in this period, nor was this the first destruction of that city over the millennia. The Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, and sacrificed dogs as well, in nocturnal offerings, to his alter ego, Enyalius. As happened in climactic celestial events of earlier times, the Martian period brought a change of calendars around the world [78] . Nabonassar, an obscure king of Babylon, gave his name to a new era of the calendar in the year 747 B. C. The first Olympic Games marked a reassembly of Greeks and may have occurred in 776 B. C. The founder of the games was reputedly none other than Hercules, alter ago of planet Mars. Romulus, says Ovid, brought the Romans a calendar of 10 months which made the year just the length of a woman's pregnancy, that is, 280 days [79] . But shortly thereafter, about 715 B. C., two months were added. Bentley, reporting on India, connects the end of the war of gods and giant there with the war of the gods in the Iliad of Homer and with the Era of Nabonassar [80] . Two Dutch scientists have reviewed the radiocarbon, tree ring, and varve studies of this period and conclude that the statistics point to a considerable lengthening of the solar year, from perhaps 280 to 365 days, around 780 B. C. [81] This is the century, too, when Seuss' carbondating research suggested shifts in the magnetic poles and abrupt changes of climate [82] . Carli, the early scientific catastrophist (1780), believes (I think mistakenly) that Italy was covered by swamps for millennia after the flood of Ogyges (approx. 4000 B. C. in his estimation). He quotes a report by Denis of Halicarnassos that Oenotrus, son of Lycaon, having gone to settle in Italy with a colony, found the country deserted and uncultivated and was obliged to search for habitation on the mountains [83] . Great swamps persisted in the north until the time of Hannibal. Taken together with the desolate situation of the South and Sicily in the early period of Greek colonialization, with the evidence of the destruction of the high Etruscan civilization and the coming of the Romans, this would seem to be the aftermath of the war of the gods. The Spartans were among the most disciplined and dedicated warriors of the classical world, but whenever the earth trembled they would scuttle for home. Said Ellen Churchill Semple, "If earthquakes would break the nerve and nullify the life-long training of Spartan troops, there must have been abundant reason." [84] She sets forth the exceptional seismicity of Laconia and much of the known world then, but in true uniformitarian fashion, never ventures that natural disasters were worse then, or had been unbelievably worse a couple of centuries earlier, when all the settlements of the Mycenaeans were wiped out, and the Spartans, as Dorian survivors and sons of Herakles, took over the area. {S : THE WOUNDS OF PLANET MARS} THE WOUNDS OF PLANET MARS Like Venus and the Moon, Mars shows the severe effects of its recent space encounters. The geological evidence for large-body encounters with Mars in a recent time can be summed up in nine points : 1. Argon, an important ingredient of Mars' atmosphere, is also found in unexpectedly large amounts in the clouds of Venus and in the Moon's surface rocks [85] . 2. The surface of Mars is rent by canyons and craters of prodigious size. exhibiting both gravitational and electrical disruption [86] . 3. The polar caps of Mars are composed of solid carbon dioxide (CO2) and possibly ice [87] . This must be a very recent freeze, following acquisition of CO2 from Venus. 4. Sets of laminated spherical caps lay near the polar areas. These are meltings of the surface. They are irregularly laminated, one upon another [88] . They occurred perhaps when the polar axes heated up from interplanetary encounters with Earth or Venus, involving electrical discharges. The near side of the Moon and the surface of Mercury evidence the same type of molten-looking splotches. 5. The present poles of Mars are far off the laminated electric melts of the old poles (or the old magnetic poles when Mars rotated within the magnetic tube). This would indicate an axial tilt. 6. Hot spots, perhaps of volcanism, surface contortion and radioactivity may exist. These are signs of recent externally produced disturbances [89] . 7. No erosion has occurred on the many great cracks, rilles and canyons of the surface. These are electrical in origin, therefore, and not products of turbulent water (although E. J. Opik thinks that they may be radiating lines of craters exploded from external agents.) [90] 8. A complex of a canyon, Coprates, exists that is 2000 miles long, up to 300 miles wide, and over 4 miles deep. As described, in Chapter One, it is a product of a single instant unzippering of the surface by a passing body, possibly Venus. 9. The crater Nix Olympica is 300 miles wide and has a 100-mile-high peak. It is not volcanic but the result of an electrical-gravitational explosion [91] . The historical evidence may also be summarized : Hebrew, Roman, Mexican, Greek, Hindu, Babylonian and other nations and tribes report heavy natural disturbances throughout the period 776 to 687 B. C. All of the high-energy forces of catastrophism were involved. Mars (Ares) is then newly worshipped everywhere, with great intensity. The god is identified with the planet in many places. The behavior of the god corresponds to that of the planet. For example, in the Iliad which I have elsewhere assigned, not alone, to the turn of the Seventh Century [92] , Pallas Athene (Venus) "cast her spear mightily against his nethermost belly" upon which "the brazen Ares bellowed loud as nine thousand or ten thousand warriors cry in battle, when they join in the strife of the Wargod." [93] This may conceivably have been the occasion for the tearing open of the Coprates canyon on Mars. Hamon, in Hebrew, means "noise" and is a name for Gabriel (Mars). "Assyrians of the host of Sennacherib, before they died, were permitted by Gabriel to hear 'the song of the celestials, ' which can be interpreted as the sound caused by a close approach of the planet." The god Hemen elsewhere in the Near East, is the god of Noise [94] . {S : THE GREEK "DARK AGES"} THE GREEK "DARK AGES" With the affixing of the Mycenaeans to the events of the Eighth and Seventh centuries, a major question arises concerning the "Greek Dark Ages" that are supposed to have occupied the years between the Thirteenth and Seventh centuries, between the fall of the Mycenaean cities and the advent of the archaic Greeks. An answer to this question will conclude this chapter. I. Isaacson, an associate of Veilkovsky, has driven nails into the coffin of the Greek "Dark Ages" that Velikovsky designed [95] . Velovsky's own work on the subject awaits publication. He has shown how Mycenaean civilization moved directly into the archaic and classical Greek culture without much lapse of time. The centuries hitherto assigned to the Dark Ages are fictions aimed at accommodating an incorrectly dated Egyptian chronology to a Greek chronology that is only correctly figured after the seventh century. Mycenaean ruins and art, as with the remains of all of the Near East civilizations, have been tied to the Egyptian dating, which, for reasons exposed fully by Velikovsky with contributions by independent scholars such as Courville and Dayton, is made out to be far too old. It is noteworthy that the collapse of Mycenaean civilization around the Aegean Sea has been believed to correspond in time to the "Invasions of the Sea Peoples" throughout the Near East, that is, the 13th century B. C. In fact, both the Mycenaean collapse and the Near East ruination are events of the same period. It is not the 13th century but the 8th and 7th centuries. The cause is not "the Sea Peoples," who did not exist as such, but the raging sky- god Mars, and his antagonist, Venus. Once the reconceptualization of the events and time is accomplished, the reconstruction of the separate pieces of near East history, including its mysteries, becomes routine. Thus when the newest edition of the Cambridge Ancient History publishes tablets inscribed on the doomsday of Pylos, the city of old King Nestor on the western Peloponnesus, it reports that a tablet, apparently the last, written in haste, "immediately before the destruction which baked them and rendered them durable." details how troops were sent to watch the sea [96] . Again, far to the East, the last documents of Boghazköi and Ugarit, reported by M. C. Astour and J. T. Hooker, appear to describe defense preparations, after which there is nothing but destruction and ruins to await the modern excavator [97] . The revision in these cases, and in many excavation reports, is simple : for "invaders" or "people of the sea," read Mars-Ares-Nergal etc. For defense preparations, read universal portents, alerts, rescue parties, mobilization, sacrifices, propitiations, exodus. A people in readiness for cosmic catastrophe behave, at least in the prejudiced eyes of an archaeologist, like people organized to defend themselves against foreign enemies. Claude Schaeffer, famed excavator of Ugarit and practically the sole systematic and clear- sighted surveyor of Bronze Age reports in the archaeological profession, published as early as 1948 his findings. Absolute and complete, they showed the set of disasters as I have labeled them in Figure 33. In 1968, Prof. Schaeffer was impelled to point out to his still uncomprehending colleagues that no trace of "sea peoples" were to be found in certain cities [98] . Yet, in 1948, he had been required, by the authoritatively accepted chronologists of Egypt, to mark a limit to the latest excavations of many sites of the Near East at about 1200, labelling them as destruction by "Peoples of the Sea." In 1977, Velikovsky published Peoples of the Sea. But here the iconoclast was undertaking one task and that alone -- of showing that Ramses III, and certain successors were of the time of the Persian conquests, that is, of the fourth century B. C. instead of the conventionally dated thirteenth century. An absolute and authoritative chronology was off by 800 years! In 1977, Velikovsky published Ramses II, whereupon a large chunk of the pseudo-historical plastering covering the "Dark Ages" -- that connected with the "Hittite" Empire -- cracked. The Hittites evidently were Chaldeans, and their time was of the beginning of Martia. The Greek "Dark Ages" plaster, too, will soon fall in another volume of evidence. Meanwhile, should the scholar wish to premeditate the reconstructed history, a number of cracks in the plaster can be discovered simply by reviewing old "discredited" studies. In Krickenhaus' work on Tyrens, for example, fire destroys the Mycenaean palace and a new temple of Greek style is promptly built over it [99] . No five centuries of "Dark Ages" in between! What Velikovsky did not delve into were the many other "Peoples of the Sea" cases. These, as stated above, fell not into the thirteenth century, not into the fourth century, but into the eighth and seventh century Martian catastrophes. That is why, on Schaeffer's early studies, it can be observed that following this period of disasters, settlements were either absent or, if present, of proto-classic or even classic type. Extensive systematically presented documentation is available in Schaeffer's work. Below one meter of Troy's soil, all remains are prehistoric except a "few Roman sherds fallen from above." [100] Below begins Troy VII B prehistorically with ruins caused by "Peoples of the Sea," dated at about 1150 B. C. Archaeological science has taught its students for generations that the site of Troy, which Mireaux said was a source of violent contention for many centuries because of its position to command the commerce between Asia and Europe passing through the Dardanelles [101] , was abandoned. Even a catastrophist becomes a uniformitarian in the face of such long-term desolations : it cannot be. Yet we find the same disconsolate conclusions reached at the many other sites [102] : Ras Shamra, nothing after -1200; Byblos, final destruction -1200; Chagar Bazar, nothing from -1350 onwards; Hama, Mycenaean at -1300 and nothing thereafter; Beit Mirsim, Jericho, Beisan, Megiddo, Tell el Hesy, Tarse -- all finished by the "Peoples of the Sea," ca -1200; Alaca Huyuk; first level of culture begins at -1300; Alishar Huyak, -1150; Cyprus, Iron Age at -1150, then nothing; Tepe Giyan, last level ends at -1200; Talyche, Agha-Evlar, etc. in Persia, end at -1150; the Caucasus sites, no beginning after -1200; Luristan, nothing after Recent Bronze set at -1450. No man-made catastrophe then could be so bad as all this. The uniformitarian chronologists, unwittingly leagued with the mistaken Egyptian chronologues, have produced a 500-year artificial extension of catastrophe throughout the Old World. The New or Late Bronze Age did not end because of some new use of metal, or the advent of some enlightened monarch, or the desire of some people to intrude upon another people's habitat. It marked a new celestial stage. A cosmic catastrophe destroyed cultures to the extent that the newly created cultures were distinctive. The world moved into the so-called age of Mars, during which the fortunes of the Earth and human race followed a path of exponentially declining destruction, violence and madness. Finally, that which is here called the Solarian age begins. We mentioned the cyclical theory of history in Chapter 3 and said we were helicalists. Egyptian priests told Herodotus that this was our Fifth Sun after four destructions of the celestial order. The Aztecs told the Spanish priests the same. The Hindu Bhagavata Purana puts us in the fifth age also. But the Buddhist Visuddhi-Magga allows seven destructions. Rabbinical authorities claimed six reconstructions, placing us in the seventh. Many cyclic systems exist [103] . Why do they never (perhaps) exceed ten; why are they never one or even two? Or even three, the favorite categorial fixation of scholarship since Plato? Tentatively, for convenience, we place ourselves today in the eighth destructive period of the Holocene epoch and seventh age of humanity, following six great quantavolutions. {S : Notes (Chapter Ten: Venus and Mars)} Notes (Chapter Ten: Venus and Mars) 1. "Hymn to Athena" in Homeric Poems of Hesiod volume. On Athena/ Venus identification with the Hindu Devi see Isenberg (1976). The dynamic problems of such an explosion have been mentioned above, see Index, "Encounters." 2. Rose (1977) 110-1. 3. In addition to Velikovsky (1950), (1972a), (1973-4a) on the Venus question, cf. A. de Grazia, Ralph Juergens and Livio Stecchini (1966); ten special issues of Pensée magazine, Vols. II-IV; the Review of the Society for the Study of Interdisciplinary Issues (England) 1976- present; Kronos (1977); Ransom (1976); E. Milton (1978); and Asimov et al. (1977). All contain mainly material pertinent to the controversy over the natural history of Venus. Velikovsky has produced a volume of evidence on the destructive career and nature of Venus. Less known subsequent articles and books discussing his work have added the equivalent; there have been hundreds of articles and books since 1950 that inadvertently lend support to his thesis; my purpose here is not to recite all of this work, but rather to sharpen the issues by the employment of selected studies, and to produce a theory to integrate them. 4. Velikovsky makes a critical synchronization of the Biblical Exodus with the Egyptian papyrus Ipuwer (1950) (1952); John Van Seters and W. F. Albright lend independent support: also agreeing are Sieff et al. (1977) and Greenberg (1975): contra cf. Bell. 5. Meade (1977); Kuong. 6. This Biblical image, cited by Velikovsky, reminds one of the Phaeton image, discussed below. 7. Rix (1977). 8. Tompkins (1971). 9. M. Y. Maror of Soviet Acad. Sci., quoted in 109 Sci. News, June 19, 1976, 388. 10. To be discussed in a later Volume of this series, but cf. Velikovsky (1950). 11. Sieff et al. (1979) 787; Greenberg (1977). 12. Cardona (1975) 37. 13. Wallis (1972); Baum (1978); Ransom (1976) 76 citing Bridges et al. 14. Rix (1975) 15. Bimson (1977). 16. Rix (1974). 17. Barbeau 118. 18. Lowery. 19. Epinomis 2.99-101. 20. These matters have been developed in an unpublished manuscript of the present author, The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (1972). Aphrodite, the goddess, was assigned to the Moon by Velikovsky and Suhr. James (1976, 1976a) has attacked this identification. 21. Velikovsky (1950) chap 6. 22. The owl is Athene-Minerva's symbol, probably a forcible vision of the comet. 23. Sutherland (1973-4), 50. 24. Bimson (1977). 25. (1950); Kondratov (1974). 26. Raikes (1965) (1967) (1976); Possehl (1967); A de Grazia (1977). 27. Adams (1975), Adam's discoveries drastically amend the old positions (Encyclopedia Britannica; vol. 18, p. 404, 1969, "Tiger-Euphrates River-System") He acknowledges conflicts between geological and archaeological evidence regarding the delta but claims no historical record of changes upriver. 28. Kondratov (1974). 29. Schaeffer (1948) 604. 30. MacKinnon (1976). 31. "Black Sea..." (1970). 32. Coe (1967). 33. Bernals (1969) 152. 34. Cf. Stecchini 143 quoting the Sybilline Oracles : The Morning Star fought the battle having climbed on the shoulders of Leo." 35. Isenberg 90 quoting from The Devi-Mahatmya (tr. S. Jagadisvarananda) [Madras, 1953], 25- 178. 36. Ibid., 90-1. 37. (1975), 271. 38. Bernal (1969) 108. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Bentley (1825). 42. Ibid. 2, 3-5. 43. Ibid. xiv. 44. See Stecchini in de Grazia et. al. (1966) and Rose (1977). 45. (1975) 9,10. 46. 19-20. 47. Velikovsky (1950). 48. Ibid., 341. 49. Ibid., Bernal (1969) 103-4 mentions the 52-years cycle of the Mesoamericans. 50. Nancy K. Owen, 92. 51. J. Isaacson (1975). 52. Velikovsky (1955) 191. 53. (1950) 147. 54. Mowles (1973); Acta (1969); Isaacson (1975); Weinstein (1978). 55. Patten (1973) 161-2. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Cook (1961-2). 59. (1975-6) (1978). 60. (1978). 61. (1964) 45. 62. Rilli (1964); Pliny ii 53; Velikovsky (1950) 273; Patten 18-9, 92; Piero Leonardi, geologist at the University of Ferrara and Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, writes in a personal letter to the author of October 3, 1977, however: "Regarding the Lake of Bolsena, one is dealing undoubtedly with a normal volcanic structure, and I do not believe at all that its origins can be attributed to extraterrestrial phenomena." 63. Wainwright on blood types; Cambridge Ancient History II (1973) 161 on Lemnos; Fell on the Hittite connection; Rilli on the ashes of Prato. 64. Rilli develops this theory and attaches the Saturnian Deluge to the flooding of the Tyhrennian sea area, original center of the Villanovans. 65. Velikovsky (1950) Part II, ch. III et passim. 66. Carpenter (1966) 47-57. 67. Ibid., 47. 68. Ibid., 18. 69. Bimson (1978) 59. 70. Cf. Mullen (1973) 11. 71. Greenberg and Sizemore (1978) 74. 72. Velikovsky (1978), (1950) 292. Kesil means "fool" in Hebrew. 73. Ibid., 216. 74. Bellamy (1948) 124-5. 75. Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 324. 76. Occidens (1888). 77. Formenti (1969) xxii. 78. Velikovsky (1950) ch. 8. 79. Van Oosterhout and van der Lek (1972) quoting Ovid, Fasti. 1 5, 5-7, 8-30. 80. Bentley (1825) 49. 81. Van Oosterhout and van der Lek (1972). 82. Ibid; see above Fig. 83. Carli (1780) 307. 84. Semple's ancient geography suits nicely the ruling formulas of the old geology (cf. G. Grinnell, in Milton, 1978). 85. Ransom (1976) 134-6, 146-7; on Venus, Wash Post, Dec. 11, 1976, A6 quoting Donahue, Mc Elory, NASA Pioneer probes. 86. Juergens (1974d, 1974c); Kelly (1974). 87. Pollack (1975) 82-3. 88. Ibid., and 90. 89. Ransom (1976) 132-3. 90. Opik; Juergens (147d, 197e). 91. Ibid., Kelly (1974). 92. In an unpublished mss, "The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars" (1972). 93. Iliad V. 94. Vikentiev (1930); Velikovsky (1950) 292. 95. Isaacson (Eddie Schorr), (1973, 1974). 96. (1973) Vol. II, Part I, p. 611. 97. James (1977). 98. Schaeffer (1968) 607-8. 99. 1, 31-40; Velikovsky (1974) 6,45. 100. Schaeffer (1948) xxxii. 101. Mireaux (1948). 102. Synoptic Table IX. 103. Cf. Velikovsky (1950) 29-35. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 11: } {T THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE 1 January 1980 Dear Professor de Grazia: I have now read your manuscript, "Chaos and Creation," in its entirety and have a number of criticisms to offer. You asked me to comment upon the work as a "uniformitarian," which I suppose you can call me, but naturally I feel that I am judging the material on grounds of science and scholarship, rather than upon the basis of what is non-uniformitarian. As a matter of fact, I should say that I have found some points of agreement with your work, and, if I do not mention them here, it is because you specifically asked me for negative, not positive, criticism. So I am, as you requested, acting only as the devil's advocate. Granted as you imply in the Foreword that you have at least one scientific or ethnological (conventional) authority supporting every significant point that you make (I haven't checked it throughout the book), this does not mean that your theory holds together. No more than the blind men could describe the real elephant when each could only feel a part of him. Your theory or model of quantavolutionary primevalogy has to make a real world, one in which people can believe and experts can work with. As you painfully-well perceive, the most vulnerable side of your book has to do with the absolute chronology of events. I remain quite unpersuaded that the holocene period is as catastrophic and as crowded as you make it out to be. One can take 14,000 years ago as its beginning (many dates have been roughly of this order), but you are claiming to include in the period, explicitly or implicitly, the whole Paleolithic (which now means the Quaternary plus upper Tertiary) in respect to humans, the Triassic (-200 my) with respect to the Spreading of the ocean basins and laying of the ocean bottoms, the carboniferous (-300 my) with regard to coal and oil deposits, the Cambrian ( -500 my) insofar as Grand Canyon is included, and the Precambrian ( -600 to -2500 + my), when it comes to atmospheric changes, the coming of the Moon, the newness of gases, uranium flux and so on. In fact, you go about placing whatever you think appropriate whenever in time your theory requires that it must have happened. About the only law of time that you seem to obey is the principle of superposition. which is only a relative ordering of times and which you appear to think can permit anything to occur in the absolute measure of time. Surely you must be aware that even if all the conventional dates of all the events that you compress are incorrect by many millions of years, they will still not fall within your few thousand years. It would be a miraculous coincidence if half-a-dozen radioactive tests of time were all wrong, totally wrong. It is hard to conceive how hundreds of geologists and geophysicists working upon these tests have not to any degree acquired your suspicions, and you must admit that you have not yourself performed any of the tests, which require extensive laboratory facilities. Even if all radioactive tests were wrong you would have to grant the unanimity of opinion in respect to the older methods which you have listed in the first category of your tests-of-time chart, (Chapter 3). They, too, are the word of a horde of geologists. Nowhere will you find them hesitating in putting most of your "holocene events" much further into the past. Granted that some tectonic, depositional, and climatic events are saltations of normal rates of activity, these form only a small fractions of all events that have occurred and all changes that have shaped the present surface of the globe. One anomaly or exception does not undo a rule or make a new rule; how do you know, or how does your reader know, the ratio of exceptions to the normal cases? You make much of your revolutionary column; it is merely the geological column extended into the atmosphere. You will have as much difficulty proving a recent catastrophe in every column on Earth as geologists have in finding a real geological column with all ages represented by it. Geologists may not be able to prove that a certain discontinuity is a product of depositional slowdown, or slowly changing material of erosion, but you cannot prove it to be a product of disastrously speeded up or cut-off erosion, or quick change in the material mix of erosion. Fifty or more fields of science and learning say that they need lots of time to explain all the changes that have occurred in the behavior of whatever they may be studying -- genetics, birth of planets, development of human intelligence, culture, a rock system, a river valley, an ocean floor, a change of climate, and so on. You take away their time and give them explosives. You're smashing the clock. It won't work. Even if it could work it would take a couple of centuries for the large body of scientists and the public to feel comfortable with your paradigm. I would like to point out to you what you would have to give up if your short time-scale were proven wrong: (1) Your homo schizo would be looking for a new niche in time farther back and opponents would be encouraged to go back to work on their evolutionary ladders. (2) The surface of the Earth, the atmosphere, the solar system -- would have a new lease on life (backwards life, of course). Here again, the evolutionary idea, or at the least a long- term catastrophism, would take over. (3) Many of the anomalies that you have elevated to the dignity of data will be degraded to anomalies again. (4) Most disastrous of all, the large body of legendary evidence would have to be discarded, since the memorial generations of the human mind can go back fourteen thousand years, but they cannot go back a hundred thousand or a million or remember events that happened before homo sapiens existed ten or a hundred million years ago. What would remain then -- if the attacks upon your timescale were to succeed -- would be the general sequences and interplay of forces; a method of explaining orogeny, sea bottoms the moon emplacement, the extermination and birth of species, etc. A theory of the time-stretched solar- system as an evolution from a binary would remain hence the movements of planets, the disintegration of Super-Uranus in nova phases, the heavy atmospheric envelope of the binary system, etc. But all of this can probably be successfully attacked too. You coin too many words. Take your calendar of ages, now wouldn't it be better to call Urania "The Stone Age" which it is; and Lunaria "the Hunting Age"? And then Saturnia, "the Golden Age;" Jovea, Mercuria, and Venusia, "the Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze Ages," and Martia "the Iron Age," and perhaps Solaria, "the Machine Age," going back, perhaps, to the first clocks and mining equipment of the European middle ages. The god names are too romantic and animistic. As for the general term "revolutionary primevalogy." well, no one will buy that. "Quantavolution" sounds a little better. I think that you are stuck with "catastrophism" even though you say that the great disasters gave us all our "goods" as well as "bads" and made us what we are. Of course, it all starts with your Solaria Binaria electrical system. What can I say about that? The scenario you provide is simply unbelievable within the narrow time span that you have set for yourself. You say that the "straw that broke the camel's back" came about 14,000 years ago and the electrical current pulsing between Sun and Super-Uranus diminished so much that the latter big body began to fission and the small planets and magnetic tube began to spiral in towards the central axis or arc of fire. Why should it happen so fast considering that it was running for -- what? -- a billion or 5 billion years before? As for Juergens' theory that the Sun is a dispatcher of charge obtained from galactic sources, you must know that he and you are about the only people who believe it (I hadn't ever heard of it before you used it). Here, as in so many places in the book, I felt that you were asking for more than any reader could give, that is, acceptance, or at least consideration, of a general theory that was quite unacceptable to prevailing science in every single chapter. You should perhaps concentrate on just one chapter and do a whole book on it alone. This is how I feel about the Moon chapter, too. The topic is large and your theory about it far too big for the few pages given it. Again you are proceeding with clues that are ambiguous and faint. I cannot say that they are erroneous. It is simply that I expect, when more data comes in, that the Moon's material will prove to be distinctly different from all possible Earth material: I expect, too, that you'll just have too much of a problem explaining away the continental-type rock found in several places in the Pacific Basin where the Moon would have erupted from. Frankly I find it hard to imagine so much of the crust skimming into space. I won't demand calculations at this point; I know that George Darwin and others have claimed such a Moon eruption, but not so impossibly recent. The calculations of the force required to pull away the crust, the amount of interrupted Earth rotation, and the paths of the Intruder and the pursuing crustal matter would be anyone's guess; you'd probably be able to ward off attacks on these accounts. But the heat and gases released would annihilate the atmosphere (your dodge here of the Earth's atmosphere being part of the great binary tube atmosphere is just too neat). Aren't you just like Höerbiger-Bellamy, whom you criticize for having fetched earth satellites out of thin air and then put them through all the gyrations and crashes necessary to account for all of the peculiarities of earth history and morphology? You move the planets at will in a shorter period than these men do. The "gods" fly hither and yon at your bidding. Of course you can then explain all that is asked about nature and mankind. Even if, as seems possible, several catastrophes caused by external encounters have devastated the globe, it is more likely that one or more comets, coursing thru the solar system, have inflicted the damage and terrorized the human mind, than it is that the planets, each in turn, have done this work. This theory would allow you to keep the planets in their present location into the indeterminate long past. It would let you give up your attempt to destroy what is generally considered to be the necessary long-term dating and evolutionary process. Further, all the religious practices and beliefs associated with planets (accepting your evidence of this as sufficient) would naturally result from their being the regularly observed bodies that are most similar to comets. And, further, comets, upon passing thru the solar system, would affect and "inflame" observably planets other then Earth and would appear also to come from the planets. The increasing evidence of the possibility of our Sun to create catastrophe -- some of which you bring out in your last chapter --leads me to think that all of your quantavolutions could have been caused by the Sun in one or another of its aberrances. I realize that you have bricked up the door to the sunlight by showing the sun to be a weak god and the planets as great gods. Still, my position is that time is long and these disasters far away in time; therefore, it is impossible to consider these human memories as authentic. Probably the planets stand for some small special phenomena of recent years. Then the sun could carry the burden of the very great primeval disasters of millions and billions of years ago. Your general theory of a recent Solaria Binaria and of planetary deviations, can be rendered useless, not to say wrong, if the ancients had simply observed that the planets are moving stars, not fixed stars, that when the comet was also unfixed and wandering, and that when the comet approached from the region of a planet, it became automatically a herald emissary, representative of that planet and the planet would then be given various names and traits characteristic of the cometary behavior and its effects upon Earth. Admittedly it is difficult to explain the origins of gods. But I would rather believe that if Uranus were the first god everywhere, it was because some fascinating phenomena in the skies made him an appealing idea and the idea had other uses, as e. g. a father substitute, and was spread by traders, warriors and other ways of cultural diffusion. I think that man had enough fears within him to use the suggestion of a god fearfully without the "god" in reality behaving catastrophically. Here and in many other places you could have "settled for half a loaf;" man can work himself into a froth with very little help from celestial rage-makers; just watch a poor farmer shake his fist at the sky when there has been no rain! Again on the matter of accepting "half a loaf," most scientists might today accept your description of the universe, the skies and even the solar system as more unsettled, explosive, threatening and damaging than is generally believed. But why go to extremes? There could have been solar disturbances so extensive as to cause Venus to behave strangely -- as if alive --at one time, perhaps even light up if its rotation were slowed down. Jupiter might have exploded some brilliant gases under solar influence, too. It's quite believable from your evidence, also, that the Earth may have suffered a disaster from a comet tail on some occasion, and from a large meteoroid falling in the area of the Near East on another occasion. You should stop at that; it is too early yet for the quantavolutionary model. Be content with bringing out the anomalies and the incidents, in all fields of knowledge, and let the pattern, if there is such, emerge with time and study. Look at Vitaliano's book, for example. She explains various cases of disaster one by one as a result, finds nothing remotely resembling a Deluge, world fire, instant cleavage of the Earth, or any of that. How do you know what to select as truth and what to disregard as fantasy or social lies? If all of mythology including all ancient religious documents amount to, say, a hundred thousand pages, whereas your selections come to a few thousand lines, I cannot believe such selectivity is possibly valid; no matter that you are personally skilled, you just do not have any reliable method to work with. I am sure that your sampling is biased. There are no good rules for analyzing myth. Your approach is psychiatric, I would say, but with this great difference, that you go beyond Freud and Jung and the others in assigning a reality to the final objects inspiring myths and legends. I took down a copy of Robert Graves' Greek Myths from my shelf and find nowhere in its mass of confusing details even a hint of the kind of reconstruction you have made of Greek myth. You do more to establish the early cloud canopy of Urania by myth than you do by hydroengineering. Canopy theory is far more complex. Practically any way you handle it, you will have immense bodies of water falling upon Earth with a destructive heat of impact. In effect it would be a gigantic meteoroid shower or at least the physically oppressive effects of an endlessly descending vapor cloud. You regard Aphrodite as representing the Moon, at least in her earlier phase. You can see here how tricky is the game of associating gods with celestial bodies, because you quote Plato to the effect that the planet Venus is to be called Aphrodite. Even I know that the love affair of Aphrodite and Ares is always translated as the love affair of Venus and Mars. Why do you feel that you must have Aphrodite as the Moon? Anyhow --I don't see how it would affect your case one way or the other to give in to the general opinion, although you would have to surrender your astonishing interpretation of the Iliad as describing a war of the followers of Venus to recapture the Moon from her abductor, Mars. You don't agree fully with any catastrophist, not even Velikovsky, and yet don't explain why. Perhaps it's simply a problem of limited pages. But there are some tricky cases. In all the gymnastics that you have the Earth perform, you don't have it reversing its rotation or turning upside down. Yet you must know that Velikovsky and others have quoted Herodotus quoting Egyptian priests that "the Sun, it rose in the West," and they have displayed the Senmut ceiling of late Empire days which shows the sky upside down. Now why shouldn't you accept this remarkable evidence? Why don't you discuss it? Velikovsky gives many additional examples and details in chapter five of Worlds in Collision. It is a crucial case for catastrophism. In chapter after chapter you attempt to show that new gods follow old ones because new or different heavenly bodies dominate the skies. You also grant that no great new body has disturbed the skies since Mars did so in 687 B. C. Nevertheless, we have had new gods and new religions since then; Jesus. Mahomet, maybe even Buddha, and an infinite number of minor gods have arisen here and there in the world. Furthermore you attribute the destruction of civilization to catastrophes, but the Roman the Mexican, the Inca, the Byzantine, the American, the Tibetan, and the East European capitalist civilizations have been destroyed in the Age of Solaria. It is man who changes gods and civilization, without the need for help from the skies. Nor do I believe that ancient, terror- driven catastrophized man is any better at slaughtering his kind and ruining the environment than twentieth century, westernized man. Another effect of your revolutionary model is to my way of thought undesirable. I don't wish to censor you on grounds that by destroying the stability of the skies you will destroy the stability of the social order. That point of view in no longer respectable, although Plato and many others, and even unconsciously, many present-day scientists would feel so, although they would not express the feeling. But certainly your model will reduce the close relation between mathematics and celestial mechanics to a shadow exercise. I don't regard it as an accident that Laplace's theory of tides is still taught, even when it will not predict tides. Or that Newton's mechanics govern physics and astronomy. The variables and hypotheticals of your natural history are so many that even the virtuosity of such astrophysicists as Bass and others whom you cite will be strained to beyond the breaking point. We shall be left with a suppositious sequence of events. Scientists generally believe that the progress of a science moves in step with its mathematical formulation. In the sense of this belief, you are setting the sciences back hundreds of years by taking away the empirical foundation of their mathematics. Maybe this all can be recouped; if not, natural history will become a toy for everybody's amusement. It should not be difficult to demonstrate that your model will not work. Quantavolution, at least as you have stated it, is forthright in its challenges. These can be directly met and overcome. First we shall, in some part of the globe, discover a non-quantavolutionary geological column, that is, a pillar of earth and air that has not undergone catastrophic change in the past. Then we shall discover a human settlement older than 687 B. C. that has not suffered natural disaster in its history. We should also be able to produce fairly soon at least one test of time that can tell time for at least 30,000 years without being based upon uniformitarian premises. Also, some ethnologists or linguists or mythologists should be able to prove that none of your gods are clearly defined and therefore we do not really know whether they have had 'careers' such as you have given them. Certainly, nobody who reads this book should become a quantavolutionist in consequence. There are too many unanswered questions in it, even if one were to accept its general theory (which I do not do). It would require a much larger volume, prolonged public discussion, and many new special studies before one could take the unlikely step of siding with its views. As a model of contrariness, the book may have value. I can see many a sullen student in introductory science and history courses discovering an anti-establishment enthusiasm -- which is a step forward in learning. I can also picture some instructors in the sciences and humanities using it as an imperialistic weapon to expand their subject-matter. The work is too technical for the general public, I would guess, which is just as well. I fear that I must use a trick to conclude my comments. That is to leave you with the innuendo that additional counterarguments exist that I have not put forward. If I had more time I would take up point by point the questionable assertions in each chapter. I am confident that for every one of them, "uniformitarianism" or "evolutionism", or whatever you wish to call the prevailing model of thought to which I belong, will have an alternative explanation that does as well or better. But it's your book and welcome to it. Sincerely yours, Joseph Grace Professor {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 12: } {T VICTORY OF THE SUN } {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWELVE: VICTORY OF THE SUN Albert Einstein once remarked. "What is inconceivable about the Universe is that it should be at all conceivable." We have spoken of things beyond immediate belief. They seem to be miracles. But miracles are everywhere, in a true sense. Before it happens, your next sight -- whatever you next see when you lift your eyes -- is a miracle. Its every detail could never have been predicted. Still, surprisingly, after you see it, a full report can demonstrate that the view was no miracle: it was ordinary. That is why old ladies and little boys may enjoy sitting by their windows: every few moments will bring a miracle; afterwards, every miracle can be told. If it were a miracle, it couldn't be told. So we say that miracles never happen; yet they happen all the time, As Bertrand Russell said, the next license plate number that you see is a miracle. The probability that you would have observed this very number is one in millions. You may rest assured then: we are asking you to believe in miracles even as we ask you to disbelieve in them. What we say may have happened, is not at all a miracle if it did happen. And whether it happened is to be judged by evidence -- miracle or no miracle. Cosmogony changes. Unfamiliar models become intelligible. It is anachronistic for a scientist to deny the ancient occurrence of cosmic catastrophes and biological revolutions, to accept geological and radiological chronometry as unquestionably valid, to believe that the succession of historical gods is without historical meaning, and to deny human beings any role as witnesses of epochal happenings in the history of the Earth. Charts are drawn today that show peaks of sunspots occurring when Jupiter and Saturn are in position to exercise their maximal tidal draw upon the Sun. We can wonder whether this is but a feeble grasping to reestablish the great electrical are that once shot out from the Sun to its binary partner [1] . It is conceivable and defensible that the suns were two, that Earth and the planets have changed their motions radically, that the atmosphere of Earth is but a ghost of an enormous electromagnetic gas tube, and that the Moon was torn from the crust of the Earth in recent memory. The high energy forces that play upon the world collapse the time-scales of natural history and simultaneously withdraw the intellectual need for long draughts of time to explain the world. High energy forces make out of natural history a set of exponential curves resembling very old human theories that universal history runs in cycles. The set of curves represent, of course, the approach, climax and recession of revolutionizing events. It is possible that, chained together through time, the curves exhibit a spiralling or helical history; that is, natural history may have a direction, rather than simply repeating itself. By direction is meant that the periods of the history, besides their obvious unique and eccentric qualities, may be stages of a process with an end. What is left now, as an inheritance, of a cosmic system, of the air, of the land, and of mind, may be all that we shall have to work with for a long time to come. Humankind has not tested its inheritance fully, yet. It does not know yet what it is capable of becoming. So we are learning to dance upon the hot coals of history, daring that the coals will not flare up before the dance is learned. {S : SUN AND SCIENCE} SUN AND SCIENCE In the creation period of human nature, the dominant role of the Sun was largely unrealized by mankind. Over half the period was completed before the Sun was fully visible. All of the great gods were of the Super-Uranus complex. The regularity of the Sun once it appeared in the skies, worked against its becoming a great god. After the major physical changes had been wrought in the skies, when the visible planets moved reliably on remote cycles, and when others that had been gods had disappeared from sight, the Sun came to be a symbol of eternal security and was credited with the more stable and beneficent traits of the gods. "Old Sol" called up the affection of "Santa Claus." Then, from time to time, out of the welter of submerged memories and habits of mind, a penchant for mundane explanation emerged. By the year 600 B. C. (2600 B. P.), secular and scientific cosmogonies were appearing, certainly in the natural philosophy of the Greeks, probably in Asia Minor as well. Not until another thousand years had passed, however, did any movement on a culture-wide scale offer to smooth out the cycles of ancient history, center a science as well as the fate of the Earth upon the Sun, and proceed to disentangle the knotted forms of the human mind and social practices. This has been the modern science of Solaria. Plutarch, in full Roman imperial days, was writing on "Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers." [2] At about A. D. 400 we may commence Solaria. As Velikovsky writes, "With Macrobius in the fourth Christian century, there begins a tendency to see in many gods of Egyptian and Greek antiquity the personification of the sun. Macrobius compared Osiris to the sun and Isis to the moon, disregarding the opinion of earlier authors. He also interpreted Jupiter as the sun." More generally, "not only Ra, Amon, Marduk, Phaeton, and even Zeus, but also king-heroes, like Oedipus, became solar symbols." [3] Many more ancients were translated erroneously into sun- gods (Pharaohs, for example) or solar symbols (Odysseus, for instance). Apollo was especially favored as the sun because he had no ready planetary position and yet was a bright, shining god. "Collective amnesia" about the old planetary gods was almost total [4] . In fact the Earth and skies had been settling down for centuries. "In those last days of classical paganism," writes Jaquetta Hawkes, "the Sun God shone like a pharos for ships at sea, guiding them on their way or lighting them into a harbor where all conflicting ideas could anchor together in a kind of harmony and mental agreement." The West had become monotheistic in the sense of Solarianism before it was converted to Christ. The mentality and behavior that was possible and promised by the Age of Solaria did not replace more than a fraction of the human nature created by 12,500 years of intermittent chaos and disaster, Indeed, the world view of Solaria cannot hope, even if granted an ultimate full success, to master the facts and fate of the Cosmos. The human experience of catastrophes is too long to be exorcized by sunbeams. {S : FOREBODINGS} FOREBODINGS The Sun itself is not as constant as one had been led to believe. The recent discoveries of the role that sunspots play in the Earth's weather, climate, and, possibly, its seismic movements, have been capped by the discovery that the Sun is at the least capable of withholding sunspots for most of a century. John A. Eddy, an astronomer from the National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude Observatory, upon reporting about the historical facts of the Sun's quiescence, remarked, "we've shattered the principle of uniformitarianism for the Sun." [5] Afterwards, George B. Field, Director of the Center for Astrophysics at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory commented to the audience, "Maybe we've heard a turning point in the history of science." The period of quiescence, called the "Maunder Minimum," was discovered from a search of records by E. W. Maunder, an English 19th century astronomer. The Sun was not exhibiting sunspots between A. D. 1645 and 1715; the sun's corona shrank greatly. Europe suffered extreme cold and famine. The Thames froze over several times [6] . Perhaps the Earth accelerated; a debate is occurring on the thesis that the Earth decelerates in response to great sun flares [7] . Already, carbon 14 and bristlecone pine variations during this period have been verified. Moreover, three studies promptly appeared, based on notes of astronomers in the period 1611 to 1644. They concluded that there had been a dramatic acceleration of the Sun's rotation in these years leading up to the period of sunspot minimum [8] . The speed-up was particularly marked in the regions within some 15 of the Solar Equator. "Until recently the character of solar differential rotation has been assumed to be constant. But in the period 1642 to 1644, "the equatorial velocity of the sun was faster by 3 to 5 per cent and the differential rotation [between the equator and high latitudes] was enhanced by a factor of 3." [9] The variability of the Sun's various behaviors must now be taken for granted. A few years ago Carl Sagan and Andrew T. Young in studying a group of solar-type stars in the cluster of Praesepe, at about equal distances from our Sun, found that the individual stars were not uniformly bright. Their varied light would indicate periodicity, inconstancy, and fit the new evidence from the now-known history of our Sun. In the case of our Sun, further, another low sunspot period was discovered and a high sunspot period, in the same past one thousand years. In 1978, two prominent astronomers in England, Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, accused scientific research authorities of discriminating against their work in exobiology, which had postulated that plagues and diseases are derived from the debris of space, particularly the biophile environment of comet tails. There, germs are nurtured, and fall upon Earth with the dust and debris from time to time [10] . It is noteworthy, in this connection, that popular traditions around the world associate comets with sundry grave human disorders -- pestilence and war among them. In A Journal of the Plague Year of 1665, Daniel Defoe reported that "a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the Plague." The renowned Bayeux tapestry (see Figure 3) presents a scene of despair in England and the premonition of King Harold that his realm will be invaded and be overthrown by the Normans in 1066. Above the scene hangs the comet, Halley's comet to the best of our knowledge. The last six sunspot peaks have coincided with flu epidemics. [11] Birgham, a century ago, reported the discovery of organic remains in fallen meteoroids; actually Hahn and Weinland, German scientists who did the research, claimed the presence of sponges, corals, and crinoids in the stone [12] . About the same time, the American politician and writer, Ignatius Donnelly, guessed that such widely dispersed events as the great Chicago fire, the Pestigo Forest fire, and the immense volcanic explosion of Krakatoa may have been caused by an encounter with the tail of Biela's comet [13] . I hardly need speak of the occasional comets and meteors whose impact alone, should they strike Earth, can cause local devastation with worldwide effect. On August 10,1972, a meteor of perhaps 4000 tons and forty feet across, skipped through the atmosphere of the Mountain Sates of America and was by chance closely observed. Luigi Jacchia, an astrophysicist, who glimpsed by accident the passage, afterwards estimated its explosive force at four Hiroshima-type bombs [14] . The Tunguska explosion of 1908, in a remote area of Siberia, belongs to this category, and its effects were described earlier; reindeer became scabrous; unusual radioactivity is present still; the foreign matter is microscopic if it exists at all; some 80,000,000 trees were blown down; and some mutagenesis seems to have occurred [15] . The blast might have destroyed any city on Earth. Jupiter is restless, too. Its Red Spot, a baleful eye of huge dimensions, was first reported by Cassini three centuries ago, in 1666 [16] . Its behavior has little changed. The Red Spot, by a satisfactory theory, that of R. Hide, is deemed to be a stagnant atmospheric column hovering over a very large, topographical feature of the planet's solid mantle. Some students have guessed it might be the place from which cometary Venus was wrenched some thousands of years ago. The question suggests itself : if one Red Spot, why not more? Is Jupiter capable of further fissioning? Momentary decelerations have been noted. Vsekhsviatskii claims Jupiter as a source of comets [17] . Others see Jupiter, when in near conjunction with other bodies and Earth, as forming a mechanism that can trigger disastrous earthquakes in California and elsewhere [18] . In 1944, Bruce, unaware of the great heat of Jupiter, which was then considered a "cold body," mentioned that "Kothari and Anluck have recently concluded that the largest possible cold body will have a size comparable to that of Jupiter." The implication here is that Jupiter should perhaps have been hot, a binary star, and in fact, as we have seen, it is hot, and it probably was a binary. But there is a further implication. If Jupiter is cooling, as it must be, then at some point, on some day, it must also become too cold to hold together. Then it will fission, or nova. The unmanned spaceship Voyager I crossed the bow of the magnetosphere of Jupiter at a distance of 3.8 million miles (6 million Km). Photographic close-ups gave new evidence of the immense turbulence of the shut-down binary. The satellites of Jupiter were shown to be variously formed. Io, among them, might be extremely young or continuously melted, for it was seen to be relatively unblemished. Also discovered in early 1979 was a band of charged particles, glowing in ultraviolet radiation, which circled the equatorial region of Jupiter, perhaps akin to the rings of Saturn [19] . The explosion of such an outwardly poised mass into interplanetary space would not be a difficult job for the restless giant. The consequent radiation storm on Earth might be terribly effective. All in all, two thousand years into the Solarian Age, and despite all the attempts during that time by philosophers, theologians, and scientists to discover an eternal orderliness in the skies, it is not given to us to believe that the heavens have settled down forever. In a strictly logical sense, we must however agree with the founder of uniformitarian thought, James Hutton, he who influenced Lyell and thus Charles Darwin. Writing in 1795, he declared: "In examining things present we have data from which to reason with regard to what has been; and from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen hereafter." [20] In their simple and elegant abstraction, his words are no more than both quantavolutionist and evolutionist require. For in newly "examining things present we have data" of particles and waves, turbulent heavens, mobile rocks and ocean basins, and electromagnetic-gravitational forces pervading all things. We must freshly "reason with regard to what has been." Thereupon "we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen hereafter," although it be far less data than we recently believed that we possessed, far more bewildering data, and far too little data for painting serenely a picture of the hereafter. {S : THE PROPENSITY TO SURVIVE} THE PROPENSITY TO SURVIVE Like all the world, mankind, creature of the heavens, has not settled down. What he has learned of controlling himself has been compensated for by what he has learned of destruction. It is deeply feared that a volley of nuclear missiles will destroy the human race. For those who are detached observers of the cosmic scene, quantavolutionary history offers a half-promise: nuclear bombs probably cannot exterminate this hardy species. In ancient times, universal deluges have driven people to the heights to survive. Sheets of fire have not reached survivors in their miles-deep caves. Tides have swept over mountains but passed over caves on the opposite slopes. The fall-out of deadly radiation had missed deep pockets of still air; also, there are humans suspected of possessing a partial immunity to radiation. The burn-up of atmospheric oxygen has not consumed the exhalations of all crevices nor suffocated all swamps. The human race rafted upon the continents to new habitats, and rode the folding and thrusting rocks. Some of us were somewhere else, too, when half the crust of the Earth exploded into space. The trump card that the human race has always played against catastrophic forces is its exponential reproducibility. This it still possesses. One may be a staunch supporter of the control of population -- believing with reason that overpopulation is itself a kind of catastrophe -- and, too, one may dread, with all reason again, a nuclear war. It is nevertheless of some consolation to consider that the reproducibility of the species amounts to an ultimate mechanism of escape from extinction in chaos and war. A woman of fifteen can reproduce. Thereupon, the arithmetic of survival is simple : a surviving couple can generate a population of billions in a thousand years, under conservative theoretical assumptions. So effective is this challenge of life to the principle of entropy that one must credit somewhere in the dim past an evolutionary saltation that was based upon the presumption of catastrophes. Furthermore, the individual human being is capable, in extremis, of excelling a giant programmed computer in its sensing for the possibilities of survival and can exploit any promising niche in the new world. Then and there, the human survivor will re-invent the words of Yahweh: [21] Here I am creating new heavens and a new earth; and the former things will not be called to mind, neither will they come up into the heart. {S : Notes (Chapter Twelve: Victory of The Sun)} Notes (Chapter Twelve: Victory of The Sun) 1. Alter (1929) A2-191. 2. IV 56. 3. (1950) 301. 4. Ibid., 298-300; A. de Grazia (1978). 5. John A. Eddy, quoted in Frazier (1976). See Eddy (1976) (1977) et al (1977). 6. Mulcaster (1977). 7. 104 Science News (1973), 136. 8. Herr (1978). 9. 824. 10. Times (1978). 11. Hope-Simpson (1978). 12. Birgham (1881); cf. Ransom (1976) 114-5. Given the conditions of Solaria Binaria with its enduring magnetic tube and huge atmosphere, life must be presumed to have existed on other planets, such as "Apollo" and Mars. 13. (1883) 408-23. 14. New York Times, July 4, 1974, p. 8. 15. Rich (1978). 16. Chapman (1968). 17. (1967). 18. Gribbin and Plagemann (1974). 19. New York Times, March 1, 1979, B20. 20. (1795) 19. 21. Isaiah 65: 17. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V CHAOS AND CREATION: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T BIBLIOGRAPHY} {S - } CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia BIBLIOGRAPHY The Bibliography contains all works cited in the text or notes and a number of additional works deemed relevant. All journal citations may be clear except perhaps S. I. S. R. which refers to the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review (11 Adcott Road, Acklam, Middlesbrough, Cleveland TS5 7ER, England). A full general annotated bibliography of quantavolution is in process under the direction of Professor Earl S. Milton, Lethbridge University, Alberta, Canada, and the present author. Acta (1969), First International Scientific Congress on the Volcano of Thera. Athens, Greece. Adams, Robert McC. (1975), "From Sites to Patterns," 68 Univ. of Chicago Magazine, Winter, 19-20. Adey, Walter H. (1978), "Coral Reef Morphogenesis: A Multidimensional Model," 202 Science No. 4370 (November 24), 831-7. Ager, Derek V. (1973), The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, John Wiley, New York. The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 (1970), U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. Albright, W. F. (1946), Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 2nd ed., Baltimore. ----(1965), 179 Bulletin American Schools of Oriental Research, 41-2. Albritton, Claude C. (1974), "Uniformitarianism," 18 Encyclopedia Brittanica, 857-9. ----(1975), Philosophy of Geohistory, 1785-1970, Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, Stroudsburg, Pa. Alfven, Hannes (1971), "Plasma Physics, Space Research, and the Origin of the Solar System," 172 Science (June 4), 991-4. Allchin, F. R. (1956), "The Stone Alignments of Southern Hyderabad," 56 Man, 150: 133-59. Alter, Dinsmore (1929), "A Critical Test of the Planetary Hypothesis of Sun Spots," 57 Monthly Weather Review (April), 143-6. (Repr. in Corliss, A2, 190-5.) Allen, Clabon W. (1963), Astrophysical Quantities, Oxford U. Press, 3rd ed. Allen, Richard H. (1899), Star Names, their Lore and Meaning, Dover Publications, New York, repr. 1963. Aller, Lawrence H. (1974), "Star," 17 Encyclopedia Britannica, 584-604. Ambraseys, N. N. (1971), "The Value of Historical Periods of Earthquakes," 232 Nature (Aug. 6), 375-9. "An Ancient Roman Coin Found in Illinois," (anon.) (1882), 46 Scientific American (June 17), 382. Anderson, John Lynde & George W. Spangler (1974), "Radiometric Dating: Is the 'Decay Constant' Constant?" 4 Pens‚e, No. 4, 31-33. Areng, Victor (1971), Ionizing Radiation and Life, C. V. Mosby Co, Saint Louis. "Argon in Mars' Atmosphere," (1975), 49 Sky and Telescope (May), 291. "Ash" (1978), IV Kronos (Winter), 101-4. "Ash" (1973-4), IV Pens‚e (Winter), 5-19. Aspden, Harold (1977), "Galactic Domains, Geographic Fluctuations, and Geometric Reversals," 2 Catas. Geo. 2, 42-7. Hymns of the Atharva-Veda, transl. Maurice Bloomfield (1969), Greenwood Press. New York. Atkinson, R. J. C. (1960), Stonehenge, Pelican Books, London. Asimov, Isaac, et al. (1977), Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Cornell U. Press, Ithaca, N. Y. Aveni, Anthony F. & Robert Linsley (1972), "Mount J, Monte Alban: Possible Astronomical Orientation," 37 American Antiquity, 529-31. ---- H. Hartung & B. Buckingham 91978), "The Pecked Cross Symbol in Ancient Mesoamerica," 202 Science (October 20), 267-79. Avery, T. E. (1975), Natural Resources Measurements, McGraw-Hill, New York. Babcock, William H. (1922), Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography, American Geographic Society, New York. Bader, Otto N. (1965), La Caverne Kapovaia: Peinture Paleolithique, Moscow. Bailey, James R. A. (1973), The God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder & Stoughton, London. Bailey, James R. A. (1973), the God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder & Stoughton, London. Bailey, V. A. (1960), "Existence of Net Electric Charges on Stars," 186 Nature (May 14), 508-10. Baity, Elizabeth Chesley (1973), "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far," 14 Current Anthropology No. 4 (October), 389-449. Baker, G. (1960), "The Present State of Knowledge of the 'Age-on-Earth' and the 'Age-of-Formation' of Australites," Nature (January 30). Baker, Howard B. (1932), The Atlantic Rift and Its Meaning, mimeograph, Detroit. ---- (1954), The Earth Participates in the Evolution of the Solar System, Detroit Acad. Nat Sci. Ball, Robert S. (1906), The Cause of an Ice Age (3rd ed.), K. Paul, London. Bancroft, Hubert H. (1874-76), Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, D. Appleton and Co., N. Y. Barbeau, Marius (1967), "The Old-World Dragon in America." in Sol Tax, ed., Indian Tribes of Aborginal America, Cooper Square Publ., New York. Bargmann, Valentine & Lloyd Motz (1962), "On the Recent Discoveries Concerning Jupiter and Venus," 138 Science (December 21), 1350-2. Barnes, Thomas (1977), "Recent Origin and Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field," II S. I. S. R. No. 2, (December), 42-6. ---- (1978), "A Response to Dr. Milsom," II S. I. S. R. No. 4 (Spring), 110-1. Bass, Robert W. (1974), "Did Worlds Collide?" 4 Pens‚e No. 3 (Summer), 8-20. ---- (1974), "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," 4 Pens‚e No. 3 (Summer), 21-26. ---- (1975), "Can Worlds Collide?" 1 Kronos No. 3 (Fall), 59-72. Bathurst, G. B. (1964), "The Earliest Recorded Tornado," 19 Weather, 202-4. Batten, Alan H., ed. (1973a), "Extended Atmosphere and Circumstellar Matter in Spectroscopic Binary Systems," I. A. U. Symposium No. 51 (May). ---- (1973b), Binary and Multiple Star Systems, Pergamon, Oxford. Baudouin, Marcel (1916), "La Prehistoire des Etoiles au Paleolothique. Les Pleiades a l'Epoque Aurignacienne et le Culte Stello-Solaire Typique au Solutr‚en," ser. VI Bull. et Memoires de la Societ‚ d'Anthropologie de Paris, Tome VII, 25-103, 274-317. Baum, Richard (1978), "The Maedler Phenomenon," 27 Strolling Astronomer, 118-9. Beaumont, William C. (under pseudonym of Appian Way) 1925, The Riddle of the Earth, Chapman & Hall, London. ---- (1945), The Mysterious Comet, Rider & Co., London. ---- (1949), Britain, the Key to World History, Rider & Co., London. Bell, Barbara (1971), "The Dark Ages in Ancient History: Part I, Egypt," 75 American Journal of Archaeology, 1-26. Bellamy, H. S. (1936), Moons, Myths and Man, Faber & Faber, London. ---- (1943), Built before the Flood, Faber & Faber, London. ---- (1948), The Atlantis Myth, Faber & Faber, London. ---- (1951), A Life History of our Earth, Faber & Faber, London. Bellamy, H. S. & P. Allan (1956), The Calendar of Tiahuanaco. Faber & Faber, London. Bender, Barbara (1975), Farming in Prehistory, John Baker, London. Benedict, R. (1935), Zuni Mythology, Contributions to Anthropology No. 21, Columbia University, New York. Bentley, John (1825), A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, from the Earliest Dawn of that Science in India to the Present Time (Part I & Part II), Smith, Elder & Co., London. Bernal, Ignacio (1969), Olmec World, tr. D. Heyden and F. Horcasitas, U. of California, Berkeley. Berndt, Ronald M. (1948), "A Wonguri-Mandzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX Oceania (September), 16-50. Berry, William B. N. (1968), Growth of a Prehistoric Time Scale, Freeman, San Francisco. Bibby, Geoffrey (1969), Looking for Dilmun, New American Library, Mentor Books, New York. Bidez, Joseph (1945), Eos: ou Platon et l'Orient, M. Hayes, Brussels. Bimson, John J. (1977), "Rockenbach's 'De Cometis, ' and the Identity of Typhon," I S. I. S. R. No. 4 (Spring), 9-10. ---- (1978), "An Eighth Century Date for Merenptah," III S. I. S. R. 2 (Autumn), 57-9. Birgham, Francis (1881) "The Discovery of Organic Remains in Meteoric Stones," 20 Popular Science, 83-7; repr. in Corliss AI-AMB001, 25-8. "Black Sea Issue: From Meter to Centimeter to Micron and Finally to Angstr”m Units," (1970), XV Oceanus No. 4 (July) (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). Blinkenberg, Christian S. (1911), The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore, The University Press, Cambridge. Bloch, R. (1962) Gli Etruschi, II Saggitore, Milan. Blumer, M. & W. W. Youngblood (1975), "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils and Recent Sediments," Science (April 4), 53. Bord, Janet (1976), Mazes and Labyrinths of the World, Latimer New Dimensions, London. Borst, Lyle B. (1969), "Megalithic plan Underlying Canterbury Cathedral," 163 Science (Feb. 7), discussion with Frank K. E. Barmore, 166 Science (Now. 2, 1969), 772-4. Bostick, Winston H. (1957)," 197 Scientific American (October), 87-94. Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine (1765), "Deluge," in L'Encyclop‚die, D. Diderot, ed., Briasson, Paris, 1751-65. ---- (1766), L'Antiquit‚ Devoil‚e par ses Usages ou Examen Critique des Principales Opinions, Ceremonies et Institutions Religieuses et Politiques des Differents Peuples de la Terre, 4 Vols, Amsterdam. Brandon, S. G. F. (1963), Creation Legends of the Near East, Hodder & Stoughton, London. Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles-Etienne (1857-59), Histoire des Nations Civilis‚es du Mexique et de l'Amerique Centrale, A. Bertrand, Paris. ---- (1864), S'il Existe des Sources de l'Histoire Primitive du Mexique dans les Monuments Egyptiens, etc. (Extrait du Volume, Institute Relations des Choses de Yucatan, de Diego Maisonneuve, Paris. ---- (1868), Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique, maisonneuve, Paris. ---- (1869-70), Manuscript Troano, Etude sur le systeme graphique et la langue des Mayas, Imprimerie Implide, Paris. Bray, J. R. (1974), "Volcanism and Glaciation during the Past 40 Millennia," 252 Nature (December 20-7), 679-80. Bretz, J. H. (1969), "The Lake Missoula Floods and the Channeled Scabland," 77 J. Geology, 503-43. Breuil Henri (1909), "Le Bison et le Taureau Celeste Chald‚en," XIII Reveue Archeologique, series IV, March- April, 250-4. Briffault, Robert (1927), The Mothers, A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions, 3 vols, Hamilton, New York. Brooks, Charles Ernest Pelham (1949), Climate Through the Ages, McGraw Hill, New York. Brown, E. W. (1931), "The Age of the Earth from Astronomical Data," Bull. National Res. Council, No. 8 (June), 460-6. Brown, Hugh A. (1967), Cataclysms of the Earth, Twayne Pub., Inc., New York. Brown, John Macmillan (1924), The Riddle of the Pacific, Small, Maynard & Co., Boston. Brown, W. Norman "Mythology of India," in Samuel N. Kramer, ed. (1961), Mythologies of the Ancient World, Doubleday Anchor, New York. Bruce, C. E. R. (1944), A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony, Unwin Brothers, London. ---- (1966), "Lightning Currents," 12 Electronics and Power (June), 200. ---- (1968), Successful Predictions of the Electrical Discharges Theory of Cosmic Atmospheric Phenomena and Universal Evolution, The Electrical Research Association, Leatherhead Surrey, England. ---- (1975), "The Role of Electrical Discharges in Astrophysical Phenomena," 95 The Observatory No. 1008 (October), 204-10. Brunhouse, Robert L. (1973), In Search of the Maya, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruno, Giordano, (D. W. West, ed. 1950), His Life and Thoughts. Bumstead, A. P. (1943), "Sunspots and Lightning Fires," 43 Forestry Rev., 134-44. Burgstahler, Albert W. & Ernest E. Angino (1967), "Venus --Young or Old?" XLI Yale Scientific Magazine No. 7 (April), 18. ---- (1973-74), "The Nature of the Cytherean Atmosphere," 4 Pens‚e No. 1 (Winter), 24-30. ---- (1973-74), "A Concluding Note," 4 Pens‚e No. 1 (Winter), 37. Burkert, Walter (1972), Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E. L. Miner, Harvard University Press. Burtt, E. A. (1954), The Metaphysical foundations of Modern Science, rev. ed., Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Butzer, K. W. (1971), Environment and Archaeology: an Ecological Approach to Prehistory, Aldine Press, Chicago. Cadogan, Gerald, with the collaboration of R. K. Harrison & G. E. Strong (1972), "Volcanic Glass Shards in Late Minoan I Crete," 46 Antiquity, 310-3. Cambridge Ancient History (1973), Cambridge, Eng., University Press, vol. II. Campbell, Joseph (1949), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Cardona, Dwardu (1973-74), "The Pyramids and Earth's Axis," letter, 4 Pens‚e No. 1, 66-7. ---- (1975), "Tektites and China's Dragon," I Kronos No. 2, 35-47. ---- (1976), "The Problem of the Frozen Mammoths," I Kronos No. 4, 77. ---- (1976a), "On the Origin of Tektites," II Kronos No. 1, 38-44. ---- (1977), "The Sun of Night," III Kronos (Fall), 31-37. ---- (1978a), "Let There be Light," III Kronos (Spring), 34-54. ---- (1978b), "The Mystery of the Pleiades," III Kronos (Summer), 24-44. ---- 1979), "The Stones of Ballochry" and "The Cairns of Kintraw," IV Kronos, No. 3 (Spring), 23-55. Carey, W. (1958), The Tectonic Approach to Continental Drift, Symposium on Continental Drift, University of Tasmania. Carli, Giovanni-Rinaldo (also Carli-Rubbi) (1788), Lettres Americaines, 2 Vol., Buisson, Paris. Carpenter, Rhys (1966), Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. Chamanlal, Bhikku (also Chaman Lal) (1966), Hindu America. Chalmers, R. O., et al. (1979), "Australian Microtektites...," 90, Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull., 508-12. Cicero, M. T. (1933), De Natura Deorum, H. Rackham transl., G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. Chinnery, Michael A. & Robert G. North (1975), "The Frequency of Very Large Earthquakes," 190 Science (19 December), 1197-8. Chapman, Clark R. (1968), "The Discovery of Jupiter's Red Spot," 35 Sky and Telescope No. 5, 276-8. Clark, D. H., W. H. McCrea & F. R. Stephenson (1977), "Frequency of Nearby Supernovae and Climatic and Biological Catastrophe," 265 Nature, 318-9. Clark, G. W. (1977), "X-Ray Stars in Globular Clusters," 237 Scientific American No. 4 (October), 42-54. Clausen, C. J. et al. (1979), "Little Salt Spring, Florida: A Unique Underwater Site," 203 Science (16 Feb.), 609-14. Cobine, J. D. (1958), Gaseous Conductors -- Theory and Engineering Applications, Dover Press, New York. Coe, Michael D., R. A. Diehl & M. Stuiver (1967), "Olmec Civilization, Veracruz, Mexico: Dating of the San Lorenzo Phase," 155 Science, 1399-1401. ---- (1975), "Native Astronomy in Mesoamerica," in Anthony F. Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. Cohane, John Philip (1967), The Key, Crown Publishers, New York. Coleman, P. J. (1967), "Tsunamis as Geological Agents," 15 Journal Geol. Soc. Australia, 267-73. Colman, William (1964), Georges Cuvier, Zoologist, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Cook, Arthur B. (1964), Zeus, a Study in Ancient Religion, Biblo & Tannen, New York. Cook, Melvin A. (1957), "Where is the Earth's Radiogenic Helium," 179 Nature (January 26), 213. ---- (1961-62), "The Radio-Carbon Method," 39 Utah Academy Sci. Arts Letters Proceedings, 115-5. ---- (1963), "Evidence for Recent Rupture of Continental Crust," 40 Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Part I, 74-77. ---- (1964), "Continental Drift: Is Old Mother Earth just a Youngster?" The Utah Alumnus (September), 10-12. (Critiques and Debate, Nov., 1963; Oct., 1964; Nov., 1964). ---- (1964a), Uranium-Thorium-Lead 'Time Clocks', University of Utah, Depart, of Metallurgy, Salt Lake City, Utah. ---- (1966), Prehistory and Earth Models, Max Parrish, London. ---- (1970), "Carbon 14 and the Age of the Atmosphere," Creation Research Society Quarterly (June). ---- (1972), "Rare Gas Adsorption on Solids of the Lunar Regolith," 38 Journal of Colloid and Interface Science No. 1 (January), 12-18. Corliss, William R., compiler (1974-X), Sourcebook Project, Glen Arm, Maryland, 9 Vols. Courville, Donovan A. (1975), "Limitation of Astronomical Dating Methods," 1 Kronos No. 2, 49-72. Cox A. & R. R. Doell (1956), "Paleomagnetic Evidence Relevant to a Change in the Earth's Radius," 189 Nature, 45. Crew, E. W. (1974), "Lightning in Astronomy," 252 Nature No. 5483 (December 13), 539-42. Crew, Eric (1976-7), "Electricity in Astronomy," in four parts, Soc. Interdiscip. Studies Rev. Vol. I, No. 1, 2, 3; Vol. II, No. 1. ---- (1977), "Stability of Solid Cores in Gaseous Planets," III Kronos (Fall), 18-26. Cuvier, George (1831), Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, and the Changes Thereby Produced in the Animal Kingdom, Carey and Lea, Philadelphia. Dachille, Frank (1962), "Interactions of The Earth with very Large Meteorites," 24 Bull. S. Carolina Acad. Sci., 1-19. ---- (1963), "Axis Changes in the Earth from Large Meteorite Collisions," 198 Nature (April 13), 176. ---- (1977), "Meteorites-Little and Big," 46 Earth and Mineral Sciences, No. 7 (April), 42-52. Daly, R. A. (1923), "The Earth's Crust and its Stability: Decrease of the Earth's Rotational Velocity and its Geological Effects," V Amer. J. of Sci. (May), 349-77. Damon, P. E., A. Long, E. I. Wallick in W. G. Mook, et al. (1976), Proceedings 8 International Conf. RC Dating (Wellington, N. Z., October 1972), mimeo, University of Delft, G. W. van Oosterhout, Neth. D„niken, Erich von (1971), Chariots of the Gods, trans., Bantam Books, New York. ---- (1973), The Gold of the Gods, Putnam, N. Y. Danjon, Andr‚ (1960), "On the Change in the Rate of Rotation of the Earth Occurring During the Month of July 1959." 250 Comptes Rendus des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences (February 22), 1399-1402. ----(1962), "On the Continued Variations of the Rotation of the Earth," Series 8, 254 Comptes Rendus des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences (April 2), 2479-82. ---- (1962b), "The Rotation of the Earth and the Quiet Sun," Series 8, 254 Comptes Rendus des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences (April 25), 3058-61. Darwin, Charles (1845), Journal of Researches, D. Appleton, New York. Darwin, George H. (1879), "On the precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the Earth," II Phil. Trans. of Royal Soc., London, 447-538. de Grazia, Alfred (1975), "The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences & Humanities," From Past to Prophesy: Velikovsky's Challenge to Conventional Beliefs, Proceedings of the Symposium held at the Saidye Bronfman Centre (January 10-12), Nahum Ravel, ed., Montreal, Quebec. ---- (1976), "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by Fire in Pre-Historic and Ancient Times," I Kronos (April), 25-36; II Kronos (August), 63-71. ---- (1976a), The Palaetiology of Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis, Xerox edition, Quiddity Books, Princeton, N. J. ---- (1976b), "Catastrophic Finale of the Middle Bronze Age," Proceedings IX International Prehist. and Protohis. Cong., Nice, France, Sept. 1976. ---- (1977), "Ancient Knowledge of Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings," 2 Kronos (February), 64-9. ---- (1978), "Palaetiology of Memory" in Recollection of a Fallen Sky, Earl Milton, ed., Lethbridge University Press, Lethbridge, Canada, Symposium 1974. de Grazia, Alfred, Ralph Juergens & Livio C. Stecchini (1966), The Velikovsky Affair, New York University Books, New York, 2nd ed. (1967) Lyle Stuart. (Second ed., Sphere Books, London, 1978). de Leonard, Carmen Cook (1975), "A New Astronomical Interpretation of the Four Ballcourt Panels at Tajin, Mexico," in A. F. Aveni (ed.), Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, U. of Texas, Austin, 263-83. Deluc, J. A. (1831), Letters on the Physical History of the Earth, C. J. G. & F. Rivington, London. de Santillana, Georgio and Hertha von Dechend (1969), Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, Gambit, Boston. The Devi-Mahatmya (trans. by S. Jagadisvarananda, 1953), Madras India. De Young, Don B. (1966-67), "The Precision of Nuclear Decay Rates," 13 Creation Res. Q., 38. Donnelly, Ignatius (1883), Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, D. Appleton & Co., New York. "Don't Rock the Ark," n. a. (1977), III Kronos (Fall), 68-71. Dorsey, G. A. (1904), Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee, Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston, New York. Douglas, Mary (1970), Natural Symbols, Explorations in Cosmology, Pantheon, New York. Doumanis, George A. & William E. Long (1962), "The Ancient Life of the Antarctic," 207 Scientific American No. 3 (September). Doumas, Christos (1974), "The Minoan Eruption of the Santorini Volcano," XLVIII Antiquity, 110-115. Driscoll, E. (1972), "Bonanza from the Highlands," Science News (July 1), 12-3. Dudley, H. C. (1972), "Letter on Internuclear Exchanges produced by Neutrino Sea," 5 Nuovo Cimento, 231. Duran, Diego (1971), Book of the Gods and Rites of the Ancient Calendar, Transl., ed. and annot. by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Duxbury, T. C. & J. Veverka (1978), "Deimos Enocounter by Viking," 201 Science (September 1), 812-14. "Ebla, the Plain Dealer," (1978), II S. I. S. R. No 4 (spring) (unsigned note.) Eddy, John A. (1976), "The Maunder Minimum," 192 Science (June 18), 1189-1202. ---- (1977), "The Case of the Missing Sunspots," 236 Scientific American (May), 80-92. ---- P. A. Gilman & D. E. Trotter (1977), "Anomalous Solar Rotation in the Early 17th Century," 198 Science (November 25), 824-29. Eggleton, Peter, S. Mitten & J. Whelan, eds. (1976), Structure and Evolution of Close Binary Systems, I. A. U. Symposium No. 17, Reidel, Boston. Egyed, L. (1956), "Determination of Changes in the Dimensions of the Earth from Palaeogeographical Data," 178 Nature (September), 534. See Also: (1965), 190 Nature, 109. Ehrich, Robert W. Ed. (1965), Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, 4th impression 1971, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago & London. Eicher, Don L. (1974), "Geological Time Scale," Encyc. Britannica, 1065-70. Einstein, Albert (1955), Letter to I. Velikovsky, of March 17. repr. in 2 Pens‚e 2, 39. Eiseley, Loren (1943), "Archaeological Observations on the Problem of Post-Glacial Extinction," 8 American Antiquity (January), 209-17, 291-5. ---- (1946), "The Fire-Drive and the Extinction of the Terminal Pleistocene Fauna." 48 New Series American Anthropologist (January-March), 54-9. Eisler, R. (1910), Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, C. H. Beck, Mnchen Eliade, Mircea (1949), Trans. By Trask (1954), The Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton U. Press, Princeton, N. J. ---- (1963), Myth and Reality, Harper & Row, New York. ---- (1964), Trait‚ d'Histoire des Religions, Payot, Paris. ---- (1974), Gods, Goddesses, and Myths of Creation, Harper & Row, New York. Emery, W. B. (1961), Archaic Egypt, Baltimore, Penguin Books. Eratosthenes, (C. Robert ed., 1878), Catasterismorum Reliquiae. Ericson, David B. et al. (1963), "Extinctions and Evolutionary Changes in Macrofossils Clearly Define the Abrupt Onset of the Pleistocene," 139 Science No. 3556 (February 22). Everhart, Edgar (1969), "Close Encounter of Comets and Planets'" 74 Astronomical Journal (June). 735-50. Ewing, M & W. Donn (1958), "A Theory of the Ice Ages," 123 Science, 1061-6. Fairbridge, Rhodes W. 1974, "Holocene Epoch," 8 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 998-1007. Fauconnet, Max (1968), " Mythology of the Two Americas," New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, Hamlyn London. Fell, Barry (1977), "Etruscan," V (Occasional papers) No. 100, Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Mass. Ferte, Thomas (1972), "A Record of Success," II Pens‚e No. 2 (May), 11-15. Finney, John W. (1964), "Slowing of Jupiter's Rotation Reported by Radio Astronomer," New York Times (April 27). Fisher, Osmond (1881), Physics of the Earth's Crust, London. ---- (1882), "On the Physical Cause of the Ocean Basins," Nature (Jan. 12), 234-4. Fitzgerald. C. P. (1965), China: A Short Cultural History, New York. Flammarion (1880), Astronomie Populaire, C. Marpon et. E. Flammarion, Paris (repr. 1955). Flint, R. F. (1971), Glacial and Quanternary Geology, Wiley, New York. Fontenrose, Joseph (1959), Python, A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins, U. of California Press, Berkeley. Fox, Hugh (1979), Gods of the Cataclysm, Harper and Row, New York. Francis, Wilfrid (1961), Coal: Its Formation and Composition, Arnold, London. ---- (1972), "Velikovsky on the Origin of Coal," 2 Pens‚e (Fall), 19-21. Frankfort H. et al. (1946), The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago. ---- (1954), The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlessex. Frazer, James G. (1919), Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, Mac Millan and Co., London. ---- (1968), Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, Dawsons, London. Frazier, Kendrick 91976), "When the Sun went strangely Quiet," Science News (March 6). Frickenhaus, August H. (1912), Tiryns, vol. I Athens. Funkhauser, John g. & J. J. Naughton (1968), "Radiogenic Helium and Argon in Ultramafic Inclusion from Hawaii," 73 Journal of Geophysical Research, 14 (July 15), 4601-7. Furneaux, Rupert (1964), Krakatoa, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J. Galanopoulos, Angelos & Edward Bacon (1969), Atlantis: The Truth behind the Legend, Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis & New York. Galilei, Galileo (ed. by Giorgio de Santillana, 1953), Dialogue on the Great World System, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gallant, Ren‚ L. C. (1963), "Meteorite Impacts, Lunar Maria, Lopoliths, and Ocean Basins," 197 Nature (January 5), 38-9. ---- (1964), Bombarded Earth, An Essay on the Geological and Biological Effects of Huge Meteorite Impacts, John Baker, London. Gardiner, A. H. (1909), Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden (Papyrus Ipuwer). Gaster, Theodor H. (1965), Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, Harper & Row, New York, repr. (1969);( 1975), Harper Torchbooks. Gentry, R. V., W. H. Christie, D. H. Smith, J. F. Emery, S. A. Reynolds, R. Walker, S. S. Cristy, P. A. Gentry (1976), "Radiohalos in Coalified Wood: New Evidence Relating to the Time of Uranium Introduction and Coalification," 194 Science (October 15), 315-18. Gibson, John (1977), "Saturn's Age," pre-publication interview with author David N. Talbott, Research Communication Network (October 15), Portland, Oregon. Gillispie, C. C. (1959, 1951), Genesis and Geology, A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850, Harper, New York. Gilvarry, John J. (1961), "How the Sky drove the Land from the Bottom of the Sea," Saturday Review (November 4), 53-8; with critique and defense, op. cit. (1962) (April 7), 40-5. Gimbutas, Marija (1974), The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: Myths, Legends and Cult Images, U. of California Press. Ginzberg, Louis (1909-1939), The Legends of the Jews, trans. by H. Szold, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia. Glass, Billy (1967), "Microtektites in Deep-sea Sediments," 214 Nature (April 22), 372-4. Glass, Billy & B. C. Heezen (1967), "Tektites and Geomagnetic Reversals," 214 Nature, (April 22), 372. ---- (1969), "Silicate Spherules from Tunguska Impact Area: Electron Microprobe Analysis," 164 Science (May 2), 547-9. Count Goblet d'Aviella (1956), The Migration of Symbols, New York U. Books, New York, repr. Goff, Beatrice L. (1963), Symbols of Prehistoric Mesopotamia, Yale U. Press, New Haven. Gold, T. (1955), "Instability of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 175 Nature (March 26), 526-9. ---- (1958), "Irregularities in the Earth's Rotation -- Part I," 17 Sky and Telescope (March), 216-8; "Part II," (April), 284-6. Golonetsky, S. F., V. V. Stepanok & E. M. Kolesnikov (1977), "Signs of Cosmochemical Anomaly in the Area of the 1908 Tunguska Catastrophe," 11 Geoktrimiya, 1635-45. Goneim, Zakaria (1956), The Buried Pyramid. Gordon, Cyrus H. (1971), Before Columbus -- Links between the Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publishers, New York. ---- (1974), Riddles in History, Crown Publishers, New York. G”ssmann, P. F. (1955), Das Era-Epos, Augustinus-Verlaz, Wrzburg, Germ. Graves, Robert (1955), The Greek Myths, Vol. 1 & 2 Penguin, Baltimore; repr. 1959. Gray, L. H. ed. (1964), The Mythology of all Races, Cooper Square Publishers, New York. Greenberg, Lewis M. (1973), "The Papyrus Ipuwer," III Pens‚e (Winter), 36-7. ---- (1973-4), "W. F. Libby, C14, and the Americas," VI Pens‚e (Winter), 60-1. ---- (1973-4a), "Atlantis," VI Pens‚e (Winter), 51-4. ---- (1975), "A Concordance of Disaster," I Kronos (Summer), 16-22. ---- (1977), "The Venus Greenhouse Theory Debunked," III Kronos (Winter), 132-4. Greenberg, Lewis M. & Warner B. Sizemore (1978). "Jerusalem--City of Venus," III Kronos No. 3 (Spring), 56-90. Gribbin, J. & S. Plagemann (1973), "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate Following Great Solar Storm of August 1972," 243 Nature (May 4), 26-7. ---- (1974), The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes, Vintage Books, New York. Griffiths, J. G. (1956), "Archaeology and Hesiod's Five Ages," XVII J. Hist. Ideas No. 1 (January), 109-19. Grove, David C. (1970), The Olmec Paintings of Oxtotitlan Cave, Guerrero, Mexico, Harvard U. Studies in Pre- Columbian Art and Archaeology, No. 6. Guerrier, E. (1976), "Le Forgeron venu du Ciel," 17 Kadath, 30-6. Guirand, F. (1968), "Greek Mythology," Larousse World Mythology, 85-198, Putnam. Gundel, (1894-1941), "Kometen," in Pauly-Wissowa, XI Real Encyclop„die (also "Planeten.") Gunkel, H. (1895 & 1921), Sch”pfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit, Eine Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung ber Gen. I und Ap. Joh. 12, Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, G”ttingen. Goodrich, Luther C. 1957), A Short History of the Chinese People, Allen & Unwin, London. Haliburton, R. G. (1881), "Primitive Traditions as to the Pleiades," 25 Nature (December), 100-101; repr. in W. R. Corliss, Compiler, 91974), Strange Artifacts, M-1, MLW-003, Glen Arm, Md. Hamilton, Edwin L. (1953), "Upper Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Recent Planktonic Foraminifera from the Mid- Pacific Flat-Topped Sea Mounts," 27 J. of Paleontology, 207-37. Hampton, John (1955), N. A. Boulanger et la Science de son Temps, Librairie E. Droz, Geneve. Hapgood, C. H. (1966), Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Chilton Books, Philadelphia. ---- (1970), The Path of the Pole, Chilton Books, Philadelphia. Harris, T. M. (1958), "Forest Fire in the Mesozoic," 46 J. Ecology No. 2, 447-453. Harrison, E. R. (1977), "Has the Sun a Companion Star?" 270 Nature (November 24), 324-6. Hartmann, William K. (1975), "The Smaller Bodies of the Solar System," 233 Scientific American No. 3 (September), 142-59. Harwit, M. (1968), "Spontaneously Split Comets," 151 Astrophysical Journal (February), 789-90. Hatfield, G. B. & M. J. Camp (1970), "Mass Extinction Correlated with Periodic Galactic Events," 81 Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer., No. 3, 911-14. Hawkes, Jacquetta (1973), Atlas of Ancient Archaeology, McGraw Hill, New York. Hawkes, J. & Leonard Wooley (1965), History of Mankind: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, Vol. I, Harper & Row, New York. Hawkins, Gerald (1969), Ancient Lines in the Peruvian Desert, National Geographic Society, New York. Haymes, Robert C. 91971), Introduction to Space Science, John Wiley and Sons, New York. Heezen, B. C., Marie Thorp & M. Ewing (1959), Floors of the Ocean, Geological Society of America, New York. Heezen, B. & C. Hollister (1964), Face of the Deep: Physiography of the Indian Ocean, Geological Soc. of Amer., New York. Heide, Fritz (1964), Meteorites, Edward Anders & Eugene Du-Fresne, transl. U. of Chicago Press, Chicago; (1969), 3rd impression; trans. from (1957), Kleine Meteoritenkunde, Springer Verlag, Berlin. Heninger, S. K. Jr. (1960), A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, Duke U. press, Durham, N. Ca. Hentig, Hans von (1968), Ueber den Zusammenhang von Kosmischen, Biologischen und Sozialen Krisen, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart. Herr, Richard B. (1978), "Solar Rotation Determined from Thomas Harriot's Sunspot Observations of 1611 to 1613," 202 Science (December 8), 1079-81. Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, H. G. Evelyn-White, trans. (1936), "Eastern Anatolia and Velikovsky's Chronological Revisions I," 1 Kronos No. 3, 20-30. Hibben, F. C. (1953), Treasure in the Dust: Archaeology in the New World, Cleaver-Hume Press, London. ---- (1968), The Lost Americans, T. Y. Crowell, New York. Hild, J. A. 91919), "Saturnus," IV-2 Dict. Antiq. Grecque et Rom., 1083-90. Walter Hirschberg (1928-29), "Die Plejaden in Afrika und ihre Beziehungen zum Bodenban," 60-1 Zeitscrift fr Ethnologie. Hitching, Francis (1977), Earth Magic, Morrow, New York. Hoch, Roy (1969), God in Greek Philosophy, Princeton U. Press, Princeton. N. J. H”rbiger, Hans (1925), Glazial-Kosmogonie, R. Voigtlander, Leipzig. Holbrook, John 91973), "The Revised Chronology," 3 Pens‚e No. 2 (Spring-Summer), centerfold. Homer, Richmond Lattimore trans. (1951), The Iliad, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago; (1961) Phoenix ed.; (1967) 19th impression. ---- A. T. Murray (1919), trans., The Odyssey, 2 vol. Putnam's Sons, New York. ---- E. V. Rieu (1955), trans. The Odyssey, Penguin Books, Baltimore. Honeyman, James R. (1976), "Sinking Continents," 13 Creation Res. Q., 58. Hooker, Dolph Earl (1958), Those Astonishing Ice Ages, Exposition Press, New York. Hooqkaas, Reijer (1970), "Catastrophism in Geology, Its Scientific Character in Relation to Actualism and Uniformitarianism," 33 Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschaften Letterkunde, No. 7, 271-316; repr. in Albritton (1975), 310-56. Hope-Simpson, R. E. (1978), "Sunspots and Flu: a Correlation," 275 Nature 86. Hopkins, Clark (1965), "The Canopy of Heaven and the Aegis of Zeus," Bucknell Review (March 29), 1-16. Hoyle, Fred (1951), The Nature of the Universe, Harper, New York. Hoyle, Fred & N. C. Wickramasinghe (1977), "Identification of the 2, 200A Interstellar Absorption Feature", 270 Nature (November 24), 323-324. ---- (1977), "Does Epidemic Disease Come From Space," New Scientist, Nov. 11. Humboldt, A. von (1814), Engl. transl., Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, Vol. II, Longman, etc. Hurt, Rees, Orme & Broung J. Murray & H. Colburn, London. Huxtable, J., M. J. Aitken & Bonhommet (1978), "Thermoluminescence Dating of Sediment Bedded by Lava Flows of the Chaine des Puys," 275 Nature (September 21), 207-9. "How the Ice Age Began," unidentified author (1975), 105 Time (Canadian Edition) No. 52 (March). Inglis, D. R., "The Shifting of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 29 Review of Modern Physics, 9-19. Isaacson, Israel M. (1973), "Carbon 14 Dates and Velikovsky's Revision of Ancient History: Samples from Pylos and Gordion," 3 Pens‚e No. 2 (Spring-Summer), 26-32. ---- (1974), "Applying the Revised Chronology," 4 Pens‚e No. 4 (Fall), 5-20. ---- (1975), "some Preliminary Remarks about Thera and Atlantis," 1 Kronos No. 2, 93-99. Isenberg, Artur (1976), "Devi and Venus," 2 Kronos No. 1, 89. Jacobsen, Thomas W. (1976), "17,000 Years of Greek Prehistory," 234 Scientific Amer., 76-87. Jaki, Stanley L. (1978), Planets and Planetarians: A History of Theories of the Origin of Planetary Systems, Halsted-Wiley, New York. James, E. O. (1961), Seasonal Feasts and Festivals, Barnes & Noble, New York. James Hutton (1795), Theory of the Earth, 2 vols. London. James, Peter (1976), "Aphrodite -- The Moon or Venus?" I S. I. S. R., No. 1, 2-7. ---- (1976), "Aphrodite," Letters, I S. I. S. R., No. 3. ---- (1977), "Peoples of the Sea?" II S. I. S. R., No. 1, 4-6. ---- (1979), "Metallurgy and Chronology," III S. I. S. R., No. 4, 81-3. James, Williams (1896), The Will to Believe, Longmans Green, London, 1937 ed. Jastrow, M. (1898), Religion of Babylon and Assyria. Jaynes, Julian (1977), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston. Jeans, J. H. (1928), Astronomy and Cosmology, Cambridge, Eng. Johanson, D. C. and T. D. White (1979), "A Systematic Assessment of Early African Hominids," 203 Science 4378 (26 Jan.) 321-30. Jordan, Pascual (1971), The Expanding Earth, Trans. from German (1966), Die Expansion der Erde, F. Vieweg, Braunschmeig. Joseph, P. (1972), The Dravidian Problem in the South Indian Culture Complex, Orient Longman, Ltd., New Delhi. The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. Whiston, 91895 ed.), J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia. Jueneman, Frederic B. (1973), "Letter on Mutagenic Acoustics," I Pens‚e , No. 4, 112. ---- (1973), "A Most Exciting Planet," 15 Industrial Research (July), 11. Juergens, Ralph (1972), "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," 2 Pens‚e No. 3 (Fall), 6-12. ---- (1973-74), "Juergens Replies," letter, 4 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 62-64. ---- (1974), "Electricity Absent from Sagan's Astrophysics," 4 Pens‚e, No. 2 (Spring), 38-43. ---- (1974b), "Electrical Discharges and the Transmutation of Elements," 4 Pens‚e , No. 3 (Summer), 45-6. ---- (1974a), "Of the Moon and Mars, Part 1," 4 Pens‚e, No. 4 (Fall), 21-30. (1974-75), "Part 2," 4 Pens‚e, No. 5 (Winter), 27-39. ---- (1976), "The 'Bulk chemistries' of Venus and Jupiter," II Kronos, No. 1 (Summer), 11-15. ---- (1976b), "Velikovsky and the Heat of Venus," I Kronos (Winter), 86-92. ---- (1977), "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos (Fall), 3-17. ---- (1978), "Geogullibility and Geomagnetic Reversals," III Kronos (Summer), 52-63. Justin (3rd century A. D.), The History. Kaiser, T. R. (1955), "The Incident Flux of Meteors and the Total Meteoric Ionization," Pergamon, London. Kelly, Allen (1963), Continental Drift: Is It a Cometary Impact Phenomenon ?, Carlsbad, Calif., rev. ed. 1966. ---- (1974), The Gravitational Disruption of Mars: Speculation, Theory or Fact? (privately printed) Carlsbad, Calif. Kelley, Allan & Frank Dachille (1953), Target: Earth, the Role of large Meteors in Earth Science, Carlsbad, Calif. Kennedy, G. E. (1975), "Early Man in the New World." 255 Nature, 274-5. Kennett, J. P. & N. D. Watkins (1970), "Geomagnetic Polarity Change, Volcanic Maxima and Faunal Extinction in the South Pacific," 227 Nature (August 29), 930-4. Kerenyi, Karl (1976), Hermes, Guide of Souls, Spring, Zurich. Kerr, Richard A. (1978), "Isotopic Anomalies in Meteorites: Complications Multiply," 202 Science (October 1973), 203-4. Kofahl, Robert E. 91976-7), "Could the Flood Waters Have Come from a Canopy or extraterrestrial Source?" 13 Creation Res. Q., 202. Komarek, E. V., Sr. (1965), "Fire Ecology -- Grasslands and Man," Proceedings, 4th Annual Tall Timber Fire Ecology Conference (March 18-19), 169-220. Kolata, Gina Bari (1977), "Catastrophe Theory: The Emperor Has No Clothes," 996 Science (April 15), 287. Kondratov, Alexander (1974), The Riddles of Three Oceans, Progress Publishers, Moscow, U. S. S. R. Kopal, Z. (1959), Close Binary Systems, Wiley, New York. Kramer, Samuel Noah, ed., (1961), Mythologies of the Ancient World, Anchor, Doubleday, Garden City. Krinov, E. L. (1966), Giant Meteorites, Pergamon Press, Oxford. London, Edinburgh, New York. Kronos, Editors (1977), Velikovsky and Establishment Science, Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J. ---- (1978) IV "Scientists Confront Scientists who Confront Velikovsky," 2: 2-79. Kroeber, Alfred L. (1952), The Nature of Culture, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kruskal, Martin, Ralph Juergens, C. E. R. Bruce, Eric W. Crew, "On Cosmic Electricity, Supplement," III Pens‚e, No. 3 (Fall), 42-50. Kugler, Franz Xavier (1927), Sybillinischer Sternkampf und Pha‰ton in Naturgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung, Munster. Kuong, Wong Lee (1973), "The Synthesis of manna," III Pens‚e( Winter), 45-6. Kuper, Charles G. & Asher Peres, eds. (1971), Relativity and Gravitation, Gordon and Breach, New York. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. & M. (1971), "An Early City in Iran," Scientific American (June), 102-11. Lane, Frank W. (1965), The Elements Rage, Chilton Co. Publ., Philadelphia and New York. Langdon, Stephen H. (1923), Enuma Elish, The Babylonian Epic of Creation, Clarendon Press, Oxford. ---- (1935), Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendars, Oxford U. Press, Milford. Laning-Emperaire, A. (1962), La Signification de l'Art Paleolithique, Paris. Lantzy, R. J., M. F. Dacey & F. T. Mackenzie (1977), "Catastrophe Theory: Application to the Permian Mass Extinction," 5-12 Geology, 724-8. Larrabee, E. M. (1962), "Ephemeral Water Action Preserved in Closely Dated Deposit," 32 Sedimentary Petrol, 608-9. Lasaga, A. C. & H. D. Holland (1974), "Primordial Oil Slick," 174 Science (October 10), 53-5. Laville, Henri (1978), Climatologie et Chronologie du Pal‚olithique en Perigord, Laboratoire de Plaentologie, U. de Provence, France. Lederer, Wolfgang (1968), The Fear of Women, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York. Legget, Robert R. ed. (1976), Glacial Till: An Interdisciplinary Study, Royal Society of Canada. Leglay, Marcel (1966). Saturne Africain, Boccard, Paris. Leighton, Robert G. (1970), "The Surface of Mars," 222 Scientific American (May), 27-40. Leroi-Gourhan, Andre (1957), Originalit‚ Biologique de l'Homme, Paris. ---- (1965), Le Geste et la Parole, Albin Michel, Paris. ---- (1976), Les Religions de la Pr‚histoire, 3rd ed., Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Lessing, G. (1888), Laokoon, trans. by E. C. Beasley; G. Bell and Sons, London. Levin, B. Y. (1968), "The Interaction of Astronomy, Geophysics and Geology in the Study of the Earth," in The Interaction of Sciences in the Study of the Earth, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 165-180. Lewis. Gilbert N. (1934), "The Genesis of the Elements," 46 The Physical Review (November 15), 897-901. Libby, W. F. (1973), "The Radiocarbon Dating Method." 3 Pens‚e No. 2 (Spring-Summer), 7-12. Libby, L. M. & H. R. Lukens (1973), "Production of Radiocarbon in Tree Rings by Lightning Bolts," 78 J. Geophysical Res., No. 26 (September 10), 5902-3. The Lichtenberg Reader (1959), Beacon Press, Boston, (Georg C. Lichtenberg). "Lightning Superbolts Seen from Space," (1977), New Scientist (October 20), 150. Liller, William (1977), "The Story of AM Herculis," Sky and Telescope (May), 350-4. Lockyer, J. N. (1965), Dawn of Astronomy, M. I. T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. Long, Charles H. (1963), Alpha: The Myths of Creation, G. Braziller, New York. ---- (1974), "Myths and Doctrines of Creation," 5 Encyclopedia Britannica, 240-1. Lowery, Malcolm (1977), "Father Kugler's Falling Star," II Kronos, No. 4 (Summer), 3-28. ---- (1977), "Some Notes on Senmut's Ceiling," II S. I. S. R., No. 1 (Autumn), 7-10. ---- (1977-78), "Dating the 'Admonitions': Advance Report," II S. I. S. R., No. 3, 54-7. ---- (1978), "The Sybil and Dr. Stecchini," III S. I. S. R., No. 2 (Autumn), 32-4. de Luc, M. (1790), 10th letter to La Metherie, "On the History of the Earth, from the time when that planet was penetrated by light, until the appearance of the Sun..." 37 Journal de Physique, Part 2, 332. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. by R. C. Trevelyan, The University Press, Cambridge (Eng.) (1937). Lyell, Charles (1831), Principles of Geology, Vol. I.; (1832), Vol. II.; (1833), Vol. III., Murray, London. Ma, Ting Ying H. (1943), "Alteration of Sedimentary Facies on the Ocean Bottom and Shortness of the Period of Diastrophism after a Sudden Total Displacement of the Solid Earth Shell," II Oceanographica Sinica, Fasc. 1 (September), the Author, Yungom, Fukien, China. ---- (1955), Research on the Past Climate: Vol. VI. The Sudden Total Displacement of the Outer Solid Earth Shell by Slidings, Relative to the Fixed Rotating Core of the Earth, World Book Co., Ltd., 99 Chung King Road, 1st Section, Taipei, Taiwan, China. Maccoby, Hyam (1971), "Ebla," a note, I, S. I. S. R. (Spring), 3. McCall, G. J. H., ed., (1977), Meteorite Craters, Wiley, New York McCrea, W., D. H. Clark, F. R. Stephenson (1977), "On possible cosmic event of last several thousand years bombarding Earth by cosmic radiation," 265 Nature, 318. McDonnel, J. A. M., ed., (1978), Cosmic Dust, Wiley-Interscience, New York. MacKie, Euan W. (1974), "Megalithic Astronomy and Catastrophism," 4 Pens‚e No. 5 (Winter), 5-20. ---- (1977), Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain. ---- (1977-78), "Radiocarbon Dates for the Eighteenth Dynasty," II S. I. S. R., No. 2-3, 95-6. MacKinnon, Roy (1976), "Cenomanian Sync.," I S. I. S. R., No. 2 (Spring). ---- (1977), "The Inexact Science of Radiometric Dating," I S. I. S. R. (Summer), 8-19. Mac Neish, Richard S. (1964), "The Origins of New World Civilization," 11 Scientific American (November), 29-37. Macrobius, (P. V. Davies trans., 1969), Saturnalia, Columbia U. Press, Mainwaring, A. Bruce (1973), "Final Report, Foundation for Studies of Modern Science Radiocarbon Project," Project conducted by the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. Malin, S. C. R. and I. Saunders (1973), 245 Nature 25. Manuel, Frank E. (1963), Isaac Newton: Historian, Harvard U. Press, Cambridge. Marcanton, Paul L. (1907), "La Methode de Folghereiter et son role en Geophysique," 112 Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles, 467-82. Maringer, Johannes (1960), The Gods of Prehistoric Man, trans. by Mary Ilford, Weidensfeld and Nicholson, London; Knopf, New York. Marov, M. Y. (1976), in 109 Science News (June 19), 388, Venus surface light. Cf. II Kronos, No. 1, 104-5. Marsden, Brian G. (1967), "One Hundred Periodic Comets," Science, 10 March, 1207-13. Marsden, B. G. & A. G. W. Cameron (1966), The Earth-Moon System, Plenum, New York. Marshack, Alexander (1972), The Roots of Civilization. The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol And Notation, Weldenfeld and Nicolson, London; McGraw Hill, New York. Marshall, Sir John (1931), Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, 3 vols., London. "Martian Poles Shift, Say Polar Drift Theorists," (1973), 43 Science Digest (June), 74-5. Martin, P. S. & H. E. Wright, eds. (1968), International Association for Quaternary Research, Pleistocene Extinctions, The Search for a Cause, Yale U. Press, New Haven. Martineau, LaVan (1973), The Rocks Begin to Speak, KC Publ., Las Vegas, Nev. Mavor, J. W. Jr. (1969), Voyage to Atlantis, Putnam's Sons, New York. Mead, G. R. S. (1906), Thrice Greatest Hermes, J. M. Watknis, London. Meggers, Betty J. (1975), "The Transpacific Origin of Meso American Civilization: A Preliminary Review of the Evidence and Theoretical Implication," 77 Amer. Anthro., 1-27. Mellaart, James (1967), Catal Huyuk, a Neolithic Town in Anatolia, McGraw Hill. New York. Menard, Henry, W. (1961), "The East Pacific Rise: Convection Currents in the Mantle Bay Account for this Bulge on the Ocean Floor," 205 Scientific American, No. 6 (December), 52-61. Mercer, S. A. B. (1952), The Pyramid Texts, Longmans, Green, New York. Mergell, M. et al. (1978)," A City Plagued by Noise..." Environment Report (November 27), I. National League of Cities, Washington, D. C. Michell, John (1969), The View Over Atlantis, Ballantine Books, New York. Michelson, Irving (1974), "Mechanics Bears Witness," 4 Pens‚e, NO. 2, 15-22. ---- (1974), "Tide's Tortured Theory, ' 30 Science and Public Affairs No. 3 (March), 31-4. Miller, Molly (1970), The Sicilian Colony Dates: Studies in Chronography I, State U. of New York Press, Albany N. Y. Miller, Robert D. (1939), The Origin and Original Nature of Apollo, Ph. D. Dissertation. U. Of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia. Milsom, John (1977), "A Commentary on Barnes' Magnetic Decay. ' II S. I. S. R., No, 2 (December), 46. Milton, Earl (1975), The Planets Bear Witness, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Lethbridge, Canada. ---- ed. (1978), Recollections of a Fallen Sky. Lethbridge U. Press, Lethbridge, Canada. Mireaux, Emile (1948), Les Poems Homeriques et l'Histoire Grecque, 2 Vols. Albin Michel,, Paris. Mishra, D. P. (1971), Studies in the Proto-History of India. W. H. Patwardhan, Orient Longman, New Delhi. Misner, Charles W., K. S. Thorne & J. A. Wheeler (1973), Gravitation, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco. Mowles, Thomas (1973), "Radiocarbon Dating and Velikovskian Catastrophism," III Pens‚e (Spring-Summer), 19-25. Mulcaster, Geoff (1977), Letter on the "Maunder Minimum," II S. I. S. R., (December), 31-2. Mullen, William (1973), "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," 3 Pens‚e, No. 1 (Winter), 10-17. ---- (1974). "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 Pens‚e, No. 4 (Fall), 34-44. Mller, Rolf (1970), Der Himmel ber dem Menschen der Steinzeit, Astronomie and Mathematik in den Bauten der Megalith-kulturen, Springer, Berlin. Munch, Peter A. (1926), Norse Mythology, Am-Scand. F., New York. Munk, W. H. & G. J. F. Mac Donald (1960), The Rotation of the Earth, Cambridge U. Press, Cambridge. Murdock, George P. (1968), "The Common Denominator of Cultures" in S. C. Washburn & P. C. Jay, eds. Perspectives on Human Evolution, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York. Murray, Bruce C. (1975), "Mercury," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September). 58-69. National Academy of Sciences, Astronomy Survey Committee, Astronomy and Astrophysics for The 1970's, Washington, 1972. Newell, N. D. (1956), "Catastrophism and the Fossil Record," 10 Evolution, 97-101. --- (1967), "Revolutions in the History of Life," Geol. Soc. Amer., Special paper No. 98, 63-91. News Report, excerpts (1972), "Cosmic Violence," National Academy of Sciences. National Research Council, National Academy of Engineering (June-July). In 2 Pens‚e, No. 3, 39. Newton, Robert R. (1970), Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Acceleration of the Earth and Moon, John Hopkins Press. Baltimore. Niederberger, Christine (1979)," Early Sedentary Economy in the Basin of Mexico," 203 Science, 4376 (January 12), 138. Nieto, M. M. (1974), "The Titius-Bode Law and the Evolution of the Solar System," 4 Pens‚e, No. 3 (Summer), 5-7. Nilsson, Martin P. (1920), Primitive Time-Reckoning, Oxford U. Press, London. Niniger, Harvey H. (1953), A Comet Strikes the Earth, Palm Desert Press, Palm Desert, Calif. ---- Out of the Sky, (1959), Dover Publ., New York. Ninkovich, P. & B. C. Heezen (1965), "Santorini Tephra" in Submarine Geology And Geophysics, W. F. Whittard & R. Bradshaw, eds. Butterworth, London, 413-52. Ninkovitch D. & W. L. Donn (1977), "Explosive Cenozoic volcanism and Climatic Implications," 196 Science (January 10), 1231-4. Opruchev, V. A. (1959), "Fossil Cemeteries," trans. from Russian, Fundamentals of Geology, Moscow, 321-6. Occidens, Stella (1888), "Moon Lore and Eclipse Superstition," 11 Knowledge (January 2), 51-2; repr. in Corliss, Compiler, Strange Universe, Vol. AI-13-14, Source Book Project, Glen Arm, Md. O'Gheoghan, Brendan (1978), "Cosmic Imagery from the Time of Joseph, ' S. I. S. Newsletter, No. 2 (July), 8- 9. O'Keefe, John A. (1966), "The Origin of the Moon and the Core of the Earth" in B. G. Marsden & A. G. W. Cameron, The Earth-Moon System. Plenum, New York, 224-33. ---- (1973), "After Apollo: Fission Origin of the Moon," 29 Science and Public Affairs, (November), 26-29. ---- (1978), "The Tektite Problem," 239 Scientific American, (August), 116. Olson, E. A. (1974), "Dating, Relative and Absolute," 5 Ency. Britannica, 496-13. Olsson, Ingrid V., ed. (1970), Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology, Wiley & Sons, New York. Oosterhout, Gerard W. van, & Wouter van der Lek (1972), "Radiocarbon Dates of Samples of Known Age Suggest that the Length of the Solar Year Did Change," unpublished. xerox, 18 pp. (August). Opik, E. J. (1966), "The Martian Surface," 153 Science, 3733 (July 15), 255-65. Otto, Walter (1954), The Homeric Gods, M. Hadas, trans., Pantheon, New York. Ovenden, M. W. (1972), "Bode's Law and the Missing Planet, ' 239 Nature, 508-9. Ovid, Rolfe Humphries, trans. (1971). Metamorphoses. U. of Indiana Press, Bloomington & London. Owen, Nancy K., "The Dresden Codex and Velikovsky's Catastrophe Dates," III S. I. S. R. 3 (Spring, 1979), 88-93. Oxnard, Charles E. (1975), Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution, U. of Chicago, Chicago. Oyama, V. I. et al. (1979), "Venus Lower Atmospheric Composition," 203 Science, (23 Feb.), 802-5. ---- (1970), "Could Paleomagnetism Be Wrong?," 227 Nature, (August 22), 776. Parker, David & Martin Sieff (1975), "Joseph and the Pyramids," letter and reply. I Newsletter of the Interdisciplinary Study Group, No. 2 (September), 18-19. Parker, L. N. (1975), "The Sun," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 42-57. Paterson, A. M. (1973), "Giordano Bruno's View of the Earth without a Moon," III Pens‚e (Winter), 25-6. Patten, Donald W. (1966). The Biblical Flood And the Ice Epoch: A Study in Scientific History, Pacific Meridian Publ. Co., Seattle. Patten, Donald W., Ronald R. Hatch & Loren C. Steinhauer (1973), The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes, Pacific Meridian Publ., Seattle. Pauly-Wissowa (1894-1919), Real-Encyclop„die der Klassischen Alterumswissenschaft, J. B. Metzlen, Stuttgart. Pawley, G. S. & N. Abrahamsen (1973), "Orientation of the Pyramids," 181 Science, (July 6), 7-8. ---- (1973), "Do the Pyramids Show Continental Drift?" 179 Science, (March 2), 892-3. Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia (1977), "Fifty Years of Novae," 82 Astronomical J., No. 9, 665-73. Pearce, Joseph Chilton (1971), The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Julian Press, New York; (1973), Pocket Books, New York. Pearl, R. M. (1976), "World of Lakes: Meteorite Lakes," 31 Earth Science, (March 1978), 75-6. Pens‚e (Magazine), ed. (1976), Velikovsky Reconsidered, Doubleday, New York. Petterson, H. (1960), "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoric Dust," 202 Scientific American, 123-32. "The Phanerozoic Time Scale," (1964), Q. J. Geol. Soc., London, whole issue. Piddington, J. H. (1969), Cosmic Electrodynamics, Wiley, New York. Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. trans. F. M. Cornford (1937), Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York The Epinomis of Plato, J. Harward, trans. with intro. and notes (1928), Clarendon Press, Oxford. Pluche, Noel-Antoine (1740), Histoire due Ciel O— l'on Recherche l'Origine de l'Idolatrie et les Meprises de la Philosophie sur la Formation, et sur les Influences des Corps Celestes, Veuve Estienne, Paris, Trans. J. B. De Freval as The History of the Heavens, Osborn, London. Plutarch, trans. (1818), Miscellanies and Essays, Little Brown, Boston. Pollack, James B. (1975), "Mars," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 106-117-129. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the translation of Adrian Recinos (1950), U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Posnansky, Arthur (1945), Tiahuanaco, the Cradle of American Man, J. J. Augustin, New York, (1958), 2nd ed. Possehl, Gregory L. (1967), "The Mohenjo-daro Floods: A Reply," 60 Amer. Anthrop., No. 1, 32-40. Price, George M. (1934), The New Geology. Pritchard, J. B. (1955), Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd ed., Princeton. Proclus Parmenides nec non Procli Commentarium in Parmenidem, eds., R. Klibansky and C. Labowsky, London, 1953. Raikes, R. L. (1965), "The Mohenjo-daro Floods," 39 Antiquity, 196-203. ---- (1968), "Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes," 42 Antiquity, 268-91. ---- (1976), "The Ecological Role of Extreme but Predictable Climate Events on Prehistory..." Ninth International Congress of Pre-Historical and Proto-Historical Sciences (Nice, France), 15 pp mimeo. Ransom, C. J. (1972), "How Stable is the Solar System?" II Pens‚e, (May), 16-7, 35. ---- (1976), The Age of Velikovsky, Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J. Rawlinson, H. G. (1965), India: A Short Cultural History, New York. Reade, M. G. (1977), "Manna as a Confection," I S. I. S. R., No. 2, 9-13, 25. ---- (1977), "Senmut and Phaeton," II S. I. S. R. No. I (Autumn), 10-18. Rich, Vera (1978), "The 70-year-old Mystery of Siberia's Big Bang," 274 Nature, 207. Richardson, Emeline (1964), The Etruscans: Their Art and Civilization, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago. Richter, N. B. (1963), The Nature of Comets, Methuen & Co., London. Riley, Carroll J., J. Charles Keller, Campbell W. Pennington & Robert L. Rands (1971), Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts. U. of Texas Press, Austin & London. Rilli, Nicola (1964), Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino, Tipografia Giuntina, Firenze. Rittmann, A. (1962), Volcanoes and Their Activity, John Wiley & Sons, New York. Rix, Z. (1974), "King-Shepherds or Moloch Shepherds? ' unpubl. manus. II p. ---- (1975), "The Great Terror," I Kronos, No. I (Spring), 51-64. ---- (1977), "Note on the Androgyne Comet," I S. I. S. R., 5, 17-19. Robins, Don (1978), "Isotopic Anomalies in Chronometric Science," II S. I. S. R., (Spring), 108-10. Rock, Fritz, "Die G”tter der 7 Planeten in Alten Mexico und die Frage eines Alten Zusammenhanges Toltekischer Building mit einem Altweletlichen Kultursystem," Anthropos. Rose, Lynn (1972), "Could Mars have been an Inner Planet?" with a note by Lynn Rose and Raymond Vaughan, 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 42-3. ---- (1973), Babylonian Observations of Venus," 3 Pens‚e No. 1 (Winter), 18-22. ---- (1974), "The Length of the Year," 4 Pens‚e. No. 3 (Summer), 35-7. ---- (1977), "Just Plainly Wrong: A Critique of Peter Huber," III Kronos, NO. 2 (Winter), 102-12; IV Kronos (1978), 2: 33-69. Rose, Lynn & R. C. Vaughan (1974), Velikovsky and the Sequence of Planetary Orbits," 4 Pens‚e, No. 3, 27. Rowland, B. (1953), The Art and Architecture of India, Penguin Books, London, Baltimore. Runcorn, S. Keith, Leona Marshall Libby, and Willard F. Libby, (1977), "Primeval Melting of the Moon," 270 Nature, (22 Dec.), 676-81. Ruzic, Neil P. (1973), "The Case for Returning to the Moon," Industrial Research (July), 48-54. Sagan, Carl (1975), "The Solar System," in The Solar System, W. H. Freemann, San Francisco, 3-11. Salop, L. J. (1977), "Glaciations, Biologic Crises and Supernovae," 2 Catastrophist Geology, No. 2 (December), 22-41. Sanford, Fernando (1931), Terrestrial Electricity, Stanford U. Press, Milford, Oxford, U. Press. London. Santillana, Giorgio de, & Hertha von Dechend (1969), Hamlet's Mill: An Essay On Myth and the Frame of Time, Gambit Inc., Boston. Sarvajna, D. K. (1970), "Orbits Of Charged Bodies," 6 Astrophysics and Space Science, 258-62. Schaeffer, Claude F. A. (1948), Stratigraphie Compar‚e et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale, Oxford U. Press, London. ---- (1968), Ugaritica V, Imprimerie Nationale, Paris. Schaeffer, O. A., ed. (1969), Potassium-Argon Dating, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, New York. Schindewolf, Otto H. (1963), "Neocatastrophism?" 114 Zeitschrift Deutsche Geol. Ges., No. 2, 430-45; trans. in 2 Catastrophist Geol. No. 2 (December, 1977), 9-21. Schultz, Gwen (1974), Ice Age Lost, Doubleday Anchor, New York. Semple, Ellen C. (1932), The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History, Constable, London. Shafer, R. (1954), Ethnography of Ancient India, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. Shapiro, Irwin I. (1967), "Resonance Rotation of Venus," 157 Science (July 28), 423-5. Shelly-Pearce, Derek P. (1978), "The Catastrophic Substructure of the Samson and Delilah Myth," S. I. S. Newsletter No. 2 (July), 9-11. Sherrerd, Chris (1972), "Venus' Circular Orbit," 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 43. Shklovskii, I. S. & Carl Sagan (1966), Intelligent Life in the Universe, Dell, New York Sieff, Alvin, et al. (1979), "Structure of the Atmosphere of Venus up to 110 Kilometers," 203 Science (23 Feb.), 787-90. Sieveking, Gale, "The Migration of the Megaliths," in Edward Bacon (1963), Vanished Civilizations, McGraw Hill Book Co., London. Siever, Raymond (1975). "The Earth." 233 Scientific American, No. 3, 82-91 Simpson, John A. (1973), "Journey to Jupiter," 66 U. of Chicago Magazine, November-December, 6-11. Simpson, G. G. (1953) Life of The Past, Yale U. Press, ---- (1970), "Uniformitarianism, An Inquiry into Principle, Theory, and Method in Geohistory and Biohistory," 43-96 in M. K. Hecht and W. C. Steere, Essays in Evolution and Genetics in Honor of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York. Slosman, Albert (1976), Le Grand Cataclysme, Laffont, Paris. Smart, W. M. (1953), Celestial Mechanics, John Wiley and Sons. New York. Sorensen, Herbert C. (1973), "The Age of Bristlecone Pine." 3 Pens‚e, No. 2 (Spring-Summer), 15-18. ---- (1976-77), "Bristlecone Pines and Tree-Ring Dating: A Critique," 13 Creation Res., 5. Spanuth, Jurgen (1956), Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled, Citadel, New York. Spence, Louis (1975), Atlantis Discovered, Causeway Books, New York. Staudacher, Willibald (1968), Die Trennung von Himmel and Erde, Wissenschaftliche Buchegesellschaft Darmstadt. Steen, Lynn Arthur (1974), "Mathematicians Hail New Theory", 106 Science News, No. 11 (September 14). Strickling, J. E. (1980), "The Tower of Babel," 16 Creation Res. S. Q., March, 22-3. Struve, Otto (1952), "Pleione -- A Story of Cosmic Evolution," Sky and Telescope, (August), 243-5, 254. Stuart, John (1856-67), Sculptured Stones of Scotland, The Spalding Club, Aberdeen. Stuiver, Minze (1978). "Carbon-14 Dating: A Comparison of Beta and Ion Counting." 202 Science, (24 November), 881-3. Suarez, Max (1976), An Evaluation of the Astronomical Theory of the Ice Ages, Princeton U. Press Princeton. Sues, H. E. (1970), "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations, Their Amplitudes and Time Constants," in Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology, Proceedings, 12th Nobel Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969, Univ. 1969, Ingrid V. Olsson ed., Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm. Sugden, David (1976), Glaciers and Landscapes, E. Arnold, London. Suhr, George (1969), The Spinning Aphrodite, Helios Books, New York. Sullivan, Walter (1974) Continents in Motion, McGraw Hill, New York. Sutherland, Carter (1973-74), "China's Dragon," 4 Pens‚e, No. 1 (Winter), 47-50. Sykes, N. J. G. (1978), "An Investigation of Isotope Decay Constancy," III S. I. S. R., No. 2 (Autumn), 43- 5. Tacitus (tr. 1885), De Germania, George Stuart, ed., Eldredge & Brother, Philadelphia. Talbott, David N. (1977), "Saturn: Universal Monarch and Dying God," Report, Research Communications Network, Portland, Oregon. Talbott, George R. (1978)," The Cabots, the Lowells and the Temperature of Venus." IV Kronos, 2: 2-25. Talbott, Stephen (1977), "Mystery of the Radiohalos," Res. Communications Network (February 10), Portland, Oregon, 3-6. Taylor, Thomas (1819), "On the Coincidence between the Belts of the Planet Jupiter and the Fabulous Bonds of Jupiter the Demiurgus," XX Classical Journal, No. 40. 324-26. Temple, Robert K. G. (1976), The Sirius Mystery, Sidgwick and Jackson, London. Thom, Alexander (1967), Megalithic Sites in Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Thom, Ren‚ (1968), "Topological Models in Biology," Topology, No. 2. ---- (1977), "Catastrophe Theory," 270 Nature, 658, and (1977) 270, letters, 381-4. Thomas, P., et al. (1978), "Origin of the Grooves on Phobos," 273 Nature, 282-4. Thompson, J. (1970), Maya History and Religion, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman. ---- (1977), Rise and Fall of the Mayan Civilization, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Thompson, Win J. III (1976-77), "Catastrophic Origins for Asteroids and Rings of Saturn," 13 Creation Res. C., 82. "Times Higher Education Supplement," (1978), The Times of London (April 14); Scientists Protest denial of research on plague origins in space. Tompkins, Peter (1971), Secrets of the Great Pyramid, with Appendix by L. C. Stecchini, Harper and Row, New York. Treash, Robert (1972), "Magnetic Remanence in Lunar Rocks: A Candid Look at Scientific Misbehavior," II Pens‚e, 21-3. Trento, S. M. (1978) The Search for Lost America: The Mysteries of the Stone Ruins, Contemporary Books, Chicago. Tresman, Harold & B. O'Gheoghan (1977), "The Primordial Light," II S. I. S. R. No. 2 (December), 35-40. "The Tunguska Meteorite," (1967), 172 USSR Academy of Science Reports No. 4-5. "Tuolumne Table Mountain -- Human Remains Under Lava Flow," (1891), anon., 44 Nature, No. 438 (September 3); repr. in Corliss, Compiler, A Source Book Project, Strange Artifacts MES-006, Glen Arm (Md.) Turekian, K. ed., (1971), The Late Cenozoic Glacial Ages, Yale U. Press, New Haven. Uman, M. A. (1969), Lightning, McGraw Hill, New York Umgrove J. H. F. (1947), The Pulse of the Earth, Nijhoff, The Hague. Underwood, Guy (1969), The Pattern of the Past, Abacus ed. 1972. London. Urey, Harold (1965), "Meteorites and the Moon," 147 Science (March 12), 1262-5. ---- (1973), "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," letter, 242 Nature, (March 2) 32-3. Vaihinger, Hans (1924), The Philosophy of "As If", Harcourt Brace & Co. Inc., New York. Vail, Isaac N. (1972), Selected Works, Annular Publications, Santa Barbara, Calif. Valentine, James W. (1974), "Temporal Bias in Extinctions Among Taxonomic Categories," Journal of Paleontology (May), 549. Van Allen, James A. (1976), "Interplanetary Particles and Field," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 160-73. Van Buitenen, J. A. B. (1975), "Manu, Ut-Napischtim, and Noah," U. of Chicago Magazine, Winter, 10-3. Van Deventer, T. R. (1977), "Holocene Woodlands in the Southwestern Deserts," 198 Science, 182-92. Van de Kamp, Peter (1961), "Double Stars," 73 Publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, No. 435 (December), 239-409. Van Seters, John (1964), 50 J. Egyptian Archeology, 13-23. Velikovsky, Immanuel (1945), "Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History," Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana, New York. ---- (1946), "Cosmos Without Gravitation," Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana, New York. ---- (1950), Worlds in Collision, MacMillan (April), Doubleday (June) New York. ---- (1950), "Hoerbiger's Theory," New York Times, Sect. IV, p. 8, col. 6 (June 25). ---- (1951), "Answer to Professor Stewart," 200 Harper's Magazine (June), 63-6. ---- (1952), Ages in Chaos: A Reconstruction of Ancient History from the Exodus to King Akhnaton, Doubleday, New York. ---- (1955), Earth in Upheaval, Doubleday, New York. ---- (1960), Oedipus and Akhnaton: Myth and History, Doubleday, New York. ---- (1967), "Venus -- A Youthful Planet," XLI Yale Scientific Magazine, No. 7 (April), 8-11. Lloyd Motz, "Velikovsky -- A Rebuttal," Immanuel Velikovsky, "A Rejoinder to Motz". ---- (1972), "When was the Lunar Surface Last Molten?" 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 19-20. ---- (1972a), "On Decoding Hawkins' 'Stonehenge Decoded, '" 2 Pens‚e, No. 2, 24-28. ---- (1973), "Astronomy and Chronology," 3 Pens‚e, No. 2 (Springs-Summer), 38-40. ---- (1973a), "Metallurgy and Chronology." 3 Pens‚e, No. 3 (Fall), 5-9. ---- (1973b), "Eclipses in Ancient Times." 3 Pens‚e, No. 3 (Fall), 20-1. ---- (1973c), "The Orientation of the Pyramids," 3 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 17. ---- (1973d) "Earth without a Moon," 3 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 25-6. ---- (1973e), "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," 3 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 31-2. ---- (1973-74), "Tiryns," 4 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter). 45-6. ---- (1973-74a), "Venus' Atmosphere," 4 Pens‚e , No. 4 (Winter), 31-6. ---- (1974), "My Challenge to Coventional Science," 4 Pens‚e , No. 2 (Spring), 10-4. ---- (1974-75), "The Scandal of Enkomi," 4 Pens‚e No. 5 21-23. ---- (1977), Peoples of the Sea, Doubleday, New York. ---- (1978), "Khima and Kesil," III Kronos, (Summer), 19-23. ---- (1978a), Ramses II, Doubleday, New York . Venturi, Franco (1947), L'Antiquit  Svelata e l'Idea Del Progress in N. A. Boulanger, 1722-1759, La Terza, Bari, Italy. Vermeule, Emily (1967), "The Promise of Thera : A Bronze Age Pompeii." CCXX The Atlantic Monthly, (December). 83-4, 89-94. Vico, Giovanni Battista (1961), The New Science, trans. T. G. Bergin and Max H. Fish, (1937) Scienza Nuova; A. Miliani, Padova (Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y.) Viemeister, Peter E, (1961), The Lightning Book, Doubleday, New York. Vikentiev, V. (1930), "The God 'Hemen, '" Recueill de Travaux Faculte des Letters, Universite Egyptienne, Cairo. Vilks, Gustavs & Peta J. Mudie (1978), "Early Deglaciation of the Labrador Shelf," 202 Science, (December 15), 1181-3. Visher, S. S. (1925), "Tropical Cyclones and The Dispersal of Life from Island to Island in the Pacific," Smithsonian Institution Report, Washington, D. C. Vita-Finzi, Claudio (1969), The Mediterranean Valleys: Geological Changes in Historical Times, The University Press, Cambridge. ---- (1973), Recent Earth History, John Wiley & Sons, Halsted Press Division, New York. Vitaliano, Dorothy B. (1969), "Plinian Eruptions, Earthquakes, and Santorin. A Review," Acta of Firest International Scientific Congress on the Volcano of Thera. ---- (1973), Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins, Indiana U. Press, Bloomington & London. Vitaliano, C. & D. (1974), "Volcanic Tephra on Crete," 78 Amer. J. of Archaeology, No. 1 (January), 19-24. Vsekhsviatskii, S. K. (1962), "Comets, Small Bodies, and Problems of the Solar System," 74 Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 106-15. ---- (1967), "New Evidence for the Eruptive Origin of Comets and Meteoric Matter," AJ Soviet Astronomy, No. 11 (November-December), 473-84; trans. from 44 Astronomicheskii Zhurnal, (May-June), 595-609. ---- (1976), "The Origin and Evolution of the Comets and other Small Bodies in the Solar System," II Kronos, (November), 46-54. Wainwright, G. A. (1959), "The Teresh, the Etruscans and Asia Minor," 9 Anatolian Studies, 197. Wallis Max K. (1972), "Comet-like Interaction of Venus with the Solar wind," 3 Cosmic Electrodynamics, (April), 45-59. Warlow, P. (1978), "Geomagnetic Reversals," II J. of Physics, 2107-30. Watson, David L. (1938), Scientists are Human, Kegan Paul, London. Weber, Joseph (1969), "Evidence for Discovery of Gravitational Radiation," 22 Physical Review Letters, No. 24. (June 16), 1320-1324. Webre, A. L. & P. H. Hess (1976), The Age of Cataclysm, G. Putnam's Sons New York. Wegener, Alfred (1924), The Origins of Continents and Oceans, trans. from 3rd German ed. by J. G. A. Skerl, Methuen, London. Weinstein, G. A. & H. N. Michael, "Radiocarbon dates from Akrotiri, Thera," 20 Archaeometry (1978) 203-9. Wells, Dr. Calvin (1964), Bones, Bodies and Diseases, Praeger, New York West, R. G. (1977), Pleistocene Geology and Biology, Longmans, New York. Westropp, Hodder & C. Staniland Wake (1875), Ancient Symbol Worship : Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity, J. W. Bouton, New York. Whiston, William (1717), Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, London. ---- (1722) New Theory of the Earth, Tooke 3rd ed., London. White, J. P. & J. F. O'Connell (1979), "Australian Prehistory, 203 Science, (January 5), 21-8. Whitehead, Alfred N. (1925), Science and the Modern World, New York. Whitehouse David & Ruth (1975), Archaeological Atlas of the World, Freeman, San Francisco. Wilkins, Harold T. (1956), Mysteries of Ancient South America, Citadel Press, Secaucus, N. J. Williams, Emmett L. and R. J. Herdklotz (1977), "Solution and Deposition of Calcium Carbonate in a Laboratory Situation II," 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q., (March), 192-9. Williams, I. P. (1971), "Planetary Formation from Charged Bodies," 12 Astrophysics and Space Science, 165- 71. Wilson, A. T. (1962), "Origin of Petroleum and the Composition of the Lunar Maria," Nature (October 6), 11- 13. Wilson, Clifford (1972), Crash Go the Chariots, Lancer, New York. Wilson, J. Tuzo (1968), "Static or Mobil Earth: The Current Scientific Revolution," 112 Amer. Philos. Soc., No. 5 (October 17), 309-20. Winchester, James H. (1972), "Safe Havens for Sea Life," in Marvels and Mysteries of the World Around Us, Reader's Digest Assn., Pleasantvile, New York. Wissler, C. and H. J. Spinder (1916), "The Pawnee Human Sacrifice to the Morningstar," 16 Amer. Museum J., 49-56. Wolfe, Irving (1975-76), "The Catastrophic Substructure of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra'," I Kronos. No. 3, 31-45; I No. 4 37-54. ---- (1978), "' Worlds in Collision' and the Prince of Denmark." II S. I. S. R. (Spring), 104-8. Wolfe, John H. (1975), "Jupiter," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 130-141. Wood, John A. (1975). "The Moon," in The Solar System, Freeman, San Francisco, 69-77. Woronow, Alexander (1972), "Origin of the Martian Chaotic Terrains," 178 Science, (November 10), 649-50. Wright, G. Frederick (1889), "The Idaho Find," 11 Amer. Antiquarian 379-81; repr. in Corliss, W. R. Compiler, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts (1978), Source Book Projects, 458-60, Glen. Arm., Md. Wright, Robert C. (1972) "Effects of Volatility on Rubidium --Strontium Dating," 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 20. York, Derek (1972), "Lunar Rocks and Velikovsky's Claims," 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May) 18-19. York, D. and R. M. Farquahar (1972), The Earth's Age an Geochronology, Pergamon Press, Oxford. Young, A. T. (1973), "Are the Clouds of Venus Sulfuric Acid?" 18 Icarus, 564-82. Young, Andrew & Louise (1975), "Venus," 233 Scientific American No. 3 (September), 70-81. Zahan, Dominique (1958), "Etudes sur la Cosmologie des Dogons du Soudan Francais," 80 Notes Africaines, 108- 11. Zammit, Sir T. (1930), "The Prehistoric Remains of the Maltese Islands," IV Antiquity, 55-9. Zenner, F. E. (1959) The Pleistocene Period: Its Climate, Chronology and Faunal Successions, Hutchinson Scientific and Technical London. Zeuner, Friedrich E. (1946), Dating the Past, London. Zeylik, B. S. & E. Y. Scytmuratova, (1974), "Giant Impact Structure in Central Kazakhstan and its Magma and Ore-Controlling Significance," Dok. Akad. Nauk, SSSR, 218: 1, 167-70. Ziegler, Jerry (1977), YHWH, Star Publishers, Morton, Illinois. ---- (1978), Indra Girt by Maruts, unpubl. Manuscript. Zimmer, Heinrich (1946), "Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization," ed. by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Foundation, Washington D. C. End of Chaos and Creation {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLEPAGE} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH by Alfred de Grazia EXOTERRESTRIAL FORCES AND QUANTAVOLUTIONS IN THE EARTH SCIENCES by Alfred de Grazia METRON PUBLICATIONS PRINCETON, NJ, 08542,USA Notes on the printed version of this book Copyright (c) 1983 by ALFRED DE GRAZIA No reproduction in any form of this book, in whole or in part (except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews), may be made without written permission from the author. First Edition 1983 Metron Publications Box 1213 Princeton, N.J., U.S.A. 08542 Note: The word 'exo-terrestrial' is used in preference to 'extraterrestrial.' It is more exact etymologically, less romantic and sensational, and easier to pronounce. The design on the jacket is one of several drawings by Leonardo da Vinci of the "Deluge." He portrays the cataclysm as a terrific downbursting of water and whirlwinds. "Nihil difficile naturae est, utique ubi in finem sui properat." * Seneca De Quaestiones Naturae * "Nothing is difficult for nature. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH TITLEPAGE Foreword 1.Quantavolutions PART I: ATMOSPHERICS 2.The Gaseous Complex 3.Hurricanes and Cyclones 4.Magnetism and Axial Tilts 5.Electricity 6.Cosmic and Terrestrial Lightning 7.Fire and Ash PART II: EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS 8.Falling Dust and Stone 9.Gases, Poisons and Foods 10.Metals, Salt and Oil 11.Encounter and Collisions PART III: HYDROLOGY 12.Water 13.Deluges 14.Floods and Tides 15.Ice Fields of the Earth PART IV: CRUSTAL TURBULENCE 16.Earthquakes 17.Volcanism 18.Sinking and Rising Lands 19.Expansion and Contraction PART V: RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS 20.Thrusting and Orogeny 21.Ocean Basins 22.Fractures and Cleavages 23.Canyons and Channels 24.Continental Tropism and Rafting 25.Sediments PART VI: BIOSPHERICS 26.Fossil Deposits 27.Genesis and Extinction 28.Pandemonium 29.Spectres PART VII: DIMENSIONS OF QUANTAVOLUTION 30.Intensity, Scope and Suddenness 31.The Recency of the Surface Epilogue Two Charts of Time {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P - } {Q - } {C CHAPTER 1: } {T Quantavolutions} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE QUANTAVOLUTIONS Clarence King was the first Director of the United States Geological Survey. He was liberally educated at Yale University and spent years in field work thereafter. According to the historian Bancroft, he "had acquired a reputation and a position second to no scientist in America." When he returned to lecture at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale in 1877, he argued against the prevailing opinions in geology and evolution, insisting on the basis of his experiences and visions as a surveyor that the Earth had been lately devastated. The belief in catastrophism, he said, in surprising pre-Jungian language, was a true grasp of what had happened to the World. "Catastrophism is therefore the survival of a terrible impression burned in upon the very substance of human memory." [1] Because catastrophism is a word that excites emotion and connotes only destruction, the present work and the series to which it belongs prefers the more general idea implied in the word quantavolution. The concept allows a more peaceful invasion of the realms of gradualism, uniformitarianism, evolution, and anthropology. I do not mean this book to be violent and bloodcurdling. We have far too much of such stimulus today on television, in movies and in other books and magazines. I even go so far as to say that the Earth system has been settling down -this without conclusive evidence. But facts must be faced. The Earth has been severely traumatized in the memory of mankind. In words that I have used before, any place on earth can be viewed as a Quantavolutionary Column: Any tube of one kilometer diameter circumscribed anywhere on the surface of the Earth, which reaches as high as the end of the magnetosphere hundreds of miles upwards, and as low as the upper mantle some thirty kilometers down, will have endured within the past 14,000 years radical changes in its absolute and relative orientations, its atmosphere, its rocks and its biosphere, including any long-lived human cultures. Several principles characterize the theories of quantavolution: Every major feature of the Earth's surface is an effect of quantavolution; hence every feature figured in evolutionary theory is translated more realistically into quantavolutionary theory. The dominant shape of the most determining events in natural history is a logarithmic or exponential curve where, from a pre-existing state, sharp change occurs, followed by a steep exponential decline in the effect. After a time the curve of the effect flattens out, and an illusion may arise that the processes under scrutiny have always been as they are now. The several descriptive spheres of natural activity: atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, transact regularly, but most emphatically and completely under catastrophic impulsion. Partly because of the greater force of inanimate being and partly because its own basic nature is identical with the inanimate, the biosphere is as subject to quantavolutionary experience and interpretation as the physical spheres. The theory of quantavolution depends upon the evidence that catastrophes really happened, for it is upon such abrupt, large-scale natural events that the quick leaping changes of quantavolution in the holosphere depend. By the same token, a quantavolutionary theory must show either that large spans of assigned time in natural history are fictitious, or, if they occurred, little of the natural world changed during their passage. Every chapter of our book is dedicated to these tasks, but several general comments may be offered in advance. If our minds were still strapped to the ideological framework of the seventeenth century, there would be less of a problem in these regards. For we should normally believe that great floods, fires and earthquakes had happened in ancient times, and operated on such a vast scale that many "miracles" were associated with them. By miracles, I mean such phenomena as the falling of edible material, manna or ambrosia, from the sky, and the specters of enormous brilliant comets to which the Earth around us responded like a giant animal coming alive. No mental gymnastics would be required to see in the Earth's behavior an abundance of evidence of at least the one great Flood of Noah in which the whole world was deluged and inundated. Indeed, we should see so many marks of catastrophe that we would have to invent several such floods and conflagrations, and comets to explain the complex piling up of ruin upon ruin, fossil upon fossil, and their bizarre collection and combinations. Practically every extensive ancient document and legend known to us from around the world would repeat the same kind of catastrophic history and lend support to the testimony of our eyes and the voice of religious and social authorities. We might have been granted different, or additional, heroes of science, too: the brave Spanish priests who rescued from certain destruction the iconography and writings of the original inhabitants of the Americas; astronomers like William Whiston who perceived an exoterrestrial cause for the Noachian deluge; anthropologists like Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger who recognized the symptoms of catastrophic fear in the history of religion; paleontologists such as Cuvier who discovered the layerings of catastrophe; anthropological-biological explorers like Humboldt who accorded respect to aboriginal accounts. Charles Lyell and his supporters thereupon might have had less success in dominating natural history --even allowing that they were riding on the crest of English world power, political power always being consciously or unconsciously imperialistic in the dissemination of ideas. Admittedly there is a world history of science to be written from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge as a first step in the opening-up of thought upon quantavolution. We must nevertheless still provide in the here and now the evidence of catastrophes called for earlier. Fortunately and yet unfortunately, the here and now is prejudicial to quantavolution. Fortunate it is that mankind up to the time of the atom bomb has had a respite from cosmic catastrophes for over two thousand years. However, the respite has permitted a thoroughgoing sublimation of memories of general disaster even in religion, all of which are rooted in proto-historic disaster, not excluding the Judaeo-Christian- Islamic faiths. The greatest secret of religion today is the ostensible fact, too obvious for continuous attention, that religion is originally founded upon the terrifying behaviors of its founding gods. Jesus and Mahomet originate in the Books of Moses, in the frightful times of Exodus when Yahweh became God of the Jews. The history of religion as the history of catastrophes is also to be written. Once more we return to the quantavolutionary evidence in the here and now. If science, politics, and religion are using the relatively peaceful natural world of today to cover up ancient catastrophes, how are the catastrophes to be uncovered? So far as research goes, one must read between the lines of natural science and politico-religious arguments, picking up here and there bits of knowledge and threats of argument. Ultimately, these can amount to many thousands of pieces and a strong line of argument. The mills of conventional science, originally churning out milk and honey, are beginning to grind stones and salt, as in the ancient Scandinavian myth of the end of the world. This trend is faster than generally believed. I would guess that the leading scientific magazines such as Nature, Science, and Sky and Telescope have carried since 1945 an ever increasing number of quantavolution-oriented articles, minute proportion to the total, to be sure. But this number has been increasing exponentially in the past several years and by the year 1993, I would expect that fully a quarter of all publications in natural history will treat of quantavolutions. Going farther, in geology and geophysics a number of scientists are deliberately hypothesizing catastrophes at the boundaries of several geological ages and adducing old and new evidence, especially by chemical examination of sediments, to prove that they occurred. The space programs of U. S. A. and U. S. S. R. have naively reported ancient catastrophes and on-going explosiveness wherever their vehicles have gone -Venus, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. Astrophysicists and astronomers are edging into catastrophic explanations of the surfaces of the inner planets and the asteroidal belt between Mars and Jupiter. Whereas in Charles Darwin's youth many scientists disbelieved in meteors striking the Earth, today certain scientists are advancing serious proposals for a space project aimed at exploding meteoroids that might appear to be on collision courses with the Earth. Where once the evolution of coal beds was supposed to have occupied million of years in the ample time depots of natural history, today at least one authoritative textbook adopts great fires and floods as the most possible explanation of the origin of coal [2] . Biology is moving swiftly, but biology (and in the case of man -anthropology) as the history of life moves much more slowly, moves even in reverse motion, sucking up ever greater draughts of time. Still, Walter Sullivan, dean of science reporters, could declare in the New York Times in December 1981 that serious challenges to the conventional tempo and mode of evolution were arising; they came out of proof concerning links between catastrophe and extinction/ genesis of species, out of the capacities of genetic engineering for modeling new life forms, and from the growing tendency to interpret the rarity of so- called missing links or transitional types as the non-existence of said types, introducing therefore the alternative presumption that macroevolution (quantavolution) introduced distinctly new forms suddenly. What Lyell wrote a hundred and fifty years ago, "that no causes whatever have changed the earth except those that still do so under the eyes of man," can be easily updated: today man's eyes are wider; they can see more and can see into themselves. The surface of the Earth that appears before our mind's eye is largely a crystallized image, a set of snapshots of a whole too large to be embraced by a single thought - valleys, plains, deserts, seas, mountains, clouds, jungles, islands, cities and more - ten, twenty, thirty, until the mind tires and says 'enough' and that is our Earth image. And, if we were quickly to call out words that we associate with each snapshot, we should probably begin with a couple of descriptive terms like, 'tall' or 'dry' or 'water' or 'trees', but then somewhere in the early words of each list there would perhaps be words like 'slow', 'long', 'evolving', 'the same', and 'old' that hint at 'long, slow processes in Nature. ' Without conscious awareness, we perceive and recite the ideology of the prevailing science. Yet only when we imagine the cities of the Earth are we describing a surface feature that is surely known to be very recent, because these are manmade. We mostly come from western countries whose dominating perspective on the Earth and its history has been shaped by the victorious currents of scientific thought of the past two centuries. Other peoples, and our own peoples in other times, and many of our own peoples who do not participate in this phase of our culture, would not exhibit the same responses. As they imagine the Earth's scenery, they would think in terms of 'creation' and often use the very word. This would mean to them an animate god, the creative force. And when they say 'long ago' they mean 'very lately' in geological terms, and the same if they were to say 'in the beginning. ' Between the gradualists and the creationists are those whose outlook is quantavolutionary, thinking that the Earth here and now presenting itself is both natural and young. To them this Earth is a setting recently arranged by disasters. Quantavolution has had a foot in both camps. Insofar as it claims the methods of science and the empirical positivism of science, it is in the evolutionist camp. Insofar as it adheres to facts and theories resembling the earliest stories of the great and small religions, it is in the creationists camp. The combination of ideas has never been given a full trial. When, in the early nineteenth century, a few quantavolutionists were active, they were known as catastrophists, or revolutionists, or saltationists. They were soon identified with the enemy by the uniformitarian and gradual evolutionists and crushed in the same battles that saw the defeat of the creationists. Let us identify ourselves as quantavolutionist and, confronting the Earth's features, ask "How and when did what make what?" For instance, "In the 1980's exploding and erupting magma rising under high pressure fashioned the top of Mt. St. Helens as it appears today. "This is not much of an answer but it suffices to introduce the complicated subject of this volcano. If "what is made" has to be thought of as the whole surface of the Earth, large categories are needed. So we adopt several arenas or spheres of activity, and place this volcano under volcanoes in general, and volcanoes in general are part of the lithosphere, inasmuch as what remains on the spot is now frozen into rock. Much of what emerged from the Earth rose as ashes, and gases, as electric discharges, too, and water, in a veritable cyclone. For some purposes, then, Mt. St Helens could find a place under a second category, the atmosphere, which was much affected locally by the eruption. The clouds of water vapor ultimately fell upon the ground and the seas and circulated widely in the hydrosphere, another principle arena for geophysical activity. Except for a few insects and plants, the close-in biosphere was wiped out by the disaster. Some biosphere specimens of homo sapiens cleverly moved to a safe distance and observed the events; a few persons were killed. So in the instance, forces typical of the lithosphere changed a feature of the lithosphere and affected the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere to a noticeable extent. There are not so many different crustal forms of the Earth that they cannot be encompassed by the mind and by this book. The splendid and fascinating variety of nature is in its details. We hope to treat the major features in a general way: volcanoes, rifts, mountain ranges, ocean basins, etc. in the lithosphere; gases and electric charges etc., in the atmosphere, but too, exoterrestrial intrusions by meteoroids, electricity, gases and dust; further, the waters acting in the oceans, floods, tides, rocks and rivers; and the biosphere of the plant and animal kingdoms. These spheres are the general answer to the question: where does change on Earth occur? The features or forms are the "what is made." As to "what makes them," we have to settle upon a classification of forces or energies. Here we prefer a pragmatic approximation which is close to the phenomena as experienced, so most of the terms are straight from the newspapers: the volcano, though a feature, becomes also a force. Meteoroids as well, and others, too. Most of the chapter titles convey an impression both of cause and effect. Atmospherics are the workings of and in the atmosphere; hydrospherics of and in the hydrosphere; and so on. Had it seemed more useful, a highly abstract nomination of forces might have been attempted; electromagnetic, inertial, 'weak' force, and the whole Earth described as built from the working of forces beginning at the level of particle physics. Something like this procedure is followed in an accompanying book (Solaria Binaria). But as matters stand, here we have already enough abstraction for our needs and perhaps even too much for the tastes of the reader. The forceful phenomena that landscape the Earth and impress mankind go by a score of names. Some surprising consequences attend even the seemingly ephemeral noises and sights that attend natural operations; they are, to be sure, powerless effects in one sense, but in another sense, as we shall see, they are forces in their own right. The "music of the spheres" and "the wheels within wheels" are but ancient inherited words fossilizing for us ancient phenomena of sound and sight. They help make man what he is and this can be regarded as a criterion of a natural force; thus, what concerns us about the atmosphere is partly that the air we breathe and the food we eat are governed by atmospheric processes. Such are the homocentric beginnings of ideology, that which inspires our curiosity about nature in the first place. Otherwise, the categories of forces are commonplace enough and group themselves fairly readily in the several spheres of natural operations. We name them as winds, hurricanes, cyclones, lightning and other electrical flows; as meteoroids and fallouts of all kinds, terrestrial and exoterrestrial in origin, including especially radiation. We call up as forces too, the downpours of rain or cataclysms, the floods, tides, tsunamis, accretions of ice, the ocean currents and chemical 'baths. ' And of the land we speak of continental drift or rafting, of seismism, volcanism, the folding and thrusting of mountains, erosion both fast and slow, the rising and sinking of land, the electrical processes in the land as well as air. And, so far as concerns the biosphere, we are interested in the mutational forces that speciate life forms and the human work that can often transform the landscape and affect the atmosphere and oceans. We may become most general in our language and conceive of a holosphere, all spheres transacting among themselves. As in the case of Mt. St. Helens, effects of a natural force are likely to be experienced in all spheres, immediately or with the passage of time. An earth tremor will divert a stream, gather and discharge electricity, send the animals fleeing in all directions, and set humans to praying. Seismism is neatly numbered by intensity nowadays, and it is easy to test the holospheric principle by observing effects in all spheres produced in association with a Richter scale 1 and, say, 9, but allowing that this reading of 9 may have, in times before measurement and, more, before conscious memory, reached hypothetical reading of 12 or 20. What would the Richter-scale reading have been when the Indian sub-continent split off East Africa? Or when the fabled island continent of Atlantis "sank in a day of furious trembling," according to Plato? Now a criticism can be launched against quantavolutionism. India split from Africa, not in a day, but by an exceedingly numerous series of a centimeters a year, as Arabia is pulling away from Africa today -so it is argued. This might be measurable on the ordinary reaches of the scale. So the event, as grand as it appears on maps, was not a catastrophe; besides, the argument goes, it happened a hundred million years ago. This kind of argument is bound to brew trouble. The "when" problem occurs in conjunction with the "how" problem. The "when and how" are answered together. First, an up-strain from below works gradually along a weak line of rock and slowly insinuates a crack which lengthens and widens until India is separated from Africa and, impelled by mantle- located forces of the same type, is slowly pushed towards Asia. Millions of years were consumed in accomplishing the clear break, many millions more in rafting to Asia. In such circumstances, the hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere would be hardly affected; even the lithosphere would not be severely disturbed; there are always a few crumbs falling when a slice is cut from a cake and slid across the table. All to the tune of numbers 1 to 9 on the Richter scale. Adversely, a catastrophe is asserted. India's separation from Africa was part of a worldwide fracturing of the globe. It happened quickly, with a hard blow impacting somewhere. Within hours, India was cut off and moving rapidly through watery wastes lately occupied by other lands that, too, were dispersed and moving eastwards. Not only was the event consummated suddenly, but it happened lately -thousands, not many millions of years in the past. So goes the quantavolutionary argument. We shall join the argument again and again in the chapters to come. A classic case of holospherics is the much-studied and well-discussed theory of world- disaster befalling about the year 1450 B. C. at the instigation of a great comet. Here I shall repeat only the hypotheses, as I have stated them elsewhere, suggesting that the reader may resort to my Chaos and Creation and God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus for a fuller account, or to the famed book of Velikovsky called Worlds in Collision and the debates surrounding it [3] . In regard to that fateful year, and throughout the world, the quantavolutionary hypotheses may be stated as follows: (a) No geophysical feature or process that manifested a sensible form then, and which is capable of exhibiting the effects of discontinuous stress when examined by current geophysical techniques, will fail to show that such stress occurred. (b) No record of astronomical events available for the period around that year will present astral, planetary, or solar movements as unchanged or uniformly changing from before to after the year. (c) No retroactive calculation or index (such as of carbon 14 levels) or historical reference will fail to show atmospheric turbulence and atmospherically implicated irregularities. (d) No survey of biological history around this year can deny highly unusual animal and human behavior and widespread destruction in the plant and animal kingdom, including agriculture. (e) No graphic, legendary, or archaeological account will produce a human settlement in the world that escaped heavy destruction from natural causes. (f) No religious temple that was constructed anywhere beforehand and rebuilt thereafter shows the same astronomical orientation before and after. (g) No god passed through this year without change of status, rites, family relations, and serious personal incident, and, correspondingly, all religions changed. (h) No culture complex can be shown to have avoided, with or without detectable hiatus, significant changes in institutions, rulership, and artifacts. (i) No institution, behavioral pattern, and natural setting existing today, if its history is complete, will fail to recall the effects of the events of these times. In brief, no sphere of existence escaped intense experiences and transactions with other spheres in the quantavolution of the times. All quantavolutions imply heavy holospheric events. For periods before human race had quantavoluted (the subject of my work, Homo Schizo I), anthropological spheres of existence would, of course, be excluded. It will be appreciated that, under evolutionary theory, holospherics tend to be less stressed. When large effects are reduced by time to minute causes, the side-effects are proportionately and even exponentially reduced. The more intense and sudden the event, the more spheres will be transacting. The larger the scale of an event, too, the more spheres will enter the action. Suppose the Earth's rotational speed were to be slowed. This is a mighty event and takes a mighty force; Earth's rotational energy is calculated at 10 36 ergs. Yet it has been observed (by Danton) to happen recently, if only for a millisecond. No account of effect has yet been rendered; perhaps the effects were immeasurably small, or perhaps the reaction of scientists were too slow. If large solar flares caused the retardation, as seems to have been the case, worse flares or other causes might produce a larger rotational lapse, perhaps a second of time would be lost; perhaps then a minute; why not an hour? -Hypotheticals are cheap. The effects of lengthening the slowdown would be heavy. Every sphere of Earth, every force, would be activated in using up the energy surrendered by Earth in the deceleration. One would have holospherics on a grand scale. Ordinary language, the most archaic religious language, and scientific language could each provide the description required. Now the quantavolutionist reverses the logic as well. We say, "the more affected the holosphere, the greater the force to be sought." The effects are proportional to the original force. When the effects exceed (or are theoretically calculated as having exceeded) a certain intensity, we must even go beyond the Earth into cosmic forces drastically simplifying. Only in the supra-terrestrial arena, the planetary and galactic systems, are to be found forces large enough to do the Earth what appears to have been done. Only cosmically can truly great holospheric transactions be generated. One can realize, then, the importance of the "when" and "how long." To say "speedy reactions" is to invite ultimately the cosmos in to explain our terrestrial phenomena. To say "slow reactions" is to keep the Earth within its cocoon in space, traveling evenly and safely. If the Alps tower above Europe, some force must have pushed then up. If the Alps are to arise suddenly, then something besides earthly forces are behind the event. We move into the cosmic realm. If the Alps are to arise over a great many millennia, then the force might be generated in energy measures conceivable from some mysterious, but still earthly, internal force. {S : Notes (Chapter One: Quantavolutions)} Notes (Chapter One: Quantavolutions) 1. Scientific American, Supplement N 80, 14 July 1877, 1276. 2. Wilfrid Francis, Coal, Its Formation and Composition, 2nd ed., London: Arnold, 1961, 625, 3. (a) Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publications, 198 1; (b) ibid.: 1982; New York: Macmillan, 1950; and see the files of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review hereafter SISR, Kronos, and PensÚe magazine, passim. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART I: } {Q ATMOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 2} {T The Gaseous Complex} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part I: Atmospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO THE GASEOUS COMPLEX The atmosphere of Earth is so delicate that most sudden and violent transactions in space or on Earth transform its constituents and their behavior. Considering what is to come in this book by way of demonstrating terrestrial catastrophes, one may wonder how it happens that life has survived five thousand, much less five billion years. The very fragility of the aura around us bespeaks the recency of the atmosphere as we know it. For example, in-coming cosmic particles collide with atoms of the atmosphere, giving off neutrons that interact with nitrogen to make carbon 14. Then C14 couples with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, and is often ingested by plants and passed along to animals through the plants. When any plant or animal (living from plants) dies, it ceases to acquire C14 and the C14, which is radiogenic, decays at a constant rate into nitrogen. In the short term, the process is fairly regular. The ratio, in a specimen, of C14 to C12, a non- decaying type of carbon, can be used to date its decease. But lightning, smoke, dust, explosions, vapors and cosmic particle flux can alter the density of C14 in the atmosphere, hence in organic material. Soviet investigators found C14 deviations in connection with galactic supernovas of the years 1054 and 1700 [1] . Judging by the C14/ C12 ratio in annual tree rings in or about the year 1908, when the Exoterrestrial Tunguska body exploded with heavy local effect in Siberia, 1% less of the C14 was available in that year by comparison with the year before and after [2] . In another case, during a period called the Maunder Minimum, 1645 to 1715, when the Sun exhibited no sunspots and the Earth was gripped by a "Little Ice Age," the C14 found in tree rings of the period averaged 20% more than before and after [3] . Grave events disturbed the atmosphere on other occasions. Between 3200 and 3700 B. C. and in the eighth and fifteenth centuries B. C. the quantity of C14 in the air fluctuated heavily [4] . A theoretical calculation by Cook that retrogressively computed the presence of C14 in the atmosphere, basing itself on a presently observed slight built-up of the gas, concluded that today's volume of C14 would have had to originate from a zero point 13,000 years ago. Why the rate would decrease to zero around that date has been interpreted as an indication of an extremely short Earth history; we here regard the hypothetical absence of C14 around that time as owing to several factors, most importantly (a) the presence of a plenum of gases incomparably more impenetrable by cosmic radiation that the present atmosphere, (b) a stronger geomagnetic shielding produced by a stronger geomagnetic field than exists today, and (c) exoterrestrially produced turbulence in the Earth's gaseous complex [5] . The inference here would be that major events before that time might have reconstituted the atmosphere, at which time C14 would have begun to accumulate. Obviously C14's history indicates that other atmospheric components would not have escaped turbulent experiences. Carbon dioxide in the air fluctuates with industrial and domestic combustion. The amount in the air is increasing (it is some .03% of the atmospheric mass) and concern is expressed that the Earth's climate may change so as put much of the biosphere in jeopardy [6] . So also it has been surmised by students of the ozone (O3) constituent of the upper atmosphere that its destruction as a particle shield by aerosol discharges on Earth would engender high risks of biosphere damage [7] . All of this may happen within the next century or two. Very similar types of blue-green algae live under the skins of rocks in the frigid Antartic desert and in the heat of the Sahara [8] . Abyssal organisms live beyond the reach of light. The limits of humans and their predecessors are much more narrow, whether we speak of oxygen or a dozen other basic requirements. (Later we shall examine the claim that simple organisms can traverse and inhabit space-conveyed meteoritic vehicles even "on their own.") Humans have been known to acclimatize themselves to high altitudes with low oxygen and low barometric pressure [9] . But beyond 20,000 feet, the human dies. Pure oxygen is, of course, a poison and an explosive. There is little certainty about the history of the atmosphere, even during human times [10] . The primeval air must have contained some molecular oxygen (O2) for the lung- breathers. Not too much lest the air catch fire. Legends do report "world-burnings," that Donnelly and Velikovsky, for instance, attribute to hydrogen gas pockets of exoterrestrial origin. Nitrogen might not be needed but the air must then also have held much other gas; for terrestrial life forms are constructed to deal with outside pressures. The diaphragm and chest muscles are made to operate as a bellows sucking the oxygenated air into the lungs and exhaling it with carbon dioxide. A pressure gradient must be accommodated between the external air and the internal metabolism. Yet if the air had been too dense, creatures such as humans would be too burdened by it to move about. Considerable leeway is permitted for the amounts of inhalable oxygen, the mixes of gases inhaled (barring poisonous gases such as carbon monoxide), the atmospheric density (pressure) and degree of vaporization, the kinds and amounts of radiation such as ultraviolet rays, temperature (from 40 to 100 Fahrenheit as a milieu), and luminosity of the environment. Dew will suffice in place of other freshwater sources. Edible plants or animals, including one's own species in extremis, must be available, and these, of course, are atmosphere-dependent too. The present human cannot survive in the highest mountain altitudes or underwater without artifices. Given the prolific potential of human reproduction, the atmosphere might have been severely ravaged and changed without destroying utterly the species. The human body is built upon and functions with the basic elements of nature. It is catastrophised and by the very fact catastrophe-proofed to some degree. Its incubating young are deeply encased and easily transportable. What it cannot cope with internally it seeks to escape by rapid mobility and exponential rates of reproduction. The atmosphere presently consists of a changing mix of gases and vapors that moves from surface levels upwards to where the magnetosphere ends at any moment of measurement. What is beyond may be called outer space, where space plasmas, solar winds, cosmic particles, and meteoritic material play about in some disorder. The atmosphere itself is a model of disorder. It is continuously moving and reorganizing. Everyday its pressure goes up and down. About 99% of its mass blankets the globe at under 19 miles of altitude. This consists of the gases, molecular nitrogen( 78%), molecular oxygen (21%) argon (1%) and carbon dioxide (. 03%). Water vapors rarely reach 1% of the total: normally, half of the globe is covered by clouds, which form, reform, and discharge their vapors almost entirely within six miles of the surface. Below the clouds hang most of the "pollutants" of industry, consumption, war, and transportation. But some of this may rise so high as to threaten the layer of ozone, a poisonous triple-atom oxygen molecule (O3), which, so long as it stays out of the animal system, performs a vital function in stopping solar ultraviolet rays from reaching the animals. As one moves up the atmospheric column from ground-zero one passes successively through "belts." These are statistical entities, not the usually discontinuous strata of the lithosphere. The sixty-mile homosphere is divided into troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. Then occurs a heterosphere, and, at around 300 miles, an exosphere. The homosphere is a molecular region where nitrogen and oxygen are the principal actors; but at bottom are cloud and pollutant behaviors and at the top occur some vigorous radiation, dissociation of molecules, formation of hydrogen compounds, and ionization. In the heterosphere, atomic oxygen, helium and hydrogen are the abundant elements. Some of the helium and hydrogen is on its way into farther space, but is replaced, it is believed, to produce an equilibrium. However, Melvin Cook, a quantavolutionary geophysicist, has asked, "Where is the Earth's Radiogenic Helium?" [11] . Cosmic-ray sources are alleged to generate helium at 3x10 9 g/ year. The same amount is estimated to be generated from the uranium and thorium in rocks of the lithosphere. With an Earth age of 5x10 9 years, about 10 20 grams of helium should have passed into the atmosphere by now. The atmosphere contains 3.5x10 15 grams of helium-4; if a steady state, it must have passed out through the exosphere the equivalent of the aforesaid 10 20 grams. However helium-4 does not concentrate in the upper atmosphere significantly and "at the escape temperature of 1500 K at the base of exosphere, the rate of escape of helium-4 would be only about 600 g/ year, or only about 10 -7 as great as the replenishment rate from the lithosphere." Only by raising temperatures at the base of the exosphere by thousands of degrees could the helium be allowed to escape in sufficient quantities to permit equilibrium. This can be conceived as possible only by means of a number of immense solar storms that would wreak havoc on Earth or, worse, by large-body encounters wrecking the atmosphere. Cook suggests that the helium-4 is still increasing; the atmosphere is not in equilibrium; and if retrocalculated, a recent beginning or reconstruction of the atmosphere must be confronted. Geophysicists and meteorologists nevertheless retain the concept of the atmosphere as a whole being in equilibrium. This is probably not so, even in the short run of a thousand years. The idea is difficult as commonsense, considering that all the way from sea level into outer space the atmospheric column is in continuous flux. It is agitated and fed from the bowels of the Earth with heat, vapor, etc. and bombarded topside by elemental particles of all kinds. Motion is continuous, too, up and down the column and then horizontally with winds produced by thermal changes, such as the seasons produce, and rotational effect that, for instance, disturb the atmosphere via surface irregularities such as mountains and basins. Indeed, equilibrium of the atmosphere is probably more of a hope than a fact. What makes the hope into a "fact" is, not surprisingly, the uniformitarian conviction that today's actors and roles are unchanged from eons ago. Given hundred of million of years when animals and plants have been surviving, then the mix of vapors, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, ozone, and radiation must have been what they are today. And that spells equilibrium. The belief becomes so strong that meteorologists, possessed of the "fact" of atmospheric equilibrium, can even take their turns at guarding the portals of uniformitarianism, assuring other scientists that meteorology, too, proves the long-enduring stability of present-day conditions. At the same time, ironically, meteorologists are leaders in the campaign to save the world from the atmospheric ravages produced by a few years of industrialism, atom bombs, and aerosol discharges. A quantavolutionist may share heartily the meteorologists' fear of the poisoning of our present atmosphere. The quantavolutionist would at the same time point out the extreme improbability of the atmosphere's having been preserved intact-free from radical changes and poisons over long periods of time. Unless, of course, there were, before the present atmospheric system came about, some ancestral system that in its nature involved a true long-term equilibrium. It is generally admitted that the sources of nitrogen and oxygen of the air are uncertain and disputed. Further, the sources of water and salt are unknown. Too, all of the minor gases of the atmosphere are of mysterious origin: neon, helium, methane, krypton, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, and xenon. And some has mysteriously "disappeared;" neon "should be" far more abundant, for example. Oxygen is supposed to have been exhaled from plants, permitting thus the beginnings of animal life. Orthodoxy puts this "happening" at over a billion years ago. Perhaps the only "hard" evidence for the event is the discovery of a non-oxidized core of uranium and sulphur in Kenya, the presumption being that there was little or no molecular oxygen with which the elements could react when the rock was formed. Yet by this kind of reckoning, it is hard, too, to explain fossils of 3.1 billion-year-old bacteria [12] . It has long been permissible to speculate that the components of the air came from the "primordial melt," a fiction of science performing very much the same role as the fiction of "the end of the Ice Ages." One may as well speculate that they came from space, since practically every element has been identified within the magnetosphere of Earth. There are indications that the Earth may have evolved in a binary system such as I have described in Chaos and Creation and, with Earl R. Milton, in Solaria Binaria. An electrical axis, carrying an arc or current between the Sun and its small and less radiant binary partner, would be a more durable and gently changing source of radiation and chemical energies than the direct glare of the sun today. A magnetic gaseous tube rotating around the axis would provide a full complement of chemical elements, again in a highly stable medium that so minor a product as aerosol sprays could not disrupt. It would be making large quantities of all the substances whose manufacture in the small atmospheric and petrological economy of "Spaceship Earth" has been hard to explain. Atmospheric pressures, too, would be stable. Winds would be largely absent, illumination fairly constant. It should be permissible to speculate that the magnetic gas tube stretching between the binary's two principals was the source of the Earth's atmosphere. Most of the binary tube gases would have escaped into space with the decline and disappearance of the axial current. The Earth then may be surviving upon the fragment of the gases that its electric-gravitational field retained. The atmosphere now may be only a remanent halo. The variety and abundance of the atmospheric gases are what would be expected according to the gas tube model. A long-time continuity of the atmosphere and biosphere would have been possible; life could have begun long ages ago (or recently) and enjoyed the same relationships it now enjoys with oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and salts. The fragile ozone layer was entirely missing, without ill effects, because the Sun and galaxy were not striking directly upon the Earth. Indeed, there would be little need for a stratified, local Earth atmosphere. The Earth could change position along the central axis without losing its atmospheric and thermal equilibrium. In the early declining period of the axial current, the pollutant of meteoroid or large-body contacts could be dissipated into the gas tube environment, and important losses replaced from the same source. Even the effects of an eruption of the Moon from the Pacific Basin would be cushioned by the binary atmosphere. The postulated magnetic tube would be randomly composed. Its gases would be arranged with the lighter elements nearer the axial current, heavier elements in the middle; simple compounds would occur toward the boundary of the tube, where the planets were rotating. The heavy-bodied planets would accrete their special atmospheres within the tube, even while rotating magnetically around the axial current. But the difference between the terrestrial atmosphere and the tube atmosphere would be far less than between the Earth's atmosphere and its heterosphere or outer space today. It is understandable, under these postulates, how the Earth's atmosphere, so fragile, might have existed for a considerable period of time. Given the evidences of catastrophes on Earth, I do not see how the atmosphere could have survived without large external atmospheric background. Still the Earth was lucky to escape the fate of Mars, Mercury and possibly other inner planets, whose atmospheres were almost entirely stripped; Venus, with an infernally hot and turbulent atmosphere, was an exception, but a recent arrival from Jupiter. All of this is possible, and dealt with in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria. Scientific opinion has slowly liberalized in respect to new models. By 1972 a scientist might write offhandedly in Nature magazine that "major reorganizations of the solar system are no longer regarded as ridiculous." [13] Recently, dendrochronologists, historians, meteorologists, radiocarbon dating specialists, and astronomers combined in a most unusual enterprise. They delivered a blow to the theory of the constant Sun. John A. Eddy of the National Center for Atmospheric Research conveyed the message: "We've shattered the Principle of Uniformitarianism for the Sun." [14] He presented evidence mentioned earlier, showing that for 70 years between 1645 and 1715 A. D. sunspots were almost entirely absent. It proved to be a period of bitter prolonged winters, when Londoners walked across an iced- over Thames River, when the Northern Lights hardly displayed themselves, and when the 11-year sun-spot cycle was absent. Lapses of the same kind were uncovered in other historical periods. Other conditions may be expected to vary with sunspots -solar flares, ozone density, radiation diminution, precipitation, magnetic fields, atmospheric turbulence, famines and perhaps even human energy and inventiveness. No doubt the last will be among the most difficult to prove. No simple search of the annals of culture will reveal a closely related trend. Stretching the uniformitarian thesis, more severe storms may be conjectured for pre- historic times, in an attempt to keep the planetary bodies in place, eliminate cometary encounters and still explain catastrophes upon Earth. Thus Harlow Shapley, who led some scientists in an attack upon Velikovsky's catastrophism in 1950, himself had in 1935 proposed a solar nova as the explosive generator of space X-rays. Hurricanes, volcanism, interrupted rotation, ozone destruction, ice ages, geomagnetic field reversals, biological extinctions and even explosions of cometary and meteorological material on Earth can be rationalized up to a point as effects of solar misbehavior. Such a theory is possible, but it would be like hiring a thief to catch a thief. For the Sun would then become sole factor in quantavolutions, in the effort to exclude other bodies from trespassing upon Earth. As we shall see, there is too much evidence of other operative factors to assign the whole job of quantavolutions to the Sun, even though, as a matter of fact, the Sun is the original sire of quantavolution in the solar system, according to the model of Solaria Binaria, mentioned above, which begins history with a nova of the Sun. According to the quantavolutionary theory here presented, solar behavior has exhibited only effects of a moderate kind since its gradual emergence as a distinct bright image some thousands of years ago. Before then, the Sun was hidden or a bright prominence in the cloudy firmament. Its indirect influence was of course always paramount. But should the counter-thesis be proposed that the Sun was responsible directly for earthly catastrophes, it would have to be said that its "uniformitarianism," though spotty, was nevertheless much greater than that of the planetary family descended from the Sun's binary partner, which I have called Super-Uranus after the Greco-Roman first Heavenly Father. The sunspots may be a trailing-off effect of the exhaustion of the electrical current and magnetic tube. That is, they may be fairly regular attempts of electricity to jump the gap between the Sun and its binary. In such a case, the sunspots should become less intense and more sporadic with the passage of time, like the plasmoids and bolts of Jupiter. Climate is the typical behavior of the atmosphere over any geological column during a longish time. Every island, they say in the Caribbean and Aegean Seas, has its own climate; "mini-climate" would be precise. More expansively, we can talk of a regional climate or a global climate. Too, we shall soon have a "cosmic climate," since evidence is fast accumulating of solar-planetary transactions on a continuing climatic basis. Earthquakes, volcanism, winds, precipitation, magnetic fields, temperatures, electric currents and the biosphere transact in climatic affairs. One does not get this sense of a welter and complex of factors in going far back by conventional chronology. Rather one has the sense that climates have swirled around in multiform changes in the Quaternary period but then somehow climates withdraw into the background while we are presented a broad succession of ages in the tens of millions of years each, when life changed very slowly and conditions of biological survival and adaptation must have been constant over long periods of time. One is privileged to view charts in which paleontological developments occur at the slowest imaginable pace, with only a dozen or so boundary lines where, certainly, it is given that climates changed and new names are provided -Devonian, Carboniferous, and so on. Did climates, with all the factors that engender them, stand still for these long periods in rigid constancy? This would be unbelievable. If in between the major boundaries of epochs, climates changed as they have in the brief recent past of the Quaternary, then the paleontological and geological record is far too short, or contains very little information. In sum, either the world has changed and the recent past speeds up wildly in comparison with the remote past, or else the remote past is still quite unknown despite its diligent study over two centuries by numerous disciplines and thousands of scholars. Hence climatology lends us a great doubt when we imagine it fitting to the long past ages, and many doubts when we try to use it for the turbulent recent times. A great many works on pre-history try to associate events with climatic changes. Considering that geologists have failed to establish confidence in climatic boundaries and periods, the pre-historian's failure is predictable. For instance, classicist Rhys-Carpenter has endeavored to explain as a climatic worsening over generations the end of the Mycenean (Greek) civilization and the subsequent so-called "Dark Ages" (an invented period of several hundred years to evade evidence of catastrophes in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. and to accommodate Greek to Egyptian chronology, the later itself wrong by centuries) [15] . Cities were abandoned in the face of desiccation; new hot, dry prevailing winds made impossible the carrying on of their culture. To believe him, however, one must have a reason why the flowering of Greek culture occurred under the same climatic conditions later on. One must also discount the many evidences of natural destruction by fire and earthquake of the Mycenean centers [16] . One must cling to a spurious Egyptian chronology, which gives 500 years to Greek and Mediterranean history that, since nothing happened, are not needed [17] . Further, catastrophic changes in winds and precipitation have a cause; that cause can only be celestial changes, whether by introduction of new Earth motions and land forms, or by solar-system particle-outputs. If the Alaskan musk contains the swept-in plant and animal life of large areas and the species it contains are modern, then one should suspect that sooner or later, as Hibben has opined, humans, even clothed and deep- frozen, should turn up by accident or deliberate excavation. Already, several pre-" Ice Age" settlements have been uncovered within the arctic circle by Americans and Russians. Rodents and mammoths froze quickly while eating warm-weather plants. How abrupt was the climatic change that killed them is unreported, if known. The polar regions were recently near-tropical in climate and ecology [18] . The bafflement of archaeologists over climate is understandable. They follow the evolutionists. But the attic of climatic evolutionism is stuffed with junk. When a modish dress does not suit the facts, an old-fashioned one is tried on. For example, the heat of the Earth has been described in numerous ways over the past two hundred years; hence, without ostracism, one may propose that the Earth has an enormous internal heat or is cool -whichever advances one's theory of climates. Too, the ages of the Earth and its geological periods have been estimated with tens and hundreds of millions of years of variance and leeway, so that evidence of climatic shift can often be placed in time wherever it will fit the theory at hand. And the melting of the ice sheets can proceed rapidly or slowly, as needed for a particular job of explanation. Uniformitarians employ typically six mechanics of climatic change : (a) a cooling of the Earth's interior over eons of time. (Since this should have ended long ago, with the Earth's interior stabilized, a radioactivity of deep rocks is now believed to be an incessant source of heat from below.) (b) a crawling up and crawling back of ice owing to pronounced cyclical solar activity (which has lately received some support by the aforementioned "Maunder Minimum" and sunspot studies.) (c) a reorientation of prevailing winds due to a manmade or artificial desiccation of lands, or to ice movements or Earth cooling (as above.) (d) the "inches-per-century" drift of the continents from cold to hot places or vice- versa. (e) heavy multiple volcanism, called upon to supply the heat for the vaporizing of waters that then proceed northward and drop upon the polar areas as snow and ice. (f) changes in solar activity, whereby a period of diminished or augmented sunspots will produce cold weather or stormy weather. That all of these are explanations inadequate to explain even holocene climatic change is evident in the controversies and the contradictions continually appearing. Geologist Vita-Finzi practically abandons his search for climatic benchmarks in his authoritative work on the holocene. Lacking the engine of a general theory and a time-table to run it on, freightcars may be switched around at will. In one place he is driven to remark: "On the assumption that every yodel in the Alps had its echo on the coast, pebble bands are equated with glacial episodes, truant beds are eroded away, and the uplift of mountains is delayed to justify the absence of glacial features." [19] He prays that the radiochronometrists will rescue the situation. But I have already concluded in my analysis of tests of time, published in Chaos and Creation, that a rescue must come from elsewhere. Perhaps a quantavolutionary scheme may do better. It is not written in some law that enough time must be allowed to let humans get away, bag and baggage, from the changing air. Every catastrophe which they underwent would demand a climatic response as one of its effects. Hence there may have been a score of global shifts in climate within a 14,000 year holocene period. Certainly the boundaries of the ages would point to climatic change. The onslaughts of the early holocene mark a paramount boundary. There came destruction of a worldwide greenhouse regime and the beginnings of mountain ranges, huge deserts, stripped shield rock, high plateaus, oceans and their currents, and biosphere revolution. This Pleistocene-Holocene boundary climax is euphemistically carried in the logbook of the sciences as "the end of the Ice Ages". I treat it as the Lunarian climax in Chaos and Creation, because of its apparent connection with the advent of the Moon. Hundreds of titles from many fields are dedicated to it. In oceanography, Emiliani extracts from Gulf of Mexico bottom cores the information that a fresh water avalanche descended upon the basin some 11,500 years ago and he wonders whether this was from a cataclysm such as sank the legendary continent of Atlantis. Tree pollen changed abruptly in the Great Lakes region about 10,000 years ago, according to J. G. Ogden III. "The only mechanism sufficient to produce a change of the kind described here would therefore appear to be a rapid and dramatic change in temperature and/ or precipitation." [20] Oceanographers Broeoker, Ewing, and Heezing gather ocean-bed "Evidence for an Abrupt Change in Climate Close to 11,000 Years Ago." [21] Vita-Finzi reports that a group of geosols, or weathering profiles, ended their development about 12,000 years ago; the date is proposed as the holocene beginning for the U. S. A. [22] . From Israel, paleo- zoologist Joseph Heller writes of the faunal remains of a Kebaran Site on Mount Carmel [23] : What then was the cause of the post-Natufian size crash? (9000-10,000 B. C.) The fact that the crash occurred in certain carnivores and rodents simultaneously suggests that it was not causally related to phases in the evolution of human cultures. Rather this simultaneous dwarfing favors climatic interpretation. Drastic climatic changes occurred in various parts of the world towards the end of the Pleistocene about 12,000 years ago. In tropical Africa, India, South America and Australia, conditions that were extremely arid before 12,500 B. P. suddenly gave way to increase in humidity. It is generally accepted by pre-historians of Europe that the end of the Pleistocene Ice Ages brought disaster to human races and cultures. The finding is surprising, considering that the warmer the climate, the more abundant the biosphere should be. But if catastrophes were involved, the reduction and retardation would be understandable, indeed demanded. Ruins of cultures are found in many a harsh climate of the world, in deserts, on high plateaus, amidst perma-frost, and in steaming jungles. (Let us exclude, under the seas, which, after all, involved a climatic change, one which we shall discuss later on.) When archaeologists and pre-historians cannot explain the death of a culture by enemy invasion, plague, or economic decline, they are prone to seek out a change of climate. But what they seek out is a uniformitarian or gradual change of prevailing winds, rainfall, and temperature. Centuries, if not millennia, are invoked to pursue the death agonies of a culture. The quantavolutionist tackles the same problem with a markedly different concept, catastrophic climatic change. With the images in mind of an aboriginal greenhouse world afforded by many sources, he sees in every desert a likely disaster, every tall plateau another one, under frozen arctic shores still another. For the quantavolutionist, too, the mechanisms of explanation are available, they are high-energy forces as provoked possibly by changes in the Earth's motion, a change of its orbital path around the Sun, a shift of its angle of inclination to the plane of the ecliptic (axial tilt), and a movement of its crustal shell (continental displacement). They include, further, a bombardment or discharge of particles, including cosmic electricity, affecting the atmosphere and magnetosphere that stretches even now beyond the Moon. And deluges of salt, oil and other dense material that spoils the land. With all of this, it would seem that the quantavolutionist would necessarily bungle more than the uniformitarian in describing the natural history of climatic change. He is using, it seems, many more variables, and the more the variables, the more complicated the solution of a problem. However, the quantavolutionist has two sources of encouragement, he can see how futile are the explanations of the conventional climatologists of the natural history of climate. And the evidence appears to fall into the line of this theory with surprising ease. The uniformitarians, in attempting to explain climate by reducing chances of natural catastrophes to a near-zero constant, become bogged down in a morass of special climates; every way they turn they discover new and different climates. They cannot cope with the possibility that in the sudden prelude and aftermath of disaster, short-term climates by the hundreds are created around the world; deserts are deluged, jungles are desiccated, lands are flooded, lands rise, winds change sharply, soils are turned over, the biosphere is transformed; if late in time, cultures terminate, or spring up, or react eccentrically. Nor can they allow that, if several global catastrophes may have occurred in four billion years, several might have occurred in ten thousand year, each transforming atmosphere and climate. A Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution team reported in the Scientific American of March 1982 a set of discoveries which threatens the prevailing theory that oceanic waters are regionally stable, that regional bottoms reflect this aquatic stability, and that world climates can be determined by fossil and chemical balances of the bottom content. Eddies of the great oceanic currents such as the Gulf Stream occasionally break off from these gigantic oceanic flows and set up columnar rings of water that can reach 300 kilometers in diameter, even in this relatively placid age, and endure for 18 months or more. The ring-waters differ significantly in salinity, oxygen content, and temperature from their surroundings. Biological assemblages follow suit. Sedimentation rates are also a function of current velocity. Under such conditions, given several thousand, let alone several hundred million, years false climates can be expected to be inferred practically everywhere. Misleading strata will be exceedingly numerous. Once more, we must warn against the many theoretical structures of climate, hydrology, chronology and paleontology that interlock in varying degrees of poorness of fit. These findings by the Woods Hole scientists may effectively administer the coup de grace to the whole lot of them. But we must not be carried away with the holistic interplay of factors before we have explained them. We may content ourselves at this point with three tentative, even sceptical, remarks. The atmosphere is not stable and has not been for long in its present state of equilibrium. When subjected to quantavolutionary hypotheses, the history of the atmosphere becomes full of mystery and potentiality. The study of climates has been vigorously pursued, but perhaps with the wrong conceptual instruments. Climates, the benchmarks of atmospheric history, seem to us to disintegrate under analysis into ephemeral signals of catastrophic events. {S : Notes (Chapter Two: The Gaseous Complex)} Notes (Chapter Two: The Gaseous Complex) 1. B. K. Konstantinov and G. E. Kocharov, "Astrophysical Phenomena and Radiocarbon," 10 Sov. Physics 11 (May, 1966), 1043-4. 2. C. Cowan, C. R. Atluri, and W. F. Libby, 206 Nature (1965), 861. 3. Science News, March 6, 1976; Astronomy (March 1979), 58; J. A. Eddy, P. A. Gilman, and D. E. Trotter, "Solar Rotation During the Maunder Minimum," 46 Solar Physics (1976), 3-14. 4. A. F. M. de Jong, W. G. Mook and B. Becher, "Confirmation of the Suess Wriggles: 3200-3700 B. C." 2180 Nature #5717 (July 5,1979) 48-9; I. U. Olsson, ed. "Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology," (12th Nobel Symposium, 1969; Alqvist and Wiksell, Stockholm and New York: Wiley, 1970) esp, H. E. Suess; Alfred de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, 48-52. 5. Melvin Cook, "Carbon 14 and the Age of the Atmosphere," Creation Res. Soc. Q., June 1970. Reuven Ramaty (U. C. L. A., Calif) has studied extensively geomagnetic effects. 6. Gilbert N. Plass "Carbon Dioxide and Climate," Sci. Amer. (July 1959), 3. 7. S. W. Tromp, Biometeorology (Philadelphia: Heyden, 1980), 12, 16-17, 19. 8. George W. Gray, "Life at High Altitudes," 193, Sci. American (Dec. 1955), 58; "Respiration and Respiratory Systems," Ency. Britannica (1974), 763. 9. E. I. Friedmann and R. Ocampo, "Endolithic Blue-Green Algae in the Dry Valleys" (Antarctica), 193 Sci. (24 Sep. 1976), 1247. 10. L. V. Berkner and L. C. Marshall, "A History of Major Atmospheric Components," 63 Proc Nat'l Acad Sci 6( 1965) 1215; John A. Eddy, "The Sun Since the Bronze Age," Int. Sym. on Solar-Terres, Phy., June, 17, 1976; J. S. Sawyer, ed., Proceedings Intl Sym on World Climate: 8000 to B. C. (London: Royal Meterological Soc., 1966; Donald W. Patten, The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (Seattle: Pacific, Meridian, 1966), Chapter. 9. 11. 179 Nature (26 Jan. 1957) 213. 12. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: Dell, 1966), 223-4. 13. A. G. W. Cameron, 240 Nature (1 Dec. 1972), 229 14. Supra, fn. 3. 15. Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard U., 1966) 16. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie CornparÚ... (London: Oxford, 1948). 17. I. M. Isaacson (pseud.), "Applying the Revised Chronology." 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall). 5. 18. This has been known since O. Heer in the 1860's. See Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 44 et seq. Cf. H. H. Lamb, "The Earth's Changing Climate," 180-5 in Encycl. Britannica Yrbk, 1975; Frank Hibben, Treasure in the Dust (195 1). 19. Claudio Vita-Finzi, Recent Earth History (New York: Wiley-Halstead, 1973), 106-7. 20. See below, Chapter 31 21. 258 Amer. J. Sci.. 429. 22. Op. cit., 42-3. 23. The Faunal Remains of Iraq es Zihhan, a Kebaran Site on Mt. Carmel; cf. Livingstone, 1975 "Late Quaternary Change in Africa," Ann. Rev. Ecology and Systematics 6: 249-81; Williams, M. 1975 "Late Pleistocene Tropical Aridity Synchronous in Both Hemispheres," 253 Nature 617-18; Hamen, Wunstra, and Zagwin "The Floral Record of the Late Cenozoic of Europe," in Turekian, K, ed. The Late Cenozoic Glacial Ages (Yale U. Press); Farraud, "The Floral Record," Ibid {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART I: } {Q ATMOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 3} {T Hurricanes and Cyclones} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part I: Atmospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE HURRICANES AND CYCLONES An explosion of Mt. St. Helens recently blew down thousands of trees. An exoterrestrial explosion at Tunguska in 1908 blew down million of trees. The Fens of East Anglia contain millions of felled trees. Here the trees were knocked down facing northeast and were buried. They were sheared off a meter above the ground and their stumps remain rooted. Many were tall and thick trees. No volcano is to be located as the source of the blast. What kind of a wind was this? Winds find a minor place in textbooks on earth features. They erode rock by polishing and pitting it, by making grooves, by shaping and faceting. They make various alcoves and niches in rock walls. They also form sand dunes in deserts, and blow the sand and silt of stream beds hither and yon. A sandsheet in Libya, over a meter thick, rests on bedrock over many thousands of square kilometers and is supposed to have been laid down by winds of the desert. There are others like it around the world. Such aeolian activity is allotted millions of years to help shape the landscape; the number of millions, one or a hundred, is calculated from estimated past climatic conditions working against various constraints, such as whether landforms exist nearby to provide the material of erosion. Tornados, cyclones and hurricanes now and then wreak havoc upon soil and settlements. Part of the climatic complex of this age, these storms are localized -the "tornado belt" of the south-central United States, the Japan and China Seas, and so on. Of course, bearing in mind the "many changes of climate over the ages," most places on earth would have suffered such storms in turn. When they occur, part of the biosphere is blown away with some of the natural landscaping. Paleo-anthropology and archaeology debate the relative contributions of the Orient and the Eur-African world to the earliest American cultures, for example, without proper attention to the possibilities afforded travelers by changing winds that come with changing climates, now pushing things one way and then again another way. So that even when the possibilities of cataclysmic changes in early human times are ignored, changing climates would carry culture both East and West [1] . Tornado effects are discoverable in some places where sedimentary beds are interrupted by poorly sorted mixtures of rock which evidence by their shape, fragmentation, and positions a sudden displacement and replacement. Ager calls these storm deposits "tempestite," after a word that he ascribes to Gilbert Kelling, when he observes them, for instance, on the heights of the Atlas Mountain of Morocco [2] . Similar deposits have been identified in a few other places. Missouri, Virginia, the English Channel, the Paris Basin, in rocks of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic. Carozzi and Gerber consider that "such an early generation of cherts in carbonates is more common than generally assumed." [3] We cannot figure how often such high energy local events have occurred, until the world is better surveyed with this idea in mind. But one can "think big". With a thousand tornados a year (300 in the U. S. A.) tearing up two thousand square kilometers of sediments and breaking down surface features, an area equal to the total land surface of the world (240 million square kilometers) would be superficially pulverized in about 120,000 years. If a conventional age of 3.6 million years is accorded the Earth's crust, the whole of it would have been scoured, not once, but 30,000 times by cyclonic action. In the short term, not all land would be affected equally, but in the long-term, given changing climates and drifting continents, an assumption of randomized strikes could be tolerated. Where then are the scars of 30,000 tornados in every geological column? Or even in any single one anywhere? From this we might conclude that we have a great deal of field research to do in geological history so as to obtain a realistic estimate of the number of events. This is also the situation, we may as well say, in respect of meteoroid falls, volcanism, and other high-energy events to be discussed. The quantavolutionary approach to history comes naked as a neonate, without systematic hypotheses, data, or applicable mathematics. If few such effects are discoverable, it may be because catastrophes acting on a large scale have obliterated almost all localized indications of damage. For instance, if great earthquakes have shattered rock strata, lesser violence to the rock would be hardly visible. The schist dropping deep below the city of Athens is infinitely fractured. Is this tempestite, thermotite, seismotite, hydrotite, turbotite, or what? If the wind god, Aeolus, blew at once all around the world, many sediments would be displaced, losing their local cyclone scars in the process and letting no new strikes penetrate deep into the new strata. But perhaps the Earth's surface has spent 99.9% of its time in a peaceful state with a quiet atmosphere. Such quiescence contradicts uniformitarianism as much as it does catastrophism; that is, I have used above the present "quiet" state to reconstruct the past, as Hutton and Lyell recommended. Yet even so, estimates resulting therefrom would be much more impressive than present conventional history gives one to understand. A final possibility is that the sedimentary rocks of the Earth are much too young to have experienced all that is supposed to have happened. That is, if the Earth were 100,000 years old, much of its surface would perhaps not have been scarred by tornados (or meteoroids). Ancient legends speak of a large role for winds. The sacred book of Buddhism, the Visuddhi-Maggia, says that when world collide the winds "turn the ground upside down. Large areas crack and are thrown upwards. The winds pulverize the ground and it disappears into space, never to return. Thus ends a cycle of the ages." [4] It is the extreme catastrophic typhoon. The ancient Meso-Americans said that the former world was brought to an end by the great wind god, Huracan. Probably the origin of the word "hurricane" is here. Huracan is also a manifestation of the great god Quetzalcoatl, who is also identified with the god and planet Venus [5] . Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, fathered a large number of people, who he then destroyed in the darkness of a storm amidst black rain that fell day and night. So records the Quiche book of Popul Vuh. Then animal gods mangled the bodies [6] . "Air" is rarely missing in the legendary and early scientific classifications such as "earth, air, fire and water." The idea of world destruction by wind is, of course, quite disregarded by modern scholars. One hears the term "marine transgressions" but not "wind transgressions." It is surprising how few pages have been devoted to the winds by catastrophists, too. Again, perhaps the effects of hurricanes and typhoons are quickly concealed by other forces operating. Or the effects may be interpreted as tidal wave deposits. The splintered bones of some fossil assemblages would indicate aerial rather than water transport. Although he does not follow through, F. Hibben provides a rare passage dealing with the immense deposits of bones that he witnesses. "Throughout the Alaskan mucks, too, there is evidence of atmospheric disturbances of unparalleled violence." [7] The Cumberland Cavern catastrophic life dump shows no evidence of water transport [8] . Probably as many collections of animals and vegetation have been gathered and flung in heaps by winds as by water. In seeking the origins of some coal deposits, catastrophic winds are a prime suspect, along with rock and water thrusts. What can create deposits can remove them. Heavy winds, operating tidally or cyclonically, can blow away pre-existing structures. Contemplating the early ages of human settlement, one may wonder at the frequent absence of primordial sites. Here, as everywhere in the mythicized realms of science, there is a vision that is perhaps false, of excavating sites layer upon layer until arrival at bed rock, and thereupon pronouncing the last ruins to be the first settlement. But the god Huracan is able quickly to erase settlements down to bed rock one and more times. The typical absence of human vestiges before the neolithic age is usually taken to signify that human settlement began with the neolithic. There is small reason to believe this to be the case. In fact, there is a hint of aeolian morphology in the near absence of paleolithic remains except in caves and abris in the Dordogne of France and elsewhere. The power of winds to push, pull and lift is great. The Hiroshima nuclear fission-bomb explosion is assigned an energy of 7.9x10 18 ergs. The measured energy release of a one- megaton fusion bomb explosion is in the range of 10 22 ergs. This is about the same energy as exploded in the Berringer meteoroid crater in Arizona. "In one day a large hurricane releases as much energy as a 13,000 megaton nuclear bomb. Some hurricanes take a week to reach such intensity, others mature in a day or so. And during the time another may be at full blast a thousand miles away." [9] Some hurricanes last three weeks and travel 1,000 miles. (One can bear in mind the immediate transport of resilient living species around the world by such means.) An ordinary Kansas tornado will approximate 4x10 18 ergs of kinetic energy. Its power in kilowatts is 10 18 , "which is in excess of the capacity of all the generating stations in the United States." (ca 1959) [10] . The wind velocity at the center of its funnel theoretically may achieve 2000 miles per hour. By the Fujita scale, an F-5 wind, indexed at combined forward and rotating speeds of 261-318 mph causes "incredible damage." Electrical activity is so vigorous that Peltier's words of 1840 can be used as a model for an electrical cyclone theory. "Everything proves that the tornado is nothing else than a conductor formed of the clouds which serves as a passage for a continual discharge of electricity from above." [11] Observers have been inside of this "enormous vacuum tube, somewhat similar to a geissler, neon or fluorescent light tube, conducting very low density electric current whenever there is a sufficient accumulation of electricity in the clouds to make the jump to Earth." [12] Typhon, the cosmic spectral dragon felled by a thunderbolt from Jupiter, was anciently described by Apollodorus as "rushing at heaven" with hissing and screams, spouting a great jet fire from his mouth. This same Typhon is probably the origin of the word "typhoon." [13] Cyclones and water spouts (water-bearing cyclones) often appear in groups. An outbreak of 148 tornados was registered in the United States and Canada on April 3,1974. Sometimes associated with a tornado are a number of downbursts of high-velocity winds that blow down whatever they strike, whether groves or houses or aircraft. Ted Fujita of the University of Chicago compares the downbursts with giant garden hoses aimed downwards upon circles kilometers in diameters; often they end their work in two minutes. What might cause a vast number of cyclonic events to appear? A meteoroid bombardment, an interruption of the Earth's motion, a tilt of the Earth's geographic axis, magnetic axis, or sidereal axis: these would do, and also a large meteoroid impact, and a large body passing nearby, the latter, however, being tied almost inevitably to other changes in Earth's motions. Too, a deluge of waters might form into many ribbons, mushrooms, or funnels in descending. The winds and other effects of a heavy meteoroid impact would be simulated if a large number of nuclear missiles were trained upon a single spot and exploded at the same moment. The atmospheric turbulence accompanying such impacts must include more than a blasting power. Its heat can provide the circulating system for a natural instantaneous chemical factory. The turbulence generates disturbing sounds and sends them over long distances and brings intolerable changes in barometric pressures. Volcanic explosions produce similar effects: whether a crater is a volcanic or meteoric effect is often contested, and both produce tornado and hurricane effects. During the Krakatoa volcanic explosion of 1883, winds stripped all the surrounding area of its lush vegetation before burning it [14] . People heard noises of anchors being hauled up and dropped, of thunder and beating drums: the winds carried the explosions across the Indian Ocean where they were heard as distant cannonading. The barometer on a ship nearby jumped up and down an inch at a time. The air was sucked up so that people could not breathe. The gases were sulfurous, choking and blinding. The sun was obscured, and slightly so around the world for years. In the pitchblack day, a Dutchman groped for a knife to despatch his family. So cyclones darken abruptly the sky, and bring ear-bursting and chest-bursting drops in barometric pressure. They explode houses by creating vacuums into which the inside air must burst. They lift boulders and cows, carrying them off, and they dig up the earth. There is a hint in cyclonic action of what may have happened to some of the mammoths and other large-animals that were exterminated a few thousand years ago: suffocation; lifting and dropping; followed by quick freezing; thence to be discovered in the same position today. Winds act faster than water and have the same exponential effect upon the bodies which they may encounter as their speed increases. Wind pressure, that is, increases as the square of wind velocity, up to the velocity of sound at least. A 500 km/ hr wind exerts 25 (not 5) times the pressure of a 100 km/ hr wind; gravel then begins to behave like fusillades of bullets. Kelly and Dachille calculated that the winds created by a large meteoroid impact will move laterally and vertically with the speed of sound [15] . Their effect has to be measured, too, in terms of the amount of debris that they transport. A single such blast, moving horizontally, can strip its area of passage bare down to bed rock, or below, especially if it is loaded with detritus, and may continue its major effects for a thousand kilometers. Only a mountain can stand against it and it, too, will be defaced; an instant ablation corresponding to millions of years of ordinary aeolian erosion will occur. Rivers would be wiped out and set up elsewhere. Valleys would be filled with debris. Great vegetable and animal dumps would be established in many places. Waterspouts have been known to hoist and drop far away the water and biosphere of large ponds; since these events happen under meteorological conditions ordinary to our age, they must be hundreds of times less powerful than the waterspouts (and land spouts) that would arise from large-body impact explosion or related events involving catastrophic energies [16] . The turbulent atmosphere of the planet Venus rotates in six days as contrasted with the 243 days that the body of the planet takes to rotate. Its normal wind velocities of 10 to 100 meters per second are comparable to those of the jet stream that races through the upper atmosphere of the Earth [17] . The surface heat of Venus is of course in the hundreds of degrees Celsius. The mechanism has not been solved. Several effects of a perpetual firestorm might be considered, granted that free oxygen is absent. One is reminded of the firestorms that were engendered in the Chicago fire, the Tokyo earthquake, the Pestigo forest fire, the firebombing of Dresden, and the atomic bomb-burst over Hiroshima. Large areas can become like giant tornados; perhaps a planet can suffer the same fate. Winds can operate like tides. Thus, if the Earth's rotation is altered, the atmosphere will be subjected to the same influences that cause the alteration and will in effect act turbulently, that is, out of phase with the lithosphere. They will sweep over the globe like a tide of water. The atmosphere, if electromagnetically affected by a conjunction of planets and Sun, will help to disturb the lithosphere and engender seismism. Differential atmospheric pressures define the existence of a wind; two clouds of gas, essentially isolated but lacking an effective "bag" to contain their isolation, interact. Electric potentials are established. Electrical forces thereupon flow throughout the transacting systems laterally and vertically. It is perhaps axiomatic that where there is wind there is an electric current and discharges. And where there is an electric current there is bound to be a magnetic field. And, lacking a better container, an electric current is contained by its magnetic field. More than one observer has confirmed the testimony of a man who was caught in the open as a tornado passed above him by a few meters. He was beneath a tunnel whose walls were composed of whirling clouds, in the manner of a magnetic field as this is pictured in drawings of a textbook. He looked up into the tunnel for at least half a mile; brilliant lightning flashes illuminated the tube. Where he crouched, the air seemed calm; the gases stank suffocatingly; screams and hisses could be heard. The tornado, having deftly raised itself to pass over him just as gently dropped down upon his neighbor's house, exploding it and its objects [18] . This small tornado may function very much on the same principles as the cyclonic effect of a large meteoroid explosion, and again like the great tube of gases that envelops a binary star system, such as I outlined for the solar system in Chaos and Creation and discussed at length with Earl R. Milton in Solaria Binaria. In the Uweinat section of the Great Sand Sea of Southwestern Egypt, a number of possible meteoric impact sites have been reported. One, positively identified, is of 4 km diameter; another is of 14 km diameter. Many extinct volcanos are also evident in this desolate area of sand and sand dunes, which was occupied by humans until at least the neolithic period [18A]. A great climatic change must then have occurred lately. The region is part of the Sahara Desert, which is also marked here and there by human traces. The Gobi Desert, greatest in Asia, bears human relics as well. So do the Mexican and U. S. deserts, and the Peruvian. The great deserts of the world are recent, it appears. The astroblemes and volcanism of Uweinat may have been associated with the events ending civilization and creating deserts. The wind-blown dunes are long, wide, and tall; yet the same winds have not erased the meteoric or volcanic craters, even though these are often not so deep as the dunes are high; not enough time may have passed. Aeolian dunes, astroblemes, volcanos, climatic switching, and culture extinction together can entertain an hypothesis of holospheric quantavolution, pending the establishment of a chronology that would prove the hypothesis or temporally sunder apart the events. The largest deposits accorded to winds are not those of the Lybian peneplain mentioned earlier, nor those of Egypt, but the huge areas of the Earth covered by loess. The term itself was invented for glacier deposits of the Rhine and Danube valleys and elsewhere in Europe. It found itself connected with the "drift", the glacial pebbled clay of North America, where vast stretches of the buff and porous earth, compacted but frangible to the fingers, were found distributed. Here transportation by ice sheets and rivers forming from their melts was imagined. Then, west of Peking, an area larger than France exposed its loess to geological inquiry. Loess can occur at high elevations as well as on great plains. It breaks down into excellent thick soil in China and its cliffs degrade into natural terraces [19] . Old roads cut through it, sometimes passing through the Chinese countryside thirty meters below the houses and farms on the loess above. In Indiana, the highest lands and ridges in particular have the thickest yellow clay (called drift or loess) and it is free of sand and gravel [20] . The loess is not stratified, nor does it contain marine fossils, and land fossils of shells and mammals are only occasionally found in it. Sedimentation from lakes and rivers seems to be an impossible explanation. Adequate sources of glaciers and ice are often absent, as for example near the loess that occurs inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The favored theory of loess formation stands upon the transporting power of winds that would carry the material from distant high places or deserts, operating over long periods of time. But where are the loess heaps on the fringes of great deserts? There are none. And why should stratification and cross- bedding not then have occurred? Nor can the chemical composition of loess be assigned to the mountains of its supposed origins. And the loess grains are not rounded by wind or water but are angular, as if exploded, and are settled in vertical lines through which rain readily percolates. Ignatius Donnelly, in Ragnarok (1882), was already ascribing till, drift and loess to fall-out from a great comet, going so far as to deny the very existence of past ice ages, to which most scientists then and still today ascribe these materials. He read many distinct legendary sources and intercepted many sedimentary strata as stories of great winds that picked up the detritus of Earth, whirling it around wildly and depositing it in "intercalated beds." [21] Donnelly's denial of the ice ages in favor of exoterrestrial deposits by comet does not appear so outrageous today. As we shall see, ice age theory has been used (and abused) to the point of exhaustion of the subject and of the geologists working in the field; it has been made responsible for many geological forms and events that might more readily be assigned to other forces. Velikovsky, in a note of the 1940's, before he had himself been subjected to ridicule, commented that Donnelly had been called "the Prince of Cranks" for his books on several difficult and controversial subjects [22] . Donnelly was in fact a superior writer and lecturer, an intense student with a sensuous affinity for the palpability of the ground, a political and social hero, and a precursor in fundamental ways of later writers such as Velikovsky. Fifty years after Donnelly, Penniston was advocating the thesis of an exoterrestrial origin for loess [23] . Citing Shapley (later a violent critic of Velikovsky) and Belot for having proposed a solar nova as the cause of the ice ages, he reasoned upon this as a possible source of the material, which, experiencing high temperatures for a period of time, had its silicates metamorphosed in part to quartz, thus arriving at the loess. That stony meteorites have differed in composition from loess has stood against his theory. The source of meteorites has probably been mainly from the asteroid belt in contemporary times, however, and cannot be well compared with either the solar or the cometary origins hypothesized. Not unnaturally, geologists faced with a choice of wind or exoterrestrial fall, would prefer the wind. Wherever possible, as in middle America, they introduce " glacial sluiceways." Yet we would prefer to discuss the matter once again when it comes time to ask what can and does fall to Earth from outer space. Let us rest content here if we have but established several points: The force of wind rises with the square of its velocity, with correspondingly large effects upon the landscape. Hurricanes must be associated with every abrupt and intensive geological event. Cyclones convey major electrical and fire phenomena. In large-scale catastrophic events, a great many typhoons could originate to accommodate changed atmospheric and lithospheric motions or multiple meteoroidal instrusions. Finally, if the sediments of the world do not reflect adequately cyclonic effects, the reason may rest in their continuous erasure by more forceful events which themselves require identification. Furthermore, assigned geological times may be too long; maybe not enough events have happened to flesh out the skeletal ages. {S : Notes (Chapter Three: Hurricanes and Cyclones)} Notes (Chapter Three: Hurricanes and Cyclones) 1. Cf. C. L. Riley et al, Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts (Austin, Tex.: U. of Texas, 1971) 302 et passim. 2. Derek W. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (New York: Wiley-Halsted, 1973), 39. 3. A. V. Carozzi and M. S. Gerber, "Late Paleozoic Tornados and Synsedimentary Brecciation of Chert Nodules." 4. Warren, Buddhism in Translation, p. 328 quoted by Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision 70. 5. William Mullen, "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall), 34-44. 6. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya (Norman, Okla.: U. of Okla. Press, 1950), 90. 7. Op. cit. 8. I. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 60. 9. Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965), 6. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. 38 Amer. J. Sci. and Arts (1840) 73, cf. William Corliss, compiler, Strange Phenomena (Glen Arm, Md.: Corliss), GLD052-G2-105. 12. Ibid., G2-104-5. 13. Velikovsky, World in Collision, 68-70. 14. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), 34. 15. Allan O Kelly and Frank Dachille, Target: Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science (Carlsbad, Calif.: Box 335, 1953), 203, 66 et passim. 16. Ibid., 202; Hans Oersted, 1 Amer. J. Sci. 37 (1839) 250-67, quoted in Corliss, op. cit., G2-233. 17. Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus," 233 Sci. Amer. (Sept. 1975), 73. 18. Alonzo A. Justice, 50 Monthly Weather Review (May 1930) 205-6, quoted in Corliss, op. cit., G2-105-7. 18A. Faraouk El-Baz, 213 Science (24 July 1981) 439-40. 19. Frederick W. Williams, "Loess Deposits of Northern China," 22 Popular Sci. Mon. (1882) 243-8, quoted in W. Corliss, compiler, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md. 21057: Sourcebook Project, 1978), ESL001-E2-161. 20. J. T. Campbell, 23 Amer. Naturalist (1889) 785-92, quoted in Corliss, ESL004-E2-167. 21. I. Donnelly, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton, 1883), 53. 22. "Precursors," 7 Kronos 1 (1981), 53. 23. J. B. Penniston, 39 Pop. Astro. (1931) 429-30 and 51 Pop. Astro. (1943), 170-2, quoted in Corliss, ESL-003-E2-165. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART I: } {Q ATMOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 4} {T Magnetism and Axial Tilts} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part I: Atmospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR MAGNETISM AND AXIAL TILTS The Earth has two axes of concern here, its axis of rotation between the geographical north and south poles, and the warped axis of its magnetic field lying between the north magnetic pole and the south magnetic pole. It is easier to imagine the axis of rotation; the imaginary equator divides the globe into two equal halves and this equator marks a circle around the spinning globe which, every 24 hours, completes a turn. The magnetic poles are distant by some hundreds of kilometers from their corresponding geographic poles. They are denoted by the behavior of a compass needle which assumes a vertical position when at or near the magnetic pole; the nearly global distance that lies between the north and south magnetic poles witnesses a continuously changing dip of the compass needle which reverses itself as it passes approximately half the globe and again turns to the vertical (in reverse) as it approaches the opposite pole. The magnetic poles are in perpetual motion, seemingly traversing a kind of oval figure. In the north, the pole is just south of King Chirstian Island (1980, 77 19 N; 101 49W) and is moving north by 24.4 km per year and west by 5.4 km per year [1] . Apart from a certain usefulness in navigation, its extreme weakness may let one think such magnetism to be quite unimportant. But it indicates the presence of several important processes of the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere and cosmosphere. An entertaining book might be written concerning the effects on life of the loss of the magnetic field. How will wild geese navigate? Will there be less heart attacks or more? Cox says that the removal of the dipole magnetic field will reduce the total shielding of the biosphere from cosmic rays by 10 to 12%, no more than is involved in a person's moving from the equator to Alaska. Waddington is of the same opinion "unless it is assumed that these periods are associated with greatly increased particle radiation from some external source." [2] This last point stresses the atmosphere-exosphere relationship, and may serve later on to solve some reversal perplexities. In 1989, NASA's Magnetic Field Satellite confirmed that the field, already weak, is decreasing in strength. The trend indicates a zero strength in about 1200 years [3] . Relying upon studies begun in 1830 by Gauss, Barnes made the same prediction earlier [4] . Theorists are divided, some saying that the field hits zero, then reverses, and then returns to zero, and so on over great periods of time. A few, the present author among them, say that the field is a once and for all thing: it began at higher intensity, endured for a long time, then began to diminish, meanwhile from time to time reversing its direction. Assuming a continuously increased strength reading backwards in time, however, implies an enormous intensity eons ago; there is a hint here, to our way of thinking, that the field was created and sustained at a constant level, and then abruptly was cut off from its source, and began to decline. Barnes declares, too, that "This magnetic decay phenomenon could not have been going on for more than a few thousand years, as the magnetic field would have been implausibly large for a relatively neutral body such as the earth." [5] The magnetic field constitutes a magnetosphere which is much larger than the Earth itself; [6] it can be imagined as a kind of giant electric globe enclosing the Earth which is perceptible even as one descends into the deepest rocks and which may only end in some kind of an electric current which may be running through the core of the Earth at about the geographical spinning equator, very roughly perpendicular to the geophysical poles. It is important, too, to appreciate that these two features, the magnetic electric current and the geographical spinning equator may be largely independent of one another. That is, one can conceive of the magnetic and geographical systems operating even at right angles to one another. We have discovered no natural law that says the two equators and sets of poles must be close together. This implies, however, that the two sets of poles are not stable, that their present positions are a historical accident. But, then, to think so introduces worrisome possibilities: that the axis of spin of the Earth may be changed, too. Both of these possibilities have increasingly occupied the minds and studies of scholars and explorers. Have there indeed been occasion on which the globe has tilted, geographically and magnetically? The answer today is yes, that the axis of spin has shifted and also the magnetic axis has shifted. But before we consider these two probabilities, it is well to mention yet a third change in the Earth's behavior that would possibly occur without magnetic or geographic shift. Suppose that the Earth simply tilted in space. On this phenomenon, Peter Warlow reports that both Needham and Dodwell found oscillatory change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, on the basis of ancient astronomical records. Dodwell concluded that three factors were operative in the movement, the linear drift conventionally ascribed, a decaying oscillation with a period of 1200 years, and a logarithmic-sine decay. Dodwell saw in the exponential decay (quantavolutionary exponentialism that I mentioned earlier and in Chaos and Creation) a drastic occurrence some 4500 years ago [7] . Could the Earth have even turned over completely without interrupting (interrupting very little) its spin or its magnetic field? The geographic poles would be reversed, and along with them the magnetic field. The Earth could not perform such a movement without an external assist, whether from an upsetting explosion of gases from the Sun or from the attraction or repulsion of a large passing body. According to Warlow, who has however been challenged by Slabinski, the transaction could be relatively delicate; it would amount to the drawing of a force along the Earth's path that would cause it to tip over while containing its spin, in the manner of a tippe-top, a toy that is weighed on top and set to spinning on the board; the top turns completely over continuing to spin all the while in the same direction, North becomes South and East becomes West [8] . The motion performed is technically a fast precession. A moment's reflection will rid us of any notion that the action would be harmless. The atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere would be agitated and produce effects that by any measures would have to be called quantavolutionary. For instance, it appears most likely that the widespread sudden destruction throughout the northern regions of the mammoths and other large mammals occurred in conjunction with a tilt of the Earth's axis in the presence of the exoterrestrial entity causing the tilt. We can say this because a sudden deep vacuum freeze, asphyxiation, thrusting of masses of gravel and bones, and permanent cold ever thereafter, such that the animals are sometimes found still fleshed-out and diagnosed in certain cases as heart-failures or with blood- clotted lungs, must indicate a holospheric event comprising an atmospheric and aquatic withdrawal, the descent of an extreme coldness, and upon the passing of the body, returning tides of water and wind to accomplish quick burial under muck, ice and tundra. Yet, according to Warlow's theory, the tilt, which might have been complete to 180 and would change East to West and North to South, would require only thousandths of the energy to be disposed of if, by contrast, the Earth were largely cease or reverse its rotation. If such were to happen, it would be most unlikely that the two bodies, Earth and the intruder, would achieve just the mode of encounter and passage that would avoid direct electrical and material exchanges or that would bring about a full 180 reversal; the Earth, unlike the tippe-top, could cease its tilt at any angle not excluding a full 360 circle with its intruder acting momentarily as its binary, and performing a "loop-the-loop." Should the intruder collide with the Earth, the Earth might tilt, also, and the damage to it would be much greater. Dachille estimates that a body 320 km in diameter, impacting tangentially at a velocity of 12 km/ sec would produce an axis shift of a mere 0 32' [9] . Many forms of energy disposal are available, it appears, besides reorientation of the global axis. One is led to suspect that non-colliding encounters involving heavy electrical differentials might more effectively produce axis tilting than would collisions. Lest the idea be considered quite fanciful, it should be recalled that several ancient sources refer seriously to a reversal of directions. Herodotus and Plato cite Egyptian sources of occasions when the Sun changed directions and arose in the West instead of the East. A ceiling in the tomb of Senmut of Egypt also pictures a reversed sky tableau such as would occur were the Earth turned upside down. In fifteen spectacular pages [10] Velikovsky searches out and orders rationally other indications in legends and writing of a reversal of directions that could only come with the Earth turning upside down. The contexts scarcely permit the alternative, a cessation and reversal of the Earth's rotation. Thomas Gold once remarked that, if the Earth were a perfect sphere, an insect alighting upon it might turn it over. In revising Warlow's calculations, Slabinski assumes that the Earth has to be turned over in a single pass-by at two Earth's radii distance in a parabolic approach trajectory. He emerges with a requirement for a body with the mass of 62 Suns. Even if the crust of the Earth is shoved around independently of the underlaying layers, a body of the mass of 68 Jupiters is needed [11] . We expect that such an action will be totally catastrophic." Furthermore, "any appeal to electromagnetic forces that does not give a quantitative analysis of how such forces produce the required torque is equivalent to saying..." a miracle occurs." Ellenberger, although a stout Velikovsky supporter, agrees: "Since motions occur along the path of least resistance, the possibility that a spin reversal has occurred would appear to be greatly reduced and that interpretation of Senmut's ceiling (and other evidence cited) may be in need of a raison d'etre other than evidencing a spin reversal. If a spin reversal is a viable alternative, where are there discussions and quantifications of its mechanism?" [12] Yet Velikovsky, arguing the case for axis displacement, had earlier discussed a calculation by Weizacker demonstrating that an Earth transaction with a strong magnetic field would affect its axial inclination much more readily than its rotation [13] . Presently, the evidence for sidereal tilts is considerable, for geographic tilts also some, for upside down tilts little, for stop-and-reverse rotation very little. There is no way in which astronomical assurances can be lent to geologists on this account. Conversely, there is enough doubt on all scores to let geologists be open to the possibility of several catastrophically effective maneuvers of "Spaceship Earth". A moment's consideration of Slabinski's calculation leads to the suspicion that he may be employing a rate in his formulas that soars to wild heights and casts doubts prima facie on his procedures: if it would take the gravitational force for 62 Suns to turn the Earth around at a distance of less than 15,000 km, how does a single Sun lock the Earth into fixed orbit at 150 million kilometers? Also, evidence of a geographical shift of the poles is abundant; if this is not to be denied, then we should have to supply the force to do the job; if not 62 Suns, then how many Suns at 15,000 km distance are needed? The possible occurrence of reversals in proto-historical times may suggest additional reversals in pre-human ages. However, Milton and I have presented in Solaria Binaria (Chap. 8) a theory according to which the Earth was in grip of a huge external magnetic field of the solar binary system until perhaps eight thousand years ago; during almost all of geological time, it could not reverse its field. In fact, it is argued that this same magnetic field and its reciprocal electrical current are the present geomagnetic field and current within the Earth, which have been steadily undergoing decay since the grip of the external magnetic field was released. This theory permits us here to explain the principal geological problems connected with terrestrial magnetism. We would have to assert that the numerous alleged reversals of the Earth's magnetic field in geological history simply did not occur. Obviously there is no evidence to be obtained one way or another by atmospheric testing of the field; any number of reversals (or none at all) might have occurred without leaving discernible evidence. The geophysicist, however, can search for evidence of the magnetic field in rocks [14] . Igneous rocks have often been imprinted with magnetism when in a molten state; hence they hold myriads of tiny compasses, pointed towards the magnetic pole. If for one set of rocks the compasses point north and for another adjoining set they point south, it is conceivable that the magnetic field had reversed itself on an occasion between the melting and hardening of the first set of rocks and the melting and hardening of the second set. Magnetic mapping of rocks is almost entirely of this century but has burgeoned swiftly and, some say, chaotically. Persuaded that they can tell the ages of rocks by radiometry, explorers have used time as a reliable indicator of the change in the magnetic field of the Earth. Since the rocks of the world have exhibited a bewildering variety of magnetic directions, many "dated" strata of differing magnetic direction have been assigned to the different magnetic periods, usually forced into a preconceived mold of "normal" and "reversed" magnetic field. Depending upon the angle of declination, not only have such fields been noted, but they have been asserted to pertain to shifting magnetic poles. Some students have supported the idea that hundreds of field reversals have taken place in the several billions of years allotted to the Earth's history. One catalogue reports 433 paleomagnetic poles for 3 to 4 billion years of Pre-Cambrian time, an average of one new pole per 7 to 9 million years [15] . Since the Cretaceous, says Heirtzler, 171 reversals of the magnetic field have been identified [16] . Others have perceived certain intervals of time to elapse between reversals, 700,000 years, fifteen million years, and so on; several studies claim that the farther back in time one goes, the longer the period between reversals. Some observe much more frequent reversals; they can claim that a reversal occurred 2600 years ago, 3500 years ago, a dozen times during the Pleistocene, and so on. If, they say, we cannot perceive so high a frequency in times more ancient, it is because the reversal is not accompanied by a general melting of rocks and therefore cannot be detected, or it is too faint to be recognized because of disturbances or contamination of the strata. Magnetic reversals may be concealed because sedimentation is too slow to capture its duration, when samples are not closely spaced in time and the reversals are brief, when turbulence and contamination affect samples, when the sediments are dumped or shifted, and when biological activity is high at the level being searched for magnetism [17] . Still indications are strong in favor of heavy magnetic disturbances in the mid-first and mid-second millennia B. C., with ceramic, clay, rock, biostratigraphic, legendary, and historical contributions. As early as 1907, P. L. Marcanton, using Folgheraiter's method, demonstrated magnetic reversal and intensity changes by studies of the magnetic inclinations imprinted upon Bavarian and Etruscan vases of the period 600-800 B. C., a period that in Chaos and Creation I called "Martia." [18] In 1981, K. Games reported upon a similar investigation of Egyptian pottery over a 3000 year period, concluding: "Clearly, the geomagnetic field in Egypt has varied rapidly and by large amounts. The greatest rate of change, which occurred around the maximum at about 1400 B. C. was about 140 manoteslas/ year... and lasted about 300 years either side of the maximum [19] . He did not study directional changes of the field; further, his date of 1400 B. C. is more likely to have fallen in the 8th century, since he was using an unreconstructed chronology which is backwards by 500 years. One important off-shoot of this enthusiastic age of magnetic pole discovery is the belief that the discovery of a new magnetic pole means that a new geographic pole has been discovered. If so, and if what is being discovered are true magnetic reversals, the Earth would have suffered thousands of devastations. A shift in a true geographic pole (as opposed to a purely celestial or sidereal tilt) must involve a shift in the axis of rotation, the worst kind of disaster. Apparently some geologists are runaway catastrophists as long as they can run on free time long past. Munk's title, "Polar Wandering: A Marathon of Errors," [20] deserves sober thought. The significance of this chaos of findings also lies in the association of magnetic reversals with atmospheric, biospheric and lithospheric turbulence. The magnetic field or magnetosphere, even though it is remarkably weak in the farthest stretches of the atmosphere, nevertheless blocks and deflects a host of incoming particles. It acts thus like the ozone layer and atmosphere in general, as a protective shield. If it is removed, or temporarily "shut off" because it is shifting, or overwhelmed or shunted aside by great blasts of gases and charged particles, species extinctions may occur. Kennett and Watkins claim, on the basis of deep-sea drilling, that volcanism was at a peak in coincidence with changing geomagnetic polarity [21] . Wollin, Ericson and Ryan have noted by faunal and oxygen indicators at various sedimentary levels that cool climates may be associated with high magnetic intensity [22] . These may be short-term indicators, since at least by the Solaria Binaria theory, magnetic intensity was stable and high until recently and has since been declining. A sampling of Siluro-Devonian sedimentary sections from the Arctic Archipelago of Canada reveals a common magnetic reversal. The magnetic inclinations suggest a low equatorial latitude. The rocks were apparently laid down under equatorial conditions, and they magnetized rapidly. Unfortunately, if the globe's axis rotation has since tilted or the continents have shifted or a plenum of clouds then covered the globe, the findings of such studies must be discounted; all three probably occurred. That is, the Devonian has long been thought to have been a warm world; the arctic rocks, whether drifted by conventional modern theory or by quantavolutionary theory, would give false paleomagnetic readings, and the geographical poles may well have shifted as late as the end of the ice ages. Also, field reversal is an indicator that worse things may be happening. An incoming giant meteoroid may dislocate the magnetic field in the course of destroying life and blasting rock. Whatever it lays down or heats to melting point will be stamped with a deviant magnetic imprint as it cools, provided the field has not sprung back into its original figure. The complex picture is liable to so many contradictions and misinterpretations that one is tempted to discard it completely. If the magnetic field is due to an original source of electrical current deep in the Earth, can such a current be so fickle, breaking down and resetting itself in a new pattern time after time, so as to mark new orientation upon the rocks and atmosphere above? Runcorn has written that microsecond daily changes in Earth's rotation (one report gives 1 second slowdown every 600,000 years) may cause variations in the shape and intensity of the current; he adds that sudden changes in rotation would produce radial changes in the currents [23] . Michelson argues that the energy required to interchange the Earth's magnetic poles is about that of a moderately strong geomagnetic storm resulting from an intense solar eruption [24] . Meteors have pronounced magnetic effects. Studies to this end by Jenkins, Gilmor, Campbell and Green are summarized by Corliss, and Dachille has also insisted upon the phenomenon [25] . Passing cometary trains exhibit strong electrical disturbances and can cause the same in transacting bodies as in the space plasma. A large meteoroid, whether impacting or passing close by, will disorder the Earth's electromagnetic field. Also, were the Earth to change its orbital position, it would behave like a comet, with a flaring electric tail representing electrical transactions with the unaccustomed medium of passage. The most enthusiastic students of terrestrial magnetic changes are the exponents and developers of continental drift. Prof. Billy Glass once told the author that what convinced him of continental drift was paleomagnetic measurements. These generally are held to correlate positively bands of rock, moving away from the central Atlantic ridge, with time; the older rocks are farther from the ridge. Not only do the magnetic measurements depend upon geochronometry but also upon uniformitarianism, because it is assumed that the lava flood extending from the ridge has been of the same volume-to- time ratio for many millions of years. More on this last point will be brought forward later. To conclude these pages on magnetic and geographical tilts, we can state our position: the geographical figure of the rotating Earth can tilt or reverse north and south, with moderate applied exoterrestrial force and with large holospheric damage. It has done so. The magnetic figure of the Earth will tilt or reverse in general accord with a change of geographical figure, but can also tilt or reverse independently depending upon a large electrical exchange between the Earth and a massive agglomeration in space. It has done so repeatedly. The damage is much less. Both types of change -of geographical and magnetic axes -could not have occurred, by the theory of Solaria Binaria, until the binary system was collapsing, which has been placed in time by the present author and again by Milton and myself at less than 14,000 years ago. There remains a more devastating change, whereby the Earth not only tilts but also emplaces its poles upon a new geographical location. The physical force needed to accomplish such a change is many times greater than that required for the tilt alone, because the rotation of the Earth is both interrupted and altered in orientation. It is known that the Sun changes differentially the rotational speed of its several sections and some sharp movements may occur in connection with solar storms [26] . Too, on Earth, an interrupted rotation is likely to be ramified latitudinally and stratified internally. T. Gold has given attention to such problems; in one place he has demonstrated that the polar positions will change owing to crustal movements and distortions [27] . In another place, too, he insists upon the alteration of the Earth's shape that must accompany a displacement of the geographical poles [28] . He points to the evidence of paleomagnetism as indicating numerous different polar locations over geological time, evidence that we must largely discount. But hard geophysical evidence, as presented by Hapgood, Velikovsky and Cook, for instance, supports belief in a recent ice-age finale that shifted the north geographical pole from a position presently denominated by Baffin Island, 20 south of its present location. There is a measurable spring-back occurring all the way from Scandinavia to the Hudson Bay area, a rising area that may be due to a new rotating figure of the Earth, involving a new equator, and possibly to collapse and sudden removal of a burden of ice that had been weighing down the region. (Inasmuch as the great global cleavage passes through the center of this region, one has to introduce the probability of a forcing apart and expansion of the area between the two rising elements of continental rock.) Surely, if the Moon were to have erupted from the Pacific Basin, the Earth's shape would have been altered, the crust would have been half removed, and the conditions Gold sets for a shift of geographical poles would be satisfied. A great force moving southwestwards would have tilted the globe, removed the crust, cleaved the globe, set the continental fragments into motion, slowed the speed of rotation, and established a new figure of spin, with a new equator and new geographical poles. This occasion may have been the one and only time that the Earth changed its true axis of spin, as opposed to a number of other occasions in which the geographical and magnetic axes tilted. All the historical and legendary allusions to the world "turning like a potter's wheel," to celestial dizziness, to changing constellations, suns standing still, and so on may relate only to tippe-top behavior of the globe. Moderate changes in time, that is, of orbital and rotational motion, are not excluded, involving deceleration of the Earth's rotation, whether momentary (the Gibeon phenomenon) [29] , or permanent. Claims of heavy deceleration, even so, are suspect; with a tilt, the sun may be visually retarded but the Earth's rotation very little affected. The full range of possibilities in tilts has not been completed yet. Two additional ideas remain to be presented. The first concerns crustal slippage. The Earth's shell or crust, contributing about 1% to the Earth's radius, lends about one-thirtieth to the moment of inertia of the whole Earth. Apparently, then, if the shell can slip without an identical movement of the mantle and core, the energy required to change celestial and geographical orientations on the shell would be less than that required for a total reversal or retardation of Earth motions. There are signs that this stratified slippage has occurred in the overwhelming evidence of crustal destruction around the globe as, for example, in the outpourings of lava found everywhere. Even so, the energy required for total shell slippage (following the attraction of a passing body) is formidably high, and where it would be applied is crucial, so that this idea appears, initially at least, to be as totally destructive as any other means of moving the Earth about. However, if this crustal slippage were to occur at the moment when over half the crust was being blasted into space, then obviously the problems of slipping and venting would be greatly lessened, especially with the assistance of fracturing, rifting, and expansion. These topics cannot well be delved into here, and are reserved for treatment in later chapters. Archaeology affords support to the proposition that the Earth has changed position relative to the Sun and the planets in recent antiquity. In connection with the human drive to build settlements according to the prevailing cosmological observations and beliefs, the compass orientation of the constructions presents highly important issues in regard to changes in the Earth and the sky. That the earliest humans felt compelled to address their dwellings and public places to astronomical occurrences is generally granted. No one has yet found an ancient settlement capable of taking some shape that is not sky-oriented. The mind of today's scientist turns first to the Sun, then the routines of the current Sun -the rising and setting, the solstices and equinoxes -to answer all problems of ancient civilizations. When the ruins do not confirm to these directions, then Polaris, the current fixed star of the north, is assumed to guide the primeval builders. One preplexed writer suggested that the Mesoamerican Olmecs aligned their structures with the Big Dipper. When neither the north-south axis nor the solar behavior nor a constellation fits the orientation, then it is that the ancients could not tell directions well, or that the matter in any case was not important to the builders. What is absent from such reasoning? First, there is a failure to appreciate that the desire to orient to the skies was an obsession, a compulsion, an inescapable tradition, a sacred obligation, a proud duty. Second, the ancients, as far back as we can discover their humanity, could calculate readily and exactly the course of heavenly bodies and orient themselves thereto. Many examples of this are presented in G. de Santillana and H. von Dechend's book, Hamlet's Mill [30] , indeed this is the book's theme. Third, not only the Sun, the North Star and the constellations, but also and especially the Moon and the planets were often objects of sacred (which is to say, all-important) architecture. This point has been stressed in numerous works on many cultures. The ancient pyramids of several countries, the design of Greek temples, the Hebrew Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon -these and all other ancient masterpieces were like wedding rings uniting Earth and Heaven. Fourth, when the heavenly bodies deviated from their customary paths or when the Earth shifted its position with respect to them, then the plans of temples, buildings, and settlements were shifted to conform to the new order of the skies. That is, celestial and mundane catastrophes of the past can explain many deviations from present "true" orientations. Controversy naturally is engendered by any claim that the planets and Earth have shifted their axes in million of years, if not billions. Still, every oriented edifice or monument built since about 2600 years ago (after the last of the catastrophic shifts, as argued by Velikovsky) [31] seem to have remained fixed in relation to the present skies, while those built before then appear to have moved. Certain claims of "fixed" structures warrant study. The most famous is the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Recently, the Stonehenge megalithic "astronomical observatory" has also been widely discussed. The age of the Great Pyramid of Ghiza is in question. It has been ascribed to around 3200 B. C. and to other times. But no one suggests that it was built after 687 B. C. or for that matter after 1450 B. C. that is, after the end of the Middle Bronze Age. The West face of the Great Pyramid, which Stecchini believes was drawn first and is the basic face, is oriented 2'30" west of true north [32] . This slight discrepancy, claims Stecchini, may be attributed to the precession of the equinoxes, which occurred from the time at which the plans were drawn to the commencement of work. He thinks that the Egyptians knew of the precession and deliberately allowed this discrepancy. I doubt this thesis, also, which is based partly upon the work of de Santillana and von Dechend, and ascribe the deviation from true north as an increment of continental drift and other seismic movement of the area. A more important question concerns whether the almost perfect north-south orientation means that no tilt or change of poles has occurred since the Great Pyramid was constructed. The following possibilities ensue : 1. The Pyramid was imperfectly oriented to true north. 2. The Pyramid was perfectly oriented to true north but the continuing drift of the African land mass or at least northeastern Africa has amounted to minute disorientation since the Pyramid was built [33] . 3. The Pyramid was oriented to a pre-existing true north, marked by another star. The axis of the earth shifted celestially. But an abundance of stars can be used to mark true north; Polaris is the most recent star and naturally the Pyramid points to it. 4. The Pyramid was oriented to a pre-existing true north, which coincided with the present true north. The Earth's axis tilted on one or more occasions and then tilted back to its former position when it was built. 5. The Pyramid was oriented to the north-south. Subsequently, the rotation of the Earth changed direction, meaning that a new geographical (not celestial) true north was set up, but the rotation was either changed by 180 and therefore south became north, or alternatively, accompanying or subsequent land mass thrusts coincidentally brought the area around Cairo to rest pointing at the true and original north-south axis. Of these five possibilities, the third appears most acceptable within the framework of this book. It would permit a number of axial tilts but only a minimum land-mass movement affecting Egypt since the Pyramid was constructed. This seems to be in accord with the theories advanced in Chaos and Creation that catastrophes subsequent to the great Pyramids construction did not cause major crustal slippage or a changed axis of rotation even though they caused heavy electrical, flooding, hurricane, and volcanic events. Earlier catastrophes involved the major changes in the geographical existence and location of the Earth's land masses. At least so far as the Egyptian area is concerned, Velikovsky's descriptions in the Venusian case (ca 1450 B. C.) especially may be exaggerated; any implication that the geographical masses moved, or the Earth's axis of rotation changed, would have to be discounted. His evidence that the Pyramid shows signs of great seismic stress should be recalled, however. The most resistant material ever sculpted and fitted by mankind was affected visibly by earthshocks that must have been beyond the present limits of the Richter seismic scale. The huge stones placed in circles and lines at Stonehenge, England, can be proven to be only generally oriented to observe solar solstices of the present age. Otherwise they display actual rearrangements of stones, done with immense labor, which can best be accounted for by an axial tilt, that is, by catastrophe. Here, as at other magnetic settings, the earth scientist needs to take into account human motives, asking oneself: is it likely that the stupendous collective labor required to build these great structures, admittedly astronomical, would have been mobilized if the Earth (and hence the skies) were not exhibiting strange and terrifying changes of motion? Was the human urge to control the sources of his terror implicated? Attempts have been made at dating Stonehenge by C14 on organic objects found in association with it. MacKie is of the opinion that the dates of Stonehenge and other megalithic astronomical sighting locations would not permit one to claim reorientations of the Sun after 1500 B. C [34] . Hence, in Joshua's time or on later occasions, reports of the Sun altering its route would have to be considered false. Still, Stonehenge, like the Pyramid, is a catastrophized artifact in the first place, and bears also the marks of catastrophic changes in its settings. The C14 dates are not abundant and consistent, nor generally reliable within the span of centuries. The Mesoamerican sites magnify the uncertainty. There are many of them. All are thought to have been set up after 1500 B. C. Macgowan, (1945), and now we quote Anthony Aveni extensively [35] , ... seems to have been the first person to suggest that the plans of a large number of Mesoamerican cities exhibited an east of north axiality. Among those sites which evidenced some orderly arrangement, he observed that the orientations fell into three groups: true north, about 7 east of north, and about 17 east of north; he noted that few sites were oriented west of north. In the 17 group were Teotihuacan, Cholula, Tenayuca, Mexican period buildings at Chichen Itza, Tula, and the pyramid adjacent to the Zocalo in Mexico City. A number of sites of the Peten District seemed to belong to the 7 group. Macgowan suggested that a historical pattern might emerge in the sense that early structures such as Cuilcuilco possessed a nearly true north axiality while the 17 east of north orientation showed up in the later buildings. Aveni found by transit that fifty of the fifty-six sites surveyed align east of north; the 17 orientations seems to be prevalent in the valley of Mexico. Yet Carlson, working on centers carbon-dated between 1000-1400 B. C. says that "Olmec culture is well-characterized by ceremonial centers, which are generally 7 to 12 west of north..." [36] . This would suggest that tilts of different ages are represented in the two regions, or that the Olmecs, who invented the magnetic compass, may have oriented their buildings to a magnetic north. Almost all of them deviate from true north orientation. According to sacred scripture, the four gods who were born of the creator gods govern the four cardinal points of the Earth's compass, and struggle with each other. It would appear from the chart that, while north-south was the way human construction should be engineered, by present direction lines, frequent changes have occurred. A few years ago, Mesoamerican civilization was considered recent and crude. Today the view has changed and the same respect is given the early Mesoamerican as is accorded to other world civilizations. In 1976, a lodestone compass was claimed for the Olmec civilization at 1000 B. C. or earlier, before the earliest demonstrable Chinese compass. In this case, it cannot be argued that the Mesoamerican were incapable of planning their settlements and public buildings with accurate reference to north or any other cardinal point. In a letter describing a study trip to Central America, Patrick Julig writes: [37] . ... I observed changes in the orientation of the foundations of Mayan buildings between the Archaic and Classical periods. Sometimes there were changes within the same building by as much as 10 in later additions to the structure such as in the Palace at Palanque. This could possibly be a way to date the structures, or at least the foundations, as being pre-687 B. C. One must tentatively conclude that at least Middle America suffered serious crustal slippages. Or, axial tilts occurred frequently and the Mesoamericans were employing a method of determining true north (the Earth's axis of rotation) by a means not dependent upon a star. And, if this technique existed, the alternative presents itself that the object defining true north itself moved on occasion. A second study by Aveni leads us also to believe that astronomical settings have altered in proto-historical times. He and his associates traced and surveyed the orientations of "The Peaked Cross Symbol in Ancient Mesoamerica" in many places [38] . These peaked crosses are not monuments of the highest level, but remind us in some ways of the frequent crude religious sculptures that are to be found at crossways in many places on Earth, dating up even to the present day. The cross represents the application of the Sacred Year to the four quarters of the world, the cardinal directions, the highly significant merging of time and space that the ancient Mesoamericans achieved. Teothihuacan was probably the religious center of ancient Mesoamerica, like Rome of medieval Europe. The fundamental Teotihuacan grid as excavated is oriented 15.5 east of north. Of the some 30 symbols that the Aveni group have assembled from elsewhere in Mexico, the orientations of 19 are given. Of the 19, nine are oriented with in 2 of the Teothihuacan grid. Of the nine, all except one (carved on an outcrop) are on a floor. Of the remaining ten with known orientations, all range between 35 42 and 80 24'; all are incised upon outcrops except one that is on a broken flat stone whose "axis points toward Teothihuacan"( TEP3), and another (TUI) that is "pecked on horizontal floor of lava field." Most of these are considered as pointing towards the summer solstice sunrise, which is rather insulting to the intelligence of the humblest pecker. Are we to believe that they could not find the point of farthest advance of the Sun? And why should outcrops be carved east and floors to the north? It would appear that either (a) the carvers were inexact amateurs with biases towards the east, or (b) the larger part of Mexico shifted its axis by 15.5 to the west of north in response to seismism and/ or a tilt of the Earth's axis in reference to the solar and sidereal system, or a geographical transfer of poles implying a changed axis of rotation, or (c) the axis of Teothihuacan shifted at an early time eastwards from true north and its new position was assigned sacred and ritual meaning, a Holy North to be imitated, just as the 260-day Sacred Year was tenaciously preserved, without a celestial referrent, until modern times, alongside the 360 and 365-day calenders. In the case of (b) and (c), the extreme eastern orientations of the peckings might have been memorial, without special orientation, to Teotihuacan's gods upon the occasion of faulting, fracture and exposure of new rocks. The geology and the relative dating of the peckings are important in considering these alternatives. Especially, the hypothesis can be entertained of a deliberate attempt to follow a fault line (especially if an electrical current were running) in the outcroppings. (If the Etruscan priests took possession of and catologued all aspects of a spot struck by lightning, similar obsessions may be expected among the equally obsessional Mesoamericans.) So long as north-oriented axes were to Holy North, they would be consistent. But east- oriented axes, if there is no "Holy East", would wander with tilt of the Earth's pole, that is perhaps from 30 to 80 , whether in the wake of the Teotihuacan shift or upon some later occasion. The association of the peaked cross symbols with outcroppings must have some significance. If a desperate speculation may be permitted, new outcroppings might have become thereby "holy" too, just as fallen meteoroids have become holy, and perhaps the outcrop orientations might be attempts at affixing the eastern risings of that vagabond planet, Venus. A research of deviating Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Mycenean, Greek and other structural orientations may suggest dates for the construction of earliest Teotihuacan-a subject of some controversy -as well as point to causes of the phenomena of the peaked crosses. Finally, one may observe that the Teotihuacan orientation 15.5 to the east of north could have indicated a transfer of the geographical north pole of the Earth by that amount at some point of time. This shift is not far from the degree of shift in the north pole from a location at Baffin Island to its present location northwest. A number of students believe such shift to have occurred at the "End of the Ice Ages." {S : Notes (Chapter Four: Magnetism and Axial Tilts)} Notes (Chapter Four: Magnetism and Axial Tilts) 1. Paul H. Serson, "Tracking the North Magnetic Pole," Geos (Winter, 1980) 2. II S. I. S. R. 2( 1978), 45. 3. "Magsat down: Magnetic Field Declining", 117 Sci. News (1980), 407. 4. Thomas G. Barnes, 8 Creation Res. Soc. Q. 1( 1971) 24-9; 9 C. R. S. Q. 4 (1973) 322- 30; 18 C. R. S. Q. (June 1981) 39-41; II. Soc. for Interdisciplinry Stud. R. 2 (1978) 42-5, 4( 1978), 110-11. 5. Allan Cox, "Geomagnetic Reversals," 163 Sci. (17 Jan. 1969) 237-45; C. J. Waddington, Sci., 17 Nov. 1967; Cf. J. Eberhart, "Of Life and Death and Magnetism," Sci. News (Mar. 27, 1976), 9. 6. R. Juergens, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," 2 PensÚe 3 (Fall, 1972), 6-12. 7. Geoffrey Gammon, "Focus: Catastrophism Old and New," V SISR 2 (1980-81), 34. 8. Peter Warlow, The Reversing Earth (London: Dent, 1981). 9. 198 Nature (13 April 1963), 176. 10. Worlds in Collision, 105-20. See also, A. W. Perrins, (tr., 3 S. I. S Workshop 1 (July 1980) 27-8, on the reversed burials of Pharaohs, the inscription of Horemheb's tomb that the Sun rises in the West, and Rameses II at Abu Simbel facing East rather than the orthodox western way to where, with his false beard, he should be oriented. 11. VII Kronos (Winter 1982), 86-94, 92. 12. V. J. Slabinski, "A dynamical objection to the inversion of the Earth on its spin axis," 14 J. Physics A. (1981) 2503-7. 13. "Straka: Science or Anti-Science," I PensÚe (Fall 1972), 16. 14. S. Matsushita and W. H. Campbell, eds. Physics of Geomagnetic Phenomena (New York: Academic Press, 1967). 15. P. L. Lapointe et al., "What happened to the High-Latitude Paleomagnetic Poles," 273 Nature (22 June 1978), 655. 16. J. R. Heirtzler, "Seafloor Spreading," 219 Sci. Amer. (1968), 60-70. 17. Thomas McCreery, "Krupp and Velikovsky," VI Kronos 3 (1981), 44-5. 18. 112 Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles (1907), 467-82. 19. New Scientist (11 June 1981); cf. Brian Moore, note in V S. I. S. Rev. 2( 1980-1), 38, and 4 S. I. S. Workshop 2 p. 17. 20. W. H. Munk, 177 Nature 4508 (24 Mar. 1956). 21. J. P. Kennett and M. D. Watkins, "Geomagnetic Polarity Change, Volcanic Maxima and Faunal Extinction in the South Pacific," 227 Nature (29 Aug. 1970), 930-4. 22. G. Wollin, D. B. Ericson and W. B. F. Ryan, "Variations in Magnetic Intensity and Climatic Changes," 232 Nature (20 Aug. 1971), 549-50. 22a. P. Lapointe and P. Dankers, "L'arctique Canadien sous un climat equatorial?" Geos (Summer, 1982), 12-6. 23. S. K. Runcorn, "The Earth's Magnetism," 193 Sci. Amer. (Sept. 1955). 152. 24. Irving Michelson, "Mechanics Bear Witness," 4 PensÚe (Spring 1974), 15-21. 25. A. W. Jenkins, et al., 65 J. Geophys. Res. (May 1960), 1617-19, and in Corliss, compiler, op. cit., GMM-001 to 4 in G2. 26. "Solar Rotation," 202 Science (8 Dec. 1978), 1079. 27. "Irregularities in the Earth's Rotation," in two parts, 17 Sky and Telescope, (March 1958) 216-8 and (April 1958), 284-6. 28. "Instability of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 175 Nature (26 Mar. 1955), 526-9. 29. J. Gribbin and S. Plagemann, "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate Following Great Solar Storm of August 1972," 243 Nature (4 May, 1973), 26-7; AndrÚ Danjon, Comptes Rendus des SÚances de l'AcadÚmie des Sciences, series B, 250: 1399 (22 Feb. 1960), 254: 2479-82 (2 Apr. 1962), 254: 3058-61 (25 Apr. 1963). 30. Boston: Gambit, 1969. 31. See Velikovsky, "The Orientation of the Pyramids," 3 PensÚe 3 (fall), 20-1. 32. L. C. Stecchini, Appendix to Peter Tompkins: Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 380. 33. Cf. G. S. Pawley and N. Abrahamson, 179 Science (2 Mar. 1973), 892. 34. Euan W. Mackie, "Megalithic Astronomy and Catastrophism," 4 PensÚe 5 (Winter), 5- 20; "Megalithic Astronomy: Neolithic Stone Circles," I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1976), 2- 4. 35. Anthony Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America (Austin, Texas: U. of Texas Press, 1975). 36. John B. Carlson, "Lodestone Compass: Chinese or Olmec Primacy?" 189 Science (5 Sept. 1975), 753-60. 37. To William Mullen, 1974 n. d. Julig studied the famous Nazca earth lines of Peru and concluded that they might represent lines of meteoritic falls from which the (sacred) burnt stones were removed. 38. A. Aveni. H. Hartung and B. Buckingham, 202 Science (20 Oct. 1978), 286-79. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART I: } {Q ATMOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 5} {T Electricity} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part I: Atmospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE ELECTRICITY Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, came to the attention of a contemporary physicist delving into the occult, and he, J. Ziegler, has supplied us with this quotation which can introduce this chapter and the next: The philosophers know the distinction between common and mysterious fire. The First that serves man's use is one thing. The fire that ministers to the judgement of God is another, whether flashing the thunderbolts from the heaven or rushing up from the earth through the mountain tops. For it does not consume what it burns, but, even while it spends it, repairs the loss. So the mountains remain, ever burning; and he who is touched by fire from heaven is safe -no fire shall turn him to ashes. Lightning expresses only a small fraction of electrical processes. Electricity is everywhere. It presents itself in the smallest particle and, some of us believe, commands the behavior of every remote galaxy of stars. It is part and parcel of every natural transaction. Perhaps it is the hunger of protons for electrons that initiates all natural behavior, whatever the scale or intensity. Earth scientists have been reluctant to admit electricity to their domain. There is a confined interest in "hard" lightning, taken over by metereologists now, and geophysics must trespass upon nuclear physics in connection with chemical bonding and radioactivity. Historically, earth scientists have led the parade of debunkers when meteoroids were reported to fall or when lightning took unusual forms. Of course, when geologists stood upon mountain tops and St. Elmo's fire flowed from their beards and hammers, they could not well deny this "god's fire" of the ancients [1] . But one searches in vain for a treatise on St. Elmo's fire, one of the oldest and most fascinating phenomena continuously reported. In fact, there exists no treatise on the full range of electrical behaviors related to geology. This universal presence of electricity in geological events does not excite systematic attention, no more than it has in astronomical events up to the present. If one seeks a rational explanation for this neglect, it may lie in the unreadiness of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere to display their electrical history, letting the electrical be considered transient and superficial. If one seeks non-rational explanations of an ideological or psychiatric sort for such avoidance, it may be in the quixotic or miraculous appearances of electrical phenomena. Bordering upon the religious and the occult, these set up psychological resistances among "hard" scientists. As we shall see, even the famous subject of lightning, which can hardly be ignored, is little understood. The latest literature on lightning is still at the state of trying to survey its extent and intensity, and not even its forms are classified. The ancient Etruscans thought that they could discern eleven different types. So wrote Pliny, but a modern Etruscan expert, Rilli, says that they recognized thirty kinds of lightning [2] . Ancient sources that refer to fire often are speaking of electricity, "god's fire." Applying the modern meaning of "fire" as combustion and conflagration, one cannot comprehend their outlook. To early theologians and philosophers," fire" meant a set of qualities exhibited by the "aether", loosely translated as "air", and when "air" was considered a basic element of existence, electrical phenomena were deemed to be integral with it. The large importance given to electrical phenomena in ancient times, drives us to believe that their manifestations were much more in evidence. Furthermore, although there are a few indications that the Egyptians may have employed wire on occasion to transmit electricity, unquestionably they were preoccupied with electrostatics, the exploitation of the generous and ready electrical potentials of the ground atmosphere. This I have discussed in my study of Moses. Lately, the ionization of the atmosphere has come to be studied. Even the ground beneath our feet has come to be conceived as a conveyor of waves of numerous types, ranging from the gross seismic tremors that topple whole cities to the delicate motions of the wire in the hands of dowsers in search of underground water [3] . Ions are electrified particles; they affect the growth, fibres and nervous system of plants, animals, and humans in ways mostly unknown [4] . Many students think that an abundance of negative ions in the atmosphere produces a sense of well-being, but that "excessive" positive ions provoke depression, irritability, and illness. The Earth's surface contains a charge; it too is unknown in extent and effects [5] . The charge is called negative originally because it is of the kind that comes from rubbed resin, and conventionally because it comes from the ground. On a clear day an electric potential of about 100 volts per meter of height occurs. The charge of Earth tends to persist in the absence of exoterrestrial intrusions, employing the lower atmosphere as an insulator. The charge in our opinion, will have varied greatly over the human past. Then its variation, as well as its constancy, must have had significant effects upon human behavior and ecology. The Earth may have presumed once to have been in the grip of a constant heavy charge, for reasons that will unfold below and are also treated in Solaria Binaria. It began to lose this charge, both gradually and in series of catastrophic discharges. Today, solar flares excite large surges in the flow of charge from upper atmosphere to ground. Too, thunderstorms may be principally a method of balancing the atmosphere-lithosphere equation by releasing ground electricity [6] . There persist certain phenomena that may reflect this decline of charge. All over the world there are pathways that were worked out mysteriously (part instinctively and part deliberately) by ancient men and that are followed today. Michell has sought out the English paths especially. He shows that they are often not the shortest way between two points [7] . Rather they have seemingly pursued geodetic "power lines" which thereupon developed as religious routine, ritually followed. As with many customs, people follow behavior that originally had a perceived and sound meaning. Waterlines have been explored successfully by following the cues provided by traditional water-dowsers. It may well be that underground water moves along paths which are electrically distinctive. In other cases, it may emulate the course of lightning that once travelled along root networks and also fractures formed by lightning. Seismic fractures also are important conduits of water. Lightning has been used as a kind of naturally-provided instrument for studying the electrical nature of the ground. Aside from numerous ancient observations along these lines, a few modern studies exist [8] to indicate that soils of high conductivity (e. g. marshes) are lightning-prone; that ironstone outcrops attract lightning; that strata discontinuties attract lightning. So do underground springs; so do areas of high negative ion concentrations. Masts, lightning conductors, and buried metal pipes invite strokes. Experiments by Stekolnikov showed that soils attracted sparks depending upon their conductivity. Certain trees are stroke-prone, the oak, for example. The variety of effects is scarcely understood -the fancy dendritic patterns sometimes displayed underground, the killing of flocks of sheep, the escape unimpaired of a girl enveloped in lightning flames, the subsequent death of a man seemingly unaffected at the moment of stroke, and so on. In 1977 an American physicist, J. Ziegler, published a study of the knowledge and uses of electrostatics among the ancient Hebrews and other peoples of the Near East and Greece [9] . His thesis, elaborated shortly thereafter by the present author in a book on the period of Moses, maintained that these ancient peoples possessed devices for inducing and displaying electrical effects in their religious practices. The most spectacular of the devices was Moses' Ark of the Convenant, which G. C. Lichtenberg, a German Electrician of the 18th Century, termed a form of Leyden jar. The Leyden jar is called an electric capacitor. A metal rod based upon a metal lining within an insulating (e. g. wood) vessel will store a charge from the air. When the outside of the vessel is also lined with metal that is in touch with the ground, an opposite charge is induced. The potential between the two poles may accumulate to a level at which a spark will jump the gap between them. The frequency, brilliance, and power of the spark or arc (Ark = box = Aron in old Hebrew) depend upon the size of the gap and the voltage differential that is generated. The condition of the atmosphere and ground are critical factors. The higher the box and the wetter its grounding contact, the greater the electrical effects. That is, the effectiveness and potency of the devices depends upon local conditions that can to some degree be manipulated. Aside from this, the general electrical state of the Earth and atmosphere (including exoterrestrial influences affecting these bodies) determines the overall effect. In an atmosphere where electrical and dust turbulence were prevalent, as in times of Exodus and other periods that I have identified elsewhere, and the Earth was discharging at an effectively higher level than it is today, the incitement of electric displays without motors, pumps, and wires was easy: large potential differences continuously presented themselves for exploitation. Electrical effects became essential to political and religious roles and were subjects of jealous contention within and between governments. A full social analysis is presented in my treatise on Moses; what may be stressed here is that the existence and activity of such devices evidences that the Earth was then in a state of heightened electrical activity relative to modern times. With the settling of the skies, the intensity of electric phenomena diminished. The divine spark manifested itself less and less; the arks were carried more and more up to the mountain temples (e. g. both the Temple of Solomon and the Temple of Jeroboam). The angels, demons, and mountain gods manifested themselves in electrical demonstrations on high with the aid of crosses, trees, and poles [10] . These, too, could not be maintained. Empedocles, when discussing the four elements, fire, earth, air and water, says that fire has ceased to "travel", and no lower forms of fire remain [11] . Plutarch wrote at the end of the pagan age an essay on why the highly placed Delphic oracle had lost its influence; he gave the vaguest of references indicating a failure of electric current, but the question itself is significant [12] . By late classical times, the knowledge of arks and of the exploitation of "god's fire" was largely defunct. Yahweh became "invisible", who before, declares the Bible, could be seen in flaming display upon the Ark of Moses. So later philosophers gave new meanings to words: realities became metaphors and abstractions; thus, the "word" and "presence" of the divine became thoughts, rather than the noises and signs of electrical divinity. The profuse electrical references in the Bible, in ancient Near East documents and Greek Mythology, in the Hindu Vedas -all were reduced to metaphors, generalized into ordinary meanings ('fire' becomes 'conflagration'), and metaphysical abstractions (the commandment to worship no other God nor image is interpreted philosophically rather than realistically). The obelisks whose points once lit up as the eyes of the hidden god Amon (Amen) came to be variously interpreted as giant sundials, emblems of royal power, phallic symbols, or sign boards for vainglorious inscriptions. As Ziegler suggests, the Greek word "obelisk" itself might have meant "ob-el-ish," or "serpent-light-fire." Von Fange recounts a century-old report on a Babylonian ziggurat, which may have been the Tower of Babel. The structure can be placed several centuries earlier than Moses but also in a highly electrical epoch. It appeared that fire struck the tower and split it down to the very foundation. In different parts of the ruins immense brown and black masses of brickwork had changed into a vitrified state. At a distance the ruins looked like edifices torn apart at their foundations. Evidently the fiercest kind of fire created the havoc. The most curious of the fragments found several misshapen masses of brickwork, black, subjected to some kind of heat, and completely molten. The whole ruin has the appearance of a burnt mountain. On one side, beneath the crowning masonry, lay huge fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcined and vitreous surface of the brick had fused into rock-like masses. It is difficult to explain the cause of the vitrification of the upper building. Great boulders were vitrified, and brickwork had been fused by fire [13] . Here possibly was cosmic fire. Another effect deserves mention. A major electrical discharge in which a number of humans are stimulated, as in a town on an eminence, may proceed slowly and without killing. It leaks rather than blasts. It might affect people's minds. Today, a fearful side-effect of electroshock therapy, which is used to treat persons suffering from depression, is amnesia; whole sections of the person's store of memories will be erased. The Tower of Babel was probably erected at a time when electrical perturbations were attributed, if my analysis in Chaos and Creation is correct, to movements of the planet Mercury [14] . The arrogance of the builders in attempting to reach the sky was punished, recites the Bible, but in a peculiar way. They who spoke the same language when they began their work were caused to "babel" in many tongues. The Earth shook long beforehand; the tower partly sank into the ground, so say Jewish legends; but also much of the tower was destroyed by fire from the sky. The work had to be abandoned and afterwards the nations spoke different languages. I offer a scenario for consideration. The Tower of Babel was being built in terror and hope of appeasing sky-bodies, possibly Jupiter-Marduk or Mercury. Conscripts or slaves of many countries made up a work force of 50,000 men. They put together a rough lingua franca from the language of the area to communicate on the job. The approach of a large body (there were actually many adoring and frightened references to planet Mercury around this time) occasioned the build-up of charge and then a flowing discharge through the structure, creating a confusion in administrative orders and a linguistic amnesia especially in the lingua franca. No longer could people understand each other. And then the whole edifice was stuck by immense cosmic bolts, partly fractured, and exploded. "Slow lightning" is the geologically and biologically effective discharge of terrestrial electricity. A "slow lightning flood" may be conceivable, too. The curious vitrified forts of Scotland may be a case in point [15] . They remind us of the Ziggurat of Babylon. Their stone and mortar are fused solidly with the clifftops to which they adhere. The forts are much in need of study. The early interpretations of them as cattle pens is uncomplimentary to a people that lived in hovels that experienced no such fusion. The idea of brush being heaped outside the precipitous walls, and then burning them with an intense heat, would require a mobile ceramics oven and vent. We would argue that the lightning here was not "bolt-thin" and "lightning-quick" but poured upwards over seconds, diffusing through its medium, ferruginously-mortared stone. There would have been an approaching unequally charged great body or gas cloud that had pierced the electrically balanced plasma and drawn away or brushed aside the magnetic space sheath of Earth. The Earth below would have collected on its highest surfaces a charge to meet the incoming charge. This would begin to flow upwards. Heavy leader strokes descending would have collapsed the roofs of houses. A tube of ionized dust would arise and descend, make contact from both ends and set up a fierce heat that would scorch its "vessels." A final flash, and then the body would pass or the cloud dissipate, and a rain of dust and vapors would fall back upon the ground, calcinating it. It is probable that many thousands of burnt eminences exist around the world whose tops have seen the fusion of rocks, perhaps even Troy IIg, the "Burnt City" so-called [16] . The famous site, whether or not it was the real Troy, is on an eminence. While not high, the city would have had many small reservoirs of water, whereas the ground outside might already have been dried out. In Troy IIg a sulphurous color suffuses all outdoor spaces and passageways of the town. A deposit of lead and copper melted and flowed around the town. (It is possible that this melt had been scavanged after Schliemann reported it in the 1880's and the discoloration was all that was discoverable when the Blegen expedition re-excavated the site in the 1930's). No human hand could have or would have set such a fire. The heat was fierce. The ash was far too abundant for a deliberate fire from local materials, and carried a red color. In places it was like calcinated rock, a meter or more in depth, perhaps like the vitrified Scottish forts. No one would have wanted to destroy precious metals (not so mention even more precious metal left in abundance in the scorched houses and the Treasure of Priam, found on a Wall). Noteworthy is the absence of human and animal skeletal material in the ruins. Either they turned to dust from the heat, or the electrical build-up was sensed, as it is by animals before earthquakes for example, and they fled from the hill onto the plain where the sensations were absent. Perhaps a heavily charged cosmic body was approaching or was near the Earth with an opposite charge or inducing one to collect on Earth; this would cause numerous discharges. Every eminence, one might imagine, would offer an exit for lightning, especially if it held the slightest metallic component, and were not surrounded by damp lowlands. Buildings are not needed. If settlements seem to have been affected by slow lightning flood, unsettled eminence should often have endured the same experience. I have explored as a candidate a conical hill of Stylida, Naxos, Greece (Alt. 152m) [17] . The top is a hard silicate with bits of ferruginous rock in the eroded (burst?) rubble. It nests among loose, hardly consolidated rocks that have fast fallen away from the columnar core. This phenomenon is usually seen as an ancient metamorphosis. Somehow the temperature of water-laden deep limestones and granites mounted and caused them to nearly melt and to rise. Limestone is a common environment of silicification. Silification is abundant around igneous metamorphism. In a hot and fast reaction, siliceous fluid is introduced hydrothermally and replaces the host rock, such as limestone, into which it intrudes. Such is the case where an electric charge is seeking an exit from far below. With or without water, a hot electric discharge current can assemble and proceed quickly up the core of a hill, heating and silicifying as it move. On top of the hill, it forms a cap just as caps will form on the sparking end of a discharging rod. The charge, that is, uses the plastically flowing rock as a conductor and then builds a deposit from which it may discharge more easily. The taller the mountain, the less time and chance for the siliceous fluid to reach and cap its peak. At the same time, electricity of this type may even build mountains. Juergens has suggested that mounds may have been formed on the planet Mars by the same process. An electrical process may also be involved in the vigorously erupting mountains of Io, satellite of Jupiter. These are casting material to heights of several hundred kilometers from caldera-like structures. Unless Io is newly emplaced, all water or carbon dioxide would have long ago been exhausted as propellent media. Spectroscopy evidences no water on Io, moreover. Sulfur would be too heavy to gain the speed of eruption required for such lofty explosions. Therefore, Thomas Gold turns to the electric current of 5x10 6 amperes that cyclones upwards from the Jovian surface arguing that it is "largely conducted through the body of Io [18] . The current contracts along a narrow tube of passage which is kept hot and therefore more conductive. As it emerges into cold space, the current encounters conductive resistance and, hence, forms heat spots of several thousands of degrees kelvin. "Most current spots are likely to be volcanic calderas, either provided by tectonic events within Io or generated by the current heating itself." The electric volcanism is steadied by the "accurately repeating" electric arc from Jupiter. So now we find here a model for processes that may once have occurred on Earth as well, supposing a sufficiently intense terrestrial discharge were occurring at a weak spot for even a few days. The "slow lightning" may shape not only eminences but also subterranean cavities. Von Fange writes that "The same phenomenon has been observed in the mounds and barrows of the British Isles. Some have at one time been filled with an intense heat. Their walls are melted and their contents fused. The stones of the innermost cell of a long barrow near Maughold on the Isle of Man have been fused together like the mysterious vitrified towers of Scotland and elsewhere." [19] Many Egyptian tombs and the interiors of pyramids are scarred by intense heat. Caliche (CaCO3) adhering to bones and rock undersides in a California burial cairn provide radiometric dates of 19,000 to 21,000 years, whereas archaeological estimates of the many such cairns give 5,000 B. P. or less [20] . The famed caves of Aquitaine (France) [21] whose primeval users carved and sculpted images upon the walls, may surprise the naive visitor. One expects to find a general similarity of the interiors. Not at all. Each interior is unique. Some are serpentine, others like grand ballrooms; some have magnificent silicate columns and startling naturally formed shapes; others are plain and dull, save for the signs of human occupancy. All are of limestone; all are elevated, if only slightly, above the flat river and stream valleys around. Why are they so different? Caves are said to be formed by the percolation of water through weak stone, cracked stone, or interstices of layers of stone. The filtering drops become trickles, and then streams. The cavity is enlarged. The river deviates or dries up and the interior is prepared for occupancy. Time elapsed may be "millions of years." However, Worrad reports that limestone caves can be rapidly formed by water -"that in one year a cave of 3ft. x 6ft. cross section x 120ft. long would be formed per square mile of the surface," and opines that the Deluge [not to mention other floods] provided huge amounts of water for limestone solution and cave foundation [22] . Dripstone would be formed rapidly, too. A National Geographic Magazine photograph (1953) carried a picture of a bat "entombed" inside a stalagmite, which, therefore, could not have formed at the "0.001 inch per annum or so rates " usually assumed [23] . In Brixham caves (Devonshire), the bones of fossil mammals, of the types drawn in the Caves of Dordogne, are stuck in the ceiling -so writes a correspondent, U. E. Ramage, to this author -as well as in the sides and floor. In as much as these species' extinctions were quite recent, this shows that it may not take long to hollow out a cave. Furthermore, the small cave is "prettily ornamented with concrete growths." [24] So we would appear to have a very recent catastrophic bone assemblage of animals, then or soon extincted as species, followed by a geologically instant cave-making, and prompt furbishing with stalagmites and stalagtites. Although water may quickly hollow out caves, the role of electricity is not to be ignored. Electric fields, as Asakawa has demonstrated experimentally, enhances heat transfer in nearby gases ( up to 1.5 times); liquids (up to 2.0 times) and solids (up to 1.6 times), depending upon the positioning of electrodes and the strength of the applied fields [25] . Perhaps caves are ancient hotspots, electrical calderas, where creation time is shortened by the blasting impatience of electrical arc currents. {S : Notes (Chapter Five: Electricity)} Notes (Chapter Five: Electricity) 1. Cf. 44 abstracts of such experiences in Wm. Corliss, Sourcebook GLD-001 to 044, GI-81 to 110. 2. Pliny, Natural History, Rockham tr. (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967), II. LIII; N. Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Florence: Giuntina, 1964). 3. Guy Underwood, The Pattern of the Past (London: Abacus, 1972) Treats dowsing, electricity, geodetic lines, and cultural associations all together. 4. Fred Soyka and Alan Edmonds, The Ion Effect (Toronto: Seal Books, 1978); S. W. Tromp, op. cit., 112-5. 5. Fernando Sanford, Terrestrial Electricity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U. Press, 1931), Chapter 4. 6. "Solar Activity and Terrestrial Thunderstorms," 81 New Scientists (1979), 256. 7. A View Over Atlantis, (1969). 8. See the survey of unusual ground effects by B. L. Goodlet, J. Inst. of Elec. Eng. 81 (1937), 1-26. 9. Jerry Ziegler (pseud. Zeromiah II), YHWH, Princeton: Metron Publns., 1977. 10. Ibid., 53ff. 11. Hock, God in Greek Philosophy, 99, cited in Ziegler. 12. "Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers," IV, 56. See Ziegler, Chapter 19. 13. Erich A. von Fange, "Strange Fire on the Earth," 12 Creat. Res. Soc. Q. (Dec. 1975), 132. 14. Op. cit., 210 ff. 15. James Anderson, 5 Archaelogia (1777), 241-66; ibid., (1980), 87-99. and see the materials reprinted in W. R. Corliss, Strange Artifacts (Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook Project, 1974) vols. M-1, M-2, under "Forts." 16. A. de Grazia, "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by Fire in Pre-Historic and Ancient Times." I Kronos (April 1975), 25-36; II Kronos (August, 1975), 63-71. 17. The author thanks geologists Dr. Gerd Roesler and Dr. Poul Andriessen, who aided me notwithstanding their scepticism. 18. "Electrical Origin of the Outbursts of Io," 206 Sci (30 Nov. 1979), 107 1-3. On sulphur as the medium, cf. Guy J. Consolmagno, "Sulfur Volcanos on Io," 205 Sci (27 July 1979), 396-7. 19. Op. cit., 132. 20. P. J. Wilke, "Cairn Burials of the California Deserts," 43 Amer. Antiquity (1978), 444-8. 21. Inter alia cf. J. P. Rigaud and B. Vanderneersch, eds., Sud-Ouest (Aquitaine et Charente): Livret-Guide de 1' Excursion A4, IX CongrÚs U. I. S. P. R. Paris, 1976. 22. Worrad, Creat. Sci. Res. Q. 197; see also letters by D. Cardona and B. Raymond in 3 PensÚe (Winter, 1973), 48-50; and E. L. Williams and R. J. Herdklotz "Solution and Deposition of Calcium Carbonate in a Laboratory Situation," 13 Creat. Res. Sci. Q. (March 1977), 192-9. 23. Ltr. of Felix Fernando, III PensÚe (1973), 50, citing Nat. Geog. (Oct. 1953). 24. 8 Sept. 1967 from Ceylon; Villey Aellen And P. Strinati, Guide des Grottes d'Europe (Paris: Delachaux, 1975), 130. 25. Y. Asakawa, "Promotion and retardation of heat transfer by electric fields," 261 Nature (20 May 1976), 220-1. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART I: } {Q ATMOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 6} {T Cosmic and Terrestrial Lightning} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part I: Atmospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX COSMIC AND TERRESTRIAL LIGHTNING A powerful, highly developed and mysterious people of ancient Italy, the Etruscans, believed in the strictest set of relationships between the small Earth and the great and divine Universe [1] . They planned their cities astronomically, as did all early peoples, but, more specifically, worshiped lightning and gave "the thunderbolting god" Jupiter to the Romans. They founded a College of Lightning Arts (ars fulminum) at Visul. When a bolt of lightning struck, the ground became at that instant hallowed; no one might disturb it until priests made a site inspection and had concluded which of thirty types of lightning it was and what should be done about it [2] . They dug wells to receive lightning and marked the wells with the bidental symbol of Jupiter (Zeus), a two-pronged spear. Zeus has been variously portrayed as the hurler of cosmic lightning, with a two or three-pronged spear, and even hurling a bolt whose shape was not forked lightning but like an American football, a plasmoid perhaps, a kind of lightning bomb [3] . All mountains were sacred to thunderbolting Jupiter. Seneca, the Roman stoic and dramatist, has him dissolving mountain ranges with his bolts [4] . The Bible says the same of Yahweh, all this and more. Psalm 97 gives us : "His lightnings lighten the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth." The Babylonians speak so of Marduk, the Indians of Shiva, the Persians of Mazda. Other gods played with lightning and fire -Hephaistos, Apollo, Hermes, etc. but Jupiter was the overwhelming lightning god. Giambattista Vico believed that lightning was less on Earth in the damp age of Saturn, before Jupiter, because of deluges. It is noteworthy that satellite maps of terrestrial lightning published this year (1981) by Orville and Vonnegut show a dearth of discharges upon oceanic surfaces [5] . Satellites have also shown that a realm of lightning bolts a thousand times more powerful than the ordinary terrestrial bolts dominates the upper atmosphere [6] . The Etruscans said that their great city of Volsinium, by what is now Lago Bolsena, was destroyed by a thunderbolt of Mars. They believed that a portent or an inducement to the awful act came from rituals performed by their King [7] . This was about the time that Rome was founded, likely by near descendants of fugitives from grave disasters in the Near East [8] . The famous Seven Hills of Rome themselves may be a set of extinct volcanos, according to an early French geologist. Since few scientists believe in cosmic thunderbolts, this report of Lake Bolsena has never been thoroughly investigated. The Italian anthropologist-geologist Leonardi assured me that the lake basin is a typical extinct volcano. Velikovsky accepted the lightning thesis [9] . Geographer Donald Patten calls it a meteoric crater-lake because it lacks a volcano talus, is oval shaped, 7x9 miles, and is bottomed by lava and ash [10] . Until an intensive investigation is made, Leonardi's expertness must weigh heavily in our judgement. J. E. Strickling has guided the author to a passage in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews( I, 240) where, it is said, " the day whereon God visited him (Abraham) was exceedingly hot, for He had bored a hole in hell, so that its heat might reach as far as the earth..." Was this hole dug by a meteoroid impact, a lightning stroke (downwards or upwards), or a volcanic outburst? That it would have been a sudden occurrence, and that other studies indicate probably exoterrestrial (hence volcanic) disturbances in Abraham's time and that Abraham's God was a God of lightning are bits of fact to consider with the larger mosaic being pieced together here. Archaeologist Nicola Rilli dug in one location at Prato (near Florence) and found three distinct heavy ash layers defining three distinct periods of prehistory [11] . He found a small silo grain, intact but carbonized, a fact that he ascribed to a great fire that had been suffocated. Lightning fires may have played a role in the burnings. Recent astrophysical opinion regards Jupiter as a hot hyper-active planet that exchanges bolts with its satellite Io over a distance of 50,000 miles. The bolts are frequent enough to be an arc or current. Strangely, Pliny described great thunderbolts as the "fire of the three upper planets," not to be confused with terrestrial lightning [12] . Today lightning could not discharge over the great distance between Jupiter and Earth, not unless Jupiter were to explode, a great cloud of gases that would drift between the planets and provide a conductor for the electric spark. Something akin to discharge can affect the Earth and Sun, though, when the great planet is in conjunction with Earth and Sun, as Gribben and Plageman have propounded [13] . However, according to the theory of Solaria Binaria which we have advanced in another book, the two bodies were once nearer, there were remnants of a gaseous envelope between Sun and Jupiter, and there were sporadic efforts to push through discharges along the defunct axis of an electrical current that had once connected the bodies. Since Earth was descending upon this axis, which became the ecliptic plane it may have experienced the reported Jovian bolts. These would still be discharging from time to time, seeking to make contact with the Sun and being short-circuited by Earth and probably other intervening bodies. It may be surmised, too, that, upon the nova and fission of Super-Saturn (Saturn- Jupiter), not only would water and debris be discharged into interplanetary space, but also gases that would temporarily afford Jupiter its chance to earn its reputation as the discharger of interplanetary thunderbolts. Not until the arc flashes had quite disappeared, the gaseous medium had been quite dissipated, and the Earth drifted out of its binary-locked, conjunctive orbit with Jupiter would the cosmic lightning cease to threaten the Earth with a bolt from the blue. Replacing the binary current and magnetic gas tube were two contemporary phenomena: the solar winds and the space plasma. The solar winds are not a current, but are unfocussed particle flows and blasts. They diffuse into space rather than concentrate upon the planets. Earth receives only a very small fraction of the solar radiance. The space plasma that surrounds the planets is composed of dissociated ionized atoms that generally do not assemble in electrical charges [14] . It protects the Earth and other planets from inducing and suffering repeated cosmic discharges. And it prevents leakage of the remaining charge of Earth, which may indeed be building up. However, the space sheath or magnetosphere of the Earth cannot suffice as a buffer when large or fast erratic bodies approach. In the Venusian catastrophe, cosmic lightning played a heavy role. Cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky's reconstruction, encountered the Earth in the spring of 1453 B. C. and followed roughly its orbit for some days. The comet with its millions of miles of tail appeared and reappeared as the Earth continued with interruptions its rotation. On the second approach, after six days had passed, a gigantic column towered into the sky, a pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, as Exodus 14: 19 describes it. This stage was accompanied by violent and incessant discharges between the atmosphere of the tail and the terrestrial atmosphere. When the tidal waves rose to their highest point, and the seas were torn apart, a tremendous spark flew between the earth and the globe of the comet, which instantly pushed down the miles-high billows. Meanwhile, the tail of the comet and its head, having become entangled with each other by their close contact with the earth, exchanged violent discharges of electricity. It looked like a battle between the brilliant globe and the dark column of smoke. In the exchange of electrical potentials, the tail and the head were attracted one to the other and repelled one from the other. From the serpentlike tail extensions grew, and it lost the form of a column. It looked now like a furious animal with legs and with many heads. The discharges tore the column to pieces, a process that was accompanied by a rain of meteorites upon the earth. It appeared as though the monster were defeated by the brilliant globe and buried in the sea, or wherever the meteorites fell. The gases of the tail subsequently enveloped the earth." [15] I would depart from the scenario mainly to suggest that the column of smoke seen everywhere was probably a mixture of the comet's tail and the "catastrophic column" (as Kelly and Dachille picture it). The main contact between Earth and Venus occurred at this point were the main discharge left Earth carrying upwards surface material and building then and there a "great chemical factory" of Venusian and Earth raw materials [16] . Legends from around the world describe this engagement. It is the battle between Marduk and the dragon Tiamat, between Isis and Seth, between Vishnu and the serpent (or Krishna and serpent), between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between the Lord and Rahab and, the most widely known of all, between Zeus and Typhon. Velikovsky proceeds, after citing these legends, to place the comet Typhon in the mid- second millennium B. C., at the time of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Bimson has established the pharaoh of Egypt just then as the first Hyksos King by the name of Typhon [17] . Typhon is related to Typhon (South Seas), Toufan (Arabs), and is another version of the legend of Phaeton. Legends, myths sacred scriptures, and ancient historians have been mobilized to support the theory of the encounter. That Venus also suffered is logical; it still faces Earth "respectfully" in "resonance", upon its near passage [18] . Electrical phenomena akin to lightning are associated with volcanism, earthquakes, and meteoritic phenomena, including atmospheric pass-through and impact explosions. They may also be an independent "instrument of the gods," as strong or stronger than gravitation in their effects when two dense bodies approach one another closely. Further, cosmic electricity may traverse a whole star system or planetary system. C. E. R. Bruce of the British Electrical Association for many years sought recognition of the place of electricity and lightning in the creation and destruction of whole galaxies of the universe [19] . He described lightning discharges of 6x10 11 miles in width and ten times as long generating temperatures of 5x10 8 degrees Celsius and lasting for 10 6 years or more. The discharges occur amidst accumulations of cosmic dust. Bruce's colleague, Eric Crew, who shares his views, has given more attention to cosmic lightning within the solar system and particularly in encounters involving earth. How he handles electrical problems of large-body encounters can be exemplified in the following passages: If a charged body B (such as a large comet) approaches a planet A which has an atmosphere, opposite charges are induced and the atmosphere will be pulled out towards B. This increases the voltage gradient between B and the extended atmosphere very rapidly and violent discharges may take place even though the two bodies are separated by a considerable distance. The effect is intensified if both A and B have atmospheres, and even more so if they have opposite charges. The effect... is to cause jet of compressed material to form and for the substance to be ejected on to the negatively charged body, or the induced negative charge. Charges induced in the solid surface of A as B approaches will cause a ground current to flow and the resistance of its path will cause the induced charge to lag behind the line joining A and B. The electrical force will produce a turning moment on A and B and the resultant motion will depend on the direction of the force in relation to the axis of rotation of A and B. The displacement may be increased if B has a crust floating on a molten interior, as the moment of inertia of this would be much smaller than that of a completely rigid sphere, even if the possible tilting of the axis is ignored [20] . That is, in the case of the several large body encounters of the Earth, which we think may have occurred, strong lightning exchanges took place, atmospheres exchanged in varying proportions, debris flew into space, powerful ground currents of electricity followed the point of closest contact, and these currents assisted inertial forces to push crustal sections of the Earth over its plastic mantle. Ralph Juergens' theories of cosmic electricity have been close to the historical events proposed by quantavolutionary theorists. Intimately acquainted with the experiences and ideas of Velikovsky, he worked for many years upon the basic astro-physical problems posed by the Venus-Mars-Earth scenario, specializing in the application of electrical theory. His primary theory deals with the source of solar energy [21] . It is in one sense non- catastrophic. It is also quite new and unaccepted; yet, as he says "the modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the Sun's energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicated by nearly every observable aspect of the Sun." Whereas the conventional theory is that the Sun derives its energy from a hydrogen- fusion nuclear reaction continuing over millions of years, Juergen's theory is that the Sun's surface bears a negative heavy electrical charge, which it has gathered mostly from galactic winds and from a great many bodies brighter than the Sun, and which discharges itself upon the solar system bodies. The solar radiance that strikes Earth and causes heat is as nothing compared with the galactic radiance that strikes the Sun. The Sun's bloated atmosphere is the anode; its highest levels are of the highest temperatures, which go down, rather than up, as the surface of the giant gas bag of the Sun is approached. Hence, elaborate attempts to catch neutrinos from the Sun's "solar furnaces" as they traverse the Earth must fail; if no nuclear fusion, then no neutrinos. The Sun's radiance, varying only slightly as its total charge varies, penetrates the electrically neutral plasma of interplanetary space, passes through the positively charged outer magnetosphere, enters a neutral zone and then a negatively charged inner zone, and finally strikes the Earth's atmosphere with warming and radioactive effects. (Jupiter does not "need" the Sun's heat; it radiates several times as much energy as it receives from the Sun.) A great proportion of all the craters and many fissures of the Moon and Mars, and, though less visible, of the Earth, are explained by Juergens as the effects of cosmic lightning, occurring during the holocene period that we are studying. The "plasmoids" which I referred to earlier are a type of lightning conducted to Earth as "pieces of plasma." These balanced "things" of positive ions and electrons retain their identity and appear as luminous objects of missile-like proportions. They would cause impact craters or above-ground explosions that leave little trace. A second type of primeval lightning, like that known best to us, would give clear evidence of electric scarring, whether as a crater or as a jagged crack in the ground. The jagged cracks of clefts are called rilles and are found by the thousands on the Moon. The principal candidate for the most recent creation of rilles is the planet Mars, which, following Velikovsky's reconstruction of events, would have happened in the period 776-687 B. C. Electrons has to be torn from the lunar crust in numbers sufficient to trigger an interplanetary discharge. The Moon becomes the cathode, Mars the anode. As the charge mobilizes quickly on the Moon, it probes along lines of weakness and explodes the surface in traveling to its discharge point. It blasts a crater as it exits into space. Again Juergen's theory is exceptional. More favored as agents are running water (now gone), erosion by dust winds, an explosion of underground gases, and the collapse of lava tubes through which liquid lava had passed. That these alternatives to the agency of eruption of a breakdown channel raise severe problem is documented by Juergen's table presented below. It may be seen that the lightning channel eruption, not entirely unknown even today on Earth, provides a better explanation of rille characteristics. Competence of Various Theories to Explains Sinuous Rilles of the Moon Proposed Rille-Origin Theory Rille Characteristic Erosion by Ash-Gas Cloud Formation by Gaseous Outburst Formation by Gaseous Outburst Formation Lave-T Collapse Eruption of Breakdown Channel 1. Width greater at higher end C C O B A 2. Channel sinuous A C O C A 3. Irregular crater at upper end B B O B A 4. Ends of rille at different elevations A A O A A 5. Outwash deposits lacking at lower end C-X B A C-X A 6. "Bridges" lacking along channel A A O B-C A 7. On-channel cratering frequent O O A O A 8. Channel may traverse high ground X X B X B 9. Channel may stray from dip of surface C-X C-X B C-X B 10. Channel may follow crest of ridge X X A B A 11. Channel may expose numerous strata B B A C-X A-B 12. Surface strata upturned at rille margins X X A X A 13. Clustering of rilles C C B-C B-C A-B 14. Young rilles may cross older rilles C-X C-X A-O C-X B 15. Secondary rilles in rille bottoms Erosion by Running Water B C C C B Symbols : A. Predictable on basis of theory, B. Permissible in terms of theory, C. Permissible, but difficult to explain, O. Apparently irrelevant in terms of theory X. Evidence precludes theory. Probably the main focus of the electrical battle between Moon and its assailant is the huge crater Aristarchus. It expresses its recency by a bare uncratered floor, by giving off light and by being intensely radioactive. The greatest concentration of lunar rilles is also located at and near Aristarchus. The light bolt was estimated by Juergens at 2x10 21 joules of energy, "a few million times as energetic as ordinary lightning." The likely partner in catastrophe, Mars shares gases with the Moon. As things stand, the situation is this: Lunar finds are rich in argon, neon, other rare gases, and carbon dioxide None of these gases is known to be present in the solar wind, nor is elemental carbon a known constituent of that medium... Precisely those gases known to be present in the atmosphere of Mars -the great bulk of which has been mysteriously "stolen" away in the not-too-distant past -are also found tenaciously held in superficial crystalline layer of the Moon's outermost blanketing materials. This would be a most incredible coincidence if the interplanetary discharges described by Velikovsky never took place [22] . We are only in the early stages of fulminology. Edward Komarek has discovered that the effects of modern lightning are extensive. When a tree is struck, surrounding trees and vegetation are affected by structural, biological, and chemical changes for a long time to come. Lightning also may fuse the Earth around. Fused sand tubes caused by lightning and called "fulgurites" are common around the world. "In one sand-dune patch of 5,000 acres at Witsands, on the southeastern border of the Kalahari Desert, Lewis estimated that there were not less than 2,000 fulgurites. Since lightning is at the present time very infrequent in this area, some of the tubes must have been formed thousands years ago [23] . The fulgurites often followed bush and plant roots. Perhaps they occurred simultaneously and were one of the causes of the desert. That all deserts, whatever their origin, may be indeed new is a question worth considering. Lightning may descend in showers. Lightning may instantly fossilize trees; a high tension wire did so too in Alberta, Canada, E. R. Milton reports. Lightning alters C14 content in trees, hence their "age" for dating purposes [24] . Recently various theories have been offered to explain the mysterious kimberlite tubes of South Africa and similar tubes in Utah. The former are like fulgurites and are found near the great diamond fields. Probably the same electrical flows that dug the kimberlites produced the diamonds. Whether this should be called "slow lightning," and discussed in the preceding chapter, or should be discussed here is perhaps immaterial at this stage of research. The Moses Rock dike of Utah is about 4 miles long at the surface, in the shape of a hook, and about 1000 feet wide. It was forced up from possibly 200 kilometers below the surface. Komarek has come to believe that "lightning is ecologically fully as important as such better known factors as temperature, rainfall, soils etc [25] . He does not estimate past incidences. If present lightning effects must be exponentially retrojected into the past, the world would have been significantly remolded therefrom. Juergen's theory of Moon and Mars belongs to Earth as well. The Earth must have lunar rilles in large numbers. An unknown but considerable number of craters, "river" valleys, fractures and ravines must owe their origin not to ice, water, volcanos, or meteoroids, but to cosmic lightning. In the absence of well-directed field work, not only are their indications misinterpreted, but usually their very existence remains a surmise. The present level of electrical activity on Earth does not excite research except in imaginative minds, like Ralph Juergens, Nicola Tesla and Frank Dachille. It is well for geologists to consider meanwhile the promise of such theories. Take, for example, the consequences of the concept that the Earth's global electric potential has not been uniform throughout its history, an idea that I repeat in this book several times; consider its consequences for another insistent idea of these pages, that geological time may be grossly exaggerated. Juergens argues that the Earth's surface potential is highly negative and low [26] . Suppose that it is lowered further. Rampant radioactivity would occur. The half-life of every radioactive atom would be drastically reduced. Radiochronometric time would be largely erased. In the opposite case, if Earth's potential became higher and less negative, polonium, for instance, which has a short life as evidenced in the geological record by the halos it inscribes upon rock, would acquire a much longer half-life and so would other radioactive isotopes. Nikola Tesla's work is acclaimed for its genius. But some of it was unfortunately cut short by a lack of funds and his growing madness. It went largely unreported and, especially because it was so astonishing, it was and is difficult to describe and appraise. Around the turn of the century, after his dramatic successes in designing and building alternating current electric motors in the East, Tesla went West to Colorado Springs and built an extraordinary electrical apparatus [28] . He set up a 200 foot tall mast with a metal ball on top nested in a 10 foot diameter coil. At a diameter of 80 feet he provided a second surrounding coil. These were affixed to banks of condensers. A 300 volt line from a nearby power plant supplied initial impetus to the oscillator. The magnetic field created by the current in the large coil set up an alternating current in the central coil. Over 150,000 times per second, a charge was sent through the Earth and back up and out into the atmosphere, discharging as bolts of lightning. Tesla thought that such a machine oscillating through the Earth might be tapped at a number of place through local receivers to supply energy for local consumption. It would be a wireless electrical power distribution system. This naive and astounding project has not to my knowledge been seriously considered by geophysicists and electrical engineers in these years of energy crisis. Nor, for that matter, has the idea of Juergens, that "once the curtains of thermo-nuclear theory are drawn aside, electrical engineers will quickly discover that the controlled-fusion reaction they have been seeking in vain for a quarter of a century have actually been within their grasp for at least twice that long - that a relatively small throughput of electrical energy will release the pent-up power of matter on a scale far beyond the most fanciful prediction of the late 1940's." {S : Notes (Chapter Six: Terrestrial and Cosmic Lightning)} Notes (Chapter Six: Terrestrial and Cosmic Lightning) 1. Nicola Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964), 92. 2. Ibid., 94-5. 3. Ralph Juergens, "Of the Moon and Mars," 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974) 21-30; 4 PensÚe 5 (Winter 1975), 27-39; A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, 203 for illustration. On ball lightning see A. Wittmann, 232 Nature (27 Aug. 1971), 625. 4. In Thyestes, a drama remarkable for its catastrophic images. 5. R. Orville and B. Vonnegut, "Patterns of Thunderbolts," 92 New Scientist (1981), 102. 6. New Scientist (20 Oct. 1977), 150. 7. G. P. Pliny, II Natural History (trans. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967) II: LIV. The translation of Rackham is questionable, if only because he has no idea that the Etruscans and early Romans, like the Hebrews and Greeks of the age, were using electrostatic machines to produce divine image and oracles. 8. A. de Grazia, critique of Enea Nel Lazio (Rome: Palombi, 1981) on the Virgil Bimillennial Celebration, in The Burning of Troy (in press). 9. Worlds in Collision, 273. 10. Donald W. Patten, R. R. Hatch and L. C. Steinhauer, The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes (Seattle: Pacific Meridian Pub. Co., 1973), 18-9. 11. Op. cit., 88-91. 12. Patten et al., 92. 13. The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 14. Juergens, "Moon and Mars," loc cit., 37 et passim. 15. Worlds in Collision, 77-8. 16. Target Earth, 189ff. 17. "Rockenbach's 'De Cometis' and the Identity of Typhon," I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1977), 9-10. 18. C. G. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Fort Worth, Texas: LAR Co., 1976), 117 interprets several studies. 19. His basic work is A New Approach to Astrophysics and Cosmogony, (London: Unwin Bros., 1974); cf letter of Dec. 1958 in 4 Electronics and Power, 669-70, "Cosmic Electric Discharges." 20. "Electricity in Astronomy," S. I. S. R. (1976-7) I: 1,2,3, II: 1. 21. 2 PensÚe (1972) 3 (Fall), 6-12. 22. Juergens, "Moon and Mars," loc. cit., Winter 1974-5, 33. 23. "The Natural History of Lightning," Proc. Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conf. (9-10 Apr. 1964), 150. 24. L. M. Libby and H. R. Lukens, "Production of Radiocarbon in Tree Rings by Lightning Bolts," 78 J. Geophy. Res. 26 (10 Sept. 1973), 5902-3. 25. Op. cit., 171. 25A. 98 Sci News (11 July 1970), 33 on the work of T. R. McGetchin; I. D. MacGregor, "First Kimberlite Conference," Rep. S. A. F. Geol. (Mar. 1974), 151-2. 26. "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos I (Fall, 1977), 3-17. 27. J. J. O'Neill, Chapter 2. 28. 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974), 30. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART I: } {Q ATMOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 7} {T Fire and Ash} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part I: Atmospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN FIRE AND ASH "A 'universal conflagration' (if possible) would certainly not last long enough to leave any sort of recognizable stratigraphical record, whereas a few centuries or millennia of occasional heath or forest fires, during a particularly dry spell, would probably do so without requiring any special mechanism." [1] Even to speak of a universal conflagration gives a geologist cause to blush, as Derek Ager, the author of these lines, remarks in another context. Without the "special mechanism", forest fires, started by lightning, and volcanos, started by hot spots in the deep crust or mantle, must do the full job of whatever we see as signs of burning on Earth and whatever the ancient voices are fearfully asserting. If this were all, and it certainly is not all, we would still have to ask about lightning and hot spots; neither is a simple autodynamic mechanism, as we have seen already in the case of lightning and will see in regards to hot spots. The legendary and early historical record is replete with assertions that global burning has occurred. Writing apparently about historical experiences, Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher, gives a common ancient view of the holocaust: And when the time is come when the world destroys itself to be renewed, then (Earth, seas and life) will destroy themselves by their own strength. Stars will fall upon stars. And when all material things are in flames, everything which now shines according to a planned distribution will rise up into a single fire [2] . Of course, Seneca does not declare that a stratigraphical record will be thereafter available; the Earth is "renewed," which implies that few marks would have been left upon the rocks and no bed of ashes would have formed and persisted. Where are the ashes of single or multiple events, for that matter? Sometimes they are present, sometimes not. In certain parts of the world, extensive beds of ashes of possibly local type can be found. They are thin. We can find the ashes of Troy, on several levels of destruction, but can the ashes of the countryside around be found? If not found, does that means that Troy alone was burned, or that ruined Troy alone preserves its ashes? Paleocalcinology -such a science hardly exists -will help us someday to measure the words of Ager and Seneca. The "ordinary" fire mechanism of volcanos and forest fires sometimes incite rains, but these are hardly conspicuous. On the other hand, the legendary coupling of fire and water is so flagrant as to pass notice, except when a progressive rabbi, for example, finds it easy to explain to his children why the heavens are of fire and water; ish- vamayin (fire and water) make up shamyin (heaven) because the ancients thought of sunlight as fire, and the rains, of course, come from the sky [3] . G. R. Carli, writing in 1780, was already asserting that "the idea of a deluge of fire and a deluge of water was present among all peoples... This idea of fire and water... seems to recall tradition of an event of which the memory has endured. It is certainly odd that the indications manifested by a seaflood should have suggested the idea of a deluge of fire [4] . Carli cites Clement of Alexandria for the observations that Stenelas, father of the king of the Ligurians, lived at the time of the fire of Phaeton and the flood of Deucalion. So fire and flood occurred together. Reasoning from effect to cause, Carli then assigns the coal deposits of the world to burning and water acting in quick succession, a theory now coming into prominence again. He argues that only a comet could burn up the world, drop vast amounts of water, and bring great tides at the same time. Probably this line of argument will stand up: a large body encountering Earth, even if it were not dropping water or ice, would bring both conflagration and flood. Whether it crashed or not, the effects would still be similar. Donnelly produces an abundance of legendary accounts of the world in flames: from Druid mythology, Hesiod's Greek account, the Eddas of Scandinavia, Ovid's Roman account of Phaeton, the meso-American Toltecs' Codex Chimalpopoca, the Persians' Zend-Avesta, the Hindus' myth of Ravana and Sita, and the legends of the Tupi, Aztecs, Tacullies, Ute, Peruvian, Yurucares, Mbocobi, Botocudos, Ojibway, Wayandot, and Dog-Rib Indians, that is from one end of the Americas to the other, and across both continents. He quotes the Gothic Surt of the flaming sword, "He shall give up the universe a prey to the flames," and also the Algonquins, whose god "will stamp his foot upon the ground, and flames will burst forth to consume the habitable land." [5] Job of the Bible hears from a retainer that "the fire of God is fallen from heaven and hath burned up the sheep [to the number of 7000], and the servants, and consumed them, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." (In our days cases of a score or more animals being electrocuted by a lightning bolt are recorded.) There begins then the woes of the stubbornly patient Job against frightful divine tests. It is only one of many references to naturally caused combustion in the Bible. The story of Job may be exceedingly old; there Elohim (Heavenly One) is addressed; it happened in full Neolithic times, perhaps at the ending of the age of predominantly Saturn worship [6] . Later in reference to fire is the "flaming sword", east of the Garden of Eden, "which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life." This was after the "Fall from Grace." [7] The image of a sword in the sky may refer to the Great Central Fire of early Greek Philosophy and, as we elaborate in Solaria Binaria, to a then intermittent arc between Jupiter and the Sun. (We treat the image in detail in Solaria Binaria.) The seasons begin; it must be now the period of the gods Jupiter-Jehovah, the Jovean Age I have elsewhere termed it. In a later incident, the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by a fall of fire and brimstone and swallowed up. Then, as earlier described, the Tower of Babel succumbed to fire in part. During and after the Exodus, repeated references to the heavenly fire are encountered. It comes in all its forms; lightning, gas blasts, burning naphtha falls. These are elaborately treated by Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision and by the present author in God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus. In all, von Fange quotes 37 different passages from the Bible referring to, or prophesying, destructive fire from heaven [8] . Both Donnelly and Velikovsky claim the myth of Phaeton -the one writer for a Great Comet of an earlier age, the other for the events of the mid-second millennium, where we too have decided to place it. The Latin author, Ovid, is the principal source of Phaeton. The Babylonian cuneiform expert, Kugler has explained Ovid's as a true history of a comet [9] . Phaeton is the inexperienced son of Phoebus who demands to be let to drive the chariot of the Sun one day. He prevails, but loses control of the steeds and burns up sky and earth. The constellations are disturbed. The flames turn whole nations into ashes. The ground bursts asunder, the rivers dry up. Smoke billows bring darkness to the world. The ocean shrinks. Ashes cover the Earth. Mother Earth trembles and sinks below here usual place. She pleads with Jupiter. "If the sea, if the earth, if the palace of heaven, perish, we are then jumbled into the old chaos again. Save it from the flames, if aught still survives, and preserve the universe." Jupiter responds by demolishing Phaeton and the chariot; Phaeton, his yellow hair streaming in flames, is hurled to the earth like a falling star. The Sun, Father of Phaeton, mourns as in an eclipse. The earth was lit only by its own flames. He would not resume his daily journey until all the gods supplicated with him. The days appeared once more, and Jupiter restored order and life to the heavens and earth. No one disputes the fact that the earth has been badly burned. Provided, of course, that the statement is properly qualified. The ocean basins are of melted rock; they are fashioned almost entirely of basaltic lava. Ocean abyssal sediments are thin and loose, and composed of organic and dust fall-out for the most part, including some products of combustion. Of the continents, part of the surface that is exposed to view is igneous, a product of old or new melting. Another portion is metamorphic, a word meaning rock transformed mostly by heat and pressure, both old and new; this emerges from both sedimentary and igneous rocks. (It is significant that whereas observers are compelled by the sight of volcanism to say that some lava beds are new, they are reluctant to name any metamorphosis of rock that has taken place very recently.) Igneous rock, if not witnessed as it forms, is also invariably given old dates. A Phoenician vase of around 1500 B. C. was found embedded in the copious lavas of the Jezreel Valley of Palestine, where volcanism had supposedly ended in prehistoric times [10] . At Nampa, Idaho, in 1889, a well-worked human image carved of pumice stone was found amidst coarse sand of an old lake bed beneath 300 feet of alluvium, lava and clay [11] . The lava had been and still is classified as late tertiary or quaternary, a million or more years before mankind is supposed to have arrived in America. The Nampa image, now lost, is disregarded; given the strong testimony concerning it, one may wonder how much of natural and human history would be erased under the same strict rules of appraisal. Granites are the continental structure: nearly all come from an ancient cooling of molten rock. They rest below the recent igneous rock, metamorphic rock and sedimentary rock on all continents. We have direct information downwards only on a couple of miles of crust; it is considered that granites carry on down to a basalt not unlike that of the ocean bottoms. When and how the granites formed is unclear; their chemistry is distinctive. A final part of the continents is covered by sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock is formed from transports of materials by wind, water, and ice. Donnelly argued that much of the clay, gravel, and till that composes it descended from a cometary train recently in " the age of fire and gravel," rather than from other rock being ground up and spread around by moving ice. From the standpoint of human primevalogy, the uppermost layers of rock and debris are highly important. These are usually termed unconsolidated, or loosely consolidated, or aggregated, or conglomerate. High energy expressions of "earth, air, fire and water" will produce large quantities of this material and their origins, dating, and relation to the biosphere are hard to discern. Everywhere one is likely to find soil, a catch-all work for any layer from the thinnest film up to a few meters in which life forms take hold or dwell. Fossil soils often rest between layers of the several types of rock. Besides the soil, too, exist metals, soda ash, peat, various ashes, coal, oil, natural gas, salt, and other deposits. Some of these are thermal products. Billions of tons of glassy microtektites are strewn over the globe; whatever their origin, they may have fallen in as hot rain on land and sea. Layers of ash are found over vast stretches of the oceans bottoms, perhaps everywhere, since the searches have just begun. Ash is fairly distinguishable; it is more difficult to detect whether the much more profuse sedimentary clays are not themselves in part the products of combustion, carried over and dropped upon the sea or drained off the continents onto the slopes and shelves. On the land, too, ashes mix readily with soils and detritus to form clays. It is not impossible to detect calcination in soils and clays, but the subject has attracted few geo-chemists. Soils and young marine sediments of northeastern and offshore America reveal, under chemical analysis, evidence of a fiery origin in that they contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [12] . These are carcinogenic and mutagenic. It is possible that their incidence is world-wide. If so, it would indicate that the whole world suffered one or more fall-outs of burning or burnt material. The burning could have been caused by super-terrestrial impact explosions or gases. Or the products of atmospheric fire (burning naphthas and brimstone or sulphur, as the Bible would have it) descended. Or both might have happened. The authors of the report cited here considered the effects to have been possibly produced by giant forest fires and air transport, and unfortunately, did not consider exoterrestrial origins of the widespread combustion products, or for that matter, of the fire that consumed the biosphere. T. M. Harris [13] , in describing "Forest Fire in the Mesozoic," found much fusain in many layers at many places, including the deltas of Greenland and Yorkshire. The admission that cosmic lightning and cosmic fire were prevalent at quantavolutionary points is avoided by placing layers of time between layers of ashes. We cannot readily separate ash from human, at least not without chemical tests of a degree of sophistication hitherto undeveloped because of the theory of gradual accumulation of soils over long eons. Commenting upon Ager's search for ash, Hans Kloosterman speaks of a "black horizon" of soil "that seems to have been covered with sediments immediately after its formation," this in Derek Ager's work; and despite Ager's retreat into what Kloosterman calls "crypto-uniformitarianism," the latter defends the idea that there might be identified only" one enormous forest fire, which is moreover correlatable from Southern England to the Great Lakes of North America. Doesn't that sound somewhat like a universal conflagration? [14] Kloosterman goes on to discuss the "dark bank" he witnessed in Brazil. Despite deliberate tropical burnings that are regular and go back hundreds of years, "no charcoal-rich layer is formed anywhere; the ash is incorporated into the human layer or washed away." Whereupon, this author adds evidence by Wendorf, Said, and Schild that in Egypt, at claimed dates around 10,550 B. C. a burnt layer appears over a large region of the Upper Nile Valley, which the investigators guess to have been caused by brush fires, but which to de Grazia seemed to have been associated with holospheric catastrophe and world-wide conflagration and/ or incredibly heavy ash fall-out. J. Lamar Worzel of Lamont Geological Observatory (Columbia University) published important findings in 1969, entitling them "Extensive Deep Sea Sub-Bottom Reflections Identified as White Ash." [15] The analyzed deep sea cores came from the east-central Pacific, from Mexico to Peru, an area of a million and a quarter square kilometers. The piston-corer was not long enough to probe the nature of echoes, possibly representing other ash layers, obtained from below 78 feet. The layer of ash measured differently in the various drilled cores but ranged from 5 to 30 cm of thickness. "Since the layer is fairly near the surface and is not discolored and contains nothing but the glassy ash material, it must have been laid down fairly quickly." At depths of 1000 to 3000 fathoms, the ash was under great pressure, also the original atmospheric and hydrospheric conditions might have dissipated and disintegrated some of the initial deluge. The fall was so heavy and quick, "that it may be difficult to ascribe it to the Andes... Perhaps sub-bottom echoes from other areas can also be correlated with this white ash layer. If so, it may be necessary to attribute the layer to a world-wide volcanism or perhaps to the fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin." In a critique of "The Significance of the Worzel Deep Sea Ash," Maurice Ewing, Bruce C. Heezen and David Ericson, also of Lamont Geological Observatory, advanced reasons why the white ash layers might be found elsewhere: citing the sounding of the vessels Albatross, Galathea, and Verna from different part of the world, they conjectured that the same sub-bottom echoes and possible ash layers existed over much of the globe [16] . Sedimentary mixing would often subdue or annul the echoes. The ash deposits observed by Kuenen and Need and Bramlette and Bradley were mixed through a column of sediments several times the thickness of the original ash bed. In addition to this mechanical mixing, solution may vastly alter the sediment before permanent burial is accomplished. Devitrification and alternation, proceeding at rates dependent on the environment, may transform an ash bed into products whose origin is not readily recognized. "Extensive ash layers are now recognized in continental areas throughout the geological record," they point out, citing C. S. Ross. They declare too that "ash of similar composition has been logged in boreholes in many of the dry lakes of the western United States." (These dry lakes are all very young, post-glacial.) As mentioned, Wengret and others showed extensive ashes and calcination in the Nile Valley to which they assigned fairly recent ages; one can only wonder, for similar reports simply are not registered generally, how many cuts and profiles around the world reveal such calcination and why, as has been observed, the older rock-strata show almost no calcination -except that metamorphics, granites, igneous rocks, and perhaps limestones themselves are sign of heavy thermal activity. Until very recently, geologists, like archaeologists, have been incurious about thin beds of ashes. An alerted surveyor, Heladio Agudelo, wrote this author (Oct. 4, 1977) saying, "In my work... while helping build a new street I noticed a black line in the gravel formation." It was a "one inch thick black line in otherwise homogeneous alluvial(?) formation." Within several weeks it became invisible due to erosion "but it will take no bigger a tool that a hand shovel to expose it again. This is in Londonderry, N. H., no more than an hour's drive from Boston Airport." Thin beds of ashes represent enormous fire, the effects of ordinary forest and construction fires disappear quickly. The Ewing group, quoted above, comments that "Murray and Renard identified volcanic particles in practically all of the Challenger surficial samples of deep sea deposits, demonstrating that volcanic detritus is an important component of modern deep sea deposits throughout the world. They suggested that the abyssal clays are largely the result of alternation of volcanic ash." Later on, the authors themselves conclude: "It is necessary to study the alterations of fine pyroclastics in the sea and to set up criteria for recognition of the alteration products formed under the full range of environmental conditions." (I proposed such procedures for heavy combustion products in many archaeological levels, exemplified in the "Burnt City" of Troy IIg). The Worzel ash consists of colorless shards of volcanic glass without sorting by particle size. "In all important respects it is similar to material which has been classified as volcanic ash in the deep-sea deposits of the world." Analysis of the surrounding sediment in the Worzel cores indicates that the bottom waters "must have contained some oxygen" and that the sediments "probably represent no more than 100,000 years and conceivably far less." Whatever the date, mankind was very much present and concerned. Certainly years of darkness, disease, distress and terror occurred around the world with this deluge. "The ash is entirely unlike material described as meteoritic dust. Only the wide geographic extent of this layer suggests any source other than volcanic eruptions. "To this proposition, with which Worzel might differ, given his quoted remarks, one might take exception. "Meteoritic dust" is too imprecise a term to use in argument, considering that we may have to consider lunar material and the 50 to 150 million mile tails of comets. If, as the authors grant, there is a need to examine and re-examine numerous types of sediment, there is also a need to distinguish, if at all possible, "cosmic dust" from "terrestrial dust". If world-wide volcanism can only originate from an externally interrupted motion of the Earth, or from a titanic large-body encounter, then "terrestrial dust" is also an effect of exoterrestrialism. Heezen and Hollister write that the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 "produced an insignificant sprinkling of ash" by comparison with six great eruptions of the past "million" years that blanketed thickly the ridge and basin of the Java Trench. "Indeed how great must have been the earlier eruptions if the greatest known to man was too small to produce significant record. Powerful eruptions in the Japanese, Kurile, and Aleutian arcs have produced so much ash that these airborne volcanic products dominate the scenery of the Northwest Pacific in a belt almost 1000 km wide [17] . (We note again that human were already present during these great ash storms and presumably coining legends.) Heezen added elsewhere the Mediterranean Sea bottom as a depository of several heavy ash layers. Walter Sullivan describes " a succession of ash layers" encountered on the edge of the continental slope before striking the lava basalt of the true ocean bottom. Might this not indicate that the continental slope was laid down subaerially, collected its sedimentary and ash layers and was then inundated by the ocean? Drilling in the Atlantic "has begun to paint a picture of the awesome events that accompanied the birth of that ocean [18] . To all of the ash layers referred to, and much more exist, one must accredit exponential ash storming that has dropped to relatively tiny amounts during historical times. Max Blumer led the discovering and detailing of paleochemicals in soils. His group found polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon from pyrolysis in many places and wondered at the great conflagration of ancient times. Blumer even suggested that these carcinogens and mutagens played a role in the mutation of species [19] , Beadle has explained the origins of a peculiar ancient Mexican corn as a case of thermal polyploidy, genetic gigantism brought on by subjection to environmental heat, a feat he duplicated in the laboratory [20] . Gigantism, and possibly dwarfism, and associated polyploidy in plants and animals have, then, as a possible contributing cause, heat stress. The work of Edward Komarek Sr. on fire and lightning stresses the role of these agents in prehistoric as well as modern times. He regards many species of plants and animals as fire-prone, including mankind. They have become adapted at some time in the past to naturally caused fires and are inclined to make the best of it. Komarek has been active in instituting controlled forest fires to imitate natural fires which strengthen growth, rather than weakening it as is popularly believed; the observed quick recovery from fire is one more indication that the great conflagration can occur without citation in the geological record. Fires in prehistory may have been much more extensive than they are today and their part in animal adaptations may have been considerable. He quotes Harris on "Forest Fire in the Mesozoic," where the author describes vast fusain deposits, identifies them as fossil charcoal, and says "the objection usually used against accepting fusain as charcoal produced by fire is that there is too much of it and in too many layers. It would make the past a 'nightmare. '" Fusain is intimately associated with coal beds and thus reinforces the Carli and Velikovsky thesis, seconded by Francis and Cook, that coal is what remains of a bulldozed burning biosphere, buried deeply and tamped down promptly by successive waves of other material. Animal fossils are sometimes found amidst ashes. "Ancient Ashfall Entombed Prehistoric Animals," heads an article by M. H. Voorhies [21] where a Middle Miocene prodigious ashfall over hundreds of square miles snuffed out over 200 species at one waterhole alone. When geologist Louis Lartel was excavating Cro-Magnon man (fragments of 15 individuals) near Les Eyzies-de-Tayec (Dordogne, France) in 1868, he uncovered five archaeological layers that had been covered by ash. The Upper Paleolithic was an age of ashes too. The glacial ice, where such great sheets existed, must have been covered with ash, if today ice drilling reveals no heavy ash fallouts it must mean that the caps are exceedingly young. Erich von Fange has come upon many a recent report of burnt sites. He mentions towns whose calcinated ruins resemble strikingly what one can read of Troy IIg, "The Burnt City," when reexamining the extensive records of its excavation. His cases come not only from the Near East but also from Western Europe and Britain, Central Africa, the Gobi Desert of Central Asia, the Mohave Desert of the American Southwest, India, Cusco (Peru), and Cete Cidades (Piaui, Brazil). The "Cities of the Plain," including Sodom and Gomorrah, flourished in an area that became a scene of utter devastation to this day, over four thousand years later. All that grew in this Dead Sea Rift area, all who lived there, all that was built there, were wiped out by falls of fiery debris and an upheaval of the earth; asphalt, salt and sulphur are abundantly displayed now. The prophet Isaiah (2: 10,2: 19) has people rushing into holes and caves when the Lord in his majesty "ariseth to shake terribly the Earth." The lowland Indians of Peru put pots on their heads and run for the hills when the earth quakes. So do Kamchatka Siberians. Against softly reasonable explanations of such behavior stand grimly reasonable ones, that in times past, earthquakes and fall-out and heavy tides came together. Boiling seas have been observed near subterranean volcanos. That large stretches might boil is arguable. Velikovsky adduced legendary accounts around 1450 B. C. Thus, quoting the Zend-Avesta, "The sea boiled, all the shores of the ocean boiled, all the middle of it boiled," when heated by the star Tistrya (Venus) [22] . Carl Sagan claimed a total boil-off if the Earth abruptly stopped rotating [23] , but a slowdown would bring limited surficial boiling. Perhaps the oldest radiocarbon dates of a burnt city come from Dilmun (modern Dahrein) at the North end of the Persian Gulf [24] . There the lowest level is calcinated. It is located below a thick wall. The burning occurs over the whole area of settlement. The debris contains burnt bitumen and "black masses," producing radiocarbon dates of 19,000 to 36,000 B. P. (in my opinion, valueless). There are "strange" sand "fill" intrusions at this level that carry various artifacts and bits of copper. Below the calcination occurs a meter of sand with shards, and below that, bedrock. The ruined mysterious city of Tiahuanacu, 18000 feet high in the southern Andes mountains, is believed to have once rested upon the shores of the ocean, now hundreds of kilometers distant. It seems to have had port installations and to have been connected with Lake Titicaca, to the north, which contains living species of oceanic type. Tiahuanacu stands on strange ground. The climate is dry, the foliage is scanty, the weather is cold, the neighboring people wretchedly poor and few in number. The top soil of the plateau is a two-foot dry deposit, now soft stone. Below it stands the lignite of charred tropical plants. Next come a layer of ash deposited amidst rainfall, and then appears an alluvial deposit. All can be considered short-term deposits of the lowlands. Combustion obviously played a large part in the happenings. In such a place, one would normally expect merely a scanty soil, windwept, on rocky ground. Poznansky, the major investigator, detected three cultures and three natural destructions [25] . He allows Tiahuanacu a very old age, calling it the oldest known city in the world. Bellamy believed it to be a city that dwelt beneath a terrible sky, with first a satellite that closed into Earth and crashed later, and then a newly captured moon circling above [26] . I argue elsewhere for a single event, that the Moon erupted from the Pacific Basin to occasion the destruction of Tiahuanacu; at the same time it was elevated, but not to its present height. Another elevation might have followed in the second millennium B. C. whereupon the city was left in ashes and ruins. That is, an early Tiahuanacu might have flourished before the new-born Moon. Peruvian legend has it that before the Sun and Moon were made, Viracocha, the White One, rose from the depths of Lake Titicaca and presided over the erection of the cities on its islands and Western shores. The conventional view classifies Tiahuanacu as pre-Inca and places it therefore in the present era. It was never an important Inca site and its resemblances to Inca culture are no more than its resemblances to the earliest Ecuadorian or Mexican cultures or to the Easter Island complex for that matter. Its astronomical observations carved upon stone gates were magnificent [27] , the Incas were underdeveloped by contrast. Tiahuanacu may then be the oldest of fire-devastated ruins. Examples of the latest possible world conflagration can be found in Greece. These would be in the -776 to 687 B. C. period, by Velikovsky's chronology, which I accept; owing to a major shift in time reckoning, most of the great destructions in these areas that has been assigned to around 1200 B. C. is now scaled down to the eighth and seventh centuries. The new great destructive sky god was Mars in many forms [28] . It was now that King Nebuchadnezzar ravaged the Near East believing himself to be the personification of the planet-god Mars-Nergal: " I am Nergal. I destroy, I burn, I demolish, leaving nothing behind me." (He was, of course, not nearly so effective as his model, and was ultimately killed). The same age began with the downfall of the Mycenean culture. The evidence of the destruction of Mycenean culture by fire has been available for a long time, but put aside for lack of a cause. A. H. Frickenhaus, a German excavating long ago at Tiryns, described how he had located a burnt Mycenean palace with a new Greek-style temple built right over it [29] . At Pylos, not far away and of the same period, fire was manifest everywhere, burnt rooms, burnt oil, fused metallic implements, scorched pots. In his analysis of the Pylos event and others, Isaacson has substantially proven the correctness of the revised dating [30] . Apparently, the Mycenean (Greek) Age changed into the archaic Greek period amidst general conflagration. But so did age upon age before, both geologic and cultural. I have not mentioned thus far the catastrophes that ended the Old Bronze Age around 2300 B. C. According to Schaeffer: "There is not the slightest doubt that the conflagration of Troy IIg corresponds to the catastrophe that made an end to the habitations of the Old Bronze Age of Alaca Huyuk, of Alisar, of Tarsus of Tepe Hissar, and to the catastrophe that burned ancient Ugarit in Syria, the city of Byblos that flourished under the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the contemporaneous cities Palestine, and that was amongst the causes that terminated the Old Kingdom of Egypt." Egyptian Old Kingdom tombs are generally marked by signs of conflagration, Emery has discovered [31] . A great many places elsewhere must have become heaps of ashes as well. At Anemospilia, Crete, a small north-watching hillside temple was excavated [32] . Of four skeletons unearthed, one was identified as a priest, a second as a youth of 18 who had just been sacrificed. (" The only remains of Minoans heretofore unearthed had been recovered from tombs.") He had been trussed and laid upon the altar. The sacrificial knife lay on his bones. The priest sprawled in an agonized posture nearby, intimating death by sudden collapse of the stone structure. The other persons were perhaps attendants and killed simultaneously. Earthquake was presumed. The youth, an analysis of his bones revealed, had died just before the disaster, half his body had been drained of blood, the upper-most half. Then a fire had swept the premises before the bottom half was drained. The fire is attributed to tipped oil lamps, but, following the logic employed in my study of Trojan fires, I would suspect an external source, possibly drifting flammable gas pockets, for an ordinary fire would consume the bones, in the unlikely event it could start up in the first place. Perhaps it was not fire, but a scorching blast, that preceded or succeeded a seismic shock. Why, also, were there only three persons in the temple? Were all other people in hiding while the heroic priest and his staff went to offer the sacrifice? Why did not the people return to dig out the bodies and restore the temple? Burial was a holy obligation; an unburied priest would be a holy horror. A presumption of total desolation and death over a considerable area arises. John Bimson, describing the recently famous Ebla excavation in Svria, finds that the proto-Syrian culture datable sometime after 2300 B. C. by Schaeffer's scheme was destroyed by seismism and fire [33] . As I stated on several occasions, this finding was predictable, for all known settlements of the time were similarly struck. It would fit among the Mercurian disasters described in Chaos and Creation. The specific origins of burning are usually in doubt. Catastrophic combustion is a product of earthquake-caused fire, of fissure and cone volcanism, of lightning, of phaetonic atmospheric penetration, of typhonic impact explosion, of fall-outs of combustible materials that are ignited in flight, including gases and naphtha. Donnelly, a century ago, speculated convincingly upon the fall-outs of gas clouds from the tails of comets. His Age of Fire and Gravel, the culminating devastation of all human time, was pictured as a burning of great patches of the world from carbureted hydrogen. Some kind of exoterrestrial gases are often to be suspected in great prehistoric and ancient fires. A combination of gases and lightning, if the gases are not too concentrated, will bring masses and sheets of flame, rather than explosions. I have read few convincing reports of gas and fire explosion -the Pestigo Forest Fire and the Tunguska blast, both modern, being the type of event to look for, nor have I read a report of excavation revealing an exploded city, unless some of the settlements that seem to have been wreaked simultaneously by fire and earthquake do not in fact involve earthquakes. Probably a strict investigation would discover any such explosion affecting human settlements, but the geologic causes would have to depend for evidence upon legends. A gas explosion and flash fire would leave practically no traces within a few years of occurrence. Volcanos are more obvious sources of fire. Many a volcano has claimed its Pompeii and Herculanum. It has worked its way with mud and lava flows, ashes lofted nearby and afar, and noxious gases. It may be fissure or cone, extinct or live. One of the oldest pyramids, that of Quiquilco in America, stands almost buried in lava. It is probably as old as the oldest pyramids of Egypt. When a great may volcanos erupt simultaneously, the effects upon settlements are more than proportionate to the effects of a single eruption. Inasmuch as layers of ashes have been discovered over millions of square kilometers of the ocean bottoms, it has to be granted that the same ashes fell upon the land and the biosphere, and upon human settlements, if such existed. Ashes are apparent to an alerted observer when they lie in belts and heaps. But material dissolution occurs, the destruction and effacement may involve additional forces that remove the ash, incorporate it, or dissolve it. Ash may be washed away by tides, blown away by hurricanes, or subjected to these forces gradually. It may turn to clay, impervious to all but the most exacting chemical analysis and electron-scanning microscopy. The tephra of Thera-Santorini, falling from the plinian explosion of 3000 B. P. (a less likely date is 3500 B. P.) is found in heaps, but also in miocroscopic form amidst debris that may or may not have been of the same occurrence, in widely separated locations. In Thera itself, one bluff is composed of pumice, the next one, higher, contains none. In Kos( Greece) at one place, 40cm of Thera ash is visible; at many other outcroppings of subsoil in Kos, no ash is visible. So in Crete, so also Anafi. Common clay is abundant on land and on sea bottoms. It contains not only the material of slow erosion and ice age drift but of sudden exponential erosion and ice cap avalanche, of volcanic ashes, and of meteoritic and other exoterrestrial fall-out. To conclude these pages of fire and ashes, we may assert once again that the gradual processes of today were preceded very recently by quantavolutionary processes. More and greater fires burned more widely in the world than during the past two thousand years. More blankets of ashes were laid down. More settlements were ruined. That the fires and ashes may often have had ultimate exoterrestrial causes is probable. Until the basic issue of geological chronology is settled, we are not prepared to affirm that the 85% of the exposed Earth's crust which is of igneous rock is all nearly as young as the ash levels, but the possibility is real. From the standpoint of theoretical mechanics, the Earth's ash layers and all the components of soil and clay originally containing ash may have been the fall-out of global volcanism which produced the igneous rock. But we have yet not covered enough ground in our tour of the Earth's features to determine the matter. And perhaps in the end, we shall still be uncertain. {S : Notes (Chapter Seven: Fire and Ash)} Notes (Chapter Seven: Fire and Ash) 1. letter, 2 Catastrophist Geologist, 1( June. 1977), 13. 2. "Consolatio ad Marciam" 3. L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, p. 7: 15, 76; cf. H. Tresman and B. O'Geoghan," The Primordial Light," II S. I. S. R. 2 (Dec. 1977), 40, fn. 102. 4. II Lettres Americanes (Paris: Buisson, 1788), 309. 5. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton, 1883) p. 428. 6. Martin Sieff, "Cosmology of Job" I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1977), 17-21, 32. 7. Genesis 4: 24. 8. Op. cit., 136-7. 9. L. C. Stecchini in A. de Grazia et al., The Velikovsky Affair, 2nd ed. (London: Sphere, 1978), 120ff. 10. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 197-8. 11. See W. R. Corliss, ed., Ancient Man (Glen Arm, Md: Sourcebook Project, 1978), 457- 60, from G. F. Wright, 11 Am. Antiq. (1889), 379-81. 12. Blumer and W. W. Youngblood, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydracarbons in Soils and Recent Sediments," Science (4 Apr. 1975), 53. 13. 46 J. Ecology 2 (1958), 447-53. 14. 2 Catas. Geol. (1977), 14. 15. 43 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (15 Mar. 1959), 349-55. 16. 45 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 351-61. 17. B. Heezen and C. Hollister, Face of the Deep, 476-8. 18. Walter Sullivan, Continents in Motion, (N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 147-8. 19. 234 Sci. Amer. 3 (1976), 45. 20. Cf. New Scientist (12 Nov. 1981), 433. 21. Nat. Geogr. Mag. (Jan. 1981), 66. 22. In Asimov et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky, (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1977); but see Shulamit Kogan, ltr. Physics Today (Sept. 1980), 97-8, repr. VI Kronos 3 (1981), 34-41. 23. Worlds in Collision, 92 24. G. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun (N. Y.: Mentor, 1969), 167-9. 25. Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American Man, (N. Y.: Augustin, 1958). 26. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1951); Built Before the Flood (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), especially on Tiahuanacuo. 27. Cf. H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco (1959) and The Great Idol of Tiahuanaco, both published by Faber and Faber, London. 28. Worlds in Collision, Part II; Chaos and Creation, 235-46. 29. August H. Frickenhaus, I. Tiryns (Athens, 1972). 30. In 3 PensÚe 2 (Spring-Summer, 1973), 26-32 and 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974), 5-20. See also my study: The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (1983). 31. Arhaic Egypt (Penguin Books, 1961), 71-3, 92, 97. 32. Y. Sakellarakis et al., "Drama of Death in a Minoan Temple," 159 Natl. Geog. (Feb. 1981), 208-23. 33. "Ebla Reconsidered," V. S. I. S. R. 2 (1980-1), 37-9; Matthias, Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered (London: Hodder, 1980). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART II: } {Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: } {C Chapter 8} {T Falling Dust and Stone} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHT FALLING DUST AND STONE When Alexander the Great asked some Celtic leaders in 325 B. C. what they most feared, expecting them to reply Alexander himself, they said it was that the skies might fall. Somewhere along the line of history, this story lost Alexander but became attached to the Celtic Gauls; the schoolbooks universally read by French children until lately began by telling them that their earliest ancestors were the Gauls whose eyes were blue, who feared nothing but that the heavens would fall on their heads, and whose huts had holes in their roofs to let out the smoke. Were the Gauls known for nothing else? The naive, simplistic image lets the children be amused. But the insistence with which this particular canard is purveyed says something about the fear of falling skies, which absurdly seems to grip even the savants in their obsession with foisting it upon their perceived ancestors and their descendents. In the most ancient legends it is common to find references to more than comets and deluges of water. Deluges from the sky consist also of dust, loess, stones, glass, tar, oil, salt, gold, iron, ashes, carbohydrates -all of them sometimes hot and sometimes aflame. They are invariably tied to catastrophes. Donnelly collected some of the stories: We read in the Ute legends... that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats struck the sungod full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the earth, causing a general conflagration." [1] [One is cautioned to read "sun" with reservations; foreigners who pass along legends are likely to make the word "sun" out of any brilliant great body in the sky. That the Sun is only one of such historically manifested bodies is the thesis of a number of studies.] Further : It is a belief in many races that the stone axes and celts (chisala) fell from the heavens. In Japan, the stone arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits, who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil, China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal etc. [2] (And the Greek Apollo is famed for discharging clouds of arrows and plagues from afar). Also from the Aztec prayer to Tezcatlipoca : Hast thou verily determined... that the peopled place become a wooded hill and a wilderness of stones?.. Is there to be no mercy nor pity for us until the arrows of thy fury are spent? Thine arrows and stones have sorely hurt this poor people [3] . And, of course, the Bible (Deuteronomy xxviii) The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed..." Thus, in Deuteronomy; but more too in Joshua x: And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: There were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword. This, it may be recalled, was the day when the Sun "stood still", a swing-back of cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky, 52 years after Exodus, and at the least he shows that this hail was not ice but of stone [4] . The student of geology today is realizing that what falls from the sky is not only nickel, iron or stone fragments. There is a continuity of materials. P. M. Millman writes: ... physical theory, applied to the observed heights, velocities, deceleration, and luminosities, indicates that in most cases the mean densities of the meteoroids may be below that of water and that they have a fragile structure with a tendency to crumble and fragment. A small fraction, probably 1 or 2 percent, consists of denser, compact particles corresponding more closely to meteorites. These latter are either nickel- iron, with densities about eight times that of water, or heavy stone, with densities between three and four times that of water [5] . Where does all the dust and stone rest today? It may be, as Donnelly said it, the main constituent of the so-called glacial till and in heaps called mistakenly glacial moraines. It may be in much of the clay of the Earth, in red loams of many countries, in abyssal clay of varied red and blue hue. The geologist Johan Kloosterman tells a story from Brazil : Early this year, Professor Doeko Goosen in Enschede, Holland, told me that there was something odd about the iron content of the early-Holocene coversands of the Netherlands. These sands are thought to have been formed through a combined fluvial and aeolian activity. But in many of their soils, the amount of iron is much too high for such an origin. Moreover, the present loss of iron by seepage water, observable along many ditches, demonstrates that the original iron content must have been higher still. Weathering of minerals (loss of Silica and relative accumulation of iron) does not satisfactorily explain this anomaly. Could the iron have come from above, as a sort of ferruginous loess? A few months later in Mato Grosso, Goosen's remark led me to look more closely at laterites profiles. I noticed an inch-thick layer of hard laterite between two layers of unconsolidated gravel; its undersurface was smooth: it had obviously been formed prior to the deposition of the top gravel. I traced the layer for several kilometers, and later found it in places tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, on different deomorphological levels. The only possible explanation for these observations seemed aeolic precipitation on a barren, moist surface [6] . Doeko Goosen has gone well beyond the ordinary unsatisfying explanations of soil formations commonly employed." Not so long ago soils were considered to form in materials derived by weathering of the underlying rock. Over several decades there has been a growing recognition that much of the mantle of soil is allochtonous." [7] But where does it come from? Few are the regions where soil can be shown to have aggregated as humus from the vegetation above. The large areas of Europe and Asia covered with loess are now considered all or in part by Russian scientists as non-aeolian. This is conveyed forcefully to their minds by the presence in the loess of numbers of angular stones. Promptly we are recalled to the pages of Donnelly's old book where he insists on the exoterrestrial origin of the angular stone typical of "glacial till" and of loess. Now Goosen advances the argument with respect to the soils that sit atop the loess. He claims that humus does not form except in waterlogged area, presently and historically unlike the Kazakhstan (U. S. S. R.) area he discusses. Furthermore, the "Chernozems," the aforesaid soil, is rich in hydrocarbons. Presumably, some of it was combusted, too. The incident of its formation was most likely a cometary encounter. Goosen goes farther, in what approaches in fact a general theory of soils formation. Slickensides (common in cracked vertisols and related to mass movements of ash and clay), and latosols, along with much other soil with a high iron content are assigned catastrophic origins, with tides and floods in the first case, and heavy hematite exoterrestrial fall-out in the second as the mechanism. "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." From dust to dust, goes the pathetic saying about man's fate. "To dust" we know from experience. "From dust" -what does geology say? Nothing, of course. Does mythology have something to say? Yes. One of the most popular creation legends has man being made from clay, Hebrew Genesis, for example. The Greek Promethean creation, for another. Moreover, the "Cree Indians believe that the flesh of those who perished in the waters of the Deluge were changed into red pipe-clay. Similar myths or echoes of myths are found in the tales of almost every nation. "So reports Bellamy [8] "We are all made from common clay," say egalitarians. Why clay? Because, according to ordinary surmise, clay is malleable; early people would made images of clay and, projecting their desire for omnipotence onto the gods, would imagine that the gods could fashion real people from clay. Is this adequate reason? Is there additional reason to believe so? Bellamy also asserts that the enormous and unfamiliar loess deposits, which must have formed such a striking feature of the new Earth, were regarded by the survivors as the dissolved bodies of their unfortunate brothers and sisters [9] . It is noteworthy that loam deposits do surround the remains of Peking man at Choukoutien and human tools of the Lower Paleolithic in Europe and Tadzhik (U. S. S. R.) The loess is a fine undifferentiated loam of brownish or reddish color that makes eerie standing images by its vertical pipe structure when eroded. The logical divine action, in magical theory, is to create people from the same material, especially if its origin is celestial. To conclude our reasoning, the myth and the magical reasoning press a hypothesis upon the geologist. The origin of loess may be in an immense fall-out of dust from a comet or an explosion of Earth material into the highest atmosphere whence most of it fell back to form loess and clay covering many hills and valleys to this day. Since humans seem to recall such an event, the time might not be far off. Donald Cyr, a California amateur and devotee of the Canopy Theory of Isaac Vail, has studied loess. He has a story to tell too. "Loess is mixture of silica and clay, with particle size ranging from 0.1 mm down to 0.005mm . Where loess in unoxidized, it has a greyish color, but may also be yellow, orange, or brown because of presence of ferric oxides. Deposits of loess occur in North America, Europe, Russia, Siberia, China, and also in Argentina and New Zealand...." [10] The State of Kansas is estimated to be overlain by more than 50,000 cubic miles of loess. There is little glacial outwash in Kansas, Cyr writes, and he does not see how glaciers had the power to grind down sufficient rock within the Pleistocene age, wherein it is placed, to supply the loess. He estimates the worldwide deposits at 7,000 cubic miles per degree of longtitude per hemisphere. And he suggests that the ocean "blue" mud may be part of it. A few more words are owing on the origins of the drift or till, before letting the abused author Donnelly stand in his solitary majesty. Many accounts of stone falls are acceptable; Corliss has compiled and introduced some of them. Velikovsky has analyzed several cases, while rejecting Donnelly as to the cometary origins of the drift. For instance, he points to 28 fields of blackened, sharp-edged and broken stones (harras) in Arabia in strewn fields of many thousands of square miles; they are not igneous; they are referred to in ancient Arabic and Hebrew literature; they originate from the sky in early historical times [11] . Till is a stiff clay full of stones varying in size up to boulders; conventional science says it was produced by abrasion and carried along by the ice sheet as it moved over the land. So Geikie said in 1863, and the definition is still useful. Donnelly pointed out that this till, which he called drift, is not in all places where the ice was said to be and exists in other areas where no ice was supposed to have been. Till is common "over much of the most important mineral producing terrain of the northern hemisphere. Till occurs ubiquitously in Canada and Scandinavia and is present as well over significant areas of the United States, U. S. S. R. and United Kingdom." [12] But why, argued Donnelly, was there a "driftless region" is Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota [13] . And why is very little found in Siberia; there exist " the great river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface." So wrote James Geikie [14] . And why are "glacial" pebbles and a "terminal moraine" found on hills and in valleys of the Southern Appalachians, and where the ice was not supposed to have reached in Eastern Kentucky [15] . Why do glaciers today not produce true ancient-type till, that is, striated stones, drift clay, mountain-top till, and how could glaciers form sheets over 30% of the Earth's surface a million years ago, not to mention pushing boulders up thousands of feet in elevation [16] . Crossed trains of drift occur, and are rationalized into successive advances and retreats of ice under different climate and morphological conditions. The till is not fossiliferous. Where drift and till have been found in Australia, India, and deep beds of older rock in Scotland, they were attributed to more ancient ice ages, thus scholars might conveniently dispose of all material appearing to be till. It is not difficult in historical geology to use time freely to make place for anomalies and to create events, even the greatest types of events, such as ice ages. Using the ordinary theories of glacial geology, even though he is an exoterrestrial catastrophist, the Soviet geologist Salop has pointed out "that the Precambrian glaciations occurred under very unfavorable physical-geographical conditions. The glacial deposits are interbedded between strata indicating a hot climate, such as red- beds, dolomites, phytolite-bearing limestones (at present only found in warm, usually mineralized waters along the seashore or in tropical lagoons and hot springs), evaporites, kaolinitic sandstones and bauxite." This association of tillites with formation of warm and hot climates is typical of the Paleozoic Ice Ages too [17] . But Salop also demonstrates that nine ice-age pre-cambrian "intervals vary from 40 to 125 (or 180) MY and no evident periodicity can be observed." He then associates "biologic revolutions with the epochs of excessive climatic cooling usually resulting in glaciation." Tillites are taken as the signal of an ice age; whatever the climate above and below the till, whether cold or hot, the till is supposed to designate cold. Some association may be found among tillite beds and a) low sea-water temperatures as measured in the differing gas and mineral concentrations of stratified sea-shells, and b) "coeval strata" that "attest to the influence of a cold, almost glacial climate." All correlations are subject to variations and even to possible basic flaws in radiometric dating. The association is loose enough to permit the argument that tillites may not be associated with cold climates, hence the tillites are not deposits of ice sheets and glacier, and, further, that tillites may be exoterrestrial deposits occurring in both hot and cold climatic period, wreaking quick destruction upon the biosphere. Cyr and Sun point out that tektites are chemically similar to loess. This would suggest a possible exoterrestrial origin for loess and a coincidence of the two substances. Tektites are jets of fused silica. They range from microscopic size to large chunks. They are strewn around the world in enormous fields. They are found in the waters and soils of Central Europe, West Africa, Australia, Indochina, Thailand, the East Indies, the Philippines, Japan, China, and the Caribbean [18] . Heezen and Hollister estimated an Indian Ocean deposit of a billion tons that they think occurred upon a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field 700,000 years ago. Billy Glass and R. N. Baker of the University of Delaware, with D. Storzer and G. A. Wagner of the Max Planck Institute of Heidelberg, studied intensively the Caribbean- North American strewnfield [19] . They estimated the total tektite field at 10 17 grams of material, dated stratigraphically at Middle Upper Eocene. Some 6000 such glass microspherules were found in the sediment of one thin core at a depth of some 250 centimeters below the Caribbean Sea Bottom. The falls apparently came either at different times, or from different phases or portions of a gigantic single incident, because there are chemical differences among the tektites coming from different strewnfields of the world. The writers claim different times, for they hold few reservations about their dating techniques. If from different times, a Moon origin is suggested, for there could have been large meteoroid explosions upon the Moon that would have splashed debris onto the Earth. Or, since the tektites are of a material akin to the Earth's crust, they might have been a fall-back from large explosive impact encounters with Earth. Glass and Heezen differentiated three forms of tektites found in the Far East. One was melted twice, one melted once, and a third little melted. They deduce a massive cosmic body breaking up upon atmosphere entry into two or several pieces. Of these, one would explode in the upper atmosphere, another closer to the ground and a third close to the ground [20] . Faul says "it is an established fact that tektites fell from the sky," but show too little cosmic-ray interaction to have spent much time in the sky [21] . Although he allows a possible lunar origin for some tektites, he shows that some tektite fields are too concentrated spatially to have been flung from the Moon and that, in Germany and the lvory Coast, a similar composition can be ventured for large astroblemes and nearby tektite fields. No writer has considered the possibility of an origin from the fission of the Moon and Earth. If the present author's theory of lunar fission were postulated, then the composition, distribution and occurrence of the specified forms of tektites would be consonant with the event. I think that legendary streams of cosmic arrows shot by the gods upon hapless but offensive mankind might refer to the glassier kinds of fall-out. Tektites resemble somewhat obsidian, a popular igneous stone for fabricating arrowheads. Tektites may fall like showers of needles, or arrows, or as arrowheads in size, weight and hardness. The same tektites are called "Dragon Pearls" in China. Carter Sutherland in 1973 traced dragon art in China back to its apparent origins around 1500 B. C [22] . That reinforcements of the horrendous (but sometimes beneficent "Lucky Dragon") image have been supplied by various comets through the ages was documented by Dwardu Cardona (1975) [23] . Invariably the Chinese dragon is chasing a "chuh," or globe, or sphere, and "chuh" also means "pearl". "Huoh chuh" is "fiery sphere" and "fire pearl." Moreover the Chinese also call the tektite "huoh chuh". Indians, Javanese, and Tibetans also call the tektite "fire pearl". Long before modern science became interested in tektites, the ancient Chinese (the T'ang Annals) knew that these 'fire pearls' originated in space." They were esteemed by priests and emperors. The tektites fell from the sky [24] . Aerodynamic ablation experiments with tektite glass have simulated their shaping upon entry and passage through the atmosphere. They are found in recent sediments and on the surface. The tektites were not long in space, they display no cosmic-ray interaction. They are easily eroded [25] but still exist in abundance and cannot be found in fossilized beds, another sign of youth. But other tektites have received old ages, 20 to 45 M/ Y, as reported by Barnes [26] . Many are around the million-year mark (Heezen Glass, Chaprian) [27] . and ages of 5000 years were found by George Baker and Edmund Gill [28] . Gentner's dating by fission-track suggests a million years or less for certain groups, much longer times were assigned to others. The tektite falls have been associated by Billy Glass and others with magnetic reversals and faunal changes [29] . A syllogism emerges: a heavy-body impact explodes tektites high into the sky; it causes reversal of the Earth's magnetic field; as the EMF hits zero point, cosmic particles, ordinarily deflected, pour down and cause mutations and extinction. Contrasting with this theory are opinions such as Lyttletons's that tektites fell from a passing comet train. However, Urey and Spencer argue that they reflect a splash from a cometary or meteoroid impact on the Earth. Moreover E. A. King: "the answer is now clear: tektites are produced from extraterrestrial rocks melted by hypervelocity impacts of large, extraterrestrial objects." [30] Erratic bits of an exploded planet from the Mars-Jupiter interregion often fall to Earth. Some of them may also be surviving, uncaptured, terrestrial material. The tektite fields on Earth could also be fall-back from the lunar eruption. Rittmann writes : "The chondrites (of meteoric falls) correspond genetically to the terrestrial sima, and the tektites to the protosialic upper crust of the primeval earth." [31] James Sun proposes that half a million years ago, a snowball comet laden with flammable gases approached Earth from the Northwest [32] . It shattered by gravitational force, and part crashed while part continued on. Loess was thus laid down, and in some place melted by impact into glass. Loess has a chemical composition very much like the tektites, as I have mentioned above. Aerial explosions created innumerable small glass blobs that fell to Earth. The investigators generally agree that tektites are earth-like and moon-like in composition. Probably, the loess and tektites arrived within the same time span after passing into the upper atmosphere following their explosion from the Earth. Either a passing large body exploded the Earth's crust to make them or a meteoroid impact did the job. John O'Keefe links the North American strewn field of tektite and microtektite falls with the terminal Eocene (Tertiary) event, when radical climatic change can be perceived in floral abundances and radiolaria were devastated [33] . His theory calls for the tektites to assume, before final descent, a ring-like structure around the Earth. The ring might have lasted a million years and cast a blighting shadow over the biosphere. It is apparent here, once more, that earth scientists are becoming ever more daring in their suggestions of mechanisms to satisfy the resultant state of geological facts. Just under a century ago, Issac Vail received short shrift from academicians for proposing a Saturnian ring canopy system for the globe and arguing that it was known to early civilized man and fell apart before his very eyes [34] . Reporting systems on natural phenomena have gradually become more complete, regular, and valid. Nevertheless, the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819 issued an enchanting list of "meteoric stones, masses of iron, and showers of dust, red snow, and other substances, which have fallen from the heavens, from the earliest period down to 1819." [35] Among the exotic items were: a great fall of black dust at Constantinople on November 5-6, 472 B. C. accompanied by burning heavens; a kind of red matter like coagulated blood in the middle of the 9th century; a burning body that fell into Lake Van, Armenia, turning the waters red and cleaving the Earth in several places (1110 A. D.); gelatinous matter in India with a globe of fire; and a mixture of red rain and snow whose dust contained silica, aluminum, lime, iron, carbon and loess and was coincidental with a shower of meteoritic stone over central and southern Italy in 1813. Red rains, often associated with meteors, were common. William Corliss, in his compilations, has educed much additional literature on peculiar fall-outs. Peter James [36] , Donnelly, Velikovsky and others have demonstrated the frequent occurrence of red falls in proto-history. Much meteoritic dust falling upon the Earth is invisible and immeasurable. Meteoritic falls have been estimated at 4000 tons per year by Saukov [37] . Hughes (1976) arrives at a figure of 16,000 tons per year. Schmidt gives an average for all of geological time at 8x10 11 tons per year, very much larger and based upon an exponentially leveling off of initially vast drops of material [38] . At the last rate, with a geological age of 5x10 9 years, one would have a total of 40x10 20 tons dust dropped on Earth from space. This is not far from the total mass of the Earth, 6x10 21 tons. But if Pettersson is correct, the rate of accretion of cosmic dust may be about 10,000 tons per day [39] . Micrometeorite dust has been estimated by Fred Singer [40] to fall at a median rate of 1250 tons per day or 456,250 tons per year (the rate may actually be 10 times more or less, he estimates). The calculation is from the detection of aluminum 26 abundance ratio in Pacific Ocean bottom cores. This is 4.5x10 11 grams per year today, but Schmidt's estimate is only 400 tons per year today. If any exponentialism is part of Singer's scheme and it should be, a fairly considerable portion of the Earth's crust should be composed of gathered-in planetary dust, achieved in a fairly short time. If, for example, we had a measure showing this figure to have been 10 20 grams per year in 500 B. C. and 10 25 in 2500 B. C., the subsequently plotted curve would give us the mass of all of the continental crust except for the basic granite within a few thousand years. We do not have such figures, but if we consider the obsession of ancient voices with days and years of darkness and ascribe half of this to fall-out of dust, the required substantial deposits would be quickly forthcoming. Between 1956 and 1964, W. D. Crozier collected exoterrestrial black magnetic spherules from atmospheric fall-out at two New Mexico stations, of a type noted around the world and in sedimentary rocks of great ages. These were accreting at an average annual rate of 1.04x10 11 grams for spherules in the diameter range of 5 to 6. David Hughes considers the interplanetary dust to originate with comets and arrives at a figure of 16,000 tons per year of all sizes. Hans Petterson, reporting upon the oceanographic expedition of the Albatross, disclosed a high nickel content in the Pacific Clays. Since basalt, the bottom material contains little nickel and meteoritic dust, meteoritic showers hundreds of times greater than presently observed were required to explain the abundance. The nickel abundance is also 5.5 times that in continental igneous rock; hence an exoterrestrial source is invoked [41] . Assuming the average of nickel in meteoritic dust to be 2%, he arrives at the aforesaid figure of 10,000 tons of dust per day, 3,650,000 tons per year (3.6x 10 6 ), hence, especially if any kind of exponentialism is introduced as we go back in time, we should have the sediments of the ocean receive their quota of nickel laid down in a few thousand years. McSween and Stolper, in their study of basaltic meteorites, which were definitely not of earthly or lunar origin, abstracted a type of shergottite meteorite. This material they assign originally, not to comets, or asteroids, but to the planet Mars, which has many extinct structures and surface rocks with a known resemblance to the shergottite [42] . The electrician, Eric Crew, has analyzed confirmed reports of ice and stone falls associated with lightning; many such were collected by Charles Fort (1874-1832) who wrote once, "we shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded... a procession of the damned." [43] . Crew ascribes both pick-up and fall-out phenomena sometimes to high-speed jet occurring in and about air-to-ground fast electrical discharges [44] . Dust storms and volcanism greatly augment the fusion of particles. There may be posited that in large meteoroidal and cometary encounters, the Earth will be subject to considerable material exchanges by the electrical discharge channels occurring between Earth and the intruder. The "White Cliffs of Dover" and other immense chalk beds elsewhere are a mixture of tiny spheres, a formless chemical mass, and organic debris, which contains some marvelously unattrited marine skeletons. How were they formed? Conventional science pleads continuing longtime deposits, but the stratification and water-current markings attesting to such are missing, nor can the preserved shapes admit to this mechanism [45] . A great updraft and precipitation is suggested, or else a dust-laden electric discharge penetrating the waters, followed by an upheaval or expansion of the bottom terrain. A study by L. and W. Alvarez, Asaro and Michel describes a fall-out of dust 1000 times that of Krakatoa from a meteoroid crash, which, they claim, darkened the Earth for years [46] . The crash was deduced from the presence in Italian, Danish, and New Zealand limestones of the fossil break between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods of iridium, 30,160 and 20 times its normal background level in terrestrial rocks but characteristic of meteoroids. Spain and Holland were added by Ganapathy to the locations bearing the tell-tale chemical signals. Fish-clay analyses by Kyle and others in Denmark agreed with the limestone findings. A number of additional rare elements were also in long supply, 5 to 100 times their normal abundances. The correlation of a fossil index set with a distinctive chemical element marks an important advance in geological investigation. A sure layer is now presumed to exist worldwide; even were it not to signal an age boundary, it would permit a tightening of identifications of relative and absolute dates of strata and species. We know that we are dealing with a uniform world-wide event, something that is only hoped for when correlating fossils and rocks. We know that the event is limited in time. We know further that if the event is not denoted in the strata, the reason is not that the event did not occur. That is, some stratum capable of containing the iridium (or other element) must at the stipulated time have existed everywhere. Where not found, conditions for its prompt removal must have existed, or later removal must have occurred. Alternatively, the fall-out was erratic and initially directed only to certain spots by the presumably catastrophic winds and tides of the moment. Despite all this, with a dozen such exoterrestrial chemical markers, historical geology and paleontology would undergo a quantavolution. What conclusions can be drawn from the material of this Chapter? At the least, a considerable part of the Earth's crust is exoterrestrial and has fallen as dust and stone not long ago. There is reason to accept in general terms the multitude of legends speaking of heavy falls. Even the most bizarre material has descended during historical times and every indication points to an exponential increase in the quantity and perhaps the variety of matter with the regression of time from the present. All the seas and continents contains heavy deposit of suspected exoterrestrial origin. Yet there is also some indication that the time of heavy falls may have been concentrated in a catastrophe or set of catastrophic climates. The "ice ages," for instance, may have been a period of combined ice and stone deluges from outer space, explaining thereby a number of inconsistencies in the terrestrial pure theory of a central focus and outspreading therefrom. The absence of fall-out stratigraphic formations in older rock formations bespeaks a primeval peace. A question arises as to what constitutes outer space or exoterrestrialism for dust and stone falls. Under certain conditions of large meteoroid or cometary impact, and heavy multiple volcanism, exploded material can achieve extreme heights and even be lost into space. Such would be the case, for instance, were the Moon to have been exploded from the Pacific Basin. In such a case, a prolonged fall-out period of a great many years, perhaps centuries, might result. Pebbles, dust, loess, tektites and other types of matter might separately collect in orbit and shower down homogeneously, while simultaneously, volcanism would pave large stretches of the globe. Once more, we find the gradual fall rates of the present and the more credible exponentially higher fall rates of the recent past so productive of mass and volume for the Earth's crust that a young age for the Earth or a very young age for the catastrophized Earth suggests itself. Whatever the properties of fully exoterrestrial falls to explosion and fall-back, the fall-out even will wreak havoc: darkness, lightning, winds, possible interruption of Earth motions, and biosphere destruction, plus excitation of seismism and volcanism; holospheric transactionism, that is. {S : Notes (Chapter Eight: Falling Dust and Stone)} Notes (Chapter Eight: Falling Dust and Stone) 1. Op. cit., 258. 2. Ibid., 258-9. 3. Ibid., 186-90. 4. Worlds in Collision, 42-3, 51-3. 5. "Meteor," 12 Ency. Brit. (1974), 36. 6. I Catas. Geol. (1976). 7. Unpubl. mss., 1980, Soil Dept., ICT, Entschede, Netherlands. 8. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 241, 243. 9. Ibid. 10. D. A. Cyr, Annular Space Dust (Thousand Oaks, Calif. Annular Publs., 1968). 11. Earth in Upheaval, 96. 12. W. W. Shilts, "Glacial Till and Mineral Exploration," in R. F. Legget, ed., Glacial Till (Ottawa, Royal Soc. Can., 1976), 205; Also Dreimanis, Ibid., II, 14-5, 42. 13. Op cit., 28-31. 14. ibid., 121-2. 15. John Bryson, 4 Am. Geol. (1889), 125-6; W. R. Jillson, 60 Science (1 Aug. 1924), 101-2. 16. Chester A. Davis, 19 New World Antiquity (Mar-Apr. 1972), 27-43; Donnelly, op. cit., passim. 17. L. J. Salop, "Glaciations, Biologic Crises, and Supernovae," 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 24-5. 18. John A. O'Keefe, "The Terminal Eocene Event..." 285 Nature (1980), 309-11; Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 254; O'Keefe, ed., Tektites, (U. of C. Press, 1963) and Tektites and Their Origin (N. Y., 1976). 19. B. P. Glass et al., "North American Microtektites from the Caribbean Sea" 19 Earth and Plan Sci. Ltrs (1973), 184-92 (N. Holland). 20. 217 Sci. Amer. (1967), 35-6. 21. 152 Science (3 June 1966), 1341-5. 22. C. Sutherland, "China's Dragon," 4 PensÚe 1 (Winter 1973-4), 47-50. 23. "Tektites and China's Dragon," I Kronos 2 (Summer 1945), 35-42. 24. 152 Science , loc. cit. 25. G. Baker, "Origin of Tektites," 185 Nature (30 Jan. 1960), 291-4. 26. Gill, 75 J. Geophys. Res. (1970), 966-1002 finds ages of only 4830 to 14600 years. B. glass et al. find end of Eocene deposits, 10 Lun. Plan. S. (1979) 434-6. 27. B. Heezen, B. Glass, op. cit., and 112 Science News (1977) 408 on Ivory Coast tektites. 28. Op. cit. 29. John Lear, Sat. Rev. (6 May 1967), 57. 30. E. A. King, 65 Amer. Sci. (1977), 212-18. 31. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity (New York: Wiley, 1962), 284-5. 32. James M. S. Sun, 56 Trans. Am. Geophys. U. (1975), 389. 33. 285 Nature (1980), 309-11. 34. Selected Works (Santa Barbara, Ca: Annular Pubns, 1972). 35. Edinburgh Philos. J. (1819), 221-35. 36. I. Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5. 37. In D. I. Shcherbakov, ed., The Interaction of the Science s in the Study of the Earth (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1968). 38. R. A. Schmidt, "Extraterrestrial Dust as a Source of Atmospheric Argon," 151 Science (14 Jan. 1966), 223. 39. "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoric Dust," 202 Sci. Amer. (Feb. 1960), 123-32. 40. S. Fred Singer, "Zodiacal Dust and Deep Sea Sediments," 156 Science (26 May 1967), 1080-3. 41. "Exploring the Ocean Floor," 183 Sci. Amer. (Aug 1950), 42-4. 42. Sci. Amer. (June 1980), 44-53. 43. Book of the Damned, repr. (London: Abacus, 1974). See also the compilations of W. Corliss (Glen Arm, Md., 21057, Sourcebook Project). 44. "Electricity in Astronomy," I S. I. S. R. 1-4 (1976-7), esp. # 4. 45. W. A. Tarr, "Is the Chalk a Chemical Deposit," 62 Geol. Mag. (1952), 252. 46. Luis Alvarez et al., "Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction," 208 Science (6 June 1980), 1095-1108. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART II: } {Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: } {C Chapter 9} {T Gases, Poisons and Foods} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER NINE GASES, POISONS AND FOOD That "all things come from heaven" may be untrue, yet even in these last peaceful centuries the quantity and variety of things reported to have fallen upon Earth is astonishing. For two hundred years, scientific establishments sought to resist the flow of accounts, making out those who appeared with such claims to be culturally retarded and childish, clowns, cranks and religious fanatics. Now the door is open to claims, and some scientists are tripping over each other's footnotes in their eagerness to go to through it. Since most chemical elements and compounds can be either found beyond the Earth or conjectured to have once formed from the thermal and electrical conditions that occur exoterrestrially, scenarios of past events to explain present processes are becoming as common, prolonged, and disastrous as the "soap operas" of radio and television. Contemporary man is motivated to come to grips with the sky by economics, politics, militarism, and the need to survive. Poisonous hydrocarbon, radiation, aerosols, carbon dioxide, acid pollution, radio microwaves, ion disturbances, acoustical turbulence, supersonic stresses in flight, and civil and military thrusts into outer space amount to a major challenge to human modes of existence. To cope with such developments, ever more scientific knowledge is required and this in turn leads to discoveries of processes occurring in outer space that influence the Earth, and thereupon present new problems and possibilities -solar energy, weather control, incursions of hitherto unrecognized chemicals and particles, and even, say some, life forms contributing to evolution and diseases. A modern pragmatic preoccupation with the skies, it would appear, is now being laid on top of the age-old preoccupation with the forces and gods believed to dominate the celestial sphere. The gases that we discuss are mainly effective in the biosphere. We address not only their chemical qualities but their behavior in mixtures and their propulsion by winds. The poisons we discuss are cell destroying chemicals. The food consists of the rare occasion of the descent of digestible cell-building chemical compounds. Hydrocarbons are considered here as poisons; petroleum deposits are dealt with in a chapter to come. Radiation is treated as a poison, though it may be a creator at times. Electricity, as was said earlier, is everywhere and can go onstage with a number of the processes involving gaseous behavior. Comets and meteoroids, like volcanos, can emit gases. Explorer and scientist Humboldt thought it probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823. When, on March 24,1933 a fireball of six miles diameter sped across the American South, it trailed a tail one mile wide that carried a thousand cubic miles of dust. The people who were beneath its passage smelled a peculiar sulphurous odor for hours and for several days suffered from throat irritation [1] . If the intruder is admitted, one may grant the occurrence of gases. An actual impact is not necessary. Can a gas cloud descend through the atmosphere without exploding or burning? It would have to be charged oppositely to the Earth's surface and buffered during descend by a plasma. Even under normal conditions, the positions of light and heavy gases are sometimes reversed in the disorderly atmosphere. The Great Chicago Fire, and forest fires which burned out millions of acres of land in Wisconsin, Michigan, Western America and Canada broke out on the same day in the fall of 1871. E. K. Komarek speaks of a peculiar fire weather and cites this case; Donnelly claimed that all were due to gas drifts from the tail of Biella's Comet which had not been seen on its expected three previous visits but was glimpsed without its tail in 1872, a year later, at which time a spectacular meteoritic display occurred [2] . Donnelly offered a number of testimonials that the fires referred to leaped incessantly from different locations above the houses and forests and behaved as electricity in some ways (fusing without burning) and as a gas in others (asphyxiating people away from the blaze). A few years later another comet neared Earth and the Earth passed through its tail. The comet broke up on September 9, 1882. Krakatoa exploded on August 26, 1883, after months of eruption. A great many people were burned, smothered in the choking gases, and nearly blinded. We should recall how the Krakatoa ash is negligible in the sea today when compared with the layers described in earlier pages. Mass asphyxiation would be a logical deduction from the conditions cited. Just as research has shown sunspot gaps to be connected with climatic disaster, and has correlated planetary-solar conjuctions with earthquakes, it may establish that cometary passbys have occasioned violent volcanism -all of this during the uniformitarian Solarian period. All the more may have happened, then, during ancient periods of catastrophes. Cosmic dust can be struck by particles from the Sun or stars and emit gases. David Tilles explains only 20% of the argon 36 and 38 on Earth as an effect of the solar wind upon space dust and debris. The balance he believes to be derived from an unquiet sun of long ages ago acting upon then larger dust clouds surrounding the Earth [3] . However, argon has been unexpectedly detected in the thin atmosphere of Mars, and if Mars has been recently in gaseous exchange with Earth, as Velikovsky wrote in 1950, it would have given argon to the Earth or taken it away [4] . Gibson and Moore, investigating subsoil samples from the Moon, found so many differences in volatile elements between North Ray Crater and other sampled locations that they concluded it to be the site of a cometary impact. They agree with Kopal that "the total amount of gas which can be acquired by the Moon in a catastrophic encounter with a comet is far from negligible." [5] The Earth is a bigger target for comets than the Moon. We would expect the Earth, then, to have also picked up many elements from foreign sources. Traces of gases and hydrocarbons were found some distance from the crater. Gases emitted by an impacting body would probably cause significant surface phenomena on Earth as well. In the year 687 B. C., at a time when natural phenomena, attributed to Mars, were verging upon the catastrophic in many places on Earth, the great army of the Assyrian king Sennacherib was destroyed as it was preparing to assault Jerusalem. "The angel of the Lord" is credited with the deliverance from the enemy by the Bible. The angel is identified as the Archangel Gabriel. He is connected with divine fire, with the founding of Rome, with the planet Mars. It was "a consuming blast" that rabbinical sources say burnt the souls of the Assyrians but not their bodies. An analysis is contained in Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (230-41) in several fine passages. The grotesque incident was coincidental with several other documentable events around the world, and with a probable interruption in the Earth's movement. As happens when a mega-force is operating, one force incites another: the destruction might have been occasioned by gas and "celestial fire" acting together. A charged gas would have descended, possibly lured by the concentration of metal weaponry and myriad campfires. The gas cloud would have sent an electrical leader to the camp grounds and the subsequent exchange of potentials would have killed the Assyrian host. Sennacherib the king escaped, he was probably camped high and far from the multitude of soldiers. Even in modern times of untroubled skies, verified reports of flocks and herds being annihilated by a lightning blast occur. The destructive meteoroid in this case would have been a plasmoid, preserving its integrity as it passed through space and the atmosphere by the repulsion of its surroundings, but driven down to Earth's surface by decrease in the repulsion, until ultimately a "soft explosion extinguished the oxygen available to human and replaced it by methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or these together. We turn next to the famous case of the mammoths, not waiting for the chapter on extinction [6] . One almost should say the "deathless" case, for it has endured the whole battle between catastrophists and uniformitarians, two hundred years -except that now it may even become the case of the "deathless" mammoth, for a late news report tells us that certain Russian experimenters are seeking to unfreeze and clone a mammoth cell with an existing elephant to give birth to a live mammoth. Were the original mammoths gassed into extinction? Instant death, fractured limbs, destroyed sometimes in herds and sometimes alone, discovered on hills (not in river channels), some found with their skins and innards intact, several found with food in their stomachs, even their mouths, often associated with an incongruous assembly of other species, they lived and died where they were found, several still standing, one with a rooted tree buried with it. The mammoth and almost all other large animals of the same period were extincted between 5,000 and 30,000 years ago over the face of the globe. The extinctions occurred from over practically the whole arctic area and down to the southern part of the United States, Europe and Middle Asia, where their close relatives, the mastodon, now-extinct elephants, and modern elephants browsed. It is strange that no human skeletons have yet been found, since we have their drawings of the mammoth. Obviously if the date of each specimen were to be taken seriously, we would have, as one writer argued, a series of local catastrophes. All over the world, he might have added. Nor were the frozen elephants found encased in ice, but rather in a muck of pebbles and clay, which is the same kind of muck that is widespread over hundreds of thousand of square kilometers in the frozen arctic regions and contains the mangled remains of millions of animals and plants. It is hard to dispute claims of a sudden, widespread, simultaneous, and single catastrophe. The assigned dates are hardly defensible. In the preliminaries of such a catastrophe, valid carbondating would be extincted along with the large animals. The supplemental dating is provided by the complicated ice age series, of which more later, but which, we can say, is something of a muck itself. With the unreliable dating shunted aside, a global scenario can be provided, an extravaganza, to be sure, but one is driven to it by the facts. One may speculate that a large body passed by the Earth perhaps 6,000 years ago. It drew up tides of water and air below its path by hundreds of meters. It drew along and up, then, water and atmosphere from the extreme northern and southern latitudes. It tilted the globe at the same time. Most animals were asphyxiated during the hours of the withdrawal of air. Simultaneously they were deep-frozen by temperatures reaching in directly from outer space in the range of -150 F. The intruding body departed. The columns of air and water collapsed, and rushed up to the north and south. The winds and tides collected most of the dead animals, tore up the ground, and finally deposited the remains in a muck that sometimes reaches to 1,000 feet of depth, even to 4,000 feet in one that the Soviets have excavated. Much of the air never returned; the supply from the larger envelope around Earth was depleted and the immediate atmosphere was thinned. As the legends say, it was now the bitter, cold age of the "God of the Bright Skies", Jupiter. The mammoths, dry frozen in a vacuum, rested in their packages of muck until the present day. After relating so dramatic a story, it would be excessive to speak of the dinosaurs and other mass extinctions, and these shall be saved until the appropriate chapter. Other issues remain to be discussed here relating to gases and poisons. One has to do with human experiences with atmospheric pressure, not only in moments such as asphyxiated the great mammals, but time and time again in primeval history. Sudden electrical events, not encounters alone, must have raised and lowered the air pressures under which humans lived. At times, mankind must have endured miserable headaches. Anthropologist Kennedy once referred briefly to "certain ritual practices like trepanation (which also developed obsessive proportion in Late Neolithic and Beaker time in Western Europe)." The practice extended in North Africa from the Canary Islands through the Berber lands at least as far as Egypt. It was performed in Mesoamerica as well. George Sarton writes in his history of science of prehistoric skulls that have come down to us with evidences of trepanation (trephination) performed upon them in life. The trepan is a saw for cutting holes in or removing pieces from the skull. It is a dangerous operation, hardly on a plane with piercing the nostrils to hold decorative devices. (But why are these devices so near the sinuses, too?) Extreme headaches and fury can thus be relieved. Trepanning, we surmise, was an indication that some considerable part of the population could not cope with a periodical fluctuation or definite change in atmospheric pressure. A second issue has to do with ozone. Having discovered that aerosol devices and supersonic transports might destroy the ozone layer, several scholars have ventured to say that such events have occurred in the past. Ozone, or atomic oxygen, exists in a thin layer in the upper atmosphere, where it blocks solar and cosmic particles from penetrating to the Earth's surface, here to cause innumerable mutations and cancers. Ozone, too, is a poison in itself. Associating ozone layer destruction with the periods of a reversal in the Earth's magnetic field and these with the extinction of a number of species, discoverable in ocean bottom drilling, Reid, Isaksen, Holzer and Cruzen theorize " that current concern about possibly anthropogenic destruction of stratospheric ozone may be well-founded since it is possible that major depletions occurring in the distant past have had profound effect on the development of life as we know it." [7] Anticipating again what is to be developed later, we can give credence to the theory, but would add that the destruction of the ozone layer will have occurred during any catastrophe involving turbulence in the stratosphere, especially with the passage of a large body. Furthermore, the authors say, "the harmful effects accompanying polarity reversal, whatever they may be, form only one component of the total environmental stress on a given species." Beland and Russell point out that solar flares of extreme power, of a kind never observed and perhaps occurring once in 200,000 years by probability theory, would have to coincide with the reversal of GMF in order to account for a large number of species extinctions [8] . The Sun might well have become agitated by changing movements of large bodies within its field and add a heavy dose of radiation to what might be occurring on Earth in reaction to an intruding body or bombardment of meteoroids. Ozone problems would have to take their place among many disturbing chemical and radiation changes. As Waddington pointed out in 1967, particle radiation increases inversely with magnetic shielding [9] . Presently one speaks of background radiation, or low-level radiation, and a pressing problem of the future is how to keep radiation at the same low level at least. Sternglass finds even now indications of birth defects, infant mortality, and old-age respiratory problems traceable to low level radiations [10] . Evidently both long-term increases of level and single bombardments can cause damage to most people. Latest medical reports (1983) are more ominous. Prehistoric cases can exchange ideas with future cases. J. W. Gofman has predicted that "a nuclear-based (U. S.) economy with 99.9% perfection in plutonium containment could mean a 25% annual increase in total death rate from this source alone," amounting to over 25 million extra cases of lung cancer over 50 years [11] . One must evaluate prehistoric indications of abnormal radiation and high-energy explosions in this light. Vera Rich, reviewing knowledge of the Tunguska (Siberia) meteor of 1908, brings forward evidence of scabrous infection of the local reindeer in that year, a great acceleration of tree ring growth beginning then, and an increase in the radioactivity of surrounding trees [12] . Another report has it that certain plants mutated as well. The event was exoterrestrial in origin and probably is of the category of "gas-bag" explosions, since scarcely a ton of exogenous particles has been recoverable from the immense scene of destruction. Perhaps the body entered the Earth's atmosphere with great speed, electrically attracted as well as driven by inertial differences, and thoroughly ablated until it became a gas projectile without a casing, that exploded before striking. Or perhaps it was a "Sennacherib plasmoid" from its inception. Generally speaking, the radiation effect of a single meteor or cometary train passing through the atmosphere would be heavier than many hydrogen bombs (unless these latter are deliberately "dirtied" by cobalt or other chemicals) because of its great heat, its compression of the ambiant air, its wide path of fall-out, and deep and large explosive cratering. During the disasters of Exodus, several documents give indications of radiation effects. The widespread "leprosy" effect may denote radiation disease, as I have explained in my study of Moses. Eating fallen quail killed many persons, reports Jewish legend. The manna, too, had to be eaten under supervision; to argue that it was" holy" and thus had to be treated ritualistically is a modern sociological notion overlooking that it might have become "holy" for several reasons, one being that priests, the savants, were called upon to distinguish the edible from the poisonous manna. The Egyptian Ipuwer papyrus conveys the impression that women became barren and that people lost their hair. The cattle herds died of scabrous diseases. The most substantial theory of Exodus times regards them as part of a much larger, a global, event, involving the close passage of a comet, so that radiation effects are logically to be expected. Recent studies have discovered high levels of radiation in fossil flora and fauna, going back far in conventionally dated geological time. Kloosterman writes of " anomalous high radioactivity" in a fish from the same Old Red Sandstore beds in which the Pterichtyades occur, "fishes often invoked by catastrophists..." and quotes Hugh Miller (1841) on a quiet but potent agency of destruction erasing "innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations." [13] We mention the case again when discussing extinction; electric shock probably accompanied the poison, and was succeeded immediately by great tides of slurried water. In 1975, Bramlette described deep fossil beds a plankton in the sea bottom that he tied to cosmic radiation storms [14] . Radiology is a new field of knowledge, whose development is producing a new attitude toward what can be transformed, in biology, geophysics, meteorology, and geology. Oparin some time ago began to call upon it to explain the long chain of chemo- biological events leading up to The Origin of Life. He wrote of inorganic meteoric material suffering far-reaching transformation from inter-stellar radiation before arriving upon the Earth, of transmutations, for instance of iron and nickel into aluminum and silieni and of these into magnesium, sodium, and helium. An instance of how rapidly old problems can be tendered new solutions by seemingly remote scientific developments occurs in the case of perhaps the most famous of fall- outs , that of manna, ambrosia to the Greeks, soma to the Hindus, and other names to other peoples. The insistent claim of the ancients takes on enhanced validity in the context of operations of modern technology. The bits of suggestive evidence come from all quarters. We begin with a famous 1945 experiment of S. L. Miller (in consultation with H. Urey) and ask Bernard Newgrosh to describe it for us: On the suggestion of H. C. Urey he took a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane and ammonia (which were then thought to be the constituents of Earth's primordial atmosphere but which are now known to be the constituents of cometary matter), boiled the water and ran an electrical discharge through it continuously for a week. The end products were an assortment of organic compounds, including some sugars, cyanides and small quantities of amino-acids. It was the latter which evoked the most interest and sparked off a whole new avenue of research into "the creation of life on Earth." Miller had boiled his liquid only to prevent the growth of (and therefore contamination by) micro-organisms. Later experiments used far less energy, and it transpired that the shorter and smaller the amount of heat used, the greater the yield of amino-acids obtained since these are denatured by heat. Other workers tried different mixtures of gases including, in some cases, oxygen and hydrogen sulphide. As long as the mixture was basically reducing in nature, the organic compounds and aminoacids were produced [15] . M. G. Reade and Wong Kee Kuong have more recently discoursed theoretically upon methods by which carbohydrates, such as the manna which fed the ancient survivors of the Exodus disaster, could be produced with the aid of cosmic lightning [16] . Formaldehyde (a compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) is a partially combusted gas, of which "there will be no shortage.. in a burning fiery cloud, almost whatever its origin." In mixtures of free oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, this is the only product. It has to be synthesized into sugar in an alkaline environment (already done) which is not poisonous and can be converted into starch, rolled into "coriander seed" sizes and dropped at dawn. So goes the argument of Reade, himself a confectioner and engineer. The necessary procedures and formulas are presently at the threshold of laboratory chemistry, he asserts. On the processes required to produce edible carbohydrates in the form described by the ancient sources, all are present in the environmental setting described by the same sources, although without making the scientific connection that present knowledge affords. The analysis of Reade is especially literal in matching edible product and the natural "chemical apparatus" within the Bible. In a yet unpublished manuscript on the Vedas of India, Ziegler brings forward many ancient statements about dust and gases pervading the skies, including the fact that the dust was falling and carrying the dew of heavenly waters (soma) with it. In Hindu rite, the soma-devi are celebrants of sacrifices using soma. As a libation to Agni, soma is now superseded in India by ghi. Now the deva is a goddess practically identical with Venus, and the devi are her cohort. Venus, east and west, is worshiped at times in the form of a cow, the sacred cow of India, for instance. Ghi is clarified butter. The "golden calf" of the Hebrews in Exodus is the equivalent Baal-Venus image. These few (from a great many) observations are made solely to point out and complete the coincidence of a great celestial presence (a cometary body), a turbulent atmosphere full of dust and lightning, the availability of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, formaldehyde, and water in large amounts, the presence too of many enormous laboratory vessels from which would fall not one but several products, and, of course, the desperate survivors who would eat anything (regardless of its nutritional value) and reverence the imagined donor. At the same time as the Hebrews, Hindus, Mexicans, Greeks and others were munching manna, they were vitally concerned with a certain redness in their environment. The most astonishing and fearful color had fallen out of the skies and penetrated the surface. Again we take leave to quote copiously from Newgrosh: Dr. Velikovsky has produced numerous citations from ancient sources to show how falls of a blood-like substance occurred when a "new" comet (later to become the planet Venus) came into catastrophic contact with the Earth: the Manuscript Quiche of the Maya, the so-called Papyrus Ipuwer from Egypt and the Book of Exodus all record the fact that the water in the rivers was turned into "blood". In addition to these examples, Dr. Velikovsky refers to the Greek myth of Zeus and Typhon, the Finnish epic Kalevala and the lore of the Altai Tartars. However, a more exhaustive survey of such legends would include the Sumerian myth of Inanna (a Venus goddess) who filled the wells of Sumer with "blood", the Egyptians story of the goddess Hathor (also Venus) whose visits to Earth were associated with the covering of the land with a blood-like "beer", and the Norse legends of the "raining of blood" associated with the Valkyries. These myths are widespread and all tell the same story. There can be little doubt that something looking like blood fell from Venus during its close contacts with Earth. What was its nature? Dr Velikovsky noted that it was a soluble pigment: "In sea, lake and river this pigment gave a bloody coloring to the water. These particles of ferruginous or other soluble pigment caused the world to turn red." Moreover, the accounts of Exodus 7: 24 and of Ipuwer lamentations agree that this bloody colored water was unpleasant and maybe poisonous. It is recorded of the Nile that "the river stank" (Exodus 7: 21). There was disease among the cattle which, Dr. Velikovsky claimed, was due to dust of an irritant nature. Another writer, Peter James, asks whether legends of red falls from periods before 3,500 years ago might not refer to geological occurrences that deposited red sands or ferratites around the world [17] . In Greek myth the Sky-god Ouranos, the first ruler of the universe, was castrated by his son Kronos and his blood fell to the Earth, impregnating it with a number of dreadful deities. To turn to Roman literature, we have a very graphic description of fall of blood in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in his account of the fall of the Giants. "The terrible bodies of the giants lay crushed beneath their own massive structures, and the Earth was drenched and soaked with the blood of her sons." Egyptian myth tells a tale of the Sungod Re similar to the Greek myth of Ouranos -it was said that Re mutilated himself and that new deities sprang from his blood as it fell. In another Egyptian myth, Re decides to punish mankind by sending down the Goddess Hathor/ Sekhmet. She performs her task enthusiastically, gorging herself in the blood of men, but Re does not want Man utterly destroyed, and he has to devise a stratagem to stop here in her path of destruction. He mixes red ochre with beer, and pours a vast quantity over the Earth during the night, to a depth of three palms (about nine inches). The goddess sates herself on this "blood", and intoxicated she returns to heaven having forgotten her task. Newgrosh refers back to the Miller experiment, for a crucial detail that has long gone unnoticed. Miller wrote: "During the run the water in the flask became noticeably pink after the first day, and by the end of the week the solution was deep red and turbid. Most of the turbidity was due to colloidal silica from the glass. The red color is due to organic compounds absorbed on the silica." To conclude, electric discharges between the intruder and Earth synthesized organic compounds in the cometary gases, including an edible component and an inedible red silicate that showered down to color the Earth and water a turbid red. Newgrosh adds, "being organic compounds, they would be speedily denatured, leaving no trace -except, that is, in the memory of mankind." Also, an iron compound of partially hydrated FeCl2 has been reported present in heavy concentration in the clouds of Venus today [18] . Considering that a possible source of Venus is the "Great Red Spot" of Jupiter, together with the material already mentioned, if this analysis remains valid, this is a significant quantavolutionary indication, perhaps a better test than the hotly debated question of hydrocarbon clouds. On many occasions in the past several centuries, falls of gelatinous material have been reported in connection with meteors. The literature in part has been compiled by Corliss [19] . Luminous and therefore probably electrified while falling, the stuff is transparent and colorless, texturally a jelly, stinks when disintegrated, and dissolves into a few grains of residue after some hours. One may guess that the Earth's reducing hydrogen-rich top atmosphere is carried into contact meteorically with an oxidizing lower layer, gathering dust particles and vapor, including metallic catalysts, to form a semi-solid type of formaldehyde glob the size of a drinking cup. These are certainly poor imitations of manna, but a similar process is entailed. To portray its relation in volume to a smallpox virus, a single crystal of salt would have to be enlarged to a five-meter cube, on a ratio of one centimeter to 1 micron (10 -4 cm) for the virus to be visible [20] . There is certainly room for viruses to ride on cosmic dust. There is not yet a definite answer to the question whether meteoroids and comets do now carry or ever have carried organic molecules and primitive life forms. Brigham, in 1881, following Hahn and Weinland, reported a collection of some six hundred specimen of fossil life obtained by analysis of meteorites [21] . Their work was discarded as imaginative to the extreme, for they were discovering corals, sponges, and crinoids. In the thirties, Lipman and Roy debated the former's findings of rods and ovoid cells in meteorites [22] . Recently, Claus, Nagy, and others have discovered inherent organic compounds, carbonaceous chrondrites, in meteoritic material. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have tackled the problem vigorously over the past few years and emerged with two relevant hypotheses: one that life forms originated in space and a second that plagues also descend from space. Comets carry the appropriate chemicals and can carry on the necessary varying experiments naturally, over millions of years, until "photosynthetic bacteria, able to oxidize hydrogen sulfide anaerobically," emerged. If a cometary impact led to the start of life, the question arises: would subsequent arrivals of cometary material carry biological or prebiological material which might affect terrestrial biology? The boldest answer must be yes; that is to say, extraterrestrial biological invasions never stopped and continue today. These invasions would take the form of new viral and bacterial infections that strike our planet at irregular intervals, drifting down onto the surface in the form of clumps of meteoritic material probably similar to those studied by Dr. Rajan and his colleagues [23] . The authors propose a perpetual vigil and a screening of stratospheric contents for microbes. If their theory is correct, one might expect veritable plagues to have had a hand in the great extinctions of species that have marked geological history. The causes of death would not only be mechanical -flooding, wind, hailstones etc. -and radiation, but also should include "biological warfare" against the Earth. Actually there is yet another dread possibility, chemical poisons, such as cyanide. Iridium, osmium and arsenic occur in quantities hundred of times above the normal in strata of the cretaceous-tertiary when the dinosaurs and many other species, both terrestrial and marine, extincted. Kenneth Hsu discerns at the same time a double blow to the biosphere in the form, first, of heavy atmospheric heating owing to a cometary pass-through and explosion, which killed off large terrestrial animals, and cyanide poisoning that wiped out calcacerous marine plancton [24] . The cyanide effect would be stressed by a catastrophic rise in calcite-compensation depths in the oceans after the cyanide was detoxified. During these disastrous events, which may have happened on several or more occasions, not one alone, the ground forces would be highly energized. Velikovsky found it impossible to determine whether, in the plagues of Exodus, "the comet Venus infested the Earth with vermin," or "the internal heat developed by the Earth and the scorching gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the Earth propagate at a very feverish rate." That many forms of life are comfortably buried below ground surface is well-known. But a thermal rise, flooding, earthquake, volcanism, and electrical discharging, will bring them out in incredible numbers. Thus the frogs of Exodus, the locusts, and the vermin also. One need only retroject modern reports, and raise the scale of intensity, to imagine the succession of events. In the area of the Krakatoa explosion, the nether world of animals was stirred up even while the gases burned, choked, blinded, and smothered people. There is normally more in the soil than the erosion of terrestrial rocks: this has become apparent. Equally, new elements are discoverable that convey surprise, mostly unpleasant. The Dow Chemical company of Midland, Michigan, has been for several years in a quarrel with local authorities and environmentalists. The latter claim that Dow has manufactured chemicals that deposit dioxins, a carcinogen, in the soils. Dow says " we now think dioxins have been with us since the advent of (fire). It is perhaps uninformed to discount the company's research, that is apparently discovering dioxins everywhere. Adding more dioxins to the ground, of course, makes matters worse. A parallel can be cited from the research into "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons is Soils and Recent Sediments," conducted by Blumer and Youngblood, on behalf of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution [27] . Samples were drawn from "depositional and chemical environments ranging from continental and coastal soils to marsh and subtidal marine deposits, and from high to low oxidation-reduction potentials." The PAH component is significant; PAH is carcinogenic; ancient burning may be producing some of today's cancers; it would be well to perform statistical correlations on populations, cancer incidences, and "background PAH" of soils. PAH are formed at elevated temperatures by incomplete combustion. Our interpretation would imply that carcinogenic and mutagenic hydrocarbons occurred on the earth's surface during geological times spans. This raises the question whether these compounds might have contributed significantly to the processes of natural selection of mutation, and to the evolution of species. The scientists assess the possible origins of the PAH deposits. They exclude weathering, seepage and spills, they exclude biosynthesis; they doubt early diagenesis in process of formation; they settle upon pyrolysis. This burning might be thought to occur on the site, but "the consistency in the PAH distribution among our samples suggests a predominant single mode of origin;" the sites are distant from one another. The chemistry does not permit regarding the PAH as "urban air particulates." Forest fires are "possible but unproven:" low temperature burning could provide the homology among the samples and air transport of PAH carbon ash from a great central fire somewhere might preserve the similarity. The ash layers are not noticeable, however. The authors do not consider typhonic meteoric explosions and fall-out. This could raise to great heights the combustion residue of large vegetal areas and drop it around the world. Nor do they consider a cometary pass-through with a burning hydrocarbon tail that could deliver the PAH where and how found today. The time would be recent, for the PAH are in surficial sediments. In sum catastrophes, especially if exoterrestrially invoked, display much chemical creativity. Great typhonic explosions on Earth, probably exoterrestrially induced, will behave more modestly, but similarly. Numerous gases, poisons, and foods have fallen out in natural history, and very recently. Precarious life situations have been widely and abruptly generated. Multiple reports of gaseous and fall-out processes in space and atmosphere challenge the credibility of radioactivity rates that have been established under guidelines consistent with presently observable rates. {S : Notes (Chapter Nine: Gases, Poisons, and Food)} Notes (Chapter Nine: Gases, Poisons, and Food) 1. F. W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Phila: Chilton, 1965), 179. 2. Donnelly, op. cit., 102-6. 3. David Tilles, "Atmospheric Noble Gases...," 148 Science (21 May 1965), 1085-7. 4. L. M. Greenberg, "The Martian Atmosphere," II PensÚe I (1976), 5-9. 5. 179 Science (5 Jan. 1973), 69-71. 6. W. R. Corliss has compiled and reprinted numerous extracts from the scientific literature, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md.; Sourcebook Project, 1975), section EBM. An important update and new material is contained in L. Ellenberger, et al., "Catastrophism and the Mammoths," VII Kronos 4 (Summer 1982), 62-96. 7. G. C. Reid et al., "Influence of ancient solar-proton events on the evolution of life," 259 Nature (22 Jan. 1976), 177-9. 8. 263 Nature (16 Sept. 1976), 259. 9. Science (17 Nov. 1967) 10. E. J. Sternglass, Low Level Radiation (NY: Ballantine, 1972). 11. Report prepared for the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (Yachats, Oregon). 12. 274 Nature (1978), 207. 13. J. B. Kloosterman, 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 49. 14. 187 Science (17 Jan. 1975). 4172. 15. 4 S. I. S. Workshop 1 (July 1981), 2-3. 16. Wong, Kee Kuong, "The Synthesis of Manna," 3 PensÚe (Winter 1973), 45-6; M. G. Reade, "Manna as a Confection," I S. I. S. R. 2 (Aug. 1977), 9-13, 25. 17. I Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5. 18. G. P. Kuiper, "On the Nature of the Venus Clouds," Planetary Atmos., Intl Atmos Union, Symposium 40 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971). 19. See W. R. Corliss, Strange Phenomena, (Glen Arm, Md., 1974), 2v. 20. Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (NY: John Day, 1957). 21. F. Brighan, 20 Pop. Sci. (1881), 83-7. 22. Work by C. B. Lipman; S. K. Roy; E. Anders et al. and R. L. Levy is extracted by W. R. Corliss ed., in Strange Universe (Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook Project, 1977), 2v. 23. "Does Epidemic Disease come from Space?" New Sci. (17 Nov. 1977), 403. 24. 285 Nature (22 May 1980), 202. 25. Worlds in Collision, 192-3, 268. 26. R. Jeffrey Smith, 202 Science (15 Dec. 1978), 1166-7. 27. Science (4 Apr. 1975), 53; see also R. A. Hites, Laflamme and Farrington, "Sedimentary Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons...," 198 Science (25 Nov. 1977), 829-31. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART II: } {Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: } {C Chapter 10} {T Metals, Salt and Oil} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TEN METALS, SALT AND OIL Iron-working is siderurgy, a word out of ancient Greece and Rome. It translates properly as the working of star-iron. The Greek word for anvil, on which iron was worked, was close to the word for a meteoric stone. The Eygptians called iron "the bones of Typhon" and "a gift from Seth," both names corresponding to bodies crashing into the Earth, devil-monster and devil-god. Meteoritic iron was known to the early dynasties. "The Jews called iron ore nechoshet, which literally means the 'droppings of the (cosmic) serpent, ' a nonsensical term unless our interpretation of it is allowed." [1] The Jews forbade the use of iron in chiseling stones for the construction of an altar. "A similar taboo was observed in Greek and Roman cults, it was and still is widespread." [2] But, whereas the Egyptians held an especial taboo of iron, the Assyrians did not, and M. Sieff has described how Egyptian power waned when it lacked iron and waxed, on occasion, when foreign workers and allies such as the Greeks and the miners of Zimbabwe brought in iron and worked it. The Assyrians achieved their greatest conquests at a time of grave natural disasters (the Mars-associated events between -776 and -487) [3] . South and north of Egypt, iron in large quantities was found and used; in Egypt it was neither found nor used. Query: why was no distinction made between meteoritic sacred iron and mined iron? Possible answer; because all iron was known to be meteoritic. Much may have fallen in association with the activity of the great war god Mars-Ares-Nergal. Adequate metallurgy was known for thousands of years before the iron age; increased temperatures could have been devised if the will--and the material--were present. In conventional works of human history, iron is placed as a late discovery. The "iron age" comes after the "bronze ages" which follow the "Stone-ages." These terms and divisions now only perpetuate confusion in anthropology, history, philosophy, and perhaps even in geology. Thus, a common reference, the Columbia Encyclopedia, thinks that meteoric iron beads existed in Egypt as early as 4000 B. C. but iron smelting not until 1900 B. C. and later [4] . Some confusion is admitted on the matter and Velikovsky's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology has added dismay to confusion [5] . Some even say that iron may have been used before bronze, since isolated iron artifacts of very early dynasties have been recovered. By the end of the second millennium, iron was in general use in Palestine and probably also to the North. A Soviet excavation has reported a metallurgical industry between 3000 and 2000 B. C. in Medzamor [6] with steel tweezers dated at about 1000 B. C. Several experts now assert that there was no clear functional superiority of iron in the first centuries of its use; bronze was adequate even for weapons. This all would signify a concurrent use of iron, lead, tin, copper, gold and silver by 2500 B. C. in the Mediterranean and Middle East, also perhaps elsewhere in the world. The question arises why mankind did not use metals and invent metallurgy earlier. Could all the workable surface metals of the world have arrived from exoterrestrial sources within a brief period of late proto-history, and so vividly that the ancients even could assign separate periods for their arrival, as Hesiod and Ovid did when reporting a golden age, succeeded by a silver age, and ending in an iron age? I cannot attempt a full answer here, but would support the case for human-witnessed exoterrestrial falls. Bellamy can again be quoted [7] : Gold, platinum, uranium, radium, mercury, bismuth, and other heavy metals are not detected in the surface layer of the Sun, nor of any other star. As we cannot suppose that they do not exist in those bodies they must logically be present in their cores--and hence also in the cores of the smaller cosmic bodies, planets. Therefore the presence of heavy metals on, or near, the surface of our Earth points to strewing from without. Without such cosmic strewing no ores would probably be found on, or near, the surface of our Earth at all. In the south of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) there is a zone, about 180 miles long by 25 to 30 miles wide, which contains great deposits of ores--chiefly copper, iron, tin, uranium, and cobalt. In Angola and Rhodesia, as well as in South Africa, there are smaller deposits. Indeed, many geologists are of the opinion nowadays that the great rich ore deposits at least must have been brought into being through strictly localized, exceptional, and briefly operative causes. Iron, the ancients believed, was meteoritic in origin. What would they have believed if they had seen the now exposed great iron mountains of Minnesota or Venezuela? Could such mountains have fallen from the sky? Unquestionably. Asteroids exist in the size of iron mines and contain as much iron. Would they not have exploded and dissipated into dust upon landing? Some would and some not. A not-well-understood feature of meteoroid falls is that they can accomplish soft landings as well as hard crashes. In hard crashes, such as at Campo del Cielo (Argentina) where a number of meteoroids fell, "large masses of meteoritic iron and shale have been found in its vicinity." [8] Heide writes, "the 60-ton meteorite from the Hoba farm near Grootfontain, South West Africa, the heaviest of all known meteorites, imbedded itself in friable limestone at a depth of only 1.5 meters. The iron meteorites of Cape York in Greenland, weighing up to 30.875 tons, lay on solid gneiss rock, or were barely imbedded in moraine rubble, without any trace of an impact. Here we may guess that they fell on a thick layer of ice or snow and sank to their final location as the snow or ice melted [9] . However, as the Mass and Velocity of the meteoroid increase, its Energy of impact increases, according to the formula E = 1/ 2 mv 2 . The atmosphere cannot brake the body in time. Therefore, no iron masses of over 100 tons have been deemed to be of exoterrestrial origin; where such have actually fallen, and few doubt this, they have been vaporized by the impact. In the face of this formula and the visible facts of meteoritic iron, it would appear that the large iron ore masses on Earth cannot have originated exoterrestrially. The negation, if any, depends upon variable velocity. If the falling iron mass is electrically charged, or gathers a charge, so as to render it less attractive to the Earth its velocity would diminish. Theoretically, it could waft down in a soft landing in one piece. If it crashed upon landing, it would possibly assemble itself into the form of an iron ore deposit as deluges of water and dust would fill the interstices. Strange objects have been found in the midst of iron ores being mined, such as wood of recent date [10] . Much that is meteoritic may not be discovered. On an Antarctic ice field, Japanese explorers found over 1000 meteorites, of which only one was composed of iron [11] . Were the field of stone, instead of ice, the stone meteorites would probably go undetected. Obviously we could not test all the Earth's rocks for exoterrestrial origin, especially since the tests themselves might beg the question. Masses of iron were found lying upon a Disco Island (Greenland) shore with a great gneiss erratic boulder and associated with the talus of a basalt cliff which itself contained similar bits of iron. All the iron was termed meteoritic which led the investigators to wonder, especially since the basalt fragments were found even embedded ' inside the iron of the beach, whether the meteorite shower "occurred while the basalt was in a state of pasty eruption." [12] But, too, the range itself, though immense and tall, might have been the rim of a great impact collision and was permeated by and interacted with the exploding body. Suppose all known meteoritic material in the world were assessed for its proportion of iron. Suppose then that one calculated the proportion of iron ore to the amount of drift, loess and homeless clay. If the two ratios were similar, the exoterrestrial thesis would be expanded to embrace the materials of both ratios. Iron in one form or another composes about 5% of the Earth's surface rocks; here is a thoroughly homogenized relationship of iron to rock. This ratio turns out to be closer to the ratio of iron to stone in meteoroids. Both ratios would be far removed, no doubt, from the ratio of iron ore to drift and loess, which would probably be one in thousands. We can imagine, as have several scientists, that the meteoroids fallen upon Earth are those of a late planet explosion in the region of the belt of asteroids and therefore we have been sampling a planet composed as the Earth is supposedly composed, with iron and nickel core, sima mantle, and sial crust. Calculations, given this simple idea, are complex but not enough. There is too much evidence of exoterrestrial dumping upon Earth by other bodies, more of the nature of Jupiter and Saturn, to carry out this algebra of ratios with confidence. Generally, "terrestrial" iron bodies are distinguishable in composition from meteoritic iron in that they contain either smaller amounts of nickel (about 3 per cent) or larger amounts (about 35 per cent). The meteoroids also contain some cobalt. The distinction is hardly foolproof. Generally, too, the meteoroids have encrustations attributable to their experiences in space, although this is statistically discoverable and not an absolute distinction. Perhaps somewhere in the literature, unknown to the present writer, exists a systematic examination of the boundaries of a very large metal body demonstrating a lack of exoterrestrial experience. Nor is there a great iron body embedded in precambrian rock; nor has anyone come upon intrusive pipes of iron ore that would have conveyed metal from the core or mantle, by some combination of electrical and volcanic force. If an alternative to an electrically-assisted soft landing were sought, one might better conceive of a welding process; gigantic lightning strokes from iron bodies in space lasting for a minute would cast molten iron ore down their path to where they now rest in heaps. Again, a study of ore body boundaries is needed. Schaeffer has written of the layers of ashes and cinder scories close in to a huge pure copper mine of Cyprus [13] . One recent theory has the same copper distilling from a hot spot of a northern fork of the great African rift. To this author, the exoterrestrial notion is as convincing. Like Bellamy, I am impressed by the fact that "there are, scattered over the Earth, a number of ore-mountains which are evidently foreign to their surroundings. At Eisenerz, in Austria, there is a huge mountain, consisting altogether of iron ore .... On the island of Elba, in Sweden, in Russia, in India, and elsewhere we find more or less considerable hills consisting of pure iron ore, mineral wonders of the world. In Orissa, India, in the jungle near the village of Sakchi, is a hill consisting of iron ore which is so rich that it yields almost 65 per cent of pure metal." Elsewhere he writes that such mountains would, upon investigation, probably prove to be 'rootless. ' He describes others. "At Gellivara in Sweden there are enormous deposits of iron ore whose special characteristic is that they are found in floelike masses, as if they had been 'pancaked' down. At Kirunavaara and Loussavaara, in Lapland, there are similar deposits of iron ore. The 'Kursk Anomaly' in Russia consists of a mass of iron ore estimated to contain about a cubic mile of high-grade material. In the Ural area there is Gora- Blagodat, the 'Blessed Mountain, 'an iron ore mountain 520 feet high, situated in a plain. In Russia too is the Wyssokaya Gora, a deposit of rich magnetite ore, littered over a strip 40 miles long by 9 miles wide." [14] As with iron, so with other metals: many legends have them falling from heaven. The Chinese sky dragon's "breath descends as a rain of water or of fire. Gold is the congealed breath of a White Dragon, but a Purple Dragon's spittle turns into balls of crystal; glass is regarded as solidified dragon's breath." (The tektite allusion is plain). "The dragons of mythology are often described (among the Teutons, for example) as guardians of hoards and givers of wealth." The dragons are wise in metallurgy [15] . Donnelly says the same. He describes "Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster, rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's death." [16] Further, now Humboldt writes, the Scythians had a sacred gold which fell burning from heaven. "The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover bronze coins." [17] An image of a rattlesnake with a tail of gold, and descended from heaven, was worshipped by the Inca as the god of riches. In the Bible (Job 21) it is said of the horrendous dragon Leviathan, "he shall strew gold under him like mire." And Chan reports that in ancient Mesoamerica "yellow was the color of gold, the teocuilatl or excrement of the gods." [18] The dragons that are the substance of most ancient myths and of children's fairy tales today tortured and enriched both the Earth and the minds of men. Cores drilled from Antarctic sediments of pleistocene age contained iridium and gold in anomalously high proportions. "A sizeable fraction of the noble metals is contained in vesicular, millimeter-sized poly-mineralistic grains that closely resemble ablation debris from chondritic meteorites, and there is little doubt that the noble metals resulted from the accretion of a large extra-terrestrial object."[18A] About the same time as this expedition, the largest American gold strike in a century was occurring on the Thornton-Ash ranch in Nevada. The gold was not in nuggets, but in microscopic sizes like the Antarctic find. It is extracted by crushing and leaching its host rock. Large tracts of land are being scooped out and many millions of tons of rock processed to obtain the gold. In the absence of a comparative examination of the Nevada and Antarctic discoveries, one may suspect an exoterrestrial origin of the Nevada gold as well. Conventionally, studies of the origins of metals and their cultural recognition do not mention any exoterrestrial contribution to their chemistry, appearance or use. Instead, they are looked upon as components of igneous intrusions. Speaking of gold, silver, copper, lead and tin, Clair Patterson in his exceptionally important study of "Native Copper, Silver, and Gold accessible to Early Metallurgists,"[18B] declares: The primary igneous minerals of the 5 anciently used metals were generally mixed with a large number of unwanted minerals in the vein or lode. Useful igneous minerals of the 5 different metals were not generally mixed together, however. Except for close relations between lead and silver, deposits of the 5 metals were more unrelated than related in a specific region (Noble 1970). The different metals were generally successively deposited over a period of time in adjacent regions (Noble 1970). The common characteristic which bound the deposits of all 5 metals together was the fact that they were emanations derived from igneous intrusions in mountainous belts, sometimes occurring together, or nearby, or not at all. He reports that the ratio of copper to silver to gold mined from all types of deposits in the entire world from 3800 B. C. to 1925 A. D. was 3,000 to 11 to 1, and believes the ratio not to be far removed from their natural incidence as ores. These are largely surficial, he says, even though he expects the same metals to be found in highly dispersed, fine grains throughout the crust, where their bulk would be perhaps seven million times that of the ores. "The lower the grade of ore, the more there is of it, until finally we include the entire earth's crust in our consideration."[18C] It is likely that the greatest masses of copper, silver, gold, tin and lead ores were emplaced in the upper several kilometers of the earth's crust rather than throughout the total 35 km thickness of the continents or the thicker upper mantle. Governing agents in this vertical distribution were abrupt decreases in temperatures and pressures near crustal surfaces. It is unlikely that there are any large deposits of the kind we commonly recognize as ores at great depths in the crust, although there are very large amounts of copper, silver, gold, tin, and lead dispersed down there. It seems that ores are found in a highly confused and diversified state that does not let one assume any neat intrusion of pure metal. Nor even is the intrusiveness manifest; the term seems to define itself, as simply something differing from its surroundings, not a clean belt or stratum, but as a conglomerate chemically, physically, and morphologically. Ore is the valued part of minerals, including metals. The modern processes used to isolate ore are imitations of nature. Crushing is first, where the pressures and grinding of water, wind, and rock movements are emulated. Mineral separation follows. Minerals of different sizes are shaken through sieves. A hydrocyclone may be used to segregate particles by their response to varying winds. Flotation is employed to separate the crushed particles according to their density. The material may be conveyed along jigging tables under running water so that high density, then afterwards lower density material, settle. A magnetic wheel can collect from poured minerals the magnetic ores and cast off the less-magnetic ores. Minerals that accept water-proofing can float in a froth while non-proofed minerals and rock sink. Once minerals have been chemically created, by high-energy forces, the same or a varying mix of quantavolutional forces can segregate them. Under these circumstances, a person of our persuasion is likely to see exoterrestrial intruders smashed, crushed and exhibiting metal here and there; or, secondly, rims of hardly discernible craters containing segregated elements of the Earth's rock mixed with exoterrestrial elements that have been subjected to the immense heat and pressure of a crash; or, thirdly, effects of massive electrical discharge plus fall-back of exploded earth. (Regarding this last, and considering the unusual conductivity of metals, have they been prepared for conductivity, like quartz semiconductors? Are we dealing with homeopathy or homology?) The distribution of metals in the world is associated somewhat with folding and thrusting, but this may be a finder's help, not a random sample of ore distribution. More significant is the lack of correlation of these metals with volcanism or even with great faults. Why should metals congregate near circular features and basins, suggestive of astroblemes? Flint is found that has undergone controlled heat treatment, with pressure retouching as revealed by spectroscopic experiments; this is at least Solutrean in age, 22000 B. P by conventional dating [19] . The skill is as complex as and less enjoyable than metalworking by heat; why then did man wait another 15,000 years to begin his work with copper, tin, lead, gold, silver, and iron? Perhaps they were not available. Or, perhaps the dating is too long and, soon after the flintworking, metalworking began, which is one logic for preserving the conventional origin of metals by casting aside the conventional chronology. Before the ages of the metals, so-called stone age man existed. He used many different kinds of stone, bone, wood, and grasses. He designed, cut, heated, and molded them. He domesticated animals, grew cereals, performed anatomical operations with stone knives. He built cities and great monuments. He painted, danced, and sang. Coal and peat were burned. Obsidian and flint were mined; Greek myth portrays Saturn castrating his father Uranus, using a jagged-edged sickle of flint. If any amount of terrestrial iron had been present on the surface and outcroppings, why would it not have been employed? Gold, silver, copper, tin and lead were mined and used. Mankind was ready to work and even to melt and purify iron, it seems, long before it was available. If only in order to supply the type of hypothesis that may lead usefully to historical research on the subject, I would suggest that most metals occurred around the period of the great Deluge and in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter worship, about 4200 B. C., and may be connected to a cosmic explosion that I have in Chaos and Creation assigned to a planet with the legendary traits of Apollo. It is noteworthy that the ancient metal mines of Attica had two favorite names, Artemisiakon and Hermaikon, both siblings of Apollo [20] . John Saul drew circles corresponding to rounded features, possibly ancient exploded craters, on a topographic map of a portion of Arizona. He independently marked the location of mineral deposits on a similar map. When one overlaid the other, there appeared a significant relationship between craters and mines, with the deposits generally occurring on the rims of the circles. One circle was abundantly supplied with minerals, indicating that a certain small percentage of craters, and hence their originating body, may be heavily mineralized [21] . R. S. Diez is cited by Pauwels for arguing the origination of the immense Sudbury (Canada) nickel mines from a meteoroidal impact of pre-Cambrian times. One can conjecture, then, about a possible ratio of large stone meteoroid impacts to large mineral meteoroid impacts corresponding to the experienced ratio of small stone to small iron-nickel meteoroid impacts. Since historical experience has been limited (explainable by the negative exponential principle), one would hardly expect historically the fall of the rarer metals such as gold, silver, and copper. Walter Sullivan has presented in the New York Times of Nov. 2, 1966 a map of the world's most productive gold field below Johannesburg, which shows a large primary "bulls-eye- formation" rimmed by gold-bearing formations and a much larger 200-mile-diameter, secondary, cratered, rim-like area, also bearing gold, and asks "Did a comet create a South African gold field?" Unless the gold was alchemized on the spot, it might have been part of the meteoroid that crashed. Most metals, in conclusion, may originate exoterrestrially. If an alternative must be found, it may be suggested, although hardly discussed directly here, that special thermo-electric events might produce the metals. This would constitute electrolysis on a huge scale, in a dense catastrophically formed atmospheric plasma, before or after striking. The metal, manganese, is exceptionally terrestrial in origin. Its growth out of underseas volcanos is particularly explosive and rapid. Pure manganese is found in cones near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Hot water and steam percolate through lava segregating the metal and depositing it in molten pools where it cools shortly. The French-American Mid-Ocean study, "Project Famous," found manganese geysers along the Ridge in the 1970's. Manganese is also found in nodules on the ocean floors. These, by contrast with the geyser type, are supposed to have required much time to grow. Scott and his colleagues estimated that nodules grow at rates of 1 to 10 mm/ million years. They are supported by Ku, Burnett and Morgenstein, using both radiometric and nonradiometric techniques of dating. But Goldberg and Arrhenius reported finding a 50-year old naval shell with a ferromagnesium oxide coating 30 mm thick, indicating a rate of 60,000 mm/ m years [21A]. Heezen and Hollister point out that the rate of accumulation of manganese is a function of its concentration in water and the availability of a nucleus in the water [21B]. Conventional gradualist theory cannot explain the "mystery" so well as quantavolution. Nodules abundantly litter the deep abyssal hills. They form around a particle, tephra, a pebble, an animal tooth, a bone, or on the surfaces of volcanic or drifted rocks. The nodules should require a very short time to form, if supplied with nucleus, warm water and a manganese rich soup emerging from fast flowing and erupting volcanos. The manganese adheres to any object and rafts to its ultimate destination far from its birth place with fast-spreading lava, which also boils out manganese accumulations as it spreads, and by swirling currents of newly forming seas around it, the same currents that hold the nuclear objects in suspension for a time. The process 'proves itself as turbulent and swift by the nuclei, which would otherwise sink in the abyssal muck if there were such and by the availability of manganese only at the hot spots of the ridge. Thus, contrary to the long-time theory of manganese formation, the very presence of the manganese nodules goes to demonstrate how rapid was the paving of the ocean basins, a topic to be treated later on. Sodium chloride is of course a mineral compound, and not a metal. The salt domes of the world, averaging 30 cubic miles each, may carry 100,000 cubic miles of salt, about three-tenths of all the salt of the seas. Salt is not found in pre-cambrian rocks, which are said to embrace most of the time since the Earth was created. Basalt of the ocean bottoms contains no salt and salt could not have been precipitated from the melting of mantle rock [22] . Granite is also deficient in salt. The presence of salt, like the metals, in living tissues, and therefore the need of it, does not prove its terrestrial origin. Nor should one gullibly receive the story that since salt is in our tissues, it must be part of the ancient waters that bore the first life, hence giving us proof of most ancient salt oceans. Life digests salt-free water, even ocean life. If all the water of the world were to receive all the salt deposited in domes, life as we know it might become precarious--except insofar as we constructed desalification factories to sustain it. The miracle is that salt has not killed life already, like many ancient settlements had their land sown with salt by their enemies, and thus were extinguished. Species closely resembling one another are to be found both in oceans and freshwater lakes and rivers. Salmon live in both oceans and rivers during their individual lifetimes. Paleontology may not be able to demonstrate the precedence of saltwater over freshwater life forms. Too, the medium of early marine life may have been brackish. There is no apparent earthly source for salt. A Head Curator of Geology at the U. S. National Museum, George P. Merrill, long ago wrote that sodium chloride (at least the latter) must have come like meteorites from outer space and been caught up first in the atmosphere and then dumped in the oceans. By the atmosphere is implied a canopy sky. From the canopies, salt would descend with water deluges, which we shall be considering later as a quite recent event. The canopy or set of rings may have been a momentary affair or endured for centuries. The rings and body of Saturn may contain sodium chloride or its elements; the rings contain millions of small mineral objects. Legendary evidence exists on this account. Once salt in solution strikes the ground it must run off into the basins that have water, making it salty, and also contribute with its host water to new seas. If it sinks into the ground in solution it will form a reservoir, either exposed or folded under or trapped in a cavity. In these cases, the water will boil out as steam: or it will percolate into underground and above-ground branches flowing to the sea. The salt residue will then form domes. Cook argues that the salt domes were created in the same set of events as the deep burial of organic material of which petroleum is composed, for many salt domes act as oil traps, keeping oil from dissipation. Avalanching ice from collapsing ice caps, and sediments pushed by these, suddenly thrusted and folded salted waters that were swirling around the great movements, containing them under high heat and pressure. The trapped waters were squeezed out of insoluble sediments into their own cavity. There they evaporated quickly, leaving salt deposits. But it is unlikely that the waters of the Earth were so salty as to provide, via tides, the salt domes and still leave the run-off waters with the present heavy component of salt in solution. Furthermore, as later chapters here will argue, the bulk of the ocean waters and ice came exoterrestrially and the salted waters mostly arrived later. The salt may have descended both as a solid and in acqueous solution. Salt domes exist beneath the sea floor as well as below the land. Salt domes containing oil have been discovered beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico at 12,000 feet of depth (2000 fathoms) [23] . Great salt domes have been discovered below the Mediterranean floor as well, giving rise to an idea that the Mediterranean once, 12 million years ago, became a dry basin. Why salt should not then be evaporated and laid in even layers of sediments rather than in intrusive pockets is unanswered. In South and East Texas many cylinders of salt (with nearby anhydrite, gypsum, oil and sulfur deposits) penetrate the Earth to depths of a thousand meters and more. Kelly and Dachille ask "What could have caused these tremendous beds of practically pure rock salt?" And they write: "Our inevitable answer is the same, collision-flood. We should guess that this pan of the earth was struck by a body or bodies of sufficient size to evaporate great quantities of ocean water, both by the Kinetic energy released by the impact and by the great pool of molten lava that must have been formed in the crater. This evaporation of ocean water would have left the salt provided that it was not connected directly with the main ocean, otherwise the salt would have gone back into solution." [24] The Gulf of Mexico does seem to have vague characteristics of a gigantic meteoroid impact. Since other salt domes have been also discovered beneath the gulf itself, one may wonder whether the meteoric body itself may not have been composed largely of salt and injected its own salt tubes into its crater basin. This would seem a more realistic scenario than the Kelly-Dachille vision of a typhoon lifting salted waters into the air, evaporating the waters, and having the salts precipitate in favored sequence and locale in a pure state. The fact, as they recall it, that salt is so free from contaminants (less than 0.4%) argues for the solid integrity of the salt from its initial appearance on Earth. Legends imply my theory. Saturn was the first Lord of the Mill, a grindstone round like the revolving vault of the sky. It ground salt into the sea and was sunk in the ocean during the great maelstrom and deluge that brought the golden age of Saturn to an end. In Hindu myth, the gods churned the celestial ocean and the mill ground out salt into the sea. Norse myth has the heavenly mill churning out gold, then salt, then, sunk in the sea, sand and stones. The unhinging and failing of the Mill implies, too, a tilting of the axis of the globe, a likely accompaniment of the cataclysm. A South American legend supplies significant detail. "The Arawak of Guyana call the Galaxy 'the Tapir's Way. ' This is confirmed in a tale of the Chirignano and some groups of the Tupi-Guarani of South America." According to Cuna tradition, "the Tapir chopped down the 'Saltwater Tree', at the roots of which is God's whirlpool, and when the tree fell, saltwater gushed out to form the oceans of the world." [25] The Cuna cosmology thus unites the idea of the tree-of life found in many places, including Genesis, with a Tapir-god, Saturnian-Elohim divinity, and, as the tree of life is destroyed (the old order ends), saltwaters deluge the Earth. (In Solaria Binaria, Earl R. Milton and the present author identify this tree of life with the legendary and philosophical axis of fire and this with the presence, until a nova of Saturn, of an electric arc-current flashing between a then-larger Saturn and the Sun, and visible to man.) In sum, various legends independently agree that the salt of the oceans came with an aquatic cataclysm in a time when mankind was an intelligent witness. That salt came down upon the doomed "Cities of the Plain" at a later time as well is argued by Dwardu Cardona. Yahweh threatens his people with "sulphur and salt and burning, so that its whole land will not be sown... like the overthrow 3f Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which Yahweh overthrew in his anger and in his wrath;...." [25A] In the same work, Milton and I propose that the Noachian Deluge occurred in cyclonic form, with the salty waters hosing or jetting down at thousands of locations. If this were correct, some of the characteristics of salt deposits would be explained, such as their common cylindrical shapes and great depth below the surface of land and seabottom. The saltwater would bore through the surface rocks under great pressure and with enough time to penetrate deeply. The water would vaporize promptly in the ambiant heat and what was left of it would leak through a multitude of fractures on the margins of the deposits. In Manchester, England, a process of making petroleum from garbage has been announced (1982). "We can do in ten minutes what nature has taken 150 million years to do," asserts a proud engineer. The oil costs half the prevailing price of natural crude oil. This price does not consider the original devastation of the biosphere that occurred with the natural production of oil. Conventional belief interprets oil resources according to an idyll, that organic rot was deoxidized, accumulated over long periods of time, roasted slowly at a deep warm level in the rocks until it turned into oil, then seeped into rock reservoirs where it was trapped to await the oil explorer of today. There is little use in our discussing this story, inasmuch as the reader will have ready access to it in many books. Here it is argued that oil is a catastrophic product and the major questions concern the catastrophic mechanisms of its formation. The "ten-minute oil" suggests that there may be no inherent guarantee that natural oil is old. Recently discovered hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California are producing from sediments a petroleum that is close to commercial standards. Several C 14 dates of oil offshore California and from the Gulf of Mexico range from 5000 to 20000 years. Still petroleum generally is dated from two to six hundred million years; a common age given is fifty million years. One group of scientists suspects that solar ultraviolet polymerized the methane atmosphere of primeval Earth to form an oil slick of one to ten meters' depth all over the globe [26] . T. Gold believes that methane, composed of carbon and hydrogen, erupts from primeval reservoirs in the mantle; they sometimes explode from electrostatically induced sparks [27] However, the presently continual explosions would indicate to this writer a recent origin of the methane, probably from biomass deep-buried by catastrophe. A. T. Wilson produced hydrocarbons out of electrical discharges on methane and ammonia, and claimed in 1962 that the Venus atmosphere held hydrocarbons [28] . Oro and Hart maintain a case for current hydrocarbon production on Jupiter from methane; they manufactured hydrocarbons from methane in their laboratory [29] . Libby has theorized that oil is raining down upon Jupiter today [30] . Max Blumer, a pre-eminent paleo-geochemist, lately of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, used the conventional age estimates given above in making a calculation of some social significance. Reminiscent of the Dow Chemical Company's claim about natural dioxins mentioned in the previous chapter, oil shipping interests have protested that only half the ocean's petroleum content comes from polluting practices and the other half comes from natural leaks and seepage. In 1970, Blumer, following this logic, estimates the amount of seepage at 5 x 10 6 tons. Quoting then high estimates of offshore oil resources at 100,000 x 10 6 metric tons, he points out that all of this would have leaked out in less than 20,000 years. But, taking the average age of oil as above, 50 million years, and the claimed seepage rate, "the average offshore oil-field would have lost to the ocean 2500 times the free flowing oil or more than 1500 times the total oil existing in situ before commercial offshore oil production started." [31] Obviously, in Blumer's view, and the publicity attendent upon the brief article indicates a wide acceptance of it, the estimate of natural seepage is ridiculously high; the polluters are responsible for the oil in the oceans. The same is true on land. Seeps are negligible because "oil reservoirs are well sealed even on the continents where uplifiting and erosion should have bared oil-bearing strata more extensively than on the ocean floor." Oil leaks are frequently sealed by natural asphalt. The quantavolutionist can address three comments to Blumer's line of argument. First, the age of oils in the sea may be grossly overestimated. Possibly the oil resources of the world are under 20,000 years old; in this case, the allegations of the seepage advocates would have to be disproven by other evidence, if at all. Second, Blumer does not deny seepage, but wishes it reduced. But he does not estimate seepage, or else, I guess, he would have to name a figure, such as one-tenth of the seepage claimed. In this case, the age of the "average oil" would drop by a factor Of ten; all oil resources would be exhausted by leakage in 200,000 years. Surely he would not insist upon the fifty million years age and therefore be compelled to argue that true seepage is hundreds of times less than claimed. In other words, he is walking right into the quantavolutionary door; no significant seepage is satisfactory if conventional oil ages are to be defended. This is especially so, given that strict uniformitarian rates are not likely; no matter how oil is made, early seepage must have been at a faster rate than today's seepage. Even just the transfer from factory to reservoir cannot occur without large losses. Again the age of oil must drop. And of course if a quantavolutionary theory of oil formation is adopted, the exponential principle come into play: oil is made, not in ten minutes, not currently in submarine hydrothermal factories, but in very short times nevertheless. Two quantavolutionary theories, requiring very short times, offer themselves, one best enunciated by Melvin Cook, the other by Velikovsky. Cook hints that a great deluge may have precipitated the lateral break-out of the ice caps. The vast ice avalanche bulldozed the biosphere long distances and folded it into the Earth in a heated state. Velikovsky argues for the origin of petroleum from the tail of a great comet, which he identified as an erratic Venus. Both offer short-term explanations, Cook placing the production of oil around 10,000 years ago, Velikovsky around 3450 B. P. Cook reconstructs the oil production process as follows: around the old ice cap of the north grew a heavy biosphere. The towering ice cap, triggered by deluges, exerted fracturing radial pressures that sent great bulldozers of ice and rock in all directions to sweep up, ignite and bury deeply the vegetation and animal life. The organic matter stewed under high thermal and pressure conditions. Some became coal; some became oil and natural gas. Here is a quick "Cook's Tour" of the world's petroleum [32] . The most prolific oil basins of the world are those associated with the postulated major long-thrust systems described previously, namely the Mississippi valley--Gulf of Mexico system and the extensive and complicated overthrust systems comprising the great oil fields surrounding the Red, Mediterranean, Caspian and Black seas and the Persian Gulf. The southwestern USA thrust system responsible for the fragmentation in the Basin and Range province possibly contributed to the California oil basins. Another similar thrust system apparently generated the oil and coal provinces of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and New Guinea. These great oil and gas regions are most likely associated with sudden deep burial of marine and vegetal matter in (1) spoke-like radial thrusts from the ice sheets that began with the flood and eventually triggered continental drift, (2) continental drift itself, and (3) the Subsequent catastrophic effects of readjustment (ocean ridge and related systems). The greatest oil fields in the world, those in Iraq, Iran, Arabia and Kuwait, are apparently the result of all three of these mechanisms of sudden deep burial. The Gulf of Mexico system is postulated here to represent tremendous, sudden and deep burial thrusts contributed largely in the pre-continental drift stage, but with great contributions from both the north and the south such as to insure deep burial of sediments all along the coast and shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. The west coast of North and South America represent regions showing perhaps all of the deep burial effects: that due to welting and overthrusting in the pre-continental drift stage being strong in this region, the welting at the front of the thrust blocks during continental drift itself and the tremendous upheavals strongest here in the final readjustment stage. Perhaps the great (bathylithic) uplifts associated with the earth- circling ridge and rift system, particularly that part that cut into the continent in the western side of the Americas, contributed mostly to the deep basin structure in California, accounting for the youngest pools of the world. Cook, then, must provide a force sufficient to initiate the break-out of an ice cap of enormous size; then a thrusting and folding of crustal rock over large distances, burying a whole biosphere of vegetal and marine life; then a cracking of the globe, sending the continents skittering from the great Atlantic and southern ocean cleavages in a complex pattern, with a major fracture moving through most of the world along the old Tethyan sea belt. He concludes as follows: The physical chemistry of oil, including its formation from marine raw materials, its conditions for cracking, its observed composition and physical properties as a function of depth of the reservoirs are, apparently, better accounted for by the sudden, deep burial mechanism than by the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Oil reservoir temperatures are too low to permit appreciable cracking during all of geologic time even assuming existence of the best known catalytic cracking conditions. The observed changes of oil grade with depth may be explained instead on the basis of the physical chemistry of decomposition of green marine and vegetal raw materials in their sudden burial at various depths in the oil basins [33] . But Velikovsky's theory of petroleum Origins introduces a frightful deluge of oil. He cites references in legends and scriptures to the fall of naphtha, sometimes blazing, and of brimstone, often rendered otherwise as a rain of hail. The Abkasian, a people famous for their long life-spans, convey a story about a fall-out of cotton, which caught fire and burned the Earth; perhaps it was "cotton-candy" mixed with hydrocarbon [34] . The ancient bible of Mesoamerica, the Popul Vuh, tells of the fate of the people of that age: And so they were killed; They were overwhelmed. There came a great rain of glue Down from the sky. [35] The "glue" is still found in the land of the Olmecs. William Mullen comments on the work of the pioneer excavators: radio-carbon samples are contaminated by asphalt. "Much of the Early Tres Zapotes level was sealed with volcanic ash. Coe reports that lumps of asphalt were found everywhere at the San Lorenzo excavation." [36] I consulted with an expert on the area. As expected, he said that the area practically floats on oil. I visited the area. He spoke truth. But the question is: Which came first, the culture or the oil? Here, as throughout the world, the ancient voices give precedence to the people. Velikovsky's concept can be summarized to a degree in his own words [37] : The tails of comets are composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen gases. Lacking oxygen, they do not burn in flight, but the inflammable gases, passing through an atmosphere containing oxygen, will be set on fire. If carbon and hydrogen gases, or vapor of a composition of these two elements, enter the atmosphere in huge masses, a part of them will burn, binding all the oxygen available at the moment; the rest will escape combustion, but in swift transition will become liquid. Falling on the ground, the substance, if liquid, would sink into the pores of the sand and into clefts between the rocks; falling on water, it would remain floating if the fire in the air is extinguished before new supplies of oxygen arrive from other regions... The descent of a sticky fluid which came earthward and blazed with heavy smoke is recalled in the oral and written traditions of the inhabitants of both hemispheres... All the countries whose traditions of fire-rain 1 have cited actually have deposits of oil: Mexico, the East Indies, Siberia, Iraq, and Egypt .... The rain of fire-water contributed to the earth's supply of petroleum; rock oil in the ground appears to be, partly at least, "star oil" brought down at the close of world ages, notably the age that came to its end in the middle of the second millennium before the present era.... In the centuries that followed, petroleum was worshipped, burned in holy places; it was also used for domestic purposes. Then many ages passed when it was out of use. Only in the middle of the last century did man begin to exploit this oil, partly contributed by the comet of the time of the Exodus. Definite legendary, archaeological, and geological evidence of a holospheric catastrophe in Mesopotamia was provided by J. V. K. Wilson for a period tightly connected with Inanna (identifiable as Venus) [38] . Large-scale mesolithic rock displacements are displayed, and accounts of rains of oil, the poisoning of the land, and falling sheets of fire are described in the ancient documents. Lion-headed pillars are associated symbolically with mushroom-shaped clouds (our typhonic cyclones) in the legend and architecture of the times. The Soviet geologist Levin asserts that the hydrocarbons in cometary heads must have played a part in forming petroleum and in the origin of life." [39] Velikovsky wrote once: "Actually, if we can believe numerous testimonies bequeathed to us by ancient sources, the ancients had already what we intend some day to obtain from Venus--samples of its dust, ash, atmosphere, and rocks." He believed firmly that "Venus must be rich in petroleum gases," which, because of the planet's great surface heat, "will circulate in gaseous form." Fred Hoyle, in Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), argued for less heat and therefore oceans of oil on Venus. The historical and geological evidence led Velikovsky to argue that Venus was hot and cooling measurably, that it was comparatively flat, with a dense atmosphere, an anomalous axial rotation, and the aforesaid hydrocarbon gases. The other predictions having been generally fulfilled, it seemed for a moment that hydrocarbon gases had also been detected; if so, the theory of the historical encounter and the dropping of Venusian oil on Earth would be strengthened. However, the NASA scientists involved in an early statement favorable to hydrocarbons withdrew their support, and a controversy ensued, to no final end. The clouds of Venus appear definitely to be mainly of carbon dioxide. Whether this is compatible with an existing component of hydrocarbon or can have resulted from chemical transformations that resulted in the disappearance of hydrocarbons is disputable. Furthermore, organic compounds seem to be present, and also indications of iron and sulfur, possible sources of pigment for the red fall-out phenomenon mentioned earlier. Blumer, in a path-breaking article on organic paleochemistry, pauses to reflect that "man has long been curious about the origin of these materials," coals and oil. "On occasion, early speculations approached the truth in a colorful way; thus, the Triassic Tyrolian oil shales, which are rich in vertebrate fossils as well as in chlorophyll and haemin derivatives, were thought to have resulted from an impregnation of the local rock with the blood of a slain dragon." [40] Perhaps he should have reflected longer. The dragon, in many a myth, has poured its red blood, metals, dust., and oil upon the Earth, and the dragon is often identified with destructive sky bodies, comets, no less. That silicates and oil should descend and emplace themselves in oil shales should hardly cause surprise; we have seen that the color of red-brown to blue-black oxidized heme, blood red, is often reported in myth as falling in dust or in the gore of a slain dragon. The shale could be formed quickly, baked by a moderate heat. How could the organic matter be injected into shales and oil from above? As related earlier, the presence therein and a fall-out of a biomass from a comet is not at all impossible. Furthermore, the distinction between living and non-living structures is not clear in the hydrocarbons of oil. "Trieb's isolation of pigments related to chlorophyll and haemin marks the origin of organic geochemistry... The fossil prophyrins of ancient sediments and of petroleum are chemical fossils; just as the more commonly known morphological fossils, they represent surviving evidence of ancient life processes that had achieved an increased structural order on the macroscopic and on the molecular level and inorganic as well as in organic structures." It seems Blumer is claiming the unprovable, that in their beginnings these morphologically unrecognizable organic chemicals were in living organisms. Yet he declares, "in organic geochemistry, the distinction between chemical fossils and artifacts has not always been sharp." And he says, after defining geochemistry as ultimately based upon the molecular remains of ancient life, that thousands of changes occur: "chemical fossils are far more abundant than their better known morphological analogues. Contrasted with 90,000 (some say 110,000) species of fossil animals known presently, are millions of fossil chemical derivatives." Then, further: Research on the constitution of crude oil and of oil shales has revealed severely altered biochemicals and numerous structures which occur neither in living organisms nor in recent sediments... Also crude oil and sediments contain polymers (asphaltenos, kerogen) of a type not found in living organisms. For pages, Blumer struggles to trace the complex descent of petroleum hydrocarbons from living organisms while insisting upon the intrusion of many non-organic chemical processes, only to admit that "we are virtually ignorant of the reaction mechanisms and. reaction rates." He proceeds to establish that depth, deposition rate and temperature control the chemical chaos during the critical moments of oil formation. Still, "we remain uncertain of the extent, the rates and the mechanisms of geochemical reactions and of the composition and role of the sedimentary polymers." We shall certainly not be contradicting him, if we conclude that the chemical transformations producing oil are as likely to occur in space as below ground, probably more likely, if we wished to argue the point. Further, we do not see how it can be asserted either that organic biomass capable of forming oil does not exist in exoterrestrial bodies or, if it does not, that its absence precludes space gases constituting or contributing to the constitution of the oils that are present on Earth. Most metals, salt, and oil, we conclude, are more likely than not to have originated exoterrestrially or in exoterrestrially precipitated transactions at the Earth's surface. {S : Notes (Chapter Ten: Metals, Salt and Oil)} Notes (Chapter Ten: Metals, Salt and Oil) 1. Bellamy, op. cit., 84. 2. Velikovsky, Ramses II and His Time (N. Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 221-47. 3. "The Road to Iron: 8th and 7th Century Metallurgy and The Decline of Egyptian Power," (In press: Catas. and Anc. Hist. M.) 4. R. Maddin, J. D. Muhly and T. S. Wheeler set a date between 1100 and 900 B. C. ., "How the Iron Age Began" 237 Sci. Amer. (Oct. 1977), 112. 5. See fn 2, p. 5. 6. L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, Eternal Man (Herts, Eng.: Mayflower, 1972), 58, 160; and also their Morning of the Magicians for many suggestions of prehistoric discoveries. 7. Op. cit., 197-8. 8. Fritz Heide, Meteorites (Chicago: U. Of Chicago, 1969), 44. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. Melvin A. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models (London: Max Parrish, 1966). 11. 52 Sky and Telescope (1976) 429 citing a report by Walter Sullivan, NYT. 12. 2 Sci. Am. Supp. (1876), 510. 13. Stratigraphie ComparÚe... (London: Oxford, 1945). 580. 14. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 196. 15. Bellamy, Moon... 87, 89. 16. Op. cit., 16. 17. Cosmos, I, 115. 18. R. P. Chan, A Guide to Mexican Archaeology (Mexico City: Minutiae Mexicanae, 1971), 75, 78. 18A. F. T. Kyte et al., Nature (30 July 1981), 417-20. 18B. 36 Amer. Antiquity 3 (July 1971), 286-321, 288, cf. 294. 18C. Ibid., 291. 19. 276 Nature (14 Dec. 1978), 7013-4. 20. Advice of Prof. Merle Langdon, then of Am. School Class, Studies; Athens. "Artemisiakon" was a favorite name, the "kon" ending meaning "under the protection of," "owned by" or "discovered by." 21. 271 Nature (26 Jan 1978), 347. 21A. P. A. Smith, 265 Nature (1977), 582-3 reporting Scott et al., I Geophys Res. Ltrs (1974) 355 and Golberg and Arrhenius, 13 Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta (1958) 153; Corliss, op. cit. ESS-005 doc. 21B. Op cit., 424, 440. 22. Cook, op. cit., 87. 23. Oscar Wilhelm, Geol. Soc. Am. Bull (March 1972). 24. Allan Kelley and F. Dachille, Target Earth, 211; cf. 205. 25. G. den Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 247, cf. 146-7. 25A. Deuteronomy 29: 22 (Watchtower Edition); Cardona "Jupiter--God of Abraham (Part III)," VII Kronos (Fall 1982), 66. Fire evidence is copious in the settlements excavated at the sites. 26. A. C. Lasaga and H. D. Holland, "Primordial Oil Slick," 174 Science (10 Oct. 1974), 53-5. 27. See K. S. Lewis, 78 New Sci. (1978), 277 and Walter Sullivan in NYT (24 Dec. 1977), 1. 28. A. T. Wilson, "Synthesis of Macromolecules." 188 Nature (17 Dec. 1960), 1007-8. 29. J. Oro and J. Han, "High Temperature Synthesis of Aromatic Hydrocarbons from Methane," 153 Science (16 Sept. 1966), 1393-5. Cf. J. Oro, "Comets and the Formation of Biochemical Compounds on the Primitive Earth," 191 Nature (29 Apr. 1961), 389-90. 30. C. J. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Glassboro, N. J.: Kronos, 1976), 80-2. 31. "Submarine Seeps," 176 Science (16 June 1972), 1257-8. 32. Op. cit., 241 ff. 33. Cracking is the process of breaking up large molecules of heavy hydrocarbons into smaller ones of lighter type, accomplished by heat, pressure, and catalysts. 34. Sula Benet, Abkasian (NY: Doubleday) 35. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the ancient Quick Maya (Norman; U. of Ok., 1950 trans.). 36. Ibid. 37. Worlds in Collision, 53ff. 38. The Rebel Lands: An Investigation into the Origins of Early Mesopotamian Mythology (Cambridge, Eng.: Faculty of Oriental Studies, 1979), reviewed in IV S. I. S. R. 2( 1981), 64. 39. B. Y. Levin, "The Interaction of Astronomy, Geophysics and Geology in the Study of the Earth," in The Interaction of Sciences in the Study of the Earth (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1968), 178. 40. "Chemical Fossils: Trends in Organic Geochemistry," Contrib. 2898 of Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, n. d., 592. See also W. W. Youngblood and Blumer, "Alkanes and Alkenes in Marine Benthic Algae," 21 Marine Biol. (1973), 163-72. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART II: } {Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: } {C Chapter 11} {T Encounter and Collisions} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ELEVEN ENCOUNTERS AND COLLISIONS "Even heaven, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not inalterable." So wrote Laplace [1] , who has been freely used to attest to the security of the celestial order. Nothing in his unparalleled mathematical and physical achievements kept him from soberly portraying the effects of collisions of the Earth with comets, and expressing the view that these had occurred and would probably again occur. He warned of movements that he could not take into account in his calculations, and mentioned the forces of electricity and magnetism whose effects were then unnoticeable. The gravitational balance of the solar system, he proved, however, was near perfect, an empirical demonstration that became a shibboleth to astronomy and thence to progressive mankind. The present trend to accommodate ancient cometary and meteoroid encounters in the earth sciences and biology cannot but bring about a revolution in thought. A large body impacting on Earth is the most versatile mechanism of quantavolution: so everyone will admit. Its effects begin upon approach, increase upon passage through the atmosphere, reach a climax in its explosion, and continue to spread from the point of impact until the whole world and all its spheres are affected. Too, the effects may continue for many years in an active form and then go on in the 'genetics' of the holosphere. During a period, which Nininger has well described, when scientific dogma forbade the serious discussion of exoterrestrial interference in the affairs of Earth, when even light meteoritic falls were ignored, students were denied the use of this marvelous theoretical construct in explaining what lay before their eyes. Finally a scientific commission was dispatched from Paris in 1802 to the countryside to investigate a reported fall. It returned with evidence of several thousand meteorites. So "America was discovered." Still in 1933, a Smithsonian Institution report by L. J. Spencer could declare, "the problem of meteorite craters is quite a new one." Only several were listed, and of these only the Barringer crater of Arizona and the Wabar Craters in Arabia had been well described, both lately. Yet, to continue the litany of this book, it appears now that enough meteoroids and comets have struck the Earth to deface it throughout. Moon, Mercury and Mars evidence telescopically tens of thousands of large astroblemes. Dachille (1962), projecting the Moon's apparent experience onto Earth, estimated a round million of heavy impacts here [2] . He assumes five billion years of uniform falls and applies weathering rates for the continental masses from wind, tide and vegetative erosion, ending up with somewhat over a thousand craters that are potentially identifiable. Of this thousand, 750 are below water and ice; of the remaining 250, "in the last few years a staccato tally of meteorite scar finds or recognitions has raised the total to 42-50 at this writing." He offered an independent survival rate calculated by Krynine that would be in the neighborhood of 10,000. He pointed also to new diagnostic methods, such as the discovery of coesite, a silica mineral that forms under high pressures in the laboratory and has been found in craters suspected of exoterrestrial origin. Meanwhile the space shuttle Columbia has photographed beneath the sands covering the eastern Sahara to reveal fractures, dried-up rivers, and probable paleolithic settlements. The U. S. Geological Survey confirmed the radar penetrations. Craters can be discerned as well, and they will probably be promptly mapped over the globe. Many bodily and electric encounters of Earth with exoterrestrial bodies will one day be counted, measured, plotted for concentrations, and assigned to temporal episodes. The difference between a meteoroid and a comet may be an artifact of biased experience. Lately no comet has fallen to Earth. Perhaps, too, most or all comets come from a special source today; Jupiter has been suggested. Perhaps the meteoroids come from the asteroid belt; such is generally believed. The major distinction may come from their manner of flight; with highly elliptical and often eccentric orbits, comets must forever change their appearance in transacting with their electrical and material environment; the asteroids are generally in regular orbit. Too, we know the size of many asteroids, but not of comets. Once, to ridicule Velikovsky, a renowned astronomer claimed that comets were filmy and insubstantial bodies. A more acceptable theory of Whipple of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory (he was by no means a supporter of Velikovsky) sees comets typically as bodies of ice and other frozen gases cementing together rock and dust. It may be of significance to note the presence of water in recently examined meteorites, from studies by Hughes, Ashworth and Hutchison [3] ; if water, then a watery planet once upon a time: so the reasoning goes. Gravitational anomalies on the Moon and Mars have been interpreted to signify dense mass concentrations, hence "mascons." They are associated with large circular basins, therefore probably with meteoroid impacts [4] . The Earth has not yet registered mascons. Because of its heavier atmosphere, more intense magnetosphere, and greater electrical charge, it may be that the Earth has means of ablating and retarding the velocity of meteoroid falls. On the other hand, gravitational anomalies have begun to be detected in circular areas of the Earth and shortly we may expect mascons in the Earth's morphology as well. With the aforesaid "soft frills," one can expect the Earth to exhibit hills and mountains, as of iron ore and erratic isolated hills, which are then surficial mascons. Concerning the "abrupt" extinction of Cretaceous life forms, Smit and Hertogen, like Alvarez and his associates, see in a general distribution of two trace elements, iridium and osmium, at this stratum of the phanerozoic record a proof of meteoroid impact [5] . Soil and rock everywhere, it would seem, are in need of chemical tests in search of exoterrestrial influences during their deposition. A decade after his estimates were published, Dachille would report that the number of identified craters had risen to "60 well-documented craters, 25 very likely candidates, and another 20 hopefuls." [6] The greatest of these are the Ishim, Kazakhstan, USSR, (7000 km diam.), the Nastapoka Island arc of Hudson Bay (440 km diam.) and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence opening onto the Atlantic Ocean [7] . The Ishim crater is estimated as initially of 350 kilometers in diameter, 12 kilometers in depth. "The subsequent rebound of the central region and the collapse of the surrounding area enlarged the crater to 700 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than the average lunar mare. The area of this impact structure is a little greater than the combined areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Maryland. The kinetic energy of the collision can be shown to have been at least one billion times as great as the energy in any one of the largest earthquakes of recent history." [8] And these quakes, of course, much exceed the greatest hydrogen bomb blasts in energy output. In a work of 1953, Dachille, together with Alan Kelly, offered the circular Bermuda Deep as an astrobleme. By all odds the largest candidate for craterdom so far, this feature might be held responsible for Bermuda Island, as its typical central peak. The hundreds of Carolina Bays were conjectured as the splash-down sites of successive meteors in the same train or later on. The Appalachian mountains would become the westward-thrusted, outer rim displacement from the crater. Significantly, in 1982, claims were voiced that a Northeast to Southwest belt of the Appalachians was once an offshore island chain rammed into America in the course of continental drift and, after the growth of the Eastern plain, the two continents split once more to create the Atlantic. More persuasive to this writer is the Kelly-Dachille view that would let the mountains be the Bermuda crater rim, let the plain be the crater debris and sediments and let the Atlantic cleavage be abetted by the Bermuda impact. The authors of the Bermuda theory proceed to discuss the dozen high-energy expressions that must necessarily accompany so stunning an impact--global hurricanes, eruption of hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava, darkening of the globe for years, deluges of water and debris, destruction of most of the Earth's biosphere--terrestrial and marine--poisoning of the atmosphere and fall-outs of many kinds of material, a giant set of electrical typhoons centered at and around the impact and moving radially outwards, earthquakes and volcanism in many places including the antipodes, and vast tidal waves sweeping across America, the Caribbean, and the oceans to the north, east, and south. Large tracts of land would be sunk and others elevated. Minerals would be formed, elements transmuted, species extincted and new forms created in the radiation storms. They assigned an axis tilt of 30 to the blow, shifting the north pole from near Akpatok Island, in the Hudson Strait, to its present location. The diameter of the Bermuda crater appears to vary between 2200 and 2500 kilometers as its limits are drawn, the western being more marked than the eastern, which disappear into the oceanic abyssal bottom. The western arc extends from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland down around the East Coast of America to Puerto Rico. The diameter of the original comet or meteoroid is estimated at 400 to 700 kilometers, greater than the possible Hudson Bay crater (440 km). The relative speed before impact of the meteoroid with Earth is given at about 100 km/ second, with an approach from the northeast. The collision would involve an energy approximately equal to that of the Earth's rotation (1.2 x 10 37 ergs) and would readily provoke an interruption of the rotation, an axial tilt, a slippage of the crust above the mantle, and an immediate orogeny around the ruin of the blast crater. The scenario includes many details that need not be repeated here. For instance, the hypothetical Bermuda intruder would theoretically account for all the coal, gas and oil of Appalachia and the North American continental shelves by instant burning in passage, deep burial and dampening upon impact folding, and tidal land thrusts and water flooding. Even cutting back its diameter to 280 km, the intruder upon impact would raise a column of vapor and debris that easily could measure one thousand miles in diameter at the base, and possibly larger at the top after the fashion of the atom bomb explosions. This column might tower something like five thousand miles above the earth, the higher particles doomed to float out beyond the reach of gravity for all time... the energy of the collision we have pictured is so great, that but 2 to 3 per cent of the total would be required to evaporate completely the meteorite and its equal in weight of the earth's crust. Therefore the column above the collision area may take on the function of a fractionating column for these mineral vapors, refining minerals to varying extent [9] . Streams of speciated minerals, metals, rocks and salts would pour down to form deposits. Large areas would be melted and magnetized by electromagnetic fields arriving from intense brief currents of electricity formed of the electron and ion plasma. In all of this, it should be noted that the colliding intruder partly or largely provides for its own concealment, by cross-winds, cross-tides, rain, volcanism, debris fall-out, and differential diastrophic effects, some of them called forward from remote areas. Moving about the global map, Kelly and Dachille could suggest numerous candidates for their meteoroid inventory. Wherever an arc appears on a coastline--they noted five large ones off the west coast of North America, two off of West Africa, two off of Brazil and Argentina, plus the great island arcs of the north and east Pacific Ocean--a crater is implied. Norman elsewhere suggests "that any large-scale crustal feature which exhibits an arcuate outline is deserving of special scrutiny--for example, the curve of the Coast of China, the curved mountainous coast of eastern Australia, and the magnificent sweep of the Himalayas bordering northern India. Smaller-scale versions exist bordering the southern parts of the Caspian and Black Seas, and eastern Korea. We must also think of examining concave arcuate coasts such as the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Australian Bight." [10] In 1981, Fred Whipple suggested Iceland as the site of the giant meteor impact which, striking the volcanically active ocean ridge, initiated the finale of the Cretaceous period, its dinosaurs, and its marine life [11] . A year later, Sky and Telescope [12] reported the discovery of a double ring of magnetic anomalies of 60 and 180 kilometer diameters, in Yucatan. The anomalous magnetized rocks are about 1100 feet deep and assigned to Late Cretaceous which makes it, too, a candidate for extincting dinosaurs and decimating the biosphere. But other candidates can be named, for instance an astrobleme feature beneath the disturbed ice of Wilkes Land, Antarctica, to which Weihaupt ascribes hypothetically the origin of the tektite strewn fields of Australia, calling the collision of "Recent geologic time." [13] I might, too, suggest the Pacific Basin as a possible impact site, though here the size of the feature is so great as to imply the total destruction of the globe, and I have, for this reason and many others, elsewhere defined this area as the escape basin of the Moon, following G. Darwin, Osmond, and other writers. Notable in this case is the set of great transform fractures, pictured by Norman [14] which point from south, east and north like arrows to an "impact" or "escape" point in the central Pacific Basin. The current theory of scientists concerning the asteroid belt orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter is that here is the debris of a great body exploded by collision with another body some millions of years ago. One may reason that if this could happen in asteroidal space, it could also happen to Earth's space. There has obviously been a limit to the size and mass of all that has struck Earth. Satellite photography has in the past few years introduced a new instrument for crater detection, whether volcanic or meteoric, as in the Bichat structure of Mauritania. Some photographic reconstructions delineate what appear to be many crater outlines. Soon, it appears, the number of defined crater outlines will soar into the hundreds, and perhaps thousands. Given the new interest in meteoritics, the identification of meteoritic fields may also proceed apace. As long ago as 1889, a list of 14 small fields was published, all of the nineteenth century and ranging from 3 to 16 miles long. The Arabian barrad fields, Donnelly's drift stones, and the tektite fields, already discussed, are much larger and older phenomena. The Atacama Desert also evidences a large meteoritic field, still unmapped, with many siderites and rich silver mines at its center. Meteoritic material on Earth is evidenced therefore by dust, stones, and craters, with all ranges of size from visually undetectable clay elements to basins so large as to be hitherto visually unimagined. The answers to our persistent questions about the extent and recency of quantavolutionary phenomena at the Earth's surface are now beginning to take shape. The Earth must have suffered as much meteoritic bombardment as its planetary neighbors and satellite. On several occasions--at Hudson's Bay, the circular bulge of the West Africa Coast, Ishim, Bermuda, St. Lawrence Bay, Argentina, Australia, Antarctica, and others, all inadequately discerned until now--global catastrophes could have occurred with large-body impact encounters. On other occasions, as we. discussed earlier, meteoritic showers and bombardments also may have been globally catastrophic. Harold Urey writing in 1973, conjectures a comet of 10 18 grams and an impact velocity of 45 km/ sec to end the Cretaceous and begin the radically different geological period of the Tertiary [15] ; his scenario of effects upon Earth is substantially that provided here and in the much more detailed analysis of Kelly and Dachille for so large a body. (The reader is asked to recall that scientists have only lately granted comets this possibility of large masses and Earth collisions. The recent work by S. V. M. Clube and W. M. Napier, entitled The Cosmic Serpent (1982), essaying a connection between solar-system galactic spiral encounters and recurrent paleontological catastrophes, via cometary and meteoritic crashes, is perhaps the first treatise to be published by professional astronomers. The independently pursued work of the astronomer Earl R. Milton, much of it in press as Solaria Binaria, with the present author, is comparable. Clube and Napier wrote unaware of the astronomical theory of Chaos and Creation and similarly, I did not obtain a copy of their book until the present work was at the printers.) But would any or many of the larger impacts be recent, within the past score of millennia? This is probable. The methods by which heavy meteoritic and cometary impacts on Earth are timed begin with averaging on uniformitarian assumptions. Thus Dachille arrived at his 1967 numbers by averaging the expected number of major impacts over a five billion year age for the Earth and Moon; then, again using uniformitarian premises, he reached for some broad guidelines. 'Weathering rates estimated for continental masses and great mountains are about 80 meters per million years, and for land masses in tropical regions 225 meters per million years. Circular ridges of less than 750 meters relief could be broken down in 5 million years, to be unrecognizable..." [16] Thus he arrives finally at his low figure for discoverable craters. But when, with Kelly, he came earlier to describe the Bermuda event, he could contemplate this global catastrophe of maximum intensity as having occurred at the time of the Chaldeans and Hebrews, about 3500 years ago. In the Bermuda case the two scientists follow quantavolutionary logic and can explain the new face of the globe in terms of seconds, minutes, weeks, years. They do not need or use much time. Not only that, but they indeed destroy time by the few-second incoming passage of the body through the atmosphere and the gigantic explosion that transforms a considerable portion of the atmosphere and rocks of the world. How many radioactive clocks, depending upon stable rocks and atmosphere, were disrupted? Here the uniformitarian suffers the same embarrassment as the catastrophist. Just as he jests at the catastrophist, "You say that evidences of catastrophe are unavailable because they are destroyed," now the catastroptfist jeers at him, "you say that you cannot find meteoroid craters because they were eroded." Perhaps there never were a million craters or more. If undeniably showers of ice, water, dust, stones and heavy bodies have struck the Earth, cannot a deluge of dust, stones and heavy bodies have done the same? It is prima facie reasonable that the changes wrought, upon Earth have been the work of a few thousand years. And it is an open question whether the changes are recent or ancient. Perhaps the bombardment of Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Earth is all recent history. C. Simon (1982) reports on the topography of giant circular ripples moving out from a point west of Hudson Bay as indicated by gravity anomaly data [17] . Scientists involved conjecture that a 60-90 km meteoroid impacted, digging a great crater and wrinkling the surface for thousands of kilometers around. All is covered over but the density variations remain, below the surface, to provide the circular patterning. That such an event would be electromagnetic as well is certain. Lacking surveys, we are left to surmise. Electromagnetic effects must' be especially important in meteoroid impacts. Dachille has described electromagnetic fields produced by impacts of high- velocity explosives in military tests, and has projected the Em fields to meteoroid masses of 10 12 , l0 16 , 10 20 grams at 40 km/ sec. "Magnetic fields more intense than those of the most powerful electromagnets extant would be imposed upon matter many hundreds of kilometers from the point of impact." [18] Once again, we must pose the dilemma that is to be a theme of our book: either the Earth must be so thoroughly tortured electromagnetically that the search for magnetic maps to represent the Earth's magnetic fields is futile; or the Earth's surface was so lately magnetized, whether for the first or last time, that collisions and encounters and all other remagnetizing influences have not had time to deface it. A generation ago, in the Physical Review for Aug. 15, 1948, Carl Bauer theorized that the asteroid belt contains remnants of the explosion of a planet less than 60 million years ago. He calculated the age from the quantity of helium in examined meteorites, assuming its origin from radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Ovenden also later on retrojected an exploding planet as the ancestor of asteroids. Von Flandern added comets to meteoroids: "Comets originated in a breakup event in the inner solar system about 5 x 10 6 years ago. In all probability it was the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt and which produced most of the meteors visible today." [19] In the course of his study, he alludes to "the lack of any definite finds of 'fossil' meteorites or meteorite craters," citing Cassidy; moreover, he reports that "Stair mentions that neither tektites nor other meteorites have been found in any of the ancient geologic formations, which also suggests that most surviving meteorites are relatively quite young, in contradiction to their estimates by the usual dating methods... The need for a revision of the standard dating methods is certainly suggested by these new results." An astrobleme, large or small, disappears quickly under conditions of rain, tides, current, wind, fall-out, seismism, volcanism, biosphere invasion, and recurrent disasters governing its location. Still, what, if not astroblemes, are the multitudinous faint circles that John Saul has located on published maps, publicly available? The Earth's surface exhibits faint circular patterns which have not been described before. These circles are characterized by near perfection of outline. by the presence of topographic highs (rims) along parts of their circumferences, by their generally large scale (diameters of from under 7 km up to approximately 700 km in the areas examined), and by their definition in various geological environments, in many rock types, and in rocks of all ages. Many of the circles are intermittent in places along their rims but about 55% of the approximately 1,170 definite circles observed to date can be visually traced around an entire 360 of arc. The circles are further characterized by the presence of fracturing and brecciation along parts of their rims and by the extraordinary control they place on regional geology in general and on ore mineralization in particular [20] . Saul has only begun such surveying, and has found circles in the Western United States, northernmost Mexico, the Appalachians, Alaska, the Yukon, Madagascar, and Corsica. The circles occur more frequently in mountains rather than plains, indicating that mountains may often have been formed by such upheavals and that the scars are too deeply buried by overdrift to be observable straightaway on the plains. Perhaps, he says, these circles are more shadows of astroblemes than the original craters themselves; they would be like old scars on human skin, which often are distorted and shift away from the original wound. Kellaway and Durrance, it turns out, had some time earlier discovered such circles too, and called them cycloliths [21] . They called attention to cycloliths in Great Britain and Mauritania (the Richat structure), and stress that they can be responsible for river development and drainage patterns. Rivers would channel along the rims, giving them a negative enhancement, and would make gulleys in the fractures associated with the cratering. The cycloliths are granted great ages mainly because of their faintness. Yet their existence contradicts the interpretation of the rocks below them; if two intersecting or adjoining circles of similar states of preservation overlay rock exposures, say, a hundred million years apart, then, either the rocks or the circles are of the same age, and the rocks give no indication of the age of the cycloliths; worse yet would be the finding that the circles straddle rocks "older" than themselves. This is all matter for investigation. Yet if time were short, could the Earth have suffered so many blows? In any event, large cycloliths must number in the scores of thousands, unless the Earth, like the Moon, has a preferred side for suffering bombardment. Small cycloliths must then approach the millions. Nor are we speaking of fossil craters, contained in stratified sediments, none of which appear to have yet been discerned. It is one thing to say, as do the writers above, that the bombardment occurred upon a newly formed Earth crust, as on the Moon, four billion years ago, for then all the time given is free to give. But could they have been made by impacts in a recent period of, say, six thousand years? Then if two million landings ensued, they would average several hundred a year, like one clean hydrogen bomb per million square kilometers. Deluges of water might settle much of the dust. Still the prospect is awesome. Soft landings, ice falls, cosmic lightning blast--these might cause the Earth less agony. It is too soon to say. Velikovsky, in Worlds in Collision, did not treat of collisions, strictly speaking, between Earth and its principal antagonists in space, Venus and Mars. The bodies approached one another at times between about 1450 and 687 B. C.; they exchanged electrical charges; dusts, stones, and gases fell upon Earth. Earth passed through the tail of Venus, which was behaving as a comet. The earth paused in its rotation on encounter. Here Carl Sagan in criticizing Velikovsky had to agree; the biosphere would not go swirling off the globe into space by centrifugal force, as others had argued. Actually the danger of explosions into space would rather come from electro- gravitational interactions [22] . A portion of such a cometary Venus or of its tail probably did, however, crash into the terrestrial globe. This was called Typhon by many writers and in legends. Typhon was both the name of a conquering king of Egypt, following the disasters that brought the Middle Kingdom to an end, and the name of a monster who threatened the world at the same time. We can let Donnelly tell the story [23] ; he does it well: Born of Night a monster appears, a serpent, huge, terrible, speckled, flesh-devouring. With her is another comet, Typhon; they beget the Chimaera, that breathes resistless fire, fierce, huge, swift. And Typhon, associated with both these, is the most dreadful monster of all, born of Hell and sensual sin, a serpent, a fierce dragon, many-headed, with dusky tongues and fire gleaming; sending forth dreadful and appalling noises, while mountains and fields rock with earthquakes; chaos has come; the earth, the sea boils; there is unceasing tumult and contention, and in the midst the monster, wounded and broken up, falls upon the earth; the earth groans under his weight, and there he blazes and burns for a time in the mountain fastnesses and desert places, melting the earth with boundless vapor and glaring fire. We will find legend after legend about this Typhon; he runs through the mythologies of different nations. And as to his size and his terrible power, they all agree. He was no earth-creature. He moved in the air; he reached the skies... According to Pindar the head of Typhon reached to the stars, his eyes darted fire, his hands extended from the East to the West, terrible serpents were twined about the middle of his body, and one hundred snakes took the place of fingers on his hands. Between him and the gods there was a dreadful war. Jupiter finally killed him with a flash of lightning, and buried him under Mount Etna. And there, smoking and burning, his great throes and writhings, we are told, still shake the earth, and threaten mankind: "And with pale lips men say, To-morrow, perchance to-day Encelidas may arise!" Typhon, also spelled Typhaeon, is evidently another version of Phaeton (and probably of Python who was a monster killed by Apollo). The Phaeton myth, most famous 'of all, is treated by Plato self-consciously as a myth in form but standing for true natural history. Phaeton is reluctantly lent the chariot of his father the Sun for a day. He cannot control its powerful steeds and burns sky and Earth in his wild plungings. Finally he is felled by a Jovian thunderbolt, cast dead into the river Eridanus, and the nearly destroyed Earth recovers. The sad and angry Sun emerges once more. Parallel legends are found in other cultures; the best resume occurs again in Donnelly's Ragnarok. The paramount student of ancient astronomy of his day, F. X. Kugler, dissected the myth of Phaeton to assess its validity and concluded that a comet struck the Earth in the north Aegean region in the second millennium B. C. The event is probable. If it is tied into all the other evidence, in legend, history, and geology, of the same time, the event becomes more probable--and of more dire consequences. It is best if we avoid repetitious listing of disastrous effects; suffice to say that every criterion of a major exoterrestrial impact is satisfied, except the location of the point of impact. Still the story is not to be ended neatly. At one and the same time, so it appears, a great body passed close by the earth (call it proto-Venus) and a large body collided with Earth. The disasters afflicting the world in those days were effects of both events. Until the crater or aerial explosion point of flaming yellow-haired Phaeton can be found and its size and traits used to evaluate the occurrence, the effects of the principal body's pass-by cannot be calculated. Inasmuch as the effects have been extensive and continuing, not only geophysically but socially, the research seems worthwhile. Because it is our favored theory that the Moon erupted from the Earth, we give less attention to the idea that we discarded some years ago, namely that the Pacific Basin originated in a meteoroidal impact. We do ascribe many impacts prior to the episode, based upon legendary indications (see Chaos and Creation) and contributing to the loosening of the crust. It is noteworthy that E. R. Harrison "proposed that the Pacific Basin was the seat of an immense explosion in the primitive Earth" and suggested a planetesimal of about 100 km radius [24] . The rim of the Pacific has a number of characteristics of an astrobleme rim, on a gigantic scale. Our preference for the lunar fission is based upon evidence elsewhere in this work, and in the Quantavolution Series; it has to do mainly with the nature and behavior of the Moon, with legendary evidence, with the recency of the event as attested to by today's oceanography, and by the electrical effects of a two-body pass-by that would execute more efficiently, even while dampening, the effects evidenced in the Pacific Basin and throughout the global cleavage and rifting system. By now the reader may be wondering how the Moon and more could have been erupted in one set of events, how so much of what we see on the surface could have dropped from above, and how thousands of craters, many quite large, could be dug into the Earth, all within a period of time which, it is increasingly apparent. I believe to have occupied only ten to twelve thousand years, in the Holocene period, no less. Are there not too many disasters to let the biosphere survive? Further, how do these relate in time? Finally, does the author accept all of the suspected astroblemes of the world without question? To the last question, the author has to apologize for a general ignorance. The Bermuda astrobleme may be an illusion, for example. The thousands of faint circles or cycloliths may be how the Earth swells and expands. As to how the growing inventory of astroblemes may be placed in time, the author refers to a hypothetical calendar, carried here below and in Chaos and Creation. The ladder of associations between time and events will be better and better constructed as the calendar is investigated. To the first question, on the inconceivably large scope of the disastrous falls and their bisopheric effects, the author again pleads the general ignorance. On one issue, he feels confident, namely, that a small meteoroid such as the Alvarez team has sought and believed sufficient to destroy the dinosaurs and much else around the world--a meteoroid of a few kilometers diameter--would barely interrupt the reproduction cycle of the species; but it did not occur alone. Certainly I did not begin my studies with so prodigious an armory of missiles in mind. It happened that more and more effects called for causes. It happened, too, that more and more literature has been becoming available that indicates exoterrestrial intervention in earthly processes. Meanwhile, I increasingly strapped myself into a short-time harness, which is explained astrophysically in Solaria Binaria, anthropologically in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, and to some extent in the chapters gone by here and in those to come. My model demands a short-time for many exoterrestrial transactions to occur. If either the amount of time or the number of encounters is to be substantially changed, my model will crack up, and the value of my work must then rest on its assembly and description of exoterrestrial effects in the different areas of geology, astrophysics and anthropology. An exception would occur if it will be shown, as we have said in Solaria Binaria, that the formative period of the Earth, under a million years ago, brought down showers of material whose marks are faintly observable everywhere still. However, I am in no sense foreseeing a crack-up and ask the indulgent reader to continue to ride along with the model. {S : Notes (Chapter Eleven: Encounters and Collisions)} Notes (Chapter Eleven: Encounters and Collisions) 1. (1749-1827) Oeuvres ComplÚtes (Paris: 1884) VII 121; and see VI 234-5, 478; VII cxx ff. 2. Frank Dachille, "Interactions of Earth with Very Large Meteorities," 24 Bull. S. Ca. Acad. Sci (1962), 1-19; see also "Axis Changes in the Earth from Large Meteorite Collisions," 198 Nature (13 Apr. 1963), 176. 3. "Meteorites-Little and Big..." 46 Earth and Mineral Sci. 7( 1977), 49-52. 4. C. S. Beals, Ian Halliday, and J. Tuzo Wilson, Theories of the Origin of Hudson Bay (Ottawa: Dept. of Energy, Mines, ResoHad trouble resolving dest near word action type is Launch urces, 1968). 5. Dachille (1977) 51; 5 Astronomy (Feb. 1977), 60. 6. D. W. Hughes, 256 Nature (28 Aug. 1975), 679, referring to studies of Ashworth and Hutchinson on hydrous meteoritic minerals. 7. O'Leary, Campbell and Sagan, "Lunar and Planetary Mass Concentrations," 165 Science (15 Aug. 1969), 651-7. 8. J. Smit and J. Hertogen, "An Extraterrestrial Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary," 285 Nature (1980) 198-200. 9. Op. cit., 203-4. 10. John Normain et al. "Astrons--The Earth's Oldest Scars?" New Sci. (24 Mar. 1977), 689-92. 11. New Sci. (19 Mar. 1981), 740. 12. 63: 249 (1982). 13. 81 J. Geophy. Res. (1976), 5651-63. 14. ( 1977) 692, fig. 5. 15. " Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (2 Mar. 1973), 32-3; cf. R. A. Lyttleton, 245 Nature (21 Sep. 1973), 144-5 for comment. 16. Op. cit., 2. 17. " Deep Crust Hints at Meteoritic Impact," 121 Sci. New (1982), 96. 18. " Electromagnetic Effects of Collisions at Meteoritical Velocities," 13 Meteoritics (Dec. 1978), 430-3. 19. " A Former Asteroidal Planet as The Origin of Comets," 36 Icarus (1978), 51-74, 71. 20. John M. Saul, "Circular Structures of Large Scale and Great Age on the Earth's Surface," 271 Nature 26 Jan. 1978), 345 ff. 21. Supra, 75, ltr Geoffrey A. Kellaway and Eric M. Durrance with Saul reply 273 Nature (4 May 1978), 75. 22. Asimov et al., loc cit. and S. Kogan, op. cit. 23. Op. cit., 140. 24. 188 Nature (24 Dec. 1960), 1064-7. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART III: } {Q HYDROLOGY: } {C Chapter 12} {T Water} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part III: Hydrology by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWELVE WATER With both waters and elaborate forms of life, Earth is unlike other planets. The belief that this situation has persisted for billions of years may be considered someday as bizarre as the belief that the earth is flat. The world's oceans contain 1.4 X 10 18 tons of salted water. Its surface fresh waters - streams, rivers, lakes -come to 5.1 X 10 14 tons, 50,000 times less, a drop in the bucket. The ice of the continents amounts to a menacing 2.3 X 10 16 tons. And water vapors constitute 0 to 7% of the atmosphere up to 50 miles high, enough to lay a cloud cover over half the globe at any given time. And there are groundwaters, more voluminous than those of the surface. The fresh waters amount in all to three percent of all waters, and three-fourths of the fresh waters are bound up in ice. The omnipresence of water in large amounts in all life forms grant it a large role in biological and atmospheric activities. Its employment and bulk make its lithospheric transactions important shapers of the Earth's surface. Where do the ocean waters come from? Since she sees the streams and puddles after a rain, a child reasons that all water comes from the sky, that is, unless a geologist gets to her quickly to tell her that the oceans have always been here from the time the Earth was formed, or almost as long. An eccentric geologist might say that, over the ages, hydrogen atoms descend from the Sun and space upon Earth, unite with oxygen in the atmosphere and then over billions of years drop to form the waters of the oceans. The conventional myth -by which I intend no slight -is set forth by E. Bullard [1] who assumes "the obvious things.... one of them is the constancy of the total volume of water through the ages." Water is "obviously" in "equilibrium," but "the mechanisms of the equilibrium are unknown." Thus "it looks as if the water must have been tied up in compounds, perhaps hydrated silicates, until the earth had formed and the neon had escaped." (This last is needed to explain why neon, so abundant in the Sun and stars, is so rare on Earth.) "Water must then have been released as a liquid sometime during the first billion years of the earth's history, for which we have no geological record." Bullard follows this with further apologies for the myth but says that the past decades have revolutionized oceanography and have "unlocked the history of the oceans." The door may be unlocked, but few have entered. The billions of years of equilibrium can no longer be accepted: new theory has the ocean floors being scraped and relaid by the continental plates at least over the past two hundred million years or less; no longer can the myth hold that the most ancient sediments must rest on the ocean floors, hence no evidence is thereby offered of what the waters may have been like. Surely there has been water so long as life has existed, but not necessarily salted water nor much water. One may assume little water to begin with and little for long after. Swamps and shallow seas are best for evolution and quantavolution of species; thick atmospheric soup might be even better, at least in the beginning. Even now, life seems to reject the oceanic abyss. This is a sign of youth, for the abyss is not without nutrients, and forms of life exist that require little or no sunlight. The oceans do not carry all the uranium that they should possess after long eons of riverine deposits. Their salt is excessive and its sources are not organic. One calculation emerges with only 2.6% of the present chlorine of the oceans as conceivably of continental origins. The sea bottoms seem never to have been compressed and folded, so this indirect evidence of the age of the water is lacking. Sediments are thin, and mostly accorded under 80 million years of existence. That is only one-fiftieth of the conventional age of the world oceans. Have there been fifty world-girdling oceans? If the ocean basins were filled late in time, deluges from the skies have to be assumed. There is no other source, nor any more apt source, than the waterlogged comets and great planets. One is compelled to seek water there, and bring it here. Hence the need to invoke explosions of water from Saturn et al., and passing cometary encounters. Once the theory of a deluge( s) is given, the search for the source of the water is by no means ended. The Earth's water may have been injected, boiled off the imagined primodial melt, stayed up in the skies, and then fallen when a crust had formed and cooled below 212 . This may have happened, but then again it may not have. It would seem that if vapors rose high, they would stay there and rotate with the Earth, descending only when terrestrial electrical conditions permitted or were "seeded" by exoterrestrial fall out (which is also an electrical phenomenon). Professional courtesy grants geologists not only their huge oceans but also the basins to hold the waters. "God" must have made the basins to hold the water, and even if gods are dispensed with, the basins must stay. So just as some communists stuff their religion into the mummies of Lenin and Mao, some geologists stuff their religion into the "nature" that wisely provided ocean basins to hold the great waters. The waters are too great for the basins to contain; they cover much of the "true" continents. The fact that the basins occur and the waters occur does not mean that they were made for each other. Nor have they corresponded. Yet the presence of the basins is essential to the preservation of the greater part of the continents. If all the earth's present crust were a uniform level, the waters would cover the globe to a depth of a kilometer and more. There is not enough water in the earth's granite or basalts to fill the oceans. Granite, the rock that underlies the continental sediments, is notably lacking in porosity. Porosity is the ratio of void space to the bulk volume of a rock, and therefore a measure of the water or gas contained in the rock at the time of its emergence from a molten state. Its porosity ranges from 0.3 to 1.5%. That granite could not be generated from the deeper basalts of the mantle is argued by Y. N. Lyustikh, a soviet geophysicist; four times the present water mass of the earth would be needed for the job. [2] Nor can the process by imagined. The crystalline, glassy, volcanic basalt, which lines the ocean floors, can have a porosity of anywhere from 1% to 30%. Generally the porosity declines with the depth of the sea, a phenomenon attributable to pressures more lately applied than to original pressures, since this rock was often melted and extruded in unfilled basins that is, at less depth that it is presently discovered. Rocks of the same chemical constitution that differ in porosity will have had different histories in at least one significant regard: the rock of lower porosity had larger infusions of water and/ or vapors during its last melting and reforming. An expansion of the earth could be facilitated by the incorporation of water and vapors in heated rock. Water could recycle itself time and time again: it would flood a hot chasm, be incorporated in the rock, be extruded, expelled, and again enter a hot chasm. Water exists exoterrestrially. Only in 1970 were the first observations of comets in the ultraviolet spectral region made. Cometary atmospheres (comas), in which dust and minor molecular components had been hitherto alone observable, now revealed indicators of a large component of water, "confirming the Whipple hypothesis of comets being 'dirty' ice conglomerates." [3] By 1980, other comets had disclosed similar compositions. The outer planets contain great amounts of water. The rings of Saturn contain about 377 billion km 3 of non-conglomerated swarms of ice particles, by one reckoning. It has been dropping rings in the past. Saturn is 95 times the size of Earth; if Earth carried the same amount of ring ice relative to its size, it would have had 4 billion km 3 of ice particles to fill the ocean basins. The ocean basins contain 1.37 billion km 3 of water. True the density of Saturn's rings is much less than Earth's waters; still, the necessary relation of sky waters to ocean waters can be premised, especially if Saturn were to have shed most of its waters in times past. Moreover, Saturn is only one of many waterbearers in space. Jupiter and the other planets carry water, like Saturn and numberless comets. Ancient wise men of Palestine, Mexico and India are known to have attributed the deluging of the earth to planet Saturn. Thus, the Hebrew Talmud reads in one place. "When the Holy One decided to bring the Deluge on the Earth, He took two stars from Khima and (hurling them against the Earth) brought the Deluge on the Earth." [4] Velikovsky identified Khima as Saturn. In Mexican documents, where ages of the world are called "suns," "the first world age, at the end of which the earth was destroyed by a universal deluge, and presided over by Ce-acatl, or Saturn" [5] The ancient Persians reported the star Tistar appearing in three manifestations to the accompaniment each of a different deluge of rain of ten days' durations. [6] Long before modern astronomy, Saturn was perceived to have rings and to be watery, never Venus, Mercury, or Mars. How the ancient would associate Saturn with water is a mystery unless the planet had been observed at a distance much closer than it appears to the eye today and seen to blow off some of its rings or gases that ultimately arrived to deluge the Earth. Since Saturn under various names was the ruling god in human cultures at the time of Noah's Flood, the associations begin to appear reasonable. However, the Saturnian deluge followed the Golden age of Saturn, and oceans existed at least to some depth in Saturnian times. They were navigable by Saturnian age peoples. It can be hypothesized that Saturn contributed some of the vast bulk of ocean waters. Where did the earlier waters come from? If Saturn did not supply the primordial and secondary earth waters, the deluge theory has to seek evidence of earlier acquisition of water. We can begin with a postulation providing for some water that the Earth inherited from the plenum of gases in which it thrived over most of its history. Then three major sources are indicated, this inheritance from the gaseous plenum enveloping Solaria Binaria -the Sun and its partner -in a long period of binary transaction; second, deluges when the legendary Uranus (Ouranos) complex broke up; and third, upon the disruption of Saturn. Let us say, for hypothetical purposes, the three investments of the Earth with water came in one-sixth, three-sixths, and two-sixths of the total. The ocean waters are geologically young. Granted waters are difficult to date, Melvin Cook has shown that the oceans contain under 100,000 years' accumulation of uranium, even granted a uniformitarian riverine run-off curve (which, of course, would mean much less time on the quantavolutionary exponential curve). [7] That the basins which hold the water are young, which is yet to be shown, holds significance for the youth of the waters as well. Few evolutionists and quantavolutionists regress in time to a completely water-covered Earth, although the first passage of Biblical Genesis might be construed so: for Elohim separated the chaos by a firmament dividing the waters below from the waters above, and assembled the land out of the waters below. And the primeval legend of the Earth being fished out of the waters is found in the farthest removed cultures of the globe. Also among the first impression and memories of mankind was the image of the vast cloudy universe recurrently pouring water and debris down upon the hapless Earth. A more correct interpretation is that early man was caught in an increasingly turbulent cloudy world. The next chapter, on Deluges, carries this matter forward. But meanwhile let us interject a commentary on the origins of the fresh waters of the Earth. Most if not all of the lakes of the world can be thought of as slowly diminishing stagnant floods -the salt lakes like the Great Salt Lake (Utah) and the Dead sea, and the freshwater lakes such as the Great Lakes (USA), and the thousands of Canadian and American "glacial lakes." That these latter are in most cases being fed by rains and streams as fast as they evaporate or drain does not obviate the fact of their origins. They were created under flood conditions. If this is so, it is likely that ground waters and swampland are also behaving as flood waters, that is, everywhere draining at the levels of the ocean basins. The Caspian Sea has been shrinking rapidly over the past 150 years, not alone because of human diversions, and becoming more saline. According to the idea that this sea may be a remnant of a recent and westwards dumping of the contents of the vast Gobi Sea, now Desert, carried on over thousands of kilometers, ending in the Mediterranean, the desiccation is to be expected. But, too, the local freshwater replenishment of the Caspian may be inadequate, and may always have been since its quantavolutionary creation. So, too, can the ocean basins be regarded as flood drains, again to make a logical point, which is otherwise an absurd stretching of language. It can be looked at in this way: the basins of the oceans existed before they contained water; some water flowed or dropped into them, "flooding" them. More craters were added, more 'flooding' took place. Finally they were even 'over-flooded, ' that is, land not properly abyssal but belonging to continental sial was flooded up to present shorelines. Whether or not the flooding is continuing is debated in hydrological circles, along with the questionable trend of land elevation, and is, of course, related to trends of climate as well. If the hypothesis here is correct and the freshwater (and saline) bodies are late aspects of world tidal and flood movements, and if swamp and groundwater levels are also aspects of the same, then the biosphere worldwide is faced with a growing shortage of water. In the foreseeable future, life on earth will come to depend upon the systematic utilization of freshwater trapped in ice, upon irrigation from reservoirs, upon converting freshwater bodies into reservoirs, upon worldwide controls over the augmentation and distribution of atmospheric waters, and upon conversion of salt waters to fresh water. Mankind may confront, not only the effects of its ravaging of water supplies everywhere by overuse, by populations pressure, and by promoting off- flow of continental water supplies -but also a more grave problem, the hitherto unsuspected natural trend of the continental crust to lose its water holdings, because "they never belonged there in the first place." A great many dry lake basins exist around the world. Some are large, as Lake Bonneville, whose remnant is Great Salt Lake, and the Caspian Sea basin, containing today's shrunken lake, still the largest in the world. Some freshwater lakes, such as Titicaca (Andes) and Tanganyika, contain adapted or primordial oceanic animals like the seahorse and jelly fish. Perhaps a million watered and dry lakes exist. By origin, basins may have been created by natural dams accreted gradually or thrown up abruptly by avalanche, by calderas of extinct volcanos, by meteoroid craters, by faults and rifts (as lake Baikal and the Dead Sea), and by the bulldozing done by ice and rock thrusts. The original water may have been groundwater seepage, rainwater, deluges, ice melt, or tides. With six forms of basin and six archtypes of water, the combinations and permutations are numerous. And we have no global survey of lakes with which to compose a frequency distribution. The only exclusively non-quantavolutionary basin form is the damming by gradual accretion. Four types of water contents (excluding rainwater) might be quantavolutionary; three types (excluding deluges and tides) might be non- quantavolutionary. No lake is geologically old: this is an impressive datum. It says something about the lately tortured Earth. An undisturbed or slowly changing surface should include a proportionately great number of lakes aged in the millions and tens of millions of years. To object that lakes become filled with sediments must imply that such fossil lakes should exist by tens of thousands in the stratified rocks of the world. They do not. Some seemingly ancient lake beds are evident. These should be placed in the frequency distribution. The results, even by raw conjecture, would be disappointing. The fossil lakes would be all too few. For, if we multiply the present million lakes, say, of an average age of 10,000 years as a guess, and take the last billion years of the earth "history" as providing similar lakes, we get 100,000 periods, and one hundred billion lakes. With climates changing (and Flint, for one, along with many other geologists had to invent a turbulent rain belt to fill his pluvial lakes), and with continents drifting about, and lands rising and sinking, why should not lakes have visited every place at some point in geological time, and be found in all (or say 10% to 100%) of the geological columns dutifully examined. I fear that reductio ad absurdum will once more assail conventional geological theory. Freshwater springs exist in many places, emerging above their "natural " level, often quietly but sometimes with explosive vigor. The subterranean liquids and gases -water, oils, natural gas, and even compressed air -appear frequently to be pocketed under pressure. Calculations by M. Cook and others allow only a few thousand years for their escape, at most. Their burial must have occurred in some form of thrusting and folding, that is, is no longer occurring; we have accounts of many springs that have died, few that are new. This last fact would arbitrate against conventional theory that underground volatile pockets are fed from descending rock strata and then forced up above their local level at some interstices among the rocks, unless, of course, it is granted that the fresh waters generally are draining away, for the reasons given above. Once more we turn to oceanography for help. The U. S. Atlantic Ocean shelf was drilled in 1976 at water depths of less than 300 meters and penetrated to depths of from 20 to 300 meters, at 19 widely separated sites. "One of the most significant discoveries... is that fresh ground water occurs beneath much of the Atlantic continental self." [8] These fresh and sometimes brackish waters occupy large lenses in rock strata that are Cretaceous or younger. The investigators considered whether these expanses of fresh water below the ocean salt waters were remnants that had been trapped in shelf sediments when the Pleistocene ice ages lowered the ocean waters, or were submarine discharges from mainland aquifers. Generally the first solution was preferred, although indications of submarine intrusions were discovered at southerly sites. The investigators did not suggest a third hypothesis, which we offer here, that indeed the freshwater lenses are fossils, but not from a period of withdrawal of waters to make ice. Rather they are both remnants and submarine channels of the age before deluges filled to over flowing the basaltic ocean basins. Fresh waters were trapped in the continental rocks as they made way toward the abyss and are probably trapped in the debris of the continental slope as well. They are extensions of normal aquifers, a circulation and storage system that is being broken into and polluted. We speculate( as do the investigators) that these waters have been suboceanic for only a few thousand years, and will not be with us for long. {S : Notes (Chapter Twelve: Water)} Notes (Chapter Twelve: Water) 1. "The Origins of the Oceans," in The Oceans (San Francisco: Freeman,), 16-25. 2. B. Y. Levin, op. cit., 168. 3. M. K. Wallis, "Cometary Science," 286 Nature (17 July 1980), 207. 4. III Kronos 4 (1978), 19. 5. Velikovsky, V Kronos 1 (1979), 5. 6. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man, loc. cit., 124. 7. Prehistory and Earth Models, loc. cit. 8. J. C. Hathaway et al., 206 Science 4418 (2 Nov. 1979), 515-27, 523. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART III: } {Q HYDROLOGY: } {C Chapter 13} {T Deluges} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part III: Hydrology by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THIRTEEN DELUGES We resort again to the skies for cataclysms. A dense canopy of primordial clouds, lately dropping, has long been a tempting theory. Jordan, who wrote a book generally upon earth expansion, assembled data and authorities in support of the idea that in the Devonian and Carboniferous age there was "a world-wide uniformity of climatic conditions from the furthest south to the furthest north." [1] A cloud cover of a thickness of perhaps ten kilometers was deemed possible, leading to the warmth and precipitation that grew rapidly the huge forests of the carboniferous period where, he pointed out, the trees carried no seasonal rings. R Potonie is cited on the evidence for low light intensity in those times. Jordan favored Dirac's hypothesis of a declining gravitational constant. This would permit a larger solar constant in earlier times, which would have brought on the vapor cloud canopy. At some point the gravitational grip relaxed and the rings and clouds descended. Jordan was not concerned with the speed of drop or the basins required to collect the waters or with the recency of the translation from sky to Earth. However, the sky-drops may not have been so long ago. Rich and specific traditions of great celestial waters and deluging of the whole earth convey a strong presumption of truth. Prehistoric floods are believed in by many peoples who have suffered in historical times floods of only trivial consequences. Not even psychoanalytic theory, which is the most penetrating critic of delusions, can locate a psychic source of the flood complex; the waters of the sac in which we all swam in embryo are believed to have been a soothing, not devastating, medium. Scholars have repeatedly analyzed much of the surface of deposits of the Earth and reported them to be the result of universal deluges; just as often they have been rebutted by scientists who see in their studies the hand of religious authority. The greater the controversy, the less immediate the conviction that my few paragraphs here can convey. Nevertheless, I will state that an unbiased scientist must today admit that the action of heavy, large-scale floods produced by vertical and lateral rushes of water can, in a holistic context, account for numerous deposits and land forms around the world. A presumptive and perhaps invalid stretching of time can only stagger the events so as to deny them simultaneity and hence grand scope. Or, in keeping with legends, the events can be concentrated, but the intervals of quiescence then may be stretched out greatly. Or, finally, both the events and the interims may be condensed in time, a view preferred here. The sources of huge flood waters are limited. They may occur from the sudden collapse of an ice cap such as that of the Pleistocene, which covered, it is said, 30% of the Earth's surface. They can be exoterrestrial -from a comet or exploding body of the planetary system. They can descend from a onetime far-flung vaporous canopy. They can be mobilized as tides from an interruption of the Earth's motion, a tilt of the Earth's axis, or a drag induced by a giant passing body. They can, also as tides, be generated from a heavy meteoroid impact on the ocean, directly and also indirectly as in all cases above, from the winds, rock shifts and seismism accompanying them. Deluges and tides both cause flooding. Some distinctions are necessary, though, for the next chapter continues this one with the story of great tides that swept the Earth. "Deluges fell." We should preserve the strict meaning of deluge, as a cataclysm, a "down fall." That is, a deluge is defined as an immense rain or fall of matter from the sky. A flood tide is a body of water in motion. A flood is a raising of water levels from rain or tide or both. In this chapter, only the vertical flood, the true cataclysmic deluge, is considered; in the following chapters, lateral floods and tides are treated. Diderot's Encyclopedia (1751-1765) carried an article on "The Deluge" written by a young French engineer and soldier, Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger. Going beyond Newton's disciple, Whiston, who had explained the Deluge by a comet, he then wrote the first scientific work uniting the four factors; comet, flood, terror, and the origin of religion. G. R. Carli followed in a few years with additional world-wide legends and geological evidence of catastrophe. The ancient reports of universal catastrophe, both men reasoned, bore the stamp of truth. In the century that followed, the natural and psychological sciences separated themselves from history and legend. The Biblical Deluge, for example, was steadily diminished and even dismissed as a fairy tale. It became a local flood along the Euphrates River, an account which the Hebrews picked up and patched into their holy scriptures. The influential geologist Seuss opined that "the traditions of other peoples do not in the least justify the assertion that the flood extended beyond the lower course of the Euphrates. More recently, the great floods that moved over the Indus River centers of India in the second millennium B. C. have been explained by Raikes as the effects of the bursting of natural mud dams. Such floods, goes the conventional belief, typified in the work of D. Vitaliano, occurred elsewhere from time to time and were exaggerated out of local pride. Anyone who has experienced heavy rain and flood is keenly aware of the damage and the fright that come with the prolonged precipitation combined with the rising and swirling waters. Individuals and towns do not forget them easily. But no culture makes of any such weather event a centerpiece of their history as human beings. No matter how disastrous (as for example, was the Yangtse flood that killed an estimated million people in 1887), unless a flood practically obliterates a culture, or is accompanied by compelling foreign "divine" phenomena, it does not mark indelibly the social memory. Donald Patten lists sixty-eight deluge traditions on six continents. He might have named many more. For instance, twenty-five of them come from the Americas; but Marie and Richard Andress, folklorist and geographer respectively, found forty-six in the New World, almost twice as many accounts. But Bellamy estimated 500 deluge myths coming from 250 peoples or tribes. The probability is high that every culture can recite the story of a universal flood which practically nobody survived. [2] The deluge is frequently pictured, too, in ancient and modern art. A. Durer and Leonardo da Vinci painted their images of it, both making it a kind of typhoon. And indeed, in the ancient Chaldean story of the flood of Xisuthros the node of the Deluge is spoken of as a waterspout that "swelled up to heaven "and struck fear into the gods; the god Ea pleaded that any and all disaster be visited upon men, but nothing so terrible as "the waterspout of the Deluge." [3] In every ancient legend of great waters descending from the sky, a few survivors live to tell the tale. At any rate, so it seemed to the survivors. But given any tiny sum of survivors in various parts of the world, one has the basis for survival of the human race. Even a single couple procreating successfully can set off a population explosion within a few generations. The mathematics of reproduction are such that some eight billions might theoretically come forth in a thousand years. That is over twice the present population of our crowded world of today. While catastrophic forces work on exponential curves, so do populations of all living forms. Indeed, unwilling as they may be to accept such a defense, one of the best arguments for Darwinian adaptation is the capacity of all living things to increase from a pair to billions in a numbers of years. There would be no need for exponential population growth under uniformitarian conditions. But population explosions themselves are an indirect proof of catastrophes. Since the time of Boulanger, quantavolutionary thought has arrived at a number of additional conclusions about the "Deluge." These are at odds with conventional science, yet have been using more and more the findings of conventional science. Boulanger and others have talked of "the" Deluge as if there were only one, whether unique in occurrence or unique in size. Most of the ancients spoke of periodic flood catastrophes. The Greeks spoke of three great floods, Deucalion, Ogyges, and Dardanus. The first two have been tied to great floods of Exodus times, the mid-second millennium B. C. [4] According to Philochorus (3rd c. B. C.), "deluge-swept Attica remained without a king for 189 [or 190] years " in the wake of the Ogygian Flood. [5] Sextus Julius Africanus said that "all the former population of Attica was killed in the Ogygian deluge and the country remained uninhabited for 270 years." [6] The Flood of Dardanus was probably of the 8th century B. C. The story of Atlantis may be contemporary with the Saturnian flood. We note that the Atlantic Ocean was called the Sea of Kronos. Atlantis would then have sunk in the flooding of the continental shelves by the Noachian Deluge. In a prescient line, Bellamy thinks: "Genesis I is a dragon myth without a dragon, a deluge myth without a deluge." [7] This would be the initial deluges of the first, Uranian period of Chaos. The Greek myths of Ouranos and Okeanos were concerned with universal deluges of the earliest catastrophes, involving the breakup of the Super-Uranus partner of the Sun. Diluvians are of several minds. My view is that the deluges were numerous, with two great peaks. This view has at least the advantage of including all known and suspected deluges in human memory. As pointed out earlier, various high energy expressions such as typhoons and volcanic explosions invariably pick up and drop huge amounts of water and are at least localized deluges. The first peak, the Uranian, consisted of a series of drops of sky-held waters, occurring from the beginning of the holocene period when set at 14,000 B. C. and continued for several thousand years through the lunar fission. Deluges of stone and dust (or mud) occurred simultaneously. The second peak may be placed at the end of the age of Saturn and can be identified as the flood of Noah (sometimes calculated at 4000 B. C.). Dense material fall-outs of catastrophic extent occurred at the time of the heavy-body encounters with Venus and Mars, in the second and first millennia B. C. These were exoterrestrial. In these cases, described in Chaos and Creation, as well as on a number of other occasions, universal and local conflagrations and explosions caused damaging fall-outs of material that was raised from the Earth. The gravest such occurrences would have been the fall-back of some of the material that was erupting to form the Moon, around 11,500 B. C. Huge falls of insects, fish, frogs, etc. would have certainly constituted terrifying spectacles over less extensive areas, and were sometimes the cause of plagues. Issac Vail, an American naturalist, in 1874 proposed that the Deluge of Noah occurred "as a philosophical necessity, arising from a world-condition that no longer obtains .... A vast cloud-canopy of primitive earth-vapors, such as now envelop the planets Jupiter and Saturn, lingered as a revolving deluge-source, in the skies of antediluvian man --a source of primeval rains, snow and hail, competent to produce all the floods, and all the Glacial Epochs the earth ever saw, and that this last fall of those primordial waters deepened the oceans many fathoms." [8] Vail was a polymath whose analyses of myth were superb. Unfortunately, a fire consumed his principal manuscripts and he was compelled to rewrite them from memory, and then only in part, omitting many citations of sources. Vail calculated the fatal flaw of the conventional theory of the ice ages; the incapacity of the Earth internally to generate enough heat to lift the waters and convey them to where they would form ice. And, had a mechanism to lift such masses been employed by exoterrestrial sources (although noone considered this possibility), then the poles as well as the Equator would be consumed by heat. The only alternative, Vail thought, was a pre-existing high set of Saturnian rings which descended into Jovian cloud bands and then fell upon the Earth as snow and ice in the polar regions, to which they were deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Vail thought that the vast changes recorded in ocean and terrestrial life proved that a canopy had existed and had from time to time dropped part of its contents upon the earth. He pointed to pre-existing tropical conditions uncovered throughout the globe as proof of a "greenhouse" climate in which the clouds diffused the sun's heat and maintained even temperatures everywhere. Vail did not introduce heavy-body encounters into his model of heaven and earth. Yet there is yet another possible source of a deluge, terrible beyond all others. If a passing body were attractive enough to disrupt, dislodge, and explosively pull into the sky portions of the earth's surface, it would also extract water and ice directly from the earth. The portion of the water that did not follow the intruding body into far space beyond the earth's grasp would fall back upon the world as a deluge or circle the earth with the moon and ultimately, if disturbed, fall. Vail was not specific as to why the canopies would ever fall. He appealed to a "natural" and "divine" order or process happening over long ages, without external intervention. If the rings had moved with the Earth like the Moon does, they would hold their orbits similarly. Their fall would be at best exceedingly slow and the climatic ages that they would produce on earth exceedingly long, too long for any catastrophic theory. However, a collapse would be rapid under certain conditions. The globe or canopy might change its motions and/ or electrical charges. Both would occur with large-body encounters and dense-material fall-outs and radionic storms. A great meteoritic explosion, a phaetonic atmospheric pass-through, and a bombardment of particles would singly or in combination, and in proportion to their volume, precipitate deluges upon Earth. Now we see a complex of possible events: that "heavenly waters" (canopies) might have existed, that they might have fallen, and that explosions might have produced them and/ or brought them down along with exploded waters. The mechanisms are described more precisely in Solaria Binaria. We continue Vail's account: the most ancient of East Indian gods was Varuna, whose name means the "surrounder" or "concealer." He is the regent for the Sun. The root syllable "var" means water, hence "he who covers the heavens with his water canopy." Ouranos is the Greek equivalent: this Heaven-god, ancient Hesiod's Theogony tells us, came from far away to embrace "Mother Earth," Gaea, and "lay close about her on all sides around." The most archaic deity of the Latins was Coelus, ruler of heaven (Coelum), who like all the other heaven-gods, was ultimately banished. The Kojiki, holy scriptures of Japan, maintains that the gods, in the earliest days, brought the heavens and earth very close together. Two light-gods then ruled the world from their "f1oating bridge of heaven." Later, heaven "began to retire and eventually passed utterly away." In the Hebrew Genesis, the Elohim (the Most High) created the Heavens and the Earth. The Heavens were a "firmament" placed "in the midst of the waters." The "there-waters" (Shimayim or Heaven) existed with lights but not with the sun and moon, for they are not mentioned in the opening passage of Genesis. The Assyrians said also that the sun, moon and stars came into view only when the monster foes of order were dislodged. When the Scandinavian heaven, Asgard, died with the gods, during Ragnarok, "the Sun and his legions came riding through the gap in shining array." The name "Yahweh" came later when the skies were opened, just as names of the leading gods changed in all cultures, with the coming of a new age. In Greek terms, Kronos (Saturn) became Zeus (Jupiter). When Kronos was removed by Zeus, Zeus removed also his own younger brother Poseidon from Heaven and sent him to rule the terrestrial waters. But note that Okeanos (the Ocean) had, as a rebellious Titan, already been expelled from Heaven before Poseidon left it. So the Great Deep of the earliest religions was a watery sky. The final waters of the Great Deep were broken up at the time of the Noachian (or Poseidon) Flood. But there was "a long, long time when floods were the order of the day." If I may refashion the theory of Vail, in the light of what I have written elsewhere, I should suggest that (a) self-conscious myth-making mankind was born beneath a high canopy of rings and clouds, without a visible Sun; (b) deluges began and a visible Uranian Sun and the present Sun appeared; (c) the Uranian Sun went nova, the Earth bore forth the Moon and cleaved, while undergoing further deluges that partially filled the newly formed ocean basins; (d) the heavenly clouds remained to some extent thereafter (during the Golden Age of Saturn when the world lived tropically); and then (e) the second great Deluge came, which was the Noachian deluge. Jewish legends of the earliest period of man go beyond the Bible in defining a cosmic catastrophe prior to Noah's Deluge. It may be called the Enosh Catastrophe, for it happened during the time of Adam's grandson, Enosh. Since I have designated the full self-awareness of modern man (in Homo Schizo I and I1) as part of the early catastrophic scenario of a binary nova of Super-Uranus, and suggested that this was accompanied by great flooding, and that the Moon eruption and Earth cleavage (Chaos and Creation) also brought down to Earth great deluges to fill the ocean basins, perhaps Enosh belonged to one of these eras. The second is preferred if only because in legend and scripture Adam (mankind) was self-aware and active, and had been evicted into a hard world from the Garden of Eden, which represents a catastrophe of a universal globe-tilting kind. The legends say that mankind's attention was riveted upon celestial events; idolatry (implying deviant sky-body worship) and gods (the same, but lawful) were active and importuned. The terrestrial effects were said to be threefold: the sea transgressed its bounds and a third of the Earth was flooded; "There arose mountains, valleys, and rocky ground, whereas prior to that everything had been smooth and even...; man's stature was shortened." [9] Ignoring the last, which is for another book, we are left to conjecture original or successive (Uranian) deluges possibly in conjunction with the eruption of the Moon and the cleavages of the globe, at which time great orogeny occurred and much of the land was thrusted and folded. O'Gheoghan points out that two deluges were attributed by Phoenician sources to the planet El (Saturn, possibly our lunar Super- Uranian and Super-Saturn novas) [10] . The Greeks had a god who was a son of Ouranos. His name was Okeanos and his behavior was consonant with our theory. Okeanos, writes Giorgio Santellana and Hertha von Dechand, dwelt originally in heaven [11] . He was the rivers of heaven who flowed down from the sky to earth. He was the "beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pale" and his name, too, is derived etymologically from "heaven." Jane Harrison also found that "Okeanos is much more than Ocean and of other birth." [12] He was the "daimon of the upper air," of the stratosphere, of the binary system's atmospheric plenum in our interpretation. According to Homer, the universe took the form of an egg that was girded about by Okeanos, the Generator. And Socrates in Theathetus says, "When Homer sings of the wonder of 'Ocean whence sprang the Gods and Mother Tethys' does not mean that all things are the offspring of flux and motion." [13] "Mother Tethys" is the ancient sea that in my opinion preceded the earthly oceans, and was the central body of water of Pangea, as the wholly land-covered Earth may be called. A whole subsequent paragraph of Santillana and von Dechend bears quotation: The authority of Berger can reconstruct the image. The attributes of Okeanos in the literature are "deep-flowing," "flowing-back-on-itself," "untiring," "placidly flowing," "without billows." These images, remarks Berger, suggest silence, regularity, depth, stillness, rotation--what belongs really to the starry heaven. Later the name was transferred to another more earthbound concept: the actual sea which was supposed to surround the land on all sides. But the explicit distinction, often repeated, from the "main" shows that this was never the original idea. If Okeanos is a "silver-swirling" river with many branches which obviously never were on sea or land, then the main is not the sea either, pontos or thalassa, it has to be the Waters Above. The Okeanos of myth preserves these imposing characters of remoteness and silence. He was the one who could remain by himself when Zeus commanded attendance in Olympus by all the gods. It was he who sent his daughters to lament over the chained outcast Prometheus, and offered his powerful mediation on his behalf. He is the Father of Rivers; he dimly appears in tradition, indeed, as the original god of heaven in the past. He stands in an Orphic hymn as "beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pole," and in that famous ancient lexicon, the Etymologicum magnum, his name is seen to derive from "heaven." Boreal means "northern." It also means "bore," a "hole". Both of these prehistoric meanings refer to the first human sense of direction. As the clouds that surrounded man 's early cultures began to break up and descend as deluges, the first openings of the sky were in the north (to those living above the Equator). Uranus, in the late Roman Empire, was still pictured as a god cloaked in clouds. The Hyperboreans were people who lived farthest north. Their legends said that the great light (commonly, but mistakenly translated as Helios) arose and also set but once a year. So time-cycles were possible in the brilliant peak of illumination. Most legendary clues seem compatible with the model being tested here--of an early cloud-covered greenhouse world, now broken through and deluged by water, fire, and rocks; of clouds lowering upon a smothering Mother Earth; of the beginnings of reliable changing lights and planetary figures in the Boreal hole; of a rapid development of thought and culture; of the retreat of Ouranos (Uranus) and the appearance of Kronos (Saturn). But then also the land of Pangea was being flooded and the ice was piling up in the polar regions. Life forms retreated steadily southwards. Then came a Lunarjan catastrophe, the worst, followed by the full mild, misty "golden age" of Saturn (Kronos). Again, disaster, with the Noachian Deluge and the coming of electrical Yahweh (Zeus-Jupiter) to the force [14] . Afterwards, sunshine, dryness, lightning, thunder and the present rain-making cycle governed the atmosphere. Vail put it one way: "All through the Ouranian and Kronian ages, the thunderer [Jove] was silent." I would say that these former ages were fully catastrophic in their beginnings and end, and cosmic lightning and pandemonium were present, but that a fairly clear and dry world was the scene for the working out of Jupiter's divine character. The first fall-out of sky-waters must have been limited--one sixth of today's total, we guess--because, as we argue later on, they descended upon a world largely without basins to receive them. The world would have drowned without the basins. Nor did the second fall come at one time but over a period of centuries prior to and after the forming of the basins. Even then, if the waters had not fallen partly as ice upon the caps, where it did not melt, then too the world would have been swamped. The deluges would not amount to much rain if they were spread out over thousands of years. This, of course, was not the case, but is worth calculating. We assume that the original Tethyan Sea, shallow but globe-gidling, held one-sixth of the 1,347 million cubic kilometers of water contained in the present oceans. Further, we assumed that two- sixths of the present oceans came down in subsequent deluges of Noah and thereafter. Ice caps (now I/ 200 of the total waters) are ignored, so, too, possible expansion of the Earth during the period, and also the rain cycle that would be occurring all the while. We allow ourselves 6000 years to bring down new waters equal to half the oceans today, that is, 673.5 million km 3 . The annual average quota becomes 112,250 km 3 /y, which turns out to be only 22 cm 3 /cm 2 /y, when it is averaged over the Earth's surface. This is much less than the average rainfall around the world today, which can rise well above 200 cm3 in a number of localities such as the State of Washington or Hongkong. Evaporation and precipitation would add to the figure. Further, most important, most of the deluging might occur in years, not millennia, and then we should have to resort to a dynamism unlike ordinary rain, and resembling more ropes, hoses, and cyclones of water at many locations. The ancient Scandinavians called snow the "pus of the gods." Something is to be said about snow and ice deluges soon. In many places, however, the waters of the deluges and floods or tides were heated. Rains came down in gobs the size of a man's head and were at times boiling hot, according to the Zend-Avesta of Persia. Josippon bin-Gorion repeats a Jewish myth: "The fountains of the deep broke up first. Then came the flood from above. Then fire fell also, and rain, boiling hot." [15] Bellamy writes that "quite a number of peoples report not only a Great Flood, but specifically a flood of hot water." American Indians of the West claimed that the waters of the Great Flood were warm. The Voguls of Finland said a great fire raged over the world first and was followed by a deluge of hot water. Then the hot waters raged across the land. Fire mixed with the water--even their rafts caught fire, they said. Amerindians of Brazil said that the Sun was a cauldron of boiling waters that tipped over. Saturn was the chief sun in ancient legend, it should be borne in mind; several recent studies have established this identification (see Chaos and Creation). Saturn, successor to Uranus, was both an early sun, a bright binary partner of the Sun, and flared magnificently when it went nova just before its deluge waters struck the Earth. Moreover, while lightning would unquestionably have played about the deluge scene, the fires and heat connected with the deluge and flood waters would be associated with the debris of the nova and the heavy volcanism which, as one Jewish commentator wrote, sprang up on all sides [16] . The Feast of Lights (Hannukah) and the Christmas Light festivals, as well as the Hindu, Roman and other Saturnalia derive from the brilliant seven-day display of Saturn in nova, before the deluge struck. Frazer give us a Jewish folktale to conclude our instances of sky-associations for the Flood of Noah: Now the Deluge was caused by the male waters from the sky meeting the female waters which issued forth from the ground. The holes in the sky by which the upper waters escaped were made by God when he removed stars out of the constellation of the Pleiades; and in order to stop this torrent of rain, God had afterwards to bung up the two holes with a couple of stars borrowed from the constellation of the Bear. That is why the Bear runs after the Pleiades to this day; she wants her children back, but she will never get them till after the Last Day [17] . In Solaria Binaria, which is the heavily astronomical work of the Quantavolution series. Milton and I formulate the dynamics of the deluges. 1 mentioned earlier that the form which the deluges of Uranian and Saturnian times took was probably cyclonic, with the waters jetting down, as fountains or as liquid meteoritic fails. This would be a necessary assumption for biosphere survival and for disposing of the huge quantities of water involved. At the same time, we must speculate upon the lithospheric effects of the thousands of jets or spouts. Where are the visible effects today? Perhaps the myriad rings faintly visible on satellite photographs of the Earth's surface (as reported in earlier pages) represent cyclonic craters formed by the jets and soon filled by aquatic tides and earth flows. When I first began to study the incidence of meteoroid impacts, I was pleased at each new discovery. But as the number of indicated craters grew larger and larger, 1 began to wonder how the Earth could have been so completely bombarded yet its biosphere could have survived. Cosmic lightning bolts and plasmoid lightning balls supply part of the answer. A liquid bombardment might also be an answer. We shall have to await a more extensive survey of the surface halos of the Earth. {S : Notes (Chapter Thirteen: Deluges)} Notes (Chapter Thirteen: Deluges) 1. Pascual Jordan, The Expanding Earth (1971) (orig. German ed. 1966). 2. The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, op. cit., 164-6, 52. Bellamy: Moon, Myths and Man, op. cit., 120. 3. Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 241. 4. By Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, 148-52. 5. H. S. Bellamy, The Atlantis Myth (London: Fabar and Fabar, 1948), 145. 6. Ibid. 7. Moon, Myths and Man, op. cit., 178. 8. "The Misread Record," p. 1. Most of the specific allusions in these next paragraphs are form Vail's Selected Works, loc. cit. 9. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: 1909), V. 152, note 55. Quoted by B. O'Gheoghan, "Notes on a Possible Pre-Deluge Catastrophe," III S. I. S. Rev. 2( Aut. 1978), 36. 10. Op. cit., and see H. Tresman and B. O'Gheoghan, "The primordial Light?" II S. I. S. Rev. (1977), 35ff. 11. Op. cit., 190-1. 12. Ibid., 189. 13. Ibid. 14. The author's Moses examines the electrical associations of Yahweh. 15. Bellamy, M. M. M., op cit., 124-5. 16. Velikovsky in V Kronos 1 (1979), 9. 17. Folklore in the Old Testament (1981), I, 143-4. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART III: } {Q HYDROLOGY: } {C Chapter 14} {T Floods and Tides} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part III: Hydrology by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOURTEEN FLOODS AND TIDES Paleontology is based largely upon the classification and ordering in sequence of marine fossils. Cuvier, one of its founders, claimed as the best evidence of universal floods, that land animals were always found in association with marine fossils. Terrestrial strata were laid upon marine strata which were superimposed upon terrestrial strata. In 1796, he named three ages and three catastrophes, evidenced by three quite different 'aggregates of species. Man appeared following the last of these, he believed. Today, many fossil deposits consisting solely of land animals can be pointed out, but the presence of marine fossils in all regions of the world and at all altitudes provides an unending source of doubt. The Earth has had to be made mobile, with sliding land masses and sinkings and rising, to explain this fact, and with great stretches of time to accomplish what several very general tides, directed by exoterrestrial bodies, might in theory accomplish in short order. Strictly speaking, floods are waters 'seeking their own level. ' 'Gravity flow' is implied, whether a high cresting river is over-flowing a town's streets or waters from all Sides are rushing down into a huge basin from which the Moon has been wrenched to form an ocean. Phenomena often called 'floods' might be more carefully denominated deluges, tides, and tsunamis. Remaining as floods would be barrier-bursting avalanching floods, the aforesaid floods from the rising and sinking of land (elsewhere treated), the varieties of rain-fed waterdownslides, the rising of waters below the ground from higher waters of distant sources and. more obviously, the melting of ice. Tides. on the other hand, are moving waters led by other moving forces. We are not concerned here with ordinary lunar tides, of whose perplexities I. Michelson writes, "We are to this day unable to decide whether high tides occur when the Moon is in the meridian or whether the exact opposite, low tide, is more nearly correct." [1] The implications in this state of affairs, that electrical fields are operative, etc., are not germane here. The palaetiology of flooding is no less complex than the lunar tides. Possessed of records of the Nile, Thames, Mississippi and other river flows, one can make predictions of some value concerning their behavior in the near future. Given a case where long-term records are not available, it is easy to make errors both about past and future behavior. For instance, the Pecos River in Texas flooded severely in 1954. older techniques of paleohydrology had assigned a frequency of recurrence probability in the millions of years; newer techniques reduced the recurrence interval to about 2000 years [2] . Such cases should be borne in mind when considering the probable dates of prehistoric floods: are we viewing a 10 million-year effect or a 2000 year one? Are we dealing with a rapid series or very gradual pulses? More important to geomorphology are the tides of the great tsunamis and the tides of an Earth that is losing its balance by some external intervention. On several occasions, the Earth has had not only its waters diverted up and around, but also its very crust, this too constituting a tidal movement of land. A comet with a nucleus as large as the Earth would from 50,000 miles' distance pull up ocean waters to a height of several miles at its focus. An exact calculation requires many assumptions; approximations of such encounters have been figured by persons as eminent as the mathematician Laplace. Hoerbiger and Bellamy more recently have calculated the tides engendered by a capture of moon-sized satellites. If one is pondering the escape of a Moon-sized mass from the Pacific Basin, a larger body, closer approach, greater mass, and favorable electrical conditions (greater attraction) must be conjectured. Atmosphere, water, the crustal rocks, and the upper mantle must participate in the tidal action--indeed the tidal force would extend through the whole globe, and the concept of tide becomes as strained as the globe itself under the postulated circumstances. Should such an event have occurred, and it does seem the most plausible method of providing the Earth with its satellite, the tidal pull would have dragged the surface waters everywhere towards the node of escape. Thereupon, as the intruding body moved on, the tidal force would relax and the tidal waters would rush back in great rings around the globe, reverberating for large but diminishing distances until they should accommodate to the new complex of Earth motions and the tortured terrain. However, our model here and in Chaos and Creation calls for a small portion of the Earth's present waters having been available for the tides caused by lunar evacuation. Less waters would yet have been available for the tides that would otherwise reach miles into the sky. Nor, for that matter, were the mountains elevated to their present heights, but rather were only then forming under catastrophic diastrophism. The Saturnian or Noachian Flood some thousands of years later than the postulated lunar tide also would have had major traits of a tidal disaster. Patten estimates aquatic tides of 5,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level and extensive tides of magma beneath the crust. This "breaking up of the fountains of the deep," he says, might account for 99.9% of the flood waters of the Great Flood of Noah, leaving only 0.1% as deluge waters from the skies. His schedule of events follows Davidson, Stibbs and Kevan and is useful [3] . During forty days the rains fell. For another 110 days flood (tidal) waters continued to rise. Next, 74 days were occupied in the "going and decreasing." Not until another 40 days passed did Noah send out a raven. Then 21 days were taken to send out three successive doves. A further 86 days occurred before the total experience ended. Thus 371 days passed. If the Bible is historically accurate, even only generally so, a tidal catastrophe is depicted in which rains played a minor role. Even granting that all the overrunning of the land and climbing of mountains was accomplished by tides, there remains in mind a question respecting the origin of the oceanic waters. The continental slopes and shelves were permanently inundated at some point in time, and this seems the most reasonable time for the job. The quantity of water required and mode of deluging are difficult to conceive. E. R. Milton and I finally settled upon introducing waters sufficient to cover the slopes and shelves at this time, despite the enormous bulk required to raise ocean levels by thousands of feet. We reasoned that, if all of this water were not introduced here, we could not find legendary substantiation for it elsewhere. Having the waters descend was more difficult. As Kofahl has clearly shown, so heavy a deluge in the short period of forty days might practically wipe out the surface of the Earth [4] . So, as already indicated, we relied upon a few bits of evidence to consider and adopt the typhoon mechanism, having the waters streaming down in thick columns dispersed around much of the globe. This would have the advantage of letting much of the Earth go relatively unscathed. An average of one typhoon for every 100 square miles on the globe's surface would provide all the new water needed to cover the continental slopes and shelves. Preceding and successive deluges would make less severe the requirement. So would, of course, an increase in the 40 days and nights of rain that the Bible allows for the Deluge. A reason for acknowledging the many days of rising and falling tides is that, subsequent to exploding its waters upon the Earth, a major portion of the fissioned Super-Saturn may have pursued a path paralleling the Earth's for some time before overtaking and passing the Earth. This or another major portion finally receded into a position beyond Jupiter, and probably even retained its identity as the retired god, god of the underworld, the god placed in bonds by the new king of the gods, Zeus-Jupiter-Marduk-Yahweb. Early students of Siberian geography, working without an ice-age theory, observed from geomorphology and fossil conglomerates that in the far north a gigantic tidal wave had recently been propagated. North-south tides of this size strongly suggest an axial imbalance of the Earth. Water in the bottom of a rowboat splashes towards someone climbing up from the side, and splashes then back and forth, as he gets on or drops off. The enormous fossil aggregations that, with a sand admixture, compose whole offshore islands, testify also to tidal action proceeding northwards and then withdrawing [5] . A change in the speed of rotation of the globe, for which an exoterrestrial large-body encounter must be presumed, necessarily entails large tides. Some writers, including ourselves, have surmised a shift from 360 to 365 days a year around the eighth century B. C. Putting aside the more plausible cause of orbital recession, and laying the burden of such a shift upon a speed-up of rotation, with shorter and more days, the sea level would be theoretically raised by 118 m at the Equator and dropped by 227 m at the poles. So calculates V. J. Slabinski, assuming a water-covered Earth and implying instant time [5A]. The "historical belt" around the world in the Mediterranean, Near East, India, China, and Mesoamerica would have noted "moderate" drops or rises of 35 m or less. If an axial tilt occurred at the same time, counterrailing and aggravating motions would have occurred. Presumably, too, the "solid crust" would soon warp and flow to erase much of the change. Some orbital change, as stated above, probably would alter the calculations, too. The several factors at work highlight the problems of conceptualizing and calculating the effects of encounters, but heavy tidal movements must be assumed. The legends of tides number in the hundreds, but they are usually hard to allocate to periods of time, particularly in this incipient phase of the science of quantavolutions. When the Biblical Book of Exodus says, "The waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left," tidal behavior is suggested at the critical point of the Venusian comet, about 1450 B. C. by Biblical-derived dating. And the Psalms are chanting of the same event when "He made the waters to stand as a heap..." And the Midrashim comment likewise, "The waters were piled up to a height of sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations of the earth." (Though here we are bothered by the height and wonder whether, with the tides, there was a cyclonic tube reaching into the far heavens, the famous column of smoke by day and fire by night, that guided the Hebrews in Exodus). Also, in China, if the time of Emperor Yahou belongs anywhere, it belongs around the time of Exodus; and there the waters "over-topped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." [6] But when the Lapps recite how the angry god Jubmel raged against the wicked, and, "foaming, dashing, rising sky-high came the sea-wall, crushing all things," we are not sure that this is the time of Exodus or earlier or a combination of later and earlier events. So it goes around the world. The tides are there: immense, overpowering everything, wrecking the surface, launched by the gods, accompanied by fire and wind; still each legend has to be examined carefully before assigning it to a given catastrophe. The Jubmel legend ends up as sophisticated language, as good a poetry as ever written perhaps, but it is not the language of the time of the event. Even the Biblical language is not the Exodus language. All the accounts are much later than the events. So the quality of the language does not date the legend. I think one may accept, however, that the tides were overwhelming at Exodus-time. They were also present at other catastrophic intervals, and particularly in the Lunarian Age. The Noachian-Saturnian Flood was a deluge and tidal flood. The Popul Vuh of the Meso-Americans speaks of the god Hurracan as the driver of disastrous winds and tides, but sounds as if it were reminiscing about events of the early primordial period, our Lunarian episode. The peculiar image of the walls of water parting gives pause, too. It is not only Biblical but, for example, Inca; near Yucatan, twelve roads of escape were opened through the sea to let pass certain peoples from the East. Can tides behave to create passages? The answer must be "yes." Not only is there a typical shore withdrawal before a tsunami; the tsunami can occur in a series. Further, the immense expressions of energy in tides, as in winds and earthquake, sometimes act to spare the most incongruous as well as precious things. Cows have been picked up by cyclones and set down miles away without injury. When Krakatoa exploded, the people of Batavia a few miles away braced for a gigantic tidal wave that never came. Yet the wave wiped out other villages not far away and raced across the oceans to frighten Indians and Africans. There are parts of the Aegean islands that were scarcely mounted by the towering wall of water that set out with hurricane speed from Thera-Santorini around 1000 B. C. Tides rip, cross, translate, and in other ways convey their force. During the flood of Manu (Saturnian flood, probably about 4000 B. C.) hurricanes and turbulence surrounded the boat of the Indian Noah. The skies are full of motion and the mover's body is itself moving. The atmospheric is raging with currents of wind and electricity. The Earth itself is moving. The celestial actors in the scene are imposing or withdrawing forces. Hence, exoterrestrially induced tides will not behave so simply as tides operate with the regular passage of the Moon or of a single earthquake. They will draw startling geometric figures. No one would have been more amazed than the Jews themselves, to have survived the double-walled water passage into Sinai. They lost, according to legend, the vast majority of their people to the waves that swallowed the Pharaoh's warriors. It is logical that few might reach the "Promised Land." The "great spark" that Velikovsky says struck the walls of water and caused them to collapse upon the hapless pursued and pursuers is attributed by him to a discharge of cosmic lightning between Earth and Cometary Venus, releasing the attraction between the two bodies. It is well to note in this connection that an American Pima Indian myth paints a similar scene [7] . There were 3 warnings from an eagle of great flood. Suddenly a terrible roar paralysed men with fear. A green water-mountain rose over the plain. For a very short time it seemed to stand upright like a wall -then it was split by a vivid flash of lightning, and plunged forward like a ravenous beast. Only one man escaped, keeping afloat by clinging to a large lump of rubber or pitch. The flood of Noah is an example of both deluge and tide. If it were purely a deluge, how would the Ark end up on a tall mountain of Anatolia? (How would the boat of Manu, the Hindu Noah, end up in the high Himalayas, for that matter?) Even the heaviest deluge could not over-fill the ocean basins and cause the waters to ascend the highest mountains. The waters would run off, carrying any barges downstream, or else the world would be permanently drowned. Alternatively, the mountains would have appeared in the course of the deluge (because the continents were on the move) and afford anchorage and survival. Or else the deluge was accompanied by tidal rises of the waters of the Earth owing to the electro- gravitational attraction of close-in celestial bodies. Or else all three events happened more or less simultaneously: the deluge fell; the lands moved and rose; and a tidal force (the same that was causing the deluge to fall and the lands to move and rise) drew the waters up to the heights of whatever mountains pre-existed or were appearing. The Bible contains many specifics, almost as if it were, as Patten says, an eye-witness account. His is probably the best all-around analysis relating to the Flood. He establishes it securely as a tidal flood, "a universal, global Flood, and that it was caused by the interacting gravities of two astronomical bodies of planetary dimensions -the Earth and the astral visitor. Since the Earth possesses two fields, one gravitational and the other magnetic, there were two kinds of celestial conflicts with the intruder." [8] The question of "how few" were the survivors need not detain whether scores or thousands -but they certainly were widely scattered about the world. The following quotation from the ancient Nicolaus of Damascus seems reasonable [9] : There is a great mountain in Armenia, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were for a great while observed: this might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews wrote... The steady increasing and decreasing of waters is a tidal as well as a deluge phenomenon. The ten-month duration assigned the flood seems more to indicate a long- range tidal attraction of a celestial body; a flood, even if universal, would not take so long to recede as the 74 explicit and 90 additional implicit days before the full grounding of the Ark. The archaeological history of the deluge has been controversial. It has been reviewed by M. E. L. Mallowan and H. J. Lenzen, among others, and Robert Raikes has supplied a critique of the theories [10] . What is generally discoverable in the Middle East is a seeming succession of water-destroyed levels in many excavations dated in the period 2600 to 3500 B. C. Raikes accepts these datings. I cannot, for I am compelled by many other considerations in this book and others to assign the Biblical Flood to a time 500 to 1400 years earlier. That humans were civilized before the Flood is undoubted. Whether there exist excavations from this period among the Middle East excavations has to be determined by examining one site after another. Judging by the way the tide advanced and retreated, there would not have been a total dredging and destruction of already buried antediluvian sites but probably a complete extirpation of diluvian settlements. There should therefore be a rupture and hiatus between ante-diluvian and post-diluvian cultures. Probably the distinction ordinarily made between Paleolithic and Neolithic ages directs itself unwittingly at this catastrophic break. Hence the Great Archaeological Debate over the Deluge of Noah has probably not been treating of the Deluge at all, but has been trying to force lesser floods of later eras upon the legendary accounts of the great Saturnian floodtime. Nor was Velikovsky of a precise opinion in these matters. It is in the hiatuses between Paleolithic and Neolithic that one must search for evidence of the Noachian-Saturnian-Gilgamish-Manu world flood. Tides may be aquatic, but readily transport denser bodies. The velocity of water is as significant as its volume for carriage. Moving currents carry to the sixth power of their velocity. If a stream of volume "X" were to move at 2 km/ h it would carry 64 times the load it could carry if it moved at 1 km/ h. Tidal transport is scarcely less powerful. Tides can stretch for great lengths and in all directions. Those who like to imagine that the Exodus tide was limited ignore the evidence that the Red Sea was in motion. Moreover, they overlook the fact that unidimensional tides are practically restricted to hurricanes. A splash, a large-body pass-by, an explosion or a deluge summons a 360 degree tidal effect. The speed of tides is swift unless remote bodies are their cause, as with the daily tides of the Moon. The appearance of the tidal effect during the Exodus, long after the first plague signaled the approaching comet, indicates a remote and approaching body. The Navajo say that on the occasion of the world flood (which cannot be precisely named) the animals had been running from east to west for days before they saw a semi- circle of water moving, like a mountain range, towards them from the east. By the next day the waters were upon them and only those who had reached the nearby mountain-tops survived. The tidal flood was preceded by a bright light in the east, an indication that an incandescent body was in the sky [11] . Again the speed was relatively slow compared with the tidal waves from hurricanes, explosions, earthquakes, and falling bodies. The amplitude of tidal waves will vary greatly. Historical explosions have raised waves of 85 meters, as in the Krakatoan case. Earthquakes, as in Alaska, have done as much too. The Thera volcanic tsunami of circa 1000 B. C., is thought to have raised higher tidal waves than Krakatoa. As we have said, an exoterrestrial body may raise tides kilometers high. Adding to the rain-flood from a deluge would be the flash-flood, the destruction wrought by fast-draining rain waters. Ancient times witnessed flash floods of great scope and intensity under deluge conditions. Heavy deluge waters filled the rivers and ocean canyons of the world; they poured off the mountains in the Deluge of Noah, and legendary heroes from Columbia, China and elsewhere earned their glory from engineering the escape of the floods. A non-tidal moving flood is caused by the bursting of barriers: a natural dam blocks and collects water and then collapses. Some of the behavior and landscaping to be expected of great tides and floods are exemplified in the Channeled Scablands (Wash., U. S. A). They are 15,000 square miles of effects of a barrier burst flood; they were not made by a tide, not directly at least. Some 100,000 miles of this section of North America are thickly covered with lava, in places more than 10,000 feet thick, which can be ascribed to the immense volcanism incurred when the American continent traveled westwards over the global fracture of the East Pacific area. This might have been around 11,500 years ago, not the 10 to 30 million years conventionally given to the set of events. The whole area was then covered with silt and loess. The Scablands are a water sculpture of this lava surface. Expert opinion asserts that a barrier of ice corked a mountain pass and caused a Glacial Lake Missoula to form. The Lake was half the volume of present-day Lake Michigan, but pitched high above sea level. The lake, it is thought, was of short duration and finally overflowed. The water cut through the ice cork. (The immediate cause may have been Earth movements.) "Within a very short time -perhaps no more than a day or two -the ice dam was destroyed and the contents of the lake were released." [12] So reads a tourist bulletin on the area. A maximum speed of 45 miles per hour has been assigned to the resulting flood, and a maximum rate of flow ten times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world today. A luxuriant biosphere was wiped out, including large mammals, camels, bison, antelope, and, to my thinking, humans. I add "humans" partly because a doll was found in clay below 150 feet of lava, not far east of the same lava field, at Nampa, Idaho. The flood plucked and transported huge blocks of basalt. It flayed the basalt of its skin of loess. It dug channels in the basalt more than 200 feet in depth, and one of 8 miles in width. It made instant falls and plunge pools and eroded them backwards quickly. When the waters slowed they began to dump debris, some 500 square miles of it, to a depth of over 125 feet. The flood crest lasted a day or so, the main flood 2 to 3 weeks. Today, a satellite photo taken from 569 miles up shows the ramified and interlacing channelways of the flood cutting through the loess into the basalt, and then generally the unvegetated region around them. The barrier-burst flood theory originated with Professor J. H. Bretz of the University of Chicago and was not accepted for many years because it was catastrophic. [13] In fact, the theory can be pressed further in the direction of radical catastrophism. First there are the reaffirmations of certain catastrophic doctrines. Energy kills time. Buttes, ravines, and river channels can be carved from dense rock in days. A biosphere can be destroyed down to bedrock in a single rush. Broad river channels are sculpted immediately through deep soil and loose rock. Giant gravel ripples are laid down; hills are fashioned; long steep slopes are fashioned Ó la minute. Heavy stones are sown far and wide, the famous "eccentrics." Basalt is stripped to form monumental columns. A catastrophist still may not rest content with the analysis. Why, he can ask, is the volcanic base of the region timed so long ago and why is the volcanism supposed to have required intervals of thousands or millions of years to be laid down deeply? What water did in a month could be equaled and surpassed by lava in a few years. It is thought that glacial Lake Missoula formed 18 to 20 thousand years ago. Also it is said that several smaller lakes had formed in the same way and been discharged in the same manner. That is, the glacial ice lobe plugged the escape gap and pulled the plug several times. The previous logic holds here too: ice can form slowly or fast; climates change slowly or fast; plugs must be pulled in tempo with these fluctuations. Moreover, plugs can be placed or pulled tectonically, perhaps without the use of ice; the Earth shakes and gaps are blocked; another shake and the blockage bursts. More generally, suppose that the lava-paving occurred in the first phase of "Lunaria" (11,500 to 10,500 B. P.), after the Moon explosion, global fracture and the mountain- building thrusts and folds from the north. The high canopies are still descending and drenching the northern areas. The waters drain down the old raised glacial valleys and new ravines. The tectonic scenario of Lake Missoula goes into effect. The area through which the flood raged is tipped to the southwest and the waters of the flood drained that way. The land is supposed to have tilted after the lava beds were laid. The tilting actually might have been responsible for the uncorking of Lake Missoula. Such extraordinary seismism would have been heavily felt in the Lake area. Nor may the heavy loess coverings of the basalt give more than brief pause. Credited to wind-blown erosion material, it is not clear where such heavy dust would have originated or what climate brought such strong winds to transport it. Wherever it came from should contain the "mother lode"; where is it? This deep frosting was laid down by exoterrestrial sources, a cometary train, some would say. Others may claim that the loess or silt is a deposit from the inutterably greater thrust and fold phase of the ice cap avalanche and crustal movement, with contributions of ashes from biospheric and volcanic fire. By the time the scablands were etched upon the surface, the fires had been banked and the Earth was settling down. The Scablands, we recall, are supposed to have registered several floods in succession from the same general source, glacial waters. I collapsed these somewhat and placed the Uranian-Lunarian deluge-avalanche-uplift period earlier. The Saturnian deluge and tidal flood would have come later, and contributed to a huge rise of waters drawn by a passing comet, which moved from place to place, drawn upwards and penetrating barriers and then withdrew as the attractive force was withdrawn. I have not attempted to say whether the Venusian episodes drowned and scoured the Scablands; when one thinks of the shrinking times allotted to ice ages, Lake Lakontan, Niagara Falls, and a great many "post-glacial" lakes, one should not be surprised if the Scablands Flood was a much later event and that my guess is too old. Across the world from the Scablands are Mesopotamia and India, whose peoples claim great floods as part of their historical experiences. These floods -were they originally from deluges or tides? Comparisons with the Scablands may be useful. In all cases, the tradition claims several great floods. Just as the Greeks had at least three floods, the Indians seem to have had their flood of Manu and the flood of the Gariga region, both described in the Puranas. Both were disastrous, and we need not doubt that, as with the Scablands, other floods occurred from time to time. A similar series seems to have happened in Mesopotamia, where for centuries controversy over the number and extent of floods has raged. However a hydraulic engineer and scholar, Robert Raikes, has given close attention to the literature of archaeology and to the topography of the reported events; Raikes favors a non-catastrophic approach which, to his annoyance, has been deemed by many others to be a catastrophic approach. So he is in somewhat the same seesawing position as Bretz of Scablands fame. Let us take up the Indian case first. Here, on the one side, are the true catastrophists, religious or scientific, who say that the Indus civilization was wrecked by the mid-second millennium Venusian events -mostly earth movements and tidal floods. In full opposition, the uniformitarian extremist would be one scholar (Fairservis) who deems the Indus culture to have declined because of economic extravagance and poor ecological practices, until finally the Aryans of the northern plateau could swoop down upon the remains [14] . The area under discussion is of great size. The influence and interconnections of the Indus and probably pre-Indus culture were most extensive -at least from today's Iran on the north to China on the east, to Arabia and Africa in the west and south to the islands of the South Seas. Raikes finds in the Indus River Valley evidence of repeated flooding and of attempts to build against the flooding, until finally about 1500 the Valley was abandoned. He finds reprehensible "a general tendency to ascribe the abandonment of prehistoric sites to climate changes" without quantification of the degree of change beyond normal variations; also quite wrong is "the over-simplification which is to ascribe abandonments of sites to regional, or even world-wide periods of tectonic catastrophes." [15] "Many archaeologists believe that at Mohenjodaro an extreme flood event or a series of them account for the great depth of silt/ clay which has buried 11 or 12 meters depth of occupation levels under the present flood plain." Raikes traces the cause of flooding to "a combination of tectonically caused damming of a part of the Indus south of Mohenjodaro coupled with the division of Indus flows between the Nara channel and that of the Indus proper." Behind the tectonism may have been a rising seacoast, together with "extensive mud extrusions (including mud volcanoes) still active..." "Both the flood deposits and the evidence of rebuilding occur at a great many different levels." Thought Raikes, perhaps the people built, were flooded, rebuilt, and so on, always keeping just above the new water levels. But why did the act not go on indefinitely, so that when the river finally settled itself the people might be still around and flourishing? They either abandoned the culture or they were destroyed. One can imagine that silt (loess, clay) can be laid down by comet trains. Also from far off multiple volcanism and cyclones. Or the tectonism, that Raikes tries to contain, was far more extensive. The seacoast and mountains were rising rapidly. Dams were tectonically built and burst as at the Scablands. The elapsed time from damming to filling to flood "would have been very short," in Raikes own words. Raikes suggests similar events at Chanhu-daro. He refers to "other uplift episodes," in the same article. And in another to "a general, if less marked," raising of the Indus flood-plain to the south, at Sehwan. He believes that "there has been no climatic trend toward either wetter or dryer conditions since Harappan times," so again turns to a stress upon tectonism [16] . Many sites, particularly in the Baluchistan region, north of Mohenjodaro, show signs of a destruction by burning. Harappen centers were not flooded. Abandonment was sudden in these and other places after which they stood empty for centuries. Yet "one fails to see any evidence of the hill raiders who supposedly brought Harappa to its knees." B. B. Lal turned his attention to the phenomenon of a wide scattering of copper pieces and Ocher Color Ware in the present Delhi area of India. They are found over a huge area of 60,000 km 2 [17] . At Bahabrabad, for example, the pottery and copper objects had been strewn in a level six meters below ground, and had been covered by sand, pebbles and earth. The hypothesis was a veritable "deluge." Tectonism is blamed, with or without a deluge, possibly through the mud dam mechanism or river diversion. The Indian flood area, whether once devastated or several times over, includes the famous fossil beds of the Siwalik hills. These are foothills of the Himalayas, north of Delhi. They are crammed with hordes of specimens of a great many species. Many of them appear for the first time in these beds and are extinguished in them, so far as paleontologists know. In the Geology of India, D. N. Wadia writes [18] , "This sudden bursting on the stage of such a varied population of herbivores, carnivores, rodents and of primates, the highest order of mammals, must be regarded as a most remarkable instance of rapid evolution of species." Tortoises of over six meters, two dozen species of elephant, pigs, oxen, and apes are scattered about. There are signs of earthquake, folding of the land, perhaps folding and deep burial of animals. Similar deposits are found 1300 miles away in Burma, cut away to view in the valley of the Irawaddy River. Two great zones of fossils are separated by 4000 feet of sand. Petrified trees pervade the fossils in the thousands. Writes Velikovsky: "Animals met death and extinction by the elementary forces of nature, which also uprooted forests and from Kashmir to Indo-China threw sand over species and genera in mountains thousands of feet high." [19] Other instances may be added to extend the area involved in disaster much further, probably to the limits of proto-Indian civilization, and indeed throughout the world. The dates are hinging upon 1500 B. C. in many instances. Therefore, it would seem reasonable to place Raikes' work on the revolutionary shelf; try as he may to limit it, his evidence and own conjectures press in the direction of general catastrophe. What emerges from Raikes' complex analysis is that in the Old and Middle Bronze Age - and particularly at the age-break between Middle and Late Bronze -there is proof of various terrific floods to which all known settlements succumbed. Raikes inclines, after considering six possibilities, towards a land subsidance on a large scale complementing a land rise to the east. He does not mention the backup of river waters that would occur from Thira-type tsunamis driving north through the Persian Gulf, although the evidence allows it. Such tides could come from a Typhonic impact explosion, a poseidonian earthquake, or a large-body encounter producing an axial tilt or interrupted rotation of the globe. (One notes the level of ashes and char beneath the flood level of Shurrupak. It does not appear to have been an incendiary blaze.) He does not consider canopy water-drops, but insists upon retrojecting uniformly precipitation rates from modern times. Although the evidence of the period which he is examining is disordered and prejudiced already, yet the evidence that he must confront shows a flooding that is utterly devastating, and unexampled in recent times. But still, he draws back from catastrophic conclusions, loath to abandon the dogma that catastrophe could not have happened, and certainly not an exoterrestrial one. Since large upthrusts of the Himalayan mountains are now being dated to post-glacial times [20] , since even mountains much higher than the Siwalik foothills contain "old" marine fossil beds, since the Siwalik-type beds are so young even when conventionally dated, since evidences occur of huge waves of translation moving from south to north in India and leaving great moraines (including the Siwalik-type hills), since neolithic stones are found in the loess of the Himalayas and since great human cultures were flooded over and probably deluged as well, one is entitled to the quantavolutionary hypothesis: a series of abrupt, intensive, wide-scale changes overwhelmed the Indian subcontinent. Frantic proliferation and extinction of species occurred, while India broke from Africa and crashed into Asia, while tides moved over the land, ramming, ripping, rising, and drowning, while the land raised up in a great arc into Asia, while hominids, then humans, entered and built cultures that were then destroyed and recreated. It may be that from this part of the world will come the easiest and fullest proofs of revolutionary primevalogy, of a succession of geological and cultural ages coinciding with the successive disruptions of what had been Solaria Binaria. Dwarfing the Scablands and Indus barrier floods was the Gobi Sea flood, which may have been connected with the complex Noachian Flood. Thomas Huxley wrote the first scenario of the event. Bellamy refurbished the story in this century [21] . The Gobi desert, which the Chinese call "the Sea of Sand," was once a great body of water. Numerous settlements lined its shores. Then suddenly it was emptied in a huge barrier-type flood. Its cultures disappeared along with a great many other settlements along the line of the flood. The western barrier of the Gobi Sea broke between Tian Shan and Altai mountains, and rushed through where today remain the waters of Telli-nor, Ebi- nor, Ala-kul, Sasyk-kul and Lake Balkhash, much of it now saline and disappearing. The great flood spread out into a "Sea of Turkestan" and then drained down into the depression of the Aral and Caspian Seas. It then poured out between the Ural mountains and the mountains of northern Iran, descended west through the Manych Depression into the Valley of the Don, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea. The areas of today's Romania and Bulgaria were temporarily part of a greater Black Sea. Soon it overflowed at the straits of the Bosphorus and pushed through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean region. The Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lands were flooded. Next the Adriatic River, possibly the legendary River of Eridanus, and nowadays the truncated Po River, was turned into an Adriatic Sea. The Ionian Sea overflowed and the land bridges between Italy and Africa were covered with water. The shelves of the region of Tyrrhenia were submerged, the survivors driven to the high places of the Italian peninsula and islands, and contact was ultimately made with Gibraltar. The Sahara basin may have been filled with water upon this occasion, to have become the ancient sea of Triton. It was this Tritonian Sea that figured in the mythical birth of Goddess Pallas Athena (the planet Venus) and I think that it was around 3500 B. P., therefore, when the Tritonian Sea broke out and threw itself into the Atlantic Basin. Ancient Saharan ruins and the art of the Ahaggar mountain caves amply testify to the ancient cultures there between 4000-1500 B. C. The elapsed time for the 4000-mile journey from China may have been months or years. The drainage of the several temporary basins established en route from East Asia to the Atlantic Ocean occupied centuries. Barrier-burst floods and tides must have been numerous, we conclude, because of the mountain-building, severe faulting, deluging, and other movements and outbursts that were occurring. Both actions would have been quite unexpected and erratic. They would have devastated the biosphere. Evidence of both effects comes sometimes from jumbled deposits of animal bones and wood. These locations consist of different species, that were killed suddenly (not by men), by the hundreds or thousands, and were transported to the location, by tides of water but in some cases also by hurricane and cyclonic action. In the Yukon Valley of Alaska, bulldozers scraping for gold have removed bones by the ton and drills have picked up bones hundreds of meters below ground. Such evidence exists around the world, and much more will be said on the subject in Chapter 26. The number of fossil deposits will probably be extended to many hundreds of cases in the future. Still, most deposits would have been destroyed at the moment of catastrophe. Fires would have burned others. Impenetrable ice covers many bone piles. A succession of revolutionary actions would have blown to bits, dissipated, ground up, converted to fuels, washed into the sea, and deeply buried many others. The scenes at bone deposits are impressive: they are worldwide; they are found at low and high altitudes. Strange bedmates are discovered: ostriches and foxes; mammoths and lions; peacocks and horses; elephants and sharks. Anthropologist Frank Hibben surveyed the bone mucks of Alaska and heard of similar deposits in nearby Siberia. The Arctic Ocean is in fact rimmed by the bones of many millions of animals. Hibben weighed the possibilities: hunters' overkill, ice flows, natural death, volcanic ash burials (ashes are abundant in the muck), volcanic gases? The mystery seemed to him unsolvable. He wrote of it in 1947; he revised his work in 1967 [22] . There is no indication that he had heard meanwhile about Velikovsky, Hapgood, Patten, or Cook who were offering solutions to the mystery in terms of Cuvier's century-old expression -"revolutions of the globe." Derek Ager, with a mind and eye for the catastrophic occurrence, remarks that "tsunami, ' or 'tidal waves' as they were for long misnamed, have an immense effect on shorelines, both in erosion and in the shifting of great quantities of sediment." [23] But what parcel of land in the world has never experienced a tsunami? "It is generally accepted that tsunamis are usually triggered by earthquakes or violent volcanic explosions. It is also possible that they can be produced by the slumping of large masses of sediment in water..." Or by meteoroid splashes, we might add, or hurricanes and cyclones. "Though infrequent, there are certainly enough of them for geological purposes. From historical records it can be deduced that there have been more than two hundred notable tsunamis in the last two thousand years; this would allow us more than 100,000 in a million years." Then move the continents a little here and there, raise and lower shorelines, change climates a few times, and add ten, fifty, a hundred million years. We have millions of great tsunamis to work with. Obviously the whole surface of the Earth will have been worked over a number of times by ordinary, uniformitarian waves. Thereupon add all the other high-energy forms: deluges, exoterrestrial impacts, volcanism, and so on: it is a wonder that the crust of the Earth is not a homogenous finely ground mixture of all past life and surfacing rocks. Now add great catastrophes elaborated in this book and the homogenous mixture should be guaranteed. That is, stratigraphy is hardly understandable by following uniformitarian principles, if we acknowledge what scientists have all along been discovering, but more recently have become acutely aware of. Even if, as Ager writes, "the changes do not take place gradually but as sporadic bursts, as a series of minor catastrophes," the strata of the Earth do not make sense. Those who believe in major catastrophes interrupting huge serene tracts of time may be wrong, because they must add to the effects of the great disasters the effects of a multitude of minor ones called for during great stretches of "peaceful" time. The result would be a homogenized crust. The effects of the forces that have operated are such as to suggest for the Earth a short and recently catastrophic history. The Earth's surface still retains its forms and fossils because its tortures have been clustered and have occurred following a short total Earth history. {S : Notes (Chapter Fourteen: Floods and Tides)} Notes (Chapter Fourteen: Floods and Tides) 1. PensÚe (1974), 71. 2. 215 Science (Jan. 22), 4531. 3. Op. cit., 65, 61. 4. R. E. Kofahl, "Could the Flood Waters Have Come from a Canopy or Extraterrestrial Source?" 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (March, 1977), 202-6. 5. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 7-9, 38-9. 5A. C. L. Ellenberger, ltr., VIII Kronos (1982), 94-5. 6. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 70-6. 7. Bellamy, M. M. M., op. cit., 257. 8. Op. cit. 9. Book 96 (lost) quoted by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, by Whiston, and by Patten, op. cit., 61. 10. R. L. Raikes, Unpubl. paper, "Ecological Role of Extreme but Predictable Climate Events on Prehistory with some examples, for comparison, of Unpredictable Events and Their Consequences;" "The Physical Evidence of Noah's Flood," 28 I Rag part I, 52-63. 12. The Channelled Scablands of Eastern Washington (U. S. Govt. Printing Office, Wash. D. C., 1974). 13. J. H. Bretz, "The Lake Missoula Floods and the Channelled Scabland," 77 J. Geol.. (1969), 503-43. The original work was published in 1923. 14. See Gil. Possehl, "The Mohenjo-daro Flood," 69 Am. Anthrop. I (1967), 32-40, opposing views such as Raikes, 66 Amer. Anthrop. (1964), 284-9 and see below, fn 16. 15. Op. cit., fn 10 (unpubl. paper). 16. " The Mohenjo-Daro Floods," 39 Antiquity (1965), 196-203, 203. 17. " A Deluge? Which Deluge?" 70 Amer. Anthrop. 5( 1968), 857-63. 18. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 79. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Ibid., 74-8. 21. Bellamy, M. M. M., op. cit., 308-16. 22. The Lost Americans (NY: Crowell, 1968). 23. Op. cit., 45. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART III: } {Q HYDROLOGY: } {C Chapter 15} {T Ice Fields of the Earth} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part III: Hydrology by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIFTEEN ICE FIELDS OF THE EARTH The earliest humans had to contend with growing ice caps and glacial fields, or at least some force that created their effects. Did the Great Ice Ages really happen? For a century the confident answer of science has been "yes." The idea is fetching; so much ice surrounds the north and south poles now that it seems reasonable that once there was even more, and probably once there was less, or none at all. At peak time, an estimated 30% of the Earth's land surface was covered by ice, three times the area occupied by ice today; this was as late as 11,000 years ago, or so it is believed. When Emiliani discovered evidence that the Gulf of Mexico was for a time freshwater, he posited a rapid end to the Ice Ages and a flooding which may have drowned the mythical Atlantis culture, since the time (ca. 11,600 B. P.) conforms to Plato's date of the disaster. The surmise engendered sharp criticisms, allowing even historians to get into the act [1] . It seems that everyone believes that the ice cameth and each has an individual scenario, which is not complete unless it contains quotas of confusion and contradictions. If one wishes to spend a lifetime solving a puzzle while wrapped in an enigma, a career in paleoglaciology is recommended. One can scarcely blame an amateur from enjoying and even tolerating Donnelly's old idea that the ice ages never existed. Next best, one can call down the ice (or most of it) from outer space, as we do here. And so does Patten. Third best would be the Milankovich theory which depends upon cosmic perturbations in Earth- Sun transactions, but lets Earth manufacture the ice. John and K. P. Imbrie have updated and defended the theory, which, highly complicated in itself, is also confounded by the uncertainties of paleoclimatic studies [2] . Hard evidence that a set of ice ages occurred falls into several categories, as follows: Certain northern lands near the present ice are rising, as if a large load had been lifted from them. They seem to form arcs with Baffin Bay as an old geographical pole and center of an ice cap. (The western rising arc is separated from the eastern arc, as if they had been pulled apart.) An issue occurs if one asserts that the rising would ensue from a shifting of the Earth's axis and North Pole, regardless of the presence of ice. Far to the South of the present Arctic ice, and far to the north of the present Antarctic ice, the rocks and soils show peculiar qualities. Huge areas of rock are scoured and scratched as if some gigantic force has scraped over them, now advancing and then again retreating. Immense fields of stones (or drift) have been pushed and shoved into place, as if by moving ice. An issue occurs if one asserts that tides and exoterrestrial stone fall-outs had produced the fields. Glaciers, formed on mountaintops around the world, take their origin usually in a U- shaped nook of a mountain. Their ice forms and slowly slides downwards through valleys, carrying drift and ending in melting waters. They abrade and pluck the drift as they go along. They are broad, and they terminate in broad curls, from which streams form and run off. Many "extinct" glacier forms exist, indicating that once there may have been much more cold and ice. That is, unless these "fossil" glaciers were pointed towards the sun in a global Earth tilt, and melted, or once were a part of a large crustal lateral avalanche that thrust whole areas away from the polar regions. Or unless exoterrestrial ice were dumped upon higher places and melted away from lower places. Heat is required in large amounts to raise water for the snow falls over glaciers as well as polar regions. Some say the heat required would be too great for the biosphere to tolerate unless the snow gathered by very slow increments; there is evidence that "glacial ages" came and went rapidly. Further flora and fauna of the glacial age seas are arctic types; then where were the sufficient warm seas whose waters would evaporate and stream polewards as clouds? If cold water and snow fell from high cloud canopies, it could persist at higher altitudes and latitudes and accumulate and flow. In many settings, such as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, large plains end on the downslope with a number of ponds and layer upon layer of sands, gravel, and clay. In it are scratched stones and finely ground glacial flour. It seems that an ice sheet had once moved downwards on all sides from a northerly direction, acting like a glacier on a grand scale. Humps, low ridges, occasional erratics (rocks foreign to where they are found), and kettle pools (some dry) are scattered along the hypothetical front of the glacial sheet and might well have been produced by the forward march and retreat of the flood of ice. Futhermore, an ice sheet that moved down into North America all across the continent blocked all northward flowing rivers; it created many lakes, some extinct like Lake Agassiz, others extant like the Great Lakes. The ice sheet forced a southward fanning out of many rivers, away from the ice front, to carry the melt waters. Once again, much, if not all, of the work assigned to ice could have been performed by winds, tides, exoterrestrial fall-outs of pebbles, dust and ice, extreme precipitation, and axial tilts of the globe. I have not mentioned climatic changes: a very cold climate, as evidenced by the kinds of fossil flora and fauna discovered in old beds, indicates that a great deal of ice might have been nearby. Nor have I ventured to say when the ice ages happened and how many of them there might have been. Full justice cannot be done here to the case for the ice ages. The conventional literature does so. But because some of the ice age reasoning falls victim readily to catastrophic claims, it may be time to advance the cause of quantavolution. Here three different positions are held: one is that the Ice Ages did not occur. The second says that they did exist but were sudden events, beginning and ending in disaster. A third admits their slow development but claims that they ended in catastrophe. Ignatius Donnelly is the best older critic of the very idea of ice ages. (Douglas Cox has recently presented strong persistent objections to the reality of the ice ages.) [3] In Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, Donnelly asserts first of all that there is no evidence of the ice ages in the cold Siberian wastelands and parts of Alaska that stretch up to the present Arctic ice. This is true enough. But, most catastrophists believe that a sudden tilt of the Earth occurred in the last ice age and hence these areas had not been so cold before then. However, Donnelly proceeds. He argues that the debris of the called ice age -the pebble fields, erratic stones, and vast clay and till deposits -are not caused by the movements of ice at all. Rather they are the stuff of which the long tail of a comet is in part composed and it was a comet that devastated the earth in the early memory of mankind. Little was known of comets and comet tails in his days. Until the past few years, scientists generally doubted that such substantial material was being transported around the heavens. Indeed, Velikovsky came in for much ridicule when he wrote in the nineteen fifties, in much greater detail and with stronger evidence, of the substantiality of comets. (He did not adopt Donnelly's anti-theory of the ice ages, however.) Today the immense material potentiality of comets is scarcely doubted. Ice and gases, and otherwise terrestrial minerals found in meteoroids, are now accorded comets. Yet Donnelly's theory has not been seriously criticized; we forget that geology once got along without the ice ages, and that the inventor of the ice age theory, Louis Agassiz, was a catastrophist. The immense drift and till deposits could have come from exoterrestrial sources. Although the analogies between glacial behavior and ice sheet behavior are numerous and strong, it is possible that the ice did not exist and that the dead glacial moraines are merely evidences of a cold climatic episode or episodes, not direct proof that they were related to a larger ice age sheet that blanketed millions of square miles to a depth of a kilometer and more. Moreover, since the poles are flattened a bit from the spin of the Earth, would not the old polar areas of a perhaps faster spinning Earth be still relaxing into a spherical form? This would give a false impression of heavy ice caps having been removed. Further the weight of the Wisconsin ice cap would have been 3.10 23 grams and 10 33 ergs of heat would have been required to melt it. The melting would have taken at least 30,000 years, yet there is near to a consensus even among uniformitarian geologists that the ice cap disappeared rapidly, catastrophically. And the arctic land rising, mentioned earlier, appears to have begun only 10,000 years ago. Why I do not accept Donnelly's theory despite its brilliance has to do with the correlative evidence going far off the straightforward discussion of ice ages. Some of the reasoning emerges when the theory of Melvin Cook is explained. Cook writing in the nineteen sixties, accepts the evidence for huge ice caps at both poles. Further he seeks no exoterrestrial power. His theory is nonetheless the most perfect of catastrophic models yet advanced. Ignoring the beginnings of the ice ages, but pursuing their end, his story commences with the great ice caps. These, he says, by their enormous and accumulating weight, bore down upon the crust so heavily as finally to cause a rupture of the rim of the crater. The ice caps avalanched. They scraped the earth as they moved. They acted as gigantic bulldozers that caused mountain ranges to be thrust forward and buckled and folded upwards. Giant floods from the rapid melts swept the earth. The globe fractured and caused the continents to spread apart rapidly. The Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean were opened up. In the end the surface of the earth was greatly changed. A great many land and life forms, together with cultural centers, were destroyed in the process. As the huge ice blocks descended, they turned over the biosphere and folded it to create coal and oil deposits in a geological "instant." Waters that were buried deeply are still rising under pressure. Yet the end came quickly, occupying a few years, not millions of years. The legends are definite but seemingly too rich. The northern peoples talk of terrible ice falls and winters, far beyond historical experience, and perhaps long before history as we gauge it. In Old Norse, the language of the Edda epics, snow is called eitr-ornir, "white pus of the dragon." Martin Sieff writes: "Saturn is the solar system's 'treasury of snow'... The Greeks associated the planet Saturn (Kronos) with snow and hail, which were thought to be the planet-god's weapons; Nonnos told of the "shining victory of Zeus at war and the hailstorm-snowstorm conflict of Kronos..." [4] Could the ice have fallen from the skies? Examination of glaciers shows that there is a gradation of consistency, from fresh fallen snow to dense ice, the dense ice being older. No question but that, if snows fell heavily they would promptly turn into ice. Further, the greater the falls, the swifter the glaciers would move and the longer and greater their moraines. Moreover, why should the ice ages occur in extremely distant as well as recent ages; how do they come and go in stages, and concentrate most recently in a million years of the recent Pleistocene epoch (which is the typical allotted time)? The Sun is invoked. Whereas, on the one hand, the Sun is credited with great stability, on the other hand it is presumed to have stoked its furnaces from time to time, causing the ice to form. But back again. If the Sun cools, the equator cools; if the equator cools, waters evaporate more slowly; there is less to be carried north and to drop in the form of snow. Continental drift has been argued as the cause of ice ages: "The ultimate cause of glaciation is thus seen to be movement of continents into appropriate latitudes... And much of the fossil evidence upon which the time-honored concept of Tertiary 'cooling' has been founded could be nothing more than a reflection of drifting of what are now the northern-hemisphere land masses and ocean floors toward the pole and hence into cooler climes." [5] Another theory holds that a huge number of tropical volcanos erupted at once, which threw vast amounts of water into the air, which, because the upper atmosphere was darkened, caused less sunlight to bombard and warm the Earth, which finally caused the vapors to fall at the poles in the form of snow and ice [6] . Also, Hibbin attests to many burials of pleistocene animals in ashes that fell after the ice ages [7] . It should be borne in mind, however, that extensive simultaneous volcanism, as well as the ice ages, points to exoterrestrial forces impinging on Earth. The solution must be catastrophic, it appears, but must take a special form, which elsewhere we have called Solaria Binaria. If it is consolation to the reader, explanations of "the ice ages" have generally been bizarre and fantastic. Nothing less may be expected of our theory here, unless, of course, the reader is conversant ahead of time with our work. It is not unreasonable, we argue, to postulate a primordial age, as recent as 14,000 years ago, when no ice caps existed. The Earth would have been generally comfortable. It would be also enveloped in the gaseous atmosphere of the binary magnetic tube. This Uranian heaven blocked direct sunlight, but afforded an equable climate to the Earth. The binary tube atmosphere would itself have been maintained by the same electrical and inertial forces that kept the Earth in rotation and orbit. Then the solar system as a whole was disturbed by the failure of one of its parts. The part that failed was the counter-solar or Super-Uranian node of the binary solar system. When the electrical current between the Sun and Super-Uranus diminished, the magnetic field around the current diminished. All the bodies that circled around the current ceased orbiting around the axis between Super-Uranus and the Sun and descended radially to the plane of the ecliptic. They began to find new individual orbital paths around the Sun. They moved out towards larger orbits. The atmosphere, a remnant, specially attached to the Earth, of the old plenum atmosphere, drew more closely about the Earth. "Heaven came down to embrace Earth," to paraphrase the Greek myth. The clouds were pierced by material erupted from the disintegrating Super-Uranus and blown down the magnetic tube between the binary partners. Some of it precipitated upon the surface of the Earth. The Earth could not melt much of the ice, most of which fell at the electrically least-guarded poles. The now direct sunlight helped the friction of the fall to vaporize and precipitate some of the ice as rain. Flooding began at the edges of the forming ice caps. The time postulated for these events began about 14,000 years ago. Within a few centuries the threat to life on Earth became extreme. Great ice blocks covered the extremities and local regions of the globe and threatened ultimately to make contact, erasing practically all life.. At the same time flooding spread throughout the world. If one-third of the globe was covered by ice at the time of maximum advance, according to conventional theory, ice was piled three miles deep at the poles; there was twelve million cubic miles of ice. For a hundred years catastrophists and disbelievers in the ice ages have pointed out that an incredible power (heat and winds) was required to evaporate equatorial water, lift it, and transport it to the polar areas. The world would have burned up at the equator while freezing deeply at the poles. The idea supplies its own contradiction; yet it is the accepted theory, that molecule by molecule the water evaporated, drop by drop it condensed in vapor clouds, ton by ton it fell - all off and on for a million years and more. Then the mechanism was turned off, rather suddenly; much of the ice melted and the oceans rose by several hundred feet several thousand years ago. Direct exoterrestrial deposition of snow to form the caps follows from the heat requirements to evaporate, lift, transport and condense as snow the contents of the ice caps. The surface heat requirements might have stressed the biosphere life tolerances. Further, in order to raise the required mass of water, the clouds transporting water from tropical to arctic regions would become so dense that heat from the Sun of today would cease to penetrate to the surface with sufficient energy to continue the lifting task. The latent heat of aqueous vapor at the tropics is 1000 F. A pound of water vaporized at the Equator has absorbed 1000 times the quantity of heat that would raise a pound of water in temperature by one degree Fahrenheit. An exoterrestrial catastrophic solution is called for, from beginning to end. The time to erupt the Moon arrived with a passing great fragment of Super-Uranus. The Earth's crust burst. Lava had to flow in endless streams. Great volumes of sky-borne ice must have fallen and participated in the bursting mechanics. Cook has figured the needed forces, but we should add an initial impetus from the eruption and blow-off of the Pacific crust. A fracture shot to the old north pole and down the Atlantic, thence around the world. The ice avalanched. It fed the boiling sea bottoms to help them settle and expand. Much was then evaporated and precipitated again by the conventional method, but under catastrophic conditions. Finally the new world surface shaped up and stabilized. The precipitous curve of disaster dropped exponentially to the slight level of activity where it could be mistaken for a linear uniformitarianism. It was thus that the worst and best accident happened. The earth cleaved, lost most of its continental crust, and the ocean basins began to form. This greatest of all catastrophes removed the ice and permitted life to survive; it became the greatest of all blessings. A date of 11,500 B. P. may be ascribed to the event. The ice caps, as Cook has so well calculated the scene, collapsed and avalanched upon all sides, moving into the great chasms of boiling lava directly or through floods that rushed over the land and plunged down into the new oceanic chasms, carrying debris to form slopes. Hundreds of deep canyons were grooved into the land and slopes around the world, where they remain today, "fossils" from the time of ice age collapse and of the filling of the ocean basins. The ice caves were formed -solid ice from the ice ages sandwiched in between layers of once boiling lava flows, still intact, though hollowed out somewhat, now refrigerating food and supplying age-old spring waters [8] . Geologists have counted and recounted the number of ice ages and of interstadials, the periods between stages. John Gribben, in a recent work on Forecasts, Famines and Freezes, counts ten ice ages, of which one lasted only for a century or less. Paying no attention in their "petrofabric analyses" to our impression that fossil "glacial and stream deposits" could just as well come from comet-tail or meteoritic splashing, geologists saw breaks of climate in the interruptions of moraines, where now a swelling and then a shrinking may appear. In the soil found squeezed between strata of glacial debris, there is also the suggestion of successive ice ages. Even the Arctic Ocean is said to have been free of ice in Pliocene and Pleistocene times, on the basis of calcareous nanno-fossil deposits below the present ice [9] . And another study, of the Labrador shelf area, based on fossilized sediment cores, argues for an ice-free sea extending back 21,000 years from the present [10] . Over a mile deep in the Greenland ice field around Dye 3 radar station, Greenland, ice cores are being drilled, extracted and analyzed [11] . From its rock base upwards, the ice is expected to afford 100,000 years of Earth history and the beginning of at least the local ice age (cf other estimates of 1 to 3 million years and our own of 14,000 years). Oxygen ratios in sampled slices of the drilled ice are calculated to determine climatic trends and time scales. The units are "annual" ice varves. As depths increase, the distinctions blur. Dust ratios are used as indicators of heavy volcanic events in the world. The stratification challenges any quantavolutionary attempt, as here, to explain the ice accumulation as a brief episode. Obviously the ice under examination did not fall as blocks, at least not most of it, or, if it did so fall in the region, the blocks splattered and connected up or flowed afterwards under weight, internal pressure and heat, picking up atmospheric exposure and dust. Heavy snowfalls, whirled about by heavy winds, would, however, establish the great depth in short order, in dozens or several thousands of years, with present snowfall adding steadily to the basic conserved precipitation. It is noted that at an estimated 10,000 years, the "ice age" deposits of tiny crystals end and the large ice crystals of the present era begin. For those who are disturbed by only 100,000 years for the Greenland ice cap, because of ice age theories of a million years, there is the consolation that the ice beneath relentlessly squeezes out to form icebergs that search out more southern climes. Interpretations that seek a long drawn-out succession of uniform deposits may be an illusion of sorts. The evidence rather may indicate the erratic character of the ice falls, both in intensity and distribution over the Earth's surface. It may also indicate a wobbling of the axis of the Earth as its electrical fields changed and its motions within the solar system altered. Whether the globe changed geographical axis once, with such gradualness that it scarcely wobbled, or whether it changed once quickly and wobbled several times before settling down in its new position, or whether the geographical axis changed several times in several hundreds or thousands of years, an illusion of several ice ages and subdivisions thereof might be fostered. Faced with the problem of explaining the chalk cliffs of Etretat (France) across from Dover, which are laminated, French geologists have tried to establish a correlation between the laminations and the oscillations of the axis of the Earth. The oscillations occur some 23,000 to 41,000 years apart, the sedimentary layers are individually accorded 20,000 to 40,000 years. Voila, as the Earth rocks, the sea level and the biological activity of the sea rise and fall, as evidenced in the layers. "But how explain that such feeble orbital variations should be capable of engendering such important changes? The problem," wrote a group of French editors led by Serge Berg, "is far from being clarified." Surely so; however, not only chalk sediments but also ice layers could be deposited in a short time if the wobblings of the axis were greater and more frequent, as is demanded in quantavolutionary theory. Strata of all kinds can be laid down quickly, including strata that reflect and measure falling snow and ice. Furthermore, as we have pointed out, unfossilized till deposits, possibly themselves exoterrestrial, are used to denote recent and ancient ice ages. ".... The Huronian super-group in the south of the Canadian Shield presents this evidence most unambiguously. Three tillite levels are reported from that region .... corresponding to three glacial periods separated by epochs of warm or even hot climatic regimes which lasted some tens of millions of years." [12] So, too, around the world, on every continent (whence geologists have deduced shifting sidereal poles); thus "two principal tillites are dated isotopically at 870-820 MY and at about 680 MY." These statements, by a pronounced quantavolutionist, L. J. Salop, evidence the overall grip of conventional scientific theory on the scientific mind, for it would be only consistent of Salop to query the origin of the tillites and then the conventional view of many ancient and modern ice ages. The correlation of tillites with ice ages is deceptive of time and causation. Why not repeated switches of a comet tail? A late report, in the newsletter of Science and Technology (54: 2, 1982), describes an area of the Huqf Desert of Oman where tillites on striated bedrock -taken as glaciation -seem to be associated with oil reservoirs, and the complex is pronounced Early Permian (-158 my), when coal is supposed to have formed as well from tropical vegetation. We see no contradiction in ice striking hot tropics, provided the ice comes from the skies, and provided that along with the ice one brings down stony till to gust along, scratching the rocks. Here, however, one may dispense with the glaciation, which is predicated upon the till; ice may or may not have fallen. One may also tie in the oil deposits with the exoterrestrial source of the till, a comet. One may, moreover, hold in abeyance the dates assigned to the events; the time may have been only thousands of years ago. The ice ages, then, may be a product not of a million or more years, but of several thousand years, from 14,000 B. P. to about 9000 B. P. At this latter time, there began a settled and milder age, with a subdued binary, an equable climate under still cloudy skies and two suns, the Sun and Saturn. This would be the renowned Golden Age of Saturn, of which so many legends speak, an age following the revolt that dethroned the god Uranus, the age before another great catastrophe, when the gods warred again and Jupiter removed his father, Saturn. There occurred huge inundations, brighter skies, and the present ice caps developed, shaped around the present geographical poles. The Antarctic cap is largely contained on a land mass with an ice flow over its boundaries and into the sea. The Arctic Sea was almost entirely a swamped continent, despite the rifts through it, and received its ice directly upon this land in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter. The extreme conditions of Earth fracture and ice avalanching encountered in the critical period beginning at 11,500 B. P. would have destroyed all ice. Evidences of mild climate and an abundant biosphere are present in both polar areas, some of this presumably from the Saturnian interlude, most from pre-lunar times. Thus far, no human vestiges have been discovered where once the Uranian ice cap lay. The turbulent moving ice would have erased all such evidence down to a considerable depth of rock, even in the absence of land thrusts, flood, wind and fire. Certainly humans retreated to warmer climates in the face of the icy tempests. Still, primates, proto- humans and homo sapiens lived among the animals whose remains have been found under ice and permafrost. Whether a long-term date (like two million years) or a short-term date such as I suggest here is adopted, these species existed before the ice and they may one day provide new fossil discoveries. There is an old map, called the Piri Reis map, that shows perhaps the coastline of the Antarctic continent as it would have appeared in the interim between the settling down from the great ice cap collapse and crustal shifts of Lunaria and the new ice caps of Jovea that remain today. That would be during the "Golden Age" of Saturn. The Piri Reis map is the subject of a book by Charles Hapgood, who also provided a singular theory of ice cap avalanche with a mechanism different than Cook's. (Einstein thought Hapgood's idea that the ice cap would have shoved the continental crust on a wedge principle to be mechanically acceptable [13] .) I incline to the view that the map, which was drawn up from various old sources a few years after Columbus anchored off Santo Domingo, plots the shores of Antarctica well because, during the Saturnian period, a mild cloudy climate prevailed, the southern oceans and shores were free of ice, and navigation was well developed. Probably human settlements then existed in Antarctica as they did in many places in the far north that are now encased in ice or permafrosted. We speculate that the "ice ages" did happen, first in Uranian, then in Jovian times. Much of the Earth was frozen. The ice was mainly exoterrestrial. Vsekhsviatskii writes of Saturn that "observation of its rings over the past 300 years have shown that during this time the middle line has moved 0.17 of its original distance closer to the surface of the planet. Therefore, one may suppose that in a matter of some 1800 years a large part of the material in Ring B will fall onto the surface." [14] We are here back to visualizing Vail's canopy drops, from primeval sources, or as a way-station. But a Saturnian explosion, not a falling of Saturn's rings, deluged the Earth with ice. Saturn's rings today may be fall-back debris of the same incident, still falling back. The ice came down with falls of gravel and tillites. The great Ice Age extended from about 14,000 to 11,500 B. P. During this time the Earth was wobbling, the atmosphere turbulent and the deposits of ice were eccentric. Life would have been exterminated by the spread of ice and flooding if the greatest of all catastrophes had not cleaved the Earth and formed the ocean basins. Then ice and waters avalanched or fell into the basins as these grew in size, filling them ultimately over their brims. The present ice age began in proto-historical times. Saturn's explosion drenched Earth with water and ice and the terrestrial axis tilted as a result of the explosive force. The age of "Jupiter of the Bright Skies," as the Greeks significantly denominated him, began; the skies were clearer and the climate colder because of the tilt; the high canopy was almost quite gone leaving merely the present upper atmospheric levels and magnetosphere of Earth. Ice began to gather around the northern and southern poles, drifting over the cultures of the age of Saturn [15] . {S : Notes (Chapter Fifteen: Ice Fields of the Earth)} Notes (Chapter Fifteen: Ice Fields of the Earth) 1. 189 Science (1975) 1083; 193 Science (1976), 1268-71. 2. Ice Ages (Short Hills, N. J.: Enslow, 1979); cf. Ian Cornwall, Ice Ages (NY: Humanities Press, 1970); Bj÷rn KurtÚn, The Ice Age (NY: Putnam, 1972); Clifford Embleton, Glacial Geomorphology (NY: Wiley, 1975); Salop, op. cit. introduces cosmic disturbance as causes of glaciation, too, as does Pattern, op. cit. 3. 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1976), 25-34. 4. S. I. S. Workshop (Mar, 1978), 4. 5. C. B. Beaty, "The Causes of Glaciation," 66 Amer. Sci. 4( July 1978), 452-9, 458. 6. J. R. Bray, "Volcanism and Glaciation During the Past 40 Millennia," 252 Nature (20 Dec. 1974), 679-80. 7. The Lost Americans, 163. 8. Patten, op. cit., 120-4. 9. T. R. Worsley and Yvonne Herman, 210 Science (17 Oct. 1980), 323-5. 10. G. Vilks and Peta J. Mudie, 202 Science (15 Dec. 1978), 1181-3. 11. See Walter Sullivan, N Y Times, Aug. 9, 1981, 1, 24. 12. Salop, op. cit., 23 ff. 13. The Path of The Pole (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1970). 14. "Physical Characteristics of Comets," (Moscow, 1958), NASA-TTF-80. 15. Flavio Barbiero, Una Civiltß sotto Ghiaccio (Milan: Nord, 1974). 16. 178 Science (13 oct. 1972), 190-1. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART IV: } {Q CRUSTAL TURBULENCE: } {C Chapter 16} {T Earthquakes} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part IV: Crustal Turbulence by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIXTEEN EARTHQUAKES The ancients may have been more familiar with earthquakes than modern man: ... The earth shook and trembled... the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken... Then the channels of the waters were seen... and the foundations of the world were discovered.,. The mountains skipped like rams... [The divine power] removes the mountains... overturns them... shakes the earth out of her place. In these and many more lines, the Hebrew Psalmists commemorated times of catastrophe. World myth contains thousands of such songs and stories. Some can be located in time; most cannot. But, little by little, the science of myth will move to help the science of the Earth; and geology will move to interpret mythology. Then the ages of quantavolution will assume a clearer shape. The deep valleys, rifts, and canyons of the globe will soon here be assigned to the greatest of movements. The Earth cleaved; the continents broke up and were rafted into place. At the same time and on later occasions, many places on Earth sank into the depths. These might all be called earthquakes, although they are global events. A great but conventional earthquake would be described as in the following testimony of a resident about the New Madrid, Mo., earthquakes: The first shock came at 2. a. m., December 16, 1811, and was so severe that big houses and chimneys were shaken down, and at half-hour intervals light shocks were felt until 7 a. m., when a rumbling like distant thunder was heard, and in about an instant the earth began to totter and shake so that persons could neither stand nor walk. The earth was observed to roll in waves a few feet high, with visible depressions between. By and by these swells burst, throwing up large volumes of water, sand, and coal. Some was partly coated with what seemed to be sulphur. When the swells burst, fissures were left running in a northern and southern direction, and parallel for miles. Some were 5 miles long, 4 1/ 2 feet deep, and 10 feet wide. The rumbling appeared to come from the west and travel east. Similar shocks were heard at intervals until January 7, 1812, when another shock came as severe as the first. Then all except two families left, leaving behind them all their property, which proved to be a total loss, as adventurers came and carried off their goods in flat boats to Natchez and New Orleans, as well as their stock which they could not slaughter. On February 17, there occurred another severe shock, having the same effect as the others, and forming fissures and lakes. As the fissures varied in size, the water, coal, and sand were thrown out to different heights of from 5 to 10 feet. Besides long and narrow fissures, there were others of an oval or circular form, making long and deep basins some 100 yards wide, and deep enough to retain water in dry seasons. The damaged and uptorn country embraced an area of 150 miles in circumference [1] . Earthquakes are most simply thought of as movements of large bodies of rock, whether of a few tons or of the whole Earth. The rocks flow, flex or fracture. There may be two sets of rocks that split and separated in times past, or which do so now: one moves up and another down; or one slips alongside the other. Or one or both sets move apart or one or both press together. Or one crawls over the other. Earthquakes may combine these movements, so that one, or two, or all may happen at once. The duration of the movement may be of seconds, or minutes. There may be a single shaking or a series going on for days, and again repeated months later. (The ancients cried to heaven over interminable tremblings, as when the Egyptians suffered them during the days of the Hebrew Exodus.) Electrical fields gather and play about the scene, beforehand, during, and afterwards. The world may seem to be glowing with fire in the distance. The ground sends up thunder and groans. It screams. It makes rattles like volleys of gunfire. Winds spring up and blow hard. Waters are agitated; tidal waves sweep over the land; wellwaters sink; rivers stop flowing or change their channels. Animals often sense an earthquake in advance and show distress. Birds fly far, mammals run off, lizards crawl out and away. People are of course terrified by the trembling, they pray, they condemn their sins and those of other, they swear to reform, and curse their government; they help each other or stand stupefied or behave like zombies [2] . When the rocks move, man's world shakes and shatters. Any force that disturbs the rocks causes the earth to quake. Pumping radioactive wastes deep below ground caused earthquake tremors in Colorado a few years ago. A dynamite explosion or a small meteoroid impact will cause one. Frequently earthquakes are associated with volcanos. A map of the earthquake belts of the Earth is practically a map of the areas of volcanism. The same forces must cause both. The primary force could be an old one, unsettled, that is still working upon the rocks. Or it could be a new force. But perhaps the old and the new force are identical: the new occurs now for the first time; the old is what occurred some time ago. Is not the earth very old? Should it not have settled down? Should not the rocks be stable? If so, then force from nowhere is impossible. Most of what is known empirically of the globe comes from earthquakes -earthquake shock waves to be more precise. Hence, it is difficult to talk about how the interior of the globe causes earthquakes, if indeed it does. Seismic waves can be made to register their occurrence and intensity on seismographs set up to record and calibrate them. Many thousands of earthquakes, mostly non-damaging, are thus registered around the world each year. They shake the housing of a heavy pendulum which, itself unmoved, marks the shaking on a graph; a reading of the graph indicates the magnitude of intensity on the Richter scale. The patterns of seismism around the world in recent history are easily described now. One simply follows the Tethyan world belt, the world-girdling fracture (noting a greater intensity where it passes beneath the land), and the island arcs off of East Asia. Cases such as the New Madrid phenomenon mentioned above are less effected, although a Mississippi Valley "earthquake region" has recently been described. Applying the quantavolutionary ideas, one may point to recent "Ice Age" shifts of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, which certainly denote earthquakes, and to the great load of detritus that the lower Mississippi basin must be bearing: "Atlas Shrugs." For, in a brief period, a large part of the North American continent surface rushed toward the Gulf of Mexico in a slurry of ice, water, stone, vegetation, and soil. If enough freshwater entered the gulf to freshen it, as Emiliani found, enough debris would accompany the flood to burden the region and deform and fracture its rocks. In a second indicative, a severe earthquake struck north of the Adriatic Sea in the Friuli region of Italy. Shocks were felt simultaneously in the Upper Rhine Valley just northwest of the Alps. We conjecture that a branch of the African rift crosses the Mediterranean, runs up the Adriatic Sea, and emerges from beneath the Alps (which have overrun it) as the Rhine River Valley, emptying its waters into the North Sea. All of this is quite recent. The Rhine canyon cuts far out into the bottom of the North Sea, revealing its very late sub-aerial existence. Dutch geologist Doeko Goosen claims that the Netherlands suffered earthquakes more frequently in earlier times [2A]. The Fourteenth Century saw the erasure of many areas and villages. The Alps, of course, make up a heavy load upon the underlying rifted area of the crust. The greatest known earthquake was registered variously between 8.25 and 8.9, in Chile on May 22, 1960. On the Richter scale, each higher unit stands for a ten-fold increase in wave amplitude, and this represents a .32-fold leap in radiated seismic energy. The numbers move arithmetically from 0 to 8.9 but the magnitude increases exponentially; for example, an earthquake of 8.0 is 10,000 times greater than an earthquake of 4.0 and the energy release much greater. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake might have reached 8.3 on the Richter seismograph scale, which registers the intensity of vibrations alone. Its equivalent in the more descriptive Mercalli scale would be 11 (out of a possible 12). The present top of the Mercalli scale reads: "Damage total. Waves seen on ground surfaces. Lines of sight and level distorted. Objects thrown upward in the air." In the Assam earthquakes of 1950 "rivers were dammed; major floods drowned the countryside; mountains and hills split open and square miles of their surface covering were stripped off; rain came down as mud owing to the dust-choked air; and the geography of the region was permanently changed." [3] . It was recorded at 8.6; it is obvious that the measuring scale is a crude indicator of real events. There may very well have been in recent times earthquakes of great force that do not register beyond the recorded limits of the seismographs, as conjectured by Chinnery and North [4] . Actually what is today meant by earthquakes is an earth movement defined by modern experience and measured by instruments calibrated to this experience. Because of the rareness with which earthquakes of magnitude over 8.0 on the Richter scale have occurred in the brief 75-year record of various measurements, "many investigators have concluded from this result that earthquakes... greater than 8.6 or so do not occur..." However, as it is likely that earthquakes of this intensity occur on the average once a decade, it is also probable that ones of greater intensity (with a seismic moment of 10 31 dyne-cm or more as compared with the Chile 1960 earthquake of 2.5 X 10 30 dyne-cm) can occur and may even be expected over a fifty or hundred-year period. If larger earthquakes occur they might cause destruction far greater than hitherto experienced and "may cause a considerable excitation of the Chandler wobble," a veritable, if slight, shaking of the axis of the Earth. Most earthquakes have a localized shallow focus and originate within the crust, at or above the Moho discontinuity which may be regarded in quantavolutionary theory as the boundary of the Earth's shell and as the line of catastrophic slippage of the crust on several past occasions; but the Moho boundary itself was born of quantavolution, we maintain. It is both conventional finding, and quantavolutionary theory, "that some overall global factor, rather than conditions localized in the hypocenters themselves, is responsible for. generating terrestrial seismicity." [5] The source of an earthquake varies. The seismograph stations of the world draw a fix upon a certain point that appears to be the focus of the earthquake, its epicenter within the Earth. The mantle of the Earth is a hot dense liquid. It does not lend itself to earthquake manufacture by simple mechanical thrusts and fractures. Are there substances in the mantle that are escaping and causing disturbances in the overhanging rock or crust of the continental and oceanic bottoms? "Yes," says the up-to-date scientist. Chemical elements are decaying in the mantle and crust. They escape upwards and set up convection currents. These currents actually amount to so much force that, like the rising heat of a boiling soup, they can move the surface of the soup off to the side and down. But the forces of convection required to move ocean bottoms and continents is tremendous and many persons, including this author, believe that they cannot be assembled [6] . Earthquakes and earth movements are basically mechanical, and do not result from chemical or nuclear forces, as Cook has shown. Still, the theory is fetching. For if one examines again the map of the rifts, earthquake zones, and volcanic regions of the world, one can see that there is an order or pattern to them all. They cut up the globe, and the pieces can be called plates. Some of the plates can be measured as moving very slightly; and it can be seen that lands that are now far apart fit together as if they once were of one piece. Since no other force can be imagined by our up-to-date scientist, the convection current force, upwelling and moving out laterally beneath the rocks, must account for rifts, seismism, and volcanos. But this accepted theory, it develops, may be incorrect, and we shall return to the issue of convection currents in a later chapter on continental drift. An ominous kind of movement has always been the "conjunction," when two or more celestial bodies line up, especially the Sun and planets with the Earth. Earlier we mentioned the Gribbin-Plagemann phrase, the "Jupiter Effect." [7] . They chose to plot their scenario along the 600 mile-long San Andreas fault, part of the East Pacific Ridge system actually. Hence, the San Francisco Bay Area and many other thickly settled communities found themselves wondering when the "Jupiter Effect" will occur. "1982" or thereabouts, said the writers. At this time, which is passing as this book goes to press, Jupiter and Saturn were to line up with the Sun, Moon, and Earth and exert an electrical gravitational tidal force upon the Earth sufficient to upset the delicate juxtaposition of rock surfaces along the San Andreas fault. The Moon is small, and 239,000 miles away on the average. Yet it affects the waters of the world with its tidal pull, daily and twice a month or every 14.8 days. The same writers go a certain distance into history, where a few records are to be found, and are able to discover devastation by earthquake close to the time of past conjunctions, specifically in 1800-03. The timing is a bit off, the disaster by no means a catastrophe, but the evidence points to the "Jupiter Effect" as the culprit. In a close encounter with a large celestial body, the earthquakes would be immeasurably worse. Before Gribbin and Plagemann, Charles Davison examined the same celestial motions to relate them to earthquakes. He found increases in seismism at full moon, 14.8 days, and 19 years and also found a sunspot period every eleven years: when the spots were particularly active, rains and earthquakes increased. Davison's periodicities may thus be added to the planetary "Jupiter Effect." They show how sensitive are the shell and rock layers of the earth, in their fractured condition, to impulses from the outside. They are clearly tidal, i. e. cyclical. Davison also discovered that atmospheric pressure could be correlated with earthquakes. Here there were two cycles: a daily one and an annual cycle. Midwinter midnight and midsummer noontime were seismic favorites. Perhaps the atmospheric phenomenon may be connected with the vast diffuse sky lights that occur before earthquakes, arising probably out of a discharge of electricity. If changes of atmospheric pressure trigger quakes because they represent a "true dead weight" of the atmosphere above a certain shifting point of focus, then this too is a tidal effect. If it is itself produced by electrical changes, then the direct cause must be assigned to whatever assembles atmospheric potentials. Sunspots have been increasingly blamed for climate and earthquakes. Recently a 70-year gap in the sunspot record between 1645 and 1715 A. D. was rediscovered and called the "Maunder minimum." [8] It was a time when the Northern Lights hardly appeared; when the Sun's corona was relaxed and clear of disturbances; when C14 was increased because solar particles were not blocking in their usual way the cosmic particles that cause the C14 in the atmosphere; when tree rings became irregular and thin; and when the climate was called a "Little Ice Age." John Eddy, in announcing some of these findings, declared, "We've finally broken a block that held us back - uniformitarianism. It was an assumption we took as fact." And "We've shattered the Principle of Uniformitarianism for the sun." As yet a negative correlation with earthquakes has not been plotted; earthquakes should have declined in number and intensity. The possibility also arises that some earthquakes are responses to increases in the amount of ice contained in the polar caps. This may be true today and also of any prehistoric ice-caps. Cook and A. Brown develop this line of thought [9] . Cook points to a correspondence between total annual seismic energy and a seeming accumulated energy in the growing ice of the caps. The huge vertical and radial pressures exerted on the earth's rocks by the caps may be taken up by the elasticity of the shell, or, on the other hand, and at least occasionally, the pressures may be alleviated by a shearing or refracturing of rocks even quite far away from the perimeter of the ice. We stated above that seismic origins are in global overall forces rather than in local areas of earthquakes themselves. However, quantavolutionary theory leads us to suspect that, not the present ice caps, but rather the effects of the great catastrophic periods are still felt. Earthquakes are seismic memorials to ancient disorders. The rocks of the Earth will not rest in place until their very gradual tailing-off consequences end. The major source of present-day earthquakes is to be sought along the lines of the global fracture. The fractures will be discussed later on; here they must be mentioned because of their connection with earthquakes. Taking up first the north-south Atlantic rift and following it from the Arctic to the Antarctic, one observes intense seismism throughout its length but largely in the middle of the Atlantic and little on both sides of the Atlantic Basin. The fracture, like an almost healed wound, throbs, festers and drips a little, pushing the continents left and right almost unnoticeably. Perhaps the rocks of the Atlantic Basin are lagging or stretching behind the Pacific rocks, which are being pushed into the basin of the lunar genesis. No theory is yet adequate to explain the difference in intensity and frequency between the Atlantic and Pacific seismism. Wherever the fracture moves -into the Indian Ocean, across Asia, and laterally across the Southern Pacific and up the East Pacific, it bears with it seismic strains that develop as earthquakes of shallow focus. Quakes of deeper focus take place along a belt that circles the Pacific area of erupted crust, from New Zealand north and east up to Siberia, across the north Pacific and down the west coast of the Americas all the way to Antarctica. It is famous as "the Ring of Fire." A second belt of shallow and deep focus earthquakes pursues a route along the old Tethyan equatorial region. It begins in mid-Atlantic, pushes through the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East, shifts to follow the Himalayans where these break upon the Asian heartland, and swings down and across the south Asian seas. Here, where it overlaps the "Ring of Fire," it is intensively active. But the Tethyan belt does not appear to cross the Pacific basin. It would, of course, have been erased if the Moon had erupted from the region. There thousands of seamounts stretch up from the ocean bottom, and long transverse faults occur. Rather, it resumes off of Central America where, indeed, there is a meeting of all four great earthquake belts -the globe-girdling rift, the Pacific "Ring of Fire," the westwardly moved Americas, and the old Tethyan belt. Afterwards it proceeds into the Caribbean which may have been once coupled with the Mediterranean. It ends with the outlying islands some hundreds of miles south of its connecting link, from which I began here to trace its around-the-world movement. Geographers have matched Spain with the West Caribbean region; it is to be expected therefore that the Tethyan fracture of the south would tie into a transverse fracture to the north, thus circumnavigating the globe. Earthquakes are seismic memorials, it was said. Today there are precipitators, but not important new causes, of seismism. The old causes that regularly occur are themselves significant reminders of a time when the heavenly bodies were much more active. Just as most religious holidays around the world celebrate or re-enact the terror of primeval catastrophe and the relief of survival, the rocks of the world move from time to time in reenactment of their ancient catastrophic motions, prodded by the ancient forces when these are stimulated by recurrent anniversaries. But some still say that earthquakes go back in time without an increase in frequency or intensity. N. N. Ambraseys, a seismological engineer of the London Imperial College, concluded, after prolonged study of Near East documents, that the 3000 large and small earthquakes of which he found evidence in the period 1 to 1900 A. D. did not in this period show a decline of frequency and intensity . His evidence is piecemeal, localized, undefined in regard to intensity, and barely usable. Only if there were enormously worse earthquakes early or late in the period could a conclusion be drawn. By the first century A. D. the world was already seven hundred years past the last general catastrophe, as described elsewhere [13] , and the skies had been tranquillized. Still, in the several hundred years before Christ, many accounts of severe seismism were handed down. The Spartans, most doughty of warriors, were so deadly afraid of earthquakes that if the land shook in the middle of a war, they would quit and retreat home; this kind of terror suggests a legendary experience recent to their times [14] . Ellen Churchill Semple, writing of ancient Mediterranean geography, admits the profuse claims of risings, sinkings, chasms, and upheavals both in legends and in the scientific accounts of such illustrious reporters as Aristotle and Strabo. Not to mention Seneca, who declared that "Tyre is as regularly shaken by earthquakes as it is washed by the waves..." But she simply puts them down as exaggerations and furthermore "they erred as to the time element in the problem," for they did not employ the million or so years that she gave to the geological order of the Mediterranean. (We see, though, that her Mediterranean is only Quaternary!) Yet who can deny Pliny, the natural historian, when he claims 57 earthquakes to have occurred in a single year at Rome in 217 B. C. [15] ? As we move back in time, the earthquakes increase in severity. Velikovsky points out that in the eighth and seventh centuries earthquakes were so numerous that when they occurred they were mentioned in a bare line of the astrological tablets of Ninevah and Babylon [16] . Nevertheless, "reports concerning earthquakes in Mesopotamia in the eighth and seventh centuries are very numerous, and they are dated. Nothing comparable is known in modern times." He quotes from a tablet of Babylonia, "The earth shook; a collapsing catastrophe was all over the country; Nergal [Mars] strangles the country." Further, "references to breaches in houses, large palaces, and small dwellings are very numerous in the [Hebrew] prophets of the eighth century." Neglecting such sources, a historian could claim that "the earthquake held a place in the religious conception of the Israelites quite out of proportion to its slight and relatively rare occurrence in Palestine." Obviously, some literalness has to be restored to the language of the Bible, as well as to many ancient voices, if a better natural history is to be written. A destroyed city may leave no records of its destruction; a sunken land leaves only an outsider's report and a myth. A lifetime (19371975) of work was dedicated by S. Marinatos before the archaeological and geological world came to realize, perhaps too enthusiastically, what earthquakes and explosions befell the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea some 3100 years ago [17] . Velikovsky's research is especially thorough on the "tenth plague" of the Exodus, which he places at about 1450 B. C. [18] "At midnight, there was not one house where there was not one dead" in Egypt, says Exodus. All the houses were destroyed. It was the unlucky 13th day of the month. "The thirteenth day of the month Thout (is) a very bad day. Thou shalt not do anything on this day," according to an Egyptian myth. Why should a single event be frozen into all behavior unless it was far more frightful than other earthquakes, no matter how severe? "The children of princes are dashed against the walls" and "cast out in the streets," wrote Ipuwer, an Egyptian scribe of those days; "the prison is ruined;" again, "the residence is overturned in a minute." It would seem that in those days the Earth shuddered and cities collapsed across the world from Mesoamerica through the Mediterranean, the Near East, Middle East, India and China [19] . The greatest modern earthquake becomes insignificant by comparison with the disasters of the Exodus period. Even so, that is not the earliest period of catastrophic earthquake known to archaeology. Claude Schaeffer systematically combed the files of all excavations in the Near and Middle East that were connected with the period from some 3000 to 5000 years ago. His conclusions are sharp: all known sites suffered multiple destruction; most of the time the destruction was by earthquake, often with fire, sometimes by unknown causes. In the city that he himself excavated in part, Ras Shamra-Ugarit, at least eight heavy disastrous discontinuities were discovered in the period 2400 to 1000 B. C., by his dating. At five points in time a general destruction of the whole Near East occurred. Small earthquakes, that must have been very common, are of course not considered. They are hardly detectable in excavations. After practically all of these disasters, many years passed before a culture could renew itself or be resettled by survivors from other areas. Schaeffer plotted the destroyed settlements on a modern seismic map that shows areas where earthquakes of intensities 6, 7, and 9 of the Mercalli scale are typically found. A number of the repeatedly destroyed settlements were located in regions of lower magnitude earthquakes. As noted earlier, this is true of Rome and Palestine, too. They are no longer so prone to earthquakes as they were then. The destruction was so total in many of the cases which Schaeffer studied, and had such peculiar features -heavy combustion, for instance, and in the case of Troy II, "the Burnt city," which I too studied, both deep calcination and yet enough time for the population to escape -that the investigator is led to consider even exoterrestrial hypotheses. Invading troops, volcanos known to exist, and hurricanes acting by themselves are inadequate hypotheses. Deep ash falls might apply in some cases; unfortunately archaeologists before World War II paid little attention to levels of destruction; anyhow, where would the ash come from? Once again, the lack of data frustrates theoretical reconstruction; moreover, the less severe modern experience of earthquakes had led to simplistic and negligent judgements even on the part of groups which spent years on site. Were the quantavolutionary hypothesis to be increasingly applied, the contrast between the past and present would become more marked. Systematic review of the field work of the past two hundred years is needed, as is also a thoroughly objective analysis of ancient legends and records. Too, technical awareness and application of new paleo- chemical techniques are needed in further field investigations. We can conclude that earthquakes were greater in early history and pre-history than they are today. Further, the seismic experience of the past century is not adequate to assure us that earthquakes a thousand times worse in their effects are no longer possible. They then approach a new level of destruction wherein fire, flood, fall-out, avalanches, diastrophism and other effects assume major roles. Under such conditions the seismism itself tends to become a relatively minor feature and even to lose its name to much greater movements of the land, sea and air. The earthquake is supremely prominent today because the rocks replay more of the history of catastrophe than the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the biosphere. No people has recalled total cultural destruction by shaking but perhaps all recollect its destruction by fire, winds and water. There are parts of the world where the rocks, seeming so firm to the naive eye and touch, are criss-crossed by what must have been an interminable succession of surges and shakes. Cores of the earth under Athens were drilled lately in the planning of a new subway; most of them pulled up cylinders of the so-called "Athens schist," a rock formation that is a mass of small chaotic fractures. It is conceivable that millions of years of erosion caused the cracking; it is perhaps more readily conceivable that the schist was macerated in a period of continual trembling. Plato reports that Athens suffered severe earthquakes in its earlier history; springs on the acropolis were stopped and cliffs were toppled. According to Plato, the Attica of old was practically unrecognizable by his own time, which seismically is our own time, the flattened end of the seismic curve. [20] {S : Notes (Chapter Sixteen: Earthquakes)} Notes (Chapter Sixteen: Earthquakes) 1. The account of one Godfrey Le Sieur, in E. M. Shepperd, 13 J. Geol. (Feb. 1905), 46- 7. 2. U. S. Government Printing office, The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 (1970). 2A. "A New Model for Level Areas," Vitgeverij Waltman: Delft, 1974. 3. Lane, op. cit., 211. 4. "The frequency of Very Large Earthquakes," 190 Science (19 Dec. 1975), 1197-8. 5. Cook, op. cit., citing Benioff (1955). 6. See Chapter 24 below. 7. See Chapter 6, fn. 13. 8. John A. Eddy, "The Maunder Minimum," 192 Science (18 June 1976), 1189-1202. 9. Hugh A. Brown, Cataclysms of the Earth (NY: Twayne, 1967). 10. P. Jordan, op. cit. 11. As is argued by Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Chapter 8. 12. Nature (16 Aug. 1971), 375-9. 13. In Chaos and Creation (1981) and Worlds in Collision (1950). 14. E. C. Semple, The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History (NY: Holt, 1931), Chapter 3 15. II Natural History 86. 16. Worlds in Collision, 274-8. 17. Chaos and Creation, 233-4. 18. Ages in Chaos (NY: Doubleday, 1952) and Worlds in Collision, op. cit. 19. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, and Schaeffer, op. cit. 20. ph. Negris, Plissements et Dislocations de l'Ecorce Terrestre en Grþce, leurs Rapports avec les PhÚnomþnes Glaciaires et les Effondrements dans l'Ocean Atlantique (Athens, 1901). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART IV: } {Q CRUSTAL TURBULENCE: } {C Chapter 17} {T Volcanism} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part IV: Crustal Turbulence by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVENTEEN VOLCANISM Five hundred volcanos of the Massif Central in France, now defunct, were erupting 12,000 years ago, or less, during the Magdalenian Upper Paleolithic culture. So maintained Escalon de Fonton of Montpellier University. The spheres of the Earth were once so active that humans must have been encouraged to a pan-animism, an omnidirectional feeling which would have dominated all religion and culture if there had not appeared some immense and forceful sky bodies that focused attention upon themselves. Mother Earth, now a picturesque name, was devoutly and literally supplicated by the ancients even in the millennia of the great sky gods between 13,000 and 2700 B. P. She was often married to the greatest of the gods, and it was generally believed that her nuptial ties explained much of the animism of the Earth. "A theory of volcanicity" must not only be "taking into account the whole range of geodynamic processes," as Rittmann says in his classic work on volcanos, but also the whole range of cosmodynamics. The great movements have gone, but a restlessness remains, erupting locally; volcanos erupt solo, almost never performing duets. The volcanos of the world adhere to the world-girdling fracture system. The system organizes the world's volcanos. The volcanos of the land, active and extinct, follow the great fracture lines that pass underground as for instance in the Tethyan shear sub-system of the Caribbean-Mediterranean-Middle East, or beneath the Pacific coastal states of America. The same is true of the volcanic belts off the East Asian continent. The oceanic volcanos string along with most of the fracture system. Isolated volcanos such as the Hawaiian Islands require special explanations; if the general theory here that seamounts (guyots) are fossil short-lived mantle taffy is correct, the isolated volcanos can have originated at the same time, "the same, but more so." The difference may be explainable by measurements made by Preston in 1893: "The lower half of Mauna Kea is of a very much greater density than the upper. The former gives a value of 3.7 and the latter 2.1, the mean density of the whole mountain being 2.9," [1] for the height above sea level. Thus, like a seamount, Mauna Kea stretched in a taffy bubble until finally it burst and began operating as a typical volcano. More puzzling is the absence of clear connections between volcanism and astroblemes. Why should not a deep shocking crater give rise to a volcano? That a meteoroid often makes a melt of a kind is undisputed, but where is the persisting volcanism? Obviously one must seek for deeper roots of the world's volcanos. Volcanism takes the form of cones and fissures. It is also beneath swellings and bubblings of surface features. Most of the igneous basaltic surface of the world, including the ocean bottoms, was created by fissure volcanism. As occurs still in Iceland, fissure volcanos produce lava copiously. "During recorded history more lava has poured forth above the sea in Iceland than in all the rest of the earth's volcanic belts combined. Yet... Iceland's volcanic belt comprises less than one-half of one per cent of the total length of the world-encircling rift." [2] Beaumont points out that 40,000 square miles of the British Isles afford plateaus of basalt in sheets; though nowhere are cones or vents to be found, till and clay accompany the basalt [3] . Rampant fissure volcanism is today observable on planet Venus. "Recent first-class Pioneer photographs of Venus show that the planet is rent with fissures, and most remarkably has been described as 'the most volcanic planet' in the solar system." [4] By "most remarkably" the writer implies the theory that Venus is a very young planet and has been losing its heat of eruption from Jupiter only slowly. When the Earth had to erupt magma on a large scale, from far down, because of a loss of crust and an expansion of crust, fissure volcanism had to be the means. The deep ocean ridges of today still supply lava for paving the abyssal surface; the process has assumed a certain orderliness. On the other hand, viewing the Pacific Basin one must conjecture that a very large surface was once removed and a deep wound was left exposed that repaired itself in situ. The concept of cone and fissure volcanism fails, then and there, and one must speak of sheet volcanism, creating its own hard skin. Fissure volcanism stands for extensive catastrophic venting; if there is so little of it today, the reason occurs in the general global settling. Cone or tube volcanos represent a moderate 'need to erupt. ' Volcanic fields denote an interconnected set of tubes with a number of outlets. Volcanic outlets are spaced apart in relation to the thickness of the lithosphere; thinner rock invites closer spacing [5] . When dormant or extinct, all of these suggest either that a local rock crisis has been settled or that the global volcanic system has been shutting down its ramifications and further extensions. Many hills and uplifts, whence gases and lava have never escaped, are in the same fossil status. A major exoterrestrial encounter, the only event that can excite general volcanism, would reinvigorate the pattern of prehistoric and present volcanism insofar as the force vectors of the encounter prescribe, and would excite new volcanism wherever new stresses were imposed. Ultimately, geophysics should be able to locate as a set of overlays the total historical series of exoterrestrial encounters in fossil and live volcanism and go so far as to discover or substantiate the detection of their avenues of approach, their duration, and their energy. Neat surveys of past volcanism are not to be had. Rampino, Self and Fairbridge collected "known volcanic eruptions of large magnitude within the last 100,000 years." [6] Their interest lay in associations between volcanism and climate, and a shaky correlation was established, with climatic change apparently preceding eruptions, suggesting to this author exoterrestrial issues. Presently germane, however, is the possibility that the statistics will confirm or deny a greater incidence of volcanism in the past. No help is forthcoming, because of the inadequacy of the data: the dating methods are perforce questionable; the bias toward known historical instances is heavy (12 of 28 cases occur in the past 5000 years, one twentieth of the period studied); and there is no uniformity of occurrence over time (implying, if anything) that heavy volcanism is aroused by global events. Because fossil volcanism is generally assigned even older dates, most scholars do see very heavy volcanism in periods beyond 100,000 years; australopithecus, for example, is often tramping in volcanic ash, but 'three million years ago and more. ' Some 13 ash layers have been already discovered in the Central East Pacific Ocean, none blanketing the entire region. There is a great discrepancy in dating between the argon radiometric and biostratigraphic methods, about half a million years within the single million years of total assigned time. The argon technique is faulted for atmospheric contamination and incomplete outgassing of lava containing radiogenic argon. (But is this not an inevitable occurrence, then, in all catastrophism, where atmospheric 'pollution" is inevitable?) Even so, both methods are faulted when it appears that preclassical Mayan artifacts are found under the 500,000 y argon-dated (or 50,000 y biostratigraphic-dated) so-called "D" (or Worzel) layer of ash in the region. The explosion of the island of Thera about 3000 years ago sent about 40 km 3 material into the atmosphere. The seas were covered with pumice, some of which was driven ashore. Marinos and Melidonis plotted the story of one such incident at the small island of Anafi to the east of Thera. Two pumice deposits were noted. The one at Vounia is notable. On the base of a natural profile of soil, we observe the following sequence: lowermost schists of the basement (bed rock), on this a bed of earth and pieces of schists of alluvium and slope debris. On this the mentioned bed of pumice and on the pumice a younger bed of soil and small stones of the surrounding rock with the usual cementing of lime carbonate. The general dip of these strata is gentle (about 10 ) to the bottom of the valley. The lower part of the pumice bed consists of broken pumice, though the upper one consists of almost powdered pumice mixed with small pieces of pumice, irregularly rounded, of some millimeters to a few centimeters. We cannot give any other explanation about the formation of the above pumice bed except the transportation and deposition of this material by the tidal tsunami wave following some terrible phase of the catastrophe on Santorin (Thera). [7] The height of the foaming wave increased after rushing into the funnel opening of the narrow deep valley. It ascended, achieving 250 meters, and then retreated, leaving the pumice. The authors do not comment on the heavy, late diastrophism evidenced: the absence of low-lying pumice beds, the abrupt cut-off of the bed, as drawn by them and the layering of ca 2 meters of alluvion talus atop the pumice bed. I have observed the same deep bedding of semi-consolidated rock over pumice in Thera-Santorini itself. Possibly there occurred subsequent explosions of rock and soil, or violent quakes that shook down hill-tops. The investigation of cases such as Vounia and Thera where the dating is relatively secure may enable us to reconstruct a larger and/ or later sudden deposition of non-volcanic material. Without the historical dating here, one would be inclined to assign very old ages (as was the case here before Marinatos discovered Late Bronze Age artifacts in the ruins of Akrotiri) in order to account for the superposition of heavy 'erosional' deposits and then a slow landscaping. Today, volcanism of all kinds may be remanent. Fascinating and destructive as it may be, it is as nothing compared with the volcanism of times past. The Soviet geologist, A. P. Pavlov, declared in 1936: "At the present time, only a residual, negligible manifestation of volcanic activity is observed on the earth; formerly, this activity was perhaps the most typical and almost universal phenomenon in the life of the planet." [8] Probably the phenomenon is correct, but the volcanism, like astroblemes, may have happened during only several immense exoterrestrial encounters. The greatest eruption of modern times, some say (incorrectly) of all history, was the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The total volume of erupted material has been estimated at 18 to 21 km 3 . "When compared with prehistoric ignimbrite-forming events ranging in volume up to 10 3 km 3 .... the volume of the Krakatoa eruption was very modest." [9] So declare S. Self and Rampino. Thera's volcano (Aegean Sea) blew away most of a large, high island and its culture three thousand years ago [10] . Ilopango (El Salvador) destroyed a cultured Mayan area of thousands of square miles in an explosion of 1800 years ago [11] . The volcano of Tamboro on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies emerged from the waters in 1812. Within three years it grew the awesome height of 12000 feet, some three miles tall. Then it exploded. Approximately 100 cubic kilometers of material shot into the atmosphere. About 100,000 people were killed, many more than died in the Anglo-American War of 1812 being fought at the same time across the world. Hawaii arises eleven miles from the bottom of the sea. It is the world's tallest mountain. It appears to be stable. Yet it ends a long fracture out of Mexico and begins an arc of seamounts that strikes Siberia. The scene of volcanism today is the pallid termination of the scenario of quantavolution. There is nothing objectionable in present theory; it is just not historical. Volcanic activity serves as a mechanism to release thermal energy from the Earth's interior. Thus, we can view the Earth as a boiler and the inactive volcano or vent as a sealed valve. Conversion of tidal energy to thermal energy by friction is concentrated at plate boundaries, where almost all active volcanos are found. Thus tidal energy helps heat up the boilers and increase the pressure, while tidal stresses weaken and break the seals. Both of these triggering effects increase during periods of increasing peak tidal stress... Once a volcano has erupted, its susceptibility to triggering remains low for a longer period of time and then increases rapidly following a hyperbolic or exponential stress [12] . Now we turn to Rittmann for additional theory: Volcanic activity is caused by the loss of gases from magmas, a process which takes place wherever magmas can ascend from the depths and come into regions of lower pressure. This ascent of magma is, however, only possible if the earth's crust is stretched and fractured through tectonic forces. The existence of volcanos is thus closely connected genetically with orogenesis and epeirogenesis. We then attempted to explain these genetic connexions on the principle of the causal chain of disturbed equilibria, and so to place volcanicity in its correct position in the overall picture of geodynamic processes. The interpretation of a wide variety of observed facts led us to the conclusion that magmas could originate in two ways, and that we could distinguish between primary magmas having their origin in a subcrustal zone encircling the earth, and secondary magmas formed by the anatexis of sialic rocks within the earth's crust [13] . One notes here, besides the requirement of a stretching and tearing of the crust, the origination of volcanic magma from the "subcrustal zone encircling the earth" and anatexis, or regurgitation of surficial rock. This region occurs some 15 to 30 miles below the land surface and about 5 miles below the oceanic bottoms. This layer corresponds not only to the Moho discontinuity, as I have mentioned in connection with the base of seismism, but also with the volume of "missing sial" from the ocean basins, which roughly approximates the volume of the Moon. Volcanism, then, like seismism, reflects the level at which, all over the globe, the still landed crust moved in reaction to the eruption of the Moon. Whether or not the mantle on which this lunar boundary level rides jostling is solid or liquid, in the years of its fast movement it would have heated, liquefied, and expanded. The volcanos are probably still draining the liquid. Studies of volcanic eruptions arrive at correlations between the moment of major eruption and the tidal forces exerted upon the Earth by the Sun and the Moon. Similar correlations have been detected between tides and seismism. In this regard, volcanism and earthquakes reveal themselves as close relatives. G. Beccaria ( 1716-81 ) with Stokeley, Franklin and others, set the stage early for a systematic approach to electricity in connection with earthquakes, cyclones, and volcanos, but the promised scientific drama has never been enacted [14] . As early as June 21, 1902, Elmer G. Still published his observations of the volcano-solar-lunar relationship [15] : The writer has for several years been observing this relation between the positions of the heavenly bodies and seismic, volcanic, and electrical disturbances, and is forced to the conclusion that the latter are caused in part by the conjunctions, oppositions, perihelions (or perigees) and equinoxes of the moon, earth, and seven other planets, especially when several of these occur at once. He warned that such disturbances do not always occur at these times and that the relative position of the heavenly bodies have to be combined with local causes to produce volcanism and seismism. After all, he commented, if solar storms (sun spots) are excited by perihelion with Jupiter, why would not earthquakes and sun spots be transactive? A second article in the same year stressed that "the influence of the Moon and planets in causing and intensifying seismic and volcanic disturbances is not altogether tidal action -gravitational; it is partly, or mostly, electrical, and seismic and volcanic action is an electrical disturbance." [16] Once more in 1902, the same author, E. Still, continued his prescient argument, now declaring that gravitational tides of the Moon were quite inadequate as explanations of many terrestrial disturbances. "We know [Still was seventy years ahead of the field] that magnetic earth currents (which interfere with telegraphing), brilliant auroras, severe thunderstorms, violent storms of many kinds, and also earthquakes and volcanic activity accompany sun spots. All these are electrical disturbances, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and numerous seismic shocks which occurred at the time of the last large sunspots -about September 15, 1898 -were no doubt electrically caused by them." [17] We are not surprised at these statements, in view of Chapters 4 and 5 earlier on in this book, where electricity was allowed a broad scope among geological effects. The electrical volcanism of Io, satellite of Jupiter, will be recalled, where ejecta speed at 2000 miles per hour from 60 to 160 miles above the surface. A number of factors operate holistically in terrestrial volcanism; electricity may sometimes take up center- stage; mechanical heat and pressure are probably the chief actors in late historical times. Yet the electric and the mechanical are always working together: no rock can be squeezed without emitting electricity; no electric charge can pass without heating rock. Recently, Johnston and Mauk examined the unusually complete records of Mount Stromboli (Italy) over a 72-year period and related 33 major eruptions to the amplitude of tidal forces operating upon the Earth [18] . A distinct pattern emerged. Some ten days after the tidal peak is the significantly likely moment for the eruption. The eruptions concentrate in the days between full moons. Roosen used oxygen isotope ratios in cores of the Greenland ice cap as an indication of mean temperatures between 1200 and 1976 A. D. Variations in tidal stresses on the Earth caused by the Sun and Moon cause changes in the stratospheric dust produced by volcanic activity; this in turn changes the thickness of the stratospheric dust veil and hence the atmospheric radiation balance. At least some significant fraction of the dust occurs at peaks of tidal stress. The tides measured vary over long periods. There is a peak of stress at approximately 179.3 years period. This period actually shows up in a (significant) correlation of 0.37 between the stress periods and the temperature curve [19] . The relevance of such studies here is that tidal stresses and volcanism correlate; hence, great tidal stresses of the past must have excited great volcanism; conversely, evidence of heavy past volcanism denotes heavy past tidal stresses. In the present placid astronomical order of the world, there is scarcely a place to look for such tidal forces. A mere 500 active volcanos occupy the world landscape, compared with the 500 of the Massif Central of few thousand years ago. Flying high over southern Italy, one may luckily see Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna all smoking at the same moment. Arriving in sight of the famous seven hills of Rome, there is a grandeur of culture, not nature. Yet Breislak in 1801 was arguing that the seven hills were debris amidst a large volcanic caldera, and Cuvier for one approved the idea. When the oldest hominids, human in some ways, walked the Earth at Afar (E. Africa), some ten nearby volcanos were active. A great many dormant volcanos exist and an enormous number of extinct volcanos. If the belts of inactive fissures and the unnumbered thousands of seamounts are added, the Earth has undergone periods of the most intense exoterrestrial stress. Or else, one will have to parcel out these millions of volcanos and 'volcano equivalents' over exceedingly long stretches of time. But if volcanism even in the stable "solarian" period of the past 2000 years exhibits a 'grouping' tendency in response to exoterrestrial tides, then pre-historic volcanism must have exhibited grouping, too. Once more, we force the question: quantavolution, yes, but could it not happen at widely spaced intervals over time? Even with fossil and radiochronometric data that give, I think, ages too "old," the ocean volcanos and ridges are geologically young, under 80 million years. Is there some reason to believe that land volcanos should not be also as "young"?. Probably not, inasmuch as most of the land volcanos are tied into the ocean ridges, into great faults, and into the ring of fire that bounds the Pacific Basin. If there exist extinct volcanos and fissures that belie this statement by extruding from the surface far from the zones of present activity, these, it will turn out, are aligned with expired branches or special fractures of the Earth's crust. That is, it is plausible to assign all volcanos to the same geological time, and a young age; "where are the volcanos of yesteryear?" If the continental and oceanic plates break up and drift apart, as the prevailing theory will have it, touring the globe every 200 million years, forming new combinations, where are the extinct volcanos that should dot the world like pine trees? That is, so far as volcanos are concerned, history ends recently. Presumably, before then, lands broke up and plates travelled without their fiery boundary-markers; this is implausible. The innumerable seamounts are a standing reproach to opponents of quantavolution. I have mentioned their origins as pulled mantle taffy in cosmic encounters. They are an impossibility for tectonic plate theory for there the continents move on plates, not through them, and seamounts appear abundantly around the Moon Basin of the Pacific, with a solitary but impressive chain of hundreds off the New England Coast [20] . If the Moon were erupted from the now Pacific region, the seamounts could be visualized as pulled taffy drop-backs that could not follow the Moon into space. But the Atlantic Ocean off New England would only then have opened its abyss and "New England" would have been retreating westwards. To explain this particular "taffy-full" we must conjecture a prolonged explosiveness or subsequent passes of an attractive exoterrestrial body in order to assist their generation. Morphological comparison of Atlantic and Pacific seamounts may be of use in deciding the sequence of events. One study of the former finds shallow water fossils, including coral and the algae Melobesia, at 3000 meters, and suggests that somehow the seamounts subsided that much. More in order is our hypothesis that the sea did not fill the basin until recently; similar phenomena are discoverable in the Pacific seamount areas. I would be loath to leave the subject of volcanism before tightening its awesome connection with the birth of the Moon in the parturition of Earth. In 1907, William Pickering was continuing George Darwin's effort, begun in 1879, to establish that the Moon fissioned from the Earth's present Pacific Basin. He called it "The Volcanic Problem." [21] He alluded to spectroscopic binaries as examples of fission in the Universe. He argued that when the Moon fissioned, "the Earth was in much the same condition that we find it at present, except that it was hotter." It was supposed to be rotating in only several hours (so as to provide the centrifugal force for whipping out the Moon). He matched the continents at the Atlantic to show the breaking away occasioned by the need to fill the emptied basin; he mentions "North America during its transit across the fiery ocean, in obedience to the pull of the Moon." (Thus he preceded Wegener with the idea of continental drift.) Geologists generally abandoned the search for proof of Moon fission, even though they could choose their own time and state of the Earth to accomplish the feat. Thus they might afford a gaseous fission, or a thin crust, or a hot and molten body and they had no care for the biosphere or atmosphere or even stratified rocks. It is surprising that under such easy conditions for speculation, they could reject the theory. A reader of this book will surmise that an ideological block against any immense catastrophic event would account for the rejection of fission. Rather should the Moon come sailing in nicely and moor itself above the Earth. The catastrophic implications of capture were not generally pursued, except by Hoerbiger and the maverick mythologist Bellamy. Nevertheless many establishment scholars looked benignly upon the fission theory, allowing that the event was to have occurred eons ago. Also, of course, exoterrestrial inducements to fission were taboo. D. U. Wise, more rationalistically, attributes non-acceptance of the fission theory to calculation problems. "The traditional and seemingly insurmountable obstacle to all fission hypotheses has been the discrepancy of approximately 400% between the present angular momentum of the earth-moon system and the values calculated as being necessary for the last stable configuration before fission." [22] That is, an incredibly flattened obloid would have to drop its end like ash off a cigar. After disposing of several types of calculations, he is satisfied that "the basic problem of excessive angular momentum in fission hypotheses may have a solution in volatilization and escape of a silicate atmosphere generated by dissipation of lunar tidal energy in a high- temperature early earth." [23] The eruption of the Moon certainly extends beyond the conventional concept of volcanism, although Vsekhsvyatskii claims that planets and comets originated in volcanic episodes, especially involving escapes from Jupiter. Explosion is of course a fission; rocks are transformed; gases and electricity are part of the process, and so on. Also, exoterrestrial influences are connected with volcanism, both as to origins and to triggering activity. These influences are provable in our own time by correlations of volcanism with tides, electricity and seismism. They are provable for ancient times by the patterned system of volcanism in the world and the obvious function of volcanism in relieving stresses according to a pattern highly suggestive of transactions in outer space. Withal there is a uniqueness to the lunar event; the dimensions of the event soar almost beyond comparison with ordinary disaster and even all other catastrophes. But the theory of the fission is greatly simplified if it is conceived to occur through the passing intervention of a large body in space. Furthermore, it is well to mention, as a postscript, that should the Moon have erupted from the Earth and all ocean bodies are young, then the eruption must have occurred recently. The basins are dated at under 100 million years. Thus the Moon episode, so incredibly destructive, would have occurred with the full realization of life on Earth, including many thousands of existing species and with most Earth rocks still present. If those species could survive, so even could homo sapiens. Therefore, one must accept the possibility of the Moon originating by eruption. The evidence is that such occurred. The evidence is that it occurred recently relative to geological convention. The evidence is that it occurred without total destruction of the Earth's surface or its occupants. If, finally, one is to argue whether the Moon erupted 12,000 years ago as opposed to 120 million years ago, the issue may seem idiotic, but it is imperative to dispose of it. {S : Notes (Chapter Seventeen: Volcanism)} Notes (Chapter Seventeen: Volcanism) 1. CXLV Am. J. Sci. (1893), 256. 2. Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 557. 3. Comyns Beaumont, The Mysterious Comet, (London: Rider, 1945), 197. 4. R. D. Mac Kinnon, 3 S. I. S. Workshop 1 (July 1980), 7. 5. P. J. Smith, 265 Nature (1977), 206; Vogt, 21 Earth Planet. Sci. Let. (1974), 235. 6. 206 Science (16 Nov. 1979), 826. 7. G. Marinos and N. Melidonis, "On the Strength of Seaquakes (Tsunamis) During the Prehistoric Eruptions of Santorin," reprint from Acta (see fn. 10), 280. 8. Quoted in S. K. Vsekhsviaskii, "Indications of the Eruptive Evolution of Planetary Bodies," (Kiev: unpubl. paper, ca 1973), 7. 9. "The 1883 Eruption of Krakatoa," 294 Nature (24 Dec. 1981), 699-704. 10. Acta, First Int'1 Cong on Volcano of Thera, 1969 (Athens, 1971) J. Keller, D. L. Page, and C. and D. Vitaliano, eds. 11. N Y Times, 101 Jan. 1977, quoting Payson Sheets. 12. R. G. Roosen, "Earth Tides, Volcanos and Climatic Change," 261 Nature (24 June 1976), 680. 13. Rittmann, op. cit., 267. 14. Artifical and Natural Electricity. See Heilbron. 15. 86 Sci. Amer (21 June 1902), 433. 16. 87 Sci. Amer. (26 July 1902), 54. 17. 87 Sci. Amer. (27 Sep. 1902), 203. 18. M. J. S. Johnston and F. J. Mauk, 239 Nature (29 Sept. 1972), 266-7. 19. Op. cit. 682. 20. J. R. Heirtsler et al., 65 Amer. Sci.( 1977), 466-72. 21. "Place of Origin of the Moon: The Volcanic Problem," 15 J. Geol. (1907), 23-38. 22. "Origin of the Moon from the Earth: Some New Mechanisms and Comparisons," 74 J. Geophys Res. (15 Nov. 1969), 6038. 23. Ibid., 6044. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART IV: } {Q CRUSTAL TURBULENCE: } {C Chapter 18} {T Sinking and Rising Lands} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part IV: Crustal Turbulence by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHTEEN SINKING AND RISING LANDS Vita-Finzi remarks that we cannot tell whether, over the past century or even now, the shorelines are sinking or rising [1] . Furthermore, there is much greater complexity and much less data when making such determinations for the longer past. The Earth has demonstrated a capability for moving up and down here and there leaving scarcely a clue as to the causes. The wisest path may be to pursue a general theory, such as the Ice Ages or, I think, a great lunar eruption, and build hypotheses and information upon it. The legendary voices are worth an audience. Alexander Kondratov, a Soviet linguist and compiler of legendary and geological evidence of the sinking of lands, writes [2] : China's oldest myths tell of a war between the god of fire and the god of water 'at the beginning of the world. ' The mountains erupted fire, the earth quaked and the sea attacked the land. When the fire god was defeated he decided to commit suicide and struck his head against the highest mountain in the west. The frightful blow drove the land into the sea in the east like the prow of a boat, while in the west it flew into the air like a boat's stern. Since then all the rivers in China have flowed eastwards. Kondratov inquired of geologist Yuri Reshetov concerning this myth and received the following in reply: Geological, geophysical, paleontological, archaeological and anthropological studies have shown that up until at least the middle of the last Ice Age the Japanese Islands and Indonesia were Asian peninsulas. During the second half of the Ice Age (from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago), vast areas of land subsided into the sea and were replaced by what are the Sea of Japan and the south China Sea. The sinking was accompanied by powerful volcanism and by earthquakes. At about the same time, that is, towards the end of the Ice Age, the ranges of Indo-China and the mountains of Central Asia rose another 2,000 meters. Many generations of Chinese must have witnessed the gigantic geological changes in south-east Asia. It is these events that the myths about the struggle between the gods of fire and water evidently reflect. This is macro-geography, indeed. It speaks of a quarter of the world. Part of the world rose and part of it sank. The events described are probably much more recent, the 20,000 year figure reading 10,000 years in other sources. Many Europeans still speak, as they have from the dawn of history, of a civilized continent of Atlantis that sank in a day. The legend of the Lost Continent of Atlantis is a hardy tale; billions of words have been written about the few words of the legend. It is quite incorrect of F. M. Cornford, for example, to write that "serious scholars now agree that Atlantis probably owed its existence entirely to Plato's imagination." If Plato lied in his tale of Atlantis, there would be little truth in him generally; for Plato repeatedly insisted that his story be considered seriously and literally: the Atlantean culture did exist across a water barrier to the west; it had relations with the ancestors of the Athenians and Greeks; it did sink abruptly in an earthquake. Plato's date would place the event at about 11,500 years ago. I attribute this date to a confusion with the lunar catastrophe and assign it instead to the time of the Noachian Deluge, that is, about 6000 B. P. as described in Chaos and Creation. An ancient document, the Oera Linda manuscript, which was written in Frisian with runic characters and whose age and authenticity is much disputed, claims a general Atlantis- type sinking of a prosperous civilization of the Fryas between the North Sea and the Baltic, where frost was rare and fruit trees blossomed. There came a summer of darkness, great earthquakes, a spitting of fire from newly bursting mountains, a general holocaust, an obliteration of rivers, and huge floods that advanced to cover most of the land. Whole islands were newly formed by the bones of dead cows and sand (one is reminded of the Siberian islands formed of mammoth bones). The survivors were subjected by invading Finnish bands (just as the Hyksos invaded Egypt after the Exodus) [3] . The Caribbean peoples talk of an "Antilla," now sunk beneath the ocean. The Pacific Ocean and American peoples of the Southern Hemisphere say that once a continent existed where now stand a few islands amidst a great deep sea. The perplexing books of Churchwarden concern this continent of "Mu." Legends of the Greeks speak of a drowned Aegean Sea, and the ancients believed the Mediterranean Sea was recently arisen. In the Pacific Ocean of the North, there is supposed to have been a Beringia where now stands the Arctic Ocean on one side and on the other side the northern half of the "arc of fire" bordering the great Ocean. The East Indian peoples and Indian Ocean people offer legends of the sunken continent of "Lemuria," whence came world civilization. T. Huxley and F. Engels were famous supporters of the theory over a century ago. And the islands of the South Seas, where Indonesia stretches out, are reputed to have been of a single piece before the waters rose or the land sank. The Dutch geologist Bartstva claims that a landbridge connected the Celebes and Philippines until Holocene times. In August 1982, Alan Thorne announced the discovery of Chinese human remains in North Australia with an estimated age of at least 10,000 years [4] . A map in Chaos and Creation outlines in the most general way all of these mythical lands that are said to have existed in human times. If one is to believe legend, every large expanse of ocean once had its land mass. A form of quantavolutionary reasoning could proceed as follows: the ocean basins are new, created in the time of man; before the time of man, there was Pangea, a globe covered by continental crust that carried shallow freshwater seas, especially in the then equatorial area, which area, now greatly tortured, is still recognizable in the fabled Tethyan Sea remnants of the Mediterranean area and the "belt of fire" that girdles the world longitudinally. The awesome depths to which the land has sunk or from which the crust has been removed should not halt the argument. If the Andes, the Alps, and the Himalayas can rise miles high, Lemuria and Atlantis can slump miles deep. If the sial debris of sunken lands cannot be scooped up by dredges or pierced by the few meters of core drills, that too is not surprising; the ocean basins were opened up and repaved recently with basalt; where the land was not exploded away, it was covered over by lava working furiously and fast under the catalysis of falling and flooding waters. Where the continental fragments do not remain to be fitted obviously together, then the intervening land was blasted away or sunk. Continental sial has been extracted on occasion from the deep bottoms in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean; this is surprising given the major discovery of recent oceanography that the ocean bottoms are covered everywhere with lava. Metamorphic rocks typical of the nearby islands and Italy were found 3000 meters below sea level in the central Tyrrhenian Sea, as reported by Heezen [5] . Fragments of black carbonaceous sandstone were found on the Rocksall Plateau and Orphan Knoll, between Greenland and North America [6] . Some legends have been confirmed by geology; many might be confirmed; most are not, because they are vague or misleading. It would be well to examine closely the myths that have proved quite accurate to see in what mythical form they found expression and then to proceed systematically to the translation of similar myths around the world. The aboriginal Australians who live around MacDonnell Bay say that an angry witch once stirred up the waters and flooded the beautiful land to make the Bay. Geologists confirm that the land was high in the ice ages and recently sank to form the Bay. The image of the witch should not be discounted; Velikovsky has described how European and Chinese alike have an image of a witch riding a broomstick, which he traces to cometary images of 3500 years ago. Indians of the area of Crater Lake recalled in their oral history what geologists later confirmed -that a great volcanic explosion fashioned the beautiful basin in the mountains that has since collected rainwaters. These were not the only risings and sinkings, but they were by far the major ones. Kondratov, for example, mentions that Bulgarian researchers have compiled a detailed map of underwater archaeological finds, dating from the eighth to the fifth centuries B. C., discovered along a large section of their country's Black Sea. Irish Celts were in America in this period, according to several recent studies of history, archaeology and linguistics; they were perhaps driven to explore and immigrate by a further sinking of their homeland coasts. The age of the comet-god Athena-Venus preceded these episodes of the age of the god Mars by under a thousand years. The Gulf of Mexico may have been sunk at this time, for the peoples of the Mexican Gulf Coast were not long afterwards lamenting the destruction of their previous civilization by the jaguar-god (a Venus symbol) and storm-god Hurracan, and telling of how they were taught their arts by a few people who came from the east. Kelly and Dachille wrote that the Gulf of Mexico has the superficial appearance of a meteoritic impact crater. In Cook's reconstruction of the area prior to continental movements, the Spanish peninsula is fit like a socket into the Gulf but a gap, possibly a crater gap, remains. These several speculations treat of events of 11,500 years ago, or at the latest 7000 years ago, not of 3500 years ago -unless, of course, everyone is right: that is, the breakup of the area occurred and "western Europe" rifted outwards; the flood of Saturn deluged the shallow gulf areas; a fragment of the Venus tail spilled petroleum in the area and impacted. The Caribbean area generally is rife with myths of disaster and immigration. The timetable is chaotic. Archaeologist Cyrus Gordon has described convincingly Mediterranean materials that originated between Phoenecian and Roman times and that were uncovered in spots so far apart as the Brazilian Coast and Tennesse (U. S. A.) [7] . Sanders and Price in 1968 set up a convincing case for direct Asiatic influences upon the New World. East Indian contacts with the Americas can be traced as well. At maximum age, none of the materials would go back to before 1500 B. C. That leaves a great prior gap of culture, untilled save by indistinct legend. Brasseur de Bourbourg was one of many early European scholars who felt that, in these myths of white-skinned, technically competent people coming from the East, there were visitors from or survivors of a great continent of Atlantis. Interest in East-West contacts has increased recently among scholars. That ancient "Japanese" had cultural contacts with at least "Ecuador" is a distinct possibility. That unusual blood types appear among villagers in settlements of the Andes is demonstrable. Also, the ancient Meso-Americans, as judged by sculptures and drawings, seem to be a population in which African-Negroid and Tethyan-Caucasoid (Semitic) types were mingled with Mongolian-Sinyan-Amerindian populations. John L. Sorenson, citing Kroeber and others, examines 200 basic, defined culturalfeaturesof the "Old World Oikoumene." [8] What would be called the "common heritage" of the peoples of the Near East. Of these features one in eight is found in Meso-America definitely. He believes that another tenth would be added to the New World list when checked out through the whole body of information; thus about 18 percent of the Old World basic culture traits are shared with the New World. The statistical probability that this percentage of correspondence would occur by accident is low. It suggests land bridges of past ages. Perhaps it was around 1500 B. C. as well when Thule vanished into the Faroe Rise. Thule is famous in Northern European myth and is referred to in many books and accounts with tantalizing brevity. Russian geographer N. Zhirov argues this theory, citing evidence that Thule was near Iceland, that many islands were mentioned thereabouts, that it was in a warm oceanic current, and its people grew grain and other crops, (We are reminded of the Oera Linda manuscript.) Indeed the birth of the North Sea may have come so late as 1500 B. C. The famous amber of the North and Baltic Seas is conventionally dated at seventy million years; it comes from submerged pine forests that are assigned that date. Recently geologists have begun to stress the youngness of the area, prodded by archaeologists. Drowned settlements have been found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and off the British Isles. These are not to be confused with the sunken settlements of later time -Slavic Vineta in the Baltic by a tidal wave of 1100 A. D., many places off the mouth of the Rhine in 864 A. D. and so on. We are writing of the whole of these seas. "Europe was inhabited when the North Sea did not exist, when England and Ireland were not islands and Jutland and Scandinavia were not pennisulas but were all parts of a single land mass." Thus writes Roy MacKinnon, who gives us a fix on these great submergences [9] . Aristotle wrote in his book Of the Earth, "Inroads and withdrawals of the sea have often converted dry land into sea and sea into dry land." And Strabo, the most reliable geographer of the classical age, declared that "extensive submergence of the land, as well as minor submergence, has been known." Reviewing these and other ancient writers, Professor Ellen Churchill Semple wrote in 1931 that they "attributed the straits and sounds of the Mediterranean and the formation of many islands to convulsions of nature. They found evidences of previous land connections in the similarity of relief and rock structure on both sides of the intervening channels, as do modern geographers, but they erred as to the time element in the problem" That is, she would accept what they said of sinkings and risings, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea connection, the Sicilian-Italian-Tunisian bridge, and so forth, but simply dismissed any short-time reckoning for the events. She is not alone in thinking that the ancient sense of time was palpably and prima facie stunted. The same authority speaks airily of the Mediterranean Sea being of Quaternary origin or less (perhaps a million years); whereas now the Scientific American publishes maps of the Mediterranean as it was supposed to be half a billion years ago, a discrepancy of some 50,000 percent. Not to be outdone, Heezen and Ewing, two of the best contemporary oceanographers, found continental land far beneath the Tyrrhenian waves, even while the "oldest" parts of the seven seas are credited with a mere 200 million years. (Many say less.) That is, 200 million years ago would represent the time a continent was lofted by its convection cell currents over the oldest spot of the oceanic abyss, erasing its sediments and boiling it. If so, the Mediterranean could hardly resist for such vast lengths of time the passage of land masses over it, while land rocks betook themselves into its depths. One is attracted once more to the ancient idea of the Tethyan Sea, a shallow home for innumerable species until the new oceans were created to house them. Geographers have long known of this mythical Sea of Tethys of which the ancients spoke. They appropriated the term for a Tethys Geosyncline or trough which they traced around the Old Worlds -from Gibraltar to Indo-China. The Mediterranean Sea is regarded as descended from it. I use the term for an equatorial belt and shallow seas circumscribing the original Pangean globe. With the new theory of continental drift and splitting of the Old World from the New by the Atlantic Ocean, Carey changed the concept of the Tethyan geosyncline. "The Mediterranean shear system links up en echelon with the Caribbean system to form part of a global sinistral shear system which I have called the Tethyan Shear System." [10] The lands (and shallow seas) were wrenched apart between North America/ South America and Europe/ Africa. and Asia/ South Asia. Then Africa rotated sinistrally and Asia dextrally. The Asian continent encountered land masses moving sinistrally from the South, Arabia and India primarily. So incomplete is the understanding of great movements of land that, where one encyclopedia, the Britannica, is merely out of date, another, the Americana, assigns to the Mediterranean a Tethys origin that runs far to the north -taking the Black Sea route to the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Aral, and into Mongolia. In myth this is incorrect Actually this is a third and temporary great ocean of Tethys that may be called the Gobi Sea. It replaced the Tethys geosyncline and the remnant of old Mediterranean which are more plausible successors to the ancient mythical Sea of Tethys. It gathered waters in the great basin that is now the Gobi desert or "the Sea of Sand," as the Chinese call it. Like the extinct Sahara Sea, the Gobi Sea lasted long enough to attract many human settlements to its shores. Then it was emptied in a great flood and its cultures disappeared, as described earlier. Thus there were perhaps three Seas of Tethys, the latest being the Mediterranean Sea of recorded history. The first would be the Pangean shallow sea that carried the vast majority of marine species and supported a thriving population of plants and terrestrial animals, including australopithecines. This area, like the rest of the world, was severely buffeted in Uranian times but became known to the first modern humans. They were called pro-Selenians because the Moon was absent from the sky, and were the prototypical Tethyans of generalized Mediterranean race. A second sea would be produced from the Lunarian catastrophes and be deepened by transverse cleavages of the world-girdling fracture system; it is discoverable today as the Balearic, Ionian and Eastern Mediterranean basins. It may have been a major locale of recovery for humans and their cultures. But the recovery was far from peaceful. Africa slammed into Europe at several points, raising the Alpine ridges and the mountains of Anatolia, then withdrew after a short interval. The third Sea of Tethys was formed by the flood waters of the evacuated Gobi Sea basin, four thousand miles away. It was at first huge in expanse, then in a short while diminished to the earliest Mediterranean Sea known to history. The Sea of Azov and the Black Sea basins would have been filled and connected with the Caspian Sea. The Tyrrhenian area was flooded beyond its present level and survivors occupied the high islands of the Western Mediterranean. Ancient history saw many more risings and sinkings of land and towns than have occurred over the past two thousand years. Extensive research would probably be able to distinguish the sinkings of what we have been calling sometimes the Solarian, Martian, Venusian, and Saturnian ages. They are all part of legend, of some remaining historical fragments and, unfortunately, of an age that knew writing and had a complex culture, but whose achievements are inadequately identified because of the great destruction and the unwillingness of scholars to entertain even a hypothesis of the events. The names of the places supposedly sunk or serving as havens for survivors read like a roster of geography and mythology. Attica; many places of the Aegean Sea; numerous places around the Sea of Azov, a ring of towns around the Black Sea; the whole Adriatic basin (this was probably the location of the predecessor of the Po River, the mythical deep river of Eridanus, that used as its channel an arm of the global cleavage that forked from the Red Sea clear up through the Rhine), the Gulf of Taranto. The Straits of Messina and the Sicilian-African straits, the lands around Corsica and Sardinia, the coast of ancient Etruria, the Cyrenaican coast of Libya, Jerba in Tunisia, towns of Crete, the Gulf of St. Gervais off of Marseilles, the straits of Gibraltar, the Isthmus of Suez. One can only guess that the Sahara Sea (Sea of Triton of myth and ancient reports) was created during the Saturnian deluges. If so, it probably was emptied into the Atlantic Ocean and its cultures destroyed during the cometary intrusion of about 3500 years ago. Scholars of every science have pondered the many tantalizing indications of shared history in the southern regions of the globe. Kondratov exclaims at one point: The most surprising part of it is that a study of the world's earliest civilizations reveals a whole series of riddles that can be solved only by using the hypothesis of Lemuria, a large land mass in the Indian Ocean that was inhabited not just by lemurs and not even by Pithecanthropi, but by human beings who had reached a high level of civilization. (p. 131) And later he says: Lemuria... is connected with sciences that range from marine geology to the deciphering of ancient scripts, and geographically, from the Indian Ocean to the Himalayan mountains and the Buryat steppes. It may be that Australia and Australian studies are also linked up with Lemuria. One can conceive of the original extent of Austroafrica or Lemuria by noting that Africa, South America, Australia, India, and Antarctica were once intimately connected. Moreover, in the South Pacific a huge amount of shelf area exists beneath the waters and a great amount of continental crust is missing. The Americas were heavily reconstituted by natural disaster. It is reasonable to presume that humans occupied these continents prior to the great catastrophes. Conventional anthropology and archaeology would do well to drop the theory that all Americans are descended from some few who made the passage across Bering Strait a few thousand years ago -some say 20,000, some only 12,000. They assume that the continents were in their present positions; only a bridge of land sank and rose. Even among believers in the possibility of contact from the Pacific islands by sea, a recent occupation is credited. A few think it more likely that the people of Tierra del Fuego and other southern stretches came from "down under," that is, Tasmania or other islands of the South Pacific. I think that it will not be long before some human remains of Uranian or pre-catastrophic times are discovered or rediscovered. The same will be true of Antarctica. This huge continent, nearly twice the size of Australia, gives many indications of recent tropical climate, and produces many types of fossil animals and plants including those associated farther north with human occupations. Kondratov writes that "we do not know when the antarctic region became covered with ice. Some glaciologists think that it cannot have been more than nine or ten thousand years ago." Two maps have appeared in recent years after four centuries of gathering dust. One is the Piri Reis map that depicts the true un-iced coasts of Antarctica with considerable accuracy, another, the Orontius Fineus map, that carries interior topography with considerable accuracy. By conventional theory, mapping of a land mass of Antarctica could not have occurred until the middle of our present Twentieth Century because of the ice cover as well as the great difficulties in moving about without planes and snow vehicles. It seems likely, then, in accord with the general theory of this book as well as such evidence, that African peoples occupied Antarctica during Pangea and Urania, and were decimated by the Lunarian disasters, especially by electrical and atmospheric ravaging; that they recovered somewhat during the Saturnian period, and then died out in the icy climate that descended in the age of Jupiter. Somewhere in the interior their remains will be found Moving north from the frozen continent to the micro-continent of New-Zealand, largely buried under water, and to Australia, the situation is not too different. There few people were living before the European immigration. These few are supposed according to conventional wisdom to have come from the northern and western islands of the Indian Ocean some 20,000 years ago. Another theory says that this was impossible because there was open water that could not be crossed and that there would have to be land bridges. Presently, the geologists of the area have gotten together with the anthropologists, to the extent of saying that the land bridges existed for the movements of people. (Admittedly, the people of New Zealand, standing across a deep sea, would be difficult to account for by a shallow sea land bridge.) So the theory goes back and forth in a way to satisfy now theorists of the bridges and then again theorists of the clever navigators. The theory which we employ is that the land masses of New Zealand and Australia were sliced away from Antarctica by the now quite evident earth cleavage and sent rafting along with other lands towards the excavated crustal areas, north and east. On the rafts were Austroafrican survivors. Australia rafted mostly to the east; India moved mostly northwards and to the east; the Asian continent moved east and south nosing under the waters in places, and ultimately (after the Saturnian deluge) with a large section of its underside underwater as ocean shelf and slope. It is probable that the Indian Ocean was an excavated basin forming part of the great Pacific basin and then was closed in upon by Asia veering southwards and Australia going north. India itself, it is agreed, became detached from Africa and Madagascar and rafted north to lodge itself into Asia. Half the crust of the earth was gone and the earth was expanding somewhat so that there was plenty of room for maneuver and titanic forces to propel the rafts. Now to examine the human record in the southern regions. It is becoming ever more plain that the oldest surviving large-scale culture in the world is African, exemplified in the Tamil culture of India. For thousands of years we have heard claims that this south Indian culture was a survival of a great sunken culture. Ancient writers even asserted that India had been connected with Africa. Probably the first modern man to consider the evidence of the common roots of the Dravidians of Tamil Culture of Southern India with the natives of Australia. and then to connect this idea with the notion of continental drift, and hence continental drift in recent times, was the Soviet ethnographer, A. Zolotaryov. He was deeply influenced by Wegener's book and presented his synthesis in 1931. Before Zolotaryov, the Tamil (Dravidian) legends and the many ancient commentators had impressed others. Thomas Huxley, the apostle of Darwinism, wrote that mankind had originated on the now sunken continent, Lemuria. Frederick Engels, the intimate cohort of Karl Marx, and a believer in Darwin's theory of evolution, wrote that a "particularly highly developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone -probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean." Ernst Haeckel, German biologist, named the proto-human "pithecanthropus," and assigned its origins to Lemuria; he said it migrated from there to India, Africa and South-East Asia; indeed, in all three places pithecanthropus was shortly found. The Dravidians, who are among the darkest in skin of the Indians and who had generalized features which could be called Negroid but by the same token primordial human features, are located principally in Southern India today. Their culture is called the Tamil and is now reputed among scholars to be the oldest in India, predating by far the Indo-European culture of the Aryan immigrants of the mid-second millennium B. C., not to mention the medieval culture brought in by Muslim invaders. The Tamil scholars look back not only to a sunken Lemuria, but to a sunken larger continent called Gondwana. And it is this "Gondwanaland" that has given geologists the name for their conception of a united land mass of the southern hemisphere that split apart in the breaking up of the continents an alleged hundred million years or so ago, long before the age assigned to the primates. (I may note here the interchangeability in the context of this discussion of the words "sinking" and "drifting apart." One must be prepared mentally to think of sinking whenever rifting occurs, both because a cleavage is seen by terrified observers to be a sinking of the opposite lands and because flooding and sinking actually occurs in most areas of rifting.) However, the number of species whose remains have been found in separate areas where there was once Gondwanaland (that is, around the world in the southern and tropical regions), increases from year to year. Some are alive. Earthworms of the same species are found in Australia, India and Ceylon. Pouched mammals or marsupials are found in the Americas and Australia and nowhere else. (In 1982 fossil marsupials were uncovered in Antarctica.) Old world and new world monkeys exist. So also, identical as well as related fossil species, of horse, elephant, tiger, camel and rhinoceros. So, too, both living and fossil plants. From Kondratov's summaries, it appears that Soviet scientists have been most active in tracing the ethnic movements of pre-history from the Lemurian homeland. Surprising developments have occurred one after another, building up the case espoused by the old Tamil scholars. In the first place, and using "Dravidian" as the term for the basic generalized Negroid (Australoid) race, the Dravidian language has been compared with and found to be related at some remote period to the language of Madagascar, thus supporting floral and faunal resemblances and geophysical similarities previously uncovered by other scientists from several nations. Further, the Dravidian roots have been traced up through the Indian sub-continent to the proto-Indian high civilizations of the Indus valley and indeed up and across the whole north of India. Computer analysis of proto-Indian and a number of other writings indicated the Dravidian affinity. Moreover, Soviet scholars contend that the proto-Indian, hence Dravidian influences, move up the Persian Gulf and into the very foundations of what were to become the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilizations. These have long been thought to be the rock-bottom, independently developed civilizations of the old world. This earliest pre- Sumerian culture has been termed the Ubaid. Kondratov makes clear that it is not alone a matter of trade and other intercultural relations; for the pre-Sumerians or Ubaids were part of the proto-Indian, hence, Dravidian complex. Place-names, language roots, religious images, god-names, and forms of building construction are similar if not the same. Far to the East now is the present Khuzistan, Iran, once called Elam. The Soviet linguist I. Dyakonov has said that "the only hypothesis supported by a few indicative facts," in a comparison of Elamite with other writings, "is that of an Elamo-Dravidian relationship." Further, "tribes related by language to the Elamites and the Dravidians were scattered throughout Iran, or at any rate, throughout southern Iran, in the fourth and third millennia B. C. and perhaps later as well." Traces of the Dravidian race have been noted since then in various places in southern Iran. Far to the north, recent Soviet archaeology has been uncovering a South Turkmenian civilization of the third and second millennia B. C. Again, statuettes, symbols and skeletal and cranial analysis point to close relationships to the Elamites, then the Ubaids, then the proto-Indian, that is, the Dravidian, and ultimately to the sunken or rafted continent of Lemuria-Gondwanaland. Kondratov does not leave his discussion of the Lemurian cradleland without elaborating two further items of significance. The origins of Egyptian high culture, following the neolithic, have puzzled many scientists. Suddenly, upon the neolithic, a high culture seems to have been imposed. I believe that it came from the Tethyan movement eastwards from the Atlantis-Mediterranean centers. Kondratov suggests that a Dravidian north-west thrust may have brought it in. The earliest Egyptian writings are estimated at five thousand years of age. They are not primitive; they are classical, that is, developed and complex. Perhaps Dravidian India was the source. Indian archaeologist S. R. Rao has analyzed rock drawings of early Egypt found along the Red Sea coast and sees in their high-prowed, high-sterned boats portrayed there the vessels of Dravidian India. I find no contradiction, but actually two early post-diluvian civilizations encountering each other in Egypt. The Dravidians, or perhaps more properly, the Austroafricans or the fundamental negroid race, did not cease their travels to the East until they reached the farthest islands. African blacks, Dravidians, and the Melanesians that reach across the southern islands of the Pacific to New Zealand relate to a basic African race that was not greatly different from the Tethyan and Sinyan groups during the Uranian age. (Racial differences develop rapidly in isolation and under conditions of inbreeding.) Now it appears that the languages of the Dravidian and Australian peoples -both of which, incidentally, throw the boomerang -are cognate. The Australian scholars J. C. Pritchard and William Bleek argued the case a century ago. In 1963 Swedish linguist, N. M. Holmer, systematized the grammatical and phonetic coincidences of the two languages. Kondratov continues: In the last century philologists discovered a remarkable similarity among the languages spoken over the vast area that extends from Madagascar, near the shores of Africa, to Easter Island in the eastern part of the Pacific. It has now been demonstrated that the similarity is not accidental. The languages spoken on Madagascar and on Easter Island which, along with those of the Hawaiians, Maoris and other inhabitants of Polynesia, belong to the Polynesian group, the languages of the Micronesians, living on islands in the North-West Pacific, those of the Melanesians, inhabiting islands in the South-West Pacific, the languages of the Indonesian Archipelago, and those of the indigenous population of Taiwan all come from a single root and constitute the Austraonesian (" southern islands") family of languages. In view of all of the foregoing, which has relied heavily upon Kondratov, it might be reasoned that the whole southern hemisphere of the world and perhaps a very large belt moving north above India belonged once to a great African grouping and was catastrophized and separated during the lunar fission. Any Antarctic survivors were removed by the new ice age. It may be that the same is true of South America, but with flood, not ice, as the destroyer. The scientific roots of catastrophism are more extensive than ordinarily believed. Alfred Wallace, co-inventor of evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin, believed that a single oceanic race had inhabited a great island in the Pacific Ocean which had then been sunk. So did Darwin's disciple, Thomas Huxley, and Darwin probably agreed with him. No injustice is done to Darwin by regarding his work as a great model of natural history, or "simply a theory" as some critics like to say. He had many doubts and made many "anomalous" observations about vast sudden catastrophes of species, of mountain building, and, when he experienced a now-forgotten earthquake off the coast of Peru, he was appalled by the high energy displayed, noting in his Journals that the surface of the stricken island was changed more in a day than in a century of uniformitarian processes. Lesser known scientists developed more elaborate theories of the sinking of Pacific lands: a century ago, Dumont d'Urville, naval officer and explorer, Moerenhout, folklorist, both French; then earlier in this century, J. M. Brown, ethnographer, and M. Menzbir, Russian zoo-geographer. Others might be also named. All brought forward evidence of a great continent joining the Americas to Asia and of human cultures flourishing upon it. What kinds of evidence of this theory might be advanced? Again, as with the Indian Ocean, the material is geographic, ethnographic, zoological, and mythological. Again the chronological problems are perplexing. Kondratov, whose work was passed by a high- level interdisciplinary committee of Soviet scientists, can therefore only hint at the possible resolutions: It used to be thought that the earth sciences possessed indisputable data. However, oceanography and geology are both developing so rapidly today that many seemingly settled questions are being revised. Substantial changes may soon take place in one of the cardinal questions of geology and oceanography -the dating of events that have changed the face of our planet. Relating to the geographic is our general conception of the Pacific area as an exploded basin, filled promptly with water. The famous "ring of fire" is an effect like a fractured earth that is cauterizing the wounded edges of the continents. Repeated catastrophes irritated and reopened the wounds. The famous arcs of islands and their associated trenches were left in an advanced position when the Asian continent was forced back by the Indian collision and an elastic withdrawal after the continent had been pushed to its maximum. Japan is rising out of the water. Eastern Siberia is also, as evidenced in a progression of shell mounds of shellfish-eaters marching inland from the coast where the food was taken and eaten. Is Eastern Asia still pulling back from its farthest advance? But southeastern Asia is still subsiding. Is the continent still moving southwards? Experts may be found to date these events anytime from the Tertiary Age to the end of the last Ice Age. As with the ice caps and climate, the rising and sinking of continents is difficult to measure, much more difficult to interpret in terms of localized theory, and always hard to time. If only people had kept off of the hundreds of Pacific Islands, geologists of long-term persuasion might rest easily. But some surprising human developments have been going on throughout the vast region. Related to the great Sinyan race of the Asian continent are the Malaysians to the southwest and the Polynesians to the south and east. Farther south and mingled with these groupings in some places are the Negroid or Australoid types to which reference has been made earlier. Nor should one neglect the Negritos and pygmies who are found in the middle of Negroid regions but are reputed to have dwelt practically everywhere. "The little people" are a universal subject of folklore. Wherever found they are designated as a very old, perhaps aboriginal, type of mankind; they are said usually to be more clever and have a richer mythology than the peoples around them, despite their smaller braincases. Not only are there peoples on the Pacific Islands, but also the peoples have cultural complexities and have exercised technologies beyond their recent capacities. Picture writing is found on a number of islands, the kohau rongo-rongo tablets of Easter Island and the Woleai Island script, for instance. Monumental sculpture, comparable to "Old Bronze Age" achievements of the Middle East, existed on Easter Island, Ponape, and the islands of the Caroline Archipelago. Brown found Easter Island sculptural forms in many islands: Hawaii; Pitcairn; the Marquesas; Christmas; Malden; Tinian; and Ponape. There are no two sculptures alike; hence the contacts were not recent and even originally the peoples must have been of diverse sub-cultures. And everywhere, including the tiniest atolls, the peoples have myths of large populations, greater lands, of sinking lands, and of past ages of glory. An Easter Island legend is typical. It is translated by Kondratov from Easter Island writings brought back by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian archaeologist-explorer: The Youth Teea Waka said: 'Our country was once a big land, a very big land. ' Kuukuu asked him: 'Why did the country grow small? ' Teea Waka answered: 'Uwoke lowered his staff on it. He lowered his staff at Ohiro. The waves rose, and the land became small. People began to call it Te Pito o te Henua. [Navel of the Universe] Uwoke's staff broke against Mount Puku Puhipuhi." A later arrival on the island, Chief Hotu Matua is told the story. It is added that "When Uwoke's staff was big, the land fell into an abyss. The chief corrects the report: "That was not the staff of Uwoke, my friend," said chief Hotu Matua. "That was the lightning of the god Makemake." The parallels here to the Phaeton and Typhon myths of Greece and the Near East seem to be beyond mythical fantasy. The comet (staff) of the god (cf. Uwoke, Yahweh, Ea, Yahou, Hermes), the marine tidal upheaval, the near approach of the huge comet, the sinking of the land into the abyss, the stroke of cosmic lightning that broke off the comet's tail, and the resulting "navel of the world," a sacred place like Delos Island in the Aegean Sea, which was called by the same term. But now we are given pause. The Phaeton incident was of 3500 years ago, not 11,500 years. How explain the discrepancy in time between the Lunarian fragmentation of continents and the Venusian cometary catastrophe? The question is actually an opportunity to advance the theory. Perhaps the most perplexing of the problems enmeshed in the multifarious evidence of grandiose Pacific happenings is this: the debris of the Pangean continental breakup is scattered around the Pacific as its fundamental morphology; yet reports of more recent disasters occur. Many a geologist has dismissed offhand all evidence of recent happenings because he knows how removed in time were the major events; meanwhile the ethnologists are fixated upon the evidence of a human history unfolding in the midst of disaster. If the Pacific continents sank once, how could they be there to sink again even in the past three thousand years, even, indeed, in the nineteenth century, when reputable navigators swore to the presence of islands near Easter Island and elsewhere that are no longer there. Some indications fit different periods. One may conjecture that, in the Lunarian episode, small pieces of land survived the chaos, or disengaged from the nearest continent and floated into the vortex. But, as for Europe, Africa, and Asia, so for Oceania. There was no end to catastrophe. Considerable populations and cultures could still be built up, only to be drastically reduced by subsequent lesser catastrophes. The Earth has not yet achieved equilibrium, particularly in the regions that were most heavily damaged. Igneous islands, such as the Hawaiian chain, must be considered as the tallest of seamounts. Coral islands and atolls may be considered as debris of Pangean sea bottoms and as new growth, accelerated by heat and by being adaptable to a quick rate of bottom sinking. Rare igneous bits of rock, such as rhyolite, are of continental origin and found on Easter Island. The Soviet geologist, V. Belousov, maintains that a large zone off of Western south America had once been continental sial. Moreover, the seabottom of this southeastern sector of the Pacific rests upon a crust 20 to 30 kilometers thick; this is characteristic of continental crust, not of oceanic crust, which is only three to five kilometers thick. It is possible that the area is continental sial, and even was once populated land, but that the stripping of crust by the moon eruption brought on lateral avalanching to the north and west and a sinking generally in this sector. Then as the world cleaved, the rift here overran the land that was to sink. The setting contrasts with western North America where the rift was overthrust by the continent. One may expect to find oceanic basalt or sima beneath Easter Island, which extruded from the rift to pave over the land. Just as in the northwestern United States, the rift extruded lava on top of the land in wave upon wave. Regrettably, judgment cannot yet be passed on the origins of Tiahuanaco, in the Bolivian highlands, or upon its related areas of culture in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. It may well be connected with Polynesian settlements in mid-ocean. The Galapagos Islands, once thought to be an isolated laboratory of plant and animal evolution, now gives up 2000 pieces of pottery and implements of human manufacture, as well as continental species of flora and fauna. If Tiahuanaco last rose high when the Sierra Nevadas of California did, and when the area around Easter Island sank, then this event and a new phase of existence maybe placed in the second millennium B. C., rejecting its present dating of around 400 A. D. and moving backwards part of the way to Bellamy's 11,500 dating. Soviet opinion on the American Indians, like that of most Europeans, assigns earlier dates to their arrival in the Americas. Kondratov works on the baseline of 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, and of 25,000 years for the Indians of the U. S. A. In Kamchatka Peninsula, sites are dated at 14,000 to 15,000 years. Red ochre, arrowheads, and beads and pendants like American Indian wampum were unearthed there. (Perhaps the question should be not "How so early?" but rather "Why so early?") Some 14,000 years of dealing in the same monetary exchange appears extraordinary in view of the fleeting career of historical monies. There are drawings in the American southwest of man and dinosaur; also footprints of man and dinosaur are linked; it is hopeless to calm the heated objections to these finds here; they are not impossible; then either the dinosaur survived until very late, or Americans are extremely old. Evidence is difficult to come by, but quantavolutionary theory may find profit in considering a humankind in America who was primordial with humans everywhere, who was almost annihilated in the subsequent catastrophe, who was Tethyan (Mediterranean-Atlantean), Melanesian (African) and Sinyan (Mongolian) - all three - and who was later reinforced by way of the Aleutians and the Bering Strait region; there is no gainsaying the supposition. Perhaps by this time the reader has already noticed the magical phrase which conventional science uses to deal with recent catastrophes of all kinds: "the end of the ice ages." It is a useful way of saying what is uncertain, without admitting that it is uncertain, or that scientists are even in agreement on when the ice ages ended. It could be anywhere between 5000 and 25,000 years ago, with most scientists centering upon the date that I have assigned to the Earth cleavage and Moon eruption, about 11,500 B. P. Thus, Vladimir Obruschev places "the sinking of the land in the region of Easter Island at the time of the glacial epoch" when the ice melted and waters rose. Or "Bering Land began to sink at the end of the last glacial period, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago." Probably in any sample of books and articles on quaternary geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, most authors will be found to use the "end of the ice age" as a general synonym for catastrophe. From pole to pole and all around the world "the Pleistocene ended in disaster." The reader might examine the two contrasting hypothetical calendars that follow after the text of this book. To claim a known sinking for a known time invites error. The help that one can get from geologists and prehistorians is mainly inadvertent. The calendar of events and dates could be readily improved were a quota of careful scientific attention granted to quantavolutionary hypotheses. Even conventional geologists of the holocene period have complained that their colleagues turn their backs on any phenomena that are recent. Geology has traditionally opposed or ignored the interjection of legendary history and anthropology into its concerns, especially insofar as revisions of time scales are stated or implied. How then has geology coped with the rise and fall of land masses? After shaking off the idea that Noah's flood had covered the world (and the Deluge became a bogeyman to them, obliterating ancient human voices and behavior), geologists were possessed by the need to explain why marine fossils are found in lofty and protected enclaves of the continents. It seemed natural to resort to risings; then just as naturally, the land beneath the sea had taken part in sinkings. Blessed with the gift of time, they could assign to every parcel of land its turn above and below the sea. The mechanism for the many freight elevators was unfortunately almost as mysterious as the "Hand of the Almighty," and is to this day. Furthermore, the mystery has in the past generation been enhanced by the discovery that most land beneath the wave is a stranger to the subaerial land. 'Sial is sial, and sima is sima, and never the twain shall meet. ' J. Tuzo Wilson pioneered the theory of the destruction and remaking of present ocean floors every couple of hundred million years: so much for sunken lands; they are stuffed down and run over by drifting tectonic plates. The rises are another matter. The uplift of the continents is by the rise of flat domes of a variety of sizes, which have been called shields, cratons, batholiths and smaller domes... There have been intermittent uplifts involving the rise of land areas of the size of shields, or even of whole continents. Uplifts are followed by erosion and flooding of continents by the sea, each cycle requiring something like a hundred million years... Next smaller in size are cratonic uplifts of which Southern Rhodesia affords a fine example... Much of the shield of Southern Africa is underlain by a series of about a dozen cratons, each roughly circular and a few hundred miles across. These cratons are uplifted more actively than the shield as a whole... Smaller again are batholithic intrusives... Each craton was formed of a hundred or more batholithic uplifts... Those formed during a period of a few million years in Jurassic-Cretaceous time in the western Cordillera exceed in area by a factor of 1,000 all those formed during the rest of the half billion years since the close of the Precambrian eras. Once considered to have been intruded while molten, batholiths are now widely considered to have more likely resulted from plastic deformation with recrystallization and partial melting of piles of pre-existing sediments. They are often approximately circular and those showing the strongest evidence of recrystallization and igneous activity grade into uplifts of similar size that were clearly intruded while cold and in a solid state." [11] Even smaller uplifts are very many in number. Wilson's statements are descriptive: the mechanism is here presumed. Too, the language itself is non-operational and Aristotelian in undue proportion. Noteworthy in our view is the assignment of uplift to practically all land above the sea. It is thus that the marine sediments occur in all regions. The uplifts are circular, but not meteoritic; they seem like aborted volcanos, whether great or small. The total impression is of immense uplifts from pre-existing sea beds, accompanied by smaller uplifts, then smaller, and finally quite small rises, a bloated skin with many thousands of protruberant patches. There appears also to be a heavy concentration of these rises in an age that concluded with worldwide biosphere extinctions, the Cretaceous. Further, the subterranean force involved a heat whose temperatures might begin by melting rocks and end in slight metamorphic deformation of rocks whose top levels were in fact pushed up in a cold state. Might this whole worldwide process have occurred mostly in a single quantavolution? Some regions, even large parts of continents, would have been lifted hundreds or thousands of meters higher than others. Shallow marine sediments would be raised. Many sediments would be reworked in the heat, pressure, and churning of the uneven general uplifts. Erosion would be heavy in such an event, from mechanical disruption, uneven heating, electrical and gaseous outbursts, precipitated vapors, and winds. A great many inter-lift depressions and fractures, laying the groundwork for gullies, streams, and valleys, would develop. The superpositioning of fossilized sediments according to age would be preserved, even as these were raised. High in the plateaus of Africa, Tibet, and Bolivia, fossils from shallow seas and swamps would be stretched out in their original beds. The Earth would have a largely new surface, uneven, less neat, and confusing to the eye of the beholder. Too, with all this swelling, could not one speak of a general expansion of the Earth? Again, we go in search of a mechanism. Let us turn to another admirable geologist, whose work unwittingly has helped us to generate the theory of quantavolution. Shelion explains the modern theory of crustal movements of the Earth -diastrophism, in a word [12] . Most geologists look inside the earth for the ultimate driving force of diastrophism; no known exterior forces are sufficiently versatile to account for the variety of deformation we see... Plastic creep, perhaps in the upper part of the mantle, is the active element, and the brittle crust on which we live is passively tiding on this very slow flow. Of course, discernible forces arise from the rotation of the earth, from the tides, and from gravity acting differentially on irregularities in the crust and its surface topography, but these influences probably can do no more than modify and locally complicate what is probably the essential mechanism of crustal deformation - very slow plastic movements at about the level of the upper mantle. One notices an absolute indifference to exoterrestrial forces and to their high energy expressions of an electrical, atmospheric, aquatic, and lithic kind. Shelton proceeds: This concept is attractive for many reasons. By postulating different directions of flow in the upper mantle, it is possible to imagine many different kinds of stress being imparted to the lower side of the comparatively passive crust. If the flow involves circulation in three dimensions it must include rising currents in some areas and sinking currents in neighboring ones hundreds or thousands of miles away, as well as horizontal transfer from the first type to the second. One notes the speculative terms: "attractive," "postulating," "imagine," "must include." There can be no objection to speculation, especially in so excellent a volume as Shelton's, but neither should geology claim to be a "hard science," fighting off speculators. Shelton, perhaps embarrassed by the weakness of conduction currents, suggests that the rising heat of the deep mantle is so great as "to require the actual rise of masses of rock from hotter regions deeper in the earth." And he concludes that "some kind of very slow thermal convection -the rise of relatively warm columns and sinking of relatively cool ones -is a favored hypothesis for the ultimate cause of diastrophism." Then in two final paragraphs he reverts to basic questions, asking, too, for the essential information needed to answer the questions. He doubts finally that the information at hand is more than enough to tell one rock from another, and certainly not adequate enough that "a hypothesis of thermal convection currents in the upper mantle can even be formulated, let alone tested..." Sometimes, when asked why he does not sufficiently quote "creation scientists" -George McCready Price, Donald Patten, Byron C. Nelson, Alfred Rehwinkel, to name a few -the present author answers that he has only a limited perspective, an individuated paradigm, which cannot move too far if it is to remain intact. Moreover, he cannot assimilate theoretically the instrumentation of some secular catastrophists such as Hoerbiger and Beaumont, whereas he feels comfortable in the modes of thought of such as Boulanger, Donnelly, Bellamy, Kelly, Dachille, Velikovsky, and a number of very recent historians and catastrophists. But finally he must confess that he feels more inspired by the contradictions displayed within the evolutionary and geological literature as it marches in fine array through the catalogues and journals of science. It profits science and pleases him more to tell the latter writers that he agrees with what they are saying but that they do not realize the full meaning of what they are saying. {S : Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Sinking and Rising Lands)} Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Sinking and Rising Lands) 1. Op. cit. 55, 59. 2. The Riddles of Three Oceans (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1974) 101. 3. Unpubl. miss. communicated to author by RenÚ Roussel of Ablon, France, Apr. 19, 1974; cf. discussion by J. Bimson, S. I. S. Workshop, Feb, 1979, P. M. Hughes, ibid., Sep. 1981, and 35-6 editor). 4. Melbourne Sun, Aug 14, 1982. 5. 229 Nature (Jan. 29, 1971), 327-9. 6. By the "Glomar Challenger," cf. 227 Nature (Aug. 22, 1970), 767-8. 7. Before Columbus (NY: Crown, 1971); Riddles in History (NY: Crown, 1974). 8. In J. C. Riley et al. Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts (Austin, Texas: U. of T., 1971). 9. "Cenomanian Sync., "I S. I. S. Rev. 2 (Spring, 1976). 10. S. Warren Carey, The Tectonic Approach to Continental Drift (U. of Tasmania, 1958); The Expanding Earth (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1976). 11. In Beals, et at., Theories of the Origins of Hudson Bay, op. cit., 37-40. 12. The material to follow is contained in Shelton's Geology Illustrated, 423-4. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART IV: } {Q CRUSTAL TURBULENCE: } {C Chapter 19} {T Expansion and Contraction} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part IV: Crustal Turbulence by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER NINETEEN EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION Mankind has been impressed by many lands sinking like Atlantis and Lemuria, and by others, such as the Atlas, the Cascades and the Chilean Cordillera rising. The movements, all legends insist, were sudden. And, of course, since it is the human who speaks, the movements were recent. L. C. Stecchini, historian of ancient measures, maintained [1] that the Babylonians, calculating the diameter of the Earth subsequent to Egyptian measurements, arrived at a larger figure. Some of man's early obsession with geometrical measurements of Earth and sky were motivated by perceptions of terrific effects and of changes still then occurring or feared. Geologists prefer to think of lands sinking in one place while rising in another. I doubt that ancient man would argue the point. The geologist may call the total process isostasy, by which is meant the belief-not necessarily a fact that the mantle around the world so acts as to stabilize the crustal surface. The mechanism of isostasy is questionable, but, since it is only a question-begging term, it is less questionable than the mechanisms for pushing up and pulling down the crust, which may be a non- existent practical fiction. What would provide an intelligible mechanism? One such possibility is the expansion of the Earth as a whole. When the remarkable past changes of the globe first assembled themselves in my mind, I imagined them to have occurred solely as a result of the expansion of the Earth under the influence of exoterrestrial forces. Then the theory of lunar eruption appeared more convincing than a very large expansion, and finally I settled upon a combination of loss of mass and expansion of volume. Whatever can explode can expand. Worlds explode. Radio astronomy and even visual observation on rare occasions, confirm this. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was probably a planet until recently. There are some small indications that it may have been identified with the Greek god Phoebus Apollo, hence be so close in time. The Earth can explode. Therefore it can expand. It is more difficult to construct a model of expansion than a model of explosion. Both layman and expert can readily conjure up an image of "more than enough" energy to explode any body. In so imagining, they may skip over the crucial problem of how much it takes exactly to explode the body. An explosion can be defined as a rapidly accelerating expansion that has achieved a specified rate where a set of effects occurs that is called "explosion." The conservation of angular momentum of a rotating body depends upon its retaining the sum of its mass, its velocity and its radius. The radius is the distance from the center of rotation to the direction of its motion along the axis of rotation. Expansion signifies a change in radius. The concept of radius describes a relationship of objects. It is not itself a force or an entity. Therefore, the expression "increase in radius" must signify a changed spatial relation between things that determine the radius. Once more, the salient question points at electro-mechanics, determinants of mass that might act to increase the radius. Expansion of a rotating body then must be associated with a change in velocity or mass. In the case of the Earth during a lunar eruption, the loss of mass consists of half the crust and most of a dense atmosphere, altogether no more than 2% of the mass of the Earth. An interruption of rotation imposes an abrupt decline of spin velocity upon the Earth. This then requires an increase in radius and expansion in order to maintain angular momentum. At the same time, the conservation of angular momentum does not occur in an isolated system. In the present case, energy representing the angular momentum is transferable to other external systems: the space plasma, the proto-Moon, the Sun and planets, and cometary bodies. A body such as Earth will expand when it is freed from an external pressure. Possession of a dense atmosphere of the type of Venus would have limited the Earth's figure; if removed, the Earth would have expanded. Its outer surface will even spring back, that is, exhibit an acceleration and a counterpressure that causes it to "take off" from its base. Irregularities found in a number of places around the globe may be fossil expansions, if not fossils of impact explosions and massive eruptions. There are reasons to believe such events can occur and have occurred. In anticipation of stating them, we may suggest why land has sunk; for the two behaviors of expansion and sinking are not independent, although they may occur at different places and lithospheric levels. Lands have sunk by collapse into new basins, by flooding, and by their contents disappearing in explosive clouds of debris. If the force that explodes the land expands the Earth, then we have sinking and rising in a new formula, one which contains its mechanism, and furthermore may be true. The Earth was not pre-ordained to its present volume or density. No two planets have the same size or density. Earth's mass density differs considerably from that of the inner planets and much from that of the outer planets. So does its volume. It could once have been denser and smaller. That its mass and volume have been constant through long ages is 1) an ideological dogma and idÚe fixe 2) a mistaken simplism regarding the "hardness of rock" and the innateness of volume 3) a mistaken reading of natural history 4) a psychological denial of an undesired state 5) a practical fiction, or 6) a fact. The first five possibilities might be demonstrated without much difficulty, but will be left to such evidence as the reader may cull from this and related studies. If they are so, then the sixth may be in doubt and the contrary may be considered, namely that the Earth's volume has fluctuated or at least been subject to expansion. Such a consideration is the purpose of this chapter. A number of theories have given the Earth different sizes in the past. A number of means of expansion are available. A number of reasons lead one to a probable opinion that the Earth was once smaller and has recently expanded in volume. Pickering long ago realized the necessity of Earth expansion. "A rising region... must evidently be increasing its volume. This increase may occur either with or without an increase of mass. In the latter case, the increase must be due to a rise in temperature. It has been shown that, if a part of the Earth's crust fifty miles in thickness were to have its temperature raised 200 F, its surface would be raised to the extent of 1,000 to 1,500 feet. The Bolivian plateau has an elevation of two and a half miles. That of the Himalayas is about a mile higher. It is improbable that these elevations are due to this cause." [2] He finds that an increase in mass is impossible. He then turns for an explanation from a simple temperature rise to the possible pressure of water and steam, and since he was unaware of the lack of water over the rock of ocean beds, and since he presumed the Moon eruption and the catastrophic period to be very ancient, he called upon a still watery mantle to produce the necessary thermodynamics for expansion. Even were the age to be granted, the mechanism would be hopeless for the task. No exploding steam engine could blow the material of the Moon basin into space. Carey and Jordan have devoted books to the subject of Earth expansion, and were cited earlier. Both see the process as very gradual. Carey estimates a 20% radial expansion and uses the projected expansion as a mechanism to account for continental drift. M. Cook, in criticism, finds Carey's theory short in energy supply, and argues that the required release of chemical bonding of molecules would melt the Earth. Jordan, following Dirac, claims a relaxation of the gravitational constant over time. As gravitational attraction declines, matter expands. The application of Dirac's theory to Earth expansion would logically follow, but Jordan is unable to provide convincing geological evidence, even when presented with a long Earth history. R. H. Dicke and C. H. Brans also predicted a slow drop in the force of gravity, and Dicke estimated that Earth gained from this source 15% in volume over 3.25 billion years. When the Atlantic basin was shown to be young, Dicke ceased to credit its widening as support for his theory, because it apparently had grown 300 times faster than his theoretical rate would allow [3] . Egyed's theory of Earth expansion, based upon paleogeo-graphical data showing a modest inverse correlation between the quantity of ocean waters and the passage of time seems vulnerable both because a uniform quantity of water is assumed and because the time periods, though conventional, can be challenged. Egyed cites Cox and Doell, further, in claiming an increase in the Earth's radius of between 0.5 and 1.0 millimeters per annum [4] . This would amount to 10 6 meters in a billion years, about one-seventh of the Earth's radius. In comparison, my estimate of the radial expansion which accompanied the fission of the Moon is about 9%, less than one-tenth of the total radius; the estimate is the result merely of topographical scrutiny. The expansion in volume represented is about 20%, much less than Carey's estimate. Carey's expansion took place over many millions of years; the process here discussed would have occurred in perhaps three thousand years. Again, we rely upon a uniquely great exoterrestrial encounter to compress time, accomplishing in centuries what the aforesaid scientists have allocated as the task of very many millions of years. Any evidence at present of an expanding Earth, we would accredit to the extended uniformitarian tail of the exponential curve of quantavolution. Of the several attempts at demonstrating expansion, Meservy's appears most clear and valid. He shows that "the separation and movements of the continents in the last 150 million years cannot be explained by continental drift on the surface of the present- sized earth." [5] This he does topographically. Following the Bullard and Hurley reconstruction of the supposed original supercontinent before its continental elements drifted apart, he retrojects the present continental map as it must have drifted and shows that the present arrangement could not have emerged from the reconstruction. In order for the supercontinent of one time to fit the map of the continents of today, the continents of today would have to come from a smaller globe. "It seems highly improbable that the area enclosed by the perimeter [of the Pacific] was ever as large as half the earth's present area in the last 150 million years." Furthermore, he claims that his "argument is not very sensitive to the exact time scale or to variations in the rate of ocean-floor spreading, as long as these were reasonably monotonic in the period in question." That is, the solution of a smaller Earth would emerge even if time were foreshortened and ocean-floor growth were rapid. "The most direct interpretation of the evidence... seems to be that a large expansion of the earth's interior has taken place in the last 150 million years. The nature of the physical process that could have led to such an expansion is highly conjectured, but such a process cannot be excluded on the basis of present physical knowledge." By what means could the Earth have expanded at the time of or subsequent to the breakup of the original super-continent? Six means can be suggested, none of them excluding all others and in fact all six could be simultaneously operative to produce a concurrent breakup of the continental mass and an expansion of the globe. Meservy does not consider a sudden loss of over half the Earth's crust, as by Moon fission, but significantly the occurrence of such a loss, concentrated within the Pacific perimeter, only serves to strengthen his topographical demonstration. An abruptly slowed rotation of the Earth over days of time, never to be restored, would reduce the centripetal force of the globe and tend to expand its volume. This would be especially prominent if the body causing the slowdown were electro-gravitationally attractive. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald (1893) equations assert that all matter contracts in the direction of its motion and the amount of the contraction increases with the rate of motion. The Earth rotates with a kinetic energy of 2.6 X 10 36 ergs. If an interruption by an external body depresses its rotation by 35% and shortly thereafter the rotation assumes the level of a 20% reduction, an energy of some 10 36 ergs is available, along with a large electrical, gravitational, and axial torque energy, to push the continents and expand the volume of the Earth. This heat of rotational slowdown is sufficient in theory to unleash 50 billion Krakatoa's. That volcanic eruption, one of the worst in history, released about 2 x 10 25 ergs. The conditions for expansion of the Earth were probably present, but they approached the conditions for a complete melting of the crust of the Earth. They approached, beyond that, the conditions for the explosion of the Earth. Nevertheless, in the end, the sphericity of the globe was maintained, half of Pangea was preserved, and small numbers of most flora and fauna, including homo sapiens, survived. The fall of cold water on the continents helped to preserve their structures against heat from below while the same waters moving into the oceans and the falling waters there catalyzed the expansion process. The sudden acquisition of a huge heat presented problems of storage and prompt use, if the Earth were not to explode. The Intruder's pass-by and the forces it exercised upon the globe would begin some days before the moment of maximum impact and continue for several days thereafter. Thus the heat would not be applied all at once; by the time the critical moment arrived, the Earth was committed to partial explosion and expansion. The loosening of the Moon-making crust and the cleaving of the globe would take place quickly; then immediately the heat would be drawn upon for the reconstruction of the Earth. Also, a great proportion of the heated matter would be exploded into space. The global fracture system would help to handle the venting of enough heat and material to cool, pave and expand the Earth's surface. Moreover, it would develop the capacity to do so within the required time. And the density of the Earth's interior would be originally sufficiently high to provide the material. A decline in atmospheric pressure by the temporary and permanent removal of atmosphere, especially a heavily vaporized one, would also contribute to an expansion of the Earth. So too, of course, would the actual removal of crustal material of low temperature. It is not necessary that the rising magma be less dense than the escaping crust but only that temporarily it be in a molten state, mixing with gases and water as well, and hence capable of freezing into a solid at a higher level or over a larger expanse of surface. H. J. Binje said once that "the driving force of rising magma lies in change of the nuclear structure of the magma itself." [6] Water added to a silicate solution reduces its melting point. The lower crust and mantle boundary might melt at as low a temperature as 500 C under water saturation. The water itself would be provided by old surface waters and incoming deluges of rain, snow, and ice. The upper crust on which the biosphere and sediments rested would be shielded from the abyssal heat by thousands of volcanic vents penetrating its surface and by the cyclonic venting of heat into space over the immense flayed crater of the Moon. Still the thermal pressures throughout the globe would be heavy and accompanied by rises in temperature that would increase the expansion. The globe would fracture throughout. Pictured as scraped of its biosphere and surficial sediments, the globe today presents a thoroughly fractured appearance. Nowhere on Earth is one very far from a great fissure that would have been involved in expanding the globe. Perhaps one of the reasons for the discontinuity and absence of expected sediments in so many places is the underlying expansion by igneous intrusions that once occurred. Furthermore, the very 'success' of the globe-girdling fractures in producing ocean beds of lava and pushing away the continents is that they were engaged in expanding the volume of the Earth. The sial continents that remained obviously were not destroyed in the process of partial explosion and expansion. However they were penetrated at many points by expanding lava. The sial could be lifted by less force than would be required to dissolve it. Given over half the surface as a direct outlet, and a huge fracture network for disgorging heat and magma, there would be less occasion to obliterate the many large areas of sial overhang. Willis once wrote that "it is established by observations on rocks that the chemical compounds of which they consist can adjust themselves to changes of pressure or of temperature or of both by changes of volume as well as by alterations of form. Larger volume would result if a mass of rock were heated and at the same time relieved of some of the load resting upon it." [7] He even went so far as to say that erosion can cause underlying rocks to expand their volume. Rock crystals respond to new conditions, not even highly thermal, by reorganization of their structure. "Crystals are almost human in that they always seek the easiest way out... Where crystals grow vertically, continents rise." A sudden and massive change in crystallization may have occurred in many rocks. Now we might claim that the lunar explosion may have been the chief factor in expanding the Earth and producing the granites of the continents whose origins we had been wondering about in an earlier chapter. A definition of stability and even of structure is that the defined complex resists electro-gravitational dissolution. If a complex, say of rock, is stretched in a lowered gravitational field, that is, attracted by another field, and obtains a revised structure, then, after release from the second field, it will tend to retain the form temporarily assumed. This may be a factor to be considered in relation to an expanded Earth. An analogy suggests itself: rock under conditions of the assumed encounter would behave like oil shale when it is processed. The rock that is mined expands its volume by 20% or more [8] . Seismic signals experimentally transmitted through the Earth produce more or less sudden changes in velocity, indicating "boundaries" at six radial distances before reaching the center: the Moho discontinuity, and at 400+, 950+, 2900+, 4800+, and 5100+ kilometers of depth. There seems to be little explanation for these seismic transitions unless they represent levels of response to an historical torque. The interruption of a rotational motion of a mass must be perceived by the whole body. At some ratios of density to torque, indications of a phase shift should occur. These indicators would be erased by a huge expansion, but by the same token, will remain vivid under conditions of moderate expansion. In another work, I asserted briefly, and probably in error, that the Earth would lose electrical charge in a grave encounter such as would remove the lunar material: "loss of electrical charge may also have decreased the density of the Earth." [9] This was based on the assumption that piezoelectricity from rock turbulence and electrostatic charges would be lost into space to the larger intruding body; then matter hitherto bonded electrically would be unbonded and take up more volume. However, after discussions with E. R. Milton, I became persuaded that the intruder would have carried a heavier charge, since it was transporting charge from the outer solar system toward the Sun; it was also much larger than the Earth; therefore it would have deposited charge upon Earth. The charge would then be incorporated by the Earth's molecules and cause the stretching of their internal atomic bonding. Hence expansion. But where the charges would accumulate is critical, whether on the continental surfaces, or diffused in the mantle, etc. "It is not generally known that the volume of a Leyden jar is increased by charging the jar and diminished by discharging it, wholly or partially. The crust of the earth resembles a Leyden jar, of which the coatings are represented by the liquid core and the enveloping atmosphere." So wrote Abbe Moreaux in 1909 [10] . He envisioned a daily expansion and contraction of the crust. Possibly the same charging phenomenon would effect a larger and more enduring expansion of the Earth. The almost non-existent evidence, and the complexities of the electrical phenomena accompanying such an encounter, make all reasoning highly speculative. It is possible that both processes occurred, a gain and loss of charges, with the gain predominating. Yet another set of phenomena may be connected with Earth expansion, rather than simply the adjustment, unexplained, of coastal margins to which it is otherwise attributed. That is the tendency of continental margins to stretch out over the ocean basins. For instance, "as late as the beginning of the Quaternary period the land of Siberia reached much farther north and at the end of the last glacial epoch was broken up, large areas sinking into the sea." [11] Elsewhere we read, "while exploring the seismic structure of the continental margin off France, Lucien Montadert, of the Institut Francais du Petrole, noticed that the upper part of the continental crust of margins has been fractured into a remarkable pattern of narrow sedimentary basins bounded by listric faults, that is, faults that 'curve, ' being steep at the surface, becoming more horizontal with depth. He suggested that the continental crust at the margin was extended at the time of rifting by up to 20 per cent." [12] The listric faults are not found where internal basins, such as Lake Michigan, have been examined. We are inclined to view this oceanic marginal fault system as a possible stretching to accommodate expansion. If the rift did not cleave cleanly, however, the stretching might be expected. As the Earth expanded, and radial pressures pushed upwards, blocks of rock would be broken off serially from the continental mass. The stretching might also, still in accord with our general theory, be a result of a differential speed of rafting, with 'France' here heading eastwards faster than the bottom of the basin could be paved with fresh lava. When the Earth's surface is viewed from a detached intellectual perspective, it begins to appear as a thoroughly disorganized assemblage. Instead of its presenting logical conformities on a grand scale, its every feature becomes an anomaly. All of its real rules seem to have come from violating the rules of the earth sciences. When such a condition is manifest in human organizations, such as the factory, or the hospital, or the government, that is, when what is regularly done contrasts with the way things are supposed to be done, the usual recommendation is to change those rules that are inapplicable to reality. Unfortunately in the present case, as in many cases of social organizations, new rules are not easy to write and, meanwhile, the old stable mixture of reality and pretense that has been managing the enterprise dissolves into fantasy and disorder. {S : Notes (Chapter Nineteen: Expansion and Contraction)} Notes (Chapter Nineteen: Expansion and Contraction) 1. In conversation with author. His yet unpublished manuscripts may cast light upon the matter. 2. 15 J. Geol. (1907), 34. 3. W. Sullivan, Continents in Motion, 50-6. 4. "The expanding Earth," 197 Nature (16 Mar. 1963), 1059-60; see also P. S. Wesson, "Does Gravity Change with Time?" 33 Physics Today (July 1980), 32-7. 5. "Topological Inconsistency of Continental Drift on the Present Size Earth," 166 Science (31 Oct. 1969), 609-11. 6. Quoted by Jordan, op. cit., 121. 7. B. Willis, East African Plateaus and Rift Valleys (Wash. D. C., Carnegie Inst., 1936), no. 470; 306, 309. 8. Encyclo. Britannica yearbook, 1976, 289. 9. Chaos and Creation, 154. 10. 68 Sci. Amer. Suppl.( 24 July 1977), 3. 11. II Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 3. 12. Tony Watts, "Plate Tectonics," New Sci. (6 Nov. 1980), 362. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART V: } {Q RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS: } {C Chapter 20} {T Thrusting and Orogeny } {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY THRUSTING AND OROGENY When nineteenth century geologists departed from their original simplistic uniformitarianism, they found it useful to identify in Earth history several points of great diastrophism (" turnabouts" in Greek) or revolution. Whence came the Laurentian, Algonkian, Killarney, Appalachian, Laramide and Cascadian Revolutions, each marked by profound unconformities in the rocks. Naturally a quantavolutionist will wonder why these never evolved into a new catastrophist geology. First, there was the obstacle of ideology, which a social psychologist can appreciate more than a natural scientist: the social atmosphere of the times, the breakaway from religion, the need of biology to pursue prolonged development periods, and the empirical fascination of studying the processes going on before one's very eyes -these acted to subdue diastrophism and revolutionism. Long periods of slow changes were supplied until the revolutions themselves appeared as continual skirmishes of the elemental forces. The search for internal forces capable of sculpting the Earth's surface went so far as to conceive of the massive core of the Earth wobbling within the globe so as to push out or pull back crustal features. Some have thought of shrinkage, so that as the Earth aged it wrinkled (apparently not willing to move out upon the seabeds). Nowadays radioactive decay, rising from the rock deeps and engendering heat, has been called upon to push the continents slowly about. And this is said to crumple the colliding edges of continents into mountains and to stretch and reform the landscape. A second reason why catastrophist geology could not evolve is also related to the ideological: geologists have refused to look into the skies for the forces needed to accomplish the revolutions that they perceived; without a mechanism, they were left with mere names -and questions, such as ones asked by K. Krauskopf [1] ; "What are the irresistible forces which can twist and break the strongest rocks?" "Where do the forces originate which can raise and lower continental masses vertically? ... Why have not forces in the crust long since reached an equilibrium? With questions like these we have long since reached an impasse." Since we have essayed answers to questions of vertical movements for the sake of this chapter, we may add: "How can kilometer-high sediments be pushed over thousands of kilometers of the surface of the Earth?" Every thrust that has occurred or might happen can be described by the same few variables. The permutations resulting in reality may be numerous but are still intelligible. Price details several thrusts; Cook and Velikovsky describe a number; Burdick, Brock and Engelder have produced case studies. It should be possible to conceptualize thrusting. Suppose a thrust as any lateral motion of a definite mass. The mass will have an initial velocity and acceleration, a momentum and inertia, a direction. It will have a surface to ride upon, and the interface will have a characteristic viscosity. The mass need not be solitary, even though it is definable; a limestone may be riding on a schist, or rock upon oil or water slurry, and so forth; hence there will be another set of variables for each definable component in a complex thrust. Melvin Cook and Charles Hapgood employ prior ice caps as a mechanism of sudden diastrophism. Accepting prior calculations and proof of the existence of towering ice caps at the poles in recent times, they weigh the ice and decide that enough mass is available to cause unbearable pressures laterally (Cook) and a lever effect (Hapgood). The ice mass avalanches upon the world, perhaps in conjunction with the fracturing of the globe. The massive thrust of the ice bulldozes the surfaces of all sediments and biosphere in many areas; the fractured Atlantic region of Pangea, now the Americas, moves westward and the bows of the continents rise into high mountains as they plough through the oceanic crust. Hapgood adds a tilt to the Earth, product of the same event, and this permits him to add another string of disasters to that of the precipitating cause. I cannot criticize these works here. In general, to tie together the apparently interconnected Pacific Basin and continental movements I find a need for a more universal force. Mountain ranges are folded. What is a fold and what is a thrust? There can be no fold without a thrust. Nor is there any major fold that comes from two opposite thrusts at the same time. There must be a source of the push that folds, and sometimes folds in two or three laps. And the push must be along a surface that is the base for itself and the fold. Conceivably an uplift might come from an expanding Earth or an attractive electrogravitational force above the Earth. In the latter case, however, irregular outbursts would occur, and the landscape afterwards would be volcanic or batholithic or like the seamounts of the ocean bottoms. In the former case the surface would crack, swell into circular rises of different sizes, cause gentle slopes, and also erupt in volcanism. There is no need to deny the ordinary idea of a fold as coming from a push. Enough of the high mountain ranges of the world are poised at the edges of the continents to admit the possibility that they were pushed from behind by the moving continental mass. Their pitch, too, suggests a seaward thrust. If the thrust was initiated by ice blocks, they would ultimately take the form of a scow uplifted at the stern and bow. If in movement because of a forward electrogravitational slide and an upwelling and expanding lava flow from the rear, the bow would be much less pronounced than the stern. If the movement were accompanied by a swelling of the magma below, especially if the expansion were more pressing from the rear magmas, the scow would tend to nose down and come to its ultimate halt with towering mountains and deep roots. If the uplift were general beneath the thrusting mass, the prow and mass as a whole would lift itself, too, and ride more easily on the magma. Like a motorboat that rides higher as its speed increases, the continents would be elevated and move faster once in motion over a swelling magma. Unlike the motorboat, the continental blocks as a whole would not then sink; the supporting rock would be metamorphosized at a new density. The emptiness of the Pacific Basin stands for an event quite capable of initiating global diastrophism once and for all. This would require the withdrawal from the Earth of a moon-sized body, in fact the Moon, an event that must call upon an enormous electro-gravitational attraction, which must come from a body even larger than the Earth that passed close enough to pull out over half the crust. And this event is described in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria. Thereupon all the terrestrial processes that Melvin Cook so well portrays proceed: the remaining crust fractures down to the mantle in an explosive network providing the globe-girdling rift and fault system. Orogeny occurs rapidly as the cut-apart continental blocks scramble for position. Cross-tides of water and wind race around the world. Rock and ice are in motion as great bulldozers, thrusting here and there. The immense number of faults, not only of the global girdles but practically everywhere, establish the infrastructure of the valleys and rivers of the world. The true ocean basins are created for the first time. Under such circumstances and sequences of events, the vocabulary of science is strained. The most extreme case of thrust would be a force gripping or pushing the crust of the Earth like a shell so that it moves independently of the mantle and core. That such an idea may be rooted to some degree in reality is attested by studies proposing analogous movements in the Sun and Jupiter, and at least one suggestion that the Earth's core rotates out of step with the crust. The contacts of the crust with the plasmas of space and with its atmosphere may set up a continuous drag and eccentricity on the mantle, manifested for example in seismic and volcanic responses to heavy solar storms. Natural history may have witnessed, if not a complete and neat slippage of the crustal shell, some diastrophic approaches thereto. I do not know where to place the finding of F. A. Vening-Meinesz: as related to lunar eruption, Earth expansion, rifts and fractures, landforms, or to thrusting? He studied the major topographic features of the globe in relation to the Earth's axis of rotation. Their pattern of shocking and shearing evidences a clockwise rotation of the crust in relation to the core of 70 . That is, as the Earth moved east, its landforms struck out south by east [2] . The unified nature of his finding suggests a single giant thrusting episode sequential to the evacuation of the southern hemisphere. The continents move; this is a form of thrust. Often it is a thrust through water and basalt bottom; then, again, the Indian subcontinent thrusted upon Asia. Sedimentary rock layers are scraped and dumped over the sides of the awesome abysses; here is thrusting. Coal fields are forests bulldozed and deep buried: this is a form of thrust. Mountains are piled upon one another, again a thrusting action. Tides and winds lay down field upon field of debris, of vast extent; are these not thrusts, too? It is fruitless to argue over definitions. As with earthquakes, which are moving earth, and shaking, so with thrusting: beyond a certain intensity, the vocabulary is inadequate to the quantity of cleavage, the quantavolutions. Then, too, earthquakes and thrusting can come to a marriage; in a discussion of even the relatively mild seismism of our times, Frank Lane writes that "where an earthquake is concerned there is no such thing as an unmovable object, even mountains are moved." They are thrusted. Yet it has been a long time since "the mountains skipped like rams," as the Biblical Psalm goes. Although the records of solarian geology are far from complete, we suspect that such a sight has not been seen in the past two millennia. The occasional spectacular rock avalanches and submarine mud avalanches that are presently recorded are not what the Psalmist had in mind. In an age that experienced earthquakes abundantly, he was celebrating and reporting Yahweh at a peak of power, probably in the centuries that remained vivid to him -the seventh to the fifteenth before Christ -reinforced by the cherished accounts stretching back to the breakdown of the pangean surface. He was speaking for the hapless ones who watched the Alps rise up from the Tethyan geosyncline to be "shoved northwards distances of the order of 100 miles" where now are located Italy and Switzerland. The famous "nappes" of the Alps are but smaller thrusts laid upon great ones. The alpine massif smothered the long rift that once cut through the "Adriatic Sea" and "Rhine River Valley." Or the American cordillera, thousands of kilometers long, stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; there mountain uplifts amounting to thousands of meters have occurred, it is agreed by a range of authors from C. Darwin to I. Velikovsky, in absolutely modern times. The Sierra Nevadas of California are a single block, a thousand kilometers long, thrust up westwards. The Himalayas rose steeply in human times. "The highest mountains in the world are also the youngest," wrote Helm and Gausser [3] . But the Himalayas are also reasonably accredited to the crumpling of the "Indian" subcontinent against Asia with the vast inertial forces initiated in continental rafting. And probably the rising of the Tibetan and African plateaus occurred under lateral and subterranean pressures of the same time. One after another, explorers and writers have expressed surprise at the youthfulness of the mountain ranges until at least and at last all that are spectacular have been moved up in time to the age of humans. Velikovsky published a brief survey of this evidence citing the geological works of R. A. Daly, G. M. Price, R. F. Flint, B. Willis, A. Heim and A. Gausser, H. de Terra and T. T. Paterson, and R. Finsterwalder. He offered general catastrophic forces as the cause operating most often in human times. Melvin Cook placed orogenesis in a single set of great earth movements of human times. The present work unites the recent risings, the great global faulting, and exoterrestrial forces mainly of the lunarian age. Cook uses huge avalanching ice blocks convincingly as the bulldozer of many thrustal incidents in America and, in one case, in South Africa. The ice sheets push the sedimentary strata for many kilometers, melt and flow around them, crack through them, scatter mounds of debris in their path "like loads of loose, dry snow thrown ahead of a fast moving snow shovel." [4] Possibly the only alternative to his mechanism would be rapid continental movement toward the south, deceleration of the basal movement of the crust, a swelling of the Earth beneath the rear echelons, inertial continued movement in the same direction by weaker overlaying sedimentary strata, in some cases even overrunning the halted forward elements. Under this scenario, one would have numerous cases of inverted strata, older on top of younger, and hence the fossil inversions sometimes deemed a disproof of evolution. One would also expect then the occurrence of thrusts in regions of the world where no ice sheets were at work; in fact the Alpine overthrusts, the Atlas mountains and other overthrusted areas were not near to overpowering ice masses. Thrusting played a large role in the formation of coal, lignite, and fusain deposits, which range in depth from the surface down to over a kilometer. The distribution of world coal deposits, Cook shows, follows in significant part the radial avalanching of the ice caps. Coal deposits radiate from cracking and thrust points of the old ice cap and shell-slip. "Most coal deposits are found apparently squeezed by crustal thrusts, between the ice cap depression zones and the concentric, flow-resisting mountain ranges." [5] Ice cap fragments moved outwards upon the biosphere with the scooping and scraping motions of a giant earth-moving machine, depositing it, often smouldering, often slurried with ice and sky waters, into heaps, folded and thrust them over and in- between with thin sands, clay and gravel, and abandoned them in a state of thermal- retaining and heat-generating compression laterally and from above. Super-hurricanes, fast deep water tides, and typhoons can also scoop and pile up the total biosphere. Since the deep oceans did not exist during much of the quantavolutionary crises, the massive scoopers, scrapers, and in-folders might handle the marine life of shallow seas identically. Coal of different grades, and in thin beds, is interlarded with layers of ash, charcoal (fusain), clay, till, and pebble, that is, with all that goes before the blade of the bulldozer. Velikovsky's summary of H. Nilsson's analysis of the lignite or brown coal of Geiseltal, Germany, is revealing. The original studies were the work of J. Weigelt and associates. There plants from contrasting climatic regions of the world are identifiable, as are insects, algae, fungi, reptiles, birds, and mammals, (including apes). "Plants are represented there from almost every part of the globe." [6] The material is well preserved: chlorophyll, colors, membranes, and nervature are in many cases apparent. The fossilization says Nilsson, happened lighting fast -"blitzschnell;" the catastrophic process is evident. Nilsson explains the event by tidal waves moving in from around the world. The time is given as early Tertiary. Velikovsky is noncommittal. To us, more likely than tidal action would be cyclonic action: a great funnel of gases passed over a wide band of territory collecting the biosphere, macerating it, and finally dumping it. Little heat and pressure is needed to bake lignite. Carbon 14 would be low in coal deposits, not for the reason commonly given, that coal is an old deposit, but because it was not in a constant state of equilibrium and is, as Cook shows [7] , not now in equilibrium and, when the rate of growth of carbon 14 is projected backwards, it arrives at a zero state around 13000 years ago -subject to much turbulence, of course, but pointing to a thoroughgoing reformation of the atmosphere around that time. Where is the thrusting and folding of the ocean bottoms? There is very little of it, unless, as we said, continental drifting is called thrusting. The seabeds are flat, save for the steep oceanic ridges, the great rises, and the innumerable seamounts. Geophysicist Edward Bullard marks the contrast: The mountains of the oceans are nothing like the Alps or the Rockies, which are largely built from folded sediments. There is a world-encircling mountain range -the mid-ocean ridge -on the sea bottom, but it is built entirely of igneous rocks, of basalts that have emerged from the interior of the Earth. Although the undersea mountains have a covering of sediments in many places, they are not made of sediments, they are not folded and they have not been compressed [8] . The last sentence points up an impossible predicament for conventional geophysics: a supposed situation in which the continental crust folds and thrusts and compresses into abundant mountains while the oceanic crust slides up and under and around without making mountains, having once and for all and by gradual processes made its igneous ridges and seamounts. That no continental mountains are to be found imbedded in oceanic basalts is remarkable. Considering how recently most of the mountain ranges of the Earth have formed, however, we surmise that the mountains came on the heels of the ocean basin creation or thereafter. But this points to the conclusion that the world has been flat until very lately. And this leads to the idea that quantavolutions of all kinds may have begun only recently. The seamounts are igneous, and usually flat-topped. They came into notice during and since World War II. Their astonishing numbers point to a common and concurrent origin: almost all of them must have been both extruded and pulled up in the exoterrestrial engagement of the lunar fission period. There are no substantial currents to erode their tops and anyhow erosion creates peaks and gradual slopes. They are not volcano fields, connected underground by a piping system for magma flow. Sedimentation on them is slight. Some have "surprisingly young" fossil-impregnated rocks on their beveled tops, write Heezing and Hollister [9] . Some of the fossils are subaerial, not marine. Could sea levels have been 400 meters and more lower than today, ask the same authors. (Actually, subaerial fossil species have been found at 1000 m depths.) Or could the ocean bottoms have subsided by that amount? Neither hypothesis finds favor. They probably stem directly from the lava pavements of the ocean floors. They probably lifted up into a maelstrom of air and water, rather than grew up underwater like some volcanos, even now, are observed to form. For a short period they stood amidst a rising ocean of water. The water ceased to rise rapidly. Life took hold on some of them. After a couple of thousand years, an immense quantity of water was poured into the ocean. The seamounts now drowned. The rhetoric of geology is overpowering in its stress upon time. It rolls along in the cadences of an epic poem, stressing eons of time like the pause at the end of the lines. But today has its poetry of the absurd, and this may drive the incessant echo for a moment from the mind. Consider, then, the absurd: that legitimate arguments can maintain, facing the geological world, an age of 10 9 years and an age of 10 4 years - ten billion against 10 thousand years. The absurd, of course, is the theory of quantavolution: time is squeezed out of explanations of the Earth until only the minimal amount remains, like forcing the air out of a bottle until a nearly total vacuum is reached. The analogy is not so remote: some say that the Earth is losing its atmosphere, atom by atom, until one day, eons from now, it will move denuded of air in the vacuum of space. The same might be done in hours and days by the near passage of a body sufficiently large and electrically attractive to suck up the atoms of the atmosphere. The absurd in geology makes statements of a related type. All the igneous rock and its formations of the Earth's crust, could be brewed by sudden heat over 1500 C and pressures over 5000 atmospheres within a few years. Igneous rock is the greater part of all rock. All rock that is metamorphic needs less heat and pressure to form, and the same short time. Metamorphic rock is a small percentage of all rock. Sedimentary rock, least common but plentiful nonetheless, by definition never boiled or overheated or intensely pressurized, can be laid and formed as fast as material is provided, this consisting of biosphere products, fall-out, and erosion of other sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rock. Slower than all of these in forming are the biosphere products. Still, if upon the crust of the Earth were laid the seeds of plants and the eggs of animals, and these were enveloped in an electrified atmosphere, and souped up with nutrient minerals, a passage of several thousand years would find the crust blanketed kilometers deep in biotic debris. If one were intent upon preserving the evolution of species, species would mutate to their present forms in two to thirty leaps, say, and this would provide the varieties of today. It would, of course, require several thousand extra years. It is no secret, actually, that the fillip of evolution has supported geology's claim to time, rather than the contrary (except for radiochronometry); life takes longer than rocks, and fossils can be used by the theory of evolution to push back the age of the rocks. The absurd idea still has not gone far enough; the Earth's surface and crust are a complicated mixture, of thin and thick pieces, of sliced and hacked out layers, and of dense and light materials, under different pressures and temperatures. How is it to be fashioned to bring order? Dispense promptly with the word "order". The natural order is largely in the mind. The "order" is a wish and illusion. Pursuing the absurd, the mixture of forms and materials of the Earth's crust are but the work of a clumsy chef, who shakes his pot, stirs it erratically, burns the bottom and adds ingredients to his strange tastes. Or, to assign no blame to a divinity, the same effects are achieved by forces born within the Earth and coming from outside of it, but great forces, of the kind that can form the materials. The force that can suddenly slow or change the world's motion can thrust and scatter about the formed materials, and concoct others. What can chop and grind and break the materials can inject all the heat and pressure to make them in the first place, and again and again. What is more, in this absurd scenario of quantavolution, processes occur simultaneously. The chalk cliffs of Dover do not wait to form until the Anatolian chalk cliffs are made; nor does the mutation of species await a sunny "bowr of earthly blisse." While the Earth's crust is reforming into the Moon, a multitude of volcanos blaze, and deluges of water and debris fall upon the world. All the rocks everywhere are in movement, under pressure and exerting pressure; electricity exudes from every pore and catalyzes the already hard-working floods and vapors; radiation and adaptive saltations are differentiating many species and exterminating many more. How does one argue against the absurd conception of natural history? One would draw books on the Grand Canyon of Colorado from the shelves showing "two billion years of history passing before one's eyes." But the quantavolutionary vision of the Grand Canyon springs readily to mind: the complex can be put together in a short time in uplift and cross-cutting floods, then cleaved, supplied with torrents, and finally quieted down to make it attractive for tourists. Should one appeal to radiochronometry to resolve the vision, it occurs that the radioactive isotopes might have been stopped or raced in the catastrophic maelstrom. We recall again some of the features of the Earth's surface previously discussed. One by one, it would appear, the morphological features of the world succumb to quantavolutionary explanation. "Long distance overthrusting has occurred (a) for whole continents over the ocean crust where overthrusting has been several thousand miles (continental drift), and (b) for the superficial Cambrian and 'younger' sediments over the continuous, strong basement rock." (Cook) The greatest thrust and rift and the smallest rock-crack can be considered as "faults." "Shields [the flat barely covered rock of Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere] are here interpreted as crustal rocks denuded of sediments by thrusts of their original sediments from beneath the ice caps driven by the hydrostatic pressure and the friction of the ice flow" (quoting Cook). "Welts" define pre-Cambrian rocks (that is, with slight signs of life), exposed at the surface as a result of uplifts and crustal buckling. Huge troughs such as the Mississippi Valley are the result of an immense flow of turbid ice-laden waters and tidal flooding, so recent that spectacular anomalies such as the great New Madrid earthquake can occur. Countless rubble hills are dumped in place by floods and wind from rocks expanded and broken up by earthquake. Most of the rubble orogeny has occurred in times of quantavolution, not by evolution nor uniformly bit by bit. Uprisings occur through collision of rock masses, undercutting, compression, heat expansion of undercrust, and cooling of quasi-exploded material. Here would be included the igneous mountains of the world, such as St. Helens or Vesuvius. Here also would be earth that did not escape upon explosion and appears as mounds or hills swollen up (not buckled). Here too would be broad plateaus caused by a heat-expanded crust that cooled in its expanded form at great heights. Finally, closely related to the previous item, are the submarine ridges around the world and the myriad seamounts (guyots). The ridge mountains, the world's tallest, are igneous productions, still bubbling and bursting along their length. The seamounts, as noted earlier, are the taffy-like pullback, unexploded lava blisters of the lunarian outbursts. Quantavolutionary theory, then, holds that any hill and mountain of the Earth can be explained by concepts such as these. All involve energies that erase millions, even hundreds of millions of assigned years of time. Nor is it difficult, either, to imagine a quantavolutionary definition of other features not before discussed. Where a gorge, a rift, or a canyon is observed, we are traumatized into seeing faults, fissures and turbulent waters rushing to shape them. Where others see placid lakes, long ago hollowed from rock and fed from melting ice, we see land sinks, quick filling with avalanching waters, now stranded and in all shortlived. Where deep surface deposits of clay, pebbles, sand, till and their associated rocks occur, we see tidal catastrophes, cyclones, and exoterrestrial fall-out. In lava fields are seen, not occasional flare-ups after long-prepared mantle heating, but the rivers of boiling rock forced up and out by large earth movements and expansion. Fan deposits are not gradual accretions at the foot of a flow, but sudden dumps by turbulent currents, and the continental slopes are the largest of fans. Catastrophic winds, tides, and floods form dunes and peneplains, abetted by seismism. Basins are formed and erupted by catastrophic uplift, changed Earth motions, or meteoroid impact explosions. What is left to mention in the lexicon of landforms? We still have to do justice in succeeding chapters to several major Earth features: the ocean basins; the rifts, canyons and channels; and the sediments, including the continental slopes. Otherwise one is driven into sub-classification. Faults, for example, can be classified into tilts, grabens, horsts, and troughs and each of these is divided into sub-categories; these are treated in textbooks and present no unsurmountable obstacle to quantavotutionary theory. Each of these pertains to its parent-category û faults -and cannot supply something which the parent lacks. Metamorphic rock is of many kinds -schists, gneiss, limestone, marble mycorites and migmatites -and a natural history museum will present an orderly array of them. The world "order" occurs again. And again the order is in our minds. The several conditions of heat and pressure and the several minerals that altogether manufactured these rocks were a disordered composition baking inside a faulty oven. One is seduced by the vast quantities observed of each type into imagining orderly production. A tall mountain of sedimentary rocks appears orderly to us, but so does the simple snowflake under a microscope. One is impressed also by the very many material compositions and forms. But this is an illusion arising from the many different combinations which a few conditions and chemical elements can create; a mere eight separate states of being, described in terms of a temperature, a pressure, and a chemical compound free to combine, can, after all, supply some 2 8 or 256 entities to contemplate. There is order in all things and alongside this order there is chaos in all things; that is, we can look at any event or thing as orderly or chaotic, just as Parmenides looked at the permanence of being and Heraclites at its eternal flux. Where in the world is the remaining virgin land of Pangea? If one is to believe surveys of the presence around the world of all the conventional geological ages, the answer is "practically nowhere." Perhaps 2% of the world's land can claim a full geological column. The ages are either a fiction, or the victims of quantavolution. Still, even at this early stage of quantavolutionism, when few minds -and even fewer resources -have been brought to bear on the issues, it appears that by employing only a modest increment of time, quantavolution can move from the absurd to some respectable level of probable validity. One can comfortably and scientifically operate given an Earth age of a million years, with a late resurfacing of the Earth accomplished during the past fourteen thousand years. It might seem impossible to reconcile the 5000-times-greater time span of conventional geological theory. Actually it is not impossible. The processes reflected in the Grand Canyon profile could be temporarily collapsed by a factor of 5000, making every five million years become a thousand years, without scrambling ordinary explanations. The rules to reduce time are: increase heat; increase pressure; add motions; introduce electric potentials; and look into the skies. Says the sage to the astronomer, writes Friedrich Nietzsche: "As long as you still experience the stars as something 'above you' you lack the eye of knowledge." [10] {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty: Thrusting And Orogeny)} Notes (Chapter Twenty: Thrusting And Orogeny) 1. Quoted by Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 76. 2. Discussed in Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 125-6. 3. Ibid., 78. 4. Cook, op. cit., 188. 5. Ibid., 11. 6. Supra, 219-20. On Nilsson, further, see B. Gray, VII Kronos 4 (Summer 1982), 8-25. 7. "Continental Drift," Utah Alumnus (Sept. 1964) 12, and see discussion, ibid., Nov. 1963, Oct. and Nov. 1964. 8. "Origins of the Oceans," op. cit., 19. 9. Op. cit., 521. 10. Beyond Good and Evil, Epigram 71. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART V: } {Q RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS: } {C Chapter 21} {T Ocean Basins} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE OCEAN BASINS The planet Venus, which has been shown to have had its share of astroblemes, lightning activity, melting, volcanos, plateaus, mountain ranges, great valleys, and closed depressions or basins, has a "curious dearth of great basins," whence we surmise that Venus never underwent the trauma of Earth, which resulted in most of the Earth being ocean basins. "The tectonic forces that have shaped the surface of Venus have raised only 5 percent of the surface into 'continental masses' and left only 15 to 20 percent of it as basins... " [1] Nor do we know whether these are "real" basins, that is, distinct from the continental material as they are on Earth. The ocean's "trackless wastes" may be a nice metaphor for the 71% of the Earth's surface covered by water, but the ocean bottoms are marked by enough signs to revolutionize the earth sciences and natural history. Essentially the ocean basins are three in number, the Pacific, the Indian and the Atlantic. The Pacific Basin was the recent scene of the most awesome event ever to have befallen the Earth since its early times, the outburst of the Moon. The Indian Ocean appears to have been created at the same time by the migration of continental land driven to the scene of the disaster. The Atlantic Ocean was rather obviously originated from a great wedge that helped propel the continents east and west so as to distribute the mass, heat, and electrical charge rather more evenly in the expansion and filling initiated in the evacuated areas. The only possible mechanism for the lunar outburst would involve an exoterrestrial body, to which I have alluded on several previous occasions. The clearest description of the event and the closest to our own theory was provided by Howard B. Baker in an obscurely published article of 1952 [2] . He was an American geologist, who from 1909 worked on the problem and completed a manuscript in 1932 that was never published. Both works were discovered by the present author after the manuscript to Chaos and Creation was completed; no changes were needed as a result, except to credit Baker for his achievement. Baker stipulated an eccentrically orbiting planet, "Pentheus," as the intruder, and illustrated how by perturbative increase of orbital eccentricity alone, without any alteration of mean distance ... an orbit of mean distance 3 (astronomical units) might be so displaced that perihelion would be tangent to the Earth's orbit and aphelion well into Jupiter's danger zone, that is, greater than Jupiter's perihelion distance, which is 4.95... The planetary disturber is conceived to have been broken up by gravitational encounter with Jupiter, as suggested by Jeans (1934), and much of its ocean water, frozen with sand, gravel, and other debris, continued on a cometary orbit. The Earth occasionally met with these showers during the Pleistocene glacial epoch. The Roche limit, as explained by Jeans (1934, p. 269), is 2.49 times the radius of the larger of two bodies in an expanded or a contracted state as computed to make the density the same as that of the smaller body. With equal densities, the volume and mass are both represented by the same figure and are proportioned to the cube of the diameter. Thus Earth, with mass 1 and diameter 1, and a radius of about 4000 miles, would encounter Pentheus with a mass 27 times greater, a diameter 3 times longer, and a radius of 12,000 miles. In this case, the Roche limit would be 2.45 X 12,000 or 29,400 miles from center. As Pentheus progressed in its orbit it occupied a path 58,800 miles wide, within which no body much smaller could survive. The earth is conceived to have been deeply touched on the Pacific side by the Roche limit of the larger planet at the latter's perihelion... with the result that the Moon was born... If Pentheus were a mass of 64, radius 16,000 miles, its Roche limit would be of 39,200 miles. Baker's model path calls for a two hour passby between 10 PM and 12 PM, at a perihelion velocity of 23.5 miles per second. A bulge distending the Earth appears at l0 PM with a tide raising power 225,425 times that of the Moon. At 11 PM the Roche limit is almost tangential to the Earth with a power of 816,818. At midnight, the tide power is 1,170,701 times that of the Moon and the Roche limit embraces the whole outbursting section of Earth, which then escapes into space. The Earth has lost most of its crust, but has gained water and a fall-out of rock. Baker does not use the electrical power that would also operate effectively to the same end as gravitation. The distance might be several times farther given the same masses, if the intruder had come from afar bearing an electrical potential much different from the Earth's charge. Also the model proposed by this author is of a more gaseous and heavily electrified body. Its detailed treatment is available in Solaria Binaria and it ought perhaps not be discussed further in these pages, whose subject is the bottom of the oceans. The prevalent view of sea-floor spreading has molten material exuding from the great oceanic ridge volcanos, pushing into place as a strip and jostling the older strips that compose the floor to move further away from the ridges. Ocean floor chronology and drift theory are based upon observations that from one strip to another, every several "millions" of years, there occurs a magnetic field reversal. However, besides the other problems, which I have recounted, one core (395 A) from the Atlantic ridge flank shows magnetic differences in depth; the upper 170 meters is normally magnetized, the next 310 meters is reversed: and the following 40 meters is again normal [3] . This is an unwelcome surprise to chronometry and the theory of convection currents. Still, pursuant to our theory here, we should expect erratic magnetic effects to accompany the great outpourings of lava; as soon as a batch is dumped off the ridge it hardens with the magnetic orientation of the moment. Very soon, before it has moved away, another batch is dumped on top of it, then another, all occurring before the whole thickness of lava moves far enough to be free of additional burdening. If, as we think, the ocean basins could mostly be paved in a thousand years, during which time the Earth's field would be moving geographically and oscillating, the laminated magnetic structure of the floor must follow. Allen Cox points out that "if sea-floor spreading has occurred at a constant rate, the marine magnetic profiles may be interpreted to yield a reversal time scale going back 75 million years. The apparent average duration of the polarity intervals was greater during the time 10.6< t< 45 million years than during the past 10.6 million years, and during the time 45< t< 75 million years the average length was still greater." [4] That is, periods between reversals of the Earth's magnetic field occupy ever broader stripes or bands on the ocean bottoms as we go back in time. Cox realizes that this might be an effect of an inconstant rate but dismisses the idea. With our larger theory that negative exponential rates followed a catastrophic opening of the basins, we find this data supportive. The ocean basins opened fast and then ever more slowly, giving the appearance of a magnetic field that used to reverse more slowly than it does now. The Arctic Ocean scarcely deserves the name [5] . The North Pole area is flatter than the lands to the south and some miles lower than the swollen equatorial belt. If it were not so, there would be no Arctic Ocean. By far the greatest pan of the Arctic Ocean floor is continental shelf, less than 300 meters below sea level. There are half a dozen abyssal plains with depths from 2700 meters to 5000 meters. The Mid-Atlantic ridge forks northwards around Greenland and the two prongs come close together north of Greenland, then move in parallel across the ocean bed sandwiching the North Pole abyssal plain between them. A third "Alpha Cordillera" meanders northwest from the North Greenland regroupment, with many seamounts. The three ridges enter the continental shelf of northeast Siberia. They seem to disappear. But the Nansen Cordillera moves into the continental shelf in a great "Sadko Trough" and, precisely in line with it, some 400 km on, there begins the delta of the Lena River and a great valley, probably a rift valley. This rift cuts down through Asia ultimately to join the Indian Ocean ridges. Throughout the Arctic ocean bed the continental mass rises abruptly above the abyssal plains. Sheer cliffs of over 2000 meters are the rule. Although, on the one hand, a defender of erosionary theory would offer in explanation that the solid ice cover has preserved the "original" morphology, it may be argued that the fractures are new, occurred when the ice cap avalanched in Lunarian times and then were covered up during the Saturnian-Jovian age-breaking events that included a new ice cover, the present one. Semi-tropical, fully human cultures have been uncovered in islands only a few hundred kilometers from the North Pole. Iceland is apparently a high element along the North Atlantic (Reykjanes) ridge, volcanically produced. Figure A : Sketch of the main ridges and fractures of the Pacific Indian ocean bottom with main trenches. Possible Trans Asian and Trans-Euro-Mediterranean rifts are added to the drawing, which is adapted from O. G. Sorochtin, ed., Geophysics of the Ocean (in Russian), vol. II, fig. 17. The lithosphere (crust) is everywhere shallowest beneath the ridge lines. Thousands of seamounts shooting up from the ocean bottoms are not drawn here. FIGURE B (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The Arctic Hemisphere, indicating the largely continental (rather than basaltic ocean-type) bottom; and the North Atlantic Ridge passing by the North Pole and proceeding towards Siberia, where possibly it becomes a land rift proceeding to the Indian Ocean via Lake Baikal. (Pages B to F are author's sketches. In all of them, the outlines of the full continents, including shallow shelves, are drawn.) FIGURE C (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The Indian Ocean Hemisphere, noting the African Rift on the extreme left, the East Ninety Degrees Ridge, and the largely continental rock platforms that underlie the vast Asia-Australia area. FIGURE D (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The American Hemisphere, noting how both the Atlantic and mid-Pacific Ridges follow the shape of South America at great distances. A world-circling Tethyan shallow sea belt may once have passed through Central America, the Mediterranean and the South Seas, but can hardly be discerned because the ocean bottom growth and expansion and crustal slippages have largely erased it. FIGURE E (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.): The Antarctic Hemisphere, showing how ridge-fracture cut the south polar Continent off completely from all land to the North, as by a circular saw. It would appear that the main fractures occurred before the main continental shift, (as in the Arctic Basin to the South), because there still is a semblance of order to their progression around Greenland and into Asia. Furthermore, Greenland adheres in shape to the North American continent and its neighboring western fracture does not seem to descend as deep as the eastern one. And on its East, Greenland seems conformable to the Scandinavian platform. The simplest scenario for the mass movements that created the Arctic basin would call for a fracture, a swinging down of North America with a widening of the fracture valleys to create the abyssal plains. Northeastern North America was stretched out; Greenland and the many Canadian islands moved more slowly. Later Asia pushed northwards at one point in its generally southeast torque -the Yermak underseas Plateau -almost restoring contact with North America (Greenland) but letting the great ridge system pass through. The total true ocean area created by and in consequence of the explosions and worldwide venting system amounts to 310 millions km 2 . Its depth averages 4 km. A floor of 1.24 billion km 3 would have been laid almost entirely in a period of about 2000 years. After that time, the activity of basin-evolution would begin quickly to subside. The basins would continue to evolve at a greatly reduced rate. Most of the vents would have become inoperative. The ridges and fissures are still expanding around the globe but at a scarcely discernible rate; like today, rarely would the oceanic surfaces be troubled by seabottom volcanism and spreading. A full life would have arisen in the warm oceans; the marine species of today originated in the shallow Tethyan waters. Men began navigating the oceanic surfaces now. Whereas ancient fossilized life-forms have been discovered on high mountains, they are absent from the bottom of the sea. It is presumptive, if not incorrect, for geological writings to state that the oceans have covered and uncovered the land on several lengthy occasions. The mountains have arisen from the shallow waters of Pangea, bearing the fossils, or the fossils have been laid down by flooding and tides, or they have been dropped by cyclones. The abysses of the ocean contain only species whose origins in shallower waters are patent. The oceans were born recently, and therefore hold only what has lived in these times. Heezen and Hollister, recounting the scarce record available of life on the ocean bottoms, conjecture that "either there was no abyss then, or the relicts of these ancient seas have been completely destroyed. The deposits of earlier seas are found exclusively on the continents." To us it is clear that these earlier "seas" were the only "ancient seas" and were the shallow Tethyan seas and swamps. The length of the oceanic fractures and their transverse fissures (transform faults) amounts to some 300,000 linear kilometers. The funnel volcanos number in the tens of thousands. The emission from a volcano cone can be given a value equivalent to 5 kilometers of fissure volcanism, and the number, never counted, can be set at 50,000. Then 550,000 kilometers of venting area was available to produce on the average 2,254.5 km 3 of ocean floor per venting kilometer within 2,000 years, or an average of 1,127 km 3 per year. In two days in 1902, the Volcano of Santa Maria in Guatamala erupted and emitted 5.5 km 3 of material. A fissure of Laki, Iceland, part of the Atlantic northeast ridge forking, was quite active in 1783 and along a 25 km line emitted 15 km 3 of material in 4 1/ 2 months. In the tenth century an Icelandic fissure one year erupted 9 km 3 of lava alone along a 30 km trench. It is evident that if its activity were continuous at its full rate of eruption, the fissure of Laki would eject about 3,000 km 3 in 1000 years, 9000 km 3 in 3000 years, far more than its quota. The figure used as a base requirement, 1.24 billion km 3 , is twice as large as required. The underside of the ocean floor, comprising half the thickness of the floor, appears to be not a product of lava flow but a melting and cooling of basaltic rock in place. As the gaps widened, and the lava flowed to fill the chasm, the floor of the chasm at first softened from the heat all around it and from the waters, and then quickly hardened beneath the lava flows. This is but the cooled crust of the exposed magma of the mantle. When geologists declare, as does Shelton, that "... we cannot yet explain why magma exists where it does or seeks escape when it does," [6] they are not considering this kind of quantavolutionary and exponential solution. The continents can be viewed as the rims of the ocean basins. They are steep-sided blocks, whether they plunge directly into the waters or have sea-covered shelves that then plunge down. The continental slopes, on the other hand, are water-covered moraines of continental debris laying on top of ocean abyssal basalt. They have a triangular profile, making nearly a right angle where continental block meets ocean floor; the hypotenuse is a lengthy stretch moving from the top of the shelf at an angle of 5 on the average. The declining rate of expansion of the ocean floor contributed to the profile of the slopes. By moving first rapidly, then ever more slowly, they heighten the illusion that a gradual off-flow of sediments has created the sloping figure. More likely exponentially declining rates of continental debris and seabottom spread worked together to provide the profile. Deep river canyons extend hundreds of kilometers into them. Elephant teeth are found far out on the slopes at great depth; probably the slopes were laid down, occupied by terrestrial life forms, and then lately flooded. Deep turbidity currents, if they were to transport them, would bury them or destroy them. They lay near where the elephant died not long ago. As told in the previous chapter, the continental slopes are free of continental mountains, as are the true ocean bottoms. The logical implications of this fact have evaded geology. If most great mountain ranges are new, whether by our chronological reckoning or by that of conventional geology, why have none appeared on the continental slopes? The answer suggests itself: the mountains rear up at the edge of the precipices of the continents; they dump their debris into the abysses. Immense floods and tides traversed the continents and poured off the miles-steep continental blocks into the ocean. The canyons occur where the blocks were fractured, and consequently where the waters poured out most heavily. The canyons, which will be treated soon in more detail, were not submerged beneath the oceans until the ocean basins stopped growing and their waters crept up upon the continental blocks and shelves. The seas do not come in and kidnap the land; they beat back the detritus and even build land. Thus the great slopes could not have formed under uniformitarian conditions or even underwater. Prolonged, universal run-off of deluge and catastrophic tidal water produced slopes; the blocks were often towering water falls, dropping sheets of slurry into the abyss to form the slopes. The coarse gravel typical of the slopes far out to sea signals the impetuous rush and transporting power of the waters going to fill the basins. The scale would have dwarfed even the scene pictured by K. J. Hsh for the Mediterranean Sea (our dates and events differ, of course), "a giant bathtub, with the Straits of Gibraltar as the faucet. Seawater roared in from the Atlantic in a gigantic waterfall." If the falls delivered 10,000 cubic miles of seawater per year, they would have exceeded Niagara Falls 1000 times, and filled the Mediterranean basin in 100 years. "What a spectacle it must have been for the African ape-men, if any were lured by the thunderous roar." [7] The Mediterranean basin requires in its complexity an analysis that we cannot afford here. It appears to have been primordial, that is Pangean, and shallow. Then it may have suddenly closed and as suddenly opened, dry for a few years, and then overwhelmed by floods of water much greater than at present. [8] The ocean basins are composed of sima, rich in silicon and magnesium elements. They are of basalt. They are igneous, formed in red heat. They are thin. They are denser than the continental sial. The continents probably sit upon similar material, but much deeper, perhaps directly upon the upper mantle, save where the magma of the mantle may have expanded and intruded upon the continental granites. The continents and the ocean basins are distinct formations that were produced at different times and by different mechanisms. The sial is old. The sima is new. The fact that the shell of the ocean bottoms is only one-tenth as thick as that of the continents in itself suggests that the ocean crust is the product of a melt, that the seas are new, and that the continents were somehow in a position to resist complete volcanism or explosion. The fact that ocean crust is more basic or less acid than the continental crust indicates that it separated from the primeval melt after the granitic crust; so says M. Cook. The continents were produced by a cooling of the Earth's surface and by their own erosion and debris, and in direct contact with ultra-basic material of a heavier composition. Hence, the igneous marine floor does not cover a former continental surface, and density probes show this to be the case. Nevertheless the floor probably contains continental debris in small amounts. With all the sinking of lands reported in legends, one would expect ocean-bottom drills to collect continental material here and there. Very little appears, leading one to suspect that most sinkings have occurred on the continental slopes or shelves. The ocean basins are scarcely sedimented; they hold only 1% of all sedimentary materials. Under uniform conditions, this would represent only 16 million years of runoff deposits amounting to 10 18 tons 3 . Dissolved solids in the ocean waters compose 3.5% of their mass, far from making up the difference, nor can these solids be allocated to detritus removed from the continents. Often the rocks are bare along the circumglobal ridges. They are 20 meters thick or less. The thickest ocean sediments are not on the basins proper but on the continental shelves and slopes. Further, next to these areas where the abyss begins, sedimentation is thicker and can reach 1000 meters in exceptional areas. All of these oceanic sediments come either from cataclysmic off-pourings from the flooded continents, or from fall-outs, both volcanic and exoterrestrial. Material lagging at the end stream of the fission of the Moon might have dropped back to form islands of continental crust in mid-ocean. The time required for such sedimentation is calculable in a couple of thousand years or less under quantavolutionary conditions. The character of oceanic sediments varies. It differs markedly from much continental sediment that is rock. It is clay and ooze. The shelves carry clay; the polar regions, the slopes, and some of the abyss carries ooze; and the deep abyss carries clay. The polar basins also carry sand and boulders. Carbonates are heavy on the shelves and bottom oozes, but compose only from 2 to 10% of the clays (since they dissolve in the colder waters). Layers of distinct calcination and ash are interlarded with the oozes and clays in many parts of the world. An unknown proportion of additional ash has been incorporated chemically into the clay and ooze and remains to be distinguished. Much clay is igneous in origin, a product of volcanic tephra, volcanism, and cosmic fall-out. Much manganese has been precipitated onto rocks, pebbles, fish teeth, and bones over many areas, and pure manganese has been found on the bottom near the ridges. The towering ridges that girdle the world have flanks that descend gradually. They present almost no underseascape for many hundreds of miles. There is no thickening of the ocean basin crust beneath the ridges, unlike the so-called isostatic thickening beneath the mountains of the continents, much of which is probably due to blunted thrusting. This occurs despite the fact that the ridges rise higher than the continental Alps. Thus they are distinct in origins, as was pointed out in the last chapter. The continental mountains were shaped by horizontal forces, with the intense, sporadic assistance of electro-gravitational forces from outer space. The ridges were formed by vertical forces from within the Earth, with similar assistance; unlike continental mountains, they lack rock roots, evidencing that they were not thrusted. An impossible predicament is presented to conventional geophysics; how can uniformitarian forces produce this contrast? The continental crust folds and thrusts and compresses into abundant mountains; but the oceanic crust, having made its igneous ridges and seamounts once and for all, slides up and under and around without making mountains, but exudes lava in discrete amounts, and shakes seismically from time to time. The Pacific Rise conforms generally to what one would expect from an exploded, as contrasted with a cleaved, basin such as the Atlantic. Worthy of quotation here is a passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica (my remarks in brackets): Fast spreading... as is characteristic of the Pacific [because the basin was already blasted out], produces a rise. Slow spreading... results in the formation of a ridge. Sea-floor spreading is a symmetrical process that accretes new ocean floor equally to both flanks of a rift; [The East Pacific basin obviously did not accrete symmetrically.] When a former landmass splits apart, the ridge maintains a median position as the newly created ocean basin increases in size. This phenomenon occurred in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but, in contrast, the rise in the Pacific did not rift a landmass when it was formed, and consequently there is no reason for it to be median. [Again, no land mass.] A slash wound upon already swollen human flesh produces a swelling along the line, but a lower ridge than a single slash wound upon healthy flesh; so the Pacific rise is swollen high off the middle of the ocean bottom, and has a less marked ridge from the slash wound cutting it than the Atlantic basin has from its same slashing. The Earth expanded as well as exploded; whatever can explode can expand: a chapter has been given over to this subject. Although the Pacific Basin is concave, no one can examine a relief map of the Pacific Rise, for example, and say that the volume of the Earth remained unchanged thereby. Since this rise occurred, along with many other bulges, then a considerable expansion might be demonstrated by survey without resorting to theoretical physics. The globe has many slight bulges. Russian geophysicists have recently described its shape as formed by at least two geometric networks of lattices, a many-faceted figure [9] . So there may even be a pattern to the expansion of the global crystal. The latticework can be viewed as expansion joints; the total pattern makes the surface of the globe a set of convex plates rather than a perfect sphere. Under the conditions imagined here, much of the expansion would be expressed simply in a hurrying of the basin-paving process, accelerated by inrushing waters. The salt of the dropping canopies would also promote magmatic melting. Molten lava takes up more volume than solidified basalt; wherever the crust was boiling, it would expand the surface of the globe. The tidal pulls of the Intruder, temporarily, and the new Moon, permanently, would draw the surface of the Earth outwards; there the surface would pause, cool, and harden. The ridge mountain volcanos, and the ridge and transverse fault fissure volcanos, differ from tens of thousands of sea mounts, atolls and guyots that rose tall and slumped back upon the escape of the Moon from the Pacific Ocean Basin and smaller crustal material elements elsewhere. Some of these became instantly created volcanos and continued activity after the others had collapsed back. The Pacific seascape differs from the Atlantic by its incomparably more numerous holdings of seamounts. Morphological examination would indicate that the seamounts do not have the extensive piping systems of continental volcanos. As the main blow struck and the fracture opened in North America, it drove that continent as a block southwestwards until it overrode the East Pacific Rise (fracture) that had just appeared off what was now its west coast. Much of this western area promptly erupted into volcanism and was covered by huge lava flows and extensive, faulted desert plateaus and plains. The Asian and Australasian coasts and islands do not fit into the North American continent because vast spaces opened up and the whole arc from Alaska to Southern Asia broke away with the explosion of the Moon. A boundary ridge is not easily visible but extends down the Pacific basin on the West from Kamchatka Peninsula to the Campbell Plateau and ties into the Emperor Sea volcanic seamounts and the Line Island Ridge. The Indian Ocean bottom, unlike the Pacific and Atlantic basins, appears to have been well-traveled. Antarctica has been shoved southward some hundreds of kilometers, and girdled by two great ridges. A newly discovered rift pierces the Waddell Sea, probably a transverse fault from the ridge to its north, and is lost under the great ice plateau hundreds of kilometers inland. Australia has been ushered eastward by a fork of the same fracture that pushed India north and Antarctica south. Indeed, if one wishes an up-to-date definition of the continents of the world, useful for some purposes, one may say that a continent is a body of land surrounded by an oceanic cleavage. Even in the case of Europe and Asia, some believe the fracture to exist, going up from the Indian Ocean through the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the Ural mountains and into the Arctic complex earlier described. Contemporary geological theory has also traced the path of the Indian subcontinent from Southeast Africa to the Tibetan Plateau. "The vast Himalayan range was created when a plate of the earth's crust carrying the landmass of India collided with the plate carrying Asia some 45 million years ago, having travelled 5,000 kilometers nearly due north, across the expanse now occupied by the Indian Ocean." [10] The drift itself took much longer, since it occurred at the rate of 6 to 16 cm/ year, if one were to accept the belts of magnetic reversals that mark the stretches of ocean bottom along the line of march and the dates given the lava from one belt to the next. However, cores drilled into the Indian Ocean bed not far from the observed course produced gaps in dating of sediments by fossils of many millions of years, perhaps fifty millions in some cases. "Why these accumulations are missing," commented the directors of the survey, "is at present a mystery." [11] Fifty from a hundred million or so years is a big proportion. That "there are more gaps than record" is, of course, a familiar complaint among paleontologists on land as well as under the sea. In the other great basins, gaps of twenty million years in the fossil record are common. With sediments so thin, the gaps are not so important, say some -a turbidity current or two, and there you are. (Geophysicists and paleontologists can be catastrophists Ó la minute, when it is demanded of them.) Still, when there is a gap in the fossil record of between 50 to 70 millions of years ago, we are speaking of late Cretaceous times and of the disastrous end of the dinosaurs and most marine species. A layer of unfossilized chert tiles the floor just above this zone, "as though some catastrophic development killed off most of or much marine life." One begins to suspect that the Cretaceous boundary may be considered as the primeval age of the ocean beds and that all which is found in the abyss arrived there afterwards; further, the finale of the Cretaceous may have been the end of Pangea and the outburst of the Moon, even if both are to be dated at a few thousand years ago. Almost all of the sea floor assigned to a date is Cretaceous or younger [12] . We mentioned earlier that the Himalayas are agreed to have risen steeply within the last dozen thousand years. We called to the attention of Raikes and other students of the destruction of proto-Indian civilization that their "uplifts" were part of world-wide catastrophe. Today, the people of the southern Himalayas are suffering from a horrendous erosion of their soil. They are blamed for improper farming practices and overpopulation. This may be true enough, but, considering the youngness of this region, it is also fair to suggest that the Himalayan slopes have simply not existed long enough to have come sliding down on their own accord. The cruxes of the internal activity of the Earth during the lunarian period occurred at two well-marked belts of discontinuity. One is the Moho discontinuity just below the shell in which the oceans and continents are fixed. Here the upper mantle boundary preserves an almost liquid character before it resumes a hotter but hardened condition farther down. This boundary of difference would scarcely be noticeable if it had not marked the torque and twist of the surface in the phases of shock and adjustment. For a simple unagitated melt produces, except in purely statistical terms, an undifferentiated transition of rocks up to the sedimentary level. The Moho boundary marks a breakdown of viscosity on a worldwide scale. The second crux occurred at the 2900 kilometer-deep level of the lower mantle, some 50.0 kilometers before the upper core's boundary. Suddenly the density index, that had been moving at a fairly even rate of increase through the rocks after leaving the lighter crustal regions, leaps from 5.42 g/ cm 3 to 9.91, a difference of 4.49 g/ cm 3 . This is about one-third of the total value of the scale, which begins at 3.31 and ends at 13.00 at the center of the Earth. No marked changes in pressure, gravitational intensity, or incompressibility are notable at this level. The largest secondary torque of the globe in reaction to axial displacement and rotational torque and retardation happened here. Lesser torques occurred at the 400, 1000, 5000 and 5100 kilometer depths where seismic discontinuities are observed. Several points deserve stress in reviewing what has just been said and looking ahead to the next chapter. An immense part of the Earth's shell is simply missing. It had nowhere to go except into space, for it cannot be decomposed, mixed with plutonic material, or shovelled under the sea bottoms. A psychological fallacy pushes us to believe that the ocean basins were made by and for the primordial waters. That the basins exist is one accident; that waters fill the basins is another accident. The accidents added up to a "miracle" of good fortune for mankind. Better near extinction than a totally frozen or drowned globe. At first, the waters were below the rims of the basins; now they slop over the rims. The East Atlantic Basin corresponds to the West Atlantic Basin. Their former juncture is plain. The Pacific Ocean is deeper. The East Pacific Basin is sharply marked where the southern, western and northern margins are arranged as a giant set of arcs detached from a blasted area. All the ocean basins are young, thin, and scarcely sedimented. Oceanographers who recently discovered these facts were amazed; in a few years, the basins became four billion years younger. Only potassium-argon datings, which are vulnerable to catastrophic events, let the bottoms achieve even this young age. The basins are not 200 millions as against 4,500 million years old. They maybe only aged a dozen millennia. The surprise is greater: not one-thirtieth as old, but one-ten-thousandth as old. Three additional, related points are stressed in other works of the author and have only been mentioned in this book: Despite the almost total destruction of the biosphere by heat, explosion, suffocation, and famine, many species survived. Marine life soon found vast new breeding grounds. So did plants and land animals. Even before they were drowned in the later deluges, the cooled seamounts harbored many forms of land life on their summits. Horrified, stunned, fully human beings saw all of this happen. Wherever archaeology finds "paleolithic" and "early neolithic" sites, it finds not slow soil coverings but fast disaster coverings. Much legendary and physical evidence points to a newly emplaced Moon and a worldwide catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago. The network of fractures around the world is unitary. Mechanically it must be considered as the effect of one and the same event. The Moho discontinuity recorded today beneath the Earth's shell at from 5 to 50 kilometers depth may denote where the shell rafted and where it was peeled off. The next two chapters deal explicitly with the fracture and rift system of the world. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-one: Ocean Basins)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-one: Ocean Basins) 1. Richard A. Kerr, "Venus...," 207 Science (18 Jan. 1980), 291. 2. Baker was born in 1872. In 1932 he mimeographed The Atlantic Rift and Its Meaning in Detroit. Fortunately a copy reached the library of Congress. The article is "The Earth Participates in the Evolution of the Solar System," Detroit Acad. Nat. Sci., 1954 (pamphlet). 3. "Testing Vine-Matthews," Open Earth 3 (Apr. 1979), 28-9. 4. Geo Rev., 244; and see A. Cox R. R. Doell, 189 Nature( 1956), 45 which contains summery of paleomagnetic tests; and "Geomagnetic Reversals," 163 Science (17 Jan. 1969), 237-44. 5. See National Geographic Magazine, map, "Arctic Ocean Floor" (Wash. D. C., 1976). 6. Op. cit., 69. 7. "When the Mediterranean Dried Up," Sci. Amer. (Dec. 1972), 33 8. E. Smith 28 Sea Frontiers (1982), 66-74. 9. Chris Bird, New Age J., 36-41. 10. D. P. McKenzie and J. G. Schlater, "Evolution of the Indian" Sci. Amer. (May 1973), 63. 11. Sullivan, op. cit., 172. 12. See map in Sullivan, op. cit., plate 22. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART V: } {Q RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS: } {C Chapter 22} {T Fractures and Cleavages} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO FRACTURES AND CLEAVAGES In the past few years, the public has become well aware of the revolution in oceanography, a major element of which was the uncovering of an immense integrated global fracture system. It is a kind of reverse harness which works from the inside instead of the outside to control natural behavior around the world. The question is whether the harness emerged from deep within or whether the globe was harnessed by an exoterrestrial force. Except in westernmost North America, in East Africa and the Near East, through Iceland and Central Asia, through the Adriatic-Rhine River rift, and beneath India, the fractures course below the sea, where they are rendered visible by the ridges running alongside of them. Many years ago, De Lapparent and Howard Baker had recognized the oceanic rifts and called them recent, while Heer had assigned the boundaries of the Mediterranean to the era of the drift [1] . The system is worldwide. It may be said to begin in the arctic region, moving south from both sides of Greenland. It shoots down to the antarctic region, forks west and east, and forks again north and east. The east fork traverses the South Pacific and rises northwards when it strikes South America, proceeding up to and around the North Pole where it is reconnected with the northward fork that has shot up through the Asian continent via the Persian-Indian coast, Lake Baikal, and northern Siberia. There it probably connects with the fork around Greenland, completing a circuitry of the globe. Less apparent is a worldwide rupture that carries through the East-Central Pacific, Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South Asian areas, possibly a fracture along the line of the old Tethyan Sea equatorial belt. The present globe does not portray the original situation. A Pangean globe would show nothing but land and shallow seas. Today's named areas stood unbroken. The globe then was without ocean basins. Its main body of water was the Tethyan Sea, corresponding to the present Caribbean, Mediterranean, and trans-Pacific northern tropical region. This was the equatorial region. The South Pole was bounded by lands now disappeared, unless New Zealand and a few other continental areas are remnants of them. The continents of South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica were far to the North, and part of the Pangean land mass. The fracture originated at the old North Pole and proceeded rapidly towards the old South Pole, bending as the north geographical axis of the globe shifted to the northeast and as global rotation slowed and resumed. The globe must have jerked suddenly as the Atlantic cleavage passed through what are now the Brazilian and African humps, and then resumed its more direct southerly course. The polar ice cap is said by Weyer to have shifted its position by 10 to 15 degrees along a line 60 degrees west and 120 degrees east [2] . Possibly the cap was cleaved and the rift began running; then almost immediately the Intruder began to cut its swath from the Pacific crust and staggered the Earth to a momentary pause, driving the rift eastwards in Mid-Atlantic. When the fracture reached the South Pole, losing momentum but cleaving the Earth rapidly at the full depth of the continental crust, it veered sharply eastwards slicing through the then polar south region until it met with the westward shifting "American" continents, whereupon it veered northwards until it reached the northwestern fork of the north polar fracture. It skirted the eastern rim of the great pit of the Moon material that had been blasted up and away. A secondary forking sent the fracture northwards shortly after the south polar fracture occurred, slicing through "Africa/ India," then, after crossing the Tethyan fracture, resumed in diminished depth its course across central Asia. Meanwhile the initial point of rupture at the old North Pole sent a forking movement northeast and northwest, isolating Greenland. Both of these fractures joined the trans- Asiatic fracture at different points. Earlier, as the main "Atlantic" fracture encountered the equatorial Tethyan area, it incited a trans-world secondary fracture, that moved more rapidly east than west. The western Tethyan fracture cut through the continental mass then occupying the Gulf of Mexico and lost itself in the inchoate molten mass occupying the blasted crater of the fissioned Moon material. It may scarcely be perceived to end at the West Pacific Rise (rupture). The eastern thrust moved, however, through the "Mediterranean" and "Near East" then through a blast area which soon was overrun by a jumble of lands moving southwards. Finally major rifts struck out from the Tethyan fracture north and south. On the south a Mediterranean and a Syrian fracture join the Red Sea rift and continue south across East Africa to join the proto-Indian fork. In proportion to a number of submarine fissures, this rift was a moderate addition to the world fracture system. Africans of the Rift countries retain legends of great structural changes in their land. To their stories are to be added similar Arab and Hebrew stories. From the beginning to the end, the fracture system might have been the work of a day; geophysicist Cook speaks in terms of hours. It conceivably inspired the "Third Day", during which "God created the oceans" in Hebrew story. "And God said, 'Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear. '" [3] At the end of the day, the continents had been carved out, many islands had been sliced along the Tethyan way, the antarctic region, the arctic region and the "East Pacific" area. The continents were in motion. The Earth was girdled by chasms and ready to move and expand. Pangea was ended. The climax of chaos had passed. Two characteristics of the world fracture system deserve much more attention than geophysicists have allowed them. Only Cook, to my knowledge, has frankly expressed what is so apparent, that the total system was the work of hours; perhaps he could utter the shocking sentences because he had won a Nobel prize for his work on explosives. That our precious globe could be treated so abruptly and cruelly is inconceivable to most people; it is like an innocent child coming upon the scene of an autopsy. Cook remarks that "there is evidence for the hexagonal structures characteristic of shock fracture..." This is no less than what many geologists have been trying to say in the "tectonic plate" school of thought and the Russian "crystal grid structure" theory that C. Bird has described, all hesitating to give voice to the necessary implications. Cook goes on to add the clause, "but this evidence is by no means perfect." He may be saying this because he does not deal with the two essential components of the epoch- making event, the intervention of a great exoterrestrial body and the blasting of the Moon from the Pacific Basin. These elements of the scene tend to obscure what would otherwise appear as a more normal hammer fracture of a solid crystal globe in rotation. The Antarctic continent (including the continental shelf of the Ross Sea) is steep- standing in its surrounding ocean. About half of it executes a remarkable circular tour, from 0 to 180 east. The other half presents a more jagged coastline, deeply retracted from the imaginary circumference of the eastern arc. Opposite the uniform half circle are the continental masses of the world. Opposite the retracted half of the continent occurs the South Pacific Ocean, between New Zealand and South America, where by our theory the Moon was drawn forth. The Antarctic continent, we surmise, must have been located north and east, and its south and west side was the limit of the exploded crust. Its north and east portion was broken off from the neighboring continents by the forking of the Atlantic fracture, east and west along the circular arc, and had just been isolated to its west and south by the lunar explosions. Forced down by the fracture and up by the new abyss, it settled centrally over the new South Pole, contained there by lava flows from all directions. Its slopes are heavy with debris, indicating that the separation and explosion happened when the continent was ice-free and/ or that an ice cap, if there, melted catastrophically. The lack of fossils more recent than the Cretaceous in Antarctica seems to pose a challenge to short-term time reckoning in quantavolutionary theory. If the terminal Cretaceous was the time of lunar fission, however, the lack tends to confirm the theory. Thereafter Antarctica was isolated. The puzzling fractures of the Pacific basin north of Antarctica invite puzzling quantavolutionary assumptions. The Nazca Ridge and its associated seamounts moving west off northwestern South America find their mirror image in the Tuamotu Archipelago far on the other side of the mid-Pacific Rise (Albatross Cordillera). Also the whole of the western coast of South America conforms in shape and fit to the same cleavage. The cleavage image is shifted southwest. Are we seeing double? These features must have originated together. The Rise must have pulled away from South America faster than South America, impelled from the east by the Atlantic, moved to follow it. This is understandable if the Rise had no crust, but a yawning basin, to its own West; meanwhile it was being pushed reactively by its own east side lavas as these were blocked and pushed by South America. Farther North, the Rise loses itself in the great transform fractures of what we call the Tethyan Belt and is then overriden by the North American continent which has been shifting southwest with the opening of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans. A second matter calling for attention is the form of the fracture system: the ridges move rectolinearly with sidewise steps and with a great many perpendicular fissures. Perhaps the successive torques to which the globe was now being subjected shifted the main line of fracture. Every time there occurred a glitch in the crustal velocity of rotation, the main fracture line would shift to the East. At the new equatorial belt, a great shift to the East is observable. Several more 'glitch-points' occur before the fracture cuts through Africa-Antarctica and then, perhaps because the slowdown of rotation had terminated, the sidewise steps are no longer in evidence. Nor are the transverse fissures any longer apparent. The long east-west fractures seem independent of the main ridge. Instead, passing now for the rest of its journey through evacuated surface, the major fracture, in its bifurcation, is accompanied by myriads outbursts of lava mountains, the seamounts. Seamounts occur in large numbers along the Atlantic ridge and in various evacuated regions of the basins. A close statistical analysis may ultimately use the seamounts as indicators of torque, time of fracture, velocity of the land masses, and other events, now quite obscure, of this period. The striking conformity of the Mid-Pacific Ridge with the shape of South America and its passage beneath western North America persuades us that the original continental land on the east of the fracture is still there. But there exists no sial continent west of the Rise, that has any kind of morphological association with it. There is no well-defined boundary of the oceanic expansion to the west, nothing to compare with Euro-Africa on the other side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, no well-defined boundaries such as tie South America, Africa, and Australia to Antarctica. The "Circle of Fire," which marks an arc of volcanism and seismism from Southern Chile to the Aleutians and down through Japan, stops; so the Circle is not a circle and not a fitting image of the American side either. The morphology of the basin of the Pacific would be an incredible coincidence, a gross improbability, without our positing the disappearance of its entire crustal covering west of the Rise. Attempts to produce a unified time-scale for the spreading away from the ocean ridges have not been successful. Heirtzler and his associates found that relative to the time scale for the spread of the South Pacific, the North Pacific time scale was in error by a factor of two. The principal technique employed has been potassium-argon radiochronometry. Nor do the spreading patterns moving from the ridges around the world agree on the location of the North Pole around which presumably they would evidence rotation. Still, because of similarities in the spreading pattern of widely separated regions, it is believed, and we think rightly, that the spreading of lava was a universally concurrent phenomena. The similarities, where they show a discontinuous floor-laying off of one ridge show the same off of another; such similar discontinuities connote simultaneity. Earlier Cook (1963) had advanced evidence for the recent rupture of the continental crust that would probably have erased most of the perplexities just evidenced [4] . 1. The uplifts observable in Fennoscandia and Northeastern America "began at the same time and followed essentially the same relaxation equation. This equation, derived by Vening-Meinesz, is an exponential rise equation characteristic only of a sudden unloading of the crust followed by a normal relaxation." 2. The maximum depression at the center of the ice cap was along the seashore where presently stand Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and Labrador Sea. 3. Without the missing land in these northern areas, no great ice masses would have collected: "the ice would simply have rolled off into the sea." The seas of the region could not have existed prior to 10,000 years ago. 4. The uplift data fits into the extended fracture that thereupon moves down the Atlantic and around the world. 5. The ice stored in the ice cap is calculated as equal to providing the water that would fill the Arctic and Atlantic basins. 6. A "Great Arctic Magnetic Anomaly" defined by E. R. Hope from the magnetic remanence of crustal rocks exhibits "a surface dipole magnet in the North Pole region." One apparent pole is in Northern Baffin Island, the other offshore from Severnaya Zemlya in Siberia. These two apparent poles appear to be at one and the same location, if the two separated lands represented are pushed back together at the location of the former pole. "In other words, it would only be necessary to return all the land masses in the northern hemishpere to their original position by reversal of the process described by Du Toit [the splitting and rafting of the Arctic crust] in order to completely remove this magnetic anomaly." Two sets of conditions governed the occurrence of the world-girdling fracture and the Earth's expansion. The first condition of fracture is an unevenly applied pressure on a shell. The shell is the Earth's surface down to a level which presently can be called the Moho discontinuity but which in the Age of Pangea was the point when the coolness of the Earth's surface disappeared into the mounting temperature of the crust and mantle, caused by primordial rising heat convection from the center, by pressure from the rocks above, by radioactive flow blocked from emission by the surface charge of the Earth, and by the greater centrifugal force of rotating material of greater density than the surface material. The unevenly applied pressure consisted of ice caps rapidly formed in the thousand years before by falling ice and icy waters; these did not need to be melted at the equator, then raised by evaporation, then blown to the north, and then dropped again. They contributed directly to the ice cap, and to such an extent, that shortly there formed a tall mass of ice covering Pangea around its North and South Poles. If the Earth had not had its magma sources opened up by fission, fracture and expansion, it might have been frozen completely over. Great depressions were formed in the rocks, depressions which have still not relaxed after 12,000 years. This pressure was a mechanical potential exercised around the circumference of the ice bowls. The fact that oceans did not exist permitted a much greater piling up of the ice caps, for a deep water basin cannot hold the same amount of ice. A second condition of fracture is a formation that can be split. Millions of geological faults of the Earth attest to the potentiality of rocks for splitting and shearing. If the body to be split is spinning, the slightest delay in spin along a line of fault will drive the one side of the fault away from the other side. The centrifugal force in the Earth's rotation achieves this. The setting up of a massive horizontal circular pressure against weaker rock and the resistance of denser and stronger rock below incline the potential event towards a split rather than an implosion or collapse. The buildup of ice will continue until the horizontal walls will give way through folding and thrusting. But the ice mountain does not thrust over because it is sunken in, with the form of a cap. The horizontal strain to the depth of the ice cap causes a continual heat at its edges. It leaks water, but accumulates more ice than it loses. The heat augments below, too, from the pressure of the ice upon the non-basic sedimentary rock and granites below. These grease the cap undersurfaces. If there were now to be a sharp blow upon the center of the cap, the cap would crack radially. In addition the weakened crust beneath the cap would give way. The Earth's axis of rotation would be tilted to meet the first blow; the Earth's spin would take up a new figure with an axis towards the direction from which the blow came. The fracture would leap out of the blow and race around the globe in the manner described above. All of these conditions were fulfilled. The blow struck. The hammer could have been a lightning bolt from an Intruder from the northeast. At a distance of a million kilometers, it began to agitate the space sheath of Earth. The axis of the Earth tilted to meet it. The bolt struck the ice cap and sent radial fractures in all directions. At the same time electro-gravitational force was applied, with particular stress upon the pole, wrenching the Earth by its cap against its rotational direction. Earth's rotational velocity slowed sharply. All lines of weakness were stressed. The Globe shuddered from the blow and fractured deeply. The eastward rotation of the Earth sent the deep fracture rushing down the "Atlantic" and "Pacific" sides to the other end of the spin, the South Pole. The Intruder swooped closer and passed over the Southern Hemisphere, the "Pacific Basin," where it flayed the Earth of half its crust, and then passed on. The crustal debris shot up into space in pursuit. Most of it turned aside and became the Moon. Some fell back to Earth, now and in the succeeding years. After centuries of a ring of debris, the Moon was fully assembled. The Earth came to see the new great light and the Sun and other planets as well. The globe was probably spinning east before and during its exoterrestrial encounter, and the Intruder apparently approached from the northeast. Thus a swath of crust was removed that began narrowly in the North, barreled out at the epicenter of the encounter in the Pacific Basin, and continued to explode for thousands of miles until it passed into farther space. The "crater of the Moon" was elliptic in form. Because of its possibly being remembered and because of its continental geography, the great Rift Valley of East Africa might be recalled for discussion. Viewed from the south, it appears to begin where the Island of Madagascar was detached from the African continent, proceeds north, bifurcates, resumes a unified path and leaves the continent at the Afar Triangle, thence moving northwest below the Red Sea, bifurcating once more to pass up the valley containing the Dead Sea into Syria (where it loses itself in the jumble of mountains observing the burial of the old Tethyan Sea and Tethyan welt that is moving generally west and east; the western bifurcation is questionable, but is likely to pass across the Mediterranean, up the Adriatic, beneath the Alps, and out along the Rhine graben that ends far to the northwest beneath the North Sea. Arabia fits cleanly into Africa across the Red Sea. Why the Rift should turn northwest at this point may be explained by the westward thrusting Gulf of Aden-Indian Ocean faults, which have sent out a powerful arm in this direction, thus reinforcing each other and cutting a neat right angle around the Arabian peninsula. The narrows where the Gulf of Aden enters the Red Sea are called Bab-el-Mandeb, the straits of tears, after the legendary devastation the rupture caused. The Olduvai Gorge and Afar Triangle, whose hominid fossils have been assigned ages up to 3.5 million years, sit upon the Rift Valley, which is kilometers wide and houses its own world beneath the towering plateaus and mountains abutting it. Opinions differ as to the age of the African rift. That it has been active in human times seems evident from legends and excavations. Its origins have been set as far back as 2.7 billion years, however, by R. B. M. McConnell, speaking most directly of the 4000 kilometer section from the Red Sea to the Zambezi River [5] . He speaks of "transcurrent movement" between more ancient shield rocks, but also of "perennial" reactivation. So eminent an authority as Flint accorded the Rift an origin in the late Pleistocene, well within our ken [6] . If India and Madagascar were dissociated from the continent some 100 million years ago, as is currently believed, certainly the Rift would have been strongly activated then. Also, if Africa and the Americas had separated not long before that time, then, too, the Rift would have been agitated. The great platform that hovers above the Rift might represent the kind of worldwide swelling expounded earlier as an accompaniment of the general global cracking. From the standpoint of this book, the arguments giving a long history to the Rift are worth no more or less than the arguments for long time-scales elsewhere in the world. In Solaria Binaria, which is primarily a work in astrophysics, the age of the Earth's rocks is put at less than a million years; in this work, which concentrates upon the recent reworking of the Earth's surface, we are not interested so much in the older rocks as in their recent upheavals. In this context, we see the swift movement eastwards of the African continent and the lifting of its great southeastern plateau region as concurrent. The Rift had already happened; two masses were pulled apart in the global fracturing; but reactive pressures from the even larger fracture to the east, now below the sea, compressed the Rift and let the dropped rocks fall only a small distance before halting, trapped as they are today, covered with lakes, volcanic ash, and plains. The Olduvai Gorge has been assigned 200 million years; it was then a late fault branching off the main faulting of the Rift. If it is so old, it becomes difficult to explain the hominid and mammal fossils protruding from its walls. They could not be cliff-dwellers; so the Gorge must be younger than they. How young they are is in question; the legends of heavy rift activity weigh upon our mind, and there is a variety of evidence that the hominids may be much younger, material that is treated by this written Homo Schizo I. The evidence extends to the Afar Triangle, a flat land-fill actually, born of the pull-out of Arabia, where related hominids are found. It also extends to the Palestinian portion of the Rift where Olduvai types of hominid sites are discoverable. The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, we have said, seem to have been produced out of sharp lateral faulting shifting the end section of the Carlsberg Ridge of the Indian Ocean northward. This might indicate that the total area east of the Owen Fault Zone, including the African Rift-Gulf of Aden-Red Sea rift occurred at the time of or only a little later than the globe-girdling rift of which the Carlsberg Ridge forms part. Further activities of the Rift advance into proto-historic times, particularly into the Bible. The occasion of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, including the story of Sodome and Gomorrah (see below, Chapter 29), treat specifically of the same rift. M. Blanckenhorn placed the age of the Syrian section of the Rift in the early glacial period [7] . W. Irwin retrojected the influx of magnesium salts into the Dead Sea, on uniformitarian principles, and arrived at a 50,000 year approximation of its age. Velikovsky gives several reasons for reducing this age drastically, and estimates both the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley have an age of 5000 years. In all the disastrous effects of the biblically described destruction, a sea is not mentioned; yet when the Israelites under Moses and Joshua arrived on the spot around 3450 years ago they encountered the Sea. The Jordan River, argues Velikovsky, had changed the direction of its flow, too. "Prior to the Exodus, the Jordan Valley was on a higher level than the Mediterranean Sea. With the rupture of the tectonic structure along the river and the dropping of the Dead Sea chasm, many brooks in Southern Palestine which had been flowing to the south must have changed their direction and started to flow towards Palestine, emptying into the southern shore of the Dead Sea." Legendary references indicate that heavy bursts of lightning were involved in the production of fire, smoke, and sulphur, whether by cosmic stream injections in which the planet Jupiter (Marduk in Babylonian, Zedek in Hebrew) is insistently implicated, or by subterranean upheaval along the rift (by no means excluding an exoterrestrial prime mover). Allowing therefore that some of the major rifting of the Earth occurred as late as several thousand years ago, we conclude this chapter. All of the great rifts of the world are connected in time and by cause. They form a system that harnesses the world to the recent fission of the Moon. The individual histories of the sections of the world fracture system are insignificant by comparison with the common historical experience of the whole. The system functioned to balance the world by redistributing the crust and by expansion and to vent gases and heat during the process. The climactic event was tangibly sensed by the Pangean Earth days in advance; it occupied a day in establishing the new morphology of the Earth-Moon system; thousand of years were required for its major effects to devolve into the processes recognizable in the world today. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-two: Fractures and Cleavages)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-two: Fractures and Cleavages) 1. Beaumont, op. cit., 190, 197. For Baker see the preceding chapter. 2. V S. I. S. R. 2 (1980-1) Discussed by Warlow, 34-5. 3. Genesis I: 9 and fn Oxford Annotated Bible (NY 1965), 1. 4. 40 Proc. U. A. S. A. L., part I, op. cit., 74-7, also in Prehistory... 5. R. B. McConnell, 83 Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull. (Sep. 1972), 2549-72. 6. Glacial Geology, 523; Glacial and Quaternary Geology (1971). 7. Velikovsky, "Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah," VI Kronos 4 (1981) 49, and see the accompanying note by Frederick B. Jueneman; also J. E. Strickling, "Sodom and Gomorrah," 2 S. I. S. Workshop 4 (1979), 3-5. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART V: } {Q RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS: } {C Chapter 23} {T Canyons and Channels} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHANNELS AND CANYONS The model river channel combines the history of an earth fault, a catastrophic torrent, and an erosional runoff bed. Most large rivers, perhaps all of them, are children of Okeanos, whom the Greeks called "the Father of Rivers" who personified the sky waters before the first deluges, as we said in Chapter 13, and then came down to Earth. His children carried his waters into the new ocean beds. Many myths appear to conjure rivers where none exist, and, of course, a great many dry river beds of once tremendous rivers are to be found around the world. During the Universal Flood of Deucalion, a small chasm was said to open in Athens into which the waters emptied. According to Lucian the people of Hieropolis (near Aleppo, Syria) "say that a great chasm opened in their country, and all the water of the flood ran away down it." Again, myths warrant hypotheses. In the Volta River Project (West Africa), a onetime shallow river bed was suggested by a deep river bed with a jagged bottom. Local legends spoke of upheavals in the now quiet area, and when the water was lowered prior to constructing a dam, several protuberances became islands, and at a depth of 35 feet revealed carvings whose age was estimated at 3000 years [1] . The Po River is probably an extension of the African-Rift-Red Sea-Rhine rift valley that connects with a buried rift in the Adriatic Sea. It carried down the immense debris of the sudden uplift of the Alps. It may be the ancient sacred river, the Eridanus, of Greco-Roman legend, long-lost because later a sea. The Po serves in truncated form to water and drain the Po Valley. The Rhine River picks up the graben northwest of the Alps, and moves it far out into the North Sea; not long ago, it shared its burden with a westward flowing river that was then naturally dammed so as to reduce the Loire River of France to more modest proportions. The Colorado River may be a ramification of the East Pacific Ridge, that runs up the Bay of Lower California and strikes through the desert into the raised platforms of the southwestern states, abetting the disintegration of the Rocky Mountain uplift; once its tectonic work was done, it began its present work of erosion. The great rivers of China flow in the direction they do, says a Chinese myth, because the goddess Niu-Kwa made the waters of the great flood stream off towards the southeast; the whole Earth had tilted and sunk into the sea there [2] . Most great rivers of the world understandably conform to the processes set into motion by the lunarian outburst. Many hasten along courses conveniently provided them and their tributaries by fractures, the Rhine, the Colorado, the Susquehanna, the Indus, the Congo and others. In decoding the natural history of river beds, geologists fighting the ghosts of catastrophism have refrained from extremes. M. G. Wolman and 3. P. Miller in 1960 essayed an analysis of the "Magnitude and Frequency of Forces in Geomorphic Processes."[2A] Using mainly four rivers as their cases, they conclude that "dwarf" gradualist forces operate steadily to perform most transport of sediments, that "man- sized" moderate forces of brimming "bankfull" waters supplement the "dwarf" work in carving banks and valleys, and depositing sediments, thus accounting for perhaps 90% of the changes effectuated. The rare work of "giants" make up the balance, including many switches off channels and movements of erratic boulders. Unfortunately they lack respectable data over time even for these "giant" events, which they estimate at 50-year intervals; yet they call them catastrophes. Like the experts on seismism, their extremes are historically confined to what noone doubts have been uniformitarian times. Of course, then, they must pass over with the weakest of scenarios the grand metamorphism and concentrate upon pygmy processes playing out recent history. They realize that they are dealing with exponential, logarithmic processes, but excise the peak curves. In the only concession to longer history, they murmur at one place about "materials inherited from a period of greater stream competence which possibly existed during glacial times." As we have noted, "the end of the ice ages" is a cover-up fiction of all that has happened to the lately tortured Earth. Not alone of river channels do they speak but also of beaches and winds. With regard to beaches they introduce the commonly accepted concept of an "equilibrium profile." It is "an average form around which rapid fluctuations occur. Waves from storms may periodically destroy the equilibrium form, but over a period of years there is an average equilibrium profile by which the beach may be characterized." The more meaningful question is where does this profile come from in the first place -these millions of profiles, we should add, unique in themselves but in distribution worldwide? Where is the "supergiant's" place, that smashed out the profile to begin with, in the analysis and theory. As for the effects of winds upon river and beach morphology, many analyses, they say, "indicate that a log-normal frequency distribution of wind velocities is a general rule." The log-normal winds, like log-normal river flows and sea waves are what recent experience and the authors give as "log-normal"-curves that rise scarcely enough to make their uniformitarian hearts skip a beat. Their last paragraph is naive, but so unconsciously significant as to be worth quoting: Perhaps the state of knowledge as well as the geomorphic effects of small and moderate versus extreme events may be best illustrated by the following analogy. A dwarf, a man, and a huge giant are having a wood-cutting contest. Because of the metabolic peculiarities, individual chopping rates are roughly inverse to their size. The dwarf works steadily and is rarely seen to rest. However, his progress is slow, for even little trees take a long time, and there are many big ones which he cannot dent with his axe. The man is a strong fellow and a hard worker, but he takes a day off now and then. His vigorous and persistent labors are highly effective, but there are some trees that defy his best efforts. The giant is tremendously strong, but he spends most of his time sleeping. Whenever he is on the job, his actions are frequently capricious. Sometimes he throws away his axe and dashes wildly into the woods, where he breaks the trees or pulls them up by the roots. On the rare occasions when he encounters a tree too big for him, he ominously mentions his family of brothers -all bigger, and stronger and sleepier. In their last sentence, they suggest the truth as in a dream. This should be the extreme dimension of their theory, accounting for the largest facts before their eyes. Thus the larger catastrophic origins of the morphology under examination are excluded. A century ago, geologist Clarence King was describing the river system of the Pacific coastal area of the United States [3] . A most interesting comparison of the character and rate of stream erosion may be obtained by studying in the western Cordilleras, the river work of three distinct periods. The geologist there finds preserved and wonderfully well exposed, first, Pliocene Tertiary river valleys, with their boulders, gravels and sands still lying undisturbed in the ancient beds; secondly, the system of profound caZons, from 2000 to 5000 feet deep, which score the flanks of the great mountain chains, and form such a fascinating object of study, and not less of wonder, because the gorges were altogether carved out since the beginning of the glacial period; thirdly the modern rivers, mere echoes of their parent streams of the early Quaternary age. As between these three, the Early Quaternary rivers stand out vastly the most powerful and extensive. Theà present rivers are utterly incapable, with infinite time, to perform the work of glacial torrents. So, too, the Pliocene streams, although of very great volume, were powerless to wear their way down into solid rock thousands of feet, at the rapid rate of the early Quaternary floods. Between these three systems of rivers is all the difference which separates a modern (uniformitarian) stream and a terrible catastrophic engine, the expression of a climate in which struggle for existence must have been something absolutely inconceivable when considered from the water precipitations, floods, torrents, and erosions of to-day. Uniformitarians are fond of saying that give our present rivers time, plenty of time, and they can perform the feats of the past. It is mere nonsense in the case of the ca±ons of the Cordilleras. They could never have been carved by the pygmy rivers of this climate to the end of infinite time. And, as if the sections and profiles of the ca±ons were not enough to convince the most skeptical student, there are left hundreds of dry river-beds, within whose broad valleys, flanked by old steep banks and eloquent with proofs of once-powerful streams, there is not water enough to quench the thirst even of a uniformitarian. Those extinct rivers, dead from drought, in connection with the great ca±on system, present perfectly overwhelming evidence that the general deposition of aerial water, the consequent floods and torrents, forming as they all do the distinct expression of a sharply-defined cycle of climate, as compared either with the water phenomena of the immediately preceding Pliocene age or with our own succeeding condition, constitute an age of water catastrophe whose destructive power we only now begin distantly to suspect. These passages, according to the model for which we are groping, refer to the three phases of recent quantavolution. The Pliocene river beds represent a period of increasing disorder and deluge in the world for about two thousand years prior to the climactic lunar fission. The awesome dead rivers of the Early Quaternary are relics of the phase of mountain thrusting, westward movement of the American continent and the deluges associated with it, which broke down and flushed away the elevated landscape onto the shelves and slopes along the Pacific scarp. The rivers of the American heartland do not exhibit so obviously the recent catastrophic forces. Still, in the late Pleistocene, both the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers changed their courses markedly along an east-west axis, provoked by great seismism [3A], and watched, most probably, by awestruck humans. Today's third phase finds "pygmy" rivers, many in new channels, watering and draining the country. We group all three phases in the latest of holocene period of the past 14,000 years. "Nothing comparable" with the second phase river action, "ever now breaks the geologic calm," writes King. Then, with prescience of the concept of "collective amnesia," he adds that the idea of "catastrophism is therefore the survival of a terrible impression burned in upon the very substance of human memory." Some rivers possess drowned deltas of enormous proportions. The collision of India with Asia produced, besides the Himalayas, two equally large-scale, if less visible, phenomena in the deltaic fans of the Indus and Ganges River. These stretch into the Indian Ocean, one to the west, the other to the east of the subcontinent, covering with detritus ocean basin areas together as large as India itself. Like the raging torrents of yesterday in North America, these great transporting systems are today inactive. Although the rivers still carry two of the largest flows among all of the world's rivers, they are, as King would say, "pygmies" compared with their ancestors, their "fathers," or "holy fathers" at that, because all of this work that conveyed the tumbling slurry from high places for hundreds and thousands of kilometers had to do with mountains and plateaus just created. There stand no millions of years behind these works of nature. It would seem appropriate to pass from the subject of rivers to that of undersea canyons by way of the most famous of natural monuments, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Grand Canyon is a monument also to deceased uniformitarian geology. It is so well- studied and rationalized, with long-time-term reckoning, that every geologist is expected to recite its history liturgically. Not so Cook, nor Kelly and Dachille, nor the present writer. Conventionally, following Woodbury, Shelton, and Redfern, we commence with an age approaching two billion years ago. Radiochronometry supports the great ages found in the canyon. The canyon proper is allowed an age which Derek Ager, for example, sets at ten million years, but, pursuing a negative exponential principle, gives one million years to the mere latest fifty feet of erosion [4] . (That is, a practically catastrophic rate is seen to have occurred at times.) The floor of the Grand Canyon complex is an unknown material supporting what is called Vishnu schist, composed of mud, sand and lava. Thereupon the miles of sediments begin to pile up, most of them now missing, and probably eroded, but today some three miles can be accounted for: one in the bottom and main canyon itself, a second mile from the brink of Grand Canyon to the top of Zion Canyon, and a third up the face of the higher plateaus to the top of Bryce Canyon. Wind and water bring in the sedimentation layers. Many in variety, several distinctive deep beds of schists, sandstone, limestone and shale compose the great bulk of deposits. Discoverable in the series are ten major unconformities and many minor ones, where intervening layers existed and were worn away before being covered by new deposits. The area was uplifted and submerged a number of times with relation to the seas around. Some lapses in the record are so prolonged that whole mountain ranges on site could be worn down and planed off by erosion, succeeded by new tall deposits. Fossils of algae, primitive and later vertebrates, fishes, and footprints of amphibians are discovered in ascending. Fossil trees, fishes and reptile tracks are found in higher Triassic rocks. The fossil record stops at the Eocene epoch of the early Cenozoic (recent) era. In the Cenozoic, the entire region was uplifted from near sea-level to the present elevation. During uplift periods the Colorado River system has washed away materials and cut the gorges. So goes the gradualist solution of the Grand Canyon scene. The quantavolutionary view, as may be supposed, stresses high energy forces, fractures and quick deposition. "Many of the pools and rapids in the Grand Canyon are located where the river crosses regional and local fracture zones." [5] Cook points out that the Canyon is narrow at Supai Village and that the gorge appears to have ruptured open in a brittle fracture. The Grand Canyon, as was mentioned earlier, is perceived as a branch of the earth-girdling rift system; numerous other branches of the fracture system are observable north and south of Grand Canyon also. All of this occurred when the continent was thrust westward over the Pacific Ocean rift and the ocean rift fractured the continent. A number of orthogonal embayments of the Canyon are perpendicular to the main fracture or canyon, and these have been filled with debris from the outpouring of temporary great inland lakes known to have existed in the region. The three miles of sediments, all heavily fractured, were products of overthrusts from afar and of great slurries that brought in and laid down beds of fossiliferous sand and mud. Speaking of the sediments of hundreds of feet, "if all this was a very slow process requiring millions upon millions of years, how did it happen that the rivers carried nothing but clay for millions of years and then suddenly changed to sand?" And "nowhere today do we find rivers producing deposits of such uniform nature..." [6] The erosion was generally prompted by heavy seismism. The fossils found in the beds would have quickly disappeared if they had not been buried in sudden local and general disasters. The radiochronometry employed is of dubious validity, or, let us say, requires a specific set of challenges going far beyond these rudimentary paragraphs. All may agree that in the deep non-marine but water-deposited Eocene limestones of Bryce Canyon may be found some excellent carvings. Grand Canyon would be a minor feature of the continental slopes of the ocean and a minor canyon among submarine canyons. Even the Hudson River possesses one as awesome; it proceeds underseas for hundreds of kilometers, first cutting into the continental shelf, and then extending down the continental slope to the abyssal plain of the ocean, 4.5 kilometers below sea level. The difference is not that the one has grown sub-aerially and the others aquatically; both types have been sub-aerial for all their active lives. The seas encroached as the lunarian period created the sea basins, slopes, and canyons. Grand Canyon and several other such remarkable sub-aerial features are of the ilk; a comparison of a profile of Monterey Submarine Canyon (California) and of Grand Canyon [7] reveals very close similarities and indicates strongly a common ancestry. Scores of impressive submarine canyons extend the courses of rivers around the world. The idea that they were once active as rivers was resisted for a generation. In 1936, Francis P. Shepard could formulate the predicament, which still stands unresolved [8] : Investigations of submarine canyons carried on for a number of years with the cooperation of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Geological Society of America, Scripps Institution and other organizations have revealed that these sea-floor canyons have all the characteristics of river canyons and are distinctly different from fault valleys. Also tests of the idea that the submarine canyons might be the product of currents have produced negative results so that they have evidently been cut by rivers. The significance of this sub-aerial erosion on the present sea-floor is particularly disturbing, since the submarine canyons extend out to depths of from 2,000 to as much as 10,000 feet and are found off practically every coast of the world. Also all available evidence favors a Pleistocene age for the canyons. Accordingly, there is the implication that the coasts of the world were greatly elevated above their present positions during the glacial period. That all the continental margins both off stable and unstable coasts could have been subjected to such movements in comparatively recent times is scarcely credible. The alternative that there have been sea-level changes connected with the cause seems much more reasonable. Such changes are indicated not only by the submarine canyons but also by many of the phenomena of coral reefs and by oceanographic data from various parts of the world. The only cause of sea-level change which does not meet with almost insurmountable objections is that of glacial control. It seems quite possible that the continental glaciers during some of the earlier glacial epochs may have been sufficiently thick and sufficiently extended to have allowed a lowering of 3,000 feet or more. While such a lowering was probably insufficient to account for the deeper canyons it is felt that it would have resulted in the development of a universal canyon system which, connecting with much older sunken canyons in some places and modified by subsequent sinking elsewhere, would account for the present situation. The world would have to be a great ice mountain to provide such waters. The waters had to come from elsewhere, and be accompanied by great tectonism. We hold rivers to be based upon faults. In the same year, geologists Harry H. Hess and Paul MacClintock presented a striking solution. They saw in the canyons evidence of recency, a late Pleistocene age, of suddenness of creation, and of worldwide simultaneity. Here are the three primary tests of quantavolution, all passed by the submarine valleys. Then they are compelled, with reluctance, apologies, and special consultation with H. N. Russell (who advised against it), to advance the quantavolutionary mechanism, exoterrestrial encounter. The passages deserve quotation [9] : The valley-cutting conditions resulted from a sudden change in the shape of the hydrosphere, depressing sea-level in low latitudes, raising it in high latitudes; in other words, a change in the ellipticity of the sea surface. At present we can think of no orthodox cause for this change... However, a speculation comes to mind; if a sudden decrease in the rate of rotation of the earth took place, the hydrosphere would respond by being drawn into polar latitudes. The solid body of the earth would less rapidly adjust itself into a new spheroid in equilibrium with the slower rotation, which adjustment, when complete, probably would restore sea level to approximately its present position. But during the adjustment, it is postulated that there would have been time enough to allow rivers to cut valleys on continental slopes. While of course we do not know what could have caused the sudden change in rotation, it is conceivable that a collision with a small extra-terrestrial body would be competent to produce the effect. The authors then sought for evidence that the depths of the canyons would decrease from the equator to the poles, and, second, that there would be found high marine terraces in the northern latitudes where the shores would have been temporarily flooded. Indications of both were deemed favorable. The failure of theory to move along such lines is unaccountable, except in terms of the psycho-sociology of science of which we speak in the Velikovsky Affair and The Cosmic Heretics. Many years later one reads in a study by Landes approvingly [10] : I claim that the finding of graded clastics and misplaced (shallow-water) faunas deep beneath the sea is not prima facie evidence that they were carried there by turbidity currents: that the finding of cobbles does not prove that they were transported by submarine landslides; and that photographs of ripple marks lying at a depth of 4,500 feet do not necessarily mean that they resulted from current action operating at depth... I likewise believe that deep-sea-floor current ripples, like the truncated seamounts, are relics of shallower water. At this point, Landes should be looking into the ancestral skies. Instead he suggests that the deep ocean basins might once have been over 20,000 feet deeper. Even this idea might lead somewhere, but, instead, the ad hoc argumentation that so often passes for geological theory obtrudes; when in trouble, call upon isostasy, diastrophism, time, lifting, and, as here, sinking, and thus by name-calling the problem is solved and the matter ends; the data are not pushed to their ultimate meaning. Landes writes: "What manner of logic allows us to accept evidence, such as marine strata, of a sea-level far above present datum of 25,000 feet, but causes us to run from evidence of a sea-level depression of 25,000 feet?... What is so sacrosanct about current sea level?" The trouble here is that the logic is not good enough. One ought not to have indulged in the notion of a sea-level 25,000 feet higher because of the marine fossils up there, especially while he was laughing over Noah's Ark. Furthermore, the present sea bottoms and therefore sea-levels can be depressed by another 25,000 feet, but again no mechanism is perceived. He, and others, should be asking the deeper questions: "What are these deluges that humanity has been clamoring about since the dawn of history?" "Must every drop of water bear the holy stamp, 'Made on Earth'?" "How long does it take a pre-designed fracture trough to make a river channel, complete with fractured and non-fractured meanders? .... What is so sacrosanct about the ocean basins having always been filled with water?" I think that we have progressed far enough along in this book to dispose readily of the submarine canyon problem. The canyons were instantly created great river courses that rushed down, first, precipices, then, steep slopes, then gradual slopes, into the ocean basins that were only partly filled with water. Drainage of the water-logged continents and successive deluges filled the ocean basins to overflowing. As the seas encroached upon the rivers, the rivers were also receiving far less water to give to the sea. The underseas box-like, sluice-like channels ended their careers as turbulent rivers within perhaps two thousand years. They have not filled with sediments. Gross, in his Oceanography, says that submarine canyons would soon fill up if they were not being emptied by turbidity currents. Geology has invented some bizarre mechanisms to circumvent catastrophism and here is one of them: turbidity currents. They have never been actually observed; they are "intermittent;" they are caused by earthquakes; they have speeds of 20 km/ hr; they account for anomalous continental sand and fossils found on the ocean floor. A rare study assigns them credit for having broken a trans-Atlantic bottom cable. (Still, no one denies seismism.) Would not such currents act as bulldozers instead of sweepers, and fill, rather than clean out the canyons? Our quantavolutionary theory is adequate for all that bespeaks turbidity currents, including the oceanic sands and fossils. A question remains to perplex: if the continental blocks were meanwhile rafting over long distances, would they not have left behind their detrital slopes? The slopes would then be flat and spread over the abysses. A logical answer is available here, too. We have but to recall that the continents travelled because they were both pulled and pushed. If they had been only pulled they would have left their ocean moraines behind. But they were standing on a kind of conveyor belt, as has been said by Harry Hess and others, and their slopes moved right along behind them; the belt was being pushed by the lava currents issuing from the ridges, fissures, and volcanos. Anyhow, the canyons were working rivers after the continents ceased to move rapidly, and before new ocean waters drowned them. In concluding the chapter, a few words may be in order on the more puzzling problem of the deep sea trenches. These deep, narrow and often long slits in the crust are found in various regions but are especially prominent around the Pacific. There they gash the sea floor off of South America, Central America, the Aleutians, Kuriles, Japan, the Philippines, Java, and various island fronts, including a long stretch north of New Zealand. In a typical large trench, a depth of ten kilometers is precipitously achieved, with a slant toward the continental rock against which it is emplaced. Its sediments are shallow, its walls bare. Trenches were never rivers. A function for them was hard to discover until the tectonic plate theory of continental drift went shopping for its mechanism. Then it occurred that the ocean floor being made at the ridges had to be disposed of somewhere else, if the world was not expanding. For lack of better, the trenches became locations into which the sea floor plate crept upon encountering another plate, thus disposing of itself tidily. The next chapter will handle this theory, but we cannot leave the trenches without an explanation. Trench walls are igneous for the most part, straight, and nearly vertical, like fault scarps, say Heezen and Hollister about the Puerto Rican Trench. They belong to the period of great disruption. Their oceanic sides abut continental walls that are much taller and deeper; the connection between the two may not be binding in many or any trenches. The continental wall is of varying chemical composition; the oceanic wall is purer basalt of the mantle. They heat and expand, cool and contract at different rates. The gap or trench may occur as a pull-back of the oceanic basalt or the continent, a drop fault where nothing drops. "The crustal block which forms the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench resembles the dropped keystone of a rising ramp, which once bridged the transition from the thin oceanic crust to the thick foundation of the island arc." [11] Sediments of the trenches are scanty. The same writers say: "It is a general lack of sediment accumulation which is the most notable feature of all the deep-sea trenches. This lack... demands a recent origin of trench topography." [12] Recent must mean holocene or pleistocene, it appears. But now, the plate tectonicists chase in full cry after the trenches as fulfilments of the need of convection cells and subduction of continental and oceanic material. Are trenches barren because they appeared lately or are they barren because they have just digested hearty meals of sial? {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-three: Channels and Canyons)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-three: Channels and Canyons) 1. Anon., 229 Nature (5 Feb. 1971), 371. 2. Bellamy, M. M. M., 261-2. 2a. 68 J. Geol. (1960), 54-74. 3. 11 American Naturalist (August 1877), 449-70. 3A. A. C. Johnston, "A Major Earthquake Zone on the Mississippi," 246 Sci. Amer. (Apr. 1982), 60-83. 4. Op. cit., 48. 5. R. Dolan, A. Howard and D. Trimble, "Structural Control of the Rapids and Pools of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon," 202 Science (10 Nov. 1978), 629-31. 6. Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 113. 7. Ibid., 81. 8. 83 Science (May 22, 1936), 484. 9. 83 Science (1936), 332-4. 10. Reprinted in W. Corliss, compiler, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md: Sourcebook Project) vol. El, Doc. ETS-002). 11. Op. cit., 490, 467-9. 12. Ibid., 483-4. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART V: } {Q RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS: } {C Chapter 24} {T Continental Tropism and Rafting} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CONTINENTAL TROPISM AND RAFTING A Texas association proclaims the slogan "Stop Continental Drift," in its attempts to foil the trend to believe that the Earth's crust has been, and is, in motion. The crust is thin below the ocean bottoms and thick beneath the continents. It is broken up into a dozen major plates whose boundaries are defined by faulting, heat, and turbulence. The plates show signs of having moved great distances over time. Most scientists have been converted to this mobile perspective from a static one during the past generation. "We now have a new, mobilist orthodoxy, as definite and uncompromising as the staticism it replaced." So writes Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History Magazine [1] . Now and then, goes the theory of continental drift -that is, every couple hundreds of million years, the plates renew themselves. The continents do not. They may be split asunder, or bash their fenders, but they move on and on, majestically riding upon the same material, their own mantle magma. They carry a two-billion-year record of life, while the ocean bottoms have deposited their sediments periodically beneath the sea shores of continents, or beneath other plates which they may be jostling, so that now they carry no more than the last 160 million years of sediments. The plates are pushed around, it is said, by convection currents. These are hot rock moving up to the cooler surface areas and pushing them aside until these bump into other plates which are being also pushed; then they are forced to descend (or force the other plates to descend); they melt once more and become deep mantle material. Much of this theory is incredible, we shall argue. We accept gladly the facts that the continents were once together and then moved long distances and still exhibit minute motion. We accept also the facts showing the ocean bottoms to be geologically very young. Several other facts are grist for our mill, and some minor theories are also credible; we have mentioned several of these and will mention others. But we shall concentrate upon the quantavolutionary theory that an exoterrestrial catastrophe brought about the movements of the Earth's crust recently, and we begin with the most obvious fact in topography, namely that the continents of the Earth are concentrated opposite the oceans. "This means that 82.6 percent of the total continental area is antipodal to oceanic area." [2] So saying, C. G. A. Harrison goes on to describe how, on a computer, he rotated randomly coordinates representing the continents on a sphere, in order to discover how often the actual antipodal percentage would appear. He simplified the continental areas into circles and fed their numbered forms into a computer which then randomly placed them to see how much land would be antipodal to oceanic area. He repeated the random placement 2000 times. "The median percentage of continent opposite ocean to be expected from a random distribution of circular continents is 68.0 percent of the continental area. The observed figure of 82.6 percent is exceeded in... 9.6 percent of all cases. Thus from this evidence alone it would appear that there is a probability of only 0.096 that the present distribution of continents is random over the surface of the earth." He repeated the test with triangular instead of circular simplifications of the proper areas and the results were similar. He concluded that "there is less than 1 chance in 14 that the present antipodal distribution of continents and oceans is the result of a random process." This is hardly surprising. If the Arctic-Atlantic ocean were closed up, if Australia and Antarctica were fitted to their apparent points of departure from southern South America and Africa -that is, if the continents were rendered into a single mass as they appear to have aggregated before the present age of "drift" began, then all of the existing continental land would be antipodal to oceans. The implication is strong that before the drift began, the ocean areas were in fact land-covered. The major differences between the Pacific Basin and the other oceanic basins, we have noted, indicate that continental material was blasted out of the former and pushed aside from the latter. The movements of the continents since this time can be interpreted upon the premise of a sudden removal of over half the Earth's crust in what is mostly now southern hemispheric ocean. The land of both the eastern and western hemispheres has traveled towards this vacated area. So have Australia and Antarctica. The so-called plate movements have not been random, nor can they be interpreted in any other way. The continents all exhibit "lunagenic tropism" and nothing much else. They have moved in the particular direction of the lunar-vacated, now south-central Pacific Basin under the special stimuli of global fracturing, electrogravity slide, earth expansion, hydrostatic equilibration, and isostasy. We define isostasy here (and elsewhere) as the process by which all mutually affected elements in a system, consequent upon any change in one of them from within or without, share the effects of the change by changing themselves in closest accord with their peculiar sites and natures. When a change is introduced to Earth from outside, all possible responses of the Earth's motion and masses are drawn upon to incorporate its effects and to do so in accord with their ranked most possible behaviors. Isostasy has to have a function; in the great post-lunar diastrophism, isostasy functions as a tropism. It moves the continents not randomly, nor to the poles or the equator, nor to gather surviving animals for the Ark, but to repair and redress the lunagenic basin. Propelled by three rifts in all and with a blasted out area east of it, the exception to lunagenic tropism would appear to be the Indian subcontinent. India moved east faster than Africa. But since the continental world was moving generally south as well as east, why did India move north? Relatively Eurasia was moving south, and this is part of the suggested answer. Also India and Australia were simultaneously and together disconnected with a large land mass from Africa and Antarctica by the Atlantic-Indian and Mid-Indian Ocean Ridges; India was simply at the northern end of a plate and could not pivot southwards; northward lay the old Tethyan Sea region, which was now being compressed and closed up. India was pushed by the largest expansive fracture complex per land unit: this "lava grease" worked upon it like the currents of a powerful river moving a raft downstream. When it arrived at the southern shores of Asia, it encountered the Tethyan shear with weakened rocks and islands, all of which it overran, thrusting and folding its edge over them until the Himalayas were produced, meanwhile elevating, with an assist from the swelling mantle, the great Iranian plateau area. (Two surviving races, one African and the other Indo-European or Tethyan, found themselves on opposite sides of the great mountain mass. They encountered one another thousands of years later, when the Proto-Indian civilization was battered by natural disaster and the Indo-Europeans came down from the Plateau.) The low continental Pangean mass to the south and east ultimately was partly flooded by the waters of the sky, never to reappear again. Higher elevations constituted the South Seas islands of today. This can be called Australasia. It is a land that has the Tethyan shear and moon basin through its northern belt, the northern trans-Asiatic rift to its west, and the South Pacific fork moving eastwards and finally up to mark its southern and eastern limits. The northern extremity of Pangea was depressed originally by the ice cap and is still rising, although at a decelerated rate. The fjords mark sheared continental mass, sharp, clear, new; the low-lying lands that compose the great flat watery islands and the Arctic Sea (which is mostly continental) signal the former land mass under the ice cap load. Some of it was additionally compressed by the new ice cap formed in the Age of Jovea. The Antarctic Sea was opened up at the south polar forking fracture, and the Antarctic continent, denuded of ice, was pushed southwards to center upon the new south polar axis. It, too, received a new ice cap beginning in the later "Age of Jupiter," but, to follow Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings," possibly not until exploration, after a period of civilization, when maps of the coastline were drawn to a considerable degree of accuracy. Some 450 specimens were recovered at Coalsack Bluff, Central Transantarctic Mountains. Found there were terrestrial amphibians and reptiles of lower Triassic, typical of the same age in Africa, India and China, especially genus Lystrosaurus. These creatures had no "long way around." "The interchange of Lower Triassic tetrapods between Africa and Antarctica could have been only by a direct ligation of the two land masses," probably at Southeast Africa [3] . The Labyrinthadont, the first land vertebrate to be found in Antarctica, has also been found in Africa, South America, and Australia [4] . Marsupials are now placed in South America, Antarctica, South Asia, and Australia. The infinitely complex faulting of the Earth's surface rocks, aside from the major morphological transformations, is an expected phenomenon of the multiplex pressures of rafting land masses. Additionally, the phenomenon expresses surficially what were more profound upward pressures during the Uranian period. The "latest" evidence supports Alfred Wegener's view that the continents moved only once, this in the Mesozoic, and that there were two continental masses, one to the north and the other to the south [5] . These "findings" are expected in our theory. The Tethyan equatorial waters of Pangea probably are the source of the belief that there were two masses. As for the Mesozoic, 65 to 225 million years ago by conventional reckoning, this period is being rapidly invaded by similar species from both directions, but there may have been a period of terrestrial isolation when the Tethyan waters intervened. If the continents split asunder or were "born separate" and moved several times, there should be abundant evidence of the events. There is little fresh data on this score. The most prominent basin, the Pacific, hardly gives evidence of having been traversed by continents, though they all drift toward it. Mostly, old theories of the lifting and dropping of land during ancient orogeny have been dusted off and varnished to claim the several periods of movement. Fossil ice ages have been claimed, too, as proof of former dislocations of the continents, but these have been embarrassments to ice age theory from the earliest discovery of pertinent evidence; the presence of pebble drift and till, and of glaciers or high mountain freezing may be referred to dense material fall- outs such as were discussed earlier. "In the whole of geophysics," Defant once wrote, "there is no other law of such clarity and certainty as that there exist two preferred levels in the Earth's crust." [6] Continents are like ships in a frozen sea. "The continents, steep-sided massive blocks surrounded by an enormous world-encircling sea, have deep roots which project 30,000 or 40,000 meters into the earth's mantle while the ocean crust is but a thin 5000-meter- thick film frozen over the earth's massive mantle." Thus report Heezen and Hollister. These continental blocks, I have maintained, are splittable only by a great external force and a responsive expansive force, while the ocean basins are easily producible by fissure volcanism. The post-catastrophic process is followed by a rapid relocation of the continents and reencrustment of the globe. The continents were not "just drifting"; they "were going somewhere." A. L. du Toit was veering toward reality when he offered in his early (1937) book, Our Wandering Continents, the idea of a "gravity slide," the creeping of continental masses toward rimming geosynclinal depressions. He gave at the same time perhaps too much encouragement to the idea of thermally driven currents in the mantle. These were, as we may establish, an accessory after the fact. When F. Tuzo Wilson, reviving du Toit, and the spirit of Plato's ancient words for that matter, exclaimed, "the earth, instead of appearing as an inert statue, is a living, mobile thing. The vision is exciting. It is a major scientific revolution in our own time...," [8] he was thinking of continental drift but could better have been speaking for a continental trot, or rafting, or lunagenic tropism of the continents. Continental drift theory has invented convection currents to move the Earth's plates with whatever continental land may be aboard on long journeys over the Earth. The convection currents cycle vertically between the mantle below and the crust above; the currents push the plates about the surface like the uplifted trays of waiters in a crowded cafÚ, except that waiters as they weave and duck are known to descry paths between the bar and the tables, while noone can even guess why the convection currents go one way or another, if indeed they exist. For example, Harrison, after proving that a non-random process had to account for the counter-oceanic distribution of land, mentioned large-scale convection currents in the Earth's mantle as a possible cause. This seems to put too much directiveness into convection currents, which are already overloaded with the task of pushing huge tectonic plates around the globe. A better hypothesis would have been "lunagenic tropism," the tendency of the continental land to move toward the crater of the Moon and to fabricate new crust in compensation for the excisions. Still, the convection current hypothesis is worth considering, if only because at the moment it is the height of fashion in geophysics. Tall mountains, a trillion geological faults, islands, bays, and most other morphological irregularities denote that the continents were not peaceful bystanders to the creation of the oceans. The Earth is slightly flatter at the poles than its present rotational velocity would explain. The difference is 1%, which is a disappearing relic of the period of rotational deceleration. The great depressions found in the Hudson Bay, Greenland, and North Eurasian areas, which when refitted, fit the shape of the destroyed ice cap, are also relics of the lunarian crisis. The trans-Atlantic coastlines, above and below the Tethyan transverse fracture area, fit together well. The probability that the jagged and curved pieces would fit as they do by random development is negligible. South America and Africa, North America and Europe, have many points of topographic, lithospheric, and biospheric identity. The blocks of the continents on both sides of the Atlantic Basin are steep and sharply outlined at the edges of the continental shelves. The west coast of the Americas are also steep and sharply marked. The western mountains seem to be a unit from Alaska to Chile; this in itself must have great significance: the nearly 180 degree belt of rock had a single, simultaneous experience; how can geology, geography, and geophysics ignore the simple meaning of so magnificent a display? The Andes are so continuous with the Rocky Mountains, and the Mid-Atlantic so parallel to the two Americas, and South America so congruent with the Albatross Cordillera that they must all have been engaged by approximately the same vector forces during lunagenesis. The force of lunagenesis affected profoundly the now western terrain of the Americas even though its epicenter was probably emplaced on the old equatorial Tethyan belt and thousands of kilometers west of Central America. The western shelves of the Americas are of the same age as the East and West Atlantic shelves. But they poorly match the continental shelf morphology across the Pacific Basin. If the steep shelves of the Americas represent one side of a fracture, where is the western fracture to match? The Americas have moved westward; they have risen greatly; they have probably climbed over and rest upon their once opposing land as upon the fracture itself in the north. Part of the sunken continent of Mu, to pre-empt some wag, is below California and explains why it is so. The East Pacific Rise pushed up and out rapidly; its transverse fractures struck out far to the West. It met little resistance. The crust had been vaporized, and the upper mantle was boiling, just as it was along the great fractures. To the west of the craters was the larger land mass of Asia, to the southwest the morphological disorganization produced by the fracture system and to the southeast that affected by the elliptoid Moon Basin. The new coasts of the south and west of the Basin were attracted toward the basin; fragments separated and rafted faster than the larger mass to become the offshore islands of South and East Asia. Oceania was born, much of it in arched array, moving inward upon the swatch cut by the main explosions. The wide Tethyan tropical belt of Pangea was generally trampled upon by the shifting continents, disappearing beneath the Middle East, South Asia, and the Moon Basin. The "Mediterranean" seas were swept north and south and the area was partially fractured and closed as Europe moved down. The PyrÚnÚes, Alps, and possibly the Balkans were then created by shearing forces as Africa rotated southeast beyond Europe. [9] In the withdrawal of Africa the Mediterranean Basin opened up and waters from northeast, east, south and finally the Atlantic filled it. Later movements may have sunk the Tyrrenian plateau. Later, too, the Triton Sea of the Sahara was emptied leaving a great desert. The complex Mediterranean morphology reveals deep bowls and large shelves. Hs³ has reported investigations of its western bottom, evidencing a dry, desert terrain at one time. The deceleration of the old globe would have promptly dispatched its waters north and south to higher latitudes, supposing it had before been tropical. Huge submarine canyons depict a scene of inpouring waters afterwards. The mouth of the Nile River discloses a narrow, deep gorge cut 700 feet below the sea level of today, which may at that have been several thousands of feet deeper, according to Chumakov. Libyan off- shore canyons are also impressive, as reported by F. Burr and associates. Geophysics, not having yet considered our hypothesis, has not clearly expounded the original torque of the continents. Earlier I wrote that the Mid-Atlantic ridge veers sharply east at the Equator and explained it as the result of the Earth's sudden deceleration of axial rotation. To this I may now add that five major occurrences signify the same slowdown of rotational velocity. At the same time they explain the location of several land masses. The first is that the larger of the two branchings of the Mid-Atlantic fracture, arriving at about 50 South Latitude, swings in the direction of the Earth's rotation, east, that is. The fracture is pursuing its original route and continues while the Earth as a whole is slowing. It is following the direction of greatest stress, too, where the greatest need to fracture exists. Second, this bifurcation of the fracture may have happened where the old South Pole may have been; but, more likely, the fracture had not achieved its 'objective, ' the old South Pole, before it was forced to split into two. This giant forking might, as M. Cook has suggested, be the normally expected effect of the decelerating explosive fracture of a globe; it might also be an effect of the resumption of mondial rotation, within an hour or so following the halting that may have produced the aforesaid Mid- Atlantic transverse movement of the fracture. The split to east and west now cut off Antarctica, which because it was in a low latitude and neither east nor west, was rendered safe from lateral movement and became a polar continent. But, third, the fracture, continuing, divided again. This was logical, too, one fork continuing east, but the original torque reversing on the sphere and heading back north. The east fork severed Australia from Antarctica and the north fork cut between Australia and Africa. Fourth, Australia proceeded swiftly eastward propelled by the crustal slowdown and the attractiveness of the lunagenic basin to the east. Fifth, India, cut off from Africa, rotated clockwise, as expected, and headed, also as expected, north by east. Since the world-girdling fracture system will be encountered sooner or later no matter in what direction one goes, any area enclosed by fracture boundaries can be called a plate. Ignoring most fractures or rifts that traverse the continents, one may conclude that some ten (Gould) or twelve (Toks÷z) such areas or plates exist. Curiously, they are of greatly different size; the Pacific Plate, for instance, covers most of the Pacific Basin, while the Cocos Plate encompasses a smallish region between Central America and the East Pacific Ridge. Inasmuch as a very slight annual movement of several centimeters seems to be occurring at the edges of most plates, and the boundaries of most plates include some portion of the volcanically and seismically active oceanic ridges, it would appear that the whole of the Earth's surface is somehow in motion, and therefore, a science of "plate tectonics" must be devised to account for the "drift" of the combined, inseparable continental-oceanic lithosphere. That the Earth may have expanded or be expanding in volume along its fracture lines is a theory not to be dismissed, but geologists for the most part prefer to portray crustal, lithospheric drift (carrying the continents) as a perpetual steady-rate movement, which disgorges molten rocks from deep in the mantle, along one and another plate boundary, while engorging rocks at other boundaries of the plate, thus maintaining a constant global surface area. To account for this upwelling and subduction is no small task; "an area equal to the entire surface of the earth would be consumed by the mantle in about 160 million years" at the presently calculated rates of movement up and down [10] . That would be about 510 million square kilometers, of which 310 would be true ocean basin of about 8 kilometers in depth of rock. Granted a uniform rate of exchange and the time allowed for it (which is roughly based upon the age of the oldest portions of the oceanic rocks ), something like 1.55 cubic kilometers of crustal rocks has to be subducted annually. The preferred instrument for subduction is the once altogether mysterious but impressive submarine canyons. These line up along the coasts of western South and Central America, also along the western Pacific Basin arc from the Aleutians down to New Zealand, and then too stretch westward off the southern boundaries of Indonesia. Lesser lengths can be discovered in the Caribbean, and in the extreme South Atlantic ocean. Altogether over 10,000 kilometers of submarine canyons are notable. The time allowed for subduction is conveniently long, so that very little work is required at any given time and place. To the average kilometer of these canyons is assigned the task of ingesting .00015 kilometer or 1.5 cubic meters of the Earth's surface per year. This is a modest undertaking, but also one can call for help from the old standby, orogeny. India is still smashing into Asia, hence the Himalayan range is piling up debris from the plate edges. South America is being pushed away from the welling-up Mid-Atlantic Ridge and also away from the East Pacific Ridge; perhaps it too is rising from the east while the oceanic crust of its west is being subducted into the long western trench. The convection cell is a natural heat machine. Hot material deep in the Earth's mantle rises to the cooler regions of the surface, breaks through as a plume or fissure and pushes aside the colder rock; the colder rock is moved along to a subduction zone where it is mechanically forced downwards into the deep mantle. There it assimilates to the hot surrounding material, and may even return to an area where it will rise once again to repeat the process. The scheme is almost entirely theoretical, although one may, by watching a stew pot, see a similar occurrence, the heated mixture arising from the bottom of the pot to displace the cooler surface mixture which then sinks to the bottom, is heated, and then rises once more. To observe any part of the convection process, even indirectly, is difficult, but bits of data can be made to fit. Thus, the fact that submarine canyons are coincidental with earthquake and volcanic and mountainous zones implies a turbulent function, such as subduction would be. One cannot deny the evidence of upwelling magma along the great oceanic ridges; there is an output, and there is a movement away from the output. But is there a subduction? The submarine trenches appear to be cleared for action tomorrow, but not the scene of yesterday's action. They have scanty sediments, whereas they ought perhaps to be full of oceanic sediments, not to mention continental sial that would happen to be subducted. In what was the first attempt at observing an actual subduction of sea floor, Heezen and Rawson made four dives to the floor of the Middle- America Trench in a U. S. Navy submersible, DVS Turtle, at around 1600 meters of depth. They observed a set of escarpments moving steplike down to the bottom floor, then an "apron", which shortly encountered the abrupt landward wall of the trench. The apron was bisected parallel to the wall by a "line of contemporary deformation;" this "is interpreted as the sea floor trace of subduction." [11] But the scene is peaceful. "We observed no features which could be attributed to turbidite erosion or deposition." Further, "at the present time no movement is occurring at the base of the landward wall andà probably no significant deformation has occurred there for decades or centuries... Perhaps the most surprising observation was that most of the steep wall is covered by smooth undisturbed ooze." The trench here is obviously long defunct or inadequate for the task assigned it. The stepdown escarpment into the trench seems to be a normal faulting occurrence, like much of the African rift, denoting dropped blocks, in connection with a pull-back motion of the landwards wall of the trench. Still, even if this were an "average" point of a trench, the activity of subduction might be too miniscule to observe. Several years later, the Glomar Challenger was drilling into oceanic sediments north of Barbados at an apparent plate boundary and discovered older Miocene sediments overlying younger Pliocene deposits. [12] The phenomenon was explained by plate tectonic theory as a product of an underthrusting (subducting) sediment-loaded oceanic plate. As the plate went down its older sediments were sheared off and ended up overlying its younger sediments. All of these formed now part of a mass that culminated in sub-aerial volcanic mountains. The volcanism would be an effect of the descending slab, which generates heat by friction, shear stresses, and rock faulting. Channels for explosive heat escape would be provided in the course of structural adjustments between unlike rock masses. Earthquakes occur until the masses become thermally indistinct, never below 700 kilometers; there the rock can no longer behave in a brittle manner [13] . The occurrence of earthquakes up to this point is taken to indicate the correctness of subduction convection cells, and plate tectonic theory. Here is Toks÷z' summary of the current theory of the subduction of the lithosphere. The lithosphere, or outer shell, of the earth is made up of about a dozen rigid plates that move with respect to one another. New lithosphere is created at mid-ocean ridges by the upwelling and cooling of magma from the earth's interior. Since new lithosphere is continuously being created and the earth is not expanding to any appreciable extent, the question arises: What happens to the 'old' lithosphere? The answer came in the late 1960's... The old lithosphere is subducted, or pushed down, into the earth's mantle. As the formerly rigid plate descends it slowly heats up, and... is absorbed into the general circulation of the earth's mantle." [14] Interestingly, "in certain areas convection currents in the asthenosphere may drive the plates, andà in other regions the plate motions may drive the convection currents." Lest the reader hoot at the picture of a driver driving the car but sometimes the car driving the driver, it should be interposed that this latter possibility is a broad hint of what may be the truth of the matter, namely, that so far as the evidence goes, the paving and expansion that went on in the past, and their faint stirrings today, would have to, and do, generate currents, even cyclical currents, in the mantle. How could they not do so? Where plates collide, to resume the theory, a trench is forced open and one or the other plate descends the trench into the mantle, thus letting the ridge, perhaps thousands of kilometers away, continue to churn up lava and pass it along, so efficiently indeed that folds or thrusts are hardly to be found in the vast expanses of the abyss nor alongside the ridges. The trenches "accumulate large deposits of sediment, primarily from the adjacent continent." (This contradicts another view, Heezen and Hollister's, that the trenches are scarcely sedimented.) "As the sediments get caught between the subducting oceanic crust and either the island arc or the continental crust they are subjected to strong deformation, shearing, heating and metamorphism... Some of the sediments may even be dragged to great depths, where they may eventually melt and contribute to volcanism. In this case they would return rapidly to the surface, and the total mass of low-density crustal rocks would be preserved." Skillful drawings enhance the text by showing some sediments being scraped off on the opposite side and other sediment being miscilated and conveyed below. Without wishing to burden this one article with problems universal to its genre, one cannot but allude to additional contradictions. There should be enormous masses of plate-served detritus on the inward side of a receiving trench. Indeed, the whole of a previous world of sediments should be dumped in such heaps or carried down into a mantle reluctant, because of its higher density, to receive it. There are, of course, no such masses. The sediments by the trenches, if they exist at all, are mostly igneous masses, which foregather there in as ordered or disordered a condition as anywhere else. As for the metamorphosed rocks, they show no preference for trenches and can hardly amount to the quantity under consideration, unless this is to be the origin of new granites. The balance of new and old sediments, it appears, is impossibly askew. The trenches, according to the prevailing notion, have good appetites, but are slow feeders and neat eaters. Perhaps that is why they have never been observed while at dinner. Toks÷z refers to low and high subduction rates and draws several diagrams of the subduction process, but offers no proof of subduction other than gravity anomalies (whose findings, he grants, are belabored by uncertainties) and seismology. "The most compelling evidence of the subduction of the lithosphere comes from seismology." Seismic wave behavior in the vicinity of the trenches, where earthquakes are common, has exhibited differences, as might be expected, showing different depths of activity and these have not been interpreted satisfactorily. Now these seismological differences have been assumed to be measures of different depths of the mantle's alimentary canal, so to speak, where different stages of rock digestion are occurring. The argument is almost totally deductive. If the oceanic plates and basins have been completely renewed every 160 my, then they will have been renewed about 35 times since the Earth originated. Each time these plates would have scraped off some of their sediments upon each other. By now the continents of the Earth should be presented in heaps of sialic rock randomly distributed as islands around the globe. Such sediments scarcely exist. Or they are unrecognizable as such. The sediments of the oceans are less than a kilometer deep on the average. Call them a kilometer; double this to match the disproportion of sea to land; and multiply this volume 35 times. The result, a column over all the land of 70 kilometers, far exceeds the present continental sediments (if the only source of these is oceanic sediments) nor does it appear in any large sedimentary masses distinct from the indigenous continental mass. The present mass of sedimentary rocks is about 32,000 X 10 20 grams. It is about 5% of the crust. From the deepest trench to the highest mountain of the Earth is about 20 km. Some 44% of this is pre-cambrian, 56% of it of later origins. Most has been recycled several times, but not all, else we should not possess fossils indicative of all ages. "The whole sedimentary mass has been turned over five times." [15] The oceans are thought to have been in a steady state throughout all of this time, picking up and delivering sediments. Most of this conjecture becomes nonsensical if a single fact is considered: consistent stratification of species around the world, such that exceptions are considered anomalies. If oceanic plates repeatedly dumped their "young" sedimentary contents at the base of the onshore sedimentary heaps, the phanerozoic order would be reversed, as in the Glomar discovery just reported; the older the sediment, the higher up it would be stratified. Such not being the normal case, one is compelled to reject the theory of subduction and perpetual plate renewal. Marine sediments are the majority of all organic facies; they are loaded in temporal order according to the principle of superposition. They did not arrive on the land by plate tectonics; they arrived by tides, floods, land rising, and other quantavolutionary mechanisms. For subduction, forceful convection cells are required. "All the fountains of the deep must be broken up," in a parody of the unique event of the Bible, not once but continuously and forever, over billions of years, enough to move the furniture of all the Earth's land around the world every 160 million years, inch by inch. The path of upward and downward movements cannot be smooth; at the least it is different beneath the thin sima than beneath the thick sial; furthermore, some interception must occur at the two or more levels of the mantle where striking seismic discontinuities are observed; indeed, it should perplex the conductionists that these seismic barriers even exist, for would not eons of convection have effectively erased what, after all, can only be levels of chemical mineral differentiation? Seismic studies show that the Earth below the surface is stratified; what else could seismic discontinuities mean? The thickness of the Earth's crust, as the physicist P. Jordan once said, is a breath of air blown upon a desk globe. The breath should be unevenly blown, for the continental portion is 40 km and the oceanic crust is only 5 kilometers thick. This is using the Mohorovicic Discontinuity as the boundary between crust and mantle. At this "Moho" boundary the velocity of a seismic signal increases sharply, indicating a density increase from 3 to 3.3, the mean for the crust being 2.8 g/ cm 3 and that for the incomparably more massive mantle 4.5. The increase in velocity (and density) occurs within a band of rocks of under five kilometers thickness. Below the oceanic crust, the Discontinuity zone is less than half a kilometer thick. The Discontinuity seems to be caused by "a difference in chemical composition between crustal rocks and the underlying mantle rocks. " [16] The theory of plate tectonics visualizes the conveyor belts of ocean crust moving along between ridges and trenches just above the Moho Discontinuity. In cases where the plate is oceanic and encounters a plate carrying continental material, whether supposedly built up of primordial granites and sediments or of trench debris folds, the conveyor belt (convection current) dips down, and, of course, the Moho dips too and resumes at about 40 km below the continental rock. In all of this process, the Moho is conceived to be independent of the tectonic process presumed to be taking place. This is incredible. It is much more likely that the Moho Discontinuity marks the level at which the continents marched around the world after the Moon erupted, and, below the ocean, the level above which new crust had to be created from the uppermost magma of the mantle with atmospheric chemical participation. A new, subaerial, low-pressure, hydrated factory produced the oceanic crustal basalts out of upper mantle material. The continents and ocean bottoms are probably still in motion along the Moho Discontinuity, as they were, but much more rapidly, when the Discontinuity was born as the boundary between crust and mantle. There are, besides the Moho, two more major discontinuities in the mantle, one at 400 km depth and the other at 650 kin. In both cases density and chemical composition are believed to change markedly. Inasmuch as both of these discontinuities, as well as the Moho, pervade the globe as "shells" they must be continuously penetrated by rising, falling, and lateral convection currents. It is perplexing to consider how the currents could be maintained throughout Earth history without erasing the discontinuities. Since there is evidence of the Discontinuities but not of the convection, the existence of the convection cells must be doubted. Moreover, as with the Moho, these other discontinuities may represent secondary and tertiary torsion levels, as the Earth, more than once, suffered deceleration of its rotation. The fact of the general uniformity of depth of the Moho Discontinuity around the world is also an indication that it was formed at the same time as part of an epochal event whose negatively exponential tailing-off was temporally brief. The fact that the continental blocks move at a distinctively different, lower depth in the mantle has less to do with their "greater weight" (relative to the oceanic crust) than with the historical fact of their quite different genesis. Quantavolutionary theory explains the occurrence of earthquakes along the global fault system, even where no trenches are subducting. And the convection cell theory is susceptible to challenge simply on the basis of insufficient energy, while the theory of plate tectonics as a whole does not pass a number of tests. Regarding the first point, earthquakes have long been associated causally with faults, even before the oceanic ridge system was known. The submarine trench can be construed as a magnificent type of fault, almost always near an earthquake zone. But a great many earthquakes occur away from trenches. If they occur because material is being stuffed into the bowels of the Earth by a plate, there is yet no evidence of it, and one may as well maintain that the seismism denotes the relative motion of rocks, as was said earlier. The movement is often vertical so that, relatively speaking, some rock is often moving down, but that is not the point. It would be more in order to demonstrate that all the earthquakes occurring landwards of the trenches (and this is mostly the case except in the Java-Sumatra region) bring about increased elevations as the debris is refused by the depths beyond the trenches. Moreover, if the continents shifted and the ocean bottoms were repaved by an exoterrestrial and hence surficial force, then the disturbance of the Earth's crust and mantle would form a large area of surface directed as a narrowing cone into the mantle until it reached a point below which seismism could not be energized. Such may well be the case. The points would lie along the global fracture system and also where meteoroidal impacts have occurred. The fact that an overwhelming majority of earthquakes is registered on the sial of the continents rather than upon the sima of the oceanic crust has surely to do with the greater depth of the continents as contrasted with the oceanic crust, but it also has to do with the greater age and rigidity, hence recent disturbance, of the plutonic land rocks. One may surmise that the sima is "better adapted" to movement because it was "born of movement." The very planar, uniform, featureless character of the sea bottom evidences that it has not participated in terrestrial diastrophism, but has, like the water itself, filled in with molten and flexible rock wherever the land has been removed. The heat required within the deep mantle to expel excessively heated rock up to many thousands of linear kilometers on the surface is, of course, great; and, at the other end of the conveyor belt, or surface convection current, the rock must be dense and cold enough to sink, with a mechanical force assisting. Elaborate calculations have been made to demonstrate the possibility. None are convincing. It must be in many thousands of degrees celsius, enough to burn the bottom of the pot, if the favored analogy of the boiling cauldron is pursued. However, although the presence of radioactive minerals deep within the Earth is only a postulate, rising radioactivity-produced heat is given as the source, rather than some internal fire. Metaphysical figures are not difficult to come by, my critics will have been observing; so I can assert the same. There must be an irregular distribution of giant kettles and small kettles (because the surface areas of the convection process are vastly different) and hence some zones of radioactivity must be chemically different than others. It is well known that volcanism gives off great heat into the atmosphere and beyond. Why, with this naturally effective heat venting apparatus, would the cumbersome convection cell be required? There is no limit but the universe itself to the heat ejected sub-aerially; the bubbling stew is without a lid. Why should there be vast surfaces (between plate boundaries) bereft of volcanic outlets while the enormous mass of molten rock is pushed so delicately sideways as to not break the surface? Repeatedly the convectionists and subductionists use the quantavolutionary words "collision" and "plunge" to denote operations occurring at a scarcely observable rate out of "collisions" between bodies which are already impacted and therefore scarcely able to collide, though capable of jostling perhaps (wherefrom we might receive the submarine trenches). Still we read often that plates "collide"; one plate "plunges" beneath another. They are in a desperate theoretical fix: their instruments tell them that they have only about 160 million years to sweep around the globe; the energy for this must occur by a relative heat emanating from radioactive decay. Some scholars must long for a young Earth whose interior might still have its "primordial heat" to give away. Their belief in stable astronomical motions of the globe and its solar system neighbors precludes their introducing thermal and inertial forces to abet the heat emerging from radioactivity and pressure. To speak of flowing rocks as the convectionists do, and to a degree all must, is to employ the word viscosity. "Viscosity is a function of the chemical composition, temperature... and pressure..." [17] A high viscosity marks a slow flow: measured in poises, water flows with a 0.01 poise, honey creeps with 100 poises; and the rocks of the Fennoscandian uplift (where presumably once an ice cap and a polar region had produced Earth-flattening) exhibit by one estimate 2.4 X 10 22 poises [18] . Summarizing and developing several studies, Cook publishes figures of about 10 22 poises as the average viscosity of the crust and upper mantle, a viscosity of 10 13 to l0 14 poises at the bases of continents and about l0 11 poises at a depth of 150 kilometers. A minimum viscosity or maximum fluidity would occur at about the 150 km depth, both geochemical and seismic observations being seemingly in agreement on the matter. But if there are no reasonably short gradients of viscosity thereafter, it is hard to visualize a large-scale convection dynamic in operation, much less a host of a dozen giant cells or a pattern of a thousand smaller convection cells working within the mantle. Not unexpectedly, then, Cook and Eardley calculated that to move the continents even in 200 million years would require forces "a billion to a trillion times greater than those that should be generated by the postulated mantle convection currents." [19] Some scientific creationists, as exemplified by G. R. Morton, cannot accept continental drift, much less rafting as here described, because by their calculations, "neither convection cells nor any other [lateral] forces could have separated the continents within a few thousand years, if the viscous forces were involved in that movement." [20] The heat generated would have to be in the millions of degrees and would vaporize the Earth. Morton concludes that "either God separated the continents outside of natural agencies or that the Earth expanded in such a way that the viscous forces were not involved." Creationists generally avoid naturalistic exoterrestrialism, Patten being exceptional. So Morton does not consider the possibilities that led the present author to the model of Solaria Binaria: heat can be exploded and fresh atmosphere brought in from a fuller plenum rather than the thin present air of Earth. However, Morton remarkably adds a final sentence, irrelevant to all that he has said before: "The expansion of the earth caused by an expansion of each individual atom due to a change in the permittivity of free space (the electric force) is a possibility which could avoid the viscosity problem." Thus he finally grasps for "the electric force," which, we have seen, is a heat-saver. We are led back to the only mechanism that can produce low viscosity and provide it where needed, an exoterrestrial and hence surficial force suddenly applied to set the crustal blocks containing the continents -that is, the remaining blocks -into lateral motion. First, an explosion of surface must occur, with heavy electrical attraction and expansion. Then what Cook writes (and he uses the northern ice cap as a self-mover, without exoterrestrial assistance) is Ó propos: "Crustal distortions under a force sufficient to cause continental drift should then have amounted to from hundreds to thousands of times more than witnessed in the recent uplifts. In a catastrophic drift process viscosity breakdown along the shear surfaces would permit relatively easy flow compared with that of a threshold drift process." [21] Once in motion away from the rifts, the blocks (or plates) will have provided their own "grease" for a movement enduring several thousand years and exponentially declining to today's minute rates of drift. Overall, the pattern of movement was lunatropic, directed at resurfacing the Earth. That nevertheless some collisions would ensue was to be expected, for the fractures around the globe necessarily expanded to move crustal fragments towards one another as well as toward the lunar basin. It is not surprising that modern studies detect contrary motions, as, for example, South America is being pushed westwards from the Atlantic Ridge and eastwards from the East Pacific Rise at the same time. These are not contradictory motions, so far as the theory of lunagenic tropism is concerned. Most geologists and geophysicists today are satisfied that the heat generated and in part used to move the dozen plates of the world around is not so great as to make life impossible today or for a billion and more years past. A minority, as here, is not so sure. The issue is complex, technical, and abstract to the edge of pure speculation. This, however, is certain: an exoterrestrial and sub-aerial force can require less continuous heat and dissipate it more quickly; it operates with heat as more of a waste product than the key to the movement of the crust. The greatest portion of the heat given off to set the continents in motion would be explosive and would disappear into cold space with the exploded crust. The resistance to the movement of the remaining crust would be much less than if the crust of the Earth had remained intact throughout Earth history. The continental blocks would require much less energy to move into the large areas heretofore occupied by continental material but now unoccupied save by an erupting and boiling mantle material. Only several soft kilometers of depth would need to be ploughed through by the continental blocks heading toward the lunagenic basin. Further the quantavolutionary theory, as proposed here, would rely upon earth expansion, largely owing to electrical discharge, as a precipitator and facilitator of the crustal movement. Except most rarely, as with Carey, the writers on continental drift ignore an obvious probability and even necessity, that when continents drift around the globe and the whole Earth's surface moves -no matter how slowly -the Earth's surface cannot remain a constant quantity, as if some secret ordinance has determined that the globe must have retained its precise figure of today through hundreds of millions of years, no more, no less, no matter what heats burn, what pressures invest the rock masses, what atmosphere bears upon it, what collides, what escapes. Lately, orogeny has come to be added to the marvels created by plate tectonics; the Alps and Himalayas are thus explained; so too the mountains and islands that stand landwards of some submarine trenches. The aforesaid secret ordinance must decree that extra plate is created for every mountain rise, or else admit some expansion of the crust. But if some expansion, why not much expansion? The material that is rising from the hot mantle must bring with it an expansive pressure; it is less dense; but when it cools upon erupting at the ridges does it become more dense? Not if it is like the famous stew pot or porridge in the analogy of convection cells. What remarkable chemical properties the magma must have: having had its backside scraped of sediment by the razor-bladed trench, it returns to the deep mantle millions of years later and hundreds of kilometers away and resumes its former thermo-chemical state. Scientific advance of an important kind occurs when an acceptable interplay of theory and fact occurs. On the issue of the movement of continents, tropism towards the lunagenic basin was suggested as long as a century ago, by Osmond Fisher. But little was known of the ocean basins and the time scheduled for the event was in the dim beginnings of the Earth. W. H. Pickering of the Harvard College Observatory argued the case in 1907, [22] and it was well publicized. Meanwhile H. Baker was evolving his theory. "The separation of the continents by fission," wrote Pickering again in 1923, has for 18 years "been attributed to the great convulsion that occurred at the time of the birth of the Moon, from the side of the Earth. This explanation of the origin of our Moon is at the present time almost universally accepted by astronomers. We see the same phenomenon occurring in many close double stars." [23] He placed the "center of origin" of lunagenesis off the southern tip of New Zealand. However, Pickering held to the view that, although terrestrial lunagenesis and the Atlantic fission must have occurred late enough so that the continents possessed their modern forms, the time had to be early: "that a catastrophe involving the sudden removal of three-quarters of the Earth's surface could occur without destroying all life, both vegetal and animal, appears impossible." Therefore he disputed Alfred's Wegener's contention that the Atlantic Basin opened up at the end of the Cretaceous period or in the early Tertiary. Thus an impasse occurred until the present day. Wegener's continental drift theory is accepted but not its cause. Instead geologists cling to their terrestrial ideology and posit convection currents. The effects of ripping some 50 kilometers in depth off of most of the Earth's surface were conjectured to be utterly destructive of the biosphere. Today much new geological and geophysical evidence can be adduced from an examination of the Earth and Moon, tending to support the terrestrial origin of the Moon and the connection between lunagenesis and continental break-up and movement. Moreover, the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary is increasingly understood to mark the extermination of most species. Whether this boundary happened at sixty million years or twelve thousand years ago (which I construe to be the case) does not much matter on the issue of biosphere survival. I have pointed out elsewhere that biosphere annihilation was not necessarily predicated during lunagenesis. The immense typhoon that conveyed the crust of the Earth into space would have carried away with it most of the heat generated in the transaction, while at the antipodes of the event, downwards draughts of the then much more voluminous atmosphere would have cooled and regassed the land. This is only one instance of the physical arguments that can be brought into play to establish that the biosphere would survive. To be borne in mind, also, is the prolific regenerative capacity of all species, no matter what their method of reproduction. The proper question to ask regarding biosphere survival is: what chance did one or more reproductive units of each of a million species have of surviving the conditions of lunagenesis? To conclude, the tectonic plates are with declining force moving to restore the global holospheric symmetry lost in lunagenesis. They are constrained and directed by the global cleavage system. The subduction theory is demonstrably incorrect. The convection theory, which aside from its weak force and its dependence on subduction theory, depends upon a place to go, is impossible. Quantavolution theory, on the other hand, copes well with continental drift theory, assimilates it, simplifies it, and gives it a strong foundation in cosmogony. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-four: Continental Tropism and Rafting)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-four: Continental Tropism and Rafting) 1. "The Continental Drift Affair," 17. 2. "Antipodal Location of Continents and Oceans," 153 Science (Sept. 9, 1966), 1246-8. 3. D. H. Elliot. E. H. Colbert. W. J. Breed, J. A. Jensen, J. S. Powell, "Triassic Tetrapods from Antarctica: Evidence for Continental Drift," 169 Science (13 Sep. 1970), 1197-1200. 4. "Continental Drift," V Ency. Britannica (1974), 112. 5. Ibid., 108. 6. Quoted by Jordan, op. cit., and see the chart there (and in Chaos and Creation) of the frequency distribution of altitudes of land and sea bottoms. 7. Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 521. 8. "Static or Mobile Earth: The Current Scientific Revolution," in Gondwanaland Revisited..., 112 Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. (Phila, 1968), 309. 9. "Mother Earth...," op. cit., 12. 10. M. Nafi Toksoz, "The Subduction of the Lithosphere," Sci. Amer. 89. 11. Bruce C. Heezen and Michael Rawson, "Visual Observations of the Sea Floor Subduction Line in the Middle-America Trench," 196 Science (22 Apr, 1977), 423. 12. Roger N. Anderson. "Surprises from the Glomar Challenger," 293 Nature (1981), 261- 2. 13. Toks÷z, op. cit., 97. 14. Ibid., 89. 15. Fred T. Mackenzie, "Development of the Oceans," 13 Ency. Britannica (1974), 480. 16. A. E. Ringwood, "Structure and Composition of Earth," 6 Ency. Britannica (1974), 51. 17. M. A. Cook, "Viscosity-Depth Profiles...," 68 J. Geophys. Res. (June 1963), 3515. 18. G. Robert Morton, "Creationism and Continental Drift," 18 Creation Res. Sci. Q. (1981), 42. 19. "Analysis of Crustal Deformation by Mantle Convection Currents," 1962, unpubl., cf. Cook, "Continental Drift: Is Old Mother Earth Just a Youngster?" Utah Alumnus (Sept. 1963), 10-12; also critiques and debate, Nov. 1963, Oct. 1964, Nov. 1964. 20. "Creationism and Continental Drift," 18 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1981), 43. 21. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models, op. cit., 271. 22. Am. J. Geol. (1970), 23; cf. CXV Harper's Monthly (1907), 120; Scot. Geog. Mag. (1907), 523. 23. 61 Geol Mag. (1924), 31. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART V: } {Q RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS: } {C Chapter 25} {T Sediments} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE SEDIMENTS We have entertained the possibility that till might have originated from the tail of a comet or cyclonically (tempestites). Using the typical approach of an intruder with an unwelcome hypothesis, I introduced statements of anomaly and bafflement. Thus, where is the till of the seas? Why is the correlation between till fields and glaciated areas not strong? If tektites can be exoterrestrial, why not till -remember that the feather and cannonball of Galileo fall at the same speed? And so on. Dreimanis could be quoted: "Most of North America, particularly Canada, the entire northern part of Europe and considerable portions of other continents have been glaciated several times during the last two million years, and covered by various thicknesses of till and other glacigenic deposits... It sounds like a paradox, but till appears to have become more complicated with time, in spite of detailed and extensive investigation... " [1] And Kujansuu showed that "the flow directions of the ice sheet in Central Lapland," as indicated by five beds of till, followed five largely different directions [2] . And G. W. White: "In almost any excavation in the glaciated northwestern Allegheny Plateau, a till different from the surface till will be encountered, and in an excavation of 15 feet or more, several till sheets of different ages are to be expected... The tills vary in texture, composition, compactness, permeability and in joint spacing... the till sheets may be separated by a sand layer or a silt layer of varying thickness... unweathered till may lie upon weathered till, or a paleosol, or another unweathered till." [3] As with till, so with all sediments: none is perfectly simple, or, if so, can be proved to be. Sand occurs as 10% or less of deep ocean sediments. Basalt does not give up sand; sand is continental. Is this fall-out, turbidity currents of unobserved ferocity coming off the slopes, early winds over empty beds? Shelton ends his book on geology much as I end this chapter, musing about hypothetical studies, "and finally, before we can do any of these things, we must be able to tell one rock from another -which is just about where we started." [4] About 5% of all crustal rock is composed of sediments that remain in something approaching their state after deposition. They veneer about three-quarters of the continental surface to thicknesses ranging from the merely visible to a dozen kilometers in height, with the average for the globe at over two kilometers. Sediments have been classified by priority of deposition and anywhere from ten to hundreds of major and minor strata have been allocated positions, sometimes only after prolonged controversy, some only among certain believers. Besides containing chemical and mineral traces and distinguishable fossil remains, an estimated 80% of sedimentary rock are shales composed of mud or clay, 10% are of sandstone and 10% are of limestone. The old problem of sediments missing from the geological column became more worrisome with the discovery that the ocean bottoms do not carry their proportionate burden of sediments, much less the extra quantity to fill the gap in the geological column. The continental slopes are formed of shaken down, wasted down, and blown down debris from the shelves of the continents; but they would constitute only a small part of the supposed accumulation. The composition of the slope deposits is unknown. Perhaps half was carried off the shelves in the continental movements and orogeny following lunagenesis. A fifth may have descended from the sky preceding and accompanying the event. A tenth might have been washed in during the Noachian deluge. The small balance may be divided between river run-off into the oceans and cosmic and volcanic fall-out. Ager reports that "... chaotic deposits and slump topography have now been found at the foot of many present-day continental slopes." [5] The continental shelves and the abysses carry clay. The polar regions and half the remainder of the basins carry ooze. Sand and boulder are confined largely to occasional polar sediments. However, sand composes 10% of the ocean bottoms, too much for long-term sedimentation to have occurred. Carbonates, suggesting organic detritus, are common in the shelf and ooze sediments. Little suggests the continental rock in the oceanic sediments; it is a different world of unconsolidated material. Perhaps the granite that forms the massive substructure of the continents down to about ten miles is composed of melted sediments, making the original crust out to be a thin basalt covering where the upper mantle has cooled. The chemical composition of granite would deny this idea, however. Nor does the location of the granites or sediments suggest that granitization has consumed sediments. Granite is found below, and intrusively, among sediments, not apparently where it might have been transforming them by conveying some special electrical or thermal force. Old sediments do not appear to be far less common than new sediments, which they would be if they had been formed and consumed in a special earlier time on Earth. Granites can be formed by subjecting a mixture of albite, orthoclase and quartz minerals to high pressure (30,000 lbs/ in 2 ) and melting temperatures, and then allowing cooling. Hence it was surmised by O. F. Tuttle that the origin of granites was in hot magma of the mantle [6] . This idea may be the best of the three considered by him (the others being the metamorphosis of mostly sedimentary rock through hot chemical solutions, as above, and metamorphosis of proto-granites from ion exchanges causing crystal changes even while in a solid state); but he does not consider, nor do others, the possibilities of an accumulation of granite from atmospheric (plenum) deposits in an earlier state of the solar system, or of a massive electrical discharge between Earth and external bodies, or of a melt of an earlier crust by an exoterrestrial encounter. In this book, granite is presumed to be the creation of a period during which the Earth gained dust, charge, water, and heat from the gaseous tube extending between the Sun and its binary partner. We suppose that granite is an exoterrestrial electric welding of a crustal covering for the Earth. It lay under such sediments as have formed out of largely 'cool' fall-out and heavy erosion. That granite and basalt, both with the hardness of steel, can be quickly reduced to debris is attested by the well-defined Washington scablands; there closely-spaced rushes of water cut many channels of many meters of depth through hundreds of kilometers of basalt plains, before dumping some of their debris in hills, and more debris into the Pacific Ocean basin, where perhaps it was overrun by the continent. It may be added that most of the granite once possessed by Earth was ripped off and exists in a reconsolidated state on the Moon. With the granite went half of the sedimentary rock as well. Still, much sedimentary rock is found in a largely disarranged condition on Earth, in some places being miles thick, in other places scanty or even nil. And the geological ages of the Earth, largely founded upon the layerings of sedimentary rock of the continents, have long been suspect simply because of the disarrangement and, indeed, chaos of the sediments. Geologists customarily still speak of erosion as the source of all sedimentary rock [7] , following a process of weathering of source material, transportation, deposition, and lithification which compacts and cements the material into a coherent rock. But to address such rocks with the fixed idea of gradual erosion is inappropriate. Geologists, writes Ager, generally act on the belief that "the stratigraphical column in any one place is a long record of sedimentation with occasional gaps... But I maintain that a far more accurate picture of the stratigraphical record is of one long gap with only very occasional sedimentation... The gaps predominate .... the lithologies are all diachronous and the fossils migrate into the area from elsewhere and then migrate out again." [8] Ager does not presume to measure gaps of time, perhaps because if nothing happens, there can be no measure of it. Therefore the gap may be long or short. Here we prefer the brief gap to the long. Indeed, often it can be argued that no gap exists. In a remarkable survey, Woodmorappe has denoted the presence or absence of the ten conventional geological periods on a sample of 967 equal square areas of 406 square kilometers of the continental lands [9] . Ideally, every square on Earth should exhibit some rocks of all ten periods. Natural history assumes that all areas have undergone similar weathering experiences during any given long period of time; if, as is known, rocks of all ten periods are not found, it is because field surveys have not been competent or complete, or because the weathered debris of given age has been transported as such or as rock later on to somewhere outside the 406 square kilometer area (a journey of a maximum of a dozen kilometers), or because the rock did actually form but was eroded and carried off, or because the rock once formed was later subjected to metamorphosis. Some credence can be given to all these explanations, but, too, it is noteworthy that the "presence" of period rocks in Woodmorappe's study often refers to a minor outcropping within the area and not to full coverage of the area. The departure of reality from the myth is impressive. In no more than one per cent of this sample of the areas of the world are all ten periods of natural history represented. Some of these widely scattered areas are doubtfully complete (in the Himalayas, Bolivian Andes, Indonesia, South Central Asia, and Cuba). Rarely does one find even three of the ten geological periods in their expected consecutive order. Moreover, "42% of earth's land surface has 3 or less geologic periods present at all; 66% has 5 or less of the 10 present; and only 14% has 8 or more geologic periods represented..." Individual geologic periods' coverage of the earth's land surface range from a high of just over 51% for Cretaceous ... to a low of only 33% for Triassic. Only 21% of the Lower Paleozoic is represented in 3 or more of its periods; the complete Upper Paleozoic is found in 17% of the areas; the Mesozoic is complete in 16% of the areas. A complete Paleozoic record is found in 5.7% of the areas, and a complete Upper Paleozoic plus Mesozoic in 4.0%. Some percentage of every geologic period rests directly upon Precambrian 'basement', especially high percentages of Ordovician (23.2%) and Devonian (18.6%) doing so. The data confirm the belief of those who argue, with Ager, that there are more gaps than record. Too, the chances are painfully high that one stands upon a seriously incomplete geological column wherever one may be on Earth. Although the statistics will not suffice to show causation, they support the line of thought here: the Earth's surface has been reconstituted; the reconstitution has camouflaged the earlier surface and the earlier surface has disguised the reconstruction. Many of the "gaps" in the record are illusions. Fossils are probably as often the perpetrators of unconformities as the indicators of them; they must often have gathered where "they didn't belong" in the course of catastrophes. The strata of all periods prefer to rest directly upon their prior strata, showing a tendency towards a time-consistency in superpositioning, as conventionally believed; that is, each era tends to be more on its preceding era than on any other era. There is one important exception: all have a greater chance of resting on pre-cambrian than on the last post-cambrian eras. Except for the two periods just prior to it, a period has a better chance of resting directly on pre-cambrian than on any other stratum; the correlation except for two directly preceding periods must be nil. This indicates a pre- cambrian basement preference of all strata. It also suggests a simultaneity for deposits that have previously been assigned as successions [10] . So what Price once called the "onion skin theory" of sedimentation is untenable, if it is indeed still retained by many. The essential principle of sedimentation should probably be called "quantavolution." Actually the idea has many antecedents and precedents: this we now well understand. Specifically applied to sedimentation, it means that the rocks of the phanerozoic era convey by their composition, strata, geography, quantities, and geological columns a patterning that suggests intensive, large-scale sudden and brief events, that is, a lately tortured Earth. Derek Ager takes the position of a macrochronic quantavolutionist. "Changes, cyclic or otherwise, within the solar system or within our galaxy, would seem to be the easy and incontrovertible solution for everything that I have found remarkable in the stratigraphical record." [11] The secondary mechanism, which he employs repeatedly but without criticism of its fundamental origins, is plate tectonics. "The theory of plate tectonics now provides us with a modus operandi." [12] He sees a distinction between the exoterrestrial cause and the drifting continents as cause; thus, "we come to one of the great anomalies of the stratigraphical record, with the widespread extinctions of the Frasnian/ Fammenian junction" of the Devonian. There is no evident explanation to be found in drifting continents or colliding plates. It seems that here, at least, we must appeal to an exoterrestrial cause. He has several additional preferred temporal locations for exoterrestrial interventions in geology. He can use plate tectonics to discover and discuss numerous "periodic" and "episodic" catastrophes around the world. This enables him to be macrochronic: "the history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." He offers a wide range of examples, from numerous eras, of the worldwide distribution of various rock-types and fossils; this leads us to the supposition not only of a Pangea in which sediments and life forms might readily become worldwide but also, and perhaps more important, of species that never reached their potential limits, suggesting forceful interruptions of their spreading. Further, it implies worldwide equal conditions for even very special kinds of sedimentation and rocks to form. He illustrates the bizarre differences in depth of the deposits of the same age in separate regions both near and distant, pointing out, for example, the one foot of Jurassic sediment in Sicily in contrast to the 15,000 feet of one Jurassic zone's sediment in Oregon [13] . Since they do not form on mountains, sediments, which can fill basins to a depth of up to 20,000 meters, would have been below sea level if the oceans existed when they grew. He alludes to numerous wide differences in rates of sedimentation: a 38-foot fossil tree stands amidst the late Carboniferous Coal Measures of Lancaster; but for the flow of sediments from rivers into the seas he quotes Holmes' measure of only one centimeter per millennium. He estimates the Grand Canyon at under 10 million years; the gorge, that is, provides a case of rapid erosion. "The periodic catastrophic event may have more effect than vast periods of gradual evolution:" this he calls "the phenomenon of quantum sedimentation." [14] As there are more gaps than record, it is also true that there are more rapid deposits than slow ones, and the two facts may be connected in quantavolution. Rapid rates are easy to discover; Vita-Finzi cites a mid-Atlantic rate of clay deposit that increased suddenly from 0.22 to 0.82 grams/ centimeter 2 /year about 11,000 years ago (conventional dating), along with a drop in total carbonate deposition from 2.80 to 1.34 g/ cm 2 /y [15] . Nearly a 400% increase over an immense area; was it a type of Worzel ash fall-out? Or another case of rapid sedimentation? At Nampa, Idaho, a well-carved human image in soft stone was recovered at 300 feet depth during well-boring [16] . The drill had penetrated 60 feet of alluvium, 15-20 feet of lava, and 200 feet of quicksand beds and clay, coming upon the sculpture in coarse sand, just below which was vegetable soil, followed by sandstone. One recognizes here a probable catastrophic sequence; the statue's presence, if admitted, wreaks havoc upon anthropology or geology or both. Doeko Goosen has developed a wealth of related material, yet unpublished [17] : Two of my students collected undisturbed samples of a transition zone between a soil of less than 1 m thick and the underlying shale. My hunch was that the soil had not developed from the shale, and minerological analysis proved me right. Within cracks of the shale multi-layer cutans were found. Traditionally such is explained by the one- layer per season theory, but when I looked through the microscope I saw oddities not compatible with that theory. [An expert on micromorphology confirmed his conclusions.] The phenomenon must have been caused by very strong tectonic vibrations, causing cracking of the slate and a sudden influx of clay and lime. At the same time fragments of the slate must have been projected upwards violently, passing through the soil, and now found on the surface. Such tectonic miscibilation must be worldwide and visible under examination according to the quantavolution hypothesis in ground not believed to have experienced tectonism historically. Furthermore, a probable catastrophic cause may be assignable to soil processes that are considered ordinary and gradual. Goosen writes: The formation of a laminated deposit via the season after season theory occurs only in highly exceptional circumstances. Wherever flooding occurs, there is also biological activity. The Rhine in the Netherlands each year floods pastures within the zone between the dikes, and leaves a thin deposit of clay. In the thus accumulated soil there is absolutely no lamination. The growing grass plus organisms like worms lead to homogenization. Indeed, it will be difficult to find on earth an environment where the season after season theory could be demonstrated. And then, upon seeing a laminated sediment, the inevitable conclusion must be that it is a catastrophic sediment, including the famous Scandinavian varves. "Sedimentation goes on all the time, for ever moving from place to place, for ever cannibalizing itself." [18] It accumulates also from erosion of igneous and metamorphic rock. All sedimentary bodies, other than deep sea oozes and volcanic ash deposits, are likely to be diachronous. They stretch and spread out from a node over a small or large region, so that the elapsed time from the center outwards may be considerable. Two contrasting illusions, we note, can be created if the same sediment is thinly spread over a large area, first that the sediment is all of the same time, whereas it is not, second that the time itself must be long because of ambiant indicators applying to some central segment. That is, dating the indicator, one applies it to the whole, which brings about an illusory dating of adjacent rocks, too. Rejecting the "layer cake" and "gentle rain from heaven" images as explanations of sedimentations, Ager introduces a rolled carpet that is gradually unrolled with time. We can extend the analogy. A producer of carpets lays down his roll and rolls it out before a salesman; the salesman rolls it up and carries it away to sell to buyers. Sometimes the producer has no carpets; at other times he brings only part of his collection; sometimes he brings in many rolls. The salesman sometimes rejects carpets and they are not sold; sometimes he buys one, or several, or all. A pile of rugs accumulates in the producer's showroom. Piles grow elsewhere. The salesman may even return his defective carpets. He may decide to deal with several producers, even as the producers may deal with different salesmen. Some buyers save carpets as a form of money; others wear them out quickly. In critical times for the economy, heaps of unsold carpets are laid out and accumulate, or are desperately sold in heaps; in inflationary periods, carpets become quickly and widely distributed. These last time periods would quantavolutionize the rug business. When he is not imagining rugs, Ager's picture of the stratigraphical record is "of one long gap with only occasional sedimentation." [19] But his "occasional" sometimes is rare and sometimes frequent. I have noted this earlier in his view of tsunamis. Also now avalanches: "the frequency of landslides is quite enough to account for a major part of the wearing down of new mountain chains." Three cubic miles dropped in one slide at Flims, Switzerland; 40 million cubic meters of mountains fell into Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1958. Still, a single earthquake of 10 or more on the Richter scale (and what was the number of the rising of the Sierra Nevadas?) would shake a new mountain range into well- worn shapes with garlands of debris all about below, and enough detritus to provide many moraines; the rise of a mountain range, indeed, may be its own heaviest eroder, then and there. The more rapid its rise, the more eroded it will be when it ceases to rise. Ager argues convincingly the origin of deep sediments. The production of sediments is independent of subsidence. "It is only when sedimentation and subsidence coincide that the conditions will be right for the preservation of the vast thicknesses that constitute the stratigraphic record." [20] Again, we encounter a falling back upon the old notions of subsidence and uplifting. The phenomena are not mistaken; they are only insufficiently explanatory. Ager partly realizes this, and sets up a very busy plate welding shop operating episodically over vast periods of time. A number of plates (and he seems to accept many major fractures everywhere as plate boundaries) spend history in roughly their original geographical locations, jostling heavily against one another periodically, episodically, spasmodically. "The continental plates, rather than sailing about the earth until they met in catastrophic collisions, separated and came together again repeatedly along the same general lines. In other words, there were many catastrophes and certain parts of each plate were particularly accident prone." [21] He would better have taken up the simple concept of ocean basins being created before the oceans and filled by debris washed down and fallen out of the catastrophic deluges. We should not diminish one whit or alienate so expert and staunch an ally. We may, as mildly as we can, offer a suggestion. Let us give one more turn to the screws on the lately tortured Earth by computerizing its morphology. Suppose only one index to be composed for a sample of, say, 5 100 sedimentary sequences chosen at random from the 510 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface (one in 100,000; this ratio and size of sample is typical for discovering the political opinions and predicting the voting behavior of the American population). Call it an Index of Quantavolution "Q/ a" (actually this could be a composite of a set of indices). It should contain and combine the number of distinguishable strata; an index of conformity to the ideal sequence of geological ages; the number of discontinuities that might be of diastrophic origin; the proportion of igneous and metamorphic intrusions; the proportion of the square kilometers (as judged by a hexagonal reading from drilling or otherwise) occupied by the central sequence of strata; and a total of the estimate of the lowest possible elapsed time for the deposit of each stratum to the column. Determine the usual statistical parameters of the sample, the sums, means, modes, quartiles, standard deviations etc. of the 5100 sedimentary sequences, and perform the obvious analysis and comparisons. Some will say that the general information sought here is already known and taken into account, others that it is largely unknown and impossible to achieve, and many (rightly) that it is a caricature of a carefully drawn index. Many will comment that if the MOHOLE could not be financed to drill into the underseas mantle at an especially flushed period of American government finances, this project could never be funded. Many would want "add-ons": for example, "why not get samples of all strata in every sequence while we are at it?" We would eagerly agree. However, plausible conjectures and semi-data might be developed for all aspects of the index by library research and questionnaires addressed to many experts. Substitute sampling could be extensively employed. Ultimately I would suppose refined summations to emerge such as the following: that the number of strata increase with recency; that superposition is 90% or better, but less than 50% of the recognized sequence is present; that 95% of the discontinuities might conceivably indicate diastrophism; that possible intrusions occupy over 50% of 80% of the sequences; that few sequences preserve their integrity over a square kilometer; that 80% of all sequences might conceivably have been laid down in their totality within 1000 (sic) years and that individual sequences would never exceed 10,000 years using conceivable assumptions. The report would be entitled, Reductio ad absurdum, Part II. Perhaps one of the more entertaining aspects of such a study would be the objections that it is too literally empirical, and that the "total picture" is needed to disprove it and set it aright; the "total picture" is, however, what hitherto has given rise to the cosmogonies and science fiction that have commonly caused distress among geologists. It would be possible to elaborate the hypothetical findings of such a study and to explain their heuristic and substantial utility, but not here. Thus, if the data is rotated topographically, significant summaries of continental and regional data would be generated. Moreover, as characterizes discussion of empirical data, no matter how crude, the air would be cleansed of some of the purely terminological pockets and gusts that cause turbulence and mental cloudiness. I see in such a project, also, a confrontation of the facts and their consequences that even a most learned and iconoclastic scientist does not consistently afford himself. He may come to realize that microchronism must be employed as a hypothetical model if a catastrophist is ever to integrate his facts. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-five: Sediments)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-five: Sediments) 1. "Tills: Their Origins and Properties," in Legget, ed., op. cit., 11. 2. "Glaciological Surveys for Ore-Prospecting Purposes in Northern Finland," in Legget, ed., op. cit., 225. 3. "Thickness of Wisconsian Tills in Grand River and Killbuck Lobes...," in R. P. Goldthwait, Till: A Symposium (Columbus, Ohio State Univ., 1977), 160. 4. Op. cit., 424. 5. Op. cit., 38. 6. O. F. Tuttle, "The Origin of Granite," 192 Sci Amer. (Apr. 1955), 81. 7. As for example, W. G. Ernst, Earth Materials (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), 111. 8. Ager, 34. 9. "The Essential Nonexistence of the Evolutionary-Uniformitarian Geologic Column," 18 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1981), 46-67. 10. Ibid., Table II. 11. Op. cit., 83. 12. Ibid., 100. 13. Ibid., 40. 14. Ibid., 41, 44, 50. 15. Op. cit., 73. 16. G. Frederick Wright, 11 Amer. Antiquarian (1889), 379-81. 17. From letter to author, 15 Oct. 1982, Enschede (The Netherlands). 18. Ager, 58, 52. 19. Ibid., 34. 20. Ibid., 20. 21. Ibid., 86. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART VI: } {Q BIOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 26} {T Fossil Deposits} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part VI: Biospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX FOSSIL DEPOSITS In coarse quartzose sandstones of stream channels of Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains, fossil bones of the definitive reptilian genus, Lystrosaurus, were found. Deemed typical of Lower Triassic forms, it has been uncovered also in South Africa, India and China. In the sandstone, mudstone and white quartz pebbles are intruded along with the bone fragments. Logs and coal are at the same depth. Volcanic material is above and below. Remains of between 40 and 50 specimens are among the more than 400 specimens of other species in the same deposit. Numerous fossil relations have been shown between South America and Southern Africa, though not yet the Lystrosaurus. The China parallel introduces properly the Pangean connection. Pangean world distributions of many species of flora and fauna, both fossil and living, can be traced. Living species that have no way of traversing present-day barriers are discovered to exist on both sides of the barriers, as the tigers of Africa, India and Siberia. Extinct species of one area are alive in another area, impassibly separated by modern geography, as the elephants and camels of North America, probably miscegenable with those of Africa. Specimens of the same extinct species are found in areas separated by modern geography. A collapsed time schedule for the creation of the ocean basins demands a reconstruction of how aquatic species developed. Pangea was a world of small waters. Small and shallow lakes and swamps are conducive to the generation of individual variations within species and the prolongation of their careers. Whales and sharks travel great distances, but do not need to do so; they can flourish in a Tethyan sea; so with every other aquatic species. The great deeps are a last resort. The eels from everywhere descend to breed from their rivers into the salt ocean and there find the Sargasso Sea, the great belt of weed-bearing waters on both sides of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They die there and their young swim for thousands of miles and years of time to find the rivers of Europe and America. The American eels have 104 to 111 vertebrae, the European 114 or 115, and n'er the twain shall meet. Igor Akimushkin conjectures that eels originated or dwelt in the intercontinental fissure when it opened up an asserted 130 million years ago, not far from their fresh waters. Then they expanded their mobility to follow the drifting continents [1] . Fitting the case to the quantavolutionary theory, it would appear that the Sargasso Sea is a part of the old Tethyan world-girdling shallow freshwater sea; that for breeding the eels found the gulfweed more necessary than the saltwater noxious; that there has been too little time to cast off the habit of traversing great distances, or of adapting to seawater for the long adult life; and that the small differences between American and European eels are an additional indication of a recent common ancestry. The Sargasso Sea seems to be growing, which, since it must precede the eels, indicates that it may not have been in existence long. In sum, eel migrations are as much a proof of continental rafting as continental drift is proof of the reason why eels must be astonishing long-distance travelers. So also with aquaticized birds: if they migrate today intercontinentally, it is a stretching of their original habits; the irregular geometry, followed by birds that fly away from the arctic directly south and then veer at sharp angles to find their winter grounds, and vice versa to return, may be a function of land-mass migrations; the birds seem to be pursuing their original routes. If so, there may have been little time in which to evolve more efficient habits. The Pangean shallow waters life centers were mostly wiped out, but survivors could readily adapt to the continental shelves and slopes, and the shallow and middle depths of the new ocean basins. (Wegener once alluded to the exclusive presence of shallow- water fossils in marine paleontology.) A typical succession pattern for the survival of an aquatic species would be to migrate or be turbulently transported from a Pangean center in a flooding action that settled into a temporary pond on the way across the land and towards what was to be the ocean. By the time of arrival at the finalized ocean shelf, where almost all aquatic species concentrate, the ocean waters bordering the land were quiet and cooled enough to permit proliferation. The exponential arithmetic for the growth of the population of the species at this stage would produce numbers sufficient to choke the oceans in a thousand years. In the oceanic abyss, few species are found, and the same species are more commonly found on the continental shelf with few mutations. There is no exclusively abyssal flora or fauna, nor any "living fossil ancestors." The fact, however, that species do inhabit the abyss signifies that the abyss, were it old enough and the conventional processes of evolution occurring, would be teeming with adapted and mutated species. The same logic would explain the scarcity of life forms in the high mountains, in the atmospheric bands, deep, below the land surface, and in the deserts. The inhospitability of these environments is only relative to dubious premises. Conventional long-time uniformitarian evolution and adaptation would have permitted all niches to become life-niches. Recent catastrophes provide of extinct niches such as would support a 50-foot winged dinosaur. If the oceanic salt seas carry few analogous niches for today's species, the reason may be limits imposed by the recency of drastic change, rather than limitations of nature. Rocks dredged from the bevelled tops of a number of seamounts carry imbedded fossils of current species that give 8 to 12,000 years readings on C14 dating (probably 4000 years old, then). The abyssal floors contain many bones, remarkably preserved. Large shark teeth of unknown species abound. Elephant teeth are found far down the continental slopes of North America. Their preservation for more than several thousand years is unlikely. The mountain is a new life-niche for mankind. A swamp is preferred. The altitude of the ruined city of Tiahuanacu is too high for the natives to reproduce themselves readily; they used to descend to the plains for the purpose. Either they were correct or had been living too brief a time up high to be sure. The mountains rose after the city was flourishing. Generally, if mountains were old, they should support many more life forms than is the case. The erect posture of humans is well-adapted to sky-watching and life in the swampland; wading and carrying were greatly facilitated (as probably with certain dinosaur species). The food supply of swamps is lush and the fish and game of swamps easier to catch than the animals of the plain and mountain. It is a common error to portray hominids as living in the African climates of today and exerting themselves in the pursuit of large animals. Findings of bones pounded and scraped by hand-axes relating to hominoids might only signify omnivorous scavengers. Large attached organisms are rare on the most recent oceanic ridges. The proliferation of such species on such ridges, that are rich in flora and fauna, is to be expected after a brief passage of time. The intense activity of the ridges several thousand years ago blocked their prompt development. A distinctive southern flora, Glossopteris, found nowhere in the northern regions, is found as a fossil in India, Australia, South Africa, South America, and Antarctica. The case of India is doubly significant because a northern, adaptable, counterpart to Glossopteris exists but has never been found in India which is attached to Asia. This fact not only indicates continental rafting, but also recent continental rafting; there has been too little time for overland diffusion to have occurred. Identical genera of late Permian fauna are found in Northern Russia and South Africa. A fossil dinosaur of five continents (North America, South America, South Africa, Europe, and Asia) is known. Pangean distribution is generally confirmed. South America and South Africa, however, do not share mammalian identity today; cats are the only common genera. Many mammals common to both areas existed in Pangean times, before the catastrophes. Flora and invertebrates present a different picture today: there are numerous identities. Evidences of paleozoic faunal commonalty between North America and Europe are common. Many extinct Bohemian forms are replicated in extinct Texas forms, for example. During the paleozoic and mesozoic, some identical flora were to be found in East Asia and Western North America, and others in Eastern North America and Western Europe. The age-breaking catastrophes, since they came from the skies, handicapped severely large land animals. Most of the dinosaurs were wiped out at once; the larger mammals were mostly exterminated in one brief period. Elephant remains have been found in South America in Chile, Venezuela, and Brazil, as well as alive in Africa and India. Mastodon remains were discovered in Ecuador and Colombia. Elephant fossil bones were found in a Brazilian bed, or nearer to the sea than that same bed, which contained hundreds of modern human skeletons mixed among numerous marine shells and nodules of carbonaceous matter; these were discovered about 1827; the bed was referred to as of limestone and of tufa (volcanic lava). Piles of torn and mashed mammalian remains (mastodons, mammoths, bison, etc.) along with remains of many types of contemporary flora and other fauna, are discoverable in Alaska and Siberia. They are found in muck pits. They portray instant disaster by tidal and atmospheric forces. Large deposits of bones are found in Baja California (Mexico) cast up by the same kind of forces, uniting elephants and sharks in death. Most species of large mammals suffered extinction in undeniably modern times. (In 1975 a radiocarbon dating of a mammoth find placed it at only 400 B. C.) The species that could betake themselves to high ground or fly quickly from one place to another survived in larger numbers. Humans were among the survivors. Maybe it will be also shown that humans were present when the continents split apart. The implication of such proof is that an ecumenical culture must have existed prior to the Lunarian diaspora. The references to the catastrophic extinctions at "the end of the Pleistocene" mark the end of the ice age, which should, according to conventional theory, have been a blessing to most species, but was a universal disaster; life was first threatened by advancing ice and water, and then practically destroyed by the forces that broke up the ice and by ice break-up as well. Many voluminous deposits of destroyed life occur in areas far beyond the tropical or temperate climate where the same or related species exist today. Injections of space gas at very low temperatures, associated once or several times with the tilting of the Earth's axis, may be evidenced in well-preserved, suddenly frozen life forms found in various places. Moreover, in every area of the globe where collective disaster is manifested among the plant and animal species, the geology of the areas usually confirms the biology: ooze and clay boundaries shift in the deposits of the ocean beds; organic layers are sandwiched between inorganic; ash is generally distributed on several levels of many marine and terrestrial sediments. Each level represents a general disaster; some stand for world disasters. Conflagration, tides, atmospheric violence, and other disastrous forces can probably be discovered wherever the mind is directed. Or so it seems. Nature lends her occasional favors of fossils in a cruel way -by disasters. Human cult practices provide on occasion fossil cemeteries; otherwise human paleontology, too, would be dependent on the rare, unplanned event of a Pompeii. It is a euphemism, and misleading, to speak of "fossil cemeteries," or even of '" fossil assemblages," but, too, "dump," 'heap," "deposit," 'collection," 'aggregate" and other words are also questionable. Perhaps "fossil deposit" would be best, signifying many life forms concreted with clay, pebbles, and sand. Fossil deposits may include on the one hand mineralized or petrified remains, or on the other hand preserved organic remains. The basic principle of fossil analysis requires every fossil occurrence to be approached as a catastrophic event. Quick burial of a potential fossil is essential. Then, occasionally, one or more of several chemical processes will preserve some of the organic structure itself, or an image of it, for posterity. R. Redfern summarizes fossilization for us, letting disaster pop out of a fully uniformitarian ideology in an analogy of the "fossil food" in a supermarket. Paleontologists sometimes find fossilized animals preserved in an almost complete state: sloths in arid caves, mammoths packed in ice, and men in peat bogs. Such effective preservation was the result of rapid reduction of moisture content or temperature, impregnation with chemicals, exclusion of air, or of a mixture of all four. Although we would hardly call preserved food 'fossil food' when we buy it from a supermarket, there is really nothing new about desiccation, deep freezing, chemical additives, vacuum packaging, and various combinations of all four [2] . If all the remains of all that has ever lived had been preserved, might they exceed in mass the Earth itself? Termites and many insect species are considered geologically ancient. There is said to be a half-ton of live termites for every living human being. Considering that entire islands and hills have been found composed of mammoth and large mammal bones, and considering the huge fossil beds of vegetation, we can be sure that recent catastrophes have laid down the organic soils of today and a great deal more that has been eroded or quantavoluted since then. What dies is thus quickly recycled biotically, unless some geological intervention occurs. And this intervention that fossilizes is almost always connected to the cause of death. The fossil record therefore is distorted as to populations of the species and to a lesser degree to the kinds and numbers of species. Not all is known about fossilization, and less is realized. Ardrey mentions that the waters of Lake Victoria (Africa) were once fossilizing animals quickly and well because of some unknown quality probably not now present. E. R. Milton describes his examination of a petrified tree trunk in Alberta (Canada) [3] : The piece... was pure clear silica inside, it was coated with a rougher opaque crust of partially fused sand. The tree whose stump was petrified was alive five years ago! After the tree was cut down to accommodate the right of way for a new power transmission line, an accidental break allowed the live high-voltage wire to contact several tree stumps still in the ground. The power was cut off within hours of the break. All of the tree roots which contacted the broken wire were fossilized... Obviously, electricity can metamorphose matter quickly. One's mind reverts to earlier passages of this book where the presence of heavy electric fields and poisonous gases are given credence; perhaps these may have helped in the fossilizing process. A fossil is typically an accident, a disaster, an anomaly. We should not find in Ecuador a mixture of mastodon bones, pottery, and coal. Nor reptiles with full stomachs, pterosaurs swallowing food, a mammoth with buttercups in his teeth, or an ichthyosaur mother in the throes of birthing her infants. The very existence of fossils reflects, says C. B. Hanson, "inefficiency in the natural systems for recycling organic material." He experimented with sending mammal bones down a flume in a laboratory in attempts to replicate natural conditions. M. Coe studied the decomposition of elephants in a Kenyan drought, and concluded that only rapid burial would allow any chance for fossilization [4] . There was no question here of the elephants being assembled to die and then deeply buried away from water and doused with petrifying chemicals so as to produce one of the fossil assemblages so commonly found in natural history. In fact, the best case of a fossil assemblage that geology can afford from historical times is the resort population of Pompeii and Herculanum smothered and buried by the gases and ashes of Vesuvius in 79 A. D. The following exchanges concerning a fossil conglomerate of prehistoric Nebraska clarifies the issues, as perceived by uniformitarians and catastrophists [5] . We quote the catastrophist: "In the American Museum of Natural History (New York) there is on display in the Late Mammals room (Room 3, 4th floor) a rectangular fragment (about 1.7x2.5 m, and 15 to 50 cm thick) of a bone breccia from a 'fossil quarry' near Agate, Sioux Co., Nebraska. Most of the bones are from a small, two-horned rhinoceros, Dicera-theriurn, with minor amounts from Moropus (6%), a clawed mammal related to horses, and from Dinohyus (1%), a giant piglike mammal. Extrapolating the quantity of individuals that make up this fragment over the total volume of the breccia layer (360 sq. m 15 to 50 cm thick), one arrives at 8200 Diceratheria, 500 Moropi and 100 Dinohyi. This breccia is believed (by Museum officials) to have formed in quicksand. The accompanying text reads: The accumulation of bones is believed to have been formed in an eddy in the old river channel at a time when the valley was not so deeply cut out as it is now, and the river flowed at the higher level. A pool would be formed at this eddy, with quicksands at its bottom, and many of the animals which came to drink at the pool in the dry seasons would be trapped and buried by the quicksand. The covering of sand would serve to protect the bones from decay and prevent them from being rolled or water-worn by the current, or from being crushed and broken up by the trampling of animals that came to drink. But the sand of a quicksand is always moving and shifting around (whence its name of quick-sand), and with it the buried bones would be shifted around, disarticulated and displaced, so that when finally buried deeper by later sediments of the river valley they would be preserved as they are seen here, complete and almost undamaged, yet all the bones separate and disarticulated. "I wonder whether the inventor of this mechanism has done his best to find an actualistic example of quicksand sucking up animals (with a lesser density than itself) in such a selective manner. Or is this another example of a gradualistic mechanism being preferred at all costs, even if it violates actualistic principles and physical laws? Has the possibility of a herd suddenly buried by a landslide or a liquefied sediment been considered? Are the properties of the overlying sediment compatible with this hypothesis? If so, it would be interesting to investigate this possibility also for other bone breccias, and to find out whether such breccias are more common from certain periods of Earth history than from others." The story and comments are those of Hans Kloosterman, Editor of the magazine, Catastrophist Geologist. Kloosterman's note receives a reply from Richard H. Tedford, Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Museum of Natural History: The hypothesis you object to also bothers me. The hall displaying the block of bones is to be revised and that will give us the opportunity to revise the captions for the exhibits. I think the critical evidence here is the extent of disarticulation of the remains which implies dismemberment of the carcasses and transport in a fluid and I see nothing improbable in the ordinary hydraulic agencies in a fluviatile regime. The concentration of remains can also be attributed to irregularities on the floor of the channel (observed during excavation) and the development of local eddies over the larger bones first deposited that trap further remains being swept downstream. The catastrophic factor may be the cause of death of a large group of animals and there are ways to assess this (unfortunately not tried with reference to the deposits in question), but normal stream transportation and deposition seems to me to be sufficient to explain the resulting deposit. Richard H. Tedford The American Museum of Natural History Dept. of Vertebrate Paleontology New York, USA And, in rebuttal, Kloosterman writes the following: If we first of all keep separate the two possibilities: death and deposition by the same or by different causes, the disarticulation of the remains certainly suggests that death has occurred previous to deposition, but the high bone-to-sediment ratio of the layer and the paucity of species suggests rapid burial after death, pointing to a connection between the causes of death and burial. Museum specimens will provide no answer to these problems and we will have to go back to the field, and also compare the characteristics of many different bone layers. Are layers when consisting of only a few species always composed of herbivores? Are their sedimentological characteristics different from other bone layers? Doesn't there exist any classification of bone layers, or have I just been unable to find it? The issue is attacked by a hydrologist: The quotation from the American Museum of Natural History implies that a pool, formed at an eddy in a river would have a quicksand bottom. There is only one way such quicksand could form, and that is by upward movement of groundwater through the bottom of the pool (see reference on Ink Pots springs). While this is not uncommon, there is no evidence (e. g. sorting of the sandy matrix of the bone breccia) presented for this. Again referring to my Ink Pots paper, it is clear that density differences between quicksand and "trapped" animals do present a problem. The animals may have died from exhaustion, but they would not have been "sucked in". Lacking further evidence for the quicksand hypothesis, I think the mud flow (liquefied sediment slide) solution is more likely. The only way to solve this question is to collect all the evidence, including grain size distribution throughout the deposit, and detailed description of all "foreign matter" in the sediment. Robert O. van Everdingen Hydrology Research Div., Environment Canada Calgary, Canada Ref.: Van Everdingen R. O., 1969: The Ink Pots--a group of karst springs in the Rocky Mountains near Banif, Alberta. Can. J. Earth Sci. 6/ 4: 545-554. And Kloosterman concludes the case: The problem here is that an equally strong and pervasive uniformitarian influence exists in sedimentology as in paleontology, with, in the interpretation of sediments, an aversion to even such common and minor catastrophes as rapid mass movements. Even if we are willing to consider catastrophist hypotheses, some basic data may be lacking, and thus the "cooperation" of the two specialities may lead to a typical case of "cross sterilisation," so common between two different disciplines or even branches of the same discipline. Enlightening as these comments may be, it is noteworthy that what to this author seems to be the more likely solution of the problem is not mentioned. The animals are of distinct species and were killed together, their bones disarticulated, and their bodies concurrently buried, in a (probably presumed) "eddy" of a now extinct river. No indication of water-wear or scavenging affects the bones. Probably a large cyclone was involved; the animals were picked up, torn apart, dumped, at some distance, and buried in a matrix of debris that was also being transported. If the conglomerate contained more species, further study might reveal a possibility of a water tide as the prime factor. K. E. Chave's tumbling barrel experiments, in which shells and skeletons of marine animals were subjected to water, chert pebbles, and sand abrasion at 30 revolutions per minute, saw a reduction to under 4 mm grains of most of the structures within 183 hours, with perhaps 40 hours representing a half-life figure for average structures [6] . Complementary reduction occurs biochemically and by the action of other animals. Clearly, then, given 200 hours of rolling about, little identifiable fossil life would remain. Supposing that the rolling were stretched out in a tide or current, about 300 kilometers of movement at one kilometer per hour would reduce practically all life forms to grain size in a bio-mineral soup, which, when motion ceased, would be deposited and in a matter of days form a strong deposit, partly mineral and partly biological. The tide would be moving much faster in any disastrous scenario. The rate of destruction would increase with the speed. Therefore, a fast tide in a few hours over a stretch of a few kilometers would render the fossil record something readable, if at all, by electron microscope and paleobiochemistry. If tides had totally overrun the globe, the fossil record would be much less -all the less because tides dig up old deposits as they move, too. On the other hand, is the fossil record so generally rich as to imply large expanses of peaceful, tideless time when shells could find a quiet home, preserved, until pushed into visibility, there to encounter aeolian forces? Looking at the question in another way, where in the world would a fossil go to rest undisturbed by currents, electricity, and chemicals for a million years, or a hundred million, or a billion? "Hitler's Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) has no ceiling," we used to say in 1944. Has any fossil anywhere an anti- electro-chemical fortress, a Festung Fossilia with a ceiling? If we had available to us a thorough paleontological survey and map of the Earth above its granites, we should be able to answer the question of the age of the surface since its last scourings. We do not have it. Discovered fossil assemblages number in the hundreds, although they are not nicely inventoried. They occur on every continent, in many countries, in high and low latitudes, whenever land animals, plants and marine life have thrived. A large number remain to be discovered. A list of over fifty is before me as these lines are written, and I realize that they are almost all either late Cretaceous (reptiles) or late Pleistocene (large mammals), and that one must take into account many times this number for the aforesaid periods and then every "rich fossil bed" that graces the boundaries of the total phanerozoic calendar. An item from Chemical and Engineering News comes to mind [7] . Workers "found the fossil skeleton of a baleen whale some 10-12 million years old in... diatomaceous earth quarries in Lompoc, Calif. .... The whale is standing on end in the quarry and is being exposed as the diatomite is mined... The fossil may be close to 80 feet long." A sarcastic reader wrote in (March 21, 1977) that "Everybody knows that diatomaceous earthbeds are built up slowly over millions of years as diatom skeletons slowly settle out on the ocean floor. The baleen whale simply stood on its tail for I00,000 years, its skeleton decomposing, while the diatomaceous snow covered its frame millimeter by millimeter." That is, catastrophes affect the minute as well as the great life forms. We do not know what proportion of fossils contributing to paleontology was derived from conglomerates as against individual finds. As expected, no one has sorted the assemblages into those involving collective catastrophe and those accumulated by normal individual disasters. A committee of experts would probably find few if any of the latter category, some of doubtful origins, and the majority to be collective disasters. It would not take long today to conclude, for example, that the famous La Brea (Los Angeles) tar pit and similar pits, discovered many kilometers away, portray catastrophes. The conglomerates of smashed and disarticulated bones of discordant species (saber-toothed tigers, peacocks, etc.), gravel, and asphalt point to a paradise of wild life suddenly devastated and revived only as the dry, thinly populated land, poor in fauna, of recent historical times. The time of the La Brea incident has had to be lowered drastically; for one thing, human bones have been found there; but also, the assemblage has been connected with other major events, such as the drying of lakes, placed at about 3500 years ago. On the principle of "the Great Contrary" as the ancient Chinese called it, it would seem that the uniformitarians have received their chief input to the reconstruction of ancient species from the catastrophes that they would deny, just as the omnipresence of strata upon which they depend for their geology carries the heaviest implication of repeated disturbances of the Earth's surface. Fossil conglomerates are not partial to genera or to epochs. Many recent studies have been based upon material dredged from marine sediments, and concern minute organisms or creatures. These, too, usually mark boundaries ordinarily termed epochal, or climatic, or even catastrophic, for they involve abrupt terminations of some certain composite of species. Thus, when suddenly a thick band of coccoliths is dredged up from the bottom of the Black Sea, aged perhaps three to five thousand years, a sudden end to a regime becomes apparent: a deluge of strange waters, an abrupt climate change, an electric shock transmitted throughout the body of water, or a sudden break in the food chain occasioned by similar events [8] . We speak more of this when we come to discuss extinctions. At Bearsden, near Glasgow, a fossil conglomerate termed Carboniferous by age is found. Marine and freshwater strata are interlaced; marine and non-marine life-forms are present, not necessarily tied to their "appropriate" rock strata (land plants and marine animals are mixed); crustacean and shark fossils (rapidly decomposable) are found in high degree of preservation [7A]. Though often the material of coal beds, they are not carbonized. A series of tidal thrusts is to be assumed; further, coalification does not occur, it appears, unless an independent heated element is added before or after dumping. The evidence is consistent with the catastrophic theory of coal formation. Coal deposits are fossil conglomerates of a most impressive kind, and call upon the winds, the tides, and the giant bulldozers of ice and rock. Quotations from botanist Heribert Nilsson are pertinent [9] : Even if our peat-moors grew to a thickness of 2,000 meters, nothing would be similar to the Ruhr Carbon or any other coal district... If the possibility of an autochtonous formation of the seams is judged from the point of view of the amount of material available, the results must be considered as highly improbable. A forest of full-grown beeches gives material only for a seam 2 cm. It is not unusual that they are 10 meters thick, and such a seam would require 500 full-grown beech forests. Whence this immense material? How was it deposited all at once? Why did these masses of living organic material escape decay, why was it not completely decomposed?" To what degree sediments are "rock fossil assemblages" is unknown. They too, with or without fossils, can be transported by high-energy vehicles. If a tree stands vertically in a sediment does it not demand that its whole depth of burial should be carried throughout its stratum wherever it leads and the whole be considered instantaneous? Should not the vertical great whale referred to above be a measure of a whole stratum's instantaneity? A stratum can only be as thin as its tallest fossil will allow. A poly-strata fossil wipes out practically all the temporal pretensions of the blankets of its bed. Ideally, it should wipe out all identical blankets everywhere. A famous instance of ancient catastrophic fossilization was introduced by Hugh Miller in 1841 in regard to the Old Red Sandstone [10] : The River Bullhead, when attacked by an enemy, or immediately as it feels the hook in its jaws, erects its two spines at nearly right angles with the plates of the head, as if to render itself as difficult of being swallowed as possible. The attitude is one of danger and alarm; and it is a curious fact... that in this attitude nine tenths of the Pterichthes of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are to be found... At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the Fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved, the tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in Fish that die in convulsions... The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended... By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations? The depth of the fossil bed was immediately determined. Miller gives it at over 8000 feet. Hence all sandstones of this type everywhere in the world must be treated hypothetically as quantavolutionary. This promptly casts suspicion upon all rocks in the 360 global ambiance of the sandstones. It seems that this episode, which fascinated the scientific public over a century ago, is due for a reassessment in the light of current knowledge especially since a new element is found at the well-known scene, radioactivity. "Anomalous high radioactivity has been detected in Homosteus, a fish from the same Old Red Sandstone beds in which Pterichthyodes occur," writes Hans Kloosterman [11] . We have mentioned similar cases earlier. Kloosterman continues: Latter-day uniformitarians tend to explain the radioactive anomalies by differential absorption of radioactive elements posterior to deposition. Conceivably this will bear out to be correct, but it could be only a partial explanation. Has any study been undertaken to find out whether high radioactivity in fossil bones correlates with the great faunal breaks of the Earth's history? Radioactivity does not kill and assemble fauna quickly. It is associable with forces that do so and it implies exoterrestrialism: cosmic lightning and electrical discharges; freezing, gassing, and smothering fall-out, and incoming tides that have been radiated elsewhere. Many microchronic catastrophists, hot on the scent of fossil absurdities, believe in the contemporary existence of species that are conventionally placed in superposition and assigned sequential periods of existence. The number of individual anomalies -a cold-water clam in a hot-water clam bed or a dinosaur among mammoths -is too small. Indeed, I have read of no incontrovertible case of major consequence for the reconstruction of time and evolution. The most sophisticated of their concepts seems to be fossil zoning, by which, if I understand rightly, is meant the simultaneous growth of ecological sets of a greatly different order. These sets are shuffled about as the scene changes, under castastrophic duress. One ecology is piled upon another and a long temporal sequence is assigned to the whole and its parts. I can conceive how, let us say, continental tides of translation might sweep in and deposit a life zone upon one area; also I can conceive of another wave, reverse or oblique to the first, carrying upon the same area a second layer of fossilized sediments, and, in the end, of the second being given incorrectly a much younger age that the first. I cannot conceive, on the other hand, of nature being so neat, so orderly, or so given over to long range thrusting. One bears in mind that the longer the transport, the worse the conditions for fossilizing. Also, the chances that a tide or bulldozer will pick up inter-zonal species are excellent and therefore will place not only 'A' upon 'B' but 'B' upon 'A'. But such occurrences are quite rare, and almost always distinguishable. The inconsistency would be noticeable. One cannot but feel at times that paleontologists have a lore that is locked out of the literature and that would emerge upon systematic questioning. Thus, what are the statistical parameters of fossil deposits in situ: how often, for instance, are fossil beds pure and how often apparently heterogeneous and to what degree? Are fossil deposits of ancient ages more likely to be heterogeneous than late fossil beds? If fossils usually travel, as Ager says, do they travel with their own age group? Does the age-pure rich fossil bed indicate, not a long, but a short chronology, because the fossils have not had time to be mixed or destroyed? No part of the world is without fossil deposits. This would indicate that no part of the world has escaped catastrophic experiences. Marine fossils are of shallow seas: the oceans may be too young to have spawned new species, much less to cast them over the continents. A great many fossil deposits are assigned old ages. The horrified fish of the Old Red Sandstone referred to earlier are Devonian and given hundreds of millions of years. The theory of this book has been tending toward confining biosphere catastrophes to the nearby ages and to an early period of "radiant genesis," defined in Solaria Binaria, with a stable intervening period. Either the ancient assignments will have to be re- timed or we shall have to give up this notion of a long period of Pangean stability during which quantavolutions were in abeyance. (See, e. g. the time charts following the text.) We cannot conclude here from the study of fossil deposits that all major disturbances have been recent. But these conglomerations lend direct and substantial support to the quantavolutionary theory that Earth changes have been sudden, large-scale, and intense, and that most, if not all, have been very recent. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-six: Fossil Deposits)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-six: Fossil Deposits) 1. Animal Travellers, loc. cit., 126-46. 2. Corridors of Time: 1,700,000 Years of Earth at Grand Canyon (N. Y.: Times Books, 1980). Cf. G. M. Price, Evolutionary Geology and the New Catastrophism (Mountain View, Calif: Pacific Press, 1926), 234-9. 3. V S. I. S. Rev. 1 (1980-81), 10-1. 4. Fossils in the Making 5. 2 Catas. Geol. 1 (1977), 1-2; Ibid. n 2, inside cover. 6. K. E. Chave, "Skeletal Durability and Preservation," in J. Imbrie and N. Newell, Approaches to Paleoecology (N. Y.: Wiley, 1964), 377-82. 7. Chem. and Engin. News, Oct. 11, 1976, quoted in III Kronos (Eall 1977), 68-9. 7A. 5 S. I. S. Workship 1 (1982) 28-9 citing Nature (17 June 1982), 574. 8. Egon T. Degens and D. A. Ross, "Chronology of the Black Sea over the Last 25,000 years," in Chemical Geol. (Elsevier: Amsterdam, 1972), 4; also, with J. Mac Ilvaine, 170 Science (9 Oct. 1970), 163-5. 9. Quoted by Bennison Gray "Alternatives in Science," VII Kronos 4 (1982), 15, from Nilssen's "Summary of the facts and leading principles concerning the non-evolutionary phenomena in the world of biota and the theory of emication," based upon his Synthetische Artbildung: Grundlinien einer exakten Biologie, 2 v., Lund: Gleerup, 1953). 10. The Old Red Sandstones (Edinburgh, 1941), 48. 11. Kloosterman, et al. (supra, fn 5) citing S. H. U. Bowie, D. Atkin, "An Unusually Radioactive Fossil Fish from Thurso, Scotland," 177 Nature (1956), 487-488; W. R. Diggle, J. Saxon, "An Unusually Radioactive Fossil Fish from Thurso, Scotland," 208 Nature (1965), 400. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART VI: } {Q BIOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 27} {T Genesis and Extinction} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part VI: Biospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN GENESIS AND EXTINCTION Man is an exceptional creature, creative and destructive. He is a walking catastrophe for other kinds of life. Rashmi Mayur, in agitating for a "Kalotic World Order," projects that mankind will extirpate most species of life within this generation in exchange for 1.5 billion more people. J. W. Carpenter has cited estimates that 25% of all existing species may become extinct by the year 2000 [1] ; this is not the work of man alone perhaps, for the Earth itself may be enduring a longer-term decline stemming from its ancient cosmic bouts. But man is failing to protect the Earth. If our approach is believable, nature requires high-energy forces to extinguish species and must need an equally great force to create them. The forces at the same time maybe subtle and powerful, as with invisible radiation, or flagrant and powerful, as with the crash of a large body into the Earth. Such is quantavolution. It appears to be easier to discover death than new life. The literature on biological extinctions is getting heavier all the time, but little is forthcoming on genesis. We wonder why. Could it be a taboo against one kind of creation? Perhaps. Might it be this, that eighteenth century economics picked up an idea that common people have always had -and some great ones like Machiavelli and Hobbes, too -that life is a struggle among men; there are few places at the top; one must eliminate competitors to get one's place; survival is a power struggle. Early modern economists went along with the notion. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) pushed the line of thought into a world-wide view: goods are scarce, and men will compete for them; who is most effective gets the most; human populations are checked in their growth only by nature's instruments of famine, plague, and war. Later man was excused from the struggle, if he would develop "moral restraint" against excessive breeding. He has not done so. But the biological world, as young Charles Darwin saw, had no moral restraints and was operating continuously under the pressures of the environment. Nor was there any rentier psychology in nature: "Give me my little niche and I will give you yours." Pressure to expand was infinite and this aggressiveness led to the most marvelous adaptations (to other's niches) and actual physical evolutions. So went the line of thought. The underlying amoral (but moral in its own way) view here found the idea of catastrophism disturbing, first because a moral agent called God was customarily employed to command the disasters and reconstitute the world afterwards, and second because catastrophism without divine controls appeared to be quite disorderly and not progressive, lacking the capacity to create species (Elohim promises Noah this Deluge would be the last; nor did the survivors anywhere talk of new species, these all having been created once before.) Nor when Mendel appeared on the scene with proof of mutations, was it appreciated that a mutation was a micro-disaster, perhaps tied into catastrophe somehow. It was for a later generation of scientists and theorists, impelled by the logic of the atomic bomb, to bridge the gap between an invisible particle and a visible awesome destruction. It was (and is) still too early to say how catastrophe creates as well as destroys; a third line of theory has to be developed to explain the paths of genesis, which despite repeated extinctions, have led to new and different forms of life. Nonetheless, biological quantavolutions appear to have a large creative element. One of the rare early geologists to perceive this was Clarence King, and, in his attempt to assail evolution on its firmest historical ground, he penned several passages of beauty and importance [2] : Greek art was fond of decorating the friezes of its sacred edifices with the spirited form of the horse. Times change: around the new temple of evolution the proudest ornament is that strange procession of fossil horse skeletons, among whose captivating splint-bones and general anatomy may be descried the profiles of Huxley and Marsh. Those two authorities, whose knowledge we may not dispute, assert that the American genealogy of the horse is the most perfect demonstrative proof of derivative genesis ever presented. Descent they consider proved, but the fossil jaws are utterly silent as to what the cause of the evolution may have been. I have studied the country from which these bones came, and am able to make this suggestive geological commentary. Between each two successive forms of the horse there was a catastrophe which seriously altered the climate and configuration of the whole region in which these animals lived. Huxley and Marsh assert that the bones prove descent. My own work proves that each new modification succeeded a catastrophe. And the almost universality of such coincidence is to my mind warrant for the anticipation that not very far in the future it may be seen that the evolution of environment has been the major cause of the evolution of life; that a mere Malthusian struggle was not the author and finisher of evolution; but that He who brought to bear that mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at the same time a power of development by change, arranging that the interaction of energy and matter which make up the environment should, from time to time, burst in upon the current of life and sweep it onward and upward to ever higher and better manifestations. Moments of great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments of creation, when out of plastic organisms something newer and nobler is called into being. The breaking of an age is the occasion for instant creation and instant destruction. The quantavoluting high-energy forces concentrate upon reducing and at the same time increasing the variety of species. Otto Schindewolf, from 1950 on, was tracking what he called faunal discontinuities, for which task D. L. Stepanov called him the "most important and consistent spokesman of the idea of neocatastrophism in contemporary paleontology." In him one finds a more stringent scientific tongue than King's but the same view. "Faunal discontinuities... involve not just the dying out of old, but also the more or less sudden emergence of new phyla. This phenomenon can no longer be successfully accommodated under the term catastrophe in the true meaning of the word: it should rather be described as anastrophe." [3] (that is, 'upturn, ' not 'downturn'). It was partly for this same reason that the term quantavolution was chosen. Probably most species are born or die out at the disastrous junctures of natural history whence the rocks and fossil seas, too, provide evidence of commotion. Pietro Passerini cites estimates of 1.5 million extant species and between 3 million and 8.5 million species as existing but still unidentified [4] . G. G. Simpson estimated the number of existing species at two millions. and the all- time average since the beginning of life at between 500,000 and 5 millions. He guessed that the average species endured from 500,000 to 5 million years. He put the time since life began at from one to two billion years. When he performed his arithmetic he emerged with a high total estimate of all species of four billions, a medium estimate of 341 millions and a minimal estimate of 50 millions [5] . Sometime later, Teichert estimated the number of discoverable or fossilizable species at ten millions, lower than Simpson by a factor of five. The vertebrates among them were guessed at a round million. Cook used many less, accepting 1,105,000 for the living species, and then proposed that a figure of 130,000 for fossil forms discovered be considered a fairly complete sum of all past species. He asserts grounds for believing that most fossilizable species have already been discovered, implying that most or all species were created in short order and that a tenth or so have been eliminated. If algae and worms can be traced in the sediments, what would not have been traceable? Schindewolf comments that "good conditions of preservation existed even for the most delicate, soft-bodied organisms in the Precambrian;" furthermore, it is incorrect that the rock strata of quantavolutionary times are missing or totally destroyed along with their hypothetical fossils [6] . Cook's view accords with his microchronic view of Earth history, which would permit one or several catastrophes and a natural dissembling of the fossil record to tempt exaggerations of the expanses of time and the progress of evolution. Between Cook's one million and Simpson's two million for living species, reconciliation is conceivable. Between his 130,000 (say 200,000), and Simpson's maximum of four billions, there is no hope of ultimate agreement. Even Simpson's minimal figure of fossil species, 50 millions, is 250 times larger than Cook's. Altogether we are in a state of ignorance on what nature has afforded as candidates for extinctions. For that matter, no one is so bold as to define absolutely a species, much less to maintain nowadays that the conditions for speciation have always been the same. There may indeed be one or more dubious premises in all reasoning on the subject. We may be confident that at least all major forms of life and many manifestations of each have been recovered from the past. In this sense, for the philosopher anyhow, there are no important gaps in the record. Yet, evolution demands ancestors, and its theory becomes dubious if the extinct are not sufficient in numbers to provide ancestors. Or at least the same few ancestors would have had simultaneously to branch in numerous directions; this is not impossible to argue; and a shortness of time would be no handicap to the argument. For the moment, to hold in abeyance an opinion on stasis and evolution, I shall accommodate my thinking to a million or more living species and over a million fossil species. For several additional issues beg introduction. With the painful realization of gaps in the record that refuse closure, the reality of quantavolutions, and the improbability of point-by-point evolution no matter how much time is allowed, some scientists have spoken forthrightly for a new look at the record. They find that the path of evolution has been irregular, that there are times to evolve and times for quiescence. (Nor is this an artifact of time estimates.) Writes Brough, concluding an extensive review: [7] Evolution seems to have worked in a series of more and more restricted fields with large-scale effects steadily decreasing. Evolution at the present time is a slower and much more restricted phenomenon than it was earlier, and seems to be concerned with speciation in a pattern of larger systematic units which was laid down in the more or less remote past, and seems to have been standardized for a long time. Genesis may not work at the will of God, but it does not work uniformly either. "Given a more or less even mutation-rate, and Natural Selection as a cause in evolution, there is difficulty both in accounting for the early and relatively rapid phases of evolution giving rise to major groups and also for the great decline in this phenomenon in later geological time." Brough holds to spontaneous mutation as the source of genesis and speciation, and "Natural Selection merely works on these;" furthermore, "changes in organic forms have nothing to do with external factors." So he gets into a tight corner. There seem to have been evolutionary surges in the past when large changes of organic form took place, and produced the larger systematic units... There is plenty of evidence suggesting that during these evolutionary surges changes produced by mutations were not random, but were directional; this is well seen in such groups as the mammal- like reptiles, and in the higher bony fishes where several independent phyletic lines undergo the same sort of changes at about the same time. Natural Selection may have assumed more importance when this process slowed down. An example of the evolutionary surge would be the "sudden appearance of a highly-developed fauna in the Cambrian," after diligent search of undisturbed sandstone, shales and limestones of the pre-Cambrian for hints of what was to come. We speak here of simultaneous physical changes in a collectivity of species that may be unrelated. Within a species a saltation of individual changes must be also occurring. Hence there should suddenly occur a heavy branching out of types, some to survive, some soon to die. But then we encounter two additional phenomena of the fossil record -a lack of transitional types and an absence of short-lived sports. In the case of all the thirty-two orders of mammals, Simpson tells us, the ancestral record is very poor. "The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed [8] . ' E. C. Olson, reviewing the literature lately, reports: "under the very best circumstances... morphological and stratigraphically graded transitions between classes and subclasses have been found. At the level of phyla and higher categories, any information on transitions as far as the fossil record is concerned is essentially non- existent." [9] T. H. van Andel surmises that missing links "may have been expunged from the record." [10] The Glomar Challenger found one-half of the assigned 125 million-year record missing from deep cores drilled in the South Atlantic Ocean: he implies a catastrophic removal of the layers. Other paleontologists, specialists in other evolutionary fields, agree: as with the rocks, so with the life forms, there are more gaps than record. In treating of this important point, discussion has focused upon "transitional types." It can be said that for no phylum, class, order, family, or species is there an indisputable succession of types that is predicted under the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. If, as Rodabaugh points out, micromutations must account for all observable variations between species, then the number of transitional species must be exceedingly large. "Furthermore, each species must be exceedingly viable in order to survive long enough to give rise to some 'evolved' descendent." [11] He then proceeds mathematically to demonstrate, with a probability approaching certainty, that transitional forms have not in fact existed. A "transitional form" is the species of life that is both intermediate and ancestral in relation to any two discovered fossil or living forms. "Missing link" would be a synonym for it. Where, for instance (if birds are indeed descended from reptiles), is the reptile who is just starting to sprout the wings of the bird? And the ancestor of the horse is nowhere to be found. D. M. Raup and S. M. Stanley [12] are quoted: "Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery; commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms." Until lately, the ape Ramapithecus was in favor as the possible ancestor of the hominids. In 1982, it was reported that close study of a skull of Sivapithecus dated at 8.5 million years, and regarded as practically identical to Ramapithecus, showed definite relationship to the orangutan and hence was deemed not to be a transitional form to man [13] . Nevertheless, although it is already admitted that transitional forms are absent, Rodabaugh computes, from the number of fossil birds estimated to have been found, the probability that a transitional form will exist. He finds the possibility so tiny as to be absent, quoting Emil Dorel: "Events whose probability is extremely small never occur." Rodabaugh concludes that, either the present biological world got here by macromutations ('hopeful monsters') or by special creation. The "hopeful monster" is the new species, containing many changes, thrown out by a general mutation, and hopefully satisfying the conditions of survival. Rodabaugh declares that the concept "is rejected by nearly all evolutionists." Still, it has been reported, "within certain of the dying families [of Upper Cretaceous ammonites], an increase in size and the presence of bizarre-looking forms may be noted. This is a common accompaniment of extinctions of many groups." [14] It suggests catastrophe, accompanied by radionic mutating storms that both alter and destroy species. At the end of an "age" (defined as a "more settled" period), the species-mix and distribution of the biosphere suffer revolutionary change. Whereupon the struggle for life niches renews under more and more uniform conditions, which may, however, not be the uniform conditions of the past age. Charles Hapgood, another catastrophist, whose work has already been cited, confronts the same problem and although admitting that the major proponent of macromutation or "systematic mutation," Richard Goldschmidt, is opposed by the majority of writers, believes that a sudden shift of the Earth's poles and crust could produce the requisite shortening of the tempo of evolution. I am treading upon uncertain ground. In what has been said of the sacred and divine elsewhere (in Chaos and Creation and The Divine Succession, both works of the Quantavolution Series), I maintain that the historical gods are scientifically explainable within the framework of natural causes and human nature, but merge into a philosophy of religion that is not germane here. Hence enlightenment on the scientific level has to come through a uniform explanation of the fossil record or through macromutation in a catastrophic setting. It is possible that a trillion "sports" have been disposed of by quick extinction, and that the few fossils that come down to us represent trillions of individuals of the standardized species. In this case, the absence of transitional "missing links" is not so improbable as some make it out to be. That is, if during a billion years, the average number of individuals per "long-lived" species has amounted to, say, a trillion and the average aborted and transitional form had to "make" or "break" on no more than one thousand specimens, then the chances of finding and recognizing such a necessarily handicapped form in the fossil record are negligible. That is, the transitional species would be a small population. If successful, it would spread with exponential rapidity. If, for every significantly mutated species which survived there were 10,000 that did not, then even 10 4 Xl0 3 would give only 10 7 . By contrast, the surviving species averaged l0 12 specimens that might enter the hall of fame of the fossil record. The relative chance is then 100,000 to 1. Consequently, if even a single showcase of transitional freaks has entered into the fossil record, there is enough to satisfy mathematical expectation. It is more likely that a form of quantavolution operates (it is discussed in Homo Schizo I and Solaria Binaria). The absence of transitional types, if it proves anything, probably goes to prove that something like quantavolution must exist in genetics; there is then no expectation of transitional types. A mutated reptile has wings and it flies, without a long time of flight-prone ancestors. However, transitional forms are not the most bothersome problem. Nor is it the continual relapse into Lamarckian environmentalism that characterizes the literature of many professed Mendelian-Darwinists. It is the nagging intuition of purposefulness that afflicts both the religious and atheistic observers alike. The species, from the virus up to the human, appear to be put together meaningfully. The species function in the wierdest, meanest, most wonderful ways to exist -not to progress, adapt, change, or intelligize, but simply to carry on an existence as best they can. Every species appears probabilistic to the point of impossibility. A species may be "fantastically" constructed; but it is functional. A billion cases of an animal or plant cannot be denied. Its every trait relates to every other trait, just as in a culture every culture trait relates to every other culture trait somehow, no matter how "senselessly." The species is a whole, just as a culture is a whole. How can it be that, amidst the millions of chemico-physico transactions always occurring in the human body, a shot of adrenal hormone, prompted by a scare, is practically simultaneously counteracted by a hormone to prevent over-reaction to the scare, as the classical work of Cannon on homeostasis, or The Wisdom of the Body, first elaborated? Stanley's calculations show that species of European mammals of today have on the average survived for one to two million years by conventional calculation (middle pliocene mollusks had a mean duration of 7 my). Very few species of short duration (less than 0.4 my) occurred in the record. No ephemeral species appeared and disappeared. He concludes that "much more than 50 percent of evolution occurs through sudden events in which polymorphs and species are proliferated." [15] So here we find no sports, no transitionals, and a suggestion of macroevolution or quantavolution or "punctuated equilibrium." Also Stanley and Harper have noted a lack of correlation between rate of evolution and generation time [16] . Life forms have widely varying generation-lengths. The human, who lives relatively long, reproduces from dozens to millions of times more slowly that most animal species. The human, therefore, should have had less evolutionary change in his past than a great many 'lower' and 'simpler' forms. Too, if the capacity to mutate is considered a positive feature of a species in "natural selection," then the human and many another 'advanced' species should be regarded as handicapped in the struggle to survive and adapt. The biologist will probably agree with this and go in search of other advantages afforded these handicapped species in natural selection. When his search fails, he must grant that biology has always had an in-grained prejudice for the complex 'higher' animals, especially man. Man, like other advanced mammals, and indeed like all specialized as opposed to primitive, general, and simple organisms, is poorly designed for survival. Nevertheless this dismal picture includes a seed of hope, indeed a new hypothesis of quantavolution. If generation rate and evolution rate do not correlate, it may be that evolution occurs, whether in simple short-lived forms or complex long-lived forms, at an instant time that is absolutely short and therefore, reversing the history of the Colt revolver, "makes a big man equal to a little man." More importantly, a long-lived form may inherit a genotype which all life forms share, no matter their generation time. This would be the ability in a mutation to change instructions for the largest and most complicated cell assemblage as readily as for a single-celled animal. One result would be equalization of evolution effects; the concomitant would be quantavolution or macroevolution, that is, the instant all-around change when a mutation occurs. We have already noted the conspicuous absence of flora and fauna of the ocean bottoms and high mountains. The matter is relevant here again. The charts of extinction of species are also charts of genesis of new species. When species are exterminated in large numbers, new forms follow. Paleontologists question whether the new species are alterations of the old, or descended from earlier forms that failed to appear in the old fossil record, or evacuees from other zones of life. The first would seem logical but we are given to believe that first the old die out and then the new appear. This is an aspect of the problem of missing transitional forms. Yet it seems inexplicable. Should not the dying dinosaurs and mutated mammals appear in the same strata? If heavy radiation is killing off one form but creating another, the stratigraphic gap should be inconsiderable, or the old and new forms should grade continuously into one another. It should not require more than several centuries to prove the fitness of a new form and to find it in numbers upon the next catastrophic occurrence. Perhaps this is what did happen; however, we are used to placing a million years between any two highly visible events in the record. Or at least one should be able to locate first a catastrophized conglomerate of fossils and then in succeeding uncatastrophized strata the new forms appearing as individual fossils. Else we should have to double the number of catastrophes, one for extinction and a second for genesis. But is it "flesh or fowl?" Or, as Velikovsky asks: "Were all dinosaurs reptiles?" [17] Live birth among dinosaurs seems now fairly certain and not rare and there may have been a large mingling of important features hitherto believed distinctive between dinosaurs and mammals. Western USA rocks (Hava Supai Canyon, Colo.) produces drawings of dinosaurs, elephants, ibex, and human figures, as well as pictographs. If this ensemble is of the same time, a shocking reconstruction of the holocene period must ensue, absorbing time all the way back into the Cretaceous and up into the neolithic. But all those creatures exhibited may be pre-selenian, and were extincted, even the particular human race of the artist, around 12,000 B. P. Leaving this perplexing issue, we return to the problem of the ecological niches. These should be quickly occupied upon the demise of old species. Cameroun and Benoit found algae, fungi and bacteria thriving in volcanic lava laid down by volcanic eruption on Deception Island in Antarctica. Elapsed time was one year [18] . Krakatoa's little island received new life, too, within several years of being exploded and completely burned out, not only microscopic life but amphibia, reptiles and birds. Yet, to repeat an earlier fact, large attached organisms are rare on the most recent oceanic ridges, according to Heezen and Hollister [19] . At 1000 to 4000 meters of depth, the ridges should be rich in flora and fauna, of established species. This signifies either an extremely young age for the ridge system as a whole, or for the most recent millennia a very heavy general eruptive activity. In the end, so far as concerns genesis, we hold to quantavolution in biology and geology. The holospheric principle continues to be productive; the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere transact continually with the biosphere: all are affected by high-energy forces ultimately originating exoterrestrially. Genesis or the new in life occurs hand-in-hand with the destruction of the old life forms. This is nothing more than Schindewolf's "anastrophism." No more revolutionary times than the present have struck geology and biology since the victory of gradualism and evolution over a century ago. The most striking signals of the change are emitted from the new studies of the extinction of species. In 1961 Schindewolf prepared for the 113th General Assembly of the German Geological Society a status report on neocatastrophism [20] . He claimed major faunal discontinuities on the boundaries of the Precambrian-Cambrian, Permian-Triassic, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary eras. "On the divide between the Precambrian and the Cambrian there was a relatively sudden and thorough-going transformation of the animal kingdom, in which durable hard parts were deposited for the first time." There is a partial species overlap of short duration as the Permian moves into the Triassic as he notes in 4 groups of fauna, but he names 24 that expired and 24 that newly appeared. At the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, "the dinosaurs represent only one aspect of the much wider extinction process and the profound change in the composition of the faunas..." The larger mammals then came into being. P. S. Martin and others trace the extinctions over most of the world [21] . D. A. Russell draws a picture of losses of 50 out of 250 terrestrial genera, a third of floating marine genera, half of the bottom-dwelling genera, and least of all in losses, about a fifth of the swimming marine genera [22] . He estimates that 75% of all species died alongside the dinosaurs, and in a period of only 1000 years, in conjunction with magnetic field reversals instigated perhaps by blasts of supernova radiation from a nearby star. He argues that "it is beyond the capacity of forces within the crust of the Earth to produce global catastrophe on this time scale;" conjectures of glaciation are inadequate, especially since no evidence is to be had of a general temperature change. Nor does Russell grant that the Sun could expel such high bursts of radiation. Schindewolf here denominates 16 faunal groups as exterminated, 3 as overlapping briefly, and 24 as newly arising. As young Darwin wrote in his Journals (Jan. 9, 1834), "certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants." (How could such observations end up in uniformitarianism?) Schindewolf also dismisses explanations offered for these quantavolutions, none of which he deemed valid, such as gaps in the rock and fossil record, epidemic diseases, climatic changes, ice ages, differing depositional characteristics of species, reduced salinity of seawater, competition and natural selection, mammals eating dinosaur eggs, and changing sea levels. Then he reaches into the skies. "Since faunal discontinuities are universal phenomena, they must arise from universally active causes. This has compelled me to look for agencies that would (1) have worldwide effects and (2) could extend to the totality of biotopes in the sea, on dry lands, in freshwater and in the air, as well as to stocks of most varied habitats and ways of life." [23] His explanation lies in radiation storms: Since 1950 I have favored the hypothesis that sharp fluctuations in the high-energy cosmic radiation reaching the Earth should be considered among possible causes... I proposed that, on the one hand, the direct impact-effects of ionizing radiation should be considered, and, on the other, especially the increased generation of radioactive isotopes, which would become incorporated in the living organic matter and the molecular compounds of the chromosomes. Here they would unleash a twofold mutagenic activity, through ionizing radiation, on the one hand, and by the liberation of electrons in the decay of the isotopes on the other. He cites theories of supernovas as the source and media for the transmission of the anastrophic material, and credits E. A. Ivanova with "a connection between the faunal discontinuities and the migration of radioactive elements." Schindewolf points out that the exceptional survival rate of insects compared to other fauna may be due to the fact that "the resistance of insects to radioactive radiation is about ten times greater than that of human beings and other organisms." Schindewolf's conclusions, including his exoterrestrialism, have been supported by later studies. In a summary report of 1982 [24] , W. Sullivan added the Devonian- Carboniferous and the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary periods. In the former some 30% of the animal families disappeared. In the Pleistocene climax, 70% of the large mammals extincted. In both eras, marine life suffered greatly as well. He separates the Permian-Triassic into two extinction periods, 50 million years apart. Raup estimates that 96% of all marine species may have died out in the late Permian. Valentine and others before him (1974) have noted the petering out of highly innovative evolution [25] . The origination of phyla, classes, and orders came successively to a halt; families declined, but diversified in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic. A macrochronometrical paleontogist would say that there has been no major innovation in life for 40 million years (present company excepted). Species, as we have indicated earlier, are an unknown quantity, with gross discrepancies in estimates of their historical numbers. Species are also more susceptible to genesis than the statistically concocted general groups with their assigned, more basic features; this is in accord with theory, whether microevolutionary or macroevolutionary. Probably species have been extincted and ramified on disastrous occasions that did not affect the existence of the basic forms to which they pertain. Mankind may be one case in point; small differences are all that can be observed between man and ape, but as with the absence of major differences between men and women, in the words of the French deputy: "Vive la petite difference!" In the two volumes on Homo Schizo, the origins of the differences between hominid and homo are discussed. We uneasily recognize the need to consider together at the same time a new chronology, a new theory of mutations, better data on numbers and extinctions of species, and the observed quantavolutions of the Earth. For only by such means will we be enabled to answer a question such as the suddenness of extinctions. Somewhere in the space between a day and twenty million years, a line has to be drawn to distinguish catastrophe and gradualism. The studies and critiques of the work of Alvarez and associates on the Cretaceous- Tertiary extinctions illustrate the point. The superseding of dinosaurs by large mammals is known, with their accompanying less dramatic extinctions and creations. Also now a chemical boundary is known. By one count, "Iridium-rich layers marking the end of the Cretaceous Period have now been found at more than two dozen locations around the world." Freshwaters and seabottoms were affected along with dry land. Iridium is much rarer in the Earth's crust than in presumably exploded and space-affected meteorites. Hence a cosmic event is predicated, the Alvarez group holding to a middle-sized meteoroid explosion as the source, and a several months darkness accompanying the explosion as the killer of the dinosaurs. Critics argue that the dinosaurs did not extinct with the end of the Cretaceous and took much longer to die out anyhow. Others say that the iridium is a product of heavy deep volcanism and slow sedimentation. Another maintains that the dinosaurs died from a drying up of their swamps. Still another claims that a mere several degrees of temperature rise or fall would halt the incubation of reptilian eggs and in a short time destroy the species. After the Cretaceous comes a "nine-million-year" period of the Tertiary known as the Eocene. Geologists (Ganapathy, W. Alvarez et al., and O'Keefe) now speak of a "terminal Eocene event", a catastrophe marked, as in the case of the end of the Cretaceous, by high iridium concentrations and microtektite fields. Do tectites and iridium always occur in exoterrestrial crashes? Or does this suggest that the two events, post- Cretaceous and post-Eocene, were one and the same, the "Eocene" and other eras having been concocted for differing fossils and strata of the same time. An impatience and frustration seizes a person who is imbued with the perspectives of quantavolution and recency in biology and geology. Ordinary accounts of animals, plants, volcanos, winds, rocks, etc. become lame and foolish. The author, riding a KLM plane across the Atlantic in 1982, puts aside this chapter and glances through the KLM News magazine. There a puff is given KLM for flying seven small lemon sharks from Florida to Holland. The sharks needed "tender, loving care," "had to be massaged constantly," "sprayed continuously," "given extra oxygen," -these being beasts "having inhabited the oceans since some 50 million years before man made his first appearance." How, one wonders, could the sharks have prospered through one catastrophe after another: either the extinction would not be complete and exponential reproduction would quickly make up the difference, or else sharks are young species and much of their ecology must be young as well, including, say, manganese nodules that form around shark teeth in the abyss. There are then the meteoroids and the supernovas as sources of anastrophic radiation. Could "cosmic" radiation come from volcanism? If deep, heavy, and worldwide, radiation closely akin could fall out from volcanism. But such volcanism, as we explained earlier, must look for high-energy excitation from the skies. As for the supernovas, in Solaria Binaria Milton and I attribute heavy radiation to at least three novas -a preliminary outburst of the Sun creating its binary, and two explosions of its binary in subsequent millennia. We also designate several other possibilities of radiation, that would be heavy enough to account for periods of intervening radiation, not from novas but from impact-explosions and crustal removal in passing encounters. Here and there now reports are issuing of excessive radiation levels in rocks and fossils. Kloosterman was earlier quoted on the subject. Salop speaks of a primary enrichment of uranium in dinosaur bones. Numerous similar findings have been reported since 1956 in Brazil and Argentina. Some bones from an undated red sandstone were radioactive. J. E. Powell summarizes these findings. Fossils from Mongolia also show high levels of radioactivity. Kloosterman located these facts and also discovered that almost none of the world's natural history museums have measured radioactive levels in specimens of their collections [26] . However, the prevalence of fossil conglomerations around the world implies brief periods of extinction, and forces not alone of radiation, and pre-existing ecologies quite different from those that came after the catastrophic periods. So many rich fossil deposits occur in circumstances that reveal high-energy processes to be at work. In Baja California, fossils were laid down over hundreds of square miles of the desolate terrain, exposed by surface erosion. Living and extinct species mingled in broad confusion. Flint and obsidian artifacts lay also upon the fossil sediments. The bones of mastodons, ancestral horses, a giant tortoise, camels, bison, sharks, whales, sea cows, and fish were plentiful. A shark species found in Mississippi turned up here in the Pacific. Assigned times, prior to investigation on the spot, ranged from 50,000 years (in the case of the artifacts) to 60 million years. Dating aside, the giant, confused, and rich fossil fields signal a catastrophe or a series of catastrophes at short intervals of time, from floodwaters sweeping in from land and sea. S. J. Gould, who has pursued assiduously the study of extinctions, has had to go well beyond gradualism, uniformitarianism, and natural selection. Luck or chance figures heavily. Random macromutation can substitute for isolation, by creating two species in the same niche without the benefits conferred by travel. Commenting on the Permian- Triassic catastrophes, where an estimated ninety-six percent of the families of marine organisms ceased their existence, he says: There are few defenses against a catastrophe of such magnitude, and survivors may simply be among the lucky 4 percent. As the Permian extinction set the basic pattern of life's subsequent diversity (no new phyla and few classes have originated since then), our current panoply of major designs may not represent a set of best adaptations, but fortunate survivors. Would the stripping of half the Earth's crust and an associated expansion and cleavage of the Earth, together with a paving of the ocean basins, all occurring within several thousand years and most of it very quickly in a single action complex, exterminate entirely the biosphere? Even the most determined catastrophists have passed over so frightful a concept. If, as has been conjectured, a meteoroid explosion of a few kilometers' diameter would destroy the dinosaurs, the colossal event portrayed here would annihilate all life. To counter this universal scepticism, there is the fact that life does flourish today despite the event, so that if the event were proved, then the scepticism would have to vanish. However, taken as a problem in its own right, instead of an inference determined by an external logic, we should stress certain possibilities in the event of lunar fission. 1. The atmosphere at the time might have been enormously greater and so extending far into space to permit a reviving reverse flow to replace the escaping atmosphere, and to act at the same time as a great vacuum cleaner against the heavy dust clouds and heated air. 2. Although an enormous number of species may be extincted, only several survivors of a species may guarantee a replenishment of continental scope within centuries. 3. The possibility must be entertained that hitherto unused intra-species genetic adaptability can permit survivors of modified form under stresses seemingly quite destructive. 4. Holospheric catastrophes by their very complexity can block each other's effects, allowing some life-preserving niches to survive and even fabricating niches where none existed before. It is no longer rare to hear scientists arguing an intervention from outer space to push evolution along. Objections arise from extreme proposals, whether of intelligent visitors or of lower orders. "Extraterrestrial footsteps on the sands of history," R. E. Dickerson has remarked, "do not seem to be mandatory." [27] They would be superfluous, for that matter, if a quantavolutionary theory has laid down the sands. Further, as detailed in Solaria Binaria, if exoterrestrial voyagers had landed on Earth they might well have felt at home. Until quite recently, their former planetary abode would have provided a genetic milieu in the same vast plenum of atmospheric gases that the Earth enjoyed. However, Mars and Mercury have lost practically all of their life- support systems while the Earth has retained a crucial halo of air and a vast supply of water. In itself this can be made into an argument for a short term of life on Earth. The more one studies the possibilities of natural disasters the more likely it appears that, over long stretches of time, these would have been so frequent as to make a total disaster much more likely to occur. That is, if several disasters are granted, given the same Earth and Universe, why did not many occur and why not worse? Assigning the Earth and its species five billion years of self-development may turn out to have been a frustrating detour in the history of the human mind. By contrast, encapsulating the disasters within a unified theory, quantavolution, may prove enlightening and progressive. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-seven: Genesis and Extinction)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-seven: Genesis and Extinction) 1. Despatch, UP Int'1,19 April 1982. He is Res. Director, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. 2. Op. cit. 3. Op. cit. 4. "Knowledge and Entropy," 3 Catas. Geol. (June 1978), 17-9. 5. 'How Many Species?" 6 Evolution (1952), 342; Teichert, "How many Species?" 30 J. Paleont. (1973), 967-9 6. Op. cit., 12 7. James Brough," Time and Evolution," in Studies in Fossil Vertebrates, Atlone, London, 1958, 38, 34, 36. 8. Tempo and Mode in Evolution, (NY: Columbia U. Press, 1944) 106; see review of his Splendid Isolation (New Haven, Conn: Yale U. Press, 19800 by Jill Abery, S. I. S. 4 Workshop (1981), 25-332. 9. "The Problem of Missing Links: Today and Yesterday," 56 Q. R. Biol. (1981), 405-40; cf Mark Ridley, "Evolution and Gaps in the Fossil Record," 286 Nature (31 July, 1980), 444-5. 10. Nature (3 Dec. 1981). 11. David A. Rodabaugh, "Probability and the Missing Transitional Forms," 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q.( Sep 1976), 116-9. 12. Principles of Paleontology, 1971 (San Francisco: Freeman, 1971), 306. 13. 121 Sci. News, (Feb. 6 1982), 84. 14. V Ency. Britannica (1974), 576. 15. S. M. Stanley, "Stability of Species in Geologic Time," 192 Science (16 April, 1976), 267-8. 16. C. W. Harper, Jr., comment, 192 Science (16 Apr. 1976), 269-70. 17. II Kronos 2( 1976), 91-100. 18. NASA, news release 69/ 80, 27 May 1969. 19. Op. cit., 550-7. 20. Op. cit. 21. S. Martin, and H. E. Wright, Jr., ed., Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1967). 22. 3 Catas. Geol. 1 (June 1978), 8; additional data in 10 Geos 3 (Summer 1981), 8. 23. Op. cit., 18-9. 24. NY Times, Jan 19, 1982, C1. 25. 48 J Paleontology (May 1974) 549-52. 26. 3 Catas. Geol. (June 1978), 4-7. 27. Letter, Sci. Amer. (Dec. 1978), 10. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART VI: } {Q BIOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 28} {T Genesis and Extinction} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part VI: Biospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT PANDEMONIUM Polite language exclaims, "Pandemonium ensued..." In ruder language, "All hell broke loose..." In either case all (pan-) demons (daemon-) are in action (ium). "Pan" was a god as well as the word for "all." He was the son of Hermes (Mercury) according to one story. He was a noisy disturber of the peace, a collector of disorderly crowds, an orgiastic god of revelers. He was by no means a symbol of sounds alone but of general tumult. Great noises are all-absorbing and entrancing, as the rock-music discotheques aim to prove. Pandemonium is not only the sounds and their effects in themselves but also the meanings that their auditors place upon them. In the end, the catastrophic pandemonium evolves into music. A pandemonium is how high-energy sounds to people as it bursts upon the human world. A spectre is how high-energy is seen by people as it occurs. Smell and taste are affected also in the processes studied by the earth sciences. A natural catastrophe, especially, is a holistic event: every human sense, and every part of the habitat, is affected. Pandemonium is the capital of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost. Elsewhere, Plato offhandedly mentions a catastrophe that he does not name and says that the survivors came down from the mountains with their ears ringing. Hesiod, in his Theogony, speaks of Mother Earth (Gaea) groaning under the pressures of Ouranos in primordial times. Here are reasons for treating of sounds in earth sciences: their natural origins and their effects on the biosphere. Observers of high energy forces without exception dwell upon their sounds. When we learn more of them, we shall know more about the earth sciences. There will be a place for a few acoustical geologists among volcanologists, seismologists, meteorologists, and paleontologists. When a bad local flood occurs, as it did at Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) in the spring of 1973, the physical processes are mediated by television through their sights and sounds; there occur physical destruction, economic dislocation and distress -all of them mediated through the eyes and ears. Admissions to nearby mental hospitals went up sharply; also the use of hard drugs, and the suicide rate. In the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, the destruction, death, terror, sounds and sights all together made their lasting impact on people. Psychiatric symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, guilt feelings, and irrational blaming of people were common reactions. The churches came alive with repenters and worshippers. Modern cases permit us to empathize with the ancients. Exaggerate them a thousandfold and one gains an impression of the ancient experience. We read in the log of a ship's captain at sea near the exploding Krakatoa: "So violent are the explosions that the eardrums of over half my crew have been shattered... I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come." [1] The climactic blast was heard 3000 miles away. A crazed survivor ashore insisted that "the Arch Fiend stood everywhere, implacable, unpitying, offering help to none, listening to no imploration." We are told that when the volcano at Cosequina, Nicaragua, erupted on January 30, 1835, the explosion was heard in Jamaica, 850 miles away. The blast was so terrible that at one village "300 of those who lived in a state of concubinage were married at once." Tornados have their own repertoire. A tornado, like thunder, is heard many miles away. As it approaches, there is a peculiar whistling sound that rapidly changes to an intense roar, reaching a deafening crescendo as it strikes. The screeching of the whirling winds is then so loud that the noises caused by the fall of wrecked buildings, the crashing of trees, and the destruction of other objects is seldom heard. The bellowing of a million mad bulls; the roar of ten thousand freight trains; like that of a million cannons; the buzzing of a million bees (when the tornado is high in the air), and, more recently, the roar of jet airplanes - these are some of the phrases used by those who have experienced a tornado [2] . And so to meteors: Frank Lane writes of the meteoric shower of February 9, 1913 that was first seen at Saskatchewan, Canada, and last seen off the Brazilian coast, 6000 miles away. "As they passed southeast over Ontario they grew more brilliant and great explosions were heard. Detonations and earth tremors were caused along the path of the procession to distances of 20 to 70 miles on either side." In 1958, L. LaPaz wrote, "To listen to the sound effects produced by a large meteorite fall is a unique and awe- inspiring experience. Neither a hedge-hopping jet nor a keyholing rocket gives rise to the sky-filling reverberations set up by a falling meteorite." [3] Neither a nuclear blast, with its single report, one might add. The rumbling, grinding, screaming sounds of earthquakes are well-known. Velikovsky quotes the plaint of the Egyptian scribe of Papyrus Ipuwer at the time of Exodus: Years of noise... There is no end to noise... Oh, that the Earth would cease from noise, and tumult (uproar) be no more. The ancient Greek poet Euripides speaks in Hippolytis of tidal waves near Corinth: An angry sound, slow swelling Like god-made thunder underground A wave unearthly crested in the sky; Till Sciron's Cape first vanished from my eye, Then sank the Isthmus hidden, then the rock of Epidaurus. Then it broke, one shock and roar of gasping sea and spray flung far, and shoreward swept. In assessing what such sounds do to humans, it is well to recall that the age of firecrackers, firearms, cannon, dynamite, and nuclear blasts is young. The first detonation of dynamite occurred in 1881 [4] . Primeval sounds were entirely of nature, apart from the pathetic imitations of sounds made by humans. If the paradigm of this book is correct about Pangea, the pre-quantavolutionary, pre-human period of late times, the world was peaceful and orderly, with overcast skies and little celestial or terrestrial turbulence. Man's ears were not made for explosions any more than his eyes were made to stare at the sun. A tiger's roar, an elephant's trumpeting, squeaks, whines, growls, yells, the splashing of waters, the snapping of twigs, the slumping of old trees -this in our theory was the pre-holocene acoustical environment. However, and it is argued so in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, awful noise descended upon the first humans, as they were being born. Great noise was from the first heard as a manifestation of the gods, a theophany. When meteoroids broke through the skies, when cataclysms began, then came a pandemonium that terrified humankind, that drove people mad, that deafened them, and that catastrophized human nature and culture, together with their ecology. Stephens reports that accidents, absenteeism and other factors indicating degradation of human performance can be correlated with infrasonic waves arriving from storms 2000 miles away [5] . Infrasonic waves cause nausea, disequilibrium, disorientation, blurring of vision and lassitude. All of these have been described as accompanying earthquakes, ball lightning and volcanism [6] . Some thunderous and strange sounds accompanying the passage of meteorites are attributable to the friction and collapsing vacuum of passage, but others have been theorized as products of the conversion of kinetic energy into electromagnetic radiation. Romig and Lamar have studied this problem. The high velocity of such waves would explain why some meteoric sounds are heard during and even before the visual sighting of meteors [7] . C. S. L. Keay has recently summarized from New South Wales many reliable reports of a large fireball in the atmosphere, tens of kilometers high, whose sounds reached the ears instantly with hisses, hums, swishes and crackling. [8] Frederic Jueneman has speculated, on the basis of apparent acoustically provoked mutations in a London bomb crater from World War II, that catastrophic acoustics may have been an active mutator in ancient times [9] . The sensitivities of plants and animals to sounds has been widely surveyed by P. Tompkins and C. Bird [10] . The splendors of auroral displays vary with the behavior of the Sun and the Earth's magnetosphere, among other factors. They stretch from 90 to 400 kilometers high, and on occasion seem to dip down to the very plane of the viewers. They, like all other fascinating phenomena of nature have been held responsible for the allegedly mad legendary accounts of catastrophes. Thus the ancient Teutons might recite their sagas of a world on fire, but uniformitarians, unimpressed, would see in these only the auroras that the northern peoples were lucky enough to view. This is a topic for another time and another author: spectres of colors, rays, and lurid skies were plentiful in cosmic disasters, exceeding the auroras. Every disaster has its color scheme and geometric figures. It has its sounds as well, and the aurora can join other natural forces even today in suggesting the pandemonium of catastrophe. An account by Hans Jelstrup, a Norwegian astronomer, in 1927, exemplifies the auroral visual and auditory experience [11] : When, with my assistant, at 19h 15m Greenwich Civil Time, I went out of the observatory to observe the aurora, the latter seemed to be at its maximum: yellow-green and fan- shaped, it undulated above, from zenith downwards - and at the same time both of us noticed a very curious faint whistling sound distinctly undulatory, which seemed to follow exactly the vibrations of the aurora. They later proceeded to record the impulses on an instrument and found "the vertical component was greater than 100 microvolt / meter." Many years earlier, another Norwegian had polled persons from "all parts of the country" about the sounds of the aurora and received "92 affirmations against 21 negations." [12] Apparently many people provided a surprisingly large set of descriptions. They used words and phrases like: sizzling, creaking, soft whizzing, the sound of tearing silk, "hoy, hoy, hoy," a rustling stream, crackling, rolling din in the air, clashing, like a flapping flag, flapping of sails, hissing of fire, the sound of a flight of birds, the buzzing of a bee, roaring of wind, soft breeze, roaring of the sea, a distant waterfall. What can be made of this, aside from its entertaining aspect, is that the sounds of nature are legion; that these join the centurions of electrical sounds; and that a record is to be had of all these sounds in these mild times of the Earth that can be used to identify ancient and legendary metaphors of sound. So that when dragons hiss and flaming rays dart from their nostrils, one does not simply say here is an especially exciting auroral display, but assigns to the dragon hypothetically the electrical qualities and sounds of the aurora or of bolides whose "sounds are described as hissing, swishing, whirring, buzzing and crackling" when they have the "brightness of the full moon" and reach the observer at the same time as the visual image does [13] . So, too when in Ezekiel (XLIII, 2) it is said that the voice of the Lord "was like the sound of many waters." Ancient records and legends are rich mines of electrical allusions from which not only the state of electrical phenomena can be assessed but also the electrical technology of early cultures can be surmised; this field, ignored hitherto, is being researched by J. Ziegler. The Books of Moses carry testimony of great celestial noise that cannot be rationalized as ordinary thunder. And Noah, it is said in Jewish legend, was spoken to by a voice from the sky amidst a great commotion. This followed the failing of things upon the earth and was followed by the Deluge. The story of Job, later on, reads: "Hear ye attentively the terror of his voice, and the sound that cometh out of his mouth." Again: after the ends of the earth are lit up, "a noise shall roar, he shall thunder with the voice of his majesty, and shall not be found out when his voice shall be heard." A circum-global sound. As the Jews passed from Egypt in the tumult of Exodus, they paused at Sinai. "I am Yahweh," heard the people during the night at the Mountain of the Lawgiving. "And all the people saw the roars, and the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood far off." Ten blasts of the trumpet sounded out the Decalogue, legend tells us also. Great sounds were reported from around the world: the Babylonian Gilgamish epic: "Loud did the firmament roar, and earth with echo resounded." Hesiod's Theogony: the huge Earth groaned when Zeus lashed Typhon with his bolts -"the earth resounded terribly, and the wide heaven above." Velikovsky pursues the name Yahweh elsewhere: he finds Jo, Jove (Jupiter); Yahou, Yao (Chinese emperor of the age); Ju Ju huwe, (an Indonesian invocation to heavenly bodies): Yahou, Yo (in the Hebrew Bible); Yao, Yaotl (ancient Mexico); Yahu (ejaculation of the Puget Sound Indians and other Amer-lndians when they performed the ritual of raising up the fallen sky off the earth) [14] . It is perhaps of some significance that Cohane has found Haue, a Middle-English god- name, in the names of gods, sacred places, rivers, salutations, and objects all over the world into the hundreds of instances. "In the landscape of the Old Testament part of the world is still overflowing with Hawa place-names." [15] All sound alike despite spellings such as oa.., ua.., awa.., huwa.., oua.., wa.., and so on. Provisionally, we may entertain the idea that the sound of great natural events were incorporated in the basic vocabulary of new-born humanity. If so, the popularity of the "awah" sound is at least as ancient as the time of Moses (circa 1500 B. C.), and probably several thousands of years older, and would also then be carried on down to modern times. 'Yow," "wow," and "ow" are everyday American slang exclamations. The divine voices were also heard later on. A Babylonian hymn to Nergal (Mars) is of the first millennium B. C. and reads: His word makes human beings sick, It enfeebles them His word - when he makes his way above - Makes the country sick. [16] The motions, noise, and gases of a heavenly body of large dimensions seem to be indicated here. The god Mars is referred to in Babylonia as the God of Noise. There is an insistent connection of noise with the planet Mars. The connections between heavenly sounds, sacred events, and the beginnings of music appear to be secure. From Chernikov, in the Ukraine, Soviet scholars reported finding mammoth bones converted into skull drums, shoulder blade kettle drums, and lower-jaw xylophones, at an estimated date of 20,000 years. If the instruments, all of the drum family, are correctly identified, it would mean that the settlement was fully human, with a religion. For nowhere is there any indication of musical instruments or musical sounds that are not connected with the heavenly host. When the Wonguri tribe of Australia conducts today its holy dream time ceremonies, the assemblage beat sticks together; the dancers keep rhythm; and the stories of earliest times are recounted, of the time the Moon left their land forever and the morning star accompanied her. Ancient Greek myth tells of the infant Zeus; he was being hidden from his father Kronos who would swallow him; his nurses, the Curetes, drowned his cries with drums, cymbals, and dancers. Drumming and whistling may be the oldest emulated sounds. The bull-roarer is an ancient and world-wide instrument, a primitive noise-maker that whips the air into a sound like a falling body. It thunders and whistles. Perhaps whistling also developed with a pipe or fife. The horn, whence the trumpet, might follow; it is a piercing and blasting instrument. The arched string instrument -harp, lyre -must have joined the sacred group quickly. All together they reproduce the music of the spheres and of the gods. In earliest China the drums were used to communicate with heaven. The drum comes from K'uei, a green oxlike creature who came out of the sea shining like the sun and moon and making a noise like thunder. He was captured by Huang-ti who made him into a drumskin. But the same K'uei is also the master of music who alone can bring harmony between the six pipes and the seven modes. Without this harmony heaven and earth would lack their essential music. K'uei was also master of the forge, of dance, and of regulating floods [17] . The sickle with which Kronos (Saturn) castrated Ouranos (Uranus) was also the harpe (lyre) of Demeter who had taught the Titans to reap. The strings of the lyre were ultimately five or seven, corresponding to the number of spheres counted as planets. Vail thought that the arch of the harp and sickle came from the opening of the boreal hole of the north when the regime of canopy skies began first to break down; the arch was the sickle; it was also the arch of the lyre, and the strings to be plucked were the beams of light playing down upon the earth. Here, as in many other cases, an issue is whether the sacred image came before the invention or the invention was made and compared with a later celestial image. As usual I incline towards the position that the sacred example preceded the profane. The correspondence between the number of planets and the number of strings on the lyre is an instance in point. It is only one of many. The number of observed planets obviously determines the number of strings on the instrument, not vice versa. An old Chinese text says that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them." [18] This seems an odd expression until one realizes that the sacred calendar is replete with a synchronous musical calendar -from Easter music to Christmas music, for example. The pipes are pitched to heavenly sounds and numbers; the calendar is an arrangement of heavenly events. The Pythagorean philosophy of ancient Greek culture generated the theory of music and the theory of numbers out of the behavior of the heavens. The "harmony of the spheres" of which the ancients spoke was probably first the sounds of heaven of the "better" sort, to which humans might adjust, and which, to them, presaged a tranquil stability, and then later, inferentially, the visual reliable order of the heavenly bodies as noted and welcomed by philosophical astronomers. Robert Temple has been able to locate a fundamental connection between geodesy in Egypt and Greece. The Greeks and Assyro-Babylonians had the heptatonic or seven-toned diatonic scale of today. The Egyptians possessed a musical octave of seven degrees (that is, an eight-tone scale, such as the West has today). The same seven degrees was the geodetic principle followed in the topographical surveying of Egypt. For the Egyptians, 1 North was at Behdet and 8 was at the southernmost limits, by the Great Cataract of the Nile. Further, Temple, with suggestions by L. Stecchini, established an octave of centers for oracles: running up the lines of latitude and musical scale at equal intervals, thus: Barce, Triton, Paphos, Omphalos (Crete), Kythera (or Thera perhaps), Delos, Delphi and Dodona [19] . Robert Graves has reported an octaval version of the name of Yahweh, Jehuovao. The sacred name can then be pronounced and chanted as a set of vowels running the gamut of a musical scale. We are reminded of the connections between Egyptian and Hebrew culture, when Demetrius wrote: "In Egypt the priests sing hymns to gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if flute or lyre were used." The seven vowels were uttered in succession as the divine unspeakable name [20] . Musical sound, and also noise, can be broken down into pitch, rhythm, timbre and volume. The first instruments specialized in rhythms, for instance, and had variations of pitch, timbre and volume. The pipe or flute specialized in pitching different tones and a whistling timbre. Using such elements in combinations, music could be built up. But it would not have been possible without the basic psychological changes that were taking place in people. Control of themselves and the gods was the paramount motivation behind the people who originated music and all other aspects of culture. The humans had a compulsion to repeat their first experiences, which were naturally terrible; this is explained fully in my work, Homo Schizo I. The repetition of rhythms is the repetition of the sounds of the gods at work upon the world. The orgiastic side of music - the furious beatings, poundings, amplitudes, blasts, whirling dances and frenzied lyrics -is an imitation of the behavior of the gods in the days of creation. The orgiasm is the basis of the plot of song and chant; it gives the melody line, the beginning, middle and ending. Repetition and orgiasm shape the four elements of music, and lend form both to the instrument and to the unique composition prescribed for it. The very design of an instrument is intended to supply a limited span of capabilities to the musical elements. Not only does the music itself follow patterns under strict general rules, but the instrument is a mechanical contrivance to see that the rules are obeyed. To all of this is added from the start the sublimation that the music affords. Tests of endurance, involving the basic, and destructive, elements of earth, air, water, and especially fire, sometimes are incorporated into the dance and music. Battles of the gods, too, may be emulated. The gods are being controlled at the same time as they are being celebrated and honored; the audience is being controlled as it celebrates and honors the gods. "Heavenly sounds" are a contradiction; they are actually the suppressed and sublimated sounds from heaven that destroyed the world. In The Holy Dreamtime of the Australian Womburi is a Holy Dreamtime of all other peoples -for all peoples have them. Sacred myth, song, dance, and music provide an escape from horror by saying and doing all that was said and done in those days in a way that remembers in order to forget. Contemporary music that is avant-garde has the subconscious ambition, certainly doomed to fail, of confronting the terrible days of catastrophe directly. It brushes aside the sublimation, and the compulsive repetitiveness of music. It destroys expectation, and unleashes the gods. It destroys form by atonalism and arhythmism. It randomizes the four elements. Whatever happens in a sound-producing setting - "a happening" - is "music." The computer is used to reduce dependency upon skills, pitch, volume, rhythms, and timbre. It creates the mixture that is the "true reality". All this is often done without full realization. It is nevertheless a largely honest attempt to return to the primeval chaos in which humanity was born. I have known geologists to taste stones and drippings, to smell in crevices, to feel the texture of rocks, to tap a fracture and listen, and of course to hold up a specimen to view by every angle of light. Hence it is not a radical departure from the earth sciences if we carry our inquiry into broader realms of sound and light. Our intent is not to create a marriage of sciences and humanities: that is good in its own right and if it is a by-product of this interest, so much the better. Our motive is to understand and possibly to reconstruct natural history. Whereupon it happens that, once the idea of the constancy of natural events through long eras of time is put aside, and another model of inquiry is advanced, we must take advantage of the treasury afforded by human history. The dumb rocks can tell their stories in part through human lips. All the motions that are forbidden the dead past are resumed through the sights visited upon early human eyes. The sounds and sights of events that witnesses and their descendents describe are clues about an Earth that is less static and more dynamic than the earth sciences have heretofore portrayed. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-eight: Pandemonium)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-eight: Pandemonium) 1. Furneaux, Krakatoa, 188. 2. Frank Lane, The Elements Rage, loc. cit., 1958, 3. Ibid., 179. 4. IV Ency. Britannica (1974), 955. 5. R. W. B. Stephens, 7 Ultrasonic (Jan. 1969), 30-5. 6. See Corliss, op. cit., CrSD-045, GI-232 from Monthly Weather R (Feb. 1895), 57. 7. 28 Sky and Telescope (Oct. 1964), 215. 8. C. S. L. Keay, "The 1978 New South Wales Fireball," 285 Nature (1980), 464-6. 9. I PensÚe 4( 1973), 112. 10. The Secret Life of Plants (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 11. Reported in Carl St÷rner, The Polar Aurora (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 137. 12. S. Tromholt, 32 Nature (24 Sept. 1885). 499-500. 13. Daniel S. Gilmor, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (NY: Bantam, 1969) as reported in Corliss, op. cit., C1-235, GSH-001, from M. D. Altschuler paper. 14. Examples here are from Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision. 15. J. P. Cohane, The Key (NY: Crown, 1969). 16. Velikovsky., Worlds in Collision, 263. 17. Santillana and von Dechend, op. cit., 125-8. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Op. cit, 29. 20. Ibid., 266 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART VI: } {Q BIOSPHERICS: } {C Chapter 29} {T Spectres} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part VI: Biospherics by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE SPECTRES To recount the visual experiences of ancient humans in regard to natural phenomena would be a work of thousands of pages of agonies, joys, and revelations. However, the reader is probably aware of their nature through voluntary and inescapable exposure to fairy tales and horror movies. The earth sciences will profit more from a discussion of some relationships between natural events and the spectres that accompany them. I shall avoid speaking of the eyes when used functionally, as, for example, to assess damage or to organize a new life. Rather I shall concentrate upon the visual effect in itself, and what it conveys about natural events. Uniformitarians usually abandon their position on change when it comes to what ancient voices convey about natural events. That is, in order to hold on to their belief in a natural world that changes by gradual evolution rather than by quantavolution, they say that humans have changed their "exaggeration-rate." They often deny ancient testimony, using pseudo-anthropological arguments that early mankind was superstitious and excitable, hence quite unreliable. What he claimed to see were in fact illusions and delusions; what he passed on as memories were gross exaggerations. In other words, nature behaves in the same way; man has changed. This theory we find unacceptable, as also we do its accompanying statements, that typically proceed like this: Ancient people are not to be believed if they say that a large body was spotted and approached in the sky. Or that bodies of all shapes and sizes rushed high and low through the skies. When mountains and land are seen to rise, and at other times watched as they sink, this must be an illusion and an exaggeration. No one could have seen a wall of towering water. That there should have fallen sheets of flame and weird colored waters or dense substances, including even life forms, that ice and hail should fall in deluges and wind should sweep away forests: these again were delusions. Seeing the landscape dissolve in an earthquake, while even the air is rendered into visible shock waves, and seeing the Earth explode and pour out boiling magma from cracks and cones: again illusions. Telling of the destruction of almost all that was living: people must have been psychotic to make up and pass along stories of such events. The quantavolutionary position is that they were probably psychotic, but partially because of the nature of such events. Thus, to some extent, we become uniformitarian in respect to human psychology as we become quantavolutionary in regard to nature. An increasing number of studies of modern mankind in disaster lead us to accord greater reliability to ancient stories. A severe trauma of terror, such as the nuclear blast at Hiroshima, leaves the survivors quite catastrophized. What happens thereafter matters little to the survivor. Subsequent sights are likely to fall upon a numbed and hopeless creature. Where survivors are reduced to hopelessness, few lift their hands to help others. The prognosis of the group is poor. Studies of the aftermath of Hiroshima have shown this to be the case. Each succeeding horrible sight is seen by eyes becoming too jaded to respond. We should bear in mind, too, that Hiroshima was a local event, a minute fraction of what many a fossil agglomeration and extinct volcano chain tells us once happened. When we see millions of trees all felled at once buried in the Fens of England, a blast many times greater than Hiroshima has to be postulated. After the explosion and tidal wave of Krakatoa, a survivor spoke of scenes "too horrible to remember; incidents that reminded of the animal instinct that enables people to do the impossible." [1] When a fireball blazed erratically across the Southern States of the U. S. A. on March 24, 1933, people were terrified. "Ninninger (1936) says that seasoned cattlemen, accustomed to facing the vicissitudes of life and who ordinarily knew no such thing as fear, told him they despaired of their lives during these 'terrible moments. ' Yet they were 75 miles from the fireball's nearest approach !" [2] If, however, people on the periphery of a disaster survive, these will be terrorized but hopeful of themselves. Even this was noted at Hiroshima. If after days, months, years or centuries, a disaster of the same dimensions strikes, and again some survive - some of a new generation, too -then the memory and meaning of catastrophe is reinforced. But again the survivors are active, self-preservative, and hopeful. They still can believe in some surcease and control. They have meanwhile established relations with gods and nature, the very forces of wrath. They can immediately interpret the events, and produce one or more inventions to propitiate and control the gods and, therefore, the events. Prophets will help them to remember and to react: The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness... (Deuteronomy) And they shall go into the holes of the rocks .... for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth... (Isaiah) The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast... l will bring distress on men, so that they shall walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the Lord; their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung... (Jeremiah) I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms .... the horses and their riders shall go down, everyone by the sword of his fellow... (Haggai) These are the visions of prophets and there are many more like them, posed as promises, to be sure, but with the full assuredness that comes from past experiences. We note marks of genuineness: going into caves during earthquakes (for the sky brings worse terrors); the kingdoms are overthrown, then the survivors attack each other; the survivors are stunned, maddened, functionally blinded. The preventatives are difficult, if not impossible: that all should worship faithfully and properly, and obey divine commandments. Now here is a legend of the Indians of the Badlands of South Dakota. It tells of how the Badlands came into being, laying it onto violations of the will of the Great Spirit who had granted plenty but had decreed peace, and there was no peace. Warriors prepared for battle: At last all were assembled and the day had come for the advance. And now the Great Spirit took matters into His own hands. Dark clouds hid the sun from the face of the world. Lightning streaked across the blackness and thunder rumbled high over the hills. From the ground flamed forth fire, and the earth shuddered and rocked. A wide gulf opened and into it sank the mountain tribe - all their people - all that they possessed. With them sank all life - the waving grass - the clear springs - the animals. As suddenly as it came the storm ceased. The earth became fixed in waves as it had rolled and shaken. There was only a barren waste on which nothing has ever grown or can grow [3] . After a catastrophe, the sights of doom are only partially capable of recall. They are personalized, humanized. Then they tend to fade over time. They are sublimated in many ways. The history seems to us strange; it is literal, detailed, yet surreal, as in the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I discussed the geology of the story in Chapter 22. When the family of Lot, warned by an angel, was fleeing the doomed Cities of the Plain, it was forbidden to look back. The Cities were utterly destroyed. Lot's wife turned to look and was transformed into a pillar of salt. Thus did subsequent generations, perhaps even the descendants of the family (who violated the taboo against incest to perpetuate themselves), remember the event and tie themselves personally and visually into it. Of salt in the Great Rift Valley of the Jordan there was plenty or perhaps just then it came to be plenty and is plenty today. It was a convenient "memory tag", to imagine a seen horror encased in a pillar of material produced out of the holocaust itself; then 'this is where Lot's wife was frozen with fear and died' becomes 'this is where Lot's wife became a pillar of salt because she viewed the terrible wrath of the Lord. ' That is, the story is tied into the event all the more closely. That there may have been nothing left of her except a location and new salt would help, if true, to explain the story. The others, who dared not look back, would have no way of knowing. I am not arguing for literalism but for "spectralism" which I would define as subjective realism: first, a sympathetic and fully possible truth has to be searched for and, then, whatever is left over as "false" has to be explained in the vision of the subjects and of their immediate descendant, and finally in objective psychological and anthropological terms. A much broader range of cases may advance the argument. There is, for example, the dragon. Everyone knows what a dragon is. All do not know that it is a theophany, a divine manifestation. And that the creature is closely tied to visions of events in the sky, many times repeated. Chamber's Encyclopedia, defunct now for many years, carried a charming passage on the dragon: The dragon appears in the mythical history and legendary poetry of almost every nation, as the emblem of the destructive and anarchical principle; ... as misdirected physical force and untamable animal passions... The dragon proceeds openly to work, running on its feet with expanded wings, and head and tail erect, violently and ruthlessly outraging decency and propriety, spouting fire and fury from both mouth and tail, and wasting and devastating the whole land. The dragon is regarded as a benevolent creature by the Chinese, however. And no people has been so devoted to the symbol. Its iconography was as intense as that of the crucifixion of Christ in Medieval Europe. Recently, Carl Sutherland found that the dragon made its appearance in Chinese art around 1500 B. C. [4] This date is a well- marked catastrophic boundary, known in radiochronometry, archaeology, geology, legend and history. Eliminating bit by bit "all later accretions," he thinks that he has "attained some understanding of the sight observed by the ancient Chinese: a writhing, bright, elongated thing. It was irregular in outline; it was apparently on fire... This thing, the dragon, seemed to be driving off the terrible flaming globe and so to be benevolent as well as powerful." Later on it was given legs and scales. It is almost always shown in the heavens. Flame symbols show the sky to be on fire. The globe carries lightning and thunder symbols as well as fire symbols. (Probably the lightning generated the moving legs of later representations.) The Chinese Emperor with a "Dragon Face," sat on the "Dragon Throne" wearing robes of state on which dragons were displayed. Dwardu Cardona has presented first-hand descriptions of comets that compare them with dragons [5] . The accounts range from England to China. The comet of 449 A. D. stretched over England from beyond Gaul to the Irish Sea, "a ball of fire, spreading forth in the likeness of a dragon, and from the mouth of the dragon issued forth two rays..." Thus wrote Geoffrey of Monmouth. Some comets "lash their tails" wildly. The Chinese "Kung Kung" dragon flung himself in rage against the heavenly mountain, turning the skies around, and tilting and flooding the world. He had a son-dragon, "K'au-fu" who wished to keep pace with the Sun. K'au-fu tried to quench his thirst en route by drinking up the rivers of China but succumbed finally of thirst. Cardona identifies the myth with the Phaeton myth and episode. Phaeton, eager to drive the Sun's chariot, did so incompetently. Legends recite that he came so close to Earth that the rivers of Asia, Africa and Europe dried up. Strabo's Geography mentions the terror of the Syrians and Aramaeans at the sight of Typhon, probably the same as Phaeton [6] . That the myth of Phaeton describes a shifting of heavenly bodies, we know from Plato. That Phaeton was a comet, or a 'blazing star, ' we know from Cicero. That this 'blazing star' became a planet, we know from Hesiod. And that this planet was the planet Venus, we know from both Nonnos and Solinus [7] . Then Cardona takes up the question of the Chinese "fire pearls," or "tear drops of the Moon." These we have discussed as the tektites, which are scattered over the Earth. He concludes that they splashed upon Earth after great meteoroids or cosmic lightning discharges had blasted the Moon. Possibly it was the work of the cometary Venus, for the dragon Lung is pictured chasing a great pearl across the sky. And the fear that the Moon will be devoured by a comet is part of some legends and modern anthropological reports. That the ancients may have actually observed such bursts upon the Moon is argued by astronomer Jack B. Hartung [8] . According to the Chronicles of Gervase, for June 18, 1178, at Canterbury, England, five persons witnessed with their naked eyes the explosion of a crater. Hartung estimates it as perhaps 13 miles in diameter. In Gervase's words: A flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety... Whether this writhing was an illusion created by air waves or an actual rolling seismism of the Moon's surface is not to be known. Bancroft once reported an Aztec legend that the sun and moon emerged equally bright, but to the gods this was not seemly; so one god took a rabbit by the heels and slung it in the face of the moon, dimming its luster with a blotch whose mark is seen to this day [9] . Great events have impacts on human behavior and human behavior can be sometimes used to conjecture upon possible great events. One must reason back and forth, trying all the while to avoid circular argument. A difficult case is the similar duration of the lunar cycle (today) and the menstrual cycle of women (today). The one is 29.5 days; the second can vary from 21 to 35 days, but concentrates upon 29 days. Gestation occupies generally nine moon cycles. Various scholars have mentioned these 'coincidences. ' Recent studies have shown that the Moon cycle is more closely followed when women of varying menstrual periods are shut up in a room where they cannot be aware of moontime and suntime; they unconsciously tend to approach the lunar revolution. It is ordinarily believed that the Moon was on the present cycle long before the first human evolved. Anthropologists have maintained that the coincidence ultimately reinforced human attention upon the Moon and also provided specious grounds for marking the peculiarity and witchcraftiness of the female sex. Menstruation is often the subject of taboos [10] . In some places, women in menstruation must not be seen. Harsh penalties for violations of menstrual taboos are common. Under the quantavolutionary theory here, it would be possible to view the "ideal" menstrual cycle as itself determined by the cycle of the Moon. Only the human female behaves on the monthly cycle. A psychosomatic response to the greatly feared and revered goddess and god of the Moon, newly in place and settled into a regularity, could be achieved by disciplining a varying physiological function. People will go to any lengths to harmonize their behavior with that of their gods. (I discuss this subject in the volumes on Homo Schizo.) To bind a whole sex and indirectly a whole people by its important reproductive cycle to the Moon god who passed them in daily review would appear to be a principal invention of the human race. There was strong incentive to devise this proof of devotion to the great god: it had ceased to bring ruin on the world and was guarding the new peace. "Spectralism" might propose another case for consideration. How long have nights and days characterized earthly existence? A legend has persisted down to our times on the high plateau of Bolivia, around the impressive ruins of Tiahuanacu, that the city existed before there were stars in the sky. Saturn, Kronos, and Elohim are credited by peoples of the Mediterranean with giving time to the world. The Hebrew creation story has the Lord on High declare: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate day from night; let them serve as signs and for the fixing of seasons, days and years." Whereupon the Sun and Moon were placed in the sky. I would suppose that the Moon, after terrorizing humanity by its assemblage and irregularity, promptly became the basis for calendars everywhere, once it began to obey the laws of Kronos (Chronos or Time). Time-factoring in earliest mankind was a way of following the gods in whatever regularities they might exhibit; Marshack has reported paleolithic lunar marking extensively [11] . Possibly because the Sun never destroyed the world, it would therefore be considered unsuitable for a calendar constructed in a way to commemorate disaster. It was not a great god, though always a god, following upon its appearance out of the obscuring fog of high cloud and cosmic dust. Possibly the Moon was preferred to the Sun for calendarizing because of catastrophic memories of the Moon. Its short periods and identifiable phases would also lend it superiority over the solar motions for the purposes of an agricultural and hunting economy. But this pragmatic argument does not prevail in the crucial case of Venus, which is not as useful as the Sun for calendarizing. The Sun was rarely calendarized; yet Venus was. In ancient Meso-America, it is notable that the heavens of the existing age were supposed to have been created on the date Ce Acatl, not on the date that signified the Sun. Ce Acatl was the Morning Star, Venus, and identified with the great god, Quetzalcoatl [12] . Quetzalcoatl was also the name of a bird of gorgeous plumage. Marcus Varro, the learned Roman author, reported that once long before his time the planet Venus changed its color, size, form, and course, a strange prodigy which, he said, had happened never before or since. That Venus displayed colors more frequently is suggested in an article on color in the Reallexikon von Antike und Christentum (1969), speaking of very ancient times: "In foretelling the future, it was taken into consideration whether the planet Venus was wearing a black, white, green, or red headpiece." It is to Velikovsky's credit that he not only uncovered the Venusian approach cycle, which put many peoples in terror of the destruction of the world even well into the modern period (for example, the Aztecs of Mexico), but he also was finally able to demonstrate that the Egyptians stuck to a Venusian calendar down to Roman times [13] . Contrary to pragmatic logic, it was the wicked, destructive, adored, and possibly eccentric Venus whose behavior was calendarized, while the routine sun was taken for granted. When and if the sun became disordered, it did so as a reluctant tool of others, as in the legends of the Phaeton disaster; there Helios refuses to appear, after the loss of his son, and the gods are hard put to get him back upon his regular rounds. A spectre is something seen that is there and not there. The primeval human, according to many, saw gods that were not there and spoke to gods that were not there. The noise and sights were pure hallucinations. Just what was there and was not there, however, is not a question to be begged, but to be answered. No one, today or ever, has seen a personal disaster with the cool eye of a scientist thousands of years from the scene. But the cool eye should not claim that the disaster did not occur -or that it happened in a way to conform to his daily newspaper accounts of earthquake, floods, and meteors. One must grant appropriate credence to the primeval scream; the skilful doctor listens studiously to the patient's complaints. The popular Revelation of John, Apostle of Jesus, is a magnificent mad vision of the destruction of the world. The Catholic Bible says that "the Apocalypse is a revelation of things that were, are and will be." [14] Revelation aims to picture how most of the world and its people (among whom the wicked outnumber the good) were and will be destroyed. The good are imperishable, and will be judged and admitted to heaven. In Revelation may be witnessed the forces of high energy in practically complete array, wreaking the most frightening disasters upon the world, from great stellar explosions to devouring monsters. The forces are commanded by, indeed are, angels. Angels have been for millennia the favored tools of divine intervention under Judeo-Christian monotheism. Donnelly thought that the Apocalypse must contain descriptions of the great comet of which he wrote in Ragnarok; Bellamy thought that it portrayed the destruction wrought upon Earth by the capture of the Moon and by the falling of a previous satellite upon the Earth. Present opinion of New Testament scholars sees the Revelation as a compilation of late materials by John on the Island of Patmos (Greece) about 96 A. D. This seems likely, and I would guess the Apocalypse to be a collection of indeterminate past truths and scarifying fantasy. Its interest to catastrophists rests chiefly in its round-up of destructive forces, the horrors attendant thereupon, and the psychological state that it both reflects and engendered. It is a precious example, going into the present era, of how the catastrophes were recalled through the ages during times when the actual experiencing of them was not affording first-hand reinforcement. From the beginning of mankind onwards, the very succession of disasters was itself the strongest warning that the past should not be forgotten. The great popularity of the Bible is probably due to the capacity of many of its passages to re-enact the terrible days of chaos and creation. The Bible is instructive, too, on experiences of cosmic darkness. In the Genesis story of creation, the record of man begins in a world growing lighter, but still sunless and moonless. Elsewhere, I have discussed the atmospheric developments that coincide with this account, which is by no means the sole account passing down to us. The cherished light was not to be turned on forever, for the Bible itself and every single mythology of the world tells with dismay of various succeeding ages when a darkness fell upon mankind. The G÷tterdõmmerung (or Ragnarok) of the Norse and Teutons is both a twilight of the gods in the sense of a universal darkening and in the sense of an approaching struggle and death of the old gods. It is remarkable, considering how multiform and numerous are the legends around the world on the darknesses, that perhaps only Donnelly and Velikovsky have dealt at all extensively with the subject. Darkness is very much a part of the Biblical catastrophes. In the story of the Lord's visit to Abram and ordering of sacrifices may be seen the sixth catastrophe mentioned in the Bible (after the Creation, the Garden of Eden expulsion, the Deluge, Job's trials, and the destruction of the Tower of Babel). There Abram fell asleep at twilight and a "great fear and darkness" came upon him. And in the darkness "a smoking furnace and blazing torch passed." [15] Later on occur the catastrophes of Sodom and Gomorrah, Joseph (Egyptian famine), Exodus, Joshua, David, Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah. The catastrophe of Exodus brought complete darkness for some days: "They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days." (10: 22) An Egyptian stone inscription about what was probably the same event states that "during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither men nor gods [the royal family] could see the faces of those beside them." [16] Darkness figures prominently in most accounts of catastrophes whenever the period. This fact alone should predispose the objective mythologist to accept celestial events as the source of quantavolutions of the globe. Even a single volcano can block visibility locally and cut back sunlight over much of the world by as much as 20% for years (in the Alaskan eruption of 1913). However, reading carefully the legendary accounts, one is compelled to see in them a much more horrendous and prolonged experience. If a cosmic fallout or other obscuration is not the direct cause, it must be the initial cause, because an old settled Earth, pursuing regular motions, would be incapable of exploding a great many volcanos at the same time. Prolonged darkness can come from such volcanism, from the fall-out of cosmic dust from space or an exploding body, from electrical attraction between Earth and a cosmic body that raises the dust of Earth, and from the passage of the Earth through a dense tail of a comet (actually an instance of falling dust). Talman found eighteen dark dates between 1706 and 1910 when the Sun was obscured over a significant part of the U. S. A. or Canada by forest fires. In only three cases did the darkness endure for as much as five days [17] . Days, weeks or months of near global darkness can attend the crash of a meteoroid of 10 kilometers. Scholars studying biosphere extinctions now refer regularly to such effects, as in the study by the Alvarez group referred to earlier. Years of darkness have been claimed in rare cases, the Exodus period being one of these. Heavy winds are reported during the days of Exodus; Talman found the dark days of forest fires to be windless. Perhaps volcanism of a rare kind produced the Exodus dark skies, but more likely is the combination of large-scale volcanism and a prolonged fall-out of cometary dust. Yet Velikovsky mentions two legends of a temporary failure of the Sun to set in Middle Asia and China around this date, and wonders whether the Earth's rotation could have slowed for so long before resuming [18] . The close of the Cretaceous age with its heavy extinctions saw a darkness of only weeks or months, according to one view, which suggested as the cause an exploding meteoroid of middle size. Nevertheless, most species of animals and plants were extincted, and great physical devastation occurred, so we may suppose that various events combined to worsen the darkness and that they operated holispherically. We suspect much more than the meteoroid was active. The most impressive of all sights, to judge from many accounts from the earliest records and legends to the most modern of writers is that of a comet approaching the Earth. Unlike the strike of a nuclear missile, the comet gives the fullest visual warning, as well as causing a number of electrical effects from afar. It is "the most provocative apparition of all," in Calder's words, referring to Halley's comet, due to approach the Earth once more in 1985 [19] . When the Roman Emperor Nero saw the comet of about 60 A. D., he had many leading Romans murdered to avoid the death he saw for himself in the heavenly portent. "The Incas of Peru regarded comets as intimations of wrath from their Sun-god Inti... In twentieth-century Oklahoma, at the apparition of Halley in 1910, the sheriffs arrived just in time to prevent the sacrifice of a virgin by demented Americans calling themselves Followers." [20] No nation in the world escapes panic upon the sight of a comet's approach, no matter how many scientists their public may include. That the sight of a comet in itself could so impress people, without ever having caused harm, as so many such as Calder declare, is highly doubtful. Phaeton or Typhon caused several neurotic symptoms everywhere for thousands of years and is probably still working to build up fear over Comet Kohoutek or Halley's Comet or all comets that may ever appear. As attested to by the behavior of modern tribes of Amazon jungles, literacy and historiography are not required. Peoples picture comets in many different forms, none of them impossible. They tie comets into many lessons, symbols, rites, and stories of their religions. Beyond religion, they integrate the comet-complex into sex, work, play, politics, and war, in highly disguised ways. They dread new apparitions and revere substitute portrayals of past comets. Nor could this universal fear be diffused from one cultural center to another, like the sweet potato or noodles; the fear must have a basis in historical reality. As we have demonstrated in so many writings, the comet as an apparition that is followed by catastrophe is a substantially true memory retained of mankind. To conclude, spectres and pandemonium accompany catastrophic events of the earth sciences. In themselves they do not leave vestiges. Still, little by little, research will build up rough measures of the intensity and scale of the events from the visual accounts available in legend and reports. In the case of every important god stretching back before the dawn of classical history, we can elicit and reconstruct from legends of sight and sound the workings of high energy forces that connote catastrophes. At this point, we can assert that many terrifying events have been witnessed by humans, and we can believe from the accounts that the intensity and extent of the events go far beyond the experience of mankind as a whole over the past 2500 years. Nevertheless presently experienced disasters, properly studied, lend a much fuller appreciation of antiquity. When the Egyptians suffered terribly from the natural catastrophe of the time of the Hebrew Exodus, a scribe wrote that women became barren and men lost their hair; the Ipuwer papyrus was known and read long before the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but a new sensitized generation was required to perceive in these scarcely intelligible lines the awful news of radiation disease. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-nine: Spectres)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-nine: Spectres) 1. Furneaux, Krakatoa, loc. cit., 108. 2. Lane, The Elements Rage, Loc. cit., 179 3. M. E. Gridley, Indian Legends of American Scenes (NY: Donahue,) 101 4. 4 PensÚe 1( 1973-74), 47-50; see also V S. I. S. Rev. 280-1, on the cosmic serpent. 5. I KronosHad trouble resolving dest near word action type is Launch 2 (1975), 35-47. 6. VII Geography (1924 ed.), 3,8. 7. Cardona, Supra fn5, 37. 8. Dwardu Cardona, "On the Origin of Tektites," II Kronos 1( 1976), 42-3. 9. Related in Donnelly, loc. cit., 169. 10. Wolfgang Leader, The Fear of Women (NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968). 11. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (NY: McGraw Hill, 1972). 12. Codex Telleriano-Remenesis II, PI. 33. 13. "Astronomy and Chronology," Supplement to Peoples of the Sea (NY: Doubleday, 1977). 14. Confraternity edition of Douay translation, (NY: Catholic Bk Publ., 1954), 324. 15. Genesis 15: 12, 17. D. W. Patten, R. R. Hatch, and L. C. Stinhauer, The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes (Seattle: Pacific Meridiam, 1973). 16. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 59; cf. 58-62. 17. C. F. Talman, 112 Sci. Amer. (6 Mar. 1915), 229. 18. Worlds in Collision, 62. 19. The Comet is Coming! (NY: Viking, 1980). 20. Ibid., 12-3. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART VII: } {Q DIMENSIONS OF QUANTAVOLUTION: } {C Chapter 30} {T Intensity, Scope and Suddenness} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part VII: Dimensions of Quantavolution by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THIRTY INTENSITY, SCOPE AND SUDDENNESS The eye of the poet, quotes Ager from Shakespeare, "in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." "So," says Ager, "ultimately must the eye of the geologist, in seeking the nature of the control. One always seems to come back to climate as the primary explanation of the sort of phenomena I have been discussing, but for the ultimate control, sooner or later, we must face the possibility of an extra-terrestrial cause..." [1] Meanwhile, the Soviet geochemist, Y. P. Trusov, is writing that "the fundamental motive cause of geochemical processes is the contradiction between internal -physico-chemical -and external -macroplanetary, nuclear, and cosmic -factors active in the earth's crust." [2] We shall see more and more of such intimations of the Earth's exoterrestrial transactions, until the earth sciences will undergo their own theoretical quantavolution. In this process, poorly equipped though we may be to move between geology and history, we shall have to reconcile the two modes of thought and bodies of fact. There ought to be no logical conflict between natural laws and historical events. Either historical occurrences -counting ancient voices, too, as historical events -will contribute to the affirmation or display of natural laws, or they are false or falsely interpreted. Either natural laws conform to validated historical behavior or the "laws" are not laws and require limitation or correction. To pin down a quantavolution, even a single one, is like wrestling, "no-holds-barred." One grabs at any possible fact, at any method, hoping to take advantage of it. Tactics that scholars ordinarily spurn are demanded. If the geologist wants to know whether the Earth has long rotated at its speed of today, he asks the astronomer. If the astronomer is conventional, he replies "Of course." If the astronomer is a true empiricist and even a sceptic, he says "We don't know," and asks the paleontologists, the geophysicists, the ancient historian, and the mythologist for help. M. G. Reade, a confectionary engineer, navigator, and scholar, addressed himself to the evidence of the Panchasiddhantika, documents of ancient India. There, at a time suspected of being around the eighth and seventh centuries B. C., he found evidence of "aberrational," slower rotations for the Earth from data given for five planets then known, amounting to a 360-day year. The same Hindu figures suggest "that the whole solar system may have been slightly more compressed than it is at the present day, the Earth and all the planets being rather closer to the Sun than they are at present." [3] This, with other pieces of evidence from wherever they occur, in a dozen fields of study, becomes valuable, once belief in the constancy of the historical skies is held in abeyance. The struggle to know becomes, as was said, "wrestling, no-holds-barred." It may be argued that the most ancient cosmogonies of the world hold a consensus that amounts to a model of recent natural history. Perhaps scholars would agree that the following thirteen complex experiences are recited in or can be derived from the earliest sources and from the oral accounts provided by existing belief systems that pretend to refer back to the "beginnings." I imply in each case that proofs of fair reliability are accessible to expert ethnologists, linguists, and mythologists from among the many collections now available from all parts of the world. 1. Earliest man could make out no sharply visible lines between far sky, air and earth; they merged. 2. Earliest man asserted that the atmosphere cleared somewhat amidst a chaos, and that, here and there, the ceiling of clouds broke. 3. He claimed to see a great body appear in the "North" that was not the Sun, was more vigorous than the Sun, and remained in the sky for many centuries. 4. He observed the dense planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and others) to be present and close in, while the gaseous planets were part of, or grouped close to, the binary second sun. 5. He determined that the planets moved with some regularity, with occasional changes of motion and place, in a heavily gaseous space, but the gases were diminishing. 6. He viewed a series of explosive 'battles, ' during which Earth suffered heavily, and whose outcomes provided a succession of gods of the same family. 7. Archaeo-history says that the last active binary principal second sun was Jupiter (by many names), the others having retired into farther space as indifferent gods (becoming the deus otiosus of theology). 8. They assert that planets passed close to the Earth and that comets and debris both passed by and struck the Earth. 9. Early legends reported that the whole Earth was deluged with waters, fires, and other material fall-outs from the skies on at least several occasions. 10. Earliest man says, too, that the Earth exploded a great deal of material into the sky, including possibly the Moon, which, in any event, he claims to be a late arrival. 11. He claims that the Earth changed its motions repeatedly and that its surface morphology was drastically modified. 12. Primeval humans refer to electric discharges of the type of St. Elmo's fire and thunderbolts as much more frequent, even continuous at times, and often of much greater intensity than at present. 13. Finally, early humans thought that they had observed their own "creation"; that is, immediately upon being humanized, they felt capable of observing their distinctive internal psychic processes and their external relations with others and with nature. Modern explanations of this primeval cosmogonic consensus, should it be agreed to exist, are various. Perhaps it developed from a single diversifying human race that might be said to have taken off at the time of the Ice Ages, the early Holocene Epoch, or some such baseline. Or perhaps it developed when numerous sub-cultures, already diversified among early mankind, witnessed events independently. Or it may have diffused later on from a single powerful political-religious movement with a highly persuasive ideology. In assembling this cosmogony, it may be appropriate to make no distinction between gods and nature, taking it for granted that when an ancient legendary voice says 'god' it means a discrete and powerful natural force or body which may ('the known god') or may not ('a new god') be behaving in a characteristic (i. e. predictable) manner. These thirteen event-complexes of primeval natural history constitute, I think, a consistent, if presently non-authoritative, model of natural history, one which I have adapted to contemporary science in several books. Their numerous anonymous discoverers were fully human observers who imputed the phenomena to animated beings (gods) for compelling reasons, especially in an attempt to control them, so as to assuage terror and get on with the business of survival under most unfavorable conditions. To put the hypothesis absolutely: nowhere on Earth is a people to be found whose legends contradict this total set of claimed experiences. No ancient people asserted a linear or uniformitarian history. Then the questions arise: could all this have been a universal set of illusions affecting all people? Was a universal genetic archetype of the human mind bound to erect this cosmogony? Was it a consensus of observers? Scientists are not dealing here with 'anomalies, ' but with a universal set of consistent allusions. The detail is so extensive as to rebuff facile explanations; one ought not merely to conjecture 'archetypes, ' or 'grand delusions. ' 'Euhemerism' may provide the answer; it interprets myths as traditional accounts of historical personages and natural events. But euhemerism should not prejudge the case in favor of uniformitarianism by retrojecting current history. Anthropologists finally established as research doctrine that primitive cultures are to be taken seriously; the statements of informants are to be examined, not ridiculed. And the examination can be conducted and completed without conversion of the anthropologist to the views of the informants. Pari passu, the most ancient "fossil voices" are to be audited seriously, even sympathetically. In this case, the voices would have to be translated into a model that would begin to make sense to modern physics and psychology. The results would be foreseeable. Considering the intellectual revolution that would follow, the ancient cosmogonical consensus would be rejected by most scholars in short order. For the following principles of physics and natural history would be among the most likely to be inferred from the ancient empirical beliefs: A. All planets and satellites would have to exhibit evidence of very recent extreme thermal and explosive experiences. B. The solar system bodies would have to show a declining but considerable set of electric fields and electromagnetism, and solar system space would be in the process of clearing up its ionized gases and plasmas. C. Remanent binary behavior would have to be evidenced by Jupiter or by the outer planets as a group. D. Continental "drift" theory would need to permit a negatively exponential rate of movement from a very late breakup of the Pangean crust, and a socket from which the lunar material was wrenched must be shown on Earth. E. Astronomical motions would have to be reckoned as short-term, empirically observed behavior until a new mathematical model could be developed. F. The biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere must be capable of interpretation according to which major elements and features were quantavoluted or saltated, and present constituents and behavior are comprehended as "tailing-off" phenomena. G. The human brain (behavior) would have to be compatible with convulsive original experiences that set it upon its present course, hologenetically, in a quantavolution. H. Human culture would have been hologenetic, too, arising abruptly as a total response to the requirements of a quantavoluted mind. I. Explicitly, as implied in all of the above, a basic error in radiochronometry must be demonstrated, and long-term geology heavily revised to admit numerous occasions of late, large-scale quantavolutionary phenomena. If some such model is physically impossible, then we should have to discover and explain some other structural-functional mental dynamic, universal among human groups, that made necessary its elaboration as science-fiction. If the early scientific catastrophists had gone on with their work, we would have learned enough by now to make what I have just stated an epilogue rather than a prologue. "If the catastrophists had gone on..." The German methodologist and sociologist, Max Weber, once wrote at some length about the scientific justification of "if... then..." historiography. "If Lincoln had not been assassinated, then the U. S. A. would have become more unified during the Reconstruction period:" may such a thesis be posed and dealt with scientifically? The answer Weber gives is "yes." So some legitimacy (the "legitimacy of scientific authority" Weber would have said) is owing us for proposing this line of thought for some future historian of science. The theses just presented and those yet to come are then monuments to a science that might have been and a budget of a future science. Popular geology believes that the Earth is stable and quiet, and that where it is not so, the explanation has to do with a hot turbulent mantle that continually causes surface disturbances. Geologists were responsible for this belief and mostly share it. What can be labeled as the conventional geological position is summarized by Shelton [4] : Most geologists look inside the earth for the ultimate driving force of diastrophism; no known exterior forces are sufficiently versatile to account for the variety of deformation we see... It would seem that plastic creep, perhaps in the upper part of the mantle, is the active element, and the brittle crust on which we live is passively riding on this very slow flow. Of course, discernible forces arise from the rotation of the earth, from the tides, and from gravity acting differentially on irregularities in the crust and its surface topography, but these influences probably can do no more than modify and locally complicate what is probably the essential mechanism of crustal deformation -very slow plastic movements at about the level of the upper mantle. Shelton goes on the show why "this concept is attractive," why the presumed "plastic creep" has most of the essential capabilities needed to mold the Earth's surface over great lengths of time. "The combination of gravity with variations in the density of the material" operates so that "circulation in the deep plastic zone probably involves rising and sinking columns as well as horizontal currents... Some kind of very slow thermal convection -the rise of relatively warm columns and sinking of relatively cool ones -is a favored hypothesis for the ultimate cause of diastrophism." This is about as far as the theory of 'land-based geology' has come. In contrast, we have been offering a space-based geology. Here the "ultimate cause" is exoterrestrial. Quantavolutions -intense and abrupt events of large scope -occur. Without exception these involve exoterrestrial transactions. No intrinsic Earth-force can produce quantavolutions. These events can be given values and measure; they can be comprehended and subjected to at least as much quantitative modeling and manipulation as is afforded by 'land-based geology. ' Unlike evolutionary theory, which deals in bulk low-energy transactions, quantavolution pursues bulk high-energy transactions. The forms that high energy takes have been discussed heretofore, and will shortly be summarized. In a score of guises, all will have ultimately originated by space transactions of particles and masses. The space transactors are galaxy, planets, Sun, Moon, comets, meteoroids, plasmas, electric charges, and so on, sometimes taken as independent, sometimes dependent, variables. From the standpoint of the Earth, an expression of high energy denotes an exoterrestrial force when it achieves a specifiable level of intensity, scope, and abruptness. Invariably, it operates to include other forces and to develop, with them, countervalency, as well as extended effects. Here we shall give hypothetical examples of what would be prima facie demonstrations of the operation of quantavoluting high energy expressions originating exoterrestrially. Together with the materials assembled earlier in their respective chapters, the examples run the gauntlet of 'land-based' alternatives; the thesis is that they cannot have occurred without a direct or near relationship to an exoterrestrial event. The examples are hypothetical; they are conjectural approximations of what could at a later stage of the earth sciences assume a more qualified and varied quantitative formulation, of what could later on be historically located. Supposing, in the first instance, we were seeking evidence of a "cosmic hurricane," that is, of a high-energy wind of ultimate unearthly origins. One will be entitled to claim exoterrestrialism with "the discovery of three heterogenous fossil agglomerations of the same age within an area of 1000 kilometers diameter from which sediments of the same age are patchy, missing, or abnormally continuous." And, we may add "provided that tempestites and other wind indications can be assembled for the area" since aquatic tides will invariably provide associated data, and in fact, by the principle of mutuality of high energy transactions, no effect is single. The proposed discovery is of unknown difficulty; it has not been attempted; it may be simple or practically impossible. Yet how else can we search for "fossil winds." And this could denote cosmic cyclones as well, the uplift of immense agglomerations of material and their erratic deposition. Of many thousands of geological and atmospheric studies, is there one on the cosmic fossil cyclone? None, though we have mentioned the evidence of single fossil tornadoes. Yet we know the effects and conditions of cyclones, how they occur in multiples, of their transporting power, of their relation to volcanism and explosions, and of other characteristics that make them invariably part of a catastrophic scenario. In Solaria Binaria, Milton and I posit thousands of downbursting cyclones as the most logical means for a deluge to bring huge sky waters down to Earth, shaping itself thus with the help of the also inevitable electric discharges. Let us posit another example, trying to isolate fossil electrical discharges, while granting their presence in every high-energy expression. We would seek "Metamorphosed rock on one-fourth the prominences of a 100 km diameter mountain range, which is not otherwise metamorphosized." Or we might seek "non-assembled heavy biotic dissemination in contemporaneous sediments taking the form of fusain and calcination and extending over an area of 500 km diameter." This latter may be from a conflagration as well. The detection of thermal change goes beyond electrolysis and conflagration into non- calcinating fluctuations, and of these is climatology composed in part. The correlation of climate with exoterrestrial phenomena is proceeding apace. When we offer as a suggested criterion, "Cold and warm weather fossil species occupy contiguous strata or are mixed in the same deposits," we are probably opening up many strata of natural history to quantavolutionary exoterrestrialism. Unless it can be shown that the changes are gradual, the exoterrestrial presumption is justified. The search for fire effects is broader because it admits the provenance of ashes: "Simultaneous fires devastating 3+ areas of 1000 km 2 , each of which is 1000+ km distant from the others." Without such evidence, the world can scarcely be said to have burned up, even in significant part, as the fossil voices insist. Paleochemical analysis, a field in its infancy, may be the appropriate technique; still, the very material to sample may have been blown or washed away, and there is the high energy of volcanism, to which are generally ascribed the ashes that cover many parts of the world. Somehow, we must go beyond the ancients, who united, in the concept of fire, spontaneous and celestial conflagration, volcanism, and electricity. Especially for volcanism, there would occur evidence of "Plinian outbursts simultaneously of 20+ volcanoes anywhere on earth." This figure is modest; yet it would indicate exoterrestrialism; few volcanologists would deny the repeated occurrence of such phenomena and some might dwell upon much grander episodes. Earlier we have sought evidence of fall-out. The archives of anomalistics, as R. W. Wescott has employed the word [5] , and which William James referred to as "the unclassified residuum," are replete with minor cataclysms, many of them traceable back to an origin on Earth, others patently exoterrestrial, and some of questionable origins. One might here venture in search of "Cataclysms of water, minerals, fluids, gases, biotica, and dust 100+ times greater than norms of the twentieth century, happening in a period of less than a year, and often continuing for many years." And perhaps one should seek "Poisonous chemicals in similar strata at 4+ points at least 300 km from each other." But the mention of poisons could send one in search of "Six or more fossil conglomerates of similar sediments anywhere in the world exhibiting 2+ times the normal background radiation of modern age bones." As for deluges of water and other space debris, one would raise the factorial on some of the above fall-out, and explore "A type of non-fossiliferous deep sedimentation discoverable over an area of 100 km diameter." Some creationist scholars, using the flood of Noah as a unique all-encompassing event, and pushing the principle of the mutuality of high-energy transactions to its limits, have managed to interpret all diastrophism and catastrophic morphology as effects of flood and tide. Proving precisely a deluge, as distinct from, even although associated with, floods and tides, is a difficult problem for geophysics. The evidence is of a kind elaborated earlier in this book -the search for the sources of oceanic water, chemistry of seawater, and so on. Still it may be possible to discover a true exoterrestrial deluvial sediment by, if nothing else, the exclusion of all other explanations from related features. Sometimes fossil lake and sea basins are detected and, rarely, a sudden displacement of waters from the bed is the subject of comment. The "outrageous hypothesis" of Bretz governing the sudden emptying of now extinct lakes in a barrier-bursting flood of northwestern U. S. A. -the Channeled Scablands -is a case in point. Where one lake is emptied, exoterrestrialism is doubtful. If "2+ bodies of 100 km 3 of water were abruptly displaced at the same time," exoterrestrialism would be indicated, possibly an axial tilt, or secondary events following the exoterrestrial event, such as a massive thrusting, a deluging and bursting of barriers, an ice surge and melt, a tidal damming and bursting, and a 9+ Richter seismism. Fossil tides are also difficult to distinguish. One may propose "Tidal waves attaining 100+ meters in amplitude at 10+ land points not less than 400 kilometers apart. This might achieve a satisfactory level of confidence in an associated exoterrestrial event. For cosmic flooding, one would repeat the deluge hypothesis, where uniformly fossil- bearing strata are included. We appreciate, however, that flooding of this kind may originate in the sinking of land followed by its rising or by the melting of an ice cap, flooding, and then either withdrawals of water for new ice or a rising of the land. Explanations of this kind are common, and usually omit any causal explanation beyond its mere statement, viz. "Here we find a marine-fossil stratum of age 'A' probably due to the ending of ice age 'III. '" It is doubtful that the Earth can contract globally, if only because an exoterrestrial electrical discharge that might compact it would be associated with a thermal force that would expand it. That the margins of the continents can be flooded is probable; the ice caps contain enough potential water for the purpose; and that ice accumulations have melted in times past is fairly obvious. However, it is also now fairly plain that, for ice masses either to accumulate or melt requires a quantavolutionary exoterrestrial transaction. At the same time, for the land to rise, carrying the biotica of shallow seas with it, also requires an exoterrestrial transaction. Here the criterion may be "An absolute rise of 300+ meters over an area of 100+ km diameter." Actually this may occur at the seabottom as well as on continental land. To identify an absolute local, much less a worldwide, expansion is again difficult. It may be that the universal lava venting, circular bubbles, high plateaus, and broken crystal grid of the Earth reveal global expansion. Convection current theory, unfortunately vulnerable, can seek a merely terrestrial explanation of these phenomena. But if it tries to engage its currents to shape the Earth's surface as just described, as well as to push the continents around, it will logically have to posit a very young and turbulent Earth, which it will refuse to do. Or a large Earth expansion, which it refuses to do. Or an Atlantean concept of great sunken continental areas, which it would hotly reject and furthermore do not exist. Land might be removed by explosion into space, with some fall-back. It can also accrete, meaning that a mechanism such as a cosmic wind or typhoon has incited local "minor" turbulence. Suppose "A heterogeneous conglomerate of 100+ km 3 filling a basin or composing all or part of an elevated range." Must this accretion be exoterrestrially caused? Probably indirectly by induced winds, tides, and bulldozing. Bulldozing with a rock, or ice, or aquatic shovel can accrete (filling basins and forming hills); it can produce thrusting, and it can remove land features. Thus if "Five or more blocks composed of similar rocks, of 30+ km 3 each are separated by 100+ km from each other and are 10+ km from kindred strata," we can speak of thrusting by bulldozing provoked by exoterrestrial transactions. The figures used may, in fact, be much reduced. Thus, also, if "Two or more consecutive eras of sedimentary rock are missing over a region of 200 km diameter," the removal will have been accomplished, if not by bulldozing, then by hurricane or tides on a cosmic level of intensity. The relation of cosmic pressure (electro-mechanical) to expansion and thrust may be explored by the detection of "Expanses of 10,000 km 2 with frequent granitic and metamorphic outcroppings designating a prior period of heavier overhang rocks and a thrust or blast removal of the overhang." The argument here would follow along the lines of argument against "plastic creep" in general. When speaking of thrusting, the original event will have been a large-body collision or encounter near-in with a great body -Sun sized or greater to the eye, yet seemingly far removed. Inertia comes into play in the atmosphere and lithosphere. "A ten-second deceleration of the Earth on a single day" will produce many local thrusts, expansions, and probably every other high-energy manifestation. Even at this seemingly modest deceleration, one would be able to find later on extensive macro-and microfracturing of the lithosphere. Raise this deceleration to hours and the surface of the Earth would be extensively altered. As evidence, what would be demonstrable is probably already present and awaiting discovery, that is "Areas of 500 km: exhibiting fractures of 85% of all included grids of 15 kilometer diameters in one or more strata." Perhaps here one should expect tortured seabottoms and igneous flows that would have been nonexistent or molten during the events. Axial tilting would also be denoted by patterns of inertial change probably by now totally confused in the morphology and petrology of the Earth, except as we have pointed out in earlier sections of this book, where axial tilt can be detected on gross features of the global map. The most obvious form of exoterrestrial transaction is the meteoroid explosion, which is provable on its face, of course. That a great many of such intrusions are not yet discovered has also been shown. That the Earth should have fewer craters than the Moon only occurs by reason of their quick erasure here. As detecting techniques improve we should be able to speculate reasonably, in the manner used for fracturing above, that meteoroid impact craters arc present over all of the globe save where erased by other quantavolutionary processes. Several biosphere phenomena may be hypothesized as indicative of exoterrestrialism in quantavolutions. The pandemonium accompanying quantavolutions is not likely to have left a geophysical record. "World-wide sound at 100+ decibels, approaching human physical limits" can be considered, given, for instance, the thousands of square kilometers of high audibility of the Krakatoa volcanic explosion; still such effects would not fracture rock nor (probably) affect the hearing of species genetically. Other acoustical effects might, however, be mutating, and even chemically effective on the molecular level of the atmosphere and lithosphere. Legends do describe great sounds that suggest exoterrestrialism: we have alluded to them. So too, have we mentioned spectres as often the greatest contribution of ancient voices to the proof of exoterrestrial events affecting earth; thus we would allow as evidence of an exoterrestrial transaction "Reports of an observed cosmic intrusion of an apparition the size of the Moon when at meridian, or larger." We would expect such a spectre to be associated with at least several other high-energy effects mentioned above. A final trio of expressions may be advanced. We should be alerted to magnetic effects. These may be indicators of axial tilting. But when localized, they can point to meteoroid explosions and peripheral and subsurface melts, where post-event magnetization differs from magnetic orientation, as displayed in the circummagnetic field of central Canada, having south Hudson Bay as its focus. "Inconsistent and strongly deviating rock magnetism over 5 grids of latitude-longitude" proves quantavolution. In biospherics, "Biosphere extermination over 100 km 2 in 1 incident of under l-day duration" would be proof of exoterrestrialism. So would "The extinction of 3+ species in less than 1 year," or "Depopulation by 70% of l+ species of 10 biological families in less than a year in an area of 1,000 km diameter." A number of phrasings may be formulated to denote physical catastrophe in biological terms as well as in terms of physical science. At the same time, genesis may be used as an indicator of quantavolution. Thus. "The simultaneous appearance of 3+ new species" will suffice to indicate a catastrophic innovation. "Simultaneous" means genesis within a century, or the smallest frame visible in the fossil record. An "appearance" should not prompt an assumption of missing transitional ages. Thus we have possibilities of operationally defining quantavolution as a happening of high intensity, everywhere, at the same time, and, as we shall shortly argue, quickly. In a great quantavolution, many things change at once, overlap, transact, follow in quick succession. A quantavolution of one kind, once initiated, has a prelude, a climax, a procession, a recession, a stabilization and finally a uniformity. The concept of negative exponentialism holds that the initial quantity (intensity, number, frequency, amount. volume, locations, incidence, etc.) of a type of event decreases sharply with the passage of time, but ever less sharply as time is extended. Finally the rate is indistinguishably uniform, that is, the same, and the activity being observed is constant. One notes that this may be accomplished theoretically (i. e. imaginatively) or by the use of empirical data. In theory one can annihilate change by stretching time: increments of volcanism are spaced so far as to provide a negligible rate of change, or spaced so tightly as to provide catastrophic rates of change. To denote negative exponentialism realistically (empirically) requires data on the beginning, the end, and at least one point of time in between. Thus, if 500 volcanos were active 11.500 years ago around Auvergne in France and 0 are active today, a decrease is undeniable (from 500 to 0 in 11500 y) but the decreasing might have occurred at any point and in a number of ways: all 500 might have stopped erupting last year, for all we know. At least one estimate of the number of active volcanos at some point of time between the two given ones is required to permit an elementary idea of the progression. Let us suppose -which, alas, may be the fact -that all activity ceased before history began; further, that no evidence of relative youth is to be observed by geological examination; worse, that no radiometric test and not even Carbon 14 dating is capable of assigning relative dates. All we can say is that the first local references were 2000 years ago and no mention of volcanic activity is to be found. So the curve is flat for the past 2000 years. What next? One can go searching for records of other volcanoes in other areas, the Mediterranean say, where history of a kind goes back another 2000 years. There we would have to discover some evidence -whether on official tablets, in legend, or in archaeological excavations of extinct human activity laid upon or beneath lava or ashes -that an ascertainable level of volcanism was occurring, whereupon the indicators of this would be presumed to indicate what was happening in the Auvergne. But this logic, of course, violates the ordinary supposition of most volcanologists, that volcanism in one area does not suppose or call up volcanism elsewhere, a supposition true in these days, it would seem, but not necessarily true if volcanism were more rampant. One may resort to widespread ash layers as well. If layers are thick and far-flung, it may be reasonable to suppose the Auvergne would be afflicted by the same activity as is producing the ashes generally, and, with ever better chemical analysis, the ashes may even be traced to the neighborhood of the volcanoes in question. Still, as the chapter on volcanism reflects, at the moment historical volcanology has to put together bits of evidence from widely separated localities in order to supply what is largely a conjectural statistical foundation to the generalization that at certain historical points in time volcanism leaped to peaks, subsided quickly, and then evened out, thus lending the appearance of a uniform activity but, if one wishes to assume our position, also letting us guess that volcanism is delineating negatively the exponential principle. . For each and every type of expression of force involved in a catastrophe, there would exist a statistical curve delineating its individual intensity over time. Each expression would possess its peculiar rate of decline from its initial peak -its own "disturbance constant" -giving us various exponential or hyperbolic functions. Then, for instance, as more and more data illuminated the dispute over the late Cretaceous extinctions, curves might be drawn to depict the fate of biosphere segments and of inorganic expressions of the catastrophe, answering ultimately the questions: "How intense, what scope, how sudden?" for portions of each sphere, the several spheres, and the holosphere of Earth. If peak catastrophic and holospheric turbulence has occurred, say, at five points of time in the holocene, there will be a new negative exponential curve to assign to the effects of each set of events. If these curves are merged, one gets a kind of roller- coaster curve, rising and falling in conformity with each set of events, while at the same time maintaining a momentum of generally falling activity until, at the end, like when the roller-coaster ride is ending, the past two thousand years become practically a smooth glide. Such is the negative exponential curve of quantavolution, taken as a whole or in its subsets. For these phases in any high energy expression are subject to the successive sets of phases of the quantavolution of other kinds, subsequently, yet concurrently, initiated. These may accumulate intensity at any phase, or countervail, that is, diminish intensity. The whole Earth is acting out the several stages for numerous forces at any given moment in time, and the state of the Earth may as a whole be deemed uniformitarian or disastrous as it is working its way through a low cumulative effect of the forces or a high cumulative effect. The low effect - the world as it is today is mostly a descendant effect from original high effects. This we have considered as the principle of exponentialism, which results, in the end, as an almost uniform rate, with exceptional cases of high activity. In an article on "Landform Evolution" (geomorphology), interesting in its vagaries and confusion, the Encyclopedia Britannica cites many catastrophic conceptions, ascribes erroneously the beginnings of scientific catastrophism to Bishop Usher's Biblical literalism, and summarizes uniformitarianism today as holding, "Although present processes are similar in kind, process rates must have been variable." But it is doubtful that any scientific catastrophist ever believed that processes were dissimilar. It has always been an argument over rates. It is also of interest, and insufficiently addressed by the many commentators who recognized that C. Darwin took from Malthus the idea behind his theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection, that he did not see the larger consequence of Malthus' idea of exponentialism. This latter idea expressed in the belief that while population rises geometrically, the means for its subsistence increases arithmetically -points to catastrophism but inversely, that is, negatively, implying that the catastrophe is a sudden leap and then an exponential decline from the leap in the direction of increasing gradualism. Ignore the leap and the character of exponential decline, as Darwin did, and natural history is stripped of its salient behavior. What appealed to Darwin and those of like mind, such as Spencer, was the competitive struggle as the means of subsistence grew scarce in relation to population; and the notion, of course, that "fitness" is an objective concept, in nature as in society. There exists little speculative or empirical literature on the abruptness of catastrophe. Catastrophe by definition connotes an abrupt disintegration of an existing course of natural behavior. How is "abrupt" to be conceived? Suddenly, quickly -but is this seconds or millennia, or something in between? Should we say that, to have a quantavolution, an event or set of them has to occur in less than a million years? This would please some conventional geologists who have given themselves some five thousands of such units to reckon with. Five catastrophes distributed over the period would consume only one-thousandth of the time allowed. But what kind of catastrophe is it that would take a million years to happen? Suppose some poison slowly entered the atmosphere or suppose the Sun for a million years was hyperactive, and radiated the biosphere beyond the sufferance of many species. Even conventional scientific gradualism would find the postulation of such slow "catastrophic" processes implausible. Natura facit magnum saltum: that nature, when she leaps, leaps high, is a more believable axiom. This is no place to argue, as we do in another book, Solaria Binaria, for a million year history of the solar system. But if we were to cast dice, giving each possible source of catastrophe, whether slow or fast, an equal chance, we should very probably cast forth one of the fast catastrophes. That is, of the half dozen major types of catastrophe that are possible, only a special variety of particle and dust bombardment produces a slow catastrophe. And this, as we have implied, should be measured in hundreds rather than millions of years. The many scientists who today make dire predictions about the effects of a carbon dioxide pollution of the atmosphere or of the removal of the ozone barrier to exoterrestrial particles, couch their forecasts in hundreds of years; why would the same and other scientists wish to insist retrospectively upon tens or hundreds of thousands of years for the same phenomena to have occurred? If they did, it would be for irrational, that is, ideological, reasons: they would be unconsciously straining to support an evolutionist view of natural history. Luis Alvarez, and perhaps his associates as well, after suggesting that the sweeping extinction of the biosphere at the Cretaceous boundary came with a solar obscuration by dust raised by a meteoroid crash, elected a period of about three years of dusty atmosphere, then lowered the effect by a factor of ten, to three months [6] . Again, what is abruptness? What is "geologically instantaneous?" Eicher notes a "huge" recent Chilean ash fall which is never over 10 centimeters deep away from the central volcanic area [7] . Yet in the Upper Cretaceous strata of Colorado, over thousands of square miles, there occurs a bed of bentonite, highly compressed volcanic ash, which is a meter thick. This may have been coincidental with the boundary events of which the Alvarez group speaks. Smit and Hertogen inform us that the great biosphere extinction marking the Cretaceous- Tertiary boundary "was abrupt without any previous warning in the sedimentary record." [8] O'Keefe at the same time accounts for the devastation of fauna at the end of the Eocene (assigned 34 million years ago) by radical climatic change induced by a ring of microtektites and tektites circling the Earth for perhaps a million years and obscuring the Sun [9] . Ogden discusses abrupt changes in American forestation about 10.000 years ago, also climatically impelled, with the pattern of pollen deposits in lake sediments moving at the rate of a mile a year [10] . Hapgood has compared what arc regarded as 'normal' rates of ice retreat with the results of carbondating, and allows some 60,000 by the one and only 17,000 by the other. He believes that the carbondating must be in error [11] . Cracraft, in expatiating upon the "punctuated equilibrium model" of macroevolution, argues that speciation is a "geologically instantaneous phenomenon." [12] There is, in sum, a growing body of paleontology and geology that perceives abruptness of change as a feature of natural history. What means "sudden" and "abrupt" is likely to be a much-discussed question in the near future. We can suggest here merely that every feature of the holosphere enjoys its idiosyncratic manner suddenness. A species, a land mass, a body of water, and an atmosphere all change according to their nature, and measured in human terms, this may be fast or slow. When a quantavolutionist speaks of abrupt change, he can only mean the margin between explosion and extinction on the one hand, and the rate of change peculiar to a given organism or natural process when the rate is affected by a disaster produced by a specified high-energy expression. Similarly, when speaking of energy of high intensity, the quantavolutionist is describing known natural forces proceeding at abnormally high rates. A recently discovered ash layer in E1 Salvador covers 1300 square miles and a once flourishing Mayan civilization. (The fall of ash was dated much earlier before the culture was unearthed.) Some 45.000 of such eruptions would be needed to blanket the Earth. The volcanoes, mostly extinct to be sure, are present; how many of these were ever exercised simultaneously? One more, when speaking of scope, scale, or simultaneity, the quantavolutionist seeks limits appropriate to the effects of a high-energy force, between total immediate transformation and a highly significant change. Isaacs and Schmitt address themselves to oceanic energy sources; they provide global figures on the great energy sinks and low energy manifestations involved in currents, waves, tides, thermal gradients and salinity gradients. The rising and falling of waves is an energetic type of movement. When it occurs as a tsunami, or is pulled up tidally in an exoterrestrial encounter, it multiplies exponentially its force, as was said earlier, so that nothing can withstand it finally except the Earth itself. The rotational energy of the Earth can he translated into 6X10 15 Megawatt years. All the electrical needs of the world projected into the 21st century amount to 3X 10 17 MW: if continuously mined from the energy of the Earth's rotation, the length of the day would be increased by five minutes per million years. This is the latest and one of the finest comparative measures by which the forces of nature are converted into everyday terms and may be used to explore the dimensions of catastrophe as well [13] . Until recently, to take another example, only three cubic miles of petroleum have been drawn upon for the useful and often unpleasant industrialism of modern times; if, as we suspect, the origins of petroleum are largely cometary and cataclysmic, many an ungovernable object in the sky may contain that much and many more cubic miles of the substance or its components; awaiting the occasion of manufacture may be an abundance of cosmic electric potential. Hibben once voyaged the far North with an eye for catastrophic remains. He remarks that the Pleistocene ice sheet (if it truly existed as such) never covered the central regions of Alaska nor parts of the Aleutian Range. He reports, as have others, the several hundred feet of frozen muck deposited in various unglaciated areas. In the muck are volcanic ash layers, peat, animal and vegetable matter in vast quantities, and ice fragments. Below the muck have been found mammoth bones, human artifacts, and tree stumps in their original position as they had grown. The total effect is of several simultaneously interacting high energy forces, whose total rate of burnup of the Earth's rotational energy must have in hours, not in a million years, taken up the equivalent of five minutes of the Earth's rotational energy, and perhaps then, indeed, as a prior condition, the Earth's rotation may have slowed by that much, or more. All effects of high energy deteriorate exponentially, we repeat. Often, as with a hurricane that expends the energy of many hydrogen bombs, the force is largely employed within and against itself. Forces also act by the principle of countervalency. Bursting into operation, one force generates another, which may not only bring on a third, but may turn against the first and moderate (as well as heighten) its effects. A volcanic wind can halt a lateral hurricane; two sets of rocks can counterthrust. An extinction of one species can promote the survival of another species. Cross-tides may create destructive vortexes but also moderate each other. A deluge can dampen the fire with which it originated from a third force. And so on. The possibilities are very many; if the Earth exhibits patches of peaceful history here and there, these may be effects of countervalency. Countervalency may occur on the grandest scale. Repeatedly the theory of the eruption of the Moon from Earth is challenged by the conviction that so large-scale and destructive an event would have destroyed the Earth's crust entirely, or at least its biosphere, or at least all vertebrates and forests, or at the very least mankind. Such is not the case. The energy of the lunar eruption may or may not have exceeded the energy involved in wiping out the Martian atmosphere and biosphere; the gross energy expended (transformed) is not the issue; the counterrailing operations of the energy forms, the coincidences, are the determining factor in the extent of destruction. One several occasions, the Earth's atmosphere may have been destroyed and transformed. The presence, according to the theory of Solaria Binaria, of a gaseous tube enveloping the solar system, even until a dozen millennia ago, allows for a drawing off of the atmosphere over half the world, for a rush of atmosphere from the opposite hemisphere, and for cataclysms of atmosphere from the plenum, not irreconcilably different from the atmosphere that it displaced. In other uses, the very motions of the Earth itself will tend to deprive a catastrophic force of complete victory. If 50,000 volcanoes erupt simultaneously, the whole atmosphere will be put to work with electricity and water to bring down the dust, part of which, for that matter, may erupt into space in pursuit of the body that produced the motion changes and eruptions in the first place. In Saint-Pierre, there was a prisoner in his dungeon, sole survivor of the volcanic explosion of Martinique. In Hiroshima there were the unexplainable uninjured survivors of the blast and holocaust. Once again, problems posed by catastrophes find their solution in the behavior of catastrophes. At the present stage of the earth sciences, there are probably many fewer persons who will insist upon finding the ultimate source of great turbulence inside the Earth alone. Still this conviction -or is it a hope -persists. Geologists tend to believe that nothing grave ever happened in the skies; biologists often look upon the rocks as gift-wrappings for their fossils; astronomers are inclined to believe that nothing serious happened upon Earth; anthropologists and historians usually believe that ancient times were as serene as nature today. This consensus is suspect. Some scholars apparently are still reassuring one another, so that all might eventually come to believe that no event of great importance has happened in any sphere of existence. I hope to have suggested in this chapter some orderly means of bringing forward and considering exoterrestrially provoked quantavolutions. Most such means are difficult, even impossible. But what else can be done? Most of us, whether from timidity, distaste, or because expertly qualified for other forms of combat, will not engage in "wrestling, no holds barred." {S : Notes (Chapter Thirty: Intensity, Scope and Suddenness)} Notes (Chapter Thirty: Intensity, Scope and Suddenness) 1. Op. cit., 83. 2. Interaction of the Science in Study of the Earth, loc. cit., 252. 3. S. I. S. Workshop (1982). 4. Op. cit., 423. 5. V Kronos (Spring 1980), 36-50. 6. Op. cit. cf contra R. Jastrow, "the Dinosaur Massacre," Sci. Digest (sep. 1983). 7. Don L. Eicher, Geologic Time (Englewood Cliff, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1968), 72-3. 8. 285 Nature (1980), 198. 9. 285 Nature (1980), 309. 10. Op. cit. 11. Hapgood, Path of the Poles, 127-8. 12. Phylogenetic Analysis and Paleontology (NY: Columbia U., 1979), 26. 13. "Ocean Energy: Forms and Prospects," 207 Science (18 Jan. 1980), 265-73. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P PART VII: } {Q DIMENSIONS OF QUANTAVOLUTION: } {C Chapter 31} {T The Recency of the Surface} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: Part VII: Dimensions of Quantavolution by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE THE RECENCY OF THE SURFACE If a fossil whale standing on its tail can disprove "millions of years" of sedimentary accumulation, perhaps a live animal can try to do the same. Igor Akimushkin tells us how "The cepola fish... may sit still for hours on the crooked end of its tail, with its wide-open jaws turned upwards expectantly, waiting patiently for heavenly manna to fall into its mouth." ' [1] The cepola is a fish of the abyssal ocean, where it lives in perpetual darkness. If it feeds this way for twelve hours a day and collects one millimeter of material with its mouth, in which enough nourishment is contained, then in a year it might be said that a column of 365x 2 millimeters will be striking the ocean floor. This would amount to a column of 730 meters in 1000 years, assuming that inedible waste and compression cancel each other out. Since the ocean sediments average one kilometer, and our live precipitation meter may be at a typical location, the column will reach the average depth of sediments in about 1350 years, under uniformitarian suppositions. With a negatively exponential fall-out, cepola would have once fed more quickly than he does today. So the ocean bottom cannot be older than 1350 years, and ethology becomes the queen of clockmakers. Quantavolution should be embarrassed to joke so, if science were not on some occasions a theatre of the absurd. One can reflect upon the history of geology when, blessed by the nihil obstat of Lyell, geologists would simply draw upon time without end to do away with complexities and perplexities. When Poulett Scrope prepared his famous studies of the volcanoes of Auvergne (France), his theories might be liberated from temporal restraints, such that a recent commentator on his work, Rudwick, could refer to "unlimited drafts upon antiquity" as his necessary and useful tool [2] . Continuing until today, the time scales have been even more expanded, much more, so that many a geologist has felt free to mount his facts into any frame of time that can hold them; the duration itself would scarcely be accosted for proof. Owing to recent discoveries such as the youngness of the ocean bottoms, and to late criticism of biostratigraphy, the license to capture time has become more restricted. But radiochronometry, newly developed, reigns supreme over time and is dizzied by success. Conventional chronology today gives about 15,000 years to the Holocene and latest period, and about two million years to the Pleistocene. Then some 35 my go to the Tertiary, with its Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene; 55 my to the Cretaceous; 27 my to the Jurassic; 23 the Triassic; 33 the Permian; 74 the Carboniferous; 72 the Devonian; 22 the Silurian; 57 the Ordovician; 92 the Cambrian; and some 2000 million years (or much more) to the Precambrian era. By this point, the reader is well-aware of our scandalous departures from the conventional text. We have been arguing, in the whole of our Quantavolutionary Series (and see page 497 below), that all of the preceding ages probably have occurred within a million years, and especially that major elements of the Holocene, Pleistocene, Tertiary, Cretaceous and Carboniferous have occurred within the time usually allotted to the Holocene, namely some 15,000 years or less. The great disparity has occurred, we maintain, owing to the displacement of time by catastrophe. And to denote these catastrophic intervals, we have used certain disruptive episodes that we have tied into astronomical events, bringing a sequence of periods that we begin with the Pangean, and then go on the Uranian, Lunarian, Saturnian, Jovean, Mercurian, Venusian, and Martian, each marked by catastrophe, until the present or Solarian period to which only some 1600 years are allotted. Many salient events are disallowed to quantavolution theory by conventional science not because they take too long to happen, not because they did not happen, but because they happened very long ago. Notable among such cases are the fission of the Moon from the Earth, the transportation of hydrocarbons by comets, the prolonged great heat of Venus, the desolation of Mercury and Mars, and other impliedly catastrophic occurrences, whose number is surprisingly large -even determining -when plucked out of the pages, for example, of the special account of the solar system contained in the Scientific American for September, 1975. Some fifty-nine techniques of determining prehistoric duration and fixing distant events were summarized by the present author (1981) and deemed faulty in one or more regards. This, even when taken together with the sources to which it refers, does not constitute definitive disproof of the validity of long-time chronometry. However, it does permit us to entertain a short-term model of solar system history. The evidence of Solaria Binaria is such that all previously existing tests offering macrochronic conclusions are either modified to suit our model, or declared invalid. With regard to geological and biological tests that assert long duration of processes, evidence is accumulating rapidly that quantavolutionary transformations are physically possible. Independent of historical argumentation, geological and biological time are collapsible in theory and in the laboratory. Astronomers figure time in light-years over vast distances, but this is a convenience, not a measure of history. Empirical tests are, however, also theory-dependent, as, for example, the "thermonuclear" Sun whose dynamics are invisible, and the potassium-argon radioactive decay tests performed upon moon soil that presume a three-billion-years-old Moon, or the radiocarbon test that believes in a practically constant atmosphere. Every discipline advancing long-time claims would today be in a defensive posture were it not for the heavy investment, both intellectual and material, in radiochronometry, which is believed to be paying rich dividends. The bedrock defense of radiochronometry is that radiodecay rates of known elements are regular and inalterable by any conceivable environmental force. Lately, this view has been challenged. Once the quantavolutionary hypothesis is substituted for the evolutionary hypothesis of uniform and gradual changes based upon the change rates of recent centuries, the majority of tests simply is nullified. The reason is that the constituents of time- measurement are nature-dependent -the time-makers are, like undisciplined and free workers, able to speed up or slow down and hence cannot be counted upon for an indefinitely long series of regular movements or changes. If there are 59 different measures of time, say, each one will have to know enough about a certain changing phenomenon of nature to guarantee that it has given off a set of signs or signals throughout a specified period, that these signals composed intervals translatable into current understanding such as solar years or millennia or some usable sequential juxtaposition, and these signals that were once given off can be reliably reproduced, observed, or inferred when recently or currently the signals were registered and/ or interpreted. Considering the prevalence of scientific opinion on the side of a universe, solar system, Earth biosphere, and hominoidal presence, each of long duration -say, of 6 gigayears, 5 gigayears, 3 gigayears, and five million years -the challenge which short- time chronologists present to the time-keepers of science should be easily disposed of: these need only provide one incontrovertible proof of long duration where short duration is claimed. Should it be demanded that the short-time advocate offer his proofs first, one may plead that the long-time chronometrician is rich in experimental resources, hence noblesse oblige. The stakes in radiochronometry are very high: all of the natural sciences have a stake in the game, plus ancient history, pre-history, anthropology, archaeology, indeed all of the humanities and, in the end, philosophy, theology, cosmology. At Valsequillo (Mexico) human occupation is evidenced by sophisticated stone tools but the horizons occupied have been dated by the fission-track method on volcanic material and by uranium dating of a camel's pelvis at 250,000 years of age [3] . At least one of the team believes the age to be "essentially impossible." North of the border, at the Calico site, California, early humans occupied premises and employed several categories of tools. Uranium-thorium tests yielded a date of 200,000"20,000 years for the artifacts [4] . Meanwhile, in Israel, at the 'Ubeidiya site, previously dated to 700,000 years, fossil mammals were redated to a human site containing Acheulian artifacts at two million years, "500,000 years older than any record of Early Acheulian artefacts or Homo Erectus in Africa." [5] These claims support my attack in Homo Schizo I upon the hominid chronology asserted in such studies as those of R. Leakey and Johanson in East Africa. That is, all datings of hominids and early man are far too old, and the so-called hominids were probably human. They also support the thesis of Chaos and Creation that assigns an ecumenical culture, worldwide, to Pangea, prior to the breakup of the continents. In the realm of legend, challenges to radiochronometry emerge as well. The following abstract from Catastrophist Geology may be quoted in its entirety [6] : Lake Bosumtwi (diameter 8 km) in Ghana is by geologists generally interpreted as the impact scar of an extraterrestrial body, and the Ivory Coast tektite field has been correlated with it on chemical and geochronological grounds. The Dogons, who live 800 km away in Mali, preserve an ancient tradition attributing the Lake to the fall of a fiery metallic mass of unusual dimensions. This legend is also an integral part of the cosmogony of many other West African peoples, such as Mandingoes and Bambaras. Many priests make a pilgrimage to the Lake or to the nearby town of Kumassi, and also many blacksmiths visit the Lake before initiation to their sacred profession. Glass from the impact rim around the Lake has been radiometrically dated at 1.3 to 1.6 million years, a period when Africa was inhabited by Australopithecines. The moment is opportune for some scholar to compile such victories of oral traditions. No less than eight hypotheses of this book are combined in and supported by this single story. And who dates the Australopithecines and how? The problem is global. Every proposition that supports exoterrestrial influence on Earth threatens radiochronometry. Radiochronometry has meanwhile thrown biostratigraphical chronometry into disrepute. Vita-Finzi, for example, places his hopes for quaternary geochronology on radiochronometry [7] . Richer in his turn writes: Radiochronometric dating thus laid to rest once and for all the idea that rocks can be dated, even in a gross way, by their lithology or by the extent of their deformation and metamorphism. Radiometric dating also revealed that Precambrian time was far greater than anyone previously imagined." [8] (Precambrian time is accorded 80% of all rock time and Precambrian rock by one estimate surface over 17% of the Earth.) Fossil-time is heavily theory-dependent. Alter the assumed speed of evolution and one alters fossil-time, and the dating of its associated sediments. Evolution-time, once we dismiss the pretensions of natural selection (adaptation and survival of the fittest), and microevolution (neo-darwinism) and introduce quantavolution, can be calibrated on practically any time-scale, allowing only a perceptible succession and superposition of species. The boundary times between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods are increasingly recognized to have been catastrophic. From tall mountains to the deep abyss, notable turbulence occurs. Asteroids or comets have been called forth to explain the phenomena, which are holospheric. One study [9] concentrated upon a single core drilled at 4805 meters of ocean depth off Africa into a fan of a submarine canyon cut into the Walvis Ridge; at about 205 meters below the bottom the C/ T boundary was ascertained and its materials analyzed. Numerous anomalous chemical conditions were discovered, leading the 20 authors to support conclusions, some suggested elsewhere, that the state of carbon dioxide, oxygen, iridium, platinum, cyanide, osmium, arsenic, calcium carbonates, terrestrial ejecta dust, and exoterrestrial dust indicated and/ or caused general decimation of marine invertebrata, and, by extension, as suggested elsewhere, insufferable conditions for flora and fauna of the continents, with magnetic disturbances, a rise in temperature of 8 degrees centigrade, flash-heating of the atmosphere at the explosive moment, difficulty in photogenesis, and starvation. The mixing of C/ T fossils above the boundary for two meters led to an unresolved question as to whether bioturbation or a prolonged extinction process was proceeding after the extincting event. There was only a film of sedimentary clay to work with at the boundary. Above lies core material ending with lower Eocene fossilized ooze at the surface: thus, most of the Cenozoic or recent period is unrepresented. Basalt is first struck at 280 m subbottom depth, below which it alternates to 340 meters with volcanoclastics, clay and sand. Above the latest basalt occur the same, with fossils at intervals intermingled with a sandstone marl, and, toward the present, chalks, cherts, limestones, and ooze. A layer of ash is found at -200 meters just above the C/ T boundary transition and another at -60 meters. There is an obvious sequence from older to newer nannofossils, but there is also a gnawing doubt as to the length of time which the total deposition, even in its presumably truncated form, actually required. If, for instance, in the 280 meters of postbasalt deposits, some 7 meters consist of ashes, which must fall rapidly, then ashes amount to about one-fortieth of the column, but they must have dropped in a matter of days. If, too, the submarine fan was laid down turbulently from its parental canyon, and, all the while, heavy volcanic fall-out was occurring, one might conjecture again in terms of days, or months, or years, but hardly in millions of years. The sudden cessation of deposition at the Lower Eocene of 50 million years ago suggests a bottom of prolonged stillness, but then what comes before as here must suggest a brief turbulence. The sequence of fossils could extinct and proliferate in centuries or millennia, or, less likely, occur by instant turbulent crossbedding from different sources. The authors and others are looking for a medium-sized astrobleme that would have been the disastrous Intruder of the C/ T boundary; a 25 km/ diameter crater at Kamensk (S. Russia) is alluded to. By our theory the Earth may have suffered numerous meteoroid explosions at this time. In earlier pages, the exponential rate of astrobleme discoveries was noted. There is no chance of finding a solitary culprit. Cretaceous craters will be numerous, and if time is compressed, distinction among the ages of most astroblemes may be vitiated. All of this is ominous. If geology and geophysics are so ready to sell out biostratigraphical chronology, on which natural history has depended almost entirely from the beginning of its modern phase 150 years ago, then those disciplines, if not bankrupt, are poor. One cannot be blamed for addressing them with alternatives. Moreover, one must consider whether radiochronometry would ever had developed if geochronology had not already felt the need to posit macrochronism. The presuppositions of radiochronometry are such that it would have had hard going against a microchronism. Basic among these uncertainties of radiochronometry are, first, the setting of zero time for the start-up of radioactive decay of the measuring elements such as 238- uranium, second, the need to assume a constant intake of exoterrestrially produced elements during a long Earth history, and third, the belief that electric charges within the crust and their magnetic fields are either constant or do not affect rates of radioactive decay of the elements whose decay is used as a measuring rod. As Cook has argued, the early state of the Earth is hardly empirically known or deducible. Yet radiochronometry must proceed as if it were, and, furthermore, somehow, whatever is found now as the result of decay was not present in the beginning but finds its only source in the decay process [10] . There is a basic weakness of all radioactive decay methods of chronometry that is too frequently ignored. All these methods must assume a given composition of species at zero time. For example, in the original 'lead method' it was assumed that the total 'chemical' lead was zero in uranium-thorium minerals at their time of origin. In later lead 'isotope' methods the decay isotopes were assumed to be absent in the original sample. Later work showed that such assumptions were very doubtful if, indeed, not untenable. Any such method would seem on its surface to be invalidated as soon as one obtains evidence regarding an appreciable abundance of decay products at zero time unless some means were available to determine the zero time concentration of the radioactive decay products. Unfortunately, one may only guess these concentrations, and the age results thus obtained can be no better than this guess. The apparent hopelessness of this situation is exemplified by relative lead isotope abundance data presented in extensive tables by Faul and Kulp (Landsberg, 1955). Cook proceeds to the second problem, that of cosmically produced nuclear transformation of the isotopes being used to measure time. A few years ago radioactive decay processes were the only natural ones known. Perhaps all of the nuclear reactions previously described as 'artificial' as well as many others involving energies quite outside the range of artificial transmutations actually occur probably at appreciable rates in the earth. Puppi and Dallaporta (Landsberg, 1955) showed that the average star (cosmic ray-promoted nuclear explosion) rate is about 2/ cm 2 /s or 10 19 /s in the atmosphere alone. George (Landsberg, 1955) gave star count data which would suggest possibly about another 10 25 inside the earth. Moreover spontaneous uranium fission alone should produce 10 26 stars/ year inside the lithosphere. Since a particles emitted from radioactive elements have enough energy to penetrate the coulomb barrier in nuclei of atomic number Z up to at least 20, perhaps upwards of 10 -4 of these particles (geometrical cross-section about 0.02 barns) should produce secondary nuclear transmutations. If this is the case, natural decay processes should effect at least 10 29 - 10 30 secondary transmutations in the earth's crust each year. This would be enough to disjoint the radio clocks. Jean Perrin, as noted by Baranov [11] , has gone farther than Cook to argue that radioactive decay is not spontaneous, but is caused by ultrahard radiation coming in from exoterrestrial sources. That is why "natural" radioactivity is concentrated within the crust of the Earth. We have stressed that exoterrestrial bombardments of the Earth by particles from nova explosions and other sources of hard radiation have been repeatedly experienced by the crustal rocks of the Earth. The present state of the Earth must be receiving a small fraction of its historical radiation. Yet scientists who have provided some of the chemical proof of these catastrophes have been, inconsistently, strong advocates of timing their own disproofs of cosmic particle equilibrium by the very radioactive levels being simultaneously disproved. Like the proverbial military headquarters, they issue bulletins that "the situation is developing well; our troops are withdrawing on all fronts." A similar problem is to be seen in the separation of electricity from radioactivity. Ignoring the electrical state (or, better, the electrical history) of the Earth may foreclose alternative life-experiences of radioactive materials. But we have intimated earlier that the Earth has had heavy periodic electrical transactions with exoterrestrial bodies and plasmas. Further, the Earth has had electric potentials differing from its potential today. Sykes placed a standard radioactive cobalt-60 specimen between the poles of a magnet with an estimated flux-density of 0.1 Tesla, positioned a gamma radiation detector in proximity, and took readings of the emissions when the magnet was on and when it was off. The "decay constant," which is supposed to be invariable if it is to be used to clock geological time, speeded up about 2% when the magnetic field was applied. He concluded that "the thesis of decay constancy under all environmental conditions cannot be maintained." [12] These experimental results move in the direction theorized by Juergens and experimentally indicated by Anderson and Spangler [13] . The half-life of radioactive isotopes appears vulnerable to external electromagnetic influences. Since the strength of the Earth's magnetic field has been diminishing, along with that of magnetized rocks, the radio clocks within the rocks will have been slowing down. Further, it is not alone a matter of a long-term trend. In any quantavolution, strong electromagnetic forces are likely to be applied to crustal rocks causing sharp increases in the speed of passage of "radio-time." Furthermore "electric discharges of cosmic proportions should be capable of creating new elements; even atmospheric lightning is credited with producing radionuclides, and all artificial element-creation starting with the first fusion reaction ever achieved in the laboratory -producing technetium from molybdenum, in 1937 -has involved harnessing the forces of the electric discharge." So writes Juergens [14] . Tesla, his biographers recall, once began experiments to make of the whole Earth an accumulator of induced atmospheric charge; in 1982 an immense electrical current was traced from its North Pacific origins through the Strait of Georgia behind Vancouver Island past Tacoma (Wash.), into Oregon, paralleling a fault line [15] . "What role," Juergens goes on to say, in passages cited briefly in our chapter on lightning, "might environmental electrification play in setting the rules for nuclear stability, radioactive-decay rates, and energies of particle-emissions in decay processes?" The ambiant electrical stress would be different, whether continuously or for short periods of time. "It would seem to follow that decay rates for radionuclides might well differ radically from today's norms. Polonium isotopes now exhibiting very little stability [referring to Gentry's experiments] might then acquire -briefly, but long enough, half-lives in keeping with the evidence of the Earth's crustal rocks." Gentry had shown the existence of short-lived polonium without evidence of association with uranium-decay, whereas polonium has been considered an essential link in the chain of decay that ends in 206 lead. Critics of Gentry objected that his findings would cause "apparently insuperable geological problems." Juergens proceeds farther. Following experiments by Gamow in wave mechanics, he describes the nucleus as having a well-potential or '" potential-well" out of which alpha particles must climb to "decay," mustering sufficient energy to escape. He regards the Earth's electric charge as a principal "well-builder." "The Earth appears to be strongly charged with negative electricity, so that its surface potential is low, which is to say, highly negative." Suppose, then, that Earth potential is suddenly lowered by just 1 million volts -this, in all likelihood, is an almost negligibly small fraction of the planet's 'normal' negative electric potential. Alpha particles could, so to speak, climb out of the well readily. "Any abrupt lowering of Earth potential by a mere million volts could be expected to produce rampant radioactivity, with consequent lethal or at least strongly mutational effects on all forms of life." Even presently, under quiet cosmic conditions, the possibility of electrical intervention in radioactivity is not to be ignored. Radioactive radon is released from rocks in earthquakes [16] . This is revealed by a sudden decrease, followed by a sharp increase, in the radon content of the water table just prior to an earthquake. The mechanism is obscure, but it can be conjectured that the electrical fields being generated in the area of the faulting play a role in the phenomenon. When these occur under conditions of a largely quiet exosphere (though we bear solar-storms correlations with seismism in mind) piezoelectricity is to be suggested, as rock is being recrystallized under pressure and heat. What happens to cause a radon deficiency in the subsurface rock may be happening to other radioactive elements as well, including uranium and potassium isotopes. If so, such rocks may be incapacitated to serve as radiometric clocks, supposing, for example, that potassium 40 is under the same stress. It will either leak out of the rocks, or decay rapidly into the more stable form of Argon 40. If it leaks, and Argon 40 remains, the rock will become promptly "older" in K/ A testing. If the Argon 40 leaks disproportionately from the rock, the rocks will become "younger." More likely, the ratio of the two will change and establish itself in a false gradation within the local geological column that will, upon testing, confirm relative age differences with perhaps little more chronological information than is supplied by simple superpositioning of the strata. But what is "local" is probably large-scale, inasmuch as rocks everywhere have been involved in seismic disturbances. A treatise or symposium negatively critical of the macrochronal pretensions of radiochronometry would be welcome and is overdue. The objections raised here cannot be sustained without much more elaborate treatment. Nor can we more than mention the problems of radiocarbon dating, so important to holocene and pleistocene geology with which we deal heavily in these pages. As I have written elsewhere, the fragility of this index of time is such as to make it less useful beyond 2500 years ago [17] . As with every radiochronometric process, various fluxes of cosmic and terrestrial electricity, large fluctuations of the gaseous and radiation intake of the atmosphere, and biospheric conflagrations all contribute to radiocarbon disequilibrium. Given, for instance, that a solar magnetic storm of the 1950's was observed to add 1% to Carbon 14 of the atmosphere, hence the intake of the biosphere, the probably much heavier solar storms associated with several kinds of atmospheric turbulence of antiquity might seriously affect dating, which, indeed the studies of H. E. Seuss have proven [18] . We bear in mind, too, the calculations of Cook, which, retrojecting the small but perceptible increase in Carbon 14 in the atmosphere under uniformitarian conditions today, come out with a figure of zero-carbon in the air some 13,000 year ago. [19] Like every radiochronometric process, with its half-life calculations, radiocarbon decay is figured at a declining exponential rate. The mathematics of exponentialism subjects the process to time collapse; exponential rates in chronology are an unreliable ally of uniformitarian rates in biostratigraphical measures of time and of macrochronism generally. In the clamor of debate over the significance of the multitudinous mammoth (and antelope, rhinoceros, and other) fossils of recent times, the long spread of Carbon 14 dates assigned to the finds has attracted attention, but their meaning for carbondating has been ignored. If frozen mammoth finds are dated from 44,000 years ago at one extreme to 2500 years ago at the other extreme, an impossible pattern of climatic changes has to be developed, all allowing some of the cadavers to persist unthawed during the whole period, while letting others cadavers give all signs of eating warm-weather plants just before death [20] . The Carbon 14 dates must be invalid. The same dates, if collapsed and rendered simultaneous, then support an abrupt event, as opposed to an event occupying many thousands of years. The same reasoning would apply to other Carbon 14 problems of the end of the ice ages. Here then, one would refer back to the last chapter and its stress upon the abruptness of biological and geological change. Is there then nothing whose history when retraced on an exponential rate of development must still have been of long duration? Most likely to limit the microchronic concept of quantavolution are certain biological phenomena. Thus, if a living bristlecone pine tree shows annual growth rings now, and if these go back in time for hundreds of years on the same tree, and these live trees are positioned above a locality of fossil trees, which exhibit the same many rings, and in turn connect with the rings of other trees obviously buried continuously below them, a lengthy period of time begins to develop which, founded upon the need for the species to have evolved beforehand, would begin to push time back by thousands, if not many thousands, of years. Proof of such retrogression is not quite satisfactory yet. With an enthusiasm born of religious convictions and impelled by many years of frustration at playing the other fellow's game, a group of creationist geologists, without spending much time at the task, can readily explain the history of the world's landforms in terms that allow only a few thousand years. That they can do so constitutes in itself a formidable challenge to conventional geology. Still, even granted that they can do so, are they correct? If they pursued the line of thought that I follow in my books, they might first dispose of the missing half of the Earth's crust by removing it, in a major incident, from the Pacific Ocean hemisphere. They can place the removed crust on the Moon and in planetary space. Then the minor oceans of the world open up to let the continents raft into their present position. Practically all of the ocean bottoms are of recent lava. Next, they tackle the waters, which descend largely from the heavens, and from boiling metamorphosizing basalt foundations. Next they fashion the rivers from the world's infinite cracks and faults, big rivers from big faults. The mountains are folded and thrust up forward and aft of rafting continents. Huge tides create deserts and fill some lakes. Precipitation fills others. The ice comes from precipitation in darkness, and from exoterrestrial falls. The sedimentary rocks are ground up from the turbulence of winds, tides, and the friction of moving land masses. Their fossils, when they occur, denote rapid deposition. Volcanoes spurt up along the forward edges of movement in vast numbers and volcanic fissures vent even more than cones. All of the sea and some of the land is lava-covered, an igneous composition. Another large part of the land and ocean shelves is of the original basalt base of the earlier all-land system and is called shield rock or Precambrian exposures. The biosphere that has been destroyed by drowning, burning, burial, poisoning, and freezing exhibits itself largely in a few assemblages, as fossils, coal, fusain, and some types of oil. The metals coming from earlier explosions among the planets fall in dust or globules, mixing with the turbulence as deposits. Repeated falls of dust, terrestrial and exoterrestrial, mingle with the slowing floods to give the Earth its patina of soils in favored places. Here, and also at one time in the drowned slopes of debris off the shores of continents and around submerged volcanic heights, most of the surviving and adapting biosphere found its home. Who needs more time than several thousand years to explain all this, they may well say? I would say that we need at least a little more time for all of this work, another ten thousand years perhaps. Even then, we would need an additional longer period for the creation of the solar system, the planets, the Earth, and the land and biosphere that were worked upon in the scenario just presented. In an accompanying volume, Solaria Binaria, a million years is given. (See page 497.) Only a small fraction of the operations and product of the earth sciences and biology depends directly upon the chronologies that have been developed in natural history. Determining whether the dinosaurs were exterminated five thousand or fifty million years ago may have little to do with deciding whether the mammals had reptilian ancestors. King Kong may still be alive in some jungle for all the difference it would make to primate zoology. The protozoans are alive and studied without reference to the discovery of similar Precambrian species. Even the science of radiology is independent of its use to measure time; geophysicist Melvin Cook, following upon his trenchant criticism of radiochronometry, is prompt to praise other uses of radiation physics in geology. Similarly Dudley attacked vigorously the idea of stability of radioactive decay measures even though he was a professor of radiation physics in medicine and quite aware of the value of radiation science [21] . When asked to comment on tests by Anderson indicating the non-random and unreliable decay of C14, "scientists said that it could be possible to accelerate or control the release of energy from decaying nuclei... This could lead to..." [22] It's an ill wind indeed, that blows no good. When a group of scientists and philosophers, perhaps the most notable of them being Albert Einstein, radically criticized the notion of time, the progress of physics is said to have been assisted. Even when time is conceived to run backwards in certain physical, chemical and astronomical theories, the idea is treated as possibly a positive contribution to the solution of perplexing issues. Nor does the radical alteration of other hard-shelled concepts throw the sciences into unhealthy turmoil. For some time now, the gravitational constant has been assailed as an inconstant, possibly diminishing on the Earth and in the cosmos, following the work of Dirac, Dicke, and others. In an accompanying volume, Earl Milton and the present author, in a history of the solar system, seek to dispense with the concept of gravitation entirely, save for the notion of inertia. At the same time, we seek to work with the concept of a single charge in electricity, endeavoring to solve cosmogonical problems without the two-century-old idea of positive and negative charges. Why, then, does it matter at all when, in looking upon a mountain or dealing with a human being, one person says he is looking at a historical creation of a great many millions of years while another person says he is observing the creations of a few thousand years? Each sees beauty in the sight, let us grant; each understands the morphology; each commands techniques for mastering problems that arise in connection with the mountain and the human. Indeed, each may exclaim, "What wonders hath God wrought!" -God taking much time to the first observer, little time to the other. But, now the second person adds that he believes in the validity of certain scriptures that purport to convey the word of God, among which are some sentences that describe how God made the world, including a time-schedule of the construction. The first person has no interest in these same scriptures except as possible scientific testimony, and as such he finds them almost totally incorrect, and says so. Now an issue is joined. But note that the issue concerns time only incidentally. The issue is whether a body of writings can be the words of God; many other parts of the scriptures are at issue which do not concern time at all, such as, for example, a statement forbidding the eating of pork and shellfish. The issue of sacred authority is beyond the method of the present work (and is treated in my book, The Divine Succession) unless, as a consequence of this book, either the one or the other person derives support from it, which he can then use in proving that the alleged words of God do or do not conform to a historical reality, proved by other means. However, it is deemed permissible to employ the scriptures in a secular sense here, as a source of facts, allegations, and hypotheses about natural history; in so doing, we submit the scriptures to the same respectful treatment we give to all the rare ancient documents treating in their own way of scientific subject-matter, such as Hesiod's Greek Theogony and the Hindus' Rig-Vedas. Therefore, questions of the elapsed time for accomplishing the present surface of the Earth have to be answered with a set of intellectual instruments called the scientific method, which are presumed useful to all persons engaged in seeking such answers. The primary tools are the empirical proposition, the testing of this by factual evidence, and some control of reality under the government of the propositions -that is, hypothesis, proof, and application (prediction being one form of such). This is all elementary, but leads us to ask about time. If the duration of historical time is unimportant and inconsequential in most of the work of the earth sciences, why should it be important in natural history? If it can be shown that natural forces could have provided all of natural history through the agency of hundreds of millions of years, why trouble oneself with showing that they could provide the same in a few thousand years? There are two answers, not identical even though usually correlated: one set of solutions may be more consonant with reality; further, one set may be more useful. A satisfactory explanation of those answers (apart from the problem itself) would require a volume of philosophy on the true and the useful. We might, for instance, find ourselves concluding that the short and long chronologies are both equally true, but the short answer is useful for people who wish to correlate perfectly their natural philosophy about the empirical world with their beliefs in the words of their sacred scriptures. Alternatively, we might discover that the long-term view is really true and we might as well accept the reality principle as our guide, instead of the sacred doctrine. Since this is a fairly weak view (why hold to reality if it doesn't make pay-offs?), it is often strengthened by a historical, acquired fear of negative experiences in treating with persons holding to the scriptural text. Taken together with various sociological forces -such as professionalism and bureaucracy -truth per se and historical fear can generate a strong sense of the utility of the truth. The stage is then set for an enduring struggle between creationists and gradualists. Here we end up in a distinctly different position. We wish no quarrel with anyone; yet, in a sense, we have to quarrel with everybody. We say that, properly understood, natural forces can have created the present world in a vastly compressed span of time. Too, they may have done so. In arguing that they may have done so, we probably lend a hand to creationists; we do so, too, by according respect to ancient holy writ, as we find this source of evidence shabbily treated in both scientific and humanistic circles. On the other hand, we see no divine miracles in a nature operating by quantavolutions over a short time. Nor do our time schedules and calendar of events correlate fully with the sacred ones that we know. Nor, finally, unless I underestimate my work, do our explanations facilitate the introduction of an animate divine intelligence into natural history. Indeed, "creation science," as is called the systematic effort to validate the natural history of the Bible, may be self-defeating. It lets a holy statement, which might better be believed as a different kind of truth-telling and saving instrument, enter into competition in the contests of science, where the rules, the umpires, and the rewards are greatly different. I say this while expressing appreciation of the distinctive contributions that creationists have continuously made to the earth sciences, and realizing that, were it not for their religious zeal, their scientific interests alone would not have given birth to their hypotheses and research. Supposing that a respectable case has been made for its actuality, what utility does mini-temporal natural history possess? It displaces time as dictator of events. Although it does not abolish historical time, it allows natural forces to play flexibly with time in history. It lends historical stimulus to inventive ideas that would be hopeless if time were by its very slackness a limiting factor. We see this kind of idea now seeking realization in such fields as elemental physics and genetic engineering. Third, it permits the amalgamation of the earliest records of mankind into the natural sciences, makes man a creature and creator of nature in a holistic sense, helps understand the human story and uses that story to help explain nature. Here arises the theory of which Velikovsky was the leading exponent, that the morale and behavior of the human race would be improved if humans would appreciate their catastrophic history. Once recalled and realized, the catastrophic record would keep mankind alerted to its compulsion to repeat its past. The racial death-wish could better be kept under control, especially now that racial suicide is facilitated by nuclear armaments. Since there exists a high correlation between millennialist attitudes (the expectation that world-destruction is imminent) and support for catastrophist scientific theories, I doubt that a therapy for the unconscious compulsion to destroy the world is to be found so easily. "If one is going to go to heaven, the sooner the better." More complicated solutions will be addressed in another work concerning religion. It is conceivable that quantavolution offers possibilities of a new effective synthesis of religion and science, which existing creationism and evolutionism cannot afford. Beyond such utilities rest the several advantages that a microchronic model provides in association with the other elements of the theory of quantavolution: such as the negative exponential principle, the holistic principle, and the transactions of exoterrestrial and terrestrial forces. For example, moon-eruption theory (G. Darwin, Fisher, Pickering et al.) was first posited as occurring in early stages of the Earth's formation by macrochronic reckoning. When Wegener advanced his continental drift theory, he was impelled by paleontology to place the rifting continents in the Cretaceous period. An opportunity to join lunar outbursting and continental drift was lost because of vast differences in timing the two events. Both theories, moon-eruption and continental drift, were placed in abeyance for many years. Then, when Wegener's theory was revived, an elaborate mechanism of tectonic plates moving by convection currents was devised (Hess et al.). Again an opportunity was lost. But microchronism, together with its allied quantavolutionary principles, brings all three events together: paleontological ecumenicalism, the moon-eruption, and continental cleavage and rafting. For propagandistic purposes, one might take advantage of the credibility that attends long time scales: granting quantavolution, may I not still allow a few millions of years for the resurfacing of the Earth, or only a million, or even a hundred thousand? Or use the Pleistocene, that period of "ice ages" which can be stretched from 100,000 to 2,000,000 and has as many climates and ice advances as we have fingers and toes, thus to avoid a furor of reproaches? Why do I crowd the Holocene so? I reject this admittedly tempting idea for one large reason alone. As is demonstrable fully in my books on Chaos and Creation and the rise of Homo Schizo, I find evidence in the earliest behavior and beliefs of mankind that I cannot dismiss, which attests to human experience with every form and scale of quantavolution. At this point in the study of quantavolution, I would lengthen the time scales only if some incontrovertible proof of a relevant far-distant event were offered, or if it were to be discovered that the earliest humans whom we know about were survivors of earlier advanced civilizations whose true long natural historiography was handed down in garbled form. Neither seems likely. {S : Notes (Chapter Thirty-one: The Recency of the Surface)} Notes (Chapter Thirty-one: The Recency of the Surface) 1. Animal Travellers, loc. cit., 87. 2. M. J. S. Rudwick, "Poulet Scrope on the Volcanos of Auvergne: Lyellian Time and Political Economy," VII Brit. J. Hist. Sci. 3: 27 (Nov. 1974), 205-42. 3. Virginia Steen-McIntyre et al., "Geologic Evidence for age of Deposits at Hueyatlaco Archaeological Site, Valsequillo, Mexico," 16 Quaternary Res. (1982), 1-17. 4. Ruth D. Simpson, "Updating Early Man, Calico Site, California," 20 Anthro. J. Canada 2 (1982), 8. 5. C. A. Repenning and O. Fejfar," Evidence for Earlier Date of 'Ubeidiya, Israel, Hominid Site," 299 Nature (1982), 344. 6. E. Guerrier, "Le Forgeron Venu du Ciel," 17 Kadath (1976), 30-6. 7. Op. cit. 8. Op. cit., 65. 9. K. J. Hau et al., "Mass Mortality and Its Environmental and Evolutionary Consequences," 216 Science (16 April 1982), 249-56. (20 authors, now at 13 different institution, 2 funding organization, sponsoring center, and a number of readers were involved.) 10. Prehistory and Earth Models, loc. cit., 24. 11. In Interaction of sciences in the Study of the Earth, loc. cit., 221-2. 12. N. J. G. Sykes, "A Simple Investigation of the Thesis of Isotope Decay Constancy," III S. I. S Rev. (Aut. 1978), 43-5, 45; cf Don Robins, "Isotopic Anomalies in Chronometry Science," II S. I. S. Rev. 4 (1978), 108-10. 13. 77 J. Phys. Chem. (1973), 3114. 14. III Kronos (all, 1977), 3-17, 11. 15. J. R. Booker and G. Heusel performed the work; see "Nature's Hidden Power Line," 90 Sci. Dig. (Oct. 1982), 18. 16. Hiroshi Wakita et al., "Radon Anomaly..." 207 Science (22 Feb. 1980), 882-3. 17. A. de Grazia, Chaos and creation, loc. cit., 51, and Chapter 3 generally. 18. 4 Radiocarbon Geophysics 3( 1980), 113-7, 117. 19. "The Radio Carbon Method," 39 Utah Acad. Sci. Arts Letters, Proc. (1961-2). 11-5. 20. Cardona, I Kronos (Winter 1976) ' 77-85; Ellenberger, op. cit. 21. See Chem. and Engin. News, Apr. 7, 1975, "Comment." 22. Interview NY Times (30 Mar. 1971), Following presentation of paper, see IX PensÚe 4 (Fall, 1974). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P - } {Q -} {C - } {T EPILOGUE} {S - } THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH by Alfred de Grazia EPILOGUE This book will conclude without a chapter given over to the explosion of the Moon from Earth. In Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria lunagenesis is treated more directly, whereas here we have mentioned at many points its relevance to geological processes. Lunagenesis was the paramount holospheric event. No major geological process can be understood without a theory of the origins of the Pacific Basin. The reader can, if so minded, judge the plausibility and the consistency of the theory by tracing it with the help of the Index. Geology has not been able fully to confront lunar fission because of its notions of time. Nearly all studies favoring the idea have placed the event in the most remote eras, because to place it later would require the reconstruction of later natural history, including that of the biosphere, Furthermore, recent explorations of the ocean bottoms have revealed their astonishing "youth." This finding has been thought to disprove even the earliest fission of the Moon, since lunar fission theory without the Pacific Basin as its point of departure would be unappealing. But the new evidence piles up in favor of lunar fission from Earth. The physical calculations of mass fit are plausible; the Moon fits its hole. The Indo-Pacific Basin is there; the ocean bottoms are all freshly paved. The land has been cleaved into great and small chunks and directed at the source of the eruption. The cleavages have occurred at a negative exponential rate down to the very present. The only force capable of such large interlocked effects would be the passby of a gigantic exoterrestrial body interacting electrogravitationally with the Earth. Such evidence is resisted because it is felt that the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere would be totally destroyed. This is not a challenge to be met by theory alone. If the facts occur to demonstrate the prior existence of a totally encrusted and thriving world surface and, then, after an epic quantavolution, continuation of the same processes, greatly altered, lunar fission has to be believed. Yet theoretical logic -call it speculation -has a large role to play, not the least in calculating whether the biosphere would survive. A review of all that has been written on this subject allows an affirmative. The extinction of a species is difficult; the extinction of tens of thousands of species is more difficult; the extinction of nearly all species requires the total explosion of the globe. Exponential reproduction over a few years can hide the most drastic reductions of population by fire, flood, thrusting, explosion, fall-out, radiation, de-oxygenating, and de-photosynthesizing conditions. The very excesses of blast may harbor the secret of survival. Cyclonic action fashions its own boundaries. The cyclonic form is applicable to water, heat, dust, debris, electrical charge, radiation -to all that in a spread-out form would tend to exterminate life. An atmosphere permitting survival, by the theory of solaria binaria, would have been present in a huge plenum or sac surrounding the planets; in addition, atmospheric gases in close encounters can be exchanged, possibly even created under extreme conditions out of water and other compounds. Surely survival would not be guaranteed. It might even be considered miraculous. Yet there is enough plausibility in survival so that extinction should not be assumed; what is perhaps the most useful and credible theory to explain the tortured Earth should not be passed over. If the Moon was assembled out of a blasted Earth in a highly developed and recent epoch, then the origins and behavior of continental drift are explained, world geography and physiography are explained, the oceans are explained, and the present state and distribution of the biosphere are explained. It is astonishing and dismaying to consider the huge differences in time allowances between evolutionary and revolutionary morphology. The Grand Canyon has been a showpiece of geology as well as American tourism. Its accepted history is in the range of one to two billion years for the walls and 10 millions and more for the gorge. M. Cook's explanation calls for only I0,000 years to develop the whole complex. The whole world is implicated in such discrepancies, for the types of geological structures of the Earth are limited to a couple of dozens and they are nowhere unique. Does it not wreck the earth sciences to propose a cut in time by a factor of 200,000? One might as well ask whether it wrecks economics to suffer both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. A quantavolutionary earth scientist can earn a professional livelihood as well as an evolutionary one, so long as his employer is unprejudiced. Further, radical criticism cannot but help any field, if it is properly conducted. Conventional science funds should be tithed to promote tests of the quantavolutionary model. But beyond these considerations goes the nature of the field. Geology operates upon a few basic concepts, among them superposition, erosion, heat and pressure. And these are commonsense to begin with. When one rock rests upon another, it is younger, unless some force has intervened; erosion is the effects of wind and water upon landscape; heat and pressure can transform and transmute a substance. Catastrophists do not deny these ideas; in fact, they invented them. Geology also has a large dictionary of names that are given to things large and small, representing infinite combinations of substances, heat, pressure, erosion, and position. The genius of geology is to bring order to this immense variety and to use this knowledge to practical ends like making cement and finding oil. To all of which the quantavolutionist says "amen." Neither geology, nor any other science in its historical aspect, has to fear the idea of collapsed time, but can derive theoretical benefits from it. Let us speak for a moment of chemical evolution. Should it be as well termed quantavolution? I have here above (Page 119) spoken of the Miller-Urey experiments on the initiation of primitive life processes, and have generally considered the possible derivation of earthly existence from exoterrestrial and atmospheric sources. In Solaria Binaria we go farther into the matter, elaborating the life-creating and sustaining plenum of primeval Earth. In 1983 C. Ponnamperuna reported the discovery of all five of the so-called "precursors of life" in the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia in 1959 [1] . The compounds are adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil, which are key molecules in DNA and RNA. He subsequently created all five bases "in one fell swoop" by subjecting a mixture of methane, nitrogen, and water to electrical discharges. This, he said, evidenced that chemical evolution could have been accomplished in a single pool of liquid (or dense atmosphere?) in primitive times. The process might have occurred exoterrestrially as well as on Earth, commented Melvin Calvin who had also studied chemical evolution and won a Nobel prize. "In one fell swoop:" what, if anything, is this expression but a way of saying collapsing time and quantavolution? Nor can one arrogate to man alone the ability to compress time. Nature may be blind, but she is infinitely large, powerful, and busy. Therefore, collapsing time may boggle the mind but does not destroy geology. Collapsing time introduces the need for high energy forces than can do in weeks what erosion can do in millions of years. The forces -wind, water, heat, pressure -are already present; it is a question of their organization and intensity. The more intense the forces, the more they depart from our experiences, and resemble the catastrophic recitals of the earliest humans. Also, the more intense the forces, the more likely that they originate exoterrestrially. There appear to be no means whereby the scientific ideology pervading the earth sciences for the past century and a half can continue legitimately to ignore exoterrestrial causes and exoterrestrial effects in explaining our lately tortured Earth. Notes (Epilogue) 1. P. M. Boffey, in the New York Times, 30 Aug. 1983. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: } {P - } {Q -} {C - } {T TWO CHARTS OF TIME} {S - } TWO CHARTS OF TIME 1. An Unconventional Time Scale See Table 6 in Solaria Binaria 2. A Conventional Time-Scale such as is found in numerous works. Period & Epoch Years before Present (m/ y) Duration (m/ y) Biosphere Prominences Quaternary (Holocene) 15,000 yrs. 15,000 yrs. see text below* Quaternary (Pleistocene) 2 2 Tertiary (Pliocene) 15 13 Tertiary (Miocene) 28 13 Tertiary (Eocene) 37 9 Cretaceous 92 55 Jurassic 119 27 Triassic 142 23 Permian 175 33 Carboniferous 249 74 Devonian 321 72 Silurian 343 22 Ordovician 400 57 Cambrian 492 92 Precambrian 2492 2000 * In the Q mankind caps the prominent insect, mammal, fish, bird and angiosperm plants, presences, which meet the Cretaceous that, with the J, T, and P down into the Carboniferous. abounds in reptiles (dinosaurs), fish both bony and shark-like, brachiopods and ammonites, with conifers abundant. Then we move into ages rich in amphibians, shark-like fish, insects, tetracorals, and productids. The Ordovician and Cambrian favour nautiloids, graptolites, trilobites, and lingulella, while the Precambrian reveals bacteria and algae. ============ End of The Lately Tortured Earth ============ {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton Origins and History of the Solar System by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton Metron Publications Princeton, New Jersey Notes on the printed version of this book: Copyright 1984 Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton ISBN : 0940268-04-3 All rights reserved Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first Edition Address Metron Publications. P.O. Box 1213 Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A. The Authors express their thanks to Rosemary Burnard for designing and composing their book in type, and to Malcolm Lowery for his editorial counsel. To the memory of RALPH JUERGENS ta de panta oicizei ceraunoz* * Lightning steers the universe Heraclitus, ca. 2500 BP, Fragment 64 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA: TABLE OF CONTENTS SOLARIA BINARIA Origins and History of the Solar System by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton TITLE-PAGE INTRODUCTION PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM 01: The Solar System as a Binary 02: The Solar System as Electrical 03: The Sun's Galactic Journey and Absolute Time 04: Super Uranus and the Primitive Planets 05: The Sac and Its Plenum 06: The Electrical Axis and Its Gaseous Radiation 07: The Magnetic Tube and the Planetary Orbits 08: The Earth's Physical and Magnetic History 09: Radiant Genesis PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY 10: Instability of Super Uranus 11: Astroblemes of the Earth 12: Quantavolution of the Biosphere: Homo sapiens 13: Nova of Super Uranus and Ejection of Moon 14: The Golden Age and Nova of Super Saturn 15: The Jupiter Order 16: Venus and Mars 17: Time, Electricity, and Quantavolution PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES NOTE A: On Method NOTE B: On Cosmic Electrical Charges NOTE C: On Gravitating Electrified Bodies NOTE D: On Binary Star Systems NOTE E: Solaria Binaria in Relation to Chaos and Creation GLOSSARY BIBILIOGRAPHY LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF TABLES LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IN TEXT GUIDE TO METRIC UNITS LIST OF FIGURES CHAPTER ONE 1. Dumb-bell Motion of Solaria Binaria CHAPTER TWO 2. The Sun's Connection to the Galaxy CHAPTER THREE 3. Stars around the Sun's Antapex 4. Nearby Stars in the Solar Wake 5. The Solar Antapex CHAPTER FOUR 6. Electron Flow from Surrounding Space into a Star-cavity 7. The Birth of Solaria Binaria 8. Material Flow Coupling the Sun, Super Uranus and the Electrified Plenum 9. Flow of Material Between the Sun and Super Uranus under the Influence of a Self- generated Magnetic Field. 10. Magnetic Toroidal Field Produced by Solar Wind Current Sheet 11. Magnetic Field Surrounding Several Flowing Ions CHAPTER SIX 12. The Planet Saturn in Ancient Indian Art CHAPTER SEVEN 13. Magnetic Field Associated with an Electrical Flow 14. Decreasing Magnetic Field Strengths Surrounding Central Current at Increasing Distances 15. Motion of Drifting Charged Particle in a Magnetic Field 16. Braking Radiation Emitted by a Spiraling Electron 17. Primitive Planets in Orbit about the Electric Arc CHAPTER EIGHT 18. The Earth in the Magnetic Tube 19. The Earth Magnet 20. Magnetic Transactions within the Earth CHAPTER TEN 21. Transaction between Solaria Binaria and the Cosmos: Dense Plenum Phase 22. Solaria Binaria as the Plenum Thins and the Stars Separate CHAPTER ELEVEN 23. Explosive Eruption from Super Uranus 24. Possible Astroblemes in Arizona 25. Meteoroid Trajectories CHAPTER TWELVE 26. Radioactivity of Fossilized Remains CHAPTER THIRTEEN 27. The Surviving Land from the Age of Urania 28. The Encounter of Uranus Minor with the Earth 29. The Fractured Surface of the Earth 30. Fragmentation of Super Uranus 31. Fission of the Earth-Moon Pair CHAPTER FOURTEEN 32. The Chinese Craftsman God and his Paredra 33. The Churning of the Sea 34. The Golspie Stone CHAPTER FIFTEEN 35. Apparent Motion of the Charged Sun about the Earth CHAPTER SIXTEEN 36. The Electric Field between Mars and the Moon NOTE C 37. Potential Energy Curve for the Collision of Two Atoms 38. Electric Forces Between Celestial Bodies NOTE D 39. Binary Orbits of Short Period LIST OF TABLES CHAPTER THREE 1. Stars Behind the Sun (to 25000 Years Ago) 2. Stars Behind the Sun (25000 to 75000 Years Ago) 3. Stars Behind the Sun (over 75000 Years Past) CHAPTER EIGHT 4. Calculated Undisturbed Decay of the Earth's Magnetization CHAPTER ELEVEN 5. Modes of Meteorite Encounters CHAPTER TWELVE 6. Ages of Solaria Binaria LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IN TEXT BP before the present cf. compare E evolutionary (model) EM electromagnetic f.(ff.) following page(s) fn. footnote Gm, Gy gigameter, gigayear (= aeon) ibid. in the same place ISEE International Sun Earth Explorer (a space craft) K Kelvin km/s kilometers per second ly light year mks meter-kilogram second (units) My megayear or million years NMP, NRP North magnetic (rotational) pole o. Omnindex (used in the printed version of this book. This electronic version has the same information presented as Glossary, and Bibiliography) op. cit. in the work cited Q quantavolutionary (model) q.v. refer to SB Solaria Binaria (model) SMP, SRP South magnetic (rotational) pole GUIDE TO METRIC UNITS Distances are measured in meters Multiples of the meter, by thousands and thousands, have special names designated by a prefix, such as micrometer and gigameter. Other metric units use the same prefixes for their multiples, like microvolts, gigaergs, etc. Prefix Decimal Notation Useful to Measure nano 0.000 000 001 atoms micro 0.000 001 cells milli 0.001 type size - 1.0 people kilo 1000.0 driving distances mega 1000 000.0 satellite diameters giga 1000 000 000.0 star diameters tera 1000 000 000 000.0 planet orbits {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton INTRODUCTION Since 1924, when the theory of the expanding Universe was first expounded, the phenomena of astronomy have been viewed increasingly as intensely energetic. The notion of an explosive Universe has been abetted by the identification of novas, the discovery of the immense energy trapped in the internal structure of the atom, and the detecting of radio noises from vast reaches of space signaling events so extreme as the imploding of whole galaxies. What began as a whisper in scientific circles of the late nineteenth century has become, in late years, a shout. Yet, for reasons that can only be called ideological, that is, reflecting a constrained cognitive structure in the face of contradictory perceptions, scientific workers on the whole have not heard the "shout". At the same time as the space and nuclear sciences have had to confront a new set of facts, the near reaches of space have been surveyed and the body of the Earth searched more thoroughly. The results confirm that the wars of the Universe have been disastrously enacted upon battlefields within the Solar System. Without exception, the planetary material that has been closely inspected exhibits the effects of extreme forces unleashed upon it. Mars, Moon, Venus, Mercury - all are heavily scared, Jupiter and Saturn are in the throes of internal warfare. An asteroidal belt that may be called "Apollo" represents a planet that exploded. Nor can we exclude from the common experience this scared Earth. Consistent with the panorama of catastrophes, and additionally supplying a new dynamic form in cosmogony, there has been developed a body of knowledge and speculation surrounding the phenomena of stellar binary systems. The first binary star orbit was computed in 1822, but not until the past few years has sufficient information become available to speak about binaries systematically. Since the first discovery, a large proportion of observed stars have come to be suspected as multiple star systems. Moreover many cosmogonists speculate that the Solar System itself was once a binary system, or at least is now a kind of fossil binary system, with Jupiter exhibiting star-like traits. It may be pointed out, for instance, that the distance between the principal bodies of the Solar System is comparable with the distances between the separate components in many binary systems. Hence it becomes logical that a cosmogony of the Solar System should be modeled after the theory that it was, and is, a binary system, a Solaria Binaria, accepting and applying for the purpose of the model what is known and thought about the observed stellar binaries elsewhere. The explosive or catastrophic Universe poses basic problems to chronology. The span of astronomical time has been increasing dramatically even in the face of time- collapsing explosive events that reduce drastically the constraints upon time as a factor in change. Great stellar bodies exhibit rotations and motions that accomplish in hours phenomena that would on a gradual timescale be accorded millions or billions of years. It appears that one has to work with a paradox: even as one studies a Universe that changes over billions of years, one studies local events where changes are measured in microseconds. Consequence, which is the last hope of causality, is often strained in the straddling of time. When the Solar System comes to be viewed in the light of newly discovered universal transactions, the idea necessarily arises that it has developed under time- collapsing conditions. Time measures - radiometric, geological and biological - that have been painstakingly manufactured to give billions of years of longevity to the system - must submit to a review of their credibility. The need to generate a new chronometry is enhanced by current reassessments of legends and knowledge that ancient and prehistoric human beings possessed. The authors would not have ventured upon this reconstruction of the recent history of the Solar System were it not for the fossilized voices whose shouts about their catastrophic early world and sky sound louder even today than the shout heard in contemporary science about the exploding Universe. Those anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars of ancient humanity who believe that these shouts must have been mere whispers confront the same impasse ideologically as those scholars who overlook the larger meanings of explosive cosmogony today. What the ancients said, and did not say, about the world are to be taken into account. Both their concepts of time and their visions of events deserve consideration. This consideration and the others advanced before direct this monograph towards resolving the cosmogony of the Solar System into a model of a Solaria Binaria, the last stages of whose quick and violent quantavolution have been witnessed by human eyes. The model stands as plaintiff, confronting the model of uniformitarian evolution as adversary. Although a note on method is appended to the present work, it may be well to stress in the beginning that a prerequisite of scientificity is the ability to suspend judgment on a case being tried. This is especially painful when one is expert on the matter at issue. Even so, a scientist who cannot suspend judgment must be deemed as incompetent as the judge who cannot suspend judgment while hearing a case in a court of law. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 1: } {T THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS A BINARY} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER ONE THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS A BINARY Contrary to the hypothesis that the Solar System was born as and has evolved as a single star system, it is here claimed that the Solar System was and is a binary system. The binary system was formed when the primitive Sun fissioned. Several planets were generated in the neck of the fissioning pair and co-revolved about the Sun synchronously with the companion (see Figure 1). The remaining planets were generated, one or more at a time, in several episodes, as the companion became unstable because of a changing galactic environment which we will discuss in Chapter Three. Figure 1. Dumb-bell Motion of Solaria Binaria The binary system rotates like a lopsided dumb-bell as it moves through galactic space. The Sun orbits about the planets and the companion as they also orbit about the Sun. To be precise, all bodies in the system orbit about its center of motion with the same period. Jupiter can be taken to be the remnant binary partner [1] . This => quantavolutionary [2] conception of a rapidly developed solar binary system is consonant with observations of nearby star systems. To seventeen light-years, or about one hundred million times the Earth-Sun distance of 150 => gigameters, there are forty-five star systems consisting of sixty stars and seven dark => unseen bodies. Among these are many => physical binary systems. Sixty-one percent of the sixty nearest stars are components of a double or triple star system. Inasmuch as we cannot judge the organization of distant star systems, this statistic may or may not characterize the starry Universe. Even within our sample of sixty nearby stars, the star density and the binary frequency drop with increasing distance (van de Kamp 1971, p109), a suspicious fact. Nothing that we know of the Sun is exclusively a property of a single star system or would be surprising if found in a => double star system. On the average the => principals in a physical binary system are separated by approximately 18 => astronomical units. At one extreme, separations of up to twelve thousand astronomical units are deduced; at the other, the stars orbit one another with their surfaces in contact (see Technical note D). We see Solaria Binaria as a double star system evolving from the close extreme to a system showing increasing separation of the principals with time. The typical => visual binary system that has been analyzed contains principals whose separations, periods, total masses, and orbital shapes are not markedly different form the Sun coupled with any one of the major planets of the present Solar system (Note D). The present Solar System differs from other visual binaries only when the => luminosity and mass rations of the principals are considered. The observed features of visual binary systems are not an inconsistent final state for a physical binary system evolving in the manner that will be proposed here for Solaria Binaria. The present mass ratio between the Sun and its planets would seem inconsistent with observed binary systems were it not for the fact that these latter are all visually observed and do not exclude the potential presence of binaries where the minor principal is undetectable presently by any observation. Further, as we shall show in Chapter Four the brightness of the Sun and its companion( s) was markedly different in the binary phase than in the present system. The currently accepted cosmogony of the Sun and the planets is dominated by concepts of gravitation, great stretches of time, and the stability of stellar and Solar System motions. In this cosmogony one looks backward and forward in time, confident that the world has been and will be found in place under known conditions. One assumes the order of things in accord with a three-hundred-year-old theory backed up by centuries of systematic observations. Occasionally, but nowadays with increasing frequency, new scientific discoveries are "surprising" or anomalous, within the frame of the cosmogony. For instance, devastation has been wide-spread both on the Earth and on the other planets whose surface details are visible. Because theories had not predicted such instability, these disruptive events are insistently termed episodic and localized, and relegated to remote times. As will be shown, the prevailing cosmogony of science cannot cope with increasing numbers of surprising and anomalous observations. Sooner or later an alternative cosmogonical theory is invited. The mutating evidence suggests that a cosmogony can be constructed which does not require a long time to evolve our habitable world, within which major readjustments of the planetary orbits and environments are possible, and which redefines the set of forces that bring about change (see Technical Note C) We began with the theory that the Solar System originated as a binary star system and has evolved to the present as such. In the course of elaborating this theory, we shall have to develop and use new tools of analysis - a general concept of electricity (see Technical Note B); new ways of viewing the origins of the atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere; an unusual form of legendary and historical inquiry (see Technical Note A); and revised measures of time for the process. Accepting the notion that the Solar System may be presently at the end of a long binary trail leads to a theory that the Sun is electrical. This fundamental idea is the topic of the next chapter. {S : Notes on Chapter 1} Notes on Chapter 1 1. We acknowledge the conceivability of a recent theory that a large remote planet or a dim distant companion of the Sun seems to be disturbing the planetary system (van de Kamp, 1961, 1971; Brady; Harrison, 1977) and might be a remnant binary partner in addition to Jupiter. 2. See ahead to glossary. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS ELECTRICAL} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER TWO THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS ELECTRICAL The Sun, as star, radiates energy into the space surrounding it. Stars can be conceived to have originated from electrical cavities in the structure of space. Space, to our mind, is an infinite electrical medium. It is electrical in that it is everywhere occupied by a charge, which, when it moves, assumes the character of electrons, that is, "negative" charge (see Note B). The movement energizes and carries material into the cavities which become and are the stars. Such electrical cavities or stars are observed in the millions, and inferred in the billions, in a fairly random distribution about the Sun. They form a lagoon of stars that is called the Galaxy, through which the Sun moves in a manner, and with consequences, to be described in the next chapter. Materially, a star is an agglomeration of all that has accompanied the inflow of electrical charges from surrounding space. The cosmic dust which astronomers see throughout the galaxies is matter yet to be forced into stellar cavities, or matter that has been expelled after a star dies. This dust is detected in greatest amounts in the vicinity of the most highly active stars [3] . Once in the cavity, the material cannot readily escape; it acquires increasing density because of electro-chemical binding and electrical accumulation. A cavity or star is increasingly charged but during its lifetime it cannot be more charged than the medium around it [4] . The Sun is highly charged, as some scientists have lately concluded (Bailey, 1960). The life history of any new star may normally proceed as its cavity acquires first matter, and then charges continuously until its charge density reaches equilibrium with the surrounding medium, which is to say that the cavity has then been filled. Thereupon the star releases or mixes its material with the medium until it no longer possesses distinction as a body. This "normal" procedure is conditional upon the star's transacting with the space around it in a uniform manner. The majority of stars seem to transact quietly with their surrounding space, whether they are small red stars, or giant red stars. They end their existences as they lived, quietly, passing their accumulated material into the medium of space, eventually becoming indistinguishable from the medium itself. However, the fact that the star is in motion within the galactic medium poses an occasional problem. It may journey into regions of the Galaxy which present it with greater or lesser electrical differences than it has been used to. Then quantavolution occurs. The star becomes one of the types to which astronomers pay the most attention - the variable stars, the highly luminous stars, the binary stars, the exploding stars. It was in one such adventure in space that the original Super Sun lost its steady state, fissioned, and became Solaria Binaria. The system then consisted of a number of bodies, acting first as small "suns" with a primary partner, as is to be related in Chapter Four. In recent times, according to the central theme of this book, this Solaria Binaria encountered a galactic region whose characteristics rendered the lesser stellar partner of the system unstable. In a series of quick changes the binary was transformed into today's Solar System. Bruce (1944, p9) sees the process of stellar evolution as a cyclic build up of an electrically charged atmosphere above the star. As we see it, galactic potentials will determine the nature of the "surface" presented to the outside observer. As the star journeys through galactic space, its surface nature changes in response to differences in galactic potential. A change in the local galactic environment can lead to an instability which results in catastrophic electrical redistribution of the whole stellar atmosphere and sometimes of material found well beneath the star's surface layers [5] . In short, the star becomes a nova. In his cosmogony Bruce argues that binary stars form by division of an original stellar nucleus. When the star becomes a nova, the returning nova discharge, transacting electrically with the normal outward flow of => stellar wind off the star, induces the outbursting star to rotate. A possible reverse jet blast from the explosion might also cause the rotation to occur. Stars then, should have maximum rotation during the nova outburst. Fission of the star into a binary would then logically happen most frequently by rotational fission (Kopal, 1938, p657) immediately after a nova outburst. Close-binary pairs should be found among the post-nova stars (Clark et al., 1975, p674-6; Cowley et al., 1975, p413). The Solar System is probably the descendant of a Super Sun, a body containing at least eleven percent more material than the existing Sun, which became electrically unstable and underwent a nova explosion. When the Super Sun erupted as a nova it divided into a close binary pair, whose primary became our present Sun; and its companion was a body about ten percent the size of the Sun (see Lyttleton, 1953, pp137ff) [6] , henceforth to be called Super Uranus, Enveloping the binary was a cloud of solar material constituting at least one percent of the Sun's material. Also created in the fission were the seeds which grew into the so-called "inner or terrestrial planets", probably Mars, the Earth, Mercury, and one that will be called Apollo. Apollo's fate is discussed in Chapter Fifteen. Turning our attention to the Sun itself, we observe an opaque layer called the photosphere. This layer is regarded ordinarily as the Sun's surface. Above the photosphere lies the transparent solar atmosphere, which is difficult to observe. First comes the => chromosphere and then the corona. Perhaps the key to star behavior is the distinction between the photosphere and chromosphere. Each is examined and known by means of spectroscopy, that is by observing and measuring its spectrum of => radiation. The spectrum of the photosphere shows radiation produced when the atoms, => ions, and electrons of the photosphere collide, and therefore the spectrum reflects the state of atomic collisions there. The light is emitted during the collisions. It appears that the photosphere is a region of => plasma and atoms where the motion of the material is chaotic, randomized. Collisions occur after short journeys, after short mean free paths of electrical accumulation. The electrical field is small. A high kinetic energy of collision is registered in the temperature of several thousands of degrees. Energy is transmitted with some, but not great, amounts of conversion of energy into internal atomic structures (excitation). By contrast, the spectrum of the chromosphere represents the release of the internal energy of excited atoms and ions. Light is emitted not so much at the moment of collision among atoms, but it is cast off by rapidly accelerating atoms moving to and from collisions, that is, between rather than during collisions. The chromosphere is a region of directed, vertically moving electrons descending into the photosphere, and atoms and ions escaping into the corona and the => solar wind. The mean free path is long, not short. The electrical field is large, not small as in the photosphere. The photosphere, thus, is a region where the transmission of energy is observed. The chromosphere is a region where the => transmutation of energy is what is observed. The temperature "measurements" of the two regions are not helpful in understanding the dynamics, because in one case, temperature is "low" where short paths lead to frequent collisions, and in the other, temperature is high because of infrequent long-path collisions. What is important is the contribution of each region to the electrical system of the Sun. The photosphere glows brightly with a silver color (Menzel, 1959, p24). Blemishing this visible face of the Sun are dark, slightly cooler regions called sunspots, the average spot lasts less than a day (Abell, 1975, p527). Viewed by telescope, the whole photosphere, except where sunspots obscure it, shows a granular appearance. These => granules are bright patches, hot tufts of gas that live for only a few minutes (Juergens, 1979b, p36). The photosphere and the behavior of the solar atmosphere which lies above it can best be explained using a model based upon electrical processes. Bruce (1944, p6), and later Juergens (1972, pp9ff) and Crew (1974, p539) have shown that photosphere granules have the properties of a large number of parallel electrical arcs. Further, Juergens maintains that highly energetic electrons are transmitted from the Galaxy down through the solar atmosphere to the photosphere. As in the Earth's atmosphere, the gas density and pressure in the solar atmosphere decrease with height above the photosphere. Where the atmospheric pressure falls to a value equal to one percent of the atmospheric pressure measured at the Earth's surface, collisions between gas atoms can no longer dominate the exchange of energy between the atoms. Instead it is the electrical processes that govern the energy exchanges in the solar gas. We see this transition as the hot chromosphere. The bladed or spiculed structure of the chromosphere consists of jets of gas moving upwards at about 30 kilometers per second. These spicules rise some 5000 to 20 000 kilometers above the photosphere (Abell, 1975, pp531ff) [7] . Instabilities in the arc discharges lead to a build-up of charged regions in the solar atmosphere. These eventually produce electrical breakdown; sudden discharges occur, causing bright => faculae [8] and the temporary extinction of some photosphere arcs. The result is a sunspot (Bruce, 1944, p6). The upper atmosphere of the Sun is the apparently intensely hot corona [9] . The gas atoms of the corona have been stripped of several electrons [10] by collisions with in flowing energetic cosmic electrons. The removed electrons are drawn towards the Sun so other ions can flow outwards into the corona allowing the coronal ions to recede into the solar wind. The spectrum of the lower corona shows the atoms stripped of several electrons emitting light between collisions, and the emission from the energetic electrons during collision. The corona seems to be constantly ejecting its contents into space as the solar wind. The fraction of the solar output represented by the solar wind is about one- millionth. Haymes states that the whole corona is lost and replaced in about one day [11] . Some of this material flows past the Earth's orbit as a cloud of energetic protons and helium nuclei, accompanied by electrons, known as the solar wind. In every second 100 million solar ions arrive above each square centimeter of the Earth's atmosphere. The more luminous the star, the faster its stellar wind carries away mass, and, in general, the more rapidly the gases flow away from the star. Stellar wind flows of 10 -10 to 10 -5 . Sun masses per year have been inferred with measured velocities from 550 to 3800 kilometers per second respectively (Lamers et al., Table 1, p328). Sudden explosive eruptions, called flares, occur above the solar surface. Energy in the form of light, atoms, and ions, is accelerated away from the Sun. The energy in a single flare could supply the Earth's population with electrical power for millions of years. A large flare releases in an instant about one-fortieth of the continuous solar output. Flares start near sunspots, with associated faculae, and develop over hours. They move as if driven by an electrical potential difference between the Sun's surface and the higher atmosphere (Zirin, pp479ff, Obayashi, pp224ff). Once accelerated, the flare gases escape the Sun and modify the solar wind significantly. The cause of flares is baffling to conventional theories, which underplay electrical forces in cosmic processes. Most flare models involve some kind of magnetic driver to blow the gases from the Sun with great force (Babcock, p420, p422-4). The presence of magnetism implies an electric source. As we shall show in Chapter Six, the Sun once had an electrical connection to its companion, within which energy was released that created and sustained life within the binary system. Today's flares represent an undirected remnant of the inter-companion arc of yesteryear. The solar wind consists of coronal gases which have been boiled away from the hot solar atmospheric discharges. It conducts the Sun's electrical transaction with the Galaxy. It is the Sun's connection to the Galaxy. The electron-deficient atoms (ions), by escaping from the Solar System, increase the negative charge on the Sun. This brings the Sun towards => galactic neutral and thus, in time, would end the Sun's life as star. It follows that in the past, when the Sun was less negatively charged, more current flowed from the Sun to the Galaxy. Thus the present flow of solar wind is less than the flow in ages past when the Sun was more out of equilibrium than it is now. The Solar wind varies with the ongoing "evolution" and "quantavolution" of the Sun. In the past the solar wind flow was very complex because we believe that the Sun was a binary star and its companion, Super Uranus, was not in electrical equilibrium with it. The system eventually approached => internal neutrality because a large solar wind, electrically driven, flowed directly between the two principals. In this connection we may explain the origin of the heavier elements in the Solar System. They were not built up from primordial hydrogen and helium, which show up so prominently in spectroscopic observation, but rather represents an accumulation in a period measurable in thousands of years of the fragments of heavy materials scattered initially near the Sun, near its binary partner, and along the electrified axis between the two (see ahead to Figure 7). The theory that heavier elements are sparse in the interior of the Sun is probably incorrect. Spectroscopy cannot penetrate to beyond the photosphere; therefore it must show only a cloud of hydrogen admixed with metal and molecular vapors (Ross and Aller, Table 1, p1226) at low density [12] . The mass of the Sun is calculated as a function of the orbital motion of the planets. Probably here, too, a methodological error is occurring that serves to produce the illusion of a light mass. Thus the model of the composition of the Sun depends upon the assumed structure of the solar interior and then the Sun's mass is probably incorrectly known. Both incorrect theories - regarding the elements and mass - contribute to the major error of conventional Solar System theory, which is that the Sun is powered by thermonuclear processes, specifically the fusion of hydrogen atoms, in its interior. Regarding the processes which power the Sun, most astronomers believe that there is an energy source deep in the solar interior obscured from view behind the opaque photosphere. If this belief is correct then the interior of the Sun must be hotter than the photosphere. Knowledge of the conditions within the Sun is inferred as the consequence of the physical forces assumed to be governing the stability of the Sun (Smith and Jacobs, pp223ff). It is usually inferred that near the center of the Sun the gas is sufficiently hot and dense enough to bring about => nuclear fusion on a large scale. A thermonuclear Sun is an attractive theory since the Sun seems to be composed mainly of hydrogen. By compressing itself into a nuclear-powered core the Sun might radiate energy long enough to accommodate the gradual evolutionary processes believed necessary for the biological and geological developments that have occurred on the Earth. However, thermonuclear fusion processes must dispose of large numbers of => neutrinos, and a vastly insufficient number of neutrinos have been detected on Earth in experiments specifically designed to capture the normally elusive solar neutrinos (Parker, p31). Before the nuclear Sun theory was presented, several mechanisms were proposed to explain the Sun's output of radiant energy [13] . All of these led to a radiant lifetime that was too short to satisfy the excessive time needs of the evolutionists. Fatal, furthermore, to all theories of an internally powered Sun is the minimal temperature of the photosphere. How can the "surface" of the Sun remain cool when it is blanketed by hotter regions below and above whose temperatures reach millions of degrees (Parker, p28)? The usual answer is that the Sun's atmosphere is heated by turbulence within the Sun's outermost interior layers below the photosphere (Wright, p123). Somehow this process which, overleaping the photosphere, heats the Sun's atmosphere is supposedly divorced from the flow of radiant energy from the Sun's interior. Since such separation of processes is unknown elsewhere this explanation is unacceptable [14] . Lastly, the observed turbulence (the granules) on the photosphere and its opacity are not compatible with the properties of hot gas of solar composition and condition (Juergens, 1979b, pp33ff). Since Bruce has shown the Sun outside the photosphere behaves like an electrical discharge, the theory, originally by Juergens, that the origin of the Sun's energy is external and electrical, is accepted here. Consistent with the electrical phenomena of the Sun's atmosphere, we propose an external source of solar power. The Sun's light and heat output arises from the energy released by a flow of highly energetic electrons arriving from the Galaxy [15] . This electron current is enhanced by the flow of energetic solar wind protons away from the Sun [16] . The detected plasma a density near the Earth's orbit is 2 to 10 ions per cubic centimeter [17] . The ions flow outwards. Near Jupiter's orbit the Pioneer spacecraft measured no increase in the velocity of the solar ions over their velocity measured near the Earth [18] . Figure 2. The Sun's Connection to the Galaxy Outward-flowing solar wind ions carry an electric current between the negatively charged Sun and the more negatively charged galactic space that surrounds it. The solar wind flows through a "transactive matrix" (see Technical Note B) of solar electrons, which permeate the interplanetary space but do not flow through it as do the ions. Inward-flowing galactic electrons, travelling at velocities close to the speed of light, carry energy from the Galaxy to the solar "surface" where it is released and radiated as light and other electromagnetic waves, which constitute the solar luminosity. At the edge of the Solar System, escaping protons, accelerated to high energy by the drop in electrical potential between the Sun and the Galaxy, become galactic => cosmic rays and flow in all directions towards other stars. The protons expelled by other stars arrive in the Solar System as cosmic rays [19] . For energies above 100 GeV about six cosmic rays impinge upon each square meter of the Earth every second, but these few energetic particles carry inwards about one-twentieth of the energy flowing outwards with the solar wind at 1 AU. That electron-deficient cosmic ray atoms continuously flow to Earth enhances the probability that the Earth is electrically charged. Juergens (1972) has argued that both the Earth and the Sun can have an excess (negative) charge. At energies below 100 GeV the Sun somehow modulates the number of cosmic rays arriving in the inner Solar System (van Allen, p133). This presumably represents the maximum driving potential between the Sun and galactic space, with which it is transacting electrically. Cosmic rays with energy greatly in excess of 100 GeV would not be impeded meaningfully by the Sun's opposing driving potential. Where the solar wind ends is yet to be determined. It was once believed the wind stopped inside Jupiter's orbit, later near Pluto, but today the wind is deemed to flow well beyond Pluto (Haymes, p237). Somewhere the "galactic wind" meets the solar wind; there a boundary exists where the flow of incoming cosmic ray protons balances the out flowing solar wind protons. This is the edge of the Sun's discharge region, the limit of the Solar System. To conclude, a star is born when an electric cavity forms in the charged medium of space, and matter rushes along with the charged space to fill the cavity. Then, after the cavity fills, the star dissipates into charged space, spilling out its matter simultaneously. No tombstone marks its demise; no derelicts travel forever through space. Indeed, existence is an attempt to achieve nothingness. Pockets of lesser negativity become existence by seeking to accumulate enough electric charge to emulate universal space, at which time they are capable of disappearing into nothingness. {S : Notes on Chapter 2:} Notes on Chapter 2: 3. To be considered is whether this may result from the dust in near stars being more observable. 4. The consequences of the temporary overcharging are described later when we consider stellar novae (Chapter Thirteen). 5. See Bruce (1966b) for a discussion which compares a lightning discharges to the light curve for Nova Herculis 1934. Bruce (1944) mentions a discharge of the order of 10 20 coulombs in the nova outburst. We see this atmospheric discharge as an electrical readjustment required after the star has responded to its changed environment. 6. Lyttleton (1938) has argued that rotational fission cannot result in the formation of a stable binary system, but his arguments are probably invalid if the bodies at fission are highly charged ( and of the same sign) but in different amounts (Note C). In this instance, immediate electrical transaction between the stars may allow non-collisional orbits to be stable, where they otherwise would not. Later criticism and support are well summarized by Batten (1973b). The arguments they're about the stability of binary orbits over long times are in question because of the work of Bass. Likewise, the claim that fission cannot occur because stellar cores cannot remain uncoupled from stellar envelopes once rotational distortion becomes appreciable is also in question if the process producing the rotation begins in the envelope rather than in the core. 7. Juergens (1979b) believes the spicule is a fountain pumping electrons from the solar surface high into the corona. If he is correct, the upward motions detected spectroscopically in the spicules are produced by atoms bombarded by the electron flow. The electrons supplied by the spicules are necessary to allow ions to travel away from the solar surface.( See also Milton, 1979.) 8. A facula (Lat : "torch") is a bright region seen best near the limb of the Sun where the underlying photosphere appears less bright. 9. The temperature deduced from the spectrum is millions => Kelvin. 10. Specifically, atoms heavier than helium which have lost several electrons are detected. In the corona, hydrogen and helium are present too, but cannot be detected since they have lost all of their electrons. 11. Replacement of the corona in one day produces a loss of about 10 -10 . Sun's mass each year. Haymes' estimate for the loss of solar corona is much higher than the loss expected using measurements of the solar wind flux. One such solar wind measurement cited by Marti et al. would produce a corona loss which is 1/ 10000 the value in Haymes. 12. Compared with the Earth's atmosphere, which at the surface has 1390 times the number of atoms per cubic centimeter as does the Sun's atmosphere at the photosphere. 13. Thus, the Sun, primordially hot, gives out heat as it cools; such a Sun has a life of thousands of years. Then Mayer, in 1848, supposed that the Sun is heated by infalling meteorites. If they did the Sun would gain mass, affecting the size of planetary orbits. For his part, von Helmholtz, in 1854, showed that the Sun could radiate for tens of millions of years if it were contracting slowly. The reader is referred to the following sources for interesting and readable accounts of these mechanisms: Newcombe, Russell et al., 1927; Rudeaux and de Vaucouleurs. 14. Parker argues that a man (with a body temperature of 37ø => Celsius) can rub two sticks together to ignite them (producing a fire at several hundred degrees Celsius). He adds that there is no limit to the temperature which can be obtained by so rubbing the sticks. What he fails to recognize is that if the sticks are continuously rubbed together generating heat by friction, they will conduct heat from the region of the friction. This heat will eventually reach the stick-holder's hands. Even if the stick-holder wears asbestos gloves, the wood, which is slowly becoming hotter, will eventually catch fire. On the Sun the photosphere must likewise heat up, unless it is somehow cooled by the warmer regions surrounding it. Such cooling is not spontaneous in nature. 15. The Sun's energy output is 4x10 26 watts. If the arriving electrons have the minimum energy for cosmic rays not modulated by the Sun (see below, p. 18), which is about 100 gigaelectron volts (100 GeV), the in flowing current density at the Sun's photosphere would be 6.5x10 -4 amperes per square meter. This value is a maximum; higher-energy electrons arriving lead to lower values for the electron current density. 16. The flow of the solar wind particles is consistent with a potential barrier located at infinity (Lemaire and Scherer). Moving through the potential, the protons gain energy; as they flow away from the Sun and past the Earth's orbit the protons double their velocity, increasing from 150 kilometers per second in the corona to 320 kilometers per second at the Earth. The electrons' behavior is consistent with electrons being repelled by the distant Galaxy but also being repelled by a nearby Sun carrying an excess negative electrical charge, as was postulated much earlier by Bailey (1960). 17. Zirlin remarks that spacecraft measurements of the solar wind plasma refer to protons, "but considerations of electrical neutrality require that the number of electrons per cubic centimeter equal the number of protons (although the velocities need not necessarily be the same)". Exact => electric neutrality cannot be assumed if the Sun is electrically powered from the outside, and thus we do not know the electron density in the solar wind unless it is measured. 18. At the rate of solar wind flow, a sphere 100 AU in radius could be filled with plasma to 5 protons per cubic centimeter in about 10 000 years. However, moving at 300 km/ s, a proton would travel about ten light years in this time, about 6300 times 100 AU. The material flow would be about 10 17 tons (1/ 35 000 of an Earth). 19. Conventionally, no origin other than "galactic" or "extragalactic" is ascribed to arriving cosmic rays not certainly identified with the Sun (Watson). The paucity of electrons in the cosmic ray flux is unconvincingly explained except by the notion of a star as an electron-deficient cavity in space. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 3:} {T THE SUN'S GALACTIC JOURNEY AND ABSOLUTE TIME} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER THREE THE SUN'S GALACTIC JOURNEY AND ABSOLUTE TIME Conventionally viewed, the formation of a solar-type star and planets from a cloud of gases and cosmic dust takes on the order of several hundreds of millions of years. After accretion, an Earth-like planet supposedly takes another one or two thousand million years (1-2 gigayears or => aeons) to develop a stable lithosphere, which when formed allows the much slower evolution of a viable biosphere from the materials and energy available at the planetary surface (Oparin). To us, these processes seem too slow and rely too much upon random occurrences to be viable. However, the processes forming stars and planets and leading to living things may proceed much more rapidly. Our cosmogony employs electrical cavities, charges and forces to accomplish change. These produce changes which are much more powerful and are highly selective. Electrical force, as measurable by the repulsion between two electrons, compares with the apparent gravitational attraction of the same two electrons in the ratio of 10 36 to 1 [20] . Conventional models of cosmic processes employ almost exclusively the trivially weak force termed gravity to produce and govern the Universe. Electricity is a greater sculptor of change because it operates more variably within a given cosmic setting. A simple lightning bolt can cause extensive surface damage, liberating megajoules of energy within a few meters of surviving observers. Only thousandths of a second are involved in the event. Yet, too, an undisturbed geological surface may be the setting for a large number of biological mutations provoked by a radiation storm of cosmic origin. What "gravity" is supposed to accomplish in aeons, electricity could quickly accomplish before the eyes of the earthly observer. Driven by the powerful motivator, electricity, quantavolution becomes not only possible - but also essential. Furthermore an understanding of electricity's role provides a powerful new and unified explanation of most observable phenomena. If the evidence cited in Chapter One has permitted us to proceed, viewing the developing Solar System as Solaria Binaria, and similarly, if in Chapter Two we end up viewing stars, and in particular, the Sun as an electric phenomenon, then we can hope to inquire about the time scale over which the Solar Binary developed. To be more specific, may we have a stellar binary which develops over a short interval through some of the most significant phases of the history of the Solar System ? To tackle the problem of chronology we shall, as we have done before, look to the skies for the crucial clues. We must, in so doing, introduce a seemingly radical conception, one which we feel can be defended with the evidence to follow. We assert, in line with the past chapter, that stars take their properties less from the material which they contain and more from the electrical difference between the cavity, which creates the star, and the surrounding medium of electrified space (see => space infra-charge). Translated into more common astronomical language, the luminosity of the star depends upon its galactic environment rather than upon the amount of material which it contains (see behind and to Technical Note B, fn. 116). The conventional notion that the more luminous the star, the more massive it is, was induced by Eddington from the analysis of a small sample of binary stars. As we interpret the same data, the more luminous the star, the more it transacts with its companion, and so the companion completes its orbit more rapidly (see Technical Note D). Unfortunately Eddington's Mass-Luminosity relationship is well established in astronomical formalism, so that today stars are assigned masses as soon as their luminosities are estimated. There is a problem inherent in Eddington's method of massing the binaries. He calls upon "gravitational force" and nothing else to bring about motion within the binary system. The problem is compounded when luminosities are introduced as a way to measure mass in non-binary systems. Luminosity can only be known where the distance to the star can be measured. Star distances are computed using the annual parallax produced by viewing the displacement, as the Earth orbits the Sun, of any nearby star against the background of very distant stars. The parallax measurement involves measuring minute angle at the apex of an isosceles triangle whose base is the diameter of the Earth's orbit about the Sun [21] . Parallax angles are very small; the closest star, Alpha Centauri, is only displaced through 1.52 => arc seconds over the year. This parallax, the largest, was not measured until 1839 (Baker, R. H., p317) Parallaxes are difficult to measure and they cannot be determined for stars farther from Earth than 652 => light-years. Such a small distance encompasses only one thousandth of the sphere of stars under close observation by astronomers. Thus the majority of reported star distances and luminosities are derived by theory rather than measurement. Of the twenty first-magnitude stars (the apparently brightest stars in the sky) only five are closer than 26 light years, the next five take us to 84 light-years; the next seven to 217 light years; and the last five to the measurement limit. In this sample are six supergiant stars; the parallax of one of these stars is only an estimate, two of the others are at the extreme limit, the last three are between 171 and 192 light-years distant. None of the most luminous supergiant stars are in this sample; thus all luminosities given for such stars are estimates ! Even where parallax is measured, the measurement is rarely precise; uncertainties of 25% and larger are common, leading to luminosities which are most likely erroneous in the order of at least 56% (about half a magnitude unit). Near the measuring limit the possible deviations grow immensely, often exceeding considerably the number measured. The famous => Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, the Rosetta Stone of modern astronomy, plots stellar luminosities against surface temperatures, determined from the star's spectrum. Since the spectrum is often difficult to classify, placement of the star on the diagram is not always easy (Baker, R. H., p342). To circumvent that difficulty astronomers now rely upon color indices in place of spectrum classes [22] . Such measurements are even more strongly theory dependent than the former in terms of their applicability to stellar emissions (see Wyse, p49), but they are more quantitatively formulated and therefore they lead to an unjustified sense of satisfaction with the computed result of the stellar condition. For our purposes they offer no help. What we would say about the classification of stars is the following. In going from stars whose surface temperature appears to be high, to those which appear cooler, there is a gradation of the lines present in the stellar spectra. The hotter stars show absorption produced by helium atoms. As we look at progressively cooler stars the helium lines decline and abruptly hydrogen lines appear, increase in intensity, and slowly decline. As the hydrogen declines, the lines of the metals and metal ions increase in intensity through the solar type stars; they dominate in stars slightly cooler than the Sun, only to be surpassed in the coolest stars by band spectra produced by various simple molecules, notably hydrides and oxides. In some of the coolest stars compounds of carbon are prominent. Although astronomers may continue to seek a more precise classification for stars, we are content to employ the traditional spectral types for the present study. Besides the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that is used to classify the stars, astronomers have also divided the stars into populations according to their location within the Galaxy. Some striking results were obtained: 1. The most luminous and apparently hottest stars are found within gaseous clouds containing much cosmic dust. These stars are confined in clumps to a thin plate that forms the equator of the Galaxy. Similar stars define the highly visible spiral arms seen in other galaxies. 2. Bright, cooler stars like Sirius are located near the equator of the Galaxy but are not confined to the galactic arms. 3. The disc of the Galaxy is populated with moderately hot stars (with 5000 to 8000 K surface temperatures); these stars resemble the Sun and populate the arms, the spaces between the arms, and make up part of the stars that occupy the central core of the Galaxy. These disc stars are the most numerous group of stars observed. 4. The disc of the Galaxy is enveloped in an ovoid shell of red giant stars whose spectra show fewer metals than stars of comparable type in the disc population. That these stars are mostly giant stars is usually explained by claiming that the smaller stars in the population are not likely seen because of distance from the Earth. It is possible that the latter are absent. Most of what is known about these stars is from the study of giant stars within star clusters and intrinsically varying giant stars, where the star's luminosity varies in some characteristic way over an interval of days to months. 5. The Galaxy itself is embedded in a halo of cooler stars. Most of what is known of the galactic halo is deduced from a study of a few nearby small stars and 120 globular star clusters which surround the core of the Galaxy. One of these globular clusters, Messier 13 in the constellation of Hercules, has been described as a "celestial chrysanthemum" (Baker, R. H., p451). The number of stars in this cluster cannot be counted; but estimates around 500 000 are made. Averaging this number of stars over the volume of the cluster (not precisely known) it would seem as if the stars are about two light-years apart, much closer than the stars near the Sun. Some small halo stars are observed passing through the disc stars in the Sun's vicinity. Barnard's star is an example. In summary: -- the most interactive stars and gas clouds form clumps which are the galactic arms -- around the arms is a disc of less interactive stars -- enveloping the disc are variously shaped ovoids and halos alleged to be progressively more "metal deficient" stars. It has been proposed that the stars of the different populations of the Galaxy follow orbits about the galactic core which are characteristic of the population. Supposedly the arm stars have the most circular orbits; the disc stars follow slightly elliptical paths. Some are deemed to move inclined slightly to the galactic plane, like the asteroid orbits of the Solar System. The halo stars move in strongly elliptical orbits with random inclinations to the galactic arms, like the comet orbits of the Solar System. As they pass through the Sun's locality the halo stars betray their presence by large annual displacements compared to the disc stars. All of the stars in the Galaxy are in motion. Since there is no standard of rest all we can detect is the motion of one star relative to another. Two streams of stars are observed moving past the Sun parallel to the Milky Way (the arms of the Galaxy). The two streams move oppositely at a relative speed of 40 km/ s, the outer stream moving towards Orion, the inner one to Scutum. These motions apparently reflect differences in the motion of consecutive galactic arm segments in the Galaxy. The stars in the Sun's "arm" we assume move with the Sun at 275 km/ s [23] towards the constellation of Lyra near Cygnus, which is a motion away from the stars of Puppis. Looking only at the net motion of stars close to the Sun we detect the drift of the Sun within its arm of the Galaxy. This analysis reveals a motion of 20 km/ s towards the constellation of Hercules (away from the constellation of Canis Major)( Mihalas and Routly, p103). Neither of the Sun's motions is precise but they should suffice for our purpose. The Sun's motion within its arm carries it four astronomical units per year. It takes nearly 22 500 years for the Sun to drift one light-year from its present position. But, when the galactic revolution motion is considered, the Sun is moving up to fourteen times as fast. In the extreme only 1107 years are required to displace the Sun one light-year, so in ten thousand years the Sun moves nine light-years, and in one million years it travels about 904 light years. If our hypothesis is correct and the stars derive their properties from the space in which they are embedded, then a look at the stars presently in the Sun's wake will tell us how the Sun appeared in ages past. Unfortunately the path of the Sun over the last million years, within which we believe Solaria Binaria developed and collapsed, is not wholly within measured space. Luminosity assumptions need to be made during the first two -thirds of the binary's lifetime. The Sun's total motion now is directed away from a point within the constellation of Right Carina (the solar antapex at 8.4 hours Right Ascension and declination -62§ [24] . This antapex was determined by Str”mberg using the radial velocities of globular star-clusters (Menzel et al.). In his sample, the Sun's drift and the Galaxy's revolution combine to produce a net motion of 286 km/ s away from the antapex. For star systems close to the Sun, adjacent stars are about 10.3 light-years apart, each thus occupying a sphere containing 578 cubic light years of space (Allen, 1963, p237). Given such a low star density, a rather large volume must be examined around and along the Sun's wake to ensure that some stars are included. We have constructed, therefore, a cylinder thirteen and one-quarter light years in radius about the Sun's path. Moving for ten thousand years through this cylinder the Sun will "encounter" about 5000 cubic light-years of space. In such a volume there would reside about nine stars or star systems at the average local star density. Over the sixty-five light year swath through space covered by the Gliese Star Catalogue there are only fifteen star systems. It appears that along the Sun's path, the actual star density is only twenty seven percent of that expected. The Sun entered the region included within the Gliese catalogue about 74000 years ago. Within that volume, our analytical sample of stars is reasonably complete . Beyond it, many of the stars located along the cylinder do not have published parallaxes and so they cannot be located in time; they cannot be used in the analysis. The region of space which includes those stars which now occupy the space once passed through by the Sun on its galactic voyage is represented on a star map by a cone centered on the solar antapex [25] . The base of the cone in the present includes stars over one half of the sky. As time progresses backwards the frustum of the cone projected upon the sky diminishes in area (Figure 3). The frustum of the cone 3 500 years ago is a circle 76§ in radius, encompassing stars from Orion's belt across the South Celestial Pole to the Scorpion's tail. Moving back twenty thousand years shortens the radius to 36§, thereby including the region from the feet of the Greater Dog to the Centaur's right foot. The area has only a 13.5§ radius sixty thousand years ago; it shrinks to less than a 3§ circle after three hundred thousand years. Through recent time the Sun's trail is very close to a straight line projected towards the antapex. It is shown in Figure 4 and the stars included are listed in Table 1. The stars occupying the space inhabited by the Sun through the current era (the Period of Solaria) [26] and during the time of the Late Quantavolutions, to be discussed in part Two of this book, are in this sample. Here, we find the nearest star system, the Alpha Centauri triple. The largest star is very similar to the Sun (Dole, p112). Figure 3. Stars Around the Sun's Antapex The Sun's path traced backwards through the stars of the Galaxy passes through a cylinder of space whose axis stretches from the center of the Sun through the point on the celestial sphere with coordinates 8.4 hours of right ascension and -62§ of declination. The edge of this cylinder, chosen to have a radius of 13.25 light years, is represented for different eras by the series of circles converging onto the solar antapex. Its first companion is 23.5 astronomical units away moving along an elliptical orbit (Menzel et al., p467). This star is slightly cooler and fainter than the Sun. The second companion is located almost two degrees away in the sky. It is over 550 times more distant than the separation of the closer pair. Frequent eruptions superpose bright emission lines on its otherwise faint class M spectrum. It is a flare star; its flaring might be associated with some intermittent transaction with the pair of distant companions. Unfortunately the a-Centauri triple is the only occupant within the space transited by the Sun during the series of quantavolutions preceding the historical period. It gives us no clue to an understanding of that space besides learning that solar-type stars can exist there. Figure 4. Nearby Stars in the Solar Wake The sun's path through the space now occupied by the stars listed in Table 1. This space represents the region traversed by the Sun while it quantavoluted from Solaria Binaria into the Solar System we see today. TABLE 1 STARS BEHIND THE SUN (to 25 000 Years Ago) Identification of Star Distance from Sun (in ly) Years in the Sun's wake (see Fig 3-2) Alpha Centauri: Triple Star, main sequence components, dwarf "G", "K", and "M" stars; mission lines in the type "M" spectrum 4.3 4 860 Gliese 191: MO main sequence dwarf star 13.0 14 750 Gliese 440: White dwarf start (class A) 16.1 18 200 Gliese 293: White dwarf start (class t-g) 19.2 21 700 Limiting magnitude of sample + 18 The three remaining stars are all low-transaction objects. This space we would suspect to hold a lower electric charge density than the space closer to the present. The closest of these three faint stars is located within the zone we believe was occupied by the Sun in the time before the eruptions began which eventually broke up Solaria Binaria. That instability of the recent past may well have been created as the Sun passed between the lower and higher regions of the transaction represented by these six nearby stars. The likelihood is that the Sun, late in the Period of Pangean Stability (Table 6), was less luminous than it is today. TABLE 2 STARS BEHIND THE SUN (from 25 000 to 75 000 Years Ago) Time (BP) Star Name Type 27 300 Gliese 257 M4 + 33 500 Gliese 341 M0 36 400 Alpha Mensae G6 47 600 Gliese 269A K2, Binary 53 500* Gliese 333 M3 53 500 Gliese 375 M5 + 54 300* Gliese 391 F3, Subgiant 64 700 Gliese 294A F8, Triple 68 300 Gliese 298 M 73 800 Alpha Chamaeleonis F5 Limiting magnitude + 18 * These stars are 25 ly apart, the Sun passes through space at their respective distances at the beginning and end of a 760 year interval. Extending the Sun's line farther into the past to the limit of the Gliese catalogue (table 2) we find no stars as luminous as the present Sun until we go back 54 000 years. Then along the path are positioned three stars that exceed the Sun in luminosity. The closest, an F3 subgiant, is five times more luminous; the second, the primary star in a triple system, is only 1.44 times brighter. Its two companions are very faint. The last of the three brighter stars exceeds the Sun's output eight- fold. At the 75 000 year limit to Table 2 we reach the edge of the reasonably complete star sample. So far there are no conflicts with our theory. Stars of different spectral classes are well separated in space. In fact the cooler and hotter stars seem to be sorted: the class M stars tend to lie above the Sun's route while the class F and G stars are below it [27] . If our calculated course is correct, the Sun's past behavior, as mirrored in the listed stars' present behavior, would show significant variation in luminosity over the tens of thousands of years represented here. Noteworthy, there are no highly luminous stars thus far along the Sun's trace. Beyond 65 light-years, the magnitude limit of the available star catalogues containing measured parallaxes limits severely the completeness of the star sample. We can list no stars that are intrinsically fainter than today's Sun (Table 3). The catalogue from which the sample was taken covers only stars whose visual magnitude exceeds 6.25 (Becvar) whereas the Gliese catalogue includes known nearby stars above magnitude 18. Almost all of these stars show some distinguishing characteristic. The majority are binary, another has nebulous spectrum lines. These stars are positioned about the solar antapex in Figure 5. All could reflect plausible conditions for the early stages of Solaria Binaria's Period of Pangean Stability, and possibly also for the earlier Period of Radiant Genesis which followed the binary's creation. At the limit of our proposed time (about one million years before present) using the Atlas of the Selected Areas (Vehrenberg) we count about 39 stars brighter than magnitude 12.5 in a target zone 40 by 40 arc-minutes adjacent to the Sun's antapex. Unfortunately no distances are given for the stars in this atlas. Figure 5. The Solar Antapex Map showing the brightest stars surrounding the solar antapex (see Table 3). The circles represent the described cylinder of space around the Sun at the ages shown. The successive radii are centered upon a slowly displacing point representing the solar antapex. The displacement, seen at this map-scale, occurs because the Sun rapidly orbits about the center of the Galaxy as it slowly moves through the arms of the Galaxy; its path therefore is a curved rather than a straight line. TABLE 3 STARS BEHIND THE SUN (over 75 000 years Past) Time (BP) (in Thousands of years) Distance (in ly) Star Name Spectral Type 124 112 b Volatis K1 134 121 C Carinae A2, binary 139 125 GC 12253 F0, nebulous lines 258 233 GC 11867 G8, binary (M=+ 1) 301 326 e Carinae K0, B; Spectroscopic binary Limiting magnitude + 6.5 The sample ends at the edge of measured space. Since our calculated solar target shows no stars the deficiency of the present measurable sample is confirmed. Nevertheless we see that the last listed star, 300 000 years BP along the Sun's run, is a spectroscopic binary whose class B primary is orbited by a class K secondary; a system not unlike our view of the early Solaria Binaria. In our analysis more distant stars cannot be located in time along the Sun's path. Yet we can place, although uncertainly, several bright blue supergiant stars at locations surrounding the antapex in all directions and at distances corresponding to times between one-half and three million years ago. Several of the stars are components in binary star systems. Within or on the periphery of this highly transactive region of space, the original Super Sun may have parturitioned to give birth to Solaria Binaria. Although proof is hardly forthcoming from this analysis, at least evidence disproving the hypothesis is absent. We are encouraged to retain the idea that the behavior of star systems depends, if only in part, upon the celestial charge level of the space through which they pass. It seems as if this electric charge is contained not only by material residing in the space (stars, atoms, and electrons) but also, in part, as a charge embedded in the space itself, what we shall call a space infra-charge. Literally, the space infra-charge means that a vacuum (empty space) contains normally unavailable electric charges (here electrons) which generate the structure of that space and affect the behavior and properties of all matter occupying the space. {S : Notes on Chapter 3} Notes on Chapter 3 20. Incidentally, the Universe, conventionally asserted to be held together by gravity, is said to be 10 26 meters in radius; the atom, admittedly bound by electricity, has a radius of 10 -10 meters. These radii are curiously in the ratio of 10 36 to 1. 21. In practice, the parallax is half of the annual angular displacement of the star, and the base of the triangle, now rightangled, is one astronomical unit. 22. The color index is determined by measuring the brightness of the star through two or more colored filters and comparing the intensities obtained with calculated laboratory profiles of intensity versus wave-lengths for various temperatures. 23. We choose this value from a list of several, spread between 167 ñ 30 km/ s and 300 ñ 25 km/ s, the values obtained using different samples of celestial objects (Mihalas and Routly). The choice can never be free of theoretical bias, nor of indeterminate bulk velocities possessed by the sample objects. Here, the choice is a compromise between accepted values for the galactic rotation (Menzel et al.) and the higher value derived from measurements within the Local Group of Galaxies (Mihalas and Routly). 24. Negative declinations indicate co-ordinates south of the celestial equator. 25. Because of galactic rotation the cone is bent slightly. Over one million years the path bends eastwards by a shade less than one degree , corresponding to a sideward displacement of 15 light years. 26. See ahead to Table 6 ( p. 124) for a summary of the periods during Solaria Binaria's lifetime. 27. Given a small error in the solar motion (which is uncertain because the Sun's drift velocity, especially in the direction of the Galaxy's rotation, is variously reported with a twenty percent range), It path could be veering somewhat, either upwards or downwards relative to the path we have calculated. If so in this period the Sun might have become significantly brighter, or alternatively, remained much fainter than at present. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 4: } {T SUPER URANUS AND THE PRIMITIVE PLANETS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER FOUR SUPER URANUS AND THE PRIMITIVE PLANETS About one million years ago, our Sun, then a Super Sun, underwent a nova eruption because of a sudden or unendurable change in electrical conditions. Solaria Binaria was instantly born. The Sun fissioned and in a huge blossoming cloud there would have been found a diminished Sun. Within a concentration of gases from the old sun would occur an admixture of chunks of the old Sun's interior material (nucleus), including a body that became the binary partner, which we here call Super Uranus. Between the new Sun and Super Uranus lingered other fragments of the fission and great quantities of the material that were to be absorbed into the planets. This impressive electrical quantavolution occurred in a matter of hours. The separation of the two bodies increased rapidly. In electrical and chemical terms, we begin to detail this quantavolution. The normal flow of electricity between a star (the cavity) and the surrounding space is inward as is shown in Figure 6. The original Super Sun was such a star transacting quietly with the electron-rich space around it. The Super Sun became unstable, as outlined in Chapter Three, when its galactic journey carried it into a less electron-rich region [28] . Here, the enrichment presumably was rapid and of great magnitude, producing a quantavolution. The resulting nova, which is an explosion of electrons that forces (requires) a material accompaniment, created Solaria Binaria. The Sun for a short time was relatively too electron-rich. In an explosive expansion the binary was born, not just from the solar atmosphere but also from the refractory materials normally hidden within its interior. Figure 6. Electron Flow from Surrounding Space into a Star-cavity The Sun and the other stars represent electron deficient regions within the Galaxy. These regions, cavities as we call them, transact with the space around them gaining electrons during the lifetime of their central stars. When they become filled the stars they contain cease to exist. The first state of Solaria Binaria is shown in Figure 7 below. The nova explosion had propelled what temporarily was excess charge away from the Sun. This of course would be illusory, for the Sun, by its continued existence, remained a region of relative electron deficiency. Thus, the initial dismemberment of the original Super Sun quickly halted: the expansion of the => plenum of material, now surrounding the Sun, ceased both because of the Sun's need for electrons and because the charged surrounding medium continued moving because the charged surrounding medium continued moving in upon the cavity. The boundary of the plenum shown above is actually a quantitative concept to denote the region where the outward pressure created by the charged Solaria Binaria is equal to the inward pressure normally produced by the Sun's galactic cosmic transaction. At birth the electrical state of Solaria Binaria was radially layered. The system can best be described in terms of the local charge density of both the material and of the space into which the material was ejected in the eruption. The highest relative charge density existed at the perimeter of the plenum. Inwards this density decreased. The fragments ejected from the Sun, the debris forming the planets and Super Uranus, had progressively higher charge densities than the Sun, which had the least charge density in the system. The Sun seeks its lost charge. The easiest way to get that charge is to launch into the plenum electron-deficient atoms (ions). The proximity of super Uranus distorted greatly what otherwise would have been a radial flow of ions (as in the original transaction between the Super Sun and the Galaxy). A strong electrical connection coupled the Sun and Super Uranus; a lesser connection joined the Sun to the plenum, as shown in Figure 8 (see Technical Note E). This connection involved an inward flow of charge through the plenum. The charge flowed inwards either by direct transport of electrons or by indirect electron transport accomplished through the outward flow of electron deficient atoms (ions) (see Technical Note B). Figure 7. The Birth of Solaria Binaria At its birth Solaria Binaria was embedded at the center of a plenum filling a sac of electron deficient matter. Electron flow into the sac from the Galaxy was augmented by electron redistribution within the plenum and among the components of the binary system. The strongest electrical transaction occurred between the principals; accompanying this electrical flow, and highly influenced by it, was the transfer of material from one of the principals to the other. Elsewhere, close binary systems exist where the flow is form the companion to the primary (Cowley et al., 1977, p471); more common is the flow from the primary to the companion (Mitton, p85, p100). The amount of flow and its direction would depend upon the distance between and the => specific charge ratio on the principals. We favor the flow of ions and gas from the Sun to Super Uranus. Since we often cannot resolve the principals into separate stars, designation of one as the primary and the other as companion is somewhat arbitrary. The choice usually is dictated by theory. Figure 8. Material Flow Coupling the Sun, Super Uranus, and the Electrified Plenum. The creation of the Sun's companion, Super Uranus, greatly distorted the electrical flow between the electron deficient Sun and the Galaxy. The Sun's daughter, Super Uranus, like its parent, was short of electrons compared to galactic space outside the sac. The electrical flow coupling both the two stars and the stars with the Galaxy caused and directed a significant material exchange between the pair of stars. Ionized gas atoms would be induced to flow between the principals. This flow of countermoving electrons and electron-deficient atoms would constitute a strong electrical current. As a consequence an intense magnetic field would be generated surrounding the current. This magnetic field would pinch the flowing ions producing a relatively narrow electrical flow channel (Zirin, p481). Collisions between neutral and electrified atoms would transfer the influence of the magnetic field (which affects only the electron-deficient atoms directly) to all of the gas between the principals; the result is a magnetic bottle (see Arp, pp213-5). Figure 9. Flow of Material Between the Sun and Super Uranus under the Influence of a Self-generated Magnetic Field Electrically charged material flowing between the Sun and Super Uranus generated a strong magnetic field about the axis between the two stars. The effect of the magnetic field was to squeeze all material flow into a thin tube joining the stars. So constrained, the charged matter flow constituted a potent electric discharge, the arc, through the gases and matter of the plenum. From the solar wind protons moving past the Earth, Juergens (1977c, p28) has calculated the current flowing away from the Sun in a sheet localized close to the ecliptic plane. If this same ion current was once flowing through the electrical channel, then the magnetic field generated was several thousand gauss in strength. Such a field would adequately constrain most of the gases producing a gaseous column or axis between the two stars. Material has been found along the interstellar axis in several binary systems (Batten, 1973a, p5). The absence of an appreciable interplanetary magnetic field despite the magnitude of the electric current represented by today's solar wind is understandable in terms of a planar current sheet model. Figure 10 Magnetic Toroidal Field Produced by Solar Wind Current Sheet Assuming that the solar wind is concentrated about the plane of the orbiting planets, the outward flow of ions from the Sun would represent a sheet of electric current. A significant magnetic field, curved upon itself to form a doughnut (a torus), would be generated by the existence of the solar current sheet. This toroidal magnetic field should be found in the space above and below the space occupied by the solar wind. As shown in Figure 10, the solar wind sheet produces opposed toroidal (doughnut- shaped) magnetic regions above and below the planetary plane of motion. In the region between the toroids the magnetic fields generated by the radially diverging ions act so as to cancel out one another as in Figure 11. The vector sum of the magnetic intensity cancels between the parallel flowing ions but survives on their perimeter, leaving the postulated toroidal field. So, the regions above and below the Sun could be strongly magnetic, while interplanetary space so far explored lies outside of the toroidal field region, and has been shown to be almost devoid of magnetism. The existence of the magnetic toroid above and below the Sun may be responsible for the planarity of today's planetary region and the enhancement of the solar wind flow in that plane. The Sun's rotation began consequent to the nova discharge creating Super Uranus, Super Uranus thereafter wheeled about the Sun in close orbit. The magnetic field produced by their electrical transaction was instrumental in locking the rotation of the Sun to the motion of Super Uranus about the Sun. Strongly coupled together the pair rotated looking like an ever expanding but otherwise rigid dumb-bell. The gases and the planets as they formed remained trapped along the gaseous electrified axis between the principals. Figure 11. Magnetic Field Surrounding Several Flowing Ions (Click on the figure to view an enlarged version. Each moving ion (or electron) comprises a unit of electrical current. It generates a magnetic field which appears in the plane perpendicular to its motion. When electrical charges flow radially, as does the ion wind from the Sun, only a tiny magnetic field is apparent in the region between the flowing ions because the magnetic effect of each ion is cancelled by that of its neighbors. A significant magnetic indication of the electrical flow is found only along the perimeter of the current sheet produced by the radial flow of the ions. Plavec notes that the companion, if less massive than the Sun, can always be expected to rotate in synchronism with orbital motion. He states, also, that for all binary systems synchronism of rotation and revolution seem to occur for orbital periods shorter than ten days. For longer periods the synchronism falls except as postulated above. Batten (1967, p36) notes that some semi-detached binary systems, particularly the Algol group, have primaries which rotate appreciably faster than would be expected for orbital synchronism [29] . We see these systems as a later stage of evolution of the binary. Solaria Binaria did not detach in this way until after the Saturnian period (see ahead, Chapter Fourteen). The evolution of Solaria Binaria was such that the two principals were slowly driven apart, in part by the momentum of the flow of mass from one to the other and in part from increased repulsion caused by the growing level of electric charge in the whole system by the accumulation of galactic electrons. All the while the angular momentum (spin) within the system was being transferred from the primary to its companion. At fission the Sun could have had over 80 percent of the angular momentum. The evolved binary (today's Solar System) left less than one percent of the angular momentum in the Sun. If matter was transferred mechanically from the heavier Sun to the lighter orbiting Super Uranus, the spin of the binary would decrease, but if the transferred matter is electrically driven, acceleration would be expected to accompany the transfer, thereby potentially increasing the spin of the binary. Even if no increase in spin occurs and even with a slight slowdown of spin, angular momentum is slowly lost by the Sun and gained by its companion and the primitive planets as the electric transfer continues. The pulling apart of the principals was reflected in an increase in the binary's period of revolution. That is, Solaria Binaria wheeled more slowly about its center. There is a significant relation between the period of revolution of binaries and the observed "surface temperature" of the primary star. Certain stars called => early- type by astronomers tend to have companions with shorter periods (Russell et al., 1927, pp703ff). In its earlier stages, Solaria Binaria would have looked to a distant observer as a close binary with an unseen companion. We imply that the Sun was an early-type star but not in the usual sense of the term star. Within the => sac, where the two stars and the Earth were located, the energy flow may always have been similar to what we observe now. However the outer parts of the sac were transacting intensively with the cosmos and thus were radiating so as to appear markedly hotter. The perimeter of Solaria Binaria, then, would have appeared to radiate as an early-type star and not like the Sun does now (see ahead to Figure 21). Its period of light variation, radiation emitted, and flow of mass would have attracted the attention of astronomers elsewhere to Solaria Binaria. Some curious "age disparities" exist between principals of binary systems. In the Sirius star system, a young => main sequence star is orbited by a less massive old white dwarf star (see Kopal, 1938). The B-emission stars (hot, very rapidly rotating main sequence stars surrounded by a shell of gas) are often spectroscopic binaries whose companions orbit in about ten days. The companion is usually invisible and believed to be a highly => evolved star relative to the primary (Maraschi et al.). The highly evolved component admittedly often has so little mass that a nuclear synthetic evolution (see => nucleosynthesis) could no have aged it so rapidly (Kraft). Both the age disparities and the size anomalies disappear if electrical evolution is considered. It is noteworthy that many of the interesting close-binary systems involve an unseen companion. The primaries in these systems range from very hot-type O-stars to very-cool-type M-stars. The sizes and masses within these star systems are inferred conventionally from the theory of evolution for the thermonuclear star (see => thermonuclear fusion). We do not agree with such an interpretation of this evidence. We will not pursue the stages of early evolution of Solaria Binaria here (for that, see Part Two). The first aware men saw the skies in the => Age of Urania about thirteen thousand current years before the present (de Grazia, 1981). There were no humans capable of comprehending Solaria Binaria before it began to break up at the end of an Earth age that we shall be calling Pangea. Super Uranus was first revealed to humans as a luminous object about twice the size of the Sun we observe today. The Earth was then located about two-thirds of the distance from the Sun to Super Uranus, because it was still electromagnetically bound to the axis between the stars. The objects found within the inner regions of galaxies seemingly orbit in this way - and probably for the same reason. With such a configuration the Sun, if visible, would have been seen from the Earth's southern hemisphere only and would appear 2.5 times larger than Super Uranus, which in its turn was visible only from the northern hemisphere. The hemispheres referred to here are not those inscribed on the Earth - globes of today. They refer to the ancient references to the sky gods and their places. The Earth moved with its "north" locked towards Super Uranus (see ahead to Figure 18). No other major gaseous planet was in existence at this time. As the solid-wheel binary evolved, the Sun eventually was separated from Super Uranus by 105 gigameters (about 0.7 astronomical units). Before the next great quantavolution the primitive planets Mars, Earth, Apollo, and Mercury ended up between the two principals in the region between 61 and 96 gigameters from the Sun. At such separation this would this would bring the planets Mars and Mercury closer to Earth by factors of four and six respectively. Even so these planets would produce visible discs which were only about one twenty- seventh the size of today's Moon. If they could be seen (which we doubt) they would still be observed almost as points of light in the sky [30] . The planets were originally debris from the Super Sun nova. They traveled out in the trail of Super Uranus, held in the electric and gaseous flow. They settled into their original positions rather than moving on because they were electrically less negative than Super Uranus. They distributed themselves in their magnetic cage along the axis in accord with the principle of maximum mutual repulsion (elsewhere known as "the principle of least interaction action"; see Ovenden, 1974). Several cosmogonies involve processes occurring within a binary star system. Gunn proposes that planets arise from the break-up of a rotationally unstable star, the same process by which he accounts for the formation of a binary star system from a single star. Lyttleton (1936, p559) visualizes a process by which planets form during an encounter of a star with two other stars; for such an encounter between three stars to be likely the stars must formerly be members of a bound system of stars, a triple star system. Bruce (1944, p13), like Gunn, sees the process of planet formation as a special case of fission of one star into a binary. From the beginning Solaria Binaria was enveloped in a cloud of solar material (gases and solids). As the binary evolved this sac became extended along the lengthening axis from Sun to Super Uranus. Compressed by the magnetic field generated by the flowing electrified gases, a stable gaseous tube surrounded the planets; indeed these gases pervaded the entire planetary region, enveloping all of the planets in a single sac of gases. Within this dense gaseous sac, the contents of which the ancients called the aether [31] , and we will call the plenum, the planets could receive biologically necessary temperatures from the axial electrical discharge connecting the Sun with Super Uranus (de Grazia, 1981). If today's aircraft had existed then, they might have flown regularly among the planets. The approximate size of the gaseous tube within which the Earth and the other planets moved was at most the diameter of the Sun, and at the least a significant fraction of the diameter of Super Uranus. This tube confined the plenum which allowed life to develop and thrive on all of the planets of Solaria Binaria. {S : Notes on Chapter 4} Notes on Chapter 4 28. The effect would be to make the star's surface suddenly quite electron-rich. Under such conditions the => cosmic pressure cannot hold the star's material together. The result is an explosive expansion. We cannot dismiss the possibility that a galactic electron storm suddenly enveloped the Super Sun, charging its surface to instability. 29. In cases of anomalous primary rotation, the anomaly is generally detected because the spectrum lines of the primary star are unusually bright. This line broadening could be, as well, evidence of electrical fields within the star's atmosphere (Stark effect). 30. The resolution of the eye is at best 20 arc-seconds; for night vision resolution is much worse than this (Greenberg, L. H.). 31. See Aristotle (Astronomy), where he argues that the outermost regions consist of an elementary kind of matter which is distinct from the other elementary substances (earth, air, fire and water). Also, in Meteorology, he notes that Anaxagoras thought that the upper regions were burning hot. Anaxagoras called the substance which prevails in those parts Aether. Aristotle adds that the ancients assumed that the aether is an eternal substance whose motion never ceases. It is like nothing else we know. There was controversy among the ancients as to whether the term aether (GK. aither) is derived from aeithein, " to run always", or from aethein, "to burn". Aristotle favors the former (Gershenson and Greenberg), although Anaxagoras and modern etymologists prefer the latter. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 5: } {T THE SAC AND ITS PLENUM} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER FIVE THE SAC AND ITS PLENUM The original Super Sun, prior to its nova, was accumulating electrons from the Galaxy consistent with the demands of the environment through which it was passing. As we have explained earlier, the Super Sun became too electro-negative and expelled material violently into its surrounding space. This material could not escape; its expulsion was opposed both by the post-nova Sun and by the Galaxy. It thus formed and filled a sac surrounding the newly created Solaria Binaria. In the sac was the whole system of Solaria Binaria; the Sun, Super Uranus, the primitive planets, and the plenum (of gases and solids) of solar origin that nurtured the planets. As the binary widens, the sac becomes conical in shape, narrowing from the size of the Sun at one end to about the size of Super Uranus at the other. A system of similar appearance has been postulated for the binary AM Herculis (Liller, p352). Wickramasinghe and Bessell describe gas flow patterns in X-ray-emitting binary systems. There, one may note a similarity in the shape of their pattern of maximum obscuration to the cone of gases proposed in this work. Viewed from the outside the ancient plenum would have been opaque to light. Not so with the gas of the Earth's atmosphere today, which is eight kilometers thick if the atmosphere is considered as a column of gas of constant density [32] . This atmospheric layer is of trivial thickness compared to the radius of the Earth, yet its importance to the environment is unquestionable. Even this negligible atmospheric layer removes 18.4 per cent of the incoming sunlight, mostly by diverting it from its original direction of travel. Some of this scattered light returns to space, but most of it is redirected several times to produce the blue sky so familiar to us. Atmospheric scatter is enhanced near sunset when the incoming light traverses an atmospheric column tens of times longer than near noon. The setting Sun is notably fainter and its color redder because of the increased scatter. If the atmospheric column were as little as 1280 kilometers thick (at the present surface air density) all of the sunlight would be deflected from its incoming direction. Light would still be seen but only after scattering several times; no discernible source could be identified with the light. So it was in the days of Solaria Binaria. To be precise, if, in the last days of Super Uranus, this body were about thirty gigameters from Earth and if Super Uranus was then as bright per square centimeter of surface as today's Sun, it would not have been directly visible unless the gas density in the plenum was close to that deduced today for the Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of eighty kilometers. To see the more distant Sun this density would have to be decreased another fourfold [33] . In the Age of Urania, Super Uranus was located about as far from the Sun as the orbit of the planet Venus today. This would provide the plenum with a volume of about 10 20 cubic kilometers. If the plenum contained as much as one per cent of the atoms in the present Sun, the gas density would be several times that found at the base of the Earth's atmosphere today. Neither star would be seen directly, and only a dim diffused light could reach the planetary surfaces. As the binary evolved, the plenum came to contain an increased electrical charge; it expanded, leaving less and less gas in the space between the principals. Thus it became gradually more transparent. Astronomers see diluting plenum gases elsewhere in evolving binary systems. Batten (1973a, p10), discussing matter flow within binary systems, favors gas densities of the order of 10 13 particles per cubic centimeter. Warner and Nather propose a much higher density for one system (U Geminorum-a dwarf nova system) where they postulate a gas disc with 6 x 10 17 electrons per cubic centimeter. Unless all the gas is ionized, the neutral gas density would be higher than the calculated electron density. The gas densities that they mention are comparable to those necessary to allow the early humans to discern the first celestial orbits. In the earlier stages of Solaria Binaria the plenum was impenetrable to an outside observer; all detected radiation came from the surface layers of the cone-shaped sac, an area up to fifty-five times the surface of the Sun. The luminosity of the sac would arise from the transaction between in flowing galactic electrons and the gases on the perimeter of the sac. The plenum, at formation, was electron-rich relative to the stars and the planetary nuclei centered within it. These latter electron-deficient bodies promptly initiated a transaction to obtain more electrons by expelling electron-deficient atoms into the volume of the plenum. The charge differences within the sac were modulated with time. In other words, the plenum was losing electrons from its perimeter to its center. In response, the size of the sac collapsed under cosmic pressure. In time this charge-redistribution might have diminished the volume of the sac by as much as tenfold, compressing the cone of gases into a cylinder or column of smaller diameter. Running along the axis between the Sun and Super Uranus was an electrical discharge joining the two principals. Moving with this electrical flow was matter from the Sun that was bound for Super Uranus. Some of this matter would be intercepted by and incorporated into the primitive planets. Induced by the electrical flow a magnetic field was generated which encircled the axis and radially pinched the gases. The pinch effect is self-limiting in that the more the current, the more the pinch. An infinite current in theory pinches the current carriers into an infinitesimal volume, extinguishing it (Blevin, 1964a, p214). Material would be extruded at both ends of the pinched flow by the pressure induced in the pinch. This circular magnetic field, a magnetic tube, would induce randomly moving ions of the plenum to circulate along the field direction. The circulating motion of the ions eventually would be transferred by collision to the neutral gases. The result would be that in the outer regions flow would be dominated by revolution around the circumference of the tube. Everything here would eventually revolve uniformly. The innermost regions of the column were dominated by flow along the axis. Considerable transaction occurred at the junction of these two separately moving regions of the column, the central and the peripheral. Some luminosity would arise from the transaction of electrons and ions deep within the magnetic tube. The ions electrically accelerated towards Super Uranus were neutralized at some point along their trajectory. At neutralization X-rays were produced. Some of the ions would be neutralized upon collision within the magnetic tube, most upon reaching Super Uranus; but, because of the pinch phenomenon noted above, some ions would be extruded and neutralized near the perimeter of the sac behind Super Uranus. Despite the high gas density in the original plenum, X-ray emission would be observable from the outside. That such is the case elsewhere is indicated by Brennan. As the plenum diluted with time (in a manner to be discussed in Chapter Eleven) the outside observer would see deeper and deeper into the system, and eventually all of the X-ray emission would come from the interface between the magnetic tube and the surface of Super Uranus. As in other binary systems, a partial eclipse of the main X-ray source would then be seen as the dumb-bell revolved (see Tananbaum and Hutchings for data on other binaries). Matsuoka notes a positive correlation between X-ray and optical emission in binaries. Radio-emitting regions surround many binary systems (Wickramasinghe and Bessell). Spangler and his colleagues claim that radio emission from binary stars is noted for stars that are over-luminous. The radio emission is generated by electrons transacting with the magnetic field associated with the inter-star axis. That this emission is enhanced when a stronger transaction occurs between the stars causing the over-luminosity is understandable, using our model. At the perimeter of the plenum, optical effects would show to an outside observer an apparent absorption shell associated with the hidden binary within. Like many of the close-binary systems, the stars of Solaria Binaria would not be resolvable in a distant telescope, but the binary nature of the system could be known because observable differences would be produced as the dumb-bell revolved. Gas-containing binary systems as described here, and elsewhere (Batten, 1973b, pp157ff, pp176ff), represent the stake of Solaria Binaria at various epochs, and especially in its last days. As the binary system collapsed, the plenum thinned, allowing direct observation of light produced by sources inside the sac. The gas disc, theoretically implied to surround the stars of other binaries, is waning in the late translucent plenum. The gas streams detected flowing between certain binary components are present in Solaria Binaria along what we call the electrical arc. The gas clouds, whose absorption spectrum leads us to believe that they envelop entire binary systems, correspond to the perimeter of the early opaque plenum. As Solaria Binaria evolved, each of the classes of circumstellar matter noted by astronomers became observable in their turn. Inferable from the above is the degree of visibility from the Earth's surface, or from any point of the planetary belt within the plenum. Overall there is a translucence. Objects near at hand might be distinguished, certainly after the half- way mark in the million-year history of Solaria Binaria was past. Sky bodies were indistinguishable from Earth. With passing time, the level of light would increase. In the beginning, the light is scattered and the sky is a dim white. As the plenum thinned electrically, the sky bodies would emerge as diffuse reddish patches. During this process, the sky would brighten and become more blue. Thus, as they emerge, Super Uranus and the Sun brighten and whiten while the sky becomes darker and bluer. At a time related to the changes soon to be discussed, around fourteen thousand years ago, the Earth is suddenly peopled by humans, and one may investigate whether any memories remain of the plenum. There seem to be several legendary themes that correlate with our deductions about visibility. Seemingly, aboriginal legends describe the heavens as hard, heavy, marble-like and luminous. Earliest humans were seeing a vault, a dome [34] . Probably in retrospect, to the heaven was ascribed the human qualities of a robe or covering, and, by extension, part of an anthropomorphic god. Thus, the Romans saw Coelus, the Chinese T'ien, the Hindus Varuna, and the Greeks Ouranos. Vail (1905/ 1972) presents ample evidence that day and night were uncertain and that the heavens were continuously translucent. When Hindu myth says that "the World was dark and asleep until the Great => Demiurge appeared", we construe the word "dark" as non-bright relative to the sunlit sky that came later. Heaven and Earth were close together, were spouses, according to Greek and other legends. The global climate of the Earth in the plenum was wet; all is born from the insemination of the fecund Earth by the Sky, said some legends. There was so much moisture in the plenum that, although the ocean basins were not yet structured, the first proto-humans might confuse the waters of the firmament above with the earth-waters. In some legendary beginnings, a supreme deity had dispatched a diver to bring out Earth from the great primordial waters of chaos (Long, 1963). The earliest condition was referred to as a chaos, not in the present sense of turbulent clouds, disorder, and disaster, but in the sense of lacking precise indicators of order, such as a cycle that would let time be measured. T'ien is the Chinese Heaven, universally present chaos without form. The gods who later give men time, such as Kronos, are specifically celebrated therefore (Plato). Sky bodies were invisible. Legends of creation do not begin with a bright sky filled with beings, but speak of a time before this. When the first sky-body observations are reported, they are of falling bodies. The earliest fixed heavenly body in legend is not the Sun, the Moon, the planets, nor the stars, but Super Uranus, as will be described later on. Nor was the radiant perimeter of the sac visible. It lay far beyond discernment as such, and was in any case practically indistinguishable from its luminescence. The electrical arc would have been visible directly only in its decaying days, being likewise sheathed from sight by the dense atmosphere of the tube. That the arc or axis appeared along with the sky bodies before its radiance expired is to be determined in the next chapter, where its composition and operation are discussed. {S : Notes on Chapter 5} Notes on Chapter 5 32. The actual atmosphere does not have a constant density throughout its volume. If condensed to constant density it would become an 8-km column of gas at the atmospheric density found presently at the bottom of the atmosphere. 33. The retention of a more dense, thin atmospheric skin surrounding the Earth (and the other planets) would not affect the visibility of the binary components more adversely than does the Earth's atmosphere today. 34. Vail (1905) collected ancient expressions from diverse cultures testifying to perceptions of the heavens as "the Shining Whole", "the Brilliant All", the "firmament", "the vault", "Heaven the Concealer". Heaven was the Deity who came down crushingly on Earth, and the heavens are said to "roll away" and to open to discharge the Heavenly Hosts; great rivers are said to flow out of Heaven. In other places we read of the gods chopping and piercing holes in the celestial ceiling, of a Boreal Hole that is an "Island of Stars", a "star opening", "Mimer's Well". Heaven was perceived to become ever more impalpable and tenuous with time, so that not only the memory of it but also its names, adjectives and metaphors lost their strength of meaning. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 6: } {T THE ELECTRICAL AXIS AND ITS GASEOUS RADIATION} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER SIX THE ELECTRICAL AXIS AND ITS GASEOUS RADIATION The binary electrical system was distinguished by an electrical flow between the principals. This was a highly energetic discharge which generated chemical, and probably nuclear, transformations among the gaseous constituents of the plenum. It provided the heat and energy for life to emerge. The gaseous plenum initially seems to have contained an excess of hydrogen. The combination of electrical arc with hydrogen-rich gases favored the quick production of organic molecules and of biological systems (Miller and Urey) within the plenum. An electrical current flowing along the axis of the binary of the order of 10 14 amperes (100 => teraamperes) would produce sufficient magnetic field intensity to constrain the plenum gases up to 64 000 kilometers from the axis (see ahead to Chapter Seven). Electrical breakdown can occur in dense gases where the electric field intensity is of the order of 25 kilovolts per centimeter (Schr”der, p90). The longer the electrical column the greater the potential difference required between the principals in order for breakdown to occur. Once breakdown occurs the voltage drop at a place decreases from kilovolts per centimeter to tenths of a volt per centimeter [35] . Along the discharge column the voltage drop varies considerably. It is greatest near the electrodes and is very small at most points in the body of the discharge [36] . It is difficult to estimate the energy that would be released by a discharging arc unless the voltage drop across the arc is known. Since we do not know this value for Solaria Binaria, we must define the arc's parameters in terms of other criteria. One must be preoccupied with the thermal constraints upon the Earth and its developing biosphere. It is known that transverse heat flow is hindered by the presence of a strong magnetic field (Kapitza, p962). Also the gases insulated, diffused, and rendered uniform the intermittent blasts of the arc by the time the radiation reached the region occupied by the planets. Nevertheless, the closer the Earth to the arc, the more energy it would have received. For some time the Earth gained its energy almost entirely from the arc source. It is reasonable to assume that Earth's temperature must soon have devolved below 325 K. If the Earth-to-arc distance is chosen to be fixed at 64 000 km from the arc, the Earth is irrotational with respect to the arc, and it absorbs all incoming energy (see ahead to Chapter Thirteen); the heat flowing away from the binary arc cannot much exceed 2.6 X 10 14 watts per kilometer of arc. Such an arc would dissipate at least 3.1 X 10 22 watts within the sac. Given the constraints to radial heat flow cited above, the actual arc could have been much more energetic than we calculate here. Thus, the discharge should have produced a small region of hot gas centered along the electrical axis. Surrounding the gases of the discharge was a large opaque mantle of cool gases. Within the cooler gases were the electrically charged planets, which had been repelled from the arc but caught up in the magnetic tube (see ahead to Chapter Seven). In terrestrial lightning the period of electrical build-up (leader process) compared to the time of discharge (return stroke) is in the ratio of hundreds to one. The recovery time before the next stroke has built up is often 800 times the duration of the stroke. Thus it would be reasonable to conceive of the Solaria Binaria arc as discharging about one-thousandth of the time. A lightning-bolt leader moves about 300 kilometers per second. Thus late in the history of Solaria Binaria it would have taken about 350 000 seconds [37] for the leader to work its way along the 105 gigameters between the principals. The return discharge propagates faster, taking only 2190 seconds or 36 1/ 2 minutes. Did this arc, so necessary to life, persist even into the time of human awareness? As Super Uranus receded from the Sun, and the planets redistributed themselves farther apart in its wake, it is logical to assume that the intensity of the arc declined and its flow became intermittent. Hence, at around thirteen thousand years before the present an observer on Earth would have seen a great flickering and coiling axis or column of fire. Solaria's electrical binary connection differs from a terrestrial lightning stroke of today in that it involves many concurrent (but not necessarily simultaneously launched) arc channels. A close analogy would be the granular cells seen at the bottom of the discharge channels between the Galaxy and the surface of today's Sun. In this latter case the difference between the arc in Solaria Binaria and the radially directed discharges on today's Sun is the absence of a closely spaced non- electrically neutral companion body. This proximity, which was present in Solaria Binaria, induced a continual series of electrical explosions to be conducted along the electrical tube joining the closest localities of the surfaces of the two stars. The plenum gases at this time, especially near the arc, were dense enough to be opaque to radiation. A discharge that is opaque appears to radiate from its surface rather than from the whole volume of gas. In consequence energy flows diffusely away from the central discharge into the surrounding gas, some as radiant energy, some as the flow of excited matter, some by thermal conduction (by kinetic energy exchange in collision). Collisions will act so as to maintain an outward flow of energy (Somerville, p42). Usually ions and electrons diffuse radially from the column. Later they recombine giving up the energy of ionization to the gas. Also, excited atoms, especially those which are long-lived, flow away from the column carrying internal excitation energy which they can release when deactivated by a collision with a non-excited atom or molecule. The relative importance of radiation when contrasted with conduction for redistributing the arc's energy will depend upon the composition of the gas and the gas pressure. Some gases, like hydrogen and helium, are not efficient radiators of visible light. However, for all gases, high pressures make radiation more important than conduction in the transfer of energy. In the laboratory, electric-arc current flows are of the order of 10 amperes per square centimeter. If such an arc were to flow between the early Sun and its close companion, Super Uranus, it need strike only a rather small area of the latter. A discharge column, if encompassing an area of only 10 13 square centimeters, would produce an arc current of 100 teraamperes. In an electric arc the gases "burn" [38] in a relatively narrow column. The higher the gas pressure the narrower the discharge column and the more difficult it becomes to sustain a uniform current through the discharge (Somerville, p19). Strong arc discharges, such as lightning channels, seem to bend into a helical shape. Such bending seems to generate a condition within the arc which can terminate the discharge (Blevin, 1964b, p473, Somerville, p54). "Non-electrical" gradients in the conducting electrified gases are usually offered as explanation for the curving of the discharge channel. These "mechanical" drifts set up within electrical discharges are probably better explained as electrical drifts, but neither explanation goes very far at present. Revolution of the gases around the longitudinal axis of laboratory discharge columns tends to stabilize the discharges [39] . When they do, the rotating gases are said to create a radial "gravitational" field (Somerville, p20). Similar vortical stabilization is noted in rotating air; it is suggested in tornadoes where almost continuous vortical lightning activity occurs (Chalmers, p340). The rotating gases surrounding and driven by the magnetic tube in Solaria Binaria would act to keep the electric discharge going when it otherwise would have gone out. In the laboratory, high current discharges are so unstable that continuous operation is not easily maintained. The pinch effect usually extinguishes the discharge. With the current removed, magnetic field relaxation occurs, so that the hot electrified gases begin to diffuse away, cooling the discharge column. Electrical forces quickly re-establish the current, stopping the outward flow of hot matter. So it was too in Solaria Binaria; the arc pulsed regularly responding to some natural rhythm between the forces leading to extinction and the forces promoting resurrection. High gas densities favor brief, frequently recurring, pulses of arcs (Somerville p55). Could this mechanism be the origin of the regular pulses of radiation observed in celestial objects called => pulsars? As the gas density decreases, the arc's pulsing frequency would decline; pulsars show a slowing of the pulse rate with time (Hewish, p1083) [40] . The electric arc operating in Solaria Binaria is a cosmic discharge of long duration. Bruce, in the course of seventeen letters about Cosmic Electrical Discharges (1958-1964), has documented examples of smaller arcs of shorter duration and of longer arcs lasting to millions of years. We concur in his conclusion that electric discharges on a cosmic scale explain many phenomena observed in the astronomical realm. Bruce has convinced us that only scale differentiates lightning discharges, observed regularly in the Earth's troposphere, from solar flares, periodic discharges in the giant envelopes of gases surrounding certain variable stars, and the enormous eruptions moving through the entire volumes of certain "active" galaxies (see, 1966a). He proposed that an electrical discharge liberating energy comparable to that ascribed to the => quasars was capable of transforming elliptical galaxies into spirals. It would seem that the quasar phenomenon is in fact a galaxy in transformation. This is the grandest of the cosmic lightning discharges; in its wake the spiral arms of the galaxy form with their "metal-rich" stars. Bruce speculated that in the enormous temperatures generated in these discharges, nucleosynthesis transmutes smaller atoms into larger ones. It is this latter possibility that leads us to postulate that nuclear transformations were accomplished in the arc of Solaria Binaria. If they were, they probably occurred most vigorously at the beginning, when the discharge current was greatest. Despite the many problems with laboratory experimentation in this area, some supportive work has taken place. Using a pulsed high current arc discharge, Russian workers produced beams of 40 kiloelectron volt => deuterons at instabilities in the discharge (Somerville, pp55ff). This achievement is consonant with certain proposed nucleosynthetic processes that occur in low energy flares above star surfaces (Canal). Zirin gives a mechanism for the generation of solar flares resembling processes which might occur within regions of a pinched electrical arc. Even more closely related to the situation in Solaria Binaria is Joss' speculation that X-ray burst sources result from thermonuclear flashes. X-ray burst sources are episodic; in some, bursts are much more frequent. Many burst sources can be inactive for weeks. X-ray sources, steady and bursters, are associated with binary star systems. If, particularly, the burst sources are due to thermonuclear reactions in close binary star systems, then we can be confident that these reactions occurred in Solaria Binaria and that they were instrumental in shaping its chemical and biological structure [41] . Inasmuch as these thermonuclear events were part of the earlier history of the electrical axis, no human would have observed this part of his ultimate creation. The last chapter mentioned what the earliest true humans would have generally perceived, but it postponed treating their special experience with the electrical axis. A correlation of the electrical axis with early legends about a central fire may be probative. At one region of the Earth, the axis might be expected to appear as a kind of rainbow of fire or "neon-tube" glow across the sky ending at Super Uranus. In another region the arc might appear more short at the horizon and stretch to the red star. In the opposing hemisphere, the arc might be visible alone, first, and then might reach for and finally attain the Sun, with the axis blossoming at the Sun, thus "creating" it, or vice versa. The flickering of the arc, when slowed down enough to be noticeable, might resemble red coiled snakes, intertwining and crawling brokenly towards the great red god. The snake and dragon accompany very early gods and goddesses. "The Serpent of the Jupiter-type myth is always seen to be a creation of the proto-Saturn god" (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p39), that is, Uranus. The Saturnian image with snakes from India and the Chinese painting of the espoused deities, shown in Figure 12 and Figure 32, are suggestive. Serpents are among the earliest symbols of art and myth. The color red is widely used and sacred in archaic, perhaps Paleolithic Uranian times (Wreschner). However, the abundance of such symbols is countervalenced by their generality as referents. Lacking specific applications to phenomena, they are unreliable indication of the electrical axis. Certain symbols associated directly with Saturn (of the time of => Super Saturn) are also suggestive of the arc. These include the courtly long-gowned figure of the god, the tree of life (including the Christmas tree), the sacred mountain , and others (Talbott, D. N., ch. 8) that convey the image of the god atop a cone-shaped or pyramidal design on top of the World. In Iroquois legend, at the beginning of things, the Chief of Heaven, in a fit of jealousy towards his spouse, uproots the tree whose flowers illuminate the celestial world. The Sun and Moon did not exist at the time. He cast his wife, "Fertile Earth", into the hole and replaced the tree (Eliade, 1967, pp146ff). Figure 12. The Planet Saturn in Ancient Indian Art Brahma, the planet Saturn, encircled ring-like by serpents, testimony from an early time of the serpent motif in cosmogony. -- reproduced courtesy of S. I. S. Review Among the Nagdju Dayak of Borneo, the Creator couple, dwelling as birds in the tree of life, fight and damage the tree badly. Some time after the first humans are born of their efforts, the tree is destroyed (ibid, pp77ff). More closely correlative with the axis in the linguistic frame of modern science is the concept of the "Central Fire" that occupied early Greek philosophy. This has particularly descended through the fragments attributed to Philolaos, the Pythagorean (Dreyer, p40-3). Rose has thoroughly explored the material. Philolaos was the first of the secretive Pythagoreans to publish a book and his treatment by Plato leaves little doubt that he represented a considerable school of archaic science [42] . Some thirty-two attributes of the "Central Fire" are to be elicited from Philolaos and Heraclitus, as presented by Rose, all of which can be accommodated to the theory of the electrical axis of Solaria Binaria. The Central Fire was thought to have been a layer of fire above a layer of air. It is the center of the world. It is cone- shaped. It never sets, and has always the same location in the sky. It is "alone", the "highest", "unmoving", "stable", the beginning of everything. The Earth orbits around the Fire, but Earth does not rotate upon itself. Nor has the Earth any obliquity. The Fire is not counted among the numbered bodies of the celestial sphere. It is not called Saturn or by any other name except that it was termed the "Mother of the Gods". It is called the "hearth of all", the "residence" of Zeus, his "throne", his "tower", his "fortress". It is a "divine ruler and teacher. It is the "altar", the "bond", and the "measure" of nature. The Sun borrowed light from the Fire; the Sun orbits around it [43] . The Moon, planets, and stars orbit the Fire. Heraclitus reported it as "an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures". He said that "it advances and retires" (Rose, 1979, p26) [44] . Earth turns always the same face towards the Fire. A Counter- Earth exists, which is closer to the Earth than to the Fire, and obscures the Fire from view [45] . The match of Solaria Binaria's axis of "electrical fire" (as electric discharges were called until the nineteenth century) with the attributes of the Central Fire in Greek cosmogony is close. The mention of celestial bodies can be explained as reflecting later observation of some traits. {S : Notes on Chapter 6} Notes on Chapter 6 35. The voltage drop occurs about a microsecond (one-millionth of a second) after breakdown (Bruce, 1955). 36. Francis discusses conditions in the positive column of a short discharge tube. The estimate of 0.1 V/ cm given above is a simplistic linear extrapolation from the data given for the voltage drop across an entire discharge tube. Actual values in the discharge are difficult to measure (Juergens, 1977a). In the plasma away from the electrodes the voltage drop is miniscule and could be one thousand times less than the average value. 37. 4.06 present Earth days (sidereal). 38. The gases in an electric arc do not burn in the sense of combustion, rather they are excited electrically, sometimes giving off light. 39. The Gerdien arc, where stationary gas is surrounded by a rotating flow of water, shows very marked peripheral cooling, enabling a high axial temperature to be attained. 40. Besides pulsing at intervals of one second or less, pulsars also show saltatory changes, named glitches (sudden decelerations of the object astronomers presume to be rotating). In the event that the pulsations are discharge phenomena, as we presume here, the => saltations could result if sudden outbursts altered the gas density irreversibly within the discharge column. 41. See behind, Chapter Two, where we argue that thermo-nuclear fusion does not occur in the interior of the stars. Theoretical models for the interior of solar type stars lead to the conclusion that their interiors, even if compacted, would not be hot enough to initiate nuclear fusion (Milton, 1979). Notwith-standing any contradictory calculation, the paucity of neutrinos emitted by the Sun must be considered as fatal to internal nucleosynthesis in stars (Juergens, 1979a). In solar flares and the other discharges mentioned below, temperatures significantly higher are measured. Thus only in the cosmic discharges does nucleosynthesis occur. 42. Rose supposes that the Central Fire is Saturn, the planet, as it anciently functioned, with which interpretation of the data we disagree, believing that the evidence is heavily in favor of its identification with the electrical axis. 43. At a late time the Sun would appear to orbit the axis, as would Super Saturn, when these globes would appear to rotate around the point of the axis cone striking into them, as the Earth moved in its orbit around the axis. 44. The Fire might advance and retire optically as it flared on and off in its decaying state. 45. This probably is a phenomenon that followed the beginning of Earth's rotation perpendicular to the ecliptic, or refers to the era when the arc was no longer visible (see ahead to Chapter Fifteen). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 7: } {T THE MAGNETIC TUBE AND THE PLANETARY ORBITS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER SEVEN THE MAGNETIC TUBE AND THE PLANETARY ORBITS The arc along the axis between the principals created a magnetic tube, which surrounded the discharging gases (see Figure 13). A magnetic field surrounded the electrical axis and extended outward to infinity [46] . The magnetic surfaces are here represented by lines, which by their increasing thinness indicate progressively weaker magnetic fields; see Figure 14. The strength of the magnetic field at a given distance from the axis depends only upon the magnitude of the electrical current flowing between the principals. The ability of the magnetic field to constrain the motions within a gas depends upon the presence of electrified atoms. Whenever the energy density of the magnetic field at a given location exceeds the energy density of the gas [47] , the field can influence the flow of the gas and thus delineates the boundary of the magnetic tube. As noted earlier (Chapter 5) the presence of even a small fraction of an electrified gas can be sufficient to trap the neutral gases. The electric current is mainly ions moving from the Sun to Super Uranus. It would be a negligible fraction of the total gas flowing between the two stars. Most of the electrical current was confined to small channels within the region of the flowing gas. Gas continually left the Sun and entered the plenum. Figure 13. Magnetic Field Associated with an Electrical Flow An electric current is always encircled by a magnetic field. By convention the direction of the electric current is opposite to the motion of the electrons contained in that current. For a moving electron the magnetic field is directed such that, if the election flow follows the thumb of the left hand, the north magnetic pole of the magnetic field created by the electron flow is orientated around the motion in the direction of the curled left fingers. Figure 14. Decreasing Magnetic Field Strengths Surrounding Central Current at Increasing Distances The magnetic field created by an electrical flow is oriented in the plane perpendicular to the direction of the electric current. The intensity of the magnetic field depends upon the magnitude of the current and inversely upon the distance from the current to the place where the intensity is being monitored. The further one is from a given current the weaker the detected magnetic intensity. Most of this gas followed the electrical arc through the plenum (Alfv‚n, pp433-435). At Super Uranus the flow impinged upon a small area of the facing hemisphere. It is difficult to make direct observations of gas exchange within binary star systems, but some have been made. Batten (1973a, p2, p5) reports a typical value of 450 kilometers per second for the velocity of flowing gas. Using his value, we estimate that in the Age of Urania the flow may have amounted to about one-thousandth of the number of molecules in the plenum, or one hundred-millionth of the solar material per year. In the region where the discharge passes, the gas would be hottest and hence of slightly lower density than that of the surrounding region. Moving outwards, the gas would become progressively cooler. If no other factors influenced the gas, we would expect to find gas density increasing in successively cooler layers. However, since the magnetic field grows weaker moving outwards, the density of gas that is constrained also drops. Thus, the highest gas density would be found in the warm region surrounding the discharge. Here marked chemical changes within the gases of the plenum are expected. Because the electric discharge took the form of a pulsating arc, electrified gases could move radially during the relaxation cycle of the discharge. Gases of lighter mass move more rapidly than heavier gases and thus migrate more readily. Those atoms whose electrons could be most easily stripped off also migrated. This migration, coupled with chemical processes, altered the mixture in the magnetic tube until the gases now commonly found in the planetary atmospheres dominated it. Given, a 27-teraampere current flowing late in Solaria Binaria, the magnetic tube had the capacity to contain a gas density comparable to that of the Earth's present atmosphere (at surface level). The full plenum, at this same time, could have contained more than the equivalent of one hundred "Earth-masses" of gas and vapors [48] . In a magnetic field, electrified atoms are constrained and follow the magnetic field direction at each location. Motions along the field are unimpeded, but motions across the field produce forces that cause an electrified particle to revolve round the local magnetic field line [49] . Combinations of along and across motions produce a spiral path about a magnetic field line, as shown in Figure 15. Figure 15. Motion of Drifting Charged Particle in a Magnetic Field An electrically charged particle moving in a magnetic field is subjected to a force acting perpendicular to both the direction of its motion and the direction of the magnetic field. The result is that charged particles move freely along a magnetic field. The motion of the charge becomes helical because the constraint forces the particle to circle around the magnetic field while the particle translates along the field. Electrons and ions spiral in opposite directions. The circular magnetic field surrounding the axial electrical discharge was also responsible for the production of much electromagnetic radiation within the plenum. Radiation would be emitted as ions and electrons were forced to spiral around the curved magnetic field lines of the magnetic column. This radiation process is called Bremsstrahlung, or braking radiation [50] . It is emitted whenever charged particles are retarded (decelerated). By radiating, the particles lose energy to the surrounding gas. An enormous glowing gas cloud soon surrounded the arc - an => afterglow - like the great ion trails left by large meteors. As they lose energy, the spiraling particles move with smaller and smaller radii around the magnetic field line. By emitting braking radiation, motion across the magnetic field is greatly reduced. Since motion along the magnetic field is unaffected by the presence of the field, it eventually dominates. Thus the gases surrounding the discharge tended to flow around the magnetic column. The same radiation as described here is used by biologists to mutate rapidly growing species such as Drosophila, the common fruit fly. In Solaria Binaria, radiation was abundant precisely when needed to explain periods of great biological change. Figure 16. Braking Radiation Emitted by a Spiraling Electron A charged particle experiencing a force accelerates; it gains or loses energy through the acceleration. When energy is liberated (because the accelerating particle is losing energy) it appears as electromagnetic waves emitted in a direction perpendicular to the charge's acceleration. Earlier, we suggested that, in the outermost parts of the magnetic tube, material was revolving about the electric arc. This revolution began early in Solaria Binaria when the intercompanion current was greatest. The immense magnetism so generated was able to magnetize all of the contained and revolving material. Once magnetized, directed flow was assured (see Figure 13). Among this material were the electrically accreting primitive planets, also strongly magnetized. They revolved about the arc locked in direction by their magnetized structures. As the binary extended, the arc weakened, in consequence of which the magnetism around the arc declined. With diminished magnetism, more and more material could exist in a non-magnetized state. Although this material had all been magnetized earlier, the magnetization would begin to decay as soon as the surroundings allowed it. The decay of magnetized Earth rocks has been documented by Nagata. There is probably a positive correlation between the ease of magnetization of a material and the duration of its remanence. So, as the magnetic tube weakened, the now orbiting bodies would lose their magnetism differentially depending upon their composition. As we will show later, Earth's decaying magnetism of today is a remnant of its stay in the magnetic tube. Once in orbit about the arc the gases and solids (including the planets) of the plenum would retain their motions unless disturbed. This leads us to conclude that, in addition to their binary "dumb-bell" orbit, the Earth and the other planets also initially orbited in a circle about the Sun-Super Uranus arc (Figure 17). Figure 17. Primitive Planets in Orbit About the Electric Arc Over most of time the solar planets have orbited locked between the component stars of a binary. Their motion about the electrical connection between the stars resulted because the strong magnetic field generated by the electric arc kept the electrically charged planets in orbit around the arc. In a "gravitating" system only the Lagrangian point (labeled L1) allows a planet to co-revolve with the pair of stars, but for orbits under the influence of electrical force co-revolution is possible at many points along the electrified axis of the system. Because of electric repulsion, we propose that the arcuate orbits of the primitive planets were situated somewhere in the vicinity of what is called the => Lagrangian point L1 for the Sun-Super Uranus binary system. Near this point co-rotation is expected as the dumb-bell rotates. In fact, even in today's Solar System, where the magnetic tube has collapsed, a Sun-Earth-satellite pair (ISEE 1 and 2) has been orbited at the L 1 point between the Sun and the Earth. In today's system, all the planets orbit with different times and the L 1 orbit is barely stable; but in Solaria Binaria, with a strong magnetic tube in place between the principals, L 1 would be a most likely haven for planetary bodies in the binary. Since we propose the existence of more than one primitive planet, and since each is electrically charged, the planets would revolve about the arc staying as far from each other as the principals would allow. This, we feel, would crowd the four planets near the L 1 point. The planetary orbits about the axis, like rings on a pole, would be substantially closer than today's concentric orbits. The planets would maximize their separation, subject to three constraints: repulsion by the principals, repulsion from the arc, and the need to follow the magnetic lines of the tube. In consequence each planet orbited about the axis tending to expand or contract its orbit depending upon its charged state relative to the axis and its need to stay away from the other planets. Their speed and direction was dictated by the flow of magnetized material about the arc, despite their need to avoid one another. Given that the planets as a group occupied a limited region of the tube, they positioned themselves on their orbits so as to maintain the net maximum distance from the summated repulsion of all of the other orbiting planets. Perhaps the simplest, and at the same time adequate, response to the constraints would be for each planet to take a different azimuthal position [51] on its orbit in the magnetic tube. In the opaque plenum, and because of their different revolutional phases, no planet could be observed from another planet. Even when the plenum was clearing, the planets so positioned would be difficult to discern. They may not have been perceived until the => Age of Jovea, when, freed from the tube, their dim radiance could be isolated against a darkened sky. The magnetic tube, unlike the arc and the sac, was not directly observable, and so could not enter into human awareness, even in the final days of Solaria Binaria. Its presence, nevertheless, allowed later men to see the arc. Its grasp upon the gases amidst the revolving planets was instrumental in converting the energy moving away from the arc into a huge visible column of "flaming, twisting" light -- again a possible source of serpentine imagery in early symbolism. The magnetic tube may have played a part in generating cosmic sounds. Archaic Greek philosophers, especially the Pythagoreans, employed the phrase "music of the spheres" to designate what has since been regarded as an unreal belief in celestial and planetary sound. That the violent forces within the tube would have emitted acoustical waves is unquestionable [52] . In the manner of => whistling atmospherics, as lately studied (Hines, p816), such sound would be trapped by the magnetic field and propagated along the magnetic tube. In the late times of the tube, when celestial bodies could be distinguished visually, the sound might have inspired the Pythagoreans to the invention of their sacred musical scale, which was also related to their sacred theory of numbers - both sound and numbers constituting theophanies. The sounds might first have been involved in the earliest sacred music. The magnetic tube worked its wonders by an invisible hand. {S : Notes on Chapter 7} Notes on Chapter 7 46. A magnetic field only appears when relative motion exists within systems containing electric charges (Sherrerd). 47. The energy density of a gas depends upon the density of the gas => particles and upon their temperatures (average random motion), and upon their kinetic energy as they flow within the electric field. 48. The "mass" of the plenum depends upon the gas composition. 49. The authors understand that magnetic field lines are only a method of visualizing motion of charged particles being acted upon by magnetic fields and that they are not ingredients of the theories of electromagnetic interaction, but we feel that the use of field lines provides the reader with insight into the direction of the magnetic field around the electrical arc and into the motion that would occur as ions and electrons moved within the plenum. 50. Bremsstrahlung is observed from X-ray tubes, particle accelerators (synchrotrons), atomic beta decays, "supernova remnants" and cosmic X-ray sources. 51. Azimuthal angle is, here, a measure of the planet's progress around its orbit. Planets whose azimuthal angles differ would be said to have a revolutional phase shift (as in Figure 17). 52. Several expert observers, working at remote locations, report sound associated with intensive displays of the Aurora Borealis (Harang, Stomer). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 8: } {T THE EARTH'S PHYSICAL AND MAGNETIC HISTORY} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER EIGHT THE EARTH'S PHYSICAL AND MAGNETIC HISTORY The generally round shape of the Earth is an effect of external electric pressure to bring it into electrical balance with the plenum. It was originally a dense aggregate, a fragment of Super Sun trapped in the magnetic field that was generated around the arc joining the Sun and Super Uranus. The aggregate grew rapidly in a short time from accretions of smaller bodies and chemical elements. The Earth's density alters from lighter material on the outside to heavier on the inside, in proportion to the intensity of requirements of materials for charge -- lesser on the outside, greater at the center. Density and conductivity are correlated. In an intensely electrical ambience, the deposition and transmutation of metals such as iron and nickel at the core of the Earth are understandable. Though knowledge of the Earth's interior is by inference, its seeming simplicity may be a fact and, if so the result of its electrical accretion and its conductive nature. By contrast, the superficial crust of the Earth consists of more poorly conducting species. It has also been subjected to many geophysical incidents of a recent kind. Therefore, its highly differentiated structure is understandable (see ahead to Chapter Eleven). Granite, for example, is a rock formed as a global covering at and near the surface under highly energetic conditions. It may once have been basalt that was electrically energized by the magnetic tube to the point of metamorphosis. Too, it may have migrated by electrophoresis and deposited by electrolysis, as particulate, from the enshrouding plenum. It is old, then, but not so old as the core and mantle of the Earth. Granting that the granite cloak could not be a metamorphosis of sedimentary rock requires admitting that the sediments can never have been very deep, not much more than the observable sedimentary cover on the continents and ocean bottoms today! A half-million years of violent and gradual erosion would seem to be sufficient to provide it. If, as will be argued in Chapter Thirteen, the Earth has lost crustal material by explosion, it has also gained some materials from the explosions of foreign bodies (see Chapters Eleven and Fourteen); the search to explain ore, salt, and other anomalous bodies embedded in the surface must begin with a study of their possibly cataclysmic accretion. The mineral structure of the Earth harbors magnetism, which is the capacity of some of the Earth's rocks and of its total surface and ionized atmospheric gases to give evidence of a distinctive electrical presence both now and in the past. Rock magnetism, imprinted in ferruginous and other rocks by some past event, yields magnetic intensities up to one microtesla [53] . At the surface the magnetic field of the Earth's body has an intensity of sixty microteslas. In rocket and orbiting satellite observations made in the ionosphere, high above the surface, intensities as low as ten nanoteslas are found. This ubiquitous force is weak to the point of impotency, yet at the same time it is highly significant in reconstructing the Earth's history and present state. The globe as it accreted was aligned with the magnetic field lines around the electrical axis discharging between the Sun and Super Uranus. It was forthwith magnetized [54] . It, too, orbited the axis, maintaining a fixed direction relative to the magnetic field in which it moved. As depicted in Figure 18, it posted its rotational poles at right angles to its magnetic axis [55] . Quantavolutions eventually weakened the field of the magnetic tube leaving today only a feeble magnetic field in the region of the ecliptic (see Figure 11). The outflowing solar wind protons seem to leave the Sun radially. Except near the Sun this flow seems to be focussed mainly onto a disc enveloping the ecliptic. The outer-planetary space probe Mariner 10 has noted some depletion of solar wind at high ecliptic latitudes (Kumar and Broadfoot). Figure 18. The Earth in the Magnetic Tube The magnetic field around the electric arc of Solaria Binaria made the electrically charged Earth orbit around the arc. The magnetic intensity of the constraining field caused the material of the Earth to become magnetized. So held in orbit the Earth's rotational and magnetic poles were located 90 degrees apart on the Earth's surface, the rotational axis was directed parallel to the arc, while the magnet axis was directed along the contours of the magnetic tube. After sufficient weakening of the magnetic tube, the Earth was released from alignment with the field lines surrounding the electric arc; gyroscopic action, caused by the electric current flowing through the Earth's core, then ended the former rotation about poles displaced greatly from the magnetic axis. The Earth- magnet sought alignment with the now dominant solar magnetic field created by the motion of the electrically charged Super Uranus around the charged Sun. The Earth began to rotate with the north rotational pole (geographic north) in the same place as the "north" magnetic pole (Figure 19) [56] . Later events separated the two poles. Figure 19. The Earth Magnet The surviving magnetization of the Earth's interior arises from the remnant of the electric current induced within the Earth's material during its stay in the magnetic tube. This decaying current is detected externally by the presence of an ever- weakening magnetic field, which surrounds the Earth. Presently the magnetic axis is tilted eleven degrees to the rotational axis (Haymes, p214). The term far-magnetic field refers to this dipolar field observed from a great distance above the Earth. The near-magnetic field has its poles in northern Canada and on the Antarctic coast, south of Australia. Here the magnetic field is vertical. Location of these, often called "dip poles", is difficult and somewhat dependent upon crustal conditions rather than upon the internal magnetization (Haymes, p217). The present dip pole in the northern hemisphere [57] drifts westward by more than five kilometers per year (Vestine, p90). Its daily motion carries it through an elliptical loop with amplitudes up to 130 km reported (Serson). Only in the recent quantavolutionary periods (the post-Saturnian : see Chapter Fourteen) have the magnetic poles abandoned the equatorial region. Palaeomagnetic estimates of the location of the ancient magnetic poles of the Earth's surface register an aversion to high latitudes (Lapointe et al.). Under earlier Solaria Binaria conditions, therefore, the surface rocks and internal magnetism of the Earth were in line with the field forces of the magnetic tube. All subsequent accidents to the Earth that brought magnetic disturbances, whether in the rocks or in the poles, must be overlaid on the fundamental magnetic map imprinted upon the globe during its youth. Furthermore, the electric generator of the Earth's magnetic field must be the descendant, still declining, of the primeval current set in motion by the magnetic tube. This current flows in the conductive material deep within the Earth. There it creates, and mainly defines, the field, the lines, and the poles of today. Its ancestor, much stronger, was present to imprint magnetizable rocks under circumstances of changes [58] . Today, many rocks point magnetically towards what was some pole of the past, some to the neighborhood of the present magnetic pole, and most to nowhere in particular. Only a few of the rocks are magnetized at all. The magnetic poles of today are located near Thule, Greenland, and in Antarctica (120øE, 75øS). When these poles are joined, it must be noted that their axis does not transect the center of the Earth -- it is offset by 436 kilometers towards the surface of the sphere, where lies the basin of the Pacific Ocean (Haymes, p214). From this it may be inferred that, subsequent to the establishment of the magnetic field of the Earth, a quantavolution scooped out the Pacific basin and deformed the Earth (see Chapter Thirteen). The present global field, which we have said is descendant from the Earth's stay in the magnetic tube, is complex in that later events have acted either to induce new electric currents (located superficially within the core) or to perturb parts of the main current flow. The result are the disturbing currents, shown in Figure 20, the imprint of more recent quantavolutions of the world order when Earth suffered electrical encounters on a large scale (de Grazia, 1981, 1983a; Juergens, 1974, 1974/ 5; Velikovsky, 1950, pp85ff), including meteoroid impacts (Dachille, 1978) and encounters. Figure 20. Magnetic Transactions Within the Earth. The drift of the Earth's magnetic dip poles across the continental surfaces indicates the complex nature of the causal current through the material making up the Earth's bulk. It is likely that the major current (drawn thickly) was induced during the Earth's stay in the magnetic tube. However, lesser currents (drawn thinly and located closer to the planet's surface) were individually induced in each of the interplanetary encounters of the Late Quantavolutionary period. Each of these lesser currents must transact with the main current, and likely also with one another, resulting in a complicated precession of the total magnetic field around the figure axis, which is directed perpendicularly to the plane of the major internal current (see inset). The net motion is the observed drift of the magnetic dip poles. Not only can surface anomalies be explained by celestial intrusion, but so can the wander of the dip poles, a vector sum of the complex wobbling. If large electrically charged bodies passed close to the Earth's surface they could especially disturb the electric current in the core as noted above. These lesser currents, once created, would interact with the existing magnetic domain of the Earth (see insert, Figure 20). Malkus concludes that precession of the Earth's rotational axis produces torques upon the Earth's fluid interior. He sees these torques as generating the internal dynamo that is conventionally called up to create the Earth's magnetism. Here we adduce his results only in evidence of magnetic wobble arising from torques. The Earth's magnetic field has been weakening over the 150 years of measurement of it strength (Cox, p237). This implies a decay of the current within the Earth's core. Such a decay could be the main source of heat flowing from the Earth's interior. At the observed rate of magnetic decline, it would take on the order of six hundred years to heat the core one (degree) kelvin. Even granting a much stronger field ten millennia ago we do not believe that the Earth's core is fluid. The observed surface magnetism and seismic profiles of the Earth's interior are consonant with a solid conductive body containing an excess of free electrons. Given that the Earth's field is weakening, it is logical to believe that rock magnetism is decaying at least as rapidly (see behind, Chapter Seven). Neither would still be present if magnetization had not occurred very recently. The magnetic testimony of the lithosphere is largely fossil, in that the present interior current of the Earth passes its magnetic force into the atmosphere without the capacity for imprinting anything except molten rock. That is, if some rocks carry a complex magnetism, it must be measured and read as a much more intricate registry than the present magnetic field could generate. As indicated earlier, the strength of the Earth's magnetic field is over fifty times that of the strongest rock magnetism. Presumptively, in the magnetic tube the Earth's overall magnetization would have been only a fraction of that of its environment. Notwithstanding its genesis the time measure of the current within the Earth's core is to be adjudged by the surface magnetic field and not by the rocks. Rocks containing => magnetite, of igneous origin, are imprinted by the Earth's field when they freeze. Other rocks containing similar minerals can be made magnetic if subjected by lightning to piezostress (Hertzler and Phillips or to magnetic shock (Dachille, 1978). Magnetization by any, or all, of these modes can occur when large charged cosmic bodies encounter the Earth. Magnetic surveys disclose magnetic axes in all directions (Mil-som, Vestine, p94). Typically, the survey instruments are set to read as "north" and "the reversed north". That is, the preconceived theory calls for a magnetization in the direction of the (wandering) north magnetic pole, and, in recent years, evidence that the poles may be on occasion reversed, "north" thereupon reading "south". The theory is vitiated by lack of consistency in the readings. To revive the theory, extinct poles in off-north directions are postulated as the determinants of deviant readings, even though this practice begs the question by using two variables to prove each other. Juergens (1978) has criticized the interpretation of published evidence of geomagnetic orientations and reversals (see also Cox, p244). The Earth's magnetic field has never been reversed. It is securely implanted in the Earth. Should the earth have tilted or turned upside down (Warlow), our model requires that its magnetic field would have turned with it, acquiring perhaps some minor dislocation or a tangential minor current as an offshoot. Once the magnetization has stopped, the magnet decays. What is the duration of the Earth's magnetic field and its rock magnetism? Until recently both were considered permanent or assigned exceedingly long durations. Now it is recognized that magnetized objects lose their magnetism over intervals that are impressively short, Cook (1966, p282), using data given by Nagata, estimates the total decay time at under 70 millennia. By our theory, the magnetic tube would have held sway over the Earth's magnetic field and any lithospheric imprinting up to its weakening and collapse some 6000 years ago. If the tube were weakening, the Earth's field should have decayed with it. After the tube collapsed, the Earth's magnetism began to function independently. Its continued loss in strength has been noticed. Barnes summarizes measurements made of the Earth's magnetic moment and magnetic field intensity from the determination by Gauss in 1835 until the middle of the decade past. These data show that the magnetic moment is decaying with a half-life of about 1400 years. He notes that the energy in the Earth's magnetic field can produce, by self- induction, an electric current in the conductive core of the Earth. This current loses energy to the core in the form of heat, producing the observed decay of the external magnetic field. At present, by his computations, the core current required is 6.16 gigaamperes with a power loss of 813 => megawatts. If the Earth's field had been decaying undisturbed for more than a few thousand years, magnetization would have been present whose decay should have melted the Earth [59] . Recent onset of the presently noted decay seems in order. From the Earth's magnetic moment and using Barnes' estimate of the present internal current, we arrive at a "radius" for the Earth magnet of two megameters (about one - third of the globe's size). Since the magnetic intensity at the surface is a dilution of the internal magnet, discussion should be focussed on the latter. Our estimates yield a magnetic intensity close to ten times the surface value at the source. The decay of this magnet over the past few millennia is of interest, for, adapting the decay calculated by Barnes, we obtain the data in Table 4. If no quantavolutions had occurred, the above extrapolations would predict that seven millennia ago, the Earth's magnetization was thirty-two times it present strength. In the same era, then, the heating of the core should have been 32 squared, or 1 024 times the 1970 value. Under this enhanced decay, the core would be heated by one degree in 226 days. This heavy heating could warm the iron in the core above its Curie temperature in five centuries were it to continue undiminished. Since several celestially-induced saltations punctuate this interval, it is unlikely that the magnetic decay can be extrapolated meaningfully back through the interval. Even if it could, the Earth core would still remain safely cool since the liberated heat is not all retained in the core; it flows outward towards the surface; and on its way it encounters over thirty times the volume of material of its region of genesis. The surrounding mantle material requires up to twice the energy per kilogram to heat as it does the metal-rich core. Thus the heat is easily dissipated providing the Earth-magnet is not allowed to grow further into the past and, indeed, this it need not do, for during its stay in the magnetic tube the current did not decay and its energy output was benignly dissipated. TABLE 4 CALCULATED UNDISTURBED DECAY OF THE EARTH'S MAGNETIZATION (using Barnes' Decay Model) . Date Magnetic Field Intensity . (Astronomical years) (in => milliteslas) . at surface within core + 1970 0.062 0.61 + 570 0.124 1.22 - 830 0.248 2.44 - 2230 0.496 4.87 - 3630 0.992 9.74 - 5030 1.98 19.5 - 6430 3.97 39.0 Reckoning in astronomical years. AD years are designated with a+, BC years are lessened numerically by one year and have a - preceding them. (e. g.: 1 BC = 0.; 3 BC = -2) Electricity probably played an important role in cooling the Earth's interior in the days of great magnetization. Evidence abounds that, under electrified conditions, heat flow and heat dissipation patterns are altered over those noted in the absence of electrical flow (see Asakawa). Earth currents persist to this day; we have no reason to believe that they were less strong in the past. Their role in shaping and maintaining a habitable globe cannot be overemphasized. We do not know the maximum magnetization during Earth's stay in the tube, nor its level when the tube collapsed, releasing the field to free decay. The level of magnetism induced in a magnetizable material depends upon the purity of the material, the temperature, and the strength of the inducing field. The Earth's core is unlikely to be a pure magnetic alloy, hence its magnetization in the tube would not have to reflect more than a small fraction of the full strength of the inducing field. On leaving the tube the core need not have been magnetized to any level that would pose a problem in thermal dissipation, whatever the model employed for the heat flow that began as the magnet waned [60] . Given a half-life for magnetic decay of the order of 1 400 years, it is reasonable to conclude that all existing magnetization of surface rocks must be very recent. A rock magnetized to one microtesla (about the strongest value noted) would decay to the limit of detectability (one nanotesla) in ten half-lives. If rock magnetism decays at least as rapidly as does the Earth's field, fourteen thousand years would erase all magnetic imprints from the rocks! Not only must the rock magnetism be very recent, but also most of it has probably resulted from electro-thermal events of cosmic origin. The presence of magnetism throughout the Earth's domain cannot be denied, despite difficulties in explaining its generation and variation when using models which maintain that the Earth is not an electrically charged body. Those who have studied the electrical currents associated with the body of the Earth and the higher atmosphere above the Earth, and those who have studied the electrical flow from the atmosphere to the ground and its variation, might well have concluded that the Earth is most easily understood as an electrically charged body. That they have not so concluded is significant. From the earliest modern experiments in electricity the evidence of an electric Earth has loomed closely under the printed pages of explanations. Many investigators perceived the answer but were discouraged by their inability to offer proof of their suspicions (for example, Sanford, p105, pp72ff). Our assertion that the Earth is a body that carries a net surplus of electrons is paramount in understanding its properties [61] . In the beginning the Earth was far from electrical equilibrium with the plenum of the young Solaria Binaria. Consequently the accumulating Earth material transacted strongly with its surroundings. The Earth probably glowed visibly as it formed and for a time thereafter. At an early date this visible Earth-glow was extinguished and the Earth became the dark planetary body that it is today. An electrical current of 1800 amperes still flows from space to the Earth. This continuing electrical transaction partially decreases the Earth's charge by 3.5 X 10 29 electrons per year. This altered charge represents a flux that is ten times that ascribed to the Earth-magnet in the core. The Earth-air current density is 3.5 microamperes per square kilometer of surface. There is evidence of a possible electric connection between the Earth and the Sun; this circuit drives, in part, the Earth's weather cycles (Webb, Cole). The energy liberated by the Earth-current is in addition to that from the influx of sunlight. Its power has yet to be determined and its significance is mainly unexplored. Nevertheless several phenomena are recorded indicating the Earth's electrical state. An electrical gradient exists, increasing the electrical potential maximally near the ground by a few hundred volts per meter of upward displacement (Chalmers). Higher, the gradient declines, producing a maximum potential difference of 300 000 volts between the ground and the atmosphere at an altitude of twenty kilometers. The direction of this gradient is consistent with the notion of a negatively charged Earth in a slightly less negative environment [62] . So the => troposphere forms an electrical sheath joining the ionospheric plasma to the charged Earth. Above, in the => ionosphere, strong electrical flows are documented with maximum currents of the order of 90 000 amperes. These flows occur in a plasmasphere analogous in form but not in behavior to the Sun's photosphere. Farther up, another electrical sheath, a => double layer, exists which joins the plasmasphere below to the solar wind above. This sheath, at the so-called magnetopause, has produced phenomena that have defied explanation (Kelley) because electric neutrality is demanded of the Earth. The double layered sheath, like the chromosphere-corona of the Sun, is the gatekeeper for the systems. It admits and accelerates incoming electrons, while it repels or retards incoming ions. From the Earth-side it prevents electrons from escaping and facilitates the outflow of ions. On occasion, solar outbursts flood the double layer, diminishing its effectiveness (Hartline) and suddenly altering for a time the Earth's charge level. This produces a saltation in the length of the day, that elsewhere has been called a "glitch" (Danjon; Challinor; Gribbin and Plagemann, 1973). In the weeks that follow, the Earth regains its charge balance and the rotation corrects itself. Rotational saltations are explainable in terms of a charge exchange between the Earth and the surrounding interplanetary plasma. Inasmuch as in the past the Earth was farther from equilibrium with its surroundings than it is now, electrical readjustment was more spectacular than the small electrical transaction noted today. As the Earth came into balance it would appear to an Earth bound observer that the Earth's electrical charge was decreasing with time, whereas in fact the opposite is more correct. The Earth is gaining charge continuously. In line with the electrical explanation for rotational saltations, the deceleration of the Earth's rotation is explicable as a charge increase with time. We maintain that its continuous charging and the interruptions determine the Earth's very geophysical integrity thereto. There are links between volcanism and climatic change, and tidal phenomena are linked with both of the former and with seismicity (Roosen et al.). It is suspected that an extraterrestrial trigger is responsible for these correspondences (Rampino et al., p828, Johnston and Mauk, pp266-7). That trigger is intimately related to variable rates of charge accumulation by the Earth. These variations have been in the past responsible for drastic quantavolution of the Earth's surface. There is mounting evidence that even the biosphere is shaped in consonance with the Earth's electric and magnetic state. Discussion of this subject need not be further postponed. {S : Notes on Chapter 8} Notes on Chapter 8 53. The unit of magnetic field intensity is the tesla. Such an intensity is very strong, comparable to the largest magnetic intensity noted in the cosmos. One tesla represents one hundred million magnetic lines of force passing through each square meter of the magnetized surface. The nanotesla is one-billionth (USA) as strong and represents the weakest detectable magnetic intensity. 54. As were all planets then in the tube, meteorites are generally found to be magnetized (Levy). The cases of other bodies will be treated later. 55. This rotation would have the same period as the Earth's revolutional motion about the electrical axis. The poles of rotation would lie parallel to the arc. 56. This is the south pole of the internal magnet. It attracts the north pole of a compass. 57. The north dip pole is located between Bathhurst Island and Prince of Wales Island in the Canadian Arctic (260ø E, 74ø N). Its motion is complex but reasonably well documented since 1950 (Dawson and Dalgetty) with some data over the past millennium (Yukutake). 58. It is known that molten rock will be imprinted if it solidifies, and then cools to its => Curie temperature in the presence of a magnetic field. 59. On similar grounds, cosmogonists have rejected the possibility that the Earth's core contains its share of the radioactive elements posited as the Earth's cosmic allotment. 60. The Earth's rotational spin-loss, ascribed to tidal friction, liberates forty- two million times the energy presently lost by the magnetic field. The Earth has not boiled from the tides (compare with Darwin, 1879). 61. We remind the reader that this electron surplus is relative to the Earth's material itself: relative to the cosmos the Earth is an electron-deficient body, while relative to its immediate surroundings the Earth is close to, but not quite at electrical equilibrium, as we shall note below. 62. Such an arrangement of charges is seen elsewhere; it may be a means of shielding the Earth's electron complement from a voracious Sun (see Technical Note B). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 1: } {Q ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM: } {C Chapter 9: } {T RADIANT GENESIS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM CHAPTER NINE RADIANT GENESIS The physical history of Solaria Binaria may be divided into three major periods according to the intensity of quantavolution occurring: a primary period of violent changes and rapid development, extending perhaps to a quarter of a million years; a secondary period of relative balance among the elements within the system, extending almost to the present; and a shorter tertiary period of system breakdown, when Super Uranus, the planets, the sac and plenum, and the electrical arc with its magnetic tube underwent abrupt transformations. A biosphere was generated during the primary period and produced its main forms. That is, there was first a time of radiant genesis, a proto-zoic stage, followed by a time of the escalation of basic biological types, a palaeo-zoic stage. Then occurs a meso-zoic period of formal and ambient stability, which coincides with the secondary period of relative balance in physical history. These are the subjects of the present chapter. The Cenozoic, which we redefine as a period of explosive quantavolution, corresponding to the period of system breakdown, is the subject of Chapter Twelve; there the origins of human nature will be discussed (see also Table 6). The prevailing theory among scientists conjectures that a sequence of chance chemical combinations occurring over time produces the "self-replicating molecule" deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). For the moment we pursue this idea of chance chemical combinations. In Solaria Binaria, the sac is the vat of chemical evolution. Its gases are hydrogen-rich but contain, by inheritance from the body of Super Sun, all simple ingredients found in life forms. The energy sources which catalyze the process are ultraviolet radiation, electric discharges (lightning bolts), and ionizing particles (from cosmic rays or radioactivity). Using a variety of gaseous mixtures, energy sources and temperatures, experimenters have been successful in producing a multitude of prebiotic compounds in short times [63] . The ultimate step, the creation of life, has not been reproduced in the laboratory ! Presently, experimenters are searching vigorously for some means of reproducing the "reproducer" -- DNA -- in the laboratory. The composition of the plenum gases varied significantly over time, though for a long time the gas density remained fairly constant. Once Solaria Binaria came into existence, electrical forces produced => electrophoresis among the electrified atoms throughout the system; in electrified gas mixtures the components apportion themselves within the mixture in relation to their ionization potentials. "The component with the lowest ionization potential becomes more concentrated at the => cathode, that with highest ionization potential at the => anode " (Francis, pp195ff). The rate at which separation of the constituents occurs depends upon the => mobility of the ions. The mobility of an ion is of the order of one to ten centimeters per second for each volt per centimeter of electrical field (at standard atmospheric temperature and pressure -- S. T. P.). At constant temperature the product of ion mobility and pressure is approximately constant (Papoular, p94). The least => massive ions are the most mobile and so they will migrate soonest ; the heavier ions will take longer to separate. In Solaria Binaria only a partial separation was effected, but this was sufficient to contribute to the anomalously low abundance of lithium, beryllium and boron noted in the solar spectrum (Ross and Aller). The effect of the discharge was to reapportion the plenum gas mixture, changing the local percentage of hydrogen relative to the heavier atoms. This would effect greater efficiency in producing organic compounds in certain regions within the plenum (Dayhoff et al., p1462). After the nova (see behind to Chapter Four) the plenum occupied a large volume; it was honeycombed with variously electrified domains producing a state of great electrical dis-equilibrium. Held together by pervasive cosmic electrical pressure, the gases of the plenum assumed the smallest volume consistent with their charge density. In reaction to the nova, electric flow within the plenum worked to equalize charge densities within the sac, while maintaining an outward radial gradient of increasing charge density in concession to the external demand from the continuing cosmic transaction. The result was an initial implosion of the sac, as charges were redistributed, superposed upon a much slower expansion of both the sac and the rest of the system as galactic charge accumulated. Consequently, over most of their history, the Earth and the other primitive planets were immersed in a dense plenum of gases which was opaque to radiation; this gas was at least as dense as the present atmosphere at the Earth's surface. The nutritive soup from which living forms emerged was not wholly the primitive vapors of Earth (conventionally the oceans and atmosphere) but the total surface of the planets and the volume of the sac. Appropriate temperatures were available in most of this volume within thousands of years of the nova of Super Sun. Various organisms can survive temperatures well above the Earth's present temperature. Fish, fly larvae, and aquatic metazoans survive in hot springs where temperatures approach 320 K (Dicke, 1964, pp119ff; Wickstrom and Castenholz). Live bacteria have been discovered in an oil well where temperatures approached the boiling point of water (Dicke, 1964). Thus it is argued that the Earth could have had a much warmer climate in ages past when life arose. Urey concludes that temperatures have been below 425 K since the Earth's crust separated (Miller and Urey). Fox (1960, p203, p206, 1970), maintains that certain chemical processes preceding the genesis of life were accomplished by heat. He now considers the debate over past temperatures irrelevant since the critical processes can occur at temperatures well below 425 K. If we consider only that portion of the plenum which enveloped the planetary region (a cylinder 35 gigameters long by 100 megameters diameter) we have a reactor volume which is sixty million times the combined volume of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans, in which life otherwise is believed to have been generated. The energy source for the plenum was the electric arc. The early arc may have liberated about 10 23 watts to the plenum, compared with 3 X 10 13 watts received as ultraviolet radiation by the Earth's atmosphere [64] , or with 3 X 10 11 watts received as lightning discharges (see Chalmers for data). If Solaria's plenum at the edge of the central flow zone is compared with the outer surface of the Earth's atmosphere with regard to energy density, Solaria's plenum will have had an advantage by a factor of 500 000. At the other extreme, if the energy is spread throughout the entire volume of both reactors, the advantage in energy density still is with Solaria fifty-fold. If the time taken to generate life in an energized primitive environment depends primarily upon the rate at which the primitive gases can be excited to produce chemical changes, then life ought to have been generated within the plenum after a time somewhere between two thousand and two hundred million years! [65] Should the initial photolysis not be the rate-controlling step, then the immense volume factor greatly favors a more rapid biosynthesis in the plenum than supposedly occurred in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans aeons ago. Furthermore, a highly electric environment may speed up generation time, and therefore the intergenerational opportunities for mutation. As we see it, the plenum was an ideal reactor in which living systems could be synthesized and sustained [66] . Evidence that the generative environment was highly magnetic can be inferred from the sensitivity of many living organisms to magnetism. Both animal and plant life respond to strong magnetic fields (above 100 milliteslas), showing modified growth or behavior (Kolin, pp40ff). Magnetic fields more closely approximating the Earth's field today have also been used to stimulate organisms. In some instances the magnetic field seemingly applied directional clues (Barnwell and Brown, p275, p277, Pittman). Where steady magnetism, regardless of strength, seems to be beneficial (Hays), magnetic variability seems to induce pathological effects, even in modern humans; coronary arrest correlates strongly with extended intervals of disturbed magnetism (Malin), psychiatric hospital admissions correlate less strongly (Friedman et al.). Sudden biological extinction has been linked to periods of magnetic confusion in the paleontological record (Whyte, p681). Such periods, in our view, would be more likely produced by cosmic large body encounters that would inject magnetic disturbances along with other disastrous effects upon the biosphere. To summarize, in regard to the time available for the origin and development of species, the Solaria (SB) model is 2000 times less "effective" than the Evolutionary (E) model. With respect to the volume of the life-generating region, the SB model is six million times more effective. Considering the energy density, SB is five hundred thousand times more effective following the establishment of the binary arc. Actually, before its establishment, the nova phase, lasting for months, would have organized the Solaria Binaria system to the equivalent stage of two billion years (2 aeons) of conventionally ascribed Earth history. Hence the SB model, assessing energy density, would well exceed by a millionfold the E model. Since mutagens work upon mutable forms, and branching of species is an exponential concept, the effectiveness of Solaria Binaria in quantavoluting life is multiplied again by the volume of the life-generating region. So, even on a short time schedule, Solaria Binaria appears to be millions of times more capable of producing the species of today. Still, even this might not be enough to originate and develop the species. The first stages of life are of such low probability, and the alter stages of higher but still low probability, that a "guiding factor in life development " must yet be sought. For example, an average protein is formed of a chain of about one hundred amino acids. To quote a creationist: "If all the stars in the Universe had ten earths, and if all of the earths had oceans of 'amino-acid soup', and if all the amino-acids linked up (randomly) in chains 100 acids long every second for the entire history of the Universe, even then the chance occurrence of a given very simple protein [10 - 130 ] would be inconceivably remote" (Stengler, p16) [67] . And the building of a protein is only one of many complex arrangements adding up to life as we know it [68] . The model of Solaria Binaria might only serve to supersede conventional theory of the evolutionary process, and not to discount it and provide an alternative positive theory, were it not for its electrical features. Life begins by microscopically mimicking its gigantic progenitor, the sac. It has no choice. Every atom, in endeavoring to hold its electrons or gain others, seeks to surround itself with the smallest and densest complete electrical perimeter possible. This is usually an octet of electrons. Whenever necessary, atoms aggregate into molecules where a compromise sharing of electrons will lead to a higher density electrical perimeter [69] . From here the molecules proceed to more complicated systems that ultimately come alive. The concept of life therefore is an extension of the concept of the "cavity" with which our book began. Life is a way of gaining, hoarding, and begrudgingly doling out electricity. In countless numbers organic molecules determinedly build themselves micro-sacs of chemicals in reaction to electric gradients, capture raw materials, manufacture compounds within the sacs, fire themselves with ever accumulating electric charge, until, incapable of continuing this process without bursting their sacs, they force out unused parts. Usually these are excreta. In critical cases, they are replications of themselves -- if not exactly so, then in fundamentally similar ways. No cell divides itself in mirror like fashion, uniformly, in the beginning. But every deviant is a candidate for the first exact mitosis. The step from excreta to exact reproduction is critical. The sac of organic electrical activity is not "intelligent" except by human prejudices, ex post facto. But the sac can most efficiently -- effectively and reliably -- excrete if it separates its ingredients on the binary principle of "one for you and one for me". Least change, least imbalance, and therefore longer life ensure if the sac polarizes uniformly prior to excretion, setting half of its contents opposite the other half and splitting itself down the middle, closing the gap at the instant of its division. Excretion becomes reproduction. Sacs that thus form cells which divide offer more chances of survival and conquest of space by numbers than sacs that either hold their accretions until they burst or bifurcate inequitably from an electrical standpoint, thereupon having to internally reorganize their electrical accommodation upon every mitosis. One notes the terrific speed with which life can develop and reproduce under rules of uniform mitosis. Within a few thousand years the plenum might be filled with such cells. Indeed, perhaps large areas were filled with them. One is not permitted logically to adjudge life as superior to rocks, which have their own form of durability. The biosphere today is a tiny fraction of the rock masses and space of the Universe. As an offshoot of universal change it has a special interest and importance in the perspective of the human mind. Life has a special mode of material extension which, after all, could fill the Universe promptly under proper conditions, and this is a constant challenge to the entropic concept of the Universe [70] . Life's arrangement of electrical signals is perhaps its chief embedded characteristic. "Electrical potentials occur in all cells studies thus far, although their biological importance is recognized in only a few cases" (" Cell and Cell Division", Ency. Brit., 1974, Macro. vol. 3, p. 1050). The surface of cells is negatively charged. The cell membranes are 6 to 10 nanometers thick and are highly resistant electrically (from 1,000 to 10,000 ohm/ cm 2 ). They produce voltage gradients which drive the biological functions (as noted ahead) and produce a cell interior that is more highly negatively charged than the surface layer of the cell. That cells are so electrically arranged is understandable when one considers charged cells in a charged universe. In metaphorical language, the overall picture of the cell, and the image of the primordial cell, then, is one in which a peculiar combination of chemical compounds survives by erecting an electrical screen to admit nutrients and to repel destructive invaders, then organize its internal components to sustain itself and to resist random escape from the community. Several varieties of cell growth and transformation are observable. The "main" type of self-duplication ensues as a permissible, organized, collective escape, or excretion, providing for the maintenance of a complete defense system. Cell division would operate by an electrical signal system. The members are an electric grid (as in a vacuum tube), and acts as a gatekeeper among the elements in and surrounding the cell and during mitosis. Cells make macro-molecules, including genetic molecules, which do not exist elsewhere in nature and are not allowed exit through the cell membrane. Inasmuch as macro-molecules are concentrators of electricity, this synthesis permits the cell to sustain longer than otherwise would be possible its quest for additional electrical charge. The cell thus builds a higher concentration of charge than is available elsewhere in the plenum mixture. This process is the essence of metabolism. Metabolism concentrates electricity in the macro-molecules, thus depleting of its nutrients the medium trapped in the cell. (The analogies of cell as sac and of nutritive medium as plenum are close and possible homologous.) The cell responds by excretion of water, ions and gases (by-products) and ingestion of electron-rich nutrients. Strain is imposed upon the cell membrane, for it must both contain the increased material and at the same time defend the cell against penetration by electron- deficient atoms and molecules. The membrane signals the cell nucleus concerning an imminent site of charge deficiency and leaking. Then the genetic macro-molecules of the cell, which are the only ones capable of dividing themselves more or less equally, and have been so doing since their last episode of cell division, respond to the signal of impending disaster by completing their synthesis, and by lining up on the two sides of a perimeter membrane that is being electrically trenched through the nucleus at the future site of fission. Actually, the division line-up is provoked by an electric polarization of opposed centrioles, each representing a focus of peak negative charge on the edge of the nucleus. Midway between the two centrioles, the newly forming perimeter constitutes an electron-poor trench. Following the genetic molecules, the other materials of the cell are drawn electrically to flow in equal amounts to either side of the perimeter-to-be, pursuing the two centrioles. By contrast the cellular material that is to constitute the cell wall itself flows into the trench from both sides. Thus, without breeching its old perimeter membrane, the cell has doubled its surface and has divided. Electrical forces move the two new cells apart. Never are two cell membrane in contact even in a densely packed tissue. Some 15-20 nanometers of intercellular space, filled with a sugary fluid, separate them. From the self-reproducing cell to the hominid of a few thousand years ago requires passing by many landmarks in the organization of life. Close to the solar nova and birth of Solaria Binaria at the beginning of the Period of Radiant Genesis, one may position groups of critical developments: the provision from solar debris of chemicals and transmutations in the plenum; and prebiotic organic molecules (amino acids, sugars, nitrogen bases, plus other compounds). Cell membranes, left-handed symmetry of organic macro-molecules [71] , proto- enzymes, porphyrins and => nucleotides --these developments would readily follow. The cell probably took in the latter three constituents after proto-proteins had been formed independently in the plenum. Some cells, instead of dying, began to engage in mitosis, whereupon self-duplication, as described here, would soon follow. Large cells would ingest small cells, or form around them, performing two types of action: digestion, the beginning of animal behavior [72] , with the breakdown of the electrical defenses of the smaller cells, and in other cases the formation of cell colonies using the membrane of the host cell as a super-membrane or skin of the smaller internal cell or cells. Large cell colonies would float in the magnetic tube and, later on, settle upon solid bodies. From the development of the cell, the mode of basic change in life forms ever thereafter can be surmised. Time after time it happens that some portion of the excreta of the organism is retained within the sac of the colony and supplied with the coded electrical signals that connect with the master genetic material so that its descendant in the next generation can draw upon its experience and existence. The developing special organ excretes within the organism and returns signals to make demands, denote satiety and share directiveness in the behavior of the full organism. For example, the eye is always close to the mouth. The photo-receptive organ that perceives food chances is close to the sac opening that can employ opportunities for ingestion. The organism as a whole is, as it always has been, ready and eager to accept charge-bearing contributors which allow it to increase its density. (It rejects cations for this reason). It permits and then becomes dependent upon the vision, with the genetic material duly recording and perforce returning in the form of instructions the interrelated, combined signals of the eye-mouth. The genes do not "know" that they are building an eye to go with the mouth; nevertheless, they do so with despatch, as they eagerly accept extensions of all such special organs in the Period of Radiant Genesis; for the environment has a plenitude of electron-rich chemicals, a state of affairs that does not persist beyond the first half-million years of Solaria Binaria. In more modern times, the cell (and hence the organism as a whole) is more hard-pressed to find energy-rich molecules and in the very stress to obtain nutrients it has bureaucratized itself so to speak, and is hence even less equipped to obtain them. In the modern electrified environment, vital processes take much longer. The plenum of Solaria Binaria was the creator, cradle, and mutagen of life. The broad sculptures of plants and animals were completed during the first half of its existence. If fossils represent the basic variety of life, the phyla and the orders came into being then. No new general forms have originated in recent times (Brough). Despite great waves of extinction, slightly over one million living species are named today. The fossil record should show millions of ancestral species to provide the present number, but in fact shows only about one hundred thousand species. This contrast has excited comment: why were large changes peculiar to early existence; why were small changes more common in recent times (ibid.)? Set up in this manner, the questions seem to accept answers from Solaria Binaria theory. The plenum promoted creation initially, as would be expected, promoted it less when the binary was stabilized, and became quite destructive and conservative as it exponentially decayed and collapsed. The agents of these change may be identified. The first period provided an immense number of prototypes and access to abundant nutrients, so testing their viability (Ayala). The second period provided a stable environment of abundant nutrients but an end to the easy method of forming combinations. Further, the more distinctive and specialized the species, the less likely its electrical transformation would eventuate in new designs of life. In the final period, environmental disasters extinguished many species, but also promoted very many, already genetically deviant individuals to the status of families, genera and species. To acknowledge that a great many of these lesser, less creative designs have emerged in the later history of Solaria Binaria requires a theory of genetic realization. The genetic material can carry far more instructions for the construction and behavior of any organism than are required at any given time (Ayala). Under lower (but higher than present) solar system quantavolutionary conditions, suppressed instructions can be triggered. It is conceivable that every living species carries in its genetic code instructions for metamorphosis (monsterism). Cosmic rays, nuclear explosions, radiation fall-out meteoroids, electromagnetic typhoons, encounters of Earth with large bodies (comet, meteoroid), viral epidemics, and "silent" significant changes in electrical discharges within Solaria Binaria and the Solar System may be the means of suddenly extinguishing some genetic instructions and releasing others, quantavoluting a species into a similar but substantially modified species that is altered anatomically, physiologically and behaviorally. Success has not attended the search for transitional forms that bridge the "gap" of development from one species to another under conventional Darwinian theory. It may be maintained that transitional forms, such as reptiles with half developed wings or hominids that spoke but poorly, never existed (Rodabaugh, p119). All orders of mammals appear with their "basic ordinal characters" (Simpson, 1944, p106). Many of the plant species, it is believed, are replicas of other species (=> polyploids), differing almost entirely in size alone, with the physiology and behavior appropriate to giantism and dwarfism [73] . That the horse, a favorite instance of evolution since Lyell, has evolved its peculiar configuration by means other than genetic realization seems unlikely. The millions of years authorized to complete this series of changes (among others) are unnecessary and probably even insufficient unless supported by a theory of genetic realization, a position that has forced its way into contemporary evolutionary thought to evade the constraints of ever greater stretches of time and of evolution by random mutation under uniform Solar system conditions. The problems of explanation that remain are historical and technical, inasmuch as a common electrical process is followed in all biological changes. The applications of the process -- to change marine animals into amphibians, reptilian types into mammals, one animal into another with all the anatomical, physiological and behavioral changes involved -- occur according to a simple set of principles. Nor are these adaptation, nor survival of the fittest, nor random successful experimentation with mutations, all of which are minor aspects of quantavolutionary change. Rather, electrical claims are provoked by opportunities, encounters and transactions, and organize themselves into genetic storage and release. Evidence from the surface of the smaller remaining planets shows total devastation and almost total loss of atmosphere. On Mars, where some atmosphere remains, no biological residues survived (Horowitz, p55). The Martian surface was found to be so deficient in organic material that a mechanism for their removal is being sought. The inner Solar System is now sterile, excepting Earth's biosphere, which thrives. A final short period follows the period of evolution; it is an epoch of explosive quantavolution that comes down to the present. It witnesses catastrophes of life forms, quantavolution through genetic realization, and the rise of Homo sapiens. On the physical side, it carries the record of the destruction of Solaria Binaria and the advent of the Solar System. Though short, this period contains the full human experience. Its story forms the second part of this book. {S : Notes on Chapter 9} Notes on Chapter 9 63. The work of Stanley L. Miller and Cyril Ponnamperuma stands out. 64. Miller and Urey cite this value for radiation capable of modifying the primitive gas. The more complex molecules produced after the initial photolysis are more easily excited and are affected by lower energy radiation, which is present in greater amount. 65. Presuming that the same processes took one gigayear in the primitive environment of Earth, as is postulated by currently accepted theories. 66. Recently a series of papers in Nature and elsewhere, also the book Lifecloud, authored by Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, N. C. and others, has considered the possibility of life, now on Earth, having originated from simple molecules, which populate the cold interstellar gas clouds. 67. Insertions ours, taken elsewhere from Stengler's paper. 68. The variety of propagating forms in the plenum probably extended beyond the mainstream of life. Groups of biological polymers separate spontaneously into coacervatives, small droplets of diameters to 500 micrometers. Where they can metabolize, coacervatives are stable, and can grow and divide. These active droplets are regarded as analogues, not ancestors, of cells (Dickerson). 69. Molecules often assume distorted shapes to achieve this compromise. If a spherical arrangement is possible, it is preferred to all others. 70. The Universe is supposedly increasing its entropy with time, that is to say, the parts of the Universe become even more disordered. Living systems represent increased order because of their internal organization. 71. The origin of one-handed symmetry was probably in the magnetic field (see Edwards et al.). Committed to spiralling into right-handed helices, the DNA molecule and all of the molecules with which it transacts profit from the design, for they thus attain denser molecular packing, producing greater electric stability. The tightest-packed helix is the alpha right-handed (screw) helix - here each turn of the coil incorporates 3.6 to 3.7 amino-acid units. This form of the helix has no open spaces in the center; further, all amino-acid structures are exposed on the surface of the helix (Mazur and Harrow). 72. We see certain bacterial and plant behavior in photosynthesis as a concurrent development, supplementing an animal diet with the capturing of a chlorophyll (pigment) molecule, precursor of the protein, which was useful in the internal manufacture of foodstuff. 73. One-quarter of the flowering plants may be polyploid species. Some vertebrates are polyploids as well (Tinkle). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 10: } {T INSTABILITY OF SUPER URANUS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER TEN INSTABILITY OF SUPER URANUS The first part of our narrative was given over largely to the origin and progress of Solaria Binaria up to the beginnings of a fatal instability. Almost from the beginning life burgeoned and flourished in the plenum, and subsequently on Earth and other planets. Celestial objects were not then visible from the Earth because the plenum was too dense to let light pass directly from the binary stars to the planets. Hence mankind originated its physical being almost entirely in a world where murky grey skies softened the light through a misty air. His psychic being and intelligence, by contrast, were formed in most important regards during the degeneration of the binary system. As best we can locate this turning-point of humanity, it happened during the pre- nova instabilities of Super Uranus. Already mentioned is evidence that early humans had intimations of a primordial plenum and an electrical fire. More extensive evidence correlates human observers with the expectable, inferable, behavior of Solaria Binaria as it would begin to collapse. The first human observations have to do with a solid heaven that began to separate from Earth and fell apart. A number of peoples claim that the primeval chaos was present before the creation. It was a plenum - dark (compared with what followed), uniform, dense, and housed a Demiurge who had not yet acted and a world of things and beings that were potentially activatable. The Ngadin Dayak, a people of Borneo, insist that "at the beginning, the cosmic totality was undivided in the mouth of the coiled water- snake", possibly referring both to the togetherness of the chaos and the omnipresence of the electrical axis mundi. In the Hindu Vedas, Dyaus-Pitr (Dyava), "Father Sky", can be identified with the age of first man and an unbroken plenum. He married Prthivi, Earth. The world was dark and asleep, "says" Manu (a Hindu Noah) until the Great Demiurge "appeared to scatter the shades of darkness". Coelus, or "Heaven", was the most ancient Latin god of the sky. His name means "covering". Ouranos was "Heaven" and the first god of Greek legend; this Heaven was at first a calm and settled person, married to Mother Earth, Gaea. The Chinese legend pictures Heaven as T'ien, at first a marble-like ceiling, unbroken. According to the Iroquois of north Eastern America, the Chief of Heaven was persuaded into marriage by "Fertile Earth" (Awenhai) and impregnated her by his breathing. The Hebrew Book of Genesis, a creative compilation, probably by Moses, of earlier legends, describes in its opening verses the Demiurge brooding over the combined celestial and earthly universe; "The Earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water." as the editors of the Jerusalem Bible comment, most of these images are intended to describe how being may be created from Nothing. All religions, says Eliade (1954, p4) go back to the earliest times, illud tempus (" That Time") when the world was born and the initial creative happenings occurred in all aspects of existence. Ever thereafter, the practices and rules of the religion are obsessed with repeating the events of those days. It is obvious that all peoples look upon this epoch, illud tempus, as a highly volatile quantavolutionary period, full of stresses and inventions. There is no uniformitarian or mild illud tempus. In many places, a theory of the Cosmic Egg is used in connection with the earliest god, who is Heaven; it explains how God and the World were born. Thus the Hindus asserted that a seed was laid and became the Golden Egg. The Cosmic Egg is often said to have existed from an age before it revealed itself. We construe from this that the earliest humans are present on Earth as the troubles of Solaria Binaria heighten and that they were newly human for a short time before Super Uranus, that is, the Cosmic Egg, appeared. Other widespread types of creation legends are usually conformable to the Cosmic Egg myth or do not contradict it (Long. 1963), and often occur within the legendary corpus of the same culture; as examples, in the Greek legends of Hesiod and the Cosmic Egg myths of Orphism, in China with two variant stories about P'an Ku, or with the Dogon of the southern Sahara, who put creative twins within the Cosmic Egg. Some type of creative urge is antecedent to the Egg. usually a supreme sky deity. The Egg can take related forms: a shell, a seed etc. Fuliginous powers that break out of the Earth to assume living forms are a type of creation widely believed; usually an external force inseminates or provokes the Earth, as in the Egyptian image of Nut and Geb, Heaven copulating with Earth. Finally, parents representing Sky and Earth are experienced as separating, allowing life to flourish. Earth divers, yet another type of creator, are deities who often are commanded by a supreme deity to plunge beneath the primordial waters of chaos and emerge with Earth, which becomes the site of life. This cosmic image can be a metaphor of the same events in the breaking of the Cosmic Egg and the separation of the Sky and the Earth. We assume that primordial observations gave rise to all of these legends. As part of the continuing emergence of life and intelligence from the chaos befalling Solaria Binaria, the Cosmic Egg myth is imagery for the vision of the first great "sun", Super Uranus, as it emerges from the Heavenly gloom. It emerges shortly after human self-awareness, and in a time of troubles for mankind. This Uranian Age was, both in legend and in our astronomical theory, a time of disturbances. As is typical of evolving binary systems, the principals, here Sun and Super Uranus, move apart with time. During the phase when a strong electrical current flowed between the two stars the components remained relatively close together, while the whole system charged negatively in transaction with the galaxy (Figure 21). This charging drives the Sun and Super Uranus apart so that the current flowing between them weakens and from time to time falters; the two become more isolated electrically within the ever-diluting gases of the plenum. The importance of the electrical axis of the binary diminishes. The universality of binary recession can be documented by Russell's 1927 data, where star class is correlated with binary period. Only Bruce (1944, p13) has connected binary age with separation of the components. Figure 21. Transaction Between Solaria Binaria and the Cosmos : Dense Plenum Phase. Originally Solaria Binaria transacted with the Cosmos as a unit. Electrons flowed from the Galaxy into the sac of the binary, liberating energy to the gases along the perimeter of the plenum. Charges so delivered to the binary as a whole were subsequently redistributed among the parts of the enveloped binary, producing secondary energy releases as they impinged upon some particular component (star or planet) within the dense plenum. While the two bodies, the Sun and Super Uranus, were transacting vigorously, they were quite luminous, though not sufficiently bright to be perceived as celestial bodies. As the arc between them began to falter, they and the arc remained luminous, but the latter less so than before. Though the central arc was sputtering, the surrounding gases in the magnetic tube sustained an afterglow and so were not always extinguished between discharges. But, as the arc decayed further, the discharges became less frequent, so that eventually even a long afterglow could not maintain continuous luminosity throughout the magnetic tube. At times the sky briefly darkened. This was the first light and darkness experienced by humans, who may then have deduced the concept of contraries, good-bad, yin-yang, or light-darkness, the basis for religious dualism and human thinking processes. Relative time may have been invented in the period of Super Uranian instability. If the arc pulsed regularly, the earliest humans would have responded to it, first subliminally and later consciously. Possibly, when the glow of the arc darkened and lightened perceptibly and in rhythm, a notion of periodicity would be imparted to humans they would have a clock. The experience of the first abrupt darkness would be terrible, the unexpected gloom of even a minute, provoking fears of a shutdown of light. If the pulsing were regular, but interruptions occurred, terror would ensure with the interruptions. Frenzies of fear attending eclipses, historically and recently (Corliss), may be traceable to primordial experiences with a degenerating axis. The birth of Super Uranus, emerging from the plenum sky, would be both terrifying and reassuring. Graeco-Roman mythology pictures the god Uranus as gloomy and enshrouded (de Grazia, 1981). New measures of time and space might be calculated, a reliable presence was granted humans, and even the ultimate terror of a turn-off of electrical axis activity could be tolerable if Super Uranus remained visible. It is possible that through this period the electric discharge was converting from one emitting light to a non-optical, or dark, discharge. Thus the absence of light is not a synonym for the absence of electric flow, only a change in the gases' reaction to the flow. Nevertheless, pauses in the glow were becoming longer with time and the flow more erratic in its intensity. Whereas before, the two stars transacted internally to produce the arc, while the opaque plenum transacted at its perimeter with the Cosmos, now each star transacted separately with the galaxy through the thinning plenum. This new galactic connection could occur because the plenum density had fallen as it expanded both bodies were still far from electric equilibrium with their galactic environment (Figure 22). Thereupon, Solaria Binaria would be observed to be a semi-detached binary star system (Note D) from the vantage point of another star system. Not surprisingly, the gas density detected in such binaries is at a level of that plenum density that would suffice to let the principals be seen from the Earth's presumed location during that era [74] . Figure 22. Solaria Binaria as the Plenum Thins and the stars Separate. Late in the development of Solaria Binaria the gases of the plenum had been thinned to such an extent that the transaction between the Cosmos and the binary ceased to liberate the major part of its energy at the binary's perimeter. Thereafter the cosmic transaction deposited energy individually at the two stars. The inter-star transaction (the electric arc) continued for some time after each of the stars attained a separate connection with the Galaxy. An important feature in semi- detached binaries is the flow of material from one of the principals to the other. Usually as flows directly between the principals, however, in some cases the flow is deflected or is directed around the recipient star (Batten, 1973a, p8). Gas expanding from the star is seen in some systems. Wyse showed that emission lines are often observed in close-binary systems. Emission by hydrogen, helium and singly ionized calcium is common. Mass transfers amounting to 10 -8 to 10 -5 Sun per year have been proposed in such systems (Koch, p90). In some cases, lengthening of the period of the binary has been ascribed to mass loss from the system (Nather and Warner). In our view the flow of mass contributes towards separating the two stars; nevertheless most of the separation occurs because of the electric charging of both stars through transaction with the Cosmos. We also see no way for gas to escape except as stellar wind. In certain close-binary systems, like nova AO535+ 26 in Taurus (Coe et al.), intense X-ray emission is noted as gas flows onto one of the stars (Wickramasinghe and Bessell). The discovery that most galactic X-ray sources represent close-binary systems and that in some cases a flow of ionized gases occurs between the principals in the presence of (inferred) [75] magnetic fields is an important finding (Kraft); we concur. The presence of electrical potential difference between the two stars makes X-ray emission understandable. Detection of cosmic X-ray sources implies that electric, not magnetic, behavior, is being observed. We infer that Solaria Binaria was an X-ray emitting binary at this stage. Enough of these X-rays were penetrating to the planets to cause quantavolutions in the biosphere before the eyes of humans, possibly contributing to the age-old beliefs of humans in metamorphosis of living things. Various scholars have maintained that all peoples have possessed religious beliefs from their earliest origins, that these beliefs centered upon a single "Heavenly Father" as a type of monotheism, and that this father God became indistinct after the first ages, was lost, was forgotten, and/ or was indifferent. This is true of Dyaus in India, of Ouranos in Greece, of Coelus in Latium, and of the "Great Fathers" of the Australian Arandas, for example (Eliade, 1967, pp20ff). This Ouranos-type is first the sky and then the materialization of the sky into a sun- like body, whence it disappears and is replaced by a son, a Saturn (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36). The Maori of New Zealand have the Demiurge moving form inactivity to increasing activity. And this is a universal subsequent theme. The skies break up. They fall, Humans, are much disturbed. Their world changes. The heavenly god moves heavily and destructively. The god becomes various gods, families of gods, and demons. Creation is under way, rarely in one phase, but continuously, over a long time -- thousands of years, we think -- before arriving at what is recognizably the modern Solar System. Hesiod's version of the Greek creation myth has Ouranos or Heaven squeezing down upon Mother Earth, oppressing her until she cries out in agony. We interpret this suffocation of Gaea as an increasingly disturbed atmosphere, with many extinctions and quantavolutions in the biosphere. The mechanism usually termed "natural selection" operates rapidly, under extreme environmental pressures. The "fittest" which survive are often accidents of isolation, or species that can draw upon luckily beneficial reverse or recessed genetic capabilities, as well as groups with now to be proven superiority in food-finding and breeding under difficult conditions. Ouranos goes increasingly mad, taking up his children and hurling them beneath the Earth, Gaea in desperation urges her brood to revolt against the Father. We interpret his sons plunging to Earth as a bombardment by heavy meteorites, released into the plenum by the "unsettled" Super Uranus and encountering the Earth. To the pre-nova turbulence of gases and bombardment, a duration of 1000 years may be assigned before the human creation (which will be related in Chapter Twelve). is connected with the turbulence; subsequently another 2000 years is assigned before the climactic nova of Super Uranus. In China, P'an Ku, a creator god, began pounding on T'ien, breaking large chunks off with his hammer and chisel until the skies showed through. The Dayak of Borneo, report that two mountains arose and clashed, with the first features of earth and sky emerging into existence from their explosive contest. The mountains are revealed as two creator gods, Mahatala and his parahedra, Putir, who then continue to create. Turning to Hindu sources, Dyaus is replaced by a struggle of two types of heavenly powers, one good and the other evil, one led by Varuna, the other by Vitra. The good powers were termed Adityas; the bad dragon-like demons were called the Vitras. Removed from the protective blanket of the plenum, which heretofore had isolated Super Uranus from the Cosmos, this sun-like body became directly subject to variations in the electrical environment through which it was travelling (Chapter Three); a new variability of the surrounding plenum's electrification was produced by the sputtering arc. At this stage, Solaria Binaria was transmogrified and might have resembled the cataclysmic variable stars, a group of close binaries. Here the primary is sub- luminous and its companion is often a dwarf red star. The diminished luminosity of the stars begins as the components readjust from internal transaction to galactic transaction. We think that, in transition, Solaria Binaria, now a low luminosity system, entered an eruptive phase. That Super Uranus was the erupter in these first noted celestial events, and not the Sun, is confirmed by the evidence that the ancients did not regard the Sun as a powerful sky god. As de Grazia has noted elsewhere (1981, p258), "the regularity of the Sun, once it appeared in the skies, worked against its becoming a great God". In ancient writings the planet gods sometimes altered the motion of the Sun and the stars, but never the converse. Occasionally, as part of a catastrophe, the Sun would go on strike, bringing up darkness. Velikovsky (1950, pp300ff) thinks that Macrobius in the fourth century may have been mainly responsible for the erroneous personification of many sky gods as the Sun. We can say that at least he represented a trend of ideas, which Jacquetta Hawkes has confirmed (de Grazia, 1981, p259). Closer to our time, Max Muller's extensive work on primordial religions has imprinted this error in the minds of most scholars. The outer layers of Super Uranus and its => space-charge sheath were the first places to react to instability. At intervals, a shell of material expanded explosively away from Super Uranus. To the outside observer this small star had become a nova of low intensity. Weak outbursts are not uncommon in under-luminous close-binary systems. Some close binaries contain dwarf-nova stars, for example, SS Cygni. It is possible, sometimes, to see a hot spot where gas flows from one of the principals onto the atmosphere of the other (Cowley et al., 1977, p471; Hesser et al.). Dwarf novae also exhibit flickering, which usually disappears if one component eclipses the other. The flickering, which is especially intense in the case of Z Chamaeleontis, is attributed to the hot spot (Mitton, pp84ff). On the other hand this flickering may be a variation of the current onto the photosphere of the stars as the system adjusts its mode of transaction from that in Figure 21 to the one shown in Figure 22 [76] . Many stellar binaries involve components which have perplexed astronomers, because, according to the criteria of classification, one star is very old while its companion is quite young (see Kopal, 1959). Usually these pairs are closely orbiting as we propose was Solaria Binaria. Such pairs, with discrepant evolutionary ages, are thought to be systems in which one component has passed through the nova stage, some indeed being recurrent novae. Krzeminski believes that in U Geminorum the irregular flow of matter from the red companion triggers recurrent nova eruptions on the white primary (see also Aller, p603). The primary star in such systems is usually classified as a white dwarf star (Glasby, p61). A cycle amplitude relationship has been established linking the intensity of the recurrent nova flare- ups to the time between recurrences (Kukarin and Parenago). the larger the flare-up, the longer the recovery. For the largest flare-ups, recovery time exceeds the period of observation; here periodicity is implied rather than established. The regular recurrence may be a discharge effect. The transaction between the star( s) and the Galaxy may slow down periodically due to space-charge fouling of the discharge channel. The discharge then diminishes, which allows the interfering space-charge to dissipate. A new breakdown can now occur, leading to another flare-up. Alternatively, it may be that, at this time, Solaria Binaria moved into a region of the galaxy in which the cosmic electrical pressure was diminished (see behind, Chapters Three and Four). The binary, and especially Super Uranus, as the smaller, highly electrified part, could teeter on the verge of serious internal instability. This condition, which may have persisted over about three thousand years, would have proved disastrous for Super Uranus and eventually altered for all time life on nearby planets, including the Earth. Milton (1979, p74) has postulated that the Sun today remains stable relative to the cosmos surrounding it on a moment-to-moment basis; small solar inconsistencies have been noted over the historic period (Eddy et al., pp8-9; Clark et al. 1979). Even the ultimate instability, the nova eruption, is not forbidden. Super Uranus can have erupted many times. The shock of its recurrent explosions propagated through the plenum, damaging the planets nestled within it and electrically thinning it further. Not all of the ejecta was gaseous. Fragments circulated within the system for a time, encountering explosively other bodies differently charged. Some fragments fell back upon Super Uranus, which was diminishing in brightness and may be also in size because of its outbursts. The rude disturbance of the hitherto peaceful atmosphere of the Earth was noted fearfully by the rapidly developing human culture that was spreading throughout the World. Men perceived the heavens to be alive and exercising a control over earthly affairs. Heaven both inflamed and frustrated man's desire ... which seized him in the course of his very creation -- to control himself and his environment. {S : Notes on Chapter 10} Notes on Chapter 10 74. About 1.6 x 10 -6 kilograms of gas per cubic meter, or 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. 75. Reservation ours. Conveniently, such fields are not generally detectable (Batten 1973a) 76. Juergens (1977d) notes that similar current variations exist in the solar photosphere. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 11: } {T ASTROBLEMES OF THE EARTH} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER ELEVEN ASTROBLEMES OF THE EARTH The first experience of Super Uranian instability on Earth would be a quick succession of light and darkening and a relatively more pronounced illumination from the South (Sun) and the electrical arc. The dark would come from the expulsion of dust and debris down the sac towards the Sun (see Figure 23). Pandemonium would be let loose and frightful specters abound as fragments would rip through the plenum and encounter Earth. Instability of Super Uranus periodically expelled from that body a halo of debris whose nature depended upon the intensity of the particular outburst. It is conceivable that the process could persist over several millennia with frequent small eruptions occurring at intervals similar to an active volcano or to a recurrent nova (Chapter Ten). Mild outbursts might only cause ejection of superficial material gases and fine solids. Violent ejections could send massive chunks of solid material away from the star. Because the binary is nestled in the cavity, the ejecta does not escape the system. However, its fate is dependent upon its electrical state and the direction of ejection. In its outbursts Super Uranus mimicked, but with diminished intensity, the nova eruption which the Super Sun underwent early one million years earlier. Electrical instability between the skin of Super Uranus and its interior, probably produced by the transition between one mode of transaction and another (Chapter ten), led to explosive ejection, in all directions, of layers of the star. Much of it was captured by and funneled down the magnetic tube. Its penetration towards the Sun was governed by its inertia and charge (see Note C). This material, possessing greater charge density than other parts of the binary system, caused havoc as the pieces (atoms to irruptives) encountered the plenum gases and the planetary bodies. The electrical, meteoritic, and gaseous disorders attendant upon the initial instability of Super Uranus are largely deduced from the dynamic model of the collapse of Solaria Binaria. Direct proof of the falls associated with system derangements extending over a period of perhaps three thousand years is lacking. In an extreme case it may be postulated that most of the damage of an extraterrestrial meteoritic character belongs to this period, as opposed to damage inflicted by planetary size bodies to be discussed later. Figure 23. Explosive Eruption from Super Uranus. At the period when the galactic transaction to Solaria Binaria was shifting from the gases of the outer plenum to the gases closely about the two stars, electrical instability developed within Super Uranus. This instability caused Super Uranus to shed explosively material and gases from its body. Much of the ejecta became trapped in and funneled down the magnetic tube, bombarding the planetary components of Solaria Binaria. Probably impacts were rare during the period of stability following the first accretional stage of the Earth. Evidence for this in rocks and depressions would have been metamorphosed, granitized or erased under sedimentary aggregation and erosion. We suggest that most extraterrestrial deformations of the Earth's surface would then have occurred at the end of the stable period, that is, from fourteen thousand years before the present onwards, during the period of Super Uranus instability. The lunar episode, to be discussed in Chapter Thirteen, would have provided most of the remaining meteoritic features, or astroblemes. Here the material itself would have been mostly a fallback and possibly identifiable as Earth-crustal material by physical and chemical techniques if its nature would not be later modified to conform to Earth. Subsequent disastrous showers of meteoroids, as we shall explain, would have been experienced in Apollo and Venusian times, that is, around 5000 and 3500 years ago. Lately the term "astrobleme", meaning "star-wound" in Greek, has come into scientific use along with the renewed interest in things coming out of space. Generally it refers to detectable craters dug, supposedly, by meteorite falls. Here, our discussion of astrobleme includes a whole class of effects of extraterrestrial transaction with the Earth's surface; "meteoritic" craters and mounds, irruptives (collisional intrusions that may turn out to be soft-landed meteorites); "meteoritic" craters and mounds, irruptives (collisional intrusions that may turn out to be soft-landed meteorites); meteoritic dust; => barads and field cobbles; till (consolidated clay and pebbles); metals ash; waters; ice; vaporites (fall-back of exploded and extremely heated meteoritic and terrestrial material); fulgerites (fused soils of lightning origin, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial); and biospheric transformation. Controversy and a paucity of identified materials makes this list hypothetical; certainly it is not complete, because extra terrestrial collisions, small or large, must convey many lost effects. Before long, for example, it will be difficult to detect, even guided by a precise hypothesis, the eighty million trees blasted down in the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908, probably by a meteoritic air-burst; the animals and few persons killed in this obscure wilderness disaster have long disappeared into dust. Mutated flora has been reported from the spot; such plants would have merged into the plethora of ordinary species if there were not a search party alerted to their possible quantavolution. Distinguishing among astroblemes of the various episodes 14,000 to 11,000; 11,000 to 10,000; circa 5,000; and circa 3,500 BP; and all others, even though perhaps a minor concern, is probably impossible because of the heterogeneous nature of the Earth's crustal material and the similar processes occurring in each case of a strike. Legends and history will afford some assistance and could afford more were these now to be reviewed in search of incidents. For some time Australian Caucasians disbelieved the reports of Australian Aborigines that McConnell Bay had suddenly appeared where before there was no water. Late studies have changed the date of origin of the feature from millions of years BP to a few thousands (Kondratov). Meteorites were often incorporated into places of worship, as sacred relics of the vitiation of, or a message from, a god. The Temple of Artemis/ Diana at Ephesus in Asia Minor contained a meteorite (Acts 19-35); the image of Diana was reputed to have been sent by the god Jupiter. Velikovsky (1950, p289) cites other examples. The best-known surviving meteoritic object of worship is the Black Stone (30 centimeters in diameter) now encased in silver and embedded into a corner of the Kaaba (Ka'bah) in Mecca (Abdul-Rauf, pp584ff). A local legend attributes the stone to he Archangel Gabriel who is associated with Venus (Velikovsky, 1950, p291), Moslems believe that the stone is the only extant piece of Abraham and Ishmael's House of God (Abdul- Rauf). The geophysics of crater identification is in its infancy; the very idea of the Earth having suffered extraterrestrial encounters has been resisted until lately (Ninniger), Craters from smaller than seven kilometers to seven hundred times that diameter are discernable under various geological formations at widely separated locations in continental North America and elsewhere (Saul). Ancient meteorite craters may be the source of many circular features of the Earth, but few of such topographical formations have been given more than a superficial look (Norman et al., p692) Figure 24 shows an area of broken terrain in Arizona from which Saul's analysis revealed a set of overlapping and eroded astroblemes as shown drawn over the map. Notably, metal and mineral deposits are distributed among these astroblemes, lending support to our suggestion elsewhere in this book that most if not all useful minerals and metals are deposited and produced by quantavolutionary processes. Beals and Halliday outline criteria used to identify meteorite crater remnants after erosion, and possibly glaciation, have attacked the exposed circular or oval structure. Critical is the presence of a lens-shaped layer of broken rock under the crater. This is often extremely difficult to reach by drilling. They note that fragments of the meteorite usually are absent; this they attribute to removal by glaciation. However, we maintain that no fragment need have fallen to produce such a crater. A crater produced by the shock from an explosion resembles one produced by material impacting at high energy, both exhibiting phase transitions that produce high density crystals from the resident minerals. Glasses produced by heat also are common in both settings. Craters satisfying Beals and Halliday's criteria result when great electrical discharges reach the surface (Juergens, 1974; 1974/ 75). Figure 24. Possible Astroblemes in Arizona. A section of an official relief map showing a portion of Arizona at a scale of 1: 2 000 000. The rectangle encloses the land between 110§ and 112§ West longitude and 33§ and 35§ North latitude. The city of Phoenix is located on the west margin of the enclosed area about one quarter of the distance from the bottom to the top corner of the map. The circles representing the remnant astroblemes have been drawn over the map: they are based upon the analysis of Saul. Extensive mineral deposits have been discovered at sites on the rims of these features. Vsekhsviatskii, speaking about the origin of the Moon's craters, notes that "the magnificent achievements of the Apollo astronauts... leave no doubt that most of the processes affecting the surfaces of the planets were determined by endogenous forces." He favors eruptive genesis, because of the basaltic nature of the ejecta surrounding the Moon's craters. In our opinion, he is incorrect in attributing these eruptions to processes originating within the Moon (and the planets), but is correct in his observation that only local material is present. The same is true for Earth craters. Only rarely do large meteoroids contact the Earth, because of electrical repulsion between the charged Earth and the invader (Figure 25) [77] . Some overcome the repulsion and go on to impact (trajectory 3); others do not and deflect back into space. Many meteoroids become unstable and discharge electrically (trajectory 4); the discharge can explode into the Earth's surface, producing a "meteorite" crater, or it can produce an atmospheric shock wave which devastates the surface features. More commonly, a bolide is produced that discharges harmlessly well above the surface; only audible shock - waves reach the surface (trajectory 2). Then dusty d‚bris or a few small rocky fragments, splintered off the meteoroid, may reach the ground (Milton, 1982). Most meteoroids "burn up" at high altitude (trajectory 1), the smallest of which are noted to decelerate as if repelled by the Earth [78] . Hughes (1979) commented that certain meteor swarms observed within the Earth's magnetosphere behaved as if they were electrically charged. This conclusion is consistent with the surprising finding that the rate of encounter between Earth and fainter meteors correlates negatively with increased solar and geomagnetic activity (Lindblad). Other charged particles encountering the Earth from directions away from the Sun's show a similar inverse correlation with solar activity, which lends support to the concept of charged meteoroids. Motion of ejecta, like the motion of the principals, would have been dependent upon the relative charge densities of the transacting pieces. Under stable conditions, the gases and material within the magnetic tube were close to being in electrical equilibrium with the flow along the electric arc. Thus material encountering the Earth should normally have a charge density approximating that of the Earth and would be repelled in encounter. Penetration into the Earth's electric domain (a space much larger than the body of the planet) would be determined by the combination of mechanical inertia and electric attraction/ repulsion (see Table 5). Most meteoroids would reverse their trajectories and fling them away into the plenum; alternatively the electric transaction between the meteoroid and its surroundings would consume the encountering body before it could be repelled. Figure 25. Meteoroid Trajectories. Objects from space that penetrate the Earth's electrosphere and enter its atmosphere transact strongly as they approach the Earth. For bodies larger than a grain of sand a visible trail, a meteor, is produced during the passage through the atmosphere (1). Frequently a meteor will explode harmlessly high in the atmosphere, to produce a bolide (2). A very small fraction of incident meteoroids overcome the electrical repulsion by the Earth and impact with the ground: these are the meteorites both ancient and modern, the majority of which are small and thus can become equilibrated with the Earth's electrical state during their short falls. The largest meteoric pieces can impact explosively (3) or discharge to the ground, damaging the terrain indirectly( 4). This transaction arises because particles of different sizes possessing the same charge density have different electric potentials at their surfaces (see also note C); thus they must transact if in proximity. The larger body has the higher potential and gains charge from the smaller. This heats the meteoroid and may vaporize it. If the potential difference is great enough, lightning-like currents may be induced between the meteoroid and surrounding charges, explosively stabilizing the charge levels; such discharge would be expected only for large meteoroids. TABLE 5 MODES OF METEOROID ENCOUNTERS Inertia Charge Low Moderate High ====================================================================================================== Repulsion "Faint meteors" Evasive skip Air explosion Neutral Drift down Small intrusion Rafted irruptive Slight attraction Ballistic meteor Fireball Bolide Strong attraction Soft fall Hard fall Explosion crater In the disruptive environment, when the binary began to be electrically unstable, large amounts of meteoritic material could encroach upon the Earth's domain, arriving in an electrically inflamed condition (at very different charge density). Some of this material would be strongly attracted towards Earth and could blast explosively into its surface. Even when a near miss occurred, the passage could alter the Earth's protective electrical sheath (as solar wind outbursts, produced by solar flares, do today), great thunderbolts would be generated, and again produce explosions at the surface. When a tremendous bombardment, or large-body encounter, would occur, most of the matter could not overcome the electrical repulsion of the Earth; but vast sporadic falls from above could dot the Earth's surface. Remnants are found buried under the fallout from later catastrophes (Velikovsky, 1955, p55, pp96-9, pp104ff). Repeated impacts (material and electrical) would disturb the Earth in its orbit within the magnetic tube. The globe would wobble, the magnetic axis would constantly seek realignment, only to be subjected to another disruption as another megalith fell (Dachille, 1963) or a gigantic thunderbolt struck. The assault would crack the crust in many places (Norman et al., p691), cause local uplifting, and alter the electric current in the outermost region of the Earth's conductive core. Meteoritic fallout would range from microscopic nodules, similar to those found in the seabeds of later eras, to colossal intrusions of rock and/ or metal. The Sudbury irruptive in Canada is an example. It is an elliptical ring sixty kilometers by twenty-seven, enclosing an asymmetric basin up to three kilometers thick. Along its boundary are large quantities of broken native and irruptive rock. This intrusion is judged to be younger than the rock surrounding it (Douglas, 1970). The existence of ore mountains (isolated metallic deposits of mountainous size) like Marampa in Sierra Leone is also evidence of celestial fallout (Bellamy, 1951, p196). But the Sudbury basin and Mount Marampa are far from being the only examples of celestial intrusion: these are found on every continent, and certainly more astroblemes will be discovered. Whereas the larger irruptives devastated local features upon which they fell, smaller pieces merely bombarded the surface without exploding, like artillery duds. People can survive intensive explosive barrages, as did most defending soldiers and civilians on Iwo Jima and at the Abbey of Monte Casino during World War II; pre- historic populations were no less survival-prone. Much of the smaller debris simply dented the surface and lay there exposed as testimony of a perplexing celestial activity. When a material impact occurs, electric fields are produced, causing electric charges to flow (generating an intense magnetic field). Dachille (1979) asks: What mechanisms account for the changes in crater forms from the simple bowl to the awesome mare? And then he replies: It should be noted that the microcraters observed on crystal faces or glass beads in lunar samples do not differ significantly from the Arizona crater or its lunar equivalents; the impact energies involved span at least twenty orders of magnitude. However, on progressing from bowl through the terraced -, peaked -, and melted-floor craters to the maria, the total energy difference amounts only to six [more] orders of magnitude [79] . This marked change in behavior can be related quantitatively to the reaction of the EM fields with the magnetic and dielectric properties of the target as a function of the duration of EM pulse and the passage of the much slower shock wave pulse; in the upper range of energies the EM processes overwhelm the mechanical ones and thus determine the physical, chemical and petrological character of the resultant craters. Spotting the Earth's surface are tektite fields. The large Australasian tektite field covers over five million square kilometers. From this field over 20 000 specimens have been examined. Tektites are glassy spheres, of refractory materials, erosion due to air-friction melting as they fell through the atmosphere having depleted them of their less- durable components [80] . Tektites have rained down upon the Earth episodically since late Mesozoic times (presumably the Cretaceous), according to Baker (1960, p293). Chemical studies show that tektites resemble both terrestrial sediment and lunar soil, but significant differences distinguish them from both. To explain their deficiency in volatile material, the tektites must fall to Earth at velocities sufficient for friction-induced melting and scouring to cause chemical changes to their incipiently silicic composition; heating to 1475 K would produce sufficient such ablation (O'Keefe, 1978). Accordingly, O'Keefe has conjectured that the tektites were fired at the Earth by a hydrogen-powered lunar volcano. Equally, they could be products of the electric arc, or ejecta from the breakup of Super Uranus; more likely they were generated in cosmic thunderbolt strikes to Earth which occurred at intervals while Solaria Binaria disintegrated. Tektites have been unearthed along with the fossil bones of Java man. Likely their falls were witnessed by prehistoric and ancient man and the spheres treasured as sacred. The experience would be remembered. In China, they were known as "fire- pearls"; and it is a "fire-pearl" that is pursued, in traditional representations, by the dragon, associated by Cardona (1976, pp42ff) with the memories of comets, possibly proto-Venus of circa 3,450 BP. Most of the meteoritic debris encountered by the Earth today is in the form of microscopic dust. Estimates vary a millionfold, but the Earth sweeps up a minimum of one tonne of dust per day (Singer, 1967). Daily falls of 44 times this amount are considered to be realistic (Hughes, 1976). A nine- year annual average gave 1.04 x 10 11 grams (285 tons daily) in New Mexico sampling (Crozier, 603) [81] . In two years the annual fall averaged 685 tons daily. Depending upon the influx and upon the timescale, the amount of meteoritic sediment can be calculated. Some scientists consider that a considerable fraction of earthy sediments (what amounts to about 3 x 10 18 tons) are estimated to be meteoritic in origin (Niemann). Most of this extraterrestrial dust must have fallen during outbursts in Solaria; at the present rate of influx, even allowing hundreds of millions of years since the Cretaceous, only one-million of the required meteoritic dust would drop: hence the estimate gap above. We conjecture, to conclude this set of guesses, that the Earth, from its primordial seed, could accrete from the plenum its present volume, less its sediments, in a millennium; its sediments could have been laid down in some generations of late binary times by extraterrestrial and turbulent surface events. The observation in the infrared that some nova outbursts produce a significant silicate dust shell (Ney) leads us to suspect that the eruption of Super Uranus deluged the Earth with "meteoritic till", vast intrusions of dusty d‚bris. In a short outburst the d‚bris, which in some geologists' minds must have taken millions of years to sift down, might be plunked down upon the lithosphere. Donnelly (1883/ 1970) argues that vast fields of till scattered over the world are cometary fallout and not the remains of ice ages. It is more likely that both ice and till were of superterrestrial origin. The first pre-nova eruption of Super Uranus probably rained down megaliths, rocks, glass, gravel and sand, but ice and water also fell from the sky in great amounts. The Earth was inundated with water condensed electrically from the plenum. Typhoons formed in explosions and towered into the plenum (de Grazia, 1981). They might occasionally be seen - roaring, stumbling pillars of smoke, water, electrical discharges and debris: veritable automotive disasters. New winds blew the waters across the face of the land. Since there is no compelling reason to suppose that great basins existed on Earth such as collect today's oceans, the flooding was severe. Some of the water drained into the craters blasted by meteorites and by electric bolts. Other waters slipped into the numerous fractures that appeared and into ponds fashioned by local thrusts and folds of the sediments. An annual rainfall of two-and-a-half meters (not uncommon in coastal areas today) would dump over one million cubic kilometers of water onto the Earth's surface. This amounts to about 10 18 tons of water, or about 1/ 3850 of the present oceans. Cherrapunji (India) receives 11 meters of rain in 159 days, which extrapolated (at the mean daily intensity) would yield 26 meters of rainfall annually. Hurricanes deposit rainfall at over seven times the rate at Cherrapunji; globally, such hurricanes could fill the ocean basins in five decades! By current standards, a Deluge would constitute a more extensive rainfall than this. But for a biosphere used to Pangean conditions, where rain had been supplied by mists, the new kind of heavy rainfall would be traumatic. The blast of material moving down the magnetic tube from Super Uranus created shock waves in the plenum. Where rarefaction occurred, water vapor froze, producing ice. Some of this ice fell onto the Earth. Within a short time ice sheets formed and grew all over the globe. Those were not polar ice caps. The ice caves of the intermountain plateau of the Pacific North-west region comprise millions of tonnes of ice (Patten), sandwiched between layers of lava. They are a surviving example of ice which fell from the sky. Clumps of ice avoided the numerous hot spots and lower altitudes of the world. As the ice continued to fall, electrical processes funneled most of it towards the magnetic poles, where large ice caps accumulated - this was the first ice to accumulate in what today we consider high latitudes. These polar caps grew and joined onto the sporadic patches, spreading rapidly towards the magnetic equator. The ice would probably have covered the globe and exterminated the biosphere had Super Uranus not erupted again. {S : Notes on Chapter 11} Notes on Chapter 11 77. The first documented meteoroid repulsion was made in August, 1972 (Jacchia). 78. These faint meteors decelerate at rates up to one hundred times greater than that expected for a solid body penetrating the Earth's upper atmosphere (the ballistic meteors). 79. Bracketed word is ours. 80. The tektites seem to have encountered the atmosphere (with present properties) moving at ten kilometers per second along shallow trajectories (Faul). 81. Spherules used in the counting measured 5 to 60 micrometers in diameter. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 12: } {T QUANTAVOLUTION OF THE BIOSPHERE: HOMO SAPIENS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER TWELVE QUANTAVOLUTION OF THE BIOSPHERE: HOMO SAPIENS Subjected to the effects of an unstable star, Earth's biosphere quantavoluted by extinction and genetic realization into the present form. To be emphasized here are the recent wave of genetic realization and the advent of Homo sapiens as an observer of the history of Solaria Binaria in its last stage. Radiometric chronology and geochronometry based upon gradual stratification are incongruent with the model of Solaria Binaria. The fossil record, which is the guarantor of traditional geochronometry for the phanerozoic era, is generally acknowledged to be fragmentary, disjointed, and anomalistic (Ager, ch. 3). It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt a reorganization in detail of the geological and palaeontological record, and we have had to content ourselves with using conventional labels in a preliminary sketch of the route which such a reorganization would take. Table 6 exhibits in its first part what we would regard as the several significant major divisions of binarian history, leading into a more refined division, also contained therein, of the final very recent quantavolutionary times. The Carboniferous appears in our view to have been a brief and thoroughly catastrophic set of episodes that bulldozed, burned, blasted, and buried masses of marsh and shallow water life forms in certain places, giving the illusion today that the whole (small) world of that day was a swamp. It should properly be assigned to the period of Super Uranus instability, a period of great extinction, rather than to a 65 million-year period preceding the Permian Period, where, significantly, boundaries are admitted to be rare. TABLE 6 : AGES OF SOLARIA BINARIA Suggested Names of periods Years Before Present* Duration in Present Solar years Description of period A. Super Solaria ? to ~ 1,000,000 - Electric cavity... galactic region depleted of electrons... space-material compressed into star... star transacts launching ion wind into space thereby increasing its electron density. B. Radiant Genesis 1,000,000 to 750,000 250,000 Star erupts into binary at unstable epoch... strong inter-component electrical transaction... electric flow catalyses cell production... self replicating mitosis... biologic diversification of species and habitat. C. Pangean Stability 750,000 to 14,000 736,000 Binary components separating... arc operating... biosphere thrives in plenum and planetary environments... biological creativeness declines. D. Late Quanatavolution 14,000 to 1,600 12,400 Arcintermittent... plenum thins... binary becomes unstable... planets isolated, devastated and relocated as binary translates into Solar System. I. Urania 14,000 to 11,500 2,500 Deluges form icecaps and floods... breakup of sky canopies... Homo sapiens schizo-typicus appears... ecumenical culture... Uranus Heaven religion. II. Lunaria 11,500 to 8,000 3,500 Global explosion and cleavage... Moon eruption ... ocean basins formed and filled... displaced continents... biosphere quasiextermination... people isolated and fully traumatized... lunar worship. III. Saturnia 8,000 to 5,700 2,300 Biosphere multiplies... cloudy atmosphere... no ice caps... settled continents... expansion of regional cultures.. rich technology... Saturn worship. IV. Jovea 5,700 to 4,400 1,300 Noachian shelf floods and high tides... lightning and cleared skies... new icecaps form... more severe seasons... dryclimates... eastward movements from "Atlantis" to Egypt and Mediterranean ... empires form amidst widespread conflict... Jupiter worship. V. Mercuria 4,400 to 3,450 950 Separation of magnetic and geographic poles... axial tilt enhanced... pyramid age... large new civilizations in Mediterranean, China and Caribbean... Olympian family worship. VI. Venusia 3,450 to 2,775 675 Devastation of globe by protoplanet Venus... religions and cultures reduced and remodelled... Venus worship... large petroleum fall-out. VII. Martia 2,775 to 1,600 1,175 Mars Earth Moon and Venus transact destructively... war-like cultures promoted... Toltecs, Myceneans and Etruscans reduced... Mars worship. E. Solaria 1,600 to 0** 1,600 Settling of present Solar System... secularization, philosophy and empirical sciences ... synthetic religions. *2000 AD = O BP. ** Solaria is defined to begin with victory of Christianity in the Roman World, eclipse of the pagan gods and their appropriation by solar imagery. Most of the earlier Silurian, Devonian and Permian periods would fall into our middle category of Solaria Binaria stability. Even earlier periods of the controversial scale are assigned to our period of radiant genesis. The scarcity of fossils in early Cambrian rocks indicates their formation and turbulent experiences in the early radiant period. Originally, geologists and paleontologists hoped to trace natural history backwards through the rocks and establish a long chain of rock-related fossils on the principle of super-position, the first and perhaps only quite defensible concept of natural history. Such hopes were dashed early, but the ideological stimulus behind them was so strong as to obscure the fairly obvious origins of rock and fossil discontinuities. Discontinuities (unconformities is generally synonymous) imply quantavolutions, whether treating of rocks or fossils. No continuous column of rocks or fossils exists. All => fossil assemblages that incorporate flora and fauna of diverse life niches, as a flying animal and a fish, or a hippopotamus and a reindeer, are evidence of quantavolution. Logically, and for other reasons, the rocks that contain them have been quantavoluted at the same time. Traditional geochronometry, already in a crisis of self-doubt, compromised with the new science of radio-chronometry, allowing itself within this century to move from a forty million-year to a 4.5 aeon Earth history. This thousand-fold increase was accepted on the assurance that radioisotope fractions can be used as a clock, if the initial balance of the isotopes is known. Such is not the case, as even the eruption of Mt. St. Helens showed in 1980 (Rawls). Besides the trenchant negative criticism of radio-chronometry (Cook, 1966, pp23ff), the modes of genesis and agglomeration of the Earth invoked in the present study supplant the kinds of elemental mixes presumed by nebular models of Earth genesis. Recently more direct attention has been accorded the waves of extinction that typify the fossil record (Valentine, Raup), and the theory of extraterrestrial causes of extinction has entered the house of science from its stable as a Grenzwissenschaft (fringe science), Massive intrusions of solar protons have been postulated as the cause of the extinctions and accompanying mutations (Reid et al., p179). In the period after the Mesozoic, the collision of cosmic bodies with the Earth has been proposed as an alternative explanation for the extinctions (Urey; Alvarez. et at.) [82] . Known living species number upwards of one million; estimates of living but unidentified species may reach to eight and one-half million (Passerini). The number of different species since the beginning of life was estimated at five hundred million by Simpson (1952). Fossilizable species were estimated at ten million by Teichert, of which nearly half would be marine (Passerini), but only some one hundred and twenty thousand fossil types have been identified. Thus, one in fifty species would be fossilizable, and one in a hundred of these, or 1 in 5 000 of all pre-existing species, would now be known. It may be argued nevertheless, as has Cook (1966), that the fossil record is relatively complete, and that the fossils already discovered form the vast majority of pre-existing species. Clearly, the definition of species, both as to those living and those extinct, must greatly affect the numbers. Further, in biological development speciation is much less important than major changes, as indicated in definitions of phyla, classes, orders, and families, but especially in definition of the stages of development of the living cell. Major natural change has probably ceased. Much speciation will probably come under human control, even as existing species will continue on their course of extinction. The history of Solaria Binaria would not promise the species a reprieve; this, if granted at all, must come from the laboratory. Humans are a part of the problem, being themselves in a posture of self-extinction; hence, the laboratory work may begin with the laboratory workers. The biosphere, when Solaria Binaria began to degenerate into the Solar System, was at a stage roughly equivalent to that which has been denominated in paleontology as the Triassic. All major life forms of today and most of their families and species were identifiable, but many species were absent, including the human. Conventional reckoning has already moved Homo sapiens, defined as an ancestral hominid working with tools and building shelters, back by between five and ten million years into the Cenozoic. Under such circumstances, he would encounter extinct reptiles, mammals, fish and birds, and travel between continents over broad land bridges now inundated. It is not expected that the human age will ever reach back to the Triassic, but it may be that the Triassic will reach up to the human. This may happen by assuming - with whatever adjustments may be required in the interpretation of the sporadic fossil record - that almost all present families and species, if not existent prior to the Period of Quantavolution, realized themselves in this period; most at the beginning of it, 14000 to 10000 years ago, some even later. It may be that the now well identified Permo-Triassic extinction was the period of Super Uranian novas (14000 to 10000 BP). Figure 26. Radioactivity of Fossilized Remains. Evidence from several widely separated investigators indicates that fossil remains from the Upper Cretaceous are highly radioactive. Reptile bones containing as much as 0.11% U3O8 have been found in Brazil. Fossils ascribed to earlier eras show much less radioactive content than remains dated at the Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary. - Figure after Kloosterman At this biological discontinuity Raup calculates a loss of 13.5% of the classes, 16.8% of the orders, and 52.0% of the families of well-skeletonized marine vertebrates and invertebrate animals, and of 64.8% of the invertebrate genera. He reasons that 96.0% of the species of echinoids were extinguished then, too. Basing his estimate upon a standing species diversity of between 45 000 and 240 000 in the Permian, he concludes that the marine biosphere would have been left with between 1800 and 9 600 species, from which the present species come. We call to mind that earlier we proposed a desiccating climate for the epoch when the plenum declines; the extinctions noted may be related to this phenomenon. The later extraterrestrial discharges of water collected into deep pools rather than in shallow marshes, once the ocean basins were sculpted. The end of the Triassic sees further mass extinctions. So does the cretaceous, which concludes with the disappearance of the dinosaurs and other groups. In the Cenozoic, "speciation was rampant, as a multitude of niches was invaded in the replacement of extinct reptiles" (Stanley). An average species of late Cenozoic mammal survived one to two million years without transitional forms. With this average, it seems impossible to account for changes from primitive forms to bats and whales, in twelve million years of the early Cenozoic. So reports the same author, who notes that "much more than fifty percent of evolution occurs through sudden events in which => polymorphs and species are proliferated". In the American West, drawings of dinosaurs have been found, presumably by the hand of ancient Indians (Hubbard). The existence, on the banks of the Puluxy River in Texas, of human footprints (not detectably different from the footprints of a modern human) in sandstone alongside dinosaur tracks makes the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs hard to dispute. At the end of the Pleistocene, conventionally tied to the last Ice Age and dated ten to fifteen thousand years ago, another wave of extinctions struck the biosphere (Martin and Wright). In view of these mass extinctions, any lingering hope that an evolutionary record can be completely displayed and then proven must be abandoned. So must the similar hope of proving an evolution of the lithosphere using fossils. No continuous stratification either of fossils or of rocks exists. Under these conditions, where discontinuities and unconformities mark the geological fossil record (Ager, ch. 4), quantavolution becomes the ruling concept. Fossil and rock discontinuities are to geological age boundaries what ruined settlements are to Bronze Age boundaries. Originally established to show transitions or anomalistic happenings, they end up as benchmarks of disasters. Further, the omnipresence of fossil assemblages as the basis for paleontological studies of succession is a sword of Damocles over the head of evolutionist. Fossils, themselves, are creatures of personal or, usually, of collective catastrophe. No new life forms are attributable to the interval of the Pleistocene extinctions. It may be that few new forms are associated with any extinction of the third and last period of Solaria Binaria. Apart from ideological hopes, two processes may have served to give the impression of new species and families evolving at or between extinction events. One is the bias of the fossil record, which rewards large numbers and calcium-bearing superstructures with a badge of existence. We believe, rather, that almost all modern species have survived from the Period of Radiant Genesis, either in their present form or in a form carrying in its germ plasm the present form and intervening forms awaiting realization [83] . Under catastrophic conditions immediate mutation and adaptation are possible among some individuals. Thus in a sense they both perpetuate and generate a species, Hence, non-populous species can have persisted all along and appeared in the record when their populations expanded under the "right" conditions. Further, these species and other species already part of the old (Devonian) record have quantavoluted into "new" species under the same catastrophic, mutative, and adaptive circumstances. The difference between the certainly catastrophic age of radiant genesis and the catastrophic recent record of explosive quantavolution clearly rests in the extremely powerful and rich environment of the first period and its vast domain of the plenum. The period of collapse of Solaria Binaria was incomparably poorer in genetic capabilities; to extinguish, yes; to capacitate, also yes; to create, no. The many millions of mutations and environmental changes occasioned by the instability and destruction of the system were paltry by comparison with the possibilities of the first period. Therefore, when one approaches the subject of the genesis of Homo sapiens, one need not expect grand changes of a bio-physiological type; these do not exist. With protein "chains" as the basis of comparison, humans and chimpanzees "share more than 99% of their genetic material" (Washburn, p203). A comparison of the earliest fossils of hominids with the similar parts of modern humans does not demand an acknowledgment that the two are of distinct species; and judging from remains alone, the hominid may have equal or greater capabilities than the modern human. For example, the brain case of hominids, which may contain 500 cc. is not so small theoretically as to preclude intellectual competition with a modern human brain. Though larger by far on the average, modern mankind does offer braincases that, while intellectually competent, are akin to the hominid's in relative size. This is quite apart from the presently unresolvable issues of the intensity of convolution of the brain and the percent age of brain tissue ordinarily utilized [84] . The view here conforms to the theory of genetic realization. It may be maintained that hominid is as old as the end of the period of radiant genesis; further it may be maintained that hominid had a genetic potential for becoming the modern human. A large change is not necessary to differentiate the human from the hominid. It would appear futile to search for differences in traits that recently socio- biologists have already discovered in other primates or animals: sociability; group obligations; signaling; using sticks, building houses and nests; organizing expeditions; intricate social bonds; and so forth. It may be equally futile to seek after biological differences; manual dexterity; bipedalism; brain size; omnivorous dentition; and so on. Perhaps the most rewarding area of research would be in the mechanisms that govern traits most peculiar to humans (although least likely to be determinable from fossil remains). Most peculiar to Homo sapiens from his earliest appearance has been a "non-trait", his generally defective instinctive structure. Active fear and self- awareness resulting from it generated his symbolic and ideological behavior. These are logically connected, as has been shown in detail elsewhere (de Grazia, 1983b, 1983c). Their mention here helps to explain how it happened that we have human testimony to use in constructing a natural history of Solaria Binaria and the extent to which such testimony may be reliable and valid. The simplest change would be a general constraint upon instinct. Instinct is a non- learned activity and response, unfettered by self-awareness. Homo sapiens is the least instinctive of all animals, hence the least predictive and most responsive to internalized planning. Very many, perhaps all, human actions and physiological processes can be internally constrained or modified unconsciously (psychosomatism) or consciously. The extraordinary achievements of Homo sapiens, it is argued, are entirely due to the operations of an instinctual incapacity upon an otherwise normal primate constitution. This instinctual incapacity is closely connected with and may have given rise to the generalized anxiety or fear characteristic of humans, especially "intelligent" humans. Human fear, resting on top of animal fear, was originally fear of oneself, fear of the inability to act and react instinctively under conditions of the mental division of the self into several differently aware parts. The transformation of hominid to human with respect to instinct delay, which leads to self-awareness, which then promptly adduces symbolism, ideology and recall, is most likely to have been accomplished by contradictory pressures - one to diminish instinctive response and the other to increase response. Together they produce continuing anxiety and a number of mechanisms to cope with it. Some of the pressure to diminish instinctive response may be attributed to an increase in electrical resistance between the two hemispheres of the brain, distributed throughout the corpus callosum, the large membrane occurring between the two hemispheres. This membrane would increase its resistance to the passage of messages between the right and the left brains, which are in fact electrified and responsive to changes in the external and internal environments. An environmental de-electrification would seem to occur as the Earth's interior increased its supply of electrons (relative to its cosmic surroundings) simply by the steady accumulation of charge. In a changed environment, the repetitive correlating signals that constitute a large part of the exchange between the two hemispheres of the brain would encounter increased environmentally induced resistance; so they would bunch up and interfere with one another. That is, fewer transmission lines would be available to the same number of messages. The brain originated in a world of lower electrical levels and greater electrical differences. There may be a functional problem today in a world where electrical levels are higher and electrical differences much diminished [85] . The brain was possibly originally more stable, that is, instinctive, perpetuating the less anxious hominid. The messages between the brain hemispheres propagate relatively slowly, by direct current through chemo-electrical diffusion, so to reflect a slightly diminished electrical constant, enough to furthermore "encourage" crowding of signals and a more frequent de-synchronization. The effect would be both delay and confusion - delay in microseconds in assessing a neural trigger for an information or command bit, and confusion in overburdening the channels with combined but incompletely co- ordinated messages. Signals that must "wait" and may get out of phase would necessitate momentary verification of otherwise instinctual responses, a delayed reaction, and even conflict and aborted decisions. This is enough to set up the unique pattern of human behavior in an otherwise pedestrian mammal. Thereupon two paramount qualities of the human mind would result; the need to think before acting, and the analogizing of experiences and events, leading to synthetic combinations of all types. In addition, we admit the possibility of a change in the functioning of hormonal glands, such as the adrenal cortex. A continuously higher level of secretion and induced stress - a new constant - might have been provoked by the disasters of the time of humanization and / or by a new, stronger and persisting electro-chemical stimulation. The brain would be permanently stressed towards anxiety and action. Taken with the decline in the correlation of the hemispheres, this contradictory stress would further humanize the person with the evermore- poignant auto-instructions to "look before you leap" and that "he who hesitates is lost." Promptly there would emerge a conception of the self, a continuous fear of loss of self control developing out of the need to compromise with oneself, an aggression against those who provoke difficult decisions or restrictions of the self-conflict or who "cause one to have to think", and the need to talk to oneself (one's other self), which leads quickly to talking to others to engage them into talking to one's self-which leads in turn to talking to "the most important people in the world": the anthropomorphized gods. The self would project its hopes and fears to the external world, but especially and exactly to those features of the external world from which the most impressive experiences emanate - the heavens. Thereupon the human mind is structured and in place. The devising of culture was practically instant. Words, operations and thoughts establish social contact on a level unknown to "hominids", and a "social contract" comes into being. Society helps people to talk to themselves; people talk to themselves through other people. The social process, the instant culture, is not only formed of the present. It accrues memories. It recalls. It is obsessed with its own creation simply because it is so unbelievable and dramatic (traumatic). Since this scenario was enacted only 260 => memorial generations ago (de Grazia, 1981), the transmission of some valid and reliable information in decipherable form need not be surprising. Humanization and culture seem to have appeared in the initial phases of Solaria Binaria's collapse, around thirteen thousand years ago, allowing for a thousand years of environmental instability to finally "get through" to the hominid, as described. The fact that all races share the human mentality indicates that they share a single ancestral line; no one has discovered a feral tribe or a live hominid. Still, because of the quasi-environmental character of the "mutation", several lines might have originated independently from individuals or groups hoarding the genetic substructure of the newly expressed trait. Whatever the case, the fact that many, perhaps all, peoples possessed an ecumenical "creation culture" would point to a worldwide takeover by a single culture within a thousand years. The earliest human stories reveal something both of the character of the storyteller and of the events about which he speaks. Creation legends (and many creation legends remain unclassified as such) recall a time far before the time of their recounting. As a consequence of the need to control himself and his environment, the human promptly invented history, that is, a purposive and selective recollection of all that had happened to his group since he stood as a human upon the Earth (Eliade, 1954; de Grazia, 1981,1983b). Invariably the history began with a celestial disruption of an even -- tenored, hardly conscious existence, or with gods preparing to destroy the primeval world in order to reconstruct a new world suited to mankind. The catastrophic natural frame in which the hominid quantavoluted matched the terror that seized him as he humanized. It is the oxymoronic quality of this fact that has led most experts to question the ability of a catastrophized mind to report anything but catastrophes; they view catastrophic reports of natural history as the fictions of a savage mind - a catastrophized mind (which it is, rather than savage) prone to elevating personal problems into gross slanders of calmly evolving nature. This position cannot be maintained in the context of the massive sublimation exemplified in legend, myth, fables and rites. If primeval man were "spinning yarns" in contradiction or exaggeration of actual happenings, he would probably tell stories with peaceful plots and happy endings. He would not incorporate gods, or even believe in them. Instead, he builds the totality of his culture on a tragic plane; sacrifice, suffering and punishment are its principal themes. The leading actors in his tragedy on these themes are always gods of the heavens. Of all four possibilities, then, that refer to the experience of primeval man - catastrophized mind transacting with calmly evolving nature; calm mind transacting with calm nature; calm mind transacting with catastrophic nature; and catastrophized mind transacting with catastrophic nature - it is this last that appears to be closest to the truth. Catastrophically originated, Homo sapiens built upon his irrepressibly fearful and scarcely controllable mind. With this mind, he observed and recalled with obsessed determination the time of his creation, and all subsequent landmarks of history that reminded him of the circumstances of his creation. {S : Notes on Chapter 12} Notes on Chapter 12 82. Such collisions would, as we have shown, cause magnetically confused sediments to be laid down, at the times of bombardment. Sudden biological extinction has been linked to periods of magnetic confusion in the paleological record (Whyte). 83. This may be recognized as related to the concepts of "paedomorphosis" and "clandestine evolution" ( see Ency. Brit., 1974, Macro, 19). 84. Modern humans can function broadly and intelligently on half a cerebrum, one hemisphere. 85. This may account for some of the three-fold growth of the brain by comparison with fossil hominid. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 13: } {T NOVA OF SUPER URANUS AND EJECTION OF THE MOON} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER THIRTEEN NOVA OF SUPER URANUS AND EJECTION OF THE MOON Ancient Mesopotamian accounts of gods tearing off each other's heads and limbs are not "baffling" (de Santillana and von Dechend, p303) in the context of early human existence. But these and similar stories in the Teutonic, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Iranian, Mexican, Egyptian, and archaic (" primitive") religions are baffling in regard to their positioning in time. Given an empirically established calendar, a general review of the early literature may assign a period to them. Tentatively, we assign these earliest theomachies to the period of Super Uranian instability and the climactic nova of Super Uranus that drastically changed the face of the Earth. According to Hindu accounts (Brown, pp281-9), while Adityas and Vitras fought in that troubled first phase of the skies, Heaven and Earth, living together in a common house, bore Indra. At first concealed, he fed upon soma until he attained enormous size, whereupon he blew Heaven and Earth apart forever, filling the atmosphere by himself and exploding the Vitras in the process by thunderbolts. From the exploded belly of Vitra came the cosmic waters, acknowledging Indra (Super Uranus) as their new lord. Out of the waters came also the Sun. Varuna (Heaven as Super Uranus) presided, as order and truth emerged from primordial chaos. This narrative is but one culture's account of mankind's witnessing of the explosion of a celestial body. An alternative, from the Vedic period, has a Cosmic Egg (here Super Uranus) floating for a thousand years in the primordial waters (our plenum) until it burst (as a nova) to reveal the Lord of the Universe, Purusha. It may be that Purusha is yet another phase of the troubled Super Uranus. From the navel of Purusha sprang a lotus bright as a thousand suns (possibly the electric arc), whence came Brahma, who acquired Purusha's powers as Lord of the Universe (and whom we shall identify below as Super Saturn) (Cardona, 1978a, p43). The cracking of the Cosmic Egg may represent the sight of a fissioning Super Uranus in human memory. The Hebrew Book of Genesis begins with a primordial light that did not have the company of the celestial bodies until "the fourth day". This may have been "lightness" or "a light". The deity may have been Super Uranus, who first gave "lightness" and then "a light" of himself. Some (e. g. Cardona, ibid.) place the deity here already into the Saturnian period, justifiably asserting the parallel names and qualities of Elohim and Saturn. We speculate that either Genesis begins after the Super Uranian nova, with Super Saturn, or that in the great expanse of time, Elohim in his Uranian role was merged into Elohim in his Saturnian role. Generalizing on this problem, Tresman and O'Gheoghan comment that "where there is descent (from father to son) it is obvious, otherwise the transition between the original deity and the later Saturn god is not too marked." "The Sumerian ideogram for 'star', 'god', and 'heaven' (An) is one and the same, a simple eight-pointed star shape W . This strongly suggests that they believed that the original "heaven" was a body that later became a star. It also strongly indicates that the first deity was this star-heaven god. (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, quoting Kramer, 1963 and Peter James, p36) The Egyptians defined Atum as "the incomplete one who became complete", says Lowery (ibid. fn., citing the Coffin Texts); we may surmise this as Heaven becoming a star; Atum was depicted by the Egyptians as a setting sun (Ions, p40). "There is every indication that this original deity was at one time the only visible planetary body of the heavens. From the Hindu sources we have; 'In the beginning Prajaparti existed alone'. The Egyptian records tell that Atum 'was alone in the primeval watery abyss'. The deities An/ Anu (Sumeric) and Ouranos (Greek) were both lone planetary deities, although their names translate literally as 'heaven'. In each case the successor to the original deity was a Saturn-type god." (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36) In the Edda epic of Scandinavia, "The Spirit brooding over the dark, abysmal water calls order out of chaos, and once having given the impulse to all creation, the First Cause returns and remains for evermore in statu abscondito!" (Blavatska, citing Mallet and the Edda epic, pp160ff) The star, in its pre-nova state, was apparent from the time of its emergence from out of the gloom into the now activated heavens. The interval from 14 000 to 11 000 years ago may be designated as the Age of Urania. The skies were falling upon the transformed primate schizoid, Homo sapiens. Children's fables like that of "Chicken Little", who led the barnyard animals in a search for an Authority to do something about the falling skies, are ancient and widespread and are not to be neglected as reflections of the ancient traumas imprinted upon the collective memory and sublimated into the first fictional literature alongside the sacred religious myths (de Grazia, 1978, 1984a). When the heavens were broken open, as by P'an Ku, the Chinese creator god, Super Uranus appeared in the north, immense and egg-shaped, probably resembling a giant eye, too, atop the sky. At first the white of albumen, it became yolkred, and radiated heat. It was probably the primordial light of the beginning lines of the Hebrew Genesis; as noted above, the present celestial bodies appeared only on the fourth day of creation. To the south, less luminous because it was much more distant, was the Sun. There were now three sources of heat, the magnetic tube (powered by the arc), the Sun, and most prominent of all, Super Uranus, Depending upon the earthly observer's location, either Super Uranus or the Sun could be discerned through the thinning gases. In general, northern observers glimpsed Super Uranus, southerners saw the dimmer but larger Sun [86] . During its period of instability Super Uranus erupted regularly. The body of the star contained electric charges distributed internally to be in balance with the charge on the surface, which was transacting with the Sun and/ or the Galaxy. The Sun via the arc had been robbing Super Uranus of electrons for almost one million years, a process that kept the surface of Super Uranus relatively drained of charge. Super Uranus' charge-deficient surface could be altered in one of two of two ways: a sudden influx of Galactic charge, or a short-lived disruption of the arc. Both would "overcharge" the Uranian surface. The reaction would be to further concentrate the charges within Super Uranus. When the surface charge again became reduced (which would happen if the arc suddenly reconnected, allowing a burst of ions onto Super Uranus) the interior of super Uranus, now overly packed with charge, would respond by outbursting charged matter into space. This outburst would not normally escape from the domain of the star which generated it; most of it would in time be reabsorbed into the star, returning the "released" charge. Charged debris falling back could help induce conditions for another electric compression and outburst. And so the star erupted cyclically. The cycle of erupting away highly charged material and subsequently re-absorbing it follows directly the notion of a plenum of charged gases around the binary system itself and secondarily around each charged body of the binary. The extent of each plenum is determined by the charge on the body it surrounds and by the charge in the plenum gases. When an eruption occurs the plenum gases increase in charge and expand their sac. Electric fields are set up which cause charges to flow, thereby decreasing the surrounding charge relative to that within the central body. The plenum then begins to collapse, pieces within the sac discharge and also fall back. In the Age of Urania each body might be said to possess an autonomous sac and plenum, immersed in the now diluted plenum of the whole system. The plenum of Solaria had by this time become so tenuous that the individual bodies had established around themselves electro-spheres - regions of charges, gases and, from time to time, solid matter. These spheres, or regional environments, were to their central bodies what the plenum had been to the system, in that they defined the limit of the body's influence upon nearby matter and charges. Vestiges of the electrospheres are found today in the electric sheaths surrounding the Sun and the various planets; the transition occurred mostly in the time of Jupiter (see ahead to Chapter Fifteen and Note B, fn. 117). The resorption of erupted pieces occurs so long as they do not exceed a certain critical size. Judging by today's Solar System, this would seem to be about 22 kilometers in diameter or a volume of about 6 000 cubic kilometers. Pieces that could not be resorbed could become satellites of their parent body - as had Super Uranus and the primitive planets - but in Solaria they could be transferred from the realm of one body to another whenever the two electrical plena involved were contiguous. In these special circumstances escape was possible; the smaller sacs could leak gases and pieces into adjoining sacs. This is how Super Uranus bombarded the planets. Its outbursts electrically charged the Earth's sac and filled it with debris of diverse sizes. The cooling of the Earth, noted during the Uranian Period, could be accomplished by several means. As the plenum cleared, more and more of the arc's energy was transmitted directly to the Earth without involving the plenum gases as intermediary. Thus => albedo became more important in the energy transfer. Where earlier the heated plenum kept the Earth warm, now the light conveyed energy directly to the Earth. If the cloudy Earth reflected 52% of the radiation from the arc the Earth would cool to 270 K from its former warmer temperature (see behind, Chapter Six). Alternatively, if the Earth accepted more than half of the light but the arc cooled, the temperature would also drop [87] . In its climactic explosion, Super Uranus ejected a large chunk of its material down the magnetic tube towards the Sun. This element, to be termed Uranus Minor, was preceded and accompanied by gaseous blasts and water. Badly out of electrical equilibrium, both because of the electrical cataclysm which ravished Super Uranus and because the ejects now followed orbits taking them into regions of greatly different space - charge, a vast, brightly glowing space-charge sheath surrounded Uranus Minor as it hurtled towards the Earth (see Juergens, 1972, p12, for a discussion of these sheaths). At the time of the eruption the Earth is revolving around the arc, moving counter- clockwise (viewed from Super Uranus). The globe is oriented with Africa (the old north) facing the explosion; the magnetic poles lie on the rotational equator, Greenland leading and Antarctica following. At this time the Earth had a continental crust everywhere. The continents that survive today were bunched around Africa, then located at the north rotational pole. In Figure 27 the land areas of the world today are drawn schematically as they related in Pangean (all-Earth) times. They accord with the geophysical and paleontological findings of the continental-drift school of thought [88] . Uranus Minor, moving from Super Uranus towards the Sun, encounters the outside edge of the Earth (the Pacific side) in passing (see Figure 28). An intense transaction occurs between the two. Electrical polarization distorts the shape of both bodies and their sacs, and the Earth's magnetic axis wrenches out of line, which causes the world to shudder. The sudden movement loosens part of the lithosphere; torrents of water (or ice) flow (or slide) across the surface. Fiery blasts strike the area which is now the West Central Pacific Ocean, opening massive craters, some deep enough to release mantle material previously thirty kilometers below the surface. At perigee the transaction between Earth and Uranus Minor reaches a maximum. The crust on the side closest to the intruder cracks and fragments. Explosively, as much as half of the Earth's continental material rises into the sky, leaving exposed much of the upper mantle. This extraction initiates the reshaping of the lithosphere to produce the structure we study today. Whereas before this event the entire Earth was topped by a thick granite layer, basalt was now exposed. In its brief encounter with the Earth, which we estimate to have lasted many hours, Uranus Minor peeled a deep swath of crust (and some upper mantle material) from the Central Pacific and to lesser depth from the great seamount area west of the Americas. Figure 27. The Surviving Land from the Age of Urania Prior to the eruption of Super Uranus, which hurled the large fragment Uranus Minor down the magnetic tube past the Earth, our planet was covered by a complete shell of granitic crust. Much of that crustal layer was lost when the Earth encountered Uranus Minor. That crust which remains was once clustered around the ancient North rotational pole, which then always faced towards Super Uranus. It was ruptured and rifted by the close passage of Uranus Minor. Figure 28( a) The Encounter of Uranus Minor with the Earth Figure 28( b) The Earth was in orbit around the electric arc at the time when Uranus Minor passed close by it. Then the Earth's surface was irrotational with respect to the arc so that one point on the crust (magnetic south) was always leading on the orbit (see above) and the point on the opposite side (magnetic north) was always trailing (see over page). Though the crustal arrangement of that time placed the lands differently, the lands on the present globe, which did not take up their present positions until after the catastrophe described here, would be oriented as indicated on figures 28( a) and (b) relative to the arc and the Sun Uranus Minor met the Earth on the trailing side and departed on the leading side (compare with Figure 18), tearing away crust and creating the Moon Basin where shown. The Earth wobbled eccentrically as mechanical, electric and magnetic forces acted upon it. Surrounding the wounded surface was a rampart of devastated granites. Within it were thousands of seamounts, unable quite to explode into the sky, and now frozen like pulled taffy. At its center was an abyssal plain where the surface of the Earth's mantle appeared scoured of its covering; it was then, and is now, the deepest basin of the Earth's surface. The blow-off was so great that it pulled the great central magnet of the Earth 436 kilometers towards it, making the shortest circle line of the Earth's magnetic field of today pass through the Society Islands. The Earth's center of gravity was pitched five kilometers towards the great Pacific depression (Baker, 1954, p5). In this one brief event, the entire original Southern Hemisphere of the Earth's crust, was electrically ejected into the sky. The unbonding of the crustal granite and mantle from the subsurface magma involved a large transfer of energy. If the inter-body transaction is translated into thermal terms, the heat would have been perhaps impossible for the Earth to support without vaporizing the biosphere and the globe itself. About 10 32 joules are theoretically required to peel off the surface layer of the Earth entirely. Here, over half the crust was ejected, but the balance was loosened and set into motion. However, the transaction consisted of a trade of material for electric charge. Uranus Minor, much more heavily charged, deposited charge upon the Earth. The new electrical energy was incorporated by the molecules of the Earth. Their internal (atomic) bonds were stretched. A very large amount of energy was required by the chemical bonds and supplied athermally [89] by a huge column or front of lightning bolts blasting a swath into the sky during the pass-by. That heating which occurred was concentrated at the interface of crust and mantle and at the bottom of the moon basin. In adjusting its figure following the ejection the remaining land mass fractured and the Earth expanded by about twenty per cent (de Grazia, 1981; see also Meservey, p611). This represented a radial expansion of nine per cent and a corresponding atomic expansion throughout much of the Earth. The remainder of the continental mass that had covered the Earth fractured into the complex ocean-ridge and land-rift system viewed today (see Figure 29). The separated blocks were electrically repelled [90] and squeezed apart. They rafted speedily towards the Moon basin. Lava welled up from below the fissures and widened them. Thousands of new volcanoes were instantly activated. The constellation of fractures exhibited in the world map of Figure 29 probably occurred within a day's time (de Grazia, 1981; Manson, ch. 4). Tectonic plate theory today relegates the fractures to a remote unspecified era, with ocean basins always present. It invokes various mechanisms to accomplish over great stretches of time complex slow movements of a number of plates carrying continental crust. The theory is not only unnecessary; it is mistaken on the most obvious criteria. Melvin Cook (1966, p189), from the perspective of his research on explosives, points out readily the unified and simultaneous features of the global fracture system, finding in them what is ordinarily to be perceived in an explosive impact upon a globe. Possibly, certain minor fractures branched out or lengthened in the following months or years. Some fractures were not fully consummated, such as the African-Near East rift and the trans-Asian rift. Others have been covered in part by subsequent torques of the crust, as in the case of the San Andreas fault, which was buried in the "westward" movement of North America, or the Red Sea-Adriatic-Rhine Valley rift, which was partially overridden by the Alps. It will be noted, too, how the Atlantic Ocean crack probably shot out from an Arctic base, traveled swiftly but against resistance, and then branched off to circumnavigate the south Pacific area, sending four continents on their separate journeys: South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. A deluge of water fell from Uranus Minor as it passed. These waters more than replaced the water carried away with the lost crust, fell into the hot fissures and onto the volcanoes blasted into existence at the passage. There the waters exploded, expediting further cracking of the continents. The world, which shortly before had been heading for an icy end, now become hot and steamy and threatened by falling water and rock. A cubic kilometer of Earth's atmosphere at present contains ten thousand tons of water. If the Uranian deluges were precipitated by electrical activity of the Earth's electrosphere (see ahead to Note B), only 540 tons of water per cubic kilometer would be required in order to achieve the oceanic levels that we estimate occurred in the Uranian Lunar periods. In the course of a millennium an annual rainfall of 1.2 meters depth would have descended upon the Earth's surface, a rainfall that a substantial section of the world's people enjoy today. This would be adequate to fill the basins up to the continental slopes, about half of the present ocean volume. Most of the rest of rainfall belongs to the story of Saturn (Chapter Fourteen). Figure 29. The Fractured Surface of the Earth Key to the map: Following the removal of the Moon from the bulk of the Earth by the action of the passing Uranus Minor, the surviving broken continental crust of the Earth shattered and rapidly scattered, taking up new positions around the crater surrounding the Moon Basin in what is today the Pacific Ocean deep. The troughs, ridges and faults of the current crust were sculptured as the Moon was torn from the Earth and as the Earth recoiled and recovered from that devastating encounter with Uranus Minor. The volcanic and mountainous rim around the Pacific Ocean was created in this same catastrophe. The most prominent astroblemes were also products of the Age of Urania, but not all of them were blasts accompanying the ejection of the Moon. Areas were set on fire. Elsewhere, newly created basins were being paved with basalt. As floods descended from the high land, they were vaporized on the hot lava. The water recirculated. Torrents of rain fell upon cooler land, producing another flood, which, descending, was once more vaporized, and assembled to launch yet another torrent. The sky remained cloudy while the oceans formed. With extra charge on the globe, the Earth's volume increased. The continental blocks fractured and sometimes folded as they conformed to the underlying shape of the Earth's body, and occasionally as they underwent collision. Thus the geography of the modern world was established: separated continents, ocean basins, global fractures and ridges, mountainous ramparts around the Pacific Basin and a global- circling welt (the old rotational equator), which forms the other great mountain chain of this planet. The => Mohorovicic discontinuity, which is found beneath the crust throughout the world, marks the level at which the ancient crust was served from the underlying solid. The continents continue to float, moving today ever so slowly, but only eleven and one-half thousand years ago that motion was initiated in hours and rapidly completed. Three thousand years later the continents were almost at rest and located close to where they are now found. They came to a halt because an electrical equilibrium had been established among them, at both their prows and their sterns (see Harrison, 1966). The ocean basins by them held water roughly to the base of the continental shelves. Many seamounts (and present oceanic islands) were exposed and acquired biospheres in time. But another deluge, the Saturnian (or Noachian), was to come. The sculpting of the ocean basins occupied a millennium. During all of this time, waters continued to descend onto Earth from the sky in rains and occasional small deluges. Both old and new waters traversed the continental masses in the gorges of the major fractures, converting them into rivers that poured over the continental shelves and into the abysses, forming slopes, too, from the large amounts of detritus that they transported. The slopes were largely formed from broad-sheeted run-offs from the continental blocks. Within the basin, the heavy heat from continuous mantle extrusions evaporated the waters, forming dense clouds that filled and rose above the abysses into the atmosphere above the continental blocks. The early continents, until eroded, were large buttes surrounded by the new paved basins located five thousand meters below the surviving land masses. There are indications that the drop of five kilometers into the abyss from the continental shelves was known to the ancients. Ouranos, the Greek Super Uranus, cast his rebellious sons into Tartarus, "a gloomy place in the Underworld, which lies as far distant from the Earth as the Earth does from the sky; it would take a falling anvil nine days to reach its bottom" (Graves, Hesiod a). One notes the gloom (the dense clouds below the habitable plateaux), the position (below the human world), the precipitousness (the metaphor of an unimpeded falling object). Ancient sailors spoke of falling off the edge of the world (a fear also present in the modern child). The concept of hell, which John Locke said was so persistent that it must have represented some human experience, may have arisen from the era of the great chasms; hell is straight down, is burning, is fulminating, is sulphurous. There was, too, a world of the antipodes that could not be reached, possibly across the abyss (Dreyer, pages: 7, 37, 213, 220). At higher altitudes on the plateaux and where the edges of the abysses were remote, snow fell and glaciers formed. Such appears to be the only scheme by which the heat needed to raise the waters can be supplied, while an area that can support ice caps may exist to receive the waters. The old ice-falls had been melted in the lunar eruption; the new ice persisted until the basins were filled up to the continental margins, and the ocean cooled; then, in the "Golden Age of Saturn", the ice melted into the ample basins. Not until the Super Saturn nova was there another "Ice Age". The disposition of the atmosphere is a crucial problem for our model. The atmosphere would have been sucked up under a gravitational model, and unquestionably much atmosphere, and also water, was lost in the eruption into space. However, the electrosphere was already operative, as indicated earlier, and was ionizing as well as electrically repulsing, and hence returning, the gases that sought to leave the Earth. The reduction in atmospheric pressure was short-term but unquestionably fatal in a great many instances. Even at the antipode of the catastrophe, the air would have rushed towards the scene of the disaster. Some help would have been derived from counter-winds electrically repelled and driven to the antipode. The electrosphere, containing a mixture similar to, but richer than that of the weakened plenum, would have originated downdraughts at the antipode. Assuming that the pre-Lunarian atmosphere was three times the present density at sea level and taking as the short- term extreme the habitat of people in the High Andes today, the atmospheric pressure might have been reduced to one-sixth for a short time (see Gray, pp63ff, White, p763). This would not eradicate life. The departing Uranus Minor is deflected slightly from its path by the Earth. It then crosses the binary axis so as to approach the Sun on the forward side (orbiting directly). Its passage by the Sun causes an electrical transaction which increases Uranus Minor's negative electric charge and ejects it into an orbit beyond the surviving binary pair. It now becomes the planet we know as Uranus, or possibly the planet Neptune (see ahead to Chapter Fourteen, p. 165, fn. 94). The granite and mantle material removed in the passage of Uranus Minor past the Earth is strewn along an arc between the retreating intruder and the gashed Earth, there mingling with ejects from Super Uranus and travelling with Uranus Minor. A portion of this debris escapes with Uranus Minor, but most of it, amounting to about one-fiftieth of the Earth's volume, is left behind in the space near Earth. For a time some of it fell back upon the Earth as stone and dust. The rest, partly molten, was assembled by electrical pressure into a rapidly cooling globule. The form of fission of a body in such a manner was foreseen by G. Darwin and Fisher; later Baker (1954, p20) constructed a simple instrument depicting the process: his drawing of the critical stage of the fission is reproduced in Figure 31. Figure 30. Fragmentation of Super Uranus In schematic form the relocation of Uranus Minor is shown after its explosive ejection from the solar companion, which to that moment had been Super Uranus but then had become the smaller Super Saturn. The released fragment, Uranus Minor, first traveled sunwards along the magnetic tube, where it passed close by the Earth (E), tearing crust away and forming the Moon in the process. Thereafter, the still electron-rich Uranus Minor moved into the vicinity of the Sun (S) before escaping into the outer regions of the system beyond the orbit of the new companion (O), where it is likely located today as one or the other of the two most distant major planets. Figure 31. Fission of the Earth-Moon Pair This simple diagram illustrates the minuteness of the Moon compared to the Earth's bulk, despite its having removed half of the Earth's crust when it departed. A new sky god/ goddess, the Moon, is born, child of Mother Earth, Aphrodite-Urania. She is worshipped after her father retires from Earth's view. Eventually the Moon orbited the electrical axis, repelled by its excessive charge to a greater distance from the axis than the Earth. From its removal as a piece of the Earth to the present, the Moon can never have been free of the Earth - if it had escaped it would now be an inner planet of the Sun, on an independent orbit and far from the Earth. This leads us to conclude that so long as the Earth remained in the magnetic tube, the Moon remained close by. It orbited then, as it does now, with the Earth. Though considerably closer to Earth than today, seen only in a daylight sky, the Moon was not a significant object in the sky. Likely it was larger than the disc of Super Saturn but it was incomparably fainter. It showed no phases, nor could it eclipse any body [91] ; it probably was always oppositely positioned in the sky to the arc and at => quadrature with both of the brighter stellar bodies. In the period of accretion, debris and lightning would be striking the Moon from the plane of the swath in large part. Far-flung cultures portray the goddess of the Moon as a spinner, the first spinner (de Grazia, 1981). In ancient spinning, as in its modern survivals, threads are held and fed from the one hand to the spindle held by the other hand (Suhr). The spindle grows fat and round. Such myths may represent the accretion of the Moon and its assumption of a globular shape (see Baker, 1954, p18). The process would have endured for generations and would have been most impressive at first, especially while the Moon was candescent. Afterwards, it may have been visible only on occasion during electrical discharges. Tresman and O'Gheoghan quote Midrashim to the effect that the Moon fell, was less brilliant, "and tiny threads were loosed from her body". Also, "some of her parts fell off". The legendary evidence of the birth of the Moon is discussed elsewhere (Darwin p510; Fisher; Bellamy, 1936, pp268-72, 1951, ch. 16; Baker, 1954; and de Grazia, 1981). Physical and astronomical evidence is abundant on the manner and recency of the Earth's parturition and the birth of the Moon. Here we cite only salient examples from several scientific disciplines. The Moon's overall density approximates the density of Earth's mantle material; so it is natural that many scientists have suggested some connection between the Moon's origin and the Earth's missing crust. The similarity between the chemical composition of the surface rocks of the Moon and the Earth enhances the believability of this hypothesis, especially with regard to the amount of the noble metals - gold, platinum, nickel, etc. (O'Keefe, 1973). That the Moon rocks are more impoverished in the volatile elements (zinc, cadmium, lead etc.) than Earth rocks indicates that the Moon material has been subjected to more heating than has Earth material. The Moon rocks were formed under reducing conditions: ferrous iron is common on the Moon, while it is rare on the Earth, where oxidized ferric iron is found (Arnold). If the Moon agglomerates electrically in a depleted plenum all of these differences are explained. The lunar material is heated as it is wrenched off the Earth. In space it is dispersed into an oxygen-poor dilute gas, where it accretes electrically again, liberating heat. The forming Moon is unable to conduct this heat away efficiently (as had the Earth, which accreted in a much denser and more electrified plenum at an earlier time). The Moon's internal structure testifies to the rapidity of its formation (Wood). Despite a high surface heat flow, the Moon's interior is relatively cool today (below 1300 K); the Moon seemingly accreted as a conglomerate, like stew chunks in sauce (de Grazia, 1981). Its sixty-five kilometers of anorthosite crust reveals that it was melted or, better, metamorphosed electrically, at the time of its agglomeration. Its over three trillion craters of one meter or greater in diameter (Short, p48) show that it underwent extremely heavy electrical blasting and debris bombardment after its emplacement. As a result we are not surprised that some rocks returned to Earth from the Moon show strong and fairly stable remanent magnetization (Strangway et al.) despite the weakness of the lunar global magnetic field. If electrical events magnetized the Moon rocks their in-situ magnetizations should be quite disorganized, sporadic, and of varied strengths. Several in-situ observations testify that the Moon's formation was very recent. Lunar samples do not match modern theoretical expectations about primordial planet composition (Wood, pp71-5). The oxygen isotope ratio in lunar samples is identical to that in samples of terrestrial oxygen (Epstein and Taylor). The amount of Helium- 4 (a product of radioactive decay) found in the Moon's rocks is exceptionally low (Heymann et. al.). Indicative of the Moon's youth (Cook, 1972, p18). Cracked crystalline surface rocks show evidence of shock metamorphism and rapid cooling (Douglas et al., 1970). The bombardment has been extensive and repeated, while some debris is of recent origin (Quaide et al.). Using the conventional time scale, recency means about one four-hundredth of the Moon's age; using our time scale it means very recently (de Grazia, 1981; Baker, 1954; Velikovsky, 1969). The thin lunar atmosphere is accumulating now; gases trapped when the Moon agglomerated are still escaping from orifices in its surface (Cook, 1972). Periodic eruptions are reported, notably in the craters Alphonsus and Plato, and within Schroter's Valley (Menzel et al., p229; Wilkins and Moore, p235, p263). Moonquakes, frequent though weak, may be taken as evidence that equilibrium has not yet been attained within the Moon and within the Earth-Moon system (Latham). It is presently impossible, however, to distinguish which or how much of these several phenomena are attributable to the throes of the birth or result from more recent encounters between the Moon and other planetary bodies and comets. {S : Notes on Chapter 13} Notes on Chapter 13 86. At some latitudes both bodies were visible, either together or alternately. We believe ancient accounts of two great lights in the sky refer to this era, or to the later Saturnian era (before the Deluge). 87. An Earth reflecting 30% of the light and an arc reduced by 32% would also cool the Earth to an ice-age condition. The actual mechanism by which the Earth receives its => insolation is open to question. Hanson notes that measurements made from space have necessitated lowering the Earth's global albedo from 45% to 29%, = irradiance values to the surface having been raised by up to 27%. 88. It will become apparent that our theory (cf. de Grazia, 1981, 1984b) posits a continental rapid rafting of a thousand years or so, rather than the usual 200 My drift. 89. That such an athermal encounter is possible is attested by the survival of a tree at Lugano, Switzerland, which did not ignite upon being struck by lightning. By a serendipitous coincidence the whole event was photographed by a scientist conducting research on lightning (Orville). 90. Each continent is currently located antipodally to an ocean (Harrison, 1966). 91. In support of our notion that the Moon did not orbit the Earth monthly we note that Vertes has criticized effectively the notion that certain Upper Paleolithic artifacts were lunar calendars. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 14: } {T THE GOLDEN AGE AND NOVA OF SUPER SATURN} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE GOLDEN AGE AND NOVA OF SUPER SATURN The great god, Saturn, identified by many names, of many cultures, and often associated with the planet, which has been known in the most ancient times by that name, is the son of a god. In the ancient Buddhist liturgy he is called Ravisuta, or "Son of the Sun". Uranus, by his many names, does not have a father; but he is often referred to as the father of Saturn, Uranus is killed, castrated, defeated, retired, or dismissed, and usually it is the work of a Saturn Figure. The physical circumstances of his end are those that may be associated with a stellar nova, as we have described it. So, too, Saturn comes to his end in a disastrous struggle, thousands of years later, in favor of a new planetary god, Jupiter, also called by many names, and usually made the son of Saturn. There is reason to believe that the ancients, when they used the metaphor father-son to refer to sky bodies, meant the most direct and close relationship of one body to another. Saturn came into his own as king of the gods in the period following the destruction of Super Uranus and the ejection of the Moon. We have recited only a portion of the mythic evidence for the period immediately following the rise of the moon god or goddess; there is little coherent knowledge of human societies of the time. Thousands of years were required for the reconstruction of the Earth's surface and the recovery of a biosphere; the possibilities of monumental and record-keeping cultures were low for many generations. Perhaps the Moon would receive the extensive and obsessive worship of a great god, or even the great god, for some three thousand years before Saturn came into his own as ruler of the gods. More likely, we think, would be an earlier determination that the Moon was fixed and captive, pallid, and earthly in origin, hence capable safely of dependent status, along with the Earth, under Saturnian rule. Saturn would have ruled therefore either from 11 500 (or from about 8 000) down to 5 700 years ago. The concluding date of 5 700 BP is related to proto-historical times, the time of the Great Deluge of Noah in the Bible and the First Dynasty of Egypt. The date is likely to be fixed with exactness someday. A Sumerian prism, for instance, names ten kings who ruled before the Flood, and says, "then the Flood swept over the Earth. After the Flood swept over, kingship again descended from Heaven." Wiseman, the editor of the prism, adds that "there is actually a line drawn across the text to separate the postdiluvian events from those occurring before the Flood". At this time, as the Saturnian era moved towards a close, the disc of Saturn appeared three times larger than today's Sun. Its orbit about the Sun took about sixty-four present days. Earth was still wheeling in orbit between the Sun and Saturn, such that from Earth Saturn looked about four-fifths as large as the Sun. In a time close to three present days Earth completed its circuit about the arc. Granted an elliptical orbit similar to that for binary stars of 64-day period (note D), Saturn and the Sun would apparently expand and diminish in size (cf. Talbott, D. N., p181). With this movement, time-keeping would be suggestible and simple. The Earth would also enjoy two seasons, cooler and warmer, each of more than thirty days duration. Brahma as Super Saturn absorbs, regurgitates and reabsorbs as the ages pass (Mullen, p15), So does Kronos, identified here with Super Saturn. As with Super Uranus, Kronos' instability made him less than an ideal father. In Greek myth, the great god Kronos (Saturn) swallowed at least five of the children born to him out of his sister-wife Rhea. She then hid her youngest, Zeus, and fed a wrapped stone to Kronos. When Zeus matured, he led a revolt that ended in the banishment of Kronos, after he had vomited up all his children alive. The interpretation here is that Super Saturn was absorbing fragments that remained from the Super Uranus debacle or ones erupted later by Super Saturn itself. Then during its instability, it exploded back a number of them, before as a nova it fissioned into four major parts, corresponding in the myth to Jupiter - Zeus, his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and Saturn Minor, the distant planet of today. That Saturn possessed satellites was known to the ancients (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36). That Saturn was regarded as a Second Sun, a Night Sun, is shown by Cardona (1977, p33) and others. That it was bright is claimed by numerous ancient texts and authors, surveyed by Jastrow, Mullen, Greenberg and Sizemore, Velikovsky (1973, 1978a), Cardona (1977), Tresman and O'Gheoghan, and Talbott (1980). That it became exceedingly brilliant just before the Deluge of Noah is implied in Hebrew legends (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, quoting Ginzberg). One Hebrew source has the star "as bright as one hundred suns". That widespread cultures held Saturn, the god, responsible for the Deluge is made clear by several authors already cited. That Saturn the planet was deemed responsible for the Flood is equally plain (see especially Velikovsky, 1978a, 1979). Velikovsky appears to have been the first to claim that Saturn became a nova, an idea that he found buried in Jewish rabbinical commentaries on the Deluge. That Jupiter was a prime element in the nova and subsequent events is evidenced in many of the same places; Ea, the Akkadian Saturn, reproaches Enlil, or Jupiter, for having caused the sky-waters to fall (Mason, p77). Trisiras, a son of Prajapati and a saintly Saturn figure, was a three headed god with heads resembling the Sun, the Moon and the fire, which we interpret respectively as Saturn itself, the celestial crescent and the electric arc. Indra (a Hindu Jupiter) slew Trisiras with a thunderbolt, whereupon Trisiras' three heads shone with brilliant energy until they were cut off, and then flocks of birds flew out of them and his fever left his body. The powers that acted in the Heavens were manifested to humans amidst increasing disaster. In terror, self-abasement and pleading, man created a Uranus-Heaven religion and hoped for cosmic tranquility. Unanimously the legends of the world acknowledge the human to be an imperfect creation; some have him created more than once, as for instance, the Olmecs of Mexico; they sensed faults in their powerlessness against cosmic forces. They projected then retrojected their faults to the behavior of the gods. These notions of imperfection were indelibly imprinted. Perhaps never until the past two hundred years did humans believe that they and the natural environment might be benignly controlled through human intelligence. What may have most bothered the early humans was their inability to manage their internal psychic systems. They were interminably made anxious and self-reflective by their lack of self-control. From their ungovernable alter egos arise the huge variety of traits and behaviors of the gods; they are artifacts of human conduct analogized to objective features of the natural environment. In every aspect of nature could be found some physiognomic and behavioral parallel with the self and with the primary human group with which the self identified. This intrinsic, practically congenital, confusion of the inner and outer worlds of mankind was a two way transaction that led humans to emulate the most extreme and complex manifestations of nature, with results upon human nature and culture that were in modern perspective often richly "constructive", but frequently "self-destructive" as well. When the skies opened after the lunar disaster, the new great god, Super Saturn, was visible dimly, through the clouds, to Earth's inhabitants. They had already been "religious" for millennia and might readily once more identify the sky objects with human forms and actions and project their hopes and fears upon the heavenly objects newly visible. Magic, spiritualism and animism, which have been regarded sometimes as substitutes for, and predecessors of, celestial religion, were derivative accompaniments of the human preoccupation with celestial behavior; they were forms of homeopathic social medicine for the "great disease". The first religions were in the broadest sense "monotheistic." [92] Heaven was worshipped as the active power. As we set forth earlier, from the very beginning, humans have tended towards a supreme god. The Chinese, with T'ien, may have been the most persistent in abstracting a monotheistic idea from the Heavens and using it through a succession of specifically powerful heavenly forces. The I Ching gives this sequence: the First Principle is Heaven (T'ien) eternally present, chaos without form; the Second Principle and First Sun, giver of time, called "The Arouser"; the Third Principle, and Second Sun, an orderer, "The Limiter". "The arouser" appears to have been both Super Uranus and Saturn, a merging of memories over time also to be found in other cultures. Figure 32. The Chinese Craftsman God and His Paredra Fu Hsi and Nu Kua measure the "squareness of the Earth" and the "roundness of Heaven" with their implements. The god is depicted enthroned atop a serpent-like column arm-in-arm with his mate. It is tempting to suggest that this picture illustrates the situation during the Age of Saturn, with the god-star perched stop the "fiery" electric arc, which rose above the world and faded in the distance into the golden sky. The ancient Persians and others asserted that God created Saturn (whence Saturday) on his sixth and last day of labor, before resting on the seventh day (whence Sabbath = rest) (Cardona, 1978a, p34). The implication is that all things - the separation of Heaven and Earth, the other celestial objects thus revealed, the biosphere, the advent of the Moon, and mankind - were all accomplished before Saturn appeared. Various scholar identify the Biblical Elohim as Saturn (de Santillana and von Dechend, p146; Tresman and O' Gheoghan; Cardona, 1973a; and others). More likely, the story adopts the designation of god employed during the Saturnian Age (as for example, it was assertedly retold by Moses in Genesis). But "Elohim" at the beginning of Genesis is behaving like the great inactive demiurge brooding over the Pangean chaos, who then becomes activated as Super Uranus in the troubled phase, and creates the world, as mankind, born on the sixth day, received and perceived the Cosmos. Whereupon a more detailed account begins, relating the Hebrew experience with Saturn as distinct from the more general, aboriginal human experience. When the gods changed, humans bowed to the changes. This repeated behavior over thousands of years is a significant motif in religious history. The lamentations over the death of Saturn were worldwide. Because Saturn "died" in what was an historical period, although little of its civilization remains, the hysterical and obsessive mourning shows mankind affected by, not affecting, a real tragedy. Thousands of years after the death of the second sun and the end of his age, the Roman government was acting to suppress infant sacrifice to Saturn. The parallels between Saturn and Christ as a Saturnian figure are numerous: the passion of Christ is historically and psychologically a re-enactment of the character, the unjust death, and the resurrection of the god who had died some four thousand years earlier as Osiris-Saturn. Frequent efforts philosophically to cover over the deep trench of tradition connecting the two gods have failed to divert the mainstream. Such efforts have built a distinctive existential character for Christ. The => Age of Saturn in cultural terms was probably what is usually designated as upper Paleolithic and Neolithic. It would be the age of Atlantis and other civilizations lost to view in the disasters that followed. Saturn, who was generally accredited with bringing agriculture and other useful arts to mankind, was the first Lord of the Mill, a sky wheel grinding out material and spilling it upon the Earth-gold, salt, sand, and stones. Before it sank in a cosmic mael-strom, it ground salt into the sea (de Santillana and von Dechend). The Saturnian Deluge was caused by a salt-water tree cut down by a tapir, according to the Cuna Indians (ibid). In Hindu myth, the gods were churning the heavenly waters and ground salt into the seas (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p39, and see Figure 33). Salt domes are among the most common of the mineral intrusions that are scattered over the Earth's surface. Small ones are about one cubic kilometer in extent, but some are several hundred times this extent. The largest known salt dome is in Calliou Island Bay, Marchland Louisiana; its size is unknown but it is estimated to be 43 kilometers long, 20 kilometers wide and 6 kilometers deep; if so, it contains about 10 13 tons of salt. Globally 950 large salt domes are being used for mining. In some regions these domes are associated with petroleum and natural gas deposits. Other places have sulfur deposits associated with the salt intrusions. Since most salt domes have been found scattered widely from the three major salt-dome fields known today, it is not unreasonable to think that only a small fraction of the buried salt has been discovered. These immense deposits of salt in the ground suggest a non-marine source of all salt. The salt in the seas can be explained in terms of salt falls from space. Figure 33. The Churning of the Sea Vishnu sits atop mount Mandara accompanied by his wife Lakshmi. The mountain of the world is being spun as the great snake Vasuki is pulled to and fro by the devas (grasping the snake's neck, to the left) and the asuras (holding its head, to the right). Together they churn the sea of milk, producing the liquid of immortality. Unfortunately their churning became so violent that it threatened the Earth, whereupon Vishnu, as the avatar of the turtle (seen here below the mountain), came to save the world by assuming the role as its pivot. Still the world was threatened by the heat of the churning until Indra sent the Deluge from Heaven to quench the fire. -courtesy Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology Whence comes "The Golden Age" of Saturn? Saturn is golden. So is the light on Earth. The interruptions of absorbing the children were spaced out, perhaps half a dozen marking disasters over the 2 300 years that followed the lunar period. Meanwhile life on Earth may have been easy in most places. There was no ice age. Travel by boat was easy, for the breezes were mild. Antarctic may have been mapped in this age, since an ancient map showing its outline beneath the present snow has been found and since no later age would have been able to produce it because the coastline was invisible (Hapgood, 1966). The northernmost and southernmost regions were quite habitable, even tropical. The continental shelves and slopes had become livable. There was a plentitude of moisture and all-year warmth. The plenum and electrosphere were still insulating. Further, Earth was holding its own surface atmosphere despite the thinning of the plenum under Saturn. The plenum became increasingly more transparent. The arc was less brilliant and more intermittent, yet the fire was there, binding Earth to its great god. Kronos is addressed in an Orphic Hymn as "you who hold the indestructible bond", while his Babylonian alter ego held "the bond of heaven and earth" (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36). The "central fire" is also represented, likely, in the innumerable pillars, phalluses, bonds, pinnacles, pyramids, and one- legged gods (Talbott, D. N., pages: 190, 368, 188). Even the jagged sickle, with which Kronos castrated Uranus, may have symbolized the electrical axis being severed from Super Uranus. Manu, a Hindu creator god of the Flood, stood on one leg for thousands of years, contemplating his world design. All of these images are closely connected with Saturn, often by name as well as by symbol. Yahweh is imagined in Jewish legend as radiant atop Mount Zion, and Kronos-Saturn ruled Mount Olympus before Zeus toppled him. Super Saturn sat atop the sky, a dull red disc three times the size of the present Sun. Because of the Earth's offset from the arc, the sub-solar position on Saturn's face was askew 21 per cent from the center of its disc. The arc impinged upon about five per cent of Saturn's face. Below Saturn it widened like a tree until it passed Earth's horizon, where it was something like 15 degrees wide. The insistent worldwide legendary connections between the Pleiades, the Deluge, and Saturn as god and planet (Cardona, 1978b) point to the likelihood of the Deluge as having occurred at the time when Super Saturn had masked this star group, and of the Pleiades having emerged for the first observable time in the sky at the zenith following the clearing of this place by the actual bodies and the debris of the nova. The Pleiades were widely taken to be the remnants of the Deluge nova by the myths. The report of Seneca, about Berossus' history, to the effect that when the stars are lined up in Capricorn, a great flood occurs, can be interpreted to mean that the Deluge occurred at the time of year when Capricorn was astrologically dominant, which, in the period when astrology crystallized, would have fallen near the end of the year. But the end of the year is the end of the Age of Saturn, hence the floods of Capricorn are associated with the Saturnian Deluge. Also to be considered is the naming of the large sky area, "the Celestial Sea", where the two Pisces (the zodiacal one and the southern one), Cetus (Whale), Eridanus (Styx, the river), Capricornus, and Aquarius are the dominant constellations. These aquatic images suggest the presence of vast celestial waters, and their one-time general location. Celestial aquatic motifs are common, as in the Golspie Stone discovered near the small town of that name in northern Scotland (Figure 34). At the moment of the nova the electric arc was interreputed long enough to free Mars, Earth, "Apollo" and Mercury from their million-year captivity along the axis of the binary partners. Thereupon they orbited the Sun independently for the first time, moving along a plane close to that of the old binary. Their new, roughly co- planar orbits, were similar to, but much more closely spaced than the orbits of these same planets today [93] . At the time of its nova Super Saturn broke into at least three major fragments; these pieces, constituting the present Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, all receded from the Sun following the fission. Jupiter, the largest surviving piece, took up a position near the Earth's present orbit; Saturn Minor, the intermediate-sized part, blew into space beyond Mars present orbit; Neptune receded beyond Jupiter's present orbit after depositing much water into the Earth's electrosphere [94] . In the nova, charge was expelled from Super Saturn into the plenum and dispersed in surrounding space; it was as if the mass of the system had been reduced two-and-one- half-fold; so, the planetary motions slowed considerably. Neptune is the Latin identity of the Greek god Poseidon, brother of Jupiter, who with another brother Hades, helped Jupiter overturn their father in the nova revolt. Poseidon then was granted sovereignty of the seas and assumed his role on Earth. Before him there had been Tethys, goddess of the sea on Earth, and Okeanos, god of the celestial sea girdling Earth. By implication we conclude that Poseidon played a role in the deluging of the Earth. Figure 34. The Golspie Stone An interesting collection of ancient celestial motifs. We find aquatic creatures associated with the Flood which ended the Age of Saturn; the destroyer god, who felled Saturn from his perch stop the column at the center of the world; the two stars connected, representing the earlier state of the world; and the intertwined serpents, or the electric arc, which was quenched by the Deluge. Synchrotron radiation emitted by the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus has been detected and cosmic ray sources have now been associated with these planets. Saturn, like Jupiter, emits much more energy that it receives from the Sun (Milton, 1978; Hunt and Burgess) [95] . The heat excess given off by the gaseous planets is an indication of their electrical nature. The emission of X-rays by a stellar source is often taken by astronomers as an indication of a very recent thermonuclear nova. Following our theory, the X-rays emitted by stars and these gaseous planets of the Solar System come from electrical transactions. The effects of the deluges of Saturn are a subject beyond the scope of this book (see Patton, pp51-64; Frazer, 1916). Judging by the civilizations reported to have been inundated, the fall of waters must have been worldwide and extremely heavy. Those cultures that disappeared beneath the waters (de Grazia, 1981) are presumed to have been located at the low-lying coasts of continents on what are now the continental shelves and slopes. The disappeared civilizations are not the only clues to how much water was involved. The great river canyons that course down the continental slopes to the abyss were in existence before the Deluge and were now inundated and probably greatly eroded, as were all of the valleys on higher land. The Great Deluge would thus top up the ocean basins of the globe, covering the continental margins left dry after the Uranian deluges. Not only would more water fall on the Earth than in the earlier cataclysms, but it would fall in a much shorter period. If indeed the water came down as the Hebrew Book of Genesis reports, in forty days and forty nights [96] , then fifty-one per cent of the Earth's water descended in three and one-half million seconds: 411 tons per square kilometer- second, 1.5 meters of rain each hour. The whole Deluge would have amounted to a 1.42-kilometer depth of rain upon the Earth's entire surface. Much of this water would have to drain into the basins in order to deepen the seas by more than two kilometers. That such a Deluge has dominated the myths and legends of the survivors is understandable [97] . Saturn is reputed to have lit up brilliantly and preserved its light for seven days before the Deluge hit the Earth. This may be interpreted as a set of pre-fission flare-ups climaxing with the nova that destroyed Saturn. If the Earth were still only 14 Gm from Saturn, the debris expanding away at 200 km/ s would encounter Earth in a little more than 19 hours. If the 40-days/ nights period were of present duration, the problem of depositing so much water on the Earth would be practically impossible. Millions of heavy cyclones would be needed, even one per 30 square kilometers all over the Earth. If they were concentrated at the poles by the electrosphere high above the Earth and funneled down there, the damage might be less. But then the tremendous erosion would be visible today. We think that a longer span of time may have been required, and "a day" was a translated memory of a longer regular interval unknown to us, a magical cipher, or an historical error. The problem of deluging the Earth is nearly as difficult to cope with as the recent eruption of the Moon from the Earth. In both, almost unimaginable physical phenomena must be conjectured. The biospheric aspect, which often comes first to mind, can be rationalized on the equally incredible capacity of living populations to renew themselves. Even postulating Manu and his tiny crew or Noah and his family as sole survivors, a thousand years of exponential growth could fill the land to overflowing. As with the deluges, one does not have to move far from the extremities of legend to enter the realms of the possible. The astrophysical aspect is more intimidating (see Kofahr). To launch the waters and other debris from Saturn is readily conceivable, given the nova. To guide it and land it requires the invention of low-probability solutions. Even if the dynamics thus far presented can be accepted with respect to Earth, how does one explain the absence of water on Mercury, Moon, and Mars, all of which would have been in or near the rush of water [98] ? If they were inundated, where has the water gone? There is almost no sign of water on them, or its having been on them in oceans. Where, too, is the salt? Two types of probability occur. The two planets may have burst out of the magnetic tube ahead of the Flood churning down towards the Sun, whereas the Earth was entrapped. Or else, the Flood can have descended the tube by a passage occupied at the moment by the Earth alone. In this case, the Moon occupied a special position besides, for it was a considerable distance from the Earth towards the perimeter of the tube. In any case, the Earth would still be luckier than Mercury, or Mars, for both of these planets have ruined surfaces and no biospheres. Three different Jewish legendary statements refer to a diminution of the Moon in size (Tresman and O'Gheoghan). This would occur presumably after the Deluge, when the Moon followed the Earth out of the old magnetic tube and was repelled by Earth into a larger, but still captive, orbit. Two legends imply that the stars multiplied then, an expected improvement of visibility in the star-system sac. The age of Jupiter, now upon the world, introduced mankind to the light of the stars in the darkness of the night. {S : Notes on Chapter 14} Notes on Chapter 14 92. See the works of Plato, Eliade, Lang and W. M. Schmidt, contrasting with the popular views of Frazer, Tylor, Spencer and others. 93. See ahead, Chapter Fifteen, p. 174, for the fate of Apollo. 94. The evidence is slightly in favor of Uranus Minor being the modern planet Uranus, and of the god Neptune-Poseidon being the modern planet called Neptune, a marvelous coincidence, if true. Should it turn out that Hades is the modern planet Pluto we would have to consider an unconscious mechanism at work in the naming of these "discovered" planets. 95. The thermal state of the inner planets is much less clear. There, the radiation balance is not sufficiently measured to allow any unequivocal statements about the presence or absence of a thermal excess. 96. The "day" taken here is 86 164 seconds (24= sidereal hours), but would have been different in those times. 97. The present atmosphere contains 4 x 10 13 tons of water, about 10 000 tons over each square kilometer of Earth's surface. To hold the Deluge waters the Earth's entire electrosphere must have been involved. Given its immense volume, each cubic kilometer of it was still required to hold 637 tons of water and precipitate it at the rate of 184 grams each second. An inveterate bather might measure the rains by standing under the bathroom shower for 40 days and nights. 98. Juergens (1974, 1974/ 75) has demonstrated that the canyons and rilles observed on the Moon and Mars and sometimes accredited to deluge and fluvial erosion cannot be water features, but probably result from the passage of electrical discharge currents. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 15: } {T THE JUPITER ORDER} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE JUPITER ORDER When Thor, the Scandinavian Jupiter, went into battle, and would grasp the handle of his terrible weapon, the thunderbolt or electric hammer, he was obliged to put on his iron gauntlets. He also wears a magical belt known as the "girdle of strength", which, whenever girded about his person, greatly augments his celestial power. He rides upon a car drawn by two rams with silver bridles, and a wreath of stars encircles his awful brow. His chariot has a pointed iron pole, and the spark-scattering wheels continually roll over rumbling thunderclouds. He hurls his hammer with resistless force against the frost giants, whom he dissolves and annihilates. When he repairs to the Urdhar-fountain, where the gods meet in conclave to decide the destinies of humanity, he alone goes on foot, the rest of the deities being mounted. He walks, for fear that in crossing Bifr”st [the rainbow], the many- hued Aesir-bridge, he might set it on fire with his thundercar, at the same time causing the Urdhar water to boil (Blavatsky). The numerous electrical aspects of the god are here apparent; "the euhemerization of electricity", Blavatsky calls him. Lightning is handled by a number of gods in the history of religion, but all together these are insignificant compared with the references accorded Homer's "Jupiter the Thunderbolter" alone. It is natural to see in this literature an exaggeration of ordinary lightning strokes, but we have already stressed in earlier chapters the cosmic role of lightning-like discharges. We see in the Universe countless instances of stellar and interstellar binary currents produced by the discharge of accumulated electrical charges. Also, at any given time there are several million electrical discharges in the photospheric region of the Sun, each about one or two thousand kilometers long and lasting ten minutes (Crew), "Mega-lightning" of hitherto unappreciated voltage has been observed by satellites in the Earth's upper atmosphere, but has not been detected yet by ground observation (Turman). When legend reports the electrical activity of Jupiter the god, it tells of the electronics of the planet Jupiter. Mountains are leveled or melted, sky monsters felled, citadels destroyed, the Earth scorched, and armies sent fleeing; all the work of the king of gods. Every lightning stroke to Earth becomes a theophany, as in lightning-obsessed Etruria, which gave the name Jupiter (Jove-pater) to the Romans. The sacred manifestations consecrate the cosmic bolts that were memorialized and discussed for thousands of years. The planets, following the interruption of the magnetic tube, were freed. Instead of wheeling with Jupiter, now the binary component, they orbited the Sun independently, their motion close to the plane of the old binary - now the plane of the reconstituted Solar System. In their free orbits the planets avoided one another and Jupiter because of their electric charges, which produced repulsive forces when they came into proximity. Regularly they passed through, or close to, the axis between Jupiter and the Sun. Then Jovian thunderbolts were experienced. These could be the now occasional visible discharges of the dying binary, catalyzed by the presence of a charged planet in the path of the discharge; more likely they were locally generated discharges between the planet and its electrosphere, induced by the planet's voyage through the electrified region within the invisible arc-discharge between Jupiter and the Sun [99] . Either way the planet was zapped by Jupiter as it came into opposition with the Sun. From the Earth, for the first time humans might see the other planets swinging on their journeys around the Sun. Planet Jupiter, now viewed as Ruler of the Heavens, struggled to restore and maintain the arc -- connection to the Sun -- for a time the arc flared with occasional visible spurts, but mostly the electric connection was dark. It is in this era, possibly, that the existence of a Counter-Earth was proposed, a dark body which obscured the celestial fire (see behind to Chapter Six). Jupiter is the most phallic of the great gods. The association of electrical stimulation, phallicism, and thunderbolting is strongly linked to the religious rites in vogue at the time of Jove (Ziegler, pp65-72). Phallic worship is common among Jupiter-type deities (Tresman and O'Gheoghan). The Amun temples in Egypt are liberally decorated with images of the ithyphallic god Min. Shiva (the Hindu equivalent of Jupiter) emasculated himself when the realized that his creative ability had left him. The analogy of this legend with the end of the visible electric arc is plain. The golden Age of Saturn contrasts both culturally and physically with the bright harsh Age of Jupiter. We must explain brighter skies, a worsened climate, a larger role for sporadic electrical phenomena, and certain striking astronomical movements of Jupiter's "Olympian family", The Earth emerged from the magnetic tube following the Saturnian Deluge (about 5,700 BP) with its rotational axis forcibly relocated. While in the tube, it was constrained to maintain a magnetic axis along the tube's perimeter. Freed from the tube, the magnetic axis found a new alignment in the magnetic field induced by the apparent motion of the charged Sun about the Earth. This magnetism, albeit weak, established a new rotational pole on the Earth close to, if not coincident with the Earth's magnetic pole (see Lapointe et al.) A small tilt and a relatively diffuse plenum made the variations in such sunlight as was released very noticeable on the Earth in the altered system. Seasonal differences in the earlier era were minimal compared to variations in climate now existent on the Earth and during the year. We have already suggested that the first lines of Genesis move quickly, and possibly in a confused way, from a Uranian beginning into the Age of Saturn. Similarly, the second and different creation, which follows a few verses later without evident attempts to reconcile the two theories, begins in a Uranian setting, of mist without rain, and before agriculture. Man is made out of earth and placed in the luxuriant Garden of Eden, in an innocent, proto-human state of unabashed nudity and unselfconsciousness. Man gave names to every creature, and was given woman out of himself. The tree of life and knowledge, planted in the middle of the garden, and the four divided rivers of Eden, are firm symbols of Saturn, corresponding to the electrical axis and the cross-sections of the Saturn disc. (Talbott, D. N., pp120ff). Figure 35. Apparent Motion of the Charged Sun about the Earth Freed from the magnetic tube at the time of the Deluge, the rotation of the magnetized Earth was brought into alignment with the weak magnetic field generated by the relative motion of the electrically charged Earth-Sun pair. From the Earth the charged Sun is seen to flow in a loop around the Earth in one year, representing an electron current flowing counter-clockwise along the ecliptic (as seen looking down on the North pole). Such an electron current creates a magnetic field, which enters the Earth at its North magnetic pole. This field parallels the Earth's magnetic field. The situation described here initially brought the Earth's magnetic and rotational poles together. The later quantavolutions separated them again and tilted the Earth's rotational axis to the ecliptic. The wily serpent that tempts Eve and Adam is the alter ego of the tree. The couple, eating the fruit of the tree upon the serpent's persuasion, become fully human, that is, possessed of self-awareness: "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons" (Genesis 3: 7). Thus they also work; they feel conscience already, and the wrath of the deity for what they had already become, conscientious workers. He evicts them into a world of shame and toil, far from the sacred tree (axis), the winged, lion- bodied gods (of the Saturnian symbolism) and the twisting, flaming sword (the axis again in its more visible sputtering phase). The Earth is now a drier, harsher habitat, where they had to wear skins rather than fig leaves. It is the age of Jupiter, and of Yahweh to come. The cosmic thunderbolts of Jupiter function in clear skies. There is a Jupiter Pluvius (" of the rains") but this is either one of his many powers (for he is overlord of all) or it is a reminiscence of his having played a role in provoking the Saturnian Deluge (Mason, pp76ff). The skies are clear because the plenum has greatly diminished in density; the heavens are transparent and the stars are seen. A new ice age may now have begun, centered at the rotational poles. Fossil settlements of the extreme north have been uncovered that enjoyed a tropical flora (see Velikovsky, 1955, pp44ff). They probably date from the Saturnian age. The new ice will remain, advancing and withdrawing on occasions between and during encounters with celestial bodies, up to the present time. Today we cannot yet deduce whether the ice caps are increasing or decreasing (compare Kukla and Matthews with Gribbin, 1976; A. Brown). The solar year under Jupiter may have had a succession of different lengths. First occurred the Saturnian year, to which we have assigned a 64-day duration [100] . Then it increased to 156 days when Jupiter receded. The Mayans possessed a 260-day sacred calendar that was central to their religious and cultural life, even while using a more modern and exact calendar (Coe, p9). We attribute this sacred calendar to the Jupiter-Earth synods of this era, to the time before 4 400 years ago [101] . At the Saturnian Deluge we suspect the Earth was around 96 gigameters from the Sun. It moved outwards constantly after that to 107 Gm before the Mercury / Apollo episode of 4 400 BP, then to 127 Gm as a result of that encounter. In the course of these changes, Earth's axial tilt was altered again and again [102] (see Dachille, 1963; Warlow), causing glacial retreats and advances in the extreme latitudes at each period. The Apollo episode is most speculative. Considering the traits of Apollo, de Grazia (1984a) associated him with the asteroid belt. We see no reason to alter that finding now. After 4 400 BP Jupiter orbited within the space of the "asteroid belt" we know today. Briefly, Apollo is a great god of the Greeks. His equivalent identities are obscure: he may be Horus of the Egyptians (unless Amun-Jupiter and Horus are the same). He owns no planet in late ancient times. He is a psychically remote god, and a god of plagues and remote missiles in war. He is young and a son of Jupiter. He is wise and was literally brilliant -- "Shining Apollo." The envied reputation of Apollo as the shining, "brilliant Hellenic god of peace and civilization" (see, for example, Grant, p1064) coincides with the idea that he was destroyed. He could not become even Deus Otiosus, thereby exposing the sad human experience, howbeit unconscious, that "the only good god is a dead god". It is conceivable that "Apollo", a planet nearest to Jupiter, in the second millennium of the Jovian Age, was perturbed and then destroyed by Jupiter's thunderbolts. Apollo has solar attributes which were in late classical times exaggerated until he was often portrayed as the Sun, a most unlikely identity. The shining of Apollo, as of his brother, Hermes - Mercury (de Grazia, 1981) was most likely occasioned by flare-ups in close conjunction with Jupiter, prior to the outburst that destroyed the planet. Apollo, the god, often clashed with his father. To some (Ovenden, 1972), the asteroids look like bits of the residue of a large planet, long ago exploded [103] . The time of the "asteroidal explosion" is recent (Van Flandern) even under long-time reckoning; it is very recent if placed in the context of Greek legend. In this context, several events coincide and relate to the larger theory of Solaria Binaria. Apollo has a younger brother, mischievous Hermes (Mercury), who is a swift, winged messenger of Zeus (Jupiter) and the gods, who is connected with electricity (especially as Thoth, in Egypt), the creator of illusions (mental problems), and is god of thieves, travelers, and healing. He, too, becomes a great god, known to many - East Indians, Mexicans, Teutons, and others. Though Yahweh reflects Jupiter, he also has qualities of Thoth; Moses was probably a devotee of Thoth, and acts towards Yahweh as Hermes towards Zeus (de Grazia, 1983a). Astronomically, Mercury would have been next to Apollo, would have acquired atmosphere and debris from Apollo in the latter's outburst, then lost charge and would have been displaced towards the Sun. In so doing, he would have passed by Earth and Moon, inflicting considerable damage upon both. The lobate scarps and shallowly scalloped cliffs that run for hundreds of kilometers across Mercury's face suggest shrinkage of this planet after formation (Murray, p42). In contrast, Earth, Moon and Mars seem to have expanded (ibid., p41). In electrical terms, Mercury has lost charge while the other three bodies have gained it, consistent with the orbit shifts proposed in this book. If indeed "Apollo" was destroyed, it must have been by Jupiter, which absorbed much of Apollo's material, so that a dearth of debris orbits in the space inside Jupiter's position today. Mercury seems to have escaped the full wrath of Jupiter; it was not destroyed, But it lost instead its superior orbit, beyond the Earth, and was flung much closer to the Sun. Like the Moon and Mars, it bears the marks of its devastation. Its surface is saturated with craters, strikingly similar in density of numbers to those on the Moon and Mars (Hammond). A "discrete terminal episode of bombardment" of catastrophic proportion has been proposed in an attempt to explain the similar surface destruction on these three astronomical bodies (Murray, pp45ff). Though some of these craters were caused by impacting bodies, especially during interplanetary encounters, they were in the main the result of electrical bombardment. The thick clusters of craters found even in heavily cratered terrains (Oberbeck et al., p1697) bespeak genesis by electrical rather than heavy-body impact. The crater lumps noted at the site of the lunar rays on the face of Mare Cogitum were the earliest for which a bombardment hypothesis would no longer avail (Lear, p43, p38). Yet, besides Juergens (1974/ 75, II. 28ff), only Pickering has forwarded an electrical explanation for cratering. During changes in orbit, electrical transactions on an enhanced level are induced. Unless a body is protected by an extensive atmosphere, and today none of these are, surface damage will result whenever electrical currents flow to or from them (Juergens, 1974, I. 21-3). Too, if the transactions are of great intensity, even the presence of an atmosphere will not guarantee immunity. When Mercury moved inward past the Earth it was severely damaged, both by its change in orbit and by its direct transaction with the bodies it passed. Even Mercury's present orbit is a mystery. According to gravitational-tidal theory the planet's axial rotation should long ago have been locked to give Mercury one hemisphere in perpetual daylight, the other in darkness [104] . The discovery that Mercury rotates three times over two orbits of the Sun has evoked remarks like "this is amazing" (Asimov) and has led theoreticians to postulate that the planet has been in orbit in its present position for less than six hundred thousand years (Gold, 1965). The state of astronomical and geological time-reckoning is such that six thousand may be read in place of the longer time (de Grazia, 1981, ch. 3). Jupiter, like his father and grandfather, became a kind of deus otiosus, already majestic and less active in the Homeric Wars of Troy. There was no longer a close presence; philosophy and literature might usurp the regions of near space with abstract principles and metaphors. But among scientists, today, Jupiter has suddenly recovered some of his legendary features. Astronomers for some time have considered this planet to be a dark star (Newcombe). That it radiates considerably more energy than it receives as sunlight has more recently led to speculation that it is a yet- to-be-born star. Both views keep alive Jupiter's stellar nature long after it has ceased to be visibly stellar. Today the clouds above the surface of Jupiter are very cold (150 K) yet the planet is very active electrically (Sutton, Gurnett et al.). Jupiter's "magnetosphere" is enormous: if it were optically visible, its size, viewed from the vantage-point of Earth's orbit, would be comparable to the disc of the full moon. The ion and electron currents detected within this magnetosphere represent radiation levels which would be fatal to humans (Panagakos and Waller, 1974, pp15ff). The radio noises generated within this region are received at the Earth, as are "cosmic rays" (mainly protons) of Jovian origin. Jupiter is, so far, the most demonstrably electrical of the planets. Jupiter is like a miniature Solar System, with its planet-sized Galilean satellites, its asteroid-sized satellite family and its entourage of comets. Everywhere the electrical imprint is there, and not always just by implication. The three inner Galilean satellites, Io (resembling Earth's Moon in size), Europa (about nine-tenths of the Moon's size), and Ganymede (eight percent larger than Mercury) orbit in 1: 2: 4 resonance. When any two meet on one side of Jupiter, the third is located oppositely behind Jupiter or at quadrature to the pair (see Peale et al.). The resonance is seen less clearly in the motion of the fourth satellite, Callisto (slightly smaller than Mercury). The surface of each of these bodies is distinctive (see Smith, B. A. et al., pp934ff). Io, seemingly, is close to being molten. It lacks craters, but shows over a dozen caldera-like scars, which were likened to active volcanoes when an eruption was observed during the fly-by of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (Morabito et al.). An electrical flux-tube through which a current of millions of amperes flows between Io and Jupiter (Stone and Lane, p947) has been linked to Io's eruptions (Gold, 1979). The Voyager 1 spacecraft was aimed at this flux-tube (Krimigis et al.) as it encountered Io. It missed the tube by seven megameters in what was labeled a navigational error; but more properly, in our opinion, the cause of the miss was an electrical perturbation (here a repulsion of the spacecraft by the tube). The persistent connection, by the flux-tube, between Jupiter and its satellite, Io, is one of the last sites of cosmic thunderbolting between these two bodies has been known for several years since the advent of the radio telescope, when strong radio bursts which correlate with Io's position about Jupiter were detected (Dulk, p1588) [105] . That a passing spacecraft was located advantageously to photograph the flash of one of these discharges was happy happenstance. The glow was interpreted by some experts as evidence of volcanism. Apparently, to think that we have witnessed directly the fire of the gods, a cosmic discharge, would seem to be too frightening (Juergens, 1980, p74). Jupiter discharges only to Io today, but its repertoire and gamut may have been more extensive not too many centuries ago. Photographs of Europa show it to have lobate scarps resembling those on Mercury (Smith, B. A. et al.). Perhaps Jupiter zapped it, causing it to shrink upon loss of charge. Callisto, the outermost of the four, is one of the most cratered objects in the Solar System (ibid), likely the result of thunderbolts striking it. Ganymede, the second closest of the four, shows a banded surface, pocked with ancient craters, then overlaid with younger bright-rayed craters, which stand out prominently (ibid.): distinct electrical scars resembling the rayed craters of Earth's Moon (also seen on Mercury), which Juergens (1974/ 75, II. 28ff) ascribes to cathode behavior when interplanetary discharges occur. Additional description of Jupiter's electrical nature, especially as it affects the asteroids and comets, has been afforded by Milton (1982). The present behavior of the dark remnant of Super Uranus is, in sum, fully in keeping with the pure electrical theory of the Solar System and the historical reconstruction of Solaria Binaria. {S : Notes on Chapter 15} Notes on Chapter 15 99. Today, when planets pass one another in orbit geomagnetic disturbances are noted (Jacobs and Atkinson). 100. The Saturnian year has been assigned cognizant of the requirement that the solar "mass" declined at the time of the Deluge (see Chapter Fourteen, p. 165). 101. Jupiter then orbited the Sun in 390 days while the Earth orbited in 156 days, and so the Earth crossed the Jupiter-Sun axis every 260 days. 102. The North Rotational Pole has had possibly three earlier positions, in the Yukon, in the Greenland Sea, and in Hudson's Bay (see Hapgood, 1970). 103. Nieto notes that such an explosion, which left d‚bris estimated at up to one- tenth of an Earth mass from a planet whose bulk Ovenden assumes is 90 Earth masses, would not likely have left its d‚bris exactly at the place which satisfies perfectly the so-called Titius-Bode "law" relating the planetary distance. This law, as we see it, is merely an expression that the planets repel one another. Nieto cites Napier and Dodd in arguing that such an event is almost impossible to reconstruct using gravitational, nuclear or chemical interactions, neither, apparently, having applied electrical theory to the problem of planetary repulsion. Had they done so, it follows that the insertion or removal of a new celestial body simply causes a compensatory adjustment in the orbits of the others. 104. The great eccentricity of Mercury's orbit would at best have the planet waggling, or liberating much more that the Moon does as it orbits the Earth. 105. The inner three Galilean Satellites moving in resonance, as noted above, modulate the intensity of radio emission from Jupiter at wavelengths of the order of a decameter (Lebo et al.). Since the commensurability is probably due to electrical effects, the modulation is understood, using our model. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 16: } {T VENUS AND MARS} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER SIXTEEN VENUS AND MARS It is no longer fashionable to believe that Venus and Mars are beautiful bodies, with some congenital blemishes. Like Moon and Mercury, like Earth itself, they shriek of more recent disasters. The major question now is " How recent is 'recent'?" We address the question to their peculiarities of motion, position, composition, and behavior. Myth and legend (in its deliberate attempts at science) afford voluminous material about both planets, their transactions with each other, and their encounters with Moon and Earth. Research of the past generation has evidenced that the planet Venus dominated the human cosmogonical mind in the years between 3 500 and 2 000 BP and that the planet Mars entered upon the competition to catastrophize the human mind in the latter 800 years of this period. Venus had hundreds of names and identities, many of them secret, sacred, and obfuscated. For example, the Hebrew word "shakris" means the Evening Star, Morning Star, to sacrifice, to kill something, to make sacred. Logically, one initially seeks information about the first appearance of these celestial bodies; when were they born? In the case of Venus, legends of the Near East, Greece, Rome, the Teutons, the Hindus, and the Meso-Americans seem to speak of a special time of birth of a deity with a homologous syndrome of traits (Velikovsky, 1950). Although the name "Venus" may not originate directly from "venire" (" to come"), as Cicero would have it (Lowery, Grant), it may well emerge even more significantly from Venus, which Bloch translates as "blooming nature", hence, as we see it, something new-born and rapidly expanding. The lotus and lily, two life forms suggestive of blooming cometary images, are employed in widely separated cultures as Venusian symbols [106] . Clearly conformable to an astronomical operation is the birth of Greek goddess Athene, who sprang fully armed with a shout from the brow of Zeus (Hesiod b). The Hindu Devi is remarkably similar in the commotion that she causes when born (Isenberg, p90). Various studies analyzed by de Grazia (1981, 1982a) set the time of her birth near 3,450 BP, in accordance with older studies by Velikovsky (1952, pp1- 53, 98-101). The time coincides with the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt under Moses, an event so fraught with catastrophe that it remains the substratum of the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions. If Venus was erupted from Jupiter, it conceivably burst from the disturbed area of the Great Red Spot. Although not demonstrable, this is hypothetically feasible. It was Jupiter's greatest discharge, its last attempt to rid itself of ions and gain electrons. It succeeded; it retired; and its offspring was unleashed into the inner Solar System, where all massive fragments had gone hitherto. Unlike Uranus Minor, Neptune, and possibly Pluto, Venus was of low electrical density and fell victim to encounters with Earth, then Mars, and remained within the inner circle of planets. Both the Earth and Mars took electrical charge from Venus, not without extensive physical "damage" to themselves; they both moved away from the Sun after their encounters with Venus (Ransom and Hoffee, Table 1). Venus was not rich enough in electrons to be coveted by the Sun. By the legendary and historical evidence, it took hundreds of years to achieve a "safe" orbit from where it would not venture close enough to Earth to endanger it and cause electrical damage. Until then, it may have threatened the Earth about every 52 years. During a seven hundred year period both the Jews and the Meso-Americans observed a great "Jubilee year" on those occasions; the inference from the holiday is that the proto- planet, still behaving as a comet and undergoing continuous electrical transaction, was due to arrive in the vicinity of Earth but prayerfully would design not to destroy the world. It is significant, as one of numerous details in the Venus mosaic, that the American Pawnee Indians until a century ago celebrated a Venus festival on each occasion of the reappearance of Venus, sacrificing a virgin to the star. But many another celebration of Venus could be cited. Granted that history and legend impart an aura of youth to the planet Venus, one can search for and find confirmation of youthfulness in the present state and observable behavior of the planet. We cannot do more than summarize here the debate upon the question, which has involved leading figures in Astronomy and Physics (see de Grazia et al. 1963; Talbott et al., eds., 1976; Ransom, 1976; Goldsmith, 1977; Greenberg et al., 1977, 1978; and many others referred to in de Grazia 1984d). We let the reader appraise the arguments dispassionately with the caution that theory must always bow to the demands of direct observation. We advance the following points in respect of the anomalous nature of Venus when viewed from the standard cosmogonical model, but implying the recency of Venus and its electrical nature in consonance with the thesis of this work. The 925 K surface temperature measured by landed space probes has not been explained satisfactorily (see for example. Firsoff; Velikovsky, 1978b; Forshufvud; Greenberg, L. M., 1979; Morrison) by any theory other than recent and continuing electrical transaction. The observation that the lowest thirteen kilometers of the atmosphere are glowing (Panagakos and Waller, 1979, p3) and that lightning occurs in the Venusian atmosphere (Taylor et al. ) encourage us in our view that electrical currents flow between Venus and surrounding space. The two localities which were photographed show evidence of recent surface devastation. Seemingly the surface of Venus is similar to those of its neighbors even though the latter lack atmospheres (Ksanformaliti et al.; Florensky et al.). One of the major surprises greeting the explorers of Venus and the theorists who welcomed their data was the demonstration of the slow retrograde rotation of the planet. Several non-electrical explanations have been offered to explain how Venus might have reversed its original forward rotation (Singer, 1970; Ingersoll and Dobrovolskis; Kundt). In a two-planet encounter involving electrical polarization (which induces aspherical shapes onto both bodies) strong "tidal forces" act and can alter spins, or flip planets over, as Warlow shows. The five bodies of the inner Solar System exhibit a spectrum of spins and orientation, running from fast-direct (Mars and Earth) to slow-retrograde (Venus), with Mercury and the Moon in between, Given a number of encounters among these five bodies over the past several millennia, many combinations of rotational alteration must be expected: it is probable that none of the spins are virginal. The atmosphere of Venus presents another type of problem. Its carbon dioxide composition is like that of Mars, unstable over a long time due to photolysis by ultraviolet radiation. That most of it has not reacted with the exposed surface rocks is termed "surprising" [107] , possibly Venus' atmospheric gases have recently been modified. The chemistry of the deep and dense Venus clouds has been inferred only by indirect evidence despite the passage of several spacecraft through them. Above the clouds, which seemingly insulate the planet, temperatures resemble those found at comparable altitudes above the Earth. Insolation and heat radiation from the clouds do not betray the hellish heat that was discovered below. Even at the base of the cloud layer (which is twenty kilometers thick), temperature, pressures and winds remain Earth-like (Burgess). It is the descent through the remaining forty-nine kilometers that confounds expectations and confuses the instruments of the descending space probes (making some of them inoperative and the data from others uninterpretable): here Venus does not resemble any environment yet penetrated by instruments. We find a murky and stagnant inferno under crushing pressures many times greater than those on Earth. There, lightning occurs frequently (Taylor et al.), indicating an electrical instability in excess of that found on Earth, and an electrical glow, noted above, permeates to the bottom of the murk. Even the edge of Venus' sphere of influence has produced the unexpected. Venus is only trivially magnetic; yet its interaction with the solar wind produces 80 percent of the effect generated by the three-thousand-times more strongly magnetized Earth (Russell, C. T. et al., 1979). Since Mercury, whose magnetism is similarly miniscule, also interacts strongly with the solar wind (Ness et al., p480) we are drawn to conclude that the interface between planets and solar wind is electric, rather than magnetic. The bow wave in front of the planet and the long tail in the wake of the planet represent the junction of two electrospheres: the solar wind flows on one side of the junction and the planet driven ions and electrons flow on the other side. Electrons traversing this junction behave differently at Venus (and Mars), for there they are slowed, rather than accelerated as happens with Earth, Mercury and Jupiter (Simpson et al: Wolfe et al). Electron-deficient solar wind atoms seemingly penetrate and are absorbed by Venus' upper atmosphere (and Mars' surface). The magnitude of the effect indicates that Venus is farther from equilibrium with its surroundings than are the other planets. This finding may be the "Rosetta Stone," telling us why near Venus' surface the heat is infernal. Any unequivocal evidence of disequilibrium tells us that Venus is indeed young (Van Flandern) [108] . Earth's history of the period around 3 500 BP, so far as it is known, provides proof of extraterrestrial damage. In this respect, the following propositions have garnered enough probative support to be acceptable as leading hypotheses [109] . 1. Astrosphere: the skies were disturbed and celestial motions were reportedly irregular. Astronomical alignments of before this age are out of line with references of the period following. No temple can be adduced whose orientations have remained the same through this time. For instance, the second rupestral temple at Wadi es Seboua( s) in Upper Egypt was originally orientated before 1 500 BC from its rear, through its portal, via a faraway mountain saddle to the winter solstice bearing 30ø 9' 0" South of East. It was destroyed by fire. Much later it was excavated and rebuilt. Again it was orientated to the winter solstice, this time, however, to 35ø 49' 12" South of East (Roussel). Possibly a block of the Earth shifted northward or else the axis of the Earth tilted; both are possible, and each may have contributed to the need for realignment. 2. Atmosphere: There were radical disturbances and some lasting changes in atmospheric electricity, radioactivity, temperature, winds, climate, and solar radiance. The Book of Exodus can be read as a meteorological journal - one encounters electrostatic phenomena, gales, dense clouds, a unique darkness, falls of manna (compound manufacture in the atmosphere), dense rains of stones, fire (often apparently electric), a mass of dead quail (driven down by electrical storm and hurricane winds and said to be poisonous to eat), and radioactivity (see de Grazia, 1983a). A sharp rise in C-14 levels occurs about now (and at the time of the Mars incursions 700 years later) (see de Grazia, 1981). It is doubtful that C-14 is a valid and reliable clock, since its formation and absorption rates are so easily altered by changed environmental conditions, and so evidence of this nature, though favorable to the hypothesis, must be discounted. 3. Geosphere: Every geophysical process gives evidence of quantavolutionary stress. Widespread earthquakes are part of the destruction of towns to be referred to below. There occurred "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during Kassite times" (Paterson) (of this age, we believe). A set of natural disasters plunged the Harappan culture of India into a fatal decline now too. 4. Biosphere: Unusual biological behavior occasioned by habitat disturbance and environmental stress is evidenced. The behavior of animals during the Plagues of Egypt is well known and not to be dismissed as a myth: it is typical of well-observed disaster behavior (Galanopoulos and Bacon, p192-9; Lane). In the Black Sea, a large belt of coccoliths at the bottom returns a 35-century-old Carbon-14 date at a level below the sea floor [110] . 5. Ekosphere: All human settlements suffered destruction or damage from natural causes. In one study, we read, "In the middle of the second millennium BC the ancient cities of Southern Turkomenia declined and were abandoned by the inhabitants. The South Turkomenian civilization perished at about the same time as the Proto-Indian ... and the reasons are still unknown." (Kondratov, p164) Schaeffer's survey of some 40 most important archaeological sites in the Near East arrived at the same conclusion for the same time [111] . 6. Historiasphere: All contemporary accounts or chronologically assignable legends dealing with the period mention a general natural disaster. The prime case is the Bible. The Pallas Athene instance is also referred to. The Ipuwer papyrus has strong support now as an eyewitness account of the catastrophe ending the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt (Velikovsky, 1952, pp22-9; Greenberg, 1973; Sieff, 1976, p14; Bimson). 7. Anthroposphere: Every culture-complex changed markedly. We have mentioned several major civilizations which declined sharply or fell - Egyptian, Indian, Kassite, Turkomenian, and others of the Near East. One might add the Minoan of Crete and the Chinese. Social organizations, religions and modes of life were altered. A corollary is that no god of before 3500 BP remained without change of status or serious accident, citing the advent of Athene and the Mosaic renewal of Yahweh as examples. 8. Holosphere: In summation of the foregoing seven propositions, we may assert that all spheres of existence quantavoluted about 35 centuries ago. Nor does any sphere change independently of quantavolutions in other spheres. Since all spheres are changing, a general cause must be sought. There can be only one necessary and sufficient cause of the set of quantavolutions, which must be a very large body encountering the Earth. By observation and later commentaries, cometary behavior is indicated. Nothing but a god-like comet could have produced the phenomena of 3500 years ago. It follows, finally, that every institution, behavioral pattern and natural setting that exists today, if its history is complete, will reveal an inheritance of effects from the (Venus) quantavolution. The de-traumatizing of the human mind by designing and propagating new models of natural and human history would appear to be a necessary preliminary to peace and progress. For the later time, about twenty-six centuries ago, the Mars case offers a similar set of propositions, although the evidence argues for a level of destruction appreciably lower than that obtained form he earlier Venus-Earth encounter [112] . Around the solar year 2776 BP, human activities related to celestial disturbances were generated respecting Mars, as well as Venus, and are notable in the Near East and Mediterranean world (Velikovsky, 1950, p265ff). Enough subsequent benchmarks were provided by legends and practices for Velikovsky to surmise that a large heavenly body, apparently Mars, was threatening collision with the Earth at fifteen- year intervals. The Mars encroachments may have been initiated by Venus, which, pursuing an ever-shortening orbit, perhaps encountered and displaced Mars from its earlier orbit between the Earth and the Sun (Rose, 1972). The Romans were Mars-worshippers par excellence, and the legends, rites and early reports that tie Mars to the history of Rome are not to be disregarded; "archaeological and epigraphic discoveries" continue to demonstrate that "the legendary guise of the traditional material actually masks a real foundation of authentic events" (Bloch, 1085). By contest with Venus, Mars seems to be an old god. Much less is made of his origins and birth in the Mediterranean world. When he bursts upon the world scene in the eighth century BC he is already well known. Least personable of the Olympian deities, Ares (Mars) is portrayed as a ruthless warrior. Hercules seems to be one of his more interesting identities. New militaristic nations, particularly the Romans, the Assyrians, and the ancestral Aztecs, forged empires under his inspiration. The Roman dedication to Mars is well known. He was believed to be father of Romulus, their founder. In the old calendar they named the first month after him. The Romans irreconcilably claimed both Aeneas, Prince of Troy, and Romulus as their founder. Aeneas was, and is, placed in the twelfth or thirteenth century BC with the Trojan Wars, by older scholarship. Recently the Wars have been brought into later times, along with Homer, who sang of them (de Grazia, 1984a). This is but one step in a reconstruction of chronology that eliminates the several centuries of a so- called Greek Dark Age and pulls the disastrous collapse of the Mycenaean civilization down to the eighth century as well (Isaacson). Roman legend has Romulus and Remus (abandoned and miraculously suckled by a wolf in their infancy) [113] founding a town called Rome, which Romulus rules until he is lofted into the air, possibly by a cyclone, to join his father, Mars. It seems to us reasonable that around this time, Aeneas and his band of experienced and cultivated Trojans might have impressed themselves upon, or been welcomed by, the local Latins of the new town, and perhaps even helped by their neighbors to the North, the Etruscans, who themselves were of Anatolian origins. It is an age of destruction and movement. The powerful nearby Etruscan state was staggered by natural disasters and a decline. According to Pliny, their city of Volsinium, where stands Lake Bolsena today, was destroyed by a thunderbolt. Both Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna underwent => Plinian eruptions around the same time. Many peoples were on the march or fleeing -- possibly the Etruscan elite had not preceded Aeneas by long. They were from the general area of Ilium (Troy). Southern Italy and Sicily were being heavily settled by Greeks, in trouble themselves and profiting from natural disasters that were besetting the earlier inhabitants. And at that time the Dorians (Heraclids, sons of Hercules-Mars) were moving in upon the hapless Myceneans. All of these loose connections and temporal references need a thorough analysis; indeed, we require nothing short of a total review of the most ancient history, legends, and the records of excavations. Even then the human record, like the fossil record, is scanty. One may hope for, but not expect, that the thousand-to-one chance will occur, and that a tablet or papyrus describing clearly the behavior of the planet Mars in these times will be found. The earliest Etruscan, then Roman, calendar was of ten solar months. That the later twelve months alternated at thirty and thirty-one days does not fit the present lunation, which is better suited to the 29-and 30-day alteration used in all surviving lunar calendars. The indication is that Mars disrupted the month in its transaction with the Earth and/ or Moon. The Aztec Mars was Huitzilopochtli, born of Mother Earth from a ball of humming-bird feathers that fell from the sky. His color was blue, his totem the eagle, and his weapon the blue snake. The interminable human sacrifices of the Aztecs were in his name or to the Sun in his name; the Sun, "the Eagle who rises", was believed to require the hearts of an unending stream of prisoners-of-war if he was to remain constant in behavior. The High Priest of Huitzilopochtli was called Feathered Serpent, priest of Our Lord; but "feathered serpent" is rendered Quetzalcoatl, who at a much earlier time was the ruling deity of Meso-America and was identified unfailingly as the planet Venus by many scholars. The Assyrians of the eighth and seventh centuries, "like the Romans, those other stepchildren of Mars, and more than the Hittites, its victims, had a lively reverence for the planet Mars: 'Nergal, the almighty among the gods, fear, terror, awe-inspiring splendor', wrote Essarhaddon, son of Sennacherib." Evidence of physical destruction by fire and earthquake is abundant everywhere in these years, and it was "beneath the exploits of Mars ... that Assyria marches to world power", Sieff (1981) declares. Patten et al. argue that the Assyrians timed their major offensives to coincide with cosmic approaches of Mars to profit from the physical disorder and consternation of their enemies. In general, the same hypotheses that we stipulated earlier for the Venus encounters may be translated for and applied to the Mars encounters seven centuries earlier. That is, we can adduce some evidence from around the world of deep disturbances in the six spheres and of their interconnections in the holosphere. Ancient astronomers and writers appear to have had no difficulty in considering (or perhaps they were really reflecting upon) historic encounters governing the planets; yet we can observe in their own times the strengthening of three psychological defense mechanisms that made historical reconstruction involving quantavolution difficult: denial and suppression of memory, religious and literary sublimation, and abstract philosophy [114] . Modern cosmogonists, sternly trained in the principles of uniformitarianism and gradualism under a very long whip of time, are loath even to consider large-body departures from presently observed motions. And it is true that the constraints on motions required by strict obedience to such physical laws as the principle of conservation of angular momentum are formidable; immense forces must be invoked from somewhere so as abruptly to alter the motion of bodies. Calling upon gravitational force, as this is presently perceived in science, requires "impossible" conditions even if an encounter seems "reasonable" to expect. However, if the moving bodies are charged and are transacting electrically, many "surprising" and selectively violent alterations can happen. The observations by the ancients that passing celestial bodies appeared like the objects we, today, classify as comets are understandable. Juergens (1972, p7) has shown how comet-like behavior (and appearance) results when astronomical bodies move quickly from a region with one level of electrification into a remote region differently electrified. Milton (1980/ 81) has generalized Juergens explanation to apply it to other "non- gravitational" celestial motions. Encke and later astronomers have noted with surprise how cometary bodies sometimes alter their angular momentum in seemingly sporadic episodes (Sekanina). By this point in our study of Solaria Binaria, we should not have to digress further in order to establish the capabilities of electrical motions. We can go further. The Moon has undergone its tribulations whenever the Earth has been engaged. Legends, and myths of Moon encounters with Venus and Mars, are at least as numerous as those involving Earth alone. Documentation has been presented elsewhere. Juergens (1974, 1974/ 75) has analyzed reports of various disparities between surface features of Moon and Mars, and explained them as effects of anode and cathode behavior that would be excited in close encounters. He has suggested, for instance, that some of the hill ranges of the Moon are so morphologically anomalistic as to represent a job of "electric welding" done by Mars [115] . To extract from these hills and from the canyons of Mars comparable material is presently impracticable, even though we may conceive of chemical tests to apply to the material thus obtained. Juergens has gone further in the investigation of electrical encounters between Moon and Mars. On the assumption that the ray-surrounded crater Tycho (the most prominent feature on the Moon under high-angle lighting, that is, near Full Moon) could have been blasted out of the lunar highland rock by an electrical explosion liberating almost 10 17 megajoules of energy and requiring a transfer of 10 11 coulombs of charge between the Moon and Mars, Juergens sought a suitable anode site on Mars' surface which might receive this discharge. He found a likely receptor in the mountainous feature called South Spot (now, Arsia Mons). He writes, this spot is an enormous pit 140 kilometers across at the crest of an impressive 17 kilometer rise from the floor of the Amazonis basin to the west. He observes that this volcano-like structure has no known counterparts on the Earth. Tycho also represents a lunar high point: it is some 1.2 kilometers above the hypothetical lunar sphere. The electrical connection between this feature and the Martian South Spot could have resembled Figure 36 just before the discharge occurred. Figure 36. The Electric Field between Mars and the Moon During the close passage of Mars and the Moon, circa 27 centuries ago, devastation was produced on the surface of both bodies, the result of interplanetary discharges across the gap between the two bodies. Here we see the electric field lines (arrows) and the lines of equal electric potential (variously dashed) prior to the breakdown that produced electric discharges from the Moon (the cathode) to Mars (the anode). The outer equipotential depicts the sheath boundary between the electrosphere of the charged bodies and the interplanetary plasma. -- courtesy of the estate of Ralph Juergens Juergens' analysis might well serve as a launching platform for decades of detailed studies, using a quantavolutionary electric and recent-time model of each planet's topographical peculiarities. As with Moon and Mars, so with Venus and Mars. perhaps, in the end, we shall come to regard a famous scene of the Iliad of Homer as an eyewitness account, garbled, to be sure: that is where the goddess Athene, archetype of planetary Venus, engages in awful sky combat with the god Ares, who is recognized as the planet Mars. Athene drove her chariot towards Ares, bane of mortals, and drove her spear deeply into his belly. Thereupon arose a huge black cloud, and he bellowed like 10 000 warriors and fled into the high heavens. Some 2700 years later, the United States of America sends Mariner 9 into space and photographs the most prominent feature of Mars, the Coprates Canyon complex. It is a 12 megameter line of seemingly extruded mountains, enormous beyond anything on Earth, leading into a canyon 3,600 kilometers in length, 500 km. wide, and 6,100 meters deep, ending in another string of great volcanic outbursts. Some 8.5 million cubic kilometers of rock have disappeared. The wound stretches across half the circumference of the planet. Allan Kelly has offered a scenario. The total eruption is a product of the same event, when some very large comet or other massive intruder from space passed too close to Mars .... This intruder literally sucked the lava from the interior of Mars to form the huge volcanoes .... As it came closer it caused a tremendous bulge, miles high, that burst open along the top and spewed out lava and great chunks of Martian crust; much of this material followed the intruder into space. There is no evidence of water erosion of the steep stairs of the canyon, no sedimentation, delta fans or stream beds cutting the lengthy lips of the wound. The intruder, be it Athene, Ishtar, or Venus, both repelled and implanted charge onto the defenseless Mars. Leaders of lightning from Venus incised the masses that had assembled in a belt of Mars along half its girth. In the ripping blast that followed, Mars flung them upon the intruder, and, lighter but more heavily charged, withdrew. So the aforesaid "garbling" of history lay partly in not perceiving that Mars laid a mass upon Venus and that the greatest spear thrusts of lightning were exchanged beneath the dense cloud that poured from Mars' wound. {S : Notes on Chapter 16} Notes on Chapter 16 106. The lotus was used earlier in imagery portraying the central arc of fire arising to Saturn, which probably lent force to the Venus symbolism on the logic that the electric arc, thought to be lost, now reappeared, freed to roam the heavens. 107. On Earth the sea water contains 98% of the total potential atmospheric carbon dioxide as dissolved gas (Plass; Sundquist et. al.). The carbonate rocks of the crust have locked away most of the potential supply of this gas. 108. Van Flandern, in a letter to C. L. Ellenberger. 109. From a paper by A. de Grazia, 1980, to the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in London. Published in de Grazia, 1984c. 110. But this is subject to questions concerning all C-14 dates before 500 BC (Blumer and Youngblood). 111. Here we use the traditional Exodus date for the corresponding end of the Middle Bronze Age rather than the date, about 150 years earlier, used by Schaeffer. 112. This is expected because Mars is smaller than Venus. When Mars "struck" the Moon the damage was very great. 113. The wolf (cf. Fenris in Norse myth) is often a Mars symbol. 114. Aristotle (Metaphysics); de Grazia, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1983a, 1984a; Stecchini; Velikovsky, 1982. 115. Personal communication to A. de Grazia. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 2: } {Q DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY: } {C Chapter 17: } {T TIME, ELECTRICITY AND QUANTAVOLUTION} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY CHAPTER SEVENTEEN TIME, ELECTRICITY AND QUANTAVOLUTION With the model of Solaria Binaria constructed here along the lines of short-time electrical quantavolution, we have presented physical and cultural evidence of several major historical happenings, as well as some lesser events that need not be summarized here. 1. The succession of great gods in human history coincides with a succession of ages of destruction and renewal that may tentatively be numbered at seven. These are carried in Table 6. 2. Human nature originated abruptly with a complex culture in the first age of binary instability, precipitated by electrical and hormonal changes, and displaying anxious self-awareness and a grasping for self-control. 3. The Moon was ejected from the ancient southern hemisphere (the modern Pacific Basin) later in the same period in an electrical encounter with a piece of planetary debris originating from an explosion of a star that we call Super Uranus. 4. The planets have assumed their present order in the past few thousand years, responding to a principle of mutual maximum repulsion. 5. The Solar System sac and the plenum which it contains are now so enlarged, and hence distant from us and dilute, that they have been overlooked by observers. The binary electrical axis has been diffused into a pervasive solar wind, which permeates the planetary plane. The once-substantial binary partner is dispersed into at least a dozen sizeable fragments and myriad fragments of smaller debris. All of this has happened in fourteen millennia. 6. All major chemical and biological developments occurred in a period of a quarter of a million years at the beginning of Solaria Binaria. The number of species peaked in the period of Pangean Stability and has been steadily reduced by catastrophes. 7. The planets and the Sun are accumulating electric charge and have separated greatly, whereupon their ability to discharge (take charge) from one another is diminishing with time. If the trend continues without sudden galactic interruption, the planets will disappear upon attaining the higher level of charge found in the Galaxy surrounding us. Contemporary cosmogony may be said to lack a binary model for solar and Earth history, and this we have attempted to provide with Solaria Binaria. We have conveyed it by means of a short time chronology, a concept of quantavolution, and a fully demanding theory of electric behavior. Several major observations promoted consideration of the Solar System as a binary development. A growing realization that our star system is embedded in a Universe largely composed of multiple star systems led us to match known characteristics and behaviors of these systems in their varied stages of development with our own system as it might have been, is and might become. Evidence mounts, too, that planet Jupiter has stellar traits, as have, less obviously, the other major planets. Exploration of the inner planets, not excepting the Earth and Moon, reveals the progressive destruction of their surfaces over time. Understandably , conventional cosmogony seeks to fix the destruction in a convenient episode close to the birth of the Solar System. However, the evidence speaks not of a day's work of a passing body four aeons ago, but rather of the normal work expected of a binary system. Furthermore, ancient observers and philosophers who were neither primitive nor naive, an who were also reporting the ideas of other experts of hundreds and thousands of years before them, affirm that the bodies of the Solar System and the stars changed their behavior and their motions. These men were cognizant of, and disciplined by, religious systems that were sky-obsessed, and which moved continually between celestial behavior and mundane behavior, in supreme efforts to let happen on Earth what happened in Heaven, and vice versa. As we have reviewed their ideas and reports, coupled with evidence emerging from legends and archaeological excavations, we found reason to think that they might be living in a world that was strikingly different from our own and that was recognizably a late phase of a stellar binary system. The prospect before us, then, was to understand an ancient science and tradition which had large heavenly (god-like) bodies hovering over the Earth in what today we would classify as a synchronous orbit. If the Earth were locked between the partners in a binary, much of what the ancients spoke of as their own experiences, or related as the experiences of their ancestors, makes sense. By no means were their ideas purely deductive. They recited experiences; they made empirical statements; they claimed knowledge of a world into which the human race was born. They discussed a set of events that should occupy, by temporal schemes in vogue today, millions (if not billions) of years, and that treat matters such as the acquisition and transformation of the Moon and the recession of the planets deeper into space. As soon as we began to draw upon ancient opinions concerning cosmic events, we had to take a position respecting chronology. In this we were encouraged by the binary concept itself to call time into question. Binary systems offer evidence of great forces operating over short times to produce large effects. They illuminate shortcuts in the creation of the raw materials for planetary, atmospheric and biological development. As they transact, the large bodies separate and fragment within the system, creating and destroying worlds while retaining their parts. It may be fair to say that only a binary model can supply those scientists --admittedly a small minority -- who are inclined to shorten natural history with an adequate theoretical instrument. The binary model suggests and may even require, a short-time scheme for natural history. A short-time Solar System requires high energy and precise interventions at levels of nature ranging from the Galaxy to the atomic nucleus. It is specifically this sort of intervention that is evidenced time and time again in natural history. All "absolute chronometries" become variable in a quantavolutionary world. The rampant inflation of this century, which has expanded the time scale for the lifetime of the Universe from 40 million to 80 billion years, may end in a catastrophic implosion. As if their technical difficulties were not sufficient to disable long-time chronology (de Grazia, 1981), ancient human voices seem to testify against it. These earliest humans unmistakably assert, among other things, that Heaven and Earth separated, that suns appeared, that gods fought in the skies and invaded the Earth, that the world was repeatedly built and destroyed. They are neurotically obsessed with all celestial bodies and motions, and engage in all known extremes of behavior in imitation and appeasement of the behavior observed in the skies. It is not possible to claim that this is primate activity, nor hominid, nor that it is primitive, nor finally that it is a collective psychosis of early civilizations. Modern social psychology and psychiatry can document, and even replicate, such human behavior today. The earliest cultures, those that are "guilty" of this behavior, invented social organization, agriculture, manufacturing, science, and the arts. To think that they could do all this without a firm "reality principle", as Freud has termed it, must be in error. The skeptic of our interpretation may be reduced to postulating that "illud tempus" must have been exciting and stressful, but could not be so very exciting and stressful as they would have us believe. Reasoning similarly, one could assert the contrary: the real foundations of the ancient excitement and obsessions must have been even worse than we are given to believe, because the ancients were used to disasters and hence were less traumatized by them; "war is hell", but less hellish to old soldiers than to recruits. It seems to us that both a priori views -- that the ancients were excitable or that they were blas‚ -- may obstruct the necessary work of delineating, bit by bit, the experiences of the ancients from the conglomerated assemblage of fragmentary records, legends and geological and archaeological facies, and then exposing them to analysis in the light of the sciences today. A persistent theme of the ancient voices is quantavolution, that is, that the world and all that is in it owe most of their changes to forceful torsions and saltations. That quantavolution plays a role in the theory of natural and social science has never been denied. But the role has been grotesquely reduced by ignoring it and stressing evolution, by consigning manifestations of it whenever possible to times beyond mind, by framing scientific principles in prejudicial terms, by associating quantavolution with disreputable or outmoded religions and scientific beliefs and by unconscious editing of the evidence. To our view quantavolution affords an instrument for scientific inquiry as useful as and perhaps superior to that allowed us by evolution. We find that the morphology of the Earth and the patterns and compositions of the skies bespeak quantavolutions. In biology, we see in the decline of evolutionary power over time, in the absence of transitional types in evolutionary branching, in the waves of extinction of species, and in the failure of evolution to provide an internal guiding dynamic, sufficient reason to promote the concept of quantavolution. The guiding dynamic for quantavolution, whether in biology, geology or astronomy, may be electricity, a "strong force" that has been generally accorded a weak place in most sciences. For several reasons, we believe that electricity is the necessary and sufficient impulsion of cosmology. We noticed that a strong force is needed to accomplish change, whether in biology or astrophysics. Basically, electricity is to "gravitation" (if such exists independently of electricity) as 10 36 is to 1. The behavior of stellar bodies, including the Sun, can be described in electrical terms. The composition of "space" is a plenum of charges and ions, field and currents, winds and relatively stationary matter, of orbiting bodies shifting orbits as they transact, at times attractively but usually repulsively. The fact that electricity is present in all matter, and an aspect of the existence and activity of all matter, presents us with the opportunity to study all matter and motion in an electrical perspective. Electrical attraction and repulsion seem to operate simply and flexibly in cosmology as well as in microbiology, and can be accommodated to the concept of inertia, the two together constituting a powerful instrument for the analysis of nature. Finally we would point out one more helpful attribute of electrical theory. Invoking electricity enables us to avoid the mechanical blasting, usually required of gravitational and explosive mechanics, that brings inordinate destruction and thermal excess to situations where we seek quantavolutionary change with a maximum of selectivity and minimal mechanical bursting. Despite their ubiquity, electrical phenomena have been isolated from the rhetoric of causality. When treated, they have been allowed as only secondary or even tertiary effects; instead mechanical and gravitational processes of enormous magnitude are postulated as the forces playing the primary (causal) role. Sometimes magnetism (usually not observed directly) is seen to play an intermediary, or secondary, role in the deduced causal train which leads to the observed effect. But our outlook has changed. Once practically dismissed as inoperative in celestial matters, electricity, together with electrical effects, has increasingly been recognized to play a role in cosmic actions. In every natural and biological process -- creation, accumulation, structure, function, storage, dissipation -- electrical theory is at home. The smallest observable or inferable operation of a molecule, and the largest explosion of a nebula, can be referred to the unified language and lawful behaviors of electricity. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 3: } {Q TECHNICAL NOTES: } {C - } {T TECHNICAL NOTE A: ON METHOD} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES TECHNICAL NOTE A ON METHOD Scientific method goes far beyond such tasks as washing test tubes antiseptically or inventing a better particle shield. It is more than a logical or mathematical calculation. On any question of importance, as here in cosmology, it invokes a sociology of science and a philosophy of being and change. In the famous Piltdown Hoax, a deliberately buried modern brain case and orangutan jaw were exhumed in 1912 and pronounced an exciting discovery in human evolution (see Johanson and Edey, pp77-83). Most scientists, led by an authoritative English group, assigned to the discovery an age of half a million years and Piltdown, England, became a sanctuary of anthropology for a long generation. Harry Morris was a bank clerk and amateur archaeologist. he collected "eoliths", artifacts of the Neolithic period. But his finds were rejected and ridiculed. The hoaxer of Piltdown had cast some eoliths among the relics; suddenly these were received as paleoliths and respected as part of the Piltdown assembly. Morris wrote letters accusing Dawson, the discoverer and a likely culprit, of fraud. To no avail. In 1926 Edmonds published a geological map of the area of Pilt-down, which placed the gravels of the discovery site in the upper Pleistocene of fifty thousand years ago, one-tenth of the age assigned to the hoax material. This was not noticed until 1937 when Oakley, doing fluorine research on the Piltdown bones, discovered flagrant discrepancies between the supposed parts of the same being. Finally, in the nineteen-fifties, the hoax was exposed (Weiner, p19). For us the most important lesson of this case and similar ones rests not so much in the immorality of the hoax and cover-up, with their prolonged damaging of scientific anthropology, but in the ever-present sociological process, which here demonstrated how authority in science has the same kinds of effects as it does in religion and politics - to turn attention from anomalous facts, to block inquiries, to discriminate against outsiders, and to maintain and boost reputations. These effects are normal to authority and countervailing to the also normal productive effects of authority in organizing work and maintaining morale. Embedded in the social process, scientific method is fully susceptible to fashion, also. Fashion is a modern guise of authority - there are fashions in religion and politics, too. it impels scientists to seize enthusiastically upon directing hypotheses as truths that justify a monopoly of attention, making work difficult for others concerned with conflicting hypotheses. Recently, a colleague, James Christenson, who had worked with the 1980 Nobel-award-winning Cronin-Fitch experiments in particle physics, reflected that they indicated nature to be biased in favor of running forward in time. For a generation, highly touted theory had worked upon the hypothesis that "time" was neutral to direction, contrary to human mental expectations. He went on to say that the "big bang" theory of the origin of the "expanding" universe should not have been implicated in these varying experiments. "The Royal Academy made a big deal out of the cosmological stuff because it looked like astrophysics. That's purely speculative and involves an unstable proton." Scientific models of time and motion continually change in these years, often with only the slightest evidence, but pretending a great deal of it. In 1980 an interdisciplinary conference at the Field Museum in Chicago devoted itself to examining what some members called "macroevolution" and we have called in this book and elsewhere "quantavolution". The proceedings were not to be published, but the thrust of the meeting was publicized as denoting the prominence, if not pre- eminence, and even necessity, of geosphere and biosphere changes, of abrupt, large- scale, intensive events. The new stress is interpretable as a veering towards, and a cautious detour around, the barricaded door of scientific catastrophism with an ultimate crashing through the gates of extra-terrestrialism. In hundreds of cases since 1942, when a coded message was flashed from Chicago that "the Italian Navigator has landed", scientists have uncoordinatedly begun to tap into the paradigm that looks upon nature as quantavolutionary. In all of these cases, we may perceive that a brilliant research technology is at work, a technical methodology operating with a great many electro-chemico-mechanical devices, but also that this technology inherently must depend upon the ability to ask questions and make mental combinations that position the Universe in new ways, whether examining nuclear particles, cell functions, organisms, or gross shapes of the landscape and skyscape. The theory of Solaria Binaria, typical of cosmology, depends for its success upon fashioning an appealing and effective combination of the advanced technical methodology and the guiding questions and scientific imagery of the age. The Scientific Reception System Like laymen in a court of law, scientists who cross disciplinary boundaries are chagrined to discover that in another scientific jurisdiction their "best" evidence is inadmissible. For reasons similar to those of a court of law, and with consequences that are often acknowledged by the court itself to be dysfunctional as well as functional, evidence must be limited to certain kinds, pre-processed in a certain manner, and presented in a certain way. To all else, the court is determinedly and deliberately blind. In schools of law, realization of this large fact of the preeminence of legal procedure can be traumatic to the naive beginning student. In schools of science, the same pre-eminence of procedure will often cause the same shock in the student, but is mitigated by the more confident assurance of the teaching authorities that the process is fully rational, not mythological or conventional in any way or form. The scientific petitioner, assuming that he has a truth which, if properly heard, would be acknowledged, may try to win his case by several strategies. He may fashion his evidence so as to be heard in the court - framing it as a hypothesis, eliminating value-judgments, quantifying its procedures, obtaining expert witnesses, publishing related material in a most reputable journal, and putting himself forward in academic regalia. Failing to win a subsequent judgment, the scientific petitioner may resort to a court of different jurisdiction, another discipline - history of science, say, rather than astronomy. Or he may appeal to a higher court, the cosmological and philosophic jurisdictions, for instance. If these resources are denied him, or give judgment against him, he may seek to replace the judges (as for example, Franklin Roosevelt did with the U. S. Supreme Court), or to create a new court (as Courts of Equity were established to give justice in cases unframable for ordinary judicial consideration). If rebuffed in these attempts, or if his creations fail him, he can go to "the bar of public opinion", where by an adequate display of persuasiveness, power, and intelligent support, he may intimidate or enlighten the judicial institutions, and obtain in one way or another a rehearing or a favorable verdict that is masked as a rehearing. Finally, in a revolutionary setting, and with the justification that the system is too rigid for reform, he can try to overturn the juridical order and replace it by a new juridical establishment operating under new rules for the admission and hearing of cases and evidence. Probably most scientists who have had occasion to test the reception system of science, and whom repeated frustration has not reduced to emotional confusion, will recognize this order of possibilities in pursuing the truth as they see it. They might also acknowledge that in the past half-century the reception or court system has been elaborated ingeniously, if unconsciously, to provide a modicum of success to everyone - so that there are more judges than petitioners, and a court for every conceivable case and procedure. The bureaucratization of science in academia, government and corporations promotes such a development. This tends to trivialize the caseload of all courts, and sends up a miasma of mutual deference to ward off critics. The resulting rigidity tends to create a revolutionary opposition from the start, a point that has evaded most writers seeking to explain the plethora of anti-scientific books and movements. It is not too far-fetched to compare the situation with that in worldwide politics that has produced so much terrorism. COSMOGONY: A GHOST FIELD? In the present work, we have directed ourselves to the discipline, or court, of cosmogony. This, we might think, is logical, since the work concerns ultimate causes of the physical and biological world. Unfortunately, however, the field of cosmogony hardly exists. Such is indicated, for example, in the latest (1974) Encyclopaedia Britannica, where neither "cosmogony" nor "cosmology" is allowed a place between the substantial essays on "cosmic rays" and "Costa Rica". Further, in a mere several paragraphs of the "Macropaedia" (vol. 3, pp. 174-5) we are led to perceive these subjects as special areas of astronomy (the "big bang" hypothesis, etc.) or of mythology and ancient speculations about the Universe. Now are cosmology and cosmogony offered, much less required as subjects of study in universities; exceptions are rare and usually to be found in schools with a religious bias. Writings on cosmogony are likely to run off the pens of elderly astronomers, "born-again" physicists, and uncomfortable priests. A discipline without a method is a risible contradiction in terms, but such happens to be the situation. Since the court of cosmogony is largely imaginary, we may expect an ad hoc panel, drummed up from various professions, to sit in judgment on our work. For their troubles they will find little that can be termed a cosmogonical method. Rather, they will find in one place the methodology of spectroscopy, in another place that of microbiology, then again that of Egyptian mythology, and now, too, that of theology. It is not because we possess any distinction in these, or in other fields, that we treat of them, but because of the broad and general nature of our problems and of our desire to be as denotative and technically correct as we can be. At the same time, as must benefit topics so large and fundamental, we avail ourselves of the general operational logic that is accessible to every educated person when working upon any subject whatsoever. We regret, as much as every last reader, the paucity and unreliability of data - in astronomy and physics, we hasten to interject, as well as in mythology and the history of science - and that therefore frequent speculation is necessary, although controlled to be sure, up to the final leap. By way of consolation, one of the auxiliary functions of our study may be to bring to our readers a poignant awareness of how speculative indeed is the basis of the sciences that are concerned with our subject matter. Thereupon one may appreciate why we must concern ourselves with the simplest of logical and psychological operations in a work of the highest scientific pretensions. For example, the important idea that the Greeks and Romans named planets to correspond to the rank order of importance of the gods is realized only after prolonged study. Saturn, as the retired god (Deus Otiosus) of a planet, is second only to Jupiter in size. But how could the ancients have known this without telescopes? And why would Saturn then be made "father" of Jupiter? Jupiter, the largest planet, is king of the gods, wherever his name or a version thereof is employed. Then come the children, Mars, Mercury and Venus, the others (Neptune, Uranus, the asteroids, and Pluto) being invisible. Mercury (Hermes, Thoth) is more important, earlier and absolutely, than Mars, even though it is smaller in the sky. This we think is significant. Striking, too, is the widespread ancient insistence that planet Venus, the brightest and most conspicuous starry object to the eye, is an offspring of Jupiter; for its size and brilliance should have identified it as the ruler of the planetary gods. The significantly larger-sized Sun and Moon are part of most religious, but have not received over the past several thousan years the frenzied and obsessive worship of the others. The Earth, of course, as Mother Goddess, closely identified with the human race, related as a being to, but was not placed in, the category of planets. The recency of Venus is suggested; also, one may surmise that the order of the planets and gods has been overlooked because observers, believing Venus to be a primordial planet, would not notice this coincidence. Thus several simple facts can lend their weight to our theory. Another example occurs from ordinary psychology. Obsessiveness (and compulsiveness associated with it) is a common behavior. In the history of religion (and what is not associated with religion in earlier times?), obsessive-compulsive behavior is the main trunk of the human mind. Furthermore, this obsessiveness pursues a direct line of extraterrestrial concerns, such as we have incorporated into this book and elsewhere (de Grazia, 1981, 1983b, 1983c, 1983d). Yet many scientists and experts, in putting aside their own subjectivities so as to pursue objective, value-free truths, put aside the subjectivities of their patients (the myth-makers and myth- preservers ) and discuss the infinitely varied product of the mythic mind as if it were bubbling up randomly and without reference to objective reality. Human obsessive-compulsive behavior has causes; it differs from the compulsive instinctive reactions of animals; yet it does not come from a mental tabula rasa. It is both logically and psychologically proper to descend the trunk of the human mind in search of those causes until one finds at its roots events adequate to have brought about a heavy dedication of mind and culture to them. Insistent rites, pronunciamentos, testimony, and affirmations demand the recognition of these events as the peculiar causes of compulsions. We think it more plausible than man was watching a sky model and emulating it than that, say, a hominid, who mumbled words and killed his kind, should become casually interested in the sky and use celestial imagery to describe his behavior. The Humanist-Scientist Divorce In the absence of a field with its special jurists, and of a guiding methodology, the often-decried misunderstanding between the sciences and the humanities is sure to come to the fore. There is no barrier to the negatively conditioned response of physicists to the humanities and of the humanists to the claims of physics (1984d). An historian of science, Livio Stecchini (1978, p117) has written appropriately: Most readers of science, except for the very top layer, reveal themselves as being naive realists without any knowledge of scientific epistemology. An expression of this is that some of them declared that Velikovsky's earlier activity in neurology and psychiatry disqualifies him from discussing question of cosmology. However, it was just from an interest in neurology and psychiatry that Kant moved in his investigation of the phenomenology of space and time, which is the foundation of non-Euclidian geometry and Einsteinian physics.... Snow, Polanyi, Barzun, Conant and others have taken their turns at deploring the misunderstanding. Curricula are reformed to correct it. Yet in continues unabated. The negative conditioning separating these large groupings of savants grows out of a tendency, in the first place, to define one's field in terms of one's special interests, these not necessarily constituting the general interests of the field. A common pattern of individual behavior in both groups is to proceed by an ever- narrowing path towards the proof of a special theory; any cracking of the frame of the theory will being a heavy cost of retracing the path and finding another or a broader way. Hence even an extended approach within the field is not to be countenanced. Only under optimal and rare conditions, too, does a modern discipline possess clearly defined goals, consequently, intra-disciplinary frustrations are common, as paths without ends are pursued, whereupon, in a typical response to frustrations, scientists will reproach out-side fields for the faults that they dare not denounce in their own fields. Inasmuch as internal confusion is a rather general state of affairs in a field of knowledge, it is ordinary for scientists, seeking an opinion upon a matter where an outside field intrudes upon their own, to seek out authorities in the intruding field to obtain opinions concerning the intrusion. However, the very fact that they are challenged in their own field by someone in another field suggests that this person is a maverick from the other, and increases the likelihood that, when they approach the authorities in his home field, they will receive an unfavorable account of the maverick. For instance, authorities in mythology regard legends as expressive of a culture and of some historical value; but they exercise the same control over legendary testimony as do their counterparts in geology and astronomy over the evidence of these latter fields. Hence, it is not especially useful to inquire of them concerning events that not only they themselves deem improbable, but also which they themselves have already heard from geological and astronomical authorities to be impossible. So the vicious circle is set up. This happens even with "depth" psychology. Jung ends with mental archetypes, Freud with the oedipal complex. These are myths, scientific myths to be sure insofar as they are objective in their formulations, which advance evidence, but such myths are as far from reality as the creation myths of the tribes of Borneo, not to mention those of the Bible. Conversely, should archaeologists or mythologist have the temerity to ask astronomers whether the Moon could be young or geologists whether a great land might be inundated, they can be fairly sure of a negative answer. We stress that on many facts and principles of cosmogony one has to be especially careful of what authority to interrogate. All fields of scientific study employ fictions -- abstractions, concepts, metaphors, models, and probabilities. All fields of study have private languages, which, useful as they may be to insiders, tend to persuade outsiders of a grasp of reality that may be quite weak. With such conditions prevailing in the field of cosmogony, a method is proper whose premises and goals are clear, whose terms are defined, which offers proof from the "best" evidence available, and whose propositions fairly reflect and summate all "good" evidence from whatsoever quarter or, lacking means to formulate all of it, admits the exclusions and justifies them on methodological grounds. The method may be called a "model" when the integration of hypotheses is such as to enable the behavior of a part to be predicted from the behavior of the whole and vice versa, "missing parts" to be deduced from described parts, and the whole to operate as an intelligible system through time. In sum, the procedures demanded by scientific method are clear and accessible, but misunderstandings among the sciences are psychologically and materially indulged. In cosmogony, the situation is grave regarding clarity and accessibility of materials, as well as in psychological and material inducements to discord. PHYSICS AND LEGENDS Usually "misunderstanding" between "humanists and scientists" is especially heated on current topics such as euthanasia, crime, nuclear disarmament, vulgarization, and the like; yet nowhere is the malice of natural science towards the humanities so readily vented as when legends are taken seriously. At the risk of controversy , we must nevertheless stress some congruencies between natural science and mythology. Initially we may compare the structures of legend and science. Any topic of legend can be a topic of science, and vice versa. A legend is an observation or a set of them; so is science. Legend states its observations in human language, rich in metaphor, and carries them orally from one generation to the next and, later, in writing; science seeks non-metaphoric, denotative and quantitative language, and records its observations in information storage and retrieval systems, Legend seeks to retain the functions of moral teaching (" should" and "ought" are persuasive, while "must" is a punitive "should"); science seems to limit itself to precise descriptions and observable relations among events. Legends refer to anthropomorphized sources; science to abstracted forces; both refer, overtly and covertly, to paradigms and ideologies. Legends are trifled with and tampered with in pleasant times when amnesia overlies historical memories and optimistic wishes can be indulged. In disaster, legends become more important and, under heavy pressures, change significantly . Science changes under the guidance of rules of evidence, the raising of unconscious factors to awareness, and the forging of more and more links in causal chains. Also, science changes by responding to heavy political pressure (Grinnell, pp131ff). The motives behind legends are moral teachings (religious control), and the achieving of a tolerable level of amnesia, involving fun, fantasy and aesthetics, all of which are the more obvious forms that sublimation takes. Although these motives occur in science as well, and science itself is a form of sublimation, science is anxious lest they vulgarize, popularize, distort, and divert its work. We permit ourselves here, by way of illustration, to speculate and generalize upon an as yet undeveloped series of observations: a systematic study of the oldest nursery rhymes will ultimately discover that every one of these "little classics" (" Chicken Licken", "Hey, diddle, diddle", "Sing a Song of Sixpence", "Ring around the Rosie," etc.) is based upon some historical drama or catastrophe. It will help those scientists and humanists who tend to be snobbish, puritanical or majestic about their material and scornful of the concerns of mythologists with "silliness and superstitions" to reflect upon how much of natural science has come out of amusement, as when early electrical science generated advances from shocking kisses (Heilbron, p236). Myth, science and amusement alike play games with trivia, but the grave cosmos is always unconsciously in mind. Finally, neither in legend nor in science can the observer have escaped wholly the grip of the ambiance of observations: the observer is part of the observations. The various relativity theories, ancient and recent, make much of this fact. All in all, legend-making and science-making are not foreign to each other but have much in common. Each has its own good reasons for refusing marriage while maintaining liaisons. Recently, some scientists have named a conjunction of electro-gravitational influences causing natural disorders on Earth the "Jupiter Effect" (see Goodsavage, pp144-56). They seem to be able, on good evidence, to demonstrate that Jupiter is not isolated, but has certain fearsome transactional capabilities, which may be exercised upon occasion. An astrologer would say that he has known this all along. Most ancients were obsessed with many "Jupiter effects". We say that these astrological fossils go back to real Jupiter effects that were incomparably stronger than the ones occasioning the present excitement. The ancients, seeking to control the effects, sought to control human behavior aimed at propitiating Jupiter, "lest you die". Our contemporaries do the same, suggesting more pragmatic (effective) means of protecting sectors prone to earthquakes and tidal waves (Gribbin and Plagemann, pp132-48). We would say that the legendary sources are cognizant of grave past effects, and had little new evidence and less control over expected effects. The astrologers inherited confused observations of the past, which further confused them, and could prove no new evidence because they were helpless and incompetent. Our contemporaries possess but disbelieve ancient observations, and also some new evidence of recent times that may have practical value and may lead to a systematic review of ancient celestial behavior. Ancient accounts become simply another source of observations. The Phaeton legend has been recited to young and old alike for thousands of years: Phaeton, son of Sun, incompetently drives his father's chariot too near to and too far from the Earth, causing great fires and frost. The correspondences between this flight and a cometary encounter are so numerous that many scholars are convinced of Phaeton's historicity, that is, that a comet cut a destructive swath across the tottering globe around the middle of the second millennium before Christ. As Kugler showed, material of scientific value is obtainable from the careful analysis of the legendary stuff on Phaeton (and his namesakes in other myths). There is adequate reason why the ancient "Jupiter effects" such as cosmic thunderbolts, the Phaeton legends, the natural events reported in Exodus, the Cosmic Egg mythology, the phenomenon of the Deus Otiosus, and the divergent "non- astronomical" sacred calendars of the Meso-Americans, Egyptians, and others - to mention only several proto-scientific or disguisedly scientific reports - should be given ordinary treatment, in an integrated manner, in histories of science and textbooks of astronomy, earth sciences, paleontology, and human behavior, including anthropology, prehistory and ancient history. It is perhaps obvious, also, that the ancient accounts of quantavolutionary events find all mankind in the same situations, building related cultures, seeing them destroyed, and recreating them. Once scientists decide to reach back to natural events and primordial human cultures with the hypothesis of Solaria Binaria, they will discover a most inspiring ecumenicalism for our most threatening of times. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 3: } {Q TECHNICAL NOTES: } {C - } {T TECHNICAL NOTE B: } {S : ON COSMIC ELECTRICAL CHARGES} SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES TECHNICAL NOTE B ON COSMIC ELECTRICAL CHARGES In this work we forgo the concept of opposite charges, which has been in general use since Benjamin Franklin established it. Thus, we revert to a position being argued by other early electricians, who saw no need to introduce "plus" and "minus" charges (Heilbron, pp431-38, p481). The one-charge idea suits our concept that the Universe possesses a net electrical charge and that all star systems can be represented by cavities which are deficient in that charge. Where the word "negative" occurs in this work it means only the electron and does not imply the existence of an opposing or second type of charge. For a time we, like others before us, considered the solar charge to be of positive sign, because of the gradual acceleration of the proton wind as it moves away from the Sun. However, this same phenomenon can be viewed as a flow of ions towards a surrounding region of negative electrical charge. Insofar as solar wind electrons have, if any, only trivial anisotropy in their motion and since detected cosmic-ray ions - which Juergens (1972) has described as the spent wind from the most luminous stars - outnumber cosmic-ray electrons by at least two orders of magnitude, it is logical to conclude that within the region of the Sun most electrons are occupied with sustaining the transaction tending to eliminate the solar cavity. These electrons are not free: they form a => transactive matrix enveloping the Solar System. Cells, and maybe even whole biological organisms, are surrounded by charged "skins" or "sheaths" (Ency. Brit., 1974, Macro., vol. 3, pp. 1045 ff.) Their interiors are even more charged than their perimeters, which indicates to us that these biological entities are electron collectors. This, we argue, also applies to the operation of the Sun. Atoms may be considered in the same way. The atom has long been known to be characterized by electric transactions forming both the inter-atomic linkages (which create molecules of many kinds) and the inter-atomic coupling, which defines the "electron-shells" of the atom and may even delineate the chemical elements themselves. The atom is modeled here as a plenum of charge enveloping a nucleus, which we regard as a massive, dense, compact electrical cavity. Like the cell, the atom exposes to the world a negatively charged perimeter. We therefore chose in this work to avoid speaking of negative and positive ions (say, for example, electrons and protons) being produced when an electron is removed from an atom. Rather we speak of electrons and electron-deficient atoms. This rhetoric then allows us to describe net charges on bodies that are "negative" (as with the Galaxy, the Sun and the cell) without specifying the sign of the charge. When we refer to ions in this work, we always mean electron-rich atom or molecule. It is noteworthy that atoms are almost always detected and measured when their electrons undergo some form of transition that defines the energy levels and reactions of the atoms. Electrons seem to be the monetary currency of the Universe; stars, cells, and atoms transact and transform to obtain them. It seems to us that the Solar System's development from creative-nova into binary, through the destructive nova which freed the planets and in the subsequent rearrangement and destructive encounters, is also a story of electron exchanges on the grandest of scales. The elementary principle governing Solar System behavior is that planets act to accumulate electrons from their surroundings, but in reality they are forced, by the Sun and by their orbital motion, into that space where the electron supply is least capable of yielding electrons to them [116] . Planets are also constrained by their electric charges to avoid other planets to the maximum extent. In terms of conventional gravitational models this latter behavior has been described as least- attraction interaction; we see it simply as mutual repulsion between bodies of similar charge density. Further, planets maximize their capture of the locally precious electrons by developing an electrosphere about their solid surfaces. Atmospheric layers, when present, are within the transactive junction between the planet and its electrosphere. The current flow across the lowest 20 kilometers of Earth's atmosphere is evidence of such a junction. At the outer perimeter of the electrosphere, the "magneto-pause" and "shock front" mark the transactive layer through which the Earth attempts to absorb interplanetary electrons and to exclude solar wind ions. The junction is not always successful: cosmic ray ions regularly break into the Earth's domain, as do bursts of energetic ions generated by solar flares. These ions make the Earth's task Sisyphean: it accretes electrons only to be forced also to take in electron-deficient ions that are hungry as well for the electrons. An examination of the electrospheres present in the Solar System [117] reveals a "shielding" that protects the charged planets, for they are immersed in a flow of plasma, which must remain close to charge-neutrality. In the plasma, the local differences between electron and ion densities is small, as it is in a metallic conductor through which an electric current flows. Hence in some proportional fashion the small quantity of incident electrons from the Galaxy are distributed to all of the bodies within the cavity by way of the nearly "neutral" plasma. But, in the main, electron accumulation is accomplished by the ejection of ions into the interplanetary plasma from the solar and planetary electrospheres. By launching ions towards the periphery of the cavity, where electrons are still available, the Sun gains galactic electrons; by contributing to the ion flow the planets gain an appropriate number too. Protons are observed flowing into the solar wind from the electrosphere of the Earth and Jupiter. This outward flow perplexes those analysts who assume electrically neutral planetary environments. Yet it need not, for it can be understood as the only effective method of accumulating electrons within an electron-poor cavity. The planet "disguises" its charge level by surrounding itself at great distances with an increasing proportion of ions to electrons. In this way, so to speak, the planet can defend itself in a system where the central Sun voraciously devours any available electrons and jettisons ions onto any reachable electron-sink. The planets, like flotsam, deal with the solar jetsam. Thereupon, the view from each planet is through an electrical fog [118] . The methodological problem posed in describing quantitatively an electrified cosmos is an experimental problem common to all systems where the instrument disturbs the measured systems. The dilemma cannot be resolved simply by recognizing that the instrument and that which is measured are rendered indistinguishable. We can scarcely imagine how to go about measuring the actual complex of charge-levels existing within the planetary spheres. The problem of determining the charge on a cosmic body resembles the long-established problem of determining how we can feel at rest on the Earth whilst hurtling at fantastic speeds on the globe, in orbit, through the Galaxy, and in the Universe [119] . Should electrical charge prove to be at one and the same time the fundamental element in the Universe and unmeasurable, then we may have to hammer one more nail into the coffin of deterministic physics. For the first time we are confronting processes occurring at the interactive junctions between large bodies. The very size of the transactions permits humans to observe them broadly, and even to fly among them. (On the microbiological cell level the membrane problem is equally important and complex and there is hampered by technical problems of observation.) Still, the definition of perspectives is difficult in the cosmic sphere, and this is in turn the result of confusing the identities of the actors and the sets. Given the electron and electron-deficient atom as the principal actors, and the scenery of electrospheres, plena and sheaths, the cosmic drama can begin to unfold understandably. Notes on Technical Note B 116. Here again, as with stars (as noted earlier in Chapter Three), it is apparent that space itself is the primary determinant of behavior. The stars, planets, and other material in the space compete for the contents of space. These contents not only seem to be atoms and electrons but also a spatial infra-charge, which is not normally available to the body in the space, but whose presence governs all transactions which can occur. 117. Conventional descriptions of the planetary exospheres describe their electrical properties only as adjuncts to their magnetic properties hence they are there called magnetosphere. Here we consider their magnetic properties secondary manifestations of the fundamental electrified state (see Chapter Thirteen). 118. The screening of the planets from the Sun resembles the "view" that the valence electron has in, say, a sodium atom; it does not "see" the full nuclear charge because it is screened by the shells of the intervening electrons. 119. The Earth's equatorial velocity due to rotation is 0.46 km/ s, in orbit Earth travels 30 km/ s, the Sun moves through the Galaxy at 19 km/ s and orbits the galactic center at about 275km/ s. The galaxy itself may be traversing the universe at speeds near 540 km/ s. Only the first two motions are known with confidence. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 3: } {Q TECHNICAL NOTES: } {C - } {T TECHNICAL NOTE C: } {S : ON GRAVITATING ELECTRIFIED BODIES} SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES TECHNICAL NOTE C ON GRAVITATING ELECTRIFIED BODIES In this work we conceptualize "gravitational fields" as an effect of electrical forces acting between charged bodies moving within a charged cosmos (Milton, 1980/ 81): two bodies respond and move to maintain the greatest separation. In the co- planar orbits of today's Solar System this electrical repulsion among the planets is deemed by us to manifest itself in the Titius-Bode law of commensurable planet periods (e. g. five Jupiter orbits in approximately [120] the same time as two Saturn orbits). Until now the "law" has been an unexplainable observation. In an electric "gravity" system a tangential inertia [121] is coupled to a radial electrical force whose nature depends upon the electrical state of the bodies orbiting. The electric force can vary between strongly repulsive in close encounter to strongly attractive when electrical flow joins the two bodies (see Table 5 and Figure 38). When the bodies are widely separated and relatively insulated, as are the planets now, the electric transaction among them is repulsive, but is opposed by the surrounding cosmic charge trying to fill the electron-deficient cavity, which is the Solar System; the two repulsions nearly cancel out, leading to the illusion that something called gravity produces a very weak attraction between the Sun and a planet or between a planet and its satellite( s). The fact that gravitation, the Great Mother Goddess of physics, has never been found sensibly to exist has nurtured a mild scandal in science for three centuries. After manipulating logically the relevant parameters (the separation of planets from the Sun and their motions in orbit) Isaac Newton concluded that the gravitational force acted everywhere in the same way: it was a universal force (Westfall). That his conclusion was erroneous is becoming apparent. New gravity models incorporate the notion that the strength of the gravitational force (relative to, say, the electrical force) weakens with time (Dirac; Jordan; Dicke, 1957, p356; Hoyle and Narlikar; Canuto et al., p834). If indeed the relative strength of the gravitational force declines with time, it means that the mechanical units customarily used to describe celestial motions cannot be interchanged freely with the units employed in atomic physics. Also there is evidence that the gravitational constant varies between experiments (Heyl and Chrzanowski, p1, pp30-1; Long, 1974). The experiments can be interpreted as evidence that the gravitational constant of proportionality is a function of the spatial separation between the masses gravitating and, in some instances, even of the quantity of mass involved in the "attraction" [122] . If gravity is dependent upon time and locality, conclusions about the world based upon a universal force ruling over cosmic motions without intrinsic dependency become erroneous. More specifically, the mass of a body becomes a function of how its mass is established. Its transactions become environmental rather than absolute. For example, if sex, age and occupation explain a person's consumer behavior, but elements of all are inextricably in all, the decision according to sex alone never occurs but always varies as a function of the other two factors. So here masses measured using transactions in the celestial realm need not be conformable with those determined by transactions between atoms. Extrapolations between the cosmic and atomic spheres become meaningless. The bizarre quality of conclusions about recently observed cosmic processes has already spawned the question "Do we need a revolution in Astronomy?" (Clube). All of the dilemmas cited by Clube as confronting astronomers can be resolved in a universe where electric forces are conceived to dominate. For a long time chemists who concern themselves with the mechanics of collisions between atoms (which are admittedly dominated by the forces between electric charges) have agreed that a collision between two atoms can be treated as a sequence of alternating attractive and repulsive actions (see Figure 37). At great distance the atoms mildly repel one another because their perimeters are sacs of negative charge (blurred electrons). Closer together, electron coupling produces the possibility of bonding and the atoms attract, but further inside, beyond the coupling range, the atoms again repel (this time very strongly). So it is with a "gravitational field", which is then really an electrical field. The behavior of bodies orbiting in electric transaction differs from those experiencing the conceptually simpler, weak, attractive gravitational force caused only by their mass content. The way in which planets move was shown by Kepler to depend upon the magnitude of the semi-major axis of the orbit [123] . Later, when Newton quantified the "gravitational force" into a relation containing the quantity of matter in each body and the separation of the "gravitating" bodies, Kepler's Harmonic Law was modified to allow celestial systems to be massed (see ahead to Technical Note D). Figure 37. Potential Energy Curve for the Collision of Two Atoms When two atoms collide, electrical force between them acts to alter the energy state of the system compared to the energy which the two atoms posses when they are greatly separated and at rest, the "zero" energy level. Usually two colliding atoms will have more energy than this "zero level"( some positive value). Their kinetic energy of approach determines the closeness the pair can attain in the collision. For a specific energy (the horizontal line drawn above and intersecting with the potential energy curve) the system of two colliding atoms has a surplus of energy represented by the vertical distance between the curves for any chosen distance between the atoms. Where the curves intersect they both represent the same energy; there is no surplus. As the atoms begin to collide, the approaching pair at first do not affect one another (from A to B), but as their electron clouds meet a slight electrical repulsion occurs (from B to C); then electron coupling, as in a chemical bond, produces an increasing attraction between the atoms (from C to D) until a critical separation is attained, when electron decoupling, described elsewhere as internuclear repulsion, begins and produces an increasing repulsion (from D to E) that finally overcomes the inertia (motion) of the pair and causes them to rebound (at E, where the electrical repulsion equals their inertia). The law relates three variables: the period over which the complete orbit occurs, Ti ; the average separation of the bodies form the Sun, ai ; and the total mass of the system of the Sun and the N -1 orbiting planets, S Mi, where the summation is from i = 1... N. The Harmonic Law, expressed in mathematical terms, states that the square of the period equals the average separation cubed divided by the mass of the system : where the summation in S Mi, is from i = 1... N, and the subscript i refers to the motion of the i th planet about the Sun. G is the proportionality factor applying to gravitating systems, and was first evaluated by Henry Cavendish (Shamos). As traditionally perceived the causal mass terms are invariant hence the other parameters, the separation and period, must as well remain fixed. Given electrically caused orbits, the interbody force depends upon the charge difference on the various bodies in the system. As indicated in our text, we believe that the bodies "gravitate" differently when great charge density differences exist within the system than when they do not (Figure 39). Figure 38. Electric forces Between Celestial Bodies By analogy with the collision between two atoms, charged celestial bodies in collision, if governed by the action of electrical force, also exhibit various possible degrees of attraction and repulsion as they approach one another. In (a) two bodies of like charge and like charge-density experience electrical repulsion as they approach collision. In close encounter polarization of their atoms may redistribute their charges in such a way that some electrical attraction will occur during a part of their approach, but ultimately the two bodies will repel one another and rebound from the collision. In (b) two bodies of like charge but of unlike charge-density initially attract one another as they come together. Polarization may enhance this attraction at closer range and the possibility is great for an electrical discharge between the two bodies as they pass. After the discharge( s) the colliding pair may attain the state of the bodies in (a) and the collision proceeds to closest approach, where the like charges repel the bodies into rebounding apart. For example, in Solaria Binaria the Sun and Super Uranus never attained electrical equilibrium [124] throughout the lifetime of the binary; their electrical differences persisted, though diminishing with time. The inter-stellar arc was the Sun's attempt to recapture lost charge [125] . It represented an attractive force between the two stars. So long as their electrical natures remained attractive, the inter-star flow continued. If the two had attained equilibrium, that is, had Super Uranus charge-density declined to reach that of the Sun, the two would no longer have attracted one another electrically; their equal charge-densities then would have produced an electrical "neutrality" in an inertial state. During the interval when the orbiting stars were seeking electrical equilibrium, the mass of the binary system, as measured using its period of revolution (by Kepler's Law) would have seemingly diminished. As the interval transaction that was accelerating the stars in relation to one another declined, the binary would appear to lose angular momentum. In part this "loss of energy" would be an artifact of the measuring theory; what really was occurring would be a recession of the principals to conserve and gain charge; but a dispersal of charge into the plenum would be occurring as well, causing the plenum to expand and hence the calculated mass of each transacting body to decline. Taking another example from the Solar System, Jupiter's angular momentum (the product of its mass, distance from the Sun, and its tangential (perpendicular) velocity in orbit) is 2.03 x 10 43 (mks units). If it were orbiting at the Earth's distance from the Sun but with this same angular momentum, Jupiter would move at 68 kilometers per second, two and one quarter times faster than the Earth's orbital velocity of 30 km/ s. The Jupiter year would be a little longer than 161 Earth-days. The Sun's "mass" required to hold Jupiter, so moving at this closer distance, would have to be five times its present value ! If Jupiter were more closely positioned than above, its year would be even shorter, and the Sun's mass would seem even greater. The Story of Solaria Binaria recounts the consequences of the ongoing enhancement of the Sun's charge resulting in the continuously growing repulsion of the planets to regions farther from the solar surface. Analyzed in mechanical terms this repulsion has been reported as a weakened gravitational force over time, it could equally have been as a decline in the Sun's mass (its gravitational ability). Orbits changing under varying electrical transaction behave differently than the conventional view of very slowly evolving gravitational orbital elements. The objects are drawn together or forced apart by changing radial forces. Literally, an object like Venus, born from Jupiter in a charge-deficient condition, spirals inward, driven radially by electrical force and increasing its tangential velocity in sustaining its angular momentum. It is no "lucky billiard shot" that Venus encountered all planets inferior to its initial position near Jupiter. Following an initial diminishing spiral path generally close to the same plane as the other planetary orbits, Venus could not avoid close (i. e., effective) encounter with each body it passed en route to its present orbit. The events described in this book are the recorded, recollected and inferred consequences of many planetary encounters both before and after the excursion of Venus made famous in our time by Immanuel Velikovsky. Notes on Technical Note C 120. The divergence with theory may be attributable, not to "time of accommodation", but to the complex electrical fields in which the charged planets move. 121. "Inertia" is usually defined as the quantity of motion (momentum) within a body. It also can be considered as a measure of the difficulty in altering a body's motion (accelerating or decelerating it). For an orbiting body the motion is directed tangentially to the orbit while the force which changes the motion is directed radially. 122. The implication is that very close and very distant satellites may experience significantly different gravitational transactions with their primary; that is, the force need not remain exactly proportional to the inverse square of their distances as the => Newtonian formulation would have it. Since G can have somewhat different values for different separations, then the force function becomes more complex than Newton's Law can handle accurately. Another complexity arises if G also changes values as the amount of mass involved is altered. Such a variation would mean that a binary companion or a Jupiter sized mass would not orbit with a force simply proportional to the force keeping an asteroid or a tiny meteoroid in orbit. 123. Its average separation from the Sun. 124. At equilibrium no net change occurs in a system with the passage of time. Here, interbody electrical currents would cease to flow. 125. 3 X 10 22 coulombs might have been exchanged between them over one million years. This represents a transfer of 2 X 10 44 electrons and a tiny fraction of the mass which flowed between the stars through the plenum. Even with this electrical exchange, the charges moved are negligible compared to the number in a body like the Sun or Super Uranus. If the Sun were an electrically neutral body of mass 2 X 10 27 tons, the flow would represent an exchange of one electron per one hundred thousand million electrons present. A stellar body carrying net charge, as these were, would be exchanging an even smaller portion of its charge. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 3: } {Q TECHNICAL NOTES: } {C - } {T TECHNICAL NOTE D: } {S : ON BINARY STAR SYSTEMS} SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES TECHNICAL NOTE D ON BINARY STAR SYSTEMS In the sample of the sixty nearest stars to the Earth we include the Sun. Accompanying seven of these stars is at least one dark unseen body. These unseen bodies are inferred because a wobble is detected in the peculiar motion of the star associated with the dark body (as in Figure 1). Including the unseen bodies as small stars we find sixty-seven stars grouped into forty-five systems. There are three triples, sixteen doubles, and twenty-six single stars. Sixty-one percent of these objects are thus components in a double or triple star system. There are potentially many binaries in the Galaxy. Since faint companions are unlikely to be detected by any means, many of the binary systems which exist will not be recognized by observers. In general, binaries fall into groups separable only by the technique used for their detection. Where the principals sufficiently separate they can be resolved by visual observation through a telescope: these are the visual binaries. When the principals are closer together spectroscopic detection is sometimes possible. For very close pairs eclipses are sometimes seen as the stars orbit one another. In some cases other phenomena are seen which show regular periodicity betraying the binary nature of the system. Discovery of this type has become increasingly frequent in recent years, greatly expanding the number of known binary systems. Visual observation of the binary companion depends upon several factors: the proximity of the binary system to the Earth; a sufficient separation of the principals to allow resolution of their images by a telescope; and the occurrence of small differences in the luminosities of the principals, otherwise the view of the => companion will be obscured by the light of the => primary. Tens of thousand of binary systems can be resolved by telescope into two separate stars. In about twelve percent of these visual binaries the orbital motion can be measured, but only a few satisfactory orbital analyses have been completed [126] . Where the orbit of the companion relative to the primary star can be measured, and where the distance to the principals can be measured, the physical separation of the pair is known. If the period of revolution of the binary is known, then, temporarily accepting Kepler's Harmonic Law, which is based upon Universal Gravitation as the only force binding the principals, the total mass of the binary system can be calculated (Chapter Three). This calculation based upon Kepler's Harmonic Law is the primary clue to the masses of all stars [127] (but see Chapter Two). Allen (1963) tabulates the distribution of the stars against the calculated total "mass" of the binary system. For systems equal to or greater in mass than the Sun, only thirty-two percent of the stars are not members of double or multiple star systems. In those star systems of lesser "mass" the percentage of single stars rises dramatically [128] . For the mass range 0.5 to 0.25 Sun, eighty-five percent of the stars appear single. No star below 0.1 Sun seems to have a companion (ibid). This surely indicates that the ability to see companions near such poorly luminous stars is limited, if not nil. For a typical visual binary one revolution of the companion about the primary takes a few decades. The orbits of the companions have dimensions comparable to the orbits of the major planets in the Solar System, but their shapes are much more elliptical than are the planetary orbits (see Figure 39). For a typical visual binary superposed on the Solar System the => apastron (near Neptune) is three times as distant as the => periastron (near Saturn). The shorter the orbital period for revolution, the more circular the orbit of the companion. Systems which revolve in less than ten days have relative orbits whose shape resembles the orbits of the planets Mars and Saturn. Where the orbit is less than 100 days the orbit is less elliptical than the orbit of the planet Mercury. For orbits over 100 days distinctly elliptical orbits are noted and apastron is about twice as distant as periastron. These orbits are more elliptical than the orbit of the planet Pluto, where aphelion is sixty-seven per cent further than perihelion. Figure 39. Binary Orbits of Short Period Binary stars show a relationship between the shape of their relative orbit and their period of revolution in that orbit. For those pairs orbiting in times from a few days to a few weeks the orbits are found to be somewhat like the more elliptical planetary orbits found in the solar system. Elliptical orbits are described in terms of their difference from a circular orbit using a quantity called eccentricity. Eccentricities for closed orbits have values between 0 (a circle) and nearly 1 (which would be a parabola). The ellipse above the graph shows how the eccentricity is measured for a particular ellipse. In some binary systems the separation of the components is too small to allow resolution in a telescope. Sometimes the detection of the binary still can be made because when the distance between the principals is small enough the stars move in orbit with high velocities. The binary can be observed because a Doppler shift occurs in the spectrum lines of the orbiting companion. Spectroscopic detection favors binary systems in which the stars are highly luminous and especially where the orbiting star is equal in brightness to, or brighter than, the more stationary primary. The orbital periods for spectroscopically detected binaries range from days to weeks. In such systems the orbital period is determined from the time taken for the spectrum lines to shift through one complete cycle; canceling the motion of the binary system itself, the spectrum of the companion shows a velocity of approach, then no velocity, a velocity of recession, no velocity, finally returning to a velocity of approach. Nineteen percent of all bright stars show variable Doppler shift in their spectrum, implying a companion (usually unseen). Of these, forty-seven percent show double spectrum lines; the duplication arises because the motion of both of the principals is detected, indicating that the two stars are comparable in brightness. Lastly, some binary systems are detected because the light received from the stars is seen to vary as the principals eclipse one another. The stars in these eclipsing binary systems usually revolve about one another in less than one month. If indeed these light variations are eclipses, the principals are very close together or, alternatively, at least one, and sometimes both, of the stars have a very large radius compared to the Sun. Orbits have been calculated for almost 100 eclipsing binaries. About nine percent of the spectroscopic binaries are also eclipsing binaries. To have such a high percentage of eclipsing systems in the spectroscopic binary sample is surely an anomaly. Eclipsing binaries include principals with the smallest separation; the close binary stars belong to this group. About sixty percent of eclipsing systems can be described as detached, which means that the light curves of the eclipse produced as one star obscures the other show that the principal bodies are roughly spherical in shape; the Algol star system falls into this group of eclipsing star systems. The remaining eclipsing binaries are the semi-detached star systems. Here the surface of at least one of the principals is distorted into an ellipsoidal shape, and forms at the extreme a teardrop-shaped body "in contact" with the other star. The Beta Lyrae system is a semi-detached binary. Though there is no physical distinction between all of the detached binary systems, that group transacts differently and less strongly than the remainder of the sample, all close binaries. These binary stars transact much more strongly because of the proximity of the two stars. The behavior of the close binaries can be characterized by its violence, in some examples episodic, in others sustained. Here the stars are in competition with the locally available energy supply and for the space with its infra-charge. Of special interest are the so-called contact binaries, systems in which one of the stars has seemingly expanded so as to touch, or in some cases even to envelop the companion star within its tenuous atmosphere. Some contact binary systems appear to revolve about one another in a small fraction of one day. Seldom do the close binaries resolve into two stars, nor do their spectra often show duplication. They are the binary systems with the greatest internal transaction. Many of them show gas flowing between the stars (Chapter Ten), some exhibit emission lines, in other one of the components, usually a dwarf star, erupts regularly (ibid). This eruptive behavior seems to be linked to the gas flow, which produces a hot spot on the recipient star, representing a cataclysmic extreme in activity of the type exhibited by the close binary group as a whole. Systems containing the dwarf novae fall into a group which also resembles systems containing old novae and W Ursae Majoris binaries (Glasby, p146). All of the principals are underluminous. In contrast, many close binaries contain one "overly large" principal. The Wolf-Rayet stars are found paired with a smaller overluminous companion (Glasby, p143). Frequently, B-emission stars are members of close binary systems (Maraschi et al.). As early as 1938 Haffner and Heckmann proposed that in open star clusters, stars lying above the Main Sequence (overluminous stars) were members of binary systems. It seems that a property common to close binary systems is deviant luminosity of one or both principals. This may indicate the importance both of the transaction between the components in such systems, and of the competition of these stars for the contents of their surroundings. We maintain that these transactions are electrical. In summary, the close binary stars feature one principal which is a degenerate object. At least one of the principals shows anomalous luminosity. Transactions within these systems produce various degrees of violent outburst: some flicker (Chapter Ten), all exchange material and, we believe, electric charge. These unusual characteristics of close binary systems appear to represent a competition for space and electrical charge; some scholars, perplexed by these same behaviors, have proposed that unimaginable concentrations of matter have been observed and are causing the observed violence. From the evidence presented in this book, it seems that Solaria Binaria quantavoluted through the gambit of close binary phenomena before its principals became detached and its binary nature became disguised. The electrified star system, simple in concept and understandable in its development, was the stage on which the pageant of mythology, pre-history, and written history begins to unfold as parts of the common cosmic voyage. NOTES ON TECCHNICAL NOTE D 126. Batten (1967) notes the great difference between the number of systems known to exist and those which have been studied. A highly special sample has well determined orbits, even fewer systems have known masses. Typical orbits are given in Allen. 127. We use the term massing in preference to weighing. An example of massing using Kepler's Harmonic Law; the satellite Triton is 353 megameters form Neptune: the Moon is 384 megameters from the Earth. If both Earth and Neptune had the same mass, the periods of revolution for Triton and Moon about their primaries would be about the same. They are not; the Moon takes 22.3 days to orbit while Triton orbits in 5.9 days. This leads astronomers to conclude that Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth. Any transaction equal to 17 times the gravitational pull of one Earth mass on Triton would suffice to cause Triton's rapid orbiting of Neptune as observed. So with the stars: the more intensive the transaction between the principals, the more rapidly the pair will orbit about one another. 128. In systems which show no evidence of any periodic phenomenon, the star's mass has been inferred using theoretical considerations (see Chapter Three). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P PART 3: } {Q TECHNICAL NOTES: } {C - } {T TECHNICAL NOTE E: } {S : SOLARIA BINARIA IN RELATION TO CHAOS AND CREATION} SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES TECHNICAL NOTE E SOLARIA BINARIA IN RELATION TO CHAOS AND CREATION In 1981, one of us (Alfred de Grazia) published Chaos and Creation, which presented the model of Solaria Binaria as part of a general theory of quantavolution. During the last years of its writing, he discussed first with Ralph Juergens and then with Earl Milton the idea of a book on the subject, that would establish it upon firmer foundations and raise it to a new conceptual plane. Juergens' direct participation had hardly begun when he died; but his encouragement and his writings were inspiring to both of us and so we dedicate this book to him in gratitude and friendship. While Chaos and Creation was going through the toils of publication, its author was well aware that he had only spoken the first words on the topic of Solaria Binaria, and that his books would need amendment as soon as a new book could be written. This is not an unusual phenomenon in rapidly developing areas of theory and research, and he is even pleased to constitute a case in point for the pragmatic view that science is never a final statement of truth, and to acknowledge the technical and theoretical superiority of the present work in regard to the model of Solaria Binaria. Most prominently, our collaboration in the preparation and writing of this book has led to a purely electric theory of the Universe. Chaos and Creation still speaks of electro-gravitational forces, although it relegates gravitation largely to inertial phenomena and stresses the universal electrical energies that are generated and employed in cosmic encounters. The electrical theory of Solaria Binaria further dispenses with two-sign charges, designating only the electron as the independent variable of electricity, and describing relevant natural events by the extent to which they are electron- deficient or electron-rich. We rely exclusively upon electrical charges to motivate transactions within the cosmic realm. We present our propositions, principles and evidence without resort to the concept of gravitation. This is the first work to present a history and dynamics of the Solar System in an entirely electrical form. It offers the first electrical cosmogony. Looking specifically to Chaos and Creation, there de Grazia states how the electrical manifestations declined because, he claimed, the Sun's charge has "always" been diminishing as the galactic input declined. While the galactic transaction was indeed declining and will ever continue to decline (because the Sun's cavity is filling up) the solar charge has increased steadily. But time has evened out the charge distribution within the cavity as well. And so intra-cavity electrical transfers are much less frequent and are of much lower intensity today than ever before. So de Grazia was right in that "electricity" has declined, but not because the solar charge has diminished as he once claimed. Later, de Grazia described how Super Uranus met its end, using electrically induced rotation to produce mechanical rupture of the star. Here we describe the same process in terms of an electrical instability in Super Uranus' outer layers. Both processes eject debris into the magnetic tube; both would produce sudden fission; but electrical instability would be more easily produced and could focus its effect towards the Sun and the other planets, giving both the recession of the old star and injection of the new partner into the binary position in line with the ancient string of planetary beads lying along the electrical axis. Again de Grazia talks about differences between electrical and gravitational systems. There, he notes that electrical differences are quickly erased (non- conservative behavior) while gravitational properties exist. In the strictest formal sense, as used in Physics, both fields (electrical and gravitational) are conservative. The strong electrical field in an excited state can relax itself quickly (by emitting electromagnetic radiation as in the atom) while the weak gravitational field cannot. Translated into phenomena, the overt electrical properties of the system would be the first to disappear, supporting the illusion of a non-conservative electrical presence as claimed in Chaos and Creation. Finally, in Chaos and Creation, after the explosive extraction of the Moon's material from the Earth, its phases inciting the early humans to a period of lunar worship (circa 11 500 to 8 000 years ago). To conclude that the Moon immediately orbited about the nearby Earth (its motion being somewhat disturbed by the Sun's gravity as it is today) is necessary when the driving force for the orbit arises mechanically or by some mechanical-electrical mix. But in the purely electrical field that we employ here, the Moon can remain suspended in the Earth's sky as we propose. The question of why humans worshipped the early Moon does not depend upon the Moon's motion in that era: its size, its prominence, and its observed birth and subsequent assembly before man's eyes provide sufficient motivation for worship. The time span of Solaria Binaria, unlike that of Chaos and Creation, includes the whole of the geological, atmospheric and biological development of the Solar System. The authors feel that, although they may have drawn liberally upon Chaos and Creation, they have introduced so many novel concepts and solved so many hitherto unrecognized cosmological problems in the present writing, that this book appears as a complete and independent treatise on cosmogony, which, whether or not Chaos and Creation is well known to the reader, can be comprehended in its entirety, from beginning to end. In addition, we have introduced a number of formal, stylistic, structural, and mathematical innovations that make the present book, despite the passage of only several years, the work of a new generation in the theory of quantavolution. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IN TEXT} {S - } BP before the present cf. compare E evolutionary (model) EM electromagnetic f.(ff.) following page(s) fn. footnote Gm, Gy gigameter, gigayear (= aeon) ibid. in the same place ISEE International Sun Earth Explorer (a space craft) K Kelvin km/s kilometers per second ly light year mks meter-kilogram second (units) My megayear or million years NMP, NRP North magnetic (rotational) pole o. Omnindex (used in the printed version of this book. This electronic version has the same information presented as Glossary, and Bibiliography) op. cit. in the work cited Q quantavolutionary (model) q.v. refer to SB Solaria Binaria (model) SMP, SRP South magnetic (rotational) pole GUIDE TO METRIC UNITS Distances are measured in meters Multiples of the meter, by thousands and thousands, have special names designated by a prefix, such as micrometer and gigameter. Other metric units use the same prefixes for their multiples, like microvolts, gigaergs, etc. Prefix Decimal Notation Useful to Measure nano 0.000 000 001 atoms micro 0.000 001 cells milli 0.001 type size - 1.0 people kilo 1000.0 driving distances mega 1000 000.0 satellite diameters giga 1000 000 000.0 star diameters tera 1000 000 000 000.0 planet orbits {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T GLOSSARY} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton GLOSSARY ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE BIBILIOGRAPHY AND GLOSSARY abr. abridgment Ap. appendix art. article bk. book cf. compare Ch. chapter col. column ed( s) editions( s), editor( s) Eng. English esp. especially et al. and others f., ff. and the following pages( s) Fig. figure fn. footnote l. line loc. cit in the same place o. omnindex orig. originally partic. particularly pl. plate pt. part priv. privately publ. published q. v. see repr. reprinted rev. revised [sic] thus, indicating an irregularity in this items sci. science, scientific Su. Summer tr. translated, translator unpubl. unpublished v.,vols. volume( s) GLOSSARY Glossary especially designed for Solaria Binaria, but look up these same words and many other terms of the book at the front of the CD, in the suggested index list, or simply by employing the search engine, from anywhere on the CD. aeon is usually an indefinitely long time, here to designate the order of the conventional age of the planetary system, a billion (or thousand million) years. Also equivalent to gigayear. afterglow in a molecular gas, is produced by a pulsed electric discharge through pure nitrogen. The afterglow has been observed to persist to the darkness-adapted eye for several hours (Strutt); it is strongly visible for minutes (Ruark et al.). Other common gases produce weaker, shorter-lived afterglows. Age of Jovea is the period following the Deluge (about 5700 BP) to the time of Mercury's encounter with the Earth circa 4400 years ago. Age of Saturn brackets the period eight thousand to fifty-eight hundred years before present. Age of Urania is the first age of the Quantavolutionary Period, assigned to run from 14000 to 11000 years ago. Also called the Uranian age. albedo is the fraction of light reflected from a cosmic body. anode is an electron-deficient region in an electric discharge. It is the place towards which electron flow occurs, and can be the source of an ion (q. v.) current - the ions being electron-deficient atoms. apastron means the greatest separation of the principals (q. v.) in a binary. It is a homologue of apogee for an Earth satellite, and aphelion for a planet. The term apocentron is used elsewhere in place of apastron to describe the farthest point on an orbit. arc-second is the smallest unit of angular measurement using the scale where the circle is divided into 360 degrees. The degree has 60 arc-minutes. Each minute consists of 60 arc-seconds. astronomical unit (AU) is the present value of the Earth-Sun distance. It is equal to 149.6 gigametres (149.6 million kilometres). barads is a biblical term which can be interpreted as the fall of meteorites from the heavens. The Seventh Plague of Egypt. Stones such as are found in great fields on the Arabian desert. See Sieff. cataclysm is a sudden dense material deluge from the atmosphere altering biosphere and/ or lithosphere. see, quantavolution catastrophe is a sudden large-scale, extremely harmful event; the word probably originated from two Greek roots meaning a "falling star" but came to have assigned to it two different roots, meaning "down-turning" and applied to the denouement of a Greek tragedy. cathode in an electric discharge is the source of electrons for the conduction process. The cathode usually will be the most electron-rich region. Celsius (degree) is the unit of temperature using the scale of 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water at one atmosphere, air-pressure. It was formerly called the Centigrade degree. One Celsius degree is 9/ 5 of the Farenheit degree still used in both the United States and Great Britain in 1982. Central Fire also, axis, electrical charge (electrical), see electric charge chromosphere the gases of the solar chromosphere appear to be hotter than the photospheric gases which lie below them. In the chromospheric region temperature rises abruptly by several tens of thousands of degrees Kelvin. Similar temperature increases have been detected across the chromosphere of other stars (Wright, p. 124). This layer of solar atmosphere can be viewed as an electric double layer between the plasmas of the solar photosphere and the corona. close binaries, see binaries commensurabilities, see mutual repulsion companion in a binary system is a body which revolves about the major component (q. v. principal) in the system: the orbiter; as the Earth about the much larger Sun. corona, see solar corona cosmic pressure on the theory that the Universe is pervaded by a continuum of electric charges, the notion arises that where charge-deficient cavities (stars) exist within the Universe a pressure results driving material within the cavity into one or more aggregations (stars, planets, etc.). The materials within these bodies are confined by cosmic pressure. cosmic rays are highly energetic electron-deficient atoms (mainly protons) which impinge equally upon the Earth from all directions. The average cosmic ray has an energy of 7 GeV. Cosmic ray electrons exist but they are only one hundredth as abundant as the protons (Hillas. pp. 67-9). The sky "shines" as brightly with cosmic rays as it does with starlight (Watson). The most energetic cosmic rays have an energy at least 100 billion times the average. Such cosmic rays are very rare. crater, see astrobleme Curie Temperature (after Pierre Curie) is that temperature at which magnetic materials undergo a sharp change in their magnetic properties. Remnant magnetism appears in rock below this temperature and is erased if the rock is heated above it. Demiurge refers to a grand original intelligence who acted to produce the real world, as described in cosmogonies of early peoples and philosophers. deuteron is the nucleus of a heavy hydrogen atom. Fusion of two deuterons is one step in the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen. double layer (electric) is the juxtaposition of an electric sheath containing an excess of electrons upon an electric sheath which is electron-deficient. Such a double layer is formed whenever two plasmas of differing electric charge densities meet, for example, between the Sun's photosphere and its corona and between the solar wind and the Earth's plasmasphere. The former double layer forms the solar chromosphere, the latter the Earth's magnetosphere and bow wave. double star is a synonym for binary star. early-type stars are those which, using conventional star-evolution-theory sequences, must be younger. Herein, using Bruce's scheme, these are the post-nova stars. They are in our system also high transaction stars. electric neutrality as used in this work is a local rather than an absolute condition. The existence of a measurable transaction between local bodies (like the Sun and the Earth) indicate there is not neutrality within the locality. If the galactic neutral is one too many electrons per million atoms, while in the Solar System there is one too many electrons per ten million atoms, then a current will tend to flow between the Sun and the Galaxy in order to make the Sun neutral. electrophoresis is the motion of particles (of atomic or larger size) under the influence of an electric field. This motion implies that the particles bear an electric charge. eon, see aeon epoch, see time evolved-star is one which does not obey Eddington's Mass-Luminosity law. Stars in close binary systems are usually of this type, indicative in our view of an intensive electric transaction between the principals in such binary systems. faculae are irregularly shaped unusually bright patches above the solar disc generally associated with sun spots. They are active regions in the photosphere and have their equivalent higher in the atmosphere as chromospheric plages and coronal condensations. (Chromospheric calcium plages are sometimes called flocculi.) force, electrical, see electrical force fossil assemblages are aggregates of fossils uncovered at a single location. They often exhibit ecological unconformity. galactic neutral, see electric neutrality giga( metre) The prefix giga is used to designate thousands of millions; called billions in the United States but not in Great Britain where billion refers to one million million (or 10 12 ). One gigametre is one million kilometres. granule on the solar photosphere about two and one half million granules exist at any moment. The average granule is 1000 kilometres across; it survives from five to ten minutes. Granules are about 100 K hotter than their surroundings. They show a turbulent motion of about 2 kilometres per second, like a bubble in a porridge pot (Abell, p. 526). Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram is a two-dimensional field of stars where luminosity (total radiation emitted) is the ordinate (dependent variable) and color (surface temperature) is the abscissa (determinant variable). This diagram is used extensively in astronomy to infer properties of stars whose distance makes direct measurement difficult or impossible. In terms of the HR diagram, evolved stars are either overluminous or underluminous for their color, that is, they are above or below the main sequence (q. v.) of the stars. insolation is the solar energy received at the Earth's surface. Only a fraction of the insolation is absorbed, some of it reflects into space. ion is here an atom from which one or more electrons typically present has been removed. see also, electron-deficient atoms. ionosphere is a layer of ionized atmosphere beginning at an altitude of 56 to 90 kilometers above the Earth's surface. This layer is electrically conductive. Its altitude and density varies over the day. In theory there is no upper limit to the ionosphere, yet detection of its upper layers is accomplished only infrequently. irradiance is the radiant flux incident upon a unit area of a surface. For sunlight it is the number of watts received per square metre of the Earth's surface. Jovean Age, see Age of Jovea Kelvin is the unit of temperature using the scale zeroed at absolute zero. It is the lowest conceivable temperature. The Kelvin unit is identical to the Celsius degree. The freezing point of water is 273.15 K( elvin). Lagrangian point in a three-body system the orbits can be computed if one of three bodies is negligibly tiny - in such a case the motion of the minuscule third body does not disturb the two primary bodies. Lagrange showed that for such a "restricted system of three bodies" there existed several points, co-rotating with the motion of the primary pair, where the third body could be trapped. The L1 point is one of these points; it lies between the two primary bodies. least interaction action (sometimes, least action interaction), see mutual repulsion light-year is a unit of distance. It represents approximately 10 16 metres, the distance light travels (in theory) through a vacuum in one year (3.16 x 10 7 seconds). luminosity of a star depends upon the area of the star's surface (opaque radiating layer of gases) and upon the fourth power of its surface temperature. The luminosity of a star is a measure of its energy output, it can be known directly, as opposed to inferred, only if the star's distance can be measured. magnetite is a black to brownish metallic stone with magnetic properties. The legendary lodestone is one of the magnetites. The magnetites are formed of octahedral crystals of mineral whose chemical structure contains the unit, XFe204 . X may be Fe, Mg, Ni, Zn, or Mn. The first is most common; the last two are only weakly magnetic. main sequence stars obey Eddington's Mass-Luminosity Law. They constitute the majority of stars whose distance, brightness, and temperature have been measured. massive ion ions are divided into fast and slow. Ions with greatest inertia to the field are said to be massive because they are harder to move; the easier they become mobile the more lightness they are assigned. Elements of low atomic number are most mobile. mega( watts) the prefix mega indicates a multiplier of one million. Hence a megawatt is one million watts and a megametre is one million metres. memorial generations is the difference in years between a youngest listening child and the oldest storytellers of a society. Here we assign this interval a value of 50 years. milli( tesla) the prefix milli refers to the multiplier one-thousandth. One millitesla is thus one-thousandth of a tesla. mobility is the ratio of the average drift velocity (attained between collisions) to the electric field strength (which produces the drift velocity). Mohorovicic discontinuity is the junction which separates the Earth's crust and mantle. Its depth is about 10 kilometres below the ocean basin. neutrinos, see nuclear fusion Newtonian formulation states that the gravitational attraction between two celestial bodies depends upon the product of the two point masses transacting and upon the inverse of the square of the distance separating the masses. Expressed mathematically : [Formula...] In metre-kilogram-seconds units (mks) the gravitational constant of proportionality (G) relates the force in newtons to the masses in kilograms and the separation in metres. G has the value 6.667 x 10 -11 m 3 /kg-s 2 so, : [Formula...] nuclear fusion is the supposed stellar process by which the nucleii of four hydrogen atoms collide with sufficient energy to coalesce forming a single helium nucleus having slightly less mass than the original hydrogen. The mass which is destroyed in fusion reappears as radiant energy which slowly flows away to the surface. In the fusion, two protons are changed into two neutrons, two anti- electrons, and two neutrinos. The neutrons remain in the fused helium nucleus, the anti-electrons annihilate with two electrons (liberating more radiant energy), and the neutrinos escape the star immediately, travelling at the speed of light. On Earth, a type of nuclear fusion has been sustained for one hundred pico-seconds. No continuing fusion process has been produced. To remain luminous by conventional theory the star must fuse hydrogen continuously (Rudeaux and de Vaucouleurs, pp. 316-9). nucleosynthesis, see nuclear fusion nucleotides the monomeric unit which makes up the nucleic acid molecules. A nucleotide consists of a nitrogen base, plus a sugar, and a phosphate group. particle is used here as a synonym for electrons, atoms and/ or electron-deficient atoms (ions) which are in motion, such as in an electric discharge, or in a flowing gas or plasma. So viewed, cosmic rays and stellar/ solar wind ions are particles. periastron means the least separation of the principals in a binary. Similarly, its homologues are perigee and perihelion when orbiting the Earth or the Sun. Elsewhere, the term pericentron is used to describe the closest approach between two bodies in orbit. physical binary system is here defined to consist of two bodies which are mutually dependent in respect to their orbital revolution about each other. In multiple star systems, which also exist, more than two bodies are in revolution about a common centre-of-motion, often designated as their baricentre. plasma is a gas in which the electrons are separated from the electron-deficient atoms. The whole gas contains approximately equal numbers of electrons and ions. plenum the contents of the sac of Solaria Binaria and later of the Solar System; excluding the distinctly stellar and planetary material in it. Plinian eruption is the most violent volcanic eruption known. It is of almost incomprehensible violence such as the eruptions of Stronghyle (believed to have occurred in 1500 BC), of Vesuvius (in AD 79) and of Krakatoa in 1883. polymorphs are organisms which during their life cycle undergo a transition (metamorphosis) between forms. In some species several forms co-exist within one colony at any moment. polyploids are species of plants (and sometimes animals) whose chromosome number exceeds twice the basic set of chromosomes (the haploid number) found in the gamete cell (which) produces a new organism by fertilization with an appropriate gamete cell of the opposite gender. It is not uncommon to breed plants with double or four times the original number of chromosomes (euploids). primary is the major body in a binary system, e. g. the Sun in the Solar System. The companion( s) orbit( s) the primary. In some systems neither object can be called primary. principals are the major components in a multiple or binary star system. Referring to Solaria Binaria they would be with time, the Sun and Super Uranus, then after Super Uranus' destruction in a climatic nova eruption, the Sun and Super Saturn. After the Deluge the principals become the Sun and Jupiter whose transactions today dominate motions in the surviving Solar System. pulsars are stars, a significant part of whose observed energy output is not continuous but is emitted as distinct flashes or pulses of electromagnetic radiation. Many pulsars also emit some radiation weakly and constantly, forming a background for the more intensive pulses. quadrature is the angular aspect by which two celestial bodies are observed from a third body to be ninety degrees apart in the sky. An example is the Sun and the quarter-phased Moon as seen from the Earth. quantavolution is an abrupt, large-scale change caused by, and affecting one or more spheres such as the astrophere, biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and anthrosphere. quasar is a celestial object which appears "star-like" but is not explainable in terms of the usual stellar properties. Many quasars have a visible "tail" - supposedly a jet of material expelled from the quasar. Often quasars emit anomalous amounts of radio waves. radiation is used here to denote electromagnetic waves of any wavelength. It includes, in order of descending wavelength, radiowaves, microwaves, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-rays, and gamma-rays. sac in Solaria Binaria, the container of all that can be included in Solaria Binaria, and later on the Solar System; as distinguishable from the medium of space external to it. Saltation, see Quantavolution sidereal measured relative to the stars rather than the Sun. space-charge sheath is a region in which either electrons or electron-deficient atoms predominate and through which electric currents flow. The space-charge limits the current through the sheath. There, electric field strength is not zero. space infra-charge is an electrical property of space itself, not determined by the presence of electrical charges or conductor's residing in that space. The infra- charge is homologous with Paul Dirac's electron theory (1928) which postulated that the vacuum was a sea-of-electrons possessing negative energies. These electrons are not normally detectable but can be prompted into existence (that is, converted into detectable electrons) under certain conditions. The electrons of Dirac's sea affect the energy states of atoms in space. To quote Nobel laureate Leon Cooper (606 fn.): "Thus the vacuum, rather than being an inert void responds to the presence of charges or masses and modifies their behaviour". specific charge ratio is a method of comparing the electric charge inherent in a celestial body with some other physical property such as its volume or the number of atoms which it contains. The ratio would thus be expressed in coulombs per cubic metre, coulombs per kilogram, or possibly as excess electrons per kilogram molecular mass (kilomole). stellar wind is the flow of material from a star to the Galaxy. In the electric star the stellar wind exists as one means of the star accumulating charge from the nearly "empty" space which surrounds it. By sending electron-deficient atoms to the Galaxy the star gains electrons relative to the material it contains. From the few stellar winds that have been measured, it seems as if the mass loss increases as the square root of the luminosity. In terms of the electric star model presented here, it is tempting to think that luminosity varies as the square of the star-to- galaxy current. There is some evidence that mass loss is enhanced when a close companion is present (Hutchings). tera( amperes) the prefix tera indicates one million million times the quantity. Tera- is thus a synonym for a multiplier of one billion in Great Britain, and one trillion in the United States. It is, as a measure of current, one million million amperes. thermonuclear fusion occurs in a gas of sufficient temperature that its atoms in collision will fuse in significant numbers (see nuclear fusion). A thermonuclear process is purported to provide the power radiated by the stars. transactive matrix is a quasi ordered plenum of electrons moving chaotically, which forms a medium through which ions can flow, thereby transmitting an electric currrent. The solar wind electrons form such a matrix, their existence allows the Sun to jettison ions towards the edge of the solar cavity where electrons are readily available. transmutation as used here to transmute means to change the form of, such as from kinetic to potential energy, or to modify the structure of a molecule, crystal, or atom. troposphere is the lowest layer of the Earth's atmosphere. It is characterized by the complete mixing of the atoms and molecules of the atmospheric gases by significant vertical winds. The temperature and pressure declines with height in this layer. unseen bodies are components in a binary system which remain undetected by direct observation but are implied by some anomalous behaviour of those bodies which are detected. visual binary system is a binary system where the component stars are resolvable into separate optical images, that is, the star images are distinguishable. whistling atmospheric or whistler, is an electromagnetic wave in the audible frequency range (300 to 30 000 hertz). Its origin is in lightning discharges, and it is propagated along the magnetic field lines (see Hines). Whistlers are today audible only using an amplifier but in the environment of Solaria Binaria they should have been directly audible. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V SOLARIA-BINARIA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T BIBILIOGRAPHY} {S - } SOLARIA BINARIA: BIBILIOGRAPHY BIBILIOGRAPHY Certain sources and their abbreviations: Acad. sci., compt. rend. Academie des sciences, comptes rendus Am. Beh. Sci. American Behavioral Scientist A. Chem. Soc., J. American Chemical Society, Journal An. Rev. As. Ap. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics As. Soc. Pac., Publ.( Proc.) Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Publications (Proceedings) As. & Ap. Astronomy and Astrophysics As. J. Astronomical Journal Ap. J. Astronomical Journal Brit. As. Assn., J. British Astronomical Association, Journal Can. J. Pl. Sci. Canadian Journal of Plant Science Chem. & Eng. News Chemical and Engineering News Creation Res. Q. Creation Research Quarterly Dept. En. Mines & Res. Department of Energy, Mines and Resources (Canada) Detroit Acad. Nat. Sci. Detroit Academy of Natural Sciences Ency. Brit., Macro. (Micro.) Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Macropaedia (Micropaedia) Ins. El. Eng. J. Institute of Electrical Engineers, Journal (now Electronics and Power) Int. As. U., Proc. 11th Gen. Ass.: International Astronomical Union, Proceedings of the 11th General Assembly Int. As. U., Proc. Colloq. No. 6: International Astronomical Union, Proceedings of Colloquium Number Six J. Geomag. & Geoel. Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity J. Geoph. Res. Journal of Geophysical Research J. Opt. Soc. Am. Journal of the Optical Society of America J. Phys. Journal of Physics Nat. Bur. Std., J. Res. National Bureau of Standards, Journal of Research NY Acad. Sci., Annals New York Academy of Sciences, Annals Phil. Mag. Philosophical Magazine Roy. Anthrop. Inst., J. Royal Anthropological Institute, Journal Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. Astronomical Society (London), Philosophical Transactions Roy. Soc. (London)., Proc. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Roy. Soc. (New South Wales), J. & Proc.: Royal Society of New South Wales, Journal and Proceedings S. I. S. Review (Workshop) Society for Interdisciplinary studies, Review (Workshop) References: Abdul-Rauf, Muhammad (1978), "Pilgrimage to Mecca", National Geographic 154, no. 5 (Nov.), pp. 581-607; (pp. 584 f.) also, "Arabia", Ency. Brit. 2, 9th ed p. 262 Abell, George D. (1975), Exploration of the Universe, 3rd ed. (Holt, Rinehart &Winston: New York); Adams, J. A. S., see Heymann Ager, Derek V. (1973), The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (Wiley: New York); (Ch. 3); (Ch. 4) Aggarwal, H. R., see Oberbeck Agrawal, P. C., see Matsuoka Hannes (1962), "Filamentary Currents and Magnetic Conditions on the Sun" in Int. As. U., Proc. 11 th Gen. Ass. (Academic: New York), pp. 433-5; (pp. 433, 435) Allen, C. W. Q 955, 1st ed.; 1963, 2nd ed.; 1973, 3rd ed.), Astrophysical Quantities (Athlone: London); (1963: p. 237); (1963, 1973: no. 112); (1963: 219, 219) Aller, Lawrence H. (1974), "Star" in Encv. Brit., Macro. 17 (Chicago), pp. 584-604; (p. 603) see Ross Alvarez, Luis W., et al. (1980), "Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous- Tertiary Extinction", Science 208 (6 Jun.), pp. 1095-1108; also, Russell, Dale A., "The Mass Extinctions of the Late Mesozoic", Scientific American 246 (Jan. 1982), pp. 58-65 Alvarez, Walter, see Alvarez, L. W. Aristotle, On the Heavens, tr. W. K. C. Guthrie (Harvard: Cambridge, 1971); (p. 25. 270b) -Metaphysics, tr. H. Tredennik (Harvard: Cambridge, 1975); (partic. Bk. One, pp. 3- 83) -Meteorologica, tr. H. D. P. Lee, (Harvard: Cambridge, 1978 p. 13, 339b21) Armstrong, T. P., see Krimigis Arnold, James R. (1973, "The Chemist's Moon," Science and Public Affairs 29, no. 9 (Nov,), pp. 22-5 Arp. Halton C. (1975), "The Evolution of Galaxies" in New Frontiers In Astronomy, (Freeman: San Francisco), pp. 210-21 Arvidson, R. E., see Oberbeck Asakawa, Y. (1976), "Promotion and Retardation of Heat Transfer by Electric Fields," Nature 261 (20 May), pp. 220-1 Asaro, Frank, see Alvarez Atkinson, G., see Jacobs Axford, W. I., see Krimigis Ayala, Francisco J. (1978), "The Mechanism of Evolution" Scientific American, 23 9 (Sep.), pp. 56-9 Babcock, H. W. (1962), "The Solar Magnetic Cycle" in Int. As. U., Proc. I I th Gen. Ass. (Academic: New York), pp. 419-25 Bachmang, Charles H., see Friedman Bacon, Edward, see Galanopoulos Bailey, Valentine A. (1960), "Existence of Net Electrical Charges on Stars," Nature, (186 (14 May), pp. 508-10; S; 16, fn. 16 also, Nature 189 (7 Jan. 1961), pp. 43-4, 44-5; and Roy. Soc. (New South Wales) J. & Proc. 94 (1960), pp-77-86 Baker, George (1960), "Origin of Tektites" Nature 185 (30 Jan.), pp. 291-4; 120 (p. 293) Baker, Howard B. (1954), "The Earth Participates in the Evolution of the Solar System", Detroit Acad. Nat. Sci. (Detroit). Baker, Robert H. (1967), Astronomy, 8 th ed. (van Nostrand: Princeton). Barnes, A. see Wolfe Barnes, Thomas G. (1977), "Recent Origin and Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field," S. I. S. Review II, no. 2 (Dec.) See also, Milsom Barnwell, F. H. & Brown, Jr., F. A. (1964), "Responses of Planarians and Snails," in Biological Effects of Magnetic Fields, v. 1 (Plenum: New York) Basilevsky, A. T., see Florensky Bass, Robert W. (1974), "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," Pens‚e 4, no. 3 (Su.), pp. 21-6; also, loc. cit., "Did Worlds Collide?" pp. 9-20 Batten, Alan H. (1967), "On the Interpretation of the Statistics of Double Stars," An. Rev. As. Ap. 5, pp. 25-44; -(1973a), "Discussion of Observations of the Flow of Matter Within Binary Systems" in Extended Atmospheres and Circumstellar Matter in Spectroscopic Binary Systems, Int. As. U. Symposium no. 51 (May), pp. 1-21; -(1973b), Binary and Multiple Systems of Stars (Pergamon: New York Toronto) Beals, C. S. & Halliday, Ian (1967), "Terrestrial Meteorite Craters and their Lunar Counterparts," in Int. Dict. Geogr., v. 2 (Pergamon: New York) Becker, Robert O., see Friedman Becvar, Antonin (1964): Atlas of the Heavens 11: Catalogue 1950.0, (Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences/ Sky Publishing Corp.: Praha/ Cambridge MS) Beebe, Rita, see Smith, B. A. Behannon. K. W. see Ness Bellamy, Hans Schindler (1936), Moon, Myths and Man (Faber & Faber: London) -(1951), A Life History of our Earth (Faber & Faber: London) Bessell, M. S., see Wickramasinghe, D. T. Bible, references are to Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday: Garden City) Bimson, John J. (1978), "Redating the Exodus and Conquest," J. St. Old Test., Sup. Ser., no. 5 Blavatsky, H. P. (1877), repr. (Theosophical University Press: Pasadena, Calif., 1976) vol. I., Science, pp. 160 f., citing Mallet's Northern Antiquities Blevin, H. A. (1964a), "Plasma in a Magnetic Field" in Discharge and Plasma Physics, ed. S. C. Hayden (The University of New England: Armidale, NSW), pp. 471- 80 -(1964b), "Plasma Confinement" in op. cit. pp. 471-80 Bloch, R. (1962), Gli Etruschi 11 (Saggitore: Milan) Blumer, M. & Youngblood, W. W. (1975), "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils and Recent Sediments," Science 188 (4 Apr.), p. 53 Bostrom, C. O., see Krimigis Boyce, Joseph, see Smith, B. A. Brace, Larry H., see Taylor Brady, Joseph L. (1972), "The Effect of a Trans-Plutonian Planet on Halley's Comet," As. Soc. Pac., Proc. 84 (Apr.), pp. 314-22 Brazilevski, A. T., see Ksanfomaliti Brennan, M. H. (1964), "Plasma Heating," in Discharge and Plasma Physics, ed. S. C. Hayden (The University of New England: Armidale, NSW), pp. 481-7 Briggs, Geofrrey, see Smith, B. A. Broadfoot, A. L., see Kumar Brooks, J., see Hoyle (Oct. 1977) Brough, James (1958), "Time and Evolution," in Studies on Fossil Vertebrates (Athlone: London), pp. 16-38 Brown, F. A. Jr., see Barnwell Brown, H. Auchincloss (1967), Cataclysms of the Earth (Twayne: New York) Brown, W. Norman (1961), "Mythology of India," in Mythologies of the Ancient World (Doubleday Anchor: New York) Browning, Iben, see Roosen Bruce, Charles E. R. (1944), A New Approach to Astrophysics and Cosmogony (Unwin Bros: London) -(1955), "Combination Spectra in Long-Period Variable Stars," Phil. Mag. 46 (sep.), pp 1123-31 -(1958-1964), "Cosmic Electric Discharges," letters to Electronics and Power (Ins. El. Eng., J.): 1. "Cosmic Electric Discharges," v. 4 (Dec. 1958) 2. "Spiral Nebulae," v. 6 (sep. 1960) 3. "Galactic Evolution and Cosmological Controversies," v. 7 (Jul. 1961) 4. "The Energy Radiated by Radio Galaxies," v. 7 (Aug. 1961) 5. "Cosmic Plasma Jets and Hyperthermal WindTunnels," v. 8 (Apr. 1962), pp. 204-5 6. "Stellar Temperatures," v. 8 (Oct. 1962), p. 459 7. "Radio Galaxies," v. 8 (Dec. 1962). p. 547 8. "The Evershed Effect," v. 9 (1963), p. 118 9. "Two Populations of Galaxies?," v. 9 (Jun. 1963), p. 259 10. "Zanstra's Theory of Planetary Nebulae," v. 9 (Jul. 1963), p. 303 11. "The Radio Haloes of Galaxies," v. 9 (Aug. 1963), pp. 356-7 12. "Discharge Generated Vortices," v. 9 (1963), p. 414 13. "Extremely Strong Cosmic Radio Sources," v. 10 (Feb. 1964), p. 56 14. "Theories of Radio Galaxies," v. 10 (Apr. 1964), pp. 93-4 15. "Galactic Evolution," v. 10, (May 1964), p. 166 16. "Solar Magnetic Fields," v. 10 (Aug. 1964), pp. 279-80 17. "Whiskers in Space?" [16 sic], v. 10 (Oct. 1964), p. 361 ---(1966a), Lightning, Novae, and Quasars," Nature 209 (19 Feb.), p. 798 ---(1966b), Lightning Currents," Electronics & Power 12 (Jun.), p. 200 also, Nature 211 (2 Jul. 1966), pp. 62 ff. Burgess, Eric (1979), "Venus Questions Answered," New Scientist 81 (8 Feb.), pp. 391-3 Canal, Ramon (1974), "Nucleosynthesis of Lithium in Low-Energy Flares," Ap. J. 189 (1 May), pp. 531-3 Canuto, V., et al. (1979), "Varying G," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 188, pp. 829-37 Cardona, Dwardu (1976), "On the Origin of Tektites," Kronos 2, no. 1 (Aug.), pp. 38-44 ---(1977), "The Sun of Night," Kronos 3, no. 1 (Aug.), pp. 31-8 ---(1978a), "Let There Be Light," Kronos 3, no. 3 (Sp.), pp. 34-54 ---(1978b), "The Mystery of the Pleiades," Kronos 3, no. 4 (May), pp. 24-44 Challinor, R. A. (1971), "Variations in the Rate of Rotation of the Earth," Science 172 (4 Jun.), pp. 1022-5 Chalmers, J. A. (1967) Atmospheric Electricity, 2nd ed. (Pergamon: Oxford) Clark, D. H., et al. (1975), "Is Cir X-1 a Runaway Binary?," Nature 254 (24 Apr.), pp. 674-6 ---(1979), "Differential Solar Rotation depends on Solar Activity," Nature 280 (26 Jul.), pp. 299-300 Clube, S. Victor M. (1978), "Do We Need a Revolution in Astronomy?," New Scientist 80 (26 Oct.), pp. 284-6 Coe, Michael D. (1975), "Native Astronomy in Mesoamerica" in Archaeastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, ed. F. Aventi (University of Texas: Austin) Coe, M. J., et al. (1975), "Hard X-ray Measurements of Nova AO535+ 26 in Taurus," Nature 256 (21 Aug.), pp. 630-1 Cole, K. D. (1976), "Physical Argument and hypothesis for Sun-Weather relationships," Nature 260 (18 Mar.), pp. 229-30 Cook II, Allan F., see Smith, B. A. Cook, Melvin Alonzo (1966), Prehistory and Earth Models (Parish: London) ---(1972), "Rare Gas Absorption on Solids of the Lunar Regolith," J. Coll. Int. Sci. 38, no. 1 (Jan.), pp. 12-19 Cooper, Leon N. (1968), An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (Harper & Row: New York) Corliss, William R. (1975), "Moon Lore and Eclipse Superstitions" in Strange Universe (Sourcebook Proj.: Glen Arm, MD) Cowley, Ann P., et al. (1975), "TT Arietis: An evolved, very short period binary," Ap. J. 195 (15 Jan.), pp. 413-21 ---(1977), "The Flickering White Dwarf CD-42 o 14462: A Non-eruptive Close Binary," Ap. J. 214 (1 Jun.), pp. 471-7 Cox, Allan (1969), "Geomagnetic Reversals," Science 163 (17 Jan.), pp. 237-45 Crew, Eric W. (1974), "Lightning in Astronomy," Nature 252 (13 Dec.), pp. 539-42 Crozier, W. D. (1966), "Nine Years of Continuous Collection of Black Magnetic Spherules from the Atmosphere," J. Geoph. Res. 71 (15 Jan.), pp. 603-10 Dachille, Frank (1963), "Axis Changes on the Earth from Large Meteoritic Collisions," Nature 198 (13 Apr.), 176 ---(1978), "Electromagnetic Effects of Collisions at Meteoritical Velocities: Experimental and Theoretical Results," Meteorics 13 (Dec.), pp. 430-3 ---(1979), "The Electrodynamic Aspect of Impact Cratering," unpubl., presented at International Meteoritic Society Conference, Heidelberg Danjon, Andr‚ (1960), Note: "Sur un changement du r‚gime de la rotation de la Terre survenu au mois de juillet 1959," Acad. sci., compt. rend. 250 (22 Feb.), pp. 1399- 1402 Darwin, George H. (1879), "On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the Earth," Roy. Soc. (Lond.), Phil. Trans., pp. 447-538 also, The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System, 1898, repr. (Freeman; San Francisco, 1962) Davies, Merton E., see Smith, B. A. Dawson, Edward & Dalgetty, L. C. (1967), "The March of the Compass in Canada," Canadian Surveyor 21, no. 5 (Dec.), pp. 380-402 Dayhoff, M. O. et al. (1964), "Thermodynamic Equilibria in Pre-Biological Atmospheres," Science 146 (11 Dec.), pp. 1461-4; de Grazia, Alfred (1977), "Ancient Knowledge of Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings," Kronos 2, no. 3 (Feb.), pp. 65-8 ---(1978), "Palaetiology of Fear and Memory" in Recollections of a Fallen Sky, eds. E. Milton et al. (Unileth: Lethbridge), pp. 31-44 ---(1980), "The 1500 BC Catastrophe: Ten Absolutes for Testing," rev. in "Focus," S. I. S. Review IV, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 74 f. ---(1981), Chaos and Creation: An Introduction to Quantavolution in Human and Natural History (Metron: Princeton) ---(1983a), God's Fire: Moses and the Management of the Exodus (Metron: Princeton) ---(1983b), Homo Schizo I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis (Metron: Princeton) ---(1983c), Homo Schizo II: Human Nature and Behavior (Metron: Princeton) ---(1983d), Divine Succession: A Science of Gods Old and New (Metron: Princeton) ---(1984a), The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (Metron: Princeton) ---(1984b), Lately Tortured Earth: Exoterrestrial Forces and Quantavolutions in the Earth Sciences (Metron: Princeton) ---(1984c), The Burning of Troy: Essays and Notes on Quantavolution (Metron: Princeton) ---(1984d), Cosmic Heretics (Metron: Princeton) ---et al. (1978), The Velikovsky Affair (University: Hyde Park, NY, 1967), repr. of art. orig. publ. Am. Beh. Sci. (Sep. 1963); rev. ed. (Sphere: London de Santillana, Giorgio & von Dechend, Herta (1969), Hamlets Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (Godine: Boston) Dicke, Robert H. (1957), "Principle of Equivalence and the Weak Interactions, "Reviews of Modern Physics 29 (Jul.), pp. 355-62 ---(1964), "The Earth and Cosmology," Ap. to The Theoretical Significance of Experimental Relativity (Gordon and Breach: New York), pp. 99-121 Dickerson, Richard E. (1978), "Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life," Scientific American 239 (Sep.), pp. 70-86 Dirac, Paul A. M. (1937), "The Cosmological Constants," letter to the Editor, Nature 139 (20 Feb.), p. 323 Dole, Stephen H. (1970), Habitable Planets for Man (Elsevier: New York) Donnelly, Ignatius (1970), Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, 1883, repr. (University Books: New York) Douglas, J. A. V., et al. (1970), "Minerology and Deformation in Some Lunar Samples," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 594-7 Douglas, R. J. W. (1970), Sci. Ed., Geology and Economic Minerals of Canada (Dept. En., Mines, & Res.: Ottawa) Dreyer, J. L. E. (1953), A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, 1905, repr. 2 nd ed. (Dover: New York) Dugun, Raymond Smith, see Russell, H. N. Dulk, George A. (1965), "Io-Related Radio Emission from Jupiter," Science 148 (18 Jun.), pp. 1585-9 Eddy, J. A., et al. (1976), "Solar Rotation During the Maunder Minimum," Solar Physics 46, pp. 3-14 Edwards, Deborah, et al. (1980), "Asymmetric Synthesis in a Confined Vortex: Gravitational Fields Can Cause a Symmetric Synthesis," Am. Chem. Soc. J. 102 (2 Jan.), pp. 381-2 Eliade, Mircea (1954), The Myth of the Eternal Return, tr. (Princeton Univ.: New York) ---(1967), The Quest (U. Of Chicago Press: Chicago) Encke, J. F. (1823), "Fortgesetzte Nachrucht ber der Pons'schen Kometon," Sammlung astronomischer Abhandlungen Beobachtungen und Nachrichten, pp. 124-40 Epstein, Samuel & Taylor, Jr., Hugh P. (1970), "O-18/ O-16, Si-30/ Si-28, D/ H, and C-13/ C-12 Studies of Lunar Rocks and Minerals," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 533-5 Faul, Henry (1966), "Tektites are Terrestrial," Science 152 (3 Jun.), pp. 1341-5 Firsoff, V. A. (1980), "On Some Problems of Venus," Brit. As. Assn., J. 89 (1978), pp. 38-46; repr. Kronos 5, no. 2 (Jan.), pp. 57-65 Fisher, Rev. Osmond (1882), "On the Physical Cause of the Ocean Basins," Nature 7 (12 Jan.), pp. 243-4 Florensky, K. P., et al. (1977), "Geomorphic Degradations on the Surface of Venus: An Analysis of Venera 9 and Venera 10 Data," Science 196 (20 May), pp. 869-71 Forshufvud, Ragnar (1979), letter "On the Thermal Aspects of Venus" and "More on the Thermal Aspects of Venus," replies: Talbott, George; Jueneman, Fredrick; Milton, Earl; Ellenberger, Leroy; and Greenberg, Lewis; Kronos 4. no. 3 (Feb.), pp. 76-8; Kronos 5, no. 1 (Oct.), pp. 83-8 Fox, Sidney W. (1960), "How Did Life Begin?," Science 132 (22 Jul.), pp. 200-8 ---and Windsor, Charles R. (1970), "Synthetis of Amino Acids by the Heating of Formaldehyde and Ammonia," Science 170 (27 Nov.), pp. 984-5 Francis, Gordon (1956), "The Glow Discharge at Low Pressure" in Handbuch der Physik (Band 22 Gasentlaufen II Springer Verlag: Berlin), pp. 53-208 Frazer, Sir James George (1916), "Ancient Stories of a Great Flood," Roy. Anthrop. Inst., J. 46, pp. 231-83 ---(1922), The Golden Bough (Cambridge, 1900), abr. (Macmillan: New York) Friedman, Howard, et al. (1963), "Geomagnetic Parameters and Psychiatric Hospital Admissions," Nature 200 (16 Nov.), pp. 626-8 Galanopoulos, A. C. & Bacon, Edward (1969), Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis) Gershenson, Daniel E. & Greenberg, Daniel A. (1964), Anaxagoras and the Birth of Physics (Blaisdell: New York) Glasby, John (1970), The Dwarf Novae (American Elsevier: New York) Gliese, W. (1957), "Katalog der Sterne n„her als 20 Parsek fr 1950.0," Astronomisches Rechen-Institut Heidelberg Mitteilunger Series A, Number 8, 89 pages Gold, Thomas (1965), as reported in the New York Times (21 Apr.), ascribed to remarks at one of the Planetary Sessions of the American Geophysical Union meeting. Not mentioned in the published Transactions of the 46th Annual meeting ---(1980), "Electrical Origin of the Outbursts on Io," Science 206 (30 Nov. 1979), pp. 1071-3; repr. S. I. S. Review IV, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 109-111 Goldsmith, Donald (1977), ed. Scientists Confront Velikovsky (W. W. Norton: New York) Goodeavage, Joseph F. (1978), Our Threatened Planet (Simon and Schuster: New York) Grant, Michael (1974), "Roman Religion" in Ency. Brit. Macro 15 (Chicago) Graves, Robert (1960), "The Castration of Uranus," Ch. 6 in The Greek Myths, v. 1, rev. (Penguin: Harmondsworth) Gray, George W. (1955), "Life at High Altitudes," Scientific American 193, pp. 58- 68 Greenberg, Leonard H. (1975), "Diffraction and Angular Resolution" in Physics for Biology and Pre-Med Students (Saunders: Toronto), 4-7-1 Greenberg, Lewis M (1973), "Compendium: The Papyrus Ipuwer," Pens‚e 3, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 36-7 ---(1979), "Velikovsky and Venus: A Preliminary Report on the Pioneer Probes," Kronos 4, no. 4 (Jun.), pp. 1-2 Reply to Forshufvud, 182 Reply to Morrison, 182 ---& Sizemore, Warner B. (1975), "Saturn and Genesis," Kronos 1, no. 3 (Nov.), p. 46 ---et al., eds. (1977), Velikovsky and Establishment Science (Kronos: Glassboro) ---et al., eds. (1978), "Scientists Confront Scientists Who Confront Velikovsky" (Kronos: Glassboro) Gribbin, John R. (1976), "Antarctica Leads the Ice Ages," New Scientist 69 (25 Mar.), pp. 695-6 ---and Plagemann, Stephen H. (1973), "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate following Great Solar Storm of August 1972," Nature 243 (4 May), pp. 26-7 ---and Plagemann, Stephen H. (1974), The Jupiter Effect (Random House; New York) Grinnell, George (1978), Catastrophism and Uniformity: A Proble into the Origin of the 1833 Gestalt Shift in Geology" in Recollections of a Fallen Sky: Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, eds. E. Milton et al. (Unileth: Lethbridge), pp. 129-37 Gunn, Ross (1932), "On the Evolution of a Rotationally Unstable Star," Physical Review 39 (1 Jan.), pp. 130-41 and "On the Origin of the Solar System," Physical Review 39 (15 Jan.), pp. 311-9 Gurnett, D. A. et al. (1979), "Auroral Hiss Observed near the Io Plasma Torus," Nature 280 (30 Aug.), pp. 767-70 Hammond, Allen L. (1974), "Exploring the Solar System (1): An Emerging New Perspective," Science 186 (22 Nov.), pp. 720-4 Hanson, Kirby J. (1976), "A New Estimate of Solar Irradiance at the Earth's Surface on Zonal and Global Scales," J. Geoph. Res. 81 (20 Aug.), pp. 4435-43 Hapgood, Charles H. (1966), Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Chilton: Philadelphia) ---(1970), Path of the Pole, rev. (Chilton: Philadelphia) 174, fn. 102 (verso front cover, Ch. 1) Harang, Liev (1951), The Aurorae (Chapman and Hall: London) Harrington, Robert S., see Roosen Harrison, Christopher G. (1966), "Antipodal Location of Continents and Oceans," Science 153 (9 Sep.), pp. 1246-8 Harrison, E. R. (1977), "Has the Sun a Companion Star?," Nature 270 (24 Nov.), pp. 324-6 Hartline, Beverly Karplus (1980), "Three Spacecraft Team Probes the Magnetosphere," Research News in Science 207 (1 Feb.), pp. 511-3 Haymes, Robert C. (1971), Introduction to Space Science (Wiley: New York); 12, fn. 11 (p. 277) Hays, J. D. (1971), Geological Society of America, Bulletin 83, pp. 2433-47 Heilbron, J. L. (1979), Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (University of California: Berkeley) Heirtzler, J. R. & Phillips, J. D. (1974), "Rock Magnetism," Ency. Brit., Macro 15 (Chicago), pp. 942-7 Hesiod, (a), Theogony, tr. & ed. Hugh Evelyn-Whyte (Harvard: Cambridge 1964) 101 (1. pp. 115, 87 ff.); 106; 148 (1. pp. 720 ff., 131) ---(b), The Homeric Hymns , tr. Hugh Evelyn-Whyte (Harvard; Cambridge 1964); 181 (" Hymn to Pallas Athene," pp. 453-4) Hesser, James E., see Cowley (1977) ---et al. (1976), "Sigma Orionis E as Mass-Transfer Binary System," Nature 262 (8 Jul.), pp. 116-18 Hewish, A. (1975), "Pulsars and High Density Physics," Science 188 (13 Jun.), pp. 1079-83 Heyl, Paul R. and Chrzanowski, Peter (1942), "A New Determination of the Constant of Gravitation," Nat. Bur. Stds., J. Res. (Jul.), pp. 1-31 Heymann, D., et al. (1970), "Inert Gases in Lunar Samples," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 555-8 Hillas, A. M. (1972), Cosmic Rays (Pergamon: Oxford) Hines, Colin O. (1974), "Ionosphere," Ency. Brit., Macro 9 (Chicago), pp. 809-16 Homer, The Iliad of Homer, tr. Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago: Chicago, 1951) Horowitz, Norman H. (1977), "The Search for Life on Mars," Scientific American 297, no. 5 (Nov.), pp. 52-61 Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Narliker, J. V. (1971), "On the Nature of Mass," Nature 233 (3 Sep.), pp. 41-4 ---and Wickramasinghe, N. Chandra (1977), "Origin and Nature of Carbonaceous Material in the Galaxy," Nature 270 (22-29 Dec.), pp. 701-3 ---and Wickramasinghe with other authors, "Prebiotic Polymers and Infrared Spectra of Galactic Sources," Nature 269 (20 Oct. 1977), pp. 674-6; "Identification of Interstellar Polysaccharides and Related Hydrocarbons," Nature 271 (19 Jan. 1978), pp. 229-31 ---"Does Epidemic Disease Come From Space?," New Scientist 76 (17 Nov.), pp. 402-4 86, fn. 66 also, Life Cloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (Harper & Row: New York, 1978) Hubbard, S. (1927), The Doheny Scientific Expedition to the Hava Supai Canyon, Northern Arizona, 1925 Hughes, David W. (1976), "Earth -An Interplanetary Dust Bin," New Scientist 72 (8 Jul.), pp. 64-6 ---(1979), "Meteoroid Fragmentation in the Auroral Zones," Nature 280 (16 Aug.), pp. 539-40 Hunt, Garry, see Smith, B. A. ---and Burgess, Eric (1979), "Saturn -Lord of the Rings," New Scientist 84 (13 Dec.), pp. 864-7; 165 (p. 867) Hutchings, J. B. (1976), "Massive Binaries -Early Evolutionary Stages" in Structure and Evolution of Close Binary Systems (Reidel: Boston), pp. 9-17 I Ching, tr. James Legge (Bantam: Toronto 1969) Ingersol, Andrew P., see Smith, B. A. ---and Dobrovolskis, Anthony (1978), "Venus' Rotation and Atmospheric Tides," Nature 275 (7 Sep.), pp. 37-8 and see Nature 277 (11 Jan.), p. 157 Ions, Veronica (1968), Egyptian Mythology (Hamlyn: London) Isaacson, Israel (1974), "Applying the Revised Chronology," Pens‚e 4, no. 4 (Fall), pp. 5-20 Isaksen, I. S. A., see Reid Isenberg, Artur (1976), "Devi and Venus," Kronos 2, no. 1 (Aug.), pp. 89-103 Jacchia, Luigi G. (1974), "A Meteorite that Missed the Earth," Sky and Telescope 48 (Jul.), pp. 4-9 Jacobs, J. A. & Atkinson, G. (1967), "Planetary Modulation of Geomagnetic Activity" in Magnetism and theCosmos (American Elsevier: New York), pp. 402-14 Jastrow, Jr., Morris (1910), "Sun and Saturn," (in English), Revue d'assyriologie et d'arch‚ologie orientale (Paris) (Sep.), pp. 163-78 Johanson, Donald & Edey, Maitland (1981) Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (Simon and Shuster: New York) Johnson, Torrence V., see Smith, B. A. Johnston, M. J. S. & Mauk, F. J. (1972), "Earth Tides and the Triggering of Eruptions from Mt Stromboli, Italy," Nature 239 (29 Sep.), pp. 266-7 Jordan, Pascual (1938), "Zur empirischen Kosmologie," DieNaturwissenschaften 26 (1 Jul.), pp. 417-21 Also, "Formation of the Stars and Development of the Universe," tr. H. S. Green, Nature 164 (15 Oct.), pp. 637-40 Joss, P. C. (1977), "X-ray Bursts and Neutron-star Thermonuclear Flashes," Nature 270 (24 Nov.), pp. 310-4 Juergens, Ralph E. (1972), "Plasma in Interplanetary Space; Reconciling Celestial Mechanics with Velikovskian Catastrophism," Pens‚e 2, no. 3 (Fall), pp. 6-12 also, in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday; Garden City, 1976), pp. 137-55 ---(1974), "Of the Moon and Mars," Part One, Pens‚e 4, no. 4 (Fall), pp. 21-30; Part Two, Pens‚e 4, no. 5 (Winter), pp. 27-39 ---(1977a, 1977b), "Plasma Probes," Ap. II (pp. 26-9) of "On the Convection of Electric Charge by the Rotating Earth," Kronos 2, no. 3 (Feb.), pp. 12-30 ---(1977c), "Galactic Space Charge and Stellar Energy," S. I. S. Review I, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 26-9 ---(1977d), "The Critics and Stellar Energy -Juergens Replies," S. I. S. Review II. no. 2 (Dec.), pp. 49-51 ---(1978), "Geogullibility and Geomagnetic Reversals," Kronos 3, no. 4 (May), pp. 52-64 ---(1979a), "Stellar Thermonuclear Energy: A False Trail," Kronos 4, No. 4 (Jun.), pp. 16-25 ---(1979b), "The Photosphere: Is it the Top or the Bottom of the Phenomenon We Call the Sun?," Kronos 4, no. 4 (Jun.), pp. 28-54 ---(1980), "On Morrison: Some Final Remarks -Ralph Juergens Replies," Kronos 5, no. 2 (Jan.), pp. 68-75 Kapitza, P. L. (1979), "Plasma and the Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction," Science 207 (7 Sep.), pp. 959-64 Kelley, Michael C. (1980), book review of Solar System Plasma Physics by E. N. Parker et al. (Elsevier: New York, 1979) in Science 207 (18 Jan.), pp. 297-8 Kelly, Allan O. (1974), The Gravitational Description of Mars, priv. publ. (Varsbad, CA) Kloosterman, Johan B. (1976), "Why Did the Dinosaurs Perish?," Komsomolskya Pravda (5 Apr. 1965), repr. Catastrophist Geology 3, no. 1 (June), p. 5 (supplied courtesy of L. I. Salop), 127, fig. 26 Koch, Robert H. (1970), "Observational Facts in Binary Mass Loss," in Mass Loss and Evolution in Close Binaries, eds. K. Gydenterne & R. M. West, Int. As. U., Proc. Colloq., no. 6 (Copenhagen University Observatory) Kofahr, Robert E. (1977), "Could the Flood Waters Have Come From a Canopy of Extraterrestrial Source?," Creation Res. Q. 13 (Mar.), pp. 202-6 Kolin, Alexander (1968), "Magnetic Fields in Biology," Physics Today 21 (Nov.), pp. 38-59 Kondratov, Alexander (1974), The Riddles of Three Oceans (Progress: Moscow) Kopal, Zdenø k (1938), "On the Evolution of Eclipsing Binaries," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 98, no. 8, pp. 651-7 ---(1959), Close Binary Systems (Chapman and Hall: London) Kraft, Robert P. (1977), "Double Stars" -a book review of Structure and Evolution of Close Binary Systems, ed. by Eggleton et al., Science 197 (29 Jul.), pp. 449-50 Krimigis, S. M. et al. (1979), "Low-Energy Charged Particle Environment at Jupiter; A First Look," Science 204 (1 Jun.), pp. 998-1003 Krzeminski, W. (1965), "The Eclipsing Binary U Geminorum," Ap. J. 142, pp. 1051-67 Ksanfomality, Leonid Vasilevich, et al. (1977), "The New Venus," New Scientist 73 (20 Jan.), pp. 127-9 Kukarin, B. & Parenago, P. (1934), "Investigations of Nova-like Variable Stars, II. Cycle-amplitude Relation in U Geminorum Variables," Ver„nderliche Sterne 4, no. 8 (44) (1 May), pp. 251-4 Kukla, G. J. & Matthews, R. (1972), "When Will the Present Interglacial End?," Science 178 (13 Oct.), pp. 190-1 Kumar, S. & Broadfoot, A. L. (1978), "Evidence from Mariner 10 of Solar Wind Flux Depletion at High Ecliptic Latitudes," As. & Ap. 69, Letter, L 5-8 Kundt, Wolfgang (1977), "Spin and Atmospheric Tides of Venus," As. & Ap. 60, pp. 85-91 Lamers, H. J. G. L. M., et al. (1976), "Stellar Winds and Accretion in Massive X- Ray Binaries," As. & Ap. 49, pp. 327-35 Lane, Frank W. (1968), The Elements Rage: The Extremes of Natural Violence, in two vols., rev. (Sphere: London) Lang, Andrew (1968), Custom and Myth, reprint of 1885 London ed. (AMS: New York) Lanzerotti, L. J., see Krimigis Lapointe, P. L., et al. (1978), "What Happened to the High-Latitude Palaeomagnetic Poles," Nature 273 (22 Jun.), pp. 655-7 Larson, E. D., see Strangway Latham, Gary V. (1973), "Lunar Seismology," Science and Public Affairs 28, no. 9 (Nov.), pp. 16-21 Lear, John (1964), "What the Moon Ranger Couldn't See," Saturday Review 47 (5 Sep.), pp. 35-43 Lebo, G. R. et al. (1965), "Jupiter's Decametric Emission Correlated with the Longitudes of the First Three Galilean Satellites," Science 148 (25 Jun.), pp. 1724-6 Lemaire, J. & Scherer, M. (1971), "Kinetic Models of the Solar Wind," J. Geoph. Res. 76 (1 Nov.), pp. 7479-90; 16, fn. 16 (pp. 7480 f.) Levy, E. H. (1978), "Magnetic Field in the Primitive Solar Nebula," Nature 276 (30 Nov.), p. 481 Lewis, Jr., Paul D., see Milton (1978) Liller, William (1977), "The Story of AM Herculis," Sky and Telescope 53, no. 5 (May), pp. 351-4 Lindblad, B. A. (1979), "Meteor Radar Rates, Geomagnetic Activity and Solar Wind Sector Structure," Nature 273 (29 Jun.), pp. 732-4 Long, C. H. (1963), Alpha: The Myths of Creation (G. Brazillier: New York) Long, Daniel R. (1974), "Why do we believe Newtonian gravitation at laboratory dimensions?," Physical Review, Part D 9 (15 Feb.), pp. 850-2 also, "Experimental examination of the gravitational inverse square law," Nature 260 (1 Apr. 1976), pp. 417-8 Lowery, Malcolm (1980/ 81), "What's in a Name?," S. I. S. Review V, no. 2, pp. 46-9 Lugmair, G. W., see Marti Lyttleton, Raymond A. (1936), "The Origin of the Solar System," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 96, pp. 559-68 ---(1938), "On the Origin of Binary Stars," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 98, pp. 646-50 ---(1953), The Stability of Rotating Liquid Masses (Cambridge University: Cambridge) Malin, S. R. C. & Srivastava, B. J. (1979), "Correlation Between Heart Attacks and Magnetic Activity," Nature 277 (22 Feb.), pp. 646-8 Malkus, W. V. R. (1968), "Precession of the Earth as the Cause of Geomagnetism," Science 160 (19 Apr.), pp. 259-64 Manson, Lewis A. (1978), The Birth of the Moon (Dennis-Landmann: Santa Monica) Maraschi, L., et al. (1976), "B-Emission Stars and X-ray Sources," Nature 259 (29 Jan.), pp. 292-3 Marti, K., et al. (1970), "Solar Wind Gases, Cosmic Ray Spallation Products, and the Irradiation History," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 548-50 Martin, P. S. & Wright, Jr., H. E., eds. (1967), Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause (Yale University: New Haven) Mason, Herbert, tr. (1972), Gilgamesh (New American Library: New York) Matsuoka, M., et al. (1974), "Further Simultaneous Hard X-ray and Optical Observations of Sco X-1," Nature 250 (7 Jul.), pp. 38-40; 47 Mazur, Abraham & Harrow, Benjamin (1971), Textbooks of Biochemistry, 10th ed. (Saunders: Philadelphia); 91-2, fn. 71 (pp. 71 ff., esp. 74-6) Menzel, Donald H. (1959), Our Sun, rev. ed. (Harvard: Cambridge); 11 (p. 24) ---et al. (1970), Survey of the Universe (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs); 24, fn. 23 (p. 659) Meservey, R. (1969), "Topological Inconsistency of Continental Drift on the Present-Sized Earth," Science 166 (31 Oct.), pp. 609-11 Mihalas. Dimitri & Routley, Paul McRae (1968), Galactic Astronomy (Freeman: San Francisco) Miller, Stanley L. & Urey, Harold C. (1959), "Organic Compound Synthesis on the Primitive Earth," Science 130 (31 Jul.), pp. 245-51 Milsom, John (1977), "A Commentary on Barnes' Magnetic Decay," S. I. S. Review II, no. 2 (Dec.), p. 46 Milton, Earl R. (1978), "Foreword" in Recollections of a Fallen Sky: Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, eds. E. Milton et al. (Unileth: Lethbridge), pp. 11-18 ---(1979), "The Not So Stable Sun," Kronos 5, no. 1 (Oct.), pp. 64-78; 11, fn 7 (pp. 70 f.); 56-7, fn 41 ---(1980/ 1), "Electric Stars in a Gravity-less Electrified Cosmos," S. I. S. Review V, no. 1 (Jan.), pp. 6-12; reply to Forshufvud; reply to Morrison ---(1982), "Comets, Rings, Satellites, and Things," unpubl. Mitton, Simon, ed. (1977), Cambridge Ency. Astronomy (Prentice Hall: Toronto) Morabito, L. A. et al., (1979), "Discovery of Currently Active Extraterrestrial Volcanism," Science 204 (1 Jun.), p. 972 Morrison, David (1980), letter, "On Morrison: Some Final Remarks," replies: Juergens, Ralph; Milton, Earl; Talbott, George, and Ellenberger, Leroy; Jueneman, Fredrick; Greenberg, Lewis, Kronos 5, no. 2 (Jan.), pp. 66-92 Mullen, William (1973), "A Reading of the Pyramid Text," Pens‚e 3, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 10-16 Murray, Bruce C. (1975), "Mercury" in The Solar System (Freeman: San Francisco), pp. 37-46 Nagata, Takesi (1961), Rock Magnetism, rev. (Maruzen: Tokyo) Napier, W. McD. & Dodd, R. J. (1973), "The Missing Planet," Nature 242 (23 Mar.), pp. 250-1 Nather, R. Edward & Warner, B. (1969), "DQ Herculis: Synchronous Photometry," Science 166 (14 Nov.), 876-7 Ness, Norman F., et al. (1976), "Observations of Mercury's Magnetic Field," Icarus 28, pp. 479-88 Newcombe, Simon (1878), Popular Astronomy (Harper & Brothers: New York) Ney, Edward P. (1977), "Star Dust," Science 195 (11 Feb.), pp. 541-6 Niemann, V. D., Soviet Astronomy 68 Nieto, M. M. (1974), "The Titius-Bode Law and the Evolution of the Solar System," Pens‚e 4, no. 3 (Su.), pp. 5-7 Ninniger, N. H. (1952), Out of the Sky, repr. (Dover: New York) Norman, John, et al. (1977), "Astrons -the Earth's Oldest Scars?," New Scientist 73 (24 Mar.), pp. 689-92 Obayashi, Tatsuko (1975), "Energy Build-Up and Release Mechanisms in Solar and Auroral Flares," Solar Physics 40, pp. 217-26 Oberbeck, V. R., et al. (1977), "Comparative Studies of Lunar, Martian, and Mercurian Craters and Plains," J. Geoph. Res. 82 (10 Apr.), pp. 1681-97 O'Keefe, John A. (1973), "After Apollo: Fission Origin of the Moon," Science and Public Affairs 29, no. 9 (Nov.), pp. 26-9 ---(1978), "The Tektite Problem," Scientific American 239, no. 2 (Aug.), pp. 116-25 Oparin, A. I. (1953), The Origin of Life, tr. Sergius Morgulis (Dover; New York) Orville, Richard E. (1968), "Photograph of a Close Lightning Flash," Science 162 (8 Nov.), pp. 666-7 Ovendon, Michael W. (1972), "Bode's Law and the Missing Planet," Nature 239 (27 Oct.), pp. 508-9 ---et al. (1974), "On the Principle of Least Interaction Action and the Laplacian Satellites of Jupiter and Uranus," Celestial Mechanics 8, pp. 455-71 Panagakos, Nicholas & Waller, Peter W. (1974), A New Look at Jupiter: Results from the Pioneer 10 Mission to Jupiter," NASA News, no. 74-238, 20 pp. (10 Sep.) ---(1979), "Early Findings from Pioneer Venus," NASA News, no. 79-13, 22 pp. (5 Feb.) Papoular, R. (1965), "Mobility" in Electrical Phenomena in Gases, Eng. ed. (Iliffe: London), Ch. 9, pp. 92-9 Parker, E. N. (1975), "The Sun" in The Solar System (Freeman; San Francisco), pp. 27-34 Passerini, Pietro (1978), "Knowledge and Entropy," Catastrophist Geology 3, no. 1 (Jun.), pp. 16-28 Patten, Donald Wesley (1966), The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (Pacific Meridian: Seattle) ---(1973), The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes (Pacific Meridian: Seattle) Peale, S. J., et al. (1979), "Melting of Io by Tidal Dissipation," Science 203 (2 Mar.), pp. 892-4 Pearce, G. W., see Strangway Pickering, W. H. (1903), The Moon (Doubleday: New York); 176 (p. 53) Pittman, U. J. (1963), "Magnetism and Plant Growth: I Effect on Germination and Early Growth of Cereal Seeds," Can. J. Pl. Sci. 43 (Oct.), pp. 513-8 Plass, Gilbert N. (1959), "Carbon Dioxide and Climate," Scientific American, offprint no. 82 (repr. from Jul. 1959 issue), 9 pp. Plato, The Epinomis of Plato, tr. J. Harward (Clarendon: Oxford, 1928) Plavec, M. (1970), "Rotation in Close Binaries" in Stellar Rotation, ed. A. Sletteback (D. Reidel: Dordrecht), pp. 133-46 Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secondus), Natural History, Book II. rev., tr. H. H. Rackham (Harvard: Cambridge, 1967) Plummer, L. N., see Sundquist Ponnamperuma, Cyril & Mack, Ruth (1975), "Nucleotide Synthesis Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions," Science 148 (28 May), pp. 1221-3; 84, fn. 63 Quaide, William L., et al. (1970), "Impact Metamorphism of Lunar Surface Materials," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 671-2 Rampino, Michael R., et al. (1979), "Can Rapid Climatic Change Cause Volcanic Eruptions?," Science 206 (16 Nov.), pp. 826-9 Ransom, C. J. (1976), The Age of Velikovsky (Kronos: Glassboro) ---& Hoffee, L. H. (1973), "The Orbits of Venus," Pens‚e 3, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 22- 5 also, in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday: Garden City, 1976), pp. 103-9 Raup, David M. (1979), "Size of the Permo-Triassic Bottleneck and Its Revolutionary Implications," Science 206 (12 Oct.), pp. 217-8 Rawls, Rebecca (1980), "Mt St Helens Stirs Chemical Interest," Chem. & Eng. News 58 (25 Aug.), pp. 28-9 Reid, G. C., et al. (1976), "Influence of Ancient Solar-Proton Events on the Evolution of Life," Nature 259 (22 Jan.), pp. 177-9 Reply by Beland and Russell, Nature 263 (16 Sep. 1976), p. 259; also, Science News 116 (24 Nov. 1979), p. 356 Rodabaugh, David J. (1976), "Probability and the Missing Transitional Forms," Creation Research Quarterly 13 (Sep.), pp. 116-9 Roosen, Robert G., et al. (1976), "Earth Tides, Volcanos, and Climactic Change," Nature 261 (24 Jun.), pp. 680-2 Rose, Lynn (1972), "Could Mars Have Been an Inner Planet?," Pens‚e 2, no. 2 (May), pp. 42-3 also, in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday: Garden City, 1976), pp. 100-2 ---(1979), "Variations on a Theme of Philolaos," Kronos 5, no. 1, pp. 12-46 Ross, John E. & Aller, Lawrence H. (1976), "The Chemical Composition of the Sun," Science 191 (26 Mar.), pp. 1223-9 Roussel, Ren‚ H., "The Reorientation of a Small Temple at Quai es Seboua," unpubl. Ruark, A. E., et al. (1927), "Spectra Excited by Active Nitrogen," J. Opt. Soc. Am. 14 (Jan.), pp. 17-27 Rudeaux, Lucien & de Vaucouleurs, G. (1962), Larousse Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, 2nd ed. (Hamlyn: London), 15, fn. 13 (pp. 355 ff.) Russell, Christopher T., see Taylor ---et al. (1979), "Pioneer Magnetometer Observations of the Venus Bow Shock," Nature 282 (20-27 Dec.), pp. 815-6 Russell, Henry N., et al. (1927), Astronomy Part II -Astrophysics and Stellar Energy (Ginn: Boston) Sanford, Fernando (1931), Terrestrial Electricity (Stanford University: Stanford), repr. (University Microfilms: Ann Arbor, 1067) Saul, John M. (1978), "Circular Structures of Large Scale and Great Age on the Earth's Surface," Nature 271 (28 Jan.), pp. 345-9 also, Kellaway, G. A. and Durrance E. M., Nature 273 (4 Apr. 1978), p. 75 for a comment extending Saul's sample Schaeffer, Claude F. A. (1948), Stratigraphie compar‚e et chronologie de l'Asie occidentale (Oxford University: London) Schr”der, G. A. (1964), "Breakdown in a Gas Under Extreme Conditions" in Discharge and Plasma Physics, ed. S. C. Hayden (The University of New England: Armidale, NSW), pp. 89-106 Sekanina, Z. (1968), "Nongravitational Forces and Comet Nuclei," Sky and Telescope 35, no. 5 (May), pp. 282-6 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Natural Questions, tr. Thomas H. Corcoran (Harvard: Cambridge, 1971); 163 (Book III, pp. 27, 29 quoting Berosso's explanations of why the Deluge occurred) Serson, Paul H. (1980), "Tracking the North Magnetic Pole," Geos. (Winter), pp. 15- 17 Shamos, Morris H., ed. (1964), Great Experiments in Physics (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston: New York) Shaw, G., see Hoyle (Oct. 1977) Sherrerd, Cris S. (1979), "The Electro-magnetic Circularization of Planetary Orbits," Kronos 4, no. 4 (Jun.), pp. 55-8 Shoemaker, Eugene M., see Smith, B. A. Short, Nicolas M. (1974), "Meteorite Craters," Ency. Brit. Macro 12 (Chicago), pp. 48-54; 153. Note one trillion equals 10 12 Sieff, Martin (1976), "In Defence of the Revised Chronology; An Answer to John Day," S. I. S. Review I, no. 1 (Jan.), pp. 11-14 ---(1977), "Planets in the Bible," S. I. S. Review I, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 17-21, 32 also, S. I. S. Workshop 1, no. 4 (Mar. 1978) ---(1981), "Assyria and the End of the Late Bronze Age," S. I. S. Workshop 4, no. 2 (Sep.), pp. 4-8 Simpson, George Gaylord (1944), Tempo and Mode in Evolution (Columbia University: New York) ---(1952), "How Many Species?," Evolution 6, p. 342 Simpson, J. A., et al. (1974), "Electrons and Protons Accelerated in Mercury's Magnetic Field," Science 185 (29 May), pp. 160-6 Singer, S. Fred (1970), "How Did Venus Lose its Angular Momentum?," Science 170 (11 Dec.), pp. 1196-8 ---(1967), "Zodiacal Dust and Deep Sea Sediments," Science 156 (26 May), pp. 1080-3 Smith, Bradford A., et al. (1979), "The Galilean Satellites and Jupiter: Voyager 2 Imaging Results," Science 206 (23 Nov.), pp. 927-50 Smith, E. v. P. & Jacobs, K. C. (1973), Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics (Saunders: Philadelphia); 14 (pp. 223 f.) Somerville, J. M. (1959), The Electric Arc (Methuen: London) Spangler, Steven R., et al. (1977), "Radio Survey of Close Binary Stars," As. J. 82, no. 12 (Dec.), pp. 989-97; 47 (p. 989) Spencer, Herbert (1899), The Principles of Sociology (Appleton: New York); 158, fn 92 (esp. Ch. 24 and 25) Stanley, Steven M. (1976), "Stability of Species in Geologic Time," Science 192 (16 Apr.), pp. 267-8 Stecchini, Livio C. (1978), "The Inconstant Heavens" in The Velikovsky Affair, rev. (Sphere: London), pp. 80-119; see de Grazia (1967) Stengler, William (1978), "Life By Chance?," The Plain Truth (Aug.), pp. 13, 15-16 Stone, E. C. & Lane, A. L. (1979), "Voyager I Encounter with the Jovian System," Science 204 (1 Jun.), pp. 945-8 St”rmer, Carl (1955), The Polar Aurora (Clarendon: Oxford) Strangway, et al. (1970), "Magnetic Properties of Lunar Samples," Science 167 (30. Jan.), pp. 691-3 Strom, Robert, see Smith, B. A. Strutt, R. J. (1911), "A Chemically Active Modification of Nitrogen Produced by the Electric Discharge," Roy. Soc. (Lon.), Proc. A 85, pp. 219-29 Suhr, Elmer G. (1969), The Spinning Aphrodite (Helios: New York) Sundquist, E. T., et al. (1979), "Carbon Dioxide in the Ocean Surface: The Homogeneous Buffer Factor," Science 204 (15 Jun.), pp. 1203-5 Sutton, Christine (1979), "Voyage to the Giant Planet," Science 83 (1 Jul.), pp. 213-20 Talbott, David N. (1980), The Saturn Myth (Doubleday: Garden City) Talbott, Stephen L., et al. (1976), Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday: Garden City) Tananbaum, H. D. & Hutchings, J. B. (1975), "Parameters of X-ray Binaries," NY Acad. Sci., Annals 262 (15 Oct.), pp. 299-311 Taylor, William W. L., et al. (1979), "Evidence for Lightning on Venus," Nature 279 (14 Jun.), pp. 614-6 Teichert, Curt (1973), "How Many Species?," Journal of Paleontology 30, pp. 967-9 Tinkle, Donald W. (1974), "Species and Speciation" in Ency. Brit., Macro 17 (Chicago), pp. 449-55 Tresman, Harold & O'Gheoghan, Brendan (1977), "The Primordial Light," S. I. S. Review II, no. 2 (Dec.), pp. 35-40 Turman, B. W. (1979), "Lightning Detection from Space," American Scientist 67 (May- Jun.), pp. 321-9 Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett (1903), Primitive Culture (John Murray: London), repr. under the title The Origin of Culture, Peter Smith (Gloucester MS, 1970); 108, fn. 92 (v. 2, pp. 342 f.) Urey, Harold C. (1973), "Cometary Collisions and Geologic Periods," Nature 242 (2 Mar.), pp. 32-3 Vail, Isaac N. (1905), Selected Works, repr. (Annular Publications: Santa Barbara, CA, 1972) Valentine, James W. (1974), Temporal Bias in Extinction Among Taxonomic Categories," Journal of Paleontology 48 (May), pp. 549-52 van Allen, James (1975), "Interplanetary Particles and Fields" in The Solar System (Freeman: San Francisco), pp. 129-34 van de Kamp, Peter (1961), "Double Stars," As. Soc. Pac., Publ. 73, no. 435 (Dec.), pp. 389-409 ---(1971), "The Nearby Stars," An. Rev. As. Ap. 9, pp. 103-26 van Flandern, Thomas C. (1978), "A Former Asteroidal Planet as the Origin of Comets," Icarus 36, pp. 51-74 Vehrenberg, Hans, Atlas of the Selected Areas (Vehrenberg Publ.: Dsseldorf) Velikovsky, Immanuel (1950), Worlds in Collision (Doubleday: Garden City) ---(1952), Ages in Chaos: I, From the Exodus to King Akhnaton (Doubleday: Garden City) ---(1955), Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday: Garden City) ---(1969), "Are the Moon's Scars Only 3000 Years Old?," New York Times, early ed., 21 Jul.; repr. Pens‚e 2, no. 2 (May 1972) ---(1973), "The Pitfalls of Radiocarbon Dating," Pens‚e 3, no. 2 (Sp./ Su,), pp. 12-14, 50 ---(1978a), "Khima and Kesil," Kronos 3, no. 4 (May), pp. 19-23 ---(1978b), "The Weakness of the Venus Greenhouse Theory," Kronos 4, no. 2 (Oct.), pp. 28-32 ---(1979), "On Saturn and the Flood," Kronos 5, no. 1 (Oct.), pp. 3-11 ---(1982), Mankind in Amnesia (Doubleday: Garden City) V‚rtes, L szl¢ (1965), "`Lunar Calendar' from the Hungarian Upper Paleolithic," Science 149 (20 Aug.), pp. 855-6 Vestine, E. H. (1958), "Geomagnetic Field" in The Earth and its Atmosphere, ed. D. R. Bates (Basic Books: New York), Ch. 6, pp. 88-96 Vsekhsviatskii, S. K., "Indications of the Eruptive Evolution of Planetary Bodies," unpubl., read at the symposium "Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System," McMaster University, Hamilton (18 Jun. 1974), 116 Warlow, Peter (1978), "Geomagnetic Reversals," J. Phys. A10, 11 (Oct.), pp. 2107-30 Warner, Brian & Nather, R. Edward (1971), "Observations of Rapid Blue Variables -II U Geminorum," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 52, pp. 219-29 Washburn, Sherwood L., "The Evolution of Man," Scientific American 239, pp. 194-205 Watson, Alan (1977), "Whence Cosmic Rays?," New Scientist 73 (17 Feb.), pp. 408-10 Webb, Willis, "The Electrical Structure of the Earth," unpubl., read at the symposium "Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System," McMaster University, Hamilton (1974) Weiner, J. S. (1955), The Piltdown Forgery (London: Oxford) Westfall, Richard S. (1973), "Newton and the Fudge Factor," Science 179 (23 Feb.), pp. 751-8 White, Fred N. (1974), "Respiration and Respiratory Systems," in Ency. Brit. Macro 15 (Chicago), pp. 751-63 Whyte, Martin A. (1977), "Turning Points in Phanerozoic History," Nature 267 (23 Jun.), pp. 679-82 Wickramasinghe, D. T. & Bessell, M. S. (1974), "Gas Streaming in 2UO900-40 and Cyg X-1," Nature 251 (6 Sep.), pp. 25-7 Wickramasinghe, N. C., see Hoyle Wickstrom, Conrad E. & Castenholz, Richard W. (1973), "Thermophilic Ostracod: Aquatic Metazoan with the Highest Known Temperature Tolerance," Science 181 (14 Sep.), pp. 1063-4 Wilkins, H. P. & Moore, Patrick (1955), The Moon (Faber and Faber: London); 154 Wiseman, The Flood Reconsidered; 156 (p. 46, fn. 9) Wolfe, J., et al. (1979), "Initial Observations of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter Solar Wind Plasma Experiment," Science 203 (23 Feb.), pp. 750-2 Wood, John A. (1975), "The Moon" in The Solar System (Freeman: San Francisco), pp. 69-77 Wreschner, Ernst, in conversation with de Grazia, Sept. 1977 Wright, Kenneth D., "Observation of Stellar Spectra Related to Extended Atmospheres" in Extended Atmospheres and Circumstellar Matter in Spectroscopic Binary Systems, ed. Alen Batten (Int. As. U. Symposium no. 51, May 1973), pp. 117-33 Wrigley, Robert, see Quaide Wyse, Arthur B. (1934), "A Study of the Spectra of Eclipsing Binaries," Lick Observatory Bulletin 17, no. 464, pp. 37- 52 Yukutake, T. (1967), "The Westward Drift of the Earth's Magnetic Field in Historic Times," J. Geomag. & Geoel. 19, no. 2, pp. 103-16 Ziegler, Jerry L. (1977), YHWH Star (Morton, IL) Zirin, Harold (1966), The Solar Atmosphere (Blaisdell: Waltham) =======End of Solaria Binaria ======= ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C TITLEPAGE } {T HOMO SCHIZO I:} {S : Human and Cultural Hologenesis} HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, N.J. Notes on the printed version of this book: The cover is from Pablo Picasso's Girl before a mirror (in reverse), 1932, the original of which rests with The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and a photograph of which was lent by the Princeton University, Art Library. The text was processed by the Princeton University Computer Center, with photo-composition and printing by Princeton University Printing Services by xerography in a limited edition. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: de Grazia, Alfred, 1919- Homo schizo I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis Includes index 1. Anthropology. 2. Psychology. 3. Evolution. 4. Prehistory ISBN: 0-940-268-01-9 Copyright ¸ 1983 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first edition. Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213, Princeton, N.J., 08542, U.S.A. To Sebastian primus inter pares {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO 1 by ALFRED DE GRAZIA TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD Chapter 1: SLIPPERY LADDERS OF EVOLUTION THE HUMAN BRAINCASE THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER APE LEGENDS OF CREATION MEMORIAL GENERATIONS NATURAL SELECTION SEVERE LIMITS TO NATURAL SELECTION WAVES OF EVOLUTION Chapter 2: HOMINIDS IN HOLOGENESIS HOMO ERECTUS PEKING MAN FOOTPRINTS AMEGHINO'S ARGENTINE HOMINIDS METHODOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES TIME UNNEEDED FOR CULTURE OLDUVAI GORGE A SURPRISING COLLAPSE OF TIME CHARDIN'S ORTHOGENETICS DOBZHANSKY, SIMPSON AND QUANTUM EVOLUTION Chapter 3: MECHANICS OF HUMANIZATION ANCIENT CATASTROPHES THE HUMANIZING FACTOR QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION BRAIN SPECIALIZATION SIGNALING HORMONES MUTATION INTELLIGENT MUTATION AND EVOLUTIONARY SALTATIONS EXTERNAL PRODUCERS OF MUTATION VIRAL MUTATION PSYCHOSOMATIC GENETICS AN ATMOSPHERIC TRANSFORMATION SOCIAL IMPRINTING THE SUMMARY MECHANICS Chapter 4: THE GESTALT OF CREATION THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH A MIND SPLIT BY MINUTE DELAYS FRIGHT, RECALL, AND AGGRESSION SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS MEMORY AND FORGETTING THE STRUGGLE OF THE SELEVES BECOMING TWO-LEGGED VOLUNTARISM DIFFUSION OF THE GESTALT THE DOUBLE CATASTROPHE A PRIMORDIAL SCENARIO QUANTAVOLUTION AND HOLOGENESIS THE NEW HUMAN BEING Chapter 5: CULTURAL REVOLUTION PROTO-CULTURE LOST MILLIONS OF YEARS TRIBES, CIVILIZATIONS, AND TIME MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS EVERYWHERE CONTEMPORARY ECUMENICAL CULTURE AMERICAN CULTURAL ORIGINS CULTURAL INTEGRATION Chapter 6: SCHIZOID INSTITUTIONS SPEECH AND LANGUAGE GRAPHICS PRIMORDIAL LANGUAGE GROUP VS. INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION MEGALITHS AND MEGALINES ORGANIZATION AND CONTROL REPUBLIC AND MONARCHY AUTHORITY COVENANT AND CONTRACT SEXUAL RAMIFICATIONS THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT CHAOS AND CREATION SUBLIMATION CANNIBALISM VIOLENCE AND WAR Chapter 7: PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF HISTORY A SICK JOURNEY HISTORISM SCHIZOID EPISODES IN ABUNDANCE HELL ORDINARY MAD TIMES NAZIS, STALINISTS, AND DEMOCRATS RELIGION AS CUSTODIAN OF FEAR UTOPIANISM DARWINIAN HISTORISM Chapter 8: THE HOPEFUL MONSTER REAL AND PSYCHIC DISASTER A RECENT SMALL SHARP CHANGE THE UNREDEEMABLE APEMAN SCHIZOTYPICALITY AND HOMO SAPIENS {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD } {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: FOREWORD HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia + FOREWORD Most scholars believe that man has progressed since his original appearance on earth. Probably so, but it has been a strange kind of progress, not well understood, and often showing a negative balance of the bad over the good. Some scholars believe that man is a rational animal. In limited ways he is, but, again, it is a strange kind of rationality, more ape-like than other traits of humans that are called non-rational. For, to preview an argument that comes later, man is continually seeking ways to reestablish the uninterrupted instinctive responses of his forebears, and this is the homologue of rationality. When Descartes wrote of animals as machines, he was obviously unaware that the precise rationality of man, which he, of all philosophers, elevated to awesome status, was just this homologue of the machine and animal. So constrained and confused is whatever is called human rationality, that I prefer to call mankind by the name homo schizo, that is, homo sapiens schizotypus, rather than homo sapiens. Humans were created and are born schizotypical, with a set of traits to be distinguished in this book. They were from the first, and are now, more schizophrenic than otherwise. What is called rational is a derivation out of schizotypicality. This line of argument is also pursued in a companion volume, Homo schizo II: Human Nature and Behavior, which deals with today's people. Here we are concerned with the evolution of mankind, a field densely covered with literature, but with many a sprouting mystery and contradiction that has resisted the spray of evolutionary formulas. The field is surprisingly vulnerable to a variety of pests, if iconoclastic views may be termed such. It invited questions. And to these I attempt answers. By what means did hominid become man? By electrochemical means, and suddenly. Was the change large or small? The change was substantially minute, but profound in its consequences. When did it happen? Recently -- about one thousand reproductive generations ago, which comes to about 260 memorial generations. What role did great natural forces play? They precipitated and perpetuated the change. Did culture spring up with, or did it lag behind, the human transformation? Culture sprang up with the gestalt of human creation. How many symptoms of mental illness are innate in man? All of them. How many cultures are sick? All of them, but the sickness is normal. Can homo schizo aspire to become homo sapiens? One can aspire to a fiction, but cannot achieve it. Occasionally, a person, or even a group, can reach a delicate equilibrium, which can be called reasonable, thus becoming homo sapiens schizotypus. Anything more than that is most uncertain. The answers are tentative, as must be many scientific propositions. They may appear far- fetched, but rightly so, because they must be brought in from faraway fields. They would be more firm if only a few students of anthropology, linguistics, genetics, psychology, natural history, and early human behavior were disposed to drink deeply from their primeval fountain of self-doubt, and thereafter to re-examine their data. I regret not being able to credit the full literature and cannot pretend to have slighted nobody. Especially am I concerned about the lurking work which may have quite escaped research, the work that would have bolstered my strained defenses or, for that matter, penetrated them, and which will emerge later, in a recapitulation of the Mendelian scenario. I recall that Mendel's genetic work was published in 1865, in plenty of time for Darwin to amend his view in later editions of the Origin, or so says Julian Huxley. His evolutionary theory badly needed the evidence of mutations in biology. Others, the same Julian Huxley for one, have made excuses for Darwin, and I hope that someone will do the same for me. Alfred de Grazia {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T SLIPPERY LADDERS OF EVOLUTION} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE SLIPPERY LADDERS OF EVOLUTION Scientists tracing the origins of man face an almost impossible task. So little remains of the beginnings that the very dirt around a suspected visit of early man is prized. They must grasp for anything tangible, a fossil bone, a chipped stone, a coprolite. Yet here we are, on the trail of man's most important original trait, self-awareness, an intangible phenomenon that cannot fossilize. Few, even today, would contradict what the geneticist, Ralph Gerard, said in 1959: I don't think any of us has the remotest idea of why subjective awareness developed. [1] Self-awareness is the consciousness of self. Practically every human, perhaps everyone, can stand off and look at himself. In fact, he does so normally, does so frequently, does so readily and at so early an age that maybe even the baby must think I am I. He is self- conscious before he can speak. The physical boundaries of the self, fingers, toes, ears, nose and eyes are matters of interest to the infant who teaches them to himself in a matter of months. Fixing mental boundaries goes on endlessly. Probably he begins the study of himself in utero, even though he must wait for his deathbed to conclude it. Granted we cannot discover directly the appearance of self-consciousness in fossils, we may seek its concomitants. Anything denoting symbolism is a valid clue. Apes use sounds to convey moods, intent, and information; there is no use denying that this is symbolic behavior. So humans have to employ double abstraction to be different: the sign and signal, plus a reference that is not tangible, as for instance a wind, a direction, a ghost, an absent party, a glyph on a tree or rock, a burial, a sign of yesterday, a signal for tomorrow. But what should we do with the chimpanzee 'Congo, ' who dabbled in painting, turning out hundreds of compositions in a style typified by bunched and fanned brush strokes [2] ? A second valid clue to self-awareness is a tool. Sharpening a stone for use shows a sense of the design that may be inherent in a recalcitrant object, and is a valid indicator of human abstraction. Human-seeming animals are almost totally bereft of clubs, spears, pounders, drums, ropes. If they may grasp a twig and poke out ants from a hole, they cast it away when the hunt has ended. They do not improve it or look after it or burden themselves with it for very long. Does walking on two feet, bipedalism, mark the advent of self-awareness? A baby is self- conscious before it can walk; but, no matter, the different traits need not appear in perfect succession. Congenitally crippled babies become human rapidly; again, the human setting fills the gap. That bipedalism may have preceded self-consciousness is easy to contemplate (perhaps because it is easier to 'sell out' self-awareness than a physical trait). But the mind balks at a four-footed self-conscious creature, even though babies are very human while still in the crawling stage. I think that we must admit that bipedalism may be a precursor or an invention but not a proof of self-awareness. Fire-making is sometimes accredited as a sign of humanness. Fire may have 'always' been used. Birds and other animals, including primates, play about natural fires and eat roasted vegetable and animal matter consumed by the flames [3] . A natural fire may borrowed preserved for a long time. But any group that could conserve fire was probably able to make it by friction, especially if in the habit of striking rocks together. The humanness of fire-use depends, then, upon how it is obtained and whether it is preserved. {S : THE HUMAN BRAINCASE} THE HUMAN BRAINCASE Ultimately we would have to play a trump card: the large brain. Can we not assign the birth of self-awareness to the appearance of the first modern cranium. Thus, typically, a physical anthropologist such as Le Gros Clark will arrange the fossil cranial discoveries in order of time and size. The scale might begin with a chimpanzee of 300 to 600 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity, proceed to an australopithecine of from about 450 to 800 cc, up through homo erectus who might achieve 1280, then through homo neanderthal with an average higher than our own (1300-1610 cc), then back to modern man with 900 to 2300 cc -- elapsed time being set at four million years. At what point of skull size does the hominid leave off and the human begin? It would beg the question to answer: when tool-making is associated with the skull. John Buettner-Janusz says properly: Unfortunately too much anthropological writing has focused on cranial volume when there is no evidence that a critical threshold for cranial volume need be exceeded for such 'higher' activities as tool-making and, by implication, culture. [4] The conventional answer is that we do not know precisely, but that we can assume that the cerebrum, evolving with the size of the cranium, became ever more clever until it conceived of fire-making, tools, speech, and abstract non-entities. There are reasons to doubt this scenario. We have no place in this book for Julian Huxley's exuberant declaration, that evolution simply is not just a theory any longer; it is a fact, like the fact that the earth goes around the sun and that the planets do all sorts of things. [5] Nor can we follow naively the theory that as with anatomy, so with culture: culture, too, evolves, as originally with Tylor, Spencer, and Morgan, and still now with many anthropologists [6] . However, we agree with these latter that Boaz and his followers were excessively wrought up to claim, as did B. Laufer, that the theory of cultural evolution is.. The most inane, pernicious, and sterile theory in the whole realm of science. [7] A human brain consumes 20% of the energy resources utilized by the person as a whole. At the same time only 2 to 4% of the cerebrum is said to be activated, even at peak periods. Obviously there might be an energy crisis if we could work our brains very hard. One may suspect that the brain grew large without the 'intention' or 'specific purpose' of working, much less thinking. This seems more plausible when we consider that the bilaterality of the cerebrum is not necessary. The human mind can function well with one hemisphere, if training and acculturation occurs on the basis of just the single hemisphere. Acquiring a single hemisphere would not be 'handicapping, ' as would, say, a single eye or leg. The genetic instruction for a double cerebrum is part of the bilateral anatomy that reaches far out among the animal orders. Once again, we have a surplus; it is not persuasive to claim that a second hemisphere is 'good' to have upon the accidental loss of one hemisphere, and thereupon involve 'natural selection. ' Supposing, however, a single hemisphere and a 400 cc brain --less than a third of the average human but one-half of the fast learning brain of the one-year-old baby or of homo erectus -- it would appear that, if this were functioning physiologically in a human way, it would be functioning behaviorally, too, in a human way. One would have, if nothing new were added along with size, the same mental and cultural abilities that we have at present. One would operate humanly with less than the brain capacity of australopithecus. Dwarves with well-proportioned bodies of 2 1/ 2 ft in height, and with brains weighing one- third (14 ounces) of the ordinary human's brain may be sometimes stupid, but they speak fluently. A high adult I. Q. on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test is possible with about one-third of the total cerebrum lacking. But adaptative intelligence suffers at less than the 30% level. So says one authority [8] . He was perhaps unaware that, at about the same time as he was writing, a hydrocephalic Englishman, with one-tenth of the normal cerebral volume (10%) was doing well socially and in his university studies. Another disturbing thought occurs: the weight of brain of the australopithecus was probably heavier, in proportion to his body size, than that of the modern human. This would support the idea that australopithecus should have been as clever as ourselves, or conversely, we might well be more stupid than australopithecus, if it were not for -- what? Putting aside the unconvincing though popular view that, point-by-point, evolving man grew in brain size and in adaptative control of the environment, an argument that is part biological and part cultural but in both cases implausible for reasons stated elsewhere, the source of the difference between the stupid hominid (assuming such was the case for the forebear of australopithecus) and the clever human must rest in a specialization of the brain and/ or in its electro-chemical state and operations. My opinion here -- and in the accompanying volume -- is that both types of change occurred: specialization and a new electro- chemistry. F. M. Bergounioux is persuaded that intelligence is a phenomenon with no connection whatever with the physiological structure that supports it. So it seems, and one can observe hovering in his unusual essay the ultimate resort to teleological creationism such as Teilhard de Chardin developed [9] . The theory of homo sapiens schizotypus may, however, bridge this chasm between the subtlest human behavior and the physiological housing. Something other than brain growth was responsible for humanization. {S : THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER APE} THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER APE A book on human origins written in the last century presents the same basic ideas as a book lately published; there is little new of importance in the recent book. The main difference is that about 1900, Mendelian mutations, actual changes in the germ plasma, were accepted by many geneticists as the main factor in the alteration of species. Although it could have been used to rehabilitate catastrophism, this discovery was used to reinforce the shaky foundations of the dominant Darwinian evolutionism. Whereas the old book asked only modest amounts of time for the human race to develop from the ape, the new book asks for up to five million years. Aided and abetted by modern 'time- telling' techniques, such as the potassium-argon test, the new book can fit many skull- cases, jaw-bones and some extremities that have been uncovered into a long-time frame. Many comparative studies have been made of primates and people, showing, for example, how they walk or what relationship their blood hemoglobin contains. But no old evolutionist ever doubted the cousinship of man and ape: go to the zoo and see for yourself. Evolutionary theories have to venture in fine detail into what came first. For evolution is uniformitarian, gradual, compounded bit by bit. Thus, a ladder of culture has been assembled. First, crude stone pounders and cutters, then use of fire, then many other developments, partly anatomical and partly cultural: cannibalism, walking upright, righthandedness, premature parturition, improved weaponry, crinkled brains, deft digitry, weak dentition, improved diet, signalling, thinking ahead, fortifications, speech, burial of the dead, and so on [10] . Many disputes have arisen as to priorities among the numerous steps forward in social evolution; no two ladders have the same rungs. If one were to collect a shelf of all major works on human evolution since and including the work of Charles Darwin, and took from each its 'first, ' 'truly human, ' 'necessary, ' 'all- important' steps, and then examined the list, he would feel bemused: each author builds his own ladder; each 'new' trait is the crucial trait that set off man from the ape. Sometimes the rungs are anatomical, at other times cultural; they may also be geological -- events of the rocks, ice, climates, the geomagnetic field, or of geochronometry. An interesting ladder-scheme, unfortunately not well-developed, is offered by Walter Garre and called The Psychotic Animal: A Psychiatrist's Study of Human Delusion [11] . He believes that man, in evolving anatomically over millions of years, developed more and more tools and artifacts. Man was proud of his abilities and became, indeed, increasingly megalomaniac. He began to seek goals in the sky and on earth that he could not possibly obtain until finally he went mad. Vanity, then, is the nemesis of man, and the therapy for the human psychosis is to reconcile man to what is possible. Garre's ladder is amusing and at least more logical than most; his theory is, however, very lightly constructed. To Freud, writing in 1930, the upright posture of man was the start of his fateful development. [12] By getting his nose off the ground and putting his genitals up front, man exhibited himself and felt shame. Further, man could never gratify his sexual drive fully and therefore had to seek all kinds of sublimation, all the cultural developments that are summed up by the word sublimation. Presumably this set of events would have preceded the events that gave him the truly human oedipal complex, the day when he and his brothers killed the old bull father in order to possess sexually the females, and felt ever thereafter an intensification of guilt [13] -- or, to avoid implying that Freud contradicted himself, the great guilt as against the small shame. In another widely read and more respected treatise, J. Bronowski stresses the development of omnivorous eating habits before other traits, beginning with australopithecus and moving through Neanderthal to modern man: The consequences for the evolution of man were far- reaching. He had more time free, and could spend it in more indirect ways, to get food from sources (such as large animals) which could not be tackled by hungry brute force. Evidently that helped to promote (by natural selection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone the gratification of desire [14] . Thus Bronowski momentarily sighted the instinct-delay, but was diverted into adding a rung to the ladder. Dozens of carpenters and ladders are in the race. But each author has his detractors, who say such things as: 'You cannot eat meat without cooking it, ' or 'You can cook but still not be reflective, ' or 'Lower animals were omnivorous first. ' The most effective way yet found to handle the disputatious crowd is to give everyone time -- one, five, even ten million years. Then every ladder can climb to the same lofty level of modern humans who can do everything. What I propose here may be more effective: remove the ladder and let everyone in through the front door; they are all right, at the same time! {S : LEGENDS OF CREATION} LEGENDS OF CREATION 'Let everyone in -- do you mean even the creationists? ' I am not so sure, but let us make a case for the legendary accounts of human origins. It is not impossible to do so. Man has no memory of being a hominid, much less an ape. He insists, however, that he remembers being created. The ready conclusion -- one which has been proposed from the earliest times -- is that mankind was humanized abruptly. This event was universally depicted in theological language as a divine creation. Hence scientists of the past century, in ridding themselves of religious constraints, ceased to consider whether, even without divine intervention, humanization might have occurred in a natural quantavolution. Charles Darwin, to begin with, did not attend, when his disciple, Thomas Huxley, wrote him in 1860 not to be too rigid with the adage, Nature makes no leap (natura non facit saltum). Darwin repeatedly termed the adage a canon. In the historical record from its beginnings, and in the treasured oral records of non-literate peoples of today, mankind is portrayed as a divinely created being. He was fashioned, by beings of a higher order. Homo schizo apparently knew long before Aristotle that an effect had to have a sufficient cause. We may be curious as to why they did not claim eternity, why they did not accept the idea of a world beyond time, why they postulated a chaos followed by a creation. Nor did the earliest cosmologists venture that humans were descended from the lower animals, as much as they may have lived among and respected animals. Yet scholars commonly argue that clever primeval men invented their divine makers because they were not clever enough to imagine how they might otherwise come to exist upon the earth. Peoples of all types of culture insist, with a unanimity that deafens modern scholars, that they were created, not evolved [15] . The Hopi Indians say that after the world was spun out and nicely formed and enlivened with plants and animals, twin gods made people and gave them speech and wisdom. The Wyot Indians maintain that the first people were furry and talked badly; a universal deluge was visited upon them, and a brother-husband and sister- wife brought forth the good new people. The Eskimo Creator elicited people out of a scattering of seal bones. The Quich‚ Mayans proposed that twin gods filled the great void with water and earth; living creatures were made, but their voices could not praise specifically their creators. Whereupon mankind was made of clay, and the clay melted, requiring another attempt. At first, it spoke, but had no mind. Abandoning clay, the gods resorted to wood. These wooden creatures could not walk properly, nor did they worship their creators. They were annihilated in hurricanes and deluges of black rain. The monkeys are their survivors. Now the gods made fine men, out of corn, so fine that the gods had to cast a mist before their eyes to prevent their knowing too much; and later the gods made them wives who came to them in their sleep. The Swahili of East Africa adopted Islamic creation theory, which goes back to Judaic theory, which has man created from clay, which is also the Christian belief. One pygmy group of Zaire has god creating an 'Adam and Eve' and punishing them for violating his commandment, and a second story of the god creating humans as fruit of a special tree of life. The god of the Ngombe of Zaire let his human creations live with him in the sky. Then he exiled a troublesome woman with her son and daughter to earth, and from these came the human race. (But a hairy stranger also mated with the daughter and their offspring brought evil and sorrow to the world.) To the ancient Mexicans it seemed that the first race of men, created by one of the gods out of ashes, was destroyed by jealous gods in a flood, and the people became fish. Other ages intervened before the present one, the Fifth Sun. In the fourth age the people were ape-men (tlacaozomatin). In the fifth age, a god searched the regions of the dead for the bones of a couple of humans. These were found, ground up, and watered by blood from the penis of Quetzalcoatl. Now man, creature of divine self-sacrifice, must sacrifice continuously to keep the world in orderly motion. Chinese legend has Nu-kua making people of yellow earth patties. Iranian Bundahism recites that man and bull were fashioned of the soil, and that the seed of life, made from the sky's light, was planted in their bodies. Various Greek nations claimed that the earth gave birth to their ancestors; for instance, the Thebans were born from the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus. A Sumerian story conveys that Enki, the great god, ordered Mami, the mother goddess, to mix clay with the blood and flesh of a lesser god killed by the other gods. So it was done. As usual, the earth was thriving beforehand. And so it was when Elohim created Adam and Eve, the former out of clay, the latter out of a rib of Adam. The Egyptians believed man to be divinely fashioned of clay, too. In Plato's dialogue, Timaeus, a didactic myth presents the faultless creator Demiurge, using the planets, including Earth, as factory sites, making human souls out of less pure materials than that of which the universe is made; and then he distributed them, assigning each soul to its several star. [16] The Skidi Pawnee of the Great Plains recited, Our people were made by the stars; when the time comes for all things to end our people will turn into small stars and will fly to the South Star where they belong. [17] But clay seems to be a favored material: made of common clay. So also says Ovid, at the beginning of this era, but he adds maybe. His Metamorphoses tells many a gruesome tale of people turning into monsters at the will of the gods, nor can we dismiss the idea that Ovid may have been trying to recount times of great radiation and mutation [18] . {S : MEMORIAL GENERATIONS} MEMORIAL GENERATIONS What could in fact the ancients remember, if anything? Oral traditions can survive for exceedingly long periods, at least some thousands of years. In the case of modern isolated tribes, and even in the case of the Hebrew and Indo-European Sumerian tradition, what reason do we give for our confidence that these stories cannot go back to the first stories of the first 'time-factored, ' that is, remembering or historical, mankind? Can any force change the roots of a myth? Through how many memorial generations of man do the roots of myth penetrate? The statistical reports of groups exhumed from cemeteries and analyzed for age show average ages of death below 40 until recent times, but also persons who lived to advanced ages. (In a Bushman people numbering 248, living as marginally constrained hunter-gathers, 8% were from 60 to 80 years old) [19] . If one memorial generation is the age difference between an old oral historian and a young child of a tribe, it may average fifty years. Ten thousand years gives only 200 careful sacred recitations; twenty thousand years gives 400. If all the peoples of the world pay sacred respects to what amounts to a story of the sudden appearance of humanity, this fact would seem to support the idea of a continuous story from the beginning of man. Suppose that a psychologist and anthropologist, supported generously by the U. S. National Science Foundation and Institutes of Health, were to set up a chain of 800 story-tellers, sixty-year olds alternating with ten-year olds, and told the first person in the chain the Eskimo creation story. Would the 800th person repeat the essential story, granting such changes as 'seal bones' becoming bones of another animal? Let an awesome authority warn that the story must be retold with perfect accuracy, lest you die. A much more sophisticated study design is possible; my purpose here is to position the problem for intuitive comprehension. There are grounds for believing that a basic legend can go back even 100,000 years, an age conventionally assigned to homo sapiens, if it conveys a fundamental truth. If the story goes back that far, or even if it does not, how does it happen that fine legends are not spun about the evolution of man from the animals? Or of his eternal existence? With ages of religious prejudice behind us, we must of course be contemptuous of descent from lower animals. Yet can we believe that the earliest men had to invent gods because they were so disgusted with their similarities to animals? Even when men lived close to animals, endowed them with human characters, and worshiped them as totems? And, too, the earliest stories and depictions around the world reveal, for instance, bulls and women in sacred copulation, not to mention snakes and swans. T. Dobzhansky is therefore probably reasoning ad hoc when he says: Infinity is a notion which most people find hard to conceive of. Creation myths were accordingly constructed to show that man and the universe did have a beginning. [20] The thrust of legends, when scientifically considered, is directed at humanization as a discrete kind of event, remembered by a mind that recalls not what happened beforehand to itself but what happened then and ever thereafter -- a new kind of memory. And, we guess, this was and remained a fearfully composed memory, compulsively and obsessively recollecting itself. Somehow a barrier was suddenly thrust up between humans and animals. Hans Bellamy alludes to the remarkable fact that the mythologist, though he knows an immense number of creation myths, cannot point to a single one whose report starts right at the beginning of things... Almost everywhere we find the ordering of a chaotic muddle of pre-existing things, a formation or a reformation on an improved plan, a recreation rather than a creation in the primary sense of the term. [21] The Earth is fashioned out of the body of a vanquished monster, or fished out of the primordial sea, or created by the word of a demiurge, this last a favorite of later priests, so that, for instance, the creator gods assembled, and called Earth! and the Earth arose from the waters. As St. John said, In the beginning was the word; the word pervaded God; the word was God. Afterwards man was created, as earlier stated. 'Of course, ' it can be argued, 'these are typical schizophrenic delusions, having no basis in reality. ' Very well -- although it is rather early in the book to accept our thesis that man was born schizophrenic and has always been schizotypical. Can we not also suggest here that man was striving in manifold ways to recall a hologenesis of mind and culture? And that he must have been a true human at the time of the events at issue? It is in this connection, too, that we can address the extensive work of Mircea Eliade on The Myth of the Eternal Return [22] . For he finds everywhere in the world, and displaced onto all of the functions of life, such as farming and sex, a compulsion to conduct anniversaries and rites to commemorate the first great days of human existence, insisting that 'this is the way things were in the beginning, ' illo tempore. Eliade does not analyze the causes of this universal human behavior; he rests with the facts, uncovered with so much toil. Here we take what seems to be the necessary step beyond, asserting that humans may remember their origins. Now, if this is so, then the cultural, or 'intrinsic', memory of man must be extremely long, or the time allocated to human origins must be far too long. Probably the moment has not yet arrived for calling into question the estimates of the duration of human becoming. We still have not heard the stories -- we shall not call them legend -- told by the scientists who have worked with the rocks, the bones, and the artifacts composing the under-ground history of mankind. {S : NATURAL SELECTION} NATURAL SELECTION Doubts about the efficacy of a ladder of evolution begin with questions about the means of constructing the ladder, that is, the machine of natural selection. Charles Darwin titled his influential work The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Although his mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell, had employed the word evolution since 1832, Darwin did not use the term in his own book that came 27 years later. An unfolding of new traits was certainly implied, in biology as in geology, especially since Darwin thought (rather vaguely, it seems) that new traits emerged from within individuals as they competed for survival within their species and with representatives of other species. On the other hand, Darwin used the term natural selection 414 times, and selected or selection an additional hundred times. The heavy employment of the term suggests that he was using it not only as a referent, but also as an active substitute for real natural operations and in place of non-existent evidence. In general, darwinism has provided a century of confused thought about natural selection. Looking back from today, it is difficult to understand how the idea could so have captured the minds of scientists, granted that its public appeal was large. We should not forget that Darwin (and Wallace, whose ideas on natural selection paralleled his own) received the idea behind natural selection upon reading Malthus who in turn was keen on justifying the laissez-faire notion of a struggle for survival in economic affairs. He demonstrated persuasively that, while the means of subsistence were growing arithmetically, population was growing by geometrical progression, with an ultimate resolution only through famine, disease, and war. It is surprising that even the marxists, who were so suspicious of bourgeois ideology, should have overlooked the import of this connection, when adopting the idea of evolution by natural selection. Marx did associate Darwinism with liberal English economics, but did not insist upon following through the consequences of his surmise. One may allude to Darwin's inattention to Gregor Mendel's studies of plant genetics. Why on the other hand, would he have taken the first opportunity to put down Mivart's work (1871), which argued that evolution could only be explained as a series of saltations [23] . It seems that Darwin was bent upon taking his inspiration from a hard-headed economic realist rather than from other biologists, perhaps only to guard his idea of natural selection, but perhaps also because he realized that sudden leaps in evolution would, when it came to the journey from ape to man, open the door once more to the religious creationists. Most cases advanced to illustrate the concept of natural selection turn out to be Lamarckian environmentalism or question-begging. The pattern was set by Darwin himself. He was even capable of statements that mutilations occasionally produce an inherited effect. [24] More recently, we have Washburn and Howell declaring that it was altered selection pressures of the new technical-social life which gave the brain its peculiar size and form. [25] Elsewhere, Washburn has it that, In a very real sense, tools created homo sapiens. [26] So Buettner-Janusz, claiming that culture put severe demands upon the brain, causing it to evolve [27] . That is, man is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, governing his own evolution in some of its most critical aspects such as brain size and specialized brain areas, arguments that verge beyond the Lamarckian toward several other hazy theories on the fringes of scientific discussion -- teleological explanations, inherent Platonic forms seeking their realization, etc. Where does all this evolutionary sap come from that now causes the mind to burgeon and then again fashions the tool for the mind to use? But such has been a common form of arguing around the weakness of natural selection in its stark logical definition. More often, natural selection is proven by a kind of question-begging. Thus, a trait of a species, one not found in a fossil relative, is given an ex post facto justification by natural selection. A common formulation reduces to this: a species which did whatever was done tended to survive in greater numbers. But no proof is offered. Both natural selection and mutation theory abound with the stated or implied premise that whatever changed must have changed because the change helped the species to survive. A typical problem occurs with asymmetrical brain organization in the human, which accompanies, but not necessarily in a mutually causative relation, handedness -- righthandedness in about 87% of the species. Left-handed people are more brain-bilateral, both anatomically and functionally. Their left and right crania exhibit less asymmetry and their speech areas are less centralized in their dominant hemisphere. There occur thereupon the typical rationalizations of brain asymmetry and handedness: these 'help the species to survive by promoting dexterity; ' and 'the left hemisphere, with an accomplished right hand, can carry out its dominating wishes and calculations. ' In acute brain lesions of the dominant hemisphere, left-handed persons suffer less speech loss than right-handed persons. If the majority of the LH (approximately 70%) have bilateral representation of speech, this atypical organization would spare them from the more severe and prolonged effects of a unilateral lesion that would be seen in the RH person whose speech mechanisms are more laterally differentiated. [28] Now, if enough clubs smashed enough skulls in the billions of fights during the ascent of man, and if speech were important after the battles ended, and if other variables were not present, then man should by now be left-handed and retrogressed to bilaterality. However, apart from these particular 'if's, ' there occur scores of additional 'iffy' variables. For instances, left-handers are considered wrongheaded by most people, and maybe inferior, so might they not be exterminated? Also, might not left-handed clubwielders be more surprising and effective in battle and therefore reduce the right-handers with evolutionarily significant frequency? Or be employed by right-handers to fight and disproportionately die, while the right-handers remained home to breed? And might not the right-handers, being more asymmetrical, be also more schizoid, and being more schizoid, be more paranoid, assertive and socially dominant over the left-handers; but schizotypicality is fostered, too, by invidious cultural discrimination, so should not the left-handers like Leonardo da Vinci more than hold their own in the evolution of the species. So do we not have a statistical stand-off, what evolutionists might gratefully refer to as 'an evolutionary equilibrium of 70 and 30 proportions resulting from the operations of natural selection'? This line of thought could go on almost indefinitely, with every question begged by the interposition of the magical term natural selection. GRADUALISM Charles Darwin felt committed to the view that man must have arisen from lower primate forms to his present eminence by a ladder of incremental changes. In The Descent of Man, he conceived of a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape- like creature to man as he now exists so that it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term 'man' ought to be used. [29] (He used the terms gradations and gradual some sixty times in the Origin of Species.) The history of fossil anthropology has seen many attempts to prove Darwin's insensible gradations to be the correct scenario for human development. Thus, a century later, LeGros Clark, the authoritative physical anthropologist referred to earlier, thought it is evident that a closely graded morphological series linked Australopithecus through homo erectus with our own species homo sapiens. [30] A prominent zoologist, Ernst Mayr, could in 1951 set forth a fine case for cultural elaboration being attendant upon brain enlargement [31] . A decade later he might say the same of all speciation, but only by leaving out careful considerations of time, of the mathematics of permutations and combinations, of the earliest actual origin of the rich intraspecies gene pool being called upon the allow remarkable adaptation, and by skirting the edges of Lamarckian environmentalism even while denying it [32] . In considering the advent of homo sapiens, alert scepticism about the language of natural selection and mutation theory will send many a popular view crashing to the ground. There is little in the known history of human evolution that can be called upon to show that natural selection, adaptation, the survival of the fittest, or even 'mutation as an aid to natural selection, ' has played any part in the present constitution of mankind. But, to question-begging, evolutionary discourse adds a ping-pong game in which a frustrated natural selection explanation bats the ball to mutation theory, which, frustrated in turn, bats the ball back to natural selection. Moreover, the same scepticism may be indulged regarding the mania for extending time backwards to great lengths. A theory of natural selection, plus point-by-point mutation, plus an unchanging or very slowly changing natural environment are going to require very much time to effect the multitude of alterations distinguishing the human being from its imagined primate archetype. The ladder of evolution has to be very long. However, we may not use the long ladder to prove that time is long, even though time must have been long in order to build such a ladder. Time has to be proven long by independent criteria and tests. The scientific world has conveniently forgotten that Darwin conceived of natural selection as having originated and developed all species of life to their present state within a time span which, by present standards that move toward two or more billion years, would make of him a rapid evolutionist. Relative to a small span of time, the years allocable to the ascent of man were negligible by contemporary guesses; even then time was short, no doubt explaining some of the exasperation of gentlemen of the day, who could feel the hot apish breath of their ancestors on the back of their necks. The ideology still prevails, suffusing the field of study with three hypotheses: that one fossil form has progressed to another very gradually, that the elapsed time has been long, and that the culture traits have budded upon the branches of anatomical changes. But also (see Washburn, above) the brain can bud on the branches of culture; thus, tools excite brain growth. What are we allowed to think of the evidence if we disrobe our minds of the ideology of darwinism for a moment? Humanoid types have been dispersed over most of the Earth. Different types lived at the same time and even in the same places. There are no provably transitional types. Stone tools and artificial dwellings have characterized the earliest bipedal large-brained types. Stone tools are prima facie evidence that there was sufficient neurological material for culture. [33] But can culture (that is, humanization) be potentiated for three or more million years without realizing a breakthrough somewhere? Can the measures of time be wrong? With all this, must we not begin to consider whether there occurred some quantavolution, some saltation, as opposed to a gradual evolution? Must we take a position on the duration of humanizing evolution in order to develop the theory of homo schizo? Suppose that we accept a 5-million-year evolution from hominidal ancestors to modern man. Can we then say that man has changed bit by bit over this period of time and very gradually became the schizoid type that we know today? And, to address C. Darwin, could we then speculate that, at some point near the end of this period, this changing anatomy finally produced an outburst of cerebration and culture? Also, did man lose his instinctive behavior bit by bit, with blunting and delay occurring in one after another case, until finally he became modern? Was he, incipiently, and then more and more, self-aware and was he more and more frightened and anxious as time went on, until finally he achieved full self-consciousness? If so, what brought on this gradual change? Was it a series of mutations, all leading in the same direction ('directed evolution') or a continuous process of natural selection breeding a creature more effective at survival? But it is not possible for mutations to work so rapidly under present and recent natural conditions. Nor, considering how many changes would be required and that these changes had to be transferred in a set of successive 'chain reactions' to the species wherever its habitat, has there been time for natural selection. {S : SEVERE LIMITS TO NATURAL SELECTION} SEVERE LIMITS TO NATURAL SELECTION And what is natural selection? We come back to the question. Darwin complains, I cannot... understand how it is that Mr. [Alfred] Wallace maintains, that 'natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape. ' [34] It may be that natural selection, if it makes sense at all, is capable only of ensuring survival. The fittest may survive, but to be 'fittest' means only fitter than the next individual of one's species, and being a member of a species that is reproductively fitter than whatever species at the moment may be cutting into this reproductivity. Natural selection is a measure of the influence, at a given moment, of a life form. It is the interaction of life forms and their living and inorganic environment favors the genetic descent of certain forms and the extinction of others, whether of the same or of different species. From this, it is logical that an individual life form that is favored tends to expand in numbers. But if the environment at Time 'X' changes erratically or quantavolutes, then the changes within an individual and species that have occurred up to Tx can promptly lose their merits as factors in natural selection. What helps for survival this year may hurt survival next year. So it is that natural selection is a more persuasive idea if one is a uniformitarian, believing processes in nature have always been as they are now. Persuasive it may be, but still not statistically probable. As soon as all the variables are emplaced in the correlation matrix, the likelihood of natural selection collapses. For, what uniformitarian evolution provides in the way of infinite chances of 'advance' must be provided as infinite chances to 'retreat, ' hence infinite contradictions. The general reliability of natural selection in producing an 'advance' must be close to zero. The environment which effects species selection is so changeable even under uniformitarian conditions that no 'line of evolution' can be credible as an effect of natural selection. One moment a virus, the next a drought, the next an elimination of a competing species by other causes than direct competition, then a chance mutation then a hundred other selective forces play upon the situation of a species. And, of course, the holistic structure and function of an organism, where thousands of interdependencies interact with each ongoing moment, are utterly beyond the selective capacities of nature, as these are presently construed. And, if one flees to time for protection, they are quite beyond the capabilities of the longest time. When a gathering was convoked at the University of Chicago in 1959 to celebrate a hundred years of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, and after much wisdom was spoken and the final discussions ensued, there occurred within minutes a blurting of confessions and hopes [35] . Ernst Mayr was concerned with evolutionary outbursts along some lines after many millions of years of stability, and wondered how so many extinctions occurred, considering the extreme sensitivity of natural selection, doing the most incredible and impossible things. Emerson said that he himself was of the opinion that We need much more precise information on the evolutionary time dimension within all the biological sciences - - behavior and development and so on, and A. J. Nicholson regretted that whereas much attention had been given to the disappearance of unfit forms, little attention had been given to the replacement of unfit forms. Such research specifications have, needless to say, gone unfulfilled for another twenty years. David Raup ventured to say that we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time, [36] and a conference held in 1981 at his institution, the Field Museum, in Chicago, focused entirely upon the possibility of macroevolutionary periods, without facing squarely the non-uniformitarian mechanisms that might have produced them, such as catastrophes [37] . I shall not argue that a busy god exists: but I would point out that hard-headed materialists of the evolutionist camp, who are quick to cite the human stupidity which can treasure a religious delusion for thousands of years, should not have trouble in recognizing that they, too, have been laboring under a delusion, that of natural selection, for 150 years. God is not the only ideological delusion making the rounds of humanity. If modern man has taken a long time to evolve and if the changes were on the ladder, say, of ramapithecus --australopithecus -- pithecanthropus -- homo, there should have occurred a great many intermediate types, each with some distinctly 'progressive' concatenation of bones and behavior. These have been claimed; they had to be claimed. But, as we shall see, the known types are several at most. Also, it is unlikely that more than one or two additional types will be found. Generally, the prevailing modes of thought act to suppress this kind of observation, and let presumptuous expressions such as that of Le Gros Clark pass without serious criticism. As evidenced by the Piltdown Man fraud, whenever a missing link or transitional type seems to emerge, it is eagerly seized upon [38] . In any event, should not such types have survived, even the several known fossil hominids? Up to the present, man has not been able to exterminate his primate relatives, and presumably the hominids would have been more clever and elusive than the apes and monkeys. Very recently (May 2, 1981) a commentator in the New Scientist could sloganize the controversy as 'lucky survivors' versus natural selection. Species do not arise by any provable natural selection but only on occasion flourish thereby or decline, and even then almost always by happenstance that has practically nothing to do with survival of the fittest as a selective mechanism. Mutation is the seemingly general mode of creating new species and perhaps of destroying many, but then mutation is another matter, an electro-chemical event offering advantageous or disadvantageous possibilities in a given environment. Many a 'hopelessly inept species' lives on and there are many 'marvelously adapted' fossils of extinct species. Millions fewer of extinct fossil forms are found than 'should be found, ' if one is to judge by the number of existing species. Exponential reproducibility is a prima facie case versus the refined general theory of natural selection. Natural selection by any means whatsoever, except general catastrophe, reduces to its largest component, exponential reproducibility. Clever little wings, a nose that sniffs better, and all the thousands of alterations of species and individuals designed as 'improvements by natural selection, ' are as nothing compared with the formidable propensity of every species to reproduce in infinite numbers. Seen in this light, the fact that should be astonishing, but seems to impress few, that the simplest virus or bacterium survives as well or better than the most complex species, can only mean that catastrophe and reproducibility determine natural selection. For the rest, natural selection has been a fol-de-rol, diverting developmental biology from more important business. Darwin prepared an epitaph for his main concept when, in expounding gradualism, he predicted, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of a continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure. {S : WAVES OF EVOLUTION} WAVES OF EVOLUTION Scholars generally believe that four waves of evolution have occurred in the ascent of man. The first was of pro-human apes, all fossils now, such as Aegyptopithecus, Dryopithecus, and Ramapithecus, who inhabited Old World locations from 34 to 8 million years ago (so it is said). There are, in fact, no ape fossils from anywhere after about eight million, notes Johanson [39] . These extinct beasts were without sign of human culture despite a fairly large brain. That they could have behaved in 'stupid' human ways or could have had descendants, also extinct, that might have done so, is not impossible. Adrian Desmond [40] illustrates well how modern apes are hovering upon the brink of self-awareness and of varied deliberate activities. Such intimations of humanity, which may be enhanced by future paleontological discoveries and modern experiments, are in line with our general theory here, as they are with conventional evolution. The mechanics of humanization, to be discussed in the next chapter, may have altered primate behavior in the same directions of ego-fracture and or delayed instinct response as they did in ourselves. The second wave was australopithecine. Estimates of their age vary up to a million years in the case of individual finds and extend from a half-million to several million years within the group of finds. Some 243 to 285 of these hominids are represented in fossil discoveries in Africa and Asia. The most famous come from Olduvai Gorge near Nairobi and the Afar Depression ( Lucy). Some were discovered earlier and others are being uncovered. The brain of australopithecus could achieve 800 cubic centimeters, especially large in view of his small size; his ratio of brain to body bulk was greater that of modern man, 1/ 42 as opposed to 1/ 47 by one calculation [41] . His neck was proportionally longer too. He was completely adapted to bipedalism [42] . He was right-handed. His physique varied from gracile to robust; he weighed perhaps 32 to 39 kilograms, and resembled in musculature a modern Bushman of the same area [43] . The third wave was pithecanthropus or homo erectus, who also spread out over Africa and Asia. He is found so close to australopithecus in certain excavations, as at Olduvai Gorge, that he probably lived at the same time. The most famous is Peking man from China. His brain attained 1200 cc., large also in relation to his stature. His time is guessed at anywhere from 100,000 to millions of years (or this whole range of time). Other finds of homo erectus are adjudged in the same range. Homer Rainey reports Johanson's estimates of 3 to 4 million years for the Afar Depression homo of 1975 an 2 to 6 million years for the R. Leakey rift finds of 1972 and says that several manlike and other Homo species were contemporary in very ancient times. Moreover they were toolmakers. [44] Soviet excavators at Azhch (near Erivan) have discovered remains, tools, and incised bear skulls, dated at 450,000 years. Then came the proto-homo sapiens, who differ little from modern homo sapiens in anatomy. Often they are called homo erectus, with little reason save their arguable old ages. I doubt that the earliest of these would be considered non-human if their age were unknown. There came, too, the Neanderthal (316 specimen individuals) who was long considered sub- human until discovered co-habitating with our kind in Palestine. He is now given homo sapiens status, but not quite admitted to the club of homo sapiens sapiens. By then, and even before then, modern types were flourishing, so that some 400,000 years is an arguable age of full man in current anthropological circles. There are three main cultural periods to attach to these four waves. All of the creatures except the pro-human apes have worked tools, the most tangible signs of a culture. The Paleolithic is divided unsurprisingly into Lower, Middle, and Upper, the Lower going back to the earliest tools, which may be anywhere from 500,000 to 5m/ y old by conventional reckoning; in geological time this would be Middle Pleistocene to Pliocene. After describing the habitual bi-pedalism of australopithecus, Wolpoff points out that the canine teeth of australopithecus do not differ significantly from those of homo erectus. He then describes the tool kit of australopithecus, saying, Indeed, some of the australopithecine industries are surprisingly advanced. The Sterkfontein and Natron industries have been called Acheulian.[ 45] Alberto Blanc helped rehabilitate Neanderthal man, accrediting him with ritual mutilation of skulls going back 250,000 years, in a style close to that employed in Bronze Age Germany and present-day mutilation practices in Borneo and Melanesia. Further, he pointed out that homo erectus (Pecking man) was available in fragments of forty individual skulls; only one piece was entirely missing from all forty, the base or foramen magnum, signifying probable mutilation, and therefore a possible connection running all the way from homo erectus through Neanderthal to modern man. The reconstructed skull of Sinanthropus offers, therefore, an astonishing resemblance to the mutilated skulls of the early and late Neanderthals and to the skulls mutilated for the purpose of practicing ritual cannibalism in the Bronze Age of Germany and by the present head-hunters from Borneo and New Guinea [46] . It is also probable that ritual skull mutilation signifies ritual cannibalism. He mentions the famous figure, obviously the figure of the god or genius of the hunting people, of the Cave des Trois-FrŠres in AriŠge, with the horns of a deer, paws of a bear, eyes of an owl, and tail of a wolf or horse. There is no reason to doubt his word that the constant complexity of human beliefs is valid and abundantly proved, at least since the Upper Paleolithic. [47] F. Bordes, among others, lumps together the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, does not find them in America, and attributes to the long period an Acheulian and a Mousterian style. But he speaks of overlapping: Prehistory is now at a point where we have to accept the idea of contemporaneity not only of different culture variants, but also of different cultures, and this not only in different provinces, but also in interstratification in the same region. [48] Acheulian and Mousterian have been noted to overlap, by Mellars and others. The Mousterian culture is also found in connection with Aurignacian Upper Paleolithic remains. The same type of person made both types of artifacts, or two types of people made both, thus being equally human. J. E. Weckler writes, it is no longer possible to maintain the idea that biface cores were the work of homo sapiens and flake tools the product of Neanderthal; for we know that generally in the Europe-Africa-India range the Levallois flakes and biface cores were made by one and the same people as parts of unified cultural assemblies. [49] The Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic are joined, too, in America as well as in the rest of the world. A report from Russia carries a shoe-print of an Upper Paleolithic hunter with evidence that the type worse trousers [50] . The modern races are probably present in the Upper Paleolithic. Australians go back now 100,000 years, according to a 1980 news report. Further, australoid types have been found in South Africa and Ecuador. North American Amer- Indian types have been pushed back into the Upper Paleolithic. The major Asian, Sinese or Mongolian types are on hand, and the Caucasians are amply present in the Mediterranean and Europe. Neanderthal probably merged with the caucasoids, rumors of extermination to the contrary notwithstanding. If the rock drawings of the Sahara and Southwest Africa are Upper Paleolithic, as their style might indicate, would their artists be negroid or caucasian, or mixed assemblages of types? The answer is still unknown, but that they were religious is undoubted. Little time is required for human types to diffuse around the world. As if to confirm this conjecture, a recent dispatch carries the claim of Alan Thorne of Australian National University to have discovered fossil remains of Chinese humans in North Australia which date to at least 10,000 years [51] . That humans, ecumenically cultured, split off in early natural disasters, and that a land platform prevailed until about 6000 years ago during which they might move around in the Southeast Pacific, is considered in this book and in Chaos and Creation. J. D. Birdsell thought Australia might have been settled within 720 years by pioneering negritos from Timor but places the date at 32,000 years ago, which I must regard as too long a time. He guessed that the australopithecines moved thousands of miles from South Africa to Southeast Asia in 23,000 years. This, too, seemed swift to him and to others: Pleistocene man when spreading into unoccupied territory could have saturated it to carrying capacity... in amazingly short elapsed time. [52] Yet Americanists long believed that men crossing the frozen arctic Bering Straits reached practically to Antarctica in 12,000 years. Now man is thought to be older in the Americas. I would maintain that man is as old in the Americas as anywhere else, but in any event his velocity of diffusion was much greater everywhere. No hominid or homo need have more than a few centuries to stretch around the globe. And, if hominids and homo were contemporary, and especially if all were human, the occupation of the world by mankind need have consumed no more than a thousand years. (I would maintain this whether the world was land-covered -- see my Chaos and Creation -- or fragmented.) Furthermore, present racial differences are such as may have occurred in brief periods of isolation, followed by bursts of regional expansion of new types. The mechanism of such quantavolutions in the hominid sphere, as in the biosphere generally, is quantavolution in the natural sphere, catastrophes such as I depicted in Chaos and Creation. The Neolithic period brought practically everybody everywhere to the stage where most people still are, except for some use of metal now in many parts around the world. Pottery, farming, domestication of animals, religion and many other cultural features are present everywhere. Yet, nowhere, strangely, is it claimed that the Neolithic is more than a few thousand years old, six to twelve thousand being the normal estimated range. We need not consider this Neolithic Period here. No hominid or proto-homo-sapiens emerges during it. Also, as indicated above, nothing basically important seems to have distinguished the Upper Paleolithic from the Mesolithic. So far as human development is concerned, the cultural level of the Upper Paleolithic approaches that of the Neolithic (later on, I shall offer my evidence to this point). So the temporal question is whether homo schizo originated then, or in the Middle or Lower Paleolithic, bearing in mind that by Lower Paleolithic we must mean Early Pleistocene, with this period in turn moving back into what was once thought to be Pliocene, and perhaps even into the so-called Cretaceous. The time problem is tied in with the manner of genesis. Did this human being originate in steps or by quantavolution, that is, all at once? Did his culture originate promptly with his physical origins, that is, hologenetically? In answering these questions, we shall be solving the problem of time. A quantavolution of human genetics and culture implies human hologenesis, and both imply a collapse of time scales. If timescales are deprived of anthropological, archeological, and legendary support, they must subsist upon geology and geochemistry. And if they cannot do so, they must be radically adjusted. {S : Notes (Chapter 1: Slippery Ladders of Evolution)} Notes (Chapter 1: Slippery Ladders of Evolution) 1. On p. 188, of Volume III, Issues in Evolution, Sol Tax and Charles Callendar, eds., of Evolution After Darwin, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960, hereafter cited as ED. 2. D. Morris, Primate's Aesthetics, 70 Natural History (1961), 22-9. 3. E. V. Komarek, Sr., Fire and the Ecology of Man, Tall Timbers Foundation, Tallahassee (Florida), March 1967, 151-3. 4. Origins of Man, N. Y.: Wiley, 1966. 5. III ED 265, also 107. 6. As with Marshall D. Shalins, Elman R. Service, eds., Evolution and Culture, with papers also by D. Kaplan, T. G. Harding, and Leslie A. White, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960. 7. Ibid, v. 8. Ward C. Halstead, Brain and Intelligence, in L. A. Jef-fress, ed. Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, N. Y.: Wiley, 1951, 251. 9. Notes on the Mentality of Primitive Man, in S. L. Washburn, ed., Social Life of Early Man, Chicago: Aldine, 1-64, 11. 10. Cf. inter alia J. N. Spuhler, et al., The Evolution of Man's Capacity for Culture, Detroit: Wayne U., 1959, chap. I., and S. L. Washburn and R. Moore, Ape into Man, Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 11. N. Y.: Human Sciences Press, 1976. 12. Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, NY: W. W. Norton, 1950, 46. 13. Totem and Taboo, 1913, trans. 1950, N. Y.: W. W. Norton, 140ff. 14. The Ascent of Man, Boston: Little, Brown, 1973, 44-5. 15. A number of the cases comes from Barbara C. Sproul, Primal Myths: Creating the World, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1979. 16. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, Boston: Gambit, 1969, 306. 17. Ibid., 309. 18. Ibid., 252, 118. 19. John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1972, 391. 20. Mankind Evolving, 1962, N. Y.: Bantam, 1970, 1-2. 21. Moons, Myths and Man, London: Faber and Faber, 1936, 165. 22. Princeton University Press, 1964. 23. Ernst Mayr, The Emergence of Evolutionary Novelties, I. ED. 354ff; St. George Mivart, Genesis of Species, London: Macmillan, 1871. 24. Descent of Man, 1871, 1883, 440, cf. 435. 25. Human Evolution and Culture, II ED 52. 26. Spuhler, op. cit., p31. 27. Op. cit., 352. 28. Paul Satz, A Test of Some Models of Hemispheric Speech Organization in the Left- and Right- Handed, 203 Science, 16 March 1979, 1133. 29. Page 541. 30. The Antecedents of Man, Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971, 359. 31. Taxonomic Categories in Fossil Hominids, 15 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology (1951), 109-17. 32. I. ED. 354ff. 33. Buettner-Janusz, op. cit., 349. 34. Descent of Man, 432. 35. III. ED. 141-2. Cf. Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, N. Y.: Basic Books, 1981; Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, N. Y.: Mentor, 1982; T. M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleontology, San Francisco: Freeman, 1972. 36. Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology, quoted by L. R. Godfrey in Natural History, June 1981, 9. 37. Roger Lewin, Evolutionary Theory Under Fire, 210 Science Nov. 1980, 883-7. 38. J. S. Weiner et al., The Piltdown Forgery, London: Oxford, 1955; Nature, 2 Nov. 1978. 39. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1981, 363. Washburn and Moore, op. cit. Buettner-Janusz, op. cit.; NY Times, Feb. 7, 1980 on new Aegyptopithecus discoveries by Elwyn Simone. 40. The Ape's Reflexion, N. Y.: Dial, 1979. 41. Buettner-Janusz, 146, 350-1, et passim. 42. C. O. Lovejoy, The Locomotor Skeleton of Basal Pleistocene Hominids, IX Proceedings, Congress, UISPP, 14 Sept. 1976, 157. 43. Alan Mann, Australopithecine Demography, Ibid. 181. 44. Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, 1976, 260. 45. Milford H. Wolpoff, Competitive Exclusion Among Lower Pleistocene Hominids: The Single Species Hypothesis, 6 Man 4 (1971), 606. 46. Some Evidence for the Ideologies of Early Man, in S. C. Washburn, ed., Social Life of Early Man, 133. 47. Ibid. 121. 48. Chronology of Paleolithic Cultures in France, in Renfrew, ed., The Explanation of Culture Change: Models in Prehistory, Pittsburgh, U. of Pitt., 1973. F. Ameghino, in several works at the turn of the century, claimed an Acheulian culture of the Lower Paleolithic in South America. 49. The Relationships between Neanderthal Man and Homo Sapiens, 56 Amer. Anthro. (1954) 1011. 50. Peter Kolosimo, Spaceships in Prehistory, Secaucus, N. J.: University Books, 1979, source not cited. 51. Chinese 'First to Australia, ' Melbourne Sun, Aug. 14, 1982. 52. Some Population Problems involving Pleistocene Man, 22 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium of Quant. Biol. 1957, 67-8. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 2: } {T HOMINIDS IN HOLOGENESIS} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO HOMINIDS IN HOLOGENESIS Might all types of known hominids and proto-humans have been of the species homo sapiens (schizotypus) in physiology and culture? Might these and all modern races have appeared during the past 14,000 years? Might man have originated hologenetically in the holocene period, by quantavolution? Such is the line of questioning and argument to be followed here; outrageous as it may be to conventional theory, it may be also productive. We have already noted that australopithecus had certain human qualities. We can pick up the analysis again. He was adequately supplied with cranial matter. Specimens exceeding the minimal brain size known for normal humans have been discovered. His brain-body build proportions were modern. His size was that of many millions of modern people. His dentition was close to modern man's, far removed from the apes. He was bi-pedal and held his head high (higher than we do, said Louis Leakey). He was social. He used tools. He built enclosures. He was right-handed. It appears that his brain was hemispherically asymmetric, which introduces additional human potentials. McKinley, Wolpoff says, demonstrated that Australopithecus (gracile and robust) followed a 'human' model of short birth spacing, and Mann showed that the rate of australopithecine development and maturation were delayed, as in modern man, rather than accelerated, as in modern chimpanzees. (Based upon the timing of molar eruption.) There are no signs yet of his having had speech, but no evidence to the contrary; Louis Leakey thought he had a human palate. There have been few indications yet of his having been religious and artistic. There are signs of his having used fire. He was connected with homo erectus in time and with the Acheulian-Chellean culture at Olduvai, which culture extends into the Terrafine of North Africa and is found also at Swanscombe and Steinheim, with practically modern man. Opposing the theory that australopithecus was human stands largely the thesis that he is anatomically too different from modern man. To the forgoing response may be added the following: we do not know what are the limits of variation within the single species or how the principal distinction employed -- that interbreeding be impossible -- would apply here. It is of significance that Johanson had persistent doubts about classifying his fossil hominid, Lucy. He argued that she might be called homo, but relented at the prospect, then, that all australopithecines would logically have to be regarded as of the homo line. Where would we go to find our hominid ancestors? The search for the missing link would begin again. While at the University of Chicago, Charles Oxnard compared fossil australopithecines with living apes and men by fine measurements of the foot, pelvis, fingers and other bones, transferring the measures to computer tapes for multivariate analysis [1] . Geometrically this is the equivalent of constructing and viewing from one position a three-dimensional model of the swarms (of points measuring similar objects) and then rotating and viewing the model from a new position that best separates the swarms. His studies suggest that the australopithecine bones are uniquely different from both man and the chimpanzee and gorilla. Applying stress analysis to the bones supports his comparisons derived from the computer analysis in that the finger bones of man are incompetent for both knuckle-walking and hanging-climbing, whereas those of the Olduvai australopithecines are poor for knucklewalking, but adapted for hanging-climbing. Oxnard believes also that australopithecus might have been better equipped to run than to stride bipedally. One wonders when the Olduvai creature of the savannahs stopped walking on his knuckles, how he used his hanging-climbing faculty, and why his hands were not scuppered for scooping fish from the successive Lakes of Olduvai. Kamala, the Indian wolf-girl, went on all fours and could not stand, until after years of coaching; her hands were described as very strong and rough; she could run, rising on her digits. Her anatomy was normal for homo sapiens. The races of mankind are distinguishable as skeletons, but are one species; so the hanging- climbing hands of Olduvai man may be of minor importance if he were otherwise human. Australopithecus may be a branch of the human line that habitually clung and climbed. Better yet, he may have maintained an ancestral feature that was finally bred out. It may be suggested, also, that he originated wherever homo emerged, and that the quantavolution was so open-ended as to provide a remarkable diversity of human types in the beginning, followed by a diffusion of these types around the world. Soon the types would double back, and merge with, or exterminate each other. There is much diversity among the australopithecines themselves to fuel controversy; several attempts have been made to call new specimens by new species names. Generally, anthropologists have wanted to join them together as a single species, if only to avoid barren disputation and to make it easier to sum up the primordial situation in textbooks. Charles Oxnard points out that a recent finding at East Rudolph, by Richard Leakey, of the keystone of a foot arch (talus) has been dated as the same age as, or older than, the Olduvai australopithecine. Yet the new find is much larger, more similar to that of modern men, according to the multi-variate analysis of Bernard Wood. Richard Leakey found also a skull dated from two to three million years of age with an endocranial volume of 800 cubic centimers (the australopithecine volume being generally much less), showing an overlapping of cranial capacities with homo erectus. Then, too, an arm bone fragment from Kanapoi, dated at four million years, has already been shown... to be very similar to that of modern man. In this phrase, very similar, we can read within the range of variation of modern man. The various pieces of evidence, according to Oxnard, add up to meaning that perhaps as long as 5,000,000 years ago (and the possibility is not lost that future finds may place this further back in time) there may well have been creatures living that were generally similar to homo erectus and therefore classifiable as man in a way that we must deny to any australopithecine (whether named H. habilis, H. africanus or whatever else). That is, we should say, erectus was even more modern in anatomy than australopithecus. But probably present anatomical differences between the pygmies of the Congo and their tall black neighbors are as great as between australopithecus and homo erectus; they discourse in the same language (pygmies adapt and use neighboring languages), intermarry, have continuous commercial dealings, and in fact are symbiotic. {S : HOMO ERECTUS} HOMO ERECTUS Now it is homo erectus who comes to mind, and we would like to know whether he, too, might be human. If so, how did he come to be created? And when was he created? And if five million years old, or three, or one, or one-half, or one-tenth -- to cite various estimates -- why then should he have evolved so slowly until the Upper Paleolithic, which is variously reckoned at from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago? Homo erectus cannot be dismissed from the motley ranks of modern man. He had large supraorbital ridges but so have some modern individuals and so, too, Neanderthal man, who had a cranium larger than modern man and a culture. Home erectus had a low skull, yet possessed the cranial capacity of the smaller skulls found among ourselves. And amongst ourselves, cranial size has little or no relationship to average intelligence and competence, or perhaps even to extreme intelligence. Le Gros Clark, seeking to prove gradual evolution, wrote that by the end of the Middle Pleistocene, the hominid skull had attained a degree of development very similar to modern man; indeed, except for the rather strongly developed supraorbital ridges, some of the cranial remains of this date are hardly to be distinguished from modern man. [2] His Middle Pleistocene was about 500,000 years ago, and in cultural terms might now be termed Lower Paleolithic, because well-developed stone age cultures dated at 250,000 years ago have been uncovered, as in Tadshik, U. S. S. R. Bj”rn Kurten alludes to modern humans with a brain case of 1400 cc and using fire, discovered in Hungary at Vartesz”ll”s in the 1960's and dated at 400,000 years ago [3] . Probably homo erectus and homo sapiens were contemporaries. Inasmuch as fire making was also assigned to Peking man, homo erectus whether 400,000 or four million years ago, it would seem that humans have been allowed an inordinately long time to sit around fires in a mental funk. In 1975, field work at Koobi Fora in northern Kenya resulted in the demonstration of contemporaneity between KNM-ER 3733, an unequivocal homo erectus cranium, and KNM-ER 406, an obvious robust australopithecine. This was dramatic confirmation of earlier interpretations that suggested the existence of two distinct hominid lineages in the African early Pleistocene [4] . In Java, homo erectus and meganthropus were living side by side in the Middle Pleistocene [5] . Presently, radiometric dating, particularly the Potassium-Argon test, is determining the ages of hominids, and this test is applied ordinarily to volcanic issue. The stretching of the time of hominids has gone on regardless of definitions of boundaries, and little attention is given to traditional geochronology. If the volcanic ashes imbedding a bone are adjudged to be two million years old, that is usually the end of age reckoning. So the hominids have gone back beyond the Pleistocene well into the Pliocene. How baffling the time element can be is suggested in an incident. A skull of homo erectus was discovered in Kenya by Bernard Ngeneo, working under Richard Leakey. It was dated at 1.5 million years. Peking man, a prototype of homo erectus had been dated by non- radiometric methods at 0.5 million years or less. Leakey said, this raises questions about the true age of Peking Man. The Chinese must develop a new, different way to date their sites for more accuracy. Upon re-examination, they'll probably find these fossils to be a million years older than now dated. [6] In effect, the 40K-40A dating method is giving very old and by implication good results, and should be the sole method of plotting man's ascent! If so, some dates of hominid and homo fossils that were estimated before radiometric methods were employed may be useless. Or else these types lived for millions of years on Earth. As I stated earlier, modern types are now being found aged in the millions of years, not only skulls of modern volume but also modern bones, and now modern footprints. {S : PEKING MAN} PEKING MAN Sinanthropus, the Chinese version of homo erectus, from Choukoutien [7] , probably had a cerebral mechanism for speech. He was also righthanded as judged by cerebral asymmetry and the way he made and used tools. His occlusal trough was the same as ours and he chewed the same way. His two lateral upper incisors display a crown morphology quite typical for this region in various races of modern man. The upper central incisors were longer than in the Northern Chinese today. The lower molars were of a generalized and progressive type... one whose slight modification in a given direction may readily produce a condition dominant in modern hominids (The experts who say this make a comment that should be borne in mind when comparing ancient and modern man: that the most distinctive peculiarities of modern man are degenerative in origin.) Sinanthropus built fires and made artifacts of quartz; layers of ashes were uncovered and thousands of pieces of worked quartz. We will treat this matter when we discuss cultural hologenesis, but it may be worthwhile to mention here that the Choukoutien formation must be considered as a perfectly homogeneous and distinct stratigraphical unit. To our view, this signals the possibility that the Choukoutien scenario was brief, not enduring for a hundred centuries or a thousand centuries. An archaelogical columnar section illustrates the distribution of prehistoric culture in relation to deposits of North China, as known to Black and his collaborators half a century ago. I have tabulated it here. Note how crowded the holocene period is in relation to the Pleistocene and Pliocene sections, and yet how heavy its cultural development. So much time is allotted to the earlier periods because convention so dictates, i. e., such is the ruling paradigm of evolutionary time. But inspection of the contents of the column reveals plainly that practically all of its material could have been deposited in weeks, years, or centuries. The deposits are precisely of the type that occur in floods and storms: sandy lacustrine deposits, loams, loess, and gravel. (In The Lately Tortured Earth, I examine evidence of an extraterrestrial origin of the loess.) It is unlikely that hundreds of thousands of years elapsed, as the report declares. This idea is especially poignant because the Choukoutien fossils and artifacts were found in lenses of deposits that were swept into a rock cleft, fissure, or large cave, filling it up, until, in our day, they were come upon in the course of quarrying. That the total setting is recent is attested to by occasional unsuspecting sentences in the reports: the fissure contains such a wide range of fauna from Late Pliocene and Upper Pleistocene (at least 1 myr) that it is not easy to decide to which of them it stands more closely related, so it is placed as Lower Pleistocene. The fossils... constitute a curious and heterogenous collection of types... Such forms as the marmot, the camel, the antelope and the ostrich seem rather out of their due place. Possibly they were accidental wanderers along the plain, unless we admit that the plain itself was the steppe, then elevated considerably above the present flood plain level. Also Though these pioneers probably arrived with a knowledge that crude stones could be used in a variety of useful ways, it would seem probable that the lithic industry of Choukoutien was largely if not wholly a slow autochronous development; that the latter in any case was indeed an extraordinarily slow one, is witnessed by the relatively insignificant advances made in technique over the many, many centuries during which the Sinanthropus community must have occupied the great cave of Choukoutien... The climate was mild. Curiously enough, however, a generally effective faunal barrier seems to have existed then just as now, between the Yangtze and Hoangho basins. Just as now! Why not now? There are some Mousterian (Neanderthal) cultural affinities: As a matter of fact most of the... quartz specimens would seem to be indistinguishable from the major part of the quartz artifacts which have been collected in some of the Mousterian caves in France. Then: There also occur throughout the deposit vast numbers of burnt and fragmented bones. Further, much of the deposit is of ashy and burnt clay of different colors, possibly of a great many fires, but also possibly of wind and water transported ashes. Almost nothing but cranial parts of Sinanthropus was found in the deposits, despite the abundance of mammalian bones in the thousands of cubic meters of debris examined. Could the skulls alone have been buried in the pit (a possible Mousterian practice)? Or washed in from a nearby settlement? One can conclude that more direct evidence supports a short-time life of the cave than a long-term history. Yet pressure is exerted on the curators of the site of 'Peking Man' to redate it to carry it backwards in time from 200,000 years to over a million years, so as to match East African specimens of homo erectus, which in turn has been found in association with australopithecus, and this extends backwards by another two million years, all based upon the validity of potassium-argon radiodating which is suspect. It is not beyond reason that this whole dating scheme will soon collapse and the hominids will be carried forward in time, leap-frogging the geochronological conventions of the 1920's, to the very edge of the holocene, a dozen thousand years ago. {S : FOOTPRINTS} FOOTPRINTS At a site, G. Laetoli, Tanzania, the fossil imprints of three individuals, thought to be gracile australopithecines, were discovered in a consolidated tuff of volcanic ash dated by the K-A method at 3.6 to 3.75 million years. A stereometric camera was used to compare the footprints of these two individuals with modern footprints. The contour patterns are similar. The impression of the heel, ball, arch and big toe are similar. The pattern of weight and force transference through the foot... also seem to be very similar. [8] A lucid description of the K-A dating technique is to be found in Lucy (187-207). Johanson and his collaborators worked hard on Lucy's K-A dating of three million years to reduce the margin of error from 200,000 to 50,000 years. Then, on the basis of new information coming from paleomagnetic matching of rocks here and elsewhere and matching of dated fossil pigs found in rock strata of the same type elsewhere (biostratigraphy), they discarded the 3m/ y date for a new older date of 3.75 m/ y. Lucy became 750,000 years older. One can scarcely be surprised if the reader, at first awfully impressed by radiochronometric machines, becomes now disenchanted when these are abandoned for divination from pig bones. Perhaps Lucy is a million or two years on the younger side and was gassed with her friends in a recent volcanic oven. And maybe the footprints at Laetoli were made by the Leakey family on an outing, before they had their first foundation grants. But this we know cannot be, for Mrs. Leakey would remember whether the volcano was then active. The age of Lucy did not long stand where Johanson had placed it. In 1982 Boaz and others made new faunal comparisons that younged her and her earlier Afar associates by half a million years, and F. H. Brown compared volcanic tufts and likewise found Lucy much younger than she had seemed to be; a basalt testing at 3.6 m/ y lay above a tuft of 3.2 m/ y, the basalt test, less reliable, was superseded [9] . Johanson could recognize his shoeprints and a cigarette package in the wadi where he had worked two years before, for there had been no rain. Yet we surveyed the 333 site. A good deal of sandstone had crumbled down from the overburden above. It was now scattered in large blocks and smaller chunks over the hillside that had been so carefully screened for fossils two years before. Two years and 3.75 million years: close to two million times that amount of debris might have been dumped in the area since Lucy's days, even with a uniform climate (which he claims) and no natural disasters to muck it up (but 10 volcanos were active thereabouts in Lucy's days). Old or young, the hominid and homo types have overlapped in time and habitat, as well as in numerous traits. Michael H. Day writes: It has been pointed out by a number of workers that the approximately contemporaneous Ternifine mandibles (jawbones) of Algeria and the Peking mandibles of China show extreme similarities; the great similarities between the Peking femurs (thighbones) and the Olduvai Hominid 28 femur have also been noted. A reasonable explanation of this similarity is that migratory hunting patterns had brought many groups of Homo erectus into contact and that exogamous (marrying outside the tribal group) breeding patterns had resulted in the widespread occurrence of certain traits. These similarities are very likely too great and consistent to have resulted from separate evolution along parallel lines in isolation; and, indeed, the degree of similarity seen in the available material makes it extremely unlikely that long-term isolation was a factor in human evolution after the early middle Pleistocene [10] . Ashley Montagu long ago pointed out that Swanscombe man, who was quite modern, preceded Neanderthal, and that a Swanscombe type was found at Quinzano, Italy and placed in the Middle Paleolithic. Also before Neanderthal came Fontechevade man, with cultural remains, and he would appear in all respects a modern type of man. [11] He alludes to Louis Leakey's Kanam and Kanjara discoveries as modern but Middle or Lower Pleistocene. {S : AMEGHINO'S ARGENTINE HOMINIDS} AMEGHINO'S ARGENTINE HOMINIDS The extensive works of Fiorentino Ameghino, the Argentine paleontologist and archaeologist, are due a review in the light of recent oceanography, paleontology, and anthropology. During his lifetime he was attacked and ridiculed; he lost his university position for his ideas; nor has his fame been restored to this day. Several of his claims, apart from the many new species of extinct animals that are accredited to him, are beginning to ring true. He proposed, on the basis of numerous explorations and excavations, that man had existed, with an Acheulian culture, in the Pliocene period and earlier, an age that only now is being invaded by East African hominidal discoveries. He found human remains, tools, and habitats associated with the giant fauna that were extirpated at the end of the Pleistocene. He found carapaces of giant turtles, with diameters around 1.5 meters, that could house dwellers of the plain, and inside of them, flint tools and selected bones; man, he thought, used these carapace homes on the treeless plains to avoid the giant animals of the age. He could not but believe that the association of man and great animals stretched far back into the Pliocene, even into the Miocene, and possibly the Eocene. He argued vehemently for the existence until recently of land bridges between South America and Africa, actually in the time of man. No doubt that he would have welcomed the theory of continental drift in vogue today, although he followed a theory with other well-known writers, that the land between the continents had sunk, rather than split up and drifted. His most shocking hypothesis was that mankind had originated in the pampas of southern South America and had moved North and East across continental connections. He called the Central Atlantic bridge the Guyana-Senegal connection. This is also the Antilles- Mediterranean link, which Suess, Lapparent, and other geologists and paleontologists perceived to exist in the Tertiary period [12] . I believe, he wrote, that one can regard as susceptible to nearly rigorous proof the following facts: 1. The American population is not a unique and homogenous race but the product of crossings of different races. 2. One finds individuals and tribes representing races of the Old World, but the mass of people is distinctly different... 5. Emigrations from the Old World always found the Americas peopled by natives... 7. While Europe was still peopled with savages, America possessed very advanced peoples living in great cities and constructing grandiose monuments. 8. At different periods, new emigrations took place toward the Old World... 10. The most ancient peoples of Europe, Africa and America were in communication. 11. The communications were facilitated by land, today disappeared. 12. The existence of this land can be demonstrated by tradition, prehistory, archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, philology, anthropology, botany, zoology, paleontology, and geology. 13. Up to now, science has not been able to determine in what corner of the globe man or his precursor made his appearance for the first time. Ameghino describes skeletal material and crania from the Canyon of Moro (North of Necochea) [13] as of a people rather over four feet tall, long-headed, prognathic, small-brained, small-toothed, and generally exhibiting bone-structures foreign to modern man. He called this group of hominids Homo sinemento. In another paper, Ameghino and his brother describe an apparently incised Protorotherium jawbone that they discovered. This would place Patagonian man over thirty million years ago, in the Eocene age, far earlier than the most radical of present-day datings which range up to five million years, and then only hypothetically. Two famous anthropologists from the United States visited the site, Ales Hrdlicka and Bailey Willis; neither accepted Ameghino's early datings of man or even the presence of a hominid in the Western Hemisphere, much less the four races of hominid that Ameghino claimed to have discovered. Since the present author has not studied the problem extensively or at first hand, and indeed the materials for such a study may no longer exist for specialists to investigate, one can only remain in a state of mystification, hoping that the search for primordial humans in South America will be vigorously pursued. {S : METHODOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES} METHODOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES Oxnard's statistical, computer-assisted techniques of comparative anatomy might well be applied to test new hypotheses. They are especially adapted for logical operations in which time should be squeezed out. Pearl computed coefficients of variations in the human species, along seventy dimensions. G. Simpson deemed the results to show a not unusual variability in comparison with other mammal species [14] . The data, he thought, indicated that man was changing rapidly. If modern man is so variable in physical structure, it can be assumed that fossil men (hominids included) will also be at least as internally deviant, and in fact they are, even if the australopithecines and homo erectus are examined separately. But now let us group Neanderthals and proto-modern types with modern man, and australopithecus with homo erectus. The number of parameters of difference within the two groupings will probably remain the same - the aforesaid seventy perhaps. The variations or values within each grouping will increase. What are the two sets of coefficients of variations? What are their means and extremes? Are all of these indices equal within the two groups? Then plot the ancient aggregate against the modern aggregate on every parameter, and on the means and extremes. Calculate all the differences and principal sets of differences and express them statistically. Test then the following hypotheses: a) The internal differences of the ancient group are of the same mean and range values as those of the modern group. b) The differences between all individual values and sets of values of the ancient and modern groups are not significantly greater than the internal differences found in each of the two groups. Both hypotheses are deemed to be supported if the differences trend toward their confirmation. If the hypotheses are largely confirmed, elapsed time between ancient and modern man must be presumed to approach zero time. The conclusions thus derived are subject to attack from 1) Independent measures of time by geochronology and any evidence of an independent archaeological kind such as aberrational cultural developments, as well as by 2) Independent knowledge from evolutionary genetics, from evolution by other means such as natural selection, and from paleontology concerning the length of time that the traits under examination require to reach their extreme parameters. If neither kind of independent control is valid and reliable, beyond the limits to which the aforesaid tests of the hypotheses are valid or reliable, then the hypotheses may be maintained: The groupings of ancient and modern man are internally homogeneous; elapsed time between ancient and modern man must be very short. Since little of this proposed work has been performed, however, the value of the hypotheses must be temporarily judged on the basis of such logic and evidence as are otherwise presented in this chapter and book. {S : TIME UNNEEDED FOR CULTURE} TIME UNNEEDED FOR CULTURE Oxnard is impressed by the uses to which a long history of mankind might be put: knowing as we do the enormously greater speed of psycho-social evolution as compared with the slow rate of biological evolution, then a larger absolute time span of, say, 5,000,000 years, may allow an even greater amount of relative evolutionary time for the evolution of the behavioral, cultural and intellectual qualities that stamp man as unique from any animal [15] . But whoever said so much time was needed for cultural evolution? We shall soon be arguing that culture was practically instantaneous. Some old evolutionists gave 50,000 years as the age of modern man. They were thinking in physical, not cultural, terms. That splendid hoax, Piltdown man, was expertly placed at 500,000 years and then a few years later just as expertly placed 50,000; finally, of course, he achieved the surreal, a timeless mockery of scientoid pretense. By the newest estimates, mankind would have had one hundred times as long as these 50,000 years to rise from some non-human level to its present state. To insist that very old fossils of modern physical type must have had a culture provides a sword that cuts both ways against time. The physical as well as the mental traits of the homo species, if deemed to imply each other, might be dated very recently. Homo sapiens might be born within hailing distance of 14,000 B. P., a basepoint that I have developed in Chaos and Creation for the Holocene age. To allow quantavolution in a short time, one must agree that some part of evolution might be systemic, that is, permit a set of crucial human changes to occur together in the same moment and perhaps by the same instant mutation. The issue has been hotly argued. A plurality of biologist are point-by-point evolutionists; very few are saltationists, quantavolutionists or systemists; many are puzzled over the great variety of points to be covered over time, no matter how long, and yet unready to accept successful monsters as the answer. There is no way of soothing the bafflement and frustration concerning measures of time. I have mentioned traditional geochronology and potassium-argon radiochronometry as the bulwarks of long time reckoning. Probably I must say more of them here inasmuch as they are accepted with little question by some of the foremost paleoanthropologists. Traditional geochronology needs to be considered mainly because it offers a fall-back position, should radiochronometry be deemed invalid. The major drawback of geochronology in regard to fossil man is that time is measured by evolution; the time scale follows the fossil record of the sequence from lower to higher forms. The defensive positions of a century ago are irreparably in disrepair, however. At that time the age of the Earth itself was being argued in the highest scientific circles in the neighborhood of thirty to ninety million years, which would on today's hominid reckoning give perhaps one-tenth of all earth-time for the development of man [16] . But then man was still hovering in the five figure bracket of 20,000 to 90,000 years. Certainly, were it not for radioactive dating methods, evolutionary theory would be at an impasse for lack of time for mutation and for natural selection to transform the biosphere. Like question-begging is the plague of natural selection, circular reasoning is the plague of traditional geochronology. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately... circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales. [17] There are neither transition fossils in any number to mark the important fossil stages, nor complete fossil columns showing the evolutionary sequence; nor is evolution a hard set of facts. Yet index fossils with a doctrinaire chronology are imposed on the rocks and the rocks assigned dates. Then rocks of comparable type, though lacking fossils, are dated accordingly, and many of the strata and formations surrounding them, too. Velikovsky has ingeniously displayed, using Blanckenhorn's study of the Syrian-Palestinian rift valley, through which pass the Jordan River and Dead Sea, that the old geochronology, before radiochronometry, could properly formulate for it a history of a few thousand years, rather than many millions of years [18] . He further used proto-historical evidence, that of Biblical sources, to strengthen the theory of short duration for the rifting of the area. The older methods of geochronology are often too flexible to engender confidence. We must bring time into a new order. So long as it is the tool of the old vision of a point-by-point development of humanity, time will stretch out of bounds. The Holocene- Pleistocene boundary is not fixed upon an event, unless it be an end of the ice ages. But the ice ages are still going on, and it is doubtful that they played much of a role in the humanization and diffusion of man, except for imposing sometimes rather obvious limits upon settlement. The Pleistocene-Pliocene boundary was set by the International Geological Congress of 1950 on the basis of late Cenozoic stratigraphy in Italy, more precisely on the entrance of northern marine invertebrates into the Mediterranean. This boundary, too, is scarcely useful, and should be ignored in reckoning the origins of man in time. The Pleistocene record is always discontinuous and fragmentary, especially in glaciated areas. The task of scholars would have been incomparably easier if some stratigraphic section covering the entire Pleistocene were available, showing, for instance a complete sequence of alternating tills and soils. Unfortunately, such a section seems to be available nowhere in the glaciated areas. [19] We note, too, how geological time-reckoning expands as we go back in history. The Upper Paleolithic artistic period was dated back 30,000 years by French scholars and geologists, working on remains in caves and rock shelters. Estimates of sedimentation rates of deposits into which artifacts were sandwiched, gave such duration. But the dating of the Upper Paleolithic artists is more a working consensus that an absolutely tested fix. Pergrony and Caslis give us an age of 4500 years ago for metals, a Neolithic lasting 5000 years before then, a Mesolithic of 2500 years, an Upper Paleolithic of 30,000 years, a Middle Paleolithic of 80,000 years and Lower Paleolithic of from 800,000 to 1,500,000 years [20] . As we have pointed out, this last figure is now verging upon five million years. The Upper Paleolithic period falls between the claimed periods of competence of radiocarbon dating and potassium-argon dating. The most careful work on this period is therefore dependent on sedimentary dating in large part, and this cannot get around the possibilities of periods of flood and torrents, laying down blanket after blanket of clay and gravel to create illusions, in today's peaceful landscape, of the passage of much time. This is no new problem. For instance, when Alfred Wallace was writing his studies of the distribution of animal life in the nineteenth century, he had to confess to the great difficulty of judging sedimentary deposits [21] . In repeated discussions at the Dordogne cave and shelter sites with French scientists who have excavated and are responsible for them, I have been unable to accept their meticulous reconstructions as valid. In the end, they rely nowadays upon carbondating, which although it often upsets their expectations, at least keeps them in the Paleolithic period rather than moving them into more recent times. That radiocarbondating which is based upon measuring a ratio involving the diminishing amount of carbon-14 isotopes discoverable in organic remains, can be erratic, owing to atmospheric, species, and soil transformations, has already been the subject of investigation. Recently, changes in the Earth's geomagnetic field have been added to the several conditions that alter radiocarbon dating. Unfortunately, the usefulness of radiocarbon dating decreases exponentially as we move into the periods of the neolithic and beyond, when the need for a dating instrument becomes increasingly acute [22] . Geologists bought evolutionary time to preserve themselves from alternative catastrophic hypotheses. Whereupon the biologists and anthropologists, together with the geologists, were persuaded of radiochronometry by geo-physicists. The Potassium-Argon test claims validity over a time span of a billion years and more, beginning at 100,000 years or less before the present. Its favorite rock for testing is erupted volcanic material, ashes and lava. It establishes a constant rate of decay of the isotope potassium-40 into the isotope argon-40 (40K to 40A). Then it measures the amount of 40K and 40A in a rock sample and, by the proportion of the two, determines the 'age' of the rock, hence of fossils embedded in the rock. A high proportion of Argon-40 signifies an old age. Unfortunately for its validity, and despite the brilliant technical theory and achievements represented in its applications, the 40K ug 40A test suffers from a defect common to radioactive elements in nature. The elements migrate. In consequence, the proportions change, giving illusory ages. Rocks can both acquire and lose both elements or either alone. Moreover, one cannot rely upon a temporal sequence that appears nicely to show older strata succeeded by younger strata as a proof that the sequence occurred smoothly and without disturbance. For the whole sequence may have been laid down in short order during a turbulent period that is accompanied by high argon deposition, or the eruptive sequence of a volcanic source can lay down deposits, first heavier, then lighter, in Argon-40, owing to a tendency of such trace materials to migrate from heavier to lighter rock. It may not be necessary to disbelieve absolutely in the validity of 40K ug 40A dating to maintain a quantavolutionary opinion of the process of humanization. However, it is more difficult to explain certain critical fossil data and the mechanics of humanization while adhering to a long time perspective. Vast stretches of non-eventful time have to be accepted between the occasions of significant changes, such as bipedalism, large brain, tools, and language; or else the finest, minutes, multitudinous ladder rungs or steps are forced upon one, leaving one again in baffling contradictions and a need to search for a meaning behind evolution such that every bit of change requires every subsequent bit of change, connecting intelligence with depilation, and so, on, thus accounting for the confusion of ladder-rung- labelling, with now one trait, then another being given priority. {S : OLDUVAI GORGE} OLDUVAI GORGE Homo erectus bones and artifacts, which may even be australopithecine, have lately been discovered in the Syrian-Palestinian rift valley that we have already claimed to be of recent origin. In a letter of October 15, 1981, Professor Ernst Wreschner of the Department of Anthropology, University of Haifa, wrote me that at Ubeidiya, together with an industry of pebble tools, spheroids and primitive handaxes they found a skull fragment and a tooth. Not enough to say Australopithecus or Homo erectus. I tend towards the latter. Supposed time: ca 800,000 years. Because of the similarity with Olduvai 3 it became designated: Israel-Olduvai. The Ubeidiya site, the time of its occupation ca 800,000 years ago and till about 250,000 ago, was a lake-side camp, before the tectonic tilting. The living floor is now tilted ca 43 degrees. (Dating was by 40K-40A of underlying and intermediate basalt (lava) layers, thus similar to E. African practice generally.) But, now this tool-strewn Ubeidiya hominid site of Israel has been reevaluated with respect to homo erectus in Africa and moved from 700,000 years ago to 2 million years or more, placing it alongside or possibly older than any early Acheulian finds of Africa [23] . Here we evaluate fossil mammals from Ubeidiya, which are stratigraphically and directly associated with Early Acheulian artefacts, and find no substantial reason for considering the locality younger than 2 Myr, and possibly as much as 500,000 yr older than any record of Early Acheulian artefacts or Homo erectus in Africa. In this book, I am suggesting that the Rift finds generally should be deemed contemporaneous, so that the new placement is welcome in one sense. However I also suggest reconsidering both homo erectus and australopithecus as quite young, that is, moving the Acheulian to the beginning of the Holocene period. In other books (The Lately Tortured Earth and Chaos and Creation) I ask, too, that geological dating methods be revised so as to allow the drastic younging of the strata in which all hominids and homo erectus are found. These discoveries bear ominously upon the famous centerpiece of current paleo- anthropology, the Olduvai Gorge. The narrow floor and steep sides of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania are a typical element of the East fork of the Great African Rift, which cuts from at least South-eastern Africa to the Red Sea. The problem of Olduvai man and culture is part of a complex world wide geological history that I have outlined in Chaos and Creation. I appreciate that I cannot here reproduce these materials, nor bring to bear more extensive materials analyzing the particular setting and criticizing the methods of radiochronometry employed. I can only state the nature of the problem and alert the reader to the ultimate surprises that may be awaiting historical anthropology in this setting. To do so, I quote here from an exchange of letters with Dr. Melvin A. Cook, a geophysicist, recipient of a special Nobel prize for his studies of explosives, and author of Prehistory and Earth Models. (1966). On March 10, 1976, I wrote Dr. Cook the following: ... Presently I am perusing the three volumes of reports by the Leakeys and others on the Olduvai Gorge. Here I think is a main intellectual battle front, and one that calls especially for your attention. Here the conventional paleontologists, geologists, radiochronometricians, and evolutionists are lined up in force. All the discoveries are squarely upon the Great African Rift, the bottom of the deposits is an igneous basalt, and from then on up for 300 feet are layer upon layer of tuff, clay, marl, Bonneville-like type 'sediments' and scanty soilroot elements, with earliest fragments of australopithecus and pithecanthropus interlarded at 'living' sites, and with abundant mammalian and lake fauna including very large and modern species both extant and extinct. Hominid and faunal transitions are indistinct from bottom to top, similarly the abundant scattered artifacts. The discoveries are eroding off the walls of the rift and are also found by digging back from the walls. The whole is dated after some controversy from 2 million years at the bottom to about 300 thousand at the top, using K40-A40. Everyone is proud of this showcase of many disciplines. On the other hand, I cannot but perceive a quite different solution, that is, the initiation of a heavy cone and fissure volcanism, the uplifting of the great plateau, a watered depression, successive floodings and lava flows and fallouts of ash and dense material from the many nearby centers of volcanism, repeated incursions of hominid and faunal species, and finally the rifting as a forking from the world global fracture. Several cultures, from Asia to Kenya, 'remember' the upheaval of the rift, Hebrews, Arabs, and Blacks... If you would look at the excavation profiles in Vol. III, you will note an average of about 30 levels, most or all of which are probably turbulence deposits. In his reply, dated May 5, 1976, Dr. Cook said, inter alia: Interestingly enough, just a day before your letter of April 29 arrived, my son Krehl returned from Kenya and a visit to the Olduvai Gorge and Great African Rift valleys with a large group of geographers and geologists. He gave me his vivid first-hand impressions of the geology of this region and the occurrences of fossils. It coincided very well indeed with your descriptions. After his extensive study of the region of the Olduvai Gorge and the surrounding area, he said he is completely convinced that it should be understood in terms of a catastrophic continental drift with great global overthrusts and subsequent catastrophic read-justments that have really been the facts that have shaped the region... The global extent of the great rifts, their obvious relationship one to another, the sort of chaotic geology found in and around the rifts throughout the world - not merely those in Kenya, and the excessive fragmentation of fossil skulls and bones (human and animal) in these regions are the sorts of information that to us prove that the great rifts were created all at once, i. e., catastrophically... Your reconstruction of the situation in the Great African Rift and Olduvai Gorge is very plausible... One must handle K-A dating, consistent with all the facts dealing with it, by simply dismissing it as unscientific and completely unreliable, indeed absurd. They simply don't publish the sort of facts they know about that would kill K-A dating once and for all if they are known. For example, I have heard that year-old volcanism in Hawaii can yield K-A 'ages' of several million years... As I pointed out in PEM [Prehistory and Earth Models], the A 40 found in igneous rock is largely nonradiogenic contamination. Leakage of rare gases from the crust is too great to permit any reliable dating. Moreover, leakage can both deplete and enrich. For example, leakage of A 40 along such vast outscrapings as occur in the Great African Rift can concentrate A 40 inventory of the earth even if the earth were five billion years old... Should the hypothesis of the recency of Olduvai history become adopted, the theory of homo schizo would be strengthened. Should it not be acceptable, mysteries, contradictions, anomalies and confusion would persist, such as the astonishing million-year retardation of human implement development that I stress in these pages and that Sonia Cole, among others, refers to [24] . In such a case, the theory of homo schizo would need to retreat to a position asserting that the true human was born recently out of catastrophic events which allowed a further climactic mutation and/ or chemico-physiological transformation. We would have to abandon australopithecus and homo erectus throughout the Old World, with all of their humanlike traits, to live out very long existences sub-humanly. {S : A SURPRISING COLLAPSE OF TIME} A SURPRISING COLLAPSE OF TIME But nothing stands in the way of objectively and empirically explaining the whole set of fossil hominids that rift excavations extending from Syria to Southeast Africa have produced as a short-term occurrence under catastrophic conditions. The same is true of Peking Man (see Index) and of all other hominid and protohuman finds, except perhaps certain 'anomalies' (to borrow the excuse of the opposition). The Olduvai Gorge hominids and homo can be readily brought into the Holocene period. Consider how rapidly man changes, physiologically and culturally, under present-day observation and from our earliest direct knowledge, which is Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic. To thereupon add five million years (or 100,000 'memorial' fifty-year generations) of mental and cultural evolution to a substantially completed anatomical structure would reduce to absurdity the uniformitarian theory of the evolution of modern mankind. Or else man would have evolved, and been destroyed, time and time again, never being extinguished. (But of course this would be another form of universal catastrophic theory). So much time is not needed, if man is evolving on a consistent anatomical base. More time is now defeating to evolutionary theory; the evolutionists do not yet appreciate that they have crawled out farther and farther on a limb which may suddenly and soon break off at the trunk. For instance, could humans and hominids have lived for millions of years without having reached the Americas, where elephants, camels, horses and other mammals abounded? Would they have waited until 100,000 years ago to descend upon Australia? Nor can evolutionists cease to stretch time and beat retreat to shortened time. If the time is drastically shortened for paleoan-thropology, the radio-dating techniques collapse. Then all which depends upon the techniques -- prehistory, paleontology, geophysics, geology, climatology, etc. -- will come under revolutionary assault. Against the background of this stupendous reversal in prospect, other conclusions about fossil man pale. The australopithecines existed alongside homo erectus and other types of man, as well as many kinds of ape. The vanished hominids were destroyed by or adapted to a dominant strain of the human race, in conjunction with natural catastrophes. We shall consistently maintain that homo sapiens schizotypus (catastrophized homo sapiens) reduced his live, physiologically compatible brethren, whether australopithecus, or homo erectus, or homo sapiens, to subjection, or he exterminated them. {S : CHARDIN'S ORTHOGENETICS} CHARDIN'S ORTHOGENETICS By now it should be clear that we are heading implacably toward a theory of biological quantavolution, an eventful scene in natural history, where a hominid walked upon the stage and a human walked off. This hovers upon creationism, in the theological sense. But it is not such. Nor do we need to employ here orthogenesis such as Teilhard de Chardin calls upon, a divine or even natural penchant of the soma of a species to transmute into a phylum crowned by a mysterious noos [25] . It is not that we want to, or can, or must take away from humankind all the glories that we claim for it. But this matter is not germane, and there has always been an abundance of literature exclaiming upon the incomparable and marvelous capabilities of homo sapiens sapiens. We say that humanization is a brief episode, accomplished by a set of minor alterations, and followed by a mighty effect. De Chardin was close to such significant events of fossil anthropology as the fraud of Piltdown Man and the excavation of the caves of Choukoutien in China that gave up the skulls of Peking man (sinanthropus); he was a Jesuit and a social philosopher, playing a role rather like that of Loren Eisely in America. He accepted uniformitarianism but yet conceived of teleology in evolution. He thought that the Peking skulls, that were found throughout the whole fifty meters' depth of a filled fissure of breccia, ashes, and clay, along with many extinct animals, were of thinking humans. He saw evidences, as did others, of fire-making and deliberately chipped stones. The time of occupation was estimated, by himself and others, at between 100,000 and over one million years. Two fatal observations, that are conveniently evaded in most discussions of Peking man these days, are that the assembled material may have been catastrophically collected and impacted in a short time and that the skulls may have originated elsewhere. Peking man, later identified with a widespread group of hominids of the homo erectus designation, was part of the trajectory of a humanity moving persistently towards ever higher states of individual and affective consciousness. [26] However, it seemed to him that this hominid group died out in the Middle Pleistocene, then estimated at some 200,000 years ago, as did the more primitive but possibly also pebble-chipping australopithecines, which have also been found over half the Old World. De Chardin found himself trapped between microevolution, point-by-point changes, which he nevertheless calls quantum jumps at one place [27] no matter how small they may be, and macroevolution, a large quantum leap. But he could not imagine the form of the leap except that it might be a simple chromosomatic mutation and that the gap between the human and the australopithecine has not necessarily been greater, in size, than that ordinarily observed or stimulated, beneath our eyes, in animal or vegetable populations at present living. In the case of man, we seem to have an example of mega-evolution governed by chromosomatic play of a perfectly normal type. Yet the germplasm is orthogenetically prepared for the great leap of hominization and cerebration. This is ex post facto reasoning of a dubious kind, made necessary because Chardin feels he must have a marvelous (teleological) cause. Ultimately he would then argue for noos or spiritual intelligence, and soul, detouring around all that is known about the brainwork and central nervous system, not to mention the behavior of humankind. {S : DOBZHANSKY, SIMPSON AND QUANTUM EVOLUTION} DOBZHANSKY, SIMPSON AND QUANTUM EVOLUTION Theodosius Dobzhansky picks up the problem of the quick leap, too, in two sentences of his masterful treatise on Mankind Evolving. But he perceives the leap as involving many quick successive changes. Quantum evolution, emergence of novel adaptative design, may involve breaks in the evolutionary continuity when the differences between the ancestors and the descendents increase so rapidly that they are perceived as differences in kind. [28] He passes on to other matters, missing the chance, as does Teilhard de Chardin, of launching into a quite new paradigm. After discussing, as if they were successive, a set of evolutionary are at least behavioral changes in prehominids, he raises the question as to whether upright stance, tools, monogamous family, change in food habits, or relaxation [sic] of male aggressiveness came first. Obviously we cannot answer with certainty, but it is most likely that these changes went together, with mutual reinforcement. What we are dealing with is the emergence of a whole new evolutionary pattern, a transition to a novel way of life which is human rather than animal. This is an example of an infrequent type of evolutionary change, which Simpson (1944, 1953) has called 'quantum evolution. ' Evolutionary alternatives in general, and especially those in quantum evolution, are unlikely to involve changes of one trait at a time. The whole genotype and the whole phenotype are reconstructed to reach a new adaptative balance [29] . This passage is remarkable in that, whereas Dobzhansky's work as a whole epitomizes the conventional uniformitarian and long-term evolutionary approach to the origins of human nature, here he is practically giving away the show to quantavolution. Any being that can perform all of these operations can and must perform all other human operations; man is born. At one place he says that pre-man separated from apes no less than 11 million years ago [30] . He places the proto-homo sapiens at perhaps a quarter of a million years ago. Presumably long periods of evolutional impetus occurred, or thousands of other changes took place before the sudden transformation. Then why is the great leap needed? So it was Simpson who had originally muddied the still waters of uniformitarianism. What had he said? Reluctantly, with a step backward for every step forward, Simpson applied the term quantum evolution to the relatively rapid shift of a biotic population in disequilibrium to an equilibrium distinctly unlike an ancestral condition [31] . However, the genetic processes involved do not permit making the step with a single leap. Agreeing with earlier work of Dobzhansky [32] , the accumulation of small mutations is not only adequate to permit rapid evolution, such as involved in quantum evolution, but also the best substantiated mechanism for this. The small mutations of a rapid type he accounts for by the availability of unoccupied ecological niches and the break-up of sub-groupings of a species into isolated pockets, so that one, which is preadapted, can change swiftly to exploit the niche, while the other groups often die out. Thus, some horses grow big, strong teeth while browsing, without needing them, but then, before the big toothed horses, isolated and with browsing overdone, could become extinct, the new form begins to use the teeth to graze rough grasses, then expands to fill the new niche. Simpson grants that his examples were not on large changes that bring in families, sub-orders, and orders, but thought that a process like this could cause the large changes. Indeed it was because of the continuous puzzle of large-scale extinction followed by fully developed new species, mega-evolution, that he felt the need for a new concept. The hot breath of quantavolution was on his neck, but never could be let himself turn and face the concept. Nor could Dobzhansky or Chardin. They resorted to equivocation, denial and evasion. When, later on, reports accumulated, that characterized the boundary-periods between extinctions and new species as times of natural catastrophes, Simpson resisted attempts to take up and enlarge his idea. He says in one place, Since the groups involved in the major, more or less revolutionary episodes are highly varied in structure, physiology, and ecology, it seems unlikely that the intensified factors are the same for all of them. [33] And then, farther along, he writes, The real point is simply that a modified, relatively mild and gradualistic form of revolutionism is in accord with our present knowledge of biohistory, but that neocatastrophism is not. He likes 'neorevolutionism'. Perhaps this was because the notion of catastrophe, when fully realized as in the theory of quantavolution, affects seriously the theories of evolution, natural selection, and long-time natural history. We can allude to a final example, one from primate history, based on a chart which can be found in Buettner-Janusz's Origins of Man [34] . The families of primates have clearly boundaried histories, with little overlapping from one age to another. Six out of seven boundaries are sharply defined by extinctions. Of course, the families may have quantavoluted at these points, rater than extinguished. If so, so much the better for our theory. Where the boundaries of the geological ages are not clear --such being actually the case -- the primate families themselves delineate by their careers the period boundaries, without the help of other fossils and rock strata. We note also that most of the living taxa have fossil relatives who became apparently extinct (or did they hide themselves somewhere?) eons ago. Quantavolution is manifested throughout the ages, but perhaps the ages are not so far gone either, and quantavolutions have been frequent. Under the circumstances, a close look at the mechanisms that might produce humanization is justified. Time, period boundaries, evolution, culture, geological strata and types of humanoids -- all have begun to whirl about in our minds and we begin to wonder when the skies, too, will begin to whirl, and wish that we might have a theory -- even if quantavolutionary --to stabilize the scene. {S : Notes (Chapter 2: Hominids in Hologenesis)} Notes (Chapter 2: Hominids in Hologenesis) 1. Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution, Chicago: U. of C. Press, 1976, 169 et passim. 2. Op. cit., 608. 3. R. S. David, et al., Early Man in Soviet Central Asia, Sci. Amer., 130-7; Bj”rn Kurten, p. 113 4. D. C. Johanson and T. D. White, A Systematic Assessment of Early African Hominids, 203 Science (26 Jan. 1979), 326. 5. R. Sartonon, The Javanese Pleistocene Hominids, Proceedings, IX Congress UISPP, 14 Sept. 1976, 462, using fluorine tests. 6. New York Times, March 9, 1976, 14, news conference. 7. Davidson Black, Teilhard de Chardin, C. C. Young, W. C. Pei and Wong Wen Hao, Fossil Man in China, Series A, Noll, Geological Memoirs, Geological Survey of China, Peiping, May 1933, repr., AMS press, New York, 1973. 8. M. H. Day and E. H. Wickens, Laetoli-Pliocene Hominid footprints and bipedalism, 286 Nature (24 July 1980) 386-7; R. L. Hay and Mary D. Leakey, The Fossil Footprints of Laetoli, Sci. Am., Jan. 1982, 50-7; and on Lucy's new age. 9. See Boaz in 300 Nature (1982) 633, Brown, ibid., 631. 10. Guide to Fossil Man, 1956. 11. Time, Morphology, and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man, 57 Amer. Anthrop. (1955), 15ff. 12. L'homme pr‚historique dans la Plata, and L'ƒge des formations s‚dimentaires tertiares de l' Argentine en relation avec l' antiquit‚ de l'homme, in Obras Completas 24 vols., (Buenos Aires 1912-36), vol 2. 13. Descubrimento de dos esqueletos humanos fosiles en la Pompeano inferior del Moro, op. cit. 14. The Major Features of Evolution, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1953, 78. 15. Op. cit., p. 122. 16. E. G. J. Joly measured the runoff of sodium into the oceans to get An Estimate of the Geological Age of the Earth, of 89 million years. Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report, 1898-9, 247-88. Melvin Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models, London: Parrish, 1966 criticizes a number of such techniques. Also A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, Princeton: Metron Publications, 1981, ch. III. 17. J. E. O'Rourke, Pragmatism versus Materialism in Stratigraphy, 276 Am. J. Sci. (Jan. 1976), 51; H. M. Morris, Circular Reasoning in Evolutionary Geology, Institute for Creation Research, no 48, June 1977, iv. 18. The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, VI Kronos 4, 1981, 19. C. Emiliani, Dating Human Evolution, in ii ED. 59. 20. Notions de Prehistoire, Perigeaux, 1975, 11 21. Geographical Distribution of Animals, N. Y.: Harper, 1876, I, ch 1. 22. M. Barbetti and K. Flude, Geomagnetic Variation during the late Pleistocene period and changes in the radiocarbon time scale, 279 Nature (17 May 1979), 202-5. See Chaos and Creation, ch. 3. 23. C. A. Repenning and O. Fejfar, 299 Nature (1982), 344. 24. The Prehistory of East Africa, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 130. 25. The Appearance of Man, N. Y. Harper and Row, 1956; The Future of Man, ibid, 1964. 26. Appearance, 123. 27. Ibid., 136-7. 28. Op. cit., 213. 29. Ibid., 209-10. 30. Ibid., 183. 31. G. G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1944, 206ff. 32. Biological Adaptation, 55 Sci. Mon. (1972), 391-402. 33. In Albritton, ed., Essays in Evolution and Genetics, 291. 34. Op. cit., Figs 7.1, 7.2, pp101-2. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 3: } {T MECHANICS OF HUMANIZATION} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE MECHANICS OF HUMANIZATION If time were collapsed into a short span, cultural traces now deemed hominidal would appear human. Since footprints and bones that are deviously connected with the artifacts are also now considered close to modern man's, we may suspect that homo erectus and australopithecus, if not human themselves, of having had some human cousin living up North, say. This homo schizo would send his relatives fleeing east and south from the common ancestral home, which might be at the junction of Europe and Africa. After consolidating his position -- mainly defining his proto-mind and proto-organization -- he would reach out to contact them. Then he would extirpate or interbreed with them, and come to dominate the homo line and promptly diffuse to the geographical limits of the world. Only the docile and miscegenable would be spared. Even today, several strains of homo schizo are in danger of extermination -- the pygmies, negritos, numerous Amazonian tribes as well as other Amer-Indians, and the Eskimos, for example. If homo erectus and australopithecus were human, which we deem likely, then we should look for a hominid (X) as our ancestor. This 'X' might be much like man or a surprisingly different type. Granted that the probability is low, because he still has to appear alongside the fossil australopithecines, even modern man -- to all physical appearances -- might be his own ancestor. But, too, 'X' might be an unseemly anthropoid. Eugenics cannot say how great a change of type can occur under special conditions nor whether certain species are more capable of quantavolution than others. We note how often in the fossil record, some species change while others remain the same. And we have already been startled into the realization that the change from hominid to human may have been anatomically slight. Since we have little evidence to suggest who 'X' might be, we might leave the search for him in more knowledgeable hands, and assign ourselves the task of determining theoretically how such a hominid could become human. We have already ruled out most of the traits that scholars have joined to the ladder of evolution -- skeletal, muscular, sensory, alimentary, sexual and lingualpharyngal mutations -- as the crux of humanization. We have ruled out as well the growth of the cranium. We should also rule out the piling up of reinforced primate experience in a growing storage- box brain that would eventually begin to expel human products. One need only contrast the races of mankind to see how little difference so many changes do make in psychology and behavior. With skin color from black to pink, hairiness from hirsute to hairless bodies, height from the very tall Watusi to the neighboring Pygmy, nose from flat to hooked, head from broad to long, cranial capacity from 830 to 2000* cc., differences of dentition, of blood groups, and so on, homo schizo has nevertheless come to possess a similar array of psychological qualities whatever his outward appearances. We should look most closely for signs of self-awareness, of a split ego, for from this, we believe, and only from this, would come the flood of fear, the insatiable demand for self- control, and the outward movement of this need to control, taking the form of showers of displacements that would be transformable into human conduct. Symbolism would be the necessary external manifestation of the inward symbolizing needed to tie together the ego that had been split asunder. We would expect our newly quantavoluted person to behave recognizably as an imaginary Hominid 'X', close to the chimpanzee, in that his basic needs would be the same. Much of his behavior, too, might appear instinctive. What would become quickly a critical difference would be an unending stream of delayed and unrecognizable stimuli in great numbers. He could be interpreted as an animal trying in amazing ways to consummate a new kind of stimulus-response, where the responses were delayed, as much as he might try to speed them up. He would be an action-delayed, hence decision-craving creature. Whatever its cause, the character of the mutation may have been quite simple, confounding high-flown speculations that have adorned debate about human nature over the centuries. It may have been what Dobzhansky called a polygene mutation, carried over into many chromosomes, providing a slight quantitative, not 'qualitative' change, but yet a change with great effects. A systemic delay of microseconds in overall signal transmission in the brain might act as a suppressant of instinctual response, set up an echo of the self, and excite perennial hyperendocrinalism. The gestalt of creation (treated in the next chapter) would promptly take effect. Besides mutation, it is conceivable that an environmental constant may have changed, provoking a human response that must continue as long as the constant remains unchanged. Further the human mind may have quantavoluted culturally because of experiences so intense and memorable that a new kind of creature emerged from them. We must look into these possibilities more closely. But before we do so, I ought to stress the importance of natural catastrophes as a background and source of quantavolutions in biology. {S : ANCIENT CATASTROPHES} ANCIENT CATASTROPHES Legends everywhere carry stories of great numbers of people reduced to a few survivors. They are obsessive tales, repeated continuously over thousands of years. Psychiatrists will readily deem them to be founded upon strong memories, a possibility that most historical scholars are loath to admit. The English prehistorian Childe says that the population of England in paleolithic times numbered only in the hundreds, during neolithic times in some thousands. Were then all the people of England mustered to drag the neolithic megaliths of Stonehenge into position, and then reassembled in Ireland and Brittany for the same tasks? Mircea Eliade, whose research on myths worldwide is justly renowned, is most impressed by the obsession of all peoples with the earliest times of creation, by the permeation of the totality of their cultures with the same obsession that great and terrible events occurred; yet he has not ventured to say that anything at all happened then. Are the legends mere fantasies of primeval poets, primordial Dante's, whose plots no later poet could ever improve upon? Dobzhansky, of whom we have spoken, takes one sentence in a large book on human evolution to dismiss obsessions of creation as a 'natural' reluctance of people to conceive of infinity. Are peoples, (using his own perspective) supposed to recall their lives as apes? He and many others arrogate to an illuminated modern mind the right to conjecture and endorse ideologically the concept that humans long were few and became many with extreme gradualness. For all the other people who have ever lived, and who claim by a kind of culturally transmitted history that their ancestors arose in large numbers and were wiped out in cycles of catastrophes and revival, no place is to be reserved in science. The Holocene period itself embraces many more fundamental natural events than were once accredited to it, as the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica points out. A start has been made in assigning quantavolutions to it, but the major allocations cannot occur until chronological methods are criticized and reformed. Even though their character as ages is not yet defined, the occurrences of catastrophes of continental, if not global, scope may have occurred in half a dozen sections of the Holocene period -- approximately 2700, 3400, 4400, 5700, 11500, and 14000 years ago. I have attempted to order and designate these epochs in the book, Chaos and Creation, Chapter Four. Intervening catastrophes of less global scope were common. Plato, Boulanger, Carli-Rubbi, Cuvier, Velikovsky, Schaeffer, Hapgood, Kugler, Schindewolf, M. Cook, Kondratov, Patten, Bass, Juergens, and other scholars of times past and present have exposed the revolutionary character of natural events in such ages. For the moment, and so that argument may proceed along its main line, the extent of catastrophism of the past fourteen thousand years can be barely sketched. It would help conceptually to regard all expressions of natural forces of a destructive character witnessed by modern humanity as but the flattened tails of negatively exponential curves of catastrophism. These natural forces of the past worked through explosions of the legendary elements of earth, air, fire and water. Catastrophic action and effects were manifested over the whole globe. Their intensity was such that the potential destructive force of deviations in the motions of celestial bodies must be introduced into the equation. Legends (oral history, amnesiac fragments, and sublimated tales) assert abundantly the priority of heavenly forces as destroyers of the world on successive occasions. The locations of large meteoritic explosions are discovered in increasing numbers. Increasingly, geologists such as Ager slip from the grasp of earth- bound uniformitarianism, and astrophysicists such as John A. Simpson conceive of their realm as explosive and disorderly. It can be asserted and defended that in the past fourteen thousand years, a disorder befell the solar system that terrorized and transmutated the sensible biosphere, changed the atmosphere, cleaved and ravaged the crust of the earth, altered drastically the sky and surface waters and destroyed or severely damaged every civilization up to the seventh century before the present era. During these fourteen thousand years, it can be argued, human groups spent one-third of their time in an environment of natural and social chaos and suffered intense physical and mental stress. Again I refer to the book, Chaos and Creation. Continents were fractured; mountain ranges rose; crustal material was exploded into space; cataclysms of water, ashes, oils, gases, and fire rained from the skies; ice ages came quickly and avalanched, not melted, into oblivion. Oceans were created; seas were drained; floods raged in every direction up to the very mouths of highly placed caves; climate altered in a day and the atmosphere was deprived, enriched, and poisoned on numerous occasions. No single mile of the surface of the world can be bored for its actual stratigraphic column without discovering it to be at some points a catastrophic column. No matter what part of the destruction can be assigned to the ages before man, some part of it has to be attributed to the ages of man. Settlements and civilizations everywhere, from the Arctic Sea to the Tropics, from Spitzbergen to Tiahuanacu, are now, upon exhumation, shown to have been the victims of such events [1] . Beginning with the larger part of its surface that is below the oceans, the earth is a scene of global disaster, punctuated by habitable oases. Scientists have known so all along but, in good conscience, have refused obsessively to reveal the fact. Whether one observes the ash and debris of hundreds of ancient settlements which, as C. Schaeffer has said, are studiously ignored or whether one reports on the ashes of primeval human sites, where, comments H. T. Lewis critically, ash lenses in places like Shanidar are offhandedly treated as ash middens or hearths, the 'conspiracy of silence' governs the authorities. The Sahara, the Great Salt Lake (Bonneville) area, the Gobi desert, the arctic tundra, the sub-glacial Arctic and Antarctic regions, East Africa, Southwest Africa, and so on to many smaller locales are signs that what happened to Mars almost happened to Earth. Practically all species that became extinct, and whose careers might be followed by fossil evidence, became extinct suddenly, as for example, some three- quarters of all large animals at the end of the Pleistocene, fully within the time of man's cultural flowering. It appears, therefore, that every hypothesis trying to explain the means of humanization must be developed within the historical bounds of natural catastrophe. {S : THE HUMANIZING FACTOR} THE HUMANIZING FACTOR The closest that we can come to distinguishing a key factor in humanization is an instinct- delay system operating in the brain but serviced by the body's electrical and hormonal system. This could be called the humanizing factor. In baseball language, the animal in us has been forced to touch base several times before completing the circuit and scoring, and so the human ball game is on. A close investigation of instinct-delay (see Homo schizo II) emerged with the theory that it is an effect of the specialization of the brain, with consequent transmission delays in coordination of the total brain and organism, and that there is an overcrowding of consciousness because of a spillover of repeatedly insistent messages taking alternative routes for delivery or ending up in functional cul de sac. I shall try to formulate the process of instinct delay here in a manner that will assist in seeking the mechanism of humanization. Instinct-delay (D) is a function or ratio of the product of the mass of the brain tissue requiring service (M), and the specialization thereof (S), to the product of access facilities (the number of receptors or docks and the number of routes pursued by messages) (A), the input of electro-chemical signals (E), and the velocity of the work of transmission (V). That is, D = f( MS/ AEV). When all other variables are held constant: 1. If the mass of the brain increases, instinct-delay (D) will usually increase. 2. If specialization of the brain increases, D will usually increase. 3. If the number of message docks and the number of routes to them increase, D will usually decrease. 4. If the input of electro-chemical signals increases, D will usually decrease. 5. If the signals move faster, with less impedence, D will usually decrease. However, the variables are not entirely independent, although we do not know the extend of their interdependence. Thus, an increase in brain tissue may not bring a proportional increase in docks and routes available to supply the tissue. Nor will the larger brain necessarily be supplied by an increased input of hormones, which come from several places, or electrical charges, to transport messages. Nor do we know whether the electric and chemical signals will carry on with their former speed or will move less rapidly, unless some other factor increases their speed (which may, for example, be an electromagnetic change in the state of the environment). That is, we cannot identify precisely the agents, nor the cause of their behavior. All that we can feel confident of, at this point, is that there are here the rudiments of an explanation for instinct-delay, hence self-awareness, hence humanization. We believe, too, that such a system is capable of empirical verification and modification. Further, it seems to answer a need in science for a concept that will go along with most of what is known of human development and human nature, and will not lead us astray as we seek to understand how mutation and other mechanisms could have occurred. Finally the concept will pay a large profit when it correlates with the mental and cultural behavior of the human during and after humanization. {S : QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION} QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION We return to the contention that mentation and culture have developed by small increments over millions of years. We find in it a subtle ideological attempt at cutting change into such fine bits that it will simply blow away and nothing will be left to explain. Let us address it nonetheless. The human is compelled to behave humanly in both mind and culture. Once granted that self- awareness was a quantavolution rather than very slow evolution, mentation and culture must originate at once. So one should ask whether self-awareness came at once. Self-awareness is a trait that varies quantitatively among humans; some people are apparently unselfconscious, until closely observed -- then time, space, gods, rituals, discipline, and anxiety appear, until it is obvious that their 'unawareness of self' is a catatonic suppression. In any human group, we invariably discover a capacity to be taught self-awareness among practically everyone. Even the hominids among us, if there are such, know how to 'put on a good act. ' But let us speak of the past. Could the self-awareness of the human species as a whole, regardless of whether homo schizo ultimately emerged, and granting that he did, be a matter of slow accretion, slightly self-aware four million years ago, more so three million years ago, even more so two million years ago, practically modern a half million years ago, modern 30,000 years ago? Whereupon, would not developments that require less self-awareness take less time, and inventions demanding more self-awareness take more time? The use of the right hand, for instance, might long precede the invention of tools for the right hand, and then another long period would be allowed for language and even this divided into words for sensible things, and later words for abstractions, then drawings, then domestication of animals, and so on. All of this is not impossible. It is widely believed that some hundreds of physical and cultural changes were laid upon Hominid 'X' gradually over millions of years, and that the flowering of culture occurred among Upper Paleolithic man and then again in neolithic times, and then again in the iron age, and once more in the recent centuries of science -- these flowerings being expected as accumulative, branching effects. However, the external environment and the internal tensions of homo schizo, the ones who were fully self-aware, would immediately have stressed the whole community to maximize self-awareness. The drive is socially contagious, and irresistible. It comes from the fear of itself and the need to control itself. It is not dealt out by a third party. It is excited by itself. Therefore it cannot emerge piecemeal. It must emerge for all it is worth as soon as it exists. A homo schizo in a group of Hominid 'X' would dominate or die. But might the self-aware have been precisely those who gradually became such? No. Unless a guiding hand to physical evolution were present, we cannot expect this trait to have emerged in ever-increasing quantities by successive mentations, like a turning of the screw, each turn producing a higher level of self-awareness with a consequent output of new ideas, fabrication, and social inventions. Indeed, evolutionists teach us to avoid such pathetic notions. Who advocates such a guiding hand? The psychosomatic Lamarckians probably, and I may sympathize with them. But why should a beast will for himself a small increment of self-awareness, and then another and another, especially when the psychological effects of self-awareness are not at all comfortable, not even tolerable, so that, if man had the ability to choose, he would, like a volunteer soldier caught in a battle, renounce his original enlistment gladly. Neurotics are notoriously fond of dumb animals. Conventional evolutionary theory does not provide for an intelligence that would direct mutations toward every-increasing self-consciousness. Isolation and inbreeding among a slightly more schizoid band would be counted upon to produce a type that would, given the chance, venture forth and shove aside less able hominids, or, later on, humans. But this cannot go on for long, unless there is a mutated element present in the germ plasm allowing ultimately the full exercise of self-awareness. Here is an area where evolutionary thought is especially self-contradictory and, consequently, slippery and evasive. It can only get from one small change to the next but cannot get from the beginning to the end; it can explain some intra-species changes, like horse-breeding and the Beltsville turkey, but it cannot explain a major development. No known mechanism directs a long string of slight modifications in the germ plasm. Even if we were to concede that the jump from hominid to human were only apparently large but was biologically small, human genesis would admittedly be a hologenetic occurrence; when it occurred, hominid life changed drastically; it speciated. {S : BRAIN SPECIALIZATION} BRAIN SPECIALIZATION Nor can humanization wait upon a slowly evolving culture, no more than the bee was anatomically created and then evolved the basic elements of its social system over millions of years. Even though he does not draw the consequences -- hologenesis -- we can agree with Robin Fox when he writes: The nature of order is part of the order of nature. It is not that man is as culture does but that culture does as man is. [2] Recent researches into the differing behaviors prompted by the separate hemispheres of the brain can also be considered. Hominid 'X' may or may not have had a large brain before he was humanized, that is, before he became schizotypical. The fibrous conjunction (corpus callosum) bridging the left and right hemispheres of the brain may be playing an effective role in conditioning humans for schizotypical behavior, even if it is not indeed the physical location of the genetic factor that so many are searching for. In his treatise on The Ghost in the Machine [3] , Arthur Koestler has placed the origins of human 'mis-behavior' in a malfunctioning relation of the limbic system to the cerebral region. The basic reptilian and mammalian control and response systems are located below and behind the cerebrum, which is grossly 'over-developed' in man. The rational and constructive inclinations of the uniquely human cerebrum, he thinks, may be frustrated all too often by the more instinctive, unconscious, and irrational animal systems. Human behavior, as a result, is prone to contradictions, rage and aggressiveness, destructiveness, and madness. Even while admitting that a specialization is occurring here in the human central nervous system that can bring about schizoid behavior from a lack of perfect coordination, we must say that the problem is incorrectly stated and may explain why Koestler did not arrive at the focal center of human nature. The problem is not one of 'mis-behavior' but simply of behavior, both 'bad' and 'good, ' 'normal' and 'abnormal. ' Pari passu, there is no 'malfunctioning, ' but only 'functioning. ' We do not turn off a spigot marked 'rational' and turn on the spigot labeled 'irrational. ' Once we brush aside this specious and decrepit Aristotelianism and scholasticism, Koestler's work becomes valuable. For now it becomes possible to seek a mechanism of delayed instinct between the automatic and cognitive specialization of the brain, which, in conjunction with other sources of delayed, diffused, and over-loaded responses, may explain the self-awareness, existential fear, and profuse displacements of the human being. The bilateral structure of the brain, providing two hemispheres, had been fashioned long before the advent of humans, probably one some quantavolutionary occasion between two ages. A division of functions between the hemispheres may have come only with the origination of mankind. The skullcase tends to warp to conform to the concentration of functions in the brain; and external asymmetry conforms to the internal asymmetry. Such asymmetry, implying human specialization, may characterize most or all hominids. Ornstein asserts that hemispheric specialization (asymmetry, that is) appears to be unique to humans [4] . Handedness in favor of the right hand, and language, are dominated by the left hemisphere. Asymmetry in the language region is, for instance, discoverable on the skull of Arago XXII coming from Tautavel, France. This specimen is classified as homo erectus and assigned an age of 450,000 years by uranium-thorium and electron-spin-resonance tests. (Source: Mus‚e de l'Homme, Paris.) Besides governing right hand and body movements and language, the left hemisphere is specialized in analysis and mathematical functions. It is also assertive and, in observed behavior and experiments, tends to dominate decision-making. The right hemisphere of the cerebrum initiates and supports activities of the left side of the body, and pursues non- verbal and holistic forms of thought and appraisals of experience. It is described as artistic and analogical in its ways of processing the external world for internal consumption and action. Thomas Parry has surmised that a relation exists between ancient catastrophism and a take-over of internal and external behavioral leadership by the right hemisphere of the brain on the occasion of traumatic experiences [5] . Each hemisphere alone can convey to the whole person the possibility of physical and mental survival. Each is in constant touch with the other through the medium of the corpus callosum which carries millions of connecting links between them. The severance of this membrane has permitted direct observation of the individuality of the two hemispheres. It leaves a still normal person with two separate minds, that is, with two separate spheres of consciousness. If the key to humanization is a general delay of instinctive response with a consequent choice-factor introduced into a wide range of behavioral decisions, then a possible source of the delay lies in the corpus callosum and/ or any drug that can inhibit the full and complete communication or near-identity of action of the two hemispheres. If, for example, fatigue and exhilaration both produce schizoid symptoms, some quantitative measure of interaction between the cerebral hemispheres may define the normal schizotypical state of the hemispheric relationship; the norm itself would be genetically and/ or socially induced on a continuing basis, providing typical human behavior. The recent association of high or uncompensated adrenalin secretion with schizophrenic symptoms suggests offering this drug as a candidate for a humanizing auxiliary. One is inclined to distrust so simple a solution to so fundamental a problem, even after posting the usual warning signs: that the process is more complicated than it appears; that we know next to nothing about the circulation of adrenalin and other drugs with which it interacts in process; and that historical proofs of such an evolution are probably impossible. One might as well suppose, while offering the same type of warnings, that an electrical change has brought about human behavior. If the Earth has gained charge in recent millennia, the human body may be operating in a hyper-electrical mode relative to the environment in which it evolved. This would be the case with the biosphere generally; insects, birds, and mammals are all sensitive to electromagnetic fields and changes in them. The hominid might then become the 'nervous human' who turns upon the not-quite- quantavoluted hominids and trains them to be human, meanwhile through adaptations and interbreeding creating a new race, whose, members are quantitatively distributed about the genetic norm of the 'nervous human. ' As with every significant element in the quantavolutionary theory of homo sapiens schizotypus, the hypothesis of the physiological source of humanization is put forward to orient thought and method. The theory as a whole serves to show where we can go when deprived of the assumptions of a uniformitarian external force-field of evolution and of the free, long expanses of evolutionary time. {S : SIGNALING HORMONES} SIGNALING HORMONES A logical candidate for mutation and environmental transformation in the chaotic period is the endocrinal system. It is an anciently derived collection of glands, separate from but connected with the brain, the nervous system, blood pressure, metabolism, growth, sex, fear, and stress. It discharges numerous hormones that stimulate and regulate these systems. Its main components are the pituitary gland, the pancreas, and the adrenal cortex and medulla. Lionel Tiger places phyletically prescribed environmental boundaries around sociogenic processes, treating mainly of endocrinology [6] . The bio-social movement may help quantavolution much, because of the intense scrutiny it gives to the logically necessary biological and social interface where the great change of humanization had to occur. The endocrinal system, especially the adrenal cortex, is stimulated by stress and establishes counter-stresses in the organism. For example, rats bred in the laboratory have smaller adrenal glands and less resistance to stress, fatigue, and disease than wild rats. Their thyroid glands are less active and their sex glands develop earlier and permit greater fertility. They have smaller brains, are tamer, and are more tractable. In humans, similar differences occur between people who are stressed by the environment and those who are not. New Yorkers usually have enlarged adrenal medullas, compared with the American population at large. Paranoid and obsessive traits, involving distortions of reality, are commonly observed among persons who suffer from an excess of adrenalin either as a result of great fear and anxiety or in consequence of inadequate suppressive and discharging chemicals and mechanisms. Schizophrenia involves at least some separation of the 'primary' self from a second self, which includes part of the self and engages in profuse identifications with the outer world. Frequently observed in mind-workers, it evidences heavy pituitary stimulation of the brain as well as insulin and adrenalin 'excesses. ' The brain often becomes ungovernable owing to endocrinal disturbances. Notable, too, is the association of fear, aggressiveness, and sexuality in variations of the endocrinal system. It is then reasonable to suppose, for instance, that sexuality is determined more by the stresses of the quantavolutionary period than by the aboriginal oedipal complex or simple sexual drives. Other modes of mutation or transformation also point to the importance of the endocrinal system in developing humanness. Solar radiation stimulates the adrenal system, both directly and indirectly. Hence, abruptly changed levels of solar and other types of extraterrestrial radiation may have prompted humanizing behavior. The types of social imprinting imposed upon the first generations of mankind and all generations since then were, so far as we can tell, the same; delusory, symbolic, obsessional, and aggressive; these are typical products of endocrinal excesses. Finally, the obsessive will to mutate, to change one's corebeing down to the egg and sperm themselves, has been proposed by Freud as an evolutionary example of the omnipotence of thought; so strong a will would be more probably and capably generated in individuals who are endocrinally excited. More than by growth of the brain, therefore, the accelerated development and passover of hominid to human in a quantavolutionary period may be owed to the endocrinal system. The hypophysis or pituitary gland excretes hormones that can arrest growth and cause dwarfism by reduced excretion, or giantism by increased excretion. An increase also probably increases the rate of insulin secretion by the pancreas. Growth hormone directly enhances transport of at least some and perhaps all amino acids through the cell membrane to the interior of the cells. [7] It also depresses glucose utilization by the cell. The growth hormone is secreted continually from birth to death. If the hormone reduces or perhaps delays growth, and at the same time can deprive the cell, including the brain cells, of nutrient amino-acids, and can also diminish insulin output, can it then contribute to the delay and dispersion of signals through the brain? It is conceivable; experiments can be designed to test the hypothesis. Man is supposed to be fetalized as compared with the apes since in the adult man the size of the head and the relative proportions of its parts resemble those in juvenile apes rather than those in adult apes. Bolk speculated that fetalization may have been caused by changes in the hormonal balance in the body, especially by a decrease in the production of the anterior pituitary hormone [8] . Dubrow has correlated growth and size of humans and many other life forms with changes in the intensity of the earth's magnetic field. We may wonder then whether an endocrinal change produced by a change in the GMF might stimulate pituitaryism and expand australopithecus to modern human proportions. Since the left brain hemisphere is asymmetric with the right hemisphere, being larger occipitally, and this area is close to the calculating and speech centers, then a growth of the total cranium implies an important proportionate growth of this area and its special functions. That it may be more than proportionate is indicated by Dubrow's finding that the length of the skull geographically varies inversely with the intensity of the GMF [9] . Thus humanization would accelerate. The quantavolution that split man's mind and freed it to displace copiously upon the world may thus have been influenced by a declining GMF. This 'freedom' would then take the form of the multiple selves, or poly-ego. I have noted on occasion that drugs which are used to treat diabetes of the pituitary variety, and are intended to reduce blood glucose concentration, occasion paranoid suspiciousness as a side effect. But this and these other workings of the endocrines are puzzles within riddles: as F. Dunbar said, There are no disorders of single endocrine glands. [10] {S : MUTATION} MUTATION Let me consider now mutation, asking the ethologist and expert upon instinct, Tinbergen, to describe the situation: Present day theories of evolution consider mutations in the widest sense as the basis of all heritable change. The variability due to mutational change may show directiveness of various types, adaptive as well as non-adaptive. Adaptiveness is brought about by selection. Speciation, or the divergent evolution of populations originally belonging to one species, starts with geographical expansion of the species' range to such a degree that two or more populations of one species become reproductively isolated. The various populations thus isolated are usually slightly different in genetical make-up right from the beginning. This difference, together with the environmental differences leading to different selection pressure, account for divergent evolution of the populations which ultimately results, via the formation of geographical races, in the origin of new species, genera, and even families. Whether this 'micro-evolutionary' process is at the bottom of all evolutionary divergence, even of those often called macro-evolutionary, is a matter of disagreement. It is certain, however, that the causes of evolution can only be studied in micro-evolutionary processes [11] . A gene is a large molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) wound on a double helix, along which are strung in fixed order some simple chemical structures called nucleotides. Only 4 types of nucleotides are ordinarily found in one and all chromosomes but their varied arrangements establish by code the behavior to be followed by any given gene. Hence each of the supposed 50,000 genes that carry the full hereditary code of instructions has its unique code that determines its unique job. A gene mutates, that is, changes its code and hence its 'building plan' by a disarrangement or loss or destruction of one or more nucleotides of the helix. This accident occurs when a foreign chemical or particle or charge or wave or organism enters the chromosome and its gene, with especial effects when the gene is in the process of duplicating itself. Once the gene is altered, it transmits new instructions and whatever aspect of the organism is under its command will accordingly change. Mutations may also affect the organization of genes within the chromosome, rearranging them or even rearranging chromosomes. It can be estimated (following calculations by Wallace and Dobzhansky) that in the case of man, the number of 'spontaneous' ('natural, ' 'background') mutations that would occur for a world population of four billion people in 350 generations amounting to 10,000 years would be only around two hundred (200). Since practically all mutations are 'cosmetic, ' harmful, or lethal changes, it is embarrassing to place one's faith in mutation (at least as here construed) as the factor bringing about speciation from hominid to man. Indeed, Wallace and Dobzhansky, after presenting the negative and positive effects conclude that mutation is something to be avoided. More-over, Lack of genetic variability for further evolution of the human species is something we need not worry about. [12] . Like the last man to squeeze aboard a crowded bus, they don't want the driver to stop anymore to pick up someone else. Here, however, we are concerned with the point of origin of the bus: presumably the change from hominid to man must be applauded. Somewhere along the way this genetic event occurred. But we can understand the plight of uniformitarian evolutionists. How many mutations are represented in the differences between hominid and homo schizo -- one, ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand? Geneticists cannot say, because, excepting a very few cases, they do not know yet what genes control what changes to what degree. (Anthropologists, such as Washburn and Moore, in their book From Ape to Man, can brave the statistical jungle to extrapolate, but fail.) If we retrocalculate the figures given above, we would have, say, a single viable mutation per ten million years. For, if the humanizing population is set at four millions instead of four billions over whatever time period is involved, a generous estimate by conventional reckoning, then we multiply the time required for 200 mutations one thousand times, giving 10,000,000 years. If one in 200 mutations is viable, then we get a viable mutation every ten million years. But the difference between viability and the ape-to-man difference is still to be bridged. Would then 500 viable mutations be required in order to bet upon the critical change occurring? If so, this would appear to require five billion years. Fortunately, we can dispense with further arithmetic, since authorities have pronounced this to be the age of the Earth itself. To explain the creation of man by mutation under a uniformitarian theory is thus impossible. To call in natural selection, as is usually done, does not help. For natural selection, unless it is sheerly ad hoc or post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, must have some genetic possibility to work with. It must depend upon mutation to begin with. One cannot assume that homo sapiens resides in 'Hominid X' like a homunculus, awaiting only isolation and inbreeding, or a shift in moisture-carrying winds, or a new supply of protein-rich alligator meat to give the creature sustenance. If we are to use mutation theory at all, we must associate it with radionic turbulence of the most violent kind, extended over many centuries. And it is even more plausible if, to such catastrophic mutators, we add a permanent change in some atmospheric constants. And, then, too, we must continue to belabor mutation theory, for there is some deep mystery in it --a kind of genie in the bottle, something of Lamarck's environmentalism, of Freudian psychosomatism, perhaps even of the monads with miniature universes within them, which is to say, something of a Great Intelligence. At this point in time, then, we still need mutation theory and catastrophe theory, with an open door to whatever other theory comes bearing fruit. We receive a hint that the merger of gene theory of mutation into macro- evolution or quantavolution is possible with recent studies showing that much DNA (like much brain tissue) is surplus, seemingly unnecessary [13] . Is this material that is in readiness for recombination? Is it potentiated for organizing a general response in the event of a mutation that would otherwise be too specialized to survive in the species? Some important areas of agreement exist concerning mutations. Genetic mutation is a change in the formation-instruction code contained in the DNA component of one or more genes of the sperm or egg. Of the estimated 50,000 genes, a mere 210 have been assigned loci in specific chromosomes [14] . The gene map is practically useless, then, in plotting the route of humanization. New genetic instructions are carried into the fecundation of the egg, thenceforth into the embryo, the newborn, and the adult. This happens provided that survival is possible under the changed rules of growth. Mutation of non-genetic material whether adult or embryonic, affects only the individual and is not reproducible. Many chemicals and particles can bring mutation in this sense; but they affect individuals, not species, through cancers and abnormalities. George Gaylord Simpson laid down a few years ago several principles that are pertinent to humanization. It is now known that mutations, broadly speaking, an ultimate basis of variation, are discontinuous... The somatic effects of mutations vary from great to barely perceptible, or quite likely, to unperceptible by usual methods of observation... Despite the fact that a mutation is a discrete, discontinuous event at the cellular, chromosome, or gene level, its effects are modified by interactions in the whole genetic system of an individual (oddly enough, there is no generally accepted term for that important concept). They [mutations] are also modified by varying environmental factors. The results are that for many mutations, the somatic effects in different individuals vary in an essentially continuous manner. Even an expression that is marked modification in some individuals may be only the extreme of what is a gradual sequence in the population.. [15] The whole genetic system falls into line with the mutation, so to speak. This is certainly a hologenetic effect; one wonders why no generally accepted term for that important concept exists. A great many features of the organism (hence species) are systematically calibrated. Still, individuals of the species, already unique, alter in unique ways as a result of the mutation. Whether the human 'big brain' evolved in one or several steps, the process was individualized so that, for instance, one person could have only half of the cranial matter of another person; further there are ethnic and sex differences in cranial size. Simpson hesitantly comments on the likelihood of quantavolution of species: The instantaneous origin of a new species by a single genetic event can occur but is unusual. It is practically confined to cases of increase in individual chromosome numbers happening to produce a system both viable and capable of reproduction but not capable of backbreeding into the parental population. In usual... cases distinct evolutionary change involves the increase or decrease of proportions of genetic factors in whole populations, and this is a gradual process occurring in successions of generations. The prevailing modern theories of evolution are essentially, although not dogmatically, gradualistic [16] . No new species has been proven to form, through mutation, breeding, or otherwise, in human history. First mutations occur rarely; perhaps one in 25,000 spermatozoa or eggs possesses a gene that has been mutated. Still, with a large population over a long period of time the number of mutations will be high. Since women carry their eggs from birth, some 200 of them, an egg mutated on one occasion may be represented in a birth as much as forty years later; male sperm is wasted and renewed, millions per ejaculation, so that a mutated sperm has very little chance of being partner to a conception. The chances for a successful mutation are so slight, and the process typically visualized by biologists for evolution of a species is so long, that many scholars have offered calculations showing the high improbability of the origin and development of species by mutation. Yet other theories have not been acceptable, except for the enlargement of the mutation-referral, or calibration process that Simpson spoke of above. Natural selection has to work only with the gene pool already available to a species and is questionable on the grounds already stated in the preceding chapters. MAJOR FEATURES OF EVOLUTION G. G. Simpson declares that Mutation rate can rarely be an effectively determining factor in rate or direction of evolutionary change; this is also the conclusion of Muller..., leading student of mutation rates. [17] Mutation offers plenty of possible changes but natural selection is more important: once more we face the frustrations of evolutionary ping-pong between mutation and natural selection. An effort was made by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, in 1940 to provide a new material basis for evolution [18] . He said that his lectures at Yale ought to have been called the genetical and developmental potentialities of the organism which nature may use as materials with which to accomplish evolution. Evolution and natural selection, including the survival of the fittest, were accepted by him as facts. But, he said, selection and adaptation required necessary hereditary variations to work with. So he strove to discover evidences of macro-evolution. He showed how hereditary differences, that might have fateful consequences in appearance and behavior among species, might be attributable to certain mutations. He conceived the idea that hopeful monsters would be frequently generated, from among which some rare type might accomplish an evolutionary saltation. Although he could not demonstrate such directly, he conceived that novel patterning of chromosomes might instantly achieve the same effect as an accumulation of mutations, producing a new chemical system that would substantially alter an organism's appearance and behavior. So he could speak of systemic mutation as a complete change of the primary pattern or reaction system into a new system. He might have added the term hopeful scientist, to describe himself and others who were products of the hopeful monster, homo schizo. The phrase: To illustrate the presence and wisdom of God in the natural and moral world meant to the naturalist, he declared, the demonstration of law and order in his chosen field. This view is a common amnesiac sublimation of the characters of the gods Yahweh, Shiva, Zeus, and Jupiter, spreaders of chaos and lightning-like destroyers of the order of Mother Earth and Mother Nature. Perhaps if he had investigated the character of his gods, he might have truly found the means by which nature accomplished changes -- by catastrophes multiplying infinitely the mutating forces and adaptative opportunities of the world. He then would agree even more with another authority whom he supports, O. H. Schindewolf, the German paleontologist, who not only surmised macroevolution but adjudged the causes to be catastrophic and extraterrestrial, in a set of studies published between 1936 and 1963. The earliest men were in fact hopeful monsters who had to believe that the gods were responsible for their sorrows, as well as their welfare, but sublimated many of the sorrows. Perhaps this is why Mircea Eliade, the hopeful scientist, must wonder why the first Greek god Ouranos was believed to have bred so many hateful monsters, his own children, whom he cast down and buried in the bowels of the Earth; Eliade may be avoiding his own ambivalence in not answering the question that perhaps he of all scholars is best equipped to answer. Coming closer to the key to quantavolution and macroevolution are scientists such as Dubrow, who credits sharp changes in the geomagnetic field with mass mutations leading to sudden increases in populations and systemic mutations leading to new species and genera [19] . {S : INTELLIGENT MUTATION AND EVOLUTIONARY SALTATIONS} INTELLIGENT MUTATION AND EVOLUTIONARY SALTATIONS That genes instruct organisms via chemo-electric code is well-known. That genes mutate occasionally has long been known. The mutation as an electro-chemical event with functional consequences is also appreciated. Puzzles remain: how, if at all, do mutating genes provide the non-random set of instructions needed to accommodate the rest of the organism to the new structure/ function of the changed part? The problem is made all the more poignant by the observation that nearly all mutations are relatively meaningless and mostly trivial; yet a given species is integrated functionally, and differs significantly from another species. No gift of time, no matter how generous, nor even the bonanza of radiant catastrophes, can displace our feeling that mutations may generate hopeful monsters, some of which survive. A new metaphor is therefore suggested. We assume that the mutation is a changed chemical message sent by one gene to all other genes as well as to all other genes as well as to the operations which itself commands. Every gene (hence chromosome) receives, upon mutation, not only a capability to provide a new instruction but also a capability for leadership. Every gene, like Napoleon's soldiers, carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack. When it mutates, all other genes become dedicated followers. The gene, as befits the ideal field marshal, conveys to them instructions concerning the behavior newly expected of them. They do their limited best to conform to the new order. The gene that gives the limbs of my cat a surprising six digits orders all other genes to whom the change is relevant to provide the necessary services. Muscles, brain, blood vessels, and many other structures and functions swing into line. The cat survives and breeds its kind. The instructions given out by the other genes that control the cat's features are contained in their programs, for apparently they have not been mutated. We see at least two levels or types of changed instructions passed from a leader gene to all other genes: a) a new proportionality of structure and function which provide 'normal' individuation within limits of an ongoing species, and b) ad hoc accommodations in the presence of hitherto inexperienced demands. The ad hoc accommodations may be presumed to be quantitative or extreme deviations of the individuation code. Both types of change will persist so long as the mutated gene gives off the same signal, practically forever. The mutation may be deleterious, or harmful, if the pre-existing capabilities are not flexible enough to provide holistic means of survival; on the other hand, the ad hoc instructions may be accommodated, and the organism survives. Is it conceivable that the genes carry design accommodations for every successful macromutation? If so, where do they originate? Suppose that, in the beginning of life forms, each gene is possessed of designs that can cope with every form from an amoebae to a whale (this is, of course, not a new idea). Given a certain chemical stimulus, it will produce its part of the structure and function of any species known up to the present and many more. There is no logical reason why an individual gene capability of a bacterium of 2 2000 combinations cannot foreshadow all life forms that have developed. The gene's speciated repertoire of designs presumably has limits. Indeed, such limits are commonly defined in the course of reciting the similarities among all living forms. They are further defined in the course of classifying phyla, orders, and families. Then, should a changing gene stretch the fhrerprinzip too far, asking, for example, that feathers be provided for a whale, the followers, the other genes, cannot find the requisite function among their repertoire of attainable specifications, and the animal will usually die. But suppose that my cat bears kittens with flipper-like limbs. The mutated gene passes its changed chemical messages to its cohorts and the necessary changes are made, well within limits, except that the little beasts cannot walk very well. They might swim and, if introduced to a body of water, do so. The cohorts work hard now to accommodate: eye muscles tighten; muscles bulge at the flipper joints; oil gathers heavily at the skin pores; the body becomes rotund for insulation and floating; the taste buds are alerted to watery savors; the lungs expand for searching and diving underwater; and so on. The young cats are not equally flexible and they lack parental instruction, but perhaps one or two survive and go ashore, mainly to procreate and give birth, cautious and suspicious of land forms, abandoning their unmutated kittens and carrying their mutants back into the water. Since my cat is a mixture of Siamese, Persian and Mediterranean alley-cat, its kittens and their kittens will afford numerous possibilities for immediate natural selection. They will compete adequately with beaver, muskrats, otters, duck-billed platypus, seals, and sea-lions, and will supply prey for the few large carnivores of the sea and food for smaller marine animals with their carcasses. They may live and hunt in gangs. If my cat had given birth to all of this in secret, I would be surprised by a new order of beasts when, a few years later, I would be swimming. Should, in the course of events, a member of the new species be mutated, a new gene would probably become the leader. Now gigantism is the order of the day, from among the dead-born emerge two double- sized kittens, which grow to quadruple-sized adulthood. A new instruction would have been dispatched to all its genes, which would have been received and interpreted on the basis of previously existing instructions, not for Cat but Cat I. The process of fixing the next species, Cat II, would be analogous to the earlier one. Cat II genes would be centered around the Cat plus Cat I chemical norm. Their limits of deviation presumably would remain those of Cat plus Cat I. That is, they had inherited Cat I's new instruction. The new chemical instruction would build upon it; it would only order research of the repertoire to its limits to abide the new order. So, in swimming around a decade later, I might receive an even greater surprise. Examining the gene structure of Cat II progeny, one would find all of the instructions implanted in the primordial form of life, Amoebae I (or even, in fact, its predecessors, that were locked into it), together with every mutation (or new command) ever imparted to Cat II ancestors. Missing would be only the changed genetic capabilities afforded species that have branched off of its line since the beginning of life. The whale would be denied feathers. In this sense, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Under such conditions, the number of successful mutations from the primordial form might have been far fewer than is generally believed, perhaps less than a hundred for the generally of species, and under a dozen for the particular species. Consequently, mutations can be conceived to cause very little or very great changes in the structure and functions of a species. Further, mutations are considered statistical, that is, indeterminate increments contained in a limited number of commands. They are, of course, not models of the form-to-be. Their intelligence consists in their primordial ability to induce coordinated shifts of behavior in non-mutated genes. By implication, important changes occur by saltations, as quantavolutions. In environments that provide mutational possibilities, radically different forms can emerge quickly, propagate abundantly, and branch quickly again. Long-time durations are of little importance; whether they occur or not is immaterial. The theory here is so simple that it may be merely a metaphor. It need not be justified by elaborate mathematical calculations. It preserves most of the general observations of Lamarck, C. Darwin, St. Hilaire, Mendel, Dobzhansky, Watson and many another geneticist, it can cope with paleontology and genetic engineering without strain. It suggests, among other things, that, in principle but against great odds, preexisting ancestral species can be recreated, and that the creation of future major life forms is within sight, perhaps at the level of probability of controlled nuclear fusion. {S : EXTERNAL PRODUCERS OF MUTATION} EXTERNAL PRODUCERS OF MUTATION The prevailing evolutionary theory, The Modern Synthesis, has looked to point mutation within structural genes as causing individual variability, which is ultimately carried into a population where it comes to be a dominant trait. A species change is thought to occur by gradual accumulation of small differences. Isolation and small numbers promote the change. Subsequently, the new species diffuses. Long time intervals are admittedly required. Transitional forms, which should be abundant among fossils, are rarely discoverable, and never incontrovertibly accepted a such. The fossil record appears to be a representation of quantavolutions, not incrementalism. It is suppressed, however, by an ideology of uniformitarian evolution. Even when the Modern Synthesis is attacked, as it was recently in a conference of geneticists and paleontologists, the challengers, advocates of 'macroevolution' or 'punctuated equilibrium, ' (our 'quantavolution') appear to stay within the boxing ring outlined by an assumed speciation: 'what happens in speciation? ', not 'what causes speciation? ' A rapid speciation, even to the challengers, is one taking place over, say, 50,000 years, but that is an instant compared with the 5 or 10 million years that most species exist. [20] Even so, it would be far longer than necessary to change Hominid 'X' into homo sapiens schizotypus, if the modifications which I suggested above were sufficient to make the main differences between the two species. Once the viable combination is struck, the speciation occurs instantly. Furthermore, with normally prevailing rates of mutation, speciation is unlikely under either the Modern Synthesis or the 'punctuated equilibrium' theory. It is striking that the aforesaid conference did not take up the question of the possible role of cosmic or space environmental change. Writing in 1980, a group of scientists claimed that a major extraterrestrial impact on Earth ended the Cretaceous 'reptilian' period and inaugurated the Tertiary mammalian period at which time, quoting D. A. Russell, no terrestrial vertebrate heavier than about 25 kg is known to have survived, and the food chain was completely disrupted for many years by other biosphere extinctions and reductions. Further, there have been five such extinctions since the end of the Precambrian, bringing us back to the beginning of life [21] . Schindewolf, Salop, and a number of other scholars, whether in the close fields of genetics, geology and paleontology, or in the general field of catastrophism, have brought forward volumes of material to support the likelihood of mutation-causing disasters. Probably the 'earth-bound' specialists are waiting for a green light from the astronomical establishment. Meanwhile pressure mounts from the earthlings and the general catastrophists. Nature magazine, for example, carried in one issue (May 22, 1980, Vol. 285) three articles on catastrophes at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Not only mutations, but all other factors in speed-up of genetic change are provided by natural catastrophes -- isolation, adaptation, and extinction of competing species. Thus we hear Simpson say that The chance of fixation of a favorable mutation may be considerably larger by accident of sampling in a small population than by selection in a large population... [22] Catastrophes therefore simulate in quick time the supposed effects of natural selection. If man has been humanized within the past 100,000 years, or even within the past million years, actually at any age boundary, even granting the dubious long-time reckoning, he probably was humanized by catastrophe. Here the quantavolutionary model diverges from the evolutionary model most emphatically. In order to enhance the chances of a viable speciation by mutation, a heavy bombardment of particles is required such as has not been experienced in history; a radiation storm is called for. Such storms must have existed on numerous occasions in recent prehistory, if the evidence assembled in my Chaos and Creation is accepted. They ionized thoroughly the environment by interrupting, deflecting, and reversing the electromagnetic field of the Earth, by mega-lightning electrical discharges upon the near encounter of bodies in space, upon the occurrence of great potential differences between space and Earth, and by removing cloud canopies and transforming the gaseous composition of the atmosphere. Meteoric pass-throughs collisions would have occurred. The Sun would be stimulated to hyper-activity. The electrical and atomic state of every organism and rock would be altered. The radiating effect of one meteor or comet of small size gliding through the atmosphere is heavier than that of a large cluster of hydrogen bombs because of its great heat, well over 2000* C, over a long trajectory, the wide distribution of fall-out, and its possible final explosion at a great speed of many kilometers per second. A single such passage, of which there would have been many, should produce millions of mutations in the biosphere generally. A large explosion creates a catastrophic tube from the upper mantle into outer space, in and around which many millions of combinations of electrical, chemical, physical, material, thermal, and pressure events take place. Paleontologist D. J. McLaren had events such as these in mind when, in a presidential address to his colleagues, he reviewed the evidence of the wholesale extinction of species. After describing the effects of a large- body collision, he remarked: This will do. [23] Yet, it is not only extinction that occurs, but also speciation. As soon as they will grant the occurrence of extraterrestrially caused disaster, paleontologists will arrive at a public agreement in favor of quantavolution. Essentially this would include first that the species have been created and exterminated in waves. The waves will probably be fixed chronologically at the passages between the conventionally named periods -- such as between the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Thirdly, they will probably settle upon radiation storms (or, for stretched-out changing, new atmospheric constants) as the principal force bringing in the great changes. They may well decide that these radiation storms are connected with cosmic explosions and encounters. Finally, they may, with greatest reluctance, turn to a shorter time-scale for measuring the succession of events in natural history. For radiation storms and geological disasters not only mutate and exterminate species; they also invalidate methods of dating that assume a constant chemical and geophysical environment. The time of man and protoman now includes a Holocene that impinges upon the Pleistocene that is moving back in turn into the old Pliocene. I have already noted that anthropologists believe that they are finding modern types of homo in early Pleistocene (once Pliocene) times. Whether the advent of homo sapiens should be set in these times or in the early Holocene depends largely upon whether one adopts a long-time or short-time chronology. The change from hominid to homo was not anatomically or physiologically spectacular. Australopithecine and sinanthropus, if they lived alongside each other, probably lived in the time of proto-modern man as well. Ericson declares our thesis in the title to his study, Extinctions and Evolutionary Changes in Microfossils Clearly Define the Abrupt Onset of the Pleistocene. [24] Now I report what Salop writes: At the end of the Pliocene, some 3 M Y ago, is the last great revolutionary limit-line in the history of life. The first ancestors of Man appeared and an essentially new epoch started, the Anthropogene or Psychozoic. All other changes in the organic world, however important, seem of minor significance in comparison with that event. The animal kingdom of today originated, broadly speaking, also at that time, not counting the extinction of large animals in the second half of the Pleistocene thought to be largely caused by the activity of Man [25] . This last explanation, involving man, is not acceptable; all species were under extinction stress in both Pleistocene and Holocene, including man. Moreover Salop limits the causes unduly. He comments, Growth of the solar constant by one percent results in an insignificant rise of temperature of the troposphere, but the UV radiation multiplies 100,000 times. The ozone shield would capture most of this if it were as strong as today. Recent planetary, cometary, and meteoroid catastrophes, which are more probable but are not discussed here by Salop, would engender infinitely greater radiation storms [26] . Most large mammal species were wiped out in the late Pleistocene, 70% by one estimate, in ways that would imply worldwide atmospheric revolution, as with the mammoth. The quantavolution of hominid into homo sapiens could have occurred on one of numerous occasions. Given the lesser resistance of the mammals and man to radiation effects, and granted findings such as Ericson's and Salop's, there is further reason to hypothesize the mutation and drastic adaptation of humans. If the proto-men (the Hominid 'X') of this era were spread over at least the Afro-Asian world, some estimates, no matter that they must be highly speculative, are in order. The creatures must have been numerous. In a world of ten million hominids (30 per 100 square miles) and during a thousand years of one or more ionizing forces, whether continuous or intermittent, five million females would be subjected to radiation. Their eggs would be present and available for mutation for a life-span, say, of forty years. Assuming that females averaged a pregnancy once every two years, that their life spans averaged twenty years of child-bearing, and that a radiation storm environment persisted in which one of twelve fertilized eggs had been mutated, then some 1.85 billion mutated births would occur in the one millennium. Mutated sperms might raise the number to three billions. Of these three billions, from 300 to 3 millions might be beneficial or inconsequential, guaranteeing at the least an average chance of physiological survival beyond infancy. One must not neglect the chance that two mutants would interbreed, making possible combinations of genes, or a new total configuration. If systemic mutation were admitted to be possible, then too the chances of an emergent human would be increased [27] . The numerous high energy forces would have had enormous effect upon the ecology and mankind. Not only would they cause destruction on a grand scale; they would affect the mind of future generations in many ways -- genetically, by imprinting, by social indoctrination through story, a custom and institutions. The beginnings of mankind had to be associated with fearful happenings, as Nietzsche, Freud, T. Reik, I. Velikovsky, and of course all sacred historians have declared. Much was forgotten and distorted. No one has detailed particular disasters and their human effects as well as Velikovsky. Still, it is not alone, as Velikovsky puts it, that mankind has never recovered from the terrors of catastrophe: homo sapiens schizotypus did not in fact exist before the terrible times. Mankind was born out of catastrophe and achieved his delusionary schizoid human nature out of catastrophes; and he can never be anything but the kind of creature that went through those special overwhelming experiences. Humanity was created during a natural reign of terror. {S : VIRAL MUTATION} VIRAL MUTATION Quite recently, the role of viruses in genetic change has come to be recognized. Viral storms might accompany the large-scale penetration of the atmosphere by exploded material from extraterrestrial events. Various ancient myths report such occurrences. Apollo was the Greek god of plagues and arrows; he was a sky god and not the sun, as later writers supposed. Recently, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have, in their book Life Cloud, proposed that early life forms were deposited on Earth by cometary fall-out. In Disease From Space (1979) they also claim space dust as the carrier of plagues to Earth. Their proposed investigations went unsupported by the grants authorities [28] . The search for viruses in meteorites and Martian soil samples in proceeding. Deeply buried viruses might also be exposed and some of them mutated by large-scale earth upheavals. Large explosions can create drifting material that will disseminate both crystallized and already activated viruses in similar fall-outs, and with similar genetic results. Hope-Simpson in 1978 reported that the last six peaks of sunspots coincided with pandemic influenza, possibly from increased cosmic radiation which mutated existing viruses, enabling them to evade human immunities [29] . Not to be ignored, therefore, is the chain reaction of a virus, a viral mutation, and a human mutated by a virus. Again, the likelihood of successful mutation is small but the participating organisms are exceedingly numerous. We bear in mind the theory, advanced elsewhere in my studies, that several solar system bodies disintegrated during the past 14,000 years. One or more were probably carrying life forms. Viruses might persist for some years, possibly thousands, prior to their extinction, in a permanently hostile environment, and hence, while scarcely detectable today in meteorites or direct planetary sampling, would have been aboard their exploded vehicles in ancient strikes against the Earth. {S : PSYCHOSOMATIC GENETICS} PSYCHOSOMATIC GENETICS Still another means for achieving humanization, and also mutational, would be the psychosomatic conversion of genes. For a time, the idea fascinated Freud and Ferenczi. They were influenced by Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. On October 5, 1917 Freud wrote to Karl Abraham to this effect, saying, Its essential content is that the omnipotence of thoughts was once a reality. When Abraham responded that he had not heard of the idea, Freud wrote that it would complete the theory of psychoanalysis by providing a theory of change through an entoplastic adaptation of one's own body. Our intention is to place Lamarck entirely on our basis and to show that this 'need' which creates and transforms organs is nothing other than the power of unconscious ideas over the body, of which we see relics in Hysteria: in short, the 'omnipotence of thoughts. ' Purpose and usefulness would then be explained psychoanalytically; it would be the completion of pychoanalysis. Two great principles of change or progress would emerge: one through one's own body, and a later (heteroplastic) one through transmuting the outer world [30] . Even before it was realized how minute was the probability of successful genetic mutation, Freud, like many another thoughtful person, like the theologians, like even Alfred Wallace and Lyell (until his old age), could not accept the piecemeal elaboration of homo sapiens according to the uniformitarian Darwinian model. With scientific catastrophism in disrepute and obloquy, they could not imagine an appropriate environmental stimulus to change. The theory is not beyond discussion. Presumably the hominid bearer of sperms or eggs would be so drastically affected by environmental turbulence that it would will a chemical mutation upon them. Practically every tissue and organ of the body has been shown to be capable of physical change, usually deleterious, when an obsessed person focuses intense and prolonged attention upon the soma. The genetic material cannot logically be exempted from the obsessive influence; both point and systemic mutation could then occur. The ability, conscious and/ or unconscious, to engender fully intense and prolonged neuro- chemical and/ or electrical energy, and to focus it upon a given tissue or organ, is given to few persons in these times. It might more frequently emerge when the environment is heavily agitated and the collectivity reflects this agitation and inspires a response among its members. That is, the alteration of the race by willing a genetic change might have occurred in the creative years of mankind. This would be a true mutation, inasmuch as a chemical intervention or electrical impulse affecting the genes is postulated. The psychosomatic model has a low probability. Although the terrorized hominid woman may have had the most intense desire, conscious and unconscious, to change her offsprings, how could she have known how to target the eggs in her womb? Can terror act as a chemical bullet directed at the eggs? We have noted that Teilhard de Chardin and the 'school' of directed evolution also have found it necessary to premise an inherent motivation towards progressive biological change, to go along with transmutation. Psychosomatism unconsciously targets an organ. Physical stress and psychic stress both can affect the heart, for instance. And our culture tells us: 'Don't give your dear father a heart attack by your evil conduct. ' Further, there is a lore of affecting the unborn child. And witch-doctors may sometimes pretend to know how to affect one's enemies with psychic heart attacks and psychic damage to unborn children. Psychosomatism, we can affirm, performs the seeming miraculous. But we prefer to believe here that psychosomatism is the cultural product of the already humanized homo schizo. It is an irresistible path that the fear arising out of the split-ego and instinct-delay points out to the human being. In one report, which unfortunately I have lost, the women of a tribal group are apparently capable of controlling their own fertilization by 'willpower; ' this is, if true, a possible effect on the germ plasm or on the fluids or musculature of the reproductive organs. Freud, and Jung, also believed in phylogenetically inherited material but could never describe precisely its brainwork. The evidence is that certain common symbols are not learned, nor 'classical' phobias, nor the oedipal complex, nor some other symbols and practices. The human inherits not only predispositions, but even subject-matter and memory traces. Homo schizo has a natural cultural output: so goes the contention. But we can postpone this matter until a later chapter. Freud and his associates could not come to close grips with psychosomatic humanization; the chemistry, biology and neurology were not available, then. They may not be now. Freud's reconstruction of the origin of conscience suffers from such basic flaws that one marvels at even the limited acceptance granted it. He should have worked instead upon his psychosomatic theory of mutation. He declares that, in an early family of homo sapiens, the sons, sexually covetous of their mother and other females, killed their father and ate him; ever since this significant incident occurred, a sense of guilt for the action has been transmitted through the mnemonic generations. Inasmuch as ordinary observations of primates and other mammals reveal the dispossession of the aging and weakening bull males in families and hordes, with regard to a full range of values, including the sexual, it is presumptuous to build a specifically human trait upon the assumed killing and deduce therefrom some of the most important qualities of human behavior such as guilt, conscience, totem and taboo, religion, and civilization. Unless, of course, we are dealing with an animal already so advanced in the preparation of conscience, that the concoction of new provocation would hardly be necessary. It is much more likely that the ascription of morality to events such as the reformation of sexual power in a group is attributable to a higher morality -- the instinct-delay fear --that gives in the process of its sublimation and rationalization direction to all aspects of life. {S : AN ATMOSPHERIC TRANSFORMATION} AN ATMOSPHERIC TRANSFORMATION Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) advanced two important ideas. One was that of saltation, the leap from one species to another: the first bird hatched from the egg of a reptile; the second was that atmospheric changes and other environmental changes bring about speciation, particularly those respiratory fluids, which sharply and strongly modify animal forms [31] . His treatment was cursory and unconvincing. But today it is more apparent that atmospheric reactions are an important factor in behavior. They might be an alternative or a supplement to genetic mutation in transforming mankind. In this case, Hominids 'X' are presumed to have an already existing genetic capability of becoming human. They are genetically preadapted to quantavolution. This genetic capability is not exercised in the hominid condition because the atmosphere contains a 'hominid mixture, ' not a 'human' standard. The oxygen may have been more or less ionized than it is today, for example. The atmosphere may now be heavier (or lighter) in solar or cosmic rays, certain gases, and other chemical elements affecting biological behavior. Might some of these conditions alter human conduct? The evidence is strong that some or all humans would be affected. Prevalence of unusual gases and metals in the workplace affect workers with psychiatric symptoms, even though they spend only a few hours their daily. One can surmise from this fact that an enduring day-around condition would bring about shortly a different norm of human mentation and behavior. In such cases, the changed constant would affect proto-humans in a number of places around the world and humanization would be a worldwide phenomenon of the age. Although I feel that such changed constants have affected human history, I doubt that they alone could have accounted for the emergence of homo schizo. Therefore, I follow generally the model of a single-shot mutation in humanization. Some cultural science support for this position will be cited in the chapters to come, diffusion of basic culture from a single point of origin, for instance. D. W. Patten has offered, as a geologist and creationist, several hypotheses on atmospheric acquisitions from outer planets, especially affecting the ozone and the nitrogen content of the air, which would then alter the chemistry of growth and longevity. He halts at this point [32] . Temporary or permanent alterations in the gaseous and ion composition of the air could potentiate an already existing physiology, especially via the endocrinal glands and hormonal system. Both the solar and cosmic 'constants' were inconstant during much of the primeval period of humankind; even lately, though respecting smaller deviations, the inconstancy of the solar and galactic winds has come under study. External events can introduce continuous and to some extent permanent changes (operating as a new constant), if the events and the conditions they bring about persist. So long as heavy noise, air pollution, rapid movement, and other high-stress life conditions of New Yorkers are constant, New Yorkers will tend to have swollen adrenals. Or, so long as the proportion of oxygen in the air of the High Andes is relatively low, the people there will have unusually developed lungs. A connection of the endocrinal system with megavitamin therapy has registered effects upon schizophrenia through facilitating the physiological discharge of adrenalin. A diminished oxygen supply or incompatibility of oxygen type in the atmosphere may introduce schizoid symptoms to some part of the population. The brain needs oxygen not only to survive but to energize neuro-transmissions throughout its domain. In schizophrenics the oxygen level in the brain is sharply lower than normal. Further, frontal lobe brain activity is low. Thought dissociation may be produced by oxygen deficiency in the frontal lobe. A radiation storm; a material fall-out; a sweep-out or in-take of atmosphere in transactions with extraterrestrial bodies; intense electrical storms; and the dropping of canopies (opening of skies) can drastically reform the atmosphere. They might change atmospheric constants abruptly or over a period of time. The new atmosphere forces upon the hominids a new 'norm' of response. The new norm is, at least among some individuals, within the range of genetic capability. The adaptible survivors behave according to the new norm, which is to say that they now behave as humans. The reconstructed atmospheric constant may affect most importantly the fetal environment of the humans-to-be. This happens when the new chemicals in the air find their way into the hormonal food supply of the fetus. And/ or the new constant presents its demands for changed physiology and behavior upon the infant after birth. Man, and all life, lives off a radiation diet that is generally unperceived. Even today, delicate scientific instruments are required to detect radiation, and the symptomology of radiation poisoning is not very clear, or where clear does not readily name its precise cause. The atmosphere of chaos was a mutator. The sun of the later Solarian Age may not have been. Nevertheless, the finally settled atmosphere has played a role in humanization. Legends around the world speak of a primordial cloudy sky. The opening of the skies would increase radioactive influences from perhaps still nearby and hot planetary bodies, and also and especially from the sun. Exposure to helio-radiation (including ultra-violet rays) generally increases physical resistance, relieves arthritic and muscular pain, lends a feeling of well-being, stimulates ergosterol and hence Vitamin D production, counteracts rickets and respiratory disease, and kills bacteria and fungi of the skin. It promotes the healing of wounds and athletic performance; it increases the rate of basal metabolism. All of these occur at the price of occasional skin cancers, and possibly of still unknown deep changes [33] . Although they would contribute to a higher general level of health and activity, they would not create the human. Larger events are required. The Earth's geomagnetic field has come under intense study in the past few years, because evidence now available points to reversals in the past. Whether the field has reversed quickly and often, as quantavolutionists believe, or gradually and rarely, as evolutionists think, a reversal of the North Magnetic Pole introduces as interval during which cosmic rays can descend upon the Earth unhindered and bring about mutations in great numbers. Some studies have indicated a coincidence of reversals with waves of biosphere extinction. B. Heezen, pioneer oceanographer (for it is on the rocks of the ocean bottom that magnetism can be most readily traced), has speculated that the last reversals was before the time of man. However, the time of man has been pushed back well beyond this period in conventional theory, and in quantavolutionary theory the times of the last several reversals are well within the human span, one having occurred in the eight century B. C. according to an examination of the orientation of iron particles in pottery of that age [34] . Yet another reversal is said to have occurred around four to six thousand years ago in connection with large biosphere and natural destruction [35] . Furthermore, the geomagnetic field (GMF) is declining slowly. I have already introduced the work of Dubrow on the subject. If the decline has been exponential from some past peak, as I believe and will be discussing with Earl R. Milton in a forthcoming book, then the hominid was subjected to a sharply different paleomagnetic field. So we must ask ourselves whether the relaxed grip of the electromagnetic field disorganized the hominid brain and in effect created homo schizo. For he would be presented with an intellectual freedom in the form of a bewildering number of options for action instead of the more closed system of stimulus-response accorded Hominid 'X. ' The 'constant' is still changing, but slowly, today. Still the frequency of heart attacks has been convincingly associated with internationally collected measurements of geomagnetic activity as registered by magnetometers. It may be possible, too, that many animals, including especially the primates, acquired a loosened behavioral potential at the same time, in the same way. Relieved of the heavier GMF, the minute electrical charges that operate the central nervous system may have stepped up their activity, relatively speaking, and, crowding the access points, delayed instinctive reactions and promoted displacements. An electric shock, administered experimentally or therapeutically (at this supposed new level of the human mind), provokes mental activity (mania), hallucinations, and amnesia, while reducing depression and anxiety. ECS [Electroconvulsive shock] leaves a permanent change in brain excitability. That a marked change in the Earth's electrical field would have affected the human brain is not difficult to accept. We have mentioned that much testimony on a primordial canopy of clouds exists, at the time of the first god Uranus (known by many names.) [36] The sky cover was probably removed in the time of human creation. The results would include a new and constant heavy bombardment of the biosphere with cosmic and solar particles. What legends frequently describe as the primordial chaos could have been a combination of actual celestial turbulence, ground bombardment, and mass biosphere mutations and extinctions, associated with the shock of being transmuted from hominid to homo. The Hebrew Genesis is by no means unique in referring to this concatenation of events. Nor does this conclude speculation about the possibilities of the ancient skies. If large bodies transacted in close encounter or collision with Earth, as is argued elsewhere in the Quantavolution Series, large electrical charges would be exchanged between the bodies. The Earth could either lose or gain immense charges, sufficient to affect deeply the human nervous system. Then the proto-human must cope either with an enhanced or lesser charge on the Earth's surface or in the atmosphere, either as a sudden terminator event or as a new constant or both. At this point of the discussion, the multiplicity of possibilities begins to bewilder and I would, if I could, sing the praises of Occam's razor. Would the hominid mind split and develop instinct-delay and the poly-ego from any one or all of these possibilities? Or would man becomes stupefied, more hominidal, instead of electrified, confused, and energized? Reasoning ex post facto, which is to say, begging the question, I shall have to say that since he became the latter, whatever happened, even combinations of opposites, worked to the same end of instinct-delay and poly-ego problems. {S : SOCIAL IMPRINTING} SOCIAL IMPRINTING In Seneca's ancient tragic drama, Thyestes, the chorus chants of the shocking fiery passage of Phaeton in his solar chariot, when each and every constellation deviated: This is the fear, the fear that knocks at the heart That the whole world is now to fall in the ruin Which Fate foretells; that Chaos will come again To bury the world of gods and men; that Nature A second time will wipe out all the lands That cover the earth and the seas that lie around them And all the stars that scatter their bright lights Across the universe [37] . A fifth means of transforming hominid into human nature might be by the social imprinting of shock upon the individual. The hominids again afford the basic genetic capability and a pre-adapted habitat. In this case, however, natural disasters inflict shocks upon the hominid beyond its 'normal' tolerances of stimulation. The shocks in themselves are the grossly exaggerated homologues of the shocks of 'normal' existence. They take the form of a celestial scene inhabited by new symbolic references and other mind-openers; of terrorizing high-energy expressions including spectres and pandemonium; of crushing and effacing effects that are prolonged and of high intensity; of the ranging of the natural elements. The shocks are so traumatic that the victims adopt response behaviors that become patterned as the essence of human nature. The traumatized catastrophical survivors retain the memories, but distort and use them in ways that are typically human. Most importantly, they devise in the very process of their own creation the social means of perpetuating their own changed mentalities and behavior. Human nature is then and thereby guaranteed by a collectivity of humans formed into a group or society. The memorial generations transmit and adapt new traumatic and 'normal' tribulations to the fixated human nature. In explaining the development of the human mind in relation to the catastrophes of Venus and Mars in the period 1453 to 687 B. C. Velikovsky pushes beyond Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Eliade with the concepts of collective amnesia and aggression [38] . Mankind is destructively aggressive as a result of suppressing its memories of natural disasters. The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression... Freud did not come to understand the true nature of the Great Trauma -- born in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought more than once to the brink of destruction -- which was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon. Freud died in exile from his home, when a crazed worshiper of Wotan was preparing another G”tterd„mmerung. [39] The view which I am setting forth embraces this criticism of Freud and the concepts of collective amnesia or repression concerning catastrophes. Also, aggression is to be correlated with this suppression, and the techniques of aggression are in a direct sense analogized unconsciously and consciously to events witnessed in the sky. Nevertheless I perceive social imprinting as at best an auxiliary source of human nature, an intensifier, which itself needs to be intensified from time to time by fresh natural (or man-made) catastrophe. The Middle Bronze age civilizations, 3500 years ago, whose trials Velikovsky describes so vividly, were pre-adapted to catastrophes; their societies behaved in ways already learned, and with institutions inherited from prior disasters. Ultimately, though, with the earliest disasters, a physiological change had to take precedence. Even in the genetic humanization of man, catastrophe was an on-looker, carrier, and psychological and cultural reinforcer of gene-fracturing elements. John V. Myers and Warner B. Sizemore declare that the disintegration of objective reality during cosmic catastrophe could produce subjective states similar to those of schizophrenia, and that the disintegration of subjective reality in the schizophrenic is accompanied by visions of cosmic catastrophe. [40] I argue that the reality recognized by the first human was catastrophic and his mind was as well. There was never -- and here I think we diverge from a common view of Velikovsky and a great many others, including conventional long-term evolutionists -- a clean minded, rational evolved human whose mind was 'blown' by catastrophic experiences: the recurrent disasters proved to homo schizo that his vision of the world was correct! {S : THE SUMMARY MECHANICS} THE SUMMARY MECHANICS It is perhaps apparent to the reader by now that I prefer, as a 'holding position, ' a complicated mix of several means of humanization, altogether happening within a very short period of time. The mutation of an individual hominid is given prominence generally in the scenarios to come. But it is not difficult to switch from the one to the other, or to stress a combination. The changed atmospheric constant as the mode of humanization has the value of inherent continuity, and is as efficient as genetic mutation in explaining generational inheritance; also it permits humanization to occur simultaneously among many hominids at the same time, in the same month or a few years. We might begin a search for humanizing mechanisms that are present in the modern atmosphere but would not have been present in an atmosphere in which hominids could thrive. The branches of the human race have changed in some respects, mostly cosmetically, since the cosmic beginnings of homo schizo. But the basic ways of behaving as human were determined in the midst of great crises: the interruption of the Earth's motions, the loss of electrical charge, the dropping of the immense cloud canopies in deluges, and the first openings of the sky. An allotment of a thousand years would have been sufficient for these tremendous experiences to bring about humanization. Even while mutations were abundantly occurring among all species, a single group of hominids, largely potentiated as humans beforehand, in distress and in terror, would find amongst themselves individuals of flexible, if erratic, genetic constitution, who were capable of expanded symbolic behavior and signaling various interpretations of the new giant forces of the environment. The same group would become capable of managing its newly installed communication system, and then lend its cooperative forces to the evolving interpretation of the universe, the aboriginal cosmology. The group would be driven to adopt the new system even before all of its members shared the mutant genes. In the endeavor to ease their pains and anticipate the sharing of the inheritable traits, it is possible that non-mutants actually mutated themselves by will power, adding a consistent but different emotional mechanism to the hereditary pool of the human-dominated group. Whereas the first mutants would operate by genetic instructions, the second kind of mutants would work out genetically a mode of hyper-excitation of the endocrinal system. This would lend the group an element of obsessive emotionality as soon as genetic miscegenation began. The social imprinting of shock would come about not by itself alone but in the course of executing symbolic references of the first mutant type, in accepting the obsessive drive of the second mutant type, and in the development of followership among the erstwhile normal band, consisting of sophisticated crowd behavior already possessed by hominids. All elements would be caught up in the atmospheric reformation. The mutations were consistent with it; they were in fact created by it and responsive to it so that, in a fundamental way, the correspondence of the new world with the new being was assured. Although it did not eradicate the old 'normal beings, ' the radicalized atmosphere punished them and preferred those who responded readily to the new constants. {S : Notes (Chapter 3: Mechanics of Humanization)} Notes (Chapter 3: Mechanics of Humanization) 1. This column is discussed in the author's Chaos and Creation and The Lately Tortured Earth and see I. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, Doubleday, 1955; Harold T. Wilkins, Mysteries of Ancient South America, Secaucus, N. J., Univ. Press, 1956; Claude Schaeffer, Stratigraphie Compar‚e, London: Oxford U. Press, 1948. 2. Biosocial Anthropology, London: Malaby, 1975, 7. 3. New York: Macmillan, 1968. 4. Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness, San Francisco: Freeman 1972, 63. 5. The New Science of Immanuel Velikovsky, I Kronos 1, 1975, 6-7. 6. Somatic Factors and Social Behavior, in R. Fox, ed., op. cit., 115; E. J. W. Barrington, et al., Hormones and Evolution, N. Y.: Academic Press, 2 vols., 1979. 7. A. C. Guyton, Medical Physiology, 3rd ed., Philadelphia: Saunders, 1966, 1040. 8. Dobzhansky, op. cit., 205; L. Bolk, Das Problem der Menschenwerdung, Jena: Fischer, 1926. 9. A. P. Dubrow, The Geomagnetic Field and Life, N. Y.: Plenum, 1978. Ibid., 84. 10. Emotions and Bodily changes, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1935, 4th ed., 1954. 11. N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, Oxford U. Press, 1969, 5th printing, 195. 12. Radiation, Genes, and Man, N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1959, 43. 13. Discussed in B. Silcock, The New Clues that Challenge Darwin, Sunday Times of London, Aug. 3, 1981, 13. 14. V. A. Mckusick and Frank A. Ruddle, The Status of the Gene Map of the Human Chromosomes, 196 Science (22 April 1977), 390-405. 15. Op. cit,; The Major Features of Evolution, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1953. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. The Material Basis of Evolution, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1940, 3. 19. Op. cit., 99. 20. Lewin, op. cit., 883. 21. Luis W. Alvarez, W. Alvarez, Frank Asaro, Helen V. Michel, Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, 208 Science 4448 (6 June 1980), 1095-1108. 1107; Russell, Episodes 1979 No 4, 1979, 21. Cf. Otto H. Schindewolf, Neocatastrophism? (trans. V. Axel Firsoff), 2 Catastrophist Geology 2 (Dec. 1977), 9-21. 22. Op. cit. 23. Quoted in Robert Bass, Did Worlds Collide? 4 Pensee (Fall, 1974) 8. 24. David B. Ericson, 139 Science 3356, Feb. 22, 1963. 25. L. G. Salop, Glaciations, Biologic Crisis and Supernovae, 2 Catastrophist Geology 2 (December 1977) 22-41; cf, Martin, P. S. and H. E. Wright eds., Pleistocene Extinctions, 1968. 26. See A. De Grazia and E. R. Milton, Solaria Binaria, Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publ., 1983, for discussion. 27. I am using the kind of reasoning about genetic change over time employed by Simpson (1953), 109-10, on the horse. He estimates 300 effective new steps were needed over 15m/ y with a mutation rate of .000 001 and no systemic mutations, or macromutations, which, he says, are unknown. See also J. B. S. Haldane's approach, Natural Selection, 101-49, in P. R. Bell, ed., Darwin's Biological Work: Some Aspects Reconsidered, Cambridge (Eng.) U. Press, 1959. See also Wallace and Dobzhansky, op. cit. 28. London Times, Lit. Supp. April 14, 1978. Life Cloud (N. Y.: Harper an Row, 1978). 29. R. E. Hope-Simpson, Sunspots and Flu; A Correlation, 275 Nature (1978), 86. H. Hoaglund discusses Some Biochemical Considerations of Time, in J. T. Fraser, ed., The Voices of Time, (N. Y.: Braziller, 1966), including oxygen consumption and slowing of time, and deep freezing and time slowdown of virus (325-9). 30. Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, N. Y.: Basic Books, III, 312, 341. 31. Influence du monde ambiant pour modifier les formes animales, Mem. de l' Acad. des Sciences, XII 91833) 63, quoted in H. F. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, N. Y.: Scribner's, 1894, 199. 32. The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, Seattle: Pacific Meridian, 1966. 33. S. H. Licht, ed., Therapeutic Electricity and Ultraviolet Radiation, E. Licht, New Haven, 1967. 34. Velikovsky describes this work of Mercanton and Folgheraiter in Earth in Upheaval, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1955, 146-7. 35. Dubrow, op. cit. 84. 36. Isaac Vail, Selected Works, Annular Publications, Santa Barbara, Calif., reprinted 1972. 37. In Four Tragedies and Octavia, E. F. Wartling, trans., Baltimore: Penguin, 1966, 81. 38. Cultural Amnesia in Earl R. Milton, ed. Recollections of a Fallen Sky, Princeton: Metron, 1978, 21-30, 26-7; Mankind in Amnesia, New York: Doubleday, 1982. 39. William Mullen, Schizophrenia and the Fear of World Destruction, I Kronos (Spring, 1975), 70. 40. I Kronos (1975) 70. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 4: } {T THE GESTALT OF CREATION} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR THE GESTALT OF CREATION The human creation happened all at once with a crackling and bursting of the hominidal dam. It was a gestalt, a configuration of nearly simultaneous and transacting developments emerging from a central change. A plausible scenario of the birth of mankind might be reconstructed. Let us attempt it. There follows now a charting of the total process of humanization, to be followed by its discussion. {S : THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH} THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH (The Hologenesis of Homo schizo) A. Low-powered environmental forces operate, in a uniformitarian way. B. Hominid is not self-conscious. It has fully functioning instinctual reactions. It has an ape-like cranium, is bipedal, four feet tall, semi-human in appearance, and hairy. C. Individual concentrates its life energies upon physical well-being and sociability. D. Perception, cognition and affection are governed by a single coordinated instinctual being. Only rarely and temporarily are they distorted; no matter how bizarre or self- destructive its behavior (induced by disease or fright or chemicals) it does not ask What am I doing? Postulate now a set of terrorizing natural disasters and distraught faunal populations. Problem now posed is: How could a human be created and survive? A. High-powered environmental forces are unleashed in sky and earth. All senses are bombarded. Radionic storms change the atmosphere and invade organisms. Physical well-being and sociability are everywhere damaged and threatened. A reign of natural terror. B. Instinctive behavior is generally frustrated by terror and strange stimuli. Microsecond delays in central nervous system and especially in brain transmissions occur. C. Schism of consciousness occurs in one or a few hominids with cranial enlargements. Proto-decisions are required for self-control. The ego begins as coordinating center for the fragments of the old conscious self; it is actually a poly-ego. D. Memories are intense. Memories are also suppressed in the struggle for self-control (ego versus alter-egos). Selective recall and forgetting spring into being. E. The alter-egos displace terror onto other people and the threatening natural forces. The primordial being does not know whether he is talking to himself or talking to others. Self- punishment and self-mutilation are found to be ineffective but persist in efforts to unite the soul. F. The ego begins to communicate with its selves by displacement and projection, and having begun the process, extends it to all subjects of displacement. Symbolism as internal language begins. Bilateral asymmetry (righthandedness) is stressed to help centralize dominance in the left-brain hemisphere. A second phase now occurs, organizing the world schizotypically. A. High-powered forces continue to impress senses with destruction, chaos, and threats of return. The poly-ego is fraught with ambivalence toward the forces, hence, by retrojection, also among its alter-egos. B. Perception, cognition, and affection are pliable (less instinctive and internally distorted thought-disorders) and mix up all kinds of phenomena of the triple-fear (fear of self, fear of others, fear of gods-nature) and triple control system of the person. C. Principal imprints upon perception of nature and affection are blocking (amnesia, catatonism); compulsive repetitiveness; and orgiasm (destructiveness, wild expressionism). These imprints of the new world order of the schizoid mind operate within the individual, between and among individuals, and between groups and divine (natural) forces. Without time lapse, a third phase fashions the culture. A. Persons and groups, so as to control fears of self, others, and the object-world (animated), B. and to obtain subsistence, affection and the reduction of inner tensions, C. organize their perceptions, cognitions, affects, and energies, D. through the mechanisms of memory (amnesia and recall), displacements (associations and ultimately sublimations), compulsive repetition (rites, rituals, habits, rules and routines), orgiasm (aggression and nihilism), and communication (by behavior, signs and symbols), E. work upon materials and resources of selves, others and the object world, F. set up all behavior patterns ranging from informal to rigid, including the (1) regime of language, (2) religious rites and structures, (3) compulsory modes of coping with subsistence, sex, and conflict, all of which bear the stamp of the aforesaid needs, fears, and mechanisms but assume variegated culture-forms depending upon the mix of history, no matter how brief the history, G. and then exclude or punish unaware, sinful, or sick persons or groups who, in relation to a particular culture-mix are deviant (i. e., have too much or too little of the key ingredients), H. whereupon said deviants (e. g., officially labeled schizophrenics) must fashion mixes of mechanisms and displacements, which, though great in number, represent and resemble in every case the peculiarity of the culture wherein they emerge. {S : A MIND SPLIT BY MINUTE DELAYS} A MIND SPLIT BY MINUTE DELAYS The gestalt brought forth the prototype human instantly (which explains our use of the world creation). Whether by mutation or by trauma, the central event was a splitting of the mind in an essentially schizophrenic reaction. The split mind recognized its other self. That is, it was forced into a basic, irreversible delusion that it had to deal with an inner person. Self-awareness began. It was an awful feeling. A permanent blockage (or suppression) was laid down before all instinctual behavior, creating a constant anxiety. The anxious animal could no longer act with instinctive ease although it could act more intelligently and with greater versatility. Now we have the answer to the questions: Why is human instinct so blunted in comparison with primates? How does it happen that all animal instincts in humans are within reach of psychosomatism? Instinct is the hair-trigger, set to go off without time for decision- making. Many critical human instincts are reachable by will and can be controlled; indeed they must be. They are set as slow triggers. This happened during the gestalt of creation. Generalized delays of milliseconds in response time between the limbic and cortical systems and between the left and right brain hemispheres, experienced as environmental, electrical, and chemical impulses, introduce conflicts between the systems and the hemispheres. The delays occur not once, but repeatedly and continuously, because the external forces are not withdrawn immediately. The delays add up to a general depression of instinctive responses, which is sensed by the hominid as both crippling and frightful. Even with microseconds of delay, the organism senses piercing inner contradictions that call for proto-decisions by itself vs. itself. A host of proto-decisions fill the behavioral response-space left by the depression of instincts. But there is little experience to help understand, control, and guide the mass of proto-decisions. This new anarchy requires organization, but from what sources and how? A pure anguish, it might be suggested, should drive the hominid back into the archaic limbic system whence no self-awareness would ever emerge. But this cannot occur because the stimuli for the new order of mind have blocked the regression and thrown the bewilderment into the cortical arena. It is too late to regret the passing of the animal. Either one or another of a pair of cortical referents will triumph by making a decision. Still, the several egos cannot contest indefinitely in a battle of all against all, else, like the warriors who sprang up from the teeth of the dragon that Cadmus slew, they will kill each other. The organism, to survive with its one stomach and conjoined limbs, must act as a whole. The resolution comes from moving forward, not backwards. The organism widens the gap rather than closes it. What began as a set of millisecond delays becomes an alter ego. The alter ego grows though performance, habit and training into a weltanschauung (a world view). The world order emerges, reconstructed by the human mind in a schizoid form. Drinking and eating, bowel movements, fear-flight-fight, copulation and many other behaviors are animal as well as human, but the human way of performing these operations encases them in schizotypicality. All the behavior that is authentically and ineradicably human is schizotypical. Impulsiveness begins to become a vice, not a virtue, for the human. The organism comes to realize that at any moment it has the capacity to ask itself questions. As frightful as the experience is, the new human cannot resist the asking. The boundary of the brain hemispheres is the main locus for the sensing of the gap. The left hemisphere, losing slightly its near perfect coordination with the right hemisphere, accomplishes reflection. The reflection is fearful, but effective. {S : FRIGHT, RECALL, AND AGGRESSION} FRIGHT, RECALL, AND AGGRESSION Fright was all-pervading, both for what was happening inside the person and what happening outside. Because of the terror and the split, a recollective memory leaped into being and with it instant amnesia. Recollective memory was a form of control, occasioned by the delay of instinct. Hominids might remember, but not recall. The voluntariness of recall summoned up the mechanism of the repression of recall. Meanwhile, the new creature began to talk to himself. (He was, it should be borne in mind, a child without human antecedents). As soon as he questioned his own behavior, he became superior to all hominids around him. He would think, I should do this, meaning we should, and the all-important act of will was born. Will is the spearhead of the drive to control oneself and the world. Now it was necessary to turn this weapon of will into a weapon of control. For the flood of terror demanded relief. A rapidly growing stream of symbols crossed the bridges between the two selves and flowed out to attach the symbols to the outer world and especially that part of the outer world that was threatening destruction, the turbulent skies and the effects they were producing on Earth. Great fear was never to be eliminated from the human. It dominated his mind and set limits upon all of his behavior. It was the fear of his own schizoid character and fear of the outside world (and the gods). Of all unpleasantness, being two people is perhaps the most continuously unpleasant. Out of such fear comes the desire to control and somehow stabilize the situation, preferably by merging dissimilar selves into the original unity. Assuming some success in achieving stability, any increase in internal or external fears will excite the fear of loss of self-control. In all of this a large role for human aggressiveness is prepared, for the world must be controlled if anxiety is to be relieved. Or one must delude oneself into believing that it is controlled and that one can take part in the control system to insure that it will work. It was a formidable assignment. Still, for a madman nothing is impossible, as we shall see. When the sensitive brute could not endure the intensity and scale of internal and external disasters that confronted him, he explored, besides flight and fight, other means of control to cope with reality. And immediately upon seeking control he found it in the new exigencies of his constitution: in the ability to recall and forget, to perceive his individuality and duality, in flights of fancy and in the symbolization of his lines of communication within himself and between himself and the outer world. When finally given respite from panic, these mechanisms could be used pragmatically, with brilliant and instant success, to organize and invent for all aspects of life. The human had become unconquerable, and lusted for conquest. Ordinary animal fears, with which hominid was not unusually beset, given his many abilities, were inadequate to move him into a new phase of development. With its uncontrolled and widespread displacement, the great fear, however, threatened all existence and, by inference, every life-value of the organism --procreation (sex), health, food, sense of control and adaptability, and affectional ties of the primal horde. Hence, the changed character of the mutant human affected all life-values and thereupon all the new institutions that came to be. The very fact that the changed hominid could reflect upon itself meant that it was not itself, but split self. So to primordial fear was added existential fear, the fear of one's own self-awareness, the distress of standing off from oneself, the basic schizophrenia of humankind, largely delusory from the standpoint of physiology since the same organs served the plural selves, but of course the schizophrenia was itself physiologically founded. The origins of human nature were connected with the fearing components of hominid nature, and the subsequent history of human nature, as a result, has been mostly unhappy. The misery is generic, and therefore persists even when the rude clutch of disaster is released, as it was for periods of time, early and lately. The structure of the readily mutable mammal, the hominid, was such that a benevolent mutation, if conceivable, might have been utterly destructive. Generally, nature adds in evolution; it complicates; the easiest thing to capacitate in man was his brain; so he got a multiple head. What happened to me? was the first question. Then came the gestalt of creation: it was composed of awareness, symbolizing, and projection. The proto-human strove to recollect himself amidst the turmoil of his kind and of nature. To exist and survive he had to discover himself amidst the disruptions of memory. His subconscious now existed in a way that it had not before, as a well of confusion, that overflowed with images that did not belong to the present, that offered uncoordinated seemingly unrelated elements that were taken care of by unmechanistic ways unfamiliar to animals. Before he could say I am, or I think, therefore I am, he had to come to terms with a new subconscious that distorted all perceptions of himself and others. His character was born of delusion. The broken mind of the beast sought to restore itself, but could only do so under new terms. Restoration of the previous state was destructive to the organism. A consciousness had to be organized to seek materials to guide the organism in its disorganized condition. It had to pull what it required from the forgotten, which was not really forgotten, but which would no longer normally emerge in a flow of instinctive, directed, utilizable unconscious information that characterized the hominid. The tortures and triumphs of memory then began. The accommodation of an awareness to an uncontrollable but recognized history began. The conscious and the willful assembled together upon this small island in a sea of suppression. Dominating the transition from a brutish to a human character was the psychological mechanism of projection which sprang from the creative gestalt. Projection is the imputation to another perceived existence or being of one's own motives and wishes. Once projection is achieved, and a world of transactions, real and imaginary, is set up. As his own self divided through self-awareness, man's gaze was fascinated by the sky. As he questioned himself, he questioned the intangible and uncontrollable world of the skies and all its mundane effects. The fact that the heavenly forces were abstract and impersonal became a matter of concern much later for a few generations of philosophers. Primeval man did not own a neuter gender. Everything in the world was alive. He did not have to acquire an illusion permitting him to reify or anthropomorphize. For he never had made and had now no reason to make a distinction between the living and the inorganic. Projection to objects as living things was immediate. The gods came into being. What traits the gods came then to possess were the actual traits of a god as witnessed, the traits (later on) of remembered gods, the feelings and traits of mankind in chaos and birth, and such traits of life forms on earth as mankind perceived and found to be analogous to his own and those of the gods. What he saw in the sky confirmed and strengthened his projections and let them be retrojected into his own traits even more strongly. Each time this happened, there was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a growing obsessiveness, an enhanced belief that one was being threatened by sinister forces (paranoia). {S : SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS} SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS Self-consciousness, the poly-ego, was a village built upon piles driven into the sands of permanent existential anxiety. It was and is a patterned and integrated architecture accommodating to the neural blockages that deter instinctive solutions. The neural blockages are stabilized by socially elaborated mechanisms that take certain forms such as rituals, theology, and logic. Further, self-awareness involved the use of symbols, first to institute an inner communication system, and then to introduce transactions with others and the outer world so as to keep the far-flung egos fully operative. Once achieved and begun, physiochemically constituted and socially founded, self-consciousness is revived post- natally in each generation. The human poly-ego was both individual and social. Those possessed of it sensed themselves unique, and at the same time identical with their groups. It produced an anarchism at one extreme and a regimented discipline at the other that go far beyond the capabilities of the mammals. Herein lies the eternal cooperation and conflict between the individual and the group, which is the subject of so much philosophy, sociology and political science. Self-consciousness in humans is not only awareness, as in a wakeful animal, but it is awareness of the (other) self or selves as entities. Further, the self looks at itself and at other people and objects with the same dynamic. Thus, in terms of psychopathology, the self -- the poly-selves -- is a form of delusional thought in the schizophrenic category of the split self. This usage may have developed as a convenience for considering therapy; but in actuality the poly-ego is the only human self to exist and is a system of normal and sane delusions. Since self-consciousness did not exist until the catastrophes began, the fundamental breakdown occurred only once, this in the days of creation. Repeatedly, in subsequent catastrophes, the mind might drift from its first moorings, but, with the help of culture, it would arrive at another anchorage in a new set of self-conscious delusions. An ancient set of events is incorporated in the story of Adam (man) and Eve (woman); after having eaten of the tree of knowledge, they became shameful in their own eyes, shameful for their nakedness. From a blissful lull of unthreatened self-consciousness they passed, under the harsh command of their god, into a renewal of their self-awareness. In the millennia before the new disaster struck them, they had apparently developed a religious and symbolic world of a humanistic kind. This was the Garden of Eden, a Golden Age to other cultures, where apparently threats to the poly-ego, now stabilized, were few. Analogously, Giambattista Vico comments that it was the thunderbolting electricity of Jupiter that produced the first Muse, who defined knowledge of good and evil, a power only later called divination, [1] which then, much later, is regarded as a kind of superstition. In the age of Yahweh, perhaps millennia afterwards, new catatstrophes of Exodus and the wilderness occurred, and the Hebrew Deuteronomy declared, (28.27-9), The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness. Thus whole groups of people might lose their ordinary minds, but never their human minds. Typically, the blows bludgeoned the self-aware mind into extreme pathological states (in human terms), but afterwards the mode of recovery was always the same. The mechanisms of the human conscious proved to be functional not only in obtaining relief from anxiety, but also at the same time in providing the goods of life. The proto-typical madness was superior for coping. So the mechanisms of the conscious found themselves to be generally released from their total service to emergency needs of disastrous times. They came to be used pragmatically for many other purposes, including the development of the useful arts and crafts and for social organization. Ultimately there occurred an everyday dissociation of the emergency and pragmatic functions of the self- aware ego. The emergency functions, that are similar in effects to the superego, are more particularly the primordial functions, ordinarily engrossed by theology. When a new disaster occurred, when the polyego system again was deeply disturbed and dissolving, the old self displaced the new pragmatic self and recapitulated the mechanisms of defense as they were employed in the days of creation. In times of great stress and fright, it is the primordial human self that takes command, not the unconscious nor the beast. A human organism will fall into a catatonic coma or die before releasing the self-consciousness it received upon creation. It will temporalize, symbolize, and control, up to the brink of eternity. Oblivion marks the surrender or death of self-awareness. The problems typical of the human species are in the regression of the ego-mechanisms to their primeval but human state, and not in the resurgent total triumph of the hominid. The unconscious, when reviewed, is seen to be the reservoir of hominid instincts and the suppressed or forgotten materials of experience. However, it is commanded and transformed by the primeval ego, even though physiologically coordinated with the aboriginal instinctive animal. {S : MEMORY AND FORGETTING} MEMORY AND FORGETTING Whence might come such lines as these of Baudelaire? In those times when Nature in her bursting vigor Bore of herself each day such monstrous children I would have loved to live with a younger giantess As at the feet of a queen, a voluptuous cat [2] . The corridors of art and culture everywhere echo with the cries and gasps of remote recollections. R. G. Hoskins, in his essays on schizophrenia, writes how patients describe their mental illness: Very commonly it is as if the conscious self had descended to some lower region where it is no longer in control... The eyes are opened so that one seems to see back to the beginning of creation. One seems to have lived perhaps in many previous existences. Mnemosyne (Memoria), according to a Greek legend, was the daughter of Ouranos but she bore the muses of the arts and sciences from Zeus, grandson of Ouranos and a much younger god. Thus Greek cosmogony assigned memory as an immediate effect of creation. Memory would have begun in the self-awareness of the gestalt of creation. Heavy terror worked to forge memory and forgetting. Out of the material of all things, it hammered the deepest memories. There was too much that was too bad to remember easily, and it was forgotten [3] . Also too much was forgotten for even the unconscious sectors of the mind to bear. Recall may be regarded as the most obvious and 'rational' function of the memory mechanism, mnemotechnology; it operates, however, only if the recollection does not destabilize the poly-ego. The 'forgotten, ' that is, the memories that tend to destabilize the ego's confederational balance, provide essential subject-matter and forms to sublimate activity. They force their way into remembrance via the routes of theology, myth, literature, the practical arts and sciences, and social behavior. The pride of man in a memory that is superior to that of the beasts is inordinate. Memory is a weak, self-imposed tool for displaying material to the conscious in a light that poorly reveals its sources. The special human memory, like everything else uniquely human, is a device that the beast may not need. But the human must have it. He does not go around picking his fundamental qualities like pretty spring flowers in a meadow. Accompanying the primary amnesia of events themselves, is a secondary amnesia that is associated with the forgetting of events. The amnesia of man came from the primal terrors and set up the mechanism of denial, which first insists that nothing was forgotten, and then persists in denying all sorts of traumatic memories, until we find him today the congenital liar, lying both consciously and unconsciously. Man does not remember his experiences as Hominid 'X, ' because the hominid had a conditioned reflex system that typically registered reaction, not selection; they were too boring and useless to recall; they were not layered by meanings, symbolized or acculturated; they were not history. Further, the shock of humanization was also a shock of de-hominization. Forgetting that we were once hominids is part of the amnesia of the trauma of creation. The autonomous system of selective (though usually only apparently so) memory began with the creation condition which we chose to remember and the sublimation of the larger part of the events. All cultures have creation stories. Before creation, man was clay or animal or part-god. The gods, they tell us -- and what gods are not crazy -- give us our special schizoid minds. The memories were in the brain, memories of all except the most trivial and fleeting of events. They were diffused around the brain but could not be called up indiscriminately. The call had to come from one of the poly-selves and then would be subject to a veto from another self or from the central government of the selves. An endless complex track or network became probably an index of symbols, an inner language. When this language was developed as a political process, in communications with others, it formed an outer or public symbolism or language. But this is only a small fraction of the inner language that connects memories. In the public language that ultimately developed were contained clusters of words that grew into creation stories, which purport to describe the days of creation of the world and of humanity. We expect the stories to be heavily veiled accounts of a true history, much like dreams that are internally distorted and censored but nevertheless lend themselves to scientific interpretation up to a degree. We see in the need for creator gods a determination to tell the truth in some way, to assert that the human was distinctly born. Also stories were told of the environment before and during creation. In the new public language, the legends agree that there was a chaos, a formless, mindless order of the world, going nowhere until the divine intervention. We see two types of important 'fact' in this chaos. First, there is a reality, an Earth with a dense translucent encircling high firmament clouds. Second, the human is not there but is about to appear. Man appears as the canopy breaks and the gods appear. Beyond this core of agreement, which I have not fully described here, the stories diverge. Running them together is like reciting a stream of dreams, all apparently referring to a single theme. This earliest extant public language is just what we would expect it to be, and what dreams are like, too, and what the world often appears like to persons suffering from mental illness. They hold a truth which can be deciphered. The modern schizotype or schizophrene may get up from bed late because it takes hours to sort out his dreams from his reality. Primordial homo schizo must have had the same problem, and, if it were not for the fact that primates waste a lot of time anyhow, the new human might have been victimized for this trait. But, on the 'positive' side, he acquired many new displacements (by analogy) from his dreams, a great many wish-fulfillments that encouraged his ambitions to control the world, and a number of incredible (to us) believable orders (to himself) to sally forth and conquer the world. To dream is to sleep, and, as the poet says, to sleep is to dream. Tinbergen says more about sleep in humans: Another innate displacement activity in man seems to be sleep. In low intensities, in the form of yawning, it is of common occurrence in mild conflict situations. Just as in some birds (avocet, oystercatcher, and other waders) actual sleep is an outlet in situations where the aggressive instinct and the instinct of escape are simultaneously aroused. Reliable and trained observers, among them Professor P. Palmgren of Helsingfors, have told me that in situations of extreme tensions at the front, just before an actual attack, infantrymen may be overcome by a nearly insurmountable inclination to go to sleep. I can attest to this, having sleepily observed sleepers under the circumstances. I note, too, that the Spartan warriors at Thermopylae, having sent home their allies and decided to die in the approaching overwhelming assaults of the Persians, spent their time dreamily, mutually combing their long tresses, much to the surprise of Persian scouts. Tinbergen adds, then, that Sleep, as is known from Hess's experiment, is a true instinctive act, depending on stimulation of a centre in the hypothalamus. It is also in line with other instinctive acts in that it is the goal of a special kind of appetitive behavior. The human is sleepier, or at least sleeps much more deeply and determinedly, than animals except when these hibernate. Sleep, dreams, hibernation, self-hypnosis in crisis expectancy, drifting hazes of schizophrenic displacement, catatonic cultures, sleeping culture pockets, and retreat from the dreaded or impossible; there is here an interrelated complex that helps to index some of the catatonic control operations essential to homo schizo. {S : THE STRUGGLE OF THE SELEVES} THE STRUGGLE OF THE SELEVES The ancestor of homo schizo carried a bilateralized brain; two generalized and equally functioning hemispheres operated with a minimum of conflict. The cerebrum of Hominid 'X' was large, perhaps too large already to escape conflict arising out of intra-brain and central nervous system dyscoordination. Homo schizo inherited a larger brain, with immediate problems of electro-chemical and nutritional supply, and of neuro-transmission speeds. In homo schizo the brain conflict evades the earlier physiological compensation by moving out in all directions. So it gets less rest, is more continuously restless, awake and asleep. Rest often takes the form of diversion. As already pictured, specialization within the brain was sharply increased, and right-handedness developed. A general feeling of fear, inadequacy, and weakness was instituted that demanded obsessive attempts at self- control, which extended outwards as attempts to control the environment. The mind of the hominid was shattered. The quantitative leap was great enough to be termed a quantavolution, a qualitative change. One of the sometimes enviable and endearing traits of higher mammals is their consistency of behavior. But we are often so bored with this quality that we search for the smallest indications of character in horses, dogs, and apes. After a night in town a drunk can mount a donkey and be carried asleep over the mountains to home; the animal is 'given his head. ' Many species, we note admiringly, have 'minds of their own. ' Actually, they do not; it is easy to trace the instinctive sources of the behavior. They do not perform many behaviors where doubt and decision are present. We can assume that the hominid was not plagued by indecision nor driven by strong needs to control himself and the world. The human mind that eventuates is a troubled regime. The ego is a would-be dictator whose position is shaky. He can be toppled at any time when his foreign possessions - the outer world - revolt and attack him, and his inner subordinates have sufficient autonomy to join the foreign alliance or to launch a rebellion on their own initiative. Hence we say that the hominid mind broke down in quantavolution and the human ego, basing itself on the large 'lower-level' elements of the central nervous system, grew out of the chaos of the higher level elements. The ego, then, was never hominidal and never absolute. It came into existence as a suzerain and would-be dictator, and can be toppled or changed as its components grant or withhold loyalty. A great step of the suzereign ego is to consolidate its control by seizing and managing the right hand. In a typical neglect of transactional philosophy, it is conceived that righthandedness is logical inasmuch as the right side of the body is controlled by the dominant left brain hemisphere. May it not be more logical to conceive of the right hand as being developed by the left brain in order to strengthen the dominance of the left brain? Right-handedness is genetically predisposed, but only because the left cerebral hemisphere is genetically dominant. The left brain commissioned the right hand to be commanding officer in order to bolster its shaky regime. Similarly, a struggle of the selves took place outside the mind, in the environment, in outer space. In this arena, we see the stars and planets, the comets, the clouds, the moon and sun. Homo schizo first saw these objects in a way that no hominid could see them. He was, we recall, striving to establish a dictator-ego, preferably to carry himself back to his golden age of instinctive bliss. The situation was, however, chaotic, and other selves were offering themselves as candidates for authority, or worse, were practicing anarchists. Here is where symbolism might play a major role as a ally of the dictator ego. If everything was to be called by name, and the code for the names were locked in the code counting and sorting computer of the brain, then whoever held the computer key was the master of the brain and body. So language was seized upon and developed by the left brain. With symbols and a strong right hand, a viable regime could be and was established. Too, there were no limits to the symbolism. As fast as fear erupted and displaced itself, even to far space, the symbols could pursue it and control it. To name an object is to rule it. Always the principal ego was to be an uncertain despot, yet to be a magnificent one, on whose infinite territory not the sun, not even the stars, ever set. The substance of all of these operations may have taken time to occur and be realized by the self-aware human. But the implications of them were already present upon the gestalt of creation. {S : BECOMING TWO-LEGGED} BECOMING TWO-LEGGED Humans probably became totally committed to stand and walk on two legs upon genesis. They were shifting their anatomy to conform to the global reconstitution of their mentation. Students have now shown that australopithecus was bipedal, and feel confident that homo erectus was as well. Hominid 'X', the common ancestral form of them and the human, can be imagined as preadapted to the point where he might, if he would, be bipedal. Like handedness, as soon as the ego-struggle occurred, bipedalism was pressed into service by the dominating left brain. The human stance is unique, but the anatomy of standing is only presumed to be unique. We remind ourselves that the Indian feral child, Kamala, was totally adapted to quadruped motion to the age of perhaps eight years, and several years of training were required to get her to stand and walk voluntarily. Her muscles, tendons, hands, feet, knees, and probably her total body posture were quadrupedal. She walked on her tough palms with a full heel-to-toe motion. A number of physiological and anatomical changes accompany bipedalism, but perhaps all are ex post facto, such as the stretching of lungs and swelling of blood vessels to the head. Most likely, bipedalism is an adaptation for which an intense determination is required. There are no commonsense reasons for it. Kamala was comfortable on all fours and could run well. The human infant, of course, crawls for a year and more before being able to stand up and toddle. Only for sophisticated human activities is bipedalism superior, which presumes that humanism came first. Primates and other mammals are physically and socially more intimate than humans, even including the great cats within their own families; they might be called more 'tangiphile. ' Bipedalism had some motive in the schizoid complex, in which aversiveness to others and ambivalence are prominent. Standing erect is a gesture of retreat and removal from others, which individuates beings. It is also a threatening and offensive posture, including the conspicuous chest-thumping that fiction-writers overrate in gorillas. It goes along with (deliberately) smelling less, and with offering less in the way of hindquarters and front- features to nuzzle and smell. It encourages genital privacy because the hand and upper torso can exercise protective movements. The first homo schizo, one may conclude, would voluntarily seize upon bipedalism, if it were not an already confirmed behavior. Bipedalism, therefore, matched the character of homo schizo and he is determined to master it. But what was this determination or voluntariness or will? Man was supposed to possess a will; philosophers and hoi polloi have thought so for thousands of years. Recently, however, the will has been removed by the philosophers of determinism, although retained by the masses. Did events occur during the gestalt of creation to give humans a will, yet permit it to be taken away under later rational analysis? {S : VOLUNTARISM} VOLUNTARISM The 'will' in hominid, we postulate, must be a 'want, ' typical of animals, therefore an instinct - basically a will to feed, fornicate, flee or fight. In the disaster of creation, the new human achieved a new primary 'want, ' to control himself and the world, to rid himself of fright. All of hominid's will - the aforesaid 'Four F's' - is subordinated, rendered secondary, to the primary will to control. Since the will to control is conveyed to a bewildering variety of human displacements and identifications, it acquires a new complex aesthetics that deludes humans as to its nature. People (philosophers and theologians among them) came to think that they were dealing with a qualitatively distinct mechanism, whereas it was a highly diffused aspect of all human activity, capable of exponentially more fixations than the simple 'Four F's' of the beast. Some acts of obsession and compulsion came to be called 'will, ' when they pertained to objectives of positive or negative value. These, however, if we ignore value preferences and their large variety, can be reduced to the great gestalt of instinct-delay, split self, existential fear, and consequent promiscuous and obsessive need to control. The world is as will, then, just as Hegel said. It is a delusional creation of man's poly- ego confederation playing with its kaleidoscope. This game, with its dexterity and intensity, put all other animals to shame. And individual men came to be distinguished infinitely, in their applications of will, by the way their particular minds shook their kaleidoscopes. So that one man's iron will was to win a battle, another's to win a certain mate, another's to gather money, another's to die, another's to conquer will itself by willing nothingness. Much of this diversity probably occurred promptly after the time of the primeval gestalt. Its diversity elaborated into virtuosity, which doubtlessly played a part in intimidating all surrounding conscious animal forms, including our erstwhile hominid cousins. {S : DIFFUSION OF THE GESTALT} DIFFUSION OF THE GESTALT The hypothesis pursued here is that the gestalt of creation happened to one or two hominids, and diffused as a new dominant gene system. Were this proven untrue, we should proceed to a hypothesis of changed atmospheric constants. If this should be proven incorrect, we should retreat to a theory of psychosomatism, that combines psychosomatism, the 'omnipotence of thought, ' and potentiation of everpresent lines of development of essential living matter. If this idea should be overthrown, we would put up a last-ditch defense with a purely cultural theory of catastrophic fright overturning the hominid mind. All of these are conceived to have been quantavolutionary changes, occurring quickly and hologenetically, from the one Hominid 'X' species to the present homo sapiens schizotypus. Further, it is likely that elements of all of three entered into the actual rise of homo schizo and his further development up to the gates of history. The theory of mutation-by- mutation, adaptation, rung-by-rung, millions-of-years' evolution that is generally held today seems to be mistaken and useless. In the quantavolution of homo schizo, what happened to the Hominid 'X' ancestors, and to diverging strains such as homo erectus and Neanderthal? Many mutated, sickened, and died under the catastrophic conditions that were required to generate the new dominant gene system of mankind. Furthermore, the character of the new species was such as to intimidate the hominids and drive them into marginal living niches. Inasmuch as interbreeding was common, the human population would contain for some centuries or millennia hominid members and human members with hominid genes. The sharp differences between the two types of creatures would encourage eugenics as a matter of course. There are many examples, in social and historical practice, of obligatory or authorized infanticide and of celibacy enforced upon special groups, tribes, serfs or slaves. Holy wars have been many. The hominids, then, insofar as they were not eliminated by segregation and extirpation, could have been subjected to absolute interdiction by the rules of birth and social nurture. In a quantavolution by atmospheric change, the scenario of the gestalt would have been replicated in many hominidal settings. A number of humans would have promptly appeared. The transition from hominid to homo would nevertheless proceed under the conditions just stated. Might the mutations required for humanization have occurred in several hominidal settings, and thereupon and later be fed into the human gene pool via miscegenation? We would then witness, for example, a fire-making band joining a speaking band, from which speaking fire-makers would be born. But the theory of homo schizo requires that his traits should fall out from a central trait change, which we have pinpointed as the splitting of the self. The single genetic incident is fully explanatory, and it cannot admit of any but minor exceptions to the hologenesis of traits. {S : THE DOUBLE CATASTROPHE} THE DOUBLE CATASTROPHE The necessity of natural catastrophe has been recognized, if a critical mutation of species is to be experienced. In other works and in earlier pages, I have presented the theory and evidence for such catastrophes. Strictly speaking, this external catastrophism is distinct from the internal catastrophism of creation. Man is a catastrophized animal: both external catastrophes and the internal catastrophe of his genesis have awarded him this title. Confusion between the two types of catastrophe can occur, as it did in some earlier passages that I have published. For, not only is there the outer chaos and the inner chaos but there is also the overlapping of the natural catastrophes with the earliest experience of homo schizo. He speaks the language of catastrophe out of experience. Critics of quantavolutionary theory can turn this around and say that homo schizo, being what I have said him to be, naturally imagines all kinds of natural catastrophes to have occurred to which he was witness; that is, he would normally have hallucinated world- destroying catastrophes; that is, he would normally have hallucinated world-destroying catastrophes. For instance, Fenichel alludes in his Psychoanalysis to the manic's desire to control the world and Sebastian de Grazia in his Political Community to the ever-present ideology of the destruction and reconstruction of the world. Can I not keep the skies swept clean and in order, leaving catastrophes to occur solely in the mind? To this, I would respond that homo schizo's stories of great disasters are too well supported, and too well detailed, to be either imaginary or highly exaggerated tales. It might be expected, too, that people who were genetically frightened, to appease their fears, would tell stories of a golden age and a gradual progressivism of mankind, which they do; these are partly there, but by their temporary historical framing they lend support to the disaster stories, so that both types of recollections must be accorded historicity, and thereupon further analyzed. Because the terrors were sensible manifestations of high-energy forces, delusion and reality were forever commingled in the new species. The range of thought and sense material was great, including as it did the practically infinite combinations of sense data of the high-energy events and the immediately and infinitely symbolized associations of the events with the self and group. Not only are the earliest records loaded with catastrophic events and languages, but so also are Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. The great variety of detail in man's innumerable culture traits is an expectable and understandable resultant of all the psychological and real events attending the creation. For every controlled and uncontrolled construction that the mind emplaces upon events and objects, there are real events to fit into it. De Santillana and H. von Dechend explicitly commend a large, though unmeasurable, quantity of historicity in Ovid's work on metamorphoses. The palaetiology of the concept of metamorphosis may rest upon an abundance of mutated and damaged organisms accompanying atmospheric and radionic disasters. To hear it told, life was never dull illo tempore. A portion of all religious expression and practice relates to such quantavolutions, among other things. These spectra horribilem then serve as religious lessons, teaching groups and individuals of the punishing power of the gods. The same events serve to connect the celestial with the mundane, inasmuch as sky images and stars are connected with the mostly terrible changes. The lack of control over mutants raises the level of terror. Therefore, what appear to non-quantavolutionists to be unconnected, inconsistent, and unexplainable varieties of the production of human minds here and there throughout the world, acquire under quantavolutionary theory a simple logic within a single framework of explanation. {S : A PRIMORDIAL SCENARIO} A PRIMORDIAL SCENARIO Ideally, the general scenario of the hologenesis of homo schizo would provide a highly specific scenario such as the following: A pregnant twenty-one year old female of the species homo erectus frater (that is, Hominid 'X') is a member of a band of thirteen that gains its livelihood by gathering nuts, berries and herbs, and hunting small animals and choice insects in a swamp habitat. It eats roasted products of wild fires, even spreading them to harvest a territory. It has no tools, not even reusable clubs. An aggressive older male leads the group, which has hegemony over some fifty square miles of territory. The group straggles about. The large mammals hardly disturb them, for they put on a brave front, screeching, gesticulating, baring their small teeth, and dodging adeptly. They are tree and rock climbers, and swamp floppers. They are, in effect, too much of a nuisance to bother with and not tasty to eat. But as the camera zooms in upon an abri, laying off a swamp, one female, 'Ma, ' is dropping an infant. For a long time, which no memory exists to appreciate, the skies have been falling; the waters are rising; fires are frequent; volcanoes are bursting asunder; and the animals, as always now, are agitated. They do not know it, but the fall-out of radiation is heavy. Many die without seeming cause. Many infants are born dead. Many dead animals of the water, sky and air are discoverable and eatable, though some may be radiated and chemically toxic. So living is easy, but stresses are heavy. Ma bears forth two monsters, identical twin males, glabrous, their heads noticeably larger, their movements and cries unprecedented in volume and queer. Ma and others nurture them and they survive. They are the bane of the band. They seem never to grow and their demands are insistent and unending. Crowed by them, the band cannot kill or abandon them, but as if by order of a superior, give them what they ask for, so far as possible. They are tough and wiry but not a match at first for the other young of the band, who begin to breed before these are mature. Still they have a strange power and dominate most of the band, exhibiting an aggressive acquisitiveness. Their command of screeches and gestures is far superior to everyone else's. They behave in unexpected ways. They will carry fire farther, preserve clubs, go out of their way to spy on game, remember the nature and sources of comestibles, pack, store and carry provisions, and use their resources aggressively to dominate the whole group including the present leader. They hurl pebbles at friend and foe alike. As if they can see how they appear, they stand on their hind legs and howl needlessly, with their right arms shaking a club, apparently with intent, at the sky, at holes in the ground, and against the winds. They do not forget, and discriminate savagely among the group, for one thing raising Ma to a status higher than that of anyone else, male or female, rewarding her for favors long past. The time of reproduction comes, tardily. The siblings, who have fought off together the approaches of others, mate with their mother and every female about, and other monsters come forth, bawling. Nothing is too good for the several mutant brats that issue, and their pressure for variegated responses is such that the band actually loses hominid members, by premature death and fighting. But in the next dozen years, the band grows by ten monsters, several of them out of hominids by the male mutants, and includes only six servile hominids, who are treated like retarded children. The mutants prattle incessantly among themselves, gather and hunt successfully, carry flags or branches that intimidate even large animals, not to mention other hominids, give Ma a decent and jealous burial, then dig up her skull and set it nicely in a niche of an abri that has become their headquarters, surrounding the whole with rocks and letting only the docile enter. When the group goes off on long journeys, the young, the sick and the old are left at the abri, comforted by Ma's skull and continuous fire. They spend their time attracting living things to their garbage pit and dispatching them; they chant, they make rope, break stone, and whittle lances. There is little more to be witnessed. As we take our leave, we are satisfied that a human culture, up to the standards of the twentieth century in most respects, will manifest itself in a scenario of fifty years into the future. The mutants -- call them homo schizo -- ill number three hundred, living among a dozen bands, ruling these and drawing the remaining hominids for services, and tribute, possibly cannibalizing them when convenient. The infectious family will have seeded the most attractive of the females and spread out for a thousand square miles around. Some hominids who are docile, or children of the mutants, remain; their germ plasm will soon carry schizoid genes and they are themselves trained to resemble the homo schizo types in behavior. The others flee or are killed for resisting progress in some sphere of life. Unlucky the hominid band that broke away with no mutant. Large animals can now be trapped and killed. No natural enemies exist, except microorganisms, to threaten survival. There is, however, the enemy within, for homo schizo, when seized by the will, attacks his own kind. Several bands are to be found hundreds of miles away, led by people who have fled or been driven from the homeland. Only the gods above who animate the violent forces of nature are respected and communicated with by declamations, exclamations, obeisance, gifts, chants, and dancing. This polymorphously perverse people, their instincts unleashed, are driven to try whatever comes to mind; they are capable of stressing themselves inordinately and setting up and breaking down habits continually. If the reader is interested in comparing scenarios, he may refer back to the evolutionary ladder scenario set forward earlier or to one of the quantum speciation school of thought, in Steven Stanley's New Evolutionary Timetable (157-8). {S : QUANTAVOLUTION AND HOLOGENESIS} QUANTAVOLUTION AND HOLOGENESIS The human probably was born from Hominid 'X' in a brief incident that, for reasons given elsewhere, might be placed at 13,000 years ago, perhaps even a millennium or two later, but also perhaps within a 300,000 years period earlier. It would be well to fix the Holocene boundary at the point where the humans appeared. The aggregate of data on australopithecus and homo erectus promotes them to adjunct humans, also descended form Hominid 'X. ' Hence, in the preceding chapter, they were projected up the ladder of time. John Pfeiffer, in some unusual passages, tells of how competent are the economics and how full the minds of the people of today, the Bushmen and the aboriginal Australians, deemed the simplest of humans, though living in an environment incomparably more difficult than what it once was [4] . He reports on their high mobility, the thousands of square kilometers over which they regularly range. He tells us too, of the charming dream of Louis Leakey, of a kind of dynamuseum, as I once termed such, where visitors would, each week, be transported into a different stage of human development, living as an early australopithecine one week, and the next week according to another way of life. Week by week it goes -- as if time could be collapsed and we might develop so quickly, which is true enough to be suggestive. The homeland of mankind cannot yet be ascertained, even though we agree with Washburn and Moore that man was born only once, at one time, in one place [5] . We speculate that out of Hominid 'X', whose behavior and appearance were distinctly different from those of the hominids, proto-humans, and modern humans of whom we know at present, there came a macroevoluted or quantavoluted type who intermingled with and dominated these families in short order. In Chaos and Creation I drew a schematic diagram of the continents of the Earth as they were once gathered together in an all-land world. In this Pangea there occurs a location which can only be imagined today because of the ocean's opening up and the continents separating. The Caribbean region and the entrance to the Mediterranean dividing Europe and Africa were probably a single landed area with shallow seas, the legendary and geological Tethyan Sea. This kind of area can be regarded as a possible original home of mankind, and I shall sketch here an idea of it. Basic to the argument is that Hominid 'X' existed in numbers everywhere and became human before the globe cracked, before the continents moved to their present positions, and that all of these events happened between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago. The defense of this time scale is carried in Chaos and Creation, The Lately Tortured Earth, and Solaria Binaria. Our choice of location may be preferable to the African rift, a treasury of early finds because it has been exposed by geological erosion. Our guess may also be preferable to the speculation of Thomas Huxley (accepted by the polymath co-founder of communism, Frederick Engels) that mankind originated in a now sunken area called Lemuria, a presumed tropical zone of the West Indian Ocean alluded to in Indian and African legend; this idea does not account so well for northwestern man. The location is more likely, too, than the high Iranian plateau, which more plausibly provided a refuge for disaster survivors and only much later a mobilization area for the later descent of Indo-Europeans towards the west and south. A race 'Atlanticus' may be represented in the proto-Mediterranean type and the aboriginal Europeans, North Africans, and seemingly Caucasoid traces of types reported in earliest American depictions and myths. The homeland is postulated at a point not too far from the focus of Atlantean legends. It follows educated guesses by early anthropologists such as Frobenius, who thought that man moved first from West to East and then back in later times. Nor does it contradict the evidence of relative movements and superposition of fossil data in the fossil and cultural discoveries of the past fifty years. The Americas are usually considered to have been barren of human life until Holocene times, or until late in human development. I think it more likely that existing incidental evidence of man's presence in the Americas will ultimately be augmented to the point of acceptance. At present we have hundreds of items such as inter-racial picture albums (Wuthenau's Unexpected Faces), an incredible upper left second molar associated with pliohippus and other Pliocene animals, in Nebraska (evaluated between pithecanthropus and Neanderthal), and Hooton's claim of finding negroid skulls among pre-Columbian inhabitants of Mexico. With a compacting of time, what appear to be long gaps in human development will disappear as illusions. It is probably no more implausible than other theories, that australopithecus, evolving with its Hominid 'X' form, and neo-humans moved through the then tip of South America, also down throughout Africa, thence through then-joined India, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia, and eastwards, also, through what is now the Near East, Arabia and the South Asian islands. Neanderthal's mixed hominidal-human group would have moved eastwards following the shores of the Tethyan belt through Turkey, Iran and China. Homo erectus, in combined human- hominidal form, would have struck North and South to the farthest extremities of Greenland and South America, and in a wide sweep westwards through Africa into the now South Asian Islands and farther north to China and beyond. Beyond here means, by the Pangean theory, all the land, into which elements of all races found their way, which was exploded and blasted away in the greatest of catastrophes, that which saw the material constituting the Moon pulled out largely from what is now the Pacific Ocean Basin. Once again, the reader is referred to the statement of this theory in the aforesaid volumes. I have mentioned earlier the controversial works of Ameghino that claimed an extremely old date for the fossils of men of the Pampas. Nor can the halt always lead the blind; a radiometric dating by the uranium-thorium method gave an age of 81,000 years for a human tool made of mammoth bone. It is from Old Crow Basin in the Yukon, and was reported by Richard Morlan of the Ottawa National Museum of Man. In California and Mexico, claims of around a quarter of a million years of age have been made for two sites of human operations [6] . Artifacts at the Calico site (California) were assigned by uranium-thorium tests an age of 200,000 * 20,000 years. Similar dates were assigned by both fission-track dating of volcanic material and uranium dating of a camel pelvis to the Hueyatlaco (Vasequillo, Mexico) site containing sophisticated stone tools, by a second group of scientists [7] . Once again radiometric dating is thrown open to question, but also the persistent, and I believe incorrect, theory that humans came to the Americas at a very late date following the humanization of the Old World. {S : THE NEW HUMAN BEING} THE NEW HUMAN BEING Upon a probable mutation, which has been described, the hominid was subjected to a general instinct-delay that left only lower-level and instinctive operations largely untouched (but not unreachable). The instinct-delay can be termed depersonalization, which was the first feeling of homo schizo, to be promptly succeeded by a splitting of the mind into multiple entities that ultimately became a typical human poly-ego. The depersonalization aroused the new creature to a high level of fear, a general anxiety, an existential fear, integral to its being, ineradicable. The response to the fear was a grasping for control of the selves to reestablish the former hominid consciousness and its instinctive nature. This was also permanent. The human was marked by a mania for control. The control-mania could not stop with the selves, because the selves did not stay with the body. In the struggles among the personae, the whole world was embroiled; a splatter of displacements occurred. Streams of affect or identifications were ejected, with attachments ensuing, minimally at the level of attention. Attention extended to habit and to obsession and to a sensing of property, all being mental strategies to fix upon objects to control, thence relief of anxiety. The 'return on the investments' in real or sensed or illusory affect consummates the transactions, no matter whether with people, objects, or spirits; the transactions could be termed, also, projections and retrojections. The outcomes of this unceasing and uniquely human transactional process are numerous. They can be grouped into: a. Perception and attention with typical overlappings into perception disorders, hallucinations and illusions. b. Thought, logic and analogy, moving into rationalizations, delusions and thought disorders. c. Selective, recallable memory, often employing amnesia for fear-reduction. d. Emotional ambivalence respecting all persons and things, a mild anhedonia and general negativism, anxiety-freighted, as distinguished from the hedonic animal. e. Aversion or the non-acceptance of apparent prima facie resolutions of human relationships, including paranoia with its fearful denial of retrojected affect and the substitution of alternative hypotheses of threat. f. Psychosomatism, the stressing of the body to achieve higher control levels, often with healing and destructive effects. g. Guilt and punishment, ranging among all persons, objects and spirits to discipline and erase fear. h. Discipline and work as an outcome of attention, habit, and obsession. i. Drug addiction for anxiety-therapy and orgiasm. j. Anxiety, which continually presents problems for solution, and, when overabundant and impractical, engenders neuroses, neurasthenia, epilepsy, and depression. k. Internal speech, the coding of information bits and sets, in time and space, for quick retrieval by association or for computation, including speech disorders when pieces of code are compulsively expelled as speech. l. Language, public speech, to signal and control the outside world, real and delusional, using internal code elements that others agree upon. m. Sublimation, the elaboration of symbolic activity in a low-anxiety area of displacements. n. Basal activities closely paralleling earlier primate behavior, such as eating, sexuality, mother-love, aggression, and fear-flight resulting from immediate threats, except that these activities are continuously subject to uniquely human interventions. In the outpouring of his new nature, the proto-human thus exhibited new methods of handling large portions of the range of animal behavior. He could think about, talk about, and do something about a world of problems of which his ancestors were unaware. He would give a new aspect to all the ordinary activities of the earlier hominid. However, if eternal 'angst' be considered as a cost, the new person paid heavily for his virtuosity. {S : Notes (Chapter 4: The Gestalt of Creation)} Notes (Chapter 4: The Gestalt of Creation) 1. The New Science, 82. 2. La G‚ante, in Baudelaire, Scarte, ed., Baltimore: Penguin, 1961, 25. 3. A. De Grazia, Palaeoetiology of Fear and Memory, in Milton, op. cit., 31-46. 4. Op. cit., 210. 5. From Ape to Man; cf H. H. Wilder, Pedigree of the Human Race, N. Y.: Holt, 1927, 156-7; E. A. Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons, London, 1938, 185. 6. Ruth D. Simpson, 20 Anthropological J. Canada 2( 1982), 8. 7. Virginia Steen-McIntyre et al., 16 Quarternary Res. (1981), 1. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 5: } {T CULTURAL REVOLUTION} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE CULTURAL REVOLUTION In dreaming, the human brain works fast, conjuring plots and actions that would be not only physically impossible but also temporally prolonged. Persons who have narrowly escaped an abrupt death sometimes exclaim, My whole life passed before me in an instant. Many creative artists and inventors, whether in the physical or social field, refer to their visualization or conceptualization of a total product in a moment of intuition. Such occurrences point toward a theory of cultural hologenesis: if human, then holistic thought; if holistic thought, then holistic behavior; if holistic behavior, then collective instant culture, or at least a culture that develops as rapidly as the acting out of dream and thought sequences can be managed. A culture -- a group mode of mentation and behavior -- arose promptly with homo schizo. Just as man became psychologically holistic upon his origination, so did he become culturally holistic. Human culture was global from its beginnings. Culture was schizoid and remains so. The expansion of homo schizo geographically and culturally proceeded rapidly. Three hundred people, the number achieved in the first fifty years by the scenario of the last chapter, could, under optimal conditions, reach into the billions within a thousand years. Some millions probably did breed. His spatial movements, again if under minimal constraints, could carry him in ever-widening circles to the farthest points of the globe. Like population, spatial occupation probably did proceed exponentially. For reasons given in my study of Chaos and Creation, it is unlikely that the point from which he was launched upon the conquest of Earth and its denizens is presently meaningful; the continents and the aquatic basins have shifted. His point of origin may be set at present-day zero degrees latitude, zero degrees longitude, without contravening any mass of evidence to the contrary. Neither the Iranian Plateau nor the rift valleys of Africa are any longer candidates for the spot. The mouth of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea, if these were joined instead of being separated by the Atlantic Ocean, would be a likely homeland, but to argue the issue farther than we have done in the last chapter would lead far afield. {S : PROTO-CULTURE} PROTO-CULTURE The question is, how could homo schizo, granted his rapid increase in numbers and territory, accomplish the acculturation of which we speak? We know something of his psychology. How would this originate a culture? What we have to demonstrate is that within a century or two, the major structures of culture would be necessarily, recognizably, and irreversibly present wherever the human race was found. These would be implicit in any one of many things that must derive from self-awareness: speech, tools, voluntary organization, religious symbolism, new constructions, movable property, fire tactics, time-factoring. The first culture was a set of wild moves in all directions guided by displaced instincts and an intense need to stabilize the psychic world. It was like the output of a newly designed computer that had to be newly programmed to process data that had to be freshly gathered in order to satisfy the new program. Usually the search for culture begins with a search for tools, because tools can be hard and enduring, and because they exhibit a deliberate human effort to command materials to effect a purpose. We should acknowledge first, though, the inevitable and greatly convenient built-in tool kit of a human. The first human was a tool-user whose body was his portable tool-kit. The hands of the ape are not put to many of their human uses. The human made tools of his fingers, hands, arms, feet, back and shoulder muscles, tongue, spittle, voice-box --indeed of all his senses and organs that he could command. Even today in a highly technical society where there is 'a tool for every purpose, ' the built-in tool-kit is continuously in use in ways far exceeding the imagination and capabilities of the primates. One can indeed conceive of a culture without artifacts. But in reality man must go on to make other tools. He has no choice. Like man's anatomical tools, his mechanical tools are projections of nature and analogies to it. They exhibit a sense of the future and represent the obsessiveness of humans. The tool is pragmatically rational if, in addition, it is functional (efficient) and conserves resources. A tool, then, is a socially transferable physical object believed by its user to confer a larger control over the world than he could otherwise achieve. A mechanical tool is a type of social tool, also, and there is some merit to defining a social tool as an organization of other people believed to add to the user's control of the world. Who ports a club, supports a culture. He remembers to carry it, and foresees a use for it; so he has memory and foresight. The club is a versatile tool against living things and obstructions; it extends the arm and gives leverage. It has to be produced; a skill is involved, so we have homo faber. It is one's own, so we have a property right. It is a coercive threat; it is a sign of fight more than flight, so it communicates a sign of power and authority. As the batons of upper-paleolithic man evidence, the club converts readily to a work of art, employing symbolism of lines, geometry, living things, and carved depictions of the phallus. The club reaches into the sky to connect with shooting stars and comets, as in the snake-entwined rods of Hermes and Moses. Thus the simplest tool, the club, represents the major areas of human interest: skill, subsistence, economics power, safety, authority, sexuality, religion, and aesthetics. It is required, however, that it be carried. If we knew when the club was first carried, we would have a sound basis for fixing the gestalt of creation in time. Alas there is no earliest club; wood rots quicker than bone; we have only the aforesaid early bone batons. We have practically nothing belonging to the earliest man, nor ropes, skins, bamboo constructions, and so on; all subtle evidence is gone, leaving chipped stones and stone mounds. Our statements, such as these about the club, must be highly speculative, anchored mainly by a theory of human origins and nature, and by retrojections of tribal practices today. Tool kits of different cultures might be counted. Leroi-Gourhan has estimated the oldest cultures, the Acheulian, to have possessed 26 stone tools, the Mousterian Neanderthals to have 63, and the succeeding modern type to have 93. These kits do not include all of the tools by any means - not skins, vines, ropes, gut, shells, bamboo, leaves, clubs, wood levers, wood slides, bones, hair, fur, paints, glues and so forth. E. H. Man's survey of the isolated and simple-living Andaman Islander a century ago revealed no more tools of the stone type but more made of the material that would have been destroyed by time and nature. Such tools might raise the given numbers by a factor of five, giving 130, 315 and 465 which, averaging (for who can say what determined the ratio in each case), gives some 300 tools in earliest known human cultures. Then add the tool chest in the human body. We can take it for granted that the earliest human who used any tools, used many. With such material uncovered from, or imputed to, paleolithic man, a world of intellectual, emotional, ritualistic and mundane variety can be contemplated. An engraved ox rib from Pech de l'Az‚ was called Acheulian and dated at 300,000 years by F. Bordes, and in 1982 Pietro Gaietto published in Genoa a treatise on pre-historic sculpture [1] . There he moves the earliest artistic works of mankind a million and a half years back to the pebble culture of australopithecus and homo erectus. He argues that the earliest busts and menhirs are as decipherable as the earliest utensils, and exposes abundant evidence of artistic mentation in material of a type hitherto disregarded and cast aside by paleoanthropologist. Appearing first in what may be artificial modifications of naturally suggestive stones, they develop successively in pre-Neanderthal, Neanderthal, and homo sapiens excavations. Working independently, L. G. Freeman and R. G. Klein, University of Chicago anthropologists, announced a year later the discovery at El Juyo (Spain) of a sanctuary containing a probable altar, weapons, house-hold tools, animal relics, and a stone sculpture. The sanctuary was dated at 14,000 B. P. and the bust depicted a two-faced creature, half smiling man and half cat. It resembles a number of Gaietto's sculptures. Gaietto's controversial findings conform to my theory here, lending more evidence 1) of the humanness of the hominids, 2) of cultural hologenesis, 3) of a persisting interest, amounting to an obsession, in two-headed and two-faced persons, that may denote wonderment over the self-awareness of homo schizo, 4) of concurrent cultural and physio-psychological human genesis, and 5), although he does not question the conventional long-term chronology, of the cultural homogeneity of paleolithic beings and therefore of a short elapsed time since humans quantavoluted. Even though he believes in darwinian gradualism in human development, Andre Leroi-Gourhan can say of his study on prehistoric religions that Man, from his formation up to our times, began and developed reflection, that is, the ability to translate the material reality around him by means of symbols... There is no good reason to deny to paleolithic man a preoccupation with mystery, if only because their intelligence, of the same nature if not of the same degree of homo sapiens, implies the same reaction in the face of the abnormal, the unexplained. Here, facts exist, many of them, which show that from his first moments, homo sapiens (or his immediate predecessor) behaves like modern man. The indicators involve not only religion, but also techniques, habitations, art, self-adornment; they create, by contrast with that which precedes, an intellectual ambiance in which we recognize ourselves at first glance [2] . He is saying that modern man has been basically unchanged from his beginnings. But the beginnings for him go back millions of years and we assert that the evidence of a long period is almost entirely wanting. S. A. Semonov, in his work of 1973 on Prehistoric Technology, attempted an analysis of the stages of technological development followed by mankind. He perceived seven tendencies, which he believed to have followed one another over a long time. First a manufacturing process was invented to reduce the angle of edges on stone. Then smoother blades were evolved to reduce friction. Next, the mechanical power of tools was increased by elevating the amount of force that could be applied to the instrument. Steps were then taken to increase the rapidity with which the tool can be exercised while working it. Specialization was afterwards introduced to evade the limitations of a general tool and accomplish better the foregoing processes. Later, the physical-chemical properties of the instruments were enhanced by using fire, sunlight, and water to alter the properties of rope, wood, and bone. Thereupon, abrasives and saws were invented to increase friction, and the pestle and mortar were employed to pound materials. We note that the principles of force, involving portage (pushing and pulling), the lever, elasticity of matter, gravitation, and chemical combustion, were incorporated in the processes. Too, wind, sun, and fire were used directly to play upon the materials and convert them. Animals, furthermore, were induced to dig, carry, and turn devices, much later on, it is thought, and animals too were exploited, as with bird-eggs and bees honey. Yet there is no rigid requirement that these inventions should follow one another in all cases, or, if they did, that they should not have followed one another quickly. It is the counting of time that lends an evolutionary atmosphere to the proceedings. A more rapid counting, on quantavolutionary theory, would accomplish the same developments in several hundred years. Much depends upon intensity of motive and self-awareness, once the time element is laid aside. The concept of the gestalt of creation, we have argued, supplies such strong motivation and awareness. We go further and claim that in his first years on Earth, homo schizo must have achieved much in the way of tools and culture. It is safe to say that, if at all human, that is, if self-aware, hence finding many objects and animals of interest and striking for control of the world, homo schizo would in short order arrive at a complete culture-kit. I have already shown that, to paraphrase Bonaparte's remark about bayonets, a self- conscious person can do anything with a club plus sit on it. Also, you can digest any organic material that you can find and eat, raw or processed. Processing includes to stew, heat, bake in ashes or sun, salt, soak, pound, powderize, and pre-masticate. You cannot gather plants without noticing that they grow from seeds, and that seeds and bulbs are edible, and that time after time your favorite location will renew itself. You cannot chase animals without catching their young, then raising them until they are ready and needed for food. (Modern women have been noticed to nurse suckling pigs, until these can eat other food.) You cannot have a garbage pile without observing that rodents, birds, and tasty insects feed and breed there. You cannot handle fire without preserving it, using it for roasting, and being 'spiritualized' by it. In skinning an animal before eating it, which can be done with one's hands, though a sharp rock is better, you cannot help but sit on the skin or use it as a muff or blanket or haft. You can frighten and inspire responses by hooting and whistling, and whipping branches in the air, and if you frighten other beings and they you, can readily try to impress inspirited locales, like caves and sky, where you imagine there must be live things, to keep them from frightening you. You cannot gather eggs without finding young birds whose wings you can break and which can be kept in a loosely covered hole until grown. You can get agreement with others by recalling and using sounds in common, and can convey known sounds from one person to another from one day to the next or one place to another -- a message. You can model your indecisive behavior on your remaining instinctive behavior and animal behavior, unknowingly setting up the paradigm of logical and pragmatic thought about causes and effects. Should not these necessary immediate implications of proto-human brainwork be incorporated into appraisals of earliest man? No evidence contradicts the statements; why, then, should a creature be put to climbing the rungs of a ladder for four million years or forty thousand years, for that matter? Probably the ideology of classical anthropology was at fault. In order to discover proto- man, the amateurs ventured forth among the most savage tribes. The most savage would be the poorest in property (the heyday of the bourgeoisie was then) and the simplest (rococo art permeated the Victorian age). So the students referred to the peoples who were hunters and gatherers. Instead of penetrating into and evaluating the mentation of these peoples, explorers and reporters placed them into the category of primeval man, who had to be one step above the apes and who had just climbed down from the trees. Probably there was in this theory, such as it was, an element of ethnocentrism. The British geologist Ager has noted that the nomenclature and systems of rocks in the world have had a suspiciously prominent presence in the centers of the old British imperial posts and routes. The British invented and dominated much of early anthropology, too. A joke as hoary as Queen Victoria went, One Englishman a hunter, two a dress-up dinner, three a club. The most-savage nomadic hunter- gatherer (the women gathered) was a wish-fulfillment; Tarzan, son of an English nobleman, was back among the apes. To the contrary, proto-human had very soon a culture that was as schizoid as he was and held the essentials of most subsequent discoveries and institutions. He invented as he moved through the world, and the news about, and practice of, culture moved with him. Settled and mobile communities existed, tied into the ecumenical culture, kept posted by eccentric wanderers and by group encounters. {S : LOST MILLIONS OF YEARS} LOST MILLIONS OF YEARS By extensive comparisons of primates and mammals, Robert Martin has positively related basic and active metabolic rates to body size, then again body surface with brain size [3] . Brain size and body size are also positively related. Man's enormous brain is partly accomplished in embryo and partly post-natally. The big spurt after birth, when coupled with the very small human litter, typically one infant at a time, leads Martin to believe that this relative human abnormality depended for survival in the process of natural selection upon the persistence of a stable natural environment and ecology. In our terms, this would imply a denial of the need for a high reproduction rate as insurance against catastrophe. The human reproduction rate, however, is compatible with catastrophic conditions; it is still exponentially high. Furthermore, only because it is working humanly and not because it is large, it is a pragmatic or rational insurance against catastrophic obstacles to survival. Therefore we would discount the meanings that have been offered of his correlations; there must be some significance to them, but not the one for which we are searching. The catastrophized human mind is itself proof against catastrophe. The human, it appears to us, must have grown a larger body and brain, and heightened its metabolism, and lengthened its training period because it was already human. Stated simply and crudely, the human wanted to overcome its disadvantages and extend its controls, and did so -- genetically by breeding, psychologically by practices and ideals; it invented the gods and imitated them. Population growth rates present no obstacle to a quick diffusion of mankind. They are an exponential phenomenon. An amusing calculation recently gave to Charlemagne's fifteen children of the ninth century some 255 billion contemporary descendants, a hundred times the world's population today. (Obviously heavy intermarriage occurred continuously since his day, especially inside France.) Then, the genealogist said, Attila the Hun several centuries earlier made his presence felt in what became the kingdom of the Franks, and Charlemagne had to be descended in some part from Attila, by statistical calculation. Which would permit finally every modern Frenchman to claim descent from Attila. For that matter, many of us may descend from a fecund cousin of Lucy, the australopithecine who perished in the ash wastes of Afar. Anyone in the world can play a similar game. Populations, human groups included, repeatedly expanded and contracted like an accordion, in the passage of centuries. Today we are impressed by expansion. The people of India number over 700 millions, twice the population of 35 years ago, and pressing hard upon the means of subsistence. Yet they are projected to double in the next 32 years to 1,400 millions. A quantavolution, whether deliberate or disastrous, is foreseeable. Man should have reached a comfortable Neolithic level of culture within a thousand years of humanization, and stayed there unless general catastrophe intervened. The Neolithic is universally acknowledge to have been an across-the-board human culture with all basic practices, institutions and techniques invented and in use; it was certainly in being everywhere 8000 years ago. Could man have been fully potentiated and activated by mutation -- i. e. physiologically complete as a human -- but not have behaved so as to develop his mind and culture except very slowly and incrementally? If so, then what was retarding him, keeping him for periods of first millions, then thousands of years, from making progress towards the new stone age? Might it have been perpetual dietary deficiencies? But the diet of the hunter-gatherer is excellent. Might it have been perpetual warfare? But war has incited invention and cultural diffusion throughout history. Moreover, war may not have been continuous. Neo-malthusianism and birth-control among the race as a whole or among the intelligent would be implausible. Might it have been the difficulty of first inventions, as opposed to secondary ones? The lever, the spring, the knife, the bucket, the garment, the overhang, animal training, the advent of springtime seeding? Are these inventions which would be taking trillions of man- hours? Continuous plagues of types known and unknown today? A generally stupefying plague is unknown. Might it have been a world catastrophe (climatic, fall-out, solar black-out?) These would endure only briefly. Were there recurrent global amnesias from a stupefying and dizzying electrical condition of the Earth? This is conceivable. Might it have been frequent devastating natural disasters? Like war, disaster teaches. Was there a catatonic fear of change -- a frozen taboo against change? Changes are eventually forced, and taboos do not block all avenues of development. Might life have been simply too easy, hence dolce far niente? Life (see all above) is never that sweet; and recall his eternal angst. Were men too few or isolated? Not knowing about each other? Contra-indicated. Perhaps they could not organize a division of labor? But the potentially useless would have a desperate motive to make themselves useful, to avoid being discarded. Whatever the reason, the primitivity of many tribes today shows that men do not progress except for reasons which we do not understand. But they succumb to new temptations right away -- horse, ax, gun, tobacco, sugar. Further, as we argue, primitivity may not only be a mistaken idea; it may in any case be an actual short-time, youthful phenomenon. If primitives act young ( the childish peoples some early anthropologists called them condescendingly) it may be because they are young, and so are we all. I cannot completely dispose of all of these objections here. Merely to phrase them, however, disposes of many. The very nature of homo schizo as a restless, anxious, control- seeking creature answers them. The most troublesome problem, it seems, is a possible variant of the events that produced homo schizo: if a subsequent new constant of a gaseous or electrical character were to be introduced into the atmosphere, mankind might be numbed or frustrated mentally for a hundred or a million years, a prolonged Tower of Babel effect, one might call it. By a worldwide alteration of electrical fields, the human mind would be incapacitated for consistent and routine solutions of problems; it would be amnesiac; it would be fibrillating excessively and continuously. Or, conversely, the mind would be deprived of the hormones and gases required for all except quasi-catatonic operations; mankind would be a sleep-walker for millions of years. Evidence has been already presented to show that these lost ages have not occurred; they never existed. Hence, this possibility must be preserved only to defend the theory of homo schizo in the event that long-term time reckoning turns out to be correct. I shall continue, therefore, my analysis, tending to show that human culture has not been slow in developing, but, to the contrary, rapid. Scholars have sometimes wondered at the long ages of mental stagnation. Thus, J. Hawkes remarks, That a tradition could continue with only slight changes of essential style over a period of between twenty and thirty thousand years, which is what our present chronology suggests, seems today almost incredible. [4] If this scene of the Upper Paleolithic is incredible, what then of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, of changelessness going before? Thus Sol Tax comments upon the universality of the material characterizing the East, on one hand, and Africa, Europe and India, on the other, and how their artifacts span four-fifths of the quaternary period with practically no change, and a socio-cultural reconstruction of the Sinanthropus cultural material would be mathematically the same as that made for the Australopithecines. He concludes that Certainly, the stability of attainment and the lack of change cannot ever be taken as characteristic behavior of Homo sapiens as we know him, and we must look closer to home for our first representative of Man. [5] In effect, he is saying: deny man exists, as long as he is not developing for long stretches of time. Instead, Tax should be challenging the time-clocks. His position seems all the more uncomfortable inasmuch as he has acted as a leader in bringing the public to realize that primitivity is a pejorative term and unjust to the mentality and culture of 'primitive' peoples. {S : TRIBES, CIVILIZATIONS, AND TIME} TRIBES, CIVILIZATIONS, AND TIME I prefer the term 'tribal' to the world 'primitive': it is less misleading. Tribal cultures are not young; they are as old as the oldest modern culture. All cultures are equally old, so far as one can tell. The tribal culture holds a stronger illusion of special gods and heroes; it claims common ancestry; it speaks a special language; most of its transactions are inside the tribe; and it has not been accommodated to a greater society. These conditions are disappearing; few tribal cultures are left outside the great society. Until recently, many tribes were 'resting' in the stone age. This is a mechanical and psychological judgement, not an ethical one. As Jules Henry and others have explained, their psychic unity is complete [6] . When a culture achieves some tolerable mastery of its individual and collective minds, there is little incentive to change unless it is ravaged by nature or conquest. A scarcity or profusion of artifacts is no proper criterion of the humanness or human development of a culture. Until this century, a village with its farmers on some Greek islands would possess few artifacts, and its church would be scarcely more than a shaman's hut in Central Africa. If the Greek and African villages were compared with the Shandridar village of ancient Iraq or an early community in the Basin of Mexico or classical Tiahuanacu one could not argue conclusively that the later were more evolved than the earlier, and one would find perhaps similar difficulty in appraising their outlook and mentation. The great civilizations began to appear about seven thousand years ago with commerce and conquest. There have been perhaps fifty of them. They take about three hundred years to gestate and last for a millenium before handing themselves over to another civilization as with the Incas, and/ or dissolving, as happened with the Roman Empire. During this time, and counting the component cultures from which they were amalgamated, there may have existed about 20,000 cultures in all. It is difficult to 'put a tribal culture back together again' once it has been absorbed into civilization. Sometimes a tribal culture will remember having been ruled distantly but not tightly or absorbingly. It shows almost no signs of having been included in a bygone civilization. Therefore it must have existed by itself since the beginning of human time, or since it split off from a tribal aggregate at some time in the past to form a related unit. The fission would have occurred because of natural catastrophe, flight from a growing civilization, internal disputes, or overpopulation and emigration. It is unfortunate that all of these statements must be conjectural. Yet their thrust is unmistakable. There has not been enough time since the beginning of human culture for all tribes to have experienced participation in a major civilization -- except for the ecumenical proto- culture to which all peoples must originally have belonged. In this case, the demography of cultures would imply recent human origins and support the theory of cultural hologenesis of homo schizo. Elsewhere I have defined a 'memorial generation' as a unit of fifty years that would span the age of the oldest story-teller and the youngest attentive listener of a group. It is about three times the length of a reproductive generation. Some current estimates, using long-time reckoning, have human culture appearing, bit by bit, of course, for from 50,000 to 5 million years. Here we estimate that one thousand years (20 MG) is enough; and 260 memorial generations (MG), 13,000 years, is enough for the history of mankind. Fifty thousand years give 1000 MG's, and 5 million years allow for 100,000 MG's. Unless the human mind developed finely, bit by bit, with one tiny innovation following another, the human could not consume so much time so unprofitably. And what was directing this incrementally minuscule evolution? And if it burst into quantavolution in the Upper Paleolithic, what caused that event to occur? If it were not for the accepted methods of reckoning time, scientists would probably have to agree that a hologenesis of both man and culture is logical and recent. To hallucinate further, if Solon of Athens had called on a panel of experts from Babylonia, Iran, China, India and Mexico, as well as from Greece and Egypt, in the sixth century B. C., all would have told him that man's history was short, at least since the last great catastrophe. But belief is firm in the tests that report long times for the early fossils and relics of man and life generally, and claim a long, slow ascent. A century ago, when time reckoning was governed by our type of speculation, by the fossil record, and by the apparent ages of sedimentary rock strata, time measures were easier to assail. Today, radiochronometry lengthens human time and fixes it by elaborate chemical tests, the most critical of which are the radiocarbon dating and potassium-argon (K-A) dating to which I have made reference above. Both tests are striving for validation in the crucial middle times between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago. It is expected and hoped that they will close this gap. Meanwhile the K- A test can be used to support very old ages for what appear to be human remains with artifacts; and the 14C test is keeping the Upper paleolithic age far enough back to support impressions of a very gradual human cultural development. I have given elsewhere my reasons for disputing the validity of 14C beyond 2700 years, for regarding the K-A test as quite unreliable, and for questioning most other chronometry. (Chaos and Creation, chap. III) Here, I do not treat fully these tests, because the theory of human and cultural hologenesis is independent of the time-tests frame. Hologenesis could have occurred 13,000; 50,000; 200,000; 1.5 million or 5 million years ago, except that in all of these cases, an incredible amount of human history is missing. Perhaps we should hope to find it, cheered on by the late reports from micro-paleontology that have added a billion years to the two billion year age of life on Earth (but brought the age of life and the age of the Earth itself uncomfortably close to one another). For those dates that are beyond 50,000 years, one might postulate a limited jump in human and cultural evolution, leaving a final large jump for the Holocene boundary. That is, some hominid, perhaps not even a human ancestor, could have chipped a stone, with nothing else on his mind. Given my analysis of the club-wielder, I would not know how to explain this activity. It would not be modern man, but a different species. I find this solution easier to tolerate than a gap of millions of years between a true man, a chipped stone, and the Upper Paleolithic-Holocene periods. {S : MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS EVERYWHERE CONTEMPORARY} MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS EVERYWHERE CONTEMPORARY Not only did primeval man quickly achieve a world-wide protoculture, but the next age, so far as we can tell about ages, reveals increasingly a panorama of cultures of equal status around the world. To distinguish this age from proto-culture, let us refer to it as neo- culture and think of it as merging the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic developments. Legend usually does so, and in a way so do the most ancient texts. Man is created, he is savage but human, he is given gifts of all arts and crafts, he lives in a golden age. He is destroyed, and a new age follows. If a new panel of experts were called, this time by name, say High Priest Aaron, Akhnaton of Egypt, Solon, Hesiod, Plato of Greece, and Ovid of Rome, they would probably agree to this and add much illuminating detail. If the French scholars of the years of nationalistic jealousy were not intent upon showing the great age of advanced culture in France, they might have assigned the cave are of the Dordogne to the time of pre-dynastic Egypt, 6500 years ago. The hot breath of tourists damaged the Lascaux paintings in a few years; before then, neither the ancient users nor the dozen thousand years of quiet cold damp were sufficient for their destruction. Nor the great climate changes that drove off the cave people and the large animals. Of their style in general, Leroi-Gourhan writes, The nature of the paintings does not seem to have varied from -30,000 to -9,000 years before our epoch and stays the same in Asturias as on the Don River. [7] Some 21,000 years of the same genre of painting. And by now he would have to say -- from England to Siberia. The older genealogy hardly justifies the assigning of ancient ages; it all was suspended by the thread of thriving ethnocentrism, until geophysics advanced a radio-carbon test for charcoal and bone. From A. F. Spiess' Reindeer and Caribou Hunters (1979), we are permitted the notion that protohistorical North American hunters and paleolithic hunters of Southwestern France (Abri Pataud) had similar relationships with their prey, despite the numerous different cultures in each setting and within the settings, over a passage of up to 35,000 years. The social adaptation of humans to animals suggest common behaviors persisting universally (relative to the ecology) over long time spans. The mode of life of the 'hunters' of the Upper Paleolithic, which has now been extended beyond France as far as Siberia and through the Sahara possibly down to Southwest Africa, and very lately to England, may not have been the exclusive life of the times. The caves themselves were not for living. As far as one can tell, they were modelled on the cloudy vaults of heaven and the mysterious depths of the womb. The passages and chambers were artistically organized for stages of religio-clan initiation. The bison was the central totem animal. Living, for the hunters, was outdoors, or in temporary huts, or under abris which could shelter them against the elements. They must have been connected with settlements, else where would the women and children and animals have stayed. One cannot examine their artwork without grasping that at the very least they would be living in the style of the North American Indians before 1600 A. D. Repeated devastations and heavy sedimentation and sinkings have obliterated practically all traces of their villages and gardens, and perhaps major civilizations as well. Generally the domestication of animals has been placed in the period 7-9000 years ago [8] . A claim is now advanced for domestication near Nairobi in East Africa at 15,000 years ago. In Patagonia, whose natives are looked upon as exceedingly 'primitive', men long ago captured, confined, fed, killed, and ate the giant ground sloth, now extinct, the extinction perhaps occurring when 70% of the great pleistocene mammal species disappeared [9] . This will certainly confuse the picture. Meanwhile agriculture seems to be moving backwards in time reckoning. C. Niederberger finds Mexican sedentary economies with a mixed agricultural-gathering-hunting base around 8,000 years ago. Artifactual and non-artifactual evidence from the lacustrine shores of the Chalco Basin already suggest the existence of fully sedentary human communities in this region from at least the sixth millennium B. C. [10] San Pablo (Ecuador) corn kernels embedded along with associated corn designs on pottery in deep cultural remains show a heavy agricultural population between 200 to 4000 B. C. (using 14C tests with bristlecone pine correction). These high flood plain sites are called generally the Valdivia culture. They are definitely not of Japanese culture type, as may be some other early discoveries of the same region. Agriculture was known throughout the world in Neolithic, and perhaps much earlier times. One may ask whether agriculture, which is not an easily diffusable set of inventions, was not practiced in embryo during the first ecumenical culture of homo schizo. Southeast Asia and Asia Minor are emerging with concurrent early dates. We can quote Henry T. Lewis: A search for the various stimuli to domestication should not involve looking for those factors which led man to discover agriculture; rather it should involve learning about those factors that made agriculture a necessary alternative in human adaptations, first as a complement to hunting and gathering, and later as a substitute for it [11] . In pre-European California, hunting and gathering competed successfully with agriculture [12] , for example. And, again, Lewis writes: Domestication would have begun not as a 'revolution' but, rather, as an attempt to extend and stabilize the existing subsistence strategy. Here he is saying what I earlier implied, widespread natural disasters may have driven humans into agriculture, away from the more convenient and satisfying life of the hunter- gatherer, 'just as the Bible says. ' As for today, the same group of anthropologists agree that it is merely a matter of time before all the cultural systems of the world will be different variations, depending upon divergent historical experiences, of a single culture type. [13] This exemplifies their law of cultural dominance. But it also casts doubt on any great antiquity for culture, hence for man. Baker comments on the situation concerning prehistoric botanical domestication an diffusion, saying Why is it that the ancestors of domesticated plants are now so rare (or even extinct)? It is hard to see how domestication of cucurbita (squashes) would make life any more difficult for the wild species. [14] Might it be that man under catastrophic circumstances takes care of his plant seeds while the wild seeds are destroyed? Might man also preempt the best areas for growing the plant, thus handicapping the wild sort? And might not the wild plants have come from an isolated botanical niche whence they were transported around the world by men? All three arguments, especially the last, appear to be valid. They would point to an early, rather than late, date for agriculture. It is not impossible, then, that much of the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic were merged, and throughout the world, too. As for the Mesolithic, this usually maligned cultural epoch is now receiving accolades for its own achievements. Nevertheless, it still hardly has boundaries to distinguish it as a period, and rather is sandwiched in between the two other periods to fill the greedy stomach of time. To support the foregoing hypothesis, it is well to stress again that many tools bridge gaps of thousands and even 'millions' of years between different epochs, leaving one to wonder at the marvelous resiliency of the stone age peoples who otherwise appear to reject invention. So that, for instance, Neanderthals executed works of art [15] . They also garlanded their dead with flowers in Northern Iraq [16] , implying an interest in horticulture, as well as religion. Neanderthal Mousterian styles of stone-working are found in Magdalenian deposits. And a single Greek cave assigns one chipped stone from Upper Paleolithic to early Neolithic, an adjoining stone from Early Neolithic to Late Neolithic and another from Middle Neolithic to final Neolithic; Magdalenians use Mousterian tools, etc [17] . And, once again, MacNeish, working at Teotihuacan sites, assigns one type of uniface flaked stone implement at 10,000 years of age and finds that it continues to 6300 years ago. Just before this last time, another type of implement picks up and carries on until 800 years ago. Nine thousand years are spanned by two implements [18] . {S : ECUMENICAL CULTURE} ECUMENICAL CULTURE There was in the beginning one human race, one language, one culture. The contrasting hypotheses seem to be losing vigor. That many cultures around the world originated independently implies that men scattered around the world and only then started up cultures from a delayed time-fuse in their brains. Despite the tenacity with which this idea grips many people, it would appear absurd, unless one believed at the same time that humanization occurred immediately in consequence of an atmospheric change that affected the brain with some uniformity everywhere, an idea that I have not seen expressed except in these pages, and here is included as a partial and fluctuating cause of humanization. Since we cannot agree precisely when humans originated, for certainly most will accept Charles Darwin's series of insensible gradations in preference to my theory of holocene hologenesis, how can we fix a point for the beginning of culture? As I construe the conventional argument, it must assert that the ever-extending ladder of evolution contains many rungs, some of which are physical gradations and other cultural. When a physical rung -- say a straightening of the spine -- occurs, the lucky straight-backed clan is different from all other men until its trait overcomes their curved spines; but, meanwhile, some curved-back clan invents a bull-roarer, which gives an impressive sound, and this artifact begins diffusing among the curved-backs and the straight-backs, helping both to survive in competition with men of either type, as with animals. Hence, at any given moment in this long period of human evolution up to the present, one would encounter a dizzying number of intersecting circles of diffusing physical and cultural traits. Too, it is a competition of all against all. The number would be perpetually large, and uniquely combined at any point in demographic space. So the mills of evolution by natural selection and mutation would have to be working very finely, very rapidly, and continually. Inasmuch as this theory, perhaps exaggeratedly put here, dominates scholarly thought, all coincidences of cultural traits following humanization must occur by means of independent invention, or by adoption (that is, by diffusion from one or the other source or a common third source). Hence argument always centers around these two ideas and they have been flailing at each other in their boxing ring since the beginning of the uniformitarian orthodoxy a century and more ago. The additional contestants that I would sponsor here, out of a sense of sportsmanship, namely common origination in cultural hologenesis and common experience of general catastrophe, are barred from the ring. It is easy to see why this prejudice should occur. With a very long evolution time, it is presumptuous, if not absurd, to believe that any culture trait possessing particular recognizable form could be part of a primordial culture. That is, such a namable and tangible trait cannot be very old. The idea behind the trait may be very old and represented in some now extinct forms and cultures as well as in present-day cultures. For instance, the taboo against incest extending to first cousins is found here and there. These cannot be primordial but must be independent inventions, according to long-term evolution; they would be offshoots of a very ancient taboo against incest that may have conquered all cultures in some form by diffusion or independent invention at some time in the murky history of man. Freud's speculation that this taboo may have occurred everywhere by diffusion as part of a guilt reaction, also diffused, originating from the murder of the leader of a single primal horde, seems too close in time and has not been accepted by the orthodox anthropologist. The prejudice against the arising of cultural traits out of similar experiences with a common catastrophe is also easy to explain. Such catastrophes have until recently been certified by astronomers and geologists not to have happened, or to have happened so long ago that they cannot have affected whatever it is that interests anthropologists or archeologists or prehistorians; hence no further consideration is required. The literature of prehistory is otherwise rich in the assumed effects of climate, topography, and habitat upon cultures, deriving similar cultural and even physical traits from the similar experiences of men. Thus comets terrify all cultures. But this is explained as normal fear of unusual sights in the sky. The deluge is attested to by practically all cultures. But this is explained as exaggerated accounts of flooding and high tides. On the other hand the people of the north are blond because they need to absorb sun while the people of the topics are dark because they need to reject the overabundant sun. (It seems not to matter that the Eskimos and Lapps are dark, or that the great tropical forest scarcely illuminate the dark people in them.) With all of this, there has until now been little chance of emerging from the source materials with even the beginnings of a division of culture traits as we conceive of them: elements that are assignable to times of common catastrophic experiences; independent inventions that came about owing to cultural peculiarities of given peoples with some parallels to be drawn from the independent inventions of other peoples; and innovations originating among one people and diffusing to others, whether in the wanderings after natural disasters and war, or in variously motivated migrations. For instance, fire, which had been known to, and used by, hominids and other animals, would have been reinvented by mankind. Fire was born when heaven and earth separated, says a Mongolian marital prayer. Fire -- in its modern sense of something to be used multifariously, made and remade -- was invented because the created human was terrorized by new intensities of fire, because the projected gods used fire in the skies and on earth, and because the new mind could remember its use and foresee its future utility. Credit for the invention was ascribed to a god and sometimes also to a god-hero who, partly man and partly god, could arrogate credit without displeasing the gods. The earliest town plans were built according to a celestial model, and the planners were astronomer-architects. The conditions for planning were, again, an aware and awed human group, a sky religion, a skill in retrojecting and rationalizing a celestial scene, and then a science of measurement and construction. The orientation of the towns (Greek: polis) and temples followed first the North-South line of the Boreal Hole, a northern-most sky opening which happened in cloud-canopy times to represent the north geographical pole (from polis.) In less cloudy and in bright times, measurements that were derived from the old monuments and improved by stargazing, permitted the practice to continue. The Egyptian and Mexican city and pyramid orientations were North-South. In protohistory, East-West orientations became prominent because the sky-path of Venus was East-West, and finally the Sun's regularities provided the lines of true orientation for planners. Macgowan's study of fifty early Mesoamerican towns shows modes at 70* East of North and 17* East of North, but several pitch from 1* to 21* West of North. The earliest are truest to the North [19] . La Venta was dated by Hutch (1971) at around 1000 B. C. and is oriented 8* West of North. The changing orientations suggest that tilts in the axis of the Earth occurred from time to time; ancient man was never whimsical about orienting his towns. A recognizably scientific astronomy is being sought farther and farther back in time. B. A. Frolov argues that an intellectual curiosity possessed early humans everywhere. The Russian counterparts of the Stonehenge monuments are at Lake Onega, and both are sky-directed religio-astronomical instruments [20] . The Pleiades are called the Seven Sisters by aborigines of Australia, North America, Siberia, and other ancient cultures. Petroglyphs that appear to refer to astronomical constants and phenomena are found all over the world; it may be mainly the prejudice on behalf of the 'evolutionary ladder' that forbids the assignment of many such carvings to the earliest age of humanity; in some of such cases the glyphs are found among the earliest ruins of a people or are the only remains discernible. That is, the hologenesis of mentation and culture derives support from the increasingly early assignment of scientific works. Two thousand years after humanization, a large number of humans possessed self-awareness, religion and rites, planned towns, armed forces, a full range of stone and soft material tools, special occupations, domesticated animals and plants, and complex language. They entertained a range of aspirations that followed their time sense into visions of improved life; they created the rudiments of the highest ideals of later times: freedom from fear through knowledge, individual autonomy, conquest of the environment, storage against future hunger, and social cooperation. But the high energy forces of the gods permeated history, life, and expectations. Destructions were frequent, and catastrophes, such as they already dreaded, were to recur. During the Saturnian 'Golden Age, ' which was a single Neo Age, composed of the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic, a wide circulation of traits occurred. Still a great many isolated groups, whose ancestors had survived the earlier catastrophes, continued to live apart. They became in many cases the so-called 'primitive tribes' of historical times, philosophically and technically undeveloped relative to newly organizing large central cultures. Later catastrophes added to the number of isolated units of culture. Humans who are tribal in organization possess an essentially primordial culture. Among them are found well-developed languages in bewildering variety; they share not only linguistic principles but verbal roots with the great languages of the world; their attitudes toward language and symbols are proto-historical. Totemism is common; so also complex systems of taboo. Their religious astralism varies in extent and complexity. In comparison with scientized cultures, the succession of gods is less well described in legend, though the sky god (Uranus) is found everywhere. Customs such as head and body deformation, and the couvade, that has the father imitating the pains of child-bearing, are similar in widely separated areas, suggesting an original universal community. Elaborated stone tools, advanced symbolic designs, ceramics, an attention to the North-South axis in monuments, the practices of circumcision, cannibalism, human sacrifice, flood legends, medical remedies, and a great many other practices and beliefs point back to humanization in the creative period, followed by devastation and isolation thereafter. The primeval kit of humankind, the set of ideas and devices that the proto-humans gained by the gestalt of creation, seems less sophisticated than it really was. The voluntariness and self-consciousness infusing the cultural complex set it apart from mammalian products and organization. Deliberate convocations and collecting of individuals into assemblies for planning, ordering, worship, and celebrating, accompanied by speech, symbolic gestures, markings, and rituals, also constituted part of the original cultural consensus --these in communications and organization. Planting, hunting, gathering, tool devising, storing -- all operated from the collectivity extended through memorial generations -- such were the practical activities. Joseph Campbell puts our position here well: It has actually been from one great, variously inflected and developed literate world- heritage that all of the philosophies, theologies, mysticisms, and sciences now in conflict in our lives derive. These are in origin one: one also in their heritage of symbols; different, however, in their histories, interpretations and applications, emphases and local aims [21] . {S : AMERICAN CULTURAL ORIGINS} AMERICAN CULTURAL ORIGINS Alexander von Wuthenau, in his book on Unexpected Faces in Ancient America, 1500 B. C.-A. D. 1500 [22] scans the literature on Asiatic, African, Egyptian, Semitic, and European presences in cultures and races of Central America and presents his remarkable album of stone and ceramic countenances of the stated peoples. Despite conventional theory, there seems but little question that the Central Americans were a mixture of human types long before Columbus arrived. But further, the American race had its own primeval forms. In Chaos and Creation, as in the present book, I argue that homo sapiens schizotypus was present in the Americas from his very first period, and despite repeated general catastrophes held on there in niches of survival, and was repeatedly reinforced across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, with artifacts and cultural practices to remind us of these occasions. Although this thesis is not central to the present book -- because the theory of homo schizo can be argued on whichever grounds conventional theory chooses -- it has important consequences for early American studies. As I foresee the emergent issue, it is not rampant diffusionism versus carriage across the Bering Straits, but rather how much of the similarity among races and cultures came from the ecumenical period of homo schizo and how much was transmitted via long distances thereafter. The case for diffusionism is building up. Some of the material advanced before World War II regarding Asia-to-America diffusion is summarized in Lord Raglan's How Came Civilization? (Chap. XVII). He placed the world ecumenical culture of the first civilization in the region of the Persian Gulf. More recently Betty Ebers has marshaled the evidence for Japanese to Olmec (Mesoamrica) diffusion, by sea [23] . In another case, an authority on early Mesoamerica, Michael Coe (31) reports the coincidence from Needham's studies (1959, 407) that the Maya astronomers and those of the Han Chinese worked with an eclipse calendar of 11,960 days. [24] The coincidence cannot be an accident, especially when one considers that the Mayans seem to have used 'solar mansions, ' like the Chinese, rather than a zodiac, to mark the progression of constellations, and, further, indicated constellations, in the manner of Han China, by circles connected with straight lines, which was not seen in Europe until 1785. Acceptance and progress of pre-Columbianism are blocked mainly by uncertainties over the timing of intercontinental transactions. For example, Posnanski and Bellamy go beyond 15,000 years in reconciling Tiahuanacan (Bolivian) remain with Pacific Island and Mediterranean-Caribbean traits [25] . The Atlanteans range from 11,000 to 3,500 years ago. The Asianists for some time held to 12,000 by land and nothing by sea; then neo-Asianists ascribed East Indian and Japanese contacts to materials of Mexico, Ecuador, and other parts. These ranged well back into fabled times of sunken Pacific continents, but they also surged forward into the end of the classical period; even Alexander the Great's lost fleet found a new role in a culturally fecundating voyage through the southern oceans to the western shores of the Americas. Meanwhile, evidence of Phoenician, Egyptian, West African, Jewish, Roman, Celtic, and Viking contacts ranged from New England to Middle Eastern America in the North and down to Brazil in the South. Indications of a European or Eur-African presence in the centuries just before Columbus are not wanting [26] . The idea that the Americas were a virgin to the Old World before Columbus deflowered them is an anti-historical myth. That there were many contacts seems clear. One has only to read Ameghino's survey of pre- Columbian encounters of the two regions, written a century ago as I mentioned earlier, to comprehend that, while he may have been naive, the contemporary scholar has been unreasonably skeptical. Moreover, much evidence has seen the light since his time. As to the troublesome question concerning when these contacts took place, here we propose that the Americas have been in touch with the rest of the world throughout the history of mankind, except in the periods of great natural turbulence, with the contacts swelling in numbers whenever a few hundred years of technical development and cultural organization would occur. Whenever a catastrophe happened, which cut off peoples by splitting continental blocks, lifting mountains, creating great rivers, or interposing new climates between them, the isolated cultures developed very rapidly, requiring only a few centuries to exhibit different cultures, languages, and ways of life. Let the editor of a recent collection of studies on trans-oceanic contacts summarize the situation for us: Clearly, the present status of our knowledge of American archeology does not allow us to attribute the origins of New World civilization to diffusion from the Old World with assurance. Equally, however, it does not demonstrate the independent origin of New World high culture. Just as the zero occurrence of artifacts originating in the Old World and found in America may be taken as a strong argument against the diffusionist explanation, so the early occurrence of a complex of Old World-like traits -- often very sophisticated -- in early levels of nuclear American civilization casts a strong reflection against the independent origins hypothesis [27] . This points to a very early heartland culture; then came divergence and sporadic exchanges. I would suggest, concerning said passage and the same anthology of studies, that we should be looking for several periods of transference of traits; in Chaos and Creation I suggest six of them. Artifacts and usages can then be assigned by ages and the outcomes tested (for their logic and verisimilitude). Basic social forms, early ceramics, boat design, the lodestone compass, the pyramid, Semitic, Celtic and Roman relics, and many other kinds of evidence exist with which to clarify the periods of intercourse. To summarize, an hypothesis of ecumenical world culture in the earliest times, attaining quickly the neolithic level, is supportable. Inventions require heavy motive power, both in the phase of mental gestation and of social adoption. The motive power must operate within and among individuals. Basic inventions came in rush following the gestalt of creation. They flowed from the psychology of the new human species, originally a small group. They were tied immediately to astral gods and figures and to animals as well; this identification lent memorial power to the inventions and authority to the thrust of their diffusion. Acting in the name of their gods and totems gave authority to the imposition of practices. The same aggressiveness that ultimately eliminated the hominids also foisted upon them the basic inventions. Those who grasped the meanings of the human culture, or at least could practice it, survived. The aggressors possessed ideology, skills, and zeal. No species could stand against them. In this manner an ecumenical or universal culture was quickly created and diffused among a variety of human racial types. Potentiated genes were diffused and came to the fore quickly in adapting to a changing world. Culture traits were imposed under the most stringent conditions. It was the greatest age of evangelism in the history of mankind. Within a thousand years of increasing natural terror, most basic skills would have been adapted from nature, developed, put into a framework of ideas and imprinted upon society. {S : CULTURAL INTEGRATION} CULTURAL INTEGRATION The Dogon people of the Upper Niger region of Africa have come to public attention recently [28] . Marcel Griaule's exposition of their secret lore has been presented by his collaborator, Germaine Dieterlen [29] . The Dogons have a rich astronomy. They know that the star system, Sirius, contains a bright star and also a dark, dwarf star, although it cannot be seen by the naked eye. Robert Temple studied exhaustively the sources of this knowledge and ventured the idea that astronauts from Sirius may have once have visited Earth and imparted this knowledge. Or else the dark star may have once exploded in a super- nova and was remembered. A third possibility is a one-time proximity of Sirius, which would imply a vastly accelerated expansive movement of the galaxy. Or a telescope. I incline towards the super-nova view. The Dogon were probably survivors, with the ancient Egyptians, of the vast 'Triton' (Sahara) civilization that was destroyed about 6,000 years ago. In isolation, they have kept their knowledge accurately, obsessively, secretly. It took Griaule 16 years to hear the lore from them. The Dogon culture shows clearly the fundamental law of cultural anthropology: All aspects of a culture are interconnected: The smallest everyday object may reveal a conscious reflection of a complex cosmogony... Thus for instance African techniques, so poor in appearance, like those of agriculture, weaving and smithing, have a rich, hidden content of significance... The sacrifice of a humble chicken, when accompanied by the necessary and effective ritual gestures, recalls in the thinking of those who have experienced it an understanding... of the origins and functioning of the universe [30] . And we can quote the social theorist Cassirer also: If a man first directed his eyes to the heavens, it was not to satisfy a merely intellectual curiosity. What man really sought in the heavens was his own reflection and the order of his human universe. He felt that his world was bound by innumerable visible and invisible ties to the general order of the universe -- and he tried to penetrate into this mysterious connection [31] . All the pieces of human culture resemble or hook on to each other. Social and body symbolism are international, for example, as Mary Douglas has shown [32] , also cosmogony and sex, diet and religion, and so on. Exceptions come from intrusions and novelties: these are rejected; but if lent power, persistence, and utility they will work themselves into the cousinship of culture traits. The discovery that this is so belongs to modern anthropology, to field workers such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Clyde Kluckhohn [33] . The discovery is in the air and an alert historian of science shares it. Thus Santillana writes : As we follow the clues --stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures --a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. [34] Many studies pursue the First Law of Anthropology. Yet few ask why it should be. Why is a culture -- Womburi, French Canadian, Hopi, Greek, or English -- integrated? Because the human likes to be consistent. But why does he seek this consistency ? Because the human mind has to explain itself. Why so? Because all things are connected to the stars via the cosmos! But in an industrial culture, millions of chickens are dispatched automatically without obvious connection to anything but the market for chickens. Actually, all three theories hint at the best explanation. The human must be consistent in connecting all things, because, in the times following creation, culture burst forth spontaneously in all of its manifestations; all the objects of the world were not only to be seen, but also to be reflected upon, that is, to become objects of thought. Cultural consistency came before its rationalization. And each culture is of course culture-bound, viewing the world in its own way. Since the days of creation must be obsessively remembered and repeated, as we shall see, they continue to force upon man their original togetherness. They supply the motive force for performing the greatest and the smallest tasks of society. Then, too, since the burst of revelation and discovery was tied into the outbursts of the gods, all that is thought about becomes tied to the gods. Whereupon the human must realize this fact, confess it, and lend it importance, or else he will be guilty of blasphemy, ingratitude, and neglect of the gods. Hence he must excuse himself and his actions. Such is the explanation offered here of the First Law of Anthropology. Every culture is integrated and coordinated within itself; this we know from the comparative study of existing cultures. All culture arose hologenetically, and diffused with the original homo schizo. But, in any event, they could not be radically different, because human nature sets limits on what a culture can do. We can hardly conceive of what might be different about cultures, because they are part of our very nature. Louis Wirth used to lecture that men differ in every way that it is possible to differ. If they do not differ otherwise, that is because it is impossible to do so. If it were possible, we would not know it. Further, there is no practice in any culture that lacks a homolog in every other culture. The pattern and limits of culture began with and must follow the schizotypical nature of individual humans as they transact among themselves and with the world. Therefore, we can expect to trace the syndrome of schizotypicality through any given culture and all cultures taken together. The recent insistence of some sociologists and ethologists upon the predetermination of human behavior does no more than make sense of the view that humans are culturally determined. Nature and nurture are inextricably bonded. One misleading view, which has flourished in many forms, is that culture is a thick varnish laid upon a brute to contain and rule him. To the contrary, humans are born to rule themselves and must spend their lives in trying to do so. They cannot ignore the problem of control. They must try promptly every conceivable means of doing so, whether this means reaching into their own nerves and muscles for the purpose or stretching outwards into the environment and then reimposing controls via a group and its culture. Modern empiricists are often repelled by the mythologist who says that the ancients connected all with all. They cannot pursue the line of thought that connects everything -- lines, crosses, comets, sceptres, circles, megaliths, and seemingly everything else -- with a phallic symbol, for example. Or an eye with a comet, lightning bolt, an electric arc, a giant, a mountain, and so son. Anthropologists should make such connections as a matter of course; it is surprising when they do not. There are two main reasons for granting that the earliest humans possessed a holoculture and thought in terms of it. One is the evidence itself, so voluminous that a thick book could be prepared of all the demonstrable, deliberate connections of the membrum virilis in tools, arts, stories, beliefs, and rites. But if the evidence is not overwhelmingly convincing, the quantavolutionary theory of early man should be. For the original humans -- and even the unconscious among the humans today -- thought in holistic terms. It is one of the lessons of logic, dutifully repeated in its textbooks, that 'analogy is not proof. ' But to the first homo sapiens schizotypus, and to humans of all times, analogy must be proof. The most marvelous sense of power, intellectually and behaviorally, comes from the association of the tiniest events and observations with the nature and conduct of the great universe. Here the anthropologists, the mythologists, the pre-historians do agree. All things are tied together: a sacred universal bond exists among all things. One may imagine that millions of hours went into both fantastic and carefully considered leaps in order to form all sights, sounds, and experiences into a meaningful whole. The ability and need to see all in all is fundamental to the newly created human. The scientifically and technically useful ability to concentrate upon only a single special aspect of a thing derives from the obsessive compulsion to repeat. The two needs spring quickly from the urge to control. Fearfully and paranoically, the humans saw in everything the thing that would threaten (or, ambivalently, save) them. Fearfully and obsessively, humans had to rehearse and redo what they had experienced, keeping everything the same and in order. {S : Notes (Chapter 5: Cultural Revolution)} Notes (Chapter 5: Cultural Revolution) 1. A. Marshack, Amer Sci, March, 1976 and Curr Anthro (1976) 278; Gaietto, Prescultura e Scultura Preistorica, E. R. G. A.: Genova. 2. Les Religions de la Pr‚histoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1967, 6, 7, 146-7. 3. Roger Lewin, How did Humans Evolve Big Brains? 216 Science (May 1982) 840-1. 4. I Prehistory, Part I, 280, New York: Mentor, 1965. 5. Primitive Man vs. Homo Sapiens, in A. Montagu, The Concept of the Primitive, N. Y.: Free Press, 1968. 6. The Term 'Primitive' in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, in Montagu, op. cit., 89. 7. Op. cit., 85. 8. R. Protoch and R. Berger, 179 Science (19 Jan. 1973). 9. C. M. Nelson, N. Y. Times, Aug. 27, 1980; A Smith Woodward, 15 Natural Sci (1899) 351-4. 10. 203 Science (12 Jan. 1979), 140; R. S. MacNeish, The Origins of New World Civilization, 211 Sci. Amer. (Nov. 1964), 29-37. 11. The Role of Fire,.. 7 Man 2, 1972, 217. 12. Sahlins et al., op. cit., 77-88; cf. MacNeish, supra fn 7, p. 36, where, despite rich variety of domesticated foods, only 10% of food supply came from them (ca. 5000 B. C.). 13. Sahlins et al., op. cit., 92. 14. In Riley, Ed., Man Across the Sea, op. cit., 441. 15. Walter Matthes, IPEX; Jahrbuch fr pr„historische and ethnographische Kunst, 1963. 16. Ralph S. Solecki, Shanidar IV, A Neanderthal Flower Burial in Northern Iraq, 190 Science (28 Nov. 1975), 880-1. 17. T. W. Jacobsen, 17,000 years of Greek Prehistory, 234 Sci. Amer. (1976) 19, 80. 18. Op. cit., 64. 19. In A. F. Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1975. 20. On Astronomy in The Stone Age, 22 Current Anthrop (1981) 585; cf A. C. Haddon, 10 Natural Sci (1897) 33-6. 21. The Mythic Image, Princeton U. Press, 1975. 22. N. Y.: Crown, 1975. 23. Yes, by Land, and No, by Sea, Amer. Anthrop. 24. Michael Coe, in Aveni, op. cit., 31. 25. Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American man, N. Y.: Augustin, 1958; H. S. Bellamy, Built Before the Flood, London: Faber, and Faber, 1943. 26. Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus, N. Y.: Crown, 1971 and Riddles in History. N. Y.: Crown, 1974. 27. Riley, op. cit., 457. 28. Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976. 29. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le Renard Pƒle, Musee de l'Homme: Paris, 1965. 30. Ibid. 31. Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1944, 48. 32. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, N. Y.: Pantheon, 1970. 33. Cf. Kluckhohn. Mirror for Man, N. Y.: McGraw Hill, 1954. 34. Op. cit. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 6: } {T SCHIZOID INSTITUTIONS} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX SCHIZOID INSTITUTIONS Totem and taboo organize and report 'right' and 'wrong' for the people of a culture. They control one's selves by setting up a bank of animated displacements, publicly symbolized, and preventing one's selves from disturbing the assemblage. It would seem to be a normal way for homo schizo to behave. It does not matter that the terms are reserved for 'savages; ' civilized cultures can and do employ the totem and taboo. Most of this chapter, once it moves from the opening theme, plays upon their variations. Totems and taboos are convenient ways of repeating and organizing obsessions. They are group elaborations of the schizophrenia of original humans. Both are found in all cultures and in varying degrees of weight. In large-scale cultures they are part of religion and bureaucracy. Taboos are sacred prohibitions, whether received directly or indirectly from divine authority. The 'Ten Commandments' include taboos. The name of Yahweh was taboo. At one time it might be pronounced only once a year. Violation of taboos is commonly supposed to have fatal results. Yahweh frequently concludes his injunctions with the phrase ... lest you die. The totem, more strictly, is a symbolic identification of a human group with an animal or plant, which represents a divine force. Because animals (the owl, for instance) and plants (the sacred oak) were tangible, near at hand, and well-known, they could readily be fitted into the scheme of delusions; a communication system, largely imaginary, is set up between the life-form and its human patron. In joining with a totem, a human group acquired a talisman and group representative. The totem life-form operated in the sky and on earth to the presumed over-all benefit of its sponsors. Once the sun (earth) rotated too fast; the great rabbit, said some American Indians of the Great Plains, lassoed the sun and halted it, not releasing it until it promised to go slower (perhaps the rabbit was a cometary image.) But a totem also imposed limitations upon behavior by means of taboos, rites, and penalties. Totemism came to be a set of specialized practices with regard to a species or even a particular animal or plant. It arose with the help of certain celestial behaviors that were for various reasons interpreted as animate behaviors within the celestial environments. The important illusory behaviors of the animation in the sky are carried down to Earth and cemented by analogy to the organism's earthly behavior. Thenceforth a set of attitudes to the life manifestations are produced that give birth to totemestic practices. As the human draws apart from the 'lower forms of life, ' the totem and the taboo dissolve into sublimations. A totem provides a complete schizotypical system: the injection of divinity into an animal denotes a cognitive disorder, a hallucination, a misplaced metaphor. The exclusiveness of the totem and its group towards other totem groups in its associated taboos reflects the schizoid aversiveness to others; the worshiping and cannibal sacrifice (sometimes) of the totem animal emerges from ambivalence; the numerous rituals and rules connected with the totem convey compulsive obsessiveness; and the secret and enduring aspects of the totem group's practices, going back to the totemic primal incident, display catatonism. Enrico Garzilli writes of Faulkner, Joyce, Pirandello, and Gide in their searches for the real self, notable names, to be sure, pursuing at the pinnacles of literature the primordial search for oneself within the polyego [1] . He explains that the word is the self; becoming human is to become a word. Hence the importance of such ancient expressions as begin the Gospel of John: In the beginning was Word; and Word suffused God; and God was Word. (My rendering.) We sense here the power and control exercised in the first naming of something and agreeing upon it with others. We should understand, too, here, that Word is Logos or the enlightened life of mind. {S : SPEECH AND LANGUAGE} SPEECH AND LANGUAGE C. Levi-Strauss is of the opinion that language was born all at once, thus supporting our position of hologenesis. He goes on to say that whatever the moment and the circumstances of its appearing in the range of animal life, language has necessarily appeared all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. After a transformation the study of which has no relevance in the field of social sciences, but only in biology or psychology, a change has taken place, from a stage where nothing had meaning to a stage where everything had. [2] This is a surprising use of the word relevance. Once we have understood what was happening biologically and psychologically, we comprehend what was happening socially. A quantavolution introducing language must concurrently involve a grasping for logic, for control over memory, and for the social consensus on meanings from which culture sprouts. We have already spoken of what was happening biologically and psychologically: the hominid's brain was beset by delays in instinctive reactions, building special sub-centers, and displacing throughout himself and the world outside. The internal code of language was springing up and erupting here and there into public language. According the Edward Sapir, too, language was formally complete from the beginning and existed from the beginning of man. H. Kalmus claims an explosive origin of speech, too, but then limits the speed to hundreds of generations, [3] a retreat to appease the millions of years of mankind awaiting fulfillment. Speech did not occur word by word, grammatical form by grammatical form, over millions of yeas of humanization. It probably sprang up in a mixture of counting, signs, and ejaculations. Counting has been connected (through Lord Raglan's How Came Civilization?) by Seidenberg [4] with rituals, which fits the model of homo schizo well. Counting was invented in a civilized center, in elaboration of the creation ritual, as a means of calling participants in ritual onto the ritual scene, once and only once and then diffused. Seidenberg explains that all people had religious numberings and taboos on certain kinds of counting. It is frequently imagined to be theft when one's name is counted. Today, a homologous paranoia underlies the hostility of many persons to the computer, which seems to steal one's name, carry one's number, and manipulate these and hence oneself. A person is only created when named or announced and the creative word may have been the creative number. Marshack would seem to be moving along a similar path, with stress upon arithmetic and calendarizing (the catastrophized need to watch the skies for regularities that are hoped for, and irregularities that one must prepare for) [5] . He is also locating ever earlier symbolic forms. Some anthropologists are proving that the chimpanzee can learn to understand words and sentences. The point of exhaustion is reached after several dozen of them are learned. If the chimpanzee has not learned to speak in its supposed eight or more million years of existence or whatever its age as a species, it is unlikely to begin now. On the other hand, if the chimpanzee had just recently been mutated, the effort might be worthwhile. The human seems better equipped to move his tongue than the chimpanzee, but it is not the primate's tongue that prevents speech. Basic English, a shortened selection of words for communicating in English, does well with 750 words from a possible quarter of a million. (Its problem lies in the constructions; the format or program of a language would be critical to a world tongue, and cannot be simply imperialistic.) A number of gods have as many names as would be needed to constitute a language, hundreds for every major god. Many vertebrates and insects could manage 500 distinct sound-combinations; 9 distinct sounds might be permuted about 2 9 or 512 ways. Since words have several meanings, depending upon their context, a great many more than 512 'words' are possible. When these thousands of words are combined, many thousands of messages are possible, enough to make a lexicographer out of a sparrow. In order to speak, an animal has to be intelligent. This means that it must possess a sense of being an individual, a will to words, the things to refer them to, a capacity for time and recall, and an obsession for reiteration. There is no speech center in the human brain; a large cortical area controls speech and is placed in either the left hemisphere (for the right-handed) or the right. This would suggest not only that speech is recent and non-organic in structure, but also that the will to speak is an inner necessity connected with instinctual blockage between the left and right hemispheres, and slowdowns in message transmission in other newly grown parts of the brain. Man did not get so clever that he began to talk. He was originally so frightened that he began to ejaculate names, and to call them out obsessively, then to use them on like occasion (to compare, in effect), to admonish, to pray, and command. To his surprise, he could find others who might understand, at first perhaps only a twin, then their offspring. Nouns came first, wrote G. Vico, one of the earliest modern etymologists. And he definitely connected the earliest speech with the worship of the gods. Following the ejaculative phase, which may have occupied only a few years, language probably entered upon a liturgical phase. Heavily depending upon exclamation, it moved to detailing situations and meanings. It undertook to express what had happened (to call the roll of disasters, so to speak), to exorcize the causes of the events, and to cover them up, making sounds of appeasement or evasion. Much public or formal language, like liturgy, has been formal and compulsory from the beginning. It is still so, obviously in mega-societies but also in tribal societies. Maurice Bloch speaks of the deliberate and enforced impoverishment of language in traditional oratory. The language acts to control the speaker [6] . He cannot go beyond prescribed forms of speaking. Hence public speech is understandable only in the context of ritual, as Malinowski said, not by virtue solely of knowing its lexical units. The rhetoric cannot become revolutionary. {S : GRAPHICS} GRAPHICS Speech came promptly, but writing was not developed well until civilizations had poetry, art, religions, and social systems. A possible reason for this may also be supportive of our theory of language. It is logical that as speech is to the mouth and ear, writing is to the hand and eye. No one doubts that earliest man (or latest hominid) was as digitally adept as he was orally proficient. However, gestures, grimaces, and context could let the eye help the speaking process along. But the hand and eye could not, like symbols, accomplish internal symbolizing or speech, which is probably what was occurring in the new creature to help him coordinate his several selves and their displacements in the outer world. That is, public speech was the extrusions of inner speech, like the small portion of the iceberg that floats above water. Some people with complex languages do not write even today. Art of course takes the place of writing in respect to many messages from one's ancestors. A totem pole can take the place of much written history, depending upon the kind of history wanted. There is a clue here: a large society and an official class need explicit messages and records. Until these criteria come into play, art can successfully block writing, somewhat as television blocks literacy. Art can say so much that, by comparison, the breaking down of pictures and symbols into writing may appear to be a meaningless and barren enterprise. Further, it may seem to be sacrilegious to openly admit that words are interchangeable tools. Hence writing was originally a holy profession, as in the Egyptian bureaucratic empire. It was carried over into government: the needs of a centralized administration were a far greater impetus to the development of writing, among the Sumerians (cuneiform) as in Crete, than intellectual and spiritual needs, [7] Earliest tablets speak mostly of rations and personnel in the palaces. But, in maritime cultures, such as the Phoenician, the pragmatic value of messages finally broke the sacred grip. Words (orally spoken) had departed so far from their origins and symbols from art, that they might be used casually in practical affairs. The alphabet was invented out of numbers, phonetics, and calendars by people who were on the move, as in boats [8] . The invention of writing was an effective grasping for control of memory, behavior, and pragmatics. It delivered also a severe blow to the imagination; it caused massive disenchantment. It placed credit for works effectively upon the culture. No longer could one be taught by the gods, through subtle or at least mysterious parental and social transmission or from the depths of one's being, from inner springs. Besides memorization, one had exactness, repetition, a third party, an objectivity, a beginning of coolness and remoteness. {S : PRIMORDIAL LANGUAGE} PRIMORDIAL LANGUAGE Man spoke one tongue to begin with. As he diffused from his proto-patria, his speech had reason both to change and to remain the same. If there can be found a basic set of sounds and words that is common to all of mankind today, then one would have an original language, a proof of cultural hologenesis, and an indication of the recency of human origin. Searches for the first language have been modestly rewarding, enough so to justify a greater expenditure of time and resources, especially for computerized manipulation of data. R. Fester has proposed that there is an original vocabulary of six archetypes common to all of humanity which still today comprises the basic of every language and which at the same time provides a clearly recognizable link between all languages. The root-words of 'Pangean, ' as we might call the tongue, would be BA, KALL, TAL, OS, ACQ, and TAG. From the moment when the genus homo left the family of lower animals, and thanks to his upright stance, both hands and senses could serve him more freely than before, the vox humana shared his further evolution to the Man of today. [9] We should, of course, disregard the makeshift ladder that Fester has thrown up here to arrive at human voicing. The words are prominent today in geography: Indo-European, Mongolian, Phoenician, African and Ancient American geography was decidedly using the same original words. Fester claims to have discovered that in many languages, the syllable BA pertains to human relations and subsistence; KALL appears connected with the idea of concavity and the females womb; TAL refers to clefts, to the ground, to females; OS to thresholds; ACQ to water; and TAG to height, gods, erect humans. To Malcolm Lowery, who has kindly supplied me with his translated materials, the progression by which the words related by Fester to the roots are said to drift in space and among cultures is not intelligible. J. P. Cohane also proposed a set of root words, independently and without awareness of Fester's book [10] . These key words, he believes, were strongly religious in their original associations. Like Fester, he finds his examples to be most copious in geography. His words are also six in number, although others of equal importance seem to be present in his narrative. They are Oc (or Og) as in Okeanos, Kronos, Moloch, and an ancient Irish god, Oc; Hawwah, as in Aloha, Yahweh, acqua, earth; mana; ash/ az; tema, as in Thames, Tiamat, Athena; and Eber/ abar, as in Berber, Hibernia, Calabria, Abruzzi, Hebrew, Ares, Mars. Scholars of linguistics seem disinclined to undertake the risky task of reconstructing the prototype language. Whorf spoke of the story of man's linguistic development -- of the long evolution of thousands of very different systems of discerning, selecting, organizing, and operating with relationships. Of the early stages of this evolutionary process, we know nothing. [11] We can, he said, only survey the results of this evolution as they exist today. Still, Whorf was an early enthusiast for trying to trace the original ecumenical speech. Generally, the linguistic establishment has beaten back the numerous efforts to demonstrate speech affinities, regarding them as prima facie absurd. Such connections would be Gaelic with Algonkin, Chiapenec with Hebrew, Othomi with Chinese, Choctow with Ural- Altaic, these being Amerindian connections. The diffusionists have fared better in proposing Old World connections: Hamites with Semites; Sumerians with Magyars; Late Minoan with Greek; Egyptian with Hurrian; Etruscan with Lemnian; Berber with Basque, etc. Justus Greenberg says that the 750 indigenous languages of Africa were originally four families, and these were originally one, and possibly related to Hamitic, says Gilbert Davidowitz. Encouraged by the theory of hologenesis of culture, I would conclude that the search for the ultimate ecumenical Pangean language will not be in vain. {S : GROUP VS. INDIVIDUAL} GROUP VS. INDIVIDUAL Humans of the proto-age had immediately the problem of constituting themselves deliberately into a group. The psychology of the hominid band was gone. In its place was the fearful, distracted, individuated -- even multividuated -- person. He must belong, yet not belong, at the same time. The favorite topic of political philosophers and economists -- the individual against society -- took shape. The bond between individual and collective psychology is tight. It is both genetic and adaptive. It is fully determined. It is unbreakable. Evidence of these statements gushes from history and anthropology on the one side and from many psychological schools on the other. Just as the brain can reach to the toe to express itself physiologically, it can reach to the stars to express itself psychologically. Where it happens to reach is a cultural affair. Just as the human is a coordinated poly-ego, so a culture, and for that matter any group, is a mega-poly-ego, that typically selects a dominating ego-pattern as its design for he behavior of its members. A special concept of organization is required to grasp that organized behavior that is an extension of patterned mind-behaviors. The genesis of external organization is in the mind( s) of individuals and their groups. One way of expressing the holism of personal human conduct is that private motives are displaced onto public objects. Thus, a person suffering inferiority and weakness in personal life finds superiority and strength in political activism; Harold Lasswell, following Alfred Adler, has expounded and documented this thesis [12] . I do not limit our theory to this view or language. All men, given their brainwork problems, must feel weak. All men seek power according to their own private and cultural prescription. The distinction between private (individual) and public (social, cultural) is most usefully applied during special investigations in politics and law. The human bonding is without innate distinction. The human acts in a merged internal and external context. A fond pat on the hand can stop a pain in the toe; a political victory can let a man digest a thick steak, as I once observed in a study of Huey Kingfish Long of Louisiana. There is no end to the process of 'private-public' interaction from conception to death. That means also private-cultural. The individual and the group march along, side by side, from the dawn of mankind. Both society and the individual are schizoid in origins, structure, and functions. Their behavior and forms are not always congruent; the symptomology is varied. Then it is that deviance (medical schizophrenia) is defined. The individuals seek to evade the society or change its laws; the society seeks to make the individuals conform; else it treats them for mental illness or jails them on account of their menacing or destructive conduct. The process will go on as long as human nature retains the form which it assumed in the days of creation. There are perhaps some non-schizoid culturally created humans, who have evaded hybridization with the schizoid, the fate of most hominids. Even if there were none at all, the idea of their existence should be retained for heuristic and theoretical purposes. They would be well-trained primates, although not discernible as such. The schizoids, and especially certain schizophrenes, are religiously and politically dominant. With their obsessions, suspicious hyperawareness, penchant for symbolism, and their megalomania they control the world. That is, they try to control it; but the world is, by their own definition, uncontrollable. Homo sapiens schizotypus defines 'control, ' and is insatiably anxious for control. Human action moved back and forth along an axis of tension between the individual and the collective or social. Self-awareness was an inescapably individualist phenomenon. Never after creation could the sense of the self be exterminated. Never thereafter, then, could the collectivity perpetually and wholly dominate the individual soul. Incessant, forcible, and imaginative attempts to do so over all of history were foredoomed to fail and still are. The split self, a source of the greatest terror, could not permit its unification by the collectivity, even though the collective achieved its great resilient strength from its guarantees to the individual that it would assuage, diminish and even cure the terror of the split. There was no returning to the mammal. So loyalty began, built upon intrinsic disobedience. And so began authority. The story of Job, in the Bible, represents the individual trying with all of his might to subject himself to the will of Yahweh. Dreadful catastrophe, initiated by Yahweh, abetted by the Devil and by hostile humans, crushes his life-values: his loved ones, his possessions, his power, his respect, and his health. An exception stands for the sixth value, knowledge, that is not removed but is the focus of the divine assault upon Job. If only he could be mentally broken into a numbness, stupefied, then he could be defeated. He would not then respond to God. The very failure of this last form of degradation of self is both a triumph and a negation of Yahweh. That is, all must stop short of the ultimate disaster, which would effectively wipe out creation. On the other hand, once stopped short of self-effacement, the campaign of Yahweh and the Devil is lost and the human being is restored. Job is left the victor on the scene of battle. All of his values and achievements are indeed restored. The story of Job is told as a lesson in humility; actually, it is a lesson in human arrogance: the will to control God. Job's story might be set at the end (ca 4000 B. C.) of the age of Elohim-Saturn. It is before the flood of Noah. By then, human ideation was as complete as it was to be until the Greek skeptics, unless some civilization, of which no trace remains, had operated with a secular ideology. Technology had arrived at a level hardly exceeded until 350 years ago. At Catal Hjk, in present-day Turkey (6,000 B. C. ?), orderliness and planning prevail everywhere; in the size of brick, the standard plan of houses and shrines, the heights of panels, doorways, hearths and ovens and to a great extent in the size of rooms. [13] During the age following Saturn, which may be called the age of Jupiter (Zeus, Horus, Yahweh, Marduk), the list of secondary institutions and inventions becomes long. Large scale organization or centralization developed. Millions of people were aggregated and ruled by agents and delegations of authority. Kingship; priestly, military, and official classes; record-keeping; and extensive physical properties were common. Increased domestication, breeding, and herding of varied animal species reflected a projection of human organization into the animal kingdom. Large-scale agriculture is also to be viewed in the context of an administrative organization of plants and human caretakers. {S : PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION} PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION Basically, given the domineering schizoid prototype, social behavior (including language, religion, governance, art, etc.) contains varying elements of obsessiveness, catatonism, orgiasm and sublimation. The fears of the self, of the gods, and of loss of control lead to the eternally 'shell-shocked' behavior of returning to the original traumas and repeating them, both to punish oneself and to avoid punishment by others. Deviation is tabooed, except as it finds expression in momentary orgiasm and sublimation. The only way in which language and all other inventions of customs can be developed and organized happens to be schizotypical: undeviating insistence upon repetition, the compulsion to repeat, the slavish adherence to memory and tradition, liturgies. Bleuler reports patients who will play the same musical trill or chord a thousand times and, like the esteemed citizen of the regimenting modern state, Bleuler's patient, obsessed with command automism, will mechanically obey any outside order, will imitate others slavishly, will repeat everything he hears, and, despite a lack of feelings, do all of these things impulsively or as if compelled. This is an effective human response to a loss of instinct and the great need for new forms of control over the self and others. Organization, even as we see it today in great bureaucracies, highly rationalized, is a catatonic gripping for a non-changing world: 'If I remain perfectly still, I will escape observation, I will not be punished, and the world itself will stand still in emulation of me. ' Members of a Judaic sect freeze in whatever activity they may be engaged when the Sabbath falls and do not move until the Sabbath ends. In its conception and supposed functioning, a typical modern bureaucracy is a marvel of deductive science [14] . It is hierarchy of power and control from top to bottom, with a division of tasks from broader to more narrow scope, down to the individual worker. It is regarded as a highly rational way of accomplishing large collective tasks. Yet this administrative grandeur is only the recognizable descendant of the first efforts of homo schizo to organize work, something he did half-aware but naturally. For the principle has been the same from then to now: an obsession upon a displaced target (god, a village plan, a hunt, agriculture) and an effusion of severe discipline, compulsively exercised and rationalized. Man has had to work in this way. The awareness of the principle, its statement in science and law, and deductionism as scientific method all trail after its spontaneous generation. In early organizations, the compulsion to reiterate was applied to external control and organization as it had originally been employed for self-control and the ordering of smaller groups. Authority was supplemented by deductive principle. Deductionism is the idea that from a general prescription may be derived specific prescriptions. That is, a statement, that all must be put in strict order, is followed by an enforcement system to ensure that no exceptions to or deviations from the order occur in individual cases. Deduction is consistent with the association of different kinds of displacements and the compulsion to reiterate. It permits free play to authority to expand its scope of activity and its human domain. It leads to all avenues of life. It externalizes the subjective, by providing security, letting the inner self relax, and divesting the self from its preoccupations with itselves into 'objective' external occupations. It relieves the smaller social organizations of their involuted and intricate rites and rules, moving them out upon the larger stage of a kingdom. Constructions of many types became possible. Monuments, settlements, populations, armies, and record-keeping all grew in size. A bureaucratic (usually theocratic) state might be discerned, successful in its aggrandizement of human activities, and containing within its larger order the orgiastic practices of religion and warfare, the sublimatory development of the arts and crafts, and the negativism and retardation always imminent in human populations. Bureaucratic states might collapse from natural disaster, or from competing states, or even from long-term demoralization. Deductionism is rigid and restrictive. It puts constraints upon ambitions, social differences, and new experiences (orgiastically impelled). It is prey to apathy. Nonetheless such social forms as the bureaucratic kingdom must be called a civilization. The surrounding and preceding forms might also be called civilizations. When, then, did civilizations begin? Civilization is premised as some condition beyond humanization. The human could not elect civilization; he was driven to it by his fundamental character; what was needed was a respite from catastrophe and a space of a few centuries. Civilization marked no qualitative change in the human character. It is an enduring, well- grounded way of life for a large number of persons containing elaborated and sublimated second-order effects of humanization. If more severe strictures are put upon the term, no significant benefit in logic or theory accrues. Writing is civilized, but provokes no great change in human character or ideation. Deducing commandments from a generalized authority is not exclusively a civilized practice. Peacefulness is not exclusively a trait of civilization. If it were not for the catatonic motif that freezes many cultures at a first- order stage or in a 'fallen' stage, the word 'civilization' could be logically applied to all human organization. The catatonic response to disaster may be presumed to account for a number of 'primitive' or 'retrograde' peoples and subgroups of larger populations, such that the elaboration which is the hallmark of civilization does not proceed. This catatonism is negative and refuses change. It fights the battle for world control within the person and the small clan or tribe. Its overburden of constraints, rejections, and taboos miniaturizes and trivializes. The externalized, exo-tribal culture is actually abandoned and condemned, leaving the members of the group motionless, aghast, face to face with awful eternal threat. {S : MEGALITHS AND MEGALINES} MEGALITHS AND MEGALINES People built megaliths around the world, probably beginning six thousand years ago. A megalith is a worked or cut stone that weighs, say, over 10 tons, which alone or in conjunction with other stones mediates religious sentiments among the group and with the gods. The stones stand for ancestors, gods, holy circles, sacrificial altars, astronomical pointers, centers of convocation, and tombs. The efforts required to erect them demonstrate both strenuous collaborative discipline and fervid emotions. They are large to demonstrate the peak of divine fealty of which the group is capable and to stand firm against the elemental rages of nature. That they are often isolated from their quarries or sources, have been reconstructed again and again, have been abandoned by or remain from a disappeared culture, and are fallen, split, and cracked indicate that the fears of their builders were well-founded. The builders were dispersed or annihilated. When recently the megaliths were rediscovered and studied, they were considered mistakenly to reflect a peak level of technology of their builders. Actually, many of them may represent the work of marginal surviving elements from civilizations that peaked at higher technical levels but whose centers were eradicated. The Olmecs of the Mexican lowlands used basalt quarried from eighty miles to the North to build their monumental sculptures. Single stela and single heads weigh from forty to fifty tons. The scale of the operation required dwarfs that of Stonehenge and speaks for an authority of great power at La Venta, backed by potent sanctions. [15] Gerald S. Hawkins examined the famous Nazca ground tattoo of lines for stars, planets, sun and moon alignments and found none. The line complex was not built to point to the sun, moon, stars, or planets. Astronomically speaking, the system is random. [16] But, if the Nazca lines are very old, we could expect them to be nonsensical by current retro-reckoning in astronomy, for there is evidence that the Earth has tilted during human times. Thaddeus M. Cowan, a psychologist and archaeoastronomer, writes that Old World proto-astronomers ... were primarily concerned with significant solar and lunar events as they appeared on the horizon.... Indian lore suggests a variety of ways the stars can be regarded (individual stars, groups of individual stars, patterns). Similarly, the mounds might be seen as following the same course (conicals, chains, effigies). [17] That is, to the Amerindian, the mounds and stonework were templates of the constellations and sky events, therefore measured large (though subjectively) and mostly not even fully visible from the ground and to the workers. Probably this is behind the Nazca drawings too, with their spectacular drawings of dragons and a large bird. Since the megaliths were all constructed before the Earth and sun had achieved their present orientations, none of them preserve their original orientations. At best they point roughly towards some anniversary position of the sun, moon or stars, such as the spring equinox. They were not the best instruments, either, of their times and culture. Whatever the orientation and cyclical repetition that they counted and measured, a simpler, more manageable, and finer measure was within the builders' capabilities. The megaliths were religious. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was built to celebrate a concatenation of heroic and historic deeds, not to be simply a convenient traffic divider. It was oriented to the sunset of the victorious December 2nd Battle of Austerlitz, also Napoleon Bonaparte's Coronation Day. So too the megaliths were erected, not to count months or praise the dead, but to commemorate the past, to celebrate survivorship, and to control destiny. {S : ORGANIZATION AND CONTROL} ORGANIZATION AND CONTROL The first task of the split-self was to recollect itself and gain control of itself and others. How it did so became the paradigm of governance ever thereafter. The workable mechanism incorporated the overflowing stored fear, the gods associated with its origins and still operative in the sky and on earth, and the four patterns of behavior, all of which could be brought to bear upon the problem of self-control and the control of others, lending the person a tolerable balance of mind and behavior while identifying with and yet subverting the gods and accomplishing the pragmatic functions of existence in a much more developed and technical way. All of this appears rational and fully intentional only in retrospect. Most of it occurred as the reaction and response of a new species of being to continued applications of great internal and external stress. The bearers of the new human culture were not all members of the new humanity. Whatever the combinations of mutation and potentiation, schizotypical leaders were present from the beginning, who, in order to adapt themselves to the new life, had to seek the adaptation of the others. They possessed all the tools of leadership that have ever since been possessed, namely symbols, ideology, force and goods, in the same order of importance, all tied together in the drive to control and organize the environment according to a teleological, if delusional, form. The predominance of the delusional, aggressive, symbolist character in governance began then and continued ever after. Human food production, and the useful arts and crafts could not move forward without qualities of leadership removed from the actual specialization of tasks, no matter how important and vital they seemed in themselves. Control and power in the self and in the group were their preconditions. Therefore priests were the governors, and hunters, planters, and workers the governed. In a later elaboration, god-kings assured the society a personalized succession from the gods under covenants and constitutions; these the priests contrived to tie human governance to the order and disorder of the skies. The universal presence of generalized, rather than specialized, leadership is knotted to the principle of the total cohesion of culture, earlier described. Since the culture is holistic, so must the culture's leadership be holistic. {S : REPUBLIC AND MONARCHY} REPUBLIC AND MONARCHY The basic political institutions are but two, the republic and the monarchy. All human organization resolves into a combination of these. The republican is of hominid origin and was the logical first form of human organization. The monarchies originate from the catastrophes following creation and the relentless evolution of homo sapiens schizotypus. By the time of the first extant historical records, ca. 5200 B. P., past ages and past god- kings had reigned and retired. Now there came, in what is conventionally regarded as the first dynasty of Egypt, a consolidation and a worship of the sky-god Horus (Jupiter) and the Pharaoh as divine king. But this unifier of Egypt built his rule upon a congeries of small kingdoms each with its own divinities and cosmogonies. It is said that in the control of the Nile waters (perhaps after the Saturnian flood) lay the appeal for the unification of Egypt. More important as a cause was the aggressive force unleashed in the aftermath of disaster. Just as the divinity of a king is proven by his internal absolute power, and that proof is rendered necessary by a natural (divine) destruction of the previous power of the prior dynasty and rule, so is his divinity proven by his ability to master foreign societies, in emulation of the universal omnipotence of the king in the sky. The Pharaoh incarnated Horus. The sequence of rulership tended to proceed from disaster to survivorship to monarchy to republic and then through the same sequence repeatedly, over cycles of varying duration, until the cycle became a self-fulfilling prophecy, or Plato's tyranny, aristocracy, democracy and so back to tyranny, aristocracy, democracy and so back to tyranny, a law of politics. This could be rationalized, without the recollection of primeval catastrophe, as 'the way man's mind worked' and 'how societies changed. ' Even to this day, the cycle tends to occur. The chaos that typically ends democracy is laid to libertinism, rather than to the subconscious primordial feelings excited by a rule of liberty. {S : AUTHORITY} AUTHORITY The end of democracy, that is, comes not from what happens but from an increasing feeling that 'man is getting away with too much, ' and that the gods will respond by devastating man. So a tyrant arises, plays god, restores order, and people hope that their expiation and sacrifices of their liberties will be punishment enough. Usually the occasion for the crisis of the regime and the revolution of the government is something resembling a catastrophe: a natural disaster such as a drought, a hurricane, crop failure, economic depression, or a crushing defeat by a hostile army. The function of authority is to support the structure of the human mind that was erected upon the dire events that brought the human mind into being. Authority is the formula that encompasses the three control-needs -- the control of the self, which is paramount; the control of the gods; and the control of the environment, including other people. The world may be believed to consist of an objective reality but that objective reality is a product of an uncertain mind. The objectiveness of reality consists of a mind that perceives itself and therefore perceives the need to define reality, plus an agreement of many minds that reality is as it is. Both come from the shared structure and discipline of the newly create humans. But the mind is uncertain of this absolute reality and human society is an endless struggle to set up and maintain this reality against the indecisiveness of human instinct and the discrepancies of perspective, both genetically and experientially caused. The bonding consists of a) the projection and identification of the mind with all of these together, b) the obsession (repetition compulsion) as a glue of the binding, c) the deductive principle as the method of moving through time and space and dealing with all three components while moving, d) the lesser principles of catatonism, orgiasm, and pragmatics that are intrinsically incapable of ungluing the binding formula of authority, unless and until the mind is destroyed. That is, not only was chaos the primeval cloud- world, formless and kaleidoscopic, but also chaos was his non-recollectable existence to which he could not return, and feared, and therefore would not wish to go back to. {S : COVENANT AND CONTRACT} COVENANT AND CONTRACT Men have always cherished the hope that the gods would cease to torment them. One of the most brilliant inventions to bring this about was the 'covenant' of the lord. The gods would promise to perform certain tasks and refrain from harming people provided that the people would worship them properly and behave in certain ways as well. In the Bible, Elohim and Yahweh introduce at least seven covenants. One is with Adam and Eve, another with Noah, others with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and David. Several of these followed upon natural disasters. A new constitution, so to speak, was handed down from the throne. But note how the route from catastrophe to theocracy to monarchy to individualism is pursued. First there is chaos: no promises are binding. Friedrich Nietzsche, predecessor to Freud in the discovery of the 'unconscious, ' writes in the Genealogy of Morals that the human was originally simply a fickle animal. Somehow the creature had to be severely chastised in order to give it a memory. For the keeping of promises was the basic condition of humanization and civilization. Surprisingly, Nietzsche does not take the leap to catastrophism, inasmuch as he thought that some immense event must have happened to cause mankind to acquire a memory. He says that he cannot think of anything more severe than the punishment that would be dealt out to persons who did not keep a bargain in early tribal commerce. Tribal commercial promises, like many another cultural trait, are traced by the quantavolutionist to the by-product, the fall-out, from the great reality of chaos and creations: 'You made us; you have destroyed us; do not do so again; we must believe you will not; we have this specific assurance from you, your self-binding covenant; promises must be kept (we hope) and therefore we shall kill any among us who violate your covenant; further we will punish anyone who violates any promise that he makes, and go to war over broken promises; so all contracts shall be sacred in your name. ' Thus I would imagine the genesis of contracts. Then as egalitarianism progressed, the laws came to regard a great many contracts as made between equals, rather than handed down as in the beginning. So the sanctity of contracts, which the American courts for a long time expounded with holy fervor, goes back to the times of reaction and destruction, to fear, and to the magical coupling of the sacred and the profane so as to reinforce the sacred. The pragmatic element of the contract is of course great; there is no gainsaying Nietzsche there; but the catastrophized essence is there too. As in other areas, the catastrophized behavior works itself out in a highly sublimated and indirect form. The 'rationality' of the 'contract law' is on the one side. The famed penchant of Jews for 'arguing with El, ' 'legalism, ' and 'bargaining' derived in part from their catastrophized anxiety over whether a new covenant would be pending and what the words of the last covenant really meant. On the other side, the aboriginal idea runs rampant. The Zealots of the first century after Christ are a case in point. They believed a terrible calamity would soon overcome the world and wipe out all but a few good Jews. Then a new covenant would have to be confirmed by Yahweh. St. Paul extended the time, and modified this idea into a belief in the Judgement Day. But the early 'millennialist' sects are imitated from time to time today. And a close homology is afforded by the 'Cargo Cult' sects of the Pacific Islands; there, property and promises are dispensed with, in a fatal pause or age-breaking, during which a people awaits the coming of a great ship or (now) airplane carrying the goods of life promised by a sacred ancestor. We noted how the Greeks handled the problem of promises. Their gods were full of not-so- valid promises, possibly because they were so full of obligations and interconnections. Whence their gods were deemed fickle, not at all like Yahweh. But, recalling the passages of Proclus on the bonds of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, one notes the covenant there [18] : Jupiter is the paramount god of law and order in the universe. He binds himself as well as others to obey his own laws. So the Greeks were not so far off the mode of humanity. {S : SEXUAL RAMIFICATIONS} SEXUAL RAMIFICATIONS Not much in the way of pragmatic life routines is exclusively male. G. P. Murdock surveyed the part played by women and men in the economic and household activities of 224 societies. [19] . Only the pursuit of sea mammals and major hunting were never exclusively the task of women. But neither were they anywhere usually done by women. Nor were they ever a function shared by the two sexes. Females like the goddess Diana of the Hunt were exceptional. I attribute this not to the muscular ineptitude of women, but rather to unconscious male sexual jealousy of large beasts, and a general lesser aggressiveness in the less schizoid female, as I have explained in my accompanying volume on human nature today. It is impossible for the human, given both the catastrophic and the physiological structure of the mind, to divorce his major concerns, to segregate them intellectually, mythically, verbally. One must impart congruity and cohesion to any important experience. He will put all experience into context, through unconscious processing by way of the catastrophized memory or through partially conscious analogizing and philosophizing. Important natural events will be related to sex, food, tools, violence, and death. Each will have, in its symbolization and in his mind, something of every other. Human sexuality is exponentially more complex that primate sexuality and reflects, with all other life-values, the circumstances of creation and the aftermath. Truly and simply, events of the primeval period were seen to resemble hominid organs and practices. Making sense of the sky events and their effects, with their super-potency, called upon the new mechanisms of the mind to an ever-increasing extent, a shocking extent, until finally sexual behavior, like all other behavior, came to be a secondary derivative from imputed sky practices. The origin of sexuality thus was attributed to the sky gods. Hence much that could relieve disaster-anxiety, the true primal fear, was forced into human sexual behavior. From that time onwards, sex was no longer the indigenous and instinctive product of the mammalian species but was the example and instruction of the gods. From the very beginning of humanity, sexual practices, like all other life and culture, were integrated and deduced from the behavior of the divine. Therefore, those practices which in the light of humanitarian science appear to be savage or brutal were in fact instrumentally rational and functional for the new creature. Self- consciously, he and she did not care for what was natural to animals, but wanted what was possibly divine. All manner of sexual practices and linkages of sex to other life areas came to be invented and institutionalized. In the earliest dynasties of Egypt, four-directional compass points are indicated by phalluses. Single and double-phalluses are carved as heads of batons, possibly for pointing during ceremonies and for other magical purposes; these are found in the French Upper Paleolithic sites. They are also found drawn on cave walls. Both the paleolithic Cromagnons and the Egyptians draw a picture of heaven overarching earth: the first as a bull over a female, the second as a sister over a brother (see Chaos and Creation, figure 15). The drawings are so close in spirit that they may carry Cro-Magnon man down to the Old Kingdom of Egypt. A parallel occurs in Minoan Crete where Dedalus fashions a metal cow to house King Minos' wife so that she can cope with a white bull that has attracted her. These are to be interpreted not as the exaltation of sexualism as a human drive but to the divine imposition upon sex of the rule of heaven, nature, and gods. The concept of sexual perversion dwindles when confronted by the complexity of sexuality. The Princess Palatine, wife of the brother of Louis XIV of France, in one of her frank letters describes her homosexual husband's attempts abed to fecundate her by masturbating first with holy medals of the Virgin. (The scandal of the deed and of the letter itself, which was omitted in a celebrated edition published in 1981 -- and this is scandalous, too [20] , -- invites comparison, say, with the public holocausts of sinners of the same culture in church squares before the 'god of peace and forgiveness, ' as described and surveyed in contemporary publications.) The sacred and the profane, the obligation and the evasion, merge like wrestlers, like the symbol of the Yin and Yang. Still, public madness defines private sanity. It is from the interpretation of divine behavior that cults of virgins and eunuchs originated and were perpetuated throughout the world. Peter Tompkins thinks that the loss of its tail by a comet identified with Venus may have originated these cults and perpetuated them practically to our day [21] . It was through the fear of the sky gods that punishment was ingrained in individual and collective behavior too, and that extremes of both impotency and furious rape came to be responses to every major and minor expression of the high energy forces. Violence unleashed is everywhere given a sexual form and rests with the human psyche thereafter. Sex is a screen for, and release of, the primordial fear built up by catastrophic genesis and experience. No culture has escaped the process from the beginning of human time. The more obvious violent aggression associated with human sexuality is paced by sublimated sexuality. The catatonic response to disaster reflects itself in sexual frigidity and impotence, with their hundreds of individual and collective manifestations. Catastrophized obsessiveness is reflected in the frequent fixation upon the pornographic. Unlike primates, humans have developed a prolonged coitus and frequent coitus, again as types of compulsive-obsessive behavior. Human females secured a perpetual weak rut, after an instinct blockage arose against the imperative primate rut period. Once locked into quantavolutionary theory, sexology can initiate new theories for sexual problems or deviations. The cultural relativity of sexual practices can be explained even while the universality of the catastrophe-sexuality nexus is admitted. For example, Saturnian and Bacchanalian orgies are deviant sexual as well as economic, organizational, religious, and physical (anti-hygienic) outbursts. They introduce and celebrate the end of the world in infinite series. Once reinforced and lent new meanings by the sky gods, human sexuality entered upon the social scene vigorously. The simple dashed line at varying angles ( | ) is most common in cave art; it is generally adjudged to be a phallic symbol and certainly develops in that direction. The female vulva is also common (¥). The ankh (see below) symbol of (comet) planet Venus is common and may even be found in the New World as a diffused or independently invented symbol. It has been a religious symbol in Egypt and in Christian areas for millennia. It is frequently used as a genital symbol, bisexual or androgynous, and may be related to the Greek 'phi' (f) a fire sound, that was used as a sexual symbol by itself. ankh: A variety of architectural forms have been given sexual as well as heavenly associations. The pyramid (D), the megalith and obelisk (shown below), the tomb in several forms, and the Greek temple (shown below) are suggested as primeval sexual symbols carried into the highest civilizations. (The Temple resembles a triangular female symbol resting upon male pillars. Naked and unashamed 'lingam' and 'yoni, ' monumentally constructed, are found in India and elsewhere. Obelisk: Greek temple: Thus may be explained the most incomprehensible of interconnections: the religio-politico-sexual. Creation events were seen to resemble actual sex organs and practices. This happens by the basic delusion that gives objective realism to signs and symbols. The superpotency of sky events and disastrous high energy forces might be controlled, it appeared, by controlling their close cousin-referents in society -- sexualism. The rituals, sacrifices, elaborations, and sublimations then begin. {S : THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT CHAOS AND CREATION} THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT CHAOS AND CREATION Among the Navaho Indians, women sit on their legs, and men sit crosslegged. Why? They say that in the beginning Changing Woman and Monster Slayer sat in these positions [22] . Manu, the Noah of India, was delegated by the gods to be the recreator of all creatures after the great flood. In a desire for offspring he practiced worship and austerity. He practiced severe and great self-mortification..., while he stood on one foot with his arms raised. With bent head and eyes unblinking he performed awesome austerities for 10,000 years. [23] We must do as the gods did in the beginning, says an ancient Hindu text. But not only the Hindus believe and act so. Every known religion does the same, whether it is the belief system of a great civilization or of an isolated small tribe. And not only is it the religions that aim to repeat the behavior of the gods in the beginning. All social forms of activity are saturated with the emanations of this principle. In Timor, when the young rice sprouts, a specialist on agricultural myths is brought in to spend the night in the fields reciting the myths about the origins of cultivated rice [24] . Every activity seeks to follow its earliest principle. The bearing and baptism of children, marriage, the rites of adolescence, and death -- sexual relations, family relations, work relations, -- governments, companies, armies, athletic teams: no activity can escape its beginnings. Ballgames are played all over the world. They are just games, people say, and they may even say that so-and-so invented the game of baseball or whatever the ballgame is called. Not so. Every invention is in a continuity. Every game goes back to primeval religion. Every game is a game originally of the gods. The human players of athletic and parlor games are exhilarated by their unconscious replaying of divine roles in catastrophe and so are their spectators. Thus the Olmecs of ancient central America played a ball-game and had courts built with religious carvings and paintings all around where the game was watched [25] . This was about 1500 B. C., and is attested to in recent excavations of their ruins. Their myths are clear as to what they were doing. They were imitating the games of the gods as they saw them in the sky, bloody disastrous games in which the losers, though they be gods, were killed. And so the Olmecs played their games with human skulls in the beginning, and the players who lost were killed and skulls became the balls for the next games. To shrink from these ancient practices, and take refuge rather in a supposed calm rationality of the sciences may be comforting, but is self-deceiving. No one can escape the conduct of the gods in the beginnings. Not even the secular mind of the scientist. For even while asserting his distrust of the supernatural and legendary, the scientist uses a language, a numbering system, and forms of organization derived from the celebration of what the gods did in the beginning. Science is built upon the nature of homo schizo; it does not come from outer space. The bulk of science comes from heightened self- awareness, the wide span of human displacements, the causal connective mimicking of instinctive stimulus and response, obsessive attention, suspiciousness, associations retrieved by naming, and imitating with arithmetic addition the sequential processing in the consciousness' (dominant ego's) control of attention. Scientists constitute a corps of disciplined self-controllers engaged in these schizoid practices. Furthermore, like a snail moves with its shell, the scientist carries his shell of culture as he goes about his work. An Einstein will trust that nature does not play dice, a scientific fiction that perhaps is not as reality-based as the cosmic fiction of early man, who went back to the beginnings, when the gods were playing ball. In India the game of dice may have begun, say Santillana and Dechend, with the gods, who go around like... casts of dice. [26] Indeed nature plays dice. The Hindus also played a game called 'planetary battles. ' 'Nature, ' of which Einstein speaks, is an idealization of Zeus, who maintained law and order, despite his rapscallion son, the planet-god Hermes (Mercury) who was always traveling about and bringing luck to dice-throwers. What causes this compulsion to connect all activity to its origins in the primordial conduct of the gods? A compulsion to repeat an event, say the psychiatrists, of whom Freud may have been the most eloquent and original, is caused by the traumatic nature of the event to those who experience it. What, then, was so shocking about the events of the beginning? And how can we be traumatized today by events so ancient that they slip off the pages of recorded history? Now again, unanimously, the fossil voices of the dimmest past speak; the events were the awful behavior of the gods when they created mankind. They tore apart the elements of nature to fashion this new creature. They drenched the world; they fired it; they tore up the earth; and they stormed the atmosphere. The human creature was made from the elements in a time of great stress. He was born to great fear and abject servility to his makers. He was born with a compulsion to repeat his birth throes. The birth of every infant, as in the theory of Otto Rank, is the primal trauma of the person; the birth of mankind is the primeval trauma of humanity. {S : SUBLIMATION} SUBLIMATION I explain in an accompanying volume my doubt that the word 'sublimation' is scientifically useful. It refers always to a displacement; hence what is said about the one is to be said about the other. Therefore, while I retain the word in these passages, the word 'displacement' can be read into them equally well. The gestalt of creation inaugurated for the new person a kind of incessant civil and foreign conflict, one in which his resources were over-extended internally and externally. He could not keep himself in order without ordering the world outside, a generally impossible task but one to which he was now biologically committed. But, as it happened, his most effective ally was his external enemy, society and culture, including gods. These are all non-existent delusions, and hallucinations when they 'command' one, but nevertheless interpose true ordering principles of conduct into the behavior of the inveterate warrior. In effect they tell him that he must 'sublimate, ' and teach him how to do so. Sublimated behavior is commonly understood as an unconscious substitute in socially accepted form for impulsive behavior that would be condemned. The substitution appeases the unconscious while it performs its overt function. Primevally, sublimation begins in the overt function. Primevally, sublimation begins in the distraught circumstances of self- awareness, as amnesia and recollective memory begin. When the anxious species is born and asks of itself an impossible measure of control, it begins by reacting against the memory of its harsh experience, which is soon submerged ('forgotten'). The memory is still active and sets up a ghost pain against the recurrence of the experience. Consequently, the memory lends itself in translated and disguised form to unrecognized expressions. It is carried back to the surface of the thought and activity, where it is enacted and reenacted in disguise. It is used in a solemn rite, or played with as a toy, a game, or a comedy. Thus, as was described, ball games became sacred, dramatic events, which reproduced the battles among the celestial hosts, with skulls as balls, and beheading as the price of defeat. As in heaven, so on earth. Control is established; the memory functions in a displaced setting, exuding the energies of the response that it demands but cannot perform frankly. Only a theory that human nature is schizotypical can explain the vast and ramified character of sublimation. Students of language, myth and art, in their diligent search for principles, have discovered that myriad delusive and distorting guises can surround any event. Yet sublimation occurs not only in linguistic and artistic life-areas, but also in all areas of technology. The original traumas and mental distortions of humans required all things in the objective world to be processed through the schizoid world and there given some of their meaning and forms. Beautiful church liturgies, children's fairy tales, methods of combat, designs of tools, and systems of philosophy abound in examples. Freud once wrote in Totem and Taboo that the neuroses on the one hand display striking and far-reaching resemblances with the great social productions of art, religion and philosophy, but on the other hand they have the appearances of being the caricatures of them. One might venture the statement that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, the obsessional neurosis a caricature of a philosophic system. In all three cases, the reverse is more accurate. The nomenclature is irrelevant. For instance, hysteria is regarded here by Freud as a poor artistic creation, whereas actually the art is a sublimation of hysteria. All three highly regarded sublimations are founded upon the primordial madness that says in its first gestalt: fear, remember, control; and, when external controls move against one, sublimate! In the eight century B. C., Hesiod wrote a combined philosophy, theology, and poem, containing what may be elements of a correct cosmogony. Gods and muses and humans transact in a highly metaphorical and figurative drama. Between the reality and his mythology lay an enormous collective pain, felt by a people who had not better way of confronting the terrors of existence and the traumas of their history. It is so, too, when a schizophrenic patient gives a fully pseudo-mythical account of an event that contains within it an accurate report that he is too pained to tell about 'as it really happened. ' There is a sad irony here that the more he succeeds to sublimate, the worse the diagnosis of his illness. But is he not a 'pathological liar'? He is that, too, except that his lies are embellished in a fashion close to what society will accept as myth or as a work of art. When Gustav Mahler composed the Song of the Earth, he was a neurotic who was contemplating suicide, but meanwhile he was also communicating to his audience, the society, a message in a modified 'modernized' language that they would grasp on the brink of their own madness. His song, his neurosis, his suicidal intents -- these were all himself trying to cope with his depersonalization; but the audience would say, 'somewhat mad, but sublime. ' Shakespeare has joined together the transacting elements in a few lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name... What we would conclude here is that sublimation is but whatever is socially acceptable, now or later, in homo schizo's methods of handling his displacements. Everyone, not artist and scientist and humanitarian alone, sublimates at work and play, in love and indignation, in common speech, yes, in dreams asleep and awake. One must sublimate, and always has sublimated since the earliest generations when a modus vivendi had to be established among the schizo clan. {S : CANNIBALISM} CANNIBALISM A common textbook example of sublimation was provided us by William James, who suggested that sporting contests functioned as substitutes for warfare. A weaker surrogate is afforded the spectators, and perhaps even weaker is that tendered to the masses who watch the sports on television. The problem of warfare is much more complex of course [27] . The infantryman usually hates war. Why should he need a substitute? Whereupon we begin a painstaking unraveling of the web of war, attacking the knots of displacement; projection; paranoia; aggression; tradition; authority; habitude; greed; loot; rapine; prestige; exhilaration; gambling; remote and indifferent pilots, missiles, and generals; racism; economic competition; self-destructiveness; the armageddon-complex; and so on until all the knots are untied and not much is outside of war except a few rules of the Geneva Convention which beg us not to kill prisoners, and certainly not to eat them, as now and then has been the case. Achilles wanted to eat his slain enemy Hector and Hector's mother, well, she wanted to chew Achilles' liver [28] . Cannibalism has also had to be sublimated, rendered by frontal cultural attack into a taboo in most cultures, a nauseating abomination, but then also built into the most symbolic and elaborate rites, as in the Eucharist of the Christian Catholic religion. The suppression of cannibalism must be one of the most successful and important sublimations that mankind has ever achieved. Cannibalism is not unnatural to humankind or else it would not seem so repulsive and dreadful. Further, it would not be so commonly discoverable in sublimated form among religions in the world. The major question is, in fact, not whether, but how we came to be numbered among the rare species who have eaten their own kind. The theory of homo schizo here offers three reasons. The first is that a creature that can fear and hate itself, and can transfer this ambivalence to others and gods, can sternly rationalize the eating of others, which symbolically includes itself and the divine. Second, the practice, which has psychic and religious justification, has had upon many occasions a pragmatic or calculated effect; people who would otherwise starve upon the occasion of near extinction from natural disasters, including famine, flood, and radionic plagues, would eat whatever came to hand. Third, relations for some time with others of one's band and tribe would include a stratification between homo sapiens and hominids. A logic of divine ritual sacrifice, made urgent by protein starvation, could be confirmed by primeval considerations of eugenics, population control, animal husbandry, and invidious racism. Cannibalism was restrained and sublimated very early because it was self- threatening; one was ingesting other egos of an uncontrolled kind except under rare stable ego conditions. As with psychogenic mushrooms, you have to be a bit crazy to eat them and you become distinctly crazy afterwards. Anthropologists have long suspected earliest humanoids of cannibalism. From Ethiopia (Valley of the Awash River), the Bodo hominid skull has, upon reexamination, been adjudged a victim of ritual defacement and scalping at least, with a probability that it had been treated anthropophagously [29] . These operations which use tools, are human, whether perpetrated by Bodo man or by related hominidal or human types. Nowhere to our knowledge was cannibalism more widely practiced than in the Aztec empire prior to the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs placed war and its corollary, sacrifice, at the very center of their universe... the one and eternal order. [30] Tens of thousands of prisoners were taken, nourished, sacrificed, and eaten every year. Gert Heilbrunn calls cannibalism The Basic Fear, and writes that the infant is born cannibalistic and projects its impulses upon the environment as his persecutor. Phylogenetic and human ancestral reflections in conjunction with psychoanalytic data point to the ever-existing threat of passive cannibalistic incorporation as the basic danger felt by the new organism [31] . He finds cannibalism widely spread among historical human groups and sublimated very often in modern groups. Let us now turn to anthropophagism in its most sublimated form. We begin with the warning of St. Paul (Epistle to the Corinthians, XI, 29): The Christian who enters upon communion without comprehension eats and drinks his own damnation. For the Christian is partaking of Christ. The text of the Gospel of John recites the startling words of Jesus, which shocked even his disciples, and this text is repeated by the priest at the moment of Consecration in the Mass: Most truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. He that feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has everlasting life, and I shall resurrect him at the last day; for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He that feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood remains in union with me, and I in union with him.( 6: 53-6) Henri Fesquet explains what occurs in the Eucharist: The communion, is it cannibalism? To judge by its intent it is undeniably so. It proceeds through a murder, a sacrifice, through manducation, and through the classic symbolism: uniting a person with another whom one loves, and appropriating his qualities. To eat God is to make oneself divine. But the sacrament is more than cannibalism. It surpasses and sublimates it. It is disconnected materially from the cruelty of the killing, granted that, without Golgotha [the mount of crucifixion], there could be no Eucharist, which directs the separation of the flesh and the blood. Besides, the raw material of the Eucharist, the bread and wine -- two products of the earth -- gives it a cosmic dimension, actually a pantheistic one. The vegetable kingdom, among other things, precedes the animal kingdom and, in a sense, engenders it; by means of the Eucharist, the cycle of creation begins once more. That the presence of Christ is total ( real in the bread and the wine as Catholic theology maintains) gives to the incarnation an exquisite prolongation and deprives the embodiment, the cannibal effect, of all its cruel character. Here, the violence of love is made silent, decent. The consecrated hosts and cups of wine, these there will always be, everywhere and for everyone. It is the superior gesture of tenderness. The mean which Jesus conveyed to his friends achieves a universal character. It is the virtue of Christianity, which traversed the grounds of the religion that came before it, to have adopted the better of them, to have purified their rites and broken down the barriers of races and nations [32] . The Eucharist might be compared with an entry in the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci where he wanders from his point, which is to do honor to virtuous persons. They deserve statues from us, images and honors; but remember that their images are not to be eaten by you, as is done in some parts of India, where, when the images have according to them performed some miracle, the priests cut them in pieces, being of wood, and give them to all the people of the country, not without payment; and each one grates his portion very fine, and puts it upon the first food he eats; and thus believes that by faith he has eaten his saint who then preserves him from all perils [33] . Collective violence need not proceed across territorial boundaries. The killing and eating of members of one's own group, particularly of those somewhat different, physiognomyically and mentally, and without foresight to arm and attack first, could occupy a normal place in the career of the homo schizo band. We recall that the deceased and digested are often relatives, at the least of very similar kind, although, for that matter, there would be a general animism operating by displacement and projection to make many mammals one's relatives and even totems. The general animism would only serve to make the killing and eating of one's own kind less remarkable. At what point would the practice cease and guilt be felt? For cannibalism, soon; for war, never. As evident hominids diminished in number, homo schizo would find himself battling with and dealing with his speaking and aggressive kind almost entirely. Identifications would become closer and closer until one was eating oneself. This should stop most cannibalism. Further the years of easy human hunting would be over; other animals were easier to kill; improved weaponry played a part in this switch of practices. Now then the cannibal victim can be identified with oneself (seeking esteem) and one's gods (requiring sacrifice). The outcome would appear to be sacred cannibalism, reserved more and more for ceremonial occasions and anniversaries. Thereafter any promiscuity in eating human flesh would become tantamount to a crime against the gods and spirits; a taboo would be born. Prisoners were first sacrificed and eaten, then simply sacrificed. Ultimately animals were sacrificed and eaten; this practice would be less thrilling but more reliable, since, for other reasons, prisoners of the right kind were not always available. Like infant sacrifice, prisoner sacrifice is more disturbing when other means of controlling the gods are less threatening to poly-ego stability (I must stress that this poly-ego stability is not an absolute, objective state; rather it is a cultural balance uniquely fashioned with the individuating traits of the person.) {S : VIOLENCE AND WAR} VIOLENCE AND WAR Meanwhile collective violence continued unabated, enhanced indeed by social growth. Primates do not wage war. Female primates do not even kill game. Baboons fight, and one band will live apart from another, trespass upon another's territory, and engage in a melee when challenged; instances of a baboon being severely injured or killed in such warfare are rare. Strange individuals are usually chased away by a band's 'citizenry, ' but on occasion adopted. They do not foresee war, plan war, reenact or celebrate the anniversaries of war, or train for war. The hominids behaved like primates. Warfare is peculiarly human and naturally emerges from the schizoid traits of self-awareness, memory, group-shared symbols, projection, and the limitless search for the impossible goal of control over the self, gods, others and the environment, staked by endless fear. Aware of oneself, and fearful of it, the person recalls the creators in subservience, propitiation and terror. As the creators do, so does he. The wars of the gods have always been in his mind as models of behavior. Even Christians carry along a war of god and the devil, descendents of Horus and Seth in Egypt, Jupiter and Lucifer (Phaeton) in Greece and Rome, Tezcatlipoca representing both in Aztec Mexico, according to Brundage [34] . If culture appeared promptly upon humanization, then warfare and other forms of collective violence may have roots in the same process. I say 'may' rather than 'must' because warfare and other human practices might be considered most important as effects, yet maintain no essential connection with the dynamics of human nature. If such were to be the case, we should rejoice, inasmuch as collective violence might then be more readily extirpated from culture. It is pointless as well as impossible to survey here the voluminous literature on human conflict from several major scientific fields [35] . Suffice to say that no culture, anywhere, is surprised at collective violence, whether internal or external, and, to that degree, a natural quality is indicated for it. However, nowhere does the practice of collective violence bring on, except in individual cases, the physical revulsion that cannibalism often excites when it is experienced or reported. Taboos against taking up arms, for 'just' cause of course, are rare. Ethologists, naming K. Lorenz, Arbrey, and Bj”rn Krten as instances, often claim that man was originally a cannibal warrior. Ir„n„us Eibl-Elbesfeldt finds warfare in prehistoric societies and in hunting and gathering cultures today [36] . Krten's theory, that man was originally two or more kinds of primate of generalized brain and instincts who struggled with each other, gives us a lead to pursue. An early human band, composed of homo schizo or dominated by the type, would be in continuous contact with unaffected hominid bands. The culture gap between the two species would be wider than their appearances might suggest. Even though cultural assimilation had to recommend itself to homo schizo, and he tried in the earliest times to accommodate hominids in his 'table of organization, ' there would occur internal rebelliousness and flight. The neighboring hominid bands would have no means of understanding nor wish to learn that they might become docile enough to appease homo schizo, and find a place in his expanding territory. Thereupon, they would become targets of aggression by homo schizo, who would kill some, break up the band, and acquire the more docile as slaves who would join his 'breeding farm. ' Successful violence encourages more violence. So the practice of war would be common and energetic. Relative to other sources of labor, sex, breeding, and control, bands composed entirely of hominids or almost so would be most lucrative. And as we said above, they were an excellent source of food. Peking man, homo erectus, along with other types of man, have presented some fossil evidence of cannibalism. The food would be both hunted and farmed. If the human felt at ease with himself, whether or not he controlled the world, it is doubtful that he would so persistently engage in the most risky of enterprises -- collective violence. Enough has been said in this work and elsewhere to stress that the problem of 'feeling at ease with oneself' is no matter of a decent meal and a good night's sleep, but it is the greatest and most persistent human predicament. Contributing to its recalcitrance to therapy is its embodiment in the central nervous system, where to suffer and inflict suffering is tolerable and even appeasing and the urge to control extends beyond sight, beyond the grave, into the skies. C. G. Jung would make of this the eternal celebration of a destructive archetype, developing out of the eternally split condition of the soul. The archetype is that which is believed always, everywhere, and by everybody, and if it is not recognized consciously, then it appears from behind in its wrathful form, as the dark son of chaos, the evil-doer, as Anti-christ instead of Savior -- a fact which is all too clearly demonstrated by contemporary history [37] . Moreover, the natural storms amidst which hominid was mutated into man and which occurred throughout his earlier history added to his fright and stressed his already biologically catastrophized nature. In every disaster some people run about proclaiming the work of the Evil-doer --The Evil One, one Alaskan 1965 earthquake survivor called him. All institutions and cultural practices are permeated by natural catastrophes. Their effects upon mankind would be fully apparent in history and psychology were it not that mankind already displayed and carries similar effects in his nature -- 'white on white, ' disaster upon disaster. {S : Notes (Chapter 6: Schizoid Institutions)} Notes (Chapter 6: Schizoid Institutions) 1. Circles without Center: Paths to the Discovery and Creation of Self in Modern Literature, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U. Press, 1972. 2. Introduction to M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1968. 3. In Frank Smith and G. A. Miller, eds., The Genesis of Language, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1966, 282-8. 4. The Ritual Origin of Counting, 2 Arch. for Hist. of Exact Sci. 1, Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1962, 1-40. 5. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art Symbol and Notation, N. Y.: McGraw Hill, 1972. 6. Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, London: Academic Press, 1975; cf. Charles Morris, Signs, Language, and Behavior, N. Y.: Prentice Hall, 1946. 7. M. I. Finley, Early Greece, London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. 8. Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus, 103ff. 9. Sprache der Eiszeit: Die Archetypen der Vox Humana, Berlin: Herbig, 1962, 31, 6. 10. Cohane, The Key, N. Y.: Crown, 1969, is directly comparably with Fester. 11. B. L. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge Mass: M. I. T. Press, 1956, 84. 12. Power and Personality, N. Y.: W. W. Norton, 1948. 13. W. A. Fairservis, Jr., The Threshold of Civilization, N. Y.: Scribner's 1975, 143. 14. A. de Grazia, The Science and Values of Administration Admin. Sci. Q. (Dec. 1960) 363- 98; (March 1961) 558-83. 15. Michael Coe, Mesoamerican Astronomy, in Aveni ed., op. cit., 89. 16. Gerald S. Hawkins, Astroarchaeology: The Unwritten Evidence, ' in Aveni, ed., op. cit., 89. 17. Effigy Mounds and Stellar Representation: A Comparison of Old World and New World Alignment Schemes, in Aveni, ed. cit 218-35, 222-3. 18. A. de Grazia, Ancient Knowledge of Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings, II Kronos 3 (1977), 65-70. 19. Comparative Data on the Division of labor by Sex, 15 Soc. Forces (1937), 551-3. 20. See L'Express, Paris, Nov. 1981. 21. The Virgin and the Eunuch, N. Y. Bramhall house, 1962; Zvi Rix, Notes on the Androgynous Comet, I Rev. Society for Interdiscip. Studies (Summer, 1977), 17-9. 22. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1954. 23. Manu, Ur-Napischtim, and Noah, U. of Chicago Mag. (Winter 1975), 10ff. 24. Eliade, op. cit. 25. Carmen Cook de Leonard, A New Astronomical Interpretation of the four Ballcourt Panels at Tajin, Mexico, in Aveni, ed., op. cit., 263-83. 26. Op. cit. 27. Cf. Quincy Wright, The Study of War, Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1965. 28. Eli Sagan, The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Culture, N. Y.: Psychohistory Press, 1980. 29. Based upon paper and discussions at the American Anthropological Association Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, August 15, 1982, led by Donald Johanson and Timothy White, with supporting statements by Louis Binford, Glenn Conroy and Clifford Jolly. 30. Burr C. Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World, Austin: U. of Texas press, 1979, 217. 31. 3 Jour. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. (1955), 44-450, 464. 32. Henry Fesquet, Anthropophagie, sacrifices humains et immortalit‚, Le Monde, June 21-2 1981, l, 17. 33. Quoted in K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci, London: Hogarth, 1962, 262. 34. Op. cit., chap 4. 35. Q. Wright, op. cit. W. D. Hamilton, in Fox, op. cit., 133ff. 36. The Biology of Peace and War, 1975, trans. N. Y.: Viking, 1979. 37. A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, in Psychology and Religion: West and East, II Collected Works, New York: Pantheon, 1968, 117. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 7: } {T PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF HISTORY} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF HISTORY The death-scream of Lady Macbeth is heard off-stage and Macbeth, told of her end, generalizes the human tragedy: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Act V, scene 5) Whereupon he sallies forth to battle; death is the therapy: il se fait tuer or, as Americans express it, 'he gets himself killed, ' Life is a tale told by an idiot, the many idiots who live and then those who tell of it, and such is history. These famous lines of Shakespeare seem to be in context here. Starting with its creation, mankind moved through time on a spiral path around its schizoid core. On numerous occasions catastrophes changed the arc of the spiral, sending humanity closer to the core in mentation and behavior. Whenever the natural environment seemed to settle down, it appeared that he might invent ways of reaching beyond his limitations, and his historical spiral moved away from the core. But simultaneously, as if magnetized by the core, he would be pulled inwards to it. Thus it has happened that the record of some five thousand years of proto-history and history has found mankind reenacting time and time again, without the urgency of catastrophes, his primordial behavior. His spiral path has had an inertia such that he could neither escape his core self, nor the fossil thrusts of the disastrous times that he had suffered. When a social change occurs, when the earth trembles, when a comet files by, his mind is unduly disturbed, that is, agitated beyond his normal schizoid behavior into activity reminiscent of the similar but much greater catastrophes of his earlier days on Earth. It is not necessary, either, to search only in the wreckage of recent disasters of relatively large social scope for an outburst of symptoms of schizophrenia. Even in mild episodes, whether collective or individual, the symptoms exaggerate, become full-blown. The recurrence of such symptoms, great or minor, in modern times, are not to be thought of as evidence of the weakness of the quantavolutionary model of homo schizo, but, on the contrary, are indications of its strength. Let us examine a few types of historical behavior to clarify the 'psychopathology' of history as the story of homo schizo. When we do so, we can agree that Arthur Koestler, man of much political experience as well as a profound human analyst, was hitting close to the truth as he was writing: When one contemplates the streak of madness running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. [1] {S : A SICK JOURNEY} A SICK JOURNEY Generally, history-telling is a guided use of symbols to integrate disordered minds by reiterating obsessions about how the idols of the tellers have controlled the world on their behalf. So history-telling can be a form of dance, chant, prophecy, folklore, legend, prayer, catechism, rite, epic poem, parable, fiction, literature, fantasy, sacred relics, drawings, sculptures, physical constructions, or historiography in its narrow sense. In the total accounts of humanity, historiography, which looms large in the minds of such as read this book, is a small part of history, with only a fractional impact upon the total effects of history-telling. It is a history-telling when people engage in sacred drama or dancing, as all drama and dancing were during most of the world's history. Nor does comedy or jazz dancing or even computer music escape its sacred roots, although these are sublimations of sublimations beyond facile recognition. Sacred dramas have occupied more human time in history than the whole of all secular theatrical activity since its beginning. It is common to find 'madness' in Shakespeare and Samuel Becket, but a sense of direct connection with primeval origins does not come readily. Let us use the materials so auspiciously gathered by Perry to stress the interconnections of dance forms, schizophrenia, and the origins of mankind. Persons going through psychotic episodes frequently say that they are taking part in some dramatic performance that has been already written and prepared beforehand.. nothing about them feels arbitrary or 'made-up, ' but rather they seem to follow well-established configurations. [2] They are linked actors in ritual dramas found around the world -- Egypt, India, China, early Central and South America, the Norse area, Ireland, Iran and other Indo-European regions. The inner journey of the psychotic topically repeats the following form, in the words of Perry: 1. Establishing a world center as the locus. 2. Undergoing death. 3. Return to the beginnings of time and creation. 4. Cosmic conflict as a clash of opposites. 5. Threat of the reversal of opposites. 6. Apotheosis as king or messianic hero. 7. Sacred marriage as a union of opposites. 8. New birth as a reconciliation of opposites. 9. New society of the prophetic vision. 10. Quadrated world forms. Carrying this framework into the ritual drama of Ancient Egypt, we encounter the replication of raising of the center of the city as did the creator god. Next there occurs the drama of the murder of the god Osiris, and of ensuing chaos, until his son Horus assumes world power, and is embodied in the Egyptian monarch. The king goes back to the beginning of creation and is baptized, purified, and prepared for the future. The devil god Seth, represented by an animal, seeks to usurp the monarch; mock battles are fought with warrior actors. A suspenseful period is said to follow, a chaos, while the issue of ruling the universe is unsettled. The king is crowned ruler of the world, successor to Horus. Various festivals are held; effigies of the gods cohabit. Osiris is reborn through his mother, the Sky. A new harmonious order of the world is proclaimed, reestablishing the primal order and justice. Throughout, the world is represented by a four-cornered, four- pillared structure, the four cardinal directions. The king takes possession of them all. Although a jumble of celebrations and their related dramas develop in Egypt, as elsewhere, and do so in the varying forms that personal psychoses take, the general paths of the rituals remain clear and it is likewise strikingly evident that the great society is celebrating a thoroughly schizoid cycle, year after year, endlessly. The melange of ritual dramas adds up to history, as it is known and relived by the elite and masses of all times and places. History as it is taught in the schools, schizoid though it may be, is but a pallid imitation of this more fundamental and archtypical history- telling. The Exodus story, true in most respects - as indeed the drama contains essential historicity for all peoples -is recited and replayed in Judaic ritual celebrations. The Roman Catholic mass, basing itself upon the life of the Christ, is also a ritual drama. Joseph Campbell composes a worldwide plot for the tales of heroes, which belongs in the category of ritual dramas [3] . What happens to the educated and scientific people, the millions of unbelievers, 'back- sliders, ' the communist throngs of half the world that denies the ritual drama in its traditional forms - do they successfully cast off the schizotypical behavior implicated in the ceremonial dramas? More likely, they find substitute outlets. They pursue speculation on the origins of the universe (the catastrophic 'Big Bang'), on the evolution of life over billions of years, on the climactic but prolonged rise of mankind, on blind but progressive nature and on its control by reason. In a recent television film, Cosmos, viewed by millions and loudly touted by the intelligentsia, Carl Sagan, an astronomer, chants a prolonged liturgy on the evolution of life forms from molecule to man, with the help of canonical background music and sleight-of-hand cartoons. Bits and pieces of the ritual drama (which was not a one-act performance anyhow) are parceled out to holidays, parades, 'Hollywood westerns, ' speeches, diet-fads, paranoid political causes, mass spectator sports and so on. Admittedly the sundered great god Osiris is rarely discovered and put together again. Living a new history, as contrasted with reenacting faithfully history, is difficult. But for those who cannot stand the secularized way of life, there is then mental therapy: 'Maybe you should see a psychiatrist, ' or There's an article you should read in yesterday's newspaper. {S : HISTORISM} HISTORISM History-telling today is typically viewed as the events of the past, incompletely or completely related depending upon the number of volumes given over to it, sorted by periods like the Renaissance, names like Julius Caesar, topics like architecture, events like the Battles of Verdun, or demonstrations of principles like Marxism. Behind all of this is the historian: Alexander is Great, said his faithful biographer, because I wrote about him. What do historians write? If what history tells us is true, then homo schizo is the hero of all times and places. If what history says is false, then history is the workings of the minds of homo schizo on past events. Should someone protest that history is both true and false -- and indeed it is -- then homo schizo must be both subject and author, and then in a way all history is the autobiography of this species. Historism is a production of histories about history. In its various guises, it is evoked in order to train the people of a culture how to avoid and handle anxieties. It is typically addressed to some part of society in preference to the rest because there are usually several identities striving for recognition of themselves and no history can or wants to work for all of them. Ordinarily it is the rulers who have most need of history and can command it most readily and can support it. It appears no less than right that the 'heads' command the 'heads. ' It is clear that historism is a branch of culture, a culture complex, and little more. The two have the same motive, to help homo schizo behave in a controlled manner. The major focus of historism is in a fundamental sense upon itself, that is, upon the power needs that brought it into being. What are the main problems here? Historism must show how first came chaos, then the creation of the forces that work for the benefit of its sponsors and clients. So historism must deal with the creation, with the gods who are its gods, who have chosen its clients. Then it moves to the rulers, its rulers and how they worked for its clients until, usually, the rulers went bad. It unites fate and destiny with the clients, but if the gods are not active enough, and if fate and destiny are not adequate, then it adjoins some lawful principle, like evolution by natural selection, like progress, like the triumph of the working class, or like the ideal of the nation-state. Creation, gods, and rulers or principles -- these are the major subjects of history, the events of history, even written history, much more oral history. Now then historism fattens itself into great tomes, as in epics, encyclopedias and monographs, to concentrate upon the settings or conditions of different times to make certain that all clientele will have a locale and moment with which more easily to identify. Then historism concentrates upon conflicts, and as in peek-a-boo with a baby, which Otto Rank sees as a basic play for relieving the fear of a separation from the guardians, the conflicts go to show how time after time the ego's stability is threatened by accident or malefactors, only to be restored by benign and usually anthropomorphised agents. In the end the topics of history, the main topics, not the endless sublimations of topics, serve to concentrate attention and relief where it most matters, at the most threatened points: why we are here in the first place, who we are, what has been done to keep us reassured -- even by the most devious means -- and how we may expect to preserve our being into the future. Historism, then, in all of its forms, is therapy on a grand scale for homo schizo. It operates like a giant brain. It helps a selected main ego to dominate the other egos. It occupies itself with the displacements that are current and molds them into more meaningful buttresses of the self, so at one time it concerns itself with gods and then at another time with heroes and rulers, then with food supplies, with money, with ships, whatever the focus of the attention of its clients. It aids the memory to forget and recall. It says to the Jews of 3400 years ago, 'Remember your bondage in Egypt, ' and to the Jews of 1981 'Remember the Nazi holocausts. ' And the Romans said 'Remember Carthage' and the Americans said 'Remember Pearl Harbor. ' One may wonder that these are disasters. But the disasters are still the route to victories; the end has not come. Meanwhile they give goals, ergo identity, to the clients of historism. The Germans of 1980 do not proclaim 'Remember World War II! ' with much enthusiasm; they are seeking a new dominant ego. If the disaster is final, it is suppressed. The American Indians and Blacks, for a long time, wanted no history and knew hardly any. It was ego-destroying. If, by some concatenation of events, it is revived, then its more tolerable parts are recalled. The unbelievable catastrophe that Elohim brought upon the world in the great flood is so honeyed for the surviving clientele, for the Noahs, that it can be read by tender-hearted little children without qualms. Historism supplies the proper amount of amnesia. In addition it distorts or even denies the events. Even sincere efforts of German policy since World War II have not prevented massive amnesia of the death camps, and, for more complex reasons, German democratic leaders have had to tolerate deliberate efforts to show that the Nazi holocausts were unknown to most Germans and also greatly exaggerated. All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten of murder the hands of Lady Macbeth, the poet wrote, and so guilt goes underground and historism is often nothing but sublimations of crimes perceived and committed. It becomes part of the devil within one, the uncontrollable alter ego and helps homo schizo to remain himself, eternally divided, and therefore adds to the continual flow of anxiety, maintaining the level that guarantees the genetic predisposition to remain an unstable self. If it is true, as psychoanalysts say, that one has to be psycho-analyzed before he can practice psychiatric therapy, then it must be equally true that all historians should be psychoanalyzed. But if this were so, then history would be a dull compendium of who knows what; or it might not even exist, for of what use is remembering if it does not tender oneself a psychic strength? Conceivable, but impossible: if it were done, all poetry and history and literature and music would be lost; it would be irrelevant, dead, unpracticed. Or perhaps the psychoanalyzed historians will be told by their therapists what their age- old mission is: not truth, but therapy. But homo schizo is quite incapable of this, although he toys with the idea as we play with it here. Historism gives him control, relief from fear, a more manageable ego, comfortable obsessions, paranoia and aversiveness, cognitive disorders quite believable, grounds for ambivalence, negativism; and above all it affords him sublimations. Verily, history is too important to entrust to truth. {S : SCHIZOID EPISODES IN ABUNDANCE} SCHIZOID EPISODES IN ABUNDANCE The human never acts according to a single factor in his complex, but in terms of the complex itself. Whence history as a whole can be viewed as a prolonged struggle against anxiety, as Norman Brown, for example, asserts [4] . Action according to a single mode, e. g., 'obsessive compulsion, ' without involvement in identity questions, displacements, fear-level, or sublimation, does not occur. Rather, the history of a set of actions, of a character, or of an institution involves all modes in different proportions and with intricately woven and sometimes imperceptible patterns. Technical and scientific histories, say defenders of objective historism, are exceptions to the flow of schizoid control processes through accounts of the past. Firstly, as has become accepted by historians of science, in principle if not in practice, such specialized history has the full range of homo schizo behaviors in its substance. The writing itself, far removed from a chant about the first days of creation, is a subterfuge, proclaimed so openly and therefore deemed innocent. The sublimation of factual technical narrative, even in its suspiciously professed narrowness, is intended to follow an obsessive rhythm, letting all the faculties of homo schizo sleep and dream while the brain beats to a narrow band of 'truth. ' Chess is a highly intellectual game. Computers can play it close to the master's level. Below is a story that may not be in the history books of chess, it being counter to be rationale of the game. An extraordinary everyday-life example of a paranoid reaction illustrating shame- humiliation mechanisms took place at the Spassky-Fisher chess-match of 1972 held in Iceland for the world championship. By the 17th game, Spassky, the Soviet world champion, was facing the loss of the match by three points, 9 1/ 2 to 6 1/ 2, with 12 points needed to win. In this symbolic warfare between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States, a humiliating defeat was impending for the Soviets, who had held the world championship for the previous 24 years and for 41 of the last 45 years. Soviet chess was about to lose esteem in the eyes of millions. Trying to account for Spassky's unusual slackening of concentration and display of impulsiveness, the Soviets issued a public statement claiming that non-chess means of influence (electronic devices and chemical substances) might be involved. They requested an expert examination of the playing halls and its contents. A 24-hours guard was placed around the hall. The chairs of the players were examined for poisons and x-rayed. (These were richly upholstered Eames chairs sent from New York.) Icelandic scientists dismantled the lighting canopy over the stage, but found only two dead flies. (Strangely, no one suggested further examination of these well-known bugs.) Nothing was found. At the end of the match, which Fisher won 12 1/ 2 to 8 1/ 2, Spassky, who during play sometimes peered suspiciously up at the lighting, said, I still feel there was something in the hall that affected me... I am really convinced there was some curious thing in it. [5] Whence, for that matter, come the highly elaborated practices of medical therapy? In the second millennium B. C., the Chinese word for medicine still was composed of two parts, cure and divination. W. Tseng reports that the concepts of Yin-Yang opposites, of the five elements, and of the microcosmos-macrocosmos bond dominated the corpus medicus [6] . Care and feeding of the young were perhaps the earliest therapies. Care of the self has been noted among some mammals. The licking of wounds is common; they may even be bathed. Care of other adults of the group is found in warning signals, grooming, and food-sharing. This, if it were not reflexive or conditioned, but voluntary, would require the multiple identification process of homo schizo. Worship of gods implies care and attention to the projected demands and needs of the controllers upon whom one's sense of self-control depends. The first medical therapies, it may be conjectured, were reiterative rites and celebrations, such as dramatization of big dreams, orgiastic feasting, cannibalism, self- mutilation, mud baths if it was believed that we were fashioned from the primordial ooze; blind staring of catatonia; emitting sounds evocative of pandemonia; and hypnosis. Recapitulation of collective trauma, of natural disasters and defeats, was foisted upon the group as a mode of therapeutic control. All of these are found today in highly altered forms as mental and physical healing. Then might proceed the infinitely varied and slightly less 'mad' corpus of homeopathic medicine. Displacements occur by gestalts far removed spatially from resembling gestalts in the brain. The essential methodology is still reiterative, but one large step removed to the imitative by means of extended analogies -- exploring the overlapping discs of the neuron nets for discovery of what new connections make one feel better. In the homeopathic mood a therapist might readily move into the finest sublimations, recognizable as to their origins only with difficulty. Eating the lotus flower is far removed imaginatively and practically from sacred castration as a way of controlling the god of a comet or a planet like Venus, which is associated sometimes with the lotus and with castration and clitoridectomy. The effects on a wound or on an aberrant mind are achieved, whatever they may be, at the same time as the cooperation (control) of the god is achieved. Ultimately the development of a set of plants, usable in a variety of complaints, is recognized, accepted and even experimentally enlarged. All this now occurs beneath the sublimatory umbrella of suppressed, 'forgotten, ' religious approval; thus, the god of Venus may rarely be evoked or cited. A corpus of medical therapy exists and can even grow pragmatically by means of the observation of qualities, doses, and effects. Homo schizo has no objection in principle to actual cure, so long as the cures are by-products of or do not interfere with self-control. For lack of space, the interminable parallels (really homologs) between schizophrenia and archaic human behavior cannot be drawn out. The invitation is always there, however, to scrutinize, or even simply to screen, the contents, for example, of Mircea Eliade's several books on primitive myth and behavior. There, the qualities of homo schizo exude from the time of creation (illud tempus) and pattern themselves so as ultimately to reproduce the insane-sane human of today. Whence one may venture among the deeds of the archaic heroes as, for example, in Campbell's accounts, following the gods-driven succession of compulsions, rites, sacrifices, penances, orgies, and aggressions, interlaced with an infantile cute cunning that manifests the earliest pragmatic behavior. Exemplary in studies of individuals or heroes would be Ulysses or Odysseus [7] whose pragmatic cunning was world-famous, so exceptional was it. He is otherwise a typical survivor of catastrophe; in this case some true disasters of the 8th and 7th century, now well documented, are intended, including the Trojan wars, as well as an echoing of more ancient disaster. Odysseus is an alter ego of the Goddess Athena, a thoroughly dangerous, irresponsible and exploitative psychopath, who never dares to look at himself, an accomplished scoundrel. Ulysses goes into the underworld; he has visions and hallucinations -- he is rather paranoid, not only aversive to other people, but pursued by the hostile Poseidon, god of the sea; his reasoning processes are often disordered, when they are not tricky; he is possessed by signs; eternally anxious; homicidal. Even so, Ulysses was a human with 10,000 years of 'progress' behind him and his story is told by the 'divine' or at least 'highly sublimated' Homer. His life has been faithfully taught to schoolboys by many generations of teachers, mostly 'normal' and oblivious of this simple and easy interpretation of his character and deeds. Not even James Joyce saw Ulysses in such a light when he wrote his masterpiece by that name; for his hero Bloom is a different kind of schizoid, a wandering Jew whose multiple roles were the products of the changes of scene within the city of Dublin and among its people (there being at least two ways of dissociating and cultivating egos -- internal movement and external). The weirdness of the linguistics of free associations found in the novel of Joyce creates a radical contrast to the language of Homer. Homer had to convey a crazy message to the ordinary man, and his language was ordinary; but the leaps and irrelevancies -- the great metaphoric stretching -- of his style can be seen as chanted liturgy, divine schizoid language, whereas the style of Joyce was ultra-modern schizoid, the liturgy of the individualistic priest of the twentieth century. When the Greeks and Turks mobilized in a crisis over the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the author watched young men parading around an island town singing of marching into 'Constantinople' (the Greek name before the city was renamed Istanbul). When he ventured to remark to several by-standers, acquaintances, that with perhaps a quarter of a million deaths Constantinople could be won, they looked at him as if he were a psychopath, or worse, a Turkish sympathizer. When a contract was let by an office of the U. S. Government in the 1950's to prepare a hypothetical scenario on how to make an unfavorable peace or a surrender in the event of defeat, a public uproar forced its immediate cancellation and apologies from high officials for this insult to hubris. But, then, vox populi, vox dei. Theodor Reik tells of how ordinary people, adults and children, and of how prehistoric man, the Biblical Job and Adam, and the Greek heroes were affected by hubris, an excessive idea of their competence, a presumptuousness, a belief in the power of their own wishes to transform reality. Prehistoric man must have had an even higher degree of over-estimation of his thoughts and fantasies than modern man [8] . Such would be called delusions of grandeur if met with in the psychiatric clinic. But, says Reik properly, all men have some of it. J. Jaynes has developed much material on the hallucinatory behavior of the ancient heroes of the Bible, the Homeric epics, and early empires of the Near East. Johnson has done the same, in a less analytic manner, and the present author has concentrated especially upon the psychology of Moses and the Exodus [9] . To Jaynes, the whole of these ancient cultures, perhaps from the dawn of mankind and certainly for the millennia before the eighth century B. C., were bicamerally schizophrenic, the one brain hemisphere cut off functionally from the other, until a loss of faith in dealings with the gods provoked seizures of self-awareness and the beginnings of a complex inner mentation, culminating in the Greek classical age. Jaynes has identified the greater part of recorded history as a partial recovery of mankind from an early, catastrophically-provoked schizophrenia, and has settled upon the brain- hemisphere split as the locus for the schizoid mental phenomena that we are discussing. In his view, iconoclastic and solitary in contemporary philosophical and psychological discussion, the human mind was behaving 'properly' in what may be recognized as 'the Golden Age of Saturn; ' but then it was sent, even literally, upon the warpath by natural disasters. In our view, the origin of self-consciousness was not in the breakdown of the bicameral mind but in its creation. Were Jaynes to specify the several disasters, and to allow the original schizophrenia to occur with the very birth of homo sapiens, a remarkable congruence of our theories would result. It is strange -- ought I say schizoid? -- that in the years he was working on his book he was, to judge both by its inadequacies and by its references, completely out of touch with the vigorous, and even noisy, circle of catastrophists who were working in Princeton Borough, a few hundred yards away, with Immanuel Velikovsky, who was a noted psychiatrist as well as the principal figure in the neo-catastrophist revival. {S : HELL} HELL The 17th century philosopher John Locke and the 18th century historian-engineer, N. A. Boulanger, both secular investigators, believed that mankind could not have invented the idea of hell unless hell had been an actual experience. These are interesting prologues to C. Jung's concept of archetypes of the mind, where much that governs the unconscious today has been with the human species from its beginnings. Velikovsky and the present author, among others, have presented voluminous evidence for such actual hells, brought on by natural disasters. Nevertheless, one must consider the possibility that present and historical experiences of hell are part of the self-induced and socially induced mentation of schizophrenics. Most psychologists believe it probable (perhaps without considering actual prototypical experiences) that the idea of hell is manufactured and processed within the mind. There can be no question that large-scale disasters of burning, earthquakes, explosions, and fall- outs are hellish, and the comment of survivors even of highly localized disasters is frequently 'It was like hell itself. ' How did they know so? Hell may have been sometimes anciently outside of us and affixed its impressions upon us, or it may have been both outside and inside of us since the beginnings. Hercules, the Greek god-hero, who was at least as old as the archaic age, feigned madness. The god Dionysus drove people into collective madness and orgies. Madness has always been akin to divine behavior, and the gods were the producers of hell upon earth. Hercules was identified with planet Mars, Dionysus with planet Venus. E. R. Dodds, in his brilliant study, The Greeks and the Irrational [ 10] demonstrates clearly that only very few Greeks of even the classical period, and Socrates and Plato were not among them, thought that man was anything else but irrational and likely to be possessed. Socrates' own treasured second 'voice' is the most famous of hallucinatory companions. Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, he said, the madness must be of the divine type, produced by a divinely wrought change in our customary social norms. [11] Truth was certainly an ideal, but one to be obtained principally by what we should call today 'occult' processes, involving omens, prophets, oracles, voices, mysteries, ritual, and myth. Metaphorical or analogical reasoning was paramount, which today we should regard as suggestive but not probative. Deductive reasoning was in the ascendancy, which is essentially 'pulling rabbits from a hat. ' The peculiar kind of empirical induction employed by science en masse today was in its infancy with geographers, such as Anaxagoras, and a few others, usually later, such as Archimedes and Thucydides. In all these regards, the intelligentsia was ahead of, but not much ahead of the masses. Socrates was convicted by only a small majority of his fellow citizens, nor was he a very good witness on his own behalf. So we need not venture into 'less-advanced' societies for homo schizo, nor into 'primitive tribes. ' He is the hero of historiography. {S : ORDINARY MAD TIMES} ORDINARY MAD TIMES That schizotypicality is the everyday state of historical times seems to be a verifiable proposition. It is unfortunate that in the study of societies, as in the study of individuals, schizotypical and schizophrenic behavior are regarded as departures from a norm, a norm that we can never find. A person is either schizo-typical or nothing. Edward Foulks was hot on the trail when recently he wrote, Schizophrenia is found world-wide because it has a functional basis in human groups and, until recently, may have provided certain evolutionary advantages, [12] going on to say that when a society has become stratified and retrograde, schizoid prophets or politicians arise to break down the culture and introduce changes. They rise and fall -- like Jim Jones' American sect that committed mass suicide in Guyana. They are endless in number, in all cultures. The point of distinction is not sanity- insanity but appropriate-inappropriate behavior, or well-adapted-ill-adapted. For every schizoid prophet who is successful, a hundred are crucified. But that is only a first point. Second, societies have many ways of behaving schizophrenically, ranging from the incorporation of a population in regular wars or killings (the Roman circuses, the Aztec human sacrifices) to the maintenance of a catatonic bureaucracy that employs and stupefies an active population (the thirteenth Dynasty of Egypt, the Confucian mandarins of China, the Soviet agricultural system, the U. S. Department of State). We cannot yet predict if and when a 'stratified and retrograde' society will be busted by schizophrenes. In any event, it is not a question of schizophrene against normal, but of tigers seizing each other's tail, as the children's story goes, and chasing each other so furiously that they collapse finally in a mess of butterfat. C. Jung speaks of the sudden disintegration of the personality and the divestment of the ego-complex of its habitual supremacy, [13] that marks the onset of some acute schizophrenias. It is like experiencing an earthquake, explosions, pistol-shots in the head. These disturbances appear in projection as earthquakes, cosmic catastrophes, as the fall of the stars, the splitting of the sun, the falling asunder of the moon, the transformation of people into corpses, the freezing of the universe, and so on. In 1957, Jung is again conveying the experiencing of schizophrenia, this time of latent schizophrenics, who he guesses must outnumber manifest cases by 10 to one [14] . The latent schizophrenic must always reckon with the possibility that his very foundations will give way somewhere, that an irretrievable disintegration will set in, that his ideas and concepts will lose their cohesion and their connection with other spheres of association and the environment. As a result, he feels threatened by an uncontrollable chaos of chance happenings. He stands on treacherous ground, and very often he knows it. The dangerousness of his situation shows itself in terrifying dreams of cosmic catastrophes, of the end of the world and such things, or the ground he stands on begins to heave, the walls bend and bulge, the solid earth turns to water, a storm carries him up into the air, all his relatives are dead... In the absence of a scientific tradition of quantavolution and catastrophism, Jung, like most other observers, assumes that the individual is displacing his fears upon the religious stories, fairy-tales, and cinema accounts of disaster throughout his life. Of one fact we feel confident: the human mind, whether normal or abnormal, both by past experience and in imagination, has been full of disaster from its creation. Like the main stem of the nervous system, history and historism reaches from past to present. In many schizoid mind stands a Hesiod or a Moses, ready to tell us how it happened illo tempore, and to transform events into myths, an improvisational and immense creativity deemed a severe form of insanity. The facts add up to an important bulwark of our thesis, Schizophrenia produces many collective dreams, as well as dreams of personal life. Also, the condition yields an immense harvest of collective symbols. [15] Some of the collective dreams resemble the Big Dreams found in both mobile and unmoving cultures, of the kind that were reportable to the Areopagus of Athens and the Senate of Rome. We compare these with the output of historism and conclude that in the past, now, and in the future, historism, consciously and unconsciously, is reporting reliably upon the true state of the human mind which is forever being recovered, recycled, reenacted, both personally and collectively, wherever and whenever surrounding circumstances are analogous. Mircea Eliade correctly reports the universal dedication of tribal peoples to the first days of their existence. The continuity of their cultures depends upon celebrating in all major aspects of their culture the anniversaries of their birth from chaos and their reception of culture. It takes little comparative analysis to apply fitly the schizophrenic syndrome of mankind to their reliving of the first day. This is their history. More difficult to propose and accept is our thesis here, that history, as we have known it, since 'the dawn of civilization' is also the return to illo tempore by homo schizo in search of his origins. That is, the ceremonial return to illo tempore is no more real than the true course of man's history which itself is a form of Freud's compulsive return to the original trauma. When World War II ended, a psychiatrist, G. B. Chisholm, like many others, was wishing for an end to all the products of insanity such as war. He saw it in a basic psychological distortion that he found in all civilizations. This was a force which discourages seeing facts, prevents intelligence, teaches mental dissociation and disregard of evidence, produces inferiority, guilt, and fear, makes controlling other people emotionally necessary, encourages prejudice and the inability to understand others. [16] He grasps the symptoms, but persists in superficial meliorism, ascribing the psychopathology of history to bad social policies. Until psychiatrists, like many sociologists and statesmen, view war as neither inherent in nor an aberration of civilization, but as one way of handling primordial and civilized man's mental and life problems, it is not likely that the war problem can be structured even for preliminary analysis. Earliest mankind probably killed his kind and related kinds promiscuously and in this sense practiced war. Pericot has written that on the various series of pre-neolithic paintings in the Spanish Caves, only one depicts human combat [17] . But we have already argued the prevalence of early violence, and Egyptian murals deal heavily with war. {S : NAZIS, STALINISTS, AND DEMOCRATS} NAZIS, STALINISTS, AND DEMOCRATS Often in history, the schizoid becomes schizophrenic, and we see a full clinical disease possessing the collectivity. One of the sharpest episodes of recent memory was the passage of the German nation from a strong self-aware kaiserdom whose schizoid traits were 'lawful' (according to the rules of international misbehavior), underground, and sublimated; to a weak dissociating-ego situation, following a traumatic war, under the Weimar Republic; to the overt schizophrenic state of Nazism; and to a post-World War II republican regime whose therapy was punishment, including self-punition, and an identity with the superpowers of the Age. The early studies of H. D. Lasswell and F. Schuman on Hitlerism of the 1930's [18] have been supplemented by many more recent works; they employed the method of matching the criteria of clinical madness with the speeches and writings of Nazis, the characters of the leaders, their actions and public policies, and the response to these of German public opinion. Their conclusions are typified by this sentence from Lasswell's study: The conscience for which [Hitler] stands is full of obsessional doubts, repetitive affirmation, resounding negations, and stern compulsions. Identification, displacement and projection, obsession, repetition, negativism, aversion and compulsions nest in this one sentence, most of what composes human nature in fact. We note, concerning the effective Hitler appeals, the logic of metaphor, the profligate use of analogies, the 'reasoning by right brain, ' his 'effeminate intuition, ' his artistic background, and we raise a question for those who feel that the 'left brain digital logic' is somehow more at fault for violence than the 'humanist' right brain of the poet and musician. We are reminded of a case of Bleuler. A catatonic notified the court that his illness had been diagnosed as paranoia and the apparitions as hallucinations. 'Be that as it may, ' the patient asserted, 'there are still sufficient reasons to proceed against the gang. ' [19] Then we have Hitler personally conducting the massacre of his own men, many of them loyal, in the infamous purge of June 30, 1934, asserting to the German people thereafter that, granted these men may have been innocent, they still deserved to be killed because (as far as one can disentangle his words) they were guilty of making him suspicious and this was the same as threatening to destroy Germany. These alleged conspirators, agitators and destroyers were poisoners of the wellsprings of German public opinion, a metaphor suitable also for arousing deep feminine sexual fears of impurity and impregnation, and of anti- semitism, whose folklore had utilized the same allegation against the Jews since time immemorial. To stress the metaphorical logic, we recite, too, Mein Kampf, where Hitler had written, All great movements are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual sensations, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Misery or by the torch of the word thrown into the masses, and are not the lemonade outpourings of aestheticizing literati and drawing-room heroes. [20] To generalize about history cannot be scientific, and, if scientific, cannot assemble its volumes of proof, and, if it can, it will certainly be misinterpreted. Can we agree that all history is not Nazi? Of course, but how much of history is such is a matter to report as well. If the Nazis had not deliberately put to death millions of Jews and other human beings, a German history of fifty years would not be studied as a case of collective madness. Yet it would still have been history as a recital of schizotypicality. The Stalinists of the U. S. S. R. and its satellites largely evaded the stigma of madness; they committed millions of murders, assigning as pretexts collective mutiny as with the Kulaks and Cossacks, or military necessity as with the massacre of the Polish officer corps at the Katyn Forest, or of conspiracy against the worker's state as in the 1930's treason trials and purges that brought death to many thousands and filled the deadly concentration camps of Siberia. Rigidity frequently takes the form of logic and principle as a feature of German character; it is a quality that will not compromise with politics or with 'how other people feel. ' This heavy schizoid trait is better camouflaged by acceptable doctrines in other nations. The Russian behavior was, for instance, generally believed to be more human, partly because of the humanistic ideology and underdog connotations of marxism. When Marshal Petain, later to be condemned as a traitor, became the hero of France in World War I, it was because he took the sternest measures to insure that a million or more Frenchmen should be killed or wounded in the Battles of Verdun. The German military leaders were equally distinguished at Verdun. The American and British destruction of enemy cities in World War II were justified as combination of retaliation and military necessity. The list of such behaviors is exceedingly long and falls back to the dawn of history -- to the glee of pharaohs inscribing on their temples and tomb walls what armies of men they slew, what slaves they took, what towns they destroyed, what loot they carried home; it retires also to the Vedas of India; to the epics of Homer; to the Books of Moses and Joshua. Yet it would be a cheap trick to let the case for homo schizo in history rest upon war and civil violence. We should appreciate that man is at war only half the time. Perhaps no more than a fifth of all deaths since humanity began have been from violence, directly or indirectly. The shadow of war and violence is always over mankind, of course, and this shadow uses the visions and rhetoric of insanity; and the history that is told is largely the stories of war, written by the greatest number of historians, and coursing through the historical senses of people en masse. We can proceed beyond warfare to larger realms; not a trick, but as real as can be, is the claim that collective behavior can have the same psychological adjectives applied to it as individual behavior. One needs to be careful. There is no brain, heart, liver, or limbs or phallus, etc. of society except as metaphor. As the American marine general argued, when told that his national policy was to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will come along with them. But if one holds to a quantitative mode of thought and discourse, one can say: there are 2, 3, 5, 10 out of 11 persons employing the same mechanisms, and even extend this to such aggregates as the French governing group, or even the French people, or a typical French practice, or a change in German attitude meaning over x% changed, etc. This empirical and quantitative mode of thought must be emphasized, lest, on the one hand, strange and confusing metaphors be employed and trusted -- like the heart of the nation -- or, on the other hand, lest it be regarded as unscientific to speak, for example, of a collectivity of persons being traumatized by a catastrophe. What happens to a 'group' happens to the individuals composing x% of the group, or it does not happen to the group at all. When we say 'a group is schizoid, ' we mean that the traits of human nature are all operative in varying forms among the group members in subjective, interpersonal and external transactions. When we say that this group becomes Nazi, we mean that its ruling element and a significant portion if its members are acquiring a preponderance of Nazi attitudes and exhibiting Nazi behaviors. We can also say that a group depersonalizes, as Germany did following World War I, developing, as S. De Grazia has described it, an acute anomie, not being able to find itself or an appropriate image of itself [21] . The United States appears to have gone into such a state with the first generations to follow World War II. We await a masterly treatise along these lines, but meanwhile are diverted daily by episodes such as one momentarily in the news as these lines are written, of a fourteen year old boy who raped and murdered his girl friend and who exhibited her unburied corpse from day to day to a dozen acquaintances, none of whom called the police. This is acute anomic behavior. However, any historic (i. e. past) behavior, whether selected randomly or chosen as an extreme test of the proposition, will exhibit the full range of schizotypicality, because that is the only way that people could ever behave, as they can only behave now. Some extraordinary incidents are chosen for their atypicality, and these compose most historiography and 'news. ' Schoolchildren read that Abraham Lincoln walked miles to repay a few pennies to a lady who had been given the wrong change in his store. Psychiatrists such as Clarke have dwelt upon this incident, in analyzing Lincoln's character. But let us say that Lincoln gave his next customer the proper change. Isn't this a simple transaction, a bargain, a sale? What would be psychopathological about this ordinary transaction? Of course, firstly it is assumed history and not taught -- why? Because it lacked significance, significance meaning something sinister and obviously schizoid, whether positively moral or evil. Or because it would make dull reading, which is proof once removed of the same. The total setting, the total action frame of historiography is human and schizoid. Deviancy, terror, violence, and pornography must constitute most of all that has emerged as literature, art, and history. A great many routine actions bear the stamp of rationality simply because they are conducted in an accepted cultural structure. A machine-gunner, who kills twenty men whom he has never met, is simply making small change: there is nothing psychopathological about him. There stands a fine monument to the Machine Gunners of World War I alongside Hyde Park, in London; the inscription on it reads from the Bible, Saul slew his thousands, and David his ten thousands. (I Kings 18: 8) Let me clarify by means of another case. In Psychopathology and Politics (1930) Lasswell speaks of the man who hates his father and tries to kill the king, and accords to such behavior a formula: that the political man (terrorist) displaces private motives (father hatred) onto public objects (king) and rationalizes it in terms of the public advantage (tyrannicide or republicanism). This sounds pathological, abnormal, and rare, but a few moments of analysis will reveal that everyone engages in precisely the same mental operations and activities in everyday life. That is, one aggregates 'private' and 'public' objects by displacements, and acts, in one way or another, similarly (so far as concerns his motivation) with regard to both types of objects. {S : RELIGION AS CUSTODIAN OF FEAR} RELIGION AS CUSTODIAN OF FEAR What else has man done other than prepare for and engage in conflicts and war? He has practiced religion as much or more of the time, and it would be well if one might present a concise statistical inventory of all that has gone on in the name of religion. Without such a summary resource, and not wishing to recapitulate the extensive exposes by eighteenth and nineteenth century writers such as Voltaire, Boulanger, Feuerbach and Frazer, and especially because a more systematic analysis of religion is intended in a later volume of this series, our remarks here must be brief and linked closely to our theory. I have elsewhere cited the ancient realization, expressed in the saying of Lucretius, Statius, and others that First of all the gods created fear, and First of all fear created the gods. Fear is in all life but especially in mankind. Man, upon his first full appearance, created his gods to be responsible for his fear; moreover, they were created for the major purpose of controlling his fear. If this be so, it should not surprise anyone that, since the first days of human history, religion has been the principal custodian of all the major aspects of fear. And that the general fear is incorporated in the routines of life and any particular fears that arise are invariably fitted to religious fear before they are released for testing in more pragmatic areas of life. Divine action has been the first hypothesis for explaining every event. Continuity is perceived as pursuance of divine behavior and teachings; change is seen as a violation of or an instruction of the divine. The divine is the creator and the mediator of all things, the intervening variable between cause and consequence that is too often denied or left out by those ancients with hubris and those moderns with science. Human behavior is continuity: will not most readers agree that religion suffuses all that is long-enduring, routinely undertaken, and traditional? And change is always a rebellion against some aspect of some religion usually in the name of another aspect of the religion or of another religion. That marxism, a non-religious doctrine of social science, is practised without a heaven and invisible god is apparent wherever it prevails, and often it rests on top of a population retaining its traditional religious affinities. The Chinese have for millennia been fond of what we have called ritual counting; and when the youth of China was given a carte blanche by Mao Ze Dong in 1967 to tear down traditional institutions, including the covert religious practices of Confucianism, they were told to destroy 'the four olds, ' old thought, old culture, old customs, and old habits. The terrible aftermath was referred to popularly as The Revenge of T'ien, the ancient living Heaven. That religion is everywhere schizotypical is not difficult to prove, if a hypothetico- empirical science is assumed, i. e. a science based upon the tenuousness of propositions and the rules of material evidence, for this arrives speedily at Thomas Hobbes' assertion The fear of things invisible is the Natural seed of Religion. That it is abundantly schizophrenic in the usual definition of disease, making of its practitioners either outright schizophrenes or followers of the same, also emerges from a simple and fair reading of the religious record in history. Delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and anhedonia are at the core of every great religion and tribal sect. It is ironic in the extreme for devotees of religion to explain the madman, i. e., the assertedly schizophrenic, as one who has fallen away from religion and is therefore accursed. Atheism abandons celestialism and anthropomorphism, but cannot, all hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, divorce itself from schizotypicality. Elsewhere, I have ventured to say that real celestial activity was the original sponsor of religion; and it has always been a reinforcer of traditional religiosity, as people view the skies once again as part of their religion. Catastrophes are breeders of typical religiosity. The seeds of many memorial generations lie dormant, awaiting the occasion of disaster to sprout. But in the interim of calm skies, a few people become atheist and claim a capacity to think for themselves, to think in hypothetico-empirical terms, and to act pragmatically. Modern western culture is even dominated to some extent by atheistic thought. Still there is no question of a basic change in humanity occurring. The same mechanisms and processes of perception, cognition, decision and action occur, only without an area of displacements hitherto filled with the Heavenly Hosts. An atheistic bookkeeper in a soviet machine factory, bred of three generations of urban atheists, fills his mind with identification with the dead Lenin and heroes of the communist movement: he projects his wishes into the leaders of the Soviet Union, ascribes to his boss and American imperialism feelings of hostility toward him that he feels toward them, finds solace in work and in alcohol, is scrupulous and neat to a fault, nurtures a constant cold in the head, plays psychological games with his family and neighbors, and so on. He is a good man, they say of him and he will be buried in the earth of Mother Russia without benefit of clergy. All of which is to say that this man is of the ilk of the friar of a Byzantine monastery that once stood next to his cemetery. Celestialism, sky-religion, which has marked the history of worship, was a contributing factor to the creation of homo schizo and primordially paramount in the filling of his mind with displacements and ideas, but man does not require a continuous experience of sky activity, nor a conscious belief in its historical or present actuality, to be either mundanely religious or atheist. However, in no case can he cast off the schizotypicality that accompanies celestial religion by becoming either mundane or atheist. Cambia il maestro di cappella, ma la musica ‚ sempre quella! -- the choirmaster may be changed, but the music is always the same. {S : UTOPIANISM} UTOPIANISM A final escape is solicited, not historical, but utopian. Imagine a group living communally in houses of a settlements that they have built. There they grow food and animals and eat them, and fashion tools to make necessities such as clothing and furnishings. They cure disease empirically and save only enough for a rainy day. They love their children and old people and live in peace with their neighbors. They profess no religion. Now perhaps this community has never existed. But, if it did, would not its people be called truly homo sapiens sapiens? No. These people are apparently schizotypical. The very conception of them and the conception they have of themselves -- the utopia -- is schizoid. The utopia begs all questions of its creation and leaves us with dogmas of conduct and consequence. How they positioned themselves for the utopia is unknown. Like all utopias it is an exercise in the omnipotence of thought: to think of something is to create it. Yet, passing over the absurdity, examine the activities of the community. All require severe consensus. How shall decisions be made, by what system of voting? What plan will be devised that is not descended from he prehistoric pillars of heaven, north-south orientation, the planetary circuitry of the walls of ancient Babylonia, the star of Saturn? What shall the diet -- that pandora's box of phobias and compulsions -- consist of? What is to be traded for the tools, or will we be here in an autarchic stone age village? What identifications are to exist between commune and neighbors? What language will be employed to deal with them: are they vous or tu? Will the diseases be all organic, to avoid problems of definition, and will psychosomatic illness be denied or absent? Can this last denial work, considering the rigorous training imparted to the children, who must, despite this heavy discipline, love themselves, their old people, and their neighbors. Much must be set ahead and back in time, too, for to love the old means to respect the olden times that the old like to talk about. Planning is everywhere: the crops to be harvested, the goods to be made, the curricula of teachings: the saving (how much?) for the rainy day (when will it next rain?). Practically all psychologists (except perhaps one such as B. F. Skinner who has written of such a place that he calls Walden II) will see in this mythical community a highly integrated and coordinated set of schizotypical human behaviors. They will foresee in it a propensity to totalitarianism and religious revival, once a disastrous threat appears from 'the friendly neighbors, ' or 'benign nature, ' or 'traveling in foreign places. ' The community is ahistorical, an impossibility. It is founded upon a non-existent kind of human nature. Should it succeed in any other sense, it will succeed as a grand delusion. {S : DARWINIAN HISTORISM} DARWINIAN HISTORISM It may not be long before there is a general realization that the foundations of Charles Darwin's idea of the origin of species (1844) and the descent of man (1871) were intellectually weak, and that the success of Darwinism was, like that of Alexander the Great and Isaac Newton and Napoleon Bonaparte and Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, first of all a success of the opinion thunderstorms of the times. To repeat a theme of the first chapter of this book, Charles Darwin argued often on a post hoc ergo propter hoc basis: where organic variation existed, it must have been preceded by something less advantageous, and what brought about the change would be called natural selection. Natural selection was more than a name to him; it was a reality, even a dogma. Influenced explicitly by Lyell who saw long, uniformitarian processes of change in the rocks of the earth, and inspired by Malthus who saw famine, war and disease as always ready to cut down a surplus population to viable proportions, Darwin could examine one form of instinctive behavior after another in animals and purport to find in their variations consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings, -- namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. [22] This was the principle of survival of the fittest, wrote H. Spencer, in an approving vein. A mutual approbation society grew up among economists and biologists. Its cold, dogmatic line of thought provided the largest, deepest source of aggressive laissez-faire competitiveness. To its influence, many commentators have ascribed the breakdown of the human mind in the last century-meaning the open exposure of the schizophrenia of human nature in cultures. That is, many sociologists, anthropologists, literary critics, and philosophers agree: the historism of Darwin did not settle the minds of homo schizo. He hastened the break-up of the selves system of his age. Thus can we say that Darwin, as an historian, for that he certainly was, would have been unconsciously seeking, according to our own theory, to provide his clients with the means of controlling their ever-anxious schizoid minds. The argument is surprisingly simple, and even well-known. The minds of his clientele, the cognoscenti and literati, and the radical and socialist revolutionaries like Engels, were already in a distraught condition; for they were rejecting mosaism in religion and feudalism in politics. They were desperately agitated and impatient. Darwinism provided a new swarm of displacements, a set of obsessive problems, an outlook for aggression against well-defined authorities, even a stable primate-mind that could view remorselessly the gradually changing social scene of nature. Darwin himself probably saw his mission, and, if his personal despair is significant, realized he had failed to accomplish it. Despite all that has been written about him and the history of biology, much more could be said than this study can comfortably bear. I can only try to oblige Darwin's requirement, expressed in a letter to Thomas Huxley: It would take a great deal more evidence to make me admit that forms have often changed per saltum. [23] I would probably suggest, too, a good psychiatrist. The dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on (in) the peaceful woods and smiling fields, as he put the struggle for survival, was going on in this abnormally intellectual specimen of homo schizo as well. I think that, personally and as a typical man of his times, he could bear the infinite trench warfare of his theory more than the bombastic war of catastrophism, implied in the euphemistic word saltum, the leap. Catastrophism was the world of the Old Testament and of his father's and wife's character. He was the invalid fighting the point-by-point, day-by- day war all of his life. On the eve of the publication of The Origin of Species, he wrote his cousin that I have been extra bad of late, with the old severe vomiting rather often and much distressing swimming of the head. My abstract [of the manuscript on which the book was based] is the cause, I believe, of the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir to... [24] Although he had conquered conscious mental revulsion against his theories, he could not suppress the psychosomatic revolt. He was a gentle man, people agree, but with a compulsion to speak out rebelliously and aggressively in displaced intellectual forms. His world of nature was his world of struggling selves within. I also wish that I might do a proper analysis of evolutionary theory in biology and anthropology, especially as it concerns man. Instead, I can only guarantee it to be still a happy hunting ground for the logician who is biologically trained. It abounds in evasions, question-begging, circular arguments, ex post facto 'discoveries, ' post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, proof by selective example, hysteron proteron, and doctrinaire assertions. This is all aside from the paucity of evidence on important issues, the failure to recognize important issues, and the entanglement in trivial research. The final nemesis is the ever-present, ever-available two-way switch between the genetic pool and natural selection. Natural selection can never fail as the means of evolution because it will always presumptively find among the genes of any species whatever precise gene, unknown of course, is needed to explain a given step in evolution. With this suppositious entity, any hole in the hulk of natural selection can be plugged. This is gene 'Q, ' the potential quirk that conveniently enters the gene pool prior to whenever the time arrives for it to be called forth, potentiality into actuality. If these allegations are deemed too severe, I may at least hope that biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists will realize in them a suggestion of the need for an explicit union of social, psychological, and biological theory. Also, in the course of writing this volume, it became clear to me that I was presenting neo-darwinists with a strong and original argument for their case, even while establishing my own case. This has occurred by locating and simplifying the instinct-delay mechanism as the force of transition from primate to man. It is a factor that is to a high degree quantitative and therefore could be considered capable of sustaining many minute changes by mutation and adaptation over long periods of time. I hope that this bonus will compensate my critics for reading what otherwise may have appeared to be an offensive attack upon the true facts of evolution and culture theory. {S : Notes (Chapter 7: Psychopathology of History)} Notes (Chapter 7: Psychopathology of History) 1. The Ghost in the Machine, N. Y.: Macmillan, 1968, 266. 2. Perry, Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness, 80. 3. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949, 88. 4. Life Against Death, N. Y.: Vintage, 1959. 5. K. M. Colby, Clinical Implications of a Simulation Model of Paranoid Processes, 33 Arch. Gen. Psychiatry (July, 1976), 854-7, 855-6. 6. Wen-Shing Tseng, The Development of Psychiatric Concepts in Traditional Chinese Medicine, 29 Arch. Gen. Psychiatry (October, 1973), 569. 7. A. de Grazia, The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, publ. in xerox, 1968; Princeton: Metron publ., 1983. 8. Myth and Guilt, New York: Braziller, 1957. 9. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness...., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1976; A. de Grazia, God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus, Princeton: Metron Publ., 1983. 10. Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1968. 11. Phaedrus 244-a, quoted in Dodds, op. cit., 64. 12. Unpubl. xerox mss, 1976, kindly supplied by the author. 13. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, (1939), Princeton U. Press, 1960, 162. 14. Ibid., 180-1. 15. C. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Diseases, Princeton U. Press, 1957, 165. 16. The Reestablishment of Perceptive Society. IX Psychiatry (1946). 17. In S. L. Washburn, ed., Social Life of Early Man, London: Methuen, 1961. 18. Lasswell, Psychology of Hitlerism, in The Analysis of Political behavior, New York; Oxford U. Press, 1947. Frederick Schuman, The Nazi Dictatorship, New York: Knopf, 1935. 19. Eugen Bleuler, Dementia, Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenia, 1911, J. Zinkin, tr., N. Y.: Int'l U. Press, 1950, 128. 20. From Houston Peterson, ed., Great Speeches, N. Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1965, 757, 759. 21. The Political Community, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1948. 22. Origin of Species, 1859, ed. 1936, 208. 23. Life and Letters, II (1860) 274. 24. Ralph Colp, To be an Invalid: The Life of Charles Darwin, Chicago: U of C. Press, (1977). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO I: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 7: } {T PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF HISTORY} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHT THE HOPEFUL MONSTER My story of the hopeful monster is nearing an end. Given the physique of an ape and a troublesome miniature computer, he has harried the whole Earth, scuffed about on the Moon, and can sing Aida. I see no signs of the angelic in his origins and history, only in his delusions and pretensions -- but what can one expect from a schizoid? Nor have I discovered substantial grounds for any theory of the origins of human nature except that of homo schizo. Aside from special issues and errors of fact, none of which, it may be hoped, are fatal, four major criticisms can be aimed at the theory. These can be stated as follows: first, that the catastrophes of the human creation scenario did not occur; second, that humanization was not a hologenesis but a process occurring point-by- point; third, that the human species appeared much earlier than 13,000 or even 50,000 years ago; and, fourth, that mankind is not genetically schizotypical. Any one of these criticisms can be offered by itself, while with-holding the others. Moreover, all four of them can be advanced together. At the same time, I can be correct in any of these four regards and also in all four of them, to wit, the catastrophes, the hologenesis, the recency of humanization, and the schizotypicality of human nature. {S : REAL AND PSYCHIC DISASTER} REAL AND PSYCHIC DISASTER On the issue of catastrophism, I should repeat the thesis. There are three kinds of disastrous intervention in the process of humanization: First, catastrophes are invoked as requirements for mutations, biosphere destruction, and atmospheric transformation, without which the human species -- and many others -- would be most unlikely to evolve. I have sketched the evidence and the character of such disasters and shown how they would enter into the quantavolution of mankind. Second, the metaphor of catastrophism is applicable to the hominid mind as it was destroyed and the human mind composed. In this sense, the human came about as a schizophrenic psychological disaster. To sharpen the point, one can imagine that a team of scientists, knowing much more than we do now, and expert with drugs and surgical instruments and experimental environments, might convert a hominid mind into a human one. The team could then announce, metaphorically, We have today fashioned a fearful, power-seeking, disaster- prone maniac interested in everything in the world. The third form in which catastrophe intervenes is once more in the non-metaphorical mode. Natural catastrophes occurred after humanization on a grand scale and at intervals of time. These provoked and reinforced the catastrophic character of the human mind, entering, with 'unfortunate' compatibility, upon the interior and transpersonal melee of individual and collective psychology. It would be unwise to place the burden of proving the true natural catastrophes entirely upon this one book. At the least I may refer to my books of the Quantavolution Series for more theory and evidence and then to the classics and rapidly growing literature of quantavolution, as cited in those books. The human mind -- an itself that perceives itself as a disaster emergency -- is sandwiched between natural catastrophes that preceded it and natural catastrophes that succeeded it. We are not surprised, given the catastrophic interfaces, that the human is often an unreliable observer. Still, although the world is ultimately to the mind a coded set of illusions, and although this mind must always possess a great many delusions about these illusions, there does exist a sense of reality, a pragmatic mechanism simulating the animal's instinct to respond to a stimulus. The pragmatic mechanism permits humans to distinguish between more or less delusionism. Legend, myth, history, and thought can be reality-tested for their degree of 'excess delusionism. ' The mind of homo schizo, in sensing the outer world, can build a battery of tests to discriminate more disastrous from less disastrous conditions. {S : A RECENT SMALL SHARP CHANGE} A RECENT SMALL SHARP CHANGE Whatever one's ultimate judgement on the issue of catastrophism, a second criticism may be leveled against the general theory of homo schizo, namely, that humanization was a point-by- point process, not a hologenesis. In this regard, one can review the psychological theory of this book and of its companion volume, going beyond the evidence, which is thus far scarce, concerning both quantavolutionary and evolutionary theories. Our theory here says: the critical change in the pre-human creature was probably small, a significant depression of instinct-response speed, but the effects were an avalanche, pouring into all aspects of behavior, internal and external, and prompting an immediate culture. Our position, disregarding the evidence momentarily, is logical and theoretical; it is well illustrated in the scenario of the simple club-carrying creature: he has to be a fully human person. No matter by what door one enters into human behavior, one enters upon the domicile of the human being. The central nervous system, mentation, and culture are holistic -- all must be related to all. Whereupon a third criticism is ventured, that the human species is known to be very old, even though human behavior and culture are not demonstrable until the Upper Paleolithic age. This criticism usually is brought in to support the second criticism, but is logically independent: one may have rapid-fire point-by-point evolution occurring in a short time. The question here is how long ago did humanization occur. My position is that the time scales are grossly distorted, that 'three-million-year-old-hominid bones' are perhaps no more than thirteen thousand years old. I have indicated signs of weakness in the tests of time upon which so much faith is placed. Either we are dealing with a hominid who is humanly incapacitated, or we must drastically shorten the time scales. A human who is distinguishable three to five million years ago, who then disappears for three million years, and who then emerges with a culture, is a contradiction in terms; he was not human. But could he have become clandestinely a human only 100,000 or 200,000 years ago? If one has to speculate in this fashion, then the debate will become a free-for-all, no holds barred. {S : THE UNREDEEMABLE APEMAN} THE UNREDEEMABLE APEMAN The fourth and last major objection to the theory of homo schizo is this: however he came about, man was born a rational animal, in whom signs of schizotypicality are abnormal, even if frequent. If someone will argue along this line in the face of the abundant evidence and citations advanced in this book, not to mention its companion volume, then that person is ready to accept the implantation of a soul by intelligent beings from outer space, or by a god of his choice, as the critical step in human genesis. Ironically, the ethologists are on the proper track: man in his 'rational' nature is most like an ape, seeking the simplest solutions and fastest decisions that a brokendown instinct apparatus will allow. As Blaise Pascal said, long ago, There is no man who differs more from another than he does from himself at another time. It is in one's erratic attitudes or values, in one's conflicts, and in one's unsatiable curiosity that a person is most human. No other animal species is so ineluctably schizotypical. The so-called irrational element of people is therefore their authentically 'normal' constitution. Surprisingly little systematic scientific theory of the genesis of human nature exists. We know rather well, in this age, what constitutes a general scientific theory, and if theories of human origins are scarce and defective it may be because their empirical foundations are absent. In such circumstances, we can offer the theory of homo schizo with greater confidence, realizing that it is not just 'another theory. ' Let us repeat then the theory, in summary form: Given the conditions that must have attended human creation, human nature must have been of necessity schizoid. Furthermore, judging from what is known of his early behavior, culture, and history, he was in fact schizoid. As to the first point -- what 'must' have created a schizoid human in the process of nature -- we allude to the constitution of the primate, from which man derives so many mental and physical attributes. The fascination that crowds humans into the monkey house of the zoo reflects the intuitive recognition of similar species. An unending stream of detailed studies just reinforces the resemblances of physiology, anatomy, and behavior. But reflectiveness, symbolism and reasoning on widely displaced subjects are missing. The forces that generate species by mutation are constrained by the necessity to work on what is already potential, in order for the species to survive in a physical, as well as environmental sense. Mutations are not purely random, not quite blind, but strike the target like poor archers, off center. In the case of humanization, the key mutation produced directly or indirectly a fatal indecisiveness, whose first outward evidence would be a crazy, that is, misbehaving, hominid. The preconditions for mutation included natural particle or viral storms of sufficient scope, intensity, and duration to cause a great many mutations. To fix by conventional chronology a certain date for the birth of mankind is risky and might mislead; the compression that we force upon the usual timetables reduces millions of years to mere hundreds. The boundary line between some pair of ages that run from the Cretaceous to the Holocene (a sixty-million year interval in conventional geochronology) might have witnessed the first humans. On such occasions the skies changed, the atmosphere was turbulent, the Earth was deluged, the lithosphere was refashioned, and great numbers of species were extincted. Thereupon might the human, whether by mutation or radical adaptation, have originated. In themselves, the changes from hominid to human may have been anatomically negligible. Even the swollen cerebrum is scarcely distinctive. Hence what happens inside the brain is all- important, for that is what translates into uniquely human mentation and behavior. We have argued that what happened had to happen at once, in a hologenesis of mind and culture. We have demonstrated that little time was needed to permit the speciation of man and that probably little time was actually available, the current geochronometry notwithstanding. Further, the speciated man was genetically predisposed to culture. Culture was inevitably and promptly determined by the human quantavolution. Recognition of this process has been blocked by the same evolutionary and uniformitarian ideology that insists upon point-by- point speciation; point-by-point cultural evolution is impossible. Culture is species specific behavior of homo schizo. He finds culture as he finds a water hole or a mate. And this culture is a monstrosity of nature, whose very existence proves that man is the only species that dwells outside of itself, out of its mind. {S : SCHIZOTYPICALITY AND HOMO SAPIENS} SCHIZOTYPICALITY AND HOMO SAPIENS The primate ancestry, the turbulence of the environment during the birth throes of the species, and the basic human culture all point toward a creature who is perennially distressed from having to invent his own mind. He had now to behave in the pattern of what is today called schizophrenia. He was depersonalized. He constructed a multiple personality and operated under a confederational ego. He was fearful and anxious continuously and without sufficient cause. He has remembered a terrible past which, inconsistently, he has forgotten and displaced. He had an unceasing and unbounded need for control of himself and pursued all semblances, fakes, illusions and self-deceptions that seemed to give such control. He displaced madly. He has always thought by displaced association and projection. He animated nature. He sought the eternal. He had immediately to establish the trappings and rituals of culture. He suffered religious delusions and made and unmade gods, under the illusion that these gods were busily making and unmaking him. He killed and ate his kind. He was obsessive and compulsive. He has consistently disliked himself and others, and has been characterized by aversiveness to people and ambivalence. His ambivalence extended to himself, to others, to the gods, to all of nature. He has loved and destroyed all of these. Nor has he been happy. Anhedonia, the 'joy' of suffering, has always been a major human trait, though often so deeply buried in his culture that he can go about 'happily' denying its presence. He has been typically paranoiac; never could he manage to build more than a narrow crust of trust, even though paranoia unleashed the most self-destructive kinds of behavior. He symbolized internally and then extruded portions of his code for external communication. The symbolist process expanded enormously to take in the whole of his world and of nature. Everything perceived and conceived received its code name. The linguistic process was done not once and for all, but repeatedly, thousands of times, in thousands of cultures and at different periods of the culture. He made fetishes of signs, words, and symbols. He has always envisioned a future, but the future squeezed in and out like an accordion, from the next beat to forever, dragging along a ragged melody, out of time with everyday behavior and history, and changing its tune from one moment to the next. He could add and subtract, which from time to time amounted to marvelous intricacies of mathematics and logic, yet these formed always a limited, not powerful, element of his character. He designed and valued decision in many forms as the substitute for the instinctive behavior that he lost and would dearly love to relocate. Great mythologies and sciences of decision emerged. He ventured into totally 'unproductive' fantastic and philosophic contemplation. For dreaming so much while asleep and awake, he is uniquely distinguished among all creatures. In the beginning, as ever, he became mythographer and historian, the schizoid recorder of his own schizotypicality. To conclude, we have found no symptom of mental illness, or schizophrenia as that is broadly construed, which has not been an important and 'normal' part of human nature from its inception. We find, also, that there has been no large general and persistent pattern of human thought and behavior that cannot be subsumed under the symptomology of schizophrenia. The name, homo sapiens, and especially homo sapiens sapiens, given to him, is a misnomer and he should more accurately be called homo sapiens schizotypus. Indeed, there may turn out to be, by tests refined beyond those that are presently validated, a mixture of human natures, including hominidal forms that cannot survive or regenerate as humans without instant heavy administrations of culture, and then several others, one or more of whom was responsible for the invention of culture and the great changes of history. Possibly there may be, among the latter, some genetical structure that is so fully cerebral and ego-controlled that it can be called sapiens sapiens. It is, after all, mainly a convention that bids us call all people by the same species name. There is no natural law that demands that all people be of the same species in that they apparently can interbreed. Even at that, some humans can interbreed only under high risk circumstances, at some risk to themselves and their progeny, owing to genetic differences. We may also suspect that the stress on species intra-reproducibility may be an offshoot of the peculiar sex-sublimated English nineteenth century environment, in which Darwin and his friends were heavily immersed and in which animal breeding was of large interest, as Darwin himself evidenced, and in which 'good breeding' and genealogies within human groups took on a sacred aura. By contrast, many peoples of the world, including Greeks and Hindus, have claimed that the human soul could migrate, in all or in part, hither and yon in the animal kingdom, transcending zygotic barriers. Genetic differences among individuals become minor or major by definition, by public policy, by fiat, one may say. While ordinary people, societies, scientists and the intelligentsia have their eyes upon certain visible differences of culture, upon skin color, stature, and certain other differences, not apparent but tangible, such as blood groupings, other more basic behavioral and mental differences may stand unattended. These latter may appear to be so important, when ultimately perceived, that they will erase not only the traditional insistence that all people are of one species but also the thesis of this book that all people are to be presumed schizoid. More likely to occur would be the uncovering of genetic differences that are too minor to suggest drastic eugenics. The worst possible occurrence, which would at the same time be the best possible, would be the discovery of a trulyhomo sapiens sapiens among the population in 'pure' or 'diluted' form. Even to be able to recognize scientifically such a type would be difficult if not impossible, since we should have to recognize something that we are not, to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, so to speak. If it were recognizable, presumably it would be a person whose self-awareness is infinite but at the command of a calm will of a solid genetic ego. It would be a person who can displace without anxiety, but who also has a will to displace infinitely. This person would make and unmake habits with only instrumental motives in mind, could believe in causes without bias and prejudice, could emotionalize warmly without commitment to irrelevant choices, utilize large portions of his or her cerebrum for calculations according to a presently unknown logic, control his nervous system and physiology at will (that is, by perfect psychosomatism), be prudent but fearless -- in short do many things naturally that we have here come to believe cannot be done without contradicting nature. Such would be an 'ideal' species, as we would megalomaniacally describe one, without reference to the reality of homo schizo. We construct this ideal, in fact, with as little appreciation of its possibilities and likely genetic mechanisms as we imagine the 'intelligent beings from outer space, ' with only the vaguest ideas of how such beings might be anatomically and behaviorally designed. There is, I would conclude, only a rare chance that such a species exists among us and, if it did, could be found, and, if found, could be eugenically engineered and maneuvered into commanding position in the development of a real homo sapiens sapiens. Most probably we are confined to homo schizo in ourselves and in society. Our tactics, and to some unknown degree our eugenic policies, must be to trick ourselves and others into certain ways of behavior whose consequences we desire and accept. These tricks can carry us a certain distance towards utopia. In addition, as we discover the right tricks (I realize that I should be calling them applied social science or humanistics), we can be alert to discover certain quantitative genetic differences that reliably distinguish those human schizoid constitutions that prefer our tricks -- our solutions -- and are docile respecting them. These can be genetically assisted. So a cultural and genetic kit-bag may eventuate that will give us a new typical homo schizo, ideal in these senses rather than in the unrealizable megalomaniac conception that was hypothetically formulated above, which, incidentally, resembles the far-flung schizotypical visions of man that are commonly voiced by philosophers and politicians. End of HOMO SCHIZO I {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, N.J. Notes on the printed version of this book: The cover is from Pablo Picasso's Girl before a mirror (in reverse), 1932, the original of which rests with The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and a photograph of which was lent by the Princeton University, Art Library. The text was processed by the Princeton University Computer Center, with photo- composition and printing by Princeton University Printing Services by xerography in a limited edition. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: de Grazia, Alfred, 1919- HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior Includes index 1. Psychology. 2. Medicine. 3. Human Behaviour ISBN: 0-940-268-01-9 Copyright ¸ 1983 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first edition. Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213, Princeton, N.J., 08542, U.S.A. To Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902 - 1978) Almus frater magnus idearum {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS } {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II by ALFRED DE GRAZIA TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD Chapter 1: THE NORMALLY INSANE CULTURED MAMMALS SAMPLING FOR THE NORMAL THE IDEAL PERSON SELF-AWARENESS CATEGORIES OF MADNESS THE HUMAN DISEASE SYMPTOMS OF MENTAL ILLNESS RECONCILING THE NORMAL AND ABNORMAL SCHIZOPHRENIC AND SCHIZOTYPICAL THERAPIES GENETICS: ARE THERE HOMINIDS AMONG US? Chapter 2: THE SEARCH FOR LOST INSTINCT INSTINCT-DELAY SELF-FEAR AND SELF-CONTROL THE SENSE OF "I AM" EXISTENTIAL FEAR INSTINCT IN MAN AND ANIMAL POLY-EGO VERSUS INSTINCT "YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN" Chapter 3: BRAINWORK THE ANIMAL BASEMENT THE LOCATION OF INSTINCT DELAY HANDEDNESS ORDER AND DISUNITY MEMORY AND REPETITION PSYCHOSOMATISM Chapter 4: DISPLACEMENT AND OBSESSION DISPLACEMENT PROJECTION AND PEDAGOGY TIME AND REMEMBERING OBSESSIONS, COMPULSIONS, HABITS Chapter 5: COPING WITH FEAR OMNIPRESENT FEAR PHYSIOLOGY OF FEAR GUILT AND PUNISHMENT AVERSION AND PARANOIA AMBIVALENCE ANHEDONICS CATATONICS ORGIES AND HOLOCAUSTS SUBLIMATION OF FEAR Chapter 6: SYMBOLS AND SPEECH SILENT SYMBOLISM ANATOMY NEUROLOGY OF SPEECH THE STRUCTURE OF SPEAKING VOX PUBLICA CULTURAL DISCIPLINE AND SPEECH DIVERGENCE INNER LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE Chapter 7: THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL THE MUDDLE OF MENTATION THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT SECRET WORDS AND PANRELATIONISM RATIONALIZATION THE DISSOLUTION OF LOGIC THE USES OF PUBLIC REASON THE SECURITY CONSENSUS CAUSATION TIME AND SPACE THE COST OF LOSING MAGIC SCIENCE AS INSTINCT SUBLIMATION AS PREFERABLE DISPLACEMENTS THE ORIGINS OF GOOD AND EVIL EPILOGUE {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia FOREWORD My thesis here comes close to a remark once made by Mark Twain: "The human race consists of those who are dangerously insane and those who aren't." Humans, that is, are naturally somewhat crazy, by all definitions of that term among practicing psychologists. A book on human nature, especially if it contains a theory of instincts, needs an apology. The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences of 1968 carried no article on human nature. Its direct predecessor, the Encyclopedia of Social Science of 1932, did publish such an article, written by John Dewey, where he opined that social experiments might ultimately reveal the limits of what humans could achieve and tolerate; we hope that they have not yet done so. Some 16,000 articles and reports in psychology were noted in Psychological Abstracts in 1979. None was grouped under the heading of "human nature." There was no such heading. In the area of information storage and retrieval, what is not indexed tends not to exist. Researchers usually follow marked paths. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox presented a book on The Imperial Animal recently with nary a peep or growl about human nature, although, if I read it aright, that is precisely the subject. My teachers at the University of Chicago, a fashion leader in matters intellectual before World War II, generally regarded the search for "human nature," and "instincts," too, as futile. It was the heyday for stressing cultural influences and cultural differences. "Human nature" was suspected of being a tool of conservative theologians and politicians. The ordinary man had made it a vehicle of his biases, his hopelessness, his social darwinism and his need to generalize, no matter how foolishly. In respect to the concept of instinct, McDougall and Freud were influential. But the one by overclassifying the phenomena of instinct, and the other by using the term broadly and vaguely, aroused suspicions of it. G. H. Mead, in the vanguard of imperialism for the concept of culture during the 1920's, substituted "impulse" for instinct. There came a period of "motivation," "values," and "drives" and now, too, one can see certain nuclear meanings that are handled by "reflexes," "genetic factors," and "genetic predisposition." So the term "instinct," too, went by the board of Psychological Abstracts. A third term to which I refer often is "schizophrenia" and here, I am privileged to say, a computer printout of the Abstracts will convey hundreds of titles every year. As we shall see, however, "schizophrenia" is scarcely less diffuse and troublesome a term than "human nature" or "instinct." To me the term "human nature" signifies the traits most distinguishing humans from other life forms. A model or system of behavior can be constructed of these traits such that their interrelations are perceived, along with the mechanisms energizing them. As will be observed from the chapters to follow, the half- million studies in psychology that accompanied the near demise of the two terms, "human nature" and "instinct," nevertheless changed what can and cannot be said about them. I may remark, as did Konrad Lorenz once, upon returning home from some American disputation over whether behavior was all learned, "I think I have taken some of the stink out of instinct." Empirical research, both macroscopic and microscopic, now offers pertinent data in abundance. New perspectives are invoked. The study of the brain has made excellent progress as, for instance, in the comparative study of cerebral hemispheres. The French newspaper Le Monde, quoted a Delegate to the World Congress of Biological Psychiatry in 1981 to say: "Psychiatry will slip away from the psychiatrists if they don't want to do biology." Ethology and socio-biology are aggressively pushing into the realms of anthropology and sociology. Chimpanzees have been house guests. Women have lived as neighbors to gorillas. More and more of animal instincts are observed to be subsumable under deliberate decisions and experiential learning. We have more systematic knowledge, as well, about the human social condition and what brings it about. Also, physical reconstruction of human nature has become theoretically possible, if some pronouncements upon gene-splicing, cloning, drugs, and brain surgery are to be believed. Although many books are related to questions of human nature, few works attack the subject head-on. Almost all of these latter are old. They may come out of any field of knowledge, but usually emerge from philosophy, theology, anthropology, psychology, and political theory. The present work derives in part from twenty years of teaching political psychology and the sociology of invention, and from a decade of studying prehistoric and ancient cultures which were undergoing ecological disturbances and creating myths and legends meanwhile. It connects ultimately with a merged set of pragmatic, psychological and anthropological traditions that were especially well represented at the University of Chicago a generation ago. I am indebted beyond words to that community of scholars. The sequence of chapters can be explained in a few sentences. First I seek a usable concept of the normal human being. I cannot find it, for it sinks into the quagmire of ideas concerning man as a rational animal. Thereupon I look for a description of the mentally ill today, and how they are treated. It appears that psychotherapy is seeking vainly to reduce bizarre behavior, but such behavior crops out in normal people too as their perverse inheritance. So both the disturbed and the normal gyrate around a central complex of behavior (including mental activity) that is schizoid, and this schizoid complex cannot be reduced to "normal." The "normal rational person" is a fiction, undiscoverable in reality, unsupportable and misleading theoretically. The concept of "normalcy" becomes a portion of a statistical distribution of the population whose behavior is appropriate. Thus, a person who eats moderately is sane; one who is a glutton is sick. One who kills in self-defense behaves reasonably; one who kills in a religious sacrifice is mad. Conventional behavior makes a poor key to human nature. A more workable key can be fashioned from the traits assigned to schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not an aberration of human nature but a powerful and influential expression of the basic personal and social format. It becomes especially conspicuous when social structures are displaced or destroyed. I find that it emerges from a general genetic failure of the human instinctive system, a blocking of responses. This instinct-delay brings self-consciousness, a plurality of selves, whose disorganization imparts a continuous, unstoppable and ineradicable fear. The fear transforms into a drive for total interior and exterior control. There occurs a set of strategies for coping with the fear. Language and science coordinate the strategies. The ideas of the good, true, and beautiful that eventuate convince the human being that, if not a divine creation, he is at least the monarch of nature. An analysis of human nature is likely to prove pessimistic. Although it may deny "original sin," it uncovers too many lapses and contradictions in human behavior to conclude with a happy prognosis. Nonetheless, I cannot but feel that the bio-psychiatry of homo schizo presents human nature in a perspective which scientists and philosophers will readily comprehend. From understanding to research, and then on to description, and finally to applications is a familiar path in our times. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T THE NORMALLY INSANE} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE THE NORMALLY INSANE Niccol• Macchiavelli, the clear-headed founder of modern political science, was not above a little harmless hallucinating: When evening comes I return to the house and enter my writing-room, and on the threshold I take off my everyday clothes full of mud and mire and put on royal and court robes, and properly reclothed I enter the ancient courts of the men of antiquity where, received by them affectionately, I pasture on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am not too timid to speak with them and ask them about the reasons for their actions; and they in their courtesy answer me; and for four hours of time I feel no weariness, I forget every trouble, I do not fear poverty, death does not dismay me: all of myself I transfer into them [1] . This is acceptable behavior. The relatives of a young farm lad who behaved so would think him rather mad. An atheist regards similar behavior in a working priest as a typical and appropriate feature of the great delusion of religion. It verges on the delusory, the megalomanic, the impractical, the hallucinatory. Abandoning the living to identify with the dead; treating words as voices; speaking to several people a thousand years apart in defiance of time and space. The genius of Machiavelli lay in his ability - cultured or genetic - to abandon himself to his mad world and afterwards to return to everyday chores, but more than this, to draw upon his conversations for writing that has been for several centuries a by-word for realism and the scientific approach to politics. Identification - a set of projections of himself to a wide net of characters - and control, the ability to grasp them and organize them within his personal ego system: we see these qualities fairly sharply. But we also see a typical syndrome of human nature - the conventional and the alienated rubbing shoulders, so to say: the security blanket of his authoritative clothing that admitted him to the great company; the compelling obsessiveness to tie his life experiences into the mainstream of his culture; as well as the other qualities which I have already labeled. Thus does Schizotypicality crop up in Machiavelli. A book could be easily filled with material to show that "People do the strangest things." It is not difficult to prove that all humans are a bit crazy. Quirks, exhibitionism, phobias, dizziness, hang-ups, depressions, avoidance, suspiciousness, acid stomach, fear of abandonment, nightmares and other symptoms of stress and troubles of the mind abound in ordinary experience. To have psychological problems is normal, even universal. "Do you know, Martha, I think everybody is crazy, except thee and me," said the Quaker to his wife, "and sometimes I'm not so sure about thee." Most people can joke about the prevalence of psychic disturbances. "It's a funny world." And it takes but a minute to get them to agree that politics, the world of public affairs, is a circus of abnormal behavior. An informant of the F. B. I. in the Abscam expos‚s, which recently disgraced a number of American officials, repeatedly declared on network television that "congressmen are crooks, perverts, and alcoholics." I do not intend to fish in these shallow waters. Down deep the big fish swim. There we can expect to locate the monstrous forms of an idea, that the human being is essentially and normally "insane," that what we call normal human thought and behavior are derivatives, vitally important to be sure, of the same schizotypical core that manifests itself in those whom we label insane. If everybody, at some time, acts a bit crazy, it is not because they are departing from their normal human state but because they are reaching for their normally insane nature. Of course, then, the term "insane" should have to be dropped. "Insane" is a deviation from a standard, that of "sanity." If the standard is "insane," then the deviations must be something else - sanity? It is uncomfortable to say so, but, yes, in a way, although and until a better term should be found. For the insane of society are no more fixed and pure representatives of the core of human nature than the sane. All of humanity, sane or insane, normal or abnormal, typical or untypical, forms globally around the core of human nature that we can best describe with the word "schizoid." Human nature is a set of qualities to be found only among people. Of course we must keep a wary eye on the animal kingdom and its curators, the ethologists, who persist in finding identities between animals and men where once only large differences were thought to exist. We must avoid saying what is human nature, only to find that it is animal nature as well. At the same time, we cannot get around the fact that our chromosomes and culture manage to fashion hundreds of differences between animals and humans. No matter how close the similarity, no animal trait is precisely typical of humans. We differ in every way conceivable, just as, for that matter, humans differ as individuals in every respect, no two people being alike. Withal this book must confine itself to those qualities which are both distinctively human and important as such. But, granted that a quality may be proven distinctive, who is to say that it is important? We must say, partly begging the question, that what is important in human nature is whatever has the greatest effect in producing those human traits and activities that we regard as most important. This leads directly to the human mind; the nub of human nature is in the mind. In the "minds" - because, whatever the propensities of the individual mind, the human species does not exist except in transacting minds. We have then before us homo sapiens. We declare that we shall make of him more specifically homo sapiens schizotypus, homo schizo for short [2] . We would strip from our tunics the noble title of homo sapiens sapiens, which is often now accorded us, reserving it for a species of some future event and time. So drastic an action may not be taken, however, without due process of law, and our book is intended as a hearing on the allegation that homo sapiens sapiens not the "wise wise" man and cannot by nature be so. What is the nature of homo sapiens that he should be relegated to the status of schizotypicality? According to Pascal, "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Mainly the nature of the human is that he is either normally insane or insanely normal, or both. If either or both, he is not the man we thought he was. Whereupon we should analyze his nature more critically than has been the custom, and learn what makes him behave so, and what we can expect of him. Dunbar points out that "Through the study of the unusual or deviant, the obscurity of many normal processes is penetrated. Just as the mutant is the ultimate ancestor of the race, so the deviant is often the common denominator of processes too complex to be broken down in the norm." In searching for the roots of human nature, I have to use a number of concepts that are modern, psychiatric, and originally invented for the diagnosis of disease, beginning with the very word schizophrenia. However I also use the terms of old science, like human nature and instinct, and the jargon of the computer age, and of electricity and politics. For the assault upon the problem of the human constitution and its origins levy verbal troops from everywhere. If the assault is successful, there will be time enough to provide these with the linguistic uniform that new science invariably prescribes. A first step, then, is to show how homo sapiens is insanely normal, implying paradoxically that the concept of normality is quite confused in practice, and ends in contradictions. It cannot then be a helpful idea, if its meaning collapses from one moment to the next. It is like a tall pole without a base, which can stand upright only so long as you steady it; nor does it matter where you stand to steady it. "Normal" is an interesting word of the 18th century Enlightenment; it is a late arrival to our language. Its function was probably being served before by words such as "good" and "healthy." It comes from geometry hence science, directly from the Latin norma, the right angle rule used in drawing. From "rule," came "mold," "unit," a point of comparison. Then a century later "normal" came to be a state of a living being or an organ which is not affected by any pathological modification, as in a "normal human oral temperature." Later it acquired the senses of "devoid of exceptional character," "conforming to the most frequent type" (typical), "occurring according to habit," a "normal person." So we see an object needed by the new applied physical sciences which is expanded abstractly to include a model or verbal rule; already it is forcing its way as an objective concept into the moral sphere; then we watch it attach itself to an undiseased state of a living being (which concerns us here) and ultimately to the statistical type or the ordinary (which we also consider). The problem when the world deals with human nature becomes apparent: the non- pathological state, and the ordinary or typical, are mingled in the idea of a normal human being. The normal person should be of the normally healthy majority. The trouble is that there is neither a normal standard state, nor a normally healthy majority. On those matters closest to the important code of human nature, we cannot decide on what should be termed "non-pathological." And on even those traits which are conventionally deemed healthy, we cannot find a great concentration of individuals to cluster. The normal engages the range of the abnormal, even some of its extremes, and the abnormal is a set of improvisations on the normal. We do not deal with a rational person of healthy mind and then someone who is broken down into insanity as with a bad fall off a bicycle. Rather there is the human being whose essential functions are the same, homo schizo, who is always behaving "madly," but as one of his defense mechanisms divides people into the sane and insane according to largely societal canons. The prudent approach in these circumstances is to locate a foundation for normality. By all tokens, it should be in the idea of sanity. The human species has to be composed of normal sane people; else it is a contradiction in terms. But suppose that we find mostly insane people; then something is wrong with the definition of insanity, or of normality. So we go in search of the normal great majority of sane human beings. To define who is normal is not like sounding the concert pitch for the orchestra. Various writers emit their own authoritative sounds, and these and many others bring in their peculiar instruments, whose construction and qualities defy brief classification. There are those for example who offer an anatomical definition of man. They measure heights, head shapes, dentition, and so on. They have a rather precise job. For they know in advance that they are dealing with contemporary man. They can categorize sub-races, sex differences, blood groupings, and ranges of variation on many other traits. They know that some people have small brain cases but are observably intelligent. They know that the Congo Pygmies are human, although a foot below average in height and their brains are smaller, but they have a reputation for unusual cleverness, complex polyphonic music, a large repertoire of legend, and great skill in hunting; they intermarry with tall neighbors of different race. There have been giants on the earth, too, bones and records tell us, and legends have them "normal," though on occasion more "wicked" than the storytellers - just very big. Many others traits vary around the world and within peoples: hairiness, skin color, eye color, head shape, etc. {S : S CULTURED MAMMALS} S CULTURED MAMMALS Today we are witness to rapid progress in the knowledge of brain and central nervous system chemistry and electricity. Soon we shall be able to define every mental aberration by a test result showing a surplus or deficiency of a chemical or gas or electrical charge in critical locations. This achievement will not define human nature but will certainly facilitate efforts at controlling behavior deemed sick or criminal. The normal may thus be precisely measured. Moreover, those elements of the abnormal that are regarded to have positive value, that is, those elements of the abnormal that we seek to make normal, such as "altruism," or "intelligence," or "dexterity," can probably be manipulated electro-chemically so as to produce specifically acceptable behaviors within a larger set of undesired behaviors. Try as we may, with dozens of testing instruments, we cannot find a genetically non- miscegenable, intellectually inferior (or superior), uncivilizable, ungodly, mother- marrying, physically defective, short-lived, crawling (or arboreal) unselfconscious, mythless breed. We find genetic sports, who are six-digited specimens, brain-damaged, sickle-celled, or have prodigious IQ's, and so forth, again all among normal human groups. A host of human variations exist, none of them obviously in fundamental contradiction to normalcy, either as usually defined or as schizoid normal. When a person has suffered some neurological disorder or brain injury, none can object to his being labeled sick - mentally ill, if his voluntary behavior is altered - and, even though the injury has effects much like that of ordinary psychic abnormality, and even if his treatment, too, is that tendered the mentally ill, we perceive the case as exceptional and as another class of illness. Sometimes we get the impression that the animal kingdom supplies a baseline for normal behavior in humans. To be called "a healthy animal" is ground for pride in some quarters -images of exuberant spirits, strong musculature, and high sexual potency come to mind. Everyone has his favorite animal story to show how human a beast can be - whether a dog, a cat, a pig, or a bird, not to mention elephants, octopus, dolphins and monkeys. And it is generally true that well-cared-for animals are healthy and not crazy, while demented humans do not seem to take proper care of themselves, being often enfeebled, unkempt, and of ungovernable or poor appetite. Ethologists, who lend animals their full attention, are often taken in by their charges and come to see in them all too much conduct that is human. Still it is to be admitted, as the latest returns from the field come in, fewer and fewer human activities lack a close analogy or counterpart in some other species. One after another, the "unique" traits of homo sapiens are washed away. Chimpanzees talk, flatworms reason, seagulls adapt, the devoted dog performs religious rites before his god, the ordinary biological cell contains the human code of life. The best that can be said of man is that he does more of everything and does it more consistently and continuously. And the best of human performers are mad, for is it not true, what Lombroso said, that genius and madness are akin, that only by his product is the creative genius released from the burdens of the unsuccessful madman? It is certainly true in politics. In the benighted United States, a man who drinks his urine and bathes in it is locked up, while in India, not for that, of course, he may be Prime Minister. "Of the 113 geniuses that have most helped civilization, 37 percent to 40 per cent were psychotic, 83 per cent to 90 percent were psychopathic or sociopathic, and 30 percent of the most important were committed." So says Johnson [3] . All the figures are questionable, including the 113 to begin with, but nevertheless impressive in the round. Painstaking investigations of cultures, from the deep forest primitives of the Philippines to the penthouse dwellers of Manhattan, bring to light only cultural forms that are readily analogical, even homological, with all other cultures. They can all become the life style of whoever happens to become engaged in them from infancy. This transferability, universality, and relativity of culture, is highly important to the definition of normalcy. It enables one to say that whatever may seem to be abnormal behavior in one culture will be found to have a normal place in some other culture. Properly directed hallucinating is a gift, or a symptom of insanity, according to cultural norm; in a doubting and liberal culture, as for instance the United States today, one may discover even psychologists who cultivate hallucinating, whether for religious reasons, adventure, or self-experimentation. Practically every symptom of nervous disease disappears into the tolerant maw of culture. Intercourse among uncles and nieces is taboo in some cultures while in other cultures uncles teach their nieces how to copulate. Judging by its lurid prominence in writings, an instinct to commit incest seems more likely than an instinct to avoid it. Most commentators have viewed the stern injunctions against incest that are so widespread as proof of the intensity of the instinct. Yet N. Bischoff argues a propensity to avoid incest, which is not strong enough "to determine but only to motivate our behavior" [4] . Thus, we are free enough to act contrary to our nature; but we are not free enough to do so with impunity. Individuals are not transferable so easily in practice as in theory. By the time their abnormality becomes developed, they are too encrusted with the rest of their culture and too enmeshed in their failures or careers to make a computer date via the Human Relations Area Files with a culture normally harboring the abnormality. So they appear to be condemned to being treated as sick. {S : S SAMPLING FOR THE NORMAL} S SAMPLING FOR THE NORMAL Perhaps, however, one's society is changing, and one may discover a niche of acceptability. The poet Oscar Wilde was a public homosexual ahead of his time. He was jailed. Today he would meet only with mild, and extralegal, disapproval in his mating habits. English law has changed, following upon a change in elite opinion. People are not at all sure of behavior occurring within their own cultures, whether in Singapore or Chicago. "You can't imagine the things that go on!" a tendentious paranoid third of the population will tell you. And they are correct, even if their attitude can lead to some undesirable social distrust that pulls at the weak fabric of social consensus. There are many kinds of abnormal "things that go on," conspiracy, for example, as when gangsters, politicians, businessmen and any other group for that matter plot actions better kept undisclosed, for tactical or moral or legal reasons. There are undisclosed criminal offenses, to which the American people confess in great numbers to priests, psychiatrists, and interviewing strangers. It appears that nearly everyone has committed at least a couple of crimes that he knows about and can recite. Of the conspiracies and crimes, a great many are moral in nature. Child-abuse, spouse- abuse: these are examples. Millions of such cases occur; are they normal behavior? Are they crime or illness? Or both? Benevolent associations and fiction writers try to catch up with them, and the latter at least win only a reputation for caricature and morbidity, harping upon the "abnormal." Not foreseeing how uninhibited literature would become, a French writer, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, addressing himself to famous writers, in his short stories about diabolic women of a century ago, said: "Ask them how much incest is to be found in families, whether of the poorest or highest class, and see if literature, which is accused of being so immoral, has ever dared to tell of them, even to frighten the reader," complaining that one had to go to the ancient examples of Myrrha, Agrippina and Oedipus, although, all around, there were cases to be found. But then there is the category of abnormalities called madness, or mental illness, which the legions of science strive to segregate from acts of conspiracy, immorality, and crime. Possibly they are moved by an instinct of territoriality - for without a field of study there cannot be a fat herd of scientists. More largely, they are searching for their identity in their object, as a shepherd in his flock, a priest in his parishioners. We cannot speak individually to a whole people, asking them whether they belong to the psychiatrist's flock. But we have learned to sample a population, assuring that those sampled truly stand for the whole, and we can interview these. Perhaps here the search for the normal person can end. If there is anything that is uniquely human and normal to mankind, it will have emerged from the great factory of the mind to find its way into the communication of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. All other normality can be consigned to our generic kinship with apes, fish, and bacteria. The result of such surveys of mental health gives scant comfort to expectations of normality. They disclose more people to be sick than well, many more. And if one adds to the self-confessed illnesses, the sickness that is not disclosed, because of the suppression of recall or the inadequacy of the questioning, the scene darkens and many more of the normal become abnormal. In one study of sample of householders of a rural Canadian count, as many as 69% were deemed to be psychiatric cases [5] . Most others had troublesome mental problems. Only 17 % were classified as "well." To be "well" then is to be statistically abnormal. In a middle-class white section of New York City, a different sample survey of mental health was conducted [6] . Here 1660 adult residents were interviewed at length by trained workers and the materials adjudged by psychiatrists. Some 18.5% were deemed mentally "well. " A third had mild symptoms, and the rest, about half, suffered moderate or severe symptoms of mental illness. Again the "well" or "normal" are statistically abnormal. Other studies can be cited. A recent World Health Organization report gives a figure of 40 millions for the gravely sick of mind in the world; another 200 millions are too ill to function well. One in every six Englishwomen is receiving care for mental disorder, one in every nine men. Deliberate self-therapy must treble these figures. Then, too, people go in and out of treatment, self-administered or not. A third of the American population, where hallucinations are neurotic or psychotic, nevertheless hallucinate from time to time. From one-third to one-half of normal persons aged 12 to 35 years report episodic symptoms of dissociation or depersonalization. A third, not necessarily the same two-thirds, suffer neurotic anxiety or worse. Practically everyone engages in psychosomatic illness from time to time. There appears to be little doubt: the normal is abnormal and the abnormal is normal, statistically, intraculturally and crossculturally. When one adds up the diagnosed ill, the ambulant ill, the suffering normals, the individually destructive, the sexually different, the genetically abnormal, the culturally and criminally diverse and perverse, the infantile and the senile, and proceeds to some type of summation the remainder, if they have a strong sense of normality, can be classified as megalomaniacs. Feeling bad is the norm, in one or more of a thousand ways. Mental suffering must be on an immense scale throughout the world. The "normal" human being is not the healthy animal he is supposed to be. Throughout history, anxiety has been recognized as an inherent part of man's being. Discussion of the origins of anxiety has become explicit in the 20th century and is a frequent theme in today's literature. The definition of anxiety is as varied as the experience itself, and its biological basis is obscure. While anxiety may be thought of as an unpleasant state, characterized by uneasiness and apprehension, it is also a strong motivating force in many forms of behavior and, like fear, has fundamental adaptive and perhaps evolutionary significance [7] . Perhaps the very idea of "normality" is a sickness. Psychopaths and neurotics often hate abnormality or atypicality in others, as Hitler hated gypsies and a meticulous drill sergeant may dislike a tall recruit who stands out from the line. One must consider whether the idea of the normal human is not some unrecognized myth, functioning to hold an individuated lot of persons in a tighter society. If so, we should dredge up the myth, for it may be blocking our understanding of human nature. {S : THE IDEAL PERSON} THE IDEAL PERSON An obvious relative of such a concealed myth would be the idea of the "noble savage." Something like the idea of the "noble savage" is to be found going back thousands of years. The "Golden Age" of mankind fascinated many ancient historians and peoples. It was an age of easy subsistence, warmth, equality, and peace. The Romans associated the Golden Age with Saturn; they stored their weapons in his temple when at peace. Upon the Age of Discoveries, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and despite much evidence to the contrary, Europeans conjured a vision of happy primitive peoples living in a benign state of nature, even foregoing governments, taxes, war, and civil strife, to which the Europeans were habituated. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deservedly famous Confessions frankly recited his many "abnormal," "neurotic" behaviors, played a greater role than any other writer in building up the myth. He felt a compulsion to reveal his shocking evil and errors. He was the son of a watchmaker, an obsessive occupation, and was himself a musician. He suffered from paranoia, strong ambivalences, incontinence, phobias, hallucinations. He enjoyed being spanked on the rump. He believed his portrait, though excellent, was part of a conspiracy to make him look like a monster. Rousseau yet claimed that the human being was born with natural reason and good motives. In his educational writings, he argued that to confine or restrain the pupil was to pervert him. Anthropologists, while they could not deny the most astonishing "perversions" among the peoples whom they were newly studying, nevertheless added the idea of relativity: that is, if all is not good, then it is at least different and hence we must not insist upon our absolute standards of the good. Rusticism, the belief in simple rural existence and its virtues, has been a chronic "neurosis" since times immemorial. One encounters the idea among people of all classes even, or especially, in America today, while only three per cent of the population are farmers; many politicians play upon the rustic theme. Sigmund Freud, of all people, may be perceived, in his essay on Civilization and Its Discontents, to assign mental malignancies to the burden of discipline and complexity attributable to civilized life. He, at least, explains how impossible it is to take up the rustic life again. But he does not doubt that there was and can be a rustic life. And there is little doubt he regards the human being as potentially happier if ever he would return to the "normal" of his mentality. Given his many different writings, this can only be regarded as a contradiction and a minor nuisance, still it is capable of distracting him in his search for the origins and condition of human nature. Psychologists, disobeying the first principle of science -factuality- have been loath to lay their cards on the table. "The mentally ill person, helped to discover the origins of his illness, will use the knowledge to cure himself, to become normal." So goes an ordinary principle by which many psychologists operate. Finding oneself, coming to terms with oneself, and similar slogans amount to the premise that there is a normal human self that is within us all, a core that, when struck, will resonate natural goodness. Attempts to elaborate scientifically the syndrome of normality scarcely produce an integrated core of rationality, goodness, or creativity. They elicit conventional syndromes. They tend to bring out diffuse characteristics that are tolerable. It seems almost as if, in striking parallelism with the myths of the noble savage and the rustic, they are turning back towards a docile and agreeable hominid. Johnson remarks that "tests show that so-called normal individuals have little imagination, limited interests and social activities, limited aspirations, and no ambition." [8] Gaillant presents material on life careers that reveal students testing "normal" to be less subject to illnesses that are of psychosomatic origins [9] . The finding is not soothing, for it points back to the association of creativity with mental illness, and lets one wonder whether normality is a "success story" blocking (psychophysical) illness but questionable as to the grounds of success, which can itself be grounded upon mental operations basically abnormal. A schoolmaster or legislator might define the normal person as one who imitates well the norm, who obeys the authorities, who eats moderately, does not take drugs, sleeps well, fulfills sexual desires within suggested limits, accepts responsibilities when charged with them, has only appropriate fears and associates these with the real source of danger, is hygienic, loves one's family, is careful in dealing with strangers, feels gratitude, and believes in gods. Not only are such persons unusual, but they do not constitute an integral psychological type wherein contradictions are absent. They, too, must be the results of high test- scoring on separate items of inquiry. More than this, however, is a fact which will be looming up as crucial to this book, that "normal" qualities, such as moderation, hygiene, responsibility, belief in gods and others as well, are qualities that are sculpted out of a basic natural "insanity." In everyday behavior, there are clich‚s for every symptom of mental disease. Consider only the following. Others readily suggest themselves. dissociation: "I'm not myself today." fear and control: "Afraid of her shadow.." "Get hold of yourself.." anhedonia (masochism): "Suffering is good for the soul." aversiveness: "Don't trust a stranger." "Keep them at arm's length." paranoia: "The walls have ears." "May God strike me dead if..." catatonic: "All things come to those who wait." "Rest is the best cure." "I hate to get up in the morning." obsession: "Genius is 99% hard work." "I can't help but feel that.." cognitive disorder: "Pray for peace." "Keep the family together." megalomania: "Aim for the stars." "Nothing is impossible." aggression: "We need law and order." "Equality." "National Security." Each trite expression feeds upon a human dimension that also feeds general schizophrenia. Each can be linked to others, too. "National security" is a slogan with paranoic, obsessive, and fearful as well as aggressive nuances. But is not "national security" also, at some times, in some places a reasonable demand, raised in defense against a measurable threat? Yes. I have said that it fits into a reciprocating scheme of madness and normality. It may be correct under the circumstances to arm one's nation. Should those who disagree, however, be categorized as insane, or merely as ignoramuses? And the pacifists? And, further, is it not the pride of the human animal that it can plan its "national security" far ahead of this day; and is it not true that it will be especially paranoid, aggressive, nationalistic- identifying, and obsessive characters who will be most insistent upon this human farsightedness? We shall say more of such matters as we go along. The average person lives a life of "madness." Analyze his or her activities minute by minute in the course of the day. It is loaded with sleep (a life-suppressor); dreams (by definition insane) while asleep; waking fantasies of glory, sex, escape; guilt feelings; nursing animosities; feelings of inferiority; futile gestures; self-doubts; moments of mania; laughter; doing what "is bad for me;" reminiscing; praying; ruminating; brooding; projecting false pictures; making required and excessive purchases; repeating routines uncomprehendingly or automatically; relapsing blank-minded; playing psychological games with co-workers and others - at the end there is a "product" which justifies the passage of the day, lends meaning, provides ego support if assured so sufficiently by others (whom one in turn assures also). Where the brutish activity of sleep and feeding and physically moving about ends, what must be human begins, but this human is almost entirely madness redeemed by defining "work instrumentalism" and "realistic appraisals of self and others" as sane behavior, perhaps 10% of the total of life. Rarely, a scientific writer, (Harold Lasswell is one of them) will so much as frankly acknowledge that he is interested in advancing a certain kind of person in society, an "ideal man and woman," an "ideal citizen," in effect, whose etiological dynamics psychiatrists (and statesmen) should explore, understand, and propagate [10] . The "normal" is waived in favor of the "ideal." Indeed, one suspects that it is precisely in order to control the true normal population that the ideal norm is set up. He is what he is, not because he is a natural man, but because he might be artificially created to go against nature! Lasswell speaks of the values for which humans strive. These are a type of instincts; they are generalized appetitive urges that crop out in many ways. The values are power, respect, rectitude, safety, wealth, well-being, enlightenment, and affection. The objective of public policy should be to develop the sharing of these among the people of the world. The means to the end is the creation of democratic characters who are willing and ready to share. "Failure to develop democratic character is a function of interpersonal relations in which low estimates of the self are permitted to develop." Reminiscent of Alfred Adler's "inferiority complex," a prevalent low estimate of oneself leads people to wish to deprive others, thence misunderstanding and aggression, among a host of other neuroses and psychoses. The democratic man, then, has an intact ego, open to thought and impression; is possessed of many values and disposed to share them with all. He is free from disabling anxieties and increasingly in command of the flow of energies from his unconscious self. Lasswell grants the difficulty of creating a dominating psychic type: "The task is nothing less then the drastic and continuing reconstruction of our own civilization, and most of the cultures of which we have any knowledge." Lasswell frees himself from the rustic fallacy: a new kind of man is to be created, whose life is to be supported by especially designed institutions, a utopia, to be sure, but one unencumbered by dreams of normalcy and myths of a golden age. We shall see below whether, in fact, there is a potential within the human being to create or develop, much more to sustain, such a type. To Thomas Hobbes, writing several centuries earlier, the idea would be ludicrous: man is naturally conflictful, party to a war of all against all, and capable only of receiving a brutal regimentation by a sovereign. Indubitably, history bears down on this side of the scales. Our arguments here against the prevalence of "normal people" are not intended merely to "broaden our minds" regarding normality; many writers have done this job well. Nor are we aiming to set up an ideal type, which has an elite that can create artificial normalities. We assert rather that the very logic, the very substructure, the very physiology of the concept of normality sought for as a base for judging abnormality is not present. {S : SELF-AWARENESS} SELF-AWARENESS What is there in the jumble of physiques, cultures, behaviors, in this preponderance of crimes, immorality and aberrations among the normal, that we can fix upon as unique to the human species, and that is found in the sick and the well, in criminals and judges, in leaders and followers, in Patagonia and Canada, in the first days of the human species down through history to the present. The answer is well-known, and might perhaps have been written in the beginning. It is self-awareness. Whatever recognizes itself is human. Whatever can see itself without a mirror is human [11] . Whatever thinks that it thinks: cogito ergo sum, is human. Whatever doubts is human. But the ramifications of self-awareness are so many that they may be categorized in the dozens and detailed in the thousands. We need not go farther with them here. Essentially we can say that with a couple of possible minor exceptions, involving heavy training, animals and plants are not self-reflective: they may be conscious to any degree of sharpness, ranging from rocklike inanimacy to laser-like concentrations of attention. Only by the most strenuous efforts can we deprive a human of self-awareness, and then only temporarily without lethal consequences, and without genetic effect. Never can a human maintain an alert consciousness without lapsing from time to time into sensations of self-consciousness. Pause, for a moment, to consider the fantastically complex mind that is operating in a self-aware schizophrenic. The classical tell-tale symptom is the auditory hallucination, which the patient( 1), describes to the doctor (or a friend) (2), as a voice of another (3), which the patient hears (4), and is the patient (5), talking to himself (6), and which the patient asks the doctor to believe (7), but also asks the doctor to deny (8), because he the patient is sick (9), and denies the voice is real (10), although he admits (11), and argues against the correctness of the message of the voice (12), which in fact we know (13), is not uttering anything at all (14), and sometimes the patient hears several voices speaking in unison (15.. n), or uttering different messages (16.. n). Traits ordinarily attributable to human nature are derivatives from the basic fact of self-awareness. For instance, Aristotle's famous sentence, "Man is a social animal," seems to accord to sociability a unique human quality. Social, even political, behavior is characteristic of many animal species, and in a meaningful sense plants that must live in clumps can be termed social. Going beyond this obviously inadequate characterization of man, we should also comment that this sociability, when it becomes particularly the human kind of sociability, has to be an appendage of individual self-awareness. It is not, cannot be, "herd behavior." Human individuation is rife within the human group. Regardless of how they are raised and trained, the style in which they live, and whether they are criminal or judges, moral or immoral, mentally sick or well, in or out of groups and crowds, humans are self-conscious. If not self-conscious in the immediate, flashing sense, they are coasting along with all the momentum of self-awareness imparted by the motive force of their total prior life-experiences. Not only are all mental diseases diseases of self awareness, but also all mental operations, diseased or not, are inflicted or shaped by self-awareness. The ability to go mad is almost entirely human, no matter how madness is defined. And if, in the end, all that is uniquely human is exposed and one is prompted to exclaim: "But that is madness," we had better redefine madness, and medicine, and policy, and philosophy. Again, my position is not far from those psychotherapists who say that all mental illness is centered upon problems of the ego. It will take some paragraphs now to tell how true this is, and to begin to use the diseases of the ego to construe the elements of human nature. {S : CATEGORIES OF MADNESS} CATEGORIES OF MADNESS The redoubtable Cardinal Richelieu, ruling minister of France under Louis XIII, had said "Give me a sentence a man has spoken, and I'll give you enough to hang him." The same expression might end "... and I'll show you that he is demented." Nor have modern police-states been unaware of the new alternative. The Soviet government often prefers to treat political opponents as mad, rather than treasonable; the Chinese communist government of Mao popularized the term "brainwashing," implying that its political dissidents had cluttered and dirty minds. The early Italian Fascists, more earthy and ironic, force-fed opponents with large doses of castor oil to purge them. Apropos, the French word for "asylum" has only the two meanings: "political asylum" for fugitives from a country's law, and a "mental asylum." Our grounds for suspecting the ordinary person of some admixture of madness are already considerable. Indeed the very excesses of pursuing the distinction of being mad contain more than a hint of obsessive compulsion, prompted by self-doubts. Politics aside, what is the punitive and aggressive impulse to be called that drives men to segregate indistinct orders of people in order to call them by special names- anonomania? Nonetheless, our fidelity to scientific method bids us continue, this time reversing the order and asking, "What is mental illness, the class of abnormally ill and atypical?" One may search for a classification, expecting to find an acceptable set of categories for ordering the millions of mentally ill for contemplation and analysis. No such classification exists, to our way of thinking. One can choose among many systems, each with its defects- too lengthy, too brief, lopsided, stressing any given specialist's area of expertness and giving him this as a reason for preferring it. Eugen Bleuler's scheme of 1911 is still influential, although by now encrusted with novelties and frills. From Bleuler's work we can derive roughly two groups, one of organic lesions and strongly hereditary, the other less hereditary, with strong social components [12] . So we have a first list consisting of: congenital mental detectives; cretinism and idiocy; cerebral tumors; paresis; and senile dementia. Then we have a second list containing: drug addiction; paranoia; hysteria; neurasthenia (obsessive-compulsive ideas); neuroses; schizophrenia; epilepsy; and psychosomatic disorders. The first category can be excluded from consideration here because the elaboration required to integrate its components into our theory of human nature would take up too much space, and furthermore is unnecessary, since the second category leads us more directly to the points we wish to make. The second group has been of course heavily discussed so that, again, we may save time and conserve attention by omitting descriptions and comparative treatment. I exhibit the list only to say that the symptoms that constitute all of these diseases have in one way or another, and by some, though not necessarily most, psychologists, been dealt with also as symptoms of schizophrenia and will be so considered for our purposes here. Few if any of their indications exclude them from what can be termed general schizophrenia. Once we abstract and reroute the major symptoms of insanity, we find that a not-too-rare concept of schizophrenia can hold them all neatly. Alcoholic intoxication simulates mental illness in many ways, beginning with the wide variability of its symptoms, a fact that has baffled attempts at its analysis despite the ready access to experimental and natural subjects. We note that fears, both existential and immediate, promote the use of this drug (and others) and that withdrawals from intoxication are often accompanied by panic; tranquilizers are sometimes supplied to reduce such agitation. A drunk may suffer distorted perceptions and cognition; slowed reaction speeds; hallucinations and "flights of fancy"; mania, recklessness, megalomania; depression; paranoiac aggression; change of roles and depersonalization; reduced bodily control; and heightened associational ability and creativity. All mental illnesses may be encountered in some single episodes, it would appear: can it be that there is only one mental illness, and that alcohol can induce it? If so, alcohol must be pressing upon the core of human nature from all-around, not only figuratively but literally. Perhaps all instinctual responses are slowed down, and at the same time all inhibitions are overwhelmed by the stimuli to respond. So the stimuli roam throughout the brain, seizing upon any neural outlets they can find, riding upon any neurotransmitters that are available. Irrelevant behavior of many kinds ensues. Ultimately, the sleep reaction is triggered in the "lower" animal sections of the central nervous system, there comes a significantly deep sleep, possibly death. Later on, much will be said to put psychosomatic illness in its proper place as a mimic of all mental illness, rather like alcoholism, so we shall not discuss it here. {S : THE HUMAN DISEASE} THE HUMAN DISEASE "Schizophrenia" is a widespread affliction. Its provenance is world-wide and has little regard for social class. Dunham reports its worldwide rates as "quite comparable," with a prevalence between two and nine per thousand [13] . His narrow definition, of course, leaves us the task of showing that some 90% may be "schizotypical." J. Murphy also found comparable rates of indigenously defined schizophrenia (non-hospitalized cases) in Sweden (5.7 per 1000), Canada (5.6), and among Eskimo (4.4) and Yoruba (6. 8). "Explicit labels for insanity exist in these cultures... Almost everywhere a pattern composed of hallucinations, delusions, disorientations, and behavioral aberrations appear to identify the idea of 'losing one's mind, ' even though the content of these manifestations is colored by cultural beliefs" [14] . intellectuals are prone to the ailment; counselors at leading universities sometimes warn psychologists not to use their students as standards for psychological testing because they are skewed towards the schizoid. The rates of schizophrenia rise with rising indices of social disorganization, according to many studies [15] . One might guess that "wherever anything important is happening" schizophrenia rates will increase, beware of a departure from "normal" routines (but we shall have to explore later on whether "routines" themselves are "normal"). Beware, too, of the masking of increased schizophrenia when the non-routine and important happens; war and religion are often ways of containing the increase in madness by legitimizing them. One percent of the American population is markedly ill with "schizophrenia." Since it is a gradient illness, the number may be defined upwards or downwards. Their family members may reach thrice this number, and are sorely disturbed and often "infected" by them; the victims of the disease are outnumbered, so to speak, by their public. Borderline cases are in the millions. Practically anybody who reads a piece on the subject (and literature on the subject reaches into the mass media) finds the symptoms uncomfortably close to home. And, of course, we shall be insisting throughout this book that everyone who is human is schizoid, that is, a borderline case. But this requires absorbing all mental disease into schizophrenia and then reabsorbing all schizophrenia into human nature. With all this interest, there is a little corresponding illumination. It is an exasperating mental illness. Its symptoms are so diverse and irreconcilable that many savants deny that it exists. They make and unmake classifications often so as to order the mental diseases by some abiding and knowable principle. Hyperclassification is a disease of ignorance. When a new family of phenomena is discovered (or admitted to discussion), be it mental illness or sub-atomic particles or geological strata, a plethora of terms and categories is excreted. Hundreds of mental events are named. The names are kept until common causes are found to join their referent events or some control technique (therapy) compresses many into one. Six experimenters in a Science letter of April 1979 refer to "a valid clinical classification, be it Bleulerian or otherwise," as all that can be provided "considering the arbitrary nature of all presently available diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. [l6] ] In the end, Karl Menninger has explained, all attempts at classification have failed, and a single mental disease bordering upon the concept of "maladjustment" may be the answer [17] . We might call it "holopathy." Yet other writers are convinced that schizophrenia not only exists but has a genetic basis: they claim that a special inheritance sets the stage. A family, a culture, and "the age of anxiety" can interact to produce a total stress upon the person sufficient to cause schizophrenia only when the genetic component is present. It appears that the disease in its more perverse state involves a person who is likely to be descended from schizoids and who is subsequently helped towards his illness by a set of environmental influences that are well known and generally agreed upon. Such influences include parents or guardians who behave in a schizoid way towards the person. They also include a general breakdown of norms in the near-environment and even the world-angst as a whole. These provocative stimuli bombard the person from all sides and continuously over time. S. Matthysse and K. Kidd speak of a "genetic heterogeneity among schizophrenics;" the same genes may not be involved in all cases; about one in eleven schizophrenics has an extremely high genetic risk, over 99% [18] . Edward Foulks writes that "the predicted incidence in identical twins and in offsprings of dual matings is too low for a single major genetic locus model and too high for a polygenic model. An interactional model involving four alleles is the most likely mode of inheritance." [19] W. E. Bunney, who directs the National institute of Mental Health, probably offers the now-established view when he declares that "The issue... is not whether a genetic component exists, but how is the genetic component transmitted, and how do the genetic component and the environment component interact." A colleague who heads the NIMH Laboratory of Psychology and Psychopathology, D. Rosenthal, reports from a study of several thousand Danish adopters, that the adoptees typically pursue the schizophrenic or non-schizophrenic condition of their natural parents, not of their adoptive ones. "The genetic factor comes through loud and clear." But again the mode of transmission is unclear: "a dominant gene, a partially dominant gene, a recessive gene, or poly genes [20] . In his admittedly fruitless search for fundamental symptoms, Bleuler once wrote that it is the "accessory" symptoms that usually cause hospitalization, that is, hallucinations, delusions, disturbances of memory, changes in personality, changes in script, speech and physical functions, and catatonic behavior. Problems of "another person" talking in an abrupt, simple and important manner, and of excruciating body sensations in practically all organs, are common. So all-embracing are the manifestations, that schizophrenia appears to engage all mental ills, as Menninger suggested. And Bleuler said of his work, "It may be that there is only one kind of mental illness, in that case the clinical conditions which we delineate would be artificial creations and there would be no corresponding boundaries in nature... the psychoses may be simple deviations from a norm in varying directions and degrees." [21] The singularity of mental illness is evidenced in the shifting of symptoms from one named disease to another. What is diagnosed as manic-depression may, at the next examining session, be perceived as schizophrenia. "'Thought disorder' is characteristic of all psychosis and not peculiar to schizophrenia." [22] A certain proportion of schizophrenes are not thought-disordered, while some, perhaps all, mental diseases can display thought-disorders. Thought disorder can be viewed as a problem of self-control, with anxiety or even terror accompanying it. A pain in the head may transfer its site to the stomach functionally, that is, psychically but with organic consequences. Too, one practitioner suggests that "the basic physiopathology of schizophrenia is a lack of coordination of brain-functions all the way from the cortical cells to the process of feeling and thinking." [23] This idea is rendered more compelling by the congenital relationship between schizophrenia and humanization which is postulated here and developed in Homo Schizo 1. What seem to be contradictions are resolved when the primitive history of the syndrome is uncovered. From the beginning, Schizotypicality has been the essence of human nature, and schizophrenia has been the thrusting spearhead of human nature. These were established as such when mankind was "quantavoluted." Their existence tends to prove that mankind was created in a leap, and not evolved point by point over millions of years. On one day, in one place, and under knowable conditions, the hominid was transformed into the creature, homo sapiens, that perhaps should more properly be called homo sapiens schizotypus. Thence, by understandable and logical processes of adaptation, domination and succession, this creature came to represent the human race and still does. Mind, behavior, and institutions veer towards the schizophrenic. Not only is the disease of great importance in society, but actual schizophrenia is only the eminently visible surface of a heavily schizoid world. {S : SYMPTOMS OF MENTAL ILLNESS} SYMPTOMS OF MENTAL ILLNESS In the address already cited, Paul Meehl offers four sets of behaviors that altogether compose a full illness. One consists of recognized cognitive and perceptive disorders. A second is known to be ambivalence of love-hate, or pro-con, impulses and attitudes toward objects of identification and affect. Third comes the rejection of pleasure in any form (anhedonia). A fourth is aversiveness to other people, even and particularly those near and dear. Negativism and paranoia suffuse the symptomology. I would expand Meehl's and Bleuler's list of symptoms and regroup them for our own purpose of coming to a focus on the core of human nature. An expanded list would at least contain all of these. addiction to drugs ambivalence amnesia anhedonia aphasia aversion/ paranoia compulsiveness depression displacement epilepsy mania multiple personality negativism/ denial neurasthenia neurosis obsession perception disorders/ hallucinations/ illusions projection/ blame psychosomatic disorders/ functional physiopathy thought disorders/ rationalization/ delusions These pathological symptoms will be associated with normal symptoms, and tied together, before this book ends, into the model of Homo Schizo, so that they may all be viewed as elements of human nature, emanating from the human core dynamics. If the list is satisfactorily inclusive, the many facets of mental illness can be reduced to two key parameters, depersonalization or the dissociation of identify, and fears concerning self-control. (" Dissociation," translated from "desagregation," has been in the scientific vocabulary since 1889, when Pierre Janet used the concept. ) Both are obviously and strongly connected with self-awareness, the central human trait. Depersonalization symptoms (episodic) are reported by from one-third to one-half of normal persons aged between 12 and 35. They are usually classified under "dissociative disorders." If self-awareness is uniquely human, depersonalization must be the most human of all symptoms. Fear is omnipresent, for self-control is the problem of coping with self-awareness, the human trait. I have already incorporated alcoholism into general insanity. Epilepsy, too, despite its lesser prevalence and exotic history, can be contained in the general syndrome of schizophrenia and homo schizo. George Steiner, in Language and Silence, writes: "In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream. Dostoievsky tells of it. One is somehow lifted free of one's body, looking back, one sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one's own person, and there is no avenue of return. Feeling this fear, the mind gropes to a sharp awakening." Epilepsy often involves a double or multiple personality. From ancient times and around the world come reports of the "sacred disease" as it was often called. Seizure by a god or a daemon occurs; a feeling of being beaten by others is common. Certainly epilepsy can be considered a schizophrenic seizure. It is too severe to tolerate and apparently remits until the next occasion. For another example, the symbolic process in humans is known (perceived and understood) as a map or tracking of salient coded components of oneself. Symbols tie the selves together and connect them with outside affinities. A dissociation and fear of oneself will produce and interact with disorders of signs, symbols, language, speech, writing, and reading. We shall go much farther in this study, until all of the symptoms or diseases are perceived to generate under conditions of depersonalization and existential fear and theat. "Normal" behavior, too, can be fitted into both the symptomatic categories, where useful, and into the generating conditions. {S : RECONCILING THE NORMAL AND ABNORMAL} RECONCILING THE NORMAL AND ABNORMAL The symptoms of mental illness generally exhibit a relationship with normalcy in the adjectives that are used in describing them. These adjectives are often of a quantitative and comparative (or relative) kind. Thus Melvin Gray, cited above, says: "A 'healthy' person does not dwell unduly upon his body and his functions." We note the word "unduly." In many places, the textbooks and monographs use words of a similarly undefined character: "inappropriate," "bizarre," ''harmful," "preponderant," "unreasonable, " "insufficient, " "disturbing, " "disturbed, " "uncontrolled," "unreal," "chronic," "beyond the normal," ''interminable, '' etc. If these are qualities of parameters of normal behavior, then we should expect the normal behavior to contain the same essential properties. Thus, "a normal person does dwell duly upon his body and his functions." Why does he do so? My intent here is to show that mental disease exaggerates, but mirrors, average human behavior. It is as my professor, Earl S. Johnson, told me when I was a 15-year-old freshman. "Crazy people are like you and me, but more so." Laing, Siirala, Arieti, and many other authorities view schizophrenia as a common sort of sickness shared by the healthy. The paranoid schizophrenic simply responds more to the hostile world than does the ordinary person says Arieti. In changing his position, as have others, from asserting that the schizophrenic interprets the world as hostile to saying that he sees the world fairly accurately for what it really is, Arieti resembles those, such as myself, who have changed from viewing the original basis of religion and primitive cosmology as grand delusions to arguing that there was, in addition to the nature of man, events that made the world terrifyingly hostile. One type of "normal" then who should be suspect is the incurable optimist who insists that the world is better than it really is. The "normal" says "please excuse the temporary confusion," whereas the "abnormal" says, "If things look confused, that's because they really are." The issue arises whether normal behavior includes any important operation that is not reflected in insanity. The answer is negative. There is no human characteristic that cannot lend itself to a symptomology of mental disease. When one thinks of the hundreds of human traits, this generalization acquires impressive scope. What is salient, though, is that a definition of mental illness is readily convertible into a definition of human nature. The model of mental illness can be a model of human nature. Is it the only possible model? Is it the most useful model? The answer to the first question is "no," to the second, "yes." If we list our symptoms of general schizophrenia, the all-human mental disease, we find that they include all of the most important traits of the human being. Opposite each parameter of mental illness we might place a parameter of 'normal' human nature (as in the accompanying chart) and in the course of this book much more of such will be done. This habit, "the great flywheel of progress," in the words of William James, may be shown to be indistinguishable basically from obsession, which is usually treated as a mental disorder. Symptoms that are rooted in the same psychological complex take different forms in religious and secular mentalities. I indicate examples of this in the accompanying chart. Any religious sect or political ideology can be placed into the chart, so also any type of individual, varying the clich‚s, expressions, and attitudes to suit the case. Readers here may test their own self-knowledge. As many as there are of these symptoms, just as many natural human behaviors can be found to correspond to them. Symptoms resemble the effects of the kaleidoscope; out of several bits of colored cut glass, a great many patterns can emerge when the tube is given a shake. In mental disease all of these patterns are called symptoms, and also often called diseases. The several basic mechanisms- the bits of glass-may not be recognized and known to the person playing with the toy. Between insane and normal conduct are differences of degree. We can pair off the normal and abnormal, no matter how long the list. If it were not for the fact that many people are convinced that something exists called "reasonable behavior," we would have no problem in looking upon human nature as a set of core symptoms of qualities that are common to both the sane and insane. Then, since the insane facets of the quality seem to fit better to a description of human nature, the nature of man can best be analyzed by means of the concept of the insane. The denomination of the "sane" has been the prisoner of theologians and rationalists. The miasma of wishes, ideologies, ego defenses and rationalizations constitutes itself a schizoid syndrome, a cognitive disorder, to the end that the symptoms of normality are excluded from a formulation that would realistically distinguish human nature. Man does not really want to know himself; most of those who are regarded as specialists in knowing human nature do not want to know man either. {S : SCHIZOPHRENIC AND SCHIZOTYPICAL} SCHIZOPHRENIC AND SCHIZOTYPICAL Examples from thousands of evident cases of normal and abnormal common mental aberrations from the psychiatry standpoint found in typical human mentation. Symptom category Insane non-sectarian Christian (normal) Jewish (normal) Homo Schizo (normal) Fear World destruction Judgement Day Holocaust or divine Annihilation Self- destructiveness Displacement "I am a kind of god" Jesus and Mary Yahweh and Moses Heroes Cognitive Disorder (causation) "If I say so, the building will shake" When Jesus was born, God sent a star to guide the kings "If we suffer it is because we do wrong in the eyes of God" "Humans are metamorphosing into machines" Hallucination "They order me to kill and burn" "God answers my prayers" "The Lord attends our sacrifices" "I must listen to my better self" Human Aversiveness "Danger is everywhere" "All people are Incorrigibly sinful" "Other people are unclean" "You can't trust strangers" Anhedonia Self-flagellation "In the footsteps of Jesus" "To labor condemned after our fall from grace" "Work is fun" Obsession "I must continuously wash my hands" "Pray before eating" "Dietary rules are to be strictly observed" "I watch my diet carefully" Illusion "People know what I am thinking" "God is on our side" "We are God's chosen people" Thinking machines Logic "The world is black as doom" "Paradise has no night" "Shoul is dark and dreary" "Night and day are opposites, like men and women" Having said this, we cannot now agree with those who maintain that sharp boundaries separate the well, the nervous, the neurotic, and the psychotic. Thus we have Jeffrey Gray saying that "by and large, quite different tests differentiate normals from neurotics and normals from psychotics; and psychotics do not behave differently from normals on tests sensitive to neuroticism, nor do neurotics behave differently from normals on tests sensitive to psychoticism" [24] . The tests involved are, of course, statistical, and therefore the scores must exhibit an overlapping among all three categories. Now Gray would surely recognize the overlap. He would probably also assert that each category, in verging towards some cluster of responses peculiar to itself begins to manifest behavior which warrants its being labeled as normal, neurotic, or psychotic. None can properly deny this to be the case and this is precisely what we have been saying. For example, he says agreeably that neuroses are "fear gone wrong, either because it is excessive, or because it is inappropriate, or because it has no apparent object." "Fear gone wrong" is out of control. Certainly Gray would not deny that fear plays a major role in psychoses, or, for that matter, in normal behavior. Nor would he totally disagree with Alfred Adler when Adler declares that "the neuroses and psychoses are attempts at compensation, constructive creations of the psyche which result from the accentuated and too highly placed guiding ideal of the child." [25] Nor perhaps would he deny Carl Jung when Jung writes that, in respect to treatment, the schizophrenic patient behaves no differently from the neurotic. He has the same complexes, the same insights and needs, but not the same certainty with regard to his foundations. Whereas the neurotic can rely instinctively on his personality dissociation never losing its systematic character, so that the unity and inner cohesion of the whole are never seriously jeopardized, the latent schizophrenic must always reckon with the possibility that his very foundations will give way somewhere, that an irretrievable disintegration will set in, that his ideas and concepts will lose their cohesion and their connection with other spheres of association and with the environment. The dangerousness of his situation often shows itself in terrifying dreams of cosmic catastrophes, of the end of the world and such things. Or the ground he stands on begins to heave, the walls bend and bulge, the solid earth turns to water, a storm carries him up into the air, all his relatives are dead, etc. [26] . We conclude that differences can and must always be discovered between any two groups professing symptoms. The differences are to be described in whatever way best contributes to devising a therapy or fitting into a model. The theory of homo schizo regards all behavior as symptoms and all symptoms as issuing from the schizoid core of human nature. We are still permitted to disclose genetically stronger tendencies in some people than others: some people are more "human" than others. I doubt that we can say that some "cultures" are more human than others unless it is discoverable that some isolated cultures originally branched off with a significantly lesser component of schizophrenic genes in the make-up of the group as a whole. {S : THERAPIES} THERAPIES Intense suffering often accompanies mental illness, a suffering as agonizing as the worst physical pains, as prolonged as the longest organic illness, more frightening than the worst tidings from the medical doctor, so hopeless as to lead sometimes to suicide. What of the cures, then, for insanity? Do they reveal anything of the nature of man? I will not speak of cures that are madness twice compounded, a form of direct punishment for the sake of the punishers -confinement, beatings, ostracism, moral obloquy, brainwashing. Sebastian de Grazia wrote in two books of mental illness and therapy [27] . The preventative against most mental illness he found in love, of the early attendants for the infant and growing child, and of the community later on for the person. The latter evolves into the security afforded by "law and order," by ideology, by consensus and custom, by authority. When he came to examine the systems of psychotherapy, he found at their base the idea of authority, often accompanied by punishment in disguised or sublimated form. He was not obliged to distinguish sharply between the shaman of the tribe and the therapeutic psychologist and psychoanalyst: the main therapeutic message was nearly always a combination of exorcism by the authority of the healer and needed practical advice. Primitive, religious, and psychiatric therapies are successful, up to a point, because they wittingly or unwittingly treat the diseases of schizophrenia by the therapy of authority. Authority, as an obsessed compulsive force, is zeroed in upon the patient, who is comforted, appeased, re-rationalized and redirected. The generally "benign" authority of psychotherapy stands in contrast to the authority that produces psychosis. In Bruno Bettelheim's words, "the psychotic person breaks because he has invested significant figures in his environment with the power to destroy him and his integration." [28] . He speaks in this work of concentration camps and psychological clinics. If one abstracts the message of Michel Foucault in his book, Madness and Civilization, it says that the mad inspire madness in others, on a grand scale [29] . Just as the violence of war brings out the violence on all sides, madness elicits the madness of those who deal with it. Foucault deals principally with the period of the Enlightenment, when rationalization of human relations reached new heights. Consequently a methodology of therapy developed. Patients were shocked in order to "awaken" them. Theatrical performances were encouraged to let them displace their personalities upon acceptable or controllable roles. The "return to the immediate" was offered sometimes-work on the land, physical labor, so that patients might divert themselves by exhausting emulations of the primordial struggle for brute survival. Travel was promoted- a mobile theatre, after all - to match internal with external turbulence, to provide culture-shock therapy. All of this was a gloss on the underlying punishment for the relief of the observing and suffering punishers, the wardens and the public. Nowadays, the struggle to control the bodies and minds of the mentally obstreperous continues. Besides the punishers, there are the facilitators, one leader being Laing, who grants self-government and "foreign aid" to psychotherapeutic communes, and the deniers, exemplary in Thomas Szasz, who finds in most definitions of insanity a political plot or at least a myth. How does the theory of homo schizo stand relative to the popular theories of Szasz, whose brilliant forensics (forensic medicine?) against psychiatry culminated in 1976 with a work called Schizophrenia [30] . There he labeled schizophrenia as everything and nothing, a myth, a practical fiction for the elaboration of new prisons, of new professions, of new religions, of new crimes against liberty and creativity, of non-science calling itself social science. With sympathy for Szasz and for all the victims of unfeeling, unwise, and self-serving therapy (equally present in "organic" medicine?), I will say this: He believes that there is no disease, and therefore nothing to treat, whereas I say that this is indeed the human disease and we are all patients; he is Aristotelian, Cartesian, an orthodox rationalist and materialist whose sympathy for humans, undoubtedly genuine, is an inversion of Hobbesian materialism on the one hand and Thomistic Catholicism on the other. That is, he is an old-fashioned mind rejecting new fashions (call them "paradigms") in their own terms and disclosing their new contradictions. He has written a dozen volumes to argue that "abnormality" is "normality" but it is also wrong to conclude that "normality" exists in its rational conventional sense. There is no better way to show this than to go on with the theory of homo schizo, which I shall proceed to do. Cure by professional therapy is still far from certain. Bleuler, long ago, wrote that "We do not speak of cure but of far-reaching improvements" for schizophrenia; he confesses to have never seen a full recovery [31] . A typical, almost randomly selected follow-up study of psychotherapy for schizophrenia today, this of 88 patients eleven years after a median 80-day hospitalization for therapy in Southern Canada, reports 12 deaths, 2 by suicide, and 51 recoveries (showing "no social or intellectual deficit''). Most had been medicated or readmitted subsequent to release from the hospital. Major tranquilizers and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) were employed in some cases, heavy tranquilization alone in most. Verbal therapy was not predominant, nor were therapeutic communities organized. Out-patient attention and job-assistance was available. The period covered was one of full employment, economic growth, and general optimism in the area [32] . We are accepting the premise that all patients were diagnosed properly to begin with. Another type of evaluation, autobiographical, is provided by Werner Mendel, based upon the five hundred patients of his career in psychiatry [33] . He would not score so optimistically his successes, but rather finds that when his patients were sick enough to be very sick, they were most unlikely to be entirely cured. A patient might assume after prolonged intensive psychotherapy a typical social role, such as mother and housekeeper, but would on occasion require counseling and medication. It should be stressed that illness is a form of habit or obsession and that, as you would not expect to turn a life-long blacksmith into a fine ballet dancer, you would not expect to typicalize a life-long deviant. The situation seems improved, then, since Bleuler's times. Granted that the social setting is not producing the preventative antibodies, affection and authority, of which S. de Grazia writes, the professional therapy and social ambiance of mental illness have attained a cure in perhaps two-thirds of those treated, cure being a fair social and job competence with no more than occasional therapy. Spontaneous remission (which means self-cure if it means anything) occurs in a number of cases. Where therapy has been administered, therapy may take more credit than is due. As the larger studies show, most psychological difficulties are self-treated, with the help or hindrance of whoever happens to be around. Professional therapy today consists largely of reductionism. Reductionism is discoverable in the authoritative explanations of verbal psychotherapy, in communal security and "nests of toleration," hypnosis, tranquilizers, pain-killers, electroconvulsive therapy, physical restraint, and the less commonly used leucotomy (lobotomy). Surgery, drug, and shock: these all seek to diminish and delimit the psychic energy of the sick, to shrink the ego boundaries, "to get out of Vietnam," so to speak, to "cut your losses." They can be used interchangeably. Usually they must be used interchangeably. In psychotherapy there is scarcely ever a specific, a single shot in the bull's eye. Thus electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is applied generally by electrical wires to opposite sides of the skull, is certainly punishing: the patient is strapped down so as not to flail at the menace to his well- being. Patients can "feel better" afterwards if only because they have assuaged the guilt of their deviancy from social norms. ECT then arouses the cerebrum generally, drowning out "other voices," and alerting consciousness and arousing self-awareness. It brings temporary and sometimes prolonged amnesia of life experiences: the animal can begin life anew without the nagging of memory, even pleasant memory. The zones of sleep, appetite and sexuality are scoured. Hormones such as prolactine and vasopressine are made to circulate more freely. The cortisol level, which is elevated in 75% of patients suffering from depression, is lowered. The patient usually is relieved from the catatonism and morbidity of depression; he "lets himself live." Common aims in therapy are to make the patient follow cultural norms, to be peaceful, and to suppress his symptoms: to act less human perhaps. Punishment is often implied, whether in verbal, chemical, or surgical cure. The lesions (wounds) of leucotomy, which removes cerebral tissue, tend to break up the disturbing "character-fix" of the patient; following the trauma, in the course of coping with the injury and reestablishing self-control, the patient often finds a new, more peaceful social character [34] . It is notable that some schizophrenics incur certain forms of atrophy of the brain. This is expectable, not as showing the organic origins of schizophrenia, but as an instance of self-therapy by psychosomatization. The suffering person performs his own lobotomy. He reduces his own personality structure. He performs a hysterical trephination. He devises a hysterical paralysis with attendant desuetude and shrinkage of tissue. Only in certain verbal therapies, as psychoanalysis, does theory take a rationalist, Socratic position, that if one knows oneself, one can cope with oneself. It may be regarded as left-brain-hemisphere therapy, seeking to restore a person to the status of a thinking mammal, as contrasted to reducing the patient to a more hominidal equilibrium. Even here, the psychoanalyst and psychologist find themselves administering authority, willy-nilly, and relying upon it to cure. Therapeutic methods, which may hold to distinct conceptions of mental disease, are likely in practice to become part of a melange. Thus Melvin Gray, arriving at the treatment of neurasthenia, a vaguely defined hysterical set, says "Multiple forms of treatment- psychotherapy, environmental adjustment, drugs, rest, exercise, proper nutrition, etc. - were and still are the best approach." The general formula for psychotherapy appears to consist of: A. Break obnoxious habits of the patient to the point of docility (by authority, by uncovering traumas, by drugs, electrically, surgically). B. Re-instinctualize, re-program, re-educate, re-habilitate the patient to a less demanding level of life. C. Observe the patient's new behavior. D. Repeat A and B. changing the technique as seems indicated. E. Re-observe as in C. F. Reinforce prescriptions routinely until therapy is no longer demanded, indicated, or affordable. These regrettably brief passages on psychotherapy have achieved their intent if they have exposed the prevalence of reductionism in dealing with aberrant human minds. For the object of reductionism is to get the patient back into the culture camp. And behind this objective is the realization that human nature tends to be "irrational and ungovernable," not knowing naturally "what it really is," and that it is very frightened at its lack of control of itself or, may we say, its selves. {S : GENETICS: ARE THERE HOMINIDS AMONG US?} GENETICS: ARE THERE HOMINIDS AMONG US? A great many traits are inheritable, among them some predisposition to insanity. W. R. Thompson states that "any chromosomal aberration produces a variety of psychological symptoms, including cerebral changes akin to minimal brain damage. This in turn, may result in changes in personality that dispose to many forms of abnormal behavior [35] . Over one hundred "errors" of metabolism are heritable, most bringing mental disturbances in their wake. The same writer refers to the heritability of sex behavior, musicality, introversion/ extraversion, aggression, anxiety, attention to detail, social attachment, level of activity, emotionality, general intelligence (including some specific components such as verbal ability, spatial intelligence, word fluency, and numerical ability), and numerous motor traits affecting skills and athleticism. IQs shows high heritability, 70% to 80% attributable to genetic as opposed to phenotypic variance, and is transmitted via an estimated 100 genes (which may indicate the cloudiness and ethnocentrism of the concept of IQ). It is probably safe to assume that every trait has a heritable variable component; thereby we may be saved much memorizing of lists, disputation, and even research effort. Too, heritability can work with seeming contrariness. "Unaffected offspring of schizophrenic mothers included more conspicuously successful adults than were observed among a control group." [36] Since mad behavior is variegated no two madnesses are alike either. We have already alluded to the genetic component in schizophrenia. Since some "one-third of the population suffers from excess anxiety" [37] , and perhaps half of normal people suffer symptoms of depersonalization at times, and, as we have argued, other abnormalities of mind are abundant, and we are normally insane, the whole issue of heritability of insanity may well become a "paper tiger." All symptoms of insanity will have their demonstrable genetic referents. The central problem of genetics in psychology may turn out to be the heritability of human nature itself. If our developing theory is correct, and all normal human behavior together with all mental illness descend from a schizoid core in human nature, there arises the question of whether this is a "genetic" trait. Is the peculiar function of the human brain the result of a mutation? If so, then the mutation would have small visible anatomical effect and one would be hard put to distinguish between the human and his immediate ancestor, especially were it to be his very mother. Now the question of time enters. Has there been enough time since homo sapiens schizotypus evolved or quantavoluted to spread the human gene of self-awareness (if there is such) to all persons of the human family? Some persons have blue eyes, denoting a recessive gene. Some genes produce quantitative, not sharply contrasting, qualities, as for example the bone structure favoring high-speed running, or the gene transmitting skin-coloring instructions. Racial genes have not had time to diffuse around the world. Mammalian and other species can spread rapidly around the world; yet some remain isolated. The hominids australopithecus and homo erectus, or their predecessors, diffused through Asia, Africa, and Oceania, but have been conventionally assigned long periods of time to do so. We wonder whether the critical human genes have yet had time to be thoroughly bred into all going under the name of homo sapiens sapiens. We may not all be genetically prone to insanity. But, if so, this means that we may not all be genetically prone to humanness! For just as culture can effect, and impose controls upon, insanity, it can govern hominidity. It is distinctly possible that some humans are genetically human- with the schizoid core that we are elucidating - whereas some humans, perhaps even most humans, are culturally produced in their entirety. If this were the case, it would be the greatest irony of all times! Unless a person could prove himself genetically insane, he would need to consider himself a hominid and bow down before the schizoid culture that makes him human! I do not intend to solve this puzzle in this book, and indeed there may be no means of doing so. We cannot subject people to the ultimate test, which is to arrange for many small groups to be born and grow up wild, watching for the one group that may be composed entirely of Hominids to appear and behave like non-humans, that is, unaware, unanxious, speechless, and uncultured. {S : Notes (Chapter 1: The Normally Insane)} Notes (Chapter 1: The Normally Insane) 1. Letter to Francesco Vettore, 10 Dec. 1513, trans. and reference from paper of S. de Grazia, citing F. Gaeta, ed., Nicolo Machiavelli: Lettere, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1961, 304. 2. See Paul Meehl, "Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia," in Arnold H. and E. H. Buss, eds., Theories of Schizophrenia, Atherton, New York, 1962, 21-45, 27. Here I use schizotypy, schizoid and schizo as interchangeable forms. 3. Fred Johnson, The Anatomy of Hallucinations, 1978, p. 29. 4. In Robin Fox, ed., Biosocial Anthropology, London: Malaby Press, p. 62. 5. Dorothea C. Leighton, et al., The Character of Danger: Psychiatric Symptoms in Selected Communities, III. N. Y.: Putnam, 1977, 56. 6. Leo Srole, Mental Health in the Metropolis, N. Y.: McGraw Hill, 1962. 7. John F. Tallman, et al., "Receptors for the Age of Anxiety," 207 Science Jan. 18, 1980), 274. 8. Johnson, op. cit., 1978, citing Cole's Survey of 1970. 9. Quoted in Johnson, op. cit. 10. H. D. Lasswell, "Democratic Character," Glencoe: Free Press 1951; Power and Personality N. Y.: Norton, 1948. 11. George G. Gallup, Jr., "Towards an Operational Definition of Self-Awareness," in R. H. Tuttle, Sociology and Psychology of Primates, The Hague: Monton, 1975, 310-41. 12. Eugen Bleuler Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911, J. Zinkin, tr., N. Y.: Intl. U. Press, 1950, 266ff, 304ff. Cf. Am. Psychiat. Assn., Diagnostic Criteria for Schizophrenia, 1978. 13. Dunham, cited in Johnson, op. cit. 14. "Psychiatric Labelling in Cross-Cultural Perspectives," 191 Science (1976), 1019- 27. 15. D. C. Leighton et al., op. cit. 16. Farley, et al., "Brain Norepinephrine and Dopamine in Schizophrenia," 204 Science (1979) 94. 17. K. Meninger, The Vital Balance, with Martin Mayman and Paul Prnyser, N. Y.: Viking, 1963. 18. "Estimating the Genetic contribution to Schizophrenia," 133: 2 Amer. J. Psychia. (1976), 185-91. 19. "A Sociobiologic Model of Schizophrenia," unpubl. paper, March, 1976, 11. 20. The quotations are from the National Observer, March 6, 1976, 1, 14. 21. Bleuler, op. cit. 22. Meehl, see fn. 2 above. 23. F. Lemere, letter, 132: 1 Amer. J. Psychia. (Jan. 1975), 86. 24. The Psychology of Fear and Stress, N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 221-2 citing studies of Eysenck and Cattell. 25. The Neurotic Constitution, N. Y.: Dodd Mead, 1930, trans from 4th German ed. 1912, 219. 26. "Schizophrenia," in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Princeton U. Press, 1960, 180-1. 27. The Political Community (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press 1948) and the Errors of Psychotherapy (New York: Doubleday, 1950). 28. Surviving and Other Essays, N. Y. . Knopf, 1979, 29 29. New-York: Pantheon-Vintage, 1965. 30. New York: Basic Books. 31. Op. cit., 258. 32. R. C. Bland and J. H. Parker, "Prognosis in Schizophrenia: A Ten Year Follow-up of First Admission," 33 Arch. Gen. Psychia. (Aug. 1976), 949-54. 33. Werner M. Mendel, Schizophrenia: The Experience and Its Treatment, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976 34. William Sargant, Eliot Slater, and Desmond Kelly, An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry, N. Y.: Science House, 1972. 35. W. R. Thompson, "Genetics," 8 Ency . Britannica, 1973, 1149. 36. Ibid. 37. M. Gray, 90. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE SEARCH FOR LOST INSTINCT} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO THE SEARCH FOR LOST INSTINCT Most babies cry when they are born. If they do not, they are liable to receive their first spanking. This, say their attendants, will clear their lungs; it will circulate their blood; it will exercise their reflexes. It is good for them. This crying may be uniquely human. Calves, for example, do not cry when they are born. They lay stunned for a moment, and then gradually pick themselves up, pull themselves together, receive some licks, and crawl or stumble around. The mothers of apes drop their young almost disdainfully and hardly attend to them at first; the orangutan mother is more considerate, more human. Perhaps babies cry because they are already more frightened than animals. A famous psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, found the mental state of the baby deplorable, and traced the major behaviors of later life to the trauma of birth. Some conscientious mothers even followed his line of reasoning to the point of giving birth by caesarean operation, thus assisting the baby's birth and relieving its pain of passage from womb to open air. I do not know that the effects of their altruism have ever been reported. Dr. Rank, passing over the possibly similar plight of calves, babes of monkeys, and puppies, ascribed the most marvelous effects to the human birthing experience. He sees "in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical." Even the myths of the creation of the world, that are [1] told in many cultures, are regarded by him as a sublime attempt to undo the birth trauma and to deny the separation of the infant from the mother. Although everyone has undergone and many have later witnessed the radical experience of parturition, Rank interpreted myths and fantasies of the end of the world as wishes and efforts of the human individual to be reabsorbed into the great All and Oneness. Further, "the Flood which initiates a new world period is nothing but a 'universal' reaction to the birth trauma, as the myths of the origin of the earth or the sea also show." Religion, creativity, humanness - all are to be attributed to the tragedy of parturition. No one is exempted. I think that he is reversing the order of nature. Attacking the perinatal problem by another method, Stanislas Grof employed psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, in seeking to learn of people's re-experiences of the earliest events of their lives [2] . He could identify four matrices of recollections. One expressed feelings of unbounded ease; another, frightful threat, confinement and torture; a third appeared as a struggle for survival and an ecstatic release; the fourth, a separation that seemed a kind of death followed by resurrection. These would connect with the physical sequence of natal events and incorporate analogous later effects. This is matrix (2); the unbearable and inescapable situation of the foetus, sensing uterine contractions while confronting a still-closed cervix, would and did engender visions of fear, plague, and natural catastrophe. Lacking evidence that historical experiences can affect the germ plasma, we must regard these as visions of other life experiences, as secondary or derivative suggestions, and attached to the perinatal process by mental association. We do not deny that they originally occurred. Rather, when they did occur and were experienced and remembered, they reinforced the analogous perinatal feelings. And, if what we have said concerning Rank's theory is correct, the perinatal experience is a reinforcement of the pre- existing genetic fear of oneself that already begins with the foetus. Hence, a double reinforcement may operate upon the original fear. Every species, indeed every individual, has its own pre-existing structure for experiencing; experience is species- specific and organism-specific. Otto Rank and Stanislas Grof are asking too much of the nasty surprise of birth. Rather, I should say, the baby is crying because, unlike the animals, he already possesses a kind of fear that they do not, and cannot, know. This is his existential fear, an anxiety sensed upon the realization of the existence of himself. He is reacting to a harsh accident, true, but knows already this existential fear and is demanding immediately that he be relieved of it. He already has a frustrated Voluntarism, a will that he expects to appease by action. He is terribly frightened because he is already trying to put his head together and to find himself in himself, whereas the animals have merely to compose their circulation and limbs. The infant already wants more than to fix upon comfort, although this, and food later on, will usually quiet him. Surely, given the option, the baby would prefer to return to the womb. But there, too, he may well have been frightened, not only by jostling and growth pains, but by the sense of the greatest problem of existence, how to form his identity. For his brain has begun to operate in the peculiar human way. He may be already indecisive, unlike the beasts, feeling that there is a decision to be made, and wants to do more than to wait upon the comfort of the nursery. Perhaps it is well to slap him if he does not cry: he should stop dreaming and come to attention. {S : INSTINCT-DELAY} INSTINCT-DELAY The baby cannot realize his problem. He does not know that his instinctive mechanisms are blunted, blocked and delayed, and that he will pass his life in a mammalian vehicle, a jalopy that he must tinker with and fix up at every turn of the road. Luckily, he is to be trained immediately as a mechanic. Not for him are the joys of a long life of instinctive behavior, consisting mainly of speedy, replicating responses to specific stimuli. The delays of instinct, touching upon the whole gamut of behavior, provide the human with a continuous fear. The instincts cause tension in their persistent efforts to complete themselves. At the same time, the person finds himself inundated by the tongues of instinct, lapping upon areas of behavior often little related to the original direction or object of the stimulus-response mechanism. The sexual instinct, for instance may emerge as Oedipal, romantic, homosexual, fetishistic, sadistic, aesthetic and/ or aggressive behavior; rarely is it merely the highly relevant "display; hop on; hop off; go away" sequence that even higher animals perform. The delay of instincts by a possibly genetic blockage is all-important: it permits the chaotic creational flood to rush into all the crevices of the forming human nature. The retardation of his animal instincts is viewed as flexibility in the human's behavior. Human flexibility is both cause and consequence, therefore, because both the "decisions" and the follow-up activity are subject to delays in the central nervous system. The animal world, by contrast, exists by instinct: events emit stimuli; instinctive reactions succeed or fail; the residuum reassembles amidst the continuing events. Almost never is the process punctuated by pauses to consider a dilemma. If its spasms of calculation fail, the animal surrenders to the inertial process. It falls back upon its collective line of defense, it breeds. The animate world can depend upon exponential reproducibility to render individual choice unnecessary for species survival. Meanwhile the human creature depends upon what he calls mind or intelligence. He has not chosen to do so. He cannot do anything else. Would that he could, for his lot is fearful. His reactions blocked at every turn, if only for an instant, he lives in anxiety over the last turn, the present turn, the next turn, and all the ones he can remember or imagine or foresee. Stripped of ready instinct, he confronts an instinct- ready world. He is innately, individually, and culturally anxious, and the world he encounters is too large to cope with non-anxiously. Terror drives him to act quickly, but not instinctively, and instinct is the quickest action. Why must he forever fearfully reflect? If, unlike animals, man has to make up his mind, there must be some unique quality in the mind. If two or more options rush into the open question raised by the blocked instinctual response, there is a conflict, an anxiety. Even if there is but a single and obvious solution, a pause to determine so can cause anxiety. {S : SELF-FEAR AND SELF-CONTROL} SELF-FEAR AND SELF-CONTROL When the posing of options is continuous and inevitable, the very existence of a single mind can be doubted. The pervasiveness of choice and anxiety in the actions of the human being must signify that "ordinarily he is of two minds" about everything he experiences. "Two souls within me live, damn!" said Goethe. Two souls may be too few. The well-known case study of Sybil documented sixteen different persons in a single human female, each conscious, aware, able, and resting upon the substrata of the other fifteen. Whatever the number, so long as it is more than one, it suggests that a third trait can be allocated to the non-instinctual, fearful creature, which is a multiple personality. Called by another name, this is self-awareness, a kind of behavior that could never come about were it not for the fact that someone is asking questions of someone else. A self is aware of itself. "I think, therefore I am", wrote Descartes. Not quite, we say. Rather, "I recognize myself; therefore, we are." When, 3000 years before, Moses turned aside to inspect the fiery un-burning thornbush, he found there Yahweh who spoke to him saying "I am the I am" and Moses worried (says the Bible) about what people would say when he said to them "I am the voice of the I am that is the I am." Because our selves share nearly identical anatomical housing and have highly privileged access to each other, for all practical purposes they are considered as "one in body and soul." In fact, the compulsion to be oneself is so suspiciously strong that no matter what the proof to the contrary, the self will always be the irreducible unit of human existence. Like non-Euclidean geometry and warped space, the poly-self will remain a theoretical construct, out of the realm of the common sense. It will help to understand human behavior, however, and have powerful applications in psychological therapy and law. It will, among other things, clarify an idea that is to be found in a many "primitive" and "advanced" cultures, that a person "possessed" is not to be treated as himself. So now we have the human creature, living in a house of fear, governed by a committee, and acting accordingly in non-instinctual ways. What is the agenda of this committee of egos? The agenda seems infinitely varied; it can contain anything in the whole world, internal, external, from a microbe to the stars, unlimited, too, in time or space. But the preamble to every item on the agenda is always the same: "This is a bill to control fear by..." So the human seeks control, first of himself, that is, of the committee: "This house must put itself in order." Then he must seek to control others; he must at the same time, just like a government, govern himself while he governs others. And, besides the others, he must seek to control the world, for he senses that not only these others, but also the whole world, threatens him and needs to be ordered. Something of this conduct of operations seems implied in Anna Freud's idea about the ego's "tendency to synthesis," as opposed to the fear of ego destruction, which she recognizes as an instinctual anxiety [3] . (I say, of course, that the ego was hardly there in the first place.) Control implies power, the determination of the wills or behaviors of people and events. "Power is an ingredient in the transactions which take place within all object relationships and is thus an ingredient in the interlocking forces which determine personality," so declares Arieti. Veritably we may contemplate now a being that is instinct-delayed, poly-ego, fearful on both counts and power-driven: ecce homo. Control is said to occur when someone determines the behavior of persons or things. The drive to control is a reciprocal of fear. All humans, possessing existential fear and self-fears, must seek control, primarily of the self. Very quickly in all situations the physical self becomes the arena of only a portion of the struggle for control. External objects and beings are also incorporated into the struggle. The self, others, and the natural world are the triple object of efforts at control. The total of objects, both inner and outer, operate subjectively without discrimination. Whether a person feels he controls his temper or an empire, by physiological indicators of stress, or by any other tests, he is calmer and more relaxed. If he is insatiable in his wishes to control, the diminution of tension with success will be brief and shallow; his fears will cause him to move immediately to assume control in other spheres. Under no circumstances can the urge to control be satisfied. Assuming that all humans are basically alike, rather than divided between those who are genetically human and those who are only culturally human (a question already alluded to), the challenge may be offered that women are less interested in control than men. This would imply, by our theory, that they are more instinctive, more unified and stable as persons, and less fearful. More hominidal, therefore? Less instinct-delayed? Such may be the case. There is folklore about "a woman's instinct." This special female capacity is a popular belief today. In the Western European Middle Ages, women were for a time denied a soul, until a Church conference finally decided the issue in their favor. A "soul" translates into the more active madness and suffering often characterizing males. But it is suggested that for the time being we assume a close similarity of the sexes. We offer, as adequate and at least temporary justification, that women are generally forced out of formal control activities, that they operate "underground" for control purposes, and that, anyhow, an accurate and thorough inventory of control activity would disclose an equality of the sexes. The absolute renunciation of control-needs and efforts is sometimes attempted. The cosmic indifference of Buddha lets nothing matter save finding nothingness. Once filled with nothingness, one will be at peace. All identifications and attachments are renounced in order to concentrate upon control of the self. With an elaborate strict regimen of diet and exercises, and by abstemious human relations, bolstered by a sophisticated rationale appeasing conventional philosophical demands, a mental balance is achieved that is distinguishable from selfishness, catatonism, or bestiality. Resemblances to autistic trances are present. The discipline remains severe; the drive for control of the world is not abolished. A more than casual resemblance to the Buddhist outlook is to be perceived in Teilhard de Chardin's attempt to extricate mankind from its dilemma [4] . He sees the remedy as man's reflectiveness, enlarged greatly until the world is co-reflected in his mind in a universe of ultra-reflexion. This is a vague formula, but it takes on greater meaning when we ask what is Chardin's human dilemma. This, it seems, is a state of fear, which he describes abstractly: the great fear of the human species is to be closed in and lost in an unfriendly world, condemned to live with himself as a fixed species. {S : THE SENSE OF "I AM"} THE SENSE OF "I AM" Identity and identification begin with the question of the self or ego. "Everyone is to himself that which he calls self," wrote John Locke, in discussing the idea of a person [5] . The self is "an object to itself," said G. H. Mead. The reflexive form reveals "that which can be both subject and object." This is what distinguishes man from animal, he argued, rather than the alleged possession of a mysteriously endowed soul [6] . Sommerhoff regards self-awareness as part of consciousness and, in his study of The Logic of the Living Brain, says that it is formed of "coherent internal representations of the physical self," hence also of the self's relations to its surroundings. "... The unity of the physical self finds expression in a family of characteristic transformation expectations the brain accumulates during ontogenesis." [7] Sweeping in more closely toward the concept sought here, Hilgard declares, "The unity of consciousness is illusory. Man does more than one thing at a time - all the time - and the conscious representation of these actions is never complete." [8] When the personality degrades to "a delusional chaos," some awareness survives. "Part of that total complex which we call the ego, the 'self, always remains alien to the delusions. This constellation accounts for the fact that the non-affected part of the ego may disbelieve and even criticize the delusions; on the other hand, the incorrigibility and the senselessness of the delusions are precisely due to the fact that many associations contradictory to the delusional are simply not brought into any logical connection with it." Building one's self is then every person's lifelong occupation. As we have said, he is driven by the fear of not being oneself to begin with. The self is a predisposition, but not a bequest, of nature. Indeed, it is never fully achieved. Man is always an infant in this regard. While apes grow quickly and soon act "self-possessedly", the human can grow in every respect but this, that he never achieves a single self. "The mature person is self-confident," by which is signified that his existential fear is under control and that he egoistically regards himself as one. A total lack of self- confidence results in a kind of vegetative existence, a sickness as grave as any; even the most elementary kinds of self-control disappear into incontinence and catatonism. Both "identification" and "role-playing" are in the area of the dispersed self. A "role" is behavior according to a social sub-type, which is employed to escape insecurity by virtue of a more secure status. A role may be manifested as casually as a costume for the mardigras once a year, or as intensely as a permanent switch in identity accompanied by amnesia. Role changes are common in modern society; they are rare in simple communities, where a fisherman is son of a fisherman, but even there the person goes through life-roles such as adolescence or grandparentage, has a role in a church, and so on. Roles are culturally defined, often assigned, and when fully developed and effective, encapsulate the dispersed self, guarding and maintaining it against dissolution. Identification can be attested in the assumption of a role, as the boy who identifies with his father, the fisherman, but can more broadly extend to all manner of being and abstraction. Thus one may detach some part of himself and affix it to an identification with the working-class movement, or with the Virgin Mary, or with his family and neighbors, or with a bird. Identification is associated with the wish to control its object; this may be difficult, for frequently ambivalence arises out of an obviously uncontrollable identification. The self, though it may appear so, is not a social creation, as G. H. Mead and others would have it be. Man would never have a self, a poly-ego, if he were not structured genetically to engage in the search for self by a mind that has to be pulled together. Mead's work is completely intelligible and useful, except on this crucial point. It is significant that he does not seek to go beyond society and culture as the determinants. Meanwhile, he provides us with precisely those kinds of observations which we need, as, for example: "The phenomenon of dissociation of personality is caused by a breaking up of the complete, unitary self into the component selves of which it is composed, and which respectively correspond to different aspects of the social process in which the person is involved." [9] He advanced and stressed the concept of "social roles," those social housings for the individual selves, and showed how small children could play games with their selves, as well as others, being now one kind of person, now then another - father, mother, evil one, good one, police and bandit, and so on. This author's grandchild was raised bilingually in Athens, and when playing with a toy car and policeman, would speak as the policeman in Greek, then reply as the car-driver in English. Bleuler used the word "schizophrenia" to denote a split personality, merging the Greek words for "split" and "brain" or "heart," thus meaning more than brain. Schizophrenia was applied to madness of the disordered personality, and numerous mental illnesses received different names in the early years of psychiatry. Afterwards, it became fashionable to assert that one should ignore the etymology of the word, even ignoring Bleuler, for that matter. The trend of my work, however, has been to extend the term in its literal meaning - that is, to introduce the idea of multiple "splits" - to extend it to cover practically all mental disturbances not attributable to organic and accidental lesions, whether congenital or post-natal, and to transform the disease into the elements of normal behavior, regarding normal individual and social behavior as specific resultants of certain adjustments to a natural schizophrenia. Thus self-consciousness is what might be termed in the lexicon of psychopathology a form of delusional thought. To be human, then, is to be schizotypical, or schizoid. Not to be so - that is, not to be self- aware-is impossible, or is stupid in the sense of being of the hominidal species of the primates. Again, all humans, including mad humans, are self-aware. Even in a case of severe catalepsy, self-awareness is evident. Bleuler reports cataleptics who can maintain the same position for months. But, as a patient is moved, his muscles flex and adjust so as to maintain any position in which he is placed. Normal children and hystericals will sometimes do the same, after being punished. Hilgard describes a hypnotised subject who can, as instructed, divide himself into two beings, one who feels no pain upon stimulation and says so, another who feels it and comments upon it. The source of the phenomena of self-awareness is the dispersed selves. One would not know oneself unless there were at least two of one, the observer and the observed, the knower and the known, or, better, two mutually perceptive observers. In Hilgard's experiment above, he was able to elicit two speaking selves with contrasting points of view regarding a painful stimulus. Since there is so much of the delusory in human nature, as Bleuler and many other students have shown, it occurred to me at first to regard self-consciousness only as a form of delusion. I think now that it must be reality and that the concept of the single self must be delusory, a kind of megalomania based upon an illusion of the dominating self. Just as the human sees one image with eyes that register bi-focally, so he mentates, especially when asked, as a whole, though his mind be operating eccentrically. Both neurological and psychological evidence of this will be advanced later on. The ego is not singular. "It" perceives and exists as a poly-self. Any single self in the set is a sensed or perceived claim on an acting and behaving organic system in relation to or in conjunction with claims of others. A person is a system of selves, a polyself system. Ordinarily, people successfully inhibit irrelevant material from enough of their mentation to assure others and cause others to believe that they are acting as a single or at most a self-aware self. Even too much self-awareness is a cause of disturbances, akin to disturbed behavior in the eyes of observers and in the concerns of the subject; suspicions are aroused; rapport is weakened. When persons begin to operate on several levels almost simultaneously, they are accorded various complexes by medical practitioners. Bleuler gave numerous illustrations of such behavior among his schizophrenic patients. Hilgard's studies of divided consciousness by means of hypnosis expose a "hidden observer" or "co-conscious" as an ordinary concomitant of existence. This self among selves is not a monster, a "beast of the unconscious." "The concealed part sometimes turns out to be healthier than the openly presented self." [10] Expert though he was in hypnosis, Sigmund Freud fashioned his theory of id-ego-superego from classical social psychological theory, from Plato's Republic (I argued in a paper of 1949) rather than from experiential materials readily available to him. He thus may have posed the wrong parties in psychic conflicts. The polyego concept is structurally and biologically manifest; it can be the subject of experiment; it can be operationally described. The origins of the poly-ego, the core of human nature, must be in neurological transformations at some time in the past. Here we assume the poly-ego to exist, leaving its ancient origins to be traced in Homo Schizo I. Sufficient for the moment is the hypothesis that when this transformation occurred, a number of critical innovations occurred with it, enough so that we can assume a quantavolution of creation, a Hologenesis. Human nature came all at once. As the first humans experienced for the first time a poly-ego and have until now repeated the experience with every new person, we look for a massive effect upon the human being and find it in the eternal fear that possesses mankind. {S : EXISTENTIAL FEAR} EXISTENTIAL FEAR Students of fear in humans and animals are rarely satisfied by obvious causes; human fear is not a pie to be cut up and assigned to wild animals, bad dreams, strict parents, and the like. It is well to make tallies, thus a third of the population fears snakes, most of these fear them intensely; a great many fear heights or being alone in public places; many fear injury and illness; and nearly everyone fears an assault at the time that it occurs [11] . But, perhaps because they are difficult to study and even to conceive of, "little systematic research has been applied to the nature of what are sometimes called existential fears." [12] As with the concepts of human nature and instinct, many psychologists would like to rid themselves of the concept of "fear," believing it to be vague and operationally undefinable. But, as Jeffrey Gray puts it, "Experimental psychology - as well as common sense - has been forced to invent the hypothesis of a complex psychological state, 'fear, ' precisely in order to make sense out of the otherwise shifting and imprecise relationship observed between stimuli and responses." [13] We do not distinguish here between fear and anxiety. "Anxiety, the psychological equivalent of pain, is characterized by a feeling of dread.. a vague fear.. not related to specific situations or objects.. part of the human condition." So says Mendel, abstracting from a lifetime of administering intensive psychotherapy [14] . Physiologically, insofar as anxiety can be detected, it exhibits the chemistry and muscular tensions of fear. And fear, when slight, is indistinguishable from anxiety. And anxiety can become terror and panic. The common use of the term "anxiety" has to be attributed to the need to allay people's fear that they may be suffering from fear. Fear is part of the human and of all that he creates. The role of fear in religion is large, so that a working out of fears often has taken place in the arena of the sacred. Religion approached by faith, says Rudolf Otto, cannot be the same as religion approached through reason. Central to faith is numen, the specific non-rational religious apprehension and its object, at all its levels, from the primitive stirrings to exalted spiritualism. And central to numen is dread, for it is the sacred, holy, awful confrontation of man with god or the divine essence [15] . Fear can be both immediate and existential. Immediate fear erupts upon the encountering of threat to the poly-ego system, a learned and/ or sensed emotion that sends an ad hoc electro-chemical alarm through the central nervous system. Existential fear, also an electrochemical effect, is normally at a constant level which we posit to be above some pre-human level. What evidence is there for a continuous higher level of existential fear in human nature? That man is an anxious animal has been a byword in psychology. This means ordinarily that the human is never at ease with himself. Rare cases of such are a subject of marveling comment, probably misplaced and incorrect. To suit the needs of homo schizo, all neonates are trained to high levels of anxiety. It is often argued that humans are culturally indoctrinated in fear, and therefore generally exhibit that continuous anxiety which has every conceivable object as its trigger or focus. Cultures are discoverable that train their children not to possess or display fear. Many mothers of modern western culture earnestly try to preserve their children from the sense of fear. The mothers are reinforced by cultural institutions that have special needs. These, where successful, invariably train only an ignorance of or resistance to fear in some respects deemed crucial by the society, such as facing up to an enemy in battle. Here, in the first place, there is reason to regard the training as retraining, that is, the acquisition of one set of habits to overwhelm a contrary set. The partial training underscores the practically limitless outlets to existential fear; global courage is not hoped for. The brave Spartans were obsessively fearful of their Helotic slaves; fearful of alliances; fearful of women; fearful of their gods; and would turn tail for home even from a battle if an earthquake occurred. The display of fear is culturally determined; the fear itself is universal. The most persuasive argument against the presence of an existential human fear is that the human is occupied with so many objects over such large spans of memory and futures that one is bound to be always in a state of anxiety over something. If it is not one's health, it is the apparitions of a stormy sky; if not an enemy, it is an institution. As in so many areas, here too, one must ask first of all if the logic is not reversed, possibly in a type of cognitive disorder: why does the human tend to so many things in the world, not only the infinite now, but the infinite past or future? Is the object pursued or attended to because it serves as an outlet for fear or must one believe that the human is so naturally rational as to fix his concerns upon practically everything, only then to discover a fearful aspect to it all? I think that the answer to this question will emerge from this book. Briefly, though, a fixation upon a single or very few objects is suspiciously phobiaphilic; the expansion of the scope of objects occupying one does not increase the general fearfulness of one's state, but rather the contrary: it makes the state of fear more bearable. Extraverted, "neurotic" characters typically disperse their attention and, as a result, acquire unusual versatility. Furthermore, as we shall argue later, fear is not eliminated by therapy. The objects may be changed. Or, by a variety of means, including drugs such as tranquilizers and alcohol, a high level of fear may be reduced even greatly. Fear is controlled by forcing the physiology, not by clearing away impediments to natural courage. Comparing the occasions for fear it is doubtful that the human lot is beset by more fearful stimuli than engage the attention of animals. Yet we see in man a variety of psycho-pathological tendencies and behaviors - such as merciless aggression and global attentiveness - not present in mammals and apes. Hence we must seek the source of existential fear in a logical and real condition, which we say is the poly-ego. Self- awareness, inevitable in mankind, produces continual anxiety over his inevitably and profusely invented fears. In 1933, Freud laid down the theme ".. that the ego is the only seat of anxiety, and that only the ego can produce anxiety," and "that the three main varieties of anxiety - objective anxiety, neurotic anxiety and moral anxiety - can so easily be related to the three directions in which the ego is dependent, on the external world, on the id and on the super-ego." [16] This reads, in our terms: on nature, on others, and on the variegated selves. The self is too complex to be divided into id, ego, and superego. There is a pragmatic instinctive principle involved, but there is no reality principle. The self is never a real self, either. In systematizing psychology, Freud might better have dispensed with external objectivity and relied upon a phenomenological theory of the world as a wholly subjective creation of the mind. The clutch of components of the ego engage themselves in anxiety-reduction operations. The so-called id, ego and superego elements are ancient and misleading ideas of how the mind works, even though they are conventionally handy for political, moral, and hence therapeutic disputation. Certainly, though, Freudian psychology is erected upon the presumption of ever-present anxiety. Not until we learn how this continuous drizzle of fear and anxiety is precipitated in human life by the delayed instinct and the split self will we understand existential fear. For the moment, we should counsel alertness against assigning to any experience the accountability for generalized fear. This means to avoid any commitment to sweeping theories such as that of Rank's birth trauma, or to presuppositions like Otto's that dread is validated by its divine associations. Or such large categorical explanations as "castration fear," which is undoubtedly of diagnostic utility. Or, for that matter, to any summing up to 100% of fear by adding experiences from the womb to the tomb. Rather, hypothetically at first, and then as certainly as the evidence and logic permit, let us maintain that the human would be fearful and anxious even if he lived a life totally free of frightening experience. The whole human mental structure appears to be given over to controlling the mind so as to reduce the stress of fear. The poly- self is elected as a governing committee by a central nervous system that was previously under more centralized management. The brain of the hominid loses coordinative ability and in so doing produces the human brain, which imposes a new system of coordination. The poly-ego, hence self-awareness, would not be present if it were not for the depression and confusion of instincts in humans. What forced the human egos to emerge was the necessity for continuous decision-making and what made this in turn necessary was the delaying of instinctive response. How this happened is to be discussed later on; what it consists of is relevant here. {S : INSTINCT IN MAN AND ANIMAL} INSTINCT IN MAN AND ANIMAL We begin by a comparison. Legions of horseshoe crabs (which are more related to spiders than to other crabs) make their way up the beaches of Cape Cod to breed with precisely the most predictable heavy tide, that which occurs with the full moon nearest to the summer solstice. In the swirling low waters the females discharge their eggs, which are fertilized by the sperm discharged by the males. The adults retire with the tide (save for a few who are trapped in retreating, and bury themselves in sand until the next heavy tide). The fertilized eggs sink into the sand where they develop and wait to hatch upon the occasion of the tide of the next full moon, whereupon they move out to sea. Instinctively, one may surmise, the horseshoe crab has mastered complex processes that homo sapiens would have to learn by pragmatic science. One is the relation of sun and moon to tides, or at least the empirical knowledge of when the heaviest reliable tide of the year occurs. Another is the organization of legions of males and females in rut to congregate at the same place for the purpose of conceiving upon the beach a new generation, which itself develops within the narrow limits of the next lunar month, at which time it can emerge to descend upon the sea. Thousands of such instinctive processes are possessed by the animal kingdom. In many cases one animal's instincts are aligned to exploit the instincts of other animals. The human, and perhaps the human alone, can make a great many adjustments of his behavior to imitate or relate to and exploit the instinctive behavior of the biosphere. The human's blocked instinctive structure is the basis or take-off point to invent a multitude of instinct-like habits that, for example, would have him waiting upon the beach at the summer solstice to capture the horseshoe crab and sell it for fertilizer and souvenirs. Some animals exploit instincts of other animals, as we have said. The term "instinct," like "human nature," and "ego," has a suspicious slackness about it. No wonder, given its history. Charles Darwin used it not quite as loosely as he did the idea of "natural selection," S. Freud used it as a workhorse for one speculative probe after another; MacDougall, the social psychologist, pounded it into mincemeat; Tinbergen managed to use it respectably in his study of animal behavior; and Fletcher recently reconciled its ethological and psychiatric meanings usefully. N. Tinbergen defined instinct as a hierarchically organized nervous mechanism, susceptible to primary releasing and directing impulses of internal and external origin, which responds to these impulses by coordinated movements [17] . The hierarchy is altered by changes in the intensity or by suppression of other instincts. An influential hierarchical order by Rensch gives as instincts sex, deference, feeding, cleaning, and ultimately hunting and collecting. I doubt, however, that there is any hierarchy of instincts in humans except in a group statistical sense, owing to the human ineptitude for specific instinctive response. Obviously, all writers have had in mind the large fact that animals and men respond automatically when stimulated in certain ways: they blink quickly when about to be struck in the eye, for instance. (Even so, madmen and small boys can teach themselves to control the blink.) This unrestrained reflex is instinctive, as are a great many chemical and motile reactions of the organs and limbs. In the human bloodstream are to be found leucocytes, cells that hunt infectious bacteria - instinctively? Then where is the instinct: in the whole person or in the leucocyte? As instincts come to require training (the baby can be toilet-trained) or as the stimulus of the instinct provokes a broader response (when struck, the creature dodges, snarls, and strikes back), they enter an area of science that can ultimately merge with speculative philosophy, as when one speaks of an aesthetic instinct in man. Freud's last thrust in the arena of instinct emerged with a death (thanatos) and a life (eros) instinct [18] . This dualism reminds us of entropy and negative entropy, the universal breaking down of motion and material and the countervailing creativeness of life, which, if given optional conditions of sustained full reproduction would soon cover all the stars and the spaces between with organic matter, and then presumably expand the universe beyond even the dreams of the explosive universe theorists. This thought might be taken as an irrelevant comment on the irrelevancy of Freud's two-fold classification. But neither is the case. In this very book on the pleasure principle, Freud came as close as he ever did to the theory of homo schizo. In the course of denying the domination of pleasure over human mentation, which relates to the anhedonia symptoms adverted to later on, he moves to the question of unpleasure. "Unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation" that is present but unbound in the mind; pleasure is a diminution of excitation. [19] He thus agrees with G. T. Fletcher (1873) who linked pleasure and unpleasure with stability and instability, in between which lay indifference. And he foreshadowed the behavioral conditioning school of today several of whose representatives occupy an honorable place in this book. Now Freud, typically pushing ideas to their limits of tolerance (and toleration), makes death a pleasure and then an instinct. "Instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces." [20] Instinct: reversion: death. Freud's "death instinct," so readily misunderstood, can be shown to make sense in the light of the theory of homo schizo. For we say that man seeks to revert to the animal in order to recapture the instinctive bliss of the single self. That is, man unconsciously seeks his death as a human, and of the human species. This must be very close to what was gestating in the mind of Freud. I see confirmation of this thought in a cloudy but weighty remark that relates to the dependent clause of the quoted sentence. For he writes: "In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Elementary things do not wish to change but are forced to evolve organically by external disturbing and diverting influences." My work in Homo Schizo I deals heavily with such "influences." What is pertinent here is that, by the theory of homo schizo, the evolved thing, man, wants to rid itself of the burden of the very trait that speciates it, that makes it a unique species, and such is the instinct-delay that creates and maintains its perpetual angst. Freud's early preoccupation with the sexual instinct is less pertinent, disclosing, as critics have pointed out, an ideological attachment to the worries of well-to-do patients in a bourgeois society before World War l. The varieties of sexuality, it rather seems to us, given the cultural accent upon the subject, indicate a dispersed instinct, a conflict of selves, and an employment of sexual displacements to dispose of existential fear. Love consists of identifying an ego element with people and objects (even a 'security blanket') which reassure one against fear. Love is usually deeply involved with control, and control of course is a heavy motive in sexual attraction. Affection plays so large a part in nurturing and training an infant that it becomes naturally a well-developed area of fixation for many problems of other instinctive zones besides the sexual. One can understand how affection is attached to all manner of "irrelevant" encounters and objects. It can be plucked out and credited with being the basic drive. But we always should refer to the human basic drive as self-control, then to other essential interests such as sex and food, and finally to myriad mixed displays of all of these. Without enthusiasm and with qualms, a definition of instinct may be put forward: instinctive behavior in a species is present when, in the absence of training, a uniform behavior reliably results following upon a definite stimulus. The number of instincts in mammal species subsumable under this definition must be in the hundreds. An important fact is that for every primate instinctive action, there is a human equivalent, ontologically recognizable. This fact is relatively easy to argue. However, the near reverse may be also true, as ethologists and sociobiologists increasingly contend: for every type of human action, defined with increasing specificity, there may be a genetically related primate instinct, with allowances made for training in both cases. The discussion of human instinct centers about the comparative laxness of instinct in the total behavior of man when compared with the behavior of animals most closely resembling him. Compare the separation of the mother bear and her cub, so simple, with the separation of the human female from her child, so complex, so full of woes, the inspiration of thousands of customs and volumes of literature. And include especially the "exceptional" societies such as those in which the mother is trained like the bear mother, who lumbers away leaving her cub whimpering on the limb of a tree, or the societies employing all-male initiation ceremonies to break the maternal grip, or fascist and soviet societies whose nursery schools are intended to abort family influences deemed incompatible with the ideas of the regime, or societies where the tie is broken by taking up one's first job in a distant city. Humans can come close to, or seemingly go very far from, animal practices. When giving birth, women in comparison with primate females are more agitated and uncertain, and follow practices not observable among the primates, such as engaging attendants. Again, primate females have a defined rut period when they will accept sexual advances, whereas human females frequently are receptive of sexual overtures most of the time. Kinsey found that a mild rut period is present in slightly over half of a human female population. The complications in the life of humans introduced by just these two departures from the instinctive norms of the primates are numerous. On the one hand there are the "unhappy" components in the difference of instincts: confusion, doubt, malaise, anxiety, ignorance, ineptness. On other hand there occur some "happy" elements: flexibility in relating to other environmental demands, such as planning hunting absences; reasonable timing; more frequent opportunities to breed; and the possibility of introducing healthy practices; not to mention luckier males. Here are two behaviors, in primates and humans; they "could be" alike. But some mechanism generalizes and renders indistinct the human behavior. The words used to rate human against non-human instincts are many; observers find in the human instinctive structure "atrophy," "depression, " "generalization, " "abortion," "diffusion, " "disintegration," "vagueness," "blunting," "delay," and "suppression." Obviously we have many words to choose from in denoting the main peculiarity of human instincts. Pursuing the concepts of poly-identity and fear, and considering that we shall have to provide later on an operational and etiological system for whatever word we choose, we settle upon "delay," instinct delay. This can be postulated as a general suppression of brain-mediated responses to stimulus such that an instruction can intervene to make unreliable any response. Among instructions can be included decisions, so that one can imagine the delay as automatized, unconscious, or deliberate. Culture, that is, training and education, can affect both instructions and decisions. {S : POLY-EGO VERSUS INSTINCT} POLY-EGO VERSUS INSTINCT The basic product of the instinct delay is the poly-self. Assuming that several centers of the brain can become seats of an "ego," the delay of instinctive response will cause these centers to develop and exercise influence. The instinct delay produces milliseconds of "hesitation" and "doubt." This is enough for the several centers to sense a problem, that is, non-fulfillment of the instinctive loop of stimulus-response- extinction of impulse, and to react. The general consciousness is supplemented by a superior and dominating special brain center and several inferior but rival ones. The dominant consciousness now perceives its rivals and the "problem." It casts a pall of fear over the central nervous system, including itself. The problem of non-immediate fulfillment of the instinct impulse is complicated by the sense of competitive decision-making or instruction-giving centers associated with it. Hence the external fear of ourselves is established. Physiologically a low-level of Cannon's fear-flight effect, involving the adrenals, is produced. Now we have in operation: instinct delay, poly-ego, and existential fear. The person behaves accordingly. He seeks control of the laggard instincts and their wayward derivatives. He seeks to organize his poly-ego into an effective and more comfortable relationship. He tries to abolish his fear, which, after all, is nothing but a continuous play of the fear sensations of animal life and which, mistakenly, he treats as nothing more than an interminable chain of immediate fears. Man can and would like to fill infinity with his control activities. "... The overriding purpose of the behavior is an attempt to achieve some security and certainty for the person who feels threatened and insecure in an uncertain world. The possibility of controlling oneself and the forces outside oneself by assuming omniscience and omnipotence can give one a false illusion of certainty. Therefore the main ingredient is one of control." So writes L. Salzman on The Obsessive Personality. [21] Time and space concepts are great instruments for control. Man in effect enlarges the world by imposing more and more of a time frame behaviorally upon it. He obsessively connects himself with natural instruments of time-passage, hence time-reckoning. The same occurs in the space world. This is part of an irresistible expansion of Man's will to control, which is of course dependent only upon his insatiable need to control his head which in turn depends upon the unquenchable fear that fills his head (and total body libido). And the fear comes from his inability to execute promptly and certainly the numerous and varied, often contradictory, orders of the incoming stimuli. He is more agitated in civilized than in less complex, calmer societies, and more in rapidly changing than in "stagnant" cultures. And the inability is fostered by the blocking and diversion (displacement) and echoing of incoming orders. The brainwork involved is discussed in the next chapter. Control by evolutionary reversion is impossible. Man is unable to reestablish the instinctual basis of existence. He cannot speed up his responses and eradicate their derivatives, except that his attempts at doing so produce the astonishing phenomenon of culture. Nor can he put aside his centers in favor of "one king, one throne, one people." Nor finally can he do away with his fear. The failure to complete automatically his instinctual urges, the dissipation of these urges into bizarre forms, and the conflicts of his "split brain" guarantee a level of fear that would approach panic if it were not channeled into new worlds of activity and location. {S : "YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN"} "YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN" Animals possess analogues, structurally and functionally, to human compulsions, obsessions, displacements, identifications, and other human mechanisms. Further they can be trained and experienced so as to approach in limited ways the enormous human ability to alter behavior by training and experiencing. Chimpanzees use sticks to hit the ground, throw at predators, poke for termites (breaking off awkward projections), and choose the more suitable from a set of sticks. They can invent. Their females (and the gorillas') anticipate and protect their infants from potentially dangerous situations. They use sign-words and hover on the brink of making symbols of them. A mother rhesus monkey, whose young male has approached a female and aroused the leader, will divert the leader from chasing him by suddenly assuming an attentive position towards a remote point; this alerts him to his duties in foreign affairs and allows the rascal to escape. And so on [22] . What must be stressed is the unique human dependence upon these mechanisms. Humans are absolutely helpless without constructing these mechanisms. We can picture the situation as a trade-off. In return for losing a huge number of instinctive reactions, the human acquires an ability to reconstruct reactions quickly and in manifold forms. As loss of control occurs, fear erupts. The human seeks to return to the hominid and restore the animal mechanisms, but in marvelous ways. By continuously searching to retrieve his nature, man provides himself with thousands of behaviors of the same categories but inestimably greater in appearances and consequences. He even creates robots, near to absolutely instinctive "animals." Seen from one perspective, the human behavior is homologous to the animals. Seen from another, the human behavior is only analogous. Whether one opts for the former or the latter view is simply a question of whether to regard as important the phases that intervene between stimulus and response: instinct delay -loss of control - existential fear - diffused or diverted reaction. Since these phases create the human, we prefer the view that human behavior as a whole is only analogous to animal behavior, but that man and primate share homologous infrastructure and functions. The human adds a special neural loop to the stimulus-response cycle. Identification is strictly constrained among animals, for instance. The animal self is monolithic. An evanescent mother love of the bitch for her pup will only temporarily crack the stone of self. Yet one may not ignore the dog who anticipates the feelings and command of the master, and who may die in mourning upon his demise, a strong but narrow identification, possibly of human-like physiological origins. Fletcher, in his work on instincts, classified affection as instinctive in both animal and man. Affection consists of the satisfactions brought by a sense of identity, with sexual and control overtones, but, again, often exists side by side with resentment and hostility as ambivalence depending upon the apparent effectiveness of the controls being sought through identification. However, not only abundance and variety distinguish human from animal affections, but also self-consciousness. Insofar as a person is self-aware, his self-awareness will travel with his identifications and affections. But even in self-awareness, we should preserve the useful hypothesis, as put by Lashley, that "the rudiments of every human behavioral mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale and also represented even in primitive activities of the nervous system." [23] . Conflict and self-destructive behavior can be trained into a rat. Most ethologists seem presently to agree that the differences between man and other species, while apparently wide, are still differences in degree rather than in kind. This view may be correct on a phenotypical level; as stated, analogous behaviors can be extracted from man and beast. But this is not the crux of the matter. If the human utilizes a mechanism that duplicates animal behaviors but this mechanism is implicated at the same time in other functions which do not accompany the animal behavior, even though in some cases the animal uses other mechanisms for the implicated functions, we have an important structural difference. Phenotypically the behaviors may be alike, genotypically they operate differently. A bird may be musical, and so a man, but a bird can compose music rarely and never invents an instrument like a violin. This may have to do with such findings as that animals seem not to possess cerebral specialization in any manner like humans. No double dissociations, for example, have been reported in animals [24] . Even if it can be proven that "animals have an ability for perceiving rules, incorporating them, and then applying them to appropriate situations" it is not correct to add "whether or not this ability is learned or innate is not important.." [25] The vast role of training in human behavior is a proof of instinct delay. I cannot think of a more significant distinction on which to base a separation of species. Man is condemned to a life-work of completing his instincts. If he were not so proud of himself as a species, he would perhaps say that the transition from hominid to man offers a splendid example of regressive evolution. The individual is constitutionally unable to reinstinctivize himself. It is commonly imagined that humans can revert to the beast. Not if it is homo sapiens schizotypus whom we are discussing. Mental disease (i. e., schizophrenia) cannot cause such a reversion and does not in fact do so. A person is not genetically capable of becoming (by mental illness or otherwise) a healthy (or even unhealthy) mammal. Such a person can commit every imaginable peculiar or abnormal act, but it will be a human act. One should not be misled by the multitude of instances in which sometimes, in cults, ceremonies and mental illness, a person will play the role of a pig, bear, horse, etc., or for that matter, identify with clouds, angels, chairs, and rocks. This inherent incapacity to re-mammalize is one of the most persuasive proofs that a genetic mutation occurred in the final transition from hominid to human. For, even if human behavior had changed from the hominid to a new fixed behavior owing to a permanent change in environment, such as we shall later discuss, it would be possible to retreat from mental illness in the direction of mammalianism. That is, a way would be found to psychosomatize and build up a new chemico-electrical combination to supply a new type of person. It may be noted that when a mammal is driven into "insanity", it seems to become self-aware, that is, human, and when it is cured it reverts usually to its normal un-self-awareness. De-instinctivization is accompanied by another important development in the human, namely, individuation. A social group is forced to tolerate deviations, if only because its totalitarian intentions must founder upon the rocks of its inabilities. The individual must fail, as well, in his desperate attempts to control himself, that is, his alter ego. Much less can he attune himself perfectly to the modal group behaviors. Under such circumstances, the ideal of individualism evolves and prospers in the very presence of the ideal of group conformity. The person becomes ultimately aware that he is different from others, the gaps between the various demi-instincts and the required definite response in actions and habits become filled with his unique character. Each human can be different - and comes to think of himself as different - because he has a unique set of habits or activities to fill the gap between demi-instinctual response and definite practices as the norm. As with other animal-human analogues, the observations of Eihl-Eihesfeldt and Lorenz are illuminating but theoretically inconclusive. Their explanation of aggression comes down to the following: two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In the case of animals, two cannot eat the same morsel, couple with the same female, hide in the same small hole. When inflamed by the same desire at the same moment for the same object-use, they lack (permanently or temporarily) a sense of indirect consequences - which is to say, a sense of plan or of future - or they conceive of no other known solution; or when there are "actually" no consequences, beyond the encounter, that matter subjectively to all participants and the group, then a specific violent (or implicitly violent) exchange may occur. Next, animals that behave in groups have codes about their aggressive and other behavior. These codes both limit and enlarge the scope of dominating and violent behavior that may be expected in any representative set of encounters. In the case of man, the limits are so broad and the impulses so complicated that so far as we can tell, any innate tendency can be converted into a type of encounter that everyone concerned would regard as non-aggressive and, of course, aggressive. We conclude that homo schizo produces more behavioral effects than any species, as many as a great many species put together. When operating with a perceived challenge and under scientific rules, he can imitate or reproduce almost every animal behavior. He can reproduce his logical apparatus by computers. He can outwhistle birds, and decoy ducks. He can cut his birth fertility to nil, or stimulate multiple births by chemicals. He is the most flexible animal, the most individually varied, a virtuoso, a polymath, and so on. Prod his brain electrically and an endless flow of free associations and a stream of consciousness is verbalized, though it is neither free nor conscious. And what is in his mind is potentially in his behavior. Considering that his physiology is almost identical with certain primates and that the apparatus used for being human has been hitherto practically indistinguishable from them, we much seek the origins of his uniquely broad and sophisticated outputs in a freedom from instinctive binding. The search is just begun. We go on with it now, in the operations of the brain. {S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Search for Lost Instinct)} Notes (Chapter 2: The Search for Lost Instinct) 1. The Trauma of Birth, London: Kegan Paul, 1929, xiii., 104-5. 2. Realms of the Human Unconscious, London: Souvenir Press, 1979. 3. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, N. Y.: International Univ. Press, 1966. 4. The Future of Man, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1964; The Phenomenon of Man, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1961. 5. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, Bk 2, 448ff, N. Y.: Dover ed. 1959. 6. Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1934, 136-7. 7. 350, 349, et passim. 8. Ernest Hilgard, Divided Consciousness, New York: Wiley 1977, 1. 9. Op. cit., 142. 10. Highland, Op cit., 249. 11. Jeffrey Gray, op. cit., ch. 2; Stanley B. Rachman, Fear and Courage, San Francisco: Freeman, 1978. 12. Rachman, op. cit., 145. 13. Op. cit., 34. 14. Op. cit., 29. 15. The Idea of the Holy, London: Oxford U. Press, 1928. 16. New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, N. Y.: Norton, 1933, 118-9. 17. The Study of Instinct, London, 1950, ch. 1. 18. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, N. Y.: Liveright, 1950. 19. Ibid., 2. 20. Ibid., 30, 32. 21. 1968, 13-4. 22. M. R. A. Chance and C. J. Jolly, Social Groups of Monkeys, Apes and Men, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970, 165-8. 23. Quoted in Trevarthen, op. cit., 1951. 24. Hicks and Kinsbourne, in Marcel Kinsbourne, ed., Asymmetrical Function of the Brain, N. Y.: Cambridge U. Press, 1978, 523. cf. Trevarthen in the same work, 379. 25. Trevarthen, Ibid. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 3: } {T BRAINWORK} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE BRAINWORK The human skull is an impressive work of natural architecture, especially when bald. It seem to be an apt crown for a creature of will and decision. But look inside this formidable bone casing and see what a disappointing glob of ooze is the master of thought. Undifferentiated, it has a pasty white stuff over a grey matter, spangled with fibrils and fibers, the whole suffused with pink from countless blood vessels, and, if it could be dug into, it would reveal firmer membranes, and a chunky stem that connects to the long spinal chord. The differentiation of large areas is so vague that some surgical operations are couched in how many grams (of the 2000 or so) are removed or how many millimeters of depth one may safely penetrate. Unlike other organs in the body, the brain does not usually reject tissue transplants. This feature not only suggests that the chemistry of the brain is generalized but also why specific functions can locate here and there and relocate, too. Brain operations are delicate partly because we do not know what to be delicate about. Still, successful brain operations must be as old as the oldest settlements of mankind, because a number of ancient skulls exhibit trephinations, penetrations by bores and saws, and a subsequent healing and continued life. What came out is unknown or perhaps the aim was to relieve pressure; there is, after all, little reason to believe that the atmospheric pressure on earth, or the electrical pressure for that matter, have remained conveniently the same. Anyone who has confused brains with "sweetbreads" at a butcher shop will agree that "the brain has many characteristics of a gland." And R. Bergland and R. Page go on to say: "it contains hormones, it is bathed in hormones, it has hormone receptors, hormones may serve as its synaptic neurotransmitters, and hormones modify the brain's main function, behavior. .. Endorphin and other hormones may be produced in small quantities locally within the brain but transported in larger quantities from the pituitary to the brain on demand." [1] We see one reason for the brain's innocuous appearance now: its innumerable cells are like a massive inelegant hotel, in and out of which hordes of tourists flit. It houses a great many transactions. This grand hotel is well lit. It is completely electrified. Every neuron is an electrical capacitator. The hormones could not move so readily otherwise. For the brain lacks muscle to lever the hormones about, and it is insulting slang to call a man a "musclebrain." The blood capillaries of the brain are very numerous and carry around the food of the cells and remove their excrement. They also transport hormones to their work sites. If the mechanical pumping system is out of order, even for a few minutes, and the hormones do not get to work, many brain cells asphyxiate and the lights go out forever. The capillaries may burst, too, from time to time; the larger the rupture, the greater the damage, but the location of the stroke is more important; vital faculties may be impaired. Although the brain can switch many functions around its inchoate mass, there is a limit to its versatility. Its liability to asphyxiations and strokes does not mean that the brain is overworked. A persuasive case can be made for the belief that humans have far more brain matter, especially of the highly touted "grey matter," than is needed for normal functions. J. Lorber found a "socially completely normal" young man with a large cranium, a 126 I. Q., and a first class honors degree in mathematics, but with cerebrospinal fluid taking the place of at least nine-tenths of the normal complement of cerebral tissue. Highly excited and continually enraged characters are sometimes subjected to leucotomies in which, perhaps emulating unknowingly the ancestral practice, some material of the frontal lobe is cut or burned away like a malignant tumor, leaving the patient afterwards somewhat dulled but relaxed. One wonders whether there is a disproportion between the storage capacity and the practical facilities, among other problems, so that the active behavioral outlets are technologically backward. Perhaps this might account for the displeasurable unsatisfied agitation of people, who sense too much, undergo spasmodic muscular urges, and want to express an impossible number and variety of thoughts. Suppose infants were to be typically relieved of some of their cerebral matter, in a practice like circumcision. (Frantically crying small children have been experimentally leucotomized, in fact.) How would they develop? Would they be nicer to their parents? Then Bleuler would not have to laugh at those who, he said, attributed insanity to the lack of family discipline. They might even be relieved of one of the two hemispheres of the brain, preferably not the left hemisphere, which seems to have some rational qualities. One would hardly know the difference - after all, who knows that a person is going about with a kidney removed? - and, as we shall see, some difficult human problems might be solved. For one thing, everyone, without exception, would be right-handed; this would represent a considerable social gain and relieve many people's anxieties. But it might handicap the ten per cent or so of genetic left-handers whose left brain is on the right, and they would lose some of their more "rational" faculties! This could be prevented by waiting until the handedness of the infant is proven, but would leave society with its left- handers. Still, the government might wish to allow another ten per cent or some percentage to lose their left hemisphere as a low-budget method of supporting arts and culture, we would have an anatomically generated group inclined to be musicians, poets, and artists who will be right-handed, but in other major respects distinct from the rest of the population; they would probably not understand fully the joys of mathematics, logic and spelling; the caste system, sought for thousands of years in India and elsewhere, would become a fact. {S : THE ANIMAL BASEMENT} THE ANIMAL BASEMENT Little is known of brainwork, but what is known can carry us surprisingly far in our conception of human nature. It is well, first, to remind ourselves of how the human brain and central nervous system relate to their lower class relatives of the animal kingdom, and how much of human activity begins, and ends, in the basement. Then we can suggest where to look in the central nervous system, especially in the brain, for the source of those operations that are peculiarly human: the activations and transmission system, the electric and chemical processes, and the proneness to specialization of functions found in the cerebrum. With this knowledge, we may venture such hypotheses as appear plausible on the dozen or so aspects of human nature that are the hallmarks of this book: the poly-selves, control, anxiety, instinct-delay, displacements and projections, memory, obsessions, habits, language and symbols, pragmatism and sublimation. Animals sense their surroundings - smells, chemicals, sights, temperatures and so on. Their sensitivity can be more varied, greater, subjectively "more ingenious" than the human's, or less. Like man, "an animal does not react to all the changes in the environment which its sense organs can receive, but only to a small part of them." [2] (A carnivorous water beetle does not attack and devour a tadpole simply if it sees one, but it will attack any solid object, tadpole or not, if a kind of "smell of meat" arouses it.) Internal operations of the nervous system must contribute "motive" in animals. Thus Tinbergen goes on to say: There is a mutual relationship between internal and external factors in the sense of an additive influence on the motor response. A high intensity of one factor lowers the threshold for the other factors. A high hormone level increases the responsiveness to external stimulation; if the hormone level is low, very intensive external stimulation is required to bring the total of causal factors above threshold value. Automatic centers of the Central Nervous System maintain a continuous flow of impulses to central nervous motor mechanisms; but some kind of block prevents an uncontrolled and chaotic discharge of muscles. The discharge requires adequate stimulation by signs typical to the species, whereupon an innate releasing mechanism removes the blockage. All of this about the CNS and instincts of animals apply to humans. Rigidity of instincts and behaviors, and the restriction of choice and decision, in animals, generally are more than among most humans but are not to be exaggerated. That food cannot divert animals from sex and vice versa is of course incorrect, and so on to the confusion of decision-making, that is, the selection of what drive to pursue and how far, which is vulgarly considered to be a human problem alone. Any animal can take a long time to make up its mind - too long, in many cases, and disaster or failure or good fortune may result. In the thirty years since Tinbergen wrote his book on animal instincts, ethology has run wild and is pressing upon the sacred functions of the human mind. We need to be most cautious in our defense, consequently. The cerebrum of higher animals directs the hypothalamus to cause the pituitary gland to stimulate by an "adrenocorticotrophic" hormone the adrenal medula to exude catacholamines and the adrenal cortex to emit corticosteroids that plague the motor and nervous system from the brain to the toes for action. The hypothalamus governs the pituitary gland, controls the clocks of the brain, alerts the body to changes soon to occur, and synchronizes the performance of the endocrines throughout the body. The hypothalamus, buried deep in the brain, is so widespread among animal species that it is unlikely to be the source of distinctive human behavior or to have changed to become so. The fact that it is responsive to cerebral signals suggests that the "human- disease", when it affects the whole system just described, originates in the cerebrum. The human anatomy offers essentially three brains, it is true -four, if the cerebral hemispheres are accorded autonomous status. One is reptilian (the archicortex), one from the lower animals (the mesocortex), and one from the higher animals (the neocortex). A. Koestler has argued that grave problems arise for humans because of "insufficient coordination between archicortex and neocortex [3] . He ascribes intellectual operations to the new brain, and emotional behavior to the lower, older systems. MacLean refers also the "schizophysiology" of the limbic, as the older is called, and the neocortical system, saying that the old brain provides a crude and confused animalistic and nonsymbolic picture of the outer world [4] . Koestler proceeds to the theory that rational behavior, housed in the neocortex, is interrupted, disorganized and overwhelmed often by the activity and responses of the older systems. I cannot follow this reasoning. For one thing, it could take no account of the late splurge of research into inter-hemispheric differences and of late electrochemical research. More significantly, the theory seems to be based upon an old theory of human nature, the mind and body distinction, the reasons-and-emotions duality, the rational- irrational distinction, that has led psychological theory nowhere. The human can be viewed as fully nonrational, or as rational, but so can the earthworm. H. J. Morowitz has gone the limit and asks sympathetically, "Can Bacteria Think?" They are human-like in tissue, functions, and genetic coding. They respond to varied stimuli, exhibiting sensing, big-clocks, memory, and aimed organic mobilization (decision). The human is, of course, very different on traits that humans deem important. The cerebral cortex or neocortex activates intensely and overall when stimulated by pain or strong anxiety. Blood flow, metabolism, and electrical fields and discharges increase. The person becomes alert to the self and the world around him. There is no question that the pragmatic philosophers were correct in assigning to anxiety, to the sense of problems, the major role in problem solving efforts, hence intelligence. Man would like to solve his problems by automatic reflexes but he must feel pain and anxiety, both specifically and generally before he can perceive the problem, and while he works upon it and resolves it. The cerebral cortex, for all the noble brow it presents and the most important tasks assigned to it, results from a slap-dash design. Surprisingly, when the subject is at rest and awake, in a comfortable supine position with eyes closed in a silent laboratory and neither spoken to or touched, the pattern of flow throughout the cortex is not uniform. On the contrary, the flow is always substantially higher in the front part of the cortex than in the central or rear parts [5] . The density of blood vessels is the same hence "the remarkable difference in flow rate suggests that the overall activity level of the front part of the resting brain is about 50 percent higher than that of the rear parts." [6] Apparently, as expected, the aware human is spending his quiet time "getting his head together." The phrases are: "busy planning and selecting" behaviors; "focused on inner thoughts, particularly on reflections on one's own situation;" "simulation of behavior." Notable is the fact that the perennially excited frontal region of the brain seems to suffer from poor evolutionary logistics, a merely ordinary blood circulatory system. It is as if Washington, D. C., had the same postal system as Detroit, but the employees worked longer hours. The situation suggests that the evolutionary saltation or quantavolution which precipitated mankind, in order to evade helpless confusion, may have selected large frontal brain mass but that this expansion in volume did not result in all-around equalized work assignments in coping with the problems presented. Widespread among animals and working to all intents and purposes as it does in man, is the neuro-transmission system. In humans, neural impulses are passed from one neuron or nerve cell to another; 10 billion neurons, these with their projecting fibriles - an axon to emit a message, dendrites to receive them - are half in the brain and half elsewhere in the body. No two neurons are chemically the same, because, said Polyak once, "All neurons have different shapes." [7] And they carry differently shaped muscles along their dendrites, too, according to Crick. Between any two neurons exists a gap, a synapse, where chemical neurotransmitters wait like boats to ferry messages among the neurons. There may be a dozen types of boats; a few pick up a message merely to dump it, while the others transmit their messages dutifully. An increased electrical potential of a neuron, relative to an adjacent neuron, makes it emit a charge which rides a chemical molecule, the neurotransmitter, across the synapse gap to hand it over to the adjacent neuron. The neurotransmitter then breaks down like the exhausted messenger in King Lear. It seems a great waste to lose these myriad molecules when they might be left to ferry many another charge between neurons; perhaps it is to keep the hormone factories humming. This island-hopping path may be considered "slow" or "fast" depending upon what kind of speculation one is indulging in. Speeds of a mile a minute are common. Delays here may be significant in letting messages go elsewhere. Also the messages may not get through because of the insufficiency of neurotransmitters to carry them and because of sabotage by other boatsmen. The neurons are exercised to do their part. They beat electrically in the nervous system's rhythm of perhaps ten times a second. "Neurons... have electrical beats, and large numbers of them beat in place, as armies marching in step. When impulses come in, from the eyes particularly, the neurons begin to scintillate, to get out of step with each other, and the brain wave rhythm breaks up." So says Ralph Gerard [8] . Too much synchronization gives tubular vision, too strict an attention to one thing. Too weak a synchronization would promote inattention and flightiness. Perhaps, thinks Gerard, the strictness would depress attention and be a cause of mental depression; perhaps slackness would elicit anxiety, mania, even epilepsy. We say, yes, this is an old and common system, but we can see in it some possibilities of human peculiarities. Gerard gives us more food for thought: the thresholds for messages crossing the gaps fluctuate; electron movement, Brownian movement, and other factors vary at any given synapse. If this were not the case, every input would excite exactly the same output. Innovation would be as minimal as with spinal and emotional reflexes. With threshold fluctuations the same, stimulus may vary the paths of its impulses and thus favor innovation. Of course, he suggests, in this case there would be less coherence and more flights of ideas. {S : THE LOCATION OF INSTINCT DELAY} THE LOCATION OF INSTINCT DELAY We wonder whether the synapse may be the location of the instinct-delay that we regard as the basic glory and problem of humans. Gerard points out that The synapse can only be present because it is important not to have a message go through on an express track from one receptor to one effecter. Otherwise, why break the nerve path and cause slowing, the chance of confusion, and all the rest? The synapse permits changeability, allows the units to connect now this way, now that way... Every synapse is thus, in effect, a decision point. A message comes to it from the pre- synaptic fiber; does it go out over the post-synaptic one or doesn't it go out? That is the decision the nervous system makes - at a near infinity of places and times [9] . Many animals have the same system, indistinguishable in detail from the human. Let us grant that here may be the source of animal decision-making, for instance the determination to hunt rather than rest, or simply to rest rather than move. With this, I see two possibilities for the "Human Difference." We may have a pollution problem: the human system may be dumping so many neurotransmitters and neuro-inhibitors into the synaptic canals that messages cannot pass or cannot pass clean. This would occur, say, if the human endocrine glands were overbusy at a constant rate, whether from mutation or some physiological constant, environmentally induced. Suppose that dopamines, which are neurotransmitters, generally clutter the passages: the results would be a universal set of schizophrenic behaviors. Remove a large proportion of them and we revert to the hominid. The present interest in dopamine receptors in the brain and elsewhere highlights the electro-chemical complexity of the human being. Dopamine neuroreceptors are more numerous in the brains of diagnosed schizophrenics, especially in the limbic area and the candat nucleus. Depressing the receptors suppresses schizophrenic symptoms. The energizers of the dopamine receptors are numerous drugs, some of which exist naturally in the body. Does a particular diet or food do so? Does an atmospheric gas do so? A particle? An ion as attached, for example, to oxygen? Does ambient stress level? Does climate? (hot, cold, damp. . . ?) Winds? Could a combination of these stress the hominid to the point of humanness? And persist permanently? The body absorbs a continuous supply of small negative ions, negatively charged molecules. There are some 1000 to 2000 ions per cubic centimeter of air over open land, in a ratio of five positive to four negative, according to Soyka and Edmonds [10] . Many reports declare overdoses of positive ions are unhealthy, inducing overproduction of serotonin and emotional imbalance and listlessness. A. P. Dubrov has assembled a volume of studies, many of them from the Soviet Union, on the effects that the geomagnetic field has upon the biosphere, including humans [11] . The two effects - the ion and geomagnetic - are related, and both are implicated in brain activity. At today's levels, they condition the anxiety level of humans, and the behavior of plants and animals. Whether the present rates were established in the course of human evolution is important for explaining human nature today, but is consigned to the volumes on Homo Schizo I and The Lately Tortured Earth for discussion. How these phenomena affect the speed of mental operations and memory recall is unknown. Like people, who pollute their own environments, the brain is frequently its own poisoner. For, in a coup d'‚tat which may have occurred at the time of humanization, the "higher center" of the brain seized most of the power to requisition the drug supplies of the body and to order the manufacture of more. Even though a hemo- encephalic barrier exists to protect cerebral tissues from most of the drugs going though the body tissues, the barrier can be breached by concussions, intoxication, and "affective storms" which result from the sudden flushing of the brain with certain hormones. The storm could originate from traumatic fear - accident, rape, battle, etc. Acute states of anxiety ensue. If "continuous and successive, they might weaken the hemo-encephalic barrier, causing an increase in permeability, and, consequently, the affective ability of the individual." [12] The instability of the cortex is rendered more possible by its separation by other barriers from the midbrain extra-pyramidal apparatus. Cortical agitation may itself promote increased stress on itself, also, and on the central nervous system if it breaks up, as for example happens temporarily in hypnosis; its transactions with the midbrain and limbic system through the extra-pyramidal apparatus are destabilized. A baffling problem is presented in that no single substance seems to control any given behavior of the human or his brainwork. The brain has a great many endorphins and peptides, which are identical with hormones found throughout the body. What instructions do they convey? Are they coded or merely combined in their association with other substances and electrical charges? The flow of adrenaline from the adrenal medulla, a neural tissue atop the kidneys, is excited by nerve fibers which can ultimately be excited by the cerebral cortex. Electroconvulsive therapy, for example, applied to the brain, activates the adrenal medulla. Drugs can motivate cerebral activity but also distort it. Since enhanced motivation always presents the problem of its control, the distorted attitude is most likely out of control. The pituitary gland is associated with the brain, part of it being composed of brain tissues. It emits perhaps a dozen hormones. These affect growth; they stimulate thyroid gland activity, the sexual organs, pigmentation; they influence blood pressure; and so on. These processes and many others in endocrinology are not well understood yet. Substances come from several sources; they may have specific or general inhibitors. They may affect several organs, their quantities do not have well-measured effects. When later we speak of displacements, the multi-functional overlap in behavior affecting endocrinology becomes a factor of importance; it invites confusion (including perversions) in the absence of intense directiveness toward a goal. If one also asks only which gland or organ is the most important determinant of human nature, one would have to give the traditional answer: the brain, and particularly the cerebral cortex. All else is almost indistinguishably animal and no peculiar human operations have been noted for any function or secretions. We cannot discount the possibility of a constant change of a quantitative nature in the total endocrinal system or even in the adrenals that would place the human in a distinctive drug environment, compelling him to behave differently - to think, to talk, to make war, to have gods. However, if this has happened, it is because of a "decision," a forced and involuntary command, of the cerebral cortex. It orders its own drugs, its own blood supply, its own electrical currents and charges. It can both reduce and increase its orders: that is the vital point. It may appear, all too early, that I am coming to the idea of the World as Will, to use Hegel's expression, so I must say that I am exceedingly aware of the complex interaction occurring inside the human and between the human and his environment. Homo sapiens schizotypus is not at all the traditional idea of cerebral homo sapiens sapiens. The human cerebrum, we hypnotically repeat to ourselves, is much larger than the primates', even if exceeded by the elephants'. If the human central nervous system, including the endocrine glands, is not proportionately increased in size, we have a situation where electrical and chemical supplies have to be generated or, if not generated, then rationed among a vastly greater number of neurons and synapses. This, although working against the first mechanism of Human Difference - pollution and excess - would yet have the same effect, of confusion, dispersion and delay by frequent non-achievement of synaptic threshold requirements, overworking feedback signals for more supplies. Far more displacements would occur. The most "ridiculous" and "irrelevant" behaviors and thoughts would be normal. A chronic general anxiety would be present: justified fears of failure coupled with continuous interference in the completion of tasks. This begins to look like the Human Difference. That the speed of neural activity accounts for differences among species is unquestionable. Alexander von Muralt has called "saltatory conduction" a great advance in evolution [13] . The speed with which nerve impulses are transmitted is lowest in primitive forms and highest in mammals. It is 25 meters per second at 20 deg C in myelinated (sheathed) frog nerves to 100 meters in mammals. The velocity depends upon the conducting mechanism, the diameter of the fibre, the myelinisation of the fibre, and the ambient temperature. The cephalopod nerve must carry a far heavier bulk of fibre and consume much more oxygen to carry the same message as a frog nerve. The frog nerve relies upon tubular sheaths of high-resistant protein, myelin, to concentrate the passing electrical impulse, and upon feeding the impulse at nodal intervals between sheaths with ions and dyes to accelerate it by leaps from one sheathed interval to the next. Mammals have evidently a more efficient system than the amphibious frog. Experimentation is in too early a stage to distinguish between man and primates with respect to their relative efficiencies in saltatory conduction. That man's conduction velocity may be less, or may put strains on the supply of charges and accelerators is conceivable; humiliating though it might be to possess a "regressive" evolution, this could promote a generally higher level of nervous tension, hence "intelligence." Holding neural speed constant in all "higher" animals, there would still exist a speed problem with humans. We should inquire whether the human brain expanded coincidentally with humanization or "long before." If the two happened together, humanization might be the effect of slowed responses owing to greater synaptic distances. In the simplest model, two types of distances are involved in a stimulus response. Thus: the left hand transmits a feeling through the central nervous system to the right brain hemisphere, which feels "hot" but must transmit the information through the intervening fibers of the corpus callosum to the language center of the left brain, which then forms the words "it's hot !" for the voicing apparatus to exclaim. First, does the large size of the right cerebral hemisphere make any difference to the speed of the impulse of the heat signal? Second, does the distance traversed within the brain to inform the left brain mean another delay? Third, does the distance from the language center to the exclamation center and then the voice muscles add more delay? The answer in all three cases is probably "yes." Unfortunately, we are not in a position today to know these three speeds, nor those of a primate with which we would compare them. The interhemispheric transfer time has been studied and times of from 3 to 28.5 milliseconds have been obtained for fairly comparable tests. R. Puccetti, calculating that a flash of light through the left visual field to the right hemisphere, thence to the left hemisphere for conscious reporting, would take 9.75 msec for a certain subject, reasons that perhaps twice this time, 19.50 msec, would be required for the right hemisphere to 'know' that the signal had been completed; that is, only after 19.5 msec would the transaction be fully perceived. He believes the delay must be unconsciously perceived but suppressed, "fudged over", to use the vernacular [14] . Swanson and Kinsbourne found interhemispheric transfer times of from 2 msec to 21 msec depending upon the degree of uncertainty and displacement of location with which the subjects were presented the stimulus; the findings led them to doubt that the interhemispheric delay was significant [15] . The difference between 21 and 2 was assigned to the searching process. The authors grant the simplicity of the test. Even a minimal difference would be greatly enlarged if the brainwork had to zig-zag many times across the corpus callosum. (An experiment with a cat showed a first interhemispheric crossing of under 10 msec velocity and a second interhemispheric delayed response to occur 40 to 50 msec after the initial response.) Swanson, Ledlow and Kinsbourne conclude that "crossing the structural link does take time, but the time is short and is overshadowed by other factors that involve how the subject distributes attention before stimulus presentation and how the stimulus directs attention after presentation. '' [16] This generalizes from tests so simple that ordinary animal behavior must involve many times the interhemispheric delay. And only in the case of humans is there a significant specialization that would necessitate interhemispheric transfer and coordination in a large proportion of brainwork and behavior. The human exercises many of his important qualities through myriad transfers. When a hemisphere is performing one of its special functions, high electrical measures register, by contrast with the opposing hemisphere. The activity is evidenced in high average evoked potentials (AEP) and in electroencephalogram beta waves [17] . These results confirm that the experiencing which is taking place in one hemisphere is not occurring strongly in the other [18] . Under such circumstances, there must ensue over time a great many contradictions between the left and right brains, in memory, method, and predispositions of attitudes and behavior. Every new experience therefore requires more preparatory transfers for coordination and planning. The "ever restless human mind" thus must be more than a metaphor and more than an abnormality of some people. To behave as a whole unity, decisively, with both hemispheres, requires continuous trade-offs of impressions. If enough cannot be done while awake, dreamwork must go on apace. Here, too, is a source of obsession. Transfer dyssymmetry of several types occurs analogous to coordinating two allied armies on a battle front, one can never be sure that all are agreeable, informed, supplied, and prepared for action, and the action carries its own nasty surprises. But, before going further with the potentialities of the bicameral brain for producing human nature, a brief statement of the situation may be in order. Many studies have appeared in the past few years [19] . An impetus was provided by the availability of persons who had undergone a commissurectomy in which the cord of fibres constituting that giant commissure, the corpus callosum, was severed. With this, the great part of all direct connections between the two cerebral hemispheres is broken. The left side of the brain is not privy to new information or signals presented to the right brain, and vice versa. The patient is not apparently abnormal; indeed, if the operation were performed to block epileptic seizures, he feels better, because the electric storming of the right hemisphere cannot cross the chasm of severance so as to storm the left hemisphere. Sperry wrote: "Everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left each of these people with two separate minds, that is, with two separate spheres of consciousness," [20] -together, we would add, with the general consciousness discussed above. The gist of the studies, whether carried out upon normal brain structures or commissurectomized ones, is that the brainwork of the two hemispheres differs. Although either hemisphere can carry on all known mental operations alone, when the two sides are coordinated in the normal manner, each has its special functions and "superiorities." "Asymmetries are in general present at birth or in early childhood or even in utero.. very probably genetically determined.. not absolute, but are distributed along the spectrum.." [21] The left hemisphere, which, contrastingly, connects with the right side of the body, is called dominant (except that in true left-handers the right hemisphere is dominant), not so much because it specializes in the logical and analytic processes, and verbal and mathematical functions, as because it controls the right hand. The right hemisphere specializes in spatial orientation, arts and crafts, recognitions of whole images, and music and acoustics, including vowels but not consonants. Generally the left brain is more localized, the right more diffuse and prehuman [22] . Yet something of all of these occurs in both hemispheres. Some of it is culturally induced; fluent Japanese speakers carry their vowels on the left, westerners on the right [23] . The right hemisphere (until the Japanese case came along) was described by some students as feminine, the seat of intuition and artistic taste, whereas the left was labeled rational and correct. Memory is notably diffused throughout the brain, although a single hemisphere or less could store more memories than one could ever recall. A hemisphere is insensitive to its sources. It does not footnote a datum as coming from outside or from across the corpus callosum. In fact the brain receives, recognizes and stores information and sensory bits without discrimination. They all become electrochemical transmissions whether they begin as caviar or cacophony. Once they reach the brain the transmissions generate resonances in a number of cells, sometimes widespread, sometimes localized. If they are intensive experiences, they resonate thousands of times on top of the electrical rhythms already present in the cell. They dig in especially where similar circuits already are patterned, and both reinforce, refer to, and learn from (are modified by) the preexisting patterns. Discriminations of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste are created in the brain. A taste of nectar is a gang of electrically resonating cells with experiences of sweet things from the mouth. A mild electrical stimulation of related cells in the brain might provide an even sweeter taste. The latest model of the brain - and there have been many before - views it as a repository of holograms. A hologram is a global representation of an object produced by two laser beams, one focused on the object prior to interfering with the other beam, and the interference pattern can record itself on a photographic plate with what our brains regard as verisimilitude. Karl Pribram has illustrated the holographic process by a tennis novice watching an expert play. As he observes, his brain makes transformations of the whole configuration, activating and impressing the appropriate motor patterns. That is, the brain resonates to the watched behavior and is reminiscent of the gestalt theory of learning and problem solution [24] . In his treatise on the brain, Pribram points out that any piece of an artificial hologram film reproduces the whole of the figure, which, if analogous in the brain, means that every cell or a great many clusters of cells might contain total images of much that enters the brain. This may be why, in so many instances, a lesion of the cerebrum is compensated for, the brain being in this regard one of the most dispensable tissues of the body. In addition, the hologram concept lets one explain better one of the two basic types of logic engaged in by the brain to simulate the recapture of primate instinct, the analogue and the digital logics. Without reliance upon the calculating modes of the left hemisphere or of speech, the right-handed person can employ his left hemisphere on a parity basis with his right in accomplishing instant intuitions of the connections between all manner of distantly related objects, memories, and ideas by superimposing new holograms upon old and reacting to the new experiences in the light of the old. The brain is perhaps receiving and storing prior holograms in the millions, and is recognizing its own when its ordinary feat is duplicated outside, as artificial holography. Animal brains must make holograms too. The point is that humans may be making two sets for each hemisphere. Such a situation may have grave consequences, because the two hemispheres are not identical and add different resources to the process. The division of holograms, together with the specialization found in each hemisphere, and even adding the delays occurring in interhemispheric transmission, cannot overcome the centralization forced by the pragmatic needs of the one body, the shared limbic and midbrain elements, and the central nervous system and musculature otherwise. There exists a sensation of consciousness pervading the whole brain down to the stem. For example, a concussion will usually act to depress generally all electrical activity; the localized blow is referred generally. Again, in a 15-year-old right- handed boy, callosally sectioned, the right hemisphere could not initiate speech, but could understand nouns and verbs, could carry out oral commands and could write with the left hand [25] . S. J. Diamond describes a circuit that spans the whole brain from the parietal lobe on one side to the opposite parietal lobe, and which encounters the corpus callosum in passing [26] . Giraud describes a global sensory psychic experiencing, common to man and animals, that arises out of the sympathetic nervous system, glandular secretions and muscular tone [27] . Jerison warns against overemphasizing localization and specialization, which may be useful to isolate parts of the system in order to study them more easily: "recent evidence points to the waking brain as being a complex interactive system in which truly isolated functional systems probably never occur." [28] Sommerhoff, who ignores the "split brain" entirely in his large treatise on the Logic of the Mind, writes "In terms of internal representations the unity of the physical self finds expression in a family of characteristic transformation expectations the brain assimilates during ontogenesis." The unity of the whole self requires the additional inner representations where the object is seen by the observer who knows he is observing. Thus the self comes from experiencing, and is the record of experiences and expectations of further experiencing. The source of consciousness appears to be still in the brain stem. From there, even in commissurectomized subjects, some alternative - that is both left and right side - operations are controlled. Such operations "are capable of exercising a metacontrol over the higher processes of consciousness." [29] This would be the animal consciousness, not self-awareness. How vulnerable the unity of the self is, and yet how adamant everyone is, including ourselves, about the self being an absolute unity. The analogy of a social organization comes to mind. It is in a perennial conflict between the division of labor and centralization. As Kinsbourne has pointed out, bilateralism, by which he means a highly coordinated dualism of the hemispheres (for learning, perception, memory, and volition, as his own effective investigations have shown, are independently able in each hemisphere), is not needed for linear information processing, hence specialization [30] . This is a matter of dispute. And a certain amount of information is dualistic. It must be stressed that specialization in the brain is not complete in any respect, no more than the division of labor in society is ever absolute (there is always a shoemaker or tailor at work despite the great factories). Brain specialization is limited to a dominant ganging or bunching of cells such that they alone respond (or do not respond) unless they are excised, in which event the minor gangs take over their functions, on a reduced level at first, then increasingly so, and sometimes with full capacitation. The union shop, when on strike, so to speak, finds its work taken on by less skilled scabs. We can assume that even the very minor specialized bunches here and there are active all the time. It may be these which are responsible for some of the competitive mutual inhibitions, as well as collaboration, between the hemispheres that Kinsbourne has noted [31] . Hoppe speaks of the quantitative and qualitative impoverishment of the dreams, fantasies, and symbols of commissurotomized patients, laying it to an interrupted preconscious interhemispheric stream [32] . He suggested that a "functional commissurotomy" may be present in some severe psychoses. That the hemispheres can pull themselves apart functionally seems no more absurd than the known cases of total hysterical paralysis or catatonism. J. Levy argues that differentiation of functions which are lateralized is a result of competition whereby speech and language, e. g., develop in the dominant hemisphere and displace less elaborate psychic processes such as patterning images into the opposite sphere [33] . The source of this pushy competitiveness must be humanly genetic. Anatomical and physiological differences between cerebral hemispheres develop in the human foetus [34] . "Non-human animals have not been demonstrated to possess cerebral specialization in any manner similar to humans, that is, no double dissociations have been reported in nonhuman mammals." [35] The genetic impetus may have originated in a mutation to the large cerebrum, with a neural "weakness for data collection and transfer" in one hemisphere, which required continuous orderly attention. That these minor locales may be disaffected is not an extreme view; the researchers, perhaps in their exuberance, speak of contradictions. When callossally sectioned, one hemisphere can be led to think and act angrily against the other. Are we to believe that there is no tension between left and right brains in the presence of specialism, when the corpus callosum is exchanging not only sensory information - albeit sometimes traumatic - but novel commands to change itself, give up its habits? Hence sensations of hesitation, doubt, reflection, disobedience may be part of interhemispheric relations since a hemisphere does not know the source of a message, it cannot be declared that doubt and disobedience and fear are "external" sensations, incapable of being incited from a source within, namely the opposing hemisphere. Nor should we ignore another reciprocating effect of specialization. In society as a whole, a tendency to specialize intensifies efforts at coordination. The same logic may apply to interhemispheric relations. A great many more messages will flow as the brain specializes. This may occur in a given lifetime and be more cultural than genetic. The civilized capabilities are left-brain and may be at the basis of the larger ever- present anxiety of the civilized person. {S : HANDEDNESS} HANDEDNESS Handedness, usually to the right, may itself be an important factor in precipitating humanization. It is genetically predisposed. For example, newly born infants turn four times more to the right than to the left. It seems quantitative in its intensity; it can be ranked by how much it dominates a person's relevant activity. It can be altered and reinforced by training. Injury to the dominant hemisphere can of course affect it partly or totally. Handedness is observable in some mammals, for instance lions [36] and various monkeys. It may have been elicited and stressed because human activity was being stymied by conflict and hesitation in the brain. A hand and the right one was potentiated, had to be given preference. The novel decisions (calculating, symbolizing) were being made by the left brain; perhaps it could not count upon the right brain passing the commands to the left hand without blocking or censorship. Otherwise why would not the left brain have resigned the extra quantum of dextrousness to the left hand under the control of the right brain? And passed its share of manual tasks to the right brain to execute, as the right brain does now do it? The latter "choice" makes it appear that either the dominant brain by its peculiar specialization otherwise makes for dexterity, or that dexterity induces specialization in one hemisphere. But what do language, abstraction, logic, and symbolism have to do with dexterity? Is it sheerly genetic coincidence that the two are enclosed in the same hemisphere? The right brain could use dexterity, or bilateralism, as well. Music, sounds, spatialism, images: these need a right hand also. Nonetheless, a right-hander is left-brained altogether. And the brains of mammals, including primates, are only slightly asymmetrical, and behave, with clumsy hands, more like two right-brain human hemispheres. The apparent solution for the human effect is to introduce a third factor, the fear of loss of control owing to the onset of left-brain specialization. Owing to a pressing need to specialize, whether genetic or electrochemical, a leadership or dominance problem is presented. "Somebody has to be boss" in the face of increased inputs of unresolved differential impulses, attention and decisions between the two hemispheres. "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease." Let the left brain, which is causing the new problems and is even physically enlarged to a degree, take the initiatives and give it the baton, the hand, the already most developed instrument for dealing with the world. Sperry reported that monkeys with sectioned commisures accept either of two contradictory solutions to a problem, one solution coming from the left, the other from the right. Not so man. For matters in the right-handed domain, the left brain insists upon its solution even if wrong and forces the left hand to give in, if necessary. In its few manual competences, the right hemisphere does the same. It must be one hand, not two, else the problem will be sent "back to the drawing boards." Species changes are rarely neat. A solution is piled upon unresolved problems. New tissue is made of old. A new task is given to an old bone. Two holes become a nose, two feet a fishtail. In cats and monkeys, personality, temperament, coordination, internal functions, alertness, activity, achievement of learning, and responses - all remain the same after the corpus callosum is severed [37] . Bilateral symmetry persists, rather uselessly, in the brain. The hominid surrendered bilaterality and gained a human mind. Human nature begins with an unbalanced brain and a determined hand. Dexterity by its very existence reinforces poly-egoism. Apart from what may be happening in the brain (though never separated from it), the full anatomical laterality, manifest in a thousand ways, makes itself felt as a division between major and minor modes, dominance and subordination, ruler and ruled. The dominant body side is even sensed as heavier, Ornstein has pointed out. When someone slaps his own forehead guiltily (usually with his dominant hand) and says "I could kick myself," it would probably be with his dominant foot. The brain as such is an insensitive organ, so we feel no contradiction in the left brain dominating the right side of the body. Hence the right (though representing the left brain in action) is obviously authoritative in legend, custom, law, politics, work, and other practice [38] . The right is morally right. Right-sided behavior and authority are connected. Since the right side is authoritative, the opposite of authoritative is antiauthoritarian. Often it is "leftist." We may surmise that also in the individual the left-side is anti-authoritarian. The basic polyego is of a ruler and ruled, but the ruled is frequently anti-authoritarian, a leftist. In authoritarian cultures the left-handed are said to use the "wrong" hand (e. g. Alsace, France). In administering a pretest of a national survey questionnaire, employing the occasion of an all-female meeting of Planned Parenthood, a birth control group appealing to independent-minded women, I observed that the baker's dozen of members present were all left-handed. I received incredulous and suspicious reactions when I remarked about it afterwards. An experiment may be presumed that would demonstrate that persons protesting an imagined "capture" by another party (paranoia) will reveal the resentment against the offense by uncoordinated hand behavior when compared with authority-accepting subjects. Perhaps even the enduring conflict between "science" and "humanism", the "Two Worlds" of Professor Snow, can be construed as an interhemispheric conflict situation. The specialization of the left brain encompasses speech, grammar, figures, signs, abstract solutions, classical logic, and the dominant right hand movements. These are products, not the Ding in sich, the underlying drive of the brain. They must refer to a more basic concept, and I find it in the term "order." "Order" contains nuances of "Truth," authority, goal-setting, completion, instrumental and linear progression. This is all that we would expect from human nature (of course, the left brain simultaneously contains its mammalian routines of half the body). We need only turn over the final card: the opposite of order; what prompts order: confusion, delays, fear, disorder. We need not be amazed and then suspicious at the stupendous analogy with society and social thought, where right and order fight together against anti-authoritarianism and disorder. It may be that the more the asymmetry the greater the disorder of the brain, the greater the perception of fear and of the need to control the self and the world. Sex differences may be salient in this regard. Lionel Tiger reports: "The single fact, that some part of the brain is characteristically different in males and females, is one of the most significant findings in neuroendocrinology." [39] Perhaps the hormonal variation is related to brain asymmetry, for we discover in the research of Jerry Levy proof of the greater symmetry (bilaterality, hominidity?) of the female brain. The right hemisphere of a woman has greater verbal capacity than the male's and her left brain can handle perceptual information better than a man's. This confirms older psychological tests comparing boys and girls on spatial and language tasks. It does not obviate the possibility of total cultural determination of the difference, but this is not likely. The differences collate also with the insistent, though disputed, claim that men are more dominant and power-seeking than women. Again, it would be important to have intensive research done on the correlation between the gamut of asymmetries and the range of control demands with regard to the self and others. In much mental illness and in personal and collective disaster, as Deikman and Parry have indicated [40] , there occurs a takeover of behavior by right hemisphere religious, aesthetic, ecstatic, imagistic thinking and intuitive irrational action. The reader may be reminded of an expression from World War II: "There are no atheists in foxholes." According to A. Shimkunas, in schizophrenia the left hemisphere is overactivated and overloaded, and is accompanied by a highly arousable right hemisphere. Interhemispheric transfers are defective and cannot be processed in the commonly organized manner [41] . {S : ORDER AND DISUNITY} ORDER AND DISUNITY If there is a fear of oneself, where does the presence and fear of several selves and of ego dissolution originate? The split brain is obvious but whence the multisplit? As ventured above, the minor locales of specialization in both hemispheres may, in handling events, offer different solutions than the dominant solution, no matter in which sphere. I am tempted to suggest that the resisting major hemisphere may enlist minor special spheres as allies. For instance speech can be interrupted by a blockage of imagery from the right hemisphere. The blocked imagery can go to vague speech centers in the right brain or spread to motor centers that refer back to the major speech center as compulsive vocalization. Bleuler (359f) described how patients were observed to operate on as many levels of identities as they had "complexes," whereas normal people inhibited irrelevant material. Although certain human operations generate from a bicameral brain and the problems of its coordination, we must not regard these two cerebral chambers as the two centers of homo schizo. The conditions resulting from the brain discoordination can include not only a sense of several identities and no identity at all, but also an interplay of elements, messages, responses, and directions within a single hemisphere. As a by- product, and ultimately a possibly great achievement (or defect) of the lack of phase coupling between the two hemispheres, elements of a single hemisphere may develop embarrassing or inspiring contradictions. A one-hemisphere person can maintain as many mind-sets and behaviors, perhaps, as a two-hemisphere person can. These would include neurotic and psychotic and all other types of behavior. This thesis stands yet unproven. Perhaps it cannot be proven, like the feral man, the hypothetical human who from birth has not known humans. Infants are on occasion born without corpus callosa and other commissures, but this condition is accompanied by abnormalities that render general judgements difficult. Persons with extensive one-sided brain damage are studied under similar limitations. The origins of human behavior in utero and its rapid extension outwards from birth, make even the meaning of post-callosolectomy behavior in a young child unreliable. His lack of basal anxiety, or excess, or typicality in respect to it, can hardly be laid to the sectioning of his corpus callosum. The reasons why psychosis and neurosis may be possible in persons with severed callosa are several: observers and experiments practically all agree that such persons are surprisingly "normal," which for us means to possess the nature of "homo schizo" and the potential for mental disturbance. Second, the two hemispheres still retain rich connections with the limbic system through the brain stem, and through this indirectly with each other; both the direct and indirect connections can produce typical and atypical behavior. Third, within itself, each hemisphere carries thousands of well- trodden neural pathways, including atypical ones, so that each can maintain its own peculiar behaviors; it does not matter absolutely that these paths drive off the cliff, so to speak, when they arrive at the sectioned callosum. If a living person is discoverable who by mutation or accident has always subsisted upon one hemisphere, we would have to argue that he or she is not quite human. He should reveal a defect on the basic parameters of homo schizo that we have laid down. That he would not be devoid of human qualities and would be generally human might be surmised; the heavy acculturation that would discipline his mind and behavior from birth onwards would earn him membership in the human race. Pursuing this line of reasoning leads to the possibility that humanization occurred in one place, at one time, to one person and with sufficient systematic force to account for a left-brain/ right brain difference plus an endocrinal or electrical potential, say, that conferred what we call "human nature" soon upon a small number of persons and then later upon a larger number. (Yet once more we reserve the possibility that only a minority of humans have possessed the dominant genetic structure peculiar to the species, which was necessary to establish the constitution and behavior of the species.) {S : MEMORY AND REPETITION} MEMORY AND REPETITION We have fixed upon hormonal and cerebral imbalances as the probable source of human delayed-instinct behavior. Humans are prone to hormonal and electrical irregularities in the processes of neural transmission. They also convert a phylogenetic bilateralism into a species-specific division of labor and heavy-handedness. There is enough "wobble" and "conflict" in message transmission and brainwork to delay all instinctive behavior requiring cerebral references, to the point of genetically predisposing self- awareness or a poly-self, a general fear or anxiety, and a grasping for control wherever the attention may settle, in order to assuage fear and gain self-control. The remaining concepts that were introduced in order to explain human nature in the first chapter can be explained readily in terms of the brainwork already described; these would be memory and obsession; habit and compulsiveness, to which I now append psychosomatism; and displacement, utilizing language and symbols. Memory consists of electro-chemical gestalts or holograms diffused around the brain with some asymmetry: so much we have said. A recent theory, not to be dismissed, even argues that every neuron contains all memories. The deeper the imprinting, or the more active the electrochemical gestalt, the more obsessive it becomes, prone to compete with other experiencing for attention and volition; by these last terms - attention and volition - we mean connecting with general consciousness and pushing past or suppressing all other gestalts of the moment with a heavier charge, "beating them to the punch." Presumably, unlike animals, the human develops his memory by continual brainwork; that is, memorizing is itself an obsession, transferring and reinforcing memories is part of the overtime behavior of the human mind. The desire to forget is in competition with the fear of forgetting. Who is to judge when memorizing has become obsession, and should cease? Decisions of what to forget and what to remember are "policies" of the "highest" importance to the person and to society. I shall have more to say of this in the next chapter. Enough has been said earlier on habit and compulsion to carry us forward into the subsequent chapters. Memory, obsession, habit, and compulsion all reduce to a single basic operation in the brain: that of repetitiveness. It is for the ameliorators of undesirable symptoms and for ethical philosophers and politicians to make innumerable distinctions of practical conduct. People and cultures can be graded and scored, encouraged and deprecated, in hundreds of ways. Within the brain, sometimes dealing with itself, at other times transacting with the outer world, a constant busyness occurs which a) experiences by internal and external sensing, b) imprints neurons electrochemically, c) distributes and redistributes charges, and d) emits commands, many to be aborted, to change some internal function or external relation. Homo schizo's aim in life is to recover his instincts so as to reduce fear. In a roundabout way, the being seeks to control all the ultimately uncontrollable operations to reestablish the tranquility of conscience-less, instinctive behavior. Even when unsuccessful and painful, he persists. Given the options of a blow from outside or an unending succession of self-blows, what creature would choose the way of man and rest content with it? What blow can equal the premeditation of death - a thousand blows to a coward and who is a hero, except the animal, while man suffers the inevitable consequences of identification with the dead, poignant recall, projections into the future and anticipations thereof? {S : PSYCHOSOMATISM} PSYCHOSOMATISM All brain operations instigating somatic change are psychosomatic conversions. This is obvious, upon reflection: the sight of food stimulates the appetite, which sets the guts to "growling." Indeed, it is no quibble to say that all brainwork is somatic, hence psychosomatic; every thought leaves its trace. But even psychiatrists say "psychosomatic," meaning some physical abnormality that they will track to its psychic lair and despatch by psychotherapy. At the same time, if possible, they will be applying medicine and surgery to the physical wound. They are materialists, as is this book. In what we are saying, there appears to be no need to introduce a new kind of psychic essence. Going along this route, our ignorance, too, is assumed to be materialistic. Many observers, even, or should I say, especially, medical men, incompletely realize the full "harmony" (to use a pejorative term paradoxically and with malice aforethought) of psychosomatism and "purely" mental aberration. So we find, for instance, Hoskins accepting the common idea that schizophrenics are frustrated, inadequate, lacking in robustness, and unable to face the stresses of life [42] . The same can be said of infantry soldiers being withdrawn from the front lines. The losing battle of control has been fought in the inner and in the outer systems, in the tissues and in the conventional expressive apparatus of voice and conduct. Not only this - crowds of schizoid "draft-dodgers" have escaped the line of battle and carry on in politics, the stage, in all walks of life - not least at the dinner table. "If anything can go wrong, it will," is more than a joke in psychosomatism. There seems to be no limit to where the brain can reach in its flights from fear. It is not only a matter of being tired in the morning, but also of paralysis, of being covered with open sores, of a stomach digesting itself, of fingers like claws, of heart attacks, of impotence, of deathly coma. The brain, and it must be the "higher centers," dealing with the "lower centers" in lieu of dealing with the outside world, exercises its obsessions and compulsions. "The stomach doesn't need more acids? Give it acids anyway." "I've already ejaculated a holy word? I'll repeat it a hundred times." The brain's decision to do one of these seems to be based upon a victory, a pyrrhic victory, of course, of one lively gestalt over another, both sides unleashed to battle upon the breakdown of the ego order. Both have their "traditions" or habits behind them, their memories and training, their proneness, so that whether a person psychosomatizes or bays at the moon is predictable to a degree, this despite the fact that both tendencies are rooted in the dense thicket of same-seeming cerebral neurons. If all psychic phenomena are somatic and have somatic effect, is the reverse also true, that all somatic disease is psychic? If a skier breaks her leg in a fall, does she have a psychic wound? Medically, it may be irrelevant to say so: an ambulance, a hospital, a bolt, a cast, and in several months she will be skiing again. Psychologically, her case may have so many aspects as to defy analysis in a few lines; to quote her mother, "She's crazy to take chances like that, just to be with the others." Perhaps further study might arrive at the conclusion that the only facet of the whole affair that was not psychic was the breaking of the bones. Then it is like a duodenal ulcer; the only facet that is not psychic is the ulcer. Or the heart attack of the manic depressive; only the cardiomuscular erraticism is not psychic. It is probably significant that most people, in explaining a personal accident, find themselves at fault; we suspect that the source of the guilt feelings may be not only their religious training, but a private knowledge that they were psychically not in command of themselves. "Civil conflict" within the brain, because of specialization and the larger regionalization, must be far more frequent than observed, even continuous. It is the monitor and censor from the dominant section that gives out regular bulletins that "All is quiet on the western front" - until the front collapses. Migraine (megrem, ultimately from the Greek and Latin hemicrania, half-skull) may provide significant testimony of inter-hemispheric conflict. Migraine is a common severe headache of one side of the head, occurring more frequently among women. Since no apparent organic cause can be assigned that does not merely reiterate the symptom, and because psychic distress often precedes a migraine, it may be heavily psychosomatic, more specifically an ego conflict engaging the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The preference of the disease for women may be attributed to their more eccentric endocrinal secretions and indicates that the chosen weapons of battle are hormonal, and the crux of the battle the resistance to an equilibrated flow in the handling of material that requires smooth inter-hemispheric cooperation. That women are less brain- lateralized than men would appear to excite less hemispheric conflict, unless the psychic cause of the conflict was not in a prominent aspect of laterality, that is, not in speech or handedness. I have noted that a mother and daughter suffering migraine were, respectively, rigidly conscientious and slackly rebellious, opposites in temperament. Perhaps the source, then, is in a general neurasthenia, a question-begging word, but at least meaning a genetic lability with respect to brain-transfer under stress and hence a potential responsiveness to fear-reduction therapy. To the genetic lability is added the ambiance, the mother in the case cited, who demonstrated the model and earned emulation by identification [43] . Homo schizo does not possess psychic command of himself. It is rare that a person will acquire a strong, united selves-image and be able to play the game of countering one anxiety with another, each in a positively desirable guise, and come to do this so habitually that one's whole character appears to be instinctively balanced. Whereupon, if anything goes wrong, one may correctly say "it's not my fault," and "Bad luck;" or a bacterium, or a structural genetic effect is a sufficient explanation of the evil. As for the brain tissue, it is a "no-fault" system. It moves in remorseless neutrality. Sensory data, whether endocorporeal or exocorporeal, turn on and off the same kinds of gestalts, stimulate the same score of hormones. The body system is more passive, it carries on by means of a skin, the animal distinction between an inner and outer world, but the human has in his nature to evade this skin-deep difference, to shame the snake and shed his skin a thousand times a season. {S : Notes (Chapter 3: Brainwork)} Notes (Chapter 3: Brainwork) 1. "Pituitary-Brain Vascular Relations," Science (6 April 1979), 23. 2. Tinbergen, op. cit., 27. 3. The Ghost in the Machine, N. Y.-Macmillan, 1968. 4. MacLean's theory is discussed by Koestler, ibid. 5. Niels A. Lassen, D. H. Ingvar and E. Skinhoj, "Brain Function and Flow," Scientific American (1975), 71. 6. Ibid., 65-6. 7. Related by Kluver in Jeffress, ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, N. Y.: Wiley, 1951, 78. 8. In J. N. Spuhler, Eovolution of Man's Capacity for Culture, Detroit: Wayne U., 1959, 16. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Fred Soyka and Alan Edmonds, The Ion Effect, N. Y.: Dutton, 1977, 23, 146-7. 11. The Geomagnetic Field and Life, N. Y.: Plenum, 1978. 12. Fletcher, op. cit., 164. 13. "A Decisive Step in Evolution: Saltatory Conduction." 14. "Bilateral Organization of Consciousness in Man," 299 N. Y. Acad. Scl. (Sept. 30, 1977), 454 et passim. 15. Swanson and Kinsbourne, in Kinsbourne, ea., Asymmetrical Function of the Brain, N. Y. Cambridge U. Press, 1978, 284. 16. Kinsbourne, ibid., 289. 17. Call Marsh, in Kinsbourne, ibid., 308, 295 et passim. 18. H. T. Chang, "Cortical Response to Activity of Callosal Neurons," 16 J. Neurophysio., (1953), 117-31. 19. The works cited here can be supplemented by up-to-date references in the Psychological Index and a reading of Joseph Boger's "The Other Side of the Brain," in Ornstein, The Nature of Human Consciousness, San Francisco: Freeman, 1973, 101-25. 20. Quoted in Ornstein, op. cit., The Psychology of Consciousness, San Francisco: Freeman, 1972, 58. 21. M. Le May and N. Geschwind, "Asymmetries of the Human Cerebral Hemispheres," in A. Caramazza & E. B. Zurif, eds., Language Acquisition and Language Breakdown, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 324. 22. J. Semmes, in Ornstein, 1972, 63-4. Typically, new ideas generate many metaphors (the right brain at work?), some of which, relevant here, are carried forward in Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformations in the 1980's, Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1980. 23. Tadanobu Tsunoda, The Japanese Brain: Brain Function and East-West (in Japanese), 1978. 24. Karl H. Pribram, Languages of the Brain, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1971, 149-151, 369-70. 25. Cazzaniga et al., "Language, Praxis, and the Right Hemisphere," 27 Neurology (1977), 1144. 26. "Brain Circuits for consciousness," 13 Brain Beh. and Evol. (1976), 376. 27. Paul Giraud, in 40 Evol. Psychiatrique I (1975), 41. 28. 1970, 232. 29. Trevarthen, op. cit., 378. 30. Op. cit., (1979), 6. 31. Op. cit., (1974). 32. Klaus D. Hoppe, 29 Psyche 10 (1975), 919. 33. University of Chicago Magazine (1964). 34. Trevarthen, in Kinsbourne, op. cit., 379,376. 35. In Kinsbourne, ibid., 523; also Trevarthen, 379. 36. See the photo, p. 280, pc, in J. P. Hallet, Congo Kitabu, N. Y.: Random House, 1966. 37. "The Great Cerebral Commissure," Sci. Amer. (Jan. 1964), 52. 38. S. de Grazia, "Left-Right in Politics: The Case for Symbolic Lateral Asymmetry, 29 Pol. Studies 2 (June 1981), 254. 39. L. Tiger, quoting Hutt in Fox, op. cit., 115. 40. T. A. Parry, quoting Deikman, 6-7, in "The New Science of Immanuel Velikovsky," I Kronos 1 (1975). 41. A. Shimkunas, "Hemisphere Asymmetry and Schizophrenic Thought Disorder," in S. Schwartz, ed., Language and Cognition in Schizophrenia, N. Y.: Erlbaum, 1978. 42. R. C. Hoskins, The Biology of Schizophrenia, N. Y.: Norton, 1946, 75. 43. And c f. Margaret W. Gerard, "Genesis of Psychosomatic Symptoms in Infancy" in Felix Deutsch, The Psychosomatic Concept in Psychoanalysis, N. Y.: Intl. Universities Press, 1952, 82-95. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 4: } {T DISPLACEMENT AND OBSESSION} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR DISPLACEMENT AND OBSESSION We have come to view the human as a poly-ego casting forth throngs of displacements, paradoxically in order to recapture instinctive certainty and so reduce the level of one's anxiety. "Paradoxically," I say, because there is a heavy return flow of displacements; they are in the mind and hence cannot simply be cast off, but are to be regarded as transactions: what goes out must come back. From this elementary state of human nature, the morphology of thought emerges. It begins like a person who seeks to build a crude dam across a brook. He seizes and places rocks in the path of the flood, intending to embed enough of them to block the flow, and, after a time, he does, but there is leakage, and there are diversions of the water, and anyhow the flow must continue by some means. But still he has a structure. In the mind these would be obsessions. And the rocks of obsessions are also of different forms, which we call compulsion, habit, attention, and memory, all of which we shall define here. Before confronting the ideas of displacement and obsession, an aside may be permitted, an apology. For it seems that I am culpable for using metaphoric language in describing a neurological and behavioral world, as with the analogy of bridging a stream. But not only this, which may be excused if the metaphor does not beg the question; further, I may seem to choose terms too often out of the jargon of psychopathology, as with "displacement" and "obsession," perhaps even preferring them to terms describing normal behavior. I have found, however, that the terms most useful in describing mental operations are technical words tinged with reproach, as if a person should not ordinarily engage in such an activity. In the very first chapter, it will have been noticed, I took the step of distinguishing human nature largely by what would be considered a fault in animal behavior and hardly sounds nice when attached to people - an instinct-delay. And then "schizo" itself. I must warn that this verbal situation may become worse. But names come out of attention and identities. A family will love a dog and whiles away many an hour talking about "what old Shep is thinking of now. Look at him ! He knows a lot more about us than we think he does. Too bad he can't speak." I should hardly wish to challenge such a statement, which would arouse a united family against me, but what word would we use for the process going on in the people if not "projection," the ascription to "old Shep" of ideas that are our own. Much more could be made out of the simple remarks quoted, too, but we must move along. The qualities of humans that one cherishes are aspects of the qualities one dislikes. And, because the empirical science of psychology has been built upon what is problematical and evident, the most helpful terms may be those conferred upon disliked qualities. The "good" comes out of "bad," so to speak. One takes what one gets, as in evolution where the marvelous eye comes out of a "damaged" skin, the tongue from the endoderm, the leg from a fin, the breasts from enlarged sweatglands, the cerebral cortex itself called a successful tumor, etc. If it were not for the throngs of displacements, we would be able to attend to very little of what we are pleased to attend to as humans. And without projection, a delusion certainly, we could not "know" the world. The "sick" propensity to displace and project in uncontrollable quantity is the fundamental basis for human behavior and its competences. To speak of "cures" for these mechanisms is like asking how we may best perform cerebralectomy. The most clever humans are those whose displacements and projections are the most varied, free, abundant in hypothesis, while stupidity can be readily associated with an inability to perform these operations whether because of blockage or hominidalism. Some words I might otherwise use would belong to a defunct theology and philosophy that prospered for 2000 years from Aristotle to Descartes, which, as will be described in another chapter, employed ideas of man as a rational being, much of whose behavior would be termed irrational. In that vein, savants spoke of "reason against faith," and argued interminably but inoperationally over the conflict between the two faculties. Most people still use the language of, and tackle problems of human nature in the manner of, Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, so that we have an additional task set for ourselves, namely, to show that one does not get very far in understanding human nature by this traditional route. But again, the analysis of reason is for Chapter Seven. In this chapter, stress is placed upon the major mental strategy that the human mind employs to exist and ply through life. I employ the word "strategy" realizing that it is teleological and that things without purpose should not be granted purposes. (But not such usages as: "The strategy of the French generals in World War II was obsessed with the Maginot Line complex." That is, strategy can be both conscious and unconscious.) I can also use the word "mechanism" leaving to some demiurge the purpose of constructing this "mechanism." I mean by "strategy" or "mechanism," of course, a system by which the human operates, but again one must beware of the word "system" because that implies an order, and again an author or a demiurge or a will to operate systematically. Shall we say that by these words we mean: "It happens that a pattern (or gestalt) is evident when a human acts"? And, given the operational pattern, typical consequences follow." Thus we can rationalize some suspicious terms here, and also in the chapters to come and in the past chapter, where we talked of the urge to re-instinctivize, a pattern of behavior that is largely unconscious, uncontrolled, and unwilled. Upon the elementary state of human nature, the morphology of thought is erected. It hardly matters that some of its aspects are regarded as "normal" and others as "abnormal." It is like a mountain that is a precipice when viewed from the north, and a slope when seen from the south; the core can be of the same mineral substances. The basic shape of thought occurs by displacement and obsession. {S : DISPLACEMENT} DISPLACEMENT Personal histology and history cast their images against the screen of instinct delay. A major effect is the human displacement complex. Animals displace, but humans do so with a plenitude and magnificence that lets us be astonished at ourselves. N. Tinbergen, an authority on the stickleback fish, unsurprisingly took examples from the animal in his general treatise on instincts. A male stickleback cannot ejaculate sperm until he seduces a female into depositing eggs in the nest that he has built. If two males are forced to nest closely together, they dig nests continuously "and the result is that their territories are littered with pits, or even become one huge pit." Their nest-digging activity here is part of their fighting repertoire. Similarly, "herring gulls, while engaged in deadly combat, may all at once pluck nesting material..." American television seems at times to follow only one plot: "Sex and Violence: guess which is which?" Tinbergen writes, "The motivation of an instinct when prevented from discharging through its own motor pattern finds an outlet by discharge through the centre of another instinct." Further, "the fact that a displacement activity is an expression, not of its 'own' drive.. but of a 'strange' drive.., makes it possible for it to act as a signal to fellow members of the same species, provided it can be distinguished from the 'genuine' activity, activated by its 'own' drive." As I've heard boys jeer at truculent comrades, "Are you tough or hungry?" Every action involves an emotion, which is the sensing of action, therefore an experience. And every other experience involves an emotion. Every experience invites a response, an experience feedback of some affect. Both the experience and the feedback cross the neural synapses and are in the human manner delayed at the crossing. Wherever they may wander, while waiting for their vaguely denominated neurotransmitters, they inspire a new activity, a new experiencing, which is a displacement. The human has all the instinctive foundations of the animal. But once unleashed, human instinctive behavior can rarely reach its target, if such can be discerned, but expresses itself all over the cerebrum in a splatter of displacements. Tough and hungry and devout, the Aztecs cannibalized their enemies. The Hebrews of Leviticus devised fulsome logic to accompany the slaughter and eating of a beast. It is a basic proposition of anthropology that in a "pure" culture, all practices and artifacts are interrelated. Human culture is one grand intermeshing of displacements. The result, working backwards, is to defeat the blind workings of the brain. Everyone is given to know, and to see it proven, that displacements, no matter how remotely scattered among the recesses of the central nervous system, are logical and under control. "Hold onto your mind! Nothing happens but that it is all of a piece." The stickleback and the seagull have relatively so few displacements (although even these were hard to discover and label), that Tinbergen can readily assert that they are genetic. I think that only the infinite variety of human displacements lets homo schizo congratulate himself on his large imagination, splendid lucubrations, ingenious associations, and poetic invention. It is important, all-important, "what we live for," etc., but who says so is ourselves - judges in our own trial. The human is sufficiently depressed instinctively, and thereupon anxious enough, and has enough continuously active positive and negative feedback operating, amidst ample gray matter, to support a world of delusions, no two of them alike. We can appreciate then how absurd it is to attempt physiological distinctions between good and bad (healthy and unhealthy) displacements and projections, just as it is to divide good from bad (healthy from unhealthy) psychosomatism. Nor can we even speak of true and false displacements and projections. Once the brain casts its affect upon the external world, that world is physiologically real. When a god suffuses the starry heavens and a lover glances covetously at a stranger, what happens to the brain is as real as what happens when one drinks a wine or receives a blow in the stomach. All are real experiences. Displacement might be conceived very broadly as one's sensing of anything as having effects upon one. Surely it is animal, yet the concept is the same in ethology and psychoanalysis [1] . Thanks to displacements, a great world exists that has no "excuse" to exist. But it is a virtual cornucopia in humans. "Anything" means just that; no matter is ineligible as an object of human displacement. Attempting to segregate logically or empirically those things - an enemy, a swamp - that will surely affect one, and other things - a sound, a shape - that will most certainly not affect one is largely useless. We merely say, an animal displaces little, while a human displaces much. {S : PROJECTION AND PEDAGOGY} PROJECTION AND PEDAGOGY So it is with projection, which is a common feature of displacement; anything can be a subject of projection. Projection is the animation of the universe. Everything potentially is sensed to have a will with regard to oneself. The breeze sings to one, the birds call one, the volcanoes command one, one's automobile refuses to run, the enemy possesses one's thought. Displacement and projections operate in the thousands in the human mind. While the mammal tends to a few things, the human extends almost unlimited attention to the world, an attention containing affect, that is, psychic involvement. Displacement is accompanied by affect or emotion. The human, and for that matter the animal, does not pay attention to anything unless it invests the thing with emotion and anxiety. This process seems predictable, inasmuch as the reason for the displacement in the first place is to test the capacity of the displacement object to receive a neural load that is not being fully unburdened by an instinctive reaction to a stimulus. The displaced affect being unloaded may be called positive or negative depending upon the instant state of the discharge. The perception of hovering vultures in the distance is a cultivated interest, with an ambivalent response, to which a new positive or negative affect is added, depending upon whether one imagines them to be focused upon a foreign body or a body with which one is identified. It is clear, too, that ambivalence accompanies attention to a great many displacements, even gods and spirits whose presence has signified both benefits and deprivations in times past. Indulgence and deprivation become forever related to the identification-affection nodes. The central nervous system is laced with interconnections of affection. Once the larger world opens to the baby, he must begin to accept those displacements that his attendants point out as the true sources of indulgences and deprivations. His teachers, while pointing to certain nearby objects with a cause-and-consequence nexus fairly obvious even to the inexperienced human are especially interested in indicating to him some very great abstractions as ultimate causes of his well-being or ill-being; they are not at all scrupulous, even if they could be, in pursuing cause-and-consequence in such cases. For most teachers, logic has an authoritative meaning. The myriad names of gods and spirits are short-hand vulgar logic. So it happens that their obsessions with gods and laws and great natural forces are imprinted early upon the young. A consensus of obsessions is achieved, along with some disrespect for necessary causal connections between the objects of identification and the actual production of benefits and evils. To inculcate in a child the determination to use only a special pot for his toilet needs can be, depending upon the age of the child and criteria of correct performance, a massive exercise in the transfer of obsessive behavior from adult to child. The displacement of toilet-training obsessions upon many other objects occurs readily, whether the object is an administrative routine (a "clean desk") or the traits of god, so the Judaeo-Christian god is not imagined to have an alimentary canal, but many other cultures dwell upon the excretions of their gods, the very word "urine," for instance, being originally from the god "Uranus," who rained many things upon the Earth. {S : TIME AND REMEMBERING} TIME AND REMEMBERING Man practices displacement and projection in creating space and time. The space dimension is little more than the scope of displacements, to begin with. Measure the area of displacement and one has the boundaries of space. The poly-ego can fill space; put another way, all space can be internalized so that a most remote object - a star, say - or a thought or an hallucination can vie with an insect bite for his attention, even affecting the way in which he scratches the bite. A person, and not necessarily a savage, feeling guilt before his god, may scratch himself roughly. There is a need to sense time, one more empire for the mind to conquer. Memory is of the animal, too, and so is the ability to reach back for the pattern of experiences to relate to an immediate or approaching experience. The distinction of human memory arises from its flexible control of recall. Since man's experience is rich, his memory impressions are richly patterned. It is one more great area to which he can resort for the resources of control. He can play one film against another, like a curator of a hologram museum, until he selects one or imagines a new one that will cope with an ongoing experience. Once more, fear drives him over the stubble field of instincts. The delayed impulses that are aroused by experiencing flow out electrochemically in all directions through the mind and back and forth between the hemispheres of the brain. They excite the glandular and muscular system. The feedback of "flowback" is voluminous, too. The irrelevance of much of the activity does not embarrass the brain. It highly stimulates it. Some twenty percent of the typical person's oxygen intake is consumed by the brain. What effect does this have upon the level of fear? It makes the universe fearful; for owing to projection, now the fear which is displaced upon others returns, relevant, and reinforced. But, at the same time, the fear is probably thus rendered more bearable, at the price of weakened identity and a great many unnecessary involvements. What, then, happens to the need to control? "Divide et impera": the more one's displacements are scattered, the more the selves feel secure. The need to control, already strongly felt respecting the alter egos, is also pointed towards the outer world, other people, things, notions, the sky, the phantoms out there. The great power- seeker of the universe is homo schizo. He seeks to control everything onto which he displaces and projects. Where his fear is sensed to lie, there he will seek control. Time is an expansible contoured traveling bag to carry displacements, indexed by the pockets they occupy. Old memories rest as imprints that become expectations in present action. The present is a developing succession of snapshots upon used film, especially film containing analogous memories from the file. Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans thinks: "We can expect the British troops to attack us in rows and frontally, as they always do," and they did and were mowed down. An hallucinator says: "Members of my family were across the football field yesterday and that made it easier for me to talk to the crowd on the other side;" and he asked his family really to attend the following week, to lend further aid. Time's veritable meaning in any person's life is almost entirely a plastic envelopment of shapeless experiences, erratically related. Cultures take over the obsession with time that the individual cannot avoid and pro bono publico define the intervals of time that must be mastered. This requires certain schizoid distortions of time. "Pure time," or "absolute time," does not exist save as another delusion yet one of the greatest of all cultural drives since the beginning has been to find absolute time. Lunar time is a mass of obsessive behaviors - rites, lore, and scientific study - surrounding a fairly expectable cycle. Past bad experiences and their anticipated reoccurrences are probably the chief factors in the choice of time clocks and the ways of using them. Disputes over time-reckoning and calendars have precipitated many bitter struggles in human history. The "rational" student protests: "See the big pay-off from marking time: planting, hunting, saving resources, warfare, rendezvous." No doubt, these are the pragmatic effects (gains) from partially restoring animal instinctive capacities. And they can only come when a culture's people succeed in frightening themselves into observances of certain obsessions. As an aide de peur, gods and suns and terrible memories are called upon to assist as aides-m‚moires. In consequence the obsessed biologist and souvenir- hunter can calculate exactly the time to arrive at Cape Cod when the instinctively driven horseshoe crabs arrive to breed. Time is also a way of watching oneself, hence watching the world of one's displacements. The sky-watcher is fascinated in part because he can see how "absolute time" is up there and controlling his destiny. As Immanuel Kant once said: "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." [2] There ensue the obsessions of mental discipline, the routines by which life is conducted so as effectively to generate, in individuals and groups, those technologies, artifacts, and means of subsistence that so exceed the capabilities of other species. The rules of memory and the rules of forgetting are the two sides of the same coin. Who says remember, says select. Who names memory, names forgetting. In the earliest human, memory was a desperate structuring of current events to retain on the surface of the mind what was necessary to be human -that is, a sense of time, a manipulation of symbols and projections, and the practical means of ordering the environment - while relinquishing to the subconscious the impressions so intense that they would catatonize or panic the organism. The sharpness, detail, and durability (in conscious and subconscious form) of remembering is proportional to the gravity of a trauma, that is, to the deepness and adverseness of its effect upon one or all areas of life. Forgetting speeds up with the intensity of the trauma. Thus a severe memory and its forgetting in all or part go hand- in-hand, and they follow upon the heels of the traumatic event. The most intense memories occur without being willed. They emerge encased in dreams and myths. The less intense memories ride upon and cover over the more intense ones. Disorders of recall, of forgetting, otherwise unexplainable, can be interpreted as the effects of what is memorable having become willy-nilly attached to the un-rememberable, and often relate to the symbols and affects of the repression of the great disaster, that is, the primal conditions that established the rules of the conscious human. Memory and forgetting operate like a bookkeeping system to keep the mind in balance. Little is forgotten, and therefore the balance will continue to show a profit or increase throughout life. Like many bookkeeping systems in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting a balance. With the forgotten material, the mind works to create myth and art, even scientific hypothesis. By storing and recategorizing forgetfulness, the mind achieves its ability to maintain consciousness and behave with instrumental rationality (that is, with a cause and effect logic in relation to practical goals). Memory, in the specifically human sense of ability to recall at will, is inseparable from the sense of time. One can bring back the past in part voluntarily. This past can be shared with others through signs, symbols, and language. It can also be cast into the future, just as other current and past experiences are cast forwards in time. The future-thought is born and partakes of the delusional quality of human nature in general. For time is a concept whose only existence is that given it by the time-keeper. Yet its implantation in humans gives them a tool for mental expansion and environmental control (as well as for suffering), not otherwise recognizable in the plant and animal kingdoms. Culture institutes furious rites to make people remember something that they are forbidden to remember in all of its detail. Saturnalias, the prototype of all anniversaries, famous scenes of joy and orgy, are masquerades literally of the end of the world. They must be compulsively celebrated in order, by aggressive joy and wantonness, to cover up, to ensure the amnesia, of events that cannot be forgotten. People create an elaborate mnemotechnology, to use Friedrich Nietzsche's term, to assure that they do not forget whatever it is that they have forgotten, that is, suppressed. In this same sense, a great paradox emerges: we remember most emotionally what we forget most determinedly. Memory of animals is set into "naturally" occurring categories by the predictability of instinctive response. "As I respond, so must the world be," would be a fancied animal or plant cosmological formula. The information storage and retrieval system are automatically coordinated for the most part. The human has the unique problem of determining what data to store and in what forms to retrieve it. He is very much helped by instinct, of course. Like the beginnings of most modern computer data banks, the material going in is predetermined - bank cheques, social security accounts, tax records. Thereupon, however, the human stores immense amounts of material that an animal computer technician would call "garbage." The vast weird human universe of displacements is duly punched into the memory bank. When the experience is recalled, it emerges not in the pristine sharpness of the original experience, nor even in a dulled image of it, but as a new thing, like a raised rusty anchor encrusted with weeds and shells. It entails various distortions, suppressions and reinforcements. {S : OBSESSIONS, COMPULSIONS, HABITS} OBSESSIONS, COMPULSIONS, HABITS Lorenz tells of a goose that at sundown habitually climbed a flight of stairs, always stopping on the landing to look through a window. One day, she climbed the stairs in too great haste, forgetting to stop at the window. She was very agitated in consequence; to relieve herself from her agitation, she climbed the stairs back down, and then up again, stopping dutifully to look out of the window before proceeding, now in a becalmed way. Obsession, not habit, we say, was involved. To specify the occurrence of an abnormal resistance to change in routine is not proper language when referring to a goose. But no clear line is to be drawn. Many a person is silly as a goose. In "normal" humans, we expect an acceptance of the frustration and an adaptation to the new condition. Why do we accept this? Because we appreciate that "normal" people are aware of what they are doing habitually and hence are capable of letting a frustration flow over into "irrelevant" spheres of activity. No sooner do we claim this, though, than we realize how few people are without severe reaction to a break to some of their routines. That is, most people are more or less obsessed. If they cannot find their shoes in the morning, they will behave strangely for a long time, until somehow they find the shoes, find substitutes, are given "reasons," or develop a new lifestyle for spending the morning without shoes. Stern memories, pathologically called obsessions, are an important part of human memory. Obsession is "excessive," "unstoppable" attention to something (by which, as usual, we mean "anything"). An animal can be trained to "extra" obsessions. Humans are naturally obsessive. They can be obsessed with a pair of shoes, a piece of cow dung, an inner voice or pain, the Second Coming of Christ, or a line of poetry. This "obsession with obsessions" determines what is remembered, what is recallable from memory, what the person will spend his time on, where the important things of life are in his estimation to be found. Moreover, it will give him an enormous capability. A person will be able to abandon all other thoughts and temptations and stick to a task through thick and thin. With this one (or two) abilities, he reconstructs animal instincts with some embellishments. That is, provided that he is compulsive as well as obsessive. Freud speaks of "the compulsion to repeat - something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual that the pleasure principle which it overrides. . . the pleasure principle - to which, after all, we have hitherto ascribed dominance in mental life." A simple example of compulsion is the patient who insists upon playing the same chord a thousand times in succession. Or the repetition of nonsense syllables unendingly, which reminds one of religious liturgies that depend for effect upon an obsessive idea and the compulsion to repeat, which in turn must be related to the catatonic wish to stay as one is, forever in place. This again connects with the obsessive compulsive return to origins, to a recollected and imagined primordial set of events, illud tempus (that primordial time when ...) which M. Eliade has so well abstracted from primitive ceremonies. The terms "obsession" and "compulsion" are separate but confused in the psychiatric lexicon. No special neurology is assigned to one or the other. Each can be tied to both behavior and thoughts. Obsession is of the family of memory, planning, and habit. It is a compulsion to repeat. Compulsion is the kind of driven act which is likely to become an obsession. Insofar as all major problems associated with the terms are internalized, they are indistinguishable. Furthermore, they may originate together and act together. Existential fear, and the need to control it, pursue the logical line of reestablishing the human as an effective mammal. It is not our choice whether to vary from it. We have no recourse; if we seek to follow the smithereens of our explosion of attachments, we shall go to pieces ourselves, psychologically and shortly afterwards as living organisms. We must stay at home while our displacements travel adventurously, and here recompose the hominidal character as best one may: hence, obsession and compulsion, or obsessed compulsiveness. Obsessions are linked to habit. They are deemed "bad habits". Compulsion may be an urge to shout obscenities upon entering a church. Obsession may be an agonizing repetitive recall of an embarrassing scene, like the time one uttered a string of obscenities in a church. The relation of obsession to habit is clear in this case. The relation of compulsion is not, as in many compulsive behaviors the thought has preceded the deed and has occurred obsessively prior to the occasion when the act is finally committed. Then it is a habit of thought converted into a deed. Obsession can be viewed as a form of deeply imprinted memory, which repeatedly calls the attention of the self to its selves. If a person suffers a fearful accident, the memory of it may occur with or without volition and despite a will to the contrary. At the same time, an obsession (and even faint memory is in a sense an obsession) is a repetitive trained behavior. Therefore it is a habit. It is also a compulsion, for one is compelled to recall. Compulsions as acts are distinguishable from habit only by intensity. A drug habit becomes a compulsion, or addiction, when the behavior that is represented in the mind forces itself upon the organism, consciously or unconsciously. It is impossible physiologically to distinguish between a compulsive tic of the eyelid and a compulsion to step on the brake when a deer surprisingly leaps out ahead of one's speeding automobile. Furthermore, a great many compulsions are consummated repeatedly, especially when uninterrupted by the forces of law, the community, the family, another person, or by destructive reaction or nature of the objects, or by self-destruction as in the compulsion to commit suicide. We have two further cases where a compulsive element is present: one when the act is singular in its nature, but lacks a history of obsession with it, and springs forth compulsively as an invention. Such would be an impulse out of nowhere, as a model worker for twenty years is seized by the idea of walking out of his office immediately, forever, and does so. We would surmise that the thought had been formulating in an obsessive form but unconsciously, for a long time. This contrasts with a case in which, after a decade of concentration upon a mathematical problem, a solution offers itself to a professor abruptly, and the obsession is extinguished. The place of habit in both cases, despite the compulsion and extinction upon their conclusions, is manifest. In this second case a compulsion might be exercised upon the completion of the compelled act. The professor might insist upon the correctness of his solution, despite all proof and urgings to the contrary, and then proclaim it, marking the close of his prolonged studies. Habit and obsession are distinguishable in two ways, one misleading, the other appropriate. In Aristotelian terms, a good person is one of good habits, and habits are what are rationally accepted by the free will of man. In modern and preferable terms, habit is an obsession that is governed by awareness and instrumentalism; a habit can be broken or strengthened; conversely, an obsession is a rigid habit. A controllable obsession is then a habit. The habit can be generated, moderated, and extinguished, according to the consequences sought from its practice. Only when the obsessive foundations of habit are understood, however, can the distinction be made. The human "naturally" is prone to obsession. This is because "the cheapest way to run the works" is to concentrate energy upon the most forceful options and derive security and profit from them. The infant gains all he can by means of affection, so his whole life becomes colored by the exercise of and the memory of the affection he achieved in the beginning. All his other values are supplied via this one value which of course in its turn is not only a way to food and warmth but a way to reduce existential and immediate fear. One ought not slip into half-way explanation, the sophistry of "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Toilet training is an obsession that is culture-bound, varying widely. To be instituted it had to be preceded by an obsession for obsessions. The question is: "What generated the master strategy obsession?" And, once more, we revert to the theory of a disordered poly-ego that welcomes order and repetition as a substitute for instinctive reaction. People speak of animal habits, though not of animal obsessions. It would appear that an animal habit is already an obsession. If a human trains an animal, too, the animal's habit is more obsessional, in our terms, then habitual. The same difficulties are encountered with the two words, in the animal and human settings, and we had better abandon any distinction here and regard the two concepts as interchangeable in the physiological context. The human is obsessive-habitual because he cannot otherwise cope with existence. His obsession-habits are infinitely variable. They succeed, not precede - although the organic structure is partly in place - the basal human disorder and are the human method of correcting the disorder, with all due limitations and difficulties. In the illumination provided by psychopathology, habit is more readily understandable as an obsession under some degree of control, but at all events as a repeated practice, the regularity of and insistence upon which makes it obsessive, and the social judgement of which makes it reasonable as opposed to pathological. So it goes with compulsiveness very often. One might say that all obsessions are compulsive, but not all compulsions are obsessive; these latter are better called impulsive acts. Still, it would be rare that an impulsive act does not proceed from unconscious obsession, or from an impulsive character, typically given to such actions. Examining behaviors known as memorizing, commemorative (as with the need to celebrate collective anniversaries), obsessive, bureaucratic, conventional compulsive, and ritualistic, we find in them the essence of habit. Habit originates in the need to control exploded behavior and unruliness. Fear or anxiety reduces in the presence of habit, increases in its absence. If fear diminishes, one can claim that instinctual behavior has been in some sense restored and the reduction of fear was anticipated in the creation of the habit. {S : Notes (Chapter 4: Displacement and Obsession)} Notes (Chapter 4: Displacement and Obsession) 1. Tinbergen, A Study Of Instinct, 113-g. 2. Critique Of Practical Reason, conclusion. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 5: } {T COPING WITH FEAR} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE COPING WITH FEAR "First of all, the gods created fear in the world." So goes an old Latin saying. The expression can be reversed, for it was also said, as by Statius, "In the beginning, fear created the gods." Let us suggest the primordial condition: human fear and holy dread. The fear is the existential fear of which we speak in this book. It remains, when immediate causes of fear are absent. So it is incorrect to blame ravages of ordinary life, as did the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for mankind's fearful state. Regarding primeval man, there occur several famous lines of his Leviathan: Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes, by our theory, is incorrect in two important regards. He explained "progress" as a result of "order" whereas, in Homo Schizo 1, order and progress are seen to have always and necessarily been mixed; man is by nature bent upon order. The twentieth century, and Hobbes' own times even more, provide "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives in large numbers. Hobbes also conceived of human life as originally solitary. From his birth, homo schizo was individuated, it is true, by his human character, but he still required the group, actually demanding a larger group to work out his insatiable appetite for controls. Further, as we have been saying, man was very much more dependent upon psychological "income" in comparison with material subsistence. However, fear accompanied him on his widest and wildest searches. Contrary to the speculations of Hobbes and markedly against John Locke, writing in the same period, man's mind was no "blank tablet" (tabula rasa) upon which experience alone might write. By origin, ever since, and at present, man's mind is congenitally inscribed with an existential fear that inspires his most important human operations. Closer to our concept of existential fear were the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius. They understood such fear, even in "good times." Lucretius (96?-55 B. C.), who sought a scientific account Of the Nature of Things in order to allay human fears of death and of the gods, presented the universe as an essentially neutral and natural order. Significantly, in view of Chapter Seven to come, ratio, whence "rational," is the synonym for order. Time to Lucretius was an infinite succession of cycles of creation and destruction, fashioned out of eternal atoms. Mankind should come to see death and disintegration as the work of nature; "to be able to regard all that is with a mind at peace," wrote Lucian (V, 1203). To no avail. Philosophers and theologians can pile all of their wishes for mankind, Ossa upon Pelion, without his ever attaining the heights of the peaceful mind. {S : OMNIPRESENT FEAR} OMNIPRESENT FEAR People will agree with the observation that life is spent largely on the problem of feeding themselves. The comparable idea that life is spent largely in coping with fear is met, by contrast, with disbelief. That fear should be central, dominant, and universal in humans is hard to believe, and harder to accept. Indeed one may propose, to begin with, that a cloak of denial is spread over the idea. We are afraid to admit what is forever present and all-determining because the admission, we fear, will simply worsen the condition. No amount of testimony by heroes as to their frequent fears, no expositions of how humor erupts as a safety-valve to fears, nor all the case studies and historical treatises on fear and anxiety available for affirmation, can dispel the will to believe in a life without fear. How can fear be so all-pervasive, it is objected, when our lives are crowded with details of thought and behavior from which fear is usually absent, as when tying a shoelace, eating a dessert, digging a ditch, reciting prayers, or reading a romantic novel? Once more, to reply, the very fact of crowding our existence with details arouses suspicion that a mechanism of avoidance and adaptation is operative, avoidance of and adaption to fear. To convince oneself of pandemic fearfulness, one ought to consider the total life-ways of all people in all cultures in all times. One checks off the major portions of life clearly beset by fear: infancy, childhood, dreams, religion, war service, competitive sports, risks of all kinds, old age. Then note the component of fear in all conscious mental illness and normal "neurotic" feelings. Then recall all the fear one seeks to impose upon others - intimidation, command, coercion, and so forth: is this not one's own fear projected (and milder) and is one not the victim, too, in one's own turn? Further, are not all those behaviors that are included in the paradigm of legendary creation, primeval stories and fairy tales emergent from fear? And, as Hobbes declared, does not man live in fear of violence when he is not engaged in it - just as foul weather affects not only the days when it happens but also the times when it might occur? Still, where is the fear in apple pie … la mode? Dietary, to be sure, whether fear or defiance of overweight. But the lusty appetite of the twelve year old boy: where is the fear there? In the mother-figure looming over the culinary transaction? In showing fathers how mothers love their sons? The apple and Eve? In the haste to gobble the pie and get away from the table? Why must one explain? This is all trivia; but it is in explanation of the trivial that science shows its muscle. Here is an instinct to eat a sugary carbohydrate, a culturally defined concoction, with ramifications into the habitual cuisine, the family table, with "Mom" and the "sweet tooth." If it were a cannibal feast - then none would doubt that terror is at the diner's elbows. Instead we have a most generalized, sublimated human activity, but still human, and hence suffused - even if remotely and joyfully - by fear. For the history of this particular feeding is incomprehensible (indeed there is no history to tell) without, like the Last Supper of Jesus, its carrying along the most ancient determinants of human species behavior. The trivium is generalized into a multitude. This line of reasoning is no different than that so well employed in sociology and economics when we say casually that "Joe is one of the army of the unemployed." Whatever the special circumstances of Joe's case, he is part of a large statistical aggregate responsive to general causes. He is part of an army of fear. Or should we choose some stumbling, famished French soldier in the retreat of Napoleon's army from Moscow in 1812? {S : PHYSIOLOGY OF FEAR} PHYSIOLOGY OF FEAR In terms of the psychology of conditioning, existential fear is to be regarded as continuous self-punition, whether it is called fear, anxiety, frustration, or depression. (Depression, writes J. Gray, is "a state induced by sudden loss of important sources of reward." [1] ) The punishment takes the form of inhibiting rewards, the most basic of which is probably the surcease from existential fear itself. According to Neal Miller and his associates, in a conflict between approach and avoidance the animal will come to rest at that point where the forces favoring the simultaneously feared and desired goal equal each other. The "decision" is to come to rest. Then the human, by our theory, cannot come to rest, nor does the wild animal completely, in the presence of the effective extinction of the stimulus. The human continues to live in a heavily displaced world where the avoidance-fear sensation will always find some home and sustenance. The physiology of existential fear, apart from the brainwork of cerebral conflict, is not structurally or electro-chemically much different from that of mechanical fear (in the presence of accident, blows, threats of punishment, aggression of divine wrath). Nor is it distinguishable from the long-term fear of death. It is clear that it does not constitute a major structural leap in evolution, though its actual effects are quantavolutionary. Hence it operates much like the animal mechanisms. Especially apropos is the "fight or flight" system, about which we can say, with Tepperman [2] : Although people who are disturbed by teleologically 'impure' thinking in biology are sometimes made uncomfortable by Cannon's 'fight-flight characterization of the sympathoadrenomedullary discharge, the fact is that the over-all effect of such a discharge is to mobilize the individual to meet an emergency. Hans Selye elaborated a model of the fight/ flight mechanism, as well as Cannon, generalizing it into a "General-Adaptation-Syndrome" or G-A-S [3] . So much of total human activity implicates the G-A-S, that one is compelled to view it as the dominating action determinant, which by the theory of homo schizo, means that once the G-A-S comes into play, once the Central Nervous System is operative, the essence of the response to stress is also functioning. One does not flick off the G-A-S when one is thinking about the rings of Saturn or washing dishes. And Jeffrey Gray employs in his own theory of fear essentially the Cannon-Selye model, "a single fight-flight mechanism which receives information about all punishment, and then issues commands either to fight or for flight depending on the total stimulus context in which punishment is received." [4] The enhanced release of the adrenomedullary hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine, denotes that a fight-flight signal has been passed to the central nervous system. In humans, the signal (l would argue) is incessant, or at least intermittent and rapid, and comes from a high level of excitation of the cerebral cortex, which is continually dealing with conflicts - past, present, and future. For a precise description of the body's response, we may best refer to Tepperman: The over-all response to the effects of simultaneous sympathetic discharge and adrenomedullary secretion involves cardiocirculatory responses which are qualitatively similar to those seen at the beginning of exercise -an increase in cardiac output, increase in pulse rate, rise in blood pressure. In addition, after a brief initial period of apnea, there is an increased minute volume of respiration. Splanchnic vascular constriction (including a reduction in renal blood flow) and dilation of the skeletal muscle vessels produce a redistribution of the enlarged cardiac output which anticipates muscle work. The central nervous system arousal effect of the catecholamine substances results in alertness and quick responsiveness. Hepatic glycogenolysis, its attendant hyperglycemia, and the mobilization from the fat depots of a large supply of free fatty acids (FFA), all collaborate to provide a quick charge of readily available energy to muscles that may be called on. Chemical changes in the muscles themselves increase their capacity for work and possibly diminish the generation of a fatigue signal by the muscle. The central nervous system effects of the substances may, at the same time, diminish central perception of fatigue. As if in anticipation of blood loss, the spleen contracts while the coagulability of the blood increases. If a committee of expert physiologists were appointed to draw up specifications for a set of physiological responses that would meet emergency needs it would be difficult for them to devise a more interesting effective set than that described here [5] . Notable is the cyclical effect - for the brain, arousing itself to signal a fancied or real threat, is immersed in the products of the responses to the signal, and hence can be forced to continue the signaling. Fight and flight tend never to end, save out of exhaustion. And human thresholds of exhaustion - of will and of muscle - tend to be forced to farther limits than those of animals. Horses and dogs reach their limits because men drive them. Whether in sex, sports, eating, warfare, prayer, business, or art, humans frequently test their limits. Anxiety is moderate and continual fear and, were we dissatisfied with the mechanisms of fear in producing human nature, we should seek the mechanisms of anxiety. But they are the same as those described already. The dozens of physical and mental symptoms of anxiety [6] , if they are not subsumable under the fear/ flight system in operation, are by-products or effects of the system. The explanations of anxiety are significantly related to the theory of homo schizo. M. Gray mentions five types of hypothesis. That anxiety is a catastrophic response of the organism to stress is advanced by Goldstein. That anxiety is a threat to one's concept of the self is advocated by Rogers. That anxiety arises out of unassimilated percepts is put forward by McReynolds. That it is related to commitment and awareness is Kirkegaard's notion. And that it signifies perceived threat to existence as a personality is conceived by May [7] . All can be related to the poly-self problem. Going beyond Gray to the sources, one can synthesize from them a concept of anxiety as an unending (because not quite exhausting) flight from oneself occasioned by defeat in containing emotional stress and by inability to face up to the everyday world. These opponents would be never a sufficient cause, however, were there not the ever-present existential fear that the self is not itself, but rather a dissociated confederacy. And the outer world per se is a source of fear because with this discordant confederacy, who can be sure that the world is real and fixed? One need not be a philosopher to sense this fear, but it helps in expressing it. As Schopenhauer wrote, "The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence." Is anxiety normal? Yes, endemic. Is anxiety part of the fear-flight syndrome? Yes. But for the "flight" part of the syndrome, we must investigate other behavior, beginning with punishment. {S : GUILT AND PUNISHMENT} GUILT AND PUNISHMENT A taboo forbids some relationship of a group's members to an object or being. It functions as an obsessive phobia. It can also be regarded as an unconscious plan by a social group to proscribe an activity in general but to grant that the prohibition will be violated by "sinners." Despite the score of theories as to the nature of taboos, there seems to be no significant difference between a taboo and the process of law in rationalized societies except in the degree of analytic awareness accorded to the two types of phenomena. Both condemn a transaction, elicit guilt for its performance; excite reliably the "satanic" impulse of individuals to violate the proscription; thereby exciting impulses in the satanist and, by identification, the society, to feel guilty; punish the guilty and give thereby a sado-masochistic bonus to the group members; and then conclude with the expectation that the cycle will repeat itself. So the taboo, and the law, are techniques of varying awareness for producing routine behaviors, with exceptional cases providing a leavening of guilt and punition. A taboo and a law that are never violated are not only unnecessary, but undesirable, and a contradiction in terms. It is for the group consensus that the law or taboo is needed, for "reasons" and "consequences" that are more or less clear but in any event affirmed, if only in order to exercise the ritual guilt and punishment that the human uses to assure that his psyche is under governance and can control its aberrations, both internal and external. Punishment of the self and of others has the same etiology. Humans who could punish others but not themselves, or vice versa, are structurally impossible. That observers have been misled to believe that people exist who are capable of one but not the other attests to the deluding permutations that are possible in the essential need to deal with the punitive aspects of the gods. Guilt is an obsession with the conceived need to punish some part of oneself. I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wrack, And the victim and the torturer. Thus Baudelaire [8] . Guilt and punishment are both "moral" activities, meaning by moral that their processing in the central nervous system is associated with compulsive identifications with symbols or beings of authority. The wish for, or condoning of, such authority is a wish to control oneself and others, thence ultimately existential fear. The origin of morality is frequently the perceived behavior of the gods, whether based on some reality or hallucinatory. The behavior of the gods is an effective instrument for inculcating fear because of their actual behavior as perceived by the delusory and projective apparatus of the primeval human mind. The gods, as perceived, commit wanton injury, cease to commit injury, and commit benefits more infrequently. They do so ostensibly in all the combinations and permutations of the high-energy natural forces - lightning, seismism, volcanoes, hurricanes, meteoritic phenomena. They also do so by facile penetrations of the minds of people - demanding, exhorting, frightening, and promising. The individual split-self, comparing itself with others, works to discover a pattern of actions that distinguishes his behavior from that of others, and one category of others from another category. Driven by extreme anxiety, his hypotheses become obsessions. He discovers what he thinks to be such patterns and the relation of such patterns to the response of the gods. He proposes and follows with obsessive subjectivity and paranoid zeal the line of conduct that appears to promise the greatest benefits and the lightest treatment from the gods (and their representatives - men, animals, plants). He projects his own correlations into the motives of the gods. Depending upon his charisma and the degree to which the god's behavior actually has a consistent appearance to others as well as himself, he makes a consensus of believers, a religious sect. To strengthen his own self-restrictive behavior and to bargain for control over others, he transfers his authority to the sect. He finds thereby an accommodation that far exceeds, in the security and satisfactions that it brings, even the great benefits being experienced by group cooperation in hunting, farming, and manufacturing. Indeed, this basic security is so beneficial, that it causes the great development of these latter activities, and of art, sex and procreativity. All of these activities, affecting all life, became then suffused with and dependent upon the origination of guilt and punishment. Punishment takes many forms - of the self and of others, of the world and of the thought, of the body and of the mind, of deliberate action and of subconsciously driven behavior, of mildness and extremeness. All emanate from self-awareness and the reservoir of primeval fear filled by it. The need to punish is always independent of the demonstrable effects of the punishment. Fear finds its nexus whenever it encounters the obstacle of its own illogic. To sacrifice one's own child to a demanding god is by its own extremity of pain and sorrow the proof that the punishment must be effective. Moreover, the persistent and universal presence of human sacrifice is the mere outcropping of self-destructive and destructive activity, both deliberately and subconsciously conducted, which masses itself beneath the innumerable different cultures that have evolved since mankind originated. The kind of punition that asks first for the logical connection between offense and punishment, and seeks to follow the crime with correction in the future, has only occasionally and especially in recent times had some impact upon deliberate punishment. Even then, though faced with psychiatric theories attacking primeval guilt and punishment, the urge to punish has tended to go underground into the subconscious, there to expand upwards once again in destructive behaviors that are handled in a context of fear in which punishment occurs as an ever-present instrument of relief and discharge. Basic patterns of behavior are infused with appropriate modes of punition - catatonism with paralysis for having moved, and by moving, moved the world order to destruction; obsession with numerous rules to proceed in fixed ways on pain of a variety of punishments ranging from mild social disapproval to the most horrifying extirpation that can be devised; sublimation with the torturing of thought, art, and institutional behavior, generally playing out the eternal drama of the sin of being human; orgasm with displays of violence, sacrifice and ecstasy. The common need for authority, especially one who can punish and forgive, is plain, for punition tends to unite the self, whether it be by the self or by the authority, and a god is therefore much needed. So is the god needed in external relations, interpersonal affairs where, as Martin Buber, the theologian, says, God, the Great Thou, enables human I-Thou relations between one person and another to subsist [9] . It is plain what an important role the gods play in holding the self together, and why gods are assigned the tasks of punishment. The tenuous self, striving for integrity, for self-rule or selves-government, invites a third party, the god, to intervene, who, by definition rather then logico-empirical proof, restores order in the self by punishing one or more of its components; it matters not which, and matters not why. What matters is that the punished being feels whole, feels "better" afterwards. Such is probably the essential dynamic of masochism. The transfer of godlike qualities to the rulers of the state-kings, judges, and generals - and of institutions (presidents) and families (parents) lends these real beings authority, which hoi polloi can disregard only at the risk of punishment, whether self-inflicted or imposed by the rulers. Witness today, for instance, a typical sequence of problems and behavior in the "educated" family, pictured through the mind of the father: 'My children have no conscience... They discovered that I was not obeying a third party... they don't obey me... they feel free to attack me... they should have been given a party [abstract and delusional] to which both I and hence they would refer judgements... I could have dominated them [paradoxically] much more if I showed them that I was submissive to a third party... then they would join me in relation to the third party and I would not be the target of their hostility..." Every life activity displays guilt and punishment - sexuality, food production, tool- making, war and justice, death. The peculiarly human aura of sexuality, like that of other human life areas, is owing to the architectonics of fear, with its archinstruments of guilt and punitiveness, working its way through the continuous mind- exploding mechanisms of the split self (selective memory, symbolization, control- seeking). As M. Gray has mentioned, fright in man is more complex than in animals because "the new dimension that is reached in man can be viewed as symbolic fear." [10] Sex and fear systems are tied together in endocrinal secretions, so that there is little need in psychology to devise a logico-rational explanation of how, beginning with fear, the human mind runs to sex, or vice versa. The fight-flight system is basically the fear system, and is "ubiquitous," using Tepperman's word. Bleuler discovered early that "the idea of intercourse is often expressed by that of murder," that "wars and duels are symbols of cohabitation," and that the idea of being burned is tied up with murder and sex [11] . Often we observe that peacetime anxieties or fear produce sexual impotency, whereas wartime fears, where violence is pervasive, produce lust and rape. Men going about looking for jobs develop impotence; men infiltrating an enemy town or abandoning it seek sexual outlets. Unleashed violence uses sex as a screen for and release of fear. However, regarding murder, say, sex is not the originator. The life areas are intertwined, as are all others. The human does not compartmentalize, especially when under stressed fear, nor do many animals, but the human has a lower threshold of compartmentalization than the animal and must endure, indeed often enjoys, the confusion and mingling of life activities. Strange, because the human is the greatest analyst of mixtures, and can separate, in his mind and by scientific tests, the life areas so that pure categories of sex and aggression and work, etc. are educed. A wide range of "normal" and abnormal" behaviors are developed in man, reflecting every known special sex behavior of every species, even at least up to the point of zoological impossibility as in divine and mythical hermaphroditism. (In rare cases, as today, and in perhaps a flurry of mutational cases in primordial natural disaster, hermaphrodites may have provided the grain of truth to the common myths of divine hermaphroditism.) Man's mind certainly dwells upon hermaphroditism. Resistance, obsession, sublimation and orgiasm, in turn and in combination, emit a host of various sex behaviors, in the individual and group. What the mental strategies do to characterize the sex instincts of humans is also done in the other areas of life. Consequently, if one were to eliminate, in each successive area of life, the generic holistic mechanism working upon continuously renewed and stored fear, one would discover at the end of each process of elimination a root element, the sexual, the grower, the maker, the fighter, the dying person. Although no more complex than the fullness in toto of animal behavior, these areas are elaborated in an exceedingly rich manner within humans by the basic mechanism operating out of fear in unending supply. {S : AVERSION AND PARANOIA} AVERSION AND PARANOIA A common element in schizophrenic symptomology is an aversiveness to humans. This includes social distrust, desire for privacy, fear and dislike of others, expectation of being rejected, and the conviction that one is unlovable - all on an intense level. A strong rejection to being helped is common. It is a mutual rejection of the bodyselves and a separation from the world and others of the poly-self. It is self- conscious - not animal awareness, but a delusory standing off from oneself, with the whole world (inner and outer) thus revealed, expanded by the sense of time - of recall, memory, and forgetting - and of space. The "paranoia" comes from the Greek where, anciently, to be "out of one's mind," that is para (beside) and nous (mind), denoted insanity in general; in American vernacular one would say "I was beside myself with worry." Now, narrowly, paranoia is restricted to projections of threat. The paranoic aspects of primordial and existential fear are well known. Fear fathers destructiveness. Whenever the skies darkened, or certain stars approached, or the Earth trembled, paranoia was stirred up. Legends often openly assert that "because" the gods were destroying the world, men took up arms against each other. Even voices out of highly civilized cultures, such as Alsatian peasant culture, will assure one that wars follow upon great meteoritic showers, as in 1914. What the gods are intending, as projected, is retrojected back to oneself, to one's group members, and to outside humans. In extenso, it often happens that the gods instruct men to destroy each other. Official psychiatric reports of the great Alaskan earthquake of 1964 describe how blame for the disaster, often couched in terms of an Act of God, was expressed in guilt-feelings and in accusations against others, such as "I changed my church," or "He changed his church." The inventive aspects of paranoia are considerable. The paranoid is highly energized. He stresses symbolism. He acutely discerns remote analogies as he searches for conspiracies. He prospers upon the unknown and unintelligible. He is obsessive, confident where others falter; he has answers, and insists that others adopt his answers. The dominating role of the paranoid in the origins and history of civilization becomes understandable. His "sickness" was no sickness in primordial times. Nor, properly rationalized in the language and procedures of existing culture, is the paranoid "sick" in the world of today. For every provable connection of effect with cause, humans resort to hundreds of paranoic assertions. The reason, when experts are asked why, is usually given as "ignorance." But is it not as easy to apply a simple logic on what is known, or to confess ignorance, as it is to learn or invent false accusations continually? The primary ego is compelled to assert its omniscience and, since the function of "knowing" is really to reduce internal fears, accusatory explanations are in heavy demand. A paranoid is usually beset by ambivalence, the love-hate double face and double mind of the schizophrenic, the abrupt turn from one to the other make relations between schizophrenics and others often more terrifying than consistent hostility. {S : AMBIVALENCE} AMBIVALENCE But ambivalence, we should argue, if we are set to follow homo schizo theory, must be universal in man and culture. And so it is. It is the good and the bad of everything. It is "the two sides to every question" that underlies the judicial systems and many cultures. It is manifest in the fact that people and cultures "choose" to differ in every way that they can, from one another and within themselves. The alter egos must emerge. Cannibals can be divided into those who eat their enemies and those who eat their friends. Levi-Strauss says that the incest prohibition is the only universal culture trait, a bold and learned claim. But a moment's consideration will put the claim into a revealing context. The scope of incest rules differs: some stop with parents, other with nuclear families, others with uncles and aunts, other with clans and so on in various combinations. By their existence and limitations, the rules implicate contrary wishes, hence ambivalence. Furthermore, societies have rules about everything that can be the subject of rules; incest is no more specific a concept than murder, and all societies have rules about murder; further, all societies "by right" are totalitarian implicitly if not explicitly endorsing the old army saying that "there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything in this Army." (There is an alternative rendering which is, "There is the right way, and there is the Army way; you do it the Army way!") Finally "rules are made to be broken;" without infractions there would be no rules which means, more subtly, that it is desirable to have infractions, if only to gratify the punishers, but, more than that, in order to let what is right be known. Today the gods are less frankly present in the operations of the "normal" mind and institutions; but the schizoid meaning of the primordial gods is clear. It is not enough to say that the first human mind could imagine the gods and imitate their imaginings (projection and retrojection). It actually did so on the basis of more reality than is fashionable to admit nowadays. The human mind was born with the gods, that is, with those terrible entities of the sky that are said to have wrecked the world, and that were hovering above and swooping down over a period of thousands of years, ever refreshing the reservoir of fear in the human mind. The animation was imagined, or so our modern logic insists. No matter, for every symbol stood for a memorable sign, every myth represented an event, then came imitation - prompt, unquestioning, and illogical. Above all other relationships in the world was the identification with bodies that both hated and loved humans on a massive scale; these were the gods who turned upon another, castrating (Saturn-Uranus, Jupiter-Typhon, etc.), maiming, tearing off heads and limbs, hurling mountains and cosmic discharges at each other and at men. "Black magic" sees a hand in everything that happens. The paranoid often sees the same. Comets and meteors readily simulate the hand. The prehistoric caves contain the hand in great numbers. The "Hand of God" is frequently reported stretching out from the heavens to the agonized populace. At one and the same time, it is the image of terror, of inevitability (the hand finally grasps), of help and of punishment. He also "Holds the Whole World in His Hands." But the hand is only a part of the rich assemblage of forms that natural bodies can assume, all of which contributes to the original and continued reification and anthropomorphizing of the gods. Schizophrenics, more commonly than controlled normal schizoids, reify the outer world. insofar as the schizotypical human has been in the forefront of human development, the gods as "humans writ large on the skies" are unending. What they did to men was beyond modern belief and was deeply suppressed. But it was never truly forgotten. The myths of old, the dreams of the normal, and the autistic reveries of the schizophrene are basically alike in structure and purpose: to manage the unmanageable. Whoever survived had to believe that they were the chosen people of the gods. Further, all the new aspects of their environment (like the manna and the ambrosia from heaven) that helped them to survive, kill enemies, give birth, and carry on creatively (arts and crafts) made them believe in the love of god. It is the famous "double bind," which social environmentalists attribute often to a mother who works out a hate-love relationship with her child, and which makes the child schizophrenic. But going back generation-to-generation to the earliest times the mother, and her mother, and so on, can only deal in hate-love ambivalence, because they were so dealt with by the primeval divinities. {S : ANHEDONICS} ANHEDONICS After ambivalence comes the pleasure-phobia, the symptom of anhedonia, which Meehl has called "one of the most consistent and dramatic behavioral signs of the disease" of schizophrenia. It is a "marked, widespread and refractory defect in pleasure capacity." Man has been mistakenly called a hedonistic or pleasure-seeking animal. The psychiatrist would say that this is correct only if self-destructive and other anhedonistic behaviors can be termed pleasurable. If whatever the organism seeks becomes, by definition, pleasurable, then it is hedonistic. The hedonistic theory is inherited from the Benthamite school of early nineteenth century England. The psychology of hedonism had taken over a commanding position in Western societies in the guise of democracy and socialism. Certain philosophers - ancient Epicurus for instance - certain societies, not many - the United States for example - take up the idea enthusiastically. Or, at least, so imply the advertisers. But, say the critics of American civilization, the attempt at hedonism fails miserably. In reality, the pursuit of hedonism is always a secondary social aim. No society has ever been founded upon the pleasure principle. All societies are ideologically committed to the principles of anhedonia: pleasure is evil; pleasure is impossible; pleasure brings punishment, suffering is good; pleasure is a release from disciplined suffering; pleasure is to be tolerated only upon the celebration of a disastrous anniversary, as an orgy inviting repentance. The orgy is a complex of smile and snarl - as in dogs we have known, and in humans we should wish to investigate. It is from the human person that society is constructed, and where anhedonia is born. To prove this, one may begin with deduction. Pleasure-phobia is logically implied in the theory of the fearful polyego. The mental construction of the human is fundamentally unsettled. The frustrations of existence - to satisfy needs and evade the blows of nature - write an undulating pattern over the basic unsettlement. Now if one is permitted the irony, is it not strange that pleasure should be regarded as natural and in this day people who are anhedonic should be regarded as mad, when it is the hedonist who perhaps should more naturally be taken to be mad? It is significant therefore that the definition of pleasure itself is the greatest weakness of hedonism as a philosophy. The hedonist begins by thinking of pleasure as a commonplace idea: "eat, drink, and be merry," "a car for every family," "peace and plenty," "a chicken in every pot," "free love," etc. That is, the hedonist turns out to be a superficial psychologist who has a rationalist uni-dimensional view of people. However, most people seem intent upon rejecting this kind of pleasure in part or whole. As soon as one asks of the hedonist, "What gives people pleasure?" he must reply: "People get pleasure from whatever they wish to do or have done to them." Pleasure, then, in a word, is "Voluntarism," as in the old-fashioned expression, found in several European languages as a mode of address to superiors, e. g. "What is the gentleman's pleasure?" Under the Ancien R‚gime in France, the King signed all of his promulgations with the phrase, "Car tel est notre bon plaisir," which phrase would be related upon every reading of a law or judgement, as when a man was condemned to death, "For such is our good pleasure." But of what does Voluntarism consist in primeval humanity? Assuredly it is in fulfilling those devices that are animal in kind: feeding, fornication, fighting and fleeing danger. More than that? Yes, hanging around where one can feed and fornicate and feel free from danger the next time on each cycle. What else, that is typically human? To refuse food, to refuse sex, to fight instead of flee. Even more, to do all that can possibly be imagined to use these elemental desires in ways that will establish and secure the most wanted triple-control of the self, others and the gods. Let us look at the earliest legends of mankind. What do they have him doing in these regards? A great many unpleasurable things. He sets up a host of taboos against the most plausible kinds of enjoyment. He eats only certain food, and at only certain times. He eats what is bad to eat when good foods are available. He eats in a certain way, giving a portion of the best of his food to the gods, as hungry and insecure as he may be. He fasts. He eats his gods and his enemies. He builds a great oral literature on what to avoid eating and subsidizes priests to tell him what not to eat, when, and how to prepare what he does eat, ulcer or not. Would it be permissible to suggest that two out of every ten humans who have ever lived have died prematurely from pursuing irrational eating habits? (Meaning by irrational: ingesting or avoiding because of non-dietary reasons what is severely prescribed or proscribed.) Sexual behavior, too, is thoroughly permeated by restrictions and impositions. Name an animal that lingers in coition. Other than man, of course. That exults in creating a female orgasm. Whose orgasms are compared with death itself? Not "I am born," but "I am dying" is the sometimes climactic ejaculation by the sexual partner, with subsequent relief and relaxation from having met with death and survived. And again creates a philosophy, as the Hindu, for one instance, that explains how you weaken yourself unto death by sexuality. So, too, conflict. To defend is "natural," to flee is natural; but not to attack deliberately with one's guts roiling, in row upon row with bayonets fixed, with death ahead, yet death from behind upon whoever falters. Whence the awards go to those who have suffered most joyously, doggedly, "without questioning why, but to do or die." Verily who seeks pleasure seeks its own reward; who seeks pain and suffering is exalted before oneself, before man, and before god. The earliest glyphs and scripts of mankind are pleasure-phobic to the degree to which they are sacred. Coming from the Egyptians, Hebrews, Sumerians, Mayans, Chinese, Icelanders, Myceneans and Greeks, these coherent patches of history and morality stress without exception that the pains of existence must be and should be, hardly ever do they set up mammalian or sublimated pleasures as a human ideal. The anhedonism of primordial and schizophrenic humans is understandable: existential fear demands not pleasure, but relief. And this relief results from a broad spectrum of activities that are hardly pleasurable: self-mutilation, sacrifice, cannibalism and exhausting ritual. The ambivalence of the gods and of the self, too, warn against pleasure. T. Reik has argued that the original sin was not sexual but rather of hubris, the imitation of the god's power, such as the seizing of the God's fire [12] . It was alright for the Homeric heroes to address the gods as "blessed and happy;" but calling themselves happy was an invitation to disaster. Far more institutions have been created in ancient and modern times for the suppression of pleasure than for its enjoyment. But as Freud intimated in his Civilization and Its Discontents, without suppression of the instincts there would be no civilization. Herbert Marcuse has more recently elaborated upon the thesis in Eros and Civilization. Even these trenchant criticisms for culture now seem superficial. They have but carried forward another version of "the noble savage" of eighteenth century philosophy. One cannot discover, nor properly induce from pre-history, a human culture that sought to provide pleasure except as it might be incidental to relief and escape. Anhedonism is imprinted upon human nature, the individual schizoid psyche, which is pleasure-phobic more than pleasure-prone, abets and invents the anhedonistic institutions. And institutions "hate pleasure," whereas they cultivate suffering. Usually, pleasure-phobia is an aversion to interpersonal and "animal" pleasure rather than to cognitive and aesthetic pleasure. The schizo-type can evince aesthetic and intellectual hypercathexis without the fears and guilt of interpersonal pleasures (i. e., human pleasures). Anhedonia is not apathy, but is pseudoapathy, a tense and anxious state; its final form is catatonism, which is really "playing possum" with the gods. {S : CATATONICS} CATATONICS Manu, the Noah of the Hindus, "practiced severe and great self-mortification." Wearing a bark shirt, his hair matted, "while he stood on one foot with his arms raised, with bent head and eyes unblinking, he performed awesome austerities for 10,000 years." He was chosen by order of the gods to recreate all creatures after the Deluge. "By virtue of his very severe self-mortifications the manner shall be manifest to him." [13] So the model of man is taught the greatest knowledge by the greatest suffering. Freud in one place quotes Kaempfer on the taboos governing the Japanese Emperor of old: In ancient times he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquility in his empire; for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country [14] . Gurdjieff reports an experience from Central Asia. There in a village a religious sect was playing games of magic circles. A girl was frozen in the circle that other children had drawn around her. She could not move out nor could adults from the sect drag her out. Persons who entered and left the circle remained in a catatonic state for many hours. It seems that one entering the circle grants her vital force over to an outside being as a bribe to prevent harm to oneself. Thus emptied of vitality, one cannot move. There is more than an analogy with some psychological problems in a rigid bureaucracy. The incubant at his desk gives over his life forces to an outside being - in this case the inanimate collective representation that is the agency or bureau. Whereupon the employee becomes inert, immobile, and cannot direct the very forces he is employed to manage. Workers concerned with disaster assistance comment frequently upon the fatalism and denial of the victims; often the outsiders are baffled and become angry. In one of the few honest reports ever written on this question, a transport expert working intimately with the truck drivers bringing food in the recent Sahelian drought and having substantial contact with the rural population, reported that at first none of the local population seemed ever to have heard of the drought; later he concluded that they felt it deeply and were taking rational steps to minimize the hurt in ways they had known all their lives. In much of the Savannah and desert of Africa, people take drought to be a necessary divine warning that religions and moral standards are slipping and that a revival is due. The harm done to them must actually be received in a sacred mood. It is notable that this report is of rare honesty. Ordinarily the nervous givers of charities must be reassured that the recipients are responding "logically" and "rationally," and reporters generally supply such news upon demand. What is the fear of change of habits, customs, society and human relationships, even of aging? Is it based upon some pragmatic calculus of cause-consequence; that is, is it based upon the experience of change, discovering that change is always for the worse? And why does the feeling vary so greatly, then, among individuals, so that, for example, a social psychologist such as Lowell could divide politicians and public opinion into two categories: the optimistic and the pessimistic? The fear of change derives from the anxiety over the potential loss of an ego stability, which is markedly worse the less the poly-ego is stabilized to begin with. May this not explain the phenomena of personal and social conservatism and stagnation? The process in society, as in the person, is self-aggravating. As a society destabilizes in revolution, whether social, industrial, or political, far from people becoming habituated to the change, they become more desperate. Even though the change may be rationalized as beneficial, any material improvement and a formal lift in dignity become inadequate consolations for the failures of individuals to compose new poly-selves for the new times. This should constitute a lesson for non-Marxian revolutionaries. A catatonic patient, like Manu, is far from "despairing" of control of the world. He may hold a position for months, but if moved, flex and adjust so as to maintain the assumed position [15] . His ability is unconscious in that it far exceeds any normal ability. Other patients (Bleuler called them "waxy cataleptics") were without spontaneous movement but maintained any position in which they were placed. Another type went on repeating motions that were supposed to have begun and stopped. Often the cataleptic exercises himself in an "affirmation of negativism" that requires great muscular energy and coordination. Here is what other mental patients say: "I can't move if I am distracted by too much noise. I can't help stopping to listen. That's what happens when I am lying in bed. If there is too much noise going on, I can't move." Another says, "I get stuck, almost as if I am paralyzed at times." They are driven sometimes to losing their subjectivity. They become objects and, as one patient said, "Objects don't have feelings. '' [16] Catatonism tells the gods or other authorities: "I do not move, lest when I move I am noticed, and the world, too, will move." Catatonism is a common response to the shocks of primeval and historical disasters. It is seen in every accident ward and especially in military hospitals. In a great disaster, such as Hiroshima, catatonism is a major behavioral response. Non-rationalized cultures (mistakenly termed "primitive")) simulate catatonism when reenacting the earliest days of creation. Members of a certain Jewish sect must remain throughout the Sabbath in the same posture that they were assuming when the Sabbath began. Children present during traditional religious ceremonies are warned to be particularly silent and immobile while the priest reenacts the primordial end of one world and beginning of the next. Wherever the authority of religion has descended upon secular institutions - be it a library or the mausoleum of Lenin - a "respectful" silence is maintained. Gestures become restrained. Clothing becomes "appropriately" somber, unobtrusive. All that is individually outward is suppressed, and it all "happens naturally." Short of catatonism and beyond anhedonia exists the realm of apathy. Schizophrenics, the psychiatrists say, are so contradictory: sometimes excessively voluble, hyperactive, frenzied, and then again and for prolonged periods apathetic. Nothing interests or excites them. They may be occasionally aroused, and then retreat dramatically into torpor of manner, posture, and speech. They are impossible to arouse. No one knows what stimulus will once more perhaps excite them. Meanwhile no indignity inflicted upon themselves or others, no injustice, no deprivation seems to matter. Electric shock treatment is resorted to, a horrible experience, a repetition of primeval bolts of Jove. Occasionally, a cure of apathy results, but note that it is a worse pain, a greater fear of the lightning discharge, that arouses the patient, not a pleasure; no pleasure will ever do the job. Pain, not pleasure, is the route to resuscitation, a recovery of a status as a punished one, a way to please the self, others and the gods. Self-deception of anhedonia and catatonics can be carried to the expected extreme of self-destruction by suicide, just as with the other delusions of man. Karl Meninger sees in all mental illness a core of self-destructiveness. Freud's last paradigm had "Thanatos," the death instinct, juxtaposed to "Eros," the life instinct. There is no use in trying to draw a line to include only the mentally ill. Self-destruction in its most obvious forms, leading to death, is an extreme anhedonism, by definition, which is to say that other self-destructive behaviors that are not so obviously leading out of anhedonia are tied into anhedonia for the simple reason that man seeks self-control holistically and hologramatically; the symptoms are interrelated. Oblivion in catatonism and death is the ultimate control of the self by surrender; the self is no longer divided or in disarray or scattered. {S : ORGIES AND HOLOCAUSTS} ORGIES AND HOLOCAUSTS But a place must be made for orgiastic behavior. Whereas one kind of violence emerges from the discipline and sacrifices of "law and order" or obsessive social forms and institutions, a second kind of violence entails the tearing down of structures and institutions. Sometimes this occurs in Saturnalian orgies where deliberately, for the nonce, all social forms are turned upside down; masters serve slaves, equality reigns, contracts are broken, wealth is burned or otherwise wasted. Amidst the Assyrian terror, Isaiah cries out: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." (Is 22; 13) Ecclesiastes does him one better: "Eat, drink, and be merry..." At other times, orgiastic violence becomes warfare and social purges, such as witch hunts and political reigns of terror. "The conscience for which [Hitler] stands," wrote Lasswell in 1933, "is full of obsessional doubts, repetitive affirmations, resounding negations, and stern compulsions." [17] Mass death followed. The obsessional and the orgiastic work hand in glove. Human sacrifices, an ancient Pharoah inscribed, will purge you to the satisfaction of the gods. Warfare, for the Aztecs, was continuously needed to provide prisoners whose sacrifice was demanded to keep the world orderly and the sun regular. Sizemore and Myers have connected schizophrenia, fear of world destruction, and ancient catastrophes [18] . Eissler calls Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of the end of the world by flood, fire, hurricane, and explosive seismism his last and greatest works [19] . The orgiastic event commemorates the end of the world or of one world. "Better a terrible end than an endless terror," said the Nazi slogan. Again, it is a replay of the primeval times of disaster, a carrying out of the will of the indignant or new god. Political force represents phylogenetically the force that overturns the earth; therefore, necessarily often, political force is adored, is not to be restrained, and when abused, remains still genealogically right. There are many analogies in the human mind between natural and political violence; Shakespeare, as Irving Wolfe demonstrates, interchanges social, personal and nature's language in a shower of metaphors. Holocausts are demanded. "The beast within us" is called forth. But, of course, it is not a beast; no beast acts so; it is the human within us that is called out. A common phrase in writings about repulsive practices is "Even as late as..," as if mankind had been on an upward track of moral conduct. "Even as late as the Roman Empire, infant sacrifices to Saturn occurred... etc." "Not until the Spaniard arrived, did the Aztecs cease their regular cannibal sacrifices of thousands of persons," or "the Jews of Czarist Russia and the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were not freed from the dread of pogrom and massacre until 1920," or "As late as the 1880's the Shawnee Indians sacrificed a maiden upon the near approach of planet Venus." However, relief is not in sight. Progress is a matter of a few years. Somewhere, at any given time, a massacre or deadly persecution is probably taking place. The human "holocausts" of the German Nazis, Russian communists, Chinese communists and nationalists and of the lesser Balinese military, Cambodia communists and other groups of the past half-century took perhaps one hundred million lives. Wars and starvation by neglect killed another hundred millions. And the world arms, while it talks in terms of killing more hundreds of millions of people. It is not difficult to prove that homo schizo is nearly as far from "killing only to eat" as he ever was. Nor has any social invention appeared that might promise a definite end to such catastrophic behavior. This, more than anything else, ought to motivate the study of human nature. We know, do we not, that the historical modes and inventions of systems of social cooperation have failed all critical tests? There is an automatic anhedonia about modern holocausts. The pleasure-phobia sacrifices others to reassure itself: "The only good Indian is a dead one." But the phobia then goes farther to hide the emotionality of the deed by bureaucratizing (routinizing) it. The self-suffering (which is not rationalizable to others) is translated into sublimated self-suffering that makes sense to others. In cultures where religion provides infinite legitimated anhedonia, this is an easy matter; every impulse to suffering can be indulged. {S : SUBLIMATION OF FEAR} SUBLIMATION OF FEAR Nevertheless, older religions (theocracies, specifically) set up channels of suffering that lead to astonishing aesthetic and intellectual products. Especially in cultures deviating from heavy religious norms, self-suffering by sublimated activity is given an individual or scientific-bureaucratic base, and it is here that the schizophrenic is identified; since he is not incorporated into bureaucracy and rituals, his activity is exposed as psychopathic; then wonder is expressed at the great aesthetic and intellectual product that emerges from his suffering mental state as in the case of the composer Schuman, the sociologist Max Weber, the novelist Kafka, and so on. Aesthetics and invention are displacements and trans-substantiations of interpersonal suffering, conveyed in ideas and symbols. Thus frequently the schizoid patient surprises his keepers by contrasting behaviors, on the one hand completely uncoordinated and erratic where people are concerned, but on the other hand competent, cool, logical in the pursuit of music, mathematics, and zoology. In such pursuits, the schizoid leaps over his uncontrollable anxieties of the other self, the other person, the living nature and gods. Then he (or she) doubles back upon the percepts and cognitions left behind, purging them until they form a colorless fabric of abstractions which he drapes comfortably over himself. In movies, novels, and journalism people (normal) express surprise and anger at how many institutions of love and priests of love behave contrarily; these are unfeeling, inhuman, interested mostly in abstracted aspects of people and things. Such frequent behavior of "welfare officials" is partly their anhedonism and partly their personal aversiveness, whether expressed by them characterologically or as typical representations of institutions. A climactic case of a love institution built upon a great fear and hatred is afforded by the American Jonestown community of Guyana, South America, where several years ago some 900 people living in a community of love were suddenly transformed by their leadership into a community of suicides and killers, to the end that within a few hours almost no one was left alive. In the interviews and reports issuing upon the disaster, the phrases of terror and doom dominate. Man cannot lift himself by his own bootstraps. The human has been and is always in some combined state, varying cyclically in intensity, of self-punition, aversiveness, anhedonia, ambivalence, paranoia, catatonism, and orgiasm, as well as obsession. The social structures are but an extension to help him control these embodiments of anxiety. It may be hopeless to seek exceptions via cultural anthropology or special religious sects. Fear phenomena can be manipulated, handled, understood, balanced, but not erased. Otherwise we should have a vegetable or simple animal, for the animals closest to man have also a problem of eternal angst. A normal scientist (and to be a scientist implies an abnormality), admittedly a superman of rationalized controls, is ipso facto allowed and trained to mistrust his senses, to mistrust the word of others, to regard everything as important (that is, engage in the most remote displacements), to check and recheck anxiously, to be obsessive about his subject, to avoid personal identifications and emotions, and to suffer self-punition over extended periods of times. What is science, indeed, but a capitalization of instinct-delay and the heavy anxiety-alert to develop and exploit them as actual products? {S : Notes (Chapter 5: Coping With Fear)} Notes (Chapter 5: Coping With Fear) 1. Op. cit., 234-5. 2. Jay Tepperman, Metabolic and Endocrine Physiology, Chicago: Year Book Medical Publishers, 1962, 136. 3. The Physiology and Pathology of the Exposure to Stress, Montreal: Acta, 1950. 4. Op. cit., 195. 5. Op. cit., 136-7. 6. Cf. Melvin Gray. op. cit., 97ff for a list. 7. Ibid., 93. 8. Baudelaire, (Penguin ed., 1961), 160. 9. I and Thou, 1937. 10. M. Gray, op. cit., 131. 11. Op. cit., 415-6, 27. 12. Theodor Reik, Myth and Guilt. 13. J. A. B. van Buitenen, "Manu, Ut-Napischtim, and Noah," U Of Chicago mag. (Winter, 1975), 10-3. 14. Totem and Taboo, 1913, N. Y.: Norton, 1950, 45. 15. Bleuler, op. cit., 180. 16. Mc Ghee and Chapman, 63, Patients 12, also patients 3, 5, 20, 14,1. 17. Harold D. Lasswell, "Psychology of Hitlerism," in Political Behavior (studies), London. 18. Warner Sizemore and John V. Myers "Schizophrenia and The Fear of World Destruction," I Kronos, (Spring, 1975), 75; cf. W. A. Spring, "Observations on World Destruction Fantasies," 8 Psychanal. Q. (1939), 48-56. 19. K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on an Enigma, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 6: } {T SYMBOLS AND SPEECH} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX SYMBOLS AND SPEECH Speech is the favorite among the traits said to mark the human being. "The chain of nucleosynthetic evolution.. breaks over the derivation of language," T. A. Wertime writes. To speak and understand "marks the crucial breach in the symbiosis of primate and nature, the onset of contrivance and 'sin'. '' [1] Language breaks the instinctive bond between man and nature and sets man free in a maelstrom of delusions. Other species are outdistanced in the race to set up communication systems, but still their achievements limit the human claims. Speech is systematic symbolism. Symbolism characterizes all outputs and effects of human behavior. Whether we grow crops, organize business, or sell books, what we do has symbolic origins and is conducted by and amidst symbols, and deals with symbolized things. The final form of much human output is largely symbolic, as with scientific, technical, and ordinary discourse, also with art, some myth, and a part of religion and magic. Ernst Dichter, a well-known human relations consultant, produced for the use of manufacturers and advertisers an encyclopedia devoted to the Psychological connotations of a great many industrial designs [2] . Human speech, language, the 'vox humana' does not consist of written words. The written word is merely a representation of speech in another (and more constraining) medium - a further level of symbolism, since language itself is a set of symbols for concepts which themselves correspond but poorly to external reality. Language is a code of a code; writing is a code of this code of a code [3] . I quote this out of a personal letter from the linguist Malcolm Lowery. {S : SILENT SYMBOLISM} SILENT SYMBOLISM Not to be excluded from symbolism are graphic codes, signs, marks on trees and stones, sacred paths and benchmarks, routes among the stars, and very many other human productions. All are sent and received as symbols. Illusions are symbols inasmuch as non-existent objects or facets of objects present themselves significantly to the brain, standing for something else. Studies of American Sign Language, a system imparted to the deaf and employed by the deaf, sometimes by the deaf to the deaf, establish "the fact that to be a medium capable of expressing the full range of human intentions language need not be spoken. It is the human brain, not the mouth or the larynx that makes language possible. ASL is a complete language." [4] Wit, humor, poetry and song are within the capabilities of sign language. Hence, language without speech is possible. Signals (smoke or flags), gestures (deaf mutes), whistling (cf. Harpo Marx), and writing (letter, romances) are alternative modes of communication. So is pantomime. This would suggest that speech is not the "cause" of language, but that language prompts speech and other means of communication. Eric H. Lenneberg shows that at the age of 21-37 months the age of "acquisition of language," the "right hemisphere can easily adopt sole responsibility for language and language appears to involve the entire brain.. though the left hemisphere is beginning to become dominant toward the end of the period." [5] By the age of fourteen language is markedly left-lateralized, irreversibly. I conclude that the internal language code is first set up; then the physico-motor apparatus and left-brain dominance usurp language for external and public behavior. The road is clear, then to consider whether self-speech may prompt public speech, admitting that public speech may govern self-speech to a degree. Or, more appropriately, we should assert that self-symboling prompts public symbolism. {S : ANATOMY} ANATOMY Speech occurs similarly in all humans: sound waves are made by muscles and tubes, and consist of phonemes (vowels and consonants, etc.), combining into morphemes (e. g. words), which acquire a morphology (sentences, etc.) and broader levels of syntactical patterning - the whole largely unconscious except on the superficial level of the "spelling bee." No specific speech center occurs in the brain, a fact of large significance: there is no speech organ, no lobe, no sign of an organic mutation, no high density concentration, no neural bunch, no exclusive territory. Speech is controlled from a large cortical area extending from just in front of the visual area, across the auditory to the edge of the motor region. The area can be tested functionally in the left hemisphere for the right-handed person, and in the right for the left-handed. The tongue and larynx have muscles and the brain accords them special motor areas. The area for the tongue is much larger than for the whole leg, one more instance of the dye-economy, or at least "indifference" of "nature," assigning to the "less important" a large housing while the more worthy tenant sleeps wherever he can. The whole central nervous system supplies the messages that are framed by the lips and tongue. The chimpanzee enjoys no such grandeur, says Ralph Gerard, "I strongly suspect that you could not teach a chimpanzee to speak chimpanzee, let alone English, because he doesn't have large enough areas for his tongue and his larynx. '' [6] We are not convinced: an ape can make several distinct sounds, say six; this would allow about 26 or 128 unrepetitive combined sounds, many more if repetitive, viz., "hubba, hubba." Attacking the assertion of one pongid researcher, that "language is no longer the exclusive domain of man," one group of scientists has concluded from its study of a chimpanzee called "Nim," and an analysis of other pongid and infant studies, that an "apes's language is severely restricted. Apes can learn many isolated symbols (as can dogs, horses, and other non human species), but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational semantic, or syntactic organization of language." [7] But all this is not because of a lack of tongue-motor. The brain stores, exercises as memories, and emits signals according to its history. What is used is banked and what is not used has no bank account to draw upon. If apes cannot talk, it is not because of a lack of these evanescent motor centers of the cortex. Nor is it because the brains of apes are too small. Fluency of speech is not correlated with brain size in humans, with a span of difference of hundreds of cubic centimeters, as much as one fourth. For that matter, the human brain is largely disused, so an ape ought to have brain-room for talking, even if only "small talk." The chimpanzee also has space for data storage in his brain, beyond motor areas. Nor are apes untrainable, witness the responses obtained by dedicated keepers over a period of time; they can be made to imitate man closely. Yet, as claimed above, very little speech ensues. Is it then that the ape does not want to talk? Yes, that hits at the central problem. There is not enough internal conflict in the primate to "justify" the installation of a symbol and signal system. Even if it were to be, or has been partially installed, the animal is not schizoid enough to levy continuous demands upon the system, and it deteriorates from desuetude. George Miller says, agreeably, that "talking and understanding language do not depend on being intelligent or having a large brain. They depend on 'being human'." [8] So long as the source of human nature cannot be pinpointed, it is well to put "being human" in quotation marks. But I think that we shall no longer be required to do so. Perhaps to get apes to talk, infant apes must be first neuroticized by continuous injections of chemical sensory excitants and neurotransmitter depressants. {S : NEUROLOGY OF SPEECH} NEUROLOGY OF SPEECH Monod (1971) maintains that the instructions for building human language may be contained in the genetic code. If so, the instructions are probably not complicated, as we shall explain. Writers are verging towards the concept of outer language being the language also of inner thought. Johnson writes: Although it must be recognized that language is not the only tool of thought, for we have unconscious thinking as well, it remains true that most of the mental processes of humans actually use verbal symbols as stimuli for nonverbal responses. Inner speech is produced, and it can be used as an instrument of rational processes such as voluntary movements. Herrick (1956) states: 'l repeat my conviction that some form of symbolism is requisite and that without the invention of language symbols the human type of mentation is impossible [9] . Schizophrenic patients show a profound intuitive understanding of symbolism while trampling the rules of grammar. Otto Fenichel holds that their symbolism is not a tactic of distortion but an archaic form of thinking, thinking by metaphor, we would say. The right hemisphere can assemble word forms by itself, when cut off from direct communication with the language apparatus of the left brain; this would only confirm the residue in both brain hemispheres of the bilateral primate ability to utter a variety of sounds. The chimpanzee can use words, if strongly trained to do so; one of them, Washoe, used veritable sign language, derived from American Sign Language, leading Pribram to say that "primates can construct and communicate by signs, context- free, consistent attributes of a situation which are discriminated and recognized." [10] In accordance with the theory of human Hologenesis, to be advanced later, and in striking coincidence with the philosophy of pragmatism, we can argue that language is thought, and thought is language. What happens interpersonally also happens intrapersonally. Since, as we have just argued, the brain treats "inner" and "outer" indiscriminately in relevant ways, the brain may actually employ language without discrimination as to the location of its referents. The infant babbles; a year later he utters a "word", that is, a reference that outsiders can comprehend. Whether one is talking to an audience or talking to oneself may be a reference that is learned. It is within the ken of many people to hear a victim of trauma - an exhausted survivor, a tired soldier, a mourning widow - range back and forth from talking to the outsiders to talking to oneself and to "insiders" of the self. Black (1971) has reviewed recent work which demonstrates that hallucinated words and sounds can affect the EEG [electroencephalogram]. The normal production of alpha waves are changed by such experiments, and evoked potentials are altered in hallucinating situations. The conclusion was that the EEG responds in a manner which demonstrates that hallucinatory material is processed as a reality to the nervous system just as any other phenomenon might be perceived [11] . And again: It is a fact that Gould (1948, 1949) used a stethoscope to listen to the hallucinated inner speech of a patient. The externalized sounds can be heard when the instrument is placed in front of the patient's mouth, and normal speech can be heard at the larynx [12] . It is suggested that inner thought forms itself as a neural network of neutral references among cerebral engrams (gestalts, holograms). Consequently the network itself becomes a code for interaction among the references. That is, the holograms are indexed, or given names; then grammar becomes the rules for drawing upon the names. The basic linguistic expressions, such as: "Dogs fear men"; "Gods exist"; "Go away"; "Spring will return"; are references to a key set of holograms engaging the attention to expectations based upon their summated behaviors, to egocentric wishes that can be couched as demands or "laws of nature." The "decision" to employ sound for language is partly unconscious and habitual, since sound is an old underemployed facility, and then an invention. Sounds can readily be correlated with the thought code. Silent speech connects with the speech motor system and springs outward, with striking effects. The outer world responds to the degree that it is human, or it seems to respond. Furthermore, experientially, the world responds to the thought rather well than badly. What begins as ejaculations, develops into propaganda, and propaganda in turn becomes principles - ethical and scientific. The language changes by feedback and alteration. Meanwhile, the patterned object of the grammar becomes himself a subject, if single, and a game between two subject-objects produces a "universe of discourse." Consensus on words and syntax develops. What happens "outside" happens "inside": the code one uses internally is never much different from the language used in dealing with the world. The private language of schizophrenics or anybody is merely a paranoic secret like the "Pig Latin" of children within hearing distance of their guardians. If displacements are infinite, so are codewords for them; indeed, the wide variety of displacements determines the scope of the language. Economically, efficiently, quickly, energy-conserving: language proceeds. The words need be very few to refer to everything and all the interactions among them. A half-century after Shakespeare's niagara of words, Racine's 1000 words and even less were deemed adequate to say everything in French, and for a long time thereafter anyone inclined to be more verbose, at least in tragedy, was obsessively resisted. {S : THE STRUCTURE OF SPEAKING} THE STRUCTURE OF SPEAKING What produces systematic symboling in the human? The elements of the process are self- dispersion, anxiety, self-collection, coding, metaphor, and algebra. There is a sequence in all of this, but it happens so quickly and continuously, and with so much overlapping, that it is misleading to make neat phrases. Of self-dispersion, anxiety, and self-collection we have already spoken. The self, split by instinct delays that scramble the ego, undergoes heavy anxiety, and strives for reinstinctualization or any other forms of what is hoped will be self-control. For this purpose, it ranges through the world and time by its techniques of displacement, lodging everywhere but then having to control these lodgments, too [13] . The displacements do not enter the brain pell-mell and without discrimination. The impulse that identifies them in the first place is motivated. A displacement must belong to a realm of control associations; it is metaphorical. The brain codes it by an ever-so-slight but significant tag so that it resolves into a data bank whence a codesymbol can retrieve it. If it is to be used to characterize an individual thing, it is pulled out in its entirety, sign upon sign, until it becomes a vivid picture. If it is to be used as part of a category, it is retrieved more or less as a naked index reference. As Benjamin Whorf once said, no word has a precise meaning. Mathematicians hate to admit it, but no mathematical symbol or arithmetic number has a precise meaning, either. The poly-selves are pocketed or diffused all over the brain, the body, and the outer world, including the past; the poly-self is in millions of places, a shepherd, or better, lead sheep, of a gigantic flock. Wherever and whenever perceived, they return, finding their coded abodes and reinforcing their electrobiochemical walls. Given the strength of the major ego components, the selves or roles, the coded items are not randomly distributed in the brain, but aggregate according to an abstract hierarchical classification item. If this seems like a metaphor of the rational human operation of classifying subjects, the metaphor is reversed; I would conjecture that the external work of classification in every walk of life derives from an intuitively perceived basic classifying going on naturally in the brain; man is imitating his internal central nervous system operations, just as he copies, often subconsciously, his legs, musculature, eyes and other parts of the body in designing tools. The permutations and combinations of the stored and coded material are practically infinite. The coded item which is both an abstraction and a metaphor, is "willed" to collect a sentence. (By "will," here, let us mean the set of determinants representing past operations which now demand a new operation.) The brain performs its algebra, imitating itself, and then speaks the presumably understandable words to the communicant. The algebra is simple, such as a/ b; c/ d; a= b, or a= c, or a-b = c. After all, once the wish is present and the analogues are retrieved, what still needs to be said can be formulated according to a few basic functions. Formal characteristics of the statements are not required, nor are verbs and nouns, nor singular and plural, etc.; languages have varying codes for these; they produce interesting ideological configurations in their speakers but are probably not of essential importance in creating sub-classes of human nature. Description, interrogation, demand: these three may suffice. Basically the mind works with such statements, putting into them the information bits supplied or wanted. "Fence-sitting tobacco-chewing man;" "name?" "Down, John." The first is additive of qualities, but could be of quantities; then comes the specification of an unknown blank in the "man" code data bank; finally an attempt to impose one's will. The public words needed are the question of the name, the name "John," and the command "down!" Really, only the command is needed if the intent (and power) are clear. Even a glance would suffice, if the John had been half-trained not to sit on the fence. But the little that needs be uttered hardly represents the internal processing, very rapid speech signifies a disturbing problem, not that a speaker can talk as rapidly as he can think; this is an impossible feat, though listeners tend to correlate the two. Noam Chomsky was probably on the trail of such facts when he foresaw the road that linguistics was taking. Contemporary work has finally begun to face some simple facts of language that have been long neglected, for example, the fact that the speaker of a language knows a great deal that he has not learned and that his normal linguistic behavior cannot possibly be accounted for in terms of "stimulus control," "conditioning," "generalization and analogy," "patterns," and "habit structures," or "dispositions to respond," in any reasonably clear sense of these much abused terms [14] . Also, "The speaker has learned his art by internal processing." Ernst Cassirer discussed the case of Laura Bridgeman, who was a deaf, dumb and blind child. She made distinctive sounds for people she knew, when she encountered them. Later on, like Helen Keller, she was delighted to discover that various objective (external) community names for things and people existed. Both girls wanted immediately to learn the name of everything [15] . This fact supports the theory of Homo Schizo 1, that language, like culture as a whole, was hologenetic with the first humans. Many more coded messages are circulating interiorly than find their way into vocal utterance. They are of the same kind. The most brilliant and learned voices play upon these simple themes, so that we may follow for a considerable distance those students who have reduced brainwork to an immense computer, only we say, as we shall again in the next chapter, that a combined analog and digital computer is at work. Further, the computer invention is an intuited imitation of human ratiocination. The computerized robot is man's high hope for recapturing his primate instinctive behavior. {S : VOX PUBLICA} VOX PUBLICA Symbolism is a neurological network set up to cope with the polyego predicament. Talking with oneself is not to be separated etiologically from talking with others. Basically, the same motives and the same sensory maneuvers are implicated, with the same basic effects. Once again, we encounter the hysteron proteron phenomenon, a normal logical delusion: it is believed that language is a social achievement enabling people who are apart to exchange meaningful messages, and, further, that these messages are sometimes initiated by the insane to talk to themselves. Instead, language develops as a solipsistic and holistic control of inner and "outer" messages. Without the compulsion to talk to ourselves, we would not talk to others. The outer messages are still messages to ourselves; the selves in this case are the identified, displaced objects outside of our bodies. And the aim of the outer-directed messages is to control the outer world. Carl Jung stressed the psychological difference between extroverts and introverts. Certainly the consequences of inward as opposed to outward displacement-biases are many and important for analysis and therapy. No doubt the human race can be divided into the two groupings. But both groupings derive their existence from the same, more basic human polyego origins of speech and the dilemmas of choosing internal as against external modes of polyego integration. The greatest and most urgent need of the poly-self is to "put one's house in order," part of which task, because of the excessive and demanding fear, is delegated to outside persons and objects. The feedback is extensive and compelling. The only way, or at least the best way, to control the world outside the body is to communicate with it, and the most effective mode of communication is by code or symbol, and to control by symbolism requires accepting a common medium of exchange, signs and words which prompt external behavior that reduces the anxiety of the person. The solipsistic origins of the language are clearer in an oral culture. Writing assures the objectification and authority of language; it takes people out of themselves and helps to delude them into believing that they are not talking to themselves. Thus, writing disciplines and socializes the people, taking up a centralized responsibility for their fear therapy and not permitting them to go too far towards anarchic solutions. The origins of the alphabet, proclaimed among the greatest of inventions and originating, says Santillana, from astronomy and games, shows a great capacity to generalize from observation (hearing sounds, especially). Thus 20 or 30 letters are given the task of abstracting all speech. Pictograph and syllabic writing employed symbols much more extensively, revealing a lesser application of the human power of generalization. A schizophrenic patient often invents "outer" language, swinging his clever symbolic manipulations of his dissociated egos to others, usually to ill effect, so far as his controlling them is conceived, but in certain cases, as when he "speaks in tongues," actually converting others to his will. The typical internal struggle to accommodate one's egos often requires relinquishing attempts at controlling the outer world by the language that the "egos" understand: first things first. F. de Saussure distinguished general language from speech, which is uniquely individual, like a fingerprint of structure and content. No two people speak alike. Each person has his own code, but the codes are forced together by the felt need to communicate on the part of both individual and group [16] . {S : CULTURAL DISCIPLINE AND SPEECH DIVERGENCE} CULTURAL DISCIPLINE AND SPEECH DIVERGENCE Emperor Frederick II of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, yclept "Stupor Mundi," set up in the 1300's a nursery of neonates attended by mutes, to discover from their untutored babbling how the original natural human tongue might have developed. The infants died from various causes before they could arrive at speech. As with experiments to isolate existential fear, experiments to discover the origins of speech are difficult to contrive. Psamtik I of Egypt tried a similar experiment two thousand years earlier, and James IV of Scotland also did so two centuries later. And there now is a humanistic topic for a master's degree in educational psychology. Lingua Adamica, it came to be called, whatever it might be. Cultural agents teach the infant a language. The discipline is severe, rewards and penalties are numerous: "Speak our language or not at all." Teachers of immigrant children recognize this dilemma; children sometimes stop talking altogether. Exceptions occur privately, in dreams. 'Mad poets' can speak differently. So can scientists. Drunks can babble. Religiously-inspired persons can "speak in tongues" unknown. We can learn other languages, best when very young and the process is approved by our attendants. It is not uncommon of old people, who have practiced a second language, an accent, a dialect or a jargon to perfection during their lives, to relapse in their final months into their infant and childhood language. The reason may be not that they performed best in their original language, or that the memory traces of the original words in themselves were more deeply imprinted, but rather that they established their poly-ego system and its embedded network in the earliest years of life. The strength of their original tongue is in fact the strength of their ultimate ego defenses, holding together against the dissociations brought about by the erosion of approaching death. Feral children do not speak a language, but can learn one very slowly. Some pygmy tribes are said to possess no pygmy language, but to speak the language of nonpygmy tribes with whom they associate, giving it a special accent of their own to the speech that makes their tongue incomprehensible to outsiders. Kester in his book on Upper Paleolithic language sees six basic roots in all languages and finds thousands of analogous idea-centered words surrounding each root [17] . The roots are ha, all, tat, os, acq, and tag. I agree with Lowery, who, in an unpublished manuscript, asserts that Kester has not succeeded. Nor probably did Cohane in his book, The Key, where several sacred root words such as have, og, ash, and her were pursued into hundreds of presumably derivative geographical sites around the world. Yet 1 have been long in sympathy with Whorf, who in a fellowship application to the Social Science Research Council, in 1928, talks of "restoring a possible common language of the human race or in perfecting an ideal natural tongue.. perhaps a future common speech into which all our varied languages may be assimilable, or, putting it differently, to whose terminology or.. to whose terms they may all be reduced." [18] There is a question of course as to whose code, whose exclamation would be authoritative for any given object, but the primordial scenario, which I portray in Homo Schizo I, has only siblings or mother and offspring as the communicators, and we must suspect authority in the second case to be in the mother and in the case of the siblings the same authoritative situation as arises in a gang of children coining new and secret words at "play." Language is essentially symbolism, a code that shortens inner and outer communication in respect to economy and speed of transmission. More plausibly than not, it may be maintained that whenever and wherever homo schizo originated, he spoke one language and it is from this language that all subsequent ones have descended. We may also premise that, in the beginning, descriptive epithets (Great Zeus !) were ejaculated and a vocabulary of names that included the state of the object grew rapidly until every displacement was given a name. In part simultaneously, the equal sign of the "is" was generated, with its opposite, the "is not," and sentences began. Little else need be said here: speech is basically an agreed-upon code referring to classes of objects and to their losing or gaining qualities. "Dog is wolf not wild;" "Sun is not, Moon is." But one cannot imagine a simple vocabulary and syntax enduring even for a few years. Nor can we imagine new features being deliberately invented. Language came in a rush - originated spontaneously, says Levi-Strauss. It was a cultural and organic quantavolution. Why should the first speakers stop at one or one hundred words, as if they were apes in training? There were, as I speculated in Chapter Two, impelled by the breakdown of the instinctive mammalian ego to busy themselves with coding inner communications and outer communications to their outflowing identifications. Genera and families of language in the world are few, but derivative languages, comprehended by outsiders only with much learning, number in the thousands. It has been estimated that at the time when Columbus arrived in America some 2000 distinct languages were in use. Europe is dominated by Latin, Germanic and Slavic tongues with many national and sub-national derivatives. The North African littoral speaks Arabic, while in Central Africa hundreds of diverse languages are spoken. We do not know what produces many tongues and what causes a single speech to prevail without much change over a long period of time. All effort is made to discipline people to a common tongue; yet languages ramify profusely. As propellants of divergences in speech among groups once linguistically united, several factors can be imagined on the basis of instances from history. Physical or social isolation is a necessary basis for most, if not all, cases of linguistic divergence. Movements of population with the associated ecological change promotes new terms and disuse of old ones. Differential increments of new technology add new postures towards linguistic content and style. Partial incorporation of the language of groups newly encountered, whether as subjects of conquest or as conquerors, is often a factor. Religious divergence is especially important when disasters of various kinds occur, focusing intense attention on new sacred beings of the world and all objects and relations supposedly touched by their holy hands. The practice of tactical secrecy, at first in sub-groups, then in dominating groups accompanying the fragmentation by violence or politics of the principal group, must also be considered. Memory failures, collective amnesia, accompanying abrupt splits of human groups regardless of the source, can select and discriminate vocabulary, style and usages. Conflict, competition, accompanied by hostility, snobbery, and "trade secrets" can accelerate linguistic divergence as well. Most divergence is unconsciously generated; a little is deliberate. Without a chronology, which is rarely discoverable, one cannot tell time by divergence, because the aforesaid causes may be quantavolutional or uniformitarian. The Australian dog, the dingo, is thought to have arrived 7000 years ago, but all tribes have special names for it [19] . The multitude of American tongues might have occurred in 12,000 years, or in much less or more time. Nor do we yet know how many languages were extinguished during the period, or whether the full impetus to change affected a single Asian mother tongue or also other Asian along with some proto-American tongues that preceded the conjectured recent invasions via the Bering Straits. We would stress that languages can be constructed rapidly. In a few years, a youthful cohort aged thirteen to nineteen, granted libertarian linguistic practices, can fabricate an argot that is incomprehensible to the general society. The extent of the divergence and the rapidity of change are partially concealed because the argot is discouraged in youth-to-adult contacts and the written media go their own way linguistically. Charles Morris describes the various special languages of political, poetic, bureaucratic, religious, and other cultures in his book on Signs, Language and Behavior. Zvi Rix points out [20] that "the accurate placing of by-gone happenings on the time-coordinate is the precondition for the understanding of reality. Reduction or loss of the time-component (i. e. flattening the four dimensional space-time universe into our less plastic three dimensional world) leads by consequence to misconceptions and delusions of paranoic character." It can lead to other forms of schizotypicality. The Hopi, for example, who are said by Whorf to lack a word for time, are said by him and others to have a global immediate consciousness that would be regarded as abnormal if encountered by a Euro-American. That is, we are under the influence of symbols but we do not know their origins and time of origination. Note how the invention of new words and language are attempts to get us out from under the influence of old behavior and ideology, while the opposition to new words and language is a conservative attempt, knowingly or unconsciously, to keep us under the influence of ancient symbols. It matters not what is the elapsed time since the generation of a language, in judging its sophistication. Languages, like cultures, may be tribal, but they are never primitive. No scholar has yet advanced a viable method of differentiating old from young languages, or developed from undeveloped, this despite the availability of such recent historical models as Italian-Latin and American-English. Much less has anyone been able to demonstrate the primitivity or even the irrationality (except in missing technological terms) of a language. "Many American Indian and African languages," declares Whorf, "abound in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations about causation, action, result, dynamic or energic quality, directness of experience, etc., all matters of the function of thinking, indeed the quintessence of the rational. In this respect they far outdistance the European languages." [21] {S : INNER LANGUAGE} INNER LANGUAGE We return now to the internal constitution of language. Language is useful in the animal-work of humans, as in hunting, growing, working, cooperating, and also in the displacement labors of worshiping and sacrificing. Still, language does not exist for these purposes. It exists as an internal message center. We note how words come out in a flood from a "quiet child;" the child has been talking to itself and belatedly concedes that it will have to talk to others. I think that in the behavior of Kamala, the Indian wolf-girl, who took years to emit words and then progressed rapidly [22] , one can detect an inner speech, just as in mental patients who refuse to speak but who can be heard to talk to themselves, even their speech-muscles and EEGs betraying the fact. The utility of internal speech can be identified as a message exchange in lieu of a missing automatism. A machine that is set to imitate a perfect animal, which receives and responds to stimuli undeviatingly, does not need a language. But the human mind is out of control and messages have to be sent throughout and back and forth in much greater volume than in the animal. The flock that is scattered everywhere has to be gathered. "Instead of dealing with things themselves, man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself," said Ernst Cassirer [23] . Inner language is not identical with outer language. A mad person may abandon society to control his selves, speaking a "disordered" language, which must bear significantly upon his struggle for self-organization. He does not care whether his speech helps others to coordinate the world. The effort seems not to be worthwhile; he is demoralized because he is depersonalized. If you cannot speak the language, you cannot be a citizen; and vice versa, in a radical double meaning. Working inside the social system, there is leeway to use a broader and richer language, still recognizable but suspect by those who control the system. The language of politics and power is normally barren; cliches abound; conventional images are recommended in rhetoric. As is true of language and culture so with language and politics: each can stupefy the other. But collective enterprises cannot move without rules, and rules, including language, stupefy. They do so insolently, too, and arrogantly, because connected with power and unconscious of their roots. {S : IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE} IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE What appears as speech is a voiced code shared by the speakers. The silent or unexpressed language is both the full code and the key to the voiced code. When Whorf says that the voiced code represents an ideology or weltanschauung that is peculiar to its speakers, he may be criticized for comparing the overt results of linguistic expression of two or more peoples. This enables them to assert a more marked difference between humans than may be the actual case. As Whorf and kindred scholars have established, a group's spoken language, properly studied, reveals many affinities, more or less cryptic, with the special outlook of this group on the world. Call this "the overt linguistic ideology." But now Whorf may be making too much of what is spoken. First, he assumes a mirroring of the overt language by the covert language of thought, especially since he can decipher subtle aspects of the logic of the speech. However, the covert language may contain precisely those elements of thinking seemingly absent in speech. Seen from the surface, a flounder is a brown fish with eyes; seen from the sand it is a white fish with a mouth. But it is a fish like other fish in most significant respects. If this is so, then the many linguistic groups may not represent such profound ideological differences as Whorf maintains. What surfaces as speech, that is, may be phenotypical and the genotype may be even universal. This condition, if real, has much importance for our theory of human nature. Put bluntly, "Man thinks the same everywhere, but you'd never know it to hear him talk." Whence, to appraise Whorf's original contribution, we would say, "Yes, the language that surfaces limits what can be readily communicated. Yes, the surface language, properly analyzed, shows many connections with the internal thinking processes. Yes, the surface language plus its discoverable connections with the subsurface language gives an operating distinction between two languages that can be called an ideological divergence. Yes, too, although Whorf does not digress upon it, gestures, timbre, amplification, inflections, posture in speaking, and facial expressions are part of linguistic communication, and can distinguish speakers, even of the same language; Marlene Dietrich did not speak the same German as Hitler. But no, now, these subliminal linguistic ideologies are not the human ideology; they are not basic. Language, linguistic analysis, even Whorf's penetrating analysis, does not mirror human nature. It is not the key to open all doors. The whole study of human behavior, human action, is the master key. Language, as a portion of behavior, deserves its place. If we were to bring together two strangers and they were urged not to speak, write or use conventional gesture, that is, forbidden to symbolize conventionally, they would begin to communicate by actions and imitations; emotional expressions, perhaps touching, would play a role. They would be almost incapacitated in the beginning but their activity would soon graduate into a new symbolism, and before long a common discourse would unite them. Perhaps some such mode of arriving at a universal language is better than the Basic English that Whorf so trenchantly criticizes for being so very English. Language, Whorf properly insisted, is not merely a technique of expression, but ''first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily expressible by the type of symbolic means which the language employs." [24] For instance, "the Hopi language contains no reference to 'time, ' either explicit or implicit." Yet the Hopi "equally account for all phenomena and their interrelations, and lend themselves even better to the integration of Hopi culture in all its phases." The Hopi language is rich in verbs and verb forms (but not tenses) whereas the Etruscan language prefers nouns. "Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns.." Whorf finds the Hopi possess two "grand cosmic forms," the objective and subjective, or the manifested and manifesting [25] . I would venture that these resemble the ancient Greek notions of Being and Becoming: whatever exists, is material, and what is historical must be distinguished from what does not exist (or is on its way), is subjective and is in the future. A most impressive feature of Whorf's analysis of languages is his demonstration (which I am extending logically) that languages can be graded according to how much of the logic and philosophy of the users is buried in the language as opposed to how much must be added in speech [26] . Whorf regards "thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic." Then, "silent thinking is basically not suppressed talking or inaudibly mumbled words or silent laryngeal agitations..." It is the "rapport between words, which enables them to work together at all to any semantic result." [27] These are neural processes (Whorf makes an unsatisfactory distinction between motor and non- motor processes in order to get rid of the 'mumbling' and agitations) that are, "of their nature, in a state of linkage according to the structure of a particular language, and activations of these processes and linkages in any way, with, without, or aside from laryngeal behavior... are all linguistic patterning operations, and all entitled to be called thinking." He writes, later on, "Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness." [28] Whorf takes pain to elucidate that "in linguistic and mental phenomena, significant behavior... are ruled by a specific system or organization, a 'geometry' of form principles characteristic of each language. This organization is imposed from outside the narrow circle of the personal consciousness, making of that consciousness a mere puppet whose linguistic maneuverings are held in unsensed and unbreakable bonds of pattern." [29] And he insists that the savant and the shepherd are bound alike in the toils of their mother tongue. Actually when we reach the pith of Whorf's message, it is that different linguistic groups express the same idea in different ways. And these different ways expose the falsity of thinking of language in its acceptable European form. But this is what we have been waiting for. We have now a genius in linguistic analysis to tell us that the same basic process is occurring, but is independent of our logical, grammatical, syntactical forms. Speech does not determine psychology, but the psyche finds many ways of expressing itself. There are many codes. They arrive at similar ends. To take an example from Whorf: in English, it may be said: "He invites people to a feast." In the Nootka Amerindian speech, a long word says: "Boiling - cooked - eating - ers - he goes for." (tl'mishya/ is/ ita - 'ill - ma) [30] . But the English-speaking poet can say: "Boil- feasters he invites," or "Feasters he fetches." I am sure that the Nootka word sounds no more one than the English words when these are rattled off. Whorf in several essays adverts briefly to the schemes like Basic English, in which an eviscerated British English, with its concealed premises working harder than ever, is to be fobbed off on an unsuspecting world as the substance of pure Reason itself. We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness... Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisonal analyses [31] . Whorf would seem here to reach backwards for a larger truth than linguistic-thought- relativism, namely: a language whose practitioners are acutely self-aware and ingenious can be coaxed into ways of speaking that are like those of any other language. Is this not what occurs, actually, when an English dialect becomes after some time an American dialect, reflecting a new ideology and lifestyle? And what occurs when a science takes hold of its mother-tongue and reflects and creates a new logic, an ideology and philosophy with it? The tasks of logicians, poets, and anthropological linguists should center, then, upon the interpretation of naturally emergent speech, upon what a culture does to it, upon what it does to the culture, and how cultures interact through speech. Language is here regarded as an immediate, primary function and manifestation of human nature. It is not, as often portrayed, a sort of luxury that the mind resorts to after its job of running itself is completed and it wants to communicate with its fellows. One should avoid the grand conceit that humans have a natural, built-in, realistic, and rational way of dealing with themselves and their environment, despite occasional vagaries. What is rational is not to be demeaned. There is a pragmatism of the human that extends to his speech. It begins with the kind of problem-solving that besets and befits a dog or ape. The primordial needs of food, warmth, security, defense, and sex are addressed in recognizably mammalian ways. But, quickly, lacking the instinctive definitiveness that turns one to a tunnel-like solution or none at all, the human shifts first to a schizophrenic state and then into a process of trial and error, retrial, and possible success. He requires a computer that stores, retrieves and manipulates data, and so copes with these problems in linguistic form. This is the most rational level of which the human being is capable. Here he fixes his mind as closely as possible upon the strict requirements of life as he views them. But this is the farthest development from his born condition, the "buzzing and confusion" of William James' famous description of the infant mind. He has to pass through all the symptoms of madness before arriving at this accommodation, the closest to instinctual as he can ever be. His heads are pressed together by a culture and by the exercise of the structures dealt with in this chapter, along with cultural specifications. Between the animal and the pragmatic is the natural level of homo schizo, resisting and unmaking and remaking the animal and the pragmatic in the vicissitudes of life as homo schizo. And, if the world is ever to be united in mind, it will be partly owing to a new language, in our sense a rational language, fashioned to its goal. The history of rational languages begins, like most scientific history, with a mistake. Thus one John Wilkins laboriously constructed, saved from the flames of the Great London Fire, and finally published in 1668 a treatise Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, wherein for example, the word "salmon" becomes the word "zana," a river fish with scales and reddish flesh. Jorge Luis Borges wrote recently about his brilliant, advanced ideas. The socialists and communists, following Karl Marx, produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a handful of words and slogans that dissidents of many countries might share, feeling that they spoke a common tongue. It is not technically beyond our means today to fashion a language that is much more efficient and appealing that Pidgin or Basic English, or Esperanto or Marxese to facilitate communications among the sharers of a new world belief and participants in an accompanying grand movement. This language would of course become a cultural language after overcoming its severe trials as a rational language. {S : Notes (Chapter 6: Symbols and Speech)} Notes (Chapter 6: Symbols and Speech) 1. "Culture and Continuity," 9 Tech. and Culture (April, 1968), 210 2. See this author's review of Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects, in 8 Amer. Behav. Sci. 2 (Oct. 1964). 3. Malcolm Lowery, letter to the author, 4 Dec. 1976. 4. J. B. Gleason, "Gestural Linguistics," 205 Science (21 Sept. 1979), 1253. 5. "The Natural History of Language," in F. Smith and G. H. Miller, eds., The Genesis of Language, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966, 248, 219-52. 6. "Brains and Behavior," in Spuhler, op. cit., 17. 7. H. S. Terrace et al., "Can an Ape Create a Sentence?" 206 Science 4421 (23 Nov. 1979), 901. 8. Psychology of Communications, New York, 1967, 104-5. 9. Johnson, op. cit., 170. He cites Monod. 10. Op. cit., 309. 11. Johnson, op. cit. 12. Ibid. 13. Cf. T. Thuss-Thienemann, The Subconscious Language, N. Y.: Wash. Sq. Press, 1967 on the thoroughly metaphorical and associational development of language. 14. Cartesian Linguistics, A Chapter in the Historical Rationalist Thought, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1966, 73. 15. An Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1944. 16. Ibid., 122. 17. Sprach der Eiszeit, Berlin: Herbig, 1962; mss. trans. by Malcolm Lowery, 1976. 18. Carrol, intro. to Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1956, 12. 19. Norman B. Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Berkeley U. of California Press, 1974, 118-20. 20. Letter to Peter James, Aug. 28. 1977. 21. Op cit., 80. 22. J. A. L. Singh and R. M. Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man (N. Y.: Harper, 1942). 23. Op. cit., 25. 24. Op. cit., 55. 25. Ibid., 58-61. 26. Ibid., 85. 27. Ibid. 67. 28. Ibid. 252.. 29. Ibid., 257. 30. Ibid., 242-3. 31. Ibid., 244. 32. London: Royal Society Printers, 1668. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 7: } {T THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL The good is what one wants; the true is how to get it; the beautiful is a mask of the good and true. Such is the frame of the argument here to come. The repugnance that should be aroused by it is one which I can feel as sensibly as the reader, for do we not appreciate that the good is what we good ones want? And the truth is more than mere means, but ought to be good means? And the beautiful is the subtle expression and adornment of our good means and good ends? But let us hide our light under a bushel and speak of others. How does human mentation work on these matters? Most mentation, we should have to admit, is a muddle, testifying as a whole to the frustration and futility of humankind, but this is so widely known that we need not take the time to describe it. Mentation, like human behavior generally, seeks to recapture instinctiveness and, by so doing, to hold its poly-ego in a comfortable balance as near to automatism as possible. The closest it has come to this Nirvana is a state in which the rules for quickly achieving goals are routine and effective, and the sublimation of the instinctive ends and means is at a minimum. This is ordinary scientific and rational behavior. Man chooses art, and whatever else is blessed as voluntarism and beauty, because he cannot attain instinct directly, or finds himself stranded in the muddle. {S : THE MUDDLE OF MENTATION} THE MUDDLE OF MENTATION A most apparent excrescence of the human mind is egotism. The human emits a plentitude of ejaculations, demands, and wishes, which he believes are reasonable simply because they emanate from himselves. To all of his positive identifications he ascribes a good, to all negative ones (and many are ambivalent) an evil. He characteristically emits denials of whatever would appear to oppose his good, quite aside from the rules of logic or reason or justice, although to these he may even subscribe. His capacity for denial of the opposition extends to non-perception and non-recognition. The very sensing of things by eyes, nose, taste, ears, and feeling is broadly prejudiced. Nor is this selective sensing a "logical condition for survival" or "a preference - de gustibus non disputandum est"; it is a severe effort to destroy what threatens. The human possesses a rudimentary notion of cause which labels whatever he dislikes as the cause of the evils he perceives and whatever he likes as the cause of the good. Guilt and blame are displaced liberally upon his negatively construed objects. Everyday thought exhibits an abundance of what psychologists term "erratic cognition." Some Hindus say that "The Sun and the Moon rise and set only because the brahmin recites the Jayatri." The Aztecs, who were butchering and eating an estimated 200,000 persons per year when the Spaniards arrived upon the Mexican scene in the sixteenth century, claimed that, without a gift of human organs, the sun would not rise. Still, four centuries later, the Nazis, adorned with the prehistoric swastika, conducted a holocaust of millions of humans in the belief that they were purifying themselves and Germany. Among those killed were some persons institutionalized for mental disturbances. In a related type of case, a disaster occurs; it is "normal" to believe that it happened because the victims had been bad. "They deserved what they got." The reasoning is to be discovered both in the Bible and in present-day Christian communities, whether in Alaska during the 1964 earthquake or in the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., flood of 1973; it permeates every culture's ideology. Nor is this universal reasoning simply a product of the lazy human mind, which does not seek scientifically for the antecedents of a disaster. It is an effort to control the world. It gives humans a great collective responsibility, an intolerable one. The destruction of the world itself is laid to human wickedness. In order to believe in human control, it may be necessary to believe that humans can bring the world to an end! Considering that the first psychic and social formations, such as religion, were put together under most unfavorable internal and external conditions, the basic mentation of humans is quite understandable. The formation of the logical person was a pragmatic process and still is; to the instinctive animalistic behavior that yet remained was added the ability to determine the consequences of actions and thenceforth to adjust one's behavior in accord with predictable consequences. But this pragmatic process has always been stifling under a blanket of Schizotypicality. Human mentation is normally preoccupied with the great battle for control of fear. This is and has been of much more interest and concern to the organism and society than the pragmatic concerns of the several areas of life - work, sex, science, health. All of these life areas - the immense structure of civilization -emerge from a "madman" trying to control his head. That pragmatic behavior is neglected in the frenzy for control is normally observable in human thought and behavior. Governments operate in the same muddle as individuals, whether they be democratic, communist, military, traditional-authoritarian, theocratic, or tribal. It is quite clear among them that the good is what they want, the truth is how to get it, and the beautiful is what adorns their good and true. The documentation of this statement is so profuse that I can only allude to it here [1] . A century ago, Ratzenhofer expressed the consensus of the most discerning political scientists when he suggested classifying politics as a branch of psychopathology. Raison d'‚tat carries properly its cryptic original sense: whatever the state wants is reason enough. "Do not ask questions; it will do you no good." The governments consist of the men who run states; these men are basically similar to those whom they rule; they are constrained by attitudes, ideology and capabilities. They have the same or slightly more of the schizoid traits of split personalities, fear, obsessions, paranoia, and immersion in symbolism that are observable in ordinary people. {S : THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT} THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT Man exercises from his gouty toe to the heavens above what Freud has called "the omnipotence of thought." He builds in his mind an image of a new reality that is under his control and, further, will believe and act as if the corresponding events are occurring as planned. The concept appears obviously when a physically constrained mental patient claims a power to move the world and to consult with others, such as gods and kings, who are engaged in the same business. Thus it is a kind of megalomania. Still the indulgence of omnipotent thought is ordinary, even usual. The notion of "free will" in morals and law is an example. A person is expected to claim voluntarism and, if he does not, the community claims it for him. It is appropriate behavior. He must practice affecting himself, others, and the world with his mind, and he is abetted and encouraged often in imagining his own spheres of power; so heaven is attainable, as is hell, good as well as evil, world destruction and world renewal, the triumph of the Ideal, of Truth, of Order. What grammarians say "ought to be" is obsessively regarded as "is," that is, achieved: "God is on our side." "Work is fun." "Parents are good." The distinction between a preference and a fact is overridden, not because some humans cannot comprehend it, but because they cannot tolerate the world that exists. In the beginning, and in the case of every infant, the "is" is painfully segregated from the "ought" so we should not be surprised at the universal recidivism from "is" to "ought." When philosophers like J. R. Searle, in a desperate spasm of sublimity, attempt to derive "ought" from "is," they end up deriving "is" from "ought." Still the naturalistic fallacy is an indefatigable Sisyphus. The overriding drive to control the self and everything else is the "should be" of all "should be's." The gods are made "to be" as they "should be," friends of ours, of our tribe, or perhaps even of humanity. No matter that they are also believed to have repeatedly destroyed the nations and that they will do so again; they remain, in Homer's cliche, "the source of all blessings." Wishful thinking, in matters both small and large, is universal and practically ineradicable. Megalomania is but an obvious pathology, slightly out of step with the fundamental human delusion of making a wished world out of a real world. Masses of people who are helpless and frustrated by lack of control achieve miracles by prayer - for the cure of illness, salvation of the soul, and the recovery of popes and presidents who have been shot. That will and morale are powerful agents cannot be denied. Not so long ago, in the dust bowls of empiricism, these words brought shudders. The development of psychosomatic medicine, the infiltration of the West by Hindu Yoga, the respectabilizing of consciousness-raising and, paradoxically, of suggestive techniques, brought them into new prominence. Hilgard discusses the experiments of Spanos and others on suggestion [2] . Hypnotized subjects believe all the more readily that their arm is becoming stiff if beforehand they have been supplied with fantasies, as that the arm is in a splint or made of wood or iron, and therefore cannot bend. Spanos calls these "goal-directed fantasies." We regard them also as a type of psychosomatic conversion. We see in them evidence that will-power can become an operational concept, even in practical affairs, after a century of ridicule and obloquy. Will-power in politics, religion, sports, or business must be an exertion upon external objects of the same physiological system that accounts for psychosomatism up to the point of the system impacting on the body tissue, which completes the operation if internal, but carries the operation only into an external activity if involving a displacement removed from the organism. There is little question but that homo schizo can mobilize his mind for remarkable feats of organs, mentation and behavior. We note this, too, in the connection between so-called visceral learning and yoga, and the illusion of omnipotence of thought. All serve to validate the very old supposition of homo schizo that he could do anything if he only wanted to do so badly enough. The fact that our contemporary world is so extreme a chaos of wills and wants obscures the enormous potential that this age-old idea possesses when harnessed to modern psychology. "We demand a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole - then he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of him." [3] Once again we must allude to the enormous impact on the world of the drive for control genetically engendered in homo schizo by the failure of animal instinct and the fearful balkanisation of the human self. {S : SECRET WORDS AND PANRELATIONISM} SECRET WORDS AND PANRELATIONISM Ordinary language is like the language behavior of primeval humans and of the mentally disturbed. There are many repressed inutterables and also blasphemous ejaculations. Words are kept secret; words are coined in profusion. Words are made to be deceiving and used to deceive the self, others, gods, animals. Words are given reality, made more "real" than the real. Names, too, are often secret; to name a person or thing is believed to possess it. Words are sacred: "In the beginning was the Word." God-words are addressed to those who appear both in the skies and on earth as controllers of the world and these have nevertheless to be controlled to relieve one's fears. Words are played with like fire-crackers: known to be dangerous, they are yet thrilling and give relief to anxieties. They are covered up or sublimated - all through poetry and philosophy. From Plato to Rudolf Steiner philosophers and poets have been word-players and handlers of words as sacred and secret. Words are regarded as absolute: one is forbidden to touch them. There is a fear of clarifying them or defining them operationally: to define a word instrumentally is to murder it. There is much of this in philosophy, as well as in politics and aesthetics. The animate world has never been and is not now limited to life. Animism is rife. Everything is alive. Thus the world may be controlled by incorporating it in oneself. Considering the "natural reason" supposedly granted to humans, it should be simple to draw a distinction between natural forces and animate forces. Yet it was not and is not done. In fact, the more disturbed that people are, the more they see themselves in animals, plants, rocks, and skies. This phenomenon is of course closely related to paranoia, as for example, in the belief that eyes are watching one from everywhere. The "all-seeing eye" is one of the earliest and most nearly universal symbols. It is, incidentally, inscribed upon the "Almighty Dollar" and the Seal of the United States of America. The "eye" of myth and symbol relates to primeval and schizoid thought. Isaac Vail believed that the primordial eye was the boreal opening from which Saturn on his throne looked down upon his domain [4] . He thought that it was an illusion of solar light playing upon a hole in the thick cloud canopy covering the Earth. That is, it was based on reality and psychologically perceived as an eye, and it is in keeping with the universal association fallacy: "like" means "same." Homeopathic magic, superstition, homeopathic medicine, and many more behaviors rest upon the belief that things that appear to be alike are "in each other." The "cosmic egg" is the vault of heaven and bird's egg. Both become broken. Each is the other. It is by means of such associations that mankind is not only deluded but also charged with an interest in the mundane; for the mundane is infused with the sacred. It is only then worth much attention control, development. Pan-relationism, the stretching for analogies in all of existence, is typical of mentation. The "most remote" things are brought together by a fancied resemblance. This would seem to contradict the schoolboy's resistance to recognizing the "most obvious parallels," unless we allow for his contradictory motives; and, of course, once outside the schoolroom, his heart hangs upon a cloud. Misplaced metaphors; the use of the part to indicate the whole (and vice versa) the tendency not only to dissociate analytically unanalogous things but to super-associate (" to flounder in a mire of uncontrolled associations," as Bleuler put it); to coin many neologisms - all of these "illogical" techniques of mind along with those mentioned before are rife in primordial thought, in psychopathic thought, and when dispassionately analyzed, in individual and social thought today. In German legend and folk tale, Erlk”nig (King of the Alder trees) is vaguely an ogre, who skulks in the fogs, a pedophile who then disposes of the young bodies; he is also a late descendent of Odin (identified as Wotan, a complex of Saturn and successor gods). He is also related to Rbezahl, the threatening companion of Santa Klaus (Saturn). Whence one is permitted to connect oral ingestion (cannibalism) with the sexual (especially the sexually aberrant). One does not elaborate a major connection here, but only a typical overlapping and transacting of cultural and religious displacements, according to what should be understood as the omnipresent holistic character of culture and religion. We leave it to psychiatrists to search in their practice for the suggested connections and refer to other passages in our works, Homo Schizo I and The Divine Succession. Folk tales, mythologists now generally agree, are a happy hunting ground to the sublimations of the culturally perverse, as well as for the most ancient images and experiences. If a group were miraculously to be deprived of its illogical schizoid forms, it would collapse immediately, for it has been founded upon them and penetrated by them throughout its existence. That "language loses its power to communicate on a rational level" under all of these circumstances, is true and expectable. It is also operationally and structurally not so significant as one is given to believe; for there is only a highly limited rational level in language. The human does not distinguish well between "friend" and "foe," even on the level where these interact personally with him as people and animals, much less on the level of spirits, ideologies, and gods. Again we hear that he does distinguish, but the task is difficult, "causation being often impenetrable by rational means. ' More likely, the human elects friend and foe out of a need to like and dislike and as part of his translation of reality into opposites. Quantitative thought is difficult for the human, at best, and even a slight anxiety will cancel his efforts at shading his distinctions. Useful though this latter shading may be for other purposes, it is not so comforting and reassuring to a temporary ego stability as a clear-cut invidious distinction. Whenever A is not identical with B, either A or B is deemed bad. Under conditions of the highest sublimation, A * B becomes Yin and Yang, logos and mythos, and other concepts that lend themselves to disputation, and provide fuel for the ever present ambivalence, which is conveyed by the ever present anxiety into doubt, distinction, and dislike. Most of the mentation that occupies the human mind is composed of operations such as the foregoing. They are the easiest way to believe. They arouse the least internal resistance, even though they hardly make the human consistently successful. They rather lend to his life and history that miserable erraticism upon which thrive moralists and mind healers. {S : RATIONALIZATION} RATIONALIZATION In this age that is dominated by a belief in "rationalism," much that is believed not to be rational is gathered together in the concept of "rationalization." Rationalization is supposed to be finding persuasive arguments for doing what one thinks one wants to do. It therefore depends upon the sophistication of the persuaded and upon the demands that the rationalizer makes upon himself. Rationalization is assigned to linguistic emissions whose purpose is to conceal real mentation by describing it in acceptable linguistic, moral and logical forms. Thus, as in the case of the anarchist, G. Zangara, a man hates his father, displaces his hatred upon a remote authority, the president, and tries to kill the president, believing and asserting that the sole source of his action is in the policies of the president. The idea of a separate process of rationalization characterizes all human communities, but especially modern communities, where all behaviors are supposed to become "rational," tied in as cause-and-effect with appropriate and approvable community conduct, or at least with an ideal ethic recognized as such, even if opposed, by the community. In the theory of homo schizo, rationalization is nothing but a pandemic mode of discourse; it is the "rational," but defined and shaped by whatever level of rationality that the community manifests. The most exalted philosophy, as well as the lame excuse of a malingering schoolboy, are equally rationalizations. The human does little but rationalize its wants; it does not do something extra and special called "reason." Where is the line to be drawn between rationalization and rationality? Out of the clouded mental sky do not some few stars of intelligence shine? If intelligence exists, we would say, it is a rare ability to continuously compress mental operations according to symbolized rules along a track of highly correlated "cause-effect-cause-effect... n" ties, and to make many track-switching associations, as we shall soon discover. But it is worth investigating. {S : THE DISSOLUTION OF LOGIC} THE DISSOLUTION OF LOGIC The digital (or linear) and analog logics can perform all mentation thus far ascribable to "reason," it would appear. I know of no computer designer who would admit an inability to program any sharp rational process on one or the other or both kinds of machine. As I would portray these logics, in homo schizo theory, the digital or linear is a coding to take care of "elapsed time" on delayed instinctual reactions, while the analog is a coding to utilize the displacements engendered by the same glitch. In both cases a language appears, which when working "as it should" accomplishes "rational thought." "Rational thought" is defined as appropriate public symbolic behavior aimed at a solution. The public may be anyone or everyone. A trite lesson in logic goes: "all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." (All X is Y; S is X; ergo S is Y.) Presumably, the lesson is based upon reality. We characterize many men, and then observe that Socrates shares their modal characteristics. Further, one observes that, among other happenings, they all die; whereupon Socrates must die, too. It helps to observe that Socrates did die, unfortunately. Obviously, all depends upon whether Socrates is accurately placed as a member of the human species and whether any exceptions to death occur. It is clear that Socrates can be deviant from all human norms except this absolutely inclusive norm of death. The problem is first one of analogy, then of algebra. The procedure is called an Aristotelian syllogism and has long been regarded as the classic deductive proof, but, even as William of Occam surmised in the late Middle Ages, it is an emanation from the structure of the mind, not a quality of reality, that is being processed. The lioness who has seen and hunted many antelope knows that all antelope are mortal, and that the antelope she sees now is mortal, and she can expect it to die by her claw and fang like the rest. The philosopher has to prove it symbolically, cutting through a mass of confused human neurology before putting the major and minor premises together in a conclusion. Modern psychology and pragmatism have pushed much of Aristotelianism into a corner and occupied its premises otherwise as well. Its three basic laws have become tautologies: that a thing is itself, 'A' is 'A'; that a thing cannot be both itself and something other than itself, 'A' cannot be both 'A' and 'not-A', and that a thing must be either itself or not itself, 'A' being either 'A' or 'not-A'. These statements are suppositions of narrow utility, overwhelmed by the multitudinous demonstrations of modern psychology and anthropology that 'A' may or may not be 'A'; 'A' can be both 'A' and what 'A' is not; and 'A' can be either 'A' or not 'A' or both. That is, no thing, no occurrence, no process, no 'A' exists but exists holistically, in the company of its opposites. Causes and anti-causes cohabit. This is the actual operation of the human mind, acting out of its structure. It is also homo schizo theory, which is non- Aristotelian and non-Cartesian. The mind can recite "2 and 2 are 4" and is trained to insist upon its rationality; it can apply the form in a number of cases in which it understands how numbers stand for things. It thereupon resists "entraining," which is the strenuous achievement of philosophers and psychologists; these say, "You must ask what the number-base is; and what is '2' in each case; what do 'and' and 'are' mean, and '4'?" So the mind resentfully goes from primordial muddle to philosophical muddling. The question of whether this is the actual condition of the real world rather than of mind alone might not appear germane to the present discussion. However, inasmuch as homo schizo seeks to control the universe because he is displaced throughout its time and space, he will presumably seek to know it for control purposes. Therefore, he will wish to elaborate and perfect whatever human apparatus is best adapted to that end. All of his efforts at controlling the divine and the mundane, objects and existence, will be pragmatically judged. All of the non-logical and logical procedures generated in all of human history are so tested. The modern age has proliferated not only forms of non-Aristotelian logic to this end, but it also witnessed occult ideas, cults, therapies, and countless other modes of confronting reality. Every nook and cranny of psychiatry, philosophy, mysticism, magic, behavior, life as art, group configuration, and of Siberia, the Caucasus, Egypt, South America, the Caribbean, China, Indonesia, Rumania, Iceland, Tahiti, Africa and India - the whole geographical and ideational world and outer space, too - have been poked, prodded, pierced into and opened up for a better way. All are driven by the hope of discovering and seizing upon a procedure that will give the longed-for control and set the human mind once and for all at ease. After reason has failed to prove reasonable, it is every man for himself, sauve qui peut. Internally, the "appearance" of the linear and analog logical forms must be "messy." That is, nothing is as clear in neurological language as it is in public language; this is a truism, since public language has to pursue a clearly communicative format. When a few scientists first began to speculate about the brain as a computer, John von Neuman remarked that probably "it is futile to look for a precise logical concept, that is, for a precise verbal description, of 'visual analogy. ' It is possible that the connection pattern of the visual brain itself is the simplest logical expression or definition of this principle." [5] Pribram, with the hologram image in the vanguard of his work, can today supply much of what was missing then [6] . In any event, preceding public speech, "the mess is cleaned up," in anticipation that the company to be entertained will be critical. In babbling children; senile adults; persons with "thought disorders" or brain lesions; feral boys; "mad" poets; flows of free associations provoked by psychoanalytic therapy or electric shock; dreaming; autistic reveries; or deliberate imitations of stream of consciousness as in James Joyce's Ulysses- the internal language is not sorted out and cleaned up prior to public delivery. Such is accidentally true as well of what Freud called "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," the multitude of slips of tongue, memory failures, etc. that accompany us through life - and of course, we understand that the "accident" is not a 'real accident," not fortuitous. In ordinary cases, training maintains its grip on the external communication. The mind selects the arithmetic and analog rules which, it has been thought, are acceptable manipulations of terms. The mind "makes sense," publicly. The degree to which its public demonstrations of logical mastery grip the mind, and influence it, can vary greatly. The display logic may convey little of the "true" thought processes; it may conceal them and in any event express only some part of them. But, we stress, this display is what excites much of the response in the transactions between external minds. So two people deal in a currency that scarcely measures the internal values of the exchange. The language expressed by schizophrenic patients with "thought-disorders" is reported to differ markedly from the language of a comparable non-thought-disordered group of "schizophrenics." [7] But it appears that the language of the second group, whose thought did not exhibit disorder is not somewhat disordered, nor is it normal; it is a guarded, more concise tongue, showing that the speakers are exercising stronger controls over language than either the normal or the thought-disordered patients are. In general, what makes for intense memories in people also makes for obsession with "correct" logical expression and for following compulsively the dictates, or solutions, provided by the logic. People in logical or rational communication must convey what they intend to convey in all critical circumstances, whether football players or bankers or scientists, or else the language breaks down. {S : THE USES OF PUBLIC REASON} THE USES OF PUBLIC REASON The languages of general and specialized social groups realize this principle, and they exact discipline in communication and impose heavy penalties for not speaking the language fluently and functionally. It does not matter much what "gibberish" the same people speak to their spouses in bed, or to themselves internally, or in their "free time," so long as they speak properly when "on duty." The advantages and limitations of rational language and thought are now becoming more clear. When a Corrections Commissioner says to a Prison Warden: "your remission rates are 59%. You must do something about it," the Warden understands him on the level of the discourse. The Warden does not recite to himself the history of corrections in the world and in modern society, the history of the concept of "rate," the significance of rates, all that is known about his prison, changing economic conditions, the full background of the Commissioner, and all the options facing him along with their rationalizations. He takes the statement as close to its face value as he can and tries to deal with it as narrowly as he can. "Yes. I've already set up a pre-release rehabilitation program." We can make much or little of the exchange. We can extol the marvels of speech, that lets a few words stand on top of a mountain of explanations. Or we can regret how pathetically little the words convey of the world in which the two men are operating. The language is acceptably "rational": a condition is quantitatively denotated. The condition is offered as a non-refusable challenge. The challenge is accepted, even anticipated, and a "step in the right direction" is assured. Released prisoners returning to jail may be fewer, future remission rates even decline (although the situation and the problem are grossly simplified here). The example is fairly typical of the use of reason in human affairs. As the problem becomes more special and the need for a specific result becomes more acute, humans are capable of herculean efforts at instrumental rationalism. To dispatch and recall a space shuttle, many thousands of highly trained people must work for years under the most intense discipline and supervision, and billions of dollars must be spent. Success of the venture can be said to represent every form of rational behavior known to man, from the navigational computers to the psychiatrist watching over the astronauts' social behavior to the public relations experts erecting a network to keep the public as intimate and yet non-interfering as communications technology and socio-psychology will allow. Success of a shuttle flight does not include, however, full assurances of rational behavior. For example, no one doubts that space shuttles of the next generation will be more highly rationalized in their technical and human operations. Furthermore, the original decisions to attempt a space shuttle are not of the same order of rationality, but rather typical of political decisions. Would the resources have been better allocated to the construction of new American cities? Or to other presumably beneficial ends? In such a case, too, all known types of instrumentally rational behavior might have been exercised, as indeed they are when a military nuclear missile system is designed, organized and installed. Knowing how such decisions are made does not solve the problem. Public opinion, interest groups, legislators, officials, scientists, and the media enter the decision- making process. With the increasingly rationalized tools of social science analysis, one can follow the course and weight of influences leading to the final choice, just as a radiologist, by employing chemicals, can trace the ramifications of a foreign element in the human circulatory system. Even so, one cannot locate an ultimate rational source. One can only ascend to ever higher levels of instrumental rationalism, investigating choice-behavior, with a mathematical precision that can win a Nobel prize, but without ever reaching a heaven where choice is made absolute by marrying "the Good." The Good forever basely remains what one wants, hence what one is capable of wanting and trained to want, be it comfort, love, landing on the Moon, ridding the earth of enemies, worshiping one's gods, or something else. {S : THE SECURITY CONSENSUS} THE SECURITY CONSENSUS Thus rationality is ultimately the practical ability to achieve one's good, including all lesser goods or bundles of goods that add up to the configuration of one's good. Moreover, this good of one may be the greatest "evil" as well as the greatest "good." It is only made "good" or "evil" by persons, such as the readers and author. Finding the "good" is not a discovery of the treasure in a sunken ship. It is the assembling of an internal psychic code prompted and guided by external coded transactions resulting in futuristic code-images. If the emergent image possessed by "Jean Smith" and "John Doe" coincides with your image and my image, we share the good. By many means, some more logical than others, we can determine the fit, thus the consensus. Thereupon, we may proceed with this collective good, more or less in logical language, in some cases foisting our codes upon other people and things, obtaining a broader consensus. The consensus, despite the brevity and vagaries of external language, is reassuring. It unites our externally displaced identities with our internal identities, making us "one with the world." Our sense of control is heightened, our anxieties lessened. Credit must be granted to logical processes for the welcome security, insofar as the transactions are actually or apparently couched in logical language. When children chant the table of multiplications together: 1 x 6 = 6, 2 x 6 = 12 etc., they are exchanging passwords for security, as well as confirming the validity of the terms and building habits of rationality. They also may chant prayers, identically, except that habits of non-rational belief are established. Plato's Timaeus as interpreted by Taylor argues also that those who cannot do a sum take fear when the planets show oppositions, occultations and reappearances [8] . This is not the only indication from ancient legend and science, nor from modern psychology and behavior, that numbers are a security device as is measurement, hence astrology, astronomy and astrophysics. The universally observed magic of numbers and the superstitions of numbers support this hypothesis. Numbering may have originated in the fight against fear; numbers and measures may ultimately become logical-rational procedures; but they may originally have been methods of fighting fear. Counting, ordering, measuring, have in them a fear therapy. So children are told to count sheep in order to fall asleep. "Hail, Mary's" are recited by soldiers until panic passes. Parachuters count before leaping. The count-down before space-vehicle launching is a public ritual of prayer, wish, and suppression of last frightened thoughts. {S : CAUSATION} CAUSATION For thousands of years, the leading forms of philosophy of truth have been directed generally at the destruction of commonsense truth. The analysis of discursive symbolism among the ancient Greeks affected human communications with these questions: What do you know? (perception and cognition) ; how do you know it? (logic and proof); then, do you know yourself? (Socrates). The three questions cast much of what passed (and still passes) for knowledge into the realm of the non-rational. Strong currents even of skepticism and cynicism moved through the intelligentsia. The classical Greeks were neither first nor last to go through the act of first constructing natural laws and then of finding out how to evade them. It would appear that this constructive- destructive process is characteristic of high periods of mental development, whether in the Arabic enlightenment, the high Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, or the past century. The more man subjectivizes, the more he can control the outer world, but also the more he can see of the limits of his truths. So it happened that in more recent times, we have seen the destruction of Euclidean geometric space as an absolutely existent phenomenon; "time" has been reduced to a relative, generically impelled habit and coincidence, and the "caused" has become a "function." Needless to say, the outlook of science has been forcibly affected by this relativism, but ordinary life has proceeded on its commonsense paths, carrying on faithfully the belief in absolute truths of knowledge while of course carrying along its full complement of illusions and delusions. Yet ordinary life has been always affected by the relativism of time and space, and the incidentalism of causation. The concept of causality has caused philosophers infinite headaches, leading up to its final denial; but the path remains to support the commonsense belief that stress causes pain. Analysis of alleged "causation," freed of commonplace prejudices, quickly arrives at the conclusion that in any given case of "causation," everything in the vignette can be termed a casual factor, and that what is called "the cause" is whatever the judge deems it to be. Thus, in the statement, "I rang the doorbell," "I" may be presumed to be the cause only because I, at least, am interested in my participation in the event. But, ultimately, the simple act breaks into infinite smithereens of the universal moment and of the endless past, eliciting statements such as, "if copper were not once geologically formed,... there would be no bell," so ancient deposits of copper are the cause; or, "my finger caused the ringing. . . etc. ," or millions of other causes more or less as meaningful, sub specie aeternitates, as "I." To make matters worse, lurking beneath the superficial determinism is a notion of free will that would furnish a potential "non- bell ringer." If I were completely free to not ring the bell, one would have to say that at least one and by extension millions of past decisions were unnecessary. The bell was rung, but by an unnecessary cause. Perhaps the cause was all the more unnecessary, since my excitedly expectant friend, say, opened the door just as I was about to ring the bell, and claimed that she heard it. Quantum mechanics also would destroy ordinary causal theory, lending as it does an indeterministic element to the "decision" of a causally potent condition as to whether or not to actuate, that is, happen. A given electron may or may not "choose" to leave its radioactive atom, for example. Or, in order to discover the momentum of a given particle (which is at the same time a wave), one foregoes by the conditions under which this can be observed and measured, the chance of discovering its location - and vice versa. With quantum theory and the Heisenberg principle of indeterminism (uncertainty), the following must be foregone: certainty; predictability; causation; space and time; Aristotelian logic (see above); nor can the quantum-uncertainty principle be proven true or false empirically. What remains, however, are statistical probabilities governing aggregate behavior. As we cannot ask an explanation of the basic fact that "inertia is", neither can we ask why there is a state of indeterminism [9] . As if this were not enough, what we see in causality in the human mind is a spasm of incompleteness between two events that it is felt ought instinctively to happen in sequence. Here again is the instinct glitch. Anything once delayed builds a secondary displacement circuit or hologram. The circuit continues to be excited by analogous events and the analogous sets become grouped into perceived causal classes, as, for example, "stress causes pain." When I press the bell button by a door, millions of past events, known and unknown, are bridged, but to the self-aware human, the act (or the hesitation before the act) is interpreted in the light of many analogous actions. The principle of causation seems obvious even to a child: "Go ring Auntie Mabel's bell to see if she's home." {S : TIME AND SPACE} TIME AND SPACE The world, it may be agreed, is essentially vacant of time, space, or causality. So is the human mind. No time-clock as such registers impressions and expressions of the central nervous system. However, what comes to be sensed as time is the neurological superposition of halos imprinted upon neurons as they occur. Then, typical left- hemisphere operations ensue, ordering impressions by digital logic, cleaning up inner time for incorporation into external and especially cultural time schedules. The past tense of time is perceived as one's recall reaches for lower figurations in the "stack" of impressions. The "lower," the older. When a woman tells a man, "you remind me of my father," perhaps tens of thousands of circuits are retrogressively lighting up. In her mind, a coded representation of his behavior is vigorously seeking analogues (holograms). If, is as likely, she is engaging in wishful thinking, non- analogues and distasteful analogues are being censored. As with practically every other human trait, a rudimentary time sense is invaluable to the communication of animal instincts, and the storage of time in memory as well as the projection of time are readily observable. A dog will crouch patiently besides a hole, from which once a squirrel emerged, in the hope that he will once again appear. We resort, as usual, to the human glitch and the splatter of displacements to account for the rich human display of temporal effects. No matter what philosophers may say in derogation of time, every cell and every species, even every grain of sand and atom, enjoys its big-sequences and big-rhythms. Not only are all things in change; they are also changing in patterns, and uniquely, hence a kind of triple paradox of change, pattern, and uniqueness occurs. "Our fearful mind anticipates the future but we can only understand what was in the past," declared Kierkegaard. Something has been said earlier of the sense of dread regarding death, the divine, and the future. To the schizophrenic, writes Meerloo, "the past is something demonic. The feeling of unbroken homogeneity with the present has been lost... 'The world clock stands still, ' says one patient." [10] Mendel perceives the dissolution of historicity and with it the future as a major characteristic of disease. Exaltation, which can be viewed as an agitated nervous crisis of the present moment, of which the use of the historical present in literary style partakes, is frequent in mental states pronounced insane as well as divine. It collapses both history and the future. It also reverses time. The ancient prophets - the Hebrew Isaiah, Saint John the Evangelist, the unknown Egyptian author of the Ipuwer papyrus concerning the destruction of Egypt, for example, used the future tense to say what had happened in times past. Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius included a set of Profetie, also refers in these prophecies to historical materials using the future tense [11] . Time becomes like the chain that propels a bicycle, going backwards as it moves forward. The faster a person or culture moves, the more its future and its history are changed. But a culture denies that it can change, it denies the charge of hubris, and celebrates continually its very beginnings as if they were today and in the future. Time, man's great tool, is repeatedly and deliberately destroyed. Time is projected memory. To control himself, man must control his projections both past and future. Time, to him, is an event, a fact, that must be controlled along with every other happening. Left hemisphere brain damage interferes with the perception of sequence but right hemisphere damage does not [12] . If our theory that two types of logic form in the brain, one analog, the other additive or digital, and that the first is right-brain or bilateral while the second is left-brain, the inability to perceive sequences may be attributable to a disturbance of time-counting by digital sequence coding. The analog contribution to sequencing would be by superposition of images. It may operate like holography, as was suggested earlier, allowing replicated images to be stored in large numbers, so that the excision of even a great many holograms in either or both hemi- spheres would not disturb the detection of sequences. Future tense arises out of obsessional expectations of the return of an event. For ordinary and minor events, the future is helped to emerge by the transference of analogous major obsessions. The anniversary complex has deep roots in the human mind: an intense private celebration, when congruent with a public consensus, forms the peak type of human memory event. When an anniversary is forgotten, whether private or public, it is because of dread of the reoccurrence. Ordinarily, a deep enough trauma is quite suppressed and is celebrated only unconsciously, with depression or psychosomatism or displacement behavior. Thus any of these neuroses may befall a woman upon the anniversary of the painful death of a dear mother, especially if her age approaches the age of her mother at death. Public trauma can be bifurcated to give a mourning occasion followed by a saturnalian release, or a joyful one, as before Christmas, or at Eastertime, among Christians and Jews, for different reasons, the Judaic mourning and joy in these cases relating to the great Deluge of Noah and to the Passover of Exodus, respectively. Thus we both remember and forget. Space may be dependent upon time. That is, without time, space might be inconceivable. An animal is master of the space around it, more than the human, who probably suffers more awkward bumps and falls in the house he has built than do the animals that may share it with him. But only the human is driven to conceive of, measure, and manage all space, so that one must guess that he is the jack of all space for being master of none. Human concepts of space are perhaps built upon an infrastructure of time. Once the sense of time is developed, space can be calculated as elapsed time between the self and the displacements of the self, where they were in the memory, where they occur now. Thus we think of primitive space as distance in time from an object or event to the experiencing self. Direction is also a point of reference from one's body -front, behind, right, left, up, down. Accurate mapping of space within the confines of experience becomes possible. What is beyond direct experience - over the mountains, the stars above - may be naively construed as far away, but much less far than they really are. The celestial bodies are measures of space - " I live a day's walk from you," or "six hours by airplane." But, thus, too, is time. {S : THE COST OF LOSING MAGIC} THE COST OF LOSING MAGIC James Fraser, a century ago, explained the practice of magic by two principles. According to a law of similarity, like produces like; a magician can produce an effect by imitating it in advance. By sprinkling water, one can bring rain, providing other matters are attended to also. Second, the law of contagion maintains that things once in contact continue to interact ever thereafter. A spot struck by lightening is forever sacred to Jupiter. Such was the belief and practice of the ancient Etruscans. These principles are found in current as well as ancient and tribal thought. Science often proceeds by imitating nature and unraveling strings of consequences. In them one can locate the operations of analogy that seem to be naturally produced in the brain. Analogy took the primary and more powerful role in the development of Greek science from magic and myth [13] . We do not change brains or develop new organs in going from "falsehood" to "truth." We get rid of the "hocus-pocus" that accompanies magic. We make the magic public (open display and repetition of experiments). Then we increase the validity of the analogies and sequences until they become reliable. The history of science shows us many a relation in tandem between magic, religion and scientific practice. Astrology as astronomy and magic is perhaps the most famous. The ancient Chinese could foretell eclipses, a major achievement of scientific observation and logic. But at the same time they applied rituals and emergency policies to quell official and public fear of eclipses and to repel astral invasions. Mesmerism and hypnotism are another example, from the nineteenth century, of parallel evolution of cult practices and scientific method. The discipline involved in the change from magic to science is intense, obsessive, and costly. An experiment by Liam Hudson performed upon students of history and engineering involved interrupting their sleep upon observing signs of dreaming and asking them to report their dreams. The engineers reported more frequently that they were not dreaming at all or could not recall the dreams. "The engineers' inhibition in dealing with 'primary process' thought - with ideas and images that have not been ordered in a conventionally rational way - is not a superficial aspect of their thinking; it is an integral part of the way in which their minds work." [14] What we are observing here and in primitive magic are lesser and greater degrees of the conversion of obsession into bureaucratic and scientific habit and showing that, like a form of psychosomatism, the specialized disciplined worker overdevelops a point d'appui, working from the conscious into the unconscious along a narrow band. This is not science as new theory or hypothesis, not science as poetry, which is an altogether different mental operation, distinguishing two types of scientists as night from day. So must the routine administrator or bureaucrat be distinguished from the organizational innovators of the type of Epaminondas, St. Therese, I. Loyola, Thomas Jefferson, Henri de Saint-Simon, Mussolini, Trotsky, Henry Ford and Gandhi; a great many unnamable persons have produced the largest number of inventions - there were, after all, engineering students who did recall their dreams. The rational is the routine, true, but ought one not permit the term for the creative? But, then, the creative is non-rational. So it is both rational and non-rational, a contradiction if both are the same. Therefore do we propose discarding the term "rational" or letting "rational" mean the ability to obtain what one wants, namely, "truth." We must disagree with those who, like Arthur Koestler, assert of the human dilemma: "No matter how much the symptoms vary, the pattern of disorder is the same: a mentality split between faith and reason, between emotion and intellect. '' [15] Faith and reason subsist cheek by jowl in the mentating process; we must abandon this medieval dichotomy if we would understand human nature. So, too with emotion and intellect: emotion is intellective and intellect is emotional. At the turn of this century, George Mead was lecturing at the University of Chicago that: "It would be a mistake to assume that a man is a biologic individual plus a reason, if we mean by this definition that he leads two separate lives, one of impulse or instinct, and another of reason.. On the contrary, the whole drift of modern psychology has been toward an undertaking, to bring will and reason within the impulsive life." [16] There is little neurological or pragmatic basis for the words. Nor do they help in programming policies for humanity. Close in outlook to Mead, John Dewey, too, was long engaged in combat against traditional logic and psychology. In 1929, in his book The Quest for Certainty, he devoted a chapter to "Escape from Peril," where he continued his attack upon the philosophers' search for the immutable, the truth, by way of "pure knowledge." "The quest for certainty," he said, "is a quest for peace which is assured, an object which is unqualified by risk and the shadow of fear which action casts. '' [17] We would add that homo schizo normally wants to escape his perils and invented first historical religions, then theology, then philosophy, moving outwards into abstractions to develop the sense of certainty that would relieve his anxieties. But each further stage of abstraction displaces him farther, too, from the origins of existential fear in his inability to act like an animal. {S : SCIENCE AS INSTINCT} SCIENCE AS INSTINCT If theologians and philosophers vainly sought certainty in order to displace fear, are then scientists merely at another stage of displacement or sublimation? Would the counting of binary star systems be such, too? Might the rejection of the holistic term "human nature" be a collective schizotypical symptom of depersonalization among psychologists? Would perfecting solar energy systems fall in a similar category? Yes, we would say, but all with a notable difference. Truth or the rational is how to get what one wants. Then "howling for bread" is true if it brings bread. So is prayer. Yes. What works, what is effective, is considered rational and true. Would not bread be more certainly forthcoming if one farmed wheat and baked bread? Perhaps... in some cases... yes, on the whole... etc. The sparrows don't look for the morrow, said Christ; trust in the Lord. The infant howls and is fed. The mob riots and is fed. The primitive band gathers nuts and fruits and herbs. But we applaud the ancient inventors of the science of agriculture. Now they could feed more mouths while resting in place. Science - and reason - are suppressors of unruly processes [18] . They discipline the fearful selves to follow rules which, they assert, will reliably bring desired consequences. "Get rid of the excess and costly baggage of superstitious behavior: don't chant and dance around the growing crops; hone your spades, plant more seed, dig deeper; (then, reluctantly) it may help if you play music for the crops to grow by." The rules of science and reason are simple. All things are sensible. They must be given exclusive denotations. These must be acted upon in exclusively denotable ways. They can then be grouped within a closed system of logical counting which is not so empirical. The process and the consequences are to be watched and confirmed by others. At no stage of the process should "wishing" be admitted and given any weight. Scientific procedures give homo schizo controls to add to his kitbag of controls. To some extent they are more reliable controls, though often for things that he wants to let be uncontrolled or cares little about, or are not what he wants most to control Behaviorally, what homo schizo has done, which has come to be called "rationality" and "reason," is to select out of his experience certain operations whose traits are that, first, they give success (by test) in naming, and in the transfer of naming (also by test), and, second, the names can be counted and the count tested. Success in testing is validated inasmuch as the names and their manipulation produce psychic and material effects deemed favorable. Why does man select these operations, and make so much of them that a wonderful science ensues? He finds their effects reliable; he can make easy and gratifying obsessions of them. Is this all? This is a great deal. It makes the difference between uncontrolled fear and a bearable equilibrium, between helplessness and ruling the earth and all of its denizens. It is the difference between a blank gaze and a child counting apples, or even more, a computer guiding a spaceship out and back to earth. By temporarily giving up his chaotic mentation, by submitting to the controls determined by others, by obsessively dedicating his mind to the proven possible and proven practical, he can gain a share of control. The rules, the identifications, the promises, the secrets of language and experiments, the mystique and authority of science - all help him feel comforted and less fearful. The myriad displacements augment the normal complement of animal foci of attention and sources of stimuli. The responses are the fantastically engendered capabilities of the human. Satisfactions emerge from a perceived coping with the stimulus by the selected responses. Science takes homo-specific urges, applies species-specific responses and obtains species- indulgent effects. To a foreign intelligence, none of these would make sense, much less truth. What the process resembles, in a sinister shocking way, is where it all began, the home that it never left, amidst the unselfconscious breeds of life. The closest I find to this idea of the search to recapture instinct as inherent in pragmatic or operational science is in Mead's essay on the biologic individual. After describing the physical world that faces the human as a biological and instinctive organism, Mead says "Just in so far as we present ourselves as biological mechanisms are we better able to control a correspondingly greater field of conditions which determine conduct. On the other hand, this statement in mechanical terms abstracts from all purposes and all ends of conduct. '' [19] Then he compares modern scientific method as a way of moving into the "now" to test reliability and truth. On the whole, homo schizo would prefer more direct and easy methods of reaching the good, the true, and the beautiful, than science has thus far afforded him. If he were always comfortable, he certainly would not be rational; but then, if he were always comfortable (that is, had his quota of the values of sex, respect, health, knowledge, affection, and power) he would not be homo schizo, for there is no quota, only endless discomfort. Paraphrasing Heraclitus, we could say, "One can never bathe in the same river of truth twice." But homo schizo would hate this truth, even though he has had to live by it. What homo schizo would most desire, because it would bring him immediate surcease from his existential agony, would be to become once more a generalized mammal, whose mind fit its body, able to act decisively, unconsciously, instinctively upon the presentation of a stimulus. The good, and the truth that leads to it, depend upon reestablishing the unitary ego, defining stimuli, and affixing their specific responses, all to occur together, holistically. Linear and analog science help. They build a bridge over the stimulus-response chasm. If only science might find a holistic way of bridging the chasm, of healing the instinct glitch, man would feel even better. The clue to this is in the incessant human attempt to embrace the good, the true, and the beautiful in one holistic motion where what is called ethics, science and art have no place and little interest, where he feels at one with himself and the world, an intuitive well-being. Although stoicism and Buddhism and Taoism and many other formulas of conduct prefigure this kind of confrontation that brings comfort and surcease from fear, they cannot manage reliably to control the "reality principle," that is, the persecution, hunger, massacre, frustration and demands visited upon them by the unregenerate homo schizo outside the cult. {S : SUBLIMATION AS PREFERABLE DISPLACEMENTS} SUBLIMATION AS PREFERABLE DISPLACEMENTS Sublimation is a concept that should desist and refrain from spoiling clean scientific analysis. Originally it arose out of an exaggerated interest in sex and purported to designate how sexuality might be unconsciously suppressed, and disguise itself as a virtuous activity, so that, for instance, a man who was inordinately and illegitimately fond of his mother plunged obsessively into sofa design, and thereupon was deemed to sublimate. Sublimation was looked upon as a socially welcome outlet for unmanageable, if not perverse, sexual impulses, hence applauded. But a scientific definition of sublimation, divorced from preferred behavior, must go rather like this: sublimation is a displacement activity whose original motivation is unrecognized publicly. Then sublimation is for all practical purposes identical with displacement, as in Tinbergen's example of the stickleback fish quoted earlier. Why, then, use the term, unless it be to propagandize a form of behavior, a way of life? German youth leaders say, "When you are hiking and hungry, sing to forget your hunger." Perhaps that is why the child in the old English nursery rhyme "sings for his supper." Here is a sublimation, quite explicit because the locus of the displacement barely shifts around the oral cavity. Sex, food, respect, well-being, safety, knowing, capability: such are most activities, running on tracks dug early in life, and taking up most of later life. All of these values must be satisfied within the larger control framework. No solution suffices, it appears, or succeeds except temporarily, with all of these goods, unless it carries with it a quota of control. The human is readier than any other animal to give them up, or compromise or complicate them in order to get on with the business of the triple control of his selves, others, and the world. Ethically, of course, it is important how homo schizo spends his time. As was said, the good is what we want. And if we wish to call good ways of handling problems of fear and control by the word "sublimation," none may interfere. We may apply our flighty word to an emaciated artist who paints "still-lives," a gynecologist who is sexually unarousable, a politician with an adoring public and no friends, a rich woman who hobnobs with bohemians, and a miser who leaves his wealth to his university alma mater. What can we call a man who cannot paint but loves to eat; a Don Juan who detests the physical apparatus of females; a strict parent who leaves a personally irresponsible life; a "public enemy" who is loved by his friends; a poor social-climber; a generous man who ignores his community's needs? These are fixated on "primary gratifications;" and then what? The human is so displaceable, that one might even put up stiff arguments against his having definite primary needs, as have, for example, some advocates of homosexual liberation. As is often complained by western generals, the Chinese soldier can fight on a bowl of rice. But then there was the Persian folk hero, Nastrodjin, who had just managed to teach his donkey to work without eating when, unfortunately, the animal died - showing that even animals can be trained to displace. Superficially, homo schizo is infinitely devious, because basically he is terribly interested in sensations of control and will go anywhere into himself or into the furthest reaches of space and time to find surcease. Or he may not need to go very far but will sing, or dress like a peacock, rather than eat. I trust that we are all in favor of fine arts, literature, history, and science and will do our best to commit homo schizo to their practice. Nevertheless, or should I say therefore, the analysis of cultural product must proceed apace. When we enjoy to witness the Amphytrion of Plautus or of Moliere, we must observe, too, the fascination which the plot holds because of its play upon the confusion of selves - Zeus and the Theban general two look-alikes, Hermes and the general's valet the same, and who is talking to whom? When we watch Shakespeare's As You Like It, there to observe the dissolution of court life into a forest of exile, where Celia receives the name Aliena and Rosalind becomes a transvestite and the philosophers speak schizophrenese, we realize in ourselves, the audience, the same transformations, the controlled momentary loss of control of ourselves and the world, joyful and comic when and only when we can reestablish ourselves afterwards. And so with the catastrophic underpinnings of Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream and Anthony and Cleopatra, as Irving Wolfe has shown [20] . The same person, homo schizo, is operative in the creation and uses of science and history, the former already treated, the latter more adequately analyzed in Homo Schizo 1. Only two examples are put forward here, to suggest the need for applying more trenchant theory to the "highest" products of homo schizo. Proclus, the Neo-Platonist philosopher (410?-485), wrote of the planets and gods. In several passages, he described unmistakably not only the rings of planet Saturn but also the bands of planet Jupiter, phenomena not rediscovered until the nineteenth century. He explained them by the self-discipline of the god, Jupiter, who, in binding his deposed father, Saturn, to a new regime of law and order, also righteously bound himself to his own laws. A set of natural events in the sky was observed, and was animated into a theophany; the gods were made to behave as man wished they might, as guarantors of order in the skies, and brought to earth as exemplars of order in human affairs. The language of philosophy thoroughly subdued the frightful story of the bloody struggle of gods; a euphoria emerged from an age-old collective amnesia. Thus have philosophers sought to create certainty, as John Dewey claimed. Ernst Cassirer, like Proclus a distinguished philosopher, a German refugee to America, wrote a book on human nature, entitled An Essay on Man [21] , during World War II. I studied it well among the first books coming to hand when I returned from long army service. The book maintains throughout a high rational level of discourse. It is learned, soothing, endearing, acceptable - a shimmering smooth amnesiac screen behind which other types of homo schizo were destroying the total culture of Europe which he was discussing. As in Ovid's Metamorphoses the most frightful activities are blended into a lovely serene background setting. So well was the philosopher's job done, that none, not even myself then, could suspect that here was as fine an instance of the mind of homo schizo at work as was the disastrous scene of slaughter and rapine from which I had just separated. I say of these two examples of Proclus and Cassirer, as might be said of the higher products of the human mind in general, that they are all suitable candidates for analysis by the conceptual implements of the theory of homo schizo. Ordinary appraisals of art, literature, science, and philosophy are pathetic. This has much to do with Wissenschaftsoziologie, the sociology of knowledge. But the sociology of knowledge still requires the appropriate launching pad for its flight of analysis: this the model of homo schizo may provide. In his work on Schizophrenia in Literature and Art, John Vernon explains by way of Aristotle, Locke, and especially Galileo how it came about that the world was made to split into divisions of objectivity and subjectivity, so-called. Galileo, he reminds us, performed the schizoid feat of thinking "I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, but size, shape, quantity, and motion swift or slow." Thus came about the distinct "soft world" and "hard world." [22] . Says Vernon, "The threat the world presents for the schizophrenic is often a threat of control. In the West, the split of the world into two absolute principles, subject and object, has enabled civilization to control and manipulate nature.." This all "makes reality something unreal and makes the structures of classical thought that constituted that structure insane - that is, schizophrenic." [23] Subjectivity appears to be fantasy and is relegated to the fantastic humanities. Now the same culture that creates the absolute reality-fantasy division also creates an absolute sanity-madness division. But we have always had bifurcations and contraries that obsess philosophies, science, and religion, outlooks that we have said earlier may emerge from the essential ambivalence of homo schizo. The division of man into a body and soul is one such, which rationalizes the polyego to make it more logical, following the impression that there must be a sharp difference between ape and man and discovering this in the human soul. So, too, the difference between mind and conscience, which even Freud could not evade and finds favor among many psychologists; there the attempt is made to have the split- selves appear to be an imposition of a "false reality" upon a "true reality," the former being subjective and socially imposed whereas the latter is totally mammalian. {S : THE ORIGINS OF GOOD AND EVIL} THE ORIGINS OF GOOD AND EVIL The monarch of bifurcation is "good" and "evil." On the shoulder of every little girl and boy perches a good angel who speaks into one ear (the right ear?) while upon the other shoulder perches an evil devil who speaks into the other ear, as the catechist would explain. Human existence and fulfillment, it is generally believed, depends upon the recognition of good and evil and of their consequences. This juxtaposition of forces is certainly a crowning obsession of mankind. No one knows where France's great dramatist, MoliŠre, lies buried, because he was a comedien, an actor, a player of roles, a deviser and divider of human souls whose dividends did not equal the "angel" and "devil" into which the Catholic Church insisted and insists still, for reasons valid on its premises, that homo schizo must be divided. Unless an actor repented on his death bed, he (or she, as for example, Adrienne Lecouvreur, of whom Voltaire had something to say) was denied burial in hallowed ground. The ordinary person thinks he understands this but often may not, believing, "Yes, actors are naughty and must repent their licentious and blasphemous lives." But, no, even a hypothetical blameless actor, who is punished on the stage for every sin he commits on the stage, must also be barred from consecrated soil. The culture, as authoritatively represented by the Church, decrees that the schizotypicality of man should consist of two contraries. Other poly-egos are regarded as culturally dysfunctional and are tabooed. A common anthropological misapprehension, couched in sympathetic terms, would observe: "Unfortunately, humans are often superstitious and misguided, and go about seeking the good and bad, making a great many mistakes, exaggerating, failing to consider their own motives, casting stones at others and not looking into their own sins." Underlying such commentaries is the feeling that a rational procedure must exist somewhere for discovering and applying the good. To the contrary. it is perhaps obvious by this point in our proceedings, that some mechanism of homo schizo is operating to perpetuate and maintain in royal style the distinction of good and evil. Good and evil are the product of ingenious and successful attempts of homo schizo to reduce his poly-ego problem to manageable proportions, in order to control himself and extricate himself from his predicament. If a dominant self can be named head of the confederation - and let this be called "good" - and the other members of the confederation can be joined together as the opposition and called "evil," then we shall have a ruler and this ruler shall be preferred to the other - the evil devil - on all matters and decisions: and ego conflicts can be blamed upon the evil of the other. Further the evil other can be transferred almost at will, both consciously and unconsciously, among the inner selves, interpersonal relations, the natural world, and the divine world. Ideas of "good" and "evil," we conclude, wherever they manifest themselves, function as schizotypical ways to control the world on behalf of homo schizo. It may be informative and intriguing to depict the nuances of value, the quantitative and transient nature of preferences, the complicated and multiform balances in concluding the truth of propositions or the desirability of behavior - so confesses homo schizo. But then he adds resolutely: "When the moment of truth appears, and a choice must be made, and my soul is tortured by doubts, then I must have the good, and only the good, and nothing but the good, so help me Good-God !" {S : Notes (Chapter 7: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful)} Notes (Chapter 7: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful) 1. H. D. Lasswell and A. Kaplan, Power and Society (1950) and D. Truman, Governmental Process (1951), both dependent to some extent upon prior works, such as Machiavelli's Prince (1532), Michels' Political Parties (1915), Pareto's Mind and Society (1916), Mosca's Ruling Class (1890), Bentley's Process of Government (1908), supplemented by many case studies such as N. Leites' Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), where he reconstructs the logical and thought systems of the leaders of the Soviet Union until 1950, and one can nitpick the "rational" from the multi-colored weave of ideology. Perhaps to be mentioned also are such works of this author's as Politics for Better or Worse (1973); the more formal Elements of Political Science (1952); and, as a ease study, God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus (1983). 2. Ernest R. Hilgard, op. cit. 230. 3. W. James, Essays in Popular Philosophy, 84. 4. Isaac N. Vail, Selected Works, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Annular Books, 1972. 5. "The General and Logical Theory of Automata," in L. A. Jeffress, ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, N. Y.: Wiley, 1951, 24. 6. Languages of the Brain, op. cit. 7. Rochester and Martin, Thought Disorder and Schizophrenia, also Steven Schwartz, Language and Cognition in Schizophrenia, N. Y.: Wiley, 1978. 8. Thomas Taylor, Timaeus of Plato, e. q. p. 244. on counting, fear, and planets. 9. F. Waisman, "The Decline and Fall of Causality," in A. C. Crombie et al., Turning Points in Physics, N. Y.: Harper, 1961 84-154. 10. "Father Time," 22 Psychiatric Q (1948), 599. 11. Eissler, op. cit., 247. 12. Carmon and Nachshon, 7 Cortex (1971), 410-8 cited in Ornstein op. cit., 1972, 89. 13. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, N. Y. Harper, 1953, chap 9. 14. "The Limits of Human Intelligence," in Jonathan Benthall, The Limits of Human Nature, N. Y.: Dutton, 1974. 15. The Ghost in the Machine, 259. 16. G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1934, 347-8. 17. N. Y.: Putnam's, 1960, 8. 18. Cf. J. R. Kantor, The Logic of Modern Science, Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1953, Part 11 19. Op. cit., 352 20. "Heaven and Earth: Catastrophism in Hamlet," III Kronos 4 (1978), 3-18; IV 1 (1978), 67-89; "The Seasons Alter: Catastrophism in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Vl Kronos I (1980), 25-47. Cf. R. J. Jaarsma, with E. L. Odenwald, "Nor Heaven Nor Earth Have Been at Peace: The Contemporary Foundations of Shakespeare's Cataclysmic Imagery," V1 Kronos 1 (1980), 12-24. 21. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1944. 22. Urbana, Illinois: U. of Illinois Press, 1973. 23. Op. cit., 28, That science may not pursue this dichotomy much longer is evidenced, e. g. in Judith Wechsler, ed., On Aesthetics in Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V HOMO SCHIZO II:} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T EPILOGUE} {S - } HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior by Alfred de Grazia EPILOGUE The elephant's trunk is not a nasal tumor. The androvorism of the praying mantis is not a perversion. The seal's flippers are not a deformity. Nor is the human polyego a tumor, a perversion or a deformity. It is the humble beginning of his claim to rule the world. In his immediate arrogance, like a newly ennobled baron, man invents his ancestry. The gods created him specially. The event was attended by the shaking of heaven and earth. All the beasts and flowers attended his dispositions. His every blemish became a sign of nobility: fallen hair, clumsy toes, an appetite for everything that sprouted or moved, a jerky gait, a never-ending anxiety, superstition, and suspiciousness. Compelled to count, he summed up everything. Compelled to displace, he permuted all objects into personal associations. When all is done, he looks at his work, and like Elohim, is satisfied. But he does not rest. He destroys. He tortures himself by inner contradictions. He attacks his fellows - not with the simple anatomical instruments of the beast but with an ever-elaborating paraphernalia and by all media - by the word, the organized onslaught, the manipulation of the whole range of the humanly valued - persons, objects, ideals, subsistence, affection, dignity, freedom and life itself. No insult is too subtle, no injury too enormous. If it can be conceived, it must be developed for use. So goes history; so goes the world. All of man is good and bad, mingled inextricably, beyond separation, beyond therapy, probably even beyond meaning in his brain. What is to be done with this creature? The chances that an intelligent, sharing, and peaceful creature can be formed of what exists are low, so low that it appears useless to bank upon them. Gross deficits exist in knowledge, in design, and in power. We can imagine three different scenarios. One is organization. Another is selective breeding. A third is cloning. Organization has been the largest hope of theologians and philosophers from our beginnings. By its promise, evermore increasing with the advancement of the human sciences, a leadership would be recruited to promote all observable tendencies in the cultures of the world that elicit intelligence, generosity, and pacifism. These qualities would be so fortified by all that we know or may come to know about discrimination for "good" and against "evil" that opposing individual, popular, and organizational tendencies would be frustrated, and socially extirpated. Eternal vigilance would be required, and every investment provably promoting the three virtues would be jealously protected. A second scheme is selective breeding. What is now unknown would have to be discovered: tests for genetic tendencies or docility with regards to intelligence, sharing and pacifism. This is not an impossible task. Ever more refined research may eventuate in methods of analyzing genetic correlates of these traits, as has already been done with intelligence. It might even be accomplished with crude means. Such would be the licensing of births, conditioned not only upon prospects of health but also upon the prospects for intelligence, generosity, and pacificity, as judged by ancestry to the extent possible. Where at least some precision were obtainable, for a few if not for all potential parents, a sperm bank might be created whose use would become a condition for birthing, in the absence of positive criteria otherwise. The third scheme would foster research into cloning, roughly considered as the substitution of certain undesirable genetic material in the egg of potential parents by desirable material. This would have an acceptability in that potential parents, who are often cognizant of their own deficiencies and those of their families, would accept just enough alterations to permit genetic gains while preserving most traits that are their own. All three visions have a probably fatal flaw: homo sapiens schizotypus fears them, naturally, as he fears all things. Fearing them, he will wish to control them. The more obsessive, selfish and violent his efforts at control, the more likely he will succeed in Q-CD vol 7: Homo Schizo II, Epilogue 240 obstructing, or suppressing, or perverting the three types of human reform. At the very best, a determined group, thoroughly dedicated to the visualized plans, and agreeing to subject themselves ultimately to them, would come to command the power to put the plans into effect, and, once in power, would do so. There are isolated instances of this kind of behavior in the world, but no indications of their having broadened into a world revolutionary movement without losing their raison d'‚tre. Cincinnatus resigned his post as Dictator of the Roman Republic and returned to his farm and plow. Not only are there few persons like him, but retiring from the scene is forbidden under the rules of the utopian game under discussion. We must conclude that even were science to guarantee high probabilities of success for these proposed solutions of homo schizo, we would not be able to obtain the power for the solutions without losing the dedication to them. Under such circumstances, only one course can be recommended - that whoever believes, should do what he can, no matter that it may be an iota of the envisioned state of affairs. Devise a politics - call it "kalotics" - and apply it. Invent a therapy and proceed to apply it. What else can one do without doing evil? We know this: that homo schizo has the capability for anhedonic, obsessive identification with an ideal, and he may as well work to transform himself as to destroy himself. Then, one day, just as a humble change made homo schizo, another humble change may be discovered to remake him. What a great day, when homo sapiens schizotypus becomes homo sapiens sapiens. End of HOMO SCHIZO II {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY DESTRUCTION, AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:} {S - } CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY DESTRUCTION, AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY: THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by ALFRED DE GRAZIA Metron Publications Princeton, New Jersey Notes on the printed version of this book: This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Centre, using the processing language called Script. Photocomposition, cover make-up, lay-out and printing were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services. The photograph on the front and back covers displays a marble male figure, glancing to the skies and playing the harp; it is of pre-Homeric Aegean origins and now possessed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York. ISBN: 0-940-268-09-4 Copyright 1984 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America Limited first edition. Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213, Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A. To Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." Proverbs, IV, 27.17 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY DESTRUCTION, AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY: by ALFRED DE GRAZIA TITLE PAGE & FOREWORD TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Part. 1: SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER Chapter 1. AN ATHENA PRODUCTION Chapter 2. THE SONG OF LOVE THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE HAPPY ENDING THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA Chapter 3. THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS THE HIDDEN STORY AUTHOR'S CODA Chapter 4. CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS Chapter 5. HOLY DREAMTIME THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE BURLESQUE OR RELIGION? THE PIOUS DRAMATIST Part. 2: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS Chapter 6. THE RAPE OF HELEN THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN THE AGE OF MARS Chapter 7. CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES SOCIETY IN SHOCK THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE Chapter 8. THE TWO FACES OF LOVE A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS THE COSMIC SPINNER CONFUSION COMPOUNDED A MATCH OF SOURCES HOW TO NAME A PLANET? THE ROMAN VENUS Chapter 9. THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS THE RILLES OF MOON Chapter 10. HE WHO SHINES BY DAY THE EPITHETS OF VENUS CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES APPENDIX TO Chapter 10 LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA" Chapter 11. THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY THE QUALITIES OF ARES THE FATAL WOUND Chapter 12. THE LAUGHING GODS MERCURY APOLLO POSEIDON HELIOS A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR Chapter 13. HOW THE GODS FLY THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS Part. 3: THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR Chapter 14. THE USES OF LANGUAGE METER AND METAPHOR HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE Chapter 15. THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY THE RULES OF MEMORY FORGETTING AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS Chapter 16. THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA DREAMWORK SEXUALITY AND DISASTER IN ILLO TEMPORE THE KERNELS OF HISTORY Chapter 17. SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE A CLAIM OF SUCCESS FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY Appendix: CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia INTRODUCTION The theory to be expressed here is hardly believable. We discern behind a famous Homeric scenario about the misconduct of the gods the shadow of a second scenario of astronomical catastrophe. By pursuing the connection relentlessly, many reasons are uncovered to suspect that the human drama is unconsciously imitating what the human eye witnessed as a prior catastrophe in the skies. Chant and catastrophe, dance and disaster seem to be historically linked. Can a dance and poem be a piece of astronomical history, tightly, not vaguely, related? If they are, then an idea that many psychologists have considered: that humans have a tendency to suppress the memory of terrible events, but also are somehow compelled by unconscious psychic forces to reenact the events - this idea is supported by our theory. It appears that the reenactment may take place through religious rites, through wars, through literature, through individual and group behavior of many kinds. Here it is through the sublimated medium of poetry and dance. I think that such a process is occurring in the story of the Love Affair of Venus and Mars. If my readers will agree, then we shall begin to shape a consensus on a matter of great importance to several fields of science and the humanities. The literature referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the Odyssey. It tells how the bright-crowned goddess Aphrodite loved Ares, god of battle, and how they met repeatedly to make love "in the home of fire," until they were entrapped in a marvelous net made by her outraged consort, the god Hephaestus, and released only when Ares pledged to reform his conduct. The lyric tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and directed by the sightless bard, Demodocus, who, some say, is Homer's self-image. The recital plays to a fascinated audience at the palace of Alcinous and to his guest, Odysseus, or Ulysses, hero of the War against Troy. The frank sexuality is Homer's, no matter how often it has been translated vaguely. The story is the archetype of the adulterous love triangle, as neat a plot and piece as anyone has ever composed, and a model for a thousand imitations. But it may also be the masking of a catastrophe visited upon the Greeks from the skies. I studied the lines and read some translations of them. I rendered them in something like the original epic hexameter, and shall present them below (Chapter 2) in that form. Still, examining the words was but the beginning of an investigation that carried me on odyssean wanderings into various fields of knowledge. I asked myself what spirit breathed into Homer and saw that it was the goddess Pallas Athena. Athena moved the Homeric Age. She led the Greeks in the Iliad and guided Odysseus through his many adventures of the Odyssey. I found her everywhere. She dominated the skies as a phenomenon, and human strife on Earth. I concerned myself with the context of the song and discovered that it was a Holy Dreamtime song, not a sacrilegious burlesque. It was presented as an opera-ballet, meant to take place among the gods in heaven. The same art form exists today among the aborigines of Australia. I asked myself how such holy songs could arise, and found an answer in the modern theory of catastrophism. Precedents and parallels from many countries and cultures justify searching for catastrophism behind the lines of the love song of Demodocus. Greek culture was badly damaged by natural disasters of the eight and seventh centuries before this era, and Homer's poetry (which I place later than is usual) shows both the effects of the disasters and the ways in which the Greeks recovered from them. The song of the love affair of Aphrodite and Ares is to be stripped of its facade. It is to be considered as a song about planetary gods doing violence to the world. I assign this Aphrodite of Homer to the Moon, with reservations that I believe are fully explained herein, rather than to the planet Venus. Ares stands for planet Mars without doubt. Hephaestus or Vulcan, though male, surprisingly stands for the planet Venus in this episode. Sea-god Poseidon represents the worried Earth, and persuades Hephaestus to release Aphrodite and Ares from the invisible net by which he has trapped them. Poseidon stands bond for Ares. All this suggests the unspeakable horror of natural disasters brought by these planetary gods upon Earth and humanity. That Aphrodite was always a great goddess of the Moon is maintained, again with reservations, for she may also have had her name assigned to other sky-bodies, especially planet Venus which the Greeks and Romans, following the Orientals, came to call Aphrodite. We tell of how the Moon-Aphrodite received in Homeric times the wanton, irresponsible, and imperturbable character by which later ages came to know her. Aphrodite is tied to Helen of Troy, and Helen to the Hellenes or Greeks. The Trojan wars evolve psychically into campaigns to recapture the Moon from planet Mars (Ares) by the followers of planet Venus (Athena). The stories of the Trojan wars thus use the historical and mundane battles to play out on Earth the drama of the skies. The skies of the Homeric age must be recent: 776 to 687 B. C. - or so I calculate, taking up Velikovsky's chronology. Although natural disasters had befallen the numerous settlements of Troy (possibly Hisarlik) throughout its history, a final major destruction by natural forces may well have occurred during Homer's boyhood. It was an awesome tragedy to him and others, which could not be recalled without pain, fear, and distortion. It is to be expected that the life of survivors of worldwide natural catastrophes would be fearful and turbulent. Hence I argue that the social psychology of the Homeric Greeks is framed in a concept of mania and madness, rather than in the conventional view of a primitive people gradually achieving a higher culture. Further, as on Earth so in heaven, there must be signs of the cosmic disasters of the age. I examine the Moon, as the astronauts have seen and sampled it for evidences of recent disaster, and shall recite indications that it did experience torrid bouts in the near past involving immense electro-gravitational stresses. I do the same with the planet Mars, from the evidence of the latest explorations. Mars has been the victim, it appears, of recent abysmal ruptures and explosions; I explain how these might have been caused by near encounters with Earth, Moon and Venus. Planet Venus is played by Hephaestus in the love Affair. He is a stand-in for Athena, director of the show, who is more frequently identified with the planet Venus than he. Venus is exceedingly hot, and marred beneath her dense atmosphere by shallow surface craters of great diameter. The other gods of the Love Affair introduce to the first modern bedroom comedy its humor, which can be explained in Freudian theory as yet another cover-up of the disaster. In reality they too are heavenly bodies. The role of the Sun, Helios, is shown to be secondary to that of the planetary gods and responsive to their behavior, as it is pictured in the earliest development of theology everywhere. If the characters of the Love Affair are to be placed in heaven, their motions too must be given meaning. The best explanation lately offered has the Sun and planets forming an electric systems, subordinate to and part of the galactic electrical system. They act as charged bodies separated from an oppositely charged space plasma by space-charge sheaths, the rupture of which destroys a balance and creates havoc through discharges among the bodies. These efforts seem to be discernible in the special motions of the characters of the Love Affair. We present physical and historical evidence in general agreement with the love song sung by Demodocus. How the human mind manages to react to such events in a way to preserve its own balance, and to give forth its most beautiful literary expressions, needs to be learned. An examination of the language of the Love Affair, and of Homer generally, brings forth a theory of myth: to succeed in telling the truth about an unspeakable event, a myth must fail to convey the truth. This fateful contradictory task is achieved successfully through the Love Affair. Homer was probably an editor and publisher of such great myths. He labored to write down in a fresh and convenient alphabet what he thought should be sung. He was a bringer of peace between gods and men, and the symbolizer of a unified Greek culture. Memory, I offer, is of traumatic origin. Human memory begins in horror and the need to forget. To remember is to forget; to forget is to remember. From the beginnings of true human nature until now, no one has been exempted from the rules of amnesia, not even the philosophers whose sublimation of the terrors of becoming a creature of memory have seemed to carry them very far from particular events. Myth and dreams coincide, operating according to similar laws. The conscious and unconscious parts of the mind exchange with each other what is required for a sense of control to exist so life can go on. Still the balance is scarcely a happy one. Human nature is imprinted by a deeply buried, unresting, and generalized great fear. The fear is reflected today and in the earliest human institutions of religion, politics, sex, schools, commerce, and war. I concluded in the end that the hundred lines of the Love Affair dramatize subconsciously the history of a catastrophic encounter of the planets at or near 687 B. C. Further, the mythical and literary transformations of the event mark a high point in the development of the European mind and its culture. I ask the reader - no matter that he may disbelieve me - to pursue his disbelief through the pages to follow, and acquire, at the least, a reasoned disbelief. To the reader who is familiar with my ideas, I offer assurances that the revelations contained in this introduction do not exhaust the surprises that he will encounter, one after another, as he moves through these pages upon his personal Odyssey. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD} {S - } FOREWORD In this book, I extract a dreamy bedroom comedy from Homer's Odyssey, analyze it as a dramatic form of myth, detect that it might have a real astronomical origin, seek this origin in world-wide disasters, and assert that an unconscious parallel occurs between astronomical events and artistic production. The narrative is well suited to readers of venturesome tastes, who may have a passing acquaintanceship with the history of the theater and ancient Greece, with psychoanalysis, with mythology and the ideas of catastrophism and astronomy. The work was written and offered for publication over a decade ago. Well-founded criticism from several British experts on mythology, particularly Peter James, Malcolm Lowery, Brian Moore and Martin Sieff, led me to withhold the manuscript, despite the encouragement coming from other quarters to publish it. I have indeed held it, to near the end of the Quantavolution Series, and release it now, benefited, I believe, by the amendments that my friends induced. Thanks on this occasion go also to professor William Mullen of St. John's College, whose advice extended from greek poetic meter to the full ancient oecumene; to Eugene Vanderpool of Athens, Greece, who was consistently sympathetic; to Dr. Elizabeth Chesley-Baity, who discussed with me the archaeo-astronomical anthropology of dances, fire-rites, ballgames, and sword ceremonies; to the late Dr. Zvi Rix of Israel, whose enchanting letters on problems of mythology kept the book and its author warm over the years of its hibernation; to George English for his editorial advice and Jungian interpretations; to my colleague, Professor Cyrus Gordon, for his appreciations of the values in my approach; to the late Professor Livio C. Stecchini, whose absence from the scene of ancient history and science is sorely felt; and to Dr. Jay Lefer who responded keenly to the questions here raised in the field of psychiatry. Finally, I would acknowledge the inspiration afforded by my friend, the late Immanuel Velikovsky, who designated the Greek gods as sky-bodies threatening the Earth. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 1: } {Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER} {C Chapter 1: } {T AN ATHENA PRODUCTION} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART ONE: SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER CHAPTER ONE AN ATHENA PRODUCTION The Love Affair, as I shall call it, is a story of how the arrogant god of war, Ares, made love to the Golden Goddess Aphrodite in the bed she was supposed to share with her husband, Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god. Hearing of their adultery from Helios, the sun-god, Hephaestus fashioned an invisible net that trapped the pair in bed. Returning from a pretended trip, he called upon the gods to witness their guilt and would release them only on the promise of the sea-god, Poseidon, to stand bail for the disreputable Ares. Perhaps this was the first bedroom farce of literature. Its producer, in a manner of speaking, was the Goddess Pallas Athena, patron of the arts and crafts, daughter and favorite of Zeus, father of the gods. She was born some centuries before 1500 B. C. [1] and was originally envisioned in the planet Venus. Athena was not only the producer of the 'Love Affair' but also of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as I shall seek to show: so she was not a novice in the field of dramaturgy. Her versatility was proverbial. She probably inspired the magnificent setting of Phaeacia and directed the scene closely. She sang it in the guise of the god-inspired Demodocus. Like Shakespeare she acted in her own plays: as herself, she planned the occasion for the story, and in the person of Odysseus, was the honored member of its audience. "I am Pallas Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who always stands by your side and guards you through all your adventures," she reminds Odysseus at one point. Odysseus's name means "troublemaker" or better "the inveterate troublemaker." Writes George Dimock, "In the Odyssey odyssasthai means essentially 'to cause pain (odyn‰) and to be willing to do so. '" [2] In her unruffled and sanguine way, often behind the scenes, Athena is the world's greatest troublemaker, as we shall soon learn. Though she is a mistress of disguises, Athena permitted a picture of her natural human form to develop over the centuries. E. V. Rieu, who has provided one of the many translations of the Odyssey that are available, writes that "we may think of her as a tall and beautiful woman, with brilliant eyes, clad in the white robe, with the aegis, a goatskin cloack, across her breast, a crested helmet on her head, and a long spear in her hand." [3] Sometimes an owl and a snake accompany her. However, we would warn that Athena's appearance is as varied as her characterizations, and her names are so many that some are still to be unearthed. "Most vivid and alive of Homer's gods," writes Rieu, "she dominates the Odyssey. And this is true even though there are moments when we are at a loss to say whether the poet means us to imagine her actual presence or to understand only that his characters are exercising the motherwit which she personifies." The whole story of the Odyssey itself can be retold briefly here. The saga begins with an assembly of the Gods. Athena catches her father Zeus reminiscing on the just killing of an evil man, and, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon, reminds him that the worthy Odysseus has still not reached home, although it is the tenth year after the destruction of Troy; for seven years he has been detained by the nymph Calypso on an island. And for three years before then, he had wandered: he had sacked a town, landed among the lotus-eaters who relished an amnesia-promoting vegetable, and had been captured by a giant man-eating Cyclops whom he blinded in order to escape. This proved to be unfortunate. The Cyclops was a son of Poseidon, whose enmity now marked Odysseus for unending disasters. The wanderers landed on the floating island of Aeolia where they were treated royaly. Upon departing, Odysseus was given a bag of rushing winds that was not to be opened, and granted a fair breeze for home. But his crew, acting in the typically greedy and impetuous manner that was to destroy them all ultimately, opened the pouch in envy of its supposedly precious contents. The fierce winds escaped; the way was lost. A landing among savage Laestrygonians brought a slaughter of many of the company. Fleeing, they found the island of the witch, Circe. After some difficulties (she changed a number of the men into pigs for a time), they conciliated her and spent a luxurious year at her palace. Upon his departure, Circe gave Odysseus means of discovering his own fate and reviewing the history of many a departed soul through a visit to Hades and a talk with the seer Teiresias. Pausing at Circe's island afterwards, Odysseus received further instructions that would carry him past the seductive Sirens, and through the narrow straits between Scylla, a grasping monster, and Charybdis, a swallower of ships. However, he is overruled by his men when he begs them to sail past the Island of the Sun. They land, and are kept ashore by storms until out of supplies. While Odysseus sleeps, the crew seize and eat the fat cattle of Helios. The Sun protests to Zeus (Jupiter) who destroys their ship and lets Odysseus drift alone for nine days until washed up on the shore of Ogygia, the island of Calypso. Seven years pass. Then it is that, following upon Athena's plea, the order of Zeus moves him on and he was sailing well until Poseidon, returning from a visit among the Ethiopians, spied him and dashed his little boat to pieces. The nymph Ino helped him to stay afloat and Poseidon turned away, satisfied. Athena smoothed the winds and seas so that he might survive, and arranged for him to fall into the hands of the Phaeacians. Now it is to the Phaeacian episode that I shall attend closely, but a few words more will bring the story to an end. Odysseus is transported from Phaeacia, with many gifts, and laid upon Ithaca, asleep. Athena appears to him and advises him: his wife, Penelope, still withholds her choice of a betrothed, though it is demanded of her by her many suitors, who meanwhile feast at the expense of the palace. His son, Telemachus, also faithful, is young and indecisive. Odysseus is to go first in disguise among his people, then to prepare his weapons, then, with the help of his son and two loyal slaves, to challenge and slaughter the suitors. So he does, and wins back his possessions and his wife. A final battle with the surviving opposition ensues but Athena calls Odysseus off, for he is supported but warned by Zeus. "So spoke Athene, and he obeyed, and was glad at heart. Then for all time to come a solemn covenant betwixt the twain was made by Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus, who bears the aegis, in the likeness of Mentor both in form and in voice" [4] . Thus ends the Odyssey. {S : Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production)} Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production) 1. William Mullen, "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," III Pensee No 1 (1973), 10; pp. 13- 4. 2. George E. Dimock, Jr., "The Name of Odysseus," in George Steiner and Robert Fagles, eds., Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 106. 3. The Odyssey, Penguin edition, introduction. 4. A. T. Murray, translator, Homer: The Odyssey, 2 vols. (New-York: Putnam's Sons, 1919), II, 443. Mentor was the lifetime guardian and advisor of Odysseus. He had been left behind when Odysseus sailed for Troy. (All line references to the Greek text will be to the Murray translation.) {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 1: } {Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER} {C Chapter 2: } {T THE SONG OF LOVE} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART ONE: SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER CHAPTER TWO THE SONG OF LOVE Here then is this song of love. It is presented fifth-hand: My literal verse is based upon a number of translations of what is ultimately a tenth century A. D. manuscript in Greek (the earliest extant - as written down in the seventh-century B. C. and reedited in the next century) of Homer's Odyssey, which reports what was sung by a blind harpist, Demodocus, in a time and place that have been debatable questions for over two thousand years. Alcinous the King announced the event: Now, all and one of you dancers, Phaeacia's finest! form in your corps de ballet so our stranger and guest can tell all his friends upon going back home, we're surpassing all manner of mankind; We are the paramount sailors on sea, and in running a foot race, singing of songs, and in dancing. So someone around us here go, go without loitering, bring to us here for Demodocus's use, that precious harp that so clearly resounds; it's the lyre carefully standing, it's somewhere, I know, within one of our great halls." Sacred commands of Alcinous! Quickly arose a herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from its palace place. Rising as well were a chosen nine men who were Lords Ceremonial, publically called, whenever the people foregathered and needed an ordering. These cleared out space for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring. Meanwhile the herald returned; he carried the clear-intoned lyre. Taking the lyre in hand, Demodocus moved in the midst of the young boys standing there, all of them skilled in the dance though they blossomed with fair youth. Down stamped their feet on the floor made for beauteous magical dances. Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air! {S : THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE} THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE Whereupon the song of the Love Affair begins. Striking his masterly chords in the prelude to singing his sweet song, Demodocus charmingly told of Ares' love affair and Aphrodite, Golden of Crown. In secret they lay in the home of Hephaestus. Ares came carrying all manner of gifts to dishonor the Lord's bed. Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted them loving. Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep down below to the depth of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the anvil, he struck, and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dissolve, for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his fierce aim. Then having fashioned his snare, imbued with a wrath against Ares, up to his chamber he went, by his bedstead of love, and all over, everywhere, round the four posts of the bed he moved, spreading the ligaments, dropping a number of them from above, from the beams to the floor, too, fine as the web of a spider, so fine that the Blessed Immortals, looking for them could not see them, such excellent craft was he capable of. Soon as the bonds had been stretched over all of the lovers' trysting couch, Hephaestus pretended to move on the way to his well-founded Lemnos, dearly loved island. Wherewith the unwavering gaze of the Golden-bridled Ares fixed without fail on Hephaestus, Most Famed among Artisans, going off. And Ares straight made his way to the house of the Famous Hephaestus, eager for love of Cytherean Aphrodite of the Bright Crown. She had in fact come before him just now from her father, mighty Son of Kronos, and rested herself to await his arrival. Ares entered directly the house, reached for her hands, and spoke calling her name: "Dearest one, come to bed now with me; let us together lie. Hephaestus is no longer here or about and I do think he's gone. Lemnos must have him; he's gone to his Sintians who speak like barbarians." He spoke like that, and she was quite thrilled to lie in his lean arms. Going to bed, they laid themselves together. But upon them showered the bonds engineered by versatile Hephaestus, tight drawn. Try as they might, they couldn't remove their limbs or even move them. Then they did realize no way could be found to escape the close bonds. Nearing them now, having turned himself back before reaching his Lemnos, came close the Famous, the Strong-armed, the God with Disabled Legs. Helios had watched as before and again had delivered the story. So, to his mansion once more he returned, his heart so heavy. Standing astride of the door he was seized by a wild anger. Terrible cries went up; all of the Gods heard his shouting: "Zeus, my father and all of you Blessed Gods who are Eternal, come down! See for yourselves here a laughable matter, unyielding fact. Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, has ever shunned my lameness, but loved Annihilator Ares who is handsome and straight-footed, born to stumble that I am! Yet no one to blame save my parents. Better had they not begotten me. Here you can see how this pair climbed into my bed and twine around each other so lovingly. I am torn apart by the sight. But believe me, their desire will vanish. However in love, their lust is gone, and an end to their fornication. Nevertheless, the trap and the net will not let them go free. Gifts that I gave for the right to the bride, with her eyes of a spaniel, first must be paid back to me by her father; fair though his daughter, she is a wanton and reckless." So spoke Hephaestus, seeing the Gods had now met at the house by its brazen bright threshold. Poseidon came, the Mover of Earth, and Hermes the Helper, too. Lord and Director of Far- removed Works, Apollo: he came. (Goddesses were absent, they remained home, away from the shameful scene.) Standing around the door, then, were the Gods, the Givers of Good Things. Laughter arose from the Blessed Gods, inextinguishably gleeful they were at the sight of Hephaestus' shrewd craft and cunning, saying amongst themselves, glancing at each other, "Bad deeds prosper poorly. The slow one can catch the most swift. See how Hephaestus, though slow he may be, has caught up with Ares, fastest of Gods who command high Olympus. Lame although he be, yet he has caught him by skill, so Ares must pay the just fine owed by one in adultery." To each other they spoke in this manner. Apollo, Lord and the son of Great Zeus, said aside to God Hermes, "Hermes, the son of Great Zeus, and our Messenger, Giver of Good Things: would you be willing, on oath, to wed with the Golden Aphrodite, even though trapped by strong bonds?" The Messenger God, Slayer of Argus, retorted: "Would that this happened to myself! Yes, O Master Apollo, Unfailing Marksman. If unbreakable bindings of three times the number would fasten me down, yes, and all of the goddesses were to be looking upon the two of us. Would that it happened that I should be sleeping with Golden Aphrodite!" Speeches like this caused new laughter to rise from the Heavenly Deities. Poseidon laughed not at all; he besought on the contrary Hephaestus, Supreme-of-all- Craftsmen, to let go of Ares, speaking in winged words: "Loose him, I promise, when ordered by you, to compel him to pay you all that is right, and I swear this before all these Gods, the Immortals." Famous and Strong-armed Hephaestus replied: "Do not ask this. Think! Poseidon, Earth-Surrounder. Bail for a reprobate! How can I place you in bondage among the immortal gods, granted that Ares will avoid both the debt and the bail and depart." Still the Shaker-of-Earth was insistent; Poseidon declared, "Surely if Ares shall flee from his debt I shall pay you Hephaestus." Then the Famous, the Strong-armed Hephaestus conceded in answer: "I am not right to deny you, nor would such an action be proper." Suddenly, so saying, the Mighty Hephaestus unfastened the bindings. Straightaway, freed from their powerful bonds, the lovers sprang upwards. Ares proceeded to Thrace, but Aphrodite, Lover of Laughter, went on to Cyprus, to Paphos, her domain with her fragrant-smoke alter. There she was bathed by the Graces, who salved her with oils of immortals, ointment refulgent on Gods who are Deathless. And they clothed her body. Such was the beauty of raiment, the vision astonished the eyes. {S : HAPPY ENDING} HAPPY ENDING The opera is over, its audience charmed and relaxed: This was the song that the famous bard sang and Odysseus rejoiced; glad in his heart was the guest while he listened; glad, too, the Phaeacians, men of the long oars, famed for their sea-going vessels. Forthwith Alcinous bade Halius and Laodamas to dance by themselves. No one could match them. They grasped in their hands a beautiful purple ball that Polybus the Wise One had fashioned for them and their dancing. One would lean backwards and toss it up high towards the shadowy clouds. His brother would leap off the ground in the air, and skillfully catch it, even not touching the ground with his feet until holding it firmly. Showing their skill at casting the ball straight up high was a prelude; Now they began a new dance on the bounteous earth, flinging the same ball to and fro, to and fro, as other youths stood in the wings, beating time. Great was the din that arose! Odysseus then turned to Alcinous, saying: "Lord and Renowned among mankind, you boasted of your dancers; best you had said that they be, and true are your words in our full sight. Looking upon them, amazement takes hold of me here." Alcinous is gladdened by this praise. He impetuously ordains that all manner of rich gifts be heaped up for the guest to carry along home when he leaves Scheria. {S : THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA} THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA The "Love Affair" stands as a complete story in itself. More exactly, it is a summary of a long dramatic presentation which will never be heard or seen. And this long story is of course part of only one episode of the Phaeacian Adventure. Phaeacia itself is a marvelous creation of Homer-Athena. If the "Love Affair" as a literary genre can be called the first bedroom farce, Phaeacia may be called the first Utopia, to be succeeded by hundreds of utopias in the millennia to come. It has aspects of More's Utopia, of Campanella's City of the Sun, of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of Hilton's Shangrila, of Skinner's Walden II, and of many another. Phaeacia means in Greek the "Shining Land". It is a new community, now in its second generation. Its people were once settled in Hypereia, probably far to the East, when they were oppressed by savage giant neighbors, "a quarrelsome people who took advantage of their greater strength to plague them", says Homer. Their first king, Nausithous, father of the present king, the divine Alcinous, "made them migrate and settled them in Scheria [probably a mythical name, like Phaeacia and Hypereia], far from the busy haunts of men." "There he laid out the walls of a new city, built them houses, put up temples to the gods, and allotted the land for cultivation." They have an abundance of food and water, and of niceties of civilization. "We run fast and we are firstrate seamen. But the things in which we take a perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean linen in plenty, a hot bath, and our beds." The wash is done in "the noble river with its never-failing pools, in which there was enough clear water always bubbling up and swirling by to clean the dirtiest clothes." [1] The beautiful princess, Nausicaa, is impelled by Athena to go with attendants to the river banks to wash clothes and play games, activities suggestive of the rites of Spring to at least one authority, Emile Mireaux [2] . There she inevitably encounters Odysseus, begrimed from his many days adrift but refreshed from sleep. Her ball falls near the thicket where he lay, she meets him and he wins her trust. She in turn reassures her playmates. "Stop, my maids. Where are you flying to at the sight of a man? Don's tell me you take him for an enemy, for there is no man on earth, nor ever will be, who would dare set hostile feet on Phaeacian soil. The gods are too fond of us for that. Remote in this sea-beaten home of ours, we are the outposts of mankind and come in contact with no other people." [3] A town square, marketing-place and meeting place, well-paved, adjoins the Temple of Poseidon, chief of the gods favoring the city, for he fathered king Nausithous. Poseidon is not always pleased with his Phaeacians, because they are sometimes too hospitable to travelers who have offended him, and it was fore-told by King Nausithous that Poseidon would be jealous enough one day to petrify a vessel of theirs and swing about the mountains behind them into a ring that would foreclose the sea. Meanwhile they lived well and gave their energies to the building and sailing of fleet ships. They held commerce, too, in contempt. Neither grim warriors nor merchants, yet they enjoyed all the good things of life. The King's name of Alcinous (Alkynoos) is significant. The central star of the Pleiades, the gate to Paradise and to the world of spirits, is Alkyone. Alkyonic Lake is the waters of death leading of Paradise. There has since time immemorial been a worldwide knowledge, among tribes and great civilizations, about the Pleiades, early November celebrations occur centering upon them [4] . The palace of Alcinous, too, is shining and grand, "for a kind of radiance, like that of the sun or moon, lit up the high-roofed halls of the great king." The palace enjoys a large household of retainers and its gardens extend into a bush-enclosed orchard. Homer is as respectful of women as anyone in this age of brutal male chauvinism. Queen Arete, mother of Nausicaa, "sits at the hearth in the light of the fire, spinning the purple yarn, a wonder to behold, leaning against a pillar and her hand maids sit behind her," [5] but she is a powerful factor in setting policy for the realm. "If you secure her favor, Nausicaa tells Odysseus, you may hope to regain home and friends. "On mother's wishes much depends." [6] The places of public assembly can hold "many thousands": all of the nobles, their families and the population. The king is beloved, but ruler by consensus. Social and political functions are performed by men chosen, perhaps elected, from the aristocracy. For example, when the performance of "Love Affair" was announced, a committee of nine official stewards took matters in hand. "They were public servants who supervised all the details on such occasions." The Phaeacians are a well-organized community. They have a public opinion. There are conventional moral standards: gossip, respect, a time for marriage, a place for everyone and for strangers: these seem all the more utopian as they seem real. A peaceful people, we are induced to believe, a people beloved by and respecting the gods, a people who lived serenely under an ultimate belief that their special god, Poseidon, would take away their sea, their precious sea-fairing way of life. In the end, we are told, these beautiful people, hospitable, who had sublimated all terrors to the arts and crafts, were punished as Poseidon had promised: for their kindness to Odysseus, their returning ship was frozen to stone and a range of mountains was about to encircle them. {S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love)} Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love) 1. Ibid., VI. 2. Vol I, chap. X. 3. Loc. cit. 4. R. G. Halliburton, 25 Nature (Dec. 1, 1881) 100-1; E. B. Tylor 25 Nature (Dec. 15, 1881) 150-1; R. G. H., 25 Nature (Feb. 2, 1882) 317-8. 5. A. T. Murray, op. cit., I, 229. 6. Robert Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey (New York: Doubleday, 1961). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 1: } {Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER} {C Chapter 3: } {T THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART ONE: SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER CHAPTER THREE THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY The song is sung. The play is over. Now the question is, "What does it represent?" It represents, I think, and I must take the rest of this book to explain myself, a shocked spell amidst conditions of horrifying natural disaster. The Greeks experienced it, suppressed its memories, remembered it subconsciously, and converted it ultimately into the symbolic form of a comedy. The Greeks assumed the Love Affair took place in the sky nor could it have any other location. The gods move swiftly from place to place, the Sun is one of the actors, some of the brilliant imagery such as of "the brazen bright threshold" suggests the heavens, the gods involved are all sky-gods, and the decor and associated games are celestial. Hyginus is not alone in speaking of the play as going on in the sky; speaking of Venus exciting Mars, he writes that "since she inflamed him violently with love, she called the star Pyroeis, indicating this fact." [1] Hyginus' Poetica Astronomica also says that: When Vulcan married Venus he watched so Mars could only follow but never catch her. This indicates the nature of the "love-affair" as a planetary engagement and hints at prior close encounters of Vulcan with Aphrodite and then a relationship such that Vulcan would always be closer to Aphrodite than Mars could be. Effective planetary encounters must be accompanied by grave disasters. Probably the primordial elements of The Love Affair were composed of the incoherent, intense feelings of people in a frenzy of despair and fright [2] . Words of today cannot express their feelings. The biblical prophets convey some impressions of the state of mind in the throes of disaster. The mind of today, developed in the imagery of nuclear bomb devastation, can perhaps understand something of their feelings. Accounts of historically experienced natural disasters such as Vesuvius, Krakatoa, the Pestigo (Wisconsin) forest fire, and the great Lisbon earthquake lend analogous material. What had really happened had probably caused repeated surges of disjoined symbols and thoughts. The poetry must have sprung originally from a chaos of sounds, sights and human babel and ejaculations, uttered by many tongues, over hours and days of time. A "normal" adult would probably have been reduced to bodies of expression such as follows: The worst is happening... just as feared!... all sacrifices failed... here it is... annihilator... oracles... monster-body... war... death sun... red dogs, blood... Aphrodite... sex... moon... darkness... thunder... trumpets... golden... Ares... Zeus... sword... stretched fireballs... moon rape... heat... god, god... who... suffocation... stinks... stand still... run... hide... don't move... a giant in the sky calling... he was away... his flares are out... moon is his... we give it... pray take it... all this can't happen... we did not mean it... abah, awah, abah... we are dying... glowers... shakes... where is he going... where has she gone... din... deafness... the sky and land are afire... Poseidon stop it... shake them off... take everything... let us be... uh. And so on. But the horror once past paved the way for music and literature. The state of mind of the audience of Demodocus can be reconstructed into a more coherent story in which the matching of a new plot with the original real story is nicely achieved. The original memories and anxieties are blended and smoothed over by the new story so that they erupt under control. History cannot be forgotten, but it can be made tolerate. The Song of Love is telling something that only the collective unconscious can understand, and which the unconscious rarely permits to be verbalized. I shall try, nevertheless, to force to emerge some of the unexpressed and unconscious feelings of the people of Phaeacia as the Love Affair is sung and played. To do so I may resort to a rhetorical device. {S : AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS} AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS If an old priest of Delphi were to be instructing acolytes about events of the song, we imagine that lecture-notes upon his discourse would read as follows: We know these gods for what they are, uncontrollable and primeval; we cannot say what we think of them; we must not even say who they are or where we first met them; we must not say what they did to us or in any way accuse them; we must not even remember too much lest we feel agony and panic. The rhythms and the chords keep our feeling under control, reinforcing the screen of words alone. The story, as Demodocus signs it, is familiar. Yet it contrives to excite and appease us. We shall feel better afterwards. That is because otherwise we might be compelled to confront the true story, which is rather like what follows, although we cannot be sure that it is more than a terribly realistic dream. {S : THE HIDDEN STORY} THE HIDDEN STORY Ares and Aphrodite are the planet Mars and the Moon. The Planet Mars is ruddy and far away now, but was then close to the Moon who was bathed in her golden aura. Hephaestus is the planet Venus. He is not married to Aphrodite. He approached her on various occasions in times past, and ourselves too, our Earth, and was terribly destructive. And the Moon was disturbed and drawn to him and then was drawn back, and so we gave her in marriage, or rather Zeus gave her in marriage, for how else could they be legitimately coupled save by the ruler of the skies and of humanity, who has for three thousands years dominated us. Mars and Moon are not in love, nor do they make true love. They are destroying each other and us. Mars' huge body which once seemed like a flaming sword interjects itself between Moon and Earth. And the whole primal violence of extreme sexual activity occurs on a world scale. The bed of Earth shakes, the skies glare brilliantly, electricity is all-pervasive, the Moon disappears and reappears. A massive rape is occurring. Hephaestus is far away. It is night but for the brilliance of the scene, secret night when sex flourishes and Aphrodite, the Dark One, makes love. Perhaps if he would return, he would divert the assailant Mars and spare us from total destruction. We would ourselves imitate this orgy, if we were engaging in an alternate mood of anxiety- therapy, or we would propitiate by sacrificing ourselves or what belongs to us or whatever and whomever we can lay our hands on. We know what "gifts of Ares" are. They are meteors. They are the steeds of Mars. They have struck us and are showered upon Moon. When our King Nausithous led us out of Hypereia, it was because of the stone-giants which Mars and his horde had hurled upon our land. The secret will be exposed. Helios the Sun is rising. He never takes part. He cannot rescue us. But he will attract the attention of the Planet Hephaestus and perhaps an intervention will occur. It does. Planet Hephaestus looms large, in blazing anger, his immense arms and stunted legs making him look like a comet. Then he disappears. He does not approach the lovers closely. He goes to the other side of Earth. We wonder whether he will reappear. The destruction upon Earth is terrible. Mars is twice the size of the Moon. We are struck repeatedly by his "gifts"- gases, stones, quakes. The waters are disturbed. The tides are high, the volcanos are erupting. Will the other gods do nothing? Now the Moon and Mars are behind us, leaving us rocking and quaking. But Hephaestus is once more in sight. He is as large as Mars, brilliant, and trailing electric sparks even against the gray sky. But if his legs drag, not so his arms. His huge arms flap as they hammer out the sparks. The whole sky around him is brazen. He drops flashing clouds over our heads and from the corner posts or pillars of the sky. But again he departs and again come Mars and Moon. She had returned separately to the region of Jupiter and comes back once again to meet Mars who has come flying along parallel to us. Moon attracts Mars once more. Great electric sparks envelop them. They are perturbed. They pause and move, pause and move. Now Moon appears in an unusual phase or position, now she disappears behind Mars and he moves ahead showing another part of her. Mars is closely following the Moon, which is to say that he is moving swiftly parallel to the Earth. But Hephaestus now approaches, even larger than he was a few hours ago (who can measure such agonizing time?) A thunderous noise fills the heavens, like the enraged shouts of the cuckolded husband. It is something to cause ugly laughter; it is a tangible, an enormous, a highly visible fact, this entanglement of the two. We shall now witness the catastrophe, as we Greeks call the end of an age and also that part of a drama which brings the culmination of a plot. "The Gods of the Sky must come!," says the thunderous noise. The scene must attract them, for it is their milieu. It is the end of the age, the end of the world. They will be our salvation or our doom. Hephaestus is lying. He knows he is not the son of Zeus but was cast down by Jupiter and took his strange misshapen form (compared with the other Olympians) from the accident. The bed of Hephaestus is by the Moon, not as it is today, even though he is often far away and invisible in the northern sky. But Mars has climbed upon this bed and is trapped in the invisible electrical- gravitational net. The sex bout has ended with the bodies suddenly largely stilled. Our Earth also pauses. Hephaestus hovers in the sky, glowering, raging, exchanging bolts with Mars. Mars tries to emerge from the bed of the Moon. Hephaestus demands his brideprice back from Jupiter. They are the same "gifts" as Mars, which Hephaestus had showered upon Moon in olden time, when the marriage was first consummated and we have not recovered from that marriage of the gods yet. Jupiter stays away. He is retiring more and more. He has claimed to set up the order of the skies, such as it is. He is scarcely responsible, it seems to us, for he should return to strike Mars with thunderbolts and drive him away. Instead of the conflict being adjudicated, it will have to be compromised. Other gods gather. Actually they do not. But memories of them do because of the terror of our experience. New terrors pile upon the old and explode them. Here we see Hermes and Apollo, the lucky and the wise. What can we except from them? Hermes is the helper. We say he is so, because we hope he will help and because once long ago he had been near us when we were going through a similar crisis; he fled to safety and we followed; so we say he led us. But now he is tormenting us. Prompted by Apollo, he tells the grim truth as a sexual joke; he is an old lover of Moon too, and great is the ruin they brought upon each other and ourselves but great also is the attraction these gods of the sky have for one another. They laugh at the tragedies of others because they suffered the same themselves and no one consoled them. The goddesses stayed away, "out of shame", we sing. The goddesses are not ashamed; it is male conceit. Their names are taken by the male gods whenever they please. Artemis "is" Apollo. Hera "was" Poseidon and "is" now Jupiter. And Athena? Well, Athena "is" Hephaestus, the only planetary female, so she is here in fact and deed. Hephaestus-Venus will stay married to the Moon. We know how it will end. The only question is whether Mars should pay anything. Apollo remains aloof and laughing. But for Earth and Sea it is no laughing matter. Poseidon stands for Earth when Mother Earth is absent, as well as for the all-encircling seas and waters. He is The Earth-Shaker! He repeatedly beseeches the Planet Venus on our behalf to uncouple Mars and Moon. Earth is already paying its price and willing to pay more if only the disasters will cease. The tension is terrible to bear. Fortunately Venus-Hephaestus is about to move away. The disaster cannot continue. He therefore accepts the offer of the Earth-Shaker who may be growing tired of his own exertions. More will be paid by Earth to the Planet that shines in daytime. This bodes ill. More songs, more dances, prayers, sacrifices, suffering will be required in the future, from Venus as well as from Mars. So the two bodies are loosed and spring up and away. Thank the Gods! The break happened fast. As Venus withdrew, Mars speeded away in a new orbit to the Northwest, propelled by the planets Earth and Venus, and the Moon, violently abused, flew Southwest where all smoke and fires were quickly quenched and she emerged soon, appearing as round and golden as she did before but she now carries new pocks and scars. The character of the Moon is unchanged. The Gods are uncontrollable; we must not offend them; we must not pretend to be like them; but we cannot help but sing and dance about them. It is one of the few things we can do to prevent our utter destruction in the future and suppress our intolerable memories of the past. And the old priest would conclude with a warning to the acolytes: "Someday you will understand this, but what I have told you must always remain a secret from everybody." The song, the music, and the dancing are ended. The transition to the ordinary frame of mind occurs. The sons of the good King Alcinous perform a dance to lighten the minds and hearts of the audience. They cast a beautiful purple ball far into the air, leaping to catch it. It seems to reach the shadowy clouds. They seem to touch the sky, to be as light as air. This heavenly sphere has no counterparts on earth. Perhaps it is a stretched and round-stitched bladder or skin filled with feathers, fashioned by a master hand, or a round-shaped gourd ball. It makes contact with the celestial spheres-Sun, Moon, Planets. They keep them up and leap after them; all is done quickly; it is a trompe l'oeil, a dazzling coda. {S : AUTHOR'S CODA} AUTHOR'S CODA If the preceding replay of Demodocus' song as a representation of the unconscious contains both a new "real" parallel plot and a certain "madness," one need not be repelled or even surprised. Literature was not invented by humankind out of boredom with spending long nights in caves. It emerged as a method of controlling psychological distress. Both the "real" story and the "madness" will come in for more lengthy discussion. One asks here simply for a beginning of understanding. As the plot breaks down under analysis, it should evidence some well-known psychoses of which the mind is capable under stress. In its suffering and terror the mind engages in many forms of delusional thought. An important effect is the belief that the skies and the earth are alive with beings who resemble oneself and are similarly motivated. This anthropomorphism helps the transfiguration of the uncontrollable and huge forces into the images of sex, social power, and property that the mind is accustomed to dealing with. Ambivalence to the gods erupts quickly, once the gods are born out of nature. Hate is just as quickly suppressed and turned upon oneself, for fear that one will be terribly punished if it becomes known to the gods. A persecution complex occurs instantly; one cannot evade the mighty punishers. Symptoms of schizophrenia are abundant: attempts at shutting out the real world; attempts at reconstructing quickly a new world of one's own in which events are controlled only by the mind. Forgetting and distortion proceed quickly. As soon as possible, means will be invented to screen off both the real story and its effects on the psyche. Literature, songs, and games will be invented. Wars will be waged, for one must handle the urge to punish oneself by moving out wildly and attacking others. Temples and palaces for the provision of security and order must be erected; these will celebrate, in a different screening language, of course, the events of those days; they will see to it that the right food is eaten and digested and the proper mating and reproduction will occur. {S : Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy)} Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy) 1. Poetica Astronomica, II 42. The root "pyr" denotes "fire." 2. Alfred de Grazia, "The Palaetiology of Fear and Memory," (Lethbridge, Canada: University of Lethbridge, 1976), Part I. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 1: } {Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER} {C Chapter 4: } {T CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART ONE: SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER CHAPTER FOUR CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION One may dare to suppose that the Love Affair stands for a tragedy of humanity if there is borne in mind a larger theory, already considerably developed, even if not yet widely employed. The larger theory, the modern scientific theory of ancient catastrophes - quantavolution - functions as a kind of general engineering scheme to guide the reconstruction of the song of Demodocus. It is both chronological - telling what happened when - and analytic - telling how it happened. As a consequence of work done in quantavolution, many ancient and recent discoveries have come together, attracted as if by a magnet. {S : THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE} THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE I state here the several components of the general theory of ancient catastrophes and quantavolution, shaping it to present needs to a degree, and illustrating it to the minimal extent required for its comprehension. Ample documentation and qualifications are to be found in the "Quantavolution Series" [1] and other works - of a controversial nature, to be sure. 1. Grave catastrophes have befallen the planet Earth. The evidence of geology. oceanography, meteorology, paleomagnetism, and archeology are continuously bringing forward new evidence, and rediscovering old evidence, that in times past the Earth suffered repeated devastation by quakes, floods, fires and winds whose dimensions are fantastically beyond any historical experience of the last 2700 years. The surface of the Earth has been twisted and turned, sunk and raised, scoured and ploughed on a continental scale. The orbit of the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, and the axial inclination of the Earth to the plane of the ecliptic have changed suddenly, with frightful consequences. 2. The catastrophes have been initiated in great part by changes in the solar system. Planets have changed their orbits and other motions, nearly collided, acquired or discarded satellites, become heated and cooled, accumulated and discharged electricity, and, on some of these occasions, involved the Earth in their titanic activities. One planet, Venus, may even have been newly created out of Jupiter. The number of meteors that have struck Earth is large but responsible for only a portion of the catastrophic damage, since atmospheric, electrical, tidal and seismic disturbances can occur with or without body impact. 3. Some catastrophes have had large effects upon mankind. They have been allocated to past periods during which hominids and humans lived, whether these are traced back thousands or millions of years. The last ice age has been moved up to a point where homo sapiens is readily recognizable, and has been given by many geologists a huge, abrupt beginning and/ or conclusion. All agree that, on occasion, as far back as the fossil record may carry and up to the dawn of history, many species were quickly and concurrently wiped out or reduced to a few survivors. 4. Some catastrophes have occurred at times within the capacity of humanity to transmit their memories to successive generations. All peoples have myths of chaos and creation, and of the destruction of civilizations and their recreation, in a set of cycles. As one moves from earlier to later catastrophes the linkages between oral (and transcribed) myths and factual reportage, recognizably modern in form, increase. Additional corroboration comes from the developing science of myth-analysis, contributed to by classicists, anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and archaeologists. In addition, archeology has disclosed periods of total and simultaneous devastation of existing civilizations in areas stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and from Mexico to Peru. 5. Wherever symbolic and linguistic evidence is available, and usually also where only oral traditions are preserved, the catastrophes suffered on Earth and by humanity were attributed to changes in the celestial system, and particularly to Ouranos (the Sky), the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Apollo (now transmuted beyond ready identification), Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The latest catastrophes are associated with the erratic and destructive behavior of Mars in the years 776 to 687 B. C., ending that is, 2662 years ago. These precise years, which Velikovsky initially proposed, cover the scenarios of this book, and in my view are generally acceptable. 6. Putting aside the sudden destruction of many civilizations in the course of thousands of years and granting that the sheer survival of these species was all-important, retroactively considered, and furthermore leaving to my book Homo Schizo I the question whether a highly significant mutation took place among proto-humans in a cerebral or endocrinal form that contemporary paleophysiology can barely recognize, the greatest effect upon humanity of the catastrophes was their contribution to the making of the human mind and human nature. The exceedingly heavy experience of disaster from all forms of elemental turbulence, with its associated disruption and dissolution of human communities, caused widespread amnesia. As much as they could and as quickly as possible, surviving humans suppressed the memories of those times. But the fear and the anxiety produced now by one and then by another catastrophes could not be forgotten and surged repeatedly to the surface of consciousness. The massive collective anxiety was displaced onto many different subjects, altered the ways in which these subjects were viewed and treated, until finally our modern human nature emerged, replete with a variety of sublimations, that is, the continuous and partly controlled discharge of the never-to-be forgotten experiences and fears of disaster [2] . {S : THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS} THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS The sublimations of catastrophic anxiety diffused into three major areas: expressive communication; passive controls; and active controls. In the area of expressive communication, the primitive language was expanded and grew more abstract and conceptual to describe the behavior being observed in the skies. The astral events were associated with prior experiences of the closest analogous types, especially sex and conflict, and humanized. The terrific visible skyforces were understood then to be human-like but superhuman to the nth power. (" The Lord made the mountains skip like rams," recited the Hebrew psalmist.) All manner of recounting the events was called for; no matter which mode, it was bound to be loaded with anxious affect. The different modes were sorted out, the most heavily charged from the less, the most denotative from the more connotative. Different formulas were worked out for handling the modes of expression; those that were the most direct or challenging to the superpowers had to be the most carefully licensed and regulated. Little by little, songs, ballads and fables were developed that could be granted more freedom of expression. So began the history of literature, both liturgical and profane. Passive controls include the incorporation of catastrophic anxiety into prescribed conduct, whether personal or social. The governance of behavior by taboos, fixation of archetypes and stereotypes, and the performance of rituals alone and in crowds received so much impetus from the catastrophes and their aftermaths that they practically may be said to have sprung from them. If a word had to be chosen to represent the motivation for all of these passive controls, it might be an obsession, which may be defined as the inability to move one's conscious attention from the centerpiece of one's anxiety without enchaining the attention. The greatest taboo of all is to forget the circumstances of disaster. One freezes like death, like the possum, like the soldier against a brilliant flare, like the humans who were turned into statues by the Greek gods, like the Judaic sect whose members immobilize at the first moment of the Sabbath, in the position of the moment, until the Sabbath passes. A great proliferation of ideas and customs can come from this attitude but they will all be deductively connected to the primeval chaos and creation. "Good" education comes to be making the young both as fearful and as habituated as oneself. People think, "If I do something new, it, the thing, nature, god, will do something new" and therefore it isn't worthwhile; it is taboo in fact, to try to do so [3] . The third great area affected by catastrophe governs human efforts at active control of other people and the environment. Here is included the sharp growth of the power motive (and corresponding ability) in individuals that start up the centralized kingdoms (and which prospers from the passive control behavior just noted). The urge to wage destructive warfare is enhanced, but also the proliferation of invention: all in imitation of the celestial forces who hammered, shouted, put on dazzling displays of light, showered down many types of materials and objects, and changed many species of animals and plants. "For the Spartans," wrote Lucian, "Lycurgus drew from the sky his ordering of their whole polity." [4] The Love Affair is an example of the first area of sublimation, the expressive communication, and of one kind of myth, the holy dreamtime song. But, as has become already apparent, the words alone are an inadequate description of the event. It dwells upon what was the last or nearly the last of the great catastrophes. Every major element of the general theory of ancient catastrophe put forward above is represented in the song, its latent meaning, and its physical and social contexts. At the same time, every element of the general theory of catastrophe had happened before in earlier disasters, as in the case of the repeated incursions of Venus upon the Earth's orbit, which occurred between 1500 B. C. and the time of our story and which have been described in detail by Velikovsky, by the "Quantavolution Series," and in related works. And it all happened again and again before 1500 B. C., which is a vast and difficult history only now being told. {S : Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation)} Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation) 1. The reader is referred to the volumes of my Quantavolution Series (Metron Publications : Princeton, N. J., 1981-4), especially Chaos and Creation and its bibliography. 2. These matters are discussed at length in Homo Schizo I and II. 3. Cf., e. g., Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 6-7 et passim. 4. From "Astrology," p. 367, Vol. V of Works (Loeb ed., Harvard University Press, 1936). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 1: } {Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER} {C Chapter 5: } {T HOLY DREAMTIME} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART ONE: SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER CHAPTER FIVE HOLY DREAMTIME Before the Love Affair had been played and sung Odysseus was reduced to tears by Demodocus' singing of the Trojan War. And, later on, hours after the Love Affair has been played Odysseus offers a gift to Demodocus and addressed him: Demodocus I proclaim you the most distinguished of all mortals. Either the Muse, daughter of Zeus, instructed you, or Apollo you directly. For you chant the fate of the Achaeans absolutely according to its proper ordering: What they did and had done to them and what distress they suffered - as if, in some way, you had been present yourself or had heard it from someone who was there [1] . One may wonder whether, although Odysseus does not recognize it, the Love Affair, too, is sung "absolutely according to its proper ordering," and as if Demodocus "had been present" himself "or had heard it from someone who was there." Strange it is that Odysseus, when the song is ended, has been transported and is joyfully at ease. One would imagine that the story of an adulterous love triangle might have reminded him of his own plight - long away from his palace and beset by rumors of his wife's unfaithfulness. One might believe that the song was in bad taste, or that afterwards he might gnash his teeth and rend his garments. Not at all. Homer and he obviously did not feel any such connection between the performance and his plight. When the singer, Demodocus , "struck the chords in prelude," his audience was already entranced. He himself is blind; Homer, whose image he may reflect, is also called "the Blind." He is Homer's "good minstrel, whom the Muse loves above all other men, and gave him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet song." [2] There is a hint here that ancient bards were sometimes blinded, as smiths were ritually lamed, and young singers castrated, to heighten their symbolic role and competence. No god might then envy the bard, especially not Apollo, and his blindness is an assurance that he will not see what is divinely forbidden to see. Athena, too, was known to play tricks with human sight [3] . Furthermore, his audience will not be discomfitted at being viewed in their musing mood by a sensibly alert musician. And, of course, a blind man may develop epic powers of memory. An alternative, less radical, would be to sing with eyes closed, or blindfolded. The audience is settled around as an organized community, king and queen, nobles, council of state, the citizens and retainers, and the Hero, Odysseus. The dancers continue their movements, acting out the scenes of the sacred play. Those who have competed in sports rest, their aggressiveness dissipated, their minds relaxed to receive now a flow of aesthetic communication. The singer carries the melody; it is sung in long, measured lines. His lyre was originally a gift of Mercury and Apollo, and is a beautiful instrument; its strings are attuned to the heavenly bodies, as Pythagoras will demonstrate mathematically a century hence. Although the earliest lyres held three strings, the age of seven-stringed lyres may have already arrived. The rhythms are supplied by the ballet who stress movements of the opera. The production is a drama, not a ballad or folk song. Its plot is conventionally complete, perhaps the earliest of the dramatic plots of what is to become the literary history of Classical Greece, therefore a great invention, with a pair of protagonists, an antagonist, the development of a line of conduct, its interruption, a climax, a resolution, a disposition of participants and values. All happens in a time span close to what Aristotle discovered, centuries later, to be the ideal unity of dramatic time. One notes particularly, in the jargon of literary analysis employed from the time of the early Greek tragedians, the "catastrophe." The word means "the climax," "the point of denouement;" in general, the word means "the turning-down point," and also "the end of a period of time." Yet it was historical experience that lent itself to the definition of plot, not plot of history. It was first an unconscious invention, then a conscious one, that ordained the classical climax of drama. The archetypical plot is that when the end of an age arrives, the gods foregather, and societies turn abruptly downward, after which the cycle begins once more. The Love Affair is a relic of the end of the Mycenean Age of Greece. {S : THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE} THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE What has been made of the Love Affair? It is at least a song, for it was chanted to the chords of a lyre, to the accompaniment of rhythmic dancing. Perhaps, first off, I should stress that its 'songness' has been variously imparted. In the version by the famous Alexander Pope, one would sense a different spirit. The bard, Demodokos, The loves of Mars and Cytherea [4] sings; How the stern god, enamour'd with her charms, Clasp'd the gay panting goddess in his arms, By bribes seduced And as Hephaestus traps the lovers, Pope's Homer sings: Stern Vulcan homeward treads the starry way: Arrived, he sees, he grieves, with rage he burns: Full horribly he roars, his voice all heaven returns. "O Jove, (he cried) O all ye powers above, See the lewd dalliance of the queen of love! Me, the awkward me, she scorns; and yields her charms To that fair lecher, the strong god of arms." Translation of the Odyssey are numerous. One that interested me to the point of inquiry was by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679,) prepared when he was in his eighties. His long life as natural philosopher and political scientist carried him through the extensive revolutions and religious debates of the times and up to Newton and Whiston. This was the Hobbes whose view of mankind included the famous phrase that in a state of nature man's life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Poetically, I must agree with Pope, who said that Hobbes' version of Homer was "too mean for criticism." [5] But did he treat the Love Affair in some unusual way? Not at all - though it contains a touch of unwarranted political expertness: And the judges rise In number nine, who had elected been By public-vote, of games to hold assize, And order took for large room in the middle, And made it to be planed well and even. [6] But, as a I shall explain, even if beautifully rendered, the lines of Homer must read as the pale representation of their original pronouncement and context. Experts upon Homer have generally denied serious consideration to his song about a love affair. It seems to be what Alexander Pope makes it out to be, burlesque entertainment for a visiting sailor. One seems to hear the typical commentator: "A bit scandalous, but then you know how lightly the Greeks took their gods and goddesses!" One translator, Professor Murray, indicates conscientiously that "the whole passage was on moral grounds rejected by some ancient critics." [7] Walter Otto tells us that "even in antiquity many readers, Plato among them, found this story offensive, and in modern times it is generally regarded as a frivolous burlesque." [8] Professor Finely, an expert upon the society and economy of Homeric Greece, speaks of "the little pieces, like the myth of the adultery between Ares and Aphrodite" [9] that infiltrate the Odyssey. George Sarton, the encyclopedic historian of science regards the whole of the Odyssey, indeed, as a story of peace, a gentle romance [10] . Such observations can only reflect the nostalgia for one's school-days: the blood and guts spilled in the Odyssey, and the terrors entailed, would put to shame the authors of a typical evening of violence and horror on American commercial television. T. B. L. Webster mentions the possibility that "the light-hearted treatment of the gods in some Egyptian stories may have influenced Demodokos' lay of Ares and Aphrodite in the eight book of Odyssey." [11] E. V. Rieu, introducing his translation of the Odyssey, says that "in the famous Lay of Demodocus" Homer provides "a treatment that we can only regard as humorous." This merely betrays, he claims, "a very tolerant understanding of their motives and frailties," not an absence of respect for the power and beauty of the gods [12] . But, then, the distinguished Robert Graves, premature women's liberationist that he is, says: "though masquerading as an epic, the Odyssey is the first Greek novel; and therefore wholly irresponsible where myths are concerned." Graves tends to agree with Samuel Butler, author of the utopia, Erewhon, who, in another book, Authoress of the Odyssey, ascribed the work to a young and talented Sicilian noblewoman of the district of Eryx [13] . Experts can be piled "Ossa upon Pelion" without reaching heaven. Otto's elaborate concern over reason and respect reminds one of a prude explaining why his sister is loitering on a Piraeus street corner. "The story is naturally not a moralizing sermon, but that does not make it frivolous. Its tone of lofty humor removes it from both moralizing and frivolity." Ares is a bloody savage, disliked by everyone. "All interest centers upon the discreditable role played by Ares... And Aphrodite? If we consider the story carefully we suddenly realize that she receives no attention whatsoever." His final gaff regarding Poseidon is monumental: "Poseidon is so touched by Ares' situation that, unable to laugh, he prevails upon Hephaestus to release his hapless victim and is so kindly as to provide a guarantee for him." [14] This comment would perhaps have made the surly Poseidon laugh for once. {S : BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?} BURLESQUE OR RELIGION? One cannot be satisfied with these explanations: a little piece, a casual ballad, a joke at the expense of the gods, or a pardonable escapade. Suppose the passage is reread, beginning with the paragraph before the song commences. "Sacred commands of Alcinous." Do godlike kings incite simple public pornography? "Quickly arose a lithe herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from its palace place." Are treasured instruments of music employed casually? "Rising as well were a chosen nine, men who were Lords Ceremonial, publicly called, whenever the people foregathered and needed an ordering." These are nobles. They are nine, the magic number of days in the week may then have existed or once existed in a 36-day or 27-day month [15] . They are chosen representatives of the community, a council of ministers of public order. Are these august personages activated for the sake of a ditty? "They cleared out space for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring." Is a large dancing ring being readied without apprehension and excitement? Demodocus "moved in the midst of the young boys." He is the star performer, blind, revered, also godlike (of these qualities we read in other passages). "All of them skilled in the dance though they blossomed with fair youth." This is not to be improvised. The performers know their places. They have all achieved high competence. "Down stamped their feet on the floor." The rhythms begin, even before the lyre sounds. "Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!" The little song is introduced, it is clear, as a full court opera. The preliminaries portend a significant event. Odysseus, and the rest of the audience, have become transformed by the rhythm, flashing movements, and apprehension into an unusual state of mind, a new mood. The mood is not vulgar or profane. It is not lecherous. Something more profound is to occur. The audience has experienced it all before; their contagion affects Odysseus. The incident, from its very beginnings, portends an affair of state, not a moment of minstreling, a story of significance rather than cocktail hour music. It is to be even rather sacred, I think. Perhaps reassurance is needed. Is this behavior, this kind of performance, unanalyzed in science? Not at all. It is universal and has been generalized. Mircea Eliade, a distinguished religious ethnologist, would lend his support: All dances were originally sacred;... they had an extrahuman model... The model may have been revealed by a divinity (for example the pyrrhic, the martial dance created by Athena) or by a hero (cf. Theseus' dance in the Labyrinth). The dance may be executed to acquire food, to honor the dead, or to assure good order in the cosmos. It may take place upon the occasion of initiations, of magico-religious ceremonies, of marriages, and so on... What is of interest to us is its presumed extrahuman origin (for every dance was created in illo tempore, in the mythical period, by an ancestor, a totemic animal, a god, or a hero.) Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal, or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine steps, leaps gestures, performed with ceremonial instruments) - a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. In a word, it is a repetition, and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days. '" [16] The Love Affair appears then as a sacred song, not bawdy lyric; or at least its context is unmistakably holy, putting aside its plot and words. One cannot be sure of either its full context or words, of course, because Demodocus tells of another, apparently long operatic ballet that we are not privileged to watch and hear. {S : THE PIOUS DRAMATIST} THE PIOUS DRAMATIST The Phaeacian audience is in illo tempore. It is in Holy Dream-time, a state of being in the past and in the present, where a great event is happening and still away from it in the here and now, in the presence of those who were involved in the action. One cannot watch the Phaeacians as R. M. Berndt did the aboriginal Australian Wonguri in a similar format and mood [17] , or as other anthropologists have observed primitive tribal performances; one must imagine them with the aid of all the evidence that can be brought to bear upon the scene. If one is successful, it will be owing to another scholar, in this case Giovanni Patroni, whose total immersion in ancient Mediterranean sources has permitted him elaborately to reconstruct the format of the song of Demodocus. He says: The most important observations that the singing of Demodocus merits (and has too long awaited) concern the generic type of the song, its aim and function in Homeric and pre- Homeric society, the probable frequency and importance of recitations analogous to that we see held in the agora of Scheria by Demodocus with the aid of a corps de ballet or a chorus that will interpret the narrative of the singer (but we do not mean exclusively) through the medium of movements and dance figures. This is not epic poetry. Nor is it a song, nor a fragment of a song, nor an episode of an Achaean saga... Neither, for that matter, notwithstanding that its subject concerns exclusively the gods, a sacred hymn. If it is the last, it reflects the higher personal, profound and polemical religiousity of Homer; in this sense it should be entitled: 'The triumph of Mediterranean religion over the foolish and sacrilegious heresy of Olympia. '" [18] By this, Patroni means that Homer adores the ancient Great Goddess, detests the single- minded destructive god Ares, and upholds the peaceful sovereignty of the female principle that antedated the barbarous incursions of the Achaeans into Minoan and Mycenaean civilization. In effect, says Patroni, the Song is not sacred poetry because one could not come out openly and formally to the greater glory of Aphrodite, even though the Song carried her through a tedious trial at the hands of a repulsive husband and a mindless warrior lover. So Patroni classifies the cantata of Demodocus as "opera theatre," midway between our ballet and melodrama with dance, a musical satire perhaps. But, in fact, Patroni goes beyond his own real interpretations, so prejudiced for the archaic Mediterranean religion is he (and alike to Robert Graves in this regard). We must insist that he stay with his own judgement - it is sacred poetry even if influenced by the personal religion of Homer. It is sacred enough, as he points out immediately, to prompt extraordinary preparations, measure the magic circle, place the venerated poet in the center that is to be occupied many years later by an alter of Dionysus, use the sacred instrument of religious and funereal singing of the Minoans, and employ the incredible acrobatic dancing of the bull-leapers of Tyrins and Knossos. The song, he knows, is the abbreviation of a long performance, and takes place in the halls of the prince. Indeed, such is the enthusiasm of Patroni for what he believes must have occurred in the opera-theater of the Love Affair that he uncovers ultimately the vast majority of criteria that for anthropologists and psychologists denote the Holy Dreamtime. And he forgets that he has for a moment faltered and said that the hierarchs could not allow a religious character to be granted the triumph of Aphrodite. He gives, actually, a full set of stage directions for the production of the Disastrous Love Affair of Mars and Moon. Dancers leap high into the sky. The Sun mandates a messenger to Hephaestus (for the sun, reasons Patroni, cannot move from its course). Direct quotations are sung by actors, the rest by Demodocus. The climax brings together all of the actors to determine the resolution of the plot, and the finale must be beautiful and ecstatic; Ares is summarily dismissed, but Golden Aphrodite, unabashed, flies to her island where she is perfumed, beautified, and made virginal altogether. The goddess - impersonated by an actor - hid herself momentarily in the base of the tower that had been put at the disposition of the spectacle, while the music and ballet entertained the audience; and, from another exit that gave upon the sea (at Scheria the agora was next to the arsenal: it was the same in all the maritime cities; elsewhere the sea was simulated by pulling a boat with a pulley) she embarked on a boat kept in readiness and reappeared from the other side, landing and reentering the arena with all of her cortege, quickly then joined by the entire corps de ballet which, having given further proof of its unmatchable competence, composed itself for the final scene. And what could be the meaning of the scene if not: The Triumph of Aphrodite? The answer to his rhetorical question would disappoint him. It could be, it was, the Triumph of Athena the Producer and Director of the opera. Zeus said to Hera in the Iliad when Hera proposed to fight Ares: "Go to it then, and set against him the spoiler Athene, who beyond all others is the one to visit harsh pains upon him." [19] The chorus of this Mycenaean drama moved directly into the classical Greek chorus, says Patroni (p. 250). Here is one more indication of the interface between Mycenean and Greek, rather than a five hundred year chasm of barbarism. The circle we see in Scheria, too, persisted in the theatre at Epidaurus. Patroni's informed visions of the dramaturgy of Homer are captivating. The production of the Love Affair in Scheria was complete and elaborate, as much so as the Dreamtime production of the Moon and the Dugong that I mentioned above, though relative to the culture of the indigenous Australians. Patroni's assertions, that Homer was heir to the Minoan and Mycenaean theatre, and that he was a fully experienced choreographer and dramatist, are acceptable too. The anthropological and mythological evidence should induce Patroni to acknowledge his own immense cultural panorama and to grant that the "marveling" and "spellbound" Odysseus, along with the Phaeacian audience, was in the state of Holy Dreamtime, midway between the pomp and circumstance of the religious "mass" and the nearly secular games that preceded the spectacle. Here Emile Mireaux has hit the target briefly and sharply: Choral lyric poetry naturally remained closer to its religious origins. It was really the poetry of the sacred songs, with their accompaniment of music and dancing... (It included the hyporcheme which involved mime dancing. The mischievous story recited by Demodocus... may be simply a hyporcheme... All these collective displays were designed to 'inspire' the community and lead to the exorcizing of the 'demons' of envy, discord and civil strife [20] . The Olympic Games themselves, agglomerates of athletics and poetry, had been instituted in the year -776, and no one doubts their religious and cultural aims. Then and at the time of the Love Affair, the Greeks, of many ethnic subcultures with local versions of the gods, and with all manner of archaic and foreign vestiges, were pulling themselves together. The divine Homer was striving to lead them. {S : Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime)} Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime) 1. Odyssey, VIII,* s. 487-91. 2. VIII, I. 62-4; V. I, 263 in Murray, op. cit. 3. Graves, I, 23: I, p. 87. 4. Cytherea is one of the epithets given Aphrodite. Cytherea was the holy island which the newly born goddess touched while floating towards her destination of Cyprus. 5. The English Works, Vol. X (London: ed. 1677; John Bohn, 1844, W. Molesworth, editor), p. iv. 6. Ibid, p. 376. 7. Op. cit., p. 276. 8. The Homeric Gods, trans. by Moses Hadas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954). 9. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1954, 1967, 1972), p. 40. 10. A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece, 1958 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 135. 11. From Mycenae to Homer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958, 1964), p. 88. 12. Page 5. 13. The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Braziller, 1957). Cf. v. II, pp. 376,365. 14. Op. cit., p. 245. 15. Immannuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, hereafter cited simply as W in C, (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1950), pp. 343-4. 16. The Myth of the Eternal Return, originally in French, 1949( Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1954, 1965), pp. 28-9. As a well worked out case, see R. M. Berndt, "A 'Wonguri-Manzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX Oceania (September, 1948, 16-50) 17. Ibid., and see my note on this song in The Burning of Troy. 18. Commenti Mediterranei all'Odissea di Omero (Milano: Marzorati, 1950), p. 249 19. Richard Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 148. 20. Daily Life in the Time of Homer, trans. by Iris Sells from the 1954 French edition (New York: MacMillan and Company, 1959), p. 102. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 6: } {T THE RAPE OF HELEN} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER SIX THE RAPE OF HELEN It began during the furious quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at the rich feast of the gods, sings Demodocus, "for it was at this very moment that calamity began to unroll upon both Trojans and Danaans by the plans of the Great Zeus." [1] The Iliad is sung as the wrath of Achilles on one level - the Poet says so - but is of a type with the battles of the sky gods recited in Scandinavian, Finnish, Hindu, Mexican, Babylonian, and other epics. The Greek gods of the Trojan Wars engage in plain soldiering, hurling rocks and spears, shooting arrows, and driving chariots. They make onslaughts from heaven; they launch disasters upon Earth: plagues, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, hail of stones and arrows, famines, fogs, and darknesses in the day. The gods negotiate amongst themselves and with humans. They engage in fighting, trickery, argument, and bribery amongst themselves. They build morale and conduct psychological warfare; they provide military intelligence but also distort information for the good of their favorites. They counsel the warriors on tactics. They enforce rules of warfare that they sometimes themselves violate. They manufacture weapons. They promote and reverse events, battles, and decisions of leaders. Whole sections of the Iliad are devoted to the warring of the gods. On the Achaean side there range Athena, Hera, Poseidon, Hephaestus. On the Trojan side, the line-up includes Ares, Aphrodite, and Apollo. The victory is with the Achaeans and their gods, although the Homeric element ends with Achilles' killing of Hector, the burial of Hector, and a mere pause in the struggle; however, all known versions of the rest of the story, occupying the tenth year, agree that the Achaeans "won the war" and razed Troy. Whether or not Troy was actually destroyed by the Achaeans cannot be told from the ruins of the city. Troy VI and VIIa are the best candidates for the historical city; Schliemann's Troy (now referred to as Troy IIg) is not regarded anymore as a possibility; I have written of this case in the Book, The Burning of Troy. Troy IIg was destroyed by an atmospheric conflagration; Troy VI by an earthquake; Troy VIIa by an atmospheric conflagration. These, to Homer and his audiences, would be the gods in battle, the effects of "a divine-kindled fire of stones" (Iliad) and other superhuman operations. The "Fall of a City" is a legendary symbol in various cultures for a disaster, that is, the disruption and end of a celestial order. It is likely that the Fall of Troy was such a catastrophe, in which human agency played less of a role than the divine. {S : THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN} THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN Some of the Trojan story is reported in the Odyssey, by Demodocus no less, and by Odysseus from Hades. There and elsewhere the post-war adventures of the Achaean heroes are recounted and it would appear that for the most part they received very little for their pains except more suffering, mishaps, treachery, and misadventure. But let us examine, with Finley's words, the case of Helen, who is a very peculiar figure. Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, was Aphrodite's favorite, and thanks to the gifts of the goddess she succeeded in embroiling Greeks and Trojans in a gigantic struggle that cost both sides dearly. Helen was no innocent victim in all this, no unwilling captive of Paris-Alexander, but an adulteress in the most complete sense. For Paris there was no atonement ... But Helen received no punishment, and scarcely any reproach. She ended her days back in Sparta, administering magical drugs obtained in Egypt, interpreting omens, and participating in the life of the palace much like Arete [queen of the Phaeacians and a strange, powerful figure] and not like a proper Greek woman [2] . The "enigmatic" and "complicated" image of Helen, that Finely alludes to, has a simple solution. Helen of Troy stands for the Moon. She represents the goddess Aphrodite. Paris-Alexander, Prince of Troy, represents the god Mars-Ares. The Moon that had been "embraced" over centuries by Hephaestus (Athena-planet Venus) in his encounters with the Earth is taken away from him; Athena-Hephaestus and their allies must repossess it. Helen is the Moon Goddess and the world is the male version of Helen, father of the family of all Greeks. Etymologists have also indicated a connection between "Selene" and "Helios," the latter deriving from the same Indo-European root as sun and solis [3] . Thus she symbolizes in the battle of the gods the coming of the Hellenes into their revived nationhood in conjunction with the triumph of the Athena faction of the family of Zeus. Let us read in Graves briefly: The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellenes to invade Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi 'worshippers of the Grey Goddess, or Crone'). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus as first - generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen - a masculine form of the Moon- goddess Helle or Helen ... Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation, and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite - whose sacred bird was the xuthos, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that women were the property of their father and husbands [4] . Hans Jones, author of The Gnostic Religion, may also be quoted. For he has traced a very old belief in the connection between Moon and Helen: "Some Greek mythological speculation seems to have associated the Homeric Helen with the moon, whether prompted by the similarity of Helene and Selene, or by her fate (abduction and recovery) interpreted as a nature myth, or by Homer's once comparing her appearance to that of Artemis. One story had it that the egg which Leda found dropped from the moon; and the late Homer commentator Eustathius (twelfth century A. D.) mentions that there are some who say that Helen fell down to earth from the moon, and that she was taken back up when the will of Zeus was accomplished. When and by whom this was said, Eustathius does not state; neither does he say (or imply) that in this form of the myth Helen served as a symbol of the anima..." [5] The plot of the Iliad, then, would become the plot of the Love Affair, where the central action concerns the recapture of Aphrodite from Ares by Hephaestus (Athena). The theory would explain many problems (and no doubt will create some). The question raised endlessly by students, "How could people of little discipline fight so murderously and for so long over a mere woman in an age when women were nearly ordinary chattels?" is answered. Beautiful Helen, eternally unravisheable and unconquerable, was Moon- Aphrodite. Aphrodite was also a Great Goddess, and retained qualities of a Great Mother Goddess; so the psychic prize was not only the Moon and the beautiful women, but also the Mother of Greece. The connection between the two wars - one of men, the other of gods - is often explained as a form of hyperbole and egocentrism: it "heightens the glamour of the human warriors." This kind of explanation would no longer be necessary. The two wars are inextricably and originally linked now; they must be told together because they happened together. As for the city of Troy and the Trojans, it is as much a mythical place as the Shinning Land of Phaeacia. The Trojans are the Moon-capturing followers of Ares. As has been argued increasingly for two decades, the Trojans may have been Greeks who were set up by Homer to provide a counterforce to the Achaeans. Perhaps no saga in all mythology treats the enemy so objectively, even with positive sympathy. An epic singer usually delights his audience by heaping sins and defeats upon the enemy. Even Achilles may have to assume a new character, that of Athena-Hephaestus, triumphant, but falling finally through a wound of the foot from the arrow of Paris-Ares-Apollo-Aphrodite. If this were generally so, and it is not to be demonstrated here, then at least the Love Affair portion of the Odyssey may be fixed as concurrent with the Battle of the Gods in the Iliad. It has been affirmed that the Love Affair is a late piece of the Odyssey. We would not contest this placement at all. We are thinking of the middle 7th century for the composition of the Iliad, and of the culture and the skies being both of the preceding two generations. Yet one more theory needs to be put forward respecting the Odyssey, before agreeing that the work may well be composed of older materials and have its own hidden plot. Compare the strong affection that Athena holds for Odysseus in the Iliad. He has her traits. See him again in the Odyssey. Again he has her traits.. From beginning to end, the work of the Odyssey is the divine work of Athena. She was not only the producer of the Love Affair, and of the Iliad, but also of the Odyssey as a whole, and as she was the principal actor in the first two, so she is once more the principal actor. For the Odyssey is, in its latent plot, the story of the wandering planet Venus between 1500 B. C. and her final settling in her present orbit, personified in her human mirror-image, Odysseus. She it is who saves him at the beginning from the enraged Sea-Earth god, Poseidon, and places him safely in command of his royal sphere in the end. If the Love Affair is a Holy Dreamtime cycle, and the Iliad is sacred History, then the Odyssey is to be categorized as Sacred Saga. For all of this we praise Homer and his kind. He chose for the leitmotif of his works the natural history of seven centuries. He rationalized the sky-gods for the Greeks and transfigured unbearable truth into tolerable myth. His myths coordinated the basic activities of sexuality, subsistence, respect, power, technology, and wealth into a consistent cultural pattern and created the archaic Greek character. He restored to the Greeks an ethnic identity consistent with the changed nature of the Gods and heaven. {S : THE AGE OF MARS} THE AGE OF MARS "When the gods fought" was a stock phrase among the ancient Greeks. Or they referred to "the strife of the Gods," meaning something that was not simply confined to passages of the Iliad but was a historical event. According to Velikovsky, the period 776 B. C. to 687 B. C. experienced at least four catastrophes at fifteen-year intervals that were felt throughout the world. There were probably six terror-filled episodes. This disastrous agenda began with an earlier event, which he dealt with in the first part of his work called Worlds in Collision and in his Ages in Chaos. The former amassed evidence that the planet that we know as Venus appeared before our ancestors as a comet and nearly destroyed life on Earth around 1500 B. C. Thereafter the eccentric orbit of the planet threatened the Earth at intervals of fifty-two years. The comet was worshipped as a god, Pallas Athena, in the Greek world. Sometimes before 776 B. C. and perhaps close to that year, Venus, in a diminishing elliptical orbit, encountered Mars. Thereafter, and until both planets were impelled to take roughly their present safe orbits, now one and now both approached Earth and Moon with consequent devastation to the participating bodies. Awe-inspiring celestial phenomena accompanied the founding of the Greek Olympic Games in - 776. Hercules is supposed to have organized the games, ushering in what later came to be a quadrennial all - Greek spectacle of religion, athletics, and poetry. The Greek Mythikon calendar ends in - 776. The Historikon calendar begins. But Stecchini says that it may have actually begun, or soon was redone, in - 748/ 7 [6] . And this would conform to those who say that Hercules did not enter upon the games until they had been operative on eight prior occasions. In the west, the town of Rome was founded in - 748 or - 747. Some say - 753. It was a period of commotion. Fabius Pictor's ancient adoption of the date - 747 seems most likely to have been accepted for an event which probably did not take a single day but had best, for patriotic reasons, to accompany some climactic events. The founding of Rome was in the name of Romulus who was sponsored by Mars. Romulus was the direct descendant of Aeneas, hence of Aphrodite, mother-protector of Aeneas. Aeneas founded towns in her names on his long journey to Italy. Barely had the Trojans become latinized when Rome was founded. Once more, the revised chronology connects well with an ancient tradition. In the time of Romulus the week and month were reckoned long, and the early calendar began with the month of Mars and proceeded in four nine-day weeks for ten months, a total of 360 days. Romulus himself disappeared on the occasion of a natural tumult during which, says Ovid, the earth shuddered, clouds obscured the heavens, and the sky was riven by flames; "The people fled and the king soared upon his father's steeds to the stars." [7] (His "father" was Mars.) No people on earth came to be dominated more by Mars and imbued wit the spirit of ruthless, single-minded warfare personified by Ares-Mars. In a study of the validity of carbon-dating in ancient times, H. E. Suess has come upon "a most conspicuous and so far unparalleled irregularity in the *C14 as a function of time. There was a "rapid C14 increase at the beginning of the 8th century B. C. and the sharp maximum between 780 and 770 B. C... It is also the time of a general climate change that took place on the North American continent... The climatic change was not a temporary one; it marked the beginning of a completely new climate epoch." [8] So severe a change introduces the probability of extraterrestrial encounters, for reasons that I have advanced and supported in The Lately Tortured Earth. In Egypt it was the time of the Libyan and Ethiopian dynasties. These were foreigners, whose domination over the greatest of empires has not been satisfactory explained, except as a consequence of natural disasters. In Italy, Vesuvius exploded with a fury not to be approached until the milder eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. In Judah, heavenly commotion excited the populace and brought destruction in the times of Uzziah (783-742), Ahaz (735-717), and Hezekiah (717-687); the kingdom of Israel was dissolved and its people dispersed at this time. The Assyrians were under six different kings, the last of whom, Sennacherib, saw his army blasted to death before the city of Jerusalem in a single night of the year -687. It was the period of a Babylonian-Chaldean empire; of Laomedon and Priam of Troy; of the destruction of the now Greek-speaking Cretans at Knossos; of the destruction of Mycenae; and, at the end of the period, there came Homer and Hesiod. They are the oldest known Greek writers, and the first whose writing have appeared in the classical Greek script and alphabet. The adoption of a new calendar by the Assyrians in -747, the beginning of the "Age of Nabonassar," suggests that heavy disturbances occurred in the first and second encounters; probably the Earth's orbit, rotation, and axis all underwent changes. Thales, one of the great "seven sages," calculated the Greek calendar, perhaps shortly after Homer and possibly around -600. But, as Velikovsky points out, Thales re- calculated the seasons and year after the period of turmoil and changed celestial periodicities. For, "all around the globe the years following -687 saw activity directed towards reforming the calendar." [9] Velikovsky asserts, too, that the day shortened in -717 and lengthened in -687. These would indicate orbital changes, axial tilts, changes in rotational speed, or a combination thereof. Accordingly, in the Greek-speaking and Middle East areas, crushing damage to late Mycenaean and early Hellenic civilization occurred in the period -776 to -687. One or more of the type of encounters pictured in the Love Affair took place, with Moon and Mars largely barren of atmosphere, and susceptible to nearly complete destruction on the faces that they turn to Earth. Velikovsky dates the last disaster as centering upon 23 March -687. It is noteworthy that the Romans celebrated the festivals of both Minerva (Athena) and Mars about the same time. The Exodus has also been assigned this day by Velikovsky, over seven centuries earlier. Probably this is more than a coincidence, and the double celebration is evidence of both bodies participating in an encounter about 23 March -687. That the same date would also correspond roughly with the spring fertility rites in which the Moon would have long played the major role would stress, too, the occasion. This Seventh Century date would put the story that Homer writes down and Demodocus sings in the period of heavy Greek colonization of the Western Mediterranean. The physical destruction of the pre-existing civilization, the movements of people, the loss of their written language, the capture of initiative on the part of the uncouth survivors, the loss of memory (that is, loss of will to report the disaster), the revival of poetic forms, the mastering of the forms and then the Homeric collection and integration of them in writing would have to take place in no more than a hundred years. Only a radical reformulation of the nature of Homeric studies would permit this. But one must pursue this approach, for, in the words of Lucian, "It is the conjunction of Venus and Mars that creates the poetry of Homer." {S : Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen)} Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen) 1. Od. VIII, 81-2. 2. The World of Odysseus, p. 150. 3. So I am informed by the linguist, Malcolm Lowery, who adds, "conversion of original s - to h - is also exampled by hex-six and hepta (septem, seven). 4. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Vol. I., p. 161. 5. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1958) Fn. 9, p. 109. 6. "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data," in Alfred de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky Affair (New York: University Books, 1965), pp. 158-9. 7. My source is a discussion with Stecchini. On nine-day divisions of the months, see in Worlds in collision, II, viii citing Sicke (1892), Kaegi (1891), Kugler( 1907), Naville (1875), Roscher( 1903, 1904); and Ovid; for the ten -month year, he sites Schiefner (1857), Male (1846), Nilssen (1920), and Frazer (1931) together with Plutarch, Eutropius and Procopius. 8. "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations. Their Amplitudes and Time Constants," Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology (Proceedings. 12th Nobel Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969), ed. Ingrid V. Olsson (Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm, 1970), p. 602, quoted in Pens‚e, Fall 1972, p. 41. 9. Worlds in Collision, p. 358. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 7: } {T CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER SEVEN CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES It was early Springtime [1] in Pylos, a Mycenaean town of the Peloponnesus, facing the western sea. The year was between 776 and 687 B. C. It may even have been March 23, -687. A force of 800 men was posted along 150 kilometers of shoreline. With them were liaison officers from the Palace of King Nestor. The famous old sage of the Achaean warriors himself would have been home from the siege of Troy. A clay tablet, one of those inscribed "immediately before the destruction which baked them and rendered them durable" [2] begins, "Thus are the watchers guarding the coastal regions." [3] What could they be watching for? Obviously no enemy had been sighted nor could the men be in fighting formation, so thinly dispersed were they. It might be as in Jerusalem around this time, when Isaiah the Prophet was answering the call, "Watchman, what of the night?" [4] Another tablet may have been the last: A single large tablet bears evidence of haste and changes of mind during its writing. The retention of such an ill-written document in the archive might occasion surprise, unless it was in fact only written in the last day or two before the palace fell. The meaning of some key words is still uncertain, but there is no doubt that it records offerings to a long list of deities. The offerings are in each case a golden vessel, but the principal deities, if male, receive in addition a man, or, if female, a woman. It has been suggested that these human beings were being dedicated to the service of the deities, but the grisly possibility that they were human sacrifices cannot be lightly dismissed. At all events the offering of thirteen gold vessels and ten human beings to a whole pantheon of divinities must mark an important occasion; and what occasion more likely than a general supplication on the receipt of news of an imminent attack? [5] The "occasion more likely" is catastrophe. Tidal waves were to be watched for, and the setting of the sun behind the flaming horizons. Matters quickly worsened. The news was bad. The gods and goddesses had taken to the skies. "The whole pantheon of divinities" was supplicated, with the richest offerings; gold and human bodies. Not a solitary god of the sea, or a single god of the hearth, or of love, of battle. All of the great sky- gods seem to have been involved. So Pylos perished. The Palace was destroyed in a "holocaust" which "consumed everything that was inflammable within it, and even melted gold ornaments into lumps and drops of metal." The flames melted brick and stone into "a solid mass... as hard as rock." In one room two large pots were fused "into a molten vitrified layer which ran over the whole floor." Everything that a human invader might desire was reduced to shapelessness. Stone was burned into lime [6] . No human hands and hand-set fires could have wreaked such ruin. Only blasts from the sky-electrical, gaseous or both. {S : THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES} THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES The name of King Nestor graces both the annals of the siege of Troy in the Iliad and the Linear B tablets. Which came first, the burning of Troy, or the disaster at Pylos, or did they occur simultaneously? If Pylos were consumed by fire at the same time as Troy was, than its King Nestor would have been away at the siege of Troy. He would have been, shall we say, fifty-five years old, with plenty of fire left in him. One day, before the gates of Troy, he told a long story, whose irrelevance is only seeming. Professor Denys Page refers to it significantly as "a brilliant piece of late Ionian composition, but it has a continuous pedigree ascending to the Mycenaean era." [7] That is, ascending 400 years or so, by his reckoning; by mine, Nestor was a Mycenean in the Homeric Age of 800 to 650 B. C. When Nestor was a child, Hercules had descended upon Pylos and a battle of the gods ensued. Hercules and Athena were on one side, while Ares was on the other, and Hercules bested Ares. "Herakles had come in his strength against us and beaten us in the years before, and all the bravest among us had been killed. For we who were sons of lordly Neleus had been twelve, and now I alone was left of these, and all the others had perished." Little by little the Pylians had recovered until they were able to raid their northern neighbors and revenge themselves somewhat for the ravages of old. The revenge came when Nestor was still young - shall we say fifteen years older? Perhaps he was nineteen, for he had been warned from the fight because of his youth, yet had become its hero. If he was fifty-five in -700, say, he would have been nineteen in -736. The disaster that killed all but a few Pylians would have come around -747. Working in the other direction, one learns something else about the wise old time- clock. Nestor lived to entertain Telemachus, son of Odysseus, shortly before the latter's homecoming in Ithaca. Therefore, we would add ten years to Nestor and ten years of life also to his palace. It could not have been destroyed when the city of Troy was. Supposing Pylos to have been consumed by an atmospheric disaster, and Troy VIIA by the same (for it was indeed incinerated), it is possible still then that the end of Troy VI, which was wrecked by earthquake, might have marked the end of the Trojan War and the departure of the Greeks. We recall two stories of the war: Poseidon battered down the famous Achaean defensive wall near the sea after the Achaeans departed; further, the breech in the Trojan Wall was made to admit the Trojan Horse, which may have been the symbol of Horse-Tamer Poseidon, whose tides swept over all barriers like charging steeds. If such were the case, Pylos and Troy VIIa would go down in -687, along with pitiable Phaeacia. Troy VI would go down eleven years before. And the War of Pylos involving Hercules, Ares and Athena would be set around -747. We may take this occasion also to tie in the "neighboring giants," who made life impossible for the Phaeacians when they lived in Hypereia. These were probably astral phenomena of monstrous shape who hurled debris upon them from the skies. The Babylonians were chanting in their hymns to Mars-Nergal: "Great giants, with awesome members, run at his right and at his left." [8] This may have been part of the terrible destruction wrought in Asia Minor in -747 in the time of King Uzziah [9] . For King Nausithous led them to Scheria, and he was the father of their present King, Alcinous, who is in the prime of life. The excavations of Schliemann and Blegen at Hisarlik were valuable as ordinary archaeology; they contributed almost nothing to solve "the Homeric Questions." What we derive from their reports is an important negative: if either Schliemann's Troy or Blegen's Troys were "the real Troy," then Troy was destroyed not by the Achaeans, but by "the gods" - by earthquake and by conflagrations exceeding any possible human agency [10] . Unfortunately, one cannot at this point be certain of how many celestial encounters in the period -776 to -687 involved simply Mars alone. As we shall see, the years -687 and -747 are candidates for the triple encounters. If the Battle of the Gods and the Love Affair took place in 698 then, accepting the end of the Trojan War in its tenth year and then years of wanderings of Ulysses, one would have the destruction of Pylos and Odysseus' killing of the Suitors [11] occurring at the same time, eleven years later, 687 B. C. On both occasions, both Venus and Mars were active in the sky. This is not impossible. Venus was "seeking" a circular orbit. Mars may have been "knocked out of the ring" of its more regular orbit. Professor Earl R. Milton and I discuss this matter in Solaria Binaria. Two encounters with Earth as a participant might have been needed. This interpretation is preferable to one that would dissolve the Odyssean temporal sequence and have Pylos come crashing down at the same time as Troy, with Nestor in two places at the same time. The scene at Pylos upon which Telemachus, son of Odysseus, happens, when in search of news of his father, is convincing. Nestor tells him that he himself had hastened home from Troy (wise old man that he was) in fear of divine wrath, and that those who tarried suffered greatly. Now we find the King and his whole people on the seashores sacrificing a hundred rich cattle to Poseidon. The skies and Earth have not settled. It may be that a month later, Pylos will be destroyed by "star-fire" or astro-flame. If we check back upon Velikovsky's accounting of concurrent events in the Middle East, we see that Sennacherib's Assyrian Army was blasted in 687 B. C. but also that the army of Esarhaddon, his son, fled in terror of astral phenomena on a successive invasion of Palestine [12] . Here again, the puzzle was whether to unite the two events or treat them successively, and Velikovsky chose the latter course, as do we. The present state of speculation may be conveyed in tabular form: The Pylos story is not ended, however. There is more to it, and it fashions a warning to scholars who have accepted faithfully the theory that a Mycenaean age was ended about 1200 B. C. by barbarian invasions and a "Dark Age" set in that was to be illuminated by the great poets, Homer and Hesiod, finally around 800 B. C. The Love Affair holds a light to the Dark Age and the disposition of the Dark Age provides a key to the Love Affair. To return to the story, we call upon the research of Isaacson on Pylos. The destruction of Pylos has been compared with the destruction of Gordion, in Asia Minor. The city whose Gordian knot was later cut by Alexander, perished also in a disaster. Pylos was of Mycenaean Greek culture: Gordius was Phrygian. At Pylos were found ceramics that resembled Mycenaean ware that was associated with Egyptian ware and therefore assigned the Egyptian dates because these were the basis of Near Eastern chronology. The Phrygians, however, are honored by their own archeological and historical dating system and Gordius is said to be of the eighth century before Christ. Table Hypothetical Benchmarks: Planetary Encounters and Historical Coincidences Calendar Elapsed time Nestor's Personal events Other events Sky encounters (B. C.)* between possible periods age ================================================================================================================================================ 776 - - - Olympic Games Founde Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon 761 15 - - Hercules Destroys Troy Mars/ Earth-Moon and Wins Olympic Games 747 15 5 Nausithous Moves to Phaeacia; Pylian War of Gods Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon Iliad and Odyssey begin Career as Epic Cycles; Hercules and Heralids in Peloponnesus (Nestor Sole Survivor) 732 15 20 Atreus and Thyestes; Pylians Raid Elians Mars/ Earth-Moon (Nestor a Hero) 717 15 - Alkinous Becomes King of Phaeacia Mars/ Earth-Moon 702 15 45 Nestor and Odysseus at Troy Start of Trojan War Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon 698 - 55 Nestor at Troy; Agamemnon Fights Troy VI destroyed Mars/ Earth-Moon Memnon the Ethiopian Prince (Egypt) by Earthquakes (War of Gods) 687 11 66 Demodocus Sings - Odysseus Returns. Troy VIIA Destroyed by Fire; Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon Nestor and Telemachus at Pylos. Pylos Falls (Last War of Gods); Homer Born. Phaeacia Falls by Earthquake; Sennacherib's Army Destroyed at Jerusalem Skies clear 670 - - Greek Alphabet Developed Calendars Reordered; Earth Trembles 630 - - Iliad Revised and Transcribed by Homer Present skies Odyessey Revised and Transcribed by Homer *The six major intervals are 15 years each, placed largely on the reasoning of Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp 362 ff., that Mars' present orbit is in "favorable opposition" respecting Earth every 15 years. Since Mars had a different orbit before - 776 and might have changed its orbit at every encounter between -776 and -687, we must of course ultimately use historical evidence to plot all of the encounters. We must bear in mind, too, that the geological and ecological aftermaths of disaster provoked by celestial behavior can continue for some time. Here, also, we have reasoned that only an 11- year interval separated the last two disaster, that is. Mars was on its way to becoming an outer planet and suffered two encounters close together. Although the problem is not insoluble it will require a great deal of research to established empirically the dates of several peak disasters and the rate of subsidence of disturbances in the aftermaths. (Worlds in Collision, 274-8). Charcoal of both burnt-out sites was tested at the same laboratory at the same time to determine its carbon-14 loss. For it is by living that a plant or animal ingests carbon 14; after death the ingestion stops and a decay of this radioactive substance begins. Measuring the loss of Carbon 14 in charcoal samples of the two towns, the investigators discovered what they had expected: the samples of each site could give dates that conventional archeology had already established. But to do so, the investigators performed miracles of purification of the Gordian sample to reduce its age by several hundred years, while they let the samples of Pylos go by polluted and unchallenged because they "proved" what was expected. Not content with casting the Pylos samples back into the ash-heap, Isaacson advanced three further conclusions from the materials of these two towns far apart, whose dates may now be said to be close together. He discovered that the C14 dates of the olive pollen in a core from the bottom of a lake near Pylos conveyed eighth century readings when the pollen was at its peak. Reasoning that Pylos was tending a maximum of olive trees when the town was flourishing, and that there would be little cultivation in the "Dark Ages" when the population would be sparse, Isaacson logically deduced that the maximum of the short-lived pollen in the eighth century could mean that Pylos was in full flower then as well, although, once destroyed, it remained uninhabited ever after. He went on to a second point. Analyzing the famed reports of the University of Cincinnati excavations at Pylos, he read in their pages accounts of the mysterious mixing of Mycenaean pottery and geometric pottery in strata where neither could have intruded upon the other. Yet these two types of ceramics were supposed to have been fashioned centuries apart. Now the basic and perhaps the only unassailable law of geology and archaeology is the law of superposition. Unless proof of accident if brought forward, what is on top is younger than what it rests upon. The Mycenaean and the Geometric Ages then had to be contemporaneous! The "Dark Ages" of 400 to 500 years appeared to have been squeezed out at Pylos. Pondering this point, one is led almost reluctantly to the third point of Isaacson. Gordion of Phrygia in the 8th century has walls that strikingly resemble the walls of Troy VI, which were devastated by earthquake. Archaeologists who are faithful to their conventions must bargain with an architectural similarity that flatly denies their 400 years' or more gap between Gordius and Troy. Isaacson's work was following a trail already laid by Velikovsky, who had observed that archaeologists of the 19th century had somehow lost their way. Velikovsky exposed the problem and its probable solution in 1973 by the long-deferred publication of his manuscript on the famous rampant lions gate of Mycenae [13] . In 1881, W. M. Ramsey had noted that the Gate closely resembled a Phrygian tomb gate of the 8th century. Flinders Petrie, the renowned pioneer of Egyptian archaeology and history, had established an authoritative chronology of Egypt which could be applied wherever Egyptian artifacts were discovered, or conversely when foreign artifacts were discovered in Egypt. Petrie discounted Ramsay's evidence, because Mycenae had already been "dated" by the association of its artifacts with those of Egypt. Resemblance or not, the Lions of the two cities were moved four hundred years apart. Petrie's Egyptian chronological imperialism, spreading over the Near East and the Mediterranean island, compelled scholars to invent a long period of Hellenic culture in which "little happened," barbarism prevailed, the Greeks were illiterate, the arts and sciences were lost - the Dark Ages of Greece, in short, conventionally dated between 1300 or 1200 B. C. and 800 B. C., a span of perhaps 500 years. Not until Velikovsky [14] challenged the Egyptian chronology frontally could any scholar imagine that various baffling puzzles of Phrygia, Mycenaean Greece, and Homeric Greece would have ultimately simple solution; the Gordian Knot was cut. Isaacson's studies of the excavation records at half-a-dozen famous sites, following Velikovsky's hypothesis, have shattered the empirical foundations of the theory of the Dark Ages [15] . {S : SOCIETY IN SHOCK} SOCIETY IN SHOCK Speaking of the aftermath of catastrophe, Plato declares of the survivors; "At first, they would have natural fear ringing in their ears which would prevent their descending from the heights into the plain." [16] If one were, at this pint, to take up in order the authoritative works of history and archaeology it might be shown that they are in every case affected by a blind spot in regard to the Dark Ages. This method would be repeating much of Isaacson's work and would expand unduly the present text. It may be better to fashion a new model of the Homeric Age and, by demonstrating its consistency and efficiency, to buttress the theory that the Love Affair portrays an astral and earthly disaster that had recently occurred. Let us call this model, "The Crazed Survivors of Disaster." It stands in contrast to the conventional "Greek Dark Ages" model. The latter holds that the Mycenaean Age collapsed over the period of a century because of barbarian invasions and that these barbarians in the course of centuries acquired the mentalities and facilities of a civilized people. The "Crazed Survivors" model is constructed from the theory that a general catastrophe involving great ecological and cultural damage is followed by a shocked society. The shocked society would exhibit a complex of expected behaviors that distinguish it from stable or moderately changing or even revolutionary societies, or more significantly, from a society that is slowly evolving from a "primitive" to a "civilized" culture. In the societies of crazed survivors, personal and mass self-destructiveness and destructiveness of others and of culture increase as terror and guilt interact on a complex and massive scale. Depending upon the extent of the disaster, a totally amnesiac and stupefied society of cultural degenerates may ensue or a more furious cultural coping that may eventuate in a flowering of religious institutions, crafts, and arts. The Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Achilles among them, typified the bands of survivors of the extensive Mycenaean civilization that was largely destroyed in the catastrophic interventions of the planets Mars and Venus in the Earth-Moon system in the 8th century. The plots of the Iliad and Odyssey, despite 2700 years of trying to make something else of them, clearly point to the skies as the source of the disruptive and awful events that produced the crazed heroes of the dark times. Western civilization has treasured and imitated the posturings of these mad warriors, hardly ever realizing what they were and how the docile mind of later generations would be affected when this madness was presented to it as normality and for inspiration. We shall proceed now to enumerate and describe briefly a number of psychological and social indications that we are dealing with human beings behaving in the aftermath of catastrophe. The Homeric Greeks developed a pantheon of skygods and assumed that these gods would continuously manifest themselves by thunderbolts, showers of arrows, tidal waves, earthquakes, meteorites, and so on. They venerated all sky signs and objects from the sky, such as meteoric iron and stones. The earth itself was a living animal and thoroughly animated in its parts [17] . A number of gods and demi-gods contributed to a continual geological and ecological restlessness. Animals, plants, and rocks changed readily into humanoid forms and vice versa. Ovid's Metamorphoses elaborates this theme interminably. By the time of Thucydides, free will and controlled change were accredited to mankind, but the Homeric Greeks were yoked to moira, fortune, destiny, lot - the law of chance that determines human fate [18] . Uncontrolled license and little self-discipline were ascribed to (projected upon) the gods. Well-developed priesthoods had dissolved, just as other specialized occupations crumpled into individuals. (Finley calculates that over 100 occupations discernible in the linear B tablets dropped to a mere dozen in Homer.) Nevertheless there were ritual guardians and diviners with prodigious memories, aides to kings but not members of kingly families. Priests, bards, and madmen were possessed by gods. The priests "were guardians of ritual and of the forms and language of the sacramental songs; preservers of the motions and rhythms for the due observance of ceremonial; interpreters of those signs and often obscure sayings by which the gods manifested their decrees, desires or warnings; and, lastly they were the custodians of the science of precedents in all domains;" [19] The preceding Mycenaean bureaucratic and feudal order had broken down. Finley and other experts have described an oikos (household) system as a kind of feudal plantation system that survived the collapse of bureaucratic urban centralism. It is true that the oikos system prevails, but it is really a piratical or ship-wreck system in which people gathered around surviving leaders. A great many expatriates, outcasts, outlaws and refugees were to be found among the community. There is a remarkable lack of the stable assignment of social, economic, and political rights to the types of people who clustered in these strongholds. Practically all of the titles of hierarchical officialdom disappeared. The chiefs of households (that it would be a mistake to call "clans") [20] ruled a mixed community as judge and religious-political protector. The "Argive Kings" and the kings who were supposed to have developed from and after the Homeric heroic age were actually the same traditional kings whose Greco-Mycenaean kingdoms had come tumbling down in the disasters of the 8th and 7th centuries [21] . The warlords and oligarchies followed. Alcinous of Phaeacia rules like Agammemnon. We quote Denys Page: When history dawns on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century B. C., we discover there a mode of government hardly distinguishable from that of Agamemnon at the siege of Troy. The will of the sovereign power, Agamemnon himself, is not absolute: he must first summon a council of elders, and whatever they approve must be declared to an agora, an assembly of all lesser noblemen. In the seventh century, B. C., at Lesbos the political constitution is exactly the same; and it happens that the sovereign power is still in the direct line of descent from the family of Agamemnon [22] . This startling claim is followed by one even more sweeping: "In this place certainly, and in other places presumably, the royal family survived throughout the dark ages from beginning to end." We cannot grant either the Lesbos presumption or the general presumption. It is rare in the annals of history to find a genuine 400-year old dynasty, and hard to imagine one that would have suffered 400 to 500 years of the so- called Dark Ages. If the family of Agamemnon of Troy still ruled Lesbos in the seventh century, it is simply because the Trojan War took place less than a century beforehand. Indeed, Agamemnon himself had probably an upstart pedigree like most of the Homeric heroes. The heroes spoke of home frequently but there is a lack of definition of their homes, Nestor's account being exceptional in the Iliad and those of the Odyssey being largely mythical and savage. The heroes boasted in the names of their parents, some of their grandfathers, and usually stopped at this point; some lapsed into claims of divine forebears in the second generation. Glaukos and Diomedes, in a famous encounter in the Iliad, discovered while bragging of their antecedents that their grandfathers were guest-friends and decided not to fight each other [23] . The absence of "family trees" among self-assertive "nobles" raises doubts that they either knew their ancestors or, if they did, could claim any distinction on their behalf. The Dark Ages, as a catastrophic century, found ancestors in short supply. So also communities. Homer "does not talk a great deal about tribes and groups and clans and sects and varieties of idealistic associations, whether pacific or belligerent. What Homer does is to confine himself to the immediate family of the warrior in question." [24] Only a short paternal link is stressed, along with guest-friends. This is exceedingly strange. It is not at all like "primitive peoples" whose lives are bound into communities of blood served by totems. Nor like a bureaucratic society. But by the "dawn of history," in the next century, we find definite blood lines as the basis of organization of the Greek polis. Apparently, though missing in Homeric times, they are quickly reestablished in the succeeding generations. The warriors stayed away from their "homes" so long that we could question whether they had any. They remind us of Vandals and Vikings who left home never to return. Of all of Ithaca's warriors, only Odysseus ever reached home. Odysseus played the pirate - looting, killing, raping. For the sake of Athena, he had to be brought home, there to face and slay a horde of suitors of his "long-suffering" wife. His shepherd slave, Eumaeus, was armed against other shepherds and wild beasts. Marauding was frequent, if not from one's neighbors then from pirates and foreign warriors. Slaves abounded, of various nationalities, one may note. It was a society where every man's hand was raised against his neighbor. Homo lupus homini. "The bearing of arms, particularly lance and sword, on all solemn occasions of civil life, was the distinguishing feature which, more than any other, marked the separation of classes in Homer's time." [25] In battle one encounters a frenzied behavior whereby fear is whipped up in order to gain courage. Eliade's words apply to the heroes: "The frenzied berserker, ferocious warriors, realized precisely the state of sacred fury... of the primordial world." [26] In a famous scene of the Iliad, Achilles went so berserk that he battled the river, the River-God and the gods themselves. Ajax went mad and finally committed suicide. A frank, hollow, extreme braggadoccio characterized the best and the worst of the fighters. The glorification of destructiveness seems interminable. Apart from a chosen few, the women are subjects of aggressive degradation and measured by head of livestock; yet some time before, in Minoan, if not Mycenaean, civilization, women had achieved high position and status. More information about Mycenaean women is needed before we can claim what we guess to be true: that the degradation of women was not a trait of the Indo-European but was the outcome of catastrophically induced aggression. Certain undercurrents of attitude haunt the passages of Homer. The boasts of the warriors are often about the conquests and destruction of towns. The similes of Homer are overwhelmingly rural and pastoral. May we surmise that the heroes sacked many a half-destroyed town? There is a pervading sense of splendors of the past being gone and citations of armies, cities, and wealth appear to be grossly exaggerated. This pretentiousness is not that of nobles, or of a people who had lost something they once knew, did not own, but had given them their character. One senses also the general lack of awareness, a "mind-blown" stupidity, a calloused morality. Am I reading feelings into Homer's poetry that are not there? Perhaps. But the interpellations of morality in the Iliad and/ Odyssey are mostly those of the poet. Are these traits not typical of "primitive man" ? Definitely not. It is only by getting one's concept of primitive man from Homer that one can believe so, for usually modern "primitive man" is gentle, aware, and only occasionally "possessed" or obsessed. The Homeric warriors are not primitive types. The "guest-stranger" concept of Homeric times is intriguing too. The Homeric peoples had an ambivalence towards outsiders. Deep mistrust alternated with sometime hysterical acceptance. Apparently, a person entering the precincts of an unknown community, one such as Odysseus, for example, would not know whether he would be maltreated or well- treated. This ambivalence appears to have gone beyond logic or normal behavior [27] . Odysseus was warned by Nausicaa that he should avoid being seen in Phaeacia because of the general mistrust of strangers. Yet she also assured him, that if all went well, he would be royally treated. And so he was. The forms of human relations, like the world itself, were shaky. Augeas, "the king of the Epeians, treacherous to his very guest- friends, not long thereafter saw his own rich city, under stark fire and the stroke of iron, settling into the deep pit of destruction. Augeas was himself dragged to the edge of steep death, nor escaped it." [28] It was for double-dealing over the cleaning of his stable that Augeas incurred the wrath of Hercules which destroyed his city and him. We should say that this same Hercules is an active participant in many of the events of the dark times and one day it may be confirmed that he is an alter ego of the planet Mars. He destroyed Troy once before its destruction by the Achaeans of Homer. He destroyed Nestor's Pylos once. He is often berserk, a paragon of the crazed survivor, and was deified upon death. Hercules (or Heracles) had progeny, the Heraclids. They were so many that they seemed to be whole bands of people. More than that, they have been identified with the Dorians whom scholars believe to be the Greek ethnic strain that devastated the Mycenaean kingdoms and carried on their primitive development during the so-called "Dark Ages." For example, Rhys Carpenter [29] is to be discovered on a magnificent tour de force aimed at proving that long term intense climatic change from wet to dry caused the Mycenaean civilization of the "14th century" literally to collapse and permitted the starving country folk to sack and burn the centers of civilization in search of necessities. The country and islands were practically abandoned, and only with time did a better acclimated population begin its rise. Carpenter encounters many obstacles, only two of which need be mentioned here. He is confronted by sudden disaster; yet it is apparent from his own words and in meteorology that climatic disaster can only be sudden and quite destructive if an immense external source produces it. Second, everywhere he turns he sees terrible incendiarism (or, rather, he turns everywhere to avoid seeing the terrible incendiarism that destroyed Mycenaean civilization). We cannot help but thank him, however, as one must thank practically every strainer and stretcher of the Dark Ages. For he describes in many an incident the takeover of Mycenaean areas by the Heraclids, whom he obligingly postulates as Mycenaean refugee families returning a couple of generations later at the head of mixed bands of other ethnic Greeks, especially Dorians. The Heraclids, in our theory, are crazed survivors, sons, naturally, of Hercules, who is identifiable in myth with Ares or Mars, even though he sometimes fights Ares. The Heraclids are borne back in the name of the God who destroyed their kin and culture. "How unsettled and mobile were all these heroes," writes Mireaux [30] , after he has devoted a book, like Finley, to discovering a social order that would make sense. "The heroic world of the epics appears in our eyes as something mobile, effervescent and tumultuous." They depended upon the seas but were bad sailors. There was no class of specialized sailors. Everyone was a "sailor." Maritime ventures were not materially distinguishable from piratical excursions. We can imagine what confusion and fear drove them over the seas to found their many colonies, for the period 750-600 B. C. was the great period of colonial expansion. The journey from Crete to Egypt took five days and nights, "a terrifying venture for such poor navigators as were the Greeks of Homer's time." [31] They were meat-eaters: cattle, sheep, and wild game, animals of the uplands. "For Homer fish is a detestable food, while Hesiod does not even deign to mention it. Never is fish eaten at the Homeric repasts." [32] Probably around 67\ 87 B. C. Gyges the Lydian overthrew the Heraclids of Maeonia in Asia Minor, and struck the first coins. Actually they were not the first coins, but the Greeks had largely abandoned coinage. Homer mentions a gold talent of fixed value, reports Mireaux, but exchange was almost entirely in kind rather than in money. Gift-giving was often a spectacular affair. It was more a system of exchange than a pleasant supplement to normal exchange like bonuses or birthday presents. The things given seem often to be for re-giving, to be untouched and unused, even homely objects like linens, and the metal gifts seem all too frequently to have semidivine or divine "makers" which, as false pedigrees conceal humble origins, may have concealed their origins in loot and theft. Their description, too, conveys an awesomeness, as if they were not familiar objects to the childhoods of the gift-exchangers. They are described as pirates would speak of their misunderstood loot of pots and laces. Altogether there is an incongruous mixture of ethnic names, events, artifacts and practices in the works of Homer. Names that are "centuries old," and not to be heard again in history, occur. Chariots are used, not as battle-wagons, but to convey warriors to places where they would descend and fight. Their use was partly forgotten or had not been familiar to the types who owned them. T. B. L. Webster [33] shows that Homer is indebted to Minoan and near East influences in plots, style, and references. He is influence by the archaic Mediterranean culture. He is very Mycenaean, Webster concludes. But in all of his speculations, Webster does not speculate upon the important chronological puzzle: If it is proper to imagine that all of these influences happened so "early" and Homer came so late, why not speculate as well that all of these similar bits actually existed almost within the living grasp of the poet? At one time, many scholars believed that Troy and the Trojans were poetic inventions. Then Schliemann discovered "Troy" or something that corresponded to indications found in the poetry. His site at Hisarlik has revealed in successive excavations a number of "Troys." It appears now that the Troy of levels VI and VIIa may have been Homer's Troy but it also appears now that the Trojans were akin to the Greeks and that the Trojan War( s) pitted Greek against Greek. Homer probably stressed differences between Greeks and Trojans as a splendid device, first, to convey the battle of the gods, and, second, to give the disarrayed and scattered Greek communities a common weltanschauung - a common religious, political and cultural outlook on the world. Moreover, now we permit ourselves another conjecture: The besieged Troy was a congress of allied forces containing Greek and non-Greek forces, clustered survivors, who could be called Greek or Anatolians, who might provide characters with connections as far away as Etruria and send an Anatolian like Aeneas to seek kin in Italy after the wars (as Virgil says). The Trojan Wars were plural, most likely, during the Martian period. Armies may have come and gone; the occupants of Troy may have changed several times. The artifacts dug up could be interpreted as coming from a melange of cultures - Greek and Anatolian. The revolution of heaven and earth is the heart of the primordial myth and the epic poem. The Homeric epics are no exceptions to the rule. An old era was being destroyed and a new one was arising [34] . The Iliad and the Odyssey used various dialects of Greek blended by the genius of the bard. Homer used metaphors of the clearest and most ordinary kind, to the exclusion of far-flown and fancy comparisons. Words expressing "fire" abound, for example. His poetry seems to be addressing audiences of low verbal ability; or they might have understood a melange of dialects and phrases, a lingua greca like a lingua franca or both. On the other hand, his similes are prolonged and complicated, dealing with rural and pastoral comparisons. Obviously Homer was not primitive, nor inexperienced, nor bereft of imagination; nor were his confraternity of poets, nor their audiences. Why should this melange be used, and not, say, a single preferred dialect like the Tuscan that Dante's genius made to become the preferred Italian tongue? A reasonable answer would be that there was then only a gathering of tongues: the audiences were related, widespread, itinerant, and diffused. More significant is the non-use of a sacred, liturgical language. If there had been a Mycenaean dead language, like classical Greek is to modern Greek, or Latin to Italian, then would not that have been the basis for portions of the epic poems? But it was not, not even for prayers. Therefore it did not exist. Mycenaean Greek was probably a living and related set of dialects whose standard expression had disappeared with its ruling class and scribes. It gives cause for bewilderment. If a sacred language was not understood, that would place the old civilization far into the past; but there are many tie-ins of Homeric and Mycenaean cultures. Conversely, the fact might indicate that the old civilization was either foreign (which it was not) or largely destroyed (which we think was the case). The linguistic melange (with its numerous catch-phrases of all Greek sub-cultures), which was Homeric Greek, was "instant prosody." There had been no time, no more than a couple of generations, to build an epic language. Yet such an epic language would surely have evolved smoothly and uniformly over the several centuries of any "Dark Ages." What emerges therefore is a people and culture exploding in space and time, whose language, that of Homer, had not yet caught up with its expanding front. The Greeks of Homer, to conclude, did not come as an invasion from afar. They consisted of all kinds of Greeks. They were survivors, largely from the rural areas and the interior highlands. From personal experience and hearsay, they knew of the centers of their societies that had been destroyed. They often lacked kith and kin; they lacked communal security; they lacked law and order; they lacked education; they trembled upon the trembling earth. The experts commonly remark on the unabashed juxtaposition of knowledge and ignorance in the epics. Mireaux has said, "There was decidedly nothing primitive about Homeric civilization." The very sophistication of the poets, like Homer and Hesiod, who told about them, indicates an age whose savagery could easily be penetrated by civilized forms. For a grandly disciplined, informed, and stylized poet like Homer to write so sympathetically of his subjects, he had to be of their age, and to be of their age required that their age be the eighth century. The massive destruction of Mycenaean civilization fully attested in the archaeological record, was accompanied by a complete social transformation, in which all the institutions by which men organized their existence were refashioned to met the new situation... When Mycenae fell, the surviving Greeks, in their new kind of society, had no need for records or for scribes; in fact, on the evidence we have at present, they had no need for the art of writing and they lost it altogether, improbable as that may seem to modern men [35] . What seems "improbable" to us is that anything but abrupt catastrophe could cause "the massive destruction" in so many places - Crete, Mycenae, and elsewhere. The Homeric scribes, working with new dialects and a new alphabet, did not need centuries of time to accumulate material on the chaotic life that followed. Homer did his best to reassure the survivors and to set them on their way again. The incongruences and inconsistencies of material culture, nomenclatures, customs, and attitudes found in his works are not sloppy artistry; they are of the essence of the people whom he was describing. And his work was not an oral conglomerate of centuries, but a description, from two main sources, those of the Iliad and the Odyssey, [36] with as much consistency as he could import to them, of the suddenly produced cultural chaos of the eighth and seventh centuries. He took as his task the assembly of plots dealing with erratic and fear-driven survivors and inspiring these folk to become "one nation under the gods." {S : THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE} THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE The contrast with conventional historiography is obvious: Homer flourished in the middle seventh century. His writings were an agglomerate of the early century. The pieces of his writing came from different quarters; many from the period -670 to -776, some from times stretching far before (-766 to -1500). The people active in his writings were from the crushed cultures of -776 to the beginning of his own lifetime. The Mycenaean Civilization collapsed in a set of natural disasters. The marginal survivors regrouped repeatedly in the following century. They fought bitterly amongst themselves, used what they could manage of the old tools and skills. Homer sang about them and their destroyed culture. The assumption is tied to a brief time sequence derived from evidences of natural disaster. (See the Chart on pages 64-65). The theory of causation seeks evidence of abrupt takeover of a destroyed culture by marginal survivors who cast aside, or employ ceremonially, practices they do not or cannot use or understand. Then they proceed to draw from every source their new synthetic culture. On the other hand, most Homeric experts nowadays believe that Homer lived a century earlier, that his writings were an agglomerate of centuries before, that the pieces of writings came from different quarters, some of them as early as 1500 B. C. The people acting in his writings, they believe, are fictional characters referring to real characters occupying a space of 400 to 500 years. Their culture is believed to be a composite of all this time, but is concentrated in a true primitive culture that made savage contact with the civilized world in 1300 B. C. or thereabout, and after half a millennium, arrived at the stage of producing Homer and Hesiod. The Mycenaean civilization weakened and then was ruined by invaders. Centuries of primitive illiterate history followed. The pre-Homerics emerged and found new tools and skills. Homer at this point sang about their deeds. They were learning to sail boats; they disliked eating fish; they were learning to use chariots. This conventional theory is tied to a time sequence derived from an incorrect Egyptian chronology. The society and behavior of the pre-Homeric Hellenes are viewed in a sequence, according to a theory of causation that has a culture being gradually born. Practices are invented or adopted slowly from abroad. Thus occurs the confrontation of two theories. The reader has already some means of adjudging it. Other means will follow. But before this chapter is ended, a suggestion may be offered to all those who read and write about the Dark Ages of ancient Greece. The suggestion concerns methodology, or, more simply, logic. The logic of writing about history, that is, about the sequence of cause and events, is that events are arranged by time and then causes are uncovered. This usually works because the succession of events is ordinarily known before the causes are discovered. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, though strictly speaking a logical fallacy, establishes a presumption of cause: After this, therefore (perhaps) because of this. However, the less the evidence of temporal sequences, the greater the possibility of logical fallacies. Hysteron proteron, as the Aristotelians called it, or "putting the cart before the horse" is one of them. When a temporal sequence is not known, but a presumption of the sequence is held, then the possibility of the reversal of cause increases. The logical problem that is involved in "putting the cart before the horse" is exemplified in the saying, "If the Brahmin do not pray, the Sun will not set." Wise skeptics know that "If the Sun will not set, the Brahmin will pray." (As a matter of fact, they will pray anyhow, if only because in illo tempore the sun did not set.) At the same time, many people, zealous or simply naive, will let the cart be placed before the horse and believe that the cart pulls the horse. In a subtle way, much of the writing about the Greek "Dark Ages" falls victim to this fallacy. Take, for instance, the statement that "the Dark Age Greeks were poor sailors." This fact is usually interpreted to mean that these Greeks were evolving from land animals into seafaring animals; they had not learned yet to sail. But these Greeks had no reason to be good sailors because they were raised as herders and warriors. Seamanship had disappeared with the washing away and destruction of the seacoast settlements. Or take the fact that "the Greek warriors before Troy misused their chariots, dismounting from them instead of fighting from them." This fact is usually interpreted to mean that they were just learning of the chariot from a superior culture with whom they were now coming into contact. But their chariot subculture had just been destroyed with the palaces, and the survivors had not been raised as chariot warriors but used chariots because their "betters" had used them. "The government of Phaecia was a typical emerging primitive state heading towards the polis of classical Greece out of tribalism." But no tribe stands behind the Phaeacians; they are a colony surviving its mother country and organized more simply than it was. Or take the fact that the "The Achaeans attacked Troy in the name of their gods, and Troy was destroyed." To most, the statement means that the Achaeans destroyed Troy. On the contrary, "the gods" destroyed Troy and the Achaeans occupied it. Not, "the wrath of Achilles elaborated into "the battles of the gods," but rather "the battles of the gods reduced to the wrath of Achilles." Finally, considering the Love Affair in this light, the "gods" do not act so that people can have comedy; comedy is played so that the effects of the gods can be controlled. Further, the dance forms and opera theater of the Love Affair were ancient and Minoan. So asserts Patroni [37] He points out that the dancing circle and chorus carried from Minoan to the classical Greek theater. But when the Greek theater appeared, he writes, we find the rustic god Dionysus, with a goat-cult of dancers cloaked in skins. The poverty of the means, the few actors, the vagabond origins of the Thespian theater, all showed - still according to Patroni who follows the Dark Age theory faithfully - that the primitive real Greek theater was not receiving the subsidies of princes, not the interest or participation of Mycenaean high society; it was left to the rural folk. Again "the cart before the horse." In the general destruction of societies, the art of the survivors made its way quickly forward. The elite and its sophisticated art forms were destroyed; folk art (not primitive art) dominated the scene. An analogy with the problems of geology is tempting. When folds and faults occur, the principle of superposition is thrown off and the effects are baffling to explain. So in history, when temporal evidence is scarce, the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc loses its ability to guide one. Then, in geology, one says of a layer of shells and pebbles: "This land was raised from the sea", while another will say, "This land was once flooded with shells and pebbles." A rather lengthy example may be excused, especially since it is the last. After describing what appears to have been a solid and regulated archaic system (which led me to suspect my theory), Mireaux [38] concludes: Thus one is led to believe that the (lack of) care for agriculture, and the dispersal of a peasantry so firmly rooted in the soil, must have brought about, in most of the cities, at a quite early stage - and no doubt as early as Homeric time - the dissolution of the primitive brotherhoods of youth and soldierly companionship, and the breaking up of their community-centres. Nevertheless, even if the traditions of a life in common and an armed confraternity were growing looser, they were not yet so obsolete that they could not still color the lives of the rough peasant classes, guiding them and instilling into them the old ideals of honor and pride; for they still knew that their lands were only theirs as long as they could defend them, with helmet, buckler and javelin, after an appropriate training and a traditional initiation received at the hands of their elders. In this quotation and all of the chapter containing it, Mireaux first establishes the existence of a rigid (old) order, which he calls "primitive," because presumably he believes it to have followed the Mycenaean culture over the centuries. Then in the same breath, as above, he speaks as if this order preceded the Homeric order which was a breakdown of it. That is, he reverses the logic of his own evidence. He moves back and forth uncertainly, reversing precedence and effect, and, of course, cause and effect. It is more likely that the "primitive order" he describes was the collapsed remains of the Mycenaean order that had persisted into the eighth century and was retained especially long by the Spartans who clustered fearfully in villages rather than committing themselves to a great polis. This order could only be feebly reinstituted by the Homeric crazed heroes. But a new civilization, which developed out of the Homeric age, moved in all directions; it quickly blended new and old forms. The Love Affair was an effort, on the literary front, to establish the new age by mastering the trauma that came with the end of the old age. {S : Notes (Chapter 7: Crazy Heroes of Dark Times)} Notes (Chapter 7: Crazy Heroes of Dark Times) 1. The Cambridge Ancient History (1973), Vol II, Part I, p. 611. We recall the suggestion that Odysseus may have awakened to Nausicaa's spring washing rites. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., p. 624. 4. Cf. Velikovsky (1950), p. 214 et passim. 5. The Cambridge Ancient History, loc. cit., 626. 6. The above details of this paragraph come from Israel M. Isaacson, 'Carbon 14 dates and Velikovsky's Revision of Ancient History." III Pensee no. 3 (1973), 26, p. 29 who is quoting C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), I, pp. 167, 40, 199, 210, 169, 66. 7. History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ of California Press, 1959), p. 255. 8. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 281, quoting Bollenbucher, Bebete and Hymnen and Nergal, p. 29. 9. Worlds in Collision, p. 213. 10. T. Blegen, "Troy VI," Cambridge Ancient History (1973), p. 685. 11. The interpretation of this event, which we cannot take at face value, must await a later day. 12. Worlds in Collision, pp. 268-9, quoting Sidney Smith's Babylonian Historical Texts (1924), p. 5. I refer the reader to The Lately Tortured Earth for explanations of the phenomena of extraterrestrially produced incineration and blasts. 13. "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," Pensee, III (1973). p. 31. supported in the same issued by Lewis M. Greenberg, "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," p. 26. 14. Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1946); Ages in Chaos (1950); "Astronomy and Chronology," III Pensee, No. 2. 38. 15. I. Issacson, op. cit., and "Applying the Revised Chronology," IV Pens‚e (Fall, 1974), 5. Posthumous studies of Velikovsky are expected in re Dark Ages and Issacson's (Schorr's) studies are being prepared by him for publication. 16. Plato, The Laws, III, p. 57 of the translation of B. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, v. V (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1871). 17. Mireaux, p. 24. 18. Mireaux, p. 28. 19. Mireaux, p. 79. Cf. p. 14. 20. As e. g. Mireaux does, p. 55. 21. Contrary to Mireaux, cf. p. 31. 22. Denys Page, The Homeric Odyssey, pp. 145-6, citing Alcaeus and Aristotle. 23. IL, VI. 24. John Cowper Powys, "Preface to Homer and the Oether," p. 146, cf. Mireaux, 124-5. 25. Mireaux, p. 137. 26. The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 21. 27. Cf. Finley, op. cit., pp. 115-20 et passim. Sociology delineates a "stranger" concept and says it is always observable; but it is a quantitative ambivalence that has a norm which is here far exceeded. 28. pindar, "Olympian Ode 10." (Loeb ed.) It would seem that Augeas and his city were swallowed up by an earthquake or volcanic fissure. 29. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966). 30. p. 241. 31. Mireaux, p. 249 and 242-5. 32. Mireaux, p. 146, citing Od XII, 329-32, IV, 368-9. 33. From Mycenae to Homer (1964), p. 197 et passim. 34. See Mircea Eleade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, chap. IV. 35. Finley, p. 168. 36. See pages 134ff below. 37. Op. cit., pp. 250-2. 38. P. 124-5. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 8: } {T THE TWO FACES OF LOVE} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER EIGHT THE TWO FACES OF LOVE The Aphrodite of the light Olympian-age character plays opposite her usual star in the Love Affair, Ares. Her husband, Hephaestus, earns little affection from her, and, though the story is not mentioned here, she is the mother of three children by Ares. She is one of the few ever to have expressed love for Ares, and in "The Battle of the Gods," in the Iliad, she goes to his aid in battle and is roundly smacked by the Goddess Athena. If we look into Homer for the precise astronomical referents of Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus and Athena, we are disappointed. Homer does not say that the three sky bodies - planet mars, Moon, and planet Venus are represented by them, not in the Iliad, nor the Odyssey, nor in the Love Affair. How then are we to assure ourselves that we are on the right track when we allocate among them several celestial bodies? We cannot be certain - not now, nor in ancient times, if we follow the record. Our difficult task of astral-mythical correlation is to be made even harder by the requirement that we show that Aphrodite in the Love Affair is, if not certainly, then most likely, the Moon. However, we shall proceed to the task, taking four steps. First we inquire whether Aphrodite was tied to the Moon in Greek, Near Eastern and other sources in primeval and ancient times. Next we ask whether Aphrodite was the name of entities other than the Moon. Further, we ask whether she was possibly both the Moon and another entity. Finally, we ask whether Aphrodite stood for the Moon specifically in the Love Affair, in the song of Demodocus. {S : A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS} A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS The Aphrodite of whom we speak is an old goddess. Always speaking in relative terms, "old" means coming into recognizable form and identity before Jupiter, Venus and mars, probably after Uranus, and possibly early in the age of Saturn - using the Greco-Roman Eastern Mediterranean theogony and names as points of reference. A quotation "On the worship of Venus-Urania throughout the East," from the work of a famous scholar, G. Rawlinson, begins our introduction of the Love Affair's goddess: [1] She was the 'Queen of Heaven, ' the Moon... she corresponded to Minerva, and in Greece to the original Aphrodite, who became at last the mere personification of beauty and voluptuousness. In the work of another scholar, Jane E. Harrison [2] , we read a passage from the Danaides of Aeschylus, and we are told something of the jurisdiction of this Aphrodite - words put into her mouth by the great dramatist: Lo, there is hunger in the holy Sky To pierce the body of the Earth, and in the Earth too Hunger to meet his arms. So falls the rain From Heaven that is her lover, making moist The bosom of the Earth: and she brings forth to man The flocks he feeds, the corn that is his life. To trees no less there cometh their own hour Of marriage which the gleam of watery things Makes fruitful - Of all these the cause am I. These lines seem to convey what we would expect of a lunar goddess. We are moving far back in time. In a passing reference, Mircea Eliade writes of a "regime brought about by Aphrodite and later governed by Zeus, in which the species are fixed, there is order, balance, and hierarchy." [3] I have carried the birth of the Moon back in solar system history to an astronomical catastrophe occurring even before the Age of Saturn. We hear Theopompos quoted by Plutarch: [4] "From Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their birth." So Aphrodite is moved back to the time of Kronos. Back of Zeus, stands his father Kronos, and back of Kronos, his father, Ouranos. Hesiod (8th century?), the earliest Greek source of all, places Aphrodite with the earliest great god of the cloudy skies, Ouranos (Uranus). The motherless Aphrodite is daughter of Ouranos, and Eros - a figure of love - seems to have been born with her, nor will this divine helper ever leave her. A little while after Hesiod wrote, Homer worked, and Homer alludes to a second Aphrodite Pandemos, daughter of Zeus by Dione, aided by Eros Pandemos. Cicero, a typical confusion emerging out of his elegant prose, has Hermes as husband of the Uranian Aphrodite who is given Hephaestus as a husband and Ares as a lover. A third Aphrodite is the sister of Hermes and daughter of Heaven and Die. Finally a fourth Aphrodite emerges as a Syric-Cypriot wife of Adonis, by the name of Astarte. We have almost nothing to say of the latter two personae. It is enough to discuss Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos, if indeed they amount to two distinct goddesses. If the former is the Moon, there is no reason to make of the second also the Moon. Rather, this latter may even have been the planet Venus, who as the goddess Athena, was born out of Zeus' forehead, lacking association in such case with either Dione or Eros. Proclus, much later, but still authoritative, has this second later Aphrodite also born from the sea like the first [5] . The first goddess, Aphrodite Urania, was born in the throes of the destruction of Ouranos by his son Kronos (Saturn), who severed his father's genitals with a sickle of jagged flint and flung them into the sea. From the foam of these organs arose Aphrodite, a foam god, literally foam-born (aphrogenis), the "one who is generated from foam." [6] Only three words in Greek are known to carry the Aphr-root: "foam" (aphros), "recklessness," and "sexually stimulating," All are obvious associations with Aphrodite's birth and character [7] . This will become more significant when we ask why Aphrodite Urania cannot have been Athena, or Ishtar, or another goddess. {S : TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY} TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY The later myth might have both confusing and clarifying elements, confusing in its resemblances to the Uranian episode, clarifying in that, if it were Athena-Venus which was involved, foam-covered seas are understandable (" Beaufort 10" in navigation has the surface of the sea foaming, hence sperm) and a turbulent setting in which Aphrodite-Moon (does Dione relate to Diana?) was destructively involved and Zeus' activity might have been construed as an attempted (and actual) ravishment of the Moon in the days of the birth of Athena seven hundred and more years before the Love Affair. The Homeric "Hymn to Athena" reproduced in chapter X chants of the foaming seas resulting from her birth. "Sea" foam, we can see, had reason to be brought in a second time on a later date. Of the name "Aphrodite" itself, a case can be made for its being of an origin earlier than the planet Venus, because of the temporal precedence of the Moon and the definite designation of Urania, an impossible name for a later deity; long before historical nations began, Ouranos was a deus otiosus. The goddess Amphitrite Thalassa (" of the Sea") shares this epithet with Typhon and his paredra, "making one being with foam-born Aphrodite," according to F. Nork [8] . Here is another indication that Aphrodite Pandemos is lateborn and accompanies the birth (and death) of Typhon. We employ the scenario of Aphrodite Urania in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria to approach the reality of those days. Uranus is a giant luminescent planet that fissions in the earliest days of humanity. There occurs a separation from the electric arc or "tree of life" which humans saw reaching up the god-planet. A major fragment from the nova takes cometary form. In the severance from the tree and in the cometary form, a castration of Ouranos is perceived. When the Moon is seen to arise from the disturbed Earth, it is perceived as born out of the turbulent seas, out of the froth, and the connection is made with the genitals of Ouranos, from which foam-born Aphrodite Urania is generated and rises into the sky. The bloodiness ascribed by myth to the foaming scene would refer to the ruddy color of the turbulent elements and to the horrific analogy of the divine actions; the same color relations would occur upon the much later occasion of the mythical fall of Typhon and the birth of a new goddess. Many thousands of years separate this catastrophic primordial scenario from the fully sublimated painting by Botticelli of a tender, beautiful Aphrodite riding upon the sea-shell. In Sumerian mythology, the god of the aether, Enlil, who can be compared with Uranus, separates the interlocked Earth Mother and Father-Nammu, and then creates the Moon god, Nanna. Among the thousands of verses of the Rig Vedas of ancient India there is an allusion to the birth of the Moon, which is not among those presented in my other works but was culled by J. Ziegler during his study of the Vedas. The Moon is "the Prudent (Moon)... allied by birth to Heaven and Earth in kinship. The Gods discovered in the midst of waters beautiful Agni (the Moon) with the Sister's labor. Him, Blessed One, Seven strong Floods augmented, him white at birth and red when waxen mighty.... Then they, ancient and young, who dwell together, Seven Sounding Rivers, as one germ received him." [9] Ziegler has also identified as Moon-names of the Rig-Vedas : Pusan, Indu, Two-Mothered Sun, Pavamana, Sura, Wanderer, Red Bird, Lord, Bull, Vaisvanara, Maghavan, Brhaspati, Brahmanaspati, Kutsa, Sindhu, Sage, Shining One, Agni and Indra, and probably many more. We note how other gods are called by Moon-names or there is a confusion, as with Agni and Indra. The same duplicity may occur in the Mediterranean area. John Bentley, writing of India, supports us from his peculiar point of vantage: in the war between gods and giants, "the goddess Sri, or Lakshmi, was then born, or produced from the Sea." "The Venus Aphroditus of the Western mythologists (is) emblematic of the lunisolar year; therefore she is called the goddess of increase, abundance, etc. She is the daughter of Durga, and the Proserpine of the West; and, considered as time, she is the same as her mother. Metaphysically, she may sometimes represent the Moon." [10] Later on, we shall see that Bentley's support has its problems. He may be confusing two Aphrodites (Moon and planet Venus) and Hindu mythology, it seems, may have the same problem as the Greek. In geological terms, however, and according to a view that I present at length in the Quantavolution Series, the Moon has recently arrived upon the sky. It was assembled electro-gravitationally from a vast explosion of crustal material from the Earth. It began to orbit the Earth, always facing it, within the traditional era of a cultured humanity that recorded the events through legend later on. Inasmuch as a number of ancient authors declare that there existed, still intact, cultures that claimed existence prior to the Moon's appearance, there was a "Proselenian Period" before the Moon existed [11] . Among the Proselenians, doubts existed; the Moon may have come into position earlier but, owing to a thick canopy of clouds girdling the Earth, it may have merely come into evidence at a later time, and therefore the Proselenians witnessed the coming of the Moon as an emergence from behind a cloudy barrier, after it had been present in the nearby sky for some time. Around the world, the moon was more often attributed female gender for several reasons that can be touched upon only briefly here. A matriarchal system may have come into being at times and the Moon was deemed female. Or the rough coincidence of the normal menstrual period of women and the cycle of lunar phases - 28 days, 36 days and perhaps other periods as well, in various calendar ages - could have produced numerous speculations, "confirmations," institutional and ritual tags for the measure of time and religious behaviors. The Moon would thus become female because of its behavior according to the menstrual cycle? Yet, we think, could not a male Moon have commanded and ordered the menstrual cycle, according to the mythmaking mind? Only Venus, of the planets, is often female. The others and the Sun are regularly male. A number of qualities are associated with the Moon and these are also associated with the Moon and these are also associated with the female sex. The chief among these is a role in fertility. But could not the qualities have been ascribed to the Moon after they were developed in females ? Not altogether, of course, because certain qualities are found so universally among women that they would appear to have originated in a common source such as the Moon. One refers here to the function of women in spinning and weaving. Do these derive from lunar behavior? {S : ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS} ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS Robert Graves refers to "Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite" and develops the lunar traits of Aphrodite extensively. "The Athenians called Aphrodite Urania 'the eldest of the Fates' because she was the Nymph-Goddess, to whom the sacred King had, in ancient times, been sacrificed at the summer solstice... Aphrodite is the same wide-ruling goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea, and who was worshiped in Syria and Palestine as Ishtar, or Ashtaroth [12] . She was regarded as a queen-bee. "She destroyed the sacred king, who mated with her on a mountain top, as a queen-bee destroys the drone: by tearing out his sexual organs." As Cybele, Phrygian Aphrodite of Mount Ida, she accepted "the ecstatic self-castration of her priests in memory of her lover Attis." [13] Concessions, suggests Graves, to the need to grant her masculine powers as society moved under the influence of Jovian patriarchy [14] . Thus could society employ the fantasy of bisexuality to further a political cause. The Scythians, it is asserted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (16-44) worshipped "Artimpasa (Aphrodite Urania), goddess of the Moon." The famous Encyclopedia of Pauly- Wissowa tells us that Philochorus, "resting on the oldest conceptions of nature," finds a duplicity in Aphrodite and the Moon (p. 2738). It refers to Horace speaking of dances to Aphrodite in the night under the Moon (Horace, Carm. I: 45). It pitches the Lemnos myth of a marriage between Aphrodite and Hephaestus against a Theban myth of her marriage to Ares, which are then merged in the Song of Demodocus (p. 2769); the Orphic hymns stretch far back of the Homeric period of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries; the image of Aphrodite here seems lunar rather than planetary, but we realize that the same Mistress of the Heavens title is given to Astarte in Syria, who is probably more planet Venus (with Ananna) than she is the Moon. Also, as Astarte is seen by some as Aphrodite barbata (bearded), still Pauly-Wissowa can find at least that the ancient authority Philochoros again calls the bearded goddess a Moon figure. Numerous writers besides Graves, among them Winthuis, Jeremias, and Rix, have stressed an original bisexuality of ancient deities. The primordial All-Mother of ancient tradition is a man-woman, or a woman-man, virgin not in the physiological but in the cosmic sense.... A naive androgynous symbolism for the primeval mother, forming a part of the doctrine, is apparently shown in the oldest temples to the Virgin Mother, when the All-Mother is represented with a beard... Astarte may appear in a masculine form... sometimes with the characteristics of the masculine sex. Certain authors have even offered the hypothesis of an androgynous Ishtar [15] . There are many of such androgynous representations of Aphrodite, as in Cyprus where the goddess wears a beard, female garments, and seems unisexual. Pilgrims to Paphos there received 'gifts of a phallus and salt, ' the latter standing probably for the sea-froth and semen of which the goddess was born. In Rome, like New York City, anything could be found, including this, too. The case for bearded Aphrodites representing the planet Venus occurs partly because the ankh (shown below), the crux ansata or 'cross with a handle, ' is associated with both the planet and with a number of representations that must be regarded as the goddess Aphrodite. The ankh is an ambivalent symbol that denotes bisexuality, a combined phallus and vulva. The cometary references seem clear, for a comet's generally round nucleus and straight-out long tail convey in the sky a genital meaning. Insofar as the history of the planet Venus is known, and that may well be from its beginnings, the ankh has been a sacred symbol and one appropriated for the planet Aphrodite-Venus. Athena is not without bearded associations. Male, bearded serpents were to be found on a pediment of the archaic Athenian Acropolis. These would have been representations of the dragon who was Typhon, and also a part of Athena as cometary Venus. The larger question to be dealt with later on, is whether Athena had a double, a male duplicity, a god of prominence. The Dictionnaire des Antiquit‚s is more confident than Pauly-Wissowa of the lunar identity of the goddesses Aphrodite and Venus. It recognizes the duality of the Uranian and Jovian Aphrodites which grew close with time or may even have been originally the same. (91 fn1) We quote here two passages from the extensive article on Venus: She came from Asia where almost all of the Semitic peoples worshiped a lunar deity representation of fertility and animal fecundity. Artakatis-Derketo at Ascalon, Mylitta at Babylon, Ishtar in Assyria, and above all, Astarte among the ancients. From Cyprus and Phoenicia, the goddess moved North to the shores of the Black Sea, Northwest across the Cyclades, West to Cytherea, to Sparta, to Sicily, Carthage, Latium. Aphrodite Urania is identical to lunar Astarte of the Semites, who appeared at Carthage under the name of the Celestial Virgin. The relations of Aphrodite with the night star are further implied in the myth of Phaeton whom the goddess seized to make guardian of her temple. Phaeton is, in effect, the star of the morning and evening, whose vivid brightness naturally associated it with the Moon whose brilliant acolyte it appeared to be. This star, among other names, is also called the star of Venus, and the assimilation of the goddess to this double star contributed, at Cyprus and Pamphylia, to the idea of an androgynous Aphrodite. It is to be noted that this authority not only awards Aphrodite and Venus to the Moon, but also Ishtar and Astarte, two goddesses that a number of writers, the present author included, assign confidently to the catastrophic comet-planet Venus. Are we to win one position only in order to surrender another, perhaps more important in the total picture? For much of the best material on the history of the disasters of the mid- second millenium B. C. comes out of the histories of Ishtar and Astarte. Sophie Lunais tells us that lunar cults are more ancient than solar, that the Moon was worshiped more than the sun, that Diana came to be identified with the Moon and so, too, Artemis, and of course Hecate, Selene, and Luna, but despite all of this, "curiously the mythology of the Moon is practically nonexistent." [16] Her surprise is not surprising, considering that often myths of the Moon do not come forth labeled clearly as such, and that in the book is to be found no reference to Aphrodite ! Most of the mythology of Aphrodite is lunar mythology. Diana and Artemis were late arrivals as Moon goddesses, she reports; certainly later than Aphrodite, we add. We could further add that, if moon mythology is not abundant in the Latin authors, it is because Aphrodite tended to monopolize it, and in art as well. Reports Graves: "The later Hellenes belittled the Great Goddess of the Mediterranean, who had long been supreme at Corinth, Sparta, Thespiae, and Athens, by placing her under male tutelage and regarding her solemn sex-orgies as adulterous indiscretions." [17] Graves continues: the Moon, to whom "the sun yields precedence" [18] in early myth has three phases - the maiden of spring, the nubile nymph of summer, and the crone of winter, to correspond to her three phases: new, full, and old. She could also be identified with Mother Earth's vegetative year, who produced first leaves and buds, then flowers and fruits, and then a withered barrenness. "She could later be conceived as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the crone of the underworld - typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite, and Hecate. These mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon-goddess became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons - maiden, nymph, and crone - appear in triad to demonstrate her divinity." (We note, in passing, that the council of Phaeacia numbered nine men, who measured the magic circle of the dance and whom we have also associated with a nine-day week.) Aphrodite was the nubile female, par excellence, declares Graves. She wore the Golden Girdle of the Moon, whose magic would incite concupiscence in any man. In addition, she could stand in the place of the "General Chairwoman," from time to time and from place to place, as the Great Goddess protem. By the time Demodocus sang, Aphrodite was officially of the family of Olympian Gods, a daughter of Zeus, a relatively specialized god of desire, and the moon by inference as the dark time of trysting and loving. She is fickle, light-hearted, willful, beautiful, golden, perfumed, and anointed, with, of course, all the powers of her station in respect to humanity and an invulnerability in fact to terrible retribution from her father or sisters and brothers. She was a seductive, but no longer active, force. Still, the universal help and harm, of which she was capable in earlier ages and even now, remained impressed upon the minds of the audience of Demodocus. Whatever happened to Aphrodite was of importance and if she might be treated good-humoredly, it would be still with respect, with awe, with ceremony, and behind the protective shield of other gods, who alone could be the causes of whatever embarrassment her shameless character would permit her. {S : THE COSMIC SPINNER} THE COSMIC SPINNER The most penetrating studies of Aphrodite as the Moon Goddess come from Elmer George Suhr. He entitles one of his books Venus de Milo, The Spinner; the Link between a Famous Art Mystery and Ancient Fertility Symbols [19] A decade later he published The Spinning Aphrodite; The Evolution of the Goddess from Earliest Pre-Hellenic Symbolism through Late Classical Times [20] . The Venus de Milo, as is well-known, is a statue without arms. Suhr, reconstructing the statue anatomically and on the basis of more complete representations of Aphrodite, concluded that she was occupied at spinning yarn. A fine picture is to be found on the Berlin lekythos where beside the spinning goddess are Ares and Eros. "The moon... is in full view behind Aphrodite, where it serves as the total center for the whole composition." Suhr associated a whole complex of attributes and functions with Aphrodite: the Moon directly, the shadow of the Moon (its cone), spinning, the vortex theme in myth, the emblem of the spiral, the dew and rain, Klotho, Hecate, Medusa, the omphalos (sacred navel of the world), rainfall (the dropping of threads upon the Earth), the turning of the vault of Heaven, the forming of thunderhead on her distaff with the help of Ares, lunar calendars. She was "worshiped as the dispenser of the divine elixir running through all life, the mistress of fate and fortune, the author of all things fair and lovable." She is generally antagonistic in various manifestations to Athena. She is a long-time enemy of Athena, in the Iliad but elsewhere, too. Aphrodite, Suhr thinks, was reduced in importance during the age of Zeus, but could not be fundamentally deprived of form and function. The Moon, which heretofore had played an important part in this program (of cloud, thunder, and lightning) was also relegated to the background. But Aphrodite was too powerful to be lightly brushed aside. As a goddess of love and beauty she became a respectable member of the Olympian family, both causing the other gods much trouble and bringing them countless pleasures by trapping them in the net of desire. Since Zeus was a male, he never took over the spinning equipment as an adjunct of creation; such an attribute was below the dignity of the father of the gods and men. Aphrodite was allowed to keep this attribute and though she remained a powerful divinity, she was pushed aside in Athens, no doubt in the days of Theseus, by Athena, the bachelor girl goddess who became a favored child of Zeus. That the Moon goddess was a spinner is also to be discovered in Meso-America and Egypt. Hence if Aphrodite is connected with spinning in Greece and the Near East, then Aphrodite is to be connected with the Moon, for the Moon and spinning are generally associated. An article and photograph of the National Geographic Magazine (Dec. 1975) describe .... The Mayan moon goddess Ixchel, patroness of fertility, weaving, and medicine. Wife of the sun, she consorted with other gods, just as the moon crosses paths with the stars and planets. In this 4 3/ 4-inch figurine from Jaina Island, off Yucatan, the moon goddess takes a grinning rabbit for her partner. The grinning rabbit might in other place be taken to be a wolf, a mouse, a dove or another animal such as have been associated with the planet Mars-Ares in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. The Indo-Iranian texts of the Bundahis refer to a planet called "Gokihar" or "Wolf - progeny" as "special disturber of the Moon" [21] while the Slavs beheld a wolf-shaped Vukadlak that devoured the moon (or sun) [22] . Medusa is identified with Aphrodite and with Selene (moon) by Suhr, who points out that Selene was the patroness of generation and "as a friend of Poseidon (one among other reasons) she became offensive to Athena." We bear this in mind when we see Odysseus protected by Athena and murderously pursued by Poseidon, and when we see Poseidon in the Love Affair arranging an easy exit for Aphrodite and Ares out of the vengeful hands of Hephaestus (hence Athena who, we shall see, is tied to Hephaestus and a protagonist and director of the action in the Love Affair). Suhr speaks of the countless clay cones of Mesopotamia that copy the shadow of the Moon. They rotate upon the face of the dark land, and become a type of menhir turned by human figures of stone. Nannar the moon god of Mesopotamia works hard to keep the cone rotating. The cone emblem is found on a coin of Byblos (Syria) and at the city of Paphos (Cyprus) where a large cone stood in the open court of the Temple of Aphrodite. With regard both to Aphrodite of Cyprus and Astarte of Syria there was a close association with the Moon. "Both are heiresses of the moon god of the city of Ur" with many cone figures. {S : CONFUSION COMPOUNDED} CONFUSION COMPOUNDED We have already given reasons for the oriental associations of lunar Aphrodite so we are not surprised but confirmed at finding her great temple at Paphos, Cyprus, constructed in the Phoenician style (or is it vice versa? No matter here, but relevant chronologies should be approached skeptically). In this temple, we have noted, stood a monolith that Tacitus, the Roman historian, described as "A rounded mass rising like a cone from a broad base to a small circumference." Some scholars think it to have been an aerolith or meteoroid that had fallen and was emplaced in honor of Aphrodite. This, indeed, it may have been. To suspect that the fallen stone may be set up in deference to a cometary Venus or would be a meteoroid associated somehow with Athena is certainly permissible. We know of a Palladium of Troy, a probable meteoritic stone, associated with Pallas Athena [23] , who is herself identified with the planet Venus. Other meteoroids have been associated with other gods. In the present instance at Paphos, and following Suhr's earlier theory, we would have more reason to see in the meteoritic cone an accidental resemblance to the Shadow Cone of the Moon, and its many fabricated images going back to the city of Ur. Aphrodite of Paphos would then be, if not exclusively lunar Aphrodite, largely or partly such. Pliny, the natural historian of Rome, writes that Venus is given the name Lucifer as another sun bringing the dawn, whereas when it shines after sunset it is named Vesper as prolonging the daylight, or as deputy of the Moon, and he credits the discovery of the twin property of planet- Venus to Pythagoras of Samos, 142 years after the founding of Rome. Others besides Pythagoras are also credited with the discovery, Parmenides and Ibycus of Rhegium among them. One implication of this remark, corroborated broadly in Plato, is that planet Venues did not occupy the same course after the incidents that we are tracing in the Love Affair. Planet Venus arrived to be deputy of the Moon following the disastrous scenario in time. At some period when the planet Venus was emplaced in its modern orbit and coming to be recognized as such, in its morning and evening manifestations, there may have been a movement in Greece to call it Hera, for Hera it was called by some. Perhaps the astronomers, more in touch with oriental thought, won out with their name, Aphrodite. Another source of confusion turns up in the pages of Robert Graves, where he distinguishes the animals of the Moon, Selene, and Aphrodite as those that 'parted the hoof' in the manner of lunar crescents so that the lunar symbol occurred as two facing arcs, contrasting with the single simple disc of the sun. The sacred cow that directed Cadmus (from Ugarit, facing West) to the site of Thebes was so branded on each flank. At Denderah a red bull was sacrificed formally as Typhon. Temples there for Isis and Aphrodite were found, as well as shrines for Seth-Typhon. Cows, young bulls, bulls, red bulls: to whom does each category belong, to what gods, in what aspects? There were more sky-bovines than bovine species to assign to them. It will be a long time before the pattern is fully discovered. At Denderah, there is something of Aphrodite as the Venusian goddess implicated in the mid-second millennial events. Cloven-hoofed animals are not alone of the Moon, whatever may be the inclination of the symbol of the double- facing crescents elsewhere. Just as Lucifer is the light-bearer of the morning, but is also the Prince of Darkness, Satan, Seth - the light that brought darkness, the darkness of wanderings in the wilderness, of Egypt following the Great Light? What, then, should one do with the many indications from Egypt, the Near East, and Western and Northern Europe that the Planet Venus is associated with the cow and even the young bull (as in the Revolt of the Golden Calf in Hebrew Exodus)? It would appear that we are dealing once again with mysteries of the succession and amalgamation of divinities in the course of experiencing and forgetting, mnemotechnology. Especially because of the ultimately close physical association of the Moon and Venus and the skies, the facile mirage of celestial horns, and the shapes that comets take, we can reason that Aphrodite would be party to and victim of a confusion between Moon and the Star of the Moon. Hence, Symbols of the one may develop some distinction from those of the other, but an overlapping occurs, enough to tell of the merger of gods, a merger perhaps supremely important in preventing the human mind from taking sides against itself. That is, the very confusion that sets us to arguing is the therapy enabling us to live mentally with historically opposing gods. And such is carried into the sublimations of the arts. "There is something for everyone," "everyone" being the society seeking consensus (therefore a consistent history) and the individual seeking personal sacred integrity. {S : A MATCH OF SOURCES} A MATCH OF SOURCES The time has come, it appears, to switch perspectives, to show how it might be argued that Aphrodite is also tied to the planet Venus, thus rescuing the several goddesses of the planet Venus from capture by the Moon. Perhaps following Plutarch, St. Augustine went as far as to assign the archetype of the comet-planet Venus, Athena, to the Moon. As for Minerva (Athena), they have given her the responsibility for the arts of mankind; but they have not found her a star to be her habitation, and so they have identified her with the upper region of the ether, or even with the Moon. We can do without this sort of help. This is as unlikely an assignment as any identification can get in mythology and I join Peter James in dismissing it. But James' adamancy on the balance of the equation remains to be dissolved. It lets him turn around and accept Augustine's comment that Aphrodite won the Judgment of Paris about which goddess should represent Venus (the golden apple), "but as usual Venus wins. For the overwhelming majority give the star to Venus." [24] Is it not once more likely that Aphrodite won the star of Venus, that is, the planet that attended the Aphrodisian Moon? The Greeks, he insists, regularly applied the name Aphrodite to the planet Venus, and addressed prayers to that body as the planet associated with her. They could not really be thinking of the Moon in all of this. If Velikovsky and de Grazia are right, then Lucian of Samosata, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Plotinus, Diordorus Siculus, Manetho, Sappho, Bion, the Emperor Julian, Nonnus, ... and ... the ancient Greeks were all wrong. My list of debatable sources here is perhaps as long and may be longer. Several of the star witnesses are contradictory and can be controverted. Augustine mentions two groups, one awarding planet Venus to the goddess Venus, another insisting also that Venus is the Moon. Other witnesses can be called: where are Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch, Cicero, Hyginus, Augustine, Proclus? And where are the modern encyclopedists? They may do no worse, or better : James of course knows them well; I have already joined him in discussing Plutarch and Augustine. But to take another example, Hesiod is the earliest source extant to refer to the transformation of Phaeton, felled by Zeus for threatening the destruction of Earth, into a star. Hesiod writes of "Phaeton, a man like the gods, whom... laughter-loving Aphrodite seized and caught up and made a keeper of her shrine by night, a divine spirit" (987ff). Clearly in line with what we are saying the proto-planet Venus was said to be captured upon her fall from the skies by Moon-Aphrodite and thereafter employed as her divine priest. In a second example, I cannot understand why Sappho is forced to take sides. She sings: And may Hesperus lead thee full willingly to the place where thou shalt marvel at the silver-throned Lady of Wedlock. Here, clearly, planet- Venus is performing as the acolyte of the Moon. Nor, to take another instance, is Bion less than a Moonie. The pastoral poet addresses the Evening star, which art the Golden light of the lovely Child of The Foam, which are the holy Jewel of the blue night. Here again we are permitted to regard the Moon as lovely Child of the Foam, Aphrodite, whose acolyte is the Evening Star. I suggest that the passage and the poet are ambiguous, and would not rely upon it for support or denial in the argument. The ancient source Nonnus speaks of an astrologer who "looked especially for Ares and spied the wife robber over the sunset house along with the evening star of the Cyprian." Is the evening star "the Cyprian" or "of the Cyprian;" if "of the Cyprian" then the evening star is the planet Venus and the Cyprian is the Moon, whether present or absent. The modern source Jean Richer (G‚ographie Sacr‚e du Monde Grec) speaks of "... Cythere, whose Venus was foremost a lunar goddess." On the other hand, Cicero is often confused, too. Cicero writes that "Diana they identify as the moon... while the name Luna is derived from Lucere, 'to shine; '" and he says that Diana to the Greeks is Lucifera (the Light-Bearer) and is one of the seven planets or wanderers. Diana is generally involved with the Moon, it is agreed, and with menstruation and childbirth, hence the Greeks were making an erroneous transfer unless they carry the Moon as a wanderer and planet which in fact was often done; so Lucifera could be the Moon as well as the planet Venus of the morning. I prefer to renounce the lunar argument here, and to let go of Cicero, rather than to assert it as evidence. The best that can be said is that Lucifera is a feminine brightness that can be ascribed to the Moon as well as to its primary reference, the Morning Star. James would cease to "strenuously deny that Aphrodite had anything to do with the Moon," perhaps, if he were to realize how large a contribution his own work has made, first, to my being able to reinforce the Moon identification of Aphrodite and, secondly, to arrive at my final theory on the matter, namely that the two bodies - Moon and planet - interacted physically, became confused in history and myth in certain regards (though not in many others) and were to be found, in the end, to have played now one role and then another. I have shown that their alternation of roles occurred elsewhere; I would only insist that Aphrodite is quite capable of the lunar role I assign to her (and believe that subconsciously the Greeks assigned to her) in the Love Song of Demodocus in Book VIII of the Odyssey of Homer. Peter James proposes another theory - or sub - theory - on the issue, suggesting that a lunar Aphrodite can be totally excluded from consideration if only we imagine that warlike Athena was early granted the Morning Star (Phosphoros) while peaceful Aphrodite was given the Evening Star (Hesperos); thus both goddesses might be accounted for and the Moon excluded. No less an authority than Kugler can be called on to state James' position on the double nature of Ishtar, hence planet Venus, in his work, Sibyllinischer Sternkampf und Phaethon (1927, p. 14) he says of the Babylonian Ishtar: "Venus-morning star there represented Ishtar-Kakkabe, 'Ishtar of the Star', and is thought of as 'masculine' - in distinct contrast to Venus-evening star, the Belit-ile, 'Queen of the Gods, ' the goddess of love and motherhood." In examining a rock relief of the Hittite pantheon, James discovered that the Venusian planet Shaushga held a double identity and preceded the Moon god on the one side and the Sun god on the other. She also wore wings. She must be here the planet in its morning and evening aspects [25] . This indicates a young (Velikovskian) age, not an old (Jamesian) age of the rocks, if one believes that the planet did not settle into its morning-evening routine until the period of the Love Affair. Still, one should acknowledge that the double goddess and the Moon are distinctly different. Steven Langdon, another authority, has it that the morning star was called in Babylonia "the male Venus" and the evening star the "female Venus", with Ishtar, of course, as the word for Venus; there is "Ishtar of Agade" and "Ishtar of Anech", for morning and evening manifestations of the planet. We can go so far as to say that Athena was Venus in her cometary phase, ending in her status as the morning star during the early years of the new status of the morning star. We cannot well imagine the second because of definite statements associating Hesperos with Moon-Aphrodite. We accept, too, that Lucifer was planet-Venus and the morning-star. Such were Ishtar and Astarte, and other gods. At the same time, although the Aphrodite of the morning was not the Aphrodite of the night, the morning-planet-Aphrodite was working her way into many of the traits of the night-moon-Aphrodite, so that goddesses of the morning star could ultimately possess traits genetically possessed by the Moon goddess - lovingness, peacefulness, sexuality, Queen of Heaven. S. A., Bedini, too, sees this process as occurring - that Ishtar, for instance, guaranteed contract among men together with the Moon God Sin. She was goddess of love, fertility and war. She took qualities from the Moon with her when she moved fully to occupy the morning and evening stars, Venus [26] . Also, long after and for many centuries of the present era, many Arabs worshiped the morning star as both Lucifer and Aphrodite, never mind the evening star. The scum of the salty foaming sea, held in revulsion by Egyptians, was again two foams, the original Aphrodite-Moon foam of the seed of Ouranos, and the later Aphrodite-Typhon foam transferred from the mid-second millennium. The latter foam came about, the Egyptians thought, from the falling of Typhon (the cometary tail of proto-Venus) into the sea (after Zeus had struck him with a thunderbolt, according to the Greeks), this according to Plutarch. There are in sum numerous reasons to explain the confusion, to assign the name to the planet, and to retain it for the Moon for all the purposes that we have in mind here. {S : HOW TO NAME A PLANET?} HOW TO NAME A PLANET? We know that the Moon had names - Selene, Luna, Sin, etc. - which an astronomer or educated layman could apply, whether in Greek or Latin; but the planet Phosphoros and Hesperos had only this double name, implying two distinct bodies, and the Greek intellectual reformers needed a name for the planet that would denote a single entity, a point that they were trying to get across to their public. They could not and would not take away Moon's name and affix it to a planet. But Aphrodite had long since left the Moon in a conscious sense though she was stubbornly, obsessively the Moon in the subconscious. The literal minds - such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Diodorus, Manetho, Pliny and Cicero were less (or differently) imprisoned by their subconscious: "Let the planet be called Aphrodite, after the famous goddess." Today we name a new planet Neptune or Pluto; such is astronomical tradition of naming; it can be false to history, unless saved by subconscious memory. Aphrodite was still Aphrodite in a host of connotations, memories and expectations - and she had a wandering star named for her. All the other planets had names of gods, new names, though the names had long traditions behind them - Zeus, Kronos, Ares, Hermes. Now the Romans too would call them Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury. As for the Moon, it already had names enough. But what did the Greeks call the planet before it received its new name? It is said Phosphorus-Hesperus. What was its name when, as our scheme calls for, it was raging through the heavens as a new blazing comet? Perhaps then it was called Phaeton, Typhon, Pallas, Baal, El, the Archangel, or "Daughter of Zeus," or "Athena," or perhaps "She" and then "He," or "The Thing," "It," or why not "the God." Hundred of appellations can be found for it around the globe. What did the Mycenaeans call the planet? No one yet knows. Under such conditions, it would be foolish to be hooked by a name assignment, to neglect natural and human history, and to become illogical in the face of other types of evidence, especially when we are fairly confident that the name was deliberately imposed upon the planetary body by highly sublimated intellectuals. Does this mean that the Greeks and Romans then stopped upon applying he word, and never added their prior traits of goddess Aphrodite to the planet? No. As soon as an object is called by a name with a history, the history begins to flow onto the name. Further all that was previously attached to the object continues with it. Suppose nowadays we were to decide that the asteroidal belt, whose materials are being discovered in every greater detail, had to be called by a name, and hence called it the "Belt of Mars." Suppose that subsequently some traits of the ancient god were evidenced in the asteroidal belt and some students decided to call it "the Belt of Apollo." This does not make Apollo out of Mars, or vice versa. It brings confusion. Soon the word "belt" would be dropped, and just the names would be used. The "Mars Program" and the "Apollo Program" would be erroneously associated with the planets. After a century or so, only some priests of NASA would be able to explain the history, and, if NASA were dissolved, practically no one would know the story. And, after a sky-war in which civilizations were shocked and reduced to subsistence level, only a cultist now and then would revive the terms. Where would truth exist under such circumstances? Probably where truth exists under present circumstances concerning the ancient history of Venus and the Moon. In the case of the planet Aphrodite-Venus, some of what was Aphrodite in the collective mind attached itself to the new Aphrodite. Furthermore, some that was in Astarte, Ishtar, Isis, and a dozen other Eastern relatives, began to be transferred over to the name Aphrodite. In the end, the goddess Aphrodite changed. She was now two psychic entities, Siamese twins, in the categories of the mind. Concurrently, the gods that have lent their qualities to the new member of the planet-family, borrow her qualities of old; they take on the history and rights of the Moon. This reverse borrowing results in dubious but understandable claims that Ishtar is the Moon, Astarte is the Moon, even Athene is the Moon (Plutarch, Bedini, etc.). The confusion that must always occur in the association of great gods with natural objects and events here was compounded and intensified by the transference of Aphrodite to an actually antagonistic planet. We must reckon, too, that a new god may be given an older name in order that humans may prove to the god that "we knew all along who you were, even if it seemed not so. We did not have to await your coming to destroy us before knowing of your eternal being." (" Therefore, planet Venus, cease and desist from your threats to the Earth and Moon.") On one occasion, depending upon prior conditions such as the background of the subject, the subject's felt needs, and the information and setting provided the subject, the god who appears is a selection of one set of divine expectations. On another occasion, the god who appears may be different. In God's Fire, I explain how impossible is true monotheism, and that even Moses was in a realistic psychological sense a polytheist. The same reasoning may be applied here, where Aphrodite is now one god and now another. It is unscientific and pedantic to charge that a name is all that there is to a complex and subtle mental operation. After the name Aphrodite is given to the planet, the Greeks began revising their religious history. Planetary conjunctions of Venus and Mars were of course known. So now Lucian of Samosata could claim that it was the juncture of Aphrodite and Ares that creates the poetry of Homer, and probably means by her the planet and not the Moon. So Eratosthenes and others. But this is not a proof of what Homer meant or, regardless of what Homer meant, that Aphrodite was not the Moon in the reality behind the poem and psychically in those who heard the Song of Demodocus chanted. Especially are these reservations proper if Athena is conceded to stand for the comet Venus, whence it may be truly said that the war is between planet Venus and planet Mars, but certainly, since Aphrodite and Ares were allies, the epics of Homer could never have been plotted on the liaison or juncture of Ares and Athena. So insistent are the ancient claims of the classical age that the same planet was at a late time discovered to be not two but one, and therefore given a name, that of Aphrodite, that we must believe so and allow that in the mind of Homer and Demodocus, Aphrodite did not posses that planet, except as the Moon. Several generations had lived and died between the last Battle of the Gods and the willful emplacement of the name of Aphrodite upon the planet. By the time of Plato only vague memories stirred of the original behavior of this doubly duplicitous body and of its dramatic roles in the skies of times past. Revivals occur. Suhr writes that "the association of Aphrodite with clouds, the moon, spinning and fertility was more popular in Greece after Alexander had opened up the channels for a free exchange of ideas with the East than before, but this we may consider a revival; Aphrodite was known and worshiped, even in Athens, in very early times." There is no suggestion that Aphrodite of the Love Affair is trespassing upon the identity of Ishtar. Ishtar is goddess of the morning star and also of the evening star in the usage of a removed culture. Aphrodite of the Greeks is made to be the goddess standing behind Phosphorus and Hesperus and their duality. Meanwhile she remains goddess of the Moon. Plato mentions a Syrian law-giver as the source of the name. But after considering this surprising suggestion for some time, I think now that Plato may have been of the opinion that a Syrian lawgiver with the advice of the court astronomers gave to the planet Venus the name of Ishtar or Astarte or another such name. In following this learned and authoritative source, the Greeks applied the old name Aphrodite to the planet. Once to the Europeans, the Western hemisphere had no names - or rather, numerous names. A geographer published a map drawn by an Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. It was the map of Amerigo, describing a vast land. What was the land called? Not the "country of Amerigo" but, eventually "Amerigo," Latin masculine Americus, for a feminine country becomes "America." {S : THE ROMAN VENUS} THE ROMAN VENUS We ought not settle the Aphrodite identity without a parallel investigation of the word "Venus." Malcolm Lowery conducted appropriate etymological research. Its root, he discovered, contained the senses of seek, desire, want, wish, and winsome, while its relative venire (to come) also relates to the same root, that includes the word "to go" in Greek. Velilovsky follows Cicero's idea that "Venus" meant "the goddess who comes to all things" and extended it to mean "newly come" to fit his theory. Lowery effectively discusses Velikovsky's speculation and limits Cicero to a possibly very old truth about the word, a truth established long before the time when the goddess would have been attached to the planet Venus. An implication here is that the goddess called Venus may earlier have been attached to a conception of a goddess like Aphrodite, even lunar, before the planet Venus was identified. Lowery may err in his innuendo that the Roman Venus was "unlike the Greek Aphrodite, whose name, meaning 'foam-born, ' was subsequently applied to the human activity of which she served as patron, namely love-making. born in and from sperm." If the modern, vernacular of the English-speaking world uses the word "come" to designate an orgasm, there is reason to suppose that the less sexually restrained ancient Greeks and Romans could employ the same word in their goddess of coming and thus allow to the Latin word its obvious root meaning. Lowery misunderstood his own contradiction, for he writes that "the layman may find the range of meaning here attributed to one root something of an obstacle to acceptance of this reconstruction: achievement, supposition, habit and delight are, after all, rather a distance from seeking or desiring." Rather a small distance, we should say. And, once again, we see an old goddess at work, a lunar goddess, a pre-planet-Venus goddess at work, an Aphrodite of the Love Song of Demodocus. Some etymologists say that the word "Venus" is of an unknown Italian origin but crept out of fertility and bucolic functions onto the skies, where it may have become a mistress of heaven but ultimately became the planet Venus, when the Greeks named their planet Aphrodite. The Greeks have no letter "V". The letter "B" is used instead. The intermediate Greek- English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott offers only two words beginning with "ben." One is "benthos," poetical for "bathos," meaning the "depth of the sea." This is not too removed from the lunar role, for the Moon rules the night and the night seas, and was born from the sea. The second meaning is "Bendis" which is a name of the Thracian Artemis, found in Lucian. This is more suggestive to us. For if Aeneas and the Trojans of Northwest Anatolia brought their gods with them, Bendis may have been among them; Thrace is not far away. And if Bendis is Artemis; and Artemis, we know, is the Moon; and if Bendis is a progenitor of Venus, then Venus, too, is lunar, and there is good reason to tie her to Aphrodite as Venus. The faithful Aeneas, on this way to found settlements in Latium, that later spread to Rome, may well have founded a town in Thrace, as he did Aphrodisia in the Southeastern Peloponnesus (Gulf of Boiai) and other settlements elsewhere. This shows not only how disorganized and turbulent were the eighth-seventh century decades of Mars-Ares, but also how Aphrodite may have come to Italy, there to become identified with Venus, who thereafter came to be identified with the later Jovian Aphrodite, which came then to be connected, in the wake of Greek insistence, with planet-Venus. We note, however, that the Aphrodite of Aeneas was she of the Iliad and Odyssey, and of the Love Affair, enemy of the Athena-Venus-Aphrodite goddess therefore and holding to the Moon in history and traits except that now her name superficially will be taken over almost entirely by the planet Venus. Or, as some believe, Venus may have come out of the Etruscan Pantheon, whence she may too have arrived as Bendis, for we think that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, as we shall argue later; further the island of Lemnos between Troy and Thrace contains Etruscan inscriptions, and, as we develop the argument, is significantly connected with Hephaestus, a principal character of the Love Affair. Aeneas was a son of Venus, that is, Aphrodite, and Romulus a son of Mars. Julius Caesar claimed the same descent. If we did not believe that substantive connections may have existed between Aphrodite and the Moon, we should not be so concerned with demonstrating the linguistic associations. In our case, the allegation that Aphrodite was not thought to represent the Moon to the audience of Demodocus is tantamount to refusing much of the theory of this book. It is not the same as asking whether the Venus of Willendorf is really the planet Venus, or Aphrodite, or whatever; this is a conventional term invented for a class of small, crude prehistoric stone sculptures of obese females, and is little else than a playfully applied name, which we hope, will not throw our descendants into confusion a thousand years from now. Those going before Plato knew Aphrodite as a goddess, and probably as a lunar figure, although this latter may have become subconscious. "A new ferment was introduced by the first knowledge appearing with Plato of the oriental significance of Aphrodite as a star." [27] It would seem that the Greeks, especially the astrologers among them, were now to call Hesperus and Phosphorus the stars of Aphrodite, and were thereafter to live with two sets of symbols and references intermingling and causing confusion. There were enough similarities to permit the duplicity to endure to our day. Both were "foam-born." Further, each in her own way was "One who wanders over the foam," (Aphr- Oditi). Both were strongly female, even while male on occasion. Both were beautiful, in their own way. Often they traveled the night skies together. Whether referring to the planet or the satellite, both could be "of Aphrodite." Both might be called the "Queen of Heaven." Both had been heavily involved with Mars-Ares, and in destructive behavior with regards to Earth. Both were in the Olympian family and council of gods, one as Moon-Aphrodite, the other as Athena-Aphrodite, but who was to say or needed to say, after Hesiod's time, which heavenly body the two goddesses possessed? On the other hand, each goddess - call one of the Moon and the other of planet-Venus - owned peculiar traits that never to be reconciled or assimilated one to the other. The possibility that "foam-born" could be rationalized for the birth of the Planet- Venus-Aphrodite should not obscure the importance of this difference. Being foam-born from the Uranus incident means from the seed in the genital and blood foam, not a mere roughing of the waters that would occur with the passage of cometary-Aphrodite. Another important distinction was occupational. Athena-Minerva-Ishtar-( Aphrodite) never lost her military and craftsman-like qualities. Greek and Roman warriors marched into battle led by these but not by Aphrodite. Why not Aphrodite, if she were among them? On the other hand, Aphrodite-Moon never lost her connection with the motions of the spinning complex in the domestic occupation that emulated the motions of the universe. Yet another kind of difference persisted in the realm of love. Aphrodite-Moon generally portrayed what today's vernacular would call "straight" sexuality, while Aphrodite- Ishtar-Athena would be assigned to "kinky" sex. The former was the marrying type, the latter an independent and ambiguous lover. Eros helped Aphrodite-Moon, and Suhr has placed this child-god in the closest association with her; he helps her spin and weave to attract "straight" lovers. It is possible that Eros, though as old as Moon- Aphrodite, merged with Hesperus, the Evening Star, and carries this association as well. Eros certainly resembles the later cherubs that float around the Mother of God in Roman Catholic paintings. The stimulation of fertility belongs to Ishtar-types as well as to Moon-Aphrodite, yet not so much so, and this must be a quantitative judgement for the moment. Virginity is a technical word and should not be confounded with the idea of concupiscence. But consider that Athena-Ishtar is celebrated for her virginity and in one startling portrait is carrying her babies in a basket. "Not only was she never in woman's womb," wrote Helene Deutsch, "but she herself apparently had no womb, for when she carried children, it was in a basket." [28] Such marsupial behavior is hardly the symbol of fertility for womankind. Planetary Aphrodite is semper parata like the U. S. Marines. Granted that planet-Aphrodite or Venus was once a comet that lost its tail, then the aura of sexual "kinkiness" around Athena-Ishtar-Aphrodite makes sense: bisexuality, unisexuality, technical virginity, androgyny, vestal virgins, castration - these cluster around the cometary Aphrodite and relate to the phallicized comet that loses its male organ in a sky-conflict and becomes a special type of female. She is not sexually stimulating, at least not to a conventional male. Moon-Aphrodite is more languid, less aggressive, usually "there when you need or want her." Athena and her planetary counterparts are artists appearing one moment here, the next moment gone. The materials assembled here help us to understand that the nations at some point were observers of a great change in the sky, an implantation upon the human vision: a single body of double aspect and less terror. A cometary Venus was greatly feared in the period 1500 to 700 B. C. and the Moon god had been heavily worshiped long before then. We will suppose, therefore, a competition of these two gods, female, for a long time before the disastrous natural events of the Eighth and Seventh centuries that involved Mars. By the process that might be called divine succession, the god of cometary Venus was the more terrible in this period of 700 year and took over a number of traits and much of the obeisance given previously to the Moon goddess. The Shaushga, Astarte, Annana, Anat, Minerva, Ishtaroth, Ishtar, Isis, and Aphrodite figures would have become largely proto-planet Venus in their connotations, orientation, and imagery. The Aphrodite idea would have moved from lunar to cometary, carrying a conglomerate of old and new traits. When, however, the catastrophes of the Martians age reduced and confounded the pre- existing civilizations - Mycenaean, Trojan, Near-Eastern - a readjustment of the Pantheon had to occur. New relationships had to be invented within the family structure of the gods. Mars, for one, had to be granted a larger role. Proto-planet Venus was at a new peak of activity, but was apparently tamed by the god of Mars. When the disasters subsided, the skies had to be resurveyed; a new astronomy occurred. After some decades, astronomers discovered, first, that two new bodies existed, a Morning Star and an Evening Star. The former was quickly re-identified as old cometary Venus, on a new regular and unthreatening orbit. Soon thereafter the Evening Star was declared to be the same planet-star. Then came the fateful attachment of the old names, once ambiguous and now still ambiguous, to the planet in both of its manifestations. Goddess Aphrodite once more became strongly planet Venus, with lunar attributes. With the passage of time, Aphrodite became a more ambiguous figure, because peace had settled upon the heavens; she was once again lunar, a peaceful spinner, a sensual lover. To some, psychically, she was the planet Venus; to others she was the Moon and the planet was "of Aphrodite the Moon;" to others she was the god of night and the lunar heavenly spaces. So she was a complex "herself," the goddess, rather like the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which, they say, was neither "holy" nor "Roman", but he could act either way on occasion. After all of this complicated research and reasoning, it is hard to recall ourselves to the present issue and to its vulgar denouement. The question is still, "How did the Phaeacian sailors, women, courtiers, adolescents and priests imagine the heroine of Demodocus' Love Affair?" As in a modern public opinion poll, the gravest questions of world concern have to be reduced to extremely simple questions. Here our respondents (in Phaeacia, Naxos, Athens, or Syracuse of about 650 B. C. before the Scientific Revolution of Thales et al.) are to be interrogated, with (I think) the following results: "There are those who say that Aphrodite stands for the Moon (Selene)?" Do you (indicate the response closest to your opinion): agree-15%; maybe-25%, disagree-10%; no opinion or don't know-50%. Next, of those (10%) who disagreed, the question is asked: "Who, then, does Aphrodite stand for?" Athena-3%; Hera-5%; Hesperus-32% Phosphorus-10%, No opinion or don't know - 50%. That is, I would estimate that even on the conscious level, there is a tendency to tie Aphrodite to the Moon. The high level of unconcern and ignorance as to the question would signify that the Love Affair is making no demands of ordinary people to extract subconscious materials and bring them into consciousness. Both this figure and the 25% of "maybe's" would indicate that many persons mixed up Aphrodite with the Moon, Athena, Artemis, Hera, et al. I would maintain that on the subconscious level, the identification with the Moon would be much more common and intense. I have tried to describe earlier what the subconscious contained, and will try to express this subconscious mood in a later chapter. It does not matter that elsewhere and at other times and among other people, the name Aphrodite signifies the planet Venus. Indeed we have been pleased to contribute to an understanding of her plural personality and worship. On the basis of this chapter and of other congruencies and support found throughout our work, we conclude that for the purposes of this book and in the scene of the Love Affair Aphrodite acts the role of the Moon and is so understood by the audience. Aphrodite represents the Moon in the drama and, insofar as the drama represents a memory, then Aphrodite acts out this memory. {S : Notes (Chapter 8: The Two Faces of Love)} Notes (Chapter 8: The Two Faces of Love) 1. Appendix to Herodotus, Histories, Bk III. 2. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis, Cambridge, Eng. 1921, reprinted IIyde Park, N. Y. : University Books, 1962, p. 176. 3. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 77. 4. Isis and Osiris, Lxix. 5. Plat. Kraty. 1-116. 6. Hesiod, Theogony, 196. 7. Using the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 7th ed, 1968. 8. Etym., Symbol. Mythol. W”rterbuch, 1844, reference kindly supplied by Dr. Zvi Rix. 9. J. Ziegler, The Vedas pp. 233-4 (1983, unpubl. mss) 10. A Historical Review of the Indian Astronomy Part I "The Ancient Astronomy" (1825; reprinted 1970, Osnabrck: Biblio Verlag). 11. A. M. Paterson, "Giordano Bruno's View on the Earth without a Moon," Pens‚e, (winter, 1973), pp. 46-7; I. Velikovsky, "Earth without a Moon," Ibid., p. 26. Both writers, at least then, believed that the Moon was recently captured. The present author decided upon the Earth-fission model in the years that followed, cf. Chaos and Creation, Lately Tortured Earth, and was supported by Earl R. Milton, cf. Solaria Binaria. 12. Graves, I, 49. We disagree that Ishtar was the Moon, at least finally, for she is clearly Athena and Planed Venus, cf. Velikovsky. Further, on Aphrodite as the Moon, see the conclusion of this chapter. 13. Graves, I, 71. Unity with the goddess excited anxiety over violating the incest taboo and brings on sacrifice of kings and priests. "As Goddess of Death-in-Life, Aphrodite earned many titles which seem inconsistent with her beauty and complaisance" - Melaenis (black one), Scotia (dark one), Androphonos (man-slaver), and Epitymbria (of the tombs). At Cyprus she would sometimes wear a beard, and was also portrayed as "bearded and having the male member, but clad in a female dress and holding a sceptre," 1 George Hill, A History of Cyprus (Cambridge: University Press, 1972), Vol. I, 79-80, citing Macrobius (Sat. III, 8) and Fragmenta Historica Graecorum (1878-85), Vol. I, p. 386. 14. Graves I, 73. When Plato (Epinomis, lines 99-101) gave the name Aphrodite to the planet that we call Venus, he said that he was using the name of "a Syrian lawgiver" and in the next statement uses the pronoun "him" in referring back to it. He could mean the "authority" or "in the name of" the Syrian. 15. Personal letter to the author from Dr. Z. Rix. 16. Sophie Lunais, Les Auteurs Latins -Recherche sur la Lune, I, Brill: Leiden, 1979,99. 17. Graves, I, p. 18. I. 18. Graves, I, p. 12. 19. New York: Exposition Press, 1958, Foreword by Rhys Carpenter. 20. New York: Helios Press, 1969. 21. Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Part II : 3. 22. Ibid., ch. 4. 23. See Harrison, op. cit., p. 87, who finds "Pallas" in the "Palladium." 24. Citing The City of God, VII: 15. 25. Op. cit., I : 2, pp 3-4. 26. S. A. Bedini, p. 23, in Bedini, Werner von Braun, and F. L. Whipple, Moon: Man's Greatest Adventure (New York: Abrams, n. d., ca. 1970). 27. Pauly-Wissowa, p. 2772. 28. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo, New York: Int'I U. Press, 1969. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 9: } {T THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER NINE THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY In the Iliad, Aphrodite leads her wounded lover Ares off the field of battle after he is pierced by the spear of warlike Athena-Venus, and in so doing is herself struck. The poets and historians of ancient times may have known more than we do of disasters among the planets, "That the Moon was attacked and scarred by the comet Venus was known to the Greeks and described graphically by Nonnus." So writes Peter James, and we quote the fine passage from this historian of late ancient times, Nonnus: "Many a time he (Typhon) took a bull at rest from his rustic plowtree and shook him with a threatening hand, bellow as he would, then shot him against the Moon like another moon, and stayed her course, then rushed hissing against the goddess, checking with the bridle her bulls' white yoke-straps, while he poured out the mortal whistle of a poison spitting viper." But Titan Mene would not yield to the attack. Battling against the Giant's heads, like- horned to hers, she carved many a scar on the shining orb of her bull's horn; and Selene's radiant cattle bellowed amazed at the gaping chasm of Typhon's throat." [1] The fable bespeaks cosmic cyclones, where earthly and celestial effects are simultaneously visible and apparently connected by an uncontrolled raging dragon-god. {S : THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS} THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS The Moon, as a round rock in the sky, was a manifestation of the Goddess Aphrodite. What happened to it happened to her and what happened to her, in many cases, happened to it. We turn, therefore, to geology and astrophysics and ask what, if anything, happened to the Moon in the time of Homer. The Moon is old, as all matter and energy may be said to be old - even infinitely old if one considers that "matter" and "energy" are convertible events and that neither can become space or non-being. That is not a point to be disputed. The question is whether the Moon, as a chemical agglomerate, pursued its present set of motions at the time of which Homer wrote. Moreover, was its chemistry the same after that time as it was before? The moon is enveloped by a crust of igneous anorthosite to the depth of 35 kilometers, "which must have resulted from melted rock of at least twice that depth." [2] Lunar rocks were discovered to have undergone heating and bubbling, probably more recently. A large part of the soil consisted of tiny glass spheres, probably resulting from the evaporation of boiled lunar rock that collapsed back upon condensation in the cold. Some trace of organic, aromatic hydrocarbons were found in lunar sample returned by the astronauts of Apollo XI. Carbide rocks were found on the lunar surface. Rocks of the moon also revealed magnetic properties, a remanent magnetism that could not have been implanted by the moon's own weak magnetic field and certainly not at any time since the rocks solidified from a molten or gaseous state. The equipment implanted on the moon by astronauts of Apollo XII returned to its monitors on earth a record of moonquakes, averaging one a day. Lunar rocks were found to be rich in argon and neon; the larger the ratio of surface to mass, that is, the smaller the rock particle, the more of these gases was contained in it, leading to the conclusion that the source of the gases was external. Some unusually radioactive "hot spots" were observed. It thus appears likely that the Moon experienced devastating events within a period of time into which the Love Affair might have fallen. Conventional theorists of lunar history have been relieved of a number of expectations, founded on the belief in a three to four billion years old object that, since then, "has been a remarkably quiet body suffering only the occasional large meteorite impact. Subsequent modification of the surface features has been mainly erosion due to the impact of small meteorites, cosmic rays, and particles from the sun. This is in great contrast with the earth's history which has been one of continued volcanic and mountain-building activity up to the present day." [3] {S : RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS} RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS Nowadays, such statements are not to be heard. It is difficult to conceive how such could even have been written in 1972 in view of the lunar quakes and the other discoveries recited two paragraphs above. But the author of the quotation, Derek York, was holding fast to what others were telling him about the general situation and was supporting his faith by work that he had been hired as a specialist to do: radioactive clockwork. He used three clocks: the uranium-lead, the rubidium-strontium, and the potassium-argon methods of determining the ages of rock samples picked up and returned to Earth by the astronauts. York offered, against Velikovsky's proposition of a recently molten lunar surface, alternative explanations based on the fact that all three tests showed the lunar surface to have been last molten 3.6 billion years ago at least. In each case, a determination of the amount of the first chemical element that radioactively decayed into the second element was used to estimate age, since physicists believe that we know the rate of such transmutation and can rely on its constancy over all conceivable time spans. York therefore argued that either (a) this part of Velikovsky's thesis is wrong. (b) Velikovsky is right but the four Apollo landings and the Soviet Luna 16 landings were in areas which escaped the 'catastrophes' referred to by Velikovsky. (c) There is something seriously wrong with the radioactive clocks or our reading of them. In reply, Velikovsky cited two additional "commonsense" tests in his favor. Geologist examining the samples of Apollo XI recorded "the extremely fresh appearance of the interior of all crystalline rocks, in spite of their microfractures and high potassium- argon age." [4] Moreover, noting a widespread glazing of the lunar surface, T. Gold, writing in Science had conjectured upon "a giant solar outburst in geologically recent times" that glazed lunar surfaces less than 30,000 years ago." [5] Velikovsky mentioned here yet another prediction of his, earlier in time, that gained in validity when the Apollo 15 team discovered that the outflow of heat below the surface was almost three times greater than expected by those who believed that the moon originated gaseous and then became molten: those who thought the moon had always been thoroughly cold could make nothing of this internal heat at all. Specifically with regard to the challenge of the tests, Velikovsky argued that lunar rocks would be argon-rich (and therefore seem very old) because they would have captured, while molten, some of the argon of the atmosphere of Mars. (In 1974, Russian reports spoke of a Martian atmosphere of argon in the 10's of percent.) [6] As for the reading of the uranium-lead test, the explorers had apparently sampled rocks not only poor in lead but in all volatile elements: bismuth, cadmium, thallium, indium, etc. He surmised, therefore, that the volatile elements had escaped their rock housings in a period of high heat and melting, such as the episode in Homer that occupies our attention. The third radioactive clock appears to be the most absurd of the three, since rubidium vaporizes and migrates from its housing with strontium even under the conditions of present-day temperatures of the lunar day (+ 150 degrees Celsius) and the continuous bombardment of surface rocks by hydrogen ions from the solar wind. A period of electrically and gravitationally induced heating such as occurred in the Love Affair would have greatly reduced the rubidium present in the tested rocks. Velikovsky and Wright [7] are not alone in their criticism of these tests. We cannot close these brief passages without referring to the brilliant critique offered of these and other clocks by Melvin Cook in his book, Prehistory and Earth Models 1966. In brief, what York regarded as impossible was true. "There is something seriously wrong with the radioactive clocks..." [8] The one test that Velikovsky asked for was to determine the degree of thermoluminescence of lunar surface cores extracted at about three feet of depth to avoid contamination of the test by the effects of normal solar heat. The more the time that passes after a heat-up of over 150 degrees Celsius, the more luminescence is stored and given off in a laboratory re-heating. When the tests were performed on cores gathered by Apollo XII between 4 and 13 centimeters underground, it showed "anomalies resulting from disturbances "10,000 years ago." Such disturbances had to be thermal, that is, events of great heat upon the moon. Velikovsky thought that increased radioactivity may have promoted a quick-aging effect on even this test and suggests sampling from sites that are least radioactive. We return now to the problem of the remanent magnetism in the rock samples brought back from all Apollo missions. Velikovsky's theory of the Mars-Moon encounters required that such fossil magnetism be traceable in the rocks, and it was found. Robert Treat has written the history of the affair, from which we quote: Scientific deliberations grew in intensity after the third (Apollo IV), and the fourth (Apollo XV) missions testified to the bewilderment of astrophysicists. It transpired that sometime in the past the moon must have been heated in the presence of a strong magnetic field. The best guess was: 'It is a thermoremanent magnetism acquired when the specimen cooled in the presence of a magnetic field. ' Other possibilities were weighted. Was the inducing field due to a close approach of the moon to the earth? "In this model the hard remanence suggests a distance of closest approach of 2 to 3 earth radii," But this is 'an uncomfortable proximity to the Roche limit.... ' The moon would have been broken into pieces if it ever approached the earth so closely. Another team of scientists found that the magnetization "shows a well defined curie temperature at 775 degrees Celsius": the lunar surface must have been heated above this temperature in the presence of a magnetic field and must have cooled off thereafter [9] . Surface marring, "hot spots" of radioactivity, high past heat, and encounter with another large celestial body spell devastation. Fresh-looking rock, high thermoluminescence levels, "hot spots" seismic movement, and below surface heat spell recency. The "recency" suggested by our interpretation of the explorations of the moon is "under 10,000 years." The world-wide historical and legendary record strongly indicates about 2700 years. There is good reason, therefore, after having passed the 10,000 year barrier, to proceed without hesitation to the 2700-year point. {S : THE RILLES OF MOON} THE RILLES OF MOON The recent devastation of the Moon is the subject of an analysis also by Ralph Juergens [10] . He focused especially upon its hundreds of wavy rilles, its canyons and its craters. The craters are sites of explosions. Some, like Aristarchus, are still warm. The rilles cleave the surface and often seem to feed into the craters, going up-ground to do so with whatever they might once have carried. The craters seem to have exploded after the rilles reached them, since debris obscures the ends of the rilles. Juergens examinations of the rilles shows that they cannot have been produced by water erosion; they flow uphill and have no deltas. Nor can they have been produced from the collapse of underground tubes that once carried lava; for the margins of the rilles reveal upturned strata and empty bottoms; Nor can gas explosions have created the rilles, for they are exceedingly tortuous; and they are not vented holes. Only electrical currents, declares Juergens, could produce the jagged trenches. The currents erupt, heat up the land and excavate it, and cause secondary melting in the rille valleys. They move as streamers upwards. A return stroke explodes the ground and creates a crater. What caused the rilles to erupt and the craters to burst? On the basis of his general theory of the electrical nature of the solar system, to be explained later, Juergens posits that Mars and Earth-Moon each held (and hold) massive electrical charges of negative valence. These charges, on the close approach of the bodies, repel each other. But if the bodies are approaching with great momentum, the repulsion is not sufficient to divert them entirely. The charges are driven to accommodate. By "accommodation" is meant that, if there is any possibility of a reversal of charges on one or both bodies, the negative electrons will "flee" from each other. Assuming that Mars, with an atmosphere, and a larger surface, more readily permitted its electrons to flee to regions far removed from the nearest points of contact, positive ions would congregate and set up an anode-cathode relationship, that is, a situation matured for an exchange of thunderbolts. The rilles ditches erupted by a rapidly moving and charge-accumulating current. Craters are the spots where the exchange of opposite charges, attracted for discharge, occurred, usually at prominences of the two bodies. A map of the major rilles of the moon shows a concentration of them in the general area of the great crater, Aristarchus. Emanations of radon-222, whose parent element is radium-226, were detected from Aristarchus. The rays are several times more intense there than in areas farther removed, indicating a local source. Radium 226 isotopes decay rapidly. In 1620 years, half the element is transmutated; that is, it has a half-life of 1620 years. "If the radium were produced by an electric discharge to the Aristarchus site some 2700 years ago, more than 25% of it would still be there, emitting radon -222." [11] Lightning strokes of 100 billion volts can constitute a high-energy projectile capable of creating heavy elements such as radium-226. It should also be pointed out that visible light, as well as heat, has been observed from time to time, from Aristarchus and other sources. Again, a sign of recency. Glass found that glass ejecta along the banks of the Hadley Rille and procured by the astronauts of the Apollo 15 and 17 expeditions exhibited significant peculiarities in comparison with other moon glasses. Tests on one sample showed that cooling rates of 1000 F/ sec. were necessary to form the glass. The researchers considered the possibility that volcanic eruption might have caused the glass to form, but the cooling rate was too fast. So they conjectured meteoritic impacts. However, for meteorites, the glasses are too uniform and are not splashed or shattered. Furthermore, meteorites would not line themselves up along a rille valley, if such is the case here. Juergens conclusion is acceptable [12] . The glass is a product of an electrical current that melts instantaneously, explodes simultaneously, and withdraws its heat immediately along the meandering course of the rille before streaming upwards from the ground at the end of the rille. The surprises that the Moon holds for scientists are not ended. Because of the nonexistence or prior extirpation of life forms that would have ingested radioactive carbon, there appear to be no possibilities of applying Carbon 14 tests to Moon material. Still, the electrical mechanical behavior of the Moon and Moon-space are coming to be better understood. The Moon's several spherical asymmetries deserve pondering. Unmanned excavating apparatus may bring back more material for analysis. Moreover, ancient records and myths are still largely unanalyzed. The "beauty of raiment" with which the Graces "clothe her body" and the "refulgent ointment" with which they anointed the Moon, once her love affair with Mars was ended, may refer to a shift to a position nearer Earth; the month of 29.5 days replaced a longer month [13] . Greater brilliance indicates that the change was in orbital radius, rather than in orbital speed. It is also possible that the lines of Homer may be a reference to a chain of colorful low mountains whose origin has baffled astrophysicists. Juergens has suggested that, if the theory of electrical discharges is credible, the explanation of these anomalous protruberances may lay in a simple and surprising theory of cosmic welding [14] . They are Martian material electrically heated and exploded, which fastened electrically upon the surface of the Moon. To the wishful eyes of men, women, and children of the eighth and seventh century, Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever from her escapade with Mars. Perhaps it grew less lovely thereafter, for Plutarch was speaking of its craggy appearance seven centuries later [15] . The astronauts and geophysicists of today have to report the disillusioning fact that the face of the classical beauty was ruined. {S : Notes (Chapter 9: The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty)} Notes (Chapter 9: The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty) 1. Dionysiaca, I, 213-23, trans. W. M. D. Rouse (Loeb Library). 2. Neil P. Ruzie, "The case for Returning to the Moon," Industrial Research (July, 1973), pp. 48-54, p. 51. 3. Derek York, "Lunar Rocks and Velikovsky's Claims," II Pens‚e no. 2( May 1972), p. 18. 4. "When Was The Lunar Surface Last Molten," II Pens‚e, no. 2,( May 1972), p. 19. 5. Ibid. 6. James B. Pollack, "Mars," 233 Scientific American (Sept. 1975), p. 110. 7. Also in Pens‚e (May 1972), loc. cit. 8. Ibid., p. 21 9. "Magnetic Remanence of Lunar Rocks: A Candid Look at Scientific Misbehavior," II Pens‚e, no. 2 (May, 1972), p. 21-2. 10. "Electrical Discharges and the Transmutation of Elements," IV Pens‚e 3, (1974), pp. 45-6; "Of the Moon and Mars, Part I," IV Pensee 4 (1974), pp. 21-30. 11. Juergens, "Electrical Discharges...," op. cit., pp. 45-6. 12. "Of The Moon..," op. cit., pp. 27-8. 13. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp. 342-4. 14. In a communication to the author, October 1973. 15. "The Face of the Moon." {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 10: } {T HE WHO SHINES BY DAY} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER TEN HE WHO SHINES BY DAY Not satisfied with setting up the production of the Love Affair, Athena, the virtuoso of Olympia, must play a leading role in it. Will it be masculine? Athena has been known to play such roles. Actually, she ends the Odyssey playing the male role of Mentor, Counselor of State. By now we know that gods can readily become transvestites. Hercules, for all his impressive masculinity, dresses and behaves like a woman when he lives in the court of Omphale, Queen of Libya. More strikingly there is the beautiful Aphrodite who sports a beard as the so-called Cyprian Aphrodite. A major role is intended. In the Love Affair, there is only one such role for her that is logical: that is Hephaestus. Athena, the goddess of the Planet Venus is Hephaestus, also the planet Venus. No one appears to have said so, but the evidence is strong to that effect. Velikovsky and the scholars associated with him have presented evidence that Pallas Athene was the god of the planet Venus, that the planet appeared in the sky sometime before 1500 B. C., that she behaved as a comet, traveled on an eccentric orbit that brought her perilously close to Earth, and that around 1500 B. C. and on several other occasions caused tremendous destruction here. The foundations or refounding of the city of Athens may be of this date [1] , just as those of Rome were concurrent with the raging appearance in the skies of the planet-god Mars 700 years later. References from a number of cultures lead one to believe that, as the Greek theogony put it, Athena sprang from Zeus fully-armed with a shout. Athena sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis, shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright- eyed goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly; the bright Son of Hyperion stopped his swift-footed horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the heavenly armor from her immortal shoulders [2] . Hephaestus, some said, had to split Jove's aching head with an ax to help him give birth. {S : THE EPITHETS OF VENUS} THE EPITHETS OF VENUS Velikovsky, James and others offer numerous connections between Planet Venus and Pallas Athena through analogies of birth, traits and deeds. They further offer persuasive cross-identifications of Athena and Planet-Venus with the corresponding divinities of the same planet from other cultures, among them the Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Mexican, and American Indian. Graves, for example, lays out in detail the material on Pallas, whose primary myth- ensemble is as foster-sister to Athena. Pallas means simply "youth" or "maiden." Athena and Pallas were raised on the shores of Lake Triton in Africa. While playing at armed combat Athena accidentally killed Pallas. In grief, she placed the name Pallas before her own. The incident is symbolic of the world tragedy of that time. An immense Saharan lake, called Triton by the ancients, suddenly disappeared, leaving a great desert and some marshes, with the dry beds of rivers and streams. A flourishing civilization subsided with the lake, a civilization that perhaps dominated the Mediterranean and surely represented a pre-Hellenic, matriarchal culture, whose women wore the same garments and aegis of Athena, even down through many centuries following the catastrophe. The destruction provoked and wrought by Planet Venus probably encompassed in North Africa not only the Egypt of the Exodus but the recently explored Saharan "Libyan" culture. And if, as Velikovsky argues convincingly, Phaeton, which plunged somewhere along the longitude of the Red Sea, was a part of Comet-Venus, Planet-to-be, then Pallas was the earthly destructive force of comet Venus in North Central Africa. Stecchini, from his studies of the architectural measurements of the Parthenon, the crowning temple of the Virgin Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, offers a confirmation. The Temple was erected in the glorious late period of empire. The Athenians, subconsciously true to remote history, set their Pallas Athena pediment facing directly and accurately towards the marshes of present-day Tunisia, and portrayed on the pediment the birth of Pallas Athena [3] . In the manner of legend, an alternative myth is offered. "Some Hellenes say that Athena had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of skin to make the aegis, and of his wings for her own shoulders...." [4] . Hardly a "maiden" and hardly a maidenly reprisal. Perhaps, as Graves suggests, the myth came from an ancient story of one of Athena's many combats. But, more interested in what force can have carried this underground myth, we would suggest that this "fake Pallas" is a diabolic representation of Zeus; the physical contacts of Athena with the Father of Gods are numerous. And humans, as already argued, have ways of getting back at the gods who caused them so much fear and suffering. "Pallas" may also designate Athena as a comet before it lost its appendage. Visually and astronomically, it should be recalled that everyone speaks of the "tail" of a comet, whereas this "tail" sometimes moves in directions parallel to the "head" and "coma." The ancients often were excited by the image of the comet "tail" as a phallus. Hence Athena would be phallus-Athena before Pallas was destroyed and she became a proto-planet without a penis. In Sanskrit, palas means Phallus. The altars of Athena were called Palladia, as at Troy. The dropping of the "ph" (j) sound takes away the sexual "fire." One would proceed farther. The "goatish giant" who attempted to outrage her has additional dimensions. He may stand for Hephaestus who, in another legend, attempted to rape Athena at his smithy and was repulsed. So that Athena's killing of this monster corresponds to the professed Hellenic triumph over the powerful proto-mediterranean religious culture. The mythic mind can support this idea along with the contradictory apotheosis of Athena as the ideal castrating female of psychoanalytic theory. Hephaestus has a resemblance to the Etruscan smith-god and death-demon, Tuchulcha, who dispatches people with a giant hammer. Tuchulcha is assisted by a winged demon with snakes [5] , So that the composite suggests a god-monster like Typhon, a devastating winged dragon who, like Seth and Lucifer is sent crashing into the underground, there to fulfill his destiny. The Love Affair lends support to the quadrilateral relationship: Hephaestus/ Tuchulcha: Greeks/ Etruscans. There one hears Demodocus singing that the cherished home-island of Hephaestus was Lemnos. Also, he has Ares speaking disrespectfully of Hephaestus having left to join his barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. (By "barbarous" is probably meant non-Greek.) Now recently some inscriptions found on Lemnos have been identified as Etruscan [6] , even though they are not yet deciphered. Etruscan has been connected also with Hittite and Minoan (Linear A) by Barry Fell [7] . New information has appeared, too, placing Etruscan relatives in the area at the same time as the Love Affair. These people of Lake Van are not only culturally close but close in blood types to the Etruscans [8] . The Etruscans feared and were obsessed by this Hephaestus- Tuchulcha. They offered human sacrifices frequently: the planet Venus, says Nicolo Rilli, was a favored object of such bloody supplications [9] . It will be a long time before the identities of the gods of one and all cultures are clarified. The sublimation of God requires a smokescreen of confusion and the allocation of ambivalence. If a god has been given too much of good, a balancing evil is allocated, and vice versa. The interplay of names and epithets is part of this process, but more unconsciously, the neural equivalents must function. Basically such is the meaning of the practically universal theological belief: "God cannot exist without the Devil." Athena was a "glorious goddess, bright-eyed, inventive, unbending of heart, pure virgin, savior of cities." [10] She was brilliantly beautiful, a great warrior; she enjoyed the confidence of Zeus to an extent unequaled by any other god. In the Iliad (iv, 74), she sweeps down upon the Trojan plain like "a shooting star," trailing fire. She was furthermore the most creative god, mother of invention, teacher of the arts and sciences. It is bizarre that we should find her the female counterpart of Hephaestus. But that she was, of course, an evil destroyer as well, emerges from many an earlier description. She was, in the Greek mind, a desexualized good-bad mother. Many deeds ascribed to her directly and indirectly would make lame and slow Hephaestus appear quite harmless and capable of exciting laughter of a grim sort. She in fact, as a planet, broke up the Jovian order of the universe and kept it in confusion until the eighth century, when Zeus, through Homer's and Hesiod's work, deserved to the full his reputation as the law-giver. At least so far as Greek myth was concerned, and we cannot go farther here. {S : CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY} CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY Athena's birth from Zeus is expressly related to the birth of Hephaestus. A quarrel between Zeus and Hera had been mentioned in what preceded the fragment (of Chrysippus), and in consequence of this quarrel, Hera gave birth to Hephaestus without Zeus' aid, and Zeus lay with Metis and swallowed her. But she conceived Athena, and Zeus gave birth through his head. That Hephaestus' birth was a complement to Athena's, and connected with a quarrel between Zeus and Hera, is also implied in (Hesiod's) Theogony (924-9), but the logical order of events has been destroyed. So writes West in his Commentary on Hesiod's Theogony (pp. 401-3). We need not agree that Metis was the mother of Athena, because Athena is not only called parthenos (virgin) but also parthenogenous (the offspring of a single sex). West (with others) suspects that the quarrel may have arisen over the capacities of the sexes. Hera and Zeus disagreed concerning whether man or woman achieved more pleasure in sexual intercourse. Teiresias, called to arbitrate, declared that the pleasure is woman's in the ratio of ten to one. Hera, a poor loser, blinded Teiresias and Zeus gave him the gift of prophesy as a consolation. Then each defied the other and gave birth parthenogenously. Hera to Hephaestus, Zeus to Athena. In a striking parallel, Hera also bore parthenogenously the monster Typhon, who was also sent crashing to Earth by Zeus [11] . Plato has Critias (109 b-d) declaring that Hephaestus and Athena are of the same father. They are of the same nature. "In the days of old the Gods shared out the earth among themselves... Hephaestus and Athena, for instance, being brother and sister... obtained this our land as their joint portion... They raised its aboriginal population to the status of a great nation." It was protocatastrophic Attica, much larger in extent, before the disasters that ended an epoch. When Poseidon (god of deluges and waters and chief god of Atalanta, the Moon) struggled to possess Attica, he had to contend with both Hephaestus and Athena. We find in Robert Graves' The Greek Myths these words: Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name, if it does not stand for hemerophaistos, 'he who shines by day' (i. e. the sun), is perhaps a masculine for he apaista (shortened in Stesichorus: Fragment 97 to aista), 'the goddess who removes from sight, ' namely Athene, the original inventor of all mechanical arts [12] . Graves, like most authors upon whom we depend, did not ascribe real celestial behavior to the gods and demigods, planetary or otherwise. When a celestial reference is forced upon Athena, the Sun or Moon or other bodies are called upon. This has resulted in the Sun, workaday Helios, being elevated to a divine status such as he never achieved in the minds of the ancients. If the minds of scholars had not been embraced by uniformitarian principles, that is, the ideology of science of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they might have asked, as for instance in this case, why "shining by day" should be the exclusive prerogative of Helios or, at least, why bother to name a god by this trait which is so ordinary and expected? Every ordinary thing shines by day as well. A nearby cometary body, meteorite, or planet, especially if it is incandescent, as was Athena (Hephaestus), will shine like the sun, and supplement the brilliance of the day to a painful degree until clouds intervene, mercifully in some cases, destructively in others if they shower down red waters, brimstone, ashes, and noxious gases. She and he have a habit of disappearing. They blind humans; and they cover up deeds. Both are great dissemblers. As for the alternative base of his name, we can rephrase what was just said: His name again would be a name of Athena, for the action implied is the beclouding of the human vision. Who might shine brilliantly and also block vision - contrasting behaviors? A cometary intruder in the skies is one answer, and there are not very good alternative answers, especially when the details of both behaviors are collected. An enormous volcano will shine brilliantly in the daytime as it erupts, and afterward darken the vision of humans. But one volcano does not inspire a whole people in communication over thousands of miles to create a major god. Hephaestus is, for that matter, god of volcanoes and fire, but this is not his sole or even major life-activity. Graves reports (I, 51-2) that Hephaestus seems to have been the title of the sacred king as solar demi-god. We have alluded to the former; for "solar" we insist upon "Venusian," because the sacred kings of the ancient Mediterranean flourished concurrently with Cretan and Minoan civilizations and were both well-remembered and hated as an institution by the misogynist Hellenes, for whom kings were not to be periodically set up the sacrificed by queens. Hephaestus ruled with Athena over the realm of arts and crafts. Sing, clear-voiced muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athene he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, - men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts [13] . "Athena was frequently linked with Hephaestus, as in the simile in which a comparison is drawn with a goldsmith, 'a skillful man whom Hephaestus and Pallas Athena taught all kinds of craft (techne). '" [14] Hephaestus was the Smith-god [15] , suggests Graves, to be found in many distinct cultures. We understand that Hephaestus is a technical genius, like Athena. He is more circumscribed; he is a Master Electrician, a fabricator of thunderbolts. Often he is portrayed as lame; sometimes the smiths were lames, says Graves to prevent their wandering far from their proprietary city. This is all very well. We recognize the need for towns to retain their smiths, even as we recognize [16] that the smith was one of the few "strangers" to be invariably welcomed in their wanderings, along with poets. However, one must acknowledge that just as there are sacred kings who are put to death annually, there may be "sacred smiths" who have to be lamed in order that they behave like the god whose skills they possess. "Smith-god" surrogates, like "sacred kings," were also anciently killed in sacrifice, every 20 years, says Graves, to correspond with a solar-lunar calendar conjunction; we are entitled to question whether it may be a Venus-Moon conjunction, the 20 years being a playback of time of modern calendar reckoning, but we find no grounds presently to challenge the periodicity and its source. Which leads us to the general problem of the lameness of Hephaestus, the god and the Planet. There is more than one legend of the source of his disability. One legend would have it that Hera chose a monster to conceive of Hephaestus and, naturally, the offspring was ugly and deformed. So she cast it from heaven. A second is that Hephaestus defended his mother, Hera, for leading a revolt against Zeus and Zeus cast him from Mount Olympus to Earth, crippling him. Here we find Hephaestus as the monster, Typhon, that part of Athena the planet that was struck by a thunderbolt of Zeus while it was wreaking destruction upon Earth, and crashed, some say near the Red Sea, others say upon what is now the Sahara, burning and drying up the area and pushing the waters of the Great Lake Triton into the ocean. To pursue the parallel, instead of the monster Typhon, it was Hephaestus who came crashing down and, presumably, he picked himself up, physically the worse for the experience, and rejoined the Olympian party of gods when the father of the gods graced him with his pardon. Vase paintings show Hephaestus mounted upon a mule (symbol of sexual barrenness), plodding back up to Heaven, escorted by Bacchus (Dionysus), satyrs, and bacchantes. Both descents of Hephaestus-Athena from the skies precede Homeric times by 700 years. Krates of Pergamon explains that Zeus was determining the measure of the universe by means of "two torches moving with the same speed:" the Sun from east to west, and Hephaestus from Olympus to Lemnos. Hephaestus struck Earth as the sun was setting. The measure of a new age of the world was taken [17] . Graves points out the Hephaestus has affinities with Prometheus [18] , Talos, Daedalus, Icarus, and Minos [19] . Graves further illuminates the emerging picture in giving us further details of the birth of Athena Tritongeneia. "As Zeus walked by Lake Triton [the great Saharan Lake that disappeared]", say the priestesses of Athene, "he was seized by a headache and he howled until all heaven echoed. Hermes ran up, divined the cause, and persuaded Hephaestus (or possibly Prometheus) to take a wedge and beetle and make a breach in Zeus' skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout." [20] So Hephaestus was involved in Athena's birth. Hephaestus has enough reason to be lamed. However, a marvel of myth, like creative works in general, is that several levels of meaning can be simultaneously conveyed, both consciously and unconsciously. If Athena is a virgin, and ushered in legions of virgins in many parts of the world (as Peter Tompkins relates in The Virgin and the Eunuch, citing the Vestal Virgins of Rome, among others), not to mention their contraries, the sacred harlots of the temples, then how would Hephaestus portray the analogous quality? By being a eunuch, a castrato, one would reply. But a god, not, in any event, a Homeric Hellenic god, could not suffer this indignity unless, like Ouranos, he was Deus Otiosus, that is, permanently removed from the scene. The lameness, we are bound to suggest, was a genital lameness. To match Athena, Hephaestus had to be unsexed. The crippled feet would represent this to the unconscious. Psychoanalysts find such to be the case in their analyses of dreams. We note again how Hephaestus in pictured riding a mule, a barren animal, on his way back to heaven after his fall. Also, the Roman Hephaestus is Vulcan; Vulcan is represented by several Roman authors in the form of a phallus in the hearthfire [21] , an image that joins together Hephaestus fire, and the comet's severed phallus-tail. Slater stresses not so much the idea of Hephaestus' lameness as a symbolic castration but "what might be called his 'interpersonal' self-castration. By this I mean his withdrawal from the lists of sexual and marital rivalry, his role of clown - in a sense, his resignation from manhood." [22] Consistently, he is rejected both by Zeus and Hera, for he was also cast into the sea by his mother, Hera. Now again, one may ask about the marriage of Hephaestus and his famous marriage bed, that four-posted imitation of the four-pillared sky he was wont to occupy with Aphrodite in the Love Affair. It was on the instigation of Zeus, once, perhaps as a bad practical joke, that Hephaestus when Athena arrived to be fitted for a fine suit of armor, made the amorous advances upon her, which she repulsed. Apart from marking a further association of these two parthenogenous gods, mulishly incapable of offspring, the tale stresses Hephaestus' unluckiness in love. Aphrodite is his "better half," fully sexed, unlike Athena; he wants her (the Moon) but also rejects her, for he cannot cope with her. Aphrodite has not been known to copulate with him recently, although in a dim past there was a marriage and contacts resembling sexual relations. But now, in the Love Affair, the bed is cold. Aphrodite's children come from others, including especially Ares. Hephaestus may be the indignant husband, but he is impotent in sexual affairs and it is perhaps because of this empty show of dignity that the gods Apollo and Hermes laugh. Hephaestus' advances upon Athena were strangely fruitful, says another account. As he gazed at Athena, he ejaculated and his seed fell upon Gaia, "the Earth," from whom Erichthonios (Auriga) was born. Athena succored the infant when Gaia rejected him. He was half-man and half-serpent; later on he became King of Athens and instituted her worship [23] . Once more we find interconnected Athena-Hephaestus - sexual incapacities, the serpent Typhon, destruction visited upon Gaia, and the Athens connection. Dr. Z. Rix of Jerusalem, a medical doctor and mythologist, writes me on January 26, 1975, that : "Hephaestus is the primordial father whom Freud recognized again and again in his patients' dreams. He is cometary Venus who struck by Jupiter's lightning fell from heaven. Many mythological narratives recount the event of Lucifer's, Phaeton's, and Typhon's (the Egyptian devil's) fall. It is comprehensible that the onlookers wished that the forbidding figure should lose its tail - conceived as male attribute - with which it threatened to annihilate the whole population of the earth." Again, Dr. Rix calls my attention to the deity, Nephthys (in Egypt, Nebti), who is wife and sister of Typhon. She is the seashores: Typhon is the sea, according to the ancient Egyptians. This same Nephthys is pictured in various Egyptian sources [24] together with Isis (the Egyptian Athena), lifting the sun-ship at dawn. Surely this is additional evidence of the connection Athena-Hephaestus, corresponding to Nephthys- Typhon. Herodotus mentions that there were numerous temples to Hephaestus in Egypt. At the same time, such is the overlapping that readily occurs in the memory of the gods as the ages pass, that foam-born Aphrodite later is said to be created, not by Uranus, as we assert, but by the seed of the drowned Typhon that becomes the salt-foam of the sea. Now one may perceive how some confusion between Athena-Aphrodite-Urania and Aphrodite-Planet Venus arose: the former sprang out of the sea earlier from the fallen member of Uranus; the latter arose later from the seed of the fallen Python. Probably the new myth was grafted upon the old. On still another level of suggestibility is the profile that the hobbling smith in the sky would provide. It is easy to see in many artifacts the shapes that celestial bodies like meteors and comets take. Nevertheless it may be of some value to mention that a comet in a typical apparition is an angel with wings and flowing gown, a head with horns, a helmeted head (Athena), a long-haired one (coma means hair in Greek), a phallus with testes, and even a head with two massive arms - "Hephaestus of the two strong arms," Murray translates the phrase, and then, curiously, notes that other scholars translate the phrase as "Hephaestus of the lame legs." We wonder at the possible original sight of the mighty-armed bronze-smith trailing his feeble legs like the tail of the comet, and at the etymology that could cause such an alternative construction. In connection with the language of the Love Affair, to be treated below, additional symbolic issues will be discussed. Finally there is the sentence: "The slow catches the swift; even as now Hephaestus, slow though he is, has outstripped Ares for all that he is the swiftest of the gods who hold Olympus. Lame though he is, he has caught him by craft." Once more the synchronization of reality into a plausible plot seems incredible. To take part in the cosmic drama, as it probably occurred, Hephaestus (as Planet-Venus) would make his planetary approaches at a great distance and behind Moon and Mars, which would put him actually a half-million miles distant from the pair with a gravitational-electrical effect sufficient to repel the Earth's magnetic envelope and cause their liberation. Under the circumstances, Hephaestus would move with apparent slowness, as would, mirabile dictu, be in accord with his crippled condition. So it was then, that Pallas Athena, Hephaestus the strong-armed Smith, and the planet Venus are locked in unconscious identity in the human mind as indissolubly and unbreakably as Ares and Aphrodite were by the invisible net. {S : ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES} ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES Velikovsky summarizes the late history of the protoplanet that became Venus in the following words : Venus, which collided with the earth in the fifteenth century before the present era, collided with Mars in the eighth century. At that time Venus was moving at a lower elliptical velocity than when it first encountered the earth; but Mars, being only about one-eighth the mass of Venus, was no match for her. It was therefore a notable achievement that Mars, though thrown out of the ring, nevertheless was instrumental in bringing Venus from an elliptical to a nearly circular orbit. Looked at from the Earth, Venus was removed from a path that ran high to the zenith and over the zenith to its present path in which it never retreats from the sun more than 48 degrees, thus becoming a morning or an evening star that precedes the rising sun or follows the setting sun. The awe of the world for many centuries, Venus has become a tame planet [25] . The planet now called Venus, identified with the goddess Athena (and later with Aphrodite ) in Greece, Minerva in Rome, Tistrya in Iran, Ishtar in Babylon, Baal and Lucifer-Mazzaroth in Judea, Hathor in Egypt, and Quetzalcohuatl in Toltec Mexico, was to become only the morning and evening star, an ever-pleasant sight, if, at the sight, people could rid themselves of its historical connotations. The planet circle nearer to the horizon, and, because it did not approach Earth closely again, was smaller in apparent size. Isaiah proclaimed (14: 12-13): How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning ! How art thou cast down to the ground Who did weaken the nations! Still human sacrifices were offered to Venus, the planet, when she approached closest to Earth on her famed journey. Still she was the greatest goddess of Athens and the fountain of some of the world's greatest literature. Still, in the sixth century, Jews evading the Babylonian captivity and settling in Egypt rued their abandonment of Venus- Baal for the abstract single God. At the same time, the Greeks were circulating a legend of Cadmus who had killed a dragon, a son of Hephaistos, no less, and the devilish lame Hephaestus had laid upon Cadmus and his descendents, including Oedipus, a curse; thus was the sin of castration punished in hereditary succession [26] , and the sin of Oedipus foredoomed. And walk down any street where astrologers tell fortunes or pick up any book on astrology, and see that the deeds and spirit of Venus are still part of human nature, speaking now literally, and not even of the unconscious role she plays in our religious rites and our forms of thought and behavior. But in those days when it was visible to mankind that "the star Venus pursued Mars and inflamed him with an ardent passion," as the geographer-astrologist Erastosthenes wrote in the third century, B. C., (thinking probably of the planet as the Aphrodite of the Love Affair, in the confusion which we addressed earlier) what happened to Venus is marked upon her today. From the encounters with Mars, of the eighth and seventh centuries, we seek positive evidence, and that is difficult to find. Velikovsky has been proven correct in several of his judgements respecting her seven- hundred-year reign of terror. It is now known, as Velikovsky claimed beforehand, that Venus is a hot planet, whose surface attains 9250 Kelvin without explanation except by a recent origin (from Zeus) and/ or a recent heating-up [27] . Although only more simple compounds have until now been found, her fifteen miles of dense clouds may contain some of the chemicals that could have mixed with the Earth's upper Atmosphere under electrical discharges to make and precipitate the ambrosia and manna that tradition says preserved various early peoples wandering in desolation and darkness [28] . We know an ever-enlarging fraction of what the surface of the earth and archaeology can tell us about the catastrophic events of her pre-Martian period. We are aware of, and shall soon understand better, how the horror of her visitations affected the human mind. But precisely because of her erratic, destructive, and self-destructive, earlier history, it is difficult, more difficult than in the case of Mars, say, to pinpoint her presence by the scars left upon her by the Love Affair. Let us look again to the song of Demodocus and see whether Hephaestus-Venus signals any possible effects of its role. Velikovsky has gathered historical, legendary, and geographical evidence to the effect that the shortened tail of the cometary proto-planet was effectively destroyed in the Mars encounters. Hephaestus trails his legs; that may be indicative of the tail. He also manufactures his gossamer trap in a shower of sparks and lays it about the trysting place of Mars and Moon. These actions may signify the shedding of cometary material in great quantities, producing meteoric effects of high visibility and destructiveness. Some of the voluminous debris here portrayed as sparks off the anvil and netting for the trap may be what supplied Mars with the troop of "terrible ones" that stories from Greece, Palestine, India and elsewhere described, a host of terrifying images in the sky and real storms of missiles and gases. As a result of the Martian encounters, several gods of planet Venus became lesser gods, the Fallen Lucifer and the Etruscan Tuchulcha, an underworld god. In the Love Affair, Hephaestus does not win his case: he has been the victim of the crime of cuckoldry. He has discovered the culprits. He has captured them and turned them over to the police and to the great judge. Yet, instead of retribution and triumph, he receives indifferent admiration for his technical skill, a jest from a policeman that he would commit the same crime if he could, jeering laughter, a bail that may or may not be paid, and a bail-jumping by the criminal. The great judge does not even put in an appearance. Indeed, how Lucifer is fallen ! Does Hephaestus change his ways? Does the orbit of Venus change from the elliptical to the circular to some degree, in the course of the Love Affair? This is difficult to say. He is wont to visit the barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. He starts back to see them, but doubles back again to view the lovers caught in his trap. This may signify an axial tilt of Earth. (See Chap. XIII.) Does Hephaestus ever return to Lemnos, as the others return to their familiar places? Probably not. Like many an old warrior, the time has come to write his memoirs and live off his past deeds. Still heated up but without a tail, the planet is braked as it has been for some time by its own viscous surface, but more speedily. Then it is struck and forced into an inner orbit by the combined energy of Earth and Mars. Thus it may have achieved the circular orbit it has maintained since the regularization of Venusian movements. Records, newly ascribed to the eighth century in Babylon, appear to show that by the seventh century Venus was approaching a circular orbit and, by the sixth century, it is definitely revolving on a near perfect movement [29] . Not only was there an orbital change in this period, but also a rotational deceleration of the earth was experienced. Velikovsky shows that the day grew longer, at one point, and then shorter. Also, the Moon changed its orbital speed. Also an axial tilt was experienced. Can these possibly be accounted for from a small treasury of poetic lines? Hardly. As the next chapters will show, many motions can and probably do change at the same time. We may solve some of the problems in the future, but at this time, we can only point to two indications of such change. The Sun, Helios, appears to have behaved erratically. Patroni, we recall, thought that the Sun had to send a messenger to inform Hephaestus of events in his brazen palace. This might literally indicate a tilting of the earth's axis momentarily, and twice, as a matter of fact. During such tilts the Sun and Venus, as seen from the Earth, would apparently come closer together and then resume their distances. However, electrical solar flares of great magnitude might have stretched out from Helios to give the same impression, as Kugler surmised. The second indicator of changed position in the story would be the freezing of the action at its climax. Hephaestus roars his anger to the skies. (Was this when, in the Battle of Troy, Athena "uttered her loud cry. And over against her spouted Ares, dread as a dark whirlwind, calling with shrill tones to the Trojans"?) The gods stand with him at the threshold. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed in their trap. The Sun may be gone. There is a definite and portentous pause here. It could be the climactic conjunction of the four bodies: Earth, Mars, Moon, and Venus. It could be a moment when "the sun stood still," or more likely, when the night lengthened and the day refused to come. But what a night ! The sky would have been more lighted up and colorful than ever by ordinary solar day. Finally, Planet-Venus may be searched for some signs of surface and atmospheric damage that might be attributed to the Love Affair. It is easy to say, and undeniable, that since Venus suffered such an experience also with Earth, Moon and Mars, then it would have to exhibit the same effects as they did, given, of course, the differences in its composition. An already hot planet would be heated up more, but other effects could cool it. More of its atmosphere would be dissipated to a larger planet and some gained from a smaller planet that possessed any, but this would depend, too, upon the composition, atomic weight, electrical discharges and pressures exerted. More recently, an important set of observations of the surface of Venus was made by the use of radar [30] . In August of 1973, American astrophysicists announced that they had penetrated the hot dense clouds by radio waves, which were then able to probe features of the unknown surface. They discovered the equatorial region to be marked by craters of large diameter, dozens and hundreds of miles wide. But these gave shallow soundings. A crater of one hundred miles diameter appeared to have basin whose depth was only a quarter of a mile. We should expect a depth of several miles. If Venus were incandescent in 1500 B. C., it will have been cooling up to the present. Originally, any exchanges of material that might have occurred in its encounters with Earth and Moon would have been promptly concealed by the sinking and melting of the foreign bodies. Over time, the temperature of the molten surface would have reduced to that of today. It is conceivable that by 776 B. C. the surface temperature might have solidified to a point that would register the imprint of a large body falling upon it through its dense cloud formations. Of course, the foreign body would itself become heated, but if it were large enough it might not disintegrate before striking home. If the craters had been formed by electrical explosions, again the soft terrain would have shortly reduced their depth. Shallow craters would, then, be explainable either by explosions alone or by an exploding body, and would tend to support the theory of Venus' cometary history, and the theory of its exchanges with Mars, Earth and Moon of the eighth and seventh centuries. In 1975, Soviet scientists landed an apparatus upon Venus, named Venera. Venera endured the hostile environment long enough to register brisk winds and to photograph, in a surprising amount of natural light, a shambles of sharp rocks. The rocks were described as seemingly "new." They are probably new. Whether the area in which they were found was struck by planetary debris or by electrical discharges, a splattering of foreign and indigenous rock would have occurred in and around the craters. The great heat, the heavy winds, and the high atmospheric pressure (90 times that of Earth) would very shortly have metamorphosed any terrain of sharp rocks. Volcanism, of course, would not throw off sharp rocks, but lava and Tephra. Therefore, Venus may now exhibit the scars of very recent events. Such were the effects of Athena's last battles. As if to commemorate the occasion, planet-Venus resonates periodically with the Earth. On April 23, 1966, P. Goldreich and S. J. Peale reported to the American Geophysical Union the surprising discovery that every time Venus passes between the Sun and the Earth it turns the same face towards Earth. T. J. Gordon, rocket scientist and author, wrote, "This type of resonant motion resists outside disturbances; once locked, the motion tends to remain locked. When did the Earth capture Venus' rotation?" [31] Might it not have been on or about 687 B. C.? {S : APPENDIX TO CHAPTER TEN LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA"} APPENDIX TO CHAPTER TEN LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA" We are pursuing a set of identifications in this book. We say Hephaestus stands for Athena, for instance, and Athena is also the planet Venus, and the goddess of the Greeks. She is also Hathor, Ishtar, Lucifer, and Minerva. Some aspects of a lunar deity have also affected her identity. To a remarkable degree the validity of this book depends upon such identifications. In this chapter, for example, everything said which favors the identification of Hephaestus with Athena-planet Venus ipso facto supports a separate Aphrodisian identity for the Moon. We must be careful of the word "is," short of writing a volume of philosophy on the question. For "is" can never mean some absolutely simple "is." It has to mean something that never quite "is" no matter how close two things are to being the same. One scholar who appreciates this process in which mythologists commonly engage is Philip E. Slater. In his book on The Story of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (1958), we read: "To demand an exclusive interpretation is equivalent to insisting that a Spanish peasant, a tropical flower, the Hudson River, an oyster, and the fountains of the Villa d'Este are identical because they contain H2O. It tells too much and therefore tells us too little of what we need to know precisely... A myth draws material from events in the history of a group, but orders it according to the desires and stresses common to those participating in the culture of that group." An extreme example can be offered. Suppose we say A is H, or A is P. We intend by these two statements that: A and H refer to one and the same thing; A and O refer to one and the same thing; and H and O are the same. Even so they differ - these A and H and O - by the fact that they are named differently, and, however complete their shared identity, they are called by a different name. And every name has some connotation, some affect-load in the sensing organism. Now let us proceed to the other extreme, and declare: A is quite non-B. We will, no sooner than we are told this, tend to affirm an identity of A and B, namely that the two are associated in the same sentence, capable of undergoing the same logical analysis, have qualities that are comparable, and further that he who says so has some ulterior motive which joins them in his mind. From these examples we are led to various surmises, pertinent to the Love Affair. One is linguistic. One symbol can excite stimuli by being related logically and empirically to a predicate. It must be also related illogically, through sheer conditioning by "irrelevancies." We can imagine this seemingly foolish conversation: 1st speaker: "See the planet." All: "Yes." 1st speaker: "It is Athena." 2nd speaker: "It is Lucifer." 1st and 2nd speakers: "Athena is Lucifer." 3rd speaker: "I sacrifice when the planet arises. You must sacrifice too." 4th speaker: "I sacrifice only to the god Hephaestus who helps me make sturdy plows." 3rd speaker: "My planet represents the invention of the plow." 1st speaker : "Athena invented the plow." 1st, 3rd, 4th speakers: "All hail to the plow, the planet and the gods Hephaestus and Athena. Preserve our way of life." 2nd speaker: "Lucifer is cast down by God." All others: "Lucifer is cast down but restored to heaven by his father, Zeus. If you don't believe it, we shall hate you." 2nd speaker: "Lucifer is not Athena or Hephaestus. Lucifer is the devil cast down." All others: "Go to the Devil! Hail the gods of Olympus! ' Let us proceed with speakers (1, 3, 4) whom we recognize now as a group of the Olympian Culture. We find in them: "H is A" meaning a. H is identical with A b. H is related to A c. H represents A d. H symbolizes A e. H & A share similar relations to L in each case with respect to: 1) Speakers 1, 3, 4 for certain subjective functions, but 2) H and A are separate for other functions serving speakers 1, 3, 4. That is, Athena is Hephaestus and vice versa when and insofar as they share similar qualities (traits and behavior) in the minds of any person or group. Athena is Hephaestus when the effects of Hephaestus and Athena produced on any person or group are similar. Athena is Hephaestus when their names are used interchangeably. Athena is Hephaestus when their names are not used interchangeably, because to avoid the interchange permits the fulfillment of and resolution of a cognitive dissonance. That is, where what must be said about the one psychically precludes that the same be said about the other. For understanding both natural and social relations, all forms of "is" must be taken into account. When a Q-behavior of A produces changes in X that H also produces, then A is HQ and H is AQ. When a speaker affirms (or denies in such a manner as to affirm) that A and H are the same, in respect to Q, this is evidence also that AQ is HQ. When the behavior of a body X activates A and H with similar effects AQ( X) and HQ( X), then A and H are also given an identity. When similar X effects are observed upon A, H, L, S... n, then we can say that A has psychological and organic existence in the group (A, H, L, S... n). To say that A "is" or has existence apart from (XQAG) and (YQAG), we resort to a second group (abc... n) and observe whether (XQVg) and (YGVg) are observable. If yes, then this is a confirmation. If (XQVg) and (YQVg) are different than (XQVG) and (YQVG) then we must investigate whether the two sets of effects are reconcilable according to the logic of each group, G and g. That is, discover whether Q is the same, despite the different logics of G and g. This is essentially what we do when we inquire whether the planet Venus know to modern observation (G) is the same as the planet Venus known to the ancients (g). Carl Sagan is only reciting a phenomenon well-known to ethnologists when he says: "legends and myths, handed down by illiterate people from generation to generation, are in general of great historical value." From the remnants of what has been handed down, we are here trying to discover a history in which "who is who?" and "Who is what?" are central questions. Notes (Chapter 10: He Who Shines by Day) 1. Stecchini, op. cit., p. 145. The destruction of Thera-Santorini about 1100 B. C. would have overwhelmed the Attic shores, even if it bad occurred as a solitary catastrophe (Cf. S. Marinatos, whose writings on the subject began on Minoan Crete, XIII Antiquity (1939), p. 425); Velikovsky interprets the myth of Solon concerning Atlantis as occurring around 1500 B. C. (W in C, pp. 146-8). Plato refers to Athens after Atlantis as a remnant civilization, peopled by illiterate survivors. I believe that Solon's Atlantis was sunk about 4000 B. C., but that Plato, not knowing of the disasters of 1500 B. C., telescoped the two catastrophes in his mind, and made them more ethnocentrically Athenian. 2. "Hymn to Athena" XXVIII. 3. Telephone communication of October, 1973. 4. Graves, I, ch. 9, p. 45. 5. See Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, II, frontispiece. 6. Patroni, op. cit., p. 244, fn. 3; Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II (1973). 7. Occasional Publ., Epigraphic Society, Vol. 4, no. 77 (Sept. 1977), Harvard University. 8. G. A. Wainwright, "The Teresh, the Etruscans, and Asia Minor," IX Anatolian Studies. 9. Conversation with the author, 1966. Cf. his Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964), where the Etruscan obsessions with lightning, flood, and fire are treated. 10. Homeric "Hymn to Athena," no. xxviii. 11. Slater, op. cit., 130; see Apollodorus i, 3, 5; Homeric Hymns to Apollo; Hesiod, Theogony 924-5. 12. Vol. I, p. 87; 23: 1; cf. I, 393. 13. Homeric Hymns, no. XX, in the Loeb edition of Hesiod. The "men" referred to are possibly the catastrophized victims of this same pair 700 years earlier. 14. Finley, p. 83, citing Odyssey, 6, 232-4. 15. The Greek Myths, I, 51-2. 16. Cf. Finley. 17. Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, inc., 1969), pp. 273-4; cf. 73-4. This book contains on page 272 a design from ancient China showing twin deities, male and female, dragon footed, surrounded by constellations and carrying a plumb bob, square, and compass, reproduced in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria. 18. Graves, The Greek Myths, I, 149. 19. Ibid., 1, 315-6, 172. 20. Ibid., p. 46. 21. Ovid, Fasti VI, 627; Pliny, 36.70; Ling, I, 39; Plutarch, Lives, Rom., 2; Pauly- Wissowa, Realenzyklop„die article on Tullius, Ocrisia, Tarchetius; Frazer, Golden Bough; II, 198; O. Gruppe, Griech-Mythologie (1906), p. 1311. (Citations kindly supplied by the late Dr. Z. Rix, Jerusalem.) 22. Op. cit., 130. 23. Ibid., p. 264; Graves, I, 25b, c, d, 1, 2. Erichthonios means "wool-strife-earth" or, possibly, "from the land of heather," but the heather-country meaning may picture the former meaning. 24. Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, "Nephthys," Vol 53, p. 100. 25. W in C, p. 259. 26. Anton Ehrenzweig, "The Origin of the Scientific and Heroic Urge," 30 International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1949), 115. 27. See Eric Crew, "Thermal Equations of Venus," 3 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4 (Ap. 1981) 1-4. 28. See The Lately Tortured Earth and God's Fire surveying recent research on these matters. 29. Lynn Rose, "Babylonian Observations of Venus," III Pensee no. I (Winter, 1973), pp. 18-22; C. J. Ransom and L. H. Hoffee, "The Orbits of Venus," " Ibid., 22-25. 30. E. Driscoll, Science News, 4 August 1973, p. 72; Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus," Scientific American, 233 (Sept. 1975), pp. 70, 78. 31. Ideas in Conflict (New York, 1966), p. 37. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 11: } {T THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY SWORDSMAN} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER ELEVEN THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY SWORDSMAN A Homeric hymn addressed Ares: "who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the aether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear your above the third firmament of heaven." [1] Ares had many names and epithets in and among the peoples of the world. He is Mars of the Romans, Nergal of the Babylonians, Gokihar (and Indra) of the Hindus, Odin of the Teutons, Huitzilopochtili of the Aztecs, and the Archangel Gabriel of the Jews. In Babylonia, writes P. F. Gossmann, he is Nergal, and also Era, Irra, and Death [2] . Odin had over fifty names and epithets. This Gokihar of the Hindus was "born of the wolf," was a "special disturber of the Moon," and became involved in yuddha, which in ancient Hindu astronomy meant a clash of planets in conjunction [3] . {S : THE QUALITIES OF ARES} THE QUALITIES OF ARES Ares, scholars typically assert, was the simplest character among the Olympian gods. Ares means in Greek "male warrior." Eris, "strife," is his sister. He is bloodthirsty, ruthless, warlike, fleet, ruddy, and, of course, well-muscled. He is drunken, quarrelsome, impetuous, and a favorite lover of Aphrodite; he had a number of children by her and other women. "Rushing Stars" often appear to the vision as swords Ares seemed especially prone to the sword. Velikovsky expounds the theme of the sword in the international background of Ares. He quotes a hymn to Nergal: Shine of horror, god Nergal, prince of battle, Thy face is glare, thy mouth is fire, Raging Flame-god, god Nergal. Thou art Anguish and Terror, Great Sword-god Lord who wanderest in the night, Horrible, raging Flame-god... Whose storming is a storm flood [4] . Of the Scythians, Solinus wrote: "The god of this people is Mars; instead of images they worship swords." [5] . Herodotus tells that they sacrificed human beings and poured their blood upon the sacred sword. The Romans, sons of Mars, perfected their sword, a short, straight, double-edged steel weapon with an obtuse-angled point. Their drill, their fighting formations, and their tactics were based upon the sword in the hand of the legionnaire. The male-chauvinist Greeks and Romans made Mars out to be a handsome athletic lover. He both vanquished and loved Aphrodite-Venus. The sword is a phallic symbol by an easy stretch of the imagination: a "dashing young blade" and "a swordsman" are used in vernacular epithets today of the sexually eager pursuers of women. Homer, pro-Athena, grants her the victory over Ares in his epics, but around the world, Mars is victor more than vanquished because planet Athena never threatened Earth again after the age of Mars. Ares was called "Alloprosallos" because he fought indiscriminately, without principle, "on one side or the other." We have pointed to Odysseus in his wanderings as the representative of Athena in her planetary behavior over the centuries. It would be well to investigate Hercules as the representative of Ares, performing an analogous set of tasks. Although his exploits find him sometimes assisted by Athena and in opposition to Ares, he is said to be Mars himself by Eratosthenes and Varro, the ancient commentators. Hercules, son of Zeus, wanders and is directed over much of the world. He destroys Pylos; he captures Troy in a preview of the Trojan War. At times he goes mad, explicitly so. His stories often do parallel the probably older Babylonian Gilgamish, but his exploits are sometimes transferred to the western regions where the Greeks have gone in large numbers. Indeed Hercules is engaged in measuring the new dimensions of the world. Hercules spawns the Heraclids who are identifiable with the Dorian invaders (reinvaders) of post-Mycenaean Greek places in the period following the planetary disasters visited upon earth in the eighth and seventh centuries. More than Odysseus, Hercules is one of our crazed heroes of the catastrophic generation, just as his godhead is a cause of the catastrophes. Gods, like people, have different reputations depending upon whom you ask about them. Priests, poets, and people - all have a say. Gods have a good side and a bad side. In the case of Aphrodite - sheer beauty and concupiscence may pass for good in the later Greek lexicon, whereas sheer irresponsibility denominates evil. In the case of Ares, physical beauty combine with swift force on the good side; ruthless destructiveness highlights the bad. The terrible presence of Mars attended the birth of Rome and warranted him a longer and more fateful career than the Greeks could afford him. The Judeans, striving for monotheism, incorporated the visitations of Mars variously - now as a divine intervention of the Lord (and the archangels) against the army of Sennacherib, blasting it to death, then again as a divine retribution for a collective "immorality" that the population and its rulers appeared to exhibit prior to each natural or human disaster visited upon them [6] . Good and bad traits of a god are, hence, a combination of what happened alike to a set of cultures, what happened differently to them, and whether in either event what happened chanced to be good or bad in its contemporary historical circumstances [7] . Also, the fear of offending a god brought about the coinage of multiple names and related gods, so that good and bad epithets might be buried in obscure and "innocent" references. {S : THE FATAL WOUND} THE FATAL WOUND Let us examine more closely the present and possible prior condition of the "blood- stained stormer of walls" as the Iliad called Ares. The state of Mars today is known not only by means of transcribed legends, but by telescopes and space explorations. Ancient history, myth, and theology have advised what to expect in general. They suggest that Mars underwent severe electrical encounters and some exchanges of material involving Venus, Moon and Earth. Its satellites entered the picture as the Steeds of Mars, the Maruts, etc., terrifying "animals" or "angels" indeed, if we heed the ancient accounts. J. Ziegler, a physicist interpreting the Hindu Vedas, finds the "Maruts" to be electrical phenomena, or at least short-circuits and resistors for cosmic electricity [8] . The two satellites of Mars are rough rocks of small size. Today they are called Phobos (fear) and Deimos (rout), names given to the steeds of Mars by the ancients. There is some likelihood that, although they are invisible now, the ancients may have recognized them [9] . Legend has it that they are the sons of Aphrodite . Hence we must raise the possibility that they were engendered in the Love Affair, the lovers' last encounters. Just as some mascons of the Moon may have been welded upon it by interplanetary thunderbolts, the sons of Aphrodite and Mars may have been exploded from the Moon and carried off by their father. They were part of a frightful bombardment of debris and ball-lightning which Earth suffered in the days of the Vedas and the Hebrew Prophets [10] . Velikovsky wrote in 1950 that an atmosphere, now residual, existed on Mars and that organic carbons may characterize the polar caps. Soviet sources now report that a considerable proportion of the thin Martian atmosphere is of argon. Recent photographs indicate that the polar caps, which advance and retreat seasonally, are composed of solid carbon dioxide with possibly some ice beneath [11] . In Solaria Binaria, Milton and I speculate that all planets have had experience with life forms. That the surface of Mars was devastated beyond recognition and beyond any remaining possibility of "higher" forms of life is consistent with the legendary damage done to the warrior god, and also with the legend concerning the removal of Venus from an orbit that threatened Earth. As was remarked in Chapter Six, a heavy contamination of the carbon constant was noted to have occurred in the 8th century B. C. This might result from several causes, granted the near presence of Mars in the sky. Electrical and geological disturbances on Earth and material and atmospheric exchanges among Earth, Moon and mars are suggested. Electrical charges can assemble and disassemble molecules of many different types. As a smaller planet, Mars was much larger than Moon and might devastate it, but be equally devastated in turn by Earth. In the heavens, even more than among men, the larger force strips the smaller. The present features of Mars are becoming known and even give hints of what it might have lost 3200 years ago. First its geosphere. The mariner IX flight (1972) that provided year-long observations by camera in orbit provide evidence that, in Velikovsky's words (1950), "Mars has been subjected to stress, heating and bubbling activity in recent times." [12] . Also that hot spots of presumed radioactivity would be found as evidences of electrical exchanges [13] . The cracks of Mars, concentrated upon one face and along the equator, appeared quite fresh to the readers of its photographs. Little erosion has occurred. It was as if, some said, a highly vigorous water system had carved itself onto Mars' face and then all the water had been instantly removed. How fresh is "fresh"? No one will speak up, unless one has a prior theory (the Velikovsky position). The uniformitarians are hesitant. "One week?" "Impossible, we would have photographed it." "One century?" "No, we would have observed something going on through our telescopes." "One-two-three thousand years?" "Events of this magnitude even then would have caused apparitions that are neither recorded nor geologically possible if not observed." "Apparitions were observed in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. respecting Mars." "That is astronomically impossible." "Well, how fresh is fresh, then, do tell?" "Fresh is millions of years. It has to be." "What happened then?" "We don't know, but we know that you cannot know either." As Eugene Rabinowitch, physicist and editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists once wrote, historical evidence is "inevitably tentative and often controversial matter." [14] "I see.. Unlike historical geology." The "erosion," "vulcanism," or devastation of Mars is most impressive, by earthly standards. Its major feature consists of a canyon running along the equator for nearly 2200 miles in a sinuous line that brings the "crack" to 3300 miles. The canyon, called Coprates, is over 300 miles wide near its center, and about 4 miles deep. Proceeding beyond the canyon and various associated faults with the same general orientation, one encounters "volcanoes" of massive diameters and great heights relative to earthly experience. Nix Olympica, previously believed to be a crater, appears now to have a base that is 300 miles wide and a 100-mile peak. The Island of Hawaii, the world's largest volcano, can be easily lost in it, along with Fujiyama, Vesuvius, and Etna. The response of the scientific establishment to the evidence produced by its own work may have been predicted but is continually frustrating. It is not only that conventional hypotheses are advanced, but that they are exclusively employed. For example, an article by Bruce C. Murray in the Scientific American of January 1973 is possessed of full documentation from the flight of Mariner IX and illuminated by all the graphic tools that imagination and skillful hypothetical speculation might demand. The article describes the enormous canyons and craters, and a number of features of the battered Martian hemisphere. But faced with the facts, the same author reverts to conventional theory. He accepts the eternal, unchanging order of the heavens. He resorts to internal heat and vulcanism. He wonders at the sudden burst of activity that must have erupted upon an earth-like atmosphere and that produced canyons, craters, and liquid flows in dozens of meandering rifts by a single event. Then a sudden freeze, et voil…, the present surface of Mars. The author says he cannot believe this could happen but he is forced to believe in miracle. The "waters" that "produced" the vast canyon and rift system are nowhere to be found, nor is there evidence that they existed. Further, the "waters" would have existed solely in one region of the Martian surface. The claim is made that Mars has no magnetic field, yet the enormous dust storms that howl over the planet go unexplained, too. The cameras of Mariner IX circled the planet for weeks before the dust settled enough to photograph the surface. Now would not cavities miles deep and many miles across, and craters that would contain cosily the great cities of Earth offer a settling place for this dust? How does this dust pick itself up and fly about the planet? And, if it is once up, and accelerated in a vacuous atmosphere, whatever brings it down? It would seem reasonable to assume that the Martian "atmosphere" is capable of regular electrical phenomena such as produce clouds, winds and tides on Earth even if the constituent material is so humble as to be called "dust." In fact, as Ralph Juergens has mentioned, airborne dust is an ideal medium in which to "brew" electrical discharges [15] . Nor, for that matter, is Murray perturbed by the fact that the carbon dioxide caps photographed at the poles of Mars are a couple of hundreds of kilometers off center. Here, again, is evidence of a tilting of the axis of the planet. The obvious hypothesis is that Mars was intruded upon externally in recent times; and suffered an axial tilt. The polar caps have not had time to reassemble around the true geographic poles. Furthermore "Mariner 9's pictures also disclosed a most peculiar terrain in the south polar area... It covers much of the south polar region up to about 70 degrees south latitude. The laminated terrain is composed of very thick layers, alternately light and dark, whose gently sloping faces exhibit a certain amount of texture, or relief." [16] These "plates" are perhaps half a kilometer thick and up to 200 kilometers across, with slopes that face outward. They exist only in the polar regions. They have few impact craters. To our eyes the feature appears as a frosting to a turning cake applied erratically by a baker between filing orders, each layer flowing out and hardening before the next diminished batch was poured over the center. In the wintertime of mars, the error is partially concealed by a coating of carbon dioxide. These laminated plates may well reflect a series of meltings of the Martian surface, produced concurrently with a series of axial tilts. If in the six or seven near passes of Mars with Earth, the Earth's axis tilted twice (or, for that matter, not at all), the possibility of more numerous changes in the Martian axis of rotation would be greater. However, there is also to be considered, given the thermal melting of the surface, the possibility that a period of axial wobbling from a single blow would produce the "start- stop" effect observable on the poured-out area. The thermal melting itself might have been produced by the rush of electrons to the poles of Mars, when, with a negatively charged surface, Mars approached other like-charged bodies, especially Moon, equatorially; there the electrons would pour out into space inciting discharges upon encounter with the positive ions that had been contained from them hitherto by a neutral belt. Whereupon we return to the main features of the devastation of "fiery, bridling" Mars: the canyons and crater system. None of the hundreds of Mariner-watchers who have spoken up under establishment sponsorship by the time these words are written have dared to mention an external force. Much more is at stake for the human mind than a scientific theory; Holy Dreamtime is threatened if a disorderly cosmos is recalled. Only a few non- establishment scientists, almost exclusively sympathizers with the ideas of Velikovsky, were quick to recognize how relevant were the materials of Mariner 9 to the theory of an erratic cosmos. Allan Kelly has described what may have happened to create the gigantic canyon of Coprates. He had written, with Frank Dachille, a seminal book on comets and geology in 1953, and has lately come to regard close-encounter as important as collision in the carving of planetary surface [17] . An "Intruder (much more massive than Mars) was traveling in the same direction as Mars and in nearly the same direction as the Martian rotation about its axis. This nearly parallel movement of the two bodies provided a relatively long period of time in which the gravitational force could act... As the two bodies approached each other, the gravitational power of the Intruder suddenly came to a focus [we would say "arrived at a sufficient intensity"] on the surface of Mars, ripping off the crust in a swirling motion beginning at the eastern end of the canyon called Coprates." Mars was zipped open. The sinuous "unzipping" we would imagine to be the effect of erratic jostling between Mars and the Intruder. From the wound crustal material exploded and lava flowed. Possibly the satellites of Mars, with their rough shapes, blew out at this time along with a stream of material that was not recaptured. The metaphor of the unzippering of Mars reminds one of the battle of the gods in the Iliad, when Pallas Athena charged Ares and cast her spear "mightily against his nethermost belly," upon which "the brazen Ares bellowed loud as nine thousand or ten thousand warriors cry in battle, when they join in the strife of the Wargod." And Homer adds, marvelously, "Even as a black darkness appears from the clouds when after heat a blustering wind arises, even thus... did brazen Ares appear as he made his way among the clouds towards the sky." As for the "volcanoes" of Mars, Kelly argues, these number twenty and all except one are found along the same straight line, but at some distance from the unzippered canyon. These Kelly explains as being created by related, gravitationally induced, explosions produced as the Intruder pulled away from Mars. In the Iliad (Books XX and XXI) we find additional details of the fighting between Athena and Ares. Athena screams great war cries (one thinks of Wagner's Valkyrie). Ares comes "spouting" against her, shrieking to his Trojans, and leaps at her with his spear, driving it into her tasseled aegis. She gives ground, but smites him on the neck with a huge rock that "loosed his limbs," or, as we say, "shook him from head to foot." When Aphrodite tried to help him off the battlefield, she too was struck by the hand of Athena and her heart melted. Planet Athena-Venus was probably the Intruder that devastated Mars. The Earth, while doing damage also, was too remote to have produced the Coprates complex. Yet it may be incorrect to believe that the Coprates complex was a product of gravitational explosion alone. Electrical forces were assisting. True, the point of minimal distance and weakest material strength between two bodies would be the first disrupted area. But to overcome the resistant gravitation of these two points inwards upon their parent body is not all that is needed to cause material dislocation. At the protruding points, the chemical bonding of the material would have to be overcome. That is, a rock is self-contained hardly at all by its center of gravity, but is held together by the chemical ties among its molecules. Otherwise mountains would flow down to the sea like water. The Coprates complex exhibits the important qualities of the rilles of the Moon, which the electrical theory of Juergens appears to explain. The zig-zag eruptions (also explainable as "wobbling"), the sharp cleavages in the waterless environment, pointy canyon bottoms, "river" valleys that stop in the middle of nowhere instead of by the banks of a sea, and rilles that do not approach "volcanic" mountains close enough to "drain" them of liquid are reasons to diagnose the "blood-stained stormer of walls" as a victim of electrical as well as of gravitational disruption. Therefore, probably both Moon and Mars were affected during the Love Affair by electrical discharges building on gravitational pulls. These were sufficient to soften and break the chemical bonds of many places on both spheres. Such, at least, is the terminology I am using in this book. Elsewhere, most prominently in Solaria Binaria, I join with Earl R. Milton in an exclusively electrical formulation of interactions between large bodies. We find that the concept of gravitation is no longer needed, in accounting for the transactions. From all over the world, a small collection of peculiar meteoritic stones has been collected over the past hundred and fifty years, half of which were originally seen to fall from the sky, none of them anywhere near active volcanos. Lately, examinations have been made of the rocks by new techniques, and they have been deemed to have originated from Mars. A high content of mineral maskelynite along with crystals of augite, indicates that they were originally igneous feldspar and later were converted by an explosion or impact that did not melt them. Their chemical composition is "unlike that of any known Moon rock," reports S. P. Maran [18] . The clouds of Venus would prevent such material from escaping. The rocks are young with respect to the time of impact (assigned 180 m/ y), and they could not be part of the asteroid belt because the asteroids are supposed to be much older and a large one would have to explode more recently producing a great many more small rocks of the same age than have been observed. Io, the explosive Jupiter satellite, is dismissed because it appears to have much more sulphur in its constitution than these so-called SNC meteorites. "The tests reveal that the meteorite's content of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon, and especially the relative amounts of two isotopes of argon and two isotopes of xenon, have an uncanny resemblance to the relative abundances of these gases as measured in the Martian atmosphere by the Viking Landers." There is an equally good match with the chemical composition of Martian soils. "Mars would accordingly appear to be the parent body of the SNC meteorites," writes Maran, "but how did they get from there to here? Alternative theories are, first, collision, but the heat of such would have melted the rocks when they separated from the parent body, or, second, a glancing encounter with an obliquely approaching body that pulled off rock fragments in its vapor stream without melting them." This problem is not serious, it seems to the present author. Furthermore, to these two mechanical theories may be added electrical effects: lightning strokes can pull up material from the ground without melting it; so can tornadoes which are closely related to lightning phenomena; I discuss such matters in The Lately Tortured Earth. As expected, the dates given to these episodes by the investigators are uniformly far older than the mere 2700 years of which we speak in Moon and Mars. Still, within their very old framework, the SNC meteorites "represent notable exceptions," to all other extraterrestrial ages, 1.3 b/ y instead of 4.5 b/ y. Also, the shock waves that produced the maskelynite are dated only 180 b/ y. In the grossly short-time perspective of the Quantavolution Series, the .180 b/ y figure would be 2700 y and the 1.3 b/ y figure would be between .5 and 1 m/ y. As to whether the Earth or Venus was the wounder of Mars, Venus seems the more likely, astrophysically as well as historically. The evidences of change and destruction on Earth, although great, are less than those of its earlier encounters with Venus. Furthermore its motions changed less than did those of Mars and Venus. Tentatively Venus-Hephaestus is designated as the assailant. More will be said on this subject later on, in pondering "How the Gods Fly." For now, it is proposed that the main encounter devastated Mars - that it was caused by Venus, that an enormously long venting fissure and holes opened up, and that it was recent. Too, the blow was forceful enough to change any and/ or every motion that characterized Mars beforehand. Furthermore, the Martian surface and atmosphere may have been quite different before this particular incident, as before the series of incidents with Venus, Moon, and Earth that Mars experienced. It probably vented poisonous carbon dioxide clouds through the Earth's atmosphere, in association with electrical discharges, resulting in occasional episodes of mass asphyxiation such as I have cited in The Lately Tortured Earth. It may also have lost a considerable atmosphere, a soil (that precious few feet upon which all terrestrial life depends) and a hydrosphere (on which all marine life depends). Apart from signs and remnants of these features, the planet Mars has been reduced to a naked force, resembling what the Greeks thought of Ares as a god, a narrow-minded compulsively destructive force whose solitary spark of sensitivity was reflected in the perverse love that Aphrodite bore for him. But virtue triumphed: "Behold on wrong Swift vengeance waits... ... and the god of arms Must pay the penalty for lawless charms." {S : Notes (Chapter 11: The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman)} Notes (Chapter 11: The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman) 1. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, Loeb edition, 1950), p. 433. 2. Das Era-Epos (Wurzburg, 1956). 3. W in C, p. 256. 4. W in C, p. 261. 5. Ibid., p. 263. 6. W in C, Part II, Chapter 1. 7. See the author's The Divine Succession (1983). 8. Manuscript kindly lent to the author for reading, 1982. 9. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 279-80. 10. Ibid. 11. Bruce C. Murray, "Mars from Mariner 9," The Scientific American, January, 1973, p. 60. 12. Worlds in Collision, 36-5, 367-8. 13. Ibid., 368. 14. Actually in a letter to the author, June 23, 1964. 15. Letter to the author, Oct. 27, 1973. 16. Bruce Murray, p. 60. 17. The early work was Target: Earth (1953); the present account is based upon an unpublished paper kindly furnished the author by Mr. Kelly. 18. "Rocks from Mars," Sky Reporter, 36-9, 38. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 12: } {T THE LAUGHING GODS} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER TWELVE THE LAUGHING GODS When Hephaestus roared out his anguish and humiliation at being cuckolded, he demanded that "Father Zeus and all you other eternal and blessed gods come here to see for yourself this laughable, this unyielding truth." But not all the gods came to gaze upon the trapped "embedded" couple at his copper-floored house. There came Poseidon, Hermes, and Apollo, all three being important Olympian sky gods. From Father Zeus came only silence. He deigned neither to appear nor to return the bride-price that Hephaestus had paid him. The "gifts of wooing" were unlike the gifts of Ares to Aphrodite; they were injuries received, not injuries given. Most of the gods had "taken their lumps" from the Father, from time to time. To imagine Zeus upon the scene could only occur to the raving Hephaestus. He is not to be called upon for a laughable matter. Indeed, the presumptuousness of calling upon him is comic. The scene would become too heavy, the literary critic would say, if Zeus should appear. Besides, Zeus was in truth absent. In the tragic setting of the Trojan War, Zeus had been engaged, acting to preserve the balance of power so as to work out the preordained plot, arbitrating, mediating. Still he is remarkably aloof, even there, his thunderbolts remembered by gods and men alike, but held in a kind of nuclear missiles reserve. His deeds were deeply etched upon human memory but physically he was receding into the far skies. Why then, would Hermes, Apollo, and Poseidon make an appearance? {S : MERCURY} MERCURY Hermes does not enter upon the action, As the planet Mercury, he may have been in a conjunction with one or more of the principles, in which event he may have vented some unusual expression. He may have presented an apparition at the time. For the scene may not have had the celestial clarity in the actuality that it achieved in the dancing circle. In a time of storm, of darkness and ashes, of lightning strokes, of different visual and acoustical perspectives - especially at the climax of the celestial disturbances - it is possible that a convocation of the gods was perceived. Perhaps Mercury appeared as an optical illusion and also as a re-engagement of memory, as both crisis and the memory of crisis struck hammer blows upon the mind and, later on, made demands upon the unconscious to recreate the "pluperfect" along with the "perfect." Venus was there; Mercury had been there, too. The climax of tension produces in the mind both memories overlaid. The fourth day of the month in Greece was sacred jointly to Aphrodite and Hermes, celebrating a game of dice between Moon and Hermes, the outcome of which added five days to the year, bringing it from 360 to 365 days. (The legend is probably of Egyptian origin.) In my book of Chaos and Creation (1981), Mercury was assigned a period of heavy worship between 2200 and 1500 B. C., that is, up to the Exodus, when Athena-Venus became the cynosure of Earthly eyes. M. Mandelkehr has more recently informed me of several additional authoritative sources who found Thoth active throughout the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and points out that his ibis symbol existed even before dynastic times [1] . One should not be astonished by the implication that the planet Mercury had inflicted its presence upon Earth. Other volumes of the Quantavolution Series have explored this possibility in detail. The natural history of Mercury is significantly marked by its appearance earlier as a most prominent god in the succession of gods. Its physical composition and size resemble the Moon's; the two bodies possess, too, with one of Zeus' satellites, an odd angular momentum. Like the Moon, it has suffered heavy bombardment from space. Called by different names in different cultures, he was represented often by various animals, especially by monkeys, in Egypt for instance, among the Gauls, and in India. Hanuman, the Indian monkey-god, once became as resplendent as the sun and moved whole mountains. The planet is suspected of having played a major role in the destruction of the Tower of Babel; there in Babylon it was called Nebo and emperors carried his name in theirs. A Jewish legend says that the survivors of the disaster and fire were turned into monkeys. The recollection may have arisen from a gibberish, the confounding of tongues, following upon mass electroshock; it may also have pertained to many physiognomic changes by mutations or congenital defects [2] . As a god, Hermes has more than a touch of the Moon's irresponsibility. He is fleet, perhaps because his solar orbit is shortest of the planets. He is the lucky god of gamblers, the messenger, the robber, the friendly night. He leads downwards into Styx and upwards into heaven (as a planet rises and sets). He guides the flocks. He is a helper, a healer; he is - writes Otto - Priapus, Tychon, and Perseus. He may have inspired Moses as scientist and electrician. He caries a snake-entwined rod, nowadays the symbol of healing medicine. He is younger than Apollo, older than Athena. He can laugh. His responsibility here is as spectator, apparition, and "extra" brought in to reinforce the climax of the story with more bodies. But he not only laughs. He speaks several significant lines. Asked by his older brother "would you really be willing, despite being tightly netted, to couch yourself alongside golden Aphrodite?" Hermes replies that he would gladly be witnessed by the gods and goddesses and suffer twice as many fetters for the pleasure of Aphrodite's love. Perhaps, then, he is reminiscing; perhaps once upon a time he, too, had enjoyed the devastating experience. "Again the laughter arose among the immortal gods." Unless Mercury was laughing at his own joke, Apollo must have been laughing alone. In two places, the poet has more gods laughing that appear to be present and in a laughing mood. It is possible that several dancers are emulating unidentified minor gods or the idea of collective divine laughter. {S : APOLLO} APOLLO Apollo, himself, is always a character of ambiguity and mystery. We have an abundant mythology about Apollo, from several cultures, but he has never been placed among the heavenly bodies, except that, for lack of better, and because he is "shining", he is commonly identified with the Sun [3] . But most, if not all, of his Sun-identity comes later in the history of mythology, and much of this ascription is readily traceable to an effort to clear the skies of gods. Apollo earlier commanded greater respect and fear than did the Sun. He was the god of prophecies, of music, the archer-god, the source and also healer of plagues. He showers rocks and poisonous airs as well as arrows upon humans who have incurred his enmity. He has an aloof, judicious temperament. He does not interfere in the Love Affair but plays the minimal role of lending his presence and posing a question to his younger brother. In the Iliad, at one point, he disdained a challenge to personal combat. If Hermes is a subconscious memory of an apparition which itself is the subconscious memory of an earlier celestial appearance, Apollo may be the same. But he may be even more so, as I explain in Chaos and Creation. Unlike Hermes, who existed in the sky as the planet Mercury, Apollo most probably did not then exist in the sky at all. He may represent a lost planet, a destroyed planetary body of an earlier age. He may be the belt of asteroids between mars and Jupiter, whose existence has from time to time been premised upon a previously existing body that disintegrated upon the approach of Jupiter or another intersecting mass [4] . Apollo's traits befit vanishing and disintegrated behavior. Plague, arrows and prophecies have in common a widespread incidence of discrete events upon individuals. In addition, Apollo acts from a distance. Murray, in one of his few interpellations, explains his translation of an Apollonian ephitet as "the archer god" by adding "or, possibly, 'the averter of ills. ' The word means literally, 'he who works afar. '" [5] Apollo is a retired and disoccupied god, Deus Otiosus; he is a god who works as a ghost presence. Apollo has been moved in myth closer to the events of which we speak, for he is the slayer of the monster serpent Python. Python, says Graves, is none other than Typhon [6] , hence to us a form of Hephaestus. But Graves is probably mistaken, for the Python incident seems to have been an earlier analog, following the death of Saturn (Osiris). So we use it here to explain further how the presence of Apollo at the Love Affair climax was subconsciously prompted. The closeness of the names strengthened the suggestibility of Apollo's presence, and originally Typhon may have been named out of a wordplay with echo of the more ancient Python case. There is yet another hint of Apollo's presence. If he does represent the asteroids, if he does pelt the earth with various small missiles and gases, then the disintegration of the cometary tail of Venus-Hephaestus, not to mention the material exchanges occurring among other bodies, would prompt the subconscious memories of Apollo and bring him into the climactic scene of the opera. {S : POSEIDON} POSEIDON Poseidon is present, "yet did not laugh." He is disturbed, impatient, persistent. He wants Hephaestus to set Ares free. He offers to guarantee Ares' just debts as an adulterer. Hephaestus at first refuses: "Don't ask this of me, Poseidon, You're sure to be sorry if you give bond for a miserable rascal. And how would it be among the gods, if Ares should escape both his fetters and his debt and I should have to bind you instead?" Poseidon is etymologically "master of the earth." He is the sea and the mover of Earth. Here now, he insists. "Even should he avoid his debt and flee, I shall pay for him." Hephaestus cannot refuse. "It is not permitted me to say 'no', nor would it be proper." Why? Is this mere politeness, to move the plot along? But a plot in literature is as determined by psychology as falling rock by gravity. Is it respect for a feared uncle, brother of Zeus? Hephaestus once sympathized with a rebellion against Zeus; he is clamorously angry at his parents now. No; the end is foreseen because that is the way it happened in nature. Hephaestus cannot command the planetary gods. They move ultimately in freedom according to their natures. So the fetters were loosed and the freed pair sprang up and off. Poseidon has reason to feel relieved, although he is still in bondage to Hephaestus. Poseidon is here a representation of Earth. He is the masculine of the Earth-Goddess. Before the Olympians came the Earth-gods. The Earth Gods were female, as Erinyes in Aeschylus' Orestes. In Sophocle's Antigone, the chorus chants of Gaia, "the eldest of the gods, the eternal and inexhaustible earth". Poseidon, says Graves, is lord of the seas and the Earth-shaker, but is always greedy to possess himself of land, if by no other way, then by loosing floods upon it. The "Love Affair" threatens turbulence for both land and seas. Poseidon is the only god to fit the role, and the plot might have had to be completely redesigned if the role were absent. Besides, the evidence of the ancient accounts and of the calendrists and geologists lend confidence in the designation of Poseidon and Earth. Michael G. Reade, in a brilliant study of perplexing perturbations registered in the famous "Ramesside Star Tables" of Egypt, has fixed the critical year to which they refer as around -700, about the time of our Love Affair. It would be the time of the Trojan War, too, when Homer says, as Lattimore translates the line (p. 405), Poseidon "shuddered all illimitable Earth, the sheer heads of mountains." We quote Reade's conclusions. "... the axis of the earth was forced out of its hitherto normal alignment with the stars at a season shortly after the summer solstice... the displacing force was a sustained one rather than a shock... it was associated with an acceleration in the spin rate of the earth... the effects of the disturbance were in many respects only temporary... the axis of the earth did eventually drift back in the same attitude with respect to the fixed stars (subject to a minor discontinuity in the precession of the equinoxes)..." (IV S. I. S. R. 213 1979-80, 49.) Any such disturbance in the motion of the Earth would have caused earthquakes, volcanism, tidal movements, and atmospheric turbulence. Poseidon has reason to feel surly and "put upon." It is Earth that has suffered devastation in these sky-battles. This is no laughing matter. Earth has had to change its calendars. Its cities have been battered, its plains flooded, its skies filled with poisons and ashes, its magnetic field has been reversed [7] . Earth will chance future disaster at the hands of cometary Venus if Venus will only deliver it from Mars. Besides, the Moon is with Earth. If Hephaestus-Venus lays claim to Moon, that is one thing, a claim long experienced. If Mars now claims Moon, that is another thing, a serious conflict indeed. Already, the Moon may have been drawn away from Earth. It would be noticeably smaller. Earth-Poseidon is put in the sky, as a sky-god. This should not cause surprise. he was born brother of Zeus and son of Chronos (Saturn), and assigned Earth, when Zeus received Heaven and Hades the underground. Earth was immemorially conceived as an entity, a unity, a being. Further, even the idea of Earth as a space-ship, like the other gods, had been developed in a number of pre-Homeric cultures. The sense of the instability, the changeability, the restlessness of Earth affected Homeric and pre-Homeric humanity much more profoundly than it affected mankind more recently. To the Greeks, as expressed in Plato's writing, the Earth was an organism, alive, as the planets and stars were alive. In conceiving of this state of affairs, modern man might not simply imagine that it was alive simply because it was covered with live plants and animals but that it was full of gods (as Thales said), alive as a whole, breathing and moving as the Mother Earth Goddess. Poseidon, her counterpart, was masculine, but so was the god-earth of Egypt, Geb. This conviction was a sensual impression, not a metaphor and was born out of thrashings, twistings and turnings, and from transformations for which people have today only the barest of sensitivity. So the song has the Earth siding with the lesser of two evils to retain the Moon, to settle peace upon the Moon-path and thence to tranquillize its own way through the skies. {S : HELIOS} HELIOS Helios is not present among the laughing gods and there is no reason why he must be. There are so many differences between the Sun and the sky gods that one must continually suspect mythological claims that assimilate their identities to him. Helios is an everyday herald, a routine chariot-driver of the sunlight. Whatever importance late historical man may ascribe to his life-giving powers, he did not contribute significantly to the development of the human mind and soul in the Homeric age. A Homeric hymn begins "tireless Helios who is like the deathless gods," and ends, "now that I have begun with you, I will celebrate the race of mortal men, half-divine." [8] Something of the passive incapacity of the Sun is revealed in another place in the Odyssey. Helios, when his cattle are stolen and eaten by the sailors of Odysseus, exclaims: "Father Zeus and you other happy and eternal gods, I call on you to punish the followers of Odysseus, son of Laertes. They have had the insolence to kill my cattle, the cattle that gave me such joy every day as I climbed the sky to put the stars to flight and as I dropped from heaven and sank once more to earth. If they do not repay me in full for my slaughtered cows, I will go down to Hades and shine among the dead." "Sun," the Cloud-gatherer answered him, "Shine on for the immortals and for mortal men on the fruitful earth. As for the culprits, I will soon strike their ship with a blinding bolt out of the dark-wine sea and break it to bits." That is, the Sun must keep to his course. Only the great gods fly freely. Helios must use the gods for his needs. Graves reminds us that "Helios was not even an Olympian, but a mere Titan's son; and, although Zeus later borrowed certain solar characteristics from the Hittite and Corinthian god Tesup and other oriental sungods, these were unimportant compared with his command of thunder and lightning." Further, Graves tells us, "The Sun's subordination to the Moon, until Apollo usurped Helius's place and made an intellectual deity of him, is a remarkable feature of early Greek myth [9] . It appears that the herds of Helios are numbered by lunar multiples, that "cattle are lunar rather than solar animals in early European myth", and that "Helius's mother, the coweyed Euryphaessa, is the Moon-goddess herself." [10] "Thessalian witches used to threaten the Sun, in the Moon's name, with being engulfed by perpetual night." [11] {S : A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR} A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR When the gods are no longer near enough to be recognized as dwellers in their celestial homes, the age of philosophy begins. They are assigned to a mundane abode or relegated to astrology and denigrated. A Mount Olympus is provided, together with such local vacation places, you might say, that they favor for rest, recreation, rehabilitation, and retreat. The gods must be kept nearby. It is well enough for astrologers to watch remote planets and to bank their fears and hope thereupon, but for most people, displacement of the gods upon more familiar grounds is preferable. For humanity can suffer great fear, but it is an animal with a formidable physiology for converting fear into intelligence and power. Much of the complexity of theology is the rationalization of how the powerless, the misbehaving and the ashamed can nevertheless infiltrate their will into the almighty and the all-knowing, living a successful perennial paradox. By the time of Homer, men are beginning to strut, to smile grimly, to mutter innuendoes. Hybris? This laughter of the gods has puzzled ages of scholars and schoolboys. However, the gods jest with each other. They do not laugh at pathetic, troubled, insubordinate, vicious or the occasionally happy human beings. Nor do humans indirectly laugh at the gods. The sight of the gods in good humor is still a sacred sight. One of the means that enable the plot of the Love Affair to come off so well is the absence of humans in the cast. This precludes a dangerous conflict of interests; one need not fear the overstepping of bounds. Which is not to say that the audience is not laughing at the gods. It is, but by the completely safe psychological technique of displacement and projection. The Greek sense of humor, itself derived from the way its theomachy is constructed, writes into the gods' behavior what they would laugh at in themselves and at the same time feels dissociated from that behavior by its imputation to sacred character. Therefore, the audience may have laughed as the dancers and singer spun out the humor; more likely they marveled, were fascinated, and thought of themselves as receiving moral instruction from the gods. The humor itself - the laughing at the discomfiture of Ares and Aphrodite, at the insulted dignity of the insultable Hephaestus, and at the desirability of committing the same crime if one could (spoken in the very presence of the injured party) - this falls readily into the category of sadistic and savage humor. Except that we do not understand the genesis of humor very well yet. Two major contributors to the theory of humor are Sigmund Freud and Arthur Koestler. Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious explains a joke as the subconscious prevention of a wish from completing its natural aim. For that aim is tabooed or aggressively hostile or tragic. Hence the mind switches onto a parallel track that unexpectedly carries it to a conclusion of minimal threat. In Act of Creation, Koestler insists, besides, that both humor and creativity rest upon hidden associations. These associations are inharmonious. They are wrestled into contact with one another in a double frame of meanings that resolve into a synthesized single frame with a new more acceptable meaning. Since the whole of the Love Affair proceeds on a double level of meanings, two sets of mental events that lead to humorous resolutions may occur, or six in all, because there are three mentions of laughter. For the Love Affair, Hephaestus is first to confess the laughable. It is that he should be victimized for his born disabilities. On the overt level, the threat is that he will prove false assurances of fidelity had been given him when he married Aphrodite. The expected and feared result is that he will prove these false assurances and gain an undeserved right. The situation is to be resolved humorously, laughably, as Hephaestus himself confesses in advance, because other people actually will see that he has been denied his rights despite his assurances. Covertly, Hephaestus is threatening to possess the Moon himself, though rather impotently. The danger is nevertheless that the Moon will go beyond all bounds in losing its free and irrepressible spirit. However, all will gather to see that the assurances are denied of their validity. There was probably also amusement, though not named as laughter, in calling upon all the gods to appear. Nothing would be less funny in the play or more tragic in reality than the coming of Zeus, the father of gods. Fortunately "everyone knows" that Zeus is not likely to intervene in such a ridiculous affair. Hence, humor. In fact, Zeus does not appear. Again, comic relief. Next, the gods laugh as they see how "swiftness," speeding to its rendezvous, is unexpectedly and ignominiously trapped by "craft." Here the overt thrust of the action is that Ares is bound to steal a love. It is expected that he will succeed. But he is in fact trapped. Covertly, Mars is moving towards the ravaging of Moon and Earth. The fear is that he will succeed. The comic release follows when he is trapped and exposed to view by the public of gods. Then the gods laugh because Hermes gives an unexpected and amoral answer to a question about himself. Apollo asks whether he would agree to such fetters if he might lie with Aphrodite and Hermes answers that he would accept thrice as many bonds for the pleasure it would give him. Here the thrust is towards repeating the adultery. The expectation is that he will falsely deny it. Instead he affirms it, but does so "harmlessly." The covert parallels are that Mercury too now (as once) is invited to ravage Moon and Earth. The result expected is that the disasters will continue; instead the memory is affirmed while the future possibility is dismissed. There are here, in effect, four types of joke. But in all there are four overt thrusts leading to expected disappointments; four covert thrusts leading to subconsciously feared disasters; and eight triumphs of evasion leading to laughter. So then a conclusion is manifest, in general, regarding laughter: that the formula of laughter is ipso facto satisfied when laughter occurs, but an audience will laugh only when a threshold of anxiety has been reached. Also, laughability (and its companion, the plotting of laughability by a jester) is moral one in which criteria of savagery, vulgarity, virtuosity, and sophistication enter. To know when to joke is to know when to harm; to know how to joke is to know how to dodge the larger harm - which is to say that high wit and laughter become a property of morals and genius. {S : Notes (Chapter 12: The Laughing Gods)} Notes (Chapter 12: The Laughing Gods) 1. E. A. W. Budge: Osiris, The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, (Univ. Books, 1961), pp. 81-3; J. Bonwick: Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought, (Falcon's Wing Press, 1956), pp. 101-2; R. T. R. Clark: Myth & Symbol in Ancient Egypt, (Thames & Hudson, 1959), pp. 124-6; D. B. Redford: "The Sun-Disc in Akneton's Program: Its Worship & Antecedents I", Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 13 (1976), p. 57; Cambridge Ancient History, Third Edition, Vol. 1, Part 2 Early History of the Middle East, p. 53. 2. Hugh Eggleton, "Mercury and the Tower of Babel," V Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Workshop 2 (1982-3) 10-1; and see the present author's God's Fire, Chaos and Creation, and The Lately Tortured Earth. 3. See discussion by R. A. Herring and others in 2 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4 (april, 1980) and subsequent issues. 4. Cf. Fritz Heide, Meteorites, 1957, trans. by E. Anders and E. Dufrense. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 130, and Solaria Binaria. 5. Op. Cit., p. 281. 6. Op. cit., Apollo used a bow and arrows fabricated by Hephaestus, ibid., 21. a. We must suppose this is an incidental mythical reversal of time. for Hephaestus, we reason, is active later than, unless he earlier participated in, the events of Apollo's life and death. 7. Science News (Penguin Publications, July 1949). Manley discusses the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field as evidenced in Attic and Etruscan pottery of the eight century. The reversals, cited in Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955) p. 283, seem to have been a temporary phenomenon resulting from "The Battle of the Space Sheaths;" See below pages 265ff. 8. "Homeric Hymns," no. XXXI, contained in the Loeb edition of Hesiod, p. 459. 9. Graves, I. 156. 10. Ibid., 156-7. 11. Ibid., I, 13 citing Apuleius, Metamorphoses iii, 16. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 2: } {Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS } {C Chapter 13: } {T HOW THE GODS FLY} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART TWO: GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS CHAPTER THIRTEEN HOW THE GODS FLY My readers, who thus far have been kind enough to loose me on a long tether, have probably been conducting their own more restrained examination of the events being discussed. I suppose that I can rely upon their achieving a certain respect for the connections shown between gods, skies, Earth, and the audience of Demodocus. Reviewing their own information, they will have recalled that a great part of human activity, especially in earlier times, has gone into watching the skies, relating the movements and events there to human affairs and celebrating the connections by religious observances, astronomical observations, fairy tales, song, and dance. They would readily acknowledge the occasional episodes of conjunctions of planets, earthquakes, clouds of volcanic dust, lightning storms, and cometary apparitions; these they might think are adequate to explain the celestial imitations occurring in the Love Affair. More than this may be in their opinion unnecessary and probably untrue. Indeed, the reader may feel that every step that I take to tighten the correspondence between a sky episode and dramatic poem and dance becomes less believable until finally every step become false. "Let well enough alone !" would be their advice. I grant that this liberal view may be correct, and that I should be thankful for it and that in pursuing my radical exercise I am constructing a model of the absurd. Nevertheless, I shall proceed, on and on, until if I fail to validate the relationship between the scenarios of drama and disaster, I shall have opened up new lines of thought about ancient history, dramaturgy, religion, human memory, and the psychology of the unconscious. Whereupon, since the cast of characters in the "Love Affair" is composed of celestial bodies, it needs to be explained how they can move about in the skies as they moved in the opera theater of ancient Phaeacia. The movements of the scenario should be translated into astrophysics. One will encounter three major problems. The first, which has been dealt with in Part One and will be treated again later on, is to discover and justify the movements of the plot as being the movements to be traced in the sky. How strictly must one be able to follow the scenario in the sky in order to accept its general validity? Up to a point, it is excusable to perceive a physically impossible movement; myth and dream, in the interest of censoring content and creating an aesthetic experience, may have Hephaestus-Venus, for example, doubling back on the "celestial bedroom" too quickly for any conceivable physics to account for. On the other hand, suppose that Ares-Mars had flown off to Cyprus with Aphrodite there to be reunited with her. This would present an obstacle to credulity, although there are some twenty-eight movements, and "one swallow doesn't make a summer." The whole set of movements must be nevertheless both necessary and possible leaving only an occasional screening anomaly to be justified by causes outside of astrophysics and astronomy. Secondly, there is the problem of apparent movements of celestial bodies. The Phaeacians, proud of their navigational skills, will nevertheless have set the story on a flat stage, a platform of the celestial map of the vault of heaven emplaced upon the platform Poseidon-Earth. They will have been perceiving apparent speeds, flattened orbits when the bodies were close-in, apparent sizes that would not make allowances for distances in space. How great a problem is presented by the semblances, as opposed to the reality, of vision of bodies in outer space, remains to be seen. Although the best of ancient astronomers struggled to actuate the apparent frame in their observations and calculations, still the Phaeacians may have carried an astronomical sense from extremely ancient times. That the Earth is round has been discovered and forgotten several times. The measured circle of the dance and the Coda Dance of the Purple Ball are suggestive of many early theories of the vault and dome of heaven. The problem is that of translating apparent motion into acceptable and probable real motions. If one cannot offer an explanation of the movement of the scenario that is respectable, even if controversial, as a working hypothesis in astrophysics, then the credibility of the structure here established will slump. Accordingly, after discussing the movements of the scenario, we shall consider in the section on "Electro-mechanics of the Gods" certain theories of astrophysics under development today, and use them to explain the events of the Love Affair. Another indulgence is besought. Consider, for a moment, that there are five bodies plus considerable debris whose matter, motions, and positions are to be accounted for. Each body has orbital and rotational motions that provide its angular momentum; it has orbital distances from the sun and the other bodies, orbital speed, and mass. It has volume. It has rotational speed. It possesses an angle to the ecliptical plane, and an axis of rotation at an angle to that plane. It has a magnetic field. These still do not include "minor" eccentricities, such as the fact that the shape of the moon reveals three "remnant" asymmetries, or that the earth is swollen at its equator and flattened at its poles. More ominously, the other planets, notably Jupiter, are excluded from the scenario. Consider, too, that each property of a body may have an effect, provided it changes, upon all these other properties of its own body and upon any one or all of the properties of the remaining four bodies. The number of possible combinations of changed motions - taken in the bare qualitative sense of change, not as a quantitative set of relations that would give us azimuth readings or particle counts - will be (pardoning the metaphor) astronomical. From one moment of time to another, one state of affairs may transform into another. It is as if one had come upon a round billiard table with five balls already struck and in motion at each its own speed. Each is of different size, each is capable of a change in its volume; each is spinning at a different rate and angle to the board; each possesses a magnetic field of different size and intensity that is capable of change, plus a changeable electric charge; each is drawn invisibly and is electrically related to the center of the board (the Sun). If commanded to describe the scene, one might pray to God to restore order immediately by sending the bodies into non-intersecting circle moving around the center of the board according to a single law of gravity and with unchangeable speeds. Failing this, one might invoke the most skillful mathematicians and latest computers to tell us what is happening. But they would be distressed by the lack of data. "Give us some benchmarks," they would plead, "Give us parameters." At which point one would have to offer some fuzzy archaic snapshots with their double and triple exposures saying; "Here you are. We must do the best we can with them." Thirdly, concerning how the gods may fly, is the problem of power to change all the motions involved in the scenario. Briefly, the gods fly by electrically assisted inertial power, gravitationally maintained. This, too, requires explanation, much more than what can be supplied here. {S : THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO} THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO The group's dance in the measured circle that precedes the song is intended to indicate the celestial and sacred nature of the story. It is not counted here as a spatial event. Nor is the Dance of the Purple Ball that follows the story. In general, the scenes are brilliantly lit, 'Phaeacia, ' 'Hephaestus, ' 'brazen, ' 'copper, ' 'golden, ' 'sparks, ' 'bronze, ' and 'blazing' are among the metaphorical suggestions of light; brilliance is carried as the 28th movement or change. The "Love Affair" proper gives the following spatial changes. They are listed in the order in which they occur. 1. Secret copulation of Ares and Aphrodite in the house and bed of Hephaestus. 2. Ares gives gifts to Aphrodite 3. Helios moves past their bed. 4. Helios passes and reports to Hephaestus 5. Hephaestus goes to his smithy. 6. Hephaestus places his anvil on the block and hammers out fetters in his smithy. 7. Hephaestus goes to his house and bed. 8. Hephaestus spreads the net from ceiling and bed posts. 9. Hephaestus moves towards Lemnos. 10. Ares is moving towards house and bed. 11. Aphrodite goes from Zeus presence to house. 12. Ares arrives at house after Aphrodite does, and speaks to her. He reaches out for her hands. 13. Ares and Aphrodite copulate in the bed. 14. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed. 15. Helios passes by their bed. 16. Helios approaches Hephaestus and reports to him. 17. Hephaestus moves to the doorway of the house and stops. 18. Hephaestus shouts terribly to the gods. 19. Poseidon arrives at doorway and pauses, disturbed. 20. Hermes arrives at doorway and pauses. 21. Apollo arrives at doorway and pauses. 22. Hermes and Apollo laugh, jest and draw conclusions. 23. Poseidon argues with Hephaestus and gives guarantees. 24. Hephaestus strikes off the fetters. 25. Ares flies to Thrace. 26. Aphrodite flies to Cyprus. 27. Aphrodite is bathed and anointed. 28. Overall and repeated brilliance. Let us classify these movements, following their temporal sequence in the scenario and retaining their given numbers. When a movement is appropriate to more than one category, it is carried more than once. At this point we shall also change to astronomical names. 1. The first category of movement includes all passages of bodies through space. In astronomical terms, we are speaking of the relative motions of these bodies in the terrestrial sky. The left-hand numbers correspond to the list of spatial changes above. 3 Sun passes Mars and Moon 4 Sun moves and passes Venus FIRST 5 Venus moves to a false setting DAY 7 Venus moves to Moon and Mars apparent orbital rendezvous location 9 Venus moves to a second false setting 11 Moon moves to rendezvous location NIGHT 10 / 12 Mars moves to rendezvous location 15 Sun passes Mars and Moon 16 Sun (approaches) passes Venus 17 Venus moves to apparent rendezvous point slower than Mars SECOND 19 Earth moves to rendezvous point DAY 20 Mercury moves to rendezvous point 21 Apollo moves to rendezvous point 25 Mars moves from rendezvous point 26 Moon moves from rendezvous point From these movements comes confirmation that the action takes place in the sky. The Sun gives an orientation by pursuing its regular rounds. Although Demodocus does not say so, the elapsed time may be two days; the Sun makes two rounds; better say two days and their intervening night, but the climax (catastrophe) of the scene probably occurs after sunset of the second day. Moon appears generally to hold its course. Venus moves erratically and may not have set during the period. Mars appears to be moving on a near collision course parallel to the Moon-and-Earth solar orbit (the persistent lover) until sprung into a farther orbital track by Venus. II. The second category of movement includes all decelerating and accelerating events, including pauses, that is, what would be referred to astronomically as changes in orbital and rotational speed. 1 Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close proximity 6 Venus apparently pauses for discharges remotely 8 Venus apparently pauses for discharges near at hand 12 Mars stops at Moon's house (apparent rendezvous point) 13 Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close proximity 14 Longer pause and slowed movements of Mars and Moon as Venus approaches 17 Venus apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point 19 Earth apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point 20 Mercury apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point 21 Apollo apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point 25/ 26 Mars and Moon move at opposing adjacent angles for rendezvous point From this collection of movements, it may be inferred that marked changes in the orbital speed of Mars, Moon and Venus occur. The two sets of encounters tend to confirm the two- day calendar. Earth's rotation is slowed to give a strong impression of the whole action being frozen during the dramatic crisis, when Mars, Moon, Venus (and Earth) are all lined up (in perilous conjunction). Mercury and Apollo, with Earth, join the scene at this point, as archetypical memories from earlier crises being forced upon the scene of the present crisis. If it is objected that the convocation is simply a literary device invented to stress the literary catastrophe, one should recollect the theory that experience calls forth devices of literature. III. The third category of movement involves motions, sounds, and colors that connote exchanges of energy and/ or mass. 1 Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close proximity 2 Material leaves Mars for Moon 4 Venus increases in size, darkening as Sun passes behind 6 Venus thunders and discharges streams of electrified clouds 8 Venus discharges streams of electrified clouds all over sky andaffecting Earth 12 Noises from Mars/ Moon as Mars approaches rendezvous. Electrical belts stretch out between the two as they near each other. 13 Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close proximity 14 Venus' relative movement halts or slows jostling 16 Sun passes behind Venus, darkening it apparently 18 Giant cacophony apparently from Venus, which also explodes materialagainst Mars 22 General noise 23 Quakes on Earth promised 24 Venus approach suddenly propels Mars and Earth-Moon to resume movement 27 Moon returns to serenity with new face 28 All major bodies (Venus, Mars, Moon) and their atmospheres achieve some incandescence during the experiences The events of the third category include Mars disturbing Moon and Earth disturbing Mars with discharges of electricity and material. Earth slows Mars' rotation causing heating and jostling. Venus showers Moon with the sparks of Hephaestus' smithy. The intervention of Venus behind Mars and Moon causes heightened disturbances. Terrible noises are heard - electrical, atmospheric and/ or meteoric in origin. Incandescences of Mars, the Moon, and Venus (already incandescent for over 700 years) are noted, from which great heat is inferred caused by electrical discharges, crustal frictions from altered motions, vulcanism, and atmospheric turbulence, especially on Venus. The appearance of the Moon is altered. Its rocks seem new, contain remanent magnetism, and are freshly glazed. For the Earth to magnetize the rocks of the Moon would require that the Earth approach its satellite to at least three and possibly two earth-radii distances, there to heat up and magnetize its surface [1] . This is unlikely to occur in any event because Moon might disintegrate at about that distance from the electro- gravitational force pulling at it. Since in the period of the Love Affair the Moon appears to have been drawn for a time away from Earth, and Mars came between the two bodies, it is likely that while Earth beat upon the one face of Mars, Mars beat upon the Earth face of Moon. The perspective of the scenario is probably that of an observer in the southeast corner of Asia Minor. Then, as evening came and Earth rotated eastwards, and the bodies were accelerated, they would see Mars-Ares fly northwest to Thrace; Sun-Helios would fly west; and Moon-Aphrodite would spring southwest to Cyprus. Venus-Hephaestus is presumably left in charge of the moonpath from a great distance and follows the setting sun. Phaeacia was discovered to be a Utopia, but positioned in Homer's mind in the west. Some have assigned it to Corfu. Patroni insists upon Malta. Pocock opts for Trapani. Etc. Notwithstanding this doubt, Phaeacia was recently founded, by Nausithous, the father of King Alcinous, who hosts Odysseus. He took his people on a long journey to the deliberately preferred isolation of Scheria because they had been persecuted by neighbouring giants (more likely, the meteorites of Mars). But Phaeacia is now doomed. Two days after the recital of the Love Affair, as the boat that carried Odysseus home was returning to its harbor, it is turned to stone; a circle of mountains erupts and girdles the town, land-locking it forever. We can surmise, therefore, that the Phaeacians had witnessed the Love Affair in Southeast Anatolia and had played the drama later on in the West, without realizing that the actions in the sky would have followed a different terrestrial mapping if witnessed from their new home. {S : ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS} ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS Isaac Newton cleared the skies so tidily, and his laws imparted such regularity and tranquillity to the solar system, that, amazed at his results, he imagined that only a God could create the heavenly order. There was born in those times a new deus ex machina, a mechanical god, from the laws of gravity, inertia, and angular momentum. But the real historical gods are created out of catastrophes, not from order. And the heavens are as prone to disorder as to order. Attention is called to two additional facets of Newton's mind, one naturalistic, the other religious. He could not believe that gravitational attraction between two bodies could exist without a medium for transmitting the gravitational force. And, putting aside his deux ex machina, he went searching for his real God, the Old Testament God, who brought the Deluge down upon mankind, even seeming to agree with Whiston, his disciple, that a cometary force might have provoked the Deluge [2] . The latter is an irony that needs no elaboration here. But the former sets one to wondering. That all things are "falling" towards other things with measurable momenta is apparent; also that motion and matter are communicable, intra se and inter se, seems indubitable; further both seem to be inextinguishable. One must be wary, however, in using general laws of physics and astronomy when questioning the validity of observed events and historical-mythical accounts. The task of reconciling the two kinds of data is so difficult and frustrating, that many a good mind ends up in some dogmatic or empirical monomania. All this is a prelude to saying that the Love Affair portrays cosmic events that require extraordinary explanations. Yet one can take heart from the direction in which the current revolution in astrophysics is moving. Much of the new astrophysics is based on non-equilibrium - even explosive - phenomena, rather than the steady state thermal phenomena which have been the primary concerns of astrophysics in the past. It is the violence of the phenomena discovered in the astrophysics of the past fifteen years that has changed dramatically our current views of the universe [3] . That some physicists are moving closer to a determination that gravitation may be transmitted by waves, and that others are pushing ahead rapidly in electromagnetism and plasma studies likewise enhances the plausibility of the events of the Love Affair. For the Love Affair appears to have the planets moving in an essentially electric environment, with gravitational movements largely subsumable under the law of the conservation of momentum (inertia), which in turn may remotely have originated as a product of electrical laws. The imagery of the story is conveyed in motions that appear arbitrary, reversible, and erratic - qualities more characteristic of electrical than of gravitational forces. The examination of Moon and Mars has already shown features, such as rilles, that electrical theory can explain. Ralph Juergens, who has made a special effort to reconcile the much-neglected science of gaseous electrical discharges with the theory of cosmic catastrophism, has recently proposed an electrical concept of the solar system that appears to fit the scenario of the Love Affair [4] . He suggests that the Sun's corona and the surfaces of the planets carry a heavy electric charge of negative value. Interplanetary space, on the other hand, is a plasma, a gas of dissociated positive ions and electrons. This highly conducting medium isolates the electric field of the planetary body; it shields itself from it. The shield is called a space-charge sheath. "In the space-charge sheath, positive and negative charges collect and arrange themselves in such a way that the electric field of a body with alien potential is contained within a limited region surrounding the body." [5] The electrical composition of the sheath is a function of the need to segregate itself from the interplanetary plasma and thus the plasma from the charged planet. The electrified body, however, has to continually receive a current of like charge from the outer environment in order to maintain its charge. This the planets do from solar and galactic sources, Juergens theorizes. Thereupon "when no orbital conflict exists, the system operates serenely under the direction of forces accounted for in conventional celestial mechanics." However, he continues, ... Let us imagine what might occur should two electrically charged major bodies in this system find themselves on intersecting orbit... The stage would be set eventually for a rendezvous at one or another point of orbital contact. Since the space charge sheaths of the bodies would occupy greater volume than the bodies themselves, a collision between sheaths would actually be more likely to take place than a direct, bodily collision. When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter, sheaths would make contact. Unleashed electric fields would clash. Almost instantly, forces immeasurably greater than gravitation would be brought to bear on the charged bodies. Cosmic thunderbolts would flash between the bodies in an effort to equalize their electric potentials [6] . In the present case, Mars, according to Velikovsky's reconstruction of the events of 776 B. C. or thereabouts, was caused to shift its orbit by the planet Venus, that had previously caused periods of cataclysm on Earth. The orbit of Venus grew more round, while that of Mars enlarged. The new orbit carried Mars on a collision course with Earth. In due time, the encounter occurred. The encounter witnessed in the Love Affair was one in a series that agitated the world in the period between -776 and -687. The first encounter between Venus and Mars may have taken place at a great distance, with a largely visual impression being created on Earth, an impression that the terrible and eccentric proto-planet Venus was following a new course and that Mars too had changed its orbital movement to an eccentric one that brought it periodically - every fifteen years by Velikovsky's reckoning - racing on an elliptical orbit almost tangent to that of Earth. There were six such near-misses in the period between 776 and 687 B. C., until a final encounter among Venus, Mars, and Earth brought about the present planetary system by expelling Mars into a new orbit. That Earth may have had the last word may be the inference to be drawn from the coincidences between the rotational period of Mars (approximately 24 hours) and its inclination to the ecliptic (approximately 24§) and those of Earth. For these qualities, "swift Ares" may have exchanged orbital speed and an outside position on the racetrack around the Sun. Let it be supposed now that the Earth and Moon compose a type of binary system bearing negative charges on their surfaces: the two bodies tend to revolve around each other; but the only sign of this is the perturbation of the Moon, because Earth is so massive relative to the Moon. The same electric sheath, however, (which may coincide with the magnetosphere of the Earth) keeps them in electric balance with the plasma. The sheath is elongated to embrace the Moon as the Moon, pulling the earth around it, ineffectually, because of the great inertial orbital momentum of the Earth, revolves around the Earth. When the sun shines upon Earth, the Earth's magnetosphere streams away from the sun-side to a perceived distance at least sixty times the distance from Earth to Moon. The approach of Mars, on a generally parallel course to Earth, disturbs the Earth-Moon system. Repelled by both bodies from a direct encounter, it passes between the two. (One argues this midpassage because of the recent searing of the Earthward face of the Moon and the one-sided searing of Mars, also recent.) Its orbital momentum is also great and there is no question, under these conditions, of its becoming a part of the binary system. Nevertheless, it introduces a new negatively charged body into the sheath and the sheath undergoes violent adjustment. All three bodies intrinsically repel one another, bringing about bodily vibrations of considerable amplitude (the "sex bout"). The electrical repulsions overcome the gravitational attractions. Earth pushes Mars; Mars pushes Moon, and pushes back at Earth; the Earth's orbit expands slightly. The two sheaths temporarily strive for electric assimilation and equilibrium, although this is doomed from the start by the differential in inertial momentum (including factors of speed and angle). The space sheaths expand enormously into the plasma to acquire the electrical charges they need on their peripheries. They probably invade and excite the electrical sheaths of Venus. As the sheaths move to assimilation, they invade the negative fields of the body surfaces and cause physical conversions of several types - chunks of matter are exchanged between the bodies (in a sense, "gravity falls apart" as opposite charges momentarily prevail); thunderbolts strike the surface of all three bodies, with immense violence. Some of these are not typical thunderbolts. They are the weapon of the sky gods, at least of Jupiter, Athena and Hephaestus. Thyestes, a hero of the period, is portrayed by Seneca as asking Jupiter to still his anguish by bringing disaster upon Earth, "not with the hand that seeks out houses and undeserving homes, using your lesser bolts, but with that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell... These arms let loose and hurl your fires." [7] Juergens refers to them as of the species of plasmoid, explosive projectiles of electricity consisting of equal numbers of electrons and positive ions, rare examples of which have been duplicated in the laboratory by Winston Bostick. They carry immense electric and magnetic energy at the speed of solar flares [8] . A simple principle might explain which body will receive the greater damage. Since the electric charge of a sheath is proportional to the surface size of the spacebody, the destructive potential of the sheath in reference to a second sheath is proportionate to the surface size of the body contained by the second sheath. This would account for devastation of the side of the Moon facing Mars and Earth and of the side of Mars that locked its face upon Earth. Nor should we neglect the protective capacity of the Earth's atmosphere against all types of bombardment. The Earth's rotation brought repetition of the incident the next day. Now, however, Venus is much closer than it was on the day before and Mars is greatly retarded. It is said that today Mars rotates at less than half its expected speed. Such may be an effect of one or more of the encounters. Here Venus actually seems to catch up, watch, and then passes by. It is possible that at this point, Mars was driven back by Earth and Venus, and moved into its present outer orbit. That Mars is locked in on Earth in its rotational speed and axial tilt may indicate that its final pass by Earth came after Venus had sprung loose the "loving couple." Also, when Venus "loosed" them, it perhaps added a push to the Moon that reduced its orbit, restoring the lunar month to very much what it had been before the series of incursions by Mars began, and to its present length of approximately 29 1/ 2 days. Thus the electromechanical scenario may be synchronized with the year -687, with calendar adjustments that began all over the world after -687, and with the physical description of the Moon following her devastating Love Affair. Concerning the last of these, we recall that Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever - bathed, anointed, and astonishingly clothed. That would mean with "new beauty marks" and an aura caused by heat and dust clouds. In effect, both the destruction and the preservation of the bodies in the encounter are due to the electric environment which lets only a limited collision of spheres take place. At the same time, the electrical theory permits one to explain how planetary surfaces can be torn, exploded, and heated - including in all cases the dissolution of the chemical bonds of matter - without carrying the bodies implausibly close enough to call upon gravitational pull alone. The primary effects of encounter are the penetration of the atmosphere and surface of the bodies by attracted oppositely charged ions. A secondary effect is the retarded movement (rotational and orbital speed), displacement (oscillations), and orbital shift of all bodies. The gravitational force, which, if the bodies were nearing in a non-electric vacuum, would draw them together in inverse proportion to the square of their distance, is canceled out by the repellent negative charges on the surface of the bodies which operate with quite opposite effect and force. (They are repelled in proportion to charge and the square of the distance.) The "Battle of the Gods" resolves into a battle of the space-charge sheaths. The tertiary effects are heating of the bodies and their atmospheres, resulting both from electric particle bombardment and from atmospheric, hydrospheric, and lithospheric shearing friction. New levels of surface crust are developed on all of the bodies, new "scar tissue," new stratigraphy. The effects upon the biosphere are grave. They have been described time and time again by the ancient observers, by early students of the Deluge such as Whiston, Newton, and Boulanger, by modern catastrophists such as Cuvier, Donnelly and Beaumont, by contemporaries such as Patton and by Kelly and Dachille [9] , Lane [10] , Schaeffer, and, in especially systematic form, by Velikovsky. There emerge, in the perspective of the human race, disasters without number. The gaseous composition of the atmosphere changes (a noticeable thinning and occasional mass poisonings). Large-scale destruction of herds and crops, and of wild-life and forests occurs. Basins are emptied or filled with water. Tidal waves wipe out nearly all coastal settlements (where perhaps 80% of the Greek-speaking population was contained in 800 B. C.). Chasms are opened; volcanoes are created and activated. Surface soils are ripped off by winds traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. Communities are obliterated or disrupted by showers of ash and debris, winds, water, fire, and famine. The apocalyptic vision, historically founded, is renewed. The stupefaction and manias of the survivors are understandable. Older, similar experiences are reinforced in the memories of the group. That every aspect of human feeling, thought, culture and creativity should be affected is to be expected. To the explanation of these psychological and cultural transformations, the next chapters turn. They continue, at the same time and to the degree possible, with the exegesis of the torrid Love Affair of Moon and Mars. {S : Notes (Chapter 13: How the Gods Fly)} Notes (Chapter 13: How the Gods Fly) 1. R. Treash, Pens‚e, May 1972, p. 22. 2. Stecchini, op. cit., pp. 89-105. 3. John A. Simpson, "Journey to Jupiter," The Univ. of Chicago Magazine (Nov.-Dec., 1973), 6-11. 4. "Reconciling Celestial mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," II Pens‚e (Fall, 1972), 6-12. The concept is full developed by Early R. Milton and the present author in Solaria Binaria. 5. Ibid., p. 6. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Recently, what are believed to be electrical discharges have been observed between Jupiter and one of its satellites, Io, whose distance is many thousands of miles. The heavens have settle since 687 B. C., but the same natural phenomena may continue in a subdued form. 7. Atreus and Thyestes (Miller, trans., 1917), quoted in W in C, 217: and cf. p. 272. 8. Ralph Juergens, Pens‚e, Jan., 1974, pp. 2-4, citing Bostick, 16 Scientific American (oct. 1957), 87-94. 9. The scenario of geological effects is well-delineated in their book. Target Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science (Carlsbad Calif.; Box 225, Target Earth press, 1953). See also this author's The Lately Tortured Earth (1983). 10. Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 3: } {Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR} {C Chapter 14: } {T THE USES OF LANGUAGE} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART THREE: THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE USES OF LANGUAGE The Love Affair is not a double entendre and was not viewed as such in its ancient production. It is not an opera with two levels of conscious meaning. If it were, it would have arrived in our hands in a different version. But the Love Affair does not permit a conscious second level. In order for the drama to have been born at all, it had to become the mask of a historical reality. It had to speak and sound and mean a love story, first and finally. Nevertheless, upon being created, the story still had to develop in two contradictory directions. It had to retain its hidden meaning, and it had to shed more and more of its hidden meaning. It had to tell the truth and in the same breath deny it. This formidable task of the unconscious was doomed from the start, but yet it is perennially successful. Such "success through failure" is achieved not only in the Love Affair but in all myth. It is granted to few minds to comprehend the mechanism. Even philosophers build defenses against its comprehension. Some are rigidly obsessed with the attachment of words to objects (nominalists), or with words to operations (operationalists). Others, their opposites, insist upon the correspondence of words to ideal images (idealists, Platonists); to them the contradiction is anathema. It is intolerable, unphilosophical, confusing, meaningless. To the anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and psychological linguist, however, it is the veriest grist for the mill. {S : METER AND METAPHOR} METER AND METAPHOR Homer's 28,000 lines were six-footed, the hexameter, which Paul Maas [1] renders schematically and typically as: Each of the six long, stress syllables is followed by two short ones except at the end of the line, where a stressed sound prevails. Besides the stress, there runs a pitch that rises on some of the short syllables. The fifth and sixth syllables present a more variable combination than the other feet; they often embrace a "caesura," a pause or rhythmic division of the melody of the line. "All methods of imposing an order upon discourse by means of rhythm... are on a lower level, from the point of view of metric, than the oldest type of Greek verse, the Homeric hexameter." [2] Unfortunately, little is known about the rhythmic feeling of these measures or how dynamic and tonal accents were introduced as well. Furthermore, "we have no means of reading, reciting, or hearing Greek poetry as it actually sounded," [3] and can only form a shadowy notion of it. And, to make matters worse, nearly everyone believes that it is practically impossible to render English acceptable into epic (dactylic) hexameter, a judgement with which we do not agree. The reader may address the question by means of the author's working carried in Chapter Two above or search out a now rare translation by H. B. Cotterill done in 1911. The rewards of metric and phonetic analysis of the Love Affair may appear slender. One can listen time after time to tapes of it recorded by a trained actor without the rhythms registering more than the serious, singsong, long-drawn tread of the epic narrative. The sophistication of the rhythm finds itself in the length of the line and the large variety of subordinate rhythms that emerge from the counterpoint of whole- word against metric division, producing a harmonic unity and disunity at the same time. No doubt it was this last that induced Aristotle and others to affirm that the basis of poetry was the syllable; but the syllabic structure, taken alone, would collapse unless coordinated with the word structure, phonetic structure, and meaning structure. These all confirm the belief that Homer's 1 € € 3 € € 5 €€ 7 €€ 9 ___ 11 ___ Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô ÔÔ ÔÔ form is "advanced," technically, as Maas asserts, in consistency with the total state of his culture, regardless of the remanent social chaos of his times. A little more is to be learned by investigating the technique of metaphor. One might expect that, if there is a second level of meaning to the passages of the Love Affair, it would crop up in the guise of metaphor. W. B. Stanford writes that Homer generally engages heavily in metaphor but that his metaphors are ordinary and uninspired; "with a very few exceptions, Homer seems always stilted and even deliberately archaistic [liturgical] in his use of metaphors." [4] In the Love Affair, we find only three "genuine" metaphors among the hundred lines: "fine as a Spider's web" refers to Hephaestus' net; Aphrodite "bridles not her passion" is an expression that may well have had the ordinary meaning of "restrain" and therefore not be metaphorical; and Poseidon speaks "winged words," a favorite hackneyed Homericism. Hephaestus goes home "with a heavy heart," but one may regard this as literal, especially given Homeric physiological theory. And the lovers "shamed the bed" of Hephaestus, which illustrates a displaced object rather than a metaphor. Also there are epithets that refer to the gods - Poseidon, "the earth-enfolder," among others - but these we again see as literal adjectives and part of the divine names; the gods are described "as they are." Moreover, only the single simile is to be found in the passage. Yet it would have been easy to conceal catastrophe in one of Homers' famous similes. He might have chanted, "and as the gods laughed, it was as when great thunderclaps and bursts of light came from the blue skies, shaking the trees and setting the rocks to trembling, alarming the shepherd to gather his flock into the shelter of the cave." Instead, the Love Affair is completely matter-of-fact. Hence one may consider the opposite hypothesis: there must be reason for the passage to be barren of metaphor and simile. The reason is not slow to suggest itself. Since the parallelism between what is said in the lines and what is happening in the sky and on earth is so close, and, furthermore, so well-kept a secret, the need for metaphor and simile is negligible. Indeed, the whole passage is a single great simile ! And similes upon similes don't go. A second clue is intriguing. Stanford was cited to have praised Homer's similes and depreciated his metaphors. "Why," one asks, "would Homer be apt to this criticism?" A statement of Stanford deserves repetition: The essence of effective metaphor is a clear and definite understanding of the two constituent ideas incorporated in the metaphorical term, together with an appreciation of the new concept integrated from those constituent ideas... In order to insure that a reader or hearer will thus fully appreciate his metaphors, a poet must be certain that his audience understands clearly and precisely the meanings of words as he uses them [5] . Then comes his thesis: "Because words lacked precise definition in Homer's time, Homer could not, even if he had wished, have used daring metaphors." [6] Since Stanford is unaware of catastrophic theory and of this book's alternative short- term theory of the Dark Ages of Greece, he pursues his arguments in the typical manner. Homer was building a primitive language and savage customs into the dawn of Greek civilization. So again, Stanford's evidence support unwittingly the 'Crazed Survivors' theory. Stanford quotes C. M. Bowra who holds that Homer's language is clearly not primitive but "in other ways he employs a speech which has not settled to fixed forms and uses... This inexactness of function is natural in speech which is still finding itself." Stanford agrees and adds, "This is the common experience of all readers of Homer. In his dialects, grammar, prosody, and syntax, everything points to the growth of conciliatory order out of chaos and not to deliberate variation of an existing uniformity." [7] Demetrius long ago had written, "Homer impresses his hearers greatly by the employment of words descriptive of inarticulate sounds, and by their novelty above all." Homer had to make the meaning of many words - "to combine," as Stanford puts it, "with his poetic gifts the work of a pioneer grammarian, semiologist, and rhetorician." Another facet of the greatly and eternally confused "Homeric question," it appears, is resolved by our theory. Homer is too sophisticated to be a primitive minstrel, yet he is first and foremost of the Greek poets, and nobody feels that he stood upon the shoulders of great predecessors. Many contradictions, both technical and sociological, characterize his work, his subjects, his times. These are largely resolved if Homer is regarded to be part of his times, at one with his subjects and their fathers and grandfathers, and working in a new alphabet upon a polyglot, untutored Hellenic population surviving from a set of recent natural and social disasters. {S : HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER} HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Scholars have arrived at a fair concert of opinions about Homer. "The prevalent theory today" is that the Odyssey is not the full creation of one person [8] . Since it would be senseless for Homer to have put on a somewhat different vocabulary for each story, this evidence is weighty. The Odyssey's language is more consistent than the Iliad's, hence it is considered to be the later work. Its concepts are more abstract, another sign of its being written later. However, both these facts would also jibe with the two-author theory. Page makes the telling point that the Iliad and the Odyssey do not refer to each other. He repeated Monro's claim that the Odyssey "never repeats or refers to any incident related to the Iliad." [9] They neither boost nor knock each other. Yet they are consistent; there is no discrepancy between them. Some of the characters overlap, of course, and some of the statements correspond. Further, both epics are written from the same perspective of time. Their parallelism with regards to the events described extends beyond coincidental probability, whether these events were 400 years or 30 years before Homer. Both poems carry a style that is agreed to be oral. That is, they were intended for oral recitation, in parts and as wholes, extending over some days of recitation, if needs be. The major internal evidence of this rests in the great number of formular phrases that are employed time after time. "If the poet wishes to begin his verse with the thought 'But when they arrived... ', he has one way, and one only, of expressing this..." He has to deny himself all other ways [10] . In a sense unappreciated by modern writers, who search unendingly for an expanded, particularistic vocabulary and a way of avoiding cliches, the Greek epics were built upon collections of phrases, not words. The conclusion is that "the creation of the vast number of formulas, adaptable to almost all possible emergencies, must have been the work of many generations of poets... This is the memory technique of verse-making." But many formulas might be adapted to any long poem; ancient formulas would be the bricks that a mason could use quickly to erect a house; more closely similar is the practice of popular musical composers of folk, rock, fox trot and blues music in America who turn out great numbers of songs from a certain number of stock romantic lines and musical phrases. A number of elements of both poems were explicitly Mycenaean. They are idiomatic, even identical, They are so tightly linked with the Mycenaean culture that they could not all have been carried orally over 500 or 400 devastated, savage years. But they could represent what was destroyed one or a couple of generations before and still obtruded in the culture of the Homeric people. Further, it is agreed that many elements of the poems were non-Mycenaean, meaning contemporary or Near Eastern or Western Mediterranean. Here, our explanation is that the shocked society of Homer carried various cultures within itself, having no control over their incongruities. The oral technique would have been a continuation of centuries of recitation from memory that can prosper alongside any bureaucratic society, such as the Mycenaean, in which scribes could write, but the people could not. C. M. Bowra believes of Homer "that since he himself was alive when the wonderful art of writing returned to the Greeks in the form of the Phoenician alphabet, he dictated his poems to someone who knew it and the written texts were guarded by professional bards who recited them to later generations." [11] Page puts the Odyssey not later than -700. We would guess its composition at about - 650, its transcription soon thereafter. He mentions the possibility that the poet of the Odyssey may have been a contemporary of Archilochus, Callinus, and Alcman, two generations or more later [12] . He says there may in fact not have been any written version of the Odyssey before the sixth century [13] . The Iliad would have preceded this event by several generations. We suggest that just as the Iliad preceded the wanderings of Odysseus, the Iliad preceded the story of them. One then arrives at dates for the composition of the Iliad in several stages between -700 and -670. The great literary historian, Aristarchus, places Homer some sixty years after the return of the Heraclids, whom we have assigned to the late Eighth Century. Arie Dirkwager, in an unpublished manuscript lent to this author, has reasonably calculated that Homer "lived somewhere between 715 and, let us say, 640;" he connects Homer with Archilochus, whose grandfather Odysseus is supposed to have encountered when he visited Hades, and with Lycurgus, the "Spartan lawgiver, who we think owes his fame to his work in social reconstruction following upon natural disaster." Despite the ancient's insistence upon the single identity of Homer, Page considers finally "the relation between the two poems to be that of father and son: is it not much more probable that they are elder and younger brother, living in different places and developing in different ways? I suggest that this is so, and that it can be proved to be so." Of course he does nothing of the kind, but the concept of a family shop is congenial. It reminds one of Robert Graves' effort, possibly heuristic only, to place the authorship of the Odyssey in the hands of a daughter of Odysseus, named Nausicaa! The opinion of the present study is that Homer was unique. This is maintained not so as to ride free on the wagon of the traditionalists but because of what has already been said in this section and in this book. Homer was a trained Greek bard living in the seventh century in Asia Minor. The skies were settled and society was coming out of a century of shocks. Like Shakespeare, not only could he act but he could also invent poetry. His age was not like ours, an age of personalized authorship and copyrights. His inheritance of poetry was both his and non- his; it mattered little. Homer was alert to the future. Thus he succeeded well in binding up the past. Moreover, he witnessed the new alphabetization of Greek [14] . Excitedly he seized upon its practice and went to work. Like an editor of today, he brought into the shop what he regarded as the most vendable story in Greek culture - "Achilles and The Siege of Troy." It was an epic that he himself could recite, checking now and then its lines with another bard, discovering frequent inconsistencies and correcting as many as he could, losing patience often perhaps with the scribes of the new alphabet who must have had to make hundred of linguistic decisions in collaboration with him. The epic in writing was an instant success. In the beginning, he who writes things down is the author, with all due regard to the gods and muses. So Homer was the author. He was more the creative editor and publisher. Probably no sooner had the original version been produced than it was copied - under his supervision for he would not have let out his treasure. If the Iliad was such a success, would there be a second epic of like proportions to transcribe? There would be. Homer, Editor and Publisher, would be sought after by other bards who lacked his editorial genius and workmanship in the new literary genre. Would he help them - at a price, of course? The work would be in his name, but his patronage would be valuable. So one may conjecture that after he had created the Iliad in written form, he sought out and selected a second epic coming from another part of the Greek world, singing of Odysseus, a character whom he favored beyond all others. The signs of a common editorial hand in the two works exist; they have encouraged the belief in a unique "author" over the whole time. There is evidence of deliberate tampering with the two poems to make them consistent and related, but never duplicative. Thus Nestor's story of his early life in Pylos, found in the Iliad, is "remarkably Odyssean in style." [15] The Odyssey, coming from another bard or geographical area than the Iliad, would not be so familiar to Homer and a number of inconsistencies would escape his editorial scrutiny. Or perhaps he was anxious to complete its transcription and get it out on the market. The major inconsistencies of plot and dialogue are found in the meshing of the Telemachus story into Odysseus' return, although Professor Page adds analyses of other contradictions and lapses [16] . Inconsistencies of general outlook, ethics, theology, and philosophy scarcely exist. Homer may have made his greatest contributions here. He would have been not only copy- editor, but also moralist, bent upon securing the larger Greek cultural community to its ultimate values in human relations and the human in relation to the divine. It is for reasons like these, and because the terrors of continuous disaster stretch their penumbra over the actors, that Mircea Eliade diverges from his contemplation of the remotest antiquities and calls the Iliad a kind of creation epic. It is a new age whose story Homer reorders and edits for publication, one that begins a century before he deals with it. {S : TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE} TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE By the time the first Greek grammarians went to work, the language of Homer was quaint. The language changes. The references of words change. Associations are formed and join in the same word. Words expand their meanings and simultaneously contract them. Words are invented by new combinations of sounds, relating to the events referred to, and to familiar sounds of nature, and previously exciting words of like character. Take the word "brazen." It connotes 'bronze. ' It also means 'hot. ' This is easy enough. Examine the epithet "golden-bridled Ares." It means to Murray, "Ares of the golden rein." Both are "correct." Why, as the authoritative translator (Murray) would have it, does it mean the latter, when a translation bearing in mind the hidden construction could picture Ares as a darkly ruddy planet with electric flashes and belts playing across its face, bridling it like the head of a warhorse [17] ? Alexander Pope, puzzled, finds it, "He glows, he burns," (with love, of course). Fitzgerald gives simply "golden Ares." Graves discovered that Hephaestus can be rendered as "He who Shines by Day." Phaethon, of the same root, means "shining, the shining one, radiant" and was the name of the mythical son of Helios who, paralyzed by fright, let the chariot of the Sun scorch the Earth and plunged to a fiery death, an occasion that quite probably corresponded to an earlier catastrophe, associated with the planet Venus. One should also note that Phaeacia is the Shining Land, land of Fire, the Phaeacians being "Phaecixikos." The words of "shining" and "fire" are dear to Homer. He uses them on hundreds of occasions in his epics, perhaps ninety percent of the time in symbolism of passion, heroism, and death [18] . He calls Hephaestus "the fire of the world." The early Greek philosophers, reports Burnet, called the planet Saturn "Phaenon," the planet Jupiter "Phaethon," Mercury "Stilvon" (Brilliant), Venus "Phosphoros" (light- bearer), and Mars "Pyroeis" (Fiery one) [19] . Perhaps someday a scholar will go back to the symbol and root of the j and find there only "fire, feuer, fuoco, feu, phaeton, etc." with perhaps an astral significance in the birth of the language and perhaps even search out the origins of other root sounds in the same vein. We should know, however, that j seems to have had phallic associations as a letter of the Greek alphabet [20] . And fusiz means creativity, talents, and the penis. At Lemnos, in probable reference to Hephaestus, there was found a medal with the inscription, "kabeireia pythia phi," or "the strong one, python, phi." [21] Moreover, the (j) of Hephaestus is close to the modern symbol of the planet Venus. But this is also close to the apparition of a comet, with its tail; a planet could better be a circle or a star. Many ancients designated the planet Venus by the same symbol. And Aphrodite contains in her name the same letter, and, generally, is described by a number of words conveying brilliance and light. The symbol is a hieroglyph of Egypt but is also found around the globe, in ancient Mexico, for example. In Egypt it may also be rendered or And as it was ascribed phallic meaning in Greece, so it was in Egypt. The statue of Horus at Coptos has a phallus in his hands which is said to have been taken from Typhon (the monster, the part of Venus-Hephaestus, that crashed into Earth). Isis-Athena and Typhon-Hephaestus are recalled unconsciously in the symbol of the ankh, both as comets and as dismembered comets. It then recalls terror and can join with the castration fear, so that the phallic symbol and the astronomical symbol unite in a syllable that is both pornographic and anxiety-causing. But, with typical ambivalence, the ankh comes down to us in a long procession led by the Christian church, where the ankh is the symbol of "life." Still, the Egyptian 'Ankh', the symbol of life, is a combination of male and female. Moving to line 273, one finds a complicated sentence; Hephaestus fashions a device to capture the secret lovers in flagrante delictu. No translator feels the need to indicate that the original meaning of akinon is thunderbolt, not anvil (from which sparks fly). It also means a meteoritic stone. The mundane word derives from the astral; the significant aspect here is not the precedence, but the insistent astral atmosphere of the passages. Hephaestus, after all, might have woven a net of cord, or dug a collapsing pit; or "bummed a ride" on Helios' chariot: he is a versatile genius, not only a blacksmith. The device is of copper, again not of fibre, as fishing nets are. A slightly different sentence emerges than the other translators, who are in rough consensus, give. Murray studiously emerges with "But straightaway one came to him with tidings, even Helius, who had marked them as they lay together in love. And when Hephaestus heard the grievous tale, he went his way to his smithy, pondering evil in the deep of his heart, and set on the anvil block the great anvil and forged bonds which might not be broken or loosed, that the lovers might bide fast where they were." And we read: Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted them loving, Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep down below the depths of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the anvil, he struck and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dissolve, for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his fierce aim. Little can be done with the most common verb of the passage; Ercomai meaning simply "to go and come," and Homer uses almost no other word of movement. "Why not 'fly'?" one asks, for, in general, Homer is fond of metaphors of birds and flight. Or even "rushed." Alexander Pope translates the word into airy and flighty language, indeed gives the whole play a fully heavenly treatment. Still, although the language openly describes events in the skies, the word "go and come" is just that and one has to be resigned to the correct perception that these heavenly bodies did not fly; they came, moved, stood, departed. The personages were huge masses, not birds or "shooting stars." To conclude, a slight tendency exists for the translators to reduce the instances when the words and phrases of the original might have suggested hidden parallels of an astral and catastrophic character. To this they are driven not only by their own preoccupation with the evident and conventional, but by lexicons that are a product of the establishment, in effect, a guarantee that when in doubt they will follow the consensus. It is of little use to appeal to "The Original," dismissing all translations. A thoroughly versed classicist would be similarly tempted to "read" or "explain" in classical Greek the meanings of the words in their singular romantic sense. One can imagine Homer himself, half composing, half reporting the story; even he must have contributed to its integrity as romance at the cost of greater ambiguity as history. For basically all words describing events are a translation abinitio (See above, page 29). Even the most rigorous scientific language begins to wash out meanings through metaphors. Only in the subconscious minds of the earliest singers of the song and their audience would there exist openly sensible connections between the event and the signs, and between the denotating signs and the connotating signs. And soon only these latter were permitted to bubble up into awareness. {S : THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT} THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT Thrusting at these arguments from another point, a critic may offer the reasonable observation that the Love Affair is only an instance of the ever popular plot of the love triangle. Two people owe each other love. A third in fact captures the love of one of the pair. The third is outraged at being excluded from the prior love. And, naturally, preceding this plot came many familiar personal histories from time immemorial. At the risk of offering a theory of literary creativity that cannot be amply defended here, I would say that we are treating of time immemorial and even of the rise of language and literary forms. Long before the Love Affair could be composed, there had to be a language; that language, to be invented, had to be preceded by and based upon a ritualized culture fascinated by repetitions and order. The "obvious plot" had not only to be experienced, but had also to be perceived as important in two regards: to be certified by higher authority (i. e. the behavior of the gods); and to be translated from common occurrence into Symbolic form. (More will be said of this later.) The Oedipus story, from which the important psychiatric complex derived its name, had occurred innumerable times in the dawn of humanity. But it took a particular episode of Egyptian history, involving a God-Pharaoh, which I. Velikovsky has brilliantly detected in Oedipus and Akhnaton, to sponsor the translation and elevate into literature, first spoken and then written, the general human experience and anxiety over the sexual love between mother and son. Among the several facets of Homer's genius is that he carried wars, sex and feasting into the humanly experienced life of the gods so that divine behavior could be at least partly understood, though full of contradictions that themselves created, including a contemporary practical wisdom and a later "rational" philosophy. Too late after the events, in the third century, A. D., Quintillus wrote a sequel to the Iliad. It is insipid, uninspiring. It affords no sense of the presence and reality of the gods when compared with the Wrath of Achilles or the "Return of the Heroes" sung to Odysseus before he hears of the Love Affair. It is as if our primeval myth-maker knew the crude principle of stardom in Hollywood. "If they can't remember the story, they'll remember who starred in the movie." Hence one speculates that the enduring plots and themes of the arts, including history, were invented with great effort and through a real-perceived event, sparking a combustible mixture of instruments and institutions - linguistic, behavioral, and technical. {S : HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE} HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE A child likes to repeat words, phrases, and sentences. One will chant the same line indefatigably. It may be newly invented or a thousand years old. It may or may not "make sense". A relief of anxiety occurs in the repetition. The speech of the old and dying often becomes repetitive, and an old person who has spoken an acquired language will often revert to the sole use of the language he first learned. When pinned down by enemy fire, a soldier will often chant words incoherently, or if he had instruction, say, in the Catholic Church, will repeat the "Hail, Mary" prayer times without end. Sad folk ballads and neurotic "rock-and-roll" songs are obsessively simple in word and beat and prolong themselves to the agony of anyone not afflicted who must endure them. The language of sudden grief and disaster is often "No! No! No!..." or "She can't be dead! She can't be dead..." The sacred dream recital and liturgy, plus many institutional offshoots, are a repetition of events that once occurred. That the original event was a terrible event followed by great anxiety is evidenced in many ways, as in the punitiveness with which unbelievers are regarded, for the unbeliever is saying that "the tragedy that once happened to you is insignificant." In the realm of rhetoric and linguistic pragmatics, the sacred expression is using symbols as a way of regressing to stress, reenacting it, rememorizing the events, and ultimately releasing tensions. Insistence upon correctness in detail prolongs the generation of memory and at the same time insures that the gods realize how faithfully these humans have remembered their lesson. The repetitiveness, another aspect of obsession, and another means of insuring memorization, progressively fixates the ritual participant upon the root of his ailment. "She can't stop scratching her mosquito bite," "He wallows in his misery;" these are trivial obsessive actions. The original recital of the Love Affair would have taken hours; Homer cut it and shaped it to a new form of art, but note well that he lets one know that it is far form the original version; he did not steal, abridge it, and present it as original. The sacred originates in a stressful and tragic condition. In the process of sublimation, the tragic stress gives way to liturgical language, promoting the development of language itself, in both "hieratic" (priestly) and popular (" demotic" ) forms. Tragedy is never lost. Its final triumph is to give birth to comedy. {S : THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE} THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE The rules of scientific language are well-known. They should actually be called "ideals," since they cover far less of science than they "should," and necessarily so, because scientific language cannot generate its highest flights unless it resort to philosophic language. To the scientist, the rule is: "one event should receive one signification." Further: "the signification should be the same for anyone to whom it is communicated." Moreover, "the signification should be testable, by repetition of the event sequence in experiment, etc." Finally, "events should be described and combined in forms of signification that do not add external meanings;" that is, no extraneous feelings or meanings should slip in by design or surreptitiously to spoil the purity of the generalization. All of this began with Aristotle's nominalism (words are distinct from, and refer to, objects) and has arrived at Whitehead's operationism (the meanings of words can only lie in the events they describe). Aristotle had another side, also. He understood rhetoric and pragmatics. While developing a rational grammar of science, he was preparing a science of influencing. Given a particular audience, what symbols should be chosen and manipulated to produce a desired effect? Here words are signs of mental affections, not exclusively of the dualities of things. Once pursued, this line of thought has ever more fearful implications. Not until the latest stage of the modern scientific outlook has a body of scientific work been permitted to arise that would inquire into the reasons for reasoning, the meaning of meaning, the ideology behind every body of action, including the activities of science itself. When science has come this far, it is capable of analyzing the language of myth scientifically. The first rule for the interpretation of myth is that symbols in their content will have a determined and possibly determinable meaning. The second is that "what the symbols mean" contains, besides other things, "the psychological effects produced by them." Thirdly, there is an "unconscious science of myth," as well as certain principles of the "conscious" science of myth that we have dug out and can apply with predictable effects. Just as the athlete, poet, orator, and composer may not know the scientific rules of their successful performances, so the myth-teller and myth-hearer will not usually understand what rules of linguistics and psychology he is applying. The most important of these unconscious rules, all of them practiced and evident in the Love Affair, are perhaps the following: 1. Make a myth of any collectively experienced event that had tragic consequences in order to give symptomatic relief to the perpetual illness. (The myth of the Love Affair exemplifies this rule.) 2. Remain steadfastly true to the event. As the consensus that perceived the event then and there defined it, so relate it. (As a result of this rule, many generations later, we can behave as cryptographic detectives in relation to the historical character of the myth. We are trying to replay this rule as it guided the producers of the Love Affair.) 3. Conceal the truth of the event insofar as it is disturbing. (We are seeking the truth of the Love Affair in many areas, not the least of which is in the language, where we observed a number of techniques of concealing the truth while telling it.) 4. Use methods of concealment that contribute symptomatic relief. (We find in the Love Affair a thoroughly satisfactory plot that amuses, a suggestive language, reiteration, ritual, collective reassurance.) 5. The therapy should last for the duration of the pain. (Over a span of forty memorial generations and eighty reproductive generations some portion of humanity has obtained symptomatic relief from the Love Affair. However, the myth has lost impact steadily from the settling of heaven, and from more philosophical methods of coping with the symptoms. The doctrines of the eternal constancy of the heavens, the practical timelessness of earthly change, and the gradual evolution of humans - sometimes referred to altogether as the ideology of uniformitarianism - have proven a more effective repressor and a partial therapy in the long run. They have made the Love Affair mainly a salacious tale, told in a thousand forms, whose insistent threats and memories linger only vaguely. As for adults, so for babies. So turkey-lurkey turned back, and walked with gander-lander, goose-loose, drake-lake, duck-luck, cock-lock, hen-len, and chicken-licken. And as they were going along, they met fox-lox. And fox-lox said "Where are you going, my pretty maids?" And they said, "Chicken-Licken went to the wood, and the sky fell upon her poor bald pate, and we are going to tell the king." And fox-lox said, "Come along with me, and I will show you the way." But fox-lox took them into the fox's hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up poor chicken-licken, hen-len, cock-lock, duck-luck, drake-lake, goose-loose, gander- lander, and turkey-lurkey, and they never saw the king to tell him that the sky had fallen! [22] The story is much longer, of course, because one after another of the little animals is added to the fearful procession following chicken-licken, and the list is repeated liturgically. The sky is beginning to fall; the people are frightened; they seek the religio-secular authority to ease their fears or perhaps to do something about it. But they encounter the fox who, ancient myths relate, "nibbles continuously at the thong of the yoke which holds together heaven and earth" (Proclus) and "German folklore adds that when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end." This same fox can also be a wolf, and a dog. It is a star. It is also called "Electra, mother of Dardanus, who left her station among the Pleiades, desperate because of Ilion's (Troy's) fall, and retired above the second star of the beam... others call this star 'fox. '" So write Santillana and von Dechend, from their sources, calling finally upon the great expert on ancient astronomy, F. X. Kugler who had said: "The star at the beam of the wagon is the fox star: Era, the powerful among the gods. In astrological usage, it represents above all the planet Mars/ Nergal." [23] The same story, whose origins disappear into the immemorial (read "memorial") past, has been altered over the last century of time. Today, people may read to their three-year olds in a new version [24] that the little animals encounter, not a fox, but a wise owl, and that the owl skeptically asks to be shown the fallen piece of sky: heaven cannot fall; it turns out that it was only an apple that had fallen. They found the apple and Chicken-Licken ate it and was happy. Alas, they are back to the owl, which happens to have been a paramount symbol of "owl- eyed" Athena [25] , and they are eating the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden. Once more, "success through failure." {S : Notes (Chapter 14: The Uses of Language)} Notes (Chapter 14: The Uses of Language) 1. Greek Metre (trans. from German ed;, 1927 and addenda, by H. Lloyd-Jones, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 59. 2. Ibid., pp 1-2. 3. Ibid, pp. 3-4. 4. Greek Metaphor (1936, reprinted New York: Johnson reprint. Corp., 1972), p. 120. 5. Ibid., p. 121. 6. Ibid., p. 121. 7. Ibid., p. 65. 8. D. page, The Homeric Odyssey pp. 52, 72 et passim. The Iliad and the Odyssey do not seem to have written by the same person either. The two epics have divergent vocabularies. Ibid.. pp. 149-57. 9. Ibid., p. 158. 10. Page, Ibid., p. 139. 11. "Problems Concerned with Homer and the Epics," in Thomas, op. cit.. pp. 16. 18. 42. 12. Op. cit., pp. m147-8. 13. Ibid., p. 97. 14. A. J. B. Wace writes in the Foreword to M. Ventris and J. Chadwick's Documents in Mycenean Greek (Cambride, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1959), XXViii. that Linear B probably carried over until driven out by the more efficient Phoenician alphabet. We Would agree that both alphabets were concurrently used, and, moreover, the success of the new alphabet was precipitated by the natural disasters and social destruction. 15. Page, Ibid., p. 161, fin. 8. 16. Summarized, Ibid., p. 159, 53 ff. 17. This construction is supported as conceivable in an electric encounter in the study by Franz Xavier Kugler of the Sibylline oracles, Stecchini, op. cit., p. 143. "The Battle of the stars began with the appearance in the eastern sky of a body as bright as the sun and similar in apparent diameter to the sun and the moon. The light of the sun was replaced by long streams of flame crossing each other." 18. Cedric H. Whitman, "Fire and Other Elements; "in Steiner and Fagles, op. cit., pp. 40 ff. Cf. also D. page, The Homeric Odyssey, 152-3. 19. J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers (London, 1920), 3rd ed., p. 23; Plato's Epinomis (Harvard edition, Oxford: Clarendon press, 1928, lines 986a-987d) first gives the planets their Greek Present names. 20. W. B. Stanford, Greek Metaphor (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1936), 67, 81, citing Franz Dornsieff, Pindars Stil (1921). Cf. supra, p. 175. 21. Isaac N. Vail citing Eckhel, p. 45, of Mythic Mountain (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Annular publications. 1972). see also above. p. 160. 22. This last part of the typically repetitious (liturgical) story for tiny children called "Chicken-Licken," is quoted from James O. Halliwell-Phillips, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London: J. R. Smith, 1849), p. 31. The story is found in Africa, India, all over Europe. Cf. my own note in The Burning of Troy. 23. G. de Santillana and II. van Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time.( Boston: Gambit, 1969), p. 385. 24. Chicken Little (Racine, Wisc.: Whitman Publ. co., 1958). 25. The owl is a marvelous tranfiguration of a blazing-eyed twin comet that may have been one source of the duality of Athena-Hephaestus and the many twin serpent symbols of antiquity. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 3: } {Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR} {C Chapter 15: } {T THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART THREE: THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth to the Muses out of union with Zeus, son of Chronos, and thus of the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. So writes Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer in his Genealogy of the Gods. The Theogony was composed after 730 B. C., that is, during or after the era of troubled skies; but it was a mythical work, "reporting" on events that had occurred hundreds and thousands of year before. "The ordered pantheon of Hesiod ended in supplanting the anarchic society of the Homeric Gods." [1] A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage. "Remembering" was no mere scratching of experience upon a tabula rasa of the mind. Memoria or Mnemosyne or "Recollector," is the mother of history (Clio). She has as her progeny the means of controlling herself, for Zeus is the ordering paternal force. There are nine (some said three or five) muses governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and singing, but also history and astronomy. They will lend human memory its possibilities of selective attention, delusion, illusion, abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening - all that is necessary to achieve that combination of remembering and forgetting which makes social life possible on a level that is higher than the level of non-remembering or total amnesia. Significantly, Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who was the grandfather of Zeus; she is no mere sprite. Her Eleutherian Hills are the realm of freedom, so she governs freedom. Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created "by Zeus" to control the human memory so that humans should forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get surcease from sorrows. The word "muse" by itself has a meaning of happiness. And that the Muses will achieve this by transforming events through art and song, through myth. The memory of disasters is doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash humanity and to present the new order of heaven as proper, lawful, and beautiful. Hesiod, reciting this profound truth, goes on to describe how the muses work, reminding us of a combined team for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare. As a result, all the arts and sciences have been manipulated by the muses. What we know of the catastrophes must come from a "natural history" - geology, biology, physics and astronomy - and a politics, philosophy, and theology that have been censored by the Muses. Additionally, we must obtain our historical material from myth, song, dances, and drama that are similarly screened. It is well to insist upon this premise, whether we come to the problem from an acquaintanceship with the natural sciences or the social sciences. The gods and especially Zeus, who seems under various names to have developed the patterns of anthropological psychology among most cultures, have required this premise of us. The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be called - mnemonology? Its scope ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the "psychopathology of everyday life," as Freud put it, to the "collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts of ancient catastrophes and that German educators observe as they try to teach the history of Nazism. It must deal with the Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite that masks a world disaster, and with nursery songs that mask the murder of kings. We may quote what Katherine Elwes Thomas found when she explored The Real Personages of Mother Goose: The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to childish minds have only quaint charm of meaning, which suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous- hearted creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality grim import. Across all this nursery lore there falls at times the black shadow of the headman's block and in their seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and queens, the corruptions of opposing political parties, and stories of fanatical religious strife that have gone to make world history. For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie." And "when the pie was opened the birds began to sing," now, "wasn't that a tasty dish to put before the King?" The child is singing of actual history that was never heard or learned, of an incident in the grim struggle between the English Crown and the Church, during which, to appease the greed and hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of church land were sealed into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. In old slang, the dough was handed over; in new slang, the "bread." The elapsed time from event to amnesiac song might have been less than a century. The Oedipus myth, to take another instance, is capable of providing an accurate account of an episode in the history of Egypt. Its central figure was the Pharaoh Akhnaton. The story survived its original obliteration at the hands of the theocracy of Egyptian Thebes. It held intact as it was transferred across cultures, probably via Ugarit whose King Nikomedes may have founded Grecian Thebes, as Cadmus. By the time of Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus Rex, seven mnemonic or fourteen reproductive generations had passed, that is, about four hundred years. [2] . Heavy trauma, it is here proposed, is at the source of many features of the higher intellectual operations and "advanced" social institutions of humankind. An experience which we call traumatic is one which within a very short space of time subjects the mind to such a very high increase of stimulation that assimilation or elaboration of it can no longer be effected by normal means, so that lasting disturbances must result in the distribution of the available energy of the mind [3] . {S : TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY} TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals, 1887) stabs into the heart of the matter. He asks, "How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?" [4] And he continues, "One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnenotechnics. If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory - this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective: the past, the longest, deepest and sternest past, breathes upon us and rises up in us whenever we become 'serious. ' Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) - all this has its origin in the instinct that realized pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." [5] Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche's genesis collapses. Although he immediately goes hunting for the acts that provoked such mnemotechnics, he shoots a little rabbit: the primitive forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order to trade, men had to keep promises; in order to ensure obligations, the failure to repay had to be punished severely: thus the genealogy of morals. One is reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to fundamental error in Totem and Taboo: that in the oedipal conflict and the slaying of the father, man achieved a (bad) conscience and the need to justify and to punish. The Oedipus myth, as was said above, has much breadth and staying power, but a still greater and universal fear had to be imposed to support its recollection, and this was the fear of (devotion to) the god of Akhnaton. And it is difficult to conceive of anything more grand and durable than the catastrophes attendant upon encounters between Earth and other heavenly forces. It is significant that Freud, perceiving an inadequacy of general sexual theory, moved Beyond the Pleasure Principle [6] , searching out a deeper fear that he termed the death instinct and observed to be present especially in veterans suffering from "shell- shock," whose nightmares and hallucinations found them continuously repeating what, after all, could hardly be called a pleasurable wish. Nor did such "symptoms vanish when their unconscious antecedents have been made conscious," as Freud remarks concerning obsessive fixations, following his earlier theory [7] . He and many others would have done well to stick with Nietzsche's brilliant premise and continue the search for historical psychological experiences of great stress befalling humankind when it had arrived at a complex state of organic potential. The Love Affair involves both a disgraced contract and a disgraced sexuality. But these are cover-ups for a disaster too great to talk about. Indeed, by the time that the Love Affair occurred, only sexual imagery and violence were sufficiently eloquent to use as disguises, at least in literature; beyond that, one would have to resort for the patterning and recapitulation of such traumas to religious and political institutions - hierarchic, obsessed with the symbolism of violence, compulsively repetitive. The Love Affair, one must bear in mind, was only the latest in a series of catastrophes over thousands of years, from which human nature as we have known it was born and which shaped the physical world in which we live today. Man's memory itself, the prototypical remembering, is a consequence of catastrophe more than of any other incidental or habitual interest of humanity. The Love Affair, in reflecting a catastrophe, reflects a late event in a series of catastrophes that created memory. It was perhaps the last of the qualitatively distinct mass events on the basis of which memory was institutionalized, routinized, and socialized. Humans now remember (and forget) according to rules in which social forces play a continuous role, but this role evolved from catastrophes. {S : THE RULES OF MEMORY} THE RULES OF MEMORY All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its imperfection. Given its mode of creation, remembering must function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by the senses, which themselves, in large part, perceive because of their prior social conditioning, but by the willingness to admit only censored data. This holds true, as many careful studies have shown, for the most noncontroversial and trivial kinds of experiences. Who says remember says select, who says memory, says forgetting. By the time of Homer, numerous natural disasters had befallen humanity; the perfect ease of the whole Phaeacian episode, including the Love Affair, attests to the approaching achievement of "perfect imperfection": nothing of the original truth need be omitted, so well under control are the conditions creating imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of artistic sublimation. The concept of "perfect memory" is a useful fiction. One is compelled to say that it is a theocratic fiction. For the content of what is remembered is in the broadest sense religiously and politically determined. The ideal canons of registering and remembering, set by modern science, are evidence in themselves that "you cannot trust your memory" and "independent observers have to confirm the same facts." But also the establishment of scientists as a social system lays down the rules of what is to be watched for, what is to be ignored, and what is to be distorted. The Homerids were the practitioners and teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect society against its anxieties. The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the gravity of a trauma. By intensity is meant sharpness, detail, and durability in conscious and unconscious form. By gravity is meant how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major regions of his life: his physical being, his cherished ones, his group, his wealth, his control, his beliefs about good and the true. Machiavelli said to the rules: it is better to be feared by the people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety drove primeval humanity to invent and to organize. Fear mixed itself early with love, and produced the continuous ambivalence towards sexuality that is exhibited in the Love Affair. The most intense memories are likely to occur without "willing" them. This is understandable once we consider that no one will willingly subject himself to the conditions that produce intense memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory. How many times do people think: "I shall never forget this beautiful sunset... I shall always remember this kindness... I shall never forget this orgasm," only to lose their grasp of the memory shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act" done to him long ago, it is in the context of a generally unkind and fearful environment of acts. The most that can be done to "will" the memory is to tie it consciously and unconsciously to disasters and especially institutionalize the disasters so that the group will continuously reenact them. All great historical religions are based upon these psychological operations. The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to the conscious mind, and to be buried in dreams and myths. These latter act to suppress and control anxiety. The dream and myth language is likely to approach as close as possible to the ultimate universal, traumatic experiences, without becoming unbearable. It rides on the tracks of birth throes, the fearful side of sexual copulation, death scenes, violence and conflict, including all the conventional transformations of these materials into religious and social activities, routines and institutions. This "step-down" principle works on the descent into the depths of the unconscious; it works, that is, on the depth of burial, and it brings about the selection of the next less traumatic kind of material as the screen for the more traumatizing type. The speed of remembering is proportionate to the intensity of the trauma. "The experience burned itself indelibly upon my mind," one says. A single experience is enough to cause remembering, if it is grave enough. If it is too grave, physical collapse occurs and no further memorization is possible. At the other extreme, in the absence of fear, interest or even recognition - as in most classrooms, an abundance of knowledge moves, as they say, "from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either." If our physical analysis is correct, the astral Love Affair occupied a few hours among many years of experiencing all sorts of things. The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of the cultural personality, which is merely to say that the kind of story told, together with its details, are characteristic of the culture. Some more ancient pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures practicing group marriage would have had to find a different plot and details to screen the reiteration of the Moon and Mars encounter. It is characteristic of "Western man's" partially Greek-born culture, and a proof of his cultural ancestry, that the adulterous love triangle, descended from the Greeks, is still a favorite artistic theme. {S : FORGETTING} FORGETTING Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. We remember to forget. That is, amnesia is activated in the same way as memory. Glancing at the list of rules of remembering, one can substitute forgetting for remembering and get the following rules of forgetting. Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all conditions, and to be imperfect, never complete. Nor is forgetting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many particular causes. If the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory, one can speak as well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting occurs proportionate to the gravity of a trauma, and forgetting occurs without willing to forget. The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to the conscious mind; one must admit "we cannot recall what it is that we have forgotten," when the thing forgotten is a matter of grave threat to the mind. Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma. For this reason one can believe that events that occurred perhaps only a generation before Homer, or even in his lifetime, might achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Of course, a multitude of local scenarios are possible; but let us imagine what may have happened in a typical disaster of the "Age of Mars" that is, in the eighth and seventh centuries [8] . An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a foreboding of evil. A brilliant speck grows larger from day to day. He is told that it has done so before, with terrible consequences. The memory is already excited. Calendars are studied and worked over. Oracles are consulted. All group efforts are mobilized to control the menace: rituals of subservience and devotion; the stricter punishment of any suspected deviants in all areas of law and conduct; the destruction of enemies if they can be promptly engaged; the sacrifice of more and more valuable properties and persons. Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights, shapes and turbulence. The Earth begins to respond - to live, to move, to smoke, to blow up strong winds, to shriek, to take fire. Thunderbolts strike on all sides. Our hero watches, bemused. He is exceedingly frightened, as are his family and neighbors. There may be a pandemonium in which he faints or is struck dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he will cover his head. The young will observe more than the old. "The disaster occurs in successive kinds of turbulence, in all the various destructive forms of earth, air, fire, and water, the primordial elements. Animals, both tame and wild, crowd in upon people, terrified, unaggressive, unhungry. Eardrums are blown in or sucked out by abrupt pressure changes. Some are struck blind, others gassed. Strange objects and lifeforms drop from the sky. The sky reels. The waters gyrate madly and rush to and fro." The vista is one of unmitigated disaster. There is nowhere to go. The survivors regroup after each incident. They are partially paralyzed with fear and despair, partly striving for survival and control. "What god is angry?" they wonder, if they don't already know. What other gods can they appeal to and how? What trait of a god should they address themselves to? The most important religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the most sacred instruments and skills of the immemorial past are called upon in the crisis. Nothing, nobody, will ever persuade him to behave differently, or his children or, if they can help it, their descendants into the eternal future. When the disasters subside, the survivors are crazed. They must regroup, recollect their thoughts, and do something about the memory. This is not a task for an astronomer sitting in the air-conditioned hall of a giant telescope in Arizona. Nor for a sober historian. It is a task for any surviving priest rulers: "We have been visited by the gods. The figures they strike in the sky are their various apparitions when destructive and punitive... Good gods and spirits fight evil ones. Our conduct displeases them: we must strengthen our observance of rituals: purify ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice ever more precious possessions; kill more enemies; control the libertarian; guard the names by which we call a god; and remind ourselves forevermore of the events of these days while we watch for their eventual recurrence." Again history is quickly subverted: indeed, it has never existed. Instead memorial activities are planned by the community that will register whatever intensity on the memorial-screen is sufficient to suppress the pain of the memory of the original experience plus all the preceding related and similar traumatic experiences. It is well to be quite explicit: No sooner is a disaster experienced than it is remembered: no sooner remembered than it is forgotten. All the rules of remembering are rules of forgetting. What? Is memory a forgetting while to forget is to remember? One seems to be approaching this paradox; if it is not indeed an absurdity. Yet, if we resolve this paradox we shall better understand the great mystery of myth, which bids us remember ferociously in order the more firmly and securely to forget. The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The fact is that a memory can enter the mind, but can rarely leave it. Except by organic lesion, there is little forgetting. The biological system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can readily manipulate it. What is called "forgetting" is the eternal bookkeeping system of memory. From conception to dissolution and death, the system will always show a net profit. But, like many a bookkeeping system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting the balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is with the forgotten material that the mind works to create myth, art, and hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to describe the handling of the transactions of memory that permit consciousness, instrumentally rational conduct, and normal behavior. Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites indeed opposite? In the functional machinery of the mind, where opposites are coined according to the needs of the moment. Whatever stabilizes the organism's "normalcy" is chosen; and the organism remembers or forgets conveniently. {S : AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS} AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS Whatever the finesse with which memory and forgetfulness may be explained, there must remain some incredulity in the modern mind. Scientists believe proudly that they can read any evidence unflinchingly. If the human mind that experienced catastrophe should not remember consciously, and discourse liberally and frankly upon it, what then of those tough intellectuals of ancient times who conducted inquiries afterwards? Why have they not handed down frank evidence of catastrophes? The disbelief of the theory of the Love Affair that was based upon archeological, geological and astronomical grounds may have changed to acceptance. But what of the silences of ancient history? Though certain biases of languages and philosophy that formed after the catastrophes have already been noted - several additional suggestions may be offered as to why Hesiod, Homer, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato and other illustrious ancient Greeks do not frankly tell their curious descendants of the true deeds of Mars and the Moon. In the first place, natural disasters and sudden change did occupy the minds of ancient thinkers (sticking still to the Greek-speaking area). Homer's Iliad is replete with accounts of god-enacted and god-caused disaster. In Aristophanes' comedy, "The Clouds," the gods reprove the Moon for having brought disasters to the calendar and their cult. Plato begs us to take him seriously when he relates the story of the destruction of Atlantis. (One may infer that there were a great many spoofers of old myth in Athens.) In The Laws, he asserts that mankind has been reduced to marginal survivors on numerous occasions owing to natural disasters. Conversely, he is angry at the "immorality" of Homer, which he takes at face value, and in the same dialogue he proclaims the god-given harmony and regularity of the heavenly spheres and would punish severely offenders who claim disasters have come or will come from the skies. Plato's self-contradictions in respect to catastrophism are serious. They reveal great doubts in his mind, and what in an ordinary person would be called "typical neurotic aggressiveness to resolve the tensions provoked by his doubts." In the Epinomis, Plato is again exhibiting his anxieties, in a form that has not been generally appreciated. As mentioned in an earlier place, he gave the present Greek names of the planets for the first time. He offers the lame excuse that the fiery terms used for the heavenly bodies were so similar because the Greeks did not know the planets and did not want unfairly to give names to some but not to others. Perhaps the whole matter of naming was controversial, involving as it did ancient psychological associations, theological theories, and intercultural contacts with Egyptians, Syrians, and others. In any event, attention should be called to Plato's statement that the heavenly bodies are gods without souls. He distinguishes these from the Olympian gods, whom he dislikes, precisely because of their reputation for immorality and uncontrollability. He is, in effect, trying to rid the mundane scene of these gods, by exiling them in the eternal immutable astral regions. He would then fix the calendar of festivals to their periods. This would seem to be a major unconscious philosophical step towards controlling the gods and paving the way for a lawful universe. Thus it happened that Plato usurped the Olympian gods. Aristotle, over three hundred years after the Love Affair, was still conscientious, if serene, in his study of the skies: heaven and the planets are self-moved movers executing perfectly regular motions; they are substances immune to change and far more perfect than man. He is nevertheless impelled to write of planets: Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to us, their posterity, a tradition, in the form of a myth, that these substances are Gods and that the divine encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expedience; they say these Gods are in the form of men or like some of the other animals, and they say other things consequent on and similar to these which we have mentioned. But if we were to separate the first point from these additions and take it alone - that they thought the first substances to be Gods, we must regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions have been preserved until the present, like relics of the ancient treasure. Only thus, then, is the opinion of our ancestors and our earliest predecessors clear to us [9] . Moreover, the ancients were habituated to a level of natural disaster that would astonish moderns. Earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and "rushing stars" (meteorites and comets) were much more common in the era following the settling of heaven. Earthquakes were ordinary in Rome, for instance, even five centuries later. The Greeks did not develop a tradition of geological and astronomical reporting until the scientific period began, over a century after Homer sang (seventh century). Herodotus carries remarks about disaster in his Histories (fifth century); Thucydides, who could describe plagues in acceptable modern medical style, flourished 250 years after the Love Affair. He reported no astral phenomena of consequence during the Peloponnesian Wars. Third, the number of survivors was small. Many storage and retrieval systems of memory were blasted or drowned out. If the many dutiful clerks of Pylos, Mycenae, Knossos, Troy, and other centers had continued their bureaucracies, the records might be ample. Furthermore, astral encounters and an earthly turbulence would provoke dense or brilliant atmospheric conditions that would render stable observations rare. Encounters would often be obscured and only partly visible in the areas where there would be potentially competent observers. One would always expect disputation as to what occurred when the celestial armies clashed. The printing press was unknown and only the bark of the papyrus, clay tablets, stone, and several types of leaf were the media for the inscription and transmission of messages nonorally. Although more durable than modern books and film, they lacked the widespread dissemination that can be achieved with the printed word. Records were always few and a great burden was placed upon accurate memorization and repetition to the young, to an extent quite unappreciated today. Oral accounts, like writing to be sure, have intrinsic mnemonic techniques, which, to the discredit of our scientific age, have not been adequately analyzed, and which lend, therefore, a greater semblance of error that actually exists in the accounts told. Personification of events, for example, is a technique of illiterate memorization, as well as a psychological process that is pervasive of mental operations in nearly all cultures. There has been an almost total destruction of records, both from the time of the catastrophes and later. Only several thousands of the clay tablets from several locations carrying the language "Linear B" have been rescued from the ruins of Mycenaean culture. These tablets, by their paucity and scorched condition offer mute testimony that a well-administered civilization became a shambles of fire, destruction and death perhaps in a few hours, and a few events. The classical period produced thousands of volumes by scientists on most subjects. Almost all of these have been lost owing to carelessness, barbarian depredations, and political and religious fanaticism [10] . Of 150 known Greek authors of tragic drama, we have full plays by only three of them and only thirty-three of the 297 creations of these three men remain. From this ancient treasure would have come a number of plays such as Seneca's Thyestes, which could only be a pale later replay of Sophocles' lost Atreus, both concerned with the devastating commotions of the globe in the period of the Love Affair. Owing to the rules of memory and forgetting, one should not expect an elaborate literature of catastrophe to have existed in scientific form, but the writings of Pythagoras, Eudoxos, Alcmaion, Eratosthenes and many another author would have established ample foundations for a set of modern sciences that would admit of catastrophism in their theories. When the great modern astronomer, Schiaparelli, reconstructed the planetary theory of Eudoxos (408-355), the colleague of Plato (427?-347) and Aristotle, he had this to say: For Jupiter and Saturn, and to some extent for Mercury also, the system was capable of giving on the whole a satisfactory explanation of their motion in longitude, their stationary points, and their retrograde motions; for Venus it was unsatisfactory, and it failed altogether in the case of Mars. The limits of motion in latitude represented by the various hippopedes were in tolerable agreement with observed facts, although the periods of the deviations and their places in the cycle were quite wrong." [11] We would surmise that Eudoxos' problem arose from an absence of data concerning the classical and present celestial order. For the other planets, he may have had access to several centuries of observations from Egypt or Mesopotamia. For Venus, and even more for Mars, there may have been fewer ancient sources and less lengthy series of observations available to him. These planets, too, in their present motions, are more difficult to plot than the others. Perhaps the problem of theory was even more important than the problem of data; he might have had to disencumber himself of a theory of motions and cycles that was more adequate for an earlier sky than for a classical sky. If this speculation about Eudoxos is tenable, one may dissever in him the factors of amnesiac relief through abstraction, a lack of fundamental data from the past and puzzlement owing to incorrect theory. Eudoxos was striving to order the cleared skies; he would in any event have found ancient evidence of erratic skies a nuisance and impediment. These several reasons why direct scientific observations of ancient catastrophes have rarely reached us complement the primary and most striking reason that has already been discussed: massive instantaneous amnesia in direct proportion to the pain and horror of disaster, followed by heavy ritualistic, aggressive, and expressive displacement of the fear and avoidance involved. Nichomachus of Gerasa and Lucian agreed; the divine Orpheus was the founder of astronomy and the inventor of the harp. "The harp, that had seven chords, discoursed the harmony of the errant spheres." [12] The "errant spheres;" the disasters; the memory and the forgetting; the muses; the harp for the sublimation of memory; and the "holy dreamtime songs" like the Love Affair. {S : Notes (Chapter 15: The Birth and Death of Memory)} Notes (Chapter 15: The Birth and Death of Memory) 1. Mireaux, op. cit., p. 429, who acutely perceives that Hesiod is a "futurist," not a" reactionary," and that his book on farming and farm life, Works and Days, was a treatise searching for justice and orderly existence. 2. Cf. I Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (New York: Doubleday. 1960); Cyrus Gordon, "Oedipus and Akhnaton," II Pens‚e, no. 2( 1972), p. 30: also notes in the same issue. We are using Velikovsky's revised chronology; John Holbrook, Jr. interprets this in III Pensee, no. 2( 1973). I use term "mnemonic generation" to denote a sixty-year "memorial generation" in which the oldest members of a group can convey information to young children. 3. Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-7: Eng. trans. 1929), New York: Washington Square press, 1935), p. 286. 4. p. 496 of the Kaufman edition. 5. Ibid., p. 497. Cf. Carl J. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious," in Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 968), 1-94, for related material on fear, and on memory, pp. 34, 52-3. 6. 1920, published in English, 195-, rev. ed. 1961, New York: Liveright; Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses( 1919), Stand. Ed:, XVII, 207; 7. General Introduction, op. cit., p. 291, 287. 8. Frank W. Lane's book, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), Can be used as a kind of reference manual for all that happens when the forces of nature intensify into their disastrous forms. 9. Metaphysics (W. D. Ross trans.) Vol. II, L. 1074b. 10. Cf. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), pp. 44-7, for details of the destruction of ancient records. 11. Quoted in Ross, op. cit., II, P. 390. Cf. Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. by E. L. Miner (Cambridge Harvard U. Press, 1972), part IV, regarding, inter alia, Eudoxus' influence on Plato. 12. Lucian (second century, A. D.), "Astrology," in Works, Vol. V, A. M. Harmon, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ, Press, 1936), p. 355. Nichomachus (first century A. D.) was famous for his mathematical accuracy. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 3: } {Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR} {C Chapter 16: } {T THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART THREE: THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA One thunderstorm does not make a great god, nor does one volcano. Further, ordinary nature does not make a great god, neither its abundances nor its famines. The struggles of old bulls with young bulls over cows do not make a great god. A great god dwells in heaven, but can be everywhere. A people will recognize another people's great god as kindred but, too, the god is often hostile. Every great god emerges out of an apparently universal disaster in which the skies are involved, not excepting the great Mother - Earth Goddess, oldest of all, who cast off from her heaving body the oppressive Heaven, Uranus. The gods of the Love Affair are great gods. And to the skeptic who deplores the deceit, adultery, an generally libertine and human deportment of these "stars," one might remark: "You cannot imagine how really badly these gods behaved; it was inutterably worse... Anyhow, no one is saying that these are your gods, and we had better not get onto that subject." The gods of Demodocus opera theater behave as they do to cover up their real behavior which is infinitely more destructive, indiscriminate, and punitive. The next problem of this stage is to show how their more intolerable behavior works itself out as a bedroom farce. How was the traumatic disaster transformed? {S : DREAMWORK} DREAMWORK The best available model for the interpretation of a myth is the dream. As was shown in an early chapter, the staging of the telling of myth creates a collective Holy Dreamtime. The audience is prepared to dream, to engage in dreamwork themselves, and to emerge with a sense of heightened reality. For reality is the unreality that enable people to compose their anxieties. In The Interpretation of Dreams, his admitted masterwork [1] , Sigmund Freud told how dream functions to keep one asleep, and one can only stay asleep so long as the unconscious problems that bother him most are censored and reworked into a form, which, while often disgusting and disturbing upon recollection, is nevertheless better than the unconscious reality. To discover the latent wish whose fulfillment keeps one asleep is not always easy, as many a psychiatrist will attest. Homer tried his hand at it, in an astonishing scientific leap over two millennia: It is dark. Odysseus has returned to his palace. He presents himself to Penelope, his wife, in the disguise of an old beggar who has some knowledge of her husband, the long- wandering king of Ithaca. He wins her confidence. Penelope speaks to him (in disguise as an old beggar): Let me ask you to interpret a dream of mine which I shall now describe. I keep a flock of twenty geese in the place. They come in from the pond to pick up their grain and I delight in watching them. In my dream I saw a great eagle swoop down from the hills and break their neck with his crooked beak, killing them all, There they lay in a heap on the floor while he vanished in the open sky. I wept and cried aloud, though it was only a dream, and the Achaean ladies, gathering around me, found me sobbing my heart out because the eagle had slaughtered my geese. But the bird came back. He perched on a jutting timber of the roof, and breaking into human speech he checked my tears. "Take heart," he said, 'daughter of the noble Icarius. This is not a dream but a happy reality which you shall see fulfilled. The geese were your lovers, and I that played the eagle's part am now your husband, home again and ready to deal out grim punishment to every man among them. ' At this point I awoke. I looked around me and there I saw the geese in the yard pecking their grain at the trough in their accustomed place. "Lady," replied the subtle Odysseus, "nobody could force any other meaning on this dream; You have learnt from Odysseus himself how he will translate it into fact. Clearly the suitors are all of them doomed: There is not one who will get away alive." [2] The cunning and cautious Odysseus agrees quickly, in an uncharacteristic way. (Or can one believe that Homer was so extremely subtle as to make him here super-cunning?) A psychiatrist does well to avoid counsel where his own private involvement is deep. Penelope's wish may not have been that her husband return and the suitors be slain, but quite the contrary, that her legendary patriarchal husband not return so that her beautiful geese could continue to play about her and eat from her board. This latent and ambivalent wish has been bothering her and making her sleep badly, we hear. Perhaps the best that the dream could contrive for her was to act out what she feared, followed by a hysterical awakening; and then came the half-asleep explanation, with which Odysseus emphatically agreed [3] . It is perhaps one of the signal achievements of humanity to have discovered and applied the principles of collective dreamwork. The sacred conscious dreamers of ancient Phaecia do stay asleep and it is an amusing dream. They are awakened gently by the boys leaping into the air after a ball. Odysseus, one might think, should have been upset by the Love Affair dream. It would not stretch the imagination to put himself in Hephaestus' place, long absent, with his wife rumored to be consorting with various suitors, enjoying his bed as they were his board. Instead he was "glad at heart, following the Song of Demodocus." There was fundamentally more at stake in the dream than his Penelope and possessions. The reduction of the gods to human terms in the Love Affair myth under examination is basically a way of coping with them. It is universal in religion, as annoying as it may be to rational philosophers. All religion is a dream; the actions here analyzed are a mere flicker played upon a universal human screen. Within itself, however, the present myth has an external logic that most dreams do not possess. Freud speaks of the occasional reorganization that occurs in dreams so as to reassemble the transmuted pieces into an acceptable form that fools one with its facade of "really the way things happen." The myth has been worked upon consciously. It is not Kafka-esque or Ionescu-esque; it does not double back upon itself like the theater of the absurd. Homer had gone far, but not that far. His myth is classical, "rational," "normal." His handling of the material gives a clue as to how the Greek and Western mind will work from then on in transmuting its unconscious material into its fictional components: "realism," romanticism (in the vulgar sense), explicit motivation, clarity of plot. At least, this has been the leading thrust of western literature, especially of popular literature, until now. Freud mentions also the reversal of cause and effect in dreams. One is uncertain, for example, exactly "how the gods flew." The astrophysical uncertainty leaves one uncertain whether such a reversal may have affected the myth. Since destruction was mutual among the parties, the myth-work could have enjoyed some leeway in deciding "who did what to whom" and thereby ease its task. Other features of dreamwork that Freud analyzed have already been treated. He says that the dreamer is always present in his dream, although somewhat apart as a kind of third person, and our myth contains its dreamers as well, from Athena and Odysseus, down to the ordinary household retainer crowding at the periphery of the audience, the ordinary man beset by the disastrous conduct of the gods. Freud says, too, that the dreamer commands symbolic language which he has never been aware of learning. And George English has neatly stated that "a dream is a tool for rubbing information against information." So, although the ordinary Phaeacian was not a master of the ceremonies, he was, as a community member, entitled to identify himself with the action; the symbolism of the myth may have meant as much to him or her as it did to Odysseus, or more. Freud discovered that when the wakened dreamer recites the dream, he is prone to deny most vociferously those elements that are exercising the dreamwork censorship. Everything may be made clear except that which is most obvious - the purpose of the dream. What might have been going on in the unconscious mental operations of the Phaeacian dreamers was described in the pages on "The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy." But if Odysseus or any Phaeacian were to be questioned about the myth, his most assured remark would be that it was comedy, not a tragedy; that disaster was not his concern, that the gods had everything under control and didn't mean what they were doing anyhow - in short, a total contradiction of the covert meaning of the myth. Elsewhere in these pages, other Freudian injunctions as to the components of dreamwork were considered: the transmutation of catastrophic symbolism into the symbols of the smithy and the bedroom; the matching of plot with reality, and reality with wish; the uncovering of the levels of meaning. Freud can help on at least one more perplexing point, because it bedeviled him too. One cannot help but wonder at the sanguine piling up of levels of different meaning upon single words, phrases and symbolic deeds; this author must seem like a table waiter setting upon his arm an alarmingly tall stack of plates. Freud talks in The Interpretation of Dreams of the genius of dreamwork. It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds. Nor is it easy to credit the skill shown by the dream-work in always hitting upon forms of expression that can bear several meanings; My readers will always be inclined to accuse me of introducing an unnecessary amount of ingenuity into my interpretations; but actual experience would teach them better [4] . Even when the mind is carefully trained to perceive and understand by one sign only a single referent, it does so under duress. For such perception and cognition is not only inhuman; it is false to "reality." And when freed from the bonds of an everyday meaning, the mind exhibits an astonishing genius for combinations and patterns of "unreal reality." Hephaestus' lameness means all that we have said it means, and perhaps even more. The movements of the plot of the Love Affair are of the number and variety of the movements of great bodies in the sky, a double-tracked reality that scarcely strains the myth-making mind. Given that Ninevah and Sparta were designed by their rulers to imitate various celestial archetypes, can one still be amazed that the same archetypes will have been working within the unconscious mind to produce many other manifestations, concealed as well as overt? Where Freud cannot help one, or rather, where one would not want his help, given his theories, is in the interpretation of the larger framework of sexualism and catastrophe. For here, as mentioned before, Freud, like every other authority except the rare predecessors of, and those of the circle of, Velikovsky has not known or been willing to acknowledge the priority of catastrophes over other drives and behaviors in the creation of human nature and institutions as found today. Freud may have postulated an instinct for "ego-survival," but he did not conceive how catastrophically the ego had been threatened. {S : SEXUALITY AND DISASTER} SEXUALITY AND DISASTER The Love Affair is especially appropriate for the analysis of the causal forces in human history because it seems on its face to show that sex is so important that even disasters are translated into sexual terms. This is true only in a quantitative sense; sexuality is a step down from catastrophe in the mental turmoil associated with it, and, as such, is a logical deflator of catastrophic anxiety. The Love Affair, paradoxically, reveals sexuality to be secondary in the definition of human nature. At the beginning one must of course grant the obvious: the Love Affair is saturated with sexuality. It would be difficult to conceive, furthermore, of any area of behavior that would provide such a complete analogy to the latent action and at the same time one that would communicate so readily with the audience of ancient Greeks. We have already remarked on the Grecian fascination with the struggle between the sexes. Sexuality is primeval, familiar, a continuous source of conflict. It is both marvelous and understandable, surrounded with mishap, steady, dangerous and humorous. It lends itself to moods, to sharing and exclusiveness, to love and hate. It is endlessly diverting and suggestive with respect to ordinary nature. In its reproductive aspects, it is profoundly meaningful to short-lived and disease-prone people. But, one should not forget, sexuality points "downward," to the animal kingdom, further to the plants. What has sex to do with the astral gods? No. The philosophers are right in their way, Sex is tossed by man onto the laps of gods. It is an expiative and control mechanism. "You shall have all we have, and, (cunningly) you will be controlled by it, too." One must not go too far afield. This ground should be left for a later ploughing. One is faced in the Love Affair with a sexuality thousands of years beyond its first ramifications into human nature. Here it is necessary only to throw up a barrier against interpreting the Love Affair as a love affair because sexuality is deemed to be the fountainhead of myth. Sexuality can also be a cloak of disaster. It stands here with all of its traditional and well-developed imagery in place of the true story. There is reason for its use. Catastrophe can be buried well beneath sexual imagery; there are enough intimations of fright, noise, violence, love, hate, strangeness, explosiveness, conflict and damage in the "primal scene," the "birth trauma," the lust to mate, and the competition for mates to inspire the most profound analogies. Still, they are partial analogies, not "the whole real thing." And when the direction of causation is reversed, there is additional reason to believe that the catastrophes of the gods are the teachers of sexual conduct, as they are the teachers of religion, of politics, of war, of the arts and crafts. Catastrophe reinforces sexuality, provides taboos, devises perversions, excites sexual orgies, and poisons relations between the sexes even while it exalts them. That the often repeated song of Demodocus must have taught the audience something about sex, marriage and justice is quite likely. The "calloused attitude" toward such affairs may have been Dorian Greek but where did the Dorians get it from? The sexual psychoses, which Sigmund Freud and every doctor from the shaman to the Park Avenue psychiatrist have treated, are aggravated by the uncontrolled amnesia of disaster and by many of the transfigured forms of behavior that man invented to ameliorate the symptoms of disaster. Not having yet uncovered the source of the infernal angst that crouches ready to produce psychotic behavior, therapists, whether specialized in sexually oriented crises, or religiously inspired, or war-peace directed, or of any other inclination - alienation, materialism, etc. - can go on in endless circles, curing when easing of symptoms will occur in any event, curing through authority, or passing along through symptomatic relief a psychosis from one object-fixation to another [5] . Withal one should not deny that a skillful cutting of the brain and drugging of the glands may someday excise the primeval angst; it may be that the stoneage men of many areas were up to treating a catastrophically-induced psychosis with their frequent resort to trephination of the skull. {S : IN ILLO TEMPORE} IN ILLO TEMPORE It is common for persons who have suffered a personal disaster to have a recurrent dream respecting it. The same dream or one like it may repeat itself for years, disappear for years, and recur. Similarly, every known human group has developed in its prehistoric period various myths that have to be retold and rituals that have to be repeated. All of them go back to the great times of destruction and creation, illud tempus, a phrase that Mircea Eliade finds useful as a pivotal point in his far ranging studies of comparative religion. Writing of the activities of archaic man, which would include Homeric man, he declares that "their meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example. Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and the collective orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (in those days in illo tempore, ab origine) by gods, ancestors, or heroes." [6] "We must do as the gods did in the beginning." [7] Time must be regenerated periodically, in endless cycles; in accord with the temporal period, many things are renewed: fires are put out and rekindled, the dead return to visit, the original combats between gods and devils are reenacted, and orgies commemorating the destruction of all values are held to precede the new year. The year in illo tempore ended in a catastrophe of earth, air, fire, and/ or water. "In fact, among many primitive people, an essential element of any cure is the recitation of the cosmogonic myth." Also, it is recited on the occasions of birth, marriage, and death, indeed for practically every occasion when a person needs to build up morale [8] . Yet this same "archaic man" dreads history. He wishes only to recapitulate his beginnings, the sacred events, not the profane events that have happened since. He is not simply a conservative, a traditionalist; he is superconservative, obsessed with what happened in illo tempore. For there was a dreadful thing then, beyond all historical measure and until it is controlled, nothing else is controllable. With all his acumen and learning, Eliade himself does not penetrate the iron curtain illius temporis. Something Big Happened! He writes one work entitled Myth and Reality, but the "reality" is not what happened; it is the interposed reality of a revisionist philosopher, not the reality of which the myths speak in deafening language and blinding imagery. And he entitles another of his works The Myth of the Eternal Return, but here, too, he confines himself to providing valuable illumination from all quarters of the globe on the obsessive need to make the great leap backwards to the traumatics events, not to the actual conditions that mankind returns to. The terror in illo tempore, the fact that "for archaic men, reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype," the association of the return with cures that practically scream out, "If we survived chaos and creation, we can survive anything!" the fixation upon cycles of disaster and revival and the incompetency of humanity over millennia to get onto a longitudinal temporal plane - all of these facts and many more constitute evidence that unspeakable disaster governs the so-called "archaic mind" and carries through to modernity. Indeed, one must credit the doctrine of uniformitarianism, and all of its ramifications in the sciences and philosophy, as being the first successful counterattack of the human mind against the fetters that catastrophes imposed upon it. It was largely this modern doctrine in astronomy, geology, biology, and finally religion and politics that smoothed out the external cycles, made the proven details of history important, claimed millions of year for human development, and set up the idea of progress - all of these being achievements that would have been difficult without denying the importance of what happened in illo tempore. The myth of the Love Affair is not a basic document to establish the general theory of the first days because it is not a myth of creation. That it is in direct line with cosmogony may, however, be asserted. It is a tale told in a newly settled land under semi-cosmogonic conditions of dream, dance, rhythm, and verse. The gods struggle; the Moon is renewed. It is a second-level myth in the last series of catastrophes. Its relationship with the events in illo tempore is apparent, but it is of the last days of that time. In the next century and a half, the first group of uniformitarians will have appeared, with the colossal nerve to say, with Plato, that "the ruler of the universe has ordered all things with a view to the excellence and preservation of the whole." [9] {S : THE KERNELS OF HISTORY} THE KERNELS OF HISTORY Millions of words of myth have been born of the human mind through the ages. Myth is still being created, not only among the so-called primitive peoples whose numbers are so rapidly diminishing everywhere, but also in the sophisticated editorial rooms of giant newspaper and television monopolies and in the halls of law and bureaucracy. The myth that "the President works with great energy and command of information" is comparable to the myth that "Hercules cleared the Augean Stables." (Amusingly, Hercules was accused of a conflict of interest for taking pay from two sources for his work.) This is so if we take, as the superficial rendering of the word, that myth is a factual narrative whose aim is to some important degree to stabilize the ever-flowing stream of anxiety of the organism within itself and in regard to the outer environment. It is like a dam that commands the flow of water from the rains and streams above in the interest of the consumers of the water below. By using common symbols, the system operates on behalf of a community. As a result, a myth will perform little or no functions for a person who belongs to another community, to a different hydraulic control system. One should not be put off, therefore, when a scoffer exclaims, "All these myths do nothing for me." The greatest sources of trouble and fear are the greatest and most enduring sources of myth. The doings of the gods (nature), supplemented by the dynamics of sexuality and the competition for the other scarce values of power, respect, wealth, knowledge and health provide both the anxieties and the linguistic references used to compose myths. The combinations and permutations of expression that give rise to particular myths are infinite, especially when one adds the universal factors of wish fulfillment, already mentioned, and functional design, by which different types of myths are to be used as supplications, expiation, lessons to children, augury, dramatic entertainment, and so on. Myth is adapted, also to create the type of person a society's ideology needs. That millions of words have been composed for such personal-social reasons over 10,000 years, say, is not at all surprising. and that most myth is untranslatable without knowledge of its culture, its language, the context in which one myth is employed, and its typical audience is also understandable. Which is to say that the problem of the historic message contained in a myth is to be solved only when these features of its expression are known. Afterwards, the historic content of the myth can be approached directly. In this sense all myth contains history about a group; it could only come about as a result of experiences, whether one or many; and its detail contains empirical and linguistic references. Ares does not "bridle" in a horseless culture, nor does one smite a rock to get water in swampland. That Achilles is known by 36 epithets and Odin by fifty names, gives some idea of the variety of traits of a hero or god in a given culture. But now to the most difficult problem; the portrayal of an actual event in a myth, as in the Love Affair. If one has arrived at the historic message contained in the Love Affair, what is to prevent him from putting all of Greek myth or any other body of myth through a historiographical sausage-grinder, emerging with thousands of little links of Greek history? It is conceivable. But much is trivia and repetitive. Or the history involved has such vague parameters of time, space and references when treated as history as to be useless. Also, a great, if unknown proportions of myth consists of references to cultures, sub- cultures, priesthoods, temples, occupations, and schools that are lost to history. Their local contexts are missing. Furthermore, many myths are hopelessly successful in their function of telling about something while at the same time concealing it (the opposite of scientific communication which aims at telling something and only that something in a special language designed to communicate it clearly and exactly). Still, the impression of impenetrable jungle and inescapable labyrinth that the first sight of the body of myth makes upon one retreats remarkably upon application of the tools of the sciences and the virtues of patience and imagination to particular segments. Then the questions occur: "Who cares?" and "What resources are we willing to devote the task?" For most people, and experts, too, the use of myth is largely that of symbolic poetry: the mind reacts to it, is startled, pleased, achieves a phantasmagoria or pandemonium akin to the effects of various drugs. Enough. On the other hand, where there exists little of other types of knowledge of important historical problems, natural or social, resort to myth analysis is necessary and its techniques will be continuously improved. To the degree that such systematic work is accompanied by an equally alert and extensive archaeology, considerable advances in a number of sciences might ensure. As the expert on Babylonian and ancient science, Otto Neugebauer, once commented to the author in a few moments of smoking of the peace-pipe between exchanges on the work of Velikovsky, we could dig up the whole ancient world with a fraction of the funds of the space program, and thus find out what it has to say to us. The art treasures to be excavated would, of course, be also of value. {S : Notes (Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Trauma)} Notes (Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Trauma) 1. (1900). Vols. IV and V of the Standard Edition (London: Hogarth press, 1953; New York: Basic Books; Avon Books, 1972. 2. Lines 531-590, Murray, op, cit. 3. An alternative reconstruction, more Jungian than Freudian, is that Penelope was suffering a crisis of Character, in which the eagle (her stronger, more dictatorial, dogmatic aspect) was moving bloodily to dispose of the geese (her inner weakness), and, in the course of the resolution, identifying with her absent husband. George English, who pointed out this interpretation to me, thought as well that the transition was a bloody bridge that often is crossed at the presumed age of Penelope age of, between 35 and 45. 4. Page 562, 332 fn., 560, 60, 534 ff. 5. Cf. Sebastian de Grazia, Errors of Psychotherapy (New York: Doubleday. 1952). 6. Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 4. 7. Ibid., p. 21. 8. Ibid., pp. 66, 68, 73, 82-3. 9. Plato, The Laws, book X, p. 290, loc. cit. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P PART 3: } {Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR} {C Chapter 17: } {T SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART THREE: THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR CHAPTER SEVENTEEN SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND Great myths are the stories of human tragedy on a grand scale. If mankind no longer exists in an age of myth, it is not because of a new intelligence or style but because of the lack of terrible stimulus. Even so, the ages of myth-making have left a legacy of serious problems. One does relive the ancient terrors; they have left deep tracks in minds and glands, regularly revived by a horde of customs and rememorized. Furthermore, man is a myth-maker and he will always find sufficient personal and social crises to inspire individual and collective repressions of memory, though not on the original grand scale. {S : WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED} WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED Earlier, we decided to place Homer's "publication" of the Odyssey around 630 B. C., two generations after the end of the Martian catastrophes. We mentioned in another place that amnesia can set in abruptly following a grave event and the sublimation of the troublesome subconscious memory could be accomplished quickly as well. We alluded to nursery rhymes based upon atrocious political acts for an example. Still, the question gnaws at us: "Did Homer really not known of the disasters of the century before him?" The catastrophist reaches, all too easily at times, for the "proof by non-existent proof," which comes close to begging the question. Thus, physical and biological destruction, if complete, makes memory non-existent, therefore impossible. Psychic destruction (total amnesia) also makes proof impossible in the sense that the remembering mind cannot remember any of the events one is called upon to remember. Total Psychic Destruction and/ or Total Physical Destruction equals Zero Proof, hence zero recall of the catastrophic events. We have advanced in these pages and elsewhere many conditions approaching the Zero Proof formula, but never has history been totally obstructed. Therefore Homer must have had some means of knowing the catastrophic events of two generations earlier, even in his childhood. We now can suppose that he did remember terrific destruction and social turmoil, directly or through his elders. Why would these memories not enter into his work directly? Why would he not attach the Greek gods (except Helios, the Sun), to their sky- bodies? In the first place, he would not dare to or wish to tie the gods explicitly to their bodies. The gods were much more than the bodies, much older than the events in which they acted, and hostile to presumptions (hubris) of humans about them. Homer and other dramatists might also have agreed to a convention not to portray the gods in this manner. On the subconscious level, Homer may have written of the gods in such a way as to display their natural histories, even knowing of their history in some part and consciously, without realizing that he was writing the history of the gods. He could describe Ares as Ares, actually appreciating that he was doing so, protesting (as writers accused of libel or of autobiography sometimes do), "I am only writing fiction," and furthermore they will believe it and so will their hearers. This is no more than happens with children, who, in their play, will often reenact disagreeable experiences with cruel attendants or playmates in a comic or brutal scenario with toys, and, when questioned, will sincerely deny that they were reenacting the real experiences. I need only mention similar and well known behavior among persons who are mentally ill. Nor need I discuss again the technology of dreams, whereby the dreamer translates the experience into a detailed representation, which he may promptly forget, or he is unable to retranslate into real terms, or which he may refuse in either event to accept as connected with his experience. We conclude that, behaving typically, Homer could know both subconsciously and to a degree consciously of a horrendous history, could rewrite the history as poetry, could refuse to make explicit connections that would be obviously revealing, and could deny that his story was historical. "How can you doubt me," we hear Demodocus and Homer crying, "am I not blind?" There is no end to the self-deception and deceptiveness of the schizoid human. {S : THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE} THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE Scientific theories are metaphors that, when pursued, place their users into a position of control and prediction. Scientific theories are also consensuses in as much as they cannot be communicated or believed, much less worked out and routinized, unless a number of competent persons accept them as a basis for conducting operations. Modern science has made great efforts to put aside, first, the primitive metaphoric systems such as are found in the myth we are studying, second, the mystic metaphorism, though much more agreeable, of Pythagoreanism and Platonism, and, third, though with great reluctance, the empirical nominalism of Aristotle and of the Newtonian Laws. Now it moves uncertainly on a stripped-down linguistic and mathematical basis, purely operational and denotative, so far as particular small areas are concerned. Ironically , the bigger the library and the greater the equipment of a university or research center, the more likely the scientists in it will be utterly specialized and isolated from each other's group. Their metaphors will communicate with the smallest number of persons. Then it happens that many chasms are created which no one dare approach and the bridges over these chasms become and will remain forever the operational constructions of metaphor. Pythagoras and his associates, who flourished early in the sixth century B. C., give us a crucial lesson in the transformation of "true myth" into "false science". We say that until the 7th century (687 B. C.), the planets moved erratically from time to time. This fact was known to "pre-scientific" Greeks. Planos, the root word, means leading astray, cheating, deceiving; a wandering, roaming, straying; (metaphorically a wandering of mind), a madness, in uncertain fits (of disease). (These all from Liddell-Scott Greek- English Lexicon.) Wanderer meant as Odysseus wandered - without knowing what would happen next. (And, of course, Odysseus, complemented by his mentor, Athena, is the greatest deceiver, the trickiest of men, "the born trouble-maker.") The eminent historian of science, George Sarton, says that Pythagoras aimed to prove that the planets were not "planets". He points out that "as their Greek names implied; plana• means to cause to wander, to mislead; planŠtŠs is a wandering, erratic, misleading body." [1] To Pythagoras, " the planets cannot be 'errant' bodies; they must have circular and uniform movements of their own.. If one could not but analyze those complicated motions they would be reduced to uniform circular ones . The whole of Greek astronomy grew out of that arbitrary conviction." [2] We begin to perceive what happened. Even though Sarton sees the origins of Pythagorean astronomy in an id‚e fixe - that heavenly bodies must move regularly and circularly, he believes that his arbitrary idea had a true result- namely to "discover" that the planets do have such motions. Hence, astronomers and public now agree that, as the contemporary popularizer Asimov puts it, "the Greek astronomers realized that there must be more than one canopy. For while the 'fixed' stars moved around the Earth in a body apparently without changing their relative positions; this was not true of the Sun, Moon, and five bright starlike objects (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)- in fact, each moved in a separate path. These seven bodies were called planets (from a Greek word meaning 'wanderer'..." [3] . So the word "planet" means "wanderer" but wanderer on a path, a contradiction in terms. Pythagoras asserted their paths to be regular. We know that they have been so, since then. Two events have occurred. The first is that the planets, which were originally named correctly, have stopped acting so as to deserve their name. Pythagoras denounced the meaning of the name and postulated their orderly movement. Modern astronomers accepted his meaning and introduced their order on top of his order. Pythagoras indeed was far more anxious than they to reduce the planets to order. He was obsessively concerned with the development of all abstractions in accord with fixed formulas. Not content with abstraction, he founded a secret society to contain his truths and avert public examination. Propelled by "the Great Fear," he led the search for absolutes of order, a search that led Plato less than a century later to propose imprisonment in a "House of Better Judgement," and even death for those who would deny the immutability and harmony of the heavens. Laplace is regarded as the founder of the science of probability. Writing two centuries ago, he disposed of the providential hand that Newton had postulated to set the solar system in orderly motion and maintain it. Order there was, declared Laplace, but it may be explained as originating in natural causes and as preserving itself by regular motions whose disruption was quite unlikely. However, he declared, in passages rarely quoted, the probability of a comet striking the earth in the course of centuries is great and its result could be devastating if the comet were very large [4] . Besides, he warned that his own calculations, reinforcing Newton's conception of regularity in the movements of the orbs, did not take into account "various causes that can be ascertained by careful analysis, but which are impossible to frame within a calculation;" such would be comets, meteors, and even electric and magnetic forces. "The sky itself, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not unalterable." So spoke Laplace. However, because the heavens have "settled down" in recent millennia, major displacements and encounters are increasingly unlikely. The celestial encounters of 2700 years ago may have been the last for some time to come. In 1974, Robert W. Bass went beyond this self-critique of Laplace into a critique of Laplace's famous calculations of stability for the solar system [5] . Instead of confirming the practical immutability of the planetary motions, Bass emerged in agreement with W. M. Smart's thesis that the theoretical term of assured reliability of the planetary orbits is in the hundreds or few thousands of years. The fabric of mathematical "proof" of the orderly skies has been torn to shreds. {S : A CLAIM OF SUCCESS} A CLAIM OF SUCCESS When the lines of the Love Affair were read, of a summer day on the island of Naxos in July of 1968, the hypothesis of this book sprang to life. Nowhere, whether in writing or in conversation, had I come upon a parallel between the song and external events. Nor, for that matter, had there ever been, to my knowledge, a predecessor to the story itself in ancient times. Overtime, the means of providing theory occurred in three forms, each depending upon a number of theories, techniques and facts. One method would be to draw up all parallelisms (and lacks thereof) between the Love Affair and the celestial disasters that contemporary quantavolutionists, particularly Velikovsky, had described as occurring around the time of Homer. This has been done and a close parallelism discovered. A second method would be to translate the myth by psychological and linguistic theories into a set of events that would most closely adhere to the characters, setting, dynamics (plot), and language of the myth. This has been done and the set of events that was most satisfying to the myth was the aforesaid catastrophic period of encounters among Mars, Earth, Venus and Moon. The third method would be to search for the effects of the events, both upon human behavior and the cosmic bodies involved. The human avenue led into a stream of effects that has been accumulating from previous disasters; indications of collective behavior expected under the circumstances of the Greek disaster were also found. In the geologic and astrophysical areas, recent explorations of all three extra-terrestrial bodies, together with revised theories of cataclysmic changes on earth, tended to confirm the historicity of the Love Affair. As Isaac Newton would say, "To the same natural effects we must as far as possible assign the same causes." [6] The probability of the theory as a whole being correct is enhanced by the concordance of the three results of the three methods. One should remain critical, however because in each area of method, theories are being developed and employed that are controversial, and also because in each methodological area, much less than an "ideal" amount of factual material is available. Also this study attempted to do what Laplace avoided doing, to introduce many factors whose quantification for the purposes of a calculus of probabilities was impossible. Considering the confusion of theories and the onrush of incompatible facts in every related area of knowledge, it may appear to have done rather well. From time to time, in the course of research, a question would return to haunt the author: suppose that an older version of the Love Affair were to be discovered. If there were a predecessor to the Love Song of Demodocus, it would be Homer's work, a work well known to Homer, and/ or a fable known to other contemporary cultures or preceding ones. Thus far, none has appeared. However, the effects of such a hypothetical discovery would be considerable. It would undercut my logical insistence that this particular plot is a screen for historical events of the early seventh century. Almost certainly "love triangles" were observed and caused trouble for millennia before Homer. For that matter, walruses and apes snorted and grunted their way through similar affairs. Adultery found itself condemned under laws that were promulgated before Homeric times; Deuteronomy bans it, and also Genesis. Depending upon the culture, the emotions evoked by such triangles might be no less than the outrage of Hephaestus. The fearfulness of earlier catastrophes may have helped to build up the emotions. So the preconditions of the particular plot- the triangle and the emotional charge - were known and diffused. In order to nullify the theory, however, the structure of the pre-existing plot would need to be closely parallel, and analogous gods would need to participate in it. An Egyptian creation myth, much older than "the Love Affair," has a marriage between the Sun (Re) and the Heaven god (Nut, Roman Uranus) that is disturbed by copulation between Heaven and Earth (Geb). The Sun forbids Heaven giving birth to children during the year (360 days), but clever Thoth (Mercury) gambles with the Moon for Time, wins 1/ 72 part of the day, and hands over to Heaven five extra days (365) in which to give birth, whereupon Heaven bore Osiris (Saturn), Horus (Jupiter), Set, Isis, and Nephthys (the last three Venus-connected) on 5 successive days. Many events are incorporated here, but the major characters are from an earlier age and the plot is not analogous or homologous with the plot of "The Love Affair". Respecting divine participation in Genesis, God does intervene against Abimelech to prevent his consummation of a relationship with Abraham's wife, Sarah, whom he has taken in god faith and with the consent of Abraham. It is plausible that other plots of adultery of a historical and fictional character, involving deities, should have existed. There is no reason to believe that Homer had written (as Patroni insists) or knew of an original Opera Ballet of the Love Affair, parallel to the plot found in the Odyssey, and including the same gods as characters. The details of the story of the song are stuck off so firmly that a complete version resounds from behind the lines. Assuming that Homer or another had presented the Opera Ballet before, would this fact preclude a late dating of the underlying historical catastrophe? I think not, if it is in the same generation, and especially if it were the work of a younger Homer. Hence, the haunting question can be answered by a denial: this certain plot probably did not exist before the celestial events that it represents in disguise took place. {S : FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY} FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY If it is true that mankind suffers infinitely from the gods, it has become human because of them. They are in a sense, then, entitled to do with man what they will. As the old- fashioned property-owner used to say: "It's my property. I can dispose of it as I please." Many will assert that man would have been better off without the gods. No. This is a materialistic, mechanical view of human origins and human nature, more in keeping with tight suppression of memory and uniformitarian ideology, than with the lessons of catastrophe. Man was created by catastrophes and made to some degree what he is by them. This is a point on which pragmatists, phenomenologists, and idealists may agree. But - it is more doubtful that the species would have become human if it had not humanized the gods. It is almost impossible to conceive that humans would have become humanly intelligent if they had been physiologically capable of experiencing the disasters mechanically, "in cold blood". They could have forgotten the disasters more easily over the generations. They would not have developed the arts and sciences. That is, there are few, if any, grounds for believing that they could have become scientific before they had passed through a stage of being monstrously human. If people are able now to become "rational" and view ancient catastrophes and natural history as truly natural, it is only because they did not have the capacity for viewing events as natural in the first place. The first humanoid who pointed at an active natural force with a capacity to impress a whole people and said: "There is our god. He made us and is now sending us a message" - that humanoid became the first person. After the dreamtime dance and song of the Love Affair ends, and the dance of the spheres completes the ceremony, a peaceful and generous mood pervades the audience. King Alcinous announces that all the nobles must give fine personal gifts to Ulysses. This they do: cloaks and tunics and bars of gold. Euryalus, who has slandered Ulysses, gave the best gift of all, a gleaming copper sword with a silver belt in an ivory sheath. All these are heaped before the visitor. A hot bath is prepared for him and preparations for dinner are made. I allude to these lines to stress once more the effects of the dance. The sublimation of unconscious effect has been well-nigh perfect. The ancients who heard these passages would imagine the full and blissful original scene, the way in which a sacred song and dance should ideally be conducted, the effects upon the participants and audience that should ideally occur. This no one may deny. All that may be said by way of criticism is that such is the intent and result of great literature, of music, of dance, of plastic art, of liturgies, indeed of all constructive crowd behavior whose aim is social internalization. In the group, an anxiety is present whose specifications are hidden for fear of their depressive and disruptive effects. A spell must be cast; the symptoms will be displaced, discussed and alleviated; and everyone will feel better afterwards. Objectively one can appraise the effect; it is good therapy; people are kinder to each other; possible alternative means of handling the anxieties are rendered unnecessary. Amidst the frequent crowd panic and madness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Bible, of aggressive, ritualized, stupefied, and senseless self-sacrifice and others sacrifice, the Song of Demodocus in its context, for all that the gods misbehave, is superior therapy. It is well that those ancient censors who called the story false and sacrilegious and would have ripped it out of the Odyssey did not have their way. This is said, not alone on behalf of many bored and salacious schoolboys, not even for the sake of Truth, but for the realization it can bring of how ancient cultures, no less than primitive and modern ones, strove for alternatives to the labyrinthine rites, collective murder and bloody offerings by which societies sought to extirpate the hidden anxieties of catastrophe. The present age is fraught with anxiety; still it has not reached the levels of our ancestral disasters. Up to this moment, the settled skies have allowed scientists and poets in free countries to move ever more boldly in exploration of the world within and the world without. The most radical investigations of nature and human nature have been permitted. The most radical experiments in the expressive arts have been tolerated. It is no longer true that the human mind cannot face, at least intermittently and "for the record," the evidence of ancient catastrophes. On this account one may predict that, within a few years, much more proof than is presently available will be collected and advanced in favor of the general theory of quantavolution and catastrophes and that the theoretical reconstruction will proceed apace. When Odysseus is about to complete the slaughter of the suitor's relatives, Athena gives him pause: enough of bloodshed [7] . And when Eurycleia caught sight of the slain suitors in the palace hall, "she was about to cry out in exultation, beholding so great a deed. But Odysseus restrained her... 'Rejoice in your heart, old woman, and restrain yourself and do not cry aloud. It is an unholy thing to glory over slain men. These men the destiny of the gods and their own merciless deeds have overcome. '" [8] The Hero resigns. The Moon is in place. The Goddess Athena is in her heavenly sphere. And Mars in his. Mercy begins once more. And 2500 years later, the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, writes: "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely one's thoughts are drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me " [9] . {S : Notes (Chapter 17: Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind)} Notes (Chapter 17: Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind) 1. History of Science, V. I, op. cit., p. 13. 2. Ibid. 3. An Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, p. 17. 4. Stecchini, p. 107. 5. "Did Worlds Collide," and "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," IV Pens‚e (1974), 8-20, and 21-6. 6. Principia, Bk. III, Chap. V. 7. Even if someone later than Homer wrote these last lines of the Odyssey (D. Page, op. cit.) and they lack poetic merit, their moral function is apparent. 8. Rieu trans., Is. 411-17. 9. Quoted by Stecchini, op. cit., p. 44. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS} {P - } {Q - } {C APPENDIX } {T CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK} {S - } THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS by Alfred de Grazia PART THREE: THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR APPENDIX CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK (Italic-faced ones have a direct part in the plot and action in THE LOVE AFFAIR) GODS Athena (also Athene, Pallas Athene): Greek Goddess of wisdom, war, and the arts and sciences, "officially" declared to be the same as the Roman goddess, Minerva; identifiable in her planetary aspect with the planet Venus. In other cultures, she carries many names, including Ishtar (Babylonia), Quetzalcohuatl (Mexico), Lucifer (Rome), Helel (Judea), Aten (? Egypt), Subari (India). Protector of Odysseus. Hephaestus (Hephaistos): Husband of Aphrodite. Greek god of fire and of the crafts and sciences, comparable to many smith-gods, also a solar deity; called Vulcan by the Romans and probably is Tuchulcha of the Etruscans. Identifiable with Athena and planet Venus. Ares: Lover of Aphrodite. Greek god of war, called Mars by the Romans, Nergal by the Babylonians. Identifiable with the planet Mars. Aphrodite: Lover of Ares. Greek goddess of the Moon and of love. Also, Greeks called the Moon "Selene" and partially transferred Aphrodite from the Moon to planet Venus and called the planet Aphrodite; meanwhile, the later Romans transported the name of the Italian goddess, Venus, to the Goddess Aphrodite and named the planet Venus. The Roman "Selene" was "Luna". Hermes: Messenger god and god of luck. Identified with the Planet Mercury. Apollo: God of Far-Distances and music. Personifies detached Wisdom. May represent a destroyed planet, now the meteoroid belt. Was later identified with the Sun. Zeus: Son of Kronos and called the Father of the Olympian Gods in Homer. Identifiable with the Planet Jupiter. Poseidon: God of the Sea, of Earthquakes, and ultimately of the Earth. Brother of Zeus. Enemy of Odysseus. Helios (Helius): God of the Sun. HUMANS Demodocus (Demodokos): Great singer and harpist of Phaeacia, who recites the story of The Love Affair, and may be a self-portrait of Homer. Odysseus: Hero of Homer's Odyssey. Epic poem of wanderings after the Trojan War. Known in Western Europe also as Ulysses. Guest of King Alcinous. His name, in American vernacular, would be "the born trouble-maker." Penelope: Wife of Odysseus. Alcinous (Alkinous): King of Phaeacia. Nausicaa: Daughter of Alcinous. Halius: Son of Alcinous. Dancer. Laodamas: Son of Alcinous . Dancer. PLACE AND TIME The ancient Mediterranean and the ancient skies above, possibly 687 B. C. Phaeacia: Realm of King Alcinous, probably based on real places in the Western Mediterranean, but fictionalized by Homer. Scheria: The larger land of which Phaeacia formed part. Troy: Fabled site of the Trojan War, identified by most archaeologists and classicists on the site of the town of Hisarlik in Turkey, near the Dardanelles Straits. Lemnos: Island in the upper Aegean Sea where the Sintians lived, favorites of Hephaestus. End of The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE } {S - } TITLE-PAGE GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, N.J. Notes on the printed version of this book: ISBN: 0-940268-03-5 Copyright C 1983 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first edition Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213, Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A. To Stephanie Neuman "It takes a chaos within oneself to give birth to a shooting star."* *(Nietzsche) {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS } {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD I PLAGUES AND COMETS Comets and Angels Cosmic Plagues The Destruction of Egypt II THE SCENARIO OF EXODUS High-Level Negotiations Why Pharaoh pursued the Hebrews The Organized Move Opening and Closing the Waters Unforeseen Circumstances III CATASTROPHE AND DIVINE FIRES Whose Angel? The Censored Designs of Heaven The Gentile Exodus The Horror of Red The Electrostatic Age Yahweh's Electrical Fire Conglomerate The Celestial First Cause IV THE ARK IN ACTION The Golden Box Dangers of Electrocution The Ark at Work The Electric Oracle The Battle of Jericho The Ark's End God's Fire Gone V LEGENDS AND MIRACLES Radiation Diseases The Electro-Chemical Factory Manna The Burnt Offering The Brazen Serpent and other Rods The Pouch Of Judgement VI THE CHARISMA OF MOSES The Love Child A Disliking for Hebrews The Meek Killer The Courtly Shepherd Circumcision and Speech Problems Scientist and Inventor Talking with Gods The Centralization of Hallucination An Israelite Opinion Survey Routinizing Charisma The Maniac Scientist VII THE LEVITES AND THE REVOLTS Numbers Leaving Egypt Impedimenta Technicians and Security Police Blame the People Revolt of the Golden Calf Korah's Rebellion Freud and the Murder of Moses Beth Peor VIII THE ELECTRICAL GOD The Name of Yahweh The Character of Yahweh Sin vs. Science Immortality Monotheism CONCLUSION APPENDIX: TECHNIQUES FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEGENDARY HISTORY The Limits of Distortion Unbelieving Theologians The Pragmatics of Legends LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. A Comet in Human Form 2. The Plagues and Exodus 3. Pharaoh's Army Drowned 4. The Tidewaters Passage 5. The Route of Exodus and Wanderings 6. On Eagle's Wings 7. Moses' Tablets and the Golden Calf Heretics 8. Zeus Strikes Down Phaeton 9. The Leyden jar 10. Egyptian Ark in Procession 11. Cherubim of Nimrud 12. The Ark's Structure and Function 13. Ground Plan and Design of the Tabernacle 14. The Destruction of Jericho 15. Moses with Horns, Veil and Mask 16. The Brazen Serpent is Formed 17. The Burning Bush 18. Mass Electroshock 19. Myth of the Death of Moses 20. The Moses of Klaus Sluter LIST OF TABLES I. Attitudes of Israelites Encamped at the Holy Mountain. II. Affection and Aggression in the Books of Moses, III. Sin, Blame, and Compulsion. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD } {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia . FOREWORD The Judaic, Christian, and Islamic religions go back to the Exodus from Egypt of the Hebrews under the leadership of Moses. They center upon this event and upon Moses. Ernst Sellin, a distinguished German authority on the Old Testament, once declared, "The ultimate and most important question for the investigation of Israelitic-Judaic religion must inevitably be: 'Who was Moses? '" [1] Despite his own reply and notwithstanding the hundreds of works on Moses that are catalogued by the Library of Congress, the question has remained unanswered. I have found no book that deals adequately with the psychology of Moses, and therefore have portrayed fully the workings of his mind. No study has properly embraced Moses in his two great capacities as a manager and scientist, and so I have reconstructed these his qualities as well. Furthermore, the Exodus and Wanderings, those operations that Moses directed, are generally misunderstood, both in their particulars as Jewish history and in their representation of what was happening throughout the world in those days. Part of the 3000-year misunderstanding stems from the strange environment in which Moses lived and worked. The Exodus was not a stroll through the desert by some truant slaves. The Exodus occurred in an extraordinary setting of great atmospheric and physical turbulence, a catastrophic world. Unless we comprehend precisely the natural and social upheavals of those days, we cannot grasp Moses. Nor can we fathom the religion of Moses. I have introduced in every chapter new methods of viewing the environment of the Exodus. Meteorology and electricity are joined to chronology, archaeology and biblical study, and all of these with psychology, sociology and political analysis. I have some confidence in this multidisciplinary approach, and I hope that others will capture from its results some of the exhilaration that I experienced in its conception and elaboration. The very first chapter tells how a comet passed by and the plagues struck. The second chapter describes the failed negotiations between Moses and the Pharaoh, and the subsequent pursuit and escape. Each subsequent chapter picks up a critical part of the story -- to explain it, to add evidence, and to place it naturally, coherently and sympathetically into the general scheme. In the end, the reader will perhaps have derived the same conclusions as I have from the Old Testament account of the most human of all experiences, the birth and establishment of a great god. Alfred de Grazia Washington Square New York City 21 June 1983 Notes (Foreword) 1. Ernst Sellin, Mose und seine Bedeutung fr die Israelitisch-Jdische Religionsgeschichte (1922). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T PLAGUES AND COMETS} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE PLAGUES AND COMETS Disbelief in the Book of Exodus, for the modern educated person, begins with the fantastic story of the infant Moses' survival and salvation in the bulrushes of the Nile, advances through Moses' encounter with the Burning Bush whence speaks Yahweh, ascends rapidly with the plagues of Egypt that follow his threats as Yahweh's messenger, and reaches a climax in the parting of the waters to let the Israelites escape and the closing of the waters upon the Egyptians. Thereafter the incredulous reader can only sigh as one after another lesser miracle occurs - - water from tapping a rock with a wand, manna from heaven, tablets engraved by Yahweh, a little Ark with a bench on which Yahweh perches when he pleases, and a tent in which he dwells. Overall is the panorama of the people wandering in the desert, observed closely by this same Yahweh, who calls them his chosen people, despite their giving every indication of not behaving as chosen people should, and indeed not wanting to behave as his chosen ones. I doubt that we can make sense out of these or other events of the Exodus if we insist upon examining them as separate and distinct bits. If it were only a question of a man being addressed by a bush, we might reach into the mental asylums and locate thousands of hallucinators. And if it were only an earthquake that was shaking down the houses of Egypt, we could assert that hundreds of earthquakes occur annually. Of slave rebellions, there are a great many in history. Of stubborn pharaohs, how very many world leaders are stubborn. And so on, until every event is identified with its own kind, but the kinds do not mesh together. There is, in every episode of this whole history, a mysterious factor "X", something that is common to all of the behavior and events. Rather than let a realization of this factor "X" dawn upon us gradually, I think that we may identify it now. It is not Yahweh, the God of Moses, at least not conventionally Himself. It is an uncomfortable idea at first, but it lends shape and meaning to all the parts. Let us call it only a hypothesis at the start, a large supposition, leaving it to the reader, as events progress and one's thoughts progress with them, to decide in the end whether the supposition helps pull the pieces of the story together, and furthermore whether it is the probable all-embracing influence that lends a very special character to those days and years. {S : COMETS AND ANGELS} COMETS AND ANGELS Beginning with the famous plagues of Egypt, occurring just as Moses confronts the Pharaoh and beginning shortly before the day of the Exodus proper, we search for the common factor, "X". What were these plagues? A legendary account gives us a convenient summary of them. Thus did God proceed against the Egyptians. First he cut off their water supply by turning their rivers into blood. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He sent the noisy, croaking frogs into their entrails. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He brought lice against them, which pierced their flesh like darts. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He sent barbarian legions against them, mixed hordes of wild beasts [1] . They refused to let the Israelites go, and he brought slaughter upon them, a very grievous pestilence. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He poured out naphtha over them, burning blains. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He caused His projectiles, the hail, to descend upon them. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He placed scaling- ladders against the walls for the locusts, which climbed them like men of war. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He cast them into dungeon darkness. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He slew their magnates, their first born sons [2] . All of the incredible plagues (including related phenomena that go beyond the magic number of ten) would come from a near passage of an awful celestial body; and nothing but the passage of such a large celestial body could cause the incredible plagues. Many ancient writers known to us, who had something to say of the period of Exodus, mentioned a great sky-connected disturbance of the world. Among them are such well-known figures as Eusebius, Pliny, Plutarch, Ovid, Seneca, Varro, and Augustine [3] . Further, every modern archaeologist and geologist whose investigations can be indisputably fixed in the period have reported serious physical upheavals [4] . I use this insistent form to express the generality of agreement; contemporary egotism, we realize, fears and hates to believe that ancient times might have witnessed natural behavior of a scope and intensity not experienced today. In 1602, Abraham Rockenbach, a German Professor at Frankfurt University, published a "Treatise on Comets according to a New Method," there offering the following conclusion: In the year of the world two thousand four hundred and fifty-three (1495 B. C.) -- as many trustworthy authors, on the basis of many conjectures, have determined -- a comet appeared which Pliny also mentioned in his second book. It was fiery, of irregular circular form, with a wrapped head; it was in the shape of a globe and was of terrible aspect. It is said that King Typhon ruled at that time in Egypt. (This king, assert reliable men, subjugated the kings of Egypt with the help of the giants.) [5] Certain (authorities) assert that the comet was seen in Syria, Babylonia, India, in the sign of Capricorn, in the form of a disc, at the time when the children of Israel advanced from Egypt toward the Promised Land, led on their way by the pillar of cloud during the day and by the pillar of fire at night [6] . Yahweh, says the Bible, led the people out of Egypt "with his face." [7] The comet joined the people when they began their march and provided their posterity with a familiar image: "And the Lord [Yahweh] went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night; the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from the people." [8] When not Yahweh, the comet was an angel of Yahweh. The comet's head is the Angel of the Lord, its coma the wings, its tail the trailing gown. A recent compendium of cometary photographs and drawings displays several such images. Reproduced here, as Figure 1, is one of them. Figure 1. A Comet in Human Form (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.) Source: Atlas of Cometary Forms, J. Rahe et al., NASA, Washington, D. C., Sp-198 (1969). Isodensitometer tracing of Greenwich photograph of Oct. 3, 1908, 30 min. exposure, Comet Morehouse 1908III. A star with a rod is a cometary image. So we understand Balaam the Prophet when he says: "A star shall advance from Jacob, and a staff shall rise from Israel" that will destroy Moab, Suthites, Edom and Seir [9] . Commenting upon this verse, B. Gemser explains why the word "staff" or "rod" here should actually be read as "comet." The Hebrew word is shevet and for comet is shavit. Jacob is Israel, and "father" of the tribes of Israel out of Egypt [10] . A variety of cometary shapes with the names given them, such as "horn-star," "goats," "daggers," "serpents" etc. is offered by Pliny. He reports also "a shining comet (called Zeus' comet) whose silvery tresses glow so brightly that it is scarcely possible to look at it, and which displays within it a shape in the likeness of a man's countenance." [11] Since Yahweh watched out for them as Israel passed out of Egypt, "on this same night all the Israelites must keep a vigil for the Lord throughout their generations." [12] There was a physical presence in the sky, else they would have nothing to watch for. With the retirement ofthe original body, the anniversary merged with and strengthened the rites of spring, for the time was near the Spring equinox. One more quotation can suffice here to suggest the cometary presence: "By a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors the Lord has snatched your nation from the midst of another. Out of heaven he let you hear his voice and on Earth he let you see his great fire, and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire." [13] The Bible dates the Exodus 480 years prior to the beginning of the construction of the Temple to Yahweh at Jerusalem, about 960 B. C., some twelve generations having passed. [14] This provides a date of 1440 B. C. for the Exodus, not too far from Rockenbach's date, allowing for calenderizing discrepancies. Cyril of Alexandria assigns both the great fire of Phaeton and the deluge of Deucalion to the sixty-seventh year of Moses; Kugler regards the idea as plausible. Velikovsky's reconstruction of Egyptian-Judaic chronology, partially supported by Bimson, permits the retention of the Biblical date, and we shall use it in this book. [15] Whether we are or are not descended from that fraction of humanity whose story is told here or from that larger fraction -- called Christian or Moslem -- whose story has assimilated this particular story, our lives are spent under the lingering effects of the great comet. Our minds, religious attitudes, social institutions, wars, sex behavior, eating habits and even the sciences are pervaded by its influence. Human memories and consequently human histories have not yet fully recovered from the shocks of the event. We bury, distort, and sublimate the memories in many ways. [16] The Bible itself is a case in point. There myth is cozy with history. And the combination has been fiercely, obsessively retained, as if a purely historical recollection would be unbearably painful. Although the second of the five Books of Moses, the Exodus, is the best account that we have of that year, its most ancient lines were written down under stressful circumstances; to these lines, perhaps of Moses himself, a full oral tradition was added in the course of several centuries. The materials were sometimes lost; they were copied, rewritten, amended, translated and retranslated, time and time again. A similar history befell the other Books of Moses. The basic document which we use was given its penultimate form some 2500 years ago and its study today depends largely upon this canonization plus some volumes of legends and commentaries of the Jews, some old writings that are based upon writings no longer extant, and many modern archaeological discoveries in Egypt and the "Lands of the Bible." Further involved in the study of Exodus are the social sciences, such as the anthropology and psychology of religion, the history of science, and the sociology of organization, and even the natural sciences, especially geology, the atmospheric sciences and astronomy. All are usable at various stages of investigation. When the facts are few, and their reference, the Exodus, is still only a few pages long, then we must admit of every imaginable intellectual and scientific contrivance to extract from and add meaning to those few facts. Withal, the reader will be astonished when he comes to see how rich and unequivocal are the sources in the Bible itself for the main theses of this work. Not to be passed over is an obvious fact of a stubborn significant type: the Jews have always claimed the inseparability of catastrophe from the foundation of their religion. Thus when the medieval publicist and commentator Judah Halevi argued the merits of Judaism over Islam and Christianity, he fixed its superiority upon its unique origins in divine revelation amidst catastrophe [17] . Despite their philosophical defense, both of these religions had to remain in effect branches of Judaism because they had to claim a part in Moses and the Exodus. We return now to the Comet of that winter as it approaches ominously the Earth. It is on a stretched solar orbit, counterclockwise like the Earth, and of similar speed. It is producing a number of effects, although it is months away from its apparent target. When it finally closes in for a near pass at the globe, it gives rise to the famous plagues of Egypt. These effects could occur, since the comet was very large and radiant, so long as it was within a million miles of Earth, and would be heavily experienced on both its approach and recession. Generality cannot be avoided here. We wish, as Aristotle phrased it once, to be as precise as the facts will allow. Data would be needed on a number of motions, speeds, volumes, densities, and charges in order to calculate the pattern, timing, and effects of the Earth- Comet encounter. Given ever more intensive research and repeated calculations, I think that the scenario could come much closer to the reality of the encounter. Its mass may have been smaller than the Moon's or even larger than that of planet Venus, as Velikovsky thought. Part of the mass would be contained in the far reaching cometary tail or train. N. Bobromikov ascribes to several modern comets an original mass, taken together before explosion, of the Moon [18] . Astronomers are most reluctant to conjecture a comet of such size or greater, lacking an historical experience, and it is true that, at a close distance or in collision, a very much smaller body would do the same damage. [19] The comet called by many "Typhon," brought "destructive, diseased and disorderly" changes with "abnormal seasons and temperatures," wrote Plutarch [20] . We shall have more to say about it in the next chapter. {S : COSMIC PLAGUES} COSMIC PLAGUES The fateful encounters between ex-Prince Moses and Pharaoh Thoum took place at the Egyptian capital city, of 'Itjtowy, near the Delta [21] . They occurred amidst cosmic and mundane turmoil. Moses had returned from exile abroad ahead of the events. After dealing with his followers, he felt secure enough of his backing and certain enough of the emergent unsettling natural forces to approach the king of Egypt as the chief spokesman for the Hebrews. Estimates of the period occupied by the plagues and the negotiations between Hebrews and Egyptians range from a few weeks to years. A tradition gives one year for the plagues. Pliny, writing in the first century A. D. reports that the briefest comet was visible seven days, the longest for 180 days (following Seneca). [22] A few weeks may be presumed necessary and sufficient. More would be inconsistent with the phenomena of a cometary encounter; less would not allow time for the goings to and fro, the shocks of experience, the communication of rumors and reports. Early "Eloist" editors named four plagues: blood, hail, locusts, and darkness [23] . The number of plagues is an abstract of reality, a literary device for the editors of the Bible on the one hand (because they liked decimals) and a scientific abstraction for those who were and are trying to divide the turbulent natural unity into types of effects. The variation in the "number" of plagues is, in itself, an indication of an underlying complex and catastrophic reality. Philo Judaeus, in his 2000-year-old Life of Moses, reaches close to reality in a seemingly naive comment that all four basic elements of the universe - earth, air, fire and water - were involved in the plagues of Exodus [24] . Legend points out that the plagues proceeding from air and fire were entrusted to Moses whereas the others were reserved for God with the solid parts assigned to Aaron [25] . There are ten listed here. To these ten, traditionally denominated as plagues, we may add two logically and causally connected phenomena, the serpent-rod contest between Aaron and the Pharaoh's magicians, which preceded the first plague, and the opening and closing of the sea waters that let the Israelites safely out of Egypt. Moses had already gained experience with a lively, twisting rod at the instigation of his mentor, Yahweh. This was when he encountered Yahweh at the Burning Bush, of which more will be said later. (Yahweh will often be spoken of as if he existed; it is a convenience of reference to be clarified as the book moves on; care will be taken not to lead the reader astray by creating a special figure, distinct from Moses, who acts independently of Moses or freed from a priestly or editorial formula.) Moses would not have gained access to the Pharaoh and his advisers if he were not already known and respected and if they had not been uneasy. Moses and Aaron would not have introduced their rod into the conference with Pharaoh unless they were convinced of its superiority. It was perhaps heavily magnetized; it would behave strangely in the presence of metal objects, whether on the robes of persons, or on furnishings, or perhaps unobtrusively carried by Moses and Aaron, who might have borne other magnetized or electrified objects as well [26] . A tendency to draw to one end of itself the rods of the Egyptian scientists, as they were cast down near it, would give rise to the story that it had swallowed them. Moses was already quite aware of the enhanced electrical excitement of the Earth in anticipation of the comet, and might well have played upon static charges on gilded draperies or clothing to let Aaron's rod cling, and climb and spark. That Moses would have been able to produce a rod and perform such tricks better than the Egyptian scientists has to do with who Moses was. Again, we will defer this matter. Now came the reddening and poisoning of all the waters. Both should indicate a heavy fall- out of some combination of radioactive red phosphorous, cinnabar, ammonia, sulphur, and ferrous oxides. Since the population was not reported dying in large numbers yet, the fall- out may be presumed to have not been heavily radioactive, except that one must decide whether the radiation disease soon to come was part of this fall, or of a later one. Radiation came probably with the later plague of dust that caused sores and boils on all exposed animals and people, for this latter is so specific. But meanwhile there were other troubles. There were frogs, then lice or gnats, then beasts or flies. So far as troubles go, these are all of a kind, pests, all, they agitate and multiply and emerge into the human habitat in response to a warming of the earth, and enhanced electrical currents flowing though the earth, and an increase in the food supply occasioned by the death of water animals and organic life generally. Their great numbers present no problem. An isolated, luminous cloud in a clear sky in Hutchinson, Minn. USA, dropped 50-100 insects of the non-luminous species hemiptera per square foot [27] . A Dutch woman, fleeing with her babies through the woods near her house from the explosions of the volcano Krakatoa, Java, in 1883, found herself covered with leeches when she halted. All kinds of animals were fleeing from above and below the ground [28] . So the dust crawled with vermin and swarms of flies were everywhere, proliferating on the dead fish and frogs. But, as yet, no great number of persons had succumbed to the evil conditions. The water supply was the worst problem. Unlike fairy tale plots, there was here no neat progression from bad to worse, such as would be concocted to bring increasing pressure upon the Pharaoh. For a poisoned water supply is worse than a plague of insects and frogs. It stank, of course, from the death of its organic life and a combination of the gases and putrefaction and perhaps the causes of its pollution, sulphur and phosphates. Daiches thinks that he finds an inconsistency in the Bible between a verse that tells of all the water turning to blood and another that describes the Egyptians as digging round about the river Nile for water to drink [29] . In fact, the contradiction is a confirmation of what is said here: new wells bring in filtered, unreddened water. With invisible radioactivity (which he did not of course consider) a shelf of ground water could be contaminated, but would be unnoticeable at that time and for years afterwards, if at all, there being the vague word "leprosy" to cover the symptoms. We wonder whether something could be made of the magicians predicting the plague of frogs but not that of lice. (A legend calls this "prediction" to our attention.) There is some ambiguity in Velikovsky's conjectures about vermin, since he wondered whether they might be underground productions or would descend with the train of the comet. If from below ground, the vermin, we guess, would have been predicted; if extra-terrestrial in origin, there would have been no precedent for the prediction. It has become scientifically permissible recently to suppose plagues to descend from space via dust, comets, or meteorites, and the search for evidence of organic evolution on meteorites is an acceptable scientific issue [30] . I doubt that the comet had to inject the atmosphere with vermin in order to explain them; there have been ample cases of local fall-outs of fast-breeding and erupting insects. An Italian observer of the Neapolitan earthquake of 1805 had much to say of unusual animal behavior, of which I quote a few lines. Rabbits and moles were seen to leave their holes; birds rose, as if scared, from the places on which they had alighted; and fish left the bottom of the sea and approached the shores, where at some places great numbers of them were taken. Even ants and reptiles abandoned, in clear daylight, their subterranean holes in great disorder, many hours before the shocks were felt. Large flights of locusts were seen creeping though the streets of Naples toward the sea the night before the earthquake. Winged ants took refuge during the darkness in the rooms of the houses [31] . A legend calls "the fourth plague" "a mixed horde of wild animals, lions, bears, wolves and panthers, and so many birds of prey of different kinds that the light of the sun and the moon was darkened as they circled through the air." [32] In great natural disasters - earthquakes, floods, volcanism - the beasts, both wild and domestic, are driven by their psychological and physiological needs to invade the haunts of humans. If the Bible does not include this, one must conjecture it; it is a logical event, not exaggerated in the startled eyes of the people experiencing it. Figure 2. Pestilence, locusts, fire and hail are shown to obdurate pharaoh. then comes the slaughter of the first born (which the Hebrews avoided by marking their door with sheep's blood). Finally the Hebrews are bidden to leave Egypt. (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large) Source: reproduced with the permission of the trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York But perhaps we are leaping ahead of ourselves, for other things happened before the Egyptian earthquake, to wit, electrical fires running along the ground, a plague of boils and sores, and a hail of burning naphtha and meteoritic stones. After these came a plague of locusts (we presume these to be belated arrivals from outside the centers of population, awakened from dormancy by electrical and thermal currents in the ground), then afterwards only came the earthquake. The plague of boils and sores on flocks and people came in connection with a fall of hot ash, as from a furnace. Moses, it is said, casts a handful of furnace ashes into the air before the Pharaoh to demonstrate his point (reminding one of some of the more popular college instructors of elementary physics and chemistry). Sure enough, shortly after his announcement, the ash fell and plague or infection spread. One wishes the Bible supplied more dates. If the ash were radioactive, within a few days sores would appear. The ashes "produced leprosy upon the skins of the Egyptians, and blains of a peculiar kind, soft within and dry on top." [33] The boils were burning blains and blisters [34] . Centuries later, Solomon reminds Yahweh of "the people which thou didst bring out of Egypt, from the midst of the iron furnace." [35] Fine dust was failing, but quick death was contained in the fall of barad (the Hebrew word for "meteorites"). This hailstorm not only inflicted a heavy death toll upon people and animals - it fell in heaps - but carried fire with it. Fire can fall with stones when a volcano is vigorously erupting near at hand. Volcanoes were erupting everywhere but seemingly not near at hand. Fires running on the ground were probably electrical. They were probably running up the taller buildings of the government and of the official class, and, too, the pyramids. People were burned in the palace, even the King's son, according to legend. The indications of a mixed fire and stone downpour are logically associated with a cosmic fall-out from a cometary tail [36] . The fires were of naphtha (hydrocarbons) and simultaneously electrical. A fire rested in the hailstones as the burning wick swims in the oil of a lamp. The Egyptians were smitten either by the hail or by the fire. In one case as the other their flesh was seared, and the bodies of the many that were slain by the hail were consumed by the fire. The hailstones heaped themselves up like a wall, so that the carcasses of the slain beasts could not be removed [37] . The legend tells how the Pharaoh, in refusing permission to the Israelites to go, following the hailstorm and fire, declared that his god Baal-Zephon would block them, and that truly the Israelites were in desperate straits when they came before the sanctuary of Baal-Zephon [38] . This may have been when they discovered their passage blocked by the rushing tidal waters. Possibly the Pharaoh saw in Baal-Zephon the celestial source of the hail and fire. Hordes of locusts emerged prematurely from the ground and were blown in from other parts by furious winds, which just as quickly swept them away. "I will bring locusts into your country and they shall cover the face of the lands." Thus speaks Yahweh, implying a foreign terrestrial invasion [39] . But why did the locusts then quickly move on, after what must have been a brief respite and repast? Probably the heavy winds as explained drove them on; but also they might have been impelled by the sense of worse things to come. The darkness that came next was unearthly, says the legend; it came from hell and it could be felt. The winds blew out the fires or else the density of the dark swallowed up the fires that could be lit. The winds were carrying in the dense clouds of dust from everywhere, obscuring all natural light. Local, and even world-wide obscuration from natural disasters is not unknown in recent times, sometimes with long-lasting effects as with Krakatoa. But this was only the beginning of a dimmed world destined to endure for many years. The profound darkness lasted for seven days, or perhaps nine. It became worse: people moved about for the first three days. It was still dark, on the seventh (ninth?) day, when the Egyptian army launched its pursuit of the Hebrews, who had been on the road for three days from the morning after the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt by Yahweh [40] . Did this earthshaking event occur in full darkness, then? If so, how could Moses find his way to the Pharaoh's palace for the final permission to leave? I am inclined to think that the great upheaval had come before the full darkness, and that Moses met with the Pharaoh for the last time amidst the gathering gloom. Then it was that he received permission for the Hebrews to depart with all their worldly possessions. A strong implication rests in Moses' words to the Pharaoh on being refused as the darkness of the third day continued to grow. Pharaoh says angrily: " Never see my face again; for in the day you see my face you shall die." Replies Moses: "As you say. I will not see your face again." [41] The next and last meeting in the middle of the night after the passover and smiting of the first-born would have been in even greater darkness, and Moses' face would be obscured. Many terrible things happened in the gloom. Although the Bible says that "all the people of Israel had light where they dwelt," [42] some of the Hebrews lived in dark zones, according to legend. The great light of the comet did not break through the clouds until the night before they departed. According to legend, "the infliction of darkness served another purpose. Among the Israelites there were many wicked men, who refused to leave Egypt, and god determined to put them out of the way. But that the Egyptians might not say they had succumbed to the plague like themselves, God slew them under cover of the darkness, and in the darkness they were buried by their fellow-Israelites, and the Egyptians knew nothing of what had happened. But the number of these wicked men had been very great, and the children of Israel spared to leave Egypt were but a small fraction of the original Israelitish population." [43] A legend has the Pharaoh complaining: "Thou didst say yesterday, 'All the first-born in the land of Egypt will die. ' but now as many as nine-tenth of the inhabitants have perished." [44] What are the facts of the first-born, we must ask? Gressmann tried to solve the riddle anthropologically. Yahweh wanted the Hebrews to go out to the desert to sacrifice their first-born to him. The Pharaoh was frustrating this appetite of the god and hence Yahweh turned upon him to kill his first-born. This story, ways Gressmann, can be composed from the most ancient sources of the Old Testament [45] . Velikovsky sought to solve the riddle linguistically. Thus, Yahweh decrees that he shall kill the first-born of all of Egypt, from the Pharaoh to the maidservant, not excepting the cattle. Moses passes the word along; Pharaoh again refuses; the event occurs as predicted; the Pharaoh accedes to the departure from Egypt. Velikovsky finds a link between the almost indistinguishable Hebrew words, "first-born" and "well-born," and explains that the latter was intended, and that the earthquake was especially severe on the Egyptian upper classes who lived in stone houses, whereas the Hebrews and others, less smitten, lived in mud or thatch houses. This ignores the fate of the other "first-born" of maids, prisoners, and cattle - "I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt both man and beast" [46] - and is doubtful, given the history of earthquakes, which strike crowded quarters of the poors and let the rich flee to their courtyards. It may be more logical to give partial exemption to the people of Goshen from all the plagues simply because of the erratic nature of the disasters. Enough truth may rest in this geophysical separation to justify a later tale of a special dispensation for being Hebrew. So far as concerns the first-born, Moses had already proclaimed to the Pharaoh: Thus says the Lord, Israel is my first-born son, and I say to you, 'Let my son go that he may serve me'; if you refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay your first-born son [47] . The analogy is clear: Israel is first-born son, i. e. the chosen ones, to Yahweh; Egypt is first-born, the chosen ones, to the divine Pharaoh. Let mine go, else I will kill yours. Afterwards, references to first-born are to be interpreted in the light of this analogy. Further, if the Pharaoh's first-born son happens to have been killed, there will have arisen a general rumor to the effect that the "cream of Egypt was destroyed." Hereditary elites are notoriously self-centered. The lintels of Hebrew houses were marked with sheep's blood to inform Yahweh not to destroy his people dwelling within, particularly the first-born. Many Arabs continue this custom. Yahweh would "pass over" them. Prof. Beer finds in the word "passah" the original meaning "Jumping of the ram." Several images now occur: the original spring sacrifices, the identification of Yahweh with the ram of Egyptian Thoth (Hermes) and thus a clue to Moses' religious origins, the passing over of the god in a cometary form, the awesome destruction of most homes and buildings by violent earthquake, and the passover into the desert from Egypt. Moses and his Hebrew cohorts knew beforehand much of what happened, and understood the interconnections, and therefore the succession, of many of the events. The Egyptian leaders knew, too, although perhaps not so clearly as Moses, but they had to stay put. They had no "promised land" towards which to flee. {S : THE DESTRUCTION OF EGYPT} THE DESTRUCTION OF EGYPT An immense gravitational-electric strain interrupted the Earth's rotation. Earthquakes faulted the ground and fires broke out, mingling with the electrical fires. In many areas most houses were shattered. The pyramids stood the strains well. They were an excellent solution in stone for shock-proof structures. They must have been ablaze with Saint-Elmo's fire with great eyes of the gods alight at their peaks, The eye at the peak of the pyramid is of this age. (Thanks to the Masonic order, it may be found today on the American dollar bill.) Now the Earth prepared to tilt, in order to decelerate less. A tilt of the axis wreaks less strain upon it than a sudden slowdown of rotation or revolution [48] . An oblique approach of the comet would also have contributed to the choice of the tilt over the abrupt slowdown, since its electrical-gravitational pull was at a sharp angle to the rotation. Whether it actually tilted is a highly debatable question, to which we address only a few remarks in this book. We say here merely that the strain to tilt must have occurred and had consequences. The question is not beyond the capabilities of geophysics to resolve. A research team would obtain a set of measurements showing the angles of stress of disturbed monuments and geological features; it would postulate several chronological settings; it would calculate a number of possible movements of the crust resulting from combinations of decelerating and tilting forces; and significant statistical correlations would be computed. Tidal waves swept the coastal areas, and whenever the land was flat, raged inland for many miles. If the Delta area of Goshen was spared some of the disaster until some of the Hebrews had left, it was a miracle, perhaps related to the preventive measures that Moses and the leaders ordered. But Goshen may have been overturned as the Hebrews were crossing the Sea of Passage; a Jewish legend says that the cities they had built for the Pharaoh collapsed. Here again is what happened, told, now, from the Egyptian viewpoint. It is taken from the papyrus of Ipuwer, an Egyptian writing shortly after the Exodus [49] . Velikovsky located it in its true historical context, and independent sources have fixed the same time for it [50] . Forsooth, great and small say: I wish I might die.... Would that there might be an end of men, no conception, no birth! He who places his brother in the ground is everywhere, There is not a house where there was not one dead. The children of princes are dashed against the wall; The children of princes are cast out in the streets. It is groaning that is throughout the land, mingled with lamentations. 0 that the earth would cease from noise, and tumult be no more! Years of noise. There is no end to noise The land turns round as does a potter's wheel. The towns are destroyed. Upper Egypt has become dry. All is ruin. The land is not light Gates, columns and walls are consumed by fire The fire has mounted up on high. Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. The river is blood. Men shrink from tasting and thirst after water. Hair has fallen out for everybody. Women are barren; none can conceive. Trees are destroyed. No fruit nor herbs are found. Grain has perished on every side. Cattle are left to stray. The laws of the judgement-hall are cast forth. The storehouse of the king is the common property of everyone. Behold no craftsmen work. A man strikes his brother. One uses violence against another. If three men journey upon a road, they are found to be two men; the greater number slay the less. Noble ladies go hungry. She who looked at her face in water is possessor of a mirror. Serfs become lords of serfs. The Desert is throughout the land A foreign tribe from abroad has come to Egypt There are none found to stand and protect themselves Enemies enter into the temples - weep. Woe is me because of the misery of this time. We note here, in addition to the other plague evidence of the Bible, complete social breakdown of a type never observable in modern disasters, even at Hiroshima (where outside help came); prolonged chaos, for Ipuwer has experienced weeks and months of it; a foreign desert tribe has taken over the country and its temples; death is everywhere; wobbling of the Earth, possibly the tilting axis slowly coming to rest; fires mounting to the sky, consuming stone; radiation disease (falling hair, women barren); all Upper Egypt affected as well as Lower Egypt. Ipuwer mentions the baffling death of his Pharaoh, but much more detail is supplied, again from the Egyptian side, particularly as to the manner of death of King Thoum. This is from the inscribed stone of el-Arish [51] : The land was in great affliction... It was great upheaval in the residence... Nobody left the palace during nine days, and during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither the men nor the gods could see the faces of their next.... His majesty went to battle against the companions of Apopi [fierce god of darkness]. His majesty [the culprits] finds on this place called Pi-Kharoti. Now even the majesty of Ra-Harmachis fought with the evil-doers in this pool, the Place of the Whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his majesty. His majesty leapt into the so-called Place of the Whirlpool. The el-Arish inscription reports that the King's son led a search party that heard "all that happened... the combats of the King Thourn" and that the prince was badly burned and his companions killed by a "blast." "The children of Apopi... fell upon Egypt at the fall of darkness. They conquered only to destroy." The prince fled the land in the face of the invading Hyksos. Later "the air cooled off, and the countries dried." {S : Notes (Chapter 1: Plagues and Comets)} Notes (Chapter 1: Plagues and Comets) 1. Generally this plague is said to be of flies, not of beasts as in this rabbinical tradition. I also here prefer the reading of "lice" to "mosquitoes," as some writers say. 2. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, Philadelphia, 1909, vol. II, 3423. (Hereafter this is cited as e. g. II G 3423.) 3. These and others are collected and quoted in Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (New York: Doubleday, 1950). Additional sources will be cited below. 4. For example, Claude Schaeffer, Stratigraphie Compar‚e et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale (London: Oxford U. Press, 1948), and Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins, (Indiana University Press, 1973), 179-271. The reader's attention is called also to a book by two British Astronomers, V. Clube and W. Napier, Cosmic Serpent, who assign a comet to the Exodus days. See appendix below, section 1. 5. These giants are of certain tribes, well distinguished by Bimson (see below, 1977), of very large stature, who were never numerous or organized well enough to become a major nation, and were finally extinguished; Goliath, fighting with the Philistines and killed by David's slingshot, was one of the last such types. 6. John J. Bimson, "Rockenbach's De Cometis' and the Identity of Typhon," I Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review (hereafter cited as SISR), 4 (Spring 1977), 9-10. F. H. Baker, 189 Living Age (1891) 818-23, gives Halepo (Da Aleppo, Halep) credit in connecting the comet with the Exodus and the destruction of the Egyptian army. 7. Deut. 4: 37, Unless noted, Biblical citations are to the Oxford Bible, Revised Standard Version. Annotated. Martin Buber's transliteration (155) in his Moses. 8. Ex. 13: 1. 9. Num. 24: 17. To the Biblical scholar, Hyam Maccoby. I owe the suggestion that Suthites may be read "Se'thites" (" wicked people") and the embracing phrase may mean in effect "the whole human race." 10. Quoted by Z. Rix to the author in an unpublished manuscript "King Shepherds or Moloch Sheperds?" 2, 1976; Gemser, "Der Stern aus Jacob," 45 Zeitsch. fr Alttestament. Wissen. (1925) 301 ff; and also quoting W. Staerk, "Die Jdisch Gemeinde des neuen Bundes in Damascus," in 27 Beitr. Zur F”rederung christ. Theo. 65 (1922). 11. Natural History, II, ch. XXII, 89-91. 12. Ex. 12: 42b (Douay tr.) 13. Deut. 4: 34-6. 14. 1 Kg 6: 1. 15. Ages in Chaos (1952); Peoples of the Sea (1977); Ramses II and His Time (1978); John J. Bimson, Reading the Exodus and Conquest, Sheffield, 1978; Donovan Courville, The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications, Loma Linda: Calif., 1971, 2v. 16. N.-A. Boulanger, L'Antiquit‚ Devoil‚e par ses Usages, 4 v., Amsterdam, 1766, was the first major scientific writer on the social effects of cometary encounters. More recently, see Nahum Ravel, ed. From past to Prophesy, Bronfman Centre, Montreal, 1975; Earl Milton, Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, Lethbridge U. Press, 1978; A. de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky Affair, 3rd ed., London; Sphere Books, 1979. 17. The Kuzari (ca 1140 A. D. ), intro. by H. Slonimsky, New York: Schocken Books. 18. "Comets," in Lynch, ed., Astrophysics, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951) 19. A. O. Kelly and F. Dachille, Target : Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science, Carlsbad, Calif., 1953. 20. "Of Eating of Flesh," in Morals, quoted by Velikovsky in W. in C., p. 12; cf. 85ff: 21. Thoum is a name of the Pharaoh of the Exodus as reconstructed by Velikovsky (see Ages in Chaos, New York; Doubleday, 1952, p. 40). I do not support the theory that Ramses II or other famed kings, were the Exodus pharaoh. J. Bimson, "Israel in Egypt, "IV SISR 2 (1979), 15, identifies the place, not far form Memphis. 22. Natural History, II, ch. XXII, 90, Rackham trans., 1938. 23. Hugo Gressmann, Mose and Seine Zeit, G”ttingen, 1913, pp. 97-108. 24. I. p. 96 He was of the generation of Jesus. 25. II G 341. 26. The royal courts and public were excited by the revival of electricity at the hands of early eighteenth century European and American scientists. One experimenter (Wall) fashioned a kind of cane of amber, which could collect and hold charges, would give cracking sounds and "infinite flashes of light," and puff and explode. It would attract to itself smoke and then give it off "like a small cloud."( Joseph Priestley, I History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, London, 1767, 12-4.) 27. John Zeleny, "Rumbling Clouds and Luminous Clouds, "75 Science, (15 Jan. 1932), 80-1. 28. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964, 69,74. 29. David Daiches, Moses, New York; Praeger, 1975, 60; Ex. 14: 24. 30. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, "Does Epidemic Disease come from Space?" New Scientist, Now. 11, 1977. 31. H. V. Gill, 63 Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1908), 144-150, in W. Corliss, comp., Earthquake Phenomena, G2-151 (GOE-030). 32. II G 352-3. Significant, in view of our later discussion of the origins of the Israelites, is the added statement that the plague of beasts came "as a punishment for desiring to force the seed of Abraham to amalgamate with the other nations." This may refer to a considerable assimilation of the Hebrew, Egyptian, and other peoples during the sojourn in Egypt. 33. II G. 354. 34. II G 354. The air-exploding Tunguska meteor of 1908, apart from knocking down some eighty million tress, radiated the surviving trees, caused vegetables to increase in size, and induced mysterious scabs among the reindeer of the region in that year. (Vera Rich, "The 70-Year-Old Mystery of Siberia's Big Bang, "274 Nature (1978), 207). 35. I Kings 8: 51, as derived from the pen of the second Deuteronomist again much later. 36. I. Donnelly, Ragnar”k, New York, Appleton, 1883, ch. 2. 37. II G 356. 38. II G 358. 39. Ex. 10: 4. 40. II G 359. 41. Ex. 10: 28-29. 42. Ex. 10: 23. 43. II G 345; see also 14. 44. II G 369. 45. Mose und Seine Zeit, 103. 46. Ex. 12: 12. 47. Ex. 4: 22ff. 48. I. Michelson, IV Pens‚e nø 2 (1974) 20, 18, estimates a force of 10 24 ergs is required for a 180ø (North to South) reversal of the geographical poles; and to bring the Earth to a stop 10 36 , a trillion times more. We are speaking of incomparably smaller changes in rotational velocity. More recently, Warlow has shown that "to turn the Earth upside-down, with all the attendant havoc such an action can produce, a mere three-hundreth of the Earth's rotational energy will suffice - and that is only borrowed for half a day." "Geomagnetic reversals?" J. Physics, Oct. 1978 repr. in III. S. I. S. R. 4 (1979); cf. IV S. I. S. R. 2-3 (1979-1980) 8ff. 49. The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden, Alan H. Gardiner, trans., Leipzig, 1909; Velikovsky, W. in C., p. 18-24; L. Greenberg, "The Papyrus Ipuwer," III Pens‚e (Winter 1973), p. 36-7; anon., "A Concordance of Disaster, "I Kronos 2 (1975), 16-22. 50. J. Van Seters, 50 J. Egypt Arch. (1964), 13; W. F. Albright, 179 Bull. Amer. Sch. Orient. Res. (1965), 41-2. Malcolm Lowery, "Dating the 'Admonitions': Advance Report" II S. I. S. R. 3 (1977-8), 54-7, gives the most useful lines of Ipuwer's Lament, and affirms that "the Admonitions offer us an eye-witness report of the events at the end of the M. K." (57). 51. See Velikovsky, A. in C., 39-45. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE SCENARIO OF EXODUS} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO THE SCENARIO OF EXODUS Amidst the escalating terrors of the plagues, the Egyptian government struggled to control the total situation. Boldly exploiting the disasters, Moses and his followers hastened to organize the Exodus. Negotiations proceeded in an ever more tense setting, The antagonist of the God-King Pharaoh Thaoi Thoum was the man Moses. What Moses was really like and what his background was will be portrayed later. In anticipation, here one may consider that Moses was a Hebraic Egyptian raised in a royal household, on the princely level of an adopted son of a princess. He had a named father whom he never saw. He was exiled by his pharaoh-father, and was now back on the scene of his earlier life, dealing with a pharaoh who, considering Egyptian royal incest practices, could have been his step-brother, his step-uncle, or his step-father, or even a combination thereof, and whom he had once known well. Much that the Bible contains about the behavior of the Egyptian elite seems to come from an inside view. Professional journalists assigned to world capitals would probably agree that the exchanges between the Hebrew and the Egyptian leaders sound true. The general format could hardly have been corrupted, although Moses' reports must have been extensively rewritten. Whoever was writing the scene originally (and it was probably Moses) dealt familiarly with their conduct. Moses "knew his way around." {S : HIGH-LEVEL NEGOTIATIONS} HIGH-LEVEL NEGOTIATIONS When it came time to deal with the Pharaoh, there appears to have been no trouble in gaining access to the greatest ruler on earth. Moses, if an ordinary agitator, would have been jailed or executed offhand. His background, scientific reputation, and government connections prevented this fate. And that is precisely what Aaron and the Jews had counted on in seeking him out as their leader (not to mention Yahweh, who insisted that Moses be his spokesman and that of Israel.) Moses had found an ethnic connection; very well. The Pharaoh's government wanted to solve the problem of growing unrest in Goshen and elsewhere. "That the Levites, who promote the state of unrest, are not interfered with is apparently due to the uncanny air of power which the Egyptians scent as emanating from Moses." So writes Buber [1] . "Ben David has asserted that Moses possessed some knowledge of electricity," reported Salverte. [2] "Some knowledge" is an understatement; we shall see him as the world's best electrical scientist until Benjamin Franklin. Actually, I think, the Egyptians wanted Moses to help them not only to settle the unrest, but also because he came out of exile already known to them as one of their top-ranking scientist-magicians, and his predictions, noisomely ethnic as they were, gave them another input on what was happening in the natural world. The negotiations over the permit for the Jews to leave their homes in Goshen, Egypt, were based upon conditions and motives clear to both sides. The Hebrews were primarily interested in economic freedom, not religious freedom; Yahweh wanted to help them, but it is always "Let My people go, that they may serve Me." Moses, that is, was interested in theocratic power. Moses did not plead the economic cause. It would be useless to do so: no ruler in the world would let a useful subject people resign from the nation where they had resided for centuries. Imagine, for instance, the response of the Habsburg Emperor of the old Austro- Hungarian Empire in the face of such a demand. He would laugh and be pleased to hear that so much work was being exacted, especially considering that the same complaining people had houses, flocks, and lambs to slaughter in most homes when sacrifices were called for. Furthermore, the Hebrews had religious freedom. They were not being denied their God (significantly, the Egyptians refer to the Hebrew god as "Elohim".) True, at one point in the negotiations Moses actually made his strongest argument: that some Egyptians would stone the Jews if they conducted large public religious celebrations. The Pharaoh does not object to this argument; he is in fact sympathetic (and mind you, the Hebrew Bible is saying this!). But he feels that this problem of free public worship can be overcome by means other than letting the Jews move out of Egypt with all of their worldly goods, and without compensation. The Pharaoh Thoum is not quoted in support of his father's policy, but it must have still remained the official policy: the Jews were to be suppressed and mistrusted, lest, as the Bible itself quotes the father: "If war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." [3] Were the negotiations conducted in good faith? No, not on the Pharaoh's side nor on Moses. Moses intended all along to take his following out of Egypt forever, but he let the Pharaoh believe it would only be a brief trip to conduct sacrifices in the wide-open spaces. The Pharaoh never did believe this and made Moses appear insincere by counter-offers that would have let the Hebrews sacrifice freely within Egypt. Then again he said he would let the men alone go forth to sacrifice; only the men, after all, conducted sacrifices. Then again, later, all the people might go, but without their herds. He says bluntly, well along in the negotiations: "You have evil purposes in mind. " Moses never believed the Pharaoh, either; all along the voice of Yahweh dinned in his ears that the Pharaoh would be impossibly obdurate. Pharaoh Thoum guaranteed on three separate occasions the permit, only to rescind it after the occasion for the permit - a plague had passed. So far as the script reads, there were fourteen encounters between Moses and Pharaoh, plus three unsuccessful attempts by Moses to see him. The initiative was taken by Moses on seven occasions and by Pharaoh on seven. The scenario is plausible; an expert on labor bargaining or diplomacy would readily grant this. Most of the initiatives of Moses occurred in the early part and middle of the series, when Pharaoh was apparently incensed and confused. The calls by Pharaoh came mostly later. And in the last stages both parties responded to the events unpretentiously, for matters were quite out of control, When the final permission to leave came, the Hebrews were already in motion. So Moses pleaded what he knew best and what the Egyptians knew that he knew best. And he played upon the foreknowledge of disaster that he possessed, and here again the Pharaoh and his staff knew that Moses could advance evidence in his favor. Moses identified the agent of these forces of impending disaster as the Israelite god. The Egyptians were wondering whose god was agitating the world. The largest lessons in anthropology and theology are sometimes forgotten in the haste of students to address the details of Exodus. No rulers would ever conduct any kind of discussions in which plagues were the topic, without watching the sky; they were talking of gods and the gods had one true home and one main realm - the sky. This had been true since the days of creation, thousands of years before, by ancient reckoning in many cultures. The Pharaoh did not dispute the existence of Yahweh, indeed he reasoned and behaved as a typical sceptical and sophisticated ruler: "Maybe their god, which is not unlike our gods, Amen, Thoth, and Horus, has gotten something going for them." His obduracy, of which the Bible makes much, is to a certain degree rational and prompted by his knowing full well that the Hebrew complaint was almost entirely political and economic. It was Moses' scientific renown, coupled with the increasingly terrible natural manifestations, that prompted the Pharaoh to conduct the negotiations on Moses' religious grounds. He wanted any information (and so did his advisers) that would help cope with the deteriorating general situation caused by a raging great god. He begged Moses, not on one occasion alone, but twice, to intercede with the Lord on his behalf and to ask the Lord to bless him. One would say that the ruler was converted, not so much to Judaism, as to Moses as a verified expert and predictor. This came later with the breaking down of the hard heart of Pharaoh. Most commentators on the Exodus and indeed most careful readers of the Bible are baffled by a large problem. It has incited theologians and philosophers to perform remarkable feats of rationalization ever since the mosaic tradition came to be reassembled and committed to writing 3000 years ago. Why did Yahweh, time after time, harden the Pharaoh's heart? Why did Yahweh predict repeatedly, beginning with his first appearance at the Burning Bush, that Pharaoh would not let the Hebrews go, and that he, Yahweh, would not let the Pharaoh let the people go? Why was it necessary to visit every single plague upon the helpless country? Why is everyone concerned - Moses, Yahweh, the Pharaoh and all others who participated in or reported the events - willing and ready to let the plagues run their full course? Childs, for example speaks of the "strange atmosphere which surrounds the plague stories," of "the extravagant length of the stories," and of "a pervading quality of historical distance" not characterizing miracles such as that of Elijah on Carmel [4] . He wonders at the "mystery of Pharaoh's resistance" and "the ultimate strangeness of the plague narrative." [5] Childs then demonstrates that the narrative was edited to impose the idea of Moses as a prophet upon the events, but that Moses was not behaving like a true prophet; rather, Moses, too, was watching the events. That is, the Bible was assembled to portray the history of the world as the working of divine will. Its editors took up Moses as a prophet of the divine will. It therefore had to shape the account of the plagues to incorporate Moses as their prophet. This procedure later led many, including scholars such as Gressmann, to see Moses as the miracle worker and magician. But, in fact, the narrative is independent of Moses. The narrative is independent of Pharaoh, too. "Repeated efforts to illuminate the concept of hardness" [6] of Pharaoh have failed. And Yahweh moves inexorably, while insisting that these humans play out their pathetic roles. There can be only one reason for these behaviors, and theologians, not knowing it, have labored vainly to explain otherwise: the great natural force - the body in the sky - that was operative would hear no plea, see no reason to cease, change not its course until it had completed its approach, destruction and departure in its own time, inevitably, remorselessly, heartlessly. Further the Bible is reporting after the fact; it had to give meaning to the fact; it had therefore to implant free will where there was no free will, call for solutions when there was only resolution, and present history in the catastrophic model of Greek tragedy, where the characters are set into motion as if they were free, while affirming in the end that there was no alternative to what they did or what happened to them. Loudly, clearly, and predictably, the Bible sends forth the signals of desperate creatures from a world in distress. Under such circumstances, the hardness of Pharaoh is understandable, just as it is understandable why in the end he surrenders permission for the Exodus to occur. Buber asks "Why does Pharaoh permit himself to be convinced? We find ourselves face to face with a historical mystery." [7] Nor does Buber try to answer his own question. It is just as well. He has already destroyed, in his impeccable unbelieving theological style, the grounds for its solution. "The negotiations between Moses and Pharaoh and the associated plagues, can scarcely be fitted into historical reality." [8] How could a king negotiate with "a representative of the slaves," he asks. He proceeds farther, with what he - and most other scholars - regards as the only way to demystify the plagues, to diminish them: "masses of small frogs which come out of the river (it is summer, and the season for the flood);" a winter hailstorm; next year a swarm of locusts; one spring a sandstorm of hitherto unknown fury bringing darkness for days; a children's epidemic which cuts down the king's own son: "Go forth! he cries" to the "hated one standing before him." [9] If, by contrast, our version of the events is accepted, we may give credence to Jewish legends that other nations besides the Hebrews were mutinying [10] . Moreover, riots had broken out prior to the final earthquake and passover, a riot of the "first-born." Was a group of highly-placed Egyptians in incipient rebellion [11] ? The final night of the Passover may refer to the passover from Egypt into Sinai, or the passover of the Lord's Angel to destroy Egypt, or the Yahweh's passover of the protected Hebrew area "on his way" to the Egyptian concentrations, but certainly not merely to a traditional shepherd's festival to usher in spring (Buber, sic!). It was on this night before they departed from Egypt, incidentally, that the Hebrews baked bread for the feast. The haste before the departure, say many biblical authorities, prompted instructions to take unleavened bread, whence has come the matzos of ages since and today. Folklore, however, has long told us that bread dough will not rise in a thunderstorm. The Hebrews could not get their dough to rise, owing to intense electrostatic disturbances, but baked the flat dough into bread anyhow. The earth heaved and, as with the greatest earthquakes, electrical storms broke out in the darkness. The two are interconnected. Yahweh "appeared in Egypt, attended by nine thousand myriads of the Angels of Destruction who are fashioned some of hail and some of flames, and whose glances drive terror and trembling to the heart of the beholder;" but Yahweh took the main task of destruction upon himself [12] . A rabbinical source [13] maintains that 49 out of 50 Hebrews perished in the plague of darkness, and a legend declares that the faction readying for the flight slew their fellow Hebrews who would not go along [14] . Eusebius quotes a passage ascribed to Artapanus about the last night before Exodus: there was "hail and earthquakes by night, so that those who fled from the earthquakes were killed by the hail, and those who sought shelter from the hail were destroyed by the earthquakes. And at that time all the houses fell in, and most of the temples." [15] Velikovsky adds, too, a source from the midrashim: "The seventh plague, the plague of barad (meteorites): earthquake, fire, meteorites." He points out that the Egyptians have always regarded this night, the 13th of the month, and the number 13, as unlucky, a superstition the Jews did not share, and that the Aztecs, across the seas in Mexico, marked the 13th day of the month as "Earthquake day" when the sun began a new age [16] , and all work ceased on this day, that was passed in a kind of catatonic fear. {S : WHY PHARAOH PURSUED THE HEBREWS} WHY PHARAOH PURSUED THE HEBREWS Given the chaos and the final consent to the inevitable, it may seem surprising that the Hebrews should be pursued. Yet "when the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the mind of Pharaoh and his servants was changed towards the people, and they said, "What is this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us." [17] Or, as a Jewish legend has it, "Now that the children of Israel had gone from them, the Egyptians recognized how valuable an element they had been in their country." [18] It was not the whole Jewish people as a working force that they pursued; it could not have been; it would have been unreasonable, impolitic, rash, and inconsequential, given the sad circumstances of the country. The target of the pursuit was Moses, the Levites, and the knowledge, designs, metals, jewels, and equipment with which they were absconding. Political science is largely a study of non-rational behavior; still, a fear of loss of secret knowledge in the Exodus cannot be deemed non-rational, even if the chase was doomed. A parallel may be drawn. According to Heilbron [19] , in the "world's greatest collections" there are some 315 electricians of the period between 1600 and 1790 whose publications are noticed. Calculating with 40 years as the average duration of a scholarly career, the average of published producers per generation for Euro-America, which had an average population of perhaps fifty millions over the whole period, was then 67. In any year, that is, one might expect one or two active electricians per million people. In Egypt and the Near East, before the Exodus catastrophe, there lived perhaps twelve million people. Supposing a higher electrification of the environment and a greater theocratic interest in electricity, the ratio of experts to population was probably greater. The Egyptian government might reasonably view with alarm and suspicion the subversive activities of Moses and his Levite followers, even if there were only a dozen of them. The Soviet and American governments strenuously sought to seize and employ a small group of German scientists at the end of World War II. Also, the Egyptian leadership wanted to prevent a junction of the Jews with foreign enemies. The Egyptians would have just learned of the movements of the Hyksos tribesmen towards Egypt. "Putting two and two together " and, as sometimes happens in military intelligence, coming out with five as the answer, the Egyptian high command would have reported to the Pharaoh at this very moment that the Jews were heading for a rendezvous with these forces out of Arabia, and together they would turn upon Egypt. Moses, it would appear obvious, had been in touch with them while in exile [20] . Little did Egyptian intelligence realize that the Jews themselves were soon to enter into desperate battles with elements of the same Hyksos who, in the Bible, are called Amalekites [21] . In the midst of the chaos, the idea finally possessed the top elite of Egypt that they were losing some of the best applied scientific talents of the country all at once, at the moment when they were most critically needed, together with some of the most advanced technical apparatus in Egypt. Whether the Egyptians knew that the lands of their foreign enemies were also stricken is immaterial; they would have behaved in the same way. They must have felt a fearful loss of power, already experienced from the natural and "divine" forces. But now, as politicians often feel when otherwise powerless, "'Here is a matter we can do something about." We shall go deeply into the matter, but might presently declare what lay behind the changed mind of the Egyptians. In Egypt during the Middle Empire, electricity was a central concern of the government. Among many functions ascribed to the pyramids, one stands out as the most plausible: they were electrical guidance and control equipment, The great gods Horus, Thoth, and Amon, the nearest to Israel's Yahweh, were thunderbolting and cosmic fire gods. The word "pyramid" is Greek and "pyr" means "fire" as in "funeral pyre." Especially later on, the distinction among fires lessened and electrical fire and combustion are given the same word. The Great Pyramid compound at Giza was caled Khuti , "the Lights". Egypt was flat and the best way to observe and utilize electricity was by the pyramidal design; the pyramid was a superior artificial mountain from whose peak (a metallic cap), St. Elmo's fire would frequently be discharged skywards. At times, a whole pyramid would light up, miraculously without signs of burning afterwards. The pyramids had long been the rock and strength of the Pharaohs and Egyptian elite, too. They were of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, of the age of thunderbolting electric gods, and must have been centers of atmospheric science and of electrical phenomena. Religion and science were tied to the pyramids, and the genealogy, traditions, and faith of the royal family and elite. Even today, thousands of miles and thousands of years away, more people belong to the "pyramid cult" than, say, to the Episcopalian Church. Millions of people believe in pyramid electricity. Associations with roots in secret pyramid knowledge number their members by the millions. Books on pyramids are continually being published. Hundreds of general stores in America have recently carried pyramid devices, which are said to prolong life, to sharpen razor blades, and perform other marvels. These facts should suffice to stress the obstacles facing someone like Moses who did not deny the religious and scientific phenomena that are observed by means of the pyramids, such as the voice of the gods and the electrical "temperature" of the environment, but who argued that they might also be observed by means of a small electrical device of the type of the Leyden jar, which could even be portable. The great pyramid compared with the tiny electric device was like the early giant computers compared with the miniature computer of today. So, his argument would go, when the peak of the pyramid lit up, a compactly constructed arc (ark) would also activate, and when a lower pyramid would light up, the ark would signal faster, and that "eyes" would appear on both) and that when the pyramid edges began to light up from the top edge and run down, the ark would talk "a blue streak" ' and its surroundings would become dangerous. And in the end, in both cases, fire would leap down and run around the premises [22] . The Ark, then, must be defined in a preliminary way here; very much is made of it later on, as the secrets of Moses' science took concrete form in the Ark of the Covenant, among other things. The ground ark, unlike the pyramid or mountain altar, makes its own divine fire. It does not depend upon a single point high up to provide the electrical discharge. In a small machine, grounded by one pole and pointed to the sky at the opposing pole, the two being insulated from each other, an opposing charge is accumulated at the poles and, when sufficiently charged, the poles exchange a spark, a light, a divine fire. Unlike the pyramid, or mountain, the Ark can be moved to where its sources of strength are greatest and its effects can be most effective for psychological or other purposes. The Ark is not weak. Set up properly, and given the electrical conditions of today, a sparking machine, a large Leyden jar, can accumulate and discharge tens of thousands of volts. It was something, both in actuality and potentiality, that would indeed interest the rulers of an empire. We may recall that it was only the awareness that a nuclear chain reaction might be created and fashioned into a bomb that prompted the American President and his closest advisers to launch the huge and top secret Manhattan project. In this chapter, I will provide only a single indication of the Ark at work, for the weapon is treated heavily later on. This is a passage from a legend of the Jews, and has some of the typical markings of a fairytale: It was through the Ark that all the miracles on the way through the desert had been wrought. Two sparks issued from the Cherubim that shaded the Ark, and these killed all the serpents and scorpions that crossed the path of the Israelites, and furthermore burned all thorns that threatened to injure the wanderers on their march through the desert. The smoke rising from these scorched thorns, moreover, rose straight as a column, and shed a fragrance that perfumed all the world, so that nations exclaimed: 'Who is it that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant [23] ? It may be useful to continue in this fanciful vein. Probably the Egyptian leaders knew about the Leyden jar effect. They seem to have had an interest in studying such phenomena. But they were probably "isolationists," disinclined to making new weapons for foreign adventures and also without inclination to change the established order and rites. There were probably budgetary priorities involved. A new temple or pyramid would have the same effect on defense spending as a large aircraft carrier does now, Moses was perhaps a "hawk" in foreign affairs, coming from an internationalist Near East background, and would have been keen on weapons systems that could be carried abroad. Thus, if for some time Moses and some fellow-scientists, mostly Hebrew and Thoth religious pragmatists, had been experimenting with ark devices, and urging applications of the devices for military expeditions, domestic propaganda operations, and even "home-made altars" for middle-class funeral parks, the Egyptian conservatives would be deeply concerned and hostile. And they would exile Moses for this kind of trouble-making far quicker than for the accidental homicide of a labor foreman (which is the reason the Bible gives for his being condemned to death by the Pharaoh and forced into exile). And, too, it is typical of human behavior that when Moses had gotten his own electrical system going, he had the same obsessions about its being duplicated in other forms, about its falling into the hands of the enemy, or regarding even its being understood by ordinary people. {S : THE ORGANIZED MOVE} THE ORGANIZED MOVE The instant that Moses heard the voice of Yahweh at the Burning Bush, two deep motives in his ambitious character joined. One was to act upon the knowledge of the tremendous changes about to occur to the world. The other was to tie in his actions, not with an Egyptian bureaucracy of which he had been heartily sick and disenchanted, but with a restless people with whom he was also connected. This kind of switch is common, witness George Washington. Furthermore, Moses was in a unique position. He knew the sources of technical support personnel that others did not. These were the Levites. He was a Levi himself. They were assimilated Egyptian Hebrews. "Levites don't work like other Israelites," goes the legend [24] . They knew the Egyptian technology. They had probably flourished in Egypt since the time of Joseph, not a tribe but a skill echelon; skills are housed in families and clans, not in tribes which are more like nations. Many Levites had Egyptian names. The ill-fated Levite, Korah, was reported to have been Treasurer to the Pharaoh. Maccoby calls them a "leader and liaison class." [26] The idea of a Hebrew sub-proletarian mass is nonsense. How could the descendents of Joseph be mere slaves? (Unless, indeed, they were like the generally competent Greek slaves whom the Roman took.) Recalling the earlier quotation of the Pharaoh's father, how could the Jews as a nation "Join our enemies and fight against us and escape" without their having in the first place a potential social organization? Look only at the preparations for departure. Give the scheme, as detailed in the Bible - including even the elaborate instructions for stripping the awed Egyptians of their jewelry and roasting the last dinner before moving out to a logistical expert, and ask his opinion. There are several references to the Egyptians who were neighbors. The Hebrews were not in ghettos. Many did not want to leave, and probably many that did leave, and their Egyptian friends, were leaving in fear of being enveloped by the successive disasters. Israel, the core element, that is to say, was organized down to the last battle ration and, indeed, so says the Bible, moved out girded for battle. Slaves are never permitted weapons. The Hebrews, says a legend, bore swords and "five sorts of arms." [27] Moses knew long before Machiavelli "why unarmed prophets fail." Further, slaves are not permitted genealogies, but a legend about the first battle of the Jews in the desert, with the Amalekites, the Hyksos, has the enemy luring unsuspecting Jews out of the camp by calling out their family names that they uncovered among the captured Egyptian archives [28] . Compare them with the Huns, the Tartars, the Teutons, the American wagonŽtrains, the SudŽAfrikaaners of the Great Trek Ž and say whether the popular imagination of a throng of fleeing people could be correct. We note, too, that a "mixed multitude" accompanied the Hebrews. Apparently many friends and gentile relatives thought that they would be better off leaving with the resolute and wellŽorganized Hebrews than to remain in Egypt. It is conceivable, then, that a people moving out under such duress, with such immense natural and human forces pressing in upon them, would have among its leaders men who would seek to seize amidst the confusion the most valuable technological devices that they knew about and could possible use in the journey and battles ahead of them. Legend has it that Moses was a poor man in the desert. For, many Jews were carrying jewels and metal that were .. given" them by the Egyptians, out of superstitious hope promoted by the Jews themselves, that their departure would end the plagues. But Moses was burdened down with the remains of the great Joseph. it is well, however, that the charismatic leader think not of material dross. Carrying the dust of Joseph was possession of legitimate authority. The Bible uses the same word for the coffin of Joseph as for the Ark. And Joseph's coffin, like the later Ark, may well have carried Mose's most closely guarded secrets. Indeed as one re-examines the relation between Moses and the people, one gets an impression of a kind of expeditionary contract that is subordinated to the Lord's covenant with Israel, of which Moses is executor. It is glued by a common resolve and a professed religious unity, but nevertheless a kind of agreement which we can imagine to have been worded: We have heard of you, Moses, and you've heard of us. You say that you can do this for us? We can do this for you. Now let's get going. The people are continuously recalling Moses to his promises: "Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, 'Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness." [29] Some Bible-editors, totally committed to Yahweh and the leaders, berate the people continually for "complaining". Moses in turn is saying: You must follow me because I speak for God. You cannot turn back on God (me, Moses). At the Sea of Reeds, with the Egyptian force fast advancing upon them, they say to Moses in effect, the whole thing was your idea! (And with a Yiddish humor, the first in history: "Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?" [30] Evidently, from a kind of well-qualified expedition manager, Moses was quickly transformed by events into a charismatic leader. {S : OPENING AND CLOSING THE WATERS} OPENING AND CLOSING THE WATERS "And the waters of the Red Sea divided, and not they alone, but all the water in heaven and on earth, in whatever vessel it was, in cisterns, in wells, in caves, in casks, in pitchers, in drinking cups, and in glasses, and none of these waters returned to their former estate until Israel had passed through the sea on dry land." [31] The legend makes a point. The earth tilted in its attraction' to the passing comet. The Almagest sky map of the astronomer Ptolemy shows a bit of sky to the south unseen today and fails to show a bit of sky to the north; the map was probably copied from maps drawn before the Exodus [32] . Probably all Egyptian temples shifted several degrees north to catch the sun in a new position on the winter solstice following the Exodus [33] . In Upper Egypt, at 32ø 34'E/ 21ø 46'N, at Ovadi es Sebova (South), excavators discovered three temple foundations; one, the original, rested against the hillside from before Exodus; two were constructed later on. A shift of 5ø 01' between temple I and the temples II-III is evident. When the temple by Amenhotep III was built, the innermost target of the solstitial sun of winter had to be shifted to catch the sunrise on the eastern horizon farther north. One may reason that the axis of the Earth shifted, carrying Egypt further North by 5ø 01' or that a great earthquake moved the hill and its attached temple counterclockwise [34] . Figure 3. Pharaoh's Army Drowned The waters that confronted the Israelites were unexpected. Else the Exodus would not have gone in that direction; they would have known that they would be trapped. But the Red Sea sent a tidal wave north that ran through the belt of lakes between it and the Mediterranean. (Today it is the route of the Suez Canal.) The Israelites watched with distress the oncoming Egyptian army. The light in the sky never faded on that gloomy night before the sea [35] . "Then the Angel of God who went before the host of Israel moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness; and the night passed without one coming near the other all night." The Hebrew version carries "and the night disappeared in light..." [36] "God caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind, the wind He always makes use of when he chastises the nations," as in the Deluge, the Destruction of the Tower of Babel, of Samaria, of Jerusalem, of Tyre [37] . Battles of Egyptian and Israelite Angels waged in the skies. The Egyptian soldiers were met by strong winds, fiery darts, lightning flashes, thunder, hailstones and coals of fire [38] . The chariot wheels and the hooves of the horses were burned by divine fire and got stuck in a boiling mud [39] . (America's worst earthquake was around New Madrid in Missouri, in 1811, and an observer tells of his horses suddenly sinking up to their bellies in new black mud.) [40] It would appear that, even while all the aspects of the plague of the first-born repeated themselves, a tidal motion was added because here waters were involved. The accompanying Figure 4 displays several possible movements of the waters and of the two masses of human beings. The plan of march of the Israelites was southeastward through a known gap in the shallow lakes that stretched between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. When they arrived at the jump- off point at Pi-ha-khiroth, they were met by a wall of water. It was the tidal wave moving north from the Red Sea, following the comet and the tilt of the earth. They waited out the night in sight of the pursuing Egyptian force. The earth's tilt paused. The tilted waters continued to rise [41] and rush north. But gaps opened. The Israelites passed through, Moses and his Levite troops in the vanguard. The Egyptians perceived the gaps, too, and headed somewhat south of the Israelite passageway, intending to gain time. Then the tidal flood drops from its heights and reverses to the south. It catches some of the Israelites and the main body of the Egyptians and their leaders, including the Pharaoh. Even before the flood engulfs them, the Egyptian forces are deep in mire - perhaps in the old bed of a lake, perhaps in a new earthquake fissure eruption. The Israelites who remain alive continue southeastwards (Figure 5) leaving Egypt behind. They learn then something of what would have happened if they had taken the northern route to Canaan by the Great Sea. The peoples have heard, they tremble: Pangs have seized upon the inhabitants of Philistia. Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; The leaders of Moab, trembling seizes them; all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. Terror and dreadfall upon them; because of the greatness of Thy arm, they are as still as a stone. Till Thy people, o Lord, pass by, Till the people pass by whom Thou hast purchased. [42] Fig 4. The Tidewaters Passage (Present-day maps of these waters may not be helpful, although a careful hydrological study might reveal ancient basins and flood channels.) Figure 5. The route of Exodus and wandering I have chosen Mt. Horeb at the Eastern end of the Gulf of Aqaba as the "Holy Mountain" of Moses, instead of Mt. Sinai, following Winnett's arguments. (The Mosaic Tradition, p. 86 et passim.) This would be the Midianite (and Kenite) territory, where Moses passed his exile. Gressmann (Mose, 414) agrees and sees the Exodus moving along the Egyptian "Highway of Reeds," which continues, after Horeb, down to Arabia. Bimson places the capital of the XIII Dynasty at Itj-towy, near the Delta (" Israel in Egypt," p. 15, citing Hayes 12 JNES, 1953, 33-8) {S : UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES} UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES It is doubtful that even Moses, when he first conceived of returning to Egypt and exploiting his connections, knowledge, and daring - an event that can be fixed from his sight of the Burning Bush from which Yahweh addressed him - had any idea of how bad conditions would really become. And if, at the beginning, in the typical psychology of the great but frustrated man, thinking in the lonely wilds of his life's purpose, he began to hear from a superhuman being, and only half-believed in what he had heard, but was nevertheless seized by the idea of uniting his return to Egyptian affairs with the need of the Hebrews for a spokesman, then by the middle of the series of disastrous events, he could well be fully convinced that Yahweh was personally guiding all, and that even Egypt's best scientist- politician could do little without a god. Although the Jews were compelled by coastal tidal waves and hostile terrified nations to head southwards on the Sinai peninsula, they may also have chosen that direction upon the instigation of Moses. Moses may have believed that "the Promised Land" was where he had already been. For, after all, if the Jews had come from Palestine, and were to return there, it would be a returning home to the old condition, not a discovery of the Promised Land. Biblical scholar Auerbach believes that the goal of Exodus was to settle down at the oasis of Kadesh where Moses saw the Burning Bush. Although Moses had in mind Kadesh or Midian as the terminus of the Exodus, it is possible, even probable, that he thought of this location as an organization and staging area for the ultimate descent upon Canaan. His great ambitiousness and the dreams and wishful thinking of his officers would point to Canaan; also, he would have foreseen the need to consolidate his forces, to integrate their diverse elements, to train and discipline the people, and to gather resources for the second phase of the movement. Moses could hardly have imagined the horrible immensity of the natural catastrophe. A legend recites that the plague of hail in Egypt had brought great famine to Jethro's Midianites [43] . Upon arriving in his "promised land" there was little left there but parched earth, dry water holes, flaming mountains, and, Thank God, Yahweh. By now Moses and the leaders must have known that they could go nowhere until they were in better shape all-around and the natural forces had become subdued. The Bible says, as things get better and then bad again, "Moses spoke thus to the people of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel bondage." [44] The words read like a modern sociology textbook: their "slave psychology" couldn't stand up to the idealistic behavior that they had promised. But noone could have foreseen the catastrophe visited upon gentile and Jew alike. Even princes despaired. So Moses promised too much, and the people of Israel expected too much. And they paid for promises unperformed and conditions unforeseen. The Bible says that some 2.5 millions plus a great number of outsiders, "a mixed multitude," set out from Egypt. The general view is that this was a greatly exaggerated figure for "how could the desert into which they were moving support such a mass of people?" The desert did not, unfortunately, support them. Jewish tradition, more believable, says that the vast majority of the people perished in the passage out of Egypt. If the Biblical figure is used, perhaps only one out of a hundred survived. The waters that closed upon the princes of Egypt and their only "strike-force in readiness" washed over most of the pursued as well. A great number may have turned back immediately. Nor did the desert support even the remainder, though well-organized and led. By that time, Moses must have been as fanatically possessed as any man could be, insane with the problems of a people clinging only to hope and staring wild-eyed and worshipfully at alternative hopes. Whatever he did had to be quite mad. But what he did was rational unto the occasion. He insisted upon his obsessions. He exercised his talents, and those of the Levites and Aaron, and all the capabilities of his instruments. He worked Yahweh, "the Lord," furiously, wrenching from this Great Father Figure concession after concession, arrangement after arrangement, law upon law, giving up in the end only his right to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land. And it is said by some, such as Sigmund Freud, that he did not give up this right. Rather, he was put to death in a final revolt against his rule, possibly on the grounds that he, Moses, was impossibly intolerant and unfit for a new society - a leader of a long march that had now to end. And, with the understanding of Moses' behavior, the parts of the Exodus pursuit come together. In the dire national emergency, the Pharaoh and his national security council had to do what any modern high command would have done: turn their backs on a country in turmoil and disaster in order to regain control of the men and apparatus, which were needed to control nature (the gods), and to prevent them from being used by foreign enemies. What followed spelled the ruination of Egypt for centuries. "In the morning watch the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians, and discomfited them so they turned to flee." But then Yahweh gave the word to Moses to wave his hand, and the sea closed down [45] . Not only were the weaponry and Hebrews now beyond recapture, but the only organized striking force of Egypt perished, with its Commander-in-Chief, in the whirlpools of immense crosstides near Pi-ha-khiroth just as the forward elements of the Jewish column passed beyond the waters. Then it was, as Egypt lay helpless and in ruins, that the furious and equally distressed "King-Shepherds" Hyksos of Arabia, the Biblical Amalekites, fleeing from their own ruined lands, swept into Egypt and subjected the country to their rule. The XIIth Dynasty that had endured over centuries and that had extended Egyptian sovereignty as far north as Byblos (Syria) was ended in this year of Exodus [46] . For hundreds of years to come, the Bible speaks only rarely of Egypt and then merely of the popular nostalgia for the great land. The silence is awesome: we see it in the catastrophe and the Hyksos take-over. And also the actuality of the disaster of the pursuing army. Else we should have had repeated expeditions to recapture these slaves. The American army was quick to pursue the Sioux Indians after the massacre of General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry regiment. The Hebrews, whether they were few or many, would have been marked for implacable pursuit - immediately, soon, or eventually, repeatedly, too, if the Empire of Egypt were not prostrated. For centuries the peoples of Sinai, Transjordan, and Canaan were left free of Egypt and Babylon to fight among themselves. Perhaps the most aggressive of the peoples was the new nation, the heterogeneous federation of Israelites, forged by the steel-willed Moses in the name of the electric god of war, Yahweh. In the miraculous turbulent atmosphere of the wilderness, Moses established the illumination and voice of Yahweh upon the Ark. Speaking then for Yahweh, he organized the people, taught it a new law and discipline, and injected it with an inextinguishable monotheism, proofed by fire against enemies within and without. Israel scourged the borderlands before finally descending upon Canaan. Moses, the archetype of the mad scientist and religious prophet, beat down successive rebellions that, if successful, would have dissolved the new identity of Israel into the larger surrounding culture. Then, the terribly oppressive and vindictive old man mysteriously died. {S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Scenario of Exodus)} Notes (Chapter 2: The Scenario of Exodus) 1. Buber, 67. 2. The Philosophy of Magic, quote by Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (1887), I 528. 3. Ex. 1: 9-10. 4. Brevard S. Childs, Exodus, London: SCM Press, 1974, pp. 142-3. 5. Ibid. p. 149. 6. Ibid., pp. 170ff. 7. Buber, p. 64. 8. Ibid., p. 61. 9. Ibid., p. 68. 10. III G 12. 11. II G 365. 12. II G 366. 13. Velikovsky, W. in C., 59. 14. Cf. II G345 where Yahweh does this slaying. 15. Velikovsky, W. in C., 4, from Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospels (transl. 1903), IX, ch. 27. 16. Ibid., 66. 17. Ex. 14: 5. 18. III G 11. 19. J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1979), 98. 20. That is, Moses had dwelt on the borderlands of Arabia, whence came the Hyksos. 21. Velikovsky, A. in C., 57ff. 22. It is noteworthy that Worth Smith a century ago was able to charge a Leyden Jar with extraordinary success by carrying it to the top of the Great Pyramid. (See Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.) 23. III G157. See below III, 3a. 24. II G 248. 25. III G 286. 26. Hyam Maccoby, "Freud and Moses," Midstream (February, 1980), 9-15 27. III G 15. 28. III G 56-7. An alternative explanation is that the Amalekites extracted this information from captured Jews. 29. Ex. 14: 12. 30. Ex. 14: 11. 31. III G 20. 32. See p. 225 in 2 Ency. Brit. (1973), "Astronomical Maps." 33. Tompkins, pp. 159ff, for instance, incorrectly explained, I think, as following changes in positions of fixed stars, an old theory of Lockyer. cf. K. Mohlenbrink, Der Tempel Salomos, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1932, 79-85. 34. My source is an unpublished study by Ren‚ Roussel, Albon, France. 35. III G 21; Ex. 14: 20. 36. Oxford Annotated Bible, 85, note p. 37. III G 20. 38. III G 26-8. 39. III G27. Re pre-Hyksos Chariots cf. J. Bimson, "Israel in Egypt," IV SISR 2 (1979), 17- 8. 40. E. M. Shepard, 13 J. Geology (Feb. 1905), 45, in Corliss, comp. Strange Phenomena, G2- GQE-026, 147. 41. Granted the passing body, there would be no question that the tides would be elevated as well as moved horizontally (See Velikovsky, W. in C. p. 86). Priestley in his famous History and Present State of Electricity with Original Experiments (2v. London, 1767) describes (73) Grey's simple experiment with a bowl of water. He passed an electrically charged object over the bowl, which drew up the water into a "hill;" at the point of nearest encounter, a spark was exchanged, and the "hill" collapsed, sending out waves. 42. Ex. 15: 14-16. 43. III G 73-74. 44. Ex. 6: 9. 45. Ex. 14: 24-5 The Douay translation indicates the head of the comet is Yahweh: "The Lord cast through the columns of the fiery cloud upon the Egyptian force a glance that threw it into panic." 46. Bimson. "Israel in Egypt," IV SISR, no 1, (Aug. 1979), 15. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 3: } {T CATASTROPHE AND DIVINE FIRES} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE CATASTROPHE AND DIVINE FIRES If the Israelites did not know that a great comet was visiting disaster upon the Earth, they would be the only people in the world from whom the knowledge was withheld. In fact, they did know. And they called it by god-names just as everybody else did in those days. But it is also true that a peculiar kind of suppression of cometary evidence is present in the Israelite record, for which there is an explanation. In Chapter 1, I offered several pieces of evidence that the Israelites knew a comet was in the sky, and that the disasters on Earth were from heaven, and, furthermore, that the Lord bore them "on Eagle's wings" from Egypt. (See Figure 6) More evidence is due here. I must reason out the position as well. Was the whole world electrified beyond any later historical awareness? Is there an alternative to the comet: could there be another cause of all the disturbances? What was the fate of the comet? Figure 6. On Eagle's Wings "You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you to me." Ex. 19-4 (The Torah: The Five Books of Moses, trans from the Masoretic text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1962) Cf. Deut. 32: 10-3. The cometary images are of Comet Swift-Tuttle (1962) III, NASA, op cit., 29. {S : WHOSE ANGEL?} WHOSE ANGEL? It is said that the Israelites were frightened in their Exodus by the sight of the Angel of Egypt darting through the air, "as he flew to the assistance of the people under his tutelage." [1] This tutelary angel was also called Uzza by the Jews [2] , strangely, because the name is found among the ancient Arabian people in reference to the planet Venus [3] . It is to be identified with Seth, god of the Hyksos and the anti-god of the Egyptians, with Lucifer, and Phaeton-Typhon. Hence the "Egypt" referred to is already the conquered Egypt. Uzza is also Azazel, the devil to whom the Jews dispatched the scape-goat carrying their sins on the annual Day of Atonement. A very large body it would be. Uzza, goes the legend, accosted the Lord, with a plea to return the Israelites to Egypt. A debate ensued between Uzza and the champion of the Jews, the Angel Michael. Archangel Michael is identified by Velikovsky as a Hebrew equivalent of the planet Venus. So that we had here the same figure debating itself, that is reasonable, for a myth as for a dream. Uzza claimed that the bondage of the Hebrews had not been completed; only 86 years, not 400 had passed. No explanation is given of the 86 years; Auerbach and others believe that the Jews had been in Egypt for that time or less; perhaps only 60 years had passed since Joseph's death, since the pharaoh who "did not know Joseph, succeeding to one who did, laid heavy hands upon the Jews." The point may not be important [4] ; the characters to the debate are. Uzza, of course, loses the debate. The Jews owned the comet, not the Egyptians (or the Hyksos). Another of the explicit references to the comet is contained in a legendary speech of Moses to Yahweh, following upon the adoration by so many Jews of the Golden Calf. Imploring the angry Yahweh not to annihilate the chosen people, Moses says: "Fulfil not, I implore Thee, the prophecies of the Egyptian magicians, who predicted to their king that the star "Ra'ah" would move as a harbinger of blood and death before the Israelites." [5] "Ra'ah" in Egyptian must mean "the Great Sun," the comet luminous and larger than the sun. The night before departure from Goshen, the terrible night of the killing of the first-born, was said by one legend to be a bright night, as bright as the brightest day of the year [6] . This legend contrasts with another, that the darkness persisted in the Egyptian capital. Might the comet tail be falling so densely in some places as to block the light, while the comet appeared larger than the sun in others, at least to accommodate these particular differences? Perhaps. The prophet Isaiah, recalling the Exodus long afterwards, preached: "The People that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death (which must mean Egypt), the light of Noga was upon them." Noga, insists Velikovsky, means planet Venus in Hebrew [7] . In the year 1666, a young man called Moses Suriel from Brussa, Turkey, claimed to be a prophet and supported Shabatai Zevi as savior of the Jews. He pointed to a comet that had appeared and explained that this, too, had appeared in the sky during the Exodus. (In 1665, G. A. Borelli probably used the same comet in calculating the parabolic forms of cometary paths.) [8] We infer that an insistent Jewish tradition tied the cometary form to Exodus. Velikovsky claims that the adventuring Israelites saw this and more. That they saw the full comet in the apparition of a serpent. When Moses, later on, made a serpent of brass and put it upon a pole," [9] he was in fact modelling the image of the great comet as it snaked through the sky [10] . The same sculpture had, as we shall see, electrical utility, and could well have been a symbol that united the electrical events of heaven with those of the ground. Legend has Yahweh at the Burning Bush foretelling to Moses: "I behold what cometh after, how the people will worship the steer, the figure of which they see upon My chariot " [11] This has a four-fold significance: it conforms to cometary images in general; it connects the comet with the "golden calf to come;" it puts Yahweh into the driver's seat of the cometary chariot, and it parallels the Greek myth of Phaeton, searing the world from his solar chariot. But the most powerful and exercised of cometary references is the towering column of smoke and fire that was first before and then behind the Israelites as they crossed into the desert. In ancient history and in folklore comets are often "hairy" and "'smoking" stars. I have already quoted this apparition of the lord that had led them from the beginning; it "did not depart from before the people." [12] The Lord here must be the comet. Ilse Fuhr, writing of comets in 1967, says [13] : A comet which approached the Earth moving for a time - for the sake of argument - in synchronous orbit with the Earth between latitudes 33ø north and south, would move back and forth in a flat figure eight with the two halves meeting at zero (this was demonstrated by the orbit of the synchronous satellite Syncom II), in other words, during a period of 24 hours it would seem by an Earth-based observer as appearing once behind him and once in front of him in the sky (cf. Exodus 13: 21). It is not announced when this apparition ceased, but it was the veritable incarnation of their god in their eyes. It was a monstrous verification that they were being watched over by the god whose protection and leadership Moses had prophesied. We never escape this deity during Moses' life, for it assumed terrestrial form. It was Yahweh who led them on their wanderings, in a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, he who encamped with them and whose very same manifestations emerged from the sacred enclosure that Moses had built for him. There is a naive myth, founded indeed upon the very words and acts of Moses, that the Israelites shunned the gods of the sky - the sun and moon, planets, and stars and would not fashion religious images. Although Yahweh is reconciled to the existence of other gods, he is zealous to be first and exclusive with his chosen people, on pain of their destruction. Yet the people knew there was more to the sky-scene than Yahweh. Heaven to the people of Israel was a thickly populated region. Besides the gods of their enemies, there were hosts of angels, animals and ancestors, not represented alone in the stars but by all the meteorites that flew in the disturbed skies. The heavenly host rained down fiery darts, lightning balls and wheels of light, stones, and coals of fire. The Bible is purged of most of these visions, but the legends carried forward the visions of the people [14] . They are admitted to the Scriptures on occasion, as in the Revelation of John of the Apocalypse in the New Testament. "In a somewhat indefinite way some Biblical scholars have recognized that Jacob's Bethel might have been a meteorite." [15] The Greek word for Bethel was Baetyli, meaning a Jovian thunderbolt. Baetyls are sacred thunderstones or meteorites carried by the holy litters or arks of various Bedouin tribes. Originally, directly or indirectly, the Ark of Moses carried the Ten Commandments on such tablets, as we shall understand later on. Very material things from the sky, then, were connected with Yahwism. {S : THE CENSORED DESIGNS OF HEAVEN} THE CENSORED DESIGNS OF HEAVEN The Israelites were therefore eager to construct their habitat on earth in the image which they transported of heaven, and felt constrained to carry out as closely as possible the instructions that Moses received from Yahweh in this regard. These were numerous and the designs that he carried down from his first forty days and nights of isolation atop the sacred mountain of Sinai were particularly impressive. "And see that you make them after the pattern for them, which is being shown to you on the mountain." [16] Yahweh's 'commands were not so easy to execute: "Upon the occasion of the erection of the Tabernacle, God gave red, blue, black and white fire to see and imitate. To the question of how this might be possible, God answered: "I fabricate my glory; you make your own colors..." [17] A legend conveys what must have been the feeling of the people, that the existence of the world depended upon the construction of the Tabernacle, sanctuary of Yahweh, "for when the sanctuary had been erected, the world stood firmly founded, whereas until then it had always been swaying hither and thither." [18] If, as now seems probable, the Earth suffered a moderate tilt at the climax of the Exodus, a celestial unsteadiness would be perceived, both in the general turbulence and in the erratic movements of the stars and heavenly bodies. And one can be sure that in the retelling, if not in actuality, the earthly and heavenly climaxes would be brought together for maximum effect and symbolism. Perhaps the new awareness came in intervals of light in darkness or from reports received from the larger world. Nor can one be positive that the reference is not to continuous earthquakes. Then, too, "The land (world) turns round as does a potter's wheel," in Ipuwer's metaphor [19] . And the Psalm sings out: "God, when you set out at the head of your people, and marched across the desert, the earth rocked... The heavens deluged at God's coming " [20] It may be premature to claim definitive proof, but we can make the following statements with some confidence; no settlement anywhere in the world escaped heavy destruction in the finale of the Middle Bronze Age, at the time of the Exodus, that is, about 1450 B. C.; further, no temple that existed before 1450, and that was reconstructed or added to afterwards, was given the same astronomical orientation that it possessed before. The implication of these statements will not escape the reader. With the accumulating evidence of worldwide destruction, it will no longer be permitted scholars to cast the Exodus in whatever form they please - as a stroll in the desert, the flight of some slaves, a Jewish fairy tale. The Exodus occurred in a catastrophic setting. Secondly, shifts in temple orientation form the strongest possible proof of an historical shift in the angle of the axis of the globe with respect to the ecliptical plane. And when an axial tilt occurs, great destruction is visited upon the Earth: tidal waves, adjustment of the equatorial (rotational) bulge by rising and sinking land, earthquakes and volcanism, vast and violent storms, and electrical discharges of all kinds. Further, the almost certain cause of an axial tilt is the near encounter of Earth with a great passing body. Some of the objects of the Tabernacle stood for celestial bodies - stars, cherubim, the curtain of the sky [21] . "The separate parts of the Tabernacle had each a symbolical significance, for to all that is above there is something corresponding below." [22] The great encampment of the Israelites follows a celestial plan. The division of the tribes of Israel according to four standards, as well as their subdivision at each standard, is not arbitrary and accidental; it corresponds to the same plan and directions as that of which God made use in heaven. The celestial throne is surrounded by four angels: to the right Michael, in front Gabriel, to the left Uriel, and to the rear Raphael. To these four angels corresponded the four tribes of Reuben, Judah, Dan, and Ephraim, the standard bearers [23] . The sacred ball-courts of the Olmecs of the same age and of other Meso-Americans are authoritatively acknowledged to be tied to the cardinal points of the sky. The planet Venus is prominently represented in the games [24] . The players fought to the death. The Roman circus had on its axis altars of the planets [25] . There, too, blood flowed freely. "Ninevah proclaimed itself the seat of stable order and power by its seven-times crenellated circle of walls, colored by the seven planetary colors." [26] Chariots would run along the top of the walls. "Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven " So goes the Lord's Prayer. The idea is worldwide. "Ancients believed that earthly temples and their cultic equipment were made according to the pattern or prototype of heavenly models." [27] The comment is too mild; it was imperative to imitate heaven, to placate, identify with, and control heaven. In most of this construction is to be seen a cultural heritage going back long before Moses and deriving from many gentile nations. Yahweh, himself an old god in many ways, puts old things together to make new ones. But when it comes to mirroring himself, Yahweh is avant-garde. There is no throne in the Tabernacle. He is not carried about as a beautifully enthroned image, as Arabs carried their palladium and Europeans carry their saints and the Son of God. He has a "Mercy Seat" - strange contradictory words of the King James translation - the lid of the Ark-box a "vehicle" is the more literal translation - where he makes himself visible from time to time. That invisibility had drawbacks is indicated by the Revolt of the Golden Calf when, before Moses' designs can be implemented, a great many Israelites melt their gold and fashion an animal form whom they immediately term their god. (See figure 7.) This is usually regarded as Baal, but "what Baal?" is the question, for Baal means "god" unless a special context or appellation is provided to further distinguish the Baal. Here, say some scholars, it is Baal the Cow, or Baal the Bull, which could mean Baal Venus, inasmuch as the great comet, so often identified with the planet Venus, took on the appearance of a cow, its head elongated, its coma looking like horns and its tail pulling itself into the perspective of a great thick body dropping ambrosia or manna like milk, and like excrement, too. The legend has it that the Golden Calf heresy "is in part explained by the circumstance that, while passing through the Red Sea, they beheld the Celestial Throne, and most distinctly of the four creatures about the Throne, they saw the ox. " [28] On Earth, in those days of high electrical effects, the homology is proven by the discharge of fire between the horns of the animal. (A sculpture in the Athens Museum from Mycenean times, perhaps paralleling the Exodus period, carries a bull's head with a double-edged ax between the horns; the ax, as well as the ox horns, conveys electricity - mountain climbers write about the lights streaming from their axes.) The altar of the Tabernacle carried four gilded horns at its corners. But why is this Baal of the Israelites a calf and not an adult animal [29] ? It is called a "bull" on occasion in Jewish legend, however. "The word (translated 'calf' from Hebrew) is not a pejorative term for an ox, as many surmised. It denotes a young ox, an ox in the full vigour of its youth." [30] The only reason I can offer for this modification of the universal cow-bull theme is that the Israelites knew that the comet was a young body in the sky. It had not been known to them for long. The bison and bull, always with a divine celestial connection, had been worshipped and were sacred since time immemorial [31] . Zeus, the thunderbolter, assumed the image of the bull. Thoth (or Hermes or Mercury) took the image of a ram, afterwards. Figure 7. Moses' Tablets and Golden Calf Heretics. La Somme le Roy, ca. A. D. 1295 British museum Add. MS 54180, folio 5v) Zeus, it will be recalled, had fathered and mothered Athene who was the Greek planet Venus. The new heavenly body, the Messiah, would take the form of a calf. The Venus connection is obvious, with Baal, then, being Venus. And for some hundreds of years the Baal Venus cult occupied a great many Jews. It was not generally admitted, but usually the god who competed with Yahweh and aroused the indignation of the Yahwists was the cometary Baal. That the rebels of the Sinai incident had deep roots in the community was evidenced much later on, when the writers of Judah had to mention them again in order to demonstrate the terrible end that awaited their likes: when the Northern Kingdom of Israel, hundreds of years later, under Jeroboam, built two golden calves, one for each of its principal sanctuaries, in competition with and defiance of the Kingdom of Judah that possessed the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple at Jerusalem. But even before Moses' death, the Hyksos in Egypt had elevated the new young bull to divine status as Apis [32] . Enough sights, apparitions, effects, events, and experiences come with a large-body near- collision to supply readily all the personnel and myths of a full-fledged religion. Yet Moses was not alone in rejecting the absolute identification of a comet as a mainstay of his god. Generally so-called planetary, solar, or lunar religions are not exclusively such: there is a marked body giving substance to their god, and its behavior is carefully observed for indications of how to conduct themselves. In addition, there occur innumerable god-named manifestations and designations in the sky, the biosphere, the air, and the falling stones. When the profound prejudices in favor of the Hebraic religions are waived, their resemblances to other religions, even to planetary religions, are great. But Moses probably had something special in mind, and the subsequent Judaic priesthood in their mind, in laboring against cometary (or planetary) worship. Moses wanted to root his religion in earthly phenomena to the maximum extent possible so that he could control it. And the priesthood, too, had the same motive, plus a strong desire to make ritual all- important, so that they might control the worshippers as well as the god. The transition from the charismatic religion of Moses to the ritualistic anti-charismatic religion of the body of priests can be so understood. Another reason occurs for banishing sky-body worship, and suppressing reference to any distinguishable body as being part of Exodus. If a named natural object were worshipped, even only as a manifestation or presence of the god, then all other peoples who saw the same body could pretend to the same god. They could match their experience, and counter their claims against those of the Jews. This would not do for Moses' exclusive people, exclusive god, exclusive religion. Furthermore, the comet was terrible and damaging to the Jews. Undoubtedly the behavior of the god immanent in it was a large factor in permitting the extremely harsh rule that Moses imposed upon them. But the relation to Yahweh could be controlled; deep down there was an ambivalence, a hatred that could hardly be governed, working against a gratitude for an escape from "slavery," together with all that was provided for survival - water, manna and the poor subsistence coming from hard labor. Moses himself could not help but feel this intense ambivalence, for of all people he could understand how the comet was wrecking the Earth. So he would not wish to make the phenomena of the skies of Exodus any conscious part, much less any identifiable part of the new religion and new god that he was building. Other religions with multiple gods, or gods and devils - and we should note that Moses would deny the existence of a devil - could handle ambivalence toward divinities much more easily than Yahwism could. Now we are face-to-face with the phenomena of psychic repression. Yahwism sees no comet; it sees as little of the sky as possible; it allows only the fire of Yahweh to be seen. Z. Rix is "convinced that the prohibition to show an image of Yahweh is a repression, very injurious to the human mind." [33] What begins as traumatic terror is suppressed in memory; then, rather than gradually becoming adjusted to the memory, the mind is committed to the suppression by priests and ritual. And it never can adjust to the reality of recollection, and hence never can accommodate to the reality of the present. This mental condition is bound up with the invisible god and is a large factor in the psychological operations of mosaism and Yahwism. If the mental process were to be divided into phases, in the first phase a perception occurred: the sight and force is then accorded life, that is, anthropomorphization. The reality of the comet passes and the memory remains, but not a memory of a comet as such; rather the memory of a divine intervention, of a god who can be controlled by sacrifices and subservience. Memory always has a function and, to have this function, especially in terrible instances, must be distorted. The trauma of anthropomorphic natural force can be managed; a great natural force cannot, and hence must be denied. Thus, the Romans had gods with human qualities and permitted themselves psychologically to associate these gods with planets - as in the case of Mars - but in only one case, cited by Pliny, was an actual comet consciously named and admitted to the pantheon as a god, that of Augustus Caesar. {S : THE GENTILE EXODUS} THE GENTILE EXODUS The experience of Exodus was critical in the history of the Jews; further, a long chain of history has bound up over a billion people, indirectly the whole human race, in its consequences. Yet, at the time, the Israelite experience was special, affecting only a small fraction of the world's people. I say this not only to extend history but to contract it, and then I contract it in order to extend it differently. It has been a source both of pride and sorrow to the Jews in that they have unwittingly made the whole world suffer their Exodus. But every people of the world suffered its exodus at the same time. By taking on the record of the Hebrew Exodus it has been substituting the Jewish Exodus for one of its own, or blending them, or reviving its own. Whether this is for better or worse depends upon how each of hundreds of surviving cultures and many more dead cultures incorporated their own catastrophe. In this age of one humanity and a sense of the good of all, I cannot but feel sympathy for the hapless nations and tribes that succumbed or survived in wretchedness. If only all had written books and these had been preserved, what a sense of common destiny, amounting practically to a common humanistic religion, we might share. Nevertheless, we have this one, with its terror, strife, and striving. And, here and there within it, we glimpse the distraught other peoples, the Egyptians of Ipuwer and El Arish accounts, but also especially of the Bible, written by their presumed enemies, the Israelites. In the chant of Moses, already quoted, we hear of the people by their great highway into the Near East, the Philistines, Edomites, Moabites - all prostrated by disaster [34] . Velikovsky is like many people when he forgives the desperate Jews their transgressions upon others, while denouncing their equally desperate enemies such as the Hyksos-Amalekites for their transgressions. This is not only unfair; it obscures also the motives of peoples, their common fates, and the origins of their gods. It continues the destructive notion of the chosen people whether it be Israel or the mosaic-inspired Kaiserdom of "Deutschland šber Alles." From the scene of the Exodus we can fan out in all directions, finding everywhere in the records and ruins of the time the same elemental fury. We look of course for the same things that we have found in the Biblical setting: the plagues, the years of darkness, floods, earthquakes, wanderings of people, continuous heavenly fire, electrical effects, new frenzied and obsessive forms of worship and gods on the ruins of shattered cities and among groups of survivors. "Plagues of insects, drought, earthquake in the night, the most terrible devastation, clouds sweeping the ground, a tidal flood carrying away entire tribes - these disturbances and upheavals were experienced in Arabia and Egypt alike." [35] Amidst tumult and disorder, the Amalekites-Hyksos managed to reach and conquer Egypt. During the Late Holocene period, which may actually have included the time of Exodus and later catastrophic episodes as well, the Sinai subplate was subjected to heavy uplifting, folding and submerging at its East and West margins. This is the scene of the Exodus drama; however, archaeological evidence is not yet available to tie a phase of this turbulence to the end of the Middle Bronze Age. (As matters stand, a connection can be made with an uplifting event and the disturbed astronomical years 776 to 687 B. C. that I refer to and describe in Chaos and Creation, in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, and, with Earl R. Milton, in Solaria Binaria.) [36] In a paper published elsewhere [37] , I surveyed the evidence for the catastrophes of the Near and Middle East, which I can summarize here. Claude Schaeffer, whose archaeological work in Syria brought him many honors, published as early as 1948 a great compendium of the destruction of settlements in the second millennium before Christ. The end of the Middle Bronze Age, corresponding to the end of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom that we have been studying, seems to have witnessed the complete destruction of every city that had been excavated. The effects of earthquakes were most common. Since it is believed sometimes that the pyramids and other strong stone structures have escaped damage through the ages, it is worthwhile mentioning that even the Great Pyramid exhibits severe damage by earthquake [38] . I do not make more of this case and others because there is presently no way of judging whether the damage was caused in the earthquakes of the Exodus. The destruction of Minoan Crete around the same time was exposed by Evans. Evidence of a Chinese catastrophe with a hiatus between the Hia and the Chang dynasties was adduced by Schaeffer and Velikovsky. Previously, the Indus River civilization was shown to have collapsed in ruins then, too, and the extent of the fall has been steadily expanded north, east and south on the Indian subcontinent in the past half century of excavation[ 39]. The Euphrates River systems of channels moved west at this time and hundreds of settlements were abandoned in a long dark age [40] . It was then, too, that "the ancient cities of Southern Turkmenian civilization perished at about the same time as the proto-indian, and the reasons are still unknown." [41] The antiquity of Meso-American civilization is only now being discovered. The Olmec civilization, which had the lodestone compass before the Chinese, suffered devastation by fire and flood at this time [42] . To the evidence of the spade may be added the evidence of legend from around the world. Greco-Roman civilization knew of the Exodus catastrophe, which Pliny gives passing mention to, in part by way of the stories of Typhon and Phaeton. Phaeton loses control of the chariot of the sun and sets fire to the world; Zeus has to strike him down with a cosmic thunderbolt to save the world from destruction. (See figure 8.) Stecchini has recently publicized the work of the Babylonian astronomical scholar, F. X. Kugler, that assigns to about 1550 B. C. the adventure of Phaeton. By Kugler's reconstruction, "a sunlike meteorite" passed by Earth from South to North creating various disasters until it, or some portion of it, fell in the Thracian region. This would be the region of the Celts, whose representatives, when asked one time by Alexander the Great what it was that they feared most, replied "that the sky might fall." Typhon, too, was part or all of a monstrous sky body, which Zeus was supposed to have felled with his thunderbolts. Bimson shows that Typhon has another identity, that of the first Hyksos king of Egypt following the Exodus. Either the comet or the king was named for the other. The typhoons of the South Seas carry the name, too, and resemble, as do the American tornados, the pillar of smoke, water and fire. The legends of the world are rich in material probably of this period. From Egypt we have a depiction of the "red (angry) eye of Horus in the mouth of Seth," who is the Typhonic monster. Sutherland has given us an account of how the unlucky dragon of China originated at this time and developed into the "lucky dragon" of later times, honored by being woven into the Emperors gown, even as magnificent as the ephod, robe and breastplate of Aaron. He depicts a large serpent-like creature with stubby feet and jets of flame flashing the length of its body as it pursues with jaws agape a round globe that may be taken to be the head of a comet [43] . Obviously the Jews were not alone in converting the harbinger of disaster into a benevolent and beneficent being. Figure 8. Zeus Strikes Down Phaeton. (Source: Sixteenth century embroidery of scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses) On what must be the last day of Passover week, but in every month, the Babylonians celebrated a 'Day of Wrath' of the goddess Ishtar with the stoppage of work and lamentations; Ishtar was Athene, Minerva, Venus, and Baalzevuv. Baal Zevuv or "god of the flies," whom Americans know by the popular devil's name of Beelzebub, was also Baal of the Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and of the Canaanites; god Ares in the Iliad calls Athene: "dog-fly;" a reading of the voluminous cross-cultural evidence brought forward in Velikovsky's books should provide assurance that the four plagues of diverse insects or vermin before Exodus were inextricable from a celestial, catastrophic event. {S : THE HORROR OF RED} THE HORROR OF RED The horror of the color red in Egypt after 1450 B. C. is an understandable result of the Exodus catastrophe and most precisely the red plague. "Red is regarded as a purely calamitous color." [44] Yet the heavenly gods of Edfu (third dynasty of the Old Kingdom) were clad in festive red. The tracing of just this detail of a culture, the color red, illuminates how the cometary disaster produced long-lasting psychological and material changes, The Egyptians could not even enjoy a red sunset or sunrise for a long time thereafter, deeming the sun to be ominous of danger and anger. It was "Horus raging with red eyes." The Red Sea was probably named for those days of the red plague. "It is remarkable that the designation of 'Red Sea' has no precedent in Old Egyptian; to the contrary, expressions regularly contained no mention of color." [45] The seas all around were feared and the Egyptians did not go to sea but left the waters to other peoples. The whole foreign world was called "the red " with the same loathing that a modern capitalist might talk of the "reds" of communism. While the murex, the shell that makes a beautiful red dye, was the object of brisk trade elsewhere, the Egyptians would never deal in it. In the sarcophagi, a bull at one end of the tomb was painted red. The dead who were buried with broken red pots were said thus to ward off Seth and recognize Osiris. The Egyptians were probably the source of imagining the devil to be red. Seth - god of the conquering Hyksos, but eternal foe of Horus - was sent into the underground after the expulsion of the Hyksos. The color of Seth was red. So was the color of Typhon, who came to be a monstrous identity of Seth. Human sacrifices - the highest compliment that humans can make to a deity - were offered to repeat and thus reassure the destruction of Typhon. According to Rix, Jews were often chosen for Typhonic sacrifices, especially red-headed Jews. Possibly thus the historical connection of the Jews with the red plague could be more sharply symbolized. "Therefore the nuggoi (red) people were persecuted, therefore only nuggoi animals were chosen for sacrifice, therefore also fiery colored people (Typhonians) according to Diodorus in ancient times were offered at the tomb of Osiris, and according to Plutarch, later, were burnt in Eileithyia and their ashes winnowed to the winds." [46] Yet, "the name (or nickname) 'the red one, ' referring to skin color or hair color had at first no negative value," [47] When animals were substituted for humans, "the sacrifice of a red bull is represented at Denderah with the formal statement that the animal was Typhon." [48] Cows, bulls and asses were portrayed as red on ceremonial occasions. Seth was also the red ass and hippopotamus. However, the bull-god Apis, object of the Hyksos cult, is colored black [49] . The Pharaoh of Egypt wore a double crown to represent both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, which includes Memphis and the Nile River Delta whence occurred the Exodus: the crown of Upper Egypt was white, the crown of Lower Egypt red. This was to show the domination of Lower Egypt by Upper Egypt. But this domination meant probably the disaster, suppression, and finally liberation of Lower Egypt from the Hyksos, the people of Typhon. "Because red had an evil meaning, the red crown was referred to euphemistically as 'the green." ' A district governor from Siut declares his resolve "to bring order to the red." [50] The god, Horus, was connected with the color white but when angry, his eyes became red. Isis, when siding with her brother Osiris, is black; when shown as the sister of Seth, she is red. Although red originally was used on a papyrus as "the color of high rank" it "becomes later the symbol of the unfavorable and dangerous." The Pharaoh's name is in red in the Book of the Dead. Calendars marked their unlucky and evil days in red ink [51] . The pervasiveness of the attitude toward red as evil is a measure of the trauma of cosmic catastrophe, followed by foreign oppression, that befell Egypt as the Israelites under Moses departed. {S : THE ELECTROSTATIC AGE} THE ELECTROSTATIC AGE His lightnings lighten the world; the Earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth. This Psalm 97 of the Bible seems to have been composed by a devout but advanced electrician. So also seems Deborah: "The mountains melted... even that Sinai." (Judges 5: 4-5). Only lately, and by means of satellites, have scientists known of mega-lightning, 100 times more intense than the typical thunderstorms discharges, which shoots bolts of 10 13 watts and 10 9 joules between the highest atmosphere and low clouds or earth [52] . Such discharges, of which there are many and which were probably once more common, can transmute heavy elements and create radioactivity in abundance. Since we have had no recent experience of lightning-like electrical discharges between a large body and Earth, we need to draw analogies from extra-terrestrial astronomy to imagine what can have happened during Exodus times. The closest analogy may be what is happening between planet Jupiter and its moon-sized satellite Io. "Probably the most spectacular discovery of the Voyager mission has been the existence of active volcanoes on Io, erupting material to heights of several hundred kilometers above the surface." [53] According to T. Gold, these "volcanoes" are probably of electrical origin. Seeking out points of high potential and conductivity on Io, lightning from Jupiter shoots ten trillion watts of power repeatedly across the space gap between the two bodies. It digs volcano-like craters with high heat and explosive force, raising pillars of material to heights of up to 270 kilometers, whereupon most of it falls back around its caldera. The electric current or arc "can be expected to be an accurately repeating process." [54] I would add here, and discuss later, the comment that the Earth-to-comet discharges would range from such enormous discharges (which would however be not so repetitive) to much less powerful, non-explosive electrical melts of mountain-tops. The tie-in of electrostatic discharges with a thermal flow through mountaintops is still a problem for a future science. Meteorologists and geologists have no sense of its history, possibility, and effects. Hence for thousands of years Psalmist 97 has been regarded merely as an exuberant poet. The Age of Exodus was perforce electrical, judging by the traits and behavior of the greatest gods of the age, such as Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Marduk, Thoth, Amon and Yahweh, electric phenomena were pervasive and intense, and took many forms. As G. B. Vico wrote, every gentile nation had its Zeus. Every mountain had its fire sanctuary. The Etruscans, probably in the Near East in Moses' time and, later on, a powerful and advanced Italian nation, are a case in point. They exhibited the most frenetic obsession with lightning; every stroke made its target sacred and approachable only by one of the powerful priesthood; today every eminence in Tuscany seems to reveal to the aerial infra-red camera a ruined development beneath its soil. The Etruscans gave the Romans Jupiter, who was Jove or Ioweh or, who knows, Yahweh; they originated in the Near East and some of their linguistic roots are in Sumer, their blood types resemble an Anatolian group, and they possessed creation and flood legends strikingly like those of Genesis. Throughout the world, altars were placed on eminences, where a "priesthood of the mountain" would collect and administer static electricity in the course of its rituals, orgies, and oracles. These would not necessarily be the highest peaks. Very tall mountains discharge readily and invisibly into the vapor clouds that hover over them and frequently envelop them. For electrical purposes, lesser eminences, with the proper types of conductive rock, the proper network of fractures, and the presence of groundwater steeply descending would facilitate the religious function. Everywhere priesthood developed an expertness in selecting and shaping sites for the exploitation of divine fire. The Druids of Britain distinguished between the lightning of priesthood (drui-lanack) and the lightning of god (dis-lanack). In Egypt, the age of pyramids preceding Exodus brought the mountain priesthoods to the flat Nile Valley. Everything that was luminescent, that emitted a high density of photons, was termed "fire." Left with this general word, we of this age, when much less of fire is left in nature, are likely to regard all ancient references as combustion or lightning. The term may mean these two forms; or it may be a metaphor; but very often it refers to strikingly different manifestations. The incessant attention given to many forms of fire is one reason why I believe that certain ancient periods were undergoing a universal change in electrical conditions. Already highly electrical before Exodus, the world was impelled by the comet of those years into a yet more widespread and intense electrical condition. There is every reason to believe that "present conditions" - meaning by this the past 2500 years - have experienced in no way the conditions of the Jovean age which we are discussing, and the Bible misleads or is read wrongly when Moses is pictured as a traveling magician with a tent full of trinkets. Seneca, the great Roman stoic, recalls in a tragedy a Jupiter whose bolts would level mountains; this is the kind of god with whom we are dealing. Experts on lightning who have looked into paleontological lightning evidences - such as E. V. Komarek [55] - draw pictures of heavy past electrical activities; immense fields of lightning-caused fulgerites are to be found embedded around the world. No such processes have been reported in historical times. Electrical fires may have been responsible for scorching of some sealed tombs of the period [56] . The pyramids or Egypt may seem to have evaded divine melting, but calcination is manifested in certain places, and the plated stone that covered the pyramids is missing. We do have a provocative instance of burning in Babylon, such that it has been considered by some as the original Tower of Babel, whose brick and bitumen construction was struck by divine fire [57] . It was of the stepped, ziggurat type. It appeared that the fire had struck the tower and split it down to the very foundation. In different parts of the ruins immense brown and black masses of brickwork had changed into a vitrified state. At a distance the ruins looked like edifices torn apart at their foundations. Evidently the fiercest kind of fire created the havoc. The most curious of the fragments found were several misshapen masses of brickwork, black, subjected to some kind of heat, and completely molten. The whole ruin has the appearance of a burnt mountain. On one side of it, beneath the crowning masonry, lay huge fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcinated and vitreous surface of the brick had fused into rock-like masses. It is difficult to explain the cause of the vitrification of the upper building. Great boulders were vitrified, and brickwork had been fused by fire [58] . It is probable that thousands of burnt eminences exist around the world whose tops have seen the electrical fusion of rocks, perhaps even Troy IIg, the "Burnt City" so-called [59] . The famous site, whether or not it was the real Troy, is on an eminence. While not high, the city would have had many small reservoirs of water, whereas the ground outside might already have been dried out. In Troy IIg a sulphurous color suffuses all outdoor spaces and passageways of the town. A deposit of lead and copper melted and flowed around the town. (It is possible that this melt had been scavenged after Schliemann reported it in the 1880 s and the discoloration was all that was discoverable when the Blegen expedition re-excavated the site in the 1930's.) No human hand could have or would have set such a fire. The heat was fierce. The ash was far too abundant for a deliberate fire from local materials, and carried a red color. No one would have wanted to destroy precious metals (not to mention even more precious metal left in abundance in the scorched houses and the "treasure of Priam," found on a wall.) Noteworthy is the almost complete absence of human and animal skeletal material in the ruins. Either they turned to dust from the heat, or the electrical buildup was sensed, as it is by animals before earthquakes for example, and they fled from the hill onto the plain where the sensations were absent. Troy IIg, however, should be dated around the time of the Tower of Babel, and exemplifies the unusual play of electrical forces in pre- Exodus times, rather than during the Exodus itself. In this connection, it is suggested that a great many eminences without settlements or special conditions may, in the process of conducting a charge to or from deep below the surface, have liquified silicates and ferruginous substances together as a conductor, or fused them from the ancient rocks and from by-products, and brought these materials up to the top of the eminence where they are today found, resting on loose, hardly consolidated rocks, as a hard dense cap. This phenomenon is usually explained as a metamorphosis, of very old age, that somehow raised the temperature of water-laden deep limestones and granites and caused them to nearly melt and to rise. Silification is abundant around igneous metamorphism. In a hot and fast reaction, siliceous fluid is introduced hydrothermally and replaces the host rock, such as limestone, into which it intrudes. It is possible, with or without water, for an electric discharge to assemble and flow quickly as a current up the core of a hill, heating as it moves. Resistant rock heats up like the resistant coils of an ordinary electric room-heater. The taller the mountain, the less time and chance for the siliceous fluid to reach and cap its peak before the current is dissipated in heat or finds enough discontinuities of strata and faults to disperse in different directions. {S : YAHWEH'S ELECTRICAL FIRE CONGLOMERATE} YAHWEH'S ELECTRICAL FIRE CONGLOMERATE Yahweh is present in smoke and fire both in the Tabernacle and elsewhere, giving rise to the naive view that he was simply a typical volcano god, of which, presumably, there are as many as there are volcanoes [60] . Freud adopted this view as part of accepting the primitivist bedouin theory of much of Exodus. The volcano gods that inspire this belief are the small "retail" gods of today, not the wholesale volcano and fire gods of old - like Hephaistos. And Yahweh was more than a wholesale volcano god; he was a giant fire conglomerate god. When Moses invited the elders to visit Yahweh with him, they came upon his presence on a vitrified surface, sapphire as of heaven. This was the Sinai that "burned like wax." On the occasion when Moses had spent days and nights on the Holy Mountain, the electrical currents were so heavy that he had crouched in a cleft for fear of electrocution as Yahweh passed by. The Israelites had their own electrical mountain: There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast... And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended it in fire [61] . The fire came down to the mountain. Only Moses could approach its heights safely. The people had to stand below, which is something nevertheless that they might not do if it were a violently erupting volcano. A column of smoke went up. The horns sounded ever louder. Fiery darts dropped everywhere. There were frightening electrical storms and earth movements. Stones were cast down from the sky. The people scarcely dared approach the foot of the mountain for fear that they would be destroyed by fire. They did finally run away. Since Mount Sinai does not behave like a volcano, one is not surprised to learn that explorers have not found a volcano, whether extinct or alive, at any of the sites proposed for the location of Moses' Holy Mountain. The two major contenders for the position are Jebel M£sa in the South Central Sinai Peninsula and a mountainous location at the northeastern head of the Gulf of Aquaba (see map of Figure 5) referred to as Mount Horeb. Following Winnett's tracing of the Wilderness itinerary, I am adopting the latter in my considerations, partly because this is in Midian and Horeb is placed in Midian by Ex. 3: 1 and Moses has had so much to do with Midian otherwise [62] . Geological investigations are required before Mount Sinai-Jebel Musa is definitely pronounced a possibility for "electrico-vulcanism," and even less is known of the geology of the several locations heretofore proposed near modern Eilath, in ancient Midian or modern North Hˆgaz. On various occasions Yahweh sent consuming fires upon the Israelites, once even at a place renamed Teberah, "the Burning Place." [63] The fire: "wrought havoc among... the murmuring and complaining multitude that had joined the Israelites upon their Exodus from Egypt." [64] It was a fire that destroyed fire. It spread on all sides. It was the same fire that "found its place on the altar of the Tabernacle," and that destroyed Aaron's sons and Korah's company. "Moses took bundles of wool and laid them upon the divine fire, which thereupon went out." [65] Wool is of course more effective than water in extinguishing electrical fires. One cannot be sure what kind of fire it is that runs along the ground. It is not ordinary combustion; it may be fleets of ball-lightning such as have rarely been observed in recent times [66] . "Fire has mounted up on high" (Ipuwer) is significant. This is not lightning: the combination indicates a type of St. Elmo's conflagration - there are cases reported even recently like this with a climbing of whatever eminences are accessible. Pyramids, obelisks, buildings, perhaps even balls and jets of fire leaving the ground and moving through the dense atmosphere upwards, like a clutch of balloons, are probable. The repeated Biblical references to Yahweh's sending darts of fire, jets of fire upon the enemies of Israel and even upon the Israelites when they displease him inspires one to seek the corresponding natural phenomenon, even though it would be enormously amplified in a general catastrophic encounter. Juergens has suggested plasmoids, pieces of plasma, as being formed and bombarding earth on some ancient occasions. These electrical footballs are formed of a balance of positive ions and electrons. They retain their identity and appear as luminous objects of the size of missiles. They would cause explosions near the ground and/ or dig craters [67] . It is the voltage difference that promotes electrical activity; opposite charges that attract are not necessary for a discharge. A high negative charge will discharge to a low negative charge; the electrons explode or spark to the less dense negative region, or follow a highly conductive medium. The difference in potential is the setting for an activity. The Earth as a sphere carries an overall charge but no one knows what it is [68] . The concept of "charge" is effectively meaningless except in relation to other aggregates that carry an electric charge. The charge of the Earth as a whole then is significant when any part of the whole - its rocks, its waters, its atmosphere, its depths and heights - becomes electrically differentiated, which means that these are electrically potentiated for activity when their charges or distances or media of conduction change in relation to one another. Also the Globe is charged in relation to other aggregates of the solar system environment, be they plasma, gases, meteoroids, planet or sun, just as it may have a gravitational relationship to them. And just as that gravitational relationship varies exponentially with the distance of the aggregates, so does the electrical relationship vary. The solar system as a whole, moving as it does in relation to millions of bodies of the Milky Way Galaxy, operates in a changing electrical environment. This is constant so long as the solar system as a point in the Galaxy retains a stable position, though moving, in relation to all other significant charged points. And it does so too, so long as such body- points are not rapidly changing their electrical condition, as for example happens when a star explodes as a nova or supernova. In good weather a point on the Earth's surface carries in the meter of atmosphere above it a negative charge of about 100 volts. (Ground zero is a relative concept; an immense voltage might conceivably be in the Earth.) The luminous halo-discharges from points, known as St. Elmo's fire, "are caused by a sharp increase in the voltage field to a value a thousand times greater than the average 120-150V/ m." [69] At a height of 50 kilometers, the ionosphere carries a positive charge of about 400,000 volts, which would indicate an average vertical voltage gradient of about 8 volts per meter. This difference produces no visible or felt effects ordinarily. A sudden change, such as occurs just before an earthquake, will excite greatly the biosphere and produce weakness, giddiness, and tense feelings among people [70] . Eric Crew points out that there is a normal leakage in the atmospheric column; this current is tiny and totals 1800 amperes, which is balanced by the charging effect of lightning carrying negative charge to the ground [71] . Changing atmospheric conditions also play upon this voltage gradient causing electrical effects. Any changed deployment of external aggregates also plays upon this voltage gradient and often it is by no means child's play. A volcanic eruption or a meteorite fall plays havoc with its ambiance, electrically as well as otherwise. Sun spots, which are electrified explosive events, have meteorological and climatic effects on the Earth and may even disturb the Earth's motion. If two large bodies - such as the earth and a great comet - approach each other, they will invariably be carrying unequal charges at various lines of potential contact. They will exchange charges between their plasma sheaths (magnetospheres), between their atmospheres, between their surface prominences, and between their surfaces, which are graded according to conductivity and resistances. Even if all of these changed states and all bodily motions were known and this data were fed into a computer, and even if all the laws of electricity now known were programmed to manipulate the data, the pattern of exchanges would be exceedingly complicated, fast, often violent, and in any event impossible to plot given the present state of knowledge and the many behaviors that are beyond history. A long-term charge exchange of Earth with its atmosphere and interplanetary space is postulated, together with a large-body encounter, to explain the apparently heavy electrical effects of the mid-second millennium B. C. A third major producer of electricity would be the crustal stresses of the Earth in the aftermath of a large-body encounter, whether involving a slight or major deceleration or axial re-orientation of part or all of the Earth's crust, mantle and core. These would bring about a long period of earthquakes and piezo-electric effects. The relation between earthquakes and lightning has been foolishly neglected for two centuries until now. The Chinese earthquake of July 28, 1976 lit up the sky in red and white colors for 200 miles around its epicenters for hours [72] . Observers, from antiquity to the present day, have spoken of the flames emerging from earthquake fissures; one student counted ten such reports in a survey of several hundred earthquakes. [73] Piezoelectricity comes from stresses of pressure and heat upon quartz rock, which is widely dispersed over the Earth's crust, particularly in lavas. "The North Idu peninsula earthquake on November 26, 1930, the best documented instance of seismoelectricity (over fifteen hundred sightings), occurred in a region with widespread quartz rich lava flows." [74] In quartz whose axis has been lined up by tectonic strains, an earthquake can create "an average electric field of 500-5000 volts/ cm. For distances in the order of half the seismic wavelength, the general voltage is 5 x 10 7 to 5 x 10 8 V, which is comparable with the voltage responsible for lightning in storms. The discharge will seek outlets through tooth- like (Sinai= Sinn= Tooth?), sword-like (Horeb= sword), and especially quartz-loaded eminences, or in fissures, or, if needs be, in fires "running along the ground" (plagues of Egypt). The piezoelectric effects, occurring from earth strains, would long outlast the cometary encounter, and provide continuous high voltage above ground. E. A. Von Fange quotes 37 passages from the Old Testament referring to great destruction by fire, only one of them from Exodus, which we find has numerous references to fire. He also mentions "a total of 28 fields of burned and broken stones called harras, has been found in Western Arabia, covering up to 7000 square miles each. " [75] A comprehensive list of all electrical phenomena that are mentioned or hinted at in the Bible and Jewish legends would include: celestial eyes; angels and other apparitions on prominences; St. Elmo's fire; blasts; jagged lightning; jets or darts of fire; exploded gas pockets or petroleum fires; electrically induced or electrically accompanied dust and water typhoons and tornados; ionized winds; charged and ionized dust-falls; illuminated skies, including earthquake lights; the electrical flashes from volcanoes; point discharges on controlled machines or near to such apparatus; smoke clouds of luminous quality; night lights; phosphorescence; thunder, trumpets and singing; piezoelectric effects; and natural electrochemical compositions of manna and other substances. To these should be added the fall-outs of electro-jet transported stones and dust, and electrically accompanied radioactive fall-out or explosion. Nor should one neglect the many electrical changes overcoming the great comet in its movements through space, that gave it so many different identities - animal, human and divine. We can be sure that a full range of electrical effects - visual, auditory and physiological - would be experienced by the whole population and that many changes would occur in the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Furthermore, the effects would be enduring. Centuries would pass before the numerous causal chains would emerge into an apparent equilibrium. Then all spheres of nature would gradually have been adjusted to all others. Earth rock strata, discontinuities, faults, and contours would carry differing currents, generate piezoelectricity, and so-on, but at a level finally recognizable as of the present day. Like water seeks its own level, electricity gropes for a balance of charges. {S : THE CELESTIAL FIRST CAUSE} THE CELESTIAL FIRST CAUSE Given the Exodus symptoms which were exhibited in the Near East and elsewhere, which were not all confined to Lower Egypt, we can surmise that physical convulsions overcame the Earth. These were provoked either by internal causes or external ones. But what would provoke a quiescent Earth, as we know it today, to such energetic reactions as we observe during the Exodus? If the Earth's interior were as it is now, and as many believe it to have been for a billion years or more, and if its motions were then as they are now, as they are believed to have been for a billion years or more, neither Exodus nor any other such general catastrophe would have been experienced in history and prehistory. We have a convenient test of this statement. The island of Thera-Santorini, north of Crete, and only some hundreds miles from the scene of the Exodus plagues and tides, has recently been accredited with that disaster [76] . Thera, an ancient center of Minoan civilization, suffered more than one explosion in the second half of the second millennium. The date of its climactic destruction may be about 1000 B. C. based on Isaacson's matching of cultural remains with Bronze Age remains of Egyptian origin also found there [77] . The incredible blast, 50 times that of Krakatoa offshore Java in 1883, is known to have filled the sky with a fall of ashes and excited great tidal waves. I eliminate Thera as the source of the Exodus catastrophe, not only because of the late date of the most destructive outburst, but also because it alone could not have brought about the long period of ground and air turbulence of Exodus, the biosphere behavior, the sky scenes of moving bodies, or the years of dust, chemicals, and dark clouds. Further, it is more likely that a general thermo-electric effect of the Earth's crustal torsion brought on the explosive series of Thera than the reverse. Mount Vesuvius exploded with a force equal to the climactic Thera explosion about 3500 years ago [78] . Many other eruptions would have occurred, both conical and fissure in type. The great explosion of Thera, when it did happen hundreds of years later, may have contributed to the rapid decline and fall of the Hyksos empire of Syria and Lower Egypt, a fall made final by an alliance of King Saul of Israel and Pharaoh Ahmose of Egypt [79] . Therefore, there must have been some extra-terrestrial cause of the Exodus catastrophe. There might have been a change in the sun, which we consider because of its great size to represent also any considerable change in the galactic environment. Or there might have been a wandering cloud of gases or meteoroids that invaded the Earth's "air-space." Or there might have been some large-body intrusion, coming close enough to the Earth to provoke the destructive effects experienced on Earth. This large body would be by definition a comet, because any body on an irregular orbit or path near us cannot be called a planet, and further, there is no fundamental difference between a meteoroid and a comet (although it used to be thought that meteoroids were short- distance travelers in the solar system and comets long-distance travelers [80] . As for the coma, or "hair" (Latin) that characterizes the comet, any body moving through different types of space will react gaseously and electrically to the differences, and grow or lose its "hair" or "tail." Since large meteoroids behave like comets, we may turn to smaller meteoroids. A meteoroid of, say, the diameter that caused the Berringer Crater of Arizona, or the Tunguska blast in Siberia, which exploded aboveground, falls on rare occasion. Today Earth experiences incursions by swarms of meteorites from time to time. A regular swarm hits the atmosphere and is to be seen on or about August 10 of each year. Their effects go generally unnoticed. Several reliable accounts of meteorite swarms of greater moment are available: the widespread terror is noticeable; the incitement of earth's tremors has been attributed to some meteors. Strange effects such as gas clouds, ball-lightning, and small gelatinous masses have been partially verified. No effects comparable to those of Exodus are demonstrated. Especially in view of the astonishing irregularities that have been ascribed to the sun in the past several years [81] , one might think of blaming the sun for the Exodus catastrophe. But here the problem is that those who experienced Exodus did not blame the sun. The Phaeton legend is practically alone in asserting that the son of Helios stole his chariot and lost control of it, careening about the sky to the great distress of the Earth and its inhabitants. I have already referred to the study of Kugler who severed any relationship between Phaeton and the sun, giving an independent existence, path and destruction to this large sun-like body. The Greek legend of Zeus striking down Typhon, and the Egyptian legend of Horus defeating Seth and sending him to hell represent much better the celestial events surrounding Exodus. It is probable, however, as I explain in another work (Chaos and Creation), that changes in the sun and solar system precipitated the great body upon its errant course. Nevertheless, the body is independent, very large, and distinct in the eyes of the beholders. Velikovsky says it was the planet Venus; I term it elsewhere the protoplanet Venus or Cometary Venus. This is because of the abundant connections made in antiquity that associate the great body of the Exodus skies with the planet Venus. But this point has been heavily discussed in many places and we can be satisfied, for the purposes of this book, with the realization that an enormous body passed near the Earth and that only such a body could have produced the Exodus effects. {S : Notes (Chapter 3: Catastrophe and Divine Fires)} Notes (Chapter 3: Catastrophe and Divine Fires) 1. III G 13-4. 2. III G 17. 3. Velikovsky, W. in C., 156. 4. If 430 years (not 400) are divided by 86, and the dividend is 5; then Uzza could have been calculating in some cycles of 86 years, but the legend is mute about the further meaning and I know of no such cycle. I mention later that the years of Moses, some patriarch, and other events before 1440 B. C. may have been calculated on a sacred year of 260 days, perhaps the work of Amon-Jupiter or Thoth-Hermes. 5. III G 126. For other references to the great celestial light over Exodus, cf. II G 37, III G 133. 6. II G 373. Earlier, in contradiction thereof, we spoke of Moses' last meeting with the Pharaoh being in heavy darkness. 7. Is. 9: 2; W. in C., 175. 8. B. Feldman, in a letter to VI Kronos, 2( 1981) 92, reporting from G. Scholem's Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (trans. Werblowsky), Princeton U. Press, 1973. 9. Num. 21: 9. 10. Velikovsky, W. in C., 176. 11. II G 316-7. 12. Ex. 13: 21-2. Cf. 14: 19-20. 13. Translated as, "On comets, comet-like Luminous Apparitions and Meteors," VII Kronos 4( 1982). 14. III G 26. 15. G. A. Wainright, "Jacob's Bethel." Report. Pales. Explor. Fund, 1934, 32. 16. Ex. 26: 49. 17. VII Reallexikon fur Antike and Christentum, p. 376, citing a Midrash. 18. III G 150-1. 19. Velikovsky, W. in C., 107. 20. Ps. 68: 7-8. 21. III G 151. 22. Ibid., 165. 23. Ibid., 231-8, with each of these four were grouped two others, making four groups of three. The Levites, not a tribe, were centered around the sacred area in the middle of the roughly nine square miles of residential area. 24. E. C. Baity, "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far, "14 Current Anthropology 4( Oct. 1973), 389. 25. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill, Boston : Gambit, 1969, 239. 26. Ibid., 239-40. 27. Oxford Annotated Bible, fn. Ex. 25: 40, citing also Ex. 25: 9; 26: 30; 27: 8. 28. III G 123. 29. It is called a "bull" on occassion in Jewish legend. 30. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the book of Exodus (tr. I, Abrahams) Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew U., 1967, 412. 31. Coe. Henri Breuil, "Le bison et le taureau c‚leste chald‚en, "XIII Revue Archeologique, series IV, Mar-Ap 1909, 250-4. 32. Velikovsky, W. in C. 181, quoting Nechre-Wahibre. 33. Unpubl. letter to author. 34. Ex. 15: 14-16. 35. Velikovsky, A. in C., 62, quoting Arab sources. 36. David Neev and G. M. Friedman, "Late Holocene Tectonic Activity Along the Margins of the Sinai Subplate, "202 Science (27 Oct. 1978) 427-9. 37. "The catastrophe Finale of the middle Age," Proceeding, IX Int'l, Congress Prehist and Protohist, Nice, France, 1976. 38. W. F. Petrie, Egyptian Archaeology, p. 67. 39. G. L. Possehl, "The Mohenjo-daro Floods " 69 Amer. Anthro., nø 1, 1967, 32-40. 40. R. M. Adams, "From sites of patterns," 68 U. of Chicago Mag., winter, 1975, 19-20. 41. Alex. Kondratov, The Riddles of Three Oceans, Moscow, U. S. S. R, 1974, 164: 42. William Mullen, "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 Pens‚e, 4 Fall 1974, 34-44. 43. "China's Dragon," 4 Pens‚e, 1 (1973-4), 47-50. 44. Reallexikon fur Antike and Christentum (Anton Hiersemann, Stuttgart, 1969) 366. 45. Ibid., 362-6. 46. Zvi Rix, unpubl. mss., quoting K. B. Stark, Gaza and die Philistaische Kste (1852), s. 268. 47. Reallexikon for Antike and Christentum. 48. Rix, quoting E. Lefebure, "Le Sacrifice Humain d'aprŠs les rites de Busiris et d'Abydos," III Sphinx (Upsala), 1900, 143. 49. Reallexikon, 368. 50. Ibid., 372. 51. Ibid., 374. 52. New Scientist (20 Oct. 1977), 150. 53. B. A. Smith et. al., 204 Science (1979), 961. 54. Thomas Gold, "Electrical Origin of the Outburst on Io, "206 Science (1979), 1072. 55. "The Natural History of Lightning," Proceedings, III Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, Tallahasse, Fla., 1964, 150. 56. Velikovsky, W. in C., 56-57. 57. Gen. 11: 1-9. 58. E. A. Von Fange, "Strange Fires on Earth," 12 Creation R. Q. (Dec. 1975), 132. 59. A. de Grazia, "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by fire in Pre-history and Ancient Times," I Kronos 4 (1976) 25-36; II Kronos (1976), 63-71. 60. Cf. Oxford Annot. Bible, Ex. 3: 2 fn; 19: 9; 33: 9; 40: 34-8; 1 Kings 8: 10-11. 61. Ex. 19: 16-19. 62. The Mosaic Tradition, 74 and 71ff. Pythian-Adams is cited as first to suggest, in his Call of Israel, that all Sinai reference were Post-Exilic while the reference to Horeb are older and original. 63. Num. 11: 1-3. 64. III G 244. 65. III G 245. 66. Cf. W. Corliss, comp., Strange Phenomena, 2 v. (1974) GLB series for recent cases. 67. The plasmoid may be distinguished from ball lightning by its more volatile and heavy explosive quality. Cf. R. Juergens, "Of the Moon and Mars," IV Pens‚e 4 (1974), 21. 68. Contradicting this, V. Manoilov, Electricity and Man, Moscow: Mir, 1978, 54, sets the Earth's charge at 50 million coulombs, granting that the charge is continually changing globally and locally. 69. Ibid., 55. 70. Cf. W. Corliss, comp., Strange Phenomena, 2 v. 1974, GE-GQE-029, 030, et passim. 71. Eric Crew, "Electricity in Astronomy," II SISR 4( 1977), 24. 72. U. S. Geological Survey, "Earthquake Lights," (July 3, 1977, Wash. D. C.) 73. The space available here does not permit citation of the numerous scientific articles on electrical effects of earthquakes such as would have been experienced during the Exodus and in the wilderness. A number of useful reports are cited and partially reprinted in Corliss, compiler, op. cit. (GQE series, Sourcebooks, 1974f). 74. David Finkelstein and James Powell, 228 Nature (Nov. 21,1970) 759-760. 75. Op. cit., 131. 76. D. Vitaliano, op. cit., ch. 8ff. 77. I. Isaacson, "Some preliminary Remarks " I Kronos 2 (1975), 93-9. 78. M. R. Rampino, S. Self, R. Fairbridge, "Can Rapid Climatic Change Cause Volcanic Eruptions," 206 Science, 16 Nov. 1979, 826, citing J. Keller et al. 79. Velikovsky, A. in C. 79, ff. The cause may have been an isostatic adjustment or a cometary revisit. 80. Richard A. Kerr, "When Disaster Rains..." 206 Science (16 Nov. 1979), 803-4. 81. John A. Eddy, "Case of Missing Sunspots," 236 Sci. Amer. (May 1977), 80-92; Earl s. Milton, "The Not So Stable Sun," V Kronos 1 (1979), 64-78. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 4: } {T THE ARK IN ACTION } {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR THE ARK IN ACTION Salem, Massachusetts, a century after it achieved fame in witchcraft, became an exciting center of the new science of "electric fire." Of an evening, for instance, according to an advertisement of March 7, 1765, one might attend lectures at David Mason's house, learning there: That the Electric Fire is a real Element, - That our Bodies at all times contain enough of it to set a House on Fire, - That this Fire will live in Water, - A Representation of the Seven Planets, showing a probable Cause of their keeping their due Distances from each other, and the Sun in the Center... [1] Until the 17th century, "experiment (what little of it there was) belonged to 'natural magic, ' " [2] Then, three thousand years after Moses, the European-American world rediscovered electricity through experiment, that is, "natural magic." We see clearly now why the tradition that Moses was a great magician, no matter how often "rebutted" by his admirers and "advanced" theologians, persisted. He who was an experimenter was thought to be a magician. He who was a magician performed experiments. It is not surprising that Moses regarded the electrical fire as divine. Nor that Jesuit priests were among the most active modern experimenters. A prolonged debate divided early modern electricians into those who believed electricity to be a substance, and those who considered it to be an influence (both attractive and repulsive). It is of the essence of Yahweh that he be such an "incorporeal" substance on a cosmic and microscopic scale and be at the same time an invisible influence for good and evil. Long before the early modern scientists found their deus ex machina, Moses displayed Yahweh from the Ark of the Covenant. The divine presence luminesces from the pillar of cloud [3] and from between the two cherubim "visible to the people as the radiation of the divine substance, as the kabod always visibly directed towards or pointing to the tent." [4] The invention of the Leyden jar in 1745 aroused great scientific and public interest. The Jar, which has found its way into hundreds of classrooms in elementary physics since then, was independently contrived by two scholars. One was the German scientist E. G. von Kleist. The other, a Dutch scholar, Peter van Musschenbroek, was affiliated with the University of Leyden. Innumerable ingenious applications took place. Working with materials and instruments that were available to Moses, the new scientists literally played with every device and scheme that, according to my study here, was employed by Moses. So secular were the new scientists and so futuristic their pride, that practically never did they think to search among the most ancient records for their origins. A few years after the invention of the Leyden jar, Georg Wilhelm Lichtenberg (1743-1799), one of the founders of electrical science, called attention to its resemblance to the Ark of the Covenant, to the "Powerful One of Jacob." [5] Another distinguished electro-physicist, Maurice Denis-Papin (1900-x) asserted that the ark as an electrical capacitor was capable of producing from 500 to 700 volts [6] . This is quite enough to electrocute humans and animals as well as to perform many other electrical operations such as apparitions, smoke, and fire-making. However, neither scholar had in mind the effects upon the ark of the electrical turbulence of the Exodus period, a condition that was deduced from many circumstances and the Bible itself by Jerry Ziegler (1977), in his book YHWH. The Leyden jar collects electricity. In its simplest form it consists of a pointed metal aerial conducting rod that is insulated from the ground by being immersed in water inside a glass jar, An electrical charge accumulates on the rod and will discharge to any grounded conducting element that touches it or comes close enough for the charge to jump the gap with a spark. (see figure 9) A similar device will add a conductor to load the opposite ground charge. A jar is coated with a metal foil on the outside, and another metal foil on the inside; the glass, which will not conduct a charge effectively, insulates the one charge from the other. Water is unnecessary. A metal rod affixed to the inner foil helps to gather the atmospheric charge. A potential difference of voltage will build up between the two conductors and if it is heavy enough, will discharge by a spark or by a conducting contact like a wire, between the two, or by a deliberate or accidental interposition of a hand or another resistant or short- circuiting medium. The voltage between the stored charges is dependent upon: the electrical condition of the earth and the atmosphere; the material of which the conductors are made; their shape and size; and the time elapsed for the accumulation of charge. Various means can be taken to enhance the electrical potential, and therefore the force of the discharge. Benjamin Franklin in 1752 charged a Leyden jar by attaching to it a silk thread that could conduct electricity from a kite that entered a thunderstorm. He was taking a great risk. He drew up a list of ways in which the "electrical fluid" of the Leyden jar resembled lightning [7] . Concluding that the phenomena were identical, he thought to capture and store lightning, but luckily he did not pursue his dangerous designs; a Swedish scientist did so and was struck dead by the badly stored charge (see page 100 case of Dr. Richmann below). The abundant electrostatic phenomena, both natural and humanly induced, of the Exodus, have been generally attributed to "lightning" as we know it today; this is a convenient category that disguises all references to other types of "fire." Figure 9. The Leyden Jar. If A is touched to AI, and B to BI, simultaneously, the jar will discharge at the points of contact and sparks will probably illuminate the two points of contact. Nicola Tesla in 1881, produced spark discharges five inches long in his New York loft; the potential was estimated at 100,000 volts. He elicited "a variety of new forms of illumination." [8] By 1900 Tesla was imitating lightning. He claimed he could produce two- mile long sparks conveying ten million horsepower. He wanted to create electric power by using the whole earth as a kind of Leyden jar (condenser) and resonating coil combined [9] . Franklin and others experimented with "the power of points ... drawing off and throwing off the electrical fire." He exploded cork balls from a muzzle and said that at night the muzzle cast off lights. He observed that the shots caused halos of smoke [10] . Sulphurous smells were associated with them in other instances. Franklin also set up an electrostatic device to ring a bell when the atmosphere was charging up. Aaron, High Priest of Israel, had to wear the blue ephod, a gorgeous pullover to whose skirt are attached golden bells, "and it shall be upon Aaron when he ministers, and its sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord, and when he comes out, lest he die." [11] Petrie reproduces from an Egyptian priestly garment a border of "lotus-flowers and seed- vessels" that seem like "bells and pomegranates." Few doubt, however, that the Israelite bells would ring. Cassuto says that they would sound so that the priest would not enter the sanctuary unannounced and irreverently. And in departure the priest would prostrate himself and the bells' sound be a blessing [12] . But perhaps Moses grafted electronics upon the original design. Thus, at Dodona, seat of the oldest Greek oracle, dedicated to Zeus Naios, there was "an oak grove hung with vessels of brass, by which the god's voice was thought to be made audible." [13] This Zeus Naios was related to Zeus Ammon of Libya and Amon of Egypt, who is not unrelated to Yahweh. Priestley describes eighteenth century electrical experiments with bells besides those of Benjamin Franklin [14] . The bells of Aaron's ephod might usefully have been agitated by an excess of electricity about him, warning him not to come into the Inner Sanctum or sometimes to get out while he could (" lest he die ") Franklin did not escape unscathed from his experiments. On one occasion he was knocked unconscious when he made an accidental connection while hooking up two Leyden jars to electrocute a turkey. Franklin was a humane man who liked turkeys - he once nominated the turkey for the American national bird in preference to the eagle totem - and was probably seeking a less painful way of butchering them. The device, it needs be said, does not display its charged condition to the eye; it is an invisible power of "an invisible god." Musschenbrock, foreseeing such accidents, wrote: "The hand and the whole body is struck in such a terrible fashion that it is hard to describe. In a word, I thought the end had come." He advised a friend to "never repeat this new and terrible experiment." [15] {S : THE GOLDEN BOX} THE GOLDEN BOX The Ark of the Covenant, so named because its hollow interior probably contained at first solely the stone tablets that Moses had brought down from Mt. Sinai with the words of Yahweh, measured probably between 45 X 27 X 27 and 63 X 38 X 38 inches, That would be close to the bulk size of a secretarial desk. Tradition maintains that the Ark itself was fashioned by Moses [16] , and, of course, the design was his, dictated to him by Yahweh on the sacred mountain. An ark "denotes here a kind of chest or box." [17] Its Hebrew word is 'aron. ' It may have meant once something other than a box; that is, the structure embracing the function may have appropriated the name of the function in later ages. The root of 'aron, ' says Strong's Concordance, signifies a gathering in; in this case, charges are collected and Aaron is the collector. The name of Aaron thus may be closer to the function, the priest of the ark or arc science. Flinders Petrie, the greatest of Egyptologists, used the word 'ark' to describe one of a number of Egyptian depictions, such as is portrayed in Figure 10 here [18] . One is tempted to speculate that it is an engineering sketch of the Ark itself, lacking the box below. There would be little reason for the construction of these poles or this arch, aesthetic or otherwise, except to manage an electric arc or system of sparks. This ark in operation would flare at the junctions of the grounded poles and the top horizontal bar. Why would the Egyptians set up an ark upon a boat? The implications are surprising. We think first of where a box to generate an electric arc would function more continuously and intensely. This would be a location on water, where charges gather more readily because of high conductivity of the medium. Especially in pre-cometary or post-cometary times, when the Earth was discharging less strongly, the ark as pictured in the illustration would create a more active arc discharge. Figure 10. Egyptian Ark Procession Source: Hugo Gressman, Die Lade Jahves und das Allerheiligste des Solomonischen Temples. Leipzig: Kohlhammer, 1920, from III Denkmaler 14. See also F. Petrie, Egypt and Isreal, p. 62a Secondly we revert to the puzzle of why the Jews named the Ark of Noah and the Ark of the Covenant similarly. The answer is probably that the electrical phenomena of Noah's Ark were stupendous, that the Egyptians generated their arcs on boats, and that Moses derived his land-based Ark from the aquatic models. These may have descended to the Egyptians from the Noah tradition via the Hebrews, or have been a joint Egyptian-Hebrew development, or may have been indeed Moses' invention, whether in the aquatic forms or the land form or both. Regarding this last item, we may recall that Moses the infant floated on the Nile in an "ark", the same rare word. Priestley tells us that "as the electric fire may be made to take whatever circuit the operator shall please to direct, it may be thrown into a great variety of beautiful forms." [19] With various adjustments, all of which were recapitulated in the renaissance of electrical science in the eighteenth century, the poles or bars could be made to scintillate throughout their lengths, the wings of the cherubim would light up, and a glow would occupy the space beneath or shrouded by the wings, with the four ankhs (pictured at the corners in Figure 10) sparking like brilliant erratic candles. A god was present. The only meaning of 'Ark' in the dictionary of Egyptian hieroglyphics is the name of a god. But when was this Egyptian ark constructed? Was it for a shrine made before 1450 B. C. or afterwards? The ankh answers the question. It is the paramount symbol of the planet Venus. Though it is also a symbol meaning 'life' and 'salvation' and the procreative membrum virilis, it reverts to Typhonic Venus in the end [20] . Therefore it is mostly of the period after 1450 B. C., by the chronology I am following, Thus were joined the Ark of Noah, the Egyptian ark, the ark and ankh of the gods, and the Ark of Moses. Then five possibilities occur, assuming the gift of the design from Yahweh (see figure 12) to be a theological invention. The Ark of the Covenant may be an invention of Moses based directly upon Egyptian models known to him as a member of the Egyptian theocratic-scientific establishment. Or the Egyptian ark may be a copy of Moses' Ark. Or the ark might have been independently invented in both countries. Or Moses' Ark may be an outright theft of an Egyptian ark. Fifth, the Arks of Moses and of Egypt may be Hyksos inventions that Moses acquired under Hyksos subjection. The independent invention I would regard as impossible; the details are too close and are not found elsewhere in the world. Continuing, it cannot be a copy of Moses' Ark because Egypt was not free to copy until the Ark had lost its puissance. Therefore, the Ark must come from possibility 1, 4 or 5. Number 5 is possible, but the Hyksos were on a lower technical level, before and for long after their conquest of Egypt. Numbers 1 and 4 are compatible. They move towards each other. Moses knew and worked with Egyptian science and technology, He would certainly draw on them for the design of the Ark. Then the question of whether a specific ark or set of arks was operating in Egypt before the Exodus is not too important. The ark was in Egypt. The Ark was also Moses' (and possibly Aaron's) invention for Israel [21] . A capacitor or condenser of the size of the Ark might be rated in many thousands of volts if atmospheric electricity were more continuous and abundant then it is today and if the earth had suffered shocks and were emitting electricity in the aftermath. Large sources of leaking or gathering earth charges and a heavily electrified atmosphere would be required. The operators of the Ark system would, under such favorable conditions, be able to induce repeated sparks, of heavy or light intensity, slowly or rapidly. Early modern science also discovered that electricity could be induced from the atmosphere and ground to produce differential charges and then sparking or shocking discharges. This discovery was combined with the knowledge that a charge could be built up by scraping the electrical "fluid" off of certain materials and loading it onto other materials. So they went about rubbing and storing and discharging electricity with cloths and amber or glass or gem sticks. They devised machines to create ever larger charges. One experimenter was sure be could create a discharge attaining the power of a lightning bolt by enlarging the surface to hold the charge which a rubbing machine would create. Some inventors imagined they might fabricate a circular series of lugs that could turn a wheel whose bits would be alternately attracted and repelled until a perpetual motion machine was thought to be possible. Did Moses and the Levites explore frictional electric manufacturing so thoroughly? They probably did; once begun, the logic and direction of experimentation is irresistible [22] . However, the difference between those days and nowadays is that the Exodus atmosphere had more than enough to offer to build any usable charges without further exertion. Like agriculture was unnecessary in the climate and ecology of Adam and Eve's Garden of Eden, electrical manufacture in Moses' time did not require hydraulic, fossil, animal, or human energy input. I think that similar circumstances may have discouraged the development of wire for the transmission of electric charges or current. Early modern scientists used fibre and silk lines to transmit charges; these could have been employed by the Israelites as well. The moderns used hammered and stretched metallic wires; the technology was obviously within Israelite capabilities. Hundreds of copper necklaces have been recovered from Middle Kingdom sources. In Petrie's catalogue of Egyptian artifacts, we read that "the necklet of a single stout wire of metal belongs almost entirely to the Twelfth Dynasty [before Moses] and the Ptolemaic to Coptic period." Number 28 is "a silver wire with curled ends." Number 32 is of "two silver wires bent double and linked together " Petrie describes the sophisticated technology of wiring and soldering in the Twelfth Dynasty. A single piece evidences soldering, wire stretching, die stamping, and a gold tube to carry a thread wire. Whenever a spark jumps a gap, a conductor suggests itself to induce the discharge, be it a hand, a dagger, or a metal rod. We reexamine the Egyptian ark in Figure 11; it is bent at 90§ in two places. Would it be wood or metal? Most likely metal. Why is it then, that museums do not exhibit lines and wires? Does it matter that Moses had an affinity with the Kenites? Their "name means 'smiths, ' so we take it that some of the Midianites were coppersmiths." [23] Sometime afterwards, Kenites worked for the Egyptian government at the Sinai copper mines and were using the alphabet, "the earliest known." [24] A curator would not be likely to postulate an electrical science if handed fragments of stretched organic or metal line. Nor likely would any be received by the museum in the first place; the materials are quite decomposable. In contemporary paintings they would appear as indistinct lines, on the rare occasion when they would be drawn. Wires would be short; insulation, new technology, and much metal alloy is needed for long wires. Telegraphy inspired wire technology in the nineteenth century. The ancients used fires and torches from eminences and may have employed "divine fire" in the electrified ages. There are hints of this in ancient historical ages a millennium and more after Moses, when technology generally was not much advanced over his times. Moreover, natural electricity is erratic and powerful. It can disintegrate a line or wire, whether or not insulated, quickly, by explosion or intense heat. A heavy conductor, as in the Egyptian ark, would be prohibitively expensive. It would be used only for in-house contraptions, entirely religious or experimental (that is, playful). So we return again to a basic reason: the sufficiency of atmospheric or natural electrical electricity, and add that its oversufficiency may have contributed to blocking further development. As natural electrification diminished in the environment, the religious "atmosphere" added its weight to the causes forestalling development of electrical manufacture and wires. The divine fires were for priests and the priests were for tradition. The early modern electrical scientists, although evincing surprise at how electricity seemed alive, (just as Thales, the Greek philosopher, remarked at the spirit that animated the electrified amber), paid no further attention to gods or church. They went ahead individually, men women and children excitedly and delightfully playing the new game. Catastrophe, too, inspires great tragic games. It frees its survivors. Wars are games of catastrophe and play out the catastrophic mentality. Moses was induced and permitted by catastrophe to change and manipulate people and things in many ways, to invent with a rare freedom. The Ark box was gold outside and gold inside with an insulating layer of hard wood in between. The lid of the box, the kapporeth, also of wood overlain with gold, held at each end a cherub of gold. These cherubim faced each other with their wings spread out. In between them, over the lid, when he chose to be among his people, hovered Yahweh. This was his "mercy seat," in the anachronous English translation. Here he manifested himself to his people and, it is important to stress, to their enemies. The limitations of space on the kapporeth or coverpiece of the Ark define in part the sculpture. Unlike the winged lions and bulls, griffins and other animals fashioned as cherubim in Assyria and elsewhere, the Ark's cherubim were probably two-footed with unisexual human features [25] . A later Assyrian assemblage (Figure 11) is similar. So are two figures from Egypt, showing two winged goddesses hovering protectively over idols of Osiris, in one case, and Thoth in the other [26] . The cherubim could not be seated or squatting, because they were facing Yahweh, but would stand with faces elevated, says the legend [27] . Figure 12 may convey some notion of their appearance, in accord with legend and with the Bible. It may be seen that their wings would be spread wide as a covering of the box so that, in effect, two platform levels would be created, one on the ample but separated pair of wings and again on the lid of the box. The Bible affords images of Yahweh enthroned on the wings, speaking of "the ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim." [28] He at the same time is "the Lord, that dwelleth between the cherubim, whose name is called on it." And another verse speaks of "the ark of God, whereupon is called the Name, even the name of the Lord of hosts who sits enthroned on the cherubim." [29] Then Yahweh is appealed to, with the words: "Thou that dwelleth between the cherubim, shine forth." Moreover, Yahweh says, I will speak with you from above the Kapporeth, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony of all that I will give you in commandment for the children of Israel." [30] If Yahweh sits upon the wings as a throne, then the lid below is his footstool. Thus, "Let us go to His dwelling; let us prostrate ourselves at His footstool." [31] Hence, Yahweh when present in name, voice, or image might be above the wings, between the wing separations, and between the wings and the footstool. The variant expressions imply what Priestley said earlier of the electrical effects he had achieved by similar devices, that they make different and beautiful figures as the charges move and sparkle. When conditions were propitious, a great leaflike sheet of fire might define itself over the sculptured golden group as a whole. It would be three-dimensional, like a hologram. (See Figure 12.) Figure 11. Cherubim of Nimrud. In this piece open work of ivory, a pair of winged female figures wearing the Egyptian double crown protect with their outstretched wings the aegis of Bastet on the flowering "Lily" tree between them. Since Nimrud (or Kalah) became the Assyrian capital city only after 880 BC The plaque must be post-Mosaic. The resemblance to the floral pattern to flames and even the Lion of Judah may indicate the invisible electrical flames. A very old principle of opposing and yet cooperative forces seems to be incorporated in the twin figures so often encountered around the world -- from Castor to Pollux to Yin and Yangmartin, pp 293ff: Ziegler, pp 113ff) It appears more likely than not that the two identical cherubim of the Ark are mossaic version of this universal twinship. (source: redrawn from Kenyon p58) Buber, apparently dissatisfied with biblical description, writes that "The Royal covenant is followed by the building of a throne," generally speaking. But "we have no reliable reports as to the original appearance of the Ark... We do not know why the description 'Throne' for the Ark was avoided. " [32] What bothers Buber is that it is not a throne, not a shrine, although it is like the litters carrying the throne of god that the Bedouin tribes possessed. It is yet a "genuine migrating sanctuary." It comes from the time of Moses, as various archaeological findings have proven. The learned Buber, a hero and good man in the terrible Nazi period, is at his wits' end when he approaches the obvious. He laboriously formulates the question: "Was there a moment in the life of Moses which drove him overpoweringly to unite and mould the elements familiar to him from extended observation and knowledge of tradition, and to make some new formation out of them?" [33] "He said, to be sure, did that man, that God goes before them and that He makes His presence known by one or another sign; but the sole firm and unshakable fact was, in the last resort, that the God could not be seen; and all said and done you cannot actually follow something which you cannot see." [34] Figure 12. The Ark's Structure and Function. Top: View from top Middle: View from side Bottom: " Thou that dwellest between the Cherubim shine forth." (Psalm 80: 1) The Ark with Yahweh displayed. Legend claims the wing spread of the Cherubim was eleven spans( of the hand) plus a span for the head, and that the Cherubim were 10 spans tall from head to ground( III G 158-9) Buber is now rationalizing why the Israelites should have preferred a Golden Calf to an empty litter. In the face of the most explicit references, which he himself employs, that the Ark was occupied, or would be, when Moses made it, he abandons his inquiry into its design. Gressmann is also baffled by the apparent emptiness of the seat of Yahweh. He insists [35] that there must have been a little figure of Yahweh, or an animal, or at least a meteoritic stone that rested or could be placed beneath the wings of the cherubim. The perplexity is understandable but wrong-headed. What is to be found elsewhere, sometimes, and later, is not definitive of the Ark of Moses. And how, when the Bible says that Yahweh sits upon the cherubim, is a figure beneath the Cherubim to be accounted for? The answer must be that Yahweh, the Electrical God, was both present and invisible. Certainly the Bible does not go heavily into describing the functions of the Ark but it has many brief direct and explicit references to its electrical operations, and how and when its effects would come about. Nothing about the human mind is incredible, but it is almost incredible that for three thousand years the Ark has not been understood, whether by the friends or foes of Yahwism, or by theologians or scientists. Or, lacking absolute proof, why has this theory not been before the world as one of the most plausible explanations of Moses, of Yahweh, and of the Ark? Perhaps the savants of ancient times preferred description to analysis, statics to dynamics, Aristotelianism (Maimonidism) to pragmatism. With all of their zeal for mummification, the Egyptians have left us no recipes for the technique. Perhaps the electrical powers were only vaguely known to those who may have inserted most of the description much later - that is, after it had ceased its active functions and become a "period-piece." Perhaps its externalia were more gaudy than its unknown, even sacred, interior dynamics -rather like, as they say, the automobile today that is sold on its appearance to people who never lift the hood of the motor. Another answer, too facile, is that a few critical points of design were deliberately omitted from the Bible for the sake of secrecy. For instance, if the connections of the cherubim were machined to serve as opposing poles, and were minutely described, the secret would practically surely be revealed. Perhaps all of these reasons enter into the mystification, and to them we should add the strong, even unconsciously strong, wish to reject any mechanical explanation of the sacred. And it was precisely after the Ark ceased to be operative that the desire to explain its former workings would be suppressed. The most perplexing problem of the Ark as an electrical worship, control, and weapons system does, in fact, involve the cherubim. Two descriptions of the Ark are provided [36] . In both, the cherubim are facing each other from the two ends of the Seat. But we note: "Of one piece with the [gold] mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends." [37] This would imply, if accurate, that the cherubim would be of the same charge and that the ark would not function electrically by a discharge between them. Against this seeming design defect are the dozen and more descriptions of the Ark in action. Ziegler does not address this problem and says that one cherub would be grounded, the other affixed to the inner gold shell of the Ark. In short, only one cherubim was of a piece with the lid or seat. He thinks that the intricate mechanisms of the ark are kept secret. However he does assign a function to Aaron's rod which he believes would have been the aerial conductor. This, it seems to me, is close to the solution. The Ark is a variable machine and the control of its power must be capable of modification, This is impossible with the fixed cherubim alone. They can only store charge, the same charge. But what can be varied is a rod, preferably and inevitably a sacred rod, Aaron's rod or Moses' rod. The rod would connect with the inner gold lining of the box while the cherubim connected with the outer, grounded lining. The rod would be adjustable in relation to the cherubim, in one or more of four directions, such that weak or powerful discharges, under unfavorable or favorable charging conditions, could be made with the cherubim. Sockets and ratchets of simple design, and a telescoping rod, could manage all of the required motions. Remarkable phenomena could be induced. Perhaps the most inspiring would be the luminous arcs of fire that would be emitted between the two cherubim and the pole, bringing into a high intensity image the presence of Yahweh at the center of the Mercy Seat. The arc or spark will jump the gap as often and as rapidly as the voltage can build up. Writes Priestley, "If the knobs of two wires, one communicating with the inside, and the other with the outside of the phial, be brought within four or five inches of one another, the electrical spider will dart from the one to the other in a very surprising manner, till the phial be discharged." [38] It can become almost a column of fire to the naked eye. In the presence of prolonged discharges, an ionized cloud of dust will gather around, concealing the discharge in the daytime at least and making it less visible at night. There are ways of placing an arc apparatus more advantageously to produce electrical phenomena, ways of guarding it, of measuring its potency, of enlarging or diminishing its activity and noises, of enhancing the surrounding cloud, of using water and dirt and various stones for visual effects, and treating, blessing or magnetizing metals and metal alloys. One might also produce some mental phenomena by feeding and extracting ionized air to and from the device. We are dealing with a complicated technical apparatus and set of operations and effects. Nor was any other religious device so activatable. The ark made the pyramid obsolete. In an age that saw no reason to distinguish between inanimate and animate natural forces, the liveliness of electricity would put it definitely in the sphere of the animate and, if not in a god, then in a voice of the immediate presence of a god. As Ziegler writes, the word electricity comes from the Greek electron, which may come from El, meaning "god" (as in Elohim) and ech meaning "to have," that is, "what gods have." And ark is surely related to the arc that it creates, and to the form of arch that an arc takes, and probably to early ages (archeons and archaic) and forms of rule (monarchy, oligarchy). The archaic electrical age may have sponsored these words [39] . {S : DANGERS OF ELECTROCUTION} DANGERS OF ELECTROCUTION The Ark was a highly dangerous machine. Ordinary Bible reading and anthropological training about primitive customs condition one to pass over indifferently its taboos. The people, officers, dissenters, priests and in fact everyone except Moses are warned to avoid the Ark, or to approach it carefully on pain of death. The Holy of Holies is well away from strange hands when Israel is in camp. (See Figure 13.) The invisibility of electric charges is, of course, a major concern. The danger is unseen. People must have faith and discipline to observe safety precautions respecting electricity. Not until the studies of S. Jellinek in Austria during the 1920's did it become quite clear "that death from electric shock could be instantaneous and without any visible signs of injury." [40] Figure 13. Ground plan and Design of the Tabernacle. (Source: redrawn from the New World Translation of the Bible, after a reconstruction by Conard Schick) Some body areas are more sensitive than others: the back of the hand, the neck, the shoulders, the temples. Some persons - perhaps Moses - are less sensitive to electric injury than others. Perspiration (and all water) heightens conductivity; the minute burns discoverable sometimes in different places on the body of a person who has suffered electrocution may signify resistances in such conductive spots. Washing therefore helps to avoid or pass a shock, as priests of various cultures still do, even if symbolically, when approaching an altar. Burns can be severe, but occur at voltages of 200 or more; meanwhile, lower voltages can cause death with little or no visible markings on the corpse. Voltages as low as 10 have been known to kill, according to the Russian expert, Manoilov. The heart or brain electrical systems need only be interrupted for life to quickly cease, often with the disruption of breathing control, hence asphyxiation. Yet high voltages are used in penal death by the electric chair, 1200 to 2000 volts, and excruciating minutes of time can be required to kill. This may be owing to a strange fact, that a person who is anticipating an electrical current or sparks can, especially if not too fearful, absorb or pass a larger voltage without death or with less serious an injury than otherwise [41] . Four-legged animals are more sensitive to death by ground charges or lightning than two-legged people or birds. The electrical potency of the Ark or a similar mechanism varies with the differences in charge between air and ground. If the air is losing charge rapidly, the ground will concentrate a charge rapidly and on a point contact discharge will cause a heavy explosion, a brilliant arc, and a deadly experience for anyone or even a group who short-circuit the contact. If St. Elmo's fire is arising naturally from an elevated point, an arc machine nearby would carry a heavy static charge, capable of jumping more forcibly. Amidst general rejoicing at the fine manner in which Yahweh was coming down upon their offerings at the new shrine, Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, priests themselves, "each took his censer, and put fire in it, and laid incense on it, and offered unholy fire before the Lord, such as he had not commanded. And fire came forth from the presence of the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord." [42] According to a legend: "From the Holy of Holies issued two flames of fire, as thin as threads, then parted into four, and two each pierced the nostrils of Nadab and Abihu, whose souls were burnt, although no external injury was visible." [43] Modern medicine knows that the nostrils are peculiarly susceptible to electric shock. It is generally known that electroshock can kill and injure without signs of burning. The Bible implies that the two men were drunk and hence unholy before Yahweh, whence we may see in the accident the kind of negligence that does occasionally cause fatal accidents among skilled electricians. Rabbi J. H. Hertz, in one of his enthusiastic interpretations, blames the sons of Aaron for their "intoxication, unholy ambition, arbitrary tampering with the service, and introducing 'strange fire' into the Sanctuary." [44] Hertz believes (p. 445) that they were struck by lightning, since their garments were not destroyed. Further he defines "strange fire" as "unconsecrated fire, not from the Divinely kindled flames on the Altar." It is a more meaningful translation of the words "unholy fire," which can mean anything or nothing. "Strange" or "alien" means that it is not the fire that is appropriate to the fire of the Holy of Holies; for it is fossil, not electric, fire [45] . Moses explained then to Aaron what the Lord was doing: "I will show myself holy among those who are near me, and before all the people I will be glorified," says the Bible, "and Aaron held his peace." As they were carrying off the corpses, Moses, in his genial manner, tells Aaron and the remaining sons, "Do not let the hair of your heads hang loose, and do not rend your clothes, lest you die " He says that it is up to the general congregation to mourn for them. Further, he says, apparently not sure of their self-control: "And do not go out from the door of the tent of meeting, lest you die." For there was a crowd of spectators outside [46] . Poor Aaron had to take much scolding with his bereavement and hear many safety lessons: The Lord spoke to Moses, after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near before the Lord and died; and the Lord said to Moses: 'Tell Aaron your brother not to come at all times into the holy place, within the veil, before the mercy seat which is upon the ark, lest he die; for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat [47] . One must also bow low before Yahweh, if only to avoid a shock. But this practice presumes that a divine fire is hovering above [48] . In a history of electrical science, we read the following: A. D. 1753. Prof. George William Richmann (1711-1753), native of Sweden and member of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, who had already constructed an apparatus for obtaining atmospherical electricity according to Franklin's plans, was attending a meeting of the Russian Academy of Science, on the 6th of August, 1753, when his ear caught the sound of a very heavy thunder clap. He hastened away in company with his engraver, M. Sokolow, and upon their arrival home they found the plummet of the electrometer elevated four degrees from the perpendicular. Richmann stooped toward the latter to ascertain the force of the electricity, and "as he stood in that posture, a great white and bluish fire appeared between the rod of the electrometer and his head. At the same time a sort of steam or vapour arose, which entirely benumbed the engraver and made him sink on the ground." Sokolow recovered, but Richmann had met with instant death [49] . The sad story of Uzzah who was electrocuted for trying to steady the ark which was on its way to Mount Zion in a cart will be told shortly. He was not a Levite. But the Levites had their problems too. The most distinguished among the Levites were the sons of Kohath, whose charge during the march through the desert was the Holy of Holies, and among the vessels particularly the Holy Ark. This latter was a dangerous trust, for out of the staves attached to it would issue sparks that consumed Israel's enemies, but now and then this fire wrought havoc among the bearers of the Ark. It therefore became a customary thing, when the camp was about to be moved, for Kohath's sons to hasten into the sanctuary and seek to pack up the different portions of it, each one planning cautiously to shift the carrying of the Ark upon another. But this even more kindled God's anger against them, and He slew many of the Kohathites because they ministered to the Ark with an unwilling heart. To avert the danger that threatened them, God ordered Aaron and his sons to enter first into the sanctuary, and 'to appoint to the Kohathites, every one, his service and his burden, that they might not go in to see when the holy things are covered, lest they die. ' This was done because previous to this command the sons of Kohath had been accustomed to feast their eyes on the sight of the Ark, which brought them instantaneous death. But, according to this order, Aaron and his sons first took apart the different portions of the sanctuary, covered the Ark, and not till then called the sons of Kohath to bear the burden [50] . This legend is technically and behaviorally so clear that little interpretation need be supplied by this author. As a modern example, one needs only picture the scene of deadly sputtering which occurs when some object like a pole falls against a gang of live wires and machines. The Ark makes a noise, a hissing, crackling, moaning complex that can rise to near-deafening decibels. If the air-ground differential remains large, the arc and the noise can continue for minutes, hours or days. Various observers have written that electrostatic discharges on mountain-tops and elsewhere make a noise like vast swarms of bees. Yahweh tells the Israelites: "I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out Hivite, Canaanite, and Hittite before you." [51] {S : THE ARK AT WORK} THE ARK AT WORK An obvious first function of the Ark is to be the main vehicle of a procession. All too many students have ceased their inquiries after making this observation [52] . They are reinforced in their belief by witnessing religions where litters carrying sacred images are borne - whether on camels of bedouin tribes supposedly like the primitive Jews, or upon the shoulders of devout males in Catholic feasts of the Virgin, or even in the form of the wagon of juggernaut of India. Yet practically the only reference to the Ark in procession is hidden in Psalm 24: 7-10: Raise your head, 0 you gates, And raise yourselves up, 0 you long-lasting entrances, That the glorious King may come in! Who, then, is this glorious King? Jehovah strong and mighty, Jehovah mighty in battle. Raise your heads, 0 you gates; Yes, raise [them] up, 0 you long-lasting entrances, That the glorious King may come in! Who, then, is he, this glorious King? Jehovah of armies - he is the glorious King. Se'lah. The staid editors of the Oxford Bible, Revised Standard Version, comment blandly that the Ark "served to guide Israel in wandering (Num, 10: 33), to lead in war (Num. 10: 35-6), and to be a medium for oracles (1 Sam. ch. 3.)." [53] From this, one might imagine the Ark to be a kind of brave flag carried at the head of a troop; the flag is also used when swearing to agreements and making promises for the future. The Jews, however, had plenty of banners inscribed with tribal legends and Israelite mottoes. The Ark was no mere banner or image. The Ark would always give psychological consolation, of course. It would indicate by its activity and sounds the comforting presence of Yahweh. In what seemed to be interminable periods of despair and starvation, it lived for its people. Thus: And they departed from the mount of the Lord three days journey: and the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord went before them in the three days journey, to search out a resting place for them [54] . I would stress here the separation of the Ark from its people; it went ahead with its special guard of Levites to spy out a camping ground. There is no reason for this tactic unless the Ark was required to perform a real special function. Although it was the clouds that gave the signal for taking down and pitching tents, still they always awaited the word of Moses. Before starting the pillar of cloud would contract and stand still before Moses, waiting for him to say: 'Rise up, Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee, ' whereupon the pillar of cloud would be set in motion. It was the same when they pitched camp [55] . Ziegler tells us: "The mysterious Ark seems endowed with intelligence. With this viewpoint we see that the ark was an instrument carried by men and was capable of measuring to some extent the electrical activity of the atmosphere. In a safe place, the ark or electrical capacitor would charge up little, if at all, and no electrical discharge would occur. If placed in a dangerous region, the ark would build up a charge quickly and give a strong discharge. " [56] The rule was to rest when the ark was active. A pillar of smoke by day (or smoke and fire by night) indicated that the Lord was present and the people must remain encamped. When the ark was less active and the smoke vanished, the hosts of Israel moved on, carrying the ark in their front ranks. "And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up Lord and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee. And when it rested, he said, Return, o Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel." [57] No Jew could or, later, was allowed to speak the real name of Yahweh. Yahweh means "I be," according to Moses. Clear enough: He is the basic principle of life and existence. He cannot be known in his full being. I doubt those Jews and gentiles who say the "word" Yahweh was the name of God and not to be spoken. More likely, Yahweh spoke his own name from the Ark, which could not and should not be mimicked. {S : THE ELECTRIC ORACLE} THE ELECTRIC ORACLE That the ark had oracular powers can be explained. The ark would charge even at low potentials. No electricity would be manifest here. But the ultimate discharge would give some measure of how rapidly a charge had been accumulating. "This same idea is used to measure the electric potentials of the atmosphere by modern scientists," comments Ziegler [58] . The fatal accident to Professor Richmann, recounted above, occurred when he stooped to examine an atmospheric electrometer. The Ark in the hands of Moses and the Levites was a fire-measuring instrument. Dangerous ground could be avoided, not only high places, such as all could soon learn of, but lower places where underground water could result in quick accumulation and discharge or where unseen rock formations fostered lightning exchanges with the atmosphere through the unhappy animate contacts moving in-between ground and air. But, too, insofar as the voice of Yahweh was heard coming from the "mercy seat" or divine vehicle emplaced between the two sparking cherubim, and there are actual variations in the sounds of rapidity, rhythm, pitch and tone [59] , oracular instructions could be systematized and related to reality with a degree of reason much superior, let us say, to the kinds of relationship among the stars that astrologers used then and now to prophesy and advise. The Jews did not ignore the predictive science of astrology: far from it; a Roman author called them "star-obsessed." But their astrology was purged from the Bible over time for being close to a violation of the commandment against worshipping other gods before Yahweh. And besides, these earliest times were not adapted to astrology, since the skies of the Exodus period were largely obscured. During the Egyptian crisis, the crisis of the plagues, and during the many years in the wilderness thereafter, careful astrology would have been of little help, except for watching the cometary behavior of Venus-Baal. Hence, we have another practical reason for the preoccupation with electricity. It was temporarily the only major method of discussing the will of God and the movements of the cosmos in a systematic way. So it was not only that electrical phenomena were abundant, but also that the basis for another oracular technology was inaccessible. Without the Ark, how could Yahweh communicate to His people? "There I will meet with thee and I will commune with thee above the mercy seat from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony." Not only was the ark voluble, speaking for Yahweh in tongues, but also visible: in Psalm 80: 1 the direct statement is made: "Thou that dwellest between the Cherubim, shine forth." Ancient Greek theurgy sought sometimes to induce the presence of a god in an inanimate receptacle, and sometimes in a human form. Luminous apparitions were favored, as in the Chaldean Oracles, which promised that by pronouncing certain spells the operator should see 'fire shaped like a boy, ' or 'an unshaped... fire with a voice proceeding from it." [60] An oracle of Porphyry speaks of "the pure fire being compressed into sacred forms..." Elsewhere, "the 'strong immortal light' replaces the mortal light of the lamp... the watcher sees the light of the lamp become 'vault-shaped, ' then finds it replaced by a 'very great light within a void, ' and beholds the god." [61] Such practices, a thousand years after Moses, suffered from a paucity of god's fire; they seem to reach back in time for more auspicious electrical conditions. {S : THE BATTLE OF JERICHO} THE BATTLE OF JERICHO At the time of Aaron's death, legend has it, the skies cleared and the sun and moon came forth. This was not long before Moses' death and towards the end of the wanderings. The lower atmosphere would carry less charge and the Ark could not be so continuously loaded. Recalling, however, the simple rule of potential difference, we would be able to judge the new conditions if we knew whether the earth was still releasing charge regionally as the lithosphere sought electrical equilibrium. Indications of disequilibrium could be obtained if we knew whether volcanism was still raging in many places, if earthquakes were frequent, if St. Elmo's fire were common on higher places, and if the state of all such activities were changing not only in the Palestinian area but in the broader areas with which Palestine was connected, such as the great Syro-African-Mediterranean rifts, the Danubian region, the Upper Nile, the Anatolian mountains, and so on. Further, we would wish to know the conditions of the upper atmosphere, whether the dust on high had dissipated, whether large meteoroids were circling and occasionally falling, whether the great comet were returning on an earth-approaching orbit from time to time. If Velikovsky is correct in ascribing the 52-year jubilee cycle of the Jews and the 52-year ceremony of atonement of the Mexicans to the regular return of the great comet, we would expect a renewal of electrical activity regularly, and a heavy residual effect during the interval between visitations. The jubilee was a time for the cancellation of obligations such as land tenure and slavery [62] , and for repentance among the Mayans and the Aztecs; there human sacrifices were made, fearful convocations were held, and then great bonfires celebrated the passage of the 52nd anniversary without a new catastrophe [63] . I am accepting the attack upon Jericho as an event close to the 52-year cycle and as probably affected in its outcome by the cosmic event. Strong traditions attest to forty years of wandering in the wilderness; perhaps another dozen years found the Israelites before Jericho and then before Gibeon; the conquest of Canaan is said to have occupied 14 years and Joshua's leadership in all 28 years, so the time schedule seems appropriate. I am sceptical of the old ages attained by both Moses and Joshua, and think that they may have been measured on a shorter-year sacred calendar from a prior epoch. Studies of earlier and later human remains indicate a younger average adult age of death than in modern times. The Ark was used many times in battle. Going to war without it was foolhardy. Onetime Moses said to a gang who wanted to raid the enemy: "Go not up, for Yahweh is not among you." [64] They disregarded his words and were thrashed by a combined Amalekite and Canaanite force. Moses was not an infallible oracle, but he had more foresight than others, partly because Yahweh's vehicle was providing him with intelligence on fighting conditions. And Yahweh, too, was worth a regiment. When the Ark behaved in an excited fashion, it foretold heavier discharges, The enemy, observing the Jews, could see their renowned Yahweh. When the same phenomena began to manifest themselves inside their fortress they would imagine that "Israel - the Fighting God" - was in their very midst. (People unacquainted with the immediate circumstances of battles are inclined to judge their outcomes in terms of gross figures of men and equipment committed. The spearheaad of the vast armada of Americans that descended on "D-Day" upon Normandy in 1944 was blunted for many hours by a single German artillery piece, well-emplaced and manned by a stubborn, well-trained crew.) "In any terrain Israel had the advantage with the Ark of the Covenant," argues Ziegler. "They were warned earlier of the electricity by it and could seek out a better shelter." [65] Cities that were built up for protection found themselves vulnerable to Israel. In some cases, with advance knowledge of a cosmic electrical storm, the Jews could surround the town and capture the population as it came fleeing down the hill. The conquest of Canaan by Moses' successor, Joshua, was swift and decisive. Many small kingdoms were destroyed, many towns burned, many people slaughtered, many idols smashed. The ark worked well. Its use in the battle of Jericho is exemplary. When, some 52 years after Exodus, Joshua's army approached Jericho, his spies reported the city already in a state of fright. They were huddled behind the massive stone revetment of their hilltop town [66] . Very likely the heavens were disturbed, and a return of the great comet was expected by the Jews (and most likely, the Canaanites as well). Joshua could have timed his invasion in anticipation of it. The Jews were already, as Moses and the Levites would have them, a "People of the Book," obsessed in their tactics and memory. When the earth shook and the river's northern sources were blocked [67] , the Jordan River was regarded and treated as another Sea of Reeds. The whole people marched across the river-bed saluting the Ark there upheld to view. The tactics for Ark employment called sometimes for electrical disengagement. Thus the people were kept at 2000 cubits from it during the approach to Jericho but then ordered to pass close by it on the stopped-up river bed of the Jordan. Disengagement would be accomplished by removing the center pole affixed to the Lord's seat between the cherubim and elevating the cherubim. A crossing of the dry river bed of the Jordan might be accomplished at a speed of three miles an hour. We can allow therefore that a two-mile column of people could walk across in an hour. Perhaps there were 40,000 in all that day. The whole Jewish nation with its impedimenta and herds could cross readily in four hours, if they didn't stop to stare at the Ark. Even in historical times, the Jordan has been blocked by seismic landslides for that long and longer. Figure 14 gives us the story in the collapsed time perspective of a medieval mosaic. Yahweh commanded a daily march around the beleaguered citadel for six days, and seven rounds of the city on the seventh day. Armed men went first, then seven priests blowing rams' horns, then the Ark whose behavior by now must have been transfixing the garrison, and finally a rear guard. On the seventh day's seventh round of the hill, the trumpeters blew their horns, and the expectant people of Israel, hitherto silent by command (probably to let the voice of Yahweh give the city "the screaming meamies") huzzahed as they had been told to do. The walls collapsed in a great blast. The slaughter began. The terrified survivors of the blast tried to flee and the Jewish shock troops poured through the breaches. Their comrades stationed below walked up the hill, cutting down the people attempting to escape. Only the whore, Rahab, and her family were permitted to survive, for she had earlier helped the Jewish spies to hide [68] . Jericho is on a western rise of the Jordan Valley, seat of the catastrophe of the Cities of the Plain, which forms part of the northern line of the great African Rift. Its earthquakes have been frequent, and electrical phenomena are associated with seismism. Joshua was maneuvering in accord with the ionization and charge-up of the ground and air. He expected electrical display and fires, and a nervous enemy. He could hardly have expected the huge walls to be overturned, although the connection among electricity, fire, and seismism must already have been known to him. Archaeologists have discovered that the great Middle Bronze Age walls of Jericho were in fact overturned by a great earth shock. John J. Bimson presents archaeological confirmation of the events [69] . Figure 14. The destruction of Jericho. (Source: Mosaic in Church of Santa Maggiore, Rome, about 432-440) MBA [Middle Bronze Age] Jericho was destroyed by Joshua, around 1400 B. C. Then followed a long gap in occupation [Joshua cursed whoever should try to rebuild the city.] In the time of David a settlement of some kind was established on the site, though this was very small and no traces of it have been found on the mound, pottery and scarab from Tomb 5 being the only indication of its existence. A proper town ... was rebuilt in the Amarna period, ninth century B. C... The blast must have included cosmic electricity as well as seismism, because one excavator, John Garstang, found plenty of evidence of intense fires; storerooms were burned; stone houses were reduced to calcinated debris and white ash was overlain with thick layers of charcoal and burnt debris [70] . (I am reminded here of the Trojan case, recited in the preceding chapter.) Granted that the Jews had made the eradication of Jericho a holy war; there is still a limit to the amount of ash that can accumulate from hand-burned stone houses with a few wooden utensils and some wooden beams. An atmospheric discharge probably occurred, accompanied by numerous thermoelectric pyres, concurrent with the earthquake. That is not all: Jericho, like the typical Middle Bronze Age ruin, presents several mysteries. Kenyon reports a plague in Jericho then [71] . Bimson links this plague with the death of 24,000 in Israelite territory shortly before the crossing of the Jordan [72] . The Bible says this was a plague in punishment for the Beth Peor popular heresy [73] . The Beth Peor plague or scourge may have been a massacre or civil war; we discuss it at the end of Chapter 5. The Jericho plague or scourge, evidenced by tombs crowded with bodies, may not have been a disease either. Zeuner found an extraordinary preservation of organic material in the tombs of the multiple burials [74] . He ascribes the phenomenon to natural gas, a combination of methane and carbon dioxide, which may have entered the tomb shortly after burial. The gas, he believes, may have originated from fissuring of the ground during an earthquake. The Bible reports that the last fall of manna occurred just before the Jews entered the Holy Land, that is, at this moment of time. Formaldehyde vapor, also a preservative, falls with manna and is poisonous, apart from whatever chemicals may be falling with it. The cause of death, then, and the cause of the plague, may have been external and atmospheric; the bodies were preserved before burial. A cometary origin of the gases, and even of viral material, cannot be ruled out. {S : THE ARK'S END} THE ARK'S END Apparently the Ark was used less and less as a mobile weapon. Electrical conditions were changing so that it became more difficult to operate along the full range of its original functions. "The clouds of glory" vanished for the first time with the death of Aaron. People born in the desert saw the sun and moon. They had to be warned against worshipping the heavenly host [75] . Also the skills of the personnel assigned to it after Joshua may not have been adequate; perhaps they knew the procedures well enough but could not adapt them to new conditions or invent new procedures. I would suppose, too, that as the division of labor proceeded after Moses, the priests might be content with managing a tractable ornamental ark, and the military men would like to get rid of "civilian" participation in matters of the sword [76] . The very sacred nature of the Ark and the taboos surrounding it would also obstruct any bright young scientist from tampering with its structure. We hear on one occasion that the ark was duplicated by a young man named Micah in his home, a surprising occurrence, reminiscent of claims that the nuclear bomb can be home-made. The lad's mother was quite proud of him; she had consecrated her silver for the purpose. [77] He made a graven image, a molten image, an ephod, a teraphim and hired a priest. Nothing untoward occurred save that the tribe of Dan descended upon the household and carried away the ark and the priest. Later we learn that the true Ark was kept at Shiloh, whence it was occasionally employed. Once the Philistines captured the Ark in battle, killing its attendants. They sent it from one city to another, but it acted so disastrously at each place in turn - perhaps as they sought to make it work - that the Philistines finally made a substantial offering of gold objects and a sacrifice of beasts to it and conveyed it back to the Israelites. The propitiatory golden mice of the offering are connected with Apollo Smintheus of Crete and Palestine, sminthos meaning "mouse." [78] In several passages, Ziegler reaches for connections between the mouse and electricity [79] . "Sminthos" was "mouse" in Greek and "mus" in Latin. "Mys" is another word for "mouse" in Greek, and "Mystery" (as in Eleusian Mysteries) is a cognate term and appears variously in connection with electrified rites. Apollo is also called "Mysagetes," which relates him to mouse and to his role as protector of the Muses. Much later, and the historian Herodotus relates the story told him, the army of Sennacherib, besieging Jerusalem, was set upon by an army of mice in the night; they gnawed the bowstrings of the archers and caused the army's total discomfiture. The Bible has it, and the date must be around 687 B. C., that a blast from heaven destroyed the Assyrian army. I discuss elsewhere this incident and ascribe the blast to an electro-gas explosion. Whether or not the cloud descended in the form of a mouse, a horde of mice would be drawn from the ground by the electricity. At all events, the Egyptians memorialized them by erecting a statue of a mouse (for they, too, opposed the Assyrians), at a city called, significantly, Letopolis, meaning "City of the Thunderbolt." At least two Greek towns were named Leptopolis (" Mouseville"). Josephus said that "Moses" should be written "Mouses." [80] This seems ridiculous; but let us ponder the matter. The usual Hebrew for Moses is "Mosche." The French version is "Mo‹se" but was once "Moyse." Depending upon the vowels that go between the consonants "M" and "s" we can be dealing with Moses, a mouse, a god, a ritual, a statue, or a musical muse, all of these somehow in an electrical context. The root flourishes, too, in several cultures, and attaches to events stretching at least from 1450 B. C. to the present era. The mouse involved is sacred, as at Letopolis and other mouse-named places, and has some association with a god, and in the present case sacrally with the Philistines and the Jews. In Chapter VI we shall trace and assign the name "Moses" to the Egyptian word for "child." Could it also be the Egyptian word for "a little being"? For a "mouse"? Probably not; we are fairly certain of our etymology. However, this is not to say that a mouse in the age after Moses might not have acquired from Moses the root of his name, especially since electricity seems to have been connected over some centuries with both Moses and Mice. Words often derive from the names of famous practitioners of what they refer to. An electric figure rather like a mouse could clump at the top of a rod like that of Moses or Mercury (brother of Apollo); it can surmount a turret, crouch upon a church steeple, or move restlessly about the top of a promontory. Numerous modern reports have ball-lightning "'scurrying like a mouse" around a house. A connection between Moses and the mice of the Philistines may, therefore, not be entirely fanciful. The Philistines also placed in the Ark as a propitiatory offering several modelled gold hemorrhoids. This would appear to be a singularly unaesthetic gift; it has quite baffled and embarrassed biblical students. Finally, now, we have clues. Thoth, we know, was the god of healing and is associated with Hebrew-Egyptian mosaic religions, even in the Bronze Serpent Rod (or caduceus) of Moses. Serious electrical shocks can cause nose-bleeding and anal bleeding. So can radiation. The membranes of both organs are electrically hyper-sensitive. Electrical and magnetic shifts promote plagues and changed incidences of heart disease and other troubles [81] . Not to be dismissed is the possibility that, during the Philistine affair, electrical conditions were disturbed. A disturbed electrical situation and probably radioactive fall-out, or some heavily ionized fallout would provoke simultaneously epidemics of several illnesses, hemorrhoidal and general bleeding, enhanced and uncontrolled Ark activity, and thence the religious, unitary "solution" of the biblical scenario. But, still, a model of hemorrhoids or piles seems unlikely and inexplicable. Then a solution appears, from deep in the etymology of the word "hemorrhoids." We find "haemorrhoid" also "haemorrhe," from the Greek meaning "blood-discharging." It is "a serpent whose bite was fabled to cause unstaunchable bleeding." [82] The Bible refers to these "serpents" and the plague of bleeding that they caused. These serpents (could they be leeches?) are the same as caused the plague which led to the fabrication of Moses' homeopathic Serpent Rod of Brass, sparks and jets of hissing fire breaking out in connection with radiation and electrical storms. The specific disease of hemorrhoids was probably a conspicuous part of the general bleeding epidemic and was attached to the word after general bleeding epidemics were long forgotten. The totem and taboo of the Ark would deter other enemies (or allies) who might have been tempted to acquire or imitate the Ark. It is noteworthy that the Bethshemites, in whose territory the Ark was abandoned by the Philistines, and who were connected with the Israelite, suffered the plague, too, and pleaded with the Israelites to come down from the hills and take the Ark away. It had the tabooed reputation of being the Jews' god. Those would properly be accepting Yahweh who accepted the Ark. Other peoples lacked, too, the history - the mixture of catastrophe and science in the Egyptian context - that the Ark grew out of. Then again it was difficult to construct and operate. Moses was a genius at synthesizing elements and a terrible bully at seeing that the machine was handled properly. Also, the others were probably too sky-oriented, astrological, and the idea of Baal, say, marching along with them humming his own name, would appear weird. Then there was the ever-present problem of technological change: what would their feather-bedding priests do without their sacred time-honored tasks to perform? (only the machinegun finally broke the centuries-old habit of European armies to attack in fine straight rows.) In all of this, I am not arguing that the ark machine was solely Israel's. The same may have been invented elsewhere, even in Egypt, but would not be adaptable to the central complex of functions - military, theological, political, and managerial - which it performed among the Israelites. When David was King he wished to bring the Ark to Zion where he ruled. So "David went up and all Israel to bring up thence the ark of God, the Lord, that dwelleth between the cherubim, whose name is called on it." [83] Yahweh was still there saying "Yahweh." A great festive party accompanied the ark as it moved on its way drawn by oxen. But at the threshing floor of Nacon, a man named Uzzah "took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled and God smote him there because he put forth his hand to the ark; and he died there besides the ark of God." [84] The electrocution frightened David so that he waited three months before his second attempt to move it, and this time installed it beside him. (One wonders why the Levites were not tending to the Ark; they are not mentioned.) In a queer incident, David is so happy at having the Ark that he dances naked around it, incurring the reproaches of his wife for making a public display of himself. She is suitably punished for her prudery by becoming barren for the rest of her life. Now the Ark was ensconced on high ground. It no longer went to war. Yet it is not known whether the Ark was regularly employed for its remaining functions. With David we are in the tenth century, five hundred years after Moses. We wonder whether electrical conditions can any longer support the Ark and whether Yahweh's presence will ever again grace the mercy seat between the cherubim. In a plaintive passage, Yahweh tells the Prophet Nathan to tell King David that he has not had a decent house but has had to live in tents since leaving Egypt. And we are informed that "the people were sacrificing in high places because no home had yet been built for the name of the Lord." [85] He asks therefore for a temple, but warns David against rushing into the job. David thereupon designs the Temple and leaves it for his son, Solomon, to build. Meanwhile it is clear that the Ark needs artificially supporting conditions to work at all. This bodes ill for the Ark as a mobile weapon, and as "inspector-general" of the tribal centers. It is discovered that the Ark works best standing upon a source of natural heat. The proper thermal conditions may be found usually on threshing floors, where in some ancient time the threshing of grain and the heat have become associated [86] . Matthew refers metaphorically to "unquenchable fire" that "will burn up the chaff." [87] David goes looking for a threshing floor on which to place the Ark [88] . Beneath the floor may be a source of ionization, a conduction of charge through rock - many floors being of smooth bare rock. Gressmann wonders at the Ark being regularly placed upon stones [89] . The Ark has no legs; very well, one might think; therefore it must be placed upon a stand of stones. Rather, the Ark had no legs so that it might be placed on stone. For it is on stone and rock, whether from the Jordan River or an old threshing floor or whatever, and especially on meteoritic stones, that the Ark can charge up negative electricity. The next artificial support of the Ark comes from being elevated. On high, it can profit from the accumulation of ground charge for point discharge into the atmosphere. Mt. Zion is a hill of Jerusalem. The Ark is there more active. Yet it should now be confessed that the original principle of the Ark is being lost - that it was a weapon of the plains and desert capable of being moved and of assaulting the mountain fortresses where St. Elmo's fire was active, and sometimes too active, as in the case of Jericho. A third artificial stimulant was water. Water conducts electricity and wetted conductors function better [90] . If the Ark were on deep smooth rock whose surface was wetted, the chances of the Ark becoming operational would be much greater. Any sacrificial object to be burnt by Yahweh had also to be wetted. So we find King David pouring water around the altar to assist in his sacrifices [91] . He may have also supplied water to the grounding and casing of the Ark to promote its conduction of charge. The altar was on a bare rock threshing floor and Yahweh sent a fire down upon his burnt offering. All facilitating conditions are brought together in the climactic Temple of Solomon high in Jerusalem - Ark, rock, height, top water, bottom water, and finally a temple that is itself designed as an Ark with devices in its Holy of Holy Rooms, the Inner Sanctum to connect the Ark to the building itself. Seven years were required to build it. The roof was of gold-plated wood. Indeed there was a separate house of wood inside the outer walls, which were of stone. Inside, "no stone was seen." [92] No metal connections were used on the outer wall; no hammering or metal work resounded during the construction. Stone, then wood, the insulator; then gold, the conductor. In the Temple court, a "molten sea" holding 12,000 gallons of water rested upon twelve couchant bulls facing in the four cardinal directions; it was for the priests to wash themselves [93] . A multitude of sharp gold points covered the roof of the Temple. The Temple was never struck by lightning during its long existence [94] . Michaelis and others have identified the points as lightning rods and he says that they connected "with the caverns in the hill upon which the temple was situated, by means of pipes in connection with the guilding which covered all the exterior of the building..." [95] Ancient Hindu fountains were also protected from lightning by rods that grounded charges, and the Temple of Juno in Rome was protected by a roof of many pointed sword-blades [96] . One may surmise that the Ark was connected with the deep natural rock and water, and that the smaller cherubim of the Ark were in contact with the giant cherubim, that in turn connected with the roof where exterior rods or spires induced the atmospheric charging. Scrutinizing the appropriate Biblical passages, we can reconstruct the ultimate setting of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was set in a windowless room that was a perfect cube of 20 cubits (about 30 feet). It was placed below two giant cherubim of wood, covered with gold, the tips of whose wings touched each other and the golden walls of the rooms; that is, each cherub had a wingspread of 10 cubits. Gold covered the whole inside of the Temple including the inside ceiling of the roof. Three possibilities appear: that the whole was a purely symbolic creation not intended to work; that the design was intended to function under the new and weak atmospheric conditions, but could not work without blowing up the Inner Sanctum; that the system was designed to work but could not function, or its functioning was believed to be too dangerous and the connections were deliberately broken. King Solomon, in his dedication speech, is supposed to have said to the assembled throng: "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built." [97] The speech does not ring out with confidence. In the very next verse, Solomon prays that "thy eyes may be open night and day toward this house, the place of which thou hast said, "My Name shall be there." ' Electric eyes and electric name! "When the priests came out of the holy place," on this first occasion, "a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord." [98] Either the system worked, or the priests lit a phosphorous smoke and bungled it in the closed quarters. I doubt that it worked. The conditions were not propitious; if the gigantic apparatus had loaded and sparked, the lightning bolt would have blasted the room of wood and gold to pieces. Thus stands the Ark. Ultimate perfection. But the "Holy Ghost," so to speak, is gone. Yahweh says little: the mobile weapon of the plains has surrendered to the pyramidal weapon of the mountains. The assimilation is completed. Still the gods of the mountain scarcely speak, nor does Yahweh, now also a god of the heights. It may be appropriate to use the fact that out of Egypt, in the fifth year of King Rehoboam, son of Solomon, came Shishak, Pharaoh of Egypt. Jerusalem was surrendered without siege. Shishak "took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasure of the King's house; he took away everything," [99] It is ironic that Shishak should be identified as Thut-Moses III [100] - "Child of Thut" echo of Moses, "the Child. " It is doubly ironic that Thut (Thoth) should mean the god "Thoth," "Mercury" in Latin, "Hermes" in Greek, who was an electrical god - distinct from the "greater god" Horus or Yahweh or Zeus-Jupiter; his famous caduceus, composed of a winged rod with a serpent entwined upon it is nothing other than Moses' rod of the brazen serpent, the original of which probably ended up in the trophy rooms of Shishak-Thutmoses [101] . It is trebly ironic that Thut-Moses III might have had, as aunt and Queen Mother, Hatshepsut, who has been identified as the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon and admired so his treasures [102] . An inscription of hers has recently been publicized, in which she boasts that "when I became king, my uraeus threw fire against my enemies." [103] The uraeus denotes a symbol of royal power, but here may refer to an Ark display, employed hundreds of years after Moses and at the time of King Solomon. Finally, it is ironic that the Ark ended where its idea had begun with Moses - in Egypt, impotent [104] . Nor perhaps were the pyramids employed under Shishak of the New Kingdom as they had been under Thoum and his predecessors of the Middle Kingdom. The "Ark School" of Moses was moribund. So was the "Pyramid School" of electricity. The age of pyramids was over. The Romans relied upon heated oil, levered projectiles, assault towers, well-worked battering rams. Somewhere in the Near East was invented "Greek fire," a sticky, nearly inextinguishable mixture, that was hurled upon the enemy. Everyone relied upon banners, trumpets, drums and images to inspire themselves and terrorize the enemy. Not until the deployment of explosive power in bursting units or by blunderbuss were the effects of the Ark achieved. But then, of course, the natural conditions for the progressive development of an electrical weapon had disappeared. And there was no Moses around and about to develop electrostatics into other electrical forms - unless it was Nicola Tesla (1856-1943), who sought to make of the whole world globe and its atmosphere an electrostatic machine. But Tesla, a lonely genius akin to Moses, lacked Aaron and Joshua, and led no revolutionary people. He encountered the effective neglect of the "Motor and Wire School" which he himself had helped create. Nor had he the Great Comet or Yahweh. {S : GOD'S FIRE GONE} GOD'S FIRE GONE What was left of the electrical function was carried out on altars in high places, which would serve on occasion to induce St. Elmo's fire upon sacrifices to produce burnt offerings. Psalm 78 chants: For they provoked him to anger with their high places; They moved him to jealousy with their graven images. When God heard, he was full of wrath, and he utterly rejected Israel, He forsook. his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among men, and delivered his power to captivity, his glory to the hand of the foe. It is registered that as the Jews were being carried into captivity in Babylonia, Jeremiah the Prophet hid the fire of the Altar in a secret waterless pit [105] . Upon the return from captivity, the priestly posterity repaired to the place and found only "thick water." They took this and placed it upon the Altar, whereupon, the sun striking it, a great flame was kindled. The pit was made a sacred enclosure, sometimes called the chamber of Nephtar (Naphta, oil). The thick water was probably petroleum. The incident is connected with the celebration of the Festival of Lights (Hanukkah). The possible use of petroleum then, at such other times, would supplement the true "Lord's fire" when this became unavailable, or, as may have happened here, too [106] , when a chemical fire was needed to excite an electrical discharge. The age of the prophets had been an age of renewed electrical phenomena. We ought not here discuss this subject, which is extensive in itself, because the Ark was not in action. Then, as Ziegler writes, "The age of the Prophets came to an end with the death of Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi. A Rabbinic book says at this time: "The Holy Spirit ceased out of Israel." [107] Electricity might still be induced in sacrifices on high places. The Jewish historian, Josephus, writing in the first century of this era, said that the light which "shined out when God was present at their sacrifices" ceased for the Jews two hundred years before his time, "'God having been displeased at the transgression of his laws. " [108] Under special conditions and with the most elaborate arrangement, high sites such as that of the famous Delphic oracle would still produce electric shocks. These would inspire the Pythoness to utter sounds, which would be interpreted by the priests. A young Scythian visitor, who paid his charges and watched the scene, exclaimed in disgust in a letter afterwards at the great many personal decisions and determinations of public policy which had been arrived at by these means. Plutarch, 1500 years after the Exodus, wondered "Why oracles cease to give answers." He had been himself a priest at Delphi [109] . During his tenure, as described by him, a Pythoness was killed in a way that suggests electrocution, after the oracle's weakness of response had induced unsafe practices in fact, an over- watering of the ground in the oracle chamber. Three centuries later, an anti-Christian emperor, "Julian the Apostate," decided to help the Jews rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem, probably to spite the Christians. The project "was dropped when it was reported (as it was on both an earlier and a later occasion) that 'balls of fire' had issued from the old foundations and scared away the workmen." [110] The name of Yahweh lapsed among the Jews upon their return from the Babylonian exile in the sixth century. One scholar [111] suggests that this happened because Elohim was a more universal god and the Jews began to proselytize in the Greco-Roman world. Or else, says he, the divine name may have been too sacred to utter, and the ritual of the synagogue replaced it by "My Lord Adonai." Both may be true reasons and connected with the third, more basic reason, that is, that Yahweh was no longer manifesting himself because he could not. Or he had retired, deus otiosus, and would not create the electrical conditions of the earlier world. The name is hidden, not because it was too sacred to utter, but because it was not to be heard. {S : Notes (Chapter 4: The Ark in Action)} Notes (Chapter 4: The Ark in Action) 1. Paul F. Mottelay, Bibliographical History of Electricity and Magnetism, London: Griffin, 1922, 235. Mason's advertisement is the earliest explicit mention that I have found of the idea that the organization and motions of the solar system can be explained on the principles of electrical forces. 2. T. A. Hankins, 206 Science (30 nov. 1979), 1066. cf. J. L. Heilbron, op. cit. ; Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 1956. 3. Ex. 33: 9. 4. Buber, 161. 5. Ps. 132: 2; 5. 6. Tompkins, 278. 7. Heilbron, op. cit., 340. 8. John J. O'Neill, Prodigal Genius, 1944, 91 et passim. Kenneth M. Swezey, Science (May 16, 1958). Tesla lived 1856-1943. 9. Ibid., 188, 182. 10. Heilbron, op. cit., 327ff. 11. Ex. 31: 23-5. 12. Cassuto, 383. 13. Jotham Johnson, ed., The New Century Classical Handbook, New York: Appleton-Century- Crafts (1962), 411. 14. Priestley I, 140. 15. V. Grigoryev and G. Myakishev, The Forces of Nature (MIR Publ. Moscow, 1971). 16. Deut. 10: 3. 17. Cassuto, 328. 18. From page 62a of Egypt and Israel. 19. Priestley, II, 154. 20. Zvi Rix, "The Androgynous comet," I SISR 5 (1977), 17. 21. Worth Smith is cited by P. Tomkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, New York, 1975, p. 278, to the effect that the unlidded open box or coffer of the Kings Chamber inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops had "exactly the same cubic capacity as the Ark of the Covenant." This is almost surely incorrect. The coffer holds 8 cubic royal cubits by Livio Stecchini's computations. The Volume of the Ark would be roughly 5.625 cubic royal cubits. Further, the coffer could readily have been a sarcophagus because of its 78" length, the Ark at about 45" not at all. And the coffer is of a single piece of granite. See also Stecchini, in Tomkins, pp. 322-6. Stecchini identifies three different cubits in Egypt. Piazzi Smyth held that the "sacred cubit" used in the Great Pyramid was the same as the one used by Moses for the design of the Holy Tabernacle (25. 025 Br. inches), Ibid. p. 77. 22. A systematic exposition of what the ancients knew about electricity, and a refutation of the liberal position that they knew very much, is contained in T. H. Martin's La Foudre, l'Electricit‚, et le Magn‚tisme chez les Ancients, Paris: Didier, 1866. 23. G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, London, 1957, 65. 24. Ibid. 25. The legend says faces of boys. III G 158. 26. II. Gressmann, Altorientalische Texte und Bilder zum Alten Testamente, Tubingen: Siebeck, 1909, plate 106.) The goddesses are probably Isis and Nephthys. 27. Ibid., 158-9. 28. I Sam. 4: 4; Cassuto, p. 333; also I Chron. 13: 6 and Ps 80: 1. 29. 2 Sam. 6: 2. 30. Cassuto, 336, translating Ex. 25: 22. 31. Cassuto, 330, rendering Ps. 132: 7; see also Ps. 99: 5; I Chron. 28: 2. 32. Buber, 157,159. 33. Ibid., 150. 34. Ibid., 151. 35. For instance, 12. 36. Ex. 25 and 37. 37. Ex. 25: 19; cf. 37: 8. 38. II Priestley, 150. 39. Ziegler, YHWH, Princeton, N. J. : Metron Pubns., 1977., 10. 40. Manoilov, 120; Jellinek, Elektrische Unfalle, Vienna, 1925. 41. Ibid., 150. 42. Lev. 10: 1-2. A parallel occurred in Roman history: Tullus Hostilius was a prince "who found in the Book of Numa instructions on the secret sacrifices offered to Jupiter Elicius, made a mistake, and, in consequence of it, 'he was struck by lightning and consumed in his own palace. '" (H. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877, 527, quoting here Livy, Rom. Hist. I, ch. 31 and also Piso and Pliny. 43. III G 187. 44. The Pentateuch and Haftoras, London: Soncino Press, 1938, 480. 45. Velikovsky thinks (W. in C. p. 56) that the "strange fire" was petroleum. 46. Levit. 10: 1-7. 47. Levit. 16: 2. 48. Ziegler, 27. 49. Mottelay, 204. 50. G III 228-9. 51. Ex. 23; 28 (New World Trans.) 52. Gressmann, Die Lade Jahves, 3-6, is baffled at the idea of the Ark being a direction- finder (see next page) and thinks it was hitched behind animals who were "given their own heads" with the Israelites trailing along behind. 53. Footnote to Ex. 25: 10-22, p. 99. 54. Num. 10: 33. 55. III G 235-6. 56. Ziegler, 23. 57. Num. 10: 35-6. 58. Ziegler, 24. 59. II Priestley, "The Musical Tone of Various Discharges Ascertained," 355. 60. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1968 298. 61. Ibid., 299. 62. Lev. 25: 9ff. Cf. Velikovsky, W. in C., 155. 63. W. in C. 153-154. 64. Num. 14: 40-5. 65. Ziegler, 28. 66. K. M. Kenyon, Digging up Jericho, London, 1957, 43. 67. Chaim Herzog and Mordecai Gichon, Battles of the Bible, New York: Random House, 1978, 28. Although these military men are psychologically insightful, the several pages that they consign to the Exodus and the Battle of Jericho suffer from "the four sins of modern biblicim": confused chronology; reductionism; primitivism; and uniformitarianism. 68. I think that Herzog and Gichon perceive correctly that the present word "harlot" was originally a "victualler" or "hostess of an inn", 27. 69. I SISR 3 (1976), 2-7 and II SISR (1977) 16, 19. 70. Ibid. and K. M. Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land, 3rd ed. London (1970), 197. 71. Kenyou, p. 254-5. 72. "The Conquest of Canaan and the Revised Chronology," I Interdiscip. Bible Scholar 1 (Aug. 1979), 43. 73. Joshua 3; Num. 33: 48-9; 25. 74. "Notes on the Bronze Age Tombs of Jericho," PEQ, 1955, 128, discussed by Bimson (1979). 75. G III 330-1. 76. When in Vietnam in 1967 the American leader urged a broader approach to the problems of pacification, a Marine general was widely quoted for saying: "Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will come along behind." 77. Jud. 17: 3. 78. Theodor H. Gaster, Myth, Legends, and Customs in the Old Testament, New York, Harper and Row, 451-3. 79. Ziegler, 107-8. 80. Ziegler, 107 and cf. Josephus, II Works, Ch. 9: 6, 120. 81. Manoilov, pp. 60-1, 72; Fred Soyka, The Ion Effect, New York: Dutton, 1977. 82. The Oxford English Dictionary. 83. I Chron. 13: 6. 84. II Sam. 6: 1-7. 85. I Kings 3: 1-2. 86. I Chron. 21: 15-22, 26. 87. Ziegler, 229; Matt. 3: 11. 88. 2 Sam. 24: 18-24. 89. Die Lade Jahves, 17. 90. Cf. R. T. Omond, 40 Nature 102, May 30, 1889 for a description of the enhancement of St. Elmo's fire by water. 91. II Sam. 24: 16-25; I Chron. 21: 15-22,26. 92. I Kings 6: 18. 93. II Chron. 4: 6. 94. Josephus the Historian, Jewish Wars, bk V, ch. 5; Motteley, Biblio. Hist., p. 10. 95. Magazine Scientifique de Gottingen (1783), no. 5: quoted by H. Blavatsky. Isis Unveiled, I, 528. 96. Ibid., 527-8. 97. I Kings 8: 28. 98. II Chron. 7: 1-2. 99. II Chron. 12: 9. 100. Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos, ch. 4, Eva Danelius, "Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?" II SISR 3 (1977-8), 64-79. 101. The rod destroyed by Hezekiah was most likely an imitation of the original. 102. Cf. Eva Danelius, (discussing Velikovsky, A. in C., ch. 3)," Identification..," I Kronos n§ 3 (1975), 3. 103. New York Times, May 4, 1941, pp. l, B12. Hans Goedicke associates the tablet with the Exodus, and the tidal wave of Exodus with the explosion of the volcano of Thera-Santorini to the north. But Hatshepsut came in Solomon's time (948-927 B. C., see Geoffrey Gammon, "A Chronology for the Eighteenth Dynasty," II S. I. S. R. no. 3, 1977-8, 90-4); the Exodus occurred around 1440 B. C., by Biblical reckoning, as developed by Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos; and Thera, or Thira, exploded bout 1000 B. C. (see my Chaos and Creation, 1981, following Isaacson). 104. Since the Ark is no longer mentioned until the 7th century B. C. (R. H. Kennett, "Ark," I Ency. Rel. and Ethics, p. 791), and three possible arks are pictured on the bas-reliefs of Thutmoses' booty, and no ark is mentioned in Nebuchadnezzar's booty from Jerusalem, Velikovsky's reliance upon legendary source for believing the Ark was not taken (A. in C., p. 158) may be misplaced. Cf. III G. p. 158. But Velikovsky in A. in C. p. 210, fn. 14, reports in contradiction an Abyssinian legend that Menelik, a son of Solomon and one who may be the Queen of Sheba [Hatshepsut], stole the Ark. In a booklet published by a fundamentalist sect, the British Israelites, and reported to me by Hyam Maccoby, the thesis that Shishak looted the Ark is asserted. 105. The first letter of the Second Book of Maccabees. 106. 2 Ma. 1: 31-6. Perhaps a search for the pit of Naphtha might locate a source of badly needed oil for Israel. 107. Ziegler, 72, citing Tosefta Sotah, xiii, 52. 108. Works, III, 9, 194. 109. Ziegler, ch. 19. 110. 10 EB, "Julian the Apostate," 333. III. X EB 786. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 5: } {T LEGENDS AND MIRACLES} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE LEGENDS AND MIRACLES Settled temporarily by the Holy Mountain, Israel awaits miracles. Moses and no one else must provide them. The Mountain is very active - smoke and fire abound. The scene is obscured by the continued high dusty and turbulent sky. Moses ascends the Mountain and gets initial instructions regarding preparation of a covenant. Moses returns and receives the assurances of the people: "All that Yahweh has spoken we will do." [1] Yahweh, hearing this, commands Israel to be present at the foot of the mountain on the third day of their consecration. The third day broke with horrendous thunder, lightning, clouds, and trumpet blasts upon the mountain. The people assembled as instructed. Yahweh called up Moses and Aaron and delivered the Ten Commandments to the multitude. Apparently the people could not make out his words with all the thunderings, lightnings, the sound of the trumpets and the mountain smoking, so they said to Moses: "You speak to us and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die." [2] So Moses drew near again to the "thick darkness" where Yahweh was and he received many ordinances. Moses is told to invite the leaders of the people up to see Yahweh; do not let the people come up. Before doing so, Moses sacrificed oxen and sprinkled their blood over the people as they gave their pledge to the Covenant. He brings the seventy elders and three priests - Aaron and his sons (later to be accidentally electrocuted) - up to a marvelous plateau, a table or pavement of sapphire stone, evidencing prolonged electrical discharging, raising a heat that glazed the rock, perhaps metamorphosing it [3] . There "they saw the God of Israel;" it is repeated: "They beheld God." [4] Not so, the exegetes say, Yahweh is invisible; ergo they could not have seen him; never mind the explicit language. Nonetheless Moses is inspired and hears Yahweh calling to him. He tells the elders to await him and, during his absence, to refer any problems to his adjutants, Aaron and Hur. Joshua, who is called his servant, goes part of the way up, and halts. Moses waits because of a dangerous cloud that hovers over the summit. On the seventh day, Yahweh calls, and Moses enters the cloud. All Israel, meanwhile, can see from below "the glory of Yahweh like a devouring fire on top of the mountain." [5] After forty days and nights, Moses descends from the mountain with the laws, written by Yahweh on two stone tablets. Awaiting Moses is a full scale revolution - the Golden Calf. He destroys the tablets in shame and anger. He suppresses the revolt ruthlessly. He begs Yahweh for another chance. Again he goes up the Holy Mountain. This time, Yahweh admonishes him to hide himself from His person, so Moses enters a crevasse, a cleft, a kind of cave, and there crouches as far in as possible (" bows low") when Yahweh's brilliance passes by him. Not even a pinprick of light penetrated his cave, says a legend, or else he would have been consumed when Yahweh and his retinue passed by; still the intensity of illumination was such that "he caught the reflection of it so that from its radiance his face began to shine." [6] When he descends, the people recoil from him in fright and awe. His countenance is radiant. He has a halo - the first halo, and the only one on earth - Neher states enthusiastically. Others give Moses horns on this occasion. Michelangelo's great conception of Moses depicts him with horns. Why didn't the Jews and Catholics complain of this? Daiches presents an unconvincing etymological argument [7] . All the medieval and Renaissance scholars and churchmen, led astray by St. Jerome, read a word wrong: Karen (H) is a verb meaning "shone" or "gave forth rays of light"; the noun keren means "horn" or ray of light" (Ex. 34: 35). He objects to deriving the latter from the former word. But the words are obviously related; Hebrew vowels are notably unreliable in sounding words (as when a preference is sought between "Jehovah" and "Yahweh"); the earliest etymologies are often indefinite and partial. Perhaps something with connotations of both "horn" and "ray of light" may be intended, inasmuch as the phenomenon was capable of giving both impressions, and people were quite sensitive to "horns" in this aftermath of the revolt of the Golden Calf. Ruth Mellinkoffs enchanting study of The Horned Moses concludes that St. Jerome's translation of Exodus 34: 29 as 'horned' appears "in keeping with the context and meaning of 'horned' in the ancient world as well as the metaphorical meaning of 'horn' and 'horned' in the Bible. It meant strength, honor, victory, power, divinity, kingship, and salvation..." The scholar-theologians of the Church saw them as "horns of light, or light emanating in the manner of a horn" - an interpretation first suggested by Rashi, the famous eleventh-century Jewish commentator. [8] Moses has unusual ways of conducting, storing, and discharging electricity. Or was there so much of a voltage gradient as he descended that he discharged static electricity in coming down? As mountaineers have testified, St. Elmo's fire under certain propitious conditions, even now, will stream like horns from the ears of a subject and from any tool he is carrying. The horns of animals stream fire, too, in such circumstances. And always in mind is the comet with its horns reaching far out from its head. Close the horns and there arises a halo, given to Moses and to saints. The later saints got their radiant 'halos' by traditional inference; for them it is a medal, like millions of Christians wear the crucifix without experiencing crucifixion. Earth and heaven are united in a single symbol once more. Moses "did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking to Yahweh." He ordered all to draw close so that he could give them the laws. The people's faces shone, too, briefly [9] . Perhaps they felt a sympathetic contagion. Afterwards Moses put a veil over his face whenever he was in public. He removed it when he spoke to Yahweh in the tent and then replaced it when he came out. St. Paul spoke of "Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of his fading splendor." His skin was probably desquamating. When it was cured, an explanation for removing the veil would not be difficult: to avoid claiming a permanent gift, or as punishment by Yahweh for some peccadillo. One rare picture of ca. 1000 A. D. gives Moses all three: horns, veil, and mask [10] . (See Figure 15.) We may go farther into the mysteries of Moses' halo, Hugo Gressmann [11] , one of the greatest of Old Testament authorities, asserts that Moses always wore a mask, that Moses wanted to play god and, after he had come down radiant from the Holy Mountain, he assumed a sacred mask. Gressmann had no idea of the atmospheric turbulence nor of its affecting Moses' skin; he claimed that priestly masks were to be found elsewhere, whether among the Egyptians or Semitic tribes. By intensive linguistic analysis, Gressmann demonstrates elisions in the Bible where the word "mask" would occur, and says that the word "veil" is a weak and vague substitution of a thousand years later [12] . On the contrary, I find a powerful connection between Moses' perilous sojourn on the mountain, the radiation disease symptoms, his donning the veil or mask, and his incorporating the mask into the required equipment of the priests when working amidst the divine smoke and fire of the Inner Sanctum. Gressmann lets us believe that Moses' mask was his permanent public face; if so, it can only mean that Moses was disfigured for life and therefore wore a mask, naturally proclaimed sacred; or more likely that Moses' facial disfiguration was itself considered a permanent mask of Yahweh, and that Aaron's and other masks were artificial, in imitation of Yahweh's mask and for protection against dangerous radiation and shocks around the Holy of Holies. I find additional support for this view in the advice of Hyam Maccoby, who asserts that the word in dispute is in fact Karan, the only occurrence in all of the Bible in this form. The phrase would then read that Moses' skin became of horn-like texture {S : RADIATION DISEASES} RADIATION DISEASES The cause of Moses' halo may have been phosphorous burns, Figure 15: Moses with Horns, Veil and Mask. (Source: Bible of Lubeck, 1494) compounded by a dose of radiation. Both elements would be present in abundance in the clouds of the mountain and the artificial clouds of the Tent of the Tabernacle. Whoever entered the Tabernacle unless under order was to be stricken with leprosy [13] . Many sins are punishable by leprosy [14] . And there are various types of leprosy; despite all the detail on the diagnosis and treatment of leprosy in the Book of Leviticus (13: 1-59; 14), no clear single disease emerges. A "leprosy" that is not excluded is radiation sickness, which of course during all the centuries when the Bible was seriously studied by scholars was an unknown disease. Skin lesions, blisters, and ultimately death among experimenters with radium and X-ray are a twentieth century phenomena. When the first atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, and features of radiation disease began to emerge, it was thought at first that an infectious plague had followed in the wake of the disaster. In the Revolt of the Golden Calf, Aaron, whom Moses had appointed high priest, lost hope for Moses and deserted briefly to the opposition. Later Aaron and their "sister," Miriam, who had become a kind of priestess for women and children, entered the Lord's tent and accused Moses of such irrelevances as taking for his wife a non-Jew. The woman in question may have been the daughter of Hobab, the Kenite, although referred to only as the Cushite (Ethiopian?) in the Bible. Thus suggests Winnett, who adds that this bigamous liaison was probably contracted for political reasons inasmuch as the Jews were now leaving Midianite territory and moving northwards into Kadesh, land of the related Kenites [15] . Moses promptly squelched his relatives. He said, in effect, that if it was Yahweh they would complain to, all three of them should have a talk with Himself. They did, and Miriam, I think, emerged from the tent with a mild case of radiation sickness and phosphorous poisoning that blanched her skin, and greatly frightened her and Aaron. She was to be permanently expelled from the camp for leprosy; but Moses put in a good word for her with Yahweh who limited the expulsion to seven days, after which she returned, healthy, perhaps having fed meanwhile upon the honey-like manna which, like honey, would have been an antidote for radiation sickness and blood-poisoning [16] . According to legend, when Moses wanted to cure Miriam, he drew a circle around himself and, in praying to God, concluded with: "If Thou do not heal her, I myself shall do so, for Thou has already revealed to me, how leprosy arises and how it disappears." Perhaps he was referring to his own "halo" case. Miriam may have lost a lot of blood cells but she did not become bald. Many in those days were not so lucky. Isaiah probably had their history in mind when later he prophesies: "The Lord will give the women of Zion bald heads, the Lord will strip the hair from their foreheads." [17] Since he raises the same point twice elsewhere, Isaiah must have had an experience in mind in which he firmly believed. But then, far back, in the time of Exodus, the Egyptian Ipuwer had been lamenting: "Indeed, hair (has fallen out) for everybody, and the man of rank can no longer be distinguished from him who is nobody." The upper classes had worn their hair long. A Swedish commentator, Ragnar Forshufvud, writes that "a dose of 300-400 rem will give temporary epilation while 700 rem will give permanent epilation." (1 rem = the radiation dose of 1 Roentgen of X or Y radiation.) If the whole body is subject to a single dosage of 450 rem, there is only a 50% chance of survival, which may be another reason why Ipuwer had written of Exodus in Egypt, "Indeed men are few, and he who places his brother in the ground is everywhere." [18] Thomas Foster, "a physician of some note in the scientific world and member of several learned societies in England and the Continent, in a work published in 1829, devotes forty- one pages to a catalogue of plagues and epidemics, in nearly every instance accompanied by a comet." [19] Sometimes beasts (the "murrain") are afflicted as well as or instead of humans. The relation between chemical and radiation plagues and "real plagues" of viruses and germs is close in the history of Exodus and its aftermath. Realization that their sources may be cosmic disturbances will no doubt help in their investigation. In a recent BBC interview (1977) regarding his research on "Diseases from Outer Space," Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe maintained that "invasions of this type could be responsible for all the major plagues and epidemics which have punctuated our history from antiquity to modem times." He was seconded by his colleague, Fred Hoyle [20] . {S : THE ELECTRO-CHEMICAL FACTORY} THE ELECTRO-CHEMICAL FACTORY Of clouds in Exodus, there are the high clouds of obscuring the sky and causing the long- enduring darkness; next the cloud or pillar of smoke that leads the Jews out of Egypt; the cloud and pillar upon the mountain; the cloud arising from the Tabernacle sanctuary; the cloud that moves with the ark; the cloud above Moses' tent outside the camp; and occasional clouds that are dangerous to the camp. Yahweh's fire, which we find synonymous with electrostatic fire, is present in all the clouds. The fire can come before, with, and after the cloud's appearance. The experience of clouds is frequent. These clouds do not carry rain. They carry vapors which have serious consequences for evil and good. The clouds in all cases are associated with Yahweh; they are dangerous; Moses is uniquely competent to deal with them, and even he is overexposed on the mountain and perhaps on other occasions. The great pillar of cloud and the high obscuring blanket of cloud are probably connected, the first being an earlier state of vision and contact with the comet's tail and the second being a later state of the elements of the tail that diffused throughout the earth's atmosphere. Comet tails can be millions of miles long and thousands of miles in diameter. Since we have had no late experience with large comets, their components are subject to debate. It has lately become permissible in scientific circles to attribute many kinds of materials to them - elemental and molecular gases, particles, ice and rocks. Should a large comet-tail pass through the atmosphere, it would deposit its own materials, and combine its materials with those of the earth, not only with normal atmospheric components but also with the discharges peculiar to volcanoes and typhoons or tornadoes. In the major catastrophic columns or typhoons of a comet-earth encounter, therefore, would be discovered a variety of chemicals under turbulent conditions of pressure, heat, and electricity. Picture a vast gaseous and heavy meteoritic fall-out mingling with the eruptions of volcanoes and electrical discharges by the many thousands, and one has the beginnings of a conception of the event. In such a maelstrom, miracles would be multitudinous. We are dealing with a vast electro-chemical factory. The first response of a catastrophized human group is to relate itself to the turbulent skies. Moses was exceedingly busy - up and down the mountain - trying to reproduce on earth what he saw in heaven. Hence what we expect is that certain "miracles" happen naturally and others, much simpler and crude, but nevertheless amazing, happen as the artifices of man. Reciting the Biblical references, we can derive radiation and radiance of various types: a complex chemically- loaded dew; red phosphorus; hydrocarbons; unidentified poisons; sulfur; mercury; ammonia; cinnabar (cinnamon); formaldehyde; manna; and perfumes. The sky and earth are producing enough heat and electricity to manufacture many products. The element phosphorus might have been prominent in the Exodus chemical environment. It may have had poisonous effects, especially if accompanied by radioactive materials, in the Nile and the wells of Egypt. It was probably present in the clouds of the mountain. It was a major ingredient in Moses' arsenal, possibly for helping to send up smoke when smoke did not originate in satisfactory abundance from the ark, possibly for communicating with Yahweh in his tent, possibly as smoke bombs. When Moses set up his tent far outside the camp for living and counseling, Yahweh would visit him there: witness the cloud or pillar of smoke that descended whenever Moses entered the tent door [21] . Phosphorus is "not found free in nature except in a few meteorites " because "it takes fire spontaneously upon exposure to air and forms dense white fumes of the oxide." [22] It is a colorless, transparent, soft wax that glows in the dark. It converts to red phosphorus with sunlight or heat, after which it neither glows nor spontaneously combusts in air. White phosphorus is used to make smoke shells for military use.) White phosphorus is easily made. Calcium phosphate, a stone, is ground into powder and combined with silversand (silicon dioxide) and charcoal. Carbon monoxide is a by-product. When exposed to air, the phosphorus burns with a bright hot flame, a voluminous dense white smoke, and gives off a poisonous gas. Moses would have known from Egypt the properties of these common materials, what they smelled like when burned, what the clouds on the mountain appeared to be. His main problem would have been to encapsulate the white phosphorus in order to deprive it of air until the moment of use. Small gourds, ceramic jars, or bladders would contain the material under seal. A poisonous grenade would be available to toss into the tents of opponents of Yahweh, such as Dathan and Abiram. They had refused Moses' summons and denied his authority. Moses supervised their execution by Yahweh. The ground was said to split open and swallow their households. The crowd fled the scene, which might have resembled the hell-fires bursting out and enveloping them. Small amounts of phosphorus would suffice to emit a smoke cloud about the Tabernacle and tent of Moses, Phosphorescence, which may characterize many objects, is "the emission of light from a substance exposed to radiation and persisting as an afterglow after the radiation has been removed." [23] A phosphorescence may last for an instant, days, or years and will react whenever agitated by heat or optical waves. This refers to the cases of Moses and Miriam and a kind of leprosy, but also to the "footstool of Yahweh" that the elders witnessed; various apatite phosphate minerals are of a green glassy appearance and "are often fluorescent in ultra-violet light...; phosphorescent; sometimes strongly thermo-luminescent." [24] Although we cannot be sure of the processes of the clouds of Exodus, the existence of a special electro-chemical environment and an applied science thereof are fairly demonstrable. The dew that fell in great abundance in the wilderness was no ordinary vapor. It was often red, often poisonous, often conductive and facilitative of electrical discharges. The wearing of Moses-designed heavy and full priestly garments, the washing that went on before and after rituals, the placement of veils and curtains within the Tabernacle, the holes in the tent tops, the arrangements of vessels and paraphernalia: - "Aaron and his sons are to do this lest they die" - these were safety practices and procedures for handling dangerous products. Only later could they be called psychological obsessions, when their functions had disappeared with the fading of the electrical age and the great electrochemical factories of nature. One scholar, Von Fange, writes that "In the Middle East in Ancient times there was an amazing number of literary references to a garment of flame, the goatskin dyed red, or a ramskin dyed red, or a red-dyed goat. The meaning is completely obscure." [25] An editor's footnote reads: "Obviously references to ramskins dyed red as in Exodus 25: 5 [describe] directions from God for construction of the sacred Tabernacle, and would have no connection with pagan use of goat skins dyed red." Both are connected probably to the red dust and dew that covered everything dead and alive in the Egyptian plagues and from time to time in the wilderness. The startling, ominous, and effective events are typically perpetuated in design and rites. Earlier, we had occasion to discuss the taboos of redness. {S : MANNA} MANNA "When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it." [26] Obviously, despite the darkness of the days, a solar heating and nocturnal cooling were occurring in the wilderness. The manna may cure the very radiation sickness often caused by the radiation-loaded dew. Both are part of the Exodus experience of Egypt and Israel. Few scholars doubt that something natural and edible was being made available to the starving Israelites. Almost always, they have sought some desert plant that by its excrescences or pollen fall-out would give nourishment. Buber writes as if the matter were settled [27] : "The tale is told of manna (a secretion of cockineal insect, tasting like crystallized honey, which covers the tamarisk bushes at the time of the apricot harvest, drips to earth by day and becomes hard at night)." This is a whit short of absurdity. The large volume of manna, its long duration, its fall from heaven, the technique of its baking, and other details of the story are shunted aside. More persuasive incidents are available, with lichen as the possible agent, thus: "In 1829, during the war between Persia and Russia, there was a great famine in Orumiah, south-west of the Caspian. One day, during a violent wind, the surface of the country was covered with a lichen which 'fell down from heaven. ' The sheep immediately attacked and devoured it, which suggested to the inhabitants the idea of reducing it to flour and making bread of it, which was found to be good and nourishing." [28] Electrical winds have been blamed for such drops, which is a step in the right direction. Manna is described in two places, in somewhat different terms [29] . "Almost any reasonably experienced confectioner will recognize the substance concerned as a common constituent of sugar confectionary, usually called invert sugar." [30] It fell nightly as seeds, for a long time then occasionally. The last fall was reported just before the Battle of Jericho, "and the people of Israel had manna no more." [31] It could be baked into sugar-carbohydrate loaves. Although at first delighted and grateful, the people ultimately became heartily sick of it. The basis for its natural production was the huge volume of formaldehyde gas, formed by the incomplete combustion of many organic substances. "At least one worker has actually produced sugars directly from very freshly formed gaseous formaldehyde at a temperature of 150§-180§ C (H. Vogel at the University of Geneva in 1928)." [32] A British expert on the chemistry of confections, M. G. Reade, has followed the various processes whereby, from the formaldehyde of incomplete combustion in the atmosphere, edible manna could have been naturally fashioned. The problem is like that of artificially accomplishing photosynthesis. He concludes that "Synthesis in a burning fiery cloud is feasible, even probable when other environment conditions are favourable." [33] He thinks that Moses designed the Tabernacle to produce manna, but only because of the tent's construction [34] and not because there is any evidence of manna being actually produced. (Reade does speculate ingeniously that the reason why the often grumpy people followed the leader and Tabernacle was in order to get the manna that Moses was producing artificially.) His comments on the tabernacle are revealing: "Perhaps the single most basic association is that between the 'Tabernacle of the Lord' and the physical characteristics of the cloud. In laying down guidelines for the construction of a tabernacle, or church, it was clearly stated that the whole was to be the same as had been seen by Moses in the cloud... A burning fiery cloud has to have a fresh air intake... This air intake would probably be at its base and, it would be tent-shaped." Here one can be best protected from "poisonous or asphyxiating fumes." One might locate such air intakes on mountain tops or man-made tents. Observing, as a trained scientist, from the "eye of the cyclone," that is, for many days and nights, Moses produced the design and specifications for the ark, tent, and tabernacle. Here, as elsewhere, the imitation of nature is used as the basis for an applied science; a priest or layman or political boss or "Just a guy hearing voices" could not produce the works of Moses. {S : THE BURNT OFFERING} THE BURNT OFFERING Servius, a commentator on Virgil, writes that "the first inhabitants of the earth never carried fire to their altars, but by their prayers they brought down the heavenly fire." [35] Even in the first century after Christ, Josephus the Jewish historian could describe a successful sacrifice to Yahweh: "There came a fire running out of the air, and rushed with violence upon the altar, in the sight of all, and caught hold of and consumed the sacrifice." But such fires of Yahweh had long been rare, Josephus himself having testified that the Holy Spirit disappeared two centuries before his time. I think that the great electrical flood was mostly dammed by the time of Joshua and then was reduced incrementally from century to century, with perhaps a century or two of revival of flow during the time of the prophets and the end of the Late Bronze Age. I have paid little attention to the altars of Moses and those that followed. I do not mean the Israelite altar of unhewn, heaped-up stones that was called for by Yahweh at first [36] , or the Altar of Incense, but the elaborate one for sacrifices designed by Moses during his mountain retreat. The design of altars generally was fairly straightforward. It is clear what the priests were seeking; it is evident what they found and what failures they experienced. What is most obvious is that altars were uniformly constructed to carry out a simple electrical function, throughout the Near and Middle East. The Cretans, for instance, had horned altars, as did others. Perhaps the very origin of altars goes back to the beginning of the electrical ages, about six thousand years ago, when Zeus in all his forms became a great god and Saturn withdrew. The concept of archaeo-electro statics permits us to imagine that altars were designed for burnt offerings when it was observed that the gods whom one wished to propitiate were in the habit of dispatching sparks upon metallized prominences such as horns, spears and elevated plates. This was direct contact of a most exciting kind between god and humans. One could scarcely doubt that the gods were receiving and acknowledging the offerings. When Yahweh's fire is not called for, the worshippers use ordinary combustion. When the oil lamps of the Tabernacle were readied upon their seven-pronged lampstand, Moses "then fit up the lamps." [37] Fire did not descend from the atmosphere to do the job. The great horned altar of Israel in the wilderness was another of Yahweh's Mount Sinai designs that Moses applied at the foot of the mountain [38] . It was a hollow, ninety-inch square cabinet of bronze-plated wood, standing fifty-four inches high, with carrying poles. It was hollow to permit its being filled with stones and dirt according to Yahweh's first instructions out of Egypt. The horns of the four corners were one piece with the rest. According to tradition, this magnificent altar did not work at first; but finally "there came a fire out from before the Lord and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and fat." The fire stayed there for 116 years without melting the brass or burning the wood, the legend concludes, leaving us to wonder: why '116'"? [39] A legend has Yahweh reproaching Moses, who wondered whether the divine fire would consume the thin altar brass and wood: "Thou judgest by the laws that apply to men, but will these also apply to Me?" Then, referring to the fires and ice of heaven, he goes on: "Doth the water quench their fire, or doth their fire consume the water? For, 'I am the Lord who maketh peace between these elements in My high places. ' No more shall the brass overlay of the altar be injured by fire; even though it be no thicker than a denarium [a coin]." [40] Obviously, he had in mind an electric fire, not one of coals. Cassuto [41] insists, against exegetes and legends, that the altar had an earthen and stone top. The legendary metal and wood top would be quickly destroyed by a heavy wood or coal fire, as other sceptics, too, have pointed out. I am inclined to disagree with the distinguished Cassuto; electrical conditions were such at this time and so well controlled by Moses that he could be confident of exciting an electrical fire whenever it was required. The sceptics have not considered an electrical fire. As with the Ark, once the significance of electricity is perceived in regard to the altar, we may deduce certain behaviors and understand others. We appreciate, once again, the immensity of electrification in those days, the universality of electro-static applications in worship, and the possibility of following electrical sensitivities wherever they may lead over the lithosphere and especially up into the mountains, the "high places" to which the Jews repaired more and more as the Earth-charge in relation to near space diminished and the atmosphere cleared. By "burnt offerings" the Bible means an offering destined for sacrifice on an altar, as well as the same sacrifice after it has been burnt. On one occasion, Moses and Aaron entered the Holy Tabernacle and came out again; then the glory of Yahweh appeared to all the people. And fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering [42] . So far as one may tell, a burnt offering is successfully burnt when it is struck by a spark discharged from above, a divine fire... It need not be cooked; it should be marked or signed. Occasionally the enthusiasm of the language lets one imagine that Yahweh in fact did sometimes voraciously "consume" the burnt offering. To get Yahweh to accept an animal sacrifice, it may have been prudent to drain the animal of its blood, whence would perhaps come the Judaic taboo of animal blood. Blood conveys electric current. A spark might be dissipated if it short-circuited through a bloody offering. On the other hand, the blood was useful in the sacrifice for inducing a charge to collect on the metal of the altar base. Moses taught the Israelites to pour the drained blood upon the sacrificial offering, on the altar, and on the ground around the altar. Levites, clean-shaven all over to minimize risks of shock, performed such tasks. Ordinary fires by friction and combustion were also built to burn offerings and to encourage, as with blood, the descent of divine fire. Water, we indicated in the last chapter, will also expedite an electrical discharge. Altars worked better if means were available to wet the same surfaces that Moses used to pour on blood - not inside the offering but over it, on the altar, around the altar, taking care not to move too close or in any way short-circuit an impending spark. Elijah, the prophet, was mostly incredible as a worker of miracles. There was enough of the scientific in his behavior in his famous contest with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal to judge it correct as to structure even if exaggerated [43] . In a time of great drought for the Northern Kingdom of Israel, when the king and most others were whoring after false gods, Elijah, hiding out from sure death, suddenly catches the message that finally a great thunderstorm is coming to end the drought. He impatiently importunes a friend to ask the king for an interview. The friend says in effect : "Why are you in such a hurry to get killed and to get myself killed?" Elijah insists, and the king sees him. Elijah asks for a chance to confute all the false prophets and the king agrees. A contest is set up on Elijah's terms - the opposition is to choose a bull, sacrifice it, and ask for a sign of the Lord's acceptance. He, Elijah, will do likewise. Whoever receives the sign wins. The opposition builds its fire, places its offering, dances about, and gets no response. Elijah builds an altar of stone, places his offering, and then pours twelve barrels of water upon the offering. He dowses the offering thrice. He digs a trench around the altar and fills it with water. The time is approaching evening. The water soaks down and makes contact with the water table. The approaching thunderstorm is preceded by a heavy, moist, ionized, and charged lowering atmosphere. The fire of Yahweh descends upon the offering of Elijah. His triumphant followers escort the prophets of Baal to a nearby place and kill them. {S : THE BRAZEN SERPENT AND OTHER RODS} THE BRAZEN SERPENT AND OTHER RODS A final "miracle-product" permitted by the electrical age to the ingenious scientist was a variety of rods. The most famous was the caduceus of the Greek god Hermes (in Egypt, Thoth), nowadays the symbol of the medical profession because Hermes was also the greatest healer. The next most famous rod was the Brazen Serpent of Moses, then Aaron's Rod, and then, of course, we hear of other wonderful staffs. Every shepherd needs a staff, every walker a cane, every boy a stick. So we should expect great disbelief to be visited upon rods. Yet rods have a mysterious quality: they are "guns" in slang; they are phalluses among many prehistoric peoples; they are water-finders in the sensitive hands of dowsers; they are electric attractors and lightning-rods; they are Upper Paleolithic batons; they are lances, tilting weapons, flag- poles, may-poles, dolmens, bethels, etc.; no man is complete without one. Yahweh, in a legend, advertises that "dead things come before Me and leave Me imbued with life," referring to the rod of Aaron which had lain in the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle one night and then "brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and even yielded almonds." [44] This is a flagrant challenge to legend-analysis: what can be made of it? The Bible tells that Moses, in need of proving why Aaron should be High Priest of Israel, decreed that a beam of wood should be cut into twelve staves, that the Levi's should have one marked for them, and all other tribes one each as well, the Levi staff being that of Aaron. The rods would be left with Yahweh overnight to see which tribe shall have its rod singled out by him as the rod of the High Priest. Aaron's, and Aaron's alone, was transformed in the night, and his priesthood was divinely authorized by test once more. If there is a kernel of truth in this sacred competition, it must rest with the manipulation of Aaron's stick in the middle of the night. It may be conjectured that it was subjected to severe shock on the mercy seat of Yahweh until it evidenced changes sufficiently symbolic to suggest the buds, blossoms, and almonds described in the Bible and legends. The ark when operative is somewhat like a tornado: it discharges sparks that set up a column of gases and dust and modifies whatever conductor it may embrace. A tremendous tornado occurred in Chatenay, France, in 1836, and an expert report was made upon it for insurance purposes: All those (trees) which came within the influence of the tornado, presented the same aspect; their sap was vaporized, and their igneous fibres had become as dry as if kept for forty-eight hours in a furnace heated to ninety degrees above the boiling point. Evidently there was a great mass of vapor instantaneously formed, which could only make its escape by bursting the tree in every direction; and as wood has less cohesion in a longitudinal than in a transverse direction, these trees were all, throughout one portion of their trunk, cloven into laths. Many trees attest, by their condition, that they served as conductors to continual discharges of electricity, and that the high temperature produced by this passage of the electric fluid, instantly vaporized all the moisture which they contained, and that this instantaneous vaporization burst all the trees open in the direction of their length, until the wood, dried up and split, had become unable to resist the force of the wind which accompanied the tornado [45] . Aaron's rod, by discontinuous and repeated sparks, could achieve something of the remarkable representations that the observers saw in it the next day. The other rods had been laid aside, of course. Moses had had several rods, the rod that impressed the Hebrew welcoming committee in Goshen, the rod that he carried into his negotiations with Pharaoh Thoum, the rod that he held high in the first battle with the Amalekites, the rod that he used to find water, and the rod that was the Brazen Serpent. I have mentioned some possible special quality of each in another chapter. Of these, only the battle-staff appears to have been luminously activated; "the Midrashim narrate that the Israelites encountered the Amalekites in a thick veil of clouds," [46] hence it must have sparked a light to have such effect on friend and foe alike. The early rods that behaved like snakes may have been metal or metalized for high conductivity, insulated at the grasping points, and with pointed head to encourage a discharge upwards. If they discharged they would rustle and hiss like snakes. Possibly, too, by a certain disjointing, sparks might be induced to leap the hinging points and cause a wriggling effect by attraction and repulsion. (Priestley, quoted earlier, was calling such a spark "spider.") As with other magical tricks, the competition of professional magicians would accord to someone the fame of being the best of magicians. If a god or demon is associated with the basic phenomenon, that god, that magician, and that device are altogether connected and acknowledged superior. The Brazen Serpent (see Figure 16) was the outcome of popular grumblings and protests which provoked Yahweh into sending fiery serpents among the people to bite and kill many of them. Moses, begged to intercede, was told by Yahweh: "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live." [47] There was no doubt always cause to blame the people for their disagreeable temper. The snakes that caused anguish were probably innumerable animals driven above ground by thermoelectrical phenomena [48] accompanied by fiery electric charges snaking though the ground, else why so many? Why so homeopathic a solution as another fiery snake that is under control? And why the cure from seeing the model excepting that thus would Yahweh and Moses lend their authority to psychosomatic therapy? But the bronze serpent, as an independent spark-generator, might have occupied a private tent of healing. Dr. Mesmer, famous for "mesmerizing" people, was one of "a long line of electrotherapists, that even today practices with some success. Healing might originate in certain cases by electroshock with the priesthood as therapists administering sparks to patients. Other cases of healing might occur by the bactericidal effect of ozone in the rooms where the electro-static machines were operated" as with Mesmer [49] . Figure 16: The Brazen Serpent is Formed (Source: Bible of Lubeck, 1494.) The bronze serpent, representing unconsciously the comet by its shape and electrification, was carried with the Ark; as Ziegler has suggested elsewhere, it might have been used as an independent capacitor with its rod and snake separated by an insulator so as to permit the tongue to discharge against the head of the rod. It might, too, be employed just behind the mercy seat as the target for discharges from both of the grounded cherubim; and it might be operated as an independent electrical demonstrator affixed to the Ark. Numerous instrumental assemblies and adjustments could be managed for different purposes, with more or less sparking, smoking, noise-making, and explosions. Since Pliny described the great comet of Typhon as spiral-shaped, [50] there is some reason to connect the serpent with the celestial apparitions of Exodus. King Hezekiah broke into pieces the Serpent of Moses or a reproduction thereof six centuries later on grounds that it had become the object of idolatry. Or perhaps it could cause panic if it were electrified and, as Ziegler guesses, there would be nowhere to go from a city undergoing siege, or about to do so. The electrical signaling had to be astutely controlled to prevent its causing self-demoralization. Twenty-five hundred years later, in the first modern outburst of enthusiasm for the rediscovery of electrical fire, there comes once again the idea that electricity cures. The spark-spitting is not from snakes but from jars. Some religious evangelists, admirers of the new science, unconsciously emulate their Old Testament hero, Moses. So we find in a bibliography the following item, which speaks for itself: [51] A. D. 1759. - Wesley (John), the founder of Methodism (1703-1791) and the most eminent member of a very distinguished English family, publishes "The Desideratum; or Electricity made Plain and Useful, by a Lover of Mankind and of Common Sense." In this he relates at great length the cures of numerous physical and moral ailments, attributed to the employment of the electric fluid, under such curious headings as "Electricity, the Soul of the Universe," "Electricity, the Greatest of all Remedies," etc. {S : THE POUCH OF JUDGEMENT} THE POUCH OF JUDGEMENT Moses, who hates sorcery and divination, provides a special place for a pair of objects, the Urim and Thummim [52] . He orders to be made a pouch of cloth that is closed at top and bottom but open at its two sides, with gold chains attached to hang it from the High Priest's shoulders and to tie it around his waist. It is the size of a man's hand. To the front of the pouch is attached a gold plate into which are fitted twelve different precious stones, each containing the name of one of the Twelve Tribes. "And into the pouch of judgement you shall put the Urim and Thummim." ' No one has found an origin for these two words. They are thought to be a very ancient device. Their shape is "impossible to ascertain." [53] Only top officials, perhaps only heads of state or tribes, could ask the priest to employ them. "They served as a means of inquiring of God, that is to say, of obtaining from the deity, with the help of the priest, an answer concerning matters beyond human ken." [54] Since they were used to choose which of two goats would be sent into the desert to Azazel on the Day of Atonement, it is thought they were a kind of lot. Other incidents of their employment are known. They gave short answers, usually "yes" or "no," to carefully framed question about a highly uncertain decision. Only one question could be handled at a time. Moses never used them, probably because he could speak directly to Yahweh. But Joshua did, and Saul, and David. After David, the two objects disappear from the Bible. Legend does not go farther than to implicate the Urim and Thummim in the processes of inquiry. The open-sided pouch indicates that the pieces were not carried in it, but employed in it, for at least a hand might enter it, Legend says that the two words mean "Light and Truth." "Only a high priest who was permeated with the Holy Spirit, and over whom rested the Shekinah, might obtain an answer, for in other cases the stones withheld their answer. But if the high priest was worthy, he received an answer to every inquiry, for on these stones were engraved all the letters of the alphabet, so that all conceivable words could be constructed of them." [55] For lack of any better explanation, we are impelled to think once more of electrical mysteries. The Holy Spirit and Shekinah, like angels, may be metaphors for a manifestation of electricity. The "Light" does not always appear. The priest must be worthy. King Saul could not get an answer one time, and searched then who had done wrong, for Yahweh "did not answer him that day." [56] A successful attempt is described by the legend: after the King or head of the Sanhedrin looks into the face of the priest and makes inquiry, The high priest, looking down on his breastplate, then looked to see which of the letters engraved on the stones shone out most brightly, and then constructed the answer out of these letters. Thus, for example, when David inquired of the Urim and Thummimm if Saul would pursue him, the high priest Abiathar beheld gleaming forth the letter Yod in Judah's name, Resh in Reuben's name, and Dalet in Dan's name, hence the answer read as follows: Yered , 'He will pursue. ' [57] More electricity is revealed here: certain stones shine brighter than others, "gleaming forth." The priest ponders the letters and composes the reply as best he can. We cannot truly solve this mystery with all of its mechanisms - or electronics. Relevant is the fact that the famous early modern scientist, Gilbert (1600), performed and described hundreds of small experiments to determine the electromagnetic properties of precious and semi-precious stones. For most of 200 years following him, scientists pursued the same type of experimentation. Efforts were made to classify all stones by their electrical properties. Jewish legend claims to know what the twelve stones of the Pouch of judgement were. A discussion of the truth of the legend and of these stones and other stones also proposed is not possible here. It suffices to speculate that the original stones fell into a similar order of electrical behavior; particularly, each engraved tribal gem would collect, hold, and emit the same charge under like conditions, as would befit a confederation of equals. The Urim might be an electrifying brush, a "rubber" the modern scientists called it. The priest would rub the gems until they held a charge, or rub them one by one. This he could do more easily by steadying the pouch with one hand from inside it. The Thummin might be a stubby rod of metal. The priest would whirl it in the air a fixed number of times and then present it to a tribal stone. He would repeat the procedure with all other stones in succession. If a spark gleamed forth, the letter would be used, otherwise not. Then the full word would be combined from the letters that lit up. The procedure was not dangerous; nevertheless it was most holy. King Saul would have killed his son, Jonathan, that day, because, in successive inquiries of the pouch, Jonathan was blamed for the absence of Yahweh. But the people rebelled "and redeemed Jonathan and he did not die." [58] {S : Notes (Chapter 5: Legends and Miracles)} Notes (Chapter 5: Legends and Miracles) 1. Ex. 19: 8. 2. Ex. 20: 18. 3. Cf. Ps 97: 4-5: "hills melted like wax;" "the mountains melted, even that Sinai" Jg 5: 4- 5. 4. Ex. 24: 9, 10. 5. Ex. 24: 15-18. 6. G III 137. 7. Moses, 243. 8. Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1970, p. 138-139. 9. G III 92-3. 10. Mellinkoff, op. cit., plate II. 11. Hugo Gressmann, Mose und Seine Zeit, Gottingen, 1913; cf. Cassuto, 448-51. 12. Wayne A. Meeks (" Moses as God and King," 254-71 in Jacob Neusner ed., Religions in Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 1970, 370-1) writes that "in very diverse sources there persist the remnants of an elaborate cluster of traditions in Moses' heavenly enthronement at the time of the Sinai theophany." 13. G III 190. 14. G III 213. 15. P. 198; Cf. Num. 11: 35; 12: 1-15. 16. Ziegler, 45-7. 17. Is. 3: 17; cf. 7: 20; 3; 24. 18. In II SISR 2( 1977), letters, cf. comments on both famine and depilation in 3 pp. 101-2, and B. O' Gheoghan in II SISR I (1977), pp. 2-3, Where radiation disease is discussed as causing abrupt stoppage of childbirth at time of Exodus in Egypt. 19. Francis II. Baker, "Comet Lord," 189 Living Age (June 27, 1891). pp. 818-23, repr. in W. Corliss, comp., Strange Universe, A2-ALC-001. 20. See also their book Lifecloud, Harper's and Row, New York, 1978. 21. Ex. 33. 22. VII Encycl. Britannica 1964, hereafter referred to as E. B. 23. VII EB p. 962. 24. Ibid. 25. (1975), 136, citing George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation, Baltimore: John Hopkins U. Press, 1973, 43,109. 26. Num. 11: 9. 27. p. 80. 28. M. J. Teesdale, "The Manna of the Israelites, "3 Science Gossip (1897) 229-33. 29. Ex. 16: 14-15,21,31; Num. 11: 7-8. 30. Reade, "Manna as a Confection," I SISR 2 (1977), 9. 31. Joshua 6: 12. 32. Reade, p. 10. 33. Ibid., p. 12. 34. Reade believes that the tent was pitched high at the center to let out fumes. Though logical, this view conflicts with the ordinary reading, which results in a construction as depicted in figure 13. 35. Commentary on Virgil: XII, 2OO; cf. Eclogue VI, 42, quoted by Blavatsky, I, 526. 36. Ex. 20: 24-5. 37. Ex. 40: 24-5. 38. Ex. 27: 1-8. 39. III G 184. 40. III G I62. 41. Cassuto, 362-3. 42. Lev. 1-9; 10; 23. 43. III Kings 18. 44. G III 162. 45. Hare, R.; Journal of the Franklin Institute, 54 (1852) 28-29. 46. Velikovsky, A. in C., 60; 55-6. Ex. 17: 8. 47. Num. 21: 4-9. 48. Before the Haicheng (China) earthquake of Feb. 4, 1975, "there were a multitude of warnings, local changes in the earth's magnetism and snakes coming out of their lairs in the frozen ground." NY Times, Oct. 1, 1979, 60. 49. Manoilov, 81. 50. Natural History, II, ch. XXII, 91. 51. Mottelay, 216. 52. Ex. 28: 15-3; see Cassuto 372-87. 53. Cassuto, 380. 54. Ibid. 55. III G 172-3. 56. I Sam. 14: 37-38. 57. III G 172. 58. I Sam. 14: 45. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 6: } {T THE CHARISMA OF MOSES} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX THE CHARISMA OF MOSES "To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly - especially by one belonging to that people." So goes the first sentence of Sigmund Freud's book on Moses and Monotheism, that views Moses as an Egyptian disciple of Pharaoh Akhnaton, and he continues: "No consideration, however, will move me to set aside truth in favour of supposed national interests." [1] If Freud had published his first line in 1980 rather than in 1937, he might perhaps have taken advantage of the reconciliation achieved by the leaders of Egypt and Israel to advertise his works as an historical gift to the reconciliation. For the first time in 3400 years, some people were speaking well of the Egyptians. (It matters little in the rhetoric of religion or ethnicism that neither the Egyptians nor the Israeli of today are much like their namesakes of Exodus.) {S : THE LOVE CHILD} THE LOVE CHILD What strikes me about Freud's determination that Moses was an Egyptian was that he should not ask whether Moses might have been both Egyptian and Hebrew. This I attribute to Freud's own problem of identification. On the one hand, Freud believed himself consciously to be a latter-day Moses, a point that will be explained in Chapter VI here below. On the other hand, Freud disbelieved strongly in ethnicism and wished time and time again that psychoanalysis become universal, rather than an isolated Jewish school of thought, to the point where he conceived of himself unconsciously as an assimilated gentile, a Christ-figure, whose teachings would become universalized. Freud's first act, when he arrived in Rome on a long-delayed trip, was to go view the heroic statue of Moses done by Michelangelo. It was, I say, psychologically easier for Freud to claim that Moses was all-Egyptian than to think sociologically and psychologically of the obvious possibility that Moses was half-Egyptian and half-Jewish. "How much" easier can be measured by the frail, yet psychologically significant, rationalization that Freud gave of the two sides of Moses - the universal Egyptian and the tribal Yahwist - that there were two Moses, separated by a century or so, and brought together later to rationalize Hebrew history. Who is rationalizing what? Freud was irrationally led to postulate two Moses, rather than descry a half-gentile, half-Hebrew Moses. In doing so, he was perhaps unconsciously admitting the two elements of Moses, asserting, also surprisingly covertly, that Moses was schizophrenic, and revealing that he, Freud, was ambivalent about the relations of gentiles and Jews. Needless to say, Freud brought down upon his head the wrath of all mosaists. With such controversy over Moses' origins, perhaps the fairest resolution would be to divide Moses in half Hebrew, half Egyptian. Let both mothers claim him, … la Solomon's judgement. Philo Judaeus says that when the princess saw the beautiful weaned child of three months, "she adopted him as her son, having first put in practice all sorts of contrivances to increase the apparent bulk of her belly, so that he might be looked upon as her own genuine child, and not as a suppositious one." [2] One might believe this - and take the ethnic position - or half believe it, seeing in it a denial that confesses: that is, the princess was pregnant with Moses. Then several problems are solved, quite apart from ending the argument. Moses would be the son of a Hebrew official and an Egyptian princess (or, as the Moslems claim, the wife of the Pharaoh). Probably only such a love-child would have received the adoption and attention that Moses got. Hebrew women would understandably be his wet-nurse (his "mother") and baby-sitter (Miriam, daughter of the wet-nurse); Aaron, older brother of Miriam, would be a devoted admirer of the young gentleman from childhood. Thus we solve the relationship with Aaron and Miriam - no brother and sister, but possibly half-brother and half-sister through their father, or cousins by an uncle, with his step-mother or aunt his wet-nurse. The Jewish legends, unlike the Bible, make a number of references to the Egyptianizing of the Hebrews, their abandonment of their old religion, their working against their own people and for the Egyptians, and, of course, the non-tribal "mixed-multitude" that joined in Moses' expedition into another world. In a curious legend, Yahweh blames Moses for the Revolt of the Golden Calf [3] , saying that it was Moses who wanted to bring along the mixed multitude that wanted to join them... It is now these people, 'thy people', that have seduced Israel to idolatry. And Moses replies that, yes, "that it was chiefly my people, the mixed multitude, that was to blame for this sin..." Exogamous marriage and concubinage, as well as incest, were common among Egyptian royalty. If recent American statistics are any indication, among the upper-middle classes the Hebrews might have achieved a rate of miscegenation of 15% or more. In more than one legend, the loss of Hebrew race through intermarriage is denounced, it might even be that "Levites" was a generic term for mixed Hebrew-Egyptians (see our index to the book), a thesis defensible both in theory and on the evidence. Jacob-Israel, in his last words, blesses the descendents of Simeon and Levi (perhaps similar in composition) [4] by calling them ruthless, violent people, saying: "I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel." [5] This puzzling passage might mean: they will live individually spread among the Egyptians in Egypt, and (as occurred) they will be disposed in gangs among all the tribes as an arm of the central Israelite nation. Moses would perforce acquire his combination of arrogant and schizoid traits, his large erudition, his familiarity with the ways of the Egyptian court, his immense ambition and quarrelsomeness, his ready promotion in the Egyptian hierarchy and introduction into both cosmopolitan and esoteric scientific circles. He would be cut off from the line of inheritance to the throne, which would rankle him and bring him enemies too, even those who feared that he would in any event become a threat. He would have an access to the Pharaohs that would otherwise be incredible. But, beneath the veneer of his life and character, he would actively identify with the Hebrews. He would know them and understand them in a special detached way, particularly the assimilated leading Hebraic-Egyptian types among them. If and when the time came to switch roles, the ground would be prepared. His birth would be nicely managed by a myth typical of the birth of heroes. His infant attendants, or relatives, would become his "true" family - mother, Aaron, Miriam. His Egyptianized friends and supporters would become the Levites. His tongue-tied speech would have an additional psychosomatic source in his fear of his loss of identity (nor would I discard completely Freud's suggestion that be might not have spoken Hebrew perfectly, at least not idiomatically). The land of Midian where he was exiled and married was an ally of Egypt; it is mentioned that when the Exodus army came upon them, the Midianites had to make apologies for their faith in Egypt. Much later on, the Midianites fell victim to an Israelite attack. One can only wonder, in the end, why Moses has not been considered the offspring of a Hebrew and Egyptian love-affair. Certainly because the word of the Bible is sacred to many people. Also, the legend of a chosen people demands a full-blooded leader for their birth as a nation (despite history's frequent waiving of this rule). Moreover, the Judaic rule that descent as a Jew occurs through the mother, regardless of the father, contributes to ignoring the possibility. Judaic traditionalists are prone to frown upon miscegenation. (Apropos of this feeling, Senator Barry Goldwater once quipped at the peak of Egyptian- Israeli hostilities that he would be shot at from both sides of the Nile.) But Joseph married an Egyptian beauty, Asenath, daughter of the priest of On, by whom he had Ephraim and Manasseh, who were blessed by Jacob (Israel) and destined to be founders of tribes. And David's grandmother was Ruth, the Moabite... According to the Bible, Moses was born of humble but good Hebrew parents at a moment when the king, advised by a prophecy that a newly born child would live to kill him, had issued a blanket order to kill all Hebrew babies. Indefinitely, says the Bible; for nine months only, says the legend [6] , and all babies of Egypt. When the edict was publicized, legend reports, Moses' Hebrew father divorced his Hebrew mother to avoid having a child [7] . This, too, gives pause. Is there some implication of illegitimacy here? Perhaps. Put in a rough basket and set afloat amidst the marshy sidewaters of the Nile, says the Bible, the infant Moses was found there by none other than a princess, daughter of the very same king. He was raised in secret by her, even was nursed by his real mother, hired unknowingly by the princess for the purpose. He grew up a prince, but somehow realized that he was a Hebrew. Not much can be made of this story at first, which Otto Rank, Joseph Campbell, and other scholars would agree is a typical birth of a hero in myth and legend. We gather from it that Moses was probably born in Egypt during an anti-semitic period, that he was related to Hebrews, and that he was related to a highly placed Egyptian woman who raised him in a princely fashion. Everything else seems questionable and in need of analysis and reassembly according to a new theory. It is possible, too, that a general heavy pressure of population was occurring, and infanticide would be a policy, not unknown in many lands, to reduce the numbers of people, with expectable suspicions or actual overtones of genocide among minorities. The Pharaoh mentions overpopulation as a reason for his edict. Whether it was decided to let the minorities pay the price, we cannot say; the Jewish legend says that it was a temporary moratorium on births for all people. Even birth control policies in America have been declared forms of infanticide and genocide by religious and racial minority leaders and writers. Egypt was a heavily regulated, bureaucratic state. There is something to be made of Moses' name. It is clearly Egyptian, meaning "child" or "son" [8] and lacks the surname or prefix as, for example, in the pharaoh's name, Thoth- Moses, or "Child of the God, Thoth" (Mercury, Hermes). A variant theory says Moses means the "born one" in Egyptian, which is only a clumsy version of "child." Buber says: "That Moses bears an Egyptian name, no matter whether it means 'born, child (of somebody) ' or something like 'seed of the pond, of the water, ' is part of the historical character of the situation; he seems to derive from a largely Egyptianized section of the people." [9] Some say the Hebrew etymology is "he who is drawn from" the Nile River, which is the popular Sunday School meaning, but Buber reverses this to mean "he who draws forth" the Hebrew people. Otto Rank, citing Winckler, gives Moses as "the Water-Drawer." Psychoanalytic theory permits a reversal of meaning, so it becomes "he who is drawn from the water." Whatever route is taken one comes back to the profound simple meaning of "the water-born one." All children are born in the water of the womb. And legendary heroes are sometimes placed amidst water imagery at birth, as King Sargon of Assyria, who, like Moses, was a real person. The box or ark (tebah) of the infant Moses represents the womb of the mother. Eduard Meyer, upon whom both Freud and Rank draw, says that "Presumably Moses was originally the son of the tyrant's daughter (who is now his foster mother) and probably of divine origin." [10] {S : A DISLIKING FOR HEBREWS} A DISLIKING FOR HEBREWS Moses would have known Goshen by passing through it on the way here or there but would have little familiarity with the Hebrew people. Legend has him meeting his first connections when grown up; then it was that he observed the complaints and hardship of the Hebrews; he used his court connections to help lighten their burdens, says the legend [11] . It is likely that his relatives there would bring him problems from time to time. When he returned from exile to lead the Hebrews, he was a delegate of Yahweh, not a Hebrew who had met with Yahweh for new instructions. Yahweh, not Moses, chose the Hebrews. Moses was launched upon a splendid career. The best teachers were brought in to educate him [12] . He is said to have exercised military command, to have traveled outside Egypt, and to have been well-versed in the science of the times, It is said, too, in a legend, that he had originally an evil disposition, that he was "covetous, haughty, sensual" [13] (reminding me of Mahatma Gandhi as a young man before his great alteration of character) [14] . He cured himself of his vices by a strong will to change. He seems to have submerged his original traits in a kind of inhibition and reserve. He is not "a man of the people," a kindly father-figure, and seems to reject, for himself, the paternal role in regard to the "Children of Israel", giving this all over to Yahweh, Any love that he might have for the people of Israel, and indeed for everyone, including Aaron but with the possible exception of his devoted aide-de-camp Joshua [15] , is suppressed; he scarcely permits himself to use Yahweh to express love for the people. In the Pentateuch, forms of the word "love" occur only 41 times, disproportionately in Genesis with 15. (see Table II) Yahweh's "love" for the people is mentioned seven times, Moses' love for the people not at all. The duty to love Yahweh receives 13 mentions, love among individuals 13, social love 5, and the love of pleasure and things 3 [16] . For every word of affection there are a dozen words of reproach, censure, adverse criticism, and dogmatic command. One would be naive to search in the Torah for any but the most feeble sources of the often- experienced warmth and graciousness of the Jews. Two notable exceptions - the happiness over the Golden Calf and the union with the people of Beth-Peor - end in horrifying slaughters. Almost never does Moses indicate that the Israelites are his people, and usually, in speaking to Yahweh, he refers to "your people." When Moses heard all the families weeping about the lack of meat, and saw Yahweh getting angry, he exclaimed to him: "Why have you caused evil to your servant... in placing the load of all this people upon me? Have I myself conceived all this people? Is it I who have given them birth...?" In fact, Moses urges Yahweh out of motives of self-esteem not to exterminate Israel: what would other people think if, after all his public boasting and Moses' advertising, Yahweh were to destroy his chosen people? This would be Moses himself speaking; Moses would look the fool (to his imaginary and now mostly deceased Egyptian reference group) if this great adventure were to fail and the people killed or scattered. The projected conscience is often more juvenile than its possessor; so we need not think it odd that Moses, through Yahweh, should be so unsophisticated. At best, then, Moses and Yahweh are ambivalent about the Jews, both hating and loving them. A peculiar, stunted affection for them exists, growing feebly amidst the abuse. It takes sometime the form of a feeling of responsibility for them, having brought them out of Egypt. They were characteristically suspicious of the people's loyalty and affections. Time after time they allege that these are only pretenses, shams. And they allow no excuses, insisting that the people willed their own defects and aberrations. This refusal to accept and receive affection is the paranoiac expression of ambivalence. Part of this suspicion was warranted. A considerable proportion of the people did hate Moses and Yahweh. Moses knew this and said so. Yahweh directly accuses them of knowingly defying him and breaking their promises. Of course the people had good reason to hate Yahweh since the god was the cause of their worst disasters as well as their savior. Moses would be strongly interested in their hating other gods, that is, in displacing the people's hostilities upon Baal and other heavenly gods, and in trying to suppress the destructive side of the great comet. Baal later became the devil figure, Lucifer, who was the "Light- bearer" in Latin (or "Phosphorus" and the word for the planet Venus in Greek). The process of displacement did not work perfectly. Unconsciously many people hated Yahweh as well as or instead of Baal and certainly hated Moses, while Moses and Yahweh did not even try to divide and transform their ambivalence toward the people. The love that is behind Jesus' feeling of atonement for the sins of humanity is not present in Moses and therefore the doctrine itself is largely absent. But Daiches goes too far when he writes that "the concept of vicarious atonement was quite foreign to Mosaic thought." [17] He adds, rightly, that Moses was a "mediator and intercessor" and that sins were forgiven even of all Israel for the sake of their great ancestors. (This latter atonement in reverse being also a way of getting them to focus favorably upon a line of national history.) However, Moses based the authority of the Levites upon vicarious atonement. By taking on onerous sacred tasks, they relieved all Jews of the duty to sacrifice their first-born children and beasts to Yahweh [18] . Further there was the custom of the scapegoat. Annually the goat conveyed the load of Jewish sins away into the desert to the demon Azazel [19] . Following upon the worship of the Golden Calf, Moses himself is on the brink of atoning for Israel's crime, but lets Yahweh pull him back into his typical egotism. For he declares to the people: "you have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin." [20] Then to Yahweh he says: "If thou wilt, forgive their sin - and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book..." Yahweh refuses and lets Israel live as a personal favor to Moses [21] . {S : THE MEEK KILLER} THE MEEK KILLER Machiavelli commented once: "Whoever reads the Bible sensibly will see that Moses, in order to push through his laws and orders, was compelled to kill an infinity of men who were guilty of nothing but opposing his designs." [22] Time after time, Moses imposes rules and hardship upon others in the name of Yahweh. His famous meekness, which the Bible stresses and his biographers claim to find is in psychological terms the "meekness" of an inhibited rage type, who cannot trust his deep passions to public display. He insists, in effect, that he cannot help himself, that he is executing the will of Yahweh, like the foreman who explains to his workers "I'll see what I can do, but you know how things are up there. I can't do much about it." Such is his "meekness." Andr‚ Neher recalls that "one searches vainly in the Books of Moses for the exposition of a doctrine or theology." Moses "had no need of dreams, trances, quackery, ecstasies, but spoke with God man-to-man." [23] His was a down-to-earth religion. He was a cold, careful, bold manager of schemes and driver of men. There is pressure by Miriam and others to begin a line of hereditary seers [24] . He rejects them. He is hardly ever called a prophet; the word is far too limited for him. Moses is called by Yahweh only three times: from the Burning Bush, from the Holy Mountain and then at the Tabernacle where Yahweh instructs him how sacrifices shall be done [25] . He is moderate, too, in hallucinating; he does so almost always in private and restricted circumstances. He does not prophesy hysterically. His only outburst occurs when, returning triumphant from the Holy Mountain, he comes upon the Golden Calf worshippers, whereupon he dashes the sacred tablets of Yahweh upon the ground. The frequent violence that bears his imprimatur is phrased in divine rhetoric and impersonally ordered and executed. His murder of an Egyptian work-boss has a surprising explanation. After this killing, Moses goes into exile. He has been betrayed to the government by two Hebrews (brothers, says a legend) who were fighting, These workmen know of the secret murder of the Egyptian, who had been beating a Hebrew, and when Moses, now perhaps 30 years old, intercedes between them and admonishes the assailant, this person replies in words typical of lower class insolence to an upper-class member of their minority group: "Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Moses was startled because he had "looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand." [26] One wonders how they learned the secret, by the next day, too, unless they were working for or near Moses; and then how did Moses kill the foreman? Legend says be killed him not by violence, but by uttering the secret name of god [27] . We know that this word is the treasure of the Ark of the Covenant. It is the equivalent of the word YHWH. Was the Hebrew who was being abused by the supervisor a Levite or helper of Moses? And did Moses electrocute the supervisor on one of his dangerous experimental contraptions? Ordinarily, in a highly stratified society, a highly placed person will not demean himself by physically fighting a member of a lower stratum, but will have the job done for him by the man's equals. Were the Hebrew accusers other workmen in the same establishment, who had perhaps helped Moses bury the body? A body is heavy and not easy to dispose of , nor would a prince dirty his hands with a body. If my guess were correct, it would explain why a princely official could expect to be haled before the highest authority, and why he would in person or in absentia be condemned to exile. The enemies of Moses in the pyramid priest-science establishment would be awaiting such an occasion to demand the punishment of this rash and controversial man. Philo Judaeus is close to arguing in this vein. Pharaoh punished Moses, not for killing the foreman but for siding with those perceived to be enemies of the Pharaoh. "When the Egyptian authorities had once got an opportunity of attacking the young man, having already reason for looking upon him with suspicion..., they even implanted in his (Pharaoh's] mind an apprehension that Moses was plotting to deprive him of his kingdom." They told Pharaoh, "He will strip you of your crown. He has no humble designs or notions." [28] {S : THE COURTLY SHEPHERD} THE COURTLY SHEPHERD Next we come upon Moses in exile among the Midianites. "In his general appearance and clothing he looks like an Egyptian." [29] Buber, too, comments on his "court dress" when he first appears at the water well in Midian. At the well, the daughters of a priest-shepherd named Jethro, who came early to water their flock, are being pushed away (molested and sexually attacked, says the prurient legend) [30] by several rough shepherds. He must have been impressive, this stranger, to browbeat the local roughnecks. Upper-class Egyptian dress was known, most likely, and Egyptian authority was not far out of mind. Moses must have been generally well-equipped to appear so well turned out several days' journey from Memphis. He rescues the damsels, and is presented to their father and referred to by him as "the Egyptian" who helped them so. "Egyptian?" goes the legend; that is why the Lord kept Moses from entering the Promised Land: Moses should have insisted immediately that he was Hebrew, not Egyptian [31] . Moses bought a flock, or tended the livestock of Jethro. He was a careful and methodical shepherd, the legend goes. And he fathered two boys by Zipporah, daughter of Jethro. His mind was on natural events and the court of Egypt; his ambitions raged within him. He explored the area, for the site where he came upon the Burning Bush was removed from his pastures. Besides his trained and self-developed scientific acumen about things electric, he may have been one of those unusual persons who are hypersensitive to static electricity [32] . He would become the world's most famous dowser, finding water miraculously in the desert [33] . No student, to my knowledge, has yet graded a sample of people by test as to their electromagnetic fields which can be measured by vacuum-tube voltmeters and vary in intensity from 15 to 20 millivolts, depending upon emotional states and certainly upon hereditary or bred differences [34] . The famous "Burning Bush" was a "thornbush," its spikes pointed to heaven. (See Figure 17) It was speaking with the sounds of electricity and releasing fire without being consumed. Moses knew better than any man what this meant. His imagination began to work rapidly. He took off his shoes to help ground any electrical contact and examined the bush closely. He touched his staff to the active area and it jumped like a snake. A phosphorus dew whitened his hand and he wiped it off. A surge of excitement might have overwhelmed him. He is said to have had a revelation that a great god was addressing him from out of the bush. The bush suddenly symbolized all that he wanted to be and would be. The portents of heaven were in the sound and flames. They culminated in the Burning Bush experience: Moses who had been watching carefully for changes in the sky, would tell of this experience when asked: "When did your visions come together in you for the first time?" Figure 17. The Burning Bush. He explained his prophetic revelation to Jethro: the new presence of the great god in the world, the fitting of this god to the aspirations and religion of a discontented Hebrew people. He sent a message to the priest Aaron (Yahweh had assured him that Aaron would come to meet him) and when the reply was received and was favorable, he was ready to return to Egypt. He departed with his family [35] . {S : CIRCUMCISION AND SPEECH PROBLEMS} CIRCUMCISION AND SPEECH PROBLEMS An episode occurs on the way to Egypt that surprises and puzzles many students. Yahweh tries to kill his own representative on Earth. Some say by lightning, others by Satan, in serpent form, swallowing him. Moses simply cannot keep away from electricity in one form or another. At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah [his wife] took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched Moses' feet with it and said, "Surely you are a bridegroom to me." So he let him alone. Then it was that she said, "You are a bridegroom of blood, because of the circumcision." No more is written [36] . There is a question of pronouns here. Some say that Moses must have been already circumcised and all the pronouns refer to his son, making even "Moses' feet" "his" (the son's). Others say that Yahweh was trying to kill Moses because he had still not attended to his own circumcision. That is, lacking a proper scientific hypothesis, they make of Yahweh's action something arbitrary. The Editors of the Oxford Bible become avant-garde and write in a footnote: "Feet, a euphemism for the sexual organs (Is. 7: 20)." Isaiah does support this interpretation, speaking there of a razor shaving the head and "the hair of the feet." I would agree with this view, It is surprising that Freud, who certainly knew of this psychoanalytic principle, if indeed he were not its discoverer, makes no mention of it in his Moses and Monotheism. Can it be that this great objective mind was too fixated upon his idea that Moses imposed circumcision upon the Jews to notice who was circumcising whom? Freud further ignores the son and has Moses being circumcised explicitly; but he says the story is false and that Moses must have been circumcised since he was Egyptian, a kind of petitio principiis that is not otherwise absent from Freud's book. Buber has Zipporah both circumcising the boy and touching the boy's legs. Daiches suggests that Yahweh was aiming his bolt at Zipporah and the boy. Were the Hebrews circumcised at this time or not? Freud says no: the Sumerians, Semites, and Babylonians were not; but the Egyptians generally were [37] . Hence another proof that Moses was an Egyptian and wanted his Israelites to do the same. But then why, if he were an Egyptian, would he not have long before been circumcised? The situation seems totally confused, and I could make the situation worse by asking how Zipporah, a Midianite, happened to be expert with the flint and incantation? Or why did not Moses do the job himself? If Moses were a Hebrew or an Egyptian he would have been circumcised at one time or another. How could he expect to lead a circumcised people if he were not circumcised himself, and even demand their circumcision before admittance to full membership in the new nation? I go into the matter because it may bear upon Moses' character. If Moses is part Hebrew and part Egyptian, and assimilated almost completely to Egyptian thought and ways, and his Levitic friends are almost all circumcised in the Egyptian mode, then he is under cross- pressures. But perhaps he has always been too proud to let himself be circumcised as a concession to Egyptianization. And by "proud" I mean "regards it as a threat to himself" and perhaps in this was defended by his freethinking Egyptian mother: "No part of my precious boy will be taken away." And there is no patriarchal father to put the boy in his place by circumcision. At the same time, Moses has become in character extremely authoritarian and patriarchal. Thinking of himself as his own remote father plus the father who has rejected him, the Pharaoh, Moses projects all of his patriarchalism onto his god Yahweh, who becomes a most arbitrary and autocratic father, carrying all of Moses' subjective passion into the role, and letting Moses loose upon the world in his name. Now Moses, the uncircumcised, becomes Moses, the all-powerful father, in favor of the circumcision of others. Here he may be supported by Levitical-Egyptian scientific opinion. It is the modern argument on behalf of the practice. The Levites and Moses were of a character to believe in health practices; it is only because of the modern tendency (certainly not of many younger scholars, though) to think of ancient thought forms as primitive and incapable of pragmatic behavior, that the idea of a "health practice" as opposed to a ritual is usually ignored. I would surmise that Moses believed the Egyptian practice sane and civilized so that "rational" as well as "unconscious" motives spurred him in his campaign for circumcision. Again cross-pressures, if Moses were not circumcised himself. But profound and sincere hypocrisy is of the essence of the charismatic leader: Do as I say, not as I do; furthermore, I am symbolically circumcised before Yahweh himself, simply one more of the miracles that set me off from ordinary men, Joshua (5: 1-9), beyond the Jordan, calls for the total population to be circumcised. Evidently, the practice had fallen into desuetude, implying either that all or some of those born in the desert had not been circumcised. Whether this had grown out of Moses' inability to exercise control over the many new adherents to Israel gathered up along the way, or whether a second mass circumcision of confirmation of unity and dedication to Yahweh was here performed is debated; probably both are true. Moses has a speech defect. He is slow of speech and tongue [38] . The words do not come out. The legendary story of how Moses became thick of tongue is an excellent example of how myth speaks truth even when highly improbable. Moses was only three years old at the time and was sitting with his mother the Princess Bitriah, daughter of Pharaoh, at a dinner party. Moses took the crown from off the king's head and placed it upon his own head. The group was astounded and Balaam, son of Beor, reminded the Pharaoh how troublesome and clever the Hebrews could be and suggested killing him. Pharaoh called for advice, however, from wise men and so came Angel Gabriel in disguise. Let the boy choose between a coal of fire and an onyx stone. If he chooses the gem, slay him, but if he chooses the coal, he shall be judged a simple little child. Moses was forced by Gabriel to seize the live coal, and because he thrust his burnt hand into his mouth and burnt his lips and tongue, he became slow of speech and tongue. Legend here expresses Moses' mind, I think. Possessed of great ambitions, Moses "burned his lips and tongue" psychologically so as not to confess them. One is reminded of a kind of common saying: "She bit her lip to keep from exclaiming in protest..." An alternate common expression, at least in Germanic culture, can occur when a person blurts out words that she instantly regrets: "Oh, I've burned my tongue." It is pertinent here as well to point out how frequently schizophrenics develop speech patterns of an odd, disjointed, fragmented, and irrational kind. When he explains his lame speech to Yahweh at the Burning Bush to avoid going on his mission to liberate Israel, he is told that Yahweh will tell him what to say and Moses can put the words into the mouth of the eloquent Aaron who is coming to meet him, In two further incidents, he is depressed and tells Yahweh that he cannot persuade the reluctant Hebrews nor the Pharaoh of what Yahweh wishes, because he is "a man of uncircumcised lips." And, again: "I am of uncircumcised lips." Yahweh dismisses him the first time and on the second occasion again says he needs only Aaron to speak for him. Yahweh then adds, significantly: "See, I make you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet." [39] This metaphorical expression is not used again, For it does make Moses his two fathers - Yahweh and Pharaoh. It reveals for an instant the otherwise suppressed wish of Moses. In any event, the first metaphor is a transference from the genital region to the oral one, and vice versa. Moses cannot get his words out for reasons also bearing upon sexuality. Jewish legend has it that at the same encounter by the burning bush, Yahweh instructs Moses to forego hereafter the pleasures of the marriage bed; two children are enough; he is now to be wedded to the female holy ghost, uniting with "the Shekinah, that she might descend to earth for his sake." [40] But this is post-climactic in Moses' life. He has long been mumbling in an attempt to control his fierce resentments against the father who was not and the father who exiled him. (The pharaoh who exiled him was, besides the great father figure of political authority, his mother's father and, given the incestuous customs of the Egyptian royalty, perhaps his mother's spouse or lover and therefore his "father.") I would therefore ascribe Moses' incoherent speech to his inhibited rage, a rage reaching the magnificent heights which only the most ambitious achieve [41] . "He repressed all the principal impulses and most violent affections of the Soul..." [42] And the connection of his speech with his genital integrity - verbally as well as in fact - is psychologically and physiologically strong. From this powerful foundation in the unconscious, it is therefore possible to conclude, first, that Moses was never circumcised, that he seized upon a symbolic circumcision before Yahweh himself as adequate for his own conscience and to appease others, that his wife and son were apt tools for the purpose, that he could insist that all Israelites, as Yahweh's children, must do their duty by their father and be circumcised. Moses neglected his wife sexually and was reproached by Miriam, one legend states [43] . Philo Judaeus wrote: "He never provided his stomach with any luxuries beyond those necessary tributes which nature has appointed to be paid to it, and as to the pleasures of the organs below the stomach he paid no attention to them at all except as far as the object of having legitimate children was concerned." [44] He scarcely neglected legislating on the subject. If the fulsome detailing of sexual taboos in the Pentateuch is more the product of unoccupied priestly successors and purist prophets than of Moses himself, he designed its framework. It is nothing new: the striving for absolute power and authority go along often with sexual impotency, or uninterest. Moses in de-imaging Yahweh did a more conscientious job in the sexual realm than in all other parts of the anatomy. The de-sexing of Yahweh may have been part of the motive for de-imaging him, in fact, rather than the reverse. Every movement, whether political or religious, that has since been tinged with mosaism has stressed sexual repression, Aside from outright prohibitions in most life circumstances, there has occurred an infinity of regulations on the management of the sexual organs, making of Yahweh a gynecologist as well as an expert butcher. Z. Rix and Peter Tompkins have traced some cometary sources for this painstaking religious interest in sex [45] , and argue cogently that, when the comet lost its tail, whether it was cut off, struck off, or bit off, a fine precedent for all manner of sex neuroticism presented itself to human view. Hardly a glimpse of this enters the Bible of course; largely the effects occur without treating of the underlying causes, whether in Moses or in the great comet. The lightning bolt, or serpent Satan, or nightmare inspired Moses to think, and to think meant for him to act upon some major problem. Since those who speak of a close escape from death infer a divine presence, Moses had to put his mind upon Yahweh. Here was his immense new revelation of a father "not trusting Moses," say the commentators. No; conversely, Moses was not trusting the father. Not yet. But in the decision to circumcise himself symbolically and to lead a group united by circumcision, be could gain one more measure of control of the father. He could accept and please his close followers, the Levites. He could preserve his own bodily integrity and possess the female Holy Ghost. Thus, three items of the Old Testament carry a profound illumination of Moses - the Burning Bush, the assault by Yahweh, and the case of the tongue-tied prophet. More is to be made of Moses' speech problem; it has to do with the character of Yahweh, which is treated later on. The reader will probably guess correctly that a man with a speech defect will prefer an ideal without one. Even better than this, a man with a speech defect will invent a model whose speech defect will be, not a source of humiliation, but a divine gibberish to which all must bow down, on pain of death, and who speaks to him alone so that he, who cannot be well understood, is the only one in the whole world capable of understanding all that is spoken by this other unintelligible being. Thus he punishes those who would not understand him, by the act of interpreting another voice for them. {S : SCIENTIST AND INVENTOR} SCIENTIST AND INVENTOR Most of the scientific and inventive genius of Moses is shrouded in a general misunderstanding of the biblical language of fire, spirit, and the Ark. Much is short- circuited by the interjection of Yahweh in all affairs. Still, enough emerged even in early times to create a legend of Moses as a scientist. Philo Judaeus wrote of his intellectual precocity [46] . A composite portrait can be drawn from the Pagan writers of Greece and Rome [47] . Moses was an Egyptian who invented sun dials for solar worship in place of obelisks. He was learned, a great magician. He was the best of alchemists, a copious writer, and was called Thoth-Moses by the Egyptians. The legend of Pythagoras influenced the writing of the life of Moses during the late Alexandrian times, writes Buber [48] . Another source relates that in the same general period, in a fashion then typical, Jewish legends grew up asserting "that Moses, blithely identified both with the semi-mythical poet Musaeus and with the Egyptian Thoth, had been the teacher of Orphaeus.. and the inventor of navigation, architecture, and the hieroglyphic script." [49] As the French say: "One lends only to the rich..." We have already presented enough evidence (and there will be more) to show that Moses was a master of electrical science. Until it should be discovered that the Egyptians possessed the Ark, that great technology must be credited to Moses in Israel. His altar does not stand out technically from the other altars of the priests of the high places [50] . The age of the Delphic altar technology is uncertain. It may well go back to Mosaic times. Here again, we await archaeological and mythological studies that are illuminated by appropriate hypotheses. We will question later how the god Thoth (Hermes) and Moses were connected. There is an old tradition both flattering and uncomplimentary, that pictures Moses as a magician, a sorcerer, a medicine man, and a seer. From the presumptuous modern perspective, these words are insults and invitations to disputation. I see no reason for defining and distinguishing them, and fitting them well or illy to Moses. Buber barely skirts the "our boy is no magician" attitude, yet we can quote him here as showing that Moses was a better magician, ergo a better scientist, than others, and I have argued earlier that Moses was tolerated up to the last plague precisely because the Egyptian court knew and respected his science, going back many years. Discussing the plague of frogs, Buber is moved to say: "That he has... foretold the incident, and unlike the usual magicians, has done so without any magical conjurations... and that he further knows how to interpret the signs of the incident; these facts have a somewhat weird atmosphere not inviting any too close contact. The unwieldy words, with which a strange God jerkily moves his throat, only serve to enhance the weirdness." [51] If correct prediction is the test of a scientist, then, never mind the sorcery, augury, conjuration or magic; Moses is a distinguished scientist. Moses himself is at the same time interpreted as one who banishes magic, augury, and divination. But, even when we discover that science underlays the Ark, we must grant that the Ark is intended for augury and divination. No one except Moses can go to the Holy of Holies for oracles, but he does so himself. Judgement is rendered upon Korah and his band of rebels by seeking signs from Yahweh, and so on. One man's science is another man's magic. Our position here is that Moses exceeded by far the then normal ratio of science to non- science in a large realm of practices having to do with discovery, instrumentation, application, and foresight. Moses' alleged detestation of the non-sciences is part fact (granted he was more of a scientist) and quite expected. His suppression of non-science is part of his desire to suppress science as well, for he did not want more than one Ark, nor more than one "research center," for reasons of political control. Nor did he want people to engage in practices, which, quite apart from their scientific validity, would make of them independent leaders in prophecy, ceremony, or combat. Yahwism was to be a central rule interpreted by priests after Moses and enforced by the security police. Free science was believed to be inimical to religion and good government. We have already dealt with Moses' competence in the field of radiation diseases, phosphorus, and manna. According to legend [52] , Moses claimed to know "how leprosy arises and how it disappears." He certainly knew in Miriam's case and could be sure that seven days outside the camp was enough to heal her "leprosy" or phosphorus burns. We should also remind ourselves of Moses' Brazen Serpent, probably his final perfected instrument of the type of the rod. Used in conjunction with the Ark, it found a place therein, and was exhibited for a long period as a healing caduceus on its own account until it was destroyed. The contraption could by itself act as an electrical sparker, and it is conceivable that it was used both for charismatic (psychosomatic) therapy and for electroshock therapy. Moses was not an astrologer (except in the sense that any astronomer whose ideas are mistaken or outmoded is an astrologer). On the contrary, his preoccupation was earthly, and he hated astrological science. This probably stems from his controversies with the Egyptian "pyramid scientists" and his perceived "persecution" by them. In Deuteronomy [53] he warns the Jews against worshipping the heavenly bodies, condemning to death by stoning any man or woman who is proven to have "gone and served other gods and worshipped them, or the sun, or the moon or any of the host of heaven..." But there is no question of his meteorological interests and competence; he is a master of atmospheric and electrical arts. Why did he not expand Yahwism to take in the heavenly movements? The answer is fairly plain: there is too much fatalism, too little drive, permitted in the fascination with celestial bodies; further, other religions were performing astrological services as effectively as the Jews with their scant resources might, and hence people would hear the fatal call of Egypt and Babylon. Again the problem of control. Precisely during Moses' tenure, also, the skies were usually clouded and dusted over; it was a poor period for astronomical observation. Finally, a sedentary observatory would be needed for star studies; this a wandering nation could not provide. In Jewish tradition we hear that a new calendar was divinely ordained to begin in the month of Nisan, with the Passover to be celebrated on the 15th of Nisan, "but the computations for the calendar were so involved that Moses could not understand them until God showed him the movements of the moon plainly." [54] God ordered a court to be set up to attest to each new moon. Apparently there was some change in lunar, solar, and Earth apparent motions, together with an intervening cloudiness. New calendars were required. One of Velikovsky's surprising hypotheses was that the 365 day year did not exist before Exodus, and that before Exodus the year was of only 360 days. He denied that available evidence supported such beliefs. He cites hints that the new Hyksos rulers introduced the 360-day year in Egypt and that while the Jews were in Egypt, 210 modern years passed, although 400 revolutions of the sun occurred [55] . Here I confine myself to the indication of mosaic calendar change, and to a second suggestion namely, that the year's length before Exodus may have been 260 days. This was the sacred year of the Mayans tenaciously adhered to by these great ancient American calendrists for long after they designed and employed a new calendar [56] . Evidence of Mayan-Egyptian interconnections is not absent, but the problem is too complex and controversial to treat briefly. Suffice it to suggest that the 360-day year would give Moses an age at death of 85, instead of 120, 360-day years, and other time counts of the several centuries before Moses would also make more sense. I fear however that the temporal confusion is so great that no easy formula will ever deal with all instances. Perhaps the most enduring of Moses' scientific contributions has to do with the beginnings of popular records and historiography. Hardly had the Israelites left Egypt when Yahweh said to Moses: "Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua..." [57] it being a curse upon the Amalekites. In another surprising sentence of Exodus, Yahweh declares: "Whoever has sinned against me, him will I blot out of My book." [58] History and anti-history: god as a writer and bookkeeper! Had this ever happened before? What faith in the record! Yahweh was supposed actually to have written the first set of tablets of the Decalogue. They were written with "the finger of Yahweh." When Moses broke them, he had to repair back to the Holy Mountain, like a dutiful schoolboy, with a new set of writing materials. Moses made the Jews "the People of the Book." From then on, they were literate and regardful of the written word. That Moses was quite literate surprises no one, yet it should. Probably only scribes then wrote, and the priest scientists of Egypt. Neither common man nor noble would be able to write, one more indication that Moses had been more than a prince in Egypt. Some scholars and an old tradition credit Moses with inventing the alphabet [59] . The alphabet that matches sounds with signs, as contrasted with communicating written meaning by pictures and constructions, is accredited to a North Semitic person and group of the same mid-second millennium of which we are speaking in this book. We know, too, that the Israelites were a people forged - in a strict sense of integration of diverse elements - in anticipation of, and amidst catastrophe. They established their continuity precisely in the period between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages when other peoples that we know about were experiencing a rending asunder of their cultural continuity. Therefore, more rapidly than others, the Israelites might have captured the peak development of the Middle Bronze Age and applied it under the new conditions of the Late Bronze Age. At the time of Exodus, Israelites knew probably three kinds of script, the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the Babylonian cuneiform, and a popular script. Ernst Sellin called it "a popular alphabetic writing." He says: "The only piece of evidence that goes to suggest that Israel may have been acquainted with it as early as the Mosaic period is that the Mosaic oracular symbols, the Urim and the Thummim, appear to be not unconnected with the first and last letters of this alphabet... but it would be perfectly possible that Moses might have taken it over from the Kenites. Cf. I Chron. 2: 55. This alphabet made it possible to express everything with exactitude in the national idiom, which was not possible with the cuneiform.." [60] Sixty years after Sellin's remarks, Barry Page, employing the revised chronology used here for Egyptian history, can conclude: The initiation of a 'developed' linear alphabetic script in Canaan occurs after the conquest and occupation of Israel by Joshua, and one is strongly tempted to suggest that Israelite scribes brought a developed linear alphabetic system with them from Egypt to Canaan [61] . Moses is of the right time, the right place, and the right race( s). He has, too, a thorough education and literacy; he knows how to work with symbols. He has the explosive ingenuity as a person, and what is crucial, he exercises the necessary social control over his people; for an alphabet is a communication technology; it must be imparted with coercive sanctions or high voluntary motivation. With the adjustment of dates so that the Hyksos invasion of Egypt coincides with the Hebrew emigration from Egypt, the thought that the Hyksos may have carried an alphabet into Egypt is lamed by the fact that they did not impose the alphabet upon the Egyptians. There were many movements of tribes and peoples now, but was there any people whose particular situation was equally congenial to the invention? Several theories of Ugaritic and other origins must go by the way, because, by the chronology we are using, their alphabetic usage must be advanced to a later period and the Israelite presence placed ahead of it. Nor have we finished with the circumstantial evidence pointing toward Moses. The tongue-tied genius was inherently interested in sounds. He is, we know, also interested in communicating - both because he is a distant type of character and because he is embarrassed at his speech - through agents (Aaron, yes) as well as written messages. Further, he was the originator of the idea that Yahweh speaks his own name; Yahweh can be pronounced like a string of phonetics proceeding from an electrical discharge of the Ark. If one imitates the various hums of live wires and St. Elmo's fires, one can imagine the name of Yahweh continuously repeated. If this name is written down as in the First Commandment of the Decalogue, it is a phonetic name, perhaps the very first. But Moses is still adding to his points as inventor of the alphabet. He carries the Decalogue down from Mount Sinai on two tablets. Could he do so if they were written in hieroglyphs? A scholar complains that the Decalogue could not be compressed into two tablets, But it could if it were Moses writing in the abbreviated and new script. Of course, one cannot yet prove that Moses was the principal effective inventor of the alphabet, but, on the evidence, he may be acknowledged as the leading contender for the honor with regard to the Near East. With all this, I have hardly begun with the inventions of Moses. Bearing in mind that no invention comes without a buildup of antecedents and precedents and that Moses, as hero, even autobiographer, of the Pentateuch, will be credited for some discoveries not of his own making, still the total is astonishingly great. I shall adduce here briefly five sets of inventions, amounting to fourteen important individual inventions in all, that are in addition to the inventions of the Ark, the calendar, historiography, the alphabet and several others hitherto described. The first set is national: Moses invented the idea of a new nation, the concept of Israel, and the plan for it to come into existence - the Passover and Exodus. Surely there was insurrectionism in Egypt and among the Hebrews; surely the name of Israel-Jacob was known as a grand patriarch of old; surely there was a plethora of desires and schemes to win independence or set up a colony somewhere; perhaps a vague notion of the Promised Land existed. But Moses alone, so far we can tell, confirmed that all of these things could be planned and carried out, and he directed the operations. That he met with a response adequate to the occasion, and could rally the people and find the resources, that he could evade a crushing preemptive suppression were effects of his workable scheme. The outcome was the republican confederation of Israel. A second set of Mosaic inventions is religious: the new Covenant of Yahweh with Israel which he "negotiated;" the idea of a Constitution of morality: the Decalogue of Commandments; and the Code of Laws [62] . Of these, the Decalogue is outstanding, both as to form and to contents. Let me abbreviate these commandments of Yahweh [63] : 1. I am your god-ruler. 2. Do not experiment with other gods. 3. Do not employ me needlessly. 4. Rest from labor to celebrate my being. 5. Respect your parents. 6. Do not kill amongst yourselves. 7. Confine sex to your spouse. 8. Do not steal. 9. Do not slander. 10. Do not covet. The first four are intended to protect Yahweh. The six that follow are for the protection of the community. All are designed for the circumstances of life then and there. They are designed for people moving among disasters and disorganization. That they have been considered to be for all time and have been proclaimed as eternal simply proves that mankind has been forever in a state of disaster and disorganization, one step, two steps, but ever hardly more, from the Israelites in the desert. They are almost entirely negative, a criminal code, rather than positive, and punishment for their violation is intended to be heavy. To contemplate god; to sympathize with the gods of other people; to wish divine help for all who need it; to enjoy one's rest from labor; to love and respect one's parents in the measure of your maturity and their worth; to respect human life everywhere; to give a full measure of intimate love; to guard the possessions of others as your own; to be benevolent and generous to others; to wish all people well: these are hardly suggested in the Decalogue, nor are many other positive virtues. The Decalogue is a hard-hitting, explicit set of solutions for survival, brilliantly conceived and promulgated by Moses (though almost frustrated by the preemptive apostasy of the Golden Calf). Even with this explanation, modern exegesis has presented a hurdle to believing that this Ethical Dialogue is of Moses. Winnett [64] assigns the Ritual Decalogue [65] to the times of Moses and the Ethical one much later, to others. Judging its linguistics, it is, he argues, of a more cultivated age. The question can hardly be solved by stylistic considerations, inasmuch as, throughout the history of the Old Testament, we have a condition prevailing whereby, alongside what has found its way into writing, there runs an oral tradition that has not been written down and a problem of lost written pieces that had later to be recomposed. Moreover, the Ritual Decalogue is heavily agricultural. It contains instructions on how to make an altar, to sacrifice, and to cultivate; on attending to Yahweh's words but to mention no other god; it defines the Sabbath and feast days, and prescribes dietary practices. If my analysis is correct, Moses was quite able, and indeed more likely, to have produced the Ethical than the Ritual Decalogue, The catastrophe of Exodus would not have destroyed Moses' cultivated and managerial mind nor those of the elders. The Ethical Decalogue would have been the more useful one in the wanderings. The Ritual or Cultic Decalogue would have emerged as a product of post-mosaic times, when the culture of the leaders would have slumped for several centuries. The third set of Mosaic inventions treats of anniversaries and history; the change of the Sabbatical Year (from, I should say, a Saturnian-Elohist baseline to a Jovian-Yahwist baseline); an intense revival of the Sabbath day with the purpose of serving Yahweh; the possible inculcation of the second creation myth, that of Adam and Eve (which again I attribute to Jovian Yahwism), to follow the Saturnian-Elohim creation myth of Genesis. These are innovations, rather than heavy inventions. The Yahwist creation myth, like Mosaism in general, is sin-obsessed, punitive, and vengeful. It tells of an age of fire rather than water. It must have come into existence thousands of years later than the Elohim myth of creation. The fourth set of inventions, more important here, deals with social organization. Moses created a new organization of twelve tribes that he called Israel, counted the people by tribes, and had them organized by tribes and by military units within tribes. The military units were based upon the decimal system, not upon families or clans. At the same time, he created a separation of powers between the priesthood and the security police (Levites), and defined their functions; these men he placed over all the tribes, and then created an apparatus of state: the Ark, centralized worship, the Tabernacle; and provided (at the instigation of his father-in-law Jethro) a means of instituting complaints and pleas in the tribes and carrying the more important cases before Moses himself. Finally, there is the religion itself: Yahweh and Yahwism as an integrated religion. The Elohist tradition "quite unambiguously states that Yahweh was a newly received god for the Israelite war confederacy received through Moses" [66] . So far as we can tell, Moses invented the name "Yahweh." Merely to imagine that this is possible is amazing. The Egyptians had not heard of the name, nor probably had the Hebrews. Both groups used Elohim until Moses brought Yahweh from his exile. Later on, this point will be argued further, Although I believe that I have proven Yahweh to be in one sense an electrical engineering system, in the broad sense Yahweh stands for an integrated social system, a religion replete with a tradition in Genesis, a priesthood, a mobile cathedral, and a host of ordinances. This last achievement of Moses may also be considered as the invention of an integrated system of law related, of course, to the Decalogue. Thus Moses belongs with Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed as an inventor of religion. There can be no question but that mosaism was as far from Elohimism as from Christianity and that these two latter manifestations may be closer to each other than to mosaism. {S : TALKING WITH GODS} TALKING WITH GODS Among the many thousands of Israel, there must have been a hundred who talked with god, the holy spirit, or angels - some once, some many times, some with every authentic sign, others lacking all substantiation. No one but Moses talked with god authoritatively: there is the difference. One has to earn the right to be believed to talk with god. Moses had very right to do so. Practically everybody admitted this; and almost all thought it fitting and proper that, as the Pharaoh of Egypt was himself a god, so the leader of the Hebrews might bear the Lord upon him like a crown. When one claims to be talking to supernatural super-powerful beings one is "talking with gods." Such behavior is not at all uncommon and is engaged in sometimes by most contemporary people. One "prays to god" and god "answers one's prayers." In cases of disaster, such behaviors are normal. About ten percent of a western population in non-catastrophic times experience visual or auditory hallucinations, or both. [67] Many of these talk to the "other." When there is great physical and nervous stress and difficult decisions must be made, tendencies to hallucinate increase sharply. The environment, then afterwards the person, is deranged. Thus, a Dutchwoman on Java, when Krakatoa is exploding, flees in terror and arrives in complete distress and agony among people, where she hears her own voice as someone else talking [68] . An "Evil One," to quote one survivor, is everywhere causing confusion and driving people mad. In ordinary times, persisting delusionary behavior is deemed unjustified and therefore a symptom of mental derangement. When the behavior is part of a syndrome of activities and attitudes adjudged antisocial or personally deleterious, it is grounds for special repressive measures against (on behalf of) the person. When the behavior is associated with "beneficial" attitudes and activities, the person is tolerated and even promoted in esteem and encouraged to develop. From culture to culture, or (which is to say the same) from one epoch to another, talking to god is deemed more or less possible and more or less rational by the therapeutic rulers, who are theologians, psychiatrists and politicians. The role of ordinary people in relation to the therapeutic rulers is generally similar to their role in relation to the elites of other areas of social rule. In the case at hand, that of Moses and the politico-religious environment of Moses, there is every reason to believe that the situation was highly favorable to exceptional cases of talking to god. In the Egyptian setting the general power configuration was a theological bureaucracy, with a rationalized god-man ruler whose divine qualities were part of the law and did not have to be frequently demonstrated by charismatic acts: such was Pharaoh. On the same side, the Egyptian people may have been inefficiently coordinated to the ruling religion in that they were prone to accept wayward actions and ideas connected with religions. This, again, is not uncommon. It may be presumed that the present populations of the secular regimes of the world are also prone, though not to the same extent, to expect "true" and "real" divine manifestations, including talking with god. Further, in the Egypt of the late Middle Empire, the Hebrews were generally a separately organized, ethnically distinct, and geographically concentrated element of the Egyptian population. It is precisely among groups of such special distinction and traditions that deviant religious manifestations may appear, often in connection with political movements arising out of perceived grievances. Numerous instances may be located in the history of protestantism and heresy in the Christian empires and among American Indian tribes of the past century. If, under such circumstances, a figure like Moses originates, the grounds are prepared for manifestations of charismatic leadership. In such cases, talking to god is one of a number of attributes, though a key one, that are attributed to the leader, here Moses. Indeed, given the circumstances, so fertile for charisma and dedicated believers, it is to be remarked how widespread was the scepticism and opposition faced by Moses among the Hebrews. One may speculate that, if there had been an Egyptian policy of promoting an alternative Hebrew leadership and if the Egyptian elite and mass had not themselves been subjected to immanent tendencies to religious deviations, and, most importantly, if natural disturbances were not mounting in intensity, there would have been no real chance of Moses' assumption of power and successful leadership of a mass insurrection. Moses himself realized this and returned to Egypt when he deemed conditions to be favorable. On the question of to whom Moses was talking and the functional analysis of this relationship, we are led to several conclusions. Although it is by no means clear how long Moses had spent in the psychically incompatible Midianite environment, probably a period of some years is involved. He is granted a family. One legend has him spending forty years as King of Ethiopia before arriving in Midian to begin his period there. These stories indicate at least the passage of some time, and the development of a character which while basically operating with a mind that knows intimately the Egypt of the high courts, of polyglot areas, and jealously competitive theo-sciences, would have suppressed much and fixed upon a relationship between the old life and new life over the years. Moses is an originally internalized rage type; his renowned humility rides upon a deep inner belief in his superiority both of genesis and of mind. He would therefore be prone to hallucinating and projecting with great conviction this deeper level of his personality. Finally it became what was so obviously offered by the relatively devout and unidimensional shepherding culture - a god who discussed issues with him and who alternately browbeat him, cajoled him, and seduced him. Biblical historians have wrangled over how much of Yahweh Moses brought from Egypt and how much he brought to the Hebrews from the Midianites. The one critical export to Egypt was the talking god. The pattern of hallucinatory projective development is so obvious that one would have to believe either that many thousands, perhaps millions, of characters in similar etiological circumstances have spoken to their god, or else that Moses was talking to himself, employing a spectacular set of media provided by natural events. Once more we recall the theory based on tradition and on evidence that Moses was a great magician and derived much of his political power from his successful competition with other renowned contestants in this sphere. Yes, we say, Moses was a successful competitor in contests of the marvelous. But his magic was the expression of a condition much more profound than magic. Those scholars who are inclined to attribute magic to phenomena such as were played upon and excited by Moses and magicians, are usually ignorant of the intrinsic, embedded place in the history of religion and politics of persons possessed. The magician is, at least in the most common usage of the term, a person who is in rational and cynical command of a limited number of media of obscuration and symbols. The sincerely dedicated person of magical powers who acts consistently in matters of political and religious organization, negotiations, and leadership has to conduct himself in affairs that, intermittently magical, are ordinarily replete with pragmatic judgements of reality, heartrending failures, dull routine, and practical communications to mobilize human action. Agonizing self-appraisals, fits of disbelief in the capabilities of his associates and the possibilities of the situation, and divine discussions in both dysphoric and euphoric moods are not marks of the specialized and self-aware magician, but of the charismatic leader. The leader can be relied upon for responsible hallucinations. Thus was Moses. {S : THE CENTRALIZATION OF HALLUCINATION} THE CENTRALIZATION OF HALLUCINATION The Holy Tabernacle and tent of meeting was not a public place. Moses had exclusive rights to its use and extended that right to Aaron and other carefully supervised personnel. "When Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim, and it spoke to him." [69] Hallucinations were exclusively his right, and were rarely delegated, Aaron was permitted them from time to time. The occasion of the visit of the seventy elders to see Yahweh on Mount Sinai was a command invitation from Yahweh conveyed by Moses to them. It was to be a visible visitation, not a talk, and certainly not a roundtable, and was not completely successful. The "footstool" of Yahweh was manifest in the gleaming sapphire rock and it is said that the visitors saw Yahweh but not how or what they saw of him. A more extensive visit with Yahweh was achieved later. For he commanded Moses, when the people were desperate for meat, to bring seventy elders and "officers over them" to the Tent. "And I will come down and talk with you there; and I will take some of the spirit which is upon you and put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it yourself alone." So they came and were placed around the Tent. "Yahweh came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was upon him and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did so no more." [70] It was their first and last "pep talk" from Yahweh. That Moses and his aids were managing an electrochemical sound and light event here is manifest. Meanwhile, in the camp, two invited elders, Medad and Eldad, did not come and were prophesying on their own account. A young man ran to tell Moses about them, and ever-ready Joshua said: "My Lord Moses, forbid them." But Moses, in a surprisingly benevolent mood, replied: "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them." Needless to say, precious little of this occurred; Joshua's posture was the official one. Talking to Yahweh was centralized. Suppose that Moses had no god, as perhaps was the case before his revelation at the Burning Bush. Suppose that he had otherwise all of his genius and driving energy. Might he not have been accepted to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and in the years of wandering? Could he not have established his authority and held his power out of sheer ability to solve their problems? With all due regard for the pragmatism of people and for the effectiveness of sheer force (which was not originally available to Moses), there must be an identification with a god, a constitution, a popular will, or a possession by long inheritance to lend enough authority to a person to rule a people. The leader may then monopolize the source of authority, but he must rule in its name. The most obvious, striking, immediate, effective identification in this case was with a god. Moses found the god and established the ruling formula: Yahweh, through me, governs you for your own good. Moses could never have achieved his great tasks by his admittedly great energies, genius, and artifices. Yahweh, his companion, had to be acceptable to others, so that he, Moses, might be believed. But how could such a stern god be acceptable to a people? It would not be Moses' Yahweh of course if he were anything but rigorous and stern. But, again, if Moses could perform the impossible feat of inventing a benign, good-humored, tolerant god, would not everyone be happier (everyone, that is, except Moses!) and the god made more acceptable? The answer may very well be that Yahweh was not so acceptable. We shall soon look into the matter of revolts against Yahweh, but meanwhile we might try to visualize the Israelites and the state of their beliefs. Truly we are dealing with a practically unknown situation and there is nothing to be done about it, no public opinion surveys to call upon, no interviews of people to determine the degree of charisma in their relation to Moses. Nevertheless, it is more useful to guide our thought with a model of the people's beliefs than to rest forever in a vague and confused cloud of ideas or to insist on some impossible idea such as that Moses was faithfully served by the Children of Israel unto his death. As soon as such an idea is abandoned, and one forces himself to roam with the help of an instructed imagination over the square mile or more of the Israelite encampment, one begins to appreciate how limited Moses' charisma must be. {S : AN ISRAELITE OPINION SURVEY} AN ISRAELITE OPINION SURVEY Granted his greatness and energy, given the need to believe in authority, given the marvels of manna and water and quail, given the glorious Ark, prescribed a god to follow, nonetheless with all of this, strong forces work against the total harmony of convictions and behavior under the formula: 'Do thou as I say because I am uniquely assigned to your salvation': the nearly impossible situation of the people out of Egypt - beset on all sides by enemies, without a fixed territory, victims of repeated natural disasters, composed of diverse ethnic and religious elements, holding little realistic hope for the future, death on all sides. It is a charismatic setting, but by the same token, it is a setting for disenchantment, despair, and opportunism. Gressmann thinks that Aaron and many others were anti-Yahweh [71] . I have supplied a table of what may have been the situation. If my analysis falls anywhere near the true situation, then it is sharply evident that Moses had plenty of reasons for his dyspeptic view of the people of Israel. It would require altogether too many pages to discuss the numerous cells of the table. To repeat, it is presented so that a reader of the Torah may realize the importance of thinking of the whole people of Israel and so will not abandon them to the good graces of Yahweh and Moses. TABLE I Attitudes of Israelites (grown males) Encamped at the Holy Mountain (Hypothetical) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- . % of % of %of % of Egyptian Mixed Midianites Total Elite Hebrews Multitude (7000) (2000) (1000) (500) True Believers ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in Yahweh neutral or opposed to Moses) 8 10 20 15 in Moses (neutral or opposed to Yahweh) 8 10 5 15 in Both 10 20 10 10 Self-Servers ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- support Moses 5 10 3 10 oppose Moses 10 2 2 5 avoid commitment 5 15 5 7 Apathetics ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (tied to group by family or accident; nowhere else to go; taken care of; etc.) 20 20 35 3 Disbelievers ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in Yahweh (neutral to Moses) 10 6 5 10 in Moses (neutral to Yahweh) 14 5 10 20 in Both 10 2 5 5 ============================================================================================================ TOTAL 100% 100% 100% 100% ============================================================================================================ See Chapter VII first section, for the population in Exodus. Here the total population (with grown rnales in parentheses) is taken to be 25,000: 15,000 (7000) of (A); 5000 (2000) of (B); and 5000 (1000) of (C). To take one case, those who believe in Moses and are neutral to or opposed to Yahweh, and those that believe in both amount to 18% of the male Hebrew Egyptians, 30% of the Egyptians and other ethnics, and 15% of the Midianite and Kenite proselytes. This would total 2010 grown males who were the "true believers," the hard core of Moses' support, his charismatic followers. They would amount to about one-fifth of the potential warriors, and since the women and children would be inclined more than the males to be true believers, perhaps a somewhat larger percentage of the total population of 25,000. 1 believe that political scientists who are experts on elite theory would regard this as a robust basis for a tough and even despotic rule. The core of the opposition would be the 1970 disbelievers in Moses or in both Moses and Yahweh. For the hard core of true believers, the charisma of Moses is evidently based upon many proofs: that the Israelites survived due to Moses was the main proof and incessantly, compulsively repeated as a soldier tells of a dud bomb landing next to him; then the litany of his miraculous infancy (Did you know, too, that Yahweh sent a plague of boils upon Egypt just then ?); [72] his immense erudition; his princely connections; his works with divine fire; his halo; his tablets written "with the finger of god"; his escapes from two Pharaohs; his rod; his forty days and nights on the fiery mountain without food and drink; manna, quail, water; his knowledge of healing everything from snakebite to leprosy; the strong and deep men who obey him; his silence and aloneness; his speaking in tongues; his amazing timing of when to move, when to stay, when to fight, when to evade; and all the laws that keep the camp from anarchy and licentious chaos. He talks "mouth-to-mouth" [73] with Yahweh; Yahweh lives through him; Moses does nothing without Yahweh; who is against Moses is against Yahweh, and if you don't believe in Yahweh, you must all the more believe in Moses who knows how to pronounce himself in the "court language," the divine jargon of earthly rulers. {S : ROUTINIZING CHARISMA} ROUTINIZING CHARISMA I doubt that Moses was author of most of the as yet undeciphered rituals of the Books of Moses. A brief "Decalogue" may be traceable to him. The "safety rules" for handling the Ark and altar which extend to a danger zone beyond the tent are his. There are certain organizational ideas that would have been instigated by him. And, certainly, much else that was attributed to Moses in the Bible was his in fact. But the veritable avalanche of rules and taboos that have fallen into the Torah are the work of people who needed to lay the heavy hand of god upon every detail of existence in order to give themselves occupation and power. Moses gave them certain concepts - national pride, ethnocentrism, law, written records, fear of Yahweh, circumcision, repression and suppression, punishment. He opened the door to mosaism. They entered and took possession in his name, and dwelled there forever after. They routinized the charisma of Moses. Mosaism without Moses, like Christianity without Christ, or like Leninism without Lenin, brings about a different social order; behavior, and even the teachings change. However, the process began early, with Moses himself. He personally took charge of digging up and carrying the coffin with the bones of Joseph - traditional Hebrew authority - on the Exodus. Poor Moses, says the legend; while others carried their valuable loot from Egypt, Moses was burdened down by Joseph. Not at all. The coffin was like a suit of armor against his Hebrew opponents. And there was probably more in it than Joseph. It is another proof of Moses' genius - and the competence of the people around him - that hardly had they left Egypt when, with a greatly reduced people, in hunger and amidst disaster, he began to fashion ideological and social structures for the new nation. The central headquarters system, the reorganization of tribes, the provision of eternal slogans such as the curse against the Amalekites and the framing of laws - not despite the chaos of Mount Sinai, but taking advantage of that very chaos - all tended to move the nation into a future. Promises, promises: the people were fed upon these as well as miracles of springs and manna and quail, and were fed up with them. Yet there was always a developing system of rule that carried its own promise. Perhaps those people who survived ancient catastrophes best were those whose religions in some fundamental ways imitated the catastrophes and whose nations were born in the name of the disasters: it is a thesis we should like to develop sometime. It seems, at any rate, to have been the case with the Israelites. Like all charismatic leaders, Moses had problems in delegating authority: Aaron was a superb assistant but not harsh enough, Joshua was too harsh and very young. The tribal heads had little legitimacy in their own tribes. Moses complains to Yahweh: "I am not able to carry all this people alone, the burden is too heavy for me." Yahweh suggests an assembly of seventy elders come to him. Along with the Holy Spirit, they get executive responsibilities, by nearly direct divine authority, "nearly" I say, because Moses is explicitly tied into the donation of the spirit and power [74] . Jethro came upon Moses, his son-in-law, occupied endlessly with hearing disputes and advised him to appoint subordinate hearing officers. Moses promptly did so [75] . This probably was the institution of the elders [76] . As soon as he could, Moses institutionalized the Levites. They were given religious foundation, functions, authority, and a claim on the revenues of the tribes. Yahweh, in one of his most bloodthirsty moments, had claimed all the first-born of Israel for his sacrifices. Moses, speaking for a more moderate Yahweh, dedicated the Levites as surrogates for the infants. What better basis for the authority of this security police force than their having ransomed by their own persons the first-born of the Jews from infanticide? The Bible implies strongly that the whole Jewish nation was to have one Ark of the Covenant alone. It would be at the seat of government, the principal town. In fact it was literally the "mercy seat" of the government of Yahweh. This was certainly true centuries later, when it was installed in Jerusalem. More significantly, in the earliest period, when the population is divided by tribes and assigned regions in which to settle, the Levites alone are not given a special place but spread out as detachments among all of the fifty-eight townships. This would confirm the role of the Levites as special troops of the central government but would also indicate that each township was expected to have its own ark, if not immediately, then later. The Levites would operate it. I guess that after Moses, Israel decentralized, but had agreed in principle to keep a single ark which would be under central control. If one could rely upon the tribes to construct, maintain, protect, and employ their arks properly, there would be no cause for concern. However, in periods of low ark activity, they might expect too much from their arks and abuse them or abandon them; further, they might hear Yahweh with different ears, and disputes about the voices of Yahweh would occur. So, splendid and edifying as might be the possession of twelve or fifty-eight means of hearing and seeing manifestations of the Lord, and using arks in local warfare and criminal justice, there were probably even more compelling reasons for letting there be only one Ark, one Voice, one Interpreter (Moses or the high priest), one weapon system to maintain and control at instant readiness. {S : THE MANIAC SCIENTIST} THE MANIAC SCIENTIST If what has been said here were presented to a personnel officer or an occupational psychologist for a determination of the true vocation of Moses, the reply might be: he was a scientist. Educated. Literate. He is slow in speech, apparently modest but prone to indignation. Does everything in the third person (laying it onto Yahweh). Uncircumcised (indicating that neither Egyptians or Hebrews who raised him thought the question important, and that would mean a secular environment.) Heavy on abstract ideas. Does not believe in immortality. Impatient. Likes everything in writing. Handy and knows materials and tools. Weak on family life and sentiment. Marries outside the tribes of Israel. Needs help in political negotiations. Has an international reputation as a "magician." Is highly respected by establishment scientist. Although revered by many, never fully trusted by most people. Understands phenomena like electricity, manna, plagues, phosphorus, fire, smoke. Continually experimenting and inventing. Likes to number things and count people. Does not eat much or carouse; doesn't like people very much, and likes to see them well-ordered, serious. Does not believe the priesthood should have full authority. Keeps records. Was very open-minded on questions when young until he learned the "truth"; then he becomes dogmatic and insistent upon "the one right way" to do everything. Now he tends to be dogmatic from the first moment of a problem. Contemptuous of idols and images, though strongly object-oriented. Perhaps our imaginary occupational psychologist would agree, "Yes, the man's a scientist, one of these new-type administrative scientists." The question whether Moses had traits of a scientist may not interest the reader so much as whether he was a madman. I should say that by every criterion of madness, especially the test for schizophrenia, Moses would appear to have been mad. My answer, however, is that Moses was mad in theory but sane in context. Whereupon, of course, we become involved in the distinction between madness and sanity, psychosis and normality. Let me first recite the indications of madness and then afterwards explain my position. Not only may we arrive then at a determination concerning Moses but also at a better understanding of the perennial mad leader. Taking Moses to be psychotic, his illness would be termed obsessional neurosis leading into auditory hallucinations and culminating in paranoid megalomanic messianism. The disease begins with a weak early identity and a loss of self-respect, arising from circumstances such as I have already related in Moses' early childhood - a biethnic parentage with a confusion of attendants and conflicting messages from Hebrew and Egyptian attitudes playing upon him. He must suppress his speech and, in so doing, adds a physiological handicap of incoherent speech to his already diminutive self-respect. His drive to achieve intensifies and, because of circumstances, is repressed into autistic reveries of grand scope and ambitions. On both his Egyptian and Hebrew sides, his educators encourage him (build up his expectations) but at the same time his ideals are incompatible and unachievable, frustrating him when he seeks a clear realistic directive. He turns to scientific (and necessarily, in those days, partly magical) studies which reinforce his solitary and exclusive character while producing a value that both his sets of attendants recognize - priestly scientific magic. When we apply the Hoskins-Boisen basic behavioral manifestations of schizophrenia [77] - lack of self-respect, delusional misinterpretations, the externalization of conscience, and the sense of compulsive behavior, we can surmise that Moses is potentiated in all of these regards even before he gets into trouble and must leave Egypt. He is already a trouble-maker in the Egyptian scientific-priestly establishment. Naturally, excluded from the semi- theocracy of the pyramid cult, he is developing cultist tendencies of a different sort, probably Hermetic (Thoth), for Thoth (Hermes, Mercury) is the most ambulatory and earth- bound of the pantheon, and probably in the direction of experiments and machines that are excluded from the main career line of science. His quietness, incoherence, and seeming meekness are the outward cover for a demand-system that is really excessive, harsh, and incredible. The conditions of exile, as I have detailed them, reinforce Moses' traits. He does not forget Egypt; his obsessions are nourished by the quite incompatible silences and solemn, accepting unrelatedness of the wilderness. God-names with a sound even of "Yahu" are heard among the tribal Semites [78] . His cultic tendency is confirmed when he hears a force that he has long thought to be everywhere - electricity - increasing its activity and producing god-like sounds, even the name of god itself. There is a decisive change, a worsening of his mental disease from a psychiatric standpoint, a move towards one of the most noble ventures in history according to another viewpoint. In the years to come, Moses exhibits the full range of schizophrenic symptoms. To those already suggested may be added those indexed by Paul Meehl [79] . Meehl describes schizophrenia as characterized by a deficiency in the ability to enjoy life or people (anhedonia), an aversion to other humans, a loss of control over certain kinds of perception including the introduction of a special logic, concerns about the abnormality of one's bodily organs and functions, ambivalent confusion of simultaneous love and hostility towards all upon which and whom his interest is centered, and a hypercathexis or superabundance of intellectual activity of a possibly fully rational sort. The application of these mechanisms to Moses is apparent. Respecting anhedonia, there is scarcely any passage to be found in the Torah respecting pleasure. In a negative sense, Moses berates the people for not enjoying their poisoned quail and endless manna. But the point is too obvious to belabor - sex, food, all is: "Be glad you're alive: Thanks to Yahweh!" Miriam leads a victory chant and dances one time, a pleasant surprise, though she sings bloody murder [80] . If a Harry Golden would appear and call to Moses a hearty "Enjoy!" he would be thrown out of the camp. But we know from Puritanism, a mosaic throwback, that pleasure is a sin. I have commented already on Moses' inability to support affectionate human contacts. The loss of control over perception is the famous "talking with Yahweh" of which we have said much and more is to come. But note only how well-regulated Moses is in this regard; he disciplines his hallucinations marvelously, according to a special logic of schizophrenia. And the result is not only persuasive as to the reality of his discourses with Yahweh, but also fits into Moses' general psychological dynamics, and this too is appealing: thus Moses projects his immense aggressive superego or conscience upon a god; then creates a bad family of children for the great father, namely the Israelites; then has Yahweh play the strict father of this bad family, punishing them on every possible occasion. He, Moses, finds the spectacle edifying, while preserving a remarkable detachment. This matter of "cognitive slippage" may contribute to the solution, also, of the great riddle of how Moses, the scientist, could give what a modern scientist would regard as an unreasonable and inadequate description and explanation of his intricate and ingenious works and of natural events. I said earlier that the answer may be partly for establishing the greatness of Yahweh and partly out of contempt for the popular intelligence. But one may perceive another reason: a schizophrenic need to satisfy only himself with explanations of why he is acting so and he is satisfied by bizarre or simple explanations. Further, when an applied scientist, here Moses, cannot explain whether in thought or in language the theory and causes of his scientific operations, he may satisfy himself by introducing the deus ex machina: Yahweh causes all things to happen - end of argument. Putting together the last two impulses with the first two reasons, a conventionally acceptable cognitive slippage will do great service. In regard to concerns about his bodily image, we have little of Moses' physiognomy to go on. The legends say he was a beautiful young boy and man. Obviously, his speech difficulty is relevant, as is the circumcision issue, already discussed. Yahweh is supposed to be invisible, and Moses is accredited with the great religious invention of abolishing anthropomorphism. Yet a review of the Bible and legends in search of anthropomorphic passages discloses them in abundance. Yahweh has mighty ears, arms, legs, brow, eyes, nostrils, lungs, and everything as Michelangelo paints him on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. He also hates, loves as a father, threatens, burns with rage, gives, takes, instructs, commands, discriminates, plays tricks, tests, and of course, is jealous. And as with Yahweh, so with Moses who is living in his image of Yahweh, and - apropos - it is not Yahweh who is the jealous god so much as Moses in his other self as Yahweh. Obviously this metaphorical kind of imaging did not violate the Third Commandment , whereupon we think that Ziegler may be correct in that the most important meaning of the forbidden "image" and "standing image" may be the visible presence of Yahweh on the Ark of the Covenant [81] . Next we consider Moses' ambivalence, alluded to earlier on in this chapter in connection with the Israelites. In several specific passages, Yahweh is directly described as the source of good and evil. Moses had no need for Satan: why? Because Yahweh was the devil and in Moses' unconscious mind there could be no separation of god and the devil: he must both hate and love the same personage. Again, going back to the bad children of Israel, Moses uses them to express all of his hatred of Yahweh - their willful disobedience, their unfaithfulness, their whoring after false gods, their ingratitude, their forgetfulness of the past, their disregard of obligations, and so on. Then, reversing the ploy in a marvelously acceptable but mad logic, Moses displays his detestation of the Israelites by having them continually and severely chastised by Yahweh. Thus Moses safely hates both Yahweh and the Jews. As for Meehl's final criterion - the hypercathexis of intellect among schizophrenics - Meehl makes it clear that in some cases the schizophrenic often pursues, alongside his rocky road of cognitive slippage and incoherent behavior, a straight path of intellectual hyperenergy and achievement. I have already advanced much evidence of the superiority of Moses in this regard. Such genius is already a sign that a most extraordinary emotional dynamic must be operative. With all of this, how can one avoid concluding that Moses was a madman? I refrain not so as to appease the billion labeled followers of Moses in the contemporary world. I refrain because Moses effectively managed the Exodus in ways that were the outcome of his character and depended upon his character. Given the disastrous conditions, the heavy risks and the loosely aggregated people, it is highly improbable that another man could have succeeded in any other way than that of Moses. I see two major errors in decision produced by Moses' character. The first is that it may not have been wise for the Hebrews to leave Egypt at all, or it may have been wise for the people to return, even if Moses and the cohort of leaders might lose their new power. The second is that there may have been enough stability and responsibility among the elders and representatives of the people at the time of Korah's revolt, of which I shall speak, to convert Moses' tyranny into a federal republic, with the ultimate result of holding all the tribes of Israel together in times to come. Other errors of judgement occurred, none fatal to his mission. Other traits of his also made life difficult beyond necessity for the people of Israel. There is another and imperative reason for not applying the term "psychotic" to Moses. Many of the biblically related events of the Exodus and its aftermath took place in a physical environment that was as chaotic as it was unforeseen. It was surreal. It was the substance, but the real substance, of which the visions of the schizophrenic are composed. Quoting alternately the studies of Hoskins and Boison [82] , we see in the mind of the psychotic what was the real world of Exodus: To the patient himself, his ideas and emotions are the matters of primary significance... To him they represent firm, terrifying, torturing, mocking, and fascinating reality. An initial feeling of strangeness is rather common. In the words of one patient, the subject is often beset by a 'flood of mental pictures as though an album within were unfolding itself. ' Elements of the unconscious come into awareness and are interpreted as manifestations of the supernatural, often with devastating impact. In the new world into which the patient is thrust, previous principles and standards seem irrelevant. 'He sees strange meanings in everything about him and he is sure of only one thing, that things are not what they seem. ' His new ideas and mental pictures become so vivid as to constitute the voices and visions that a large proportion of the patients experience. 'Very commonly it is as if the conscious self had descended to some lower region where it is no longer in control but is at the mercy of the terrifying ideas and imagery that throng in upon it. The eyes are opened so that one seems to see back to the beginning of creation. One seems to have lived perhaps in many previous existences. To the individual, the new experiences are so vivid that they seem to represent profound, new revelations and the marked sense of mystery is often associated with the more profound types of disturbance, with characteristic archaic symbolism, bizarre ideation, and often deep religious concern. A second set of observations confirms this view of the world as catastrophe. The latent schizophrenic must always reckon with the possibility that his very foundation will give way somewhere, that an irretrievable disintegration will set in, that his ideas and concepts will lose their cohesion and their connection with other spheres of association and with the environment. As a result, he feels threatened by an uncontrollable chaos of chance happenings The dangerousness of his situation often shows itself in terrifying dreams of cosmic catastrophe, of the end of the world and such thoughts. Or the ground he stands on begins to heave, the walls bend and bulge, the solid earth turns to water, a storm carries him up into the air, all his relatives are dead, etc. [83] Here again, notably, is the Weltanschauung or cosmic image, this time observed by Carl G. Jung. It corresponds to the real images of the external world during natural catastrophe and the feelings normally inspired by the images. In the case of Moses, and generally in the psychology of catastrophe, the real and the unreal confirm and reinforce each other; they interact, but so in tandem are they that when the real pulls ahead of the unreal (or mental) it drags it along and vice-versa. This is what I mean when I say that Moses, with a character appropriate to an environment "gone mad," is not himself of chaotic and disordered mind in the framework of the surrealist natural and human behavior he was experiencing. Although Moses was beyond madness, the question of whether his life-work was "good" is swamped by "ifs" and "buts." Certainly he helped a small population to survive. However, the good in the survivors has consisted in the greatest degree of aberrations from, conflicts with, and transformations of mosaism. I shall explain this line of thought later on and in the light of more information about the revolts against Moses and the character of Yahweh. Professor James Breasted wrote that Moses was "cognizant of all the wisdom of the Egyptians." [84] But he was a creator, too. He was a type of Leonardo da Vinci in the variety of his scientific and military inventions, although we would have to reconstruct his tabernacle and clothing designs to evaluate his aesthetic ability. He was a ruthless monotheist who slaughtered his own charges, the "Children of Israel," to keep them in line. He was a hallucinatory genius, without his own father (his own father being practically unknown to him and powerless, and the Pharaoh unaccepting and remote), who made the voice of god his father and everyone else's father in a pure patriarchal absolute form spelled out in a system of laws and political organization of which he was the dispassionate proponent. He was a George Washington (even to his inarticulateness and the combination of arrogance with humility) who fathered a nation and led it through difficult years. Moses was even a kind of adventurer, clever and unscrupulous, who conceived a scheme to fit the times and pulled it off successfully, giving Israel the most sophisticated weaponry of the Middle Bronze Age and thus ensuring the capture and holding of a considerable "Promised Land" against a ring of powerful enemies for centuries. All of this was achieved amidst recurrent natural chaos. There was too much of Moses to make of him a god or a son of god: this at least all scholars and priests have agreed to and seen to. Moses was more than a man; he was many men at once. Yet he himself declined any relation to Yahweh other than being Yahweh's exclusive intermediary with Yahweh's "Children of Israel." From this one concept, which might be termed a legal fiction, ramified the structure of mosaism, then and thereafter. {S : Notes (Chapter 6: The Charisma of Moses)} Notes (Chapter 6: The Charisma of Moses) 1. New York: Knopf, 1939, 3. 2. Life of Moses, 5. 3. III G. 4. The tribe of Simeon was quite lost to history, either assimilated to Judah or lost with the people of the tribes of Northern Israel. 5. Gen. 49: 7. 6. II G 269. 7. II G 262. 8. Auerbach, Moses, 17, and others. 9. Buber, 35. 10. "Die Mosessagen und die Leviten," xxxi Sitzungsberichte der koniglich-preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1905), 640, quoted in Rank, fn. 83. 11. G II 277-8. 12. G II 275. 13. Ibid. 14. Sebastian de Grazia, "Mahatma Gandhi, Son of his mother," 19 Polit. Q. 4 (1948), 336-48. 15. A legend says that Joshua had already a vocation as an executioner before joining Moses on the Exodus. (My source here was I. Velikovsky in a conversation in Oct. 1979; the passage is in Ginzberg's Legends.) 16. The relevant verses are listed in James Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Nashville: Abingdon, 1963, based upon the Authorized Version. 17. Moses, 243. 18. Ex. 30: 11-6. 19. Azazel was also a fallen star or Lucifer and called also Azzael, Azza and Uzza. Uzza we have found is the star angel of Hyksos Egypt, and was thrown into the sea during Exodus; al- Uzza is the planet Venus in Arabic, to which human sacrifices were once made. (see Velikovsky, W. in C., 157-8. 20. Ex. 32: 30. 21. Ex. 32: 33-5; 33: 12-16; 34: 6-10. 22. Il Principe e Discorsi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960, p. 468. 23. Neher, 79. 24. Buber, p. 167-8; Cf. Philo Judaeus, On the life of Moses, 5. 25. Ex. 3: 4; Ex. 19: 3; Lev. 1: 1. 26. Ex. 2: 12. 27. G II 281. 28. Philo, 11. 29. Auerbach, 25. 30. II G 290-1. 31. G II 293. 32. Cf. W. Hosford, "Extraordinary Case of Electrical Excitement....," 1: 33 Am. J. Sci. (1838), 394-8, about a woman with such a faculty, unexpected and unwanted. 33. He would not be the only Hebrew dowser, but the only one with authority to whom attention was due. At this writing, on the Island of Naxos, Greece (pop. 15000), anyone may dowse, but only one dowser, Aristoteles, is hired to dowse. 34. H. S. Burr and F. S. C. Northrup, "The Electrodynamic Theory of Life, "19 Q. J. Biol. (1935), 323-33. 35. Probably he sent them back to Midian when the crisis deepened, for they were with Jethro when finally Moses returned to Midian after the Exodus. Ex. 18: 5-6. 36. Ex. 5: 24-6. 37. Freud's statement is supported by Gressmann, Altorientalische Texte, op. cit., 126, plate 254, which depicts an Egyptian circumcision operation. 38. Ex. 4: 10-6. 39. Ex. 7: 1. 40. II G 316. 41. I find myself having to criticize Freud for his neglect of the unconscious again. He lays Moses' speech impediment to his inability to speak Hebrew properly! Even then, his reasoning is illogical, because Moses complains of his affliction as an impediment to persuading also the Pharaoh, who presumably spoke Egyptian. Arthur Koestler once pointed out that the Greeks called stutterers and foreigners by the same name, "barbarous" (IX Ency. Britannica 9). Here is a hint of support for Freud. We cannot eliminate the possibility that Moses confronted his speech problem by employing a special or stilted form of Hebrew. 42. Philo Judaeus, 7. 43. III G 256. 44. Philo Judaeus, Ibid. 45. Rix," The Great Terror," I Kronos n§ 1 (Spring ;1975) 51-64 and "Note on the Androgynous Comet," I SISR 5 (1977), 17-9; cf. P. Tompkins, The Eunuch and the Virgin, New York: Potter, 1962. 46. Moses, 6. 47. John Gager, Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1972. 48. Moses, 41. 208. 49. 10 Encycl Brit., 193. 50. Ziegler, 105ff. 51. Moses, 67. 52. III G 260. 53. Deut. 17: 2-5. 54. II G 362. 55. Velikovsky, W. in C., 124. 56. M. Coe, "Native Astronomy in Mesoamerica," in A. F. Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre- Columbian America, Austin, U. of Texas, 1975. 57. Ex. 17: 14. 58. Ex. 32: 33. 59. Neher, 62-3, citing signs sculpted upon a statue at Serbit-el-Hadim. 60. Ernest Sellin, Introduction to the Old testament (tr. London, 1923), 13-14. 61. Barry Page, "A Palaeography of Biblical Israel," I Interdisc. Bib. Scholar 1 (1979), 26. 62. Max Weber credits Moses with inventing the Convenant with the deity, p. 78, Ancient Judaism, Glencoe: Free Press, 1952. The Covenant codes of Ex, 20: 22-3; 33; 34: 11-6. cf. M. Greenberg, "History of Judaism," 10 Encycl. Brit. 304. 63. Ex. 20; 24; Deut. 5. 64. Winnett, 30ff. 65. The Ritual Decalogue (Ex. 20: 23-6; 23: 10-9) is assembled by Winnett, 192-3. 66. Weber, 121. 67. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976, 87. 68. Furneaux, Krakatoa, 219. 69. Num. 9: 89. 70. Num. 11: 17-25. The exceptions prove the rule. The spirit of Yahweh changed the false prophet Balaam into an absurd but true one (Num. 24: 2). Jephthah, with the "spirit of the Lord" upon him sacrificed his daughter (Jg. 11: 29). Elijah the Prophet, transfers his spirit to Elisha before he is carried to heaven by a chariot of fire (2 Kg., 2: 9-10). 71. Mose and Seine Zeit, 441. 72. Actually, scorching heat, leprosy and boils, in legend. II G 266. 73. Buber, 168-9. 74. Num. 11: 10-25. 75. Ex. 18: 13ff. 76. III G 68-72. 77. R. G. Hoskins, The Biology of Schizophrenia, New York: Norton, 1946, pp. 82-9. 78. Buber, 50. 79. Paul E. Meehl, "Schizotaxy, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia," om A. and E. Buss, eds., Theories of Schizophrenia, New York, Atherton, 1969. 21. 80. Ex, 15: 20-1. 81. Ziegler, 33-7. 82. 85 83. Carl G. Jung. Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1906, tr. Hull, Princeton U. Press, 1974). 181. 84. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (1934), 334. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 7: } {T THE LEVITES AND THE REVOLTS} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN THE LEVITES AND THE REVOLTS The "Hebrews" of Exodus were of various degrees of Hebrew-ness. Many were quite Egyptian. Many others were assimilated to Egyptian culture. The most important larger group were traditionally loyal Elohists. Few could have been Yahwist, inasmuch as Moses was only then expounding the new cult. In what would have been Goshen, at Tell ed-Dab'a, a town of the Middle Bronze Age has recently been excavated. It reveals a heavy non-Egyptian, Palestinian aspect. Skeletal remains, etymology, and artifacts disclose a heterogeneous population of Semitic and other backgrounds [1] . This would support our theory that the proto-Israelites were a geographically separate and autonomous people, to some degree maintaining their old ethnic identity, living among Egyptians and other peoples from East and West, intermarrying, holding a full range of occupations, but now caught up in a xenophobic, anti-semitic period and forced to supply corv‚es and employ birth-control. It is not surprising to learn that the Book of Exodus, as befits a historical work of those times, has much in it of the popular Egyptian language [2] . The some three million souls that the Bible asserts left Egypt are far too many. It is not that aggregated tribes of 500,000 or even more have never moved long distances; they have. The Cimbri and Teutons migrated in this number over a period of years at the end of the second century B. C. from the North Sea region to southern France and Italy; after seriously threatening Roman power, they were annihilated by the Roman legions of Marius. {S : NUMBERS LEAVING EGYPT} NUMBERS LEAVING EGYPT The number of persons in Exodus has been estimated variously from 2000 to 6,000,000 [3] . The great range of figures adds confusion to the theory of Exodus. We should at least estimate, if we cannot know, how many persons left Egypt and how many were alive to muster for the handing down of the Ten Commandments at the Holy Mountain a couple of months later. Avoiding such estimates, although usual, leaves many questions open and lends an air of unreality to the grand project of Moses and the Israelites. Therefore, reasoning from what little is known and what would have been possible, I shall try to establish how many people were involved at the several stages of Exodus. The conditions of Exodus, as we have described them, were peculiar. The Exodus of three millions in one group in a few days would imply a line of marchers stretching from Goshen to Horeb; ten abreast with beasts of burden or one wagon, three meters apart, say, would produce a column 900 kilometers long. The flocks and herds would flank the marchers. If so many did leave Goshen, perhaps as a horde fleeing from the disasters, believing that the Israelites possessed secret knowledge of an undestroyed "Promised Land" (as likely a reconciliation of Bible and reality as one might conjecture), the refugees would have dropped to a figure nearer the one out of fifty that a rabbinical source says completed the march. Even in this case, I would distinguish between the two types of persons abandoning their region, and allow for only 60,000 or so organized marchers at the end of the first two days. I would assume that of the three millions of refugees, some 300,000 may have been affiliated to the Exodus movement, but turned back on the vague promise, half-welcomed, of making up a second wave of Exodus at a later time. This has happened often in tribal migrations and in the wagon-train movements of the American western settlements. Another 240,000 Hebrews more or less would have refused to go from the very first [4] , and it would have been with these that the departing Hebrews had their rumored conflicts. The 60,000 who arrived at Pi-ha-khiroth near the frontier would include more warriors than is typical of a tribal migration. Many would have left their families. Men of working age would be the most anxious to leave. But when the pursuing Egyptian army was espied, many, especially of the Egyptians and physically weaker elements, would have deserted and fled to all quarters during the long bright night. A drop of some 10,000 persons would be expected at this critical point. Next came the crossing. Here the legends, as well as logic, would dictate another serious loss, perhaps another 10,000. [5] The panic would be extreme, the time very short, the waters appearing from all quarters of the compass in cross-tides, the muck deep in places, exhaustion general. The many days of march between the "Sea of Reeds" and Mount Sinai (or Horeb) would have cost another 10,000 lives from weariness, thirst, starvation, and illness. And the assaults of the Amalekites would have cost yet another 10,000 lives, first from the slaughter of Hebrew rear elements and then, much less, of warriors in battle. The survivors of Exodus, then, would have numbered 20,000 of which probably a full 10,000 were warriors. This figure of 10,000 is one out of sixty of the figure of 600,000 males of battle age carried, as "planned hope" and "lost vision," in Exodus and the Book of Numbers. The Bible mentions that the Israelites did not march as a single body but in phased stages; too large a number were involved to proceed in a single, or even in two, marching units. These would then be reinforced by the followers of Jethro, a tribe, or part of one, of the Midianites, who had been struck by their own disasters, and who accepted Yahweh and little else in the way of conditions for becoming Children of Israel. Perhaps 5000 were thus joined to the 20,000 from Egypt. The 25,000 would still be a considerable and formidable people. Most were warriors, too. It would explain the prompt organizational step that Moses and the Levites took. The twelve tribes of Israel were filled out around cadres of the same name, in almost every case greatly outnumbered by the new elements - Egyptian, Asiatic and non-tribal Hebrews. The tribes were then assigned quotas of fighting men, organized by the decimal system, which would be called upon by Moses and Joshua when the hour for battle struck. {S : IMPEDIMENTA} IMPEDIMENTA I have already explained, in Chapter One, that the Exodus was not a pell-mell flight of a horde of slaves, but that it was well-organized, with a highly competent and determined Hebrew leadership under Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Hur, and others [6] . As soon as he had finished his last session with the Pharaoh and Egyptian councillors, Moses hurried to Goshen, a few hours away. He may have cut across to a planned rendezvous with the advance elements already moving out. So far as he could tell, he had done his job well; the Egyptian forces were under orders not to interfere with the movement. The people of Exodus were carrying all that they could. The headquarters materiel transported by Moses and the Levites consisted of more than one ordinarily imagines. On the wagon and in the coffin or ark-box carrying Joseph's remains would be the most secret and precious items. It would not hold much. They would also have collected and carried a complete collection of tools, including construction, metal working, medical and sculpturing instruments; metal rods; gold, silver, bronze; copper and lead, and preferably alloys of lead and copper already smelted; perhaps meteoritic iron or even iron from the Caucasus or Anatolia; levers and ratchets; nails; amber or a substitute; glass rods; magnets; surveying instruments; sun dials; water clocks; straps and ropes of various kinds; various small wheels; buckles and pills; artificial and volcanic glass; drugs; poisons; phosphorus (white and red); flint; a large quantity of papyrus; clay tablets; styluses; bales of cloth, especially canvas and wool, and skins of animals; cut hard and soft wood, especially cedar and shittum; written tablets and papyri, containing history, formulas, and instructions; military equipment including tools for its repair - swords, lances, slings, and missiles; staves; possibly some apparatus and models that Levites were working on or knew about; plus a variety of then known and now-forgotten implements and provisions, various idiosyncratic fancies and expressions of ideas of varying utilitarian possibilities, and, of course, rations for weeks of time, including tons of unleavened bread. The collecting process had gone on for months. The Bible mentions almost none of this effort. In a number of passages, both in the Bible and the legends, we are offered a strange picture - of the Hebrews first borrowing valuables from their Egyptian neighbors for the trip and then being given them, with a strong implication of blackmailing and looting the frightened people - both Egyptian and Hebrew - who were staying behind, and stripping the ruined houses and settlements. The implication, too, is that these activities were ordered by the leaders for the purpose of supplying the expedition. It would be in accord with the Bible's mode of expression, also, to lay the activity upon the departing people, whereas, in fact, the Levites and their helpers probably engaged in the work systematically, going to the known sources of the required or desired materials. Livestock was probably rounded up from wherever it was corralled or had strayed, the clip of the ears notwithstanding. Calculating solely the transportation of the materiel of the headquarters and of the special assault and guard troops, perhaps a hundred carts, a hundred mules, donkeys and horses, and many litters would be needed. After the Levites, the Judah tribe seems to have been organized and of high morale. Moses and the Levites would march in the vanguard preceded by reconnaissance patrols of Levites and Judahs. The throng of followers was too great to organize properly and probably a detachment of Judahs was used as a rear guard, with a small Levite staff, under instructions to delay and hamper any pursuit or harassment but not to fight uselessly for the unorganized crowd of followers. In the passage of the Red Sea, by which is meant the tongue of waters and lakes extending north of the Red Sea, the headquarters detachment and the special troops, with Moses, would move through first, hoping that some or most of the people would pass before the waters returned. The sight of the heavily loaded caravan marching out would have been impressive. Reports and rumors of it and its contents would have been immediately relayed to the Egyptian armed forces headquarters and the Pharaoh at Memphis from road guards and small military posts that were not overrun before they could flee. Most unnerving of all might have been the sudden intelligence that a number of trusted officials and technicians had decamped with the Hebrews. The astronomers would have been quite discredited by events; the military would call the next move; logically, it was to pursue and recapture the materiel and slay or take prisoner Moses and the elite element. The pursuit was launched. When the pursuing force and head of the Empire were lost, the regime of the Middle Kingdom collapsed and the Hyksos entered immediately. They would become aware promptly of the mass exodus when they found the land of Goshen stripped of valuables, livestock and goods. Soon afterwards, the Jews found a detachment of desert warriors at their rear, slaughtering the lagging elements. They showed knowledge of the Jew's history in Egypt. Moses detailed his best troops to engage them and accompanied them. I think that these Amalelite-Hyksos were not encountered by chance; they were on the same mission as the Egyptian forces, to retake the spoils of Egypt. Moses took part in the first battle, standing on a prominence with Aaron and Hur, holding his rod of Yahweh aloft to encourage the Israelite fighters; before the day was over, he needed their help to keep his arm up. His staff would be the famous staff that performed before the Pharaoh. The three men may have been able to induce an electric charge from the ground and bring about a discharge into the clouds and dust that hovered very low above them. An effect of this kind would tend to intimidate the enemy and revive the Israelite morale. It would be especially effective because the troops were battling in near-darkness under the cosmic clouds. Every time Moses lowered his arms, the enemy gained an advantage, it is said [7] . {S : TECHNICIANS AND SECURITY POLICE} TECHNICIANS AND SECURITY POLICE More practically, now, we can consider the nature of the Levi's, the Levites, who were critical in the management of Exodus and the succeeding wanderings and conquests. Not a tribe, not priests, the Levites may have included representatives of all the tribes, says the article in the Encyclopedia Britannica [8] . I said in the first chapter, too, that the Levites may have been assimilated Hebraic Jews, many or most of mixed ancestry. What is a tribe, and what is a nation? The Hebrews of Egypt became in basic ways the Jewish Nation in Exodus. A tribe is sovereign; it may be part of a confederation of tribes, but it can go its own way when it feels it must. Moses put an end immediately to any pure confederation. It would have been exceedingly difficult to mobilize and lead the Hebrews from Egypt, and organize them into the masters of a promised land, without strong central leadership. This implied a group to wield the central power and carry out the central plan. Such were the Levites who had in many cases developed their skills under the Egyptian imperial administration. Only among the Levites were Egyptian names found in later times [9] . The Exodus marked the end of the Dynasty. In Egypt, the other Hebrews were terrorized and driven to work without pay, "all except the tribe of Levi who were not employed in the work with their brethren Since they had not been with their brethren at the beginning" they were not disturbed [10] . The Levites appear in modern terms as a kind of technical police and fire brigade. They seem to be in families, yet not a blood clan. They served as individuals. They are competent. They are not as beloved or revered by the people, I think, as were the priests. At first, they are not permitted priestly functions. They have orders to "shoot to kill" should anybody approach the holy premises. In fact, they turn out to be something like the special forces that the Department of Defense organizes from time to time with high technical qualifications because of the special weaponry involved. They were indeed handling deadly equipment. They were in charge of the mobile worship-weapon system: the tabernacle, tent, altar, and ark. Various wagons were assigned to them for transporting this national equipment [11] . "Historians are still unable to explain satisfactorily such problems as the relationship that existed between the Levites and the hereditary priesthood." [12] Moses developed the Levites as a special arm of Israel. Satisfied that his older "half-brother" Aaron should have the priesthood and guarantee its security, he appointed the Levites, the best educated secular element of the Hebrews, many of whom had served the Egyptians along with Moses himself, to manage the Tabernacle with its equipment and the most precious goods of the people. No wonder there was puzzlement about the Levites centuries later as the environment became more orderly, uniform, and electrically balanced. Why should the Levites have shaved from head to foot, for example, if electric shock were not a danger? From elite troops, the Levites became property and stage managers, with a right to read the Torah following upon the preeminent right of the Kohens or priesthood. However, as one reads in Deuteronomy [13] , during some lengthy period, after Moses, the Levites performed the duties of the priests themselves. Moses decided, in the name of Yahweh, of course, that death would be visited upon a priest who approached the Ark with unclean hands - death by accidental or deliberate electrocution in some instances. Down to today, significantly, the Law does not get read in the Synagogue before a Levite washes the hands of the Kohen who is to begin the reading. A psychiatrist's reasons for this ritual purification (and individual problems of the genre) in an uncontrolled liberal society are usually adequate, but shaving one's body completely, wearing special clothes, removing one's shoes before the altar, and washing one's hands begin to make up a complex that primordially might have to do with precautions against unwanted electrical connections. And the technical expert is he who insures precautions. Thus the Levites were to serve, but also to control the priests and their equipment. Exceptions from their control were Aaron, of course, and Aaron's son, Eleazer, subsequently High Priest. The reason is given in one place "that there may be no plague among the people of Israel in case the people of Israel should come near the sanctuary." [14] Here the intent to avoid a dew of dangerous chemicals and radiation seems clear. The plagues would be widespread outbursts of skin lesions and sores (mistakenly called leprosy), but would include plagues of vomiting, diarrhea and eye diseases, all of which occur with radiation poisoning. These are related in turn to the plagues of Egypt preceding the Exodus, when the red dust poisoned the water and covered the land. The natural excitation, emergence and proliferation of frogs, insects and vermin that would also be lifted and dropped in the cyclonic winds would be connected by observers with the chemically caused plagues. Yahweh exempted the Levites from the Mobilization and Census of the people because they were his retinue, says a legend [15] . Only Levites from 30-50 years of age were called to active duty. They were divided in eight sections. Levites were to consecrate themselves to Yahweh in lieu of the consecration of the first- born. The implication is strong here that the Jews were supposed to sacrifice their first- born, of all children and animals, to Yahweh. The Levites might always impress upon the people that they and they alone were responsible for and to be credited for removing a great load of sacrifice from everyone else. Too, one may consider whether there is a threat contained in this relationship, in the fear that the Levites may renounce this surrogation and ask Yahweh for a resumption of the obligation upon all. Yahweh spoke to Moses and said: I myself have chosen the Levites from among the sons of Israel, in place of the first- born, those who open the mother's womb among the sons of Israel; these Levites therefore belong to me. For every first-born belongs to me. On the day when I struck all the first- born in the land of Egypt, I consecrated for my own all the first-born of Israel, of both man and beast. They are mine; I am Yahweh [16] . Yahweh said to Moses: Take a census of all the first-born among the sons of Israel, all the males from the age of one month and over; take a census of them by name. Then you will present the Levites to me, Yahweh, in place of the first-born of Israel; in the same way you will give me their cattle in place of the first-born cattle of the sons of Israel. As Yahweh ordered, Moses took a census of all the first-born of the sons of Israel. The total count, by name, of the first-born from the age of one month and over came to twenty- two thousand two hundred and seventy three. Then Yahweh spoke to Moses and said, Take the Levites in place of all the first-born of Israel's soils, and the cattle of the Levites in place of their cattle; the Levites shall be my own, Yahweh's own. For the ransom of the two hundred and seventy three of the sons of Israel in excess of the number of Levites, you are to take five shekels for each, reckoning by the sanctuary shekel, twenty gerahs to the shekel; you must then give this money to Aaron and his sons as the ransom price for this extra number. Moses received this money as the ransom for this extra number unransomed by the Levites. He received the money for the first-born of the sons of Israel, one thousand three hundred and sixty-five shekels, sanctuary shekels. Moses handed over this ransom money to Aaron and his sons, at the bidding of Yahweh, as Yahweh had ordered Moses [17] . From first to last Moses depended upon the Levites for maintaining his absolute power. According to legend, the Levites were the most faithful to Yahweh in Egypt where so many of the population lost their religious ardor. (I think that they may have had the most skilled and curious religious cultists.) They passed Yahweh's test at Massah (" proof") and at the waters of Meribah (" contention") where they rallied around Moses when rioting began over the shortage of water and before Moses had had time to discover it beneath the rocks [18] . Nevertheless, leadership in domestic security and war went to Joshua, son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, not a Levite. He was Moses' personal bodyguard from the beginning of Exodus. His devotion, diligence, and aggressiveness were all that Moses could ask for, and sometimes more. He had neither sons nor daughters; when spies were sent to survey Canaan and report back whether Israel should then and there descend upon the Promised Land, Joshua was criticized by the other spies for having little to lose by going into battle [19] . Legend gives several surprising comments on Joshua, more consistent with this book's findings than with ordinary opinion. Joshua grew up without knowing his antecedents; he was raised by strangers, and his father's name, "Nun," means "fish," because, the legend says, he was cast into the waters, and swallowed by a whale, then spit up. "The government appointed him to the office of hangman. As luck would have it, he had to execute his own father." [20] He was called a fool because of his general ignorance and the spies called him a "head-cutter." [21] {S : BLAME THE PEOPLE} BLAME THE PEOPLE At first, Moses, Yahweh and Aaron were concerned that they would not be able to assemble and march out the mass of people. The Egyptian taskmasters were instructed to demand more work of the Hebrews for their unruliness; there was a general uneasiness, a feeling that the Exodus might not come off, and that all Hebrews would suffer severe discriminatory penalties. Moses and his following prevailed; the plagues were most impressive. When Moses and the Levites could not control the situation, blame for it is projected upon the people. Because of their unseemly complaints to Yahweh, "His anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord burned among them, and consumed some outlying parts of the camp." The people cried to Moses, who prayed to Yahweh, "and the fire abated." [22] Moses no doubt consulted the Ark and recognized that a temporary excess of electricity was leaving the Earth via tent poles and metals and exposed rock floorings. The electrical fire would travel to and enhance cooking-fires in or by the tents. Having practiced several tricks with Yahweh at the Burning Bush - using an electric jumping rod and phosphorus - Moses employed them on a group of Hebrew leaders at a conference arranged by Aaron. They were impressed enough to hear his proposition, and liked it. But he had other difficulties from the beginning with organizing the people for Exodus. A change seemed gradually to come over him. When the people cried in terror at the sight of the pursuing Egyptians and reproached those who had brought them out of Egypt, Moses spoke to calm them and to "see the salvation of the Lord which he will work for you today." [23] The problem of bitter water three days into the wilderness from the Sea of Passage caused murmurings against Moses that he stopped by casting a certain tree made known to him by Yahweh into the waters, which made them potable [24] . When the people groaned with hunger and talked of returning to Egypt, Moses and Aaron addressed them, saying that all was the work of Yahweh: "For what are we, that you murmur against us?... Your murmurings are not against us but against the Lord." [25] Quail fell in great numbers, as did manna, that could be baked into bread. Moses became angry when people tried to hold the manna overnight and, as he had warned them, it turned foul and wormy. Then thirst assailed the Israelites. To their reproaches and threats to stone him, Moses retorted "Why do you find fault with me?" and, upon the advice of Yahweh, found water beneath rock. The Levites, we learn, earned high praise for helping Moses to suppress the protesters. When a protest was raised, the complaint was turned against the people. To strengthen their own position, Moses and Aaron displaced responsibility upon Yahweh, let the people know how sinful they were to attack the Lord, and then punished them whenever they could. The Books of Moses are generally unfair to the Jewish people, giving little credence to their opinions, requiring of them self-abasement, piling up rites endlessly, dwelling upon their "unfaithfulness" and exalting the wrath of God. As I labored to fix my mind and feelings within the mental, social, and physical state of the Exodus and Wanderings, I was often diverted by free associations to find myself once again amidst the English dissenters of the 17th century, the American colonial puritans of the same age, and the westward movements of the New Englanders. All of these, which I had studied when young, were attempts by groups to relive the Pentateuch; in some ways they are better analogies than the anthropological and historical comparisons of the Mosaic Jews with other semitic and nomadic groups, which are so common, for we have more information on precisely those matters which are left vague in the Bible - namely the reasons for the resistance to mosaic theocracy, the limits of the theocrats as nation-builders, and the souls and aspirations of the common men and women who were caught up in the new Israels. Despite the considerable successes of the Jews in surviving as a people within the Mosaic framework and despite their occasional successes, under David and Solomon, for example, in setting up a larger national state, they could not establish an enduring nation over the centuries. It used to be believed that the position of Israel between great nations such as Egypt and Assyria made their military position difficult. But this is post facto reasoning; military history reveals a Roman Republic that wrested central Italy from numerous apparently stronger neighbors; a revolutionary France surrounded by enemies, which defeated them all; a Germany surrounded by enemies that required a concerted alliance including overseas America to contain it; and a contemporary Israel that has had to be restrained by distant great powers from conquering an empire in the Near East. I am permitted, therefore, to think that the dominating influence of mosaism in Jewish history was a principal source of Israelite misfortunes over many centuries. By way of analogy, it was only the breaking away from mosaic theocracy - the taking in of other peoples, the revolt of democratic sects such as the Baptists of Roger Williams in Rhode Island, the coming of new democratic sects such as the Quakers, the rise of free science and a commercial life free of religious and state regulation - that permitted the explosive expansion of American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within a unified and great domain. Because the people of Israel were downgraded and thwarted and kept as Children of God and Moses, the Jewish nation labored between an absolute monarchic vision and the squabbling tribes. The change in Moses, from a supplicating organizer of a loose aggregate of new believers to a religiously inspired autocrat, occurred in the first few weeks of Exodus and might have been predicted from his character. He was afraid at first that the people would not follow him, but once in control of the people he set about becoming their absolute master. It was no doubt Moses who led the Israelites to believe that they had been abominably enslaved in Egypt. This was required to counter-balance the call of Egypt to which many of the Israelites responded wistfully and by rebellion over many years. It was also a useful myth to inspire gratitude for Moses and Yahweh. The slogan is dinned into their ears: Yahweh (and Moses) led you out of slavery in Egypt. Obey them gratefully. As soon as possible, Moses proclaimed a "Royal Covenant" [26] to replace the implied covenant with Pharaoh. A new authority, Yahweh, had to replace the old. (Thus were the mosaic Puritan covenanters of New England, who were fracturing their bond with the royal authority of England.) About a dozen insurrectionary crises are registered in the Bible and legends [27] . In organizing the Exodus within Goshen, Hebrews clashed amongst themselves and with gentiles. A legend goes so far as to say that all Hebrews who refused to leave Egypt were massacred under cover of the plague of darkness. The leaders wanted no one to know of the dissent in the Hebrew ranks. The Bible gives only a hint of this; Moses and his cohort are opposed by many doubters and realists. Next, Pi-ha-Khiroth; fights break out as so many desert the Exodus. The Levites acquitted themselves well here, but there was no way of avoiding a great many desertions. The sea was crossed and a great feast of singing and dancing by all, led by Miriam and including angels, took place. But after the ball was over, Israel petitioned Moses for a return to Egypt. The legend recites the story in a reasonable way: Hardly had they seen that the Egyptians met death in the waters of the sea, when they spoke to Moses, and said: "God has led us from Egypt only to grant us five tokens: To give us the wealth of Egypt, to let us walk in clouds of glory, to cleave the sea for us, to take vengeance on the Egyptians, and to let us sing him a song of praise. Now all this has taken place, let us return to Egypt." Moses answered: "The Eternal said, 'The Egyptians whom ye have seen today, ye shall see them again no more forever. '" But the people were not yet content, and said, 'Now the Egyptians are all dead, and therefore we can return to Egypt. ' Then Moses said, 'You must now redeem your pledge, for God said, 'When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. '" Still the people remained headstrong, and without giving heed to Moses, they set out on the road to Egypt, under the guidance of an idol that they had brought with them out of Egypt, and had even retained during their passage through the sea. Only through sheer force was Moses able to restrain them from their sinful transgression [28] . Might this indeed have been Moses' greatest error, that he did not turn his expedition around, and, leaving a force to repel the oncoming Hyksos-Amalekites, go back to conquer Egypt in the name of Yahweh? Then there are protests and demonstrations when the first crisis of thirst occurs, only several days into the desert. The word "murmuring" in the Bible must be distrusted; it means protest, demonstrations, a crisis requiring defense and resolution by Moses and the armed forces. Next comes the food crisis. It lets one imagine that most sheep and cattle were lost in the first week of Exodus. Now came the quail - a gift and a punishment from Yahweh. Great flights of the birds fell - probably not quail alone. But the high doses of pollutants to which they had been subjected and which helped to bring them to earth poisoned many of the people. The Anger of God rose and "he slew the strongest of them, and laid low the wicked men of Israel." [29] Quail can carry a viral infection, it is argued, but a legend says that they came in a great wind, and the results were dramatically sudden. The manna was certainly a godsend; it was not only nourishing but probably contained a specific antidote to radiation poisoning as does honey [30] . Next came the second crisis of thirst. Here, on the rock at Mount Horeb, Moses produced water with his rod. In the third month of the Exodus, Israel was encamped below Mount Sinai. Moses ascended the mountain and, upon his long-delayed return, was greeted by the spectacle of the Golden Calf. This revolt will be described shortly. Then came the mysterious fire of Taberah, so unconnected with a specific misconduct of the people that the most general explanation is required; the Wrath of Yahweh was kindled and burned down portions of the camp. It was an electrical fire. Dissent and complaint were blamed. A legend speaks persuasively on the subject of the fire. The fire wrought havoc upon the idolatrous tribe of Dan and upon the Egyptian and foreign mixed multitude [31] . Yet we learn that as a result of this dissent and fire, Moses decided upon the election of the new elders by means of a lottery. Then Aaron and Miriam personally remonstrated and demanded a showdown with Moses. Yahweh called Aaron and Miriam to the tent. Miriam emerged a "leper." Moses was appeased and kept both at their appointed functions. The people could see that not even the close-in family could affect the bond of Yahweh with Moses. A legend says that Miriam and Aaron "talk against Moses" because his wife is a foreigner, a Kushite, hardly true, since Zipporah was from Jethro, the Midianite, not out of Ethiopia. Perhaps it is his second wife, we suggested earlier, also a foreigner. Perhaps Miriam wants Moses to begin a hereditary line of seers of Hebrew tribal extraction. Moses refuses and has Yahweh punish them. A foreign wife is preferable to a Jewish wife; she is without familial and tribal support, without hereditary linkage to Jacob. Moses is not interested in a succession; perhaps he does not foresee the survival of Israel, as we imply later on. He is not "a family man" as we have already indicated. Next came the Report of the Spies [32] . All who disputed Moses' intimation that the time might have come for an incursion into the Promised Land were executed. Many others died in a plague, for once again harkening to the Call of Egypt. "Let us choose a captain and go back to Egypt, they said." Further all must now wander a full forty years and never would those who had departed from Egypt live to see the Promised Land except Caleb and Joshua who had refused to agree to the majority report. According to legend, when the people thought that Moses was going to go against the Report of the Spies, "in their bitterness against their leaders they wanted to lay hands upon Moses and Aaron, whereupon God sent His cloud of glory as a protection to them under which they sought refuge." The crowd even cast stones into the cloud in trying to smite them [33] . Moses here does something only a true Machiavellian ruler would do; he punishes the spies for their pessimistic report and punishes the people for believing it. But he believes it himself, and he tells the people that now they must continue wandering because of their lack of faith in him and Yahweh. He also talks Yahweh out of exterminating the Jews for their general pessimism and nostalgia for Egypt. Later on occurs the serious revolt led by Korah. For this episode, we reserve ample space a little later on. After Aaron's death, bitter civil warfare broke out again, between those who wanted to return to Egypt and those, especially the Levites, who insisted upon continuing toward Palestine [34] . The legend says that they actually retreated eight stations to Moserah. The Tribe of Benjamin lost most of its warriors and six other tribes lost heavily. Several divisions of Levites were mauled and did not recover until the time of David, some centuries later. Peace was made in a great mourning ceremony for Aaron. Once more there is a grave insurrection, this time at Beth Peor, just before Moses' death, and of this too we shall shortly speak. When Joshua assumed command before the entry into the Promised Land, he instituted severe measures to unify the Israelites. He had all households destroy their god-images, masks, and other sacred representations [35] . And he ordered by command of Yahweh a general circumcision; the Bible says that those born in the desert had not been circumcised [36] . This is odd, coming so long after Moses had appeared to demand it; it does indicate, I think, that circumcision was a relatively new practice without heavy sanctions of opinion and tradition or else that a great many non-Hebrews had joined Israel on exceptional terms, or both. The population was now consecrated to the Holy War in Palestine. Ringing in their ears were the words of Moses' last address to the people of Israel: "You have been rebellious against Yahweh from the day that I knew you." [37] True words, spoken by Moses-Yahweh, implying once more that Moses and Yahweh came late to know the Hebrews. Moses was not born and bred a Hebrew. {S : REVOLT OF THE GOLDEN CALF} REVOLT OF THE GOLDEN CALF Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai, at the command of Yahweh, and there received for the first time the Law and the tablets engraved by the finger of Yahweh. Returning from the lengthy isolation on the mountain, he discovered to his consternation that in his absence the people had melted down their gold and fashioned a calf of it, and around this marvelous image were worshipping, eating, dancing and singing. For they had beset Aaron, demanding: "Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the Land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him." So Aaron asked for their gold jewelry and melted it and fashioned it into a molten calf. And the people said: "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the Land of Egypt." Whereupon Aaron "built an altar before it" and declared a feast day for the Lord. The people then betook themselves to the seventy members of the Sanhedrin (the ruling council of elders) and demanded that they worship the bull that had led Israel out of Egypt. 'God, ' said they, had not delivered us out of Egypt, but only Himself, who had in Egypt been in captivity. ' The Sanhedrin remained loyal to their God, and were hence cut down by the rabble [38] . This legend indicates that the Revolt was even more bloody than the Bible depicts (as well as testifying to the cometary bull). In his fury, Moses cast down and broke the tablets given him by Yahweh. He seized the calf. Aaron blamed the people: "You know the people, that they are set on evil." [39] The people were scattered all about; the military aspect of the camp was quite lost. Moses stationed himself at the gate of the camp and called: "Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me." The sons of Levi gathered around and Moses' orders were brief and harsh: "Put every man his sword on his side, and go to and from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor." Within the day, the Levites slaughtered three thousand men of Israel. Moses had the image of the bull burned and ground into powder. Then, mixing the gold powder with water, he forced the heretics to drink it. Order was restored. Moses spoke to the people, reproaching them but promising to intercede with the Lord regarding their great sinning. But Yahweh sent a plague upon the people because of the Golden Calf [40] . Although the Golden Calf disappeared into frightful memory, this was not the last of non- Mosaic Judaism, and most Jews were lost to Israel and Yahwism for the worship of Baal and other gods in the centuries to come. The Northern Ten Tribes, breaking away from the united kingdom to find a northern Kingdom of Israel "worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served Baal." King Jeroboam founded at Dan and Bethel sanctuaries that rivaled the Temple of Jerusalem. He set up in each a golden calf image to Yahweh, and appointed non-Levites as temple custodians [41] . They were destroyed in 723 or 722 B. C. Similar events occurred in the Southern Kingdom under Manasseh. Then, shortly before the Babylonians descended upon them and carried them off into exile, Josiah restored Yahweh against much popular opposition. Many Jews fled then and later to Egypt where they worshipped Anat-Yahweh, Venus, "Queen of Heaven." [42] What did the Golden Calf represent, if not Anat-Yahweh (as it is called in a Psalm)? It was the child of the comet Venus-Baal-Ishtar-Athene-Minerva-Isis-Devi and a hundred other names from all over the world. The same calf became the sacred cow of the Hindus who were moving just then into India. The young bull was the apparition of the great comet at some points of its approach and retreat from near collision with the Earth, when it looked like a cow, bull and calf. "Only if we realize the planetary-cometary significance of the egel (meaning 'young bull', but also 'roundness'), do we find any sense in the reaction of the People of Israel to the calf." "... and... they cried: This is thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt!" [43] One legend says that, while passing through the Red Sea, the people saw the Celestial Throne and most distinctly the ox among the four creatures around the throne (lion, man, eagle, ox) and therefore they thought to worship the ox as the helper of God in the Exodus [44] . Another report, already cited, says that the bull was inscribed on the chariot of the Lord as he drove across the skies in aid of the Hebrews. The comet was regarded as the offspring of the greater god Jupiter-Zeus-Marduk-Amon-Yahweh in many places, and confused with these divinities, who were universally fire-and-thunder gods. Moses would not have it so: His Yahweh spoke from heaven and mountains, true, but was a god of electric fire. He filled the heavens but not visibly. He was among his chosen people, went with them in those days in an awe-inspiring physical sense. Still, apparent in the verses of the Bible is the fright of Moses that somehow Yahweh would not act for him in the aftermath of the revolt. He pleads for assurances; he has to repeat the whole act again, returning to the mountain and descending once more, this time in a subdued triumph. No Golden Calf could fight for the Jews like the Ark of the Covenant. No astrology could have provided a people with so personal a god as did the electrical science of Moses. Yahweh was always moving, always up to something new. All, even in the remote outskirts of the camp, had their attention focussed upon Moses and the Tabernacle. Moses had every reason to become furious. The shock of betrayal was great. The people were ungrateful, too. They must have hated him to think him dead and become so happy. The fragility of his charisma was apparent. All of his plans seemed wrecked, the designs of the sacred machinery and of the religious center, detailed even to the priestly clothing and ornate draperies. The gold that the leaders had caused to be begged, borrowed, and stolen in Egypt was now unclean, and could not be reused for the instruments of the sanctuary. If the dancing and singing were not enough, a mere glance at the young bull exhibited its sexual connotations. Why was it a young bull - to replace Moses, the old bull? (Moses had already designed an altar with four corner-horns of undesignated species fashioned of wood in one piece with the altar.) [45] Many of his subordinate leaders had been massacred in the attempted coup d'etat. For it was such; Levites, among others, were involved. A cometary image would replace Moses as the center of sacramental behavior; half of his power would be gone. His electrical science would be demysticized, desacralized. The reprisals of the counter-revolution were severe. Perhaps thousands were slaughtered. All weapons were seized [46] . The gold-poisoned drink killed many. The legend says it was a form of "capital punishment." [47] A plague of Yahweh raged among the guilty people, until all who were involved were dead or had fled into the desert; Moses exterminated all those who had been unclean. As for the loyal and the non-participating, and for himself, he discussed seriously with Yahweh the question whether they too were unworthy to survive. After the Revolt, Moses had his tent removed from inside to outside the camp. He posts Levite guards before it and says it is a tent of coming together. Actually it marked a new phase of reaction. He needed greater personal safety. He felt more strongly than ever in isolation from and aversion to the people. Perhaps he thought, too, that one day Yahweh would set the whole camp ablaze with a fire from his "Mercy Seat" and strong winds. {S : KORAH'S REBELLION} KORAH'S REBELLION A 13th century English painting of the Rebellion of Korah [48] shows the rebels being assailed from the heavenly canopy by many pointy little tongues of flame. "These tongues remind us of 'little quadrants of light... constantly jumping' along a wire at the Harvard College Observatory at Pike's Peak, Colorado, as described in a report [50] . Korah's revolt posed a grave threat to Moses' absolute rule. The boldness with which the rebels moved in upon Moses and close-in loyal supporters indicates a large confidence in their chances of success. It happens at the semi-permanent encampment at Kadesh, whence a short time before the spies had been sent out. Korah, himself, is rumored to have been Treasurer to the Pharaoh of Egypt. He was both a Levite and a Kohathite, therefore of the division of Levites directly responsible for the management of the sanctuary, except that the most critical jobs were given to Aaron and his priesthood. Legend has it that Korah was angered at having been passed over by Moses for the leadership of the Kohathites. Moses probably had already had trouble with Korah. Top leaders, at least 250 says the Bible, were openly lined up with Korah. They had a large popular following, which Moses appreciated. And when the leaders confronted him at the Tabernacle the day after the rebellion began, they brought with them their popular following. Moses invoked the crowd to disperse, and it did so, possibly because he threatened them with a plague and also because he seemed to be striking a deal with the rebels. The philosophy behind the rebellion was well thought out. The rebels declared to Moses: "You have gone too far! For all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them; why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?" Notwithstanding that he is the one accused of exalting himself, Moses transfers the problem to a grasping for the top offices: Isn't it enough, you Levites, says Moses, that you do special services for Yahweh and are near him. "Would you seek the priesthood also? Therefore it is against the Lord that you and all your company have gathered together; what is Aaron that you murmur against him?" [51] Moses promptly changes the grounds of debate. He does not address the main charge that he, Moses, acts as alone holy, whereas the doctrine of Yahweh is that all Israel is holy, each man in his own special relationship to God, as the Covenant with Yahweh would imply. Moses points out that Levites are in fact privileged and separated from the people of Israel. Thus he begins to isolate them from the people and limit their demands. Moses then, I think, carries out a secret plan which he had held in abeyance for just this eventuality. No doubt he had conducted experiments with animals, and, I would guess, with prisoners who were caught in holy wars and brought to receive judgement within the courtyard or even before the "mercy seat" of Yahweh [52] . He announced to the rebel chieftains that, since they claimed equality before Yahweh, they should arrange to present themselves fittingly, lighted bronze censers in hand, with Aaron, before the Holy of Holies to see whom Yahweh would select to receive a sign of his favor. The decision would be up to Yahweh; this is repeatedly stressed. And they must not bring their weapons. The rebels consented and repaired to their tents. Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and their most faithful assistants went to work. They set the Ark to accumulate its maximum charge short of sparking, Given both the atmospheric charge held by the cherubim and the ground charge gathered by the outer golden sheath of the box and focussing in the rod that extended above the outer box at the rear center of the mercy seat, a voltage of from 20,000 to 100,000 could be accumulated. The total Tabernacle area was about 15,000 square feet, and was fenced off and guarded. The area enclosing the Altar of Incense before the curtain of the Holy of Holies was some four hundred square feet. Many, perhaps all, of the rebel chieftains, could press into the inner sanctum and the rest would crowd at the entrance. The tent would have been pitched originally on all area where ground currents of negative ions could readily be attracted. Lightning is the discharge of the electrical potential (termed "voltage") between two points of different charges, when the setting is between air and ground or is air-to-air. Average amperage (current) may be about 20,000 [53] . Electrical charges are measured in coulombs. Current is measured in joules or amperes. Resistance is measured in ohms. Electrical discharges can peel a sapling, undress a person, and pluck chickens. The effects of electroshock upon the human body depends upon the individual constitution, both genetic and acquired, and upon the intensity of the current (amperage) which enters the body and where it passes in relation to the heart or brain. "Fatal traumas from potentials of 10-24 V are described in the literature." [54] The current in such cases is perforce low, even under 100 Amperes. In most deadly instances, voltages of under 400 are involved. "As the great majority of electrical fatalities are due to currents passing between an arm (usually the right) and the legs, the current passes through the chest and affects the organs within it." [55] The longer the "juice is on," the greater the danger. Earth current can be a source of great danger. If a current of 50,000 amperes enters the soil at a point and spreads out uniformly in all directions, the current density, and hence the voltage drop, along the ground surface will be appreciable even at a considerable distance from the flash. The furrows which sometimes radiate from the point actually struck show that the voltage-drop may be sufficient to produce actual discharges through the soil. The voltage between two points on the earth separated by the length of an animal's stride might therefore be quite sufficient to pass an appreciable current up one leg and down the other. There are many cases of cattle-killing which can be explained in no other manner. When 126 sheep out of a flock of 152 arc killed by a single flash it is hardly conceivable that they were all hit by the main channel [56] . But we need not speak only of lightning. Closer at hand and more controllable was the artificial lightning of Moses. Granted that an electrocution of a herd of livestock is possible by lightning, we may surmise that a deliberate mass electrocution of humans would be possible, especially 3400 years ago, when electrical conditions of nature were disturbed. In the earliest beginnings of modern electrical science, and in a mood of dangerous play that forms an ironic and tragic contrast with the Old Testament setting, we find enough ideas and procedures to understand the behavior of Moses and the Israelites. It is worth citing in detail the new scientists of the mid-eighteenth century in connection with Korah's Revolt. Mr. George Graham shewed how several circuits for the discharge of the Leyden phial might be made at the same time, and the fire be made to pass through them all. He made a number of persons take hold of a plate of metal, communicating with the outside of the phial; and all together, likewise, laid hold of a brass rod with which the discharge was made; when they were all shocked at the same time, and in the same degree [57] . Scientists elsewhere produced similar effects: In France as well as in Germany experiments were made to try how many persons might feel the shock of the same phial. The Abb‚ Nollet, whose name is famous in electricity, gave it to one hundred and eighty of the guards, in the King's presence; and at the grand convent of the Carthusians in Paris, the whole community formed a line of nine hundred toises (1754 meters), by means of iron wires between every two persons (which far exceeded the line of one hundred and eighty of the guards) and the whole company upon the discharge of the phial, gave a sudden spring, at the same instant of time, and all felt the shock equally [58] . Joseph Priestley's own experiment is especially worthy of attention. It is contained in an essay entitled "Entertaining Experiments performed by means of Leyden Phial." A great deal of diversion is often occasioned by giving a person a shock when he does not expect it; which may be done by concealing the wire which comes from the outside of the phial under the carpet, and placing the wire which comes from the inside in such a manner in a person's way, that he can suspect no harm from putting his hand upon it, at the same time that his feet are upon the other wire. This, and many other methods of giving a shock by surprise, may easily be executed by a little contrivance; but great care should be taken that these shocks be not strong, and that they be not given to all persons promiscuously. When a single person receives the shock, the company is diverted at his sole expense; but all contribute their share to the entertainment, and all partake of it alike, when the whole company forms a circuit, by joining their hands; and when the operator directs the person who is at one extremity of the circuit to hold a chain which communicates with the coating, while the person who is at the other extremity of the circuit touches the wire. As all the persons who form this circuit are struck at the same time, and with the same degree of force, it is often very pleasant to see them start at the same moment, to hear them compare their sensations, and observe the very different accounts they give of it [59] . Priestley's happy sublimated imagination was far removed from mosaism. (He was, in fact, a founder of Unitarianism.) He could go on and on with games, given a few basic electrical principles. This experiment may be agreeably varied, if the operator, instead of making the company join hands, direct them to tread upon each others toes, or lay their hands upon each others heads; and if, in the latter case, the whole company should be struck to the ground, as it happened when Dr. Franklin once gave the shock to six very stout robust men, the inconvenience arising from it will be very inconsiderable. The company which the Doctor struck in this manner neither heard nor felt the stroke, and immediately got up again, without knowing what had happened. This was done with two of his large jars (each containing about six gallons) not fully charged [60] . A number of drawings of mass shockings are to be found. The one in figure 18 from Japan is chosen precisely for its lack of explicitness. Made far removed, culturally and geographically, from the scene of the experiments, it would inform or persuade us of nothing scientific. Therefore it suggests how the memory of Moses' electrical operations might be distorted, sublimated, and finally misunderstood over the centuries. The drawings we possess of Korah's rebels show them dying mysteriously, victims of the invisible Yahweh. In the deep shadows of the past, grim real games were going on. We can watch them only half- understanding. We imagine only the simplest devices and system, even though the applications may have been more sophisticated. Moses and his officers, early in the morning, poured water over the rock floor of the tent, wetting it thoroughly to make it as fully conductive from the earth as possible. A copper wire was laid down and around the floor of the area. Then the carpets ordinarily covering the floor were replaced, hiding the wire [61] . The wire connected at the Ark on a metal rod extending from the outside golden plate of the Ark. Thus a very large negative charge could gather and be prepared to discharge if contacted or approached close enough by a positive charge. Figure 18. Mass Electroshock. (Source: Figure 13.2 from Heilbron. op cit) The positive charge was in fact gathering from the atmosphere on the golden cherubim and inner lining of the Ark. The whole inner metallic complex of cherubim and lining were separated by a screen of wood or glass from the stored negative charges of the outside lining and its upright rod. It is apparent now that the Ark is charging up heavily but is being prevented from discharging upon itself by the insulation. We recall that the wire beneath the carpet is disconnected, so we imagine that it was carried around to the Ark and affixed to a heavy metal bar. The movement of this bar is controlled by the priest Eleazer, son of Aaron, who can push it into a lock against the positively charged wing tip of a cherub. He is insulated by gloves, masks, heavy clothing and non-conducting wood tongs. This is usual equipment for tending the Ark. The rebels assembled the next morning, lighted censers in hand [62] , before the Tent. Their large following had come as well, and Yahweh was enraged. They were threatened and dismissed by Moses. The sight of Joshua and many armed men frightened them, too. But also and even before the test of the rebels with censers, Korah and the two men who were rebels but refused to appear with the assembly at the tent had been killed dramatically at the instance of Moses. These two men had called out to Moses defiantly: "Are you going to bore the eyes of these men?" [63] Aaron stood beside the Holy of Holies on an insulator, with insulating footgear and clothing, out of contact with any of the possible lines of electrical charge. He welcomed the rebels, who crowded, elbow to elbow, into the tent. They prostrated themselves before Yahweh, head, arms, knees, feet and censers touching the ground. Eleazer pushed the bar into the wing lock. Most, if not all, of the rebels were promptly electrocuted as the charges raced towards each other and coursed through each man, striking upwards at the brain and heart. Those merely stunned and shocked would be dispatched by the swords of Joshua's guards, moving in from their insulated corners, after the charges were spent, or the connecting bar was pulled out. "Fire came forth from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering the incense." [64] Thus the Bible. "The souls, not the bodies of the sinners were burned " [65] Thus the legend. Perhaps this method of mass execution was not followed [66] . The Ark might provide a second method by individual sparks. In both is involved the ancient and primitive means of administering justice through the trial by ordeal. Such is the trial of a woman for adultery, for instance, in the Bible [67] . The accused is traumatized, and is deemed guilty or innocent depending upon the outcome of the test or ordeal: "Yahweh will show who is holy, and will cause him to come near to him." [68] Electrocution by the Ark of so many, individually, would be much more difficult. Since each leader was to be judged by Yahweh, each in turn would be marched to the altar and struck down. Men who were physiologically resistant to fatal shock would be dealt with by sword. (The Abb‚ Nollet in 1746 "gave the shock with porcelain, and observed that some persons were much more sensible to it than others in whatever part of the circuit they were placed.") [69] Those who refused the test would be dispatched by the sword; for the refusal was taken to be a confession of guilt. A ring of guards around the tent prevented any break-out of the group. From a rubbed and electrified jar, Von Kleist, dean of the cathedral in Camin, in 1745, took "a nail, or a piece of thick brass wire" that carried a charge; "it throws out a pencil of flame so long, that, with this burning machine in my hand, I have taken above sixty steps, in walking about my room." [70] Around the same time, Monnier discovered that "the Leyden Phial would retain its electricity a considerable time after it was charged, and to have found it do so for thirty-six hours, in time of frost. He frequently electrified his phial at home, and brought it in his hand, through many streets, from the college of Harcourt to his apartments in the King's gardens, without any considerable diminution of its efficacy." [71] Heilbron sums up this development: "Physicists soon learned that an electrified phial need not explode to be intriguing: when doing nothing at all, innocently insulated, it unaccountedly preserved its punch for hours or days. Even when grounded it remained potent, provided that its top wire was not touched." [72] The English experimenter, Wilson, equally early (and all of these experiments and many more occurred before Franklin's discovery of positive and negative charges), found that the first discharge of a simple Leyden jar was the most explosive and dissipated the load quickly. "Whereas, when water was used, the subsequent explosions were more in number, and more considerable; and when the phial was charged with nothing but a wire inserted into it, the first explosion and the subsequent ones were still more nearly equal." [73] Aaron, of course, came out well from the ordeal. The manner of Korah's death, by turning into a ball of flame that rolled into a cleavage of the Earth, is not too far removed from what might have happened in several cases, with help from the special police, and could have been a report displaced from these to Korah, the most important figure, as often happens in the garbling of news reports. Now Eleazer was told by Yahweh "to take up the censers out of the blaze; then scatter the fire far and wide." [74] Afterwards, the censers were melted down and fashioned into a plate for the altar. Thereafter nobody save of the seed of Aaron would dare to "come near to burn incense before the Lord ," lest he die. This grim reminder was an endless source of sorrow to the families of the deceased, the legend says [75] . The next day a mob approaches the tent of Moses, "murmuring" as was their wont, whereupon the cloud of Yahweh appeared dispersing them. "Wrath has gone forth from Yahweh, the plague has begun." [76] Some 14,700 people were killed in this manifestation, says the Bible, before Aaron, with his blessed censer, could move out and halt the plague. The implication is that the cloud was directed into the crowd of people, for Yahweh told Moses to get out of the way before he consumed them. The cloud was of some type of poison, evidently, probably white phosphorus grenades cast into their midst by Moses' soldiers. Faced with declaring this, or assigning the action to Yahweh, the Bible, as it commonly does, simplified and moderated the action by laying it upon Yahweh; ruthlessness becomes justice when done by him. To confirm the end of the three-day tragedy, another contest is rigged. This time a beam is split into twelve rods, Aaron receiving the rod of Levi, and the tribes a rod marked for each of them. After a night by the Ark, Aaron's rod has grown blossoms and almonds. Let us say that it has been sundered in a most interesting fashion, which we have already described. Thus Aaron receives one more sign that he is to remain High Priest; Yahweh does not fear nepotism as did Korah and his rebels. Following Korah's rebellion, Moses dowses, after Miriam's well dries up. Moses then fetched out of the Tabernacle the holy rod on which was the Ineffable Name of God, and accompanied by Aaron, betook himself to the rock to bring water out of it. He refused to find water from any random rock, despite the jeers of those who said he knew how to find water not because of Yahweh but because he had once been a shepherd. He insisted upon a chosen rock and succeeded in two attempts [77] . {S : FREUD AND THE MURDER OF MOSES} FREUD AND THE MURDER OF MOSES Sigmund Freud, inventor of the psychoanalytic method, and principal creator of the theory of psychoanalysis, could not resist, in the last years of his life, the temptation to publish his highly speculative book, Moses and Monotheism. Correctly he foresaw that he would offend Christians and Jews - and, of course, the world of biblical scholarship. Brave intellectual that he was, Freud offered frank answers to several moot issues. First of all, he claimed Moses to be Egyptian. So were most of the Levites, the retinue of Governor Moses (for Freud placed Moses most likely as the official in charge of Goshen, with its unruly Hebrew population). Moses was a devout follower of Pharaoh Akhnaton (Freud calls him Iknaton) and, upon the overthrow of this great reformer and monotheistic sun-worshipper, Moses aroused the Hebrews and others in his bailiwick to follow him out of Egypt to a land where they might worship Aton instead of Hammon or Amon or the solar identification of Aton, for Moses was more enlightened, and derived the first abstract god. For his pains, Moses received death in the end. Following the biblical scholar, Ernst Sellin, Freud argues that a rebellion overthrew Moses and he was killed. The curtain then drops upon this hapless abrogation in the desert. Perhaps a century later, the same group, with the now assimilated Levites, make a religious and political pact with their ethnic relatives, the Midianites. If the Midianite "Jews" of Kadesh agree to a watered-down version of monotheism that takes in the ancient patriarchs such as Abraham and Isaac and accept, without mentioning his name, their one god (Aton?), and upgrade the history of the Exodus, then they - the Egyptian faction, now practically a tribe - would agree that Yahweh, a local volcano god who hovers about Mt. Sinai, become their special god, too, and lead them in a totally chauvinistic, ruthless career of expansion to the north and west. As token of their good will to their Egyptian brethren, the Midianites must also accept circumcision, which Freud, particularly in this case but also in general, believes to originate as a form of mutilation carrying on from generation to generation the punishment of the young for the murder of the father. The leader of this new Israel would be known in the future rewriting of history as Moses (number 2) and the intervening century or so would be forgotten. Having concocted this scenario, Freud, a Jew, has brought the Jewish nation to an all-time historical low. They were, in the days of which Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy chant, mere barbaric Semites, acknowledging the memory of a single Egyptian god, guilty of murdering their greatest leader, and set to follow a frightful marauding God, Yahweh, whose main claim to fame was that he was better than any other god they were likely to encounter in the course of their bloody wars. As for the Exodus, while not a stroll in the desert, it was a group departure when conditions in Egypt were unsettled. Freud does not hesitate, in this forceful little book, apologetically presented, to promote three of his older scientific theses: religion as a collective neurosis; the unconscious collective memory of humankind as having begun its guilt-laden career with the murder of the father of a horde by the sons for possession of the womenfolk; and the slow release of the load of guilt upon tribes as well as individuals by a suppressed traumatic incident of early times or early life. Freud uses the Exodus as a kind of unreliable case study in which the three concepts are displayed. Moses, says Freud, proclaimed a good god, a universal god, and became identified in people's minds with him. Although, to be sure, every attack upon a father or father- figure repeats the primeval prototype patricide, presumably the more meaningful and great the figure (e. g. Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln), the greater the burden of guilt thereafter. The killing of Moses was the greatest historical shock for the Jews and they have lived ever since in the guilt of this recollection, which they suppressed and denied even a few years after the rebellion against him. But over many centuries this guilt has worked itself out by an increasing devotion to the ideals of Moses the First: an ever purer monotheism, a dedication to philosophy and intellectualism, a renunciation of instincts to violence, and an obsessive claim to the lion's share of the early history of universal religion. Little by little, they strove to eliminate the Yahweh in themselves in favor of the unknown universal god. They cannot help but feel the chosen people of God; their unique guilt goes to prove this. It might be thought that, having gone this far, Freud would bestow his blessings upon Christianity. For Christianity, he points out, is founded upon the murder of the son who is also the father. As grateful recipients of this favor from Jesus, who stands for all sinners and who dies for their sins, the Christians are relieved from the very heavy burden of guilt carried by their fellow-Jews (speaking now of the earliest Christians who were all Jews): Freud offers this possibility. But, he argues, it does not happen so. For, the relief from the burden of their sins only permits Christians to behave badly with less troubled consciences. And especially badly towards the Jews who raised the issue in the first place in this particular form. Hence Freud ends where he began - and where most scholars feel that he should have stayed - in the anthropological perspective that regards all religions as a more or less uncomfortable treatment of neurosis. But a great mind, like Freud, or Picasso, or Plato, or Leonardo, or Marx, or Dewey, is incapable of a work that is all bad. In the present instance, Freud does not labor under the compulsion of biblical scholars to cover up for Yahweh. He makes Judaism a part of the anthropology of religion. He reveals, by his very errors and wild speculations, the flimsy foundations of biblical exegesis that are made to seem solid by the silent consensus of biblical experts to assume or ignore them. But there are a number of improbabilities and impossibilities in Freud's study of Moses and the beginnings of the Jewish nation. For some of these he was responsible, such as various exaggerations, as when he exaggerates the unconscious guilt felt by Jews for the "murder" of Moses; it is most doubtful that the average Jew has, since the Romans became Christian, been more guilt-laden than the average Christian. And one must challenge, too, whether a group- trauma operates in the group over the millennia just as an individual trauma functions in a single lifetime. The old bulls are disposed of in many a mammal group without guilt- feelings. There had to be an interposition of conscience, which would require a more fundamental genetic or environmental change than a repetition of an act that had been going on long before humanization occurred. Freud's official biographer, Ernest Jones, provides illumination: Freud had thought of his idea for many years. Nearly thirty years earlier he was looking upon Carl Jung as his successor and referred to him as "son and heir." Further, "Jung was to be the Joshua destined to explore the promised land of psychiatry which Freud, like Moses, was permitted to view from afar. Incidentally, this mark is of interest as indicating Freud's self- identification with Moses, one which in later years became very evident." [78] I pointed out earlier how, when in Rome, Freud was drawn to Michelangelo's statue of Moses and contemplated it for a long time. So the "truth" which Freud revered was hidden from the master of unconscious truths. When the time came to analyze Moses, his genius failed him, for he was talking about "himself." Moses was not to have the traits that are strewn about the biblical record for the edification of the psychoanalyst, nor commit all of the horrendous acts that are described or to be inferred. Moses the First was a good man, like Freud; rather flat in profile, to be sure; and Egyptian, not Christian, because of some inconvenient lapse of time. Moses the Second was the Bad One and the Jews had become unhappily stuck with him and his Yahweh. For two additional errors in his scenario, Freud was not completely responsible, but they are fatal to his work; they are errors of the same biblical historians who denounce him. The first is the false and evasive notion that the Exodus was not a journey through catastrophe. There was nothing in the experience, Freud believed, to determine Moses' behavior or a people's character or the events of history or a peculiar religion. The second error that the professional establishment handed Freud was that Akhnaton lived before Moses. Velikovsky has demonstrated the opposite: Moses came first. [79] This of course is logically fatal to the thesis that Moses was a devoted disciple of Akhnaton and led a utopian community to the practice of his religion. The Encyclopedia Britannica, to exemplify what confronted Freud, even in 1974, some sixty years after Freud got his key idea, gives the reigning dates of Akhenaton (their spelling) as 1379 to 1362 B. C. and calls him "possibly the first monotheist in recorded history." (Freud uses the dates 1375 to 1358 B. C.) The same work accords Moses the date "fl( ourished) 13th century B. C." and reports that "Ramses II (1304-c. 1237) was probably the pharaoh at the time." Freud puts the Exodus between 1358 and 1350 B. C., dates that he regards as shortly after the death and obloquy of Akhnaton. Hence Moses is supposed to have followed Akhnaton, and closely enough so that the fluid dating might even have permitted Moses to have personally known the guidance of Akhnaton. Freud, the iconoclast, followed the great majority of traditional scholars on the key fact and went wrong. But how was he to know? Velikovsky had not begun to work on the problem. Freud was one more victim of the chaotic Egyptian chronology. The other psychoanalyst gone egyptological, Velikovsky, had discovered the weak point in Freud's psychic armor, and knew "in his heart" that Hebrew and Egyptian history must be synchronized. So he proceeded with an iron will, indefatigably, to disassemble the "unassailable" structure of ancient Near East chronology. In the process, and with the help of an unsupported, unpaid, self- disciplined, polymathic group of scholars, he ended up engaged in an assault upon the belief system of modern science as well [80] . {S : BETH PEOR} BETH PEOR There is usually a suspicion of foul play when a person disappears. Moses, says the Bible, went off alone to die and was buried by Yahweh in a gorge below Mount Nebo whence he had looked out over the Promised Land. (See figure 19) Strangely, it seems, he was buried facing Beth-Peor, where the last of the collective disturbances that marked his rule had occurred [81] . There the Israelites in large numbers had united with settled Moabites or Midianites in unauthorized religious festivals - particularly, recounts the Bible with some indignation, fertility rites encouraging free love in the fields in the name of the local Baal, with the purpose of inspiring nature to greater productivity. Freud cited Ernst Sellin, a German scholar, as proving Moses died in a revolt, but gives little detail on the occurrence, referring only to Hosea, a prophet of six centuries later, as insinuating the events. As I read this on a remote island, far from a copy of Sellin's book, I sought to follow the hypothesis by myself, in anticipation of ultimately locating the work. Hosea writes a diatribe against the Israelites, which he acts out. Imitating, so he says, the behavior of Yahweh towards the Jews, he takes in marriage a prostitute. The history of his relationship to the prostitute whom he has freely and firmly wedded then comes to stand for the history of the wedding and marriage of Yahweh and the whoring people of Israel. I thought that Hosea or Yahweh here could as well be Moses, speaking as he often did for the Lord. And I thought of how Moses might have acted in the circumstances of Beth-Peor. I concluded that there was a possibility that the old man, Moses, would have met his death in a murder or under undignified circumstances - a stone thrown, a stroke - in the course of suppressing the Baal-Peor heresy [82] . He was fearfully agitated and may have been fatally strained in dealing with the heretics and their Moabite seducers. Moses' loathing of sexual deviancy, his strenuous efforts to keep Yahwism free of sexual imagery (No Zeus bull rapist of Europa he! No Baal bull here!) and his severe attitude in general towards breakdowns of law and order, made him more ruthless than ever: the peoples' chiefs were hanged, murders were committed and sanctified, and plague carried off thousands of Israelites, 24,000 says the Bible. Moses directed, further, the extirpation of the Midianites [83] , first the men in battle followed by massacre, then cold-bloodedly the male children and all women who were not virgins. Their camps and cities were burned, and their livestock and valuables taken as booty. Figure 19: Myth of Moses Blessing the Tribes, and His Death. (Bible of San Paolo Fuori le Mura ca. A. D 870., folio 49v) The verses on executing the Israelite leaders carry a grim double meaning 1) "Take all the chiefs of the people and execute them in full sunlight before the Lord so that My blazing wrath will be turned away from Israel" and 2) "Cut off the heads of the leaders of the people and impale them in the courtyard before My Holy Tent so that my blazing wrath will be turned away from Israel." Further, Moses ordered his officers: "Each of you slay those of your men who attached themselves to Baal-Peor." The crowd before the court of the Tabernacle was full of grief and rage. To the many deaths occurring with the raging plagues of Yahweh there was added to their grief this harsh remedy to propitiate Yahweh which would also strike down many of their loved ones. At this juncture, there passed before their eyes the noble Zimri, with his Midianite companion, the lady Cozbi, as they went into his family tent. Phineas, son of Eleazer and grandson of Aaron, in a fury, seized a spear and followed them. He drove the spear through their bellies. Moses approved. The plague ceased. Moses heard from Yahweh that Phineas' zeal for Yahweh's honor had saved Israel from extinction. Phineas earned the perpetual right to the priesthood for his family by this action. But what Moses had said was good in the eyes of Yahweh was perhaps beyond the sufferance of the people. It was Moses' last battle on behalf of Yahweh. He knew that he was to die and perhaps wished to leave things tidy [84] . We note in Hosea, moreover, a repeated violent denunciation of the tribe of Ephraim, to which Joshua belongs, and which took for itself perhaps the richest section of the Promised Land. Possibly, Ephraimites accompanied Moses on his last journey. No matter how Moses met his death, the Bible would adorn it with some elements of the legendary. Founding heroes of a nation are not permitted to die ignominiously or even ordinarily. Romulus, founder of Rome, was reported to have been swept into the skies where he joined his father, Mars. But, as Freud says, a murder by his own people would be shameful, considering what role Moses must be given in the founding of Israel. Hence what would be in any case censored and elabo-rated for the sake of the sacred egoism of the tribe would in this case invariably result in strong guilt feelings. Proportionately, as the return to Mosaic rule and law would be demanded by the prophets and priests, the guilt feelings would be restimulated, and work their way out in an even more frenzied and dedicated mosaism or Yahwism. This, then, would be the effect of a murder of Moses upon the history of Judaism. It is to be expected that the verses involved are considered as some of the most confusing and esoteric of the Old Testament. So much was surmised by me from the normal open lines of the Bible. Three months later and five thousand miles distant, a microfilm copy of Sellin's work at the New York Public Library was consulted [85] . What had Sellin discovered? First, in various places the Bible refers to a Messiah, a servant of God, who is to deliver the Jews from their enemies; this person, says Sellin, was Moses. Moses was once the Redeemer and would return again to save the Jews and establish in Jerusalem "a Kingdom of God for all nations." [86] In line with Hosea, Moses was considered by tradition, writes Sellin, to have been the atonement victim of the Baal Peor heresy. Long before, Moses had asked Yahweh to kill him in atonement for the sins of the people. This was during the Golden Calf Revolt [87] . The tradition of a second coming of Moses persisted into the third century and is even to be located in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew (17: 1-13). The major thesis is summarized by Sellin: "Moses, in Shittim in the Holy place of his God was killed by a trick of his own people after they turned to Baal Peor and Moses had called them to repent or in any event had called down punishment upon them. Maybe his sons encountered death with him as well." [88] Sellin derives this scenario from three places in Hosea's book, and relies upon a reconstruction and some rearrangement of lines at ambiguous points; in these respects his ability is unquestionable and I would accept his new rendering. I repeat the verses here: "They have dug a deep pit-trap in Shittim." [89] "The days of terrible ordeal arrive; now come the days of reckoning. Israel shrieked: 'A fool is the Prophet, a madman in his mind, Because of the enormous guilt and the great making of enemies. ' Ephraim skulked by the tent of the Prophet and laid snares on all his paths. In Shittim in the house of his God they have dug a deep pit. Like vines at the panicle I found Israel, like an early fig on the fig tree. They came to the Baal of Peor and gave themselves up to shame, and became abominable fornicators. I have seen Ephraim as a poisonous plant. Ephraim chose as its hunting game the prophet and Israel led his sons out to be strangled, The people shall disappear beyond sight like birds . May it be the end of child-bearing, of conception, of pregnant bellies. Even should their sons grow, I shall take them away until there will be no one left. But a curse upon themselves as well, when I come skulking upon them. Give them, o Yahweh, what you can and will, Give them a childless belly and withered breasts." [90] "But through a prophet I brought Israel out of Egypt, and, it was shepherded by a prophet. Ephraim aroused his anger. Israel made him better. So long as Ephraim read my Torah the prophet was preeminent in Israel. Though he made atonement because of Baal he was killed. I will leave his blood upon you and I will make you pay his shame." [91] From the new rendering emerge certain clues. A great crime has been committed. The prophet who is involved was certainly not Hosea and is not any prophet before Hosea but Moses. Ephraimites are most involved in the sin and the crime. The people are enraged against Moses, a "fool" and "madman", burdened with the guilt of massacring his charges and hated for it. The conspirators hide themselves on the approaches to his tent, seize him, take him to the Holy Tent where stand the altars, and there dig a pit and bury him in it. They kill his family as well. Not since the original sin of Adam and Eve has such a sacrilegious act occurred. Ephraim (and by implication Israel) repeats the original sin; it is the original sin of the history of Israel from its founding to Hosea's time [92] . For it, Israel and especially the Ephraimites are cursed and must pay in days of terrible ordeal and reckoning. The worst curses of Hosea are in these lines. He would have the land and the people return to the desert so that Yahweh might rule as of old. The Biblical scholar, Gressmann [93] , and others, among them Sellin, believe that the judges refused to carry out the orders of Moses for the killing of all the people implicated in the Baal Peor orgies and rites, and that the Levites, obeying Moses, began to carry out the massacre. I think that these deaths must be the 24,000 who were scourged by Yahweh, as the Bible reports. The scourge or plague now was of the Levites' swords. My theory is this: While the Levites were dispatched and dispersed upon their murderous mission, the Ephraimites trapped Moses, killed or disarmed his guards, killed him, buried him, and held prisoner Joshua of their own tribe. When Joshua agreed to recognize the coup d'‚tat and to take command, as was his right, and as Moses would wish, he was released, and he ordered the Levites to cease operations. The killings by Phineas are passed over in arriving at the new ruling formula, and his sacred role is confirmed. We note in connection with Joshua's role a legend educed by Elie Wiesel [94] : When Moses refused to die, says the Talmud, God made him jealous of Joshua... God's explanation to Moses that he must die, to allow Joshua to take over, meant to Joshua that so long as he himself would not take over, Moses would go on living. For him to rule, his beloved teacher had to die, One perceives here what could be a rationalization of Joshua's conduct and a hint of the killing of Moses. An impressive network of authorities stress that Moses' death took place in public. It is witnessed, or almost witnessed, or circumstantially witnessed, even though the Torah and Bible assert that he finally died alone. Ginzberg [95] thinks that the legendary assertions originated to combat the vulgar demand that Moses not die but be made to ascend to heaven. A typical scenario has all of the people following him until they were dismissed; then the senate followed him until they too were dismissed; then finally a cloud descended over him and he was lost to the view of his last companions, Eleazer the priest and Joshua the generalissimo and heir apparent to Moses' authority. Can we decipher this legendary scenario? Only within strict limits. Suppose an alternative hypothesis; not Ginzberg's, but one in keeping with the theory of these pages, is suggested: if a great hero is killed and secretly buried by some of the very people to whom he is and will remain a hero, he must in legend either "really" not be killed and/ or ascend to heaven. Thus Jesus is said to have been voluntarily killed and to have ascended to heaven. If he had been killed by his own people who had continued to believe in him, he would have ascended to heaven when his mission was completed without having being killed. But the Christians' discrimination against both Roman and Jewish authorities permit them to assert that he was killed; they need not cover the fact. A second point may be induced from the scenario. The public is asserted as a witness of Moses' death, at least down to the very last moment, when the two witnesses are left standing outside of the cloud enveloping Moses. If, on the one hand, the Bible has Moses dying quite alone, and the traditions have Moses dying in public, the contradictory insistence now upon the one, and then upon the other, implies that neither is correct and that both are straining for their own kind of credibility. If the solitary death admits the public, it must explain what kind of public was present and what it saw. If the public death admits the solitary, it must implicitly allow the belief that Moses was secretly killed. So the two legends exist in eternal uneasy partial contradiction, The legends of Moses' death dwell pathetically upon his desire to live, particularly to live to lead Israel into the Promised Land. The legends seem to feel an injustice is being done. We weep in sympathy with the grand old man's frustration and importunities to Yahweh. Why, too, must he die so alone? Why does Yahweh harden his own heart so, we wonder? Then, in a start of realism, we recall that Yahweh is Moses, and lives after Moses in the minds of the tellers of the story. Moses is condemned, dies, and is buried by Yahweh no more than the sons of Aaron are electrocuted by Yahweh for approaching the Ark in an improper frame of mind. Moses is killed by his enemies and his remains are disposed of. Both murder and burial probably occurred within the sacred precincts. Foes and friends join thereafter in a conspiracy to cover up the deed and refashion its circumstances into a sacred lie. Soon the sacred lie transforms itself psychologically into holy myth. When the Israelites had crossed over the dry bed of the Jordan, Joshua did not immediately press on to attack Jericho. Instead, following the order of Yahweh to "circumcise the sons of Israel again, the second time," [96] Joshua performed the ceremony and "when they had completed circumcising all the nation, they kept sitting in their place in the camp until they revived." [97] Yahweh, satisfied, said "Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you." In these passages, the Bible explains that all the circumcised men out of Egypt were dead but "all the people born in the wilderness... had not been circumcised." [98] Max Weber believes that the operation was performed so as to emulate the circumcised Egyptians and "allegedly in order to escape the scorn of the Egyptians." [99] Neither reason is correct, I think; rather the mass circumcision was an atonement for the collective guilt in the death of Moses, and a fresh affirmation of loyalty to the army of the confederation in preparation for the campaigns ahead. The location of Moses' grave was taboo to all except the High Priests and his attendants. In a sense, and as it would appear, Moses died by order of Yahweh. The Bible's insistence upon the unknown grave, while declaring it to be nearby, seems needless unless it is an unwitting confession that Moses was deliberately put into a grave that should be unmentionable and unknown (except in this metaphorical sense). And, as the Bible says, "his eyes had not grown dim and his vital strength had not fled." [100] {S : Notes (Chapter 7: The Levites and the Revolts)} Notes (Chapter 7: The Levites and the Revolts) 1. Bimson (1979), 16. 2. A. S. Yahuda, The Language of the Pentateuch in Its Relation to Egyptian, vol. 1, London: Oxford U. Press, (1933), 294. 3. Some say that Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons and families (Gen. 46: 37) totaling 170 persons in Egypt could not in 430 years grow to 2 millions. They could have grown to 10 or 100 millions or more, theoretically, by the exponentials of population theory. Daiches (p. 82) estimates 2000 to 6000 marched in Exodus, on no evidence. Cf. Ginzberg II, p. 375; 600,000 heads of families plus five children each on horseback, plus a mixed multitude, "exceeding greatly, the Hebrews in number." The "mixed multitude" referred to in Ex. 12: 38 in some translations is termed "persons of mixed ancestry" im the Douay (R. C.) translation and a fn. p. 89 defines the term as "half-Hebrew and half-Egyptian." Sir Flinders Petrie (Egypt and Israel, p. 67) offered an ingenious explanation of the numbers... Instead of translating the Hebrew word for "thousand" as a numeral, he would translate it as "family" or "tent" Thus the number in the tribe of Manasseh in the first census at the Holy Mountain, 32, 200, would really mean 32 tents for 200 people, at six people per tent or family. The total number in exodus would be 5-6000 people. This attractive hypothesis is not accepted by experts in the Hebrew language. G. Mendenhall, 77 J Bib Lit (1958) 52-6, says the same word may mean "military units." 4. A legend (IV G fn, 806) claims that only one in fifty Hebrews believed in Yahweh and left Egypt. (Cf. Psuedo-Philo, 14: 156) 5. Psalm 68: 22 speaks of the people lost in the depths of the Sea of Passage and promises them redemption and revenge. 6. See also Ex. 1: 9-10; Ex. 4: 3-4; Ex. 16: 22, all indicating an organized movement. But they are not tight tribal groups, more an insurrectionary movement like the Long March of Mao and the Chinese communists. "The human groups whom he proposes to lead out are only loosely associated with one another; their traditions have grown faint, their customs degenerate, their religious associations insecure." (Buber, 69). 7. Ex. 17: 8-14. 8. VI EB 180-1 Cf. Buber, p. 218-9; fn 284, on theory and literature of Levite origins. 9. Freud, 46, and curiously, several XIII Dynasty Pharaohs possessed semitic names (Bimson, 17 fn. 50). 10. III G 248. 11. III G 194. 12. IV EB, 180-1. 13. Deut. 33: 8-11. 14. On Levite functions, cf inter alia Num. 4: 4-15; ch. 18; 6: 22-7. 15. III G 224, 228. 16. Num. 3: 11-13. 17. Num. 3: 40-51. 18. Ex. 17: 1-7; Num. 20: 2-13. 19. III G 272. 20. IV G 3; (cf. IV G 353-4) 21. IV G 3 fn2. 22. Num 11: 1-3. 23. Ex. 14: 13. 24. Ex. 15: 25. 25. Ex. 16: 7-8. 26. Buber's term, pp. 102-3; 108. 27. Winnett offers a close discussion of the murmurings. For mnemonic purposes, the Biblical editors sought to contain the number at ten. Winnett establishes the important point: the editors labored to change the insurrectionism against Moses into tests of Yahweh. 28. III G., p. 36-7. 29. Ps. 78: 31; cf. Ps. 106: 13-15; Ex. 16: 12-13; Num. 11: 20, 31-2, 33. 30. Ziegler, p. 47. 31. III G 243ff. 32. Num. 14: 1-4; cf. III G 172. 33. III G 277. 34. III G 333ff. 35. Buber, 202. 36. Joshua, 5: 2-8. 37. Deut. 9: 24. 38. III G 122-3. 39. Ex. 32. 22. 40. Ex. 32: 35. 41. 2 Kg. 17. 42. Velikovsky, W. in C., 297. 43. Gunnar Heinsohn ltr. II SISR I( 1977), 3. 44. III G 123. 45. Ex. 27: 2. 46. III G 132. 47. III G 130. 48. Num. 16. 49. Daiches, 183. 50. Ziegler, 15. 51. Num. 16: 8-11. 52. In the early years of modern electrostatics, experimenters used animals and human subjects repeatedly. Grey, in 1731, electrified a boy and suspended him from a rope; he suspended a second boy, unelectrified; then he connected them with a wire and observed with satisfaction that the "fire" (charge) passed to the second boy. (Cf. Priestley, pp. 52-3.) Only rarely did someone die; Moses would probaly have no qualms about "putting the heat" on prisoners; it would be an easier death than others then in vogue. 53. "Lightning" 10 EB 967. 54. Manoilov, 133. 55. 16 EB 698, "Electrical shock." 56. Corliss, op. cit. cf. Manoilov, 152. 57. Priestley. 122. 58. Ibid., 125-6. 59. Ibid., II 151-2. 60. Ibid., II 152. 61. Joseph Bozolus, an Italian priest and professor, proposed in 1767 to lay two wires underground connecting with a Leyden Jar at one end and close enough at their other ends to let sparks jump in coordination with coded messages sent at the Leyden Jar end. This was one of the first schemes for a telegraph. (Stottely, pp. 226-9.) Heilbron recalls (320) that Le Monnier "passed the shock through a mile of long-suffering Carthusians joined together by grounded iron wires. In fact moist ground may offer a discharge path as good as a human chain." 62. In Galvani's classic discovery of the neural response to electro-shock, the scalpel that discharged to the frog's nerve and caused the leg muscle to contract had been charged accidentally by ionized air emanating from an idle electrostatic machine that happened to be nearby. 63. This follows the New World translation; some Bibles view the "blinding" as a metaphor, e. g. "Do you expect these people to be blind?" (Jerusalem Bible.) 64. Num. 16: 35. The number seems impossibly large, like the number of those leaving Egypt and other numbers. There may at one time have been a formula for inflating biblical numbers, but no one has yet been able to break the code. Decimal numbers and numbers to the base of 60 are preferred. Here a clue that about 50 might be involved is available in the melting of the censers into an altar plate subsequently (see below, VI-40). The altar would not hold a plate, even a thick one, made up of the bronze of more than fifty melted censers. 65. II G p. 303. 66. Martin Buber rather believes (309-10) that Korah and the Rebels were doused with oil, burned, and cast into a pit, than that they were electrocuted by a powerful battery, as Fisher had suggested (in Beitr„ge zur Urgeschichte der Physik in Schweig-ger's Sinne, 1833, pp 4 ff), My position would be that such a "voltaic pile" was not beyond Moses' capabilities but was unneccessary, since the electrical trubulence of those times in effect provided continuous "batteries" of nature for electrostatic devices and procedures. As for Martin's theory, it wanders too far from the story, which is obviously attempting to be historical. Velikovsky's similar solution (W. in C. p. 56) is similary mistaken; furthermore, he generally interprets electrical fires as petroleum fires. 67. Num. 5: 16-31. 68. Num. 16: 5. 69. I Priestley. 125. 70. Ibid., 102-4. 71. Ibid. 125. 72. Heilbron, 320. 73. I Priestley, 122. 74. Num. 36: 37. 75. III G 303. 76. Num. 18: 46. 77. III G 310-2. 78. Jones, (1 vol. ed. ) 246. Cf. I. Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960) 196-202. 79. Velikovsky, A. in C. 329 et passim, where Akhnaton is made contemporary of Ahab. 80. The literary sources of this paragraph are extensive. Cf. de Grazia et al. (1978), and Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, A revised Chronology for the Ancient Near East, Cleveland (Eng.), 1977. 81. Num 25: 1 ff. "Peor" says a legend, is a second name for an Angel of Death that Moses had once scared away for excessive vindictiveness against the Jews, and by facing Peor, he would continue to frighten the angel away from this same task. 82. Numbers 25: 3 Baal Peor, it is suggested, is the god or lord of fire. Mendenhall noted there is no satisfactory semitic etymology for the word Peor, but the meaning now seems clear. Peor is the Hittite word for fire. It is the base of the Greek word, Pyr, meaning fire, and of course the English word fire." (Von Fange, 136.) 83. Num. 31. 84. Deut. 31: 1-2. "The lord spoke to Moses, saying, Avenge the Isralite people on the Midianites; then you shall be gathered to your kin." 85. Ernst Sellin, Mose and seine Bedeutung fur die Israelitisch-Judische Religiongeschichte, Leipzig (1922). 86. Sellin, 81-113, based mostly on a study of Deutero-Isaiah. See also Sellin, Introduction to the new Testament, 142-4. The second original sin is rendered below for Hosea, 9: 10. 87. Ex. 32: 32. 88. Sellin, 49. 89. Hosea, 5: 2. The accursed Shittim was the point of entry into the Promised Land (Num. 33: 49; Joshua 3: 1; Ex. 33: 1-6; Hosea 6: 4-6). 90. Hosea, 9: 7-14. 91. Hosea, 12: 14-13: 1. 92. Hosea, 9: 10. 93. Citing Num.. 25: 6-15. 94. Five Biblical Portraits, South Bend, Ind. :U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981. 95. IV G fn 904. 96. Joshua 5: 2( New world tr.). 97. Joshua 5: 8. 98. Joshua 5: 5. 99. Ancient Judaism, 443 fn. 2: 92. 100. Deut. 34: 7. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 8: } {T THE ELECTRIC GOD} {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHT THE ELECTRIC GOD A famous figure of the French Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Voltaire, reduced the miracles of the Bible to a laughing stock of the French salons. Voltaire nevertheless believed in a god. In a world then bemused by the technology of clocks, with clock-makers and clock-philosophers everywhere, he examined the astronomical system of the Earth and the heavens and pronounced it a clock. With all of this clockwork, said he, there must be a clock-maker somewhere. So Moses and his men will be readily understood when, in an environment that exhibited electrical effects in many places, they found, behind the grand son et lumiŠre show, a great electric god, Yahweh. It may be that Moses, in ways unsuspected by the psychohistory of science, has infiltrated the lives and work of Newton, Darwin, Edison, Einstein, and others; by his tenacious insistence on the single god, he made all things dependent on a single system incorporating a key machine assembly, and therefore made an integrated philosophy of nature imperative. In one legend, Moses cannot get the great natural bodies Sun, Moon, Earth, Heaven, Stars, Planets, Sea, Rivers that is, all the gods of the Greeks, to intercede on his behalf with Yahweh because, they said, they were but Yahweh's helpless creatures [1] . Possibly Yahweh's invisibility was a model of the ordinary invisibility (immateriality) and omnipresence of electricity, and of its appearing as incorporeal "fire" when it was visible. I think it no coincidence that among the enthusiasts and practitioners of early electrical science were numerous mosaist clergyman, both Catholic and Protestant. G. Beccaria, pioneer of electrical field theory, was a Piarist; John Wesley, founder of Methodism, wrote copiously on electricity. By one cause or another, being mortal, Moses died. But Yahweh did not die. Even in the technical sense of "the name of the Lord," he did not die, because the Ark and Altar remained in the Yahwist repertory for some centuries. He was no longer, thereafter, much of an hallucination; he joined the ranks of the gods as a pure collective delusion. With the ups and downs typical of divine careers, he has come into the present. Moses' greatest triumph was to bequeath a portion of his mind to posterity by means of Yahweh. Unfortunately, it was the wrong part, the conscience-loaded superego, but so it must go with the birth of religious cults. Since it was the hallucinatory and delusionary operations of his mind that were handed down, these would in some ways not be truly Moses. They would be idiosyncratically Moses, but not completely him. Moses stopped far short of placing all his religious impulses into the hallucination of Yahweh; he seems to have been previously what might be called a liberal Hermist, a devotee of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury. His invention-conversion to Yahweh did not eradicate the Hermetic qualities that took deep root during his Egyptian years. His great and versatile skills gave him a reputation throughout the ancient world for being a veritable Hermes. Julian Jaynes has developed a theory that the human race, for a period of time extending up to the classical period, was of two minds, one rational and pragmatic (corresponding to the traits of the left hemisphere of the brain) and the other mind hallucinatory and occupied by gods who talked to men and appeared before them (corresponding to the traits of the right side of the brain) [2] . Moses, he said, was an archetype of this type of mind. The hallucinations are of a type well-known in psychiatry, often if not always associated with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. This is true, I think, and also Moses was much more than Yahweh, and maintained a pragmatic balance that brought him great and justified fame as a scientist and leader, There is much to be said for Jaynes' theory. Its analytic side is in line with what is advanced in these pages, and I have elsewhere pointed out that the complex membrane dividing the two lobes of the cerebrum, the corpus callosum, may well be the site of schizoid behavior; in fact, I have hypothesized that behavior which is specifically human has occurred because of a possible physiological-psychosomatic microsecond block in transfers of information and impulses through the corpus callosum; this delay would constitute an instinct block and therefore would promote human self-awareness, reflection, and the feeling of talking to oneself, whence one hallucinates others as well [3] . Jaynes was not able to cope with the historical materials, largely because he relied upon conventional ancient history and chronology. As a result, he was put into a position where he had to perceive just the opposite of the actual process. He says that the "bicameral mind" as he terms it, finally broke down because world-conditions became unsettled and the gods that had satisfied the needs of the hallucinators such as Moses lost face. In reality it was the catastrophes of the world whose terrible stresses made hallucinatory leaders out of borderline cases and staunch believers out of normal people. (And elsewhere Jaynes makes this very point.) There is every reason to believe that long cycles of history occurred before the time of Exodus and Moses when there were "golden ages" of Saturn and Elohim, whose central and celebrated significance was the reduced role permitted to mosaic characters, that is, reduced schizotypical behavior. Yet, as one studies Moses as a person, it is plain that his peculiarities as a human being are remarkably well reflected in Yahweh as a god. If Yahweh were given a worldly childhood and experience, like some gods and god-heroes, instead of being presented full-blown, they could be like the childhood and experience of Moses. If Yahweh were extinguished from Biblical history as a god and become a kind of sequestered ruler speaking only through Moses, he might appear inexplicably incoherent, stupid, non-revealing of his motives and reasons and of his knowledge of the world. Moses would be continually besought by his people to seize the name and authority of the hidden power. One is placed in a tight logical-psychological corner here. Speaking now for persons bred in cultures colored by mosaism, one's conception of a father is Moses' conception and is also, in fact, Moses. So when one says Moses is like a father, and is also like Yahweh, who is the father, one is measuring a standard by the standard itself. One has to make a very simple statement, which sets up a very different anthropological perspective, namely: "I would not want Moses, hence Yahweh, for my father." When asked "Why?" one responds in the pragmatic manner: "Because I do not like the consequences." Then one lists those experiences that emanate from fathers like Moses-Yahweh. Those that evolve from other kinds of fathers are possibly better; in any event, one rejects the mosaic consequences. {S : THE NAME OF YAHWEH} THE NAME OF YAHWEH Recently circles of biblical scholarship were agitated by some newly uncovered tablets of the ancient city of Ebla in Northern Syria that were reported to contain the name "Ya." If this were a contraction of "Yahweh," it might be Moses' Yahweh, and place the god several centuries earlier than we have him here. One of Moses' inventions would be struck from our list. More lately, it appears that the syllable might have had several usages in the Semitic languages, and that no single tie with Moses' Yahweh has appeared [4] . There is some likelihood, however, that Moses derived the name from the Midianites or another tribe thereabouts when he was in exile. Buber, for instance, says that Yahweh may be related to "Ya-hu," that is "O He!" of the Dervishes and that this cry occurs once in Genesis during the blessings of Jacob [5] . The name is not foreign to Genesis; Abraham uses it, but more commonly used is Elohim, and most likely, Yahweh was implanted in the Book of Genesis by Moses or Yahwist editors [6] . A suggestion can be made that would lend integrity to such an assertion. In the years of the grandson of Adam, "men began to call upon the name of Yahweh." I make the identification, as have others elsewhere, of Yahweh with gods of lightning and fire, such as Zeus and Jove, and I place the beginnings of the great electrical gods around the time of Adam and Eve, replacing Elohim and Saturn. Yahweh may have been inserted into Genesis to claim his own from times long past. Ziegler maintains that "the original god of the Hebrews at the Exodus was Zeus." The Greeks change H to E and final H to S. (Jeremiah is Jeremias). The "Y" was originally a "Z". Thus YHWH becomes ZEWS or ZEUS, and with the erroneous transliteration of Y for J, "Jews." The Etruscan-Roman case, "Jove," pronounced "Yowe" is so close to Yahweh that the Roman Jupiter may be considered as basically the same entity [7] . Another theory holds that Moses framed the word from Egyptian roots, meaning "I am." Egyptian was familiar to all Hebrews and was Moses' native tongue. A Jewish legend says that Yahweh's first word when he announced the Decalogue was Egyptian: "Anoki!" (" It is I") [8] . The Bible has Yahweh announcing the well-known "I am that I am" from the Burning Bush. The phrase has been played upon endlessly, which is what a religious phrase should be and do for people. Moses is given to understand this when he asks Yahweh for more concrete identification, and it is denied him. Let me now assemble the name of Yahweh in the context of this book. Moses, learned as he was, had known the syllable "Ya"; he heard it, and also other compound words including it, in Egypt and then in Midian among the Kenites and the nearby tribes. It was a godword, part of various sacred epithets. He heard a sound very much like "Yahweh" streaming with light from the Burning Bush. This is the essence of god, he thought; it is the name of god and is hinted at in all the "ya" syllables that I have heard. Now he asks what it is, and "Yahweh ehweh" is heard. This makes sense. "I am that I am." "I am the great I am." I am It!" "I am the essential principle." Not the principle of light alone. It is already sound and light. It is the activity of the skies and earthly nature. It is the main and primary manifestation. It is connected with the old gods as well. Yahweh tells Moses: "Say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you Yahweh, the God of your fathers has sent me to you: this is my name forever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. " [9] Then Yahweh tells Moses that his plea before the Pharaoh is to lead the Israelites thither to worship him. Unless Moses convinces the Hebrews that they should worship Yahweh [10] and that this will be the way that they will be able to break through to freedom, and unless he is ready to give the Pharaoh a good reason for their leaving Egypt, after so many years of sacrificing within Egypt, his plan will not work. He must therefore tie in Elohim, whom both Hebrews and Egyptians acknowledge, with Yahweh. So Yahweh is a very new god of special manifestations and a concrete task to perform: getting Moses through the specific obstacles on both sides to an Exodus. Hence, Moses was the inventor of Yahweh in every meaningful sense of an invention, no invention ever being unprecedented and quite new. Merely to imagine that it would be possible to propose a new god to the world was audacious and brilliant. Yahweh is explicitly new, yet another name, as Yahweh says, for the old god of the Hebrews. His name dwells most precisely on the mercy seat of the Ark, and then in the place in the temple chosen by him. With negligible exceptions he speaks only to and through Moses. Moses invents Israel as well, in the sense that he takes a nickname given to Jacob after Jacob has wrestled with God or the Angel of God, and attaches it to the descendents of Jacob and the initiates into the new Yahwist Israelite group led by Moses himself. The term is translated variously as "the god-fighter " "God fights," [11] "the god who battles," or "god rules." [12] Israelites were then "the people of the fighting god." Yahweh is of course a bellicose god, so the name is apt, and both "Israel" and "Yahweh" become battle cries of the newly founded nation. The idea that the Jews never spoke the name YHWH seems to me preposterous. The name was inutterable simply because its authentic voice came only from the Ark of the Covenant. When the time came that the Ark was rarely functional, the name became secret. The name of "Amen" had the same history; presumably the Egyptian pyramids, too, were no longer displaying or sounding the god's name; whereupon it was said that Amon hid himself - not of course from all prayers and enunciations to which the response is "Amen." Does not the idea that YHWH has the electric name of god when he spoke through the noise of the ark contradict the very Third Commandment that says: "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain?" Of this, Ziegler says, "with the idea of YHWH as an electrical discharge, there are at least three possible reasons for the commandment. First, there might have been a danger of injury to those using the power indiscriminately. Second, its use might have allowed the enemies of Israel to obtain this secret, Third, a frequent use of the power might discourage the worship of it." [13] Or at least, so Moses thought at the time. Actually the ark ceased to speak as YHWH when the electric age ended - around 600 B. C. - and the substitute notion arose that the commandment referred to the human voice not uttering the word YHWH, because it was the name of God [14] . Moses was concerned with law and order, and therefore with blasphemy. The Douay (R. C.) Bible adds abruptly to the Third Commandment: "For the Lord will not leave unpunished him who takes his name in vain." [15] The Jerusalem Bible (also R. C.) renders the verse as banning utterance of the name of Yahweh to misuse it (that is, maliciously or for unholy purposes). Ziegler argues that "we are warned against effecting the sign or signature of the powerful YHWH. More specifically here, the Third Commandment forbids us without good reason to discharge an electric arc with its accompanying flash of light and noise. It is believed here that this discharge is the name of God, YHWH." [16] Later on the sound becomes a word and then a secret word, for the sound has gone. Cassuto gives this version of the Commandment: "You shall not take up the name of the Lord your God for unreality, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name for unreality." [17] I think that Cassuto's version gives us the clue for expatiating fully the commandment. The word is the thing. We face here the crux of the ancient philosophical debate between the "realists" and "nominalists," Platonists and Aristotelians. (Primitive, untrained thinkers, and religious devotees are generally realists; the word is a sacred entity and not to be used as a mere tool nor certainly for deliberate blasphemy.) The thing, by reverse (and incorrect) logic, is the word, and especially the sounded name, for the most ancient sacred associations of things and sounds came before the written word. The electrical discharge is the voice (as well as the vision) of Yahweh, and, in the Ark, the name of Yahweh. Blasphemy is any assertion that the sound of Yahweh is unreal and does not exist, and by inference that the name is an inconsequential incident; and by extension blasphemy is also any assertion that the name can be used for purposes other than harkening to the emanations from the sole source of the authentic God on the Ark. For common people, the sin of blasphemy is ordinarily a denial of the reality of the word, or ridicule of it. Bearing in mind this anthropological and psychological process, one can understand how the cult of the secret name of god developed and how the common sin and crime of blasphemy evolved. Does not the design of the Ark contradict the second commandment: it says "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.." This is altogether strange since the Lord also commands that Moses make the Tabernacle and the Ark "after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain." And the Ark even carries two cherubim. The Ark itself was duplicated at a later time by a private person and carried off by the tribe of Dan. The answer is, of course, "I am a jealous god," who reserves the right to spot and destroy possible competitors, such as the Golden Calf The cherubim were almost surely recognizable likenesses of living things, although Cassuto apologized that since they were composites of more than one being, they were not to be banned. He surmises that "on the kapporeth [the lid or mercy seat] there was not sufficient room for two images of quadrupeds, and it appears that the cherubim on it were erect figures, like the cherubim of Ezekiel's visions and those of Solomon's Temple [18] . R. W. Moss also believed them to be winged human figures [19] . The mention of quadruped is logical, inasmuch as many winged bulls and other animals are to be found of the same general period throughout the Near East, The word "cherubim" itself seems related to an Assyrian word for the winged bull. Yahweh was a ground force sometimes exhibiting himself, but ruled the heavens invisibly. By keeping Yahweh as a heavenly god, under a new name, and invisible, Moses could avoid choosing among the specific historical heavenly gods. Moreover, Yahweh must not be identified with a heavenly body, for a good reason; the heavenly body could not be controlled or possessed uniquely by the Jews, that is, by Moses, As time passed and the name of YHWH disappeared along with his image in electrical form and his burning of the altar-offerings, the Jews might have been expected to bring back images, especially of YHWH. But here we may call into play Freud's concept of instinctual renunciation which he applies to the self-denial of holy image-making [20] . This refusal of the strong urge to reproduce the forms of the deity was probably built up in the mosaic period and later on maintained by the compulsive repetition of the highly ritualistic religion, with discipline maintained by the priesthood. Referring to Max Weber's analysis of rabbinical Judaism, we may speculate that any image of Yahweh would have to represent some other culture's image and therefore violate the "pariah" tendencies of the Jews. Yahweh and Moses made the Jews a lonely people, isolated, not sharing other gods, as other nations did whenever they so desired for purposes of international amity and communication of sentiments. This was a source of pain to many Jews, as it was a source of pride to others. Many more Jews chose other gods than other people chose Yahweh. No wonder, then, that the Jews as a group never could fulfill the promises of Yahweh that they would multiply in vast numbers. Moses' deep aversiveness to humanity determined in the beginning of Israel that this should be so. {S : THE CHARACTER OF YAHWEH} THE CHARACTER OF YAHWEH Yahweh says and Yahweh does. What he says consists of describing himself, expressing his emotions, relating what he has done, instructing as to what must be done, and foretelling what he will do. In describing the hallucinatory voices of schizophrenic patients, Jaynes stresses that they speak "often in short sentences." [21] They command, yell, curse, and consult. They are sometimes rythmical. The abrupt commands of Yahweh, his great noises, curses, and marvelously clear consultative advice enrich the verses of the Books of Moses. The lack of explanation is typical of both hallucinatory voices and of Yahweh's words. One must wonder whether the hallucinatory patients have learned through mosaism to speak like Yahweh or Moses is the prototype of hallucinators. All that Yahweh says is in an absolutely authoritative mood. This includes those expressions which comment upon behavior that is against his will or interests; one learns of the crime when Yahweh refers to it and considers what punishment to meet out, without trial, of course. This last kind of behavior is presumably an exercise of "free will" on the part of Israelite believers or non-believers or on the part of gentile non-believers. They have the uniquely human ability to obey or disobey him. It is a totalitarian system in that no human act is done outside of his jurisdiction or without religious meaning. A secular sphere does not exist for him. What Yahweh does, supplementing what he says, is to cause all things to happen, even expressions of disobedience coming out of "free will", in the sense that if he wished to do so, he could make people will what he wanted them to will. He is thus all-powerful, even against free will. Sometimes, as with Pharaoh, Yahweh plays a mean game with people, forcing them to be bad so that he can punish them more. "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders..., he will not listen to you." [22] He even asserts a power to be bad, to do evil. He is not bound by notions of good or evil. "Who makes peace and creates evil, I Yahweh do all this." [23] Speaking through the prophet, Ezekiel, Yahweh proclaims of Israel: "I defiled them through their very gifts in making them offer by fire all their first-born, that I might horrify them: I did it that they might know that I am Yahweh." [24] Nor is he bound by promises and laws or a principle of consistency. Thus he is unlike Zeus, as Eliade Points out. [25] He is in this sense, like Moses, charismatic, above the rules. Although he causes all things to happen, only selective actions of Yahweh are described. Yahweh acts in categories set up almost always by his worshippers, rarely by non-believers or opportunists outside of Israel. He rules the heavenly host, destroys nations, feeds Israel, punishes friend and foe, and so on; he wills all natural forces and especially great or unusual natural forces. Particular actions are of the same kind, but deal with special cases that come to his attention, such as punishing a named person or giving a sign at a certain time and place or appearing on the mercy seat of the Ark, or sending down manna or causing all East wind to blow. As with his speech, all that he does is likewise in an authoritative mood. Can one then slip in a substitute word for Yahweh such as "nature" and read the Exodus and wanderings as natural history? If one uses the word "nature" or "a natural force," can one then also eliminate all anthropomorphic or metaphorical references? Such would be, for example, reading only the first three words from "Smoke went up from his nostrils " etc [26] Perhaps, yet one must not dismiss metaphor. In a certain broad sense all language originated metaphorically, and further, one can often find a fact through the metaphor used to describe it. If Yahweh (Nature) melts mountains like wax, it may be that sudden eruptive thermal melting is occurring, producing the viscous appearance and softness of wax. Or, whenever Yahweh "appears," is it to be taken as metaphor? A god who is everywhere, omnipresent, cannot "appear" in one place; he was already there; or, logically, since nothing is beyond him, he can appear, even in seeming contradiction to himself. No, Yahweh is not Nature animated. And he is not metaphor (unless hallucination is metaphor, which in a way it is but in a way that is irrelevant here). The activities of nature - especially the powerful, disastrous and brutal forces - are contained within the sum total of activities - moral, social, political, and military - of a hallucinated, all-powerful man. But then, in the end, all words and deeds are but weak tools to describe one to whom the absolutes of presence, knowledge, power, and activity are assigned. One either makes of blind faith a virtue or brings to bear the tools of psychiatry. A logical exposition of Yahweh's mental labyrinth is impossible. It is the ghost of Moses' mentation. A religion cannot come to be without voices sacredly and definitively authorized to speak accurately on behalf of the god; therefore, it has to be presumed that Moses, who claims and is accorded such credentials, is speaking the truth about Yahweh. Yet Moses himself is but a delegate of limited instructions, and often repairs to Yahweh for further orders or clarification. But Yahweh, the absolute one, knows that, at best, Moses is only a superior human; that is, Moses is still a weak reed to lean upon for establishing godly rule among a portion of the human race. And, as for the Jews as a body of people, Yahweh has little confidence or trust in them, and the grounds on which he has chosen them as his "peculiar treasure" are indefinite, to say the least. The choice seems to have been practically a random act of grace on his part. An outside observer can scarcely be faulted, then, if he feels himself racing giddily in a circular trap, with his every attempt to question a fact or a cause being referred back to an absolute quality which respects neither fact nor cause. He can only cease his anxious circlings, he is assured, if he accepts to believe, or if he is coerced into non-believing acceptance. Accepts what? Authority, of course, and please do not begin circling around again in search of the justification of authority. That is merely another circle around Yahweh. Are the words and actions of Yahweh such and only such as would emerge front the delusionary projections of Moses? Generally, yes, and nothing important comes other than through the screen of Moses or through the operations of nature. Are all the events that occupy the perceiving apparatuses of the speaker( s) of the Pentateuch - Moses and all the preceding rememberers and all those who have worked upon the materials after Moses - possible or probable when appraised by the rules for testing the occurrence of events that are laid down by social and natural scientists? Again the answer is yes. The "unscientific miracles" that are left to explain are few and casual, not worth explaining, one might say. I am not here denying the great mysteries of existence, I merely assert that these are in no wise explained by the Pentateuch-Torah: Moses and mosaists are not theologians, much less philosophers. Those who accept such scientific answers do not generally find themselves less in control of themselves and of the world about them, and less happy, than those who have accepted the authoritative complex of Yahwism or have resigned themselves to the coercion to accept the same. That this should be generally believed, even among psychologists after the manner of William James, does not make it so. It is ordinary to feel, when anxious, that "the grass grows greener on the other side of my fence." I would not deny, however, that one day a religion might be invented that would deliver a delusional system that would make humankind happier than even a dependence upon truth and consequences. {S : SIN VS SCIENCE} SIN VS SCIENCE If Moses is a scientist, a great inventor, why does he not hallucinate a god who is recognizably a scientist? Yahweh writes; he organizes lists or rules; he keeps books; and little else that is technical; he is the product, not the fountainhead of the science of Moses. Yahweh, though, is an unlimited, ungoverned power. Being a great scientist is certainly sometimes a strong fantasy and even can be hallucinated, but the urge to know is subordinate to the urge of power. The urge to power was exceedingly strong in Moses, for reasons and in ways already put forward. Further, hallucinations generally fulfill a role that is absent in the person, not one that is satisfied. Everybody had always said that Moses was a supremely intelligent person. But that was not enough. They also withheld from him, partly because his demands were so excessive, the power that he wanted. Only god could give him that, so Moses, the archetypical mad scientist, invented a god. This invented god is full of instructions but is a perfectly bad model for a teacher. He rarely connects things causally. He rarely explains. He simply asserts and commands. That is quite satisfactory for Moses who has no love for his pupils, and, more and more, wishes them simply to memorize and obey. Moses' Yahweh begins as a set of creative miracles coming out of Moses' science and his cooperation with and exploitation of nature. Then, owing to the rush of catastrophe, what begins as a fairytale ends in a monstrous takeover by wild natural forces. Yahweh becomes catastrophic. Yahweh symbolizes the most terrible memories. Moses is changing his own character, though in directions pointed out by his earlier character. Yahweh is accompanying this change with changes in his character. Every attempt is made by Moses, the Bible, the people, to assemble and reorder their minds in the process and aftermath of the natural catastrophe of Exodus. Moses' mind and to a quintessential degree that of Yahweh moves towards severity, punishment, and order. As much as must be forgotten and reassembled, that much is to be converted into sin, blame, and chastisement. The invention of a punishing god is to help people to remember lessons of unity and ethnicity. "Early Israel was the dominion of Yahweh, consisting of all those diverse lineages, clans, individuals, and other social segments that, under the covenant, had accepted the rule of Yahweh and simultaneously had rejected the domination of the various local kings and their tutelary deities - the baalem." [27] To recall the slogan: "Yahweh brought you up from Egypt," is to recall slavery and catastrophe. And it is also to recall simultaneously Moses. So the edifice of history and religion is the private property and power of Moses. In the famous formula of Harold Lasswell: the power-driven man displaces his private motives upon public objects, and rationalizes the displacement in terms of the public interest [28] . Moses needs a god of power - nothing very much else. Once Moses has his god, and that god has become identified with a catastrophe, then the god has to be the center of a cult of power centered around the expiation of disaster. For Moses, and therefore Yahweh, there is no other route, and for the people who became Israel there was no escape, no turning back to the call of Egypt, no popular vote on what type of character Yahweh should be, no fairytale religion except in the underground of their popular legends, no evasion of his rule. The continuous disastrous circumstances of nature and society, beginning in Egypt and ending generations later, reinforced the authority of the god that the people had taken, for better or for worse, as their spouse (as the prophet Hosea would call the relationship). Not even by turning whore (again using Hosea's image) could Israel escape the claims of its husband, and indeed suffered the mosaic penalty for adultery, death. It is not hard to prove the primary obsessions of the Books of Moses. One can examine, even if summarily, the amount of declaiming about sin, guilt and compulsion that occurs in their pages. Should the reader at this point complain that everybody knows this to be true, I would grant that most may know it but few have the nerve and stomach to bear it in mind. As their part of the general trend of scholars and ministers to make the Bible unthreatening, by erasing the natural catastrophes, and by "humanizing" Moses, they also downgrade or dismiss its obvious impact and look in it for sweet and rare words like love. Buber's elaborate Index to his life of Moses contains no references to sin, guilt, blame, or punishment. Nor does the equally detailed Index of Daiches. The major concordances of the Bible list references and passages to all except minor words. If we look into a concordance to see how often certain significant words are used in the Books of Moses, we shall find them in context. Should we count the references to sin, guilt, punishment, coercion and enemies, and then their contraries of love and friendship, we might test our impression that aggression in its various forms overbalances affection in the Books of Moses. And, as Table 11 shows, so it does. Overwhelmingly. In the two concordances, based upon two different translations, differences occur. But both versions agree emphatically at all important points. The five books of Moses carry from eight to twenty times as many accusatory, demanding, punitive and hostile references as they do affectionate and friendly ones. If Genesis is removed from the calculation on grounds that it was mostly inherited by Moses from the earlier Hebrew religion and incorporated partly to bolster his claim to base Yahwism upon the "god of the fathers," then the extreme misanthropism of mosaism becomes all the more evident [29] . Love and friendship are absolutely wanting in Moses himself, if this statistical indicator possesses any validity. To search out additional evidence, we can fashion another kind of sample, this time the first verse that appears on every upper left hand corner of every page of the Oxford Bible. Of the Pentateuch, there are 262 pages and therefore a sample of 262 verses. Statistically the sample approaches randomness and adequacy, so that what is represented in the 262 verses is probably close to what is contained in the whole. We judge in each case whether the statement does or does not directly involve sin, blame, or compulsion. Table III reveals the findings. Sin is guiltiness and is defined as an ascribed quality of deserving punishment, implicitly or explicitly stated, and attached to an action. Blame is the assignment of guilt or sin or evil to a person or object involved in an action. Compulsion is a holy penalty established in the verse or referred explicitly to its being provided elsewhere for this described action. TABLE II Affection and Aggression in the Books of Moses Explicit wortds of Books of Moses Explicit wortds Strong's 5 Concordance Presbyterian 5 Concordance of Books of Moses Books of Moses Genesis Books of Moses Genesis only only ============================================================================================================= Love, Loved, Loves Lovest, Loving 41 15 52 14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guilt, Guilty 16 1 66 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Must 17 4 24 11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lest CA 17 22 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anger, Angry 43 7 66 12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Obey, Obedient, Obedience 21 3 12 5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sin, Sinned, Sins, Sinning, Sinners, Sinful, Sinneth 204 8 179 6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enemy, Enemies 58 3 64 6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friend, Friends 5 3 12 5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sources: James Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1963) based on the Authorized Version; and the Living Bible Concordance, J. A. Speer, ed., Poolesville, Md.: Presbyterian Church, 1973, based on K. N. Taylor's (Paraphrased) Bible, 1972. Half of the Books of Moses, we would conclude, is devoted to alleging sin, casting blame, or inflicting and threatening punishment. Very few of the balance of actions are concerned with love, neighborliness, mutual help, sowing and reaping, or the like. The rest is mainly comings and goings. The catastrophes of Genesis such as the Deluge and others less definitely treated are long gone into thousands of years of tradition. Moses copied Genesis; he lived and wrote the essentials of Exodus, and the other books are in a way commentaries upon Exodus or extensions of it. Hence they reflect his character. We can observe that little place is left in mosaism for an honest mistake or an error in judgement, There are no means of discriminating between pragmatic and sacred action. This is truly primitive or, better, traumatized; practically everything is within the grasp of religion. It reveals, too, how profoundly Moses had changed from a scientific genius; to all intents and purposes, apart from his bag of techniques, Moses had become a wholly obsessed, hallucinatory, punitive theocrat. TABLE III Book Actions involving Sin, Blame, or Compulsion All other verses ================================================================== Genesis 18 = 27% 48 Exodus 32 = 58% 23 Leviticus 30 = 79% 8 Numbers 19 = 35% 35 Deuteronomy 26 = 53% 23 ================================================================== Total 125 = 48% 137 Those who profess a Christian, Moslem or Judaic mosaism, or who are subjected to mosaic education in the contemporary world number some 1.3 billions, a third of the world's people. The history of Europe and the Near East has been deeply affected by mosaic conduct and ideas for 1900 years - since the Christians let them out of the bag, so to say. There should not be so many mosaists in history if the momentum of mosaism came only from Moses. That is, people have had within themselves, as a product of their genesis and ancient history, a capacity for grasping and becoming Mosaists and Yahwists. They can become something else - and obviously most people who have ever lived were something else - but not something so different that they are freed in utero or in culture from the possibility of lending themselves, as leaders or followers, to mosaism. The human is catastrophically constructed and prone to a kind of schizotypical behavior. What universally appealing features can make mosaists of normal humans? First there is the world out of control: the heavy anxiety in the face of disturbed nature and nations creates the need for psychological, if not actual, control and security. In ancient history, and still today, nations imitate nature. There is a constant interplay of metaphor between the two: rulers and winds are strong; saviors and suns bring illumination; and so on into hundreds of parallels. When we have "Gott mit uns" we feel a control over both our human problems and our natural problems. Mosaism very clearly places gods on earth among us. It establishes a worldly god who is interested in the smallest details of our existence, so as to control us; but we are controlling him (little does he know) by occupying him with our problems. A jealous god, like a jealous lover, is a prisoner of his chosen one. This limitation of, or demand upon, the divinity is most useful for the organization of primitive political power and of political power primitively. If people look elsewhere than within the fabric of their conscience for their god, the rulers cannot so neatly use him. Further, the insistence upon a single god, monotheism, pyramids the possibilities of employing the one god for the purpose of absolute social control. There has been a great god in most cultures and the erosion of his powers is fought in order that power may be more concentrated in the hands of rulers. Monotheism simplifies the monopoly of authority and totalitarian rule. Inasmuch as societies have not discovered how to exploit the mines of human energy without coercion and oppression, they may find in mosaism an ample and simple ideology of sin, blame, and coercion. Unconsciously, sincerely, and manipulatively, the power to speak in the name of a single, absolute, demanding and unbound god is a very great power; it leaks into politics, family relations, work groups, and every other sphere of life, with plenty of power to spare: it is theoretically unlimited. When, to this power, is attached the logic of sin, blame, compulsion, and punishment, the power is greater and more effective. Thus occurs the formula: Yahweh has an interest in all your actions; all your actions are good or bad; that is, either demanded by or prohibited by him. If you fail to be good, you can expect punishment now or later, and punishment then is never a surprise, for the storing up of evil is great in you. If you do good and suffer, this is for a past misdeed, even as Moses was kept from the Promised Land by an obscure fault. Even the most heinous deeds are in the name of Yahweh or are committed as a punishment by him. Sacrifice to Yahweh of the first-born of children and cattle was originally proclaimed as the price of his guiding the Israelites out of Egypt. It is avoided or discontinued by Moses by the expedient of dedicating the Levites as substitutes for the sacrifice, the cost being obedience to the Levites. The duty of such sacrifices remains as a holy theoretical obligation. Exceptional killings of offspring occur in the royal families of Judah and Israel, and elsewhere. The gruesome passages on infanticide and cannibalism in Deuteronomy (28: 53-75) are put into the future tense. However, it is not reasonable to believe that the prophets, in accord with what scholars say often, told history in foretelling events, whereas the Deuteronomist had no historical sense when foretelling events. Both recited history. The terrible memories of sieges and famines erupt in the present tense. We stress here that the people are assured that they were condemned to commit these acts because of their disobedience to Yahweh. Again, as we said earlier, the concept of absolute, peak obedience to Yahweh makes all other crimes pale into insignificance, and all evil actions are capable of losing their criminal quality. Moses could commit his frightful actions because they were in the name of Yahweh. When any and all crime can be justified if attributed to a god, then secular authority will not lag far behind. Rarely is an action mentioned that is good, either pragmatically and socially or religiously; much less is it praised. A dreadful negativism pervades the Pentateuch or Torah. All of this is helpful in controlling a population without their consent. At any instant, the criminal or charitable or pragmatic (useful) nature of an action may be altered; the psychological bind in which a person finds himself is obvious, as is the inherent connection with schizophrenic training, where Moses is the trainer. The connection with ritual becomes manifest here as well. One reaction to contradictory and inexplicable behavior of authorities is catatonism. The person dares not move in any direction. To reestablish control over this numbed mind, highly explicit and numerous behaviors are prescribed; life processes become ritualized. Moses inaugurated an obsessive ritualism, that was to be perpetuated over the generations by the succession of priests. The signal quality of obsession, which can begin with the obsession of sin, is that it provides a compulsiveness to behavior. That is, once put on the treadmill of obsessive-compulsive conduct, the person cannot get off of it. If a population behaves so, the rulers know at any given moment where the people are and what they are doing. They will not become friendly with foreign people, as at Beth-Peor; they will not be running up to the high places and behaving licentiously, as the Yahwist prophets later complain. They will be working painstakingly, guiltily, and reserving the Sabbath for Yahweh. There is this to be said on the positive side of mosaism, but only from a psychological and not from an ethical or religious viewpoint. By keeping people eternally in pain and guilt, with a sense of being continually observed by the kind of mean father that Moses conjured, there would be produced not only many mad-persons but also some unusual number of geniuses. For creative, driving genius is a kind of malady of deviance that can win freedom from mosaism but cannot win freedom from the watchfulness, self-consciousness, restless movement, and obsessiveness that had been inculcated by mosaic training. Unfortunately for mankind, more humanistic and pragmatic forms of pedagogy, as in classical China and Greece, Augustan Rome, Medieval Islam, Renaissance Italy, and the centers of nineteenth-twentieth century science - including always the formidable humanistic Judaic contribution - have had only small constituencies, and are always in danger, whether from some extended form of mosaism or another religiously founded authority-formula. {S : IMMORTALITY} IMMORTALITY In Yahwism, life after death is a matter for legends and rabbinical speculation. Moses is given a guided tour of all the wonders of heaven says one story, while he is supposed to be on Mt. Sinai elaborating designs for the Israelite camp and carving the tablets of the Decalogue. But the Bible, more correct as to Moses' mentality, has Yahweh visiting face-to- face, "mouth-to-mouth," with Moses on solid ground. Yahweh does not grant immortality nor even comment upon it. Death is everywhere in the Books of Moses, and death is final. There is no intimation that Moses believes in heaven as an abode for the souls of the departed or as a place for terrestrial visitors, nor for that matter does Moses believe in a hell or a sheol, where the dead may receive punishment or purgation. This lapsus on Moses' part is strange. First, one might think that so ambitious a man would find a place where he might continue his mission after death. Whether he would have received the inspiration from Egyptian, Hebrew, or Mesopotamian sources, he might have felt the need to project himself into a prolonged relationship to Yahweh. Further, it might have consoled his people "in the land of the shadow of death" [30] to provide a place for at least the better among them in heaven, and it might have helped him to control the people were he able to assure them, as did later Christian mosaists, of burning in hell-fires for their wrong-doing to Yahweh-Moses while they were alive. Various explanations occur to us. Moses was in need of immediate obedience, not in allowing a lifetime of choices to qualify for heaven or hell. "Obey, or be burnt now!" is rather obviously his theme, whether addressed to individuals or to all of Israel. On the annual Day of Atonement, one goat is burnt before Yahweh and another, the scape-goat, is heaped with the sins of all the people and loosed into the wilderness to find his way to Azazel, the evil demon. Atonement is earthly, too. Moses would have felt threatened with the loss of control of the people, if each had come to think of himself according to Plato's vision as destined to occupy one of the myriad of stars. Moses is intent upon conquering an earthly Promised Land where Israel may dwell in material comfort and seek to please Yahweh. "The God he discovered was eventually a protecting lawgiver who enunciated comments to the people in their own interests, not in the interests of their eternal salvation, for such a concept was quite foreign to Moses' way of thinking, but in the interests of their earthly welfare [31] . This nationalistic goal would be rendered vague and even unessential, if a heavenly goal and immortality were projected as well. Perhaps he believed in an eternal nation, with endless religious and blood descent, whose people would fulfill their need for immortality in the transmission of Yahweh along the lines of their descent as the Chosen People, "the Peculiar Treasure" of Yahweh. There is another side to this matter of the Chosen People. Yahweh commands the destruction of all peoples who stand in the way of his "children." The limits of their territory, it may be argued, are those of the Jordan Valley and Canaan; but the directive is without limits, according to another argument. Since even related tribes come under the annihilating directive, thanks to the monopoly the Israelites allow themselves in the use of the Ineffable Name, one would have to conceive of a special heaven for Israelites only. This invites theological problems, and we know that, as Neher points out, Moses was adverse to such. Later on, Christian and Muslim sects would produce the theologians to invent exclusive heavens for their true believers. Moses himself would probably not care for such a heaven, no matter how thinly populated by select yahwists such as Aaron, Joshua and himself, some of the people of Israel, of whom he has little good to say, might by some independent judgement of Yahweh, find their way there. He would not like his decision-making powers to lapse, and, if they were tendered to him ad infinitem, heaven would soon be cleared, and hell full. These musings may not be in vain, because ultimately they lead us to a hard theory. Moses, we have stressed, possesses a catastrophist mentality and an earthly mission; he has no interest in preserving the souls of the people of Israel. If one were to judge by the many times that he prophesies for them, and threatens them with, total destruction for their failures in respect to himself and Yahweh, one might guess that he fully expected the world, or at least the world of the Jews, to go up in flames and destruction at any time. And certainly, he would believe that, upon his own demise, and deprived of his leadership, the chances of their prompt destruction would be greatly increased. Can we go one step farther and say that Moses harbored the wish, not very deep below the surface of his consciousness, that the Chosen People be destroyed? Yahweh occasionally toys with the idea. In the Revolt of the Golden Calf, Yahweh says of Israel: "Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation." [32] But when Moses remarked that he would lose face with the Egyptians, and that he should remember his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel [Jacob], Yahweh repented and forebore to kill them all. Again, quoted by Ezekiel [33] , because they profaned the sabbaths and walked not in his laws, Yahweh says: "I promise to pour out my fury upon them in the wilderness, in order to exterminate them." He withholds his hand: "But I acted for the sake of my own name that [it] might not be profaned before the eyes of the nations, before whose eyes I had brought them forth." Again, too, a vulgar regard for public opinion. This catastrophic wish and its related belief disposes of the problem of immortality. Like many a sick and dying person, and like many otherwise normal persons, Moses wanted to take the world with him. Or, if he refused to entertain such a notion, he would expect and prophesy such an event. Then there would be no problem of immorality; the solution would be total. Neither Moses nor Yahweh, when they argue the question of extirpating the Israelites, wonders how to go about judging their merits and assigning them a place in the afterlife. I would conclude, until otherwise instructed, that Moses carried like a great lump with him an obsessive idea: when Moses dies, Israel must die with him. Reinforcing his obsession was the unconscious appreciation that Yahweh also must die with Moses. Moses did not grow kinder with age; the obsession would have become more and more difficult to suppress and conceal; it might ultimately have contributed to the cause of his death - by a flying stone, by shock, by accident, by abandonment, by physical removal from office, by execution. Then, despite his unconscious wishes, Yahweh, mosaism, and Israel did survive. As the psychological imprints of Moses, they survived. The brand of Moses and Yahweh upon the character and history of the Jews carries this sadism into a corresponding masochism of self-destruction. No matter how successful in mundane terms, no matter how let to live in peace, they were haunted by the fear that they would be destroyed as a people. It is of course part of the tragic game that they should be encouraged by their religion and leaders to believe that this destruction is the desire and intent of the outside world, for they could not permit themselves to recognize that it was Moses and Yahweh who wanted them to die as a people. Yet, with unerring technique, they set themselves up time after time for destruction, expecting, in the end, to tell themselves: "You see now it is as it is written in the Law. We shall be destroyed for our sins." And they permitted their destroyers to say: "By your own profession, it would not happen, if it were not that you are wicked." One after another national disaster is attributed to Yahweh - whether the instrument is some now-dead nation, whether the Egyptians, or the Neo-Babylonians; it happens because they have misbehaved towards Yahweh; the score of millennia amounts to an impressive collective masochism. Hardly is one disaster ended, than the prophets of new disaster arise, recalling to them all the previous disasters back to Exodus. Although it cannot be said that people behave as they say or believe, nevertheless, in the absence of a competing ideology - and the Jews have never permitted one in their midst - it cannot be argued that the dominating ideology has been without effect. {S : MONOTHEISM} MONOTHEISM Myth presents us with a cluster of ideas about Judaic-Christian-Islamic religion which are in significant respects untrue and harmful. The function of the myth (as is typical) is to make its believers feel well and superior to others. So it is with the myth that Yahwism is monotheism; further, that Yahweh is invisible; further, that monotheism is good for people and naturally reasonable. Yahweh is very much anthropomorphized, in fact. He is portrayed as a magnificent man. He is, like Moses, exclusive and will not show himself to anyone in his true figure. Once he promised Moses to exhibit himself to the Elders on Mount Sinai, but they were treated only to a smooth rock and bright light. "No prophet had anything to tell of a figure resembling the human until Ezekiel " [34] He does reveal his presence by the light of the Ark and the column of smoke. He sits on the "mercy seat." He directs campaigns, promulgates laws, decrees punishment and in every way, save sexuality, which he treats almost entirely by restrictions, he is human. I have found it difficult to distinguish between Moses and Yahweh once Yahweh is assumed to be Moses' other self and his presence is otherwise manifested in forces of nature and in the good and evil fortunes of people. Then, too, he has the normal emotions of hate, love, anger, boastfulness, jealousy, mercy, but not fear, because fear is the reciprocal of power, and power is the essence of Yahweh. Yahweh does not claim that he is the only god. Nor does Moses claim that Yahweh is the only god. He is content to quote Yahweh to the effect that Yahweh is the same god as the god of the Hebrews. At the Burning Bush we hear "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." [35] And again, after Moses' first meeting with Pharaoh, "I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), and by my name of Yahweh I did not make myself known to them." [36] Buber says that Moses saw the god of his wife's tribe but recognized him as the god of the fathers [37] . This is interesting but goes unexplained: how do you recognize a god as your own? It is perplexing. Surely the Hebrews of Egypt knew their god, Elohim El Shaddai, God-Most- High, well enough to tell whether he would permit himself another name. Gressmann, among others, declares Elohim and Yahweh to be two distinct gods. "Yahwism, in mosaic times, suppressed the older religion of El." [38] "The legends treat the patriarchs as thoroughgoing pacifists. Their god is a god of peace-loving men," writes Max Weber [39] . Moshe Greenberg tells us so: The God of the patriarchs shows nothing of YHWH's 'jealousy'; no religious tension or contrast with their neighbours appears, and idolatry is scarcely an issue. The patriarchal covenant differed from the Mosaic Sinaitic Covenant in that it was modeled upon a royal grant to favourites and contained no obligations, the fulfillment of which was to be the condition of their happiness [40] . Perhaps the Hebrews had become Egyptianized and religiously indifferent, as legends indicate. Messianism is not specifically conceptualized in Exodus; but sociologically Moses would have to be understood by the Hebrews and related populations as a messiah coming with a representation of the old god on a specific mission of deliverance. And always there were the looming catastrophe, the perceived comet and the plagues to validate a return to religion and messianism. With Moses there came another kind of god. With Jesus there came still another, closer to Saturn-Elohim than to Yahweh. The disciples and crowd of Jesus formed one more of the several splinter movements that took their devotees from Judaism. The Israelites had no sooner struck the deserts when they began building variant gods: idols of Egypt came out of the luggage; a new cometary Baal emerged in the Golden Calf. Following the proclamation of the Covenant, Yahweh claims the whole earth; Israel is but his "peculiar treasure." [41] In Amos' prophecies, Yahweh asserts that he led other nations to safety at the same time as he retrieved the Hebrews from Egypt. He says that he punishes them all alike, including the people of Israel [42] . These seem but minor claims when contrasted with the striking verses that, along with much other evidence, put Yahweh in his place. They are the words of Moses, in a farewell address to Israel, as recomposed by a writer during monarchic times, six or seven centuries later: When the Most High [Eyon] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, according to the number of the sons of God. For the Lord's [Yahweh's] portion is his people, Jacob [43] his allotted heritage. The Lord [Yahweh] alone did lead him and there was no foreign god with him [44] . Clearly Yahweh here is one of the sons of god, to each of whom a nation of the Earth's people was distinguished and allotted. Yahweh receives Israel, and is free of interference from any foreign god. "The sons of god" are "the divine beings who belong to the heavenly court," and when god speaks of them he uses the term "us" and "our." [45] It is a very old relationship, encountered in the first chapter of Genesis, The resemblance here to the Olympian family of gods under Zeus the Father is notable; the Greek gods take up the sides of different nations as in the Iliad; have favorite countries as Athene with Athens; and so onto other conformities. A god is usually an idea of a people about a being that controls their destiny. The people establish a religion to control their god by being in step with him. The more out of control their destiny, the more they look for and seek to control a god. The god takes on traits that are appropriate to their problems: if fire is threatening to their world, a fire-god occurs; if sheep are critically important, god will tend their flocks. The worse the problem, the greater the status of the god attending to it. Stabilizing the universe is a most common trait of the most powerful gods. Therefore we reason that the unstable universe has been the most important problem when the greatest of gods came upon the scene. The moral dogmas of humans are avocational pronunciamentos of the great gods; try as may the philosophers and theologians of another, later age, they cannot get rid of the essence of divinity, the bringing and removing of catastrophe. Yahweh saved the Hebrews from catastrophe: specifically, he brought them out of Egypt and through the years of wandering; but these events are formal history, the idiosyncratic chronology moving on top of the informal history of the catastrophe. Elohim (God-in-Heaven) would appear to have preceded Yahweh in the Hebrew theogony. He is frequently mentioned. He is securely identified by a number of writers as the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Saturn of the Romans, and the Kronos of the Greeks. Other god-names in Genesis are El Shaddai, El Eyon (God Most High), El Olam (Eternal-God), El Bethel (God of Bethel), and El Ro'i (God of Vision) [46] . The word "Elohim" denotes a plural entity in Hebrew. Isaac Asimov, in his commentaries on the Bible, discussing this point, concludes that an original polytheism existed; we would agree. Cyrus Gordon in all analysis of Psalm 82 shows that Elohim is regarded as the "President of the gods." [47] The gods let rulers be wicked. Whereupon "all the foundations of the earth totter." Elohim then says: Ye are gods And all of you are deities. But ye shall die like mankind, And fall like any of the princes Arise, 0 God [Elohim], rule the earth; For Thou shalt take over all the nations! Gordon finds a parallel to the Psalm in the Ugaritic epic of Krt. We would again see in Elohim the great god Saturn whose recall of the world's people to his Golden Age is longed for. The character of Yahweh, like Indra, as well as Zeus, is bound up with catastrophe and war. Max Weber writes [48] : Yahweh, like Indra, is fit to be god of war because, like Indra, he was originally a god of the great catastrophes of nature. His appearance is accompanied by phenomena such as earthquakes [49] , volcanic phenomena [50] , subterraneous [51] , and heavenly fire, the desert wind from the South and South East [52] , and thunderstorms. As in the case of Indra, flashes of lightning are his arrows [53] as late as the prophets. Yahweh includes insect and snake plagues, and epidemics in his repertoire. The connection of the qualities of Yahweh as a god of frightful natural catastrophes, not of the external order of nature, preserved down to the time after the Exile, [that is, for a thousand years] was, beside the general relationship of those processes with war, based historically on the fact that God had made use of his power first in battle We have seen in this book that what Weber says of Yahweh as god of catastrophe and battle is exactly correct. But we have also seen that Weber is quite deceived by a Biblical reductionism of the Exodus environment so that he reverses the order. Yahweh, in fact, historically, made use of his power first to create catastrophes, then to bring wars. His pugnacity, Moses' pugnacity, and the bellicosity of the Israelites, Hyksos and many other nations followed, both in time and as effect, the natural disasters whose turbulence destroyed the social order. Gressmann, like Weber, committed "the four sins of modern biblicism": confused chronology; reductionism; primitivism; and uniformitarianisin. He too observed that catastrophe was connected with Yahweh. "The catastrophe of the Sea of Reeds," he declares, "laid the basis for the Yahwist religion." [54] He treats this event as a local disaster caused by a volcano and tidal wave at the gulf of Aqaba, far from Egypt; the plagues are to him relatively meaningless. Therefore he is in no position to make the correct statement, which is that cometary Yahweh brought the ecological catastrophes of Yahweh, which incited Yahwist aggressiveness among people, and all of this laid the basis for Yahwism. But, if Yahweh is just coming upon the scene, and Elohim is Saturn, how could Yahweh not be known to the Hebrews before Moses, since Yahweh is like Zeus and Jove, and Horus-Amon? And these gods have been heavily worshipped for perhaps 2500 years. There is a gap. A god of the Hebrews is missing. Perhaps, unlike other peoples, they clung to Elohim from the first creation of the world in Genesis and through the flood and thereafter, disregarding candidates for a Jove-type god until Yahweh was introduced. Then Elohim would be given an additional name and, with this new name, certain new qualities, The early Hebrews moved long distances, had many skills, were not bellicose, and lived among many nations. Their religion shared many legends and features with other peoples. Perhaps their monotheism had its origins in an innocuous name that was not objected to by their neighbors, not a source of contention. That is, Monotheism may be a pantheistic device. We tend to think of it as we see it in Moses, as a parochial, exclusive, anti-polytheistic device. It may not be so. But if Moses were the Messiah, coming upon a people in distress with a new version of god, there would seem to be good reason why a universalistic uncompetitive god should suddenly acquire the traits of a nationalistic jealous god - keeping monotheism constant. Still this would presume that Elohim, and also El Shaddai, were plugging the gap. However Elohim-Osiris-Saturn, while still a great god in Egypt, had long given way there to Horus- Amon and Thoth. "From the sixth dynasty on, Horus alone appears as the true patron of monarchy" until the end of the Middle Kingdom. [55] Then Seth, who can be identified as the perennial antagonist of Osiris, Horus, and Isis (Venus), becomes the principal divine monarch of the Hyksos until their overthrow by a combined Israelite-Egyptian army. But Thoth is not to be neglected. He is the Egyptian Hermes or Mercury, who bear a caduceus like Moses' Brazen Serpent. Just as Hermes served under Zeus in Greece, Thoth might have served under Horus in Egypt. His cult in Egypt was huge. His character is singular. In Egypt, Rome, Greece, Phoenicia, India and Mexico, he is powerful and gives judgement on the law; clever; rebellious; electrical; inventor of writing, expert scribe and linguist; magical; a wizard; a healer; mundane; instructor; guide of wanderers and roads; equivocal; he hides himself; but never so great as the greatest on high, never El Shaddai (God Almighty), never Jupiter. But when Horus resigned his earthly power, Thoth succeeded to his throne [56] . The cult of the ram followed the cult of the bull in Egypt [57] that is, Thoth followed Horus. It is conceivable that Abram when he changed his name to Abraham, was adding the Egyptian god Ra to the name of his Hebrew capital city of Ramah. Ram is Thoth and its totem animal is the ram. In this case, one might investigate whether the god of the fathers may not always have been a Saturn or a Jove, but a Mercury. Moses would have been familiar with Thoth - the sophisticated man's god - in Egypt. Perhaps when he began to hallucinate Yahweh, the traits of Yahweh became a combination of those of Jove and Mercury, Horus-Amon and Thoth. The mundane Thoth is perhaps the strongest model. What he found the Hebrews enjoying was a composite of Elohim and Amon-Thoth, perhaps so indefinite as to be the source of legendary complaints that the Hebrews had lost their religion in Egypt. Thoth, believed the Egyptians, created the world by the force of his word [58] . And the Gospel according to John says, "In the beginning was the Word." Whose word, Thoth's? We have noted how strong for the word were Yahweh, and Moses: "Write it down in your Book!" And how Moses has been inextricably identified with Thoth-Hermes by scientists of the occult over the ages. Biblical exegetes insist that "Logos," the original word in John, means more than Word; it means Life, Intelligence, Light, and metaphorically, Christ the Savior, present in the Word and in God from the beginning of creation. So did Thoth represent his Word, too, as life, intelligence and light striking upon mankind. We must observe closely and speculate cautiously: Moses as a "rational" cultist was Thoth- Hermes; Yahweh was Zeus-Horus-Amon. That is, when it came to projecting a god, Moses' personal need was for a stern, heavy father-figure, connected with lightning and meteors [59] , admittedly more powerful than Thoth. Moses does not introject Zeus as well as he does Hermes, Horus as well as he does Thoth. This may explain why Yahweh is such a crude and simple power-directed god, so unidimensional. He provides the strength and will, the compulsion, and the brute force. Thoth-Moses provides the brain. The reasons why Moses chose monotheism are fairly plain. Not only was there this syncretistic monotheism to work with among the Hebrews, but Moses had only the technology for one god. If the god were to be wandering with, talking to, and working with a tribe, he should better be unaccompanied by potential competitors. Moses did not have the ability to talk to more than one god at a time. He was a rigid person, and changed roles only with great difficulty. He could not be the executive secretary of a council of gods. He had in mind the concentration of power in his own hands: as on earth, so in heaven. A single god seemed logical, and could manage everything alone, with occasional messengers or angels. By the same line of reasoning, we may understand why there is no devil in Yahwism; Yahweh is his own devil-demon when necessary. Moses did not need to split his ambivalence into personalities. The destructive behavior of Yahweh gave Moses all the satanism that he needed. To be possessed by two or more gods at the same time is not at all impossible; indeed, such is the case with most people and most of history: monotheism is claimed only for some few religions. The human mind compartmentalizes readily. Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and other gods occupied the Roman mind, and no one will say that the Romans were confused or impractical, at least not by historical standards. Nor does personal development - although many imagine such - shunt all that is god's onto one's superego or conscience. Just as a boy will take several men as his models, believing, whether true or not, that these men possess abilities and traits that he must emulate, so he may take on several hypothesized gods as his inspiration for learning different skills and achieving different goals in life. So it was that Thoth-Hermes could fill the developing Moses with desires, techniques, and traits, and then bow down within Moses to let pass the new god of the conscience, the aggressive and absolute Yahweh, who is exclusively to occupy the grand ballroom of world dominion in Moses' mind. In this basic sense, Moses was a double religious personality, and thus, quite specifically, polytheistic. He was Thoth-Hermes in his ego and unconsciously, while he was Yahweh-Zeus in his superego and consciously. This, if nothing else, can explain why monotheism may never have existed in mosaism except as a formal, scholastic, linguistic construction, ex post facto. This construction of monotheism, once it burst its priestly bonds, encouraged everyone from philosophers to mechanics to shave off strips of reality from the religious sphere. They might invest their conscience in Yahweh while inventing a realistic, objective, scientific world, as did Isaac Newton and a host of other workers. Or they might reinvest their conscience in Jesus, while dealing pragmatically with the scientific world. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), one of the founders of electrical science and experimental method, was an early Unitarian leader. John Wesley (1701-1791), founder of Methodism, wrote on "Electricity made Plain and Useful, by a Lover of Mankind and Common-sense." Such is the "monotheism" that the present world inherits and passes on. It is descended from the monotheism of Moses. It consists of concurrent and successive images of a single god, who is usually accompanied by a host of celestial figures. It is certainly not the logically sharp and eternally consistent monotheism, such as the human mind has conceived and maintained. Monotheism belongs actually in the category of legal fictions, together with concepts such as "sovereignty." All the world may be persuaded of one god, with no single person agreeing within himself on the matter, and with no two persons agreeing between them. Nevertheless, the persuasion of monotheism will have substantial effects upon mind and conduct. {S : Notes (Chapter 8: The Electrical God)} Notes (Chapter 8: The Electrical God) 1. III G 431. 2. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. 3. The Palaetiology of Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis, Princeton: Quiddity Press, 1976. See, now, Homo Schizo volumes I and II, Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publns., 1983. 4. William J. Broad, "Syria Said to Suppress Archaelogical Data." 205 Science (31 August 1979), 878-1, 880. 5. Gen. 49: 18; Buber, 50. 6. Winnett, 20-4. 7. Ziegler, 98. 8. III G 94. 9. Ex. 4: 14-15. 10. II G 318-9. 11. Auerbach, 189. 12. Buber, 113-4. 13. Ziegler, 14. 14. Ibid., 72. See A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publns, 1981, where a setting of the skies is said to begin at this time. 15. See also Lev. 19: 12 against swearing falsely and profaning the name. Lev. 24: 15 sets the death penalty by community stoning for cursing the Lord or blaspheming his name. Weber writes (p. 447, fn. 23), "The abuse of the name of Yahweh finds its Correspondence in the sanction of blinding." Why? So that they may not ever see Yahweh upon the Ark speaking his name? Cf. Gaster, nos. 187, 72; Erman, SBAW (1911) pp. 1098 ff. 16. Ziegler, 13. 17. Cassuto, 243-4. 18. Ibid., 334. 19. III Ency. Relig. and Ethics, 510. 20. Moses and Monotheism, 144. 21. Jaynes, 89ff. 22. Ex. 7: 3-4. See also here in chapter I, where it is shown that this "hardening" theme is owing to the comet's implacability. 23. Is. 45: 7; Cf. Buber, 58. 24. Ezek. 20: 26. See Ex. 13: 1-2; 34: 19-20; 23-29; Lev. 27: 26-7; Num. 3: 13; 8-17-8; 18- 15. Cf. Gen. 22: 1-19; I Kg. 16: 34; II Kg. 16: 3; Mic. 6: 7. 25. M. Eliade, Trait‚ d'Histoire des Religions (1964, 1974), 88. 26. 2 Sam. 22: 9. 27. George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition, Baltimore: John Hopkins U. Press, 1973. 28. Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1930. 29. This sharp statistical distinction between the religion of Genesis and the other Books of Moses supports the argument made elsewhere in this book, that Moses invented Yahweh and that Yahweh is unconnected with Elohim in actuality. 30. Jer. 2: 6. 31. Daiches, 154. 32. Ex. 32: 9-10. 33. Ez. 20: 13-14 (New World transl.) 34. Buber, p. 117; Ezek. 1: 26. 35. Ex. 3: 6. 36. Ex. 6: 2. 37. Buber, 44. 38. Mose and seine Zeit. p. 433. 39. Max Weber, 49, citing Gen. 13: 8f. 40. "Judaism," 10 EB (1980) 304. Also Cassuto (27) and Sellin are unusual in stressing that Moses was a Messiah and Savior. 41. Buber, 105. 42. Amos 9: 7-10. 43. Jacob is Israel. 44. Deut. 32: 8-12; Oxford Bible, fn 256-7 says "sons of god" means "the divine beings who belong to the heavenly court." 45. Cf. Gen. 1: 26; Ps. 29: 1; 1 Kg. 22: 19; Job. 1: 6; Is. 6: 8. 46. Andrew Jukes, The Names of God, London: Kregel, 1888. 47. Contained as pp. 129-31 in G. A. Tuttle, ed., Bible and Near Eastern Studies, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans. 48. Weber, 128-130. 49. Ibid. I Sam. 14: 15; Is. 2: 21f, 46: 6. 50. Ibid. Gen. 19: 24; Ex. 19: 11f; Psalm 46: 6. 51. Ibid. Is. 30: 27. 52. Ibid. Zech. -: 14. 53. Ibid. Psalm 18: 14. 54. Mose and seine Zeit, 443. 55. J. Van Seters, The Hyksos (1966), 99 quoted by Bimson, I SISR 4 (1977) 9. 56. Larousse Encycl. of Mythology, "Thoth." 57. Tomkins, 169. 58. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 22. 59. See G. A. Wainwright, "The Relationship of Amun to Zeus and His Connection with Meteorites," XVI J. Egypt. Archaeo. (1930), 35-8. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T CONCLUSION } {S - } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia CONCLUSION In what could be called his last sane moment, before he had ever talked to Yahweh, Moses was leading his flock and saw a bush that was alight and not reduced to ashes, and said to himself: "I will turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." [1] This kind of "why" stood behind my undertaking this book and has, I hope, conveyed my reader rewardingly through its pages. The work is now finished, with its details fitted into its major parts and there assembled into the whole. Some 3500 years ago, the area subject to the Bible came under an extra- terrestrial force, apparently a great comet, which, amidst the destruction that it wrought, set into motion the human characters whom we have come to know well: Moses, the Pharaoh, Aaron, and especially the Israelites, who were shaped into a chosen people. The experiences of this people contained the material of a great and true story of disaster and survival. The story centers upon a scientific genius - Moses - and a new god - Yahweh. Yahweh is recognized as a great comet, as an electrical presence on earth, as the hallucinations of Moses, and as all cognate mental and social behavior in the times and places of Exodus, the Wanderings, and the invasion of Canaan. Of Yahweh, Vriezen has stated correctly: "If this God has to be typified in one word, that word must be: Power; or, still better, perhaps: Force. Everything about and around Yahweh feels the effect of this. He as it were electrifies his environment." [2] His electrifying force is more than psychological and metaphorical; "The Great I Am" is electrical in fact. The ideology of mosaism, a set of formulas for tying the aims of Moses to the purposes of Yahweh, proved to be adaptable from one restricted area and culture, the Judaic, to several grand civilizations - Byzantine, West European, Islamic, and American. The Ark of the Covenant, "the Vehicle of Yahweh," symbolized, as well as played a critical part in, the whole story. Its electrical functions represented the achievements of the Egyptian theocratic establishment from which Moses, one of its luminaries and scientific managers, was expelled. The Ark was the centerpiece around which the aggregate of survivors of the flight from Egypt were organized into a new nation. The Ark gave voice to the new god, Yahweh, distinguishing him from related old gods, and lent credibility to his being one god, the great god, the most active god, a god who moved and rested with his followers, an invisible god, a god of explicit advice, a god who was independent of any sky body once he was defined by Moses, Numerous miracles of the Bible have been shown to be based upon historical happenings: the escape from the enemy, the finding of food and drink, the punishment of sinners by god's fire, and so on to all significant miracles. They are demonstrable by ordinary rules of anthropology relating to a group interacting with nature to produce recognizable cultural behavior. Much of the non-miraculous but apparently nonsensical - the clothing, the taboos, the prayers, the rites, the devices, the social behavior, the attitudes of people - can be linked to the miracles, the setting, the motives and purposes of the leaders and people. All of this invites a renewed attention to old problems under a new light. We may be in a better position to learn from the Bible and to know what is not to be learned from it. The experiences of Moses and Israel may be better guides through history than they have been in the past. Yet even such generalities seem bland and anti-climactic following the outburst of arguments and propositions in the individual chapters. But rather than summarize all of these too, which are clearly signalled where they occur in the book, I should like to enter a plea on behalf of their implications. It is that Biblical scholars may join with specialists of other cultures throughout the world in reviewing materials of this electrical period of Exodus. It is, furthermore, that natural scientists, especially geologists and meteorologists, may lend their skills as historians of nature to the researchers in human history. I have no doubt that my book is to be corrected in many ways; I would, however, be gratified if the process of correction be managed so that all benefit in their own field of interest, rather than that I be loaded with the sins of all and sent into the desert to Azazel. Figure 20: The Moses of Klaus Sluter. ( Sculpture at chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon A. D 1404) Notes (Conclusion) 1. Ex. 3: 3. 2. The Religion of Ancient Israel (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), citing N. Soderblom, P. Volz and J. Pedersen. ; {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V GODS FIRE: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T APPENDIX} {S TECHNIQUES FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEGENDARY HISTORY } GODS FIRE Moses and the Management of Exodus by Alfred de Grazia APPENDIX TECHNIQUES FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEGENDARY HISTORY The Book of Exodus reminds one of the Iliad and other great epic poems. But Iliad and Odyssey chanted of much later events [1] . I am ready to believe, with Cassuto, that "one of the principal sources - possibly the principal source - was... an ancient epic poem, an epos dating back to earliest times, that told at length the story of the Egyptian bondage, of the liberation and of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness." [2] It has numerous lyric passages still, also word and sound play, and formulas and fixed numbers to help remember its verses. V. Cassuto points out various sacred literary harmonies through the text: the play upon threes, sevens, and seventies, for example; the repetition of words for emphasis; the use of expressions of salvation and deliverance in the 3rd episode of Moses in Midian, and so forth [3] . {S : THE LIMITS OF DISTORTION} THE LIMITS OF DISTORTION There was a major difference, however, between the Exodus and other epic accounts. The Exodus began in writing, under the authorship and direction of Moses, then was carried by epic tradition in oral form, and then was revived in written form in the tenth century at which time there was no Homer to reassemble it. So it came together afterwards piece by piece for five hundred years, as sacred history and in writing. In inception and conception, the Exodus was modern; it was to be a sacred written history. Luckily for students of ancient events, the Exodus was from its beginnings a sacred happening so that no despot, no matter how powerful, could afterwards rewrite it with impunity. Apart from the theological miracles that the Books of Moses describe (which we translate into historical and scientific miracles), the book in itself represents a set of historical miracles. First there was Moses who believed in historiography. Then there was Moses' Yahweh whose imprimatur on the mosaic word made tampering sacrilegious. Afterwards, there was spawned by the new nation a priesthood, Aaronites, Levites, and popular priests and prophets that oscillated between centralized and decentralized federationism. These men were compelled to recite historical truths even when the truth hurt their interests; they could never erase it; they could only accent their own position in the process of history, swearing continuously that they were only repeating what had been historically said. The divisiveness of the Jews let this process go on for many centuries. Then, in exile in Babylon and fortunately deprived of their own secular leadership, the priests crystallized their Torah, and upon their return to Jerusalem, decided once and for all that they possessed the sacred truthful history that must hereafter only be discussed, never changed. Thenceforth, no matter where they might be, those who claimed descent from the Exodus preserved with very little change the writings, while the Christians, who might have rewritten them, were from their own beginnings somehow persuaded that the Books of Moses were reconcilable with the teachings of Jesus and therefore sacred and untouchable. Thus happened the miracle of the Torah, that unique book. As a result, we have found much history in the Books of Moses, and we shall find much more. But perhaps the moment has arrived to explain how this adventure in historical discovery is engineered. What logic and techniques am I trying to employ? I shall explain my procedures now, hoping that the reader has reached "the point of no return." First of all, we need some agreement on the composition of the Pentateuch. Who wrote or pronounced what in Exodus? Who says that they did so? When did they say so? And we begin by asserting that Moses himself kept the log of Exodus; he wrote, too, of his talks with Yahweh; he recorded as well the laws that he promulgated. We have already learned of his passion for the written word, which is integral to his character, and became part of the Jewish national character. The log is reported in the Book of Numbers: "Moses recorded their starting points in writing whenever they broke camp on Yahweh's orders." [4] We recall, too, that Yahweh refers to Moses' book and tells him what to write in it as well as helping him write the Decalogue. Probably most scholars will agree that writing was indeed occurring in the wilderness. The major problems occurred subsequently. The writings were entirely lost. The period between the events, which in great part, no doubt, were not even originally recorded by Moses, but in vital parts were, and the canonization of the experience and its discussion consists of some eight or nine hundred years. "The final redaction and canonization of the Torah book... most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th-5th century B. C. E.)." [5] Hence the attempt to establish the authenticity of Biblical passages has depended largely upon linguistic analysis, and, to a lesser degree, upon internal consistency, comparative history and archaeology - all supervised by logical and anthropological speculation. Linguistic analysis allows an expert to criticize and perhaps rearrange passages in accord with what is known of the progress of the Hebrew language and of the style used by different individuals whose accounts have come down to the present. Linguistic analysis is inadequate often not only because of the uncertainty of its data and of its premises, but also because it cannot discover the career of oral traditions. We know from general anthropology and ancient literature that an exact rendition of a large body of verse and prose (such as Homer's Iliad and other epic works) can be transmitted over generations and centuries. The same exactitude can be expected of a sacred written work which is committed to collective memory, then lost in written form. Even though the style and other minor changes may be introduced when the oral version of the original written version is written down, the substance of the account may be exact. In both cases, in the period of oral transmission, trained speakers can memorize and reproduce exactly thousands of lines heard from the lips of a teacher. All along the line, a sacred duty to repeat the original faithfully encounters social interests to whose advantage certain changes might be made. In the case of the Bible, much effort must go into locating such interests, whether by internal analysis or by matching the known later political and natural environments with the suspected changes in the text over time. We have to take it for granted that those who had the last word to say on the Old Testament said it the way they wanted it. Nobody knows the name of these gentlemen, but they were a group of Jewish scholar-priests living 800 years after Moses. We can assume that they were a corporate group and, therefore, the "very last word" would have been that of a "research director," namely a qualified priest with political and social engagements and contacts, more attuned to the mission of the Old Testament as he saw it than to the literal nuances of the text. We know, too, that the period in which the last important editing was done was without general physical upheavals. Hence, the editing would lack the first-hand experience with catastrophe that marks the age of Moses and the age of the prophets and would not be conversant with strong references of the words, as compared to alternative weak references. Lacking direct comprehension, they would be tending toward using the name of Yahweh ever more promiscuously as a shorthand substitution for natural explanations or references. They would be uniformitarian (" conditions were the same then as now") and metaphorical (" what a fine analogy is implied in this language about angels.") Pari passu, the translations that are generally used now exhibit both tendencies of the text editors to a marked degree. The editing, moreover, occurred in a parochial and depressed period of Jewish history, the period of the Babylonian exile from which only some fraction was freed by the Persians and wanted to return to the Jerusalem area. The priest-scholars would be intent upon preserving their small ethnic and linguistic group, and would be without hope of expanding their realms, as contrasted, for example, with Jesus and Paul, working with the protection of and with the model of the seemingly universal Roman Empire before their eyes. The unwritten directive that would guide their minds and hands would then be: 1) The "Chosen people" are a "select and exclusive people," and should preserve their religious heritage against any infiltration, expansion, or assimilation. 2) Establish the continuity of Yahweh with Elohim, i. e., between the gods of Genesis and Exodus. 3) Eliminate realistic and natural explanations of events in favor of the indefinite, all- explaining "hand of god." 4) Provide a maximum of ritual so that the priests must be involved in all personal actions: "Whatever is not forbidden, must be prescribed." 5) Let it be clear that all that Moses did he did under strict orders from above, and further that he was the last man to be under such direct divine guidance. 6) Stress the undeserving character of the people; build up their guilt; establish, as the only route for the expiation of this guilt, renewed obedience to the Torah (the Law) and to the Priests and Levites who administer it. 7) Evade the secular, the political, and the contemporary environment of Judaism. Then, of course, the last word to the people of Israel would carry a meaning like: "now you have your inalterable sacred text. It is your first and last resort on all life's issues. And you have the priests to answer any questions. Lucky, undeserving people under Yahweh that you are!" I would argue that something like this revisionary process actually occurred and needs to be watched for in educing history from the Torah. Nevertheless, one must not take the naive cynical view that anybody who handled Biblical material in the course of a thousand years could shape it to his whims and fancies. On the contrary, the great scandal of the Bible is its uncompromising confrontation of real human behavior which in modern "scientific" society is confessed to psychiatrists or kept secret at all costs. The Revolt of the Golden Call offers a case in point. Frederick Winnett flatly declares that the story of the Golden Calf (incident, affair, revolt, revolution - one names it out of prejudice often, just as modern scholars quarrel over whether the Korean or Vietnam conflict was a "war") was a product of the southern penmen of Judah after the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed in 722 B. C. and its inhabitants lost to Judaism [6] . The Northern Kingdom, reports the Bible, had two major places where images of golden calves were worshipped. Hence, southern blame-mongers had inserted the Golden Calf of the Holy Mountain into the story of Exodus to prove just how blasphemous and deserving of destruction were the idol- worshipping northerners. This intervention would have occurred shortly after 715 B. C. However, as we have already evidenced earlier, we here take the Golden Calf revolt seriously, and fit it neatly into our total theory of Moses' character, of Yahweh, and of how the people really felt about religion. Are we now to erase our theory and loosen one of the stones of our edifice? I think that the answer must be negative, for several reasons. The weakest of these reasons is that practically all biblical scholars accept and discuss the Golden Calf revolt in its place in Exodus. This is an appeal to authority; but it is the authority of linguistic analysis in which we ourselves are weak and impressionable. The next reason, concerning which we feel stronger, treats of the minds of the vindictive writers of the Southern Kingdom. These men, scholars themselves, are caught in a bind. Just as rulers nowadays almost invariably reject rational advice to assassinate their political enemies, the priestly writers cannot violate the rules of the Bible, including that what goes into it must be sacred and true, and, further, must not violate a widespread appreciation of what the book ought to contain. Tampering with Moses was like playing with dynamite. A third reason is a question: Are we certain that Jeroboam did indeed cause two golden calves or bulls to be erected at two principle sites of his Northern Kingdom of Israel? Or is this one the concocted story? Or were these images only rumored to be "golden calves," and were something else; or were they metaphors for the very word "images"? They might be arks, even the ark seized by Dan. A fourth reason for maintaining the credibility of the Golden Calf Revolt is that, after the return from the exile in Babylon, a priestly group had occasion to make revisions in the Hezekiah recension that, says Winnett, had produced the story. They had good reason to remove the story if it were not true, because the Southern Kingdom itself had also been destroyed shortly after the Northern Kingdom and therefore the redactors may have felt less triumphant and scornful and more subdued. They let the story stand. A fifth reason is that the Torah did not then and does not now include accounts of all that happened during the Exodus. The oral tradition was rich and exact. It is likely that the scholars who wrote down the story found as their basis something closely matching the act of elevating the image of the Golden Calf to worship among numerous stories of Moses' struggle to maintain an imageless Yahweh. With malice aforethought, they wrote up this story and inserted it at a most logical place, if it were not indeed the proper place. What more likely occasion for this act to occur than after a prolonged absence of Moses on the Mountain? Winnett advances this possibility when he writes that "the story was present in the form of the [mosaic] tradition that reached D [the redactor], and, of all the incidents related in the tradition, that of Aaron's making an image of Yahweh in the form of a bull seems to have made the greatest impression on his mind." [7] At this point, it may be proper to argue a scenario: the great revolt at Sinai (Horeb) happened; among the gods raised up was the golden young bull; Moses put down the revolt harshly; the people never could quite believe Yahweh was fully competent when invisible or that the whole outside world of bull-worshippers was wrong; the bull theme reappeared many times, usually tied loyally to Yahweh, and in the days of Jeroboam, images, including the bull, were well-received, just as Zeus, not a bull, could be represented as such on occasion, as when he kidnapped Europa. Without question, the written Books of Moses expanded with time, as in this case, and usually, where a major affair is concerned, an oral historical tradition and a structure of truth are present. So it goes with the Moral Decalogue, the plagues, the confusing infancy of Moses, and other important elements; the written increments, uncovered by linguistic analysis, are founded upon ancient and authentic oral accounts and lost fragments. I think that more barriers to understanding the Bible have been erected by poor sociological and philosophical theorizing than by the more commonly criticized exegetes. {S : UNBELIEVING SCHOLARS} UNBELIEVING THEOLOGIANS Theodor Gaster's book of Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament is a compendium of analogous actions performed by characters in a number of different cultures. His typical procedure is to take an act or practice from a passage in the Bible and to show that similar behavior is discoverable in several other tribal or folk cultures here and there in the world. Explanations are rarely afforded. As an example, he writes of the taboo on touching the Ark of the Lord [8] . As we have already told it, the unlucky Uzzah tries to steady the Ark when an ox drawing it on a wagon stumbles; he is struck dead. Gaster gives two parallels. One is from Troy, where Ilus tried to rescue the Palladium of Athene from the flames and was blinded. In the second, Metellus rescues the same type of object from the temple of Vesta and is also blinded. Both have their sight restored. Gaster then ends the discussion. This procedure is purely descriptive and primitivist anthropology, even less sophisticated than that of Frazer on whose nineteenth century work Gaster's is founded. Human behavior must of course be analogous everywhere. People talk, eat, produce, have sexual relations, fight with weapons, and symbolize their actions, in basically similar ways everywhere. The resemblances of the three actions that he cites seem to be superficial. His implication here, as throughout his book, is that these are not events; they have no causes nor consequences; they are simply cartoon sketches coming off the brushes of long-gone legend creators. But our book is dedicated in part to showing that each and every legendary episode has a lesser or greater accumulation of characteristic symbolization centered around a core of historical reality; it is like the trillions of manganese lumps on the deep ocean bottoms that have accumulated around cores of shark teeth and other bones and stones; they are all alike but have a unique happening as a seed. By way of contrast to Gaster, U. Cassuto's Commentary on the Book of Exodus (1951, 1959) uncovers a string of three stories of wells, with Abraham, Jacob, and Moses as the heroes, each obtaining a bride thereby [9] . In this case, however, the fact that wells were universally employed for meetings and rendezvous is made significant by a close parallelism of Jacob's story with that of Moses. The two plots, involving other shepherds and the damsels Rachel and Zipporah, suggest a deliberate embellishment to tie Moses to his ancestor Jacob. Nonetheless Cassuto explicitly denies that his book aims at establishing historicity. In 1957, Greta Hort published two articles on "The Plague of Egypt," [10] there tying together skillfully much scientific knowledge pointing towards the actuality and sequence of the plagues. Briefly she argues that an unprecedented rainfall in Ethiopia eroded the red soil basin of Lake Tana and the banks of the Blue Nile and sent red floodwaters causing down the some 2000 miles of river, carrying with them a red micro-animal Euglena sanguinea as well. This polluted flood killed the fish of the Lower Nile and drove the frogs ashore, where insects infected them with an anthrax. Infestations of mosquitoes and flies followed. Independently a fierce hailstorm from the North blew up the Nile Valley. Fire is not mentioned. Weather conditions were propitious afterwards for a massive locust invasion. The dried-out land gave up its coating of red powdered dust to the first khamsin or sandstorm of the year, bringing days of darkness. She advances plausible reasons why the Hebrews should have been spared, in their partial isolation, some of the plagues. The plague upon the first-born is reduced to a ruination of the first fruits of the harvest that were ordinarily consumed in spring. The Israelites left then partly out of fear of being robbed of their harvests by the less fortunate Egyptians. Pharaoh was hard-hearted about letting them go; although prayer expeditions to the desert were not unknown, he would not chance the Hebrews leaving, because their god might answer their prayers and discountenance his god, and because sedition might be served with such moving about of people. I cannot do justice to Hort's ingenious scenario here. By way of negative criticism, I would allude to the enormous distance the red dust and flagellates would need to descend. Also, the lack of repetition of the plagues in earlier or later times makes the Exodus still unique. Critical connections are missing between the other plagues and the hailstorms and locusts. The first-born killing is laid aside. The magic wand contest is evaded. So is the climactic movement of waters in the passage out of Egypt. Nor are the negotiations or the human movements incorporated precisely into her scenario. The actuality of biblical events is, of course, a provocative issue in scientific quarters. A few rears later, Dorothy Vitaliano, in Legends of the Earth [11] stresses again a geological approach in attempting to restrain popular faith in ancient and folk accounts of unusual natural events. Vitaliano confronts causation directly, like Hort and unlike Gaster. She offers to explain the plagues as natural events, giving as much credence to the Bible as she can admit. But she is operating with a weak instrument, the uniformitarian law that the same natural conditions of today have prevailed over millions of years. Consequently, there is not enough energy in the ordinary, terrestrial, natural forces she employs to deliver the quick succession of shattering blows to the Egyptian Empire. Nor are the forces integrated by a single, sufficient cause. Her a priori refusal to consider an extra-terrestrial force cuts short the explanation at an unsatisfactory point. The major concession that she makes to the literalness of the Bible is the connection (which earlier I have adversely criticized) between the explosion of Thera-Santorini and the tidal waters sweeping in upon the Egyptian army [12] . A much greater freeing of the intellect is required before the Exodus events can be understood. It is notable that upon the conclusion of her heavily researched studies, Hort qualifies the results by reference to research by Professor Bodenheimer "on the connection between solar activity and pests" and the hope for an ultimate explanation by "cosmic and terrestrial" connections [13] . The combination of uniformitarianism and disbelief in legend leads, as with Buber and Daiches and Gaster, to a general distortion of the Bible by reductionism. The result is a sugar-coating of reality by a questionable commonsense. Shrinking from the realities of Exodus, not one but most editors and scholars have painted its human and natural background, the wanderings, and the struggles, as a quaint nineteenth century romance. Martin Buber was one of the best of biblical scholars and a hero of resistance to the Nazis; but little of the madness that he experienced under Nazism ruffles his calm book on the life of Moses. He is a rationalist - wrongly regarded as an existentialist - who ever so subtly deflates the rhetoric and propositions of the Bible, following a principle of maximal reductionism; at the same time, he is trying to keep his people, the Jews, bound together in a community, with the Bible as its glue. Perhaps the double task is impossible, or perhaps he is more an expert than a theorist; for his book is littered with disconnected, uncontrolled, and fallacious surmises. At one moment he may be Machiavellian. Thus he thinks that Moses had no clear mission in Egypt but, when rejected by the Hebrews, got himself accredited as the representative of the Hebrew god at the Pharaoh's court [14] . Machiavelli himself might have approved this notion; he regarded Moses as a model prince, perhaps even better than Caesar Borgia: Moses formed a nation and led it forth to survival. Then again Buber stretches time with an uncontrolled imagination; Moses is a kind of spook who haunted Pharaoh's court for years while the plagues went on at large intervals [15] . Buber analyzes the passover feast as an old shepherd festival of spring [16] . (Why each family should stay in its own home during a fiesta is rather strange.) His scenario of Moses talking with Yahweh is a fine example of reductionism, himself, quite unbelieving, yet letting his reader believe: In our vision, we see this man Moses at times, following some new and wearing experience with his people, entering the leader's tent, sitting down on the ground and for a long time weighing in his soul whatever may have befallen; until at length the new comprehension rises to the surface and the new word oppresses his throat; till it finally darts across into the muscles of his hand, permitting a new utterance of the Zealous God to come into being on the scroll [17] . This is practically all that passes for psychiatry in the book. Is Moses, or is he not, talking with Yahweh? Of all that is said and done in the Crossing of the Sea, Buber concludes: "It is irrelevant whether 'much' or 'little', unusual things or usual, tremendous or trifling events happened; what is vital is only that what happened was experienced, while it happened, as the act of God." [18] Here is your second greatest episode in Jewish history! (If the handing down of the Decalogue is the greatest.) "Miracle, he says, is "nothing but an abiding astonishment." But he cannot escape the urge to trivialize events: "It may be assumed that the frontier guards set out in pursuit of the fugitives." [19] As for the greatest episode, at Mt. Sinai, "every attempt to penetrate to some factual process which is concealed behind the awe- inspiring picture is quite - in vain." [20] The principle of uniformitarianism leaks out now and then: "We must maintain the conclusion that, for times about which we have nothing more than reports impregnated with material of an obviously legendary character, it is necessary to assume the same fundamental forms of historical behavior as we know in periods which have found more sober chroniclers." This, regarding the Passover! Things were then as they are now, legend-analysis is futile! (Notwithstanding that in the aftermath of catastrophe, legend, rather than purely factual history, is more likely to be written and to survive.) Gripped by philosophical confusion, he speaks of natural forces at the crossing from Egypt: "Here there is no Nature in the Greek, the Chinese or the modern Occidental sense. What is shown us of Nature is stamped by History." [21] And the history is stamped by wonder, he says, which produces cosmic exaggerations. "The defeated Egyptian 'dragon' grows into a symbol as vast as the world in the drama of rescue which serves as prelude to the revelation " From what unconscious source did Buber conjure up the Egyptian 'dragon'? It can be none other than Typhon, the great monster whom Zeus struck down with thunderbolts at the time of Exodus, and the name of the first Hyksos king of Egypt whose forces were invading the country at the moment of Exodus. If this be sheer conjecture about Buber's mind, let it pass as such. But let me nevertheless conjecture about a similar effect in the mind of David Daiches, for he, like Buber, dismisses any psychological approach to Moses. In the Epiloque to his learned and beautiful "coffee-table" book on the life of Moses, Daiches writes "For generations schoolboys have asked each other: 'Where was Moses when the light went out? ' and replied, 'Under the bed, looking for the matches. ' Thus he moved easily from the sublime to the ridiculous, a fate shared by many great names." [22] Perhaps Freud, master of the theory of wit, a biographer of Moses to whom Buber gave only one demeaning sentence and Daiches gave two, quoting Buber approvingly, would have noted this remark. Also, that the remark is in the last paragraph of the book. Why should schoolboys "for generations" (I remember well the joke) associate Moses with the light going out and why was he "under the bed looking for the matches"? Moses was the great leader of the times when darkness befell the world. Under the grim pall (pallet?) was it not he who was finding matches to make light? I play this game only to show that it is serious. Humor is an escape from fear. When legendary characters or historical characters or identifiable substitutes for them are involved, not alone Freud, but also anthropologists generally nowadays suspect that a clue to something that happened in history is contained in the joke. That Daiches should choose these words to be among his last of the book, which tackles an awesome subject, is nothing more, I suppose, than a little giggle of unconscious self-depreciation. It confesses that he has not solved the problem of Moses and has hardly dared to address it. {S : THE PRAGMATICS OF LEGEND} THE PRAGMATICS OF LEGEND Many scholars specialize in analyzing legends, but I do not know of a manual of their techniques. Whoever has not worked with legends is prone to believe that their analysis is a waste of time, baseless, or even fakery, like persons often believe who have not worked with the analysis of dreams, handwriting, or propaganda, or with the authentication of documents and paintings. On the other hand, some of those who have done so believe that rules of analysis are impossible to formulate and an informed intuition is the only resort. Nevertheless, I feel an obligation to announce what rules I try to follow, and to accept the critical consequences. Actually the rules are simple enough and can be practiced generally with fair success. We can take as a first rule what was to some degree done earlier in this chapter: Locate and dissolve the editorial screen imposed later upon a legend by well- wishing, malicious, power-seeking, or unbelieving translators, reporters, or scholars. An extra brief example is the word "Noga" translated "great light" from Isaiah, without regard for the fact that the word has another meaning "the planet Venus." Now I think that the reader will wish to analyze my own book here in this way. Read god-names as words performing specific functions. The fire referred to in the Pentateuch is of several varieties, and it is possible, although I have not studied the matter, that in a significantly high proportion of cases, the possessive "Yahweh" is appended to instances of fire other than ordinary combustion. The same may be true of natural phenomena other than fire, as for example, it was "Yahweh's wind," not simply a heavy wind, that brought down a massive flight of quail. It is ordinarily believed, in instances such as these, that the taking of the Lord's name is either to indicate that all things are caused by Yahweh, or else that any benefaction (or punishing act) is the work of Yahweh. That is, the grammar is to be read as, for instance, we might say that interference with radio reception is caused by the Van Allen belts, meaning a special kind of belt, not that Van Allen caused the belts. In the Books of Moses, the name Yahweh, when it occurs, can have six additional functions besides this first, which is a shorthand substitute for the cause of a variety of natural events or a confession of ignorance of such causes. "Yahweh" is a battle-cry; the Israelites attack or rally with the calling of a name, as in the old American song "Rally around the flag, boys!" Yahweh is a collective, abstract fiction of authority, objectified in the minds of community members, giving binding force and security to their transactions. Yahweh is who is obeyed when obedience is demanded. Yahweh is a label or designation of what is collectively sacred. A secular (slightly sacred) example is the label "Property of the U. S. Government." It joins hundreds and thousands of things, actions, persons in a commonalty. Yahweh is an attribution to a delusionary universal being of responsibility, accountability, or blame by people who wish to evade or avoid or are ignorant of such. "My son died by the will of Yahweh." Perhaps the most important function of the word is the dynamic for activating Moses and hence Israel. Yahweh is the inner necessity of Moses to objectify and reify his conscience and to spread his inner dialogue upon the official public record. "Yahweh says 'Do this' lest you die." Finally Yahweh is the inner necessity of other Israelites to objectify and reify their consciences in a privatized dialogue or collective sanctioned discourse, as limited by authority, sacred labels, and Moses' priority. They are discouraged save on rare occasions to place any hallucinations or delusions upon the public record or to discuss them in public. Different Israelites, as I have explained elsewhere, would have various Yahwehs. No two Yahwehs are the same. Yahweh is a somewhat different component in each Israelite's mind, character, and behavior. No doubt many of the people neither perceived Yahweh nor believed in other people's perceptions, such as Moses'. A corollary of this general rule about god-names is: If you accept an authoritative voice speaking for god, or talk with him yourself, then there is no point in your analyzing a legend; it is done for you, you are in a different kind of ball game. A third rule is to treat every legend as a confused and bothersome collective memory containing some truth and therapy for those telling it. Yahweh's wind blew a great flight of quail down around the Hebrews when they were starving for meat. Thus he answered their need upon hearing of it from Moses. But then, because they had complained of him, he caused many to die of eating the meat. We expect and know of the destruction of the biosphere occurring in catastrophe. Violent atmospheric turbulence with heavy radioactivity would both bring the feast and poison the feasters. A legend says that the wind that downed the quail was terrible enough to destroy the whole world. Tornados, it is now demonstrable, have plucked chickens [23] . The bird was probably coturnix coturnix, the common quail of Europe, Asia and Africa and the only migratory gallinaceous bird. If long ages have said so, respect a legend's claim to history. Persistent discussions of infanticide or cannibalism under extreme conditions merit belief. More broadly the intense conviction that the Exodus happened is some proof of it. But what of the intense conviction of Yahweh? The belief that Yahweh happened is true in relation to all the qualities that make him an historical god, and make many other divinities also "historical gods." He is a unique god, and says so himself, therefore historical, with a highly touted, historical mission as well. Do not be arrogant about how scientific our age is, and about how much is known today that used to be unknown. One thinks of perfumes, mummification, herbal medicine, etc. The evidence of this book shows that, partly because of hyper-electrical activity in nature, Moses' generation knew more about electrostatics than did the modern world until perhaps 1850. I speak not alone of natural history but in some cases of pure science and applied science. Where not lapsing into oblivion, a great deal of material, and the literary evidence of it, has been destroyed. It is hard to believe that the many thorough and even brilliant scholars who have dug and delved into the Old Testament setting could otherwise have believed that the wandering and desolated peoples were ignorant primitives. But they have been seduced into following the excursions of anthropologists into primitive cultures. Robert Temple has recently shown how advanced is some astronomical knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Mali; they have known since time immemorial of the invisible dwarf white star, Sirius B, and it is important to them. Obviously they have held onto sound remnants of a lost scientific corpus [24] . Harken, also, to new scientific knowledge that may require old analyses of legends to be revised. Radioactivity was unknown or quite misunderstood until recently. The possibility of explosive meteoric "chemical factories" was ignored until recently and hence the manufacture of great quantities of manna in the atmosphere by natural means was not considered. Another area of recent scientific progress has been psychiatry. Even a century ago there did not exist the systematic, empirically tested categories of mental aberrations such as we here apply to Moses. Or, in the field of geography, it has been established that three large rivers once flowed west to east across the whole width of Arabia, and that there was a great lake, now dead, in Northern Arabia, and that, too, immense areas of blasting and burning are discoverable [25] . Bear in mind that, within broad limits of individuality and broad limits of culture, human nature and behavior do not change. People hallucinate today and hallucinated then, under similar conditions. By torture, starvation, a volcanic eruption, and fear, a great many people are compelled to hallucinate. "Angels" may be hallucinations but sometimes only in the limited sense of reifying incredible natural operations and events occurring in the atmosphere. Neither believe nor disbelieve an event on the first reading of it. This rule applies to very many cases in the present work. The problem arises mostly, or course, in relation to disbelief, regarding the quail, the manna, the rod of Moses, etc. I first disbelieved the story of over three million souls joining the Exodus. Continually nagging the passages, I finally theorized that many people could have left Goshen, for various reasons, and only a small fraction accomplished the Exodus. Judge a possible truth both by itself and by its context. The story of Miriam's rebellion against Moses and her punishment by leprosy is rendered believable in the context of many cases of leprosy that do not conform to medical definition today. Knowing what the Inner Sanctum contained and the Meaning of the ominous cloud allows one to deem the story credible. Transform the words of a legend to behavior. Words too are a form of behavior. Visualize them as real operations. Just out of Egypt, Moses holds up his rod all the long dark day in battle with the Amalekites, but needs to be propped upon a stone and helped by Aaron and Hur. Why doesn't Yahweh hold it up or give Moses the strength? The "self-reliance" imposed upon Moses lends an air of factuality; further inquiry leads me to regard the story as true. The darkness makes light a heavy morale factor. Translate the legend into a story-form and a language that you read in the newspapers or watch in films or use in your ordinary work and days. I could not understand Pharaoh's actions until I displaced him into the setting of a contemporary head of state, interposed all I had come to know about the goings-on in, say, the U. S. Presidency, and then carried them back again to the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt. Accept the possibility that two legends may be talking about the same event in a different way. Did Moses really spend two forty day-night periods on Mount Sinai, or was there so much material coming out of one episode that it was made into two? Nothing vital is at stake in either case. The first prolonged period has to stand, in order to make the Golden Calf Revolt and other matters plausible. The second does not. It may have been a brief return following the suppression of the revolt for prayer, supplication, and redemption of the wicked people, whereupon the halo and the message. It would also let people test themselves in Moses' absence and redeem themselves by passing the "faith and patience test." Another case, already discussed, is that of the Greek Phaeton and Typhon legends, both evidently dealing with the cometary events of the Exodus. Ask what elements are missing from the legend that should be there, and why so? By any ordinary standards, twelve springs of water are insufficient to draw water for 20,000, much less two million people. But so the Bible says, a few days out of Egypt, at Elim, this happened [26] . Until 1930, Tehran, Iran, with 200,000 people gathered all of its water supply from twelve wells above the town which discharged 800 liters (212 gallons) per second [27] . What is available now at Elim is not binding upon our judgement. The behavior of giant bodies of water in catastrophes is an encyclopaedia of the amazing; the Mississippi River reversed itself for several hours in the New Madrid (U. S. A., Missouri) earthquakes of 1811-2 [28] . A single verse on the volume of flow of the springs would have helped, but then who would accept the Bible generally and doubt this fact? Grant the legend a generous quota of exaggerations, time lapses, and contradictions. I have addressed the problem of the numbers in the Exodus in this spirit. The problem of the great ages of Moses and others by modern standards continues to baffle one. One possibility is some electrical and/ or atmospheric effect upon life duration. Another possibility is the calculation of ages by a different calendar, perhaps one of 260 days such as obtained in earliest times among the Mayans and other Meso-Americans and persisted as a sacred calendar after they knew and practiced a contemporary calendar. Then at 120 years of age, Moses would have lived 31,200 days. Measured on the year base of 365 days, he would be 85 years old. I prefer this solution. There is much rhetorical exaggeration in the Bible, which is in part a panegyric for the Jews. Still I doubt whether the promise of Yahweh to multiply his chosen people to the number of stars and sands of the seashore exceeds in optimism the promises contained in the typical annual State of the Union Address of the President to the American people. Nor does it exceed the optimism with which the President views the heights achieved in the American standard of living, inviting now a comparison, too, with Moses' haranguing the Jews on their fine diet of quail (poisoned) and manna bread (wormy). Nor should one forego comparison between an American speaker describing the history of the U. S. A. on the Fourth of July and Moses in Deuteronomy, reciting the history of Israel since the Exodus. Another rule is to seek particular truths in a legend which is false as a whole, and seek truth as a whole in a legend which contains false particulars. Thus, by rule number two of this list, we do not see a real Yahweh addressing Moses in the episode of the Burning bush. But the electrical environment and effects, and the reactions of Moses' character are such as to make the event believable and significant. In converse, the Plagues of Egypt are convincing as a whole set of interconnected events that should not be dismissed because of perplexities in connection with the death of the Egyptian first-born, and because of repeated statements that the Hebrews in Goshen were exempted from them. Wishful thinking usually exaggerates the pains of one's antagonists and would create out of a quantitative difference between the sufferings of Goshen and Memphis a qualitative difference, An explanation of all events should be attempted, within the limits of time and space available. It is not only irritating, but also and more importantly unscientific, to interpret only those events for which plausible explanations are available, while avoiding others more obscure and contradictory. One should not explain manna without conjecture upon the strange dew that fell with it. Further, a Bible critic cannot be both an historian and a faithful believer. He cannot pick and choose, preserving his reputation as now one and then again the other. One may not say, as has Daiches, that normal natural conditions prevailed at Sinai during the handing down of the Ten Commandments, and that perhaps "the Kenites, who were desert smiths and would therefore carry fire about with them and whom the biblical story associates closely with Moses, were able to produce smoke and fire which came to be looked on and remembered as some kind of divine sign." [29] For then, after this incredible reductionism, he blandly finishes his book on Moses without twanging the nerves of even a moderate believer by tucking in a few 'words where he "concludes" that it would be "too crude" to say that Moses thought that he might get people to obey him by getting them to believe in Yahweh [30] ." Too crude , but he will let it slip off his tongue anyhow. The most significant actions are denied to Yahweh, but he will not address the question of whether Yahweh exists only through Moses or even whether Moses manipulates Yahweh. Sigmund Freud's paraphernalia of psychiatry is simply abandoned when he writes about Moses as a person. Velikovsky evades arguments that may antagonize, whether nationalistically or religiously, Jews or fundamentalist Christians. Eliade, while including all other religions within his generalizations of historical cyclism, finds that Christianity is donated a particular linear course of history, leaving us with the uneasy question whether he is postulating an indefinitely long, perhaps eternal, course for Christianity; at any rate, it is made an exception to various generalizations by this method. It is helpful to check out the common psychological mechanisms in legends to see how they are operative: wishful thinking (Freud's omnipotence of thought and James' will to believe); the fear of loss of control of the self and the world; hierocentrism, ethnocentrism, and self-centrism; reification of nature and objects; and the projection of feelings of guilt, blame and punishment onto the legendary characters and actions. Whose wish for what control over what fear is evident in what animated beings, and in the plot of their behavior? Nor are the rules of historiographical criticism to be overlooked. One needs to look for signs of repeated confirmations of an event, of the implied presences of eyewitnesses, and even of expert witnesses, and of chronological sequences making logical sense. The Bible is heavily historical in its approach to events; the chains of interconnections among events are many and strong. Unlike practically all legendary material, it carries details of chronology. With the later help of Christians and Moslems, the Jews were able to assert the authenticity of the Old Testament and benefit from a general approbation of its contents. The pagan world was not so benevolent, lacking the same spiritual investment, whereupon it occurs to us to check whether pagan sources provide some contrary renditions of our subject and supply an alternative theory. We find in the negative. The opinions of the pagan writers of the Hellenistic and early Christian periods about Moses and the Jews are generally stereotyped. Almost none are in depth, whether friendly or unfriendly. On the basis of John Gager's research [31] , the pagan stereotype can be depicted in an understandable form: Moses was an Egyptian, possibly a Heliopolitan scientist, said Apion; Moses led "numerous reasonable men" out of Egypt (Strabo). Moses and Yahweh, his god, brought plagues upon Egypt. The plagues "disfigured bodies", said Tacitus (radiation diseases?) The Jews were carriers of the plagues. They were expelled because they were lepers and forever resented their treatment. They were iconoclasts and destroyed all gods wherever they went; they were atheists, in this sense. The Jews were aloof, aversive to contacts with other peoples, suspicious and misanthropic. "Having been appointed leader of the exiles, he [Moses] secretly took the holy objects of the Egyptians. In trying to recover these objects with force, the Egyptians were forced by storms to return home" (Pompeius Trogus, 1st century A. D.). It is remarkable that this caricature, assembled from numerous fragments, can be applied to the scenario of the book here. Every element in it, no matter how distorted, can be associated with corresponding realities of Moses and the Exodus. Like an elaborate rumor, it has a certain probative value, in that its parts can be traced to reality, while it contains no fundamental contradictions of it. However, without full historical understanding, the stereotype leads directly down the road to anti-semitism. It is useful also to apply certain rules about rumormongering to legendary materials directly. This is to disassemble artificial conglomerations and reveal the underlying reality. In solving for the original event, one recognizes a heavy simplification occurring initially over time: single causes eject multiple causality; a leader replaces a group of leaders; one reason is given for a complex of reasons. The simplifying process lends an air of stupidity to legends; however, it is a way of buying temporal endurance at the cost of realism. There is also an invariable stereotyping, such as we have found in historiography as well. Again the Bible as legend veers towards history because of its frequent insistence upon the uniqueness of events and personalities. Aaron is, like Moses, authentic psychologically and yet not stereotyped. Even Miriam is not, though less is said of her. Joshua, of whom almost no characterization is given, can be put together into a convincing personage. Events, too. When it is said of the plague of frogs that the animals came onto the beds and into the ovens, this actually happens in local situations. And when there comes the "very heavy hail such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation," [32] the superlative is precise amid a context of precision, and is validated by this, and within the natural realm of events, and within the context of the total set of disasters. We know what pride the ancient Egyptians possessed in their knowledge of their own history; Plato tells of how Solon of Athens was lectured by the Egyptian seers on this point. The usage is stereotyped; the validity of the fact conveyed is not. One watches, too, on all sides for the inevitable distortions that accompany the memory of events, bearing in mind, when observing the distortions, the inevitable hints of their cause which they contain. The repeated references to the Egyptian people as complaisant in lending and giving their valuables to the departing Hebrews hardly succeed in covering up the spontaneous and systematic looting that occurred in the disorganized and chaotic situation. The need to preserve for racist Yahweh a pure race of his chosen people is a continual source of distortion in the verses dealing with the character and conduct of the Hebrews in Egypt and their mingling and merging with tribes during the wanderings and in the Promised Land. There is, too, as with rumor-mongering generally, a vulgarization in the account of events. What Moses does is reduced typically to the level of understanding and gullibility of the common man (though much of this may be the work of the priests and editors.) Legend lives by speaking to the common denominator of people; they must hear it, like it, be moved by it, and demand that it be passed on for generations without end. History reduced to miracles is the best insurance that it will live, somehow, for a long time. The Torah strives mightily to preserve history in the face of the competitive temptations and advantages of legend. Finally, I should like to mention the pitfalls of a simplistic anthropological approach to the Old Testament, a matter that has arisen already on occasion in the chapters of this book. German scholars, following James Fraser, were especially impressed by the possibilities of reducing the peculiarities of the Biblical text to the commonality of comparative primitive cultural anthropology. The bedouin primitivist school of Old Testament interpretation is well expressed in America by Julian Morgenstern who in 1929 wrote of the origins of the ark and continued in 1945 with studies of the ark, ephod, and tent [33] . Briefly summarized, he finds numerous Arab and pre-Arab mobile boxed and tented litters, carrying god images and sacred stones (or bethyls), usually on camels. These performed ark-like functions of pointing out routes, rallying tribesmen in battle, and transporting and exhibiting the deity. He concludes that the Ark of the Covenant was of this ilk and not much more - even less, since it would not, at least later on, have carried the image of Yahweh. Further, he claims that to the Ephraimites' tribe belonged the first ark, which then diffused among the confederation. Against this line of arguments two major thrusts can be directed. One, represented by Roland de Vaux, is historical. The Ark and the Tent, says this authority, were present and together from the very beginning of the wanderings [34] . Lacking here the justification and space for an extended comparative analysis of the two propositions, of which I favor that of de Vaux, I can move to a second mode of rebuttal, which is logical and provides at the least a stalemate. In the history of artifacts and institutions, there frequently occurs that these possibilities exist: that the historical actuality, form, and function of the central concept evolves, stagnates, or devolves. Thus "an ark" at any point of time, say between 2000 B. C. and 2000 A. D., may exist, but its form and functions may be significantly different. One might find among the bedouins of North Africa, following World War II, artillery shell cases of 105 mm. caliber. Judging by their form and function, carrying nuts or valuables on camels, they are of the species of mobile storage jars. In a brief prior period they carried high explosives and were associated with a complex propelling machine and military organization. They have devolved, or evolved, depending on the "ideal" function assigned them. This is an extreme example of what occurs with all artifacts and institutions over time. Another example is to be found in the Ark of the Torah, the standard chest that contains the Law in Jewish temples. Its design was traced by Joseph Jacobs. Its original was clearly a Roman desk constructed to hold scrolls [35] . Whatever arks and ephods and tenting may have been before and since the Ark of the Covenant and Tabernacle, and even elsewhere at the same time, the problem of the particular Ark of Moses remains. Logically not only can it be all that we said it is (and for our purposes the Biblical description is as justifiable as any other design), but also it is to be expected that the Ark, like all inventions, was built upon prior artifacts and institutions and was part of the inheritance of subsequent peoples who changed its form and function, keeping its "spiritual" functions, say, and depressing its physical construction, and forgetting (partly because of changed meteorological and social circumstances) its illuminating divine occupancy. If thus, historically and logically, we can substantiate our position respecting the actuality and functions of the ark, we may proceed to a third point, a counter-allegation. This is directed against bedouin primitivist thinking in general, which is a learned and potent kind of reductionism of the Bible. Once the catastrophic setting of Exodus is dismissed as exaggeration and falsehood, and most that we know of Moses is regarded as merely a fanciful hero's tale, then the door is opened wide to a new history of the Jews as an escaped slave remnant finding haven among an undisturbed nomadic tribe, and, in gratitude or by necessity, adopting their local volcano-god. But once the natural conditions of Exodus and the character of Moses and his cohorts are established, there can be assigned to bedouin primitivism only the limited role that I have already granted it in this book. {S : Notes (Appendix)} Notes (Appendix) 1. I examine the Homeric origins in a 1968 manuscript on the Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, yet unpublished, but Velikovsky, in part II of W. in C. presents the original case. 2. Cassuto, 2. 3. Ibid., 27-8, et passim. 4. Num. 33: 1-49. 5. "Biblical Literature," 2 EB 882. 6. Winnett, op. cit. 7. Ibid., p. 132. 8. 1969, p. 476. 9. Tr. Israel Abrahams (1959), Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 26-7. 10. 69 Zeitschrift fur Alttestament. Wiss. (1957), 84-103 and 70 ZAW (1958), 48-59. 11. Op. cit. 12. This approach is also used by A. G. Galanopoulos and E. Bacon, Atlantis, Bobbs-Merril Co.: Indianapolis, 1969, 192-9. 13. Hort, p. 59. 14. 66. 15. 67-8. 16. 69-73. 17. 144-5. 18. 77. 19. 74. 20. 111. 21. 79. 22. 256. 23. J. G. Galway and J. T. Schaefer, "Fowl Play," 32 Weatherwise (1979) 116-8. 24. The Sirius Mystery. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976. 25. Von Fange, 131. 26. Ex. 15: 27. 27. 17 EB 519. 28. James Perrick, Jr., The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812, (1976) 29. Daiches, 90. 30. Ibid., 237. 31. Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972. 32. Ex. 10: 24. 33. The Ark, the Ephod, and the "Tent of Meeting," Cincinnati: Hebrew Union CP, 1945. 34. The Bible and the Ancient Near East, New York: Doubleday, 1967, ch. 8, 136-51. 35. "Earliest Representation of the Ark of the Law," 14 JQR (1902), 737-9. End of God's Fire {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S : A Science of Gods Old and New } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION A Science of Gods Old and New by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, New Jersey Notes on the printed version of this book Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data de Grazia, Alfred, 1919 - The Divine Succession: A Science of God Old and New Includes Index 1. Theology 2. History of Religion 3. Human Behavior ISBN: 0-940-268-05-1 Copyright @1983 by Alfred de Grazia Printed in the U.S.A. Limited First Edition Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213 Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A. The cover is a composition based upon Kandinsky's Circles (1934) and two reconstructed friezes of the Temple of Zeus of Olympia. The text was set on Compugraphic machines in 10 pt. Paladium type by Get Set, Inc. typesetters, Lambertville, N.J. and the cover was made by Carol Stoddard. Printing and binding are by Multiprint Company, New York City. to Earl S. Johnson melior magister myriadis {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION: THE DEVINE SUCCESSION A Science of Gods Old and New by Alfred De Grazia TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE-PAGE PART I. THEOMACHY 01. The Genesis of Religion 02. The Succession of Gods 03. Knowing the Gods 04. The Heavenly Host 05. Legends and Scripture 06. Ritual and Sacrifice 07. Man's Divine Mirror 08. Indispensable Gods PART II. THEOTROPY 09. Sacral Vs Secular Man 10. Ethics and the Supernatural 11. Religious Elements in Science 12. New Proofs of God 13. Catechism CONCLUSION: The Divine and Human A Note on Sources {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION: THE DEVINE SUCCESSION A Science of Gods Old and New by Alfred de Grazia FOREWORD Plato could already say in ancient times "that when men first had thoughts about the gods, with regard to the way they came into being, their characters, and the kind of activities in which they engaged, what they said about these things was not an acceptable account of them or what well regulated men would approve.." (Epinomis) We should have to agree and add that the subsequent 2500 years have managed, also, to obscure the origins, characters and deeds of the gods. Many philosophers have quit concerning themselves with religion, believing that the road to wisdom is paved with logical forms. I doubt, however, that they can evade St. Thomas Aquinas' medieval injunction, to wit, "The name of being wise is reserved to him alone, whose consideration is about the end of the universe, which end is also the beginning of the universe." (Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 1) In this book we take up the history of religion and consider the meaning of the universe. From the first, humanity had to be religious. It is still so. Further, it will be religious so long as it will exist. Religion is ultimately hope, and humans live on hope. So goes, in other words, much of my story. But to my surprise, I have discovered that there is really something to hope for. The two parts of my book, going from theomachy to theotropy, pursue a way from despair to new hope. At all times every aspect of the human mind and behavior has been religiously affected. No bit of culture escapes religious relevance or effects. I mean this literally. Such is the cultural dimension of religion, which will be explained. That religion penetrates the fullness of history and culture licenses us to draw upon any and all human settings for illustration and proof. Every person in every setting, no matter how secular, merits attention as religious man. No trick is intended, no cunning definition of religion. Religion for us here is simply a belief in the existence of a metaphysical order, together with the practices relating to it. The means that I employ to select, analyze, and report religious material will be recognized and approved by aficionados of scientific method. Not that the scientific method is used throughout; but, when I move off the frame of positivistic, empirical science, I execute the movement self consciously, so that an ordinary reader, a scientist, or a philosopher of science will be alerted and recognize in the procedure a defined and denoted mode of thought. Once again, no trick in intended; all of my cards are on the table. What will follow, then is a narration in two parts and three themes. These themes are: religion as delusion; religion as politics; and religion as truth. Although treated vaguely in this order, they are also intermingled throughout. Under the topic of religion as delusion are carried the most important components of human nature and the most important historical transactions. We shall name and discuss these. Psychology, anthropology, and history are the conventional disciplines most heavily brought into play. Under the topic of religion as politics, we survey the religious aspects of collective behavior, showing religion again to be the most important part of social behavior, with the disciplines of sociology, politics, and philosophy most sharply involved. Science can explain every aspect of religion, but paradoxically, it is religion in the end that determines the metes and bounds of science. Under the topic of religion as truth, we move into metaphysics. All that historical man has attempted to achieve with religion is adequately describable by the scientific method. Most of it is also disposed of as anthropological material, not true religion. The residuum of true religion, which is also describable by scientific method, is not only considerable but also exists in its own right, functionally and eternally. This body of religion does not logically or essentially engage in controversy with science, nor with politics. Religion is an autonomous human activity, a fact of existence, like a rock or a sexual discharge. It may be useful, but its utility is not its justification nor even ordinarily expected of it. We call this activity "divine," meaning simply a person acting truly religiously. Appreciating the immediate challenge that will arise at any claim to the word "truth," we hasten to ask for a postponement of its trial until more can be said about "truthful" activity . Few will object if, in the meanwhile, we define truth as an open question of religion; one need not fear being forced to his knees. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 1: } {T THE GENESIS OF RELIGION} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE THE GENESIS OF RELIGION To the fresh, mad eye of primeval man, the world was full of gods. The human mind worked so as immediately to create religion. It does so now and it did so at its beginning. This is a function common to all humans everywhere, at all times, intrinsic, inherited, irresistible, Religion is then naturally ecumenical; any two people anywhere can agree in general on what it is that they are talking about. The mechanism is simple. The thousands of books, the infinite discussion over millions of fires, the pomp of parades, the grandeur of cathedrals, and the hysterical wars and killings about religion - all of this intimidates inquiry. Yet all of this, as we shall see, descends from the operation of the mechanism as if a holocaust would flare from a flint striking stone. The human mind, as soon as it starts working, builds a multiple identity, a self-awareness. In the origins of the race, this trait is so pronounced as to set the creature apart from other forms of life. Self-awareness is the psychological manifestation of a physiology of the central nervous system, especially the cerebral cortex, which presents a person with the feeling of being at least two persons. It is like the bother of two eyes that cannot focus well upon a single object, but it is of course enormously more ramified and important. Since the body is one alone, it is "intended" for one mind, one spring of action, a single commanding organ. Never mind that in some remotely related animals two brain centers occur, or, for that matter, that in man himself, there are such "lower" brain centers that have escaped the parturition which we speak about here as self-awareness. A person has the instinctive appreciation of and a nearly total apparatus for realization of unitary conduct. But this preparedness for the life of an ordinary mammal is rudely challenged by the sense of an inner conflict of selves, which can 'change one's mind' and redirect one's energies at any time, whit seemingly little possibility of control. It delays by microseconds the instinctive response that the mammalian physiology and neurology crave. The result of the perceived conflict, that "I am I, but who am I that says 'I am I'" is fear. We can call this fear existential because it is the absolute quality of human existence. The fear is indistinguishable physiologically from the anatomy and process of mammalian fear that arises out of non-existential causes; such would be the fear of a blow or of a lightning stroke. If it is to be distinguished at all from animal fear, existential fear has to be discovered by statistical means, by logical reasoning, by experiment, by psychiatric theory. We assume, hoping to be more empirical later on, that existential fear is a "free-floating" fear overload that characterizes the human and is attributable to the "fear of oneselves" associated with self-awareness. This state of affairs called "self-awareness" is instinctively undesirable. Its advantages are ambiguous. It interferes with peace of mind; it blocks the instinctive action of the beast; it introduces unwanted self-consultation concerning decisions and evaluation of the effects of action. It introduces continuous distrust of the self. It requires, as will be amply discussed, an endless stream of devices and decisions, all basically intended to adjust the elements of the self to each other, some of them taking place within the bodily frame, others occurring in interpretations of and controls upon the outer world of other people and nature. Obvious schemes occur to the human person. One is to stamp out the other selves, to produce a granite-like person unbothered by internal inquiries. Another is to kick out the other selves like unwanted children or undesirable tenants. The first method is workable only up to certain point; many subconscious activities occur and leak out onto external objects, no matter how impressive the monolith. The second method, expulsion of internal conflicts, creates the human's world, but is not effective as intended, either. A lady who has a bad dream, and then doubles her contribution to a church collection, may successfully lower her level of anxiety, but is likely to receive more cordial solicitations from her church, which, if refused, may give her more bad dreams. A boy who perceives a ghost under his bed will in time flesh out the ghost with various traits, motives, and activities. Displacements of anxieties, that is, are boomerangs which, no matter how far flung, unerringly return. Since the struggle of the selves is essentially psychological, it can be called supernatural. Then it is even more proper to call the projection and displacements of the self supernatural. To become more focused upon religion, it should be said that there is absolutely no resistance of the part of the human to displacing his internal world, in effect, living his life - upon super-sensory or ultra-sensory phenomena. It ill behooves the source to deny its essence in the world outside. At the same time, the operation of tying a world of external supernatural phenomena to the world of internal supernatural phenomena is invariably expressed in ritual practices, that is, repeated related performances. The lady and the boy in the instances above establish practices. The ramifications of practice are limited both by the environmental forces governing practices and by the tendency to reiterate actions. From action to practice to habit to obsession goes the continuum, a rating scale on which, given the object in the world to which people relate, the same people can be graded, like churchgoers from once-in- a-great-while to those who would rather die than miss a church service. Paul Radin has properly pointed out "that all people are spontaneously religious at crises, that the markedly religious people are spontaneously religious on numerous other occasions as well, and that the intermittently and indifferently religious are secondarily religious on occasions not connected with crises at all." "Fear made the first gods of the world," wrote the Roman Statius (c. 45 to 96 A. D.). In the long history of religion it is the only theory to come close to the truth. And man, in return, is theophobic, full of dread of god. The first gods were also the first humans, a scheme of delusions to map and control the immense, live universe. Everything seemed capable of turning into a god; hence gods were in everything (as the early philosopher Thales conjectured). They controlled everything, it appeared, but were unaccountable and did both the expected and the unexpected. The simple mechanism of religion is then self-awareness, fear of the self, fears or anxieties displaced upon supernatural or tangible appearances of the world, and the development of practices to control and maintain transactions with the supernatural appearances. The drive to control oneself (oneselves, we should say) is paramount and moves man to wherever his rears alight. Again, Radin's anthropological surmise is acceptable: "man was in a state of fear, physically, economically, and psychically. Man thus postulated the supernatural in order primarily to validate his workaday reality." His aim was "the canalization of his fears and feelings and the validation of his compensation dreams." The judgment of what is supernatural and what is tangible may bother intellectuals and theologians but has never been much of a problem to the ordinary person or priest. The logic of the multitude is foolproof: the supernatural is everywhere and is incorporated in tangible things. We shall come to understand science better when we appreciate the futility, yet inevitability, of its struggles to squeeze the supernatural out of the rocks and out of the mind. It is trying to make an animal out of man, just as the pesky theologians say, that is, trying to destroy all outward manifestations of the uniquely human person, if not he mind itself. Mircea Eliade has reported will the state of mind of the "religious man" through the ages.( He uses the term as, for instance, H. D. Lasswell uses the term "political man," as the "pure" or obsessed type of actor in history.) Where we employ the term "supernatural," Eliade uses the term "sacred." "For religious man," he writes, "the world always presents a supernatural valence, that is, it reveals a modality of the sacred." Every bit of the cosmos has its sacrality. "In a distant past" (but why not include today?) "all of man's organs and physiological experiences, as well as all his acts, had a religious meaning," "Homo religiosus always believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real." "For religious man, nature is never only 'natural'; it is always fraught with a religious value." Finally, "the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being... Religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power. This rounds out an accord with our ides of religious genesis. Man naturally sees the world supernaturally. Reality is supernatural. His heart and soul go into tying this reality to himself, to gain its powers. We should say that all of this grandiose ambition is to stabilize his mind, to let him live unanxiously, unfearfully, to be at peace with himself." How good it is to be assured of this, too, as the Hebrew Elohim assures man, that he shall "fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth," and furthermore has given him "every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit..." Elohim is thinking and working like any ideal reasonable man would think and work. All is divinely created, by hard labor. All is sacred, therefore. Yet, granted that humans are bent upon creating the supernatural and tying it into themselves, why should they dispose of the credit to gods? Why should they not he frankly proud of the world that they create and control, whether it be supernatural of tangible? First there is the fearful fact that they do not control it. Second there is the fear that disregards fact. They fear that they may not control anything; man is born with an inferiority complex from not controlling himself. Third, there is the appearance of purposeful control of the world by non-humans, an appearance, one may insist, that has both invisible and perceptible substantiation. Take up first the fearful fact that man does not control himself, or the world. Hence religion arises to drug mankind, according to Karl Marx: "religion is the moan of the oppressed creature, the heart of heartless world, the sense of senseless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Perhaps the most powerful suppressant of religion is the promise of science to give one such controls. "Serious" scientists do not pretend to such abilities or make such promises. On the other hand, they at least feel relieved when other "non-responsible" people, like science fiction writers or humanists or philosophers, make such claims in their name. "We are approaching the time when we will be able to control..." - and every human anxiety has its assurance - "our anxieties," "climate," "earthquakes," "approaching comets," "plague," "birth defects," "war," "governments," and ultimately "the challenge of death itself." This wealth of promises emerges from the instruments and procedures of scientific method, a process finding its way only through provably material entities. For those who doubt the fulfillment of these promises, the outlooks of cynicism, stoicism, and pessimism - or, alternatively, religion - are available. A society dominated by the scientific outlook will, however, endeavor to persuade many of these of its promises, and for that will take over all of the trappings of propaganda and organized pressures developed over the ages by religions, and, later, political systems. The secular society is then in being. However, there is still the fear that disregards fact. There is a factual element in anxiety, but additionally the aforementioned existential element. It is highly probable that no change in the human condition can erase this anxiety except the eradication of the human in man. Self-awareness can be detrained, stunned and doped, but never with complete success and never over a whole population for very long. If it could be done, it would long ago have been accomplished. We may suppose that most cultures, in one way or another, have tried to do so, with no lasting effect. Man has achieved every imaginably bad society except one of lasting soullessness. But fear alone might bring forth the supernatural, and the ways of dealing with it, without gods, unless some inherent part of religious mechanism demanded them, For this we require both an internal and external cause. The divine being must be both in us and in nature. The internal sequence may be suggested. If it is the plural self that disturbs our peace of mind, then the infinitely varied displacements of this self that are employed to ease the fears engendered by the civil strife of the ego are likely often to emanate as living forms. That is, the world created by the human mind is animated. The world is alive. It is an absurd but common notion, fostered unfortunately by scientists who are disciplined observers trained precisely to observe objects as "stripped-down," that the human neatly undresses his thoughts of their libido before placing them upon the world. To the contrary, the human is naturally surprised, like the child bumping his head on a table, when whatever he encounters turns out to be unalive according to the battery of tests that his mind applies consequent to the encounter. "Everything is alive until proven dead" is the natural psychic principle to go along with "Everything is sacred, unless demonstrated to be secular." To say then that a natural force has to be animated into a god by some separate superstition which the observer must be trained to apply is incorrect. Depending upon its impact, the force is a god or a manifestation thereof. It is historically, as well as psychologically, incorrect to think that humans invented gods as a kind of convenience to collect their thoughts and then gave them names. It is more likely that gods were observed and in the very process of perception named by ejaculations (so beginning human speech), and then, following natural observation, the world was ordered in consonance with the gods. As Hock well says about the early gods of Greece "... these gods were not felt by the Greeks to have been manufactured or invented as the 'Personification' implies; they were discovered and recognized, precisely as the modern scientist discovers and recognizes the effects of something that he calls 'electricity. '" Furthermore, the apparitions of nature are anthropomorphized insofar as they seem purposeful and humanlike. The human, responding to a vast range of stimuli in time and space, entranced by the sky as well as the abyss, infiltrating his spirit into this vast world, is both psychologically and materially affected by them. It is practically impossible, for any length of time, to take the apparitions of the world impersonally. There is "every reason" to regard the fall of a meteor as a purposeful intervention in one's life. It moves through the air like a flaming lance, sword, chariot, or torch held high. It is faster than a bird. It screams like a tiger. It strikes with the might of ten thousand men. As scientists say, "Everything must have a cause." Well, here the cause is a superhuman thunderbolter. From effects, one reasons to causes. If especially there are periods of time when great effects are common and men are shaken by them, the gods are implied, even visualized, as when a comet resembles different human figures and organs. Men measure the effect carefully, as the ancient Etruscans every spot struck by lightning, to see in the measure of a divine intervention the intent of the god. In summation, the age becomes confirmed as religious. The more intense, pervasive, and frequent the experiences, the more religious the age becomes. It is as certain as any other proposition of science, that, were an asteroid or comet of modest size to strike the globe, astronomy would promptly become astrology, meteorology divination, biology creationist, politics catastrophic, and theology revivalist. Evidence for this statement is strewn among all writings on the effects upon humans of close-in and crashing celestial bodies. This divinity, perhaps the same, perhaps another, is known not only by celestial or other natural apparitions; it is also manifested in ways that will be demonstrated in chapter 3. The god is as prompt to appear as religion itself, inevitable in the primeval mind, as culture, too, is prompt to appear and as fast as it is instrumented, married into, if not born of, the sacred. We speak thus, of a hologenesis of homo sapiens, culture, religion, and gods. Logically, the evolutionary theory of a slow final development of homo is gone; so is the theory of cultural evolution, of the evolution of religions, and of the progressive evolution of a concept of god. All of these things are today very much perceived, afforded and functioning as they did in the first centuries of humankind. The science that those of us who write books so highly esteem represents a sharp break with the history of mankind, but scarcely less a break with the human thought and behavior of today. We can, and shall, make much of it, but should remember all the while that the proportion of science to religion in human behavior is like the ratio of the depth of the surface crust of the Earth to the radius of the whole globe, one to four hundred. And as the thickness of the crust varies beneath oceans and continents, so does the depth of penetration of the scientific method vary in different cultures and minds. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE SUCCESSION OF GODS} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO THE SUCCESSION OF GODS The first god who was, remains in the latest god who is. The gods have been of the same descent, always, everywhere. I mean this not in the sense of many theologians, that, "Yes, God has been eternally Himself but we have gradually learned more about His nature," nor in the sense of many sectarians that, "Yes, people have forever worshiped false gods but gradually we are coming to see my God," but rather I mean it to say that the gods were discovered once, in the earliest times, and that there had been a direct descent of the same divinities down to the present. By "discovered" is meant that the first humans perceived gods in the world; they perceived the supernatural, and they took immediate steps to control it. Such statements may provoke panic in various intellectual quarters, and we wonder whether to arrest the panic or let the room be cleared. Much of out religious thinking depends upon refusing or denying the statements. Even some hard-boiled anthropologists meekly purchase meliorism in religious history, part of the famous idea of evolutionary progress, some such belief as that by indistinguishable degrees, dull-witted savages become plant-worshipers, and these grow into deists, who later become monotheists and finally begin to be secularists - and anthropologists. Even those who do not believe in gods are quite sure that they are competent to distinguish good gods from bad ones. Yet the history of religion permits the statement. Leroi-Gourhan believes that the Upper Paleolithic hunters were probably religious. I have supported this view in Chaos and Creation with illustrations of a probable mating of Heaven as a bison and Earth in the form of a woman. Much earlier practices respecting burials and the mounting of bear skull accord to Neanderthal man also basic religious ideas. Leroi-Gourhan (in Religions de la Prehistoire) produces a scenario of a large primordial religion from an "insignificant" incised tablet. What is revealed by relics must be only a token of full-scale rites of religion. A recent Soviet excavation finds religious incisions on animal skulls hundreds of thousands of years ago; for that matter, Pietro Gaietto attributes sculptures to "hominids" of 1.5 million years of age; but, as I have argued in other works, the measurement of time is a sorry state of disrepair. In Homo Schizo I, incidental to establishing the hologenesis of culture, a connection of symbols and the supernatural is made. In my general attempt there and elsewhere to shorten drastically the time of homo sapiens and to identify to erase the need to account for a long period of stupid human development prior to a mutation, or natural selection, or social invention that would initiate religion, along with man. Further, I am in accord with the claim of anthropologists Washburn and Moore, that mankind could have originated only once. It seems to me that humanity is so distinctive in its self-awareness and symbolism, and that these traits are so suffusive over the scope of human behavior, that, once human in these regards, thence human in all regards. Paul Radin (Primitive Religion) agues against the belief, represented especially by Andrew Lang, Pinard de la Boullaye, and others, that the primordial religion contained a belief in a Supreme God or High God. Rather, "wherever a Supreme Deity or a High God... exists it is the belief either of a few individuals or of a special group." He is persuaded that ordinary people are bereft of sky religion, a thesis that is patently false and can only be precipitated out of the materialistic brew of early Marxist anthropology. Our interest is not to inter this debate but to veer towards a more important truth. Earliest humans gave preeminence to sky gods, as soon as one or more might be discerned through the thinning canopy of clouds. Ouranos and his counterparts in other cultures were, as we have remarked, first Heaven, then God, corresponding to the canopy and the appearance of a great sun-like object (among many others) in the new skies. However, since we believe this tumultuous set of natural events took a part in creating the human race itself, we would maintain that man was never human before he was religious. Some tribes appear to follow spiritualism and animism and lack astral heavenly gods of human quality. We find ancestral spirits and ghosts usually inhabiting territories and, if they are disembodied, lower parts of the atmosphere; or the atmosphere is a medium through which they may move more easily than by treading the earth. Indeed, was not the vault of heaven itself low? And was not the Earth the goddess, sufficient itself to the first age of religious awareness? The Clouds of Heaven were many and low, until descended in deluges. The Vault of Heaven was lifted and humans saw the heavenly bodies removing themselves to remoteness and, too, the gods and hosts of heaven behaving destructively and benevolently with their own wills and human features. We can agree with Mircea Eliade (The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion) Where, discussing Wilhelm Schmidt (Ursprung der Gottesidee) he says, It is true that the belief in High Gods Seems to characterize the oldest cultures, but we also find there other religious elements. As far as we can reconstruct the remote past, it is safer to assume that religious life was from the very beginning rather complex, and that 'elevated' ideas coexisted with 'lower' forms of worship and belief. Thus, a prominent, although not dominant school of thought in the history of religion, exemplified in the work of A. Lang, M. Muller, R. Pettazoni, W. Schmitt, and M. Eliade propounds the thesis that the first worshiper and hence the ancestors of all religions believed in sky-gods. We find their arguments persuasive and add to them what we know about actual prehistoric skies and catastrophic occurrences affecting the skies. The belief in sky-gods is attested to both by the most ancient sources of religious practice and by the studies of modern so-called primitive peoples (whom we prefer to call "tribal"). All of the "great" religions begin their stories in the skies: The Judaic complex, the Greco-Roman complex, the Egyptian, the old Chinese religion of Heaven, the Meso-American complex, the Teutonic, the Persian, the Hindu. "The Chinese T'ien means at once the sky and the god of the sly." Among the less familiar religions, the Mongol, the Sumerian, the Babylonian, the Celtic, the Baltic, and the Slavic have nominated the sky and its god( s) for preeminence. Not only this; so far as one can tell, all primitive religions have important celestial referents, and we may quote cases from Eliade again: The supreme divinity of the Maori is named Iho; iho means elevated, high up. Uwoluwu, the supreme god of the Akposo Negroes, signifies what is on high, the upper regions. Among the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego God is called Dweller in the Sky or He Who is in the Sky. Puluga, the supreme being of the Andaman Islanders, dwells in the sky... The Sky God of the Yoruba of the Slave Coast in named Olorun, literally Owner of the Sky. The Samoyad worship Num, a god who dwells in the highest sky and whose name means sky. Among the Koryak, the supreme divinity is called the One on High, the Master of the High, He Who Exists. The Ainu know him as the Divine Chief of the Sky, the Sky God, the Divine Creator of the Worlds, but also as Kamui, that is, Sky. The list could be easily extended. Why is the sky the seat of the gods and even the gods themselves? From his unmatched scholarship, Eliade fetches a proposition which we believe to be incorrect: "Simple contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. The sky shows itself to be infinite, transcendent... For the sky, by its own mode of being, reveals transcendence, force, eternity. It exists absolutely because it is high, infinite, powerful." This speculation which figures over several pages, stands without supporting evidence. It seems to say, "since heaven is divine, and the gods are celestial, there must be a reason; the reason is a) since the gods are there, the sky must have impressed man and b) the sky is impressive (for the gods are there)." The logic is confusing and borrows, though not with conscious purpose, the propaganda technique of showering agreeable statements upon the reader. Indeed, if one shows ( as has been done in recent decades) that the religious lives of the most primitive peoples are in fact complex, that they cannot be reduced to 'animism, ' 'totemism, ' or even ancestor-worship, that they include visions of Supreme Beings with all the powers of an hypotheses which deny the primitive any approach to 'superior' hierophanies are nullified. One must return to the beginning. Granting that the sky-gods and sky-religions are primordial, how is man prompted to perceive the supernatural there, place preeminent divine activities there, and make the sky the centerpiece of religion? If humans existed long before religion was invented, then it should be embarrassing to argue that the skies might exist for millions of years before the idea of religion popped into the minds of people everywhere (and very much the same idea of religion, that is, sky-religion without aeons of animism, pantheism, ghosts, totemism, and such other forms of religion). Eliade does not explain how early religions would move from sky-gods to demonism, totemism and animism, and sometimes back, for modern tribes of this ilk meet no insuperable problem in adopting a sky religion such as Islam or Christianity. We offer two explanations. First, these religious practices were originally, have been, and are always with us, and are not at all embarrassed at co-existing with sky-gods. The second explanation is consistent with the first. The sky-gods seem to have disappeared from many minds of our "high" civilization in favor of the worship of technology, cinema and political heroes, and a number of psychopathological quirks. "Primitive tribes," since explorers and anthropologists began their profuse reports, seem to have lost their sky- gods, too, or never to have had any, or to possess dei otiosi. May not these tribe people be acting like these civilized people in focusing upon the sky-gods when the gods are active, or when the memory of them, consciously or unconsciously, is acute, tending to dismiss, forget, and deny them when they are not causing great trouble? The skies became peaceful and the world stopped shaking; people turned to the supernatural manifestations of their closer environment. In this case, we may surmise also that the sterner the institutions of memory (records, graphics, priesthoods, bureaucratic churches, holidays) the longer the sky-gods will persist in a culture. Faced with embarrassment, the idea of long evolution of religion (but then perhaps, too, of the long evolution of man) might be dropped. Then at least, we see man becoming human and sky-religious concurrently. But another embarrassment occurs. If this occurs at one place and one time, as we have asserted, how do all people settle upon the sky and often the same creation stories of first generation gods, as we shall see? "Diffusion," one might venture; from the first Adam and his home locale, there went forth the common focus and story (" Just as the Hebrew Genesis says!"?). If so, the first human must have achieved the diffusion; there would be no humans to pick up the story elsewhere. In his book of Timaeus, Plato accepts and rationalizes in its early pages the existence of "everything visible, and which was not in a state of rest, but moving with confusion and disorder" prior to the work of the Divinity of demiurge which in its plenitude of intelligence and power "reduced it from this wild inordination into order." Here is the first revolution; a Chaos, worked upon by a Demiurge (God) produces Order. This is a common ancient myth but we recall that Timaeus is a highly sophisticated Pythagorean and thinker. I conclude that the first of all great events remembered by man and emplaceable in primevalogy is the separation of Heaven from Earth. The Divinity, according to Plato-Timaeus, using earth, fire, water, and air from the universe formed (generated) it into a figure, an animal containing all figures and animals and gave it the 'most becoming'... "spherical shape, in which all the radii from the middle are equally distant from the bounding extremities." So says Taylor in his great commentary on Timaeus. This universe moves in a circular revolution. Taylor concludes that the boundless, the universe before god was composed of thick cloud or mist to early and late Greek philosophers. Fire made it visible and that is why it became the first of the elements. There is a major dilemma in Timaeus, faced by all philosophers and theologians who explain creation. Was God always around but disinclined to do anything about the Chaos? Then finally did he act and make order, i. e., the universe as man knows it? My interpretation is as follows: The Cosmologist is Man. Man senses ancient experiences. He asks when did experience begin. In fact, he is asking "when did I begin?" i. e. my inquiring mind. He thinks everything always was, because this is a logical thought. He recollects, however, a time before the time he recalls, and remembers such time as chaos or disorder (or thick fog). This time of the ordering of chaos must be either a memory of when man first got his head straight, i. e. could reason and ask basic questions, or an actual revolution of his nature or environment (a catastrophic set of events involving perhaps the lifting of a law canopy from Earth) which he recalls because he was already homo sapiens in all or part; but he cannot recall any specific catastrophic events before this time ; therefore it becomes his creation moment, his gestalt of creation. Then there are later stories about divine and celestial behavior that are found throughout the world, as, for example, the later coming of an electric or thunderbolting god. For instance, Eliade comments, as have I, on "the later transformations of sky gods into storm gods." Is this diffusion, or a common experience of separated people? Evidently, religious historians do not sense that a sequence of gods might exist, which are related to real natural events as experienced by widely separated people, such events being originally involved in the selection of the sky as the first god and the home site of the gods. Religion begins and endures in the sky, and the gods with it, because the sky has been much more than the sky that we experience today. The oldest religions and tribal legends agree generally that the skies were a heavy and full covering of the Earth, that they become turbulent, descending upon the Earth, that the broke and discharged liquids and solids upon the world, that before man's eyes the god of the sky tool shape, and that here was the first or Ouranian religion. The primordial heaven and god do not endure forever. And at this point, Eliade recalls the famous ancient concept of the deus otiosus, the distant, removed, hence disoccupied god. Having created the world the first gods generally retire. "Celestially structured supreme beings tend to disappear from the practice of religion, from cult; they depart from among men, withdraw to the sky, and become remote, inactive gods( dei otiosi);" Eliade presents relevant cases. "Everywhere in these primitive religions the celestial supreme being appears to have lost religious currency. . . Yet he is remembered and entreated as the last resort. . ." A quantavolutionary would surmise that the tribal (' primitive') response to a long period of settled skies is exactly like the civilized society's response: to forget in part the great gods of disastrous ages, to secularize, to reduce religion to superstition, and also to make the Sun a catch-all for the gods. But once again Eliade resorts to reductionist explanation and writes such lines as, "The divine remoteness actually expresses man's increasing interest in his own religious, cultural, and economic discoveries." He illustrates the "remoteness" by cases where in good times, gods are ignored, only to be appealed to in desperate times. This is a very different remoteness. In the celestial archetype, god is remote because he is not around and operative; in the second case, god is present but neglected. Eliade does not bring out the most striking fact about the retired god. His is often a forced retirement, following a bloody, world-shaking revolution. The Greek Ouranos was castrated by his son Kronos in a terrible revolt, and moved into exile, with no intimations of a return to power. A new great age begins. The birth of the great goddess Athena is reported in the Homeric "Hymn to Athene." Athene sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis, shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright-eyed goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly: the bright son of Hyperion stopped his swift-footed horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the heavenly armor from her immortal shoulders. Moreover, the new great gods are also celestial. They are not household familiars, woods sprites, or volcano ghosts. The Greek pantheon is well-known, but there are others as well. All of the great Greek gods are sky gods, though they may keep house on Earth as well, Hephaistos on Lemnos, Hades in the nether regions, and so on. The great ones are identified with the moon and planets: Aphrodite, Kronos, Zeus, Hermes, Athena, Ares, and possibly Apollo, Uranus, and Poseidon. (We do not refer, of course, to contemporary nomenclature.) When these gods are entered upon the historical record, dim though this time be, a period of greatest power can be assigned to each; this project was undertaken in Chaos and Creation. Then the sequence goes: Ouranos, Aphrodite as Moon, Kronos, Zeus (Hera), Apollo, Hermes, Athene and Hephaistos as Venus, and Ares. And there is substantial reason (not commonsensical) that these gods achieved power, fame, and worship because they were identified with great sky bodies, such as the planets, upon the occasion of great natural catastrophes be falling the Earth. Scanning Samuel Kramer's collection of Mythologies of the Ancient World, we find persistent outcroppings of the procession of gods and ages despite his complete disregard of events in the heavens that might differ from the behavior of the sun, moon, planets, comets, and stars today. We find dual splitting creation gods, of the type of Earth and Ouranos; we identify Saturn, Zeus, Venus, and Mars, and also stories of cataclysms of the raising of the sky, and of world ages. In the Epinomis, Plato is accomplishing a significant trick of theology. Complaining of the mythology that places the gods on Mount Olympus, he replaces them upon the planets where, he says, they belong, hoping to reform their bawdy characters thereby. He says we must get rid of any notion of the strife of the gods. They move always in order. (Elsewhere, Plato would have any disbelievers in orderly skies punishable.) The astral gods are the real ones, he insists, and gives them their names. (He anthropomorphizes the vault of Heaven, Kosmos.) Their names, he suggests, should be coordinated with Syrian and Egyptian observations, which are much older and "tested by vast periods of time." To us it occurs that bringing the gods down to Olympus was psychologically an effort on the part of Greek myth-makers to control the gods; they became human and tied to human fortunes directly. Now Plato, feeling no threat of planetary disorders, wants to send them back to their former homes, which are once again safe. De otiosi, the removed gods, will be doubly safe, safe for themselves and safe for mankind. We note that the Greek and many other cultures regard their sky gods as blood-related. To the Greeks - to us, for that matter - this could only mean that their history was intertwined, overlapping, of the same order of celestial experiences. We note further that the greatest Greek philosophers and scientists did not argue against the succession of gods. They did not challenge the succession because somehow it was real to them. Somehow they were experientially or psychologically inhibited from claiming that the gods were born together. And so it was with other great ancient mythologies. Eliade hardly pries into the secrets of the Hebrew gods; yet, guided by the hypothesis that gods occur in succession, and lend their new traits to religion it is not difficult to see in the Bible and the legends of the Jews a series of gods, not badly matched with the Greek and Mesopotamian gods. These were objects of worship by hostile factions. At the least monotheism becomes, if not polytheism, then serial polytheism. Thus, in the opening passages of Genesis, the figures of Ouranos and Kronos are vaguely discernible, occurring in turn, whereupon intimations of worship of the Moon, Jupiter, Hermes, and Baal-Venus intrude. The Archangel Gabriel, through Jewish legend, can be linked to the planet Mars, and the destruction of the Assyrian army of Sennacherib in 687 B. C. Yahweh, who is linked to Elohim (Saturn-Kronos) by Mosaic fiat, seems to be a Zeus-Horus-Jupiter figure to most scholars, and seems also to be a Thoth-Hermes-Mercury figure, blended with the Zeus figure, to the present writer (see God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus). This latter god( s) can be fitted into history at the beginning of the Old Bronze Age in Egypt and the Near East. Thus, there has been a succession of gods and goddesses in human history. Yet human nature is obsessive, that is, faithful; further, it was a great sacrilege to forget god, and severe punishment and expiation not only followed forgetting but were performed as prophylaxis. The compelling reason to change gods is to be found in reality. The reality is that the gods have changed, and, despite all his efforts to be loyal, man has been forced to worship new gods over the ages. The ambivalence of the gods caused mankind from the beginning to exert itself strenuously to control them. A continuous redefinition occurred. Yet never has the nuclear complex of a god been put aside without great external pressures, the most excruciating of which has been the advent of an apparently more flexible and potent deity. In these cases, people have, as often as they could, tried to merge the new and the old; any evidence of continuity and any confusion of identities, whether physically or psychologically produced, have been seized upon to establish that the worship of the new is faithful to the worship of the old. Therefore it happens, consciously or not, that all gods have an unbroken line of ancestors going back to primordial chaos; there the gods are made from the abstract elements such as air and water or the world begins out of nothing. We should bear in mind that when Egyptian history opened, with the Pyramid texts, Osiris( Saturn) was already dead, deus otiosus, and Horus (Zeus) reigned. Thus too, recorded history and ruins of civilized settlements portray the Saturnian (Osirian) "Golden Age" and its horrendous destruction. The god Nun of Egypt, first god of the first recorded cosmogony, bears in his hieroglyphic name that he is of the primordial wastes of water in the sky, and Egyptian legends state this to be the case. Mother Earth, Terra Mater, the Universal Genitrix, Gaia, is the most durable of the gods, and found practically everywhere. In Hesiod's Theogony, she gives birth to Ouranos who is "a being equal to herself, able to cover her completely." It is clear, however, that Earth (who may even be conceived of as masculine sometimes) reacts to the changing gods of change. This Nun or heaven is "father of the gods" and father of Atum or Re. He or it is the demiurge of the boundless, featureless darkness, from which evolved the first hills or eminences. There appeared in early Egypt four different cult centers with special creation myths, all of which were essentially the same. In Sumer in the 5th millennium before the present, as legend has it Nammu, whose ideogram carries the meaning of "sea," was called the mother of heaven and earth who also bore the gods. Fluids and gases are favored elements of chaos and materials of creation. There is more than a semblance of logic alone in this accord of legends; the idea that gases go with chaos is attractive but is more than ex post facto explaining of legendary fiction. Fluids and gases must indeed have enveloped primordial man and attended the birth of the gods. Ouranos emerged out of the watery and turbulent wastes of the sky cloaked in robes of clouds. Philo Byblius anciently reported from earlier sources that the first Phoenician god was Elium or Hypsistos (" the Highest") and was succeeded by Ouranos who was succeeded by El or Kronos. But I would interpret this primordial god as the first stage of Ouranos, the adamantine condition of the sky prior to its breaking open to reveal the great light of Ouranos. The Babylonians, successors to Sumer, in the early third millennium B. C. worshiped Marduk- Bel (Baal) as patron god and world creator, exalted over the old Mesopotamian pantheon just as Jupiter came to be exalted over Saturn in the Roman-Greek pantheon. Poseidon (brother of Zeus and son of Chronos) remained in heaven after his father fell and only later, upon agreement with Zeus, descended to rule the seas. He also flooded the land as he did so and was known as the land-encroacher. Thus the descent of Poseidon (Neptune) is to be identified with a great deluge, perhaps a name for, it not a later part of, the same great deluge that is connected with the crippling and binding of Kronos (Saturn) and is the same as the flood of Noah brought down by Elohim in Hebrew Genesis. The qualities of new gods were thus to replace, overlap, and add to the qualities of the old; theology assisted by political power and the manifest abilities of the new god performed the task. Jupiter, for example, was called "fecundator," but the original fertilizer of the Earth and founder of agriculture was his father, "Saturn fecundator." The process by which the Sun usurped the identity and history of the old gods over the past two thousand years is homologous; when the skies settled down, this great and apparent sky-body grew in religious stature. Buddhism climbed upon Hinduism; Confucianism and Taoism evolved from the worship of T'ien. The Christians and Muslim supplied "new testaments" to the Hebrew "Old Testament." There are no "Great Religions" in the world whose occurrence cannot be contemporaneously connected with natural events of the caliber of world-wide catastrophe. The same applies to small but persistent, durable religions such as modern Judaism, and Parsiism, descended from Persian Mazdaism through Zoroaster. I do not speak of many other religions of the world, some of which may well be "superior" or more deserving of the title "great" by such criteria as may be advanced in discussion. Nor do I distinguish among sects within the "Great Religions," while recognizing that in reality there may exist distinctions as significant, say, among Christian groups as between the "average" Christian religion and other religions. We hear of many instances in which Christians or Muslims are more comfortable among "head-hunting" sects or gnostic or totemistic religion than among their own kind. An important line of attack may be leveled against our assertion that he succession of gods reflects a series of natural catastrophes upon Earth. Religions have continued to acquire new gods without actual catastrophes and have spread widely without catastrophes to help them do so. Some of these religions have been militarily aggressive, others peaceful. Thus Islam conquered large areas at first by the sword, as is will known, but in recent years has converted peoples readily with little bloodshed and compulsion, as in central Africa. Father back in time, as Wheatley (The Pivot of the Four Quarters) asserts, the Hindu pantheon moved into Southeast Asia along with its social institutions. Along with the religion went peaceful commerce. Many shrines were erected, around which there grew up cities. So enthusiastic were people for the peacefully inculcated religion that sometimes the near totality of a state's economy was given over to oblations to the pantheon. The 2600 years since the probable last great natural catastrophes have not been distinguished by peacefulness. War and slaughter have been conducted in the name of a warlike religion (or interpretation thereof), or of a peaceful religion, or in the name of no religion but the state or tribe. We are led, then, to conjecture that homo sapiens himself, though relieved of direct models of destructive behavior in the skies, continues to carry out deeply rooted impulses to destruction, whether through unconscious memory or because he is constructed genetically to do so. That both are in fact the case is a main thesis of my volumes on Homo Schizo. So long as the skies were disturbed, and the Earth with it, the character of religion reflected clearly natural events and imposed models of conduct upon man. But religion itself was born in the creation of man and, if he were other than true to his nature or were of another nature, he would not have a peaceful religion and behave peacefully in all probability. Religion is a dependent variable of human nature. It is a dependent variable of natural events. We shall have to inquire, as we proceed, whether, in some other sense, in another kind of reality, religion may be an independent variable, owing its existence to conditions freed of human nature and ancient natural disasters. To speak of religion as a variable reminds us of how vague and intangible are the materials of the history of religion and even of religious behavior today. We must toy with notions of impractical super-surveys, in frustration over this situation. To speak properly about the religion of a person, a standard intensive interview at the least is required. "What precisely are your perceptions of the supernatural?" "What practices, life-pattern, or habits do you possess that are related to these perceptions?" Then, of course, inasmuch as one's behavior is never quite aligned with one's professed beliefs and behavior, one should bring in some external objective testimony to supplement the interview. We should have hundreds of pages per person, but only from these would we be able to define operationally the person's religion. Were all the people on Earth thus interviewed, and the results properly classified, tabulated, and analyzed, we should be able better to generalize about the relation of present religion and gods to the historical religions and gods - provided, we should add, that we have assembled and ordered all that might be known about historical religions back to their origins in the origins of man; this, however, we should probably be incapable of doing unless we were to adopt as the guiding hypotheses those already suggested in these first chapters: namely: The earliest human cultures were simultaneously religious. The earliest and most important supernatural objects everywhere were celestial. The Ouranian complex of Heaven and Gods was the first list of Dramatis Personae of religion everywhere. The Ouranian complex was overthrown by nature and simultaneously by man. All successive gods everywhere have descended from and relate to the Ouranian complex. Man believed himself forced to change gods from time to time by evidence in nature. Man, as he changed gods, accomplished the transition with as few variations as possible in previously assigned powers, traits, names, vestments, rites and religious conceptions. In these transitions, man became adept (to his way of thinking, which was and is delusory) at reconciling and controlling his gods through his religion, whence, by controlling the gods, at controlling the world, all with the ultimate and impossible goal of obtaining self-control and peace of mind. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 3: } {T KNOWING THE GODS} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THREE KNOWING THE GODS The collected qualities of gods resemble a bazaar where all types of potentially useful objects, frequently queer, are brought in by all sorts of people. The childish, outlandish and genial effects of the human mind are displayed in seller and buyer alike. What brings one to he market: curiosity? hope of a rare beautiful utensil that one can afford? something to lighten our spirits? the euphoria of the busy scene? a thing - we know not what - that may change one's life? So one shops for gods. Some say, they are in everything. Some say, you cannot find what don't exist. Some say, they are most useful. Others say, they are not to be found when you need them. If it were not for the fact that two billion people claim to know one or another god, perhaps we should scarcely bother to take up the question of what is known in this regard. Further, since most believers claim that their god wishes to be adored, and is infinitely capacitated, should not the god display himself clearly and prove at least his own existence, if not his other qualities, beyond a shadow of a doubt? But he avoids the flea market. He seems to want privacy, but then he should certainly resent the continuous universal efforts to bribe him to appear. A few hardy souls venture to say that gods have little interest in humans and therefore have no motive to prove themselves. Some, like the deists, argue that the gods created everything and set it into motion; then, retiring, the gods left the world to develop by itself. Some merely say: "God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform." (There is, incidentally, a religious adage for every circumstance.) Most who believe in gods - these are in numbers largely of the Hebraic complex or Hinduism - prove their case by pointing to divine signs (hierophanies), including the marvelously intricate reality of the world, by asserting there must be a purpose to everything, and by commanding, "Don't ask questions; have faith." Gods appear directly to people, especially to heroes, on occasion; if not the gods themselves, then surrogates or messengers reveal themselves, if not these, then hierophanies or manifestations of gods occur. Dozens of gods, thousands of agents and subordinate gods, and tens of thousands of hierophanies, performing in plural appearances, would, if catalogued, constitute millions of appearances. Zeus knew many women; Athena marched before many soldiers; Buddha came from a noble family; Jesus was known among the people as a man; Paul met him on the Road to Damascus, resurrected; children of Fatima conversed with Mary, Mother of Jesus. Millions of such encounters have gone unreported because of the modesty of people; they could not believe their good luck. In Some religious sects, it is expected that now, if not earlier or later, every member must experience at the least a significant hierophany and a changed life thereafter. A divine appearance or hierophany must be social, not individual, in the sense that it must the authenticated by the belief of others. This has not prevented millions of individuals, at some risk of persecution, whether criminal or medical, from claiming encounters. Who validates encounters? This is properly a subject for the political science of religion. Who "should" validate them is the claim of as many theistic religions as exist. A large bureaucratic church may devote much energy to acknowledge any encounters, sometimes saying that god does not conduct himself so, so that he did once but now does not. All sects lay down (that is, their gods lay down) rules for encounters. It is unthinkable that a Christian could conceive of his god going about raping women as Zeus was inclined to do. On the other hand, Yahweh, the god of Moses, delighted in the killing of enemies both foreign and domestic; at least so says Moses in numerous cases, as when the heresy of the Golden Calf is discovered, and the Lord's order is "slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor." Three thousand Israelites were killed that day. In the Hebraic complex, Moses is the central figure. "Moses spoke with God." These conversations have been subjected to analysis for thousands of years and it is unlikely that late psychiatric explanations such as have been offered by Julian Jaynes and the present author will be final. Be that as it may, the relationship of Moses and Yahweh can be analyzed within the framework and propositions of the psychology of hallucinations and delusions. That is, Moses was conducting interior psychological operations. Yahweh was, to his mind, a real sacred Lord God. By treating the world around him - the Egyptians, the Israelites, the desert, the architecture of sacred enclosures, the bushes, rocks and waters, and his disciples as if they too were under the direction of Yahweh, Moses created a marvelously integrated religious complex recomposing this world and himself in the midst of great natural turbulence. The more one studies the Books of Moses, the more sense one can make of them as literal history written by a deluded and masterful genius. But this hardly advances the cause of the Hebraic religions. Increasingly, psychiatry and physics are pressing upon religions to surrender all cases of alleged hierophanies. The majority are easy to prove false. But, as we shall see later on, science is "getting too smart for its own good," and beginning itself to present important arguments concerning the supernatural - its own hierophanies perhaps. Certain types of ancient hierophanies lend themselves to scientific reinterpretation. Examples are the collectively witnessed catastrophes of great magnitude - such as the Deluge of Noah - and electrical discharges of types no longer experienced, such as were central to, the operations of Moses' Ark and the Delphic Oracle. Whereas new evidence and scientific interpretation go to prove the veracity of ancient reports, the super natural character of the reports is thrown into doubt. Thus, a substantial proportion of the appearances of Yahweh in the Book of Moses occur in connection with (literally "on") the Ark of Moses; most probably these were electrical displays, ingeniously managed, and believed to represent the fiery essence of the deity. Deluge legends are worldwide. Survivors included not only Noah's family but, to believe their legends, other people in different places on Earth. Evidence of large-scale flooding, totally beyond present experience, is worldwide. The cause, focusing now only upon the floods contemporary with Noah, were exoterrestrial and the water was in large part new water from outer space most likely from a nova of a theretofore much larger Saturn. The establishment of this theory, even if it is accepted as the second most likely alternative to "no worldwide flood at all," reduces the religious and hierophanic aspects of the Hebrew story (and of all other religious descriptions). Those who before saw the direct intervention of an explaining, instructing, humanly motivated god in the deluges gain a minor victory from the validation of sacred scriptures, but suffer a defeat of the notion of a divinely chosen people working under the immediate personal direction of their god. Dozens of peoples, perhaps all of them, inherit the belief that the gods once saved only them from a worldwide ruin. Doubt is cast upon all ethnocentric religious aspects of the Deluge, whence some persons will be led to a "higher religious synthesis" of the relations between gods and the natural world, while others will be led out of religion entirely. Many people believe that they know gods by their effects, not by the grand effects of nature but by targeted effects upon issues of personal concern. The word "god" in Aryan etymology stems from the words "to sacrifice" and "to invoke." Invocation, prayer, and rituals are seen to be followed by events unexplainable except by a direct divine intervention. A sick child is for example, the object of medical therapy and religious solicitations; a cure is accredited to the divine; a failure of cure may be deemed to be in part a punishment, or the result of unconvincing solicitations. Seeking divine attention and determining whether and how it was provided take altogether too many forms, most of them well-known, to consider them at length here. The scientist will say "Explain all effects by natural causes; those not precisely determinable must be natural as well; where psychological effects are produced, these too are natural; for the human mind and its morale can be significant producers of effects in the context of human activity." Modern theologians and religious practitioners tend to transmo-grify all forms of knowing about gods that seem vulnerable to the lances of science. Most theology has been apology for vulgar religion. Realizing, for instance, that mental asylums are well populated by hallucinators, they are most approving of more subtle religious encounters. Encounters are favored that do not implicate divine personages or voices or external visions but which display simple faith, spiritual resources, and the Lord secondhand. Thus, "I have faith in a benign Intelligence. It enables me to draw upon deep spiritual resources. I feel like Jeremiah, when the Lord told him 'Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. '" The problem of hallucination ceases as soon as one uses indirect quotation, "I think that god would help me to defeat the enemies of our country." This technique works all the better because in a bureaucratized society it has become rather insane for any job-holder to say "I" do this or that, rather than "We" or "our policy" or "the management" or "they." It is not an accident that the most strongly individualistic and anti-bureaucratic groupings of modern America overlap largely the religious sects with the greatest expectancy of personal encounters with their god. (This, incidentally, may explain the "mystery" to many people of how the suave Hollywood product Ronald Reagan came to be allied with the simple direct primitive evangelical Christians; he was a "rugged individualist," anti-bureaucratic.) The belief in gods arising from "faith" is a step away from personal encounters and authoritative testimonials. "Faith" is an affirmation. As such it is taboo in logic, for logic is grounded upon reasons and proofs. Logic would not exist if faith had its way. Faith cannot be proven, but it can never be driven from its deep psychological recesses; it can only be surrendered. What is reported by a triumphant rationalism as the "destruction" of faith must always remain the dubious word of a third party. If the believer resists the terms of surrender, faith will never be conquered. Faith cannot prove itself by logic, but it can be justified by its effects. "See how happy is the person who believes. If you would be happy, believe!" If the faithful receive more than the usual share of what are regarded as the goods of life, their faith acquires a pragmatic proof, different from and inaccessible to empirical proof. Insofar as "the goods of life" are psychic and exoterrestrial, one can construct an infallible circle from which the non-faithful are excluded. One can come from heaven, live bathed in heavenly light, and return to heaven, invulnerable to mundane contradiction. Let one step for a moment out of the charmed circle into competition for mundane "goods of life" and one finds oneself amidst a crowd of the variously successful where statistics come into play, and one can no longer be sure that faith is associated with achievement. "God must love the poor; he made so many of them," it is said. Moreover, if the "goods" are doubted and "faith" as a good is committed to definition, debate and proof by conduct, then evil is the lot and behavior of many of the "real" faithful. "Faith moves mountains," says the Gospel of Mark (II: 22-4), but faith in whom, and to where are the mountains moved? "Faith, hope, and charity," are supplicated by Paul the Apostle, but faith in its uttermost recess may be another word for the strong and unquenchable hope of a divine existence. Scientific psychologists will agree; faith is an attitude established by, preserved by, or destroyed by all that makes, maintains, and breaks other attitudes and predispositions: as for instance, drinking and smoking, quarreling, charitability, studiousness, political party affiliations, etc. All this is what concerns a college course in developmental psychology: the workings of indulgences and deprivations of infancy, family life, and society systematically and authoritatively explained. Faith is educed as a pattern of expectations, endorsed and rewarded, such that the faithful one, under normal conditions, will never regret his course of life nor lose his expectations. Besieged and buffeted in its last traditional trenches by modern science, faith nevertheless survives, because nothing else survives better, because the desperate refugees from science and reason crowd in with it, and because a variety of non-traditional licenses are granted to privateers who venture to vest their faith in ancient astronauts, flying saucers, and the like. Philosophical arguments for the existence of the divine can scarcely capture the popular imagination and suffuse popular religion with practical implications and a precise operative morality. A mention of the traditional arguments for the existence of god may illuminate the problem. There is first the argument of the necessary reality of perfection: if we can conceive of the idea of a perfect being, the being must exist, because existence is an aspect of perfection. We join most philosophers in refusing this argument. A great deal of nonsense exists in the human mind, product of its inner machinations; must it all be granted the status of reality somewhere, sometime, someplace? All the monsters of fairy tales and science fiction would come alive. Dante's Inferno would be awaiting its newest victims even now. Most conceivable things do not exist. Nor can we make them exist by an act of will, by the mechanism that has been called "omnipotence of thought," although we can make them exist as operative forces in people's minds, as illusions. Furthermore, we know that people lie in part according to their illusions, in all areas of existence - politics, love, economics, beauty, etc. Illusions have consequences. Hence if the consequences of a belief in a being of specific absolute perfection are good, or at least better than the consequences of any substitutable illusion, we may seek earnestly to establish and maintain the illusion, or myth (for that is what it is as well.) A second traditional argument for the existence of god pleads that the world as we see it cannot have come about without a previously existing cause. Since the universe is so grand and so complex, containing by definition everything, its cause must be at least as great, conforming to what may be called god, the demiurge, the first cause, the creator. Everything does have a precedent form - call it a sense. This we sense; and every experiment can probably prove it. But it may be of the nature of the world to extend itself indefinitely in an infinity of forms occupying time and space or a presently unimaginable dimension. Hence the gods as creators are unnecessary. One may slide into a counter-assertion to prove their existence: that the gods are in the principle of change, there being no ultimate reason for change other than the will of a demiurge, who may be Aristotle's "unmoved mover," or Heraclitus' inherent changefulness of all things. So close are such abstractions to scientific generalities, so far removed from practical religion, and so vulnerable to contradiction (for all things can be viewed in their unchanging aspects a la Parmenides), that the gods would soon shuffle off to Sheol with their help. The most popular of arguments for the existence of gods is the (humanly perceived) design of the world. So marvelous are the construction and interconnections of things and so purposeful (that is, moving towards their proper goals) that an infinitely masterful designer must have created the universe. However, even before modern science exposed some of the guts of the material world, including the physiology of psychology, philosophers, priest, and ordinary people were acutely aware of the evils of the world. They were aware that the world had been nearly destroyed on occasion by natural (divine) forces, so that the gods came to represent destructiveness as well as constructiveness. Under such conditions, the problem of evil was tied into the grand design, so that interminable arguments might occur concerning what parts of the world and its people were deliberately designed by the gods to malfunction. The tedium of this discussion hardly assists in any proof of divine design, while the issue keeps people in a prolonged and useless state of fear and quarrelsomeness. To be sure, a great many processes of the world seem to be moving toward a definable end. Thus, the common astronomical theory is that the sun will ultimately burn itself out; so is the idea already cited that the present fragmented universe of starry bodies was created by a primordial explosion, but that a limit of expansion will be reached, whereupon the universe will implode. Again it is often said that man will colonize space, etc. All such processes appear to be non-random, hence to some thinkers, purposeful. Take the biological "law" that evolution cannot reverse itself. If this is so, evolution appears to have some goal, which encourages certain theorists to feel better about the world and others to believe in gods. Materialists can take a different view: non-random processes develop an evermore specific direction out of inertia; once an ear begins to evolve in animals, it will develop into various ears unless it finally quantavolutes; the developing ear preempts some proportion of the changeability of the organism. Therefore, an "end" or "purpose" can be claimed. It is hardly an occasion for divine pride, or for pride in the divine. And sense organs may degenerate in evolution, not only among blind moles, but in man, whose senses are stunted by comparison with those of one or more species. With an irresistible thrust, most theistic religions have promoted the idea that "nothing is impossible to the gods," The gods are usually allowed perfection. They are eternal, omnipotent omniscient, omnipresent, omnivirtuous, unchanging and unchangeable (for how can perfection change?) So naive are such assignments of qualities, that they seem to be pure projected delusions. Just as one can solve a mathematical problem by manipulating the concept of infinity, one can arrange and interpret any divine action with the concept of complete qualities. It seems that design is found where the heart is: one who is healthy, reared to optimism, indulged, and promoted in life, is likely to find better designs in what he senses and experiences than others find who are less blessed. Indeed, a goodly part of much religion consists precisely in designating the world as evil, in anticipation of our arriving shortly after death in a better world, or escaping presently from the world about. The stress of religions upon suffering is unavoidable. Suffering is not only blatant in ordinary lives; it is also regurgitated as feelings out of history, not merely church and social history, but the history of great disasters engineered by the gods. Finally, suffering gestates in the very genetics of humanity, in its eternal fearfulness, in the contradiction between wishing for everything and controlling nothing. At times, religious factions diverge and sects spring up which preach a religion of secular joy and the elimination of suffering and sorrowful memory. But secular joy as religion soon liquidates the religion. The joy of religion generally must consist in the appreciation of man's lot and a surcease from it upon death, or resurrection, or otiose earthliness. The philosopher Immanuel Kant perceived in the moral laws always present among human beings a proof of the existence of god. Unlike the beasts, men rule themselves by voluntary ethics, it is said. This unique and universal search for the good suggests a divine purpose. Only the magnificent order of the heavens, which moved Kant to "ever-increasing wonder and awe," was comparable to "the moral law within me." Modern quantavolution readily demonstrates the inconsistency of the order of heavens. As contrasted with older generations of scientists, the younger generation sees more and more the history of the heavens as of quantavolutions and catastrophes. Ethology and socio- biology meanwhile are asserting vigorously the presence, now here and now there, in animals and plants, of moral rules and moral behavior that man used to regard as products of his superior and voluntary ethics. As for the "moral law of man," sociologist Louis Wirth used to remark to his students that "people differ in every way that they can." A thoroughly relativistic and pragmatic philosopher would add that it is "the moral law within me" which causes most of the worst human conflicts in this world. I agree with both men. The claim to know gods, so general in history and today, has not reduced differences so much as it has promoted fights over them. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 4: } {T THE HEAVENLY HOST} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FOUR THE HEAVENLY HOST The animation of nature is an instinctual interpretation, primordial with humankind. It occurs with humans today, more obviously among the young. To exorcize it takes training. The earliest gods took shape as the Sky and Earth. There developed next a more definitely formed solar god of the Sky. A change in nature was responsible for the change in divine forms. Logically, and in accord with most evidence of what was manifest, the primordial welkin was densely packed, without brilliant separated lights, until the sky was broken up and these appeared. The great god would have come first in his solar (or planetary) form if the sky had been penetrable. Until nearly 2700 years ago the skies were periodically invested with changing forms, and much of this turbulence was impacting upon the Earth physically, as well as upon the minds of humans. The scene was conducive to polytheism. Divine presences of all types might be discerned. Yet there was usually a great god, a father of gods, an Ouranos, a Kronos or a Zeus. We infer from this fact that such beings were at some time most impressive features of the sky and, when they were not, were scalding memories, which had so dominated the human setting that no successor, no matter how prominently active could match what its "ancestor" or "father" had achieved. Some cultures, such as the Roman, Greek, and Hindu, did not conceal the succession of fathers, and assigned family roles to junior actors, while the Hebrews over a period of time accepted the Mosaic rationalization which fitted several great gods into a unity. This did not come without ideological and political struggles of great intensity and long duration, some of which are recounted, in expurgated form, in the Old Testament. "Varro had the diligence to collect thirty thousand names of gods - for the Greeks counted that many. These were related to as many needs of the physical, moral, economic, or civil life of the earliest times." He found 40 Hercules alone. So writes G. Vico. The sacred book of the Mah…b…rata (1: 39) claims 33,333 Hindu deities, and later sources say that there were a thousand times as many. The Nordic Grimnismal gives over 50 names to Odin. The Babylonian Emunia Elis culminates in a recital of 50 names of Marduk. In the history of symbolism and language, words may actually have begun as god-names. Words might have been more sacred than pragmatic, until an advanced state of collective amnesia and sublimation had been achieved. Even today, a great many people cannot adapt to the idea that words are not real hard things. If the Greeks had 30,000 god-names, and the Hindus even more, then all the world's cultures must have had hundreds of thousands. The great numbers, however, reduces to a comprehensible order when a proper theory is applied to them. The total of this heavenly host includes, first, a few great gods, whose real existence in the sky lent structure to the ages. Second occur the thousands of names of the great gods, most of which have yet to be identified with their referents. Many of these names are concealed references; others are what foreign cultures call a certain culture's gods; some names isolate a quality of the gods; some names are used to marry the gods of one culture to those of another. The principle of ambivalence (in the form of opposites) leads to the division of great gods into gods and devils. Here the human mind seeks to control the gods by projection of benevolence and beneficence upon a good god, and malevolence and maleficence upon a bad god or devil, hoping that the one will outwit and outstruggle the other. Devils have invariably extruded from an animated religious setting, there being no way of exorcizing them from man's primordially established soul. In the Hebraic complex, god cannot commit evil; if a bad effect is deemed evilly inspired, it is attributed to the devil. Some religions have merged the contradiction of good and evil into the same god, who holds different names for his given qualities and exercises benevolent or malevolent impulses for inscrutable reasons, or for "obvious" reasons, or for reasons not to be inquired about. The Greek gods were rather of this type. One significant result of the differences may be in the potential intensity of the "guilt complex." The Greco-Roman pagans suffered less from guilt-feelings than their Christian counterparts. Such gods may acquire many appellations, some of them contradicting others. New appellations may also serve to avoid the designation of new gods, an ever-present "problem" in a polytheistic system. Appellations may thus be congruent and complementary, that is, logical and harmonious qualities that a single personality may possess. Or they may appear nonconforming, leading nonparticipating observers (enemies or scientists) to question the nature of the god. However, as with great contradictions - " God vs. Devil" - so with lesser contradictions - "god of arts vs. god of war" - the contradiction might be only apparent, the same supernatural being having apparently produced a variety of effects during his primary effective manifestations in nature. Thus Mercury-Hermes is both thief and healer. And Santillana and von Dechend refer to "the baffling Mesopotamian texts dealing with gods cutting off each other's necks and tearing out each other's eyes." In the eternally agonizing search for a great god with whom one might co-exist peacefully, those who followed the path of opposites have been plagued by the possibly triumphant fearful powers of the devil, whereas those who pursued the path of the contradictions had to admit the mutability of their god and the impossibility of more than incessant recurrent reconciliations between god and people. Another major source of divine names (besides the attributions) is the outcome of processes of memory and forgetting. To forget the disasters that characterized the appearance of the gods was urgently demanded by the bruised mind; but any lapse of memory would be accompanied by fear that god will not permit himself to be forgotten and will punish forgetfulness. The mind then works to define and characterize god so that his image will be tolerable upon the conscious level. It further adds new words to its vocabulary of the divine, discovering that a god called by another name is less threatening. Still further, by the logic of delusion, a god whose name is mysterious or hidden will respect the awe and fear bound up in the secrecy and at the same time will restrict himself to activities that do not threaten the very core of terror that crouches in the human soul. A plethora of non- names, secret and cult-names, and common partial names comes forth. Effects of many kinds are produced, the least of which is the confusion of names that confronts the outside observer; the selective remembering is tolerable; occult elites can dominate societies; the language and concepts of a people are enriched as the naming of gods flows through the symbolic world by association, analogy, and implication. Although some thousands of names are those of great gods in one form or another, other thousands are assigned to angels, minor devils, minor divinities, spirits, divinized natural phenomena of the earth, air, water, fire, plants and animals, divine heroes, and divine heroes, and divine kings. This myriad of names also possesses its logic. Prior to human creation the names could not exist: there was not stimulus, impulse, or mechanisms. Once the mind had exploded into self-awareness, however, a great many beings might move into it. Limits to the number of names were set by the "behavior" of such beings, there being more sub-gods in disastrous than in peaceful times. The need for alleviation of anxiety occasions a sort of subconscious shifting of cargo with an invention and appeal to a new god following the failure of performance of an old one. The logical operation or reduction of "beings" is useful, when, for purposes of control, fewer sub-gods are needed. Finally, the ability of the inventor to achieve collective consensus may sometimes fail; no doubt heroic charisma or priestly office allows one to designate a new god only to a degree. But, while these factors restrain the process, in any given culture the number of supernatural beings is apparently magnified by the telling of tales from foreign and destroyed cultures; these beings of course enter the mind only as subordinates or evil opposites of one's own gods. Moreover, as in classical Greek mythology, supernatural beings pile their traits and presence upon the true beings of the culture until, to the undiscerning mind, they become indistinguishable from the humans; the totality of divinities and spirits becomes a seemingly nonsensical mass. By analogy with the cultures of modern tribes, and by reference to surviving cave drawings and artifacts, it would seem that people are naturally inclined to perceive gods in all aspects of nature. This perception is true insofar as the gods of creation must be assumed to be genetically behind every divine or spiritual (supernatural) communication, symbol, and image. It is also natural even among apes (The neuter gender, the "it," is itself probably a product of divinely inspired categorization; "it" is needed not for inanimate objects, as school children are told, but for a godly presence that is neither female nor male.) The collective experience and interpersonal communication of an event that requires a naming - an event whose connection with the numerous high-energy expressions of nature is obvious but whose direct efficient cause is not a great god - is a final way by which many a demigod is produced. Thus the breezes are named, the meteors, the volcanoes, the erratic boulders, the deeps of caves and seas, the ancient trees, the animals of curious form and expression, and so on to many thousands. Then, too, the early kings, the kings of crises, their mothers, the sorcerers, saints, inventors, prophets, and so on to many more thousands of the divine and semi-divine. Then, further, the products of their work: "devil's hole," "angel rock," "Mount Zeus," "Meteora," and so on through a world whose geography - that was once worked upon by the gods - belatedly and usually mistakenly accredits the heavenly host via a largely invented name. All of these processes of naming are consistent with and dependent upon the primordial appearances of the gods. The saints of several Christian churches are a form of minor divinity, who are deemed to have performed celestial miracles, given great social services, communed with the Lord, or served gloriously in battle. Saint Joan of Arc comes readily to mind. Periods of natural and social crisis are their favored setting. The Hindus, who do not draw scholastic distinctions so fine, have created divinities of the same order. Thus the villages of West Bengal worship Sitala, Goddess of smallpox, though smallpox no longer troubles the area. R. W. Nicolas has found the origins of Sitala in the 18th century, upon an unprecedented outburst of the plague. Bengali doctors soon became preeminent in their analysis and treatment of smallpox, using variolation. Simultaneously, the disease was ascribed to Sitala, who had been born late among the gods and found none who knew how to worship her. So she chose to infect especially children with the pox, for "a late-coming goddess required such terrible weapons." Hers became an annual and major rite, accompanied by processions, animal sacrifices, and music. When the plague was absent, she was also served, for "both the presence and absence of disease are manifestations of the grace of the Mother." One notes the psychic need, that science cannot fill, to displace blame to a divine party, to turn punishment by the God back upon the self, and to propitiate and thank the divinity for not exerting its full powers if bestowing evil. Divinity has often been assigned to kings and emperors. Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Chinese, Japanese, and the rulers of other cultures were considered gods, and worshiped in life and death. They have been pronounced by themselves and their associated elites as a relatives of gods or even one of the gods. This practice, so repulsive to democrats, is a means by which an elite and the people it rules can deal with and control the gods. At the same time, rule by divine kings is easier because the source of the rule is a god. He claim to divinity varies with the secularism of the elite and masses, so that it is by no means rare that the god is usurped, overthrown, and killed. In some forms of society, now extinct, kings were not only gods or semi-divine but were used as sacrifices regularly or in emergencies (often but by no means always in the form of temporarily appointed surrogates). We see once again, as we no repeatedly and more clearly than in other life spheres, the basic functioning of religion to secure humans from fear of celestial disasters, and all fears of matters deemed to be connected with the heavens gone astray and chaotic. The Japanese Emperor used to be regarded as a god and was compelled to severely restrain his movements upon critical occasions, such as during some unusual celestial phenomenon. This catatonic state was believed to restrain the gods and heavens; if the god emperor does not change even his countenance, one believed, the countenance of heaven will not change either. The puzzle of the god-heroes, with their half-and-half ancestry, still occupies us. Why must there be everywhere these hundreds of men and women who muddy the waters of great gods? Typical explanations are unsatisfactory. It is said that gods and god-heroes are the same - a truth, but too limited a truth to answer the question. Others say that people want to be descended from gods, as, later, we shall see that they cannibalize their gods. This also is apparent. And some are content to say that gods are really only big heroes. Because of such explanations and simply because of the inordinate confusion from the plethora of names and deeds, the truth behind myth is difficult to find and, indeed, few are ready to believe there is a truth. A quantavolutionary explanation of who and what are god-heroes can be set forth for what its worth. God-heroes are sublimatory. When, in periods following the direct and evident appearance and behavior of natural gods, there occurs a lull and a stability, humans, continuing their search of means to control the gods begin the process of denying their existence by humanizing them. If people were left to pursue this process, the gods would be ultimately erased from the human mind (and history). The first phase, that is, consists of direct experience of gods in nature. The second phase permits god-heroes, the third phase pure heroes, and the fourth phase calls for plain human beings with typical human behaviors. To take an example: Mars is Ares; Ares becomes Hercules; Hercules is a god, but also Hercules becomes human, first as a god-hero; Hercules becomes quite human; Hercules becomes subject of a mass of folk tales; the unconscious artistic mind can push to all limits of the imagination with him. What halts the process of losing gods entirely? On occasion (and many live in such expectations) the gods reappear, wreak havoc, and, so, self-sufficient, unassisted, full and direct god ship is restored. At the same time, the most obsessive and schizoid officials and prophets outlast the social sublimation that is occurring, and insist that gods directly are the only authorities, and will not let the process of creating god-heroes go too far. Then, too, a minor phenomenon occurs, which is incorrectly elevated to the major explanation by uniformitarianism and psychic monolithics: pride of ancestry; elite self- elevation, etc.; "credenda et miranda" of ruling groups. Heroes are built into a group's history: "A treason it is to deny them." "We can't eliminate god-heroes without denying the gods." That is, the heroes of a ruling class are made divine. This, we stress, does happen but is not the primary and independent cause of gods and god-heroes. The impregnated themselves in the god-heroes. There is little question that Campbell has succeeded in telling the universal plot of the hero found throughout the world from the most ancient times. The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation - initiation - return.... A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons of his fellow men. How does this universal and even obsessive plot of mankind relate to the theory of quantavolution? Simply, we think. First we note cycle: the going forth ends in the return. Second, the world of the hero begins ordinarily, though almost always with premonitions and prophecy; indeed the ordinary may be actual nothingness. This may be interpreted as a regular order of the universe. Next come the disastrous experiences: a succession of personalized natural forces beat against the hero, testing his will to survive, and to control himself and the human and natural environment. When the forces have subsided or have been defeated, the hero returns to a stable social order upon which he bestows his moral and material gains. The career of the hero thus mirrors the career of the gods, who mirror the career of nature. At first the tie to gods is direct; imitation is permissible, but not "heroic myth," which would be considered intolerable insolence by the gods. Only after a period of the suppression of experiences and after a working out of psychic methods of dealing with them, can a human act out the plot of the gods and be called god-names. Once the process is begun, however, it has no end of sublimated ramifications until the gods are treated cavalierly and even desacralized -until the next catastrophic event. Campbell joins himself to the psychoanalytic school that regards gods as non-existent psychological means for the human to jump beyond the ordinary world into the imaginary world; "gods are only convenient means to the ineffable." They, and myth, help the mind to transcend phenomena and achieve the great void or openness of spirit. Although this theory is functionally true, it is very limited, and without realization of the grave primordial dependence of the human mind upon the real events of its history and of nature. Connections between divinities or sacred thing and stars are usually the result, not of the activity of the stars nor of the playful resort to placing fairy tales among the stars, but of the fixing of the location from which a great event appeared to originate. The Deluge of Noah, by its many designations, is connected in widely-separate countries with the planet Saturn, but also with the star-cluster known as the Pleiades; some grave event affected the sky and earth when the Pleiades could somehow represent effects of Saturn. Scorpio is the background setting from which cometary Venus launched herself on a destructive swoop upon Earth. Scorpio is identified, if not before the event, then after the event, in new associations with the event. Early and later events occur in connection with Scorpio and by extension are associated with the Venus episode. Myths of one time and character become mixed up with others later on. The stars themselves, alone or in clusters, come to acquire legendary histories, and, as such, acquire future functions as places of resort or transubstantiation or limbo for worldly or otherworldly heroes, people, and divinities. Plato insisted that the stars "are not small, as they appear to the eye, but each of them is immense in bulk." Further every solid body of heaven had "a soul attached" to it. Thus Proclus in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus declares that each celestial god has angels, demons, and heroes who are phases and extensions of it. And usually these characters have abodes or posting places in the sky. The rich Polynesian legends carry their heroes on many travels that are often imagined as terrestrial and maritime but which originated as travels of gods though the vast stellar and planetary regions. In one of its dimensions, the legend of the Argonauts is of a sky voyage that carried the adventurers to Circe (Corsyra, the Boreal Circle) where the island of Drepane (" sickle") lay, beneath which was buried the sickle of Kronos. Much of what might be told of angels is sung by Rainer Maria Rilke. Here we have the multi- faceted visions, the mixed love and terror, the mirroring of the human mind, and the sense of co-creatures of genesis long ago. Every angel is terrible. Still, woe to me, I sing to you, near fatal birds of the soul, full-knowing of you... Early-achieved and over-indulged of creation, you high ridges, dawn- reddened peaks of all genesis, - pollen of the flowering godhead, links of light, halls, steps, thrones, welkins, shields of joy, uproars beauty then suddenly, singly mirrors scooping up outpoured beauty back into your own faces. To the quantavolutionist, the presence of naturally occurring "angels" is logical and historical. More puzzling is whether they were comets, planets, or meteorites. Thus, the astronomers Strube and Napier attempted a natural history of the encounters between Earth and comets, and argue that in the early days of mankind disastrous comets were variously named and, when they had retired to the farther reaches of the solar system or had crashed or broken up, their natures and behaviors were assigned to the planets who were the regularly eccentric movers of the solar system. That is, they would deny the asseverations of those such as Santillana, von Dechend, Velikovsky, Milton and myself who assigned the active roles in legends to the planets, and, in the case of the last three, give large changes in motion and behavior to all of the planets such as to fulfill the requirements of some angelic behaviors. This is not to say that comets did not occur, but that their original creation and impetus arose out of planetary explosions and disturbances. Too, it may be borne in mind that any body changing its movement in space will behave as a comet, growing horns and tails and trails and presenting a variety of apparitions. It will take many years of study, and even then it may be impossible, to determine the historicity of the celestial solid body identity of even the more important "angels" and "sky-heroes" of world legend. Dwardu Cardona, in his studies of the Archangel Michael and others, has set an example of what must be done on a large scale to eliminate the confusion of planets and angels. Humans have been polytheistic even when their ruling religion states that one god and only one god exists. The people (and usually, too, their religious guides) establish a heavenly host (including devils) to complement, supplement, and assist the supreme god. So it was in the beginning and ever thereafter. The propaganda for monotheism is massive, so that people claim to believe in one god while worshiping many. The monotheistic illusion occurs in two forms. First, monotheistic affirmations are made by people who upon psychological investigation obviously mean different things by the word "god." Thus, a sample of the American people in 1982 indicates that all except 2% believe in god. If the same people were interviewed in greater depth, however, different 'gods' would emerge: a punitive god, a loving god, a deus otiosus, a god who pries into every nook and cranny of every mind, a helping god, a god who helps those who help themselves, a very human 'old man', an abstract principle of good, a god of true believers, a god of all people, and so on. Some people feel close to god, others not. God confides in some humans, but such an idea seems preposterous to other believers. Then, other divinities would appear: the Holy Trinity, Christ the Son, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost, each taking some godlike qualities upon themselves, supremely competent in some regard. Saints, agents of god, would appear in abundance. Many person's religious mentation and practices are given over to a saint, whose direct protection and assistance one feels to be superior to those services obtained from god the Father or God the Son; these latter, it seems, "are never there when you need them." The devil comes up with some or many divine qualities, almost always evil but "doing god's work," and god is often deemed helpless, even if by his own will, to rid the world of the devil. Historical and contemporary heroes, such as George Washington and the incumbent President, find themselves contending with saints for the possession of divine qualities and the performance of miracles. In sum, a great variety of gods exists in fact under the name of The God. Such people may still be called monotheistic, so long as we understand the limits of this term. Then other peoples of the world confess to more than one god. Such are the Hindus and Taoists, for instance. They need not agree, either, on the definition of he gods of their pantheon, any more than the Teutons, Greeks, or Romans would have agreed upon theirs. A peculiarity of the Hebrew religion of Moses was its very early achievement of an abstraction of the Lord which permitted an easier succession of gods (so long as integrity of a Hebrew nation was preserved). This is so despite many deviations and p polytheistic cults, and much editing of the story to stress the unity of the Lord. Not all early Hebrews were devout worshiper of Yahweh alone. Also, several rebellions against Moses were directed at his special, all-inclusive, exclusive god, Yahweh. Theologians have occasionally surmised, and correctly, I think, that Aaron, High Priest of the Jews under Moses, would have been fully tolerant of the worship of Baal, and that by Baal was indicated possibly more than one god besides Yahweh, possibly Saturn, Mercury, and Venus (to employ planetary representatives who had many parochial names.) When Korah and his followers rebelled against Moses, one of their principal complaints, which has not been fully excised from the Bible and is also the subject of legend, was his suppression of their freedom to commune directly with the Lord. One encounters the same demand among the English Levellers of the Seventeenth Century, now raised against Oliver Cromwell, their Mosaic leader of the protestant revolution against the Crown. One god, the rebels are told, means a monotheism both of god and worshiper, by authoritative definition. This other kind of anarchistic monotheism cannot be tolerated by a theocratic regime. Else every person would have his own god. Jewish legends, which should be generously interpreted in the face of the monotheistic propaganda, accord a place for religious beliefs and practice connected with the Holy Spirit, The Archangels Michael and Gabriel (both identified with planets), the Moon hosts of angels, characters out of Sheol, and the Devil. Legends speak of these entities cordially and understandingly, as well as accusingly. From these stories and the historical record, it is clear that the victory of Yahweh was never complete among the Jews, and that much of the time he was "the professional man's god," the god of priests, military officers, and most kings and judges. And so it went thereafter; the seekers and executors of "the Truth" sponsored monotheism. Moses was a scientist as well as a monotheist, I have concluded from my study of his life. Akhnaton, monotheist Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, proclaimed his slogan as Truth ma'at, and was overthrown by polytheistic priests and populace. I suspect that he derived his monotheism from the Levant where he spent his childhood, perhaps even from Israel. Polytheistic societies have had their monotheists, often connected with a free-thinking intelligentsia, akin to scientists. Thus, around 500 B. C., we find the Greek Xenophanes saying, "There is one god" (Fragment 23), and "He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole" (fragment 24). The philosophical discovery of a single god often, too, verges upon pantheism; the idea that "all things are full of gods" is not far from the idea that "god is in all things." When the Romans put down the Jewish rebellions of the first century and ultimate dispersed the population, they acted partly in order to defend the principle of extending religious rights to all gods that would tolerate other gods. This the Yahwists would not accept. Meanwhile, the Christians, having promoted the Son of Man to become the Son of God, and then to become an identity united to a redesigned Yahweh, penetrated the larger population of the Roman Empire. They were persecuted as often as not on grounds that they would not tolerate other gods or worship the divine aspects of the secular power latent in monotheism; nor could the regimes succeeding to the Empire integrate the Christian doctrine firmly into their moral and legal order. The Byzantine Empire accomplished the first unification,. Only after a tine Empire accomplished the first unification. Only after a thousand years from its legitimization, could certain western regimes quite dominate monotheism. For this triumph, they required a weakened Roman Catholic Church, a theory of divine right of monarchs, and ultimately popular nationalism that in democratic form placed god and country in the hands of the "people." There came them in government and industry the theory of centralization, carefully developed over centuries by the church and embodied in many ideas, ranking from that of papal infallibility to proofs of the existence of god built upon absolute and extreme values. Finally, monotheism could obtain support from science because science derived support from monotheism. Science has been a greater exponent and defender of monotheism than has traditional Christianity. Almost all scientists who have confessed to a religious belief have been deists, that is, believers in a god whose qualities and behavior bordered upon the laws of Nature. Nature (" herself," we note in a singular transposition of sex) tends to acquire among scientific religious believers and scientific non-believers much of the omniscience, purposefulness, immanence, transcendence, power, absoluteness, lawfulness, orderliness, and responsiveness to human goodness and sin otherwise characteristic of the single deity. There is widely believed to be only one truth, one ma'at, in science. In addition, then, to its other peculiar historical features, mosaic monotheism operates still as a vital feature in the ideological, hence structural, processes of modern religions of the Hebraic complex, in conventional bureaucratic and single headed (especially charismatic) governments, in judicial fictions (such as "finding the law"), in international politics, in science, in pedagogy, in communist (but hardly "Marxist") regimes, in tradition; philosophy as in most humanistic disciplines, and, of course, in the family. The sociological treatise whose writing we are imagining would probably conclude that some of the most powerful and pervasive influences of monotheism have been manifested in "enlightened" secularized processes of the scientific revolution of the 17th to 19th centuries and the largely secular political history of the 18th to 20th centuries. Nothing of this should surprise us. Religion, we have already explained, seeps into all things. A final comment on the effects of monotheism may be in order. Elsewhere, in Homo Schizo I and II, I explained the grave and genetic human problem of combining the several egos naturally emanating from the structure of the human mind into a single ego, "a person who can live with himselves." A percipient authority once termed the ancient Greeks schizophrenic, and central in the syndrome of their behavior was their polytheism. We can surmise that monotheism was not available to them to help "get their heads together." Further, we say that monotheism fashions a therapy for one kind of schizophrenia by creating another kind. It allows an orderly mind by pushing every object and tension onto one or the other pole - oneself or a god. In line with what we have already said of the effects and function of monotheism in society and science, we can expect from the monotheistic homo schizo a more orderly and consistent accretion of symbols and a greater psychological penchant for mental discipline and linear logical forms (as opposed to artistic, analogical and intuitive modes of thought). Monotheism thus can serve as a tool of inquiry in seeking to understand why certain groups and individuals historically and today have more disciplined minds, are logically consistent, and are superior at scientific investigation and human organization. We stress once more, however, that monotheism does not clearly distinguish religions - all being polytheistic in one or more senses - but that a belief that one is monotheistic may create special qualities in oneself. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 5: } {T LEGENDS AND SCRIPTURE} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER FIVE LEGENDS AND SCRIPTURE The biggest difference between myth or legends and sacred scriptures is that the latter are selected legends, called "divinely inspired or spoken" by their believers, which have been carefully guarded and edited to pursue the continuous but also continually changing religious goals of their custodians. Myth and legends, not so regarded, or whose line of custodians died out, were left like abandoned children to wander through time as casual history and unconstrained imagination, until caught up by scientific mythological studies. Giambattista Vico was the first modern scholar to perceive this process when, two centuries ago, he wrote: The fables in their origins were true and severe narrations, whence mythos, fable, was defined as vera narratio (a true account).. But because they were originally for the most part gross, they gradually lost their original meanings, were then altered, subsequently became improbable, after that obscure, then scandalous, and finally incredible. . . These are the seven sources of the difficulties of the fables... One of many debts that we owe to Plato is his respect for myth and legend. He, too, fulminated at those who dismissed or, worse, corrupted history by their misuse of legends. In my skeptically minded exploration of the story of the destruction of Atlantis, the attitude of Plato mitigated my doubts. Plato goes out of his way to insist that the story be taken seriously, despite its prehistoric origins. Critias, his protagonist, is given to claim repeatedly that he heard and learned the story from his grandfather as a true and exact account. Significantly, to a modern mnemologist, Critias declared that although he had forgotten much of what he had heard of the previous day's discussions, he had forgotten none of what he had learned as a child about Atlantis. The Atlantis story is generally disbelieved, yet if an educated unbeliever were to compare it with the story of the Deluge of Noah in the Bible, it would appear to be just as (im) plausible. It is no less specific. The "author" of one is Plato, of the other, Moses; who is more reliable? True, Atlantis is no longer to be found, above or below the sea, and therefore presumed not to have sunk; but the flood that climbed to great heights all over the Near East has vanished, too. Objectively, one would have to be as skeptical (and no more so) about the one account as about the other. The difference is that a great many millions of people believe in the Noachian Deluge because they believe in its sacred format, while the Atlanteans are long dead and the moral of their story - that Zeus destroyed them because he found their squabbling and vices intolerable - no longer lives in people's minds. A legend is history which has been largely unconstrained by realism and objectivity since the happenings that it describes. The boundary zone between legend and history is, of course, thickly populated. Thus, we have the well-known legend of the founding of Rome by close descendants of Aeneas, exiled prince of Troy, who settled in Latium. Many ancient scholars believed the story. Most Romans accepted it as true. The actual beginnings of the legend occur before Virgil, who related it in his epic poetry. If historical, the legend should go back to the also legendary beginnings of Rome, in the Eighth Century B. C. Then it was that Romulus and Remus, grandsons of Aeneas, built the town. But while scholars have accepted the legend's time of the founding, the Eighth Century, they have rejected the Aeneas story because the last war of Troy was placed in the Twelfth Century or earlier. However, recent studies have emptied Greek chronology of four to five centuries of time, which would permit placing Aeneas within a century of Romulus and Remus. To confirm the connection is a task of future research, but in support of it is the important fact that when faced with a collection of practically all the evidence of art, archaeology, inscriptions, stories and ancient comment about the earlier times of Rome, one finds a striking gap in the collection extending between the 13th and 8th centuries, as was manifested in the great Bimillennial Exposition of Virgiliana held at Rome in 1982. Another case of the interplay among history, legend, and scripture may be offered. It concerns the Christian Gospels of the life and work of Jesus. These are four in number, all written some years after the death of Jesus, under circumstances that have never been clear. Furthermore, as the reader will acknowledge, attitudes towards the Gospels and Jesus have ranged from the denial that he ever existed, passing through an acceptance of the Gospels as generally or exactly true, to other extreme ideas such as that Jesus was a Jewish radical rebelling against Roman rule, whose story was censored in the Gospels. Dr. Livio C. Stecchini, both an ancient historian and a historian of science, for several years before his death taught a college course on the trial of Jesus. There he developed a theory that Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and Roman statesman, was the basic source for the Gospels. His brother met Saint Paul of Tarsus when Paul was imprisoned in Rome awaiting trial and execution, and Seneca himself could have interrogated Paul at will, given his high state position. That the Stoic and Christian positions on many ethical issues were similar - more so than the Mosaic-Christian position - has been often remarked upon. That Jesus follows the birth history of many Greco-Roman heroes is manifest: His father being divine, his mother human. Seneca, said Stecchini, composed a great tragedy, later lost, and upon its manuscript and/ or performances the Gospels drew very heavily. Thus it happened, as Stecchini has elaborated, that the plot of the trial and execution, the actions of the characters, and the timing and scenes of the Gospels are framed in the traditional structure of Greco-Roman drama. As important as Stecchini's theory may be, we cannot treat it here as more than a conjecture. The conjecture, however, allows us to make a point about legend and scripture. To the studious non-believer, sacred scripture is forever the source of historiography and the analysis of myth and legend. Scripture may be dissected from as many perspectives and in as many ways as the creative and scientific mind can imagine and instrument. On the other hand, to the studious believer, sacred scripture is first of all literally true, and all that the creative mind can imagine must be consistent with the literal truth. Even if, by every empirical test that is respected by historical and natural science, Jesus were deemed to have never existed (an unlikely prospect), the believer can continue to believe in the holiness of his mundane being and therefore in the literalness of the gospels, just as the Roman Catholic believer asserts in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the veritable body and blood of Christ in the Holy Communion. What we should then, by scientific standards, possess would be an entirely fictional and mythical complex contained in identical form in millions of cerebro-neural systems governing a host of behaviors. The reality of these systems and behaviors cannot and would not be disputed by science. Science would say, here we have a purely delusional system to accompany the larger delusional system that is a mixture of history, legend, myth, and non- reality known as the Old Testament or Mosaic system. And if all of the Old Testament were empirically disproved (also very unlikely), the scientist would then retire to the same position, namely treating the total New Testament - Old Testament complex as a purely delusional system with behavioral consequences. Myth may be defined as a religious and aesthetic interpretation or story based upon legend and history. Its goal is to serve essentially non-historic functions while reminding its audience of a significant historical happening. Myth is closely related to rituals and sacrifices, which have the same goal, but, like sacred scriptures, are under severe theocratic constraints. Myth is often indistinguishable from legend, but this occurs in part because the original culture to which a myth and legend belonged no longer exists to explain to us the difference between the two; myths and legends intermingle in a flow through time which we experience much later and find indistinctly composed of both. The famous myth of Phaeton, who drives the Sun's chariot, burns up the Earth, and is destroyed by a thunderbolt of Zeus, is by common standards today an entertaining myth, but appears upon investigation more and more as a legend supporting an historical intrusion of a cometary body upon the Earth's atmosphere. Sacred scripture consists of authoritative prescriptions of various compounds of legend and myth, frequently describing rites and commands for their recital, together with moral judgments. All legends and myths of the most ancient kind contain some sacred quality, but scriptures enhance sacrality by ascribing their own origin to divine or divinely authorized sources. Debating sacred scriptures is deemed to be arguing with god, which is not only useless but sacrilegious as well. One effect of this view is to allow only such discussions and research whose intended effects are to prove the scriptures correct in morals, rites, and history. This situation is antithetic to scientific method, which permits only hypotheses, never absolute and eternal truth. Nevertheless it often happens that believers in holy scriptures, when justifying and proving them, cast many bones from their campfires into the darkness where the jackals of science prowl. The very insistence of literal Biblicists has driven scholars to test the authenticity of some reported events, thereupon to learn to their surprise that these can in fact be confirmed. One of these was the dropping of manna among the hungry Israelites in the desert. Fitting precisely the details provided in the Bible and legendary sources to the conditions under which manna-like confections could be manufactured - electrical discharges, high temperatures, strange atmospheric gases, molecular compounding, etc. - a considerable degree of confirmation can be accorded to the Biblical story, enough to swing the scientific balance in its direction. Once more, however, I would stress that by proving the capability of natural causes to have produced the Biblical "miracle," ordinary science erodes sacred scripture. It removes Yahweh from the manufacturing process and the product, and tends to make him a deistic god, that is, an ultimate cause or designer of manufacturing machinery. Here, to be sure, Yahweh is still very close to events, according to Moses. But we recall that Moses is under suspicion of hallucinating; that is; another science, psychology, is working to erode the sacredness of the scripture, even while providing another form of natural explanation which authenticates in its own way the actions and speech conveyed in the scripture. Sacred scriptures will always contain a high proportion of vague, indecipherable, incomprehensible, contradictory, and substantially untestable material. They will also have lost much, as historiographic methodology increasingly shows, owing to the alteration and accidents of their form of transmission, through cultural miscegenation, by reconciliation of older history with later history, by imposition of patterns of integration and new styles, by the collective amnesia that seeks both to forget actually and recall symbolically the traumas provoked in terrible ancient catastrophes, and by other changes in referents to accommodate ancient to present conditions, as a comet becoming a star, or as invisible electrical discharges which are now referred to as purely symbolic manifestations. Therefore there are limits to the scientificity that can be granted to the Rig Vedas, Bible, Eddas, Book of the Dead, I Ching, Popul Vuh, and other scriptures. Nor can it benefit the credibility and influence of believers in sacred scriptures to be relegated by general consent, including their own, to the nonsensical remnants of the works. For example, many Biblical scholars refuse to employ or give credence to Talmudic commentaries and ancient legends of the Jews, when these documents will often testify to the authenticity of Biblical statements and elaborate them in a way that enhances their credibility. Ominous conclusions emerge from these several pages. There is much history in myth, legend and scripture everywhere in the world. In a sense, all religions are desperately honest in their fundamental statements. Yet it is appreciated that, in a memory choice between a delusion and an historical fact, a religion will prefer the delusion. An attempt to "clean up" an historical religion by eliminating historical and empirical errors cannot succeed. Meanwhile we affirm that a religion cannot subsist on delusions alone: it must make historical and empirical statements. Are we to believe then that historical religion must be abandoned? We are not yet ready to answer this question. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 6: } {T RITUAL AND SACRIFICE} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SIX RITUAL AND SACRIFICE The Spanish conquistadors were appalled when they came upon extensive human sacrifices and cannibalism in Aztec Mexico some five centuries ago, and they killed an unnecessarily large number of this "master race" in the name of Jesus Christ. The bones were thrown to the dogs, which the Aztecs also liked to eat. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand people were being killed and eaten annually, about one percent of the population of the whole region. It is argued by a student of the subject, Michael Harner, that this increment of meat went far toward making up for a serious protein deficiency in the Aztec diet. When asked the reason for the sacrifices, which were conducted always with religious rituals, the Aztec spokesmen replied that the god managing the Sun depended on them. If the sacrifices were suspended, the Sun would not rise and set, and this glorious Age of the Sun would terminate in chaos. So quite aside from the matter to dietary protein, the stability of the cosmos was at stake. There had to be here, as elsewhere, a religious justification for cannibalism and human sacrifice. The Spaniards were not impressed by this argument. They by now had many centuries of experience in confining their sacred cannibalism to the body and blood of Christ, which they absorbed whenever they partook of Holy Communion, which, if they were devout, ought to have been daily. The authority for this was Jesus Christ himself, as confirmed by no less than Saint Paul. This ritual sacrifice and cannibalism sufficed, and does to this day among the majority of Christendom. Nor did the Spaniards sacrifice animals, or even slaughter them ritually, which the ancient Jews, who almost always avoided any semblance of human sacrifice, faithfully performed according to the precepts of the Old Testament, and the Muslim followed suit. No culture has been free of cannibalism in its history, nor are most religions that profess gods fully exempted today. Apparently cannibalism touches upon some vital nerve center of historical religion. Else there would be only the onetime universal practice, which would have been stopped, and there would not have continued the substituted sacrifice and eating of animals nor the complicated symbolic sublimations whereby at the same moment religious believers both eat and do not eat human flesh. There has never been anything but sacred cannibalism except in dire life emergencies, such as occur now and then. Actually it is easier to understand why cannibalism originated and flourished than why it has been severely constrained and, in some god-supporting religions, abandoned. Cannibalism, like killing others of his kind, is spontaneously human. It is a product of the set of mechanisms that generate when the self-aware, self-fearing human first appears. Seeing his alter ego in himself, he sees himself in other. He is continuously seeking to assimilate himself; he seeks to assimilate himself in others. The identification with others is but a prelude to empowering himself by his ingestion of others. One does the same with the gods, here abetted in one's actions by the perceived behavior of the gods. The gods are frequently cannibalistic, he thinks. Gods fall to Earth or are cast down to Earth or are cast down to Earth and are devoured. Gods encounter one another electrically in meteoritic and cometary forms in the sky, are split up, are attracted and repelled. When Giorgio di Santillana comments on the "baffling" bloody battles of the gods in Mesopotamian legends, he might as well have spoken of all legend and of the cannibalism of the gods. It may always be moot whether men got their ideas of warfare, sacrifice, and cannibalism from the gods. They say so in holy writings, but who can trust sacred scripture and get a degree in astronomy without being as contradictory as the gods themselves? A decline in celestial divine struggles and in the horrendous fears incited thereby in humans may explain why cannibalism has declined. The less fearful the human, the less inclined to sacrifice and the lesser the oblation. Man, it may be said to his credit, drives a hard bargain with his gods. The Aztec-Nahua rites were the last large-scale frank cannibalistic exercises, although small populations in Africa and Oceania pursued such practices until this century, and, from time to time, cannibalism is reported in chaotic and deprived human settings, as in Germany during the Thirty Years' war of the 16th century and in Cambodia during the terrible Indochinese wars of the mid-twentieth century. Yet the Aztecs were two thousand years removed from what we suggested were prime catastrophic motivators of cannibalism. So far as we know, the latest universal catastrophes brought on by exoterrestrial forces were in the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ. Later, however, Mexico and Central America were subjected to extremely heavy volcanism (related, we think, to the earlier exoterrestrial episodes) with clouds of ashes that darkened the days and obscured the sun. None can scientifically estimate the duration of memories. Many of today's customs go back thousands of years, indeed probably to the very first men, so obdurate and obsessive is the transmission of collective experience. With occasional heavy disasters and appropriate mythology, a people can behave in the ways of their remote ancestors. None can deny that some of the Israelis of today see themselves as reenacting the scenes of the Israeli conquest of Palestine of 3400 years ago. Prime Minister Begin was himself a "Moses buff" who enjoyed greatly long discussions about "those days" with other members of the "Club." Yet he appeared to all the world as a substantially secular figure, operating efficiently amidst high Twentieth Century technology. Although anti-religious in a conventional sense, but professing a racial credo claimed to be consistent with ancient Teutonic legend, the Nazis of Germany between 1942-5 consigned millions of European Jews of all shades of religious belief to death by methodical gassing and burning. They murdered many millions of other Europeans, too. The routine, almost automatic procedures used for most of this holocaust, and the absence of traditional religious rituals in its execution, seem to remove it from the scope of religious study. No conventional religion would tolerate such conduct. Still, the initial impulse, in Hitler and other Nazis, was that of "purification of the race" and the creation of a new master race (" chosen people") to rule the world. Nor did Hitler's status rank below that of the divine heroes of legend; his book, Mein Kampf, was given to newly-wed couples in place of the Bible. The rituals frequently staged by the Nazi rulers of Germany were as spectacular and soul- stirring as any in history. The holocaust, however, was not a matter of public spectacle and in this regard was a source of sacrificial strengthening in the minds of some thousands who directly participated in the killings. One might venture that these were special ceremonies reserved for the Nazi priesthood. There is small chance that the Nazi genocides would have stopped with the Jews. Gypsies were already suffering the same fate. The treatment meted out to civil populations in Eastern Europe teetered on the brink of genocide. If the Nazis had won World war II, there would have been ample opportunity to extend the holocaust in East Europe, Asia and Africa; a successful cleansing genocide of six millions might readily extend to sixty million, or until some historical accident would happen to stop the process. Sacrifice and anthropophagy are still in the religions of a billion people and in the everyday life of almost totally secularized billions. The typical American follows the secular rules of eating, being very early in life told, "Don't just shove the food into your mouth." We are advised that "it is bad to eat between meals," we are told to "wash before coming to the table," to "set the table properly," to dress decently for dinner, eat the proper foods in the proper order, to serve foods in the proper order (' no dessert before the meat'), that father carves the meat, to leave a bit on the plate, to observe decorum at the table, and, in lesser numbers, to pray before every meal." There are a hundred or more such typical rules of etiquette, rationalized as prophylaxis, "consideration for the feelings of others," and other particular explanations involving breeding and health. But there also were and are rules, of course, for the genteel cannibal, and well-educated sacrificer. The proverbial Englishman who used to dress for solitary dinner in the jungle was doing his part to hold the universe (and his own mind) intact. It was, of course, a joke when Cathedral Dean Jonathan Swift, viewing Ireland's dismal economic state in 1792, sardonically recommended that the poor sell their babies to the rich for eating. Slater, a careful scholar of the Greek mind, thought the Greeks more mad than other peoples. Especially did they dwell in their myth upon parents eating their children. This he blamed upon the fathers for putting down the mothers, who thus, in fancy at least, revenged themselves pedophagously. The children of Alsace are treated around Christmas time (at the feast of Saint Nikolaus, December 6th), to cookies in the shapes of children distributed by Saint Nikolaus (Santa Claus) who is accompanied by Rubezahl, a gigantic man in a mask and cloak, a late impersonation of Wotan, and who can best be identified with Saturn, as indeed can Santa Claus. The one gives the imaged cookies to the good children; the other menaces the bad children. It should be recalled that infant sacrifices and cannibal rites to Saturn survived well into Christian times; in the present rites, unconscious of origins, the ancient rites are sublimated more or less in playfulness. Ritual is prominently displayed in matters having to do with alimentation. But it covers all aspects of religion, therefore all aspects of life. There is a rule for everything. Man, deprived of instinct, is a habit-former, an obsessional creature. Not only is his language founded upon obsessive reiteration, not only are his dietary manners as well, but likewise his sexual, affectional, social, agricultural, industrial, physical, and learning behavior. In all of these regards, religion and ritual come in the beginning of human existence and remain forever. If religion persists despite the extensive and eroding process known as secularization, or rationalization, or pragmatization, it will do so logically in the centers of life prone to chaos and accident. That is, religious rites focus upon and persist in the fearful and catastrophe-prone areas and, as from a lantern, diffuse their light perceptibly and gradually into the secular. For instance, baptism, ceremonializing the creation of new life in the world is a critical juncture, hence persistently ritualized; the Christian Baptists, who are relatively non- ritualistic and even anti-ritualistic, nevertheless are insistent that baptism into the church should occur by total immersion of the freely consenting new member in water to signify death of the old life and rebirth in the new. Baptism in a church is general among the French, even though the population has abandoned almost all rituals of the Roman Catholic Christian religion. Early Christian leaders believed that they had found in the Deluge of Noah the ultimate precedent and model for baptism, which repeats for each "saved" initiate the end of the wicked world and the entrance into a new epoch. Rituals are centered upon the creation of the world and man, upon the first time everything was done, upon catastrophic breakdowns of an age and the beginning of new ages, and upon the rites de passage of human life - - birth, maturation, marriage, and death. Filling in as important subcategories of these are such features of human existence as warfare, where the gods are the models and the gods "Bless our weapons," as the Kaiser of Germany (and many others) once prayed. Celebrations of cosmic breakdown are a feature of the focusing of rites upon controlling the world against chaos, as in the case of the Aztecs. The New Year is ignored by no culture, because it stands for the end of one age and the beginning of another; the usual rationalizations are afforded, that harvests are now gathered, that the calendar now repeats itself, etc. Nonetheless, beneath the considerable excitement, stirs the anxiety that the year may not repeat itself, the sun may not turn backwards to reenact the seasons, that once upon a time the world went out of control and could not provide assurances of the repetition of its orderly cycles. The bacchanalia were orgies named for Bacchus or Dionysus, a god, reputed to have traveled the world with a wild troop of both sexes, carrying wands and serpents, acting out a mad composition of dancing, drinking, battling, sacrificing, cannibalism, and feasting. Regular and sporadic orgies, patterned upon the mythology, persisted for centuries before Christ until the Roman Senate with some success banned them for their flagrant challenge to morality and political order. The crimes attributed to Dionysus were infinite, yet he received a place on the Olympian council of gods, replacing the gentle Hestia, according to one legend. Dionysus was a sky- god, perhaps originally an errant and destructive comet; the orgiastic behavior accompanying him resembles the kinds of social disorder that have been historically reported upon the fear-inspiring apparition of cometary bodies. The saturnalia of the Greco-Roman world are more precisely applicable to prehistoric events, when the god Saturn was allegedly overturned in a revolt of his wife and children, particularly Jupiter. The last days of the year are regarded as the period when chaos begins, and the new year is seen as the coming of a new age. Even if, as the result of successive calendar reforms, the Saturnalia finally no longer coincided with the end and the beginning of the year, they nevertheless continued to mark the abolition of all norms and, in their violence, to illustrate an overturning of values (e. g. exchange of condition between masters and slaves, women treated as courtesans) and a general license, an orgiastic modality of society, in a word a reversion of all forms to indeterminate unity. So says Mircea Eliade. Types of saturnalia are found throughout the ancient world - - the Middle East, the Mediterranean, China, Japan, and tribal societies of America. The Hebrew religion is not excepted, according to Santillana and von Dechend. And they continue in many places today. Eliade merges the saturnalia with creation myths. This is contra-indicated by his own evidence. The catastrophe of Saturn and the end of its Golden Age involves the destruction of a preexisting, ante-deluvian, "old world," and therefore comes long after the original creation. The dramaturgy of the Babylonian Akitu Festival is illustrative of "the abolition of lost time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act." The god Marduk slays the dragon of chaos, Tiamat, and creates the cosmos from the fragments of its body, including man from the blood of a demonic ally of Tiamat. In the chaos all social forms are confounded, as in the Roman Saturnalia. It is probable that both creation and recreation are handled together in the drama; that is, Marduk (Jupiter) is in a sense a creation god but the Babylonians and Sumerians had older more authentic creation gods; Marduk would be, let us way, a recreation god. Eliade implicitly grants this, when, in discussing the Akitu drama, he adds, "The creation of the world... is thus retroactualized each year," and, a little later, "the hierogamy is a concrete realization of the 'rebirth' of the world and man." Eliade tends to force all celebrations and rites into illo tempore, "those first great days." He has made an important contribution to the theory of the history of religions by assembling from all over the world evidence of the obsessive reiteration in human activities of the earliest days of mankind. However, he scarcely considers whether real events lay behind this compulsive return to origins of all peoples, a mechanism exactly consonant with Sigmund Freud's mechanism of compulsive reenactment of traumas. Freud, when he essays to explain the origins of the mechanism, postulates a primordial social crisis among the hominids whereby the "father" is killed by the "brothers" of a horde to gain access to the females whom the "father" monopolized; this theory is so weak, as I have shown elsewhere, as not to deserve treatment here. Eliade does not offer a theory to explain compulsive repetition of chaos and creation, the most prominent of all ritual behavior. He quotes lines from Jensen's Mythes et Cultes chez les peuples primitifs that call out to the original events: "The sacrilege of not having remembered is logically expiated by remembering with special intensity. And because of its special meaning, blood sacrifice is a particularly intense 'reminder' of this sort." Perhaps relevant as well is an inscription of the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Seti I: "The Light God Ra said: 'You are forgiven your sins. The slaughtered victims remit your extinction. ' Such is the origin of the sacrifice of victims." The shocking psychic fear associated with human creation and the terrors of the active sky can be combined to explain why mankind has persisted, openly or beneath many kinds of subliminatory activities, in reenacting the earliest scenes. But the general catastrophes were several, accounting for the succession of gods, whereas the creation trauma was singular and unique. The human has been responding not only to the successive natural catastrophes which, of course were also treated as recreations. In racial memory the traumas blend over time. It is noteworthy that they have not entirely merged, with all distinction erased, but they have apparently merged enough so that on the one hand the historian and theorist Eliade does not separate them chronologically, and so that on the other hand most creationist scholars who hold to a literal interpretation of Biblical history are preoccupied with the Deluge of Noah, seeing it as the unique catastrophe that sculpted the face of the Earth. Mankind, in bursting forth upon the Earth, experienced catastrophe, and thereafter was confirmed in his catastrophized memory by a succession of natural catastrophes. His global sense of the sacred, a sense that Otto and others have described as ambivalent feelings of fearful danger and creative power, expanded with each quantavolution of nature and relaxed between the age-breaks. Rituals are attempts at close encounters with the gods. They are a primary instrument for controlling oneself and the environment as the gods approach. We find the formula quite clearly perceived by theologians who refer to the sacrifice as the use of an intermediary, the oblation, to communicate between the mundane and the divine. "Sacrifice is ... offered to a divinity in order to establish, maintain or restore a right relationship of man to the sacred order," thus writes R. L. Flaherty in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on sacrifice. The means of ritually controlling the gods (for "communication" conveys the subservient theological mood more than it does the aggressive political mood) can be analyzed. They are scarcely exotic, though often esoteric. First, man behaves in imitation of the gods. This is in every sense the same as the behavior of the child with respect to his adult guardian and model. It is intended to gather in oneself the strength of the god, and at the same time disarm the god from directing aggression to him. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," as the saying goes. So, if the god fights, the man fights. If the god rages, man rages. If the god bestows generous gifts, so does the man. And so on. Appeasement of the god's proven potential for aggression against his very worshiper, as well as his enemies, takes many forms. Giving of one's most valued possessions is the most appropriate sacrifice. All manner of bribery, solicitations (it must be discovered what the god wants, even if by trial and error), prostitution (whether as vestal virgins or as temple harlots) - - these are common gifts. Nor does worshipful man stop short of trickery. That god knows what one thinks does not prevent the most ludicrous practicality and flamboyant excesses. "It can't hurt to perform the rites." Do this and that, not because it is right in the eyes of god, but "lest you die;" ritual is to be performed, not understood, nor does it matter to understand. The important thing is to obey the command. Miserliness is common too: "We are not sacrificing at all to Awwaw this year, since rain has fallen early," remarked an Iyala priest of Nigeria, quoted by Paul Radin. Much of ritual therefore is a kind of tactical game to exploit the gods. The human encountering god is thrown into a panic, He often overcompensates and contradicts his own view of god as all-wise . He will stop at nothing to be on the right side of his god - never mind inconsistencies, preserving other life values, and saving a personal relationship. It is the politics of absolute autocracy to some, to others the politics of a monarchical court with its courtiers, to still others a two-person game, intensely personal. Without a theory of origins and earliest history it is perhaps impossible to say whether man modeled kingship upon gods or gods upon kings, Whether rituals were practiced among men and them upon gods, or vice versa. Our particular theory here would make kingship and politics initially religious and soon afterwards transferred into a partially secular sphere, there ultimately to be pragmatized and secularized. Later one could have a secular republic such as the U. S. A. or France, highly ritualized with specific rules excluding religion from the rituals. Finally one would arrive at the Marxist republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and others, where the very permission of religious ritual is viewed as an anomalous and temporary concession. Consistent with its denial of religious ritual, religious faith and revelations are treated as mental aberrations. Religion without ritual is fear without defenses. Secularism without ritual must be the same. The suppression of supernatural belief does not eradicate the existential fear of man but only its referents - gods, spirits, etc. The French Revolution after 1789 burst upon both the political regime and the church. Churches were seized, the clergy laicized. A great Feast of the Supreme Being was inaugurated, conducted on the Champ de Mars in Paris. It is clear that the Supreme Being was Reason and Nature. Some churches were rededicated as temples to the Goddess Reason, who was sometimes represented by a pretty girl. New rituals were improvised to replace the old ones. Numerous writers have pointed out that the supernatural is actually irrepressible and finds it way into astrology, "life in other worlds," " the unexplained" (an enlarging, logically boundless area), and the like. Furthermore, the religious finds its way into the divinization of political heroes - - "St. Karl Marx," "Comrade Mao," the entombed and preserved Lenin, the charismatic leader Mussolini, or de Gaulle, or Franklin Roosevelt, or Gandhi, et al. We offer no argument against this line of reasoning. A religion of the supernatural, of faith and of revelation can be educed from such secular social phenomena. We would only wish to supplement them. There may be a reciprocal growth in secular ritual to accompany the loss of religion and its ritual. Two phenomena accompanying modern secularization display conspicuous growth, and may be surrogates for ritual. One is bureaucracy, the other centralization. The two are interconnected: the logic of bureaucracy tends to centralization. The logic of centralization demands bureaucracy. One sees the shadow of religion and ritual in the two. The French Revolution, anti-religious, gave a great boost to centralized bureaucracy throughout the world. Centralization is a search for a central truth and law toward which all procedures may be directed. Bureaucracy supplies the procedures. Large-scale armies, mass media, huge building complexes, human and computerized industrial giants, mass transportation, global planning - - all of these supply, whatever else they provide (and religion once supplied a distribution system for food out of sacrifices) reiterative, compulsive (compulsory, too), routinized activities lending a feeling of awe and security to those whom they engage and serve. The idea of "efficiency" is offered frequently as a purely secular notion, an activity that can be carried on without a hint of the supernatural or the rite. In the first place, "efficiency" like "god" is all things to all people, hence is not to be accepted as meaningful at face value. Efficiency as a reduction of activity (energy) between two points (from "here" to a goal) to a minimum is flagrantly contradicted by bureaucracy. Efficiency seemingly contradicts sacrifice and ritual, superstition and magic, but actually religious ritual can and has been over the ages consistently intended to be efficient. The idea is not new; it is only aimed at different goals. One can be sure that ancient priests worked continuously to increase the efficiency of fires on altars. The orders, rules, and laws, practically all now in written form, which pour out of the ruling organizations of the world take up many thousands of large volumes a year. Is this not ritualized behavior? It secures those involved from the nagging fear of existence, acting as a lifeline for the weak psyche to grasp. The summary effect of this overwhelming flood of order is to tell people what they must do and how to go about doing it, in the sacred written word of authority. Gone for most modern people is the lifeline of religious ritual; in its place is secular ritual. We think of the novels of Franz Kafka (The Castle, Amerika) and of George Orwell (1984) to illustrate our point. It is untrue, although Dostoevski wrote so in The Brothers Karamazov, and one hears it often said, that "if God doesn't exist, everything is allowed." After all, is it not said of the great Soviet State that "Whatever is not forbidden is compulsory"? The problem is too large for discussion here. I mean merely to add for consideration that the secularized world has a rich and abundant ritual, as well as secular divinities, charismatic experiences, and supernatural "pastimes" that are more serious than religion to their practitioners. The modern secular child knows more rules than the ancient religious child. And so, too, the adult of this world today. At some stage hereafter we must contrast the two modes of life and evaluate them. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 7: } {T MAN'S DIVINE MIRROR} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER SEVEN MAN'S DIVINE MIRROR No god is the same to any two people, nor to any two sects. This is a psychological fact, akin to saying that no two people share the same experience. It would be a more definitive statement if the gods existed in no other realm except the minds of people. It also relates to the fact that no two delusions or hallucinations are alike, although especially when a group happens to hallucinate the same image - - an angel, say or unidentified flying object - - the description may be close, and when a mass of separate hallucinations is analyzed statistically, one does obtain averages and types. When two people discuss a similar religious experience - a visual revelation of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, say - one can statistically adumbrate shared social and psychic features of the people that tend to qualify them for the experience, such as a deficient formal education, erratic and disturbed personal backgrounds, and so on. Cases where a team of scientific observers, warned and trained to be objective, are rushed to the scene to corroborate the vision are rare. Even were such to occur, the new (and probably negative) evidence would have to be dismissed on grounds that the preparation for objective identification would necessarily incapacitate the team to share the experience. If the two people had seen a monster in the Sewanee River and called it a dragon and the team had hastened in with cameras and nets, an alligator of a certain size might be captured and the vision placed upon a firm scientific footing. It would not be surprising, then, if the original viewers claimed an improper identification, insisting that the wrong creature had been snared. Whereupon psychologists would once more be called upon. That gods are often snares and delusions must be admitted. Yet the occurrence of the delusions, we have implied, takes on patterns evocative of actual events and of common mechanisms of the analyzed human mind. Natural expressions of high energy occur in cometary approaches to Earth, deluges of water and other material from the skies, anomalous intensifications of heat and cold by conflagration or sudden icing on a large scale, simultaneous large scale volcanism, and otherwise. Much evidence goes to show more of such catastrophes in ancient and prehistoric times than over the past 2500 years. We say that the more frequent these occurrences and the greater their intensity, the more that gods appear and the more religious humanity becomes. If these be called gods insofar as they are apparitions and because of their enormous effects, then there is a real historical reason why mankind once was much more religious than now. Geology and archaeology can demonstrate (with much more research than they are inclined to provide) the actual basis for enhanced early religion. Psychology and the history of religion can show how the religious mind has expectedly peaked in these actual stress periods and subsided when the strains relaxed. Practically all historians of religions of religion and renowned modern theologians have accepted evolutionary theories of cultural development in describing religious history. Even Henri Bergson who spoke of a "discontinuous evolution which proceeds by bounds" saw this progressive achievement of higher forms of behavior against the backdrop of an unchanging natural scenery. To all of such thinkers, religion must have progressed out of a rational advancement of humanity (even though Bergson credits mysticism with innovation in religion). That is, rationally evolving man creates ever more rational religion. Without correcting the human mental infrastructure, they have placed an ever heavier superstructure upon man, not knowing that when man has assumed the burden of what they term rational behavior, it is because natural conditions have allowed him to do so, and that this happened as much or more during the Golden Age of Saturn as during any period of modern times. Horses have not become smarter; horses have not; how should man have done so without a proven physiological alteration of his mind? If one wishes to animate the ancient apparitions (metaphorically or delusionally) and assign the fantastically great natural events to interventions of the gods, defining gods as "whatsoever can produce such effects," and further goes on to distinguish and assign gods to the different effects of, say, air, fire, water, and earth, there can be no logical objection. So long as one does not proceed beyond the evidence to impute motives, make misleading classification, and imagine an organization of the cosmos, none of which can be even partly demonstrated, the gods of nature can be said to exist as truly as "democracy" or an "infinite regression series." Here is where mankind gets into trouble with the scientific authorities of anthropology and psychology: it assigns a great many undemonstrable qualities to the gods and spirits. Then, hardly pausing, it fashions such qualities into a mirror of man, which like the mirror in the fairy tale of Snow White, so long as Snow White is sleeping, always tells the ugly Queen that she is beautiful. The mirror lies. We can make two principal statements and several dependent propositions about the Divine Mirror of Man: first, all human qualities are found among the gods; second, divine organization portrays a reorganization of the human mind. To demonstrate that every human quality has been sometime, somewhere, and even frequently, a divine quality requires hardly more than a list of references on the history of religion and anthropology. Let the reader make the test himself; let him try to think of any human action or trait, no matter how trivial or significant, which a god does not exhibit. The humans build a great tower to reach the sky. Very well, the gods have already their sky- topping mountains, their cosmic trees, their pillars of heaven, and many sacred paths by which souls can ascend and angels descend. When the constructions threaten the gods, the gods destroy them. So it happened with the giants who piled Ossia upon Pelion to reach Zeus, who, however, overthrew everything, and as happened with the Tower of Babel, which the Hebrew Lord sent crashing by lightning and quaking. But this is a sublime challenge, someone may object; an ordinary act is not divine, for example, excretion. But urine is a word from Uranus who copiously watered the earth in earliest times; and gold is the excrement of the gods to some people, perhaps remembering vaguely an exoterrestrial fall-out of the precious metal. Is the god assembled anthropomorphically? The implication, even when not stated explicitly in sacred scriptures and legend, is that all of the traits of the divine do amount to a creature not unlike man. That Elohim created man in his or their image is, of course, a direct statement of the Hebrew Genesis, and if one were to compose a physiological mosaic from all references to Yahweh, the mosaic would evolve to look like Moses and act like him, including how Moses would like to have acted. The Divine Mirror, it seems, is more perfect than the gazer. For it contains all of his qualities and all of his dreams and desires. Sometimes these are contradictory, but the mirror finds a solution. It may show a god with devilish features, or a god who is both female and male. Does it ever show a god who is both brave and fearful? Often; despite the fact that fear creates gods who are afraid of other gods, afraid of themselves, or mistrustful of their worshiper, this last being a kind of fear that drives gods (as it does men) to excesses of all kinds. So, indeed did the Lord behave toward Job, when the Devil drove him to be suspicious of his devoted and good worshipper. In an early work, C. J. Jung wrote an Answer to Job where brilliantly but in a fundamentally naive form, he hints that man is too clever for God. "It were better," however, "not to wax too conscious of this slight moral superiority over the more unconscious God." One notes the marvelous schizoid behavior of the human, Job, when he is trying to control God. The making of the ambivalent god and them the controlling of him becomes the greatest work of man. God suspects and is jealous of the game that man is playing, a contradiction-in- contradiction, mirror in a mirror in a mirror, contra-contra-contradiction, which the schizoid can continue indefinitely, always one step ahead of God. In the story of Job, one finds the full range of schizophrenic conduct, including the creation of the Lord as the preferred instrument for working out human delusions. I trace the schizotypical character of the human race in other books. Significantly, wherein lies at least his early naivete, Jung separately focuses his research upon Job and then upon schizophrenia. In the story of Job and God we even locate a tendency of humans to make of gods what they would make of themselves if they could, a kind of unreflective healthy instinctive animal, rid of the curse of self-awareness - - though this same self-awareness is the only true mark of the human and the source of god as mirror of man. Usually, it is declared that the gods are not like man, because they possess an infinity of virtues. But who is to say what is virtue, except man-bound-in-culture? And what are the traits that appear infinite in the Divine Mirror but extensions of the valued traits of mankind. Even philosophers, and certainly theologians, submit to the dictates of mirroring when they accept the challenge of defining gods, and thereupon they say god is omni-this and omni-that : omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnicreative, omnivalent, all-loving, absolutely just, and so on, setting, to be sure, on precisely those qualities that man has and wants much more of: power, respect, affection, wealth, skill, and knowledge. To win a debate over whether all divinity that man can know is anthropomorphic hardly needs empirical evidence. So logical is the proposition, that it is probably tautology. That is, granted that man can only know by an extension of himself, the self becomes the model of the real, and no trait can be imagined that is not already present in humanity. Therefore, in the anthropo-centric sense, all divinity must be anthropomorphic. In the days when gods were rampaging upon the Earth, theology was close to the disaster- ridden life of the people, naming and describing the fulsome operations of the divine forces, transmitting direct commands from above, concocting rites, and letting out the chains of fear carefully into sublimatory and practical behavior. When the gods remove themselves somewhat, the chains are slackened. Language, symbols, and myth are allowed to bury memories deeper. Religion becomes less depictive and denotative, more general and abstract. Finally, philosophy is freed to play about the sacred and rationalize the cosmos. The gods of the philosophers are mirrored. "An otiose God, then, surveying unmoved 'this dusty, fuliginous chaos, ' is the residuum of all this furious apostrophising." So wrote once Frederic Harrison. We find that the most ancient people - and we are not told how -- knew that the planet Jupiter had bands and the planet Saturn had rings. Probably they witnessed them directly and more closely than at any time until the year 1659 A. D when scientists observed them by telescope. By the time of Plato, several centuries before Christ, this knowledge was perhaps only present in legend, and was part of the legend that has the god Zeus Jupiter overthrowing his father, the god Kronos-Saturn, and binding him to prevent his return to power (and thus bring further destruction upon the world). The knowledge comes to us via the works of the platonic philosopher, Proclus, eight hundred years later( ca. 410-1485 A. D.). Proclus, in startling clear language, but philosophical language, tells us that Jupiter, mighty and powerful, the supreme intellect of the universe, bringer of law and order to the world, asserts his own reason upon the world by putting the also perfect intellect of Saturn under bonds. Then, because Jupiter is logical and just, he binds himself, too, so that he also will be subject to his own ordering principles. As I proceeded elsewhere to trace the development, the statements of Proclus exemplify how a primordial real experience becomes anaesthetized by its traumatic effects on humans; it is forgotten as direct experience. Yet it is remembered obsessively in the form of a religious creation legend, and then the suppressed memory and the legend are subliminated one more step into philosophy where they are used to express concepts of divine rule and natural law. The new ideas still give relief to the deep hidden anxieties over the horrible warfare of the gods, and they promote respect for human government and laws, which, it is said, are and should be modeled upon the behavior of the gods. The nature of the gods is geared into the nature of religious organization. The jealous Yahweh of Moses was not the syncretistic, confederational, religious organization closely similar to the imperial, bureaucratic, secular-dominated, religious organization of Solomon. Forms of religious organization have been many, no two quite alike as we are prone to say. This, too, is a Mirror of Man. From the organization of spirits-shaman-tribal culture to the organization of the Holy-Trinity-priesthood-Roman Catholic world religion, variation is endless. The descent of secular organizations from theocratic ones is well marked. For instance, the 13th century forms of political representation in England and elsewhere owed much to the representative convocations of the Dominican Order of the centuries preceding. Where not well-delineated, the lines of descent are concocted, In the 17th century, the Stuart line of England was "demonstrated" to go back to Adam, the First Man, and the divine right of monarchy was sustained. We might begin at the earliest age, and go on for many pages listing the religious structural forms and their secular descendants. Suffice to say here that the secular forms, so far removed from the primordial religious ones, are nevertheless still "sky-struck." Stars and totems adorn their banners; the right and the left factions stem from the Saturnian Throne in the sky; the official secular calendars are largely religious in origin; the American dollar portrays ancient Egyptian cosmology; parades, processions, decorations, robes and a multitude of rituals precede and accompany officers even after they swear an oath, in which "So help me God" may be absent but the pledge is as symbolically complete and solemn. Celestially or mundanely, man is operating with the same mental mechanisms and their external social extrusions. Symbolizing, displacements, identifications, memory, obsession, cognitive disorders, aversion to others - these psychic movements (were they not mostly unconscious, they would be called maneuvers or tactics) are all directed at handling fearfulness, and function in both religious and secular contexts. They are expressed in habitual, orgiastic, catatonic, and sublimatory behavior, which again have religious and secular counterparts. The reader may have remarked that these mechanisms and expressions are schizoid and, if practiced in full conflict with the customs of one's group, would amount to a full-blown case of schizophrenia. The human is naturally schizotypus - I call him homo sapiens schizotypus elsewhere - whether speaking of religious man or secular man; when an individual diverges from the peculiar schizotypicality of his culture, he is identified as schizophrenic. We would stress how much our view contrasts with the conventional approach, which analyzes the human as a rational individual with egoistic impulses who is struggling to reconcile these with social or altruistic demands. The distinction between self and society is itself a socially imposed distinction as it is presented, say, by Henri Bergson or the English utilitarians (whom he assails). The distinction is ex post facto. The factum is the schizotypical mechanisms mentioned above. These are what set into motion the operating religious and secular person. The "social" is immediately part of the person; it arises from the original gestalt of creation of the human species and in the birth and development of every person thereafter. The experience of all peoples has been generally the same, intense ecological stresses anciently operating upon a divided, fearful mind. To say therefore that gods are "good" and men are "evil" makes anthropological history impossible, theoretically or as fact. We have already said that gods, relatively or crossculturally considered, display all "evils" and all "goods". It matters relatively, not absolutely, that the burden of good and evil is shifted to certain different gods, devils or spirits going from one culture to another. The basic facts are the common experiences of "gods" and the ambivalence of the human mind in relation to itself. The ultimate expressions, such as "selfish" against "altruistic," are just that - expressions - not the fountainhead of the social problem or of the problem of man against god. The obverse to "how the gods could be believed to do evil to people" is, "how the gods could be believed to do good." The efforts of humans to justify the evils visited upon themselves are extraordinary, considering the gravity of those evils. Some profound reason must prevent them from declaring that gods and devils are one and the same - a disaster. Why do they not recognize the animated high-energy forces of the world as the open enemies of the human race? Indeed, this did become finally the feeling of a great many people in modern times, whose change of attitude coincided with a de-animation of the forces of nature. Primeval man and his successors found good in the gods because in the first place the ideal of the good god itself performed useful functions. The gods created man, and man was superior to the mammals whom he resembled and lived among. Therefore, gods should be loved for their creative deeds. Still, gratitude is a refined subliminatory trait that would hardly result from this syllogism. There had to arise a satisfying powerful identity out of the gestalt of creation: the creative god was built into the mind of the creature; it was his first projective delusion. His first great relief from fear was placing the responsibility for his creation, not upon himself (an idea that must promptly have occurred) but upon "some himself not himself," ergo a god. Who denied god, denied himself; who denied himself would not survive. The madness of great delusions was the condition for survival. There remained only the elaboration of the madness into human norms. A quick transfer of traits occurred - man gave to god all of his abilities and took them back as blessed gifts, down to the rudiments of stone age technology, the very fashioning of a club. Because of the obvious powerfulness of the gods, the gifts acquired power in the human mind, and man would step forward to control the world with an obsessive confidence, a false confidence, very often, yet with enough successes to accredit the transfer. At the same time, man could deny his personal responsibility for all that he was creating. Further, by imitating the gods, invention was promoted. More and more objects and procedures for controlling himself and others were imagined to descend from the gods and more and more were created under divine inspiration. This despite the interference of the gods thenceforth in inventions of all kinds, wherein nothing could be invented and applied unless it had come from the gods or was blessed by the gods. The psychological mechanism had its drawbacks; in the most peaceful and pragmatic periods, the wellsprings of invention were overlooked, while the subservience of practical innovation and social reforms to religious dogmas and rituals was damned. The mechanism for projecting and retrojecting gifts of power and techniques was in itself adequate to explain why a punitive god could be assigned benevolent and beneficent qualities. Yet it was not the only source of the idea of the good god. The first mutant humans came into being in the midst of chaos and destruction. That they had survived while all around them lay a biosphere of death and destruction, including what had been their own kind, was a miracle; their minds were now equipped to reflect upon it. Mourning was a trait already possessed; mammals and primates mourn. Beyond mourning, however, or if human mourning were t be distinguished, was a new consciousness of the self, an individuation from the group, that could see what had happened to others, see what oneself had escaped, and assign to the escape a selective feature, a blessedness, a sense of being chosen for survival. Thus arises the quality of personal satisfaction and joy amidst ruin, that interjects itself into the most grandiose human tragedies, and causes people to dance, laugh, and sing when the world shakes and burns around them. It was a primordial human acquisition, directly connected with the animated forces of destruction. Sailors, returning aboard a ship off of Krakatoa in 1883, who watched the desolation of their families on the shore from volcanic explosion and tsunamis, laughed and jumped with joy that they were being spared. Hysterical conduct, to be sure, in awful fear, but such is the nature of hysteria, and laughter often is a fringe around hysteria. The divine identification and imitation justified and provided morale for survivors to revive and conquer. A newly-acquired super-mammalian aggression abetted the profits of survival. Those who survived could move out, reinforced by grace of the gods, and in imitation of the gods, readily loot, kill, or enslave whoever remained alive and strange. The material gains of aggression were thenceforth regarded in the category of gifts of the gods, and regularly some portion of them was returned to the gods by means of sacrifices. From old Mexico Brundage gives us a song composed by the Emperor Axayacatl: "The flower death (for sacrifice and cannibalism) came down to Earth. It came here. It had been created in Tlapallan (Heaven)." Nor were these the only material benefits that came from the divine delusion. On some occasions, carbohydrates descended from the sky, notably during times associated with terrifying celestial phenomena between 3000 and 3500 years ago when manna, soma, and ambrosia were provided to starving survivors. This I explain in The Lately Tortured Earth, where too, many legends are reported insisting that copper, gold, silver, petroleum and iron were exploded or dropped onto Earth and used by their finders. Meteoric iron was commonly used long before the controversial "Iron Age" and may have fallen in amounts sufficient to institute this age. Myths of dragons burying gold are met with. And so on. The stone (and wood) age might have gone on forever if the surface of the Earth had not been blasted into metals and by metals from the skies. If this is a fact, then mankind would be historically as well as psychologically blessed by the gods. Fountains and springs of water erupted, too, in many places, even where the pre-existing waters had been diverted or buried, so that the gods could be said to have first removed good things and then relented and given them back. The gods, sang Homer, were the givers of all good things. Jupiter took away fire to punish mankind; the god-hero Prometheus stole it and gave it back to man; Zeus enchained and tortured Prometheus eternally for his gift. But the fire remained. We have spoken largely of displacement, identification, projection, and aggression heretofore. Alongside these mechanisms moves habit, the human's answer to the blunting of instinctive behavior during the creation of self-awareness. Outstanding in human behavior is the voluntary and unconsciously motivated repetition of actions in every sphere of life. In individuals, instinct serves for habit, the distinction generally being that instinct is untrained. Habit and custom are inculcated by training or imitation. Not only is habit pervasive of normal activities of individuals and groups. It is also characteristic of many psychopathologies, where it is called obsession. The origin of habit and custom lay in the primeval fears of the self-aware human, and the discipline that such fears subconsciously and later consciously impressed upon him. First came schizophrenic obsession. The more intense a blow or trauma to the body (mind), the more intensely and frequently it is autoinflicted neurologically afterwards. An obsession is an auto-inflicted reiteration of some or all of the initial reaction to a trauma. An obsession discharges quantas of the stored force of the trauma, which originally could be tolerated short of death only by it redistribution (i. e., memorizing) in successively less related circuitries contacting the affected area. Some effect of a trauma also are discharged through interfering circuitries, some of which were developed in primeval man analogously obsessive and some in non-analogous behavior, especially symbolic manifestations and erratic uncontrolled seizures. These forms of dissipating the impactive force of the trauma are founded upon analogous primate behavior. They establish themselves as quasi-voluntary and voluntary activities of the split self, which more or less observes its own reactions and discharges. They are seen by men as voluntary because the self views the action as a decision of two or more compromising internal selves. Four major patterns of expression emerged finally from the primeval trauma: catatonic, obsessive, sublimatory, and orgiastic behavior. Authentically human behavior was ever after derived and composed from one or more of these patterns. Hence all human behavior reflects, no matter at how great a distance in time and pragmatic relevance, the traumas of cosmic destruction and creation that made and successively battered primeval humans. The catatonic consists of activity whose primeval function was to keep the world unchanged. The Atlas who held the world on his back was a catatonic symbol of arrested movement; when Atlas shrugs, the Earth shakes, The Hindu Manu who held the world up for ages while standing on one leg and meditating is another catatonic god. Since the Hebrew god rested on the seventh day of creation and ordered his example to be followed forever, many millions of people have dreaded to violate the Sabbath, fearing that the world would be upset in various ways by the angry God. Physiologically, catatonism is a freezing effect, to prevent the conscious from opening up blockages of suppressed fear. It acts promiscuously, but also in more sophisticated ways, that is, partially and selectively, reluctantly forced to do so by other more determined modes of coping with the needs of the organism. Primevally, the person froze with fear. Symbolically, humanly, the meaning of freezing with fear became the preservation, at all costs, of existing circumstances, the arresting of the world, of sense intakes, of outputs, of activity, and especially of free or creative activity, all both individually and socially. By projection, if the person and group stop, the disorderly processes of nature will stop; the disorderly processes are deemed to proceed because people are moving and acting. Obsessive activity has the function-effect of sustaining a line of behavior, of repeating it endlessly with as little deviation as possible. The first symbols and sighs of the self- aware persons were naming and ejaculating. Almost instantly this became liturgy, a continuous repetition - - expressive, denotative, and expiatory - - - of anguish, labeling of the cause of anguish, and formula for control of the cause, all in one utterance, repeated continuously. Thenceforth, over thousands of years, the obsessive in symbol and behavior become infinitely varied and yet basically recognizable as originating in fearfulness and its reciprocal of ritual controls. Habit, "the great flywheel of progress" (William James), and custom came to dominate human affairs. Sublimatory activity functions and has the effects of discharging impulses that are traumatically aroused, together with associated agglomerated impulses, by deviant behavior that simultaneously and subconsciously is analogous enough to the impulses to be organically tolerated and yet sends the organism in new directions that not only complement and supplement but also contradict other behaviors. Even when contradictory, the sublimation is subconsciously recognized by others to be providing such discharges and is accepted and even encouraged by them. Symbolic communication is heavily developed by and originates in sublimatory behavior because it is like an endless treasury of ambiguities, flexible for the most remotely analogous tie-ins of original impulses and ultimate conduct. Orgiastic behavior functions and has the effects of discharges through explosions of the original traumatic force. It has the characteristics of erratic displays of energy, of spastic behavior, and acknowledged as such: it is actually approved not despite, but because of, its senselessness. It demands death, sacrifices, cannibalism, self-mutilation and the wounding of other human, animal, plants, property. It is both suppressed by and revenges itself upon the other patterns of behavior-erasing obsessions in a burst of destructiveness; alternating with catatonic behavior sometimes side by side; destroying and giving new forms to sublimatory behavior. The cumulative effect of the four behavior patterns of man was to set him apart as a voluntary self-mover. The continuous gap between the two aware selves allowed a kind of fission-fusion reaction on an energy scale immensely larger and more efficient than that of which animals and hominids were capable. Projects of many different kinds could be generated and carried on. Combinations of the four patterns provided a large variety of model or test cases, the effects of which might be pragmatically adjudged good or bad, before deciding to adopt them as ordinary behavior. The divine, thereupon, becomes a mirror image of the human, just as schizotypical as, or more so, than man, exhibiting human traits, mechanisms, and expressions. No two minds can see the same image in the mirror. This mirror is emphatically not divorced from human experience. It reflects indeed man's most destructive and exhilarating experiences. All gods are connected with disaster, the greater the god the more central his role in ancient disasters whose scope is unimaginable to most people today. The primordial human mind governs the modern mind, being the same mind, being retentive of the same experiences. We presented the view earlier that all religion goes back, overtly or covertly, to the first gods . We presented arguments that mankind was a creation of the very experiences that presented the gods to view. In discussing scripture and legend, we mentioned that the figure of Christ was heavily Greco-Romanized, perhaps even formed for the Gospels by a philosopher-dramatist, Seneca. The reader may then have wondered: since early Christians had a New Testament, a new model of God and were antisemitic (Seneca was so too), why did they not cut their ties with Old Testament Judaism? The reason, I think, is clear: the Christians needed the catastrophic history afforded by Old Testament religion; they required the Creation chaos, the Flood, the harassment of Job, the Tower of Babel, the Destruction of the Cities of the Plain, and the Exodus. Otherwise, they would have condemned themselves to early obsolescence and extinction. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 1: } {Q THEOMACHY } {C Chapter 8: } {T INDISPENSABLE GODS} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART I. THEOMACHY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER EIGHT INDISPENSABLE GODS We have progressed so far from the early chapters of this book that a review of them is probably needed, a final commentary on the divine succession and historical religions. Historical religions conserve the memory of a certain time when the world was created and humans came into being. None says that mankind always existed, or that he evolved mechanically by random association of particles. A purposeful act took place at a certain time. Most religions say that mankind was subsequently destroyed and recreated. Almost always the extermination of humanity stops short at a surviving couple or the equivalent. The subsequent homologue of the first chaos is a subsequent set of catastrophes by flood, fire, wind, and earth movements. To preserve the memory of the first time of creation is a function of rituals, liturgy, anniversaries, and sacrifices. Many religions have strenuously sought to reproduce, short of deliberately re-annihilating themselves, the exact circumstances of chaos and creation. They have obsessively kept forms, practices, and words that go back to the beginnings of all religion and the first experience with the gods. All historical religions are therefore highly conservative and weaken their foundations as soon as they admit deviations. The function of inescapable and exactly repetitive practices and symbols is to relieve the massive anxiety stored from the earliest times by confessing what happened in those times and reliving them successfully. What appears to be radical in religious history is reactionary. Practitioners of the religion, wrought up beyond sufferance, find even the rigid rites of their church insufficient to recapture the moments of chaos and creation. Prophets, apostates, evangelizes, and orgiasts arise. So do whirling dervishes and berserkers. They are chiliast or millennialists. They proclaim the end of the world while demanding that everyone acknowledge the full and immediate meaning of the creation of the world. They prepare to die and be saved in the recapitulation of the original catastrophic times. All historical religions are based upon punitive gods, are self-punitive and are punitive towards others. Gods are adjudged good to the degree to which they refrain from destroying their creatures. Humans exist by divine tolerance. A common word for a good person in most religions in "god-fearing". Personal merit through skills, altruism, and dogmatic belief and practice is sometimes, but more often not, a guarantee to a greater of lesser extent of the gods' benevolence; never is merit a perfect or universal guarantee. This belief in the denial to merit of its due is not, therefore, as some think, a connivance of religion with the envious mob. Sacrifices are forms of punishment of the self and others to forestall, and therefore to control, a punishment from Heaven. The concept of representation effectively lets a partial sacrifice stand for a full sacrifice and a sacrifice of others stand for a sacrifice of oneself. Sacrifices are said to be gifts freely given; yet it is acknowledged that withholding sacrifices will be followed by divine retribution. The more valuable the sacrifice, and the more strict the rules under which sacrifice and all other kinds of punishment occur, the more pleasing to the gods. Guilt is self-punishment. It is the refusal of pleasure to some negative degree. We often knows it in its late and rather pragmatic sense: guilt is what makes a fickle creature responsible; without guilt, personal and social discipline would be impossible. To get relief from guilt, one follows religious directives or some secularized substitute such as warring for one's country or pursuing "the work ethic." But primeval guilt originated from the terror of "the other self," the terror produced out of the minute systemic delay of instinctive impulses. At the same time, the heavens were turbulent and terrifying. To control one's unbalanced self, one signaled the gods to arbitrate; and the gods responded, saying, "Your soul is a struggle of good and evil. We, with your cooperation, will take care that the good dominates you. You are not sick. Be hopeful. Help is on its way." This formula, although it can be called delusion, was a great invention. Granted the essential incurability of human schizotypicality, it alone could lead to a manageable psychic world. Important anniversaries or holy days are celebrations of divine destruction and near escape from destruction. Every truly religious anniversary celebration is therefore ambivalently tragic and joyful. Anniversary excesses and orgies, at both extremes of somberness and exuberance, are nevertheless occasions for the relief of tragic memory, more or less deeply suppressed. Anniversaries cluster around the great cycles of the ages, which give evidence of having been common to most of the world's cultures. Calendar diversions, not psychological changes, have driven apart the anniversaries of different cultures; they are farther apart in days than they are in mind. The end of the year inspires saturnalia in many cultures. Also thus, Roman Catholic and Greek churches mark a different Easter holiday for unessential reasons. Anniversaries sometimes are pulled together in a given culture by their original proximity during a cycle such as a solar year and by their psychological resemblance. Thus, Venus (perhaps at -3437 B. P., where Before Present =1984 A. D.) and Mars catastrophes (perhaps in -2671) occurred around March 23, close to the Spring equinox; the holidays were merged ultimately, and are submerged at Easter time in Christendom and comparable holidays in other cultures. Sublimation, like ritual, is universal in religion; it pacifies, dissembles, represents, and rationalizes the strict conditions of the fatal times. Sublimation becomes more secular and pragmatic with the evaporation of stored anxiety over long periods of prosperity and peace. Disaster, deprivation, and frustration raise anxiety levels; they cause reactions against secular sublimation occurring in the artistic, social, political and religious spheres; these activities are attacked as irrelevant and blasphemous. Furthermore, all religions incorporate directives for every aspect of life -- work, sex, property, power, relations, health, and knowledge. Humanity was created and made deistic at the same time; the human mind is not logical, but it is wholly occupied by a way of looking at the world as a supernatural creation. The question of separating special values and calling these "the province of religion" has no meaning to a mind that was originally formed with every value at stake. Religious practices are basically similar everywhere and have been from the start. Permutations of practices are innumerable. The new humans executed religious observances among their first acts. In this sense, all the world's religions came from one religion, that of the first and only band of humans. Then different experiences befell the different peoples. Some were non-catastrophic experiences and these brought many minor changes. Other experiences were catastrophic -- global and intense -- and these reinforced the basic resemblances of religions while at the same time prompting many minor variations. Thus ultimately, history came to witness a similar succession of great gods ruling amidst a congeries of ethnic religions. One god has been replaced by another on various occasions. Almost always, the replacements successful because of unconscious techniques of cross-identification and rationalization. Sometimes men sought to replace gods by deliberate choice, with or without the help of events such as cultural amalgamation; invariably then compulsion and heavy propaganda were employed. Such occurred when Hinduism moved over Southeast Asia, when Christianity came to dominate the Roman World, and when Islam moved across Asia and Africa. The replacement of all gods by materialistic and atheistic ideology is a special case, discoverable, in non-catastrophic times, among philosophical schools such as the ancient cynics, among scientists and humanists of the post-enlightenment, and among communists. Invariably secular replacers have argued the lack of empirical proof of the existence of gods; they have also stressed the contradictions of ruthlessness and mercy in the concepts of god; and they have attacked the behavior of religious establishments. As alternative behavior they have recommended principles of brotherly love, cooperation, and mental health, among humans, or principles of an ideally organized state that provides enough goods to satisfy people's needs without recourse to supernatural agents. The major proof that such ideologies might succeed is based upon the waning of the gods when societies possess a pragmatically optimistic morale and are materially prosperous or believed to be potentially so, as recently. Then the gods have seemed remote and unneeded; considerations of logic and efficiency would appear to dictate their abandonment, removal, and forgetting. Even under optimal conditions of prosperity, secular morale, compulsion and propaganda, the replacement has proceeded slowly and painfully. At the peak of their success, the ungodly ideologies have been undermined by new gods (e. g., Christianity in the Roman Empire), resisted successfully by the masses (e. g., communist Poland, 1945-1983 A. D.), transformed into secular religions of temporary duration (e. g., Roman Emperor worship, der Fuhrer Hitler, Comrade Lenin), or transformed into pseudo-scientific therapeutic or philosophical sects employing substitute semi-divine agents (e. g., gurus, anthroposophists). The fundamental obstacle to ungodliness has been the construction of the human mind. Inasmuch as the events of creation that split the hominid character introduced the splitters as gods, humans become god-seekers as part of becoming human. The particular manner in which the universe was seen for the first time implied perforce the instrumentality of divinity. Self-awareness, formed a nature which was unceasingly prone to discover gods. Far from being an afterthought, the gods were a first thought. To excise this thought, after thousands of years of experience with it. was not only most difficult pragmatically; it was structurally impossible, at least as long as the origins, function, and mental structure of religion were not understood. To forget the gods is impossible; the memory deck can only be reshuffled. To retain self- awareness without schizotypicality is a contradiction in terms. Human creation involved a basic reconstruction of mammalian mind; to extinguish this essential schizotypicality would restore man as an instinctive mammal, but is in any event now physiologically and psychologically impossible. Symbolism as the effect of the split self, flows naturally and cannot be obliterated. By the same logic and dynamics, treating symbolically with both the "other self" and the "outsider-others" must inevitably result in projectional thought, that is, treating the "outside other" with the same mechanism and feeling that the self utilizes in dealing with its "own other." All of this process is transactional and the transaction is of the essence of human being. Therefore a group mode of projection, a group communication, is inherent in the individual- social complex. Thence, naturally, whatever is unanswered and questionable becomes a matter for resort to authority -- that is, a prevailing, preponderant group opinion. Since the group is forever under historical and existential stress, it is forever seeking authority and incapable of receiving satisfactory answers to its questions without a symbolic, abstract and animate referent that provides solution. Thus it happens that, if humans exist, god exists. God is the closing of the circle -- both question and answer. But so inextricable are the question and answer that only logical artifice can distinguish and designate the two. Man's need to control the terrible and the terror causes him to invent gods. Nowadays, if one were asked how to control or stop an advancing comet, he would dismiss the possibility, and say that we must await it. He is not prepared to undertake all the actions that ancient man had ready just for such approaching catastrophes -- propitiation, sacrifice, ritual, saturnalia, "going on the warpath." Nevertheless, as catastrophe approaches, at first slowly and then rapidly, and then hysterically, the modern human will act like his ancestors, including the excesses of guilt for not having foreseen the deserved end of all folly. He will draw upon the dwindling and remaining reserves of the "old time religion." If the fossil voices telling us of the nature of the gods and of the rules for man's behavior respecting the gods are distorted and incorrect, and though they are not valid and reliable guides, yet these voices have told us things of positive value. They have given us foundations of history. They have recounted the basic facts of existence repeatedly. They have conjured existences differing from ours. They have in effect performed innumerable experiments with the allegedly divine from which we can learn what not to do religiously, and to a lesser extent what to do. Perhaps the greatest lesson they have taught us (by negative inference) is that the religion of today and tomorrow should not be sought in the religion of the past: that humans, until they reach some certain level of perfection cannot be trusted to have known and arrived at the nature of the gods. Whenever historical man has said "Let us change our religion," (even if he does so in the name of preserving the old religion) he is saying "We were wrong about god and religion and it is up to us now to find a new way to god and a new religion." The gods have retired into new forms, but they still operate through the busy humans whom the poet Rilke called "the bees of the invisible." The gods are still everywhere and are not as remote as our scientific texts would have us believe. They are in astrology, in magic, in fortune-telling; they fly to the scenes of disaster; they augment the forces of authority; they heal and console; they scare; they make anxious; they set the rituals for a multitude as they have done since the times of Ouranos. They assume their own negation: for they argue with themselves in Natural Law, Bureaucracy, in Dogmatic Materialism, in Reified Words, in Mummified Heroes, in Times and Worlds without End. They let themselves be molded into One and the One obliges his necessities by becoming Many. Beyond all else, they stand at ease waiting for Armageddon and the Day of Judgment. Then they will don their armor and gather their hosts. Although they have retired it still takes rare courage to contemplate all of their continuing manifestations and to resist the invention of new negations. There is yet nowhere else to go and few who would follow. By skimming along on the thin ice of the cerebral cortex or by mathematical astrophysics or metaphysics or another such exercise, the gods can be sublimated. Dumb bestiality may be equally functional. We think that of all ways of facing them, the best is to look at them everywhere, contemplate their every manifestation, anticipate their reappearance, but do no more. If there is any question of human madness, it is erased when one pretends to be divine. Our human destiny is an open question. We deny our humanity if we try to close it. We belittle ourselves if we plead with the gods to answer the question at any cost. Whenever gods and religious practices have been abandoned, put aside, forgotten, changed consciously or unconsciously, those who made such changes are saying to us their descendants, "Do not think that our ancestors, or us, or even you, will have the answer. There will be New Testaments without end." We the present generation are told that we are not the first, nor the last, but a truth-seeking figure in the series of forevers until the day when somehow, somewhere, we shall be perfect. At which time, we might, if we dared, claim omniscience, omnipotence, and the fullness of virtue. In hastening to accuse traditional religion of claiming falsely absolute truth and morality, we often fail to see in the seeming absoluteness its inherent self-confessed contradiction. Just as psychiatry has proven that excesses of anger, self-destructiveness and aggression have ordinarily come out of self-doubt and self-hatred, so we can see in the madness and excesses of historical religious behavior the same psychological sources of self-doubt and self-hatred transformed into dogma, authority, bigotry, punition and guilt in the name of absolute achievement and arrival at the nirvana of perfection. Yet even while civilizations and peoples are being destroyed in the name of absolute truth, newly arrived at, a class of readers or priests of the absolute are contradicting the behavior in gushes of explanations and interpretations of the ways of the gods. As the Hindu Brahmin calculates, the warrior slays. As Anselm seeks proof, King Arthur crusades. The most important question of religion is not how to eradicate gods, but to establish gods at one with humanity and the human soul. For there can be no logical or moral objection to the concept of and belief in gods in themselves; again the human being, insofar as he knows any happiness, has known it in activities of a sublime sort that are inextricable from the divine. A formula and model is required, which is physically possible, and which will forego conflicts of the self, among humans, and between devils and gods. Specifications are: a) sufficient relief from fearful stress to permit the search for a new formula; b) a search for physico-chemical change agents (whether mutational or continuously operative) that would eliminate terroristic memories, with all that subtends from such in the way of self-destructiveness and other-destructiveness without damaging, and optimally while promoting, the affectional and inventive facilities of humans; c) and, while the search goes on, and anticipating that the search may be unsuccessful, the invention of social strategies( therapies and institutions) that will hold the conflicts in abeyance indefinitely. Secularism is a negative counterattack against religion, justifiable as a restraint against malpractices known to everyone. Generally, however, humankind is not in a state to abandon religion and the gods. At best it is capable of achieving a concerted view of an overall divinity and the sacredness of existence. It can borrow from and encroach upon science. Great good would ensue, provided that the concerted belief could work its way into the aims and practices of myriad rituals of human lives. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q THEOTROPY:} {C Chapter 9: } {T SACRAL VS. SECULAR MAN} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART II. THEOTROPY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER NINE SACRAL VS. SECULAR MAN Any old religion is likely to have a complete life-program, guaranteed to give satisfaction. It will include answers to all problems that arise, with a counseling service from birth to death. This is no mean achievement, but rather a work of unceasing genius characterizing all ages and all cultures, and therefore thousands of designs and operative systems. Our admiration of the astronomical universe pales in the light of universal religiousness. Indeed, if one is hungry for proofs of the existence of ultimate design and intelligent gods, here is fertile ground to plow. But why, out of all this experience has there not occurred one religion of all times and places for all people such that a model human being would lead a happy life? Why should not one formula have been discovered? Why all the changes, conflicts, misery? In replacing the instinctive existence of other creatures, why could not man rapidly invent just that proper set of behaviors that would satisfy the respective and combined needs of his human mechanisms and culminate in expressions of satisfactory existence? Is there some practical impossibility, the fault of the external world? Or is there some inherent contradiction of the mechanisms of human nature? Let us set up a model of religious citizen (not a leader) and inquire whether he should be happy, and, if not, why not. We call him "sacral man." not because he is sacred, but because he believes a great many phenomena and actions are sacred. He sacralizes. A thorough moral defense of religion from the standpoint of its expression through sacral man has not appealed to modern writers. Such old and religiously circumscribed works as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress will hardly do for these days, when the field instruments of sociology, biology, psychology, economics and political science need to be orchestrated for the purpose. Available are negative critiques of ritual and assaults upon the supernatural. But where are the moral scientific (as opposed to merely sociological) studies of the Baptist and the Secularist living on the same street, multiplied a thousandfold to cover the world scene? The ideal sacral person is born of religious parents, is baptized at an early age, and attends schools whose curriculum and teachers are of same belief. He or she hears of the gods, and experiences religious rituals, at an early age, so that by the time of receiving catechism he is already identified with supernatural beings and is pleased to learn that they have played the most important role in all major and many minor events of the history of his culture. Well before receiving formal religious instruction, he has been rewarded and punished in the name of the gods, and (he is convinced) by them directly. He knows this latter to be true, because he has had indirect and accidental rewards and punishments at the hands of what "must have been god." He has a fairly concrete impression of at least one god, the Great God, anthropomorphic but dressed in ritual clothing. He knows of many instances in which God has intervened in the current lives of persons dear or near to him, and to many others that have been the objects of his affection or the attention of his closely identified mentors. Following upon years of catechism, he can explain events by himself to the satisfaction of members of his religion, and possesses a general history of his group and of mankind from their earliest creation by his gods. He can sacralize readily, that is, impute sacred meaning to any event, natural or human, consistent with his religion. His religious mentors have long since informed him of the political climate of his larger culture respecting his religion, so that he can know what to expect from strangers in and outside of his culture. He knows how to invoke the gods by prayers and rites, even only by mentation and, perhaps with a poor sense of statistics, believes his score of successes far outnumbers his score of failures. He enjoys a logic that employs heavily the formula, "This follows That because God willed it;" "God must have willed This" (where 'This' is an event with significance and within the expected scope of God's actions -- love -- death, etc., or so unusual as to be the work of God); "This other cannot be, because God would not will it." He questions authority, since he is early forewarned of its religious untrustworthiness. He pursues a line of secular work regularly and responsibly, as an offshoot of religious ritual behavior. He understands readily the news of the larger world, for there is a general correlation between his political and religious friends and enemies. By virtue of his early training in displacement and projection, he can readily conceive of the larger society, even the whole world's people, within the sphere of and dependent upon his gods. His sources of mundane authority, if not religious, partake of the respect, authenticity, and reliability granted religious authority. Births, marriages, accidents, careers, illnesses, and deaths of all with whom he identifies -- who are part of him -- are handled by old, well-known procedures. He is probably better able to confront a personal disaster by appropriate sacred explanations, instead of trying to cope with it independently as for instance, does the character Charlotte, in Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer, who, highly secularized but also fearful of self-examination, slips into catatonic denial and mourning when it develops that her daughter was pursuing another life, an alter ego, of political criminality. For sacral man, ways and limits of mourning are well-set. Reactions and decisions are pre-fabricated. He can feel secure that all happens as part of a sacred history, elevated to celestial levels of meaning, and contemplates and suffers his own death in the same frame of mind. Since he identifies with gods, his time scales for personal achievement and for the expected future history of the world, including even rewards and punishments for actors on the present scene, are celestial as well as according to the secular calendar. He is confident of indirect and unknown measures being taken on his behalf by supernatural agencies. From early childhood, he has been god-fearing. By satisfying the gods, he is exempted from much fear of men and accidents: "If I please God, God will take care of me;" "When God calls, I am ready to go." He realizes very early in life that he has problems of self- control; he projects the unruly selves onto the deities, and thus can "bargain with them at arm's length. Self-hate becomes devil-hate. When his psychic system becomes well established, he acquires self-confidence. He has several persisting problems. Some are due to his inherent structure as a human being. Others are owing to his uniqueness when confronted by what must, after all, be a general formula of his religion for handling all humans. There occur also conflictful features of his larger culture, and accidents and natural disasters. Thus his religion, so holy to him, may be disliked by other groups with whom he must deal. He ( and his group) may have such consistently bad luck with nature that active punitive measures are continually taken -prayers, sacrifices, guilt, fasting and abstentions. Aggressive behavior against outsiders is sometimes called for by prophecy and divination: "God needs help in punishing his enemies." Furthermore, he may be genetically a "difficult character" for his religious institutions, a "nervous type" uncontrollably impatient with ritual, a person whose parents were a little deviant and unwittingly made him more deviant from the religious norms of belief and behavior. Guilt-feelings, self-destructiveness, suspiciousness, extravagant behavior (aggressiveness, asceticism, etc.) may result. Finally his modes of logic may interfere with what he wants to do with himself and the world. If the gods manage so much, he is left to cope with little, and may see little need for pragmatic learning. He may, by continuous resort to his religious logic, become stupid and retarded in contributing to and gaining from the larger culture, where different logics are called for, such as "This cannot occur without That" or "To obtain, That, do This and no more." He may suffer from a great many floating opinions, unanchored to mundane cause and effect, good for ritual, useless for practical life, whether dealing with people or tools. Regarding these issues as a whole, one large risk seems to confront model religious citizens. The near impossibility of a general religious system being all things to all people all the time causes universal individual problems within the religion. It also causes divisions into priesthood and parishioners, mystics and ritualists, managers and managed, and so on, which aggravate the insecurities of all affected by the divisions, that is, of all believers. Ritual resembles instinctive behavior and may cover most aspects of life except revelation. No religion exists without a place for mystic revelation. Yet revelation is the opposite of ritual. Somehow every church must give birth to and nurture this hero (or assassin). In addition, every religion exists within at least a partially secularized society; even in the most simple tribal society, where all seems to be definitively sacralized, there is an everyday need to confront and exploit nature, to use tools variously, to deal with outsiders. Conditions change; religion is conditioned; religions change. Every ritual change is a slap in the face of the religion, and face-saving tactics are numerous. I am not taking present Western European society as typical of religious settings, for this would be too easy. Change and secularization are rampant. I am trying here, as elsewhere in this study, to employ the most conservative type of analysis, and to avoid taking advantage of the many loop-holes of speculation and illustrations that religious history and philosophy ordinarily profit from. I am asking consideration of relatively changeless culture, while asserting that there is never a state of changelessness. And so, within and outside the model citizen, change is happening and causes him lifetime anxieties which the religion cannot possibly control by scripture or rites. A calculus of felicity is not difficult to imagine. The greater the stresses within the church and in the relations (direct and indirectly effective) between the church and the environment, the greater become the anxieties and uncontrollable outbursts of our model citizen; the greater then the changes within his groups as well. In none of this discussion have we spoken of the moral values of the activity, except we have presumed a kind of dolce vita religiosa for the citizen. We have not asked how many orphans has he sheltered, how many cannibal feasts has he enjoyed, or how productive has he been, nor have we made any quantitative gauges of his feelings of nearness to god. It seems that we must always come up to the point where we are saying "What his religion happens to say is good, is in fact good." whereas we know "in our hearts and minds" that this cannot be. There has to be more than this to justify a religion on moral grounds. Is there some metaphysical morality that can weed out bad from good religions, bad from good citizens? Or, perhaps, a model of secular man can reveal, by way of contrast, a morality overshadowing religious morality. Let us see. As with sacral man, we shall be taking an optimistic view of his development; the model is optimistically biased. Here now the person we have in mind begins life as the child of parents and in a group who disbelieve in the supernatural and practice no rites in the name of gods or spirits. They point out to the infant actions and persons whose effects are good or bad. The child is taught that nothing exists unless it can be experienced by himself and proven to his authorities, for he has these, too, in his parents and attendants. He is trained to reason pragmatically rather than to practice religious rituals or seek revelations. He is ritualized, but in the name of necessary training to achieve good or logically necessary effects. By reward and punishment he is taught to seek or avoid objects, persons and activities that he is likely to encounter. He is discharged from training when his own sense of right and wrong appears to rule him adequately. He learns that his society is benign in its intentions toward him, behaves justly toward him and others, and protects him from himself, potential assailants, and foreign enemies. If he participates voluntarily in his own training, he will acquire skills that the economic system and the governments will welcome and pay him to use. Ritualized or routine training is justified in terms of its consequences. As the British Statesman Gladstone put it (1876) in the years when the concept was becoming current, "The Secularist.... does not of necessity assert anything but the positive and exclusive claims of the purposes, the enjoyments, and the needs, presented to us in the world of sight and experience." There is only body, not soul (except metaphorically), and no afterlife to look forward to or worry about. He may enjoy fictional stories about the supernatural; he may pretend "for fun" that any phenomenon is unreal. He observes a number of secular holidays arising out of political, social, and heroic events. His respect for scientific method (empiricism, facts, logic, experiment, control of the environment) is high; he claims to believe only in its application and findings, whether in the human or the natural realm. He expects a continuous upgrading of his life, partly because of a general upsurge in health and living standards. His feelings are not rigid nor profound, He expects every person to do his duty, and does not accept authority without explanation in material, empirical, and logical terms. He seeks generally to belong to groups whose leaders are elective. What will be our felicity calculus for such a model citizen? He may be on the whole as "happy" as the religious citizen. The word "happy" would mean a usual mild euphoria, which, we must admit, may come genetically, or as a result of brute affection generously granted the infant being. Still, this affection may be tendered by his identification with "Infant Jesus" in certain cultures, which would therefore allow an intrusion of religion even into the recesses of infancy. What he loses of the security in the perceived protection of the gods, he makes up for by an increase of security owing to the perceived way in which changing explanations go along with changing events. His defenses stop at the grave, but his hopes of increased beneficial effects of science for himself and his human identifiees are greater. He has fewer judges of his actions, and perceives fewer entities to please. He will, however, be more frequently and poignantly disappointed with humans, because their conduct is not mediated through his gods, and strikes him directly and rudely. His only hope is other humans. This increases his load of fear and anxiety, and probably this will be heavier than the fearload of religious man. His temperament may also be more mercurial. On one hand, his life offers less inspiration and may be insipid, while on the other hand he may strain for sensory stimuli and orgiastic behavior. He is not likely to be less aggressive or less vicious than religious man. His morality is no more explainable than that of religious man. He simply holds it on natural grounds: "That is the way people behave when they are not driven by superstition or authority." The secularization of modern times may well have had its likenesses at certain times and among certain groups of the Golden Age of Saturn, the Confucian period of China, the Middle Bronze Age in the Near East, the Classical age of Greece, the pagan Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and other eras. The clash between the religious and the secular is prominently displayed. We have an idea that a large section of the elite, at least, in these eras was a disbeliever, a shopper for ideas, luxuriating in freedoms of choice among supernatural views and between cultism and materialism. Here may be the difference -- freedom of choice against a bound-up cosmos, not secularism versus supernaturalism or religion or sacralism. We cannot be certain at all that the secular man has ever been really secular, rather than merely a disintegrated sacred man. The modern secular man was emerging in the Renaissance. Machiavelli was living at the same time as Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola, unlike the author of the Prince, who moved fully and confidently into the modern disintegrated secular society, was seized by the need to keep the total image of Jesus under control and in mind, and to capture and reintegrate any escaping impressions and thoughts. Roland Barthes has grasped the essence of Loyola's mission and procedures, as spelled out in Loyola's book of Spiritual Exercises. The obsessional character of the Exercises blazes forth in the accounting passion transmitted to the exercitant: as soon as an object, intellectual or imaginary, appears, it is broken up, divided, numbered. The accountancy is obsessional not only because it is infinite, but above all because it engenders its own errors... [Every failure induces, requires, more accounting.] Everything is immediately divided, sub-divided, classified, numbered off in annotations, meditations, weeks, points, exercises, mysteries, etc. [That is,] The Exercises can be conceived as a desperate struggle against the dispersal of images which psychologically, they say, marks mental experience and over which -- every religion agrees -- only an extremely rigorous method can triumph. The whole aim and process is a totalitarian domination of the mind for the purpose of putting oneself into a position to ask God questions and to receive passively the answers. All vagaries were returned to the Source. There is no denying the social impact of the Jesuit method and practice. Allowing that traditional Catholicism continued inertially, Jesuitry become a great active sword that held much of secularism at bay while causing it to involute. Evidence abounds that secular man is actually a form of sacral man with Jesuitical control. What is sacred possesses for its experiencer an aura of the holy, of awe, of fear, of divine arbitrariness, of supernatural animation. Sacral man in his extreme expression sees the cosmos and all its details as sacred; there are few of such men, of course. The extremely secular man sees everything as void of the supernatural and fully accessible to the senses; there are very few of such men, too. Let us provide some categories of behavior that might be regarded as sacred or at least non-sensible, to which most so-called secular men adhere. For one thing, they believe in many myths, myths of their descent and families, of their country, of the history of their locale, of wars and voyages. More, and now we make a few specific allusions applying to some, by way of illustration, they hold myths about GM, GE, IBM, their President and political leaders, Albert Einstein, Hollywood, the Mafia, the flag (" Old Glory"), Harvard University, the "Spirit of Saint Louis," the Philadelphia Eagles Football Team, Bellevue Hospital, the "Monopolies," "Justice," "free will," "reason," "truth," "nature," snakes, elephants, diets, and so on and on. What do we mean by associating such people first with myth, then with the supernatural, hence with the sacred? The myth has in common with the sacred a non-empirical aura of "emotion" or feeling attaching itself to a non-existent or otherwise psychologically incomplete perception such that, whatever it is, it would not recognizably exist unless it were mythified. International Business Machines (IBM) does not exist as entity, but only as hundreds of millions of mental and physical operations of people, partly related to machines. But "it" is "mighty," "global," "venerable," "rich," "progressive," "losing money this year," "in need of revitalization," and so on. One is "loyal" to it, "depends" upon it, "accepts its policies," "questions it sincerity," "sues it," tries to "break it up," "ignores its complaints" and so on. Lawyers hop around on "its giant body like fleas on an elephant," "defending it," "justifying it," and of course "living off of it." A great many people derive a feeling of the supernatural and sacred form when functioning in the corporate ambiance. The Chief Executive of the great Schlumberger multinational enterprise said recently that a corporation nowadays must learn from the Japanese that "we have the responsibility that religion used to have." Are these behaviors and beliefs any less religious, say, than the behavior of believers in a volcano religion? The typical secularist worships a dozen such volcanoes; he is polytheistic; he believes in the supernatural and practices rites in regard to it. I do not argue here the consequences: this mythicized aggregate produces millions of hard objects for people; what does the religious aggregate produce but "useless objects" such as church buildings and a superabundant "software?" We cannot maintain that secular man is less superstitious than sacral man. Does he more often believe "13 is an unlucky number" or carry a rabbit's foot for luck? Encyclopedias of false beliefs and superstitions are available, but they do not speak to this issue. Superstition is sacralization gone wild, uncontrolled by formal religious authority or science. There is very little difference, too, between superstition and the "false cause" of an anxiety; worrying over the number 13 is not much different in cause and effect than worrying that the airplane in which one is sitting will plunge to earth. Secular man has a plethora of both types of illnesses. Inseparable from myth in practice are symbols and fictions. Language is but the greatest set of all fictions. That it is magical is provable in the behavior of humans in regard to it from their beginnings up to the present. Words lead a life of their own, in the world of words, distinct in part from the objects to which they ordinarily refer. Modern secularists use words freely; a candy is "divine;" every accident is a "catastrophe." No matter; that the world turns with an energy of 10 37 ergs of energy does not deny to a leaf wafting down from a tree its own erg. What we have in secularism is a disintegration of the sacred cosmos into infinite particularistic ergs of the supernatural, but at the same time a denial of the cosmic supernatural. Words merge into symbols, which may be words, pictures, displays, but also contain the impact of sets of words, without integration with the grammar of the language. A symbol contains a stimulus to arrive at an attitude or predisposition of mind or behavior. The symbol of the cross has been found throughout the world from the time of the earliest gods up to the present, denoting the chief god or a reference and extension of the god. Wherever a cross occurs, the supernatural does as well; in the ancient world, stones of Hermes were put up at crossroads. Many symbols are likewise ancient. Some of them, like the cross, find their way into the secular crests of noble families, secular institutions, the trademarks of modern corporations, and the escutcheons of government agencies. Such modern references are very weak, it is said; this is true, and art designers and public relations experts will invent trademarks and other symbols for a price, using scientific techniques for determining how readily the public will recognize and accept the symbol. Still, unauthorized use of the trademark can incite a law-suit for millions of dollars; something sacred must be conveyed. It contains more than a single erg of the supernatural. So it is with fictions, which are of several kinds, including the words, myths and symbols referred to already. We need only to mention that others remain, and also contain qualities of the supernatural, and they are continuously and necessarily employed by the secular mind The "average" is one of the most useful concepts of science, but it does not exist. Very often sought, like the Golden Fleece, once found, it leads to marvelous gains. That "everyone knows the law" is a fiction treated as fact in a court of law; "ignorance of the law is no excuse for an offense." Science, law, literature, drama, and music constitute a veritable fictional world that no amount of secularism can eradicate. Secular man can only claim that these are all piecemeal tools, that he "uses" them, that they do not make him a believer in the supernatural, and that he can understand me when I tell him that these are unreal. But this must be a very special secular man, not an ordinary one, for the ordinary one does not see the dizzying use of hundreds of tools; he is used by them, attaches all kinds of fleeting supernatural associations to them, and does not understand well at all when I speak of them as unreal. So the ideal, extreme, purely secular man will try to squeeze out of life all that is fictional, we suppose, if it ever ended in anything but the most mad hermeticism, with various rituals for exorcising fictions, in a direct confrontation of the real. Pure secularism would be a life of instinctive stimulus-response: wordless, thoughtless, myopic, and solitary. Wrung out of existence would be the arts, politics, law, the market-place, love, human relations, and science itself, including both the conception of all these and all of their ritual accompaniments. Since he must himself employ the supernatural and its rituals, secular man, we see, does not so much want to destroy religion as he does to particularize it, to make it pantheistic and kaleidoscopic. He wants to keep all his options. He wants full freedom to pick up and lay down any iota of the supernatural or any practice connected with it. He is like the sophisticated Roman of 2000 years ago who also wanted to pick up and lay down any god or rite as he pleased. He does not wish to be part of an all-embracing and integrated cosmic religious system, not even to be reminded that everything in the world and in culture is tied to everything else, even secularly, if not sacrally. Religion as such threatens his options. He wants to freely disperse his affects and attentions. He wants to be free to change them. He admires the composer who builds idiosyncratic tonal works or the sculptor whose "Composition in plastic, number 18" pretends to communicate with nothing or nobody. Just so, he wants individually to compose and recompose the vignettes of his life. There is accordingly a strong trend toward the disintegration of morality. Morality, too, is piecemeal in secularism. Each item is judged right or wrong by itself. We note this in pragmatism where the consequences of an act determine its morality. We note it in American law where social consequences tend to be the measure of a crime and its punition. We note it in the press, where instantaneity and shocks push aside moral priorities. We note it in democratic politics, where the politicians must, and willingly do, fix the plight of whoever is complaining most, generally ignoring the "good of the whole," scales of values, or long-term considerations: "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease." Still, the supernatural of everyday life in modern society is not enough religion for a great many secularists and they solicit new religions, inventing them, so they think, actually "reinventing the wheel" time and time again. These are by no means to be dismissed; they are heroic endeavors to join science and traditional religion, to worship the Divine and the Good without reference to the succession of gods, to build peaceful humanistic communities, to make contact with presumably intelligent beings in outer space, to achieve sacred communities with new rituals that dignify rather than abase their members, and to build a satisfying non-materialistic life around ideals. To ridicule them is by implication to ridicule ourselves. (To ridicule ourselves, on the other hand, is not far from our minds, as we mistake one turn of the road after another; we feel always on the brink of absurdity, that the whole enterprise of penetrating and ordering religion is surreal.) We hear of physical therapy communities, where diet, exercise, and love build new souls, and of group therapy communities where, in one case, one learns to love oneself and, in another case, to give up selfish love of oneself to love others. We learn of astrological networks of believers who adjust their lives to the elaborated meaning of planetary motions and conjunctions. There are communities and networks of haute couture, work, skills, fraternity, "rock and roll," sexual practices, diet, outer space communications, sports, and many other special areas that go far beyond occasional meetings and informational exchanges into the dense supernatural and ritual affairs of religious cults. They are voluntary. Participation may be brief and intense; it is for that period sacred, supernatural and ritualistic. We begin to see an overall pattern of the people of a secular society; they live amidst many intense but sporadic religious episodes, where their minds are fully occupied in recapitulating birth, baptism, initiation, marriage, priesthood and death in brief compass, and in between these episodes, they float and paddle in a swirling world of secular symbols, legends, myths, and fictions. Are they happy? Have they found Truth and Morality? Once again, I would warn against a hasty denial. What is "happy"? Who is happy in this world? "Happy" may be a little thing, quite evasive, quite accidental and lucky, though subjectively grand in its effects. As for "moral", that, too, may be the accident of a soul that is bumped and tossed about like flotsam, until finally jettisoned onto the shores of goodness. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q THEOTROPY:} {C Chapter 10: } {T ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART II. THEOTROPY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TEN ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL After a brief military campaign in the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands in 1982, memorial services for the dead of Great Britain and Argentina were held at the Cathedral of Canterbury, England. To some of the British, the idea of memorializing the Argentine dead was already irksome. Then going beyond ceremony, the Archbishop in his sermon deplored warfare, asserting that it proved the failure of a foreign policy. Whereupon he was verbally chastised by Prime Minister Thatcher and like-minded representatives of English jingoism for not having made it clear to the assembly that the British were righteous and victorious in the eyes of The God of the Established Church of England. Reasonably the one party might complain, of what use is the State Church if it does not support the State's wars? Just as reasonably, the Archbishop might say: Of what use is a religion if it cannot teach peace to politicians? The peacemakers often go unblessed by the religions, too. Mirza Ahmad Sohrab, in his grand tome, The Bible of Mankind, compares the great world religions to the strings of a single harp each of which gives forth its own dominant note, while the harmonious blending of all produces a symphony of music. The dominant note of Hinduism is the divine presence pervading nature; of Buddhism, remuneration; of Zoroastrianism, purity; of Confucianism, filial piety; of Taoism, the path to reason; of Judaism, righteousness; of Christianity, love; of Islam, submission, and of the Bahai Cause, universality, "In their efforts to admit and confess all humanistic doctrines of religions, the Bahai have been frequently persecuted by god-fearing believers, and, even while the British were wrestling with Christian "love," the Bahai were being dispossessed and killed, allegedly for religious and statal treason , by Iranian Muslim practicing "submission" to Allah. Secularists frequently pronounce religious slogans for lack of a substantial ethics of their own. Moral issues often intimidate secularists, too. There is a sacredness about them, a confusion, a threat, a secret, a god buried somewhere among them, a priest ready to pull one in like a fish if one takes the smallest bait. There used to be a major area of study called "the moral sciences." It is defunct. In turn, every field of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities has tried to extricate itself from moral responsibility and qualify for the name of science. Even practical schools of business, medicine, dentistry, law, agriculture, engineering, architecture, nursing, social welfare, etc., claim to provide an objective education; they have achieved the logically impossible feat of inculcating in their students an abundance of the best ways of doing things, while pretending not to consider good from bad, right from wrong. We know this to be nonsense. All applied science most exhibit preferences for lines of conduct. Scientific method is itself a moral system. And just think of the vast proportion of alumni of schools who confess, with a quaver in their voices, to all that they know and owe to their alma mater. Somebody is teaching somebody something in the way of morals! What is happening? Is this hypocrisy? Are the schools and students, the society and its people, claiming one thing and practicing another? Yes. They are using a technique that places upon an unreachable, untouchable level certain problems such as god, religion, and the supernatural, along with the associated problem of the ultimate sources of morality and their justification; they take up all other problems as only of instrumental importance, as problems of means, not ends, as problems whose solutions can be taught to burghers, brigands, and beggars alike. Whereupon a society becomes secular, segmentalized and instrumental (hence exploitative) in its behavior as well as its morals. From many a segment are cast many grappling hooks for the larger morality, some of which catch hold and from here and there spring the many varieties of religious practices characteristic of the secularized society. Where there is not a grappling for religion there is often a contradictory pair of behaviors: the one a specialized nose-to-the-ground empiricism, the other a hopelessly dispersed attention. The former was discussed in the last chapter as an aspect of secularism and occurs again for treatment in the next; the latter requires a few more words here. Religion generally focuses attention onto a few, high-priority objects of value; secularism dissipates attention. Attention is itself a value imposed on whatever is attended to. It is a preference for its object, selected out of all potential substitutes as objects of attention. Attention is instinctively determined in non-human creatures and modified by parental and group training in many species; the ambiant force impinging on the creature also helps to determine the objects of its attention. As with other creatures, man's attention in part is a valuing of the object, elementary, without training, without justification. Very few persons will even admit that their valuational life is already half described when their attention spectrum is drawn up. But so it is, pathetic as it may be. They would like to believe that attention is a real, natural, automatic experience, about which they promptly cogitate. This is Cartesian rationalism, for does he not offer as a first principle of his Discourse on Method, cogito ergo sum, "I sense that I perceive, therefore I am," and, further, "I perceive because I want, and therefore am." So, straightaway with birth, we fix the infant, if he had a mind to wander, upon the right, proper, goods things -- the nipple, the nurse, the movements of the nurse, her voice, his bowels moving, his eyes lightening, his muscles flexing, all following after the not so good things -- his wonderment at himself, a loss of his boundaries, a panicky feeling of loss of his warm pool, stunned dissolution exposed into infinite space. Suppose his family to be church-goers. He is habituated to church as soon as he can be counted upon to be quiet most of the time there. Time passes, and one day, when he hears, "We are getting ready for church," he displays a mind of his own. "Why?" "Because..." "Because of what?" "Because it's Sunday." "Why do we go to church on Sunday?" "To worship God." And so on. It is almost entirely a morality of means, that carries him from one step to the next, not "really explaining." Sometimes this begins, or he is catechized, even if he asks no questions. "Why should I worship God?" "God gives us our blessings in life." "Like ice-cream?" "Yes." And like your mother, and father, and bed to sleep in, and food to eat, to train him properly, the trainer is usually clever enough to number only things which the trainee likes. But there is small pay-off for the trainer unless he slips into the list of blessings things that he, the trainer likes. So they go to church to assure the blessings that each wants. They already have different religions, in a sense. Still later on, the child has a habit of church-going, as a result of which, his authorities are happy to observe, he feels better with himself, when he attends, and guilty if he misses church. He knows people there, and may even enjoy an occasional service. Unfortunately for his educators, he now changes, we presume. He is bored and fidgety in church; people scowl at him. He does not get the blessings he especially wants. He is drawn to television, and wants to play baseball with the kids who do not go to church. Here are better rewards in his mind; though he has no doubt of God, God's command to "Worship Me in My House," does not get to him forcefully enough. He begins an argument with his educators that will go on for years. What can be said of morality in this simple story? There is a great deal of moral training and moral response. The church and its religion are part of, and will always be part of the child's life. Unless he undergoes heavy secularization he will posses hundreds of ethical views that are connected directly and indirectly with his religion. Almost none of them has come about through autonomous action, reasonable analysis, a survey of cases. The morals collect upon him like fuzz upon a rubbed glass rod. I am saying merely what dozens of writers have said before me. With regard to practically all those who have practiced religion throughout history and today, the whole of religion may be regarded as a generally effective machine to structure a collection of behaviors and bring about their enforcement. The key to the ramshackle edifice is the reduction of cosmic, existential self-fear. For all that religion has dominated the human world from its beginnings, its ethical results have been paltry. The one thing that is supposed to justify religion is precisely the thing that religion does worst, making the human a satisfactory ethical creature. But it must be said that religion has forever assumed the most difficult of all tasks: supplying human existence with an objective morality. The problem is multiplex: how to deal with oneself, one's inner relations; how to deal with others; how to treat with the animate and inanimate world of nature. In the end, one is supposed to be able to say "ought" confidently, to live according to the same "ought," and to be happy. In all of this, one's morality ought to be consonant with the real world and its operating principles, science, that is. Hence, morality is the governance of behavior by rules for preferring and achieving certain human and natural relations and states of being. Unfortunately the simplest, most general rules crack under the stress of psychology and anthropology. "Don't drive while drunk" is a reasonable rule. It should readily illustrate what Emmanuel Kant meant when he propounded his famous dictum: "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Yet Kant's rule, though it might work to his personal satisfaction, might bring about continual disasters if it were allowed to justify others, such as many suicidal and dying persons who would be pleased to have the whole world die with them. Even the drunk may a) deny that he cannot drive safely, b) suggest that everyone should enjoy a drunken drive from time to time, or c) suggest that drunken driving is a good way to play the necessary game of half-wishing self-destruction. If he does not express such ideas, it may be because he realizes that the police make no distinction between common drunks and drunk philosophers. But now we speak of authority, not Kantian rationalism. If we ask what functions are performed by an ethical judgment, we get a more lively sense of this feeling. Feeling ethical, one praises or reprimands, one rewards and punishes another. This sometimes changes the behavior of the targets of such feelings in the direction desired by the moralist. More broadly, then, one exhibits a preference in order to arouse enthusiasm or indignation, to rally support. One raises an ethical feeling in order to determine a policy, and to get on with affairs in an orderly organized way. None of this would be done without our or someone's expression of value. Subjectively, too, the very power to make an ethical judgment is a satisfaction in itself, which often is sufficient unto itself, regardless of consequences. To express one's feelings is in fact synonymous with giving vent to ethical judgments. Alongside all of these functions is the one which religions stress but which very few people feel regularly, that is, to carry out the will of the gods or of the supernatural or fate or nature, because an ordinary resort to this function floods the sluiceways of personal and collective action; it is usually blocked very early in its manifestation. However, it can be the most powerful of all functions of ethical judgments, as we see in the Crusades, the Islamic conquests, or nowadays the rule over Iran by Khomeini. We can agree. These are the functions of words. Man is irretrievably consigned to a life crowded with them. Morals are now a heap of functions as well as forces. Thousands of unsuccessful moral philosophers attest to the frustrations abounding in the pursuit of morals. Voyaging to the Moon is less difficult than the problems of morally justifying the effort involved in the accomplishment. Nonetheless, all humans behave morally and always have. By moral behavior we mean acting one way rather than another because, among other reasons, one feels that it is right and good, and that not acting that way would be wrong and bad. This "feeling" is a "real" thing, physiologically compelling, with physical disturbance and mental states called frustration, indignation, anger, humiliation, and anxiety if the moral act is not performed and euphoria, satisfaction, and physical and mental relaxation if it is performed. The easiest way to "solve" the moral question is to deny it, that is, to assert that people feel moral or immoral, right or wrong, in consequence of a heap of experience, commands, forces, and natural traits. There would be found in this heap no specific independent moral quality. Morality then is no more than what is in the definition above, "among other reasons." The only fault that I can find with this idea is that I do not like the way people behave, and I feel that I am not alone in this regard, so I wish to change people. But how do I extricate a moral principle from the heap? Why should anyone else care what I like or what I do not like, unless I had power to force compliance with my morals and they would do well to obey my rules, or else -- "lest you die ..." as Yahweh might say. So I must search for "justification" of my morality (call it M). What is meant by justification? 1) What so appeals to those I wish to change (adopt my preference) that they change their a) attitude b) behavior c) both. That is, I manipulate them. Nothing here can be considered the satisfying "justification" which I seek. I have, after all, used completely knowable means to warp their wills and minds (" applied social science"). The forms of manipulation include: a) force; b) bribes; c) persuasion by symbols and propaganda, by example, by citing god, priests, scriptures; d) proof of advantages they derive for and by themselves (" 'x' or 'y' is good for you"). They will feel better, look better, etc.; e) 'logical' proof (" If you want 'x' do 'm'"). But in all of this (M) remains unjustified (except the word of God, but which they dispute, hence, is unjustified); that is, I have no right to inflict (M), that is, to change others. 2) So I examine myself. How does it happen that I a) do not like their behavior (M), b) want to change it (M) and I find many causes (reasons) for a) and many causes for b) which boil down to material benefits, property, convenience, and control. All of these are without validity so I must go on. I also feel embarrassment, guilt at their behavior. 3) Why am I guilty when they behave so. a. Identification: I feel that I am part of them and hence suffer their effects. b. Projection: I feel that their motives are my own. c. Self-punition: I feel guilt for them. For all of this, I change them. But why do I feel guilt? a) Because I am trained to feel guilt. b) Because I want to behave like them or did once and was punished or harmed. c) Because of experience (e. g. "I let my younger brother behave so, and look at him now!") So none of these justify either! 4) I listen to My god, and don't let them interpret god their way, and get support to suppress them. But now my insight (still active) tells me I may be wrong re god. Is there any other means of justification? 5) Can I now say, "What I want is what I want, and it is, at least, 'good' in that if I get it, I satisfy whatever it is that makes me want it." Now what is it that I am satisfying? a) A psycho-physiological process of which there are several, viz.: damping of fear, extension of control (over self, over others), displacement of affect, identification, obsession (repetition), ambivalence; b) possessing one or more of, more wealth (things); affection; power; well-being (safety, health, strength); respect; skill (knowledge). Thus everything said of 1) to 4) beforehand may in fact be the superstructure of 5) here. 6) The only way I can budge from this position of 5) which has established my Basic Morality is by changing myself so that another different or an altered want takes the place of (M). But, if M2 is substituted for M1 (no matter how little time or how long it takes) then I am changed and have a different morality. 7) What can cause this different morality (M2)? a) Failure by resistance; b) accident; c) internal change (metabolism goes down, illness, different glandular flow, etc.) 8) Then I repeat M2 with respect to the group of people whose actions I did not like before and go through 1) to 7) again. 9) Now is M2 better than M1 and will M3 be better than M2... Mn? How would one know? 10) Suppose Mx has these subsequences or consequences? It is significantly easier to run through the process. Further, no change occurs when it is achieved in me, i. e. Mx = Mn, the final value of morality. 11) Therefore, I settle upon Mx and practice Mx and all closely analogous Mxa.. n . This becomes in effect my moral system in regards to the class of behaviors we are discussing. 12) We note: a) Mx is mine, but also other's moral system because we are effectively transacting within its rules! b) The system is both egoistic and species-racial (social). It works. It can be mythicized, religified, philosophized. In the sequence of events, 1) to 12) it will be noticed that all processes are explained in natural terms, as instances of well known and common psychological and social dynamics. The supernatural is involved on the level of such fictions, concepts, perceptions, and illusions as are usually encountered in human psychic and social transactions. Moral demands, moral behavior, and moral struggle are occurring. Ethical resolutions and principles are evolving. But it is all happening without resort to a moral source existing and coming from beyond the act and process themselves. Let us consider the choices of a typical person, Abel. We assume that he makes an average of 140 choices a day, and therefore roughly 50,000 in a year. They range in significance, for example, from deciding whether to brush one's teeth quickly or thoroughly, to whether or not to begin setting aside $3000 a year towards the college education of a child. If it is argued that brushing teeth is hardly a moral or ethical issue, one can either argue in rebuttal or simply raise the threshold of a moral question by some criteria of significance that excludes brushing the teeth. Where this latter point would commence is not easy to define. Perhaps it should be an issue which, whatever its subject, involves conscience, that is, a slight or larger factor of anxiety and guilt pursuant to an uncertain decision (if it were to be uncertain). Since we are being so speculative, we can presume to estimate also that 10% of the decisions will have such a guilt factor, giving a total number of about 4000 moral decisions per year, or about 13 per day. Thus, one would count as containing the guilt factor: a choice of watching a television entertainment or doing school homework; drinking a second glass of whiskey or not; deciding how much money to put in the church collection box; whether or not to eat a gourmet garlic sauce before going on a blind date; slapping a child; etc. We shall not attempt a fine mathematical analysis of our typical citizen, Able, but merely assign him categories and percentages, basing the categories on the kinds of mentation occurring as the decision is made. (The classification is obviously slap-dash.) TYPES OF MORAL MENTATION BY HYPOTHETICAL TYPICAL CITIZEN (On Annual Basis) A. Practically automatic 40% 2000 B. Conscious, sloganized 20% 1000 C. Rationalized gibberish 15% 800 D. Carefully calculated 1% 50 E. Passionate, intuitive 5% 250 F. Troubled by aware internal conflicts 5% 250 G. Troubled by aware social conflict 6% 300 H. Flights of fancy, fantasy, solipsism 7% 350 - - 100% 5000 Thus, imagining one certain day in his life, Abel might make the following ethical choices: Moral Action Type of Mentation Involved Withholding a child's allowance F Giving a seat to an elderly lady on the bus A Overcharging a tiresome client E Working a little overtime on his job A Fantasying adultery with an attractive woman H Buying a lottery ticket A Absorbing news of a friend's death C Angered by a newspaper article on crime A Explaining his preference for a politician B Commenting on an office quarrel F Wondering whether to bring home a cake B Deciding to be sick and not work one day D Signing a negative report on an employee G Moral Action Type of Mentation Involved Withholding a child's allowance F Giving a seat to an elderly lady on the bus A Overcharging a tiresome client E Working a little overtime on his job A Fantasying adultery with an attractive woman H Buying a lottery ticket A Absorbing news of a friend's death C Angered by a newspaper article on crime A Explaining his preference for a politician B Commenting on an office quarrel F Wondering whether to bring home a cake B Deciding to be "sick" and not work one day next week D Signing a negative report on an employee G It happens, we say, that each of these decisions gave Abel a moral twinge; the other 117 moral choices did not. Other people will have different numbers, types, and intensities of moral action in a day's time. If one reads James Joyce's Ulysses, a fictional masterpiece on a day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, Ireland, taking up some hundreds of pages of print, we realize that we are probably greatly underestimating the profusion of ethical choices in a 24 hour period. Yet I have no idea of the range, average, or typical kinds of moral actions in a day's time. People are called by those who know them "conscientious," "unconcerned," "busy- body," etc., words that must refer to the extent and types of their moral behavior, but the appropriate sample survey with what happens in moral discourse of the self with itself and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed by philosophers and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Bloom, the character, had, I guess, an unusually active mind and more conflicts to resolve by the nature of his background, romantic wife, advertising work, avidity for many things in life, and continuous movement about the city. Still, we have enough of exemplary material and a frame of reference to allow suggesting several points about moral mentation and action. The average life presents a great abundance of moral choices. The form of mentation employed before, after, and in the course of acting morally is largely absurd. What happens in moral discourse of the self with itself and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed by philosophers and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Only a small portion of it is related to science or theory except indirectly. Only a tiny percentage of a modernized population spends much moral energy on the divine, or on methodical calculation (unless it is one's paid job to do so). In Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud points out the commonly known problem of ethics: that ill-luck -- that is, external frustration -- so greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances. Whole peoples have behaved in this way, and still do. He calls this an "original infantile state of conscience." fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is unfortunate, it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and, threatened by such a loss of love, he once more bows to the parental representative in his super-ego ---- a representation whom, in his days of good fortune, he was ready to neglect. Fate is looked upon as an expression of Divine Will. Fatalism is very strong in early religions and ethics. Why? The authorities and experts say: because primitive man was at the mercy of savage natural forces. Still, if man were to be of the same ideological cast today, he would also be fatalistic because obviously, when one think of it, very little real control has been exercised over the immense and infinite area of difficulties besetting us. Rather, the change of attitude has come about as a result of changed ideology, weltanschauung, and this has changed because of a fairly long calm condition of the Earth and the skies, and the development of a progressive, free-will, uniformitarian (self-contradictory) philosophy. Perhaps the distinction between traditional sacral and modern secular man is that the former has not forgotten his primeval scenarios, whereas the latter has suppressed them very deeply and become overtly pragmatic. John C. Caldwell wrote a memorandum, not formally published, on the Sahelian Drought of the 1970's. We take leave to quote him lengthily: Fatalism Fatalism is an unsuitable term because it can be used in two ways: to mean the rational acceptance by those living in a traditional society that they have little control over the forces affecting their lives; and to mean such a reluctance to attempt any control that they are more battered by such forces than need be the case. The acceptance of the blows of fate is often so great in traditional society that it is difficult to measure the personal impact of disaster or even to discuss it properly. Often technical aiders give up the attempt and go to talk to other technical aiders who seem to speak the same language, and thereby sustain the conventional wisdom and often lose all chance of adding to worthwhile knowledge about the situation. Sometimes they wonder if they have been entirely misled about the reality of the position. In one of the few honest reports ever written on this question, a transport expert working intimately with the truck drivers bringing food relief in the recent Sahelian drought and having substantial contact with the rural population reported that at first none of the local population seemed ever to have heard of the drought; later he concluded that they felt it deeply and were taking rational steps to minimize the hurt in ways they had known all their lives... In Yelwa, northwest Nigeria, it was reported that, "The Emir of Yauri and the Divisional Officer, head of the Local Administration, held that drought did not occur in Yelwa and that no problem with shortage of rains was extant". Even the farmers talked of locusts, weeds and lack of good lands as much as drought. There are many reasons for this kind of reaction. One is that the matter is irrelevant to the outsiders, whose lives are demonstrably not affected by the climatic conditions. Another is a belief, held also by the outsiders, that nothing can be done to alter the weather. Actually this view is usually more rational still -- a feeling that the bad years are as much part of the totality of what must be experienced as the good years and that the lot of man is to bend with each wind. Such attitudes are embedded deep in the culture; they find religious expression and are reinforced by religion. In much of the savannah and desert of Africa, people take drought to be a necessary divine warning that religious and moral standards are slipping and that a revival is due. Drought provides assurance that Providence is paying attention and is still concerned. It indicates a need for religious leaders to intercede with God. If the drought is long and severe, resort will also be made to age-old methods, long predating Islam, for encouraging rain... From the Western Shael to Somalia drought and religious observations are deeply linked.. In profane literature and oral tradition references, the need for water [is] equally pervasive. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the common man is somewhat apprehensive about recalling the last drought or predicting the next one. The Yelwa survey reported that, although there was clear agreement about the nature and seriousness of drought, there was complete disagreement in the farmers' responses as to when the last one occurred and three-quarters did not wish to encourage bad luck (or to trespass into the domain of Allah) by suggesting that one would ever again occur... Not only is the origin of drought either divine or in any case not to be influenced by Man, but so is death -- a proposition that is still true over most of the Shael most of the time. Western doctors working in the drought refugee camps were disturbed when the mothers of dying children seemed to be more concerned about obtaining cloth to serve as shrouds for their dead or dying babies than they appeared to be about the fact of death itself. Their reaction were partly explained by the fact that the babies had symptoms which have always presaged death in the savannah. Part, too, was the religious conviction that the babies were being called away and had been destined at this time to leave the world (the Fulani express it as the child wanting to go.) These are not societies in which determined efforts are likely to be made to counter the condition of an apparently dying child or indeed to prevent the births of children. Urbanization and other types of economic modernization ultimately lower child mortality both by providing greater health services and by convincing people that one can and should intercede with the forces that determine children's sickness and death. We see how sacral man confronts secular problems and converts them into forms amenable to sacred solutions. The thousands of cultures existing in historical time and space have given us a fair sample of the ideal and practical ethical capabilities of religion. The experience on the whole has been unimpressive to one looking for a happy human way of life. The more one trusts to religion, it seems, the less good one can obtain from science and politics. On the other hand, science in itself (that is, science which is entirely positive and empirical) is quite helpless to address the moral perplexities of man. Politics, moreover, has, if anything, a poorer record than religion, speaking now of politics as a secular approach to human issues; for politics tends by itself to depend upon sheer physical force to order a population, and systematic violence is hardly an improvement upon whatever chicanery and delusions historical religions employ to rule a people. Would one have preferred to be governed by the barons or by the monks of the European Middle Ages, by the warlords or by the Shinto and Buddhist priests of Old China, by the shaman or by the priest, by Aaron or by Joshua? And, today in America, if the lawyers, lobbyists, and military contractors were replaced in the ruling circles and representative assemblies of the country by ministers, priests, and the religiously devout, would the country be better governed, its people more peaceable, mentally healthy, and prosperous? Would one prefer to be governed by the Shah of Iran or the Ayatollah Khomeini? The questions are difficult, enormously complicated, and perhaps biased. Still they are worth considering if only as a means of suggesting that ethical progress in a society is not to be identified with its secularization. The key to good governance is an ethical system beyond facile contrivance. Neither religion nor secularism, as such, promises success. Even though it may be true that our morals come in a tangled concatenation, the human could scarcely accept the fact. One whose overriding aim is self-control and control over the world will refuse to recognize in a garbage pile his towering morality. This in itself would seem to prove him a moral failure -- shifty, gutless, inconsistent, contradictory (all that he really is, someone might comment). He feels that there must be an absolute, pure source of right conduct somewhere, and is all to ready to find and proclaim one, even an impostor. Yet occasionally the human becomes ashamed of living a lie and hates himself and hates his religion and gods for having created his dependency upon delusions. He admires the "honesty" of the bear, the trout, the dog; they are not of two minds and forked tongue. Why cannot his morality be so straightforward? Blame part of it upon his obsession with history, his compulsion to repeat his worst experiences. He demands that his morality today be that of five thousand years ago. He demands that it be of the highest order: We know what that means; it must come from Heaven. Further he demands that all people share in an ecumenical morality. The logical and sociological impossibility of both demands will not deter him. He is implacable. He will not pluck his morals from a garbage heap. What can the scientist counsel? Try as they might, the anatomist and physiologist cannot separate a pig and a man far enough for comfort. The biologist, try as he may, cannot worship an arrangement derangeable by an unseen particle, and a lucky hit out of hundreds of millions of spermatozoa. Try if he would, the anthropologist could not work up an agitation over adulterous intercourse and let the commandment be written down by the hand of a god. Nor can the geologist see in an awful blasted out crater more than a crashing meteoroid. Nor the astronomer see more than a vast number of worlds in just that, a vast number of worlds: it seems that the gods, too, have a compulsion to repeat. No, the scientists cannot appease their consciences and man's sacrality with any consistency. Besides providing people with morality, it is said, religion puts them directly in touch with the supernatural realm. For the mass of people this is untrue, just as it is that their religion gives them some special ethical competence. A few practitioners must enjoy the facilities for communion with the spiritual universe which churches and temples provide. The mass media (motion pictures especially) and drugs, as T. Leary has eloquently argued along with others, and, too, many gurus, seances, and non-church rites provide this type of communion. The supernatural is hard to distinguish from political illusions and fictions. To the practitioners of scientific method, a devotee of astrology and a political fascist share several features. Both analyze the present state of world and personal affairs, and gain confidence and make predictions on the basis of their beliefs. Knowing that a person is an astrologist or, on the other hand, a fascist, enables the social psychologist to assert and predict with high probability that each will possess certain attitudes. The fascist believes in his leader as the possessor of semi-divine qualities, a superman. He has a warped conception of history and the future (according to our scientists). The astrologist believes his astrologer has access to supernatural knowledge; he, too, has a warped conception of the path of history and the future. Both types are paranoiac in believing that a great deal of what is really happening in the world is concealed by the establishment or conspiratorial powers. The far departure from reality in both cases may have little to do with their success in life. General knowledge and matter-of-factness are only loosely connected with achievement in society. The belief of both the astrologist and the fascist in the supernatural lends each a confidence denied to less convinced persons; self-confidence is in many life situations more of an asset than knowledge of the situation. Whereas the ordinary human is only schizotypical, these two tend more towards the schizophrenic. We seem to be at an impasse, owing to my downgrading of the creative moral and spiritual functions of historical religion. Supernaturalism appears to be all manner of anti- scientific folly. Morality exists concerning countless particulars in human activities, even while neither religion nor secularism can justify its source, hence their application. We see no easy solution, perhaps none at all. Later on, we may offer some grounds to justify a relatively absolute" morality, meaning by this verbal barbarism some unchanging moral propositions that are themselves changing. If one might conceive of a religion that is an integrated whole, accommodates change easily, and that does not fundamentally and continuously violate the controls and benefits supplied by science, then this religion may not only be superior but also popular. Does this mean that morality is human and mundane, part of an endless process going on in millions of transactions every day everywhere? Yes. Does it mean that the supernatural, the divine, the gods are not the source of morality, that ethics exists without religion? Yes. Does it mean that mankind is morally sui generis and autonomous? Yes. Does it mean that humans are "immoral" and "wicked," with no means of setting ethical standards? No. Does it mean that the supernatural, all that is divine and sacred, has no effect upon ethical behavior? No. The supernatural, as non-knowledge, is knowledge of a sort. Those who transact or seek to transact with the supernatural in order to think upon the divine, engage in an ideational relation with the divine, and are affected by the knowledge which we possess of the divine. They will behave differently than those who deny the supernatural and avoid it. Religion, to put it in commonplace language, can make people better. It should be the "right" kind of religion, and, of course, this would be the form we are here advocating: self-aware, open, relativistic, non-historical, connected with the sciences of natural and socio-psychological processes, non-anthropomorphic morphologically, anthropomorphic structurally. Let us see what science is doing that is religiously relevant and can be adapted to religion. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q THEOTROPY:} {C Chapter 11: } {T RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN SCIENCE} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART II. THEOTROPY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ELEVEN RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN SCIENCE Out of religion came politics and then science, each reacting upon the others while going its own way. Science is a set of interests that is religiously, socio-politically, and autonomously determined. Science struggles to conform to a scientific method in whatever it does. The struggle lends it its distinction, providing it with its social character. Without the method, it is useless to speak of science. The method is applied to whatsoever extension of the senses is of interest and controls such extension; both operations sometimes fail but also often succeed in our day. A scientific procedure typically puts forth a hypothesis about what is measurably expected to occur under certain conditions, and, by finding or producing the conditions, finds or produces the event. Wherever conditions permit, these are produced under controls; wherever they occur naturally, they are overseen as strictly as possible. No place is allowed in theory for supernatural conditions or supernatural effects, that is, for the intervention so factors that are undefinable in material terms, or of an external ungovernable will. As Alexander Hamilton quipped, when Benjamin Franklin suggested prayer at an impasse while composing the American Constitution in 1787, we should not call upon the help of a foreign power. Hamilton, intending for politics what Franklin had already practiced in electrical experiments, had in mind a republic whose behavior might be predictable when certain regular operating conditions were established by its structure. The incident reminds us that science includes social as well as natural science. Humans are a material factor in the one, if not in the other; they are a contaminating factor in both. The human factor has so continually disturbed the scientific method in its application to natural phenomena that, in a sense, all science becomes social science, especially as the material conditions of study become more difficult and less amenable to continuous ordinary sense observation. We cannot go here into the progressive discoveries of the intervention of anthropo-sociology and especially psychology in the workings of natural science, citing the works of P. W. Bridgman and others, but we can, without fear of rebuttal, warn of the inevitable effects upon experimenters and researchers of their psychological as well as physical presence amidst the supposedly materially and logically observer -- proof conditions of scientific work. Already, then we have to be on the alert, in all that passes as science-applying- scientific-method, so as to detect the interest that inspires the work and to discern the sometimes exceedingly subtle intervention of the mind in the process of discovery, proof, and disproof. The "interest" in a scientific task may range from the most banal, obvious, and limited (e. g. to polish better a lens so as to see stars more clearly; to adjust the angle of a spade to bite the ground with less energy input) to the general and ideological, that is, unconscious (e. g. to validate evolution by setting up hypotheses implying or excluding neo-darwinian evolution; to calculate pre-historical sky charts by retrocalculating or presumptively modifying present motions of the Earth and Solar system). The aggregation of "outside" interests creates a continual uneasiness in scientific work; like barnacles on a fine yacht, it keeps science from being "clean;" but the barnacles are part of life at sea: no barnacles, no sailing. We may sympathize with scientists who call up their psychic mechanisms of unconscious denial by indignation at the idea that they may be skirting the supernatural, or, worse, serving the supernatural, or by backing up into ever narrow slips of material phenomena where it is hoped that none can say that anything but sense data are implicated in their work. The search for a body of pure science, however, like the search for the Golden Fleece, eventuates in taking aboard a witch with the long-sought prize, and Jason and his Argonauts must move on evermore in unresting adventure. The main theories of astronomy are as remote from experience as to be spooky. Astronomers walk on a tightrope between science and religion, depending upon a few principles that are empirically formulated to keep the field aloft as a science. The most that astronomers can say empirically is that much of the universe, including fortunately most of the solar system, exhibits some large uniformities of behavior. As soon as they retroject or project by thousands of years they become vulnerable, that is, unbelievable. The theories include largely a set of Newtonian laws that are fading fast and may soon be abrogated, and which serve to fire projectiles from the Earth in the direction of objects in space, such that, by deft ad hoc maneuvering, arrive on target. Otherwise, they boast La Place's mathematical explanations, which La Place himself declared to be dependent upon uniformitarian premises. Then there occur various ways of measuring brilliance, heat, distance, chemistry, speed, and chronology of heavenly bodies, which are hopeful speculations, thanklessly spared from all but an iota of factual proof, leaning upon one another for support but also begging each other's question. So great, however is faith in the one "law of falling bodies" that all else passes as science simply because, as I said, the proof of science is the scientific method, and all of astronomy, by this time, has become couched in scientific form. That some of the more famous astronomers and related scientists of these decades - Urey, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, Crick, T. Gold, and Sagan, the name only several, have toyed with bizarre theories impermissible to laymen, acknowledges the essential fragility and defensive posture of the field. Nowadays an astronomer, provided that he has an appropriate university degree, can profess the Doppler Effect, Bode's Law, intelligence in other worlds, the "Big Bang", the La Place theorems, empty space, straight lines, exact solar time and motions, and a dozen other mostly conventional concepts. Whatever the mix, it is apparently unsystematic, unreliable, ad hoc, and temporary. If scientists lay claim to authority on grounds that such a mix is true and fully representative of reality, they can deny a "union card" to whoever disturbs the mix. If, however, they place claims of authority in the procedures of scientific method, then they must give a respectful hearing to any educated person who seeks to establish an identity for Plato's "divine animal" in the universe or to prove empirically any number of such hypotheses. The same kind of reasoning can be directed at biology and geology. Basic conventional theories in both of these areas of study are weak and straining at the point of collapse into disintegration, if not supernaturalism. No more than physics can define energy other than by fiction, operations and hypothesis, can biology define life. Fringe life forms are several, with subatomic behavior, crystals, and viruses providing initial confusion, and sending practitioners to more comfortable empirical fields to work. Ethology is rampant in the fields distinguishing among animals. Evolutionary theory is a shambles; "natural selection" is invoked as often as God in the Bible, but it is an embarrassment to do so. The Earth Sciences, like the other fields, are making many advances to which the name "revolutionary" is increasingly applied with some pride. Yet two of their greatest operational concepts -- that of time and that of uniformitarian change -- are in peril. They invest much hope in radiochronometry to preserve long time spans and therefore smooth out curves of change, but, as I have explained elsewhere, radiochronometry is based upon radioactivity which is affected by the kind of history that it claims to prove; that is, catastrophe destroys time even while time pretends to disprove catastrophe. Psychology and anthropology include so many variations of methodology that discerning the supernatural in them is not difficult; only the naive can persistently believe that variant methods are independent of moral perspectives, simply grasping the struggling corpus by a toe instead of its nose. Every psychological or anthropological "school" is a supernatural sect, whether it seeks to confront the supernatural or turn its back to it. But, although moral and supernatural, science in itself is not capable of justifying human action; it cannot even justify its own. The myth that it can, which was exposed as soon as science was mature enough to bear the truth, lives on like any other supernatural belief, lending motivation, inflaming passions, claiming moral credits, inspiring lives, and narrowing thought and options. Probably, too, many scientific secularists labor in the hope that something marvelous and morally convincing will grow out of their work, as penicillin emerged serendipitously from a mold. Willy-nilly all sciences, in their healthy vigor, are wrestling with the supernatural and contributing to its expansion thereby. In this sense, all sciences are addressing the foundations of religion and theology. The more scientific work that is performed, the more areas of uncontrollability and contradiction come upon the stage. Science itself is the biggest factory of the supernatural. It tears holes in the fabrics extending reality. It works all the while surrounded by amateurs of the supernatural and theologians, pelted by derision. Perhaps one might forecast the most esteemed and influential religion of the future by locating the contemporary cult that is closest to the anomalies and radical new interests of science. Theology can be a science, whether it be formulated as pure or as applied science. As the latter, it can be called religious science, or, simply, religion, just as certain departments of political science in American universities call themselves departments of politics (New York University) or departments of government ( Harvard University), both of these terms meaning applied political science. A proposition (hypothesis) in theology might then read: "All cultures denominate historical gods." We suppose that this proposition, empirically tested, may eventuate with exceptions, such as the Buddhists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and possibly several other totalitarian socialist regimes. Then, if we wish, we may restate the proposition, as some have, to include "pseudo-gods," saying that "a god includes a figure with 3,4. .n attributes of which at least 'x' have to be present to permit the designation 'god' to be used." Hence certain cultures have figures such as Lenin or Mao Tse Tung who possess at least 'x' attributes, while others have celestial figures that border upon gods such as Region 'A' in China where "Heaven" (Ti'en) is accorded at least 'x' traits of a god, and still others elevate masters and gurus to the stature of Mohamet. We perceive that the pure proposition is heading in a certain direction and that by the manipulation of the definition of the term "god," certain areas of empirical research are opened up, and, furthermore, that some hidden intent may even be present, such as to demonstrate the ineradicability of the worship of gods. A related proposition in applied theology or religion can continue to illustrate the nature of theology and at the same time show how applied propositions formulate matters often more transparently, from the viewpoint of ideological research. Thus, one says: "To disestablish gods of traits 'a.... n' including 'g' and 'h' it is necessary to establish a totalitarian regime with semidivine figures of traits 'a... n' less 'g' and 'h'." So elementary an introduction will hardly persuade anyone of the profoundity and possibilities of theology as a science. The reader may be justifiably impatient to hear what theology can do with propositions of the supernatural. He may be wanting to know whether the supernatural exists, for example, and how the science of theology proves this. One ought not be evasive; nevertheless, it must be pointed out, in anticipation of the answer to this question, that no science pretends to answer impossible questions, even though these may be scientifically formulated and studied. Medicine has few researchers (perhaps one-ten thousandth of its energies?) given over to the long-term prolongation of human life, although this may be a strong interest of the public. Nor are many astrophysicists preoccupied with voyages of a duration greater than a few seconds of a light-year. Nor are many political scientists or psychologists devoted to the attainment of utopias. That is, one can conceive of a flourishing science of theology that concerns itself hardly at all with proving hypotheses on the existence of the supernatural (and, indeed, may flourish for that very reason, just as chemistry flourished only after it stopped seeking for an Elixir of Life and to transmute lead into gold). So warned, we can put forward a proposition that deals with the central interest that many people have in religion. One may hypothesize thus: "The spiritual, defined as any event contradicting existing laws of science relating to materiality, and probably nonreproducible by known scientific procedures does (or does not) exist." I see no objection to arguing that this statement is scientific. For instance, let us suppose that a person claims to achieve a certain vision, that no one else can see. (" No one" here means nobody in a large random sample of a population to which the visionary belongs.) Suppose an adept in drug-use demonstrates that 'X' percent of the population, to whom a certain drug is administered, claim the same vision as 'A. ' The vision is therefore proven to be possible, although not proven to deal with real objects. A scientific explanation of 'A' is not forthcoming, even though the state of 'A' is reproducible. Theology takes in consequence the position that the vision itself is actual, that 'A' and possibly some other rare persons are capable of it, and that many others can attain it upon taking the certain drug. Obviously we are not faced with a powerful proof of the existence of the supernatural. But suppose that 'A' reports that this vision is of a vaguely defined human form who tells him "You shall see my power at Bunting Green Airport in 48 hours." Two days later a plane crashes at said airport. This has happened while a quarter of the large sample has been taking the drug and many of these had images predicting dire events at the same airport or some airport at roughly the same time. It would not require many cases of this sort to prove the validity of this type of supernaturalism (the type is very commonly asserted in legends, mythology, and religious documents, as, e. g., when Yahweh tells Moses to fetch the Elders on the Holy Mountain to be near The Lord and they come and do see the Lord. (Exodus 24) However, if one were a foundation grants officer he might give money to the "control group drug study" as described, but not in any expectation of a resulting byproduct such as the air crash prediction. For he would be warned by practically every alert and informed person that cases such as this occur only insofar as visionary figures make predictions and that the predicted events practically never occur. If you cannot expect definite and defensible results from it, you should not grant funds to a project. Never mind the appeal that to prove god at work once in a million projects is enough. Suppose yet another type of proposal comes before the foundation. This asserts that, "Totemism in religion functions to repress human creativity, while anthropomorphism in religion increases it." The applicant conjectures simply that if people imitate an animal, even in imaginary behaviors, they will not become very clever, whereas if they imitate an equally fictional superman, they will become more clever. "Imitation" is, of course, defined and measured operationally as part of religious totemism and anthropomorphism, as are the concepts "totemism," "anthropomorphism," and "creativity." Whatever the results of such an inquiry, which is highly relevant both to anthropology, where pre-existing theories of the origins of totemism amount to over forty, and to theology, where, whether or not one believes in the well-nigh universal anthropomorphism, it is useful to know how it functions in the social structure, they are relevant to main lines of investigation in these fields and a priori must be useful. Our imagined foundation is not likely to look so kindly, however, upon another proposal which crosses its threshold proposing to show that A) Moses' monotheism is anti-democratic and B) leads to politically harmful ideas of the supernatural among persons steeped in its learning. If government-financed and American, the foundation might decide that support for the program might be liable to court action on grounds that it violated the constitutional guarantee against abridgment of the freedom of religion, even though the argument might be advanced that the Constitution has the right to discover and protect itself against potential enemies. A private scientific foundation would probably decide that the study would bring in no valid or useful results. The probable pro-Moses trustees would also determine that such a study is not scientific, even if the word "harmful" were replaced by several categories of consequences, empirically verifiable and undeniably relevant, such as "proneness to belief in charismatic authority," "totalitarian," "highly ethnocentric," and "highly aggressive and non-conciliatory." Perhaps the term "anti-democratic" might escape similar close scrutiny, although quite vague and usually meaningless as employed; here again, the proponents of the research would no doubt advance empirical indicators, such as scoring high in attitude test of tolerance, respect for discussion, consultation with others, compromise in decision-making, belief that opposing views may be right, and relative immunity from paranoia and hallucinations. In sum, expertly espoused, the project could rebut all attacks against its scientificity, and certainly would transport scientific method into the core materials of theology. But it would be unlikely to win support. Generally speaking, scientific investigations have scarcely been employed in the field of theology proper. To the degree that theology in a given setting could be studied scientifically, it is deprived of the means, the intervening variable being indifference. This can be promptly and cheaply demonstrated by examining the articles in standard encyclopedias having to do with the field and those who have worked in it. What is to be observed, creeping into the area from its fringes, are studies in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, political sociology, and psychology, few of which ever gain entry except through works such as Mircea Eliade's in the history of religion or works carrying a favorable attitude (from the standpoint of the market in ideas) such as Henri Bergson's and Teilhard de Chardin's or Hans Kung's. A group of scholars working in the area with an approach termed "creation science" have developed their own audience and market. Their efforts to correlate natural history with sacred scripture qualify for the field of theology, too, and there is nothing un-scientific about quoting words attributed to Elohim or anyone else as a hypothesis for testing human or natural history. One would not refuse as the hypothesis for the study of, say, American politics (1965-80), or of history generally, a quotation attributed to an historian, Harold Acton, "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." One would however have to assure himself of the usual criteria: that "power," "absolute" and "corrupt" are operationally defined, and empirical indicators or measures provided for them. When certain scholars determine to test the veracity of the Bible by quoting therefrom "God said to Noah... I will bring down a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die," and plan to adduce evidence from natural history of such a deluge, they are certainly proposing an ambitious project. And to qualify as scientists, they must clarify precisely, hypothetically, the extent of the destruction that is mentioned and its main instrument, a watery deluge, then validate by geological and ethnological evidence the occurrence of this particular flood (as distinct from a series of floods, etc.) And they would have to eschew any direct test of whether in fact the conversation took place between Elohim and Noah, because it is unverifiable. Most scientists would be logically compelled to accept a properly drafted study proposal of this type as belonging to the realm of scientific work. Some scholars, gripped in the avoidance mechanism previously alluded to, would deny the relevance of any study whatsoever that would tend to confirm a scriptural statement. When one examines an encyclopedia such as the Britannica which assigns millions of words to theological matters and many more millions to geology and ancient history, with only a dozen paragraphs treating the deluge issue, whether as an issue or as a disputable event, and when one considers that the deluge problem has agitated all generations of man everywhere since the beginning of history and before, one is inclined to ask, at least in this instance: "Who is the more biased against science: the creation scientists accepting scientific terms, or the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica avoiding the subject unconsciously?" Waiving the question, whose intent is obviously polemical, one may note once again how important is the matter of "interests" and the motives for such interests in science. The choice of subjects for hypothesis and study is obviously crucial in human culture and welfare, and yet has little to do with scientific method but much to do with the meaningfulness of science. And what is "meaning"? And who shall determine it? "Meaning" is certainly among the most profound questions of philosophy and theology. "Why do we exist?" "What is our destiny?" If scientists choose to interest themselves, or are forced to occupy themselves with research on the advertising of commodities and with the perfection of weapons of destruction, to the extent say of ten thousand times the efforts put into the most meaningful questions of human existence, then they can hardly complain that the profound questions are overvalued. One is led, therefore, to suggest that the supernatural is a proper and major concern for scientists, even if successes in the field come hard and require that they conduct humbling investigations of themselves. Perhaps a tithe of ten per cent of one's scientific energies and resources to theology is in order, and a similar tithe to the basic needs of humanity in regard to a basic minimum material subsistence, a basic possibility of gaining life experience through free movement and education, and a basically equal access to disinterested justice in all situations of conflicts of desire or interest. For, in this latter regard, scientific effort is also hugely biased against giving itself over to just those problems that render mankind incapable of an adequate material substratum of meaningfulness. It is from the basic desire for new experience that the interest in the supernatural emerges. To stunt it, by allowing it a meaningless diet according to the scientific method, is a form of deliberate, if unconscious, deprivation, just as much as to stunt it by forcing it into obsessive narrow ritual which has nothing to do with scientific method. Under such circumstances, it becomes ironical indeed to speak of "meaningless" propositions, as many modern logical positivist philosophers call considerations of the supernatural, for it is precisely against their "meaningless" reductionism that religious man is rebelling. "Words" are important in thought, but to carve them down into nothingness except as they have rigid and narrow denotations is but an unconscious method of assuring that the thought that occurs is to be equally rigid and narrow. The kind of person who is then to be fashioned out of the raw material of homo sapiens schizotypus comes to depend upon only very limited mechanisms of fear-control, to wit, obsessed and catatonic behavior according to scientific rules, with a limited capacity for displacement of the selves of a person, a limited ability to identify the selves with the larger human and natural world, a severely suppressed ambivalence turning back upon the self, and a general lack of animation of the psyche. Surely this is not the intent of science, which only hopes to use words instrumentally and to solve otherwise impossible problems by a sure-fire method; but it does tend to be the effect of science when science exceeds its logical limits, demands to be "pure," and goes so far as to restrict its own method to areas guaranteed not to possess deep human meaning. We can take up two attitudes in the face of the threat posed by many scientists to human development. One is that scientists are bound to fail in this method of coping with man's essential madness. "Just be patient; the movement will collapse from its inherent weaknesses," and indeed scientists do feel an overpowering weakness, and ensuing exasperation, when human cultures fail to embrace their interests and techniques or, worse, fashion crazy worlds of science fiction to dwell in while waiting for science to solve all problems without the aid of politics or religion. A second attitude, much to be preferred, is to encourage science in every way possible to examine itself and proceed to the examination of human nature, upon whose basic mechanisms science, politics, and religion must ultimately depend. What must this human being be fed to keep him creative and within bounds? The answer may be scientific theology. Bring together all that science is producing, half-consciously, in the way of theological findings and blend them into an integrated metaphysics, the whole of which addresses, not "mythical" or "rational" man, but the operative homo sapiens schizotypus. I have examined human mental structure and operations in other works, so am permitted to relate here only the central relation of religion and science, and of this most clues are already familiar to the reader. Science emerges from the limited but most significant ability of the human mind to capture pragmatically, that is, to control, the connections between the person and an immense world of identifications and displacements. From his very beginnings, mankind has identified and sought to control the heavens and the gods, the mountains and oceans, the plants and animals. No other being on Earth is so ambitious; all others are confined to such rational activity as instinct requires for the purpose of survival and propagation. The human mind, disordered by genesis and at birth, has the immense problem of extending pseudo-instinctive (that is, voluntary) controls over connections with existence that have very little to do with survival and propagation. The human, for instance, will sacrifice (both in the functional and symbolic senses) everything -- food, family, sex, lesser powers, safety --in his efforts to command the skies. Furthermore, besides the skies, there is many another realm of being that he is compelled by his mind to deal with, an infinite set of realms it seems, even though his mind, we must remember, is assisted by only moderately competent sensory organs, so that he is encumbered in his ingesting, questing, and adjusting. So the need to order one's head requires that the cosmos be set in order, and it is natural for one to apply the pragmatic( scientific) techniques that substitute for instinct in the obtaining of both very close necessities and the most faraway necessities, and hence the elaboration of science out of immediate pragmatism occurs on both the intimate material level and the cosmic level. Science is a human activity and therefore can be characterized as such, no less than religion is a human activity. It has a history, a sociology, a sub-culture, a psychology. It exhibits struggle, cooperation, ambition, failure, success, inducements --payoffs and penalties, a total range of material subjects to study, just as religion is subject of study, by the scientific method. It has religious and political aspects. It deals in authority, fictions, myths, claims, anomalies, rituals, and hypotheses, all of which are perilously reminiscent of religion and the supernatural. And, of course, to distinguish it especially from all other social activities, it is obsessed with the secular ritual of scientific method, and tends to extend the practice to all spheres of life. The basic rite of scientific method is similar everywhere. But there come into being elaborations, embellishments, and variations of the basic rite. Some scientists like to think of the changes in naming, conceptualization, procedures, research interests, and so on as "progress" or at least "different ways of looking at the same thing." Other scientists know that they are in the grip of fashion and fads, whether in astronomy or geology, psychology or sociology. Magic, cultism, and other overtones, usually sounded and noticed in religious practice, can be heard in any science. Every science must have a supernatural auxiliary. I would call it a suprascience, if such a term would not offend. I mean that the science itself consists of a stripped-down method and its findings, and that there must form around it not only a halo or encrustation of fictions, hypotheses, and non-empirically derived speculations, but also an attitudinal complex, rather like a system of illusions and delusions, or like a ruling formula (a term which Gaetano Mosca applied to the field of political science). This auxiliary suprascience functions as a propaganda machine to make the science appear to its practitioners and public as continuously worthwhile, to tie it non-empirically into various problem areas of life, to act as a lightning rod (I will not argue whether lightning rods really are effective against lightning) to dissipate attacks gathering against the field, to give the field a history (much of it pseudo-history) and a future (much of the genre of science fiction). As political science is impossible to consider without its ruling formulas (elites, democracy, kingship, laissez-faire, militarism, etc.), so astronomy cannot exist unaccompanied by schools of astrology, or geology without forms of uniformitarianism, or economics without models of "economic man," or literary analysis without fads and fashions, or medicine without magic and homeopathy, or chemistry without suprasciences, one or more for each of its numerous subdivisions such as diets alongside food chemistry, drug cultures alongside drugs, aesthetics alongside plastics, and so on. There is no fakery here; there is strict necessity; man lives in the skies as well as in his hovel; culture marches along all paths and all paths are psychically connected, even when, especially in a scientific and pragmatic age, they may be, by an effort of will, separated for specialized solutions. Under these circumstances, man lives throughout the cosmos, effectively. He lives pragmatically in the cosmos that he can experience and command through sensory manipulation. He lives mentally (and, by ritual, pragmatically) in the cosmos that is beyond experiencing but which he can imagine and bring into order. We may fancy that Jesus of Nazareth would speak this parable: A woman of the mountains saved her money to buy a rain cloak, for she was often wetted by the rains there, and when she had sufficient she ventured to Jerusalem to buy a cloak. But the cloak was so beautiful, that she would not wear it, so as to preserve it, and all her clothing became wet and damaged. Now I say unto you, wear your beautiful cloak of religion and all of your other clothing will be saved, and your Father in Heaven will replace your rain cloak with the raiment of angels. Reason, many theologians and secularists pray, will serve religion, and show a person what is good and bad in religion. So, if there is bad religion, it is because men do not use their reason to find the good, or they exercise their free will to choose to do bad with religion. Rationalism is thus used in two ways to damage religion. First, it becomes secular and refutes most or all religious pretension, as with Voltaire and Marx. Second, and more important here because it is a lesser known argument, rationalism erodes religion because it claims that mankind, possessed of the gift of telling what is "true" religion from what is "false" religion, only needs to be educated to distinguish "truth" in order to pursue true religion. Thus the problems of religion can be said to be solved by the independent pursuit of the principles of reason with regard to supernatural beings and rituals. In this second situation, the rationalist theologians, counting here Saint Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is Aristotelian and rationalistic, lend themselves to the continuation of evil in the name of religion; for evil becomes the result of ignorance and neglect of reason. Reason, as conceived in traditional and conventional philosophy and theology, presumes "free will." Free will is considered as the endowment of human nature with the capacity to choose one out of two or more alternative options as the basis for action upon an issue. Thus, employing reason, a choice of good over evil is imposed by free will, and an opposite decision becomes a free choice of evil. It is this "free will" which has been used in many cultures to explain the harsh effects of religion. Man is wicked and is therefore punished by his gods; by no means can the wickedness be blamed on the gods. This argument would appear to constitute an imposing defense of traditional religion and may even explain why all other life activities are dealt with by the principles of rationalism and free will (rather than the other way around). If so, it is one more important indication of the extent to which the religious sphere permeates and dominates the structure and operations of the other seemingly separated spheres of life. Actually, the belief in free will can be viewed as a primary obstacle to the improvement of religion. Not only does it make of man in his own eyes a wicked sinner, much more fearful of the gods, the authorities, and the people around him than he would otherwise be, hence aggravating his natural paranoia, ambivalence, and hostility to others. But it also makes it impossible for man to govern himself; for he believes that he has within him, quite divorced form the really essential set of mechanisms according to which he behaves, the ability at any time to change himself from good to bad and from bad from bad to good. Furthermore, the "bad" and "good" are themselves applied in the religious sphere often quite apart from any connections which they might have with the other spheres of life. "Free will," and rationalism as well, are fantastically individualistic fictions. They permit the dissociation of an individual decision from all that in fact determines, and should determine, the decision. Neither a balky donkey nor the gods themselves can prevent man's exercising his will upon them to turn along his way. By contrast, the theory of homo schizo holds that man derives his religion from the same set of mechanisms whence he derives all his religion, from the same set of mechanisms whence he derives all his other interests and activities. One cannot allow the concepts of free will and rationalism to enter. All of human behavior considered as a mind transacting within himself and throughout the medium of his culture is of one piece, holistic. Free will is no longer, if it ever was, a useful idea. The known and experienced deviations or range of choice available to us is large enough, whether determined or free, to allow for extremely diverse decisions. Now see what this theory of homo schizo does to the status of the supernatural and of religion. It elevates their status, rather than depressing it. But, more than that, it makes sacred and religious man impregnable to separatistic assaults upon his religion. For he can say and he can prove, or others can do this for him, that even if his religious aspects are suppressed, he will be different only in those particulars where a transference occurs, from the prohibited areas of religion, to the permitted secular areas. Religious man can further declare that the elimination of religion does not eliminate evil, but merely introduces more evil to other quarters of human behavior. And he can heap up evidence showing that secularized societies and secularized man have shown no noticeable improvement in conduct denominated as good. Until we decide who we are and what we want to be, we are at fault in what we are and want to do. Unless we shut the doors against all unwanted conduct from all spheres of life, shutting the door against religion in the hope of stopping all unwanted conduct is futile; it will enter by the other doors. As well as saying that religion cannot be suppressed, and as well as stating that much of religion behavior is true both in itself and in reconciliation with science, we are now prepared to say that the suppression of religion will not consign evil beyond man's ken. For that great task, a reconstruction of human nature is required. Such a reconstruction may well be impossible. We do not know enough yet to define the terms of reform. What we can do at this stage of our study is to argue for the incorporation into religion of our findings, both to prepare the ground for the possible coming reconstruction and to maintain the best possible, the least damaging, of religious as well as of all other systems. The problem of absolute morality -- of the standards of good conduct and the means to practice it -- must go unsolved here. Absolute morality may be forever beyond human abilities to demonstrate. Short of this, we resort to what many philosophers before us have advocated, a natural law of human behavior: How people have always behaved and seem compelled to behave is restructured so that the consequences which people seem always to have wanted -- even when acting in contradiction -- will ensue. Since we do not appeal to gods, reason, or secular authorities, nor to charism, faith, and revelation, it would appear best to label our natural law as hypothetical, tentative, and only so good as its consequences are acceptable to most people, whether educated or not, in all cultures. This might be called a natural moral consensus. To summarize from suggestions offered in various passages of our work, we perceive four essential and general human demands: for freedom from fear, for material subsistence, for new experiences, and for a disinterested arbitration of human conflicts. Fearlessness; subsistence; experiencing; and justice: these words may be used also. All of these require controls over the self (selves), others, and nature. Control requires skills (considering even brute force as a kind of skill at leverage, if nothing else), and mankind is obsessively driven to elaborate his internal and external control system to a stage where he has obtained what he can regard as minimal and sufficient guarantees of his several needs. The overall problem of a culture is, unconsciously or consciously, to provide a network of practices that will supply its people with excellent chances of obtaining these guarantees. And so we proceed to human relations, technology, politics, religion -- family government, world government, cosmic government -- and science, which acts to supply better ways for cultures to fulfill these needs. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q THEOTROPY:} {C Chapter 12: } {T NEW PROOFS OF GOD} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART II. THEOTROPY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWELVE NEW PROOFS OF GOD Ideas of quantavolution -- of sudden great changes -- attract the attention of historians of religion in especially two regards: religion was, and must remain in whatsoever guise, the companion of the newly born, traumatized, self-aware human mind; and the earliest religious voices, still speaking through the sacred documents of ancient times, were telling many truths, even literal truths about natural events, human nature, and human institutions -- truths that bespeak quantavolutions. Yet quantavolution also presents a distressing problem to those who believe that, if once they could approach closer to the earliest days, when "the gods walked on earth" they would be inspired, ennobled, and reinforced in their faith. This is not the case and they may become downhearted and skeptical. They should realize that even before quantavolution was assembled as a body of theories, those theologians, mystics and millennialists who ventured into the great first days of creation had to feel the terror and suffering that comes with "looking upon the face of god." Hence, indeed, most religions have calibrated the approaches to the sacred, so that only the well-prepared and thoroughly-warned would attempt the journey. That is, long before quantavolutionism, it was fully known that only the hardiest of souls could cope with the revelations of the first ages, could endure the historicity of the apocalypse. It is possible to absorb the theories of quantavolution solely in the form of science, eschewing all contact with the religious experience as truth, while pursuing every avenue to religious experience as sociological and psychological fact. That is, quantavolution would only ask of its students that they exercise its hypotheses and evidence according to the current general methodology of science. This would be the more comfortable and easier choice. Alternatively, however, one may confront the issue of the religious truth contained in this body of revolutionary theories, probing, inquiring whether perchance there is inherent in them something that those seeking a truth that is religious will recognize as valuable. The road is hard, and lined with the philosophical tombstones of many catastrophists and uniformitarians who have gone before, trying each in turn to transport a body of science into the realms of religious truth. Nevertheless I shall aim at the same goal. I shall try to reach my goal in several steps. A metaphor of a box is used throughout. The human mind is inextricably contained within a physiologically limited box of perceptive possibilities and cyclical redundant logic. The truths of religion are not within this box. Yet the existence of the box is proof of the supernatural, this being what is outside the box, which, we must admit, has an outside. It is well that religious truths are not within this box, for the box limits and shapes its contents, and therefore disciplines the fields of knowledge that it holds. The box nevertheless is indefinitely expansible. Its resources and limits have not been fully tested or strained. (This differs from the expansion mentioned above, which was only communicative expansion.) In whatever direction the box expands, it is not likely to be limited. Hence the supernatural is not bounded by the accomplished full testing of any of its facets. The simplicity and complexity of things are subjectively perceived or operationally invented. Things is themselves cannot be defined as absolutely simple or complex. The same is true of the concepts of space (size), time, past, and future. The same is true of "life" or "animism." It is subjective percept or operational invention, not defined other than by the human mind. Now, if god is whatever is beyond the box (i. e. limitless), god must be also what is in the box, inasmuch as what is in the box is speculating upon what is outside of it, as we here. Therefore, all that we sense and think in ourselves and our perceptible and thinkable world is part of the supernatural. If the supernatural and god are joined, we are pantheists. Putting god into an animistic metaphor, god is our judge; god has already judged us. We already are composed and function according to god's cosmic spirit, by intelligence, and necessity. The very nature of our ignorance, then, cribbed and confined in our cosmic box, constitutes a proof of the existence of gods. The agreement of extended ignorance from the crypto-blind bio-box probably stands up better under modern scrutiny than the traditional arguments for the proof of god that we mentioned in an earlier chapter. Furthermore, a second modern proof may tend to confirm the existence of gods, and support the proof from the cosmic box. The universe is presently thought to be some billions of years old, probably finite, although the boundaries are not clear, and populated by many billions of stars. Many stars, if not most of them, are believed to have spawned planets. Planets will have had ample occasion to acquire atmospheres and "the building blocks of life," as we like to say from inside our cosmic box. We are also forced to admit that life as we know it is defined from inside our box, and "intelligence," as we might conceive it without actually knowing it, may be a product of other means of manufacture and assembly. Even if we have to conjecture the birth of gods from the elements of the atomic table, the combinations and permutations of this, plus the practically unlimited conditions of time, space, temperature, and pressure can provide the substance and form of a god whom even scientific materialists, even Karl Marx, must recognize as authentic and in being. In the creation of all things, we must contend with the principle of entropy, a term invented by Clausius in 1865 to refer to the state in which thermal energy is no longer available for mechanical work. Later, and especially with Norbert Wiener, the term was broadened to describe "the running down of the universe." Clausius himself had written "the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." (Thus the idea merely subsisted until a century of history changed the optimistic mid-nineteenth to the pessimistic mid-twentieth century intellectual climate.) Given even a time of short duration, or of a conventional dozen billion solar years, the number of occasions for "phenomena" or "phenomenal intelligence" to appear in the universe is extremely large. Cases of "negative entropy," that is, of existence moving toward creation rather than desuetude, must be very numerous. There is no reason to use life on earth as the archetype of the universe. As the Encyclopedia Britannica reports, "all the organisms of the earth are extremely closely related, despite superficial differences. The fundamental ground pattern, both in form and flesh, of all life on earth is essentially identical." Nor ought we take mankind as the measure of the product of potential habitats of intelligence. In some proportion of them, something much more than homo sapiens schizotypus must have emerged. There should exist planets or complexes where beings of much greater intelligence and competence than ourselves exist. There must be a range of such superior intelligences from superman to gods. Whether individuals, conglomerates, complexes, spirits, physiological aggregations unknown to us, or even creatures suggesting ourselves, these will all have many times our abilities. Perhaps some will have supernatural capacities (for we cannot understand them) a billion times our own. Perhaps one of the beings may have generated power to move the universe itself; for, as the second law of thermodynamics maintains that the universe and all matter within it is running down, but an exception is made in the case of life which is negatively entropic, so there is an excellent chance that somewhere in the universe in an intelligent being, of which we can conceive but which we cannot become, whose powers are such that it is in control of the universe moving in the direction of intelligence and progress as we conceive of it: this being certainly must be called god. It would then be for all practical purposes omniscient and omnipotent. That it would be all-caring, omni- benevolent, may also be presumed, for to take care of itself it would have to take care of the universe in some part, as a case of "enlightened selfishness," in our limited human terminology. Thus the traditional concept of god is exercised with a new proof involving the probability of supreme negative entropy. God is created by the universe, working in opposition to the principle of entropy with the equally universal principle of creation. The creative principle, arising like the phoenix from its ashes of entropy, must naturally turn to controlling the universe. If this god is not already a fact, still, in the aeons of time to come, it must become a certainty. As the local gods of the solar system were born and died in succession, there may have been many temporary or quasi-omnipotent gods in times and spaces beyond all solar system experience. The universe offers billions of chances for a supreme god to arise in the future. Sooner or later, the universe will create its supreme master, just as the earth, this indescribably minute place, has created its locally supreme master, the human. Whereupon truly the universe would be intelligently ordered, as contrasted with the present chaos, and the far-flung parts, including our own, would be irresistibly induced to cooperate. Let us proceed to discuss this theory of divine actual or potential existence at greater length. To establish a new religion on solid grounds requires that the history of religion as the history of the true god be rejected. If one relies upon the scientific history of religion, one would be led to the conclusion that gods do not exist. Luckily for those who yearn for gods, one can go beyond the history of religion, to psychology and philosophy. There they will learn that the human mind is basically limited. Its perceptions and condition are structurally bounded. To exceed this structure they must rely only upon corollaries of the cosmic proof: 1) extension of some hitherto neglected remote recesses of the structure of mind and body and 2) a type of reasoning that proceeds on an "if.... then" basis which says: This is desirable; the question is open; the desirable is therefore not foreclosed. If god exists or gods, and is as we think god ought to be, then we are happier and can seek progress. Since the "if" cannot be foreclosed by any known means, the "then" is always possible. What is greater than the self can only be known anthropomorphically, that is, by extensions of the self as it is known to one. Hence, if the universe has dimensions that are quite divorced from human traits (or their extensions), we can never know them. But the premise that more exists, which we cannot possibly know, is itself a proof of the existence of gods, even though we cannot know them in any other way than in this paltry manner. Moreover, it is possible that dimensions of the universe hitherto unknowable to us will make themselves known, whether because they change so as to be comprehensible (" God makes himself known,") or we change ourselves structurally by genetic accident or manipulation. If the universe has only those qualities which we now possess or may in the future possess, or if the universe changes its qualities, then we can come to a knowledge of the gods that we, in our limited way, know must be there. Are these possibilities of knowledge additive? can we say that our full knowing potential plus the potential of the unknown gives us virtual certainty that gods exist? Like the lost sailor, we know that land lies in every direction. Also we know that land may be far away if we go in some directions. Can we determine in what direction the divine land lies? A wee mouse, five centimeters long, is in many ways superior to the human. In proportion to size, he can run 20 times as fast, jump fifty times as high, scale walls, swim naturally well, has senses superior to those of men, and trains readily for reactive tasks. His brain and his organs are marvels of miniaturization, relative to ourselves. The outstanding difference is that homo is schizotypical, that is, self-aware and all that flows from this fact. We know nothing about any species that has the equivalent of schizotypicality and what this affords us. We can conjecture how many species in all the universe might be schizotypical or have other systems capable of performing operations that we designate as being along the parameter of the human-as-divine up to the exceedingly divine, that is, the full god. Moses and his followers claimed that Yahweh could see and punish malefactors and delinquents. The Christian religion says that God can know the minds of all persons. Paranoids will sometimes say that they can tell what all minds in a crowd are thinking and single out individual minds, too. A body containing 10 20 cells can pass a signal to most or perhaps all cells in a brief time so that they are all reacting consonantly. The number of Jews is 10 7 +, of Christians 10 9 , of humans 4 x 10 9 . The coordination of "nature" exceeds that of gods, so to say, in some respects, and goes far beyond the most paranoid human mind. (Indeed, many humans are content to control one other person, such as a spouse or child.) Coordination means two things: communication and control. Thus far, the shocking modern revelation of the numberless stars and vast extent of the universe has been converted into constructive thought regarding the possibility of there being other intelligent beings in the universe, with whom we might possibly communicate. Inevitably the thought has been elaborated into contentions that at some time in the past, astronauts have settled upon our planet, assimilating biologically with lesser breeds, or constituting the human race itself. The thought has also moved, theoretically, to the contention that more intelligent or hostile or flagrantly incompatible beings might be confronted, to our embarrassment, should we be successful in communicating with exoterrestrials. These discussions employ formulas not essentially different from what we employ here. We take up estimates of 10 11 galaxies of 10 11 stars each, without counting dark stars or clouds, reaching thus 10 22 stars. We count 10 22 dark stars and dark clouds as having theogonic possibilities (" darkness" is our problem). Gods take time to develop, but we may assume that the average body has had enough of such time, billions of years. Whether, for instance, the Earth has subsisted for 4 x 10 9 or 10 6 years, it has had at least a 1/ 10 44 possibility of generating a god. Of the total source bodies, some 10 11 (plus dark stars and clouds) would exist in our galaxy alone. We are not counting the separate planets or comets, that would multiply these several stellar figures by 2, 5, 500, 1000 or some other multiple not known, but depending on the average number of planets per star. Suppose that science on Earth expands its capabilities ten times, a figure not in excess of many predictions from various fields. Suppose the human achieves an IQ of 160, lives to be 200, and can travel to the neighboring star cluster of Arcturus. Suppose the human is even morally set upon acting as god. The human will probably not be a god, but he will show that gods are possible somewhere. That is, it does not take too much more than man can be in order to define a god or demigod. If there also are and have been 5 x 10 11 centers for realizing divine beings in the galaxy and this over a period of time -- in fact, why not infinity? -- then the chance that one or more gods have developed is certain. Probabilistically, at least one is certain; let us say five are highly probable; 5000 are likely; 5 million are at least 50% probable; and some 50 million gods are possible, this in our galaxy alone. In the universe as a whole, these figures would be multiplied by 10 22 . At 5000 per galaxy, the gods would number 5 x 10 25 , too many by far to crowd into Valhalla. If gods should die (speaking of the g”tterdammerung), that is, lose some or all of their capabilities, one would halve the number of gods in the confines of the stipulated universe. Among all of the probable godships, should not many have evolved to a multi-galactic god , and at least one to supreme god of the universe? An interesting feature of the results here is that there appear to have been more gods than the conventional formulas claim there to be planets with intelligent life forms. This paradox occurs because one does not constrain estimates by looking for something close to man, to technical civilization, or intelligent life as we know it. Further the requirements of an environment similar to man's can be waived; the gods need not be limited by humanly severe temperatures, or the presence of a long string of prior primitive life forms called for by nonquantavolutionary evolution. Thus, as soon as less conservative considerations than are customary are set for intelligent forms in the universe, the number quickly exceeds the number of gods estimated here. Ordinary calculations of life spans are irrelevant, too; the occurrence of gods presumptively reduces time constraints; the possibility of divine viability stretching over much, most or all of the age of the universe adds to the probability that gods are active now. In sum, of the terms of the formula used in many discussions of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) only the gross number of celestial bodies is usable in estimating the likelihood of the existence of gods. To find the number of extant technical civilizations in the galaxy, by the "Green Bank formula" of F. D. Drake, N, one multiplies R* (the average rate of star formation over the lifetime of the galaxy), by fp (the fraction of stars with planetary systems), by no ( the mean number of planets per star that are ecologically suitable for the origin of life as we know it), by fe (the fraction of such planets on which life in fact has arisen), by fi (the fraction of such planets on which intelligent life has evolved), by fc (the fraction of such planets on which a technical civilization such as our own has developed) and by L (the average life of a technical civilization). That is, N = R* (fp)( no)( fe)( fi)( fc)( L). [Product of these factors.] Results, depending upon the estimates fed into the formula, have ranged from one to millions of technical civilizations in the galaxy. Our own technical civilization capable of interstellar radio communication is only a single generation old. The 1000-foot-diameter telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, existing transmitters and receivers, and a presumption of the same type of equipment on another planet would provide a communication medium of 1000 light-year diameter, providing 10 6 stars. Space travel and laser transmission are technically near availability to extend somewhat the range. There is therefore some chance of a communication exchange now. But how have we defined a god that gods should be so numerous? By god is meant a coordinated divine activity such that 1) it can endure or reproduce or replicate itself indefinitely under highly varying ambient conditions, that 2) it can act so as to expand communication pathways and thus its influence at an exponentially increasing rate, that 3) its proven scope and domain of intervention is extensive within a galaxy or is multigalactic, and contains no inherent limits, that 4) it provably (in human terms) acts so as to increase the aptitude and appropriate behaviors of the most promising existences (including humans) with the end in mind of reducing entropy and establishing theotropy as the dominating principle of the universe. How do these qualities, if applied to the human condition, reduce fear, war, and famine, while increasing love and knowledge? I have mentioned but a few of such moral connections in these pages. Their deduction from the principles of godship do not appear to present problems in excess of those traditionally and successfully solved by theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas when deducing human moral behavior from the qualities of gods. Theotropy can be considered from the standpoint of gods and of humans. Regarding gods, the achievement of influence is by means and in terms that we understand or cannot understand. So far as we can understand, gods must extend themselves either immediately or by a succession of moves. Insofar as our world is governed by no intelligent divine influence -- at least no sufficiently powerful and satisfactory influence then no "great" god has even in our short -- time view extended itself over us, whereupon we can probably more correctly imagine that any god occupying itself with humans is proceeding by a succession of moves, that is, by growth. Both may be occurring, a onetime immediate assumption of our world and a succession of moves to change us. A reader who has pursued our works on quantavolution knows how we believe man to have acquired his nature and how the world as we know it has come about. Thereupon he may ask: "Why does man need a god, considering all the troubles gods have appeared to cause?" Worse, "What legitimate reason has man for seeking god?" Worse of all, "What can any god do for man that is good for man?" First of all, none of these questions can destroy the gods if they do indeed exist. No more than one can dispose of tax collectors who are troublesome, unwanted, and useless. From a homocentric point of view, however, we can be more cooperative in responding. We need all the help we can get, plainly and simply. We are inadequate to our dearest wishes for the universe: that it be controlled and beneficent to ourselves and the posterity with which we identify. We need help of a quality that is beyond the ability of everything whose qualities we know directly. Our faithful dog, Shep, is not up to the task. Nor are even our most trusted friends and allies. If there is a god, we need him. The third question gives us pause. If the price exacted by seeking, finding and cooperating with god is our most priceless gifts, we may prefer our troubles, death, entropy, and oblivion. This leads abruptly to the question which we seem to confront at every turn of the way. What does, what ought, the human wish to be? If he wishes to be like the gods, and the gods are likely to be so indulgent, then all is well and good, and we should search eternally, if necessary, for the gods. One's purpose on Earth will then be answered from the divine point of view: the human is created for the divine task of helping to save the universe. He, and all developing and positive matter, are assigned this overall function. The universe has bred the human as a way to its own survival, as a challenge to its death, as an antibody against the death and dissolution foretold by the second law of thermodynamics. Elsewhere we have written of man's basic needs, to fearlessly subsist, experience and live justly. If the gods are theotropic, we have nothing to fear from them except the loss of that element in us which is self-destructive and entropic. What might this element be? Let us call it the diabolic, because it will turn out to be that often highly attractive mixture of uncertainty, fear, hatred, spite, lies, greed and egotism that goes into some of the most wonderful human creations. Will not the gods take from man the taste of evil for which he slavers? Or will the gods, like certain historical gods, allow man the gift of diabolism with all that it does for his music, dance, art, inventions, and politics? This is one question; another question, equally important, is related: will the gods take away self-government, self-rule, decentralization of decisions, whether large or small? There is indeed an argument, posed as, "Let every man go to hell in the own way." The felt uniqueness, the exultation, the happiness of determining one's way are not to be given over, even to the gods, one senses -- and we can hear the most stupid as well as the most brilliant of humans saying so. Perhaps the gods will be indifferent to such trivialities, perhaps they work sloppily, letting as much as we know of life pursue itself along their general guidelines. Or perhaps it will happen that in their intense pursuit of godliness, humans will get their fill of risks, conflicts, imagination, and autonomy. In any event, this crisis is far down the line of theotropy, whereas man's decline and destruction are always close at hand. We prefer to think therefore that, in the pursuit of the divine, humanity will have all that it will want of symbolism, diversity, and excitement. From the human standpoint, gods are to be awaited and solicited. If they are awaited, the presumption is that the gods are interested in expansion for its own sake. Any part to the universe will do. This is probably an unsafe assumption because it implies a certain kind of god. But god is more than a mere "land-grabber," we reason. He is interested in his own development; he is maximizing his opportunities of theotropy and not interested in entropic refuse. Therefore, gods are to be invited. For some lucky mystics, gods may indeed already have been entertained. I cannot understand the means, hence cannot confirm the encounters. But what are the occasions for conflict among potential and actual gods in the galaxy and universe prior to the universal achievement of a single supreme god? Will there not occur what even mankind has experienced on its low level of achievement, a set of squabbling barons, a battle of the gods? Then the gods themselves will do what it is now widely believed that man will do - destroy themselves and contribute to the entropy of the universe? As they move out to order and exalt the universe what will determine their jurisdictions and, as implied in their aims, will merge them into one? Let us look once again at the traits of the divine bodies. They excel in expansiveness, in sensitivity to domains of potential theotropic existence, and in promoting theotropism (countering entropy). It is this last that determines outcomes. The theotropism or divinity that competes most effectively to eliminate entropy will merge with other divinities to the degree that they operate in the same way. It is to their interest to behave in this way. In the end it will be the constructive principle of the universe that will influence and absorb all potential theotropy in the universe. Creation will triumph over destruction. This is the aim of the universe, the greatest of natural laws, and is the ultimate good. A second objection occurs. If, as has been asserted in this work, man is not a rational animal in any usual sense of the term "reason," and if sublimation is employed to move him from his great fear of himself and the world into large intellectual, imaginative and real worlds far beyond himself, then why is this proof of the existence of divinity not another sublimatory consideration? Is this all "mere" sublimation? The answer is that sublimation is not unreal, even though it may refuse to treat directly with its origins in human nature. Its rationalizations are testable by rules of reality, logic, consensus, pragmatism, and evidence; this, too, we have said earlier and will discuss later as well. Granted this, the theotropic proof must contend with all other assertions about divinity on the basis of which ones best fit the state of the world as we barely know it and of whatever provides the best consequences for the human condition. Homo sapiens schizotypus is released from his fearful bind and contradictions by this view of the supernatural and is directed to employ his energies constructively --theotropically rather than entropically. If the principle of entropy exists -- and we think that this is so out of our material perceptions -- then its opposite principle may exist because, first, the world is not fully entropic, next, there is an anti-entropism observed, and, third, entropism must originate from something that decays. In this last case, the something that decays must have been non-entropic, possibly anti-entropic, that is, theotropic. The entropy and theotropy can co-exist: they do so under our eyes. It may appear that the theotropic is declining, but this may be false. Our narrow perspective may be giving false measures, and we are better conditioned to detect entropy than theotropy. Especially with our present confidence in materialism, that is, our indifference to theotropy and our desire to emulate the ideal instinctive animal, we may be today underestimating theotropy. But is not the theotropic also material? It can properly be conceived as such, but only if we realize that most of what we call material is the refuse of theotropic materialism. As to what composes theotropic processes, we submit that theotropy is composed of what is tangibly material, of some extremes of the knowably material (particles, waves, light, etc.) of material potentially known to us but not yet known, and of material unknowable to us. I only call it material for fear of erecting barriers between the "material" and "immaterial." Under the regime of theotropy, it appears that mankind is to be more of an observer, thinker and admirer of the abstract than the active being who is acted upon. How can he behave religiously otherwise, and how can his morals connect with this religion? First, one who possesses this religion will be occupied with the future, as historical man has first sought a heavenly salvation and lately has sought salvation in the future also but in a more scientific and technological way. Second he will be more objectively self-searching and theological than historically he has been. He is looking for a different kind of divinity; this affects the quality of the search. Thirdly, he has to consider the question: Do I wish to attract gods? Do I wish to be adopted by gods, lightning-struck so to speak; do I wish to become chosen by the gods? Do I wish to be embraced by a larger theotropy than I have means of becoming in myself?? Surprisingly the answer to all of these questions will be a strong affirmative. (I say surprisingly for I feel personally that we have no right to expect such definite answers to questions that we have formulated with such difficulty and hesitation.) Behind the banners of entropism stands a sad, scientoid diabolism. We do want to live in theotropy, in the future, in the realms of the gods. Then the question becomes : How do we attract the gods? Do we do so with signals, search parties on vehicles, sending care packages of our little technical tricks into outer space? Or do we go seeking the gods with a message that we think will have meaning for them? What could such a message be ? Our best message, our invitation to the gods, is our ability to take care of our own world and its surroundings. It stands to reason that the gods, if they have already reached us actually or potentially, or if they were to come upon us in their expanding operations in the universe, would either embrace us or dismiss us by indifference or destruction. What would achieve their embrace? Obviously, they would embrace theotropy, for that is their essence. What are the signs of theotropy, which in our older language we might call blessedness? They would have to be signs of which we are capable. These signs are not negligible; they are signs of godliness. Theotropy is the trend of existence to achieve divine influence. Inasmuch as humans may be capable of it, it calls for an expansion of the influence of life over death and of mind over matter. Thus, it appears that the very principles that we have ascribed to the theotropy of the gods are principles that reverberate down the corridors of human time and thought. If these principles go unattended or are unsuccessfully pursued by mankind, the gods will not punish us; the gods have more important matters on their more universal "minds." They will ignore us, and let us continue in the predictable shortness of our forever to suffer both from our own behavior and being god-forsaken, which must mean the loss of our hopes, of our development, and of our future. There are a great many people who believe that god may exist but always has reason to punish people, so much so that it is useless to attempt even a decent peaceful and material subsistence for mankind. Famine, plague, flood or war are seen to be inevitable divine visitations. Such apathy and fatalism go along with the succession of gods who could hardly allow mankind to recover from one catastrophe before bringing down another upon it. At the other extreme of materialism stands the vanguard of the technical achievers. So flushed are they with the successes of empirical science, that they predict a never-ending invigoration of life and conquest of vast reaches of outer space. Among these are the ones who would fill capsules with gimcracks to fire into far space. The fatal flaw in their vision and plans is a misperception of human limits. The human race stands at a crisis of will and belief, of world disintegration and warfare, even as vehicles hurtle into outer space. Humans have not solved their basic issues of life over death, and mind over matter. They may be incapable of doing so without the help of a great achievement, is to invite the gods for help on matters of life and mind. This the technocrats and military operators of the political economy and outer space are of no mind to do, whether they by acting in the name of mosaism or atheism. In their arrogance, they see no need to invite the gods to their feast. Or they try to beckon to them by exercises paralleling the long history of sacrificed beings and the destruction of nations. We conclude that gods -- or god, if you will -- exist. They do not exist in fear; fear is human alone. They exist in our mind as the mind tests the limits of reality and invents, while integrating these limits, a special kind of reality in the supernatural -- the area of the divine. Gods exist outside the mind with as much probability as the universe that we contemplate is real. In these two senses, god is reality. Granted reality, the divine must be our most important reality. This may seem to be skating on the thin ice of scholasticism. "Tell it to a starving man." But it is a statistical reality and in the final analysis it is statistics that compose reality of all kinds. The divine is the most important because it is the only distinction that is uniquely human; it comes straight out of the awful realization of one's divided soul, two or more material contradictions, ineradicable and appositionally creative. Climactically a reconciliation takes place in philosophy and science. To know oneself is to know more than oneself; it is to know the divine. Here is the reason for the failure of historical religions, which damaged the soul is order to force it to hold delusions about "hard reality" and external gods at the same time. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q THEOTROPY:} {C Chapter 13: } {T CATECHISM} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION PART II. THEOTROPY: by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER THIRTEEN CATECHISM A catechism can summarize the fundamental facts and doctrines of religion from our perspective. The word "catechism", which now broadly means an elementary instruction manual in a given field, has for seventeen hundred years meant, more precisely, exercises for instructing Christian neophytes. Before the word achieved popularity in its Latinized Greek form, it may have come from the combined words "tying down", connoting a binding divine covenant. Less religiously, it recalls a metaphorical American usage of the same words, as when we "tie down" a matter so as to put it is form for easy handling. Our catechism here intends to tie down in a well-known format the basic facts and doctrines of religion deriving from our study. Setting forth a catechism exposes to a pitiless light our beliefs concerning religion. The onus of proselytism comes with it, for a catechism must tell people what they should believe. There are health and strength in such an exercise. 1. How was the universe created? The world has always existed in some of its infinitely possible manifestations, and is being created in some others today, and so it will go on. 2. How long will this Earth endure? The Earth will endure for an inestimable time, depending upon mostly unpredictable natural, and divine human events. 3. How much can a person know about the world? One can know more than one can learn and much less than what exists. 4. Can one know oneself? One can know oneself within the limits of one's abilities to know oneself. 5. Are the limits of these abilities known and achievable? The limits of the abilities to know oneself are unknown but more extensive than the abilities anyone has shown. 6. What should a person know of oneself? One should appreciate one's operative complex of self-controls. 7. Does a person have free will? One acts in accord with one's nature and circumstances; free will as action in ignorance of one's nature and circumstances can exist, but is not characteristic of an autonomous rational person. 8. What is known absolutely? Nothing that matters. The absolute should be ignored because its main function is to promote absolute fear. 9. What is absolutely clear? Nothing, and tolerance of ambiguity should be a religious principle, both to combat fear and to express the supernatural. 10. What is science? Science may be usefully defined as the method of choosing the largest chance of certainty in solving problems whose conditions and objectives are known. 11. How should science relate to religion? Science should solve an increasingly large number of the indefinitely large number of problems of religion, while religion expresses some of the directives and limits of science. 12. How should we express our relation to cosmos? We should relate to the cosmos by understanding it and celebrating it. MORALS 13. What needs has one? One's needs are fearlessly to subsist, to experience, and to be treated justly. 14. What duties has one? One's duties are to help others fearlessly to subsist, to experience, and to be justly treated. 15. Who is divine among people? Whoever studies and expresses the divine is divine. 16. What differences exist between means and ends? A means is a process of action that contributes to a more general process of action; it is rational according to how it works; it is deemed good or bad in its own effects and therefore contributes more or less good or bad to the end process. 17. Is good rewarded? Insofar as the religious and secular realms are consonant, good action is rewarded in both; the rewards of religion should be in its practice and in the health of character that it fosters. 18. Should evil be punished? Evil should be compensated for, personally and socially, not punished; it should be treated as a problem of coping with natural forces. 19. Do right and wrong belong in the realm of the gods? Yes, they belong where the human and divine realms interact. 20. Can a person distinguish right and wrong? Yes, by exercising himself in the fringes of the supernatural realm where the mundane realm fashions its judgments. 21. What is right or wrong? Right is a determination of consistency in the consequences of an action with the divine aspect of a person. 22. By what rules should a person act? A person should act by the rules of one's nature adjusted to the related ordinances of a consensus of like-minded others. 23. How should a person behave toward oneself? One should accommodate consistently one's divine and mundane character. 24. How should a person behave towards others? One should act towards others as to a differently shaped development of oneself, hence part of oneself, hence considerately, hence helpfully. 25. How should a person behave toward plants and animals? One should behave toward plants and animals as toward others, while recognizing in them an acute differentiation from oneself in the tragic divine need to derive instinctive gratification from their exploitation. 26. How should a person behave toward natural objects? As toward animals and plants, in descending series of their divinity. 27. How should a person behave toward the supernatural? One should practice an understanding of its potential. 28. What morality is devoid of religious significance? All morality should be religiously and politically promoted. 29. What morality should be religiously and politically promoted? Morality should be promoted which comes from a constitution that is based upon consensus and offering procedures that among other effects tend to establish the dominion of divinity in humans. 30. Is a person without religion bound to be wrong and evil? His views are narrow and he may not understand his own religiousness, but his actions may neither err nor have bad consequences. 31. What function does a person serve in the world? The person represents and takes part in universal manifestations. THE SUPERNATURAL AND DIVINE 32. Is there a supernatural part of the world? What one cannot perceive and what one cannot understand, even if he learns something about it is the supernatural. 33. Is the supernatural divine? The supernatural is divine insofar as it is meaningfully integrated into human mentation, but divinity implies no superiority over the pragmatically knowable. 34. What is the divine on Earth? The divine on Earth is a uniquely human way of looking upon oneself and the world. 35. How does one worship the divine? The rituals for worshiping the divine are whatever exercises are useful to achieve it. 36. What is sacred? Everything viewed in its supernatural and divine manifestations is sacred. 37. What is faith? Faith is positive morale, a conviction of meaningfulness about what one is thinking and doing, which when related to the divine is religious faith. 38. What is revelation? Revelation is the recognition by an internal or external stimulus of an important pattern to existence, not previously experienced, to which if a divine element is present, the term "religious" can be attached. 39. What is discovery? Discovery is a revelation purposefully brought about, whose applications are readily apparent and available to others. 40. What should authority be? Authority should be the legitimate power of one person over another, which may be religious; it should receive its legitimacy by the consensus of those ruled and should lose its legitimacy to the extent to which it is physically and mentally coercive. 41. How should we behave toward the sacred? As toward the mundane, although, as with mundane varieties, we should act toward the sacred appropriately in accord with its distinctions. 42. How much of our energies should be given to the divine? As much as necessary in order to receive divine energies in return, from ourselves, others, the world and gods. 43. What is divine energy? Divine energy is the morale that comes from developing relations with the supernatural. 44. Is there a sacred community? Yes, the community of those whose understanding of the divine is similar in forms, scope and intensity. 45. Will the cosmos ever be divine? The theotropic universe will ultimately dominate the entropic universe. 46. Is the divine also god? Yes, insofar as its mental integration functions as a presentation of the human mind, the divine is godly. 47. To what futures should a person relate? A person chooses and lives partially in whatever futures one wants and is capable of participating in, except that upon death one's future is resolved into the cosmos and reconstructed beyond personal minding and control. GODS 48. Is it proper to expect gods? It is proper to expect gods, as it is to expect enlightenment. 49. What is a god? A god is a generalized and immanent being, manifesting itself in material ways and through a demonstrable external cosmic spirit, operating in the human mind as the repository of the supernatural. 50. Is god material existence? All material is effective: insofar as the divine is effective existence, and existence is all material, the divine is material, and so is god. 51. Where is god? The god is wherever it can be and acts so as to be. 52. Is there one god or many? There are both one and many gods, depending upon how the mind assembles the divine facets in its behavior. 53. Do gods behave like humans? Yes, but only as the human in its universal and supernatural aspects. 54. How many gods exits? We have not discovered how many, if any, gods exist on Earth, while in the universe myriad gods exist. 55. What proofs do we have that there exists a supernatural, a divine, and a god? That divine beings exist is known by the logical extension of our ignorance and limitations into areas where divinity must being and exist. 56. Do all gods have the same traits and behavior? Traits and behavior are limited ideas and actions to which the gods cannot be bound. 57. Where is god in relation to the human? The god is where the human mind is affected by the supernatural and the divine, or may ultimately be in conscious contact with it. 58. How is a person related to god? Personally, as to an aspect of oneself, socially as to a joint aspect of oneself and others. 59. Does a person elect god? A person chooses god but his election is jointly with others to the extent that the gods of others permit a joint representation. 60. Can I will against gods? One can will against gods entropically for self or universally, including reductionism to greater instinctive animality. 61. Can all historical gods be attributed to catastrophes and other natural causes? All historical gods are in at least some of their manifestations catastrophic. 62. Are gods historical? Historical gods have been the outcome of persons interacting with events, and, though probably non-existent, persist in some of their earlier manifestations, so that all are partly gone and partly present. 63. Should a person obey historical gods in their original ascribed apparitions? The gods of the past are to be treated as hypothetical models to avoid and imitate as they reflect upon the present and future and satisfy today's conditions of existence. 64. Are the gods rational and welcome? Insofar as they are theotropic rather than entropic, the gods are rational and welcome, and are to be preferred. RELIGION 65. Can society hold together without religion? Society cannot be conceived without religion and therefore cannot hold together without it. 66. Should two persons have the same religion? No two persons can have or should have the same religion; all religion is therefore personal. 67. How are persons united by religion? Persons sharing significant religious perspectives identify with each other and constitute a church if they recognize their mutual identity. 68. How should we regard existing religions.? We should regard existing religions as in large part historically invalidated in terms of the ongoing and future historical process of religion, and encourage their voluntary assimilation and development into current standards of validation. 69. Should there be priests? Priesthood as religious leadership must exist, and should be practiced ideally by all when they can, and by the fewest possible full time forever. 70. What gifts should religion bring? Religion should bring joy of thought, wonderful awe, a divine community, and freedom from fear. 71. What gifts should be made to religion? One should give to others by devotion, rituals, and cooperation the intelligence afforded by religion. 72. What does religion offer to human suffering of body and mind? Religion offers to the suffering body and mind the knowledge of self, morale, scientific pragmatic support, and a cosmic sense of proportion. 73. What symbols should be sacred? Symbols that retain the least historical implications and represent the major points of this catechism should be created and promoted and become subjects of admiration and stimulation; present sacred symbols should be reduced in significance and intensity. 74. What are sacred scriptures? All graphic and written material that was ever sacred is still sacred and worthy of wonder and study, but at a reduced level of psychic investment, while new contributions intended as sacred scriptures should be no more sacred than any other sacrally intended or scientific or literary work for which merit is claimed. 75. Should our rites be simple or elaborate? Rituals should be as elaborate as necessary to learn the purpose of the ritual, as stressed as necessary to enjoy its reassurances, as simple as the available energies would afford, and should be productive of other goods aesthetically and otherwise. 76. What is the educative task of religion? Religion should educate people theotropically, which is the constructive life force. 77. What is the task of politics? The task of politics is the same as religion morally, but politics contends largely with the pragmatic problems issuing from theotropism. 78. To what extend should we be bound by our religion? We should be bound to our religion to the extent and so long as it helps us fulfill our obligations to ourselves and the world. 79. How long will it be before humanity becomes religious? Mankind will become religious when it discovers the existence of gods on experiential principles without delusion. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q CONCLUSION} {C - } {T THE DIVINE AND HUMAN} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION by Alfred de Grazia CONCLUSION THE DIVINE AND HUMAN Having begun with a pessimistic understanding of the divine succession, I have concluded with an optimistic belief that the search for the supernatural is a virtuous, healthy, and constructive activity. The divine exists and can be achieved to a significant degree by all who properly seek it. It is probable that the divine extends to the existence of gods, regarding whom the question of one or many is probably nonsense and should certainly not be sloganized. Religion is the system of relations sought for and maintained among the humans and the divine, the divine being more extensive than the human. Religion or religiousness is morally effective and can often change secular behavior with beneficial effects upon human life and the satisfaction of human needs. Rituals are exercises of the human character and are beneficial in the context of a proper religion. The search for religion is the most civilizing and lofty human experience; the claim to have found religion has been usually a disaster. Religion came with the first kit of mankind, mentally and physically. Religion covered all existence and does so even today and will do so. Neither the purely secular nor the purely sacral type of person is suited either to study or to maintain the divine search. Secularism has never been fully accomplished because it contradicts itself when it reaches its psychic and moral origins. As the method of secularism, science can help greatly sacral man achieve the divine, provided that it accepts the help of theology. Historical religions, based upon the terrible power of natural forces, limited strictly the extent to which humanity could pursue divinity. The gods were born as disastrous natural occurrences playing upon the existential fear of the self-aware human. The theory of quantavolution explains, thus, substantially the history of religion and culture. It strengthens the scientific basis of religion by cutting off the claims of traditional religion to authorize personal miracles and to arrange divine intervention. Quantavolution furthermore discerns and pursues the consistent delusional schizoid syndrome of human nature from its beginnings. It explains the unbreakable connection between the sacred and secular. Still, varieties of historical religions, such as Platonism, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Bahai, have often approached the divine by the same routes as we have ourselves. They enlarged the human perspective and performed experiments; they organized social and intellectual infrastructures for launches into the future. The goal of religious practice is the revelation of the divine through the human, and the integration of the human with the universally divine. This aim, which may be infinite and unachievable, promotes operations extending beyond the blinded box in which the human mind must work and seeks to establish relations with divine probabilities wherever they may exist and be sensed. The world of entropy is the dying universe of the second law of thermodynamics, and of the dying mind. Entropy is confronted and contradicted by theotropy, no less valid, nor less empirical, which is diffused through the universe as creation and life. Many glimpses of the universal titanic effort of the forces of light against the darkness have been afforded by historical religions operating at their best, and many unconventional and scattered secular and religious voices presently sound a call for a new religiousness that can use all that the scientific and secular might afford. Under such circumstances, religion need not depend upon its past. It can become a new kind of divine procession into the future. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE DEVINE SUCCESSION} {P PART 2: } {Q THEOTROPY:} {C Chapter 9: } {T A NOTE ON SOURCES} {S - } THE DEVINE SUCCESSION by Alfred de Grazia A NOTE ON SOURCES If we were to scan all of the written, graphic, and artistic works of mankind prior to the second World War, we should discover that religion was their chief topic, with political- military subjects a poor second, and commercial records ranking a close third. This fact, significant in itself, daunts whosoever wishes to delve into the literature of religion, or to advise others about doing so. My direct references are imbedded in the text. To assemble my general sources is an exercise in self-searching that may not profit others. As is the case generally with the humanities and sciences, the ideal reader and critic may have read few of my sources but instead "something else," as good or better, or may have shared few of my experiences that made my sources meaningful, but may have been a keen critic of the language and practices of religion as observed from childhood to old age in his or her own social settings and have read little but thought much, so that he would review his religious materials like Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce reworked their lost pasts in their autobiographical novels, making of the past a rich and elegant library. There are, of course, encyclopedias about religion and philosophy, and a general encyclopedia, excepting the Soviet, will offer perhaps a fourth of its articles as entries related to religion. James G. Frazer's Golden Bough (13 vols.) is itself an encyclopedia of the anthropology of religion. Also creations of Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell pertain here. Almost encyclopedic, yet entering boldly upon the analytic and systematic, are the studies of Mircea Eliade. His Patterns in Comparative Religions, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Myth and Reality, Images et Symboles, and other books are as indispensable as any particular writings can be in an age when hundreds of books and articles descend upon every subject. It may not be too early to alert the reader to the multi-volume encyclopedia that is being prepared under the editorship of Dr. Eliade through the auspices of Macmillan Publishing Company. [This work is now available] Every country has had its religious wars, every religion its heretics and apostates, and political history is loaded with religious conflicts. Bibliographies about them can be initially retrieved through encyclopedias and card catalogues. Too, every sect has its sacred scriptures and polemical masters, readily accessed through its leader's name -- Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Wesley, et al, as for instance, one proceeds along a particular Protestant Christian line of thought. Should not one begin with philosophy, to avoid trivia and a waste of time? Would that such were the case. A careless saunter into the woods of theology and philosophy may end up in the oven of a seminarian. Plato is recommended but not without Aristotle, nor Aquinas without Eckhart, nor Loyola without Kirkegaard, nor Hegel without Marx, and so on. The sociology of religion seems to me to be continually useful and I am sure that some of the trails of my mind pass through Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Hans Vaihinger, Benjamin Nelson, and the pragmatists with philosophical links, such as William James and John Dewey. From here it is but a step to the commentators upon science, such as Percy Bridgman and Alfred North Whitehead. In 1873 John W. Draper published a History of the Conflict of Religion and Science, but today one seeks out also various works on the conflict of science itself within science. Among the best of these might be Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances, David Bohm's Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, D. G. Garan's The Key to the Sciences of Man, and Roger S. Jones' Physics as Metaphor. Norbert Wiener's famous works on communication science are supplemented by God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment of Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Roger Shinn and Paul Albrecht have edited a two volume collection on Faith and Science in an Unjust World. Among several dozen journals, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, occurs in this connection. E. A. Shneour and E. A. Olteson have compiled writings and bibliography on Extraterrestrial Life. Psychoanalysis provides a systematic awareness of the subconscious interaction of religious material with the sexual, familial and symbolic. Sigmund Freud's relevant writings are indexed and readily available. One might read Carl Jung more selectively. As in other fields, an occasional perusal of major journals is called for. Most names in this note are of famous men, and fame breeds fame, so that, as here, lesser luminaries are discriminated against erroneously. Much is made of catastrophe and quantavolution in this work. The reader will have noticed that a background thereto is contained in other books of the author's "Quantavolution Series;" thus, for the physical evidence of quantavolution and disaster, Chaos and Creation, The Lately Tortured Earth, and Solaria Binaria; for the anthropological and mythological ambiance of religion, Homo Schizo I, God's Fire, and The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars; for the psychological, Homo Schizo II, as well as the foregoing. My exposition adopts the format of ordinary language, the structure of whose utterances must be systematic and conventional. Hence the form of communication renders obscure the meanings of mystics, already beset by the problem in their own turn when they write. Such is the case with Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa of Avila, or of Vedanta, Gnosticism, Quakerism, Zen Buddhism, or Sufism; or of the pure symbolists and the occult. Still, laid in the depth psychology of the present work and concealed by its positivistic style are paths that a mystic might perhaps follow in exploring the divine within oneself. End of The Divine Succession {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY AND OTHER WORKS IN QUANTAVOLUTION AND SCIENTIFIC CATASTROPHISM by ALFRED DE GRAZIA METRON PUBLICATIONS PRINCETON, N.J., U.S.A. Note on the printed version of the book: This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Center, using the processing language called Script. Photocomposition, cover make-up, layout, and printing were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services. Copyright * 1984 by Alfred de Grazia ISBN: 0-940268-09-8 Copyright * 1984 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved Printed in the U.S.A. in a limited First Edition Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213 Princeton, N.J. 08542 To Eugene Vanderpool Friend of the Agora of Ideas {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD 01. The Quantavolutionary Scan Part One: Historical Disturbances 02. The Burning of Troy 03. The Founding of Rome 04. Micah's Ark 05. The Catastrophic Finale of the Middle Bronze Age 06. Updating Schaeffer's Destruction Inventory 07. Nine Spheres of Venusian Effects 08. The Obliteration of Human Signs 09. Ancient Astronauts Part Two: Geological Issues 10. Indians of Illinois 11. Ice Cores of Greenland 12. A Failed Excursion to the Caves of Aquitaine 13. The Latecoming Olduvai Gorge 14. Athens Quakes Part Three: Working of the Mind 15. Comptinology and Tohu-bohu 16. Sandal-straps and Semiology 17. Making Moonshine with Hard Science 18. Holy Dreamtime in Wonguri Land 19. The 'Unconscious' as a Literary Revolt Against Science 20. O.K. Origins 21. Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings Part Four: Polemics and Personages 22. Marx, Engels, and Darwin 23. Religion and Education 24. The Outlook of Scientists 25. 'Scientific' Reporting 26. Eulogies to Three Quantavolutionaries Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model 27. A Cosmic Debate 28. Syllabi for Quantavolution 29. I.Q.: A University Program 30. Past, Present, and Future {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia . FOREWORD Entering a sparsely occupied and generally unknown region of thought is like moving into a new land. The vistas are fresh, the soil unbroken. One wishes to settle down, put in roots, build a house, raise a family. Yet the very restlessness that carried one to the frontier will not subside. There is an opportunity to do everything, it seems; the whole world attracts one and is in need of attention. So it often happens that an erratic and mobile existence evolves. An energetic spell of construction ensues; a cabin is built, animals are bred, a garden is grown, a mate is enticed, a stone wall begins to go up. Then the winds blow, the wild animals pass heading upland, the rising sun beckons and the moon waxes nervously full. Off one goes, leaving the finished things, the half-finished work, freeing the pigs, and letting the roots wither. Now it is a new sight very day, a spring discovered, a strange bird and animal, a day fishing, a day hunting, a day in the hollow of a tree with a pain. The wonders of the region spin unendingly with the vault of heaven. One is not fulfilled, but then one was not fulfilled before: such is the curse and its thrilling clutch upon the pioneer. I had thoughts akin to these while preparing this book. It contains pieces from everywhere, notes and essays, topics vigorously attacked and promptly abandoned, because one is moved by a different wondering. The earliest piece, concerning the mind of scientists, was written decades ago, the last piece just the other day. Some of the work reminds me of an abandoned plot of frontier land: if only a person had stayed there, he could have built a life upon it, as neat as a Swiss chalet. And is the world not built upon the stable creations of centuries? Yes -- but also upon the scouting parties, the forays, the fantasies. My friend Gerd Roesler came from Germany to an island of the Aegean, to Stylida on Naxos, and I came there too. And there was none on the wild promontory and he wrote his Master's thesis on the geology of Stylida, and years passed, and he wrote his Doctoral thesis on the geology of the whole island, but after all of that he comes back and builds a house next to mine, which has stood alone all the while except when I might be there. Knowing much more of geology than I, to him the promontory was very old, whereas to this natural philosopher, it seemed very young. So we stand upon it side by side, and I say to him, "You see, Gerd, Stylida is young, even by your evidence." And he replies: "No, Alfred, these rocks are millions of years old... but maybe..." and he laughs, for he likes the feeling of the frontier, too. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY SCAN} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY SCAN The nature that offers itself to our view, which includes the solar system, the earth, and the biosphere, assumed its present form in a series of sudden leaps, occurring over short periods of time. So goes the theory of quantavolution. Besides the idea of sudden leaps, other principles are basic. First the original source of great changes in the nature of the earth and man has been in the skies. Second, the latest period of time, roughly the holocene period, say 14,000 years, has witnessed catastrophes. Third, the great changes of recent times have created modern humans. In sum, nature and mankind have been recently catastrophized and transformed by forces of exoterrestrial origin. Science is full of controversies. It thrives upon dispute. Catastrophists are far fewer than uniformitarians, but they are, if anything, more disputacious, both amongst themselves and with others. Those who interpret natural history by the "sudden leap" of quantavolution or catastrophe may not accept even one, much less all three of the aforesaid principles. For instance, one of the greatest current catastrophists, the geo-physicist Melvin Cook, has treated a broad range of problems in the fossil record, movement of continents, radiodating, and atmospheric changes without resort to comets or other exoterrestrial forces. Another, Donald Patten, a geographer, makes it quite clear that his work is related to and supported by Christian theology. The most famous catastrophist, Immanuel Velikovsky, did not challenge the presumption that mankind is very ancient; although unfriendly to Darwinism, he might well disagree with some of the mechanisms and interpretations of human events that I have proposed. He would probably disagree as well with other theories connected in my opinion necessarily with the catastrophic model. These three examples could be multiplied. A practical difficulty faces a student of general quantavolution in that its materials are nowhere properly indexed as such and no special library of the field exists. Until lately, it has been the unwritten rule in scientific journals to "tone down" any indications of catastrophism in articles and especially in titles. Still I have come upon many hundreds of relevant items. They emerge mostly from conventional sources of science. A smaller number are centered upon quantavolution, with the appropriate perspective, and these are found in only several special magazines or in old scientific sources. One moves among the conventional literature with a practiced glance, like an archaeologist spotting bitty shards among tons of debris. William Corliss publishes at Glen Arm, Maryland, a quarterly scan of anomalistic material, "Science Frontiers", often quantavolutionary it so happens. Thus, examining a list of fourteen items, which he chose for Number 15, Spring 1981 --and these are only a fraction of the works published around the time -- my brain was twitched by every one of then, and I would like the reader to see how these raw twinges first enter the mind: 1. "Ancient Basque inscriptions are identified by noted expert on the so-called Mechanicsburg Stones of Pennsylvania." Yes, Basque dwellers of the Tethyan Sea, fringes of Atlantis, survivors of 6000 B. C., see Chaos and Creation. (NEARNA Journal) 2. "Agriculture was not a step forward in human development." Yes. Why plant when you can reap without sowing. Probably a response to ecological stringency; humans could plant immediately; cultural hologenesis. (Science) 3. "New discoveries of buried and changed Stonehenge stone configurations." Cf. changed and variant stone and temple orientations also in Mesoamerica. Earth tilts involved. As sky changes, orientations change. (Nature) 4. "Continental crust found 450 miles west of Gibraltar." Possible Atlantis material, sunk and left behind by rapidly rafting land masses moving both sides of the Rift, perhaps in the Saturnian deluge period. (Baltimore Sun, AP) 5. "Distant galaxies resemble near galaxies." Yes, cf. Solaria Binaria. Short time. No "Big Bang." (Science News) 6. F. E. Segal on "tired light." Light not tired. Just Busy. Gravitation very tired, needs to be retired. (Nature) 7. On "free quarks." Not only are "fractional charges... almost as unnerving as irrational numbers," but so too the ideal of infinite regression (or progression) in the 'size' of events: "man is the measure of all things" -- hardly. (Science) 8. "Do bacterias think?" Everything thinks, "Higher organisms, cf Homo Schizo, conduct more elaborate transactions with the environment (and internally) to achieve "the thinking effect". (Psychology Today) 9. Quick evolution: quantavolution of immunological systems, in re Ted Steele's studies. Functions of organisms have their own bio-time, time not absolute. Life-career (birth to death, etc.) is subjectively concept of the dominating ego, cf. Homo Schizo, momentarily in charge: the trapped soul? How free is it if it is in a paraelectric frame? (New Scientist) 10. Cf deep thrusting and folding burial concept in M. Cook's Earth Models, also my Lately Tortured Earth. Deep is very deep, perhaps embracing the surface (including exoterrestrial) origins of Soter and Gold's erupting, abiogenic, natural gases. (Geotimes) 11. Iceland a meteorite crater, according to Whipple, with high iridium at Cretaceous- Tertiary boundaries. Cf. galloping continental drift in Chaos and Creation. Was the C-T boundary laid down yesterday in the chaos of Earth parturition and Moon eruption and escape? (New Scientist) 12. "The Novaya Zemlya solar mirage" is likely, along with many such early phenomena of the disordered skies, to sponsor some fine animistic legends of the heavens. (Physics Today) 13. In re admitted "ice-ball fall in England," page C. Fort's comparable cases. Electrical fashioning of balls, see E. Crew's new essay. (J. Meteorology - UK) 14. Lorber's work on an intelligent human with 1/ 10 normal brain matter fits Homo Schizo theory, where I develop the concept of humanness being largely independent of the large brain but a product of self-awareness, of the fearful loss of instinctual integrity. (Science) The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (London) publishes Workshop, containing quarterly annotations of a score and more of titles relevant to quantavolution studies. Thus, the eye catches the following points of the varied list of Volume 5: 1 (1982). 1. New 700 B. C. Martian period tablet: "The natural order of things somehow has gotten reversed and the response of the high gods, the Shaddayin, is to turn day into night." (Bull. Amer. Schl. Orient. Res.) 2. More material on the Thera disaster (of -1100?) and the confusion of dates. Tsunamis devastate Greece and the Near East.( Bib. Archaeol. R.) 3. Reviews special issue of Frontiers of Science on Velikovsky's work. 4. The disputed case of Prof. A. C. Arp, who faces shut-down of project because he believes quasars are close, not exceedingly remote, relative to our galaxy. (Daily Telegraph report 9 March 1982). 5. Critique of N. Hembest's attack on 3 different theories of rapid (i. e. catastrophic) shifts of Earth's poles. (The Unexplained, magazine). 6. Some birds (e. g. Japanese quail and zebra finches) are unexpectedly in-breeders, not out-breeders, contra "need" for genetic variability. (New Scientist). 7. Two newly spotted asteroids make total of 40 on Earthcrossing orbits, ergo potential encounters. (New Scientist). 8. Soviet Venera 13 and 14 results show solar radiation is absorbed by Venus at 60 km and the clouds are mostly sulphur. How can "greenhouse effect" work with these conditions? Implication: Venus heat is internal. (Aviation Week and Space Tech.) 9. Viking Orbiter pictures heavy meteoric, volcanic, and erosional effect on Mars, with possible meandering dry river systems. (New Scientist). Was Mars once (lately) biophile? 10. Review of "Burt Scandal" (BBC radio 4) on ethics and prestige of scientists. 11. Controversy over evidence of "plate tectonic" continental drift without continents on Venus (Venera 14 findings) (BBC, Science in Action). 12. On the temperature extremes endurable by dinosaur's eggs. (New Scientist, Corriere del Ticino) 13. A primitive "precursor" of the even-toed hooved animals (pigs) is now revealed to be of a different family (mouse deer), so another "missing link" is gone. (New Scientist). 14. Jurassic find in China exhibits an earlier line of mammals that may have evolved and extincted 30 million years earlier than accepted beginnings of present mammalia. (New Scientist). 15. The Eocene-Oligocene boundary is marked with extinctions, microtektites and high iridium levels of exoterrestrial event. (New Scientist). 16. Gravitational Constant may be changing, as applied to changing lunar orbit (Astrophy. J.) Is one more Absolute deteriorating? 17. Venus and Earth have different origins, or Venus had no potassium or lost its argon- 40. (New Scientist). 18. Well-preserved Carboniferous Age fossil deposits near Glasgow, both marine and terrestrial, with confused sedimentation (Nature) 19. Source of earthquake lights in rock friction discharges (New Scientist). 20. Soviet Kola peninsula Bronze Age settlements contemporary with Mediterranean, with utensils and paintings, slate trade with far-off points. (Soviet Weekly). Possible polar shift or drastic (exoterrestrial) climate changes. 21. High proportion of Late Minoan Cretan copper artefacts made from Greek, not Cypriote, copper. (Nature Science). Culture shifts, or copper mine discoveries. 22. Density of wood in tree rings can indicate outer space events and exact weather data. (Soviet Weekly). 23. Reviews listed of Clube and Napier's Cosmic Serpent as indicating mood of scientific reception system re catastrophes. 24. Work of J. W. Follin on possibility of 4 billion year old solar system as a binary (report in Memphis Commercial Appeal). 25. Ophiolites (from oceanic crust) found in mountain sediments suggest catastrophic oceanbed lava extrusions buckling to form mountains. (Scientific American.) 26. Lack of texts -700 to -750 and erratic texts of mid-second millenium in Babylonian otherwise accurate Babylon records in R. Stephenson studies. (New Scientist.) 27. Low-density comet impact blamed for Tunguska 1908 event (U. S. R. & D. Associates, New Scientist). 28. Meteroid impacts (5 to 10 km diam.) may have created various large basaltic oceanic plateaus. (Nature.) 30. Comets now observed frequently to impact on Sun. (New Scientist). 31. High anomalous magnetism and radioactivity detected at megalithic sites may indicate ancient man had sensing devices for astronomical constructions. (New Scientist.) 32. Lunar rock magnetism without lunar magnetic field raises questions of origins of rock. (New Scientist.) Most of the items were culled from conventional scientific sources such as the New Scientist and Nature. A much more extended, regular survey is obviously needed; still, that limited and antagonistic sources should provide access to so much relevant quantavolutionary material is noteworthy. The eye of the catastrophist (this quantavolutionary primevalogist) is trained to see a record of natural destruction in the history of nature and man. Others, trained in uniformitarian ways of thought, will try to explain the same sight by gradual processes, or be oblivious of it. Niagara Falls, whose turbulence soothes the doubts of honeymooners, excites the catastrophist. For it cuts back into its source by a certain footage each year and this permits us to measure how long its gorge has been growing. Apparently only several thousand years have passed since the Great Wisconsin Ice Cap suddenly melted to create the Great Lakes and their Niagara outlet towards the sea. The age of the Falls has been reduced by 300% in consequence. But perhaps a great deluge and flooding created the lakes and a great earthquake the rift of the St. Lawrence River. Let us continue our noting of some relevant studies, going back in time for a few years. On January 6, 1977, the New York Times reports the detection of a quake on Mars. One asks, for the hundredth time, "How can seismism shake celestial bodies that have supposedly been undisturbed and cooling off for billions of years?" The inconstant Sun? A recent encounter? The eye notes an article in the newspapers of early 1976: a Soviet scientific expedition has moved into the territory of the Tunguska (Siberia) meteoritic explosion of 1908 where a flourishing new kind of forest has sprung up and new species of plants have been seen. The catastrophist thinks, "This explosion has been long on my mind. If it had maintained its path for minutes longer before striking St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), the capital of the Russian Czars would have disappeared in heat and dust. The heat was fierce, in thousands of degrees; no wonder odd biological phenomena have occurred. But why the absence of a crater? Was the meteoroid actually an explosive gas cloud, and was it a gas cloud that blasted Sennacherib's great army besieging Jerusalem in 687 B. C.?" In 1975 Soviet astronomers detect X-rays emanating from planet Saturn. X-rays signify a very recent explosion, a nova event, on a star. In a small nova, one that does not disintegrate the body completely, the shell blasts off, and the wounded body bleeds these rays for thousands of years. The quantavolutionary thinks: "Mythology from several places reports that Saturn, the planet-god, flew into a fiery rage... Velikovsky in 1965 wrote Harry Hess of Princeton, to urge that Saturn be studied for the emission of x- rays." And what a truculent monster appears to be the son of Saturn, Jupiter, upon examination by spacecraft. In 1974 the astrophysicist Robert Bass demonstrates mathematically that the structure and motions of the solar system cannot be presumed to be stable even to one thousand years. Bass is a catastrophist. He is also sympathetic to biblical creationism. The quantavolutionary reads him carefully. "Will Bass lead me astray out of enthusiasm, or into the Promised Land? Will any uniformitarian arise now to challenge him, to prove his equations wrong, to defend what is after all the heart of the uniformitarian position, that the solar system is stable because the laws of Newton and the mathematics of La Place claimed them to be so?" In 1974 oceanographer Cesare Emiliani of the University of Miami published results of core drillings showing that the Gulf of Mexico had filled with fresh waters from tremendous recent flooding and speculated that the event may have been tied to the sinking of Atlantis, with both occurring around 11,500 years ago. The catastrophist conjectures about the fresh waters of the Gulf of Mexico. First, they could be the floodwaters of the suddenly destroyed ice cap, an inconceivably great deluge, perhaps tied into the practically complete resurfacing of the earth about 11,500 years ago. In 1974 the chemist John Anderson reports experiments indicating that radiocarbon activity, the chief present method of dating back to 50,000 years ago, was neither random nor constant. If the isotopes of radioactive carbon, for reasons yet unknown, decay sporadically or eccentrically, may not the method be unreliable? In 1973, chemist Harold Urey, a Nobel prizewinner, conjectures that a cometary encounter with Earth could explain the abundant tektites from extra-terrestrial sources that are strewn about the world. Several scientists have collected and studied these small glassy stones and estimate their amount in the billions of tons. Since time immemorial the Chinese have called them "pearls of the dragon" and collected them. And Urey thought that the cometary collision might have annihilated the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs looked like the Chinese dragon. Perhaps Urey is right in principle, wrong in time. Quickly the quantavolutionary puts on the cap of a mythologist. All heavenly animals (the Zodiac for instance) represent recognizable species; perhaps the most ancient men knew dinosaurs by sight. Thus the peculiar revolutionary vision, like that of a surrealist painter, contorts time and form, then settles down to give battle over the evidence. In 1973, the geologist Derek Ager of Swansea College (Great Britain) writes that "the history of any one part of the earth, like the life of the soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." Elsewhere he says, "the periodic catastrophic event may have more effect than vast periods of gradual evolution." He think that "for the ultimate control, sooner or later, we must face the possibility of an extra-terrestrial cause, though in most geological circles one seems to be expected to blush when doing so." The catastrophist understands the dilemma of Ager: he longs to test his intellectual weapon, but the minds and materials of 150 years of science are constructed to refuse the test. In the same year, 1973, I am reviewing, from the revolutionary perspective, evidence about the famed "Burnt City" of Troy. I concluded that neither the torch of the invader, nor accident, nor earthquake, nor a single volcano had suddenly scorched and collapsed the famed Troy IIg. Multiple volcanic venting and extra-terrestrial electrical encounter had to be invoked to explain the observed facts and myths. Uniformitarian methods of a century had failed to identify the problem precisely and permitted not a whisper about the high energy expressions of catastrophes. In 1972 the engineer Ralph Juergens announces his theory that the solar system was an electrical system operating on galactic fuel. Particles from the Milky Way bombard the sun, building up a heat that sends out the sun's radiance. (Concurrently, experimenters announced the failure to detect the sun's presumed neutrino output from its supposed atomic furnaces.) The theory of Juergens poses a dilemma to catastrophists. Velikovsky adhered to the nuclear-furnace theory. He did not feel the need for Juergen's theory to win the war for catastrophism. C. E. R. Bruce and Eric Crew in England were catastrophists as well, whose interests, as pioneer and disciple, were in extending the discussion of cosmic electricity. They, too, disagreed with Juergens. Again, the quantavolutionary worries about the stultification of connections and internal disagreements. But when Juergens publishes two articles on electrical types of destruction found lately on the Moon and Mars, the catastrophists agree and applaud. The electrical ravaging is by cosmic lightning and probably happened within the past several thousand years. Juergens general theory is held in abeyance. (It is, incidentally, accepted by me, and is used and extended by Earl Milton and me in the model of Solaria Binaria.) In 1970 the palentologist D. J. McLaren, in a presidential address to his colleagues, reviews the wholesale extinction of species at certain times, and then ventures that a heavy meteoroid explosion should be introduced by way of explanation. Following an explanation of the effects of what I have since termed a "catastrophic tube,", he remarked, "this will do." He would have pleased George Cuvier, who for a century has entered the textbooks as "the father of fossil paleontology" but "unfortunately a badly mistaken catastrophist." In 1968 René Thom publishes his first paper on the topological mathematics of catastrophe theory. After eight years, the less specialized media, such as the Scientific American, described his work. Actually, Thom is concerned with describing symbolically and graphically the basic types of ways in which situations build up and come crashing down. In 1966 the geo-physicist Melvin Cook lays down a barrage of arguments against accepting uranium-lead, potassium-argon and other techniques for the dating of older ages. As a catastrophist, his accomplishments are numerous; none, to my knowledge, has so competently analyzed the overwhelmingly authoritative techniques of radio dating that have come to dominate geological, astrophysical, and archaeological dating. In June 1956 the New York Times reports that the temperature of planet Venus, newly measured by radio astronomers, exceeded the boiling point of water. Studies increased in number; so did the estimated heat. When finally in the 1960's and later the space vehicles of the USA and U. S. S. R. reached Venus, they found a globe whose surface temperatures hovered around 925d. But in 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky had published Worlds in Collision. There he described Venus as hot to the point of candescence. He reasoned, mostly from ancient sources and legends, that it had ejected from Jupiter's region burning. Further, its erratic course through the skies had involved it in heat-provoking encounters of the second and first millennia B. C. with Mars, Moon, and earth. In 1953 geologists Alan Kelly and Frank Dachille propose the island of Bermuda to be the focus of a giant meteoritic explosion in recent times. Their work, if known, would have stimulated among a small circle of scholars an interest in discovering impact craters around the world. (It should also have stimulated the writers of the 1970's who were excited by the mysteries of the "Bermuda Triangle.") Between 1950 and 1955 Velikovsky published three of his celebrated works. In 1963, I prepared a special issue of The American Behavioral Scientist on "The Velikovsky Affair." It analyzed the reasons why scientists generally were refusing to hear of theories and evidence contradicting the uniformitarian paradigm. If there is any lesson to be taught from this cause célèbre, it is this: "You must be ready to consider conflicting theories. You cannot stand rigidly in the face of contrary evidence. You cannot be mass-minded and call yourself a proper citizen of science." In 1950, the German paleontologist Schindewolf tied exoterrestrial impacts and radioactivity directly to the main periods of biological extinction and creation. I could move, too, into the 1940's, when Claude Schaeffer assembled massive proof of a set of concurrent destructions of Bronze Age civilizations by natural causes. I have found many sources of quantavolutionary thought and studies ranging farther and farther back in time; often they are inaccessible to most readers and buried from sight inasmuch as they are not referred to in modern literature. A large job of recapturing them is before us. Indeed one could recede for thousands of years back to the now faintly heard primeval voices that are fossilized in bone, stone, pots, and oral myth. In concluding here, I wish earnestly that my readers will turn to my books without the preconception that studies of catastrophes must be science fiction, or a work of the occult, or a defense of Biblical literalism. I do not criticize adversely such works, some of which I admire; it is simply that they are different. My books should be read and judged form the standpoint of a cosmogonic model of quantavolution that is derived from a growing body of scientific studies in various fields and a review of the most ancient as well as of the most recent sources. Just as an archaeologist reconstructs a pot from a few shards, and a paleontologist an animal from a few bones, we have to reconstruct a general history from the rare "treasures that have come down to us", as Aristotle said. I ask not for belief but for consideration. I seek for open thinking upon another model in the competition for the best design of the sciences and humanities. This said, let us take up a study of "The Burning of Troy," a work which I began, as I mentioned above, in 1973. The idea came to me while on the Island of Naxos. I was reading Schliemann's famous story of how he found the Treasure of Priam on top of a wall, and I exclaimed to myself, "What a strange place to bury a treasure!" {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE BURNING OF TROY} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER TWO THE BURNING OF TROY [1] Scientists probing the subsoil in their attempts to build up the record of prehistoric and ancient humanity have paid little attention to ashes and other evidences of high heat and conflagration that they have encountered. We would agree with Claude F. A. Schaeffer who wrote in 1948 that "Our inquiry has often been made difficult by the rarity in most reports of observations on beds as a nuisance or of little interest" [2] . The recent excavation of settlements of Minoan times, buried beneath or affected by the tephra of the exploded volcano of ancient Thera-Santorini, did posses the broader perspective that Schaeffer sought. Marinatos and others introduced research on the far-flung effects of the disaster. Heezen and Ninkovich discovered a layer of ash on the south-eastern floor of the Mediterranean Sea that they could ascribe to the Santorini explosion. Charles and Dorothy Vitaliano followed up with analyses of tephra from scattered locations on Crete and elsewhere [3] . The search and testing are continuing. Still, the Thera case is exceptional, and even yet far from complete. The ash coverings of settlements have rarely been analyzed. We speak of overall calcination, and not so much of the bones of hearths that have lent evidence of the ecology, cuisine, and religious ceremonies of early human groups. Overall calcination has sometimes, with less than complete evidence, been interpreted as the work of torch-bearing invaders. For example, James Melaart uses the convenient phrase "Whether by accident or by enemy action" to describe the destructive combustion of Troy IIg [4] . Earthquakes, too are invoked with some frequency, although a determination that a fire is an effect of an earthquake is by no means simple. On rare occasions, where there exists a historical record such as Pliny the Younger's description of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A. D., volcanism is admitted and may lead ultimately to excavation. There are still other possible causes, as we shall see. The contention of this paper is that reports of past excavations should now be reviewed with a revised set of questions. Moreover, and because of the ultimate inadequacy of the information typically contained in them, it is suggested that a new interdisciplinary calcinology be devised and carried into future excavations and the testing of soils and debris generally. The rich experience afforded by the excavations of Troy can serve to expose the problems that justify a new approach. Afterwards, we can define in a preliminary way the body of techniques that needs to be assembled and developed. {S : THE "BURNT CITY" OF TROY} THE "BURNT CITY" OF TROY In some exciting passages, which have unquestionably been among the most widely read of all archaeological writing, Schliemann describes how, in May of 1873, he uncovered "The treasure of Priam," King of Troy during the war between the Greeks and Trojans. (Neither his identification of the Treasure as Priam's nor of the City as the Troy of Homer is at issue here, and therefore these problems are passed over lightly.) Schliemann reports [5] that the "Trojans of whom Homer sings" occupied a stratum of debris "from 7 to 10 meters, or 23 to 33 feet, below the surface. This Trojan stratum, which, without exception, bears marks of great heat, consists mainly of red ashes of wood, which rise from 5 to 10 feet above the Great Tower of Ilium, and the great enclosing Wall, the construction of which Homer ascribes to Poseidon and Apollo; and they show that the town was destroyed by a fearful conflagration." He calls this ruined level "the Burnt City," and others have used his phrase since then. The large slabs of stone leading down to the plain from "The Scaean Gate" for 10 feet were so weakened by heat that they crumbled upon exposure, though farther on the slabs continued hard and intact. "A further proof of the terrible catastrophe is furnished by a stratum of scoriae of melted lead and copper, from 1/ 5 to 1 1/ 5 inches thick, which, extends through the whole hill at a depth of from 28 to 29 1/ 2 feet." Several visiting geologists and a construction engineer gave this opinion, and all concluded that large deposits of these existed at the time of the city's destruction. Schliemann continues: "That Troy was destroyed by enemies after a bloody war is further attested by the many human bones which I found in these heaps of debris, and above all by the skeletons with helmets, found in the depths of the temple of Athena; for, as we know from Homer, all corpses were burnt and the ashes were preserved in urns. Of such urns I have found an immense number in all pre-Hellenic strata on the hill." Then he says: "Lastly, the Treasure, which some member of the royal family had probably endeavored to save during the destruction of the city, but was forced to abandon, leaves no doubt that the city was destroyed by the hands of enemies. I found this Treasure on the large enclosing wall by the side of the royal palace, at a depth of 27 1/ 2 feet, and covered with red Trojan ashes from 5 to 6 1/ 2 feet in depth, above which was a post-Trojan wall or fortification 19 1/ 2 feet high." Schliemann spotted the Treasure through a protruding copper article. "On the top of this copper article lay a stratum of red and calcined ruins, from 4 3/ 4 to 5 1/ 4 feet thick, as hard as stone, and above this again lay the above-mentioned wall of fortification (6 feet broad and 20 feet high) which was built of large stones and earth, and must have belonged to an early date after the destruction of Troy." With his knife, he first withdrew this small copper shield, then a copper caldron with handles, then a copper plate to which a silver vase "had been fused ... in the heat of the fire" [6] . Next came a copper vase, a bottle of gold, a cap of gold and then other vessels of pure and alloyed metals, wrought and cast-copper, silver, gold, electrum. There were useful objects, ceremonial objects, and daggers, battle-axes, and lance- heads. Various weapons had "pieces of other weapons welded onto them by fire." "As I found all these articles together, forming a rectangular mass, or packed into one another, it seems to be certain that they were placed on the city wall in a wooden chest ... such as those mentioned by Homer as being in the palace of king Priam. This appears to be the more certain, as close by the side of these articles I found a copper key about 4 inches long, the head of which resembles a large safe-key of a bank. Curiously enough this key has had a wooden handle; there can be not doubt of this from the fact that the end of the stalk of the key is bent round at a right angle, as in the case of the daggers." Schliemann conjectures on the scene: It is probable that some member of the family of King Priam hurriedly packed the Treasure into the chest and carried it off without having time to put out the key; that when he reached the wall, however, the hand of an enemy or the fire overtook him, and he was obliged to abandon the chest, which was immediately covered to a height of from 5 to 6 feet with the red ashes and the stones of the adjoining royal palace... [7] . That the Treasure was packed together at terrible risk of life, and in the greatest anxiety, is proved among other things also by the contents of the largest silver vase, at the bottom of which I found two splendid gold diadems..., a fillet, and four beautiful gold ear-rings of most exquisite workmanship: upon these lay 56 gold ear- rings of exceedingly curious form and 8,750 small gold rings, perforated prisms and dice, gold buttons, and similar jewels, which obviously belonged to other ornaments; them followed six gold bracelets, and on the top of all two small gold goblets [8] . Finally, Schliemann adds, "The person who endeavored to save the Treasure had fortunately the presence of mind to stand the silver vase, containing the valuable articles described above, upright in the chest, so that not so much as a bead could fall out, and everything has been preserved uninjured" [9] . Schliemann says that death was risked in hastily retrieving the Treasure. Like many another digger, he was preoccupied with artifacts and architecture. And indeed there seemed to be nothing in the literature than a Greek-set fire. Furthermore, he was already reading the ancient story of the burning of Troy into his findings. He "knew" what he would find. So did the world of readers. But there are puzzling aspects to his account. First of all, there is the immensity of the blaze. Can the burning of a stone and wood town of 5,000 or so inhabitants produce a bed of ashes that may have amounted to 15 to 20 feet on its first fall? For we read that it was reduced to several feet of thickness and was so hard that a huge stone wall nearly 20 feet tall could be built on top of it afterwards. And the whole area was so completely buried that the walls of the subsequent settlement were planned and built in complete ignorance of the orientation of the walls and passageways below. "The more recent walls run in all directions above the more ancient ones, never standing upon them, and are frequently separated from them by a layer of calcined debris, from 6 1/ 2 to 10 feet high" [10] . The depth of the ashes is all the more impressive when it is observed that they formed on top of a wall. Then or afterwards, some part of the ashes would fall or drift or be blown off the top of a wall. And why would the bearers of such a Treasure, if they had even half a minute of time, leave the Treasure on top of a wall when they might at least have tipped it over onto the ground, and then fled? The ashes are spoken of as "red Trojan ashes," "ashes and stones" that buried the city, "mainly red ashes of wood." How thick a layer of ashes does a hand-burnt ancient city dissolve into? What kinds of heat would have been generated on the average outside and within houses? The answers are not now known, but might well be discovered. Craig C. Chandler writes that he has "never seen 'red ashes of wood' in natural fires, and the term sounds much more like a distillation residue than a combustion residue" [11] . With the suggestion of a distillation, the remote possibility of an early invention of "Greek Fire" intrudes. This presently unknown, highly volatile and intense weapon was possibly of petroleum plus an accelerant, and was used by the Byzantines against their enemies for centuries. But this was more than two millennia later. Further, "Greek Fire" would not account for the huge amount of ashes. A completely wooden and overstuffed contemporary house will leave no more than ankle- deep ashes when it burns to the ground, and then only on its own foundation. A flourishing natural forest and the ground cover is estimated to provide 200 tons organic matter per acre [12] . When reduced fully by heat, it will give up 160 tons of water, gases and other compounds to leave 20 tons of carbon residue and 20 tons of oily distillates. Further reduced to fine cinder and ash, it would weigh less and have less volume. If spread over an acre, the residue would amount to perhaps a pound per square foot; its height could scarcely measure 6 inches in its freshly fallen state. Chandler has pointed out that forest fires of the greatest intensity do not consume more than a fraction of the living material, producing perhaps 3 tons per acre of ashes. "This is an amount about 10 times as great as the fertilizer you spread on your lawn in the spring ... Ash residue from the burning of a city is measured in inches, rather than feet" [13] . And we seem to be faced at Troy by perhaps 15 feet, or 30 times as much ash, even allowing for no wind to blow the cloud of city ashes off the citadel onto the plain and for no drift off the top of the city wall. But, to proceed, if the city were under tight siege, would not the Treasure have been carefully packed and readied for any emergency? Would it not perhaps have been buried in a safe place or carried off to a friendly town? Schliemann assumes that a Trojan custodian was transporting the box. He discovered what appeared to be a copper handle. Would not at least two persons have carried it? It was heavy. Moreover, several guards and priests would have been assigned to accompany the porters on their urgent mission. The key to the box was found, but it may have been placed inside the box; its presence does indicate haste, or else it would have been kept by a keeper of the keys or by the chief of the little group of movers and would have vanished with him. If the "Greeks" were in hot pursuit, as Schliemann implies, would they not have caught up with the Treasure and carted it off? It would have been laid down by its porters, who would have fled for their lives. Would the "Greek" warriors have set such a blaze that they were frustrated in one of their primary objectives in capturing the city, to loot it of its valuables? Conquerors try not to burn a city before they loot it. Other treasures and valuables were located by Schliemann. Apparently the "invaders" were in some part, at least, frustrated in one of their most enjoyable missions by conflagration. We might assume that other treasures were indeed found and carried away. Their neglect of the deposits of lead and copper, an unconscionable dereliction, is puzzling; lead and copper supposedly ran in streams over the city grounds. Schliemann found no bones or warrior's equipment at the site of the Treasure save for a small copper shield, which may have been in or on the chest. Indications are, unless his search was incomplete, that the porters separated themselves physically from the Treasure in a great hurry and that the "pursuers" were blocked from reaching it. Unlike the ashes with which Vesuvius buried ancient Pompeiians and from which Fiorelli in 1863 ingeniously extricated their images by injections of liquid plaster, the ashes of Troy were apparently hot. They fused and welded exposed metal objects. The wood chest had disappeared. Any humans would have been incinerated and would have disappeared like the box, but they would at least have left their buckles and arms, and possibly teeth or long bones. Why did the porters try to go over the wall, instead of through the gate? Schliemann suggests that the "Greeks" commanded the gates. Possibly. But now we wonder whether, in fact, there were any Greek invaders climbing out of their famous Wooden Horse and reinforced by their returned comrades. For Schliemann does not find typically "Greek" (Achaean) utensils or weapons; therefore the conflagration could not come sometime after the foreigners had occupied the city and mingled their artifacts with those of the Trojans. Also, we should be inclined to deny that any invaders of any type were present. We are aware that contemporary scholarship assigns Schliemann's Troy to a period long before the "real" Trojan War. It is now called TroyII and Troy VIIa is the "real Troy," in one leading opinion [14] . A half century after Schliemann's work, a University of Cincinnati expedition returned to the site of Hisarlik. They explored painstakingly the area, employing the best archaeological techniques that the state of the art and the typically modest funding could provide. Apart from their extensive work on the other levels, the Cincinnati archaeologists, under the leadership of Carl Blegen, examined closely the ruins of the Burnt City-Level IIg by their code. The debris over the whole site is deep, yet less deep that the debris atop Schliemann's Wall. The stratum of Troy IIg had an average thickness of more than 1 m( eter); it consisted mainly of ashes, charred matter, and burned debris. This deposit apparently extended uniformly over the great megaron and across the entire site, eloquent evidence that the settlement perished in a vast conflagration from which no buildings escaped ruin. This is the 'Burnt City' of Schliemann ... In all areas examined by the Cincinnati Expedition, it was obvious that the catastrophe struck suddenly, without warning, giving the inhabitants little or no time to collect and save their most treasured belongings before they fled. All the houses exposed were still found to contain the fire-scarred wreckage of their furnishings, equipment, and stores of supplies. Almost every building yielded scattered bits of gold ornaments and jewelry, no doubt hastily abandoned in panic flight. Most of the famous 'treasure' recovered by Schliemann may now be safely attributed to Troy IIg... [15] . Thus writes Blegen (1963) and the evidence behind his words stacks up in several large printed volumes and a considerable archive. Blegen continues, seeking to explain the destruction: Whether the disaster was brought about by enemy action or by accident cannot be certainly stated, though there are considerations that point to each of these alternatives. If the city had been captured and razed by conquerors, some of the luckless inhabitants would surely have fallen victims to the attack, and an excavator might expect to find in the ruins remains of human skeletons. So far as is ascertainable in the archaelogical records, we have actually only one instance in which a fragment of a small adult skull was definitely found in the stratum of Phase Ilg. Schliemann mentions the skeletons of "two warriors" with bronze helmets, found in the burnt layer; but the stratigraphic position is not certified, and the helmets later turned out to be fragments of a bronze vessel. One might therefore conclude that the occupants of the town escaped. On the other hand, if an invading army took the city it would surely have thoroughly looted the houses before putting them to the torch; and few if any 'treasures' of gold and silver would have been left for archaeologists to recover. But again a counter-argument might hold that if all or most of the citizens had run away to safety, they would surely have returned sooner or later to recover the treasures they had left behind. Their failure to do so can only be accounted for by assuming that some powerful deterrent prevented their returning. What actually happened to bring about the burning of the whole establishment is still an unsolved mystery, but it is a fact that Troy II was totally destroyed" [16] . The mystery remains, and the range of speculation is both limited and expanded. We are compelled to put aside the Schliemann reconstruction as a rather complete fictional tale. In doing so, we are led to the alternative that some huge natural force ruined Schliemann's Troy. Enemy forces had not shown a gradual "intent" to destroy Troy, else the Treasure would have been packed and readied for transport. The disaster did not begin by slow degrees, else it would have permitted exit by the main gate. Or perhaps, to avoid panic or disorder, the Treasure was being sneaked out of town. Might it have been an earthquake followed by fire? There are few indications of fallen stones. It would not have been these that prevented the Treasure from being carried out the Gate of the city. Although the scene that we are reconstructing was not created by a great earthquake, a mild earthquake may have occurred. If it did, it had not prompted the government to abandon the town up to this last moment of disaster. Valuable objects were strewn on the floors of numerous homes. The evidence from "the depths of the Temple of Athena," where bones and skeletons were found, is ambiguous: people, sensing an earthquake, flee from the crashing roofs and walls of their structures. A large quantity of bones was found in the debris of, and next to, adjoining apartments [17] . Were these people trapped and buried by the quake? Possibly. Or did they die of heat or suffocation and were their bones preserved freakishly while most bodies were quickly consumed by intense heat? The main event may have been a sudden fall of ashes that began as a light warm shower and then developed into a heavy downpour of hot material. The fall would have incinerated all organic material except those people, plants and animals that were already in deep refuge where they suffocated and were later buried. It would have melted all exposed supplies of metal and partially exposed metal parts. Within a space of hours the city would have been covered and its life ended. There would have been no survivors or enemy awaiting outside to reoccupy the destroyed city, excavate it, collect its treasures, enjoy its strategic location [18] , and carry on or provide a substitute for its culture. If there were, they would have been blasted, drowned in ashes or suffocated by gases while the city disappeared before their eyes. The destroyed setting does not support a firestorm, such as incendiary bombs, dropped en masse from airplanes, inflicted upon the cities of Dresden and Hamburg in World War II. There the ash levels were insignificant, because "firestorm winds scour the burned area clean" [19] . The setting suggests the action of Vesuvius in burying Pompeii and Herculaneum, the one in falling cinders and ashes, the other in towering lava flows. It was the falling ash and gases that buried and suffocated the people whose images were recovered seventeen hundred years later. Some had chosen not to flee and took refuge in their houses; others could not flee; still others were drowned in ashes while in flight. Pliny the Elder was gassed to death as he stood, miles away, directing a rescue operation. The destruction wrought by the explosions and collapse of the islet of Krakatoa off Java in 1883 was done largely by tidal waves [20] . Although many persons were burned severely and succumbed to exhaustion in the hot ash-laden and gas-polluted air, the fall of ashes was not great enough to bury houses. The fall-out colors are not well- described; at least white, gray, black, brown, green, and red material was mentioned. Examining the territory around Troy (modern Hisarlik), we find no active or extinct volcanoes [21] . Mount Ida, famous in Homer, is 30 miles to the Southwest of Hisarlik. It is not reported as an active or extinct volcano. At 30 miles of distance, in order to have caused an ash-rain that would bury Troy, it would have had to explode in successive bursts of fury, exceeding the Krakatoan and Vesuvian (79 A. D.) disasters. The Thera-Santorini explosion of late Minoan culture occurred hundreds of miles away in the South Aegean Sea, and is not synchronized [22] . In any event, although it might have generated waves capable of battering the coastline of northwest Asia Minor, its ash-fall would probably not have reached so far and so heavily. Ninkovich and Heezen seem to have found that the overwhelming fallout of Thera ash occurred in the Southeastern Mediterranean Sea. Yet geologists might consider whether internal earth stresses could have induced not only the familiar cone volcanoes but also fissure eruptions, which, no matter how voluminously eruptive, leave little evidence for the unsuspecting eye once they have become extinct. A geologist might then search for some scars and volcanic products on the modern landscape. It is well to remind ourselves that Homer, in describing at least one Trojan war, has Mt. Ida behaving in peculiar ways when the gods of heaven enter the battle of Greeks and Trojans: "From high above the father of gods and men made thunder terribly, while Poseidon from deep under them shuddered all the illimitable earth, the sheer heads of mountains. And all the feet of Ida with her many waters were shaken and all her crests, and the city of Troy, the ships of the Achaians" [23] . The underworld god shrieked in terror and leapt from his throne at the prospect that "Poseidon might break the earth open." And Hera laid such a dense fog upon the battlefield that none could see to engage. There is a terrible fire over the whole scene that "first was kindled on the plain" and parched it and burned the dead warriors, then turned to the river, boiling it and its tributaries. Hera, wife of Zeus, ordered up tempests from seaward to fan the flames, which another sky-god and also volcano god, Hephaistos (Vulcan), had started. All of this bespeaks volcanism with accompanying earthquakes, and possibly fissure volcanism too. Here again, we should remind ourselves that a) the site of the "real Troy" may not be the Hisarlik site, b) there may have been several wars over the site through the ages, c) the war of which Homer sang was possibly an image of several partially idealized wars, and d) the final Homeric war probably occurred, if Velikovsky's reconstruction is followed (which eliminates the Greek Dark Age), in the late eighth and early seventh centuries. Troy IIg therefore existed at an earlier time, and we are quoting here passages regarding the landscape, nature forces, and effects of a later age or composite of ages. The date of destruction of the "Burnt City" is not at issue here. The ancients were adamant concerning the activities of the great sky gods. Hence a look into the skies for the cause of the burial of Schliemann's Troy is not unreasonable. But will it be only for the effects of remote volcanism? An anomalous detail demands attention: Schliemann mentions that the stones of the road out of the gate had been heated to the point of disintegration but, a few feet further out, the stones continued in good condition. The natural force seems here to have been selective, destroying by heat the crown of the hill, but sparing at least this part of the plain around. Alternatively the outer stones may have been relaid at a later period, or the first fires may have consumed the city premises alone, with the ash-fall coming later. Or again, at the Vitaliano's suggestion, should we return to an attacking force that heaped fires before the wooden gate to force an entrance; too, they may have hurled or shot many fiery brands at the gate. The total context is indeed important to bear in mind, whatever its complexity. Lightning can be hot and selective and may focus upon elevations. Ancient lightning and fire have received little attention from archaeologists and geologists. E. V. Komarek, Sr. writes, "I believe that the reason we have so little information on ancient fire scars or lightning streaks is that apparently no one has searched for them" [24] . Seneca, the Roman author, has a character in Thyestes begging Jupiter to bring disaster upon Earth "not with the hands that seek out houses and undeserving homes, using your lesser bolts, but with that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell ... These arms let loose and hurl your fires" [25] . Could there have been a qualitatively different kind of Jovian thunderbolt playing about the world in mythical and prehistoric times? A ramified bolt of hundreds of strokes is not impossible to imagine. The myriad lightning and fire effects in the Krakatoa disaster are worth recalling, but these occurred within a radius of a few kilometres [26] . The mysterious melted copper and lead, alluded to above, which covered a large area, according to Schliemann, might have originally been deposits that contributed to the attractiveness of the site for lightning discharges. They form a "stratum of scoriae, which runs through the greater part of the hill, at an average depth of 9 metres( 29 1/ 2 feet)." Were they stored by the Trojans or were they "welded scoriae (Schweisschlacken)" of volcanoes; that is, fragments carried up by the powerful blast of expanding gases, ejected in a molten state, and solidifying after falling with a smacking sound back to the ground? --"upon impact, they are squashed out flat, and are welded together where they fall" [27] . Volcanoes are not known to eject such scoriae to any considerable distance. Still another possibility needs to be added: a meteoric fall or shower, Homer's "divine-kindled fire of stones." If a large meteor had passed nearby without crashing, its immense heat would have consumed and raised into the sky the ashes of countless trees and the dust of exploded and cyclonized fields. But the people appear to have had warning, however brief. A veritable deluge of meteoric particles from outer space, as from a large comet's tail, might produce and contribute to combustion and burial. A cometary or planetary near-encounter, and resulting fall of gases, hydrocarbons, burning pitch, and stones, of course, is Velikovsky's "first cause." Even metals (again the layer of copper and lead) have been reputed to fall. Such events are unknown to modern experience but are indicated by ancient legends from many places [28] , and by various geological and biological phenomena [29] . We cannot ignore the Biblical sources that speak of "fire and brimstone (sulphur)" such as that which wiped out "the cities of the plain." The Cincinnati team writes in several places of the greenish-yellow discoloration characteristically found in the debris of streets and other once open areas [30] . Was this brimstone? The clays are curious. Area 210 of the city shows much disintegrated clay and debris, plus pots, but no signs of burning. A house of Square A3-4 is in ruins "covered by a mass of clay more than 0.50 meters thick, which has turned red from the effects of internal heat" [31] . The roofs were of clay and wood, but the depth is remarkable and so is the color. Is there more than one kind of clay in the ruins? Is this the same "red" that Schliemann reports as "the red ashes of Trojan wood?" For that matter, is it part of the omnipresent red dust that Velikovsky pursues through early references from numerous cultures in connection with the planet Venus [32] ? At this stage of research, one craves evidence that the rude Achaeans were quite stupid but were geniuses at setting great fires from above. Or that all excavators exaggerated in their reports. Barring these explanations, the evidence speaks, or rather, whispers faintly, on behalf of a regional multiple volcanic explosion of gases, hot scoriae and ashes, some element of which rained down suddenly and heavily upon Troy, burning, burying, and baking. The Treasure of Priam would be buried atop the wall where it had been placed as its bearers cast a final despairing glance upon the abysmal world on all sides. One should be warned, however, that a theory of concurrent regional plinian eruptions would call up a search for causes of a more fundamental kind. Volcanism on a grand scale is another word for general catastrophe: What force can roil up the mantle and wrench around so much of the crust of the Earth at a single moment of time? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE BURNING OF TROY} {S - } {S : A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD} A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD The mystery of the "Burnt City" of Troy will soon be a century old, but its solution may be within grasp. It can now be reviewed in light of substantial advances in empirical technique and general additional and spectacular theories. The latter are provided most forcibly by Claude Schaeffer and Immanuel Velikovsky. In 1948, Professor Schaeffer, who had excavated at Ras Shamra-Ugarit, published a treatise on comparative stratigraphy of the Near and Middle East during the Bronze Ages of the second millennium B. C. He incorporate the work of many predecessors, including the investigators of Troy-Hisarlik, into a theory that a sequence of fires and earthquakes had destroyed Bronze Age civilizations concurrently, several time over, in the vast area stretching from Troy and Egypt to Persia, and even beyond into China. Similar phenomena are recorded for Etruria (Tuscany), Meso-America, and elsewhere [33] and might someday be synchronized. At the time of Troy IIg, reports the Cambridge Ancient History (I: 2, 406), following in Schaeffer's footsteps, three-quarters of the settlements of western and southern Anatolia were permanently destroyed. Although he is a catastrophic revisionist, Schaeffer has not gone deeply into causes. He demonstrated the hard evidence of universal destruction. He invoked earthquakes followed by fire, or where earthquakes were not in evidence, simply enormous calcination. He exculpated invaders as the destroyers of civilization in many instances, even though he employed conventional terms such as "the Peoples of the Sea" that are used to explain the abrupt termination of many civilized communities. He can point often to disturbed and unsettled human elements who came upon the sites afterward. (Significantly, Blegen had already shown that a new cultural element did not succeed Troy IIg; the Troy III culture was closely related [34] . This is remarkable because the calcinated debris of Troy IIg was never dug out and was probably unknown, yet the debris of the old city was strong enough to become the foundation of the new city walls.) In his command of the natural sciences involved and their interweaving with ancient sources and psychology, Velikovsky has excelled all writers on questions of catastrophe. Working independently, he published in 1950 his account of universal destruction of the second half of the second millennium. He asserted that heavy seismic disturbances and devastating flames consumed the same ancient civilizations. But, with the aid of ancient legends and documents, he insisted upon the role of overall volcanism, heavy meteoric falls, and as "first cause," a derangement of the planetary system that brought down upon the earth the proverbial "wrath of the gods," not only Olympian gods, but Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian, Olmec and other gods [35] . Unfortunately, for twenty-five years, the assemblages of ideas and facts of Schaeffer and Velikovsky, "an extraordinary polymath," in the words of the late Columbia University classicist, Moses Hadas, were subjected to unscientific vilification. Schaeffer, Professor at the Sorbonne and a renowned excavator, has been hardly cited for his magnum opus. Few scholars have been ready to confront the anomalies of their own findings. One exception was Spiridon Marinatos, who plunged to his death in 1974 at the famous site of his work. His excavation of the Minoan culture of Thera-Santorini, from beneath the effects of the plinian explosion of the island, called international and interdisciplinary attention to the destruction of a critical portion of Mediterranean civilization. But Blegen of Cincinnati was also an exception; he was disposed to a cautious empiricism, but was piqued by the strange events that had befallen Minoan and Mycenaean civilization. In the voluminous published records of the Cincinnati expedition, we find the following lines: "A large collection of earth samples was also made this year. (1937). Specimens were taken from all strata of all main layers in the principle areas of digging, and the number of small bags thus collected exceeded 400. They were shipped to Cincinnati for scientific examination by specialists in geology and botany" [36] . When, in 1974, we discovered this passage, we made inquiry, only to find that the sample had never been analyzed. The long period of World War II had intervened. Personnel left, never to return. Other interests took priority. The samples rested in their cloth bags in the attic of McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati. Finally, in 1975, material from the bags was provided to Professor George Rapp of the University of Minnesota for eventual analysis. This material will serve for the first calcinological testing of the causes of the destruction of Troy-Hisarlik. It will perhaps form the basis of testing also the more general theories advanced as to the causes of the destruction of many ancient civilizations. What questions should be asked of these humble sacks of debris, and, by extension, of all similar samples to be drawn from other destroyed settlements? In other words, of what should consist the science that investigates ancient destruction by combustion -- call it "calcinology," perhaps? We may address this question either by taking up one by one the theories as to the origins of the combustion, or by taking up the techniques for the investigation of combustion. In respect to the theories, one would inquire into the possibilities of one or a combination of accidental fire; "the invader's torch"; Greek Fire; seismic-caused fire; explosive local volcanism from fissures or now extinct cones; fall-out of tephra from remote, perhaps general, volcanism; ramified lightning; petroleum (bitumen, asphalt, naphtha) rain, non-volcanic and extraterrestrial; and gas explosion in the atmosphere, terrestrial or extraterrestrial by origin. In respect to the techniques, one would speak of ambiance induction; artifact analysis; comparative historical deduction; thermal-visual examination; morphological examination; electron scanning microscopy; chemical mineralogical tests; thermo- luminescence tests; tests for paleo-magnetism. Inasmuch as individual techniques may dispose of more than one theory, it may be best to proceed by offering a few words concerning their relevance. Fundamental to pursuing all causal alternatives is a careful inductive study of the ambiance of combustion. Whether performed on records of past expeditions or upon a setting itself, a skeptical and fully alert reading or examination is required. We have entertained too close a circle of interests and hypotheses; the Trojan record shows this. So do hundreds of other excavation reports. First of all, an interdisciplinary group of scientist must set standards and criteria for entering upon a testable location. Conventional archaeology has certainly proceeded far along these lines, but new parameters need to be added, taken from geology and meteorology, as for instance, the effects of wind and the strength of building materials. The camera that has come to play an important part in contemporary investigations needs to be aimed at the hypotheses, so to speak. The pioneering work of the engineer, C. Lerice, in magnetomatic and radiotropic anterior probing of subsurface forms is worthy of generalization to standard practice. Standards for measuring depth of debris, original and actual density of calcination, percentage of ash content, and architectural and object deformities should be set up. Pre-selection and logging of samples should be systematically done in the manner of the Cincinnati expedition of 1937. The analysis of artifacts is sometimes conducted as part of a treasure hunt. To this day, objects from the Treasure of Priam have not been studied carefully to determine whether they have been fused by heat or by oxidation. Objects are described as they are found but not to the extent that a specific set of hypotheses is applied to each object as to how it might have been placed or dropped, or slipped, or fallen as a result of direct or indirect natural causes. Nor has an inductive, comparative, historical method been always conscientiously pursued. A single anomaly in a closed layer may be worth more to science than a golden chalice. To dismiss the anomaly as an "impossible" intrusion, a "similarity", and "forerunner" is all too common practice. The attempt of the University of Cincinnati expedition to reconcile the anomalies of location of their carefully uncovered sherds in the face of the conventional Egyptian-anchored chronology is a case in point. "The discovery of these 7th-century sherds 'in several areas in the strata of Troy VIIb1 stratified below layer VIIb2', which is supposed to represent the 12th century, "presents a perplexing and still unexplained problem." [37] . Fortunately the self- restraining, objective empirical techniques of the expedition simply stood even against an authoritative chronology at a later date. One goal of calcinology is to establish a frame of analysis that can be transferred from one excavation to another both to interlock events and to serve eventual critiques of received versions of the comparative development (and destruction) of civilizations. I should place in the same category of historical comparative method the application of mythology. Dorothy Vitaliano, pursuing a strict uniformitarian theory, has nonetheless exemplified the necessary marriage between myth and geology that research properly demands; to her, myth serves as a clue to past events, especially when they are extraordinarily forceful [38] . Sometimes, as in the case of Troy, there are direct myths describing events overtaking the site. In other cases, myths may be transferred from other times and places as hypotheses. The examination of bones found in circumstances of combustion may well be expanded. Paleosteology ordinarily does not address itself to the degree of heat to which human remains have been subjected, or whether the heat was searing or slow. For example, a separate volume in the Cincinnati Troy series, its other merits aside, does not answer questions relevant to the sudden destruction of the city [39] . How much heat reached the people whose skeletons remained? Would the heat elsewhere have erased entirely any humans and animals? Contemporary arson experts can transfer their "know-how" to such queries. Contemporary fire experts and combustion chemists can also contribute useful principles for the visual examination of thermal effects. A high sensitivity to variations in color and texture is still not a prerequisite for professional archaeology. Conversations with persons concerned with combustion problems come around repeatedly to unanswerable questions of color, stains, textures, bubbles and cracks. The morphology of combustion environments would deal with terrain features that might have altered, of for that matter remained significantly unaltered, in the course of the destructive combustion. Earthquakes uplift and crack the earth. Volcanic and seismic fissures leave different traces. Lightning can burn and dig distinctive fissures as well. It would be useful to perform core drillings in the hinterland of destroyed settlements to discover whether the ash trapped about the ruins is also present in some natural lowland areas of slow deposition, removed from human habitations. Recently, for example, the Athens Metro project tested the subsoil to a depth of 20 meters in 228 locations for the purpose of planning subway construction. Archealogical finds were noted and covered over, but the ordinary corings were not handled properly for the analysis of combustion or other natural phenomena. Almost all samples show "Athens schist," a vague term for sandstone, siltstones and the like; most of the preserved cores are disturbed and eroded by water used in the drilling [40] . (The rock cores, incidentally, show highly intense fracturing near the surface.) Unfortunately, oil exploration does not concern itself with logging the cores brought up from the near subsurface of wells during the drilling [41] . It may be possible in the future to make a cooperative arrangement with petroleum geologists to provide such data. Apart from its usefulness to social and natural history, near subsurface samples may reveal chemical and morphological peculiarities of areas overhanging oil pools, such as distillates of hydrocarbons indicating surface origins. (Again, this would appear to be an appropriate scientific response, as there are frequent references in myth to rains of sticky substances from the sky.) This conjecture leads naturally to inquiry into the composition of shales, clays, and soils found in connection with ancient destruction. An analysis of "samples that cover depositional chemical environments ranging from continental and coastal soils to marsh and subtidalmarine deposits" of recent ages had disclosed complex polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon assemblages (PAH) with "a high degree of similarity in the molecular weight distribution of the many series of alkyl homologs" [42] . This PAH is carcinogenic and mutagenic. The soils sampled were from widely separated locations on and off the New England coastal region. Forest pyrolysis and atmospheric transport was suggested. A search for other nonbiological organic compounds was indicated. The cause of such an immense fire is conjectural, as is indeed the postulate of the fire itself. Are we so swollen with pride that we cannot review Ignatius Donnelly's Ragnarok (1883) and not gain from it at least a doubt as to the origins of some of the world's clays? Clay is conventionally assigned to sedimentation or decomposed structural material, without inquiring as to possible volcanic or other sources. Yet a geological walk along many a Greek island beach may pass across deposits of pumice dust and of gray clay that visually suggests bentonite. Donnelly claimed a cometary origin for a heavy rain of fire and gravel that destroyed part of the globe and most of mankind. What does the new geology say to this? At least in regard to calcinated settlement debris and top open area subsurfaces nearby, what is called for is an increased resort to professional morphological, visual, and tactile examination, then to chemical mineralogical tests, and also to electron scanning microscopy. Reference was made earlier to the extraordinary layer of copper and lead scoriae found by Schliemann in the burnt city. Is this mined ore, purified metal, or ore in a natural state? The origins of metals are not a settled matter. There is too long a stone age, too ready an access to ores, too abundant a mythology to relax in the arms of conventional theory. Sample tests are generally inexpensive and well structured; they require only small amounts of material, often only a gram. But of course, the sampling technique is critical and a manual of instructions for sampling calcination with a mind to covering all hypotheses raised by this paper is a task for the future. The idea that thermo-luminescence, radiocarbon, potassium-argon, and fission-tract dating techniques can be applied to combustion studies with good effect is natural but perhaps overly optimistic. Of course, calcinology is interested in dating inasmuch as one of its aims is the establishment of concurrences in destruction; if two spatially separated combustion processes point to the same or related causes, then their dating will not only confirm their relationship but will also permit a more secure dating of other sites where similar combustion but insufficiently related artifacts and structures are discovered. Thermal effects encountered on calcinated sites play a large role in permitting age- determinations (as in thermoluminescence tests and fission-track dating) by providing a basal date from which calculations of age may be made, and in obscuring chronology by contaminating burned substances through mixing, as in radiocarbon dating. However, it will be of interest to apply long-term dating techniques such as the potassium-argon method if only to check whether the test gives an impossibly old date to a recent volcanic event. Where uranium minerals have been used to give color to artifacts of glass, the fission-track technique may provide reliable dates and a check on radiocarbon dates. If an artificial glass is subjected subsequent to its manufacture to combustion temperatures of over 600 degrees centigrade, the fission-tracks may be partially or entirely erased, permitting the date of the new calcination to be determined from the tracks now present. Tracks in volcanic glass should date the eruption that produced it. Extra-terrestrial microtektites lend themselves also to fission-track dating and can be searched for in ruins [43] . Tests for radiation levels of the debris are indicated because of the possibility that the destruction may have involved atmospheric or air-transported agents. For instance the radiation levels would vary from the norm if lightning had struck or a meteoric pass-by had greatly raised temperature levels. Lightning effects may also be indicated by magnetization of metal pieces; for this reason and also to determine whether a change in the magnetic pole had occurred, supposing a catastrophe to have been widespread, the then-exposed rocks should be tested for abnormal magnetism, and ceramic sherds of successive levels should be tested for the same and for possible reversal of direction from one level to another. As the gamut of tests and procedures is subjected to the concerted attention of scholars of relevant fields, it may be expected that a system of producers and a battery of tests will evolve -- simpler, easier to employ, practicable given the conditions of archaeological exploration. The resultant research and testing would possibly confirm that archaeology and geophysics have overlooked some significant part of the absolutely small fund of ancient data. At that point, not too far away, we may begin to speak of a new subfield of science called paleo-calcinology. And when this task is finished, we might turn to another new subfield, which beckoned us temptingly even as we tried to concentrate upon calcination, paleo-seismism. Here the implication is that the Mercalli scale may be quite inadequate to denominate thrusting, folding, and crustal rising and falling that may have occurred in the time of man, and that the present awareness of settlement sites is merely fractional; much more may have disappeared or is effectively hidden so as to lend a false perspective to the human story. Also paleo-diluviology, the study of ancient floods and tidalism. And still another, paleo-meteorology, a study that would include the great winds that can sweep away everything down to bed rock, given the slightest faltering of the earth's rotation, or the passage of any substantial material from outer space through the atmosphere. Part of the total task, we seem to be saying, is to separate ancient real occurrences from ancient myth. The larger task is to distinguish real ancient catastrophism from literal theology, not to denigrate theology but so as to recognize catastrophism for what it did to shape man and his environment. {S : POSTSCRIPT OF NOVEMBER, 1983} POSTSCRIPT OF NOVEMBER, 1983 The author's interest in the calcinology of Troy led the University of Cincinnati authorities to propose an investigation of samples of debris that had been stored for many years at the University. Generous grants were obtained from several foundations and in 1982, the Princeton University Press published Supplementary Monograph 4 of the University of Cincinnati Excavation at Troy, under the title of Troy: the Archaeological Geology, by George Rapp, Jr. and John A. Gifford. The present author, whose own research proposal had failed to receive support, was not consulted at any stage of this work. However, since his original memorandum, on which the preceding article was based, had been made available to the investigators in the very beginning and he had called their attention to the possibilities residing in the neglected samples, there may have resulted some effect on what was done in the investigations. If so, it is not notable in the book just cited. The book does not state its hypotheses. Its tests discovered only that in almost all samples, whatever the level, a reed (arundo donox) occurred; the finding lacks significance since the reed is used in making bricks. In sample number 81 (p. 130) of Phase IId, burned earth was analyzed to revel charcoal, bone, and pelecypod fragments. There appears to be nothing of further interest to calcinology proceeding from the entire investigation. The soil samples were not, however, exhausted, and a future investigation is still possible, hopefully by means more sophisticated than those described in the published work. The senior author, without serious defense of the thesis, seems to support earthquakes as the cause of destruction. ('... one earthquake of Richter magnitude greater than seven to affect the Troad about every three hundred years. ' (p. 46)). {S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Burning of Troy)} Notes (Chapter 2: The Burning of Troy) 1. This paper is an expanded version of one that was first presented on June 18, 1974 before the international symposium --Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System --held at McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario, and was published in Volumes I: 4 and II: 1 of Kronos magazine. The author is wholly responsible for the theory and presentation of this report. He wishes to acknowledge his obligation, however, to a number of persons who kindly supplied information and advice as he was preparing it. Among them are: C. C. Chandler, Director of Forest Fire and Atmospheric Sciences Research, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; Arthur Brown, Geological Engineer, Technical Consultant, Athens Metro Project; Ruben G. Bullard, Department of Geology, Cincinnati Bible Seminary; J. L. Caskey, Professor of Archaeology, University of Cincinnati; Dr. Howard W. Emmons, Karman Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics and Jet Propulsion, California Institute of Technology; John Greeley, Professor of Physics, University of the Bosphorus; Billie Glass, Associate Professor of Geology, University of Delaware, Newark; W. A. Hans, Engineer, Fire Protection Department, Underwriters Laboratories Inca; John Gnaedinger, President, Soil Testing Services Inc., Northbrook, Ill; Jorg Keller, Professor of Mineralogy, University of Freiburg, West Germany; G. Marinos, Director, Department of Geology and Paleontology, University of Athens; Dr. Charles D. Ninkovich, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Palisades, N. Y.; Dr. Gerd Roesler, Consulting Geologist, Naxos, Greece; Eugene Vanderpool, Archaeological Photographer, American School of Classical Studies, Athens; Eddie Schorr, Archaeologist, Houston, Texas; Dorothy Vitaliano, Associate Professor of Geology, University of Indiana, Bloomington, Ind.; Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, Princeton, N. J. 2. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stragigraphie comparée et chronologic de l'Asie Occidentale (London: Oxford U. Press, 1948), p. 7. 3. J. W. Mayor, Jr summarizes the work of Marinatos and Galanopoulos in "A Mighty Bronze Age Volcanic Explosion," XII Oceanus (Woods Hole, Mass.), 3 April 1966, and Voyage to Atlantis (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1969). Christos Doumas summarizes the latest "official" theory of the succession of events at Thera in Antiquity XL VIII (1974), 110-15, plates. Also, cf. D. Ninkovich and B. C. Heezen, "Santorini Tephra," Colston Research Society Papers, 17 (1965), 415-53; the papers of J. Keller, D. L. Page, and C. and D. Vitaliano in Acta of the First International Scientific Congress on the Volcano in Thera, Greece, 1969 (Athens, 1971); and C. and D. Vitaliano, "Volcanic Tephra on Crete," Amer. Jrnl. Archaeology, Vol. 78, no. 1, Jan. 1974, pp. 19-24. 4. IX Anatolian Studies (1959). 5. This and the following quotations are from pages 16-17, 348, and 325 of H. Schliemann, Troy and Its Remains (1875). 6. Ibid., p. 330. Schaeffer, op. cit., 223-4, claims that he saw no evidence of flame- exposure (feu d'un incendie) on the objects exhibited at the Berlin Museum from the treasure, and suggests chemical fusion. Also, radiative heat would be an alternative to "chemical fusion" if one must be sought. 7. Schliemann, op. cit., p. 333. 8. Ibid., pp. 334-5. 9. Ibid., p. 340. 10. Ibid., p. 302; cf. p. 347. The walls and gates of ancient cities had usually an orientation to the cardinal directional points. The "de-alignment" of successive Trojan escarpments is itself cause for suspecting and investigating a possible reorientation of the hill. 11. Communication of March 7, 1984. Bruce V. Ettling and Mark F. Adams accelerated combustion of woods, cotton cloth, and plastics by hydrocarbons (fuel oil, gasoline, could be etc.) and discovered by gas chromatography that accelerate hydrocarbons could be distinguished from the natural hydrocarbons in the char. (" The study of Accelerate Residues in fire Remains," N. D. offprint, Washington State University. College of Engineering Research). 12. Allan O. Kelly & Frank Dachille. Target: Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science (Carlsbad, Calif.: the authors, 1953), p. 192. 13. Loc. cit. 14. Blegen, Troy and the Trojans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), pp. 161-4. Troy IIg is presently dated to ca. 2200 B. C. by the conventional chronology. 15. Ibid, p. 69. There is a contradiction here with fin. 13, as to how many bones were found. 16. Ibid., p. 70. 17. Op. cit., p. 17. 18. It is well to stress that an influential school of experts on Troy consider the Trojan War( s) to have been essentially a struggle for the command of the Dardanelles, through which heavy commerce funneled. Cf. Emile Mireaux, Les Poems Homériques et l'Histoire Grecque, 2 vols. ( pairs: Albin Michel, 1948), ch. II, XIV, et passim. A strategic city that had to be put to good economic use might be thoroughly destroyed, short-sightedly, and another later on built upon the site. Even if this were true of Troy VII, would it have been also true of the earliest Troys, a habitual shortsightedness? 19. Chandler, loc. cit. 20. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa (1964). 21. Communication from Prof. Jorg Keller, Institute of Mineralogy, Univ. of Freiburg, June, 1974. 22. Israel M. Isaacson (E. M. S.), "Some Preliminary Remarks about Thera and Atlantis," KRONOS I, 2 (Summer, 1975). pp. 93 ff. 23. Iliad (Lattimore trans., 1951), p. 405. 24. "Lightning and Fire Ecology in Africa," Proceedings Annual Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference (April 22-23, 1971), 473-511,475. 25. Quoted in I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (N. Y., 1950), p. 218. 26. Furneaux, op. cit., 73, 97, et passim. 27. A. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity, trans. by E. A. Vincent (1962), pp. 12- 13. 218. 28. Worlds in Collision, especially "The Hail of Stones," "Naphtha," "Ambrosia," "Rivers of Milk and Honey," "Samples from the Planets." 29. Harold Urey, "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (March 2, 1973), p. 32; Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955), 147-53. 30. Troy (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton U. Press), Vol. 1, 325, 363. 31. Ibid., p. 373. 32. Cf. Worlds in Collision. 48-51, "The Red World." 33. CF. Nicola Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964). Also, Michael D. Coe R. A. Diehl, and M. Stuiver, "Olmec Civilization, Veracruz, Mexico: Dating of the San Lorenzo Phase," 155 Science (1967), 1399-1401 (the authors report that many pieces of asphalt litter the excavated ruin level). F. Wendorf, et. al., "Egyptian Prehistory," 169 Science (18 Sept. 1970), no. 3951, pp. 1163, 1169 and figure 1, speak of widespread brush fire in reference to a bed of ash in the Nile Valley. Geologist Louis Lartel, in his first studies of Cro-Magnon man near Les Eyzies- de-Tayec, Dordogne, in 1868 uncovered five archaeological layers covered with ash. And so forth. 34. Op. cit., p. 700. 35. E. C. Baity, "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far," 14 Current Anthropology (October, 1973), 389-449. 36. Vol. I, p. 17. 37. I. M. Isaacson, "Applying the Revised Chronology," IV Pensee, no 4, 5, p. 14, quoting C. W. Blegen, Troy, V. IV, 1, p. 158. 38. Legends of the Earth (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1973). 39. J. Lawrence Angle, Troy: The Human Remains (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton U. Press, 1951). 40. Site visit with Arthur Brown, Geologist and technical consultant, Athens Metro Project, September 11, 1974. 41. Communication of April 24, 1974 from K. F. Huff, Manager, Exploration Division, Exxon. 42. M. Blumer and W. W. Youngblood, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils and Recent Sediments," Science (April 4, 1975), p. 53. 43. W. Gentner, B. P. Glass, D. Storzer and G. A. Wagner, "Fission Track Ages and Ages of Deposition of Deep-Sea Microtektites," 168 Science (17 April 1970), 359-61. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 3: } {T THE FOUNDING OF ROME} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER THREE THE FOUNDING OF ROME For some time now, the founding of Rome has been accredited to truculent Latin rustics lost in the miasma of VIII century history. The more glorious legend of its establishment by Homeric heroes, particularly Aeneas, prince of Troy, has been in abeyance. However, in the light of recent theory and newly uncovered fact, the two stories can be blended in to a credible account. To suggest the new history is my purpose here. To begin with, I would allude to two larger ideas, which we shall be carrying into the Italian setting. One is the increasing probability that a period of over 400 years of accepted chronology around the Mediterranean world did not exist and should be stricken from the record. These are the so-called Dark Ages of Greece, which were placed in the historical record in the first place to correspond with four hundred years of Egyptian chronology that were also non existent. "The Aegean prehistorians", writes J. Cadogan, "have no choice but to adapt themselves to the Egyptologists" [1] . This may seem still to be true to most ancient historians, but a generation ago Velikovsky, in his book Ages in Chaos, knocked out the Egyptian centuries at issue and, following his cues respecting the Greek Dark Ages, I. Isaacson (Schorr), the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of England, the journal Kronos, Velikovsky himself, and even the present writer have worked to close the Greek time gap. Hence, it is possible now to connect Cadmus of Thebes with Akhnaton, the butning of Pylos with the destruction of Troy, to tie together in fact a number of natural catastrophes and movements of people that Claude Schaeffer had coordinated in time, and that could readily be slipped down by four hundred years into the VIII century. For Schaeffer's inventory of destroyed sites of the XIII century "Peoples of the Sea" period reveals that these settlement were succeeded by towns of archaic Greek, Greco-Roman, or other much more modern settings not older than the VIII. century. The case of Troy, so close to our subject here, is especially instructive about the pseudo-time gap. As J. N. Sammer sums up the evidence [2] , Troy-Hisarlik VIIb was the last Bronze Age city of the famous site. There followed a Greek town of the VII century or later; no deposits intervened. Furthermore, there was an abundant continuity. Gray Minoan pottery was found in Troy VI, Troy VII, and the Greek Age Troy. The forms of settlement were identical in the Late Bronze Age (supposedly the XII Century) and the - 700 or later Greek settlement. A Late Bronze house was obviously used by VII century Greeks. Beset by the dogmas of Egyptian chronology, scholars such as Blegen and Coldstream resorted to the excuse of an abandonment followed by contamination in a mixing of debris. In Egypt this was the time around the pharaoh Ramses III, on whose temple of Medinet Habu relating to the year 8 is recorded the "Invasion of Sea Peoples," that "They were coming while the flame was prepared before them, forward toward Egypt" [3] . Fire "before them" is not metaphor but refers probably to the innumerable cases of destruction by fire at this time, a fire which may have been from fierce earthquakes, volcanism, and exoterrestrial sources, which desolated many peoples and sent them out as marauders and colonists. Or so it is argued in a number of places, and it is precisely this kind of general ecological destruction encountered in VIII and VII century history that helped to confuse the dates by seeming to cause "Dark Ages" of barbarism, depopulation and continual movement and strife of peoples. Hence, the second point about the background of Rome is that the town originated in a turbulent period when the war planet Mars, Homer's "bloodstained stormer of walls," became a top god in Troy and not by coincidence in Rome. The latest consensus may be expressed in the words of F. Castagnoli: [4] Archaeological excavations have opened up new prospects: the considerable documentation of evidence of the Late Bronze Age (particularly in the zone involved directly with the legend such as Ardea and Lavinium) and the Mycenean imports in Southern Etruria, and between Reatino and southern Umbria, has reinvoked the thesis (for some time cast aside) of a true historical reality adumbrated in the legend; joined to this suggestion is the hypothesis that various manufactures of the oldest Latium civilization reflect Cretan models and finally the theory that the Latin language reveals Mycenean traces. In consequence, the coming of Aeneas to Latium my not be an artificially created myth, but instead, in a certain sense, a tradition, that is, the echo of real occurrences, the arrival of Aegeans in Latium during the period of the Trojan War. This certainly does not go far enough to suit our views, but will do for a start. At the magnificent bimillennial exposition honoring Virgil in the beautiful setting of the Campidoglio in Rome in 1981, the heroine was the famous sculpture of the wolf of Rome, suckling Romulus and Remus. A small boy listened while his father explained: "She nursed the orphans, and Romulus then founded Rome." The wolf was fashioned alone in ancient times, possibly by an Etruscan master, and the twins were added only several centuries ago. The wolf of Rome and the Mars-Ares of Aeneas' may not have been far apart. Already in antiquity and possibly based upon the word of Herodotus alone, the Trojan wars had been placed in remote antiquity, the XII and XIII centuries. When the Romans came to deal with this date, they found that their tradition of Romulus as founder of the city proper in the VIII century (753,747, etc) was impossibly disconnected with the Trojans, who now seemed to have disappeared four centuries earlier. Thereupon at the end of the III century B. C., Q. Fabius Pictor, a Roman writing in Greek, first (to our knowledge) bridged the gap by inserting an Alban line of Kings: but a more recent quotation from him (see below) seems to contradict this reputed view. In contrast, Ennius and others connected Aeneas and Romulus directly, as grandfather and grandson. F. Castagnoli tells us how skepticism discounted the tradition : The Trojan origin of the Latins was already put in doubt in the seventeenth century by the humanist Philipp Cluever, a rigorous critique of philological aspects begun in the middle of the Eighteenth Century (Niebuhr, Klausen, Schwegler, etc.); principally upon their work has been based the interpretation of legendary material accorded by most historians of ancient Rome. It is understandable that since the Romans had not been able to stabilize the history of their origins, the legendary part would fall prey to the new scientists who were bent upon sharpening their tools against superstition. Later on the strong interest of the Etruscans in Aeneas was exposed. Also presented was the theory that Greek writers had created the legend. But then, after Mycenean connections had been liberally displayed in the archaeology of Italy, the notion of archaic elements corresponding to the myth grew up. More recently Latium has come under exploration, including especially Lavinium. In the Iliad (302-8), the god Poseidon saves Aeneas from being killed by Achilles so as to preserve the house of Dardanus, beloved of Zeus, whose head will be Aeneas and also Aeneas will be king of Troy with many generations to follow. Hera adds that Troy must be substituted. So went the logic behind the legend. But of course there was more than nonsense in the Iliad. In the years when Virgil was writing the Aeneid, Properzio publicized him, announcing that he would revive the armed exploits of the Trojan Aeneas and the wall built upon the Lavinian strand. "Take yourselves back, Roman and Greek writers! There stands hidden something greater than the Iliad." In the middle of the VIII century, Ilioupersis of Arctinus and Miletus spoke of the secret flight of Aeneas from Troy up Mount Ida. Later the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite promises Aeneas a kingdom with a glorious future, a Troy restored. In the VI century a coin of the city Aineia on the Chalcidean peninsula displays Aeneas in flight from Troy, whence to found this same settlement. That Aeneas went west appears for the first time in the fragmentary record in a table of the Capitoline Museum illustrating the work of Stesichorus of the VII century. In one scene Aeneas leaves through a Trojan gate; in another, Aeneas, with his father, Anchises, son Ascanius, and companion Misenus board a ship eis ten Hesperian, "toward the west." Anchises carries the sacred idols. A direct connection of Aeneas with Latium appears a century later, at the end of the V century, with two Greek historians, Ellanicus of Lesbos and Damaster of Sigens. The story also appears of the burning of the Trojans' ship by their womenfolk, and of the naming of Rome after the Trojan heroine Rome, ringleader presumably in the affair. The story told by Greeks (and no Roman history in Latin is known until much later) is seen in Italian perspective about 300 B. C. when the historian Timaeus of Tauromenium attests to sacred Trojan relics preserved in a sanctuary of Lavinium. Several decades later, the poet Licofronius, depending upon Timaeus, confirms him and details on the existence of the legendary Lavinium. About the same time, Q. Fabius Pictor was writing his history. A recently discovered and fragmented inscription says only this about him: He enquired into the arrival of Hercules in Italy and (?) the alliance of Aeneas and Latinus ... Not (?) much later Romulus and Remus were born [5] . Thus contrary to his reputed view, Pictor (or Pictorinus as the inscription has it) carries Aeneas in the VIII century. The mention of Hercules is not queer. In The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, I review the legendary ties between the good- man figure Hercules and the god Ares-Mars, and place the sons of Hercules, the Heraclids, as the invaders of Greece in the VIII century, at Pylos, for example, where they fight against the Pylian kinsmen of the young Nestor, later famous as an old warrior of the Trojan War. Another case implicating Hercules-Mars and the Heraclids reminds us of the Roman case. It is introduced by Desborough in his book on the The Greek Dark Ages [6] . Temenos was one of the three Heraclid leaders who with the Dorians seized the Peloponnese, according to the conventional Greek chronology at the end of the twelfth century. He had a grandson called Rhegnidas, who gained control of the little town of Philius; this would be not much later than the middle of the eleventh century. This event, as we are told by Pausanias, resulted in the departure to Samos of the leader of the opposition party in Philius, Hyppasos; and Hyppasos was the great-grandfather of "the famous sage Pythagoras." Pythagoras should then have been living at the end of the tenth century, and so one might think, one has an admirable Dark Age situation : until, that is to say, one discovers that Pythagoras belonged to the middle of the sixth century, a difference of no fewer than three hundred and fifty years. The Heraclids are evidently of the eighth century. In the superior guidebook to the Bimillenario Virgiliano at the Campidoglio in Rome, 22 September to 31 December 1981, we find the major leads needed to connect Enea nel Lazio to the larger Mediterranean framework of time and events. Hundreds of archaeological discoveries are displayed and all of the sites excavated until now are described. The distinguished editors and authors do not speak of a "Dark Ages" in Latium or Italy. They act nevertheless as if they existed. Therefore we find that when all the artifacts can be grouped by centuries they concentrate into two groups , the first from the XI to XIII century B. C. and the second from the VIII century to the end of the Republic. The archaeological record of contacts between the Aegean world and Tyrrhenian Central Italy are few and difficult to interpret. Presently one treats with seven fragments of pottery and five fragment of bronze coming from the areas of Luni sul Mignon, San Giovenale, Monte Rovello, and Prediluco-Contigliano none of them coastal... It is almost impossible to assign them precise form and the decoration is too generic to permit all but the broadest dating [7] . Not only is there an absence of imported articles over the centuries between the supposed time of Aeneas and the time of the founding of Rome, but indigenous discoveries of the period are also rare (and, we argue, perforce non-existent). Hundreds of dates and artifacts mark the Bimillennial Exposition. Perhaps only a dozen are slipped into the period between the XI and VIII centuries. The earlier objects and dates are of Italian provenance; the later ones are heavily Greek. The earlier period carries Central Italy into late Bronze and the beginnings of the Iron Age. The cultural uniformity of southern Etruria and Latium is called total already at this XI century boundary. Iron tools of Aeneas are attested to. And then, following the "Dark Ages", there occurs an outburst of production and trade. The king and cities of Virgil become then historical realities only when figured in the early Bronze Age: it is on the other hand certain that their origins need be sought in that crucial period, the Late Bronze age [8] . The arrival of "Aegean" people in the XIII Century, writes one authority, Renato Peroni, should have inaugurated a process of elements deriving from various fields of human activity, beginning with the material culture. Yet of all this, in the archaeological sources related to the period of Latium that interests us, there is not the slightest trace. It is hard to imagine a cultural continuity, in ceramics for instance, greater than that which is presented during these centuries [9] . Peroni, after expressing grave doubt that one could have an invasion and occupation without cultural impact, though that is what archaeology seems to reveal, repeats that in the XIII to XI Centuries (and significantly for our argument he terms the XI "less developed") "the cultural uniformity of southern Etruria and old Latium appears to be total." What else can he say, so long as he believes the long chronology inherited from the Egyptologists: "The literary sources and archaeological evidence permit us to assign the destruction of Homeric Troy to the XII century. The Latium of the 'saga' of Aeneas is therefore of the period contained between the Middle Age of Bronze (XVI -XIV Century B. C.) and the first phase of Latin civilization (X Century)" [10] . He goes on to survey the town sites occupied in the late Bronze Age, and finds a continuity of occupation going into the age of iron, such as Ardea, Ficana, Pratica di Mare, and Acqua Acetosa Laurentina. This in itself is remarkable, considering the lapsed centuries and the absence of cultural remains of the long period of time. Also remarkable is the evidence that between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age the number of inhabited places of Erturia dropped by four fifths [11] ! At the same time, the underpopulated regions of Latium and Sabina held their own and increased slightly their settlements. "So rapid a process of depopulation (in some cases occurring violently, in others voluntarily abandoned) and the incorporation of the population in a few proto-urban centers will make way, in its turn, to the mechanisms of formation of a complex society, even of a 'stratal' type, at the beginnings of the Etruscan nation." Meanwhile, the Latins were beginning to accrete settlements. This scenario of Peroni suits exactly our theory of a period of natural catastrophes and survivors occurring in the VIII century. One age disappears into another without evidence of transition. As in Greece the culture reverts to survivorship; strife is rampant. The Trojans arrive amidst a general desolation and disorganization, gain a foothold without difficulty even welcomed in a way, and begin to expand and to found new towns, among them Rome. In Southern Italy and Sicily a similar set of events is occurring. The scholar's "Dark Ages" myth prevails. After the mid-XIII Century, writes L. B. Brea, "a real Dark Age set in only to be brought to an end five centuries later with the Greek colonization of Sicily and Southern Italy." Before it set in, there had been much trade with the Mycenean century and a flourishing civilization. However, we find that the city of Gela was established by a warrior from Troy in 690 B. C. We also note that at Agrigento and Segesta artwork in Mycenean style was practiced at both of the interfaces of the Dark Ages. Further, dome-shaped Mycenean tholos tombs were closely alike across the imagined 500-year gap. And that at Morgantina excavators founds a Greek fort constructed just above and on top of a destroyed Mycenean level. Virgil has Aeneas landing in Latium, at the mouth of the Numicus river (Sol Indiges, Troia and by today's name Fosso di Pratica). The hero, desperate to feed his men, chase an animal for distance of all 24 stadi (4440 meters) and comes upon a herd of pigs on a hill. He sacrifices them there and founds the town of Lavinium. The names and distances between the two given by Virgil are exact today [12] . Titus Livius remarks on the name, Troy, given to the place of landing. The Trojan altars were said to be still there at the end of the pagan era, by Pliny the Elder and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the historian. At Lavinium, named for Aeneas' wife, Dionysius visited in the I century B. C. There he witnessed relics supposedly of Aeneas held in a sanctuary and tomb dedicated to the Trojan hero [13] . The preservation of the relics and the identification of the tomb might well have been impossible if they have originated in the XII century; it is more plausible that they had lasted from the VII or at least until the time of Timaeus of Tauromenum about 300 B. C., who saw them. Recently, the "tomb of Aeneas" has been uncovered and placed in the VII century, with remodeling into shrine occurring in the IV century [14] . Dionysius describes a round temple at Lavinium that housed the idols of the Trojans, which seems to have been emulated in the round temple of Vesta and the Penati of the Roman Forum. The small Lavinium temple is replicated on a coin of the Emperor Antonius Pius. Aeneas probably rested in several places on his way to Latium, in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Crete, Carthage, and Sicily. Apollo's oracle at Delos told him to seek the lad of his ancestors and this was taken by his father, Anchises, to mean Crete. The refugees did go there, finding a desolate and abandoned settlement. They began to settle down but were beset (significantly) by a natural disaster that made further consultation with Apollo necessary. Luckily, a second trip to Delos was not required because voices authorized by Apollo urged them to find the true place of their origins, and they set sail for the West [15] . Anchises could not remember Italy, hence had not been born there, but recalled that certain ancestors had come from there, Dardanus and Iasius, and had been Olustrians or Italians. On the way to Italy, they stop at Carthage, which is, says Virgil, still under construction by Queen Dido, who has fled with her supporters from a berserk brother who ruled Phoenicia. Here we encounter a chronological problem; to be sure it is not a matter of centuries but of a generation. Dido is best placed at -804 or -803, before the dates which we accept for the Trojan War( s), which may have occurred over most of a century, at which time Aeneas would most likely have left Troy. Moreover, the dates assigned traditionally to Romulus, a grandson of Aeneas, are -772 (-771) to -717, and to the founding of Rome -747 or thereabout. Either Aeneas left upon an earlier sack of the city, or someone related to Aeneas and therefore confused with him visited Dido. The stop itself was not unexpected. There appears to be a non-Greek connection that binds in alliance the Trojans and their Thracian and Anatolian friends, the Carthaginians, and the Etruscans. Etruria, said Herodotus, was settled by Anatolian Lydians before the Trojan War [16] . But who might have visited Carthage and could be mistaken for Aeneas? Philistos and Appios clearly give 50 years before the Trojan War as the date when Carthage was founded. Timaeus gives -814 and Josephus independently gives -826. Yet Carthage's earliest archaeological remains afford specimens of Greeks material ascribed to the last quarter of the VIII century, presumably -725 to -700 [17] . Were the Phoenician and Trojan refugees in motion a century apart? Not according to Virgil, obviously, who describes a torrid love affair between Aeneas and Dido. And not according to the traditional dates for Romulus and the founding of Rome; if Aeneas abandoned Dido at the turn of the century, he could have grandfathered Romulus at the appropriate moment, about -772. Arie Dirkswager, in an unpublished manuscript lent the author, offers a solution. He suggest that the king of Tros who founded Troy then moved to Italy where he founded Etruria and gave the Etruscans his name, about -815. It was he who knew Dido! Then later, the refugee party led by Aeneas would join its kinsmen about 747 B. C., when Troy burned. However, although we also view the Etruscans and Trojans as related, we see a later date for the Trojan wars finally to end, and one has to place Romulus and the founding of Rome into the very end of the VII Century. We are perplexed now and have exhausted our meager supply of information. The most plausible suggestion I can afford is that the Trojan Wars were several until the city's final destruction (and we cannot confirm the site of Hissarlik - Schliemann's discovery - as more than a frontier post in the struggles). Given the practices of those times, an age of colonization and restless wanderings having begun, Aeneas, Prince of Troy, led his party of refugees out at an early stage of the wars (which Homer combined into one for literary effect and from amnesiac causes), did visit Dido at the turn of the century, and so history picks up with Romulus and the founding of Rome in the middle of the next century. We are introducing one doubt in order to relieve ourselves of several. And we should be grateful if some brilliant scholar carried down the whole scenario by another century to place it squarely in the catastrophic VIII and VII centuries. We have relieved ourselves of several notions: that Virgil was only glorifying Rome by mythmaking; that the "Dark Ages" existed Italy between -1200 and -700; that Aeneas and Troy were of the XII Century; that Aeneas and Romulus were fictional characters; that were was no significance to Mars and the Wolf of Rome; that he Etruscans were long settled in Italy and were a natural and continual foe of the new Latins; that the Romans were a simple farm folk who took well to fighting; and that in the VIII Century natural conditions were normal. We understand better why the exasperating gap between Aeneas and Romulus was created: the need to integrate chronology of diverse cultures by basing it upon what was believed to be the nearly perfect chronology, the Egyptian; the scholarly skepticism of all legend until recently, especially when wolves and feral infants are tied to the mythical package, not to mention the hallucinogenic pantheon; the seeming circular confirmation of Etruscan-Greek-Roman interrelations; the ignorance and neglect of great natural disasters, such as Aeneas encountered in Crete; alternative explanations of the Dark Ages such as long-drawn-out climatic changes, restless northern tribesman, and normal decay of civilizations; the injection of artifacts and personages falsely into the gap of time; and the vanity of Roman noble families who had attached themselves genetically to the fictitious personae of the noble line of Alba Longa extending back to Lavinium, including even the Caesars. We surmise, by way of contrast, that Aeneas was a Trojan noble, active around -800. He left a beleaguered Troy in an early stage of successive sieges, founded settlements in several places, eventually in Latium, near Etruscan relatives, and among a disastrously weakened native population. A prompt acculturation and cultural homogenizing began, catalyzed by the disorganizing effects of a turbulent nature. His daughter Elia mothered Romulus (and one fantasizes that his godmother was Roma who led the female party which burned the Trojan ships to prevent further wanderings). The heavens were producing some of the disasters, and the planet Mars was connected with them to the point that the god could be the godfather to Romulus who eventually joined him in a cyclonic episode. The wolf of Rome was the symbol of Mars. The experience of Italy was being replicated throughout the world in those times; many peoples were practically destroyed; many new towns were founded. The Mycenean civilization was wrecked, so too the Cretan, so too many another including the Siculian of Italy and Sicily. The Bronze Age lurches abruptly into the Iron age. {S : Notes (Chapter 3: The Founding of Rome)} Notes (Chapter 3: The Founding of Rome) 1. An extension of remarks at a conference of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies at Lake Kashagawigamog, Ontario, August, 1983. 2. "Dating the Aegean Bronze Age without Radiocarbon," 20 Archaeometry (1978) 212. 3. W. F. Edgerton and J. A. Wilson, Historical Records of Ramses III (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1936), 53; While J. H. Breasted (Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), IV, 37- 8) translates "They came with fire prepared before them, forward to Egypt." 4. In Enea nel Lazio: Archaeologia e Mito (Milano: Fratelli Palombi; 1981), 5. 5. R. M. Ogilvie, Early Rome and the Etruscans, New York: Humanities Press, 1976, 16. 6. London: Benn, 1972; Malcolm Lowery provides this instance in I Soc. Interdiscip. Stud. 1 (Jan. 1976) 16. I cite another in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, "Crazed Heroes of Dark Ages." 7. Enea nel Lazio, 107. 8. Alessandro Guidi, in Enea Nel Lazio, 94. 9. Enea nel Lazio. 87. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. Ibid., 92. 12. Ibid., 157. 13. Ibid., 158. 14. P. Somella, Rediconti 44: Atti di Pontificio accademia di Archeologia (1971-2), 47- 74; Enea nel Lazio, 157-8, 172-7. 15. Aeneid, III, 94-6 (Humphries trans.) pp. 64, 66. 16. Histories I, 94, (80-1 in the Penguin ed., 1954). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 4: } {T MICAH'S ARK} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER FOUR MICAH'S ARK Velikovsky persuasively traces the ruins of Baalbek to the ancient seat of a fine city constructed during the reign of Solomon [1] . Baalbek, too, was the second capital of Dan. "The Danites, migrating to the north, took with them Micah and his idol, and it was placed in Dan of the North." (3.14) The Oracle of Micah probably was set up in the "house of high places," a temple that was built at Dan by Jeroboam "to contest and to surpass the temple of Jerusalem." (3.15) The oracle remained in high esteem at least as late as the fourth century of the present era, when Macrobius in his Saturnalia wrote of Baalbek: "This temple is also famous for its oracles." (3.14) The Emperor Trajan questioned the oracle in the year 115. Velikovsky's notes, compiled by Jan Sammer, show two more indications of what the oracle might have been. Of Baalbek-Dunip-Seti's Kadesh, "the place is known as Yenoam (' Yahweh speaks') which refers to the oracle." Then , "Yenoam-Dan (Yehu probably introduced the cult of Yahweh at Dan). Yenoam, read in Hebrew, could be interpreted as "Ye [Yahweh] speaks..." Writes Sammer: "Velikovsky evidently saw in the name a reference to the oracle of Dan." I agree, and Yehu might be interpreted as a form of Yahweh. But Velikovsky did not proceed to identify the oracle further, although this would have strengthened his case all around. In my book on God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus there occur the following lines: We hear that on one occasion the Ark was duplicated by a young man named Micah in his home, a surprising occurrence, reminiscent of claims that the nuclear bomb can be home- made. The lad's mother was quite proud of him; she had consecrated her silver for the purpose (Ju. 17: 3) He made a graven image, a molten image, an ephod, a terraphim, and hired a priest. Nothing untoward occurred save that men from the tribe of Dan descended upon the household and carried away the ark and its Levite attendant. Later we learn that the true Ark was kept at Shiloh, whence it was occasionally employed. I owe the realization that Micah's image was an ark to J. Ziegler (YHWH, 34-35). He points out that mere images of material are common in ancient Jewish household; that the word which is translated "image" as in "any standing image" comes from the word "neck," hence refers to any arrangement or instrument capable of discharging an ark, that Micah needed both insulating carved wood and metallic sides, that is, both "a graven image and a molten image" to fabricate his ark. Ziegler perceives that the first and second commandments go together, expressing the absolute preference for Yahweh followed by the prohibition of graven images, by which is meant any competitive presentation of the divine who was displayed on the true Ark. The Danites, after stealing the image (ark), erected it in the capital of the country that they had savaged. "And they kept the carved image of Micah ..., all the day that the house of the God continued in Shiloh," an obvious reference to the prototype "true" Ark of the Covenant that rested at Shiloh for a long time.( Ju. 18: 13) Hence a functioning Ark, an electrical apparatus that has been described elsewhere (Ziegler, op. cit. A de Grazia, "Moses and his Electric Ark," Midstream, Nov. 1981), found a home in Baalbek, where appropriately, it was mounted upon a hill site. There, in the years of declining terrestrial discharges, it might still on occasion approach the norm of activity that its prototype (then in the temple of Solomon at Jerusalem) displayed during the Exodus under the direction of Moses. In Velikovsky's article, the "thing" is an "oracle," an "image," and an "idol," vague terms applied to the Ark in conventional Biblical exegesis. Too, they are terms that the editors hostile to the Northern Kingdom would use to avoid suggesting that something approaching in shape, intent, and functions the most sacred Ark would be operative there, or anywhere else. The oracle of Micah was also called "a voice ... from Dan" by Jeremiah, and "voice" was a term used literally and liberally in regard to the presence of Yahweh on the Ark. The "oracle of Micah," or Micah's Ark, lends authenticity and credibility to Velikovsky's reconstructions of the history of Baalbek. Some fifteen years ago, during a rambling conversation that took in the crises over Lebanon, Velikovsky fixed me with a confiding gaze and said: "Baalbek was part of Israel. I have never published it because it might cause trouble." He felt that such proof would be made the basis for a claim to Lebanon by Jewish extremists. He was complex; here he was a man of peace; but usually his scale of demands paralleled or even advanced beyond those of incumbent rulers of Israel. The complexity of his character is involved in the oracle of Baalbek, too. We note his statement about Jeroboam, who built the "house of high places" at Baalbek-Dan and had built the Jerusalem walls under Solomon; "before becoming king of the northern kingdom he lived as an exile in Egypt. He introduced the cult of the calf in Dan." Velikovsky despised any Jewish minion of a foreign power. Nor did he like the "Golden Calf." He acknowledged its enduring presence in Hebrew religious history, opposing it to the "superior" abstractions of Moses Yahwism. Velikovsky did not see the Ark as a functioning electrical machine, and merely grunted in response when, a year before his death, I mentioned to him that an electric Ark was a feature of my manuscript of Moses. Two years earlier, I had raised the subject of Ziegler's book YHWH and it was obvious that, although he had received it, he would not read in it. Probably he saw, in the image of the calf, which was the only ritual image turned up by the Baalbek excavations, a synopsis of Baalbek Dan's dedication to the apostasy of Jeroboam and the Ten Tribes, a taboo-guarded subject in Jewish tradition. In sum, Velikovsky probably regarded the Ark of the Covenant as a mere holy litter, in the modern scholarly conception of bedouin ritual apparatus, and may have assumed, with embarrassed haste, that the oracle of Micah related to the worship of the calf and embodied its image, whereas most likely the oracle was the Ark of Micah and preceded Jeroboam's assumption of power in Baalbek; it was infuriating to the southerners, who later on supplied the editors of the Bible. {S : Notes (Chapter 4: Micah's Ark)} Notes (Chapter 4: Micah's Ark) 1. III Kronos( 1981-2) nos. 2, 3. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 5: } {T THE CATASTROPHIC FINALE OF THE MIDDLE BRONZE AGE} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER FIVE THE CATASTROPHIC FINALE OF THE MIDDLE BRONZE AGE* (* A paper presented at the IX Congress of the International Union of Prehistorical and Protohistorical Sciences, Nice, 1976.) Catastrophes are defined as large-scale intensive natural disasters. All the world's religions are founded upon original catastrophes. Indeed, so obsessive is the connection between catastrophes and gods, that human cultures, even the most scientifically advanced ones, refused to turn over the study of catastrophes to science. As a result, science and scientific history made their way after 1840 in defiance of the very idea of catastrophes, that is, of a quantavolutionary as contrasted with an evolutionary primevalogy. Quantavolution promises, as I would like to illustrate here, an ability to penetrate some pre-historic and historic problems that have caused confusion in uniformitarian, gradualist, evolutionary theory. We are dealing here with a large area of the Earth, and with 2500 years of time. We should guard against defining catastrophe by some measure that turns out to be a mere uniformitarian statistic. The incidence of catastrophe between 3500 B. C. and 1000 B. C. must be much greater than the incidence of the past 2500 years, an equal length of time, to support my thesis. That is, we should add up all the Vesuvius and Krakatoa eruptions, the Caribbean hurricanes and Kansas cyclones, the Siberian meteoroid falls, Swiss avalanches, sinkings and risings of town harbors, Yangtse and Mississippi River floods, frozen Baltic winters, prolonged Saharan droughts, etc. Then convert the intensity and rate of these events into 2500 year averages. Then, further, if these recent indicators appear to compare 1 to 1, or even 1 to 2, with the Bronze Age indicators of the expression of high natural energy, perhaps the thesis should be abandoned... And many scholars would be pleased to confirm that the human record has been uniform, gradual, and linear, instead of catastrophic and cyclical. Furthermore, they would feel that the technological progression "from stone to bronze to iron ages" had some essential meaning, or that a sociological progression "from hominid, to hunter-gatherer, to pastoral, to agricultural, to industrial" also has meaning. They would further be reassured that the great gods that succeeded each other on the altars of ancient cultures were only the typical occasional results of the human pastime of inventing new gods whenever normal life routines were disturbed by the tides of fortune or war. But suppose the incidence of catastrophe is 1 to 3, or 1 to 5, or 1 to 100, comparing the modern age with the Bronze Ages! Then the catastrophic or quantavolutionary thesis will be nailed upon the door leading to ancient history. If it becomes reasonably apparent that the Bronze Ages exhibited high energy expressions and effects in multiples of 2, 3, 5 or a hundred times the expressions and effects of high energy in recent years, then all fields of ancient history and ecology must undergo change. Many cultures would have been caused to disappear in natural disasters. Human nature may have acquired the character of desperation. Personal behavior and institutional practices may have become suffused with the effects and expectations of intense traumas. In short, the world of natural and social history becomes a different world and had better be studied differently. Let us look briefly, then, into the middle of the second millennium B. C., that is, some 3500 years ago. (Because there is some confusion of chronology and much controversy about it, I shall mention dates between 1700 and 1400 B. C. and venture an opinion later respecting their simultaneity and succession.) Did the events so dated happen at the same time or not? I shall commence by paying homage to Claude Schaeffer. For it was he who, despite onerous preoccupations during the French War of Liberation, assembled and analyzed the mass of data which was finally published in 1948 under the title of Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie de L'Asie Occidentale, IIIe-IIe millénaires. In this great work, he compared some 40 important archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East for evidences of sudden destruction. And he found, without fail, that there had appeared several levels over a period of thousand years when destruction seemed simultaneously to descend upon Bronze Age cultures. His general conclusions were several: 1. Certain outstanding events... struck simultaneously a definite number or even the totality of urban centers of Western Asia... Not only is this conclusion persuasive as originally inscribed, but many locations can now be added to the doomsday list. 2. The catastrophes struck six times: roughly, about 2350, 2100, 1700, 1450, 1365, and 1235 B. C. 3. "The various countries of Western Asia affected by the perturbations reacted according to their own resources. Now these varied considerably, sometimes from one region to another, as a function of the climatic and geographic situation. Thus the chronology of the layers deposited during the periods of real stability between the great crises may present a deviation from one site to another. That is, nevertheless, never considerable and hardly ever exceeds fifty years." Even this discrepancy may be due to errors in dating the material uncovered. 4. The perturbations of cultures were caused by natural catastrophes, often giant earthquakes and fires, rather than by the hand of man. Cultural ruptures only rarely were caused by human elites, but "by atmospheric cataclysms or other calamities, such as earthquakes ... We perceive as yet only imperfectly the initial and actual causes of certain of these great crises. We put ourselves here expressly en garde against a generalization of the seismological explanation." 5. Long-enduring hiatuses or lapses followed the destruction, as after 1700 B. C.: "In all the sites examined up to now in Western Asia, a hiatus or period of extreme poverty causes a rupture of the stratigraphic or chronological sequence of the layers around 1700 B. C., and revival began only around 1550 B. C., 150 years later." John J. Bimson, reviewing "the Conquest of Canaan" in the time of Joshua, finds in the records of excavation half a dozen destroyed settlements beyond those reported by Schaeffer in Palestine alone - Arad, Hormah, Gideon, Hebron, Hazor, et al. All went down in violent conflagrations. It is noteworthy that Bimson, on the say-so of Epstein, excludes Megiddo, holding that there was no break between Middle Bronze and Late Bronze ages. In this case, Schaeffer is in contradiction: "The stratigraphic picture of Megiddo shows an interruption of occupation between 1650 and 1550 B. C. The excavators report a variety of remains from the Recent Bronze Age, subsequent to 1550, and of remains from the Middle Bronze Age, antecedent to 1650, in the zone of contact of the two layers." There do not seem exceptions to this world-wide disaster which so many scholars have perceived in their own digging but are blind to overall. 6. Cultures were transformed in the times that followed the disasters. Many movements of peoples occurred. Economies changed. Some sites were abandoned entirely. Also working during World war II, carrying on in New York as a journalist and psychoanalyst far from his home in Palestine, was Immanuel Velikovsky. In 1950, after rejection by eight publishers, his Worlds in Collision appeared, followed shortly thereafter by Ages in Chaos (1952). Like Schaeffer, Velikovsky reported the universal destruction of settlements in the Exodus period, which he assigned to around 1450 B. C. So all that Schaeffer says happened about 1700, Velikovsky says happened about 1450. We resolve the dating discrepancy in favor of Velikovsky. The two scholars are discussing the same set of events that brought the Middle Bronze Age to an abrupt and terrible end. Both inculpate natural catastrophe as the general cause, and relegate the usual causes of change in recent times (leadership, weather, inventions, wars) to a minor causal role. Unlike Schaeffer, Velikovsky introduced a first cause, a comet that he identified as the erratic proto-planet Venus, which has a hundred names around the world. This comet, said he, first closely encountered the Earth in the mid-second millennium. Granted this single ultimate cause, Velikovsky could support strongly the theory of the simultaneity of the catastrophes, which Schaeffer espoused. Velikovsky further asserted that the set of disasters repeated itself, in reduced degree, at intervals of about 52 years, as the comet dropped its tail and assumed a more circular orbit. When it did approach, extreme religious celebrations were inaugurated in places as far apart as Palestine and Central America, celebrations that continued until recent times and were invariably connected with planet Venus. The disasters on Earth diminished, then, until the 8th century B. C., when a new deviant celestial force began to play upon the Earth and a new and heavy set of disasters began. Also unlike Schaeffer, Velikovsky wove voluminous legendary, mythical and geological material into the fabric of proof offered by archaeology. Spiridon Marinatos and the island of Thera (Aegean Sea) is another part of the mid- second millennium story. As early as 1939 Marinatos began to publish theories of the destruction wrought by the explosion of the volcano of Thira upon Minoan civilization. Minoan culture, centered in Crete, promptly and abruptly declined. Not only Thera itself but many places of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were badly hurt by the extensive fall-out, hurricanes, and tsunamis from the explosion of Thera sometime after 1750 B. C. Isaacson, however, whom I follow, ascribes the Thera disaster to the Tenth Century, B. C., perhaps in the years of King David. A part of the debate over the dating of this event has been occasioned by the expectation of some scholars that this one explosion could carry the full responsibility for all the human and ecological changes occurring over a large area in the mid-second millennium. My opinion is that, both at the same time as the Thera disaster and before and after it, a multitude of other natural forces were unleashed, adequate to explain the total hiatus found over a great region and for a long time. Velikovsky was not the first to point to a comet as the instrument of destruction. I would only pause to mention others here -- William Whiston (Isaac Newton's disciple) in the 17th century; the brilliant young Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger in the 18th century; the American politician, utopian, and scholar, Ignatius Donnelly in the 19th century. Although they may not have been preoccupied with the Bronze Ages as such, there is no doubt of the proximity to the Bronze Ages of the events which they describe. More modern (in the 1920's) is the case of F. X. Kugler. Kugler was a Babylonian scholar and astronomer of the top rank. His last book, on the Sybilline star battles and the Phaeton myth, is a tour de force. In it, as Malcolm Lowery has shown, are the conflicting moods of one who dogmatically accepts primordial catastrophes of creation and the Noachian flood, but who is stubbornly uniformitarian otherwise. Kugler, studying the hysterical lines in the poetry of the Sybilline oracle concerning the battles among the stars (which describes a shifting struggle among the animals of the Zodiac), concludes that this must be considered a metaphor. However, he crosses the bridge to scientific catastrophism in his analysis of the myth of Phaeton. This, he argued, embodies a factual event of the mid-second millennium when "one and the same stream of meteors passed over Africa (in particular, Ethiopia) and the Aegean, producing respectively great fires and violent flood waves." Kugler, it seems, strives to limit the Phaetonic catastrophe as severely as he can, while allowing the grave reality. A number of Soviet, American, and Bulgarian students are delving into the area of the Black Sea, with the mid-second millennium as one possible breaking point. Oceanographers of Woods Hole, for example, date to something over 3000 years ago a heavy precipitation of organic material in the cores that they have drawn from the bottom of the Black Sea. In my opinion, this is a layer of sudden death. Regarding the region to the South, Robert Adams (who holds a triple interdisciplinary position at the University of Chicago) is urging a shift of archaeological and anthropological perspective from the individual site to a pattern of sites. No longer is the paradigm to be the single urban center, he says, but rather zones of cultural interaction that "will require work in many countries and over many decades." He finds, for example, "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during Kassite times." That is, perhaps in the mid-second millennium, there occurred a "dark age," "a population nadir." He finds hundreds of unknown sites to plot. Regions of culture disappear, reappear, switch places. In their Central Asian work, apart from the Black Sea simultaneities already mentioned, Soviet researchers have noted widespread destruction. In a popular but authoritative book, the linguist Alexander Kondratov writes, "In the middle of the second millennium B. C. the ancient cities in Southern Turkomenia declined and were abandoned by the inhabitants. The South Turkomenian civilization perished at about the same time as the proto-Indian, and the reasons are still unknown." The case of the proto-Indians of Mohenjaro, Harrappa, and a vast area besides is well- known, if not well understood. There is one theory that they lived so well off the fat of the land that their economy declined and they were extinguished. (This strange theory reminds me of the long-accepted idea that the magnificently equipped Magdalenian hunters of France, after flourishing beneath mountains of ice, gave up everything when the ice melted, because their reindeer prey left the area.) Yet another theory about proto-India is quasi-catastrophic, Robert Raikes holding that natural dams formed and then broke, swamping the Indus cultural centers. The formation and collapse of natural dams can truly create great destruction; in the State of Washington Scablands case, the scenario has also been well worked out by geologists. However the timing of this special proto-Indian dynamic of catastrophe is significant. Why not later? Why not today? Why were these floods coincidental with a world that was in the throes of general destruction? Further, the proto-Indian related cultures were widely diffused and most of them would not have been affected by the special flood dynamic referred to. It is most unlikely that such a great civilization of vast extent, with its city-planning, excellent cuisine, fine arts, and decimal numeration would succumb to swamping by mud, or for that matter to desperate invaders, themselves probably survivors of some northern sectors of the universal disasters. Further, Raikes has mentioned recent disasters of meandering rivers (but no culture has been destroyed). I suppose then that the conviction that catastrophe struck the proto-Indian cultures before the Aryan incursions occurred is correct. Perhaps this was a time of great flood in Northcentral Africa or both flood and sudden desiccation. Who tipped or cut into the basin of the historically known Lake of Triton, said by Aristotle to be separated by a narrow belt from the Sea? The Lake may have been so large as to permit the luxuriant development of the Saharan region and its culture. Great rivers, including the Niger, flowed into it then. If Triton did burst into the Mediterranean, a Tyrrhenian flood catastrophe that destroyed western civilization may become a viable hypothesis. The playful girlhood of goddess Pallas Athena (the Greek planet Venus) on the shores of Triton is suspicious. It was said that she accidentally killed her playmate Pallas and took the name herself in remorse. This same Pallas, however, is in another story a monster whom the notorious virgin goddess dispatched when he attempted to rape her. Even more, this Pallas is elsewhere identified with Typhon, the dragon and would-be destroyer of the world whom Zeus finally struck down in the middle of the second millennium. Pallas Athena was present in this episode, too, in the form of the protoplanet Venus, now tailless or without a phallus, by the loss of Typhon. In Italy and Sicily at this time, abrupt cultural transitions are commonly reported, although none has conducted a survey of destruction levels. At Lipari, for instance, a totally new culture (the Ausonian) entered upon the scene. At Prato, in Tuscany, the Villanovan ruins, themselves separated from the Etrusco-Campanian period by "a colossal fire," to use Nicola Rilli's words, are based upon yet another enormous bed of ashes. I suspect that this bed may be tied to the mid-second millennium, but the question requires much more study. Surveys are needed for the Western Mediterranean area and Northern and Central Europe generally. An abundance of legends of catastrophes is offered, and the shadow of catastrophe hangs heavily over prehistory. Vast forests may have swept into or been drowned by a Baltic Sea formed at this time. Offering themselves for mid-second millennium construction and abandonment are hundreds of megalithic monuments throughout the vast area. The astronomical interest of these peoples is now proven. But, even if one is not a psychologist, one cannot think it is normal for people to cut and lug 100- ton stones to do a job that a few sticks of wood would accomplish -- watching the Sun and Moon. I think that around this time, in despair and disgust, the survivor custodians of Stonehenge may have given up their job. Suggesting a need for oceanographic archaeology are the legendary sinkings of lands mentioned in Eastern contemporaneous records, and in later classical and medieval sources. Where located and explored, as with Pharos at the head of the Nile, "the greatest seaport of the Bronze Age," according to R. Graves, the question of the date of the submarine tectonism that sank the city remains. Off Cornwall, England, even a log has been recovered from the depths. Rilli, to take another example, believes that the Etruscans were related, if not descended from, the culture of a sunken central region of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In 1971, B. C., Heezen and others reported in Nature magazine upon the evidence of continental crust that lies foundered beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea. Of course, the dates are impossibly divergent. Across the Atlantic, we need not believe that the mid-second millennium was peaceful. The Olmecs, as William Mullen of Princeton University reported, relying on Michael Coe, appear to have been deep in trouble, floundering in ashes, tar, and destruction. Apart from the still flimsy archaeological evidence, there exists a mythology, well introduced in the analyses of Velikovsky and Mullen, that appears to treat of this disaster. In the southern part of the Valley of Teotihuacan, 28 occupation levels of an abri stretch from 1500 AD back to 10,000 B. C. The only great interruption, according to Richard McNeish, happened between about 2300 B. C. and 900 B. C. This is a wide gap, but obviously no one there seemed to be in a culturally creative mood in the mid-second-millennium. Both Schaeffer and Velikovsky attempted an appraisal of the Chinese condition. Both allude to mid-second millennium floods and earth movements which marked the practical destruction of one Chinese civilization and the beginnings of a new system of society. In my opinion those sinologists who take the evolutionary position that this break marked the transition from a legendary society to a historical society are wrong. The break separates two highly distinctive societies and ages; the Chinese "Bronze Age" bursts out with the Shang dynasty after 1500 B. C. Apparently, the atmosphere was not a silent witness to the global events of this period. There appear to have occurred remarkable deviant ingestions of Carbon-14 by organisms of this time, as disclosed in statistical studies by P. E. Damon, A. Long and E. I. Wallick, and analyzed by G. W. van Oosterhout. If you had died in this period, the likelihood that your anniversary would be correctly celebrated by Carbon-14 today, supposing your bones were nicely preserved, is very low. The likelihood is high that any two readings of Carbon-14 for organic death happening around then will very greatly. This indicates, at the least, fluctuations of atmospheric nitrogen, or cosmic or solar particles, or carbon dioxide (or all of them) beyond uniformitarian norms. All such fluctuations, one may be warned, are themselves possible reflections or opposite deviations. That is, we cannot say that the several forces causing atmospheric deviations or aberrations were tending in the direction solely of the increased deviation. A cloud of CO will act to age a living thing for future tests and a cloud of cosmic particles will act to young it for future tests. The same organism in its lifetime can become not only much "younger" but also much "older," depending upon the inconstancies of its Carbon-14 intake; it can thus falsely line up uniformly with the Carbon-14 "constant" owing to contradictory inconstancies. We may conclude, I think, that the mid-second-millennium was a period of serious atmospheric perturbations. The chemical measuring device seems to agree with the mass of legends about the catastrophic events of the mid-second millennium and may even underestimate their atmospheric effects. Perhaps now I have inventoried enough evidence of devastation throughout the traditional region of the Bronze Ages and indeed over most of the world. The Middle Bronze finale composed a period of catastrophes certainly over twenty times as heavy as the past 300- year record shows, perhaps hundred times greater, perhaps much more. Even in the works cited, not to mention a hundred lesser compendia, more evidence might be adduced. I am inclined to convert the hypothesis into a challenge. No stratigraphic column, whether geologic or archaeological, can fail to show evidence of natural destruction dating from the middle of the second millennium. {S : BROADER CONSIDERATIONS} BROADER CONSIDERATIONS I shall rest the case for the mid-second-millennium catastrophes and move on to address additional issues. First, I would stress one implications of the works cited. Earthquakes were only a part of the devastations wrought by natural forces. Schaeffer sensed this. The Middle Bronze Age civilizations and their counterparts throughout the world were too highly developed, organizationally and technologically, to have been overthrown by earthquakes alone, even if one could identify tectonic forces of the deep Earth that would strike to the tops of the Richter and Mercalli scales. The long hiatuses of cultures and the depopulation reported upon all sides suggest intense heat (causing death, plagues or vermin and disease), hurricane winds and tsunamis that can exterminate the biosphere, and an atmosphere often poisoned by volcanic and extraterrestrial particles and gases. Second, if the identified destruction is plausible, probably an equal or greater amount of unidentified destruction occurred. Hurricanes of 250 miles an hour strip a land and all man-made works down to bedrock. Great tsunamis, such as are caused by huge earthquakes and meteoritic passthroughs of the atmosphere, do the same. Lava flows can cause the sudden deep burial of the surface. So can heavy tephra showers, not to mention the heavy burning rains of naphta that are carried in various legends. If land can rise by kilometers, as is known, so can it sink, carrying forever from view what its surface contains. Third, the clustering of disaster between the claimed dates of 1750 and 1450 points to a centralization of the cluster in time. This we shall know when the various claimed dates are brought into closer order. One thing is sure: the dates can only move towards simultaneity not away from it. Such general simultaneous havoc strengthens the argument for celestial encounters as the first cause. Therefore, when one such as Velikovsky steps forward with the most persuasive kinds of legendary testimony, this testimony must be cast in the balance. If catastrophe on a grand scale occurs, and if all the voices of the age name the sky as its source, and if much of their behavior is organized around attempts to obey, placate, and predict the sky-beings, it becomes reasonable to incorporate astral events in attempting to explain the events of the age. In a flashing epigram, Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "to the sage as astronomer: as long as you still experience the stars as something 'above you, ' you lack the eye of knowledge." When archaeologists strike a destruction level hovering around the middle of the second millennium, they are probably looking at a global event, a cultural fracture, a movement of peoples, religious revival and suppression, revolutionary regimes, despair, spectra terribilem (on earth and the sky), pandemonium, economic wretchedness, heavy atmospheric pollution, death on all sides. To sum up, by my reckoning, the Bronze Age of the mid-second millennium experienced natural catastrophes on a scale inconceivable today. Hundreds of cultures were destroyed and their survivors were few in numbers. The broad scale and intensity of the disasters, when aligned with much direct testimony, send us looking into the skies and then to the chain of earth-air-fire-water events that follow. {S : A SCHEDULE OF CATASTROPHIC AGES} A SCHEDULE OF CATASTROPHIC AGES What happened at the end of the Middle Bronze Age happened earlier and later. It is likely, for example, that the first dynasties of Egypt began on the relaxing slopes of a disastrous period, which brought new human cultures out of the West and South into the surviving neolithic milieu of the Nile Valley. The suggestions of catastrophe at the end of the Old Kingdom are likewise numerous. These extended straight through the Old Bronze Age, Neolithic and end on the Paleolithic, into the Ice Ages and therefore throughout the Holocene which may one day be defined, at about 14,000 years in length, as the Period of Catastrophes. On the more recent side, the catastrophes extend through the Recent Bronze Age and into the Iron Age of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries B. C. Are we not therefore compelled to take up a new classification of the ages? I should say 'yes. ' The present divisions should be reordered and renamed. Putting aside the absurd local categories in the hundreds, the division by metals is poor on five counts: it is parochial; misleading; presumptuous; non-anthropological; and undynamic. Actually various ancient classifications offered by writers such as Hesiod and Ovid are at least as useful. They furthermore introduce cycles of creation and destruction with each age, and sometimes a long linear or spiral development running through the cycles (that is, progress). Nor do I see any superiority in the optimistic, linear, evolutionary schemes of Fraser, Morgan, Engels, Spencer, and the others who perceived a rational technological sequence moving from hominid to contemporary mankind. In dividing historical time, cultural change is the most logical concept to use. Where do the points of maximum cultural change occur? It appears that these points coincide with natural catastrophes. Lesser points of change can be connected with minor or localized catastrophes. Only afterwards come the uniformitarian periods, even with their brilliant episodes of Akhnaton's Thebes, of Periclean Athens, of Augustian Rome, of Medici Florence, Elizabethan England, or the France of the Enlightenment. Since ages must be arranged, let them be arranged by peaks of change that correlate then with peaks of catastrophism. Since ages will be given names, let them perhaps be named after the sequence of great gods, those anthropomorphized expressions of disaster. For when the human race was cast down, it was from the natural forces; and the forces of nature originated from the skies; and these forces were called gods and as such invaded the mind and history. But to the scientific community, sensitive to its public image, an Age of Mars or an Age of Venus may be embarrassing. Whereupon we may resort to Roman numerals and speak of Holocene I, Holocene II, and so forth. Whatever the nomenclature, a revised conception of ancient times is in prospect. Nevertheless I would suggest that we use the theological approach to fix our sights and ask "What gods ruled when?" If a certain god ruled during a certain time, and the same god flourished at the same time in different areas, then the same age could be distinguished in its natural and human condition by the nature of its god. From the blessed gods, all good things flow, just like Homer sang, so all the sciences would achieve inspiration and rejuvenation from a theological division of the ages. If a revival of interest in catastrophe occurs, the sciences of pala-psychology, pala- politics, pala-theology, archaeoastronomy, geology, and history need to reexamine many of their findings an theories. The methodologies employed in ancient studies require both intermeshing and invention. An ideal archaeologist needs to know something of psychology and geo-physics, anthropology and astronomy, the history and science of human management. (I could make the ideal even more impossible, but why go on save to underline the need for interdisciplinary cooperation.) Claude Schaeffer, a generation ago already, was writing: "We have often had to deplore the absence, in the reports of excavations, of all information relative to these layers considered unprofitable by the searchers." (That is, the layers of destruction.) David and Ruth Whitehouse have recently published an Archaeological Atlas of some 500 sites around the world. There are, of course, a great many more. These sites are mostly reported with the same lack of attention to such details as Schaeffer refers to. Were these reports to be scrutinized as he examined the Middle East reports, we would be already envisioning some five hundred man-years and woman-years of reading and analysis. It would be well worth the effort. A masterpiece of catastrophic analysis could possibly emerge, for example, from a review of the rich paleolithic-neolithic materials of the caves and sites of Aquitaine. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that future archaeological technique will make such laborious information-retrieval unnecessary. This would surely occur if the revolutionary dimension were carefully provided for in the designs and operations of archaeology and human geology. The question all can ask together is: "What happened so as to destroy and reconstruct past worlds?" The question is the foundation to quantavolutionary primevalogy, as opposed to evolutionary primevalogy. It seeks its evidence and benchmarks in the genesis and destruction of cultures. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 6: } {T UPDATING SCHAEFFER'S DESTRUCTION INVENTORY} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER SIX UPDATING SCHAEFFER'S DESTRUCTION INVENTORY* [* A summary of Professor Shaeffer's findings and notes of a research proposal to extend his work. A memorial to Professor Schaeffer (1898-1982) by Geoffrey Gammon occurs in V The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review 3 (1980-1), 70. The sites studied by Schaeffer and a map of them is contained in his work of 1948, Stratigraphie Comparée and this author's Chaos and Creation (1981).] In concluding his massive inventory and analysis of strata of destruction in Bronze Age settlements, Professor Claude Schaeffer of the University of Paris wrote as follows: The great perturbations which left their traces in the stratigraphy of the principal sites of the Bronze Age of Western Asia are six in number. The oldest among them shook, between 2400 and 2300, all of the land extending from the Caucasus in the North down to the Valley of the Nile, where it became one of the causes, if not the principal cause, of the fall of the Egyptian Old Kingdom after the death of Pepi II. In two important sites in Asia Minor, at Troy and Alaca Huyuk, the excavators reported damage due to earthquakes. Under the collapsed walls of the buildings contemporaneous with the catastrophe, the skeletons of the inhabitants surprised by the earthquake were retrieved. However, in the actual state of our knowledge, it is not possible to say to what extent the earthquakes are the direct cause of the disasters which, at a date situated between 2400 and 2300, fell upon so many of the countries of Western Asia. We are better informed in that which concerns the second of the great perturbations which in the order of time shook all of the Bronze Age civilization in Western Asia. In Anatolia, these brutal and sudden events struck fatally the brilliant centers of Troy III, of Alaca Huyuk famous for the riches of its royal tombs, and Alishar I B and of Tarse. As to the nature of this third great perturbation, registered in all of the countries of Western Asia at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and whose effects, in certain regions, were prolonged into the midst of the Recent Bronze period, we are reduced, in the actual state of our knowledge, to hypotheses. In most countries occupancy suffered a notable reduction, in others sedentary occupancy was replaced by nomadic. In Palestine and the island of Cyprus the situation appears to have been complicated by epidemics; collective tombs without durable offerings and apparently established with a certain haste were brought to light in the necropolises of the end of the Middle Bronze Age and the beginning of the Recent Bronze Age. Calamities of the same nature appear to have caused the eclipse of the Hittite empire from 1600 on in round figures. Persia and Mesopotamia in their turn then went through a severe crisis; likewise in the North, the countries of the Caucasus; our study has shown that here too there is no continuity between the civilizations of the Middle Bronze Age and of the Recent Bronze Age. This brilliant period of the Middle Bronze Age, during which flourished the art of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and the refined industrial art of the Middle Minoan, and in the course of which the great commercial centers such as Ugarit in Syria enjoyed a remarkable prosperity, was ended between 1750 and 1650 by a new catastrophe, equal in severity and in scope to the two preceding perturbations. However, around 1450, a new perturbation, the fourth since the middle of the third millenium, struck Western Asia, particularly the Mediterranean regions. Evidently less severe than the preceding ones, it was accompanied by revolts in Syria and in Palestine, resisted by Thutmose III and subdued by Amenhotep II. A century later, around 1365, mean date, in the time of the reign of Amenhotep IV or Akhnaton, an earthquake of great violence ravaged several cities on the Syrio-palestinian coast as well as in the interior of the countries. In Asia Minor also the urban centers (Tarse and Boghazkeui and Troy) suffered damage in the same period. This fifth perturbation is very distinctly marked in the stratigraphic sections of most of the sites explored in these countries. From about 1250 or 1225, the sixth and last great catastrophe fell upon the civilizations of the Bronze Age in Western Asia. Vast ethnic movements are launched again of which one, probably the most important, proceeds across the Syrio-Palestinian corridor and along the coast toward Egypt. Professor Schaeffer then searches for causes and assigns the greatest weight to natural disaster, and not necessarily purely seismic disturbances. Our inquiry has demonstrated that these successive crises which opened and closed the principle period of the third and second millenia were not provoked by the action of man. On the contrary, compared to the amplitude of these general crises and to their profound effects, the exploits of conquerors and the machinations of statesman at that time appear modest indeed. In the 1970's the present author was introduced to Professor Schaeffer by Mr. René Roussel, then an inspector of air navigation system for the French government and an exchange of letters and meeting followed. Dr. Schaeffer expressed a willingness to collaborate and to supply the study with later materials of the period 1945 to 1975 from his own archives. I applied for support to the National Geographic Society, without success. There follows now the statement of the proposed study. The data to be obtained is to be found in the great libraries of the world and it is hoped that an institute or department of archaeology will undertake the task. *** The project aims to inventory all excavated sites of the Mediterranean-Middle East (4000 to 600 B. C.); to scan their reports for indications of destruction by earthquake, volcanism and cultural periods or phases; to plot the sites on a seismic and geological background map of the large region: to test the hypothesis that all existing ancient settlement of the period 4000-600 B. C. were destroyed by concurrent natural disasters at points in time conventionally denoting the various Bronze Ages; and to publish the results. The materials of research are those contained in Claude Schaeffer's published work and archives, which are being made available to this project, and the many excavation reports contained elsewhere and obtainable by library research mail requests, and personal contacts. The data will be collected and systematically reported in manual and electronic form, and the subsequent analysis should provide a firm quantitative base on the degree of correctness of the hypothesis of the destruction of ancient civilization at significant time intervals by natural forces. {S : CORRELATING NATURAL DISASTERS} CORRELATING NATURAL DISASTERS The reformulation of the Schaeffer Hypothesis can be summarized as follows: A. All excavations in the Near and Middle East of the period 4000-600 B. C. will show levels of heavy destruction. B. The levels of destruction are correlative. C. The levels of destruction will have counterparts outside of the Near and Middle East here particularly the East and West Mediterranean. D. Natural Disasters are demonstrable. Phase 1 1. Review and updating of the same 40 sites as presented in Schaeffer's Stratigraphie Comparée. 2. Transfer to new standardized format. 3. Preparation of a list of all excavations performed since 1945. 4. Search the excavation reports for levels of destruction and categorize them as: a. no evidence of destruction levels a1. Unsearched and not definite a2. Demonstrably not destroyed b. levels of destruction b1. Concurrent with those previously reported in SC. b2. Not-concurrent 5. In every case, Determine where possible whether naturally caused or provoked 6. Merge data. Phase II 7. Determine the quantitative degree of correctness of the reformulated Schaeffer Hypothesis in all of its parts. 8. Write a narrative of the findings 9. Accompany the narrative of findings with a. an up-to-date map of the Mediterranean-Middle East exhibiting fault lines as shown by NASA satellites, zone of modern seismic intensity, and the location of excavated sites plus b. a differentiation of the mapped sites according to how many of the presumed destruction levels they actually reveal at the critical culture points. For example Troy shows all levels, and would be so symbolized on a map. c. a supplementary plotting on a separate map, of all natural destruction levels that are not correlated with the presumed major destruction levels and of missing levels of destruction adverse to the hypothesis. d. an appendix of all sites reported upon (and of those either unreported or lacking data). e. a simple constructed Index of conformity of findings to the hypothesis. f. an Appendix of techniques of discovering and reporting destruction levels and their causes. g. photographs of selected destruction levels showing ashes and calcination (Troy, Tuscany, Alaca Huyuk, etc). Phase III Theoretical Discussion 10. On the character of the natural disasters implicated. 11. On the exceptional or anomalous cases of verified concurrent non-destroyed sites, if any. 12. On chronological problems exposed in the study, and their possible solution. 13. On the degree to which excavation leader have responded to the challenge of Schaeffer's Hypothesis since 1948 (30 years). 14. On the implications of the findings. a. for the study of the rise and fall of civilization. b. On the comparative study of religion. c. On the causes of sudden, significant cultural changes. d. On the possibility that the boundaries of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages have been basically determined by natural forces. In applying for foundation support, the word "exoterrestrial" or "extraterrestrial" was not mentioned. Now, with the publication of The Lately Tortured Earth, it should be more apparent than before that the destructions of the Bronze Ages could have been produced by several causes, acting together and initiating in celestial disturbances. Other regions of the world too will lent themselves to an enhanced comparative analysis, especially in the U. S. S. R. and Meso America. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 7: } {T NINE SPHERES OF VENUSIAN EFFECTS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER SEVEN NINE SPHERES OF VENUSIAN EFFECTS* (* This paper is an edited version of a talk to a meeting of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, London 26 April 1980. The help of Mr. Peter James on important points of material evidence is gratefully acknowledged.) Whether from timidity or misapprehension, hypotheses of general destruction about 3500 years ago are felt to be based upon scraps of evidence from scattered and often unreliable sources, whereas their conventional counter-theses are solidly founded. To the contrary, as I shall maintain here, the evidence from this period points to an extraordinary destruction in culture and nature. I shall offer nine propositions to this effect, adjoin an example or two, and challenge anyone to present and defend an opposing case. Seven of the propositions govern large special areas of science. The balance cover all areas of knowledge. Since the total effect produced many great changes, and the effect in each field was also large, I do not hesitate to give them the name of quantavolutions. Quantavolutions are abrupt, intensive, large-scale changes, and contrast with evolutionary changes which are, as they say, drop-by-drop and point-by-point. The time, about 3500 years ago, was that of Exodus. The catastrophe of the Exodus is described in detail in God's Fire and Ages in Chaos. I. We begin with astronomy and physics. We speak of calendars, reports of sky bodies in action, legends of the gods, sky-struck human behavior of the period. We say of the Astrosphere: "No available record of astronomical events from anywhere presents astral, planetary, or solar movements as unchanged or uniformly changing from before that time to afterwards." When Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision appeared in 1950, many a critic leaped at it claiming that eclipses of the times before 700 B. C. were known and hence the skies had been orderly for long before then. Over the years he and his supporters put to rest this claim. No such historical record exists; there is no anomaly present. Other critics were discovering in Stonehenge and other megalithic constructions an astronomical orientation that went back to the New Stone Age and is still valid. This is not so. Dr. Euan MacKie wrote about his investigations: "In the 16th or 15th centuries B. C. a second period of crisis began during which the dressed bluestone setting was dismantled, and joints on its stones battered off where possible, and most of the sockets for a new circle of bluestones were dug. This project was abandoned before completion.." Again no anomaly. A corollary of our first Proposition says that no calendar based on the present solar year or lunar cycles is available that comes from the period before 3450 B. C. or thereabouts. However we find a severe challenge. Hastings in 1910 wrote that "the Egyptian calendar [amounting to 365 days] appears throughout the whole of its history. However far back we may trace it, we cannot reach the moment of a change in it." Malcolm Lowery stresses the anomaly in correspondence to Zetetic Scholar (3/ 4, April 1979, p. 60): To cite a case in point: according to Egyptological authorities, monuments from Old Kingdom Egypt unimpeachably and unequivocally record a year consisting of twelve thirty- day months plus five days of the year; and this 365-day year is confirmed by students of other Near Eastern civilizations. His footnote reads: "Two references must suffice here (a) Hastings: Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh, 1908-1926), II (1910), p. 93: "As it has just been described [with a year of (3 x 4 x 3 x 10)? 5 days] ... the Egyptian calendar appears throughout the whole of its history. However far back we may trace it, we cannot reach the moment of a change in it." (b) Helck/ Otto (eds.): Lexikon der Ägyptologie (Wiesbaden, 1975), III, 298, article: Kalender by J. von Beckerath: "Auf der Grundlage eines [unregelmassig 12-bzw. 13-monatigen] Lunisolar Jahres wurde in Ägypten schon früh ein... Kalender... geschaffen, der aus unveränderlich 365 Tagen bestand. Er war nach dem Vorbild des natürlichen Kalenders in 12 Monate zu je 30 Tagen eingeteilt, wozu noch 5 Zusatztage (Epagomenon) kamen." An attack from Peter Huber in the same issue (p. 67) reads: Another one [problem with Velikovsky and his followers] is that they tend to repeat the same, clearly wrong assertions ad nauseam (for example, the 360-day year mentioned by May is a fairytale, it has no more physical reality than the 360-day year nowadays used in interest calculations). Several days before his death, Velikovsky indicated to me his impression that we had only to answer one ultimate source for these statements, a single ancient document, and Malcolm Lowery and Christoph Marx helped me locate it in Breasted's Ancient Egyptian Texts. It is a business contract mentioning an addition of five days to the year of 360 days. Until this matter is thoroughly investigated and rebutted, it stands as an anomaly. A most common expression of critics is that the orbits and behavior of the planets, including Venus, were known before -1500 and are the same as today's. This has been shown to be untrue, much to everyone's surprise. The records are not there, nor can they be retrocalculated, for this would beg the question. Venus has been shown to have been perceived and observed to take an eccentric course that is compatible with the behavior of a comet. This finding, along with those mentioned above and in many other works beyond recitation here, tends to confine strictly and cast into doubt the 365 day year anomaly mentioned above. II. The Atmosphere seems intangible as a source of evidence for events of 3500 years ago, but in fact much evidence of atmospheric turbulence is available. A rationalistic and literal interpretation of the Bible at the time of Exodus reveals high electrostatic levels, high radioactivity levels, dense and persisting cloud covers, high carbon content in the air, oppressive darkness and falls of a spectacular type -- quail, manna, barads, fire etc. We are entitled to say, "There were radical disturbances and some lasting changes in atmospheric electricity, radioactivity, temperatures, winds, climates and solar radiance in the mid-II Millennium." Radiocarbon dates for the years involved require adjustments of serious consequence, as Suess and others have disclosed. The prevailing view that the Exodus was a gambol of truant slaves or a return of some bedouins to their ancestral desert is absurd and useful to divert attention from how bad conditions really were. The Jews were operating in the middle of catastrophe; there is no anomaly here. III. The Geosphere was disturbed. The world was shaking. Rivers were stopped and changed their courses. Mountains were moved. We are obliged to hypothesize: "Every geophysical feature or process in the world capable of exhibiting the effects of continuous stress will show that such stress occurred around -3500." Here we share problems with conventional students of Holocene geology: what tests can pinpoint geological events in time --radiocarbon dating, possible chemical changes in rocks and soils, changed stratigraphy and morphology that can be tied to historical or protohistorical events? So when we read a contrary statement in the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the effect that the Euphrates River bed was unchanged over many thousands of years, we must juxtapose to this a statement by R. Adams, for instance, that there occurred in the mid-second millennium "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during Kassite times." And when Robert Raikes, a quasi-catastrophist, theorizes that giant mud dams formed and broke and flooded out the Indus River civilization of this time, we have to carry his argument farther and, viewing the tremendous destruction throughout northern India and the bases of the Himalayan Range, insist upon a much more universal disaster than the mud-barrier floods. We have Sagan in his "An Analysis of Worlds in Collision," Scientists Confront Velikovsky, p. 66: But the claim that there were extensive lava flows and volcanism involving "all volcanoes" is quite another story. Volcanic lavas are easily dated and what Velikovsky should produce is a histogram of the number of lava flows on the Earth as a function of time. Such a histogram, I believe, will show that not all volcanoes were active between 1500 and 600 B. C., and that there is nothing particularly remarkable about the volcanism of that epoch. How does this anomalistic claim stand against the evidence of volcanism put forward in my Lately Tortured Earth, against the finding of Phoenician vases embedded in lava dated to 3500 years ago, against the plinian explosion of Mt. Rainier in America dated concurrently? Not well. Volcanism was not behaving normally. Velikovsky was speaking loosely and deductively, meaning all volcanoes must have erupted if the Earth paused and a great attractive celestial body was close. Elsewhere, insofar as the data allowed, he spoke in statistical language, foreshadowing the vaunted histogram. When Sagan says "volcanic lavas are easily dated" he is mistaken, even on the premises of radiochronometry. My own position is that many volcanoes were initiated, many fissures opened, all active volcanoes erupted, and furthermore a great many eminences erupted electrically. More difficult to dispute is the claim that recent ice cores drilled from beneath the Greenland Ice Cap pass through the mid-second millennium with an extraordinary appearance of debris, but not enough to suggest world disaster. I shall have to deal with this anomaly in a future study. (See below.) The cores by the way are not showing other expected effect around this time anyway. Oceanographic theory has a drastic drop of catastrophic proportions in the ocean levels of the age. Could there have been a great freeze, a deluge, a breaking into new basins such as the North Sea and Baltic Sea (actually in both cases indicated)? Or could the land have risen around and below the seas -- just as disastrous an event? IV. "Every biological species underwent radical change around 3500 years ago in numbers, habitat, behavior or genetics:" such would be our fourth proposition, concerning the Biosphere. There is much evidence regarding numbers -- including human destruction as for instance among the Israelites and Egyptians, also much concerning changes of habitat, abandonment of settlements, changes in behavior. Ovid is not to be believed when he said that the passage of Phaeton at this time burned the Earth and turned Africans to black from the heat, but it is not unbelievable that so many of the non-black peoples of Africa were destroyed that the continental population noticeably blackened after the event. Those who deny marine disasters can of course rely upon the absence of datable fossil events, but there are mammoth destructions datable to the time, and a Woods Hole Oceanographic Expedition to the Black Sea uncovered a general layer of coccoliths that occurs at the - 3500 level and could not simply have died normally and drifted to the bottom en masse. The ancient historian Josephus said that nature, in a revolution, produced "mutations in the bodies of men, in the earth, in plants, and in all things that grow out of the earth." There is little fossil evidence yet uncovered from the period or most of what there is has been assigned to later or earlier times or ignored or is of current species. Apparently "very fresh" fossil mucks have been found, but the assignment of dates to them has progressed little. V. The situation is different when one turns to the Ecosphere, the human settlements. Here the evidence is abundant, and has been presented in a number of works discussing every region of the world. Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near, Middle and Far East, and Meso- America provide evidence. Every advanced civilization suffered destruction, whether in China, Africa, the Causasus, Anatolia, Crete, or elsewhere. So we add the hypothesis: "No human settlement in the world escaped heavy destruction from natural causes in the midsecond millennium." I discussed this proposition with Professor Claude Schaeffer two years ago, and he agreed with it. Hundreds of sites that he had not included in his massive volume on comparative stratigraphy might now be added. A corollary of this proposition, which is also related to the one on astrophysics, is that "No religious temple that was built before about -3500 and rebuilt afterwards shows the same astronomical orientation afterwards as before." Peter Tompkins, for instance, carries a diagram in his work on the Great Pyramid that shows four different historical orientations of the Temple at Luxor, one of which was probably at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. René Roussel has written a report (unpublished) showing that a rupestral temple at Ouadi es Sebous (Upper Egypt) was oriented to different winter solstices before and after -3500. A disaster occurred to the temple in between; great fire damage and layers of ash are to be seen. VI. We can call the human documentation (the oral and written records, of the mid-second- millennium period) a kind of history and coin the following hypothesis regarding the "Historisphere": "All legendary or contemporary historical accounts from any people in the world which discuss events of, or attribute events to, the mid-second-millennium mention a general and natural disaster." Much of Greek myth centers upon catastrophe-born Pallas Athena, upon Hephaestos and Dionysus. The Books of Moses center upon the Exodus disasters. The Vedas of the Hindus focus upon momentous natural events at the time of their main descent upon India from the North, which time has been generally accepted as mid-second-millennium. The Ipuwer papyrus which conforms rather closely to the Biblical Exodus account appears to be datable to the end of Middle Bronze, hence confirms our thesis. Ancient pagan accounts of the doings of Moses, often unfavorable, as often agree that plagues and natural destruction were occurring then. Are there exceptions? None that I know of. Only evolutionary modern writers have presumed a benign history covering this period, and I await any contradictory thesis referring to any document or legend. I await the uniformitarian anomaly. VII. The seventh thesis, the Anthroposphere or cultural sphere, says: "Every culture complex in the world changed radically in mid-second-millennium." Here we refer to social organizations, religions, and modes of life. We know that the Egyptian Middle Kingdom underwent the political and social traumas of a takeover by the Hyksos. Most often, as Schaeffer has shown, "sedentary occupancy" of an area "was replaced by the nomadic." In Persia, Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus, he writes "there is no continuity between the civilizations of the Middle Bronze Age and the Recent Bronze Age." A recent corollary of our hypothesis number 7 is this: "No god of before mid-second- millennium B. C. remained without change of status or family change or serious incident." Zeus found a new daughter, Athene, and what a daughter she was! The Hindu goddess Devi conforms to all appearances with Athena, with the same violent entrance upon the skies and the human mind. Yahweh appears and explains to Moses, rather unconvincingly: "I am the same god of your fathers, but different." "Not different enough," replied a great many Jews and they insistently chased after Baal - represented in the young Baal-bull. Can any scholar offer an unchanging religion for this period: I think not. Certainly, if so, it would be an anomaly. VIII. At this point, I am prepared to assert that all major spheres of existence have been incorporated into a quantavolutional scheme of the mid-second-millennium: astrosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere, ecosphere, historisphere, anthroposphere. Let us then generalize a Holosphere, that which contains all modes or forms of existence, and offer an VIIIth proposition, thus: "All spheres of existence change together by a mutual interaction in the mid-second- millennium," or conversely, "No major quantavolution in any special sphere occurs independently of quantavolutions in other spheres." The Exodus case represents the best studied and perhaps the most documented history of the times we have, and, viewing it, we can confidently say: "When all spheres are quantavoluting, then the whole world is involved and the cause is universal." The forces at work are so strong and transactional that we may add an event to the workings of the Astrosphere: "There can be only one necessary and sufficient cause of the quantavolutions of the mid- second-millennium, and that must be a large-body encounter with Earth; by definition it was a cometary encounter, if a comet is considered as any substantial body pursuing an elliptical or changing orbit." The challenge is to be phrased thus: "Nothing but a god-like comet could have produced the quantavolutions of 3450 60 B. P." IX. There occurs, then, a Ninth Proposition. It concerns the subsequent history of effects of the Quantavolution of Venusia: the present-day lingering of the tail of the flattening logarithmic curve of the catastrophe. We can call this the Neosphere. "Every institution, behavioral pattern, and natural setting that exists today, if its history is complete, will reveal an inheritance of specific effects from the Venusian Quantavolution of -3500." "Arabia Felix" - Happy Arabia - of 3500 B. C. is a waste of sand with vast fields of stones and hundreds of dry stream beds resting upon layers of petroleum. Zvi Rix wrote extensively on the sexual complexes derived from the human experience with Venus. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger related basic human problems to the everlasting fear of a great comet. Moses was a reconstructor after the catastrophe of Exodus. The Jews gave in to Moses or got out of Judaism. Jesus Christ was the child of mosaism and of the morning star (as W. Sizemore and others are showing in a book underway). Islam is more mosaic than Christianity is. The Iranian mosaists are telling the other Islamic mosaists that they must kill the Jewish mosaists; and the Christian mosaists and Russian Stalinist mosaists are urging a similar business upon themselves and others. And American mosaists are contemplating nuclear war a) because they believe god is on their side b) god will take them into heaven. But the Cambodians, Indonesians, Ugandans, Vietnamese, Chinese, have no Moses; and flutter toward the same candle flame of destruction. What I am finally saying is this: Because of the lingering effects of past catastrophes mankind has long been in the business of producing catastrophes in order to recapture the madness of ancient disasters. Wars, aggression, suppression, compulsive and punitive behavior are connected with the primordial past. It is as if we are congenitally convinced that good comes only from greater evil -- to roast a pig we must burn down our house. The psychological de-programming of the catastrophized mind is still a little-understood process. Both the morale, and the rational invention of means, for moving directly to good without the intercession of great evils are very weak currents or motifs in contemporary civilization. But, to an existentialist and pragmatic mind, there can be no alternative to trying. We must keep trying. Like Sisyphus we must push the great rock of reason up the mountain, time after time, prepared always to see it fall, until one day, who knows, mirabile dictu, whether by invention or luck, the rock will stay fixed up there and we shall have surcease from our labors. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 8: } {T THE OBLITERATION OF HUMAN SIGNS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER EIGHT THE OBLITERATION OF HUMAN SIGNS The conventional scientist says to the catastrophist: "How convenient it is for your purposes to place your catastrophes just out of reach of true history, tantalizingly so. Is it so that the falsity of your views cannot be proven, that your assertions can remain forever in the limbo of seductive fable?" The answer is another question: "How is it that your accuse me of something for which I am not accountable? You ask me to provide records of an event whose great force was exercised precisely in the destruction of those records? Does this not make our scores even?" Both feel frustrated, but perhaps become a little more sympathetic, too. Nearly every work dealing with prehistory and antiquity must lament the paucity of evidence. If there is pride in this study, it comes from having made so much out of so little -- a jaw fragment, an arrowhead, a doll, an artificial pile of stones, etc. Under evolutionary primevalogy, there seems to be little need to build lament into a missa solemnis. If the human past was developed modestly and uniformly, a sigh over the incidents that destroyed or silted over a single site is enough and then on with the work. And so forth at whatever sites turn up. For instance, if it is believed, as Childe has said and most have agreed, that paleolithic mankind began in the British Isles with a few hundred souls, that a few hundred more dwelt there thousand years later, and so on, primevalogy might as well proceed as usual with the question of obliteration of evidence. On the other hand, if quantavolutionary theory is postulated, then a different attitude and approach are called for. Every sign of human presence in the distant past has to be taken as a survival of one in a thousand or even a hundred million events that had the potential of surviving to this day for the shovels and eyes of the primevalogist. Furthermore, the perspective in which the residue or remain is viewed has to be radically altered. It is looked upon as strange aberration, something of an event that had a rare quality to it in addition to its bare survival, something that kept it from being obliterated along with millions of like events from the eyes of the future. It must have had a marginal quality, some special features to augment its chance of survival, and therefore is rarely to be considered typical prima facie of its culture. The revolutionary primevalogist must also become a macromorphologist of the earth, while the evolutionary theorist can and indeed is impelled to rest with micro-morphology. The former has to look at whole areas, regions, even the globe itself, asking where the centers of human activity may have been and what might have happened to them. She or he makes different demands upon geology. "Can you tell us," she queries, "what quantities of what material were moved, how, from where to where, from what elevation to what new elevation or depression in an area of such and such dimensions and where, if at all, would indications of settlement exist, and, if indicated, what would be the chances of detecting matters of importance, considering the capacity for obliteration of the forces involved?" The complex question is bound to elicit productive answers sooner or later. And, or course, accidental macroscopic primevalogical discoveries do occur s when cliffs fall away and streams erode canyons or coal mines are dug. But meanwhile one should have at least some conception of the possibilities that what one has discovered micromorphologically is likely to represent but one-millionth of what was there. Or, to invert the issue and specify a hypothetical situation: assuming a population of a half-million persons in Britain in the year 12,000 B. C., what reasons can you give for the fact that only a few scattered stone tools and bones will confront the scientist of today who is working with conventional theories at the present "state of the art?" To answer the question, one must tell what has been discovered in the nature of remains and legends of this period. Then one must say what kinds of events would reduce "then- time" surface evidence to "now-time" surface evidence. Afterwards, one queries the likelihood of such events, matching present evidence with the proposed history. If the resulting theory is as plausible as or more plausible than the evolutionary theory, then, of course, it must be pursued, and similar inquiries launched in other macromorphological settings. A first procedure then could be to see what is left in Britain of its hypothetical 12,000 year old culture. Whereupon one continues by conjecturing upon the events necessary to destroy beyond rediscovery the hypothetical British culture of 12,000 years ago. After much reading and discussion, I came to realize some years ago that there was no simple checklist of kinds of disaster - all the forces, chemicals, and conditions that can destroy the biosphere. But before I came to realize it, a long time passed when I could not even think of the need for one; I could not ask the question. In modern times, both because of specialization and because disasters on a large scale are unusual, theory in its primitive form of simple questions and basic classification is missing. Frank Lane's The Elements Rage turned up as a rare and valuable discovery, because he uniquely takes up a fairly full list of disastrous natural forces, one by one. From that position, I could go on to offer a general classification in Chaos and Creation of super-disastrous forms and, by the time I was writing The Lately Tortured Earth, I could think easily of a set of very heavy, "cosmic" mega-forces interacting as such and with a given biosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere. High-energy forces and chemical outbursts reach toward the extermination of evidence of a biosphere. Low-energy uniform and gradual forces also tend to exterminate such evidence. The truth of the past thus remains for us in the evidence of niches where high-energy forces acted but were not totally destructive -- mountains that were not leveled, elevations by-passed by cross- tides, humans buried swiftly in a clay that quickly hardened, and so on. If at the time of Stonehenge about 3500 years ago there were a million people in Britain (for they were building other sites as well and carrying on the chores of living), and if we find no sign of them, either we have not searched very well, or there was some catastrophe that erased all signs. The very existence of the megaliths does, however, discount the notion of complete disaster -- there were no Washington Scablands barrier- bursting floods, or giant oceanic tsunamis or Biblical overturning of mountains. And of there were a few utensils found, as there have been, and even more remarkable, a few bones (unfortunately yet not found), we should say that certain forces such as atmospheric and chemical ones may have occurred - an icy climate may have come and gone, a great flooding may have happened, a devastating fire may have fallen from the sky, and so on. Now these actors, too, might be eliminated from consideration, and we might end up with an historical view that Stonehenge has been relatively peaceful and insofar as it represents the Earth, the Earth has been likewise peaceful. Of course, some force toppled some huge stones, and several stones have disappeared, or have they? This shows what I mean: there must exist, and we need it, some manual for quantavolutionary appraisal of sites and regions, a set of 1001 questions to ask and the kinds of answers to expect. Since we have nothing like this Field Kit of Quantavolutionary Questions, we scarcely realize that there is anything to ask about. It took a long time for science to work itself up to a set of questions about Stonehenge and we have hardly yet broached a full array of them. So when we ask how many people lived in Britain 12,000 years ago, we find that we have no intellectual tools to address the question; we lack the 1001 questions that follow the leading question. One would think that we might find a model to consult in paleontology. But the field has not gone far beyond associating some life forms with some rock strata and not even this is done with full microscopy and chemistry on computerized data banks. The leading question, "How many species have existed at a given point in time, or ever, or even at a given place and point in time?" is not well-answered. Estimates of all the species that have ever existed have been argued on figures around 200,000 up to some 20,000,000. That's like asserting that there may be half a million people living in Canada, but then again there may be fifty million of them. We need to have surveys of what existed before, in order to learn what and how much was obliterated. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 1: } {Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: } {C Chapter 9: } {T ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part One: Historical Disturbances CHAPTER NINE ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS Seeing that humans are very different from primates and yearning to stress that difference without the help of current religion, many people have taken an interest in the idea of the "ancient astronauts" [1] . Popularized especially by Erich von Daniken, and given intellectual respectability more recently by Robert Temple, the view maintains that primitive "backward" humans were visited by anatomically compatible beings from outer space, and taught the arts and sciences, including finally an enduring reverence for the visitors as gods. Most sets of myths do include a belief that god-heroes walked the Earth in early times [2] . They are connected with the skies. Some early signs and pots bear sky-references. Evidence accumulates, too, that the earliest civilizations were far more sophisticated than scientists believed until recently. All of these are connected with the suspected foreign visitors by the theory of ancient astronauts. The idea is not catastrophic (although scholarly catastrophists fear it will be catastrophic to the reputation of their work). It enlists catastrophes merely as a convenient means of explaining why the evidence of visitations is almost totally lacking: it has been buried or destroyed. Moreover, the idea is eclectic. Much of the material that finds its way into the writings about "ancient astronauts" consist of exotica (" Did you know that...?" and "Believe it or not, but..."), or of questions aimed at needling archaeologists and pre- historians about their many anomalies, oversights and unknowns. Catastrophists and uniformitarians alike usually reject the theory indignantly. Von Daniken himself is excoriated for his meanderings, his lack of logic, pretentiousness, vagueness, unscholarly innuendos, and profit-taking in the market of ideas. Still it seems odd that scientists such as C. Sagan, who earned fame and fortune in part from writing science fiction, should denounce the analogous efforts of others. At the least, Von Daniken's work is like the newspaper comic strips, which get people to buy the newspaper, encountering thereupon whatever else it may contain in the way of information and ideas. In any event, humanoid development in other planets or areas may have been possible in recent ages. We know the climates and resources of Mars, Mercury, and Venus today. They were probably quite different even a few thousands of years ago. It is even possible to imagine that foreign astronauts, highly advanced, would have foreseen the doom of their planet and taken off for a habitable place (a favorite theme of science fiction). Or they may simply have undertaken a routine exploration and been stranded and assimilated, or taught and disseminated peculiar human qualities, and exited forever. There exist, further, infinite possible combinations of genes of which only a few have been exercised to create life on Earth as we know it. It is conceivable, but quite unlikely, that parallel developments of being and existence could occur in isolation, one development (the foreign visitor) ahead of the other (potentiated primitive homo). The chances of two assimilable races developing independently are practically nil, despite the narrow band of evolutionary choices referred to earlier. They are rendered nil when the timing factor is considered: in all eternity, why did the two races converge at the moment when man was ready for everything except reflective thought? Although it is true in a sense that "everything is miraculous," it is false that therefore every highly improbable idea must be true. And, even if the improbable were accepted, and a fully technologized modern type of human developed elsewhere, one would still have to explain their evolution. If backward Moonmen had existed and surrounded our landing craft on July 20, 1969, and had been impregnated culturally and otherwise by our doughty astronauts, the Moonmen's descendents would still have to figure out how the astronauts evolved. Those who flirt with the idea of ancient astronauts are justifiably critical of the absence of evolutionary explanations for the great leap from pre-culture to culture. But being dissatisfied with existing evolutionary theory does not permit one to believe in all far-fetched substitutes. The "ancient astronaut" is too much like the "magician's rabbit, pulled from a hat." It is also true, as von Daniken insists, that the early humans were sky-watchers. It is fundamental to catastrophic theory that this be so. But the gods that were watched for were not his god-heroes. They were the displays of natural forces as perceived by an aroused, deluded mind. There is no evidence, anywhere and earlier, of a human skill of powered machine that goes beyond the technology employed during the "Old Bronze Age" of Egypt. These would not have been paraphernalia typical of a hypothetical culture that travels through space. It is conceivable that machine civilizations, now completely destroyed, may have existed on Earth millions of years ago, (although we are arguing in Solaria Binaria that these millions of years have not existed in Earth's history); but even this idea will not advance the question of whether living culture inherited advanced techniques. The famous Peruvian Nazca ground patterns may not be fully understood; but if "aeronautical direction-finding" is contained in them, it is more suited to a Piper Cub plane than a space vehicle. They may have been laid out under instruction from heat- lofted balloons or from look-out points on heights. Theoretical geometricians could also achieve the patterns, and may have ordered them along the lines of meteorite falls. All ancient monuments -- megaliths, pyramids, temples -- were sky-oriented; the Nazca lines may have followed star-lines, also. There remains a possibility that only the theory of Solaria Binaria permits. I mentioned this theory in a talk to the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in London in 1975 and have since developed the model in collaboration with Professor Earl R. Milton. It calls for a binary system of the Sun and Super-Uranus, electrically connected by a pulsing axis of fire and enveloped by an electromagnetized tube reaching between the binary partners and providing a vast intervening space with a viable atmosphere for planetary and biological genesis. The breakdown of Solaria Binaria occasioned the set of catastrophes that originated and imprinted homo sapiens. The rotating magnetic tube that enveloped the planets in the age of Pangea on Earth endured for a long time. Hence the planets would have shared an atmosphere, and might possibly have engendered similar life forms. Passage from one planet to another would have been possible without highly specialized airborne vehicles. It is also possible that several planets were grouped close together. Something like the "Piper Cub" plane just referred to would not appear so ludicrous. For the vehicle would not have to cross through "outer space." If the "ancient astronauts" theory were true, and adapted the scenario of Solaria Binaria, the knowledge of genetics and evolution gained in field studies of earthlings would not have been wasted. It can be transferred to the exoterrestrial location that had produced the visitors, because both on Earth and on the other planets within the plenum of the solar system the same atmospheric and hence life conditions would prevail. Then one may go on to conjecture that these intelligent beings from far away were human in a way that was related to the hominids of Earth, but had progressed much farther along. And that these ancient astronauts, coming upon the hominids of our Earth, bred with them [3] . The resulting strain, now dominant on Earth, with both astronauts and hominids having disappeared (bred out), would be the homo sapiens schizotypus that is described in Homo Schizo I and II. However, the present author, despite his attempts here to rationalize the idea of "ancient astronauts," regards the slight evidence behind it and its logic as sufficiently disposed of within the scenario of his Quantavolutionary Series. {S : Notes (Chapter 9: Ancient Astronauts)} Notes (Chapter 9: Ancient Astronauts) 1. The literature is large. A scholarly work to be recommended is Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery. 2. See Joseph Campbell's collection and analysis of The Hero of a Thousand Faces. 3. A suggestive legend is carried by H. Bellamy in Moons, Myths and Man (1936) p. 269. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 2: } {Q GEOLOGICAL ISSUES: } {C Chapter 10: } {T INDIANS OF ILLINOIS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Two: Geological Issues CHAPTER TEN INDIANS OF ILLINOIS June 14, 1974 To: Professor Howard Winters Department of Anthropology New York University From: Professor Alfred de Grazia Dear Professor Winters: Thank you for the materials on the S. Illinois digs at Modoc, Riverton, Koster (et al), and the U. S. Corps of Engineers surveys on Southern Illinois. I am returning them herewith, since I shall be leaving for Greece soon, but I would like to talk to you more about them before leaving, if that is possible. My problem was this: the stratigraphic work of Schaeffer and others show heavy ashes and calcinated debris from natural disasters over "Old World" settlements and cities, ending the Old, Middle, and Recent Bronze Ages; that is, effectively terminating these civilizations. Therefore, the "New World" in some likelihood would show the same. If, however, the stratigraphy of American Indian settlements of the Mississippi Valley is continuous and shows no catastrophic effects between, say, 3,000 B. C. and 600 B. C., then the hypothesis of world-wide catastrophe is disproved. (The same would hold for Meso-America, which I am not considering here.) Catastrophes are indicated by effects of violent flood, wind, fire, and material fall- out. Hence I examined your materials for evidence of such effects. First I considered cases without reference to carbon dating, which in all cases produced dates during and before the mentioned critical period. I note the following: 1) The strata in all cases involve very narrow bands of settlement, measurable in inches. For instance, the Modoc case is said to move one foot per 1,000 years (in the earliest period) to one foot per century in the latest. But the question arises whether we are dealing with short-term values. The cross-sections show only thinly settled camping materials; nothing indicated the presence of women and children. 2) The fauna and flora remain unchanged throughout the period of several millennia, even from 9,000 B. C. The same mammals, fish, birds, nuts, and vegetation characterize all periods with frequency distributions that could be annual or irregularly annual. One wonders, then, too, about the Indian campers whose successive waves occupied a great stretch of time. 3) The technology scarcely changes. Even the mix of material does not radically alter. 4) The area in general is subject to flooding even nowadays. The stratigraphies show effects separating older layers of artifacts an hearths from newer ones; that is, silt, loess, and clay. Again these are in thin layers. 5) The area generally exhibits frequently strata of lignite and coal near the surface, which is mined farther north. These can be scenes of catastrophic combustion (See e. g. State Coal Circ. 332, table 5,3 and Francis, COAL, new ed.) 6) The stratigraphy of the area in general permits the hypothesis of catastrophic swirling cross-currents of flood occurring in a short period of time (i. e. weeks or centuries), depositing in rapid succession thin layers of loess, silt, clay, and organic matter that are noted everywhere. Whereupon in a late period, after the catastrophes, human occupancy resumed in periods of resettling of the landscape and regrowth. 7) The descriptions of the limestone "foundations" that underlie the more evident material are typically vague. Limestone, I imagine, could signify a conglomerate of sudden sediment soaked by heavy floods and solidified by heat [electricity] and pressure. 8) The settlements are sunk into the same "alluvial" material that they rest upon. That is, the pit sides, except for the ploughed area, contain the same material layers as the bottom projections of the pits up to a certain rock depth. Hence, unlike the sites of the Near East, apparently nature was building up as rapidly as the human settlements were accruing. That is, either the land mass was building up enormously, or the occupancy of the sites was exceedingly thin, or was sinking or dug in. If the first, 30,000 years would have built up an extensive plateau. Therefore, I ask myself (and you) the following questions: 1) Apart from the superposition of artifacts, is there any proof of a succession of ages? 2) If a succession of ages is granted, is there any proof that more than a century or two of occupancy were involved? 3) Could not the occupancy take the typical form of returning to a site, clearing the brush and grass to a clay and pebble base, and thus digging in the site over a period of time under a couple of centuries? 4) In view of the major catastrophic hypothesis, might not catastrophe in the central Mississippi Valley region take the form of devastating floods and fire, wiping out most of the biosphere? The old biosphere would be represented in the near surface lignite, fusain, and coal deposits where flood waters and tides, driven by wind and surface plate movements, would dump the burning debris, cool it by flooding and bury it with successive waves of sand and silt dragged from other mostly denuded surface areas. In a few years, a new growth would occur overall, but evidences of antediluvian human occupancy would be totally absent. Also absent, of course, would be any calcinated debris of settlements, and in this area of America, any huge aqueous intrusions or lava flow. If this set of questions is answered in a way tending to support the possibility of neartime catastrophe, that is, between 3,000 and 600 B. C., then there still remains the defiant evidence of radiocarbon dating. These data, as given, are often irregular and sometimes conflicting. At Modoc, for instance, Stratum 3 which goes from 15.3 feet (below the ploughline?) to 22.3 feet moves from 3314 B. C. to 9246 B. C. or 6,000 years more or less in 7 feet (with one gross anomalous reading). This seems excessive for a "continuous occupancy" site. I cannot conceive of any kind of settlement building only about one foot per thousand years. (I knew the American Indian was a great natural recycler of materials, but this is too much, especially since the occupants were carelessly dropping their hard-worked stone implements all about.) Radiocarbon dating is known to present three types of problems. The first involves stratigraphic techniques of sampling and cleaning, that is, selection malfunctions. These can be serious and amount to a general bias in a set of cases. Another C14 problem is presented by water-soaking. Water is known to wash out C14 and produce great age even for young organisms. The materials of Illinois Indians were frequently flooded and therefore may give old readings. A third is in the atmospheric mix and flux that builds up the Carbon-14 residue in the organism to the point of death. Here the difficulty lies with the factors creating Carbon-14, the flux of cosmic particles and the density of the earth's atmosphere. The geo-physicist, Melvin Cook, argues in a fully detailed quantitative study, that the carbondating method in itself gives us an atmosphere that is only 12,000 years old. (" Carbon 14 and the Age of the Atmosphere," Creation Research Society Quarterly, June 1970.) Apart from this, it is apparent that carbondating as a test begs the question of an inconstant atmosphere. That is, like so many tests, the IQ for example, it tests itself. All of this leaves us, don't you think, with thermoluminescence tests, if the antiquity of the Illinois Indians is to be proven, and then not for pre-ceramic periods? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 2: } {Q GEOLOGICAL ISSUES: } {C Chapter 11: } {T ICE CORES OF GREENLAND} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Two: Geological Issues CHAPTER ELEVEN ICE CORES OF GREENLAND There is a certain grim quality to the confrontation of uniformitarians and catastrophists. The antagonists prowl in the jungle of natural history seeking the one definitive test that will finally discomfit and silence the other. If only the evolutionist could show that some major change in the world has come about with exquisite gradualness -- the ice ages, new species, the ocean basins -- then the opposition might be forced into silence. Just as relentlessly the quantavolutionary stalks among the events of history searching for the one indisputable catastrophe that has introduced a major change in the natural world -- a wholesale simultaneous extinction of species, a brush with a large comet, a meteoroidal crash, a deceleration of the Earth, or some similar expression of great effective force. Each must avoid the thrust of the other, even if it is blindly delivered in the course of an "empirical study" whose deadliness to the opposition was not originally intended. Such would be the study of ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica. Their purpose is multiform; a Danish group of glaciologists writes: "Ice cores have become an important tool in geophysics and atmospheric chemistry. Langway (1967) first perceived the great and many-sided aspects of extending physical and chemical analyses of snow and ice to what Crary (1970) calls: 'the thin dimension' of glaciers, thereby adding time to the parameters considered. In a more recent paper, Dansgaard and others (1973) listed the potentialities of polar ice-core and bore-hole studies relevant to glaciology, meteorology, climatology, geology, volcanology, atmospheric chemistry, cosmic and solar physics, and 14C dating" [1] . No mention is made of the small group of catastrophist scholars shuddering at the brink of the bore-hole, but it happens that if the ice core were to demonstrate the regular passage of a long stretch of uneventful time, quantavolution would simply have to surrender its claims to serious scientific consideration. The glaciologists begin their investigations with a natural pastiche: All kinds of fall-out from the atmosphere, including airborne continental dust and biological material, volcanic debris, sea salts, cosmic particles, and isotopes produced by cosmic radiation, are deposited on the ice sheet surface along with the snow. The passage of time, it appears, has little effect on the frozen material, except by tiny regular increments: The snowpack is gradually compressed into solid ice with small cavities containing samples of atmospheric air. In the coldest areas of the ice sheets, the impurities remain in the ice as indicators of the chemical composition and physical condition of the atmosphere at the time of deposition. Nothing is added, nothing runs off or is displaced, and no chemical reaction takes place; in fact, the composition of the ice layers changes only by decay of radioactive impurities and by extremely slow diffusion processes in the ice crystal lattice. The ice layers sink into the ice sheet in an undisturbed sequence with continuous horizontal stretching and consequent thinning; in areas with no melting at the bedrock, the ice layers approach zero thickness close to the bottom. The results, though complicated to obtain, produce marvelous evidence of historical conditions. This is why, under favorable conditions, an ice core obtained by drilling through an ice sheet can be used to establish continuous and detailed time series of many geophysical and chemical parameters reaching several hundred thousand years back in time: the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere; climatic changes in terms of accumulation rate and, with certain reservations, surface temperatures; the chemical composition of the atmosphere; volcanic activity and its cooling effect in the troposphere; fallout of cosmic dust; and the cosmic radiation flux [2] . The implications of this work has not escaped the nervous eye of the quantavolutionist. One student, R. G. A. Dolby, writes: The Earth's upper atmosphere is convected downwards in the polar regions, and with it some of the finer extraterrestrial dust that falls on our planet. A proportion of this is deposited on the snow falling on the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland. Thus, samples of the extra-terrestrial material are trapped with other atmospheric dust in successive levels of the ice and snow that have built up the ice caps. In recent years, deep holes have been drilled through this thick ice, and the cores of the holes extracted, to provide a continuous record of what was in the atmosphere over many years. The interesting question arises: could this record be made into an empirical test of Velikovsky's idea? According to Velikovsky, large quantities of cometary material fell upon the Earth in a number of catastrophes, the most recent being nearly 2700 year ago. Some of this material would have reached the polar ice caps, and should still be present at the appropriate depth in the cores that have already been collected. It is simple matter to study the cores carefully for signs of this material. To the best of my knowledge, the only significant nonaqueous material reported is a certain amount of dirt in six layers up to 0.5 mm thick of the Byrd Station Antarctic core, at depths between 1300 and 1700 meters. This dirt was tentatively identified as volcanic ash, and attributed to eruptions from volcanoes less than 300 kilometers away [3] . Another perplexed correspondent, C. L. Ellenberger, writes: I have heard some fantastic intellectual gymnastics from people trying to refute the Greenland core evidence... With them [the ice cores] we have a chance to observe a dust layer( s) and/ or volcanic acid layer( s) that one would expect to be significantly thicker or more concentrated than those which are known to have been produced by large, single, historical eruptions [4] . Hitherto, analogous technologies have threatened, namely carbondating, soil varves, and dendrochronology, but quantavolutionaries have learned to coexist with them. In at least the first two instances, the catastrophic event may itself adjust the hands of the geological clock, while in the third case, the trees to provide the data are limited in space and time. Setting up Mother Nature to count out past time has inspired other technologies rather less close, and sometimes more helpful than threatening to catastrophists. The rates of growth of coral and of stalagmites and the cutback of waterfalls come to mind. Because they are an example, but also because they may bear upon the ice bore-hole issue, the studies of Richard F. Flint and F. B. Taylor (1963) may be mentioned. Speaking of two late Wisconsin Ice Sheet invasions of the St. Lawrence region, Flint turns to the date of formation of the Niagara Gorge. Retrocalculating the current rate of recession of Horseshoe Falls, Taylor claims that the present flow channel was freed between 3000 and 3500 years ago. The time is surprisingly recent. It happens that the Greenland ice core exhibits some dust concentration around this time; -1390 50 is given. The connection is made with an explosion of the volcano of Thera-Santorini in the Aegean Sea, in the early Late Bronze Age. Are the breaking of a new Niagara channel and the Thera explosion connected? Conceivably, for, after all, hundreds of extraordinary and catastrophic events seem to cluster around the middle of the second millennium B. C. [5] . If the ice core of this period shows only a modest increment of dust, no more than is revealed by a dozen other known incidents of the past 4000 years as measured in the core, then little in the way of disaster would have struck upon the Earth at a time that practically all quantavolutionaries regard as a moment of worldwide destruction, most probably exoterrestrial in origin. Several stations have been boring into the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica; bedrock has been reached in both continents. Annual or close to annual series of ages achieving 100,000 years have been claimed for the cores. One core, already referred to, drilled at Camp Century, Greenland [6] , exhibits the following characteristics on its test of "acid rain" fallout. 1390 50 BC. This is the only signal exceeding 2.6 uequiv H + Kg -1 between 1100 and 2700 BC, and we therefore interpret it as being due to the large eruption of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea, which is generally agreed to have been of the same magnitude as that of Tambora (1815). The tephra production has recently been estimated at more than 28 km 3 (13 km 3 of dense rock equivalent) [7] . This unusually large eruption has been radio-carbon dated at 1720 50 BC on the calibrated radiocarbon scale... However, archaeological evidence from the excavation of the Minoan settlement near Akrotiri on Santorini strongly suggests that the island was inhabited least up to 1500 BC judging by Egyptian pottery style chronology; it was apparently abandoned shortly before the eruption, and in good order because no valuables have been found nor people killed by the heavy ash fall (10-40m). The discrepancy between the datings may be partly explained if the organic material used for the radiocarbon dating were partly built up by radioactively dead carbon-dioxide exhausted from the volcano before the eruption (an effect which has been observed recently). Our dating around 1400 BC supports Marinatos' theory of a causal connection between the Thera eruption and the decline of the Minoan civilization centered on the island of Crete. The dating can be further improved to 10 yr, if and when a deep Central Greenland ice core becomes available. Since the date assigned, -1390, confronts a radiocarbon date of -1720, a 340-year difference, the authors say that the destroyed Akrotiri settlement lasted until -1500 "judging by Egyptian pottery style chronology." Apparently they are prepared to throw carbondating to the wolves; even so, granted Velikovsky's reconstructed chronology of Egypt, which is achieving some acceptance among younger scholars, this will not suffice, because the Thera artifacts at the time of destruction now move down to about -1000. Several centuries of discordance would be excessive, given the evidence that the ice- core method is accurate within several percentage points. Either the method is rendered unreliable by the time that history loses its specificity, or carbondating, conventional dating and reconstructed dating are wrong. We cannot know whether there may have been other large volcanic disturbances that are not recorded in the same ice core. Icelandic volcanism is certainly overrepresented because it occurs not for away. The Antarctic cores reflect only volcanism of some several hundred kilometers distance. The Greenland record will not readily signal disturbances unless worldwide or above 20? south latitude. Krakatoa (1883) and Tambora (1815), two large Indonesian blasts seem to have registered with acid fallouts. Mt. Mazama, Oregon, seems to be responsible for a strong signal assigned to -4400 -110 years. Perhaps because it lacked an acid effect, the great exoterrestrial intrusion of Tunguska (Siberia) in 1908 is not signaled in the core; it seems to have produced no sharp deviation in the tests of oxygen isotope extremes, or in dust micro-particles, or in acid rain. Since this blast was more powerful than others that did register, and since it raised enough dust to darken the skies for a long period of time, its absence from the lists is strange. Furthermore, Tunguska's blast produced nitrogen oxides in the Earth's stratosphere that lowered the Earth's temperature 0.3? C for a decade (1908-18) [8] . The unusual gases and temperature drops should have affected the O 18 measure for those years as well as provided ample microparticles for an exhibition of deviance. Nor are climatic crises such as the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) noticeable in the published record of the cores. In this case, a "Little Ice Age" around the world has been attributed to a cessation of sun spots. The period should evidence itself in the ice core in some manner. Nor can we locate unusual years around the times conventionally assigned to the end of the Upper Paleolithic cave culture of the Dordogne, although the general view is that the people of that Age were forced to follow their animal quarry to cooler northern regions. The enormous quantities of ice could not disappear while the Greenland ice cap was still picking up its usual ration of new ice each year. In 1982 we read of the Soviet discovery of well-developed Bronze Age settlements in the Kola Peninsula, about the same latitude as the Greenland drill sites, with materials (slate) imported from far to the South [9] . Velikovsky pointed long ago to the discovery of human artifacts beneath the huge hecatombs of mammals and trees jumbled en masse in the Fairbanks District of Alaska; he reported, too, the hills of smashed bones on the islands of New Siberia, product of very recent events, and the findings of paleolithic, neolithic, and bronze age settlements in northeastern Siberia. The coasts of the Arctic Ocean permitted well-developed cultures in early historical times; metallurgy was practiced at Yakutsk "to make axes, beautiful bronze tips for the spears, knives and even swords" [10] . "Organic vestiges in the drift of the last glaciation have been found to be of a radiocarbon age pointing to a time 3500 years ago" [11] , while the ice appeared to be advancing about 10,000 years ago and therefore the last ice age decline or collapse must have occurred more recently. If this last figure were valid, and compared with the muddled ice of the "last glaciation" assigned 20,000 years in the ice core, most of the ice core would be foreshortened by 50%, throwing of all historical and prehistorical calibrations. Be it as it may, the chief problem is the undeniable occurrence of geophysical activity quite incompatible with the radiometric, varve, and microparticle indicators of the Greenland glaciologists. Nuclear blasts of recent years do put in an appearance. Why is it then that remote events are apparently prevented by wind patterns of the upper atmosphere from carrying signals to Greenland? A cyclonic explosion large enough to expel material from the Earth into space might not send dust the great distance to the Greenland ice cap, but I doubt this. The most remarkable feature of the ice core records is their uniform quality. Could this be a "defined" hence spurious uniformity? Precipitation of water and oxygen isotopes, climate, and underlying rock temperatures are surprisingly constant over thousands of years. "Post-glacial" times show "surprisingly stable accumulation conditions" [12] . The 800 top meters of the Camp Century core count off 4000 years with uniform temperatures. No other climatic indicator on this planet shows such a uniformity. Microparticle concentrations do alter substantially with "the end of the Wisconsin glaciation;" they "suggest high storminess and/ or atmospheric turbidity at that time" [13] . Considering that Greenland was so-named not only because Eric the Red was hustling immigrants but because he found the land more verdant than today, the waxing and waning of pollen signals should have by now prompted another technique of validating the use of ice varves in setting up a time scale. A continuous series of annual (or decennial) pollen density rates have not been published, to my knowledge. The Greenland scientists report concentrations of volcanic activity in this latest millennium and in the millennium from -6000 to -7000. This does not conform to the impressions left with us by ancient history and geology. The first millennium and the second millennium B. C. were both marked by very heavy volcanism so far as legend and archaeology can be depended upon, and heavy disturbances may have been almost continuous before then. The Danish group speaks of a dry period 18,000 years ago in the ice core period [14] . In other places [15] it marks dusty turbulence, but not in the dry period. Why does not the dryness raise dust in noticeable amounts? And why does not precipitation in dry years contain more microparticles than in wet years? The Greenland core ends in many meters of debris, which may or may not originate from a grinding of the bedrock; it may be a settling of debris when the undermost ice diffuses and spreads out leaving the debris behind, or turns to water and seeps out. In the Antarctic, the lowest meters constitute a shallow lake, rendered so perhaps by the pressure of the ice sheet alone. Or is the pressure supplemented by warmth emanating from the rocks below? And is this temperature constant? Does an ice cap melt from the top or from the bottom, or both? Does it glide off and calve from the top or the bottom? Most scientists will agree that ice is disposed of from below. If such is the case, the time measured by different cores will probably be affected by the conditions of the Earth - the depth of the crust, the proximity of mantle magma intrusions, the stresses and strains horizontally suffered by the ice. Will dust and particles descend in a given column faster over time than the original ice varve to which they pertained? Probably so, because of greater density and hardness. This may be the source of the bottom debris, but the bottom debris may not be so immobile as we conjectured above and may be moving out laterally at a faster rate than its bulk presence would indicate. An accelerated rate of bottom removal would only make the core younger and the present ice age longer than the scientists believe. Instead of registering the 100,000th year at the bottom, hundreds of thousands of years may have slipped away, and only the latest 100,000 years is present in the core. That is, provided the years are registered accurately. But the core is measured annually for hundreds of years at the top, and then in averages for the balance of the core. The statistical projection may depart far from the reality. The curve adopted to portray the rate of thinning of varves in the first hundreds of years will take very different shapes with only slightly different initial assumptions and observations. Also, the warmer the base of the core, the younger the core averages above. The Greenland cores have been synchronized to some extent by the investigators, and they are well aware of the serious discrepancies that begin to appear, and of how at one slice a core will signal an event that is not signaled at what should be the corresponding slice of a second core. That is, local conditions on the Greenland ice cap itself, operating in what is logically the most uniform of environments, will occasion salient differences between presumptively equivalent crosssections. If this is happening within Greenland, how well can Greenland register events around the world? Not even the Laki (Iceland) eruption of 1783 correlates. This immense disaster registered high at the Crete drill site in acid fall-out but at best feebly at the Dye 3 and Milcent drill sites. The incongruity demands a satisfactory explanation. Some small and large parts of each core are defective for analysis, for various reasons. The defects do not, in the investigators' opinion, occur because of external events destroying the validity of the rest of the cores, and we must accept their judgment in this regard. But suppose that there occurred a severe temperature rise over the whole of the cap and much of the ice melted and flooded away, and upon their remnant was founded a new progression which endured for a thousand or even three thousand years; would not this catastrophe go unnoticed in the ice core, and the remnant be dated as a regular recession from rates calculated from the layering of the new ice? Is this not very similar to a typical problem of unconformity in stratigraphy? Again we turn to the unreal niceness of the rates of accumulation and the neatly descending diminishing varves. The oxygen 18 isotope, annually giving us a high and low of its deposition as the year cycles from warm to cold, seems like a measures too good to be true. Is it possible that the measure works only in those years that have a high and low between certain limits, and that when the limits are exceeded, one way or the other, the ratio no longer registers? Is it possible indeed that the O 18 ratio is defining, rather than measuring, temperatures? And what is true of the ice may be true of the measuring instrument. Why should the oxygen 18 isotope be constant in vapor of the atmosphere (apart from normal temperatures that affect whether it falls or does not fall)? Would not cosmic and solar storms, and everything else affecting the atmospheric gases tend to disturb the measuring gas, too? The O 18 uniformity may be both judge and executioner of time and occurrences. The investigators have endeavored heroically to stabilize irregularities of the isotope signal by checking microparticle density, varve thickness, and acid content against the gas test, and one can observe in their efforts the progression of the common sense idea of varves into a nightmare of adjustments, extrapolations, complex indices, and averages. No articles can contain and describe for the outsider all the reassurances that he may need and should have; good faith and the objectivity emerging from teamwork will have to be involved. The anxiety of the external critic is augmented by the inattention of the literature to seeming contradictions of the type previously alluded to, the studies of glacial conditions elsewhere which indicate decisive events that somehow should be called forth from the ice cores-cases like Niagara Falls, for instance. Another example would be a study of the late ice-free period off of Labrador, when a considerable flora grew on the land nearby at 21,000 carbon-14 years B. P., and where postglacial vegetation had hitherto been dated at 8,000 to 10,000 years B. P. [16] . Other examples would be the massive recent deposits and arctic human communities referred to earlier. There have been severe recent climatic changes, say most glaciologists, natural historians, and historians of ancient cultures. It is inconceivable that these are not, in one way or another, sometimes if not always, registered in ice cores of 100,000 years of age. Climatic and disastrous events would clump together at times, guaranteeing a more effective signal to be registered in the ice; Tunguska would be only a single instance of this. That the proven inconstancy of solar storms, hence of particle bombardment of the atmosphere, would not affect O 18 concentration in atmospheric vapor from one year to the next and from one century to another, is highly unlikely. Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, himself author of a formidable treatise on geology, Continents in Motion, reported directly upon the Greenland drilling expeditions (August 9, 1981). He describes the physical set-up at Dye 3, a multi-national effort with scientists of five nations as participants, that has drilled 6600 feet to bedrock. He writes: Like the North Sea drilling platforms, it is a community on stilts, with extensive living quarters, dining facilities and recreation rooms. Every few years it is jacked higher on its stilts to keep it well above the accumulating snow. Bemused by their predicament, I inquired of Mr. Sullivan on August 20, 1981: Perhaps you can solve this puzzle which has occasioned some friendly arguments hereabouts. If the stilts of the living quarters of the scientists have had to be raised considerably since the project began, because of the accumulation of snow, say 10 centimeters of snow [actually the true fall is more], and this 10 centimeters represents at the same time a compression downward of the ice (that is, it is a true rise in the altitude of the ice cap) would not, at a uniform rate of precipitation, the ice cap of, say, 2 kilometers depth, have been built up from bed rock in 20,000 years? Sullivan replied on Sept. 10, 1981 that "the station's true elevation above sea level does not change substantially," for "The snow accumulates; Dye 3 is jacked up; and the ice beneath it flows away toward the coast." Also, "Central Greenland has probably been covered with ice considerably more than a million years, but the older ice has long since gone out to sea as icebergs." For the moment, it may be that the altitude of the camp remains the same, although this may be difficult to measure from "8700 feet above sea level." This means that roughly every decade about 100 centimeters moves out toward the sea. But this bottom 100 centimeters represents many hundreds of years. All of this ever-worsening bottom record is finally destroyed each decade. A warming period with high precipitation might wipe out long stretches of time, younging the entire core, fattening the top layers and pressing out larger sections of the bottom, even while the total column length might remain the same. The action might proceed rapidly, under certain meteorological conditions. Even though the recent period of several centuries might be well-marked, the lower sections of the core would be uninformative. But as we have seen, there do exist problems with the recent sections. I have implied that the altitude has not been measured, or at least precisely measured, within the limits demanded of the problem, that is, over several decades and in centimeters. All glaciologists are divided into three parts: those who say the ice caps are growing, those who say they are diminishing, and those who say they are constant. If it happens that the cap is here growing, and has grown by an average of a meter per decade, then the drilled core will be only 20,000 years old or less, which would suit short-time quantavolutionists well. I cannot think that the glaciologists, so apparently scrupulous in their methodology, have calculated coefficients of correlations between the a) ? (O 18 ) and b) particle and c) varve-thickness measures of the cores drilled at the several Greenland sites. Yet I have not come across them, and my cursory ocular inspection leads me to fear that the correlations are low, perhaps even to the point of insignificance. But these measures are themselves complex indices and the several variables that compose them also require correlation. Multiple correlation techniques need to be applied. If the correlations are absent, but can be raised to significance by grouping annual varves into decades, or even centuries, then some claims of ice core glaciology will be damaged but the large claim that interest us, from our radical perspective, will possibly remain strong, namely, that no worldwide catastrophe involving atmospheric contamination can have occurred over the past 20,000 years. If this single claim is or were to be firmly established, it would have to be concluded that glaciology has eliminated the theory of recent quantavolutions in natural history. Has this claim in fact been established on scientific and empirical foundations? The more regular that glacial history in Greenland is portrayed by the tests, the more a critic is inclined to see some major and fatal flaw in the system. It is too early to take a final position on ice core chronometry, and incomparably more research into the matter would be required than is presented here. As with sedimentary varves and tree rings, a great confidence must be devised upon the investigators, or the outsider must be guided hand in hand through the process to appease his doubts; some of the greatest catastrophists have been persuaded of their views by intimate contact over long periods of time with the morphology of the regions of their work-the Utah deserts, the Sierra Nevadas, and so on, yet they are not believed by most scientists. Meanwhile, every interested scholar will take up his position in terms of his interests, biases, and hopes. Acting as one of them, the present writer must shepherd his own flock of theories. These contemplate a world history that experiences a half-dozen major quantavolutionary episodes over the past 14,000 years. During this period of catastrophes, Greenland would have been severed on all sides from a Pangean land mass. It would have been deluged by ice, then overrun by tides, then subjected some 6000 years ago to another deluge of ice. Much of the ice (and snow) would have originated exoterrestrially. Cataclysms are pictured that would build a kilometer of ice in a short time. Many successive waves of snow and ice, whirled about, as pure and free from dust as outer space itself, would have plunged upon Greenland. Would some semblance of a calendar of the years finally remain to be manifested when, on top of it, two thousand fairly regular years succeeded, lending a false conception of what lay below? Probably. {S : Notes (Chapter 11)} Notes (Chapter 11) 1. Hammer et al., "Dating of Greenland Ice Cores by Flow Models, Isotopes, Volcanic Debris, and Continental Dust," 20 Glaciology, 82 (1978), 3. 2. W. Dansgaard et al., 218 Science 4579 (24 Dec. 1982), 1273 3. Unpubl. note of August 1977. Cf. II S. I. S. R. 2 (1977) 31; Soc. Interdisc. Studies R. 4 (1980), 82. 4. Letter of Sept. 20,. 1983. 5. See I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, Part I, A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, and V. Clube and W. Napier, Cosmic Serpent, together with other studies of the same writers and numerous other authors, cited in these texts and in the pages of the S. I. S. R., Kronos and Pensée magazines. See also Part I, here above. 6. C. V. Hammer, H. B. Clausen, an W. Dansgaard, in 288 Nature, 20 Nov. 1980, 233. 7. New Scientist. Sept. 2, 1982, 620. 8. Soviet Weekly. June 26, 1982. 9. Earth in Upheaval, "Supplement: Forum Address," (1953). 10. Ibid. 287, citing studies of Suess, Science, Oct. 24, 1952. 11. Glaciology, 20. 12. Ibid. 12. 13. Science, March 15, 1976. 14. Glaciology, 12, e. g. 15. G. Vilks and P. J. Mudie, "Early Deglaciation of the Labrador Shelf," 202 Science (15 Dec. 1978), 1181-3. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 2: } {Q GEOLOGICAL ISSUES: } {C Chapter 12: } {T A FAILED EXCURSION TO THE CAVES OF AQUITAINE } {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Two: Geological Issues CHAPTER TWELVE A FAILED EXCURSION TO THE CAVES OF AQUITAINE When the Ninth Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences announced an excursion to the paleolithic sites of Southwest France, I joined up. It was September 1976. The Guidebook of the Excursion was admirably executed and was prefaced by a motive for the excursion: "In the first place, to return as a pilgrimage to the sources of the science of prehistory; to see or revisit these world-renowned sites, which have given their name to the great epochs of Prehistory: Abbevillian, Acheulian, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian and so many others of the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Protohistory." What's in a name? - something of national pride, I fear. Who dares to question "the great epochs of Prehistory?" My personal motives were sinister, as is discoverable in a journal entry upon arrival at the Hotel Terminus in Bordeaux, August 30. I go to the Hotel Terminus, whose dignified greystone mass juts out from the trystone facade of the station. It is quiet and polished at the reception. "I am a day early but am reserved for tomorrow night with the archaeological group." No problem with the room. But no archaeological group is expected. "Wait," says the pretty receptionist to the handsome assistant-manager. "There is a letter here about a Monsieur Halloway, from an archaeological society." (I wonder whether it is the anthropologist Halloway.) I know at least that something will be happening with the tour. "Please ask Mr. Halloway if he might phone me when he arrives." My room is broad, tall, and old-fashioned. The hotel was built to outlast the recent growth of the city. When I draw the long draperies and throw open the large windows, I am just above the melee of the railroad station. A paradisiac room for an urban sociologist. I am content. I feel like working immediately. I clear the little mirrored table, pour out a glass of Glenfiddich's whisky, and begin to leaf through my folders, stopping at a point where it occurs to me to write down the kinds of questions I must be asking myself and others throughout the field trip through the country of the famous prehistoric caves. I copy them here. 1) Is superposition the same everywhere? 2) How clear are the separations of "cultures"? Nearly always very sharp and clear? Sometimes very sharp and clear? Only occasionally very sharp and clear Never very sharp and clear 3) At how many sites are: all cultures represented? 'x' cultures represented? 4) Are animal remains found? In what % of the caves? Are human remains found? In what % of the caves? 5) Are C14 dates compiled from 'x' caves? and available? 6) Has any K/ A [Potassium 40-Argon 40] dating been done? Where? 7) Any other radiochronology, e. g. on ceramics? 8) What is the substance of "sterile" layers inside a cave? Why formed? Do these layers correspond to ash or in the same type of material outside the cave? (Where can I find statistics of the caves? Dating (absolute) of the reported 5 ash-levels around the Cro- Magnon dig?) So the questions. But these are only a beginning. For several years, I have wondered who these people of the caves where? Where do they belong in time? Are they truly a presence that ranges from 5,000 to 15,000 to 30,000 or even 100,000 years in age? What created the caves? Opened them up? Sealed them? Opened them and sealed them repeatedly? What natural forces were playing about the world outside? The caves must have been used and disused while the last ice age came and went. The great paintings. Were they to celebrate the presence of animals or pray for their return? Where are the heavens represented in the caves? Could some of the animals be a zodiac of the caverns? I begin once more to riffle my pages. I am unprepared for the trip. This summer, until now, I have been writing of other subjects, related to ancient catastrophes - on schizophrenia among the first humans, of sudden destruction of cultures in the Middle Bronze Age, of the science of catastrophes. Now and then I would come across some mention of the cave country of France, of Spain, of grottoes of Africa and Italy, of the great Choukoutien cave of pithecanthropus in China. I know of ice caves as in America where ice lies deposited between layers of lava and schist, and melts very gradually over thousands of years. Why are none of the caves of Aquitaine 'ice caves'? The ice was near. But I know nobody - neither expert guides nor "congressistes," as the group of us are called. I have found no geological map of the area: how can I ask questions, or ask the all-important critical follow-up questions without sub-surface and contour information? I have not read enough about the caves to be more than a sponge of information, too little to be a cross-examiner. The telephone rings. It is Halloway, just arrived. He is pleased to know, too, that someone besides himself has appeared on the scene. He is from Providence, from Brown University, a classical archaeologist. We arrange to have a drink together in half an hour. I take a hot tub bath, rearrange my tangled jumble of possessions, and walk down the broad stairs of the foyer to meet him. There I note a puzzled couple, and hear the receptionist clerk saying to the man: "You are not by any means the first of this archaeological group of which we know nothing." Halloway appears. About 40, bearded, sturdily built, bespectacled. We shake hands. "Let's try the competition across the street," I suggest. We go to the bar-restaurant of the Hotel du Faisan, and order Pernod. He is just in from the States, changed planes in Paris. Tired. He will go to bed directly. He has been digging in Southern Italy for several years, an early Bronze site particularly, where metal and pots are cooked on platforms of vitrified rock that they made. There is an abundance of ash. I inquire where the ash comes from. "From their work. When it got too high, they built another platform." "Any signs of a level of destruction?" "None," "Why did they stop?" "The work simply stopped. We don't know. Maybe if we dig up the area around we may discover why." We pay 12 Francs and leave. I return to my room, glance through Whitesides' Archaeological Atlas for a while, and descend to the Buffet-Restaurant of the train station. A vegetable soup, merlu fried with lemon, crème caramel, bread, wine (Bordeaux, of course). I discover I can see faces in the distance distinctly better with my bifocal glasses. This is a surprise. My eyes are getting old. To bed, quite tired, at 11: 30. The Atlas drops from my hands. The next day I bought for the trip a Masson geological guidebook to Western Aquitaine and a camera. Back at the room in the evening. I am writing: " 'Why did they have to close the caves at Les Eyzies? ' And the answer, as often as the question: 'The pollution of the crowd was destroying the images. ' The heat, the torches - I recall one beautifully printed book saying something about thousands of sweating bodies and the vanishing images. What of the sweating caves themselves? "Do caves not sweat? Stalagmites, stalagmites. An image in paint. Who can seal it in a wet tube of dripping walls and clay bottoms for 10,000 years and find it intact afterwards? I can understand the images carved into rock, but the paint that outlives them and the paint laid on flat - what preserves it? There must be good answers. Geologists and specialists on paints have visited the caves by the hundreds. How stupid I am not to figure out why! Just as I felt stupid when I stood at a headland day before yesterday, at St. Jean de Luz, and watched belts and streams of thinly laminated rock plunging crazily, tortured at all angles, into the sea, which rushes at them, foaming. What manufactured these fine layers in the dozens and then pushed them negligently over the sea like a jumble of tissue, like rolls of toilet paper?" Within three days, I gave up the idea of an extensive account of my observations. At 11 p. m. September 3rd, I am writing in my journal at Périgueux: Three heavy days and two bad nights have brought me to think that I shouldn't continue. Nothing ever works out the way that is expected. When the mind lacks coherence, everything lacks meaning. When the environment is confusing, it is difficult to be coherent. Why be so abstract when the simple fact is that I have been struggling for three days merely to keep pace with a group that is moving all the time with little sense of itself through strange country and unanticipated petty troubles of existence. The beds have been bad, the meals poor, the bus-riding tortuous and prolonged, the days of forced company ranged around the clock... What is the writer to do? But most of all, the prehistoric times as they are advancing towards me from Aquitaine are a rough and dismaying array whose frightening aspect makes me want to retire from the fray. In 3 days, we have ridden hundreds of miles, inspected 3 caves (I have gone into Lascaux today), 4 sites, 22 cuts, and spotted a number of caves, sites and cuts from the halted or moving bus. In addition we have visited three museums. Sets and trays of paleolithic or later artifacts march through my head in silent columns. The people of the group are of greater interest, what they say, who they are. It is pathetic, in a way, to watch the paleolithic age scholar with his or her miserable accumulations of evidence and desperate concentration as if by specialization on the edge of a blade one can pierce the gloom of the birth of mankind. I am imitating them as well as I can, gazing fiercely at the cobbles and chips, hoping, too, for the Message. Sporadic entries followed, but in the end I was left with handbooks and notes and questions, whereupon we all lost ourselves in the melee of the great Congress at Nice. There was nothing left but to reminisce. I was overwhelmed by the organization, the discipline, and the assuredness of the Masters of the Caves. I do not see how any individual, unless he could lead a precarious double life over a decade of time, could treat with the Ideology of the Caves. Lacking access and resources, an outsider could only work with the printed materials, a few visits, and a deductive theory bringing to bear the general materials of archaeology and geology. Could not some authoritative scholar, long versed in the intricacies of Aquitanian archaeology, emerge in due course to say, "Dear colleagues, we must review and reevaluate the conventional theory of the Upper Paleolithic." Impossible, sociologically impossible. One would have to reverse his spin of perspective and contemplate a strange new model. Then, once persuaded of its utility, he would need to persuade others to listen to him, obtain resources for seemingly absurd research, and hold onto his job - not likely! To compose a new theory of the caves, one must consider the origin of the caves. Could they have been quickly formed and folded in the orogeny of the Massif Central and the bursting of hundreds of volcanoes in the Holocene, even while the great Atlantic cleavage shoved Europe to the East? Heat and steaming waters can form caves quickly, and so the interesting natural sculpture within the caves, as I noted in our visit to the caves of Oxocelhaya and Isturitz. Does any animal besides man penetrate into these grottoes? What geologically explains the great variety of forms? Different floodings and temperatures? The impossibility of any informed layman or ordinary scholar gaining much from visiting the caves. Bronze Age is found in the cave at Isturitz. Each chamber looks as if done up by a distinctive decorator. Red and black paint on the walls still from Paleolithic, little black horses. (Humidity constant? Young?) Stalactites make different sounds when struck. Any evidence that they were used as producers of sound? Recall: guide (" untrained") who made anthropomorphic figures out of every calcite formation. Recall: the glass cases where hundreds of objects were arranged "technologically" with no indication of where they were found, how originally, etc. (Compare with taking 2 congresses and by putting all Republicans in the first and all Democrats in the second, you show that a pure Republican was succeeded by a pure Democratic age.) All the hoopla (the comic strip ascendancy of man from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, etc.) At Eyres-Moncube, we come upon the Gisement of Pennon, dug out by Professor Thibault, who explains it to us. He is: very confident, certain in his modes of expression, polite, direct, says when he rarely doesn't 'know. ' Shows occasionality of use of this site. Maybe used as a flint- cutting site. Again deposits of sand that could be laid in a week or 100,000 years, followed by occupation, then another huge deposit contrast, another occupation... No hint of catastrophism among the 45 people... Time calendar not even discussed by anyone so far... Interest is general, attention good, but questions almost entirely factual and answers accepted. No controversy. Is this science: maybe so. Some complaint about not enough manpower to dig. Not one mention of skies. One American, expatriate in Canada, says unusually, 'Why did these people use the caves? ' Practically no interest in psychology. No talk of institutions. I probably initiate (stimulate) one half of the total volume of psychological or theoretical talk, now here, now there, often walking off, never completed. Desultory. As we near Lascaux, I jot down a nearly undecipherable note, written on the bus. I notice how often 2 or more (or all) of belts of deposits in Aquitaine look exactly alike save for a slight color and grain change. If you don't peer at it, it looks like a huge subsoil of the same sand (except here and there are stones). Yet they are dated even in a single profile as far apart as Holocene, Pleistocene, Quaternary, Tertiary and maybe even earlier. (And of course Riss, Wurm, Mendel I, II, III, and all of that, in between). Strange! Highly improbable. At Lascaux: Whenever calcite grains capture color they hold it. When the powdered rock is painted it has lost the paintings. Thus Case A: Bottom half of horse clearly and nicely painted, little affected... top half has disappeared, "because it is on calcacerous stone but not on the calcite like the lower half is." Quite persuasive. But what does this indicate about time? Two factors are involved in question whether a color will be preserved: the surface (calcite or not) and the pigment (whether organic carbon as in oil smoke or inorganic as in earth-oxide colors). At the overhanging Gisement of Micoque: Almost no assemblages are in order, and could be disastrous. Lots of open air digs. More than caves. Everywhere in Dordogne you dig you find some paleolithic artifacts. Never cases of reversed superposition of cultures: one is always earlier (below) other according to the progression. Sometimes contemporaneity, causing concern, but, to repeat, never true bouleversement... No tectonic bouleversement. Settlements occurred even during the cold glacial periods, as at Aschenheim during Riss II. Different types of limestone form in different caves. I was watchful for signs of ashes. Very little reported or to be noticed. Where, in one place, carbon flecks were noticeable amidst clay sands laying over a silt bank and solid reddish soil, there occurred white bones on the same level. The carbonized bits could have been percolated from an occupancy location, or wind-blown or carried in by a flood that swept in and dispersed hearth ashes, or they dissolved into a soil. No systematic testing of soils for organic carbon content seems to have been done. In one case a 20 X 20 meter area carried an 8 inch band of carbonization; it is explained as the effect of many hearth fires, which I accept. It appears that peat is heavily deposited in Aquitaine. How would this peat relate to Mackie's study of a peat deposit about half a meter deep over a megalith otherwise dated at about 800 B. C.? Neolithic farmsites are found under bogs of peat in Ireland. Over 10 meters of peat formed in the Holocene and is found below the river valley of Eau Claire. Another river running parallel runs on top of a peat bed of the same proportions. La Cluna abri-cave contains a one-meter level of Mousterian culture stuffed with bones of different species, including large mammals. Mousterian sites often end with blocks of animal and human bones mélangés. Magdalenian sites were usually smashed up sooner or later by seismic disturbances, or so it is believed. A scholar present told of the extinct volcano, now Laacher See, 80 km South of Bonn. It lacks cone or crater lip. Over 100 extinct eruptive sources of same type are found in the same region. Laacher is said to have exploded during the Allerit Period, around 11,000 B. P. Deep tufa is scattered around and to the East as far as Thuringia. A band of carbonized vegetation in the coastal area of the Netherlands is placed at the same time. We have only begun to fathom the fire remains of the Paleolithic. At Langerie Haute, for instance, a meter of ash rests on top of the Upper Magdalenian culture, coinciding, it is believed, with the very end of the Ice Age. I note (Sept. 7) that the excavators do not find materials of recent times, and it would seem that after Magdalenian VI, the sites were abandoned. Upper Magdalenian is loaded with doubts and controversy. Some experts see sub-periods when others do not. Magdalenian III, IV, V are often clumped together; some argue this is an effect of seismism, others that warmth may have cracked and caused rock overhangs to fall. Water action, too, is blamed. But also some say there were no plural periods. The walls of Ruffignac contain two groups of mammoths marching towards each other. They exhibit a fine sense of order, a disciplined composition. Elsewhere a parade of mammoths is overdrawn by serpentine lines. At Ruffignac, all corridors are very soft and wet, both floors and walls. One senses big water nearby. If in historic times, as reported, a flood covered the first kilometer of the cave up to the ceiling, a larger earlier flood would have swamped the whole tunnel complex and wiped out all artwork. I make note that an anthropologist from the University of Massachusetts speaks doubtfully of an arrangement of a circle of crystals and a triangular display of the skulls of a deer, bison and horse uncovered at Nice. He says that this same site contained post-holes to support shacks, which postholes remained unchanged over 100,000 years except for small movements here and there. I questioned the time, saying that it was impossible for such a composition to remain unchanged for longer than a few hundred years. A physical anthropologist from Cornell asserted that people made the same kind of tools for 100,000 years or more, citing the Acheulian. I disputed this as well; he agreed with me on the first, which concerned Pont d'Ambon, though not the second. The psycho-sociology of invention would lead me to doubt that the strongest conservatism can prevent technical adaptations to the forces of the environment. Technology may often change faster than prayers. The trip continues and I jot down another note: The Pont d'Ambon site can be critical. A stream runs parallel to the bluffs, quietly, slowly, 100 yards away. No allowance here or in numerous other gisements for violent inundations from time to time. Yet, considering that the period is said to occur here from 12,300 to 9300 = 2800 years, more or less, river floods must have occurred 50 to 100 times, enough to wash out the place. (Heavy climatic changes were said to be occurring.) The best defense is that originally the stream was deep and not until the whole shelf was filled up and abandoned in 9640 B. P. did any flooding of significance occur. We discussed this question, some saying that the river started as a "V", but then it would have been caused by a catastrophic flash-flood to begin with, which in any event would slowly fill with sediments and broaden. But it is narrow. On the objection I thought they might raise, that the stream might have been farther away, the land rises on the other side gently. Further the men of the shelter would wand to be close to the water, so the stream would not change that much. Further, if a stream did change its course, it would do so in the course of catastrophe that would have inundated the living or occupation site. One said that this area might have been spared glacial flashfloods or heavy drainage, but I doubt this and, furthermore, heat and humidity, by pollen tests, indicate watery climate part of the time. In sum, there are grounds for believing that the neat-appearing stratigraphic profile at Pont d'Ambon may testify to a rapid succession of a few seasons with stages of Magdalenian and Azilian occurring with different occupants carrying the "latest" stone chippings. The "climates" vary remarkably but may be erratic seasons; the flora and fauna change, but so they will change even now from year to year. The correlations among all four - technique, climate, flora and fauna are quite poor. There is a considerable mixing of artifacts as well. The dates are based upon five radiocarbon tests done on unscorched deer bone. Over a thousand years (half the whole time) seems to have slipped away between the earliest two strata of the Azilian levels: erosion? abandonment? never existed? The absolute dates are probably far too old, to my way of thinking, which views radiocarbon as having little knowable association with the passage of time before 3000 years ago. With due caution for what may happen in the laboratory, the relative dates may be significant, but there is one contradiction in dates among the five possible ones, and the Azilian and Magdalenian periods are so close as to overlap when allowance is made for error (i. e. 12130 160 and 12340 220). The lack of profuse material deposits of the Upper Paleolithic would be explained by the hunting-gathering complex, which seems to permit only a few inhabitants and these usually on the move. Still, where are the permanent settlements of the age? We cannot believe that the cave-users were dwellers therein; else they would be very neat housekeepers (and, in fact, what material exists is strewn about in disorder). How deep is 1000 years of an average Near Eastern tell? How deep is the typical thousand years of paleolithic occupancy? No answers are given to these answerable queries. Despite arduous labors of classification, the cultural divisions of the Upper Paleolithic are not absolute, and may not hold out much longer, especially as the geographical areas studied expand toward Asia and Africa. The Solutrean may be contemporaneous with Magdalenian, with, it has been suggested, the tools developed by horse-hunters especially. Some tools (including Levallois bifaces) that are classified as Mousterian (Neanderthal) penetrate the kits of Upper Magdalenians. I resort to my journal: The typical stratification of an excavated abri, cave, or open site permits various wash-outs and wash-ins of material, and gaps of flooding, of quick "decade" or "century" pollen and faunal changes. The reason why this short-term stratification is ignored or neglected is that C14 dates of charcoal and bones generally produce "acceptable" dates from 9000 B. P. to 18,000 B. P. for these strata. From the earliest level, say 15,000 to latest, say 10,000, there are 5000 years of time to account for in the strata and hence they are regarded as long-term deposits, rather than short-term ones. Many of the papers and discussions of the IXth Congress centered upon the climates and ecologies of the various hominids and men. Talk of 'warming' and 'cooling', of interstadials, of Wurm I and II, of moist and dry, consumed much of the week's work and hundreds of papers. Then came 'shards, ' and them came dates, which are intended to bring order to the discoveries but, like climatic schedules, are a source of confusion in themselves. The chronologists and the stone-flake classifiers are preponderant elements of a profession that has few findings with which to work, and a deep suspicion of theory. Prehistorians prefer to study coprolites rather than human thought. They are like pollsters who, by getting rid of anomalous, misunderstood, or complex responses, present the public as speaking in "baby talk." When it comes to fields of megaliths weighing tons, they go so far, under great pressure from a few cranks, as to believe that early man wanted to find the solstices and equinoxes and plot the Moon's course, but hardly attend to the question of motives underlying the movement of great stones. But the megaliths of Stonehenge and Brittany are a better measure of the fearful memories and expectations of their builders than of their astronomical skills. The excursion ended at the Congress of Nice, subject of my last note. September 13, 1976 French domination of the field of prehistory is especially evident in the grand trappings of the IXth Congress whose name is emblazoned in giant letters upon thousands of posters around Nice as if it were a World's Fair or at least the Cannes Film Festival. The field was taken up by the French a hundred years ago when the rest of the world ignored pre-history, thought it was amusing (as with the American Indians) but not a great discipline, or was deficient in all field research areas of historical science (as e. g. Thailand, India) and relied upon legends. But the concentration of leadership means the concentration of concepts and their imperialism in many places where they are perhaps inapplicable. Written during a thoroughly boring grand reunion in the Hall of the Parc d'Expositions. 1/ 5 of the 3000 people is listening, the rest gaze here and there, listen absentmindedly, think of other matters, talk to their neighbors or as I, read and write. There are 21 on the high, semi-circular rostrum. 2 hours are given over to it. I was able to be only 30 minutes late. The Program is intimidating. Hundreds of papers are listed, among them mine. Yet calculate the time per paper permitted, and it comes to 3 minutes each. Obviously some will not have come to Nice, others will scarcely cover the sub-titles of their talk, some will cling fiercely to the rostrum, some will summarize for others. The usual main function of coming to meet one's kind is rather poorly provided for because the residences are widely separated and as yet I've not seen the central "hall of encounters" that should be the central focus of all such conventions. [Later I concluded that the vast list of papers was an effective method of helping hundreds of scholars to get a vacation from their repressive governments, to boost their local reputations, and to qualify for travel funds and foreign exchange.] The Congress ended, I posted a score of volumes of preliminary reports to America, I met Dr. Elizabeth Ralph, Director of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History, and we went home together. Princeton, September 18, 1976 Elizabeth Ralph told me among many things, that: a. She thought Velikovsky was difficult and wrong. b. That the Ramses C14 dates of 13th century from at least 3 types of material disproved him and that there were 19th dynasty 7th century readings. c. That she almost lost her job in the fracas over doing some tests for Velikovsky (those were the ones that FOSMOS of which I was President authorized circa 1970 but Bruce Mainwaring carried on all the negotiations and asked all the nasty questions in his sweet way.) I doubt this but she was scared by her boss Rainey, I suppose, as well as the unusual excitement over the matter of testing Velikovsky's stuff. She is a tough, durable woman, masculine, straight-talking. Like just about everyone in the controversy vs. Velikovsky, she is not as fully informed as she thinks nor understands all the branches of logic involved. d. I raised question after question with her during the 12 hours we were altogether on the ground and aloft, eating, drinking (she drank a lot) smoking (ditto) and talking. I wasn't arguing, which is useless, but finding out what this remarkable woman knew about many questions that bothered me. Most, of course, she couldn't answer. It was important, I think, that she liked my rough sketch on an Air France route map of the outlines of a Hudson Bay Crater (Chubb Islands as the center), a second circle of lakes and water all around the center of Chubb Islands, including the Great Lakes and Great Slave Lake, etc. She had no objections either to my theory of all-around mid-second millennium destruction. e. She said, in answer to my question about magnetometers, which she has employed in Greece and elsewhere, that they aren't too useful and are useless where ash and pumice are measured. There must be metal in the rock to take a direction after the melt, so she wasn't able to do much on Thera with Marinatos. f. She said that for political reasons, that is, the insistence of Marinatos, they've held off their latest Thera measure for years, because it was 1650 while he was convinced of its being 1450 . I know the Thera dating is in confusion, quite apart from this incident. g. Yet Elizabeth said in answer to my careful questioning that all their dates were published, for better or worse, even if they did not turn out well for the investigators. (I cannot believe this, as see above [with Marinatos].) She takes several runs on every date and if they aren't close to their average, she throws them away and starts over again. "Throws them away" bothers me, although at the moment I cannot stop to pursue the effects of the logic of throwing things away. h. She says all labs do the same, publish all in the carbondating mag, including British Museum, of which we have contrary evidence (Mainwaring's report). i. I asked her whether she knew of the old article by Folghereiter that showed Etruscan vases with South-North clay-iron filings orientations instead of North-South, which would be expected if baked in the Northern Hemisphere. This is a sharp proof of magnetic reversal of the Earth for some period of time in the 8th and 7th centuries B. C., and was uncovered and advanced as such by Velikovsky. Elizabeth says yes, but unfortunately kilns are stuffed with vases so as to bake more ceramics and conserve heat. Therefore, a vase might have been baked on its head. Yesterday I had a two-hour visit with Velikovsky in the course of which I asked his opinion of the matter. He replied that the direction of the vase in baking can be told by the glazing which drips a little in the time before it hardens. Very well. But did the glazing occur in a simultaneous baking with the clay or might the ceramic body have been backed earlier and then heated a second time for glazing perhaps at a lower temperature. This is a neat and important little problem. If one absolute case may be proven of a vase that was baked upright and acquired an opposite orientation magnetically, then we have an important proof of 8th-7th century troubles. For, as I explained to Ralph, the magnetic reversal, important in itself, would also be an effect of causes with huge other effects. With luck, this study might take a week. 1) Restudy the articles of Fohlgereiter and Mercanton (see citation in Velikovsky's work). 2) Read Monley's Science News (Penguin, 12, 1948 or 9) report on magnetism on vases. 3) Consult experts unless one or more of these are perfectly precise in handling the glaze-sequence problem. 4) Conclude: a) Further experiments on vases needed, or b1) All OK for Velikovsky b2) Problems in glazing, or b3) Problems in position, or b4) New problems Then conclusions: How long does it take for the magnetic field to reverse itself, and were vases dated accurately, and when did it reverse itself to the present? Incidentally, if this test were performed with a large number of vases from the Neolithic to present, a sample of each culture should have a modal group that is logically positioned to show the N-S axis, and this axis would be presumed to change when the modal axis changed. This might be one way of resolving the Etruscan vase mystery. (Velikovsky said Mercanton, who praised Folghereiter, was Director of the Meteorological Observatory at the University of Lausanne.) It appears in retrospect now that my excursion to the Caves of Aquitaine was a failure, yet the experiencing of it and its sequel were successes, if doubts of my own mind and the minds of others are thrown into the balance. Almost nothing of importance can be said of the Paleolithic that will stand up as fact, and almost nothing that I can add as constructive counter-fact can be proven, either. Conventional and quantavolutionary scholars dispute in a darkness like that of the caves. But we caught for a while the exciting sense, around us, of another, an ancient contest, between vast, marvelously ornate natural sculpting and determined, hard-lined drawing by tight, defiant human minds. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 2: } {Q GEOLOGICAL ISSUES: } {C Chapter 13: } {T THE LATECOMING OLDUVAI GORGE} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Two: Geological Issues CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE LATECOMING OLDUVAI GORGE In September 1976, I happened to meet Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ernst Wrestler, and other archeao- anthropologists from Israel on an excursion through the caves of Southwest Aquitaine. There I learned of the work that had been done at Ubeidiya, a location two and a half hours' drive from Jerusalem. Stekelis, who died in 1967, had brought in Louis Leakey to examine the site, and they got the idea that the Olduvai and Ubeidiya remains were closely related. Yet the latter were placed well under a million years while the former was considered a million years older. For sixteen seasons the Israelis had been on the site, but work had been suspended now for two years. I was impressed; then and now; with the probability that the East African Rift, including Olduvai Gorge, was connected in time with the Dead Sea-Syrian Rift via the Red Sea. Therefore cultural contemporaneity, I ventured to say, had also to be watched for along the whole length of the Rift. My further speculations about the extreme recency of human beginnings along the Rift were mentioned diffidently and heard with some amusement. In 1983 the Ubeidiya scholars emerged in Nature magazine with a reevaluation of their hominid remains; they redated them to coincide in time with some of the oldest of the African Rift hominids. Having gone this far, I expect that one day they will go farther and will have to claim that all along the Rift, the hominid sites, "oldest" in the world, must be brought up to the Holocene, perhaps only 14,000 years ago. Earlier in the same year, I had been considering the radiometric datings along the Rift and wrote in my journal of my doubts: March 10, 1976; Bones of humans are destroyed by weathering, animals, and disasters - fire, flood, hurricane. Bones are preserved by burial in dry tombs or sand, and by dry ash or tuff at low heat. ? All Rift burials and findings are from fall-out or quick wash flood and dry-out (i. e. volcanism or flood.) Dating by K/ A [Potassium 40-Argon 40] in Rift questionable in re: 1. Erraticism of some of dates. 2. Choice of small grains with more argon because more surface ratio to volume and therefore older dates since argon from air contaminates surfaces. 3. But younger dates may come from escape of argon at near melt temperatures following flow or fallout. 4. Questionable behavior of potassium. 5. Averaging may be used questionably. 6. Fudging and rejection unjustifiably of "impossible" dates; "reasonable" choice is unreasonable. 7. Superposition over short term can be achieved by an atmospheric condition of initial high argon content which is absorbed by first-laid rocks and then as successive rock layers are laid down (or sediments) the argon in the atmosphere is escaping and therefore less and less proportionally absorbed, giving upon test a gradient of pseudoage from bottom to top in seeming accord with super-positioning. 8. ?? Were accepted test results all reported and all blind, all from same size specimens and sampled by same procedures? 9. Regardless of age gradient of tests, tests give old readings. Since 0 argon is found on new deposits and some argon on 3000 and 36000 year old (???) deposits, how can it be said that the argon test is inapplicable to under 1,000,000 y? Such tests should be highly erratic. 10. Is K/ A a test of the amount of argon in atmosphere at time of deposit? 11. Couldn't argon 40 be exuded from K 40 by earthquake and intruded into volcanic lavas and kept there as these cooled, giving them long ages? Yes. If "trace elements" rise to the top of the Earth's crust, and if "daughter" concentrations follow suit; if "trace elements" are essential to methods of measuring rock ages; if rocks are igneous; if igneous flow (fissure or cone) proceeds by erupting lavas from the top rock melt layer, then the next to the top layer of melt, et seq., - then, radiodating will show old dates at bottom of the column, and younger dates as measurements move up. This is as expected and found. But the layering could occur in a very short time set of eruptions and evidence a series of old ages in some kind of proportions because the daughter traces will be most abundant in the lowest samples and decline progressively as the samples are taken from lower in the plasma melt. Addressing himself to that part of the African-Red Sea Rift which stands on the continent, R. B. McConnell argued a 2.7 billion year age for its beginnings and limits severely the changes of recent times [1] , compares it with the Rhine Graben and Baikal depression. I have linked all three with the simultaneous world rifting or fracturing of only a dozen millennium ago. With such old dates, McConnell has to confront a general opinion nowadays that the rift system of the oceans (and, by inference and otherwise, land) is no older than 200 million years. Moreover, the great rifts of the world, oceanic and terrestrial, seem to have been in motion as part of a world system. Spreading in widely separated regions show similarities, including correspondences even when discontinuities are compared [2] . Gregory, an early explorer of the African Rift Valley, dated the vast diatomite deposits of the lakes to the Miocene Period. But Louis Leakey found hand axes embedded in the lake deposits and therefore called them Pleistocene [3] . Olduvai Gorge appears young to the geologist's eye. All of East Africa seems so, too. The Victoria Falls and Zambezi Gorge seem very young. Suppose the Falls to be of the same age as Niagara Falls; this would place a spectacular bit of Africa within reach of 3500 years of age. A quantavolutionary view of geology tends to bring more and more features more and more together; the Earth's surface tends to be hologenetic and is seen in holistic perspective. Olduvai Gorge could have been created during the Bronze Age of Egypt. Willis speaks of a geologist's (Combe's) knowledge allowing him to tell that pebbles of tin ore found in the Kafu River came from "downstream" instead of upstream, because the course of the river had been reversed as a result of the great rifting. Since the pebbles could not be of ancient origin, the story bespeaks the recency of the change and of the Rift. Flint, in his Glacial Geology (p. 523), refers to the Rift as late Pleistocene. S. Cole discusses some of the material in a manner to support skepticism: the near total confusion of climatic periods (52 and chap. 2); the unreliable use of advances and retreats of lake sands to date Rhodesian cultures (53); the great tectonic changes of the Pleistocene; the fact that neither neolithic nor bronze ages have been found in Africa; the astonishing slowness of culture change ( million years of the same hand- stone); the great destruction of mammals notable in Olduvai beds I and II, then separated by "a million years." She says (113-4) that Olduvai Gorge "assumed its present form, with narrow floor and steep sides, in Post-Pleistocene times, when erosion cut right down into the Pleistocene deposits, thereby exposing the great series of sediments seen today." Erosion, however, does not "cut right down;" Olduvai Gorge split open quickly, hence the "narrow floor and steep sides." Cole, like L. Leakey and others, have a way of speaking of "people cultures," "industry sites," "living floors," and "living sites" for the hominids, making one wonder whether they had tile floors and awnings. A uniformitarian image is thus purveyed, and one is led to think in terms of extremely gradual sedimentation as creating the scene. Yet the australopithecine (1959) Zinjanthropus' skull "had been broken by expansion and contraction of the bentonitic [i. e. volcanic] clay in which it lay, 22 feet below the top of Bed I, which at this point is about 40 feet thick; but the bones had not been distorted in any away, and even such fragile pieces as the nasals were recovered." (117- 8) And she remarks that three or more relatives were found on Floor I and 4 meters away with "a worked bone tool." She surmises that the hominids lived upon the tortoise and catfish of the shallow waters at hand (120-1). Legbones were found standing upright; this seems impossible, given the undisturbed condition of the clay encasement, unless the long period of "sedimentation" were in fact the ash fall of a single day. "Coarse vertical rootmarkings are common in many of the tuffs..." (III, p. 11). About one-fifth of the strata contain them. They also carry through beds of sediment, evidencing other instants of high production to create the geological column above the earliest hominids. Elsewhere, in Homo Schizo I., I have spoken of the human traits of australopithecus. A perplexed discussion has long centered upon the "people culture" of Leakey's first-found hominids, and much effort has gone into depriving him of his human qualities, to no avail; Australopithecus Bosei was probably the maker of Olduvai implements, of a "two-million year old" circular stone barrier of the lowest level of Bed I [4] , a selective cracker of animal bones, with a "frequency of implemental patterns of behavior" [5] . Bed II rest conformably upon the older Bed I. Yet "a million years" has passed. Conformity suggests continuity and absence of a gap in time, and an absence of natural catastrophe. But both are evident. The fossil assemblages connote disaster. Groups of mammals and primates or people do not congregate voluntarily to await death. An elephant skeleton without a skull was found. The method and motive for separating the two are found in natural forces. The hominid finds are not nicely segregated by time gaps (see v. III, 229, 234). Strange to say, a toe bone, possibly human and modern, was found in Upper Bed I (Tuff If), belonging to an "upright, bipedal, hominid possessing a plantigrade propulsive gait." (p. 230). Many years later, modern footprints of a three person-group were found at Laetoli by Mrs. Leakey. These go towards establishing the humanness of australopithecus, or else a most embarrassing confusion of time has occurred, and australopithecus consorted with humans; the latter is possible, if all artifacts were made by beings other than australopithecus. Dr. B. Willis published in the 1930's two books which treated of the African Rift system. He remarks, as is well-known, upon the foundation rocks exposed throughout East Africa, where they are intruded or covered by volcanic products. Sediment are lacking or thin. He asks, where does the great melting below the surface that lifted the continent come from [6] ? To my way of thinking, the melting came from the immense catastrophic push of the Atlantic Ocean cleavage that moved the African crust eastwards and from an accompanying expansion of the Earth. The plateaus rose. Then the great arch cracked and dropped, forming the Rift valley. Inasmuch as the Atlantic cleavage veered East and shot up a northern branch, and this fracture cut off Madagascar and India from the African continent, the Eastern rim of the new African format could accelerate into the widening basin, and hence an auxiliary fracture, not so deep, the Rift Valley, opened; in effect, it dropped between the steep plateau walls. Volcanic products are everywhere and in all forms, ash, lava, tephra; Olduvai gorge was cut through many strata of volcanic emissions. Willis writes of meeting Louis Leakey, then of merely local fame, and J. D. Solomon, a colleague, at Lake Elmenteita in 1919. "They even think he [man] may have witnessed the later developments of the rifting to which the valley owes its character. If so, we shall have to change the time scale, either by hurrying geologic processes or by greatly prolonging the stone age of man's evolution" [7] . The latter course has been taken [8] . Yet since Olduvai Gorge fractured open after hominids and hominoids were already on the land and long buried in the area, the catastrophic event must have been witnessed by humans. Considering the topography, the Gorge is directly connected to the Rift; it is 370 feet deep; about 40 strata are identifiable in some 300 feet of depth, averaging thus about 7 feet per stratum. The fossils are found embedded in the cliffs on both sides of the gorge; the fossil beds are sandwiched between lava flows on both sides; the oldest fossil bed is termed Bed I, the youngest Bed IV. Alternative possibilities are weak: if the Gorge came first, then hominids of successive ages dug themselves into the cliffs, taking care not to disturb the lower strata as they climbed up to dig into their proper superposition. Or the Gorge may have been a small stream valley, was settled by hominid I, then lava poured over one lip, filled the valley, and covered the opposite rim, while on other occasions, volcanic fall-out layered over the whole, and in both cases the stream washed away the valley deposits; hominid II came in while the stream was cutting away the valley deposits, but then the whole process repeated itself four times until today. A third possibility is that the area was heavily settled. Then volcanic eruptions brought in ash and lava and caused evacuation of the biosphere, except for rare trapped remains. New settlements occurred, and then by the same means, Bed II occurred and was covered; and so on. Then came the rifting and gradual erosion and exposure. Gradualism contradicts evidence brought out here. And what kind of volcanic system is it, which covers the region but conveniently lays down a blanket every quarter of a million years and is resting in between-times? By far the most plausible explanation for Olduvai Gorge and its contents is successive, heavy rainfall, floods, lava streams, and ash falls, occurring over a period of a few centuries. Human types moved in and out, chancing sudden destruction and quick burial here as anywhere else. Finally the risen plateau ruptured, Olduvai being a local incident in a global frame. The climate turned dry, the volcanoes became more peaceful, soda springs hissed harmlessly and began to expire, the surviving mammal population gathered near the remaining sources of water, as did the surviving and incoming humans. To sum up, I would make several points. General quantavolutionary evidence of recent global transformations supports a short-time or microchronic view of Olduvai Gorge and its biosphere outcroppings. Potassium-argon datings support the conventional macrochronism but they are discordant and may be basically flawed. Numerous geological and paleontological indications support microchronism. The recent claim of equal age for rift remains in Israel adds support, although both these and Olduvai remains should be moved up, not back, in time. The Rift, hence the Gorge, split open late enough for human legends to carry down a report of the events. {S : Notes (Chapter 13: The Latecoming Olduvai Gorge)} Notes (Chapter 13: The Latecoming Olduvai Gorge) 1. The reference here may be to a passage from Curtis and Everden, in Louis Leakey, p. 91: "... the few volcanic sanidines of historic age dated by us have yielded ages inconsistent with the concept of zero argon content at the time of eruption. Both the 1912 eruption of Katmai and the 1304 eruption of Ischia yielded zero potassium/ argon ages. Also dates of late or post-Pleistocene event have given reasonable ages. A late Gamblian tuff from Lake Naivasha in Kenya gave 28,000 years and a prehistoric post- glacial pumiceous rhyolite done near Mono Lake, California, gave 5600 years..." However, two paragraphs later, they report a possible 11,000 year feldspar (sanidine) gave them datings of several hundred thousand years. 2. 83 Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull (Sept. 1972), 2549, at 2565. 3. Heirtzler, Dixon, Herron, Pitmann and Le Pichon, "Marine Magnetic Anomalies, Geomagnetic Field Reversals and Motions of the Ocean Floor and Continents," 73 J. Geophysical Res. (1968), 2119-36. 4. Sonia Cole, The Prehistory of E. Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964). 5. L. Leakey naively compares his "fort" to those erected by the Okombambi tribe today (vol. III, p. 24), a two-million year old tradition! 6. P. V. Tobias, Olduvai Gorge, vol. 2 (Cambridge U. Press, 1967). 7. Living Africa, 289. And see his East African Plateaus and Rift Valleys (Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institution, 1936), publ. n 470. 8. Ibid., 270. 9. It is instructive to compare the processes of science that moved toward the acceptance of Olduvai hominids of great age and the rejection of Calaveras man in California, as reported in W. H. Holmes, "Review of the Evidence Relating to Auriferous Gravel Man in California," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1898-9, 419-71. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 2: } {Q GEOLOGICAL ISSUES: } {C Chapter 14: } {T ATHENS QUAKES} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Two: Geological Issues CHAPTER FOURTEEN ATHENS QUAKES* They left without paying their bills, but that is not why the waiters hurried after them. At 22: 53 hours of this evening of February 23, 1981 a strange deep bassoon called the patrons of Philippo's Taverna to attention, and seconds later they found themselves altogether swaying like a ballet, their faces turned on in the unique poseidonian awe of earthquake recognition, and some were jostling at the door even before the lights went out. Once outside, there were those who hurried to their children, those who walked the middle of the streets towards home, and those who stood about in the little open plateia exclaiming at the marvel of Athens' first earthquake. Several sheets of lightning played over the scene. A car drove agitatedly by the human clots on the street, bewildered, one driver shouting: "Has there been a coup?" The failed Spanish coup had been the topic of the day. Shortly another tremor vigorously nudged the city, but it was the last until hours later and, by then, many Athenians had left town in their cars. Others cowered in their autos during the night; the plateia were crowded; so too the seashore; but most people lay nervously in their own beds, hoping for surcease. The tremors were counted in hundreds over the next several days. Only the most sensitive people - and animals - could detect them. One woman - no doubt there were others - exhibited a surprising ability to feel trembling that no one else could sense. (It would be useful to investigate scientifically this acute sensitivity.) The next day, one could park anywhere and the ordinarily crowded center of Athens was empty of workers, a sort of class B movie setting of a city struck by plague. The Athenians who took flight behaved like true Spartans. These doughty ancient warriors, who flinched at no army whatever, would invariably be sent flying home at the rumble of an earthquake. It amounted to a psychological complex. The Hebrews, for instance, had the reverse complex. They might actually time their assaults with shaking of their enemies as witness the battle of Jericho where Joshua's men paraded around the town until the walls came tumbling down and they might rush through the breaches. Ancient precedents were not the verbal currency of these several days, however. One heard only that "Athens has never had an earthquake." Well, almost never, and never in this generation. No matter that, in the times of its founding, Poseidon, god of the sea and of earthquakes, wanted to take over Attica, and you know what that means. Pallas Athene had other ideas, and Zeus lent her a helping hand, so Athens survived. But Plato's Criton tells us that Solon was told by the Egyptian priests that, once upon a time, his Athenian ancestors lost an army that was struggling for the control of Atlantis when that fair land sank in furious trembling beneath the waves. This was fixed at 9000 years before, but possibly the years had been shorter in an earlier age - since a cosmic disaster, a comet or meteoroid, can both cause catastrophic earthquakes and slow down the movements of even a planet. More and more, the archaeological evidence would indicate that earthquakes were anciently more terrible, not only in Greece but in Thrace and Anatolia and all over the world in fact. As Helen Churchill Semple's book on ancient geography argues: "If earthquakes would break the nerve and nullify the life-long training of Spartan troops, there must have been abundant reason." Ambrayses was able to trace 3000 earthquakes of the Eastern Mediterranean since Christ's day, and perceives little change in frequency or intensity. So it appears that there were in the founding of Greek civilization great seismic eras, but that the seismism has petered out over the ages. Rome, to take another example, which presently is as "free" from earthquakes as Athens, had a couple of hundred in one year according to the encyclopaedist Pliny. Plato also tells us that the fresh water springs that once flowed on the acropolis were blocked forever by an earthquake. Pliny and Plato lacked a Mercalli or a Richter scale, so it is hard to say how strong the early quakes really were. The Mercalli scale is the common man and the politician's scale. It provides as scale markers the sensory perception that accompany the different degrees of trembling. The Richter scale was all that we heard about. It registered 6.6 and 6.3 at the epicenter below the northeast waters of the Gulf and Corinth, and a lot of other jiggles that duly engraved themselves upon the turning paper drums of the seismic instruments in Greece and around the world. What does 6.6 means? It means that Southern Italy's extra point months before was not just worse; it was many times worse - as if you moved not from 99F to 100F fever but from 104 to 105, whereupon your mind and body begin to fall to pieces. Registers of intensity around 6.5 means that many structures will be destroyed at the surface below which the rocks are slipping and sliding, and less damage will occur as one moves out along the same rocks and the rocks with which they are connected by origin or proximity. Those nice circles that are drawn around epicenters do not means much; the area of spread should have been a splotch of many measurements at specific locations. Nor was the graph with its kind of fever chart useful to people; but to feed the public craving for "hard data" the newspapers publish these. Perhaps Athens may be protected by its peculiar schist, a rock that has millions of cracks, all in fact tiny fractures that have their own slip and slide patterns. So that Athenians are provided with a kind of cushion that sends shocks flying in every disorderly direction and has space to take up shock as well. If the city were glued to the bedrock that was the prime mover, it would have suffered more extensive damage. As for the origins of this Athens schist itself, I think that it must represent an age when the ground below was in a continuous grinding torment of electrical and mechanical churning at high temperatures. Earthquakes are frequently a time to placate gods, go to war, and change governments. For a while we shall see not only a brisk commerce in plastering and selling bric-a-brac, but also a certain heightened religious enthusiasm. Something of this religious feeling must be behind the notion bandied about that the Mother Earth of Attica was rejecting the body of onetime Queen Frederika from burial in its soil (an event which had taken place only days earlier), an idea actually foreshadowed by one newspaper, although unaware of the imminence of the earthquake. Such absurd ideas can spread easily; an unscrupulous party might readily persuade an unsophisticated third of the Athenians of its relatedness. The quake was a tragic but local event; none will be swooping down upon hapless Greece like the sons of Herakles during the huge earthquakes that ended the Mycenean culture. War is not in the offing. Blaming the government is another matter. The communists have already declared that the government was forewarned of the quake to the very day by the seismic station at Uppsala, which was "99%" sure, according to certain dispatches. We can doubt that this "information" was provided or providable. That an earthquake or a set of them will soon occur is hardly a useful prediction, but is more likely the prediction that was provided. These paranoid rumors of "what others knew and we didn't know" were produced largely out of the inferiority complex many Greeks have about foreign expertness and at the same time fed upon the complex. (The American military's radio station, by the way, was almost totally useless for information and advice despite the urgent need felt by tens of thousands of English-speaking persons in the area.) True, too, a science of earthquake predictions is slowly developing. Successful prediction within a day or two can occur, as in Mexico recently, this by an American scientist practicing for the momentous earthquakes building up along the San Andreas fault in California, where the San Francisco Bay area is at stake. But for every one such, there are numerous incorrect expert predictions. We can also be sure that, like election prediction by sample surveys, the predictions will not be able to go beyond 90% in accuracy as to the general time and place, and less and less accuracy as the moment of the quake arrives, until, of course, the dogs begin to bark and the birds take flight. What can the government do? In one way, the state is more secure if earthquakes cannot be predicted. It is not a matter of incompetence alone. Imagine a 90% sure prediction for the long-range and the short-range of a 7-intensity quake in the Athens area, something now quite unattainable. Regarding the long-range, would you build a permanent vacant tent-city for three million people? And if so, where? And provide it unceasingly with its blankets, cots, freshwater, canned rations, toilets and medical supplies? Or would you rebuild Athens to withstand a 7-intensity tremor? Or would you design a new city to replace a ruined Athens, perhaps the only solution for many of Athens' urban problems, allowing, say, that three million people will live in tents or go home to No- where until it is finished? And it is well to bear in mind that none knows how intense earthquakes can be; the measuring and reporting systems are less than a century old. I can hear the voices now: "I told you we should have built against a number 8, not 7, quake." And they would flaunt a study in Science magazine. (Or, "we should evacuate at the prediction of 6, not 7.") In the short run, the curse of predictability is no less. Suppose you could march the population out of Athens in an orderly fashion upon receipt of an expert opinion that tomorrow or the day after all hell will break loose. Will the people resist? What essential services will be risked to remain in the city -- police, fire, water, light, bulldozers, building maintenance engineers, army units? Who will evict those who remained in the city from their quarters in the houses of others who are returning? Who will compensate businesses that must close down, some suffering damage, others very little? Then what if the earthquake does not happen? Who wants to decide at what point to order everyone to return? Something like that occurred in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, a few years ago: a volcano was about to explode, said various experts, and half the people were sent to safe locations upon order of the prefect. The volcano did not oblige and ever since then the French have been arguing over the decisions and the restitution of losses in agriculture, business, and tourism. Too, should people be forced to leave, even if they swear to take all responsibility upon themselves? Can children be left to abide by parental decisions; can the injured then be left to scream from beneath the debris? No doubt, steps can be taken to minimize damage and deaths: public education should go hand in hand with predictibility. A code of disaster behavior should be enacted and taught to the whole people. European and American media were talking about the Attic quake right away. In France, where demonstrations had been held against building a nuclear power plant very near a major Alsatian earthquake fault, the media, which are controlled by the government, restrain their own coverage, especially in emergencies. In peaceful periods, it is best not to build up fears that can turn quickly into panic. But, in the crisis itself, prompt and full information and advice should be the policy. Much can be on ready-to- play tapes to begin with, approved, say, by a parliamentary commission engineers, political scientists, social psychologists, and seismic scientist. The same commission could be convened immediately upon the emergency to oversee the diffusion of instructions; if the commission holds public confidence, it can lessen the dangers of panic and of senseless orders. The problems are so grave, in sum, that only deliberately partial procedures can be followed before, during, and after an earthquake crisis. Poseidon is tricky, cruel, implacable, surprising and infinitely destructive; human foresight and reactions can adapt to him but not prevail over him. He is no respecter of persons, no more than Yahweh. The Pharaoh's son and the slave's as well were struck down in the Passover before Exodus. The clients of the Hilton Hotel and Neofaleron cheap rooms sway in the same ballet. Someday it may be possible to explode or grease the faulting rocks threatening the earth. Meanwhile, one might take comfort in the thought that the risk of being harmed by nuclear missiles is thousands of times greater than from an earthquake. And what is being done bout that? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 15: } {T COMPTINOLOGY AND TOHU-BOHU } {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER FIFTEEN COMPTINOLOGY AND TOHU-BOHU Comptinology (from comptine: French for nursery rhyme, hence the study of same.) Even a small child will sometimes chant a nursery rhyme and afterwards think, "where did it come from?" "Oh, it's very old," says the mother. It is indeed very old. No one knows where it came from. The child grows old and has passed the song to others. There are variations. Beginning two centuries ago, they have been printed and the oral tradition is helped in maintaining itself in a bureaucratic world. Stories like "Sinbad the Sailor" go back and back until we discover that the dynastic Egyptians possessed them. The longest lived comptines go back to the cycles of chaos and creation. Although the temptation is strong (and it is conventional to succumb to it) to believe that nursery rhymes evolve over great lengths of time, this may not be the case. It may rather be that nursery rhymes begin shortly after a set of events, to put the population, the young and thereafter unconsciously everyone, into a mood of dreamwork, letting life go on in a community of memories, without heavy religious ritual every time a disturbing line of thought occurs. The rhymes are a friendly mocking of the sacred. Religious chants began even sooner, right away with humanization, we think, and within a generation the mocking fantastic nursery poetry commences. We are helped to maintain this theory by adhering to a larger theory, which is that mankind as such is young, and came about in a prompt hologenetic quantavolution. We do not feel that a nursery rhyme builds step by step over a hundred thousand years as the possibilities of song dawn upon an ape-person. The story of Chicken-Licken (alias Chicken-Little, Henny-Penny) comes to mind. Beginning with a frightened chicken, pelted from above by a seed or drop, a procession of barnyard animals forms, led by the conviction that the sky is falling just as the chicken claims, and moves along seeking the protection of the king, personifying authority or a god, fearful lest a wicked force, sometimes a fox, should eat them up (as he does in some versions) or hopeful that a wise owl should explain the fear away (as it does in an 'enlightened' American version). That the fox is an ancient Mars symbol, and the owl an ancient symbol of Minerva-Athene suggest that some very old mental process may be repeating itself. The story of Chicken-Little is told from Finland to Tropical Africa and from Central and South Asia to Ireland. It is entitled "The End of the World" in Kennedy's Fireside Tales of Ireland. I have jotted down in my journal, on several occasions, reflections of this sort and take leave to transcribe several entries here: Naxos, 10 April 1978 One of my favorite nursery rhymes went: "Hi diddle, diddle, The cat in the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see much a sight, And the dish ran away with the spoon." This pure nonsense probably bears meaning with every line. 1. Hi= High. Or, Hey= Pay attention! Diddle = diddle the unconscious, play with the mind. The line cues into what follows. 2. Cat associated with music, humming, electricity, purring, "cat gut", static electricity of cat's fur, cat's eyes, etc. 3. Cow = Cometary Venus, passing over Moon in the period 3500-687 B. C. Note: Violin cow- shaped. 4. Little dog = fox = wolf= star = Mars = lupus Romanus; laugh = cry = disaster and also Mars wanted Moon. 5. Dish and spoon = Leyden jar with center rod = overelectrified, juggling, diddling movements. Also comet with its tail. There are far too many associated symbols and actions here to be mere nonsense or coincidence. When the small child delights in it or is fascinated by it, as was I, he a) loves the rhyme and rhythm, b) the images conveyed c) but are these enough for such old and widespread, and obsessively appealing jingles unless some deep upsetting memory is also being "diddled"? |Diddle" has an unknown origin and a long history, most meanings centering around shaking, turbulence, sex, fiddling (violin) cf. Ox. Eng Dict. I recall English mothers and nannies telling little boys not to diddle (their penis): "Stop diddling!" "Hi" is probably "Hey" and pronounced "hay" but I'm not sure it's always so and been so, many dialect possibilities of either. The "Hey-day" is the most sensational of days, the peak day of some series of days. Two months later the journal adds: Ziegler [Yahweh [p. 85 re last line on Breton fire ritual woman singing: "Leave your spoon in the bowl for the fire is rising." May be an allusion to the ark-box and charging pole [of the Exodus, see my Moses book]; electrical conditions are charging up, building up, and time is propitious to rituals on mountain-tops. Also women in Greece jump over the flames of kindled bonfires crying "I leave my sins behind me." Compare with "Cow jumped over the Moon" (Sinn) [Babylonian word for Moon.] The sexuality of the poem is subliminal. Compare, for example, the bowl and spoon, the Leyden jar, and the lingam and yoni of ancient Hindu symbolism. The fear and delight of the first experiences with the Leyden Jar (see Heilbron's history of electricity and God's Fire) can be associated with unconscious sexuality, the "female" and "male" electrical connections used today. Electrical twinges have been associated with pleasures of masturbation and ejaculation since ancient times. The mountain-top orgies of Bacchus were associated with the relative ease of inciting electrical discharges there. "Diddle" has an unknown origin and long history. Although the Oxford Dictionary of English based upon etymological principles does not extend sexual meaning to "diddle" (out of prudery) the connotation is present in the rhyme and the usage is indestructible. Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend talk in Hamlet's Mill (287) of Tammuz, the grain-god aspect of Osiris, the Saturn of Egypt. A festival of mourning over his death marked the opening of the Egyptian New Year. The holy event lasted through millennia; lamented was the god who was cruelly killed by being ground up between millstones. The authors were reminded of the rhyme of John Barleycorn (a name in American folk stories that is synonymous with the drinker of whiskey, that is, grain-spirits drinker): They roasted o'ver a scorching fire The marrow of his bones But a miller used him worst of all For he ground him between two stones. Journal, Florence, December 23, 1980 Ami cooked a fine dinner for us at Joe's and Laurie's tonight, Marco joining us. Leeks wrapped in bacon stewed with white sauce, roast pork, rape. Fruit. Laurie whipped up a hot zabaglione. Twice today we talked of the taunting childhood tune, GGEAGE, GGEAGE, GE, GE, GEC. This is sung while dancing around. All stop. Clap hands. Fall down. Ring around the rosey, Pockets full of poseys, Ashes, ashes, All fall down. It looks as if we have another catastrophic theme. A sky body erupts in a ring-like glow, possibly Sun takes on an aura, or Moon, or comet. Pockets, pouches, collection, pocks [the pustules of an eruptive disease]. A rosa is a bloomlike sore in German, said Ami. A posey, read Joe somewhere, was a festering sore of the fourteenth century bubonic plague [He is Deg's nephew, Alfred III, and Professor at St. John's College; his wife is Laura Haskell.] Ashes fall from the sky everywhere. The ashes fall down, the plague, and the people fall down dead. I think, too, of the recent theory of astronomers Hoyle and Wickramasinghe regarding the source of plagues (and life) from outer space, independently contrived by Milton and myself in Solaria Binaria. Stylida, Naxos, January 5, 1981 Day before Epiphany. The village is on holiday between Sunday and Epiphany. Twelfth Night - Wotan rides his eight-legged horse. Presents are given tomorrow, not for Christmas. The Feast of the Kings come bearing gifts to Christ. Feast of the Wandering Star over Bethlehem. Befana (Italy) is an old witch. What is happening? What happened? In November is All-Souls and All-Saints Day. All who died in catastrophe are resurrected. Why not now? Are there two discoordinated holiday periods upon the subject of the explosion of Saturn, the brilliance of Jupiter, the coming of the Flood? Forty days before Christmas is Advent. The Flood lasted 40 days. This is a mourning and penitence period before coming of Christmas - why, so that expectation and frustration of want of a savior is celebrated. And recall the Pleiades' connection with November, remnants of the old god, celebrated by many far-separated peoples in these days. Christ Jesus is apparently Saturn (Osiris) and Jupiter and possibly Thoth-Christ Scientist) and Venus (see Sizemore and Meyer: J. C., Morning Star) all accommodated into one character. The celebrations are rationalized and spun out by Christian thought. Never mind the searches for a falling star in the presumed days of Christ's birth: whatever little surprise a meteor might have presented us, the real presence was Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus in their climactic appearances. Journal, Trenton, 15 September 1982 At breakfast Ami reads to me from Le Petit Robert, so big that it shakes the frail table when she opens it. "Tohu-bohu" in French means chaos. It comes from the Hebrew "tohu oubohou,.. chaos, or the primeval chaos which precedes creation." Nice. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 16: } {T SANDAL-STRAPS AND SEMIOLOGY } {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER SIXTEEN SANDAL-STRAPS AND SEMIOLOGY The neophyte comes upon the word "catastrophe" and feels proud to discover within it the Greek words kata (down) and aster (star), so "failing stars" is heralded as the origin of the word. Not so, say our betters: the Greek words within it are kata and strophe (turning) and refer to that part of an ancient drama in which occurs the denouement; the plot, having reached its culmination, descends, often precipitously. In a plea for the innocents, I would suggest that what we know of Greek etymology is based upon late sources. We know only several hundred words of Minoan and Mycenean, catastrophe not among them. Homer and Hesiod do not employ the word, and they are the earliest of our Greek sources. I am fortified in my opinion that catastrophe originally meant disaster (dys-aster) by more than this lack of sources of early Greek usage. There is a common tendency in linguistics for people to put two words together ungrammatically and against the ordinary rules for linguistic construction. Hence, three meanings might arise independently and join, since their cognition and perception are close, viz., down- crashing star, huge disaster in general, and the disaster emulating collapse of the plot of a tragedy. Benjamin Whorf, in Language, Thought and Reality, p. 261, exemplifies how commonly in linguistic behavior "a pattern engenders meanings utterly extraneous to the original lexation reference," to wit: "the word 'asparagus, ' under the stress of purely phonetic English patterns..., rearranges to 'spargras'; and then since 'sparrer' is a dialectical form of 'sparrow', we find 'sparrow grass. ' Another case would be the transformation of Kohlsalat into coleslaw and even, most recently, into coldslaw. We turn to France for an English etymology, wondering at the word 'martinet' as in the sentence "Her father was a martinet." In Webster's and then in Robert's French Dictionary we discover that a martinet in the fourteenth century appears as a bird, then a chandelier, and by 1743 we find it to be a whip used on children, while in the seventeenth century there lived a French army officer, Martinet, who was a strict disciplinarian, whence the usage of the word today. Let us recall the book of Cohane on The Key with his several basic words, all god-words, divine, and most likely astral in original reference, og, enah (or hawa), ala, and aza among them. The Black Magellanic Cloud is the name for the seemingly starless patch in the Milky Way near the Southern Cross. The British sailors called it the 'Coalsack' and, coming then from a land of coal, it is understandable. One may choose, says Cohane, and I agree, between imagining "coalsack" to derive from "coal" and "sack", or to think it may be remotely related in the dim past to 'Quetzalcoatl' (the planet Venus). For "... the ancient Mexicans believed that it was through these huge 'empty' spaces that Zoutem- que and his band of fallen angels arrived on this planet." All but the "t" element of the Mexican word is present, as we read Oc/ Hawa/ Ala/ Aza/ Ok or Ocoalazock which sounds like "Coalsack" out of Newcastle. The fallen angel is our Latin Lucifer as in the Bible, who is specifically the planet Venus; and we need not here explain that we have in mind the catastrophic events provoked by cometary Venus in the mid-second millennium B. C., who was not only Quetzalcoatl as savior, but was also a frightful all-destroying god to the Mexicans. We shall not proceed much farther here. A study of reversals of letters might be rewarding (I wrote "rewording" and scratched it out). Thus I think that the word "Mkl" who is Michael the Archangel and a Hebrew identity for Cometary Venus, may also be "Mlkh" in reverse, who is Moloch, the godfigure dreaded by the ancient Hebrews. And so Python (the dragon killed by Apollo) and Phaeton (the solar figure who was struck down by Zeus to save the burning up of the Earth) and Typhon (the monster dragon also struck down by Zeus) who is tied closely to the cometary-Venus of the mid-second millennium, and who is also Typhoon, the storms of South Asia and Hurracan, the great wind god of the original Americans. But, to refer to The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars. Typhon is also the Pallas portion of Pallas Athene, the great Athenian goddess, who is Hephaistos, whose name Robert Graves says means hemerophaistos (he who shines by day), related to he apaista, (the goddess who removes from sight) who is none other than Athena. Transmogrifying words is a continuous and eternal human exercise, often performed unconsciously under disastrous stimulation. As agitation creates invention, anxiety creates words; the greater the fear the more words - but the more of catatonism, too - fear of words, being stuck upon words, avoiding words. Recently two quantavolutionaries engaged in a dispute, the one Editor of the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, Malcolm Lowery, a linguist, the other Zvi Rix, a contributor to the Review and a physician. Rix became over the years the greatest authority on that symbol of "divine life" and of many religious apparitions, the ankh, the circle resting upon crossarms and vertical stroke, thus: By virtue of intensive research, Rix had established that the ankh was not only a widespread symbol, a religious symbol of wide dedication, but also a manifestation of androgyny, that is, a representation of the female vulva and the male phallus, and furthermore was securely identified with a cometary form, especially Venus, with ominous indications that the comet being discussed was a head that had dropped its tail, the victim of this accident being not only the two-sexed god concerned, but also the Earth on which the tail in the form of Phaeton, Typhon, Lucifer and Pallas descended with disastrous consequences. Lowery, the Editor, partly out of deviltry and partly out of pedantry, pulled Rix up sharply. Citing dictionaries of hieroglyphic Egyptian, he could say that "the evidence of Egyptian script makes it unambiguously clear that when an Egyptian scribe drew an 'ankh' he, at least, was in no doubt that he was drawing a sandal-strap (somewhat stylized)" [1] . This constraint upon the word excited Dr. Rix into a reply that explained how Lowery was "putting the cart before the horse," and that "the original meaning was substantially modified and moderated when terror-stricken humanity managed to analogise these catastrophe-laden prime ideograms to similar-sounding phonetic writings and spellings of less frightful character and of much later development" [2] . The present writer defended Rix, with his complaint, and specified that the castration- image of the dissevered comet, fully apparent in legends of Typhon and associated events, would readily descend into a sandal-strap, for the word "foot" is in psychiatric semiology a frequent substitute for repressed thoughts and words about the phallus. Moreover, the sandal-strap binds securely the foot, thus, in reverse imagery, to keep it from falling off like a comet's tail. I would add another speculation, too far removed etymologically, perhaps, to take seriously, that the English word "ankle" had once to do with the word "ankh" and for the same reasons, and if one speaks of "ankle-strap" one might as well be speaking of "sandal-strap." When I explained this remotely possible connection to Anne-Marie Hueber, who is expert in Allemanic (Swiss) German, she remarked that this language possessed a word "anke," now obsolete, meaning "butter." We pondered this until it occurred that the German word "butter," the same as in English, could be confused phonetically with 'boot' or "foot," possibly by a Hun invader or an early Christian missionary, and, once again, we should be on the track of the "ankle-strap" and its connotations. The same line of thought led me to a story that I had once heard, of how the bread called Pumpernickel had been named. It seems that the party of Napoleon Bonaparte had stopped at an inn on one of his journeys through Germany and food was served him. Napoleon tasted the proffered sour brown bread and handed it to an aide saying, "C'est bon pour Nicole," this being the name of his horse. The uncomprehending but flattered host announced that such was the name of his bread in French and so it would be called thereafter. (Should this story be untrue we are permitted the Italian expression, "Se non é vero, é ben trovato.") The heart as the seat of love and soul is not Greek or Roman by origin, but Christian. The Greeks and Romans were fully and explicitly phallic [3] . The Christian heart, it need no retailing to modern folk, is and has been for long a motif to be found in a great many paintings and is referred to in many prayers. The cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus originated in the Seventeenth Century with the counter-reformation texts of the ecstatic nun, Marguerite-Marie Alocoque. In searching for the origins of this shape, the heart, one is led ultimately to a most common symbol of prehistoric man, the female vulva. The sign is often an inverted triangle. As such, it abounds in ancient caves and collections of ancient artifacts. That the ancient vulva had religious significance as great as that of the Christian heart is relatively certain. An abstract of a recent article reads "A carved limestone object found in the East Gravettian [Upper Paleolithic] site at Bodrogkeresztur, Hungary, has been identified as a uterus symbol. It may also be a lunar calendar" [4] . Lunar signifies Aphrodite the goddess of love in later times and also the Mother-God and Mother-Earth. What can we do but to explain what every scholar in a sense already knows: the eternal vulva, origin of life and source of affection, was simply inverted by Christian thought, into the more abstractly identified heart as the origin of life and love. The triumph of Christianity, sexless in the origin of its god and sexless in the stern teachings of Paul of Tarsus, required the abandonment of the old symbol and did so by converting it to the new. Humans are not always deprived of control over word-making and word-meanings. George Kaufman the playwright once wrote a line for Groucho Marx - I am not sure of the exact words. A man calls down for hotel service: "I'd like my ice water." Groucho replies: "Send up an onion: that'll make his eyes water." If we could only know how many words began so, unless horrified by the implied blasphemy, we should be continuously amused. Playing with words helps a language to grow, especially subconscious play, accompanied by subconscious laughter - relief from anxiety, that is. {S : Notes (Chapter 16: Sand-straps and Semiology)} Notes (Chapter 16: Sand-straps and Semiology) 1. II SISR (D. 1977), 33. 2. Ibid., 32. 3. Cf. H. M. Westropp and C. S. Wake, Ancient Symbol Worship: Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity (London: Curzon 2nd ed., 1875); John Allegro, the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. 4. Science (20 August, 1965) 855-6. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 17: } {T MAKING MOONSHINE WITH HARD SCIENCE} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MAKING MOONSHINE WITH HARD SCIENCE [1] Professor Irving Michelson wrote a little piece of "hard science" (his term) called "Scientifically Speaking..." and subtitled "19-year Lunar Calendar Cycle: Accurate Adjustment to 365 1/ 4-Day Civil Calendar" [2] . A Greek named Meton of about 432 B. C. is credited with having discovered the 19-years repetitive coincidence of lunar month and tropical solar year. Michelson said that Meton's "discovery of the 19-year cycle presupposes precise knowledge of the length of the lunar month as well as of the solar (tropical) year of 365.2421988 days, to the second-decimal accuracy at least." He then claimed that such evolved knowledge would have taken observation of so long a period of regular celestial motions that no catastrophe could have occurred, as the Velikovsky circle believed, in the seventh or eighth centuries. The present writer addressed an ironical reply to these ideas in a related journal. A comment on Irving Michelson's column "Scientifically Speaking..." With all due respect to Professor Michelson, I cannot understand the rationale behind Pensée's having allowed him (or anyone else for that matter) to pretend to be "Scientifically Speaking..." It is a usurpation of authority, and an implication that other contributors to Pensée have written unscientifically. "Science" is exhibited in a work itself or in a judgment rendered afterwards upon it; it is also a propaganda term when employed in Professor Michelson's usage. The phrase "hard science" adds insult to injury. But rather than continue along this vein, I should like to turn to the substance of Professor Michelson's arguments. They are misleading and moreover incorrect. They are also irrelevant to Dr. Velikovsky's theories, which they strain to affect. Michelson says that "hard science" comes into being when the moon's revolution is measured to the accuracy of an eight-digit number. But eight digits can be attached to an IQ score, an automobile license, the average height of Americans, the temperature of a frying pan, a tonal harmony in music, a rhythmic sequence of Indian dance, and so on. And if we proceeded to an accuracy of ten digits, or twelve, we might find the moon revolving a bit irregularly, which a genial mechanism such as Professor Michelson might trace back to an old disaster. The important questions are what the number means and what purpose it serves. In the present case, we are held to believe that this eight-digit number will be shown to (a) have been used or discovered by a Greek named Meton about 432 B. C., or (b) have been known to the ancients at a time when catastrophes are alleged to have involved the moon in changed behaviors. Neither of these is demonstrated, and indeed, Michelson indicates later on that both implications are unnecessary to his story of Meton. Michelson further presumes that 250 years are not long enough for a changed lunar month to be noticed or calculated, but offers no argument on the point. What Michelson does ultimately argue is that by 432 B. C. (255 years after the presumed Mars disaster), a four-digit lunar cycle calculation would have been sufficiently accurate to permit the design of a 19-year calendar involving an intercalation of moon and sun, granted of course, the sun's 365.25 figure was known (as he takes for granted and I would not oppose) and provided that anyone cared about the mater. This is a useful line of inquiry, no matter how deviously pursued. It can help us understand what was going on in those days. What was going on? I hope that I may be forgiven for presenting some fictional excerpts from the recently recovered journal of Kakrates, research assistant to the astronomer Meton, the Hero of the Golden Letters of 432 B. C. (Incidentally, I doubt that any Olympic games of that year were held in Athens, as Michelson says, unless some athlete hurled a discuss awfully far.) EXCERPTS FROM THE SPURIOUS JOURNAL OF KAKRATES Tablet ? . My friend Mikelson and I were drinking a bit heavily last night and I bet him that I could produce a good all-purpose calendar without the resources of a holy temple at my disposal. From a window of my house, I can see a skinny tree on the eastern horizon that I can use for orientation. Tablet ? . I have observed the sunrise every day. I noted that after 365.25 days (or was it 365.24 or 365.26?) [3] the rim of the sun peeks up at the edge of the tree again from the left or north side. I was cheered because I caught the cycle so closely (I didn't touch a drop of wine the night before). Hence I continued. Tablet ? . I watched for another cycle, and then another. It does appear to be 365.25 alright. Meanwhile, I have learned that various watchtowers and astologers in Thebes, Syracuse, Memphis, etc. re getting the same effect. Some of them take this game seriously. If 365.25 is not observed perfectly, it can certainly be inferred from statistical averaging. I haven't told Meton what I'm doing yet, but when I told him of my concept of averaging, he smiled and patted me on the shoulder. He is busy with city planning. I could bring his associate, Euktemon, into the picture, but why complicate matters? Tablet ? . I have also been observing the moon-days from the opposite windows of my house, as it sets in the bay. The new moon turned out to repeat its appearance 12 times plus a tenth less than 11 sun-days in the time it took the sun to touch back upon the tree. I subtracted the 10.9 days from 365.25, and got 354.35. To get an average month, I divided this by 12 and got 29.53 days. Suppose I distribute the 11 days among the months, giving half-days to seven and one and a half days to 5 months. I'd have a workable calendar! I shall do something later with that little lost time, maybe spread it over the years. Some of my politician friends have become excited by the game and chipped in funds to hire a diligent research assistant to help with the sightings. The watchtower and astrological societies from here and there confirm that their instruments give the same readings. (I am glad that I entertained several of these chaps at Selena's taverna during the last Olympics.) Anyhow, it averages out. One phenomenal Chaldean with sophisticated equipment (I hear he foretold the death of the king's mother-in-law) reported that he got 29.5306 with averaging. Wow! Six digits! But who needs it. It's just pedantic overkill. Tablet ? . (I wish I could afford papyrus.) Now I added up three solar years of moon-cycles and discovered that 37 cycles came within a little over four days of matching perfectly. Carrying out the arithmetical calculations further, I got rid of practically all of the four-day fraction in 19 years. Much more refined observations would be needed to improve this cycle. As it stands, even though I have not based it upon observations for a full cycle, I can see that it will give enough accuracy for centuries. The days will not perceptibly march ahead of each other over a person's lifetime, or even over the lifetime of a kingdom. Tablet ? . I mentioned that I can match the sun and moon cycles almost exactly on a 19-years base to the politicians in Selena's taverna, and they are going to make a political issue of the Calendar. Others said, though, that the idea is politically impractical; a 19-years "year" that means nothing will bring only ridicule. I said, however, that maybe I could please the priests and cultists by getting the artist Petty to draw illustrations for each month using the Roman vestal virgins as models. This must have been what Mikelson meant when he mumbled something about "pretty-girl calendars," no doubt a Socratic slip of the tongue [4] . It won't work, they said; these soft-heads want a year for the sun, a year for the moon, a year for the seasons, a year to begin with the bacchanalia, or the saturnalia, solstices, or what-not. And, of course, the archons like to have the years named after their period in office. Tablet ? . I must find a way to appease the priests and cultists. They don't like the idea of automatic calendars (the damned humanists). Maybe I'll intercalate days by the magic number of seven. I'll figure out a common denominator and then decide what to do with the extra time. Just as the festival and political calendars do nowadays, I'll take care of the half-day problem by alternating 29-day and 30-day months. Then, to take care of the surplus of days, I'll put in an extra thirteenth month of 29 days (the cultists will like that 13-business); placing it in the years 3,6,8,11,14,17, and 19 will give us the magic number 7, the number of moving celestial bodies (I'll call them "eternal" since everyone likes the word.) It also sets well with the 7-stringed lyre. Mikelson has left town and I can't collect on the bet. Papyrus ? . I'm in trouble. The priests won't buy my 19-years calendar. All this talk of late about "an emerging power elite of secular science and politics" doesn't stand up when the fortune-tellers start demonstrating on the street. They are pressuring Meton to stop my moonlighting. He pointed out to them that an issue of academic freedom was involved. Privately, he gave me to understand that the results of my work have to be published, of course, in his name. He also insisted that I begin the year on the summer solstice and that I count months by full moons. Moreover, we must wait for a full 19-years cycle to prove my contentions. Mere prediction is not enough. Fortunately, some far-sighted statesman has given Meton a research grant sufficient to set up an observation post with a panel of three assistants (with myself in charge), and a few other amenities, including a site-visit to Jerusalem. I put a brass stake by the tree and bought a donkey, but now visit the research station mostly to pay the assistants and check out the tree (fortunately, it scarcely grows at all and one of the assistants keeps the dogs away). ... Here occurs a long time gap in the journal... Papyrus ? . I wonder why other Greeks haven't climbed aboard the wagon? Everyone still acts as if they didn't need an automatic and standard calendar and now we're moving into the 19th year. The other day I actually saw a priest of one kind or another taste the soil to see whether spring had begun - with a crowd around him. At least they don't sacrifice humans anymore to get the crops going. Are scholars afraid to tackle the problem? Haven't the times been ripe for invention? The priests are always yapping against "taking the human element out" of calendars. (their human element!). I suppose that I should have confessed in the beginning that the Chaldeans and Egyptians knew all of this. But it was pure patriotism that motivated me to suppress the information. The Greeks must pretend to invent everything. Especially the Athenians. They would have killed the project if they had thought foreigners had beaten us to the results. Anyhow, this is all a problem for psychologists and political scientists - the soft science guys. Papyrus ? . Finally! After 20 years. Everyone professes to be amazed. Our party is in power. The Athenians are ablaze with patriotism. They praise Meton all over town. They are certifying my formula in golden letters on a prime wall location! In Meton's name, of course. That will impress the watchtowers and astrological societies - their President in Gold Letters! He has authorized me to give them all free tickets to the Olympic Games. But not to that Barbarian who had the gall to write him, "Meton, stop reinventing the wheel. The Chinese have used your cycle for 100 years, and even the seven intercalations." Not to mention that anonymity from Egypt who sent him a tablet with just the obscenity "A" inscribed on it. Tablet ? . The gold letters are staying up, but the opposition is too strong. Meton's calendar will not be adopted after all. They claim that they will check things by the formula from time to time. Why do they do this? For as long as anyone can recollect, the skies have been perfectly regular and before that, well, forever. Yet these unscientific idiots pretend that they have to take their measure every day and every month to be sure things are the same - as if the skies would fall if these nitpickers turned to more important problems - like better housing, exclusion of aliens, etc. ... end of Kakrates' journal... Since I was dubious of Kakrates' work, I asked a living historian of science about the matter. This was Professor Livio Stecchini, who is an historian of science and has done much work with ancient calendars and measurements. Professor Stecchini believes (as, in fact, do I) that Meton knew all the while that the solar year was 365.25 and the lunar month about 29.5 days, for Stecchini shows, in the following paper, how readily Meton might have concocted the Metonic cycle, getting the .03 by chance, and then how Callippus and Hipparchus improved upon it. Meton was probably offering a simple formula from his stock of astronomical knowledge to some people who were interested in routinizing and mechanizing the calendar. It was ordinary applied scientific research and consultation. To demonstrate his formula (or, better, to replicate the foreign experience for Greek eyes) one would need only "poorboy" techniques. The Athenians, agree Meritt, Pritchett, and Neugebauer, did not follow the Metonic cycle, and Meritt says that the Athenians did not tie their months to lunar observations but followed a rule of convenience with alternate 29 and 30 day months and an occasional check upon the Moon and Meton to prevent the calendar from wandering too far astray. Moreover, the four-digit stability of the moon's revolution, which had been in effect for a couple of centuries, could have been proven out in a few years, and had nothing to do with when the last destabilizing encounter involving the moon had taken place. Finally, I leave it to others to make fact out of my fable in the Meton case, that is, to show how politics determines practical sciences in calendar- making as in other areas. {S : Notes (Chapter 17: Making Moonshine with Hard Science)} Notes (Chapter 17: Making Moonshine with Hard Science) 1. Adapted from Kronos (Fall 1975) 52-6. L. C. Stecchini elaborates on the matter in the same issue, p. 57. See, as supporting sources: Encyclopedia Britannica (1973) edition), "Calendar," Vol. III; Benjamin D. Meritt, The Athenian Calendar in the Fifth Century (Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press, 1928); Benjamin D. Meritt, The Athenian Year (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1961); William K. Pritchett and Otto Neugebauer, The Calendars of Athens (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1947). 2. Pensée (Winter 1974-5), 50-2. 3. Editor's note: for convenience, the fractional numbers that Kakrates used have been converted to the modern decimal system wherever they occur in the journal. 4. Editor's note: the mistake was not Mikelson's. A tablet has come to light disclosing that the slip was made by another taverna habitué, a scribe and a copyist. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 18: } {T HOLY DREAMTIME IN WONGURI LAND} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER EIGHTEEN HOLY DREAMTIME IN WONGURI LAND Towards the Napier Peninsula of Arnhem Land in Australia, there dwell a native people of the stone age, whose singing is the most developed of their arts. They are of the Wonguri linguistic group of the Mandzikai clan. Their traditional songs are rich in myth and often very long. They are arranged in groups to form particular cycles. Although complete in itself, each song is related to a central theme. It reconstructs some event or portrays some happening of the traditional post. There are sacred and secular song cycles, songs known only to the men or to the women respectively, or those of interest where both sexes join in and children take part. There are sacred ceremonial songs, secret songs, of the women, camp songs, love magic songs, children's songs. There are gossip songs and mourning songs, and songs for every event in a person's life. Nearly all songs, even when... they are presented by one particular man in any given area, are for the collective entertainment or well-being of the whole community; and it is in this respect that we can observe one of their main functions, the bringing together of all or a section of the people for the purpose of expressing and renewing tribal unity and cohesion. The majority of songs, too, are correlated with ceremony and ritual, with dancing, and the use of certain objects, which explain or represent the events related in the songs. There are secular and sacred song cycles but all partake of holy myths. Ronald M. Berndt, in reporting a classical Wonguri song, the Moon-Bone Cycle, writes that it is a secular version of some sacred songs of the moity, incorporated in a larger cycle for age-grading ceremonies. It is in the sacred version that the full myth is explained, and the totemic beings and their actions are sung. In the Moon-Bone Cycle given here, the whole myth is viewed, so to speak, in retrospect. If a sacred song cycle had been chosen much more discussion would have been involved, owing to the nature of religious concepts, to the extreme length of these cycles and to the fact that the majority of words in each song need extensive commentaries... The sacred singing (which we cannot discuss here) relates episodes of the Moon's adventures in the same region; these songs bring into perspective the concept of the Eternal Dreamtime. In the dreaming period, the period where the utmost past and present are united, the Moon who was "one of us," lived with the Dugong, his sister the sea-cow, who was also one of us. The whole region was flat and became flooded in the wet season. There was a large clay-pan here and the Moon, after making it, lived here, and later it became his reflection. Here the Moon and Dugong collected lily and lotus roots (which were to become the Evening Star). One day when the Dugong was collecting these edible roots, digging them out with her tail, the leech bit her. She returned to her brother and said: "This place is too dangerous for me, the leeches are always biting me. I like this country but the leeches spoil it for me. I am going out into the sea, where I will turn into a dugong." "And what shall I do?" asked the Moon. "Why, Moon, you can stay in the sky; but first you must die." "But I'm not going to die like other people," the Moon answered. "Why do you not want to do that, brother?" asked the Dugong. "I want to die and come back alive again," he told her. "All right. But when I die, I won't come back and you can pick up my bones." "Well, I'm different," the Moon said. "When I die, I'm coming back. Every time I get sick I'll grow very thin; then I'll follow you down to the sea, and I'll go with you a long way out into that sea. And when I'm so thin that I'm only bones, I'll throw them away into the sea and die. But after three days, I'll get up again and become alive, and gradually regain my strength and size by eating lily and lotus roots." "All right, brother," the Dugong answered. "You can stay in the sky, it is better for you." The author resumes the tale: "At the same place of the Moonlight and of the Dugong, a little after the Dugong and Moon went out to sea, a large fight took place between the Totemic Beings." As the Kangaroo-men were living around the clay-pan, collecting lily and lotus roots, a Rat-woman gossiped to them that other men were coming to spear them, and went about "setting one group against the other for no reason at all." Each began to distrust the other. They began to dance war-dances and kill each other with spears. "Many of these Totemic Beings were killed, and they were unable to become alive as the Moon does; they followed the pattern the Dugong had set." They say that women today gossip like the Rat woman did, and start fights. So the cycle of songs begins and goes on; both single words and songs are repeated frequently so that the whole cycle is rarely completed in one evening. "On such occasions, the song man becomes the teacher of a small group of men who are of his own particular clan and linguistic group. Stories relating to the songs are discussed, meanings are explained and the arrangement of words in a song taught by constant repetition." Sacred "inside" terms and "power names," as well as alternate and composite words occur in the songs, and what follows is a set of self-descriptive songs. The Moon song is begun; the people camp in the area of the Moon and Dugong. They store their clubs as if preparing for the great battle of the Dreaming Period. They construct carefully shade coverings worthy of their important headman who is related to the Totemic Beings of the past. They gather like clouds and they work and rest. Then they venture onto the clay pan looking for roots and disturbing the birds there. The kangaroo-rats leave significant trails on the clay. Ducks come to leave eggs. The people dive into the waters for lotus and lily roots. The leeches loosen themselves and fasten to people. Prawns are burrowing all about. Tortoises swim. Berry-laden vines spread across the waters. Then night comes and the Moon rises and reminds them of the whole story (already told) of the Moon and Dugong. The Evening Star or Lotus Bloom rises and sets, held by its stalk to the place of the Moon, to whom it owes its attachment to the billabong or clay-pan. The song goes: Now the New Moon is hanging, having cast away his bone: Gradually he grows larger, taking on new bone and flesh. Over there, far away, he has shed his bone: he shines on the place of the Lotus Root, and the place of the Dugong, On the place of the Evening Star, of the Dugong's Tail, of the Moonlight clay pan... And Berndt says, "At the rising of the New Moon and the Evening Star the wooden 'trumpet' is blown, the singing sticks are beaten and the songs begin; the shuffling steps of dancing women are heard..." The Holy Dreamtime has begun. The group is now where it was in those days, illud tempus. Those were the days of creation, when, with intimations of catastrophe, the Moon and Venus rose into the sky, prompting the first human beings to war amongst themselves. Myth, music, and dancing begin to sublimate the otherwise unforgettable grave early events. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 19: } {T THE 'UNCONSCIOUS' AS A LITERARY REVOLT AGAINST SCIENCE} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER NINETEEN THE 'UNCONSCIOUS' AS A LITERARY REVOLT AGAINST SCIENCE* (* In 1978 the author sought support from the U. S National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue a line of research that is described here. The application was unsuccessful, but its theory appears to be worth publication, and it is to be hoped that a more sympathetic reception will follow, and possibly that another scholar may take up the theme.) The final success of the uniformitarian over the catastrophist paradigm in the mid-19th century signaled a class of scientific restraints upon literature. Writers had to conform to a demanding science that viewed the universe as ordered and regular, old in time, only slowly and evenly changing, with a retired God, if any, with species evolving gradually in competition, and with a mankind who was mechanical and determined even though the greatest product of nature. Sudden, violent, miraculous, heroic, and divinely inspired events were reduced to a negligible place in the causative processes of the world. Of fiction writers, some conformed to the new consensus. Their novels accordingly changed to slow and gradual process of realistic character development or a sociological account without striking change at beginning or end. But literature of the occult, of science fiction, and of mystery developed too. Most impressive of all was a literature of the inner mind and especially of the unknown and uncontrolled unconscious mind, that grew to a peak one generation after the uniformitarian triumph. In the preceding two generations the concept of unconscious arose in mystical form, was given philosophical definition by the Romantics, and then formed into a science by Freud and others. Thus, the greatest writers, such as Dostoevsky, Mann, O'Neill, Proust, Pirandello, Gide, Joyce, and Kafka, were granted a scientifically rationalized ballroom of the literary unconscious within which they could work out a number of dramatic and stylistic forms that were blocked in the external world by uniformitarian principles of science. Present indications are that the pressures of literature together with new scientific discoveries are eroding the uniformitarian paradigm and a break-out into new forms of literary and scientific behavior is imminent. Such is the thesis here: the concept of the unconscious in literature is postulated as a reaction to the uniformitarian paradigm in science. The study intends to demonstrate that the psychological concept of the "Unconscious" originated, developed into its present form, and functioned in part so that creative writers (among others) might cope with certain burdensome restraints imposed upon literature by the Uniformitarian (U) scientific viewpoint that triumphed over Catastrophism (C) in the early nineteenth century. That is, the Unconscious is not explainable merely as an accident of the history of psychology, nor as a necessary, pure scientific discovery coming at a certain stage of scientific development. Nor was it a mere conceit of the intellectual salons. The concept of the Unconscious was, perhaps with all of these, the product of an unconscious alliance of psychiatry and literature aimed at accommodating the new consensus of science. Specifically in literature, its a highly useful tool of the more intelligent writers who had to adjust their dramatic forms to a rather incompatible and unbending scientific scheme. The Unconscious was, almost literally, a means of their finding Lebensraum after being evicted from the heavenly and earthly spaces of pre- uniformitarian times. The survival-service provided by the scientific theory of the Unconscious itself developed unconsciously. To this day, although there is a general appreciation of the scientific and literary value of the Unconscious, there appears to be no awareness of its role in the unceasing interplay between the science and humanities. Actually, the hypothesis might be extended, in a modified shape, to cover other forms of expression and knowledge, such as the plastic arts or areas where a subtle appreciation of human relations is demanded, such as political science and anthropology. In these areas, not to be dealt with here, as in the literature of the novel, the Unconscious played its double role as an expediter of adjustment between "the two worlds" of sciences and humanities, and as an intellectual and literary tool. Nor shall we dwell upon the study of the occult, of science fiction, of "lost worlds," of catastrophes, or of "last survivors;" nor such changes in form as the lengthening and the "scientizing" or "sociologizing" of the novel, nor changes of substance such as the decline of the divine and tragic hero. In relation to the great scientific transformations, we deal only with the concept of the Unconscious, not with the broad spectrum of literary and intellectual changes. As applied to literature, the Unconscious aided and abetted writers to manipulate time and space freely, to achieve sudden leaps and "catastrophes" in plot, and to reintroduce "gods and devils"; such maneuvers had formerly been readily licensed, but were no longer allowed if one wished to be considered a "serious" writer under the Uniformitarian regime. One was under pressure to conform to the Uniformitarian paradigm (or model, or Weltanschauung, or word-view, or ideology, or belief-system). How the accommodation of literature to science was accomplished is to be shown by a general historical analysis and an intensive study of the "unconscious" as employed by eight great authors. The hypothetical that follows this memorandum may help to clarify the purposes and procedures of the proposed research and serve as a guide to the commentary that follows. But before going into details, a statement of the significance of the project is in order. Any illumination that the project may bring to the great particular works under analysis can be considered of some significance. The possibility of success here lies with the methodology (see below) which is expected to evolve in the course of study. We have applied the method of content analysis to materials so diverse as open-ended responses of Americans to questions about their politics, to description of hundreds of budgetary programs of the federal government, and to the varied output of enemy propaganda in wartime. We should, at a minimum, answer questions such as the following: (Addressed to a particular author) What fraction of his work occurs within the Unconscious frame? How does he move the "plot" within this frame? Is the Unconscious a substitute for, an imitation of, and a contradiction of "reality"? How does he handle transitions into and exits from the Unconscious? Do climaxes occur in or outside of the Unconscious? In how many respects are the rules of the U paradigm obeyed in the exo- Unconscious material? (Of all authors) Do they establish a consistent and complete map of the Unconscious? Does the map conform to the "scientific" map of the Unconscious used by Freud and other psychiatrists? In sum, what generally have the writers achieved in putting across their messages, in movement, in style, in dramatic excitement by the use of the concept of the Unconscious? In a more general sense, the project has importance for understanding the genesis of the concept of the Unconscious, which may have been the crowning achievement of the human mind in the century, 1850-1950, and which may be a principal and still unappreciated source of the relativity physics of Einstein and the indeterminacy principle of Heisenberg and thence of the breakdown of Newtonian physics. (Schlipp, 1951) I intend to suggest such possibilities. That the study postulates flatly that unconscious forces entered into the development of the concept of the Unconscious itself is not without significance. Scientific concepts, like ordinary parents, have a way of saying "Do as I say, and not as I do." In the very beginning of the period under study, Wilhelm von Humboldt, that incredibly active and resourceful explorer-scientist, coined the term "Weltanschauung" and "claimed that the science of a certain period was always unconsciously determined by its Weltanschauung." (Ellenberger, 1970, 201) This idea, which I originally obtained in 1939 from Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, pointed me towards my first book, Public and Republic (1948, 1951), which demonstrated the unperceived connections between Weltanschauung (for which, read paradigm or ideology or world view) and surprisingly specific devices of political representation in American history (such as proportional representation and universal suffrage). In developing its hypotheses, the study can uncover more fully the important transactional role that Freud played in the interfaces of the sciences and literature. By insisting on the scientific character of the Unconscious, in the face of disbelief, opposition, and rebellion, he built bridges among the three worlds and maintained their defenses until a generation of thinkers and writers had crossed over them. The historiography of ideas here proposed may make some contribution methodology (see below). If the proposed "hard" component of the method - involving standardized content analysis of some 40 volumes and auxiliary materials - contributes to the final conclusions, which will depend substantially upon more conventional (no matter how delicate) methods of ideological analysis, then the methodology of literary analysis will take a step forward, and the techniques can be applied to other fields, most directly to those in which the Unconscious plays an important role, as for example political science. Here, for instance, one could hypothesize that a sociogenic route ran from Malthus to Darwin to Freud to Lasswell, with a "rational" diversionary and less productive route from Darwin to Bagehot to Wallas to Lasswell. Still another point of significance has to do with why the investigator should propose this study only now, after 38 years of interest in the general area. Until recently, he has not known enough of the problem-area. He has long been familiar with the literary giants that constitute the "panel of respondents" for the study, Doestoevsky, Mann and the others, and used most of the tools and concepts in other areas. In the past dozen years, he has been working steadily in the history of science and its relations to religion, legend and ancient literature, and upon the origins of human nature, the results of which research have begun to appear only very recently. Lately, he has come to think that a new paradigm of science may be imminent, one which synthesizes the uniformitarian and catastrophist Weltanschauung in futuristic terms. Within the last decade, the universe has been dubbed "explosive," the sun "inconstant," the geographical poles "tilted" and "reversed," the globe of the world "cleaved," the crust of the earth "convulsed," the civilizations of the Bronze Ages "razed" by natural forces, the species "extinguished in waves," the atmosphere "ravaged" by mutagenic radiation storms, the hominid recently transformed into a "hallucinatory" human, and Uniformitarianism reduced to "a methodological hypothesis": all of these statements have been made by "establishment" scientists of high rank. We think that the signals of a changing major paradigm are to be found not only in science but in the arts and humanities, perhaps in the burgeoning of interest in what this study regards as other "escape hatches" of the literati: science fiction in all media, extreme violence, catastrophes, the occult in many forms, "last survivors" themes and "lost worlds." There is searching for a new paradigm in literature that would burst the bounds of "the Literary Unconscious" and flood out into the exterior world under new permissive conditions, upon the dismissal of the gatekeeper, the Uniformitarian paradigm; and literature would then be partially emptied of the Unconscious that had been elaborated in the century under discussion here. In such a case, there may be something prophetic in this "Last Hurrah" for the Unconscious, and the study may offer some theoretical and methodological possibilities to those who will be addressing themselves to the literature of the future. At bottom, the project owes much of its importance to the contribution it may make to relations between "the Two Worlds" of science and the humanities. Indeed, we have here "Three Worlds," for we envision a three-way interaction among social sciences (psychology, sociology), the humanities, and the natural sciences. The study can reveal how far-reaching are the transactions and connections between the worlds in these large regions of intellectual movement, which, it is submitted, have not been as well explored as is generally believed. {S : DETAILED EXPOSITION OF THE PROJECT} DETAILED EXPOSITION OF THE PROJECT A number of elements composed the U paradigm as it emerged victorious from its centuries of struggle with catastrophism, as the C paradigm is often called: time and space are absolute; the Newtonian laws of gravity and motion govern natural events rigidly; the heavens are constant and the universe is orderly; they operate through measurably equal units of time and through measurably equal coordinates of space; time is long and uninterrupted by sudden leaps; the surface of the earth has accumulated its features over long eons of time; nor are sudden leaps found in biology and cultural history, which have proceeded "by very short and slow steps" (Darwin); and social change is part of "cosmic evolution" (Herbert Spencer). We have not, apparently, defined the U paradigm in its present circumscribed form (which already shows it to be on the defensive) as a mere hypothesis that rates of change in geology are to be considered as having been uniform unless proven to the contrary. Rather we take up the U idea in its broadest form as a world view, in the period of its great victory. For it was tied to two centuries of prior changes in the sciences of man and the skies. The philosopher-psychologists Locke, Hume, Fontanelle and Diderot had made of man a mechanical creature, highly determined by external forces. Hutton, the father of geological uniformitarianism, published his Theory of the Earth in 1775. Writes Mason (1962, 403), "Hutton based his view that the rock-forming agencies of the earth were constant on the by now established theory that the solar system was mechanically stable and permanently self-sustaining." The close friendship and association of Darwin with the great U geologists adds credibility to the labeling of a U paradigm. In fact the peak prestige of the U paradigm would probably be registered around 1875, after the publication of Descent of Man. (The Origin of Species had been published and immediately sold out in 1859.) By 1875, too, Ernest Renan was widely known for his social-scientific studies of religion and myth, foreshadowing The Golden Bough of James Frazer, of whom it has been said that "Frazer seems an English Renan, so close do the two men appear at number of points both in outlook and reputation" (Vickery, 1973). The U paradigm penetrated all scientific fields, the social sciences, and social philosophy (including both Marxists and capitalists). The criterion most commonly attributed to U is that it held man and nature to be forever undergoing a constant slow rate of change. Even if no other features of the U paradigm were unfriendly to literature, this one would be fatal to amiable concourse between science and literature. Literature has undergone great transformations from its prehistoric origins onwards, but one crowning trait has persisted: literature depends upon erratic and sudden rates of change; it demands them; its humanistic quality says, "Give me surprising and revolutionary change - I must have such concepts as the Greek 'catastrophe, ' the 'turning down point, ' and only then can I give you a story." By contrast with U, Catastrophism, whose principles had been steadily eroding between 1600 and 1875, offered the following beliefs: the world, the species, and mankind were created abruptly; they were repeatedly subject to destruction by divine or natural forces in the skies and earth; the time spanned by these catastrophes was short, changes in temporal and spatial dimensions of the universe are brought on by divine, heroic, and natural forces that are immense and unpredictable; all the hosts of heaven -- sun, moon, stars, planets -- may change their motions and qualities; in this awful setting, measurement is less of the essence of being than miracles. The Unconscious may be defined briefly here as those mental operations that are ordinarily not subject to awareness or recall. They exercise effects upon all life processes, including intellectual and emotional behavior. The Unconscious is variously portrayed and compartmentalized. One of the tasks of the proposed study is to compare and contrast the topology of the Unconscious as psychiatry sees it with the topology as it has been fashioned by literary figures for the purposes of their art. In literature the Unconscious was scarcely developed so long as the C paradigm prevailed. It was buried in sin and guilt, projected as the workings of gods and devil. Miracles and 'true' prophecy were accepted as movers of action. Authors could invoke seriously mysterious life forms, natural disasters, and portents. The external world could be turned upside down instantly. The skies were inhabited by a heavenly host that passed to and from the earth. As examples, consulting the Gospels (Strauss, 1820), or Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Wolfe, 1976), one sees how the hero, framed in the C paradigm, lived and died in company with prodigious manifestations of nature. The 'hero' in modern literature died in a way to satisfy the U paradigm. The 'hero' has managed to stay alive in politics by causing his own catastrophes, wars, and holocausts. In the period of a century following 1870, frank expressions of catastrophism were effectively stilled in the serious intellectual world of science and literature. Literature (and indeed all art) might have been expected to show no structural and thematic changes correlative with the changes in scientific philosophy, or to exhibit changes that were in tune with the dominating world view of science. And, in fact, this was true to a certain extent of the best literature as well as continuously true of popular writing whose audience lived always in catastrophic as well as uniformitarian belief systems. Stendhal's hero of Rouge et Noir rued that he was born too late for the Battle of Waterloo, and committed murder finally to achieve drama, an indication perhaps of the reluctance of the old pre-uniformitarian world view to accept the new unglamorous world view. Manzoni's Betrothed dwelled in earlier times, endured a terrible plague, but responded to modern economic 'laws' of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo. The popularity of the novel came rapidly, not only to please a new kind of public, but also to supply the author's need for more pages to develop stories, to embrace time, to attend to the once "insignificant." The poets, significantly, went "mad," like Baudelaire, and art and poetry went "bohemian." And we would point out that here was an escape route from the intolerable normality and statistical quality of the uniformitarian historical and world vision. But meanwhile a major "normal" substitute formation for the dying catastrophism was occurring. It would be consonant, even if uncomfortable, with the Uniformitarian consensus. Psychiatry began its long march. Indications of "the Unconscious" began to appear. Henri Ellenberger's excellent (1970) book brings out the highlights. (It is misleadingly entitled, The Discovery of the Unconscious. A small fraction of the large book actually deals with the Unconscious, and nowhere does the work treat of the hypothesis of the presently proposed research, except by utmost indirection and as noticed by an ear cocked for it. Its subtitle of The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry is more descriptive of the contents.) Mesmerism, spiritism, magnetism and hypnotism dominated early psychiatric circles. In literature, Edgar Allen Poe used the theories in his stories. The novelists Charles de Villers, E. T. A. Hoffman, Alexandre Dumas, and even Balzac also incorporated magnetism. "But," writes Ellenberger (p. 161), "magnetism was more exploited by popular writers than by great ones." Further, "Magnetism was condemned by the Academie and despised by Universities." (p. 160) Victor Hugo practiced spiritism. In Flaubert's Salammbo (1859) the subconscious eroticism of a maiden brings about hysterical behavior. "Hypnotism inspired a number of novels," (p. 165) such as George du Maurier's bestseller Trilby. It is fairly obvious that these modes of psychiatry could not long confront the juggernaut of uniformitarian science. They passed and with them their literary passengers. A second wave of ideas came into psychiatry with the German romantic movement (1800-1830) --an ideal, a yearning, a love of nature -- but then also a school of Naturphilosophie (von Schelling et al.), with a deep interest in the "soul" and the unity of man and nature. Freud and Jung were heavily influenced by Romanticism, and of course the intermediary psychiatric thinkers -- Von Schubert, Troxler, Carus, Fechner, and Bachofen as well. "Fundamentally Romantic are the concepts of unconscious, particularly as revived in Jung's 'collective unconscious' and the emphasis on dreams and symbols." (Ellenberger, 205). According to Ellenberger, "After 1850, the philosophy of nature and Romanticism seemed to have completely disappeared. It was the period of positivism and the triumph of the mechanistic Weltanschauung. (He excepts Fechner and Bachofen.) Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-69) stands out here, a synthesizer of brain anatomopathology, neuro-psychiatry, clinical psychiatry, and dynamic psychiatry. "He proclaimed that the greatest and most important part of the psychic processes were unconscious." (p. 241) Nietzsche is, of course, the exemplar of the Romantics in many ways and an enemy of the uniformitarian credo, with his ideas of the super-man, the will, and moral preoccupations. "Nietzsche is inexhaustible in his attempts to show how every possible kind of feeling, opinion, attitude, conduct and virtue, is rooted in self-deception or an unconscious lie. Thus, 'everyone is the farthest to himself, ' the unconscious is the essential part of the individual, consciousness being only a kind of ciphered formula of the unconscious, 'a more or less fantastic commentary on an unconscious, perhaps unknowable, but felt, text. '" (p. 273) Theodore Thass-Thieneman (1968) reports that the concept of the unconscious was actively at work in linguistics before Freud and quotes Hermann Paul (1880, trans. 1888): "Perhaps the greatest progress by modern psychology consists in the acknowledgment of the fact that a great many psychological processes go on without clear consciousness, and that everything which has been in consciousness remains an effective motive in the unconscious. The acknowledgment of this as a matter of fact is of the greatest importance for linguistics, and it became utilized by Steinthal in great extent. All manifestations of speech are growing out of this dark space of the unconsciousness of the mind." (p. 23 of Principles of the History of Language, 1888.) Steinthal's work was contemporary with that of Paul. By 1889, Hericourt could write in the Revue Scientifique that the unconscious activity of mind was a scientific truth established beyond doubt, and claimed that Chevreul had experimentally demonstrated so. (Ellenberger, 314) "In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the philosophical concept of the unconscious, as taught by Schopenhauer and Von Hartman, was extremely popular, and most contemporary philosophers admitted the existence of an unconscious mental life." (Ellenberger, 312). There was no absolutely new theory, but the growth was exponential: "The assumption had been held for many centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it attracted more attention; in the nineteenth, as one of the cornerstones of modern dynamic psychiatry. [N. B.: This term refers mainly to therapeutic as opposed to laboratory or experimental psychology, but also to Fechner and Helmholtz.] The traditional speculative approach, which was also that of the Romantics, was now supplemented by two other approaches, the experimental and the clinical." (Ellenberger, 311) Sigmund Freud, trained in neurology, attracted to hypnosis, and inspired by Romanticism, joined the scientific temper to the literary needs and produced a theory of the Unconscious that would bridge (not without strains and stresses) the chasm between uniformitarian science and creative literature. He opened up a grand ballroom of the mind, showed how its scenery could be changed instantly, depicted the wars that could be waged and the defeats suffered within it, extended its billings to include everyday life and jokes as well as tragedy, introduced the gods as the gigolos of illusion-seekers, and then, to help the literary writer more, even wrote the songs to be danced to with his ideas of symbols and languages. A most significant contribution of the builder of the mental ballroom was his life-long pursuit of scientific respectability so that those who entered and departed would not be ashamed or endure the hoots of derision from scientists gathered at the doors. The occult, science fiction, allegories, fairy tales, and other literary devices to tell a story despite the restraints of science have been extremely popular, but have not won to their authors the kudos of the science-dominated elites. "Freud claimed... that his world was grounded in reality, perceived by scientific method." (Roazen, 18) In relation to literature, his attitude is that of a scientist who is trying to study by scientific methods the writer's advanced ideas: "... Creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth, of which our philosophy has not let us dream." (Quoted by Roazen, 16-7.) Freud, rather than Nietzsche, became the central figure in the history of the Unconscious partly because he was a conformer to the uniformitarian ideal. By contrast, Nietzsche was in revolt against science; science "is a principle inimical to life and destructive. The will for truth could be a disguised wish for death." (Ellenberger, 273) So it came about that Nietzsche, who knew and spoke of the unconscious, of inhibitions, sublimation, repression, functional amnesia, selfdestructiveness and the "id" before Freud, and was admired by Thomas Mann, Carl Jung and a host of literati and conoscenti, was banned from the precincts of Uniformitarian science where Freud was allowed, no matter how reluctantly, to enter. Freud's striving for scientific status has governed psychiatric history over nearly a century, and the realm of the unconscious is widely regarded as one of the great scientific "discoveries" of the modern age. Thousand of practitioners in many fields of science have employed the concept. It was to this authoritative support, then, that the writer might refer when asked his credentials as a speaker of truths. It is not generally appreciated how important this was and now is to the serious writer who seeks to employ fiction in its various forms as a teacher of humanity. Just as it has become plausible that practically every scientific canon of the U paradigm would threaten literary creativity, it may become credible that the U paradigm would provoke defense mechanisms, and particularly, the Unconscious. But we have to analyze carefully the dynamics of the events; they are quite roundabout. Here is an hypothesis of how the "scientific Freudian" would reason, using U premises. Human behavior is animal. Animal (human) behavior was a long time is developing. What is civilized is also ancient (prehistoric, primitive [cf. Fraser]). Morality is animal and relative. It is built up in a culture, like beavers and ants and apes build their behavior patterns. Myth, language, and symbols develop either on a constant plane or curve of rationality and clarity over long periods. The evidences of catastrophism are interpreted as expressions of repressed instinctual tendencies. The developing intelligence - mechanical though it be - is given the possibility of understanding and controlling nature. Both the environment and human mind are in a "steady state." The feelings of catastrophism are attributed to the repressed traumas and anxieties of "normal" existence in civilization. In the end, the theory of the unconscious substituted for analogous functions of pre- Unconscious psychology. Thus was filled the vacuum left by the "scientific" destruction of the latter when U took over from C. The criticism often directed against the theory of the Unconscious, that it was non- provable, non-testable, etc., is perhaps correct, but irrelevant to the functions of the theory, which becomes in effect part of the U ideology. Once introduced and elaborated as part of the scientific corpus, the Unconscious made its way more readily into literature. As Steiner (1967, 6) has said, "The science will enrich language and the resources of feeling (as Thomas Mann showed in Felix Krull, it is from astrophysics and microbiology that we may reap our future myths, the terms of our metaphors)... And it is precisely the 'objectivity, ' the moral neutrality in which the sciences rejoice and attain their brilliant community of effort, that bar them from final relevance." However, by our theory, the Unconscious was not transferred as a topological field or map into the novels and dramas. Rather it was reworked. The literary Unconscious will probably be shown not to have the same geometry as the scientific Unconscious. For example, Freud's typology of regressions is not the typology adopted by novelists. No one yet knows what typology the novelists drafted and settled upon, perhaps none at all, perhaps highly idiosyncratic forms. We may discover this structure in some part. Yet, a priori, when Freud discerns a regression from conscious to unconscious, from the present to childhood, and from language to pictorial and symbolic representations, we are entitled to move with Proust's "Recovering of Lost Time," (as it is better translated) for evidences of this typology, or for additional ones or for substitutes. And so it is with a number of the mechanisms and delineations of the Unconscious; in this study, even though it is not the central issue, the comparison of literary structuring of the unconscious with scientific structuring will come naturally and one day perhaps tell us much about the nature of literary needs and inventions. The proposed study would proceed to identify among a selected group of authors the biographical information that would indicate their awareness of and interaction with the concept of the unconscious, then to show in the work of the same authors how the concept of the unconscious is employed, and finally, to examine, by comparison with the uniformitarian "real world," how the "unconscious world" of these writers manages to satisfy the demands of scientific respectability while achieving the requirements of literary fiction. Because the spread of the uniformitarian paradigms and the development of the idea of the unconscious occurred throughout western civilization, it might be well to study writers from several countries. Further, leading writers, rather than typical authors, should such exist, were chosen, because of their influence upon the other writers, teachers, scientists, and students of their cultures, and also, I should add, because I am more familiar with their lives and work. Thirdly, authors who altogether complete the range of literary activities made possible in "the ballroom of the unconscious" were selected. To these ends, the following authors and works were chosen: F. Doestoevsky (1821-1881) for his pre-Freudian use of the Unconscious. The Insulted and Injured (1861); Crime and Punishment (1866); The Idiot (1868); The Possessed (1871-2); The Brothers Karamozov (1879-80) Andre Gide (1869-1951) for his stylistic mastery and methods of disclosing unconscious motives. Fruits of the Earth (1897); The Immoralist (1902); Strait is the Gate (1909); Cellars of the Vatican (1914); The Counterfeiters (1926). Franz Kafka (1883-1924) for objectifying the unconscious by treating reality as surrealism. "Metamorphosis" and Other Stories (var. d.); The Trial (1925); The Castle (1926); Amerika (1927). James Joyce (1882-1941) for the frank and full integration of the "stream of consciousness" (and unconsciousness) into reality settings. Dubliners (1914); Ulysses (1922); Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Chamber Music (1907); Exiles (1918). Thomas Mann (1875-1955) for his frank devotion to the morality of Nietzsche and his careful, logical delineations of the unconscious vs. the rational. Buddenbrooks (1901); Magic Mountain (1927); Death in Venice (1911); Doctor Faustus (1947); The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954). Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) for his explorations of tragic madness and the Oedipal unconscious. Strange Interlude (1928); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); Ah, Wilderness (1933); The Iceman Cometh (1946); Long Day's Journey into Night (1955). Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) for his superimposition of scientifically possible contradictions into plot and character. The Old and the Young (1913); Right You Are If You Think You Are (1918); Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921); Naked (1924); Tonight we Improvise (1930). Marcel Proust (1867-1922) for his mastery of time in all of its unconscious aberrations beneath the ticking of the "clockwork universe." Remembrance of Things Past (7 vols., 1913-7). Besides these authors, to whom distinct chapters of the intended monograph are devoted, occur other intellectual figures who are to be treated in the proposed research. They include Shakespeare, John Bunyan, John Milton, and Voltaire in Chapter I; Newton, Fontanelle, Locke and Hume in Chapter II; Hutton, Lamarck, Lyell, Cuvier, Buckland and Agassiz in IV. Boulanger, rarely mentioned, is discussed in Chapter VI; he combines scientific catastrophism (comet and flood); a theory of the origins of religion in real-world fear; a theory of collective amnesia; and the use of the myth from suppressed traumas - all in an unprecedented manner. For some time now (one may argue) the theory of the Unconscious has been turning against the U paradigm. For it has been bringing to the fore unassimilable, uncomfortable, anxiety-producing material. Since the disintegration of catastrophic religions and political ideologies, there has been no vessel to hold its acids. The U theory had implied that "in time" therapies would be devised to control and appease the Unconscious. Behaviorist psychologists such as Watson and Skinner have tried to turn their backs upon it. Under the U theory, all is explainable; when explainable it is controllable; when controlled, anxiety is reduced and happiness is produced. To the extent that this sequence has failed to materialize and disenchantment with the theories has occurred, the concept of the Unconscious is counter-productive for U. That is, the Unconscious (with the old C paradigm admission to "science" denied and its controlling capacities foregone) can only turn on itself in literature and art, allying itself with impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, the occult, science fiction, yoga-tao-sufi, and other modes of compatible existence. The "tragic" departs from the art and literature; the "contradictory" (irony, farce included) and "obscene reality" replace it; there are phenomena to label "tragic" but no entity to judge them to be tragedy; the tragedy is like the tree falling in the forest unheard and unobserved. Moving along in tandem with the U and Evolutionist injunctions, the Unconscious has been revealed to affect thousands of psychological functions and social behaviors, in areas that must be designated non-instinctual or at least not wholly instinctual, and therefore human. Perhaps our historical study may generate hypotheses in answer to the questions: What will follow the U paradigm? Or, after the Unconscious, what? The literary mind is not happy with being a "reservation Indian." A continuous bombardment of the scientists occurs. We are so used to it that we only know of its excesses. The literary mind wants the real world to have the catastrophic qualities so that it can turn its plots and characters loose upon it. This will continue to cause tension between science and literature, with science requiring literature to be 'abnormal' and literature wishing its innermost thoughts to be 'normal. ' Perhaps, as Neuman (1959, 25) has written, "the breakdown of consciousness, carrying the artist backward to an all-embracing participation with the world, contains the constructive creative elements of a new world vision." Added note on Methodology: Types of Sources and Causal Connections Sought The major methodological challenges of the project have to deal with gathering relevant and ample data and establishing causal relations between several critical sets of events. I. Data Occur in Several Classes a. Writings in the History of Science, such as works number 9, 21, 27, 28, 29, 40, 47, 78 in the accompanying bibliography. b. History of Literature in general or in special aspects, such as numbers 1, 22-4, 71, 56, 59. c. History of Psychology, # 16, etc. d. History of Ideas, such as items 8, 37, and 65. e. Works of Figures Prominent in Parts I and II. These are generally available, as with S. Freud, Standard Edition (20), Kaufmann on Nietzsche (38), Boulanger's works (3) are rare, but have been read at Princeton U. Library where they remain available. f. Works of the Panel of 8 Authors: generally available both in original languages and in translation. An estimated 40 volumes are involved here, averaging 5 per author. g. Derived Data: the systematically collected information obtained from the works of the Panel of 8 authors. The parameters of this information, for which the collective terms "questionnaire" and "framework of interrogation" are used above, have to be formulated; this task is one of the most rigorous and demanding phases of the investigation. In a vital sense, the project is the devising of a "framework of interrogation" for the panel of authors and other data. Putting aside the systematic searching for biographical connections and other material of use to the study, the examination of the panel works to extract from them their "geometry" and the "dynamic" of the unconscious that they employ. There occur questions such as: What proportion of the time in each work does Author A deal with the Unconscious? In which of the following psychological categories (derived from the scientific typography) does the U action take place? (There follows a set of categories.) If there is no easy fitting, describe the image (map, idea, functions) of the Unconscious that the writer is pursuing. h. Biographical and autobiographical writings involving the 8 authors, such as the Journals of Gide. II. Major Causal Transactional Connections a. Theory of the Unconscious in Science. Well-recorded in the sources. b. Between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. Data appears adequate and interconnections already well developed. c. Between (a) uniformitarianism, (b) Catastrophism, and (c) psychology of the unconscious. Difficult (an typical of historiography of ideas). If ab, bc, ac and abc are identified (or distinguishable) as interacting according to certain typical modes, then statements of their causal connections can be deduced. If influences between and among them are directly attributed by participants, then causal transactions are more strongly proven. d. Between the psychology of the Unconscious and literature of the unconscious. Appears solvable because both universes (psychologists and literary figures), are in touch abundantly, directly and through intermediaries of press, common acquaintances and influences. III. Topology of the Unconscious in Science and Literature Topology of the Psychological Unconscious has not been finely drawn; existing schemes of the Unconscious may be improved by our analysis here. Topology of the Literary unconscious has to be invented almost entirely by the investigator. (This is the "ballroom of the unconscious" metaphor used above.) Even isolated gems, such as this statement from the pen of George Steiner (1967,31), are exceedingly rare: "As if aware of the fact that science had torn from language many of its former possessions and outer provinces, Joyce chose to annex a new kingdom below ground. Ulysses caught in its bright net the live tangle of subconscious life; Finnegan's Wake mines the bastion of sleep." The topologies must then be related to the original topology of the Uniformitarian and Catastrophist paradigms. Efforts at introducing strict logico-empirical and quantitative method into the history of new ideas are infrequent possibly because they are rarely successful. This does not mean, however, that they serve no heuristic purpose, or that they do not result in an underlying structure that produces a superior, if seemingly qualitative, work. I am not relying rigidly upon the content analysis techniques described above to disgorge neat tables; if, as is likely, they produce fairly organized heaps of data, I shall be neither surprised nor displeased, but shall fall back upon the "tried and true" styles of literary analysis employed in such works as Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony, or John Vickery's The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. As H. T. Pledge wrote in his History of Science (p. 143) "Science should explain what we notice... not notice only what it can explain." I shall try to explain what I notice by the most exact means possible. {S : SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PERTINENT WORKS} SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PERTINENT WORKS 1. Richard F. Atnally. "The Human Trinity: The Shapings of Time in Eighteenth Century Literature" (Unpublished Paper delivered at MLA Convention, New York, 1976). 2. Marie Bonaparte. "Time and the Unconscious," 21 International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1940), 427-68. 3. Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger. L'Antiquité devoilée... ages, 3v (Amsterdam: M. M. Rey, 1977). 4. Donald Brinkmann. Probleme des Unbewussten (Zurich: Rascher, 1943). 5. F. S. Cohn. "Time and the Ego," 26 Psychoanal. Q. (1957), 168-89. 6. F. G. Crookshank. Individual Psychology and Nietzsche (London: C. W. Daniel, 1933), Pamphlet # 10. 7. Charles Darwin. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2v. (1871, many editions since). 8. __________. The Origin of Species (1859). 9. Alfred de Grazia. "An Early Mathematical Derivation of an Election System," 44 Isis (Jan. 1953), 42-50. 10. ___________. Public and Republic: American Ideas of Political Representation (New York: Knopf, 1951) 11. Sebastian de Grazia. Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Doubleday, 196). 12. L. Dooley. "The Concept of Time in Defense of Ego Integrity," 4 Psychiatry (1941), 4: 13-25. 13. Jan Ehrenwald, ed. The History of Psychotherapy: From Healing Magic to Encounter (New York: Aronson, 1976). 14. Loren Eiseley. The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Scribners 1970). 15. Mircea Eliade. Cosmos & History: The Myth of The Eternal Return (New York: Harper, 1959). 16. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970). 17. Linda Fleming. The Sub-Culture of Science Fiction (Chapel Hill, N. C.: U. of N. C., P D. Dissertation in Sociology, 1977). 18. P. G. Fothergill, Historical Aspects of Organic Evolution (London, 1952). 19. J. T. Fraser, ed. The Voices of Time (N. Y.: Braziller, 1968). 20. Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. and edited by J. Strachey with Anna Freud, London: Hogarth Press, 1955-). 21. C. C. Gillispie. Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (1951). 22. Charles Glicksberg. The Literature of Nihilism (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. Press, 1975). 23. ______________. Modern Literary Perspectivism (Dallas: SMU Press, 1970). 24. ______________. The Self in Modern Literature (U. Park, Pa.: U. of pa. State Press, 1963). 25. Stephen Jay Gould. "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History (May, 1977), 12. 26. John C. Green. The Death of Adam (Ames: Iowa State u. Press, 1959). 27. George Grinnell. "The Origins of Modern Geological Theory," I Kronos # 4 (1976), 68-76. 28. A. R. Hall. The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954). 29. John Hampton. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger et la science de son temps (Geneve: Droz, 1955). 30. Edward von Hartmann. Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). 31. Jules Hericourt. "L'activité inconsciente de l'esprit," Revue Scientifique, 3rd series #1 (1889), II, 257-268. 32. Frederick J. Hoffman. Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge, U. of La. Press, 1957). 33. _____________. The Imagination's New Beginning: Theology and Modern Literature (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame U. Press, 1967). 34. Pierre Janet. Névroses et idées fixes (Paris: Alcan, 1898). 35. Carl G. Jung. Man and his Symbols (N. Y.: Dell, 1968). 36. _______________. "The Psychology of the Unconscious," in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), pp. 117-130. 37. Walter A. Kaufman, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (N. Y.: Meridian, 1956). 38. ____________. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: P. U. Press, 1974). 39. Frank Kermode. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the theory of Fiction (London: Oxford U. Press, 1967). 40. Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1962). 41. Harold D. Lasswell. Psychology and Politics (Chicago: U. of C. Press, 1930). 42. _____________. Nathan Leites and Associates. Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (N. Y.: G. w. Stewart, 1949). 43. Nathan Leites. A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953). 44. Karl Mannheim. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1936, N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1968). 45. Frank Manuel. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1959). 46. Edward L. Margetts. "The Concept of the Unconscious in the History of Medical Psychology," XXVII Psychiatric Q. (1953), 115. 47. Stephen E. Mason. A History of the Sciences (Collier Books, 1962). 48. Joost A. M. Meerloo. Along the Fourth Dimension: Man's Sense of Time and History (N. Y.: John Day, 1970). 49. James Miller. Unconsciousness (N. Y.: Wiley, 1942). 50. Joseph-Marie Montmasson. Invention and the Unconscious (N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). 51. Thelma Moss. The Probability of the Impossible (N. Y.: New Amer. Library, 1974). 52. Frederick W. H. Myers. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1903). 53. Erich Neuman. Art and The Creative Unconscious (N. Y.: Pantheon Books, 1954). 55. Marjorie Hope Nicholson. The Breaking of the Circle, Studies in the Effect of the 'New Science' Upon Seventeenth Century Poetry (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1950). 56. __________. Voyages to the Moon (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1948). 57. Shelley Orgel. "On Time and Timelessness," J. Am. Psychoanal. Assn. (1965), 102-21. 58. H. T. Pledge. Science Since 1500 (N. Y.: Harper & Bros., 1959). 59. Mario Praz. The Romantic Agony (trans. London: Oxford U., 1933). 60. Paul Roazen. Freud: Political and Social Thought (N. Y.: Vintage Books, 1970). 61. Joseph R. Royce. "Psychology at the Crossroads between the Sciences and the Humanities," in Royce, ed., Psychology and the Symbol (N. Y.: Random House, 1965). 62. Schlipp, P. A., ed. Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (N. Y.: Tudor, 1951). 63. Arthur Schopenhauer. World as Will and Representation (1814). 64. Robert Sears. Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic Concepts 65. Pitirim Sorokin. Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (1937-41). 66. George Steiner. Language and Silence (N. Y.: Athenaeum, 1967) 67. David Friedrich Strauss. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1820; trans. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1972). 68. Theodore Thass-Thienemann. Symbolic Behavior (N. Y.: Washington Square Press, 1968). 69. _____________. The Sub-Conscious Language (N. Y.: Wash. Square Press, 1967). 70. Hans Vaihinger. The Philosophy of "As If" (N. Y.: Harcourt-Brace, 1935). 71. John B. Vickery. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1973). 72. John B. Watson. "The Myth of the Unconscious," 155 Harper's Magazine (1927), 503-7. 73. Rene Welleck. "The Concept of Evolution in Literary History," reprinted in S. G. Nichols, Jr., ed., Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1963). 74. Lancelot L. Whyte. The Unconscious Before Freud (N. Y.: Basic Books, 1960). 75. J. O. Wisdom. The Unconscious Origin of Berkeley's Philosophy, International Psychoanalytic Library, #47 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953). 76. Irving Wolfe. "The Catastrophic Substructure of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, " I Kronos, #3 (1975), 31-45, #4 (1975), 37-54. 77. Walter von Wyss. Charles Darwin, ein Forscherleben (Zurich & Stuttgart: Artemis- Verlag, 1958). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 20: } {T O. K. ORIGINS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER TWENTY O. K. ORIGINS O. K. is also okay, okey, or okeh. It is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. "O. K., the most successful abbreviation ever coined, in the United States or elsewhere, has been borrowed by all the languages of Western Europe and some of those of Asia." So writes the illustrious H. L. Mencken in his book on the American language. But where does it come from? Let us resort to this author's journal: Stylida, Naxos, March 28, 1980 Stormy weather, some rain, high winds, thick clouds low-passing, two days running. Working on my novel Ron's Norm last night. Talking of a chapter in which Ron cites John Cohane on the pre-Christian Irish Christmastime Og Day when people engaged in drunken orgies. Ami suggested moving a word to another paragraph. It was the word "OC." I said "O. K." I looked at it, remembered the mystery of its origin, and thought "This O. K. could be OC, the most ancient Irish god-name." I read in the Oxford English Dictionary on Etymological Principles (Vol. II p. 4028 of microprint edition), "the earliest occurrence so far noted is in the Boston Transcript of 15 April 1840. In this and two examples from April and June the meaning is not clear, but the explanation oll korrect' appears on June 18..." Then, "1840 Atlas (Boston), 18 June 2/ 1 The band rode in a stage, which had a barrel of Hard Cider on the baggage rack, marked with large letters 'O. K. ' - oll korrect." I suspect that Irish immigrants, who were becoming exceedingly numerous in Boston at this time, brought the word, a folk word, with them. The use of the letters on a bandwagon and to mark a container of hard liquor can be related to an archaic festival, it would seem. Other theories of the origin of O. K. are weak, such as a misspelling by illiterates, which however goes well with the idea that the origin was among "illiterate Irishmen," rather than with the slightly later attribution to General Jackson who was not as uneducated as his detractors made him out to be - unless, which is possible, Jackson, descended of Scots-Irish, did also pick up the O. K. from the folklore of the ancient OC. Significantly, another explanation is that 'O. K. ' comes from the Oklahoma (note: oc) Choctaw (note: oc) Indian word "oke" (" it is") in an attribution of 1885. (Americans often use a simple "oke," one, not two syllables, and 'periods' may have been later additions.) It is conceivable that this "oke" (it is) is like the Yahweh (I am) and was a Choctaw god name once. Both OG and HAUE are among Cohane's half dozen key words. {S : POSTSCRIPT OF 1983} POSTSCRIPT OF 1983 The oc syllable is a straight-out affirmative in the langue d'oc population of southern France where oc meant yes, as contrasted with the langue d'oil of the North of France, which prevailed (oil becoming oui). Returning to the Irish drink, uech, one is led to another of Cohane's basic words, haue, who he believes to have been a divinity preceding oc, and is found in Yahweh and Jove (properly pronounced in Latin). The most sacred parish in Ireland is called Aughaval, which disassembles into og/ ava/ ala. Now H. L. Mencken comments about O. K. that "its long disputed etymology has been practically settled by Allen Walker Read." Not so, although Read wrote three articles, and Mencken one, on the subject between 1941 and 1963. He is probably correct, though, in saying that "it arose from a vogue for acronyms which developed in Boston in the summer of 1838." This would help explain the social readiness for the invention and why it quickly acquired misleading punctuation points. I prefer the bandwagon explanation, which combines the Irish, politics, music, holiday, the god Oc, and the intoxicating drink. (Only in the 18th century did the Irish authorities finally suppress the celebration of Og Night.) O. K. was early used as a watchword and title, as the "O. K. Club," and is associated with revelry, noise-making, and carousing, all of which the early Irish contributed to American politics in some unusual degree. On April 3rd, 1840 the New York Daily Express reports, "About 9 o'clock, a procession from the 10th and other up-town wards marched down Center Street headed by a banner inscribed 'O. K. '" and on November 7, the National Intelligencer declares that "The Irish Locosfocos [a political faction] in the 6th ward [of New York City] have been parading the streets with shillelahs [batons], swearing 'O. K. ' etc." Apparently O. K. was even yet an oath of some kind. O. K. is a strong affirmative, difficult to pronounce dubiously, very definite, a password, watchword, acclamation, an expression of secular camaraderie, with its sacred pagan meaning suppressed but lending force and universal acceptance to the word. There still exist the expletives, Ugh! and Oc! (in Ireland) and Och! (in Scotland). Such was Oc, says Cohane, "once the supreme ruler of the universe in the minds and hearts of our ancestors." O. K.? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 3: } {Q WORKING OF THE MIND: } {C Chapter 21: } {T JUPITER'S BANDS AND SATURN'S RINGS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Three: Working of the Mind CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE JUPITER'S BANDS AND SATURN'S RINGS [1] With a mind to the present Pioneer explorations of the neighborhoods of planets Jupiter and Saturn, an article by Thomas Taylor (of Walworth) - published in the Classical Journal of 1819 - ought to be reviewed. Taylor was a renowned Platonist and his article was entitled, "On the Coincidence between the Belts of the Planet Jupiter and the Fabulous Bonds of Jupiter the Demiurgus" [2] . There, quoting passages of the neo- Platonist Proclus (c. 410-85 A. D.), On the Timaeus of Plato and On the Theology of Plato, Taylor points out "that Jupiter the Demiurgus is said by ancient theologists to have put his father Saturn in chains, and also to have surrounded himself with bonds; and that the moderns have found the body of the planet Jupiter to be surrounded by several substances resembling belts or bands, and likewise that there is the faint resemblance of a belt about the planet Saturn" [3] . To have been capable of this assertion, Taylor would have had to educe declarations concerning the two systems of divine bonds from the highly abstract writings of Proclus and to realize the recency of telescopic identification of the two systems. Actually, Galileo and his associates had sighted the rings of Saturn about 1608; however, he mistakenly believed them to be two smaller bodies of a triple-bodied Saturn [4] . Working with a superior telescope, Christian Huygens had identified the "ring" of Saturn as such (but note the singular) and had drawn Jupiter with two equatorial streaks in his Systema Saturnium of 1659. In his posthumously published Cosmotheoros of 1698, he wrote of the bonds of Jupiter and compared them with the clouds of Earth [5] . A review of what Proclus had to say gives no cause to dispute Taylor's translation and comment. Proclus does not, in these lines, directly say that the bound gods are the actual planets of the same names. But all known planets, including Jupiter and Saturn, were identified at that time with gods, called by their names, and were supposed to exhibit their traits. Plato further argued that the planets and stars were huge, and he insisted that the gods were among the planets and not upon Olympus [6] . The modern practice of arbitrarily labeling new objects of the sky from Greek mythology has obscured the sacredness of the ancient belief in the union of astral bodies with divine personages. If any distinction between the planet and god were required, it would relate, as Taylor put it, to "the planet Jupiter, who being a mundane divinity, according to the theology of the Greeks, is a procession from, but no the same with, Jupiter the fabricator of the world" [7] . That is, the abstract god, Jupiter the Demiurge, is something beyond Planet Jupiter, the concrete manifestation of the Demiurge. Early Greek usage did employ the possessive or genitive case, "of Jupiter" in referring to the planet, but by Aristotle's time the significance of the distinction had been lost and the nominative "Jupiter" was used for both god and planet. Proclus writes in a language and logic that are typical of theological speculation, but evidently he reasons thus: Mighty Jupiter, god of law and order, god of the supreme intellect, confronts his father, Saturn, also an all-perfect intellect, and places this intellect under bonds to control its activity according to Jovian ordering principles. Then, because Jupiter is logical and just, he binds himself so that he will be subject to his own laws. Thus the intelligible intellect of Saturn is comprehended by the intellect of Jupiter which then comprehends its own intelligibility. Proclus writes: "As the intelligible is indeed exempt from intellect, but intellect is said to comprehend it, thus also Jupiter is said to bind his father. And in placing bonds about his father, he at the same time binds himself" [8] . Proclus refers repeatedly to the bonds and binding of Jupiter and Saturn, and explicitly to Jupiter's "Saturnian sections and bonds." Taylor wondered at this coincidence of modern scientific observation and ancient theology, and inferred that such theology must be "no less scientific than sublime." Is there another explanation of the coincidence? One might postulate an ancient civilization of a type advanced beyond Plato's Atlantis, which would have been thoroughly devastated but whose telescopes would have been unmatched until the nineteenth century. Only so advanced a culture could produce and systematically employ such a telescope. Paleo-anthropology and archaeology, overseen by the sociology of invention, do not admit of a specific technology that far exceeds the general level of its culture. Then, if it had existed, the destroyed civilization would have inspired myths of some essential correctness within the survivors' theology. One may stretch farther for hypotheses, but they would be most unlikely: the reports of informed visitors from outer space; the presence of magnifying atmospheres; larger, more marked sets of clouds and rings around Jupiter and Saturn seen through a clearer atmosphere of ancient times; ancient human sports with telescopic vision; a saucer telescope of brilliant conception and low technological requirements; etc. One is naturally driven back to the text and the probability that the ancient insistence upon the bonds around the planets is an independently invented conceit, a remarkable coincidence. Yet this probability is not large either. The coincidence is complex, and the more complex a coincidence, the more likely a causal association. Furthermore, the complex parallel is consistent with a great deal more of myth that is connected with the same planets, such as the great heat and electricity of "Thunderbolting Zeus," and the putting away of Saturn (Kronos) beyond the possibility of his affecting the affairs of Earth or the rule of his son, Zeus. An elementary course in the Greek classics will recite Hesiod's Theogony, wherein Zeus is pictured as the son of Kronos, preserved from being swallowed by his father through the substitution of a stone swaddled in cloth, who then leads a successful revolt of Saturn's other progeny who had been swallowed and then vomited up. Galileo ceased his observations of Saturn for two years, and when next he looked in December of 1612, the rings were out of sight. "Has Saturn devoured his children?" he mused, but predicted that in 1614 they would return [9] . If it were not for the massive conviction of contemporary science, backed by a stable sky and a workable celestial mechanics - or more bluntly, if one were to dismiss certain premises and conclusions of modern astronomy - one would apply modern psychological and anthropological analysis to the coincidence and to the words of Proclus, and suggest, as Taylor could not say 150 years ago, that the quotations exemplify how a primordial experience is anesthetized by its traumatic character and remembered as a religious obsession. This then produces a theology that proceeds to generate concepts of rule and law in the universe so as to complete and perfect the process of anesthesia or amnesia. However, since few scholars are prepared to discount current astronomical retrojections of the state of the skies, or to believe in an astronomically learned ancient civilization that was subsequently destroyed, the coincidence may be handed over to non- scientific folklorists of the occult, or laid to a naive poesy of the ancients revived by a befuddled English savant. {S : Notes (Chapter 21: Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings)} Notes (Chapter 21: Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings) 1. This article is one of 22 essays contained in a presentation to Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky on December 5, 1975, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Worlds in Collision. It was first published in Kronos, vol. II 3 (1977). 2. XX Classical Journal, No. 40 (181), pp. 324-6. 3. Ibid., p. 324. Taylor cites Bonnycastles's Introduction to Astronomy, p. 37 as his source. He properly adds that the binding of Saturn by Jupiter was well-known myth, but the binding of Jupiter occurs only in these two hitherto undiscovered passages of Proclus. 4. Cf. Galileo's First and Third "Letters on Sunspots," to Mark Welser, May 4, 1612 and December 1,1612, pp. 101-2 and 143, in G. Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. by Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957). 5. A. Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy (trans., Interscience Publishers, New York, 1961), pp. 254-5. 6. J. Harward, The Epinomis of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), pp. 93, 95ff. 7. Op. cit., p. 324 8. Ibid., p. 326. 9. Op cit., pp. 143-4. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 4: } {Q POLEMICS AND PERSONAGES: } {C Chapter 22: } {T MARX, ENGELS, AND DARWIN} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Four: Polemics and Personages CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO MARX, ENGELS, AND DARWIN More research is needed to delineate the attitudes of Karl Marx and Frederick (or Friedrich) Engels towards the Uniformitarian and Catastrophist paradigms of the nineteenth century, and to explain why the two men chose to align themselves with the Uniformitarian rather than the Catastrophist mode of thought. After all, were they not complete revolutionaries? The term "paradigm" has been popularized by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; 2nd ed., Chicago, U. of Chicago Press, 1970). The term embraces much of the theory and discussion employing the terms "world-view" (J. C. Greene), Weltanschauung (A. von Humboldt), "ideologies" (Mannheim), "models" (R. Thom), "fictions" (Vaihinger). Kuhn's term is unquestionably appropriate as he defined it: "On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community. On the other hand, it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science." (p. 175) It may be too often assumed that there is little which is problematical in the position of Marx and Engels on the present issue. That is, Marx and Engels were aspiring "modern" scientists; the movement of "true" science was along Uniformitarian lines; therefore marxism would join the victorious ranks of science, which, being politically neutral and scientifically objective, could serve communists as well as capitalists in education and politics. However, if the following steps are developed in the present research inquiry, the matter may be cast in a different light: 1. The Uniformitarians adhered to a paradigm of science that can be abstracted and observed as a developing process. Its elements were composed typically of the following beliefs: time and space are absolute; the Newtonian laws of gravity and motion govern natural events rigidly; the heavens are constant and the universe is orderly; they operate through measurably equal units of time and through measurably equal coordinates of space; time is long and uninterrupted by sudden leaps; the surface of the earth has accumulated its features over long periods of time; nor are sudden leaps found in biology and cultural history, which have proceeded "by very short and slow steps" (Darwin); and social change is part of "cosmic evolution" (Herbert Spencer). The U paradigm can be considered broader than its circumscribed form as a mere hypothesis that rates of change in geology are to be considered as having been uniform unless proven to the contrary. Rather, the U idea is taken in its broadest form as a world view, in the period of its great victory. For it was tied to two centuries of prior changes in the sciences of man and the skies. The philosopher-psychologists Locke, Hume, Fontanelle, and Diderot had made of man a mechanical creature, highly determined by external forces. Hutton, the father of geological uniformitarianism, published his Theory of the Earth in 1775. Writes S. E. Mason A History of the Sciences (1962, 403), "Hutton based his view that the rock-forming agencies of the earth were constant on the by now established theory that the solar system was mechanically stable and permanently self-sustaining." The close friendship and association of Darwin with the great U geologist adds credibility to the labeling of a U paradigm. In fact the peak prestige of the U paradigm would probably be registered around 1875, after the publication of the Descent of Man. (The Origin of the Species had been published in 1859.) By 1875, too, Ernest Renan was widely known for his social-scientific studies of religion and myth, foreshadowing The Golden Bough of James Frazer, of whom it has been said that "Frazer seems an English Renan, so close do the two men appear at a number of points both in outlook and reputation." (Vickery, 1973) The U paradigm penetrated all scientific fields. 2. The Catastrophist paradigm, whose principles had been steadily eroding between 1600 and 1875, offered the following beliefs: the world, the species, and mankind were created abruptly; they were repeatedly subject to destruction by divine or natural forces in the skies and earth; the time spanned by these catastrophes was short, changes in temporal and spatial dimensions of the universe are brought on by divine, heroic, and natural forces that are immense and unpredictable; all the hosts of heaven - sun, moon, stars, planets - may change their motions and qualities; in this awful setting, measurement is less of the essence of being than miracles; history moves in cycles. Even since ancient Greek science (Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato (et al). there had been a scientific type of catastrophism, employing the divine very much as Newton and most modern Uniformitarians did, as a removed and/ or mechanical power. This strain had been modernized, even as Newton was writing, by his disciple Whiston, and later by eminent figures such as Vico, N. A. Boulanger, Cuvier, and Buckland. The strain was much more evident in the time of Marx and Engels than now. 3. Marx and Engels were deeply engaged in developing a paradigm of Socialism (or Communism) that was composed of numerous elements: materialism (with atheism); economic determinism (which Engels traced back to the beginnings of life itself); the stability of the heavens and earth in the very process of continuous change. Science as a unity, embracing nature, species, societies, and individuals, all responding to similar laws. All is to be measured along a historical continuum in which (the Hegelian dialectic) opposing forces move according to three principles: that quantities change into qualities and vice versa, that the opposites interpenetrate, and that negations are in turn negated. That geogeny teaches the evolution of the Earth was stated by Marx in 1844. The species evolved a will that is capable independently of abetting the relentless historical process: "Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state." (Engels, Dialectics of Nature, New York: International Publ., 1940, p. 187.) 4. Given a sharply defined set of these three paradigms, one may expect to find that all three paradigms "interpenetrate" to some degree, but that the Marxist Paradigm overlapped considerably more with the other two. That is, close analysis may show that, with an approximately equal logic, rationality and (at least at that time) "evidence", either the Uniformitarian or the Catastrophist paradigm could be made to fit the Marxist paradigm. There are clear indications in their work of this: for example, Engels believed that mankind evolved first on the lost continent of Lemuria in the Indian Ocean, which sank catastrophically. Elsewhere he adopts the theory that intense atmospheric change (heat, etc.) can bring about conditions for new species of life and life itself. He rejects Lamarck's "vital aim" of evolution but often shows Lamarckian as well as Darwinian beliefs, even including the racial acquisition and inheritance of mathematical aptitude. Both Marx and Engels held to a kind of cyclical or at least helical theory in their historical dialectics, and Engels speculated upon a long-range cyclical cosmology - with worlds being born and then dying out, only to be reborn. His sense of absolute time was perhaps a little shaky, now taking in the grand new sweeps of geological time enthusiastically, and then again conjecturing a rapid evolution within the record of the human species. It remains to be seen how much he knew about or how seriously he considered the scientific-catastrophists such as N. A. Boulanger, or the scientific side of theists such as Buckland. At times he gave hints of backsliding; thus, writing in Dialectics of Nature (led. 1966, 28); "The defect of Lyell's view - at least in its first form - lay in conceiving the forces at work on earth as constant, both in quality and quantity ... the earth does not develop in a definite direction but merely changes in an inconsequent fortuitous manner." 5. Marx and Engels were conducting a triple campaign a) to revolutionize philosophy: They had turned Hegel upside down and were using his historical dialectics to unite all phenomena of nature, biology, and society into a single scheme. b) to offer political programmatics to the world: From the great philosophical scheme would be deducible the principles of the future society, the classless communist society. And c) to lead a political revolution. Any action on their part such as to align themselves with a scientific paradigm could not be accomplished to the neglect of any of these three goals. That is, to them a "fact" or "theory" of science, such as "long-term time", "drop-by-drop geology", or step-by-step biological evolution through natural selection could never be simply such. Either it could be made to fit their truly global paradigm and world-scheme, or it had to be discarded, or it was a mistake. Yet they were compelled to confront any assertion that engaged the attention of the "intelligentsia" or "the masses," and, of course, such were the elements of the great paradigms. 6. Whereupon, Marx and Engels assimilated, not without negative criticism, the Uniformitarian paradigm to their own Socialist Marxist paradigm in several philosophical steps. There is many a statement in the Marxian literature of the type of "We were first to..." and "Come into our camp..." And, also, direct statements show under what conditions they would accept "long-time"; "evolutionary biology"; stable nature, and "natural selection" into this system. 7. Simultaneously, they might have been seeking to attach to their movement the social respectability that began to accrue rapidly to "up-to-date" science. Their contempt of Catastrophists is manifest: "Cuvier's theory of the revolutions of the earth was revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in substance" (Engels, Dial. of Nat., p. 10) Their pride at being the essence of the modern scientist is manifest in many places. 8. They attempted to recruit practitioners of the new science to their political movement - or at least to their philosophy which, significantly, they felt would inevitably lead to their politics. Charles Darwin was the most notable case. Considering how enveloped Darwin was in the social circles of "gentlemanly" Whig England, and that his greatest defender and "social equal", Thomas Huxley, was a "Social Darwinist", ergo an enemy of the planned society, it can be ventured here that the attempt to capture Darwin would be as foolish as trying to hijack an El Al plane with a penknife. The London Geological Society was "composed of gentlemen", and was taken over by liberal Whigs, whose perceived opponents were the church and Tory establishment, not the capitalist class. (G. Grinnell, 131, In E. Milton, Ed., Recollections of Fallen Sky, 1978 (Distrib. by Metron Publications, Princeton) Marx and Engels are among the founders of the sociology of knowledge and were past masters at scrutinizing the motives behind people's actions. Indeed, Marx wrote, promptly upon reading The Origin of Species, in a letter to Engels (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 128): "it is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions', and the Malthusian 'Struggle for Existence'". It may be considered whether they were here acting irrationally, or perhaps rationally on a "nothing ventured-nothing gained", or "there is nothing to be lost" basis. Whether there was actually some long-term losses as a result of such a "calculated risk" is a question worthy of consideration. 9. The study has an intense focus on such incidents, but its ulterior goals are larger than the personal interactions studied. The earlier interest of the present investigator in the connections between ideologies and practices (cf. The Velikovsky Affair) have suggested to him other similar cases such as the present one of Marx and Engels. The use of Catastrophists, Uniformitarians, and Socialists for case study leads in turn to a larger interest in the sociology and psychology of science. The opportunity is extraordinary, for Marx and Engels were interested third parties to the widespread conflict of many years between Uniformitarians and Catastrophists. How they made up their minds to support the former, and to what extent they would support them, are questions whose answers bear importance in he history and philosophy of science. Such considerations imply that there will be no lack of publishing outlets for the final manuscripts, but also that the final report should also avoid being "captured" by its medium of publication and should appear in separate monographic format, or, if not, under the most objective scientific auspices. Monograph: The proposed report is conceived as possessing a simple organization as follows: Prospective Table of Content The Alignment of Marx and Engels with Scientific Uniformitarians against the Catastrophists Introduction: A paradox of the scientific and social revolution; Marx and Engels (revolutionaries) reject "Revolutions of The Globe" (Cuvier's term) for drop-by-drop and bit-by-bit evolution. Part One The Setting for Decision (1830-1870) I. The Socialist Paradigm of Marx and Engels II. The Uniformitarian Paradigm III. The Catastrophic Paradigm Part Two Matching the Paradigms IV. The Three Scientific Models Compared for "Scientificity" V. The Theological Question and Agnosticism in the Three Models VI. Social Pressures: Public Opinion and Scientific Opinion on the Paradigms. VII. The Politics of Scientific Paradigms: The "Social Darwinists" Win the Uniformitarian Paradigm; Marxists Are Trapped in It. Conclusion: A Fateful Decision for "Scientific Socialism." Revision of the conventional view of the decision; query whether subsequent progress of "communist science" has shown effects of the internalized paradox or contradiction (e. g. was the Lysenko episode an "aberration" of Soviet science or was it an eruption of the internalized contradiction?) Bibliography {S : BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE} BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE The topic of the proposed research is specific but the materials of research are diffuse and far-flung. The material to be consulted does not lend itself to a preliminary set of titles. On the one hand, a number of works on nineteenth century intellectual history and histories of science (such as H. T. Pledge's Science Since 1500, 1959) carry accounts of Uniformitarianism and Catastrophicism, Darwinism, Marxism, the struggle between science and religion and so on to other topics under treatment here. There exist some excellent more special studies as well, such as C. C. Gillispie's Genesis and Geology (1951) and John C. Green's The Death of Adam (1959). The works of Lyell, Darwin, Cuvier, and many another contributor are of course readily available. The complete works of Marx and Engels are published in German and beginning to be published in English (in 100 volumes); meanwhile much of the essential work, such as Engels' Dialectics of Nature, is available in English, too. The "Social Darwinists" who 'stole" Darwinism from Marx and Engels (and socialism) are also treated in a number of sources, both original and secondary. On the other hand, the subtlety (if the word may be permitted) of the proposed investigation requires that fragments of evidence and indicators be pulled from many sources. Consultants, who have spent their lives reading in the voluminous archives, can probably give some of the best clues to where to look for pieces of the mosaic. The most important letter of Darwin to Marx refusing permission to let Volume II of Das Kapital be dedicated to him (13 October 1880) was first published in the Soviet Journal Pod Znamenem Marxizma in 1931 (un 1-2). In his speech at the grave of Marx (17 march 1883), Engels, according to Valentino Gerratana (New Left Review, 1975, p. 61) quoting from Marx-Engels Selected Works (London, 1978, p. 435), "publicly linked for the first time the name of his great dead friend with that of Darwin," saying "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." The statement is repeated by Engels in 1888 in his preface to the English translation of the Communist Manifesto. Again, tucked away in Marx' Theories of Surplus Value (London, 1969, V. II, p. 121), is the assertion that Darwin could be used to refute Malthus (despite Darwin's statement that Malthus was his inspiration for the theory of natural selection!) Or, in setting a benchmark for the total disrepute of catastrophism (which is necessary to show that Marx and Engels would have had strong motives for eschewing it), one searches out indicators such as The Spectator (7 May 1887, 626) asserting, "No geologist of repute now believes that mountain-ranges originated in catastrophes." The literature in German, French, and Italian on evolutionism and Marxism is large, and at this point it is hard to say which works may turn out to contain more than the typical polemical and philosophical arguments. By the same token, it would be premature and tedious to list the works of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Lamarck, Lewis Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and others, who also have a general relevance and may be cited and quoted in establishing the "circumstantial evidence" for the character of the missing pieces of the puzzle. The three paradigms of Uniformitarian, Catastrophist, and Marxian thought will have to be originally constructed, though with reference to numerous works. The specific question of the research - the psychological dynamics of Marx and Engels in "adopting" the uniformitarian model in whole or in part - has not, to the knowledge of the investigator here, been asked before. The obvious "answer" given or implied in numerous places in the literature, that "Marx and Engels liked Darwin's scientific explanation of the origin of species" will, it is believed, be reduced to a misleading simplism upon the completion of the research. {S : POSTSCRIPT: A CAUSE FOR EMBARRASSMENT} POSTSCRIPT: A CAUSE FOR EMBARRASSMENT The research proposed above was submitted for support to the National Science Foundation in 1977 and turned down smartly by its anonymous critics. A note in The Journal of the History of Ideas, (Jan-Mar 1978, 135) based upon articles of Lewis S. Feuer (32 Annals of Science, 1975, 33 Ibid., 1976), called the well-known writer Isaiah Berlin to task for repeating a canard about Marx. Apparently, the widely disseminated story, that Marx had written Darwin asking for permission to dedicate to him the second volume of Das Kapital, was false; further, Darwin had not written to Marx in reply, refusing kindly the permission. But the Darwin letter had been written to Eward Aveling. In reply, I. Berlin explained that in truth Marx and Darwin had not written to each other. Berlin's passage in his book, Karl Marx, was based on a 1934 article in Biochronik which in turn cited a Russian translation of Darwin's 1880 letter in a 1931 work. He added that the story was still being disseminated in the Soviet Union. Of course, it is also still carried in a number of English-language works. Marx complained of the Origin of Species as being "grossly unfolded in the English manner" and Engels of its "crude English method." Marx, long before Darwin, had conceived of society as having a natural history and was a king of evolutionist, without natural selection. But both approved of his work. If I were now, six years later, to answer the question I posed for research: "Why did the great revolutionaries not support revolutionism?" I would not have to contend with this annoying proof of their support. I would perhaps move toward the theory that they gave Darwinism reluctant support because they were being swept off their feet by the rush to evolutionism, and because they were so totally joined in opposition to the religious establishment. The implications of the problem posed here, and for my interest in it, are not alone historical and philosophical. I foresee that communist theory, impelled by the logic of revolutionism, may discover quantavolutionary roots in the thought of Marx and Engels and find their development to be more compatible with marxist theory than is evolutionism. If so, the center of natural philosophy and its subtended sciences might shift to the Soviet Union. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 4: } {Q POLEMICS AND PERSONAGES: } {C Chapter 23: } {T RELIGION AND EDUCATION} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Four: Polemics and Personages CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE RELIGION AND EDUCATION Present here first is an editorial essay criticizing attempts to avoid the consideration of the Bible in schools and to restrain schoolroom discussion of various hypotheses of natural history. The second piece sketches a method for examining the relations of state education to religious teachings. The author is generally concerned that the words "to teach" should mean "to educate" or at least "to consider" rather than meaning "to advocate" and "to indoctrinate." {S : I. QUANTAVOLUTION AND CREATION IN ARKANSAS} I. QUANTAVOLUTION AND CREATION IN ARKANSAS Sometimes when you see how winners behave, you sympathize with the losers. I have been feeling that way about the Arkansas trial on teaching creation. The state's lawmakers, in that mixed mood of cordiality and cunning not foreign to our fifty-two bicameral bodies, decreed that creation science should be taught alongside evolutionary science in the schools of the State. This, my experience as political scientist told me, was a bit daffy to begin with - and probably unconstitutional. But now experts have paraded before the court. The lawyers have had their say. The media and the intellectual establishment have rooted against the enactment. The skeleton of the ancient Tennessee monkey trial has been dangled before our eyes. The creationists have been humiliated in one more contest. The prestigious scientists are back in their academic locker rooms receiving congratulations. A few fans, carried away by remote analogies, say that we will have to tolerate Reaganism awhile longer, but at least not that bit about God building the world in a week. The expert testimony against the law may have been misleading, however, as to the current posture of science respecting biological change. Walter Sullivan (NYT Dec. 27) has deftly indicated the short-fall of truth: that theories of evolution now also include theories of genesis in outer space or in transferences from cosmic bodies; that evidence of transitional types or "missing links" in evolution is today scarcely richer than in Charles Darwin's time; and that, in some quarters, jumps in evolution are considered probable. In this last case, we go back to catastrophic and saltation theories of the past century and to theories of a directing inherent intelligence from this century. Professor Stephen Gould of Harvard University was a witness in the Arkansas trial. Although unfriendly to the creationists, he has himself devised a saltatory argument, based partly upon increasing evidence that catastrophes have brought about both the extermination and birth (one dare not say "creation") of species; this he calls the theory of "Punctuated equilibrium." I favor the term "quantavolution" and find myself, in consequence, sometimes in the company of Biblical literalists and creationists; they are, it goes without saying, as intelligent and effective as their non-literalist scientific counterparts. Gould, like most educated people, is committed to very long ages of evolution. To him and to them, the very thought of Biblical literalism, with its collapsing of time into a few thousand years, is red flag to the bull. Here again, Sullivan has delicately hinted of the possible vulnerability of measures of time. Very little time may have been needed for evolution itself. Quantavolution could have been a prompt, highly creative business under certain catastrophic conditions, as, for instance, in great cyclonic chemical factories fashioned from a bombardment of heavy meteoroids. This would leave thousands of unchanging species hanging around "unnecessarily" for millions of years between quantavolutions. "In other words," writes geologist Derek Ager, "the history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." A number of empirical scientists and philosophers can be cited to these points. A few of them go far beyond Agar and are severely critical of long-term time scales. So, is the majority of scientists telling the majority of the State legislature: Your majority cannot vote against our majority? I trust that this is not the case. No. They must be trying to say, but awkwardly, that the name of God should not be bandied about in the classroom, first because to do so is unconstitutional, and second because discussions of God raise tempers unduly and go on interminably to the detriment of empirical studies. But, giving the legislators the benefit of the doubt (which is good law), they too may have had such in mind. They may want taught in the schools something that they think is creation science, meaning those forms and findings of scientific work that do not exclude peremptorily the account of cosmic and human origins accepted by the majority of their constituents. Besides, they may argue that young people would learn their biology lessons better if they had more than one model of genesis put to them. Furthermore, they may believe it harmful for students to hear one story in class and a second story at home or church, or perhaps nowhere; such compartmentalization can only contribute to the madness produced by our complex, contradictory, pluralistic, and confusing culture. In the end, not much will have happened by virtue of the Arkansas creation trial and we shall go on in the schizoid style of our culture. This is too bad. Discussions of contrasting theories of the origins of life are educational. There might have been an opening here to brighten up the drab and dispirited classrooms of some of our schools. {S : II. COSMOGONY AND THE CONSTITUTION} II. COSMOGONY AND THE CONSTITUTION (The following memorandum was prepared in May, 1982 for the American Enterprise Institute of Public Policy Research, Washington, DC. It outlines a research and public policy project recommended for the issue that, in a cursory way, is addressed in the article above.) {S : INTRODUCTION:} INTRODUCTION: The issue is presently raised of opening educational offerings in public schools to theories that can accommodate certain widespread religious beliefs. The theories deal with cosmogony, a basic question for both religion and sciences: what brought about the universe that humankind experiences? The answers are several and conflicting; public consensus is absent. Hence, the issue belongs in the eternally important category: the accommodation of nonconsensus views on basic matters under a Constitutional consensus. In salient ways, the question resembles others once or now experienced: Can a Constitution govern a nation half-slave and half-free? A nation half-socialist and half capitalist? A people one-third living from governmental work, a third on welfare, an a third on independently derived in come? One-half at war and one-half at peace? Of two or more languages; different religions; different world views? As the final product of the research, a report may be visualized in four parts: A historical-philosophical section; a scientific section; a legal section; and a pragmatic policy section. The first describes the problems of maintaining essential constitutional consensus in regimes split by diametrically opposing ideological factors, stressing the age-long tug- of-war between religious and secular interests, leading up to and through the U. S. Constitution, down to this moment. It focuses especially upon the educational system as the prize of the various protagonists. It defines the present issues as centered upon the demand of certain religious parties, having translated their religious authority into secular convictions governed by the rules of science to impose consideration of the new "creation science" upon the teachers of elementary and secondary school pupils. The second section inquires how far the various natural and social sciences have gone, if indeed they have so moved, in approaching the areas dominated by "creation science." The points d'appui appear to be on the suddenness of creation and the role of natural catastrophes in bringing about the changed state of the world. At the least it seems that a growing body of science, which is nonreligious, is occupying common ground with creation science on these three matters. The trend, moreover, is manifest in practically every field of science. The third section introduces the rationale by which opponents of the adamancy of conventional public education (who are in turn backed by the claims of a great majority of scientists and their organizations) seek to ensure equal status for their views under the U. S. Constitution. An intensive examination of the case thus far argued and adjudicated will be supplemented by an examination of cases pending. The last section will discuss the views of the public, the politicians, and the educators on the values implicated in the contests. It will project the consequences of the possible legal outcomes. It will finally attempt a reconciliation of the views of the parties in a public policy that, if it may not be entirely satisfactory, would satisfy constitutional requirements and improve what is in the last analysis the goal of all concerned, the mental and moral development of the young by way of the educational system. {S : PART ONE: HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY} PART ONE: HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY I. What attitudes do the public and its leaders hold on the cosmogonical issue in public education, and how intensely? Who is active on it? II. What are the young around the country hearing, reading and learning now that relates to the issue? III. Scientific freedom. Essentially all matters can be publicly discussed in philosophy and science. Instances of opposition from governments, from private groups that include scientific and educational establishments? IV. Matters permitted (or disallowed) for discussion in schools 1. "Whatever the teacher can get away with" (like the policeman on the beat) 2. What the school (educational) authorities prescribe and permit a) Free schools b) Conventional schools c) Conventional (trade) schools d) Morally defined schools (religious) 3. What the political authorities prescribe and allow the school authorities to discuss. 4. What the publics prescribe and allow the political authorities to prescribe and allow. 5. What the Constitution prescribes and allows to the foregoing. 6. What the courts determine to be what the Constitution prescribes and allow to the foregoing. V. What positions may be advocated in public? Practically any. What is disallowed? (e. g. the overthrow of government by violence). VI. What may be advocated in public schools? Describe and document 1. Systematically (in the curriculum), e. g. darwinism. 2. Personally (e. g. deism, sexism) 3. Unconsciously (e. g. class and race prejudice) VII. Limitations on teaching as affected by competence and relevance. Problems of preserving a boundary between discussion and advocacy. Might such an impracticality justify a curricular limitation? VIII. Distinctions of fact, propositions, theories, general theories, general philosophy, world-views. {S : PART TWO: HOW SCIENCES COPE WITH COSMOGONY} PART TWO: HOW SCIENCES COPE WITH COSMOGONY IX. The Topics of Natural and Religious History: The logic of their handling in science and religion (as distinguished in VIII. above). Common sub-topics: 1. Origins or genesis. involvement of the Divine and of First or Early causes. 2. The Time-table of the World, of Natural and Human History. 3. The occurrence and scale of catastrophism (e. g. "Deluge") X. Astronomy and Astrophysics A. Conventional rhetoric: "Big Bang," 5 billion years, gravitation, etc. B. Deviations approaching certain religions: intelligent life, short duration, unstable Sun, etc. XI. Geology and geophysics (Earth sciences) A. Conventional rhetoric: gradualism, landscape evolution, etc. B. Deviations: catastrophism, recency, etc. XII. Biology XII. Biology A. Darwinian, neo-darwinian, mutation, natural selection, gradualism, etc. B. Macro-evolution, inherent design of change, quantavolution, catastrophe-induced change, recency. XIII. Anthropology and Sociology A. Long history of descent from primates, gradualism in evolution of culture, religion wholly culture dependent, etc. B. Culture is religion-dependent, short history, unknown descent. XIV. Psychology A. Ethological view (" man is one of the smartest animals"), etc. B. Uniqueness of man; man creates his perceived world, etc. XV. Summary: Norms of science and deviations therefrom (unconventional logic and history). XVI. Norms, and deviations therefrom, within and among religions and in the population. XVII. Reconciliation: What can be advocated as scientifically factual and theoretical. What can be discussed under religion but not in science. What parts of views of certain religions cannot be handled as science. {S : PART THREE: LEGAL} PART THREE: LEGAL XVIII. A review of the law on separation of church and state, as related to the cosmogonical issue. XIX. A scenario of what the constitutional law "could have been" under the same constitutional provisions but with different "public winds blowing." What future scenarios are conceivable? XX. The analysis of McLean vs Arkansas and related cases on the cosmogonical issue. XXI. The extent to which the Constitution can be said to demand solely a secular and scientific approach. XXII. The extent to which the Constitution can be said to delegate the definition of secular and scientific theory and "truth" to school boards, legislatures, scientific bodies, and judges. {S : PART FOUR: PRAGMATIC} PART FOUR: PRAGMATIC XXIII. The extent to which the secular and scientific approach is presently prescribed and in fact controlled and pursued in the public schools. XXIV. The extent to which the secular and scientific approach, if "properly and logically" provided in public education, satisfies the logic, needs, and demands of religious groups. XXV. Whether religious views (considered as authoritative but unverified fact statements and other rhetorical positions ranging up to world views) can be justified in education generally, and especially in the public schools. XXVI. Whether cosmogonical material, as presented in public schools, should be assigned to the social sciences, biology, the natural sciences, or in a special combination or department. XXVII. The educated child, presumably the goal of everyone concerned with the cosmogonical issue. What the pupil should be concerned with factually and morally. How morality and moral teachings permeate all education in different forms and what the effects of excluding the divine may be. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 4: } {Q POLEMICS AND PERSONAGES: } {C Chapter 24: } {T THE OUTLOOK OF SCIENTISTS} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Four: Polemics and Personages CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR THE OUTLOOK OF SCIENTISTS A social scientist studying scientific behavior can readily bring to bear upon the subject certain facile propositions of his trade. None the less useful for being imprecise are the injunctions against regarding all scientists as alike and to allow for the temporal changes in their ways of recruitment and their environmental settings. So we cannot speak of all scientists. Yet modes of behavior do exist and, in generalizing, we should perhaps imagine a biochemist on the "pure" side and a structural or electronics engineer on the "applied." Furthermore, if it is today rather than fifty years ago of which we would speak, we should conceive of a fairly administered scientist - listed on a payroll, belonging to associations, assured of a lifetime job, possessed of an M. A. degree if an engineer and Ph. D. if "pure," using institutional rather than personal library and research facilities, spending government funds, and accorded a higher middle-class prestige. Whatever we would say about our model men may be cautiously extended to the remaining vast majority of scientists insofar as they are related in character, habit, and habitat. Had we time, something extra might be said of the more absolute deviants among behavioral and natural scientists; we wish we might, for it is tiresome to have scientists judged by their extremes and rather ironic when the judges are, in other spheres, experts upon sampling and restrictive interference. Surely, administration, of which we have to do here, can only exist on a presumption of manageable clusters of traits and actions. {S : FALLACIES ABOUT SCIENTISTS} FALLACIES ABOUT SCIENTISTS Our typical scientists are not without various conceptions that they share with the educated population and which, on the whole, do more harm than good, both in understanding the role of science and in the practice of science itself. Although an empirical validation of the extent and intensity of the attitudes is unavailable, they may be set forth hypothetically: 1) The scientist and his educated clientele are likely to believe that the scientist is more specialized than he actually is. Sociologists of science would do well to supply us with a variety of information: What part of the symbol-bank and logic-bank of typical scientists is a result of pre-specialized education and training in the culture, the family and the schools? What part of his symbol-intake is trans-disciplinary? What part of it is irrelevant, strictly speaking? What part is "Mentally or operationally" employed in ways more extensive than either the intent upon intake or the prima facie "scientific" and "specialized" meanings of the symbols? The sum of the answers to these questions would help define how specialized the scientist is. That question would probably be answered "Not much." The typical scientist carries his specialization "on the top of his head." And a gross miscellany rides below. 2) A second harmful belief is that the scientific method is a UNIQUE behavioral set; its procedures of hypothesis, controlled observations, findings, and relating - with all the detailed stipulations, techniques, and modes of expressing the behaviors in symbols - are thought to be the last word in human development and qualitatively distinct from other behavioral sets. Instead, the scientific method should be construed as a distinct but recognizable form of administration. That is, it may be viewed as a set of routines, historically evolved and professionally sanctioned, for arriving at a decision of a confirming or disproving sort, whose value is thereupon judged by the leaders (often co- administrators) of the system of administration. Their judgment is affected by, among other things, the relation of the decision to other decisions already made, and especially the disturbance to the system of decision-making and decisions-made of the new decision with its potentiality for heightening the efficiency (internal and practical) of the total system, if adopted. 3) It is further believed by the typical scientist (from whom emerges in collectivity the general influence of science upon society) that the real world is the hard world of the senses, that there is one world, and that science is objective in relation to this world; that is, science "finds" the world. I suppose that scientists will go on indefinitely en masse "finding" the real world, rushing in to fill the gap every time that a deviant scientist or a poet, or an Idealist cracks open reality. Yet one can still assert, no matter if pessimistically, that a number of the social problems of science would be eased if scientists themselves were to permit themselves a hypothetical theory of the reality that they presume to be dealing with. An important consequence of this same recommendation, if adopted, would be that scientists and their clienteles would cease to believe that they are seeking the truth, except as a myth that is needed to inspire them. They seek an answer reflected back from the packed closets of reality in the terms of the question as they ask it. 4) It would also be socially and scientifically helpful, if scientists and their educated clientele would abandon the notion that there is only one way of saying things "scientifically." A proposition may be phrased in as many ways as may prove useful with regard to the system of logic and science it is intended for or in relation to the action it is intended to guide. A single event or action sequence may be phrased in relation to several natural and human relations sets, and in prose or mathematical language of sundry kinds. In the view of science as administration, the difficulty referred to is one commonly experienced in administrative systems. Once devoted to a special administrative role and language, the administrator cannot adapt himself to other modes of expression; he regards them as wrong and sometimes dangerous - even when the applicability of the language is manifested in its control over behaviors and operations. 5) It is further erroneously believed that the natural sciences are systematic. This condition is thought to be of immense importance to science itself and to the society it serves, as well as being a holy stigma that marks it off from "unsystematic social science." (We may as well put aside the last point, the nonsensical quality of which is highlighted by the general answer to the other points.) The natural sciences are not systematic, however; some elements of mathematics are, but these are forms of non- empirical logic, a world in itself. The science of mathematics shapes and is shaped by the empirical sciences, natural and social. Not being anchored directly to reality problems, it can sometimes unite a field or part thereof before the field has valid propositions to "really" unite; "Devinez avant de démontrer," wrote E. Kasner, is the principle of great mathematics. However, systematic empirical science is hard to discover and is probably a myth. What we have are a few major individual propositions whose practical implications are numerous (for example, the Mendelian "laws"); a few links of large practical importance (for example, the general principle of relativity); the useful predictive classifications (for instance, Mendeleef's Periodic Table of Elements). Most laws of the individual fields of science are not tied together logically, empirically, or quantitatively. Men know them as impressive beings rising separately out of the formless stream of existence. The situation is worse when the various fields are considered. As they are written, understood, and applied, the statements of physics are as far from biology as those of anthropology. Yet, "in theory and essence," they might be capable of a common formulation even while carrying on their former interdisciplinary functions. If by systematic science is meant an interlocking set of propositions, framed in the same symbol-system and moving up and down the full range of generality and across the full diameter of subject-matter, then systematic science only begins to exist. (We should add, furthermore, that not one but numerous such systems is the conceivable ideal.) 6) The typical scientist is also likely to believe that a certain system of politics fosters the development of science. This is usually a "welfare state," centralized, common-man democracy. Actually, the development of science has occurred richly in mixed systems, in whose interstices science may house and whose inconsistencies feed it. Bureaucratic nineteenth century Germany was favorable to scientific development, but not bureaucratic Soviet Russia today. Elements of democraticness (in the Old Liberal sense) and aristocracy played a role in the German situation; a totalitarian psychology dominates Russian public policy today. In any event, the problem is most complex, depending for formulation and solution upon a careful de-sloganized sub-classification of political systems, but also a fine classification of scientists according to personality-structure, field, and level of problem pursued. 7) Most scientists and their clientele still hold that social scientists are not "true" scientists and almost all of them will deny that the natural scientist is a SOCIAL scientist. The first belief has been refuted elsewhere; suffice to say that no acceptable evidence demonstrates any qualitative break in the continuous susceptibility of social and natural materials to the scientific method. It is more important here to deal with the second belief, that the natural scientist is not a social scientist, when in his habits, his perceptions, and his statements he behaves as one. He would be a better scientist and a more effective personality if he acknowledged the fact. The following behaviors and conditions make him a social scientist: a) He is a psychological product of his culture and behaves as such. b) His work and his unconscious or conscious critical faculties are based upon the psychological preconditions of perception and cognition. c) He uses language. He has to communicate. d) He uses logic. e) He operates in an administrative setting whose rules are part of his work. f) His statements about natural events and relations are human-oriented, ultimately if not immediately, and if "applied," probably immediate. g) Finally and most important, if least credible, any statement of natural relations (even if it be discovering a sub-atomic particle) is a statement of social science - in all of the above senses in the first place, and beyond that insofar as the "thing" described only exists as the faint echo of a set of axiomatic behaviors begun in the everyday world. Man can only know himself, and all of the finery of the artificial world is himself mirrored. Once he disdains some part of himself, that part of his image vanishes; once he fancies himself in a new guise, a new world, which may be new science, appears. For example, today we speak of new developments in the life sciences and psychology wherein the means of psychotherapy and pharmacology are joined and where a new common language may be expected to develop. It is possible to conceive of a whole range of social and natural sciences possessing a new common language, and interchangeable operations wherein social and natural are "nonexistent" as separates. This would occur, I should venture, when the major parts of critical sciences becomes "objectified" in the fundamental sense of that world, that is, independent of the "existence" of the things being talked about. At this point, scientific discourse will be constructed around problems to be solved, including perhaps some systematic ethical statement. There are indications of such a development in segments of the information sciences, in empirical-logical philosophy, in operations research theory, in non- parametric statistics, in game theory, and in model-theory in several empirical sciences. {S : ALL SCIENCE IS SOCIAL SCIENCE} ALL SCIENCE IS SOCIAL SCIENCE Everything said in the previous section about the fallacies of the typical scientist's self-image, when reversed into affirmatives, help to describe the nature of the scientific system. The scientific system is a human system in the complete sense of the phrase. It can be viewed from the perspectives of a sophisticated time and motion study, with the proportions of science feeding into the systemic process with all other experience, with the extent of the system physically defined as the communicators of frequency of relevant contact. It is particularly important to reorganize affirmatively the last expressed thoughts about "all science as social science." Going directly to the last defense of a natural science as apart from human science, the question centers on the nature of a validated theory: 1) A validated theory expresses world relations according to a conventional set of perceptions, dimensions, and symbols. 2) It refers to values, understood implicitly, when couched in "pure scientific terms," and made explicit, when in applied terms. 3) It instructs all known parties (this is a pretense, since the unknowns share an enormous common culture) that they will experience the equation, x= f( y), as its protagonist does. It assumes that they are interested in the experience, indeed in the precise experience or one very close to it. Thus, as in (1) above, the psychological state of the unknown parties is vital to the validation and transmission of the communication. 4) As well as suggesting that in order for x= f( y) to be true the function has to be uniform to, assimilated to the symbol system of, and lead to understandable consequences for all unknown parties, we would add that all of the factors essential to the production of the equation have to be satisfied in all succeeding experiences of the event being described. That is, it is not enough to have the equation and believe that these events occur infinitely in isolation. The total human interaction pattern has to be replicated with "sufficiently high" approximation of the original condition of the communication. Only this can be the radical operationalist position. If a "core" of natural science is left, it must reside in that very constricted statement of an equation that isolates and abstracts the purely "non-human" interactions of x and y. We have shown, I believe, that everything about this statement, except the presumed "existence" of two interactants, is human, not natural. Yet there can be no denying that it is precisely this de-humanizing of the natural world, the abstracting and isolating of certain "things" in it, and the making of these particular and concrete, that has given us a changed world. (This is so, even though many other historical events of a more conventionally ideological sort, Christianity for instance, have changed the world as much or more.) This core of science, we must say then, is vastly effective. It is so because (a) it gets credit for all the human relations that first composed and thereafter surround it; (b) its isolation is accompanied by magical instruments and incantations; (c) its effects are "newsworthy" in an age when, by circular definition, "news is what people want to hear" and what people believe in (thus, even though no event is as crushing as the withdrawal of love, a nuclear explosion is a new toy, unknown to other ages and the man on the street; but (d) most of all because, on the whole, the new relations of non-human being - a chemical reaction in a cell, a sub-atomic event, a new engine - produce new human relations, both psychological and real; in this sense, still quite human, the purely physical equation is a bridge between psychomotor present and human psychomotor potential. {S : THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCIENTISTS} THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCIENTISTS The foregoing exposition of various dysfunctional perspectives of scientists and the view of science s a human system may have some utility to scientists in the process of discovery, research and development. This is usually termed the individual creative process. It is, however, my major intent here to discuss some of their implications for the science of the administration of science. For this purpose, we shall again take an affirmative stance and talk about the ideal social setting of scientific work, the ideal scientist, and the ideal scientific organization. First, a clarification of the subject is in order. Administration is a process; the science of administration is the science that describes it; and the applied science of administration is the set of rules for conducting administration on behalf of specified goals, according to the science of administration. Administration is largely institutionalized habit with varying small introjections of hypothetical or creative behavior. An applied science of administration perforce introduces values. You cannot act rationally without acting towards an end. The applied scientific administration of science must have goals. These goals are the combination of elemental goals that are found in all realms of life, with an emphasis, verging upon exclusiveness, on one goal - discovery. If we use Harold D. Lasswell's classification of valuing behaviors, we say that the total of elemental base values is eight in number -- power, wealth, well-being, respect, rectitude, affection, skill, and enlightenment. The process of discovery is the search for enlightenment by this scheme. Hence, in the broadest sense, that social setting, that scientist, and that scientific organization which can be termed most absolutely scientific are those that seek exclusively and successfully the goal of discovery. At the same time, the definition of the ideal in each case depends upon a set of preferences for means and ends behaviors that may produce more or less of the absolute achievement. Still, for an organization to be called scientific and a man a scientist it must be stipulated that they have as an important high priority preference the ambition to make discoveries about natural and human relations. Given this goal, administrative and habitual conduct must be oriented toward efficiency, that is, the highest return toward the goal in exchange for the lowest resource commitment possible. {S : THE IDEAL SETTING} THE IDEAL SETTING Granted the vagueness of the value, enlightenment, and of its sub-value, scientific discovery, we cannot expect too great a precision in describing the ideal setting of science. We may list the following four event-complexes as favorable; very rough specifications are given the major terms, simply to indicate how the setting must be examined: 1. A pluralistic society, to nourish and protect differences. (Say, at least four autonomous sub-cultural groups of considerable functional and informal authority.) 2. A social orderliness and stability of at least one segment of society that can provide a nestling place for scientists. (Say, a considerable bureaucratizing or leisure set-up somewhere, which the creative and eternal-minded can cling to and move out from.) 3. A disciplined intellectual training of a significant number (5%) of the young for intellectual pursuits. (Say, not too much "Progressivism" in education, but enough drill in procedures and in the myths of intellectualism.) 4. A willingness of the elite to commit heavy resources (always relative to what is available) to discoveries. (Say, 5% of GNP). All of these four items are, strictly speaking, beyond the province of scientists, as such. If they occur, science is promoted, if not, then suppressed. {S : THE MOTIVATED SCIENTIST} THE MOTIVATED SCIENTIST In general, keeping in mind that we are discussing a problem now of the applied science of administration, we must admit that whatever incentives produce more goal-directed behavior - with discovery as the basic aim - must be "good" ones, holding aside the surrender of certain mean incentives to other citizen goals (e. g. it may be deemed socially unwise to accord too much prestige to scientists, or too much money, considering democratic or anti-materialistic ideals). Suppose for instance a scientific group has varying numbers of certain German types who are motivated to scientific discovery by the power they gain in human relations; others of Jewish type who are impelled by a search for high respect; and still other "Yankee" types who wish to "cash in" on their knowledge or to find affable surroundings. Obviously the scientific administrator had better give up any of his own prejudices as to what a scientist should respond to in the way of incentives. So too those libertarians who universalize the force of liberty in scientific work. Liberty is a social permission to choose without restraint ultimate goals and the means necessary to reach such goals. Here too, the scientific administrator cannot prejudge the directions of the demand for liberty, nor himself demand wholesale liberty. So long as scientists and citizens make such a hash of the term liberty, of course, the administrator may often be in the position of proclaiming a desire for universal liberty on the one hand, while restraining a great many of its potential manifestations on the other. To a high degree, therefore, the administration of scientists becomes a process of giving individuals the attention they require within a framework of liberties and restraints imposed upon means-values in terms of the basic value of discovery and such basic values as envelop the larger society in which the organization operates. The sociology of science thus becomes fundamental to the administration of science. {S : THE CHANGING COMMUNITY OF SCIENCE} THE CHANGING COMMUNITY OF SCIENCE At one time, perhaps from 1600 to 1920, the scientific community was fairly close-knit. Informal ties abounded. Journals were few and well-read. Dozens of the scientific fields of today had not come into being. Individual scholarship, or scholarship-apprentice teams, were almost the sole mode of organization. The lone tinkerer held the field. A loose, informal, but effective system, we should say. The rapid increase in new fields, an increase in scientific activity in different countries, and an increase in technological orientation of societies brought about the situation still prevailing. In this phase we find a great many professional associations being organized, new journals appearing in abundance, and a developing crisis of collective information procedures. Practically all of the communicative and administrative processes are bigger imitations of the former system. Huge associations use the vocabulary, machinery, and practices of old personal associations. Every journal acts as if it alone existed and sufficed. Communications through libraries and publishing is a halting step removed from 1600 A. D. Interdisciplinary project and team research, however, are experimented with and come to be regarded as essential, but they are administered "from outside" even when the administrators are coopted from the teams. That is, administration is regarded as distinct from scientific process. One may say that there has been a failure to achieve either effective informal or effective formal community. Yet the costs of trying to maintain a community of scientists or, better, a network of communities, are mounting rapidly. Exhausting conferences and consultation, for example, are made to substitute for ample, calm flows of systematic data storage and exchange. There is a loss of creativity, too, to auxiliary occupations, such as foundations offices and research entrepreneurship. That is, there is a superfluity of expediters, because of the basic malorganization of scientists. A new era of science appears to be in the offing. In it, a rationalization of the role of the individual scientist is occurring. Both the sources and the language of contributions to knowledge are becoming collective and anonymous. Will a peak be reached in this regard and will it be impossible to give credit where credit is due? What will happen to the prestige motive that impels men to work as scientists? What "Fame" be replaced by more abstract motivations such as collective honors, security, good pay, and good fellowship? The network of scientists will be very wide, covering millions of souls, highly diversified by field. But it will be tied together by a ramified system of interlingual machinery of an interscience and inter-ethnic kind, of electronic data storage and retrieval apparatus, and of improved methods of coordinating the scientists' operations with policies and decisions. It is in this kind of general system that science as administration and the administration of science will work. It may be called a "tandem" system, for the scientific work and administrative work will go together, with each scientist aware of the communication problem as never before, seeking to observe the effects of his statements upon human action rather than their separate commentary upon an objective reality. Strangely, this is a 2500-year-old lesson that has only been verbally learned. A naive history of science is at fault. It has often been stated that the Greeks and other ancients possessed a potential for science not much less than the present achievements of science, but lacked a sense of technique. For example, Archimedes, who was the Greek scientist most concerned with technology, reports that he did not publish some of his work because it was too mechanical and practical. Far from being an aside in the history of science, this observation is the critical statement of what brought about modern science and where lies the embryo of the new science. It is science as procedure that created modern science. To the classical idea of the world as the real thing, Leonardo, Galileo, and especially Francis Bacon added "the scientific method." But it is the fully self-conscious recognition of science as procedure alone that would bring about the new science. Science is a hunt for all the worlds there ever might be. Hence, when we appreciate the operations of science as a communication system founded upon conventional agreements, we shall have a formula both for new scientific discovery and for organizing the discovering activities of scientists. Jean Piaget, psychologist of the origins of thought in children, once said "logic is the morality of thought, morality the logic of action." By the same token, scientific procedure is the morality of scientific thought, and the morality of science is the science of applied science. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 4: } {Q POLEMICS AND PERSONAGES: } {C Chapter 25: } {T 'SCIENTIFIC' REPORTING} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Four: Polemics and Personages CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 'SCIENTIFIC' REPORTING The story begins in September 1963 when for the first time a professional journal, The American Behavioral Scientist, investigated the circumstances surrounding the publication of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision in 1950. The authors of the ABS studies, which were collectively entitled The Politics of Science and Dr. Velikovsky, presented a great deal of material that would appear to a reasonable man of good will to be damaging to the pretenses of scientific institutions, scientific practices, and certain scientists themselves. Various explanations for the behavior of scientists were offered, and substantiated by considerable evidence. A plea was made to receive Velikovsky's theories with a courteous and just appraisal, forgetting the disgraceful past treatment meted out to his work and to his character. The following material consists of an article reproduced in its entirety from the April 1964 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists together with comments on that article, published in the American Behavioral Scientist of October 1964. A demand for a retraction and a chance for a full response was not conceded by the Bulletin, and required the full reproduction and response. Still, no way was available for answering the Bulletin before its own readership, who were left feeling that Velikovsky and the ABS both had been put in their place. The story is developed more circumstantially in The Cosmic Heretics. CLICK HERE TO VIEW HOWARD MARGOLIS' ARTICLE. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 4: } {Q POLEMICS AND PERSONAGES: } {C Chapter 26: } {T EULOGIES TO THREE QUANTAVOLUTIONARIES} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Four: Polemics and Personages CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX EULOGIES TO THREE QUANTAVOLUTIONARIES I. {S : LIVIO CATULLUS STECCHINI} LIVIO CATULLUS STECCHINI 6 October 1913 - 28 September 1979 Oratio delivered 17 October 1979 Livio Catullus Stecchini - Beloved child of illicit romance A boy of lemons and flower looking from Catania to the Ionian Sea harking the threatening Fascist drums following by way of eight tongues and all manner of measures the route of Odysseus, the royal passages of the pyramids, the Enlightenment and Disillusionment of modern man. Tentmate of the corps of intellectual guards, he stuck to his post to the very end, weighing hypotheses, until, not giving up, mind you, he turned his face peacefully, for a respite, and died. Diminished, the great bear, by then, so that he might, like a fairy child, slip through the keyhole of the otherworldly door, to where all measures cease to where the few corpuscules - or are they waves? - that sail about in abounding space, organized in the peculiar human mode, begin their free swim in eternity, infinity. Beyond claim is Livio Catullus Stecchini. Humanists, Catholics, Jews might find a birthmark there but no sign of manacles. No groups, except this, our own non-group, can identify his body. What a compliment, post mortem, for a man: That none owns him, none owned him Such a great man, without claims and chains, Never, nor, now, no more, ever. We, the non-group, assembled once and for all, attest to him, our man. He was a professor but this academy and others equally distinguished, were too limited for him. They can boast that they gave him a living, but better ought they boast that he gave them more than they were set to handle. Stoicly he stood for the puzzled students to milk his patience. He had his beloved families but roared when he sensed the trap of familial love and edged out the doors as daily the claims were assembled for Livio to take care of this and that: "Where are you going Livio?" "To the library - To bring Immanuel a book - To see Alfred." Not really higher claims, but freedom. He was a man without cliques; you could take advantage of him. He was powerfully observant when his attention was called; he acknowledged good food between the artillery booms of his rhetoric. He was restless, but satisfied for the moment with whatever he found. He was generous. His wealth of mind is distributed around the world now in my pockets and yours, without usury. He was full of secrets that he would give away to any interested party - secrets of private lives, of history, of science, of myth, of writings, of books. He was full of politics but emptied of actions because he knew the way and that none would follow it. He would not set out to do good, but good would ride on his back. He would not seize upon a cause, but would give honest words, a comforting example, a plan of campaign. His attention was everywhere. You must seize his ear and eye. For when you talk of General MacArthur he is reliving the disgrace of Alcibiades. And while you trace the route of Exodus he is watching the Giants assault Olympus. You receive your answer, not where you clear a spot to snare a reply, but out of an Amazonian jungle, or the labyrinth of Crete, or deep from the pages of the New York Times. He could not hate, agree as he might that in every particular, this one is an evil, that is a bad idea. He turns upon it, curious, contemplative, even grinning -- it is agreeable, yes, exterminable in abstraction, but, remarkable, droll, typical "as Cicero said when..." "like the Maori tribes who..." "like the Bible which..." He was a writer of many books who published but one, all to the advantage of the precious pieces in his manuscripts, articles and notes. They live the life of the incunabula, and bits of papyrus, the legends, the rumors, the surviving numbers of baffling series that he found, distinguished, and appreciated, like wild mushrooms of the forest floor. We must supply the ending: "Pythagoras said, whom Plato cites, as Plutarch quotes, which Stecchini renders" - but here the manuscript breaks off. And he is right, now as before. The book is never fully written, as the play never ends, except by convention, which insists upon control of the world, lest we die. If we could control the world, you would live forever, Livio, a never-ending book for us to read, whose pages of warmth and surprise move through all ages of time to all ports of call. There we visit the gods, and the fishwives. Anchors aweigh! II {S : RALPH JUERGENS} RALPH JUERGENS Who are we to say but Juergens' friends who call goodbye and wish some testimony from the world he leaves and joins concurrently: Charges on the cosmic spheres should spark, the electric sun confess its theft of power, the academic hulks should shiver, astronomy and physics classes suspend. Tall sails of new bold abstraction moved quietly his boat of exigencies carrying family, offices, friends. Diffident teacher calmly correcting. His papers stand in orderly files, called to attention for the future salute. Magna cum laude his life work ends. Princeton, November 7,1979. III {S : IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY 1895-1979 [1]} IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY 1895-1979 [1] "Where have you been? I tried all yesterday to reach you," said my mother's voice early on the day afterwards. 'Of course, I was in the library stacks, ' I said, wishing she would not demand an accounting as greeting. I might go into the stacks one day, and come out to discover that a catastrophic world war had meanwhile begun and ended. 'Your friend is dead! ' I thought, 'Velikovsky! ' My Mother, of an age with him and long hard of hearing, did not trust herself to pronounce his name quickly. He died at 0800 hours on Saturday. Day of rest, a quiet death at daylight, his hand in the hand of his lifelong love alone. It had recently occurred to me more than once that he might live forever. But he did not. He glided off to sea. I reflected foolishly and I could not be faulted for not maintaining a hot line. I was even justified - more foolish thought - in being undiscoverable, for in the labyrinthine Princeton Libraries, who could find me, and it was Velikovsky's fault; I might be in the religious section, or in archaeology, or the astronomy collection, or the art library, or in geology; I might be anywhere in the acres of buildings and shelves, thanks to Velikovsky. Survivor's guilt, compounding the loss and mourning, so tattooed are we by the ancient great losses - Noah naked drunk on the first post-diluvian vintage, the unworthy remnant brought out of Egypt, Ipuwer's lament of survivors. The great man was buried on Sunday morning, his close family in attendance, at a small Jewish cemetery near the Atlantic Ocean, in a plot that he had selected just the year before. Elisheva, Mrs. Velikovsky, is quite in command; the friends telephone one another and mark time in place uneasily, wondering what is to be done now. Before Velikovsky retired at eighty-four, he had stretched his large frame over a multitude of people and affairs. I think that from the beginning he felt destined to greatness. Out of Russia, but more than Russian, he absorbed Zionism, humanitarian Socialism, and the marvels of science. He grew into a doctor of medicine. He returned enthusiastically to Russia on the bright promises of the Revolution, only to be instantly repelled by the anti-semitism that has always cursed Slavic Byzantium. He never went back but found another life and social promise in Palestine, and intellectual promise in the psychoanalytic circles of Central Europe. He began a series of booklets on what we might call unified science. He studied, he worked; he watched the mad world like a comet thrashing its head with its tail. I have heard his reasons, and those which others give, for his next move. I think, however, that the moment to achieve greatness had arrived and he required the proper theater of action. At the decisive moment, Napoleon left Egypt for Paris. Velikovsky left Palestine for New York as the war began. There he practiced psychiatry - a brief, authoritative and evidently successful way of therapy characteristic of himself. He became a publicist, too, and wrote many articles on international affairs, the War, and Near East policies. But more and more he was digging into ancient history. For he had found reason, while in Palestine, for a basic Cartesian doubt of the chronology of ancient times. And he had grasped an almost mystical compatibility among his ideas of Freud and Moses, of his re-storying of ancient Israel and Egypt, of his perspective upon the contemporary turmoil of Palestine, and, yes, even on his view of the forces that drive the planets through the heavens. Velikovsky had civil courage. He never lost political stance. He was not recognizably a politician of a democratic setting. He was more comfortable with a marshal's baton than with a smile and a trick. It cost him much to restrain his heavy political instincts during the numerous world crises of these several decades. But he had found bigger game and a more certain target - a revolution in mankind's view of man's experience. His ponderous, direct and clearly conceived kind of political action emerged in the politics of science. It was a sublimated warfare. He never suffered a defeat, although, to hear him talk, one would imagine total defeat imminent. My former wife, Nina, with roots like him in Slavic culture, once said to me, 'You must not try to cheer him up. He is a Slav. You must tell him that things are even worse than he imagines, then he will feel better. ' So I did, once or twice, and it worked, but it's not my style. One time when he was perturbed by the clamor of his opponents and the diminishing faculties of old age, I exclaimed, 'What's the matter with you? Do you want to live forever? ' This worked, too, and he was amused when I told him that these ego- fracturing words were shouted at my platoon by our sergeant in World War II. When the war ended, he converted his great energies totally to working out the implications of his several radical ideas. He reordered Near Eastern chronology. He brought to focus and fixed the causes and consequences of several cosmic catastrophes. He produced masterly critiques of conventional astronomy and geology. By now there was no question in his mind wherein lay his greatness nor, with the publication of his first books, was there any question in the mind of a million readers. The gripe was with the academic establishments. Although prepared all his life for persecution, Velikovsky was startled and incensed at becoming a target of persecution by scientists. Here was a tragic irony for one who had believed and followed all the rules of the sciences to the best of his abilities. Here was the reputedly freest part of the free world turning upon him. Thirty years of struggle to defend his ideas and character ensued. He fought magnificently. Even if there were not a valid sentence in his books - actually, several of the greatest works of the century - Velikovsky should achieve a respectful prominence for his work on behalf of scientific integrity. Egocentric though he was (but who can deny him the right and need to draw up his embattled wagons into a defensive circle?) he maintained under the interminable attacks of those years an honesty, a personal correctness, a saliency, and a devotion to the ideals of science that made his assailants by contrast appear as howling savages. For a time, it seemed his defenses would be overrun and that he would be condemned as a heretic by the scientific establishment. As was typical of him, he chose from history the greatest intellectual heretics as his models, showing here as almost in every area a fine discrimination in taste, preferring Giordano Bruno, for example, to Galileo Galilei. The record is published in part, but there is more, much more, to come. My feeling, however, is that by the time these latter works are printed, they will be read wonderingly and happily. I think that Robert Jastrow's article on Velikovsky, carried by the New York Times on the heels of a poor obituary, practically constitutes diplomatic recognition. For Jastrow accredits to Velikovsky an impressive array of scholarly skills and theories that carry a legitimate and considerable scientific force. When the opposition consents to argue on the facts, a new juridical order comes into being. So much of Velikovsky is alive, it is conceited to call him dead. One needs to remind oneself, even here, even a few yards from his home, that he has departed. What is to be published of his now? There is much, none of it quite ready for the presses. His exchanges with Einstein are almost in final written form; here his advocacy of electromagnetic forces in astrophysics is on stage. His book on the Saturn catastrophe needs only modest attentions. The two remaining links of his reconstruction of ancient history -- dealings with the Greek 'Dark Ages' and the Assyrian conquests -- are nearly completed. Several volumes of materials concerning the first decade of controversies over his published works are finished, but not the two past decades. His manuscript on Mankind in Amnesia requires much work. In addition, individual pieces and, I believe, any notes of value should appear. Under favorable conditions, perhaps fifteen years of further publication from his pen may be expected. Beyond all of this, there will exist an archive useful to scholars in many fields. Professor Lynn Rose is to act as literary executor of his will, under the general direction of Elisheva Velikovsky, whose knowledge of Velikovsky's archives may exceed that of her husband. Together, his already published books and articles and his publishable works fashion a monumental scholarship of the age. Apart from a few notes, autobiography is lacking. Velikovsky did no like the idea of someone writing his biography. He wanted to do the job himself, and thought about it much. He was half-convinced that no one would say the right things about him, but further he was a poet and literary master for whom the task would be an aesthetic pleasure. Far less would he like our obituaries, I am sure, for we are bound to be dull or in error or inconsequential. When my father died, Velikovsky sought to console me by predicting that, following his own experience after his father's death, I would enter upon a period of heightened productivity. I did no agree; nor did the predicted happen; we were too unlike. Nevertheless, Velikovsky's death impels me to repeat his prediction, this now concerning his many intellectual sons. It is a large brood. Even if half of them have linear temperaments, like myself, there will rest a generous half who are like Velikovsky and who will bring the next two decades to burgeon with revolutionist primevalogy. Death is schizo. First it confiscates our dearest assets. Since billions have lost meaning in today's financially inflated world, we cannot decry the loss of billions in knowledge from the death of a man. Rightly we can say that the death of Velikovsky is irreparable. When I think of the extra matter that we must all discover and learn now that this prodigious man is gone, I am in despair. One day, shortly before he died, we were talking of my own finished study of Moses and His Electrical God, and of Freud's identification with Moses and assignment of Carl Jung to be Joshua, I grumbled: 'Freud didn't know 'Joshua! '' Velikovsky turned his rugged face and pale brown eyes full upon me and said evenly, like a weatherman reporting: 'Joshua was working as an executioner in Egypt. There is a midrash. ' I hate the robber death. But death releases the miscreants from school. I think not only of those sons of Velikovsky already appearing in print - perhaps they will carry forward more energetically the best of the new - but too of those persons around the world who have been hidden, sheltering contentedly under the great oak, imagining that their offerings are puny. And how these persons will now appear here and there and should be immediately recognized and greeted as authentic, hitherto silent students and advocates of the new science. Like the men who wrote letters to the Washington Star commenting on an editorial obituary of Velikovsky: 'No one knew who they were, ' but one might perceive that their letters were of an expertness and understanding that could not be called momentary nor were they incidental to the passage of Velikovsky. These types are ready to do something. They must do something now; no more free rides. Thus works death for the greater good. When all is said and done, I feel sorry for the many scholars and scientists who did not appreciate Velikovsky in his lifetime. They labored often and deviously to bring up some discovery to send crashing down upon him. By now it should be painfully evident to them that they are sons of Sisyphus, condemned for their intrigues to push huge rocks up the hill only to have them fall back to the bottom, times without end. They might have enjoyed, as we have enjoyed, to live in communion with a great intellectual adventure and its leader. {S : Notes (Chapter 26: Eulogies to Three Quantavolutionaries)} Notes (Chapter 26: Eulogies to Three Quantavolutionaries) 1. Princeton, November 1979 First published in the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review IV 2/ 3 (1979-80) 29-31 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 5: } {Q COMMUNICATING A SCIENTIFIC MODEL: } {C Chapter 27: } {T A COSMIC DEBATE } {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN A COSMIC DEBATE [1] I hope here to expound the ramifications of a coming cosmic debate in the sciences and humanities. All of the disciplines might be affected if, as a result of such a debate, there occurred a major shift away from the prevailing ideology of uniformitarianism in the direction of quantavolution or catastrophism. I attach the word "cosmic" to the debate with three meanings. First, as I have implied, it is cosmic in that all fields of knowledge are involved. Second, I must have reference to something of great importance, else why call it "cosmic"? Third, the subject will have something to do with cosmology - the nature of the earth, the skies and humanity. Also, the processes of cosmic change, creation and destruction, and the rate at which great changes occur. There remain then the words "coming debate." Debate requires two sides that are determined to confront one another on rational grounds. I must state that the cosmic debate is not in full swing. It is coming, approaching. The established and conventional theorists of the sciences and humanities are still reluctant to engage in debate on this delicate yet vital subject of the cosmos. No doubt you know how difficult it is for a minor candidate to get into debate with a major candidate in a political campaign. The major candidate has too much to lose and too little to gain in such an encounter. And so it is with established scientists and humanists. Scholars are only human, after all; I am tempted to say that they are only politicians after all. Why should they lend their ideas to attack, to change, to reconstruction? {S : EVOLUTIONARY AND REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES} EVOLUTIONARY AND REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES I shall try to state the established position in respect to this cosmic debate and then set forth my own position. The established position, with some over-simplification for purposes of clarity, is as follows: the heavenly bodies as we see and experience them have proceeded unchanged and unthreatening for ages beyond human recall, perhaps for hundreds of millions, even billions of years. The earth, our globe, has existed in its present form for hundreds of millions of years; some say that the continents have been shifting at an unnoticeable pace that has accounted for large movements over many millions of years - continental drift, it is called. Present species, including mankind, have evolved over many millions of years from primitive ancestors, with excruciating slowness; mankind is now recognized to have developed over millions of years from recognizable club-wielding, stone-working hominid archetypes. Such are the components of what may be called the uniformitarian, or evolutionary cosmology. Standing in contrast to this evolutionary position is one that may be called revolutionary, as Immanuel Velikovsky suggested to me a few weeks ago. Instead of being uniformitarian, it is catastrophic. It reviews first ages of nature and mankind, and draws several conclusions: The Earth has suffered wide-scale natural disasters in consequence of changes in the solar system. These disasters have happened within reach of human memory. Cultures everywhere have assigned disasters to the planets. Human nature was both physically and psychically affected by catastrophe. The human mind first, later, and always has suppressed its terrible memories of such events, and let them emerge in altered forms, sometimes benevolent, productive and artistic, at other times malevolent, destructive and deranged. If these propositions of primevalogy are defensible, they will affect practically all areas of human knowledge. This is perhaps obvious. Some recognize, in the theory of revolutionary primevalogy, elements of the creation theories of the ancient religions - still held by a majority of people of the world, incidentally - those talked-about gods and floods and fire, and so forth. You know, of course, that this old view of cosmology affected every aspect of life, through, and science. Then, when the uniformitarian theory arose and supplanted the older theory in the minds of the educated, it too affected every part of society and science. Hence the present proposed revolutionary primevalogy may be expected to do the same. That is, it too will affect life, thought, and science in all their manifestations. {S : I.} I. The first area of debate introduces issues of epistemology and ideology. Where did mankind achieve full awareness, the basic requirement for human memory, prediction, and control? Under what circumstances was awareness achieved? Whence came our capacity to abstract the categories of time, space and individuality? The assumption of revolutionary primevalogy is that humanity developed in great leaps, under circumstances of extreme physical and social stress. From this field of psycho-sociology, one enters the field of language, linguistics, and symbols. Here, too, occurs a universal tongue. The biblical Tower of Babel story is not a unique representation of a unity and subsequent dispersal of languages groups. Does the behavior of "The Gods" cause language to diversify quickly, and yet at other times to freeze its forms of meanings? Theology is the heir of terrible experiences. It was the conceptual battering ram that integrated animal and celestial operations. As the skies opened and engulfed mankind, the human mind responded and worked back and forth productively. Theology was the original queen of sciences because of its promise to control mankind's response to the disorders of the heavens. The government of the passions, both personal and social, is a persisting problem. Political behavior and dogmatic and aggressive ideologies have their biological origins in the physiology of humans, but their historical origins are founded upon abrupt as well as continuous change in human ecology. When the skies fell, man was shocked into self-awareness, religion began, and with religion and from religion came politics - the organization and direction of human efforts towards the propitiation and control of the gods and the environment. The controversy that has attended the publication and testing of Dr. Velikovsky's theories itself presents issues of a fundamental kind in political science, the history of science, and philosophy. The experience is already well-documented, and will, when Dr. Velikovsky's archives are opened, be the best-documented case in the history of science. A philosopher, viewing this experience, cannot help but become agitated over the intellectual and moral rules under which scientists operate and govern themselves. But even more elemental is the philosophical question as to the origins of philosophy in the sublimation and rationalization of forms of thought and behavior originating under traumatic conditions in "times beyond recall". {S : II} II A second category of knowledge to enter the approaching cosmic debate is history. No field of pre-history and ancient history can escape reappraisal. The field of ancient Greek history will serve as an example. Gripped by the uniformitarian and evolutionary ideology, and therefore unimpressed by evidences of wide-spread, almost total, disasters that overtook the Minoan and Mycenean precursors of Greek civilization, most historians have accepted a theory that allows 500 years of dark ages. During this period they allege that one set of civilizations declined and the primitive new Greek civilization began. Revolutionary primevalogy says that these dark ages were not 500 years long, but occupied about 100 years, and that what happened was the destruction of the great civilizations by natural causes, involving disturbances of the earth and the skies, and that the survivors of the catastrophe came out of a state of disastrous shock to reassemble the new civilizations of Homeric Greece. Those survivors behaved in ways that were full of contradictions and madness. And it was perhaps quite important, to the history of the Western mind, that the crazed survivors and their ideas and behavior have been taught to schoolboys for 2600 years as a model for manly behavior. Women's Liberation advocates, please take note. Educators, take note. Why have these models been allowed to persist? Is history but an obsessed recapitulation of disastrous experiences? Is it but a shell-shocked capering? Call the roll of the ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Crete, Cyprus, the Aegean, Greece, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Megalithic pre-historic humans of Europe, the Olmecs and Mayans, the Peruvians, the North American Indians, China, India, Iran, and so forth. Wherever one ventures equipped with the revolutionary theory, old historical evidence is reshaped and new theories emerge. Matters large and matters small become involved. How did the ballgames of many cultures come to be invented and why were they religious? Why do modern Peruvian Indians put bowls on their heads when the earth quakes? Are ancient Meso-American statues wearing helmets because they are astronauts, as one popular writer has implausibly said, or to shield them from "flak"? Civilized centers known to us seem to connect with common centers that were obliterated in catastrophes, leaving behind many puzzling connections between the Orient, America, and the Mediterranean. All such problems extend beyond history into anthropology and other fields, of course. {S : III} III A third large area of fuel for debate would be the humanities. There are many fields here and my breakdown of the fields cannot be very logical. Is costuming a field? Where did clothing originate, or the helmets we have been talking of? Clothing was born of disaster, says the Bible, of expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which may have corresponded to a tilting of the earth's axis and the coming of the cold seasons. Certainly mythology is a humanistic field. It seems odd to me that no contemporary school of mythology, except of course the revolutionary school of which I speak, admits to the reality and historicity of myths. Or if one does, it waters down reality to most trivial occurrences before accepting it. Robert Graves, in his famous collection of The Greek Myths, defines some thirteen types of expression that might be called myth, none of which approach our own. Mircea Eliade, the most distinguished mythologist of the moment, invented a phrase, illud tempus, "That Time", to refer to a point to which all myth connected with the cosmos went back. But he would not venture himself into the real precincts of That Time. He says, in effect, that everyone and everything can be referred back to that Time, but nothing really happened then. Strange indeed. Certainly, much is to be done in the revision of mythology. Better than Freud, Jung and others, the revolutionary primevalogist can explain myth in the context of a human mind trying to cope with disastrous ecological experience. Mythanalysis goes hand in hand with a reconstructed natural history to permit great advances in translating symbols and making sense out of the apparently senseless. This will be true not only of so-called primitive and ancient myth. But also of the great bodies of material summed up in the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, and other sacred religio-moral-historical works. If the effect of massive collective shock is the suppression of memory, another effect is the partly conscious and vigorous design of methods for ridding humans of the impressions and anxieties bubbling up from the repressed memories. This is commonly accomplished by divisionary, symbolically loaded activity. The study of religious worship and rituals can view these human activities existentially - for their present functioning, that is. It can view them, too, with their prayers and liturgies, as endless repetitions, enforced through all succeeding generations, of the both terrible and life-saving human-making events of the disastrous periods of human history and pre- history. The development of literature would be another diversion of anxiety. Every people has its songs and dances that sooth the uneasy breast. I studied one song that is found in the Odyssey of Homer, that I call the Love Song of Demodocus. It consists of a hundred lines of poetry describing an opera ballet. I believe that I have discovered in its plot a masking of the terrible planetary encounter between Moon and Mars that I mentioned a moment ago. According to the song, Aphrodite (the Moon Goddess) and Mars (the war god) are making love in the bed of the god Vulcan, who traps them by his electrical genius and then is persuaded to release them by the Earth-god Poseidon. Like religious observances, but much more roundabout, the song recalls the terrible days, and by recalling them in a disguised form, relieves the mind of the people concerning them. What people do and do not forget, and what they should and should not forget, are of course important problems, and, if revolutionary primevalogy can throw light upon stress, memory, and forgetting, psychologists will be grateful, as was a German psychiatrist with whom I discussed last summer the question of controlling the memory of Nazism. On the one hand, Germans have to remember the Nazi experience in order to think straight and correct themselves; on the other hand they have to forget and distort it in order for life to be tolerable. But now, you see, we have entered the fields of educational psychology and political psychology. {S : IV} IV And so we move into a fourth large category of the fields of knowledge, the social science. A related field of study is that of political institutions. How were the state, law and order, and administration invented? Do the circumstances of the origins of political institutions affect the ways in which these operate today? To take one instance, the invention of kingship, what does revolutionary primevalogy lend to the study of kingship? A number of scholars have shown that the earliest kings were believed to be gods or closely identified with gods; these gods were celestial and planetary; the power of the king was as unlimited as that of the gods; and often, strangely, the kings would be put to death ceremonially upon the completion of that period of time. It seems unlikely that a man would be made a god unless people had experienced the terrible turmoil of heavenly crashes and interventions upon earth, whereupon a strict imitation of the celestial model would be in order - obsessions transformed into institutions. But you see, an institution, defined as process, is nothing but a set of channels for routinized behavior. There is probably much left of this primordial desperation, fear, and propitiation in modern kings and presidents. Why, after all, should not President Richard Nixon have been fired or retired like any ordinary employee or executive? The fears and anxieties surrounding his downfall were all too reminiscent of primeval methods of imitating gods out of terror of being punished. I may read to you from the Lawbook of Manu, one of the ancient East Indian documents where the eight great gods that guard the points of the compass form also the eight divine parts of the king: When the world was without a king and dispersed in fear in all directions, the Lord created a king for the protection of all. He made him of eternal particles of Indra and the Wind, Yama, the Sun and Fire, Varuna, the moon, and the Lord of Wealth. And, because he had been formed of fragments of all those gods, the king surpasses all other beings in splendor. Even an infant king must not be despised, as though a mere mortal, for he is a great god in human form [2] . Lacking self-knowledge, and therefore lacking self-control, modern men and women and children repeat the same thoughts and mechanisms that produced the sacred absolute kings of the earliest empires. Revolutionary primevalogy has also brought new insights to bear upon two well-debated older theories of human culture. One of these has held that human institution and manufactures developed in the world independently, although similarly, in different places of Asia, America, and Europe. The second theory has held that occasional encounters between separate peoples had to be the method by which so many features of so many cultures came to resemble one another. The revolutionary theory says "yes" and "no" to both the independent invention and the diffusion theory. The revolutionary theory alone can assert that at one time in the history of mankind, before a set of universal catastrophes occurred, a universal culture existed. Further, the drastic changes of the surface of the earth destroyed most of this grand ecumenical culture, leaving the remnants of humanity in their isolated locations, there to continue many of their old common practices and beliefs, but also there to reconstruct their cultures in accord with their separately-experienced disasters. The Bible speaks of at least four universal disasters; the creation of the world itself, the drastic change of mentality and environment accompanying the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, the great flood, and the plagues and chaos of the exodus from Egypt. Those stories have a reality to them that the continuous efforts of modern evolutionary science have not succeeded in effacing. The task of revolutionary primevalogy is to resume once more, and with all the improved tools of the sciences and humanities, the reading and interpretation of the myths of creation and destruction from all over the world. The success of such studies would of course strongly impress the field of theology. Besides anthropology and political science, other fields of social science where revolutionary primevalogy enters into debate occur readily. If the disasters were tied up with the creation of the human mind, then they would be intimately connected with psychology, which studies the human mind, and with social psychology, that treats of man and society. I have already mentioned the problems of stress and forgetting, collective amnesia, displacement of anxieties, the psychology of symbols, the origins of creativity. But I should mention as well the fascinating but dismal study of warfare, of destructive aggressiveness, of war formations, of armaments. Would not our ways of looking at and attacking the problems of human conflict change if we were to see them as primeval recapitulations of projections of the battles of the heavenly hosts? Gods made war, and men followed their example, rather than the contrary, as the apologists for the gods would have it. Again, as with the large picture, so with the small. Did Roman hegemony, based upon the legion, that was maneuvered around the short sword, to whose exercise they devoted themselves so tenaciously, express in that dedication the image of flaming Mars as a sword which various ancient cultures of the seventh and eighth century attested to seeing in the sky? Nor can the field of sexology, even as developed by the Freudian psychologists, escape the debate, for it seems to me that the exceedingly ramified, refined, and violent manifestations of sexual behavior found in humans may in many respects be a secondary derivation from the catastrophic experience, rather than a primary result of biological and familial evolutionary development. I shall pass over the field of economics with a hint of the revolutionary challenge to it. The biblical, and even worldwide, myth that work is a curse upon man laid by his Fall from God's Grace is more scientifically correct than, say the theory of Karl Marx that work is an imposition of the system of ownership, or the more generally accepted idea that human beings were born workers. Work, I would postulate, is a catastrophically indoctrinated obsession with routines and with the avoidance of future disasters. (You will understand, of course, that I have no prejudice against work, and am typically addicted to it.) {S : V} V At the University of Lethbridge, early this years, I developed the question whether physical changes may have occurred in man during the catastrophes that occurred over the last 15,000 years. Here is an issue on the borderline of the anthropological sciences and the biological sciences. I reasoned that one or a combination of events must have happened to propel a large-skulled primate into the human being that we know: the annihilation of numerous "competing" subspecies; activation of glandular systems not apparent in fossils; obsessive social transference through many memorial generations; and conventional, but greatly speeded-up, mutation; such are the possibilities of explaining human history. It may be understood, then, how the biological sciences will enter the debate: through direct challenges to Darwinian uniformitarianism; through new hypotheses handed over to the chemists of life and genetics, who are already making such rapid progress that they encourage revolutionary primevalogists to think in turn of the famous literary work of Ovid, not to mention a multitude of other ancient sources, where he catalogues a bizarre zoo of metamorphosed beings; and, of course, by way of the science of ecology that would have to gear itself to considerations of sudden and extreme adaptation of species to atmospheric, climatic, and soil changes. Revolutionary primevalogy contemplates a history of life that stresses massive quantities of mutational stimuli, and the rapid proliferation and even more rapid extinction of species. At the time they took over the world's educational and intellectual establishments, the Darwinian evolutionists knew neither of mutation nor radiation. They furthermore denied gross and rapid changes of the earth's morphology and ecology. This is the year of the ozone peril, however, with newspapers carrying the warnings of scientists that if aerial nuclear bomb testing is practiced, if regular super-sonic plane flights are scheduled, and if the use of aerosol sprays continues to grow, then a point will be reached within half a century when half the high ozone layer may be destroyed and with it earth's people and animals. It should be added that these points are disputed. The Pentagon says: not so! Others, too, are content with the potential of the ozone layer for replacement, barring extreme abuse. Still, solar and outer-space radiation may do the job of killing off the species, once the ozone's protection is removed. Once more, the fragility of the earthly ecology is highlighted. Yet nothing that mankind can do is anything but a pale reflection of what nature has done repeatedly in times past. The ashes of the immense explosion of Krakatoa of 1883, a volcanic disaster that startled the world, now lay scarcely detectable on the floors of the Indonesian seas. Below it however, in the cores taken by oceanographers, are to be found six heavy ash layers, laid down within the past million years. By comparison with any one of these six disastrous events, the greatest historical explosion, that of Krakatoa, was insignificant. Sometime in the same period, another cosmic event scattered an estimated billion tons of meteorites or tektites over the island areas of the South Asia seas. {S : VI} VI I am tempted to go on describing the amazing discoveries of contemporary oceanography, were our time not limited - for instance, the global cleavage of the earth. An immense fracture runs from the Arctic to the Antarctic and then splits into a double-fork to run around the other side of the globe. It would be well, also, to discuss the youngness and biological sterility of the ocean deeps. Since the species that inhabit the deeps are rather ordinary and few in number - Jules Verne to the contrary notwithstanding - one may wonder whether some intelligent and well-organized groups of people will one day achieve methods of breeding edible species for the deeps and feeding them in their habitat. Or whether oceanic bio-culture might not be accompanied by developments in thermal control, so that energy may be produced by thermal vertical differentials in the ocean, and so that climates may be moderated by current diversion. A new comprehension of why the oceans developed only in recent times will abet humanity's search for the earthly environment of the near future. Almost without saying, now, we have passed from biology through the earth sciences, the sixth large grouping of fields of knowledge where important debates should shape up along revolutionary versus evolutionary lines. I have referred to issues of mineralogy, vulcanology, oceanography, and meteorology. Apart from the boundaries of fields, there stand some basic physical questions. Under the pressure of discoveries of the catastrophic events happening in the universe - pulsars, quasars, black holes, galaxy collapse, and so forth - scientists must begin to consider the morphology of the earth on a greatly magnified scale of forces. There have been some exertions of heat and pressure upon this globe through extraterrestrial and internal sources quite far from those normally taken into calculation by geologists in explaining surface rocks and features. The challenge that the nineteenth century genius, Ignatius Donnelly, put to the geological world, that the vast unstratified layers of clay, till, and stones that cover much of the globe are of extra-terrestrial and cometary origin, was not too well answered. But, with modern geochemical techniques, the challenge may be answered. That is, if the appropriate scientists will attend to the matter. In completing a short agenda of debating topics in the earth sciences, it may be well to introduce the field of chronology. This has, of course, its several parts, which may or may not be necessarily related. There are historical techniques where no documentation exists and even the chain of memorial generations becomes broken. Datings are then made by examining the stratification of fossils and human products below the ground. Here, and far beyond, extend the working of chemical clocks, such as radiocarbon dating, potassium-argon dating, and so forth. Geological and archaeological dating are achieved by the penetration of strata of earth and the remains of cultures, and assigning a later date to what is above something else. Archaeology has not sufficiently considered the causes of sudden destruction of ancient civilizations, and therefore has made many mistakes of time, nor has it concerned itself with very ancient civilizations and centers of habitation that may have been entirely erased. But these can be inferred in the future with fair validity. No one seems to have considered, for instance, whether the cave artists of the Dordogne in France, or the builders of Stonehenge megalithic monuments may not have been survivors of catastrophes of the second, third or other millennia before Christ. And that the centers from which they derived were much more highly developed artistically and technologically. Nor has geology sufficiently pondered the effects of catastrophes in burning and flooding deeply huge areas, and in thrusting and folding great masses of land beneath and above other strata so as to create illusions of ages that did not exist. Nor for that matter have conventional geologists given us sufficient assurances that the fossil beds by which datings are made are not the result of fossil zoning, that is, the moving of fossil beds into other strata, or above and below them, by catastrophic earth and water flows. Indeed, far from feeling insecure in the face of criticism, geologists and archaeologists have been greatly heartened in their evolutionary uniformitarianism since World War II by the development of so-called chemical clocks. Often they abandon their former datings in favor of what they believe to be more accurate radio-chemical dates. Once having discovered that certain chemical elements are radioactive and decay into new elements, scientists have elaborated techniques for counting how much of a parent element is present in a certain things, how much of the daughter element is present in the things, and then how much time must have elapsed to produce that much of the daughter element. If uniformitarian theory held, then the measurement of the ages might be satisfactorily achieved. But a serious challenge may be leveled against the concept of chemical decay: why should we assume that an element decays today as it decayed a hundred million years ago? Furthermore, in many cases, in applying specialized clockwork to given specimens, the history of the specimen is unknown. Today, the specimen may rest in a seemingly new bed; but this may be only the latest of various beds that it has occupied over the ages. The earth's surface, alas, may be a chain of flophouses for transient materials. What matters to the cosmic debate is the experiences of matter, and aging is only one kind of experience. Besides, catastrophes, by frictional heat, pressure and electricity, and the mixing of elements in disequilibrium, introduce revolutions of the atmosphere, of the rocks, and of organic existence. If, for example, Mars, which is rich in argon gas, were to exchange any argon with heated rocks of the moon and earth, then any potassium-argon test of a rock might well show a very old age because of the presence in it of argon from a foreign source. The substance will have many stepdaughters. In fact, the chemical clocks registered great ages of the moon, although physically it gives evidence of having boiled recently. Such severe criticism may be leveled against the uniformitarian methods employed, that there is, to my mind, a strong probability that the moon was subjected to highly disturbing events as little as 2700 years ago. {S : VII} VII Now we have mentioned six categories of disciplines, and there remains only a seventh to exemplify. This would be the physical sciences: mechanics, terrestrial and celestial; electrodynamics, terrestrial and celestial - all that is encompassed by astronomy and astrophysics and the special subfield that take in the individual planets, the sun and the moon, without, however, omitting the importance of the earth's external and internal responses to its membership in the solar family. Howsoever few are the fields and issues of the approaching cosmic debate in the sciences that I can present to you here, I would be remiss if I did not bring up the subject of astronomy, the "Queen of Sciences," it is called. Actually, astronomy is not the queen of sciences; it would be rather a precious and dilettante science were it not for the catastrophic events that the courtiers of the "queen of sciences" choose to ignore. Few people, certainly not rulers of empires, would pay attention to the skies were it not for the fact that the skies fell from time to time. As the children's fable about Chicken Little goes, "Run for your life, the sky is falling," and when all the little animals hear the refrain, they, too, run for their lives. Within the last month, an American professor of celestial mechanics named Robert W. Bass published articles that should stimulate debate on the stability of the solar system. To my way of thinking, his work has put to rest the myth engendered by Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, and La Place, followed by a host of scientists, that the heavens can be mathematically demonstrated to be in a condition of long-term stability. Contrariwise, Professor Bass has shown that, if the heavens are stable at all, they are stable for empirical and experiential reasons, not because of any laws discovered by Newton or La Place or anyone else following after them. We are left with the evidence of historical geology and proto-history. I think that these tell us, or they will tell us when the debate is finished, that the heavens have changed recently and are not eternally fixed in their movements. Without pausing to examine the mathematics of Professor Bass, I would call your attention also to the work of an engineer who has occupied himself with electrical phenomena, Ralph Juergens. Mr. Juergens, working alone and without support other than that provided by the inspiration and encouragement of a few friends, has written articles that I am convinced will be numbered among the most important of our age. The thesis which he advances, and which is my candidate for the winning side in the approaching cosmic debate, is that electrical forces of almost unbelievable magnitude were exercised upon the Moon, Mars, Earth and other heavenly bodies in the recent past. His demonstrations are not beyond the grasp of the educated layman, and are based almost entirely upon the evidence that the evolutionary uniformitarians who command the space explorations have had to provide the public in the course of their work. Mr. Juergens has shown that many striking features of the moon's surface - its giant craters and jagged valleys - and those of Mars as well - must be the product of gigantic electrical discharges between planetary bodies, and that these occurred in times within the memory of mankind. In a modest and incidental remark, Juergens has also suggested that the key to the solution of the urgent problem of nuclear fusion, for the production of cheap, non-polluting energy, may be in the study and understanding of the interplanetary electrical discharges that have been reported in such primeval epics as the Homeric battles of the gods. {S : SUMMARY} SUMMARY With the example of electromagnetics behind me, and the seven categories complete, I may now proceed to summarize. I fully appreciate, I beg you to believe, that I have but raised issues and not solved them. But such, after all, was the original intent of my talk. I wish to explain to you why I thought that the moment has come for enlarging the debate over cosmic issues in the sciences and humanities. I tried to explain why I believed that in practically every field there would be ample material for debate, provided only that the ruling conventional scientists permit themselves to be drawn into debate. The problems are not all resolvable in favor of revolutionary primevalogy. Indeed, the contrast between revolutionary and evolutionary primevalogy is not absolute. Rather, I find, and I hope that you will agree, that there is a pressing need to present the case of revolutionary primevalogy to the intellectuals and educated public. Let the decision rest with them. My own position, and that of other advocates of a revolutionary primevalogy, is simple to state: Humanity was born in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable set of crises. This condition was caused by stupendous celestial and geological events. Everything that humanity has done or achieved, since the baseline to this set of events was drawn some thousands of years ago, has been affected, colored, and fashioned by them. The future of both science and ethics rests in an appreciation of this revolutionary position. From these theories, we can learn, first, that mankind is in a fundamental, natural sense helpless in the lap of God or Nature. Second, mankind is all one, a unity, as he faces the most fundamental principles of existence. Third, through education and new attitudes, a future not at all inferior, indeed superior, to past existences can be formed. CODA At this point, I had intended to conclude my talk, but in view of some of the questions that have been asked in the meeting rooms and corridors, I would like to offer you an extension of remarks, a kind of coda, if you please. Perhaps you have noticed how I stress the need for the integration of numerous fields in order to develop a theory that can face several ways at once. Others have spoken in the same vein. The fact that on this platform we have had astrophysicists, humanists and social scientists is some proof of the point. Yet, on the other hand, we must be always aware of the pitfalls of synthesis. Synthesis flies off readily into mysticism, generalities and scientific errors abounding. The antidote is, of course, specialized knowledge. By specialism, I mean the capacity to understand work with severely constrained hypotheses, which presume many things, and which, braced by such presumptions, are able to dig in deeply at critical locations and emerge with findings which have to be confronted, whether to disprove them, or accept them, but in any event, to interpret them. If revolutionary primevalogy is to progress in an orderly way and not to fly off wildly, it must accommodate to existing specialists or breed its own kind of specialists. This we are only beginning to do. We need not only to turn the other cheek when we are slapped by the specialist; we have to persuade the specialist and especially the would- be young specialist that our theories are eminently testable and that the smallest problem, as well as the grandiose problem, lends itself to a particular intense interest that they can recognize and that is important to the revolutionary view. Only if success attends this process will the "Operation Bootstrap" be possible, or to use another metaphor, will the circle of "integration - specialization - reintegration" be closed. A second question that has been raised here, and often elsewhere, is the opposite of what the revolutionary primevalogists have been saying to the evolutionaries. Just as it can be rightly said that many evolutionaries are blinded by their need to find a secure world, it can be rightly said of some revolutionaries that they are catastrophic chiliasts, for whom the very next day is the great day of judgment and to whom the prospect of unsettled worlds gives pleasure. They are dominated by a Freudian death- instinct. They think of the end of the world like many of the ancient prophets are alleged to have thought of it, wishfully, hopefully, in despair at the state of the world. But I must say, as I have watched the serious workers in this field, that if they are wishful catastrophists, they have successfully sublimated the wish, and are as cheerful and concerned about a constructive future as any normal person. This is the third conference of 500 persons that I have addressed in nine months on related subjects and I have remarked on the sanguine and rational temperament of the proceedings and of the people in the audience as well. I should here say that this is in no small measure owing to the circumspection, sobriety, scientificity and humanity of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose work and whose general influence pervaded them. And so now to my final comment. This is in answer to the repeated query: When will the next catastrophe occur? Surely this is a natural human concern. It is even a scientific concern, for one wished to know whether a set of events, occurring successively in times past and at staggered intervals, will occur again, and if so, in what temporal ratio to the past events. Nevertheless, I shall have to answer in a mood that Leo Rosten wrote recently was characteristic of dialogues in Yiddish: I answer a question by asking other questions. Why do you want to know when the human race will suffer another catastrophe? How soon is soon? Worse problems are before us, so why worry? The human race is much more likely to flatten itself or obliterate itself by hatreds and through techniques that it displays at this moment of time than it is to become a victim of the raging elements of nature. To these controllable human threats we should address ourselves. And it may be that a theory of revolutionary primevalogy will help us do so. {S : Notes (Chapter 27: A Cosmic Debate)} Notes (Chapter 27: A Cosmic Debate) 1. This public lecture was January 11, 1975, in Montreal, Canada, at the Saidye Bronfman Centre under the Chairmanship of Nahum Ravel, and at a symposium to discuss "Velikovsky's Challenge to Conventional Beliefs." 2. However he rejected this term and we could never settle upon another one. I finally coined the term "quantavolution," as contrasted with "evolution," but will be satisfied if the theory and mentality associated with the latter word are changed, letting the word "evolution" evolve suddenly, markedly, and generally. 3. Quoted in A-1. Basham. The Wonder that was India (New York: The Grove Press. 1959. pp. 84-5. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 5: } {Q COMMUNICATING A SCIENTIFIC MODEL: } {C Chapter 28:} {T SYLLABI FOR QUANTAVOLUTION} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT SYLLABI FOR QUANTAVOLUTION I G 53.2112 Social Invention PRIMEVAL ECOLOGY, INSTITUTIONS, AND HUMAN NATURE Professor Alfred de Grazia, New York University Spring Semester, 1976 Prerequistites: A Bachelor's Degree. (For undergraduates permission of the instructor or advisor is required. Call 598-3277.) The course is organized around a central concept, "Revolutionary Primevalogy," by which is meant that drastic natural changes (disasters) have occurred in 14,000 years (roughly the Holocene period) and produced a self-developing homo sapiens whose very mind and all its works have been causally and environmentally conditioned by those changes. Theories and evidence are drawn from various fields of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Specifically, political institutions and behavior are treated as relatives and adjuncts of human nature, behavior, and culture in general. "Enlightenment" over the ages has been almost entirely a burial and masking of symptoms; the basic problems of primeval mankind still rest with us and radical alternatives need to be searched out if those are not to determine the human future. Primevalogy is a most difficult and complex field, both because of the clash of fundamental theories (religious-scientific, evolutionary-revolutionary), and because of the scarcity and ambiguity of data. Indeed the field hovers on the edge of being a non- field or anti-field. Sometimes one wonders: "If the events it deals with are provable, then the field cannot exist." This paradox is analogous to certain new problems of theoretical physics, where phenomena are so antitemporal or micro-temporal or spatially contradictory that to observe them as occurring seems to be a proof that they cannot occur. The approach, nevertheless, is conventionally scientific, even though it opposes conventional science and orthodoxy. We are not dealing with ghosts or creatures from outer space. Nor do we prove the existence of God. We are simply doing the best that we can with whatever the pragmatic and operational modern scientific tools and works afford us. Each session will be divided into two parts. From 6: 00 to 6: 50 p. m., the lecture will present a straightforward statement of the theory of revolutionary primevalogy. Following a brief intermission, the instructor will take up and assess objections to the theory as presented; criticism and discussion by class members will follow and will terminate the session at 7: 50 p. m. Since time may not permit all to participate who wish to do so, written comments and questions for written or oral reply may be submitted. Towards the conclusion of the first session, members of the class will be asked to write a note to the instructor on their background and preferences for areas into which they might wish to delve when writing a paper for the course. Undergraduates may contribute a paper as well. The instructor will then, later on, make suggestions concerning possible topics. The final examination will consist of brief essays upon several of a list of questions that will be distributed well in advance. Calendar of Lectures (Wednesdays, 6: 00 to 8: 00 P. M.) INTRODUCTION 1. February 4 REVOLUTIONARY PRIMEVALOGY: The science of first ages as products of abrupt, large-scale, intense events; evolution and uniformitarianism, catastrophism; the intimate relation of nature to humanity. 2. February 11 AGES OF CHAOS AND CREATION: The timetable of revolutionary changes; great world cycles; rise and fall of civilizations. SECTION I 3. February 18 HUMAN TIME AND REAL TIME: Concepts and measures; how scientists defeated the theologians and created an old Earth; radiochronology; traditional time; astronomical bench-marks. 4. February 25 THE SUPER-FORCES OF NATURE IN THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE: Nineteen expressions of super-energy and their effects upon ecology and humankind. 5. March 3 THE DISRUPTION AND SETTLING OF HEAVEN: Observations of primeval people; planetary, cometary and other cosmic phenomena; Velikovky's synthesis; the heavenly waters. 6. March 10 EFFECTS OF GEOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONS UPON THE BIOSPHERE: Ice ages; cleavages of the globe; mountains, gorges, rifts; igneous patterns; adaptation and extinction of species. SECTION II 7. March 17 WHEN AND HOW WAS HUMANKIND "CREATED": From hominid to homo sapiens; creation legends; the schizoid gestalt and the triple control problem; racial types and succession. 8. March 31 MECHANISMS & FUNCTIONS OF MEMORY AND FORGETTING; Great fears; the amnesia of holocausts; culture-creation through obsessive-compulsive behavior. 9. April 7 BIRTH, STRUGGLES, AND DEATH OF THE GODS: Gods and heroes; fatal flaws; divine ambivalence to man and man to gods; the greatest cover-up; Homeric plots; götterdämmerung. 10. April 14 COMMUNICATION BY SIGNS, SYMBOLS, AND LANGUAGE: Animal communication: earliest symbols; universal language; the Tower of Babel. 11. April 21. PRIMEVAL ORIGINS OF THE ARTS AND LITERATURE: Crafts, myths; liturgy art; dance; poetry. 12. April 28 PRAGMATICS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CONTROL: Group behavior; religio-political institutions and sacred-secular power forms; war; sexuality; economies; instrumental rationalism. CONCLUSION 13. May 5 WHAT THE PRIMEVAL FORETELLS OF THE FUTURE: Centrality of control problems; interconnectedness of knowledge; self-destructiveness; the "Jupiter effect" and other possibilities. 14. May 12 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF THE LECTURES : Synopsis of the theory; problems of validations; practical uses; the politics of science; a new science. II THE CATASTROPHIST TRADITION IN THE HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES: ITS PERSISTENCE, RECENT DEVELOPMENT, AND EFFECTS UPON THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR (A proposed seminar of 1982) Professor Alfred de Grazia New York University I. INTRODUCTION 1. Explanation of the goals and work of the Seminar. Writing the Research Paper. 2. The Tradition that General Catastrophes have occurred on Earth defined. Terms such as revolutionism, macroevolution, punctuated equilibria, quantum evolution, quantavolution, natural saltations, cyclism, catastrophe (in topological mathematics). The concept of a sudden, intensive large-scale change in the process of natural and human history. 3. Examples of the infiltration (amounting often to dominance) of catastrophic ideas and theories into most fields of knowledge. II. THE PLACE OF CATASTROPHISM IN THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 4. Origins. A. The ascribed and actual origins of all major religions in catastrophes: Cases: Mosaism, Mazdaism, Greco --Romanism, Mesoamericanism, Hinduism. B. The number and kinds of catastrophes claimed by religion. 5. Practices. A. The conversion of legendary experiences into forms of religious practices. B. Cross-cultural identification of the principal deities and their traits. 6. Ideology A. The functions of catastrophic ideas in religion. B. The sublimation of catastrophic religion in philosophy, ancient and modern. C. Attempts to free religion and philosophy from catastrophe. III. THE SEARCH FOR CATASTROPHES IN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7. Archaeology: Levels of natural destruction and ancient excavations. 8. Anthropology: the human species, a prolonged (or brief?) development. IV. THE EXTINCTION AND GENESIS OF SPECIES 9. The Pleistocene and earlier exterminations. 10. Origin of species in catastrophes. V. THE TREATMENT OF COSMIC DISORDER IN ASTRONOMY 11. "Immutability of the Spheres," Plato, Whiston, Laplace, Ovenden, Bass et al. 12. "The Explosive Universe," Hoerbiger, Baker, Velikovsky, Warwick, et al. VI. THE STRUGGLE TO DISCRIMINATE CHANGE AGENTS IN THE EARTH SCIENCES 13. The Change of Paradigm A. Dominance of catastrophism in early geology. B. The uniformitarian reconstruction: gradualism and terrestrial isolationism. 14. Ostracism and reductionism: cranks, denial, and anomalies. 15. Recent scientific literature (1970 to 1982) on extraterrestrial influences upon meteorology and geology. VII. THE CRUX OF CHRONOLOGY: 10 4 , 10 6 , 2 X 10 7 , 10 9 or 5 x 10 9 YEARS? MODES AND TECHNIQUES OF TIME-DETERMINATION. 16. Authoritative 17. Astrophysical 18. Biostratigraphical 19. Radiochronometric VIII. CATASTROPHISM IN LITERATURE AND POLITICS 20. The Pentateuch, the Rig-Veda and early western epics (Homer, the Edda) 21. Shakespeare 22. Modern Forms A. Science fiction B. The mass media 23. The Holocausts: the tendency of ancient collective traumatic experiences to repeat themselves in politics and war. IX. THE HUMAN MIND TODAY: CONFRONTING AND COPING WITH CATASTROPHIC IDEAS IN SCIENCE AND SOCIETY 24. The reception system of science A. Problems of natural science models clashing with unconforming natural history B. Evolution of Quantavolution: issues in the biological sciences 25. Developing forms of thought A. Catastrophism in contemporary religion B. Psychological therapy and the catastrophic mentality C. Cosmic and political catastrophism: the meaning of nuclear war SUGGESTED READINGS, ON RESERVE (Keyed to outline and fully cited in the master bibliography provided each member of the Seminar) I. Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky; M. Truzzi, el., The Zetetic Scholar (excerpts); A. de Grazia, "The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences and Humanities, " (offprint). II. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; D. Talbott, Saturn; A. Grazia, "Moses and the Management of Exodus;" J. Ziegler, YHWH; Plato, "Critias" and "Timaeus (selections);" A. Isenberg, "Devi and Venus;" III Claude Schaeffer, Stratigraphie Comparée.. (translated portions); A. de Grazia, The Rise of Homo Schizo (excerpted chapters); IV Luis Alvarez et al.. (Excerpts on iridium concentrations at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, from Science magazine); Otto Schindewolf, "Neocatastrophism? in 2 Catas. Geol. V L. C. Stecchini, "The Inconstant Heavens" and "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data;" Thomas Taylor, "Coincidence between the Bolts of the Planet Jupiter and the Fabulous Bonds of Jupiter the Demiurgus," Classical J. (1819); R. W. Bass, "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," in 4 Pensée; H. B. Baker, "The Earth Participates in the Evolution of the Solar System," Detr. Acad. Nat. Sci. (reprint). VI. Cuvier, Revolutions of the Globe; Derek Ager, The Nature of the Statigraphical Record; D. Stove. "The Scientific Mafia"; reprint, J. A. Eddy, "The Case of the Missing Sunspots," 236 Sci. American. VII R. Juergens, "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos (1977); "Geogullibility and Magnetic Reversals," III Kronos (1978); A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, ch. III. VIII. D. Patten, The Biblical Flood; Peter James, "Aphrodite: the Moon or Venus?" I SISR (1976); I. Wolfe, "The Catastrophic Substructure of Shakespeare's 'Anthony and Cleopatra'", I Kronos 3 (1975-6) IX. Stephen Gould, "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory," 216 Science (1982); McLean vs. Arkansas (1982, Documents and Court Opinion); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Sigmund Freud on the repetition of traumatic experiences (Selected Papers); Manifesto of Nobel prize winners on nuclear warfare and humanity (1981). SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY All works cited as the specific background of the seminar meetings will be available on Reserve. In some instances, purchase of the materials is possible: in other instances, duplication of the materials has to be arranged. Although it is expected that the instructor will be able to convey his own research in the course of the meetings, copies of his relevant works will also be available on loan; these include in published or Xeroxed form: Chaos and Creation: Quantavolution in the Natural and Human Science; Homo Schizo (in two volumes): The Origins of Man and Culture and Human Nature and Behavior; Solaria Binaria (with Earl R. Milton); Moses and the Management of Exodus; The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (in Homer); The Lately Tortured Earth (Quantavolution in the Earth Sciences). In addition, members of the seminar will be Provided with a supplemental Bibliography of several hundred related items. They can expect to read at least 350 pages a week, apart from the reading they require for their research paper. RESEARCH PAPER Each participant will be expected to write a brief, compact research paper along the lines of an article in Nature magazine. Examples of acceptable topics might be: "The Present State of Theory on the Origins of Tektites," "Astronomical Orientation of Towns, Temples, and Carvings in Prehistoric Meso-America;" "Origins and Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field;" "A Possible Reconciliation of Virgil's Trojan Legend and the Historical Founding of Rome;" "Electrical Phenomena Depicted in the Rig Veda;" "Was Australopithecus Human?" "Popular Opinion Respecting the Historicity of Catastrophes;" "Sources of Catastrophic Expectations in Certain Human Subjects;" "Statistical Frequency of Catastrophe-relevant Literature, 1900-1982, in Nature and Science magazines;" "Creation-time according to various Religions, Sects, and Writers;" "The Confirmation (Disproof) of Schaeffer's Theory of General Periodic Bronze Age Disasters in the Near East in the Light of Excavations since 1945;" "The categorizing of Donnelly's Ragnarok in the scientific and Popular Press, 1883 to 1890 in America and England;" "Current Astronomical opinion on the Fixity of Planetary Motions;" "Assessments of the Validity of Potassium40 - Argon40 Radiochronometry;" "Migrating Eels and Continental Drift;" etc. Each Participant will present a copy of his paper to all other members of the seminar. Depending upon their quality, and granted the need for this approach felt in various quarters, the papers may be published in a suitable format. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 5: } {Q COMMUNICATING A SCIENTIFIC MODEL: } {C Chapter 29: } {T I.Q.: A UNIVERSITY PROGRAM} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model CHAPTER TWENY-NINE I.Q.: A UNIVERSITY PROGRAM [1] DEFINITION OF A FIELD A continuous and perennial "fringe" area of a number of humanistic and scientific disciplines centers upon the evidence that in the history and pre-history of man extensive natural changes occurred abruptly and catastrophically, and brought "quantavolutional" rather than evolutionary changes of geography, climate, the solar system, the biosphere, culture, and the human mind. These quantavolutions or saltations are capable of systematic scientific study. The hypotheses of quantavolution pursue the following types of propositions: a) The Earth and its people have been subjected to catastrophic natural experiences (flood, heat, earthquake, meteoritic bombardment) of a kind unknown to recent history. b) These have occurred both before and after the passage of homo sapiens from the hominid. Evidence of them is to be located in legends, religions, psycho-social behavior , astro- physics, the geological and fossil record. d) A new general theory touching upon all fields of knowledge is evolving in the midst of conventional scientific theory, introducing critical modifications concerning natural history, the solar system, ancient history, and the origins of culture and human nature. {S : SCHOLARLY INTEREST} SCHOLARLY INTEREST A number of scholars around the world are concerned with these topics, yet no university has come to serve as a focus of research, writing, publication, and coursework. The principal in scientific catastrophism has been Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, recently deceased, whose published works, with several still to appear, have been read by millions of persons in several languages. At present, three journals, "Kronos" (USA), "The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review" (England) [2] , and "Catastrophist Geology" (Brazil) are devoted to the area; the literature also appears in other periodicals and in an increasing number of books; and William Corliss Co., Glen arms, Md., is engaged in an extensive publication of source-books. Quantavolution has its "fringe" problems, too, like all fields of leaning, and its scholars are as deeply concerned with maintaining scientific standards and distinguishing between "science fiction", "foolishness," and science and scholarship as their counterparts in other fields. {S : CURRICULUM} CURRICULUM The greatest single need in the area of quantavolution is a well-knit communications and learning network, and it is the idea here that University College of the University of Maryland may be well adapted to these functions. A program of sixteen courses is to be outlined below for the potential student body of an Institute of Quantavolution. Courses might be given for academic credit, whether two or four credits in every case. Courses might be audited, where students are otherwise heavily occupied or cannot afford the cost of tuition. It is recommended that for the first two years, courses would be offered not for credit, but with the granting of a Certificate of the Institute of Quantavolution, University of Maryland, in mind. Later on, after investigating the first two years' experience, arrangements might be made for an appropriate configuration of courses to constitute a major or minor offering leading to the Bachelor's Degree. Furthermore, students already possessing the BA or other degrees might earn a Master's Degree in Quantavolution upon completion of ten courses and the presentation of an approved thesis. It would be presently impossible to establish the Q program at an orthodox department or an interdisciplinary program at any university in the country. If for no other reason, the trained scholars, observers, writers, and theorists in the field are not to be found at any university. This is an especially cogent reason for initiating the program in a University College external-internal system, and, as such, it would perhaps demonstrate the unique capabilities present in such systems. Also, continuing commitment to a budget of a quarter-million dollars annually might be necessary were a university to undertake a program in Quantavolution. Course designations in the field of Quantavolution (with brief descriptions) Q1. Introduction to Quantavolution. The essential literature; the controversial character of the field; a history of catastrophism: the hypotheses of Q. Q2. Intermediate Quantavolution. Systematic development of major theses of Q in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Q3. Primeval Quantavolution in the History of Science to 1950. Quantavolution as reflected in Greek thought; the concept of the Deluge; cometary theories of catastrophes; Plato; G. Bruno, Whiston, Cuvier, Donnelly, et al. Q4. The Scientific Reception System and New Science. The Velikovsky Affair and analogies related to PQ in other problem areas of science: ethics and rules of science. Q5. The Catastrophic Origins of Human Nature. Evolutional and quantavolutional possibilities in the rise of mankind; effects of primeval experiences upon human nature, culture and modern man: Jung, Freud and racial memories. Q6. The Bible and the Catastrophic Record. A review of ancient traditions of Exodus and the Books of Moses; influences of disasters upon Judaic-Christian-Muslim thought and practice. Q7. Catastrophism in Literature: From the Vedas to Joyce. The Hindu, Biblical (Psalms. Job, etc.), Homeric writings reinterpreted. Hesiod, Ovid, Shakespeare et al. Q8. Catastrophes. Science Fiction and the Arts. Ancient art, modern and therapeutic art; science fiction and catastrophe; catastrophe in films and documentaries. Q9. The Mythology of Disaster: How myth and legend obscure while they discuss natural disasters and cultural consequences; the great bodies of myth analyzed, compared. Q10. The Ancient Electricians. Study of ancient evidence before the present era of heavy atmospheric and earth electrification in especially the Mosaic period, the Vedas, and the Greek mysteries. Q11. The New Astronomy and Quantavolution. A binary solar system; origins of planets, comets; electromagnetic effects; the surprise of space exploration. Q12. Geological Problems of Quantavolution. Ice Ages theory. continental drift and plate tectonics, general earth morphology as a record of changes in global motions and heavy-body space encounters. Q13. Quantavolutions in the Biosphere. Modes of Biological change, atmospheric fluxes and their biological effects; evidence of disastrous boundaries in evolution; fossil assemblages. Q14. Chronology and Quantavolution. Radiometric and other geo-physical methods of dating the past; critique of uniformitarian assumptions; determining archaeological time. Q15. Chronological Reconstruction in Ancient Europe and the Near East. Velikovsky's attacks upon Egyptian chronology and their effects upon the dating of Mediterranean and Near East cultural events. Western Europe and the megalithic astronomers. Q16. Professional Writing and Translating. For the Certificate of the Institute of Quantavolution. For students having completed eight courses and approved by an ad hoc committee after oral interview. Supervised work on an approved topic discussed in committee. {S : INSTRUCTORS} INSTRUCTORS Responsible instructors can be listed with the course titles. In the course of preparing this memorandum, thirty-nine potential qualified instructors were identified, of which sixteen were in the East Coast megalopolis. Especially in the formative stages, the right to designate and relieve instructors should vest in the Director of the Program. Because personal meetings are important to the purposes and method of the program, a number of adjunct instructors might be made available in various locations that are accessible to students not living within reach of the primary instructor. Every attempt would be made in advance to provide students with appointments at mutually convenient places and times with a traveling instructor. The flexible calendar of University College may permit these arrangements. For example, a student taking a course in Scotland, if the instructor is in America, or not "on circuit", might meet with an adjunct professor at a Scottish institution or another location nearer to him. An extensive bibliography is available for all of the listed courses. The required readings can be made readily available for students anywhere in the world. A microfiche system is planned to expedite communications at lower costs. {S : PROGRAM OF THE IQ} PROGRAM OF THE IQ A. A curriculum of 16 courses leading to a Certificate in IQ 1) At College Park (3 to begin). 2) Worldwide (16 to begin). B. A 2-day conference in London in collaboration with the Society for Interdisciplinary Study in March, 1981, open to the interested public. A 3-day conference at College Park, Maryland, open to the interested public, in January, 1981. C. Initiation of a library and archive of materials pertinent to Quantavolution. Works, books, and archives of Livio Stecchini, Ralph Juergens. I. Velikovsky, and others may be donated to the Institute. D. Summer Tours: "Light on the Greek Dark Ages" - Greece and Aegean. "Megalithic Cultures of Ancient Britain, Ireland and Brittany." "The Catastrophic Experiences and Legends of Mesoamerica" - Mexico. Guatemala. "Quantavolution in the Rocky Mountain Setting" - U. S., Canada, Mexico These four tours are recommended to begin. Others are possible. The lifelong learning program at the University of California, Berkeley, "Study Abroad in 1980" is offering similar courses for credit. They can be excelled in originality, if not as conventional travel experiences. Beginning in winter, 1980-1. E. An interdisciplinary faculty seminar open to University of Maryland and metropolitan area faculty who are interested in familiarizing themselves with the concepts, methods, and findings of quantavolution. (Like the Columbia University Forums). The seminar would continue throughout the year. {S : SUPPORT OF IQ} SUPPORT OF IQ The interests of the network of Quantavolution scholars are in teaching research, residential conferences of members of the group, public conferences, and publication of reprints and new works. In all of these respects, present resources and opportunities are inadequate. The experience of the past twenty years, which has included scholarly activities of all kinds, is indicative of the problems. The extent of personal economic sacrifices by practically all of the scholars engaged up to this time has been considerable. They are affected especially by the world-wide inflation and cannot cover, for example, costs for even essential travel and modest accommodations. They can use an abandoned barrack better than a Sheraton motel, a communal kitchen better than an established à la carte cafeteria. All of this is not to say that past efforts have been unsuccessful. Conferences at Frazer University in Vancouver, at McAllister University in Canada, at Glasgow University in Scotland, at Lethbridge University in Canada, and at the Bronfman Center with the University of Montreal, have been productive. The scholars involved are impecunious, but unusually resourceful and productive. The University College of the University of Maryland, in sponsoring the program of Quantavolution, can consider the following items of support: a) Office space of 5 x 10 meters for individual conferences, content management of the programs, and custody of a special library. b) Administration of the program, procedurally. c) $3000 for a substantive administrator of the program, working out of the College Park office part time. At least for two years, the job here involves building up the ramified network of communications among scholars and students, expediting assignments, watching schedules, promoting conferences, facilitating the production and publication of teaching materials, and receiving and maintaining a library. d) $5000 for the initiation of a microfiche newsletter, reprint and publication system for the program, to be sold to students and through a commercial or university publishing outlet. e) $3000 Expenses reimbursement for IQ developers for program-building, telephone and travel expenses, disbursed through central office of IQ authorization. f) Publicity of the program through University College. g) $2000 additional publicity through the facilities of the IQ group to attract students. h) Classroom facilities for offering three (assembled or open type) courses at College Park. i) Possible classroom facilities in London, New York (this may be provided by Professor de Grazia, if necessary), and a Dutch or German site. j) $3200 for purchasing the basic (missing) published materials for each of the 16 courses and duplication of the instructor's set of unpublished course materials (so that the central office would hold a record of materials on all courses). k) Provision of promotion and management of a general College Park First Annual Conference on Quantavolution in spring 1981, together with guarantees of $12,000 in expenses of invited lecturers and discussion leaders. l) Expenses of shipping study materials, including archives and books intended for the central office of the Institute of Quantavolution at College Park. m) Instructors' costs of cassettes, telephones, mailing and travel. n) Unreimbursed time of persons who may be involved in the promotion and establishment of the program. The total outlay for items not handled directly by IQ is best estimated by University College budgeting officers, but a figure of $16,000.00 is assigned here. The value of the consulting time of the professors acting as the sponsors and organizer (n above) is estimated at $8000 and waived here. The total special cash outlay of the first year of a two-year experiment amounts to about $16,000.00 of which some portion may be directly returnable and the rest returnable in the ordinary course of business. Therefore, the total of investment, allowances, and advances may be in the neighborhood of $32,000.00 for the first year. A goal of 533 student tuitions would have to be set to meet this cost, of which perhaps half at College Park and half worldwide. However, significant alternative or additional income might be returned from conference activities at College Park and elsewhere, and from sales of materials. (Tuition for a course is figured at $115.00 of which $50 is put aside for its instructor and $60 is allocated to costs.) {S : ORGANIZATION} ORGANIZATION a) An Institute of Quantavolution may be formed independently as a non-profit corporation to work with University College. b) An IQ may be formed as a non-profit corporation by the University c) The name may be used without formal legal structure and the program handled as an ordinary administrative sub-division. Perhaps the third method (c) is simplest and most flexible in the early stage. However, the group of instructors would wish to have freedom to develop a set of functions perhaps not typical of University College programs: further they would wish to accumulate ear-marked grants, contracts, etc. Finally, they would wish at some point to set up a physical presence, a living-working-teaching arrangement that might or might not be possible at College Park or even elsewhere in the University of Maryland system. The Director of the Program (who could also be chairman of the Board of the IQ) can be designated for a three-year trial period by the Chancellor of University College. {S : FIRST STEPS} FIRST STEPS a) Approval in principle of the IQ b) Appointment of instructors and publicity of the program. c) Opening and administration of office of IQ 1980-1 beginning date may be possible, until May 1, 1980, from the standpoint of recruitment of students. In addition to a Director- designate, an Associate Director-designate may be appointed to act in the absence of or under the Director. {S : BENEFITS} BENEFITS In general, the University of Maryland may benefit from the proposed program. The field is demonstrably appealing to serious students. It has achieved a sufficient degree of stability in its problems, methods and materials to avoid exoticism and cultism. It addresses important philosophical and scientific problems in the traditional spirit of the liberal arts and in the proper hypothetical and operational spirit of science. There is a chance of showing a unique capability of the University College method in developing a new field of science and humanities. {S : Notes (Chapter 29: I. Q.: A Unversity Program)} Notes (Chapter 29: I. Q.: A Unversity Program) 1. A proposal for an Institute of Quantavolution (I. Q.) submitted 20 February 1980 to Dr. Malcolm Moos, Director of the Carnegie Study on New Directions for the University, University of Maryland and Chancellor Ben Massey, University College, University of Maryland. University College operates intra-murally and extra-murally, with centers and students in various countries of the world. 2. See e. g. R. A. Kerr. Science, 18 Jan. 1980, 293. "Venus and Science's Fringe." 3. A. de Grazia, "The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences and Humanities," in N. Ravel, ed., "From Past to Prophesy." (1975) [see "a Cosmic Debate" here above.] 4. The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies has members in 19 different countries and was founded four years ago. 5. At the writing of this memorandum, Egypt appeared closed as a possibility. At the moment of publication (Dec. 1983) Egypt is open and the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (London) is planning to conduct such a tour under the direction of the ancient historian, Peter James. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE BURNING OF TROY: } {P PART 5: } {Q COMMUNICATING A SCIENTIFIC MODEL: } {C Chapter 30: } {T PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE} {S - } THE BURNING OF TROY By Alfred de Grazia Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model CHAPTER THIRTY PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE In the Quantavolution Series I have carried out my commitment to tell what the heavens were once like and how they became unsettled, and what then befell the Earth and humanity. The story of much of this was partly suppressed in the memory, partly carried esoterically in myth and legend, partly lost in natural disasters, and partly destroyed by human hand. The world is lucky that the Nazi book-burnings came in an age of printing: what was destroyed could be replaced from the stores of the free cultures. But in ancient times, books were hard to replace. Few if any copies of them existed in the first place. When the great libraries of Sumer and Akkad, of Ninevah, of Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, of Syria, of Athens, of the Celtic Druids at Alesia, of China, of Rome (even Rome, 83 B. C.), Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Tezcuco (Mexico) were burned, unique treasures were lost forever. The ancient writings that survive to this day can be carried on the shelves of a large bookcase. Almost all of the lost works that dealt with astronomy, geology, anthropology, and the history of religions must have treated of catastrophes and possessed a catastrophic viewpoint. I venture this from the fact that the great majority of the works that remain can be so described. There is no reason to believe that these are a biased sample of the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that were lost. Indeed, because the later writers were prone to amnesia about catastrophe, they would have quoted from and edited their sources to conform to the solarian consensus that I have sometimes referred to. The Bible appears to the modern sensitive mind to be often catastrophic in content and tone. Still, various humane Judaic and Christian pastors play it sweet and low to their flocks. Even this Bible evidences many effects of having been repeatedly edited, especially following upon the last series of "Mars" disasters, so as to cover up and smoothen out the more incredible and harsher passages. (I suppose that not one in a hundred Bible readers could imagine that the mysterious stranger with whom Jacob wrestled was meant to be a sky body, probably a planet.) Hence it can be said that the lost libraries of the world have been more heavily catastrophic than the typical work that has come down. The trials and tribulations of history have produced and perpetuated a kind of censorship on catastrophic thought. It is far different from, but perhaps more effective than, the deliberate attempts to suppress the uniformitarian ideas of evolution when these were advanced by Darwin, Huxley and their allies, and more effective too than the uniformitarian efforts to censor Velikovsky's catastrophism. Catastrophism flourished in the religious dogma of the world and still does. Certain doubtful exceptions are provided by a few primitive tribes, some modern versions of Christianity, periodic cultic manifestations largely of oriental character, materialistic "religions" such as the communistic, and scientific movements such as the Humanists. Otherwise religions believe that 1) the heavens and earth were torn apart in the beginning by divine forces, 2) mankind was created in the process, and 3) the original chaos and creation were repeated upon several occasions, and might happen again. Scientific catastrophism as a school of thought accepted these premises, but, as we know, the prevailing scientific majority rejects them. Significantly, the present uniformitarian dominance was not achieved at the expense only of theology and religion. Many scientists, including some great ones, had to be ignored or pushed aside. I have already indicate that in the early days of science, the prevailing view of history was catastrophic. Hindu science, Mayan astronomy, Mesopotamian and Egyptian science, and Greek science and philosophy generally adhered to catastrophic principles. The Chinese had probably the longest record of teaching uniformitarian principles. Two thousands years ago and more they began to bet the life of their emperor upon the stability of the heavens, and the emperor tried not to lose the bet. Yet the bet is itself proof that a catastrophic fear was present. The Chinese could predict eclipses but took no chances and conducted solemn rites upon their occasion. Certain medieval philosophers in the west, such as Maimonides, argued on behalf of a settled and orderly universe, but were outnumbered by Christian and Islamic philosophers in the tradition of the apocalyptics and millennialism. The brilliant harbinger of modern thought, Giordano Bruno, thought that worlds were infinite in number and extent, that worlds were often born and destroyed, that the Moon had come lately into its place, and that the Earth was only temporarily undisturbed. Isaac Newton, for all that he laid down the laws that founded the dogmas of uniformitarianism in astronomy, nevertheless gave a good part of his later life to research in the chronology and authenticity of the Bible, with attention to the great Deluge. It was his assistant, Whiston, who introduced a great comet as the force that brought on the deluge. Therefore Whiston may be properly called the first modern astrophysical catastrophist. Over a century later, Giambattista Vico wrote in his New Science (1744) that after the Deluge, Jove reorganized the world with his bolts of lightning: all the nations arrived separately at the worship of Jupiter and called him by different names. Soon afterwards Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger used an account of the comet and deluge to explain the origins of religions. They were, he wrote, based upon the primeval terror of the heavens. Sin and punishment were born, he thought, when the pleasant and egalitarian conditions of primeval life were disturbed by the disasters of heaven and earth. These events were attributed to the gods. To appease and propitiate the gods, rituals and sacrifices were established, punishments were meted out for infractions of customs and ritual rules, and great theocracies and monarchies were built up as the enforcement machinery of the gods. With Boulanger, an engineer, a full-fledged theory of catastrophism was born. Carli-Rubbi, an economist, was a worthy successor. Almost all quantavolutionists since 1860 have worked under conditions of partial isolation and ostracism from the major centers of science and scholarship. But this condition may not persist much longer. Presently, as I have shown, there is a resurgence of quantavolutionary thought. A new multidisciplinary science is being born. Until it has grown, it must depend for its sustenance upon orthodox science. Repeatedly, and often ironically, the evolutionists and uniformitarians have delivered evidence into the hands of the catastrophists. The latter, after all, are very few in number and bereft of facilities and resources. {S : ANXIETY AND CATASTROPHISM} ANXIETY AND CATASTROPHISM The present age is one to support a resurgence of quantavolution. The twentieth century has become an "Age of Anxiety" despite the soothing effects of the long-term dating of the uniformitarian model of history. Apparently the most progressive element of the human race was not to be consoled by modern science. Indeed, from anxiety, it moved towards catastrophism. When Sigmund Freud began to write in the anterooms of his comfortable apartment in Vienna before World War I, he dealt at some length with hysterical women and disturbances of middle class life. The sexual problems that occupied him are discussed as commonplace in the mass media today and would perhaps amuse more than startle the contemporary film audience if portrayed. Freud invented the psychoanalytic interview, which eased the labors of the human mind as it sought to recall its past. He rediscovered and placed upon a scientific basis the "unconscious" and the analysis of dreams. All of these enter the science of catastrophism. As Freud grew older, the world changed rapidly around him. Great wars and revolutions occurred; empires broke down; cultivated nations sought to exterminate whole classes and peoples. Freud was driven to speculate about the origins of mankind and the future of civilization. He wrote that civilization was a contradiction of the mammalian instincts of humans and could never be founded securely upon such an insubordinate creature as man. Finally, he thought that mankind was possessed by the instincts of eros and thanatos, life and death. The death instinct was self-destructive, suicidal, and, when projected upon the world, sought to carry the world into the grave as well. Thus a great mind of the century passed from the "Age of Anxiety" into the "Age of Catastrophe." And with him, yet regardless of him, whole peoples and cultures pursued the same crossing. They began to move back from the ideology of progressive science into an ideology of the mystic, the occult, of magic, and of "fundamental" realities. Instead of pursuing pragmatic science and focusing upon cultural progress, many began to develop a concern for the survival of the species and a fascination for the forces of destruction. Impending catastrophe had come to engage popular attention. Unidentified flying objects are observed, said to be carrying intruders of superior technology from far space. Since inspection at close quarters of Mars, Moon and Venus has rendered impossible a belief in these bodies as bases of operations for the invaders, a farther space is postulated. Efforts are made in the highest scientific quarters to communicate with some one of the thousands of possible advanced types of being that must exist in the universe. Too, exploding stars in many parts of the heavens have impelled people to become worried about the stability of the skies, and various studies of the processes of the solar furnaces and the tides that the great planets and sun exert upon the earth give them grounds for further uneasiness. Californians live in anticipation of great earthquakes along the San Andreas fault. Various ethnic and religious groups in a number of countries including the United States, Israel, Lebanon, the Soviet Union, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iran, and China live in fear of persecution and genocide. The case for an impending nuclear bomb holocaust is so strong that it has become a "given fact" in the logical premises of the multitudes. The poisoning of the atmosphere and of the food supply are freely predicted, with substantial justification. A climatic change spelling death by famine and suffering for hundreds of millions of persons is already happening. Laboratories of micro-biology are coming under official scrutiny for the possibility that their experiments in genetics may leak uncontrollable diseases, even while people, perhaps mistakenly, feel relieved that the armies of the great powers talk about renouncing biological warfare and destroying stocks of germs and poisons. Writings and films about catastrophe command audiences of unprecedented size. One does well to appreciate, however, that throughout the past two centuries of scientific optimism and of parochial solutions for human problems, the mass of people has been convinced, as it always was before, that a catastrophic fate awaits human existence. The religions have been, with rare exceptions (if any), catastrophic in their world view. If to this permanent majority is now added the many educated backsliders who watch the world of human and natural events with catastrophic expectation, it can be said, without much exaggeration, that we are in an Age of Catastrophism: the potentiality is present in nature and man, and the concern is widespread and evident. It should not surprise anyone to notice the coincidence of public and scientific movements. Sociologists of science and historians of science, such as, for instance, Barber, Kuhn, and Stecchini, are fully aware that the scientific movements of an epoch advance alongside public opinion; the two interact with unspoken accord to produce new models of science. {S : THE POLITICS OF UNIFORMITARIANISM} THE POLITICS OF UNIFORMITARIANISM Science is a set of peculiar operations conducted by human beings in a group setting. Operations proceed over time with the rise and fall of different theories of man and nature. The victory of uniformitarianism over catastrophism was a scientific, organizational, and political victory. One instance may be provided here to show that such was the case. A reading of accounts of efforts to discredit Velikovsky may serve to supplement this example. Incongruous though they may appear at first sight, the suppression of the word "stratum," an election of the Geological Society, and the downfall of the English Tories were at one moment in history tied together. A uniformitarian English activist of 150 years ago, George Scrope put the first two together in letters to Charles Lyell, which George Grinnell, historian of science, has published. Following Lyell's election as President of the Geological Society, Scrope wrote (April 12, 1831), "By espousing you, the conclaves have decidedly and irrevocably attached themselves to the liberal side... Had they on the contrary made their election of a Mosaic geologist like Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox would immediately have taken their cue from them." Next year, Scrope was writing: It is great treat... that two thick volumes [Principles of Geology] may be written on geology without once using the word, 'stratum... '" (September 29, 1832). Why did "the father of modern geology" Lyell, shun the world "stratum" in his great work? Why, for that matter, did Darwin not use the word "evolution" in the Origin of Species? The most fetching geological sight to the eye of even the rankest amateur is the layer upon layer of rocks that often break into view when a profile of land is exposed. William Smith (1815), Lyell's predecessor, did use the word. Perhaps Lyell felt that "strata" implied discontinuities, and discontinuities implied catastrophes between strata. Which they may do. But Lyell failed. The word "stratum" was essential to geological description and classification and he went back to it himself. Yet many geologists see in the discontinuities of strata only a gradually eroded former body of rock that would, if only it were still there, exhibit a nicely graded continuum into what is there above now. On May 3, 1832, Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor and political activist, wrote to Lyell. "I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself would only injure the cause, and I therefore leave it in better hands." Of this Grinnell comments: "Uniformitarianism" was promoted by the liberals as part of the 'cause' to undermine the theoretical foundations of monarchy and was not derived from field research." The established Church of England and the Monarchy were Tory strongholds. Thus do the politics of science, a scientific concept, and the English "Great Reform Bill of 1832" go together. Over many years I have had to consider by reason of my circumstances the ideology behind such great developments of the nineteenth century as the mass army, the large, perfectly coordinated symphony orchestras, the growth of bureaucracy in government and business, and the factory system in industry, the mass media, and massed spectator sports. I concluded that this routinization and massing of human behavior was an outstanding leitmotif of the age. I am now persuaded that uniformitarianism, the great scientific empirical data- collecting movement of the century, was also part of this same ideology. For the scientists of the century were also in the business of collecting factual evidence of all kinds, assigning places and specialization to both facts and people, and routinizing scientific work. To this great movement, catastrophe, as the rare destabilizing and disruptive event - whether destructive or constructive - was anathema. It denied the value of infinite, regular series; it upset the establishment of industry, bureaucracy, economy, music, warfare, religion, and politics as continuous, infinite progressions of small changes. Uniformitarian science, far from being the enemy of all religion, was a key element in total religion, the unconscious world view of the nineteenth century. One needs to be on guard against certain disturbing human behaviors that are inherent in scientific behavior, as in all human behavior. Yet it would be incorrect to think that the scientific establishment from dozens of fields is stupidly obstinate and engaged in conspiracy regularly against better theories. Philosophy and science are organized groups, suffering frequently from the ills that may afflict all bureaucracies and cliques. Science moves ideologically. It moves, too, as an administered, habitual form of behavior. It moves with theoretical models, or as Thomas Kuhn has said, in theoretical paradigms; under certain conditions the model fails and a scientific revolution occurs. This happened in the change from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and from catastrophism to uniformitarianism. But modern uniformitarian science, as we have experienced and enjoyed it, has achieved important successes. It has provided a housing for much practical invention. It has encouraged the careful, coordinated development of findings and techniques in many fields. Only if it comes to pass that quantavolutionary primevalogy gives a greater pay- off than evolutionary primevalogy, or when it is obviously worth setting up as a model running along a parallel track, should a changeover occur. By a changeover is meant a redistribution of effort and resources. Uniformitarianism has enabled humanity to challenge nature (by giving nature a humbler and gentler guise). It has removed the historical gods from parroting human stipulations that hamper scientific investigation. It spawned the idea of a linear history, destroying the more conservative and pessimistic cyclical theories of history. It has encouraged the idea that progress is possible in a long future of mankind. It has promoted faith in the stability of the world. An exquisite and productive division of labor in all areas resulted. There was no rushing to the caves and wombs of theology. It simplified religion, letting the deity be conceived of as a master designer and an overarching and all permeating intelligence. It promoted generally the practice of instrumentally rational bureaucracy and rationalism generally, and ultimately found expression in pragmatic, instrumental philosophy. It helped to form a vision of political and religious decision-making corresponding to the method of science - cool, not catastrophic. Granted such important social functions, plus the comfort of a now secure dwelling place for humanity, plus the apparent scientific productiveness of the theory (which, however, may be the result of the assurances, not the content of its theory), the replacement of Uniformitarianism is neither a simple matter nor is it a victory to be celebrated without anxiety. We can only surmise and hope at this time that the catastrophic subconscious of humanity, when dredged up, will bring with it its own comfort and some additional possibilities to sustain the human spirit on our small planet in infinite time and space. Unless it excites a strikingly novel religion, it may be a disastrous force in itself. Can we plan and program the human mind for all the equivalent and hopefully superior behaviors that should follow the demise of the old world-view? That science will be entering upon at least a partially quantavolutionist phase seems likely. Even without awareness, uniformitarianism and evolutionism have been eroding in astrophysics (" the explosive universe," "cometary eruption from planets," "solar uncertainty"), geology (" continental drift" and "catastrophic end of the Ice Age"), biology (" systematic mutation," "great leaps," "mass extinctions," "punctuated equilibria"), ancient history (" prehistoric missing high civilizations," "sudden destruction of civilizations," "reconstruction of Egyptian and Greek chronology"), and mythology (" the enlarged truth of legend" and "the celestial obsession of myth"). The Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 1973 in an extensively updated form. Hundreds of its articles nevertheless were erroneous or lop-sided or incomplete according to the theory of quantavolution. For an example, its article on Earth Forms (geomorphology) may be selected. It begins incorrectly by arguing that catastrophism was founded upon Bishop Ussher's calculation of a 6000 year-old world. (Actually, catastrophism had been long in existence as a scientific outlook in both Christian and non-Christian lands.) It proceeds hesitantly with a conventional explanation of earth forms. Several examples of quick transformations are introduced -- mountain-building, peat and coal deposits, glacial advances, etc. -- but they are labeled as exceptional. Then the article lets out the quantavolutionary tiger: "Although present and past processes are similar in kind, process rates must have been variable." Variable process rates - exactly! For scientific catastrophists rarely said that processes themselves were dissimilar, although some assigned a basic role to divine creation. To them "earth, air, fire, and water" were always "similar in kin" but with rates of work that have been variable: once very high, they are now very low. Uniformitarianism and evolutionism are then under critical stress. Of what use would be the emergence of a quantavolutionary model? In the first place, the newer view can claim what science in general claims on faith: To know is good because what one knows will bring good. Also, if knowledge in itself brings pleasure, then new knowledge of what befell ancient man and the skies and earth will be useful in bringing pleasure. The quantavolutionary view introduces an opposition party. In science as much as in politics, a multi-party system is preferable to a one-party system. Like the elite of an underdeveloped nation, prehistorians may suppose that their area is too poor in resources and skilled manpower to afford a democratic opposition. On the contrary, like an underdeveloped nation, archaeology and pre-history would show a new gain after costs from the activity of a critical party espousing the revolutionary against the evolutionary point of view. It has been said that "if you begin by treating the scientific ideas of earlier centuries as myths, you will end by treating your own scientific ideas a dogmas." History and philosophy will be the gainers by a revolutionary challenge. All truth, including mathematics, is based upon experience and also upon ideology. There is no purely theoretical science, nor is there any purely objective science. Continuous critical exposure of the foundations illuminates natural and early human history and makes history a living part of the operations of science. Sooner or later, as the area of natural history is mined with quantavolutionary tools, significant discoveries should be facilitated. They may occur, for instance, actually in the exploration and mining of minerals and ores. Space exploration and observations; environmental conservation; the discovery of art treasures; the rediscovery of ancient inventions in the arts, sciences and social organization; the search for new power sources in electricity and nuclear fusion; sea bottom development; genetics; and institutional and political oversight - these are some of the areas where a revolutionary perspective may be turned to some use. The question of psychological therapy arises. The catastrophized quiddity of homo sapiens schizotypus raises a fundamental barrier to therapy. Human nature stands opposed to its own cure. Nevertheless, this immense challenge should be confronted by the development of a field of quantavolutional therapy. It would work upon the quantavolutional human model through psychiatry with the aim of draining the naturally provoked and socially obsessed build-up of fear. Sublimatory measures, including personal and social pragmatics, might be devised. But of what use is quantavolution to religion? Astronomer Fred Hoyle, in From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology, once answered the question of why modern man investigates the structure of the universe. "The answer is no different in principle from the motives of the builders of Stonehenge. The motive is religious." But the motive for religion is not a religion. What shall the religion be? To get down to cases, what has been said in the Quantavolution Series to illuminate the role of religion. It must have become plain by now that a quantavolutionary primevalogy, in this book at least, regards the historical gods as part and parcel of the sudden construction of the human being. The historical gods have been delusions, possible pure delusions. We were catastrophized, and wrapped up in the gods in our delusions. Out of the study of animals, man, myth, and culture, we emerge with an historical and comparative picture that seems clear and sharp. We sense an every-present danger when the catastrophized, schizoid creature known as the human being speaks in the name of gods, asserts that gods speak to him, calls upon the gods to intervene in the world, treats in the name of gods with other people, and assigns human traits to the gods. We feel that this all may be inevitable in our natures, but we refuse to accept it. We feel that the better part of catastrophes is directly responsible for what humanity is proud to be. But the larger part of catastrophism urges mankind along a path on the brink of its self-destruction. History has on the whole been a record of failure in human relations. And the historical gods, those projected as experiences and teachers by the human mind, have invariably contributed to the record of failure. Presently, governments whom there is no reason to greatly trust are in command of populations that multiply beyond hope, of nuclear weapons aimed specifically at the destruction of civilization, and of technologies that are destroying the environment. If an ordinary person, under such circumstances, adds an entirely reasonable anxiety to his primordial anxiety-load, he cannot be reproached. However, anxious people make anxious societies. Anxious societies make anxious governments. And anxious governments suppress liberties and make war. Great gods and little gods rise up like thermometers in the social heat: historical gods, political man-gods, gurus, and psychiatrists. A world vision is lacking. The people will not then concentrate upon a consensus of behavior that would assure a benevolent and beneficent world order. The predicament is not for solution here. Never in the past 2700 years has humankind had such close brushes with death as in these last few years. And never was it so threatened by its own hand. Whenever natural disasters and the compulsion to repeat them occurred, brother fought brother, and nations fought nations; but none commanded the nuclear and chemical forces that today can consummate the terror-laden wish to destruction. In comparison with the human threat to humanity, the natural threat appears to be moderate. If my theory is generally correct, the solar system is in a relaxing phase. It is settling down. There remain four potentially disturbing elements. One is he Sun itself which is known now to be inconstant. It is well hat the disappearance of sun spots for seventy years three centuries ago caused only a "little ice age." The human suffering was considerable. Were there to be more of a lessening or on the other hand, a more explosive solar activity, the effects upon Earth could be quite damaging. It would be reasonable policy on the part of the world's governments to divert resources from armaments directly into solar study and into planning defenses against the possibility of serious solar perturbations. No comets capable of exploding the Earth are known to be circumnavigating the solar system. There may be such long-term comets, now invisible, that would someday appear before a startled world. Little could be done in such an eventuality. Happily the risk is very small. Still, at least some group should prepare from time to time a scenario and recommendations for dealing with cometary intrusions. A small comet on a collision course could, for instance, be exploded with nuclear space missiles at a safe distance. A third danger to the world arises out of the growth of ice caps. Whether they are in fact growing is disputed. An answer to the question is technically possible. The answer should be obtained. An overloading of the ice caps could create an imbalance to the globe and cause an axial tilt. Horrendous floods, tides, earthquakes, volcanism, hurricanes and climatic reversals would follow. The ice caps might avalanche. It is already possible, however, to whittle away some of the ice by explosive melting or to tow away some of it to warmer regions to melt and use. A final larger danger, as unpredictable as the others, lies in he instability of planet Jupiter. The "Jupiter Effect," which is tidal, is small by comparison. For Jupiter is extremely hot and highly electrified. If it were to fission, that is, to explode fragments of itself, the Earth might be directly affected by disastrous x-rays and other particle storms. Large meteoroids and comets from the explosion might enter upon orbits that could allow for encounters with the Earth. The human race has suffered much from its birth throes, natural catastrophes, and its own destructiveness. It would appear savagely ironic if mankind were to come to an end so early in its career. There is no arguing this issue, and it is perhaps the point at which to end the whole discussion. Whenever a strange object appears in the sky, people everywhere are alerted and alarmed, with the panic of old surging within them. Whenever the question of man's duration on Earth is brought up, the pragmatic answer is as it must be "forever." A creature in search of eternity calls for a cosmology. Scientists or not, we need to go seeking the divine in the universe, like children's chicken-licken, preparing our minds and our Earth for cooperation with the divine wherever and when it is encountered. End of The Burning of Troy {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } KA A Handbook of Mythology, Sacred Practices, Electrical Phenomena, and their Linguistic Connections in the Ancient Mediterranean World by H. Crosthwaite with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, New Jersey, U. S. A. Notes on the printed version of this book: ISBN: 0-940268-25-9 Copyright 1992 by Hugh Crosthwaite All rights reserved Printed in the U. S. A. by Princeton University Printing Services. Composed at Metron Publications. Published by METRON PUBLICATIONS, P. O. BOX 1213, PRINCETON, N.]. 08542, U. S. A. for Shirley, "..... the sweetest flower of all the field," and for Susan {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS } {S - } KA A Handbook of Mythology, Sacred Practices, Electrical Phenomena, and their Linguistic Connections in the Ancient Mediterranean World by H. Crosthwaite with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE-PAGE PREFACE INTRODUCTION Chapter 1: AUGURY Chapter 2: THE ELECTRIC ORACLES Chapter 3: DIONYSUS Chapter 4: AMBER, ARK, AND EL Chapter 5: DEITIES OF DELPHI Chapter 6: SKY LINKS Chapter 7: SACRIFICE Chapter 8: SKY AND STAGE Chapter 9: TRIPOD CAULDRONS Chapter 10: THE EVIDENCE FROM PLUTARCH Chapter 11: THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS Chapter 12: MYSTERY RELIGIONS Chapter 13: 'KA', AND EGYPTIAN MAGIC Chapter 14: BOLTS FROM THE BLUE Chapter 15: LOOKING LIKE A GOD Chapter 16: HERAKLES AND HEROES Chapter 17: BYWAYS OF ELECTRICITY Chapter 18: ROME AND THE ETRUSCANS Chapter 19: THE TIMAEUS Chapter 20: SANCTIFICATION AND RESURRECTION Chapter 21: THE DEATH OF KINGS Chapter 22: LIVING WITH ELECTRICITY APPENDIX A APPENDIX B: READING BACKWARDS GLOSSARY {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T PREFACE } {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite PREFACE THIS book, written for readers who are enthusiastic students of linguistics, of the classics, and of ancient history, results from an effort to detect and collect instances of a certain common factor in the history of the ancient Mediterranean world. Casting my net as far and as wide as I could, I have assembled a body of myth and behaviour in Greece, Italy, Palestine and elsewhere, that reveals a universal concern over electricity, communicated among all the ancient peoples, and distinguishable in their language, myths, and behaviour. Because of the wide-ranging nature of the inquiry, which demands an interdisciplinary approach, I have perhaps made more than the usual number of errors. I have also found it difficult to be consistent in the matter of transliteration. Translations and paraphrases are mostly my own; where not, I have tried consistently to make acknowledgments to the author. My chief sources are the ancient authors themselves, many of them available in the Oxford Classical Texts, and Loeb Classical Library. For the non-specialist reader, the Penguin Classics translations cover most of the ground. I am greatly indebted to Prof. Alfred de Grazia. As a result of reading his 'God's Fire', I decided to expand an article I had written into this larger work which owes much to his and Mrs. de Grazia's help and hospitality. I could not have written this book without the constant support, interest, and inspiration of my wife Shirley. She made valuable suggestions and helped in many ways, in company with our daughter Susan, who performed the arduous task of deciphering and typing my manuscript. My thanks also go to Mr. David Brailsford for his help in making copies, and to the staff of Metron Publications and Mr. Fred Plank of Princeton University Printing Services. H. Crosthwaite Three map sketches to help recollect some of the principal loci operandi of the Handbook --Greece, Italy, the ancient Mediterranean region. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite INTRODUCTION SOME years ago, at my suggestion, Hugh Crosthwaite commenced this major work. Its first pages appeared in the mails as parts of personal letters. He called them notes. They were notes, yes, but like the "toying at the piano keys" of a maestro, they possessed authenticity, reflected a great repertoire, and hit upon original meanings in every direction a tone was struck. The notes began to modulate into cultures and tongues other than the classic Greek as the research continued. I should be remembered, perhaps, for not having said to him, "Please cease to send me your notes and compose instead a proper monograph: thesis, proof, basta." Rather, as the messages kept coming, I redefined for myself, and I hope for hundreds of readers to come, the relation of form to value. The author carries, among other traits characteristic of English scholarship at its best, the famed stubborn empiricism that has so often been the despair of theorists and philosophers such as myself. The work is bound to factuality. He loosens the reins in only two regards, both at my behest: the grouping of his facts in respect to electrical phenomena, and the testing of words and behavior according to whether they relate to divine behavior in the sky. In the end, this work by Crosthwaite, which we may call a Handbook, took on its own form. It is a dismemberment and reconstruction of Greek and associated myth such as has not occurred hitherto. Its hundreds of sketches and etymologies are grouped to follow a theme: the electric fire and destructive behavior of the sky gods, as these exhibit themselves in the language, rituals, myths, and behavior of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. A surprising form of "Handbook" emerges, which renders too limited the very designation. For it appears that a major portion of the Greek language (and probably all others) derives from human readings of divine sky behavior, and transfers itself into the necessary language that guides mundane social life and thought. From far away China, the I Ching echoes this idea: "Heaven produced the mysterious things, and the sages modelled themselves on them... Heaven hangs out its symbols, from which are seen good fortune and misfortune, and the sages made symbols of them." (Sec. 1, Ch. 11) Furthermore, this same "divinely inspired" language, along with the rites and practices associated with it, does not consist of independent etymologically-unique, tribally evolved vocabularies and perspectives. Rather, there appears to have been, among many ancient peoples, an ecumenical language of sacred, electrical, pyrotechnical ritual behavior. Apparently, what had been happening, not long before the time our evidence comes into being, was similar to the development of modern language of the age of electronics and space-age technology, whereby Latinized English becomes a world-wide language among practitioners of the associated arts and sciences. Moreover, it was a language everywhere of fire, god's fire, electric fire or the closest simulations thereof. The reader may express surprise and disbelief at the multiplicity of words concentrated in these areas: I would advise him of two considerations. First, a language can be composed of and reduced finally to a handful of syllables (with varying accents, intonations, and syntax), a score of them providing thousands (conceivably ~ 2 raised to the 20th power) of different words. Second, if the primal experiences of speechifying humans occur in conjunction with preoccupying celestial visions and effects tied to them, the corresponding preoccupation of a language, no matter how banal life will ultimately become and filled with ordinary trivial objects, can well be with these original syllables from which the language subsequently descends. I have been continuously astonished at Crosthwaite's indefatigable and creative energy, not to mention the boldness with which he has attacked an immense set of challenges. The results make an important contribution to the study of linguistic origins and diffusion. The linguistic connections evidenced, as well as the sacral outlook and practices tied to them, are so close as to bring into question several dearly held beliefs regarding ancient chronology and the relative antiquity of the Mediterranean civilizations. It begins to appear as if all that was contained in the minds, speech and practice of the ancients took place in the same skies and in everyone's sight at the same time. Greece, Italy, Illyria, Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Danube Basin: indeed all are implicated. Many pages of the present work suggest such a theory. A reading of the chapter on "Ka" will let one understand what is meant here. It will explain, too, why the short title of "Ka" is given the book: this favorite Egyptian monosyllable penetrates Greek and other languages as well; it testifies, not so much on behalf of Egyptian chronological precedence, as for an ecumenical, possibly even hologenetic development of religious and thence all language of the ancient world. Alfred de Grazia Princeton, New Jersey {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T AUGURY} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER ONE AUGURY READERS and students of the literature and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans are faced immediately with a paradox. The people who did so much to develop rational thought in so many areas of life devoted much time and energy to studies, practices and beliefs which, in the eyes of many educated people today, are irrational and valueless, except in so far as a vivid imagination can be thought helpful for the smooth working of the psyche. I refer to the stories about the origin and deeds of the Olympian gods, the practice of pouring wine and other liquids on the earth (libations) as offerings to powers under the earth, the grotesque business of ceremonially slaughtering animals, especially bulls, goats, stags, pigs and sheep, tinkering with blood and entrails, the attempt to divine the future by consulting specialist prophets, the Pythia or Sibyl sitting on a tripod in an underground shrine, the Roman augurs, and so on. Nor were the ancient Greeks and Romans the only ones to hold such beliefs and indulge in such practices. Similar patterns of behaviour are found not only in the Mediterranean area, but world wide. In this short work I attempt an explanation of the apparent contradiction between the rational and irrational, and suggest that the Greeks and Romans were acting rationally according to their lights. The will of the gods had to be ascertained before any important undertaking. The Greeks sent inquirers to Delphi and Dodona. The Romans and Etruscans relied heavily on the skill of augurs, who watched all animals, but especially birds, and lightning. In Greece, the eagle and vulture were associated with the supreme god Zeus, the crow with his wife and sister Hera, and the raven with the god of prophecy, Apollo. The Roman haruspex and the Greek hiereus (priest) studied the entrails, especially the liver, of sacrificed animals. If the caput iecoris, head of the liver, was missing, it was a bad sign, dirum, ill-omened. (In the Elektra of Euripides, Aigisthos is dismayed to find the liver incomplete; shortly afterwards he is killed). Greek divination was di'empuron, by fire, or hieroskopia, the study of entrails. The Etruscans, Rome's neighbor to the north-west, were the recognised masters of the art of augury, and claimed that the birth of their art was at Tarquinia, where a boy, Tages, sprang up out of a ploughed field. Although a child, he had the wisdom of an old man [1] . The fulguriator at Rome specialised in the study of thunderbolts. There are frequent references to lightning and earthquakes in classical literature. Cicero, 1st century B. C., in his work on divination, writes that earthquakes have often given warning of disaster, and that the Etruscans have interpreted them [2] . Some of Rome's most important institutions were Etruscan in origin. The general opinion in the ancient world was that Etruscans had come to Italy from the east. Cicero mentions the Lydian soothsayer of Etruscan race, "Lydius haruspex Tyrrhenae gentis." He mentions Etruscan books on divination, haruspicini (pertaining to entrails), fulgurales (about lightning), and tonitruales (about thunder) [3] . Ancient peoples considered that it was a king's duty both to be wise, sapere, and to foretell the future, divinare [4] . At Rome in early times the augurs met regularly on the Nones of the month [5] . The magistrate is spoken of as auspicans, taking the auspices, and the augur is is qui in augurium adhibetur, he who is called in for augury. In his history of Rome, Livy, 1st century B. C., tells us that during the reign of Tullus Hostilius there was a report of a shower of stones on the Alban Mount [6] . This seemed so improbable that they sent men to the Mount to check on the prodigium. They were assailed by a heavy fall of stones like a hailstorm. They thought they heard a voice from the grove (lucus) on the top (cacumen) of the hill, giving instructions about religious observances. A nine days festival, novendiales, was declared and became a regular festival whenever falls of stones occurred. The augur set up a tabernaculum, tent, in the centre of his station, inside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city. He must not cross the pomerium before the completion of the ceremony. He carried a lituus, a staff without a knot. Cicero has left us a description of Romulus's lituus: "Est incurvum et leviter a summo inflexum bacillum"; it is a staff, curved and slightly bent at the top. It was kept by the Salii, a college of priests, in the Curia Saliorum, on the Palatine Hill. After the temple was burnt down, it was found unharmed. Under the king Tarquinius Priscus, Attus Navius made a discriptio regionum with this staff [7] . The augur wore the trabea, a state robe edged with purple. Such a garment was worn by kings, augurs, some priests, and knights. He had to stand on high ground, and a stone was needed. There are representations by Roman artists of the augur with his left foot on a boulder. On the arx, or citadel, at Rome, there was a stone, probably a meteorite, and it may appear in Livy's account of the procedure for finding whether the gods approved of the choice of Numa as successor to the throne on the death of Romulus (8th century B. C.). "Inde ab augure, cui deinde honoris ergo publicum id perpetuumque sacerdotium fait, deductus in arcem in lapide ad meridiem versus consedit. Augur ad laevam eius capite velato sedem cepit, dextra manu baculum sine nodo aduncum tenens, quem litaum appellarunt. Inde ubi prospectu in urbem agrumque capto deos precatus regiones ab oriente ad occasum determinavit, dextras ad meridionem partes, laevas ad septentrionem esse dixit, signum contra, quoad longissime conspectum oculi ferebant, animo finivit; tum lituo in laevam manum translato dextra in caput Numae imposita precatus ita est: Iuppiter pater, si est fas hunc Numam Pompilium, cuius ego caput teneo, regem Romae esse, uti tu signa nobis certa adclarissis inter eos fines, quos feci. Tum peregit verbis auspicia, quae mitti vellet; quibus missis declaratus rex Numa de templo descendit. [8] Numa sat on a stone, facing south. The augur sat beside him, his head covered, lituus in right hand. He surveyed the city and countryside, prayed to the gods, and marked out the area from east to west, with south on his right, north on his left. He transferred the lituus to his left hand, put his right hand on Numa's head, and prayed to Jupiter for a sign. He recited the desired auspices, which were sent, and Numa then descended from the temple. The augur marked out with movement of his lituus an area of the sky. The east-west division was called Decumanus (sc. limes), the north-south division Cardo (hinge). The templum from which Numa descended was originally the area corresponding to that which was cut off, and transferred to the ground. The templum corresponded to the Greek temenos, from temno, cut. Aeschylus, in his play The Persians, refers to the temenos aitheros, or temple of the sky, and the Roman poet Lucretius refers to "coeli templa" [9] . The survey of the city and fields may be referred to by Plautus: "Look carefully around you like an augur." [10] Words for the enclosure are curt, in Etruscan, gorod, in Slavonic, and garth, in English. Before a solution to the problem of what the augur was really doing is possible, we need to consider some other words and their implications. The cap worn by priests and augurs, especially by the flamen Dialis (the priest who attended the fire at the altar of Jupiter), was called an apex, after the name of the small rod on top, with a tuft of wool, the apiculum, wound round it. Such a white hat was also called an albogalerus. The connection with whiteness and light may also be seen in the word Luceres, the name of one of the original Roman tribes. The Etruscan word lauchume means a chieftain; it is related to the root luk, light. Livy tells us that the young slave-boy Servius Tullius was seen asleep with fire round his head. This was taken by Tanaquil, the queen, as a sign that he would be the saviour of the royal household, even that he would be the king [11] . Plutarch writes that the same thing happened to the young Romulus. In Homer, Iliad: XVIII, flames are seen round the head of Achilles. Livy tells a story of the augur Attus Navius. The king, Lucius Tarquinius, challenged him to say whether what he, the king, had in mind could be done. When Attus said yes, the king said that he was thinking of Attus cleaving a whetstone with a razor. "Tum illum haud cunctanter discidisse cotem ferunt. Statua Atti capite velato, quo in loco res acta est, gradibus ipsis ad laevam curiae fuit..." He did it, and they put up a statue of Attus, with his head covered. [12] Cicero mentions a rather similar occurrence. Numerius Suffustius of Praeneste, acting on a dream, split open a flint rock. Oak lots with carvings in ancient letters emerged, "sortes in robore insculptas priscarum litterarum notis." Honey is said to have flowed from an olive tree at the same place [13] . The authority of the augur was great. "Quae augur iniusta, nefasta vitiosa dire defnerit, irrita infectaque sunto." What the augur marks as unjust, impious, harmful or inauspicious, let it be invalid and of no effect [14] . The names of the augur Attus Navius probably mean father (attus, at), and prophet (navi). ('Navi' is a Semitic word). Having begun with examples of Etrusco-Roman prophecy, let us go back in time to the establishment of the Greek oracles. Much valuable information is to be found in The Delphic Oracle by Parke and Wormall; Greek Oracles by H. W. Parke; The Oracles of Zeus by H. W. Parke, and Greek Oracles by R. Flaceliere. Generally speaking, an oracle was a place where a deity spoke through a prophet or prophetess. The word means literally 'mouthpiece. ' The most famous oracle was situated in central Greece at Delphi not far inland from the north coast of the Corinthian Gulf. It was consulted by private individuals, cities, and kings, and exercised a conservative and unifying influence on the Greek world. The problem that has so far resisted attempts to find a generally accepted solution is that of the nature of the prophetic inspiration in terms that are understandable in the modern world. One may begin by distinguishing two kinds of activity: mantle, and inductive. The Trojan seer Helenos understood in his heart (thumos) the plan of Apollo and Athene [15] . The Roman augur, however, is described as using observation and induction. For the most part, divining the future at a Greek oracle combined the two methods, mantic and inductive. It was a matter of interpretation by priests or priestesses of the utterances of a woman in a 'manic' or inspired state. The word 'mantis' for a prophet is related to the word 'mania', or raging (of love as well as anger). The Greeks thought in terms of possession of a human being, whether prophet or poet, by a divinity. They used the word 'enthousiasmos', god (theos) being in one. It is usually translated as 'inspiration, ' but, as we shall see later, was not caused by breathing in, as the word inspiration suggests. At Delphi, the woman whom the god or goddess entered was called the Pythia, and was inspired, at any rate in classical times, by Apollo. She went into an underground chamber and, in imitation of the deity, sat on the lid of a cauldron fixed on a tripod. Tripods were of metal, and were highly valued. For a poet's description of an oracle in action, we can turn to Virgil. Aeneas goes to Cumae to consult the prophetess or Sibyl about the journey he is destined to make into the underworld to consult the ghost of his father Anchises. "The side of the Euboean cliff is cut out into a huge cave, into which lead a hundred wide entrances, a hundred mouths, whence rush out as many voices, the Sibyl's answers. They had come to the threshold, when the maiden said. 'It is time to ask your fate; look, the god is here! ' As she said this at the entrance, her colour and expression changed, her hair went wild; she panted, her heart was filled with frenzied raging, she seemed to grow in stature, and her voice was no longer natural, as she was breathed upon by the presence, now close, of the god." [16] There is a resemblance between the Latin rabidus, raging, and Hebrew rabh, great. Line 77 ff.: "The prophetess, not yet accepting Phoebus, is filled with Bacchic frenzy, trying to shake the great god from her breast; but he exercises her raving mouth all the more, subduing her fierce feelings, and moulds her to his will with his force. And now the hundred huge mouths of the place opened of their own accord, and carried the answer of the prophetess out into the open." Cicero says: "To presage is to have acute perception (sentire acute). Old women and dogs are 'sagae. ' This ability of the soul, of divine origin, is called 'furor' (frenzy), if it blazes out." [17] Again in Aeneid VI: "With such words from the shrine the Cumaean Sibyl sings frightful riddles that resound in the cave, wrapping true words in obscure ones; Apollo plies the reins and drives his spurs into her breast." [18] The oracle of Zeus at Dodona in northern Greece was held to be most ancient. In its oak groves a dove, or doves, were said to speak. The priestesses were called peleiae (doves). The priests, called Selli, slept on the ground and never washed their feet. The sound of a sacred dove, of leaves in the wind, of water in a spring, and of bronze gongs suspended in the trees, helped the interpreter to give an answer. At Delphi, the inspired utterances of the Pythia were interpreted by the priests and put into verse, giving what was often an equivocal answer, such as that to King Croesus: "If you cross the river Halys you will destroy a great kingdom." It turned out to be his own that was destroyed. Delphi is situated on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Parnassus has a huge cleft, with the Phaedriades, the shining cliffs, on each side. The oracle was associated with a chasm in the ground, and the inner room where the Pythia prophesied was underground. There were two sacred springs, Cassotis and Castalia. Oracles were not confined to the Greek mainland. The west coast of what is now Turkey, especially the area known to the Greeks as Ionia, had many oracles, and it is even possible that their existence was a factor in the choice of site for a city by colonists from the Greek mainland. The writer, Berossus, mentions a Babylonian Sibyl. There was an oracle at Marpessus in the Troad. The Hebrew marpe means healing. There was another oracle of Apollo, also in a cavern, at Erythrae in Ionia. The late 4th century writer Heracleides Ponticus mentions various Sibyls, including Herophile, the Sibyl at Erythrae. There was an Erythrae in Boeotia, at the foot of Mount Cithaeron, and another in Locris on the Corinthian Gulf. The red soil at Marpessus may account for the name of one of the towns (Erythrae = red). Heracleides Ponticus expresses the view that the oracle at Canopus is an oracle of Pluto, the god of the underworld. The Sibyl Bacis, in Boeotia, and Epimenides of Crete, were manteis, inspired prophets. Telmessus in Caria was famous for haruspicum disciplina. At Elis, two families, the Iamidae and the Klutidae, were famous for their prophetic skills. In early times, the Roman Senate decreed that six (some said ten) of the sons of the noblest families should be handed over to each of the Etruscan tribes to study prophetic technique. An Aeduan Druid, named Divitiacus, claimed to have studied the naturae rationem which the Greeks called physiologia, the study of nature, and made predictions by augury and by inference (coniectura). Among the Persians, the Magi "augurantur et divinant" practised augury and divination. Their king had to know the theory and practice (disciplina et scientia). [19] The Spartans assigned an augur to kings and elders, and consulted the oracles, of Apollo at Delphi, of Jupiter Hammon, and of Zeus at Dodona [20] . Cicero writes: "Appius Claudius observed the practice not of intoning an oracular utterance (decantandi oraculi), but of divination" [21] . Cicero appears to refer to shamanism when he writes: "There are those whose souls leave the body and see the things that they foretell. Such animi (souls) are inflamed by many causes, e. g. by a certain kind of vocal sound and Phrygian songs; many by groves, forests, rivers and seas. I believe also that there have been certain breaths of the earth, which filled the people's souls so that they uttered oracles" [22] . He then quotes words spoken by Cassandra, who saw the future long beforehand. The Latin word anhelitus, breath, which is sometimes translated as 'vapours', does not justify the assumption that inspiration at Delphi was caused by gases, steam from boiling laurel leaves, or smoke. Inspiration is associated much more closely with panting as the god 'breathes' fire into the soul, as Cassandra puts it in the Agamemnon. Furthermore, Cassandra could prophesy anywhere, without restriction to caves. See, for example, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1072 ff., where she prophesies before the palace at Mycenae. Caverns and water were favoured surroundings for oracles. Mopsus founded one at Claros, near Colophon, where there was a sacred spring under the temple. Cumae, near Naples, is a good example. In 1932 Amadeo Maiuri found a cavern at Cumae. There was a passageway 150 yards in length, 8 ft. wide, 16 ft. high, of trapezoidal section, narrow at the roof. It ran parallel to the cliff, and had a series of openings at regular intervals. The Cumaean oracle is thought to have flourished in the 6th and 5th centuries B. C.. The oracle of the dead at Ephyra in Thesprotia was in a labyrinth with many doors, reminiscent of Cumae, and iron rollers were found there. Strabo, a Greek writer born in 64 B. C., quotes an early writer, Ephorus, on the Cimmerians at lake Avernus. They lived in subterranean houses called argillae, tended an oracle, and only emerged at night. Homer describes them as never looked on by the sun, whether Helios is high up in the sky or underneath the earth. There was an oracle of Apollo at Didyma, near Miletus, where the priestesses had to wet their feet in a sacred spring. The earliest reference to a Sibyl is by Heraclitus, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers living in Ionia about 500 B. C., quoted by Plutarch, 1st century A. D.: "But Sibylla with frenzied mouth speaking words without smile or charm or sweet savour reaches a thousand years by her voice on account of the god." At Delphi, before consulting the god, one paid a fee, a 'pelanos', or honey cake. The Pythia was purified with water from Castalia, and drank from Cassotis. The latter was for purification, not inspiration. A goat was sprinkled with water to make it shiver, and was then slain. It is noteworthy that at Aigeira, opposite Delphi and Crisa across the gulf, there was an oracle of Ge, the earth, where a Sibyl drank bull's blood and descended into a cavern to be inspired by the goddess. The name Aigeira suggests goats (aix, aigos, goat). When the goat was slain, the Pythia went into the 'cella', or shrine, where there were an altar of Poseidon, the iron throne of Poseidon, the 'omphalos', votive tripods (dedicated to the god), a hearth for burning laurel leaves and barley, and a fire that was always kept alight. There was a golden statue of Dionysus, the god who was killed and restored to life at Delphi. The Pythia descended into the innermost shrine. Livy, 1.56, has: "ex infimo specu vocem redditam ferunt," "They say that a voice answered from the depths of the cavern." She sat on the cauldron lid, in imitation of the god Apollo. The cauldron was supported by a tripod. Plutarch mentions emanations. There is no archaeological or geological evidence for fumes, only solid rock, nor is there any clear reference to vapour in the context of other oracles. More will be said later about Plutarch's account. The priests at Delphi wrote out the answer given by the Pythia, and put it into the 'zygasterion', the collection of answers. There is a tradition that answers had at one time been written on leaves. Aeneas at Cumae asks the Sibyl not to do this. References to the Pythia chewing leaves are late, and there is no experimental evidence of such a practice causing inspiration. Diodorus Siculus, a historian writing in about 40 B. C., gives us valuable information. "Since I have mentioned the tripod, it seems appropriate to refer to the old traditional story about it. It is said that goats found the ancient oracle; because of this the Delphians even today use goats for consulting the oracle. They say that the manner of the discovery was as follows: There was a chasm in this place, where now is what is called the sanctuary of the temple. Goats fed round it, since it was not yet inhabited by the Delphians, and whenever a goat went up to the chasm and looked over, it leaped about in a remarkable way and uttered sounds different from the usual. The goatherd marvelled at the strange occurrence, went up to the chasm, and having examined it suffered the same experience as the goats; he acted like people whom a god enters, and he proceeded to prophesy things that were going to happen. Subsequently the report was passed on among the locals about the fate of those who approached the chasm, and more people went to the place, and because of the unusual occurrence all made trial of it, and all those who went near were inspired by the god. Thus the oracle was the object of admiration and was held to be the oracle of Ge (Earth). For some time those who wished to get answers went up to the chasm and prophesied to each other. Later, many jumped into the chasm and prophesied to each other in their frenzy, and all disappeared. The inhabitants of the region all decided, for safety reasons, to appoint one woman as prophetess, and that answers should be given through her. So a contraption was rigged which she mounted. She 'enthused' in safety and gave answers to those who asked. The device has three supports, hence its name 'tripod'. Almost all, even today, are bronze tripods modelled on the lines of this one." It is significant that the Hebrew 'chaghagh' is to dance, stagger; 'chaghav' is a ravine. Next there is a valuable clue from Plutarch, 1st century A. D.. As well as giving the name of the goatherd in the story, Koretas, he reports that during his term of office as priest of Apollo at Delphi there was a fatal accident. The goat refused to shiver, and was repeatedly dowsed with water. The Pythia went reluctantly to take her seat on the cauldron, spoke in a strained voice, then rushed out shrieking and collapsed. Plutarch gives no more details beyond saying that she died within a few days. I append some examples concerning omens and divination, starting with Homer's Iliad: II: 100: Agamemnon calls an assembly and stands up holding a staff. It was made by Hephaestus, who gave it to Zeus the son of Kronos, and Zeus gave it to the guide, the slayer of Argus. And Hermes gave it to Pelops the charioteer, who gave it to Atreus, shepherd of the people. Atreus died, leaving it to Thyestes rich in flocks, and Thyestes gave it to Agamemnon to carry, to rule over many islands and all Argos. Leaning on the staff he spoke to the Argives. II: 265: Odysseus strikes Thersites with his staff, for criticising Agamemnon. II: 305: Odysseus tells how at Aulis, while waiting for a favourable wind for the voyage to Troy, they were sacrificing hecatombs at the holy altar round a spring under a beautiful plane tree, whence sparkling water emerged. Then there was a great portent: A snake, red- backed, frightful to see, which Zeus himself had caused to emerge, shot out from the altar towards the tree. On the topmost branch there was a nest of young sparrows, hiding under the leaves, eight of them, nine including the mother. The snake ate them all up, but then the son of Kronos of the Crooked Ways turned the snake into stone. The prophet Calchas interpreted the omen. The nine birds were the nine years of the siege of Troy. The city would be captured in the tenth. II: 447: The Greeks prepare for battle. Athene joins them, wearing the aegis, unageing, immortal with a hundred gold tassels fluttering from it. She gives them courage and eagerness to fight. At the start of Book V Athene inspires Diomedes. She makes his helmet and shield blaze with tireless fire like the summer star which is brighter than others when it rises from bathing in Ocean. Such was the fire that she kindled round his head and shoulders. VI: 76: Homer mentions Priam's son, Helenus, the best augur in Troy. VIII: 245: Zeus answers Agamemnon's prayer for help by sending an eagle -the most sure of birds to bring something about -holding a fawn in its talons. It lets go the fawn by Zeus's beautiful altar, where the Achaeans used to sacrifice to Zeus Panomphaios (Zeus Father of Oracles). When they see that the bird comes from Zeus, they rush at the Trojans all the more and remember the joys of battle. IX: 236: Odysseus talks to Achilles. The Trojans are doing too well. Zeus, son of Kronos, has encouraged them with flashes of lightning on the right. X: 272: Diomedes and Odysseus set out at night on an intelligence-gathering mission behind the Trojan lines. As they set off, Athene sends a heron on the right. They hear its cry, and Odysseus sends up a prayer to Athene. XII: 200: As the Trojans were about to storm the wall protecting the Greek ships, an eagle appeared high up on their left, with a huge red snake in its claws, still alive and gasping, still full of fight. It bit the eagle, which dropped it among the crowd and flew away with a cry. The Trojans were terrified when they saw the snake lying wriggling among them, an omen from aegis-bearing Zeus. XIII: 821: When the Trojans are fighting by the Greek ships, Ajax taunts Hector. An eagle appears on the right, and the Achaeans take heart. XVI: 233: Achilles encourages his troops, the Myrmidons, for the battle, and prays to Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona, where his hypophetae, announcers of the oracular answer, live, the Selli, who never wash their feet and who sleep on the ground. XVI: 450: Hera urges Zeus to allow Sarpedon to be killed by Patroclus. Zeus agrees, but sends a shower of bloody raindrops to the earth to honour his son, whom Patroclus is about to kill. XVIII: 202: Hera sends Iris to Achilles with instructions to appear in the battle over the body of Patroclus. Achilles has lost his armour, but Athene spreads her tasselled aegis over his shoulders, and puts a crown of golden mist round his head, and creates a blaze of fiery light from him. The charioteers are astonished when they see the terrible fire, sent by Athene of the bright eyes, steadily burning on the head of the valiant son of Peleus. XIX: At the end of Book XIX, when Achilles sets out in his new armour to avenge Patroclus, his horse Xanthus speaks to him and says that the day of his death is at hand. It is noteworthy that Hera enabled the horse to speak and the Erinyes, the Furies, checked its speech. Passages from Homer's Odyssey. II: 37: Telemachus summons an assembly. He stands up, and the herald, Peisenor, puts the skeptron, the staff, into his hand. Antinous, chief of the suitors, urges Telemachus to send his mother away. When Telemachus refuses, Zeus shows his support by sending two eagles, who fight in the air above the assembly (1.146). The omen is interpreted by Halitherses, who is best at bird lore and prophecy. III: Telemachus goes to Pylos. At line 406 Nestor gets up and sits on a smooth white stone, shining and polished, in front of his house. It is the seat where he sat with his staff in his hand to rule his people. XI: Odysseus goes to the underworld, and consults the ghost of Teiresias, who appears holding a golden staff. XVIII: 354: Eurymachus says that the beggar (Odysseus in disguise) must have been guided to Ithaca by some god --at any rate light seems to emanate from his head. XIX: 33: Athene accompanies Odysseus and Telemachus as they hide the suitors' weapons before the battle. She carries a golden lantern. Telemachus cries to his father: "The walls and fir rafters and panels and pillars look as if a fire were blazing. There must be some god from heaven in the house." XIX: 536: Penelope tells the beggar of her dream that an eagle swooped down on twenty geese, killed them, and flew away. The eagle returned and told her that the geese were her suitors and that the eagle was her husband Odysseus. When the beggar endorses the interpretation, Penelope is dubious: dreams reach us through two gates, one of horn, the other of ivory. Dreams from the ivory gate are deceitful and unfulfilled. XX: 98: A double omen. Early in the morning Odysseus raises his hands to the sky and prays for a pheme, utterance, from somebody in the house, and for a sign out of doors, that his return is approved of by the gods. At once there is a clap of thunder. Then a slave, grinding barley and wheat, amazed at thunder from a clear sky, expresses a wish and belief that the suitors should eat in the palace for the last time. This second omen almost falls into the category of kledons, which are discussed later in the book. XX: 243: The suitors plan to kill Telemachus, but an eagle appears on the left holding a dove in its claws. Amphinomus at once warns that the plan will miscarry, and proposes dinner instead. XX: 345: Athene leads the suitors' minds astray. When Telemachus has made a short speech refusing to drive his mother from the house, unquenchable laughter, asbestos gelos, seizes them. Theoclymenus, a god-like seer, is present. Their laughter stops and they seem to see blood on the food they are eating. The seer speaks: "Your heads, faces and knees are shrouded in night; a cry of mourning is kindled; your cheeks are wet with tears, the walls and panels are sprinkled with blood. The porch and courtyard are full of spectres, rushing down to darkness and Hades. The sun has perished from the sky, and an evil mist has come upon all." At the end of Book XXI, as Odysseus strings his bow, Zeus marks the occasion with a great clap of thunder. Passages from Vergil's Aeneid. I: 393: Aeneas has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. Venus meets him and gives him encouragement. An eagle has just swooped down on twelve swans. They escape, some coming to land, others still in the air. Thus, she says, some of the Trojan ships are safe in port, others are approaching. II: 682: During the escape from Troy, "levis summo de vertice visus Iuli fundere lumen apex tactuque innoxia mollis lambere flamma comas et circum tempora pasci." Iulus's cap poured out light, and a gentle flame, harmless to touch, licked his hair and played round his forehead. While others tried to extinguish it with shaking and with water, Anchises prayed to Jupiter. He was answered by thunder on the left, and "de caelo lapsa per umbrae stella facem ducens multa cum luce cucurrit. Illa summa super labentem culmina tecti cernimus Idaea claram se condere silva signantemque vias; tum longo limite sulcus dat lucem et late circurn loca sulphure fumant." A star fell from the sky through the darkness and moved fast, trailing a torch of brilliant light. We saw the shining object glide over the roof of the house and plunge into the forest on Mount Ida, illuminating the paths; then it left a long trail of light in its wake, and everywhere around, far and wide, was sulphurous smoke. III: 1-12: We have a summary of the fate of Troy. Its destruction was the will of those above (visum supers), and the Trojans were driven into exile to seek new homes by divine auguries (auguriis divam). They carry the Penates and Great Gods. III: 90: Delos is one of their first stops. Aeneas enters the temple to pray. Suddenly the hill seems to move, the shrine to open, and the cauldron (cortina) to bellow (mugire) like a bull. III: 135: When they have sailed to Crete, home of their ancestor Teucer, pestilence from a disturbed part of the sky afflicts trees, crops, and limbs. Anchises urges a return to Delos to ask the oracle for guidance. Before they can go, the Trojan gods appear to Aeneas in a dream, with advice from Apollo that Hesperia is their goal, not Crete. III: 245: They approach the Strophades islands, home of Celaeno and the Harpies. Celaeno, the prophetess of evil (infelix vates), prophesies that they will reach Italy, but fail to build a city, and be so hungry that they will eat their tables. We shall see later that the eating of tables is a kledon. III: 359: Epirus is their next port of call. Here the Trojan seer Helenus has succeeded King Pyrrhus. When Aeneas asks Helenus for advice, he addresses him as interpreter of the gods, who perceives (sentis) the presence (numina) of Phoebus, the tripods, bay trees of Claros, the stars, the tongues of birds and omens of their flight. Helenus sacrifices bullocks, asks for divine permission (pacem), unties the fillet from his consecrated forehead, and leads Aeneas to the threshold of the god, and prophesies (canit = sings). III: 405: Helenus tells Aeneas that when he has sailed past the Italian cities on the nearer coastline, he must, when sacrificing on the beach, wear a purple robe which will cover his hair, lest while busy with the sacred fires in honour of the gods some hostile face may be seen and disturb the omens. This is to be the Mos Sacrorum (sacred custom). After urging him to be particularly careful to honour Juno, Helenus describes the raging prophetess of Cumae; Aeneas must insist on direct spoken answers, not writing on leaves which get blown away. V: 704: After the funeral games held in Sicily on the anniversary of the death of his father, Anchises, Aeneas consults the prophet, Nautes. He was the only pupil of Tritonian Pallas (Athene). He could explain what the great anger of the gods portended, or what order of events the fates demanded. VI: 779: In the underworld, Anchises reveals to Aeneas the future greatness of Rome. The soul of Romulus is seen: "See how twin crests stand on his head (vertex), and his father himself marks him out for the life of the gods above." VII: 59: After his visits to the underworld, Aeneas sails north and reaches the river Tiber. Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, the aged king of the Latins, is to marry Turnus, prince of the Rutuli, but the gods send two signs. A swarm of bees settles on a laurel in the palace. A prophet interprets this as the arrival of an army who will rule from this citadel. Next, Lavinia's hair and dress catch fire as she stands beside her father, who is kindling the altar fire. Prophets sing that she has a distinguished destiny, but that great war is the fate of the nation. The king visits the oracle of his father, Faunus, predictor of fate. At this oracle the inquirer sacrificed sheep, then lay down to sleep on the sheepskins. The voice of Faunus was heard prophesying the future. Shortly afterwards the Trojans sit down under a tree for a meal. They use cakes of meal instead of plates. Iulus exclaims "We are eating our tables!" Aeneas recognises the kledon, and declares that this is the land promised them by destiny. He wreathes his head with laurel and utters prayers to various deities, while Jupiter thunders three times from a clear sky and displays a cloud gleaming and quivering with golden rays. VIII: 608: Venus brings Aeneas his armour, made by Vulcan. The helmet is terrible with its crests, spouting flames. XII: 244: Iuturna, wishing to break the truce and prevent or postpone the death of her brother Turnus in a duel with Aeneas, sends a confusing omen. An eagle seizes the leader of a group of swans, but is attacked by combined tactics of the other swans, drops his prey, and flees. The augur, Tolumnius, says, "This is the omen I prayed for. Follow me into battle." VIII: 663: On the shield of Aeneas: "hic exsultantis Salios nudosque Lupercos lanigerosque apices et lapsa an cilia caeloextuderat..." "Vulcan had hammered out the dance of the Salii and the naked Luperci, and caps with wool on their peaks, and shields that had fallen from heaven..." VIII: 680: On the shield of Aeneas, at the battle of Actium, Augustus is seen, his brow shooting forth twin flames. Pausanias, a Greek from Asia Minor of the 2nd century A. D., wrote a guide to Greece. There are many references to augury and oracles. The Penguin Classics translation, 'A Guide to Greece' by Peter Levi, 1985 reprint, is readily available. The following are among the many relevant passages. References are to the Greek text in the Loeb Classical Library edition. I: 4: 4: When the Gauls tried to sack Delphi, they were attacked by thunderbolts, and by stones and rock falling from Parnassus. I: 21: 7: At Gryneion in Asia Minor there is an oracular temple of Apollo, mentioned in Vergil, Eclogue VI: 72, and Aeneid IV: 345. Linen breastplates were on show there, a fact whose significance will appear infra, Chapter IV. II: 26: 5: Re the sanctuary of Asclepius near Epidaurus, he tells how the child Asclepius was found by a goatherd, abandoned. A flash of lightning came from the child. VII: 25: 10: At Boura, in Herakles's grotto, the oracle is consulted by throwing dice on a table before the statue. There are many dice, and for every throw there is an interpretation written on the board. IX: 16: 1: Teiresias's observatory is behind the sanctuary of Ammon at Thebes. IX: 39: 5: At Lebadeia in Boeotia is an oracle of Trophonius. To consult it, one had to live for some days in a building nearby dedicated to Good Fortune and the Good Spirit. No hot water was allowed for washing. Sacrifice was offered to Trophonius and his sons, to Apollo, Kronos, Zeus, Hera the charioteer, and Demeter Europa, the nurse of Trophonius. One then had to slaughter a ram, calling to Agamedes. Priests checked the entrails of all the sacrificed animals. The inquirer had to bathe in the river Herkyne; he was then washed and anointed with oil by two boys called Hermae. He drank water, first of forgetfulness, then of memory. He looked at the statue of Daedalus, put on a linen tunic tied with ribbon, and wore heavy boots. The oracle was on the hillside above a sacred wood. It was surrounded by a circular platform of white stone, the size of a small threshing-floor, about four feet six inches in height. There were bronze posts joined by chains. Inside the circle was a chasm, like a kiln ten feet in diameter, twenty feet deep. The inquirer descended a ladder to a hole at the bottom, and took honey cakes. He was snatched down feet first as though by a river. Inside, some heard sounds, others saw things. He returned feet first, and was put by the priests on the nearby Throne of Memory. He was possessed with terror, but finally recovered in the building of Good Spirit and Fortune. X: 5: 7: Phemonoe was Delphi's first priestess and first to sing the hexameter. But a local woman called Boio wrote a hymn for Delphi saying that Olen and the remote northerners came and founded the oracle, and Olen was the first to sing in hexameters. Russian olenj is a reindeer. IV: 10: 6: The Messenian prophet Ophioneus was blind from birth. He found out what was happening to everyone, private and public, and thus predicted the future. VI: 2: 4: The Elean prophet Thrasyboulos son of Aineias was of the clan of the Iamidae. These were prophets descended from Iamos (Pindar, Olympian Odes VI: 72). They studied lizards and dogs. The Cypria, scholiast on Pindar, Nemean X: 62: Lynceus climbed Taygetus and saw Kastor and Polydeukes hidden in a hollow oak. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century B. C., says that, according to the Egyptians, two priestesses of Zeus at Egyptian Thebes were carried off by the Phoenicians. One was sold in Greece, the other in Libya. The oracles at Thebes and Dodona were similar. Callimachus writes: "Servants of the bowl that is never silent," of the bronze gongs at Dodona. Zenobius refers to Bombos the Prophet at Dodona. In Homeric pyromancy (telling the future from fire) the priests burnt the thighs of the victim first. The altar flames should rise high. The thigh may have been significant; cf. Zeus concealing the infant Dionysus in his thigh, and Jacob and the angel. A statue could apparently come to life, enabling a prophet to give a warning, as we see in the next example: Vergil, Aeneid II: 171: Sinon tells the Trojans that Minerva gave clear signs of disapproval. The Palladium, an image of Minerva in Troy, was stolen by two Greeks, Diomedes and Ulysses. Flames flickered from its staring eyes, salt sweat covered its limbs, and three times it jumped from its base with trembling shield and spear. The prophet Calchas sang of the need to leave Troy at once. Aeneid III: 466: Fleeing from Troy, the Trojans stay with Helenus in Epirus. He gives them presents when they leave, cauldrons from Dodona, etc. Homer, Odyssey XIV: 327: Odysseus has returned in disguise to Ithaca. In the hut of Eumaeus the swineherd, he says that he has heard of Odysseus. The king of the Thesprotians had said that Odysseus had gone to Dodona to learn the will of Zeus from the oak trees with lofty foliage. Asbolus the diviner is mentioned by Hesiod, Shield of Herakles line 185, in the representation of the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs. Asbolus is with the Centaurs. Frazer, in his edition of Apollodorus, mentions wizards in Loango, West Africa, who descend into a pit to get inspiration. Apollodorus I: 9: 24: The ship Argo speaks as the Argonauts sail past the Apsyrtides islands. Apsyrtus was the brother of Medea, whom she murdered to facilitate her escape. The Argo says that Zeus's anger will not cease until the murder is expiated. {S : Notes (Chapter One: Augury)} Notes (Chapter One: Augury) 1. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' II: 23 2. Ibid. I: 18 3. Ibid. I: 33 4. Ibid. I: 40 5. Ibid. I: 41 6. Livy: I: 31. 7. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 17 8. Livy I: 18 9. Lucretius: I: 1014 10. Plautus: 'Cistellari' IV: 2: 26 11. Livy: I: 39 12. Ibid. I: 36 13. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' II: 41 14. Cicero: 'De Legibus= II: 8 15. Homer: 'Iliad' VII: 44 16. Vergil: 'Aeneid' VI: 42 17. Cicero: 'De Divinatione= I: 31 18. Vergil: 'Aeneid' VI: 98 19. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 41 20. Ibid. I: 43 21. Ibid. I: 47 22. Ibid. I: 50 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE ELECTRIC ORACLES} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER TWO THE ELECTRIC ORACLES WE have seen enough evidence to attempt an explanation. I shall deal with augury first. I suggest that augury was an art, or science, based on the combined study of the behaviour of living creatures, especially birds, and of electrical fields both of the atmosphere and of the earth. Even today, the electrical effects of a thunderstorm are easily detectable by the naked eye. Piezoelectric effects and earthquake light are recognised phenomena, and there are grounds for supposing that conditions were more turbulent, electrically, in the ancient world [1] . The Greek augur faced north, the Roman south, and watched especially the behaviour of birds and animals. The Roman augur had a staff with a curved top. The contact with a boulder indicates the discovery of the importance of a good earth connection. Finally, since the augur worked in daytime, he threw part of his robe over his head to enable him to detect any variations of brightness of electrical glow. A Greek seer wore a net garment over his chiton. It is not suggested that this technique would be useful under average present conditions, merely that there was a time when electrical conditions were different, as we can expect from the frequency of recorded earthquakes, and that elementary electrical principles were being studied. Certainly experiments with magnets were carried out, for example at Samothrace. Cicero mentions "auspicious militare in acuminibus", divination from the points of spears (De Divinatione II: 36). This was presumably the observation of electrical flashes. When we bear in mind the fact that kings originally dealt with divine matters, we see the significance of such words as lauchme, chieftain, and of the fire playing round the head of a future king. Light, and lightning, were obvious indications of the presence of an electrical deity. At Delphi the force was used to affect the Pythia by direct contact, whereas at Dodona the emphasis was on sound effects, but there were tripods there too. At Delphi the Pythia was stimulated by a force of earth. The gods spread their force far and wide, sometimes enclosing it in caves in the earth, sometimes involving it in the human body. [2] According to Cicero, poetic inspiration shows that there is a divine power in the soul [3] . He says it is possible that the earth force, which used to stimulate the soul of the Pythia with divine inspiration, has disappeared because of age [4] . In Trimalchio's Banquet, by Petronius, Trimalchio claims to have seen the Cumean Sibyl suspended in a jar. When asked what she wished, she said "I wish to die." The story of a Sibyl small enough to hang from the ceiling in a jar may originate in the gradual ebbing of the inspirational force of the place. Cicero speaks of oracles which are poured forth under the influence of divine inspiration [5] . I suggest that the breathing of the earth, spiritus, aspiratio terrarum, and the god's breathing upon the Pythia, afflatus dei, are both examples of electrical stimulation, rather like the feeling of the approach of a thunderstorm, as in the storm in Vergil, Aeneid IV. Just as the Roman augur had to make contact with the earth via a boulder, so the Selli at Dodona were forbidden to wash their feet and had to sleep on the ground. The Flamen Dialis, or priest of Jupiter at Rome, slept in a special bed whose feet were smeared with mud. The name of the famous seer Melampus means Blackfoot. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, writes of the Agnihotris, Brahmin fire priests, who sleep on the ground. The 5th century B. C. dramatist Euripides, in his play The Bacchae, describes the behaviour of the worshippers of Dionysus, a god who fills his worshippers with frenzy. A Maenad, producing electrical effects from a thyrsus, which resembles the wand in which Prometheus brought divine fire down from heaven, went barefoot as she waved it in the air, then struck the ground [6] . Good electrical effects could be obtained on high ground, e. g. Parnassus, Cithaeron, Mount Sinai, etc.. Cithaeron, as well as being the scene of The Bacchae, had below it the town of Erythrae. There is another Erythrae in Asia Minor. Clefts in rock if possible combined with water, as at Delphi, would be helpful. Homer speaks of "rocky Pytho." Such places, together with oak groves, as at Dodona, were likely to be enelysioi, containing Zeus Kataibates, Zeus the sky god who descends in a thunderbolt. One may compare the mysterious flame that burned in Thebes on the tomb of Semele, mother of Dionysus, killed by a thunderbolt from Zeus, and also the fire round the head which did not burn [7] . The tripod and cauldron are clearly important. The tripod as a throne for Apollo was probably introduced between 1000 and 750 B. C., conventional dating. Votive offerings of tripods were made to other gods as well as to Apollo. At Dodona the many votive tripods were arranged in a circle, touching each other, round a sacred oak tree. I suggest two lines of investigation. Firstly, they are generally of metal, and the legs of the tripod would be a good electrical earth for the cauldron on which the Pythia sat. (See above for a reference to iron rollers at Ephyra). Secondly, three metal legs are the most inconspicuous safe support for a cauldron and occupant if one wishes to create the impression that the Pythia, who is in contact with the god Apollo, is hovering in the air. There is a third possibility which will be considered later in the section on tripod cauldrons. At this stage of the argument we can well consider the play King Oedipus by Sophocles. Oedipus, king of Thebes in Boeotia, is faced with plague in his city. A messenger has been sent to Delphi to ask the god's advice. The chorus say: "elampse gar tou niphoentos artios phaneisa phama Parnasou." Literally: "The voice of snowy Parnassus, recently shown, flashed (or: shone)." [8] The use of a verb of shining rather than of sounding calls for comment, especially as this usage is found elsewhere when describing oracular action. I give rough translations or paraphrases of some instances. Aeschylus, Eumenides 797 ff: Orestes, who has killed his mother to avenge the murder by her of his father Agamemnon, is tried at Athens. The Furies, instruments of justice, are the prosecutors. His defence has been that he was acting on the instructions of the god Apollo. Athene, patron goddess of Athens, has a casting vote, and Orestes is acquitted. When the Furies grumble, Athene consoles them: "But there was shining (lampra) evidence from Zeus, and he who gave the oracle and he who bore witness were one and the same." In the first play of the trilogy, the Agamemnon, the captive prophetess Cassandra sees disaster looming when the triumphant procession arrives at Agamemnon's palace at Mycenae, on his return from the capture of Troy. (Cassandra starts to prophesy) "Ah, it is like fire! He is coming to me. Ah, woe, Lycian Apollo, woe is me!" [9] . Certain Greek words are of significance in an oracular context. Pheme is a divine voice or oracle, as also is omphe. The verb phao means to make known either by sight or by sound. Aeido, sing, is sometimes used of wind in the trees, and of the twang of a bowstring. Audan, to utter, of oracles, and aoide, contracted to ode, a song, are similar. Aoidos, like the Latin vases, means a singer or prophet, and, in the Trachiniae of Sophocles, an enchanter. The link between sound, sight, and divine revelation is close. Heraclitus, the Obscure, was one of the philosophers working in Ionia in the 6th century B. C., known as the Pre-Socratics. They all studied the problem of the nature of the physical world, trying mostly to find a single underlying substance behind the variety of appearances, whereas Socrates in the 5th century turned his attention to the problem of how one ought to live. The ideas of Heraclitus are known from fragments quoted by later writers. Fragment 93 (Diels) reads: "The god whose is the oracle at Delphi neither speaks nor hides. He signals." Gaia, the earth goddess, was the mother of various powerful creatures. She is probably to be equated with Demeter, the Earth Mother. De is the same as Ge, earth. She was worshipped as a source of fruit and crops, and was connected with the mystery religion of Eleusis. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 275 ff., Demeter appears to Metaneira to instruct her about her cult at Eleusis. Radiance like lightning fills the house. Earlier I mentioned two kinds of electrical activity, that of the atmosphere, lightning, auroras, etc., and that of the earth, earthquake phenomena such as earthquake light and piezoelectric effects. It is possible to see in the succession of deities at Delphi the development of Greek thought about electricity. The opening of the Eumenides of Aeschylus is a good starting point. Gaia, earth, is the first occupant of the shrine. She is succeeded by her daughter, Themis, whose name implies 'the way things are established', and by Phoebe. There is a red figure vase illustrating Themis on the tripod. According to Hesiod she was mother of Leto and of Asterie by her brother Koios. Themis and Gaia are referred to by Aeschylus as pollon onomaton morphe mia', one form with many names. Koios suggests stones. The poet, Antimachus, tells us: "Koias ek cheiron skopelon meta rhiptozousin", they hurl stones at the rock with their hands. The 'thriobolus' was a sooth sayer who threw pebbles into a divining urn. There may be a link with the Thriae, three goddesses who practiced divination at Delphi. They are compared by Hesiod to bees, and feed on honey. Vergil describes honey as 'caelestia', and the infant Zeus was fed by bees [10] . There are other points of interest in Georgic IV. Vergil speaks of a skilled farmer and beekeeper, Corycium senem, an old man from Corycus. The Corycian cave above Delphi was dedicated to Bromios, a name of Dionysus, and there was another cave of the same name in Asia, where Zeus was kept prisoner for a time. Vergil also reports a belief that bees have a share of the divine mind and ethereal essence [11] . Themis is shown as the Pythia on the Vulci goblet. The name Phoebe, one of the successors of Gaia, like Apollo's name Phoebus, suggests light, but before we move on to discuss Apollo in detail, there is another occupant of the cauldron to consider, Dionysus. There is a story that the god Zeus fought a battle in the sky against a monster, Typhon. Typhon cut the sinews of Zeus's hands and feet and took him to Corycus in Cilicia. He hid the sinews in a cave, with the dragon Delphyne on guard. Vide 'Homeric Hymn to Apollo', 39; 'korakos' means a leathern quiver. Corycus was the site of the sanctuary of the Hittite weather god, and the incident illustrates the Oriental background of early Greece. Hesiod says that Typhon married Echidna, a monster half nymph and half snake. The episode seems to be duplicated at Delphi, where Delphyne is the name of the female dragon killed by Apollo, and the Corycian cave was sacred to Bromios, or Dionysus. Heb. obh is a leather bag, spectre, conjuring ghost, sorcerer, necromancer. Cf. obi, African witchcraft. Examples to illustrate this chapter: Vergil, Aeneid IV: 518: "Unum exuta pedem vinclis." In a temple at Carthage Dido stands before the altar with one foot bare. Pausanias, X: 5.9: The Delphians say the second shrine at Delphi (the first was of bay branches) was of beeswax and feather, made by bees, and sent by Apollo. Another legend is that it was built by a Delphian called Feathers. Aptera in Crete (north-west coast) was named after him. The theory that the shrine was woven out of feather grass growing on the mountain is not generally accepted. The third temple was of bronze. A fragment of Pindar describes it as having enchantresses in gold over the pediment, and reads "... opened the ground with his lightning and hid the holiest..." Pausanias mentions the bronze house of Athene in her sanctuary at Sparta, and refers to a temple in the forum at Rome, which had a roof of bronze. There was a story that Apollo's bronze temple dropped into a chasm in the earth or was burnt. The fourth temple was built by Trophonius and Agamedes, of stone. It was burnt down in 548 B. C.. The temple still standing at the time Pausanias visited it was, he said, by the Corinthian architect Spintharos. He mentions legends about the founding of the city, e. g., that one Parnassos discovered divination from the birds here, that it was flooded at the time of Deucalion, that Delphos was the son of Apollo and Kelaino, that Kastalios had a daughter Thuia, who was a priestess of Dionysus. (In Greek, Thuia suggests fire). As to Pytho, the snake shot by Apollo was corrupted (Pytho in Greek implies corruption). Pausanias X: 12: 1: A rock sticks up out of the hillside below Apollo's temple at Delphi. The Sibyl Herophile used to stand on this to sing her oracles. The former Sibyl was the daughter of Zeus and Lamia, daughter of Poseidon. The Libyans named her Sibyl. Herophile was younger but prophesied the events of the Trojan war. She claimed that her mother came from Marpessus, a city near Troy, on Mount Ida. Herophile is associated with Sminthean Apollo. Other Sibyls mentioned by Pausanias are Demo, who came from Cumae, and Sabbe, who was brought up in Palestine by Jews. Sabbe's father was Berosus, her mother Erimanthe. She was also known as the Babylonian Sibyl, and as the Egyptian Sibyl. Phaennis was the daughter of the king of the Chaonians; she and the doves at Dodona gave oracles. The doves were earlier than Phemonoe. They were the first women singers to sing these verses: "Zeus was, and is, and shall be, O great Zeus. Earth raises crops. Cry to the earth-mother." Euklous was a Cypriot prophet, Mousaios and Lykos were Athenians; Bakis from Boeotia was possessed by the nymphs. Pausanias, X: 7: There is mention of the bronze head of a bison. X: 13: 4: The fight for the tripod between Herakles and Apollo. Athena restrains Herakles, Leto and Artemis restrain Apollo. X: 24: 4: In the temple an altar has been built to Poseidon, because the oldest oracle was his also. There are two statues of Fates, and the iron throne on which the poet Pindar used to sit whenever he came to Delphi to compose songs to Apollo. Near the temple is the stone. It is oiled every day, and at every festival unspun wool is offered to it. III: 22: 1: In Laconia, near Gythion, is a stone called Zeus kappotas, fallen Zeus, where Orestes sat with the result that his madness left him. One may compare the Old Testament, Genesis XXVIII: 11: "And (Jacob) lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac..." And from verse 16: "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first." Romans sometimes swore by Stone Jupiter, 'per Iovem Lapidem. ' Pausanias, IV: 33: 6: There are two rivers, Elektra and Koios. They might refer to Atlas's daughter Elektra and Leto's father Koios, or Elektra and Koios might be local divine heroes. V 11: 11: When I asked the attendants why they didn't pour oil or water for Asklepios, they said that the statue and throne of Asklepios were over a well. The Old Testament, I Samuel VI. tells how the Philistines sent back the ark which they had captured. It was transported on a cart. Verse 14: "And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Beth-Shemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone: and they crave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a burnt offering unto the Lord." Verse 18: "And the golden mice, according to the number of all the cities of the Philistines belonging to the five lords, both of fenced cities, and of country villages, even unto the great stone of Abel, whereon they set down the ark of the Lord: which stone remaineth unto this day in the field of Joshua, the Beth-Shemite." Pausanias, II: 35: 4: There is a sanctuary of Klymenos at Hermion, through which Herakles dragged up from Hades the dog Kerberos. {S : Notes (Chapter Two: The Electric Oracles)} Notes (Chapter Two: The Electric Oracles) 1. For destruction of Bronze Age sites, vide: Schaeffer-Forrer, 'Stratigraphie comparée et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale (III. et II. Millénaires)( Oxford 1948). 2. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 36 3. Ibid. I: 37 4. Ibid. I: 19 5. Ibid. I: 18 6. Euripides: 'The Bacchae' 665 7. Ibid. 757 8. Sophocles: 'Oedipus Tyrannus' 473 9. Aeschylus: 'Agamemnon' 1251 ff. 10. Vergil: Georgic IV 149 11. Ibid. 219 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 3: } {T DIONYSUS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER THREE DIONYSUS THE account given of the birth of Dionysus by the followers of Orpheus goes as follows: Dionysus was the son of Zagreus, a son of Zeus and Persephone. He was torn to pieces by Titans, who ate his limbs. Athene rescued the heart, and a new Dionysus was made from it. This dismemberment is in Greek sparagmos. Osiris, in Egypt, was also dismembered and then resurrected. The Titans were burnt up by lightning, and men were born from the ashes and soot. Plato refers to man's 'Titanic nature. ' This 'original sin' was known to other writers as well. Of special interest to us is the fact that Zagreus is another name for Zeus Katachthonios, Subterranean Zeus, and is held to mean 'Great Hunter. ' He must be a god of long standing, since he assisted Kronos in a fight with a monster. The Greeks thought he was the same as the Egyptian Osiris. The usual story is that Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele. Diodorus Siculus, 1st century B. C., refers to an old Dionysus with a beard, who joined in an attack on Kronos, and a young Dionysus, shaven and effeminate. Semele is an earth goddess (Greek chamai, Latin humus, and Slavonic zemlya. She is long- haired [1] . Euripides, in his play The Bacchae, tells us how the thunderbolt from Zeus destroyed Semele, and Zeus hid the infant in his thigh [2] . One version of the tale is that Zeus named him Dithyrambus because he emerged twice, from his mother and from the thigh of Zeus. But in The Bacchae, 526, Euripides appears to derive the name from his having entered a door in Zeus's thigh, Dios thura, the door of Zeus. Much can be found about the nature of Dionysus in The Bacchae. Dionysus on his travels comes to Thebes in Boeotia, central Greece. His worship has been rejected by Pentheus, the young king of Thebes. The stranger, who is Dionysus, fills the women with divine frenzy; they rush out to Mount Cithaeron to worship and revel. Pentheus has the stranger imprisoned. There is an earthquake and the stranger breaks free. He induces Pentheus to dress up as a woman and spy on the women's revels. Pentheus is discovered and torn to pieces. His mother, Agave (sister of Semele), triumphantly carries his head back to Thebes, recovers her sanity, and recognises that she has killed her son. (Vide Agave in the glossary). In The Bacchae, 594, "hapte keraunion aithopa lampada", the stranger urges the reveller to kindle the blazing lightning torch. The scholiast on Euripides, Phoenissae, 227, mentions automaton pur, spontaneous fire, at his sanctuary on Parnassus, with which we can compare the 'mega selas puros', great blaze of fire, at his sanctuary in Crastonia in Macedonia. The name of his priestesses, Thyadae, recalls the verb thuo, sacrifice by fire. As a god of mountainous places, see Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1105: "Bacchic god dwelling on mountain peaks." Pentheus vows to stop him "ktupounta thurson", making a noise with his thyrsus, and shaking his long hair. Ktupos is the sound of an electrical discharge: "ktupei Zeus Cthonios", Underground Zeus thundered; [3] . 'Chthonia brontemata', underground thunderings [4] . 'Ktupos' is a crash of thunder, Iliad XX: 66. The plain near Cirrha was sacred to Apollo and was not to be cultivated. In the 4th century B. C., during the Sacred War, the Phocians were fined for disregarding this prohibition. In 347 B. C., the officers on the staff of the Phocian general Phalaecus searched for treasure. As they attempted to dig round the tripod in the shrine, an earthquake occurred and frightened them away. The people living in the district, known as the Amphictyonic League, had responsibility for the protection of Delphi. The Bacchae, line 145: The Bacchant runs, waving a wand with a flame, rousing the wandering dancers, raising Bacchanalian cries, tossing his luxuriant hair in the aither, or air. Aither is an interesting word to use here; normally it is the upper air, home of the gods and heavenly fire. Line 185: The aged Kadmos asks the prophet Teiresias to join the dance and shake his grey head. He loves to strike the ground with his thyrsus. Kroteo, strike, means to make a sound by striking, and is used in music. Line 306: Teiresias says: " You will see him on the rocks of Delphi, and leaping with torches over the twin-headed mountain, striking and shaking the Bacchic branch." One peak of Parnassus was sacred to Apollo, one to Dionysus. Line 313: Teiresias says: "Pour libations, dance, wear the stephanos." The stephanos, or crown, was of great importance, and a brief digression is necessary here. A crown was awarded to a victor in the games. It was also worn by a poet, and by a victorious general. At Olympia, a victor received a crown of wild olive; at Delphi, of laurel, which was sacred to Apollo; at Nemea, of parsley; and at the Isthmian games, of ivy and pine. In the case of ivy, kissos, the fruit formed a yellow cluster, corymbus, sacred to Dionysus. Offering friends wine to drink in ancient Greece or Rome involved setting up a mixing bowl, krater, for the wine and water. One put a crown of flowers not only round one's head, but also round the rim of the bowl. A priest wore a crown when sacrificing. Wine is described as fiery, Greek 'aithon'. In a Homeric house, the krater, or mixing bowl stood on a tripod in the hall, left of the entrance. It was of silver, sometimes with a rim of gold, as in Odyssey IV: 615, sometimes all gilt. Vergil has his father Anchises crowning a bowl, filling it with wine, and calling upon the gods: "Tum pater Anchises magnum cratera corona induit implevitque mero, divosque vocavit." [5] The Bacchae, line 341: Kadmos suggests to Teiresias that he should put on his head a garland of ivy to honour the god. In line 363 Teiresias has a wand with ivy on it. Pentheus interrupts and says: "Hands off! Don't wipe off your folly onto me." Avoidance of infection and pollution by touch and association was important in Greek life. The bringer of plague was Apollo. This deep-rooted fear may have been encouraged by the sensation and effect of electric shock, and even the movements of Greek dancing may have been influenced by it. The word skirtao, dance, is to make movements and skip like a goat. See above, Diodorus Siculus, on goats and herds at Delphi. Line 494: Pentheus threatens to cut off the stranger's hair. The stranger replies: "My hair is sacred; I cherish it for the god." The word for a lock of hair, phobe, is very close to the word phobos, fear. In the Iliad, XXIII: 141, Achilles offers a lock of hair to the dead Patroclus. In Vergil, Aeneid VII: 391, in a description of Bacchic rout, we see the phrase "sacrum tibi pascere crinem", to let grow the hair sacred to you. The Bacchae, 596. The chorus exclaim: "Do you not see the fire around the holy tomb of Semele?" Line 626: The stranger tells the chorus how he escaped from prison in Pentheus's palace. The god caused an earthquake, and Pentheus, out of his mind, saw fire from Semele's tomb attacking his house. Water is of no use against this kind of fire. Pentheus attacks a phantom which Bromios (Dionysus) creates out of shining aither. The word used here for shining is 'phaennos', reminiscent of the old name for Kronos or Saturn, Phaeinos. (Compare the madness of Ajax in the play of that name by Sophocles. He slaughters sheep, thinking that they are his enemies). Line 665: The Maenads go barefoot, 'leukon kolon'. In the Dionysiaca of Nonnos a Bassarid (follower of Dionysus) was apedilos, barefoot. One can compare the Selli, the flamen Dialis, and the augur, mentioned above. We might also quote The Bacchae, lines 137 ff.: "He is pleasant in the mountains when he falls to the ground." This recalls the giant Antaeus, who derived his strength from the ground, and was defeated when Herakles lifted him up. Line 704: A messenger reports the revels of the Bacchants. One of them obtains water from rock by striking with a thyrsus, another strikes the plain and gets wine. Compare the words spoken to Moses, Old Testament Exodus XVII: 6: "Behold. I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel." Line 757: Their hair is on fire but does not burn away. Line 918: The stranger talks to Pentheus until Pentheus has hallucinations. He sees two suns and two cities of Thebes, and horns on the stranger's head. Nonnus, Dionysiaca 46, has: "He saw two Phaethons and two Thebes." Vergil, Aeneid IV: 469, has: "Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus, et solem geminum et duplices se ostendere Thebas". Pentheus sees troops of Furies in his madness, a twin sun and two Thebes. Line 943: The thyrsus is held in the right hand, and raised in time with the right foot (a somewhat equivocal instruction). Line 977: The hunting dogs of the goddess Lyssa are mentioned. Is there a link with Artemis, the huntress and sister of Apollo? 'Lyssa', rage, is used of martial fury, Iliad IX: 239. Later it is used of raving caused by gods. In The Bacchae, line 851, "elaphra lyssa" means lightheaded madness. Line 1082: Pentheus has been set up on a high fir tree, to see all the revels. The voice of Dionysus is heard from the aither, ordering his punishment. As he spoke, "he set up a column of holy fire to earth and to heaven, and the heaven was silent, and so were birds and beasts..." Line 1103: The Bacchants attack, as though with lightning, the branches of oak trees, and scatter the roots (of the tree in which Pentheus is sitting) with levers not made of iron. The word 'synkeraunousai', striking with lightning, is noteworthy. Line 1159: At the end of the messenger's speech announcing the fate of Pentheus, the chorus make a few comments, including the phrase "a bull leads to disaster." Already in lines 920 and 921 we have heard of the bull-like appearance of Dionysus. In this play, Dionysus signifies a bull, Kadmos (the founder of Thebes) a serpent. In The Bacchae, the disturbing forces seem to be electrical, rather than alcoholic as one would be inclined to expect, given the connection between Dionysus and wine. Pentheus may see double, but he is not drunk and incapable, nor is anyone else for that matter. Wine would help when electricity failed. The thyrsus could be fitted with a sharp metal point to simulate electrical shock. The tomb of Dionysus was close to Apollo's tripod in the sanctuary at Delphi, and his successor Apollo is described as Dionysodotes, a dispenser of Dionysus. When we think of the ancestry of Dionysus, the name Zagreus, and the links with thunder, lightning and earthquake, it seems that Dionysus is almost a double of Zeus. Zeus is a sky god, lord of the clouds and the thunderbolt. The Romans worshipped Jupiter Diespiter, god of the open sky. The Greeks also had Zeus Katachthonios, Subterranean Zeus. The Roman counterpart was Jupiter Veiovis, or Vedijovis, Subterranean Jupiter. The title suggests seeing and knowledge. We have already seen Fragment 93 of Heraclitus: "The god whose is the oracle at Delphi neither speaks nor hides. He signals." Another passage from Heraclitus is relevant: "Fire's turnings: First sea, and of sea one half is earth, the other prester ...(?) is spread about as sea, and is measured to the same account as it was before becoming earth." 'Prester' may be connected with pur, fire, sterope, lightning flash, and aster, star or meteor. Turnings presumably imply transformations, but might also imply a changing course. There are two other fragments to consider with this one: Fragment 34: "The beginning and the end on a circle are common;" and "The way up and the way down are one and the same." It seems possible that Heraclitus is comparing celestial fire with electrical 'fire' as experienced at shrines and in caverns in the earth. Plutarch writes that a visitor to some islands near Britain had been greeted by a great tumult in the air and many signs from heaven. There were violent winds, and presters fell. Passages relating to: Dionysus, The Bacchae, fire, crowns. Homer, Iliad IV: 533: "Threikes akrokomoi" Thracians with hair on the crown. This may mean shaved, except for a crest, or it may mean drawn up in a top-knot. Iliad VII: 321: Agamemnon sacrifices a five year old ox to Zeus, and gives Ajax the best part, the chine. Why is chine best? Presumably because of mane and bristles which may have electrical significance. Vergil, Aeneid III: 125: The Trojans leave Delos and sail past "bacchatam Naxum", the island of Naxos, where Bacchic revels take place. Aeneid IV: 469: Dido, despairing of marriage with Aeneas, begins to go mad, like Pentheus who saw the Eumenides and two Thebes. Pausanias IX: 12: 3: There is a story that when the thunderbolt struck Semele a log fell with it. Polydorus decked out the log in bronze and called it Dionysus Kadmos. Nearby is a statue of Dionysus in solid bronze. Polydorus was a son of Kadmos, brother of Semele. Euripides, a fragment from The Cretans: The chorus address King Minos: "For when I become an initiate of Zeus and herdsman of night-watching Zagreus..." At Elis there was a festival, called Thyia, in honour of Dionysus. The anaklesis, or invocation, has survived; the women call on him to be present with the Graces (Charites), raging with his ox-foot. Plutarch, in his Quaestiones Graecae, asks the reason for this in question 36. The god's epiphany was followed by the miraculous creation of wine. There is reference to Dionysus Tauromorphos, Dionysus in the shape of a bull, in Plutarch's Isis and Osiris. In Orphic Hymns 44: 1: we have "Come, blessed Dionysus, created in fire, with the face of a bull." Sophocles, Fragment 94: "Iacchus with horns of a bull." Athenaeus mentions a tauriform statue of Dionysus at Cyzicus. Frazer, The Golden Bough XLIII, says that Dionysus was worshipped as Dionysus of the Tree. The Corinthians were commanded by the oracle at Delphi to worship a pine tree "equally with the god," and they made two images, with red faces and gilt bodies. In Naxos he was Dionysus Meilichios, with face of figwood. There is a connection with honey (scholiast on Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 159). He was Dionysus Liknites, He of the Winnowing Fan. A winnowing fan was a shallow basket. As an infant he was cradled in it, and his mask is portrayed on it as it is carried in the phallic processions at the Eleusinian Mysteries. Greek 'kalathos' = basket. We shall attempt an explanation of the word kalathos in a later chapter. Plutarch refers to the immortality of the soul as revealed in the Dionysiac mysteries. At Cynaetha (a name suggesting 'blazing dog') there was a winter festival of Dionysus. The men annointed themselves with olive oil and carried a bull to the sanctuary. He was in the shape of a bull when torn to pieces by the Titans. His worshippers thought that by devouring a bull they were eating the god and drinking his blood. As a goat, he was worshipped as 'He of the black goatskin'. Dionysus wore long hair, phobe. Compare phobos, flight, the outward sign of fear. For burning which does not consume, compare Old Testament Exodus III, Verse 2: "And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Apollodorus, The Library, III: 4: Dionysus was entitled 'Kid', in Greek Eriphos. He was turned into a goat when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon. Antoninus Liberalis, Transformations 28) . Apollodorus III: 5: 3: Dionysus descended to Hades to bring back Semele, whom he named Thyone. {S : Notes (Chapter Three: Dionysus)} Notes (Chapter Three: Dionysus) 1. Pindar: Olympian II: 26 2. Euripides: 'The Bacchae' 525 3. Sophocles: 'Oedipus at Colonus' 1606 4. Aeschylus: 'Prometheus Bound' 994 5. Vergil: 'Aeneid' III: 525 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 4: } {T AMBER, ARK, AND EL} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER FOUR AMBER, ARK, AND EL FURTHER evidence for an electrical explanation of oracles is to be found in the Greek word elektron, amber, Latin electrum. It has two meanings: amber, the tears of the Heliades, sisters of Phaethon, when he was killed trying to drive the sun's chariot through the sky; and a metal, four parts gold to one of silver. Tacitus refers to it as glaesum, flotsam and jetsam, found on the shores of what he calls, in his Germania, the Suebic Sea. There is uncertainty about the gender of the Greek word. The form elektros is found, both masculine and feminine, as well as the usual neuter form elektron. Its derivation is unknown. It may be connected with elektor, shining, of the sun [1] . A link with helko, pull, has been suggested, because of the attracting power of amber. Examples of its use: "having a gold chain, strung at intervals with amber beads," "meta d'elektroisin: eerto" [2] ; a necklace, strung with amber beads, like the sun [3] . I suggest that we look at the links between Greece and the eastern Mediterranean in the period of, very roughly, 1500 B. C. to 500 B. C.. We find evidence of a knowledge and application of electricity throughout the area. One of the most remarkable artefacts mentioned in the literature of Israel is the Ark of the Covenant. A recent study of the ark has been carried out by De Grazia, in God's Fire. There, in Chapter 4, he describes the ark in action. Readers are referred to the book for a full account of all the evidence, but a brief summary here may be helpful. The ark was basically a Leyden jar, or collector of electrical charge, with the lid of the box supporting two cherubim, figures with wings. The cherubim were earthed, in electrical contact with the ground. Between them, and insulated from them, was a rod, which collected atmospheric charge. The high priest probably controlled a mechanism which enabled him to adjust the position of the rod to vary the display and sound of the ark. The "mercy seat" is the wings of the cherubim, with the kapporeth or lid of the box underneath. There are representations of Egyptian arks which support this reconstruction. Kabhodh, a word associated with the ark, is the radiation. One may compare Greek kephale, head, and Latin caput, and capio, take or contain; compare also the fire playing round the head of Romulus, and of the slave boy Servius Tullius. 'El', as in Hebrew 'Elohim' and 'El', means god. I suggest that elektron is 'el ek thronou', Greek for 'God out of the seat'. The Greekless reader needs to know that 'th', theta, was originally pronounced as a t followed by an aspirate, not like English th as in 'thing'. There are many references in the Old Testament to images of Yahweh on the ark, ea. Psalm XCIX: l: "He sitteth between the cherubims; let the earth be moved." Exodus XXV: 22: "And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the Ark of the Testimony..." II Kings XIX: 15: "which dwellest between the cherubims." The link between god on earth and god in the sky, suggested by Heraclitus and the Delphic oracle, may appear in Psalm XVIII: 9 & 10: "He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under his feet. And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly; yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind." In Exodus XXV: 10 & 11, we learn that the ark is made of wood, overlaid with gold, and in verse 17 that the mercy seat is of pure gold. "And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round about." Exodus XXVI contains references to the use of silver for some of the ark's equipment. The use of gold, and some silver, could perhaps be the origin of the later use of the word electrum to denote a metal. In any case gold and silver are excellent electrical conductors. The ark operated best on a foundation of stones. The Roman augur, too, used a stone for an earth contact. That the fire in sacrifice was 'ethereal' fire, not ordinary fire, is suggested by the fact that water and blood were used to drench an altar and its foundation. This would increase conductivity, and Elijah used this technique. He took twelve stones for an altar, made a trench, and poured twelve barrels of water on the burnt offering, so that the water filled the trench [4] . "The fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice..." [5] . Compare the report by Plutarch on the death of the Pythia, after much extra water was poured over a goat unwilling to shiver. We now have an explanation of the word 'enelysios' for a place struck by lightning. It is sacred, because Zeus Kataibates, Zeus who descends, is god, 'el', in it, as in the tomb of Semele in Thebes. There may be other instances of 'el' in Greek and Latin. Samothrace, the home of electrical experiments, is referred to as "Elektria tellus" (Valerius Flaccus 2: 431). 'Elysium' seems a possibility, but there is also the 'destination' idea derived from the future tense eleusomai of the verb erchesthai, to come. Elakata means wool, on a distaff, elakate. -akate suggests akamatos, tireless. Wool has long been recognised as having some special significance; it may be the clouds from which a god, or heavenly body, appears. Alauda, lark may be 'great songstress', from al, high or great, and aude, voice. Alcis, or Alci, was a deity, or deities, of the Naharvali, a German tribe mentioned by Tacitus, Germania. The Hittite god Alalu was the god who was displaced by Anu, who is the Hittite equivalent, in this context, of Ouranos. Elektrophaes, gleaming like amber, occurs in the Hippolytus of Euripides, line 741. Elipharmakos is a plant for staunching blood. Before we leave the Psalms, here are two more quotations: Psalm LXVIII: 4: "Extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah, and rejoice before him." I suggest that here we have a link with one of the Titans, Iapetos. The Greek verb petomai means fly, so the name Iapetos probably means 'Ia who flies'. Psalm XXIX: 7 has: "The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire." When the ark was producing a visual display, there would be sound effects. It was regarded as an oracle; "towards the oracle of thy sanctuary..." [6] . Any student of speech or singing knows that if one whispers the English vowels slowly in succession from E to U and back changes of pitch of the whispered notes are inevitable. The reader is invited to try this, portamento, several times. The resulting whispered sound is 'Yahweh', a tolerable sound representation of a sine wave such as characterises alternating current. Such a sound must not be intoned casually. There was a fear that electrical shocks or lightning strikes might result. Sympathetic magic will be discussed in later chapters dealing with the Greeks and the Egyptians. The Romans called certain days of the year fasti, other days nefasti. Public business was not performed on the unlucky days, dies nefasti. Fas means 'right', and is linked with the verb 'fari', to speak. Dies fasti may have been favourable days, on which the god was present and spoke. The Greek thespesios means 'divinely sounding', of the voice. It is used of the Sirens [7] , and of the voice of a minstrel [8] . It also means ineffable, that which can be spoken only by god. It can mean marvelous. [9] . Thespiodos, prophetic, is applied to persons, and also is used by Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1134, with phobon, fear. The divine sound was associated with the wind blowing in trees, as at Dodona; against a statue, e. g. that of Memnon at Thebes, and in the prophetic grotto at Egyptian Thebes [10] , sounding like a lute string. At the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, prophecy was associated with the sound of brazen gongs, oak leaves rustling in the wind, with the cooing of doves, and with the sound of the water of the sacred spring. The possibility that the priests, the Selli, had to maintain good earth contact by never washing their feet, suggests that electrical forces were involved, and this theory is strengthened by the fact that there was a circle of tripods touching each other, round a sacred oak, itself having associations with Zeus Kataibates, Zeus who descends. The ship Argo was built partly of timber from Dodona, and spoke. Mopsus, one of the Argonauts, was traditionally linked with Deucalion, the flood survivor, and founded an oracle at Claros in Asia Minor. There is an interesting similarity between the Greek omphe, divine voice, and omphalos, a stone found at Delphi and elsewhere, which may represent the stone that Kronos devoured, thinking that it was the infant Zeus. In general, sounds were important in Greek religion. The Bacchae, line 156, mentions "barubromon hupo tumpanon" to an accompaniment of deep sounding drums to the song, dancing, and flutes. Baines, in Woodwind Instruments and their History, gives instances of flutes and drums being sacred in themselves, as well as the music which is produced from them. There is a reference to elektron in Pliny: "Chares vero (sc. dixit) Phaethontem in Aethiopia Hammonis neso obisse, ibi et delubrum eius esse atque oraculum electrumque gigni" Chares has said that Phaethon perished in Ethiopia in the island of Hammon, and that there is a shrine of his there, and an oracle and electrum are created [11] . Note the present tense of gigni: 'are created'. not 'have been created'. Instances of elektron and Yahweh: Iliad XIX: 398: Automedon takes the reins, and behind him goes Achilles, shining like elektor Hyperion, the bright sun. Homeric Hymn to Artemis: "I sing of Artemis of the golden spindle (chryselakaton)." Frazer, The Golden Bough 60, says that "Holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, which on this theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid. Hence in order to preserve the charge from running to waste, the sacred or tabooed personage must be carefully prevented from touching the ground; in electrical language he must be insulated, if he is not to be emptied of the precious substance or fluid with which he, as a vial, is filled to the brim." It is interesting to reflect, at the time of writing (1987), on how close Frazer came to an electrical theory of magic and divination. Old Testament, I Kings VII: 29: (Phoenician work for Solomon's temple) "On the borders were lions, oxen, and cherubims." We have seen the possibility of a connection between El and Elysium. In Odyssey IV: 561 ff., Proteus prophesies to Menelaus: "You will not die in Argos, but the immortals will send you to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, where dwells red-haired Rhadamanthus, where life is easiest for men, with no snowfall, no violent storm or rain, but Ocean sends always the sweetly sounding breezes of Zephyrus to restore men." Hesiod, Works and Days 171: The demi-gods dwell in the Islands of the Blest at the ends of the earth. They live free of sorrow in the Islands of the Blest along deep-swirling Ocean, blessed heroes .... Pindar, Olympian II: 71: The righteous go to the Tower of Kronos where the breezes blow round the Islands of the Blest. Euripides, Hyppolytus 732: The chorus wish that they were under the lofty cliffs, that a god would change them into birds, that they could rise up, over the shores of Eridanus, where the thrice-sad daughters of Phaethon shed amber-gleaming tears. Aristophanes refers to Zeus Kataibates in his Peace, line 42. Trygaeus's slave, feeding a huge dung-beetle, his master's pet, says: "This must be the monster of Zeus Kataibates." There is a pun: 'Dio -Skataibates' = 'descending in the form of dung'. We have mentioned already the use of stone as a foundation for the ark in Old Testament, I Samuel VI. In verse 11 we are told that when it was returned, the Philistines laid on the cart the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of the emerods. Verse 19 gives a possible clue to this: "And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter. And the men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God? and to whom shall he go up from us?" I Samuel VII: 6 gives a hint of electrical technique: "And Samuel said, Gather all Israel to Mizpeh; and I will pray for you unto the Lord. And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and drew water, and poured it out before the Lord, and fasted on that day, and said there, We have sinned against the Lord." (Mizpeh in Hebrew is an altar). II Samuel VI:( David and all the chosen of Israel fetch the ark from Baale of Judah. They play before it on instruments of fir wood, cornets, and cymbals) Verse 6: "And when they came to Nachon's threshing-floor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God." After this accident, David was afraid of the Lord that day (verse 9) and the ark was taken aside into the house of Obed-edom. The Greek threshing-floor, aloe, halos, or dinos, was sacred: Iliad V: 499; Hesiod, Works and Days, 599. II Samuel VI: 12ff.: "And it was told king David, saying, The Lord hath blessed the house of Obed-edom, and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the ark of God. So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David with gladness. And it was so, that when they that bare the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed oxen and fatlings. And David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod." II Samuel XXI: 20: The reference to giants, one of whom has twelve fingers and twelve toes, suggests mutations caused by radiation, and forms a coherent picture with our other information about the ark, and the special clothing and precautions taken by those who handled it. It may be relevant that at the start of this chapter we learn of a three year famine. II Samuel XXIV: 16 ff. contains further references to a threshing floor as a place with divine connections. In verse 15 we hear of a pestilence. Verse 16: "And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people, It is enough: stay now thy hand. And the angel of the Lord was by the threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite." Verse 24 ff.: "So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the Lord was intreated for the land, and the plague was stayed from Israel." I Kings VI contains descriptions of the temple built for Solomon by Hiram. For the entrance of the oracle he made doors of olive tree (verse 31). VIII: 6: "And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto his place, into the oracle of the house, to the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubims." {S : Notes (Chapter Four: Amber, Ark, and El)} Notes (Chapter Four: Amber, Ark, and El) 1. Homer: 'Iliad' XIX: 398 2. Homer: 'Odyssey' XV: 460 3. Homer: 'Odyssey' XVIII: 296 4. Old Testament: I Kings: XVIII: 31 5. Ibid. Verse 38 6. Psalm XXVIII: 2 7. Homer: 'Odyssey' XII: 158 8. Homer: 'Iliad' II: 600 9. Herodotus: I: 100; Aeschylus: 'Agamemnon' 1154; Plato: 'Republic' 365 10. Herodotus: II 57 11. Pliny: 'Natural History' XXXVII: 2: 33 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 5: } {T DEITIES OF DELPHI} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER FIVE DEITIES OF DELPHI IT is time to consider Apollo in greater detail. There is a vase painting showing Apollo and Dionysus together at Delphi. A fragment of Aeschylus speaks of "Apollo, ivy-crowned, Bacchic, mantle." Plutarch, in The E at Delphi, gives him three names; Apollo, not many but one; Ieius, One; and Phoebus, Pure. He came from the east. There are Hittite altars to Apulunas, discovered by Hrozny at Enni Gazi and Eski Kisla. Pule is Greek for a gate. His title Paian links him with a Cretan god of healing. The epithet Lykaios has been thought to mean: The god from Lycia (in Asia Minor); wolf-slaying, from lukos, a wolf; and the god of day, from luke, light. These different interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The name Loxias may refer to the ambiguity of his nature: god of plague and of healing, of light and death, of uncertain answers. The Greek loxias means oblique, and is the term used for the ecliptic. He is the leader of the Muses. Scholars have often contrasted the intellectual nature of his inspiration with the emotional violence of Dionysus, but Cassandra and other victims of the Far-darter might have reservations about this. Oulos is an epic word meaning destructive, baneful, fatal. Apo means from, from a distance. The name Apollo would suit him well if it implied 'death from afar'. He is often described as Hekebolos, the far darter, as is his sister Artemis. But Hermes, who is very like Apollo, is Puledokos, guardian of the gate, and it is still an open question. Apollo's weapons were the bow and arrow, but he, with his sister, and Demeter, are all called chrusaoros, with golden sword. The Trojan hero Hector is like an oulios aster, a baneful star, in Iliad XI: 62. In the form of a dolphin Apollo boarded a ship from Crete and made the crew sail to Krisa, the port for Delphi. He revealed himself as Apollo, and went to Pytho. This early name for Delphi may come from a root puth, well, which suggests the chasm between the two Phaedriades. The name Parnassus appears to mean 'mountain of the house' in Luvian, a language of Asia Minor. This, and the presence in Greek of such words as Korinthos, asaminthos, labyrinthos, Hymettos, Mykalessos, is generally held to mean that the pre-Achaean people of Greece were of Asian origin, and were hosts to an immigration of Achaeans in the 2nd millennium B. C.. Tartessus was a Phoenician city near Cadiz, ruled by King Arganthonius (Cicero: De Senectute XIX). The worship of Apollo at Delphi was not established until relations with Corinth were established about 800 B. C.. The orientalising tendency of Corinthian art is well known. The name Delphi itself suggests the Greek delphis, a dolphin. Delphyne was the name of the serpent that Apollo killed on arrival at Delphi. Note also delphys, matrix. Early in his career Apollo was a giant killer like Herakles and Hermes. He defended Olympus against the giants who piled Pelion on Ossa in their attack on Mount Olympus and the gods. He killed the giant Tityos. When Coronis, whom he had loved, decided to marry Ischys (strength), Apollo sent his sister Artemis to destroy her. He then snatched her son, the infant Asclepius, from the mother's corpse on the funeral pyre, and gave him to the centaur Cheiron to be educated in medicine. One is reminded of Zeus snatching Dionysus from Semele. Later, as a punishment for killing the Cyclopes, Apollo was servant to a mortal, King Admetus, as was Herakles to Eurystheus and Omphale. As the deity at Delphi, he shines rather than speaks. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 80, describes him as lampros, shining. His sister Artemis, called Loxo, is referred to by Homer as eustephanos, with beautiful crown [1] , and in line 207 of the Oedipus Tyrannus: "the firebearing rays of Artemis with which she rushes across the mountains of Lycia." In line 186: "paian de lampei", the shout rings out (literally 'shines' or 'flashes'). Cassandra, captive at Mycenae, begins to prophesy: "O Apollo of the roads, my destroyer, apollon [2] , whither have you brought me?" There was an occasion when the oracle at Delphi refused to answer Herakles. Herakles seized the tripod to smash votive offerings. Apollo fought back until Zeus intervened. He had long flowing hair. There is a history of disaster overtaking mortals who saw a god or goddess. The goddess Hera says: "The gods are hard to look upon in their full brightness." [3] . The soldiers of Alexander the Great were blinded when they invaded the temple of Demeter at Miletus. Anchises was blinded by a thunderbolt for boasting of his union with Aphrodite. When Hannibal wished to carry off a golden column from Juno's temple at Lacinium, he tested it with a drill and did find it solid gold, but then had a dream in which he was warned that if he removed the column he would lose the sight of his good eye. He had an image of a calf made out of the gold dust, and set it on the column [4] . A mediaeval Arab story tells that a certain pyramid that was built, according to Manetho, by Nitocris, is haunted by a beautiful woman who drives men mad. There are several instances of people being driven mad as punishment for similar offences. At Patrae, a statue of Dionysus drove mad all those who saw it. A list of examples is given in an article by R. G. A. Buxton in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1980. We have seen that Apollo's sister Artemis was called by Homer Eustephanos, she of the beautiful crown. The crown, stephanos, is associated with her brother, too. Every eight years at Delphi there was celebrated the festival of the Stepteria. A wooden structure was set on fire by youths who ran away, without looking back, to Tempe. The burning is said to represent Apollo's defeat of the serpent Puthon, and the journey to Tempe his eight years of servitude to Admetus. The situation is not unlike that at Thebes, where Kadmos killed the serpent that guarded the spring of Ares, and had to go and serve Ares for eight years. Every eight years at Thebes the festival of the Daphnephoria was held. The Greek daphne is laurel. A procession brought a piece of olive wood, decorated with bay and flowers, 365 purple ribands, and a bronze globe from which smaller globes hung, to the precincts of Apollo Ismenios and Chalazios. The lower end of the stick was wrapped in saffron coloured cloth. A boy whose parents were still alive led the procession. Next came his brother or cousin, with the olive wood, then the daphnephoros (laurel bearer), a handsome boy, with flowing hair, in a splendid long robe, golden crown and wreath of bay, and elegant shoes. Last came a chorus of girls with branches. There is clearly some astronomical significance in the ceremony --a purple ribbon for each day of the year --and the word chalaza, hail, can also mean stones or meteorites, like the Hebrew baradh. Let us look again at the Delphic succession. Gaia, Themis and Phoebe represent a powerful deity, associated with the earth and female. Dionysus, in his later form as the god with a pale face, long curly hair and epicene appearance guaranteed to enrage such a pillar of the Theban establishment as Pentheus, is a half-way house between Gaia and Apollo. Apollo is the male deity who operates as much above ground as from below ground. It is interesting that inhumation of the dead was usual in earlier times. Contact is thereby made with the earth- mother, Gaia. Cremation is practiced later, as if to link the dead with a sky god or the aither. The effects of electricity on the human body were of great interest to the Greeks and Romans. There is a fine example in Vergil. During the hunt organised by Dido for her guest at Carthage, Aeneas and the queen take refuge in a cave during a thunderstorm. Earth (Tellus), and Juno Pronuba, i. e. Juno as attendant of the bride and patron goddess of marriage, give a sign; lightning flashes, the sky (aither) joins in as an accomplice [5] . The ithyphallic statues of Hermes found in all Greek cities are outstanding examples of electrical stimulation. One of the titles of Hermes is Stilbon, a name of the planet Mercury. The Greek stilbo means 'flash'. Stilbein astrapas is to flash lightning [6] . Among the Sybarites, stilbon meant a dwarf. Hermes was the son of Zeus and of Maia, one of the Pleiades. He was born in the early morning, by noon he had invented the lyre and played on it, and by the evening he had stolen the cows of Apollo. He was the most cunning and deceitful of the gods, and gave early proof of this when he dragged the cows backwards by their tails so that their theft should not be discovered. His staff, the kerakeion or caduceus, enabled him to conduct souls to the underworld, and he has the title of psychopompos, escorter of souls. Aphrodite is described as 'eustephanos', of the beautiful crown, implying a link with electrical fire. The word was taken to refer either to a girdle (zone) or to a crown. Eros, or sexual passion, is connected with light. He appears in Hesiod as the most beautiful among the immortal gods as well as being the first to come into existence [7] . In the Orphic stories he is Phanes, he who brings everything into light, and as Eros he is responsible for the marriage of earth and heaven. The Greek word kledon means an omen or presage when one made an involuntary movement or exclamation. Such a chance act was thought to be caused by a god. Sneezing was significant. Epileptic convulsions were certainly of divine origin, and are now attributed to electrical malfunctions of the brain. Shivering was a sign, and is to be connected with the stories in Diodorus and Plutarch of the goats made to shiver before slaughter as an essential preliminary to the Pythia's descent to the shrine to prophesy. Readers of Pindar, the 5th century B. C. lyric poet of Thebes, will be familiar with passages where he uses images of fire and light for poetry, e. g. "setting the city on fire with my songs (aoidais)." [8] . Passages concerning hair, light, Apollo and kledons; from Homer, Vergil and Pausanias. From the Iliad: XIII: 435: Poseidon casts a spell on the shining eyes of Alcathous and binds his gleaming limbs so that he cannot run away or dodge sideways. XV: 256: Apollo encourages Hector. Apollo Chrysaoros, Apollo of the golden sword. XV: 262: So saying, he breathed great power (menos) into the Trojan leader. XXIII: 141: Achilles cuts off a lock of his hair to lay on the body of Patroclus. XXIII: 281: Achilles announces the chariot race at the funeral games of Patroclus. He will not compete with his own horses: Patroclus often washed them with clear water and poured oil on their manes. From the Odyssey: I: 90: Achaeans with flowing hair, kare komoontas. I: 153: The herald put a beautiful kitharis in the hands of the minstrel Phemius. He played a prelude (phormizon) and began his song. The kithara, in Homer kitharis, was triangular in shape with seven strings. It was portable, and was Apollo's instrument. It is virtually the same as the phorminx. The lura was a larger instrument, with four strings; later with seven. Homer does not mention it, but the word occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, line 423. IV: 122: Helen emerges from her room looking like Artemis of the golden distaff (chryselakate). VIII: 323: Lord Apollo Hekaergos (working far off). XVII: 541: Penelope says that if only Odysseus were to return, he and his son would soon avenge the crimes of the suitors. Telemachus gives a loud sneeze which echoes in a frightening way round the house. From the Aeneid: I: 740: At a banquet with Dido, long-haired (crinitus) Iopas plays on his golden kithara; he had been taught by great Atlas. III: 80: When the Trojans land on Delos, they meet Anius, king of Delos and priest of Apollo, who wears fillets of sacred laurel round his head. III: 170 ff.: The Trojans suffer ecological disasters in Crete. The Trojan gods appear in a dream and reveal that Corythus in Italy is their goal. Corythus was later Cortona, a town in Etruria. The name resembles cortina, the cauldron or tripod. Korus, koruthos is the Greek for a helmet. The gods who appeared in the dream had garlanded hair, velatas comas. III: 257: When they land in the Strophades, the Harpy Celaeno prophesies that they will know they are at their destination when they eat their tables. VI: 779: "Geminae stant vertice cristae," twin crests stand on the head (of Romulus). IX: 660: Apollo's quiver clangs. They recognise the god and his divine weapons and resounding quiver, as they flee. IX: 658: He vanishes from their sight, melting into thin air. X1: 785: The Etruscans charge; Arruns prays to Apollo before hurling a spear to kill Camilla. "Great god Apollo, guardian of holy Soracte (a mountain), whom we among the first worship, for whom pine logs blaze in a heap, and, relying on our piety, we step on burning coals through the middle of the fire on the bed of ashes..." Examples from Pausanias, chiefly concerning Apollo: I: 31: 2: The shrine of Apollo at Prasiae receives the first fruits of the Hyperboreans, by relay. The Athenians take them to Delos. They are hidden in wheat straw. I: 41: 8: Tereus is buried at Megara. The hoopoe first appeared there. (Cf. Aristophanes, The Birds. The crest of the bird gives it magical significance.) II: 24: 1: At Larisa is a shrine of Apollo, first built by Pythaios of Delphi. There is a statue of Apollo of the Ridge. There is a priestess who once a month drinks lamb's blood and is filled with the god. VII: 22: 2: At Pharai in the agora there is a stone statue of bearded Hermes. It has an oracle. In front of the statue is a hearthstone, with bronze lamps stuck on with lead. Burn incense on the hearthstone, fill the lamps with oil, light up, put a copper coin on the altar to the right of the god, and whisper your question in the god's ear. Stop up your ears, go into the market place, unstop, and the first thing you hear is the oracle. The Egyptians have a similar oracle at the sanctuary of Apis. (Vide Herodotus II :153, re the temple of Hephaestus at Memphis). IV: 34: 7: In Messenia, there is a seaside shrine of Apollo Korunthos (Crested). III: 16: 7: At the Limnaeum there is a statue of Artemis stolen from the Taurians by Orestes and Iphigenia. Astrabakos and Alopekos, sons of Irbos, went mad when they found this statue. When the Spartans of Limnae, and the men of Kynosouria, Mesoa and Pitane sacrificed to Artemis, they quarreled and shed blood. Many died at her altar, and disease carried off the rest. Originally there was human sacrifice; Lycurgus changed this to whipping. III: 22: 1: Near Gythion is a stone, 'Fallen Zeus', where Orestes's madness left him. VIII: 15: 9: On Mount Krathis in Arcadia is a sanctuary of Pyronian Artemis. The Argives used to fetch fire from the goddess for the Lernaean festival. VIII: 38: The city of Lycosoura is the oldest of all in the earth, the first city the sun ever saw. It is the source of men's knowledge of how to build cities. Apollo is associated with the seven-day week, his birthday being on the seventh. His title as leader of the Muses was 'Mousagetes'. The Muses themselves are sometimes referred to as Leibethrides. This word is connected with the verb leibo, pour (of libations). Libations were offerings of water, wine and blood to the dead and to the gods below. In this context it is worth considering the importance that the Greeks and Romans attached to remembering the dead, the Di Manes. The Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Memory, according to the most generally accepted story Artemis is 'Hekaerge', she who operates at a distance. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, line 529, Apollo promises Hermes a fine staff of riches and wealth, golden, with three branches, which will keep him akerios, safe from harm. Hermes: He is similar to Apollo, and may be considered here. Plato, Ion 534 E: Poets are interpreters (hermeneis) of the gods. Iliad XXIV: 339: The guide and killer of Argos obeyed: he at once bound on his feet the beautiful ambrosial golden sandals, that carried him over boundless land and sea with the speed of the wind; he took his staff, with which he charms men's eyes if he wishes, or wakes them from sleep. Iliad XIV: 489: Ilioneus, son of Phorbas who owned many sheep, whom Hermes loved most of the Trojans and had made him rich. In this capacity, as bringer of good fortune, he was known as Eriounios, the Helper, and Akaketa, the Gracious and Benignant. In his pastoral capacity he was Nomios. He was Dolios as an expert in secret dealings, Odyssey XIX: 397. Autolycus surpassed all in theft and perjury; the god Hermes had given him this skill. Hermes is Chrysorrhapis, he of the golden wand. He is Psychopompos, conductor of souls to Hades, Odyssey XXIV: 1. He is Pyledokos, Watcher of Doors, in Homeric Hymn to Hermes, I. 15. He is Hodios, or Enodios, a god whom you meet on the road. Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 680: Hermes killed Argus instantly: "Unexpected sudden doom robbed him of life." Elsewhere Hermes charms him to sleep with his rod and then cuts off his head. His early life story is similar to that of Apollo. Passages concerning: Eros; Aphrodite; electrical magic: Iliad III: 64: The lovely gifts of golden Aphrodite. Iliad XXIV: 611: When Niobe's children were killed by Artemis, they lay in blood for nine days, since the son of Kronos had turned the people into stone. The heavenly gods buried them on the tenth day. Odyssey XIII: 119: When the Phaeacians take Odysseus in their ship to Ithaca, they put him down on the shore fast asleep. Aeneid 1: 660: Venus sends Cupid to inflame (incendere) the queen, and to put fire in her bones (ossibus implicet ignem). 713: Dido looks at Ascanius, the young son of Aeneas, and is set on fire (ardescit) with love of Aeneas by looking at him. Aeneid IV: 23: Dido confides in Anna, her sister: "I recognize the signs of the old flame ..." 280: When Hermes has spoken, Aeneas's hair stands on end and his voice sticks in his throat. VI: 224: At the funeral pyre of Misenus, they look away as they hold the torch, in the approved manner. VIII: 389: Venus wheedles a suit of armour from Vulcan: "He suddenly felt the well-known flame, and the familiar glow entered his marrow and coursed through his trembling bones just like a flash of fiery lightning from a thunder cloud." Pausanias I: 14: 4: Epimenides of Cnossus went into a cave to sleep, and slept for forty years. He then wrote poems and purified cities, including Athens. IX: 25: 9: The anger of the Kabeiroi cannot be removed. Remnants of Xerxes's army who entered their shrine in Boeotia went mad, jumping over cliffs and into the sea. Macedonians of Alexander's army were destroyed by lightning. X: 29: 9: When Theseus and Peirithous descended to Hades, they were trapped and held in stone seats. There is a picture of them, amongst others, by Polygnotus, at Delphi. VI: 25: 1: At Elis, inside the precinct of the temple of Aphrodite, mounted on a platform, is a bronze statue by Skopas of Aphrodite riding a goat, also of bronze. She stands with one of her feet on a tortoise. Euripides, The Bacchae 405: Cupids who bewitch the mind. The word 'bewitch' is thelgo, and is what Hermes does with his wand. Hermes is said to have been the first to kindle a fire. He used laurel as tinder. Probably laurel symbolises a flickering electrical light or glow. 'Prometheus Vinctus' 599: Io enters; her movements, skirtemata, are irregular; she is pestered by a gadfly sent by Hera. See section on dance, in Chapter XXII. Aeneid VIII: 372: Vulcan has a golden room, aureus thalamus. Birds. Birds were so important in prophecy that they may well be discussed in this chapter on the Delphic deities. In Greek ornis is the word for a bird, whether wild or domesticated. It can have the same significance as oionos, a bird of omen. Oionos can mean the omen itself. In Latin, ales, alitis, winged, is used alone to mean a large bird. Small birds are volucres. Fulvus Iovis ales, the yellow bird of Jupiter, is the eagle, minister fulminis, the servant of the thunderbolt, flammiger, the flame carrier. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, is Cyllenius ales, named after Mount Cyllene, his birthplace in Arcadia. Perseus is aureus ales, the golden bird. In augury, alites give omens by their flight. Such are the buteo, a kind of falcon, and the sanqualis. The latter was the osprey, sacred to the Sabine deity Sancus. The eagle, aquila, was another bird watched for its flight. The oscines gave omens by their voice; for example, the crow, cornix the owl, noctua, sacred to Minerva, and the raven, corvus, sacred to Apollo. The raven's flight was favourable if it was seen on the right, the crow's was good if seen on the left. It may be helpful to glance at a play by Aristophanes, The Birds. It was first performed in Athens in 414 B. C., at the Great Dionysia, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, when Athens was at war with Sparta. The play is anti-war and Utopian. Peithetairos and Euelpides, sick of Athenian life, consult King Tereus, who had been turned into a hoopoe, and ask him which is the best place to live. After some discussion, Peithetairos suggests that the birds unite to build a great walled city in the air. It will be impregnable, for they will control the food supply of gods and men. The birds agree. The two Athenians grow wings, and Nephelokokkugia, Cloud-cuckoo-land, is built. Iris is caught trespassing when she inquires why sacrifices have stopped. She is sent away. More visitors arrive --all mortals want wings. Prometheus arrives, tells of the gods' food shortage, and urges Peithetairos to make hard terms, to demand Basileia, Sovereignty, daughter of Zeus, as his wife. A deputation of gods arrives, Poseidon, Herakles, and a Triballian god. Peithetairos is successful, and a marriage is arranged. Many kinds of birds are mentioned in the play. The hoopoe, formerly King Tereus, plays an important part. Apollodorus, 3: 14, tells of his past history. Pandion of Athens had two daughters, Procne and Philomela. Tereus, king of Thrace, married Procne, but also assaulted Philomela. In revenge the sisters killed his son Itys, and served him up to his father Tereus for dinner. When Tereus pursued them, he was turned into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale. This story can be compared with the other instances of murders and feasts treated in the chapter on heroes and Herakles. The hoopoe had great religious significance. In Greek it is epops. The epoptes is an initiate in the Eleusinian Mysteries; the word means 'one who beholds'. The bird has a remarkable erectile crest, chiefly gold with a little black. In the play it sings a serenade, in the course of which we hear that Apollo has golden hair. For its Hebrew name, 'dukhiphat', spirit revealer, see the glossary. There is a frieze of hoopoes in Crete, at Knossos. Other birds mentioned with crested heads and necks are the coot, phaleris, sacred to Aphrodite, and the lark korudalle. In Latin alauda cristata is the crested lark. The Legio Alauda was a legion named after the lark. The crested wren was called turannos, king. In line 291 ff., we hear that the birds are crested as though for the hoplitodromos, the soldier's footrace, in which each soldier wore a crested helmet and carried a shield. The cock, alektruon, was the most important domestic bird. The Persian king wore a peaked hat, kurbasia. The king alone wore it upright like a cock's comb. It is portrayed in a mosaic of the battle of Issus. The cock, alektryon, is not the only bird whose name contains the syllable al or el. We have met the lark alauda. If its voice, Greek aude, is here associated with el, so that its name is El's voice, we can see why a Roman legion should have the name. Alkuon, Latin alcedo, is the kingfisher. Alkedonia are the fourteen days when kingfishers brood and the sea is calm. The Greek kuo means contain. The woodpecker is in Latin picus, in Greek druops. As drus is a tree, especially an oak tree, it seems possible that the name means the voice from the tree. Another kind of woodpecker mentioned in The Birds is the drukolaptes. Qol is the Hebrew for voice. The woodpecker was important in augury for its note and appearance. It was sacred to Mars. Perhaps its rapid fire tapping suggested a hail of missiles. The eagle, aetos, was the bird of Zeus. It was often shown on a sceptre [9] . The falcon, hierax, is obviously sacred with such a name (hieros, sacred). In Egypt Horus was the falcon god. The owl, glaux, was sacred to Athene, who is called Glaukopis, with owl-like appearance. Some owls are called horned owls, but in the case of Athene the staring eye is likely to be the reason for the epithet. Sufferers from jaundice were advised to look at the stonecurlew. This bird has large golden eyes. Plutarch writes: "The bird draws out the malady, which issues, like a stream, through the eyesight." The wryneck, iunx, was used by witches for spells. This bird's magical importance may owe something to the fact that it makes a hissing sound, suggestive of a snake. A bronze eagle and a bronze dolphin were set up at Olympia where the chariot races were held. The eagle was raised, and the dolphin lowered, as a signal for the start of a race. Three more words of interest from The Birds may be quoted. Line 275: Exedros is a term used in augury. It means inauspicious, literally 'out of one's seat'. Line 521: The soothsayer is called 'tampon', shining. Line 364: Eleleleu is a Greek war-cry. Among the Central American birds known as quetzals, the 'resplendent trogon' is well known for its long tail feathers, causing it to be worshipped by the Toltecs. The god Quetzalcoatl, whose name means 'tail-feathers' and 'snake', is associated with the morning star, the planet Venus. The resplendent trogon not only had significance because of the tail, but also resembles the hoopoe in having a crest. The Greek adjective epitumbidios, crested, is applied to crested larks, from the resemblance of the crest to a mound. Tumbos, mound or tomb, is the mound over the ashes of a dead person, surmounted by a stele, tombstone. The divine fire in the head is discussed in the chapter dealing with the Timaeus of Plato. The Latin phrase 'jubar stella' means Phosphorus and Hesperus, i. e. the planet Venus. The Latin jubar is the radiance of a heavenly body. Ar is divine fire. Juba is the flowing mane or hair of an animal, the crest of a serpent, the crest of a helmet, the foliage of trees, and the tail of a comet. {S : Notes (Chapter Five: Deities of Delphi)} Notes (Chapter Five: Deities of Delphi) 1. Homer: 'Iliad' XXI: 511 2. Aeschylus: 'Agamemnon' 1085 3. Homer: 'Iliad' XX: 131 4. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 24 5. Vergil: 'Aeneid' IV: 160 ff. 6. Euripides: 'Orestes' 480 7. Hesiod: 'Theogony' 120 8. Pindar: Olympian IX: 219 9. Herodotus: I; 195 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 6: } {T SKY LINKS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER SIX SKY LINKS ACCORDING to Heraclitus, "Thunderbolt steers the Universe. '' We have seen evidence that this was the general view in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. Having begun this study with chthonic forces, we need now to pay more attention to the sky, which was vitally important in ancient thought as the place where action was taken to create cosmos, order, out of chaos. The main features of the Greek myths dealing with cosmogony are: marriage of earth and sky; production of a succession of monsters and giants; a succession of gods; theomachy (battles of gods with gods and with giants and monsters); allocation of spheres of influence; interference with the earth by extraterrestrial bodies and forces. The overall picture has much in common with myths from all over the world. It is important to note that these myths appear at first as history; only later were they interpreted by Greeks and then by modern scholars as anthropomorphic descriptions of natural phenomena, or projections of human psychic activities. The followers of Orpheus taught that the start of the order of the world as they knew it was Aither, upper air, and Chaos, yawning gulf. Night and the wind produced an egg, and from the egg emerged a shining creature, Eros, whose name means love. (Night was the first to prophesy at Delphi as we shall see later). Eros was the same as Phanes, the revealer. Phanes created the first gods. The Greek word theos, god, is probably derived from the word thein, to run. The alternative derivation is from tithemi, put, set in order. An alternative version, leaving out the egg, is given by Hesiod, a Greek poet active in probably the 8th century B. C.. The gods were created by the mating of Ouranos and Gaia, or Ge, the earth. The first god is Ouranos. The usual translation 'sky' or 'heaven' can be misleading. Even as late as the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers (c. 500 B. C.), we have a reference to numerous ouranoi or heavens. We should bear in mind the earlier Greek version which tells us that Ouranos was a god in the sky. Ouranos and Gaia had numerous offspring, e. g. the Titans, six sons and six daughters, whose name implies straining and reaching. Their names were: Okeanos, Koios, Kreios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Kronos, Theia, Rheia, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Of these, Kronos and Iapetos were the most important; at any rate, they are mentioned together by Homer [1] . At first they all lived in the sky, later they were ejected from heaven. Gaia and Ouranos produced the Cyclopes, huge one-eyed creatures, and the hundred-handed monsters. Ouranos had imprisoned his children in Tartarus, the world far below the earth, and their mother Gaia instigated a revolt. Ouranos was displaced by his son Kronos, who castrated his father and ruled in his place. The Romans knew him as Saturnus. Kronos heard that he would be displaced by one of his sons, so he decided to devour them at birth. His wife, Rhea, prevented him from swallowing his son Zeus by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and sent the infant to Crete to be brought up in a cave in a mountain. Kronos (according to Diodorus, Zeus) fought with and defeated a monstrous snake called Ophioneus. After his victory he wore a crown. Zeus banished his father and became ruler of Olympus. He himself had to defeat three revolts. The first was by the Titans. The second was by the sons of Aloeos in Thessaly. Otus and Ephialtes piled Mount Ossa on Mount Olympus, and Pelion on Ossa, in an attempt to storm heaven. The third revolt was by the giants. In all these battles, Zeus won with the help of the aegis (a goatskin) and the thunderbolt. Zeus defeated a monster named Typhoeus or Typhon. It had a hundred snake heads and fiery eyes. Zeus attacked it with thunderbolts and sent it down to Tartarus. Typhon corresponds to Set in Egyptian myth. Set murdered and cut into pieces his brother Osiris. Osiris was avenged by his son Horus. Horus defeated Set, but lost an eye in the process. Firmly established at last, Zeus divided the universe into spheres of influence. He himself had the sky, Poseidon had Ocean, and Hades the underworld: The subsequent history of the Olympian gods is the family history of Zeus, who fathered Apollo, Hermes, Athene, and many others. There was an old Egyptian saying: A god must die when he has seen his son. The Greek deities tended to be classified in male-female groups. For example, there was an archaic altar at Athens showing twelve deities: Zeus-Hera, Poseidon-Demeter, Apollo-Artemis, Ares-Aphrodite, Hermes-Athena, Hephaestus-Hestia. Two great floods, that of Deucalion, and that of Ogyges, were sent by Zeus to punish the human race for its wickedness. The sea is described as a "tear of Kronos" in Plutarch's Isis and 0siris, 364. The source of the floods may well be the waters above the firmament; vide Old Testament: Genesis 1: 7. The succession Ouranos --Kronos --Zeus has a parallel in Hittite myth, where it is Anu, Kumarbi (Kronos), and the storm god Zas. Anu had previously driven out Alalu, the first king of heaven. At Ugarit, on the Asian shore opposite Cyprus, the succession was El, a god with characteristics of a bull; Baal, son of El, the 'rider of the clouds'; and Hadad, god of lightning and the thunderbolt. Hadad, can mean 'The Torch', from Greek das, daidos, torch. The brothers and sisters of Zeus were Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter and Hera. The snake or dragon figures largely in world mythology, and calls for further study before we can proceed. 'Chronos', which means 'time, ' in classical Greek, was a primary cosmic figure, who was personified as a winged snake with many heads. The Babylonian monster Tiamat was a many-headed dragon, according to some reports. It is possible that it resembled a goat. In the Bible, Rahab and Leviathan are serpents, enemies of Yahweh, who destroyed them. "Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength; thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness'' [2] . Can there be here a reference to manna? Which waters are referred to? "The Lord shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea'' [3] . In Akkadian myth there is a battle between Marduk and Tiamat. In Hittite tradition it is between Zas and Illuyankas. At Ugarit the snake is Lotan, slain by Baal. In Indian myth the serpent is defeated by Vishnu. In Norse myth the fight is between the snake and Thor. Blood is shed liberally in these myths. Anath slays the enemies of Baal and wades in their blood; in Egyptian myth Hathor kills the enemies of Re, and Mount Haemus in Thrace is spattered with the blood of Typhon as Zeus pursues and kills him. Horus cuts Apep, Ra's enemy, with a flint knife. The river ran red in Egypt at the time of the Exodus. Before we leave this short and incomplete account of cosmic myths, we may note that Ocean and Night were two of the earliest cosmic entities. Okeanos should not be confused with pontos, or thalassa, two Greek words for sea. Homer, Iliad 14: 200, reads: ''to visit Okeanos, the source (genesis) of gods, and mother Tethys." Okeanos is to be located in the sky, as the '" waters above the firmament," Genesis I. Anath is female, a sister of Baal; Isis is the wife of the murdered Osiris, and in Greek myth there is a goddess, Athene, who was a sky goddess, sharing the aegis with Zeus. It is worth devoting further study to the eastern connection at this point. There were Bacchic revels in Thebes. In Egypt, Thebes is 'Waset'. The Greek word astu, city, easily becomes waste, with the help of a diagram. The legendary origins of the Greek Thebes involve a serpent. Kadmos was the son of Agenor, king of Tyre, the city on the coast of Phoenicia. Zeus fell in love with the sister of Kadmos, Europa, took the form of a bull, and persuaded her to climb on his back. He then swam off with her to Crete. In Crete she gave birth to Minos and Rhadamanthus. Agent sent Kadmos to look for Europa. The Delphic oracle advised him to follow a cow which he would meet, and to found a city where it first lay down. The cow led him to a place in Boeotia, where Kadmos founded the Kadmeia, the citadel of the future city of Thebes. His companions, fetching water from a spring for a sacrifice, were killed by a dragon guarding the spring. Kadmos killed the dragon and sowed the dragon's teeth (on the advice of Athene). Armed men sprang up. He set them fighting each other by throwing a stone into their midst. All but five were killed. The five survivors, the Spartoi or 'sown men', built the Kadmeia. Kadmos taught the Boeotians to write (the Greek alphabet used Phoenician letters). He married Harmonia, a daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. Among their children were Semele and Agave. Eventually Kadmos and Harmonia turned into serpents and departed to Elysium. After killing the serpent, Kadmos had to serve Ares for eight years. One may compare the Daphnephoria, which took place every eight years at Thebes, and the killing by Apollo of the serpent at Delphi, after which Apollo had to serve Admetus for eight years, an episode celebrated in the festival of the Stepteria. Melampus (Blackfoot) was a famous Theban seer. At his home near Pylos he rescued and brought up some young snakes. They licked his ears, giving him understanding of the voices of birds. Later, he met Apollo, who taught him prophecy by sacrifices. The association of Apollo and snakes licking ears occurs also with the Trojan seer Helenos and with Cassandra. Melampus was the ancestor of the kings of Argos, and of the two prophets Amphiaraus and Amphilochus. Theoclymenos, mentioned in Odyssey XV: 256, is an Apollonian practitioner. He has ecstatic visions. He too was descended from Melampus. Apollodorus, 3.17, tells how Polyidos, an observer of birds and snakes, raised Glaucus, son of Minos king of Crete, from the dead. We will now look in closer detail at the sky, through the eyes of the Greeks and of some other peoples. The link with electricity is lightning, and a pattern may emerge if we study a representative selection of the scenes described. An object, or objects, is described in ways that suggest a snake, a snake with wings, a horned creature, a bull, a ram, a seething pot, a stag, a horned snake, a horned owl, a goat, etc.. The Greek word drakon, a dragon, is also the aorist participle of a verb that means to see. It therefore suggests an eye. We have already seen that the Ugaritic El was bull-like. The Greek goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, is given the epithet ox-like or ox-eyed, "boopis potnia Here"[ [4] . In The Bacchae, Dionysus seems to Pentheus to have horns, and the bull leads to disaster [5] . Turning to Akkad, we find the Akkadian monarch Naram Sin wearing, as shown on his stele from Susa, a horned cap. The Cerastae, horned people in Cyprus, were changed by Venus into bullocks [6] . The ceremony of the Suovetaurilia at Rome was a sacrifice of a pig, a sheep and an ox. The word hecatomb reminds us that oxen were sacrificed in great numbers. At a sacrifice, an ox was a victima, a sheep was a hostia. Pigs, horses and dogs were sacrificed. Kerastes is a horned serpent; keratias is a word occurring in Pliny, meaning a comet resembling a horn. The Dorians who entered the Peloponnese after the collapse of Mycenean civilisation worshipped a ram god, Karnos, and in the 6th century B. C., Zeus Ammon appears with ram's horns on coins of Cyrene. Links with the Celtic World: The Celts worshipped horned deities, and Taranis, the thunderer, is the opposite number of Jupiter. Alces, Greek alkis, is the elk, and reminds us of Al, El, horns being a mark of the divine. Much important material is to be found in Pagan Celtic Britain, by Anne Ross, Routledge, 1967. There were two kinds of horned deity. There was an antlered god, Cernunnus, the 'horned one'. Keras is Greek for horn. He often wears a tore. His regular companion is the ram- headed or horned serpent. This often appears with the corresponding version of Mars. The stag god is portrayed as lord of the animals, e. g. on the Gundestrüp cauldron, and may thereby have a link with Minoan Crete. There is an association with Mercury, the Roman Hermes. The second type is of a bull-horned or ram-horned god. This also is associated with Mercury. It is commonest in North Britain, but is also found in Gaul. It is a god of war. There is an example at Maryport, Cumbria, and horned helmets have been found at Orange in France. While on the subject of horned deities, it is worth noting that Hesychius, a 5th century A. D. writer, mentions the Greek word skorobaios as equivalent to scarabos and karabos. Karabos is a stag beetle. Ravens were important to the Celts; they were sacred to Wotan and to Apollo. The North British god Veteris or Vetiris has a boar and a serpent carved on his altar. The Belgae worshipped a ram-horned god, and had bronze figures of a three-horned bull. A dog deity Nodous was worshipped at Lydney in Gloucestershire. Dog meat was taboo for the legendary Irish hero Cuchulainn. Celtic gods were to be placated by ritual, sacrifices and incantations. They were not immortal. At Reinheim, near Saarbrucken, in 1954, there was discovered a burial of a queen or princess. A gold tore displayed a head of a female surmounted by an owl head like that of Minerva. Owls, including the horned owl, were sacred to Athene. In 1891 in Denmark, a cauldron, the Gundestrup cauldron, was discovered. The scene is the slaying of a huge bull. When an Irish king was to be chosen, the men of Erin killed a bull. One man ate some of the flesh, and a spell was chanted over him in his bed. The person he saw in his sleep would become king. The cult of the severed head in Celtic religion may be linked with the tore. Cernunnus, the antlered god, often wears a torc. He is probably the same as Hern the Hunter in British folk lore. The Celtic for a sanctuary is nemeton, similar to the Latin nemus, a grove. I append some passages referring chiefly to the sky and the bull, many from Homer and Vergil, some from the east. Iliad V: 654: Hades has the epithet Klytopolos, famous for horses. Iliad XV: 184: Poseidon is angry when Iris is sent to tell him to stop fighting. He reminds her that when the universe was divided between the three gods, the earth and Olympus were held in common. Iliad XV: 225: The enerteroi, gods who dwell below with Kronos. Iliad XX: In this book, the gods join the war at Troy in earnest, Poseidon versus Apollo, Athene versus Ares, Hera versus Artemis, Leto versus Hermes, Hephaestus versus Scamander (the river). Odyssey III: 6: Poseidon the Earthshaker, of the sable locks. Odyssey VI: 42: Athene goes to Olympus, where the gods are said to have their eternal home. It is not shaken by winds, nor drenched with rainstorms or snow, but cloudless air and white radiance play over it. In it the blessed gods spend all their days in happiness. Aeneid X: 565: Like Aegaeon, who they say had a hundred arms, and breathed out fire from fifty breasts and mouths, rattling with as many shields and drawing as many swords as Jove hurled thunderbolts, so was Aeneas on the battlefield against Turnus and his troops. A. N. E. T. (Ancient Near-Eastern Texts, J. B. Pritchard (Princeton, 3rd Edition 1967): ''Primordial Apsu, and Mummu Tiamat. '' Apsu is male, fresh water. Mummu is female, salt water. The Cyclops Brontes, thunderer, is one of those named as father of Athene. Centaurs were hybristic, and self-indulgent in sexual matters. Centaur, was a slang term for pederast. Aristophanes, Clouds 346: Socrates: ''Have you ever looked up and seen a cloud looking like a centaur or lynx or wolf or bull?" "Good Lord, yes! '' Glaucopis, bright-eyed, a standard epithet of Athene, is also applied to snakes. {S : LEVIATHAN.} LEVIATHAN. Yahweh controls the waters, smites Leviathan, and then creates day and night: "Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength; thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness. Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood; thou driedst up mighty rivers. The day is shine, the night also is shine; thou hast prepared the light and the sun. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth; thou hast made summer and winter'' [7] . At Ugarit, Baal (son of El) slays Lotan with the seven heads. In Egypt, Apophis is slain (in one text he is slain by Set). Marduk defeats Tiamat in the Babylonian version, and the Hittites, Illuyankas is slain by the storm god. Farther afield, one meets Vishnu and the serpent, the Midgard serpent, and the Chinese dragon. Chronos (Kronos) defeats Ophioneus (ophis = snake), and wears a crown. In a quarrel between Ares and Hephaestus, Dionysus defeated Hephaestus by means of wine, and led him to Olympus on a mule. Mesonux: This is the name of the Midnight Planet, one of the seven planets, so named by the Pythagoreans. It is mentioned by the poet Stesichorus. The Moirae were spinners of the thread of life and fate. In the Orphic version, they lived in Ouranos, in a cave by the pool, where white water gushes from the cave. According to Hesiod, they were daughters of Zeus and Themis. Ophion: Eurynome and Ophion ruled over the Titans before Kronos and Rhea. They resided on Olympus. Typhoeus: In Aeneid VIII: 298, he is described as 'towering'. PASSAGES ON VARIOUS TOPICS: THE ORIENT; BULLS; THEBES. Iliad XX: 402 ff.: Achilles strikes Hippodamas in the back; he expires, bellowing like a bull dragged round the Lord of Helike by youths in whom the Earthshaker delights. Helike in Achaea was a centre of worship of Poseidon. The roaring of the victim is taken to mean that the god accepts the sacrifice. Aeneid VIII: 77: Aeneas prays to the river Tiber: "O father Tiber, horned river, ruler of the waters of Hesperia ... '' Pausanias I: 34: 2: Near Oropus the earth split open to receive Amphiaraus and his chariot. Pausanias IX: 8: 4: The Elektra Gate at Thebes is named after Elektra, sister of Kadmos. The Neistan gates were named after the last lyre string, the netes, which Amphion invented at these gates. But Amphion's brother Zethos was called Neis, and the gates may have been named after him. Neate chorde is the lowest string (highest in pitch). Kapaneus attacked the wall at the Elektra Gate and was struck by lightning. Further instances from Pausanias: IX: 12: 2: There is an altar and statue of Athene Onka, dedicated by Kadmos. IX: 17: 2: Near the shrine of Artemis of Fair Fame at Thebes is a stone lion. X: 15: 3: King Attalus of Pergamum was 'Son of the Bull'; he was addressed by an oracle as son of a bull. IV: 1: 6 f.: The Great Goddesses were worshipped at Thebes, in the oak-forest of Lykos. The Kabeiroi initiations were introduced to Thebes by Methapos. The Golden Bough, Chapter 36: Asiatic Greeks strung up an ox in a tree and stabbed it. Zas and Chthonie. Iliad VI: 303: Hecabe chooses her longest and richest dress, Sidonian work, as a present for Athene. Theano lays the robe on the knees of the goddess and prays for Trojan success against Diomedes. The Anakalypteria is the Festival of Unveiling, and a time for giving the wedding presents. When the oikia, home and contents, are ready, Zas makes a fine big pharos, robe, and on it he creates Ge and Ogenos and the halls (domata) of Ogenus. (Grenfell and Hunt, Greek Papyri Series II: 11 p. 23. 3rd Century A. D.). Does Chthonie put on the robe to become Ge, or is the robe hung on the tree? Isidorus: "So that they may learn what is the winged oak and the decorated pharos on it, all that Pherecydes theologised in allegory, taking his starting point from the prophecy of Ham. '' But consider also the poetry of the man of Syros, and Zeus and Chthonie and the love in them, and the coming-into-being of Ophioneus and the battle of the gods, and the tree and the peplos. Maximus Tyrius: IV: 4. I suggest that there may be a correspondence here with Yggdrasyl. Some passages referring to the bull: Achelous. Hesiod, Theogony 340: He was a child of Tethys and Ocean. Iliad XXI: 194: Not even the mighty Achelous can fight against Zeus. He had a bull's horn in his forehead, like Okeanos. Herakles had broken off the other. Pasiphae was a daughter of the sun. She married Minos, king of Crete. Poseidon made her fall in love with a bull as punishment for her husband's refusal to sacrifice to Poseidon a beautiful bull that he sent. She gave birth to the Minter, half man, half bull. It was kept in the labyrinth built by Daedalus. The name Pasiphae means 'shining on all'. The name could well be given to a bright heavenly body such as the moon, or a comet. The story is rather similar to the story from Ugarit about Anath and Baal. An announcement is made that a wild ox is born to Baal, a buffalo to the Rider of the Clouds. This chapter would be incomplete without reference to the relationship between Zeus and his sister-wife Hera. Their sacred marriage was celebrated each year in Crete. In Iliad XIV, Homer describes the seductive wiles of Hera when she distracts Zeus's attention so that Poseidon may help the Greeks. The fragrance of the ambrosia with which she anoints herself reaches heaven and earth (line 174), and her veil, of spun material, is as bright as the sun (line 185). When they embrace on Mount Gargaros, they surround themselves with a golden cloud, and dew rains on them (line 350). Early in Book XV, when Zeus wakes up, he is angry. He reminds her that he once fettered her and suspended her in the sky, and cast out of heaven those who had helped her. In line 26 we read of Herakles being despatched by Hera over the sea with the help of Boreas. It seems likely that the sacred marriage aimed at restricting the god's amorous escapades, and at preventing him upsetting the cosmos by introducing additions to the Olympic family. Possibly Hera was the atmosphere round Zeus, and people feared the result of anger and separation. when Ixion tried to rape Hera, he was deceived by a cloud in the shape of Hera. The Egyptian hra means 'face, or 'upon. ' {S : Notes (Chapter Six: Sky Links)} Notes (Chapter Six: Sky Links) 1. Homer: 'Iliad= VIII: 479 2. Old Testament: Psalm, LXXIV: 13 3. Old Testament: Isaiah, XXVII: l 4. Homer: 'Iliad' VIII: 471. 5. Euripides: >The Bacchae= 1159 6. Ovid: >Metamorphoses' X: 222 7. Old Testament: Psalm LXXIV: 13-17 95 a. 96 follow. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 7: } {T SACRIFICE} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER SEVEN SACRIFICE THE Greeks (and many others) tell us that strange objects appeared in the sky, often with unpleasant consequences for the earth. If we assume that they were telling the truth as they saw it, then their reactions appear to have a certain logic behind them. I suggest that imitation, better still imitation with slight alterations to portray a safe outcome, was the reaction of the peoples of the world; in fact, sympathetic magic. The hope must have been that a celestial object which, from previous experience, might be a threat to survival, would go away, assume a safer orbit, etc.. Since it was not possible to repel such gods or monsters by ordinary physical means, sympathetic magic and prayers were the only possibilities. Here we have one explanation of sacrifice. This is not a modern interpretation. Plutarch, in his Isis and Osiris, 362 E, tells us that "the Egyptians sacrifice to Typhon with the intention of soothing his anger, yet at some festivals they insult red-headed men, and throw an ass over a cliff, because Typhon was red- headed and like an ass in colour." In 363 B, he says that the Egyptians sacrifice red cattle because Typhon was red. The Greek verb sphazo means slaughter, Hebrew zabhach. The thuoskoos was the priest who slew and offered the victim. Thusiue are rites, or offerings. Thrustas boe is the cry uttered in sacrificing [1] . 'Thuo', usually translated as "I sacrifice", implies 'I offer part of a meal as first fruits to a god, by throwing it on the fire'. The hiereus was a priest who divined from the victim's entrails. The procedure was that an ox would have its horns gilded. Hair was cut from the forehead of the ox and thrown on the fire before it was killed. At Rome a fillet, a band of red and white wool, was worn by both priest and victim. The victim was bedecked with garlands, and some of the hair burnt. The vitta, fillet, was worn by poets, brides, Vestal Virgins, tied round altars [2] , and on sacred trees. {S : THE SACRIFICE OF GOATS.} THE SACRIFICE OF GOATS. The goat Amalthea was foster mother to Zeus. The monster Tiamat, according to an old tradition, had the appearance of a goat. The animal was clearly of great importance to the Greeks, and a he-goat was sacrificed in March at the start of the Great Dionysia, the drama festival in honour of Dionysus. The goat was used for removing guilt from a community, and the term scapegoat is still in use today. "And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness" [3] . "And he shall go out into the altar that is before the Lord, and make an atonement for it; and shall take of the blood of the bullock, and of the blood of the goat, and put it upon the horns of the altar round about" [4] "And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness" [5] . Goat and horse sacrifices are mentioned in the Rig Veda. In Greek a pharmakos is a sorcerer, also a human scapegoat. The word occurs in the Agamemnon, line 548, "pharmakon blabes", a scapegoat against harm, and in Aristophanes, The Frogs, line 733. In the festival of the Thargelia at Athens two men were driven out. Originally two men had been put to death in an expiatory sacrifice. In Chaeronea, hunger, boulimos, was whipped out of the door in the form of a slave. At Massilia, in time of plague, a poor man was feasted for a year, then expelled (see Greek Religion, by Walter Burkert). In Greece, an ox was driven out, across the city boundary, or towards enemies [6] . The aegis was the shield of Zeus, and seems to have been made of goatskin. It appears on statues of Athene as a short scaly cloak. It is fringed with tassels, thusanoessa. 'Thusanos', tassel, is also the arm of a cuttlefish. It is described by Homer: "phobos estephanotai", crowned, or surrounded, with fear [7] . Strife, Might, and Rout are shown on it, and it is set with the head of the Gorgon. The combination of goatskin and snake-like arms suggests a connection with Tiamat, the cosmic serpent mentioned above. There are plenty of accounts of monsters with writhing limbs, etc., so the derivation of aegis and of aix, a goat, from the verb 'aisso', to move with a quick darting motion, is easy. If we turn to Norse myth, we find confirmation. Thor, the sky god who wielded his hammer Myollnir, lightning, with iron gloves on his hands and wearing a belt of strength, rattled through the sky in his carriage drawn by goats. His hammer had a handle slightly too short. This is normally explained by reference to throwing hammers with a hole in the end of the shaft, but another interpretation is possible, since in mountainous country, if one sees lightning strike the cairn on a peak it seems to fall short. Thor was provided with gigantic cauldrons, which remind us of the seething pot in the sky (Old Testament Jeremiah 1: 13). Thor had a red beard, and there is probably a connection with what the Greeks say they saw in the sky. There is a story that the giant Thrym stole Thor's hammer. To recover it, Thor disguised himself as Freya, to be married to the giant. At the wedding feast Thrym tried to kiss the bride, but was disconcerted to see the fierce glare of the bride's eyes under the veil. When the hammer was passed round to bring good luck, Thor got his hands on it, and the crisis was over. Incidentally, a feather suit such as Freya wore is also worn by Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, the feathered serpent of Central American myth. Thor's encounter with the Midgard Serpent is well known. The Tarnhelm, or helmet of invisibility, may be a link with Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. The Greeks commonly used two words for an altar: 'bomos', and 'eschara'. Eschara means especially a hearth, such as there was at the shrine at Delphi by the Pythia's tripod. An altar was of stone and had horns at the corners. It was sometimes decorated in relief with a serpent. There is a Celtic example, showing a ram-headed serpent, at Lypiatt Park, Gloucestershire. There was an altar to Apollo at Delos, his birthplace, made entirely of horn, according to Plutarch: "I saw the horn altar, celebrated as one of the seven wonders, for it needs no glue or other bond, but is fixed and fitted together only by horns taken from the right side of the head" [8] . It is obvious that this altar, and any other with horns of real horn as opposed to stone representations, would not be used for an ordinary fire. The aim was to induce a lightning strike on the victim. Electrical action from the sky would be more likely if water or blood were poured over the victim and round the altar, and this is in fact what was done. There are remains of altars on the island of Samothrace. A temple precinct there had a 'bothros', or pit, and an eschara or hearth altar, and at Thera there is an open air temenos dedicated by Artemidorus, a Greek from Perge. It is cut in the rock of a low cliff. The altar to the Samothracian gods (who are closely connected with magnetism and electricity) has a hole six inches in diameter cut in the top, a channel from this to ground level, a distance of forty inches, and a shallow depression in front of the altar in the stone floor of the temenos. It is well designed for conductivity. The altar constructed by Elijah has been mentioned, but there is so clear a description of the technique that it deserves to be quoted at greater length. "And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under. And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made. And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud; for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them. And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor any answer, nor any that regarded. And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down. And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the Lord came, saying, Israel shall be thy name: And with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord: and he made a trench about the altar, as great as would contain two measures of seed. And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood. And he said, Do it the second time. And they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third time. And the water ran around about the altar; and he filled the trench also with water. And it came to pass at the tune of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art god in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the Lord God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again. Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, the Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God" [9] . If electrical effects began to fade the design would be changed, altars and horns would be of stone throughout, to allow an ordinary fire to be used to stimulate or to replace the electrical fire from the sky. There is another word for an altar in Greek --thumele. It was analtar-shaped platform with steps, practically a mini-ziggurat, which was placed in the middle of the orchestra, the circular area in front of the stage in a Greek theatre. 'Thumele' suggests the verb 'thuo', sacrifice by burnt offerings. It is also called 'eleos'. The Greek writer Julius Pollux, fl. A. D. 180, tells us that it was an ancient table; before the time of Thespis a man mounted it and spoke to the chorus. Yet another name for an altar is thuoros. Presumably it is from thuo, sacrifice by fire, and oros, mountain. It means a sacrificial table, for offerings. According to Pherecydes, a 6th century B. C. logographos or chronicler, it is the gods' word for trapeza, the usual word for a table. Opinions differ as to whether a trapeza originally had three legs or four. Trapeza also means a part of the liver. {S : MAGIC; SACRIFICE: SOME RELEVANT PASSAGES.} MAGIC; SACRIFICE: SOME RELEVANT PASSAGES. Iliad XVII: 520: Just as when a strong man with a sharp axe cuts behind the horns of an ox, cutting right through, and the ox jumps forward and collapses, so he (Aretus) jumped and fell on his back. Odyssey III: 418: Nestor gave orders for a heifer to be brought from the field. The goldsmith Laerces gilded the heifer's horns. Wood was brought to go round the altar, and fresh water. The smith beat the gold into foil and laid it round the heifer's horns. Aretus brought a flowered lustral bowl and a basket for barley grains. Thrasymedes held a sharp axe (pelekus), and Perseus held the dish (amnion) to catch the blood. Nestor started the sacrifice by sprinkling lustral water and grain, and throwing a lock from the ox's head into the fire ... They prayed and threw grains of barley, and Thrasymedes struck (elasen). The axe cut the tendons of the neck and the heifer collapsed. The women raised their cry. The men lifted up the heifer from the ground and Peisistratus cut its throat (sphaxen). When the blood had run out and it was dead, they cut up the body, cut slices from the thighs, wrapped them in folds of fat and laid raw meat on them. The old man burnt them on the faggots, and sprinkled fiery wine on them. The young men beside him held five-pronged forks. When the thighs were burnt and they had tasted the inner parts, they cut up the rest and skewered it on spits over the fire. Odyssey III: 464 ff.: Polycaste gave Telemachus a bath, rubbed him with olive oil, and he looked like a god. He sat down to the feast. When they had roasted the flesh on the spits, they ate and drank. Then Nestor, mindful of the laws of hospitality, ordered horses and chariot to be prepared so that Telemachus would not have to start on his journey alone. Aeneid II: 268 ff.: Aeneas is asleep while the Greeks are mounting the final attack on Troy. Hector appears to him in a dream, and urges him to leave at once with the Penates. He brings out from their shrine the fillets (vittas) and mighty Vesta and the eternal fire. Aeneid IV: 54 ff.: Dido confides in her sister Anna, and consults the gods about her hoped- for marriage with Aeneas. They visit the shrines, asking for the favour of the gods. They sacrifice selected sheep to Ceres, to Phoebus and to Bacchus, especially to Juno, who presides over marriage. Dido herself holds the dish and pours the wine between the horns of a white cow, or walks up and down before the faces of the gods' statues at their altars covered in offerings, and celebrates each day anew with gifts. She studies the open breasts of victims, gazing with parted lips at their steaming entrails. Alas for the ignorant minds of seers! What help to the infatuated woman are prayers and shrines? The flame consumes the soft marrow of her bones, the wound in her heart is silent yet alive. Unhappy Dido burns; she wanders, out of her mind, all over the city. Aeneid IV: 450: Bad omens on altars: The sacred water turns black and the wine turns into blood. V: 84: At the funeral games for his father, Aeneas sees a huge snake, writhing in seven coils, creeping over the burial mound and altars. It consumes the offering, then departs. Pausanias I: 16: 1: When Seleucus set out from Macedonia with Alexander, the firewood on the altar moved and burned spontaneously. II: 5: 5: Between Corinth and Sicyon is a burnt temple to Apollo. One story is that it was dedicated to Olympian Zeus, and sudden fire fell on it and burnt it down. GOATS Iliad IV: 166: Agamemnon consoles the wounded Menelaus: Zeus who lives high up in heaven will be angry at the Trojan's treachery and will shake his dark aegis at them all. Pausanias III: 15: 9: The Laconians sacrifice goats to Hera the goat-eater. Herakles founded the sanctuary and was the first to sacrifice goats. Iliad XVII: 593: Apollo inspires Hector, and the son of Kronos takes up his glittering tasselled aegis, veils Mount Ida in cloud, and sends a lightning flash with a great clap of thunder. He shakes his aegis, and gives victory to the Trojans, putting the Achaeans to flight. Herodotos IV: Greeks took the aegis for statues of Athene from Libya. The dress of Libyan women is of leather and has tassels of leather instead of snakes. Libyan women also wear goatskins dyed red, fringed. Aristotle refers to the fall of a meteorite at Aegospotami (goat's river), when a comet was in the sky. Frazer, The Golden Bough XLIII, mentions Dionysus as "The one of the black goatskin." When the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat. At Rome a she-goat was sacrificed to Jupiter Vedijovis. At Tenedos the new born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins. At Delphi the dragon Python had a son called Aix (goat). ALTARS Aeneid IV: 219: Iarbas, the unsuccessful suitor, prays to Jupiter Ammon with complaints against Aeneas, this second Paris, wearing a Phrygian cap tied under his chin and over his oiled hair, accompanied by the train of effeminates. As he prayed, he held his hand on the altar. Iliad XX: 402: A bull is dragged round the altar. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, line 325: Homer crossed to Delos to the assembly (paneguris), and standing on the horn altar he recited the Hymn to Apollo. {S : Notes (Chapter Seven: Sacrifice)} Notes (Chapter Seven: Sacrifice) 1. Aeschylus: 'Seven Against Thebes' 269 2. Vergil: 'Eclogues' VIII: 64 3. Old Testament Leviticus XVI: 7-10 4. Ibid. Verse 18 5. Ibid. Verse 21 6. Plutarch: 'Quaestiones Graecae' 297 7. Homer: 'Iliad' V: 738 ff. 8. Plutarch: 'The Intelligence of Animals' 983 9. Old Testament I Kings XVIII: 25 ff. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 8: } {T SKY AND STAGE} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER EIGHT SKY AND STAGE WE are now in a position to reconsider the origin and significance of Greek tragedy. A goat- song festival began with the sacrifice of a bull at the beginning of the Great Dionysia at Athens. The bull was slain as the procession entered the city; a he-goat was sacrificed, probably on the thymele, and the festival of drama began. The sacrifice was accompanied by a dithyramb. This was a form of lyric poetry heard especially at Athens. It was in the Phrygian mode, as befitted Dionysus, accompanied by pipes. The leader mounted the eleos (thymele), or altar, to recite a tale in trochaic metre about Dionysus. There was a circular movement of the chorus, probably with reversal of direction for the antistrophe. There is a fragment of Aeschylus, addressed to a female chorus: "You are to stand round this altar and shining fire, and pray, in a circular formation." The word tragedy comes from 'ode', song, and 'tragos', goat. The other word for a goat, aix, is used by Aristotle to mean a fiery meteor. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, developed from the leaders (exarchontes) of the dithyramb. The first name known to us of a tragedian is that of Arion, who flourished around 600 B. C. in the city of Corinth. Choral odes in tragedy retained the Doric dialect of Dorian Corinth. Thespis, about 536, wrote the first recorded tragedy. There was one actor, and the chorus. In the early days of Greek dithyramb, inflated goat skins were covered with olive oil. The chorus jumped on them and slithered off. The scenery for a tragedy was usually a palace or a temple. In the 5th and 4th centuries B. C., there would be a prologue, in which one, or sometimes two, actors introduced the subject of the play, but this was a later development. A primitive tragedy began with the entrance of the chorus, originally resembling satyrs (capripedes satyri Horace). They were generally humble inhabitants of the city where the action of the play took place. There would be twelve or more of them. At each side of the orchestra there was a parodos, or entrance, which gave its name to the opening song, parodos, of the chorus, which was accompanied by a musician playing a pipe. The actor, or 'struggler' (agonistes) came onto the stage. 'Episode' is an entrance. The chorus, rather than solo actors, were the original performers, but a second actor was introduced by Aeschylus in the 5th century, and a third by Sophocles. The first actor was the protagonist, the second the deuteragonist, and the third the tritagonist. In a very early tragedy the subject matter would be the life and death of a god, especially Dionysus. Later, heroes would be the subject, and eventually ordinary people. When tragedians abandoned stories about Dionysus, public criticism said 'It's nothing to do with Dionysus'. Aeschylus introduced the tetralogy to meet this objection. His 'Oresteia' had the 'Proteus' as a satyr play to follow the three tragedies. The actors wore masks. We learn from the Roman poet Horace that Thespis, regarded by many as the inventor of tragedy, went on tour with wagons, presumably used as a stage; his players coloured their faces red with wine lees. He is also said to have introduced masks made of linen. In the 5th century at any rate, the masks had expressions that suited the character of the wearer. The mask had a projection, onkos, at the top, supporting a high wig. The actor wore cothornoi or buskins. These were high boots, laced at the front, with a thick sole which would increase the height of the actor and help to give an imposing and even supernatural appearance. Since a buskin could be worn on either foot, the word became a nickname for a trimmer in politics. The actor wore a wig, headress and a long robe. Female parts were played by men. (In a comedy, actors wore a sisura, goatskin, like a shawl, over the tunic). The episodes in a tragedy were scenes involving actors and chorus. Between episodes the chorus would sing a stasimon, a song during which they would stand in one place, as opposed to the parodos when they entered. The stasima were reflections on the action that had just taken place in the episode. After the final episode, there was a final stasimon, then the exodos or final scene. It is generally held that in Aeschylus's plays the emphasis is on the gods controlling events, as in the Iliad; in the plays of Sophocles the clash is between man and god; in Euripides the heroes and heroines may be brought right down to earth, but the gods are never far away. Euripides was attacked by Aristophanes for clothing his characters in rags. To give an example in detail, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus portrays the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aigisthos. In the next play of the trilogy, Orestes murders his mother to avenge his father, acting on the instructions of the god Apollo. In the third play, the Eumenides, he is under attack from the Furies, or Eumenides, divine pursuers who take a different view of the action of Orestes from Apollo. Man is a puppet, pulled this way and that by warring deities. In his clash with an opposing force (god, hero, man or woman), a fatal flaw in the character of the tragic hero is revealed. Hamartia, the Greek word for sin in the New Testament, means in classical Greek missing the mark, going astray. The cause of the error is probably hubris, or arrogance, going too high and too far, like a god. The corresponding word in Latin, which comes from the same root, is superbia. It implies setting oneself up above one's fellow mortals. This results in a confrontation, and at some point the complications of the plot are resolved by a change of direction and fortune, the peripeteia. The hero who was successful and powerful is overthrown. In most tragedies, great importance attaches to a recognition scene which leads to, or indeed is part of, the peripeteia. In the Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus, king of Thebes, has been very, even too, successful. He has answered the riddle of the Sphinx, been rewarded with the throne of Thebes and with Jocasta, the widowed queen. When plague affects the city, he undertakes to find the guilty man who has brought pollution. He is himself revealed as the guilty man, a man who has murdered his father and married his mother. It is through his own persistence that he finds out who he is, and is revealed as the cause of the plague. In The Bacchae of Euripides, it is the Stranger who is revealed as the god Dionysus. After the katastrophe, or overturning, things settle down to a new order, possibly helped by the appearance of a god or goddess from the sky, lowered by a crane (deus ex machina). Scene shifting and stage effects were employed in a Greek theatre. The ekkuklema was a device for rapidly removing scenery to reveal the interior of a house. There was a lightning machine, keraunoskopeion, and a thunder machine, bronteion. The tragic pattern is a sequence: koros, a surfeit of happiness and success; hubris, the resulting arrogant behaviour; nemesis, the desire of the gods for vengeance. They are red in the face with anger. They send ate, the blind folly which is associated with disaster which the victim brings on himself. Then come the peripeteia and katastrophe. It is noteworthy that the word peripeteia is cognate with a verb meaning to collide, with unpleasant results. It is used, of ships colliding, by the historian Thucydides. The Greeks felt that life was a matter of walking along a razor's edge. Any excess in any direction might prove disastrous. 'Nothing to excess' was one of the precepts engraved in stone at Delphi. With luck, life would go smoothly with the appropriate rites and sacrifices carefully observed. The slightest irregularity, hamartia, could bring ruin. This idea may have influenced the Greek philosopher Epicurus, best known through his follower the Roman poet Lucretius, whose account of nature and the universe is expressed, as was usual for exalted subjects, in a poem, De Rerum Natura. The gods, if they exist, are far away. There is no need to fear them and placate them with human sacrifices, as was done in the case of Iphigenia in the hope of getting a fair wind for the voyage to Troy. There is a rational cause for everything that happens. But Epicurus and Lucretius were then faced with the problem of free will. The solution put forward by Lucretius, that the atoms of which matter is composed have a tiny swerve, exiguum clinamen, introduces an element of uncertainty worthy of Heisenberg (De Rerum Natura II: 292). It begins to look as if a Greek tragedy was a religious ceremony originally connected with a threat from the sky. In particular, it tried to counter a threat which had assumed the appearance of a goat. The aegis or goatskin inspired terror when waved, and, with the thunderbolt, played a leading part in the battles in the sky which are described so vividly in stories from all over the world, including Greece. The members of the chorus were in rectangular formation, but originally, in the dithyramb, they were in circular formation, as mentioned above. I suggest that they represented the solar system as the Greeks understood and described it. The intrusion of a strange body, with glaring eye (drakon), prominences that are compared to horns, a fiery crown, and a flowing tail, causes a disruption of the status quo. The danger is only averted when the object assumes a different course, is brought low like Lucifer, and is sent down to Tartarus. The representation by chorus and actors was not only a matter of remembering great events, of returning to Eliade's 'illud tempus', the past events and tune of great significance. It was also, and primarily, apotropaic, aimed at preventing disaster. We have already met a similar idea in the previous chapter in Plutarch's reference to Typhon. The axe used for sacrifice was the pelekus, a double edged axe. In Odyssey III: 442, it is used for slaying a bull. In Iliad XVII: 520, Automedon uses one in battle, and lays low his opponent like a priest at a sacrifice. For the word pelekus, compare Peleg, O. T. Genesis X: 25, in whose days the earth was divided. The head of the double axe resembles the thunderbolt as portrayed in the hand of Zeus. It can be compared with Thor's hammer Mjollnir, lightning. COMEDY The word 'comedy' is cognate with the Greek word 'komos', a revel, and resembles 'kome', a village. Aristotle says that comedy owed its origin to the leaders of the phallic songs. It shares with tragedy certain features. The chorus, twelve men and twelve women, wore masks and were caricatures of ordinary people, sometimes dressed as, for example, birds or wasps. They were generally padded, but removed their outer garments when they danced. They were equipped with phallic symbols, and specialised in a lascivious dance, the Kordax. This dance, associated with drunken revelry, originated in the Peloponnese, in honour of Artemis. After the parabasis (entrance of the chorus) there was a contest between two leading characters, an agon. The function of the chorus in comedy was to spur on the contestants, whereas in tragedy they usually only commented and tried to appease. After various episodes, a comedy ended with an exodus of celebrations, feasting, or a wedding. Just as electricity in the sky played its part in the origin of dithyramb and tragedy, so on the earth, in comedy its physiological effects were demonstrated and perceived by the chorus as the force behind fertility rites associated especially with Dionysus, Hermes, Demeter, and Pan. {S : POETIC INSPIRATION} POETIC INSPIRATION If we accept the idea that the Greek oracles exploited electrical stimulation of the Sibyl, we can hardly avoid considering an electrical basis for the Greek theory of poetic inspiration. The 7th century Greek poet Archilochus, Fragment 120, declares that he can create the dithyramb when lightning-struck by wine [1] . The Roman poet Statius has laurigerosque ignes, laurel-bearing fire, for poetic inspiration (Achilleid I: 509). The Muses were led by Apollo. They, together with the oracles, were the source of information which the Greek and Roman poets tapped. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 69, has: "I sent Kreon to Phoebus's temple to find out (pythoit) what I should do to save this city." The resemblance between Pytho and pythoit, the verb 'to find out', is a happy one. Line 8 of the first book of the Aeneid reads: "Musa, mihi causas memora..." Muse, tell me the causes ... The poet was thought of as inspired by an external force causing a condition akin to madness, 'mania'. 'Mantis' is the Greek for a prophet, and we have seen instances of mantic possession of the Sibyl at Cumae, when consulted by Aeneas, and of Cassandra on her arrival at Mycenae. Poetic inspiration was originally like this, accompanied in some cases, perhaps always at first, by dance. The verb skirtao, dance, which is used in The Bacchae, is associated with the frolics of goats. The temenos or sacred precinct at Samothrace had Ionic propylaea, or entrance gates, with a sculptured frieze of dancing girls. At Delphi, the Thriae, three goddesses who were associated with prophecy by lot, relied on honey for inspiration (Homeric Hymn to Hermes, line 560): "And when they are inspired through eating yellow honey, they are keen to speak the truth." "Inspired" here suggests 'set on fire', Greek 'thuiosin'. We can compare Vergil, Georgic IV, where honey is "caelestia mella", and bees have a share of the divine nature. The Homeric bard or rhapsode wore a purple cloak when reciting from the Iliad, and a green one when reciting from the Odyssey. The word rhapsodos is generally thought to come from rhapto, stitch. The minstrel stitches words together. It also suggests rhapis, a staff, and the satrap, the rod of Set, and the augur with his lituus. It is likely that the minstrel originally carried a staff not merely as a symbol of authority, but because of its association with electrical influences, as in the case of Moses's rod, and the ark. The words of Archilochus, already quoted, are certainly not against this idea. A. E. Housman spoke of poetic inspiration in his own case coming as a physical sensation while shaving. The poet Hesiod, Theogony 30, describes his inspiration by the Muses: "So spoke the beautifully sounding daughters of great Zeus, and they cut off and gave me a shoot of strong laurel as a rod (skeptron), and breathed into me a divine voice, so that I should celebrate things future and past. "In the Euthydemus of Plato, 277 d, there is an argument as to whether a learner in a class is wise or not. Euthydemus is questioning Kleinias. Socrates intervenes to warn Kleinias and his friend Dionysodorus: "Perhaps you don't realise what the two strangers are doing to you. They are doing what those do in the rite of the Corybants, when they hold an 'enthronement' around the one they are going to initiate. Furthermore, there is a kind of dancing there and children's games, as you know if you have been initiated. And now these two are simply dancing round you, and are dancing in play, initiating you afterwards." According to Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Kadmos saw a dance at Samothrace, with music from double pipes, and the clashing of spears on shields. In the Ion of Plato, Socrates discusses with a bard, Ion, the nature of a minstrel's art and inspiration. "I see, Ion, and I come to show you what I think this is. For this speaking well of yours about Homer is not a 'skill', as was said just now, but a divine power which sets you in motion. Just as in the stone which Euripides called the Magnesian stone, and most others the Heraclean. Further, this stone not only leads the iron rings themselves, but also puts a power into the rings so that they can do this very thing which the stone does, attract other rings, so that sometimes a long chain of bits of iron and rings is formed, hanging from each other. And thus the Muse herself makes people full of god, and through these inspired people a ring of other inspired people is found. For all epic poets, if they are good, utter all their fine poems not through art, but by being filled with the god and possessed, and good lyric poets similarly, just as Corybants dance when out of their minds; thus lyricists are not in their right minds when they create these beautiful lyric poems. But when they embark upon harmony and rhythm, they are filled with, and controlled by, Bacchic frenzy, just as Bacchants when they are in their right minds; and the soul of lyric poets does this, as they themselves say. For the poets tell us, indeed, that they bring us lyrical poetry from springs flowing with honey from certain orchards and glades of the Muses, like bees, and they fly, too, like the bees. And they speak truly. For a poet is a light, winged and holy creature, who cannot create before the god enters him, and he is in ecstasy, and reason has left him (as long as he is in his right senses, every man is incapable of creating and singing prophetic songs). So in so far as they create not by art and by saying many fine things about men's deeds, as you do about Homer, but by divine lot, each one is only able to do that to which the Muse has impelled him, one to dithyramb, another to panegyrics, one to choral odes, another to epic, another to iambics. In other branches he has poor ability. For they create this poetry not by art but by a divine power, since if by art they knew how to create well, they would be able to do so in all branches. For this cause the god robs them of their reason when he uses, as his servants, prophets and divine seers, so that we who hear may know that it is not they who say such valuable things while out of their senses, but that it is the god himself who speaks, and is intelligible to us through them." [2] When reading the above remarks about the Magnesian stone, or magnet, Chiron comes to mind. He was a centaur, son of Kronos and a daughter of Oceanus. He was half man and half horse, since in a domestic crisis Kronos had disguised himself as a horse. Chiron was the teacher of Asclepius and of Achilles, and was wise and just. He is referred to as the Magnesian centaur by Pindar, Pythian III: 45. Plato, Ion 535e: "Do you realise then that the spectator is the last of the rings which I said took their force from each other under the action of the Heraclean stone? You, the rhapsode and actor, are the middle man, the poet himself is the first. And the god, acting through all these, pulls the human psyche in whatever direction he wishes, making a suspended chain of force. And, just as from that lodestone, a great chain is set up of dancers, directors and assistants, obliquely dependent from the rings suspended from the Muse. And one poet is dependent from one Muse, another from another; we say 'possessed', but it is the same thing, for he is held; and from those first rings, the poets, others are suspended in turn and filled with the god, some inspired by Orpheus, some by Musaeus. The majority are possessed and held by Homer. {S : PASSAGES REFERRING TO INSPIRATION AND POETRY } PASSAGES REFERRING TO INSPIRATION AND POETRY Iliad XIV: 508: "Tell me now, Muses who live in the halls of Olympus, who of the Achaeans first took the bloodstained spoils from a slain enemy, when the glorious Earthshaker swayed the battle." Iliad II: 100: Agamemnon holds his staff as he stands up to speak in the assembly. Aeneid IV: 60: Dido holds the dish during sacrifice as she seeks the will of the gods. {S : PASSAGES THAT SHED LIGHT ON GREEK TRAGEDY} PASSAGES THAT SHED LIGHT ON GREEK TRAGEDY Iliad XIX: 85 (an apology for hybristic behaviour): When Achilles has declared in the assembly that he is willing to end the feud and rejoin the fighting, Agamemnon stands up and speaks. "The Achaeans often reproached me for what you have just mentioned. But it is not I who am the cause, but Zeus and Fate (Moira) and the Fury (Erinys) that walks in darkness, who in the meeting cast fierce Ate into my mind, on that day when I took away Achilles's prize." Odyssey VIII: 260: When Odysseus is entertained to dinner and a display of dancing by the Phaeacians, officials enter and clear the dancing floor and a ring, agon, wide enough for the performance. Line 264: The dancers strike the holy floor with their feet (choron theion, holy dancing- floor). Odysseus marvels at the flashing movements of their feet (marmarygas). According to Hesychius, choros is the same as kuklos and stephanos, circle, and crown. It means especially the round dance of the dithyramb, or the floor where it is performed. Choros kuklikos = dithyramb. {S : PASSAGES REFERRING TO THE AXE} PASSAGES REFERRING TO THE AXE Odyssey V: 235: Odysseus builds a boat to sail away from Calypso's island Ogygia. She gives him a big axe with an olive wood handle. Aeneid V: 305: At the funeral games in honour of his father, Anchises, Aeneas offers prizes. He will give two Cretan arrowheads shining with polished iron, and a double axe (bipennis) with silver chasing. Frazer, The Golden Bough XLIX: At the end of June in Athens, the Bouphonia took place. The ox was brought to the bronze altar of Zeus Polios on the Acropolis. The ox was driven round the altar. The axe and the knife were dipped in water. The ox was laid low by a blow of the axe behind its horns, and its throat cut with a knife. The axeman threw his weapon away and fled, and the knifeman did the same. A trial was held in a court presided over by the king to allocate blame for the murder. The girl who brought the water blamed the sharpeners, these blamed the men who handed the weapons to the butchers, the butchers blamed the axe and the knife. The axe and knife were found guilty and thrown into the sea. At one time the killing of an ox had been a capital crime in Attica. Notes (Chapter Eight: Sky and Stage) 1. Diehl: A. L. . G. 77 2. Plato: 'Iom.= 533d. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 9: } {T TRIPOD CAULDRONS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER NINE TRIPOD CAULDRONS IF put up into the air, a tripod cauldron resembles the popular idea of a comet. It also looks like the seething pot of Old Testament Jeremiah I: 13. I suggest that the Greeks linked the god in the ground with the god in the sky. There was a copper cauldron on the roof of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and another at Delos. Is there any evidence to support this theory? By simple metathesis, such as occurs with the Greek 'kratos' and 'kartos', we get 'stephanos', crown, and 'setphanos', Set revealing or shining. The Egyptian god Set was well known to the Greeks. He killed Osiris; the Greeks equated him with Typhon. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the tripod and cauldron, with a crown of fire, were an attempt to represent, and to establish communication with a god in the sky, elsewhere described as a seething pot facing north, and a cauldron for the use of the god Thor. Homer, Iliad XVIII: 369 ff., describes the manufacture of tripod cauldrons: they are for action in the sky. It is significant that the oldest attendants of Dionysus were the Silenes, followed later by the Saturoi, Satyrs. Oura is a tail. Were it not for the short 'u' of Saturos, philology might suggest that the Satyrs were Set's tail. At first a Satyr had long pointed ears, a goat's tail, and small knobs like horns behind the ears. Later, goat's legs were added. Hesiod writes: "The race of Satyrs, worthless and unfit for work" [1] . In the Doric dialect, Satyros is Tityros, but Strabo distinguishes between Satyrs, Silenes and Tityri. A comet might display less tail with each return. To the east of Ionia was the Persian Empire. The king ruled through provincial governors called satraps. I suggest that Set explains the word satrap. Rhapis and rhabdos both mean a rod or staff, like skeptron, English sceptre. Chrysorrhapis, of the god Hermes, means bearing a golden rod [2] . A satrap was Set's rod, ready to punish rebellious provincials with the speed and force of a thunderbolt. The festival of the Stepteria may have been the flight of Set (Greek pteron is a wing). A skeptron (staff) was not just for leaning on; the verb skepto means hurl or shoot (lightning, for example). There is a passage in The Suppliants of Aeschylus where the king is addressed. He controls the altar, the hearth of the land, and by his sole command controls all, sitting on his throne to which alone the sceptre belongs (line 370 ff.) [3] . Silenus, the oldest companion of Dionysus, had prophetic powers. He had a long horse's tail. His name is explained by two Greek words, seio, shake; and linos, vat. He is shown on vase paintings treading out grapes. PASSAGES REFERRING TO TRIPODS Iliad XXIII: 884: As a prize, Achilles gave an unused cauldron with a floral pattern, lebet' apuron, anthemoenta. Iliad XXIV: 233: Priam chooses presents to take to Achilles as ransom for Hector's body. He takes out of his chests two tripods gleaming like fire (aithonas), and four cauldrons. The epithet aithon, of the tripods, is noteworthy. Odyssey XIII: 13: King Alkinous proposes that Odysseus should be given presents, a big tripod and cauldron from each man. Aeneid III: 90: The Trojans call on king Anius, priest of Apollo and king of Delos. Aeneas prays for guidance; there is an earth tremor, and "mugire adytis cortina reclusis", the shrine seemed to open and there was a bellowing sound from the cauldron. Aeneid III: 466: The seer Helenos gives advice, and gives them presents when they leave, silver, and cauldrons from Dodona. V: 110: The memorial games for Anchises are prepared. Prizes are displayed, including 'sacri tripodes' and 'coronae virides', crowns of fresh greenery. Pausanias IV: 12: 9: mentions one Oebalus at Sparta who happened to have a hundred terracotta tripods. He took them to Ithome and dedicated them to the god, so as to fulfil the Delphic oracle's promise. Those who dedicated a hundred tripods to Zeus of Ithome would be the winners in the war between the Spartans and the Messenians. Pausanias III: 18: 7: At the sanctuary of the Graces near Amyclae there are bronze tripods. Under the first is a statue of Aphrodite, under the second a statue of Artemis, under the third, of Persephone. Pausanias X: 13: 7: He mentions: (1) the fight between Herakles and Apollo over the tripod at Delphi; (2) a gold tripod standing on a bronze snake, a dedication from all the Greeks from the spoil of Plataea. Iliad XVIII: 343: Achilles called to his comrades to set up a big tripod, so as to wash the bloodstained body of Patroclus as quickly as possible. They set up a tripod for washing water in blazing fire, and poured water into it, and took wood and burnt it underneath. The fire took hold of the belly of the tripod, and the water was heated. And when the water boiled in the glittering brass, they washed the body and annointed it with oil. In line 348, note the phrase "the belly of the tripod." Iliad XXIII: 702: For the winner a big tripod (to go on the fire), which the Achaeans valued at twelve oxen. Iliad XVIII: 369: Silver-footed Thetis came to the starry, imperishable house of Hephaestus, distinguished among the Immortals, made of bronze, which he himself, the lame one, had made ... She found him sweating, busied with his bellows, and in haste. For he was making a total of twenty tripods to stand round the wall of his well-based hall. He had put golden wheels under the legs of each, so that they might plunge into the arena (agon) of the gods of their own accord, or return home again; they were a marvellous sight. They were finished, but for the fact that the ornamental handles were not yet fitted. He was preparing them and cutting the rivets. This passage suggests that the tripod cauldron was a representation of an object in the sky. The word 'puthmenes' for the legs or supports, is interesting. The word is also used for the handles, or supports of the handles, of Nestor's cup. Compare the Phoenician work in Old Testament I Kings 7: 30: "Every base had four brasen wheels, and plates of brass." And verse 29: "On the borders were lions, oxen and cherubims." Iliad XVIII: 417: The golden servants hurry round their lord, like living handmaidens. They have a mind and voice and strength, and their skill comes from the immortal gods. Iliad IX: 122: Agamemnon addresses Menelaus; he intends to set out seven "apurous tripodas," tripods untouched by fire; or it might mean purely ornamental, like "apurotos" in XXIII: 270, of a phiale, or libation bowl. Iliad IX: 264: Seven untouched tripods. Iliad X1: 700: A tripod was a prize in the games. Iliad XXIII: 264: At the funeral games for Patroclus, there is a tripod with handles, a twenty-two measure tripod. In Odyssey VIII: 434, a tripod and cauldron are heated for a bath. It will be seen in Chapter XVI that the tripod cauldron was used in resurrection rites in ancient Greece. {S : THE TOPRAKKALI TRIPOD} THE TOPRAKKALI TRIPOD This 8th century B. C. tripod from Urartu was found at Erzincan, near Lake Van, in 1938. It is now in the Ankara Museum. It shows hieroglyphs that resemble Hittite, and is decorated with bulls' heads with horns. Tripods, thrones, footstools, beds, were standard equipment in Mesopotamian temples, including that to the Urartian god Haldis, at Rusahina. This temple was probably founded by the Urartian king Rusas I (733-714 B. C.). See Early Anatolia by Seaton Lloyd. Set may appear in a number of words. The following examples are mere suggestions, not certain: Setania (Latin), was a kind of onion; also a kind of bulb. The onion and garlic were powerful herbs. The bulbs and roots could resemble a comet in shape. Vide the Glossary. Setia, a mountain in Italy, near the Pomptine marshes. Marshy land attracted lightning. Saeta, seta (Latin), a bristle, hair. Cf. Gk. Chaita, mane; Egyptian chet, hair. I suggested earlier that Saturos could hardly be 'Set's tail' because of the short 'u'. It may not be a valid objection. Kastor and Pollux were twin sons of Zeus, the Dioskoroi or Dios kouroi. The diphthong 'ou' in kouroi is long; in the compound word it becomes a short 'o'. It was held that iron was Set's bone, and that iron came from him. The second of these statements may be seen today as an inversion. We prefer to think that the presence of iron attracts Set. The place where lightning struck was sacred and might be walled off with a puteal, or curb, such as was built round a well. Rock containing iron would be especially likely to attract the god of the thunderbolt, and this could easily have given rise to the belief that lightning was responsible for the presence of iron ore. {S : Notes (Chapter Nine: Tripod Cauldrons)} Notes (Chapter Nine: Tripod Cauldrons) 1. Hesiod: Fragment XIII 2. Homer: 'Odyssey' V: 87 3. Aeschylus: 'Supplices' 370ff. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 10: } {T THE EVIDENCE FROM PLUTARCH} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER TEN THE EVIDENCE FROM PLUTARCH MATERIAL relevant to our subject is to be found in the writings of Plutarch, A. D. 45-120, who was born in Boeotia, central Greece, and moved to Rome as a teacher of philosophy. Among his Moralia are Isis and Osiris, The E at Delphi, About why the Pythia does not now answer in verse, and The Obsolescence of Oracles. The following extracts are partly translation, partly paraphrase or precis. In Isis and Osiris, a work dedicated to Clea, a Delphic priestess, he gives much information about Greek and Egyptian religion. Very early in the work he declares that the truth is the most important thing for men, and that the effort to arrive at the truth, especially the truth about the gods, is a longing for the divine. Typhon is mentioned, 351, as the enemy of Isis. In 353b he says that wine was thought by the Egyptians to be the blood of those who had battled against the gods. This adds support to the placing of Dionysus in the sky, with his oldest companion Silenus, who treads out the blood-red grapes. In The E at Delphi, 387d, he tells how Herakles tried to carry off the tripod by force, explaining the occurrence as the contempt of Herakles for logical reasoning. Later, he says that Dionysus has no less a share in Delphi than Apollo. Theologians declare that the god is immortal and eternal, but undergoes transformations. He has various names: Apollo because he is alone (a-not, polloi, many); Phoebus because he is pure and untainted; Dionysus; Zagreus (the hunter); Nuctelios; Isodaites. And they sing to him dithyrambic tunes full of emotion and of a transformation that contains a certain wandering and dispersion. Indeed, Aeschylus says: "It is appropriate that the dithyramb with its mixed sound should occupy the revellers who attend Dionysus." 392a: One of the explanations put forward for the letter 'E', which was inscribed at Delphi along with 'Know Thyself', and 'Nothing To Excess', is that it means 'Thou Art'. The god greets the visitor with the words 'Know Thyself', and the visitor answers 'Thou Art', as being a true form of address, and the only one fitting, viz., the assertion of existence. (This can be compared with the 'I Am' of the god of Moses). One of the god's names is Ieius. In 393c, Plutarch derives this from the cry 'Ia', uttered when invoking Apollo. He thought it to be the epic word meaning 'one'. It might be well at this point to remember that we are not concerned here with the truth of Plutarch's beliefs, but with the fact that he and, presumably, many Greeks held them. 394a: The names of Apollo, who is permanent existence, are to be contrasted with the names of another god who is concerned with birth and destruction. Apollo (not many), and Pluto (abounding); Delian (clear), and Aidoneus (unseen); Phoebus (bright), and Scotios (dark). One is accompanied by the Muses and memory, the other by oblivion and silence. One is an observer and discloser, the other 'Lord of dark night and idle sleep. ' In Why the oracle no longer answers in verse, 397b, Plutarch gives us a quotation from Pindar: "Kadmos heard the god revealing correct music, not sweet nor voluptuous nor broken up in the tunes." 397c: "The god does not compose the verses, but he supplies the source of the impulse, and each of the priestesses is moved in accord with her natural tendency. He puts into her mind only the visions, and creates a light in her soul directed at the future." This is in accord with Plato, Timaeus 71 and 72, where we read that the liver plays a decisive part in aiding or preventing prophetic vision. When the liver is relaxed by gentle thoughts, the soul is open to divination and dreams, while reason and understanding are out of action through sleep, or an abnormal condition caused by disease or divine inspiration. It is the task of 'spokesmen' (prophetai) to interpret the visions and words, not the task of the inspired person. They should not be called prophets, but expounders of the utterances of the prophets. In this passage, at the start of 72b, "whom they call them prophets ...," Plato's language, using both 'whom' and 'them', betrays oriental influence. In Plutarch 400b, there is a reference to talk by philosophers of the Stoic school about 'kindlings' and 'exhalations', and it is as well to bear in mind the connection with thumos, thuo, and fire, in the word 'anathumiasis', exhalation. It is used of a rising in fume or vapour, by Aristotle; of the soul, by Heraclitus; and of an exhalation, by Aristotle, De Anima. The related verb anathumiao means to make to rise, to draw up vapour (of the sun, by Empedocles), and to kindle. Polybius uses it in the phrase 'to kindle hatred. ' 400f: The guide conducting Plutarch's party round Delphi pointed out the place where lay the iron spits, property of the courtesan Rhodope. Iron may have owed some of its reputation to the fact that it was attracted by a magnet. Iron objects are mentioned, and found, at Samothrace, which will be discussed in greater detail later. 401b: There is a reference to Herophile, of Erythrae, who had the gift of prophecy, and was addressed as Sibyl. 404 c and e: 'The god (anax, Lord, is the word used for Apollo), whose oracle is at Delphi, neither speaks nor conceals; he indicates. ' Add to these well said words and reflect that the god here uses the Pythia for hearing just as the sun uses the moon for sight. For he shows and reveals his thoughts, but shows them blended with a mortal body, and a soul unable to keep quiet or to offer itself unmoved and stable to the mover, but as if tossed by waves and enmeshed in the movements and emotions in it, and making itself more disturbed." 404f: What is called 'enthusiasm' seems to be a mixture of two impulses, the soul being influenced in the one case from outside, in the other in accordance with its own nature. In The Obsolescence of Oracles, Plutarch tells us that whereas formerly Delphi (where he was an official) was staffed by two full-time priestesses and one reserve, it now has only one, who is adequate for all needs. The work is full of interesting side issues. 410b: The priests at the shrine of Ammon reported that the ever-burning lamp there consumed less oil each year, and they regarded this as proof that the year was becoming shorter. 414d: We must not think that because oracles may die, the god himself is dead. He quotes Sophocles: "The works of gods may die, but not gods." 415: Cleombrotos, one of the speakers, approves of the theory that there is a race of demi- gods midway between gods and men. Hesiod, he says, mentions four classes of rational beings: gods, daimons (demi-gods), heroes, and humans. There is a force that unites them in fellowship. 417c: Concerning the Mysteries, in which one can obtain the best view of, and insight into, the truth about daimons, "Let my lips be sealed," as Herodotus says. As to sacrifices, they are performed apotropes heneka, for the turning away of evil daimons. We have already met the word 'prester' in a quotation from Heraclitus. The word is used by Plutarch in 419f. One of the speakers, Demetrius, tells how he voyaged to some islands near Britain, almost uninhabited. Some of the islands bore the names of daimons and heroes. When he visited one of these islands, occupied only by a few holy men, there was a tempest; portents (diosemiae), and presters fell. The islanders said that the death had occurred of one of the mightier ones. From this passage it seems probable that prester, to Plutarch, has its usual meaning of lightning or thunderbolt, though meteorite would fit. 421c: Among the stories about Delphi is one of the slayer of Python. The story of exile in Tempe is untrue. When he was expelled, he went to another kosmos (world), and after nine cycles of great years he became pure and bright (Phoebus), and returned to take over the oracle, which had been guarded by Themis in the meantime. Such, he said, was the case with stories about Typhons and Titans. There had been battles of daimons versus daimons, then flights of the conquered or punishment of the sinners by a god, as, for example, Typhon is said to have sinned in the matter of Osiris, and Kronos in the matter of Ouranos. The honours you pay to these have become dimmer or failed altogether, when the deities were transferred to another world. I learn that the Solymi too, neighbours of the Lycians, honoured Kronos among the greatest. But he killed their rulers, Arsalos and Dryos and Trosobios, and fled and left for another abode, they can't say which. Kronos was neglected, and Arsalos and his followers are named the hard gods, and the Lycians invoke curses, both public and private, in their names. Many similar examples can be found in the works of theologians. If we call some demi-gods by the usual names of gods, one should not be surprised, said my friend. For with whatever god a man is linked, and from whom he has been allotted some power and honour, from him he is likely to take his name. Indeed one amongst us is Dius, another Athenaios, another Apollonius or Dionysios, another Hermaios. A few by chance have been rightly named, the majority have acquired divine names that are inappropriate. 431e: As the others joined in asking this, I paused for a moment and said: "Actually, Ammonios, by some chance you created an opportunity for introducing the subject on that occasion. For if the souls which have been separated from the body or have never had one are, according to you and the divine Hesiod, 'holy dwellers on earth, guardians of mortal men, ' why do we rob souls in bodies of that power, by which it is the nature of demi-gods to know the future and reveal it beforehand?" 432b: The soul has great powers of memory. But memory is the hearing of silent things and the sight of invisible things. Hence it is not remarkable if, having power over what no longer exists, it grasps in advance many of the things that have not yet happened. 432d: The earth sends up to men springs of many other forces, some ecstatic and bringing disease and death, some good and helpful, as is clear from experience. The prophetic current (rheuma) and breath (pneuma) is most god-like and holy, whether it is produced by itself through the air or whether it comes with running water. It is likely that by warmth and diffusion it opens certain passages which form a picture of the future, just as wine, rising like fire, reveals many impulses and words that were stored and concealed. To quote Euripides: "For Bacchic revelry and passion contain much prophecy," when the soul becomes hot and fiery and thrusts aside the caution that mortal intelligence brings, and often diverts and quenches the inspiration (enthusiasm). At the same time one might not unreasonably say that dryness arising in the soul with the heat makes subtle the breath (of prophecy) and makes it ethereal and pure. For this is 'dry soul', as Heraclitus puts it. 433: The prophetic (mantike anathumiasis) has an affinity and a relationship with souls. 435 c and d: After telling the story of the discovery of Delphic influence on goats and on Koretas, the goatherd, Ammonios said: "The anathumiasis or exhalation, when it is present, whether the victim (goat) trembles or not, will create the inspiration (enthousiasmos), and dispose the soul correspondingly, not only of the Pythia, but of anyone whom it touches." 436f: For we do not make prophecy godless or irrational when we give to it, as material, the human soul, and give the inspiring breath and the exhalation as an instrument or plectrum ... 437: When priests put garlands on victims and pour libations over them and watch the victim tremble, they are watching for a sign that the god is present to give answers. 437c: Plutarch refers to the delightful fragrance that comes from the shrine. It does not come often, nor does it occur regularly. He thinks it likely that it is produced by warmth or some other force. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 11: } {T THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER ELEVEN THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS THE early philosophers before the time of Socrates help considerably in our investigation, and give support to the view that electrical forces were a major preoccupation of the Greeks. The earliest of them, the Ionian physicists, lived in a region that had close contacts with the East and with Egypt. The city of Miletus produced, within a century, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Each searched for unity behind the diversity of the appearance of the material world. Each looked for a single primary element as the basis of the physical world, and tried to isolate and to identify it. With these three we can also take Xenophanes, who was educated at Kolophon, the seat of a famous oracle. He was well informed about Ionian theories and moved to Western Greece. Thales is well known for having predicted an eclipse of the sun, probably the eclipse of 585 B. C.. His ancestry was Phoenician. It has been suggested that his parents were Kadmeians from Boeotia, and that his father's name, Examyes, is Karian. Aetius, A. D. 100, tells us that having been a philosopher in Egypt, Thales moved to Miletus when older. Thales seems to have regarded water as the original element from which the rest of the physical world is derived. Aristotle says that Pherecydes and others, and the Magi, put the "best thing" (ariston) as the first creating substance. Pindar, Olympian Odes I, says: "Water is best, and gold is a blazing (aithomenon) fire." Olympian III: 42: "Water is best, and gold the most precious." Aristotle, De Anima, says that "Thales appears to have supposed that the soul (psyche) was something that could move; if indeed he said that the stone had a soul because it moved iron." Diogenes Laertius, 3rd century A. D., reports that Thales was said to have attributed a share of soul to soulless things, calling in evidence the magnet, and amber. Aristotle, De Anima: "Thales thought that all things were full of gods." Anaximenes is the next writer to mention the soul. He says that our soul is air, and holds us together, and that breath and air surround the whole cosmos. There is an important distinction between 'aer' and 'aither', the damp misty air or breath, and the dry upper air. Anaximenes held that by rarefaction and condensation one substance can be many different things. Anaximander (he was aged sixty four in 547 B. C.) is said by Cicero (De Divinatione 1.50) to have warned the Spartans to move into the fields, as an earthquake was imminent. He postulated a single original substance, 'to apeiron', the infinite. He was a pupil of Thales. Only one sentence of Anaximander's work Concerning The Physical Universe has survived. Simplicius, quoting Theophrastus, 3rd century B. C., says: "Into those same things from which they take their origin, all the things that exist also go on to their destruction, and of necessity; for they are punished and make retribution to each other for the injustice in accordance with the decree of time, expressing it in more poetical terms." (R. Mondolfo, Problemi del pensiero antico, Bologna 1935, suggests that the crime is expansion of the worlds caused by collisions). There are infinitely numerous worlds (ouranoi) in the apeiron, all equidistant. Cicero, in his De Natura Deorum, I: 10: 25, says: "nativos esse deos," i. e. that the gods come into being by birth. Moira, one's lot, ananke, necessity, and dike, j ustice, make up the impersonal law given by the apeiron. Aetius writes: "Anaximander declared that the infinite ouranoi were gods." The 6th century B. C. poet and philosopher Xenophanes wrote a philosophical poem on nature, and a number of poems called Silloi, 'squint-eyed'. They ridiculed the anthropomorphic deities of Homer. He studied fossils of fishes in mountains, and concluded that land and sea must have undergone great changes. Simplicius reports of him that his single, non- anthropomorphic deity "always stays in the same place unmoved, and shakes everything without trouble by his mind." This thought is similar to one expressed in Aeschylus, Suppliants 96 ff.: "Zeus casts mortals down from the lofty towers of their hopes, to utter destruction. He puts forth no violence, but sits and at once accomplishes his thought somehow from his holy resting place." Heraclitus, who flourished in Ionia about 500 B. C., is well known for his doctrine of flux: "Everything flows, nothing remains constant," and "You can't step twice into the same river." He has fire, and 'logos', as solutions to the problem that occupied the Ionian physicists. The soul is a fragment of the surrounding cosmic fire. Macrobius, A. D. 400, on the Somnium Scipionis, I: 14, says: "Heraclitus declared that the soul is a spark of the essential substance of the stars, 'scintilla stellaris essentiae'." Stars are concentrations of aither. In this context, Fragment 26 is relevant: "When man dies and his eyes are extinguished, he unites in happiness with light; living man asleep resembles the dead, for he, too, has his eyes closed; man awake resembles a man asleep." Heraclitus seems to have regarded lightning as a manifestation of the cosmic fire. "Thunderbolt steers the universe." The statement attributed to Heraclitus, that the way up and the way down are the same, may imply the identity of the electrical weapon of the god in the sky, and the electrical force of Gaia, the goddess of chthon, the earth. Plutarch describes Hermes as being both ouranios (of heaven) and chthonios, of earth. Euripides (Alcestis 743) describes him as chthonios. A similar view of the relationship between the soul and ethereal fire is found in Indian thought. The flames of the funeral pyre help the soul to rise to join the heavenly fire. In Homer, on the other hand, the psyche or soul is a breath soul. It survives death in the house of Hades. When Odysseus descends to the underworld, he has to slaughter sheep so that the pale ghosts can drink the blood and speak audibly (Odyssey XI: 23 ff.). Heraclitus thought that knowledge of the soul was needed for knowledge of the cosmos, and Pythagoras linked the soul with moral standards. This brings us to the question of the Greek concept of justice. Let us start with lines from a chorus in the Medea of Euripides, 410 ff: "The waters of sacred rivers flow uphill, and justice and all things are reversed. Man's counsels are deceitful, and belief in the gods is no longer firm." The above passage is complemented by Heraclitus, Fragment 94: "The sun will not overstep his measures; otherwise the Furies, ministers of justice, will find him out." The Furies, Erinyes, Eumenides, the kindly ones, the winged females with snakes in their hair, regard it as their especial duty to punish anybody who steps over the limit, who strays or misses the mark. Hesiod says that the Furies are the offspring of Gaia, earth, and the blood of Ouranos. The word dike in Greek originally meant the way in which things are done. In the opening scene of the Agamemnon, the watchman is standing on the battlements of Mycenae resting his head on his hands kunos diken, in the manner of a dog, waiting for the fire-signal that is to announce the capture of Troy. Later, the word dike comes to mean justice and punishment. In Plato's Republic, it is not one of the virtues, but rather a harmony of the other virtues; a balance. The Republic of Plato is an inquiry into the nature of justice, and Plato proceeds by analogy. Just as in the ideal state there is a harmony between the workers, the auxiliaries and the philosopher rulers, with none becoming too powerful or overstepping the limits, so in the individual there is a balance between the instincts, the 'high-spirited element', and the reason. Zeus was above all others the god who stood for justice. To him a suppliant would pray, raising his hands to heaven and crying out for justice. Open almost any Greek tragedy, and a reference to Zeus and justice is likely to appear. In fact, we can go back to our conclusions on Greek tragedy and see a link between justice in the individual human being, in the Greek city state, and the stability of the sky and of the solar system. If the sky is darkened by a monster one can but hope that the god of light will do battle and win. In Pindar, Olympian II: 70, we read: "The souls of the just pass by the highway of Zeus to the tower of Kronos." There may also be a connection between this passage and Nemean VI:" Toward what mark we run, by day or by night ..." There may also be a link with Alkman, a Greek lyric poet who flourished about 600 B. C.. A papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, number 2390, published in 1957, contains quotations from Alkman. It is discussed in The Presocratic Philosophers, by Kirk, Raven and Schofield. "For when matter began to be established, a certain passage (poros), like a beginning (arche), was created. Alkman says that the material of everything was confused and not made. Then, he says, there came into being he (or that, masculine) who arranged everything; then a passage came into being, and when the passage had gone past, a sign (tekmor) followed. And the passage is like an origin, and the sign is like an end. When Thetis came into being, these became the beginning and end of everything, and all things have a similar nature to that of bronze, and Thetis to that of the craftsman, and the way and the sign to the beginning and the end... on account of sun and moon not yet having come into being but matter (hyle) still being without distinction. There came about therefore ... passage and sign and darkness. Day and moon and thirdly darkness; the flashings; not merely day but with sun; first there was only darkness, after this when it was separated (= distinguished?) ..." Lyrica Graeca selecta, ed. Page (Oxford Classical Texts 1968). In the Partheneion of Alkman, Poros, way or passage, is linked with Aisa as the eldest of the gods. Aisa is generally a divine dispensation or decree, sometimes translated as 'fate'. Alkman's poros may be compared to the phenomenon described by Plato in the story of Er, son of Armenius. Souls assemble on a meadow before returning to the sky before reincarnation. They travel to a spot where there is a pillar: A straight light like a column (kion) extended from above through all the sky (ouranos) and earth, looking like a rainbow in colour..." Republic X: 616 b.. The Greek 'kion' means either 'column', or 'going', depending on the pronunciation (different accentuation). Egyptian ioon =column. In Plato, Poros is the father of Eros (Symposium 203b). The mother of Eros was Night, and Night made prophecies before Themis did (scholium on Pindar's Pythian odes, in Scholia Vetera edited by Drachman; discussed by Kerenyi in Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life) The imagery of the pillar may perhaps be traced in the following passages: Euripides, The Bacchae, 1082 ff.: "A light of holy fire stood between earth and heaven, and the upper air was silent, and so were the forest glades, and you would not have heard a sound from wild beasts." The above translation is alternative to the one given in Chapter III. The verb sterizo can be transitive (set up), or intransitive (stand). For the silence, compare the silence before the god's voice is heard speaking to Oedipus before his death (in the messenger's speech of Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1623). Pindar, in Pythian X: 29, may refer to the poros when he writes: "But neither in ships nor on foot will you find the marvellous road to the agon of the Hyperboreans." The latter are the legendary people who live beyond the North. 'Huper, ' as well as meaning beyond, also means above. Agon is not only a contest but also a place where contests may occur, e. g. a stadium, as at Delphi, or the sky, as in the case of the tripods of Hephaistos in Homer, or a dancing floor, as at the court of King Alkinous. The Greek concept of justice described above may not be unique. The Egyptian ma'at is truth and justice. The Latin meatus is movement or course, especially of sun and moon. Lucretius employs the word frequently in this sense, e. g. I: 28. "... solis lunaeque meatus." The Egyptian "men ma'at Re" means, "The truth of Re remains". The Greek meno = remain, stand firm, withstand. Cf. Egyptian menkh, linen clothes worn by a priest, which I suggest were to give protection against radiation. When moving the ark from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David, David "danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod" (II. Samuel VI: 14). Similar precautions were taken by the Israelite priests, and at the temple of Apollo at Gryneion linen breastplates were on show. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 12: } {T MYSTERY RELIGIONS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER TWELVE MYSTERY RELIGIONS FURTHER interesting material concerning the soul and the aither emerges when one looks at the mystery religions, of which Samothrace and Eleusis were important centres. The Greek mysteries were secret religious ceremonies. Initiations took place at festivals in honour of Demeter (at Eleusis), and of Dionysus (the Orphic mysteries). They satisfied religious yearnings that could not be met by orthodox religion or science, and helped people to face misfortune, old age, and death. Orpheus came from Thrace, north-eastern Greece. He was said to be the son of one of the Muses, Kalliope. He was a follower of Dionysus, a god associated with Thrace. So great was his skill on the lyre that his playing moved wild beasts, trees and rocks, and on the ship Argo his singing diverted the attention of the crew from the song of the Sirens. When his wife Eurydice died from a snake bite, he went down to Hades to recover her, but forgot the condition imposed, and on the return journey he looked back, and she was lost, this time for ever. He wandered through Thrace, lamenting his loss, until he was torn to pieces by Maenads. We have met this phenomenon, the sparagmos, or tearing in pieces of a man or an animal, in The Bacchae of Euripides. The same thing happened in the case of the daughters of Minyas, the eponymous ancestor of the Minyans who lived in Orchomenos. They resisted the worship of Dionysus. The god drove them mad, as he drove mad Agave and other Theban women. They tore in pieces Hippasos, the son of Leucippe, one of the sisters. They were subsequently turned into bats. This dismemberment of a god is followed in the case of Dionysus by a restoration to life, as in the case of Osiris. It is sometimes explained as a sacrifice to a god; the slaughtered animal is sacred to the god, indeed is the god. It is eaten by worshippers in an attempt to achieve contact, even unity and identity, with the god. It is also generally thought that behind Greek religion lurk ancient fertility rites, aimed at ensuring a good harvest. It seems likely that things are first seen in the sky, and are then copied on earth. There are plenty of stories about the dismemberment of gods in the sky. Ouranos and Kronos are an obvious early example. One of the sights was a seething pot, Old Testament, Jeremiah I: 13. The Greek Tantalus killed and cooked his son Pelops, and served the dish to the gods at a banquet to see whether they would be deceived. Pelops was brought back to life, but a curse was on the house. His son Atreus killed and cooked the children of Thyestes, his other son. Thyestes had a son, Aegisthus, by his own daughter, Pelopia. Aegisthus later killed the son of Atreus, Agamemnon, on his return from Troy. We shall see later that a resurrection technique was inspired by the idea of a seething pot. Kings, priests, and people imitated what they saw in the sky. We have already had an example of this in the word satrap, Set's rod, for a Persian viceroy. In the world of ancient Greece, survival meant imitating on earth what was thought to have happened in the sky, and examples of the influence of such thinking in early times permeated classical civilisation, and are still with us today. At Eleusis, on the coast west of Athens, the mysteries were associated especially with Demeter and Persephone in association with Iacchos, who was a form of Dionysus. There is a vase painting of a child in a cauldron which suggests the reborn Dionysus. The other great centre was Samothrace, a rocky and mountainous island off the Thracian coast, not far from the coast of Asia Minor. The name of Mount Phengari suggests light. Not far away is the island of Lemnos, where Hephaistos, the god of fire and smiths, is said to have landed when ejected from Olympus. In Iliad XIV: 230 the goddess Hera goes to Lemnos to meet Hypnos and Thanatos (sleep and death). One of the Titans, Iapetos, had a son, Prometheus. In one version of the story Prometheus stole fire from the workshop of Hephaistos on the island of Lemnos. In another version he stole it from Olympus and flew down to earth carrying it in the hollowed-out stalk of a narthex. The pith of this plant was used as tinder, and the narthex was the thyrsus of the Bacchic revellers. Certain 'Great Gods' were worshipped at Samothrace, probably the same as the Kabeiroi of Lemnos, who were companions of Hephaestus and experts in metal working. Before looking at Samothrace in detail, it may be useful to review the subject of the Great Mother and her worshippers, since earth, mining, metal-working, electricity and fertility are related in the Greek mind. The marriage of Ouranos and Gaia resulted in the birth of Rhea, known as the Mother of the Gods. Her name may be linked with the word 'rheo', flow, suggesting Okeanos, or it may be metathesis for 'era', earth. On the whole the latter was the preferred derivation. She was called the Great Mother because she produced Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; their father was Kronos, himself a child of Gaia and Ouranos. Ouranos was a child of Gaia as well as a consort. Such a relationship seemed inevitable and natural, and made easier the acceptance of the relationship of Zeus and Dionysus which we have already seen in our discussion of Dionysus and the Delphic succession. It also helps to understand how Dionysus can have an alter ego, a child named Iacchos. Rhea was worshipped in Asia Minor as Meter Oreia, mountain-mother. She has other epithets derived from names of mountains. From Mount Berecyntos in Phrygia she is Berecyntia; from Mount Dindymon in Mysia, sacred to Cybele, she is Dindymene; and from Mount Ida she is called Idaia. In Phrygia she is known as Matar Kybele. According to Kerenyi, 'The Gods of the Greeks', she is the same as the Cretan 'Mistress of Animals', who appears flanked by two lions on top of a mountain. This reminds one of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and raises the question of the significance of the two animals, and of the column between them which is Cretan in style. 'Kybelis', according to Hesychius, is a double-axe. Her procession has drums, pipes (or shawms or reed pipes, however one chooses to translate the word aulos), rattles, bull-roarers and male dancers. The latter represented spirits of gods, daimones. In Phrygia they were known as Berekundae, and as Korubantes. The Greek equivalent of these worshippers of the Great Goddess were the Idaean Dactyls and the Kouretes. For the story of the Dactyls and the Kouretes, we can turn to Hesiod, Theogony 468. Kronos had decided to devour his new-born children, having heard that one of them would displace him. Rhea was received by Earth in Crete, and taken to a cave in Mount Aegeum. Dicte and Ida were two other mountains in Crete which claimed to be the birthplace of Zeus. Rhea supported herself on the soil by her two hands, and the mountain produced ten spirits called the Idaean Dactyls (fingers). They were also called Korubantes or Kouretes, but in some versions of the story the Kouretes are sons of the Dactyls. They danced round the child clashing their weapons to drown his cries. The number of Dactyls and Kouretes varies. Originally there were ten Dactyls and three Kouretes. The Dactyls from Rhea's right hand were smiths and discoverers of iron. There is a story of three Dactyls, representing hammer, anvil, and steel. In all the stories they were smiths, magicians, obstetricians, and dwarfs; sinister, like the Nibelungs. There was a Mount Ida in Phrygia, and it was said that Idaean Dactyls, called the Kabeiroi, came from Phrygia to Samothrace with their secret cult. They were fertility daimons, sexually well-endowed like the statues of Hermes. They came from the region round Mount Berecyntus in Phrygia. It was believed that Rhea had established her sons, the Korubantes, on Samothrace. Kabeiroi also lived on Lemnos, where they were called Hephaistoi. The name Kabeiro suggests the Hebrew chabhar, sorceror. Kabeiro, mother of the Kabeiroi, i. e. Rhea, had a son, Kadmilos, by the fire god Hephaestus. In one genealogy the father of the Korubantes is Kadmilos, i. e. Kadmilos is both child and husband to the Great Mother. At Samothrace two of the Kabeiroi were the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces. The Greek 'kadouloi' were boys used in the worship of the Kabeiroi; Greek 'doulos' = slave. Servants of Ka? At Rome, boys, called 'camilli', assisted the Flamen Dialis, or priest of Jupiter. The Dios kouroi, sons of Zeus, were the children of Zeus and Leda. Accounts vary, but according to one account Leda laid two eggs (Zeus had taken the form of a swan), from one of which emerged Kastor and Polydeukes, and from the other Helen and Clytemnestra. In Homer, Iliad III: 243, they are mortals, but they were worshipped as protectors of sailors. St. Elmo's Fire, flickering on the mast of a ship, indicated their presence. They were brave fighters. When Kastor was killed in a fight, Polydeukes asked to be allowed to die too. Zeus said that they should take turns to go to Hades, or spend alternate days in Hades and Heaven. On the island of Rhodes, there were 'Telchines', even more underground and sinister than the Kabeiroi. They went to Crete to help rear Zeus, and also reared Poseidon, helped by an Okeanine named Kapheira. The Telchines were servants of the Great Mother, and were nine in number. They made images of the gods. They foresaw the Flood, and left Rhodes. There was a Kabeiros at Thebes also, who resembled Dionysus. There is a full treatment of the Kabeiroi and the Mysteries by Susan Cole, 'Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace' (Leiden 1984). The story went that Eetion and Dardanus, sons of Elektra (the Okeanine, wife of Thaumas, 'Marvel'), came to Samothrace, where Eetion founded the Mysteries. Dardanus subsequently left for Troy, and founded mysteries there. The Theban myth of Kadmos and Harmonia eventually stated that Harmonia was the third child of Elektra. The buildings that survive at Samothrace are mostly from the 4th century B. C.. There was a sacred enclosure with two altars, a bothros, or pit, and an eschara, or hearth altar. The myesis, or initiation, went as follows: There was a declaration that those with unclean hands were forbidden to take part. This 'praefatio sacrorum', or preface to the rites, is mentioned in Livy 45: 5: Lucius Aemilius Paulus took charge of the Macedonian campaign that the Romans fought against Perseus. Gnaeus Octavius put in at Samothrace, and Lucius Atilius addressed the people: "Men of Samothrace, is what we have heard true, that this island is sacred and that the ground is holy and inviolate?" When they all agreed that it was sacred, he continued: "Why then has a murderer polluted it, and violated it with the blood of King Eumenes, and, although the preface to the rites excludes from the ceremonies those with unclean hands, you allow your shrines to be defiled by the presence of a blood-stained brigand?" There was a similar preliminary announcement on the first day of the Eleusinian Mysteries. There were three stages: myesis, telete, and epopteia. At Eleusis it took over a year to become an epoptes, or one who has seen the highest mysteries, but at Samothrace it could all be achieved in one night. There was a round structure surrounding a central pit, with a narrow doorway. At the top was a shallow recess, and at the bottom of the pit a stone. Libations may have been poured. Certain rocks in the bothroi or pits were objects of special libations. There was a frieze of dancing girls at the entrance to the precinct, and before the doors of the sanctuary stood two ithyphallic bronze statues, with their hands stretched to the sky. Herodotus reports, II: 51, that there was a holy tale about them in the mysteries. It is probable that there were dances round a seated figure. Plato, in the Euthydemus, quoted above, tells of thronosis, or Corybantic dances round a seated figure, and Kadmos, according to Nonnus (Dionysiaca), saw a dance at Samothrace. The diaulos was played, and spears were clashed on bronze shields. A large bronze shield and iron knives have been found. There was a lodestone, and a ring of magnetised iron. They are mentioned by Lucretius, 'De Rerum Natura' VI: 1044 "It also happens that iron sometimes moves away from this stone, and is accustomed to flee and to follow it by turns. I saw iron at Samothrace jumping, and fragments of iron moving inside the bronze basin, when the Magnesian stone had been put underneath. The iron always seemed to wish to escape from the stone." [1] Rings sometimes had a layer of gold covering the iron. "Even slaves now put gold round the iron, and other things that they wear they decorate with pure gold. The origin of this display reveals by its name that it was instituted in Samothrace." Pliny, Natural History 33: 6: 23. Plato, in his 'Ion', mentions the skill of the rhapsodist. It depends on a divine force, which moves the rhapsodist just as the force in the lodestone makes iron move. Bathing was important, just as it was for the Pythia at Delphi. We have what is probably a description of the procedure in the Clouds of Aristophanes, lines 497 ff.. As Strepsiades, a would-be initiate, is about to enter Socrates's Phrontisterion, or Thinking Shop, Socrates tells him to take off his himation and to step down. Strepsiades asks for a honey-cake as an offering, and says that he is frightened, as if he were descending into the oracle of Trophonius. (There was an oracle in Boeotia, where Trophonius had been swallowed up by the earth. He was consulted there in an underground room under the name of Zeus Trophonius. Enquirers emerged from underground looking sad and uneasy). At Samothrace there is a drain outlet, so the initiate probably went down, undressed, and was purified by bathing. We have some indirect knowledge of Samothrace from another site, Thera. There is an open-air temenos dedicated by Artemidorus, a Greek from Perge. It is cut in the rock of a low cliff. There are statues of Hecate, Priapos (a male fertility god), and Tyche (Chance). There are reliefs dedicated to Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo, and altars to other gods. The altar to the Samothracian gods has a hole six inches in diameter cut in the top, and a channel from this to ground level, forty inches, and a shallow depression in front of the altar, in the stone floor of the temenos. The Dioscuri, Kastor and Polydeukes, were worshipped here. They are represented with tall conical hats, piloi, and with stars carved in relief over their altar. Artemidorus dedicated an altar to Priapus Lampsacenus. Evidently there was a fertility cult at Lampsacus too. Next is an altar to Hecate Phosphorus, Hecate the Light Bringer. We left the initiate undressed, washed, and shivering in the dark underground. He may have worn a purple sash. At Eleusis, as far as we can tell, the final stage of the initiation consisted in flashes of light revealing glimpses of objects symbolic of fertility, resurrection and immortality, and probably a ritual representation of the birth of Dionysus. Grains of corn, and the phallic symbols carried in processions in the worship of Dionysus, would figure prominently. At Samothrace, the "Elektria tellus", as Valerius Flaccus describes it (II: 431), and at Eleusis, we see a combination of the worship of Hermes, and physiological stimulation by electricity, wine, and magnetism. Orpheus, with his power to attract animals, trees and stones, is a symbol of the power of music and the magnet. Phanes and Eros, the primal light and passion, and the sky gods whom they created and revealed, are related to the earth deities, and are equated by the Greeks with the action of the aither and of the soul. Three words often occur when the Greeks write about the mysteries: zetesis, heuresis, and tyche. Of these words, zetesis and heuresis, searching and finding, are straightforward, but chance, tyche, calls for comment. The Greek verb that corresponds to it means to light upon, to hit, to hit the mark. One might say that tyche is the opposite of hamartia, missing the mark or sin, which we have met before in the character of the tragic hero. Electricity is tricky stuff to track down, and who knows where and when lightning and meteorites will strike? {S : PASSAGES REFERRING TO ORPHEUS, MYSTERIES, AND LEMNOS} PASSAGES REFERRING TO ORPHEUS, MYSTERIES, AND LEMNOS Pausanias IV: 26: 7: He refers to a dream sent to Epiteles. He dug in a certain place and found a bronze jar. Epaminondas opened it and found a leaf of tin inscribed with the mysteries of the Great Goddesses. The British Museum contains some gold leaf inscribed with Orphic instructions on obtaining immortality after death. Pausanias IV: 14: 1: The Messenian priests of the Mysteries of the Great Goddesses fled to Eleusis when the war against Sparta ended. Pausanias VIII: 15: The Phenaeans in Arcadia have a shrine of Eleusinian Demeter. They also have a rock, two great stones fitted together, by which they swear. Once a year they open the stones, take out the sacred writings, read them to the initiated, and replace them. Aeneid VIII: 454: Vulcan is "pater Lemnius." There was a volcanic peak on Lemnos: Moschylos. (Moschos, Greek, = calf). Cf. Stephane (crown), a mountain in Thessaly. {S : PASSAGES REFERRING TO KABEIROI, DACTYLS, GREAT MOTHER, VARIOUS DEITIES} PASSAGES REFERRING TO KABEIROI, DACTYLS, GREAT MOTHER, VARIOUS DEITIES Pausanias I: 4: 6: In antiquity, Pergamene territory was the sacred ground of the Kabeiroi. Pausanias IV: 1: 7: Methapos established the initiation of the Kabeiroi at Thebes. Pausanias IX: 25: 5: Three or four miles from Thebes is a sanctuary of the Kabeiroi. People called Kabeiroi lived there. Demeter entrusted one of them, Prometheus, and his son Aitnaios, with a sacred object. Those of Xerxes's men, and later those of Alexander, who entered the sanctuary, went mad, or were struck by lightning. Pausanias warns, VIII: 37: 6, that the Kouretes and the Korybantes are of different families. Rhea, or Kybele, or the Great Mother, may have been the same as the Cretan Mistress of the Animals. As such, she appears between two lions on a mountain. Bull-roarers were used in her procession, together with pipes, cymbals, and rattles. The Kabeiroi were called Hephaistoi. The Caucasus is referred to as the Mother of Iron. Aeschylus: Prometheus Vinctus 303. The Telchines forged Poseidon's trident. They had the evil eye. They had a sister, Halia. Rhodos, Rhodes, was the daughter of Poseidon and Halia. The Dioskouroi: They were among the Kabeiroi at Samothrace, so they may conveniently be mentioned here. Odyssey XI: 300: Odysseus visits the underworld, and sees Leda, who bore (to Tyndareus) Kastor and Polydeukes. Each is alive and dead on alternate days. They are honoured like gods. Pausanias III: 24: 5: There is a small cape at Brasiae in Laconia, where there are bronzes one foot high and caps on their heads. Some think they are Dioskouroi or Korubantes. Pindar, Nemean Ode X: 61 ff.: Lynkeus saw the Dioskouroi sitting in the trunk of a tree. Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae 296, Question 23: "Who is the joint-hero in Argos, and who are the Averters? They call Kastor joint-hero and think he is buried with them, and revere Polydeukes as one of the Olympians. Those who drive out epilepsy they call Averters, and think that they are offspring of Alexida the daughter of Amphiaraus." {S : OKEANOS [2]} OKEANOS [2] Early descriptions of Okeanos put him in the sky. Sea, sky, Poseidon, Hephaestus and Athena are interlinked, as some of the following passages suggest. "Water is ariston (best)." (Pindar). "Pherecydes and some others take the first generator as the best thing." (Aristotle). Pausanias I: 33: 2 ff.: At Rhamnous near Marathon is a sanctuary of Nemesis. Pheidias carved the statue. She holds an apple branch, and an engraved bowl with figures of Aethiopians. Some say that the river Okeanos is father of Nemesis, and the Aethiopians live beside Okeanos. Okeanos is not a river, however, but the most distant part of the sea which is sailed by human beings. It contains the island of Britain, and has Iberians and Celts on its shores. Iliad XV: 160: Zeus gives instructions to Iris to go and tell Poseidon to stop fighting and to rejoin the gods, or go to the holy sea, eis hala dian. Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Tyche (Chance) is a daughter of Okeanos. Pausanias IV: 30: 6: mentions a statue of Tyche holding the sphere on her head and Amalthea's horn in her other hand. Amalthea's horn is the cornucopia; Amalthea, nurse of Dionysus, was a goat. According to another story, Amalthea's horn was that of a bull; the infant Zeus drank from it. A drinking cup in the form of a bull's horn is called a rhyton. Compare also Thor, who lowered the level of the sea in a drinking contest. Tyche, fortune, could be either good or bad. Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, received Hephaestus, with the help of Thetis, when he was thrown out of Olympus. Eurynome and Ophion ruled over the Titans before Kronos and Rhea. They dwelt on Olympus. In the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, the Okeanines enter flying, followed later by their father Okeanos on a griffin. A griffin had the head and wings of an eagle, and the body of a lion. Hesiod, Theogony 790: (Okeanos surrounds earth and sea). Far under the wide-pathed earth a horn of Okeanos flows out of the holy river through night. A tenth part of it is allotted. Okeanos, winding with nine silvery whirling streams round the earth and broad back of the sea, falls into the salt water, and the one (part) flows out from a rock a great trouble to the gods. "Eis hala piptei" falls into the salt (sea): this may be the waste of waters on which the earth floated, Hebrew Tehom, as opposed to the waters above the earth, Old Testament, Genesis 1: 7. "Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters." (Old Testament, Psalm LXXVII: 19). Theogony 292: Herakles crossed the poros Okeanoio, the ford, or passage, of Okeanos. Compare the use of poros' by Alkman, mentioned in Chapter XI supra. Theogony 265: Thaumas (marvel) married Elektra, daughter of deep-flowing Okeanos. 274: Gorgons who live beyond glorious Okeanos. ('Glorious' is 'klutos'). 242: Doris, daughter (koure) of Okeanos, perfect river. 'Perfect' here is teleeis. 'Telos' has the primary meaning of completion, end or boundary. 130 ff.: Earth first bore starry Ouranos... She also bore the fruitless sea (pelagos), Pontus, with raging swell, without desire and love. But then she lay with Ouranos and produced deep-swirling Okeanos, Koeos, Krios, Hyperion and Iapetos .... and then Kronos. 107: "halmuros pontos", the briny sea. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 364: "The sea is a tear of Kronos," a Pythagorean saying. Among fragments from the Epic Cycle we have bits of the 'War of the Titans. ' "The poet of the Titanomachy, whether Eumelos the Corinthian or Arktinos, has spoken as follows in his second book: 'In it were floating golden-faced dumb fish, swimming and playing in the heavenly water." ' Athenaeus VII: 277D. 'Heavenly' is in Greek 'ambrosios'. To Homer, fish are 'hieroi', holy (Iliad XVI: 407). Pausanias VIII: 41: 6: The Phigalians told me that it (the statue of Eurynome) is a wooden idol tied up with gold chains, like a woman down to the waist, and below that like a fish. {S : THE OLD ONE OF THE SEA} THE OLD ONE OF THE SEA He ruled the sea before Poseidon. Nereus, Phorkys, and Proteus are three names of 'The Old One of the Sea'. Pictures show Nereus with the body of a fish, with a lion, a buck and a snake thrusting their heads out of his fish body. Herakles wrestled with Nereus, who assumed different frightening shapes. Hesiod, Theogony 233, describes Nereus as the eldest son of Pontus. Triton and Rhodos were two famous children of Poseidon and Amphitrite. In Theogony 931, Hesiod speaks of Triton of wide force, at the bottom of the sea, in a golden palace of Amphitrite and Poseidon, holding the foundations of the sea (or: holding the pillars of the sea). {S : POSEIDON} POSEIDON Odyssey III: 6: He is Enosichthon, the Earthshaker, Kuanochaites, of dark hair. V: 292: He takes up his triaina and stirs up the sea to wreck Odysseus. (Ainos = dread). Homeric Hymn to Poseidon: He is a great god, mover of earth and sea, Pontios (Lord of the Sea), who has Helicon and wide Aegae. He has a double function, to be a tamer of horses and a saviour of ships. Hesiod, Shield of Herakles 105: He is a bull-like earth shaker, taureos; he is a guardian of Thebes and its walls. He was the son of Rhea and Kronos. Rhea gave Kronos a foal to devour. The infant was carried to Rhodes by Rhea, and entrusted to Kapheira, a daughter of Okeanos, to nurse. The Telchines forged his trident. The Telchines had a sister, Halia (Greek hals = salt), whom Poseidon married. Rhodos was their daughter. Poseidon also married Demeter. He was dark haired, and their son Arion was a horse with a black mane. Poseidon wished to be the patron deity of Athens. At a blow from his trident a horse sprang up from the rocky soil of Attica. The Greek 'hople' is a hoof; 'hoplon' is a weapon. Cf. the story of Pegasus, who struck Mount Helicon with his hoof, thereby creating the spring of Hippocrene. He saw Amphitrite of the Golden Spindle dancing with the Nereids on the island of Naxos, and ravished her. On their marriage he became ruler of the sea. Pausanias VII: 24: 6 ff., in a passage too long to quote in full here, gives an account of the destruction of Helike by earthquake and tidal wave. He also distinguishes three kinds of 'quake. The usual warnings are continuous rain-storms or droughts for a long time beforehand, sultry weather in winter, haze and red glare of the sun in summer, violent wind- storms, electrical storms in mid-heaven with much lightning, new configurations in the stars that bring terror to observers. The fortunes of Athene and Hephaestus were linked, and they shared a temple. We will take Athene first. Pausanias IX: 19: 1: In Teumessos in Boeotia there is a sanctuary of Telchinian Athene. Perhaps a party of Telchinians came to Boeotia from Cyprus. Iliad IV: 8: Athene has the epithet Alalkomeneis, the Parrier. Zeus notes that two goddesses help Menelaus, namely Argive Helen and Parrier Athene, whereas Aphrodite wards off disaster from Paris. Alcis is a Macedonian name for Athene. Iliad V: 856: Athene helps Diomedes to wound Ares. He draws blood with a wound to the belly. Brazen Ares gives a shout as loud as nine or ten thousand men joining battle. Brazen Ares is then seen going up to heaven in a mist. Iliad XXI: 400: Ares strikes Athene's tasselled aegis, which is proof against even Zeus's thunderbolt, with his spear. Athene picks up a big rough boulder, a marker in a field, and hurls it at Ares, hitting him on the neck and making him collapse. His hair is full of dust, his armour rings out, and he sprawls on the ground. Athene taunts him, then turns her brilliant eyes away (phaeinos, shining). Iliad IV: 70: Zeus sends Athene down to earth. She swoops down from the peaks of Olympus like a meteor (aster) that the Son of Kronos of the Crooked Ways has sent, as a portent to sailors or to a great army on land, blazing and sending out showers of sparks. Just so did Pallas Athene rush down to the earth. {S : HEPHAESTUS} HEPHAESTUS Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, with the help of Thetis, received Hephaestus when he was flung out of Olympus. It was from a temple shared by Hephaestus and Athene that Prometheus stole fire. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2: 10: 23, refers to furtum Lemnium, the theft at Lemnos (to which island Prometheus brought the fire that he stole from heaven). Hera was the mother of Hephaestus (without Zeus), and probably of Ares. Another name of Hephaestus is Palamaon. In Iliad 1: 577 ff., Homer tells us that Hephaestus is the son of Zeus and Hera, and that he makes peace between his parents. Hephaestus assisted at the birth of Athene from the head of Zeus. Hephaestus was physically abnormal; his soles and heels were turned backwards, and he rolled rather than walked. This recalls a story about the origin of human beings in Plato's 'Symposium'. Iliad XVIII: 395 gives another version of his fall: Thetis and Eurynome, not the Sintians on Lemnos, saved him. Hephaestus had the task of making thrones for the Olympians. There was an occasion when Hera sat on her throne and was paralysed. The throne rose into the air. Only when Dionysus made Hephaestus drunk, and led him to Olympus on a mule, could Hera be released. The wife of Hephaestus was Aglaia, the youngest of the Graces (Charites). Charis can mean the charm of art. Aeneid VIII: 424 ff.: The Cyclopes, Brontes the Thunderer, Steropes the Lightner, and Pyrakmon the Fire-Anvil, were making a thunderbolt. They had given it three spokes of twisted rain, three of rain-cloud, and three of red fire and winged South wind. Now they were mixing in it terror-flashes, thunderclaps and fear, and rage, with flames that pursue. Elsewhere they were working on a chariot for Mars with the flying wheels with which he inflames men and cities; also the aegis that fills with horror, the weapon of angry Pallas .... They were competing to polish it with golden scales of serpents, with snakes intertwined, and on the breast of the goddess the Gorgon's head rolling its eyes. Pallas was said to be the father of Athene. He was winged. Athene killed him and wore his skin. The Cyclops Brontes (Thunderer) is one of those named as a father of Athene. The Cyclopes were close to the Idaean Dactyls, phallic and primordial. Itonos also was Athene's father, and supervised her education. Athene bore a son, Apollo, to Hephaestus. Athene and Leto (mother of Apollo) were connected, according to stories current in Athens and at Delos. The Greeks had a tradition of unusual things happening in the sky, the sea, and on earth at the time of the birth of Athene. Pindar. 0l. VII: 32 ff.: To him the golden-haired one from the sweetly scented shrine said that he should sail directly from Lerna's shore to a pasture set in the sea, where once the great king of gods drenched a city with golden snowflakes, at the time when, by the arts of Hephaestus, with his axe wrought in bronze, Athene, shooting up from the top of her father's head, gave a great long war cry. Heaven and mother Earth shuddered at her. Iliad II: 653 ff.: In the catalogue of ships (of those who went to Troy) we meet Tlepolemus, a son of Herakles, who brought nine ships from Rhodes. He had killed his great-uncle Licymnius (a son of Ares), so fled to Rhodes, where he was favoured by Zeus, king of gods and men; and the son of Kronos poured down on them divine wealth. 'Divine' here is thespesios. It implies sent from a god, mighty, awful. Iliad XV: 669: Athene removes the "thespesion" mist that had covered the eyes of the Achaeans. Odyssey VII: 42: Odysseus lands in Phaeacia. Athene, disguised as a wondrous, young girl, leads him to the town. She does not allow the Phaeacians to see him, for she pours a divine 'achlys', mist, round him. Odyssey IX: 68: Zeus sends a north wind against their ships, with a storm from heaven (thespesie). In Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1154, 'thespesios' means prophetic. Homeric Hymn to Athene 7 ff.: At her birth, Athene stood before Zeus, shaking a sharp spear. Great Olympus raised a loud battle-cry at the wrath of the bright-eyed one, and earth gave a terrible echoing cry. The sea was moved, tossed with purple waves; foam suddenly poured forth. The bright son of Hyperion stopped his swift horses for a long time, until Pallas Athene had taken the heavenly armour from her immortal shoulders. Wise Zeus rejoiced (gethese). The break in the sun's routine marks an exceptional occurrence. {S : Notes (Chapter Twelve: Mystery Religions)} Notes (Chapter Twelve: Mystery Religions) 1. The entry under 'Pytho' in the Lexicon of Suidas states that at Delphi there was a bronze tripod, with a bowl on top, containing divination pebbles which jumped when questions were put to the god. The Pythia, supported on it or inspired, said what Apollo answered (literally: what Apollo brought out). Suidas, Lexicon, s. v. Pytho, in Adler, ed., IV: 268- 9, quoted by Kerenyi in 'Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life' translated from German by R. Manheim; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London). One of the phrases used for an oracle responding is 'ho theos aneile, ' literally 'the god raised'. 2. Akkadian 'uginna' is a circle. Hebrew 'chugh' tch as in Scottish 'loch') means circle, horizon, vault of heaven. Compare the Greek 'hugros', wet. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 13: } {T 'KA', AND EGYPTIAN MAGIC} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER THIRTEEN 'KA', AND EGYPTIAN MAGIC HOMER and the Greek tragic poets often use periphrasis when addressing people. Achilles might be addressed as "strength of Achilles." The words sthenos, is, menos, bia, each meaning force of some kind, are used, also kara and kephale, head. The Latin word vis, strength or quantity, suggests that a digamma was originally present in the Greek word is, and that it was vis. Hesiod, Theogony 332, even refers to Herakles as "is bias Herakleies", and Homer refers to Telemachus as "hiere is Telemachoio", the holy power of Telemachus. Iphi, from is, means 'with might'; iphi anassein means to rule with might. Oidipou kara means simply Oedipus, but literally it is 'head of Oedipus'. Phile kephale, dear head, is used in greeting [1] , like the Latin carum caput. Vis, Latin for strength, is personified as Juno by the writer Ausonius. In the seventh book of the Aeneid, the Fury Allecto in disguise speaks to Turnus, the prince of the Rutuli, to whom King Latinus has promised his daughter. She urges him to attack the Tyrrhenians who are threatening to supplant him. An attack would have divine approval --"caelestum vis magna iubet", the great force of the celestial ones orders it. Phaos, light, is used as periphrasis by Homer. (Odyssey XVI: 23), and by Sophocles (Electra 1224). Ophthalmos, eye, is also used. If we turn to Egyptian, we find a word which seems to correspond, and to explain some important words in Latin and Greek. 'Ka' is a man's double, and also a bull. It appears in the caduceus of Mercury, and in the kerukeion of Hermes. In the chapter on the Etruscans we shall see that caduceus is caducens, leading the Ka. The Aeolic form of the word is karykeion. The Greek 'eruko' means restrain, control. Hermes was the psychopompos, escorter of souls. He was not only the messenger from sky to earth, but also the god who led the soul of a dead person to the house of Hades. He used his staff to keep them on the right path, like a shepherd with his crook. The basket used in Dionysiac processions is a kalathos. The root lath in Greek means 'escaping notice'. Is 'Ka' hidden in the basket? There are some possibilities in Latin. Cacumen means a mountain peak point, or extremity. Pliny uses it of a pyramid, cacumen pyramidis, 36: 16. Etruscan katec, head, may be ka + tego, cover. Livy, I: 34, uses culmen of a man's head, on which an eagle deposits his hat. Cacus, a son of Vulcan and a contemporary of Evander, was a giant of great strength, living in a cave on the Aventine hill in Rome. He stole the cattle of Geryon, and Hercules killed him in return. Camenae is a Latin name for the Muses, and the 'ca' may just possibly be an indication of the electrical theory of inspiration held by the Greeks (see previous quotation from Archilochus, "lightning-struck with wine"). The witch mentioned several times by the Latin poet Horace, is named Canidia. There are examples of words which are likely to contain ka in the Phoenician and Hebrew. In the Old Testament, Numbers IV, there are instructions for Moses and Aaron for the management of the tabernacle and ark. When the camp is moved forward, Aaron and his sons have to cover the ark of testimony with the covering veil, spread a blue cloth on it, and so on (verse 5 f.). The instruments and vessels of the altar are to be spread on a purple cloth on the altar (verse 13). "The sons of Kohath shall come to bear it; but they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die." (verse 15) Kadhosh' in Hebrew means holy. Those who touch the ark are in danger from the ka or electrical charge that it may carry. The sound ka, with varying kinds of guttural or laryngeal sound at the start, occurs as qa, with the Hebrew letter qoph, probably similar to the sound of koppa in the Corinthian version of the Greek alphabet. It occurs with a kaph, like the Greek kappa; and as cha, the Hebrew heth. The Hebrew Kadosh suggests a combination of ka, and dasha, to produce. Qaran is to shine, to put out horns. Qardom is an axe. Qayin, spear, is an eye, or radiation source, of ka. Qarabh is to approach, to appear before god. Qebher is a sepulchre (Latin caverna), qesem is an oracle, qol is a voice. Qatar is to kindle incense, to sacrifice. The connection between electricity and writing is discussed in Chapter XXII, but we may note here qa'aqa, tattoo, mark cut, and chaqaq, to engrave, to ordain; a sceptre. Hebrew words beginning with heth include chaim, life; chabhar, sorcerer (cf. Kabeiro); chaghagh, to dance, to reel; chaghav, a ravine, such as the chasm at Delphi where the goats and goatherd found themselves dancing; chamman, sun pillar; chaziz, lightning flash; chazon, revelation, prophecy. This word is not unlike the Greek schizo, split, and suggests Attus Navius the augur, who split a stone with a razor. Words beginning with kaph include kabhodh, glory, weight, soul. It resembles the Latin caput, head, which may be a source of ka (puteus is a well), as was Delphi, whose other name was Pytho. Kadh is pitcher, Latin cadus, Greek kados; kamar, a priest, and to be scorched. It is possible that the Etruscan mer means to take, in which case kamar might be one who takes or catches ka. Hebrew marach is to rub in, lay on. Kapporeth is the ark cover; kashaph, sorcerer, to practice magic, suggests the Greek sophos, prudent and clever, and the Latin sapere, to be prudent. Kashil is an axe or hoe. The Arabic kasdir and the Sanskrit kastira both mean to shine. The Akkadian kudurru is a stele. The resemblance to the Latin turris, tower, suggests that it is a tower for obtaining ka. Ark comes from the Latin arca, a box or chest. Greek arkein and Latin arceo mean to suffice and to ward off. I suggest a possible link with Etruscan ar, electrical fire, and ka. There is a second kind of soul in Egyptian, the ba, or heart soul, and a third, the khu, or spirit soul, which is also the sign for radiance. Perhaps we should think of the ba when we see the Latin word baculum. It is generally linked to Greek and Sanskrit words mean 'go', and is seen as an aid to walking. But baculum, stick, is also the word used by Livy for the lituus [2] . The Greek bakteria was a badge of office of judges. Baculum is used of the sceptre, and in the Vulgate [3] of a rod of punishment. Psyche is the usual Greek word for soul or life. It was the possession of psyche which, in the opinion of the early Ionian physicist Thales, gave the ability to make independent movements, and so distinguished the planets, for example, which were gods, from mere lumps of inanimate matter. It leaves the body with the blood on death [4] , and is the breath or sign of life. In Homer, the psyche is a ghost, bodiless but with form. In general it is the soul or rational part of man, Latin animus. It is the seat of the 'thumos', i. e. of the will, desires, passions. It is found in this sense in Homer. In Plato [5] , it is the anima mundi, the world soul. 'Thumos' is the Greek for the soul as a source of passions, anger, hunger and energy. Plato connects the word with thuo, which we have met when discussing fire sacrifices. It can be breath, Latin anima. The word is related to Russian 'dym', smoke. Menos, bodily strength, often means spirit or rage. It can also mean disposition, like Latin mens, but it is physical rather than mental. It is used in periphrasis, like bia and kara, e. g. hieron menos Alkinooio, the holy strength of Alkinous (Odyssey). Sthenos, ardour, is used in the same way, e. g. sthenos Hektoros, Hector. It is often joined with kartos, and with alke, each meaning strength. It also means a large quantity of something, like Latin vis, e. g. ploutou sthenos, great wealth. Vergil has odora canum vis, a pack of keen-scented hounds [6] . To sum up: Greek and Latin words for the soul, psyche, thumos, menos, mens, animus, anima, have significant parallels in the Egyptian ka, ba, and khu. The Homeric mind and Homeric body are both composite matrices rather than unities, as demonstrated in vase paintings of the Geometric period. Bastet is an Egyptian animal god, the cat. Its hieroglyph shares with that of Set the feature of a tail pointing straight up into the air. Compare, for the erect tails, the electrical significance of Hermes and the ithyphallic statues of Hermes, and the hoopoe, a sacred bird with a striking erectile crest, a principal actor in the comedy The Birds of Aristophanes. The Greek for a cat is ailouros, wavy-tail. Setekh is the Egyptian storm god. {S : STATUES AND MUMMIES} STATUES AND MUMMIES A man's ka and character could be transferred to an image or statue of a man. If we look at relief sculptures or paintings of Egyptian gods and pharaohs, we often see some kind of apparatus framing the figure. It looks like a rod, telescopically jointed, as if it were a spark gap that can be adjusted for the best sound and visual display. It is shown well in illustrations in God's Fire and in Hooke's Middle Eastern Mythology. The Hebrew chashuq means 'junction rod, attachment'. Compare Greek arariskein, to fit, and Latin ars, skill, or art. Was the ka some kind of electrical light or halo surrounding the head? Livy tells how an eagle seized the cap of Lucius Tarquinius, flew up with it into the sky, then descended and replaced it on his head as a 'decus'. The word decus means adornment, or glory. Tanaquil, his wife, interpreted the omen as a promise of divine favour and future greatness. 'Culmen' is used of his head, a word which also occurs in the form cacumen, point, top of a mountain, etc. Statues of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, 205-182 B. C., were set up, in wooden gilt shrines, by the priests in every important temple in Egypt. Stelae, engraved slabs, were set up in the eighth year of his reign, one of them being known later as the Rosetta stone. Were these statues and shrines electrical devices for producing a glow of divine fire? His title Epiphanes, from the Greek phaino, reveal, would be remarkably appropriate if so. It is likely that a throne and footstool would be part of an electrical device for impressing worshippers. The Greek 'throngs' is the Etruscan word for fear, drouna. Cicero mentions a lightning strike that destroyed statues of gods [7] . The Hebrew elilim means empty things, idols. This may perhaps be a clue to statue design. The Latin adolere, to worship, means to magnify, to worship with fire. The concept of magnification is important, and the word is only used in the context of worship. I suggest that the ka was a visible halo which gave the effect of a magnified figure, larger than life. The Hebrew gadhol means great, 'gadhal' is to be great. Livy says that the patres, elders, were 'auctores', increasers or originators, at the election of Ancus Martius as king to succeed Tullius [8] . When Aeneas went to Cumae to consult the Sibyl, she appeared larger than life as the god approached and took possession of her [9] . She became "maior videri', greater to behold. Her hair also did not remain in order, "non comptae mansere comae." The Latin word altaria is used of the vessels used in sacrifice, perhaps for holding the sacred fire rather than flesh, which was roasted rather than boiled. 'Altar' does not mean 'altar' in modern English. 'Altaria sunt in quibus igne adoletur', literally 'altaria are the things in which magnification (worship) by fire takes place. ' The Latin 'altus' is a participle of the verb alo, nourish, and means nourished, well-grown, tall, high, and deep if one looks at it from a different viewpoint. In the Old Testament we read that the priest would elevate offerings and wave them in the air [10] . Hebrew 'nasa' = 'raise'; cf. Greek anasso, rule. 'Ana' = up, above; 'aisso' = set in rapid motion. The idea that the ka was a kind of halo enlarging and lighting the outline of a god or king may throw light on the practice of embalming. Mummification was a means of preserving a framework for the khu, the spirit soul, to occupy after death, and to assist resurrection. Osiris was the 'holy ka'. Offerings were brought to tombs in order to keep the ka in the tomb, and libations were made to the ka of Osiris. Pyramids and caves would be the best sources of energy to ensure a successful resurrection. Not all boats in tombs were sun boats decorated with symbols of Ra; some were hennu boats, of the type that were mounted on sledges. A boat would provide excellent earthing when used as an ark carrier or coffin transporter [11] . The Hebrew for a threshing sledge, bar-tan, resembles baraq, lightning. The Egyptian 'hen' means servant; 'neter hen', priest, is the equivalent of 'kohen' (Hebrew), priest. At Rome the king was a servus, servant, of the gods. Several kinds of sceptre appear in Egyptian art and hieroglyphs. The whip or flail is an obvious sign of royal and divine authority, but the 'tcham' is of special importance. The sloping top is an eagle. The eagle fits well as a lightning symbol, but the lower part of the sceptre is less obvious. One of the interesting sights in Greece is that of an eagle attacking a snake, seizing it in its talons. This kind of sceptre is a scotch, and the whole thing is a symbol of the lightning of Zeus destroying the monster snake in the sky. Sophocles writes: "skeptobamon aetos," the eagle mounted on the sceptre [12] . The Greek aetos, eagle, is probably Hebrew ayit, bird of prey. A probable link between Egypt and Greece is the word techenu, obelisks or sunbeams, which sounds like Greek techne, device, skill. Ker, evil, suggests Greek ker, evil spirit. Neb, lord, may be related to Neptunus. Poseidon, the Greek god, occurs in Greek in the form Poteidan, lord of earth (da = ga = ge = earth). Ta-neter is Egyptian for 'divine land'. The ankh is an Egyptian symbol for life. Is there a link with the Greek onux, onuch-, a hoof or nail? Pegasus created a spring of water on Mount Helicon with the spark and blow of his hoof. The ankh will be considered in detail in a later chapter. Onka, a Phoenician name, is applied to Athene at Thebes, where she was also worshipped as Athene Kadmeia. Qadhmi, in Hebrew, is an Eastern man, and the story was that Kadmos came to Greece from the east. The Egyptian thaireaa, door, resembles the Greek thura, door. Egyptian thehen, lightning, and Greek thuo, sacrifice with fire, are near enough to suggest that sacrificial fire is the door to Re, or perhaps Re's fire is the doorway to immortality. Music and sound effects are mentioned in Egyptian texts. J. B. Pritchard, in A. N. E. T., translates from a magical papyrus: "When the gods, rich in magic, spoke, it was the spirit (ka) of magic, for they were asked to annihilate my enemies by the effective charms of their speech, and I sent out those who came into being from my body to overthrow that evil enemy (Apophis)." There is another myth about the magical power of the name of god. Isis wanted to know Re's secret name so as to use it for spells. She arranged for Re to be bitten by a snake that she created. He applied to her for relief from the pain, and eventually told her the secret name, on condition that no god but Horus should know it. Isis then cured him with a spell using the secret name. (Quoted by Hooke in his 'Middle Eastern Mythology'). The seven vowels are found inscribed in triangular shape on late Greek papyri. The Gnostics wrote 'IAOOEI', a word of power. 'IA' was a shorter version that was also used. The vowels are associated with the names of the seven archangels. (Vice Chapter IV supra for a reference to YAHWEH) Egyptian priests were specialists in magic. The Hebrew 'kashaph' is 'magician' (Latin sapere = know). They used magic to control people and things. Knowledge of the names of gods and devils was needed, and was imparted to the dead person in his funeral rites, so that he could pass safely through the various gates and regions of the world after death. Models of the sky, with sun-boats containing the khu of the deceased, enabled him to travel in the sky and be received in heaven. Sympathetic magic was also used by the priests at Egyptian Thebes. Figures of Apep were trampled on. The purpose would be to ensure that there would be no repetition of the battle in the sky which threatened the earth. Nektanebos, in about 356 B. C., is said to have had wax models of ships and a bowl of water. He would put on a prophet's garment, a tunica or a network cloak and marshal the movements of ships and men with an ebony rod. There is a story that Aristotle gave Alexander the Great a box of toy soldiers with weapons pointing the wrong way, cut bowstrings and so on, together with magic words and instructions for use. There is also a story of a wax model of a crocodile being thrown into a river, turning into a real one, and seizing a man. Magical rites and incantations were used to install souls in animals, to cure illnesses, to provide a home for the dead person by preserving the khat, or physical body, and to raise the dead. The means for achieving all this is the god Thoth. He is referred to as the god who made Osiris victorious, just as the Greek Hermes is referred to as the slayer of the monster Argos. (Horus is called the Lord of the Divine Staff whereby all the gods have been made victorious, and Hermes Trismegistos, Thrice Great Hermes, is a name of Thoth). He was the "son of Aner, coming forth from the two Aners?" Egyptian aner is a stone. (Budge). The ibis is a bird renowned for its skill in killing snakes, and Thoth has the head of an ibis to symbolise his victory over the snake-like monster in the sky. The importance of Thoth can be gauged from the Egyptian belief that it was through his word that the world was created. The co-operation of Thoth was achieved by the devices whose aims and procedures were: 1. To bring down electricity from the mountain tops. In Egypt this meant in practice building artificial mountains, pyramids. Pur, fire, occurs in Greek place names, such as Pyrgos (= tower). 2. To find places other than pyramids where he is at home, e. g. caves. Caves would be especially sought for as the voltage gradient between atmosphere and earth declined from the high point of a big natural disturbance such as those of the 2nd and 1st millennia B. C., of which there is plenty of evidence. The Egyptian symbol for a deity, neter, has the same consonants as the Greek antron, cave. In Cicero's De Divinatione we read of gods being in caves, and of a vis terrae, earth force. This is most unlikely to have been gaseous or a vapour. It is more likely to have been electrical, probably piezoelectric as a result of severe earthquakes, of which there were many, at Delphi in particular. Ovid writes "Castalium antrum", the Castalian cave, of the oracle at Delphi, and Livy uses the word specus (chasm, ravine, water channel) of the place where the Sibyl sat. 3. To capture him from the atmosphere in condensers, capacitors, arks, chests, coffins, Leyden jars, whichever term one wishes to use today to denote an early form of electrical storage device. The snake was a symbol for electricity; it was said that an ark contained a snake. One of the priests in a temple was the wab. His duty was to wash the statue. Probably water was used to assist in obtaining electrical effects. The w of wab suggests the hard l of the Slavonic languages, so we may see here a connection with the Latin lavo, wash. 4. To use a staff, probably to detect variations in electrical conditions, including the state of rocky ground resulting from piezo-electric effects. The sceptre could also be used, through magnetism, to move and look like a snake and to impress viewers. A contest between Moses and the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres is mentioned in Old Testament, Exodus VII: 10, and in New Testament, 2 Timothy III: 8, and de Grazia has suggested that the brazen serpent could have been a device for the electrical treatment of the sick. Moses was learned in all Egyptian wisdom (New Testament, Acts VII: 22). The study of sound effects associated with arcing between terminals, and perhaps with the Aeolian harp effect of high winds, proceeded on the lines of sympathetic magic. Secret words of power, based on a succession of vowel sounds such as were discussed in Chapter IV, could be used for good, or for evil. They might be uttered with the aim of triggering a response from a capacitor which was slow to charge. To imitate the sound of the god's presence could be a dangerous act. The priest-electricians may have used the words pach, and lamina. The Hebrew pach is a plate of metal. It also means a snare, danger or calamity. The plural, pachim, means glow, heat, lightning. The Latin lamina is a sheet of metal, especially silver. It is tempting to see in these two words a clue to the construction of a storage device for the electrical god, perhaps on the lines of a Leyden jar or a modern capacitor. The Latin poet Ovid, Fasti I: 208: ff. tells that a praetor (Cincinnatus) made the possession of laminae a crime. Fabricius, censor in 276 B. C., expelled a leading senator for possessing ten pounds in weight of silver laminae. It is probable that more than the mere possession of riches was behind this. The Latin word maiestas means not only majesty but also treason. Literally, it is being greater, and could imply making oneself look greater. The Hebrew elilim means hollow things, and idols. Lamina can mean a threshing-floor, and will be discussed later in the chapter dealing with the Etruscans. The whole electrical theory and apparatus in Egypt was available for achieving resurrection of the human spirit after death. Pharaohs were at the head of the queue, but basic funeral rites were performed for all. Our chief source of information about the ceremonies is The Book of the Dead. A paperback translation by Sir Wallis Budge is available (Arkana, London, 1986). The Greek historian Herodotus describes embalming methods in Book 2 of his history. The ceremonies are a mixture of ritual and incantation. The soul is given power to survive in the afterlife and to ascend to heaven. For example, the mouth of the embalmed person is touched with a hoof and with an iron tool, so that he may be able to utter names of deities and of parts of gateways, and magical words which will ensure his safety. The hoof, Greek onuch-, is a symbol of electrical power, and iron's reputation rests partly on its properties as a conductor of electricity and for its magnetic associations. The human soul may suffer many transmutations on its way to the stars, where Plato, for one, placed its origin, mounting each soul on a star as if on a chariot, as we see in his dialogue Timaeus. The scarab may be another link between earth and sky. Karabos, or skarabos, Latin scarabaeus, is a stag beetle, so named in English because of its remarkable horns, such as the ancients claimed to have seen on an object in the sky. More details of the resurrection technique are given in the later chapter on sanctification and resurrection. Egyptian magicians claimed to have rule over water. In the Westcar Papyrus there is a story of a Pharaoh, Seneferu, who was rowed about on a lake by twenty pretty girls. When one of them dropped a valuable ornament in the water, the priest Tchatcha em ankh was ordered to recover it. He spoke words of power (hekau), which caused the water to be heaped up, and recovered the ornament. The priest lived in the time of Cheops, or Khufu, 4th Dynasty. The document was written during the 18th Dynasty, about 1550 B. C. (conventional dating). Further material concerning water is found in The Book of the Dead, Chapter 163. Osiris Auf- ankh prays to the soul lying prostrate in the body, "whose flame comes into being from out of the fire which blazes within the sea (or water) in such wise that the sea (water) is raised up on high out of the fire thereof ...". It is a prayer that the flame may give eternal life to Osiris Auf-ankh. Further on, it is clear that the god Amen, the divine Bull- Scarab, is being addressed, the lord of the divine utchats. The resemblance to the story of Moses and the crossing of the Red Sea, Exodus XIV: 21 ff., is striking. Moses stretched out his hand, and the waters were divided, so that the Israelites could cross. One of the plagues of Egypt mentioned in Exodus was river-water running red with blood. Cicero mentions a shower of bloody rain and rivers running red (De Divinatione II: 27). We have seen some links between Egyptian and Hebrew. There is material from Phoenicia and further east which may have electrical significance. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar resembles Aphrodite. She was powerful and dangerous. After the flood she wore a necklace. The Syrian monarch Ben Hadad is named, I suggest, after the Greek word for a torch, dais, daidos, Latin taeda. With 'son' for Ben, and the definite article for 'ha', it is possible that Ben Hadad gave himself the title of "Son of the Torch", just as the Persian king's viceroy was the rod of Set. The Akkadian 'Shamash', the sun goddess, Ugaritic 'Shapash', is often called 'The Torch of the Gods'. The Greek tripod cauldron, lebes --lebetos, is, I suggest, el bet, the house of el. Similarly, the dragon that Herakles killed on his journey to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides had a Semitic name, Ladon, El Adon, Lord El. And while on the subject of the sky, the Phoenicians, the 'red people', wore feather headdresses; cf. Quetzalcoatl. Terebinthos, a Greek word with pre-Greek undertones like asaminthos, bath tub, and labyrinthos, is the turpentine tree. The Hebrew for terebinth is elah. The pine, Greek elate, was of great importance to the Greeks; torches were made from it, and the Egyptians used the resin to fill the emptied skull of a mummy. The psalmist's disapproval of Greek-style sacrifices emerges in Psalm L, v. 13: "Thinkest thou that I will eat bull's flesh, and drink the blood of goats?" At Aegira in Achaea the priestess of Earth drank fresh bull's blood before descending into a cave to prophesy. More instances of the close relation between Hebrew and Greek can be found. Hebrew has arar, to curse; Greek has are, or ara, prayer or curse. Hebrew zabhach, slaughter, matches the Greek sphazo. But one of the most suggestive is Hebrew cherebh, sword, compared with Greek cheir, hand. Psalm CXXXVI :12 has "with a stretched out arm." Psalm XXII: 20 reads: "Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog." The Hebrew reads not 'power', but 'hand', and in this context one thinks of Greek chrysaor, with golden sword. 'Aor', sword, looks interestingly like the verb aioreisthai, to hover, be suspended in the air. Hebrew or = light. Chrysaor is applied especially to gods, Apollo, Artemis, and Demeter. It has been suggested that aor is the sickle of Demeter, the bow of Artemis, and the lightning of Zeus. Perhaps it is the golden sword suspended in the sky, the hand or arm of Psalms CXXXVI and XXII, the Greek cheir, Hebrew cherebh. We end this section with a word which is a bridge between Greece, Egypt and Phoenicia, sky, earth, and the caves in the earth. Elibatos, Doric alibatos, is a Greek word translated as high or steep. In Homer it is always as an epithet of petre, rock or the plural petrai, crags, (Iliad XV: 273 etc). It occurs as an epithet of oros, mountain, and akra, peak and is used of the Olympian throne of Zeus in The Birds of Aristophanes, line 1732. One may compare Greek oros, mountain, with Hebrew or, light. In Odyssey IX: 243, the Cyclops puts an elibatos rock against the entrance to his cave. It is used like the Latin altus, high or deep, e. g. "antro en elibato," in a deep cave, Hesiod, Theogony 483. It is also applied to Tartarus, to keuthmon, hiding place, and to pelagos, sea. Keuthmon is used by Pindar, Pythian IX: 34, to mean hollows of a mountain, and of the nether world by Hesiod, Theogony 158, and by Aeschylus, Eumenides 805, to mean a most holy place, like the adyton of a temple. The derivation of the word has caused difficulties. It clearly cannot be from helios, the sun, 'traversed by the sun', because the sun does not traverse all the places to which the word is applied. Hesychius quotes alyps, equivalent to petre, a rock. I suggest that it is from El, god, and batos, trodden, and means 'where El goes', for el is electricity from the earth as well as from the sky. One may compare the Greek for a cave, antron, with Egyptian neter, god, divine. {S : Notes (Chapter Thirteen: 'KA" and Egyptian magic)} Notes (Chapter Thirteen: 'KA" and Egyptian magic) 1. Homer: Iliad VIII: 281 2. Livy: I: 18: 7 3. Old Testament, Isaiah: X: 24 4. Homer: Iliad XIV: 518 5. Plato: Timaeus 30b, 34b, etc. 6. Vergil: Aeneid IV: 132 7. Cicero: De Divinatione I: XII 8. Livy: I: 32 9. Vergil: Aeneid VI: 49 10. Old Testament, Numbers V: 25 11. De Grazia: God's Fire pp. 85, 116 12. Sophocles: fr. 766 13. Thoth was a peacemaker. Was he seen as a god who separated opponents? Appropriately enough, in electro-magnetic terms, like poles repel. The Greek 'kreas', flesh, is another of the words used, like 'head', and 'strength', for a person, especially when addressing a person. It resembles the Latin 'creare', to create. Perhaps 'kreas, ' is another instance of 'ka', and creation is a flow of ka. See also the Appendix re the priests' language at Delphi. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 14: } {T BOLTS FROM THE BLUE} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER FOURTEEN BOLTS FROM THE BLUE THIS chapter is devoted to examples of meteors and thunderbolts, and intervention by deities. It also deals with the question of the Greek prutanis, and the Etruscan lightning- averter. In the archery contest at the funeral games for Anchises, the arrow shot by Acestes caught fire and marked its path with flames until it was burnt up and disappeared. It was like those stars which often come loose in the sky and cross it, drawing their tresses after them in their flight. Vergil, Aeneid V: 522ff.. Homer, Iliad VIII: 133 ff.: Zeus saves the Trojans by thundering and sending a terrible shining bolt. He sends it to earth in front of Diomedes' horses. There rises a great flame of burning sulphur. Iliad XIV: 412 ff.: Telamonian Ajax picks up a stone and throws it at Hector, making him spin round like a top. He falls, just as an oak tree falls under the attack of father Zeus, and a great smell of sulphur comes from it. Note: rhombos, a top; also strombos. Vergil, Aeneid V: 319: fulminis alis: Nisus, in the race, is swifter than the wings of a thunderbolt. Aeneid VIII: 524: Evander promises help to Aeneas, and Venus thunders and lightens. Weapons are seen in the sky, and trumpets sound. Pausanias V: 11: 9: When Pheidias had finished his statue of Zeus, he prayed for a sign of approval. A bolt struck the pavement. (A bronze urn was still there when Pausanias visited the place). Hesiod, Catalogue of Women: Zeus laid low Eetion with a flaming bolt because he tried to seize Demeter. Frazer, The Golden Bough, mentions the name "thunder besom," given to mistletoe, and suggests that Balder was killed by lightning. Lucretius V: 745: "Auster fulmine pollens," South Wind mighty with the thunderbolt. In III: 1034, he refers to one of the Scipios, conquerors of Carthage, as fulmen belli, a thunderbolt of war. Odyssey V: 128: Calypso tells Odysseus that Zeus killed Iasion by striking him with a shining thunderbolt; arges, shining, not psoloeis, smoky. The Greek for a flash of lightning is sterope, asterope, astrape; Latin fulgur. Zeus is Prytanis (Lord) of lightnings and thunderbolts. The word prytanis in classical times at Athens meant the President, one of a committee of fifty deputies who formed part of the Boule or Council of Five Hundred. It used to be thought that prytanis came from proteros, and protos, words that mean priority. It is much more likely that we are dealing with pyr, fire, tanuo, stretch, and tinasso, shake or brandish. Iliad XIII: 243: asteropen tinoxen, he hurled lightning; Iliad XVII: 5ff: aigida tinaxen, he brandished the aegis. Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 917: to brandish in his two hands the fire-breathing bolt. I suggest that the prytanis was originally he who tended the fire, the stoker for the sacred fire of Hestia, Latin Vesta. The Greek keraunos is the thunderbolt, Latin fulmen. Bronte is thunder, Latin tonitrus. Frontac is the Etruscan for thunderer. The Greek skeptos means a thunderbolt, also a squall from above, with thunder. The verb skepto is used of lightning striking, Aeschylus, Agamemnon: 302,310. Zeus struck Odysseus's swift ship with a smoky thunderbolt. Aithon means fiery, of lightning; also of metal, flashing. It is applied to tripods, Iliad IX: 123; XXIV: 233. Cicero mentions the Torch of Apollo, Phoebi fax (De Divinatione I: XI). The Greek lailaps is a storm, especially a whirlwind sweeping upwards. Elijah and Romulus are both described as having been taken up into the sky. A link between sound, oracles, and lightning is illustrated by the resemblance between the Hebrew ne'um, oracle, and na'am to murmur. The humming and buzzing sound, caused by electricity, was interpreted as an indication of the presence of the god. The sound could be heard in the sky as well as in a temple or physics laboratory. Edward Whymper, in his Scrambles Amongst the Alps, writes of an electrical storm: "The respective parties seem to have been highly electrified on each occasion. Forbes says his fingers 'yielded a fizzing sound', and Watson says that his 'hair stood on end in an uncomfortable but very amusing manner, ' and that 'the veil on the wide-awake of one of the party stood upright in the air. '" Farther on, in Appendix B, 'Struck by lightning on the Matterhorn', he mentions injuries, a long sore on the arm, and a leg weak and swollen next day. Being struck resembled a shock from a galvanic battery. (The date of the expedition was 1869) Lucretius, VI: 1166, mentions ulcers as coming from sacer ignis, holy fire. The above passage might be a description of an encounter with Apollo. He was the god of music, of healing and of plague, and he struck from afar. The French guide R. Frison Roche, in his book First on The Rope, 1940, describes an electrical storm high up on one of the Aiguilles of Mont Blanc. There were violent gusts of wind, thunder, then silence and calm. Mist gathered. The statue of the Virgin on the summit was wrapped in flickering blue flame, her head surrounded with an aureole of fire. Invisible hands seemed to be pulling at their hair. His companion, Jean Servettaz, said: "Les abeilles bourdonnent," the bees are buzzing, "get down quickly, lightning's going to strike!" They climbed down from the ridge and took shelter under an overhang just as lightning shattered the rocks on the ridge. This description of the approach of an electrical storm has points in common with the accounts of the theophanies in The Bacchae of Euripides and in the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles. Perhaps when we see a hieroglyph or relief of an animal with tail pointing straight up, as in the case of the Egyptian god Set, we should think of the veil on the wide awake standing upright in the air, of the buzzing sound of an imminent thunderbolt, and of the bees that tended the infant Zeus in the cave in Crete. 'Arseverse' is an Etruscan incantation to avert lightning. It appears in an inscription at Cortina addressed to Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire. 'Ar' is Etruscan for fire from the sky; 'ara' is Latin for an altar, the place to which divine fire is enticed. Latin 'verto' means I turn; severto, I turn aside. There was a temple at Rome, the Bidental, or Fulminar, dedicated to lightning. It may have been named after forked lightning. In Greece, a place struck by lightning was enelusios. At Rome, a curb, puteal, was put round the spot in the Comitium where Attus Navius split the whetstone with a razor. {S : INTERVENTIONS BY DEITIES AND HEROES (ALL FROM THE ILIAD)} INTERVENTIONS BY DEITIES AND HEROES (ALL FROM THE ILIAD) III: 375: Menelaus fights with Paris, gets hold of his helmet and would have hauled him away, had not Aphrodite broken the leather helmet strap under his chin. 381: Aphrodite then surrounds Paris with mist, carries him to his perfumed bedroom, and goes off to summon Helen. IV: 127: Athene, in disguise, urges the Trojan Pandarus to shoot Menelaus, thereby breaking the truce. Athene wards off the arrow from the flesh and guides it to the buckle of his belt, so that the wound is only a scratch. V: 311: Aphrodite rescues her son Aeneas, who has been struck by a huge stone hurled by Diomedes. She puts her arms round him and veils him in a fold of her gleaming peplos. V: 340: Diomedes pursues Aphrodite, wounds her in the hand, and ichor flows out, ichor which flows in the veins of the immortal gods. They do not eat food or drink fiery wine, so are bloodless and are called immortal. Aphrodite gives a great cry, and lets go her son. Phoebus Apollo picks him up and saves him with a dark cloud. Aphrodite borrows Ares's chariot to drive home to Olympus. X1: 690: Nestor recalls his youth, when he drove back the Eleans and took their cattle in revenge. He went to Pylos, which had few men left to defend it since Herakles had attacked it, and the best had been killed. XIII: 242: Idomeneus emerges from his hut clad in armour. He looks like the lightning that the Son of Kronos brandishes from shining Olympus, giving a sign to mortals. Thus the bronze flashed on the breast of Idomeneus as he ran. XV: 262: Apollo inspires Hector. "Speaking thus he breathed menos into the general." Menos may be translated here as ardour. XV: 308: As Hector led the Trojans forward, Phoebus Apollo went in front, his shoulders clad in mist, holding the aegis with its tasselled fringe, which Hephaestus gave Zeus for striking fear into men. XVIII: 202 ff.: Upon the death of Patroclus, Achilles emerges, stands on the rampart and shouts at the Trojans. Athene lays her aegis over his shoulders and sheds a golden mist round his head. His body emits a blaze of light. XVIII: 223 ff.: The horses with the beautiful hair backed away on their chariots, scenting trouble, and the charioteers were amazed when they saw the steady fire burning on the head of the valiant son of Peleus. The bright-eyed goddess Athene kept the fire burning. XVIII: 239: "Ox-eyed Hera sent the tireless sun unwillingly into the streams of Ocean." Unwillingly, because she was shortening the day. Compare Odyssey XXIII: 243: Athene kept the night waiting at its furthest limit, and she held back Dawn of the Golden Throne at the edge of Ocean, and did not allow the swift steeds to be yoked, which bring daylight to men, Lampos and Phaethon, the colts that draw the Dawn. Note: Only here does Dawn have a chariot. XX: 321: When Achilles prepares to kill Aeneas, Poseidon goes down to the battlefield. He spreads mist before Achilles's eyes, and carries Aeneas up into the air so that he flies over the ranks of men and lands in another part of the battlefield. XIII: 59: Poseidon encourages the two Aiantes. He touches each of them with his staff and fills them with strength and resolution. Ajax the son of Oileus realises afterwards that it was Poseidon, looking like Kalchas, who had encouraged them. He recognised him by his ichnia, footprints, and knemai, legs. The word here for staff is skepanion, similar to skeptron. XVI: 458: Zeus sends a shower of bloody rain to the earth (eraze), before the death of Sarpedon. Cf. Hebrew eretz, land. Cf. XI: 53: When Agamemnon arms himself, Zeus sends drops of bloody rain from the aither, because he is going to hurl many brave men down to Hades. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 15: } {T LOOKING LIKE A GOD} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER FIFTEEN LOOKING LIKE A GOD OLIVE oil, as well as being valuable for food, light, medicine, and general cosmetics, could help a human to emulate the electrical radiance of a statue or god. Unlike ambrosia and nectar, it was available for mere mortals. Our first reference is to the Odyssey, III: 464 ff. Telemachus is about to leave Pylos, where he has been asking for news of his father. A feast is prepared for his departure. Polykaste, Nestor's daughter, gives him a bath, anoints him with olive oil, and puts a tunic and cloak round him. He steps out of the bath looking like an immortal god. Baths and oil are frequently mentioned in the Odyssey, and it is well known that athletes rubbed themselves with oil and scraped themselves with a strigil. Before looking at further quotations, it would be as well to look at some Greek words. The olive tree, elaia, was sacred to Athene, who first planted it, either at Colonus (Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, 701), or on the Acropolis. It is described as chrusea, Pindar 01. XI: 13, golden, or xanthe, like Vergil's flava oliva, yellow, but most often as glauke. (Athene is glaukopis, bright-eyed). Moria, usually plural moriai, sc. elaiai, is the sacred olive in the Academy Aristophanes (Clouds, 1005); hence all olives growing in 'sekoi', or temple precincts, as opposed to 'idiai', privately owned. Zeus Morios is the guardian of the sacred olives, Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 705. Elaios is the wild olive, kotinos, Latin oleaster, used in making crowns for the Olympic games. Elaion is olive oil. {S : EXAMPLES, FROM HOMER, OF THE USE OF OLIVE OIL} EXAMPLES, FROM HOMER, OF THE USE OF OLIVE OIL Iliad XIV: 170: Olive oil is 'tethyomenon', sweetly smelling. Hera cleanses herself with ambrosia, then anoints herself with olive oil, whose fragrance, when stirred in Zeus's palace, reaches heaven and earth. She combs her hair and plaits her shining locks. 'Tethyomenon' is also applied to 'alsos', a grove. Iliad XXIII: 186: Achilles threatens to give the body of Hector to the dogs. Aphrodite wards off the dogs day and night, and anoints the body with rose-scented olive oil. Odyssey II: 339: Telemachus prepares to set off for Pylos for news of his father. He goes to the storeroom in his father's palace, where are gold, bronze, clothes, and fragrant olive oil. Odyssey XIII: 372: When Odysseus wakes up on the shore of Ithaca where the Phaeacians have brought him in their ship, Athene helps him. He hides his treasures, given him by the Phaeacians, in a cave, and the two of them sit down at the foot of a sacred olive tree and plan the destruction of the presumptuous suitors. Odyssey VI: 79 ff.: Nausicaa, daughter of Alkinous, is to go with the maidservants to the river to wash the dirty clothes. Her mother gives her food and drink for the outing, and olive oil in a golden lekythos, oil flask. Line 96: When the laundry work is over, they bathe, and rub themselves with olive oil, before eating their food on the river bank. Then Nausicaa begins the molpe --ritual song and dance --as they play with a ball. Line 211 ff.: When Odysseus appears, Nausicaa orders her maids to give him clothes and olive oil. Line 227 ff.: After he has washed and anointed himself with olive oil, Athene makes him look taller and sturdier, with hair like hyacinths hanging from his head. Just as when a skilled man, trained by Hephaestus and Pallas Athene, applies a layer of gold on a silver object, putting a beautiful finish on his work so Athene poured down beauty on his head and shoulders. Then he went and sat by the sea-shore, radiant with beauty and grace. Stilbon, radiant, is a name for the planet Mercury. Odyssey VIII: 11 ff.: Athene, disguised as a herald of King Alkinous, urges the people to go to the assembly, where they will hear about the stranger who has arrived at the palace, looking like one of the immortals. Her words arouse universal excitement. The assembly ground and seats are quickly filled, and there are many who marvel when they see the wise son of Laertes. Athene has poured down grace from heaven on his head and shoulders, and made him taller and sturdier to behold, so that he should seem a respected and revered friend in the eyes of all the Phaeacians, and may perform the many trials that the Phaeacians may make of him. Odyssey VIII: 450: As soon as Odysseus had fastened the coffer containing the presents given him by the Phaeacians, the housekeeper invited him to have a bath. When the maids had bathed him and anointed him with olive oil, they put a beautiful cloak and tunic on him. He left the bath, and went to join the men, who were drinking wine. Odyssey X: 365 ff.: Circe baths and oils him, puts a fine cloak and tunic round him, leads him into the hall, and sets him on a beautiful chair decorated with silver, and puts a footstool under his feet. A maidservant brings water in a beautiful golden jug, and pours it, for him to rinse his hands, over a silver basin. Odyssey VII: 105 ff.: In Alkinous's palace, the maids work at the loom, and sit turning the spindles, like leaves of a tall poplar. The liquid olive oil drips from the close-woven linen cloth. References to oil in the Iliad are fewer than in the Odyssey, but the following are noteworthy: Iliad XIX: 126: Agamemnon ends the feud with Achilles, blaming Ate, eldest daughter of Zeus, for blinding his judgement. He tells the story of Hera's deception of Zeus. When Zeus realised that he had been deceived, he expelled from Olympus Ate of the glossy hair --liparoplokamos. Liparos means sleek, glossy, oiled. 'Lip elaio' means 'with olive oil'. Plokamos is a lock of hair. XXIV: 587: Hector's body is to be washed, anointed with oil, then wrapped in a fine pharos and tunic. It is an interesting coincidence that pharos (pronounced slightly differently) is also the name of an island off Alexandria famous for its lighthouse, and that pharos comes to mean a lighthouse. The Latin for olive oil is oleum, and occurs in the phrase 'oleum addere camino, ' to put oil on the fire; Horace, Satires II: 3: 321. Greek has the phrase 'to put a fire out with pitch and olive oil'. Oleum is the word used in the Vulgate to imply spirit, joy, in Old Testament, Isaiah LXI: 3, and New Testament Hebrews I: 9. {S : AMBROSIA} AMBROSIA It is the food of the gods. In the poems of Sappho and Alkman, it is a drink. It is an unguent in Iliad XIV: 170. Hera began her toilet by removing all dirt from her beautiful skin with ambrosia, and then anointing herself with olive oil. Odyssey IV: Menelaus gives Telemachus an account of Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, and what he told Menelaus. When becalmed and short of provisions, Menelaus and his crew were helped by Eidothea, daughter of Proteus. She dressed Menelaus and his men in the skins of freshly flayed seals, and applied ambrosia under each man's nose (line 445) to counteract the smell of the seals. The word for seal is ketos. It is used to mean a sea monster, and also a whale. There is a possibility of confusion over the words ambrosios and ambrosia. The Sanskrit 'a mrita' means not dying. Semitic 'anbar', ambergris, is a magic perfume. Ambrosia may originally have been an adjective, with food or fodder as its noun. Ambrotos, a-brotos, means not mortal. Ambrosios is rarely used of persons, but is applied to night and to sleep. It is applied to all property of the gods, e. g. hair. Iliad 1: 529: Zeus nodded with his dark brows; the ambrosial locks fell forward from the Lord's immortal head; he shook great Olympus. Dress. Iliad V: 338: Diomedes attacks Aphrodite. He strikes her hand through the ambrosial garment that the Graces had worked for her. Ichor, the immortal (ambrotos) blood of the goddess, came out. Sandals. Iliad XXIV: 341: Hermes puts on his beautiful sandals, golden and ambrosial, and flies down to Troy and the Hellespont to guide Priam. Voice and Song. Homeric Hymn to Artemis, line 18: At Delphi she leads the beautiful dance of the Graces and Muses. They sing hymns to Leto with their ambrosial voice. Fodder. Iliad V: 369: Iris puts ambrosial fodder beside the horses that draw the chariot of Ares. Beauty. Odyssey XVIII: 193: Athene causes Penelope to fall asleep, then, so that the suitors shall admire her, she gives her immortal (ambrota) gifts. She first cleanses her lovely face with ambrosial beauty (kallos) such as Kythereia of the beautiful crown (stephanos) uses for anointing when she enters the delightful dance of the Graces. (Himeroeis, delightful, implies 'arousing desire'). Pindar uses ambrosios of verses. Iliad XV: 153 ff.: Zeus sits on Mount Ida in a perfumed mist. {S : BRONZE} BRONZE Not only people, but buildings, could be radiant. Odyssey VII: 81 ff.: Homer gives a description of the palace and gardens of King Alkinous. Odysseus was full of hesitation before he went up to the bronze threshold, for a radiance like that of the sun or moon was in the lofty palace of the great king. Walls of bronze (chalkeoi) were built on each side from the door to the back, with a coping of blue enamel (kuanoio). Golden doors enclosed the strong building, and silver posts stood on the bronze threshold, with a silver lintel, and a golden door handle. There were golden and silver dogs on each side, made with great cunning by Hephaestus to guard Alkinous's palace, immortal and ageless for ever .... Golden boys on strong pedestals (bomon, also = altars) stood holding blazing torches to light the banqueters in the palace at night. Aeneid I: 447: When Aeneas and the Trojans reached Carthage, they found that Dido's people were building a temple, rich in gifts and in the presence (numen) of the goddess, with a brazen threshold rising by steps. The beams were joined by bronze, and bronze doors groaned on their hinges. Pausanias X: 5: 11: Pausanias writes that the third temple to be built at Delphi was of bronze, not remarkable since Akrisios made a bronze room for his daughter. He does not believe the story that it was built by Hephaestus, or Pindar's ode about the golden Sirens over the pediment. The story was that this temple dropped into a chasm, or was consumed by fire. The Iliad is full of references to flashing bronze armour. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 16: } {T HERAKLES AND HEROES} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER SIXTEEN HERAKLES AND HEROES HERODOTUS writes about Egypt in the second book of his history. In Chapters 42 and 43 he discusses Herakles, reporting that the Egyptians regarded him as one of the twelve gods. Greeks, he says, took the name Herakles from Egypt, that is, those Greeks who gave the name Herakles to the son of Amphitryon. Amphitryon and Alkmene were of Egyptian parentage. Seventeen thousand years before the reign of Amasis, the twelve gods came from the eight, and Herakles was one of them. Such is the Egyptian story. Herodotus went to Phoenicia and talked to the priests of the temple of Herakles in Tyre, where there were two obelisks, or pillars (stelae). The priests said that the temple was as old as Tyre, at least 2,300 years. At Thasos, he says, there was a temple dedicated to the Thasian Herakles, built by the Phoenicians who founded Thasos after sailing in search of Europe. This was five generations before Herakles, son of Amphitryon, was born in Greece. There was a story, he says, of Herakles allowing the Egyptians to bring him in bonds to a sacrifice, and exerting his strength (alke) and killing them all. Herakles as hero is a link not only between god and man, but between sky and earth. From the details of his life story we may learn a little of what was happening in the sky in ancient times, just as his links with Troy may help in the reconstruction of the chronology of the times. The birth stories contradict each other. We read that he was the son of Amphitryo, but we also read that he was the son of Zeus, and incurred thereby the jealousy of Hera. Later in his life she sent Lyssa, madness, to afflict him, and epilepsy was known as the nosos Herakleie, Herakles' sickness. The connection with electricity accounts for the magnet being called the Heraklean stone. Although the Latin poet speaks of the 'ternox', the threefold night of Herakles' conception, it was still thought necessary to carry out an adoption process when Herakles was finally taken up into heaven. Frazer, The Golden Bough, describes such rites. Hera got into bed, clasped Herakles, pushed him down through her clothes, and let him fall to the ground, imitating a real birth. Such a procedure was usual in Greece. Just before the annual festival of Herakles at Thebes, offerings were made to Galinthias, daughter of Proteus and a priestess of Hecate. She had been turned into a weasel by the Moirai, who were annoyed that she had assisted at the birth of Herakles. Mayani, in 'The Etruscans Begin to Speak', quotes an Etruscan mirror engraving. Juno is giving the adult Herakles milk from her breast. Mayani refers to a legend recorded by Diodorus Siculus, that Juno once fed the infant Hercules. While still in his cradle he killed two snakes sent by Hera. When he grew up, he was given a choice between Pleasure and Virtue. His choice of Virtue accords with his life of struggle against monsters, and against death itself. In a fit of madness he killed his wife, Megara, and his children. The Delphic oracle told him to serve Eurystheus, lord of Tiryns, for twelve years, and it was Eurystheus who imposed the twelve labours. It was on his journey to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides that Herakles killed the Egyptian king Busiris. He also killed the dragon Ladon that guarded the apples. When the labours had been accomplished, Herakles led an expedition against Laomedon, king of Troy, which was being attacked by a monster sent by Poseidon. Laomedon promised Herakles a gift of marvellous horses if he rid Troy of the monster. When Herakles was successful, Laomedon refused the reward. Herakles attacked and captured the city. His army included Telamon, father of Ajax, and Peleus, father of Achilles. To revert to one of his labours: when he killed the Hydra, he dipped his arrows in the blood, and was from then on able to kill opponents with poisoned arrows. He used one to kill the centaur Nessus. The dying centaur told Deianira, wife of Herakles, that his blood, smeared on a garment, would win back the love of Herakles if ever he was unfaithful. Herakles' reputation was such that Deianira kept some of the blood. When Herakles carried off Iole, Deianira sent him a robe smeared with the blood of Nessus. Herakles suffered so terribly from the burning of his flesh, that he had himself carried to the top of Mount Oeta, and put on a funeral pyre. Poias, father of Philoktetes, was persuaded, by the gift of his bow and arrows, to light the pyre. Herakles was carried up to heaven, where he married Hebe, daughter of Hera. Euripides' play, The Madness of Herakles, puts the twelve labours before the madness. Herakles is absent in Hades, bringing up Kerberos. Kreon, king of Thebes and father of Herakles' wife Megara, has been killed by Lykus (wolf) and his Theban supporters. Lykus is about to kill Megara and the children at the altar when Herakles returns just in time to save them and kill Lykus. Hera now sends Lyssa, madness, to attack Herakles, who kills his family. When he recovers his sanity, Theseus takes him to Athens for purification. At line 1104, Athene hurls a stone to prevent Herakles killing Amphitryon. The blow of the stone causes sleep. This stone was named Sophronister, that which makes sane and wise. It was exhibited in the Herakleion in Thebes. In line 131 ff., we learn that nobody would buy Herakles as a slave because he had fierce eyes that flashed fire. His children's eyes have augai, flashing beams. He has golden hair. Although Herakles was famous for his strength, he is described by Pindar as not being a large man. Odysseus meets his ghost in the underworld, Odyssey X1: 601, Herakles himself being with the immortals, married to Hebe. To the first Herakles, the Egyptian god, belongs the story of the infant killing the two snakes sent by Hera. He crossed the sea in a cauldron. There may be here a reference to Okeanos, the waters in the sky. To the same Herakles we must refer the story that he broke off a horn of Achelous, and that he shot Hera in the right breast, inflicting a wound that never healed. To the second Herakles, son of Amphitryon, we can attribute the attack on Troy. He also attacked Pylos (Pausanias III: 26); Nestor took refuge in Enope, or Gerenia when Herakles captured Pylos. Herakles and many other heroes at times seem to be quite plausible historical characters, leaders of migrations and general benefactors, yet at other times they rescue maidens in distress by killing monsters, fly through the sky, and defy what are thought to be the laws of nature and physics. The confusion may be caused by the fact that terrestrial kings and princes imitated the apparent behaviour of objects in the sky, with a view to increasing their control over their subjects, and found it helpful to blur the distinction between man and god. HERO WORSHIP The cult of heroes differs from the worship of gods, but in the case of Herakles there is some confusion. Sacrifices were made to the shade of a hero at his tomb. Such a sacrifice was called an enagisma, as opposed to thusia, sacrifices to a god in the sky. The worshipper at the shrine of a hero did not normally partake of a sacred meal, whereas a sacrifice to a god involved the eating by the worshipper of a shared meal. At a hero's tomb, blood was poured into the bothros or trench, the victim being held head down, whereas in a sacrifice to a god, the victim was lifted up and the head drawn back to face the sky. The hero's altar, eschara, was lower than a god's altar, bomos, and round. It was for libations (pouring of liquid) only, and the rite was performed on one day only of the year. There was a hero cult of Herakles at Sikyon in Greece which was an exception. Here there was not only heroic but theistic ritual. His heroon was a rectangular stone base, with a pillar at each corner, and a pediment in front. It was unroofed, presumably for easier communication with the sky. Herakles was a god to the Egyptians; he was a mortal hero to the Greeks, but he became immortal. He constituted a link between underworld, earth, and sky, with electricity, the divine force that was detected underground, felt in one's own person, and seen acting in the sky, as the common essence of god, man, and hero. The Greek word for hero is similar to the Hebrew heron, which means conception, or pregnancy. It is at any rate clear that a hero needed a divine parent in order to establish his bona fides. Herakles was identified in the east with Melqart, and this brings us to another aspect of the Greek hero cult. Apollodorus, III: 4: 3:, tells how Ino, daughter of Kadmos and Harmonia, in a fit of madness plunged her son Melikertes into a cauldron, and fled with his corpse. Another version is that Athamas first killed Learchos, and was about to throw Melikertes into a cauldron when Ino rescued him, fled, and sprang with him into the sea. Yet another version is that Athamas killed Learchos, but his mother put Learchos into a cauldron of boiling water, went mad, and sprang into the sea with Melikertes. To understand this, we need to recall how Medea, in the play of that name by Euripides, cut up an old ram and boiled it in a cauldron, then magically restored it to life rejuvenated as a young lamb. She promised Pelias that she could rejuvenate him in the same way. He consented, and she asked his daughters to cut him up. She omitted the spells, and Pelias died. Tantalus killed his son Pelops, and cooked and served his flesh to the gods in a banquet. The gods realised what he had done, and Pelops was restored to life by either Rhea or Klotho. Pelops, on whom a curse had been laid because of a broken oath, had two sons, Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus became king of Mycenae, and his wife Aithra was seduced by Thyestes. Atreus banished him, but later invited him to a banquet for which he had killed and cooked the children of Thyestes. Another story tells how Thetis plunged her children into a boiling cauldron to test their immortality. None survived. A Greek inscription from Syria of Trajan's time (early 2nd century A. D.) has the phrase "apotheotheis en to lebeti," having been made a god in the cauldron, and is dedicated to Leukothea, the white goddess who appears in the sea. I suggest that in all these attempts to achieve immortality we see an attempt to copy occurrences in the sky. We have already mentioned the seething pot looking like a tripod cauldron, or rather the tripod cauldron looking like a seething pot in the sky. Ritual based on imitation of a seething pot was one way of trying to achieve immortality. We shall see in a later chapter that the Egyptian priests approached the problem differently, but in each case electrical theory and experiment led to the belief that the sky-earth relationship was a source of electrical influence and power, and even of life. It may be relevant that the Greek verb 'zo', I live, 'zen', to live, could easily be confused with the Greek verb 'zein', to boil. The Cumaean Sibyl is described as living in a jar suspended from the ceiling. Could it be that living in a jar was an attempt to prevent the wasting away of the divine (electrical) force that was associated with inspiration? The ischus ges, strength of earth, wasted away, and the oracles grew old. THE APIS BULL Pliny writes that in Egypt the Apis bull was killed by drowning. Death by drowning was thought to release the divine element. The dead bull became Osiris, the underworld god. In Chapter XIII I quoted from the Book of the Dead. Osiris Aufankh refers to the "flame that comes into being from out of the fire which blazes within the water". The connection between the tripod cauldron and the bull (the cauldron, cortina, could 'moo' and breathe steam) suggests that funeral rites, the heating of water in a cauldron, the washing of the body, and anointing it with oil, are based on a procedure for the resurrection of the soul of the dead hero. See Iliad XVIII: 343 ff., for the funeral of Patroclus. It also appears that in early times kings of Egypt feasted on the flesh of the bull. The king wished to absorb the strength and divinity of the bull. The running of the bull along land boundaries, and the wearing by the king of a bull's tail, show the connection between the bull and agriculture. The Latin arare is to plough; aratrum is a plough. A derivation from ar, electrical fire, seems possible. The hoof of the bull, like that of Pegasus, had magical power. The Apis cult is a large and important subject, for which readers are referred to the article in the Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum, Volume Two, "Apis and the Serapeum", by M. Ibrahim and D. Rohl. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 17: } {T BYWAYS OF ELECTRICITY} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER SEVENTEEN BYWAYS OF ELECTRICITY HEAVEN and Earth, Thrones, Pillars and Trees: various and many are the attempts to copy on earth what is seen in the sky, some having been mentioned already, namely the use of sympathetic magic to bring low the monster, dragon, snake, bull, ram or goat that is threatening the established order in the sky. The Roman augur marks out the 'templa coeli', and transfers them to the ground. The helmet, plume, stephanos, painted faces and shields of warriors, the Philistines with their faces painted red, actors similarly, can all be derived from this. There are numerous examples. Here are two which seem to be possible candidates, though less obvious than most. Aeneid IV: 146: Dido entertains the Troians at Carthage. Among the company that go out for the royal hunt, familiar to many through music by Berlioz, are the picti Agathyrsi, painted Agathyrsi, a Scythian people living in what later became Transylvania. 'Aga' in compounds implies 'very'. Were they experts with the thyrsus? Iliad XVIII: 590: The dance at Knossos starts as a round dance like the dithyramb, then develops in confrontational style like the later tragic chorus, with two acrobats loose in the company. The columns of some Greek temples appear to be cut in marble in such a way as to suggest that wood was the original material. There may be a link between Yggdrasyl, the sacred oak tree of Zeus at Dodona and elsewhere, the columns of the Greek temple, the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and so on. Nails, Greek 'helos', were sometimes driven into wooden pillars. This was a Roman method of marking the date. Pausanias III: 20: 9: "On the way from Sparta to Arkadia is the Horse's Grave, where Tyndareos made Helen's suitors swear to abide by her choice. Nearby are seven pillars in the ancient pattern, said to be statues of the planets. Further on is a sanctuary of Mysian Artemis." There may be a link between the tree, the pillar, the poros and the tekmor of Alkman, and the pillar of Plato, Republic X. The Greek kion, pillar, can also, with a change of accent, mean 'going'. Electrical displays, travelling through the sky, could be the explanation of the similarity. Temple columns were thought of as supports for heaven. The Egyptian pylon, or gateway, is seb (Greek hepta = seven). The pulvinaria or capitals of the columns may suggest the cushions on which deities reposed. {S : SOME PASSAGES OF INTEREST IN THE ILIAD} SOME PASSAGES OF INTEREST IN THE ILIAD VII: 44 ff.: Apollo suggests to Athene that they should rouse Hector to challenge one of the Greeks to a duel. Athene has no objection to the idea. Helenos, Priam's son, understood (put together in his mind) the plan that the gods intended. Helenos told Hector of this, assuring him that it was not yet the time for him to die, "for I heard this from the voice of immortal gods." X: 313: Hector offers a reward to anyone who will make a night reconnaissance of the Greek ships. Dolon volunteers. He takes his bow (line 333), puts on the hide of a grey wolf, puts on his head a ferret-skin cap. 'Kunee' is a leather cap. 'Ktideos' is a marten or weasel or ferret. A digression is necessary at this point. Smintheus, an epithet of Apollo, may be from Sminthe, a town in the Troad, or from sminthos, a Cretan word meaning a mouse, or both may come from the Cretan word 'Mouse-killer' is a possible translation for Smintheus. In the Old Testament, II Kings XIX: 19: 6ff., we read how Isaiah prophesied to king Hezekiah that the army sent against Jerusalem by Sennacherib under the command of Rabshakeh would be destroyed by the Lord. In II Kings XIX: 35 ff., we read that the angel of the Lord went out and smote the Assyrians; 185,000 were dead next morning. In XIX: 7, the words of Isaiah are: "Behold, I will send a blast upon him ..." It is significant that in the following chapter, XX: 9 ff., Isaiah prophesies that the shadow on Hezekiah's sundial will go back ten degrees. In verse 11 we read that the Lord brought the shadow ten degrees back. Herodotus II: 141, gives another version of Sennacherib's defeat. He learnt from Egyptian priests that Sennacherib's army had been destroyed in a single night. He saw a stone statue of Sethos set up in an Egyptian temple, holding a mouse. Herodotus was told that a plague of field mice gnawed away the bow strings, shield straps, etc, and the soldiers, their weapons useless, had to flee. In the following chapter, 142, he mentions the Egyptian report that on four occasions since the time of the first king of Egypt, the sun had changed its position of rising and setting. It is interesting to compare this with the fact that in II Kings XIX & XX, Sennacherib's defeat is reported just before an account of a reversal of the apparent motion of the sun. Is there any way of harmonising these two accounts of the cause of the destruction of Sennacherib's army? The weasel-skin cap and wolf's pelt worn by Dolon may be a clue. The object in the sky may have looked like a weasel, wolf or mouse, the size being inevitably a subjective matter in the description. Cicero, De Divinatione I: XLIV, says that in the Marsic War, shields, with the leather gnawed away (derosos), fell from the sky, a most sinister portent. Apollo Smintheus has a female equivalent in Mouse Artemis, mentioned by Pausanias. DISTURBANCE IN THE SKY Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 B. C. to A. D. 65, wrote not only philosophical dialogues, but also a number of plays, modelled on Greek tragedy. It is in his Phaedra that we meet the well known passages about the moon, whose birth the Arkadians claimed to have witnessed. In Act IV of his Thyestes, the chorus after the Messenger's speech express their fear that Chaos will come again, and that Nature will for the second time wipe out all the lands. The sun has turned aside from its usual path, and gone back to set in the east. Such a passage can best be considered in conjunction with the previously quoted stories of Isaiah and the sundial of king Hezekiah, and the information given to Herodotus. The Greeks and Romans, and other early ancient writers who dealt with the problem, first described these happenings as historical facts. Psychological interpretations and rational explanations came later. Iliad XII: 442 ff.: Hector storms the Argive wall. Helped by Zeus, he picks up a huge rock and breaks the gates. Line 462: Shining Hector rushes in, his face looking like swift night. He shines like grim bronze. His eyes flash fire. IV: 439 ff.: In the fighting that follows the breaking of the truce by Pandarus, Ares spurs on the Trojans, Athene of the flashing eyes the Achaeans, also Deimos (Fear), Phobos (Rout), and Eris (Strife), with insatiable raving, a sister and companion of man-slaying Ares. At first as she raises her head she is little, but then, though walking on the ground, her head stands up in the sky. XIII: 299: Meriones and Idomeneus, as they set out to battle in their shining bronze, aithopi chalko, look like Ares and his son Phobos. XIV: 243 ff.: Hera goes to Lemnos, armed with Aphrodite's girdle of Love and Desire, himas. This word also means a leather strap, harness of a chariot, whip. At Lemnos she asks Hypnos, Sleep, to lull Zeus to sleep. Hypnos is unwilling; anybody, even Okeanos, the father of the gods, rather than Zeus. "You once gave me a command on the day when Herakles, the arrogant son of Zeus, sailed from Troy after sacking the city of the Trojans. I sweetly lulled to sleep the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus, and you, devising mischief, raised fierce gales on the sea and bore Herakles away to Kos with its many inhabitants, away from all his friends. When Zeus woke he was angry, and hurled the gods about in the palace, and looked for me especially. He would have thrown me from the sky to vanish in the sea, had not Night, the tamer of gods and humans alike, saved me. Iliad XV: 1-27: Zeus wakes to find the Trojans in disarray, and Hector out of action. He turns on Hera angrily and reminds her of the time when he punished her by hanging her high. "I tied two anvils from your feet and tied your hands with an unbreakable golden chain, leaving you suspended in sky and clouds. The gods in far Olympus were angry, but could not free you. For if I caught anyone, I hurled him, taking him by the foot, out of Olympus (apo Belou), so that he reached the ground powerless. But not even then was I freed from the grief for god-like Herakles, whom you, having by your subtlety persuaded the hurricanes, sent over the barren sea driven by the North wind." Akmones, anvils, were meteoric stones. The stones fell near Troy, and were shown to sightseers. Belos, according to a scholiast, is an old Achaean word meaning heaven, distinct from the word belos, meaning threshold (Leaf and Bayfield). {S : MYSTERIES, MICE AND APOLLO.} MYSTERIES, MICE AND APOLLO. The Greek work musterion, mystery, appears to be a compound of mus, mouse, and tereo, I watch, I observe, wait for. The prophet or augur watched animals and birds. They would give warning, by their behavior, of an impending electrical storm or earthquake. Tereus was the king of Thrace who was turned into a hoopoe. Musterion can also mean mouse- hole. The Greek word, which is almost always plural, musteria, means religious demonstrations, the knowledge being imparted in secret. The electrical significance appears in, for example, Euripides, 'Stemmata' 470, "semna stemmaton musteria", solemn mysteries of garlands. 'Stemmata' are the materials, flowers or wool, for making a crown, especially for the head or for a sceptre. They probably represent an electrical aura or glow. The Roman poet Status refers to the thyrsus as "missile lauro redimitum", as if it were a javelin bound with laurel, like the fasces of the consul Marius. (Achilleid 1: 612) {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 18: } {T ROME AND THE ETRUSCANS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ROME AND THE ETRUSCANS A brief summary of events just after the sack of Troy is needed if we are to be able, later, to tackle the problem of the Etruscans, and the electrical terms in their language. We noticed, when reading of the legendary origins of the mysteries of Samothrace, that Dardanus left Samothrace and went to Troy, where he established mysteries. There is mention in Hesiod, Theogony 1011 ff., of Latinos and Agrios, sons of Odysseus and of Circe, the enchantress who delayed the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after the sack of Troy. He refers to Latinos and Agrios, who ruled over the Tyrsenians. The latter have been thought to be the Etruscans, who, according to Herodotus, came to Italy from the east. Whether true or not, a link with the foundation of Rome begins to emerge. The Etruscan language is related to inscriptions found on Lemnos. Our source for Dardanus leaving Samothrace and going to Troy is Hellanicus of Mytilene, one of the logographi, or chroniclers, of Greek history. He lived about the time of Herodotus, 5th century B. C.. Later sources say that Dardanus took statues and cult objects associated with the Penates. Dionysius of Halicarnassus equates these with what Aeneas rescued from the burning of Troy. Plutarch says that it was the Palladium that he rescued. The Palladium was probably a meteorite, sacred to Pallas Athene, worshipped at Troy. When Herodotus visited Egypt, he was told by priests that Helen of Troy and Paris, on their way to Troy from Sparta, had been blown by storms to Egypt. In Chapter 114, Paris is referred to as a Teucrian stranger. The Teucrians are first mentioned in Greek literature in the 7th century B. C.. The father of Aeneas was Anchises, and the story of how Aeneas carried his father out of Troy and escaped from the Greeks is well known. The mother of Aeneas was no less a person than Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. There is an interesting parallel between the stories of the foundation of Rome by Romulus and Remus, twins suckled by a she-wolf, and the stories of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess, in the Gilgamesh epic. There was a string of lovers of Ishtar, starting with Tammuz, who was taken down to the underworld. Another lover was a shepherd whom she turned into a wolf. There were lion and horse lovers whom she trapped and whipped. All suffered some unpleasant fate at her hands. A love affair with Ishtar was dangerous. It is of interest that at about 1500 B. C. (conventional dating), the war functions of Ishtar increase. Rome, according to a legend of about 400 B. C., was named after a Trojan woman. Capua may have been named after Capys, a Trojan and friend of Aeneas. Capys was a king of Alba in Latium, according to Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV: 613, and in Livy IV: 37 he is king of Capua. Cape Misenum will have been named after Misenus, Aeneas's trumpeter. The generally accepted view was that the foundation of Rome followed quite closely the arrival of Aeneas in Italy after the sack of Troy. The earliest Roman historian, Quintus Fabius Pictor, agrees with Greek historians in putting Aeneas in the eighth century B. C.. There is an obvious clash here with the view of those scholars who date the sack of Troy to c. 1200 B. C. Such evidence as is normally adduced for the conventional date of Troy, arrived at via orthodox Egyptian chronology, is increasingly under attack, but detailed discussions of this, and of the difficulties that are caused by the extension of Dark Ages, in the face of the archaeological and literary evidence, is beyond the scope of the present work [1] . {S : PASSAGES REFERRING TO TROY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF ROME} PASSAGES REFERRING TO TROY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF ROME Iliad V: 628: Hard fate brought Tlepolemus, son of Herakles, face to face with Sarpedon. Line 648: Herakles sacked holy Ilion through Laomedon, who rebuked Herakles when he did not give him the horses for which Herakles came. Iliad XX: 215 ff.: Aeneas, about to fight with Achilles, tells of his ancestry. Dardanus, a son of Zeus, founded Dardania. His son Erichthonius had a son called Tros, king of the Trojans. Tros's three sons were Assaracus, Ganymedes, and Ilus. Ilus was father of Laomedon. Among Laomedon's sons was Priam. Assaracus was father of Capys, Capys was father of Anchises. Aeneas himself was the son of Anchises and Aphrodite. Aeneid II: 781: In the blazing ruins of Troy, the ghost of his wife Creusa speaks to Aeneas, and prophesies that he will come to the land of Hesperia, where the Lydian Thybris flows. Pausanias X: 17: 6: When Troy fell, some of the Trojans with Aeneas were carried away by storm winds to Sardinia, where they mingled with the Greeks. Many years later the Libyans, who had landed in Sardinia much earlier under Sardos, crossed to the island again and made war on the Greeks. Very few Greeks survived, and the Trojans fled to the hills. They are still called Ilians, but have a Libyan way of life and appearance. Aeneid VIII: 479: Evander talks with Aeneas: Long ago a Lydian race, distinguished in war, settled on the hills of Etruria. Aeneid VIII: 600: Near Caere is a sacred wood. There is a story that the ancient Pelasgians had consecrated this wood, and a festival day, to Silvanus, god of fields and cattle. Aeneid X1: 785: Arruns (an Etruscan name) prays to Apollo, whom he and his people worship more than do others, and relying on whom they walk on fiery ashes. Lydia seems to have been an important centre for fire magic. Pausanias, V: 27: 5, recalls seeing in Lydia, among the Lydians who are called Persians, two buildings, each with an altar covered with ash. A magician puts wood on the ash, puts a crown on his head, and sings prayers. The wood catches fire. The importance of the Etruscans for our subject is obvious, for they were expert in the divination on which the Romans relied. Furthermore, where our knowledge of the origins of Roman civilisation is still confused, we are helped by the Etruscan links with other countries, as described in such works as The Etruscans, by Pallottino. Herodotus and most ancient authors believed that the Etruscans came from the east (Lydia). What is known for certain is that to the north-west of Rome was Etruria and that from the 8th century B. C., there were many flourishing cities, such as Mutina, Caere, Clusium, Cremona, and Felsina. Many names end in -na, a fact that is useful in tracing links with other areas. Rome, according to the official chronology, was founded in 753 B. C., or soon after. It was believed that it had a link with Troy, for Aeneas and his companions escaped from Troy and reached Italy to found a second Troy. His son, Ascanius, founded the city of Alba Longa. Alba Longa was destroyed by the Roman king Tullus Hostilius. {S : ROME, MONARCHY, AND THE GODS} ROME, MONARCHY, AND THE GODS In Mesopotamia, 'kingship came down from heaven', and the Roman state too was at first ruled by a king. Under Tarquinius Priscus (the Old Tarquin), and his two successors, Rome was under the domination of Etruscan kings. Servius Tullius enlarged the city, building new walls. He built the Cloaca Maxima, which drained especially the low-lying Subura, the densely populated area near the Capitoline Hill, and the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. His successor, Tarquinius Superbus, is thought to have been in close contact with Greece. He consulted the oracle at Delphi over a proposed colony. The monarchy ended in 510 B. C.. There were Etruscan attempts to recover Rome, led by Lars Porsenna, and the stories of Horatius holding the bridge, and of Mucius Scaevola, refer to this period. Although the Etruscan alphabet is basically the same as that of Greek and Latin, progress in understanding the language has been slow. There is no lengthy bilingual text. Certain words are closely related to Latin, e. g. fanu, Latin fanum, a dwelling or temple. It is recognised by some as an Indo-European language; the problem has been to establish the divisions between words, the system of grammar, and to find the meanings of words which have no obvious links with Latin or Greek. Readers are referred to The Etruscans Begin to Speak, by Mayani, for a challenging account of the many attempts to understand the inscriptions and few texts available. In his book, Mayani, relying chiefly on Albanian, claimed to establish some of the grammar, and enlarged the known vocabulary, relying on the evidence that Etruscan was based on Illyrian, a core of which survives in modern Albanian, quite apart from Albanian's obvious borrowings from Latin and modern languages. Etruscan has features linking it with the inscriptions on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean, with Lydia, Lycia, Phoenicia, and with Egypt. In many instances the words involved have a religious significance. Indo-European languages can be put into two groups, the centum group, and the satem. In essence this means that the letter 'c', e. g. in the word for 'hundred', is either pronounced like a 'k', as in the Latin centum, or like an 's', as in Slavonic 'sto'. The distinction between Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages becomes less useful and harder to maintain the farther one directs one's attention towards the Baltic area, and let it be said at the start that Etruscan sometimes resembles a centum, sometimes a satem language, when it is using Indo-European material familiar to us from Latin and Greek. The Greek word 'semnos' means solemn, divine. It was originally applied only to deities and to things divine. Here are some examples of its use: semnoi logoi, oracles; Herodotus VII: 6. semnai theai, the Erinyes, Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus. semnon antron, the cave of Chiron the centaur; Pindar, Pythian IX: 50. semnon nomon, the august law; Pindar, Nemean 1: 72. semna orgia, semna musteria, solemn rites; Sophocles, Trachiniae. semnos paian, a solemn paean; Aeschylus, Persae 393. en throno semno semnon thokeonta, sitting in state on his holy throne; Herodotus II: 173. Of tragedy: Plato, Gorgias 502b. ta semn' epe, proud words (haughty); Sophocles, Ajax 1107. semnomantis, a revered, venerable prophet; Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 556. From these instances it seems likely that semnos is connected with Greek electrical theology. Let us look at a few Etruscan words which illustrate the points so far raised. Cemnac. I suggest that it is related to semnos. It implies lightning and thunder. Greek and Latin 'gemo' means to make a groaning sound as a result of fullness. Ais cemnac truthtrachs rinuth, God thundering like a formidable bull in the clouds (Mayani's translation). Curte, carath, the Etruscan sacred enclosure, is the same as garth, Slavonic gorod which we see in Leningrad. Frontac, thunderer, is the Greek bronte. Truna, fear, means fear of a god or king. Compare Greek throngs, throne, whence Zeus dispensed divine justice, zealously copied by earthly monarchs and priests. Spel, cave or vault; compare Greek speos, Latin spelunca. Tarkhu, bull, appears in part in the Latin taurus. Tark suggests Tarquinius, also the neo-Hittite weather god, Tarhund. Fear, and the bull, are fundamental concepts in Etruscan, as in Greek thought. The Greek 'tarache' means confusion, reminding one of the bull in a china shop . The Etruscan connection with Troy and Aeneas is hinted at on the Tagliatella vase. The vase is decorated with a picture of a labyrinth, labelled Truia. In Albanian the words troje, truej, mean ground, area. I suggest that it is not only the Greek agon, the arena for the contest, but also the place of the double-axe, Greek labrys, Latin dolabra, the lightning symbol. We have already met the young slave boy Servius Tullius, round whose head there was a crown, stephanos, of fire when he was asleep in his nursery. The connection between electrical fire and royalty appears in the Etruscan kvil, light, closely connected with the eagle, the bird of Zeus, in the name Tanaquil, wife of Tarquinius Priscus. Hungarian kivilagit means to illuminate. Frazer, The Golden Bough, suggested that the kings of Rome may have been killed sacrificially. The regifugium, flight of the king, was a ceremony held on 24th February. The rex sacrorum fled from the forum. This may be compared with the Stepteria at Delphi, which has been discussed already. Marcus Curtius was said to have ridden into a chasm in the forum, in order to save Rome; the chasm closed over horse and rider. The story has links with a lake (Lacus Curtius) and with lightning. The Romans were originally grouped into three tribes, Ramnes, Luceres and Tities. Luceres resembles the Latin lux, light, and Tities suggests titio, a firebrand. If the link with light is to be maintained, one might consider the Greek horan, to see, Egyptian Ra, and Hebrew or. The Greek menus means force, but any solution to the problem of Ramnes is speculative at the moment. The names of the Roman cavalry divisions are Celeres, Trossuli, and Flexuntes. Celeres suggests Latin - cello, strike, found in compounds, e. g. percello. Translated as 'swift', it suggests the speed of Apollo's arrow or the strike of a snake, both of which have electrical significance in mythology. For Trossuli there is the Greek tarasso, throw into confusion. Flexuntes may be from flecto, bend. Perhaps this detachment could bend the enemy line. The Etruscan zilc or zilch is a high official, a magistrate, perhaps 'praetor Etruriae', the praetor, i. e. he who goes in front, of Etruria. The letter 'z', zeta, in ancient Greek was pronounced 'sd'. It could approach the sound of 'st', depending on the degree of voicing of the consonants. The Phoenician alphabet had consonants; vowels were added to the alphabet by the Greeks. Furthermore, the farther east one travelled in the Mediterranean world into Semitic territory, the harder it was for natives to pronounce two consonants together without a vowel, such as an indefinite 'e' sound, the Hebrew shewa, between them. This gives grounds for supposing that the word zilch began with the sound 'sed', resulting in 'sedilch'. 'Ch' in Greek was a 'k' followed by an aspirate. In Homer, one of the epithets of a king is skeptouchos, having a sceptre. 'Ouchos' is from the verb 'echo', have, hold. Zeus is described as aigiochos, holding the aegis. It seems possible that 'zilch' is sedilech, 'having a sedile', and that 'zil' is the Etruscan for 'sedile'. The Latin sedile is a seat, corresponding to the Greek thronos, seat or throne. A senior Roman magistrate, one with imperium such as a consul or praetor, had an ivory throne, a sella curulis. Sella means a saddle, as well as an ordinary seat. In Plato's Timaeus, each soul has a star as its chariot. The Arabic 'cursa' is the name given to a star in the constellation of Eridanus, and means 'seat' (cf. Latin currus, chariot). Zilch is often found in conjunction with other words. Zilch spurana is an urban magistrate (Subura is a part of Rome, and is originally 'city'). The zilch parchis may be a patrician official. Maru, marniu, and marunuch are associated with the priestly title cepen (cupencus = priest). The zilch eterau or zilch eteraias may be linked with the Egyptian hieroglyph 'heter', two women shaking hands, which means friendship. The link may be more acceptable if one recalls the Greek 'hetairos', comrade. The feminine, hetaira, means in classical Greek a lady who plays a more prominent part in public life than Athenian conservatives thought desirable. Temple prostitutes were a feature of temples in the ancient world. Perhaps the zilch eterau was in charge of the Vestal Virgins. A priestess of Astarte is in Hebrew qadhesh, a consecrated one. In the Etruscan language there are nasalised vowels. Hate, hatec is hantec, Hades. Muth = mund, the gateway to the underworld. German 'Mund' = mouth. Other examples can be found. Ceus, grandfather or ancestor, = Latin gens. Mayani quotes hutra, and hondra, lower, in the Tables of Iguvium, as examples in the Osco-Umbrian dialect. The Hebrew athiq, splendid, suggests Latin antiquus, ancient and illustrious. Nasal vowels occur in languages from the Balto-Slavonic area, e. g. Polish. This phenomenon, combined with z = sd, suggests that Zeus may be Sdeus, Sedeus, Sedens. The genitive case, Zenos, gives support to this. His name appears as the present participle, sitting, of the verb sedere, to sit. Zeus is often referred to as the god sitting on a throne. In Aeolic and Doric, he is Sdeus. It seems possible that the Greek ending '-eus' is related to the Latin present participle ending '-ens', in English '-ing'. If we take the Greek for king, basileus, as an example, we find that he may be 'basilens', 'basiling'. But what is the meaning of this imaginary verb, to 'basil'? Fortunately, Etruscan is of help here. There is an Etruscan word vacl, or vacil. I suggest that it means a religious feast, referring especially to a feast in which the priests and officials sacrificed an animal by killing it at an altar with an axe, burning the entrails, cutting up the good flesh and sticking it on iron spits to roast, and eating. That the basileus, or king, was a banqueter at a religious sacrifice, has an interesting parallel in Albanian folklore. Albanian retains some of its ancient Illyrian basis. Mayani quotes from a ballad by G. Fishta: A feast is provided by the good fairies for heroes who have defeated a dragon in battle. They are rewarded with 'dy drej te majme', two fat stags. Stags were sacrificed on threshing-floors, and here we have a scene like that of an Homeric sacrifice. The bright sky-god is represented by the priests who probably wear white robes in imitation. The snake-like entrails, and the tongues, are thrown on the fire, and other parts are eaten by the priests. It fits the ancient Greek accounts, in Hesiod and others, of lightning exchanges and the break-up of the snake-like tail in the sky. The subsequent absorption of some of the debris by larger heavenly bodies has a parallel in Thor's great appetite. The vacl took place at numerous festivals, including the games, where the battle in the sky was represented especially by the chariot race round an elliptical racecourse or orbit. There were seven pillars in the spin, or barrier, of the Circus at Rome, one of them called the fala (Juvenal: VI: 590). A chariot smash could easily be arranged at the turning point round the fala. There was a cushioned seat (pulvinar), on the spina, for the benefit of the senior magistrate. A fala was also a tower used in sieges from which to attack defenders of a besieged city. Falando means the sky. Etruscan art shows figures of humans, and of gods, banqueting. At a Roman dinner party the guests reclined on cushions. Cushions, pulvinaria, were seen in the streets, with puppets, models of deities, on them, at the festival of the Lectisternium. The priests in charge, epulones, consumed the offerings that the devout gave to the puppets. (There is a reference to cushion-shaped capitals in architecture, capitula columnarum, in Vitruvius). There was an epulum, sacred feast, of Jupiter, one of Juno, and one of Minerva. Such sacred meals were offered especially at the funeral of a great man. Funeral games were held for Hector, and games were organised by Aeneas for his father Anchises. The Etruscan words macstrevc and macstrna shed light on the Latin 'magister' and 'magistratus', magistrate. The Roman curule magistrate was accompanied by a body of lictors who carried the fasces. The Vetulonia fascis is a double axe, with metal rods. It is illustrated in M. Pallottino, The Etruscans (Penguin). It symbolised not only the legal power to kill, but also the divine authority revealed in lightning; it might be wreathed in laurel (which symbolises electrical fire) as a sign of victory. Support for this interpretation comes from the Hebrew 'maghzera', axe. The Latin 'magnus' means great, and the letter z was pronounced sd or st, helped by a vowel between consonants. It seems probable that the Latin magister and magistratus, and the Hebrew maghzerah, are 'mag set ar', the great fire of Set, or great Set's fire. Set, whom Plutarch called Typhon, killed Osiris, and was in turn defeated by Horus, who lost an eye in the struggle. The winged axe mould found at Mycenae suggests a link with the sky. On the same lines as zilch, the Etruscan rumach may mean spear holder. Ignis, fire, may furnish a clue to the Etruscan 'ichnac'. Etruscan 'zichne' may mean to engrave. Pallottino suggests that it means 'write'. The link with Hebrew and with the god Set is discussed in the next chapter. Etruscan tru, drouna, are similar to Greek thronos, throne. Etruscan 'zac' is 'stac', blood, that which makes to stand, and to live. '-ac' is a suffix in Etruscan denoting origin, occupation, or agency. When Odysseus visits the underworld, he slaughters animals to fill a trench with blood. The Greek 'zo', live, and the Latin, 'sto', stand, are cognate. A Hittite relief from Malatya shows a king holding a lituus and pouring from a smaller vessel into a larger one on the ground. Before him is a god wearing a conical hat and holding a thunderbolt over the king's libation cup. It appears that a libation bearer hoped to pour electricity onto the grave, to rouse the spirit of the dead person. It is illustrated in O. R. Gurney, The Hittites, p. 207. The Hittite, 'tipas' or 'tapas' is a cup, Mycenean 'dipas'. In classical Greek depas is a libation vessel, usually of gold, and sacred. In Etruscan, 'thapna' is a cup, and 'putere' is a kind of vase, Greek poterion'. Tipas, in hieroglyphic Hittite, = heaven. Etruscan 'spanza' resembles Hittite 'sipand'; Hittite 'panza' is 'five'. 'Spendo', Greek means 'I pour a libation'. Sanskrit 'pancha', and Greek 'pente', mean 'five'. 'C' in Slavonic (pronounced 'S') means with, from, down from. Spanza, sipand and spendo all imply 'down from the five. ' I suggest that 'the five' are the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, all of which were visible to the unaided eye, and were regarded as sources of divine energy from the sky. In this context, it is noteworthy that the Greek pempabolon, the sacrificial fork, had five prongs. See Iliad I: 463, Odyssey III: 460. [2] . In Hittite myth there was a knife with which heaven and earth were separated. It was used by Ea to split a diorite stone, thus anticipating the story of the augur Attus Navius at Rome, who split a whetstone with a razor. The name Corycus, on Parnassus and in Cilicia, links Greece and Asia. Delphyne, the serpent killed by Apollo, is a name common to Greek and Hittite. Before leaving the word 'magister', we may note that the fasces of the general Marius are described as wreathed in laurel as a symbol of victory (Cicero; De Divinatione I: XXVIII). Possibly laurel imitates an electrical glow, symbolising divine power. {S : PANTOMIME} PANTOMIME Etruscan drama was introduced to Rome at a time of pestilence and national calamity. "Ludiones ex Etruria acciti" players were summoned from Etruria. (Livy VII: 2: 4) Is there a link between the Etruscan thanasa, actor, and histro, mime or actor, and the Greek thanatos, death? The Albanian 'heshtur', silent, may be the Latin 'histro', and Etruscan drama was dancing and mime. There is a parallel in early 18th century A. D. Russia. When Peter the Great invited foreign engineers to Russia, most of them German, they were called Nemtsi, mutes, because they could not speak Russian. The Russian for a German is still Nemets. The derivation from the Thracian Istro, speedy, strong, after the Danube's name, Ister, seems less likely, expert though the Etruscan dancers may have been. Why should the Romans have thought that the introduction of silent drama would allay the anger of the deity causing the trouble? Departed spirits (Manes) in the underworld cannot speak, only squeak and gibber. When Odysseus descends to consult the ghosts of Teiresias and others, he has to slaughter animals and pour their blood into a trench. The ghosts do not speak until they have drunk the life- giving blood. Cumae, near Naples, was a famous oracle and an entrance to the underworld, where Aeneas went to meet the ghost of his father (Aeneid VI). The Hebrew qum means arise; cf. N. T. St. Mark V, where Jesus raises Jairus' daughter. Thanasa-Thanasa was a name of Amen, the hidden god of Neter-khert, the Egyptian underworld. Perhaps the Etruscan mimes specialised in the portrayal of ghosts, and their drama aimed at consulting and enlisting the aid of the dead in times of peril. We know from the Old Testament that the spirits of the dead were consulted (Saul and the witch of Endor, I Samuel XXVIII). Whatever the details, it was apotropaic, turning aside a threat, just like Greek dithyramb and tragic drama. The Etruscan word svulare is an epithet of Apollo. The 's' has the significance of the English 'un-'; compare the 's' in modern Italian, e. g. scoperto, uncovered. Albanian is quoted by Mayani: zbuloj, to unveil. 'C', English 'S', in Slavonic, is 'with', or 'from'. Svulare is the same as Sibylla, the unveiler. The Sibyl sat on a cauldron on the 'cisum pute' or tripod (cis = three, pute = Greek pous, podos, foot), and unveiled the future, or revealed the god's intentions. We have seen the importance of the liver in Etruscan divination. Ie and iu are two words meaning divine, god. In the Samnite language (mountain people east of Rome) gur, like the Etruscan cur, cure, means stone, rock. The combination of the two gives iecur, the Latin word for liver. The stone gives us a link with Delphi, where the thriabolos threw stones into the divining bowl. Furthermore, 'cur' resembles some words in Slavonic. The Russian 'gora' is a mountain, and the verb goretj (Russian) means to burn. In due course we shall see the link with a Latin word for a mountain peak cacumen. There was an important ritual at Rome, that of the Manalis Lapis. This was the stone of the Manes (departed spirits). It was sacred, and was carried in procession. It blocked up the entrance to the abode of the Manes, and the purpose of the rite was to unblock it. The Etruscan word 'muth' or 'mund', Latin 'mundus', world, meant a trench for offerings, near an Etruscan temple. It was the entrance to the underworld. It is tempting to relate the Greek 'nerteros' of the dwellers below, i. e. the dead and the gods of the underworld, to Njord, the Norse deity, and to Nortia, the Etruscan goddess of destiny. The interest the Etruscans had in the world of departed spirits is illustrated by their elaborate tombs, vaults, decorations, and paintings on the walls of underground rooms. Manthus was an Etruscan deity, Latin and Greek Rhadamanthus, one of the judges of the underworld. Etruscan 'rad' means order, and is presumably the Latin 'ratio', reason, orderly thought. The Greek manthano means 'I find out, learn'. The following words suggest either electrical happenings or possible places of origin or temporary or permanent home, of the Etruscans. Arseverse, from ar, fire or altar, and severse, Latin severto, turn aside, means a lightning averter or conductor. Mayani suggests that the word cupencus, a Sabine priest, or a priest of Hercules, may be connected with the Etruscan cipen, Albanian cip, peak. The priest often wore a peaked hat. Spura, city; tular spura, city boundaries. The Slavonic sobor means a gathering of people. In Lydian the word is Cibyra, in Latin Subura, the densely populated part of Rome which was drained by the Cloaca Maxima. Suplu, subulo, a piper; Russian sopetj, to puff quietly, and soplo, a nozzle. Lakhuth, libation; Greek lekuthos, oil flask. Kathesa, jug; Greek kados, Hebrew kadh. Capesar, shoemaker; kupassis, in Lydian, is a kind of footwear. Breseus is a Lydian name for Dionysus. Albanian vere is wine. Finnish veri is blood. Dionysus is Baki in Lydian, Pakhies or Pakheis in Etruscan. PakEhisa is the Hittite for a stick. The thyrsus? Spel, Etruscan for cave, resembles Lydian pel. Elfaci is best explained by Albanian ill, star, and pashi, vision. The Hebrew argaz is a box or chest. I suggest that it is a combination of ar, Etruscan for divine fire, and gaza, a word used by Vergil in Book I of the Aeneid. Aeneas and his fellow Trojans are wrecked by a storm off the coast of Carthage. Trojan gaza is seen among the wreckage. It is translated as plunder. This implies that it may be stolen treasure. Hebrew ariel means hearth of God, altar. De Grazia, in God's Fire, has suggested that the Egyptians pursued the Israelites to the Red Sea because they were taking with them important electrical equipment such as the ark. The Etruscan goddess Venth, or Vanth, may be Bendis, a Thracian goddess who shares the characteristics of Artemis. Tark a divine name, is Trqnta in Lycian, and is presumably related to Etruscan Tarkhies. The Etruscan 'suv lusi' is translated by Mayani as 'look on my prayer'; the verb sv = look, see. I suggest that we may have here the Latin verb 'specto', watch, see. Cremia, firewood, may be an instance of the Egyptian 'ka' plus 'remus', an oar. Remus is very close to ramus, branch of a tree. The two groves, 'luci', between the two peaks of the Capitoline Hill at Rome, were originally on the peaks. Romulus here established a refuge, asylum, which was named 'inter duos lucos', between the two groves. We may detect a link with the Hittites in 'caerimonia', which in Etruscan and Latin means religion, or a religious rite. The Hittite 'karimmi' is a temple. Etruscan 'falandum', sky, may be linked to Palladium (nasalisation of Etruscan vowels). The Palladium fell from heaven at Troy. Odysseus and Diomedes carried it off, since the safety of Troy depended on its staying in the city. When Metellus saved it from the burning temple of Vesta he was blinded. Tem, tema, may be the Greek demas, body, especially a body in the sky. The Book of the Dead has 'Tem-bull of the body' (Arkana translation by Budge p. 437). 'Tem', in Etruscan, is translated by Mayani as 'bull'. Etruscan 'lamna', Latin lamna, lamina, lammina, is a threshing-floor. Such places were sacred, with electrical significance. Uzah was killed when he touched the ark on Nachon's threshing-floor (Old Testament II Samuel VI: 6 f.). Egyptian Seker boats were mounted on sledges, which presumably were similar to threshing sledges. Stags were sacrificed on threshing-floors. Sert was an Etruscan deity who inspired fear. Egyptian 'herit' is fear, awe. Fufluns, an Etruscan epithet for Bacchus, is compared by Mayani with Albanian 'bubullij', to resound, roar. He compares it with Bromios, a name of Dionysus. Fabulonia, henbane, produces mental instability and ravings. Amongst other meanings of the Latin 'fabula' is 'plot', of a play. {S : ETRUSCAN ORIGINS} ETRUSCAN ORIGINS There has been a conflict of views over the place of origin of the Etruscans. Some have sided with Herodotus, who wrote that they came from Lydia; others have maintained that Etruscan civilization came from the north, others again that it was formed in Italy. The evidence points to all three being at least partly right. A possible scenario, based on Mayani, is that some Indo-European speakers, including the Pelasgi, who had come from the Danube area with a good knowledge of copper and tin technology (from Hungary and Bohemia), settled in Illyria, then moved via Greece and southern Italy into Etruria. Others went via Thrace to Anatolia, and thence to Italy, some taking part in a descent on Egypt, where they were known as Tursha. There is a fuller discussion in Mayani of the names Tiras (O. T. Genesis X: 2), Tursha, Rosh, Rasna, and Tyrrheni. Paris of Troy, alias Alexander, is mentioned by Herodotus, II: 114, as a Teucrian stranger. The vocabulary of Etruscan gives some clues to history and provenance. So far we have seen a few words which suggest eastern influence or borrowings. It is straining things to attribute these solely to the presence of Greek colonies in the south of Italy. The presence of Illyrian words not only in Italy (e. g. Umbrian and Tuscan) but also in Macedonia, Lydia, Lemnos and Phrygia, points to the presence of Etruscans (whose language was Illyrian) in, for example, Asia Minor, and also to an origin farther north. Messapian, an Illyrian dialect of Italy, is related to Slavonic and Lithuanian, as is Albanian. The Hungarian 'nincs', 'there is not', can be compared to the Etruscan 'ninctu' (in the Tables of Igavium). The Hungarian 'kulcs', key, resembles the name of the Etruscan deity Culsu, and the infernal deity Tuchulcha, who was similar to Cerberus in having snakes on his head and guarding the mouth of the underworld. The Hungarian 'kvilagit', to illuminate, suggests Tanaquil, wife of the elder Tarquin, mentioned by Livy (I: 34). 'Aquila', eagle, symbolises lightning. Hungarian 'kert', garden, and 'kerit', encircle, are cognate with the Slavonic 'gorod, ' city, which appears in Italy as 'carth', 'carath', and in various Pelasgian place names such as Gurton (Thessaly), Gortyna (Gete), Gortynia (Macedonia), and Crotona (south Italy). There is even a resemblance to the Egyptian 'neter chert', underworld. Slavonic words abound, ea. 'sobor', assembly, which means 'spur' in Etruscan, 'Cibyra' as a place name in Lydia, and 'subura' in Latin (a low, thickly populated area of Rome near the forum). 'Sopetj', to puff (quietly), and 'soplo', nozzle, become in Etruscan 'subulo', Latin 'tibicen', piper. Coins of Phaestus in Crete bear the name Velchanos, a name resembling that of the Roman god Vulcan. {S : Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Rome and the Etruscans)} Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Rome and the Etruscans) 1. For an account of the chronological impasse, vide The Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum, Volume I, The Institute for the Society of Interdisciplinary Studies. 2. The five-pronged sacrificial fork, pempobolon, of the Greeks may correspond to the Hebrew 'mazlegh, ' fork, flesh-hook. There is an interesting coincidence of the letters M, Z, and L in the two Hebrew words mazlegh (fork) and mazzal (planets). Hebrew 'mazar' is the north, or northern stars. Hebrew 'chamesh' = 5. It is interesting that the number 5 was associated with planets, which were regarded by the Greeks as gods, concentrations of divine force such as the Egyptian ka. In Slavonic, 'mesto' = place. 3. The finale of an Etruscan pantomime was a drinking session, Latin comissatio, from Greek komazein, to revel. It may have been a survival of a libation, with all that that implies in resurrection technique. 4. The wife of the Hittite king Hattusilis III (13th century B. C.) was called Puduhepa. Her name is perhaps suggestive of the title 'Pythia'. Her father was a priest. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 19: } {T THE TIMAEUS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER NINETEEN THE TIMAEUS IN the literature of ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome, there is a close connection between theories of vision and fire. Seeing an object was an active affair, not a mere receiving of light rays. It is necessary to digress for a moment and glance at a dialogue of Plato, the Timaeus. The fact that the Greeks used the word 'pur', fire, for lightning, suggests that we need to study their cosmology, with its frequent references to fire, from an electrical angle, and here the Timaeus is of great importance. An English translation by Sir Desmond Lee is available in Penguin, reprinted 1988. The demiurge, i. e. the craftsman, created the cosmos, the ordered universe that we perceive with the senses. He has a perfect model, paradeigma, and as he works he glances away, apablepei, from his material to his model. The result is a universe made up of nous (intelligence), psyche (life), and soma (body). Psyche is the essential vehicle for nous. Psyche was created before soma, is invisible, and is a self-mover, the ultimate cause of motion. It is a divine (theios) source (arche) of rational life. It contains reason and harmony. As to being a self-mover, Plato's view accords with that of Thales, who used the concept of psyche when describing the action of the magnet. The planets, sun and moon, seven in number, were created next as a moving image of timeless eternity. They are living creatures, zoa, and are divine, theoi. Plato uses the term 'idea ' to illustrate his use of the word 'divine'. The word implies a shape or form that is seen; it is closely linked with the concept of knowledge. The Greek 'oida' means 'I know', and is a perfect tense, 'I have seen' (Hebrew 'dea' = knowledge). By supplying the missing digamma, we get the Latin verb 'video', see. Plato tells us that the idea of the theion (divine) is mostly fire, so that it may be seen as being brightest and most beautiful (Oxford Classical Texts, Timaeus 40). This is the origin of the fixed stars, eternal, divine, living creatures. It is worth noting at this point that Plato here uses the word 'idea', of something which is capable of being apprehended by a human physical sense. This appears to contradict the usual view that the ideal realm can only be perceived by the intellect, or at least fails to support it in a context where support might be expected. Other gods, as well as the planets, exist, whom Plato calls 'daimons', but he says little about these. The creator is called father, maker, he who puts together, and god. He now creates human souls, as many as there are stars, and puts one on each star, as on a chariot. Each soul descends to earth for incarnation, and returns to its star on death. The gods now create human beings. It is significant that it is the gods, not the demiurge, that create humans. (43) The head is the divinest part of the human being, containing fire. The eyes are the most important organ of sense. Light is a non-burning variety of fire; vision is the result of a stream of fire being directed outwards from the eyeball, mixing with daylight and impinging on external objects. Of the four elements, fire, air, water and earth, the one with the smallest particles is fire. There are three kinds of fire: flame; radiation that does not burn, or light; and the remains in the embers when flame has departed from the fire. Elements are composed of particles whose surfaces are geometrical shapes. Those of fire are a combination of triangles forming a pyramid. There are important mixtures of fire and water, viz.: wine (warms both body and soul); oil (pitch, castor-oil, olive oil, etc); honey; and acid. The gods gave humans an immortal soul principle, in the head, and two forms (eidos) of mortal soul below the neck. The word arche, principle, implies beginning, source, source of authority, and rule. 'Eidos' is similar to 'idea', and refers here to the form or appearance of something. The head contains nous (intelligence), and fire. Below the neck the better part of the life source (psyche) is above the midriff, the worse below. To control the stomach the gods created the liver. It is smooth, shining (lampros), sweet, and bitter. It reflects thoughts. But the soul in the liver area is capable of prophecy. When we are asleep, or not in our right mind, it may spend the night in divination and dreams. It is incapable of logos (reason) and phronesis (understanding). A man in his right mind uses logos and phronesis to interpret the liver's message. A distinction is made between the 'mantis' (person affected by the force), and the 'prophetes', the interpreter or proclaimer. At this point in the dialogue (72 b), Plato uses a clause with both a demonstrative and a relative pronoun: "... whom some call them prophets, " 'hous manteis autous onomazousin tines." Such a construction for a relative clause is characteristic of a Semitic language, not of ancient Greek. It is standard procedure in Hebrew. Marrow is the life-stuff for creating the body. It contains fire. The best of it contains the divine seed, theion sperma, and goes into the head; the rest goes into the bones. The head's skin covering is pricked by the fire of the divine contents. Hairs emerge through the perforations. The divine 'periodoi', circlings, in the head, copying those in the sky, can be upset by phlegm and bile. Hence comes epilepsy, the divine disease, or Heraklean disease. The intelligence, nous, can suffer from anoia, lack of perception, stupidity. Plato reviews the situation thus: Of the three forms of soul, the most authoritative (kuriotaton) is a daimon given by god, living in the summit of the body. It lifts us from earth back to our starry home in heaven. If a man eagerly pursues learning, wisdom and truth, he will achieve immortality as far as is allowed to a human. He must attend to (therapeuein) the divine element in himself. Thus he will be 'eudaimon', happy. (Therapeuein is a word used of worshippers tending a divinity in a temple). Plenty of material in harmony with Plato's views can be found in classical authors. Cicero says that diviners perceive beforehand things that "nusquam sunt, sunt autem omnia, sed tempore absunt," "that are nowhere, yet they all exist, but are absent in a time sense." He refers to fate, the utterance of a god, as the Greek 'Heimarmene' or orderly linkage of causes and effects. Plato's statement that the planets, the gods, were given an 'idea', chiefly of fire, so that they and their circlings could be seen by men, finds an echo in Cicero: "Religio est iuncta cum cognitione naturae," religion is joined with a knowledge of nature. 'Cognitio' is used of perception and finding out. The Greek 'prepo' means to appear clearly to the senses. Zeus 'prepei', appears, in the aither (Euripides, Helena: 216). This is the original sense of the word, but it usually means 'to be fitting'. Vergil mentions "radii aurati," golden rays, round the head of a statue (Aeneid XII: 163). 'Radiare' is to shine. Plato's theory of vision is hardly different from that of the Egyptians. Sunlight is a manifestation of the god Ra, and the utchat is a hieroglyph comprising a picture of an eye and the radiation symbol. In The Book of the Dead there is a reference to gods with eyes as sharp as knives. Greek 'kanthos' is the corner of the eye; Greek anthos = flower. I suggest ka and anthos for kanthos. The utchat itself suggests the curve of the snake's or lizard's tongue, possibly the augur's lituus, and the Egyptian style of beard, chabes, flame of ka. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the watchman sees a beard of flame, pogon puros, from the signal fire announcing the fall of Troy. For the derivation of utchat, there is Greek chaite, hair, mane, and Hebrew chata, transgress. A suppliant would touch a person's chin or knee, when asking for mercy or help. Chins and knees were regarded as concentrations of divine muelos, marrow. The Latin for a battle-line, the cutting edge of the Roman army, is acies. It also means sight, the power of the eye. Ra says that he is the one who makes light by opening his eyes, and there is darkness if he closes them. The name of the Egyptian heart-soul, ba, may be found in Hebrew. Labbah is flame, and in Hebrew lebh and libbah both mean heart. Important words connected with light include: esh (Hebrew), fire, lightning, flame of war, anger, glitter, radiance; lux (Latin), loschna (Etruscan), losk (Slav.), light, gleam. Luscus (Latin), means one-eyed. The poet Juvenal mentions a statue of a figure that is taking aim: "Statua meditatur proelia lusca." The ancient theory of active vision leads easily to the concept of the evil eye, Latin invidere, Greek baskainein, against which one had to defend oneself by, for example, spitting. The Greek 'phthonos', envy or evil eye, appears in the Timaeus, in the context of the creation of the world. The creator was good, and a good person never has any phthonos in him about anything (or: about anybody). Being without envy, he wished the universe to be as like himself as possible (literally: close alongside, paraplesia). The power of a divine eye can be either creative or destructive. "We (sc. the Egyptians) were the first people of Asia to use shield and spear, shown by the goddess." (Timaeus 24 b). The spear, Greek 'doru', is frequently a lightning symbol. A shield could be decorated with pictures of snakes or rays to give it apotropaic power, and to frighten the enemy. Cicero says that an ox liver can be nitidum, shining, (De Divinatione II: 13.) This is in harmony with Plato's description of the human liver as lampros, shining (Timaeus 71 b). The soul, according to Cicero (De Divinatione II: 67), when we are awake, has inherent power of self motion and is 'incredibili celeritate', of incredible speed. The Book of the Dead has several references to the utchat, e. g.: "His majesty shone in the primeval time, when the utchat was first upon his head." (Chapter 140, translated by Budge). The Greek 'chaita' is hair, especially a horse's mane. Comets are, by derivation from Greek 'hairy' stars The Timaeus has a reputation for being an obscure and difficult dialogue. The reader can be puzzled by the theory of elements, particles and triangles which Plato presents to explain the nature of the physical material of our world, and there are some interesting anticipations of twentieth century physics. Also interesting is the fact that there is some inconsistency in his statements, here and elsewhere, e. g. in the well known cave myth of the Republic, referring to a distinction between a 'real' world of ideas, and the mere shadow world of our physical universe. In the Timaeus we read that an 'idea' can be seen by the human eye, not just grasped by the intellect and dialectic. This uncertainty and this lack of consistency have an interesting parallel in the uncertainty in the mind of the priest in, say, an Egyptian shrine, trying to determine the nature of the strange deity, a deity who is at one moment invisible, at another is seen and heard, and even felt, as a powerful force; that can be used to impress, to heal, to kill, to exercise magical control of the sky, and whose help is sought to raise the dead and to avert the forces of destruction. {S : Notes (Chapter Nineteen: The Timaeus)} Notes (Chapter Nineteen: The Timaeus) 1. The Hebrew 'ayin' is an eye. It is also a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Hebrew 'zayin' is a weapon. We have met instances of the letter Z pronounced in the Eastern Mediterranean as SD or ST. 'Set', in Hebrew, is a transgressor, or transgression. 'Saat' is to deviate. 'Zayin' is the eye of Set. Egyptian representations of the utchat, the eye of Ra, show a curved line from the eye comparable with the curve of the Roman augur's lituus. The Hebrew letter zayin is similar in appearance to a dagger pointing downwards. A small addition at the bottom would turn it into the Egyptian tcham, the sceptre in the shape of a scotch for killing snakes, with an eagle perched on the top, as described by Sophocles. The Greek verb 'sterizo' , set or stand up, has been mentioned in the context of 'The Bacchae'. Is this 'Set' and 'ara', Set's fire? {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 20: } {T SANCTIFICATION AND RESURRECTION} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER TWENTY SANCTIFICATION AND RESURRECTION WE have seen something of Greek and Roman sacrifices. Chapter Seven reviewed the Greek and Hebrew apotropaic practices --red-haired men being killed to avert the red Typhon, and the driving by the Israelites of a scapegoat into the wilderness. We have also studied the earthing technique (trench filled with water, sprinkling of water and blood, etc.), and details of an Homeric sacrifice and sacred meal, with slices of thigh wrapped up in fat, entrails and tongues burnt in the fire, and other meat roasted on spits. Chapter Eight described the apotropaic nature of the origins of dithyramb and tragedy, and the significance of the axe was discussed in Chapter Eighteen, with reference to the Etruscans and the Roman magistrate. It may be useful to have a summary of sacrificial procedure, assembling some of the words used to communicate ideas in the ancient Mediterranean world. The vocabulary used is one of technical terms, many of which were shared by Egyptians, Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, and others. Some of the proposed equivalences are mere speculation, but only a technical theory held in common by priests and experts all round the Mediterranean can explain the many similarities in vocabulary and practice. The electrical phenomena and concepts involved, e. g. lightning, radiation, magnetism, sympathetic magic, and so on, are not a modern interpretation forced on the ancient world, but are phenomena and procedures described by ancient authorities. SACRIFICE: SOME TECHNICAL TERMS. The altar is originally a device for bringing the electrical force, fire, lightning, god, whatever one chooses to call it, down from the sky to earth. Originally, a god could not be gratified by the sweet savour of roasting meat rising from the altar unless first the victim had been struck by a bolt coming down. The Greek bomos, altar, is raised. In Homer, it can be a stand for a chariot, or for a statue. Eschara is a hearth, or an altar for burnt offerings. Thumele is an altar in the orchestra of a Greek theatre, from which the chorus was directed. In Egyptian it is khaut, in Hebrew harel (har = mountain). Etruscan ar = fire, Latin ara = altar. The Latin altaria means ritual utensils on the altar. Anclabris is a sacrificial table, anclabria are its vessels. The Etruscan cletram is a litter or chariot for offerings. Batillum is a fire-shovel. In Hebrew such altar equipment was qadhosh, holy. Fire is agni in Sanskrit. The Agnihotras were Indian priests who were messengers bringing divine fire. We saw in Chapter I that they resembled the Selli at Dodona in that they were not allowed to wash their feet. Fire in Russian is ogonj, also zhar, in Etruscan zar, Hebrew esh, Akkadian ash or esh, Egyptian chet, Greek pur. Greek chaite, hair or mane, suggests the tail of a comet. The Egyptian teha is a fire-stick tehen is a pillar; these two words should be compared with Greek techne, device or skill. Techne sometimes implies a sinister kind of skill, just as mechane is often a sinister device. The Greeks in early times called the Persians Cephenes, but the Persians called themselves Artaei. (Herodotus VII). A link with ka and ar seems likely. Shuti, the plumes of an Egyptian crown, are the soul of Geb (Earth). Cf. Etruscan suthina, Hebrew tsuth, Egyptian Sutekh = Set). I suggest that they all relate to electrical 'fire' or force. Cf. ischus ges, strength of the earth (see end of Chapter XVI). In Latin, focus = hearth; caminus is a hearth, also a fire for smelting metals. Ignis is the element fire, igniculus is a spark. Incendo = kindle, ardere = to be on fire; excandescere = to blaze out brightly. Cremia = firewood, titio = a brand, torris = a burning brand, fax = a torch. Scintilla, Latin for 'spark', and Semitic sikina, knife, may shed light on a Cretan dance, the Sikinnis. The flamen was a stoker who blew the fire into flame. Flare is to blow. Calere is to be hot. I suggest that this is an example of ka, the double, the radiation or halo round the head of a god, or statue. Greek kaio = burn. The Etruscan and Greek prutanis was a stoker who waved a brand to make it blaze; from pur, fire, and tanuo, brandish, as Zeus did with the thunderbolt. The Greek aisso means brandish, and suggests the Hebrew waved offerings, when the priest raised an offering and waved it over the altar. Hebrew nasa = raise; Greek anassein = to be king. Man-made fire on an altar, with logs, was a copy of the divine fire. Kapnos, Greek for smoke, is possibly ka, plus pnous, breath. The axe was a lightning symbol; Greek pelekus, kybelis, Akkadian pilaqqu, Lydian labrys, Etruscan tlabru, Cretan tlabris, Latin dolabra, securis. Hebrew seghor = axe, spear, refined gold. Latin bipennis = axe (two-winged, like the winged thunderbolt); the Akkadian hazdi is a spear, which is also a lightning symbol, and suggests the Latin hasta, spear. The Hebrew maghzerah, axe, is the same root as Latin magister, Etruscan macstrna. Egyptian neter = axe. Neter hen is a priest, servant of the divine, and is comparable with the Hebrew kohen, priest; cf. the Egyptian hennu, boat. At a Roman sacrifice the person sacrificing wore a crown. The animal to be sacrificed was called a victima, if a bull or cow, and a hostia, if a smaller animal. A victima would have its horns gilded, and a chaplet, vitta, put on its head. It was brought to the altar by the popa, the priest's assistant. Some hair was cut from the forehead and thrown on the fire. Salted meal, mola salsa, was sprinkled on the victim's head. It was stunned with a blow of an axe to the back of the neck and then its throat was cut. Words denoting sacrifice include, in Greek thuo, perform a fire sacrifice; in Latin, sacrifico, operor, macto. The latter is the archaic and poetic word, and is therefore worthy of special note. The Hebrew maqqel means staff; the Latin macellus is a butcher's stall or shambles. The Latin percello = strike. The Greek skeptron, a stick, is related to skepto, strike, of lightning. The Latin baculum, stick, is generally held to be from the Greek baino, go, but is more likely to be from the Latin -cello, seen in the compound percello, strike. Greek makella is a pick-axe. Makella Dios is the thunderbolt, Aeschylus, Agamemnon 526. Latin curter is a ploughshare, or knife. The Greek sphazo, slaughter, resembles Hebrew zabhach, slaughter. Stags were killed on threshing-floors. The Etruscan lamna is a threshing-floor. The Latin lamina is a thin layer of metal, gold, silver, bronze, or of marble, such as could be used in constructing a capacitor, in an attempt to store electricity. An important function of the priest was to see that water was used for adequate earthing, to make a lightning strike more probable. A holocaust was a sacrifice where the victim was burnt whole. Some of the Greek words for lightning are: sterope, asterope, selas, pur, pur Dios (fire of Zeus), Dios belos, (missile of Zeus), keraunos, skepto (hurl). Latin has: fulgur, poetic fulgor (cf. Hebrew 'or', light); fulguratio, sheet lightning; fulmen, the destructive bolt, coruscare, to flash, to push with the horns. The Greek adjective euruopa, far-seeing, is an Homeric epithet of Zeus, and may be relevant in this context. {S : THE SACRIFICIAL FEAST} THE SACRIFICIAL FEAST We have already seen, in Chapter VII, details of a Greek sacrifice. The body is cut up, slices are cut from the thighs and wrapped in layers of fat. Raw meat is laid on this foundation. It is burnt on the fire, and wine is poured on. The worshippers then taste the inner parts, cut up the rest, and skewer it on spits over the fire. The tongues are thrown on the fire (Odyssey III). The partakers sat on the beach at Pylos, on fleeces. The word used by Homer for cutting up the meat is mistullo. I suggest that this is related to Slavonic mjaso, Etruscan and Albanian mis, meat, and to Hebrew mishte, feast, and mishman, fatness. We have already seen in Chapter XVIII that there exists in Albanian folk-lore a tale of heroes being rewarded with a feast of stag's flesh after their defeat of a monster. Olenus was an Etruscan soothsayer; the Slavonic olenj is a stag, also a reindeer. The Greek verb daio has two meanings: to kindle, and to divide. Dais, daitos, is a feast. The Latin epulum is a religious banquet. The plural epulae is a banquet in general, not religious, not a vacl. The Latin cena, archaic caesna, dinner, is derived from caedo, cut, and the food was cut up for distribution. The Slavonic tsena means price, and the same root occurs in modern Russian for price, precious, and expensive. The Latin visceratio is a public distribution of sacrificial meat. Greek deipnon is a feast, Latin daps. {S : SANCTIFICATION} SANCTIFICATION The Latin word sancire calls for special study. According to Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary, it is related to the Sanskrit 'sak', to accompany, to honour, and is related to sequor, follow, sacer, sacred, and to the Greek root hag, seen in hagios, and hagnos, holy. Sancire is to render sacred or inviolable by religious act; to appoint as sacred and inviolable. It is used of fixing and ratifying laws, and can mean to forbid under pain of punishment. This latter concept of danger is significant, and we will return to it later. A thing which is sanctus has been rendered sacred and inviolable. It differs from sacer in that sacer is applied to, for example, a place consecrated to a deity, but sanctus locus is any place which is to be inviolable, and is not necessarily sacer. Sanctus also means august, divine, pure, holy. It is used of a deity and of divine objects such as sedes, seat, fanum, temple or shrine, and sacrificial fires (Aeneid III: 406). The sanctum sanctorum is the Holy of Holies, qodhesh haqqodhaskim, of Old Testament, Exodus XXVI: 34. Sacer means holy, associated with a divinity; Greek hieros. A vates, prophet, is sacer (associated with Apollo). Sacer can also mean associated with divinity in a destructive situation; impious, accursed. Sacerdos is a priest. There are two kinds of priest, those who are in charge of ceremonies and rites, and those who interpret the utterances of prophets. The verb sacrare means both to consecrate and to doom to destruction. The poet Horace uses it with the meaning 'to immortalise in a poem'. The Egyptian symbol, the ankh means life, or to live. In Egyptian, an intransitive verb such as to live can have an 's' prefixed to give it a causative force. Thus, sankh means to make to live. Here, I suggest, we have the origin of the Latin verb sancio. A hieroglyphic text from Thebes tells of the application of protective magic. Budge suggests that the god made passes over the nape of the neck to transfer the "fluid of life", sa-ankh. (From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 487, Arkana edition). On p. 514, Budge writes that Horus embraced the dead body of Osiris, thereby transferring to it his ka. Kings embraced statues of gods in the hope of absorbing life from them. Turning to Egyptian myth, we find that the god Osiris is torn in pieces, that the pieces are found collected and put in a chest. He is then brought back to life. In The Book of the Dead, Osiris, when he is in the closed chest, is given the title of Seker. Here, I suggest, is the origin of the Latin word sacer. In a previous chapter we met the idea of worship as magnification, adolere. Here are a few more words connected with the creation of an electrical display, mostly in Latin: Augeo, make bigger (auction), tollere, to raise, magmentum, that which magnifies or glorifies. Auctificare is to honour by offerings, like mactare. 'Sacris numinum potentiam auctitare', to honour the power of the divine presence with ceremonies. Auctor is he who brings about the existence of something, or gives greater permanence or continuance to it. Augmentum is a kind of sacrificial cake. The Greek auxanein is to make large, exalt, extol, honour. Auxanein empura (to increase the sacrificial flames), means to sacrifice (Pindar, Isth. IV: 68). Cresco (Latin), means come forth, of things not previously in existence, to appear, grow, become visible. Incrementum, growth, increase, offspring; "Magnum Iovis incrementum", great offspring of Jupiter. Promittere means to let grow, to forebode. Promissa barba, a long beard. Among the experiments made by 17th and 18th century A. D. scientists, were those of the Italian Galvani, who observed the movements of the limbs of dead frogs when he created an electric current by the application of two different metals. The Egyptians, whose religion was almost entirely concerned with the problem of death and resurrection, had a deity Heqt, in the form of a frog. Heqt was a resurrection goddess; her name suggests the Greek Hekate, whose associations are with the underworld. A live frog's sudden jumps would be similar to the reactions of victims on altars, and we have here a truly remarkable coincidence. Budge, in his Egyptian Magic, mentions Graeco-Roman terracotta lamps found in Egypt, bearing representations of a frog. One of them is inscribed "I am the resurrection." When we recall the word 'ka', the connection between magnification and worship in Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek and Latin, and the apparatus of the statue or ark shown surrounded in Egyptian and Babylonian reliefs by junction rods, Hebrew chashuqim, we have an explanation of the verb sancio. It denotes the application of electrical technique to resurrect; to create an image, the spiritual body of a resurrected god, whose glow could be seen by the worshippers in the dimly lighted temple. If further confirmation be sought, we can see the ankh appearing in the Latin word for blood, sanguis. At a Greek sacrifice, the priest drained the blood from the victim before proceeding to the cutting up of the body. If poured on the body the blood would assist earthing and help lightning to descend and mark the victim. In Sumerian, sanga is a priest. This brings us to another kind of sacrifice, that to the dead. The Etruscan 'zac' is blood. If, as before, we replace 'z' with 'sd', we have 'sdac'. The suffix -ac indicates the agent; e. g. frontac, thunderer (Greek bronte, thunder). The combination 'sd' or st' appears in the Greek zo, I live, and Latin sto, I stand. In Homer, the blood is associated with life. The psyche leaves the body with the blood when a hero is killed in battle. The Etruscans thought of it as that which makes an organism live, hence their word 'zac', blood. Blood is that which enables one to live and stand up. In a temple of the god Mithras, the worshipper was showered with the blood of a slaughtered bull. Greek has a link with Egyptian seker and Latin sacer in the verb 'skirtao'. (The letter 'e' is used in English for a vowel between the 's' and 'k' of seker). The verb skirtan means to spring, of horses, and to frolic, of goats, and to dance. It would be eminently applicable to the behaviour of the goats at the edge of the chasm at Delphi, which attracted the attention of the goatherds, and led to the establishment of the oracle. Compare the Hebrew 'chaghagh, ' dance, and 'chaghav, ' ravine. There is another Greek verb using the same three consonants, skairo, which also means dance. Skarthmos hippou is the foot of a bounding horse, and skarizo means leap, throb, palpitate. One could hardly choose more appropriate vocabulary to describe the resurrection dance, or the effect of electricity in such an experiment as that of Galvani. Sanctification employed a powerful force that could both move the dead and kill the unwary, or those who acted impiously. There were some accidents in temples, and some occurrences that were not accidents, such as the suppression of the rebellion of Korah, Old Testament, Numbers XVI, where the ark seems to have given warning of an earthquake. The sounds 'skr' were used throughout the Mediterranean world. In Babylonia there were towers (durr), whose name sounds the same as the Latin 'turris'; the shrine on a 'Tower of Babel' is a 'saharu'. The Hebrew seghor, axe, Latin securis, extends the list. David's dance, wearing a linen ephod (2 Samuel VI: 14), is not the only instance of a dance before an ark. Egyptian pharaohs also danced. A tablet shows Semti, first dynasty, dancing before Osiris, who is in a shrine on top of a staircase. Usertsen danced before the god Amsu, or Min; Seti I danced before Sekhet, and Pepi I danced before Osiris. (Budge, The Book of the Dead, Arkana, Introduction p. 40 ff.). Egyptian artists sometimes show three figures on a stand. The stand is a box, the figures are known as the ark trinity. They are Ptah, the opener (cf. Hebrew pathah, and Sanskrit pathi); Seker; and Osiris. The ceremony of the opening of the mouth and eyes was performed at the tomb of a dead person, or before a statue of the deceased. The dead person is identified with Osiris, and the ritual represents the burial of Osiris and his resurrection. The evil god Set and his supporters had been defeated in their attack on Horus, and Set's friends were changed into animals. A bull, gazelles, and ducks were sacrificed. One of the bull's forelegs was cut off, and the priest touched the mouth and eyes of the mummy or statue with it. Next, he touched the mouth with two instruments, seb ur and tuntet. He "opens the mouth with the instruments of Anubis, with the iron instrument with which the mouths of the gods were opened." He then took the Ur hekau, the 'mighty one of enchantments', a curved piece of wood with a ram's head and cobra carving, and touched the eyes and mouth. This enabled the dead person to know the magical words to utter in the next world. The mouth and eyes were touched by a metal chisel, a red stone, and four iron objects. Further details of this ceremony are given in Budge, Egyptian Magic. A picture of a figure holding a fore-leg and hoof is reproduced in Mayani The Etruscans Begin To Speak. It may be significant that iron instruments play such an important part, in view of iron's properties in magnetism, and as a conductor of electrical current. When Osiris is shown on a staircase, it seems likely that this is a ziggurat. Ziggur is to be compared with seghor and securis, the axe or lightning symbol. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty: Sanctification and Resurrection)} Notes (Chapter Twenty: Sanctification and Resurrection) 1. Milk was used to extinguish the incense flame. 2. The Greek 'hepar', liver, may be another instance of ka. In Vergil, Aeneid IV: 60ff., Dido peers into the steaming entrails (spirantia exta) of sacrificial animals in an attempt to discover the future. The Slavonic 'par' means> steam'. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 21: } {T THE DEATH OF KINGS} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE DEATH OF KINGS AN early chapter of this book was devoted largely to the influence of electricity revealed in the words and action of a play by Euripides, The Bacchae. Now that we have reviewed a wider range of the relevant material, we can usefully turn to another play, the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles. We shall not be concerned here with a good literary translation, or with a balanced general criticism of the play; we shall concentrate on those details of the play which suggest links with electricity. First, a summary of the play. Oedipus has been banished from Thebes. In his wanderings, accompanied by his daughter Antigone, he reaches Colonus, near Athens. The inhabitants, learning of his identity, fear the pollution of incest and parricide, and ask him to leave, but Oedipus has heard from an oracle that this is where he is to die. Theseus, ruler of Athens, arrives. He promises refuge and help. Oedipus in return declares that his spirit and tomb will protect Athens. Ismene, the other daughter of Oedipus, arrives from Thebes with news that her brothers Eteocles and Polynices are about to make war on each other for the throne of Thebes. Kreon, brother of Oedipus's mother and wife Jocasta, arrives, keen to secure the person of Oedipus and thereby protect Thebes. His guards carry off Antigone and Ismene, and he is about to seize Oedipus too when Theseus arrives. The Theban force is defeated and the girls rescued. Polynices enters. He too wants the presence and help of Oedipus in his planned attack on Thebes, whose throne had been unlawfully retained by Eteocles. Despite his father's anger and curse, Polynices departs to marshal his forces against Thebes. Thunder is heard, a sign to Oedipus that his end is at hand. He leads the way to a lonely, rocky place. A god's voice is heard telling him to hurry. Watched only by Theseus, he dies. The nature of his death, and the whereabouts of his tomb, are known only to Theseus. We will now glance at some passages in the play susceptible of an electrical interpretation. The play begins with the entrance of Oedipus and Antigone. The scene is the entrance to the grove of the Eumenides, at Colonus. Antigone declares that the place where Oedipus wishes to sit down and rest is holy. In line 17 she describes it as full of laurel, olive trees, vines, and nightingales. She urges him to sit on the rock (unpolished, virgin rock). At line 36 a stranger enters, and asks Oedipus to leave his seat, for it is holy ground, not to be stepped on. The place is inhabited by the Eumenides, dread goddesses, daughters of Earth and the Dark. Oedipus refuses to get up or leave this land, and asks for more information. He is told that the entire area is holy, the home of semnos Poseidon and the fire-bringing Titan Prometheus. The ground where his foot rests is called the road paved with brass, chalkopous. It is a word applied by Sophocles to mean 'brazen footed', and applied to the Erinys, or Fury, in Elektra, line 491. Euripides applies it to the word tapous, tripod, in the Supplices, line 1197; here also it means 'brazen-footed'. The 'brazen threshold' is the ereisma, the prop, or support, of Athens. The word ereisma is also used, by the poet Theocritus, to mean a hidden rock or reef. Homer mentions iron gates and a brazen threshold in Iliad VIII: 15, where Zeus threatens to hurl down into Tartarus any deities who oppose his wishes. When the stranger has departed to fetch Theseus, Oedipus prays to the Eumenides as a suppliant, revealing that he was told by Apollo that he would find refuge and a place to die, bringing profit to his hosts, at a shrine of the dread (semnon) goddesses, and that signs of his arrival would be earthquake, some kind of thunder, or the lightning flash of Zeus. His mode of address "powerful ones of terrible aspect", is a natural one in the ancient world, where there were traditions of creatures or phenomena dangerous to behold, such as Medusa, who turned to stone those who saw her. White robes, breastplates of double thickness (at Gryneion and in the presence of an ark), masks (Moses), and mirrors (Perseus), are among the protective devices recorded. Right at the start of the play, Oedipus finds himself close to a shelf of rock. At Delphi, a suppliant embraced the omphalos, the stone shown in vase paintings as set in the ground at the shrine (which may originally have been not at the site of the temple of Apollo, but at the Castalian spring, in the cleft between the Phaedriades, the Shining Cliffs). When the chorus of elders approaches, Oedipus asks Antigone to hide him in the grove so that he may hear their talk unseen. When Oedipus emerges at the end of the wood, the chorus are horrified at the sight, and call on Zeus the Averter. Oedipus advances to the shelf of rock and rests there while he reveals who he is, to the horror of the chorus. Ismene arrives, bringing news of the impending warfare between Eteocles and Polynices. The chorus sympathise with Oedipus, and explain how he can make amends to the Eumenides for his sin of trespass. They give him detailed instructions for a libation (water and honey, no wine), and an offering of thrice nine olive shoots. He is to pray in a voice so low that none can hear, and then turn away and depart. One may recall the Hebrew na'am, murmur, and ne'um, oracle, and the purpose of turning away may have been to avoid the consequences of a libation on electrically 'live' rock in an area where earthquakes produce piezoelectric effects. We have already seen that a priestess perished as a result of over-zealous pouring of water over the sacrificial goat in the shrine, and that violators of shrines could be blinded. At the final scene of the death of Oedipus we shall meet this phenomenon again. When Theseus arrives, there is an interesting observation by Oedipus, at line 610, where he warns Theseus that he will not be able to rely on friendship with Thebes, or indeed on the general stability of things. "The strength (ischus) of earth wastes away..." If the "strength of earth" is the prophetic force felt at Delphi, the remark accords with accounts of the obsolescence of oracles, as described by Plutarch. Oedipus is sure that his body, cold and buried, will drink the warm blood of those who will be killed fighting over Thebes, as sure as he is that Zeus is Zeus, and that Phoebus is son of Zeus. Does this turn of phrase mean "that Zeus is still enthroned"? I have suggested in chapter XVIII that Zeus is 'Sedens' 'sitting'. In line 1643, Theseus is "kurios" lord. Here we have a similarity with the Arabic and modern Urdu 'kursa', seat. Polynices departs, having failed to secure the support and person of Oedipus. The comments of the chorus are interrupted by a clap of thunder, and Oedipus anxiously asks for a messenger to fetch Theseus. The chorus are terrified by more thunder and lightning; fear makes their hair stand on end. Oedipus tells his children that the end of his life is at hand. When Antigone asks how he knows, he answers simply that he knows well. This is the first clear hint that Oedipus has special powers, which are soon to be demonstrated openly. (It is possible that at the opening of the play he sensed some divine presence in the rock where he rested). As the thunder is repeated, he expresses the hope that Theseus will come in time to find him alive (empsuchos) and in his right mind (katorthountos phrena, line 1487). Why the latter? Does he fear that an electrical god may spark off an attack of the 'Herakleia nosos', or some kind of madness such as is sometimes mentioned in the context of holy places? When Theseus arrives, he asks whether the reason for the summons is a thunderbolt (keraunos), or "rainy hail". 'Chalaza', hail, may be the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew 'baradh', which normally means not just ordinary hail, but stones, hot stones, or meteorites, as in O. T. Joshua X: 11 and Exodus IX: 23. The word used by Theseus probably means a stone shower. He would hardly have been summoned because of a shower of ordinary hail. In line 1514, Oedipus says that the incessant thunder and lightning from Zeus (also associated with 'baradh' in the O. T.) are the signs that foretell his death. He promises to show Theseus something which will profit his city for ever. "I myself will lead you, without the touch of a guide, to the place where I must die." The place will be an "alke" defence, for Athens. Theseus alone is to come with him, and learn holy things, things not "set in motion" (kineitai) in speech. He must reveal them to nobody except, when about to die, to his successor, and so it is to continue. We have here one of the 'arcana imperii', secrets of rule, to be passed on to preserve authority in the state. Oedipus is anxious that Theseus and Athens should be safe from attack by the 'Sown Men', i. e. the Thebans, who traced their ancestry to the dragon's teeth which, when sown, sprang up as armed men. Snake or dragon ancestry suggests electrical influence from what is described as a dragon in a cave or the sky. It has an interesting echo in the Nibelungenlied; in Wagner's Die Walküre, the Volsungs Siegmund and Sieglinde are recognised as brother and sister by Hunding when he notices the snake-like appearance of their eyes, betraying their descent from Wotan, the god who wields the spear Gungnir and commands the storm. The same characteristic is mentioned in the description of Clytemnestra in the opera Elektra, by Strauss and von Hofmannsthal. After his words of advice to Theseus, Oedipus says: "But let us now go to the place, for the god (literally "that from the god") urges me on." He asks his children to follow him, as their guide, and not to touch him, but to let him, alone, find his tomb where he is to be concealed in the earth. He is being led by Hermes the Escorter, and by the goddess below (Persephone). I suggest that he senses variations in electrical conditions. He will not risk distorting or reducing his sensitivity by contact with others, hence his 'noli me tangere' instructions. His final words spoken to Theseus on the stage are: "For your prosperity, remember me when I am dead, so as to be fortunate always." This exemplifies the feeling in the ancient world that it was important to remember, recite, and re-enact stories of great events. This combination of 'muthos, ' story, and 'dromenon', action, was a magical means of averting future error and disaster. When the principals leave the stage, the chorus sing an ode to the infernal goddesses, requesting an easy passage for Oedipus to the plains of the dead. In line 1579 the messenger gives details of the last moments of Oedipus. He led the way, without a guide, to the sheer cleft in the rock going down by brazen steps to the roots of the earth. At a place where the way is split into many branches, he stopped in one of them, where there is the memorial to the pact between Theseus and Peirithous (who had once been held powerless in stone seats and kept prisoners underground). The place was shaped like a stone basin or krater (mixing bowl). Oedipus sat down here, between the Thorician Rock and the rock basin, between a hollow pear tree and a stone tomb, removed his ragged clothes, and asked his daughters to bring 'loutra', washing water, and 'choae', water for libation. He washed himself and put on the appropriate garments, whereupon there was thunder from Zeus Chthonios, Underground Zeus. His daughters shuddered with fear (rigesan). After his final address to them there was silence, then a voice was heard. All were afraid, and their hair stood on end. The god called many times, in many ways: "Oedipus, Oedipus, why are you waiting?" (The word 'god' is emphasised by its position at the end of line 1626). It is an interesting coincidence that the words quoted by the messenger, "O houtos houtos, Oidipous," each have in Greek a rise and fall resembling that of 'Yahweh, ' and the Egyptian magic words that produce a similar sound. Oedipus extracts a last promise from Theseus to look after Antigone and Ismene, then tells the girls to go. Only Theseus may remain. When the others, after a short delay, looked back, Oedipus had vanished, but Theseus had his hand shading his face, as if against some terrible sight that he could not endure to behold. Shortly afterwards, Theseus prostrated himself on the earth in prayer, and then prayed to Olympus, home of the gods, in the same prayer. (The latter would be by raising his hands to the sky). Chthonic and heavenly deities are recognized together. The scene is suggestive of an electrical incident. The water used reminds one of the death of a priestess at Delphi in Plutarch's time. The phenomenon is associated with an earthquake. Theseus appears to connect sky phenomena (lightning) with earth electricity (piezoelectric effects), in his prayer. The messenger adds that there was no fiery thunderbolt from god, nor was there a whirlwind from the sea. Perhaps, he says, it was a "pompos", escorter, from the gods, or earth's foundation opened. His end was "thaumastos", wonderful. 'Thaumastos' is related to 'thaumazo', I marvel, and to 'thambeo', meaning 'I am amazed, I am stupified', the victim of some force that affects the working of the senses. This way of looking at inspiration and the generation of ideas, namely that they come from an external source, is typically Greek and especially characteristic of Homer, as seen, for example, in the hero Odysseus. Odysseus does not so much formulate ideas as apply with cunning that which is sent into his mind by Athene. Indeed, he does not have a mind in the modern meaning of the word. It would be oversimplification to say that Oedipus committed suicide by electrocution, but it does appear that he went intentionally, not compelled by any human agent, to a death brought about by electrical means. Oedipus, like all rulers in the ancient world, is closely associated with the mantic arts. But with Oedipus the connection is unusually close. He was the subject of an oracular warning before he was born, that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He showed his understanding of monsters by bringing down a monster in the person of the Sphinx. He was associated with the prophet Teiresias, a dominant figure in the first of the Theban plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, and with the Argive seer Amphiaraus, whose wife Eriphyle was bribed by Polynices with a necklace, to persuade her husband to join the expedition against Thebes. The early experiences of Amphiaraus and Teiresias are typical of Greek prophets. Seers and prophetesses generally had the childhood experience of having their ears licked by a snake. Seers were also frequently blind, physically, but had a compensation of seeing farther into the future than others. The importance of the snake stems largely from the fact that it resembles the monster in the sky that Zeus defeated. The flickering tongue of the snake and the speed of its strike syrnbolised lightning and electrical phenomena in the battles in the sky. The tongue of a sacrificial victim was thrown onto the flames of the fire at a Greek sacrifice. It is also possible that the snake's resemblance in shape to the human spine caused the Greeks to associate it with the divine element in the skull and spine, as expounded by Plato in the Timaeus. The blinding of Teiresias was caused by his observations of snakes. He killed the female of a pair of snakes. Another story, or more probably another version of the same occurrence, was that he was called upon to settle a dispute between Zeus and Hera as to whether man or woman derives more pleasure from love. Teiresias sided with Zeus, and Hera struck him blind in her anger. Zeus made up for it by giving him long life and prophetic powers. Yet another story was that Athene blinded him when he saw her bathing. Once more we have water used for provoking an electrical display. Electricity is the link between snakes, blindness, and prophecy. It is also the explanation of the building of pillars and columns, either single, or in groups supporting temple pediments, representing the earth-sky link and the passage of the electrical god to earth from the sky. Hollows in the earth, chasms in cliffs, represent the presence of electrical forces from the earth. We have met it in the Mysteries, and Greek comedy with its phallic displays reveals the influence of the Electrical god Hermes in the field of sexual activity. The story of a snake licking a prophet's ears symbolises the ability to understand bird song, thunder, electrical humming and sparking, and the rumble of earthquakes. Perhaps Teiresias's study of snakes was part of a study of Zeus and Hera, whose sacred marriage was celebrated annually in Crete. Experiments could lead to blindness, but the knowledge acquired in the augur's studies would have survival value in a turbulent world. Protective measures against radiation were mentioned earlier in this chapter. Poets too suffered from blindness, for example Homer himself, and the bard Demodocus (Odyssey VIII: 64). The traditional view has been that a man whom blindness had made useless for ordinary work might find a niche as a court poet and survive in that way, relying on a good memory and some facility on the kithara. But Homer stood on the altar at Delos to recite the Hymn to Apollo, and Pindar used to sit on an iron throne at Delphi. The word 'sophistes' is employed to mean 'poet', by Euripides, Rhesus 924, and by Pindar, Isthmian V: 28. 'Sophos', skilled in an art, or clever, is used especially of those who understand divine matters, as in The Bacchae, line 186, where Kadmos asks the advice of Teiresias in the matter of dress, dance steps, and thyrsus management. The poet had a rhabdos, staff. We have met the Hebrew word 'kashaph', meaning magician, or magic. In Iliad II: 594 ff., Homer mentions Thamyris, son of the poet Philammon, a son of Apollo. Thamyris competed with the Muses, and was punished with blindness for his hubris. The Phrygian satyr Marsyas learnt to play the pipe, which Athene had thrown away because of the facial distortion involved in playing it. He had the arrogance to challenge Apollo to a contest. The Muses judged Apollo to be the winner, whereupon Apollo tied Marsyas to a tree and flayed him alive. One version of the story is that Apollo had him killed by a Scythian. The northern connection suggests that an electrical interpretation may be suitable. Music could be used to induce, by mimesis, sounds indicative of the desired electrical activity. If the experiment got out of hand, the result might be as unfortunate as a miscalculation by a snake charmer if the snake proved to have poison-fangs after all. Oedipus exercises prophetic powers in the Oedipus at Colonus, most obviously when he declares that Polynices and Eteocles will kill each other in the battle for Thebes. But Sophocles also lays great stress on the fact that Oedipus can find the place where his tomb is to be. We are told more than once that he is no longer the guided, but the guide, alone, without the touch of a hand to direct him. He is now as blind as Teiresias. Whereas in the Oedipus Tyrannus he had taunted Teiresias for being a failure as a prophet, and had been accused by Teiresias of blindness in return, he now, sightless through his own act, sees far enough into the future to find, unaided, the place of his death. There remains the question of the motive for his apparent suicide. Why was he so anxious to go forward to his death? Was it the suicide of a man who was tired of suffering and wished to end it? In other words, was it simple suicide by electrocution? Was it obedience to an oracular command? There is plenty of evidence that the supreme task of a king, ruler, or prince was to be willing to serve the gods by sacrificing himself, thereby saving his city from disaster. The example of Kodros springs to mind. He was the last of the legendary kings of Athens. When his city was under attack, an oracle declared that the army whose king was killed would be victorious. Kodros dressed himself as a common soldier and advanced to certain death. The ritual deaths of kings in games and chariot races can be explained on the same lines. From Rome we have the story of Marcus Curtius. A chasm had opened in the forum. He saved Rome from the anger of the gods by riding into the chasm, which closed and swallowed him up. The Oedipus at Colonus contains examples both of electrical technique and of the duties of a ruler. He must know the will of the gods, avoid hubris, be willing to be driven out as a scapegoat, and be ready to save his country from disaster by dying a sacrificial death. {S : Notes (Chapter Twenty-One: The Death of Kings)} Notes (Chapter Twenty-One: The Death of Kings) 1. Pherecydes said that Zas, Chronos and Chthonia were the three first 'archai' (sources, beginnings), and Chronos created fire, wind and water. From these elements, disposed in five 'muchoi' (recesses), the race of gods arose. Pherecydes uses the terms pentemuchos, and pentekosmos. Vide 'The Presocratic Philosophers' by Kirk, Raven and Schofield for a full account. The five gods would be the five planets visible to the naked eye. For the seven recesses, compare the seven regions of the dead in Babylonian myth, and the seven gates through which Ishtar had to pass. The number seven could signify the five planets plus the sun and the moon. In The Book of the Dead, the seven arits (mansions) are mentioned (chapter CXLIV, Arkana edition page 440). I suggest that the Greek 'arche', translated as 'beginning', or 'rule', may be connected with 'ar', 'ara', fire, and possibly 'ka'. 2. Dionysus was reputed to be the inventor of honey. (Ovid, Fasti III: 736) 3. With the Egyptian snake goddess Mehen, compare Greek 'mechane', a device, often of sinister significance. Compare also the Greek 'techne', skill or craft, and Egyptian 'techen', obelisk. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 22: } {T LIVING WITH ELECTRICITY} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO LIVING WITH ELECTRICITY THIS chapter is devoted to brief observations and suggestions about a number of activities and aspects of life in the ancient world, in the light of ancient electrical theory and practice. ANIMALS, AND MAN'S ATTITUDE TO THEM An object in the sky with two projections was held to resemble a bull, cow, stag, goat, horned snake, or dragon. If the body or tail of a comet was reddish in colour, and was the scene of what appeared to be lightning discharges, mutilation, murder and bloodshed, such as were attributed to, for example, Kronos, Zeus and Athene, this was taken as a hint that the action in the sky should be copied on earth, to ensure victory for the forces of light and of law and order. Errant bodies must be brought low. Animals must be stunned and blood spilt. Two important features of the horse are the mane, and the hooves. The mane is in Greek chaite, which can also be a lion's mane, or lophia. Lophia is also the dorsal fin of a dolphin. The hooves produce sparks; "ignipedes equi" are fire-footed horses. Chaite, long, flowing hair, is sensitive to electrical fields. The hair style of some figures in Egyptian art suggests the symbol for radiation, which is seen as part of the utchat. Horses were often employed on the threshing floor, a holy place. The sensitivity of living creatures of all kinds to electrical fields is noteworthy. The scarab has horns; it is a bull-head in Greek. The Book of the Dead speaks of the Bull Scarab. The goose, Greek 'chen', was known to the Egyptians as 'chenchenur', the great cackler. At Rome, geese were sacred to Juno; they gave warning of the Gauls' night attack on the Capitol. In the 1939 -1945 war, pheasants in country districts of England gave reliable early warning of the approach of German aircraft. We have already met the hoopoe with its erectile crest. The ibis was a symbol to the Egyptians of the electrical god, because of its skill at killing snakes, and to the ibis Thoth owes the shape of his head. Thoth armed the gods for their victory over Set. The ichneumon, or mongoose, was sacred to the Egyptians because of a similar skill, that of finding crocodile eggs, and the mongoose is known for its ability to catch snakes. The jackal is sab in Egyptian. I suggest that this may be related to the Latin 'sapere', to be wise. Anubis was the jackal-headed god. Ambitious politicians and military men copied the priestly practice of dressing up in the skins of animals. Just as in Crete and elsewhere there were ceremonies in which experts jumped on bulls, killed bulls, or were killed by bulls in the agon, arena, or labyrinth, so an Homeric hero or Celtic chief would wear a helmet, probably with horns, imitating a wild and powerful animal either on earth, or in the sky, i. e. divine. The centaur was a creature half man, half horse. Centaurs were archers, and the arrow is often a lightning symbol. The centaur Cheiron was the model schoolmaster and instructor. Pindar refers to him as the Magnesian centaur. We may have here a glimpse of ancient education in electrical theology. Kings were required to understand all aspects of augury; Herodotus mentions especially the Persians in this respect. Crete was not the only place where there was bull fighting. The Taurokathapsia was a bull-fight at a festival in Thessaly, and also at Smyrna. 'Taurelates' was a bull-driver or Thessalian horseman in the Taurokathapsia. 'Taurokathaptes' was a stuffed figure, used to enrage the bull at a fight, tauro-machia. This would be similar in purpose to the Roman pila, which, as well as being a ball, was a stuffed figure for baiting bulls. Aeschylus, Fr. 27, refers to the Edonian rites of Kottyto; the imitators, mimoi, of the bull bellow in a fearsome manner. ARCHITECTURE The light-tower is in Egyptian 'an, ' 'techen, ' or 'ucha'; in Akkadian 'durr'; cf. Latin turris, Greek pyrgos, and perhaps stele, which is a memorial stone, inscribed slab, or obelisk, Hebrew 'shath. ' When a pillar, Greek kion, was used in the construction of a temple, it was a support of heaven. We have met a description by Pausanias of pillars as planets; it may be relevant that the source of light for the palace at Knossos was a courtyard surrounded by seven columns. (J. D. Pendlebury, A Handbook to the Palace of Minos, p. 50; quoted by Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, tr. R. Manheim. p. 95). The capital of a column, in Latin pulvinar, was a cushioned seat for a god. The Hebrew caphtor is the capital of a column, the crown of a candelabrum, the island of Crete, or Cyprus. The Greek kalathos, basket, can also mean the capital of a column. Temples and shrines were often situated on high ground, and bronze doors and thresholds occur as features of Greek temples and palaces. The Egyptian pylon, or gateway, was sebchet, the opening of fire. The similarity of hept, septem, seven, and Egyptian seb, illustrates the use of a common technical language, such as was used when discussing the seven 'wandering stars' and the seven recesses, Greek muchoi. [1] Herodotus (II: 44) visited Tyre, where he saw a temple of Herakles. It had two columns, one of gold, and one of emerald, which glowed at night. Theophrastus, in his 'De Lapidibus', on stones, doubts whether such a large object could be of emerald. Green jasper and malachite have been mentioned as possibilities. Smaragdos (Greek) is an emerald. Herakles was associated with luck. His name was given to the highest throw at dice. One of the names of Baal, as a Babylonian god of fortune, is Gadh (Hebrew spelling). The Greek 'sema', sign or mark, resembles the Hebrew shem, sign or name. 'Ar' (Etruscan) is fire. I suggest that smaragdos is the sign of the fire of Gadh. There is some support for this in Hebrew. Bareqeth is an emerald or precious stone; baraq is lightning. When Aeneas is shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, he views Dido's new city of Carthage under construction. He sees huge columns, "scaenis decora alta futuris," lofty ornaments for a future theatre. In many passages where columns are mentioned, there is a possibility of a link with the poros of Alkman, with Plato's column of light, and with Pindar's "marvelous road to the agon of the Hyperboreans". Radical proposals about the astronomical significance of electrical phenomena appear in Solaria Binaria, by de Grazia and Milton (Metron Publications, Princeton), and may be relevant when attempting an explanation of such passages. The Latin 'decus', beauty, adornment, glory, and the verb 'decoro', to adorn, call for study. "Decus enitet ore," beauty gleams in (or from) his face. "Vitis ut arboribus decori est, ut vitibus uvae," as the vine is an ornament to the trees, as grapes adorn the vine. Trees here are the trees up which the vines were trained. "Larem corona nostrum decorari volo," I want our (statue of) Lar to be decorated with a crown. The adjective 'decorus' means shining. "Phoebus decorus fulgente arcu," Phoebus beautiful with his gleaming bow; Horace 'Carmen Saeculare' 61. Decorus is applied to faces, eyes, temples, heads, swords, helmets, wrestling (gleam of oil); Zeus is even referred to as decorissimus. Bacchus is "decorus aureo cornu," with golden horn, Horace, 'Odes' 2: 19: 30. I suggest that we should associate decorus with the appearance of an electrical glow round an object. The Greek prepon means fitting, suitable, like the Latin decorus. Its primary meaning is shining, conspicuous to the senses; e. g. 'Zeus en aitheri prepei', Zeus shines out in the sky. {S : ART} ART The Greeks and Romans greatly valued realism. A painting or statue should be as much like the original as possible, and should be suffused with a certain 'charis', charm. Zeuxis, who could deceive a bird by inducing it to swoop down to peck at his painting of a bunch of grapes, was held to be a great artist; his rival Parrhasios, who could deceive Zeuxis, a human judge, by painting an easel and cloth, so that Zeuxis asked him to remove the cloth and let him see the picture, was an even greater artist. In Plato's philosophy, everyday objects copied the eternal, ideal, model. In art, too, the aim was mimesis, imitation. Much of the decoration on vases, walls, buildings and columns is suggestive of flame-like effects. Perhaps we have here the influence of electrical theology. It is also probable that some ancient art is an attempt to communicate technical information. If Apollo is represented sitting on a tripod cauldron which has wings, the painter may well be telling the viewer that the god is to be thought of as dwelling in the sky. Similarly, wheels can suggest not only land travel, but the movement of heavenly bodies, e. g. the tripods of Hephaestus. Cup and ring designs are thought to be astronomical. Egyptian art is especially rich in representations of technical apparatus, such as the telescopic rods round statues of gods and pharaohs, hennu boats such as Moses would have known, and headgear. The object in the sky described as a seething pot was probably responsible for the design of tripod cauldrons, and possibly some pottery designs as well. The staring eyes seen in some statuettes may be inspired by celestial phenomena, and the owl both looked and sounded divine. The patron goddess of potters was Athene, and her name may appear in the atanuvium, or athanuvium, an earthen bowl used in sacrificial rites by Roman priests, and may be the same as the Greek attanon. In Homer, beauty is something external which is poured over a person or thing. Athene pours charis over the head and shoulders of Telemachus, like a smith overlaying silver with gold (Odyssey VI: 235). It is interesting to compare the Hebrew hedher, splendour, ornament, with Greek hedra, seat or throne, and Latin hedera, ivy. A study of art provides additional evidence for the thesis that there was a common electrical technology throughout the Mediterranean world. Egyptian reliefs showing the electrical arrangements round statues of gods are similar to a 9th century B. C. example from Babylonia. {S : DANCE} DANCE We saw in Chapter VIII that Greek tragedy developed from the dithyramb. The Hebrew 'shiggayon' is dithyramb. Hebrew 'sheghiah' is transgression; 'shagha' is to wander. The view of the nature of tragedy advanced in Chapter VIII is that it was concerned with averting, by magical means, the transgression of an object in the sky that was guilty of adikia, injustice, and hubris, assuming too exalted a position. Justice, dike (Hebrew tsadiq = just), is the normal way of behaving. Injustice is the state of affairs when someone or something misses the target, or correct path, going too high. In Chapter XVII, we considered the dance at Knossos, and in Chapter VIII, the dance at the court of King Alkinous. At Knossos, two acrobats were darting in and out among the dancers; at the court of King Alkinous the dancing floor is an agon, a place for a contest or fight. When the agon is cleared for dancing (Odyssey VIII: 260 ff. ), Demodocus sings of the love affairs of Ares and Aphrodite. The Cretans had a dance in honour of Sabazios, or Dionysus, called Sikinnis. It was danced by satyrs. Mention of Dionysus takes us to Delphi, where goats were seen dancing in a strange way. The Greek words for dancing, skairo, skirtao, orcheomai, choreuo, komazo, enkrouo, all have links with goats or the theatre. In Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 599, Io enters dancing. Her movements are skirtemata. The Greek schematizo, suggesting attitudes or figures in the dance, may even be related to the Egyptian sekhem, power. The Salii, Roman priests, performed a dance on the threshold (limen). Salio = leap. They were the guardians of the ancilia, shields. They went in procession through Rome with stamping, solemn leaps, singing songs. "Salios ancilia ferre ac per urbem ire canentes carmina, cum tripudiis solemnique saliatu iussit." (Livy I: 20, describing Numa's instructions). Dancing before an ark was done by Egyptian monarchs as well as by David, and was part of resurrection technique. It was also associated with the attempt to renew the fertility of the earth. In the 20th century ballet The Rite of Spring, members of a tribe stamp on the earth to waken it from its winter sleep. At Rome there was a priestly college of great antiquity, whose members were called the Arval brothers (arva means fields). They were responsible for the fertility of the fields. Their dance was the Tripodatio, a solemn stamping of the earth. Tripudatio is a dance of a priest round an altar. The Arval brothers were twelve in number. They made offerings to the Lares of the fields every year. The Karpaia was a Spartan dance in honour of Artemis. At Athens, it was a wanton dance, like the Kordax. The Karpaia was danced in Thessaly. 'Karyatizein' was to dance at a festival of Artemis in Karyae. {S : DRESS AND COSMETICS} DRESS AND COSMETICS Priests wore white robes. The Greek chlaina, a woollen outer garment stained purple, was of double thickness, like the ephod and breastplate of the high priest at Jerusalem which was also of double thickness, possibly in an attempt to shield the wearer from radiation. Egyptian menkh, linen garments, may mean 'resistant to radiation'. Greek meno = 'withstand', ka = radiation. David wore linen when he danced before the ark, II Samuel VI: 14. Vide Pausanias I: 21: 9, for linen breastplates in Apollo's temple at Gryneion. The Roman trabea was a state robe. Livy tells us that Servius Tullius, in his bid for power, put on a trabea and summoned the lictors. There were three varieties of trabea: all purple for religious use; purple and white, for kings; purple and scarlet, for augurs. The toga was worn with a broad purple stripe by senators; by equites, knights, with a narrow stripe. Children wore a toga praetexta, an outer garment bordered with purple, until they assumed the toga virilis, a grey woollen toga. Men who wished to be elected to office and join the ranks of the magistrates who had imperium wore a white garment, the toga candida, whence the term candidate. Egyptian priests and Greek gymnasium managers wore phaikades, white shoes. The word phaikas resembles phaikos, explained by Hesychios as being equivalent to phaidros and lampros, words meaning 'bright'. Hats are seen on Hittite and Etruscan reliefs, and elsewhere, conical in shape. The mitra may have been typical of Mitra, the Persian Aphrodite. We read of "a holy crown upon the mitre," of the high priest, Old Testament, Exodus XXIX: 6. The dunce's hat may be an attempt to obtain electrical, i. e. divine, help A Roman priest's hat had a twist of wool, apiculum, round the apex or point. This was similar to the Greek stemma. The Greeks and Egyptians attached great importance to hair styles. The elegant curl at the end of the locks of hair on an Egyptian painting or relief, closely resembles the curve of the utchat, like the Greek chaite, hair or mane. The beard looks much the same. Hair standing on end may be an indicator of an electrical field. The Greek 'phobe', locks of hair, is almost the same as 'phobos', fear. Tassels on the edges of garments remind one of the aegis, which was waved in battle by Zeus and Athene to terrify the enemy. The Etruscan augur is shown wearing a fringed robe in The Etruscans, by Pallottino. The Assyrian king presented a fringed garment to the god Ashur at akitu, the New Year festival. Herodotus (II: 81) mentions an Egyptian robe, the kalasiris, which had fringes. The Egyptian 'secher' is a fringe. {S : CROWNS AND NECKLACES} CROWNS AND NECKLACES Kronos, or, according to Diodorus, Zeus, assumed a crown after defeating the giant snake Ophioneus. The exalted tiara and the throne of kingship were first lowered from heaven to the Sumerian king in Eridu. Naram Sin had a horned tiara. In the Gilgamesh epic, after the flood has devastated the earth, Ishtar raises her necklace of lapis-lazuli and swears never to forget the flood. We have met the word stephanos, crown, in the context of crowning a bowl of wine, as a wreath of, for example, olive, worn by priests and by victorious athletes, and I have suggested that it is setphanos, Set, the seething pot in the sky. The prophet Amphiaraus is described as having pyrilampea chaiten, fiery hair, stemmati daphnaio, with laurel crown (Christodorus, Description of the Statues in the Public Gymnasium called Zeuxippus, line 259). The tore was worn especially by Gallic chieftains, and the god Apollo is sometimes represented wearing a necklace. Necklaces, frequently of amber beads, may have had an electrical, or even astronomical, significance. {S : FOOD AND DRINK} FOOD AND DRINK Ambrosia and nectar were for the dwellers in the sky. The story of food descending to earth is not restricted to the Hebrew report of manna feeding the Israelites in the wilderness. It is found in northern myth, too. Food from the sky saved mankind in the fimbulvetr, the great winter.[ 2] Wine was thought by the Egyptians to be the blood of those who had battled against the gods. In Greece and Rome, it was usual to dilute it with water, and its use in libations means that it could take the place of blood, Etruscan zac, to make the dead rise and stand. The onion was valued for its health-giving action. It was similar top garlic in that divine power came from it. In Latin it is allium, probably another example of 'el'; or caepa (ka?), Arabic basal. In Greek it is krommuon. Garlic was in Greek skorodon, also gelgis, gelgithos. Hebrew gulgoleth is a skull or head. The consonants 'skr', occurring in skorodon, are significant because of garlic's association with life. The eating of meat was done as much for magical reasons as for nourishment, as we have seen in Chapter XVIII when examining the vacl, or sacred feast. The rich and the priests grew fat on a rich diet of sacrificial meat. {S : GAMES} GAMES The games celebrated in Elis in the Peloponnese (Alis in the Doric dialect), were a religious festival in honour of Olympian Zeus. They may have been instituted in honour of Pelops, son of Tantalus and grandson of Zeus, and reorganised in 776 B. C.. They were held every fourth year, in midsummer. A sacred truce, echecheiria, was proclaimed, so that people might travel safely from all over Greece. Spectators and competitors met in the alsos, or sacred grove, where there was a stadium with room for 40,000 spectators. The main events were foot races, pentathlon, boxing, and chariot races. The prize for a winner was a crown, stephanos, of wild olive. At an early date, chariot racing was introduced, at first with four-horse chariots, later with two-horse chariots. The signal for the start of a race was given by the raising and lowering of a bronze eagle and a bronze dolphin. Pausanias relates that the horses shied at a certain place on the course called Taraxippos, where there was an altar. 'Tarasso' means throw into confusion. One may compare this with the presence at Rome in the Circus Maximus of an underground altar to Consus, a god of agriculture, earth, and secret plans. The latter suggest Hermes, who was the electrical god par excellence, but ancient authorities equated Consus with Poseidon. At his festival, the Consualia, on the 21st of August, chariot races were held, and horses were crowned with flowers. The altar was underground, but was uncovered for the festival. At Olympia, as elsewhere in Greece, the gymnasia were places where athletes trained and rubbed oil on themselves; the palaestra was a place where wrestlers trained. In the Circensian games at Rome, founded by Romulus, there was a contest between two parties. One of them was clothed in white, the albati. The Roman poet Juvenal mentions russati, clad in red, and there were greens, too. Chariot races are often thought to be linked with the death of the queen's consort at the end of the year, at the hands of the young challenger. Robert Graves maintained that many Greek myths describe the replacement of a matriarchal system by a patriarchal one. King Oenomaus of Elis promised to give his daughter Hippodameia to the man who could defeat him in a chariot race. If the challenger lost, he was killed by Oenomaus with a spear. Pelops, son of Tantalus who served him up in a banquet to the gods, challenged Oenomaus. He bribed Myrtilus, the king's charioteer, to loosen a linchpin. The king crashed and lost, but refused to give up his daughter to Pelops, and threw him into the sea. Pelops had an ivory shoulder, replacing the flesh eaten in the feast by Demeter. He was said to have migrated to southern Greece, the 'island of Pelops', from Lydia. His name may mean dark-eyed, dark-faced, or, literally, mud-faced. In Greek ops is a face, pelos is mud. It is more likely that his name comes from ops, voice, and the Lydian pel. Lydian words sometimes have an initial s which later disappears. Greek spelaion, Latin spelunca, and Lydian pel all mean 'cave'. His name could mean 'voice from the cave'. The Hebrew me'urah, cave, may be the Egyptian meh, full, and ar, electrical fire. (Echidna, half woman and half snake, lived in a cave at the place called Arima.) The presence of an earth goddess would explain Taraxippos and the worship of Consus and Poseidon. Poseidon was the Earthshaker, associated with the sound of horses, galloping hooves, sparks raised as hooves struck the stony ground of Greece with its bits of flint and iron ore, and with the groaning of rocks in an earthquake. His trident is an electrical weapon just as much as the thunderbolt of his brother Zeus, even if it is only half a thunderbolt. The thunderbolt held by Zeus resembles in shape the pattern regularly assumed by iron filings on a sheet of paper when a bar magnet is put underneath. (The patterns of lightning flashes are random.) The study at Samothrace of this behavior of iron particles has been mentioned in Chapter XII. Probably the chariot race originated in a representation of something unusual happening in the sky. The smash symbolised an encounter between Zeus and a monster. It was, like tragedy, an apotropaic rite, an attempt to save the world from an extra-terrestrial threat. The use of the spear by Oenomaus symbolises lightning. The spear is a lightning symbol, the favourite weapon, Gungnir, of Odin. In Wagner's Parsifal, it is also a healer. The spina, or low barrier along the race-course, had a seat, pulvinar. In imperial times the emperor sat on this seat on the fala. It would be a good place from which to observe a smash, even to cause one. The Greek palaestra, where wrestling took place, was holy ground, as was a threshing floor, and the gymnasiarch wore white shoes. Perhaps the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel (Old Testament Genesis XXXII) should be considered, together with the many Egyptian references to the god of the thigh, which was situated in the sky. At a Greek sacrifice it was usual to offer the god slices from the thighs of the victim. 'Kole' is the thigh-bone and flesh. The Latin poples is the back of the knee, or the thigh. References to the thigh are found in The Book of the Dead, translated by Budge: "Behold him whose face is in the Lord of the Thigh." (c. 130). "Hail, O thou Thigh which dwellest in the northern heaven in the Great Lake, which art seen and which diest not. I have stood over thee when thou didst rise like a god." (c. 98). "He whose face is behind him ..." (ch. 125). It is just possible that the last passage could be relevant when tracing the origins of the two-headed god Janus. {S : MEDICINE} MEDICINE The Latin 'stupere', to be amazed, may be related to Greek hupnos, sleep, and to the god Set. There are cases in Homer of deities, heroes and humans being immobilised, with electric shock as a possible cause. Epilepsy was the sacred, or Heraklean, disease, and hypnosis was used as an anaesthetic in sanctuaries of Asklepios, and in the Roman army. De Grazia, in God's Fire, suggests electrical treatment as an explanation of the serpent Nechushtan set up by Moses to cure sufferers from snake bite.[ 3] Henbane, fabulonia, may be associated with stories about Dionysus, one of whose names in Etruscan suggests henbane and raving. A play was a fabula, or story, and Dionysiac worship is all about raving. Apollo is the god of healing, plague, and sudden death. The Greeks feared contact with infected persons, whether the trouble was moral or physical. This is to be expected at a time when there was much electrical activity, lightning, and radiation, whose effects were called leprosy. It was dangerous to be under the same roof or in the same ship as a person who behaved impiously. The god of medicine was Asklepios, son of Apollo. His symbol was the snake; his healing activity was associated with theatres at Athens and Epidaurus. The snake would be a symbol of electrical power from both sky and earth, and is a link between the two. The curving spine of a human skeleton would suggest a snake, and the snake's habit of renewing its skin could be a resurrection symbol. The Roman house snake was a symbol of the genius of the house. {S : MUSIC} MUSIC Musical activity often took the form of imitation of the sounds of electrical activity, e. g. in Egyptian sets of vowels, and the sound produced from an ark; probably also imitation of storm effects, with rattles and other percussion instruments to suggest the sparks and striking of pebbles and meteorites. The Aeolian harp is an instance of what can be done. There is some evidence that a smooth, continuous flow of sound was considered to be more archaic and authentic than staccato sounds separated by big pitch differences, (see Plutarch; Why The Oracle No Longer Answers In Verse, 397 b, quoting Pindar). It is necessary to bear in mind the technique of the aulos. Generally translated as 'flute', it was really a double-reed instrument, allowing flexibility of pitch from reeds with a long lay. Cicero writes: "inclinata ululantique voce more Asiatico canere," to sing in the Asiatic manner, with an up-and-down wailing sound. (Orator VIII: 27) One may compare with this: "Cadmus heard the god revealing correct music, not sweet nor voluptuous, nor broken up in tunes." The lyre generally had four strings, later seven. The number may be connected with the number of 'wandering stars' that they saw in the sky. The Greek Sirens, whose song lured listeners to their destruction, bear a name resembling the Hebrew 'shir', song. A lyre player is 'elater luras', a striker or driver of the lyre. 'Elater brontes' is used of a deity who wields the thunderbolt. 'Elauno' is used of driving a chariot. The Greek Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Memory, an interesting anticipation of Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'. A less well known name for them is 'Leibethrides'. Leibo, pour, and libations are concerned with tombs, and it was an important duty to remember the dead. Epic poetry was largely a celebration of the deeds of the great heroes of the past (not necessarily a distant past). Homer's poetry was the Bible of the Greeks, and the Romans acted 'more maiorum', in the way of their fathers. {S : PHILOSOPHY} PHILOSOPHY Early philosophy can hardly be distinguished from religion and science. Greek philosophers tried to find a single reality behind the changing world, and their solutions affected their concepts of behaviour and their ways of understanding and trying to control their surroundings. At times, the presence of electricity could be detected by the eye, when it lightened or when there was a display in a temple. At other times, a man must be careful what he touched and where he stepped; sudden death was always a possibility when experimenting with a mysterious and powerful force. Xenophanes, a 6th century B. C. thinker, postulated a single god, not anthropomorphic, who always stays in the same place unmoved, and shakes everything, without trouble, with his mind. Homer's gods live on Olympus, far removed from the hurry-burly of life on earth, though they do have their domestic troubles at times, have to repel attacks by giants, and may get involved in our lives in matters of war and sex. The Egyptian phrase maa kheru is used of a soul which has been weighed in the scales after death, has passed the test, and is allowed to work its way up to join Ra in the sky. The Greek word to describe the gods, the 'blessed gods', is makar. It is used especially of the gods. Greek writers frequently use the words logo men ..., ergo de ..., in theory on the one hand, in practice on the other... What is the cause of this natural bias towards antithesis? It accords well with the sense of an unseen force with manifestations which were unpredictable. {S : POLITICS} POLITICS Kingship is only one aspect of political life in the ancient world, but is the most importat In Sumer, the god Enlil put the holy crown (which appeared after the flood) on the head of the ruler. The exalted tiara and the throne of kingship were lowered from heaven in the city of Eridu. In Babylon, Sargon, in the 8th century B. C., took the hand of Bel, and in 538 B. C. Cambyses, son of Cyrus, took the hand of Bel in the New Year festival. Sumerian kings were god's vicars at first; they always retained priestly functions. Priest is sanga; cf. Latin sanguis, and Egyptian ankh. A prince in Sumer and Akkad was chosen by Enlil to rule. Later, Enlil was replaced by Marduk, and priests and rulers became two separate classes. The king of Assyria regarded the god Assur as supreme among gods, therefore on earth he must conquer other kings (vice Roux: Ancient Iraq, passim). Oracles, and election by nobles, were part of the process of making kings. At a coronation the new king was carried on a portable throne. He entered the temple at Ekur, offering oil, silver and an embroidered robe. He was anointed by the high priest, and given the crown of Ashur and the sceptre of Ninlil (Ashur's spouse). He took part in important festivals, such as New Year (akitu), the eating ritual (takultu) and the bath-house ritual (bit rimki). He could be a scapegoat in times of trouble, and a substitute king might be killed. He consulted baru, priests (seers). The New Year festival involved humiliation of the king to remind him that he was but a servant of the god. The priest struck him on the cheek. It seems possible that this may have had another purpose, that of giving him a red face like that of an important heavenly body. Hebrew chapher is to turn red. In the course of the ceremony, a bull was burnt, and two statuettes of evil were decapitated, and their heads burnt. Statues of gods were taken in procession to the bit akitu, where the triumph of the gods over their enemies was enacted. Music and incense accompanied the procession. In classical Athens, one of the archons was entitled King Archon, a survival of the days of monarchy. We have already seen that the prutaneis were charged with the care of the sacred fire. At Rome, too, from 509 B. C., the powers of the king were divided between the curule magistrates, rex sacrorum, priests, Vestals, senate, etc.. If the consuls died in office, an interrex took over until new consuls could be elected. The interrex was originally the regent holding power between the death of a king and the election of a successor. It was important that a high official should preside at theatrical performances and games. At Athens, one sees the chair of the priest of Dionysus in the theatre; at Rome, the emperor had his pulvinar, or cushioned throne, on the spina at the circus. The king's great authority on earth sprang from the fact that he was the servant of the gods. Servus in Latin, ser in Egyptian and sar in Hebrew, show the nature of his power. He was especially the servant of the god in his temple, and was responsible for the building and upkeep of temples. Tullus Hostilius was elected king of Rome by the nobles (Livy I: 22). They were the auctores, enlargers. Here we see the word, derived from augere, to enlarge, that refers to the electrical glow that priests tried to stimulate round the head of a statue, or the person of a king on his throne, making the figure appear greater than that of a mere mortal. We have already seen, in Chapter I, the significance of light in Etruria and Rome. The Etruscan lauchme, Latin lucumo, or lucmon, is from the root luk and has several meanings. Its basic meaning is an inspired or possessed person. To a Roman this means furor, and insania. It was a title of Etruscan priests and princes. The Etruscans in Italy did not achieve complete political unity. They had a number of princes, each controlling his own city. "Tuscia duodecim Lucumones habuit, reges quibus unus praeerat." (Servius on Aeneid VIII: 475 ff). Etruria had twelve lucumons, princes, one of whom was superior to the others. The name Lucumo was given by the Romans, as his proper name, to the son of Demaratus of Corinth, who became Tarquinius Priscus, the Old Tarquin, king of Rome. Lucumo had a wife, Tanaquil, whose name recalls the eagle, aquila, which seized Lucumo's hat, carried it up into the sky, and then restored it to his head. Lucumo may mean simply an Etruscan. The Roman poet Propertius, IV: 1: 29, has "Prima galentus posuit praetoria Lycmon," an Etruscan wearing a hood first pitched a praetor's camp. Galeritus, wearing a hood, is taken as meaning a peasant, but galerum, a skin helmet, Greek kunee, probably has regal and divine significance. In the realm of history, the original aim was the establishment, by memory or by written records or monuments, of claims by rulers to divine authority going back as far as possible; hence the equivocal nature of king lists in the copies of Manetho and elsewhere. In the 5th century B. C., the Greek word historia and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides mark an era of inquiry into the past, but ancient stories were valued for a more important reason than mere curiosity or entertainment. It was felt necessary to be able to commemorate and perform ancient rituals as the best means of securing stability, lest the gods become angry and punish the world with floods like those of Noah, Deukalion, and Ogyges, or scorch the earth as Typhon did. Ancient history is informed by a feeling of past golden ages ending in disaster and a painful rise from the ruins. The course of civilisation was cyclic, and the equilibrium was punctuated by battles in the sky and disasters on a huge scale. If Sophocles could be resurrected today, he might marvel at twentieth century technology, but he would probably see hubris (overweening pride) and ate (blind folly) in modern man's drive for domination. {S : WAR} WAR The war-chariot, Greek satine, harma, Latin currus, essedum, enabled the king, leading his forces in battle, to inspire fear through his resemblance to a god. The horses with their fiery hooves contributed to this picture. Spears and swords were seen as earthly versions of objects in the sky, symbolising the power of the shock or thunderbolt, as did the net and trident in gladiatorial combats. There were apotropaic devices on shields, such as snakes or rays of light; radiation danger is implied in the Gorgon's head with which Perseus turned enemies to stone. The Twelfth Legion, named Fulminata, had shields that bore a device of Jupiter brandishing a thunderbolt. Some of the shields painted on Greek vases of the Geometric Period have the appearance of the double axe, as do Hittite shields. The burning of towns by a victorious army may well have been done not only for practical reasons, but also in imitation of the havoc caused by lightning, when a town had incurred the wrath of Zeus, Jupiter, or Marduk. There would be sound strategic reasonings for eliminating a trouble spot, but a commander also saw himself as the agent of Zeus or Jupiter. Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Carthage, was a belli fulrnen, thunderbolt of war. The helmet had a plume. Bronze armour was sometimes overlaid with tin, Greek kassiteros, Sanskrit kastira (kastira = to shine). Priests and augurs were consulted before declaring war or giving battle. If the sacred chickens would not eat, an impatient commander who said 'let them drink instead', and threw them overboard, had only himself to blame when defeated in a sea battle (off Drepanum, 249 B. C.). When war was decided on, the fetial priest went to the territory of the people from whom redress was demanded for an infringement. He put on his head a pilleum, with an apiculum, piece of wool, round the apex. He invoked Jupiter, crossed the frontier, and delivered demands to the first person he met. He then reported to Rome. After thirty-three days he returned, and hurled a spear into enemy territory. The spear had a tip of iron, or was hardened in flame. It was either of blood-red colour, or was dipped in blood, depending on how one translates Livy's account in I: 32. Fetial may be from the Greek phemi speak. Perhaps the priest spoke with the authority of Al or El. In the realm of law, morality, crime and punishment, the ruling concept was that of dike, the way things go, including in the sky, observing the limits and keeping on the right path. The heavens were the pattern, and must be copied on earth. The keen interest in homosexuality in Greece was probably inspired in part by imaginative observation of close encounters in the sky. Kings, and judges, inflicted such penalties as impalement, stoning, and decapitation. The lictor's axe, securis, was a lightning symbol, and there are plenty of stories of gods (e. g. Odin), hanging on a tree. These stories should probably be considered in the context of the world tree, perhaps of the poros of Alkman. {S : WRITING} WRITING I have already suggested that the Etruscan zichne, to write, means the tracks of Set. There is evidence that writing was associated with marks made on stone by lightning. Exodus XX: 24 refers to God recording his name. In Deuteronomy IX: 10 Moses says that he received two tables of stone written with the finger of God. I have also suggested that electricity is frequently involved where ancient languages have the sounds of ka, qa, or cha. There are examples of words with such sounds in the context of writing. In Hebrew there are chartom, a scribe or cutter of hieroglyphs; charash, charath, to cut or engrave; chaqaq, to ordain, to engrave, and as a participle, a sceptre; kathabh, to write; qa'aqa, tattoo, mark on the skin. In Egyptian there is chaker, a design. Thoth was the god of writing. Etruscan words include zichne, write, engrave; zichina, cut, bite; cana, to carve. In Hebrew there is sakin, in Arabic sikina, knife. (Cf. Latin scintilla, spark, and Gaelic skean, dagger.) It may be only coincidence that the Latin caelum means both a chisel and the sky. The Greek grapho and Latin scribo may have a link with sacer. Greek stizein means 'to brand', Greek 'hizein' means 'to sit. ' There is a striking coincidence in the fact that certain words in one language have the same meaning in another language when the direction of the writing is reversed. Semitic languages go from right to left, Greek and Latin from left to right, Etruscan now one, now the other. Two key words in ancient religion, 'holy' and 'axe', appear each way. The Hebrew peladhah means iron; Lydian, Greek and Etruscan have labrys, dolabra, falandum. Falandum is the sky, thought to be of iron, from which pieces of iron sometimes fall, e. g. the Palladium, which was probably a lump of meteoric metal or ore. The sounds F and P are closely related (vide Grimm's law). The Arabic balta is an axe, very close to the Latin dolabra, axe, and falandum, sky, when read backwards. The Arabic raqs means dance; read right to left its consonants become sqr, Latin sacer. The Hebrew raqadh is to leap, jump, start, dance, and we have seen the significance of dancing when discussing the goats at Delphi, and David and other monarchs dancing before arks. It must be emphasized that at the moment this can only be regarded as coincidence and matter for speculation, but further examples may exist, and the matter could have relevance to the problems of Hittite, Achaean, and Etruscan geography in an obscure period of ancient history. If one looks for a thread of Ariadne in this maze, for a single factor to explain the practices and attitudes of the ancient world which we have been considering, one may find it in the Greek concept of mimesis, imitation in the attempt to control a force which was often invisible, but which had great power to destroy or to save. Attitudes towards the gods changed as Greek and Roman thinkers concentrated, like Socrates, on the political and moral problems of living together at peace in cities, or on solving problems in medicine and agriculture, laying the foundations of the physical sciences, as did Aristotle. The reason for this change may have been in part the gradual fading of electrical fields after a time of disturbance, and intellectual hubris may have played a part. However, the original stories survived, especially in the works of the Greek dramatists, who taught that hubris, overweening arrogance, would bring blindness and disaster. Xerxes ordered the waters of the Hellespont to be lashed when his bridge was broken down by a storm. His hubris and impiety were followed by defeat in the straits of Salamis. The god's anger was roused when Salmoneus emulated Jupiter by riding in a chariot like a god running amuck in the sky, rattling brass pots and brandishing torches to imitate thunder and lightning. He was struck by a thunderbolt and hurled into Tartarus. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T APPENDIX A} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite APPENDIX A This book began with a study of augury and of oracles. The inquiry spread from Rome and Delphi to many other parts of the Mediterranean world, from caves to the sky. On the journey we met the Egyptian concept of the ka, or double, a manifestation of the electrical force, or god. The ka may help us to a greater understanding of the terminology employed at Greek oracles. One of the most commonly used words in ancient Greek is chre, 'it is necessary'. It comes from the verb chrao, 'I give an answer'. This word is used of an oracle giving an answer, and it is thought that theos, the god, must be understood as the subject of the verb, i. e. chre means 'the god answers'. In the middle voice, chraomai means 'I consult', i. e., I get an answer from the god. It also means 'I use'. Chreon is regarded as a neuter participle, meaning 'that which the oracle says', and so 'fate', and 'destiny'. There is an obsolete root rheo, 'I say', which appears in the classical Greek rhema, 'utterance'. It appears in ero, the future tense of the verb lego, 'say', in Attic Greek. The verb rheo also means 'flow'. The Greek word chresterion means 'oracle'. I suggest that the priest's answer to inquirers was "Ka rhei.." (becoming "chre.."), "The God says.." {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T APPENDIX B: } {S READING BACKWARDS} KA by H. Crosthwaite APPENDIX B READING BACKWARDS In Chapter XXII, in the section on writing, I quoted examples of words which, when read backwards, have the same meaning in another language. I wrote that more examples may exist. It seems best to put some of them in an appendix. Most have been mentioned already in various contexts. Correspondence between a Semitic language and Latin Ar. balta, axe; Lat. dolabra, Lydian labrus. Ar. raqs, dance; Lat. sacer. Heb. sakin, Ar. sikina, knife, Lat. sica; Heb. nachush, bronze. Ar. al shark the east; Lat. cras, tomorrow. Heb. keneset, Ar. kinisa, religious meeting place; Lat. sancio, sanctify, give life. Heb. palda, iron; Lat. fala, scaffolding, Etr. falandum, sky, Lat. dolabra, fire from the sky, axe; Lydian labrus, Gk. laburinthos. Heb. methalleah, tooth; Gk. metallon is a mine, especially a silver mine. Lat. letum = death. The tooth of the cobra, and metal, may constitute a link with the electrical deity and the danger of sudden death. Semitic - Greek Heb. baraq, lightning; Gk. karabos, stag beetle, scarab, boat. (all have divine significance) Phoenician Anath; Gk. Athene. Heb. qol, voice; Gk. logos, word. Etruscan - Latin Etr. subura, city; Lat. urbs, city. Etr. ims, Gk. hemisu, half; Lat. semi-, half-. Lat. cortina, cauldron; Etr. tark, bull. Greek, is, in-, strength. cf. Tarquin. Greek kerata, horns, Slavonic tur, bull, aurochs. Egyptian - Etruscan Eg. herit, fear; Etr. tru, drouna, fear. Cf. Sert. Semitic -Etruscan Heb. lahat, flame, magic. Etr. thal, sprout, flourish. Cf. dasha, qadhosh, of divine fire on altar or ark. Gk. thallo, flourish, abound. Heb. kashil, axe, hoe; Losk gleam (from Slavonic; cf. Finish loista). Lat. luscus, one-eyed. Greek-Celtic Gk. temenos, enclosure, shrine; Celtic nemeton, Lat. nemus, grove. Slavonic - Greek Slav. gora, mountain; Gk. argos, shining. The link may be Etruscan, as in the case of losk luscus. Three of the above call for comment. Sakin and sikina, knife, read in reverse, give the consonants nks, which could be Heb. nachush, bronze. The difference between the sounds of sin, 's', and shin, 'sh', is not great enough to prevent confusion. Sacer, holy, and raqs, dance, also suggest Lat. rex, regis, king. Kings danced before arks, which in Egypt were associated with Osiris, who, hidden in a chest, had the title Seker, the name of the earth deity. The Greek akra, point, peak, which contains the Egyptian ka and ra, also contains the Etruscan ar, fire, when the whole word is read from right to left, giving the Latin arca, chest. Furthermore, 'car' in Egyptian is the pupil of the eye. In general, Latin and Greek were written left to right, Semitic languages the reverse. It is easy to see that mistakes could have occurred which resulted in the creation of new words such as urbs. Etruscan is the joker in the pack; Etruscan inscriptions were written sometimes from right to left, sometimes from left to right. The resulting confusion arose from an area where the two styles of writing met, with Etruscan in the middle. A typical example would be balta, axe, Lydian labrus (Gk. laburinthos), with dolabra entering Latin via Etruscan. The pattern that emerges is in harmony with the statement of Herodotus that the Etruscans came from Lydia. When asking oneself whether the direction of writing and the connections between different languages are mere coincidence or not, the fact that the words quoted all have a religious significance and, if the texts quoted and the conclusions reached in this book are right, electrical implications, should be taken into account. If the pattern were seen as significant, it would have obvious relevance not only to the study of the Etruscan language, but also to the problems of the political geography, and probably the chronology, of the Mediterranean world at a time of disturbances and migrations. The Greek 'limen' is a harbor. Its consonants, LMN, when read backward, give NML. 'Namal' is Hebrew for a harbor. Al Mina, 'The Harbor, ' was the Arabic name for a city and port on the mouth of the Orontes in NW Syria. After its destruction, conventionally attributed to the 'Peoples of the Sea', the Greeks rebuilt it. The Greek name for Al Mina was Posideion; the earliest level of the rebuilt city, according to Woolley, its excavator, dates to the eighth century B. C., and thus creates a gap of about 400 years between the rebuilding and the earlier destruction of Alalakh, the associated city a little further inland which used the harbour, and Al Mina. There is a full account of Alalakh, Al Mina and Posideion in Sir Leonard Woolley's book, A Forgotten Kingdom (Penguin 1953). In Chapter X, he discusses its importance for trade between Greece and the east. Herodotus states that the builder of Posideion was Amphilochus. Amphilochus was the son of one of the Seven against Thebes, Amphiaraus. He must therefore have been contemporary with the siege of Troy, whose conventional date is, in round figures, 1200 b. c. The chronological difficulty arising from the situation at Posideion is not unique. It is typical of sites throughout the Mediterranean area. Several of the cited works below would dispose of the "Greek Dark Ages," in order to marry far-removed dates and events. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V KA: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T GLOSSARY} {S - } KA by H. Crosthwaite GLOSSARY In transcribing certain Hebrew letters, I have used the following rough equivalents: Beth, bh; gimel, ah; daleth, dh; kaph, kh; pe, ph. The 'h' is dropped if a letter has a daghesh (a dot inside the Hebrew letter to harden the sound). Tau, th; he, h; waw, v; heth, ch as in Scottish 'loch'; qoph, q; tsadhe, ts. In Greek, tradition makes it difficult to be consistent. The Greek vowel 'u' is often rendered as 'y' and 'k' as a hard 'c'. In Russian, the softening of a consonant can be represented by a 'j' (yod), as in 'ogonj', fire. Some sounds in both ancient and modern languages have no equivalent in standard English. No claim is made that in this glossary identities are established, or that coincidence plays no part. It is meant to raise possibilities, which the reader may accept or reject as he or she wishes. Akk. Akkadian Ar. Arabic Eg. Egyptian Etr. Etruscan Gk. Greek Heb. Hebrew Hi. Hittite Lat. Latin Slav. Slavonic Sum. Sumerian above Heb. al. Acheron Ar. Achernar, river's end (star in Eridanus). Adapa Sum., name of the first man. After his creation, the exalted tiara and throne of kingship were lowered from heaven to Eridu aegis Gk., goatskin. Heb. ez, goat; ezer, helper. Agave Name of the mother of Pentheus in The Bacchae. Heb. agabh, to desire, lust after. alphabet Pliny says that it was brought to Latium by the Pelasgi, that Cadmus imported an alphabet of fifteen letters from Phoenicia, and that Palamedes (time of the Trojan war) added zeta, phi, psi and chi (Nat. Hist. VII). Corinth and its colonies retained koppa, origin of the Latin 'Q'. also Heb. gam. Cf. Gk. hama, together with. altar Eg. chaut; Heb. harel (har = mountain); Gk. bomos, thumele, eschara; Lat. ara; Etr. ar, fire; cf. the Syrian city of Arpad; voice of the altar? (Gk. phatis is a divine utterance). Amar Sin Sum., bull-calf of Sin amber Gk. elektron; Heb. chashmal, in Bible = radiant, in modern Heb. = electricity, as a substance = amber. Eg. sakal, Lat. sucinum. An Sum., heaven, sky-god. Cf. Gk. ana, up. Anaqim Heb., descendants of the giant Anaq. Gk. Anakes, the Dioscuri; anax andron, lord of men (of Agamemnon). angry To become angry, Etr. ithe. Cf. Gk. ithuno, straighten, direct; of Zeus, to rule. anoint Etr. luas; Gk. Iouo, wash. Anu Akk.= An; Eg. Nu. animals Etr. bacchetidis; Albanian bageti. apex Eg. ap = top. approach Heb. qarabh. arena Etr. truia; cf. Troy. Gk. agon = arena or struggle. Ariadne Her name may not be Ariadne, very holy, but ar yad na, hand of fire. The ending -na is frequent inEtruscan. Ar, Etr., is electrical fire; yad, Heb., is ahand. She was a goddess as well as a mortal princess, and may be the lady portrayed holding a snake in each hand. She resembles Britomartis, Artemis, and to some extent Athene. There was a Cretan festival, the Hellotia, in honour of Ariadne. Athene Hellotis was worshipped at Corinth. German 'hell' = bright. It is noteworthy that snakes in the hands of statuettes are sometimes suggestive of a bow, and vice versa. ark Heb. aron. Cf. ar, fire, and ka. Lat. arca = chest. art Lat. ars, skill. Cf. Gk. ararisko, join, fit, artuno, prepare, aresko, please. Adjustment of fittings for the best electrical display. Ashur Akk, great fire. Ur, great; ash, esh, fire. atef Eg., headgear of plume, disk and horns. Atrahasis Sum., very wise, a name of Utnapishtim, alias Ziusudra. Cf. Psalm XXIX: 9: 'The Lord sitteth above the water-flood'. Cf. Heb. atarah, crown. axe Lydion labrys; Lat. dolabra; Akk. hazi (Lat. hasta =spear); Gk. pelekus (cf. Peleg, Genesis X: 25); Lat. bipennis, securis; Heb. seghor, axe, spear, refined gold; Heb. kashil, axe or hoe, and maghzerah, axe. Cf. Etr. macstrna, macstrevc; Lat. magister, magistratus. Kybelis is a double axe, according to Hesychius. banquet Etr. vacl, epl; Lat. epulum, Heb. mishte; cf. Gk. mistullo, cut up meat; Slav. myaso, meat. Baradost In Iraq, name of mountain range with caves; cf. Heb. baradh, hail, fall of hot stones. battle Heb. milchamah; Gk. mache; cf. Heb. machah, destroy. beard Gk. pogon; Lat. Barba; Eg. chabes. Eg. bes = flame. bees Gk. melissa; Lat. Apis. There was a cave of bees in Crete, where Rhea gave birth to Zeus. Every year a fiery glow is seen coming from the cave, caused by the blood from the birth of Zeus. Four men put on bronze armour, took some honey, and viewed the swaddling clothes of Zeus. At once their armour cracked and fell off. Zeus aimed his thunderbolt, but was restrained by Fate and Themis. The four men were transformed into birds. Ovid, Fasti III, says that honey was invented by Bacchus. bird Heb. oph. See 'hoopoe'. Gk. omis, oionos; Lat. avis, volucris. blood Heb. dam; Gk. haima; Etr. zac, thac; Lat. sanguis. Cf. Sum. sanga, priest. boat Eg. hennu, a sacred boat. Boreas The North Wind. He is the Kassite god Buriash. Fire of Bor? (esh, ash = fire) Cf. sobor (Slav.), spur (Etr.), subura, and vide Appendix B, urbs. Cf. also spanza, libation, down from the five. breastplate choshen (of the Heb. high priest). breath life Heb. neshamah. Britomartis Wine-wife, wine-maiden. Hungarian ver = blood, bor= wine. Albanian vere = wine; Breseus is a name of Dionysus. Gk. damart-= wife. Cf. Ariadne, who married Dionysus. bronze Gk. chalkos (cf. alke, strength); Heb. nachush. burn Gk. kaio; cf Eg. ka; Lat. incendo, uro, ardeo. bull Eg. ka; Gk. tauros (tarache = confusion), bous; Lat. taurus. carve Etr. cana; Albanian qane; Lat. cena; the old form, caesna, is from caeao, cut. Slav. tsena = price, prize. cauldron Gk. lebes, lebet-, El's dwelling. cave Lydian pel; Etr. spel; Gk. spelaion; Lat. spelaeum, spelunca, caverna. Hesiod uses glaphu. Gr. antron. chariot Eg. urit; Gk. harma, satine; Lat. currus, essedum. cherub Heb. cherebh; cf. Gk. cheir, hand. city Heb. ir; Etr. spur; Sanskrit pur; Lat. subura, urbs; Slav. sobor, assembly; Gk. astu, polis, city; Eg. Waset =Thebes. City boundaries, Etr. tular spural. comet Gk. kometes, hairy; Lat. stella crinita, comata. copper Copper or bronze, Heb. nachush. Nachash = to give oracles. crown Gk. stephanos; Heb. nezer, tsephirah, atarah; cf. Gk. sphaira; Eg. teshe; Lat. sertum is a garland. Eg. mech, tiara; cf. Gk. mechane, device. cursa Name of a star in Eridanus; in Arabic, throne. cut Heb. habhar, to cut, to divide heavens in astrology. Damascus Dim ash ka. Slav. dim, smoke; ash, fire; ka (from Egyptian). dance Heb. chaghagh dance, process, reel. Chaghav = ravine. daughter Eg. sat. dawn Heb. or = light; cf. Lat. aurora. destiny Etr. rad; Lat. ratio. destruction Heb. kalah; cf. Sanskrit Kali. destroy Heb. machah; Gk. mache, battle, machaira, cutlass. dithyramb Heb. shiggayon; Gk. sikinnis (a Cretan dance). discern Heb. kerithuth; Gk. krino. Krites = judge. door Eg. seb, thaireaa; Gk. hepta, seven; thura, door. dome Dome of the Rock Heb. kipat hasela; sela, rock. Gk. selas = light. double Eg. ka; Gk. eidolon, image. dragon Heb. nachash (constellation). nachash with short 'a' = omen. dwelling Heb. gar; cf. Gk. chara, charis, grace, and kara, head. Cf. Heb. shekhinah, divine radiance or presence. dur Dur Sharrukin, Sargon's fortress. Cf. Lat. turris, tower. earth Eg. ta; Gk. da, ga, get Poteidan = Poseidon. east Ar. al shark Lat. cras = tomorrow. A final 's' in Latin was less sharp than an initial 's', more like samekh than tsadhe. For the link between dawn and tomorrow, Gk. aurion, tomorrow, and Aurora, goddess of the dawn. For the reversed direction of the writing of 'shark', cf. raqs (Ar., dance), and sqr (Lat. etc., sacred); balta (Ar.), axe, Lat. dolabra. element Gk. stoicheion, arche. enchant Heb. kashaph. Lat. sapere = to be wise, understand. engrave Heb. chaqaq = engrave, sceptre. Eg. chaker = design. Enki Sum., lord earth; cf. Gk. ge. Entemena Sum., lord of the temple platform. Gk. temenos = area cut off, shrine. epilepsy The hand of Sin; the Heraklean disease, the holy disease. Etemenanki The tower of Babel, temple foundation of heaven and earth. evil Eg. ker; Gk. ker = evil spirit. fable Etr. fabulonia = henbane; Albanian babullij = roar, rave. 'Fabulaeque Manes', Horace, Odes I: 4: 16. Fabula is the plot of a play. face Eg. her, hra, = face; also 'upon'. Cf. Gk. Hera. fate It is fated, Gk. chre, = ka rhei ka speaks. father Etr. at; Hi. atta; Albanian at; Russian otets; Heb. abh: cf. Lat. avus, grandfather, ancestor. fear Eg. herit; cf. Etr. Sert, a fearsome deity; Gk. thronos = throne. Etr. tru, drouna, = fear. Heb. mora = fear, reverence, miracle. Lat. mora = delay. Heb. yirah = fear. Yirah Yahweh, fear of god, religion. Cf. Gk. hiereus, priest, and hieros, holy. feast Etr. and Lat. caerimonia; Albanian kreme. fire Heb. esh (nephesh = soul); Etr. ar; Lat. ara = altar; Eg. chet, fire; cf. Gk. chaite, hair, mane; Etr. zar; Slav. zhar. Etr. sarve, put fire; Albanian zjarrve; Lat. servo, servio. Fire-stick, Eg. tcha. Eg. tehen = pillar; cf. Gk. techne. Gk. pur, Lat. ignis, incendium, = fire. firmament Heb. rakia. Gk. kio = go. Where Ra goes? fish Eg. an; cf. Phoenician Dagon; Heb. dagh. flail Eg. khu; also = spirit-soul, radiance. flame Heb. lahabh, flame, lightning, spear-point. Lahat, flame; with long vowels, = magic. Eg. besu, flame. flint Lat. silex. flourish Etr. thal = go out, be successful. Gk. thallo. fly to Eg. pa; Gk. petesthai footstool Gk. threnus, Akk. galtappu. Gk. threnos = dirge. force Eg. Bi = The Mighty One of Iniquity. Gk. bia, force. form Eg. qaa. foundation Eg. sent; cf. Vergil Aeneid I: 426, sanctus senatus, at Carthage. fringe Eg. secher. frog Eg. Heqt, frog goddess; cf. Gk. Hekate. fruitful, to be Heb. para; cf. Lat. pario, bring forth. funerary Etr. suthina, suthi; cf. suttee. glory Heb. kabhodh; cf. Lat. caput; Eg. khu, radiance, and ka. See 'liver'. glow Heb. chamam. Chaman = sun-pillar, idol of Baal. goat Gk. tragos, aix, aig-; aegis, goat-skin; Heb. ez. Ezer = helper. Lat. caper, goat; cf. Eg. ka, + per, house. goat-stag Gk. tragelaphos, a bearded deer. god Gk. theos, daimon; Etr. iu; Lat. deus. gold Heb. zahabh; Lat. aurum; Gk. chrusos; cf. Heb. or, light. good Heb. tobh; cf. Slav. dobr-, good. goose Eg. khenkhenur, the great cackler, nekekur, smen. Gk. chen; Lat. anser. governor Sum. en, ensi. Lat. ensis = sword. great Heb. gadhol; Eg. ur; Gk. megal-; Lat. magnus, altus (tall); cf. Lat. adolere, to magnify, to worship. hair, mane Gk. chaite; Eg. Chet = hair; Lat. coma, iuba; Lat. iubar = radiance of heavenly body, especially of Phosphorus and Hesperus (Venus). half Etr. ims; Gk. hemisu; Lat. semi. hammurapi 'The god Hammu is a healer', or 'the rod of Hammu'. Gk. rapis = rod hand Gk. cheir; Heb. cherebh = sword. Gk. pux means 'with the fist'. Cf. Iapyx, Iapygia. head Eg. tep; cf. Karatepe; Gk. kara, kare; Etr. katec. Ka + tego, protect? healing Heb. marpe. Marpessus: an oracle of Apollo in Asia Minor. Gk. iatros, doctor; Lat. sanare, to heal. heaven Eg. pet; Gk. iatros Lat. Caelus (father of Saturn), caelum; Heb. shamayim. helmet Eg. khepers; Lat. galea, cassis; Gk. korus. Herakles Called Mars by some', Pliny N. H.: II. high Heb. ram; Gk. hypselos; Lat. altus. holy Heb. qadhosh; qadhach, to burn, glow; qaran, to shine; qayin, spear, point; qardom, axe; qeshet, bow, rainbow, power. hoof Gk. onuch-; cf. Eg. ankh, Coptic onkh. Gk. hople, hoof; hoplon, weapon. hoopoe Heb. dukiphat. Cf. Slav. duch, spirit. Heb. pathar = explain; Sanskrit pathi, path; Lat. pons, bridge, path; pontifex, priest; Gk. phatis, utterance; Lat. fatum, fate. horn Heb. qeren; Gk. keras; Lat. cornu. horse Heb. sus; Akk. sisu. Cf. Celtic horse deity Esus. house Eg. per. Per = go out. Cf. Parnassus. Eg. het, house or temple; neter het, god's house. Cf. Gk. antron, Lat. caverna, Etr. fanu, Lat. fanum, Albanian bane. House of Heaven, the name of the temple of the goddess Inanna, Semitic Ishtar, Sum E-Anna. ibis Eg. tehuti. image Heb. tselem, tsalmaveth, shadow of death. iron Heb. palda; cf. Etr. and Lat. falando, fala, scaffolding (symbolising sky). Isis Eg. Ast, Auset, seat, throne. into Etr. painem; cf. Heb. bein, between. incense Eg. sentra. jackal Eg. sab, also = a wise person; cf. Lat. sapere, to be wise, to understand. Janus Lat. Bifrons; Etr. Culsan. He resembles a Sumerian deity who opens the celestial gates to Shamash the sun. justice Gk. dike; cf. Heb. tsadiq, just. ka Eg., the double; cf. Heb. qadhosh, holy; Lat. cacumen = peak, point; ka + culmen, top. Cf. columen; -cello, strike. ka also = bull. Cf. Lat. caverna, a cave. Ka-dingir-ra Babylon. Karduniash = Babylonia. kerukeion The staff of Hermes; ka + eruko. Lat. caduceus. kill Heb. haragh; cf. Gk. charax, stake; Eg. Harachte. king Eg. hen; Heb. melekh; Sum. lugal; Gk. basileus, turannos, anax, Lat. rex. King of the four regions: Sum. Shar kibrat arbaim. Cf. Roma quadrata, the four quarters of Rome. Heb. arba = four. knife Heb. sakin; cf. Lat. seco, cut. know Heb. yadha; cf. Gk. oida. kudurru Akk. stele; cf. Lat. turris . Ladon Serpent killed by Herakles. E1 Adon? Lady Eg. turan; cf. Gk. turannos, despoina. lamp Heb. ner. Nergal is the planet Mars. Gal = great; cf. Gk. megal-, great. languid Heb. chalah, to be languid; = Gk. chalan. laurel Gk. daphne; Lat. laurus. It makes loud noises when burned, as does holly. lazy Heb. paghar; Lat. piger. libation Etr. lacth; cf. Gk. lekuthos, oil-bottle. Etr. spanza, pour libation; Hi. sipand; Gk. spendo. Cf. Hi. panza = five, Sanskrit pancha. 'S' (Slav.) = with, down from. Etr. huriur, husiur, is a libation; Gk. cheo, I pour. Chusis, a pouring. Eg. ur = great. The great pouring. life Heb. chaim; Etr. knie; cf. Eg. Khnum, the god that creates man; and Lat. genius; Eg. ankh. light Heb. or; Gk. phos = man, phos (neuter) = light; selas, lightning flash; cf. Heb. sela, rock. Etr. kvil light (Tanaquil); Lat. lux, Etr. loschna; cf. Slav. losk gleam; Lat. luscus, one-eyed. light-tower Eg. an. Etr. kvil (aquila, Tanaquil); Hungarian kivilagit is to illuminate. lightning Heb. gachelet, bazaq, baraq (cf. bareqeth, emerald; barqan, threshing-sledge), chaziz, cf. chazir, boar; lapidh; cf. Lat. lapides; stones; Etr; thehen; cf. Gkf. thuo, sacrifice by fire. lightning-conductor Etr. arseverse; cf. Lat. severto, turn aside. lineage Etr. thur; Albanian dore; cf. Gk. thura, door. lion Heb. ari. Ariel, lion of god, hero, Jer-salem, altar, hearth. liver Etr. caveth, Heb. kabhedh; cf. kabhodh, weight, glory, soul, person. Lat. iecur. look, to Heb. nabhat. Nabhi prophet. Cf. Gk. ana, up, and (v) idein, to see. The digamma gives Lat. video, see. lot Voting stone, Heb. goral. linen Linen garments, Eg. menkh. Cf. Gk. meno, stay, resist. lord Gk. despotes. Cf. Teshub, the Hurrian storm god. Gk. kurios. Eg. neb; cf. Lat. Neptunus; Heb. adhon, Baal, sar; Eg. ser, ur; Lat. servus. magic Heb. lat; see 'flame'. To practice magic, kashaph. majestic, to be Heb. ga-a; also = to rise, grow up. Gaon, majesty, swelling. man Gk. phos, anthropos, aner; Etr. aner. mane Gk. chaite; Lat. iuba; cf. iu, god; ba, soul. market Etr. terg; Slav. torgovlia, trade. meal Sacred, of meat, Heb. tebach; Lat. dapes; Etr. vacl. meat Etr. mis; Slav. mjaso. Cf. Gk. mistullo, cut up meat before roasting. messenger Heb., malakh; melekh = king. The king was the interpreter of the will of the god. metal Heb. pach = metal plate; pachim (plural), lightning, heat, glow. milk Heb. chalabh; Gk. gala. mountain Etr. mal Cf. Gk. mallos, Lat. mallus, lock of wool. mummy Eg. sahu. murmur Heb. haghah. Cf. Gk. hagios, and hagnos, holy. Muses Gk. Pierides (from Mt. Pieros in Thessaly). Cf. Heb. pe'er, head-dress, turban, chaplet. nail Gk. helos, nail, in Homer is only for ornament. A sceptre has golden nails, as does a sword. Zelos, envy, may be Set's nail; cf. phthonos, envy, in the Timaeus. Arizelos, conspicuous, of the rays of a star (Iliad, XIII: 244), has the prefn 'ari' which may be 'ar', fire. When Zeus turns a snake into stone, he makes it 'arizelon'. (Illiad II: 318). name Heb. shem. Gk. sema = sign, mark. Nar Marratu Bitter river, Persian Gulf. Lat. amarus = bitter. Neith Eg. Net, the goddess Neith. net Eg. sat is a net-work garment, such as was worn by Greek seers. Net-man Retiarius, armed with net and trident, in Roman amphitheatre. night Heb. lailah. Cf. Gk. lailaps, storm. In the storm that Poseidon sends against Odysseus, 'night rushed down from heaven' Odyssey V: 294. Nile Eg. Hap. Hap-ur, the great Hapi, the Celestial Nile. nod Heb. nudh; Lat. nutare, especially of Jupiter. north Heb. tsaphon = north, northern sky. Tsaphah = to watch; as participle, a watchman, seer, prophet. Ar. al shamal = the north. Cf. Heb. chashmal, amber. Gk. Boreas, the north wind, the north; arktos, the north, the north star, a bear, and a girl at Athens who was a servant of Arternis Brauronia. Oak Heb. tirzah; Gk. drus. Obelisk Cf. Eg. techen, and Gk. techne (skill, cunning device). Gk. obelos = a spit, for roasting. When of stone, it is a pillar, Herodotus II: 111, 170. olive Eg. baaq; cf. Lat. baca, berry. Omen Heb. nachash, oth, othoth; cf. Gk. ototoi Cassandra's cry of woe; Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1072. Onion Lat. caepa; Ar. basal. Cf. garlic, Gk. skorodon, physinx, gelgith-(cf. Heb. gulgoleth, skull); Lat. allium. Open Heb. pathah, to open, be open; pathar, explain; pethach, door; cf. Gk. ptuche, recess (seven recesses?); Sanskrit pathi path; Gk. patos; Lat. patere, to be open; cf. pons, way, bridge; pontifex, priest. Cf. Apollo Svulare, the revealer. oracle Heb. massa = oracle, elevation, song, lifting of voice, desire. Ne'um, oracle; na'am, to murmur. Gk. chresterion, oracle. order Etr. rath; Lat. ratio; cf. Heb. sedera and Lat. sidera, stars. (Sedera = row). ox Heb. par; cf. Slav. par, steam. Pelasgians They were 'dioi'= divine, and were among the inhabitants of Crete mentioned in Odyssey XIX: 177. I suggest that they were pel sagi, people with cave knowledge. Pel (Lydian) = cave; sagus (Lat.) = wise, especially about divine and future matters. The caves in the Northwest slopes of the Athenian Acropolis may have been of special interest to the Pelasgians. pelops Voice from the cave; pel, cave (Lydian), ops, voice (Gk.). phoenix Eg. khu = head of the bennu bird. pillar Heb. shath; Eg. an, ucha; Gk. kion, stulos; Lat. columna; Et. prezu; cf. Gk. prester, thunderbolt. Eg. an, light-tower. pitcher Jug, Heb. kadh; Gk. kados; Etr. kathesa. planets Heb. mazzaloth. Slav. mesto = place. El's place? Cf. Mazzaroth (signs of Zodiac?). prayer Gk. ara. Heb. arar, to curse. Etr. lut, to pray; cf. Gk. lite, a prayer or curse. pride Heb. zadhon. Adhon = lord. priest Sum. sanga; Eg. neter hen, divine servant; Heb. kohen (hen = servant); kamar, priest serving an idol; Gk. hiereus; Lat. sacerdos, flamen (he who blows the flame), pontifex, bridge or path maker. Cf. Heb. kamar and Etr. mer (take?). prince Eg. ur, ser; Lat. servus; Heb. sar, lord. Philistine p., seren; cf. Lat. serenus, clear (of the sky), of Jupiter. prize Lat. cena, banquet; Slav. tsena, price. prophet Heb. nabhi; chazah, prophesy. Gk. mantis. protection amulet, Eg. sa; cf. Gk. saos, safe. prytanis Senior Athenian official who tended fire by waving firebrands. Gk. pyr, fire; tanuo, brandish. Etr. eprithieva, he was a prutanis. pyramid In The Book of the Dead, a pyramid of Pepi is identified with Osiris (Budge p. 646). pylon Eg. sebchet, fire-gate; cf. Gk. chaite, mane. raise Heb. nasa; Gk. anasso = rule; ana = up, aisso, set in motion. red 'I am the lord of redness in the day of transformations'. (The Book of the Dead, p. 609). rock Heb. sela; cf. Gk. selas, light. Gk. petra, rock; petros, stone. Mummies were encased in rock-crystaI, Herodotus III: 24. sceptre Eg. tcham; Gk. kerukeion; Lat. caduceus, baculum; Heb. shebhet, sceptre, threshing- stick rod. seat Eg. ast; cf. Auset, the goddess Isis. see Heb. ra'ah; or = light; cf. Eg. ra, and Gk. horo, see. senate Cf. Eg. sent, outline of foundation of building. See Aeneid I: 426, on the foundation of Carthage. sepulchre Heb. qebher; cf. Lat. caverna. Gk. kamara is anything with a vaulted roof, Lat. camera. The usual derivation is from kampto, bend, but note the Hebrew mearah, cave. Eg. meh is to fill. Full of ar, electrical fire? Abraham buried Sarah in the cave of the field of Machpelah, Genesis XXIII: 19. Pel (Lydian) is a cave. serpent Eg. ara; Eg. serpent-goddess, Mehent. Cf. Gk. mechane, device, and Heb. Nechustan, the brazen serpent, Numbers XXI: 9. Gk. ara, prayer, or curse. seven Eg. seb, gate; cf. Gk. hepta, Lat. septem; seven planets, seven-gated Thebes. shade Etr. hia; Gk. skia; cf. Hi. siu, god. shepherd Gk. poimen; Finnish paimen. sign Heb. oth, pl. othoth; cf. Gk. ototoi Alas! Aesch. Ag. 1072; Gk. sema; Lat. monstrum. Gk. otobos, a startling noise, e. g. din of battle, thunder, rattle of chariots, noise of pipes. sin Heb. chata, to sin; cf. Gk. chaite, hair, mane; hamartano, miss the mark, sin; Lat. erro (wander), pecco. skin Heb. or; also = light. Shining with oil? sky Etr. falando; Lat. caelum. Fala, scaffolding. 'Falacer' is a flamen. slaughter Heb. zabhach; cf. Gk. sphazo. slay Heb. haragh; cf. Eg. harachte. smoke Gk. kapnos, ka, and pnous, breath? song Heb. shir; cf. Gk. Seiren, Siren. soul Ba, khu, ka, nephesh, psyche, anima, animus, genius, daimon, neshamah. speak Hep. dabhar. Cf. Heb. tobh, good; Slav. dobr-; Etr. ar = fire. spear Heb. chanith. Gk. kentron, goad. staff Gk. skeptron; Heb. maqqel; Lat. macellum, shambles. Lat. macto, sacrifice, magnify, worship, slaughter. Lat. baculum, stick. stone Macedonian pela (spel, cave?); Eg. aner; cf. Gk. aner, man. Deucalion and Pyrrha threw stones which became men and women. Heb. goral, voting stone; Etr. kur; Sanskrit garu, heavy; Etr. penthuna, slab of stone; cf. Gk. Pentelikos, where marble was quarried. Gk. petros Cf. Lat. iecur, liver (ie = god). strike Etr. rach; Heb. haragh = slay. summer Heb. kaits. Gk. kaio, burn. sun Etr. erus, usil; Heb. shemesh. sweet Eg. bener; Lat. Venus, Vener-; Etr. aplu; cf. Lat. placet, it pleases. Gk. ampelos, vine; Albanian ambel, sweet. sword Heb. cherebh; Gk. cheir, hand or arm; Heb. mekhera; Gk. machaira, cutlass. Tarquin Cf. the Asian deity Tark or Tarkon. terebinth Heb. elah; Gk. elate, pine. Thebes Eg. Uast (child of Set). Cf. Gk. astu, city. there Heb. sham. Shamayim, the there-waters, the heavens. threshing Etr. lamna. Gk. halos, aloe, dinos. throne Eg. ast, auset; Gk. thronos; cf. Etr. drouna, fear. Heb. kisse, seat; cf. Sum. kish. Gk. kissos, ivy; Lat. hedera; cf. Gk. hedra, seat, especially of the gods. Ivy was wound round the thyrsus. thunder Etr. cemnac, frontac, thunderer. Gk. semnos, holy. (Astrape = lightning). tin Gk. kassiteros; Sanskrit kastira = shine; Ar. kasdir. tool Eg. met, tool or weapon. Gk. mechane? transgression Heb. shal. Lat. salire, leap. tripod Etr. cisum pute; cis = three; Gk. podes, feet. Typhoeus He is 'arduus'. High, or is he blazing? Ar, fire; ara, altar. under-world Eg. neter chert; cf. Etr., Slav., garth, gorod, etc.. Etr. muth, Lat. mundus, German Mund (mouth), opening to the underworld. urim Unm vethummim, (on the high priest's breast-plate. Gk. etumos = true). 'Light and Truth'. Ve in Heb. = and. vain, in Gk. maten; Slav. darom (as a gift = in vain); cf. Heb. mattanah, gift. vine Gk. ampelos; Lat. vitis. Lat. vis = force, vita = life. voice Heb. qol, Slav. golos; cf. Slav. glagol, word, as in Janacek's Glagolitic Mass; Russian glagol = verb. Cf. Gk. logos, word. Gk. ops, voice. Pelops, the voice from the cave. Arpad, voice of the altar. Gk. phatis, utterance, especially divine or oracular utterance. wagons Frequent in Celtic myth. Gods moving in the sky? Thor's cart was drawn by goats. war Battle, war: Heb. milchamah; Gk. polemos; mache, battle. Lat. bellum, war; pugna, proelium, battle. way A going, Heb. derekh; cf. Lat. rego, dirigo, guide, rule. west Heb. marabh; erebh, evening. Gk. Erebos, a place of darkness on the way to Hades, Odyssey X: 528. The link between west and Hades appears in Eg. Amenti, Hades, and Ement, the west. with Etr. me, e. g. menatha, with the night. Gk. meta = with. wizard Heb. yidhoni; cf. Gk. idein, see. wolf Etr. vc; Albanian uc; Gk. lukos. word Heb. milah; Gk. homilia, association. Heb. dabhar. Debhir, the Holy of Holies, qodhesh haqqodhashim, sanctum sanctorum, at the west end of the temple. Debher, destruction. young Etr. re, ri; cf. Lat. rite. Renewal by rite? Cf. akitu, the Babylonian New Year festival, and Lat. ago, actum, do, perform. youth Heb. alumim; cf. Lat. alumnus, pupil. Zeus He is sedens, sitting on his throne. Cf. Ziusudra, and Psalm XXIX: 9, 'The Lord sitteth above the water-flood'. zil Etr. for Lat. sedile, seat, or throne. zilch, zilc An Etruscan magistrate, zilouchos, chair-occupier. Cf. Gk. skeptouchos, holding the sceptre, of Zeus, or of a king (frequent in Homer). Roman magistrates with imperium had each a curule chair, sella curulis. Curulis is derived from currus, chariot, a divine vehicle. Juno is addressed as Juno Curulis in an ancient prayer. ========= End of KA ========= {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN: A FIRE NOT BLOWN.. Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia Published by METRON PUBLICATIONS P.O. - Box 122, Princeton, NJ-08542, USA Copyright 1997 by Metron Publications. All rights reserved. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE-PAGE PREFACE INTRODUCTION 01: THE STORY 02: CRETE 03: KATREUS 04: ZEUS 05: DIONYSUS 06: ARIADNE 07: THE LABYRINTH AND AXE 08: THE BULL 09: NAXOS 10: CHRONOLOGY 11: CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS 12: CATASTROPHE, MYTH AND SKY 13: FIRE 14: THE GODDESS GAIA 15: AWARA AND KNOSOS 16: THE DANCE 17: ROCKS 18: RITUALS 19: LIFE 20: QUAIRO: RAISING THE KA 21: KINGS 22: SACRED BIRDS 23: BOLTS 24: THE NORTH 25: RESURRECTION TECHNIQUES 26: REVERSALS 27: GLOSSARY {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T PREFACE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite PREFACE In this work I have tried to develop some of the ideas that I put forward in my previous book Ka. The chief aim has been to apply my first work's electrical interpretation of ancient myths and cosmology to a particular area of the ancient Mediterranean world, then to quote further examples of religious practice and the relevant vocabulary from a wider area. There has inevitably been repetitions of examples and interpretations from my earlier work. In my first book I gave about twenty cases of reversals of direction of writing, suggesting that something more than coincidence was involved. The present work contains more than eighty examples for consideration, and there are more possibilities which may justify mention at a later stage. I am most grateful to a number of people for their help. I had useful discussions with the late Stephen Yates on Celtic and Gallic vocabulary, and with Amanda Farrar on drama and the dance. My daughter Susan gave me help in computing matters. Professor Alfred de Grazia once more has contributed the necessary Introduction and has continued to give me encouragement and assistance. My thanks go also to the staff of Metron Publications at Princeton. H. Crosthwaite {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite INTRODUCTION Some time ago, at a lecture, I made various remarks connecting catastrophes, electricity, and the sudden hologenesis of speech, which were heard by Hugh Crosthwaite, a Birmingham schoolmaster in classics and a musician. Perhaps I was expressing my opinion that originally an ecumenical language served primeval humans, based entirely at first upon connections perceived to exist in the sky and to transfer therefrom the objects experienced on earth. All language was in origin sacral and then became pragmatic in the sense of coping with the mundane artifacts of existence. A prime cause of humanization itself was catastrophe on a global scale, to be called quantavolution, and electrical forces dominated the quantavolutions as they enveloped and influenced humans. The same electromagnetic forces diminished with the passage of time between quantavolutions. Mr. Crosthwaite proceeded incessantly to collect related words in several languages, and brought the whole into print upon my urging. The name of the book was KA. So large was the body of material that a second volume seemed to be in order --a book that we have here, A Fire Not Blown. From these his latest studies his readers and I will have derived a plethora of new meanings to old words and a way of looking at the origins of words. I cannot repeat here the hundreds of sharp little surprises in the work, but I shall try at the least to nominate in a few paragraphs at least one major point that is established by the Author in each chapter. Practically all myth, and the Old Testament as well, referred continuously to sky events. That the Minotaur's name was Asterios, and that Theseus seized the monster by its hair, comet-like, is an instance, one of scores that are carried in this work skywards. Altogether the presence and activity of electromagnetism and charges in the earth (often represented by the great goddess Gaia), and in the sky and the interactions between the two, with mankind as mediator, victim, would-be controller, educe a lively electrical mythology of the earth, where beings such as snakes find themselves especially entrancing to men, who see them alive in the sky and in the earth and reacting simultaneously in both places on quantavolutionary occasions. The vocabulary invested with the phenomenon of fire is demonstrably capable of distinguishing electrical from other fires, within individual languages and with trans-linguistic similarities. The object of priestly study was theological electricity. Lightning, magnetism and piezoelectric effects were related in the ancient mind as divine fire. Although Crete was a land of many peoples and dialects, it followed a consistent pattern of ritual settings, and these were akin to the Egyptians. Significantly, high places were known to attract electrical discharges, but on lowlands and on hills wells could be dug and filled with stones that may have come from more electrified sacral ground and been expected to enhance local electrical effects. Lanuguage correlations include proper names, and here it is shown, inter alia, that two kings of Crete are named Minos, one of the Old Bronze Age and one of the Iron Age, and likewise there is an ingenious Daedalus in Minoan times and the same much later as pioneer sculptor of realistic marble statues in Greece. Katreus was the important successor to the king-god Minos of Crete, and his name is made up of the two components, the aura of divinity and watching for something, here the essential electromagnetism. Nomen est omen is to be borne in mind at all times in etymology. A linguistic root may never just that, but is always something behavioral, real, connected with the direst and most blessed activities of homo schizo. Once more, astronomy, electricity, gods, and bulls find a score of linguistic links, and several identities and their associated myths become clearer. Linguistic evidence implicates Planet Venus, it would appear, in the bolts of Zeus (we know that Athene was the only God allowed to handle Jovian instruments) and in the highly controversial tablets that registered it as irregular over a period of time when quantavolutionary activity was occurring on Earth. With respect to Ariadne, and to many another character in myth, a multiplicity of possible identities is encountered. And with this comes a plurality of linguistic attachments in and out of the individual culture. Then, notably, the main identity cluster is not the only one with electrical implications; others possess the same. The Island of Naxos in the Cyclades was originally called Dia (possibly a reference to the dioi or divine Pelasgians who preceded the early Karians and Hellenes), then refounded (I might suggest a catastrophe as the occasion) by a King Naxos or as well Nakaso, close to the Greek for a big shot, hero or warrior king, anax, so to the tribe of giants of the Old Testament, Anakim. Rulership --kings and high elite --is loaded with electrical trappings and obsessive practices. The ruler is expected to appease the gods by tending to fire and keep the home and altar fires burning. Labyrinths and all manner of ways, including especially the Column of Fire that connects Earth with the gods and heavens, share word roots, for the humans who want ultimately to reach up and join the gods in the sky. And then to the ax, which has so rich a mythology; in the age of metals, the sparking of the ax reminded humans that copper and iron had fallen (or better descended as a gift) from the skies on occasion, reversing the labyrinthine path that men could hope to follow. In the comparison of Hawara and Knosos is to be found a typical anomaly of dates, the two archaeologies exhibiting similar physical and psychic features. In them, one has occasion to understand the pillar or column as a construction. It is a commemoration of the pillar of electrical fire that connected the two major components of the system of Solaria Binaria and thereby all of the planets and minor bodies and electromagnetic fields with their transported materials. Resurrection was strongly promoted by electrical inducements mediated by sympathetic magic. The human head was recognized as the seat of organic electrical phenomena. The multitude of verbal connections of the direction North with religion, gods, rites, electrical phenomena, and physical history. Futhermore, does salt in various languages, contain the belief that salt came from heaven, from el or al, or in Hebrew, melach, salt, from --m --plus heaven --el). It is to be noted that, by extension, certain universal rites not directly electrical or quantavolutional in origin, were connected with the original sacral sky and electricity, but then dithered into what appeared to be disoriented and haphazard superstitions. The Hebrew word for life is almost identical with the Greek for blood, and so the Egyptian and the Latin. The connections are reasonable. By extension, when it came time to curse the memory of red Typhon, the comet or proto-planet that nearly destroyed the world, the Egyptians persecuted red-haired people as individuals and groups, threw a ruddy ass over a cliff, and sacrificed red bulls. One notes, thus, everywhere, the back-to-back connection of the reasonable and the fantastic. Language plays this game irrationally, pragmatically, intricately, interminably, and everywhere. It may be reasonably put forth that rock platforms, especially white minerals of all kinds, as flooring, and white garments simulate the serene sky, and that the function of the rocks --not all rocks, but especially adapted or amalgamated rocks --was to stimulate electrical discharges between earth and atmosphere. Sites of altars and temples often centered upon nodes of lightning and piezolectricity. Split rocks, crevasses, metallized rock, and brazen thresholds are among the obvious electrified objects encountered or emplaced in the ancient environment. The attention given universally to the behavior of birds may alert us to consider that the environment of ancient times affected birds as well as humans in ways little suspected nowadays. That is, it may be that the ancients were not asking too much of birds; it may be that the birds were in a position to tell them much more than they can tell us today. Scores of words, hundreds, perhaps thousands, can be fitted into the Crosthwaite method of searching for the key concepts in their roots. The number and proportion will be finally known only after considerable research --as with quairo (Latin), later quaero, I search, springing from more than one source, perhaps, but certainly reminding one of the endemic ka, and the Greek ku (ka) and airo, to raise), hence Araising the ka. When I published my study hypothesizing absolute correlation between myth and reality in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, I understood it as a case to be made against the traditional theories advanced by the founders of the science of mythology (Fraser et al.) and the second generation (Freud, Jung et al.) which I would show to be critically vulnerable --vastly useful, of course --for having denigrated the main issue, myth as reality-referential, capable of scaling from low to high historicity. Velikovsky, as an example of a Freudian theorist, turned from his master in part and became in a sense a Biblical literalist, because he failed to offer a theory. (Verily he had none, which serves to explain his strong appeal to Judeo-Christian and Muslim religious fundamentalists.) Other mythological literalists, too, have scored against conventional scientists, but quantavolution has had to distinguish itself from them basically by pursuing nominalist, empirical, scientific method. Nonetheless, Velikovsky, a proud and stubborn character, opened and charted new pathways, some broad, many small, and, beyond this, he had the charisma and came at the proper moment, to excite a serious crowd following that kept his work and its critique on a high enough level of public discussion to revive, sometimes against his will, his many important and sometimes great predecessors. Crosthwaite's work has come many years after Velikovsky's work, and is much advanced over it and more specialized, reflecting the original electrical theory of Ralph Juergens and Earl Milton, among others, and extending the studies over many years performed by David Talbott, Ev Cochrane, and Dwardu Cardona, especially having to do with Saturnian mythology. Viewing what Crosthwaite has accomplished, one may hope for a continual increase in systematic empirical work in linguistic mythology. There are critical and highly special issues that can be addressed. As an example, take the story of Kronos swallowing one by one the infants born to his wife, until she succeeded with a ruse in hiding baby Zeus, destined to be his successor, from him. Did the story arise by itself in the normal gradual evolution from a myriad of fireside chats? If so, how were the pieces originated and interwoven? Or did the tale require an original set of spectacles, real or apparent, and had the events attending the spectacles to be catastrophic, or might they have been impressively amusing? In the end, I think, we shall discover electrical phenomena to be the sealing wax of the universe of theology, the means of consolidating the sacred and mundane spheres of life. They were the means of finding the gods. Consciously and unconsciously, priest-rulers and their groups embedded the divine in language, so that language flowered inexorably with its seed of reference coated by electrified sacrality, ramifying root and branch. Via language, the a fire not blown came to be in charge of important and ordinary human affairs. Alfred de Grazia Island of Naxos, Greece, 27 July, 1997 {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 01: } {T THE STORY} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 1 THE STORY This study is an attempt to investigate a small area of early Greek history with special attention to the influence of electrical phenomena, which appear to have been of a magnitude greater than we are familiar with today, and which can be traced ultimately to extra-terrestrial activity, not by a god or monster in the superficial sense of the words, but by an intrusive body, or bodies, such as a comet, causing disturbances in the solar system. A full study of this would range over many early civilisations; the present short study has Minoan Crete as its starting point. The story of Theseus, Ariadne, the Minotaur and Dionysus is well known, but a brief summary may be useful. The accounts vary in details. Theseus was born in Troezen, the son of Aethra and of Aegeus, king of Athens. Aegeus left his sword and sandals under a large rock. Theseus, at the age of sixteen, lifted the rock and set out on a career of eliminating troublemakers and criminals, e. g. Skiron and Procrustes who robbed and killed travellers. Aegeus and Medea ordered him to catch the Marathonian bull. This fierce animal had been brought to Greece from Crete by Herakles. King Minos of Crete had a son, Androgeos. Androgeos was killed on Attic territory, so Minos exacted a three yearly tribute of seven Athenian youths and as many girls. The Athenian youths and girls were sacrificed to a monster, the Minotaur, the offspring of Pasiphae, wife of Minos, and a bull, in the labyrinth at Knosos. Theseus determined to kill the monster and end the payment of tribute. He set sail in a ship with a black sail. It was arranged that if he returned successful, the ship would have a white sail set instead of the black one, to give watchers early news of the result. On his way to Crete Theseus dived down into the sea to visit Amphitrite. This was supposed to prove that he was descended from Poseidon. He was presented with a crown. Minos had a daughter, Ariadne, who helped Theseus to find his way in the labyrinth where he was to kill the Minotaur. The usual version of the story is that Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to help him to find the way out. Another version is that he had a magic crown of light. After killing the Minotaur, Theseus sailed to Naxos with Ariadne. Here, he either abandoned her, or lost her to a rival, the god Dionysus. There was also a story that she was killed by Artemis. Theseus then went to Delos, where he taught the Delian girls the crane dance. He sailed homewards to Athens, but forgot to change the black sail for a white one. Aegeus, watching from the Acropolis at Athens, assumed that the mission had ended in failure, and threw himself over the Acropolis cliff to his death. While some parts of the story are like simple adventure stories such as are found in most literatures, there are things that cannot be taken at their face value, and it is these which are especially significant and they will be discussed later. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 02: } {T CRETE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 2 CRETE Crete was a melting pot in more than one sense. Ores were smelted, alloys such as bronze were produced, metal and stone were turned into beautiful objects and jewellery. Crete was a mixture, a melting pot, of peoples and of cultures. Its geographical position helped it to be a link between Africa, Asia and Europe. We will glance briefly at the evidence of a variety of physical types. At the start of the Early Bronze Age, most Cretans were of Mediterranean race, dolichocephalic, or long-headed. There was an Anatoliian element from Neolithic times, and early in the Bronze Age Armenoids, tall and brachycephalic, entered Crete. The skulls from the Cyclades are of varying types. In the Neolithic period and, in the Cyclades, in early Bronze age tombs, steatopygous statuettes are found. This may be due to influence from Asia Minor, where the Great Mother goddess was worshipped, but it may also indicate the influence of Africa. Hutchinson, in Prehistoric Crete, Penguin, 1963, gives fuller information on racial types. Evidence of attitudes, rituals and religious beliefs from other parts of the Mediterranean world suggests that it was not only in matters of race and physical type that Crete was a mixture. For example, Crete had many mountain top shrines, such as are found elsewhere. At Chamaizi, in a hill-top shrine, there is a well, or bothros, rubbish pit, such as was found by Woolley at Alalakh on the Syrian coast. Lightning, with its important place in religious ritual, explains the presence of such mountain-top shrines. The study of lightning led to further studies of electricity such as were conducted not only on "high places" in Asia Minor but also in Egypt and elsewhere. In Egypt, Anatolia, Palestine and farther east, electrical experiments were conducted by priests in the hope of capturing an electrical deity from the sky, or from the earth, and of achieving a degree of control of him or her. For example, what appear to be electrical storage cells have been found, the "Baghdad batteries". Kings, who had always performed some priestly duties, and who were expected to know the will of the gods and ensure divine protection for their tribe or country, hoped to acquire divine power and strength from contact with a divine force in shrines, caves, temples, and on mountain tops. Such, I suggest, was the case with Minos in Crete, whether Minos was the name of one king or that of a dynasty. The name Chamaizi suggests the Greek word chamai, on the ground. If the letters de are added to a Greek place name, as with Athens, giving Athenaze (Athenas-de), the idea of movement towards the place is added. The Greek chamaze means "to the ground", earthwards. This suggests that the place was a shrine attracting the electrical god in the form of lightning. Woolley, in his book A Forgotten Kingdom, Penguin 1953, writes that he found in a temple ".... something yet more mysterious....", a shaft filled with boulders brought from hills some miles away, with a packing of smaller stones. An 8ft. high mass of brickwork surmounted the filled shaft. At Chamaizi, the "well" filled with stones, as at Alalakh, would be intended to invite and help the deity to appear. Vide Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete, p. 134 and 169. Homer, in Odyssey XIX: 175ff., has Odysseus describing Crete. There are many languages spoken; there are many peoples, e. g. Achaeans, great-hearted Eteocretans (genuine Cretans), Cydonians, divine (dioi) Pelasgians. Minos was enneoros, and oaristes, an associate of Zeus. Enneoros may mean 'at the age of nine', 'associate of Zeus for nine years', or that he associated with Zeus every nine years. There may be a parallel with the Egyptian heb-sed ceremony, in the course of which the king underwent a second coronation. The purpose of this ceremony may have been to rejuvenate the king. As part of the ceremony the king had to run, probably through a field, carrying a flail. The flail may represent forked lightning. He was accompanied by the souls of Nekhem. Edwards, in The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin 1947, observes that the souls of Nekhem were the prehistoric kings of Upper Egypt whose capital was at Nekhem (Hierakonpolis}. The Greek hierax is a hawk or falcon which, like most birds of prey in the ancient world, was seen as a lightning symbol. Probably the intention was that the lightning, heavenly fire, would give life to the crops. The Latin for to plough, aro, recalls the Latin ara, Etruscan ar, divine fire, which was attracted to the altar. Minos himself was the son of Zeus and Europa. He married Pasiphae. The Roman poet Horace describes him as: "Jovis arcanis Minos admissus", Minos, privy to the secrets of Jupiter. Minos and the nymph Paria had sons, who colonised the island of Paros. According to Herodotus, Minos lived three generations before the Trojan war, and Thucydides refers to his suppression of piracy and expulsion of the Karians. There is, however, a chronological doubling of Minos, as there is of Daedalus, and this will be discussed later in the context of the Greek "dark ages", which were extended, one might almost say invented, at the end of the nineteenth century in an attempt to fit the history of the Mediterranean area into what was thought at the time to be a secure chronology of Egypt. Minos was succeeded by Katreus, a monarch whose name means "ka watcher", and this brings us to the subject of Egyptian electrical theology, or science. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 03: } {T KATREUS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 3 KATREUS Egyptian priest-electricians used the term 'ka' for the aura round a person. It is translated as 'the double', and can also mean 'bull'. The word is comparable with the Hebrew qa of, for example, qadhosh, holy, and with the Greek kaio, burn, kara, head, and Latin caput, head [source of ka]. The electrical god could be captured in a box, chest, or ark, and the Greek word elektron, amber, can be explained as El [the god above], out of the thronos [seat]. We have suggested above that the Etruscan ar, fire, and the Latin ara, altar, are the fire from the sky and the place to which it is attracted and strikes in the form of lightning. Descriptions from all over the world of a snake-like object in the sky were probably inspired by the sight of the tail of a comet. The head of a comet with protuberances would be seen as the head of a bull, goat, stag or other horned creature. Piezoelectric effects in rocks as a result of earthquakes led to the study of the earth goddess Ga, Da, or Ge. The Egyptian neter, divine, represented by what may be an axe, has the same consonants as the Greek antron, cave. Antron probably means a cave formed by a split in the rock. The Lydian word pel, cave, is related to the Greek spelaion. Pelekus is the Greek for a sacrificial axe, and it was in the days of Peleg that the earth was divided [Genesis X: 25]. Furthermore, the German spellen means to split. The name of Katreus, the successor of Minos, may have ka as a significant component. The 'treus' is probably 'tereus', which happens to be the name of a Greek king who was turned into a hoopoe. The hoopoe is a bird with a prominent erectile crest on its head. Augurs watched mice, snakes, and other creatures, but especially birds, in order to detect behaviour that gave warning of an electrical storm, or of earthquakes, which were numerous and violent in certain periods of ancient history. The Latin name for a hoopoe is upupa. In Greek it is epops. The Greek epoptes is the term for somebody who beholds the mysteries at a Greek religious centre such as Eleusis. One of the forms used as a perfect tense of the Greek verb horan, to see, is opopa, meaning 'I have seen'. Tereo is a Greek verb meaning 'I observe, I watch for something'. Tereus may be a form like the Latin present participle ending in -ens. Regens, regent-, means 'ruling'. I suggest that Tereus is Terens, observing, and that King Katreus was the ka-watcher. The same phenomenon may be present in the Greek word basileus, king. The Etruscan vacl, or vacil, is a banquet, and kings were the banqueting ones, feasting on the torn remnants of the intruder in the sky, the goat, stag or bull. The Etruscan ber is probably the Latin veru, a spit, dart or javelin. Veru in the plural means a railing round an altar or tomb. Spits, made of iron, suggest the vacl, the sacred feasting on the slain monster. The uprights round an altar or tomb would be an encouragement to the electrical deity to descend and kill, or bring to life. The mouse may appear in the Greek word musterion, which is apparently composed of mus, mouse, and tereo, observe. It seems that a mystery was originally mouse-watching as a means of detecting the presence and imminent activity of the divine power acting on the earth. In Greek rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries, the ceremonies took place underground. The prophet Isaiah, LXVI: 17, warns of the Lord's anger against those who eat the mouse. It may have been thought that by eating mice one would ingest the ability of the mouse to detect the divine presence. The interpretation of the name Katreus as ka-watcher accords with the visits of monarchs to mountain shrines, with Egyptian theory about the ka [a word which can also mean 'bull', and is therefore linked with the electrical god in the sky looking like a bull with its horns], and with Greek, Roman and Hebrew procedure at a shrine, where the priest went in fear of the deity, risked electrocution, and wore special clothing. The Hebrew yirah Yahweh means fear of Yahweh. The Greek hiereus has a similar sound, and means 'priest'. I suggest that the original meaning of hiereus was 'the fearing one'. There was a frieze of hoopoes at Knosos. Homer refers to the 'divine Pelasgians'. 'Divine' frequently has electrical significance. The Pelasgians should probably be traced back to an area, or areas, outside mainland Greece. Pel is Lydian for 'cave', Greek spelaion. In Greek, initial 'S' sometimes disappears, as does initial 'T'. 'Cave' in Hebrew is me'ara. We may here have the word ar, Etruscan for the electrical divine fire. 'Me' suggests an Egyptian word meaning 'fill'. The Latin sagus means wise, with knowledge of the future or of divine matters. The Pelasgians were probably the people who were wise about caves and rocks, where a difference of electrical potential could be detected by sensitive creatures such as goats, and by Sibyls [unveilers], as at Delphi. Sibyl is the title Svulare, Unveiler, given to Apollo, the god of prophecy. A goat, Latin caper, is a ka- container; per is Egyptian for 'house'. Homer writes that in Crete there were Achaeans. It is worthy of note that in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Ahaiu are fighter gods [Budge's translation p. 689, Arkana 1985]. In Vergil, Aeneid III: 105, Anchises, father of Aeneas, refers to Crete as gentis cunabula nostrae, the cradle of our race, where Teucer had lived, before Ilium or Pergama existed. This passage may of significance if one tries to solve the problem of the origin and movements of the Etruscans. The name Teucer may mean 'he who makes fire'. The Greek verb teucho is to create, especially in wood or metal; to create an eidolon, image. Zeus creates rain and hail, ombros and chalaza. Teucho is related to tunchano, find, hit, light upon. When Aeneas and the Trojans reached Italy, there was war between the newcomers and Turnus, prince of the Rutuli. King Latinus, who had promised his daughter to Turnus, changed his mind, and favoured Aeneas. Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, became the first king of Alba Longa, the chief city of the Latin League. The name of the wife of Aeneas, Lavinia, if reversed, becomes Inibal, presence of Baal. Was she from the eastern Mediterranean area? In the context of the arrival of the Trojans in Hesperia, the 'land in the west', it is worth noting the name of the city of Alba Longa. In Latin, longus does not only mean long; it can mean distant. Was the city of Alba Longa named after a city far away, perhaps to the east? Alba could be a reversal of Ebla, but this is even more speculative than conventional attempts to unravel the history of the period. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 04: } {T ZEUS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 4 ZEUS No less a person than the infant Zeus was sheltered in Crete. His father Kronos, hearing that his son would displace him, ate all his offspring as soon as they were born. His wife Rhea deceived him by giving him a stone, wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Kronos swallowed. Rhea had the real infant taken to Crete and hidden in a cave. The electrical significance of Zeus, the lord of the thunderbolt, is well known; that of caves is almost equally important, if less appreciated and less dramatic. We have in the cave stories an attempt to explain the fact that electrical phenomena appear to arise not only from the sky but also from the earth, or from under the earth. Lightning at night was believed by the Romans to be caused by Summanus, a god who may be Pluto, god of the underworld. The name Summanus suggests the Manes or Di Manes, the Good Ones, spirits of the departed. The name would be suitable not only for a form of Zeus, but also for Poseidon, Velchanos, or Dionysus, all of whom were associated with lightning, and with subterranean thunder. There will be more later about Dionysus and his close relationship with Zeus. There are various accounts of the birth and upbringing of Zeus. According to one version he was brought up on the island of Naxos, where he had the name of Zeus Melosios. Another is that he was actually born in Crete. According to Antoninus Liberalis, Rhea gave birth to Zeus in a Cretan cave, and every year the blood from his birth was seen as a fiery glow coming from the cave. Bees were present, and four men in bronze armour took some of the honey. When they saw Zeus's swaddling clothes, their armour cracked, and Zeus aimed a thunderbolt at them. Fate and Themis intervened and restrained Zeus. The four men became birds. The presence of the bees calls to mind the Egyptian habit of associating phenomena with those living creatures that seem to possess the relevant characteristics, in this case the hissing and buzzing caused by electricity, such as the sounds heard by mountaineers before an electrical storm high up on a peak, especially on a rock ridge. There may also be a connection between honey and the stories from the north and from Palestine and Persia of the descent of a sweet substance from the sky, manna or honey rain. The Cretans worshipped Zeus under the name of Velchanos. This name resembles the name of the Roman god of fire, Vulcan. But when one thinks of the importance of the cave in the stories of the infant Zeus, there is a temptation to see in the name Velchanos the root pel, rock or cave. Grimm's law helps one to see here the German Felsen, crag. It is probable also that the name Velchanos has the Egyptian ka as a component. The name Velchanos would be most appropriate for the electrical deity of caves in rock peaks. The Cretans were unusual in worshipping a Zeus who not only was born in Crete, as opposed to being reared in Crete, but who also died there, at Iuktas. That the chief of the gods, who, according to Homer, live for ever, should have died, calls for comment. The association with rocks and caves indicates that the Cretans were aware of the piezoelectric effects in split rocks and caves, and lightning strikes on rocky peaks, at times of violent storms and earthquakes, together with earthquake light. The latter, which is the subject of recent research by Japanese and American scientists, would be detected by a hoopoe, or by a quail, whose Greek name, ortux, means 'the one who finds the light'. Ortygia was a name of the island of Delos, the birthplace of a god closely associated with light, Apollo. Its name implies 'where the light happens' or 'quail land'. Piezoelectric effects would gradually fade away through electrical leakage as things settled down after periods of major disturbance such as affected the ancient world generally. The Zeus who lived in the sky continued to brandish the lightning bolt, either in the forked form that we see close to earth, or in the almond shape of the plasmoid for long range interplanetary exchanges [Greek amygdale, almond, is the 'sceptre of the god above']. The Zeus Velchanos, the Zeus of the caves and split rocks, gradually faded away. Perhaps the ritual uprooting of the sacred tree in a dance symbolises the failure of the poros, the column of holy fire from sky to earth. Several places in Crete claimed to be the home of the infant Zeus Velchanos. Hesiod suggests Goat's Mountain. This is probably Dikte, where there is a cave, Psychro. The Idaean cave on Psiloriti, the Kamares cave near Phaestos, and Arkalochori, near Lyktos, are among the candidates. The name Psychro suggests a flow of electrical life. The name Kamares may have ka and ar as components. Arkalochori has several possibilities. The Greek lochos is a hiding place; or is a Semitic word meaning light, or skin, and resembles ar, the electrical fire god. The cave at Arkalochori contained miniature double axes in gold and silver, and other weapons. In the Psychro cave a fragment of a jar was found, decorated with a leaping goat. Goats were thought to be more than usually sensitive to electrical fields, or rather to the presence of a deity. They were responsible, through their strange movements and sounds, for the discovery by the goatherd Koretas of the conditions at Delphi [Pytho] that were favourable for the 'inspiration' of a Sibyl or 'unveiler'. The Latin caper, goat, may be 'ka container'; compare the German Kaefer, beetle, and the Egyptian scarab. Ornamental shields have been found in the Idaean cave, with decoration pointing to Oriental influence. They reflect the presence of Curetes, youths who clashed their spears on their shields to drown the cries of the infant Zeus. Consideration of the cult of the Zeus worshipped in hill-top shrines, and of the Zeus Velchanos of the rocks and caves, leads one to the god Dionysus. He closely resembles Zeus, being associated with subterranean thunder, fire on peaks, earthquakes, caves and lightning, as readers of the Bacchae of Euripides will remember. This will also bring us back to Ariadne, who was, amongst other things, a Cretan goddess closely associated with the earth, the vine and animals. She will be considered in greater detail later. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 05: } {T DIONYSUS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 5 DIONYSUS Dionysus was a god of the life in ivy, trees and the vine, rather than the god of corn and crops from the earth. Ivy, trees and the vine all had electrical significance, ivy because it suggested an aura or glow round an object, especially round a throne. The near identity of the Latin hedera, ivy, and Greek hedra, throne, suggests that ivy symbolised the glow, Greek charis, beauty, that flowed over a person, or over such an object as a king's throne, or an ark when the electrical god had been caught by the priest. Trees were important, especially the pine or fir, partly because of the fiery qualities of resin, partly because of the world tree. The vine could be made into a drink which would produce sensations which Greeks associated with electricity. The Greek poet Archilochus tells us that he could write a dithyramb when lightning-struck with wine. He was a god of noisy revelry, of earthquake and of lightning. It is possible that the musical accompaniment at his rites, dominated by low-pitched [barubromon] drums, was meant to suggest earthquake, thunder and electrical stimulation. For a modern equivalent one might turn to the Royal Hunt and Storm, from Berlioz's opera The Trojans, where divine activity drives Dido and Aeneas to take refuge from the storm in a cave. Dionysus is said to have been born and raised in the island of Naxos. According to a mosaic from Delos, his nurse was Ambrosia. At the Lenaea, a festival held in Athens, ecstatic women worshipped a draped pillar with a mask on top representing Dionysus. The fact that he was a son of Zeus may account for the letters dio- in his name. Dio-frequently implies heaven or sky. The name of his mother Semele is the Slavonic zemlya, earth. The other letters forming his name may perhaps be explained by the Syracusan word nusos or nussos, lame. This is not very helpful, though Hephaestus, god of divine fire, was lame. On the other hand, the Greek nussein is to prick, to touch with a sharp point. This raises the possibility of an electrical explanation. It was believed that he was born in the city of Nysa, in marshy land such as encouraged lightning. Followers of Dionysus carried a thyrsus. This was the stalk of a plant, the narthex. It was the stalk in which Prometheus brought fire down to earth from Olympus. The Greek thu-is fire or sacrifice, air- is to raise. The thyrsus could be furnished with a sharp point, which could be used to give what would be thought to be an electric, i. e. divine, shock. Nussa was the word for the turning post in a circus. All these facts, together with the account given of him and his actions in the Bacchae of Euripides, show that Dionysus was a god of electricity. The name Bacchus suggests fa, light, or ba, Egyptian for soul, and cha. The Greek letter chi may be onomatopoeia for sparks and lightning, and may be related to the Egyptian ka. Dionysus exemplifies the effect of electrical stimuli and disturbances on the brain and nervous system. Dionysus is the divine bull. A typical rhyton, or drinking horn, would be carved to represent the head of an animal, often that of a bull. In the Bacchae, there is a confrontation between the stranger [Dionysus in disguise] with his revellers, and the young Pentheus of the Theban royal family. When arrested for causing disturbances and promoting immoral behaviour, Dionysus frees himself from prison by creating an earthquake and electrical fire [" against which every effort is in vain", l. 625]. Pentheus has an urge to spy on the women and watch their revels. Dionysus causes him to have hallucinations and, with the help of a pine tree and lightning, causes him to be torn to pieces [sparagmos] by frenzied bacchants led by Agave, the mother of Pentheus. The chorus declare that a bull leads to disaster. Pentheus, being descended from Kadmos of Thebes, has snake ancestry [Kadmos and Harmonia were turned into snakes]. At one level, the contest is between snake and bull. Such a contest may be seen as both electrical and astronomical. The bull with its horns symbolises the head of a comet, the snake represents the tail. The stories of a monster in the sky, such as Zeus defeated, and of lightning exchanges on a huge scale, probably with almond-shaped plasmoids, as shown in the hand of Zeus, were accounts of what looked like a battle between the head of a comet and its tail. Vide the Bacchae l. 1153ff. According to Plutarch, the Greek seer Melampus learnt the name of Dionysus from the Egyptians. Plutarch equates Dionysus with the Egyptian god Osiris. In each case there was a sparagmos, a tearing to pieces, and a resurrection. The link with Egypt is strengthened by the worship of the Apis bull. Egyptian monarchs imitated bulls by wearing tails, worshipped them and cherished them, feasted on bulls, preserved them, and drowned them to release the divine element. The ambivalence is explained by the ambivalent nature of the divine force in the sky, symbolised by the bull's horns, a power that could cause life or death. Diodorus refers to the civilising mission of Osiris, a mission like that of Dionysus, who brought wine, music and dancing on his travels through Asia to Greece. In the period after Alexander the Great, the Egyptian deities Isis and Anubis were worshipped on the island of Delos, a great centre of worship of Dionysus. Ivy, vines, and trees were in the custody of Dionysus, and a survey of the language imparted to these in Greece and elsewhere would indicate their common electrical associations, quite aside from their other connections. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 06: } {T ARIADNE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 6 ARIADNE Ariadne appears in the story in two different guises. In so far as we can talk about historical characters, she is an historical character in the Athenian story of Theseus, whom the Athenians set up as a hero like Herakles, but she seems also to have the superhuman qualities of a goddess. It may be that such confusion, which occurs regularly with heroes, is caused by the desire of monarchs and ambitious people to establish close relationships, or to persuade people that they have them, with divinities of sky or earth, in their search for sources of authority and the ability to impress ordinary people and subjects. The technical methods for obtaining divine ancestry will be discussed later. Ariadne was a sister of Deucalion. She is also thought to have been a fertility goddess. Her names included Ariagne [very holy], Aridela [the very manifest one], and possibly Erigone. It seems possible, if one looks at a statuette showing a girl with flounced dress, décolletée, holding in either hand a snake, which also looks like a bow or even a horn, that she, like Dionysus, was connected with electricity and the electrical aspects of fertility. Her name, Ariadne, could be 'hand of fire', since ar is Etruscan for divine fire, yad is Semitic for a hand, and -na occurs frequently as a suffix in Etruscan. The Greek word bios means either a bow [as in bow and arrows], or life, depending on the intonation or accentuation of the word. In Sumerian, ti and til can mean either bow or life. Horn was used in the manufacture of the composite type of bow. A link with the bull appears. Life, psyche, is associated with the power of self-initiated movement. Thales is reported to have said that the magnet contained psyche. The bow imparts movement, i. e. life, to the arrow, which, like the spear, is a symbol of the electrical fire. In Hebrew, the spear is qayin, the ka eye. Zayin, the letter Z, the eye of Set, is a weapon, like the Egyptian sceptre, the tcham. The snake symbolises electricity, in the form of both a sky and an earth deity. One form of the Cretan goddess is shown on hill tops. Hill tops were revered as places where the electrical god or goddess descended to earth. One of the names of the goddess is Piptuna. The Greek pipto means fall. The association of Dionysus with crags and mountain tops is a link between him and Ariadne, and the same may be true of Artemis. The Cretan nature goddess has doves and double axe. In this she resembles Kybele, the eastern goddess whose name means axe. The doves remind one of Aphrodite. The electrical deity is associated with reproductive urges and with life, as well as with unpleasant shocks and death by electrocution. The Mistress of the Animals is associated with snakes and lions. The Lion Gate at Mycenae has a pillar with a lion [or lioness] at each side. That a lion's mane had electrical or divine significance is made more likely by the net pattern shown on some eastern representations of lions, a pattern which appears also in Crete. Babylon was a centre of the worship of the goddess Ishtar [Astarte]. She had a fierce and dangerous side to her nature, as had Aphrodite and Artemis. An avenue of lions led to the Ishtar Gate. The lion was symbolic of Ishtar. An avenue of lions can be seen today on the island of Delos. The prophet Isaiah refers to Jerusalem as Ariel. Ari is Hebrew for a lion; El, god, means the one above. In XXIX: 1 he foretells the siege of Jerusalem. The snake can represent an electrical force in the sky -the tail of a comet, for example - and is also a symbol of the electrical deity, Gaia, in the earth. As in the case of Nechushtan, the brazen serpent set up by the Hebrews in the wilderness to cure those affected by snake bite, the snake is a symbol of both life and death. The bow or snake held by the goddess illustrates this point: the bow gives movement, therefore life, to the arrow, which, as a symbol of radiation, may bring either life or death. Homer has the word kelethmos, magic, in Odyssey XI: 334. Plato has the verb keleo, to charm snakes, Republic 358 B. It is probable that ka is present in the Greek keleo. The Cretan goddess also resembles Dictynna, a hunting goddess. This name suggests the Greek for a net, which had electrical significance. She is probably the same as the goddess Britomartis, who is associated with hunting. They and Artemis seem to be variations on an electrical theme. Solinos sad that the name Britomartis meant Sweet Maiden. It is worth asking why she should be called sweet. The Hungarian bor is wine. Albanian vere is wine. Hungarian ver is blood. Finnish veri is blood. Egyptian irp is wine. Lydian 'Breseus' is a name of Dionysus. In the above examples the reversal of rp to vr or to br is noteworthy. The Greek damart- is a wife or maiden. It is likely that Britomartis is Veredamartis, wine-wife or wine-maiden, and that she is a female version of Dionysus. Ancient deities were often grouped in pairs, male and female, and brother-sister incest occurred, as with Zeus and Hera. Dionysus and Ariadne are represented together under a vine. A statuette of the Cretan goddess holding snakes or bows has her wearing a flounced dress. She looks almost like a telescopic column or caryatid. The effect is like that of the djed column or tree in Egyptian art, as seen at Dendera and elsewhere. The significance of the column is electrical. Temple columns led up to the sky, where deities were shown high up on the temple. The Parthenon frieze may be an example, especially if it is the scene of the arrival in Olympus of the soldiers who fell at Marathon. The column of light mentioned by Plato towards the end of the Republic is a road from earth to the stars, along which souls travel after death before reincarnation. In Norse myth the world tree has a snake at the bottom and an eagle at the top, each an electrical symbol. This is the most likely explanation of the poros, passage, mentioned by the Greek poet Alkman in a cosmological context. It could well be the "marvellous road to the Hyperboreans" mentioned by the poet Pindar, and photographs, take from space, of light phenomena over the earth's north pole, show what may be what is left of the poros or column. Such a theory is supported by links between the far north and Crete, or at any rate Greece. We have already seen evidence of shared vocabulary. Priestesses of the winds are mentioned in Cretan Linear B texts, and Oreithuia was carried off by Boreas, who is the Kassite god Buriash. Ash, or esh, is fire. Buriash, or Boreas, is likely to be 'fire of Bor', the fire being the electrical glow. The first fruits of the Hyperboreans, wrapped in straw, were taken by relay to Prasiae, then on to Delos, the birthplace of Apollo. Reversal of the consonants of Prasiae gives srp, which could be the Hebrew saraph, burn. There was a Cretan festival, the Hellotia, celebrated in Ariadne's honour. This festival constitutes a link between Ariadne and Athene. There was a tradition that Athene was born in Crete. Athene Hellotis was worshipped in Corinth, a city which had strong oriental links, and the -ot of Hellotis recalls the Semitic oth, sign, which appears in the Greek ototoi, signs. This word is uttered by Cassandra just before she prophesies at the gate of Mycenae, in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, line 1072. Two daughters of the Athenian king Kekrops were given by Athene a chest, with orders to guard it but not to open it. They disobeyed and opened the chest. The stories, which vary slightly, agree on one thing: a snake was in the chest. When the girls saw it they went mad, jumped over the Acropolis wall and were killed. There is evidence from elsewhere, e. g. from Egypt, that arks or chests contained snakes. Such a statement probably means that there was a dangerous electrical god who was caught and stored in a container based on the principle of the Leyden jar. Chests were frequently decorated with a picture of a snake, probably to have an apotropaic effect. Snakes, as well as being shown in the hands of the Cretan goddess, were encouraged in Crete as guardians of the house. Snake tubes are found which encouraged snakes to emerge from the earth. Putting out food for a snake would win the favour of a creature representing a powerful and dangerous force. Not only could they catch mice; the procedure might also be thought to encourage an epiphany of the earth goddess. The words Hellas and Hellene call for comment. Different groups of inhabitants of Greece and associated areas in Asia Minor went under various names at different times, such as Achaeans, Ionians, Pelasgians, Hellenes, Dorians. The general picture is of waves of immigrants from areas mostly north and east of mainland Greece. There are similarities between the languages of Greece, Etruria, the Danube area, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, Palestine and Egypt. The preoccupation with fire, light and radiation generally, suggests that there is a connection between Pelasgians, the cave experts, and the Hellenes. The German word hell means bright, and may even point to the Selli, priests who shared with the Agnihotris or fire priests of the Brahmins the practice of keeping their feet dirty - a practice which may be explained by the need to establish good earth contact. Were the Hellenes named after an expert in the study of light and radiation? Were they the 'bright'people? It may be useful to review some of the material involving Ariadne. There are references to the 'strong goddess'. Egyptian necht [man holding a rod], strength, is a reversal of the Greek techne, skill, art. Ariadne's skill with snakes recalls Moses and Aaron, Jannes and Jambres, Exodus VII: 10f. The name Ariadne could mean 'hand of fire'. Names of the goddess were: Eleuthia, Kerasia, Piptuna, Ardoro, Pade. Greek doron is a gift; Ardoro may be 'she who gives fire' or 'gift of fire'. Pade may be 'light from the earth', but Slavonic padatj means 'to fall'. The Isopata ring shows four priestesses dancing, and a descending goddess. Ariadne, as wife of Dionysus, is Britomartis. The couple are portrayed under a vine. Her multiple personality is shown by the four goddess figurines in a temple at Kannia near Gortyn. All have snakes in their crowns; one also has a dove on her cheek and snakes on her arms. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 07: } {T THE LABYRINTH AND AXE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 7 THE LABYRINTH AND AXE The labyrinth at Knosos may have links with Egypt, Lydia and perhaps with the immigrants from the Danube area and from the east, including the Etruscans. The axe is a symbol of the electrical god. Its Lydian and Cretan name, tlabrys or labrys, appears in the word labyrinth [initial 't', like 's', is sometimes dropped]. Homer mentions Daedalus as the builder of a dancing floor for Ariadne. The word for a dancing floor, choros, is also the Greek for the dance itself. The maze at Knosos was probably a dancing floor. It is described as achanes, roofless. Spiral designs and meanders became popular in Cretan art at the time of the Egyptian monarch Amenemhet III. This pharaoh built a 'labyrinth' in the Fayum, contemporary with the first palace at Knosos. It was a temple whose design suggested a maze. Fresco fragments at Knosos show a building with columns, the roof decorated with horns, and with double axes on the capitals. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete p. 179, writes that it was presumably painted in the Middle Minoan IIIA period. This may be the moment to discuss the axe in greater detail. The Greek sacrificial axe was the pelekus. The word resembles the name of Peleg, in the book of Genesis, "in whose days the earth was divided". An Egyptian hieroglyph meaning god, divine, resembles an axe or hoe [a single, not a double, axe]. The word is neter. The word has the same consonants as the Greek antron, cave. When dealing with questions of vocabulary, it is necessary to bear in mind firstly, that Semitic languages were written without the help of letters for a full range of vowel sounds. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, introducing written vowels. Secondly, Semitic languages are written from right to left. Etruscan and Greek, after some uncertainty, changed to left to right. Confusion would occur where Indo-European met Semite, as in Asia Minor. This offers an explanation better than coincidence of why so many important words can be read backwards and give the same meaning but in a different language. For instance, Phoenician namal, harbour, has the consonants nml; the Greek limen, which has lmn, also means 'harbour'. Raqs, dance, becomes sacer, sacred. The Latin dolabra, axe or hoe, is similar to tlabrys, axe, a word which occurs in the language of Lydia, a country in Asia Minor which has Etruscan connections. Initial t and initial s are sometimes dropped, so we have in tlabrys the Lydian version of labrys, double axe, Latin dolabra, which symbolises lightning, and gave its name to the labyrinth. Dolabra is ar falando, sky fire. Falando is an Etruscan word meaning iron, and the sky whence iron falls in the form of meteorites. At Mycenae, in the Peloponnese, the mould for a winged axe has been found. The Latin bipennis means axe; penna is Latin for a feather. The chief Roman magistrates, who had executive authority, imperium, were the consuls, praetors, dictator and master of the horse. They were each entitled to be accompanied by a bodyguard of lictors, who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods and the axe, securis. The Hebrew seghor mmeans spear, axe, gold. The Latin verb icio means to strike. The lictor is probably El, god above, and ictor, striker, a word that could come from icio. The Hebrew maghzerah is an axe. This word resembles the Latin magister and magistratus, e. g. consul, praetor etc.. These words are probably magh, great, set, and ar, the divine fire, Latin ara, altar. The altar was the place to which priests tried to attract the electrical fire from heaven so that it could strike and mark the victim. Set was the Egyptian god who was equated with Typhon. For Set as an interpretation of the letter Z, one may compare the Hebrew letter Z, zayin, which means a weapon. Ayin is an eye, so zayin is Set's eye, a source of dangerous radiation. The letter zayin is also similar in shape to the Egyptian tcham, a sceptre which looks like a scotch for a snake, with an eagle perched on top of the stick. The Latin acies, line of battle, the cutting edge of the Roman army, also means eye, or vision. There is a good account of the ancient theory of vision in Plato's Timaeus. The eye was an emitter of rays, not just a receiver. At Knosos, axes are found, resting on a base of horns. This may be an indication that the electrical deity was perceived as a single force behind the two symbols. Horns are also found on altars. In Greece, suppliants, and people taking solemn oaths, would touch an altar, probably a horn of the altar. The Cretan tlabrunth is assumed to mean "place of the double axe". The ending -unth calls for examination. The Greek hodos, path, way, is likely to be the same as the Etruscan uth, or uthi. The n of -unth would indicate that the vowel u has a nasal sound, a phenomenon found in Etruscan and in modern Polish which could explain certain Greek words ending in -eus, e. g. basileus, Tereus. One may compare the Etruscan falando, sky, the Latin palatium, and the Hebrew palda, iron. The fall of meteorites led some thinkers of the ancient world to the belief that the sky was made of iron. Hodos, path or way, may mean the place where somebody is to be found, their dwelling or sphere of action. Psalm 77, verses 13 and 19, gives some support to this: "Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary: who is so great a God as our God?" "Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known". The Latin cauda, tail, sounds like ka and uthi, where ka dwells. The Egyptian hieroglyph for Set shows the animal with an erect tail. In Plato's Timaeus, the divine fire in the muelos inside the skull is also found in the spine. Greek suppliants would touch a person's chin or knees, probably because the chin and knees were regarded as containers of the muelos, marrow. The lute is a musical instrument made of wood. The name comes from Arabic, al uth, wood [al is the definite article]. Is there a link with the world tree, Yggdrasil, and the poros, passage, of the Greek poet Alkman? The kion, column of coloured light [ka travelling], of Plato, Republic X, was the hodos, road, par excellence, by which souls travelled back and forth between earth and stars. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 08: } {T THE BULL} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 8 THE BULL Bull leaping, as performed at Knosos, involved grasping the horns and performing a somersault onto the bull's back. It may have been a rite in which magical power was obtained from the horns of the bull which the leaper grasped. More than one meaning of the ceremony is possible. It may have been symbolic of apotheosis or resurrection. Dionysus, the god who could appear in the form of a bull, as implied in the Bacchae of Euripides, raised Ariadne to the sky. Europa rode on a bull. It is possible that the seizing of the bull's horns and riding on its back symbolised the obtaining of control of the animal to prevent it from doing damage [to individuals but also to the earth]. In the absence of more specific literary information than we have, it is hard to say with certainty that any one explanation is correct. All may have played a part. The name Daedalus suggests the Greek daid-, torch, and Al, or El, the Semitic word meaning the one above, god. He may have been named, or named himself, after a comet in the sky looking like a torch. His work at Knosos ranged from the construction of the dancing floor to creating bull disguises for actors to wear. Electrical and astronomical links between Egypt and Crete appear in our consideration of the bull. The attempt to produce an heir to the throne with divine ancestry, and therefore the right to be obeyed, may be the explanation of the story of Pasiphae and the Minotaur. Monarchs and priests could wear bull masks, horned helmets and tails in the attempt to obtain and pass on the divine force, the Egyptian sa-ankh. Sankh and sa-ankh appear in the Latin sancio, sanctify, bring to life. The priest portrayed in the cave of Les trois Frères in Ariège, in France, wears a stag mask. The Cretan word bolynthos means 'wild bull'. The most likely derivation is from the Greek bous, ox, and lussa, frenzy. The letter n in bolynthos would be a nasalisation of the vowel u, such as occurs in Polish, and probably Etruscan, and is seen in the Greek basileus, king, and in the names Tereus [who was turned into a hoopoe], and Katreus [the ka watcher]. The fight between a king and a fierce animal is a common theme in ancient art, especially oriental. At Persepolis, in the 'hall of a hundred columns', the Persian king is shown defeating monsters. A Greek equivalent would be Herakles or Theseus. Winged bulls with human heads are found at Persepolis, where Xerxes erected a gateway. The message is ambiguous: the king is the human representative of the divine bull in the sky, wings being added to indicate that the creature concerned is a celestial one. The Apis bull was cherished and worshipped. The king or his servants could also kill the bull if it was seen as a threat. Columns at Persepolis not only have bulls on top, but also have human heads as capitals. The top of the column represents the home of the gods in the sky; the column itself copies the phenomenon referred to by Alkman as a poros or passage, and by Plato as a column of light [towards the end of the Republic]. There were statues of bulls in the temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem. They were part of the plunder seized by Nebuzar-adan, the captain of the guard, and carried off to Babylon. In chapter LII: 20 of his book, the prophet Jeremiah writes: "The two pillars, one sea, and twelve brazen bulls that were under the bases, which king Solomon had made in the house of the Lord: the brass of all these vessels was without weight". The Egyptian Apis bulls are said to have been ceremonially drowned. Drowning was thought to release the divine element. It is possible that there is a link here with the tripod cauldron. The cauldron as a means of achieving divine status, apotheosis, is mentioned in an inscription of Roman times. Medea pretended to restore youth by cutting up the body of an old person and cooking it in a cauldron. The tripod cauldron was probably a representation of the seething pot in the sky, described by Jeremiah, I: 13, two verses after he mentions the rod of an almond tree. The almond may represent the plasmoid, the weapon used by Zeus for long range warfare. Asaminthos is Mycenean Greek for a bathtub. The word has something in common with Apollo Smintheus, Mouse Apollo. Smintheus suggests sema, sign, in-, presence, or power, and theos, god. Possibly the bathtub, with steam rising fron it, was compared with the seething pot in the sky of Jeremiah. In the Odyssey, Odysseus emerges from the bath looking like a god. The chariot, the vehicle of a god in the sky, might be thought to bear some resemblance to a cauldron, and in Homer the word bomos is either a chariot stand or an altar. The Greek kerat-means horn. Kratos is force. The bull is associated with strength, and the Etruscan word trin, hero, is probably a compound of tur, bull, Latin taurus, and in-, Greek for strength or force, divine presence. The name of Turnus, prince of the Rutuli, whom Aeneas defeated and killed [Vergil, Aeneid XII], looks and sounds as if it had the same origin. Because of the proximity of Etruscans to people who spoke a Semitic language, for example in Lydia, and who wrote from right to left, accidents occurred with a number of words. Additional evidence that the bull was a symbol of a deity in the sky is the fact that the Minotaur was called Asterios, or Asterion. Aster is a Greek word for 'star'. Furthermore, Theseus is said to have seized the Minotaur by the hair. The word hair is regularly used to describe the tail of a comet; the word comet is originally Greek for a hairy star. The Latin jubar, fiery mane, is a name of the planet Venus. Juba is a mane, ar is the electrical fire. As well as the Egyptians, the early Greeks saw the object in the sky as a bull, but their way of dealing with the situation was different. Traces of the early experiences and attitudes are found in Greek tragedy, and in the games. At the start of the Great Dionysia, the Athenian drama festival, a bull and a goat were sacrificed to Dionysus. The horns of a goat can be particularly suggestive of the protuberances of a comet, and stags too were sacrificed, especially in countries farther north. The dramatic technique of the Greeks, their action for dealing with the threat constituted by an errant heavenly body, was to resort to sympathetic magic, enacting an encounter so as to bring low into a safer orbit, or to destroy, the thing that was guilty of hubris. Hubris means going too high, or setting oneself up above others and claiming more than a sensible and humble mortal ought to claim. Hubris was the act of a heavenly body whose orbit was such as to bring it dangerously close to the earth, causing earthquakes, stone showers, floods and fire. Dionysus himself had an epiphany as a bull. The Bacchae of Euripides contains references both to his bull nature and to lightning. When Pentheus is detected in the top of the pine tree, spying on the revels of the Bacchants, the women are inspired to tear the tree down, striking at its roots as though with thunderbolts, sunkeranousae [line 1103]. Lightning, the electrical weapon of Zeus, Athene and Poseidon, was also a weapon of Dionysus, and the horn-like protuberances of a comet could be imaginatively viewed as the source of cosmic lightning strokes directed at the snake-like tail, Dionysus versus Pentheus. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 09: } {T NAXOS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 9 NAXOS As one approaches the island of Naxos by boat, one sees the sharp outline of Mount Za against the sky behind the harbour and town of Naxos. If Crete could boast of Dikte and Ida for Zeus to inhabit, Naxos has gone one better with Mount Za, named after the god himself. But the island was famed in ancient times for its Bacchic revels: "... Bacchatam Naxum...", Vergil, Aeneid III: 125. Since Theseus in the story took Ariadne to Dia, as Naxos was earlier called, it is worth considering for a moment the island and its history. It was said that one Boutes, son of Boreas, brought a band of Thracian men to what is now the island of Naxos. For their wives, he brought a band of Maenads from Thessaly. Wherever there are references to Boreas, Hyperboreans, the ox or bull, it is worth asking whether the electrical god in some form or other is involved. In this instance, we may note that the name Boutes suggests, to a Greek, oxen [bous is an ox]. There are well known stories of links between the north, Delphi, Apollo, the Hyperboreans, and Delos. There is room for speculation that the Semitic word shemal, north, may indicate 'the god up there', or 'the sign of El', and that shemal, reversed, might be El ames, the sceptre of El. The story quoted by Ginsberg [Legends of the Jewish people] of the ox seen in the sky at the time of the Exodus is perhaps less well known. Later, King Naxos brought Karians to Dia. The island of Dia then became the island of Naxos. The name Naxos, if written in the syllabic form familiar from Mycenean Greek, and influenced by the tendency of Semitic speakers to insert a 'shewa',[ an obscure unaccented sound between two consonants, and therefore between the two halves of a double consonant such as the ks of the x sound in Naxos], gives Nakasos. The final s is the ending of the nominative singular, and, as in Latin, has no significance in such a context. We are left with Nakaso. The Greek anax is the usual word in Homer for a warrior leader, prince or chieftain. The Greek princes, men such as Agamemnon and Ajax, are generally described as being big men. In the Old Testament we read of a giant called Anaq. His descendants were Anaqim, the Hebrew plural form of his name. Perhaps King Naxos was a man of more than usual size. This may seem purely speculative, but there is still today on Naxos a huge stone statue of a kouros, a Greek youth, and the island of Delos, too, had gigantic statues of Apollo and Dionysus. The hair style of a kouros resembles the hood of a cobra. The evidence for the existence of giants is partly literary, partly archaeological. The best known literary evidence is found in the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy, chapter II, we read that there were Emims, great, many and tall, like the Anaqim. They were accounted giants, as were the Anaqim, but the Moabites called them Emims. Later in the chapter, v. 19, there is a reference to the inhabitants of the land of Ammon: "That also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites call them Zamzummims; A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anaqim; but the Lord destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead". Deuteronomy III: 2f. tells of Og, king of Bashan, and of his iron bedstead. Joshua XII: 4 states that Og and other giants lived at Ashtaroth and Edrei. Ashtoreth and Astarte are names of an eastern equivalent of the goddess Aphrodite. Joshua XI: 21f. refers to the destruction of the Anaqim. Only in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod were any giants left. The hint of ka in the place names [Gaza and Gath], the link with Aphrodite [Astarte], and the position on the coast towards Egypt, all point to intense radiation in that area as one of the possible causes. Edrei, the chief town of Og's kingdom, Bashan, suggests the Hebrew eder, garment, mantle, splendour, and heder, which means splendour. The Greek hedra is a seat; the Latin hedera is ivy. Hedra is often the seat of a god, an altar, a temple, the place where a weapon fixes itself. In the plural it means the quarters of the sky where omens appear. Numbers XXI: 33ff. mentions the defeat of Og at Edrei. I Samuel XVII tells the story of David and the Philistine champion Goliath of Gath. Goliath's brother was killed in a battle in Gob [II Samuel XXI: 19], and in another battle, in Gath, one of the four giants killed there had twelve fingers and twelve toes. There was more than one Gath in Palestine. Perhaps the name Gath is ka and at, 'power of ka', or 'ka as source'. England has remains of giants. For example, near Aspatria, in Cumbria, there were found in a grave the bones of a giant over seven feet tall. The discovery at Amman of sarcophagi of great size gives some support to the statement in Deuteronomy III that Og, king of Bashan, was a giant. The fact that the Philistines on the coast of Palestine spoke a language that may have been Illyrian, and that Goliath of Gath was a man of unusual size, raises the question of the origin of the Philistines. The Etruscan link that begins to emerge takes us farther afield. Two main explanations come to mind for the existence of giants. One is that Goliath and others in Palestine were the result of mutation caused by phenomena such as those described in the Bible in the books of Exodus and Joshua and elsewhere. The other is that they came from farther afield, in which case the electrical conditions associated with the north pole and the god Bor may have been responsible. Goliath and the other giants seem to have been exceptional; Philistines in general and northern immigrants were probably comparatively large rather than gigantic. Naxos exported marble and emery. The latter compound is carborundum plus either magnetite or haematite. Magnetite and hematite are both ferric ores. The presence of emery in Naxos was attributed to Ares, god of war. Ferric compounds would be reddish. Red was associated with Ares and with military uniforms. An axe of Naxian emery was found at Calne in Wiltshire, U. K. DELOS Patara, the marble gateway on Naxos, faces the island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo. Delos first flourished in the Mycenean period, which by conventional dating is roughly 1580 to 1200 B. C.. Apollo did not have a monopoly of the worship on Delos. The island was a centre of the worship of Dionysus, and the remains of his shrine bear witness to the intense interest that there was in the electrical link between sky and sexual activity. Delos is dominated by a hill, Mount Cynthos. Near the top of the hill is a cave which appears to have been a shrine. The pit next to the altar may be compared to the 'well' or bothros at Alalakh, and the shrine at Chamaizi in Crete. The aim would be to attract the god to the shrine. Theseus left Naxos and sailed to Dia. He is said to have gone to the altar made of horn, and to have performed the Crane Dance. It may be that the Kordax, a Cretan dance in which the performers used a rope to link themselves, reflects the thread of Ariadne used by Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. THE THREAD OF ARIADNE There is a Jewish tradition that when the sons of Aaron were killed by the ark, thin threads of flame went from the ark to their nostrils. The Greek lin-is flax, and thread. Could its derivation be El, and in-, presence of El? The Egyptian ankh could be held and pointed at a person's nose in order to give him life. There may be a link here between the Egyptians and the Hebrews. The ankh, as an electrical symbol, was a device that could kill as well as give life. What was the nature of the thread of Ariadne which was so useful to Theseus? One difficulty in the usual account is that the labyrinth was probably a dancing floor in the open air, and Theseus would have had no trouble in seeing where he was, and anyway there is the story of the crown of light. Can the story conceal an electrical attack on the Minotaur, the fabulous creature said to have been the offspring of Pasiphae and the bull? The Minotaur was surely a priest, perhaps even a member of the royal family, disguised by a mask, horns and tail. The crane dance which Theseus took to Delos had harps for accompaniment. Harps have divine and astronomical significance; Hermes and Apollo were the divine harpists of the Greeks. It has been suggested that the Crane Dance, imitating the movements of birds, symbolises the "sinuosities of the labyrinth". In the dance at Knosos described by Homer, the young men each carry a gilt sacrificial knife, Greek machaira. The crane dance may have been associated with the 'Troy game', of which a maze was a feature. One could speculate that a maze or labyrinth might symbolise the winding course of a deity or monster in the sky, with an orbit coming closer to earth at each return. A labyrinth was the place of the double axe [the thunderbolt], and the climax of the wanderings would be a confrontation. In the sky, lightning strikes would be thought to result in the defeat, sparagmos [tearing to pieces], and absorption, 'eating', of the object resembling a bull, stag, or goat. The Etruscan vacl, banquet, is the most likely explanation of the Greek word basileus, king, the one who is banqueting. The ending - eus is the same as that of King Tereus, the hoopoe in the Birds of Aristophanes; he is the observing one. Greek tereo means I watch for something, I observe. There is food for thought in some of the place names in Crete and the Cyclades, for example Dia, the early name for Naxos [the Pelasgians were dioi in Homer, usually translated as 'divine'], Chamaizi [earthwards], Arkalochori, Kaloritsa, Psychro, Kamini, Kephala [the hill at Knosos], Sangria [in Naxos, where there was a temple of Demeter], Patara, and Skardana [on Delos]. The Latin sacer means holy. Ankh, sankh, are 'life', 'bring to life'; Latin sancio, I sanctify, means 'I bring to life'. Ariadne was said to have had a tomb on the island of Naxos. She was also said to have had a tomb on the island of Cyprus. The latter may reflect the close relationship of Ariadne and Aphrodite. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 10: } {T CHRONOLOGY} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 10 CHRONOLOGY So far, we have had to rely on Greek and Roman stories about an early Athenian king, Theseus, with a certain amount of historical data in the way of texts, and to supplement this foundation we have touched on certain motifs in art and architecture. A study of the evidence from art and monuments has pointed to the electrical basis of ancient Mediterranean religion, myth and magic. Another subject emerges, one closely involved with art, namely chronology. Up to the final years of the nineteenth century [A. D.] it was taken for granted that the discoveries of Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae, which had caused such surprise, provided confirmation of the general picture of the Trojan affair and the Argive tyrants that emerges from a study of Homer and Thucydides. Only since the dating of Crete and Mycenae from Egypt has there been introduced such a long dark age between the end of Minoan and Mycenean civilisation and the start of Greek, as opposed to Mycenean, civilisation. The interpretation of the data on which the astronomical dating from Egypt was based is increasingly under attack, and there are grave doubts about the value of radio-carbon dating in the period concerned. The general archaeological evidence does not support the conventional chronology. One feature of the chaos resulting from the extension of the Greek 'Dark Ages' has been the doubling of historical characters and events. Minos is an example of such doubling. The "early Minos, pre- Hellenic and Middle Minoan", is the same as the Achaean Minos of Thucydides, with all that that implies for the date of the Trojan war or wars. Doubling also occurs in the case of Daedalus, one living in Minoan times, the other the father of the artists called the Daedalidae, living in the eighth century B. C.. The second Daedalus was held to be the first artist to have created statues standing in natural poses instead of having arms close to the sides and one foot forward. Dipoinis and Skylla were pupils and possibly sons of Daedalus. Hutchinson, in Prehistoric Crete, p. 126, refers to 'torsion' as a decorative device on vases from the Danube area and from S. E. Anatolia. It is common in Cretan pottery. The Pelasgians, "divine" according to Homer, were among the inhabitants of Crete, and had linguistic connections with the Danube area. Judging by their name, they had specialist knowledge of rocks and caves. At this point, we may usefully review some of the archaeological and literary material concerning Crete and Minos. Readers who do not wish to spend time on details may safely skip to the chapter on interpretations. There was trade between Egypt, Syria and Palestine in the early Minoan period, conventionally dated to about 2500 B. C onwards. A vase found at Byblos has a handle in the form of a bull. The name Byblos may have a connection with one of the names of Dionysus, the Etruscan Fufluns, or Bubluns, meaning the same as Bromios, the noisy one. This would refer to the drums that accompanied his revels, which in turn imitated the thunder which was caused by the lightning, of which Dionysus was a god. Spiral decoration is typical of Minoan art. It is also typical of Neolithic cultures in the Danube area, in Thessaly in the Chalcolithic period, in Thrace, and in the Bronze Age Cyclades and Crete. The meander and spiral pattern were popular in Egypt and Crete in the period when Amenemhet III built his palace or temple, sometimes referred to as a labyrinth, in the Fayum, and a Cretan king built a labyrinth at Knosos. The Egyptian palace has been described as a funerary temple, and both had enough rooms for them to be called stores, possibly for food. Cretan hieroglyphic script A has some Egyptian signs, e. g. the ankh, sign of life. Thucydides, Book I: 4, writes that Minos was the earliest to control a fleet: he drove out the Karians and put down piracy. Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus relate that when Daedalus escaped from Crete, Minos, having pursued him to Sicily, was murdered there by king Kokalos. The description by Diodorus of his tomb, with its two stories, one below ground level, the other above, suggests a design similar to that of a temple tomb at Knosos. The Greeks had their Bronze Age Daedalus, and a Daedalic school of sculptors, in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C.. Rhodians and Cretans colonised Gela in Sicily in 688 B. C. There was a city called Minoa in Sicily, and others of the same name elsewhere. There are tombs in Sicily of the tholos type, but it is thought that the architectural influence may have been from Greece rather than from Crete. Europa, sister of Kadmos of Thebes and of Minos, was a Phoenician princess. Zeus, in the form of a bull, carried her to Crete. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 11: } {T CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 11 CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS We may now usefully review some of the interpretations that have been made of those myths and legends which seem the least consonant with 'rational' knowledge and views of the nature of the material world in which human beings find themselves. It is probable that the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would not have seen so many and varied attempts to explain myths, magic and ritual had it not been for a reluctance to admit or even consider the possibility of real events as the explanation of stories about extra-terrestrial interference with what people were happy to imagine was the smooth, machine-like running of the world and the heavens. Kirk, in his book The Nature of Greek Myths, Penguin 1974, gives an account of the various explanations of the stories and actions, myth and ritual, put forward during the last two centuries. Myths have been seen as explanations of ordinary natural phenomena, with gods and monsters as personifications of natural forces. Thus in the 19th century Andrew Lang proposed that myths were explanatory, and a form of early science. Malinowsky suggested that myths are practical devices for supporting social structures rather than attempts to discover theoretical truths. Eliade holds that myths are an attempt to re-experience a remote past time of divine action and creation. Such a return is not mere nostalgia. It gives power and inspiration in the present; the past becomes alive and is felt to be present. Other writers, notably Jane Harrison, A. B. Cook, and Sir James Frazer [in The Golden Bough], proposed that myth is to be associated with ritual, primitive and savage fertility rituals being particularly significant. In contrast to attempts to explain myths as being associated with nature, writers such as Freud and Jung have tried to explain myths as psychic phenomena. Myth has been compared to subconscious images and to dreams. Jung especially stressed the human need for myth and dreams to keep the psyche on an even keel. Followers of Levi-Strauss see myth as important in a society because of its ability to set up bridges between contradictory views and needs. [Contradictions occur in Greek myths and legends between divine law and human law, as in the Antigone of Sophocles.] They also see a similarity between the contradictory workings of nature and the human mind. Readers are referred to Kirk's book mentioned above for fuller information and comments on the various views. When looking at the theories, two facts emerge. Firstly, no one theory is a complete explanation of all myths. Secondly, hardly any of them embraces the possibility that they should be taken, in the case of the cosmic myths with battles in the sky, as colourful accounts of something that actually happened. Greek religion, from the point of view of the average Greek, seems to have changed from sacrifices and the recitation of stories and the performance of games and plays, e. g. muthos and dromenon, to mystery religions such as the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries. It became a matter of understanding and coping with life's major challenges, especially birth, sickness and death. Let us turn to a twentieth century A. D. opera. The interpretation made by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss of the story of Dionysus and Ariadne laid stress on the ambivalence of death. In their opera Ariadne auf Naxos, first performed in 1916, Ariadne decides that death is the only course left to her after Theseus has abandoned her. She welcomes the appearance of Hermes, the psychopomp, the escorter of souls to the underworld, as the one who will set her free. When the young god Bacchus enters, she welcomes him and experiences a transformation and feeling of enchantment. She thinks that she is giving herself up to death. In terror, she calls out "Theseus!". She then greets the stranger, the young god, as the beautiful, peaceful god. The music and words of a duet suggest her rebirth. Bacchus too is transformed, becoming a god through his love for Ariadne. To Ariadne, Bacchus is not only death, but life. He effects her transformation from a deserted maiden to a goddess. It is apparent from the above summary that the opera is an example of the restatement and interpretation of a myth as a psychological experience, in terms adapted to the intellectual climate of the time and place. Death, for example, is presented not as physical extinction but more as a 'rite of passage'. It is the death of the love of Theseus for Ariadne which makes Ariadne, faithful to the end, long for death, and it is the new love, that of Bacchus, which brings her peace from her suffering, the joy and peace which she feels to be death, and which is the power that Bacchus possesses to be resurrected [after his affair with Circe] and to bring others to life again, as he does to Ariadne. It is interesting to compare him with his Egyptian equivalent, Osiris. The apparent contradictions that von Hofmannsthal and Strauss portray in the behaviour of Ariadne result from the ambiguities in the character of the god Dionysus. He is thought by many today to be the god of life, of death, and of renewed life, not just psychologically, but in a physical and material sense, as living objects die and new life springs from them. But Dionysus is no mere vegetation god. It is not a matter of a plant, animal or human being dying, and new life being nourished by the decomposing remains. The fertility explanation is not adequate. Dionysus is an electrical god. He exists in every animal, in ivy, and in the vine, but he is greater than any one of them: he exists outside them as well, in the form of lightning. In a sense, he is divine life. He specialises in revealing the divine power to humans in their own experience as bacchants. The power of the electrical force is such that it can both kill and bring to life. Moses was aware of this dual function when the brazen serpent was set up to heal those suffering from snake bites, whatever the exact technique and efficacy may have been. Radiation from the gods in the sky or electricity from the earth helped Osiris to rise. The Egyptian ankh was life, but could be used as a weapon. The ark could be used as a war machine, and Zeus saved the world from destruction when his thunderbolts destroyed the monster in the sky. The electrical god could be seen rising into the sky, described by the Greek poet Alkman as a passage, poros, associated with creation, and described by Plato as a column of light which was the path for the souls of the deceased to return to the stars and await reincarnation. It was a god of inspiration, giving life, and, if one were struck by lightning, likely to give death as well. According to Plato [Timaeus], the heavenly fire is to be found in the head and spine as well as in the sky, and Hermes is an important character in Ariadne auf Naxos. Poros, the path between the electrical source in the sky, and earth, was the father of Eros, and Hermes was a messenger associated not only with sexual attraction and life, but with death, marshalling souls with his kerukeion, his ka- controller, the caduceus of Mercury. [The Latin ducens means 'leading'; compare the name of the hoopoe king Tereus, which probably means 'observing'.] In ancient Greek, an initial 'h', the rough breathing, is almost a 'k'. Hermes is basically hrm, or krm. Mercury is mrk; the two names, Hermes and Mercury, superficially different, are the same, as a result of confusion over the direction of writing, probably in Asia Minor, where the Etruscans met speakers of a Semitic language. This is just one of many instances of this phenomenon. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 12: } {T CATASTROPHE, MYTH AND SKY} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 12 CATASTROPHE, MYTH AND SKY Floods, earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions as at Thera, the disasters that befell Knosos and most other sites, are difficult to fit into the conventional framework. It is worth reviewing the story and associated material from the standpoint of electrical theory and early study of electromagnetic phenomena. Elektron, amber, 'god from the throne' is the starting point, and fine distinctions can come later. When a king sat on a throne, he was imitating the presence of the electrical god above the ark, chest, or capacitor. Much of the mythical material calls for explanation on two levels. Firstly, many myths and rituals deal with electrical phenomena. Experiments were made with magnets in Samothrace, the island famous for its religious mysteries, like those of Eleusis. Furthermore, there are no grounds for supposing that Benjamin Franklin was the first to try to capture the god from the sky. Secondly, it is necessary to search for the cause of the more turbulent electrical conditions and the catastrophes that are reported. This brings us to an examination of the astronomical material and to the state of the solar system in not only prehistoric but also historical times. The final sections of this study are therefore devoted to a review of a few instances where changed electrical conditions and extra-terrestrial interference are the most likely explanation of the many stories and facts that do not fit the conventional picture. Some of the phenomena described in ancient records are easily recognised and comprehended, for example lightning and radiation. In recent years the after-effects of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl have included mutation, such as the birth of babies with fish tail instead of legs and primitive wings for arms. Radiation from the sky as a cause of changes on earth was basic theory in the ancient world. Other phenomena are less obvious. The similarity of some of the words found in ancient languages and shared between different languages may in some instances be due to coincidence, but at this stage it is better not to exclude the less obvious candidates for recognition. Progress in philology is helped by an understanding of the physical reality that a word refers to or denotes. The Old Testament contains references to phenomena which resemble some of those mentioned in other literatures such as Greek and Latin. Jacob's dream, related in Genesis XXVIII, concerns an apparent link between sky and earth, and the importance of stone. At a place called Luz, Jacob took stones for pillows and went to sleep for the night. He dreamed that a ladder was set up, reaching to heaven, and angels of God ascended and descended. God spoke to him and encouraged him with promises. Jacob set up the stone that he had used for a pillow and poured oil on it. He named the place Bethel [house of God]. We shall see later the electrical significance of the name Luz, and its presence, in disguise, in Greek. In chapter XXXII: 24, Jacob wrestles all night with a man. The man touches the hollow of Jacob's thigh and puts it out of joint. He tells Jacob that he is to take the name of Israel. Jacob calls the place Peniel, "for I have seen God face to face". There are many Egyptian references [in the Book of the Dead] to the God of the Thigh. These probably concern the constellation of the Great Bear in the northern sky. The prophet Isaiah writes that "his rod was upon the sea", referring to Moses stretching out his hand to cause the Egyptians to be drowned [Exodus XIV: 26]. Rods were associated with sky phenomena and snakes. Isaiah, XIV: 12, speaks of Lucifer, son of the morning, having fallen from heaven. Lucifer is the one referred to in the words: "didst weaken the nations". Greek and Semitic literature both connect disasters on earth, such as seem to have struck Knosos and many other sites, with irregular occurrences in the sky. Greek tragedy is based on confrontation, where a character suffering from hubris, behaving arrogantly as if superior to all others, is brought low. In a passage attacking the idolatry of the Jews, Isaiah appears to refer to the practice of incubation, on a mountain top, or, as in Babylon, on a ziggurat [tower of Babel]. In LVII: 7 he writes: "upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set thy bed: even thither wentest thou up to offer sacrifice". It is probable that Minos paid similar visits to mountain top shrines. There is an Egyptian reference to "the god on the top of the staircase". Zeus, chief deity of the Greeks, god of order and justice, had the thunderbolt as his weapon against the monsters. The thunderbolt is shown by Greeks in the hand of Zeus, generally like the lines of force of a bar magnet, as revealed by iron filings on a piece of card held over the magnet. But it also appears as an almond-shaped object, suggesting a plasmoid, appropriate for exchanges at long distance and of great power. The Greek amygdale, almond, may be the Egyptian ames, sceptre, gad, a name of Baal, and El, or Al, the god above. The Egyptian hieroglyph ames is shown as shaped like an almond; vide Budge, Egyptian Language, p. 78, Routledge and Kegan Paul. The Etruscan name of the god Tin recalls the Greek verb tinasso, brandish, and may even have been Stin, since initial s is sometimes dropped. If this were the case, Tin may be Setin. The Greek is, in- , means force, divine presence, so the name would mean 'force of Set', or 'presence of Set'. Tin may mean thunderbolt, and Set is the Egyptian Typhon. In Crete, Zeus was worshipped under the name of Velchanos, a word which may mean something like 'god of the rock', or 'god of the cave'. Since the difference in electrical potential manifested by the piezoelectric effect at the time of a severe earthquake would have dwindled through leakage, it was reasonable for people to say that the god died. The death of the Cretan Zeus distinguished him from the Zeus of the sky who was worshipped elsewhere. The sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, celebrated in Crete, may reflect an anxiety lest the atmosphere surrounding Zeus should leave him and cause an outbreak of violence. Hera's name suggests 'face', and 'upon', Egyptian hra. Egyptian herit means 'fear'. The sacred marriage occurs in the Sumerian myth of Dumuzi and Inanna, enacted by the king and a priestess. Herodotus mentions the procedure in his description of Babylon. The Egyptian reference to the "Lord of redness in the day of transformations" probably refers to an object in the sky, such as the one that a Roman general, at his triumph, imitated by painting his face red. The English word 'sanguine', means red in the face and cheerful. Its origin is the Latin sanguis, blood. The Roman poet Horace, in one of his odes, describes death as pallida, pale. Sanguis may in turn be related to Egyptian ankh and sankh, live, and make to live, and to Sumerian sanga, priest. Triumphus may be connected with the Thriae, Delphic goddesses. The thrioboloi at Delphi threw pebbles into the divining bowl. Stone showers and meteorites would be associated with Mars. At Rome the triumphing general, imitating Mars with his red face, stained with wine lees as if he were an actor, rode in his chariot along the Sacred Way. The story goes that an attendant helped to stave off hubris, arrogance, and nemesis, the avenging wrath of the gods, by whispering in his ear "Remember that you are but mortal". The Latin robigo means redness or rust. Its key consonants, rbg, when read backwards, give gbr. Gibor is Hebrew for a hero, or leader. The archangel Gabriel may be associated with Mars. Gabriel may be gibor el, divine warrior. Zeus was the father of numerous deities and heroes. He was the son of Kronos, and behind Kronos lurks the figure of Ouranos, whom his son Kronos castrated. There seems to have been an object or phenomenon in the northern sky, named Bor, associated with light, and, in Jewish legend, with the ox. It may have been what inspired Roman augurs with ideas for the street plan and layout of a military camp or city. Electricity is the force behind other sky phenomena as well as that of the thunderbolt and its chief users, Zeus and Athene. The bull, stag, cauldron, snake, thigh, Venus, column, eye, radiation, axe, hand, arm, mutation and giants, tholos and dromos tombs, arks, libations and the five major planets, and writing, all figure in attempts by the ancient priest-electricians to describe, explain and exploit celestial phenomena. Monsters intrude, darken the sky, appear to cause the sun to stop or go back in its course, and so on. The dragon is a snake in the sky. In art it is given wings to show that it is the celestial monster which the earthly snake resembles. Examples of imitation are the hair style of Greek kouroi, and the uraeus, cobra, on the head of the pharaoh. The bull symbolises the power of a heavenly body with horn- like protuberances. The killing of goats, stags, bulls and other creatures was sympathetic magic aimed at checking the career of an object in the sky threatening the earth. The wearing of horned helmets, masks and bulls' tails is an instance of mimesis. If all else fails, if you can't beat them, join them. Furthermore, resemblance to a divine phenomenon instilled obedience, reverence and fear in servants, subjects and enemies. In Jeremiah's book, chapter I, the prophet sees a seething pot in the sky. The tripod cauldron, Greek lebes, lebet-, is El's house, El beit. In Latin it is cortina, which suggests the Greek kerata, horns, and in-, force. The Topprakali cauldron has bulls' heads round the rim. The Minotaur was probably a man wearing a mask, horns and tail. The name of the Minotaur, Asterios, or the neuter form Asterion, and the fact that Theseus seized it by the hair, support the view that phenomena in the sky were involved and were models for imitation. The constellation of the Great Bear, circling round the Pole Star, was referred to in Egypt as the Lord of the Thigh. It could conceivably be linked with Dionysus and his birth from the thigh of Zeus. Dionysus was one of the gods who could command lightning. There is material from further east about the thigh. The stories about the hero Gilgamesh date back to Sumer, and were known throughout the ancient Middle East. One of the episodes describes the anger of Ishtar when Gilgamesh rejected her love, fearing that he might suffer the same fate as the rest of her lovers. Ishtar persuaded Anu to send the Bull of Heaven against Uruk, the home of Gilgamesh. With the help of Enkidu, who grasped the bull's horns, Gilgamesh cut its throat with his sword. He then tore off its right thigh and threw it to Ishtar. Enkidu was punished by the gods, who afflicted him with sickness. Dionysus had a shrine on the island of Delos. The Stoibadeion, sacred to Dionysus, with its phallic decoration of pillars, links fertility, sexual activity, and the sky. Dionysus was associated with animals and the force embodied in them, especially the bull, the leopard and the other great cats. Wine was thought to be the blood of those who had perished in battles in the sky. Radiation was attributed to the five planets visible to the naked eye, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The eye was thought to be a source of radiation. Axe, hoe, spear and arrow were symbols of lightning and radiation. Seven is an important number, being five plus the sun and moon. The Cretan goddess is concerned, like Artemis, with both animals and radiation. Thoth, the Egyptian god of electricity who was equated with the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury, was active in the sky. He restarted Ra's boat when it had stopped. This Egyptian story is in harmony with accounts from elsewhere, such as the record of phenomena at the battle of Beth Horon after the Exodus, during the invasion of Palestine by the Hebrews under Joshua [Joshua X: 13]. The tholos tomb, a burial chamber approached by a passage, the dromos, may be an imitation of the column rising into the sky. The word dromos is related to the Greek verb trecho, I run, aorist tense edramon. It appears in English in the word hippodrome, originally a racecourse for horses. The transport of the body, ashes or bones into the tomb would then be sympathetic magic, mimesis of the soul's rapid ascent up the column to the stars, as described by Plato. Greek games included what may be imitation of cosmic confrontations and exchanges in the sky. The Troy game represented as a maze on the Tagliatella vase may have indicated the varying movements of an object or god in the sky, resulting in a meeting and battle. Chariot races frequently led to smashes, which may not have been accidental. In the case of the pentathlon, the number of events, five, may have planetary significance. Mayani, The Etruscans Begin to Speak, Souvenir Press 1962, puts forward some evidence that Etruscan nobles sacrificed their lives in rituals aimed at saving their city from divine anger and punishment. There is an Etruscan inscription on a stele found at Novilara. Its genuineness has been doubted. It may refer to a ritual suicide by a charioteer, krustenac, in which case it would resemble the self- sacrificing action of Marcus Curtius, who, to placate the angry gods, rode into a chasm that had opened in the Roman forum. Pessos, Greek for a 'man' at draughts, may come from pes, an Etruscan numeral. The name of Reshef, a Syrian deity, may be a reversal of pes and ar, the five electrical fires. It is disputed whether pes is five or four, but the objection is not necessarily fatal, since four-planet systems had a place in ancient thought. The root ar implies movement, perhaps the movement of light along the poros of Alkman. Hubris, going too high, as if one were superior to all other people and considerations, is the Hebrew zadhon, pride. This word may be 'Lord Set', since adhon means lord, so Set would be a celestial object that went on a dangerous course, too high. The Etruscan zichne, writing, engraving, is 'Set's tracks', ichne being the Greek for track or footprints. A hero was a man with powers so exceptional that they had to be attributed to divine parentage, perhaps through incubation. The Hebrew heron means conception. The ancient view was that mutations, including giants, monsters and heroes, were the result of divine interference, generally by a deity whose home was in the sky, though earth too produced some unpleasant creatures that make one wonder, in the words of Omar Khayam and Fitzgerald, whether the potter's hand slipped. Chernobyl and children with fish tails and wings are a recent reminder of what the ancients appear to have suspected long ago. It is conceivable that the story of Herakles dying from the poison in the shirt of Nessus the centaur may have an astronomical origin. Centaurs shot [radiated] arrows, and Herakles is associated with the planet Mars. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 13: } {T FIRE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 13 FIRE In the ancient world, a city or society had as an essential aim a knowledge of the divine will and intentions, and an understanding and some degree of control of the divine fire which, in the form of the thunderbolt, closely associated with earthquakes, was the chief weapon of the gods. The Greek aither is the upper air, home of the divine fire, pyr. The following words all mean fire of some kind, usually divine, i. e. electrical, originating from the sky in the form of lightning, or from the earth, e. g. piezoelectric effects from earthquakes, sometimes referred to by the general Semitic term ka. I put forward suggestions for the meanings and derivations of these words, based on the principle that in any philological inquiry the discovery of a link between a word and physical reality should be the starting point. Five of the most important words are: Pyr, or pur, [Greek], ar [Etruscan], ka [Egyptian], zichne [Etruscan], ignis [Latin]. A Greek u may be transliterated as u or as y. Flamma, flame, was used in Latin, like phlox in Greek, for ordinary chemical fire. The burning of wood on altars was a trigger to encourage the divine fire to descend. The prophet Job, XX: 26, speaks of "a fire not blown", i. e. not phlox. Latin materia is wood for building; lignum [El ignis?] is wood for burning. Pyr The Latin princeps, prince, is a compound of pyr, in-, and capio. The prince can capture the force of the fire. Pyramid is from pyr, fire, and amis, amid-, vessel, chamber pot. Greek amao means 'I collect, I harvest. A pyramid was a fire collector. The Hebrew arah is to collect; aron is an ark. Arabic haram, plural ahram, is a pyramid. Russian hram is a temple. Hebrew har means 'mountain'. Plato, in his Laws, refers to the survivors of the Flood as "zopura of the human race". The word suggests to us the phrase 'spark of life'. Greek prasso, I achieve, act, is pyr aisso, I brandish fire. Greek pragma is a deed. The Akkadian Akitu, New Year festival, resembles the Latin ago, actum, set in motion, act. Etruscan praco is a step, and may be from the same root as the Greek pragma. Albanian prag is step. Greek prinos, holm oak, may be pyr + in-, presence of fire. It was widely believed that oak trees were more often struck by lightning than other trees. The Greek prytanis was the official who waved the brand, imitating the god who brandished the thunderbolt. Tanuo means 'I stretch out'. Tinasso means 'I brandish', literally 'I set Tin in motion'. Tin, the Etruscan god of the thunderbolt, occurs also in the form Tinia, and, since initial s is sometimes omitted, there is a possibility that he may have been Set + in-, presence, or force, of Set. Set, the Egyptian god of evil, is also known as Typhon; Plutarch called him Seth. Ar Latin ara is an altar, essentially a place to which the electrical god was persuaded to descend to mark the victim. Ordinary fire would be lit to encourage the electrical fire to appear. Water or blood would be poured over the victim to assist conductivity and earthing. The ancients knew that water conducts electrical current. This may be a clue to the references in the Book of the Dead to the "fire that is in the water". An altar had horns. This creates a link with the horned object in the sky which was compared to a horned creature such as a bull. The Latin religio, sacred procedure, may be ar elicio, I entice the fire. Mitra, headdress, tiara, may be a reversal of ar, and time, honour. The Greek mitos is a thread. An electrical explanation of mitra becomes more likely when one thinks of the Greek for a crown, stephanos, Set visible. Thread may have some electrical significance. Images of ancestors were linked by thread in the atrium of a Roman house. Etruscan ve, put, appears in the Latin servio, I serve, I put fire. Zhar is one of the Slavonic words for fire; ogonj [Latin ignis] is another. Etruscan thesan means to kindle. Probably the word is from the Indo-European word detj, to put, and refers to the task of stoking, putting fuel on the sacred fire. This is a possible interpretation of the Greek word theos, god. Theos has been traced either to tithemi, to put, set, or establish, as a basic function of a deity, or to the verb theo, to run. The latter would be more appropriate to celestial bodies such as the planets, the wandering stars, if they really did appear to run fast. They wander, but slowly. Perhaps the various ideas present in the roots co-existed in the ancient mind. A Roman priest might be a flamen, one who blew the flame [Latin flare is to blow]. The Vestal Virgins, who tended the holy fire in the temple of Vesta in Rome, tended the life and soul of the city and of the body politic on the hearth of the temple of Vesta, the Greek Hestia. Erythrae is a Greek place name. There is an Erythrae near Cithaeron, in Boeotia, central Greece. The name is a reversal of ar and of thura, door. Egyptian, Greek and Roman pylons, gateways and arches symbolise an entry into the world of the electrical god. They can symbolise planets; in this they resemble the seven pillars near the place called the Horse's Grave, mentioned by Pausanias as being on his way from Sparta to Arcadia. The Etruscan thur means much the same as the Latin gens, family. Thura, Greek for door, may be a reversal of ar uth. Uth is Etruscan for the Greek hodos, road. The name of the god Janus was in general use in Rome to mean an archway. Shar kibrat arbaim is Akkadian for 'Lord of the four regions'. The Russian vorota is a plural word meaning 'gate'. Lord of the four gates? Arches, Latin arcus, symbolised an entrance to the world of the spirit, of divine fire, the way to the stars. The Etruscan ar is present in arcus, as it is in the Latin arca, chest. Aristotle, in his De Anima, On the Soul, writes that the soul enters the human body thurathen, from outside. Probably thurathen should be understood as meaning 'from the fire door' i. e. from the stars, which, as Plato writes in the myth of Er at the end of his Republic, are the places from which souls come and to which they return. The Hebrew timara is a pillar. There may be a link with the kion, column, of Plato's Republic, by which souls returned to the stars. Hebrew pathar means to explain. It may be 'reveal the fire'. Latin patera is a flat dish used in libations for reflecting the radiation from a source in the sky onto the earth, perhaps to feed the dead, help them to the stars, or resurrect them for advice. The Latin patere means to be open, to be exposed. There may even be a connection between the Hebrew pathar, explain, and the Greek pathos, suffering. The Athenian dramatist Aeschylus associates mathos, finding out, with pathos, suffering. In a Greek tragedy, there is a recognition scene, when a truth, previously hidden from some or all of the characters, is revealed. It leads to a reversal of fortune frequently involving a principal character in difficulty and disaster. Hebrew qe'arah is a bowl or dish, and may conceal the Egyptian ka, which appears in Hebrew qadhosh, divine. The Latin lanx, lanc-, is a dish. It may be a compound of El, the god above, and ankh, life. The Hittite spanza, libation, suggests 'down from the five', the five being the five planets easily visible to the naked eye. The libation bowl was used to reflect and focus the divine radiation from sky to earth, as shown on a relief from Malatya. The Latin armum, weapon, especially a defensive weapon, may be connected with electrical fire. The aegis was used by Athene as a shield, and inspired fear. Setting up the apparatus at a shrine involved adjustment of telescopic rods, Hebrew chashuqim. Greek ararisko, fit, adjust, may be 'please the fire', ar and aresko. Aresko means 'I please', artao means 'I fasten'. It seems likely that the Latin ars, art-, skill or art, was originally the fitting together of apparatus. In this context the Hebrew chashuqim, junction rods, may be relevant. Greek arthron, joint, could be ar and thronos, seat. The Greek stratos, army, may be the fire of Set, a body of men that was meant to strike like a thunderbolt. El and ar may be present in the name of Lars Porsenna of Clusium. The Latin lustro, review, purify, may be 'release the fire of Set', i. e. burn. The censor conducted a review of the people. He may be ka ensis, the sword of ka. Ka suggests the Greek kaio, I burn. The Ossetic word zarand means gold. The letter z can be 'st' as well as 'ts' or 'ds'. Zarand could sound like 'Set's fire'. Marshy places attracted ar. Romulus met his mysterious death on the Goat's Fen, and Dionysus was known as Limnaios, Dionysus of the marshes. He was said to have been born in Nysa, in a well watered plain. Vide Ghirshman, Iran, p. 236, Penguin 1954. The Latin ardea is a heron. It may have been a bird which, like the ibis, was thought to be expert at catching snakes. Hebrew dea means knowledge; the heron's name may mean 'having knowledge about fire'. [The snake is one of the commonest symbols of divine fire]. Ka Ar was often equated with ka. Whereas ar was thought of as the god descending from the sky, the ka was associated with the individual human being, as a kind of halo surrounding the head, and giving the impression of a double. However, it was recognised that the two were essentially manifestations of the same force; the terms ar and ka could be used indifferently. The name Ardoro was given to a Cretan priestess who may even have been the same as Ariadne. The name Ardoro means'gift of fire', doron being Greek for a gift. The Greek ananke, necessity, is spelt anagke. The word ka, pronounced well back in the throat, could have been spelt ga, Doric dialect for the Ionic and Attic word ge, the earth goddess. Ana means 'above'; ananke would thus be the ka above. Electrical forces in the sky were harder to control than those on earth. Ar and ka both appear in the Latin arca, chest. Ariadne is ar yad, hand of fire. She is represented in a statuette holding snakes or a bow in her hands. We have already mentioned that Greek bios, like Sumerian ti, til, means either bow or life. The arrow shot by a deity was electrical, as was the brazen serpent of Numbers XXI. When the priest had caught the divine fire in the ark, the deity was referred to as ka. The word appears in Greek kaio, burn, Latin incendo [in-ka-do, I give the presence of ka]. Osiris, the Egyptian god who resembled Dionysus, was the holy ka who rose from the chest or ark. The Greek verb airo, raise, may possibly contain the word ar. The application of ar was a method of resurrecting Osiris/ Dionysus. In Hebrew qadhosh [divine, holy], the dhosh element means to sprout or produce, and an ark would be made to sprout ka, to radiate sound and light. The prophet Amos, IX: 1, writes: "... I saw the Lord standing upon the altar..." The aura seen was often described, especially in Egypt, as a lotus. The Sanskrit padma is a lotus. Pa, fa, are Sanskrit for light; demas is Greek for body. Padma may be the body produced by the light. There is support for this from Greek: kreas, flesh, is a flow of ka, and the same thing occurs in the Latin verb creo, create. The old spelling of creo was cereo. In Genesis IV: 22, Tubal Cain is described as the first smith. His name can be explained on electrical lines, but first we need to know two things: that there was a deity of springs and water called Lavis, and that confusion could occur over the different directions of writing,, Semitic right to left, others left to right. Many examples of this are given later in this work. The reverse of Tubal gives Lav ut. Ut suggests authority or source. Lavis we have already met. Cain looks like ka in, presence of ka. In the smith's craft two essential processes are heating the metal, then plunging it into water to temper it, a process known as annealing. The name of Tubal Cain, whether by accident or by design, is a shorthand description of the technique of the blacksmith. The smiths of Rhodes, the Telchines, had supernatural powers, and made statues of the gods. The god whom the priest aspires to capture or persuade to descend is the one above; Hebrew El means over. Elektron, amber, is Greek for the god who emerges out of the seat, ek thronou. The Greek thronos, seat, is the chest or capacitor, the Leyden jar, on which the earthly monarch may sit imitating the deity. Etruscan drouna, truna, means 'fear', especially fear of the king sitting on his throne. "Before Jehovah's awful throne...." Readers are referred to God's Fire, by Alfred de Grazia, for a full account of the working of an ark. The fire, ar, could be felt internally by individual human beings. Artistic inspiration was attributed to the thunderbolt by the Greek poet Archilochus. The Roman poet Ovid, Fasti I: 423, writes".. simul aetherios animo conceperat ignes.." Inspiration is described as catching the ethereal fire in one's soul. The reason for attributing a feeling in the bones, or, as the Romans said, in the marrow, medullis, to a sky god rather than to an earth deity, may have been the thunderstorm. A good example of the effect of a thunderstorm is found in the fourth book of the Aeneid, when Dido and Aeneas take refuge in a cave from the storm. The Greek lagneia, lust, may be the fire of el. Agni is the Sanskrit name of the god of fire. Zichne, ignis The Latin ignis, fire, is basically the same as the Etruscan zichne, engraving or writing. Zichne is Set ichne, tracks of Set. Marks made by lightning strokes on rock were taken to be writing by a deity. The German zeichnen is to mark or draw. Latin signum is a mark. Ka may just possibly be an element in the name Pergama, the fortress of Troy. It is a curious coincidence that, if reversed, Pergama resembles magrepha, the gong that was sounded in the temple at Jerusalem at dawn to mark the beginning of the day's burnt sacrifices. The Garamantes lived in the Fezzan, SW Libya. Silius Italicus has "Gar amanticus vates", a prophet of the Garamantes. Greek mantis is a seer; Gara-may be ka and ar. Greek gaio means 'I rejoice'. Latin gaudio, rejoice, is of inward joy, as opposed to laetor, outward rejoicing. Ga = Ka. Greek gauros means proud, haughty. It may mean 'great ka'; Egyptian ur = great. Alternatively, it might be compounded of ka and oura, tail. Cassum lumine, empty of light, means dead, Aeneid II: 85. It is possible that the light is that of the ka. Greek ken-means empty; reversed, it becomes nek-. The Greek nekuia were rites for raising the dead, those who are empty of ka, for consultation. Nekuia is the title of the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Greek chrusos is gold. Gold may have been regarded as symbolising a flow of ka. Rheo, rhoos, = flow. The name of the Etruscan city of Clusium may be ka + luo [Greek, I release], the place which was a centre for releasing the ka from its prison in the ark or chest. The other name of the city was Camers. The Etruscan mar, or mer, means 'take'. The city was a place where the priest, or the princeps, caught the god. Princeps is a Latin word. He was originally an Etruscan magistrate-priest, and his title looks like pur, in-, and capio, fire, force, capture. The Latin genius, a divine spirit accompanying and protecting a person, is probably related to the Egyptian ka. The Etruscan concept of deity was of something vague and omnipresent. In this it differed from the anthropomorphism of the Greeks, which may reflect Egyptian ideas and the identity of the ar and the ka as manifestations of electrical divinity. Heraclitus may have had this in mind when he wrote that the way up and the way down are the same. The Greek kamara and the Latin camera are generally thought to be derived from the Greek kampto, bend. Kamara can mean the roof of a vault, a covered waggon, and a boat with an arched cover. Since the Etruscan mar, mer, means to take, it seems more likely that we are dealing with places and vehicles for the capturing and transporting of ka, as with Egyptian ark boats. The Latin poet Catullus wrote a poem about his yacht. Phaselus is the word he uses for his yacht. It means 'bean'. Another word for bean is faba, Greek kuamos. A boat used for transporting an ark or similar electrical apparatus not only resembled a bean in appearance. Its name was composed of syllables suggestive of Greek and Egyptian electrical terms, namely fa, light, and ba, spirit. Beans had magical significance; Ovid, Fasti V: 388, tells how beans are used in exorcism. The Hebrew qadhosh, holy, sprouting ka, is the same word as Arabic quds, which appears in the Arabic name for Jerusalem, El Quds, the holy city. The Etruscan caveth, liver, is probably the Hebrew kavedh, liver. The Albanian ka is an ox. The word may well go back to Etruscan. The Romans may have detected a link between the ka and the anima, soul. The poet Horace, Satires I: V: 41, refers to friends of his [including Vergil], as "animae quales neque candidiores terra tulit", souls than whom earth has not produced any more shining. The Latin vacuus, empty, suggests that the light of khu comes from an empty box [fa, pa, =light; khu is Egyptian for spirit, or radiance]. The Hebrew hebhel means vanity, idol, breeze, nothingness. The word is a reversal of Latin levis, light [in weight]. Wana is Lydian for fanu, Etruscan for Latin fanum, shrine. Compare Latin vanus, empty, and cavus, hollow. Shetai was a hidden god of Egypt. Compare Hebrew Shaddai, Almighty. The Greek megal-, great, may mean full of the ka of El. Egyptian meh = full; ga = ka. El's ka would be the ka of the comet or body in the sky. The head and radiance of a planet or comet were compared with the head and ka of a human being. Ankh, ka and ku may appear in other Greek words for containers, e. g. aggeion, pail, the human body; aggos, pail, cinerary urn. Kupellon is a big-bellied metal cup for drinking, e. g. chruseia kupella, golden cups, Iliad III: 248. Kulichne is a drinking cup, also a dish. The Greek word tekton, carpenter and builder, may contain ka, and it may be the Latin tego, cover, protect. A carpenter would be one who constructed a house, or ark, to protect something or somebody. But cf. Greek techne, craft, and Egyptian techen, obelisk. Vacuna was an old Sabine goddess. Vide Ovid, Fasti VI: 269. Amen was a powerful and invisible Egyptian deity who was associated with the resurrection of the spirit. Meh, power inherent in nature or in human institutions [Roux, Ancient Iraq p. 542], may be related to the Greek mechane, device, and Egyptian meh, fill. The Greek megal-, great, is probably related. The Sibyl seemed to grow larger as she raved, and senators were auctores, enlargers. The Greek kanoun, basket, was a thing containing ka, as happened in the Dionysiac procession. Dionysus shared with Osiris the fate of being dismembered. Another Greek word for basket is kalathos. Lathein is to lie hidden. Imperium, state authority, may be in-, force, and per, [Egyptian for house or palace]. A house could be a shrine where a god spoke or the human monarch aspired to divine authority. In the case of Latin dominus, lord, we may have dom-, house, and is, divine presence. It is significant that the Albanian thom, say, is probably Etruscan in origin. Hebrew pasil is an idol, image, and resembles the Greek basileus, king. Offerings were put before idols of gods for them to eat and drink. The king was a banqueter, who at the banquet, Etruscan vacl, or sacred feast, devoured the fragments of the monster slain in the battle in the sky. It is likely that the bringing of offerings was originally sympathetic magic aimed at helping the god to live and to save the world from a monster that threatened it. The Etruscan fleres is an idol. The Greek pleroo means I fill. Perhaps the statue contained a god. But pa, fa, means light, and leer is a Germanic word meaning empty. Whatever the explanation, chests or containers that appeared to be empty were the chosen vessels for containing the god or goddess whose manifestation the priests studied to achieve. A summary of the vocabulary may be useful at this point. Agni, Sanskrit, ogonj, Russian, esh, Hebrew, all mean fire. Nephesh, Hebrew, = soul. Egyptian chet, hair; cf. Greek chaite, hair, mane. Etruscan zar, fire; Slavonic zhar. Etruscan sarve = put fire, Albanian zjarrve, Latin servo, servio. Egyptian tcha = fire stick; tehen = pillar; cf. Greek techne, skill, art. Greek grapho and Latin scribo, write, both indicate that writing was a sacred act. The Latin scrobis is a trench. The Egyptian tcham is a sceptre in the form of a scotch [for catching snakes], with an eagle perched on top. Greek kaio, Latin incendo, burn and Latin calere, to be hot, all contain the word ka. Hebrew har = mountain. Harel is an altar [El, god above, appears on mountain tops]. The Arabic haram is a pyramid; Greek amao means harvest, collect. The Greek pelekus, axe, may sometime have had an initial s in Lydia; cf. labrys, tlabrys, axe. We have the words spel, spelaion, cave, Latin spelunca. Lydian pel is a cave. Caves were often associated with split rocks and chasms caused by earthquakes or lightning, resulting in a difference of electrical potential, as at Delphi, where the presence of the god was first detected by goats and the goatherd Koretas. The 'Sibyl's Rock' has a split in it. The Calabri, mountain dwellers in southern Italy, an area where earthquakes were frequent, may have been 'axe people', like the Pelasgi, the people who were wise, sagi, about caves. Their name includes the syllable ka, and perhaps labrys, the double axe that represents the thunderbolt. Hebrew seghor, axe, corresponds to the Latin securis, axe. Another Hebrew word for an axe is maghzerah. The word ar may form part of it, giving some such meaning as 'great fire of Set', and it is the probable origin of the Etruscan and Latin magister. The Samnites of central Italy wore feathers on their helmets, like the Philistines. Philistines have been described as Minoans who fled to the Palestine coast in the twelfth century B. C. [conventional dating; a revised chronology prefers a later date.] What may be an Etruscan link emerges: "Minos... cristata casside pennis..", Minos with his feathered helmet. Hebrew chets is an arrow, spear point, lightning. Qayin, spear, is electricity as a weapon, the qa eye [Hebrew ayin is an eye]. Zayin, Greek zeta, is a weapon. Egyptian set is an arrow; cf. Welsh [i. e. Gallic] saethau, arrows. The Timaeus of Plato is a good source of information about fire. The stars and planets are manifestations of the divine fire. In humans and animals, the fire is found in the muelos, marrow, which is concentrated in the head, but is also found in the spine and tail. The Latin cauda, tail, is ka uthi, where ka dwells, or goes. The Latin caput, head, reveals a close link with Egypt and the east: it is composed of ka and put. The Latin puteus is a spring or well; it is the same word as Pytho, the old name of Delphi, which was a famous source of divine energy. Put-occurs in the context of sexual activity, and survives today in Italian and Greek. The snake was seen as a source of electrical fire. It resembled a monster in the sky; it resembled the curved shape of the spine; with the speed of its strike it resembled lightning. A cobra could cause sudden death. In this it resembled Apollo with his arrows, but it also saved, as in the case of Nechushtan, the brazen serpent in the wilderness. Furthermore, the reactions of victims on altars, like the frogs of Galvani, suggested that the god could give movement and therefore life. Hermes and Dionysus exemplified the physiological effects on the human being, and indeed on animals, and the snake was thus a feature of Bacchic revels and the behaviour of Maenads. Snakes, and dogs, were kept in temples of Asklepios to lick diseased bodies. The Arabic sikina, and Hebrew sakin, knife, explain the Latin scintilla, spark. Reversed, they resemble the Hebrew nachush, bronze. Chabes [Egyptian] is a beard. Bes is a flame, so it may be a flame of ka. Aeschylus, in the Agamemnon, has the watchman see a pogon puros, a beard of flame, when describing the signal fires announcing the fall of Troy. Shuti [Egyptian], plumes, are the 'soul of Geb'. Geb resembles the Greek Ge, the earth goddess. Etruscan suth, suthina, and Hebrew tsuth, mean 'kindle'. Ar appears in the Latin jubar, radiance of a heavenly body. Juba is the hair or mane of an animal, the crest of a helmet, the crest of a serpent, and the tail of a comet. Jubar stella is Phosphorus, and also Hesperus, the morning star and evening star, i. e. the planet Venus. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 14: } {T THE GODDESS GAIA} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 14 THE GODDESS GAIA The priest-electricians were aware that the deity was to be found not only in the sky as lightning, but also in the earth. In Greek, chthon is the earth, Gaia is the goddess in the earth. The snake was seen in the sky as a dragon, and was associated with radiation and its effects, but it was also a creature living in holes in the ground, and snake tubes were incorporated in Cretan houses where the snake was like the Roman genius, guardian of the household. We have suggested that the Egyptian ka was an electrical aura or halo round a person, especially round the head, the electrical headquarters. It was associated with health and life, and appears in the Greek greeting chaire! chairete! Hail! Raise the ka! [airo = raise]. Chairete is very close to the Hebrew chaya, to live, to be well, to enjoy life. The plural chayim is life. Chai, alive, looks and sounds like a reversal of the Greek cry Iacche, which greeted Dionysus, a god of the electrical life in living things. When priests tried to capture lightning by charging Leyden jars in the form of arks or thrones, they recognised the importance of a good earth connection. Altars and arks were put on rock or a base of stone, if necessary deepened by a pit filled with stones, as at Alalakh in Syria and at Chamaizi in Crete. In Assyria, a spear stuck in an altar, or a representation of a winged disk in the sky, symbolised the god. Earthquakes, which were associated in the ancient mind with divine activity in the sky as well as underground, were a source of piezoelectric effects. The goats detected the conditions at Delphi. The Psychro cave in Crete contained a fragment of a jar with a picture of a leaping goat. The Greek verb skirtao, frolic, dance, describes the movements of the goats that the goatherd Korytas noticed at Delphi, and its consonants suggest the Egyptian Seker, an earth deity. The title of Seker was given to Osiris when he was imprisoned in the chest before being restored to life and raised up by electrical force. The Latin securus means secure and enclosed. The Latin sacer has the same consonants; we shall see the connection with dancing in a few moments. It seems possible that ka represents the same phenomenon as the Greek Ga, Ge, or Gaia. We have seen that the Pelasgians may be the people who were wise about caves, and that the tholos tomb may symbolise a link between sky and earth. Inhumation brought the dead into contact with the divine force in the earth. One had, or hoped to have, the best of both worlds. The Egyptian neter, divine, a hieroglyph looking like an axe or hoe, has the same consonants as the Greek antron. Dancing was a sacred ritual. Egyptian monarchs, and king David, danced before the god. Etruscan mimes danced to elicit the earth deity and to imitate and resurrect the dead for consultation. Skr, Latin sacer, when reversed, becomes rks, a Semitic root meaning 'dance', Arabic raqs. The hymn of the Salii, the leaping priests of Rome, included the words limen sali, leap at the threshold. We may compare with this the words of the prophet Zephaniah, chapter I: 9: "In the same day also will I punish all those that leap on the threshold, which fill their masters' houses with violence and deceit" The arch of Janus marked the start of the Via Sacra at Rome, for processions to the Capitol. As he passed under the arch, a triumphing general crossed the limen, threshold, and by so doing became, to the spectators, divine. Limen, threshold, is an interesting word. In Greek it is a harbour. Harbour, port and threshold are all, in a sense, gateways. When read from right to left, limen becomes the Phoenician word for a harbour, namal. Epilepsy was a sacred disease. The jerky movements of a sufferer in a fit probably suggested that an external power was in control of his or her body. Perhaps the lotus eaters of Homer's Odyssey lost their memory as a result of electric shock. El and oth are Hebrew for 'god', and 'sign'; a lotus is tse'el. Augurs relied on watching birds and animals, especially small animals which would creep out of holes in the ground when an earthquake was imminent. The hoopoe with its erectile crest was particularly useful when its attention was drawn to earthquake light and changes in electromagnetic states. Its cry was thought to resemble the Greek opopa, I have seen. Augurs must also have watched the quail, Greek ortux, light finder. Ankh, live, and sankh, make to live, are the origin of the Latin sancio, sanctify, a word whose original meaning was to make to live. Sanctus, holy, means literally 'having been brought to life'. The ankh was the most powerful of amulets and hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt. Its hieroglyph is described as a sandal tie with loop. Why this should mean 'life' has not been made clear. For a connection between a sandal and life, we might turn to the Selli, the Agnihotris, and the Flamen Dialis or priest of Jupiter at Rome. All these priests had one thing in common: they could maintain good earth contact. The Selli were not allowed to wash their feet, the Brahmin Agnihotris or fire priests had to sleep on the ground, the Flamen Dialis had to sleep in a bed whose feet were covered in mud. The common aim was to be in intimate contact with the earth goddess Gaia. The ankh may have a different explanation, representing the dual character, celestial and chthonic, of the electrical force. There may also be a link with the orb and sceptre, regalia with which a monarch is equipped at a coronation ceremony. The orb, which is a sphere with a cross on the top, looks like an ankh if it is turned upside down. Herakles defeated the giant Antaeus, whose strength came to him from the earth, by lifting him up in the air so that he became weak. Alke is Greek for valour, especially of heroes. The inspiration and help probably came from above. I suggest ka and al. Arete, courage, virtue, manliness and excellence may be ar and da, electrical help from Gaia the earth goddess. The Egyptian god who created human beings was Khnemu. The consonants of his name are found in the Greek mechane, a device that was cunning and sometimes dangerous. This may be more than coincidence; a temple contained a device, or devices, for producing a life-giving spark which would animate lifeless matter or the dead. Khnemu's wife Heket injected life into the body that Khnemu had made. Psyche, the Greek for soul or principle of life, is probably an onomatopoeic word for electrical sparking, revealing the presence of the god. The danger attendant on the operation of an ark, which, as well as being charged from the god above, might be a source of radiation from shamir, a substance kept in a lead container, was such that the Jewish High Priest wore special clothing: the choshen or breastplate was of double thickness, like the protective clothing found at the temple of Apollo at Gryneion. That the High Priest's breastplate was more than usually important is clear from the fact that in Roman times it was in the keeping of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem and was issued to the High Priest on special occasions. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 15: } {T AWARA AND KNOSOS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 15 AWARA AND KNOSOS In 1888 Sir Flinders Petrie excavated the mortuary temple of Amenemhet at Hawara in the Fayum. Amenemhet's dates are 1839 to 1791 B. C. It could have been the model for the rebuilding of the Knosos labyrinth in about 1700 B. C., but not for the first large palace building at Knosos, if the latter is to be dated to about 1900 B. C. Petrie assumed that it was the building described by Strabo early in the first century A. D., and by Herodotus, who visited it in about 440 B. C. Its builders were twelve kings, who were contemporaries and related by marriages. It had twelve covered courts and two stories. There were three thousand rooms, half of them underground, half above. Each court was of white stone, surrounded by a colonnade. Such a large number of rooms suggests a storage depot. Near the corner at one end was a pyramid, 240 feet high, with carved figures of animals on it. The pyramid was entered by an underground passage. [Herodotus II: 148] The Fayum temple and the Knosos palace were both temples. The use of white shoes [phaikades] and gypsum may have something to do with cleanliness and purity. The presence of a bath-house and of a guest-house fits the Greek tradition of hospitality involving bath ritual and banquet such as are described in the Odyssey. There is evidence that child sacrifice and cannibalism took place, a combination that reminds one of Kronos and Zeus. Temple ornaments included snakes, bull, horns, axe and statuettes of goddesses. What sort of temple was it at Knosos, and at Hawara for that matter? I suggest that the labyrinths at Hawara and at Knosos, as well as being religious, administrative and storage centres, were representations of heaven and earth, the cosmos. The same may be true of the Hittite capital of Hattusas. Several features tend to this conclusion. The vocabulary used for the pillar or column supports the idea that columns and colonnades represented paths from earth to sky. A summary of the words connected with pillars may be useful, and will demonstrate the close relationship between the various languages. VOCABULARY The Greek kion may have a link with Egyptian. Kion, column, can also, with slightly different pronunciation [different position of the accent], mean 'going'. The letter k betrays the presence of ka. Greek pyrgos, tower, contains the word pyr, fire, and possibly ka as well. Akkadian durr, tower, resembles the Latin turris, and Latin columna needs no translation. Egyptian has an, light tower, and ucha, pillar. It is reported that in 665 B. C. the Assyrians took from Egyptian Thebes two bronze-coated obelisks. Techen, another Egyptian word for a pillar, resembles the Greek techne, skill or art. Techen, reversed, becomes necht, to be strong. Hebrew shath, column, may have some connection with the god Set. Egyptian utchu, memorial tablet, may represent the sound of a spark, such as occurs in tcham, the Egyptian sceptre or scotch that has an eagle perched on the top. Etruscan prezu, column, is the Greek prester, a word which suggests an electrical fire in the form of a tornado. Reversed, it resembles the Hebrew tsarebh, burning. It also resembles Latin stirps. This word is basically stirp-, the final s being only a case ending. Stirps is the trunk and roots of a tree, or the stem and roots of a plant, and would be a useful word to describe a twister. We have already looked at the story of Jacob and his dream of a ladder between earth and sky. He called the city Bethel, house of El. Its original name, Luz, if reversed, becomes zul. The Greek stul- is a pillar. There was probably a connection between the building of pillars and columns and the concept of the World Tree, Yggdrasil, of northern myth. The Greek hule means wood, material. Reversed, this word would sound like el uch. Egyptian ucha is a pillar, so the word could have meant 'divine pillar'. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 16: } {T THE DANCE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 16 THE DANCE Dancing is often associated with magic, and we will consider several typical examples of dancing described by ancient authors. ARKS Not only king David, but also Egyptian monarchs danced. Vide II Samuel V: 14: David danced before the Lord, girded with a linen ephod. Why dance before an ark? I hope that the answer to the question will emerge later, after a general review of what was done. RESURRECTION Dancing was part of resurrection technique aimed at fertility of fields and at raising the dead. In the first millenium B. C. the Etruscans were the acknowledged experts in the Mediterranean world and were consulted by the Romans. Histriones were the Etruscan mimes who performed their dance ritual when summoned in times of danger. Histrio may contain hia, the Etruscan and Albanian for a shadow, Greek skia. The aim would have been to resurrect the dead, who would appear as a ghostly image, and to ask the dead person's advice. The histrio may even have played the part of a shade that was the 'fire of Set' i. e. an 'electrical' spirit. There is support for this interpretation of histrio. The early form was hister, e. g. in Livy VII: 2: 6. Skia, shadow, is used by Circe for the spirits of the dead in Odyssey X: 495, when she advises Odysseus on his journey to the Cimmerians and the land of the dead. The chief actor and choreographer was Larth Matves. Larth, or Lars, means high, or chief. Matves may be mat, dead, and ves, knowing, as in netsvis. He would thus be the one who knew how to communicate with the dead and elicit their advice. The tanasar, or thanasar, raised the Di Manes, the Good Ones, the departed spirits. His title is probably related to the German tanzen, to dance, but a fuller explanation will be attempted in a later chapter. It may be that the special shoes worn by senators were originally dancing shoes, resembling the Greek phaikades, worn by gymnasiarchs and dancers, and the white shoes worn by Egyptian priests. The Etruscan lucairce, priest, is one who raises [Greek airo] the light [Latin luc-]. The Lydians were famous shoemakers. Cothurni, actors' boots, were of Lydian origin. The word may mean 'doorway of ka', ka + thura. The title tanasar of the Etruscan spirit raiser resembles the name of the Egyptian chthonic deity Thanasa-Thanasa. EGYPT The Arabic raqs means to dance. Reversed, it becomes sqr, the consonants of the Latin sacer, sacred, and resembles the Egyptian Seker. Osiris, hidden in a chest, had this title, the name of an ancient earth deity. Thanasa-Thanasa is a name of Amen, an Egyptian hidden god. Vide Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 172; Book of the Dead, p. 542. The word Thanasa suggests not only the Etruscan tanasar but also the Greek thanatos, death. The Greek schematizo, create dance figures, may be related to the Egyptian sekhem, power. Board games were played in Ancient Egypt, Crete and Greece. The men on the draughts board were called dancers, or dogs, by the Egyptians. The ark before which David danced had three main uses: it revealed the presence of the divine power, it was an oracle that made sounds and gave a visual display, and it could be used as a war machine. GOATS Hebrew chaghagh is to dance, or to stagger; chaghav is a ravine. A possible explanation of the similarity of the two words is to be found in the history of Delphi. Diodorus Siculus, 40 B. C., tells the story of the goats dancing and the conclusion that Delphi must be a home of an earth deity. Plutarch, 1st century A. D., gives the name of the goatherd, Koretas, and tells of the accident to the Pythia when the goat needed extra drenching to make it indicate, by shivering, that the deity was present and ready to inspire the Sibyl. Skirtao is a Greek word meaning to make movements like a goat. Hebrew natar is to tremble, or to leap. It shares the same consonants with Egyptian neter, divine, and Greek antron, cave. The god Pan is half goat. Grottos were sacred to him, and the horns symbolise the electrical god in the sky. The leaps of a goat reveal the divine presence in the earth as felt where there were split rocks and caves. A goat is in Latin caper. Per is Egyptian for a house. Was a goat thought of as a ka-container? The German Kaefer is a beetle, and in Egypt the scarab was sacred. Scarab is another of the words based on the letters scr or sqr. THE THRESHOLD The Salii, Roman priests, performed a threshold dance [salio means 'I leap']. Livy, I: 20, writes: "Salios ancilia ferre ac per urbem ire canentes carmina, cum tripudiis sollemnique saltatu iussit". Numa ordered them to go through the city with the shields, with stamping and solemn leaps, singing songs. In Rome the Arval brothers, an ancient priestly college, danced the tripodatio, a solemn stamping of the earth to ensure the fertility of the fields, arva. In the hymn of the Salii, there occur the words "limen sali". This probably means 'leap over the threshold', as an invitation to the Manes to cross the threshold between the world of the departed and the world of the living, and to appear and give advice. The Hebrew shal means transgression. The Hebrew letters shin, sh, and sin, s, are almost identical, and shal could be the Latin salio. SHOES Latin calceus is a shoe. An early spelling is calcius, suggesting a connection with cio, 'set in motion', and ka may have been a component. Kupassis is a Lydian word for a shoe. There may be a link with ku, or ka, and the Greek phaos or phos, light. Hungarian cipö is a shoe; cipész is a shoemaker. A principal aim of dancing was to "raise the light of ka", like the Latin verb quaero, or quairo, to give it its original spelling. THE DANCING FLOOR The labyrinth at Knosos was achanes, roofless [Sophocles, Fragment 1030, and Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, p. 270]. This supports the theory that the labyrinth was a dancing floor where drama was enacted. At Delphi, the drama of Apollo and the snake was performed on a threshing floor next to the Sibyl's Rock, a rock which may have been chosen by the Sibyl Herophyle because it was split, and showed a difference of electrical potential, presumably as a result of an earthquake. DANCING WITH KNIVES In the dance at Knosos described by Homer, the young men carry sacrificial knives, Greek machaira. The Cretan sikinnis was a dance in honour of Sabazios [Dionysus], danced by satyrs. The root skn means knife. EPILEPSY Epilepsy was a sacred disease. The jerky movements of a sufferer in a fit led to the belief that an external power was in control of the sufferer's body. Such a belief may have influenced the movements of Greek dancing; fits would certainly have been studied. GREEK DANCE VOCABULARY The adjective poluskarthmos, much-leaping, is applied to Myrine, an Amazonian queen [Iliad II: 814]. Skairo = dance. In the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, l. 599, Io's skirtemata, dancing movements, are irregular. At Samothrace there was a frieze of dancing girls at the entrance to the precinct. Plato, in his Euthydemus, tells of thronosis, corybantic dances round a seated figure. According to Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Kadmos saw a dance at Samothrace in which the diaulos was played and spears were clashed on bronze shields. A bronze shield and iron knives have been found there. The Karpaia was a Spartan dance in honour of Artemis. Karyatizein was to dance at a festival of Artemis at Karyae. Iliad XVIII: 590: The dance at Knosos begins as a round dance like a dithyramb, then becomes confrontational like a tragic choros, with two acrobats loose in the company. Odyssey VIII: 264: The dancers strike the holy floor [choron theion] with their feet. Odysseus marvels at the flashing movements [marmarugas] of their feet. According to Hesychius, choros is the same as kuklos and stephanos, circle and crown. Choros is especially the round dance of the dithyramb, or the floor where it is performed. Choros kuklikos is a dithyramb. HEBREW Raqadh is to leap, jump, or dance, and is close to the Arabic rqs, dance. We have already mentioned the Greek halma, leap. It may conceivably be a reversal of the Hebrew melekh, king. Kings were leapers. But melekh may also mean 'he who has the honey', like the infant Zeus. ASTRONOMICAL The two acrobats loose in the dance company at Knosos may be representing some sky phenomenon. At the court of King Alkinous, the dancing floor is an agon, a place for a contest. In Odyssey VIII: 260ff., it is cleared for dancing, and Demodocus sings of the love affair between Ares and Aphrodite. Agon can be the sky, and should be understood thus in the passage where Hephaestus is described in his workshop, putting the finishing touches to his tripods, which have wheels so that they may be able to travel and enter the agon. CONCLUSIONS The purpose of dancing was: to charge a war machine, the ark; to charge an ark for an impressive display; to summon the deity at an oracle; to achieve the resurrection of Osiris; to bring to life the Manes for consultation; to rouse fertility deities [e. g. the Arval dance]; to destroy monsters by sympathetic magic, as at Knosos and in Greek tragedy; to imitate epilepsy, thereby showing that the god is in one; to imitate animals, some of which were ka-containers. There was considerable sharing of vocabulary and technique. Reversals indicate the meeting of Indo- European and Semitic speakers. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 17: } {T ROCKS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 17 ROCKS The gypsum slabs used at Knosos for floors and walls are significant because of their colour, white. The white floors and walls could be thought to represent the heavens and the brilliance of the upper air. White floors were chosen not only at Knosos but also elsewhere. The courtyard of the palace at Mari on the Euphrates was paved with gypsum slabs. The white dress of a priestess at Knosos was not only to indicate purity and ritual cleanliness. It shows that she represents a divine personage, the Cretan goddess in one of her manifestations. It is probable that priestesses appeared in openings, as they are said to have done at Ephesus, imitating a goddess so as to impress those present. Perhaps a goddess was lowered, as if in a Greek play, to indicate descent from heaven. The name Piptuna, one of the names of the goddess, suggests the Greek pipto, fall. Epiphanies are also reported by Hebrew prophets. Amos, IX: 1, describes his vision of the Lord standing upon the altar. Zechariah, III: 1, writes that the Lord and Satan appeared together. Ezekiel, VIII: 2, mentions an appearance of fire, and amber colouring. Amber is in Greek elektron, god out of the seat. In Hebrew it is chashmal, a word which in modern Hebrew means electricity. One of the most colourful references is from Isaiah, VIII: 19: "... wizards that peep and mutter..." When Homer describes the dance at the court of king Alkinous, Odysseus marvels at the twinkling of the feet of the dancers, marmaruge. It means the play of light; amaruge is the twinkling of stars. Marmaros is stone. Amaruge hippou occurs in Aristophanes, Birds, l. 925, where it may mean the twinkling movements of hooves, and perhaps sparks, as in the Latin phrase ignipedes equi, fiery-footed horses. White clothing, the pharos, is worn by girls at the dance portrayed on the shield of Achilles. It is also worn by corpses prepared for funeral rites, as at the funeral of Patroclus, Iliad XVIII: 353. The columns at Hawara were white, of marble. There was a theatre area in both Hawara and Knosos. It has been suggested that the maze design may have been a pattern on the ground for a dance. Perhaps there was a confrontation between two opponents, hero and Minotaur. The latter would be a man wearing a mask that resembled a bull's head, with horns. There were probably a dance and battle that symbolised the apparent movements of objects in the sky, and it is possible that we have here the origin of Greek drama. There is a clear link between threshing-floors, theatres, and the sacred and magical. It is easy enough to say that the link is fertility rites, aimed at ensuring good corn or grape harvests, but there is another factor, the nature of the site. The favoured base for not only threshing -floors but altars was rock. Stones could be brought to supplement the living rock of a 'high place', or as a substitute. The Old Testament contains many references to rock; the ark functioned best on rock. Genesis LV: 11 mentions the threshing-floor of Atad, or Abel. When the people of Beth Shemesh looked into the ark, there was a disaster: over 50,000 people were killed by the Lord [I Samuel VI: 18ff.]. The ark had been put on the "great stone of Abel". During war between the Israelites and the Midianites, Gideon, who was threshing wheat under an oak, was visited by an angel of the Lord. In Judges VI: 20 the angel tells him to lay food "upon this rock, and pour out the broth". In verse 21 the angel touches the food with his staff; fire rises out of the rock and consumes the flesh and the cakes. Gideon's reaction was fear because he had seen an angel of the Lord face to face. "And the Lord said unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die." Gideon built an altar there, and called it Jehovah-shalom. For an example of the sensitivity of an animal to a divine presence, see Numbers XXII: 23. Balaam's ass refuses to go forward when the angel of the Lord stands in his way. JERUSALEM Isaiah, VIII: 18, writes "... the Lord of hosts which dwelleth in Mount Zion..." There is mention of a threshing-floor on Mount Moriah. It was associated with Araunah, and with Ornan the Jebusite: "and the angel of the Lord was by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite." This became the site of the altar of burnt offerings in the temple in Jerusalem. The temple built by Solomon was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B. C. When it was rebuilt by Zerubbabel, it was said that five things were missing: the ark, the holy fire, the Shekhinah, the spirit of prophecy, the Urim and the Thummim. The Samaritans sacrificed at the rock on the top of Mount Gerizim, the Holy of Holies of the Samaritan temple. The site of the temple of Solomon is now a mosque. In the Dome of the Rock, as it is now called, a piece of living rock projects through the floor. Its name in Arabic is Es Sakhra. [Es is a form of the definite article in Arabic] It was from this stone that Muhammad took off for heaven on his horse El Baruq. The Hebrew baraq means lightning. Muhammad is not the only person of whom it was said that he ascended to heaven in a miraculous way. The prophet Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. Romulus was said to have disappeared during a storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, when he was holding a meeting with the people on the Goat's Fen. It is possible that we have a clue to these occurrences in the Etruscan word prezu, Greek prester, tornado. A tornado is associated with turbulent electrical conditions in a severe storm. There may also be a link with stories about the world tree, Yggdrasil. The Latin stirps, root and trunk of a tree, uses the same consonants as the Greek astrape, lightning. Tree, in Arabic, is shazhara. The Slavonic root zhar means fire. The importance of thresholds, especially brazen ones, is to be attributed to electrical factors. Temples and, later, Christian churches, were often situated in places associated with anomalous electrical conditions, due either to splits in rock or to a special attraction for lightning [Zeus Enelysios, Zeus who has descended to be in a certain spot]. For example, in the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles, Oedipus, warned by the god that he is about to die, goes to a place where there are split rocks, the Brazen Threshold. Theseus and Peirithous had been temporarily paralysed here, prisoners in stone seats. His death was heralded by thunder and by sounds suggestive of a sine wave. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 18: } {T RITUALS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 18 RITUALS Among religious practices in the ancient world were the following: Acquisition of divine strength by the king, through anointing by the priests with sa-ankh. Visits to shrines, e. g. to the sanctuary on Mount Iuktas, so as to be nearer to the lightning god, and, in the case of caves, to places where there were differences of electrical potential between split rocks, such as the 'Brazen Threshold' of the Oedipus at Colonus. Visits to mountain tops, where lightning was known to strike frequently, aided if necessary by a bothros as at Chamaizi. Fires on hill tops may in some instances have been mimesis, in an attempt to atttract lightning. The reports of Moses and his visit to Mount Sinai would have been influential. Worship of the bull: protection of the Apis bull. Slaughter of bulls and goats. Drowning the bull for the release of the divine element. Eating the bull; compare the Etruscan vacl, banquet. Drinking blood mixed with milk, honey and wine. In the worship of Mithras, the devout were drenched with bull's blood. Imitation of the bull, by wearing tail, mask and horns. Grasping the bull's horns, being tossed up and doing a somersault, perhaps, like Europa, riding on the bull to illustrate a degree of control over a dangerous and powerful object. Tracking down the bull in a maze and killing it. The maze could symbolise the sky through which the celestial bull pursued a dangerous winding course. At a Roman sacrifice, the man who sacrificed the animal was the popa. It was his task to cut open the animal to inspect the liver, in order to find whether the future was favourable or not. The Greek opopa means 'I have seen'. An Etruscan mirror shows an official inspecting a liver. The inscription is "pavatarchies", which Mayani translates as "Tarchies has seen". [The Etruscans Begin to Speak, p. 25] Hair [comet's tail?] was cut from a victim's head and thrown on the fire. This may symbolise Zeus or Jupiter destroying his enemy by lightning. Spiral decoration may have symbolised the maze, or the orbital circling of an intruder. Wine symbolised the blood spilt in battles in the sky. Columns and trees were worshipped. The Latin for an oak, quercus, shows that it was a ka-container. Khu is the Egyptian spirit soul. Symbolic activity at Knosos included the destruction of dangerous monsters, union with the deity, descent to the underworld, resurrection, and ascent to the sky. The task of the ruler was to acquire and exercise divine powers. Incubation was practised with the aim of uniting the royal family with the deity. Babylonian kings would spend the night in the saharu, a shrine on top of a ziggurat, in the company of a chosen priestess. The healing power of the snake was exploited in Greek and Roman temples. During an epidemic, snakes from the temple of Asklepios at Epidaurus were taken to Rome. As the ship was approaching the island in the Tiber, the snakes went overboard and landed on the island. A temple was built there; snakes were induced to lick diseased or injured parts of the body. Dogs also were used and were sacred. In Christian churches in the Middle East dedicated to St. George, rings were fixed in stone pillars. Sufferers from mental disease were chained to a pillar for the night to be cured. In this context, it is of interest to note that Morton, in his book In the Steps of the Master, reports that the Oecumenical Patriarch of New Rome had a serpent-headed crozier. An early term for Christians after baptism was 'illuminated'. Apparently there was thought to be a link between water, divine visitation, and light. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 19: } {T LIFE} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 19 LIFE Words for life cross the frontier between Semitic and Indo-European languages in the period of Greek and Roman civilisation. Greek bios resembles the Latin vigere, to be well and strong, in that it is a common word for life in the sense of day to day physical existence. Grimm's law helps us to see the relationship. Related to vigere are vis, stem vi, force or power, vita, life, and vivo, I live. The Greek is, in-, force or presence, originally began with a digamma, a letter like our f. It is the same as the Latin vis, and related to bios. Sanskrit giv is the Russian zhiv-, alive. Turning from the material or physical aspect of life, we find the key word in Greek, psyche. It is generally translated 'soul', and means the principle of life. The power of self-originated movement was taken by the Greeks to be a sign of the presence in the object or animal of psyche. The Greek philosopher Thales is believed to have said that a magnet contained psyche. Latin anima means air, then life in the sense of breath and physical life; animus is the spiritual and reasoning aspect of life. We have seen that Egyptian ankh is life, and sankh is to make to live, and I have suggested that here we have the explanation of Latin sancio, sanctify, meaning 'make to live'. Is the Greek angelos, messenger, composed of ankh and El? In Numbers XXII: 23, the story of Balaam and his ass illustrates how electrical phenomena could be interpreted as messengers. Hebrew chai means 'alive'; chaim [a plural form] means 'life'. Greek haima is blood. Egyptian sankh is almost identical with the Latin for blood, sanguis. It is possible that onomatopoeia played a part in the creation of vocabulary to communicate by sound the effects produced by the electrical god. Psyche is an obvious example of a word which can suggest the hissing or spitting sound of sparks and electrical discharges. Qa begins with a sound produced far back in the throat. In Egyptian, tcham, sceptre, suggests the sound at close quarters of a lightning strike, and ka probably sounded quite like the Hebrew qa of qadhosh, holy. Breathing, gasping and choking sounds may have provided models for the varieties of 'k' sound. The letter z could sound like st, and sometimes stands for Set. The sky, and sky phenomena, are the usual explanation, in the ancient world, for the origin of life. If the earth mother produces living organisms it is generally the result of action from above. Divine activity could come from underground, and there was a pair of deities, Cerus and Ceres, who were concerned with the fertility of the fields. But the Latin verb aro, plough, suggests the divine fire. Much human activity was mimesis, imitation of divine activity observed in the sky or coming out of the earth. Hebrew dam, blood, may have been reversed to give the Latin madeo, madere, to be wet. Blood was used to drench altars and increase conductivity. Sanga is Sumerian for a priest, who is concerned with bringing to life the god. It is clearly the same as sanguis and sankh. In Hades, ghosts had to drink blood before they were physically capable of talking to Odysseus and Aeneas. Mayani has suggested that the Etruscan levac means 'anointer', and quotes in support the Albanian ljej, to smear. Egyptian priests anointed kings with sa-ankh. This life force was electrical, transferred from a statue that had been charged. Statues could be hollow, like Leyden jars. The Etruscan levac resembles the name of the Levites, who had the dangerous task of looking after the ark. Vide Numbers III. We have seen that sancio is to bring to life. In Egypt, sanctification was the raising and bringing to life of the holy ka, Osiris, who was enclosed in a chest. Greek airo, raise, may be related to ar, the fire that gave movement and life, and enabled people and animals to stand, Latin sto. Greek zo means 'I live'. Etrucan zac [stac] = stand. One of the methods employed in Egypt was to set the coffin of Osiris in a hollow tree trunk, and raise the trunk to an upright position. The trunk could symbolise the spine of Osiris, or the world tree Yggdrasil. The Roman writer and philosopher Cicero refers to the popular belief that human beings came from rocks, or from oak trees. Both rocks and oaks attract lightning. Human beings were created by the Egyptian god Khnemu, a potter. His wife Heket provided the soul which was added to the clay. Khnem means: a jug; to write; to be joined to. It may be significant in this context that Etruscan zichne, to write, is Set ichne, the tracks of Set, i. e. the marks made on rock by lightning. LIBATIONS The Hittite spanza, and the Greek spendo, pour a libation, are best understood as meaning 'down from the five', i. e, the five planets visible to the unaided human eye. [Greek pente = five] The vocabulary used for the plates and vessels that could be employed deserves mention, and the process is illustrated in a relief from Malatya. Riqqu'a, Hebrew, plate, beaten metal. Qe'arah, Hebrew, bowl, dish. Cf. Latin patera, which may contain ar. Hulsna, Etruscan, libation. The stem of the word is huls. German schlucken is to drink. A reversal. Cepen, Etruscan, priest. This may be spendo, since the letter c in Etruscan, as in English, is sometimes an s and sometimes a k. But cepen may be an instance of ka. Phiale, Greek for a libation bowl, is similar to the Latin patera, which resembles the Hebrew pathar, explain. Fa, pa, mean light. Phiale is also a shield, and, in Iliad XXIII: 243, a cinerary urn. Spendo, with the letter 's' meaning 'down from', as in modern Russian, has something in common with Greek sophos, clever. Hebrew oph means 'birds'. The augur's knowledge came down from birds. The Hebrew mophet is a portent, meaning 'from the birds'. Greek aspis, aspid-, is a shield. It is a reversal of the Mycenean dipas, cup, or heaven. Hittite tipas is a cup, and also means 'heaven'. The Latin lanx, lanc-, dish, may be El, the one above, and ankh, life. FIVES Greek pimpremi, burn, may have a connection with the five planets that were held to radiate divine force. The Cumbrian and Welsh, i. e. Gallic, word pimp, used by shepherds counting sheep, means five. The draughts board was said to have been invented by Thoth. Alexander the Great also claimed to be the inventor. Greek pessos is a 'man' at draughts. Etruscan pes is five. The squares on the board may represent areas of the sky, and the Egyptians called the 'men' dancers. At Carthage there was an important body of five magistrates called the pentarchy. At Rome the term quinqueviratus meant a body of five officials. CAULDRONS The phenomenon described by Jeremiah as a seething pot facing the north may have had some influence on the design of ancient pottery as well as being the origin of the popularity of the tripod cauldron. The cauldron, or the object in the sky resembling a cauldron, could be a source of rejuvenation, apotheosis, destruction and death [exploited by Medea]. There is an inscription from Syria of the time of the Roman emperor Trajan, dedicated to Leukothea. It contains the words 'apotheotheis en toi lebeti', made divine in the cauldron. The Greek lebet-, cauldron, is probably el beith, El's house. Vases sometimes resemble in shape the human heart, the organ that ancient American priests regularly tore out of the bodies of their sacrificial victims. Such a rite may have had a magical purpose similar to that of Greek tragedy, and to that of the Egyptian practice of insulting red-headed people, throwing an ass over a cliff, and sacrificing red cattle, because Typhon was red-headed and like an ass in colour. The original aim was to bring Typhon low. Vide Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 362Eff.. The Hebrew parur, kettle or pot, may be a word inspired by the sight of the seething pot in the sky. Par is a Slavonic word for steam; ur is Egyptian for great. It is worth noting that the ancient views on what we might call a theory of evolution were more intelligent and accurate than the popular science of more recent times has recognised. It is one thing to explain how various species have either survived, or failed and become extinct, and to trace the factors responsible. It is quite another thing to explain why there should be different species in the first place from which nature can select. The recent study of radiation and extra-terrestrial catastrophes, leading to an increase in the understanding of the causes of change, would have the understanding and approval of the ancients, whose views amounted to a belief in punctuated equilibrium or quantavolution. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 20: } {T QUAIRO: RAISING THE KA} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 20 QUAIRO: RAISING THE KA A classical scholar glancing at the above heading may be surprised at the spelling. The Latin verb that means 'I inquire' is normally spelt quaero. Quairo, the older spelling, is the clue to the original meaning of the word, a meaning that emerges from a study of an oracular shrine and what happened there. The Arabic name for Jerusalem is El Quds. It is the same as Hebrew qadhosh, holy, 'producing qa'. The temple at Jerusalem was the site of an oracle, and this reminds us of an important point: an oracular site was holy ground. Greek chresterion is an oracle. The word indicates that it was a place where there was a flow of ka, or qa. Chre is used in ordinary Greek as 'it is necessary', but its original meaning was 'ka flows', implying that the oracular force is appearing or present. Latin delubrum is a shrine. It may be 'Ge lubet', the earth goddess pleases. Ge, or Gaia, was the earliest deity at Delphi, associated with the rock and the effects of earthquake and lightning. In the Breton language today the word loc means a holy place, presumably the same as Latin locus. The early form of locus is stlocus. This suggests a connection with Set, a deity who was electrically live, and whose name appears in Greek stephanos, crown. Greek pyr, fire, if reversed, resembles the Latin rupes, stem rup-, crag, rock. The Sibyl Herophyle at Delphi prophesied while standing on the 'Sibyl's Rock'. The rock has a narrow crack, and could therefore be a holy place where the difference in electrical potential could be felt. The Albanian thom, 'say', may be the same as the Latin domus, house, via Etruscan. There is an undercurrent of sanctity about ancient words for 'house', leading one to think that a domus was basically a building to shelter the ground where the god's voice could be heard. The Hebrew qol, voice, is a reversal of log-, Greek for word, and of Latin loc-, place. In Russian, dom is a house. Domovina is old Russian for a coffin. Etruscan tombs are often in a form suggesting a house. Etruscan thun is a house. There were two main situations where the deity could be heard, or seen, by priests, or felt by a Sibyl. The force could be felt in the bare rock, or a capacitor could be assembled and charged from the atmosphere, a dangerous procedure at a time of electrical storm conditions. The essential devices for capturing the electrical god were something hollow, a box, chest, ark, in Hebrew aron, in Latin arca, and a rod. Hebrew arah means collect. The Etruscan goddess Vacuna may be the one in the empty box: Latin vacuus is 'empty', cavus is hollow. In each of these two words there are the Egyptian ka and khu. Camera, a container, is a ka catcher; mer is Etruscan for 'take'. As we have seen, a pit full of stones could be situated under the altar to increase the likelihood of a lightning strike, as at Chamaizi. At a shrine where there was a capacitor, the priest tried to obtain an epiphany of the god. Quairo, I ask, is composed of the Greek airo, raise, and qu. The priest tried to raise the khu, the spirit soul of Osiris, or the ka of Osiris. Etruscan lucairce is a priest; luc-is light. Greek episteme, scientific knowledge, is in Homer intellectual power and artistic skill. Epi = on, histemi = I make to stand. It may refer to the skill, Latin ars, art-, of the priest in making the god stand up on the ark or chest. Hebrew qesem is an oracle. Cf. Greek sema, sign, and ka. A Roman priest would utter the words 'Favete linguis! ', be favourable with your tongues! Favere is to cherish the light. Fa is light; the verb beare means to cherish. Beare is more familiar in the form beatus, blessed. Favete linguis is generally taken to mean 'hush! ' Greek kluo, I listen, or 'I am talked about, I am heard', may be ka and luo, I release the ka. It is similar to Greek akouo, I hear, I am talked about. We have seen that padma is a lotus, composed of fa or pa, light, and demas, body. Greek anthos is a flower [blossom], and may be present in the Greek manthano, I find out, and in the name Rhadamanthus, judge and deity of the underworld. The most important branch of learning was that concerned with the electrical deity. We may have here, in the Greek manthano, the Semitic min or m, meaning 'from', and anthos, so that knowledge is 'from the flower', i. e. from the lotus, which represents the aura or glow. The Greek mant-is a seer. Lotus may be composed from two Semitic words, el, and oth, sign of el. The plural of oth appears in the exclamation ototoi, said by Cassandra as she feels the presence of Apollo and begins to speak and prophesy at the gateway of the palace at Mycenae, in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Greek gignosco and Latin cognosco mean to get to know by observation. They are presumably from ka and the Greek noeo, I notice. Similarly the Greek noun gnosis means the acquisition of knowledge by observation. It is probable that the name of Knosos in Crete means that it was the place of observing and getting to know ka. The Greek oida, I know, is a perfect tense meaning 'I have seen', implying the presence in the mind of a picture, shape or form, Greek idea. The Greek eidos also means form, shape or figure. Latin video, I see, is the same word with the digamma at the start. Creo, Latin, I create, has an earlier form cereo. A flow of ka? The Greek rheo has two meanings, to flow, and to say. Greek kreat-means flesh, Latin caro, carnis. Chrema is 'thing'. Chre means 'it is necessary', originally 'the god flows', or 'the god speaks'. Greek sophia, cleverness, originally meant having the knowledge and ability to detect the electrical god by observing birds, especially the hoopoe and the quail. The Latin lumen, light, may be from the Greek perfect passive participle lelumenos, having been released, from the verb luo, I set free. When the spark or glow appeared it was seen by the Egyptian priest as the release of Osiris from the chest in which his mutilated body had been lying. There is a resemblance to Greek louo, wash. The Egyptian wab was a priest charged with washing the statues, a procedure which would increase conductivity and encourage the flow of ka. Latin lavo, wash, may be the Egyptian word wab. [The letter w is similar to the hard l that occurs in Slavonic languages] If the priests were successful, the god would emerge and appear on the box, or throne, place of fear. Etruscan tru, dru, drouna, is fear. The Latin capax, stem capac-, means 'containing', or 'able'. It could be composed of ka, fa, and cio. It would thus have meant, originally, 'setting in motion the light of ka'. El ek thronou is the god out of the seat. The reversal of thronos is Nortia, an Etruscan deity, possibly an object in the northern sky. The Latin for science is artium studia, study of arts. Studium, zeal and care, may be Set audire, to hear Set, i. e. the sound of a spark, hiss or hum indicating that the ark, a capacitor, has acquired a charge. I have suggested earlier that ars means skill in pleasing the fire by fitting the apparatus together, and that Greek ararisko, I set up, is ar, and aresko, I please. Artao means I fasten. Hebrew pasil is an image or statue, and resembles the Greek basileus, king, the banqueter on the remains of a monster. Vacl is Etruscan for a holy feast. In Latin there is cena, dinner, which is the Slavonic tsena, price, value. It was the reward for killing the monster. Incense, Etruscan chim, was burnt in front of statues of ancestors, perhaps in an attempt to summon the life-giving force, or even to encourage breathing. Vapour can be seen; Etruscan thum is smoke, and Greek thumos can mean breath. Thuo, offer, burn, and thumos suggest the Russian dim, smoke. Egyptian sentra, incense, may be a reversal of ar Thanasa, fire of the underground deity. As we have seen, sanga, priest, with an obvious link with sanguis, blood, resembles sankh. Sanguis, and anguis [snake], have a rare form of the accusative case, sanguen and anguen. Sankh and in-suggest 'force of life' or 'presence of life'. Hiereus is Greek for a priest, and may be a link with the Hebrew yirah Yahweh, fear of the Lord. A priest's work at a shrine was dangerous. The hiereus was the fearing one; the form of the word resembles that of basileus and Tereus, the banqueting one and the observing one. Hebrew kohen is a priest. In Egyptian, neter hen means 'servant of the divine'. The Etruscan tanasar, mime, was a dancer who could bring to life. He is the one who holds out [tanas] the fire [ar]. A tanasar is shown doing this in the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia. Latin sacerdos, priest, contains a reversal of the Latin for a king, rex. Rex, king, appears to be the same word as raqs, dance. When the display at the ark disappeared, it was said that the god had left. Gk. leipo = leave. Etruscan lupu = died. Greek pothos, regret for what is missing, may have been apo, from, and oth, a sign. Pothos may have meant the absence of the desired light and sound that indicated the presence of the god in the ark or capacitor. Priests lamented his absence and prayed for his return. Latin cadaver, corpse, is probably a compound of Semitic words, ka and the Hebrew dabhar, destroy, indicating that the electrical presence in the body has been destroyed. In Akkadian, Bit Mummi is the House of Knowledge. Knosos, or Gnosos, was the place of finding out, Greek gnosis. VOICE Hebrew qol is voice. Greek logos, word, is a reversal of qol. Oracles were divine mouthpieces. The sound that emerged from the capacitor was represented in Egyptian and in Hebrew by a sequence of vowels, as in Yahweh. The smooth rise and fall, like a sine wave, can be experienced by whispering [not singing] Yahweh, or the English vowel names EAIOU and back again. It seems possible that the Latin Iov-, stem of the name of the god Jupiter, has the same origin. One may speculate that the words 'sing', 'song', and German 'Gesang' are connected with ankh, sankh, and sanc-. Singing would thus be a part of resurrection technique. Imperium, authority, and dominus, lord, are two key words in Roman political language and thought. Egyptian per and Lydian pir, house, combine with in-, to give 'house, power, ' as the meaning of imperium, and power of the house [domus] for dominus. Latin loquor, stem loq-, loc-, I speak, suggests Hebrew qol when reversed. Loc is a holy place. The Latin fanum, shrine, is cognate with fari, to speak. An animal or bird that made a similar sound to that which was heard at a shrine would be thought to be divine, or at any rate to be closely associated with the divinity. The owl might be an example of this. Apollo was associated with the wolf, as suggested by his title Lukeios. Greek lukos is wolf. The howl of a dog or wolf may be represented by iaaooei. The Russian for wolf is volk. Because the Russian letter L is hard in this word, volk sounds more like the Latin voc-, stem of the word vox, voice. The Russian bog means god, and may be the same root as vox. Hebrew has two interesting coincidences. Dabhar is to speak; debhir is the Holy of Holies; debher is destruction. Greek aeido, contracted to ado, is to make a sound, to sing. Latin aedes is a temple. Templum may be from Greek temno, I cut [of the augur's movements with his lituus], transferring the sky pattern to the ground for the foundations of a city]. Catena, Latin, chain, may be ka, and teneo, I hold. Experiments in magnetism were made on the island of Samothrace, as the poet Lucretius records in his poem on the nature of the universe, De Rerum Natura, VI: 1004. Plato, in his Ion, 533D, compares the relationship of poet to performer and audience to a chain held by magnetic force. [Vide Crosthwaite, Ka, p. 79] Latin verbum, a word, sounds like the first syllable of verbero, I strike. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 21: } {T KINGS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 21 KINGS There were various words for 'king' in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will glance at some of them such as Hebrew melekh, Greek basileus, Latin rex, and at associated words such as Greek prytanis and archon, Etruscan zilch, Latin princeps and flamen, and Norse godi. Originally, all power centred on the king. The ideal aimed at by the ancient monarch was to combine the functions and powers of prophet, priest and military leader. Later, the various duties and powers were shared between political officers and priests. For example, augurs assumed responsibility for discovering the will and intentions of the gods and advising the monarch about the probable course of events. Monarchs, officials and tyrants [in the Greek sense of the word tyrant] frequently assumed names, titles and behaviour linking them with a particular deity, divine power or phenomenon. For example, a viceroy of the king of Persia was called a satrap, the rhapis, rod, of Set. Taranos imitated thunder as he drove about in his chariot. There is often a link with an electrical term, for example, the fire from the sky, ar, which survives in 'monarch', and in Greek arche, 'beginning' or 'rule'. Kings are known to have danced, especially before an object looking like a staircase, ziggurat or step pyramid, and David danced before the ark. Dancing was one of the king's duties. Etruscan and Latin speakers, hearing the Semitic word raqs, dance, adopted the word in the form regs, spelt rex, king. A place or thing was regarded by the Romans as sacer if it was associated with a divinity. Threshing floors and places such as Es Sacra in Jerusalem, where the rock emerged from the ground, were holy, and some of them became places where kings danced and plays were performed. At first the king would dance to show that the deity was present, perhaps to impress by demonstrating that he was in touch with the god or goddess. As time passed without further catastrophes such as earthquakes and major electrical disturbances, the force ebbed away. The king's dance would then have another aim: to revive the failing god. One of the king's most important duties was to keep the god alive in his shrine. To build and maintain a temple such as that of Hestia in Athens, or of Vesta in Rome, containing fire, tended by Vestal Virgins or by a flamen, blower of the fire [flare is to blow], was a way of persuading a deity to make the temple its permanent home and to continue to protect the city or persons concerned. We have seen that Etruscan vacl, or vacil, means religious banquet. The v of vacl is interchangeable with b [Grimm's Law], and the Etruscan letter c may stand not only for k but also for something like the English s. A Greek basileus is a person who is basilens, feasting. Mayani, in his book The Etruscans Begin to Speak, quotes from an Albanian ballad by G. Fishta. Heroes defeat a monster, and feast on two fat stags in a celebratory banquet. Any animal that had horns ran the risk of being sacrificed as a symbol of an object in the sky with horns, regarded as a threat to the stability of the kosmos, celestial order. The general resort to sympathetic magic, for example by the Egyptians, who sacrificed red cattle because Typhon was red, since nothing else could be done, explains the willingness to spend huge sums on sacrifices, games and drama festivals. The Greek king, and the Etruscan or Roman noble, had to be prepared to sacrifice their own lives when necessary. King Kodros of Athens did so, as did Marcus Curtius when, to appease divine anger, he rode into a chasm that had opened in the Roman forum. In Athens, and in other places in the ancient world, the king was replaced by officials. His duties were shared among officers such as the Athenian archons, of whom there were nine. The first was known as ho archon, the archon, the second as ho basileus, the king archon, in charge of public worship and criminal trials, the third as ho polemarchos, the war archon. The others were hoi thesmothetae, the lawmakers. A thesmos was an ordinance, enjoining the orderly and correct way of doing things, reflecting order in the cosmos. All archons had something of the divine authority of the basileus, and Homer refers to kings as diotrephees, of heavenly nurture, i. e. descent. They wore a crown, stephanos, as a badge of office, as did any official or individual who was performing a sacrifice. Greek arche means origin, beginning, and hence authority and rule. Ar appears in Etruscan, meaning divine fire, lightning. Arseverse, an inscription in Etruscan, is a prayer to Sethlans, a god who controlled lightning, to turn aside the fire. Latin severto means 'turn aside'. The Greek letter chi, which appears in arche, is probably related to the Hebrew qa, which appears in qadhosh, 'producing qa' and therefore holy. Greek stephanos is Set phanos, Set appearing, a manifestation of the god encircling the head, and applied to an object such as a bowl of wine. In his Timaeus, Plato associates the head with the divine fire. Among the most important officials in Athens was the prytanis. Tanuo means 'I stretch out'. His title is similar to that of the Etruscan tanasar. The poet Pindar refers to Zeus as prytanis of lightnings and thunderbolts. The title means 'he who holds out the fire', i. e. the hurler of lightning. The prytanis was one of fifty committee members of the boule, council. It is probable that his duties included tending the sacred fire of Hestia, the goddess of the hearth of the city. As a stoker, the prytanis was the earthly copy of the god in the sky who waved the brand to make it blaze, then hurled it. Such a deity was a theos. This word may mean 'he who puts the fire'. The Indo-European root detj, which appears in Russian, means to put. Another root found in Albanian is ve, to put. This is from an eastern, Caucasian, area, as are some other words which go back to Etruscan. When combined with the Slavonic root zhar, fire, we have the Latin serv-, servant. In this context, we may recall the slave boy, Servius Tullius, who became king. The king was the one who preserved the fire. Servo means save, servio means serve. The two verbs, superficially different, are basically the same. The king was the servant of the god, the preserver of the holy fire, who added fuel to it, and waved a brand to make it burst into flame. A flamen was a Roman priest, associated with the cult of an important person such as an emperor. Like the prytanis, he had to blow the flame. The genius of a Roman was a kind of guardian angel. Considering that the letter g is often a transliteration of a Semitic q, it seems possible that the genius has much in common with the Egyptian ka. The aim was that the genius, fire and life, of the head of state should not be extinguished. Emperor worship and the building of temples to Egyptian monarchs and the royal ka reveal the political importance of the priests. Another of our words is the Latin princeps, chief, chieftain, or prince, equivalent to the prytanis as referred to by the poet Pindar. The title is a combination of three words: pyr, in-, and capio. A prince captured the power of the fire. The Norse godi was a chieftain who had priestly powers, looked after a shrine and supervised the worship of its deity. ANOINTING A Greek king was distinguished from another kind of monarch or sole ruler, the turannos, tyrant, by the fact that he was the legitimate ruler. In Egypt kings were anointed by priests, and the Bible contains many references to the anointing of priests and of kings. The practice survives today in England. The king's right to the throne and sceptre [source and symbol of electrical divinity] had support that was both human and divine. An early reference to an anointing process is that of an Egyptian hieroglyphic text from Thebes, quoted by Budge in From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Arkana edition p. 487ff. and 514. Horus embraced the dead Osiris, transferring to the body his own ka. When a king embraced a statue of a god, it is probable that the process was reversed, so that the king was hoping to receive divine life from the statue. In such a case, presumably the priest would have attempted beforehand to charge the statue, so that the sa-ankh could be transferred to the king. According to Mayani, Etruscan levacs is an anointer [Albanian ljej to smear], revealing a possible link with the Levites, who were entrusted with the management of the ark. The Sumerian King List mentions the exalted tiara and throne of kingship, which first came down to earth in Eridu. This celestial origin of the tiara is suggestive of the Greek stephanos, crown. For a king to be able to claim divine ancestry was of great help in the matter of securing loyalty and obedience. Furthermore, possible problems about the succession on a monarch's death could be forestalled. The legitimacy of the heir's claim to the throne would be supported by belief in divine parentage in the royal line. One technique employed for this end was incubation. According to Sumerian myth there was a sacred marriage between Dumuzi and Inanna. This may be connected with the story reported by Herodotus, that in Babylon, in the saharu, shrine, on top of the ziggurat, a chosen priestess would spend the night with the king. Another example of a divine marriage is to be found in Athens, where, at the festival of the Anthesteria, there was a sacred marriage of Dionysus and the wife of the king archon. One factor in the phenomenon of the Minotaur in Crete may have been an attempt to achieve divine ancestry for the royal family at Knosos, but the killing of the Minotaur is more likely to be a magical attempt to remove a cosmic threat. Kings in Greece were very close to being heroes, in the specialised sense of the Greek hero. Heroes were demi-gods, having a divine parent. They were a step below daimons, and were a link between human and divine. The word 'hero', from the Greek, resembles the Hebrew heron, conception. Infants might be hidden in caves, to escape the wrath of a divine father, such as Saturn or Zeus. Kreousa hid her child Ion in a cave to escape her father's anger. Hermes took the infant Ion to Delphi, where he grew up and was eventually recognised by his mother. When Athene revealed the truth, Ion returned to Athens, where he became the ancestor of the Ionians. There were two sources for obtaining divine parentage: the sky, and the earth. The deity could take the form of lightning, or that of the force perceived in caves and among split rocks. The Etruscan trin, hero, may be tur, bull, Latin taurus, and Greek in-. THE ETRUSCAN zilch I have suggested in a previous work that the Etruscan zilch, or zilc, thought to be some kind of magistrate, is the seat-occupier, sedilouchos. -ouchos, in Greek, means 'holding', or 'possessing'. Sedile is Latin for a seat. If the zilc is the seat-occupier, he resembles the king and the Roman senators. He is sometimes qualified by an additional title, such as marunuch. The marunuch was probably an official who held a marun, whatever that may be. Reversed, the consonants of marun become nrm. Etruscan o and u are in many words interchangeable, so it is possible that marun is norma, which means canon, rule, measuring rod. I suggest that the marunuch was an official who carried a staff like that of the Roman senator. Assaracus was a king of Phrygia, an area where Indo-European and Semitic speaking peoples met, and therefore where confusion could easily arise over the direction of reading and writing, resulting in reversals, of which we have already seen some likely examples. Assaracus was son of Tros, and grandfather of Aeneas. Latin currus is a chariot, a vehicle in which a god stood or sat as he travelled through the sky. Arabic korsi is a chair. It is just possible that the name Assaracus, with its key letters src, is a reversal of the Semitic root krs. Princes took names that suggested that they were of divine origin, hoping thereby to increase their authority. Assaracus may have wished to be compared to, or related to, a god riding on a chariot. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 22: } {T SACRED BIRDS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 22 SACRED BIRDS In the ancient world, birds were studied because they were thought to reveal, by their behaviour, the will, intentions and future activity of the gods. In modern terms, they gave warning of imminent electrical storms and earthquakes. They are still observed today for this purpose in some parts of the world. The specialist bird watcher, the augur, was an adviser of the monarch and executive magistrates. The Roman augur did not just stay at Rome and warn about likely future happenings elsewhere. Senior magistrates and commanders could take the auspices, and sacred chickens were taken on campaigns. There was an occasion when a Roman admiral was dissatisfied when told of the reluctance of the chickens to eat their proffered food, a sign that the moment was unfavourable for the planned attack on the enemy fleet. He said: If they will not eat, let them drink! and ordered them to be thrown overboard to drown. This rash and impious act was regarded as the cause of the disastrous defeat that followed. A broad distinction can be made between two kinds of bird behaviour studied by the augur: 1: The flight and direction of the eagle and similar birds of prey. The eagle's swoop onto a snake was particularly significant because it symbolised what was thought to have happened in the sky in the past and might happen again in the future. 2: The behaviour, generally on the ground, of such birds as the quail and the hoopoe. The hoopoe gave warning when it detected changes in the atmosphere that heralded an electrical storm. It detected earthquake light and piezoelectric charges on split rocks, in the ten or twelve hours before an earthquake. As in other branches of electrical theology, certain key words of the augur's technical vocabulary cross the usual frontier between Semitic and Indo-European. Hebrew oph, a collective noun meaning 'birds', is found in mopeth, omen. Bearing in mind that the Hebrew preposition m or min is 'from', we may conclude that the Hebrew conception of an omen was closely linked with the observation of birds. Teiresias, the Greek prophet who lived in Thebes, and who figures so prominently in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, had a hide, or bird observatory, oionoskopeion, outside the city. Thebes was a city with oriental links through its founder Kadmos. The fact that he and his wife turned into snakes may be a pointer to the meaning of his name, which suggests ka and the Greek demas, body. The Latin name aquila for an eagle points to Ugro-Finnish origins. The Hungarian kvil is light; kivilagit is to illuminate. Greek aigle is a ray. Greek aetos, eagle, resembles Hebrew ayit, bird of prey. The Norse orn, eagle, lived on top of the world tree Yggdrasil. A squirrel, named Ratatosk, carried messages between the eagle and the snake at the foot of the tree. Orn resembles Greek ornis, bird, and there is even a resemblance to the Hebrew or, light. The Slavonic orel is an eagle. The Stymphalian birds, whose elimination was one of the labours of Hercules, may have had electrical significance. Marshes, in which they lived, attracted lightning; Dionysus was Limnaios, 'of the marshes'. Sculptured eagles were used as lightning conductors on buildings, as at Delphi. Hebrew azniya is a kind of eagle. Reversed, this becomes ayin za. Ayin is an eye. The falcon was the lightning symbol of the Egyptians, and was associated with Horus. The object appearing in Egyptian art and hieroglyphics and called the utchat, or udjat, was the eye of Horus or of Ra. The osprey, a bird of prey like the eagle, was in Latin sanqualis. As with the eagle, the Romans watched its flight. The name may incorporate sankh; the radiation of the god was thought to give life. The buteo, falcon, was watched for its flight. The ibis, which had great skill in killing snakes, was associated with the god Thoth, who was equated with the Greek Hermes and was the Egyptian electrical god par excellence. Latin ardea is a heron. It was noted for the long crest on its head. Of the two elements of the word, ar is clearly the fire. Dea is rather less obvious, but Hebrew dea, knowledge, is an attractive possibility. Ardea was the name of an Etruscan city near Rome, capital of the Rutuli. The peacock was sacred to Juno. Its Latin name was pavo. Perhaps the pattern on its tail, resembling eyes, associated it with radiation. Its name resembles the Latin pavor, fear. The name of Juno's Greek counterpart, the goddess Hera, suggests fear. In Egyptian, her, hra, mean 'face; upon'. Herit means 'fear'. It is possible that Hera was originally thought of as the atmosphere surrounding the planet that the Romans called Jupiter. It was known that the peacock sheds its feathers from time to time. This may explain the hoplitodromos at Athens, a race by hoplites, armed soldiers, wearing nothing but helmets. The great significance of the goose may be due to the appearance of a heavenly body such as a comet, with wing-like protuberances. Aphrodite is portrayed riding on a goose. The goose has a long neck, and hisses like a snake. The owl was sacred to Athene. Its staring eyes suggested a pair of heavenly bodies, and its cry could remind the hearer of the Egyptian and Hebrew sacred sound iaaooei. The dove was the bird of Aphrodite, and represents the goddess in gentle form, in contrast to the eagle. The wry neck was used in the making of spells. It can produce a hiss like a snake, and owes its name to the wide angle through which it can turn its head, as if it were the Janus of the bird world. The cornix, crow, is mentioned by Horace as the prophet which, by its cries, foretells rain, cornix augur aquae. Vergil also mentions it in the same context, Georgic I: 388. In Norse it is kraka. The Greek korax is a crow or raven, and the word can mean something strange and unexpected. Odin had two ravens, Hugin and Muninn. Huga is to meditate, muninn is to remember. Princes and army officers wore feathers on their headgear to suggest that they would strike their enemies as if with lightning. Minos is described as cristata casside pennis, with a crest of feathers on his helmet. It was also a practice of the Philistines to wear feathered headgear. An Etruscan link is likely. If the eagle was the chief of the birds symbolising the lightning god in the sky, the hoopoe was the chief of the birds that detected the electrical god in the earth. Its name, epops, beholder, indicates that it could see the earthquake light. [Japanese and American scientists are now studying such phenomena.] In the Birds of Aristophanes, a character says Quiet! The hoopoe is going to sing! A few moments later, the hoopoe begins its song. Probably the hoopoe is on stage and it is the hoopoe's crest that attracts attention. The Greek horan, to see, has a perfect tense opopa, sometimes used instead of the usual form heoraka. The hoopoe was the bird that saw, and there was a frieze of hoopoes at Knosos, the place of gnosis, getting to know. We have already seen that the name of the hoopoe in The Birds is Tereus, a word that comes from the Greek tereo, I observe. The Hebrew for a hoopoe is dukhiphat. Duch is a Slavonic word meaning 'spirit'; phat is a Greek root meaning revelation, either by sound or by sight. The quail, ortyx, gives its name to an island: Ortygia is an old name for Delos. In Umbria, a district of Italy, the word angla, plural anglar, was used of birds that were watched for omens. There may be a link with the Latin angulus, corner. The point where a flight of birds would suddenly turn, all together, would be of great significance to the augur. The Umbrian word verfale, temple, may be from the Latin verb verto, turn. The place where birds turned could be thought to be the right place for a temple. This may be the explanation of a passage in the Etruscan Tables of Iguvium. Vide Mayani, The Etruscans Begin to Speak, p. 371. This is not the only possibility. A bird was a messenger, Greek angelos, of the gods. We have already mentioned the Hebrew mopeth, omen, 'from the birds'. It is likely that there is a similar explanation of the important Greek word sophia. Sophia, usually translated as wisdom, means cleverness and natural aptitude, contrasted with mathesis, which means learning by inquiry. The adjective sophos was applied not only to humans but also, as for example by Xenophon, to animals. It is used to mean shrewd and wise in politics. Sophocles applies it to oionothetae, augurs, in his King Oedipus, l. 484. The word can mean skilled in the sciences, cunning, and abstruse. In Wagner's opera Siegfried, the hero of that name has a conversation with a bird on his journey along the Rhine. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 23: } {T BOLTS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 23 BOLTS The Greeks knew of two different kinds of thunderbolt, and Zeus is shown with each type. The ordinary one is shown in the hand of Zeus, with spikes projecting from either end. The design is similar to the pattern of iron filings on a piece of card when a bar magnet is put underneath. This makes it probable that it was copied from experiments with magnets and pieces of iron on Samothrace, a Greek island where mysteries were celebrated, which were described by the Roman poet Lucretius in his work on the nature of the universe, De Rerum Natura, VI: 1044ff.: "It also happens that iron sometimes moves away from this stone, and is accustomed to flee and to follow it by turns. I saw iron at Samothrace jumping, and fragments of iron moving inside the bronze basin, when the Magnesian stone had been put underneath. The iron always seemed to wish to escape from the stone." The first kind of bolt was used by Zeus for short range work from a thundercloud hovering over an impious person whose wicked actions called out for punishment. It was also thought that it was sent as a general demonstration of power and as a reminder to mortals that they ought to behave properly. Bolts were frequently seen in marshy districts. The Greek word kypeiros is of Semitic origin and is the name of a marsh plant. It is possible that the Egyptian khu, soul, is present in the word. Anything suggestive of brilliant flashes of light was likely to be associated with lightning. Ovid speaks of the boar "fulmineo ore", with mouth [i. e. tusks] like a thunderbolt. [Fasti II: 192.] It is possible that the Roman toga symbolised the clouds concealing the electrical deity who controls the lightning. The Di Involuti advised Jupiter on when to hurl the thunderbolt. Their name suggests that they were wrapped in cloud. The Egyptian ames, sceptre, is represented in a hieroglyph as almond shaped. This is the second type of thunderbolt. Greek amygdale, almond, may be a compound of ames, Gad [a name of Baal], and Al, or El, 'the sceptre of Baal, the god above'. Zeus can be seen holding a thunderbolt shaped like an almond, possibly a plasmoid. This would be the high -powered long range weapon. There may be a link between this kind of bolt and the planet Venus. AMMISADUQA The Ninsianna tablets give information about the apparent movements of the planet Venus. A recent study of them by Michael Reade, "The Ninsianna Tablets, a preliminary reconstruction", appears in Chronology and Catastrophism Review 1993 Volume XV. If we assume that ames, rod or sceptre, is the first part of the name Ammisaduqa, an explanation of the rest of the name becomes easier. Duq, or dug, suggests the Greek dokein, to appear. Could the name mean 'the appearance of the sceptre'? That the planet Venus should be referred to as a sceptre may seem strange, until we recall that Venus is often referred to as the 'hairy star'. Jubar stella, the star with a fiery mane, is the morning and evening star, i. e. the planet Venus. Observations of Venus as they are recorded in the tablets are concerned with the disappearance and appearance of the planet in its journey round the sun, as observed from the earth. Fear that it would not appear on time was one of the causes of the close study of the planet by so many civilisations. It was a good sign if it appeared punctually. It may be significant that the Greek dokein, to appear, is the word used to mean 'it seems good', or 'it was decided'. For example, it was a good sign when the priest succeeded in eliciting a spark or sound from a capacitor [ark]. It is an interesting coincidence that the reversal of dug resembles the German gut, good. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 24: } {T THE NORTH} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 24 THE NORTH In ancient European literature, the north is associated with phenomena that may be the originals of what has been photographed recently from space. The phenomena described fall into two classes. The first is of those which were perceived and experienced as threats, the timing of whose arrival was calculated by seers who expected from past experience that a threatening object would reappear in the sky, probably the northern sky. Isaiah and Jeremiah are examples of such prophets. The second class is of phenomena which were more or less static and permanent, such as the poros or passage of Alkman, and the column or pillar of Plato's Republic. The Hebrew tsaphon, north, is the same root as tsapha, to watch. There are references in the Old Testament to prophets watching the skies, ready to give warning of approaching disaster. Egyptian meht means north. It is shown as a cross and a lotus flower. The Greek lotos is suggestive of el oth, god above, and sign. We have seen that in the Sanskrit padma, lotus, we may have pa, light, and demas, body. Demas is used in Greek of a living body, and may have some connection with Latin domus, house, which in its turn is related to the root thom, to speak. Egyptian meh is a tiara, like the Greek crown, stephanos, Set visible. The Greeks used for the north the terms arktos, a bear, and Boreas. Boreas was used especially of the north wind, and is the Kassite god Buriash. Esh, ash, is a Semitic root meaning fire. The names Boreas and Buriash lead one to suspect that whatever was seen in the northern sky was thought of as the fire of Bor. One may speculate and suggest a link between Bor and the Latin verto, turn, alternative spelling vorto. The poli, heavens or poles, may have been thought of as a fire stick, with fire produced as Bor caused the axis of the heavens to turn. This is a variant of the widespread myths of the mill, with which a deity such as Saturn ground the salt that was generally believed to have reached the earth from the sky. Vide A. de Grazia, The Lately Tortured Earth, p. 139f., Metron Publications, Princeton, 1983. Apollo was said to have come from the land of the Hyperboreans, a people whose name includes the word hyper, meaning beyond, or above. A connection with fire and light begins to emerge when we remember that the first fruits of the Hyperboreans were sent by relay, packed in straw, to the shrine of Apollo at Prasiae, and then taken by the Athenians to Delos, the island that was sacred to him as his birthplace. Whatever it was that constituted the first fruits of the Hyperboreans, the people who lived beyond, or above, Boreas, there is an interesting coincidence in the fact that the key letters of Prasiae, prs, if reversed, give the consonants of the Hebrew tsaraph, burn. The Greek poet Pindar writes: "But neither in ships nor on foot will you find the marvellous road to the agon of the Hyperboreans". [Pythian X: 29] An agon is a contest, or a place, possibly in the sky, where contests may occur. When the Roman augur took up his lituus, and made movements with it in the air and down on the ground, he was transferring to the ground the pattern that he claimed to see in the sky, to mark the outline plan of a projected temple. A temple would be the main building round which the houses of the new city would be built. The Latin word urbs, city, may easily be an accident created by reading what is now the Slavonic word sobor the wrong way round. In modern Russian, sobor is a cathedral, or a synod. The Slavonic preposition 's' [written 'c' in Russian] means 'down from', or 'with'. Sobor, or sbor, could mean 'down from Bor'. The Arabic shemal, north, resembles the Hebrew sham, there, which occurs in shammayim, the 'there- waters', i. e. heaven. Hebrew tav, cross, may conceivably be related to Latin vates, stem vat-, prophet or seer. Latin arbor, tree, may be the fire, ar, of Bor, who is seen above, el, in the northern sky. His name may even be the poros referred to by Alkman. Arbor may have been Yggdrasil, the world tree. Yggd, frightful, is a name of Odin. Ross is a German word for horse, and might be translated 'steed'. Ill, or Il, is light. Hungarian kivilagit means to illuminate. The Illyrians may even have been the people of the great light, since the root ur means great. Perhaps Yggdrasil is the steed [means of travel], of the light of the frightener, or the light of the frightener's steed. The name of the actual horse of Odin was Sleipnir. In Greek myth, the father of Eros, love, was Poros, the passage to the sky. This suggests a link with Dionysus and Hermes. Hermes was the Greek equivalent of Thoth, and Dionysus was one of the deities who controlled the thunderbolt. The Greeks were aware of the connection between a deity of the thunderbolt and sexual passion. Tall trees such as the pine [Greek elate], the sycamore and the cypress may be associated with the poros. Greek hule means wood [as a material]. If reversed, hule becomes eluh, the final h being pronounced more like ch, as in the Scottish word loch. Egyptian ucha is a pillar. Hule, wood, is probably the tree of El, the divine pillar. The Latin insula, island, may be derived from in-, power or presence, and sul, a Celtic word and divine name, meaning column. A city may have been regarded as an island, copying what the augur claimed to see in the sky. Egyptian texts refer to the island of fire, where Horus sits on the throne of his father Osiris. Osiris had an iron throne. Words connected with the north are rich in reversals. Subura was a densely populated area of Rome near the forum, and is the Etruscan spur and Slavonic sobor, assembly. Reversed, these give the Latin for a city, urbs. Polis, Greek for city, may be a reversal of El and op-, the face of El. El opope would mean 'El has seen' or perhaps 'El has looked'. Reversed, it could be the Latin word populus, people, but this is becoming very speculative. The Latin word for the augur's curved rod, the lituus, is a reversal of the Latin utilis, useful. It was the augur's most useful, indeed essential, tool. The Greek halme, brine, is a reversal of Hebrew melach, salt. In Hebrew, yam is sea. Yam melach is the Dead Sea. Hebrew min, m, means 'from'. Melach, salt, may indicate that the Hebrews shared the general view held by the ancients that salt came from above. Latin sal, Greek hales or hals, could be 'from El'. One may compare with this the Greek and Latin mel, honey, which Vergil describes as caelestia, of heavenly origin [like manna]. A king, Hebrew melekh, has his powers from above. The ekh part of melekh may be more familiar in the form of the Greek echo, I have. A Greek prince is described by Homer as skeptouchos, he who holds the sceptre. Could a king, melekh, be 'he who has the honey'? The evidence in Greek myth for this interpretation is that the infant Zeus was fed by bees when hidden in a cave in Crete. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 25: } {T RESURRECTION TECHNIQUES} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 25 RESURRECTION TECHNIQUES The techniques for resurrection fall into two main groups, that of collecting or summoning the electrical deity, and that of applying the electrical force. Sympathetic magic was used, and is the explanation of some of the actions. Much of the relevant material has been mentioned already, but in this chapter it may fit into a new pattern, and there are a few new details. The deity could be collected by charging a chest from the atmosphere. The chest or ark was constructed on the principle of the Leyden jar. Obviously the quickest and most dangerous charging would be at the time of an electrical storm. Egyptian art shows the god Osiris rising from a chest, holding an ankh in each hand, and a relief from Dendera shows technicians carrying a length of what appears to be striated cable, with pictures of snakes at the end to show that the god is present. A more symbolic method was that of enclosing a statue of Osiris in a length of hollow tree trunk, and raising the trunk until it was upright. I stand, sto, is closely related to zo, I live. The Egyptian practice of embalming must be included among techniques aimed at assisting the soul to continue to exist after death in a recognisable form. In Egypt, Osiris was the god on top of the staircase. Pyramids were fire-collectors; the aim was that a pharaoh buried in a pyramid should receive the full force of the electrical god. Burial in a tholos tomb or in a shaft grave at Mycenae would have the aim of bringing the dead person into contact with the deity in the earth, just as the burning of a corpse would have the aim of aiding the soul in its flight to the region of heavenly fire. Eating the bull, drinking the blood of goats, and so on, were more a matter of obtaining superhuman strength than of obtaining immortality, but are worth mentioning because they are all part of the general effort to cross the limen, threshold, between our world and that of the spirits of the dead and of the gods. Ghosts recovered the strength to speak by drinking blood. Sanguis, blood, is basically the same as sanga and sankh. Greek haima, blood, is the same as Hebrew chaim, life. The dancing of the Arval brothers at Rome was associated with the renewal of life in the fields in the spring. It was presumably aimed at rousing the chthonic deities Cerus and Ceres, the deities of crops and vegetation. The dance of the Salii, the leaping priests of the Romans, was accompanied by a hymn. It contains the words Limen sali! Sta! Berber! Vile vale! Staile! Itrile! Vide Mayani, The Etruscans Begin to Speak, p. 316. Anyone who has kept, say, a cat as a pet will know that the animal can communicate with its owner. If it is hungry, it will run purposefully and repeatedly to the place where its food is put down and look up, inviting one to imitate it and put down a plate of food. The Salian priests may have been doing just this kind of thing in their dance. The aim would be to persuade the Manes to appear and give advice and help. To do this the Manes would have to cross the limen, threshold. The Salii were showing the dead what they wanted them to do by leaping over an invisible threshold, stopping and looking backwards, returning and repeating the movements. The basic idea behind the verb salio, leap, is that of crossing. Hebrew shal is to transgress. It is noteworthy that representations of priestly dancers show them with the head turned, looking backwards. The painting of a tanasar in the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia shows him at work. In front of him is a bird, perhaps symbolising a soul. His left palm is on top of his head, his right hand is stretched out forwards. To understand this picture we have to examine the word tanasar. One of the difficulties in understanding Etruscan is that words are often run into one another, and it is hard to know how to separate them. In the case of the tanasar, it is two words, tanas, and ar. Ar we know is the divine fire that descends from the sky and strikes the ara, altar, and is also found in the head, as described by Plato in the Timaeus. We are left with the word tanas. In Etruscan, words are found ending in the letters -ac, for example frontac, thunderer; cf. Greek bronte, thunder. It is probable that we should regard the -ac as being -as; the letter c in Etruscan is sometimes to be pronounced as a k, sometimes as an s. The Lydian kupassis is a kind of shoe. Etruscan capesar is a shoemaker. Hungarian cipö is a shoe, cipész is a shoemaker. In Hungarian, the endings -as, -asz, and -esz indicate a performer of an action. Portas is a doorkeeper. Munka is work, munkas is a workman. I suggest that we see this phenomenon in the Etruscan tanas. Greek tanuo means stretch out. The tanasar is he who holds out the ar, sacred electrical fire, as he is shown doing in the picture from Tarquinia. There remains the question of why he holds the other hand on his head. The head was recognised as the electrical headquarters of the human body, as shown by the words kephale, katec and caput. The Etruscan katec is that which covers the ka, and the Latin caput is a well or source of ka, as was Pytho, as Delphi used to be called. The tanasar appears to be transferring electrical power from his head through his left hand so that he can direct it at the object with his right hand. The action is reminiscent of that of the Egyptian god Amen-Re as he holds out the ankh, symbol of life, to Psammetichus III. [From the temple of Osiris at Karnak] Another example of the invisible force being directed at a person or object is that of Kheri-heb, who is shown holding his staff to the head of a statue. Vide Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 33, Arkana edition. In the Tables of Iguvium, the Osco-Umbrian word purdouiti occurs, meaning to sacrifice. Mayani suggests that this is the Albanian pertetoj, to dedicate, to consecrate. Latin porrigere is to stretch out, to offer. This makes good sense with pyr, fire. It is tempting to speculate that the Greek word anthrop-, man, may originally have been santhrop-. A number of Greek words lost an initial s. Santhrop-could then have been a reversal of prytanis, the official who held out the fire. Humans were distinguished by their ability to imitate and even to manipulate the electrical god. In general, jerky movements were taken as a sign of life. The angular poses seen in Egyptian hieroglyphics for dancing support this idea; furthermore an electrical shock can cause convulsive movements. Libations were a method of rousing the dead. Greek spendo and Hittite spanza, libation, both show that radiation 'down from the five' was directed onto the grave. The Egyptian hieroglyph tebh is a vase containing an udjat, an eye as a symbol of radiation. Tebh means an offering, and is evidence that radiation was what the king directed onto the ground in the relief from Malatya. It is, moreover, noteworthy that when reversed, the word tebh resembles the Hebrew beith, house, and the Greek for a tripod cauldron, lebet-, which is the dwelling place of El. It is possible that the significance of mirrors, of which the Etruscans have left us so many, may be that a mirror gives the holder not only a reflection of his or her face, but also a degree of control over the direction of the divine radiation. The Egyptian un hra is a mirror. Hra means 'upon', or 'face'. Un, Uni are forms of the name of Juno. Singing was one of the methods of raising the ka, by sympathetic magic. 'Sing' may be related to Latin sancio and to sankh. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 26: } {T REVERSALS} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 26 REVERSALS The following words may be reversals caused by the meeting of peoples with different directions of writing, as could easily occur between Hebrew, Etruscan, Greek and Latin, with Etruscan territory well placed in Asia Minor and elsewhere to be the meeting place. This list is meant to be merely provisional and suggestive. No claim of certainty is made. Abbreviations: Akk., Akkadian Ar., Arabic Eg., Egyptian Etr., Etruscan Ger., German Gk., Greek Heb., Hebrew Lat., Latin Slav., Slavonic akra point, peak, Gk.; arca, chest, Lat. ames sceptre, Eg.; sema, sign, Gk. Anath Athene Anu Rav Great Anu; Varuna ar Ra ardeo burn, Lat.; drao, do, Gk. aresko please, Gk.; kasher, pleasing, right, Heb. argos shining, Gk.; gora, mountain, Slav. ari lion, Heb.; ira, anger, Lat. aspid- shield, Gk.; dipas, cup, Mycenean Gk. Assaracus currus, chariot, Lat. balta axe, Arabic; dolabra, Lat. baradh hailstones, Heb.; thorubos, noise, Gk. beth house, Heb.; Thebes. bosheth shame, idol, Baal, Heb.; Teshub cepen priest, Etr.; Nephesh, spirit, Heb. charath engrave, Heb.; trachys, rough, Gk. cherebh hand, arm, Heb.; bracchium, arm, Lat. chets stechen, prick, Ger. chlamud- cloak of a Greek general; dhu melekh, hidden king. Gaelic dhu = dark, hidden, as in skean dhu, hidden dagger. Cf. sakin, knife, Heb. clava club, Lat.; pilakku, Akk.; pelekus, axe, Gk. cortina cauldron, power of the horns, Lat.; Tarquin cras tomorrow, Lat.; shark, east, Ar. Culsu an Etruscan god; sulcus, furrow, Lat.; -cello, strike, Lat. dabhar speak, Heb.; rabid-, raving, Lat. dam blood, Heb.; madere, to be wet, Lat. dolabra axe, Lat.; vladetj, to be powerful, Slav. Dolopes name of a people in Thessaly; peladha, iron, Heb. edher garment, splendour, Heb.; rete, net, Lat. falando sky, Etr.; tlabrys, axe, Gk.; dolabra, Lat. Farsi Persian; saraph, burn a corpse, Heb. garbh west, Ar.; vrag, enemy, Slav. gibor leader, hero, Heb.; robigo, redness, Lat. hebhel idol, nothingness, Heb.; levis, light, Latin hemisus half, Gk.; ims, Etr.; semi, Lat. Hermes Mercurius herit fear, Eg.; tru, Etr. hule wood, Gk.; el, Heb.; ucha, Eg., divine pillar. hulsna libation, Etr.; schlucken, drink, Ger. iacche a cry to Bacchus; chai, alive, Heb. irp wine, Eg.; vere, wine, Etr. keilaph hoe, axe, Heb.; pelekus, sacrificial axe, Gk. keneset church, Heb.; sancio, bring to life, Lat. kerata horns, Gk.; tark, bull, Etr. labrys axe, Gk.; rabh al, great Al lahat flame, Heb.; thallo, sprout, flourish, Gk. limen harbour, Gk.; namal, harbour, Heb. lituus augur's rod; utilis, useful, Lat. logos word, Gk.; qol, Heb.; golos, voice, Slav. losk gleam, Etr.; luscus, one-eyed, Lat.; kashil, hoe, axe, Heb. Luz stulos, pillar, Gk. mare sea, Lat.; ram, high, Heb. marun staff, Etr.; norma, staff, measuring rod, Lat. mitra tiara, Gk.; ar, fire; time, honour, Gk. mors death, Lat. [stem mort-]; tromos, fear, Gk. naga snake, Sanskrit; agan, too much [hubris?], Gk. necht to be strong [picture of a man holding a stick; Budge, Egyptian Language p. 45]; techne skill, Gk. nekros corpse, Gk.; or, light, kenos, empty nemeton grove, Celtic; temenos, shrine, Gk. nemmet slaughter block, Eg.; temno, cut, Gk. neter divine, Eg.; antron, cave, Gk., Retenu, Eg. pach metal plate, snare, danger, Heb.; in the plural, pachim, lightning; hap, to hide, Eg. patagos sound of striking, Gk.; kitab, writing, Ar. pelekus axe, Gr.; Peleg, Heb.; kolpe, a blow, Gk. pogon beard, Gk.; naghaph, smite, Heb.; pogonias aster is a bearded star, i. e. comet, Gk. Prasiae saraph, to burn, Heb. prezu tornado, Etr,; stirp-, tree trunk, Lat. qal swift, Heb.; alacer, swift, Lat. raqs dance, Ar.; sacer, sacred, Lat. rex king, Lat.; sacer rupes rock, crag, Lat.[ stem rup-]; pyr, fire, Gk. Rutuli a Latin tribe; tur, bull, Etr. sakin knife, Heb.; nachush, bronze, Heb. schlafen sleep, Ger.; uples, sleep, Etr. sentra incense, Eg.; ar Thanasa, fire of Thanasa shemal north, Ar.; El ames, El's sceptre siu god, Hittite; vis, force, Gk. and Lat. subura assembly; urbs, city, Lat. taphar sew together, Heb.; rhapto, sew, Gk. thans life, Etr.; senatus, Lat.; Tanz, dance, Ger. thumos high spirits, Gk.; Muth, spirit, courage, Ger. thura door, Gk.; ar uth, fire road, Etr. vates life, Lat.; ghiv, alive, Sanskrit {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V - A FIRE NOT BLOWN: } {P - } {Q - } {C Chapter 27: } {T GLOSSARY} {S - } A FIRE NOT BLOWN... Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region by Hugh Crosthwaite Chapter 27 GLOSSARY It may be useful for the general reader to have a reminder of some features of Latin, Greek and Semitic languages. Final s may be a nominative singular ending in Latin and Greek. For our purpose the important part of, say, logos is simply log-, or even lg. Greek u can be transliterated as either u or y. P and f, b and v, may be interchanged [vide Grimm's Law]. Latin and Greek verbs often appear ending in o, e. g. audio, I hear, but an infinitive may be quoted, ending in -re, or -ein, e. g. audire, to hear, airein, to raise. In Hebrew, the endings -im and -oth indicate the plural, e. g. othoth, signs, mayim, waters. The letter c is pronounced in English sometimes like a k, sometimes like an s. This occurs also in Etruscan. The Greek letter kappa is sometimes transliterated as k, sometimes as c. The Slavonic hard L sounds more like a w. The Greek ending -eus, as in basileus, king, has a nasalised sound approaching n, as in modern Polish. The Latin present participle ends in -ens, e. g. regens, ruling, stem regent-, and in the case of a typical Greek verb, luo, I release, it is luon, stem luont- , so that the name of the Greek king Tereus can mean 'observing', or 'the observing one'. Zenos is a form of the genitive singular, meaning 'of Zeus'. The Semitic q is pronounced farther back than the English k. It was sometimes replaced by g in Latin and Greek, e. g. Hebrew qol, voice, Greek logos, word. Z can be ts, ds, sd or st, as in Hebrew zayin, the letter z, a weapon, Set's eye [ayin = eye]. Onomatopoeia played a part. The rise and fall of the sound iaaooei imitates the sound made by the wind, and perhaps by an ark. The sound of the name Set, and of the Egyptian tcham, sceptre, suggests a spark. There are four or five words or roots that stand out for frequency of occurrence and as the keys to many important words. Ar: Etruscan for electrical fire, as in arseverse, 'turn aside the fire', a prayer to Sethlans which one might describe as a lightening conductor. Cf. arca, chest; har, mountain [where the fire often appeared]; haram, pyramid [fire collector]. Sanskrit aras means 'swift'. Ka: Egyptian for the double. Cf. Hebrew qadhosh, holy; Greek kairos, success in raising the ka; Latin caput, head, source of ka. Set: the Greek Typhon. Cf. Greek stephanos, crown, Set appearing; Etruscan zichne, Set's footprints, marks, e. g. writing. El, Al: Semitic for 'above', implying 'the god above'. Cf. elektron, amber, el ek thronou, god out of the seat. Is, in-, force or presence, is a Greek word that could be used in periphrasis when talking about a person, just like kara, 'head'. "Greetings, Oedipus!" might be expressed as "Greetings, head of Oedipus!" Latin cortina, cauldron, is 'power of the horns', in-, and kerata, horns. Cauldrons could be decorated with bulls' heads, and the one at Delos mooed, "... mugire adytis cortina reclusis," Aeneid III: 92. In Hebrew, a short unstressed vowel, a shewa, is often sounded between two consonants for ease of pronunciation. The Greek stephanos, crown, is an example. It starts life as setephanos, Set revealing, or Set appearing, and ends up as stephanos. Metathesis, as in the Greek kratos or kartos, power, can be explained in this way. GLOSSARY LIST almond Juergens and De Grazia have drawn attention to the resemblance of a thunderbolt in the hand of Zeus to a plasmoid. Greek amygdale, almond, may be Egyptian ames, sceptre; the hieroglyph is of an almond- shaped object. Gad is the name of Baal, the force above. The prophet Jeremiah, I: 11, writes that he saw the rod of an almond tree. This is followed two verses later by his reference to a seething pot in the sky. The Greek for an emerald, smaragdos, suggests the sign, sema, of the fire, ar, of Gad. There was a temple in Tyre which was reported to have a column made of emerald. Sema, Greek for a sign, is probably the Hebrew shem, name. Sema is a reversal of the Egyptian ames, sceptre. Apollo At his temple at Delphi, the motto meden agan means 'nothing to excess'. Agan, 'too much', is a reversal of the Sanskrit naga, snake. The serpent in the sky went too high; the prophet Isaiah, XIV, rejoiced that it was brought low. Agenor, king of Phoenicia and father of Kadmos [who turned into a snake], has a name composed of agan, the snake, and or, a Phoenician word meaning 'light', or 'skin'. arrow In the Paradiso of Dante, God is said to shoot arrows to instil varied natures and gifts in humans. In Plato's Timaeus, 42e, gods, probably planets and stars, and not the demiurge, create human bodies and faculties. ball game In ancient China, 3rd. to 4th. century B. C., a ball game, Tsuchin, was played. It survives in similar form in Japan, where it is performed ceremonially by priests. At the start of the game the ball is held between two horns. bees The eating of honey may have been thought to give divine power; mead produces intoxication. The Cretan name of Phaeton is Adumnos. Greek hedus means sweet, menos is strength and high spirits. The buzzing of bees may have been compared to the sounds on a rocky mountain ridge warning that a lightning strike was imminent. Herodotus reports in Book V that the farther north one travelled, the more bees there were. belly The Greek gaster suggests ka, Set and ar. The word for treasure, gaza, applied by Vergil in Aeneid I: 119 to the treasure lost in the shipwreck off Carthage, may be related. The most important treasures were the apparatus used for capturing and controlling the electrical god. This would be especially the case on the occasion of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, and perhaps that of the Trojans from Troy. De Grazia, in God's Fire: Moses and the Management of the Exodus, gives a full account of the apparatus and technique involved. bow The old spelling of the Latin arcus, bow, is arquus, fire of qu, or ka. Ariadne's bow or snake recalls Artemis, Apollo and the arrows that symbolise radiation, plague and sudden death from an electrical deity. Ceres An earth goddess responsible for crops. Her male equivalent, Cerus, is named in an inscription on an Etruscan pot: cerus in ceri pokolom. Poculum is Latin for a cup [for libation?]; pokol is Hungarian for hell, the underworld, home of departed spirits. Cerritus means out of one's mind, as does larvatus, which suggests larva, a word meaning ghost, and mask. The Etruscan mime, the tanasar, was an actor who might have worn a mask. cobra This word is said to have come via Portuguese from Latin coluber, snake. The hard L and the b-v link suggest that it may be the Albanian word kove, bucket. The Hebrew kobha, bucket, may be a Philistine word, the Philistines being associated with Illyria. Etruscan katek, head, and Albanian katoc, suggest ka and Latin tego, cover, protect. The skull was the cover for the ka, the fire in the head. djed pillar This columnar structure, seen frequently in Egyptian reliefs, has been interpreted as the backbone of Osiris, as a symbol of stability. Standing upright was closely connected with life. There is a relief on the wall of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. It shows two attendants carrying what appears to be striated cable; nearby a djed pillar leans like the tower of Pisa. The snakes shown at the cable ends in what look like twentieth century thermionic valves indicate the presence of the electrical god, not stone slabs; stone slabs could not possibly be lifted or carried in the manner shown. The god is to be used to make the djed pillar stand upright. Etruscans They were Rasna. Lydian words could have had an initial t which disappeared, as with tlabrys, axe. Thus Rasna could be Trasna, Tiras, Tursha, and Trusci. They were Tursha to the Egyptians; the name Tiras occurs in Genesis X: 2. eye Greek ophthalmos. Ophis is a snake. Thallo = sprout, flower. Greek kanthos, corner of the eye, is ka and anthos, a flower. The Greek auge is ray of light; German Auge is an eye. Greek baskaino is to direct the evil eye at someone, to fascinate and bewitch. The word appears to be a compound of fa, or ba, light, and the Semitic sakin, knife. In Latin, eye is lumen, oculus, acies. Hebrew ayin is an eye; cf. Greek ainos, terrible. fear Latin pavor = fear; pavo is a peacock, sacred to Juno. Hera may be atmosphere or radiance around Zeus. The bird's sensational display of plumage, with a pattern of what look like eyes, may have suggested a celestial phenomenon. flesh Greek kreas. It may be 'flow of ka', implying creation, Latin creo or cereo. Another Greek word for flesh is sarx, sark-. Latin caro, carn-, means flesh. fool In old Norse, skir means wise, or innocent. It may appear in the name of the Cumbrian village of Skirwith. The holy fool was an important figure in Russia, and appears in the opera Boris Godunov. In Hebrew, Kesil means fool, impious, and Orion. Kesil and Khima are mentioned together in the book of Amos. Khima is equated with Saturn. In the Iliad, XXI: 410, the war god Ares is a fool; Athene hits him on the neck with a rock. In line 401 it appears that the aegis of Athene is more powerful than the thunderbolt of Zeus. Kesil, a fool, impious, means in the plural the constellation of Orion. There is a parallel with Parsifal, the young innocent, who in Wagner's opera starts as a hunter. He shoots a swan, an act which a Greek might possibly have interpreted as hostility towards Aphrodite, who is associated with birds. Orion was a great hunter, whose dog was Sirius, the dog star. The Greek for 'fool' is moros. It is possible that the word is Semitic m, from, and or, light. Or-is also Greek for a mountain. We have seen that kings, for example Minos, made a practice of visiting shrines on mountain tops. It may be that exposure to electrical storms and priestly experiments on altars could result in mental disturbances such as epilepsy, the sacred disease [electrical in origin], and amnesia such as afflicted the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey. glory Latin gloria. Sumerian gal = great; Hebrew or = light. Greek or-is a mountain, megal-means 'great'. Great light? hearth Greek eschara. Cf. Hebrew esh, fire, and Greek chara, grace and beauty. The eschara was a sunken hearth. honey Greek meli, Latin mel. It was of celestial origin; Vergil refers to caelestia mella, honey from the sky. The infant Zeus was attended by bees. Hebrew melekh is a king. Was a king fed on honey? Vergil writes in Georgic IV that bees come from the body of a dead ox. There is a possible link here with the head and horns of a comet at a time such as that of the Exodus and the fimbulvetr, when manna descended as food for survivors. In Persia it was called 'honey rain'. When Zeus put bonds round Kronos, Kronos was drunk with honey. Isis A Greek inscription on the island of Andros reads: "I am Isis.... I prescribe the course of the sun and moon." lamp Greek lampo = shine. Latin lambo = lick. Snakes gave divine help to the sick by licking wounds etc. The snake's tongue symbolised a lightning stroke. lap of the gods The Homeric phrase "tauta theon en gounesi keitai", these things lie in the lap of the gods, may refer to the apparent tendency of objects in the sky to reproduce or to eject material, afflicting the earth with, for example, stone showers, radiation, mutations and sudden death. The usual explanation is that it refers to the holding of the thread of life, or wool, for Atropos to cut with the 'abhorred shears'. But death of a person was not the only thing that depended on the gods. Much depended in the mind of the ancients on the arrival or departure, presence or absence, of objects in the sky, especially new arrivals. Much depended, too, on the power of heroes who had divine ancestry, on divine inspiration and on radiation. libation As well as the Malatya relief which shows a god holding his thunderbolt over the cup at a libation ceremony, there is a reference to libation in the Book of the Dead which is amenable to an electrical interpretation: Thoth dwells within his hidden places and performs the ceremonies of libation unto the god who reckoneth millions of years, and he maketh a way through the firmament." [Budge's translation, p. 392] magh Hebrew for a Persian priest. Cf. Latin magnus, great. The Sibyl became maior videri, bigger in appearance, as the god Apollo inspired her. manna Egyptian bener, sweet, may be related to the Latin Venus, Vener-. mouse Greek mus, sminthos. Smintheus was one of the epithets of Apollo. Augurs watched birds, mice and snakes. 'Mystery' was mouse-watching. Smintheus may contain the Greek word sema, sign. 'Sign of the god's presence'? net Greek diktys, Latin rete. The Great Net is called Anqet, The Clincher; Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 515, Arkana. Augurs wore a net-like garment. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete p. 337, notes the net-like treatment of the lion's mane on some Cretan shields, with possible eastern connections. Cf. the Roman retiarius, who had a net and a trident, matched with a swordsman in the gladiatorial games. There is a possible link with Perseus, the swordsman like Ares or Mars, and Medusa, the Powerful One, who may represent Aphrodite. Odin One of his epithets was 'the long-bearded one'. His beard may have been compared to the tail of a comet. pelor Greek, a monster. Pel = cave; Hebrew or = light. popoi A Dryopian word meaning 'gods'. Used by Cassandra in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, when about to prophesy. rite Latin ritus. Etruscan ri = fresh. A rite is a renewal, as at the Babylonian festival of Akitu, New Year. sea Latin mare. Hebrew ram, high, becomes mar when reversed. Okeanos, Uginna, was originally up in the sky, the 'there-waters'. Hebrew sham = there; mayim = waters. study Set audire, Latin, means 'to hear Set'. Studium is zeal. Concentration would be needed to hear faint electrical sounds, such as sparks, from the ark, hence the priest's call for silence. thigh The constellation of the Great Bear was named by the Egyptians 'The Thigh'. It was described as being in the northern heaven in the Great Lake. It was also named Mesekhti, and was described as having a bull's head. The Book of the Dead [Tr. Budge, Arkana p. 409] refers to the water flood which is over the thigh of the goddess Nut at the staircase of the god Sebaku. The bull is described as enveloped in turquoise [Budge, op. cit. p. 333]. thing The Greek chrema, thing, may be a flow of ka. Creation may have been thought of as a flow of ka, as the unseen god became visible. Greek rheo = flow. The phenomenon would have been helpful to Plato in his formulation of a theory to account for the power and influence from an invisible realm. thunderbolt Pliny distinguishes three kinds of bolt: those that are sicca, dry, and do not burn but dissipant; those that do not burn but blacken, infuscant; and the clear bolt, clarum fulmen, of remarkable nature, by which jars are emptied with the lids untouched and no other trace left. Gold and silver are liquified inside, but the bags themselves are in no way singed, and not even the wax labels are melted. This appears to be the same phenomenon that has occasionally been reported in recent times, and sometimes described, misleadingly, as spontaneous combustion. tripod As well as being a suitable support for a cauldron imitating an object in the sky, a tripod could imitate the apparatus used for obtaining a display from an ark. Two terminals would be needed, plus some kind of adjustable rod, making a total of three pieces of apparatus. It may even be relevant to note that a basic feature of electronic circuits in the twentieth century A. D. has been the trio of anode, cathode and grid, and, in the case of the transistor, base, collector and emitter. west Arabic garbh. Reversed, the consonants become bhrg, or vrg [bh = v]. Slavonic vrag is an enemy. In augury, the west and northwest were the directions from which there was danger. wild bull In Crete, the word was bolynthos. Greek lyssa is madness, bous is an ox. wizard Greek goetes. This might be ka and at, Etruscan and Albanian for father, implying authority and source. Russian otets, pronounced [approximately] atyets, is a father. Cf. the Egyptian ut in utchat, or udjat. writing Etruscan zichne means tracks of Set. German zeichnen means to mark or draw. Greek grapho is likely to be ka and rhapis, rod. In Hindi, nagari is a set of scripts of Indian languages, including the divine script Devanagari. Deva means 'divine'. Naga, in Sanskrit, is a serpent, also a member of a race of semi-divine creatures, half human, half snake. The Greeks were familiar with these ideas; cf. Kadmos and Harmonia at Thebes, and the legendary first king of Attica, Kekrops. ========== End of Fire Not Blown... ========== {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C - } {T - } {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA Papers presented at the University of Lethbridge May 9 and 10, 1974 Edited by: E.R. MILTON Notes on the printed version of the book Cover - Painting was made prior to the publication of Worlds in Collision, the work of a 30 year old Canadian male who utilized painting and drawing as an aspect of his therapy for neurosis. The artist shows the earth, identified by the lines of latitude and longitude in a rather unusual view. Seen from outer space, it appears to be flooded since the normal land masses are missing or submerged and the patient stands on an island reaching upwards, perhaps in distress. Above the earth is what appears to be a mass of land with mountains, river, perhaps a continent hovering in the air, To the left is an oddly shaped spherical mass, the moon, or perhaps a meteorite. The patient described that large continental mass above as a sheet of ice. Courtesy of Professor John McGregor The responsibility for producing the volume of papers presented at the symposium: Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, May 9 and 10, 1974, was delegated to an editorial committee consisting of the following members of the Faculty of the University of Lethbridge: Earl R. Milton Chairman, Department of Physics and Chairman of the Committee Paul D. Lewis Department of Biological Science Laurie R. Ricou Chairman, Department of English Ian Q. Whishaw Department of Psychology Copyright 1978 The University of Lethbridge All rights reserved excepting the Right of the Individual Authors to reproduce in any form their contributions to this volume. Afterword, Address to the Chancellor's Dinner, Address to the Convocation Dinner are Copyright 1978 by Immanuel Velikovsky. Permission to reproduce granted by the Velikovsky Estate. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS } {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD Earl R. Milton CHAPTER 1: CULTURAL AMNESIA: The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence Immanuel Velikovsky CHAPTER 2: PALAETIOLOGY OF FEAR AND MEMORY Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER 3: PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY John MacGregor CHAPTER 4: STRUCTURING THE APOCALYPSE: Old and New World Variations William Mullen CHAPTER 5: SHAKESPEARE AND VELIKOVSKY: Catastrophic Theory and the Springs of Art Irving Wolfe CHAPTER 6: CATASTROPHISM AND UNIFORMITY: A Probe into the Origins of the 1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology George Grinnell CHAPTER 7: CATASTROPHISM AS A WORLD VIEW Patrick Doran CHAPTER 8: AFTERWORD Immanuel Velikovsky APPENDICES I. About the Authors II. Honourary Degree Awareded to Immanual Velikovsky III. Addresses to the Chancellor's Dinner IV. Address to the Convocation Dinner (Immanuel Velikovsky) {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C - } {T FOREWORD } {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY - VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : CHAPTER : RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA FOREWORD On Saturday afternoon 11 May 1974, the University of Lethbridge conferred upon Immanuel Velikovsky the honourary degree of Doctor of Arts and Science in recognition of the interdisciplinary nature of his scholarship. In awarding this degree the University was recognizing a world famous scholar whose work epitomizes the ideology of the University: that interdisciplinary studies have value. For two day preceding the convocation ceremony, the University was host to an international symposium which attracted delegates from the Pacific Northwestern region of the United States and from six Canadian provinces. This Symposium, with the theme Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, examined aspects of Velikovsky's synthesis centering on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The papers presented in this volume are revised versions of the papers originally presented at the Symposium and from the first collection of papers on the subject of cultural Amnesia since Velikovsky introduced the topic in Worlds in Collision [1] . The papers have been examined by other experts in the field concerned, criticisms were collected, and the authors were allowed to make minor changes in the hope that a more accomplished volume could be produced. Since Dr. Velikovsky's addresses to the Symposium were delivered without notes, and because of Dr. Velikovsky's weakening health in the months following the Symposium, he was not asked to submit written versions of his contributions. Instead, his papers were produced from the tape recordings of the Symposium sessions. After editing them for clarity, the transcriptions were revised by Dr. Velikovsky for publication here. Although the papers all relate to some aspect of Cultural Amnesia, they deal with subjects as diverse as anthropology, geology, narrative art, and psychiatry. While the task of showing relationships between them is desirable, it is difficult. It is may hope that the interpretation presented here, with which the authors might not agree, will stimulate readers to consider carefully the papers and their relation to Cultural Amnesia. In his address, Dr Velikovsky elaborates upon his theory of Cultural Amnesia. According to his theory, mankind forgot about unpleasant catastrophic events on the conscious level, but remembers on the unconscious level. Furthermore it would appear that the unconscious memory is transmitted genetically from one generation to the next, a concept already postulated by Freud and Jung but in disagreement with much of the current biological thinking. Nevertheless, there are, as will be shown in the papers following Velikovsky's, substantial reasons for thinking that memory is indeed transmitted, if not racially, then in some other way. If the cultural amnesia theory is correct, then it is possible to suggest that every generation lives in a state of trauma induced by the conflict between subconscious memories of past catastrophic events and the refusal of the conscious mind to recognize that these events actually occurred in prehistoric and historic times. Dr. Velikovsky believes that the trauma is responsible for mankind's aggressive hostility, a concept of importance to every individual frightened by the prospect of thermo-nuclear war or of the instability which seems to be increasing in society. Moreover, the trauma is also responsible for the inability and at times the outright refusal of science to recognize the overwhelming evidence pointing to the catastrophic past of the Earth and the entire solar System. The trauma is also responsible, in part at least, for the actions of some scientists who denounced Velikovsky without even reading his work. Perhaps the men who did this really are saying that the truth is too awful; if the public knew they would be furious, and the great prestige accorded to the leading spokespersons for modern science would decline. The second paper in this volume, authored by Alfred de Grazia, discusses the origin of fear. De Grazia is an internationally recognized expert in politics and social systems. He became aware of Velikovsky because of the efforts made by Livio Stecchini, a professor of ancient history. Stecchini had tried to interest de Grazia not in the substance of Velikovsky's theories but in the political ramifications of the attack by the scientific community on Velikovsky. Shortly thereafter, de Grazia read Velikovsky's last book Oedipus and Akhnaton [2] and judged it to be "a fundamental contribution to classical history and archaeology." [3] He then decided to meet with Velikovsky and investigate the issue. A change for the better occurred in Velikovsky's fortunes when de Grazia devoted the entire September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist to aspects of the hostile reaction of the scientific community to Velikovsky's revolutionary cosmology. While preparing the special issue on Velikovsky [4] , de Grazia became interested in the substance of Velikovsky's theories, an interest which has culminated in several investigations into the origins of human nature and the development of human institutions. A part of that work in included here. De Grazia maintains that fear is ubiquitous in its influence upon the behaviour of mankind. Partly it is animalian, partly cultural. It pervades all social institutions. Memory is created by fear, a specific case of which is fear of catastrophe. Events recorded in memory will be forgotten when the need to function sanely overrides the need to remember. Thus primal fears, which exist in memory because of terrors experienced directly or historically, are suppressed in the interest of day to day functioning of the organism. In the next paper, John MacGregor outlines psychological aspects of the work done by Immanuel Velikovsky. MacGregor, an art historian and psychotherapist, has applied psychiatry to the study of art. His paper is the result of the work done to clarify the views of Freud and Jung on the possibility of inherited transmission of memories. MacGregor examines dreams which have cosmic content; patients often express inner disturbance in symbolism involving cosmic catastrophe. Although the dreams refer specifically to events in the patient's inner reality, the reason why a patient projects an inner crisis in terms of catastrophes in outer space is not always evident; it is possible that some of these dreams cannot be explained in terms of personal memories in which case they may be evidence for racial memories imprinted during past global cataclysms experienced by mankind. The fourth paper, by William Mullen, compares apocalyptic writings from the Old and New World. These writings suggest that society is restructured after a catastrophe. The survivors seek stability through worship of what they think is an appropriate deity and through ritual activities. When another apocalypse is imminent, a new religion emerges or old religions are altered in an attempt to avert the impending disaster. Mullen shows how a catastrophe which occurred in the distant past becomes, because of religion, an apocalypse which will occur in the future. Where Mullen has discussed catastrophe as it is expressed through religion, the next paper, by Irving Wolfe, proposes that catastrophic experiences are the inspiration for great works of narrative art, in particular Wolfe discusses Velikovskian overtones in two of Shakespeare's plays. Through narrative art, catastrophes may be discussed and examined without the society (composed of individuals) having to experience the traumas associated with enduring, but repressed, memories of the actual events. As "adult fairy tales" such narratives provide a way to imply a rational order to an otherwise irrational universe, thereby diminishing apprehension about the uncontrollable aspects of nature. The response of the individual to such literature also can be understood in terms of the harmonizing effect of that literature also upon the subconscious needs of the individual for comfort. Neither the author nor the reader nor the audience can admit that there is an anxiety in need of comfort but that it seems, is shy the work endures partly because it soothes a hidden fear. George Grinnell, once a geologist and now an historian of science at McMaster University, shows how science has been altered to preclude all mention or examination of catastrophic disruptions. In the same sense in which the Egyptian rituals of the Old Kingdom, described earlier by Mullen, were designed to ensure a stable society, Grinnell shows how geological language was changed in the nineteenth century to provide a stable philosophical basis for the liberal movement which controlled urbanized industrial society in Britain. After a century of use, the new language is scientific dogma. To discuss anything other than evolutionary processes now requires that even the language of science be modified. It is not surprising then, within professional scientific circles, that little or no credence is placed upon attempts to introduce disruptive or revolutionary processes as part of everyday happenings in the Universe. Grinnell however ascribes their exclusion to immediate political expediency rather than to the wishes of scientists to forge dreadful catastrophes of the past. If Grinnell is correct, the violent emotional response of contemporary scientists to revolutionary hypotheses still requires explanation, especially in a world where political liberalism is declining. The eighth and final paper, by Patrick Doran, examines life after a cataclysm. Assuming that western-industrial society has already produced an apocalypse for mankind, Doran suggests that realization of the catastrophe must emerge into consciousness before survival can be assured. In this case survival depends upon rejuvenation of earth's fragile bioenvironment. Like Mullen, Doran then deals with how a society recovers from catastrophe. He claims that the joy induced by realizing that one is a survivor is the key to freedom from the buried fears of catastrophes long past. The acceptance of Velikovsky's cosmology by western civilization is a first step to freedom from the despair induced by a crisis laden World. The World has been changed in the cataclysm; those who know they have survived now have the chance to redirect civilization to ensure continued survival. In closing the Symposium, Dr. Velikovsky reminded those present that understanding mankind's traumatic past is the key to understanding the seemingly irrational motives behind the contemporary behaviour of men. In summarizing his scientific and historical contributions, Dr. Velikovsky noted the response of scholars to his work and to the evidence supporting it, and pleaded for younger minds to carry on and complete the revolution started three and one-half decades ago. It is my duty to report that two of the participants at the Symposium chose not to submit manuscripts for publication; therefore their papers are not included here [5] . These unfortunate decisions may reflect concern for the hostility exhibited by the scholarly community toward any works which deal with Velikovsky and his theories. The question I ask is, why do the issues by Velikovsky invoke an immediate emotional response in the more conventionally-minded scholars of the academy? The answer in part seems to arise from the division of scholars in general (and scientists in particular) in to two broad and quite mutually exclusive groups, which I will describe, for want of better term, as evolutionists and revolutionists. The majority group, the evolutionists, believe that we live, at a special moment, the pinnacle of creation, the end result of several billion years of gradual development wherein Homo Sapiens has achieved dominion over planet Earth and through technology has finally achieved understanding, albeit incomplete, of the rest of nature. This could be described as the centre or liberal view of the universe. Believers in this viewpoint live in a world where events are, in general, fully predictable, hence a rational planned life is possible. Occasional upheavals, described as Acts of God, mar the otherwise tranquil world from time to time, but afterwards the Universe resumes the normal process of unfolding as it should. The other group, the revolutionists, to which Velikovsky and his supporters belong, believe that the history of the World, and of the Universe, is best described in terms of a series of abrupt large-scale and intensive changes in nature and life with periods of slow evolution in between [6] . Physical evidence of such changes is found in Earth's geological strata and on the exposed surface of the planets. For the revolutionists the task is to re-interpret the evidence which has been described in the scientific and historical literature in terms of the evolutionary model, a project to which the evolutionists usually react with intense hostility. To rewrite the literature in such a manner that it is freed of conclusions which are only valid if the evolutionary model is correct appears to be a difficult task, though in reality it may not be. The correctness of such conclusions really depends upon the validity of a small number of physical theories. By showing that these theories can be sustained only by making unwarranted assumptions, the evolutionary viewpoint is undermined. The foundation removed, the data can be re-analyzed possibly producing different conclusions. In astronomy the long-time stability of the solar system is a key theory which recently has been questioned by Bass [7] ; even the nature of gravitation itself if still in doubt [8] . In geology and biology the currently adopted time scale depends upon the decay of long- lived radioactive atoms. The possibility that radioactive decays are environmentally induced has recently been proposed [9] . Without radiometric dating the rampant inflation in the magnitude of the cosmic timescale over the last century [10] will undoubtedly enter a sharp period of regression. This question will be debated in detail in time; for the present it is sufficient to say that if radioactive decay processes are not invariant, then many problems facing Velikovsky will vanish. The end result might well be a widespread reconsideration of Velikovsky's revised chronology. Similarly, if the cosmic time scale is drastically shortened, then the physical history of the Earth and Solar System will have to change. In the interim, astronomical confirmations of Velikovsky's advance claims [11] are viewed with suspicion by those believing in the evolutionary viewpoint. As an example of an advance claim I shall cite Velikovsky's descriptions of Saturn. In the keynote address Velikovsky refers to a nova-like explosion on Saturn [12] which occurred long before the events described in Worlds in Collision. In closing the Symposium Velikovsky notes how scientist and engineers will not deny that Jupiter's magnetic field must influence other bodies moving through it [13] . Having concluded that Saturn once exploded, Velikovsky has predicted that Saturn will be found to emit low energy cosmic rays [14] . Pioneer 10 has recently measured the magnetic tail of Jupiter at the orbit of Saturn [15] . Saturn enters Jupiter's magnetic tail every twenty years, at these encounters Velikovsky predicted an enhancement of cosmic radiation's arriving at Earth from Saturn [16] . A similar prediction has been made by an unidentified writer in Sky and Telescope who claims that the Jupiter tail encounter with Saturn's outer radiation belts could produce disturbances detectable by radio antennas aboard passing spacecraft [17] . Synchroton radiation emitted by the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus has been detected and cosmic ray sources have now been associated with these planets. Velikovsky's contention that Saturn recently erupted is supported by evidence that Saturn, like Jupiter, emits more energy than it receives from the sun [18] . The usual explanation for this excess is the escape of primordial energy from the planet. Why the excess still exists after billions of years is not obvious. Again the difference between Velikovsky and the evolutionists is a time factor: the difference between 4000 years and 4000 million years. While such great differences seemingly cannot be reconciled easily, the reader is cautioned to remember that the time difference depends upon the correctness of assumptions made in applying theories based upon an evolutionary model to the data. Usually assumptions are being made because no proof is possible. Accepted assumptions represent the current consensus of opinions put forth by the scientific establishment [19] . The thoroughness of Velikovsky's scholarship is beyond question; his main heresy is to question the evolutionary view and to champion a recently forgotten revolutionary viewpoint [20] and his contention that electric and magnetic forces play an important role in the Universe. Consideration of Velikovsky's cosmology as a possible reality restores to its rightful place an old method of describing the cosmos; a method which had, at least in part, become inconvenient for political reasons [21]. The question explored here is how could the revolutionary world view be forgotten by mankind and why does its re-emergence invoke such an emotional response from the believers of the currently popular evolutionary world view. Glimpses of these answers, I believe, are contained in the papers that follow. Together they are an important statement relevant to the question of the validity of Velikovsky's revolutionary cosmology. The fact that this Symposium took place at the seven-year-old University of Lethbridge and the fact that the University granted an honourary degree in Arts and Science to Dr. Velikovsky, generally regarded as a heretic, and even as an outcast by a few misguided individuals, are extraordinary events which warrant explanation: I believe that two factors allowed the supporters of Velikovsky to be successful at Lethbridge in their attempt to have him awarded an honourary degree for academic reasons. First and foremost there was the intense dedication of those persons working to document the case for granting Velikovsky's degree. Without their enthusiasm, nothing would have been accomplished. Second, in a small university the lines of communication are short. When the case for Velikovsky was presented to the General Faculties Council of the University, those voting on the matter were friendly with those supporting Velikovsky. When one is sufficiently informed about an issue it is hard to oppose known and trusted colleagues with good academic credentials. The isolation which normally prevents frequent communication between members of different departments is minimized at Lethbridge, as all are in one large and long building. Given our size and the common cause, daily contacts in the corridors, cafeteria, or library became more than occasions for passing social discourse; they became occasions for the exchange of ideas. This was a precious period in the intellectual growth of this University, especially for those intimately involved in the debate. {S : ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS} ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the effort of the editorial committee: Paul D. Lewis, Jr.; Laurie R. Ricou, and Ian Q. Whishaw, who diligently refereed the papers, and helped otherwise with the publication of this volume. I appreciate the help of my wife, Joan, my secretary, Mrs. Elly Boumans, and Stan Heller, for their diligence in proofreading the final manuscript and Proofs. I would be remiss if I did not mention the members of the committee which planned the Symposium; they are including myself, Lynne Pohle, Don Thompson, lan Q. Whishaw, and most importantly, the chairman of the committee the man to whose memory this volume is dedicated, my close friend and greatly missed colleague, the late John T. Hamilton. For his contribution to the Symposium I want to convey thanks from many delegates to the chairman, W. J. Cousins, Emeritus Professor of History. Throughout he directed the proceeding with fairness, introducing levity when the occasion called for it, but always maintaining decorum, especially where a chairman with lesser experience might have faltered. Notwithstanding all of the acknowledgements above some persons who have rendered valuable assistance have been overlooked. To these persons I offer apology and thanks. It is with gratitude that I acknowledge, for the University, the financial support awarded by the Canada Council, which in part paid the expenses of the scholars invited to address the Cultural Amnesia Symposium. As well, special thanks are due to the senior academic administrators of the University, President William E. Beckel and Vice-President Owen G. Holmes, who from the very beginning supported this honourary degree and the concept of a symposium, who offered personal support and who committed University funds not only for the Symposium but also to ensure that this volume would be published, and could be sold at a reasonable price. For me it has been a privilege to work with the authors preparing this volume. Several of them have extended much appreciated personal courtesy, warm hospitality and stimulating discussion during my visits to their homes and institutions both with respect to the revision of their papers and in the wider pursuit of our mutual interest in revolutionary genesis. I want to recognize the debt I owe to Philip Connolly for the wise counsel he has rendered concerning decisions I had to make on the format and contents of this volume. His critical remarks on the editing have assisted me greatly. Lastly, but with special emphasis, I must thank my secretary Mrs. Elly Boumans who persevered and worked very closely with me both in the difficult job of transcribing the tape recordings of the Symposium (in view of their technical content which discouraged others who tried to help), and in typing and proofreading of the several drafts of the manuscript while the editorial committee and the authors negotiated the final form. Without her dedication this volume would not be complete today. E. R. Milton, Department of Physics The University of Lethbridge October 1977 {S : Notes (Foreword)} Notes (Foreword) 1. Velikovsky World in Collision, (Doubleday, 1950), See-part 2, Chapter 6, pages 298f (Pocket Books, 1977) pages 302f; (Abacus, 1972) pages 286f. The pagination in the now out- of-print but widely distributed Laurel edition (Dell, 1967) is identical to that in the Pocket Books edition. The pagination in the earlier Delta edition (Dell, 1965) is identical to that in the more recent Abacus edition, see ahead, footnote 3, page 21. 2. Doubleday (1960). 3. Press Conference, The University of Lethbridge, 8 May 1974. 4. The contents of this issue eventually were expanded to become the book The Velikovsky Affair, (University Book, 1965). 5. Both papers are reviewed in the periodical Pensee 4( 5): 47 (Winter 1974/ 75) published by the Student Academic Freedom Forum, Portland, Oregon. As well, both of these papers are included in the recorded proceedings of the Symposium. A set of nine recorded cassette tapes of the entire Symposium is available from the University Library. Inquiries as to the current purchase price for the set of tapes should be directed to the University Library Media Distribution Centre. 6. There is an increased awareness in scientific circles, particularly in the sciences, that not all data can be fitted to the existing theories which utilize only evolutionary process. For simplicity, most mathematical models of nature use linear system of equations, despite much evidence that many natural phenomena are clearly non-linear in behaviour. Discrepancies from linearity are in general, handled by introducing perturbing-terms into the equations or by postulating local-anomalies in the specific environment under discussion. Recently, Rene Thom has produced a catastrophe-theory which allows abrupt discontinuous changes to be introduced into otherwise slowly evolving systems. Doing so allows connection to be made between unconnected and differing sequences of behaviour for an evolving system which seemingly exhibits markedly different behaviour in the present from that recorded in the past. A consequence of Thom's theory is that extrapolation of behaviour over many orders of magnitude, either in time or in quantity is inherently dangerous. An example is found in certain mechanically stable system which can unexpectedly undergo catastrophic breakdown, yet no apparent explanation for the breakdown can be found by extrapolating from the initial conditions. See : Montgomery, M., "Why Gondolas Derail", Boston Globe, 17 April 1976, page 32. Thom's theory is summarized in two recent articles published in New Scientist; see : Stewart, "The Seven Elementary Catastrophes", 68: 447-454 (20 November 1975); and Walgate, "Rene Thom Clears Up Catastrophes", 68: 578( 4 December 1975). 7. Bass Robert, "Did Worlds Collide?" Pensee 4( 3): 8-20 (Summer 1974); "Proofs" of the Stability of the Solar System, op. cit., pages 21-26. 8. The inability of Einstein to unify the gravitational field (general relativity) with the electromagnetic field (special relativity) may arise because the two fields are different descriptions of a single interaction. Until the nature of gravitation is realized, progress can be expected to be slow in finding a physical mechanism for Velikovsky's cosmology. 9. Dudley, H. C. "Phenomenological Causal Model Of Nuclear Decay, Assuming interaction with Neutrino Sea, "Lettere, Nuovo Cimento, 5( 3): 231-232 (16 September 1972); Anderson, John, and Spangler, G. W. "Radioactive Dating: Is the Decay Constant Really Constant?", Pensee 4( 4) : 31-33 (Fall 1974). 10. Engle, A. E. J. "Time and the Earth" American Scientist 57: 458-483 (Winter 1969) see pages 460f. 11. Dr. Velikovsky prefers to use the term 'advance claim' rather than prediction. 12. See ahead, Velikovsky, Cultural Amnesia: The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence, page 21. 13. See ahead, Velikovsky, Afterword, page 149. 14. Velikovsky, "H. H. Hess and my Memoranda" Pensee 2( 3) 22-29 (Fall 1972) see particularly page 28 Saturn from the Memo to Hess dated 11 September 1973. 15. "Dimensions of Jupiter's Magnetic Tail Believed Enormous" NASA News Release 76-55. 16. Velikovsky Copyrighted lecture 5 November 1962. Are Cosmic Rays Emitted by Saturn? 17. News notes: Jupiter's Magnetic Tail , "Sky and telescope 51( 5): 375 (may 1976). 18. The measured thermal excess of Saturn is greater by a factor of two over solar insolation. Reported by L. J. Caroff at the Northwest astronomy Conference Victoria B. C., 1975. 19. In astronomy ten thousand galaxies can be counted but astronomers apply theories to infer that one billion galaxies exist in the universe; thus there are about one hundred thousand unobserved galaxies for every one that we observe directly. A similar factor exists between stars that can be counted on photographs and the total number of stars believed to exist within our galaxy. To alter the time scale of the universe by an equal factor would bring events of one billion years ago into the last lce Age and events from the beginning of the Age of Mammals into the Christian Era. Urey has proposed that collisions between Earth and comets occur from time to time. Such collision may explain massive animal extinction which accompanied breaks in the geological record. See Urey "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods", Nature 242: 32-33 (2 March 1973). That Urey, explicitly contemptuous of Velikovsky, can bring a comet to collide with Earth millions of year ago, while Velikovsky cannot propose that a similar collision occurred thousands of years ago leads me to wonder if the recency of suggested events is proportional to their capability to produce discomfort in the evolutionist's mind: even catastrophic events if in the distant past are acceptable. Alteration of the timescale by de-evolutionizing the assumptions can bring cataclysmic events currently ascribed to the distant past into the historical period and thus to the time when the cataclysms may well have occurred and been recorded. 20. Stecchini, "The inconstant Heavens: Velikovsky in Relation to some Past cosmic Perplexities", American Behavioral Scientist 7: 19-35, 43-44 (September 1963), see especially pages 22-27. This paper also appears in de Grazia, Juergens, and Stecchini, editors of The Velikovsky Affair (University Books 1966). 21. See ahead Grinnell, Catastrophism and Uniformity. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 1: } {T CULTURAL AMNESIA } {S : The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER ONE CULTURAL AMNESIA The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and their Later Emergence IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY I thank you Dr. Holmes for the introduction. My comments tonight consist of informal remarks on material that I cover in a systematic fashion in the book that I am writing. This book, Mankind in Amnesia, elaborates upon new aspects that follow from my other published works [1] . {S : CATASTROPHES} CATASTROPHES In Worlds in Collision I describe two series of catastrophic events: The first took place in the middle of the second millennium before the present era, the second in the eighth century before the present era. The last of these catastrophic events occurred on 23 March - 686 [2] . Fortunately, men were not illiterate at the time of these catastrophes. One of the first clues as to what had happened I discovered in a book written over one hundred years ago, by a French missionary who worked in Canada, but who wrote about Mexico, C. E. Brasseur de Bourbourg [3] . He wrote several books on the subject of ancient Mexican beliefs and ancient Mexican history. He also wrote a small book investigating possible connections between Egyptian and Mexican beliefs. When I read Brasseur's books on the ancient history of Mexico I found it strange that he, being a clergyman, did not observe, or did not dare to report that in the Scriptures many pages deal with the very same events he was describing. He reported that cataclysmic events had been found in Mexican lore, events also described by several Spanish historians of the sixteenth century. These were events of great violence. Mountains rose and moved; many volcanoes erupted from the North-Pacific Coast of North America all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. The ocean rose like a wall and moved, accompanied by terrific winds. Fiery bodies were seen fighting in the sky. Stones descended from above, followed by rains of naphtha. Men were maddened by the din and the paramount danger. Houses collapsed and were carried away, hurricanes tore out great trees of whole forests with their roots. If such a great catastrophe occurred today, what impression would it leave in the survivors? The catastrophe of the second millennium has been remembered on very many pages of the Biblical Prophets and the Psalms. Our whole life is pervaded by influences originating in these and other catastrophic events that took place in earlier ages. The catastrophes survive in the liturgy still used today, only we choose not to examine them as such. Whatever area of life we select to explore we find some vestige of the terrifying events of the past. The calendar is a good example, either the Jewish calendar or the Christian calendar or that of any other creed. Throughout the year the holidays are reflections of catastrophic events. The midwinter holiday celebrated as either Christmas or Hanukkah, the Week of Light, is a renewal of the Roman Saturnalia. If you read about the Roman Saturnalia you recognize immediately almost all of the rites of Hanukkah or Christmas, now celebrated at the end of December. They commemorate events of the days when the planet Saturn exploded into a nova, long before the events that I describe in Worlds in Collision, Seven days before the Universal Deluge began, the solar system became illuminated as brilliantly as if by a hundred suns. In the Deluge, not only the Earth but also other planets of the solar system were engulfed. Nature was wanton: the destruction was great, Mars, Mercury, and the Moon, as the space pictures now reveal, became flying cemeteries. Nothing living remained, although probably there was once life on those planets its destruction was complete. In comparison, the Earth fared well and thus mankind could call itself the "Chosen People": not because all men survived, not because there was no destruction; in fact there was decimation, even extinction of whole genera, and massive mutations, caused mainly by cosmic rays and X-rays emitted by Saturn. Subsequent to the Deluge an environment was created on Earth in which life could not only exist, but could flourish, with an abundance of water, a change of climate with changed seasons, with a magnetosphere now giving protection from cosmic rays and an ionosphere giving protection from ultraviolet rays. The new orbit the Earth circled was not too close to the Sun, not too far from it, a climate unlike that of Mars (too cold) or Venus (too hot). The Universal Deluge was not the first catastrophe to decimate life on our Earth: other calamities preceded it, Dim memories from these more ancient times survive in mythology. Before the age of Kronos (Saturn's "Golden Age") there was the age of Ouranos [4] , Egyptian myths of great antiquity relate stories of battles and changes in the sky and of vast destruction on Earth, changes that we neglect to investigate and know in our desire to believe that we live on a planet that is stable and safe. {S : AMNESIA} AMNESIA The phenomenon of racial amnesia occupied Freud's mind in the last decades of his life, in fact it became his obsession. Initially Freud claimed that the impressions made upon a child's mind dictate the child's future and cause also neuroses in juvenile and adult life. Later Freud reversed his thesis and claimed that man's destiny is triggered by images which exist within the racial memory, deep within the unconscious mind. From psychoanalytic studies we know that a traumatic experience, either of a physical or psychological nature, leaves a strong vestige deep within the human soul. Such vestiges are in the heritage that comes to us from antiquity. They are found in most of the written documents that survive from the civilizations of the past; from Mexico, China, Iceland, Iran, India, Sumeria, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Judea. They also survive from traditions carried from generation to generation, by word of mouth, in races that do not know how to write. These latter traditions eventually are written down by anthropologists, who collect together stories of catastrophes from north and south, from west and east, from Lapland and the South Sea islands. We ask why we do not recognize this evidence the vestiges of which exist within the souls of men, The answer is that because these vestiges are buried so deeply we are unable to see the evidence before us. The story is repeated in the records of the stones and bones uncovered at every latitude and longitude. Chief Mountain [5] , that you can see from here, was once overturned. The fossils that belong near Chief Mountain's summit are found at its base. The Matterhorn in the Alps has been moved to its present location northward from Lombardy and overturned. In several different places in the Bible you can find verses describing mountains moving or overthrown. Such biblical verses appeared even to fundamentalists as metaphoric expressions. Today many theologians prefer to regard the Old Testament as a book of poetry rather than what it seemingly is. The inability to see evidence which is clearly written down and evidence so clearly presented by nature is a psychological phenomenon. Because the evidence was so clear, it was not necessary for me to look far to find it. When I started to collect the material for Worlds in Collision it was not the scarcity of material but its abundance that was my impediment. I was able to use but a small fraction of what exists in the surviving literature. Amnesia is one of the defense reactions of man. Those who immediately survived did not necessarily become victims of amnesia, though this may have occurred. We know the effects of battle-shock on soldiers. it is likely that the ,larger amnesia took some time to develop. In the older Greek authors, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, you find definite statements indicating that catastrophes which occurred in the history of the human race and in the history of our Earth were not abnormal events, they were actually dominant, repeating themselves again and again. But from the historical records we see that the knowledge of the catastrophes disappeared slowly into oblivion. Plato described cataclysms in several works: he wrote about worlds destroyed and rebuilt. In his Timaeus he noted that the Greeks do not remember ancient catastrophes, besides the Deluge. He adds that the people of his time, as the priests of Sais told Solon, were unable to remember these catastrophic events. in another work, whose authorship is probably wrongly ascribed to Plato, he is presented as believing in a peaceful universe. Plato's pupil Aristotle refused to believe in catastrophes. The scholarly world has accepted Aristotle's view that the planets can never change their motions. He, more than anyone else is responsible for the continuing belief that we live in a safe world, on a planet to which nothing like collisions can happen. Aristotle argued that those who believe in celestial catastrophes should be brought to trial, and if convicted, punished by death. In the first century before the present era Lucretius knows of, and writes about these catastrophes and their terror. Cicero, like Aristotle, denies the possibility of the planets changing their orbits and advocates that people believing this should be brought to court and severely punished. {S : ARMAGEDDON} ARMAGEDDON At the beginning of the Christian era, or in the century before it, mankind awaited another catastrophe. This catastrophe was expected because seven hundred years had separated the last series of upheavals of the eighth-seventh centuries from the one of the fifteenth century. This expectation created an eschatological literature and the appearance of Messiahs. The Book of Revelation is one of the great books of this eschatological literature. The end of the world is painted with the experience of the past serving as a model. Look at Michelangelo's The Last Judgement. Sadism is as predominant as masochism in this Christian description of the events of the Last Day. The catastrophe, the Last Day, has now been transferred into the sky, into heaven, but not an astronomical heaven; these are different heavens. In reality Michelangelo is painting events already described by the prophets Isaiah, Joel, Amos, and Micah, who lived during the catastrophes of the seventh and eighth centuries before the present era. Because of man's aversion to knowing his past, science has been greatly retarded, pretending unreality to be as truth. This explains the fury of the opposition that declared war on my book, Worlds in Collision. If the book were fantasy, would it not have had its season and died down? it has not died down. It survives. But scientists have not investigated my claims nor tested the evidence presented, nor have they searched for new evidence. Instead, scientists have chosen to oppose me and my book in most ingenious ways, substituting name-calling and mockery for discussing and testing. Scientists are followers of a cult, defending dogmas with which they do not wish to part. Scientists have proclaimed these dogmas to be established laws, when in reality they are nothing but views, and erroneous ones at that. In my book Worlds in Collision there are footnotes which allow the reader to check the sources of my claims. In twenty-four years those scholars who have taken time to check my sources have found that my quotations have not been taken out of context. But, of course, I do not claim infallibility. Establishment scientists, despite their proclaimed idealism, deserve to be labeled pseudo-scientists. In science, claims are accompanied by proof; in pseudo-science proof is omitted and any discussion that questions the dogma is suppressed. In the discoveries of the Space Age there is now an independent proof of the claims made in Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. The Moon, and Mars, and Mercury, and also other planetary bodies went through paroxysms. The subconscious desire of man to know his past was the basis of progress which led to the development of science. The aversion to accepting the truth about the past inevitably blocks the road. Scientific efforts are directed away from the right channels, and so science briefly progresses, and then regresses. For a full hundred years Darwin not only advanced, but also retarded the development of science. My work has also produced both a positive and a negative effect. Claims have been maintained that would not have been maintained if the scientists had not felt obliged to contradict the iconoclastic views expressed in Earth in Upheaval and Worlds in Collision. {S : SUPPRESSION AND REGRESSION} SUPPRESSION AND REGRESSION In postulating that the Earth was a planet travelling around the Sun, Aristarchus was the precursor of Copernicus. Copernicus realized this, because in the original preface to De Revolutionibus[ [6] he referred to Aristarchus, but removed the reference before the book was published in the year of his death. Between these men are seventeen centuries yet both were opposed by the scientific minds of their day. Mankind has the need to live in an unreal world. Men did not wish to believe that their planet travels through space. A moving planet might not be safe, it could collide with something. The thought that the Earth could collide is by itself traumatic. No ancient scientist is considered greater than Archimedes. Archimedes was irreverent toward his senior contemporary, Aristarchus, for believing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Archimedes won, and after the time of Ptolemy (second century of the current era) the victory was complete. Science accepted this untruth, not just for centuries, but for more than a millennium. Despite the fact that Aristotle did not profess beliefs which in any way resembled the beliefs of Christianity, a strange symbiosis developed between the writings of Aristotle and the Bible. Aristotle was the authority that dominated Christian thinking for many centuries. Copernicus' theory was rejected, not because of the Bible, but because of Aristotle. In this century there was great opposition when I proposed that the Earth had nearly collided with other planets. Science, too, is torn between the desire to know and the aversion to knowing. But my revelation was really just a rediscovery, the evidence was always there. I did not read any hidden texts, the words were clearly written, they were shouting at me from all bookshelves. The Darwinian Revolution was also a regression. Disturbing evidence was ignored; it was as if he worked with closed eyes. Darwin proposed that only the fittest survive. He believed that, through competition alone, the first unicellular bodies could evolve into more complex life forms, as different as man, worm, and bird. Darwin did not know about mutations. His notebooks from the only field trip he ever undertook contain descriptions of cataclysmic disruptions. He wrote that nothing less than the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could result in the mass annihilation of life forms that he observed. On the continental scale he observed that life forms, large and small, were extinguished or decimated from Tierra del Fuego to the Bering Strait. Darwin did not accept the implications of the evidence that he saw with his own eyes. The Darwinian Revolution was the rebirth of Aristotle, whose ideas had lost ground, if not at the time of the Renaissance, then in the Age of Enlightenment. Even in the Age of Enlightenment men espoused ideas of a peaceful earth. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that there was a happy beginning to the human race and that because of man's sinfulness, he has become what he is today. That paradise existed in the past is another dream. In the days of Rousseau and Voltaire there lived in France a man whose name is probably not familiar to most of you. He was an engineer named Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. He wrote an article on the Deluge for the great French Encyclopédie, published by d'Alembert and Diderot. Boulanger also wrote l'Antiquité devoilé par ses usage's, a work in several volumes. Voltaire and Rousseau and other great names pale in my eyes before Nicolas Boulanger. At my request, Dr. Mullen [7] was kind enough to bring two of these volumes from the Princeton University Library. I have displayed them on the floor as material evidence of Boulanger's work. I discovered Boulanger rather late in my research. First I read about him in Stecchini's paper in the September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist [8] . Although I still have to study Boulanger's work carefully, his findings surprise me greatly. I realized that he was the precursorof Freud, and in many respects of myself. I do not know what led Boulanger to his discovery. He writes mostly of the Deluge, but not only does he realize that there were catastrophes, he draws some conclusions about the mental effects they caused. The recognition of past cataclysms opens new vistas in all fields of inquiry, even in morals and ethics. I wish to draw your attention to a book by Pitirim Sorokin [9] in which he discussed calamities like world wars and famine. He discovered that two reactions occur. One reaction is to help (a humanitarian reaction), and the other reaction is to harm (a destructive reaction); he saw evidence for this in the excesses of the Russian Revolution. Sorokin's idea of dichotomy is illustrated on the one hand by the way the escapees from Egypt interpreted the noises caused by the folding and twisting of strata, noises of the screeching Earth described also by Hesiod - the Israelites heard in them a voice giving ethical commands. Elsewhere on the tortured Earth, other races responded differently: Compare Olympus to Sinai. The Homeric scandals on Olympus occurred at the time of the cataclysms; this was the other reaction. Another example comes from Heraclitus 10 , who compared the different descriptions of the Pantheon by Plato and by Homer. We see then, past and present, both reactions to calamity. {S : PLANET GODS} PLANET GODS The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression. Astronomy preoccupied all ancient peoples - in Mexico, in Babylonia, and elsewhere. It was the dominant occupation of the sages. The ancients watched the planetary bodies because they were afraid that another disaster would occur. Astrology has its beginning in the deeds of the planets. Many of the liturgies since antiquity are echoing in catastrophic events. Around the world peoples of all faiths worshipped astral bodies. Great temples were erected to the planetary deities. The Parthenon was built to honour Athene. In Athens, a few columns of the temple to Zeus are still standing. Temples were erected to Jupiter in Baalbek, and to Amon (Jupiter) in Karnak. The worship and sacrifices to the various deities of the past have the same genesis, as do the establishment of priesthoods and priestly rituals, many of which are still used. Even in the Christian era, temple architecture has memorialized these events. The Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages refer to unconscious catastrophic memories and to lingering mnemes of terrifying apparitions exemplified by the dreadful figures of Notre Dame. The greatest feat of engineering of the past, the great pyramids of Egypt, were royal shelters against possible repetition of catastrophic events. In his Despotisme orientale, Boulanger discusses those ancient kings and tyrants who behaved as if they wished to be regarded as earthly equivalents of the planetary gods. Only rarely did they desire to be called sun gods because the Sun was never the supreme deity. Today, we find this strange because we do not recognize the catastrophic history of our Solar System. Macrobius, a Latin author of the fourth century identified Jupiter of mythology and of religion as the Sun. Modern authors do the same thing when they say that Amon was the Sun, or Nergal was the Sun; they were not. Around the world mythology and folklore testify that some ancient terror underlies the origin of many social institutions. The sacred prostitution of the past became the secular prostitution of today. Warfare has its origin in the same terror. As the ancient Assyrian kings went to war they compared the destructiveness of their acts to the devastations caused by the astral deities at the time of upheavals. In creating symbols, men were depicting battles in the sky; the Mogen David of ancient Israel or even of Israel of today the five-pointed star of Communist Russia and China, and of the US Armed Forces are emblems of Athene-Pallas. The dragon, be it Chinese, Assyrian or Mexican, or the dragon fighting with St. George or with Michael the archangel originates from the apparition first seen on the celestial screen in the days of the Passage of the Sea. All Mayan, Olmec and Toltec monuments and temples are constructed to Quetzalcohuatl, the planet Venus and other planetary bodies which superceded in their dominance one another in planetary ages. Quetzalcohuatl is omnipresent in Yucatan, a winged serpent or dragon, exhaling burning water or naphtha. {S : WAR} WAR The after-effects of what took place millennia ago do not lose their grip on the human race. If anything, the trend continues and accelerates. Wars made by irrational nations led by irrational governments have been recurring since the time of the Assyrian kings, and have been growing in scale as preparations for war continue. in the last century the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov recognized that almost all technology for peaceful uses had firstly originated and developed to serve destruction. The awarding of the Nobel Peace prizes has been of no help in preventing military conflicts. Freud exchanged with Einstein famous letters on the subject of 'Why War? ' - but he resigned himself to the unavoidability of human carnage. Due to the persistent urge for destruction in man, already early in the development of his theory he realized that traumatic experiences, whether of physical or psychological nature, cause amnesia in the individual; and further, as years passed, he realized that the victim of traumatic experience, whether still on is conscious mind, or submerged in oblivion' urges the victim to live once more through the traumatic experience, and sometimes, more often than not, making somebody else the victim. But Freud thought that man was reliving the regularly- repeated drama of the murder of the father by his grown-up sons which occurred in the caves of the Stone Age. Freud believed that an indelible vestige of this prehistoric trauma lurks deep within the human mind, and as years passed he came to the thought that possessed all his thinking. Racial memory of some traumatic experiences dominates man and society to the extent that the human race in his diagnosis, lives in delusion. But he did not know the true traumatic nature of the historical past, namely, the outburst of wantonness in nature itself, and so he insisted that each individual relives the catastrophes of the past, which he believed to be the murder of the father, the Oedipus complex. He opposed the biological view of his day, and of today, too, and insisted that this imprint was transported through the genes from one generation to the next. He did not come to know the true nature of the Great Trauma - born in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought more than once to the brink of destruction - which was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon. Freud died in exile from his home, when a crazed worshipper of Wotan was preparing another Götterdämmerung. The great riddle unsolved, Freud closed his eyes when the hakenkreutz (another ancient emblem) carrying troops marched into flaming Poland. Another generation rose since the end of World War II. The technology of destruction since the days when a mushroom rose over Hiroshima has advanced tremendously. The human urge to repeat the traumatic experiences of the past did not subside, but grew, and he who tried to reveal them was reviled. How many atomic submarines have been built? How many mushroom clouds can be produced? In how many ways can we destroy all life on this Earth? A Damocles sword hangs over the human race. The planets have finally retired into peaceful coexistence. But mankind, though not in the center of creation, still, in its optimal place, is a pandemonium of races and nations, while the blueprint of Armageddon is on the drawing boards, and the arsenal to incinerate this globe and degenerate whatever population will survive is growing from day to day. The adversaries on both sides of the Atlantic, with many small nations emulating them are as if living with the urge to se . e again the unchained elements in a nuclear multi-head explosion over every locality of the Old and New Worlds. I feel that I must speak out on this subject whenever and wherever I can. We are in a race, and I do not know if I can help, but I must try. Unfortunately my attempt to cure the mental illness which afflicts mankind cannot use the methods of good psychiatry. You cannot put the human race on the couch. You cannot expect to cure using blunt statements about the past. Without preparation, without giving the patient a chance to prepare himself, you cannot slowly release from his subconscious mind the necessary recognition of the traumatic past. Above all others, the scientific community has experienced great paroxysms, and reacted in fury against the disclosures of a modern book. The price for my revelation has been high, but what choice did I have? The enemy is time. I conclude with a verse which is not my own, and I don't remember it exactly, but the hour is late, and I will repeat it: We are in a race with the Reaper We hastened, he tarried, we won. I wish I could hope that it will be that way, and not the other way around. {S : Notes (Cultural Amnesia)} Notes (Cultural Amnesia) 1. Dr. Velikovsky has previously published Oedipus and Akhnaton, the reconstruction of a human tragedy, at the end of the house of Akhnaton, with the help of Greek legends, Earth in Upheaval, discussing paleontology and geology, Ages in Chaos, Volume one and Peoples of the Sea, the concluding volume, discussing archaeology and ancient sources, and Worlds in Collision, discussing folklore and mythology. 2. Which is the astronomical way of indicating 687 B. C. 3. See Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950) page 122, footnote 10; (Pocket Books, 1977), page 134; (Abacus, 1972), Page 127, footnote 3. Because of their importance Velikovsky's books will be cited for three editions. The footnotes refer in the following order to the hardcover Doubleday edition, the new Pocket Books edition, and the Abacus Paperback edition. 4. Velikovsky is suggesting that the Ouranos referred to in myths might be the planet Uranus, rediscovered in the eighteenth century by William Herschel, or the planet Neptune, rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Adams and Leverrier. 5. Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955), pages 71-72, footnote 5, (Abacus, 1973), pages 64- 65; (Dell, 1968), page 75; (Pocket Books, 1977), pages 66-67. 6. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543. 7. Dr. William Mullen, Hodder Fellow in the Humanities, Princeton University. 8. "The Inconstant Heavens", pages 19-35,43-44; this article has been reprinted in de Grazia, Juergens, and Stecchini eds., The Velikovsky Affair (University Books, 1966) pages 80-126. 9. Man and Society in Calamity (Greenwood Press, 1968). 10. Heraclitus, author of The Homeric Allegories (1st century present era) not to be confused with Heraclitus of Ephesus. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE PALAETIOLOGY OF FEAR AND MEMORY} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER TWO THE PALAETIOLOGY OF FEAR AND MEMORY Alfred de Grazia Department of Politics, New York University Palaeo-anthropology has reached a stage of agitation perhaps unparalleled since the nineteenth century discoveries of palaeolithic man. Serious questions of chronology have been raised. On the one hand, it appears that hominids have been long on Earth, perhaps even five million years by certain radiodating, and have used tools for just as long a time. On the other hand, the end of the ice Age has been pushed ever nearer to the present, and with it many of the early creations of man, so that speculation upon a neolithic revolution of mind and culture flourishes. That is, human nature is proposed both to be extremely old and extremely young. A second prominent question concerns the nature of invention. increasingly we understand that every human "invention" or practice that is a "first" cannot be called first if only because every invention is a complex of usages requiring a species that is functioning holistically. An elaborated club requires a tool for its making, a sense of design, a visualized succession of futures in which it may be used, a notion of property, a hierarchy of force, and a directed memory. Add a firehearth with its myriad implications and you have a culture. If palaeochronology is correct even in general, and I am not sure that it is a Homo of hammer and fire appeared exceedingly early. But, if so, then why the hundreds of thousands or millions of years of stagnation? If a club, why not a panzer division and an automated whaling expedition in the next two thousand years thereafter? It may be that the datings are quite wrong. Or perhaps Homo has undergone sharp genetic change on one or more occasions in the middle of his long course of life. Or maybe some set of profound experiences propelled him into the modernity of the neolithic age. Without addressing itself to the first two possibilities, this paper argues the last of them. It maintains that mankind was goaded to leap into modernity by a series of horrendous environmental changes. These events of the sky and earth closed down the age of palaeolithic hammer-plus-fire people and introduced modern humans in their stead. A furious socialization and inventiveness possessed an already acculturated people. The transformation, according to this theory, must have forcefully involved as leading elements in its development the systems of human fear and human memory. {S : PART I: FEAR} PART I: FEAR By our third year of life we are already communicating catastrophic experiences to others. If we have not yet been catechized by religion, we may have learned to chant of catastrophe by means of fables. We may have heard repeatedly of Chicken-Licken (alias Chicken Little, Henny-Penny, "The End of the World"), and we wish to join the procession of animals that hope to be sheltered from the falling sky, seeking the protection of the king (authority), fearful lest the fox (a wicked force) eat us up in his cave, or hopeful that an owl (knowledge) will tell us that we are only imagining disaster (dreaming). This same story, with some variations, is found in many cultures. The same mental process and types of output are found everywhere. People sense fear, share it with others, and treat its symptoms by means of fable. {S : A FIRST APPROXIMATION} A FIRST APPROXIMATION Psychology has long tried to pinpoint a "primal fear" or "primal anxiety" that seems to be born with us or infects us soon thereafter. The fear seems to originate very early; else why would we as infants be so eager to enter upon our therapy through chant and fable? Such therapy appears to be attachable to any object, outside or within the developing organism. By "attachable" (or should we use the term "displaceable"?) and by object," we mean that early fear can be stimulated by, and subjectively perceived as caused by, a hand, bottle, spasm, sight, noise, lifting or sinking in space, or whatever may occupy, overlay or reinforce certain neural paths that course among our glands, brains, and organs; the fear appears to have a preexisting depository somewhere within us. It has been observed to be more intense among infants who were not handled, than among those who were moved about and played with. Close observers of the experiences of infants can see that a practically undifferentiated combination of organs may respond to stimuli in all major categories of life thrusts. The earlier in life that stress is applied the more quickly the total development of the organism. Stress stimulates the organism's hypothalamus and pituitary glands, as well as its spinal cord and celiac plexus, and the aforesaid glands release hormones (ACTH) into the blood stream that activate the adrenal cortex to release more hormones that accelerate metabolism. The system functions a few days after birth. In these senses, there is no reason to deny the assertion that primal fear may be hereditary or even pre-natal. We may categorize the life-thrusts as centered upon control of the environment, affection, and well being (ingestion and excretion); that is, operationally, reactions to stimuli and stress can be placed into these three groupings. Later on, these categories branch out: well-being ramifies into purely organic health and the symbol system connected with it and into far-flung-economic systems with their symbols; affection spreads over an area of sexuality, respect, and altruism; control is refined into power and knowledge. The categories need not be defined here, but are merely illustrative. Behavioral patterns (and institutions) emerge from, cluster about, and fixate upon such categories. For example, infantile sexuality gives rise to sexuality, then to family control, or control of attendant's response, also to dominance, and to hierarchy - with all of their differentiated patterns from place-to-place and person-to-person. "No two snowflakes are quite alike." Here, too, we need not go farther. {S : ANIMAL AND HUMAN FAILURES ALIKE} ANIMAL AND HUMAN FAILURES ALIKE Primal fear, we must admit, is observed in animals, whether infant or adult. When we say of a person "she jumped like a startled doe" we begin metaphorically what could be a minute comparison of all respects in which mammals respond to events with fearful behavior. We go to accounts of disasters, which may be read into fossil palaeontology or come from histories of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods. We note such facts as, or see that, animal and humans flee alike and together into caves to avoid flood and fire. Mammals, like people, become desperate with hunger, become aggressive and seductive with sexual lust, and learn to exploit their environments. But now we come to that well-worn concept: "the range of response." The range of searching and reacting is very much greater among humans, marvelously greater, and even "qualitatively" greater. Human behavior is immensely expanded; furthermore, by imagination in the "hall of mirrors" that symbolism furnishes. We discover that we have large brains. We think, "Here is the source and solution. The one unique trait of humans!" Our vastly superior range of behavior results from a capability for cerebral reflexes on a grand scale. We can gain more impressions, store more, classify them more flexibly and finely, and use them more logically to solve problems. Our triumph is short lived. The human of today does not have a larger brain than do various fossil skeletons that were unearthed in an environment of deprivation and squalor comparing badly with the hives of bees and the houses of beavers. Yet this style of life lasted for many thousands of years. For that matter, a number of living groups and members of groups seem to be only one step ahead - largely in symbolism we mark - from the mammals around them. Moreover, we must admit that we cannot solve the most important problems that beset all animals - food, death, and survival of the species. We have solved them "in our minds" perhaps, but perhaps the animals have, too. Actually we must beg the question to proceed further. We have to say "Granted our preferences, we are the best animal on earth to achieve them." That is, we like what we like. Very well. What is it that we wish to achieve. And then we say what any animal would say if it could speak: "Self-fulfillment! We wish to be all that we might be. That is, healthy, loving, and wise. With such variations of these themes as our species can enjoy." Well, then, where is the place for primal fear in this scheme of things? Primal fear is the uncomfortable feeling that we are about to be denied some or all of all that we want, beginning with life itself, the prerequisite to health and all else. We have never been successful as a group in becoming healthy, loving and wise. Our failures in each generation, and the failures of those who train us, make us fearful. With these obvious statements of fact, have we not solved the problem of the origin and transmission of primal fear? {S : THE DRIVE TO FAIL} THE DRIVE TO FAIL We wonder how far this simple solution has carried us. The application of invention and administration to human societies has certainly erased fears, at some times and places and in certain areas of life more than in others. We write books, build skyscrapers, land on the Moon, muster armies, plough the land deeply and neatly with machines, and compound billions of aspirin tablets. True, we suspect that some of these activities and others as well have only in part to with becoming healthy, loving, and wise. Often our activities seem to resemble a dog chasing its tail, or more abstractly, they suggest a vicious cycle. We suspect that a great deal of what we do, of what we achieve, of how we fulfill our desires to be healthy, loving, and wise - indeed all of our history shows it - is not to become healthy, loving, and wise, but just the opposite: to suffer, to hate, and to suppress knowledge! We choose very often the bad, if not for "us" then for "others" (a mere non-psychological and pragmatic distinction); we make the bad look good; diabolism, in a word. We can identify this diabolism, the evil principle of life, as a product of the primal fear. Possibly Freud's "death - instinct" can be indicated as its product, as well. How do we operationalize the concept "fear"? How many stones of the Cathedral of Notre Dame were laid by fear? Whatever stimulates in an organism reactions of chemical and perceived malaise, avoidance, and hostility produces fear. The greater the scope and intensity of the stimulus (which we may call deprivation, also) the greater the fear and anxiety. The word "fear" more precisely denotes any one or a combination of chemical and behavioral activities of the organism the sheer enumeration of which would consume pages. The list grows, as more and more activities may be observed, in combination with others, to be prompted to some degree by fear. B. F. Skinner, for instance, once he acquired a keen perception of aversive training in all aspects of life, was driven to total reconstruction of society, a Walden II, where alone may all the interacting primitive mechanisms of society be avoided and substituted for by positive reinforcement of desired behavior. Both stimulus and response may be social and/ or personal, and either or both may be conscious and/ or unconscious. Much of the time we find ourselves telling someone, "You don't know what's bothering you," which is all very well, provided that we know what is bothering him and can prove it. Down, down, we are led - and back, back! {S : FEAR STORAGE} FEAR STORAGE Fear is stored as a potential response. The word "stored" is convenient but we cannot mean by it that a fear-bank is located somewhere in the organism like a slab of fat or a quart of blood. Presently, a fear-bank is a fear-capacity, that is: a capacity of a system to respond chemically and behaviorally faster, more intensively, and more extensively to a fear-producing stimulus, plus a corresponding capacity to perceive fear-stimulating events in the environment ever more finely. The response is physically connected with objects identified by the person as the same or similar. But the identifications are not easy and automatic. The logic is not according to a rational "is" but is experiential. One proceeds analogically and culturally. One is subject to the categories of mind, gland, and anatomy in general in matching a personal historical event of fear with a present cause now of fear. But to these are added social or "racial" or collective fears. One is subject simultaneously to indoctrinated matching of the historically experienced fear with the presently socially identified cause of fear which may or may not be (for many reasons) the "true" cause of the present fear here and now. Suppose that we call the emotional load of historical and catastrophic and present fear the "affect" of fear, thinking of it as a kind of fear-depot. In what way, if any, may we say the stored affect is hereditarily transmitted, as well as socially transmitted? If we exclude chemical, radioactive and viral materials from the term "history," a historical experience appears to be incapable of having a genetic impact on an organism that is yet to be conceived. The organism is unaffected at conception by the impact and effect of historical experience. A child is not frightened by a bomb that his mother heard long before he was conceived, but by stories of its fearfulness. Still the organic setting of the fear mechanism is inherited. Therefore, one's personal history, whatever the person experiences that is structurally analogous to the ancestral social experience will be organically experienced with The same types of symptoms and affect. In other words, a maze of sensible and intelligible tracks is set up genetically, and is the natural system to be used for analogous experiencing by the person or for training purposes by the group as it organizes ancestral group experiences (as symbolized) and new future experiences (as interpreted). (This general condition varies within unknown limits according to individual constitutional sensitivities to fear.) {S : PRINCIPLES OF THE FEAR SYSTEM} PRINCIPLES OF THE FEAR SYSTEM We may recall now several principles that have occurred to us thus far: a) The areas of fear coincide with the areas of life (the ubiquity of fear). b) The greater the scope and intensity of the deprivation over the areas of life, the greater the fear (the fear/ deprivation covariation). c) The greater the fear, the greater the storage of fear-affect (fear-bank). d) Any new experience of deprivation calls into being as response the affect that is anatomically and socially determined to be analogous (the analogous fear-response). e) The greater the stored affect, the greater the new fear. (The over-response to fear). Now I would suggest another principle that is not, in my opinion, difficult to accept: f) The banking of fear-affect (of anatomical and/ or social origins) is not confined strictly to a set of analogous areas of responses (the displacement of fear). For example, anatomically there is no reason to believe that there is a distinctive mechanism in the adrenal medulla that regulates the flow of the potent drug, adrenaline, according to prescriptions marked neatly "to be used for sexual use only" or "use only in case of food deprivation," or "reserved for screaming bombs." The neural instruction to the gland is general: "Emit a little" or "Emit a lot," and there follows various juggling measures by other organs to handle the flow of adrenalin, hopefully advancing the body to a postulated, fictional "equilibrium". The brain, especially the "higher" control centers in small crises (as perceived) and the "lower" control centers in great crises (as perceived), does manage to institute some kind of "cause-effect" or "stimulus-logical response" relation. So do many other more archaic elements of the body. However, we must add another principle: g) The greater the stored fear-affect and the greater the present experienced deprivation, the greater the overflow of responding affect that had been stored in remote "illogical" "unanalogous" life-areas (Excessive fear-displacement). Take, as one of many available illustrations, the expression, "When he thought he was about to die, his whole life flashed before him." In a most traumatic experience, it may occur that every area of life becomes instantly relevant, connected, and impressed. Specialization, in fear as in other areas of experience, must surrender to generalization in the face of crisis. Crisis mobilizes: psychologically, organically, and socially. {S : FEAR OVERLOAD AND FAILURE} FEAR OVERLOAD AND FAILURE Once more, we recall something already said, in order to fashion yet another principle. We said that historically humankind has been, if not a failure, then only a restricted success. The more marvelous and burgeoning our creations, the more reason we are given to believe that the very exuberance of our endeavors is itself a fatal sign that we have achieved little in the eternal struggle against fear. We have not become healthy, loving and wise. h) Humankind has stored up too much fear to become healthy, loving, and wise (unhappiness through fear overload). Wherever one is pricked by fear, the fear generalizes and is related to other areas of life. One does not have to experience on "one's own account" more than a minimum of fear- inducing experience. Most known societies have elaborate institutional and artistic machinery for building and reinforcing fears without the need of experiencing deprivations beyond the minimum. Societies carry an over-load of fear, which impresses generation after generation; hence individuals suffering frustrations must ordinarily respond with fears in a generalized rather than specialized, causally-connected way. If this is true, what areas of life are to be held responsible for providing humankind with its most excruciating and enduring terrors? Would it be in the struggle for food? In the search for love? In the understanding of oneself and nature? Or what? Let us speculate upon the history of these needs since the age of the hominids. Every single being who has ever lived has had a number of crises or encounters, many of them deprivational and frustrating, in all three areas. But meanwhile' in most cases, he has enjoyed certain indulgences, and he has seen that others, enjoying momentarily either better or worse experiences, are not overly agitated by his personal experiences. Whether the human race is five million or fifteen thousand years old, a continuous, varied lifetime of experiences has enveloped the individual human being. At all times deprivation result in structural personal affect-deposits and social deposits. For example, the birth throes are agonizing for mother and infant. The anatomy registers the terror upon the infant for life, with some variance of intensity. The society encourages the mother and attendants to reduce infant pain as much as possible, and helps the mother by various rites and medicines through her agony. So with diseases, famine, sex rivalry, accidents, and conflicts. If human existence had been nothing but these frustrations, would man be what he is today? No, we say. For he has suffered these always as an ordinary sensitive mammal. Could they have accumulated bit by bit in our customs and institutions to give us ultimately an overcharge of fear? Again we point to a largely unprogressive, artless primeval history. But add now the experiences of local earthquakes, local storms, local volcanic eruptions and occasional meteorite falls. Would these be enough to create a person who in several thousand years moved from idiot to savant? Since these, too, have been among the eternal fund of human experiences, we must a priori deny them major effect. {S : CATASTROPHIC FEAR} CATASTROPHIC FEAR However, consideration of these shocking experiences suggests that if a much greater disaster were visited upon the human species, inflicting severe deprivations of food, light, air, water, heat, affection, property, and control, extending simultaneously to practically all humans and animals, and suggesting in many ways an immense life force in human and/ or animal form, then such a disaster would bring about a massive social fear which, on top of the uniformly accruing fears, might overload the total fear-affect- bearing capacity of the human race for thousands of years. That a series of such disasters occurred in the period of the dawn of civilization seems to be highly probable. We may cite here not only the striking documentation published by Immanuel Velikovsky from religious myths and secular histories of the earliest times, but also the researches of the Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars such as Giordano Bruno and Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, surveys of Claude Schaeffer on the comparative stratigraphy of the Near and Middle East, and the ever-mounting geological evidence of widespread destruction in Holocene times, much of which was also compiled by Velikovsky. Humanity was literally born in an epoch of disasters, and it may be correct to say that man was created by disasters. That is to say, by principle: i) Natural catastrophes must be the origins of the overload of fear-affect that has driven man to create most of his goods and evils, his arts, and his institutions (the catastrophic fear). And, if we accept this idea, we place it with our other principles, and say: j) The super-experience, the super-fear, spills its affect upon other areas of life and makes them develop in multitudinous ways, all of them under the influence, the style, and the behavioral conditioning of the primal fear (the cultural ubiquity of the catastrophic fear). This catastrophic element, the "Disaster-factor," overruns all other life areas and affects them all. The catastrophic "D-factor" becomes the most widely employed model for the design of life - of religions, of governments, of transportation and commerce, of sex practices and of conflict and war. That it has been until now the least obvious and the most unconscious of human fear-burdens does not negate its presence or diminish its quantity. Its deeply buried and fully generalized character contributes to the difficulty of discovering and elaborating its origins and operations. Since D-affect has been most pronounced in the development of affects in all value areas of life, the accumulated D-affect is greater than any single source of fear and continues to supply chemicals and behaviors when these other sources are stimulated. In this sense, then, a person today responds to the disasters of several - thousand years ago. There have been 77 reproductive generations of 33 years each since the last catastrophe located by Velikovsky in -686. Calculated as Memorial or Mnemonic generations of 60 years, that is, the years between a child and an old story-teller of the clan, the elapsed time is 44 generations. One is responding today to D-events of 44 generations of collective remembering and reburial. One does so even when one (or an intimate observer) would claim that he is responding only to fear of assault, rape, thunder, hunger, punishment or whatever. A "D-event" is both general and terrible. It supplies these two qualities. Because it is general, it can be associated with all affect-types, that is, with areas of health, affection, knowledge, etc. Because it is terrible it provides a substantial part of the "D-analogous affect" stored in relation to such affects. Thus ordinary behaviors, then, cannot be natural; they are already constructed of D-affect and loaded with D-associations that are drawn upon habitually. Sex is not sex; commerce is not commerce; war is not war. They are all this at a higher level of affect. Very ancient catastrophes at the dawn of human nature continue to have pronounced effects upon a very wide range of behaviors making it difficult even to speak of a pure event in love, commerce, conflict, and science. {S : PART II: MEMORY} PART II: MEMORY Fear stands in a reciprocal relation to memory. Each exists in the other and builds upon the other. Memory is more than an instrument of fear. It is created by fear and yet alone makes possible the constructive (destructive) elaboration of fear. The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be called - mnemonology? its scope ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the "'psychopathology of everyday life," as Freud put it, to the "'collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts of ancient catastrophes and that German educators observe as they try to teach the history of Nazism. it must deal with myths such as the Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer's Odyssey that mask world disasters, and with nursery songs that mask the murders of kings. We may quote what Katherine Elwers Thomas found when she explored The Real Personages of Mother Goose: The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to childish minds have only quaint charm of meaning, which suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous-hearted creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality grim import. Across all this nursery lore there falls at times the black shadow of the headman's block and in their seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and queens, the corruptions of opposing political parties, and stories of fanatical religious strife that have gone to make world history. For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie." And "When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing." Now, "Wasn't that a tasty dish to set before the King?" The child is singing of actual history that was never heard or learned, of an incident in the grim struggle between the English Crown and the Church, during which, to appease the greed and hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of Church land were sealed into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. in old slang, the "dough" was handed over; in new slang, the "bread." Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, in his Genealogy of the Gods, writes of Memoria, daughter of Uranus, the first great sky god: In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth to the Muses out of union with Zeus, son of Chronos, and thus the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. The Theogony was composed after -729, that is, during or after an era of troubled skies; but it was a mythical work "reporting" on events that had occurred hundreds and thousands of years before. A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage. "Remembering" was no mere scratching of experience upon a tabula rasa of the mind. Memoria or Mnymosyne or "Recollector" is the mother of history (Cleo). She has as her progeny the means of controlling herself, for Zeus is the ordering paternal force. There are nine (some said three or five) muses governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and singing, but also history and astronomy. They will lend human memory its possibilities of selective attention, delusion, illusion, abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening - all that is necessary to achieve that combination of remembering and forgetting which makes social life possible on a level that is higher than the level of non remembering or total amnesia. Significantly, Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who was the grandfather of Zeus; she is no mere sprite. Her Eleuthrian Hills are the realm of freedom, so she governs freedom. Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created "by Zeus" to control the human memory so that humans should forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get surcease from sorrows. And that the muses will achieve this by transforming events through art and song, through myth. The memory of disasters is doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash humanity and to present the new order of heaven as proper, "law abiding," and beautiful. Hesiod, reciting this profound truth, goes on to describe how the muses work, reminding us of a combined team for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare. As a result, all the arts and sciences have been manipulated by the muses. What we know of the catastrophes must come from a "natural history" - geology, biology, physics and astronomy - and a politics, philosophy, and theology that have been censored by the muses. Additionally, we must obtain our historical material from myth, song, dances, and drama that were similarly screened. It is well to insist upon this premise, whether we come to the problem from an acquaintanceship with the natural sciences or the social sciences. The gods, and especially Jupiter-Zeus, who seems under various names to have developed the patterns of anthropological psychology among most cultures, have required this premise of us. {S : THE TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY AS SUCH} THE TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY AS SUCH In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals, 1887) stabs into the heart of the matter. He asks, "How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?" And continues, "One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. 'If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory' - this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective: the past, the longest, deepest, and sternest past, breathes upon us and rises up in us whenever we become 'serious'. Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of 'the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) -all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche collapses. Although he immediately goes hunting for the acts that provoked such mnemotechnics, he shoots a little rabbit: the primitive forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order to trade, men had to keep promises; in order to ensure obligations, the failure to repay had to be punished severely: thus the genealogy of morals. We are reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to fundamental error: that in the Oedipal conflict and the slaying of the father, man achieved a (bad) conscience and the need to justify and to punish. The Oedipus myth has much breadth and staying power, but a still greater and universal fear had to be imposed to support its recollection. And it is difficult to conceive of anything more grand and durable than the catastrophes attendant upon the Holocene period of Earth history. We assert therefore that man's memory itself, the prototypical remembering, is a consequence of catastrophe more than of any other incidental or habitual interest of humanity. {S : THE RULES OF MEMORY} THE RULES OF MEMORY All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its imperfection. Given its mode of creation, remembering must function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by the senses, which themselves, in large part, perceive because of their prior social condition, but by the willingness to admit only censored data. This holds true, as many careful studies have shown, for the most non-controversial and trivial kinds of experiences. Who says remember says select; who says memory, says forgetting. By the time of Homer, for example, numerous natural disasters had befallen humanity. The perfect ease of the Song of Demodokos in the Odyssey of Homer about an adulterous love among the gods attests to an approaching achievement of "perfect imperfection": nothing of the original truth need be omitted, so well under control are the conditions creating imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of artistic sublimation. The concept of "accurate memory" is a useful fiction. We are even compelled to say that it is a theocratic fiction. For the content of what is remembered is in the broadest sense religiously and politically determined. The Homerids, reciting thousands of lines from memory, were the practitioners and teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect society against its anxieties. The ideal canons of registering and remembering set by modern science are evidence in themselves that "you cannot trust your memory" and "independent observers have to confirm the same facts." But also the establishment of scientists as a social system lays down the rules of what is to be watched for, what is to be ignored, and what is to be distorted. The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the gravity of a trauma. By intensity we mean sharpness, detail, and durability in conscious and unconscious form. By gravity we mean how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major regions of his life: his physical being, his cherished ones, his group, his wealth, his control, his beliefs about the good and the true. Machiavelli said to the rulers: it is better to be feared by the people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety drove primeval humanity to invent and to organize so that it could predict and control the world, and thereupon its fears. Fear mixed itself early with love, and produced the continuous ambivalence of sexuality that is exhibited throughout the most ancient literatures. The most intense memories are likely to occur without "willing" them. This is understandable once we consider that no one will seek to subject himself to the conditions that produce painful memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory. How many times do people think, "I shall never forget this beautiful sunset ... I shall always remember this kindness ... I shall never forget this orgasm," only to lose their grasp of the memory shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act" done to him long ago, it is in the context of a generally unkind and fearful environment of acts. The most that can be done to "will" the memory is to tie it consciously and unconsciously to disasters and especially to institutionalize the disasters so that the group will continuously reenact them. All great historical religions are based upon these psychological operations. The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to the conscious mind, and to be buried in dreams and myths. In these anxiety suppressing and anxiety-controlling mechanisms, the dream and myth language is likely to approach as close as possible to the ultimate universal, traumatic experiences, without becoming unbearable: it rides on the tracks of birth throes, sexual copulation, death scenes, violence, and conflict, including of course, all the conventional transformations of these materials into religious and political activities, routines, and institutions. This "step-down" principle works on the depth of a burial, and it brings about the selection of the next less traumatic kind of material as the screen for the more traumatizing type. The speed of remembering is proportional to the intensity of the trauma. "The experience burned itself indelibly upon my mind," one says. A single experience is enough to cause remembering, if it is grave. If too grave, physical collapse occurs, and no further memorization is possible. At the other extreme, in the absence of fear, interest, or even recognition, an abundance of knowledge moves, as they say of the classroom, "from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either." The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of the cultural personality. This is merely to say that the kind of story told, together with its details, are characteristics of the culture. For instance, the Love Song of Demodokos in the Odyssey has Ares and Aphrodite (Mars and the Moon) trapped in adultery by Hephaistos, the smith god, or Vulcan, whom I identify with Pallas Athena. I place the story in the late 7th Century before the present era, 44 memorial generations ago. Some more ancient pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures practicing group marriage would have had to find a different plot and details to screen the reiteration of the Moon and Mars encounter. It is characteristic of our partially Greek- born culture, and a proof of our cultural ancestry, that the adulterous love triangle, descended from the Greeks, is still a favorite artistic theme. {S : FORGETTING} FORGETTING Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. That is, amnesia is activated in the same way as memory. If we think of our list of rules of remembering, we substitute forgetting for remembering, and we get the following rules of forgetting. Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all conditions, and to be imperfect, never complete. Nor is forgetting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many particular causes. If the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory, we can speak as well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting occurs proportionate to the gravity of the trauma, and forgetting occurs without willing to forget. The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to the conscious mind; we must admit, "we cannot recall what it is that we have forgotten," when the thing forgotten is a matter of grave threat to the mind. Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma. For this reason we can believe that events that occurred perhaps only a generation before Homer, or even in his lifetime, might achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Let us imagine what may have happened in a typical disaster of the "Age of Mars," that is in the 8th and 7th centuries. I use here a model that I have developed in a forthcoming book, but if you will, you can transfer the scene to Krakatoa in 1883 or Nagasaki in 1945. Immanuel Velikovsky has discovered a mass of particulars that he has grouped and recounted in Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a foreboding of evil. A brilliant speck grows larger from day to day. He is told that it has done so before, with terrible consequences. The memory is already excited. Calendars are studied and worked over. Oracles are consulted. All group efforts are mobilized to control the menace: rituals of subservience and devotion; the stricter punishment of any suspected deviants in all areas of law and conduct; the destruction of enemies if they can be promptly engaged; the sacrifice of more and more valuable properties and persons. Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights, shapes and turbulences. The Earth begins to respond - to live, to move, to split open, to smoke, to blow up strong winds, to shriek, to take fire. Thunderbolts strike down up n all sides. Our hero watches. He is exceedingly frightened, as are his family and neighbors. There may be a pandemonium in which he faints or is struck dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he will cover his head. The young will observe more of the scene than the old. The disaster occurs in successive kinds of turbulence, in all the various destructive - forms of earth, air, fire, and water, the primordial elements. Animals, both tame and wild, crowd in upon people, terrified, unsavage, unhungry. Eardrums are blown in or sucked out. Some are struck blind, others gassed. Strange objects and life forms drop from the sky. The sky reels. The waters gyrate madly and rush to and fro. The vista is one of universal destruction. There is nowhere to go. Cohorts disappear. Strangers appear. The survivors regroup after each incident. They are partially paralyzed with fear and despair, partly striving for survival and control. 'What god is angry? ' they wonder, if they don't already know. What other gods can they appeal to and how? What trait of a god should they address themselves to? The most important religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the most sacred instruments and skills of the immemorial past are called upon in the crisis. Nothing, nobody, will ever persuade them to behave differently, or their children, or, if they can help it, their descendants into the eternal future. When the disasters subside, the survivors are crazed. They must regroup, recollect their thoughts, and do something about the memory. This is not a task for an astronomer sitting in the air-conditioned hall of a giant telescope in Arizona. Not for a sober historian. It is a task for any surviving priest-rulers: "We have been visited by gods and messengers of gods. The figures they strike in the sky are their various apparitions when destructive and punitive. Good gods and spirits fight evil ones. Our conduct displeases them: we must strengthen our observance of rituals; purify ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice ever more precious possessions; kill more enemies; control the libertarian; guard the names by which we call a god; and remind ourselves forevermore of the events of these days while we watch for their eventual recurrence." Again history is quickly subverted; indeed, it has never existed in a value-free, fully detailed form. Instead memorial activities are planned by the community that will register whatever intensity on the memorial-screen is sufficient to suppress the pain of the memory of the original experience plus all preceding related and similar traumatic experiences. We cannot be too explicit. No sooner is a disaster experienced than it is remembered; no sooner remembered than it is forgotten. All the rules about remembering are rules of forgetting. What? Are we to believe that memory is a forgetting and to forget is to remember? We seem to be approaching this paradox; if it is not indeed an absurdity. Yet, if we resolve the paradox, we shall better understand the great mystery of myth, which bids us remember ferociously in order the more firmly and securely to forget. The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The fact is that a memory can enter the mind, but can rarely leave it. Except by organic lesion, there is little 'forgetting. ' The biological system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can readily manipulate it. What we call forgetting is the internal bookkeeping system of memory. From conception to death and dissolution, the system will always show a net profit. But, like many a bookkeeping system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting the balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is with the forgotten material that the mind works to create myth, art, and hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to describe the handling of the transactions of memory that permit consciousness, instrumentally rational conduct, and normal behavior. Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites indeed opposite? It is the functional machinery of the mind, where opposites are coined according to the needs of the moment. Whatever stabilizes the organisms's "normalcy" is chosen; and the organism forgets conveniently. A kind of mnemonic homeostasis occurs. But the forgotten, the fearfully forgotten, becomes the Disaster-affect overload whose palaetiology was discussed in the first part of this paper, with its "good" and "bad" results. Now the principles of the memory system may be elicited and put before you, as was done earlier with the principles of the fear system. a) Human memory was created and subsequently sustained by catastrophic D-Fear. b) Memory potentiates the constructive and destructive elaboration of fear out of its primeval and subsequent tracks through the forms of the arts and sciences. c) Memory (including history or group memory) is intrinsically imperfect and a reciprocal of forgetting (amnesia). d) Memory and amnesia increase directly with the severity of a trauma. e) Less fearful memories surface to consciousness to function as blocks to the surfacing of more fearful memories. f) The act of forgetting is a human mental device that functions unconsciously to balance the complex transactions between repression and recall. This process may be called mnemonic homeostasis. {S : THE DIFFICULTY OF D-FEAR THERAPY} THE DIFFICULTY OF D-FEAR THERAPY Given the fear and memory systems of humanity, is there some therapy that could rid a culture of its great fear and at the same time maintain a distinction between "good" and "bad"? We have seen that anatomical and social conditioners of fear and memory complement and supplement each other, first in permitting, then encouraging, then finally demanding the D-factor pattern of human development. A theory of genetic traits (post-human acquired) or of genetic mutation is probably not necessary to explain the eternal play of good/ evil, and indulgence/ deprivation. Neither, we stress, is it useful to postulate primeval economic encounters (Nietzsche) or primeval sexual encounters (Freud) or archetypes (Jung) as the origins of conscience and civilization. The ways in which such encounters are carried on are the work partly of themselves and of each other, but in large part of great prehistoric natural disasters, involving, perforce, changes in the conditions of the skies as well as of life on earth. Ruefully, we must admit: The creation myths are more right than we have been in their exposure of what made us human. The prospects of personal therapy and public policy for the "Disaster-affect overload" are not bright. Obviously, if our analysis is correct, we are ill prepared to meet present fears on a one-to-one basis. Rather, we must overreact continuously, instead of reacting in proportion to the need to act and in relation specifically to proven causes. Furthermore, the worse the crisis, the greater the tendency to act non-rationally and over-generally - to fire all guns of our ship at once in all directions. Moreover, to our disappointment, if we observe social and religious movements that have caught hold of the principle of "fear-affect reduction" as a way of fulfilling people's souls and making them happier, such as the Quakers or Buddhists, we remark upon two unfortunate concomitant and probably causally-related behaviors. In the first place, such movements are themselves invariably subjected to severe social threats and deprivations in their efforts to free an obsessed society from fear. Hence, often they become too loaded down with fear themselves to be, as they desire to be, much less to cure the society. The paranoia, hysteria, and rigidity in the behavior of peace-seeker movements have not escaped comment. Secondly, the arts and sciences, whether we speak of boiling a tasty soup or solving an abstract problem, are intricately meshed with the fear-producing institutions of society and their fear-laden histories. Therefore, fear-reducing movements tend to, and perhaps must, tear down the fabric of what is defensively genial as well as what is diabolic and fearful in a society. The Cultural Revolution of Red China, 1967-69, which attacked rigid and bureaucratic individuals and institutions, is a case in point. Even if we were to receive a lesser fear-load as a result of their activity, we would also receive a more barren culture. Obviously there is much need for philosophy and social invention to address themselves to these two problems if a fearless benevolence is to be developed in the human race. The flamboyantly denominated Homo sapiens sapiens needs to be replaced by breeding and by cultural reconstruction. The new Homo humanitatis would lack a fear-overload and possess a pragmatic spirit. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 3: } {T PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER THREE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY John M. MacGregor Lecturer in Art and Psychiatry Ontario College of Art In that all of us come from different academic disciplines it seems necessary for me to identify myself and to explain my interest in Dr. Velikovsky's research. I am an art historian specializing in the application of psychiatry and psychoanalysis to the study of art. I also work as a psychotherapist which explains the involvement you will see in the paper with case material, although I have avoided individual cases with which I am working because most of them are not reaching the depth of material that I will be discussing today. It was my interest in the application of psychoanalysis to historical reconstruction that brought me for the first time into contact with Dr. Velikovsky. In Princeton, as some of you know, he is a bit of a legend, if not a bête-noire. The origin of this particular bit of research dates to an afternoon in April 1971, which I spent with Dr. Velikovsky discussing the psychological aspects and implications of his work and his personal involvement with psychoanalysis and Freud. At that particular time Dr. Velikovsky was deeply involved with research for the book Mankind in Amnesia. He was filled with questions about Freud's and Jung's conception of what we call inherited racial memory, and I left Dr. Velikovsky that day with the intention of assisting him by investigating this topic in the writing of Freud and Jung, and thereby clarifying for both of us exactly what the views of these two men were on the possibility of inherited mental contents. My remarks today should be seen as a belated and certainly partial effort to fulfill that intention. The fact that Dr. Velikovsky is a psychoanalyst has tended to be obscured. The enormous range of his later investigations have covered over his original orientation. He himself has pointed out on several occasions the importance of the psychoanalytic viewpoint and also its clinical procedures, in guiding and stimulating his approach to the reconstruction of history. In the Princeton lecture of 1953 he stated: I came upon the idea that traditions and legends and memories of genetic origin can be treated in the same way in which we treat in psychoanalysis the early memories of a single individual [1] . And in the preface to Worlds in Collision Dr. Velikovsky characterized the work that he was going to undertake as an "analytic experiment on Mankind." [2] I have a feeling that when Dr. Velikovsky first published Worlds in Collision he may have chosen to conceal that he was an analyst. Although he talks about using an analytic method, he never really points to the fact that this was his training. I am not sure why that might have been, but the following quotation explains the way he saw the work he was going to do: The task l had to accomplish was not unlike that faced by a psychoanalyst who, out of dissociated memories and dreams reconstructs a forgotten traumatic experience in the early life of an individual. ln an analytic experiment on mankind, historical inscriptions and legendary motifs often play the same role as recollections (infantile memories) and dreams in the analysis of a personality [3] . Dr. Velikovsky can and should be seen as a member of the third generation of Vienna- trained analysts. He knew Freud and met with him on a few occasions, and of course he published in the psychoanalytic journals of the time and Freud would have known his work. His own analytic training was carried out under Wilhelm Stekel, who was a close co-worker for some years with Freud. Dr. Velikovsky went on to practice for a number of years in Israel as a psychoanalyst. The ability of this man as an analyst is commonly ignored. The psychoanalytic community as a group has been, probably deliberately, reticent about according him his rightful place as one of the more brilliant minds to come out of the Vienna circle. I hope that Dr. Velikovsky will forgive me if I quote from a letter which to some extent corrects this omission on the part of his analytic contemporaries. This letter was written in 1947 by Dr. Lawrence Kubic, a major American analyst who recently died, and in it he quotes Dr. Paul Federn, certainly one of the most prestigious followers of Freud, as follows: A genius. A great man. An excellent psychoanalyst. An M. D. member of the Palestine group. Some revolutionary scientific ideas that some people think are crazy, but he is a genius. Would not consider him for a teacher, but as an analyst I have sent him some of my most difficult cases [4] . If you are interested in understanding Dr. Velikovsky as a psychoanalyst, the unusual perceptiveness which he has is best displayed in the essay which he published in 1941 in the Psychoanalytic Review entitled "The Dreams Freud Dreamed." [5] In that essay he presented some very interesting speculations about Freud's attitudes toward religion, and explored certain problems that Freud may have had concerning his personal relationship to Judaism. Those of you who know the Jones biography of Freud will know that Jones attacked Dr. Velikovsky on this point, totally irrationally. The essay is actually a brilliant piece of analysis. Dr. Velikovsky then went on to continue his observations about Freud in the chapter in Oedipus and Akhnaton, entitled "A Seer of our Time." That brief chapter represents the most insightful analysis of Freud's Moses and Monotheism which has been published to date. In it he points to Freud's curious failure to utilize psychoanalytic theory in his analysis of the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhnaton. Dr. Velikovsky's own writings have not avoided that challenge. He has cautiously applied psychoanalytic theory throughout his work. In the chapter in Worlds in Collision entitled "A Collective Amnesia" he put forth a series of speculative and highly controversial psychological hypotheses, some of the implications of which I want to look at with you today. Psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, can contribute in a number of ways to the study of Dr. Velikovsky's work. His theories, if they are looked at seriously, raise profound psychological problems. it is odd that so little has been written about the psychological implications of Dr. Velikovsky's theories. In Pensée for example there are very few articles that concern themselves with a psychological examination of the Velikovsky hypotheses. One exception to that is Dr. William Mullen, who in his article entitled "The Center Holds" points out that if Dr. Velikovsky's psychological observations are correct, and that of course depends on the rest of the cataclysm theory, then his contribution to psychology would represent by far the most urgent aspect of his work [6] . know that in recent years Dr. Velikovsky has never failed in lecturing to discuss the psychological implications of his work. He has also told me that in the response he gets from his audiences (letters, discussions with him and soon), it is the psychological aspects of his work which holds the most interest for them. As has been pointed out a number of times today, the reaction of the scientific community and others to Dr. Velikovsky's proposals obviously provides a worthwhile topic for psychological investigation in itself. As a psychoanalyst, Dr. Velikovsky could have predicted in advance that his findings would have awakened the most intense resistance. I think it strange that so much fuss is made about the strange behaviour of the scientific community. It was and is perfectly predictable and understandable in terms of the very psychological theories that are being proposed. The resistance would have to be intense if indeed a collective amnesia is involved. Dr. Velikovsky identifies somewhat with Freud in assuming the responsibility of confronting mankind with information which provokes profound anxieties and defensive reactions. if the Velikovsky hypotheses are correct, these violently negative responses Are part of an understandable pattern urgently in need of change. If he is wrong, and of course, if he is wrong he is dramatically, gorgeously wrong, then the irrationality of the scientific community's response still demands a psychological explanation, except then the nature of the explanation would be quite different. Freud, speaking of the equally violent irrationality of Darwin's critics, offers some words of solace to the belaboured bearer of unwanted reality. I quote: The new truth awoke emotional resistances; these found expression in arguments by which the evidence in favour of the unpopular theory could be disputed; the struggle of opinions took up a certain length of time; from the first there were adherents and opponents; the number as well as the weight of the former kept on increasing until at last they gained the upper hand; during the whole time of struggle the subject with which it was concerned was never forgotten. We are scarcely surprised that the whole course of events took a considerable length of time; and we probably do not sufficiently appreciate that what we are concerned with is a process in group psychology [7] . Freud, of course, was speaking from agonizing painful experience of the same kind. There is a second direction in which psychology could be applied to the work of Dr. Velikovsky and that is in the area of psychobiographical investigation of Dr. Velikovsky himself. So far this particular approach has only been used in the vituperative attack on Dr. Velikovsky, confined to the somewhat unscientific goal of declaring him "crazy." But whether Dr. Velikovsky is right or wrong, and probably particularly if he is wrong, his life and work will eventually be the subject of intensive psychobiographical scrutiny. As you will probably notice, the psychotic delusions of cataclysmic destruction of the world, which I am going to discuss briefly, could easily be turned against Dr. Velikovsky's theories and particularly against his personality. Should he be in error, this will unquestionably be the punishment history will inflict upon him. The task of the psychobiographer I prefer to leave for the future. It is always easier to get away with when the subject under scrutiny is far away, usually in Heaven. Now, I mentioned earlier, the curious lack of critical discussion of Dr. Velikovsky's psychological observations. I think that this can be explained not so much in terms of psychological resistance, although that plays a part, but as deriving from the fact that psychology is unsuited and at present unable to offer any decisive support for, or evidence against, the cataclysmic hypothesis. Nevertheless, it can contribute material which enlarges the scope of the discussion and stimulates enquiries in new directions. But be warned: nothing that I am going to say will help to decide the case for or against cataclysmic hypothesis. I want to turn now to a brief examination of three points at which psychology enters into Dr. Velikovsky's reconstruction of history. The suggestion that the earth was involved in a series of violent near collisions with its neighbours in space, as recently as -686, excites considerable skepticism in historians and archaeologists. The writing of history was, of course, fairly well developed by this time, and far less significant events managed to find their way into historical records. Dr. Velikovsky has indicated that there-are, in fact, a large number of texts which can be understood as detailed accounts of the cataclysmic events, which he feels he has rediscovered. Nevertheless, the failure of a series of such terrifying experiences to leave more of an impression on the memory and behaviour of mankind demands explanation. Such events cannot possibly have been merely forgotten; and Dr. Velikovsky is well aware of this, as he points out: If cosmic upheavals occurred in the historical past, why does not the human race remember them, and why was it necessary to carry on research to find out about them [8] ? To account for this suspicious failure of memory, Dr. Velikovsky has suggested a collective amnesia, preventing these traumatic experiences from reaching consciousness. lt is a psychological phenomenon in the life of individuals as well as whole nations that the most terrifying events of the past may be forgotten or displaced into the subconscious mind. As if obliterated are impressions that should be unforgettable. To uncover their vestiges and their distorted equivalents in the psychical life of peoples is a task not unlike that of overcoming amnesia in a single person [9] . In extending findings. derived from individual psychology to mankind as a whole, Dr. Velikovsky follows in the footsteps of Freud of Moses and Monotheism. It is a jump which even Freud made with some hesitancy. In the chapter of Moses and Monotheism entitled "The Analogy," he "invites the reader to take the step of supposing that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of the individuals." [10] To proceed from the traumatic experience of the individual, to the suggestion of a collectively experienced trauma and a collective repression of painful memory is a considerable jump, with massive implications for both history and, as well, for social psychology. One wonders, for example, to what extent the memories of the Nazi death camps or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have undergone what could truly be called repression. it can't be doubted that many individuals have dealt with these agonizing memories by utilizing this mechanism of defence, but to presume that a massive act of repression can occur, an act of repression so complete that it interferes with the conscious collective memory of mankind in general, is a step which should be undertaken with considerable trepidation. It can be asked whether the entire historical reconstruction proposed by Dr. Velikovsky depends on this defensive operation having occurred. (it should be stressed that when we talk of repression we are talking about an unconsciously activated mechanism, totally distinct from the conscious suppression of unpleasant memories. The only evidence for repression of material having occurred would be an unexplainable vacuum in the mind in connection with vitally important experiences which might be expected to have left profound traces in the memory.) I believe that Dr. Velikovsky is correct in suggesting that the failure of such historical events to be remembered in elaborate detail would demand a psychological explanation. In short, if a collective repression of these memories didn't occur then there were no such events! The hypothesis of a collective repression is a crucial underpinning of the wider theory. The repression of events which he is postulating was neither instantaneous nor complete. The existence of numerous historical records which Dr. Velikovsky understands as references to a series of very specific worldwide cataclysmic occurrences indicates an effort on the part of at least some people in the human race to come e to grips with this traumatic experience on a conscious level. As he has indicated, repression in this situation is not so much suggested by the absence of memories in the form of written history, as by the inability of later civilizations to comprehend the meaning of these quite specific and detailed accounts, or to their tendency to see them as allegorical images that mean something quite different. And it is true that repression frequently operates as something of a psychological blind spot, rendering us unable to understand certain things which should be quite evident. A second psychological hypothesis which Dr. Velikovsky has put forward is far more controversial. He is of the opinion that the effect of the repeated experience of cataclysm was so intense that it was implanted in the human mind permanently, and in his view, the memories of these experiences are present to this day in the human unconscious mind, transmitted presumably by heredity. The collective human memory retained an inexhaustible array of recollections of the time when the world was in conflagration; when sea engulfed land; earth trembled; celestial bodies were disturbed in their motion, and meteorites fell [11] . Here again Dr. Velikovsky is touching on a highly controversial hypothesis of Freud's, enunciated in its clearest form in Moses and Monotheism. My constant references to that book are not accidental. Dr. Velikovsky's work can be understood in many ways as a continuation and revision of that late publication of Freud. Anyone who is interested in Dr. Velikovsky's book would do well to read the essay Moses and Monotheism. Dr. Velikovsky came to America in 1939, the year of publication of the complete form of Moses and Monotheism, and the year of Freud's death, interestingly, and he came to do research on Freud in relation to Moses, Akhnaton and Oedipus. It is little realized that Freud felt compelled to accept the idea of inherited racial memories. He usually used the term phylogenetic inheritance, but he means by this term the inheritance of collective memories. He was well aware that such mental contents would be collective in nature; a shared, inborn knowledge of the past history of the race, or, at least, of crucially important aspects of that history. This Lamarckian conception of inherited experience is totally ignored by all current psychoanalytic theorists, in fact, one could go so far as to say that it has been suppressed by the Freudian group. There are few articles published by Freudians on the concept of inherited racial memory. They would prefer to forget that Freud ever thought about this problem, or else they consider it an aberration on his part. On the other hand, Carl Jung based an entire psychology on the description of such inherited collective contents. Again we can raise the question as to whether the phylogenetic hypothesis is an essential aspect of Dr. Velikovsky's general theory. I personally feel that it is not. But, it has tremendous usefulness, as you just saw in Professor Wolfe's lecture, in explaining the occurrence over all the earth over hundreds of years, of certain legends and images which seem to have exerted a curious fascination on the human mind. Finally, in recent years, Dr. Velikovsky has begun to stress the possibility that unconscious memories (if they do indeed form a potent content of the collective mind of present day man) could be reactivated as a result of the compulsion to repeat. This powerful irrational tendency to act out or reexperience a traumatic event was described by Freud in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) where he characterized it in terms of the individual patient. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of ... remembering it as something belonging to the past [12] . In recent years Dr. Velikovsky has become deeply concerned that unless awareness of the cataclysmic events can be restored to consciousness, mankind may be compelled by unconscious forces to stage its own 'Weltuntergang man-made cataclysm on a near cosmic scale. It is this possibility which lends some urgency to the consideration of his theories. In this context, his psycho-historical reconstruction can be seen to have a therapeutic goal. More than merely a psychoanalytic experiment on mankind, it aims at rescuing mankind from its very obvious self-destructive tendencies. it is probably not without significance that the conception of Worlds in Collision took place during the Second World War when mankind was very actively involved in its own destruction. I want to consider in slightly more detail the concept of inherited racial memory as it occurs in the writings of Freud. It is of considerable interest to trace the evolution of this hypothesis from "Totem and Taboo" in 1912 where it first appears, to Freud's final and more elaborate discussion of it in 1939. It is usually suggested that Freud invented the idea of inherited racial memory because he needed it to support his speculative forays into the fields of anthropology and pre-history. In short, that the idea of inherited racial memory is the creation of Freud the novelist, rather than Freud the psychologist. Careful reading of all Freud's psychological oeuvre would quickly dispel this notion. The concept of phylogenetically inherited material is found everywhere in Freud and this despite the fact that he had an inherent resistance to the idea. Writing to Jung in 1911, he displayed this ambivalence very nicely: "If there is phylogenetic memory" and then he goes on "which unfortunately will soon prove to be so" (he was prepared to admit it but he didn't like it one bit) [13] . In a meeting of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society in 1911, he spoke of the idea of inherited memory content with considerable reserve. The influence of a phylogenetic inborn store of memories is not justified as long as we have the possibility of explaining these things through an analysis of the psychical situations. What remains over after this analysis of the psychical phenomena of regression could then be conceived of as phylogenetic memory [14] . It is highly probable that Jung's influence was a crucial factor motivating Freud to consider the possibility of inherited memory. As you know, the break between Freud and Jung occurred in 1912. Until that time Jung's ideas stimulated Freud to an examination of many areas which he might otherwise not have explored. Less well known is the fact that Freud continued to consider Jung's theories even after they broke off relations. In 1912 we find Freud using the term 'collective mind, ' a term which he thereafter avoided in his writings to avoid confusion with the Jungian term which carries implications far beyond what he or his followers could accept. No one can have failed to observe ... that I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual [15] . In 1917, long after they were no longer friends, Freud read Jung's important essay, The Psychology of Unconscious Processes, and the next year, writing about the Wolfe Man case, he stated: I fully agree with Jung in recognizing the existence of this phylogenetic heritage; but I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted [16] . As he puts it, All that we find in the prehistory of neuroses is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills ills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors [17] . As you will see presently, this tendency, if it exists, to replace individual experiences with experiences derived from the history of mankind could possibly represent a confirmation of the Velikovsky hypotheses. But Freud's warning must continue to sound in our ears: ... I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted [18] . Elsewhere he warns against "mystical overvaluations of heredity." [19] What motivated Freud to suggest this idea of inherited racial memory? Certainly it was on the basis of experience derived from his work with patients. He pointed out, first of all, that the common heritage of symbols which he kept encountering, symbols in the unconscious which seemed to be shared by all men throughout history, pushed him in the direction of thinking about the possibility of some kind of collective inborn mental content. "it seems to me that symbolic connections, which the individual has never acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as phylogenetic heritage." [20] Then the structure and the content of certain kinds of phobic conditions seemed to point in a similar direction. Among the contents of the phobias there are a number which, as Stanley Hall insists, are adopted to serve as objects of anxiety owing to phylogenetic inheritance [21] . The most significant factor which led Freud to postulate the existence of mental contents which are not derived from individual experience is the occurrence of what he termed "primal phantasies"; phantasies of castration, incest, cannibalism, parental intercourse, etc., in children whose actual experience precludes any possibility of acquaintance with such events. I believe these primal fantasies are a phylogenetic endowment. in them the individual reaches beyond his own experience into primaeval experience at points where his own experience has been too rudimentary [22] . The behaviour of neurotic children towards their parents in the Oedipus and castration complex abounds in such reactions, which seem unjustified in the individual case and only become intelligible phylogenetically - by their connection with the experience of earlier generations [23] . Perhaps you remember that Dr. Velikovsky in his book Oedipus and Akhnaton has raised the interesting possibility that there may be an historical truth underlying the deeply rooted human resistance to incest: ... is the Oedipus legend based on historical occurrence? If the latter is true, its hold on the imagination of the literati through the ages could be explained as a real experience that has been echoed in the dark recesses of many human souls [24] . By 1937 Freud was prepared to make a leap of faith and to extend the concept of inherited mental contents quite far. He did so despite the very active opposition of Ernest Jones who warned him of the danger of accepting what Jones saw as an outdated Lamarckian biology. Freud, with extreme forthrightness and some humility, stated: On further reflection I must admit that I have behaved for a long time as though inheritance of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct Communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example, were established beyond question. When l spoke of the survival of a tradition among a people, or of the formation of people's character, l had mostly in mind an inherited tradition of this kind and not one transmitted by communication. or at least l made no distinction between the two and was not clearly aware of my audacity in neglecting to do so .... And then the crucial words: I must, however, in all modesty, confess nevertheless that I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution; ... The archaic heritage of human beings comprises not only dispositions but also subject matter - memory traces of the experience of earlier generations. if we assume the survival of these memory-traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gap between individual and group psychology [25] . Of course you wonder under what circumstances material experienced by our ancestors becomes transmittable, through heredity, or whatever. Freud suggests two possibilities or at least two situations in which this might occur. First, if the event occurred often enough: The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance, but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity [26] . (This is the process which Dr. Velikovsky has challenged to some extent in his suggestion that typical and commonly repeated events do not provide a basis for the creation of myth.) Then, secondly, and of much more importance for the theory of collectively experienced cataclysms, Freud suggests that a memory may enter the archaic heritage of mankind if it was of sufficient strength, a traumatic and collective experience of the human race; An essential part of the construction is the hypothesis that the events I am about to describe occurred to all primitive men, that is, to all our ancestors [27] . As to when these events occurred Freud is very vague. At times he talks about "the childhood of the race," a very difficult era to locate, although I think we can be quite sure that he wasn't referring to the Bronze age or later. In Moses and Monotheism he places the events in the period when language developed, again a rather vague moment. Freud recognized that if there was mental content in the mind which was not individually acquired but which was inherited and which reflected our experience as a race, then that phylogenetic content could serve as a source of material for the investigation and reconstruction of the early history of the human race. He suggested, in fact, using dreams for this purpose: The prehistory into which the dream-work leads is of two kinds: on the one hand, into the individual's prehistory, his childhood; on the other, in so far as each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race, into phylogenetic history - too. Shall we succeed in distinguishing which portion of the latent mental processes is derived from the individual prehistoric period and which from the phylogenetic one? It is not, I believe, impossible that we shall [28] . Psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods at the beginning of the human race [29] . At no time does Freud ever refer to evidence of cataclysmic experience in material derived from his dream studies or from the psychoanalytic treatment of patients. He encountered no such contents. The phylogenetic memories that he referred to have nothing to do with memories of cosmic disturbance or violent natural events. I remember asking Dr. Velikovsky a few years ago whether he had himself encountered memories suggestive of such phylogenetically derived experience in his own analysis or in his analytic practice, and he was unable to recall anything of this sort. It is therefore of particular interest to investigate case material in search of references to cataclysmic destruction, and such cases are not lacking, as you will see. For the remainder of this discussion I want to accept two hypotheses as facts, and to go on to consider what would be the implications of these hypotheses. First, let us assume (and many people here do more than assume), that a series of cataclysms on the scale suggested by Dr. Velikovsky did occur, that mankind was exposed to these terrible events and that some of them lived to deal with the consequences, particularly the emotional consequences. Second, let us assume that after a time memories of the experience, as well as the intense feelings stirred up by these memories underwent repression and yet survived, not only in the unconscious of the victims who actually lived through these traumatic events, but in the unconscious of their descendants up to the present day. I am suggesting that we tentatively accept Freud's hypothesis of phylogenetically inherited memory, and specifically, the possibility which Freud would not have put forward that one of the chief fragments or complexes in the mind is a derivative of the overwhelming experience of cosmic upheaval. If such repressed memories are present in the collective unconscious of mankind now, we can expect them to reveal themselves in a number of more or less predictable ways. Remember that we owe what knowledge of the unconscious we possess, and it is very little, to the relative failure of repression and to the fact that unconscious contents frequently break through to the surface, or at least disturb the surface of the mind in characteristic ways, which tell us something about the underlying strata. 1. Amnesia Repression, of course, as Dr. Velikovsky has pointed out, implies an amnesia of limited extent. Parts of the mind are withdrawn or "blanked out," not only the actual traumatic memories themselves, but, through the associational chains which connect the contents of the mind, this amnesia could be expected to extend over considerable areas. In terms of the feeling aspect of our humanness, repression could be reflected in a precarious emotional coldness or unresponsiveness to whole areas of human experience. In terms of thought, it precipitates an inability to think about certain topics and a curious lack of curiosity about whole areas of human experience and knowledge. if you are interested in that aspect of repression, Freud's Leonardo essay provides a remarkable discussion of how intellectual curiosity can be "blanked out" in certain areas [30] . The failure of scholars to recognize the connectedness and significance of historical and mythological accounts of cataclysmic occurrences would be an example of repression interfering with the normal functioning of the intellect. if they have looked at this material over generations and haven't seen the implications that Dr. Velikovsky sees, it could be explained as a result of this 'blanking out' of the intellect. 2. Anxiety The crucial factor which enables the psychologist to identify areas of repression in a patient is the anxiety which is triggered when the repressed areas are touched upon. This can vary from hardly noticeable anxiety responses, such as you obtain on the word association test, to massive reactions approaching panic or shock. The danger represented by such occurrences is the so-called "awakening of the repressed." You have come too close to the repressed material. Any event which duplicates the originally traumatic event can be expected to produce deeply irrational responses including stark terror. Typically, the person to whom this thing is happening would not know why he is reacting with terror to a situation which may very well be completely harmless. The recent visit of the comet Kohoutek might have been expected to produce such responses in terms of the Velikovsky hypothesis. Shortly after it was announced, I wrote to Dr. Velikovsky to point out that it would be very worthwhile to collect and study the variety of responses to this event as they developed over the course of weeks. it would happen in some people, but by no means all. If he is right you could expect panic, flight reactions, religious frenzy of various kinds, obsessional rituals and insanity. On a considerable scale all of this could be predicted with some certainty if this hypothesis is correct. The reaction to Halley's Comet can be seen as supportive of the Velikovsky hypothesis, though by no means conclusive evidence. On the other hand, absence of any strong response beyond intellectual curiosity would, I think, represent fairly conclusive proof that there are no such inherited contents present in the human mind. Unfortunately, the fact that Kohoutek turned out to be such a dud tended to ruin the experiment. Nevertheless, it was interesting to observe the efforts that were made by a number of religious groups to try to artificially stimulate reaction, particularly among young people. We encountered them on the streets trying to convince everybody that the end was near. 3. Acting Out The acting out response also involves an emergence of repressed content. it is rather strange that the human mind should contain a drive to re-experience those traumatic events which were once so painful, and yet, this seems to be the case. Motivated by an urge which Freud termed the repetition compulsion, the human psyche can create actual situations in the real world which duplicate the originally unbearable experience. Of course in so doing it goes against the usually dominant pleasure principle and even bypasses the self- preservative instinct to the point that self-destruction is a very real possibility. This tendency to act out memories in reality rather than allowing them to enter consciousness in the form of memories is extremely dangerous. When you have a patient who is doing this it presents serious difficulty. Instead of understanding the past and allowing themselves to know what happened, they will go out and try to relive it, which can be suicidal. It is this particular form of the emergence of the repressed which causes Dr. Velikovsky to warn of the danger of a man-made cataclysm, purposely designed, though unconsciously, to reflect as closely as possible the experience of cosmic destruction of the planet. 4. In Dreams Freud, as I mentioned earlier, pointed to dreams as a source of information concerning phylogenetic memory traces. The study of cataclysm dreams would provide an extremely fertile field of investigation in the search for cataclysmically induced memory fragments. in fact, there is a typical nightmare, which many of you probably know, in which the dreamer witnesses or experiences the destruction of the world, lives through the horror of the last moments, and the final explosion, and then awakens at that very instant with a start. Of course, it is not enough to point to such dreams. it would be necessary to examine them in detail to discover both their source and their typical structure as well as common associations to them. It would be of particular importance if there were no associations to dreams of this type. This would be a strong indication that there could be phylogenetic memory underlying them. Let me give you just one example of a dream of this kind. The dreamer, a woman of middle age, in psychoanalytic treatment, dreamt as follows: On a palisade of bricks I saw reflected a white meteor, which was about to fall and blow up the earth [31] . You are aware that dreams usually require interpretation before their meaning can be understood, and, presumably, interpretation of this dream would lead us away from the cosmic spectacle and into the patient's personal world. But it is worth inquiring why she chose to embody that inner reality in a cosmic framework, why she experienced whatever it was in her inner life that she was dreaming about in terms of meteors and the explosion of the earth. Perhaps it is merely a residue from the previous day. If so you could find out very quickly. But it is interesting that internal emotional conflicts are so often projected into the sky. 5. Symptoms and Symbols in Neurotic Illnesses Some neurotic patients do project their emotional conflicts into outer space, not in the form of delusions but seemingly as a means of externalizing a painful inner reality in terms of more comfortable symbols and images. (Plate 1). This painting is the work of a 30-year old Canadian male who utilized painting and drawing as an aspect of his therapy. To assume that a painting such as this represents phylogenetic content would be foolish. Obviously, one would have to attend to the patient's associations to the painting, which in this, as in most cases, leads immediately away from outer space and into inner space. This analogy, by the way, is of crucial importance in understanding the predominance of cosmic imagery. At most one would expect the phylogenetic content to influence the choice of symbols in which the patient embodied his personal reality. In this particular case, the patient's associations led to his identifying the planets with his family. He saw the blue planet as his father, the brown one as his mother and the small black one as himself. He was trying to talk about his family and how he saw the dominance in that family. He also saw that the influence of these cosmic Plate 1 parents is seen on the figures below in the form of an astrological dominance of one parent planet or another. The different individuals are dressed in different colours relating to the planets above them. The figures could be in some kind of panic state, but actually, if you look closely at them, they appear to be much happier than that: they are dancing and turning somersaults. Since this painting fails to suggest anything of interplanetary collision or destruction, it would be unwise to push the phylogenetic interpretation into the foreground. However, the same patient followed this drawing with another which carries his analogy still further (Plate 2). 1 should mention that these drawings were made prior to the publication of Worlds in Collision. Here we see the earth, identified by the lines of longitude and latitude, in a rather unusual view. Seen from outer space, it appears to be flooded since the normal land masses are missing or submerged and the patient stands on an island reaching upwards, perhaps in distress. Above the earth is what appears to be a mass of land with mountains and rivers, perhaps a continent hovering in the air. To the left is an oddly shaped spherical mass, the moon, or perhaps a meteorite. The patient described that large continental mass above as a sheet of ice. While admitting the inevitable personal significance of such a drawing, perhaps we are justified in noticing that the imagery bears at least some relationship to the cataclysm theory. The symbols which the patient has chosen to embody his individual perception of his existential situation seem rather specific; a fantasy product that may well extend beyond the realm of personal experience, in the same way that the primal fantasies referred to by Freud did. But remember, we cannot be sure because these are not the fantasies of an infant but the drawing of an adult capable of utilizing experience and imagery drawn from an infinite variety of sources. Such drawings provide no proof, but merely parallels worth noting. Plate 2 Another drawing by the same patient reveals how the idea developed (Plate 3). 1 have made no effort whatever to discuss the possible interpretation of these drawings because I feel that to do so would take us away from the problem of their phylogenetic component, if any. A Jungian analyst would proceed directly into an interpretation, which would involve very specific references to primordial experience and would have not the slightest doubt that the chief content of the pictures is a phylogenetic derivative. The patient himself had very few associations to any of the visual images that he produced, "he simply felt that he had to draw it like that." [32] Plate 3 If phylogenetic memories of cosmic upheaval are postulated as present in the unconscious, then we would expect to encounter them in an almost pure form in the mental productions of psychotic patients. In such cases the defense mechanisms of the Ego are no longer sufficiently strong to inhibit the emergence of repressed mental contents. Although this material is still somewhat distorted and disguised, it provides our clearest insight into the nature of unconscious mental contents, including material from strata of the psyche not usually encountered in psychoanalytic therapy. Very few psychoanalyses reach this level of material. Such patients frequently develop complicated delusional systems which either completely obliterate their prior understanding of reality, or less frequently, these ideas form clearly circumscribed, or contained, delusional systems which are able to co-exist with normal behaviour and with more typical views of reality. Among these delusional beliefs, one that is very commonly encountered is the conviction that the world is about to end, or has already met its destruction. The patient has lived through this experience. I am not referring here to the religious fanatic who with amusing regularity predicts the world's demise, though they are also worth study, because in many instances their delusional beliefs are shared by a group of people so that they are particularly relevant to the Velikovsky theory. Plate 4 is a painting called "The Explosion of the World" by a very seriously disturbed young boy. Psychotic individuals who are preoccupied with world cataclysm, either past, or to come, usually develop very elaborate descriptive ideas about the details of this terrifying event, an event in which they commonly play a very central role. In fact at times they are themselves the cause of the cataclysm. A manic-depressive patient during the depressive phase of his illness wrote as follows: If I could only kill myself, it might blow up the whole universe, but at least I would get out of eternal torture and achieve the oblivion and nothingness for which my soul craves [33] . Plate 4 His description of his experience is entitled The Universe of Horror and the Universe of Bliss, which gives some indication of the way in which the overwhelming experience of a psychosis appears, in the patient's point of view, to include the destruction of the whole universe, not only of himself. There is no question that the experience of psychotic illness does involve such drastic change in one's perception of reality that the world does really seem to have undergone violent, even cataclysmic change. The same patient said, "At times the whole Universe seemed to be dissolving about me." [34] Let me read another account by a psychotically depressed patient which conveys very strongly the feeling associated with overall destruction of the world and what it is like to live through: There was even a day when I stood by the table in my room. lt was a sunny day, the curtains were flapping, and the daffodils were all out in the grass below when I had a sudden vision of the end of the world, a catastrophe caused solely by my fate ... As in some monstrous cosmic general strike, all mankind was engulfed, all movement ceased, I could see the steamships stopping in the middle of the ocean, while invisible waves of horror encircled the world [35] . In some cases other planets are involved, as in the following account: Shortly after I was taken to the hospital for the first time in a rigid catatonic condition, I was plunged into the horror of a world catastrophe. I was being caught up in a cataclysm and totally dislocated. I myself had been responsible for setting the destructive forces into motion, although I acted with no intent to harm ... Perhaps you notice I am quoting from the patient's own feelings, his own statements about what he felt. Notice also that if there were such a cataclysm, the people who lived through it would probably appear to feel that the were to blame, that they were personally responsible for what had happened They are overwhelmed with guilt. ... Part of the time I was exploring a new planet, (a marvelous and breathtaking adventure) but it was too lonely... The earth had been devastated by atomic bombs and most of its inhabitants killed. Only a few people myself and the dimly perceived nursing staff, had escaped. At other times I felt totally alone on the new planet ... At times when the universe was collapsing, I was not sure that things would turn out alright. I thought I might have to stay in the end less hell-fire of atomic destruction [36] . Psychiatric theorists account for these cataclysmic delusions in a number of ways. They point out that the patient's sense of his body and of his ego boundaries is damaged to such an extent that he can no longer differentiate between what is happening to him and what is happening to the Universe. Since he feels destructive processes at work within himself, he assumes that this destruction must extend to the whole universe. Megalomaniac delusions are frequent and cause the patient to feel that he is literally at the centre of the universe and that his fate must inevitably affect the planets and the stars. Inner processes are projected onto the sky, and the disintegration of the ego is experienced as natural catastrophe. The theme of world flooding and the submerging of continents is usually interpreted by analytically oriented psychiatrists as the inundation of the conscious mind by the contents of the unconscious. Patients threatened by "the rising waters of the unconscious" actually do develop preoccupations with flooding. (Those of you who come from Saskatchewan and Alberta will doubtless be relieved to know that a preoccupation with catastrophic flooding could also be the result of a recent experience of catastrophic flooding). There is a problem there actually. Are we talking about symbolic material in need of interpretation, or are we talking about memory fragments connected with actual historical events? Many analysts would tend to link the recurrent motif of the flood in literature with the shared human experience of birth. You remember Otto Rank's conception of the birth trauma, yet another primordial experience, occurring at the beginning of our own lives. It is in schizophrenic illnesses that one encounters mental content which inclines one to consider the possibility of a phylogenetic derivation. Careful examination of these very bizarre delusional ideas, and the violent feelings which accompany them, has led to an awareness that despite the intensely private symbolic nature of schizophrenic language and imagery, the ideas represent an accurate reflection of their experience, and at times, they even represent an effort at communication. But what about the form in which these experiences are embodied and the choice of symbols? Could there be an underlying memory of far earlier experiences of terrifying cataclysm? No one doubts that the patient is going through his own personal experience of cataclysm, but is it provoking in him a possible memory of much earlier ones? Freud, referring to the delusional ideas of the insane, says: We have long understood that a portion of forgotten truth lies hidden in delusional ideas, that when this returns it has to put up with distortions and misunderstandings, and that the compulsive conviction which attaches to the delusion arises from this core of truth and spreads out on to the errors that wrap it round [37] . He knew there was truth hidden in psychotic ideas, but, of course, he was talking about individual truth. As you know, Freud's experience of psychotic patients was limited because he didn't work in a hospital setting. His most intensive discussion of a psychotic delusional system was based on a published autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber [38] . Schreber represents perhaps the finest example of a man whose extremely mad ideas eventually came to be organized and limited to a well defined and clearly circumscribed set of delusions which he was able to cope with, living a normal existence out in the world, untroubled by any other signs of mental illness. He was convinced of the correctness of his views, but he was well aware that they were not shared by others and that they caused trouble if they were talked about. He saw his discoveries, as he called them, to be the result of a form of insight which was available only to him. Nevertheless, in generosity he sought to share his convictions about the nature of reality with others by publishing an account of his unique experiences and his systematized delusions in a fascinating book entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. I will quote a few lines from the book in order to give you an impression of the detailed cosmic content of psychotic delusions and of the difficulty of using this material as evidence for historical speculation or reconstruction. Connected with these phenomena, very early on ... (came) recurrent nightly visions ... of an approaching end of the world, as a consequence of the indissoluble connection between God and myself. Bad news came in from all sides that even this or that star or this or that group of stars had to be 'given up'; at one time it was said that even Venus had been 'flooded, ' at another that the whole solar system would now have to be 'disconnected, ' that the Cassiopeia (the whole group of stars) had had to be drawn together into a single sun, that perhaps only the Pleiades could still be saved, etc. etc. While I had these visions at night, in daytime I thought I could notice the sun following my movements; when I moved to and fro in the single-windowed room I inhabited at the time ... lt was as if single nights had the duration of centuries, so that within that time the most profound alterations in the whole of mankind, in the earth itself and the whole solar system could very well have taken place. It was repeatedly mentioned in visions that the work of the past fourteen thousand years had been lost - this figure presumably indicated the duration the earth had been populated with human beings and that approximately only another two hundred years were allotted to the earth. If I am not mistaken the figure 212 was mentioned. ... Later ... I thought this period had already expired and therefore I was the last real human being left. I lived for years. in doubt as to whether I was really still on earth or whether on some other celestial body. Even in the year 1895 1 still considered the possibility of my being on Phobos, a satellite of the planet Mars ... and (1) wondered whether the moon, which I sometimes saw in the sky, was not the main planet Mars [39] . The idea that some of this material could have a phylogenetic origin finds support in Schreber's own conception of what was happening to him. He tells us that he was in communion with departed souls from all periods in history. If you were encountering phylogenetic contents, ranging back through time, it would be like an experience of being in contact with departed souls. He describes visionary experiences in which he traveled back in time. In one of (the visions) it was as though I were sitting in a railway carriage or in a lift driving into the depths of the earth and I recapitulated, as it were, the whole history of mankind or of the earth in reverse order; in the upper regions there were still forests of leafy trees; in the nether regions it became progressively darker and blacker; ... I advanced only to a point 1; point 3, which was to mark the earliest beginning of mankind [40] . On the other hand any suggestion that this delusional material has a phylogenetic origin must take into account the long list of scientific books which Schreber was reading. Prior to his hospitalization he spent a great deal of time investigating the early history of the world and he tells us about a few of the books which he read: 1. Haeckel: The History of Natural Creation 2. Caspari: The Primordial History of Mankind 3. du Prel: Evolution of the Universe 4. Maedler: Astronomy 5. Neumayer: History of the Earth Given the list, there is no particular reason to jump to phylogenetic explanations. Another quite similar case about which we have considerably less information is that of Oskar H. It is a nineteenth century case which has the advantage of excluding experience of the World Wars and the Atom Bomb as the basis for such catastrophic delusions. A recent study has pointed out that the bomb has not in fact entered the repertoire of psychotic productions to any significant extent. Oskar H. was a butler, hospitalized with typical symptoms of schizophrenia. His fame is based on a group of very fine water colour paintings (Plate 5) of delusional materials. This painting is called "Mrs. Gern". Oskar was in the habit of writing lengthy texts to explain the pictures and these texts give us some idea of his delusional system and his preoccupations. He was concerned at this time with a number of scientific matters including, in this painting of Mrs. Gern, references to electro-magnetic currents, hypnosis and magnets. The electro-magnetic currents you can see streaming out of her head. Those things which he mentions are all part of the therapeutic equipment of 19th Century psychiatry. Plate 5 His unique importance for us derives from a series of pictures which he painted of the destruction of the world as a result of the collision of comets (Plate 6). The text which accompanies this painting reads as follows: Explanation about end of the world. On 3rd April 2053 in consequence of collisions of the ice comet with comet Biela main comet in indescribable distance on western horizon, sun moon stars darken; drop vertically into endless night. O. H. General Director of Royal Mental Clinic [41] . Plate 6 As you can imagine, verification of the Velikovsky reconstruction of history would result in an extremely different understanding of materials such as this, and would in fact involve considerable disturbance in the fields of psychiatry and psychology as it has in other disciplines. Whether any of the material which I have discussed can play a part in contributing to the task of verification of the theory of inter-planetary catastrophe, I leave to Dr. Velikovsky to decide. {S : Notes (Psychological Aspects of the Work of Immanuel Velikovsky)} Notes (Psychological Aspects of the Work of Immanuel Velikovsky) 1. Velikovsky, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955), Supplement, page 272); (Laurel Edition, 1968), page 254; (Abacus, 1973), page 338; (Pocket Books, 1977), page 246. This Supplement to Earth in Upheaval consists of a lecture delivered by Dr. Velikovsky before the Graduate College Forum of Princeton University on October 14,1953. 2. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950), Preface page viii; (Pocket Books, 1977), page 12; (Abacus, 1972), page 9. 3. Ibid. 4. Letter to Mr. Clifton Fadiman, dated October 23, 1947. 5. Velikovsky, "The Dreams Freud Dreamed", The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 28 (October, 1941), pages 487-511. 6. Mullen, William, "The Center Holds" Pensée 2( 2): 32-35 (May, 1972); this article has been reprinted in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday, 1976), pages 239-249. 7. Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism (Amsterdam, 1939). Citations from Freud in text are to The Standard Edition, Edited by James Strachey (London, 1964), Vol. XXIII, page 67. 8. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, loc. cit. 9. Velikovsky, op. cit., page 300; 304, 288. 10. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIll, page 80. 11. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, op. cit., page 274; 255; 239; 247. 12. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Vienna, 1920), Vol. XVIII, page 18. 13. Freud, Letter to C. G. Jung, 1911. 14. Freud, Minutes of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, November 8,1911. 15. Freud, Totem and Taboo (Vienna, 1913), Vol. XIII, page 157. 16. Freud, From The History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), Vol. XVII, page 97. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Vienna, 1937), Vol. XXIII, page 240. 20. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (Vienna, 1917), Vol. XV, page 199. 21. Freud, op. cit., Vol. XVI, page 411. 22. Freud, op. cit., VI, pages 371. 23. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII, page 99. 24. Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (New York, 1960), page 20. 25. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII pages 99-100. 26. Freud, The Ego and the Id (Vienna, 1923), page A 27. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII, page 81. 28. Freud, Introductory Lectures, Vol. XV, page 199. 29. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Vienna, 1900), Vol. V, page 549. 30. Freud, Leonard DA Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Vienna, 1910), Vol. XI, pages 59-137. 31. The personal meanings of this dream, and the patient's association to it, are discussed in: Garma, Angel, The Psychoanalysis of Dreams (New York, 1966), pages 164-166. 32. For a very detailed discussion of this case with reference to the personal and archetypal significance of the drawings, see: Baynes, H. G., Mythology of the Soul (London, 1969), pages 515-911 33. Kaplan, Bert, ed. The Inner World of Mental Illness (New York, 1964); see Custance, John, "Wisdom, Madness and Folly", pages 56-57. 34. Ibid, page 59. 35. Op. Cit., see: Brooks, Van Wyck, "Days of the Phoenix", page 86. 36. Op. Cit., see: Anonymous, "An Autobiography of Schizophrenic Experience", page 95. 37. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII, page 85. 38. Schreber, Daniel Paul, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, (London, 1955). 39. Kaplan, op cit., from the Schreber case, pages 126-130. 40. Ibid, page 128. 41. A discussion of this patient and his art is to be found in: Prinzhorn, Hans, Artistry of the Mentally Ill (New York, 1972), pages 80-83. A further case of great importance for this discussion, which I omitted because of lack of time, is found in Jung, C. C., "A Study in the Process of Individuation" (Zurich, 1950), Vol. 9, pages 290-354. (Also of value in terms of this discussion is Jung's essay "Flying Saucers: A Modem Myth of Things Seen in the Sky" (Zurich, 1958), Vol. 10, pages 309-433. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 4: } {T STRUCTURING THE APOCALYPSE:} {S : Old and New World Variations} RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER FOUR STRUCTURING THE APOCALYPSE: Old and New World Variations William Mullen Hodder Fellow in the Humanities Princeton University My project here is a kind of spectral analysis of religions - Egyptian, Hebrew, Christian, Islamic; Teotihuacano, Mayan, Hopi, Aztec - and since the subject of religion has traditionally involved polemic, I would like to begin by considering calmly for a moment the most effective means by which polemic can be avoided. We have had a taste of an ongoing scientific polemic at this symposium, and need only remind ourselves of the greater heat generated in the past by religious polemics to understand why both are best dispensed with. The work of Velikovsky is in fact susceptible to use in religious polemic as well as scientific. This has already been begun by the publication in Fall 1973 of a book entitled God is Red by Vine Deloria, a Sioux. I intend to take as a starting-point some of Deloria's ideas, but I would like to preface that with a Sioux tale he recounts on the subject of civility in the exchange of religious beliefs. The tale goes this way: A missionary once undertook to instruct a group of Indians in the truths of his holy religion. He told them of the creation of the earth in six days, and of the fall of our first parents by eating an apple. The courteous savages listened attentively, and, after thanking him, one related in his turn a very ancient tradition concerning the origin of maize. But the missionary, plainly showed his disgust and disbelief, indignantly saying: "What I have delivered to you were sacred truths, but this that you tell me is mere fable and falsehood !'' "My Brother," gravely replied the offended Indian, "it seems that you have not been well grounded in the rules of civility. You saw that we, who practice these rules, believed your stories; why, then, do you refuse to credit ours?" [1] Dr. MacGregor [2] has drawn here a picture of the possibility that mankind is traumatized by catastrophic events, and of the more distant possibility that memory of them is phylogenetically transmitted. We should not let these possibilities make us entertain fatalism. Nor should we let a mechanistic account of mythological events lead to pure materialism, a rejection of all the spiritual values experienced and formulated by our ancestors obsessed with catastrophe. All religious systems contain with them the possibility of a broad spectrum of discourse, ranging from the oral tale to the sacred book, and from the practice of reconciling theology and philosophy to the techniques of mysticism. I hope this is kept in mind as I give some necessarily very broad accounts of several religions, for I consider each of them susceptible to the same variety of interpretation in the hands of their practitioners. What we need is a simple language that can describe religion by accommodating the catastrophic elements within a larger structure. This may be conceived as a prolegomenon to the reconciliation of religion and reason. We sometimes forget that such was the very effort in which western man was engaged in the century before the uniformitarian dogma took sway. In Eighteenth Century France the names of Voltaire and Boulanger stand out; in Germany there is the work of Kant; and on this continent we have the effort of Thomas Jefferson (usually neglected because he refused to consider it other than a private preoccupation). I say this by way of supplementing the account given by Dr. Grinnell of what happened once Darwinism began to be railroaded through [3] . Deloria's book, which in some ways renews the tradition of reconciling religion and reason, contrasts Christianity with the tribal religions of North America in an effort to articulate a clear language by which religious systems may be measured. He argues that the content of the Judaeo-Christian religions is structured around their emphasis on the action of divinity through time, while the tribal American religions are more directed towards the presence of divinity in space. I would like to take up those terms to further the articulation of a comparative language. It is, of course, pointless to make the distinction between space and time without considering them together, and Deloria does not do this, though in simplifying his argument I have made him seem to. Space and time together are the necessary categories in which we experience events occurring. Whitehead has said that the event is the unit of things real; and it seems that modern physicists, in describing what they detect at the subatomic level, find it more convenient to formulate their observations in terms of events rather than locations in space and actions in time separately. if events are necessarily unfolded in space and time, this is also true of divine events, the central subject of every religion. Catastrophes, as divine events, were experienced as alterations of space and time. The celestial bodies by which time is marked changed their courses, and therefore the units of time were altered; simultaneously, the face of the earth, the space in which we live, was transformed. The religious reaction to this kind of divine event is in almost all cases to see an imperative in it. The divinity, through reshaping space and time, gives some kind of imperative to mankind, and the driving question of ancient religions is: What kind of behavior does this alteration dictate? It comes to a question of syntax. The basic proposition is something like this: "Heaven and earth are being remade" - a statement in the present tense. When this is then transferred into the past tense, several deductions can be made. The simplest and most unquestioning is, "Heaven and earth have been remade; great destruction was caused, and this we lament." It is actually a lament, the papyrus of lpuwer, which Velikovsky uses as the starting-point for his reconstruction. The alternative to lament comes by making the same statement, "Heaven and earth were remade," and then adding to it, "Stability has now been achieved, and this we celebrate." What follows on the ritual level is a celebration involving reenactment by human beings on earth of the events which took place in the sky, and the logical end of the ritual is the triumph of stability. So far, so good. it is when theories of divine motivation come into play that the syntax becomes more complex and more dangerous. One can say, "Heaven and earth were remade because of something the gods suspected or decided in regard to man," or, "Heaven and earth were remade because of something man did." In either case, obsession begins to grow with preventing reoccurrence of the catastrophe by acting differently towards the gods. Syntactically the proposition becomes transferred to the future tense: "Unless the gods feel thus and so, unless man does this or that, heaven and earth will be remade." Finally, once obsession has reached the pure stage where propitiation seems hopeless, the proposition becomes absolute: "Heaven and earth are going to be remade; act accordingly." And that is the apocalypse. Let me now apply these simple terms to some real cases. The religions I have chosen to analyse are simply those which we, as inhabitants of this continent with a certain tradition behind us, find most imperative. Through our language and culture the Judaeo- Christian religions keep a hold on us, and they cannot be ultimately understood without the Egyptian elements they react to or incorporate. Through our habitation here the archaic American religions also have a kind of authority over us. To start with Egypt, then, The Old Kingdom precedes the catastrophes reconstructed in Worlds in Collision, and Velikovsky has promised a separate volume dealing with the earlier catastrophes [4] which Egyptians in the Old Kingdom were concerned to memorialize. All the religions I am using as examples make references to these earlier events, particularly the Deluge, but in none of the others are there religious texts available in materials which actually predate -1500. (Other cultures, such as the Sumerian, do possess such texts in abundance; Old Kingdom Egypt will suffice ice for one example here.) The events with which the Egyptians were obsessed from the beginning of their civilization were those of the Deluge, and it can be shown that there are three distinct words or phrases in hieroglyphic writing for a flood of water; one designating the annual inundation, a second the primeval waters beyond the sky, and a third "The Great Flood which comes from 'the Great Lady" ' the great lady being heaven [5] . The Deluge events in Egypt, as Velikovsky has pointed out in some of his talks, were translated into the story of Osiris, Isis, Seth and Horus. Osiris was great kings whose brother Seth murdered and dismembered him, whereupon his wife Isis reconstituted his body and conceived a child to avenge him, the god Horus. Velikovsky takes these as events involving Saturn and Jupiter. The primary Egyptian reaction to these events was a massive effort to create political and agricultural stability by coordinating all activity along the Nile, and at the center of this stability was the institution of divine kingship. The living king was conceived to be the planetary divinity which had won the struggle in heaven: the planet Jupiter was the god Horus, and the living pharaoh was the god Horus. The king's activities were largely dictated by the rituals reenacting these events, and the reenactment was meant to celebrate, ultimately, the stability that succeeded them. Now the only flaw in such a system is that the king is mortal. The experience of the incarnate god's death precipitated a catastrophe on the ritual level which had to be resolved. This was done by conceiving of the dead king as the god Osiris, who had been reborn and instituted as king of the underworld. The living king who succeeds him and honors his cult then becomes the god Horus. At the time of the king's death, his body was embalmed and kept aside for a ritually correct date of entombment. The new king acceded to the throne, but before he could be crowned he had to move throughout the land of Egypt performing a mystery play which reenacted the struggle between Horus and Seth. The dead king was then entombed at the end of the prescribed period with a solemn ritual of resurrection. It is carried out in the pyramid built as his tomb, and the so-called "Pyramid Texts" are the words inscribed on the walls of the pyramid's inner chambers and recited during it. They are extraordinarily complex because the dead king is in fact reborn as many different gods, but his identity as Osiris is one of the primary among them. This ritual has a living descendent in the Christian Easter midnight liturgy. Like the Old Kingdom entombment rite, the Easter liturgy memorializes the death and rebirth of a god who once lived on earth and then descended to the land of the dead; occurs at the season when vegetation returns; and consists of the reenactment of a passion followed by the celebration of a resurrection. Most of the spells in the Pyramid Texts have as their direct goal the transfiguration of the king into one or many celestial divinities. Because Egyptian tenses are not easy to reconstruct, the tense in which these texts are composed may be taken as either the present, the subjunctive, or the imperative: "The King lives as Osiris", "May the King live as Osiris", or "Live, O King, as Osiris". But there are also spells, often inscribed on separate sections of the pyramid inner chambers, in which we find the first trace of apocalyptic syntax in Old Kingdom Egypt. They take the form of a threat by the king; if he is not permitted by the celestial gods to be reborn as one of their company, he will cause a celestial catastrophe. Here is one such passage. The priest reciting for the king addresses the supreme god and then the sun, and makes the following threat: God whose name cannot be known make a place for this single lord! Lord of the radiance of the horizon give place to the King ! If no place be made the king shall curse his father Earth, Earth speak no more, decree no more! Whom the King finds in his way he will eat limb by limb ! The Pelican shall prophesy, the company of nine come out, the Great One rise, and the gods in their nines cry: "A dam shall dam the land, cliffs crumble and banks unite, ways be lost to the wayfarer, steps of the land collapse on those who flee it!" [6] It should be stressed that this is a text inscribed inside the pyramid. It is not a mode of thought accessible to the general population of Egypt, but rather, if you like, an esoteric text. In Old Kingdom Egypt it was celebration of stability that constituted the public experience, and this kind of apocalyptic syntax was held in check. In turning to the Hebrew experience one must begin with the Scriptures, and since Wellhausen it has been agreed that to work with the Scriptures intelligently at all one must be able to distinguish the times at which different strata were composed. Unfortunately, it is impossible by this method to determine with any certainty when the central Hebrew concept of monotheism emerged. The earliest remembered moment in the specifically Hebrew religious experience seems to have been the covenant of Abraham with the god of a nomadic desert people, and the nature of this god is difficult to make out. The major moment thereafter was that of -1475, and it was passed on in memory as a law giving at Sinai by the god who "caused" the catastrophic events of that time. We cannot easily say whether he was himself originally a planetary god or was rather conceived of as a god who controlled the planets, since the latter conception had already been developed before the rescension in a text of the present account of the lawgiving. The next major episode is the attempt to institute kingship in Israel. This was not destined to last long, possibly because the king was not conceived by the Hebrews to incarnate a divinity who walked on earth or even to be the high priest of the Hebrew religion. He was a strictly political creation, the result of a demand by the Hebrew people to have a king like other nations. What follows the unsuccessful attempt at kingship is described in the second part of Worlds in Collision, which analyzes the writings of those prophets of the eighth and seventh century who were contemporary with the last series of celestial disturbances. The great phrase of these prophets is "The Day of the Lord." Again, we cannot say with certainty if the Lord is a planet or a god manipulating the planets, but the day of the Lord is in either case an experience of the reshaping of heaven and earth. Velikovsky has indicated in some of his talks that it may be only in the later prophets, Ezekiel and deutero-Isaiah, that a clear monotheistic and transcendental concept emerges. He has stressed that this is a very speculative line of thought, certainly not one which he wishes to introduce as an integral part of his work. The only way to organize such a multileveled experience is to say that, for the Hebrews, Yahweh acted over a long period of time for the benefit of his chosen people. He remade heaven and earth for them; he altered space and time for them; and he did so in a series of events so qualitatively differentiated from one another that there could be no hope to telescoping them all into one ritual. Rather, the people that conceives of itself as chosen must sustain the tension of this operation of their god through time intellectually, and thus they become the people of the Book, whose existence is organized around the scriptural record of the different events in their sequence. The concept of their chosen-ness denied them the security of living in a world of immanent deity where the acts of the gods could be reenacted in a yearly cycle. Rather, they had constantly to keep in mind the entirety of their varied history. It is this sustaining of a tension that produced the rabbinical tradition of elaborate interpretation of the Book. The difficulty of sustaining such tension also in due time produced an apocalyptic literature among the Jews, but the rabbinical tradition worked against it, and it remains peripheral to the Jewish religion. Nevertheless, when Jesus of Nazareth entered his public ministry the apocalyptic notions were at his disposal; and in some sense the gospels may be characterized as a teaching of the ethics of the last days. if this historical figure was convinced of an imminent end of the world, he must also have been passionately concerned to tell people how they should act in regard to it. There is a different aspect of Jesus, though, which may have been available to the minds of his contemporaries, and was in any case soon developed by Paul into an essential part of Christianity. That is Christ in the ancient pattern of a dying and reborn god whose death and resurrection promise salvation to mankind, whether salvation in the form of the return of vegetation in the yearly cycle, or salvation in the sense of life after the human death, or finally salvation as survival during the process by which heaven and earth are next remade. Consider for instance, a passage like Mark 13, where Christ's apocalyptic warning and his connection with the cycle of vegetation are present together. He says: For in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light. And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors [7] . The passage is remarkable because the first part of it can be read in the traditional thundering apocalyptic voice, while the second is a tender parable from the realm of vegetation, of the kind used throughout the gospels. Here two identities are present which need not necessarily have been well integrated in Jesus' actual conception of himself or in the perception of him by his contemporaries. When Jesus died and Paul propagated the gospels, the apocalyptic literature of the Jews was ready to hand for imitation by Christians. The remaining history of the West has been deeply stamped by the fact that one such apocalyptic book was canonized, that of John the Divine, which has become our symbol for apocalyptic feeling in general. It is unnecessary to quote representative passages to give the tone, since even in our present culture it is impossible to escape exposure to it in the course of one's upbringing. But one passage in John is particularly remarkable for what it reveals about the syntax I have described. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven. And swore by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer [8] . The last phrase is appallingly simple, for it represents the logical termination of apocalyptic thought, a psychological state in which endurance through time in fear of cataclysmic events becomes intolerable. What is left is only an utterly irrational desire that time shall cease. This reluctance to accept the temporal world, this demand that time end, has been with the West ever since. Yet the apocalypse did not come, and the shape Christianity took depended on that fact. With the failure of apocalypse in the generation succeeding Christ it was inevitable that the cataclysmic imagery be counterbalanced. Thus it was only a matter of time before the uniformitarian cosmology of Aristotle, diffused already through the Hellenistic and Roman cultures, should be grafted onto Christianity. Aristotle's entire view of the world is predicated on the assumption of an unending cyclical repetition of time in the natural world and among the celestial bodies. To use Aristotelian "reason" for the interpretation of apocalyptic "revelation" is therefore nothing less than to attempt to synthesize two diametrically opposite views of the solar system. In the Islamic experience it is remarkable that all the phases of Christianity are telescoped. Islam begins with the preaching of Muhammed at Mecca, in short fervent recitals or warnings called Surahs in the Koran, whose message is entirely that the world is about to come to an end and that when this happens the elect will be saved and the evil will be damned. After the Hegirah, in which he moved to Medina, Muhammed's preaching becomes legislative and longwinded, concerned with working out codes of existence. The world had not come to an end, and his apocalyptic fervor waned. Within a few generations after his death, schools of jurisprudence cropped up; debates were held on juridical interpretation of the Koran; theological controversies became heated; Plato and Aristotle were again grafted onto the apocalyptic message; and finally, in Sufism, there appears a mysticism concerned to transcend space and time altogether. I now invite you to move across the Atlantic. In doing so I must admit from the start that what I have learned about the religions of the New World has inevitably been shaped by analogies conceived with those of the Old. As long as this is recognized it is possible to proceed. One cannot encounter something utterly strange without bringing analogies to it; on the other hand, one cannot make genuine progress in understanding until the power of the analogies has been separated out from the material itself. In the New World there are no cultures that have left extensive evidence of religious beliefs actually held before -1500. There are many Deluge legends, but no archaeological remains from before -1500 to substantiate them. The archaeological starting-point is conventionally put between the 16th and 14th pre-Christian centuries, which see the emergence of the great cultures of Mesoamerica, pre-eminently that centered around the site of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City, where the so-called "Pyramids of the Sun and Moon" are located. Legends of many different cultures in Mesoamerica speak of a prolonged night following a celestial battle, during which the tribes and peoples gathered at "Tula," and it is simple to conclude that Tula was the name given to Teotihuacan. There is a later Tula in Hidalgo modeled after it, but this was the original and central one [9] . After that gathering during the period of darkness, which lasted months or years, the tribes dispersed to wait for the sun each in a different place. They felt sorrow that they could not be with their brother tribes when the sun finally appeared, but they remembered their first unity at Tula. The civilization erected at the site of Teotihuacan in time became the dominant empire of Mesoamerica, and its capital city Tula can only be compared to Rome in the history of the West. Its earliest strata are from -1500, its great period of building is in the centuries immediately before Christ, and it was destroyed by invading armies in the fifth century. This is a very long existence for an empire with hegemony, both political and cultural, over the peoples around it; and the myth of the original gathering at Tula during the long night was undoubtedly one of the sources on which its claim to hegemony was based. Unfortunately the symbolic language of the religion which unified the Tulan empire is not yet fully intelligible to us; we keep having to work back through later strata to get any glimpse of it at all. Certain themes can be isolated. The myth of the long night in which the peoples waited for the sun to rise involves the critical concept of sacrifice, to which the pyramids at Teotihuacan themselves are monuments. The original sacrifice was not of a man but of a god. The gods were in council at Tula in the darkness, and each offered to give himself in order to make the sun rise again. The legend of Quetzalcoatl is one version of this original sacrifice, and it is said that in his case, after the sacrifice, he became the planet Venus. The model of sacrifice was then practiced by the peoples ascribing to the various branches of the original Tulan religion. it should be observed that the practice of penitential blood-letting and other forms of self-mutilation was no less widespread than the practice of human sacrifice to the celestial deities. The compulsive logic of imitating the sacrifice of the god led to masochistic as well as sadistic expressions. Given the lack of detailed knowledge of this first Tulan civilization, like to turn to the most highly developed and sophisticated Mesoamerican religion, that of the Mayans. It has been speculated that their rise to brilliance followed the fall of the Teotihuacano-Tulan empire in the fifth century, and their classical period is known to be from the fifth century to the ninth. The signal feature of Mayan religion on is the way it deified not only the planets but also the cycles of time and religion numbers 1 to 13. Thus time in different manifestations - as a planet that changes time, as the cycle of time that results, and as the numbers by which that cycle is measured - all became divine. Time itself seems to have become the essence, or if you like, the substance, of divinity; insofar as divinity was incarnate it was incarnate in space, but its essential nature was as time. But these are western terms, and we had better stick to simpler preliminary statements. The Mayans were clearly aware of the possibility, or inevitability, of repeated world destructions, and like the other Mesoamerican peoples, they spoke of four earlier "suns" or ages, thought of themselves as living in the fifth "sun," and expected that "sun," too, to perish by some celestial agent. But the remarkable point is that this expectation produced so little apocalyptic frenzy or fervor in the Mayans. On the contrary, they developed their system of time until contemplation of the beginning and end of a world age was held completely in check and acquired no obsessive force whatsoever. Using units of four hundred years, they speculated that the cycle between the destruction of suns was thirteen four- hundred-year periods, thirteen baktuns. Steles from their classical period refer to them as living in the eighth and ninth baktuns, and the date they gave for the last destruction of the world has been computed as -3113. But they also computed in smaller units. They worshipped the year in its present length of 365 days, and computed the quarter-day error with greater precision than their contemporaries in the Old World. They also worshipped two other sacred years, one of 360 days and another of 260. The simplest interpretation in the Velikovskian context would be that these were extended back before the last celestial disturbances; but it is also possible that they are different celestial cycles of other bodies than the sun. The 260 day year was the most sacred, and the obsession of Mayan numerology became to reconcile the cycle of 260 days with all longer cycles. This they did by conceiving of the simultaneous journey through time of different divinities who were themselves units of time and who also bore time on their backs as they walked along the road. When a cycle ended, its god came to a restingplace and set down his burden. For the Mayans it was a sacred event when more than one such burden-carrying divinity arrived at their resting-places simultaneously. The rituals developed for units of time smaller than the baktun must have played an especially significant role in reducing apocalyptic anxiety. Most effective was that of the Katun, the twenty year period, for this was the ritual by which time could be experienced in a single human lifespan. They conceived that each twenty year period had a god presiding over it, who bore it on his back. Ten years before that period began, they welcomed the god as a guest in their temples, propitiating him and the god of the present katun at the same time. This is a very civil process, a matter of good manners to the arriving god: it is also a religious experience easily accessible to the imaginations of those who live long after catastrophes, for it accords with the length of our own lives. It is thus a magnificent check against obsession with that distant day when the "sun" would come to an end. The Hopis of northeast Arizona also trace their culture back to the great Mesoamerican complex of civilizations, even though they live far north of the area normally attributed to it. In them, one finds a conviction strongly parallel to that of the Jews, for the Hopis too conceive of themselves as a chosen people. They claim that during the last destruction of the world they, as a people, were chosen to survive, and that the divinity who reshaped heaven and earth instructed them to preserve a yearly cycle of rituals reflecting the pure pattern of creation, in order to prevent future catastrophes. Their theodicy also resembles the Judaeo-Christian, in that they believe that it was some fault in man, some moral failing, that precipitated the earlier world destructions. They are therefore concerned to bear themselves with both ritual and ethical correctness, in order to survive the next destruction as they have survived the previous ones. This ritual attitude is developed in the most minute details; even the steps of their dances reflect it. Here is a description of one such dance in which the cosmological symbolism is evident. It is the dance for Niman Kachina, a festival after the summer solstice, when the spirits from the sky who have visited the Hopi for half of the year are sent home. The pattern of the dance embodies the familiar cosmological concept. The dancers first enter the plaza in a single file from the east and line up on the north side, facing west. As they dance, the end of the line slowly curves west and south, but is broken before a circle is formed, just as the pure re pattern of life was broken and the First World destroyed. The dancers then move to the west side, the line curves to the south, and is broken as was the pattern of life in the Second World. Moving to the south side and curving east, the dancers repeat the procedure at this third position, representing the Third World. There is no fourth position, for life is still in progress on this Fourth World and it remains to be seen whether it will adhere to the perfect pattern or be broken again [10] . This concrete example gives a sense of what Deloria is talking about when he emphasizes the spatial nature of tribal American religions. The great events in time are transformed into the position of dancers in a plaza. Finally there is the Aztec religion, easily the most barbarous aberration from the Mesoamerican civilizing norms. At the time when the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs' obsessional fear that the sun would collapse if not fed by human blood had grown so great that as many as twenty thousand people would be sacrificed in a single rite. Human sacrifice existed in Mesoamerican culture before, but it was used with great reserve, if one may speak of it that way; only in times of dire necessity would one person be sacrificed. Among the Aztecs, apocalyptic feeling had dislocated the syntax of the sacrifice and become obsessional in the highest degree. Scholars have reconstructed from Aztec chronicles the possibility that there may have been one particular king who initiated the idea of a ritual war for the purpose of gaining prisoners for sacrifice, and they have speculated that this idea was manipulated by the skillful politicians of the Aztec empire. In other words, these men were fabricating a kind of ideology or propaganda to justify their conquests. This would be merely one among many cases in which an ancient mythical obsession with preventing cataclysms falls later into the hands of people ready to use it quite differently from the original intention, and the result can clearly be termed a barbarization. The Aztec culture itself was in such tension as it continued to witness these spectacles of mass sacrifice that when the Spaniards arrived it seemed to be experiencing a desertion by its own gods. it may be this experience more than any other which explains the immediate evaporation of such a large empire. At the beginning I suggested that this talk might be some kind of prolegomenon to the reconciliation of reason and religion. Hence it is not intended to be normative. And yet inevitably when I come to something like the Aztec cult of sacrifice I call it a barbarization, and when I come to the spectacle of the Mayans courteously welcoming the god of the twenty year period I call it civilized. Such characterizations come instinctively from my concurrence with the thought on which Mr. Doran ended his paper [11] . That is, that the mind most definitely has the power to relieve itself of its apocalyptic syntax. We can become aware of it when it is used or manipulated, when it becomes part of either the conscious or unconscious behavior of others. And we can, whether by an attitude or a rite, celebrate the fact that we live in stability now. In submitting religions to spectral analysis, this last capacity is the wavelength to watch for. {S : Notes (Structuring the Apocalypse)} Notes (Structuring the Apocalypse) 1. Deloria, Vine, God is Red (Grosset &Dunlap, 1973) page 99. quoted from: Eastman, Charles, The Soul of the Indian (Houghton Mifflin, 1911) pages 119-120. 2. See behind, MacGregor, "Psychological Aspects of the Work of lmmanuel Velikovsky", page 47. (Ed.) 3. See ahead, Grinnell, "Catastrophism and Uniformity", page 131. [Ed.] 4. Dr. Velikovsky associates the Universal Deluge with a nova-like outburst of Saturn caused by a close interaction of Saturn with Jupiter. These events will be described in a volume with the title Saturn and the Flood. Dr. Velikovsky has not completed this manuscript. He discusses earlier catastrophes in his Address to this Symposium. See behind, Velikovsky, "Cultural Amnesia". Pages 21 and 22. (Ed.) 5. I have discussed these phrases, and the Pyramid Texts in general, at greater length in "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts", Pensée 3( l): 10-16 (Winter 1973). 6. Pyramid of Unas, Utterance 254, Spells 276-279; my translation. 7. Mark 13: 24-29; King James Version. 8. Revelations 10: 5-6; King James Version. 9. For my discussion of the evidence supporting the identification of Teotihuacan with the original Tula, as well as for the catastrophic features in Mesoamerican civilization in general see "The Mesoamerican Record". Pensée, 4( 4): 3444 (Fall 1974). See particularly the second note at the bottom of page 39. 10. Waters, Frank, The Book of the Hopi, (Viking Press, 1963), pages 204-205. For a discussion of the reliability of this book as a source, see "The Mesoamerican Record", op. cit., page 39. 11. See ahead, Doran, "Living with Velikovsky", page 146. [Ed.] {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 5: } {T SHAKESPEARE AND VELIKOVSKY} {S : Catastrophic Theory and the Springs of Art} RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER FIVE SHAKESPEARE AND VELIKOVSKY Catastrophic Theory and the Springs of Art Irving Wolfe Etudes Anglaises Université de Montreal *[Ed.] Parts of this paper were subsequently published in Kronos: A journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis, (Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J.) see 1( 3): 31-45 (Fall 1975) and 1( 4): 37-54 (Winter 1976). I must begin with several caveats. First, I do not present these findings as a closed and substantiated set of hypotheses. They are suggestions put forth for discussion, not conclusions, but beginnings. Second, they are part deductive, part inductive, as they must be when one is mapping out terra incognita. Third, because I am addressing an audience fairly specialized in the sciences, but less specialized in literature and drama, I feel I can refer to the Velikovsky background briefly, but that I must treat the action of the plays in some detail. Now to my paper. Quite simply, I have come across what appears to me to be astonishing Velikovskian overtones in Shakespeare's plays, which I wish to present to this assembly and then use to draw some tentative conclusions upon narrative art and the nature of man. I have chosen two representative Shakespearian dramas, one a seemingly light comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the other, Antony and Cleopatra, a worldly tragedy of lust and politics. Neither might at first glance appear to have much to do with catastrophism. In this first section, I wish to analyse William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as an example of narrative art whose subconscious bedrock is Velikovskian. On the surface, the play is a typical public comedy, seemingly light, fanciful and gay, intended mainly to amuse. A significant portion of traditional criticism has treated it in just this manner. Beneath a surface however, it is highly serious, like all of Shakespeare's comedies, in the sense that what it wants to say, or what it is about, is as meaningful and profound as the great tragedies. Indeed, some critics have argued that the comedies are more serious, in that their scope of reference is wider, more communal. I propose that there is also a deep level of seriousness in the play, a level which contains intermingled elements of terror and comfort whose true source can only be appreciated in terms of the ideas of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. I am arguing that we respond to the play in different ways, at least one of which is subconscious, and that the full nature of our subconscious response can only be understood if we perceive the catastrophic substructure which underlies the play. At the outset, I want to stress the primitive, ritualistic aspects of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I feel we must see it, to begin with, as a fertility play, a genre whose roots go very far back into our past. Looked at in this way, the play is accessible to any understanding, from the most primitive to the most modern, because it embodies certain archetypal patterns of action which are universal. If we look at man's art as Jung looked at man's dreams, we discover certain archetypes produced by every society in every place and at every time in recorded human history [1] . We must conclude, as Jung did with dreams, that man as a species shows a tendency to produce such archetypes in his art, and we must then wonder why. One of these archetypal patterns in narrative art is the genre of the comic fertility play. In it, we begin with an opening situation which appears to be stable, but contains the seeds of dangerous disruption. There is usually a conflict which has reached an impasse. Then, typically, in Shakespeare, a certain person who functions as a catalyst is dropped into the impasse, and his acts set a chemical reaction in motion. As a result, the oppositions are crystallized and the play is propelled into the second phase. This is a period of turbulence and confusion, of rapidly changing alignments, of a search for correct bonding, of apparent but always comic danger. Things appear to be insoluble, indeed disastrous, when suddenly a new factor is introduced which permits everything to be sorted out in the third phase. Here, everything that must happen to achieve a happy ending does, and everything that had to be prevented, for the same reason, is. I would therefore suggest that Shakespeare's plays may be best understood if they are seen as falling naturally into three parts, or, as George Rylands calls them, movements, one arising from the other in a rather Hegelian sequence. In Shakespeare's comedy, as in all fertility plays, the center of values is always and principally society. Everything occurs for the welfare of the tribe, the group. In primitive terms, the life of the tribe is threatened at the beginning by dangers within it. The tribe, to guarantee its continued fertility, must maintain a harmony with the divine and the natural, which are the major factors affecting physical existence. This means that every member must play his role, and the mating and reproduction, particularly among those at the top, must occur between those clearly chosen to be marriage partners, and under the most auspicious circumstances. All of this, which means the very life and future of the tribe, is threatened by the original situation, where power is in the hands of those no longer able to rule, and the wrong pairs are urged to mate at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances. Of course, things must be altered before any irreparable damage has been caused to the future of the tribe. in the second part of a universal comedy, therefore, the confusions and turbulence take the form of dangers of identity, dangers of insufficient self-knowledge, dangers of irresponsible sex, and, comically, the danger of death. That is to say, all of the things which must be avoided for the welfare of the tribe threaten to happen, and none of the things which must be achieved - the purgation of youthful excess, of immaturity, of uncontrolled sexual response, of a facile tendency to bravado and recklessness and violence - appear likely. There is always a guiding force, however, which steers things in the right direction, and, at the end, when all has worked out well, the period of turbulence is seen as a time of ordeal, of testing and of purgation, by which those who survive doff their childishness and undergo a process of change of maturation, of individuation, if one may borrow the term, whereby they have been made ready to become responsible adult members of their tribe. One might say that, for the young lovers of a Shakespearian comedy, the action of the play is a sort of ritual initiation to adulthood, set in a context of affirmation of tribal harmony with the forces which control and thus guarantee life and fertility. It is not an individual who triumphs; rather, it is tribal death which has been avoided, and tribal life which has been assured. To apply this directly to A Midsummer Night's Dream, we must look briefly at the plot. It is a structure of four levels, or perhaps four boxes, each inside the next, from a group of yokels at the bottom to the world of fairy spirits at the op. It is set in ancient Athens, and the pivotal event about which the action occurs is the forthcoming marriage of its leader, Duke Theseus, to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, with whom he had previously been at war. In fertility terms, Theseus' union with Hippolyta will bring political peace and a continuation of his dynasty. it is thus critically important for the future life of Athens hat the marriage of its young leader occurs under the most auspicious circumstances. The play opens four days before the nuptials. Theseus is impatient to enjoy is bride, but he must wait for the new moon, the right time for new beginnings and fertility, before he can ease his sexual frustration [2] . O , methinks how slow This old moon wanes. She lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager, Long withering out a young man's revenue. 1.1. 3-6. Hippolyta politely but firmly tells him he must wait. Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities. 1.1. 7-11. Her reply is full of unconscious ironies having to do with sexual frustration, with nightly dreams, with Theseus, frustrated, like a bow which is bent and ready to shoot, but not released. We shortly meet two sets of young lovers, whose combined story occupies most of the action of the play. There are two young men, Lysander and Demetrius, and two young women, Hermia and Helena, in a situation of love thwarted by obstacles. It is necessary that these relationships be clear, and so I will set them out in some detail. With regard to the first pair, Lysander and Hermia, he loves her and she loves him, but her father Egeus will not approve of the marriage, wishing his daughter to marry Demetrius instead. As for the second pair, Demetrius and Helena, she loves him but he does not love her, preferring Hermia instead. Thus, there is an obstacle in the case of each pair. This is presented in the following diagram as diagram Egeus, angry at having his authority challenged, hales his daughter Hermia and her lover Lysander before Duke Theseus and demands justice. The Duke tells her she must obey her father and marry Demetrius, or become a celibate priestess, or be executed. When they are left alone, the two lovers decide to flee to some nearby woods and make their way thenceforth to Sparta, where they will be free to marry. They reveal their secret to Helena, thinking her an ally, but she, in an attempt to gain favor, tells it to Demetrius, whereupon he vows to pursue the lovers into the forest to thwart their plan. We thus have four young people fleeing Athens for the forest - Lysander and Hermia wishing to elope, Demetrius the rival wanting to stop them, and Helena wanting to be near Demetrius. At the same time, a group of yokels, preparing a rather inept play in honor of Theseus' forthcoming wedding, also .decide to go to the woods, where they may rehearse secretly and so avoid the throngs of admirers whom, they are certain, would otherwise dog their heels. So ends the first act. By this point we have met all the different levels of mankind in the play, from the yokels at the bottom to the four noble young people to Theseus and Hippolyta. We then move to the woods to meet the highest level of creation, the world of the fairies ruled by Oberon and his queen Titania; and Oberon's attendant spirit, the mischievous bubbling Puck, fills in the rest of the picture. As he explains it, an argument has developed between Oberon and Titania concerning one of Titania's attendants whom Oberon wants as part of his train. As a result there is discord in the fairy sphere. And now they never meet in grove or green, By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen, But they do square, that all their elves for fear Creep into acorn cups and hide them there. 2.1-28-31. This description is replete with romantic and fertility symbols - the sacred grove, the magic green, clear water as the source of life, starlight as the natural environment of true love - but these areas, which should be blessed by a united fairy world so they can transmit their life-enhancing virtues to Athens, are now the setting for wrangling and arguments. As a result, the fairy world, with which Athens should be in harmony, cannot perform its fertility function because Oberon and Titania are not united. When they meet, he greets her rudely, and she replies What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence, I have forsworn his bed and company. 2.1.61-62. We can thus see that the crisis of the male being separated from the female he wants applies throughout the whole world of Athens, human and spiritual. Theseus wanting Hippolyta and being told he must wait, Lysander wanting Hermia and being told by her father that he cannot marry her, Helena wanting Demetrius who rejects her, and now Oberon and Titania not mating as they should - the reiteration at all levels becomes a metaphor which delineates a situation of total infertility which has seized Athens' world the moment before its leader is to wed. All the males are like bows tightly drawn, but with nowhere to shoot. In fertility terms, if Theseus is to marry under such circumstances, both leader and tribe will be cursed. There is the danger of the total annihilation of the life of the tribe. As a result, the country is under a pall. Its communal life appears desolate, for Theseus is forced to command his master of the revels Go, Philostrate, Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments, Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth, Turn melancholy forth to funerals; The pale companion is not for our pomp. 1.1-11-15. In a country like Elizabethan England, which was given to dazzling and elaborate pageantry on state occasions, Shakespeare writes a play in which, four days before a royal marriage, the monarch must plead for youth to be merry, mirth to be awakened, and melancholy to be thrown out as more suitable to funerals. Things are not well in Athens. Titania, in a long speech, explains to Oberon the consequences of their discord. When I read a summary of Dr. Velikovsky's ideas in the May 1972 issue of Pensée [3] , I was struck by the astonishing similarity between it and Titania's speech. I wish to compare them now, to convey the eerie feeling I experienced. It almost seemed as if Shakespeare had had the writings of Dr. Velikovsky at his elbow, or at least a copy of Pensée, when composing the play. Here is Titania's speech And never, since the middle summer's spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, By pavèd fountain, or by rushy brook, Or in the beachèd margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hats disturb'd our sport. 2.1.82-87. That is to say, since the time when the crops begin to grow and thus need sunshine and water, the meetings of Titania and on in appropriate places of fertility such as water fountains, mountain brooks, and the strip of beach which is neither land nor water, where they must dance in magic circles to assure good growing weather, have been disturbed. The result is chaos. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they nave overborne their continents. 2.1.88-92. The winds can bring life, or destruction. Here, where the natural order of which Oberon and Titania are a part has been broken, the result is destructive. The winds have caused great rain clouds to form, which have rained so heavily that there has been widespread flooding. It must be pointed out that in Shakespeare, one of the most horrendous images he can think of to portray chaos is that of water swelling beyond its appointed limits and usurping the domain of the land. As a result, all cultivation - the main basis of primitive life in addition to hunting - has become impossible. The ox hath therfore strech'd his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard; The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock. 2.1.93-97. Planting has been made futile, the young grain needed to sustain life has decomposed before reaching full ripeness - another major Shakespearian image of waste, and no cattle are able to be raised, so scavenger birds - instead of men - eat the carcasses of the dead feed animals. The basis of settled civilized agrarian civilization has been demolished. With this gone, all signs of human order disappear. The nine men's morris is filled up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are indistinguishable. 2.1-98-100. The vestiges of human civilization, as in a long-forgotten archaeological site, are almost obliterated, because people have no time - or inclination - to sport. Neither are they inclined to worship, with further worse results. The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest. Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound. 2.1-101-105. The consequences continue to grow, in a proper Renaissance progression from the particular to the general, until the last image, which is one of universal chaos. And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose; And on old Hiem's thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The chiding autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world by their increase, now knows not which is which. 2.1.106-114. Here we have reached cosmic chaos. Winter follows spring, summer follows winter, and no man knows season or time; and the blame for all this is to be laid squarely at the feet of Titania and Oberon. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissention; We are their parents and original. 2.1.115-117. Discord in the heavens has caused universal disorder on earth. For those not familiar with Pensée's summary, I offer a few extracts [4] . In great convulsions, the seas erupted onto continents. Climates changed suddenly, ice settling over lush vegetation, while green meadows and forests were transformed into deserts. Fleeing from the torrent of meteorites, men abandoned their livestock to the holocaust. Fields of grain which fed great cities perished. Cried Ipuwer, "No fruits, no herbs are found. That has perished which yesterday was seen. The land is left to its weariness like the cutting of flax." In the new age the sun rose in the east, where formerly it set. The quarters of the world were displaced. Seasons no longer came in their proper times. "The winter is come as summer, the months are reversed, and the hours are disordered," reads an Egyptian papyrus. The Chinese Emperor Yahou sent scholars throughout the land to locate north, east, west, and south and draw up a new calendar. This is the situation which must be remedied in the play, for it is the cause of the vast disorder and infertility - symbolized by such patterns as the sexually frustrated males at all levels - which threatens the very life of the tribe. if accord is not achieved in the supernatural world, Athens is cursed. Something must happen - some chain of events - to turn all of this about. At the human level, if the tribe is to continue to function healthily, not only must its leader marry auspiciously, but its best young noble blood must be well-mated too, for these people must be available to aid the ruler in governing the tribe. Hermia must end up marrying Lysander, while Demetrius must be brought to accept marriage with Helena, and both of these marriages must occur within and with the full approval of the society of Athens, if Athens is to reap the maximum benefit which such noble marriages can contribute to its future. Conversely, among the things which must not happen are sexual relations before marriage, either between the young lovers or between Theseus and Hippolyta. In mythological terms, they must be preserved in ritual cleanliness and purity, to be free to share in the rites of social ordination at the end of the play. To Shakespeare, the institution of marriage is always sacred, as compared with promiscuous sex, because it represents the subjugation of sensual individuality to the interests of the group, or maturity triumphing over youthful selfishness. Equally, no violence must occur between Lysander and Demetrius, rival lovers, or they may be killed, wasted without having ripened to play their part in the continuation of the life of the tribe. The yokels too must be preserved to serve the state. Even the successful elopement to Sparta of Lysander and Hermia, without violence, would be a severe loss to Athens, and so this too must not happen. The lovers must be made free to marry each other in Athens. The forest is the testing ground where all of these possibilities, whether for the life of Athens or against it, lie waiting. The second, third, and fourth acts, all set in the forest, are thus a period of growing turbulence, where all the impulses generated in Athens are set one against another. Confusion mounts upon confusion, hatred and disorder are unleashed, but, at the end, after all the tumult and passion, events are sorted out, order is restored, and all ends well. Very briefly, that is the action of the play. Let us now look more closely at the mid le section. When appreciated in performance, the action in the forest seems totally confusing. Things happen with bewildering rapidity, with great humor and imagination, until everything is sorted out, we-know not how. However, when we look at the action in tranquility, a certain pattern emerges. As described by Enid Welsford, it is the pattern of dance [5] . Because it is a sequence of changing partnerships, like a minuet or square dance, it can be efficiently set out as a series of diagrams. In the opening situation, as the reader will recall, Lysander loves Hermia, who loves him, while Helena loves Demetrius, who loves Hermia. This was represented as 1. Diagram That is to say, both young men love Hermia, and neither loves Helena. Then, as we remember, Lysander and Hermia run off to the forest, and Demetrius and Helena follow. When Demetrius and Helena reach the forest, he looking for the fleeing pair, she pursuing him heartbrokenly despite his repeated insults, threats, and rejections, Oberon observes them invisibly and, offended by Demetrius' treatment of the girl, vows ere he do leave this grove, Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love. 2.1.245-246. He then orders Puck to sprinkle a magic juice on Demetrius' eyes, so that he will fall in love with the next woman he sees, presumably Helena. Puck, not realizing there are two Athenians in the forest, comes upon the sleeping figures of Lysander and Hermia and sprinkles the juice on Lysander's eyes. No sooner is this done but Demetrius and Helena come into the clearing and, after some abusive language, Demetrius abandons Helena. She stumbles over the sleeping Lysander, who, awakening with the juice on his eyes, sees her and naturally falls in love with her and pursues her offstage, abandoning Hermia, who awakes and finds herself the one who is now alone. The second pattern, therefore, is 2. Diagram Each of the boys now loves the girl who does not love him. The next exchange occurs when Oberon realizes Puck's mistake, as Demetrius pleads his love to the bewildered Hermia, who cannot understand why her beloved Lysander has left her, and fears Demetrius has killed him. Oberon charms Demetrius asleep and puts the juice on his eyes, ordering Puck to bring Helena where Demetrius can awaken and fall in love with her. in a moment, Puck has brought Helena back, with Lysander protesting his love for her, and Demetrius is duly awakened by their arguing, whereupon he sees Helena and bursts out in rhapsodic love poetry for her. Thus the situation now is 3. Diagram At the beginning, both young men had been in love with Hermia, and no one had loved Helena, where now both are in love with Helena, and neither with Hermia. The play seems to be weighing all the different possibilities. The two men, quite naturally, strut like rams at mating time, hurling threats at each other concerning the possession of the ewe Helena, and the situation is further aggravated by the arrival of Hermia. Helena, with the two men at her feet, cannot believe what has happened, and accuses the others of being in a conspiracy to mock her. Soon the two girls are tearing at each other's hair and the men run off to fight in another part of the woods. Puck is enormously amused by it all, but Oberon is concerned to set it all right. He orders Puck to keep the men apart by magic and tire them out until they fall asleep. He then gives Puck another magic juice, an antidote to remove the first from Lysander's eyes, so he will love Hermia once more. Puck accomplishes his task swiftly and efficiently. One by one, staggering with exhaustion, each of the four young lovers is led by the disguised Puck back to the clearing, where each simply collapses and goes to sleep on the ground, unaware of the presence of the others. When they are all safely deposited asleep in the same clearing, Puck amends his first error by applying the antidote to Lysander's eyes, and the night of confusion comes to an end. And the country proverb known, That every man should take his own, In your waking shall be shown. Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill; The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well. 3.2.458-463. Shakespeare gives Puck generic and somewhat mocking terminology to make us recognize that what has just occurred is not a private event pertaining only to these four individual humans, but a universal sequence - Jack shall have Jill - relevant to all of mankind. And so the final pattern in the square-dance sequence, after all the confusing do-si-do's and bow-to-your-partner's, is 4. Diagram The confusion is over, and now the lovers and yokels - all the humans in the forest - May all to Athens back again repair, And think no more of this night's accidents But as the fierce vexation of a dream. 4.1.70-72. Things will at last come to the desired relationship. When the lovers awake, all will indeed be well. Jack shall have Jill. In spatial terms, there has been a movement from a quadrangle to variations on a triangle, and then back to a quadrangle again. Figure 4, the quadrangle, existed before the play began, and will presumably exist after the play ends, but Figures 1, 2 and 3 are triangles, with the fourth element separated in each case. They represent the main action in the forest, but then, after Oberon's changes have been affected The fourth act finds the quadrangle in its proper state, each man attached to the right woman, restoring a situation which predates the beginning of the play [6] . The change from a grouping of three to a grouping of four is particularly satisfying because it includes the missing element for the first time in an integrated relationship. In terms of Jungian psychology, it is an archetypal move to fullness or wholeness, a reconciliation, and, in this case, a restoration of a beneficent previous order. This holds true in all ways, for, in practical terms, the result is good for all the parts of the whole. Thus, the restoration of the proper love relationships also restores the friendships of all four. even Lysander and Demetrius, who were ready to fight to the death, are friends again at the end of the play [7] . That is to say, the scheme or structure in this play is so set up that the interrelationship of the whole - from the yokels to Oberon and beyond to all creation - depends upon the internal relationships within the constituent .parts, in which one element in each must always dominate over the others, and yet all form part of an interdependent system. in poetic terms, this can be a description of the cosmos. The remaining obstacle to Athens' happiness is, of course, the discord in the heavens. To summarize this plot level very briefly, Oberon had put the same magic juice on Titania's eyelids while she slept, and Puck, by magic, had given one of the yokels an ass' head and then led him to awaken Titania, so that she fell in love with an ass, a human ass. She proceeded to decorate him with garlands and have her fairies sing to him, and have him led to her bower. Oberon, pitying her at last, released her from the spell by applying the antidote to her as she slept, as Puck had done to Lysander. Now she awakes and greets Oberon with joy, and the fairy world is reunited as Oberon proclaims (Music) Sound, music. Come, my queen, take hands with me. And rock the ground where on these sleepers be. [Dance] Now thou and I are new in amity, And will tomorrow midnight solemnly Dance in Duke Theseus' house triumphantly, And bless it to all fair prosperity. There shall the pairs of faithful lovers be Wedded, with Theseus, all in jollity. 4.1-88-95. We can now see, in very general terms, what has happened in the forest. As the diagrams illustrate, it has been a series of changing relationships, as if different combinations were tested, and rejected, until the correct relationship was at last achieved, whereupon the changes were ended and the final relationship fixed. In different terms, all of the dangerous possibilities outlined above were avoided, and all of the desired events have occurred. Shakespeare had sent into the forest a group of bumbling yokels, four angry, upset, even desperate young lovers, and a quarrelling King and Queen of the Fairies. It was a potentially dangerous mixture, for the individuals themselves but more particularly for the future welfare of Athens, and Shakespeare had stirred his ingredients vigorously, but nothing undesirable had happened - no uncontrolled sex' no physical violence, no permanent rifts between lovers, no misalliances. The Voyage Perilous through the Forest of Passion has terminated triumphantly. All have passed the test and are ready for ordination. Very few critics have appreciated the latent, subtly-suggested dangers lurking behind the comic resolution in the play. To most, the play is gossamer; to some, it can hardly bear the defilement of close analysis; to only two or three it is sober. Modern productions, overstressing the nondemonic, have seriously misrepresented the fairies as gauzy, fluttery creatures with no more mystery or authority than butterflies. Something is lost by this. Oberon is not harmless: he is a prince from the furthest steep of India, shadowy and exotic. Titania is a powerful force - "The summer still doth tend upon my state" - and Bottom is virtually her prisoner. The marital disturbances of these beings affect the weather and the natural cycles and result in floods, droughts, and famines. Their benevolent presence in this play serves to emphasize the comic context only if they are recognized as potentially dangerous [8] . Equally few have appreciated the vastness of the context implied by the surface action of the play. The most effective and memorable pictures in the play are not the glimpses of single figures and activities described above. They are the larger representations, full landscapes with a remarkable sense of spaciousness and distance . . . Throughout the night in the woods that follows, confined and hectic as it may be, we get glimpses of these magnificent views and distances ... As daylight returns to the play, the panoramas regain full splendor ... The function of these panoramas is not difficult to discern ... Only such comprehensive vantage points would give us this sense of surveying all of nature in order to discover man's unique position in it [9] . Another critic unwittingly uses catastrophic language to defend the poetic richness of the panoramic descriptions, saying they are ... calculated to make the audience respond with wonder to the effortless reach of the imagination which brings the stars madly shooting from their spheres [10] . Within the panorama, nature is presented in two ways, as a force of metamorphosis, or change, and as an inscrutable, uncontrollable power. As one critic observes of A Midsummer Night's Dream ... the whole of nature is seen to be in movement. Everything is changing [11] . The impression created by the changes is that nature is unfathomable. Those Shakespeare plays that specifically treat of nature more precisely, the nature of nature ... all posit a universe which has neither order nor discernible limits [12] . with the result that the action ... suggests that our knowledge of the world is less reliable than it seems [13] . Although man cannot understand or affect the forces of nature which control his societal existence, these forces are always pictured as benevolent in comic drama. To one critic, the pattern is society to wilderness to an improved society, while to another, schematizing the morality play, it is fall from grace to temporary prosperity of evil to divine reconciliation [14] . In the most universal terms, it has been a trip to the brink of chaos, but no further. The life and stability of Athens, and thus by analogy of human civilization, of existence itself, has been threatened, but all dangers have been overcome. The correct alignments and bondings have occurred, and a night of confusion has given way to a morning of order and fertility. In Velikovskian catastrophic terms, we have seen the brink of catastrophe, but have been brought safely back. There are other catastrophic, or at least celestial, overtones. For example, the whole play's action occurs during the crucial part of a lunar fertility cycle. It begins when the moon is on the wane, which is a period of danger and error in folklore, and so every impulse seeking to run its course during this period must be held in check, must be delayed until a time of better beginnings. The action then moves through a span of three or four nights of darkness and confusion, finally reaching the moment of the new moon. This is the correct time for beginnings, for impregnation and fertility, and that is precisely when all the discord in the play has been reconciled, with nothing irreparable having been previously set in motion. Thus, like the feminine moon, or the earth emerging from a catastrophe, the whole tribe or society has been cleansed and refreshed, and is in a sense reborn. Secondly, the particular holidays which form the context of the play are originally pagan and astral. The first is May Day, and, more particularly, Maying, or bringing home the May. No literacy was required for an audience to understand that the "rite of May" was both an individual and a communal means of celebrating the arrival of spring and reestablishing the human affinity with the natural cycles [15] . The bringing home of May acted out an experience of the relationship between vitality in people and nature. The poets have merely to describe May Day to develop a metaphor relating man and nature [16] . The other holiday is Midsummer Eve, the longest day and the shortest night of the year. Midsummer Eve, associated with the summer solstice, is one of the oldest and most widely celebrated holidays on record. Originally intended as homage to the sun at the height of his powers, it had become by Shakespeare's time a night of general merriment with overtones of magic. Its customary features included the building of bonfires and the carrying of torches [17] . In addition, J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough contains a section entitled 'The Solar Theory of Fire Festivals' [18] . In sum, the mythological and folkloric context is suffused with the presence of the classical moon - Phoebe or the triple deity Hecate Diana Proserpina - acting at a time containing the double parameters of spring rebirth and solstice celebration. We need only add that, in Dr. Velikovsky's view, the joy of the summer solstice is a ritual born out of fear of celestial aberration [19] . Thirdly, there are what appear to be a cluster of catastrophic memories concentrated in Act 3, Scene 2, the largest and most important scene in the play, where, as I have described above, a series of oscillating relationships is presented, growing more and more intense, until all the possible variations have been experienced and the right one is achieved and fixed. I feel that the events in this scene, and the context in which they are set by Shakespeare, exhibit strong catastrophic overtones whose outlines I shall now try to set forth. As we recall, the original pairings were Lysander-Hermia and Demetrius-Helena. We turn now to the point where, after Puck has placed the love juice on the wrong lover's eyes, Hermia is distressed to find Lysander gone and Demetrius in his place, pleading love, and she cannot understand the desertion of the former nor accept the affection of the latter. We shall now look at the rest of the scene through the optic of catastrophic speculation, which will involve an attempt to discern or reconstruct possible celestial events behind the actions of the characters, which must begin with an attempt to establish precise celestial roles for those characters. When we come to assign specific celestial names to the major characters in the play, we must proceed with caution for several reasons. First, we cannot determine for certain whether it may be the events of the first set of Velikovskian catastrophes, circa -1475, which lie behind the scene, or the events of the second period, from -776 to -686, or a general collective memory of both cataclysms, and others. if Velikovsky is correct - and he insists that there were catastrophes previous to the two he attempts to reconstruct then all such sources potentially are available to the artist's mind. Second, we do not really know how closely we ought to look for specific parallels, rather than general ones. That is to say, should we try to tie the action to catastrophic events as such, which is revolutionary enough in itself, or should we go even further, and link it to allegedly specific events? Can we expect that an artist, at least 2200 years after the fact, should be able to mirror precise occurrences, no matter how overwhelming those occurrences may have been? Third, before arguing subconscious inherited racial memory as the basis for the features of this play, we must take into account all possible conscious influences upon Shakespeare, particularly the works of Ovid and the writings of classical historians, from whom he might have derived the sort of cataclysmic worldwide images which we found in Titania's speech. On this basis, to make a long story short, I have concluded that the action of this scene may be both a surprisingly accurate recollection of precise celestial events as described by Dr. Velikovsky, and, at the same time, an artistically modified equivalent to those events. I might add that, if the memories of the original cataclysms were deeply burned into the racial memory of mankind, as Dr. Velikovsky argues, this is just what one would expect. I shall deal with the overt parallels now, and postpone a discussion of the covert relations for the conclusion of this paper. I suggest that one set of suitable equivalences may be Earth - Hermia Moon - Lysander Mars - Helena Venus - Demetrius Sun - Theseus Jupiter - Oberon - Zeus. We note immediately a reversal of the usual genders - the Moon is a male, Mars is a female, and Venus is a male. This is not entirely unknown in Greek mythology, where certain planets are associated with both masculine and feminine heroes, nor, I suggest, should it be unexpected in the sublimating hiding-process of art. As I will try to explain in the conclusion of this paper, the creative mind must not let itself, nor the minds which its art will affect, know consciously what it is doing, and a change in gender is a fine subterfuge. Applying these equivalences, we can see how the action can mirror celestial events, and we begin by noting individual cosmic images. Hermia observes that Lysander is as true to her as the sun unto the day, 50-51. He is then described as having been driven forcibly away while Hermia was sleeping, 51-52. This may mean at night, or in the darkness of thick clouds which so obscure the Sun that day is like night, as if the Sun has abandoned the Earth at a time - day - when it should be true to Earth. This is followed by a puzzling solar image, 47-50, of the Earth being bored and the Moon plunging through to the other side and rivaling the Sun at noon, when it should be at the opposite pole. She then calls Demetrius a murderer of the Sun, 56, and describes him as appearing dead, or pale, and grim, or deadly, 57. That is to say, the rival in the sky who has driven off or killed the Sun is pale, because obscured by dark clouds, and grim because it causes destruction, which may poetically suggest the action of Velikovsky's Comet Venus. Yet Demetrius replies that he too has been wounded, 59, pierced by Hermia's cruelty, and then tells her that she herself looks as bright as Venus in the sky, 60-61. Using these associations suggested by the words of the play, we can then derive more Velikovskian parallels. Hermia begs for Lysander back, and Demetrius calls himself a hunter who has killed Lysander and will let his dogs eat him. Hermia cries Has thou slain him, then? Henceforth be never number'd among men. 66-67. or considered a member of a stable society, whether of men in a tribe, or, by extension, of planets in a solar system. She accuses Demetrius the Comet of cowardice, saying he could never dare approach Lysander when Lysander was awake, 69-70, meaning, in primitive terms, during the brightness of day, when the shining Sun is lord of the skies and thus drives off all enemies. in primitive terms, if the sky were to become dark during the day, it would be as if the Sun's power as lord of the heavens had decreased, and only then could an enemy - a pale but deadly comet - rival or displace the Sun [20] . And in the very next image Demetrius the Comet, the rival Sun, is described as a Serpent, 72-73. It would appear that, with Shakespeare's imagination actively engaged, a series of primordial and apparently catastrophic memories emerges in one flood of connected imagery. Then Hermia, the Earth, parts from the Comet, refusing to accept it as a substitute, 80, and the Comet does not follow. Helena, meanwhile, is described as sick, weak and pale, but then Oberon anoints Demetrius with the magic juice, saying of Helena When his love he doth espy, Let her shine as gloriously As the Venus of the sky. 105-107. If Oberon is Zeus-Jupiter, then perhaps the application of the love juice represents an electrical planetary interchange which begins a new phase in the celestial events. Ralph Juergens, one of the editors of Pensée, has argued that the changes and movements which the Velikovsky scenarios require do not refute conventional theories of celestial dynamics, but could have been accomplished by the action of celestial forces, particularly the clash of magnetospheres and electrostatic attraction and repulsion [21] . Velikovsky refers to such events in Worlds in Collision, where he discusses the transformation of Phaethon into the Morning Star. This transformation is related by Hyginus in his Astronomy, where he tells how Phaethon, that caused the conflagration of the world, was struck, by a thunderbolt of Jupiter and was placed by the sun among the stars (planets). [22] Helena duly appears in the clearing, shining indeed like Venus, and Demetrius awakens and sees her, and in an instant shifts his attention to her, or becomes attracted to her. Thus, she now exerts a strong attraction for both Lysander and Demetrius, an attraction powerful enough to draw Lysander from his accustomed orbit around Hermia, 185. Helena is now described as being unusually bright, 187-188, brighter than any other object in the darkened sky. When both men appear attracted to her, Helena complains that she and Hermia had once been very close, 202-214, almost twins, and now Hermia has joined with the men to tear their former closeness apart, 215. What appears to be suggested here - and I proffer this with the greatest trepidation -is that Mars may once have been a sort of sister planet to Earth, perhaps before it was thrown out of the circle, as Dr. Velikovsky has said tantalizingly but enigmatically [23] . In any case, Lysander and Demetrius both follow after the sister planet, calling her a celestial goddess, 226-227, and neglecting Hermia-Earth. Helena-Mars asks to be released from her attachment to Demetrius-Venus, 314-316, and then the two girls clash, and now it is Helena who is accused of having stolen Lysander from Hermia, at night, and Hermia is described as being small and hot when angry, 323-325. In the last stage of this turbulence, Puck and Oberon take control, as curative night forces who do not fear the light, 388. In a period of intense darkness, fog and noise, they keep Lysander and Demetrius apart, and do the same for the girls, until they can settle all the young lovers - or Earth, Moon, Mars and Venus - into a stable relationship, effecting these changes through the love juice and its antidote, or differently-charged Jovian thunderbolts. They sort things out for the good of Athens, and so the night, which is said to have been difficult, draws to a happy end. The pattern has been a seemingly orderly but actually dangerous situation at day's end, changing to confusion and threat Chaos in the night, but moving finally to salvation and then to seemingly total Chaos by light. The pattern is substantially Velikovskian, and is also quintessential to most creative art, myth, folklore, and religion. In Jungian terms, Oberon and Puck, as different aspects of the restorative agency, may be Hare and Trickster, indicating that the restorative process is beneficent in the total view, although troublesome at certain points. To summarize, we are presented in this scene with a gamut of changes based on attraction and repulsion, set in a context of celestial images. In a period of nocturnal brilliance and oscillating movement, where individual entities suddenly become as blazing as the brightest planet, the Sun disappears, apparently killed and replaced by a pale and deadly comet-like rival, also called a serpent, who does not deserve to be numbered among the planets. This causes temporary misalliances - the Comet pursues Earth, but then is repelled, after which another planet becomes bright and attracts both Comet and Sun. Then there is a change to darkness, fog, vast noise and the disappearance of guiding light, and in this context the forces of order arrive at last, realign the attractions, and the difficult dark period is over. In the play, because it is not a dream, the variations have been carefully, geometrically structured because they must fulfill a conscious dramatic function, but, if one also looks at them as possible products of a suppressed primordial memory, then the pattern of shifting electrical electrically-charged and luminously- varying combinations may reflect celestial catastrophic events of the past being safely realized in the sublimation of art. It is only after this final and apparently desirable order has been established that the night, or extended cloudy darkness, comes to an end when the Sun-Theseus appears. The Sun- Theseus had left the play as soon as Demetrius-Venus had become attracted to Hermia-Earth, when night and conflict as possible total destruction had descended upon the forest. The second, third and fourth acts, in which all the varying alignments are worked out, take place in darkness. Then, when order has been restored in heaven and on earth, the Sun- Theseus reappears to mark a new day, a return of day, a new order. This constitutes the main action of the middle and largest portion of the play, and the two other stories developing in the night forest - the argument between Oberon and Titania, and the adventures of Bottom - are simultaneously brought to a conclusion at this point as well. To leap ahead for a moment, the third and final section of the play culminates in the solemnization of this new order, and this is performed by Oberon-Zeus- Jupiter, who no longer shoots thunderbolts at warring planets, but gives his blessing to earthly stability and concord. The mind of man, stirred to uneasiness by the recalling in sublimated artistic form of terrible catastrophic memories, is calmed by this final picture, which the controlling artist provides, of cosmic stability approved by Jupiter, the very source of such stability - or disorder. Before this point is reached, however, the bulk of the third section consists of the yokels' playlet and a general tying up of loose ends. it appears to contribute very little to the development of the action and has been considered by some critics to be a weak appendage, a simple attempt by Shakespeare to end on a purely comic note, to "leave 'em laughing." I contend that it is very much more, for in it Shakespeare proceeds to make clear the larger meanings in his play by throwing questions at us which we ourselves must weigh and find answers for, so that we are provoked, through our own efforts, to perceive and to grasp what Shakespeare is getting at. There are very few authorial comments earlier in the play, few direct references to overall meaning, but, here in the third part, after the main action has been in effect virtually completed, Shakespeare begins to pile hint upon hint, signal upon signal, leading us to reflect upon what has happened and to grasp its meaning. This process begins as soon as the night has ended and the fairies have departed, when Theseus, Hippolyta and the court go hunting in the forest and come across the four lovers asleep in the clearing. Theseus awakens them and asks the young men I know you two are rival enemies; How comes this gentle concord in the world, That hatred is so far from jealousy, To sleep by hate, and fear no enmity? 4.1.145-148. The question is also directed at us, of course. The lovers, totally confused by the past night's events, can offer no satisfactory answer, but their ineffectual gropings after the truth prod our awareness. Demetrius says of his conversion But, my good ford, I wot not by what power - But by some power it is - my love to Hermia, Melted as the snow, seems to me now As the rememberance of some idle gaud Which in my childhood I did dote upon; And all the faith, the virtue of my heart, The object and the pleasure of mine eye, is only Helena. 4.1.167-174. This is what had to happen if Demetrius and Helena were to survive happily and contribute to the welfare of the state, and we have seen how it has occurred. The process continues after the royal party leaves the stage and only Bottom remains, sound asleep. In a moment he awakens, minus his ass'head, ready to continue the rehearsal which Puck had interrupted the night before, but he sees that it is morning and that he is alone, and then he too, like the lovers immediately before him, begins to wonder about what had happened. I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. 4.1.207-210. But we have not slept. We have seen what happened. For us it is no dream, and therefore we are being prodded, as we were in the immediately preceding episode with the lovers, to reject Bottom's attitude, to think about the dream ourselves, or else we too are but an ass. We must expound it, but Somewhat more successfully than Bottom. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called "Bottom's Dream", because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. 4.1.214-221. If we are to perceive what Shakespeare is really getting at here, we must respond to the Biblical allusion to Corinthians in this passage, as a good part of Shakespeare's audience could have been counted on to do. Shakespeare is setting out to defend a play when plays were attacked as mere fancy, mere entertainment, and so he appeals to a higher level of truth. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to naught: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. We are then told how we may perceive this wisdom. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. 1 Corinthians, 2, 4-15. This hidden wisdom is available to spiritual man, to he who is attuned to deep things. Natural man, like Bottom, can never know such truth, for his dreams have no bottom, and so to him they are foolishness. With consummate elegance, Shakespeare leaves it to us to choose what we will be as we watch the last act - natural man or spiritual man. What follows - the play presented by the yokels to celebrate Theseus' wedding - has been considered by most critics a bit of lightweight burlesque spoofing the inadequacies of inferior actors and theatrical traditions. It is this, undeniably, but it is much more, and there are several major clues to its real significance. First of all, we must notice the similarity between what happens in Bottom's playlet and what happens in the play itself. Many critics have pointed out that the Pyramus-Thisbe story bears some similarities to the story of Romeo and Juliet. Whether this be true or not, however, is hardly as important as the relation between Plyramus-Thisbe and the story of the four lovers in the same play, which very few critics have noticed. Pyramus and Thisbe are in love, like Lysander and Hermia, and, like them, parental obstacles prevent their marriage. Like them, Pyramus and Thisbe flee into a forest and a sequence of confusions is set in motion; but, unlike the lovers, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe does not end happily. Pyramus, seeing Thisbe's shawl which the lion had torn, assumes she is dead and kills himself in grief, whereupon Thisbe returns, sees the dead Pyramus and kills herself. Thus, the ending is precisely opposite to the story of the lovers, and the reason for it is precisely the absence of Oberon and Puck. No supervisory force with extrahuman power intervenes. The final meaning of the whole play will be derived in part from the juxtaposition of these two stories. Second, we must situate this playlet in its proper context. It occurs after the wedding, but before the first physical consummation of the marriage bond. Theseus asks Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have, To wear away this long age of three hours Between our after-supper and bedtime? Where is our usual manager of mirth? What revels are in hand? Is there no play To ease the anguish of a torturing hour? 5.1.32-37. In other words, the yokels' playlet which fills the gap here between Theseus' frustration and the approved time of sexual release, is like the sequence in the forest which filled the gap between Theseus' original frustration, as illustrated in his first lines in the play, and the time of his wedding. There is thus a structural parallel established between the whole forest episode and the playlet. That is not the only similarity. Indeed, the connections between the two are many, and strong. if we are to appreciate the full importance of the playlet, we must see it in the following relationship - we must approach Shakespeare's play as Theseus' court approaches the yokels' playlet. That is Audience : play Court : playlet. In such a framework, a third set of clues can be perceived - the peripheral comments upon the play made by the amused members of the court. For instance, when Theseus is told A play there is, my lord, some ten words long, Which is as brief as I have known a play; But by ten words, my lord, it is too long, Which makes it tedious; for in all the play There is not one word apt, not one player fitted 5.1.1-65. he replies I will hear that play; For never anything can be amiss When simpleness and duty tender it. 5.1.61-83. If we imagine that Shakespeare's play, like the playlet, is being presented before a noble audience, perhaps even at a noble wedding [24] , we can see that this speech is a clue and an apology, a plea for understanding and tolerance, and that is how we must react. A few moments earlier, in his speech on poets, lovers and madmen, Theseus had been as natural as Bottom, denying the validity of poetic insight, but in a trice he becomes Shakespeare's spiritual spokesman, telling us how we may perceive the truth embedded in the playlet. The point is made again moments later when Hippolyta, feeling sorry for the inability of the yokels and their unavoidable scorn before the whole court, says to Theseus I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged, And duty in his service perishing. 5.1.85-86. to which Theseus replies Our sport shall be to take what they mistake; And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect Takes it in might, not merit. 5.1.90-92. That is to say, the fun for Theseus will not lie in the ridiculousness of the playlet, but in taking what they mistake, in perceiving the sensible meaning behind the ludicrous form, for noble respect - royal understanding -judges the intention of the effort, even if the execution or merit of it is clumsy - and so must we, we are being told, even if we find Mr. Shakespeare's play clumsy. Even utter dumbness must be eloquence to the perceptive audience, as Theseus found when faced with a welcomer so tongue-tied with fright he could hardly speak a word. Trust me, sweet, Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome, And in the modesty of fearful duty I read as much as from the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity In least speak most to my capacity. 5.1.99-105. The playlet itself, which occupies most of the fifth act, is excruciatingly funny, but Shakespeare's hints tell us there is some method behind this apparent madness. His speech was like a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered. 5.1-125-126. It is up to Theseus' court - and, by extension, to us - to perceive the chain beneath the tangle. As the action continues, even the sympathetic Hippolyta is driven to exclaim This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard to which Theseus replies, in a clear authorial signal The best in this kind are but shadows; and in the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. 5.1.211-213. That is to say, all plays are not real, all acting is feigning, a mirror or shadow of real life, and thus the worst production can be as usefully instructive as the best one, if the spectator fleshes out the production's weaknesses with his own imaginative understanding. When the playlet draws to an end, leaving the noble audience weak with laughter, Theseus does not permit an epilogue, for The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. 5.1.365-366. The whole court leaves, with the three newly-married couples heading for their wedding- night beds. The play had begun in universal sexual frustration, but it ends in universal sexual fertility, properly controlled within the social bonds of marriage so as to furnish the most lasting happiness both for the individuals and for the tribe. Nothing remains but the blessing of the fairies, and the marriage of the leader of the tribe, complemented by the marriages of those who must help him rule, will have occurred under all the necessary auspicious conditions. Puck heralds the entrance of Oberon, Titania and their combined train, and the blessing is performed in a magic ritual of words, music and dance. The saga of Pyramus and Thisbe, however funny, was tragic. The tale of the lovers and their King is salvation and rebirth. So the play itself ends, with everyone gone but Puck, who delivers Shakespeare's epilogue. Our response to it must color our response to the whole play. it has a rather humble tone, a very apologetic manner, and the act of making amends for any offence the play may have caused is referred to three times outright, but I suggest that the true feeling communicated by this speech is not apology, but authorial suggestion. Here are the important lines. If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended: That you have but slumb'red here, While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend. 5.1.425-432. If we take these words at their surface value, Puck is saying that anyone who may have been offended by the play need only consider it a weak and idle dream, and dismiss it as such. What he implies, if we have responded to the previous authorial hints, is precisely the opposite. That is to say, if one has not understood the play, then, like the humans in the forest, they can dismiss the play's events And think no more of this night's accidents But as the fierce vexation of a dream. If, however, one has been intrigued rather than offended, then one's reaction must be totally different. The play, the shadows, are then seen not as idle dreams, but as mirroring that which is truly real, like Plato's cave, and the wise spectator has, not slumb'red and seen visions, but has been awakened and seen symbols of universal truth, themes which are not weak, idle and unyielding of important ideas, but full of significance. And so the final choice is left by Shakespeare to us - we can react like Bottom, like human asses, failing to perceive the order behind the disorder, the chain behind the tangle, or we can be like Theseus, picking meaning out of jumble, taking what the action mis-took, seeing the grand pattern at work behind the play's seemingly chaotic events, a pattern which, when understood, communicates the author's vision of the meaning of life. I have stressed the didactic nature of the third section because I wish to make clear what I believe is the vision of life embodied in the total action. It is a vision in which, to those caught up in the course of the events, there seems to be little cause for or purpose in what is happening. To those outside the events, like Theseus and his court watching the yokels' playlet, or we, the audience, watching Theseus in Shakespeare's play, there is a meaning, a purpose. The next step in this progression, obviously, is that God, watching us and our lives, sees the meaning of what happens to us, even if we sometimes do not. It is thus Shakespeare's intention in this play to explain the ways of God to man. Shakespeare is saying that the world, life itself, may appear to be veering to catastrophic destruction from time to time, but that a supernatural force - in this case represented by the omniscient and omnipotent Oberon - will intervene when necessary and sort things out for the welfare of the state, which always comes first, and sometimes for the good of the individual, who always comes second, or last. This is Shakespeare's comic vision, as it is the vision of most great and enduring comedy. Such a play moves from an opening situation fraught with danger, to a middle section of turbulence, fear, disorder and confusion, to a final stasis of order, happiness and fertility. There is the feeling of a new birth to a new and vastly better world, where all the dangers existent at the beginning have been eliminated, where all the changes necessary for a happy future have occurred, where, barring new difficulties, those who survive the ordeal of the middle section and manifest the desirable qualities are ordained into the new order of things at the end. Total societal chaos, which seemed a clear possibility at one point, has been averted, perhaps forever, through a process of reintegration into a harmonious relationship with the supernatural forces which determine the life and future of all tribes. In the last section of this paper, I shall develop more fully the consequences of this general action in relation to Dr. Velikovsky's theories on cultural amnesia and to my own hypotheses on the nature of creative art. For the moment, let it rest at this - what happens in A Midsummer Night's Dream, transposed without much difficulty into geophysical and astrophysical terms, bears a satisfying resemblance in form and meaning to the cosmological dramas reconstructed by Dr. Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision. I turn now to Antony and Cleopatra, a play saturated with catastrophic images and themes. First, Antony is consistently associated with Hercules and identified with Mars, as Cleopatra is with Venus and Isis. Their love, therefore, and the perturbation which it causes, is portrayed as an attraction between heavenly bodies which threatens the earth. Antony glows like plated Mars, 1.1.4, he is Herculean, 1.3.84, his faults shine like stars in the sky, 1.4.12, he is The demi-Atlas of this earth, 1.5.23, and when he utters sound, he can speak as loud as Mars, 2.2.6. Cleopatra, even when she suspects his fidelity, never questions his greatness. Charmian, Though he be painted one way like a gorgon, The other way's a Mars [25] . 2.5.115-117. He is a giant, a colossus who with my sword Quartered the world and o'er green Neptune's back With ships made cities 4.14.57-59. and when he loses his military prowess, it is believed that Hercules' power has left him, 4.3.15-16. Cleopatra is both Isis and Venus. The love between her and Antony is described as an attraction between Venus and Mars, 1.5.18, she is given to actually dressing as Isis, 3.6.16-19, and, at her death, where she again costumes herself for the role she will assume, she is addressed specifically as Venus, 5.2.308, the suggestion that carries through her death and colors the final memory we have of her. Thus, both of the lovers are presented in cosmic and significantly Velikovskian roles. Second, the power contest between Antony and Octavius is likewise given worldwide terms. it is not a local political struggle between petty rivals for a petty piece of land, but a battle for the whole of the civilized world, for the territory of man. Antony is the greatest soldier in the world, 1.3.38, a grand sea, 3.2.10, and in his face the worship of the whole world lies, 4.14.86. Octavius is The universal landlord, 3.13.72, and the whole world listens to his all-obeying breath, 3.13.77. Together they are The senators alone of this great world, Chief factors for the gods. 2.6.9-10. Thus, because Octavius is given a cosmic or at least worldwide dimension, the mythical magnitude of the love affair is matched by that of the political conflict. The consequences for Earth acquire the same sign if significance, ' and indeed a greater one. In Old Testament terms, Egypt is the locale of the Exodus, and overtones of this event are recalled for us in Cleopatra's exclamation Melt Egypt into Nile, and kindly creatures Turn all to serpents! 2.5.78-79. This is reinforced at the Battle of Actium, where Scarus, Antony's lieutenant, compares Antony's defeat to the tokened pestilence, Where death is sure. The image carries through in Shakespeare's creating mind, for Scarus then Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt Whom leprosy o'ertake ! 3.10.9-11. In three lines of dialogue, there is a conjunction in Shakespeare's mind of pestilence, death, Egypt and leprosy. Yet, while the defeat of Antony may have overtones of a divine Old Testament holocaust, its consequence, the victory of Octavius, is cast in a New Testament mould. To quote from one critic: Octavius - Caesar as he is always called in Antony and Cleopatra - was to become Augustus, perhaps the greatest of Roman emperors, creator of the Pax Romana that closed the long period of unrest, revolution, and war, with the time of peace in which Christ was to be born. Thus, in the war with Antony, when Antony's allies have deserted and sympathy for him is at its strongest, Caesar redresses the balance by a brief but significant reminder of his future role in history: The Time of universal peace is near. Prove this a prosp'rous Clay, the three'nooked world Shall bear the olive freely [26] . Thus, the political story acquires a vast religious dimension - it clears the way, prepares the ground, for a new life, for Christ. The turbulence in this tragedy leads to a welcome, beneficent stasis, a new situation much better and safer than the old one, and it is the same process which we discovered in the comedy. We have thus established that the lovers, who cause so much damage to the Roman empire, are portrayed as Mars and Venus in dangerous conjunction; that Octavius, Antony's antagonist, is also given cosmic stature; that the defeat of Antony is Biblical in character, and that the whole process of the play is a movement from danger to conflict to order. if we now take the step of transposing the action into possible astronomical or catastrophic terms, as we had ventured earlier with the comedy, we can see that Antony and Cleopatra are presented as heavenly bodies, specifically Mars and Venus, who have abandoned their roles, or left their accustomed orbits, to pose a vast danger to the Roman Empire, or Earth. They are then opposed and defeated by Octavius, who may be the Sun. When they are dead, their names and memories can be safely elevated to myth, just as Dr. Velikovsky tells us that the actual planets Mars and Venus, once so prominent in the skies and so threatening, are now safely distant, in fixed orbits, presenting no living danger to the Earth, and so they too can be safely venerated. If one has read Velikovsky, the general action in Antony and Cleopatra is clearly catastrophic, and it is on this basis that I wish to analyze the corresponding celestial and catastrophic imagery which Shakespeare has used to characterize the lovers at every important stage of their story's development. Once they are in love, Antony's proximity or distance directly affects Cleopatra's brilliance, 1.1.9-10. Their attraction takes them beyond all established bounds to find out new heaven, new earth, 1.1.17. When Antony renounces Rome for Egypt his words are made to unknowingly prefigure the worldwide destruction this will cause. Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall ! 1.1.33-34. To him, Kingdoms are clay, 1.1.35, or ground covered by floods, and of Cleopatra's passions, it is said sarcastically but with unknowing truth We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report. 1.2.149-152. When trouble brews at this level whose quality, going on, The sides o' th'world may danger 1.2. 194. it is immediately associated with a serpent, 1.2.195-196, a quintessential primitive symbol of celestial disturbance, as Dr. Velikovsky has pointed out [27] . When Antony protests his love to Cleopatra, he does in swearing shake the throned gods, 1.3.28, and his propensity to violence is governed by her influence, 1.3.70-71. Cleopatra is the serpent of old Nile, 1.5.25, and when she is aroused, she is unwittingly made to predict her fall, like Antony, in catastrophic terms. O, I would thou didst, So half my Egypt were submerged and made A cistern for scaled snakes! 2.5.93-95. The image is as reminiscent of the Exodus as of Velikovsky, as indeed it should be if Dr. Velikovsky is correct, for he dates the Exodus to the time of the first catastrophe described in Worlds in Collision. Later, when Octavia fears a battle between Octavius and Antony, what she says bears an eerie resemblance to catastrophic upheavals and floods. Wars 'twixt you twain would be As if the world should cleave, and that slain men Should solder up the rift. 3.4.30-32. We think of the evidence Dr. Velikovsky presents in Earth in Upheaval of rock fissures choked with massed broken fragments of bones [28] . She herself, if considered a heavenly body consistent with the major personages, is drawn from Octavius to Antony, and then back to Octavius again, as if she represented the Moon, and her final return to the orbit of Earth is surprisingly tranquil, with no accompanying army, no troop of horses, no noise or debris, as may have been the case earlier. Nay, the dust Should have ascended to the roof of heaven, Raised by your populous troops. 3.6.48-50. Later, when the two triumvirs do at last meet in battle and Antony abandons his fleet, Scarus cries out The greater cantle of the world is lost With very ignorance 3.10.6-7. where cantle means a segment of the sphere, the globe, and Antony ascribes his errancy, his flight from orbit, to Cleopatra's astrophysical influence, because she knew Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods Command me. 3.11.60-61, Having lost humiliatingly to Octavius, he feels bereft of divine guidance, as if my good stars that were my former guides Have empty left their orbs and shot their fires Into th' abysm of hell 3.13.145-147. and Cleopatra's apparent treason appears to obscure the Moon and foretell Mars' destruction. Alack, our Terrene moon Is now eclipsed, and it portends alone The fall of Antony. 3.13.153-155. When she protests her innocence, her words ironically predict the destruction of Egypt accomplished by hail from a comet's cold heart, 3.13.159, which will also be poisoned, and will destroy all generations of life, leaving the dead unburied, prey for scavenging insects, 3.13-159-167. For a brief moment, Antony's fortunes seem to improve, and Cleopatra becomes his Sun -O thou day o' th' world, 4.8.13. His soldiers are like scourges of heaven, fighting As if a god in hate of mankind had Destroyed in such a shape 4.8.25-26. and they glow like holy Phoebus' car, 4.8.29, like the chariot of the sun god. When Antony pictures himself and his love reuniting, he imagines such vast noise That heaven and earth may strike their sounds together, Applauding our approach. 4.8.38-39. There is a striking parallel in Worlds in Collision, where Dr. Velikovsky describes the approach of comet Venus as accompanied by loud worldwide noise [29] . The false hope does not last long, for in the next battle Antony's forces are soundly defeated, and it appears that Cleopatra has truly betrayed him this time. Antony is driven into uncontrollable anger, and compares himself to the frenzied Hercules, who, near death through a poisoned garment, hurls the bearer of it on the horns o' th' moon, 4.12.45. We remember how Dr. Velikovsky showed that many myths of divine and sometimes horned animals scourging the earth are symbols of the catastrophic tempests [30] , and so it is with the failing Antony, who Cleopatra says is more mad Than Telamon for his shield; the boar of Thessaly Was never so embossed. 4.13.1-3. We perceive that Antony's magnitude is diminishing, and it is accompanied by great noise and rending. The soul and body rive not more in parting Than greatness going off. 4.13.5-6. Antony's last description of himself is of inundating dissolution. He compares his self, his identity, to a cloud which continually changes shape and so becomes nothing, a process which makes it indisctinct As water is in water. 4.14.10-11. In this last part of the play, concerned as it is with the deaths of Mars and Venus, the catastrophic images cluster most noticeably. When Anton is told of Cleopatra's alleged death, he describes himself as no longer incandescent, nor errant, and so the torch is out, Lie down, and stray no farther. 4.14.46-47. He then tries to kill himself, and, as he lies wounded, his soldiers too seem to recognize that an era is over, that their former astral guides are gone, and a new time, a new calendar, will begin after Antony's darkness, as two of them observe The star is fall'n. And time is at his period. 4.14.106-107. Dr. Velikovsky, of course, has argued that following each of the major planetary interactions there was indeed a new time new lengths of day, month and year [31] . With the approach of Antony's destruction, the relevant imagery becomes violently catastrophic. When Cleopatra, from her monument, sees Antony's body being brought onstage, she cries out O sun, Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in; darkling stand The varying shore o' th' world. 4.15.9-10. When Antony speaks his last and expires, she erupts in imagery which might almost have been drawn from Dr. Velikovsky's theories. The crown o' th' earth cloth melt. My lord ! O, withered is the garland of the war, The soldier's pole [which may be the pole-star] is fall'n: young boys and girls Are level now with men. The odds [that which was distinctive and projecting] is gone; And there is nothing left remarkable [there is nothing topographically distinctive, as if all is smooth and flat, like after Noah's Flood] Beneath the visiting moon. 4.15.63-68. She faints, and is revived, and conjures herself It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods, To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stol'n our jewel 4.15.74-77. which may suggest that, with Mars no longer incandescent, nor nearby, it no longer lights up Earth's space, so Earth no longer possesses its own star. She then continues the reference to Antony as a burned-out star. Come, away. The case of that huge spirit now is cold. 4.15.87-88. In life it was hot, bright, and life-giving, but in death it is dark, cold and contains no spirit. Velikovsky informs us that Mars, which is now simply a tranquil distant point of light in the night sky, was once a fiery, menacing, destructive entity much closer to Earth. When Octavius first learns of Antony's death, he is surprised by its lack of catastrophic noise. The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack [explosion]. The round world Should have shook lions into civil streets And citizens, to their dens. 5.1.14-17. He then explains that the solar system could not entertain two rival suns, and so a conflict between them was inevitable, 5.137-40, and one of them would have to decline, or set. Cleopatra remembers Antony as a figure of cosmic climension and stability, whose face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck A sun and moon, which kept their course* and lighted This little O, th' earth. 5.2.79-81. [* Italics the authors] This celestial phenomenon was a colossal being who threatened the Earth. His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. 5.2.82-86. Dr. Velikovsky tells us that, at certain times during the catastrophes of the eighth and seventh centuries B. C., Mars appeared to be a giant warrior with his sword spanning the sky, and that, when in this aroused state, his approach caused such extreme havoc and thunder that the whole globe tottered, or shook [32] . With Antony gone, with Mars defeated, Octavius the Sun is the only ruler of the skies, or, as Cleopatra calls him, Sole sir o' th' world, 5.2.120. There remains, then, the death of Cleopatra. It occurs distinctly apart from Antony's. Like Antony's, it is described as a loss of brilliance and an explosion accompanied by loud noise and the breaking of surfaces. just before her death, she refers to herself as almost extinct, although ready to flare up if provoked again. Prithee go hence, Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through th' ashes of my chance. 5.2.172-174. As she prepares for her suicide, her handmaiden again emphasizes the loss of brilliance. Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, And we are for the dark. 5.2.193-194. Once she has been poisoned, another handmaiden prays that her soul and body may rive, or break apart with a rending explosion, 5.2.310, and, when she dies, when her eyes close and so symbolically she can emit no more rays, exert no more power, she no longer poses a real threat to the Sun. Downy windows, close; And golden Phoebus never be beheld Of eyes again so royal ! 5.2.316-318. Indeed, Phoebus the Sun, or Octavius and the Roman Empire, must never again be beheld or challenged as an equal by eyes so royal, almost as powerful as the Sun, and that is the point Shakespeare wishes to make. That is why he includes, at the very instant of Cleopatra's passing, a reference to the Sun, to the paramount position of Octavius, who must be the one who acquires sole power at the end. When she is dead, the Sun has triumphed and the Earth is stable, more stable than it was at the beginning. I might add, in closing this section, that Halley's (then unnamed) comet was visible in Europe's skies about 1607, just before the generally accepted period of the play's composition, and Kepler's Supernova burst into prominence in 1604. The Supernova may not have been a matter of common talk, since the concept of change in the distant heavens was still a matter of fierce scientific and theological debate, but the comet may well have been a more popular sensation. This, however, is merely a tidbit, because catastrophic overtones appear in Shakespearian plays written before the celestial events I have mentioned, as we saw earlier, and also because I have not established to my own satisfaction any distinct point of view regarding the role of actual events in triggering catastrophic associations in an artist's mind. Such is the basic story of the play. its meaning, however, has been the subject of much controversy, with opinion basically divided between those who side with the lovers, and hold the world well lost, and those who support duty and responsibility, seeing Octavius as the necessary winner. Most recent criticism has tended to strike a note between these extremes, arguing that Shakespeare balances love versus duty so carefully that neither is solely to be preferred, but both are given attractiveness and importance. To deal with this issue more fully - and it is the major topic in current criticism of the play - I will turn in a moment to two quite recent studies of the play. I adduce them for one reason in particular. it may be argued that celestial imagery in Shakespeare's play is in order because he is dramatizing material only recently available to his culture, material whose origin is Roman, and thus he might naturally use the Roman elements of the story, which include the celestial. One might even wish to explain the catastrophic as opposed to merely celestial associations surrounding Antony and Cleopatra in this way, as natural offshoots of their Roman identification with Mars and Venus, although this is much less plausible. The same, however, cannot be done for twentieth-century critics. If they show evidence of Velikovskian catastrophic overtones or parallels in their criticism, in a frequency and depth which seems to go beyond chance, one cannot attribute it merely to cultural fashion or historical inheritance. Instead, one may be led to wonder whether these similar features, produced some 400 years apart in relation to the same historical material, may have similar origins which lie beyond the conscious act of writing a play or commenting on it. The first analysis I will deal with is by Robin Lee of the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg [33] . He is not by any means a conscious Velikovskyite, yet his analysis of the play produces results which are surprisingly Velikovskian. First, he acknowledges the mythic, even divine status which is given to the lovers [34] . Speaking generally, he claims that all great tragedies contain archetypal patterns of general human experience, with a stress on general [35] . In this play, he feels, the acts of the lovers take on, in our imaginations as well as in their own, the dimensions of an archetypal human experience [36] . In this way, the whole play acquires a mythic quality through the ritual nature of several of the situations [37] . He suggests no cause for these archetypes and rituals; indeed he seems to be suspicious of his own reactions for he hastens to assure us I am not here proposing some form of dramatic collective unconsciousness; but he has nevertheless recognized and responded to the ritual suggestions, and mythic shapes which will be felt by the audience [38] . The questions we must put to ourselves, of course, are - Why are certain patterns felt to be archetypal? Why do we perceive certain actions, however vaguely, as ritual? Why do certain narratives, in prose or poetic or dramatic form, impress us with these features? The answer to all of these, I suggest, lies in the Velikovskian catastrophes. Lee sees Antony as a sacrifice, a scapegoat, and he notes that Antony, as Mars, is given a poetic greatness which is contradicted by his smallness of action [39] . I suggest that a conflation of these two roles - scapegoat and Mars - is a significant clue to Antony's value, and that it derives directly from catastrophic memories. It is logical that, if another entity destroys itself to save us, we can have our cake and eat it by giving this entity mythic status but making it deserve its destruction. In this way, we can enjoy the result of its action without feeling guilt over its ruin. If we make the entity repudiate us and our values, we then repudiate it and our morality is satisfied. This, I feel, is what happened to Antony, who suffers the fate of all scapegoats. To find a source for this pattern, we need only think of Dr. Velikovsky's Mars, the once-bright and honored planet which appeared to betray Earth by being drawn away by the comet, and was defeated and expelled by the god of light as a result, to take a lesser position than before. If we make Mars guilty, our consciences can tolerate the fact of its sacrificial destruction, and thus the Velikovskian catastrophe may be the primal pattern behind the scapegoat figure which appears so universally in human cultures. Velikovsky's Mars is certainly one of the patterns underlying most tragic heroes. What Velikovsky says about Mars is What tragedy shows happening to the tragic hero. Specifically, Lee notes a vast decline in Antony. He says that Shakespeare describes him as Mars, but Mars weak, old and unstable - ready to become frenzied and erratic in behaviour [40] . In Velikovskian terms, the play pictures the last stages of the catastrophic events, and the actual features of the action, as Lee discerns them, are highly catastrophic. Lee describes the action as a series of vacillations or swings increasing in speed as they decrease in duration, until all movement stops and a final resting point is reached, so that he says ... the final point in time is the result of the swiftly alternating movement between different points in space [41] . In other words, the action impresses him as a process of (celestial) equilibrium. The sequence of events in time reaches its stasis in these scenes, as does the sequence of events in space [42] . This quotation applies as readily to the catastrophic Mars and Venus as it does to Shakespeare's Antony. Second, the image groupings which Lee discerns in the play also complement a celestial, and indeed catastrophic, interpretation. The Roman life is associated with images of straightness and stability, the Egyptian with images of fluidity (o'erflows'), mingling ('stirr'd') and relaxation ('soft hours'). These patterns are projected through the play [43] . He tells us that the play moves in an atmosphere of ambivalence which becomes the medium through which the play is perceived [44] , and that this ambivalence is the product of opposed images. Egypt - and Cleopatra - are constantly associated with water [45] . The second basic pattern of images associates Rome with the earth or land ... This pattern begins as early as Antony's first speech, in which Roman 'earth' and 'clay' are opposed to the emotional quality of his Egyptian love. Through this association we feel the stability and solidity of the Roman world [46] . As the tone of this passage suggests, Roman moral attitudes are basically stoical. They endure rather than suffer [47] . Between these opposing images of water and earth, Shakespeare creates a series of images of the process of change. The most important of these are images of earth melting into water, and finally water mingling with water ... This pattern of images reinforces the sense of dissolution by perpetual movement between conflicting opposites that is so important a part of the structure [48] . Antony, wavering between solid Rome and fluid, changing Egypt, cannot keep his integrity whole, and so he melts. Antony compares his sense of his own existence - even of his physical existence - to the tenuous stability of clouds drifting into clouds, and finally water mingling with water . . . in the phrase 'the rack dislimns', (Arden editor: 'the drifting clouds efface') similarities of sound suggest that he is undergoing almost a physical disintegration as a result of torture - being torn limb from limb on the rack [49] . We can thus see how the astronomic equivalences apply. Rome is Earth,. land, that which must survive, and therefore Octavius is the Sun, Cleopatra the Comet, and Antony is Mars. In the configuration of important entities, Antony is not a mere average man, but part of a triumvirate which rules the Roman Empire, or the civilized world. In cosmic terms, Mars is not a harmless star in distant space, but an errant planet threatening Earth and the Solar System. In the social scale of values, Antony vacillates between love and duty. in the solar structure, Mars vacillates between a dangerous affair with Venus and a required role affecting the stability of the solar system. If Antony abandons his duty to pursue Cleopatra, the Roman Empire is menaced; if Mars leaves its orbit to pursue Venus, Earth is menaced. As we have already seen, the imagery in both cases is the same - land melts into water, the structure of existence breaks, nature is disrupted. For Mars, the result was extinction and expulsion. To Lee, Antony dissolves and is destroyed ...... because of an inability to hold a steady purpose or a steady view of himself [50] . Lee sees Antony's need to break out of Cleopatra's sphere of influence [51] . for Antony seems to recognize that this alone will save him. Like Mars, he becomes dangerous when drawn to her orbit, for then he loses his identity. He used to define himself in terms of soldiership, the army, and Rome. He then centered his world on Cleopatra and so lost his former role. Mars too, Velikovsky tells us, left its orbit and so lost its previous role. With Cleopatra, the process is radically different, for the images surrounding Cleopatra's death are conversely of steadiness and constancy [52] . Antony was steady, Lee says, and was ruined because he became inconstant. Cleopatra was inconstant, and was suppressed by becoming steady. Again, this applies equally to Velikovsky's Venus and Mars. Cleopatra's stature increases as she dies, as if Venus emitted a final burst of brilliance before expiring. Her purpose is To do that thing that ends all other deeds, Which shackles accidents and bolts up change 5.2.5-6. and the image is one of a passage from change to rest. When the poisonous serpent arrives, she says My resolution's placed, and I have nothing Of woman in me: now from head to foot I am marble-constant. 5.2.238-240. As she is being dressed in her final garments, she anticipates becoming a celestial body like Antony. Husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title ! I am fire, and air; my other elements I give to baser life. 5.2.287-290. That is, she renounces her earthly aspects, earth and water, to become like a star - fire and air. She who had ravaged the earth, the Roman Empire, will go off into space and menace Earth no more. As Lee sees it, death halts chance and change for Cleopatra. She passes to .... the 'better life' that is impervious to the fluctuations of fortune and change ... and so her sacrifice is an act that finally fixes our sympathy with her [53] . We can afford to admire her now because in death she has at last become constant, and also less, for the process, in stabilizing her, has also diminished her. Thus, in her very last moments, she is forced to subside and to settle into a safe orbit by the influence of Antony, whose ... power quite literally extends beyond the grave, and reaches out to modify her attitudes after his death [54] . When we last see her, she is brilliant but distant, and so we do not become emotionally involved as we watch her ritualistic death on the stage, her literal transformation into Venus, the Star of the East. In conclusion, Lee says the attraction between Antony and Cleopatra produces ...... a universe in convulsion: the dramatic conflict between the characters is extended by symbolic action and by imagery, to suggest the involvement of the whole of the natural order [55] . This corresponds with what several other critics, equally unaware of Dr. Velikovsky, see in the play. To them, Antony and Cleopatra, each previously great in his or her own sphere assert a new order because they come together. This order is a challenge to what is and what must be, and so they are destroyed, which means catastrophic memories may underlie the pattern of Luciferian revolt. Furthermore, to these critics the overthrow of the lovers has consequences far beyond themselves. Antony's political defeat and his and Cleopatra's individual tragedy are both set within the context of a larger process, simpler and more universal [56] which we can recognize as a process of change, of a new order, in both the natural and political worlds. This is what we also discovered in the comedy, and so we may suspect that the form of most great narrative art is dictated by suppressed catastrophic experiences. Imagine that man, considering the catastrophes, had to see good in what happened, or his existence would become unbearably anxious. He might then construe the catastrophes as cleansing scourges provoked by the revolt of certain heavenly bodies who had been duly chastised, and thus, in such a story, the solar system is left stronger than it was before, albeit bereft of several of its more spectacular entities. Imagine then that this rationalization, which has imposed a beneficent ethical meaning upon a horrendous physical event, is transferred to creative art. The result might well be a play like Antony and Cleopatra, in which William Shakespeare's depiction of Mars and Venus bears so great a resemblance to Immanuel Velikovsky's. I turn next to another recent study of the play, by Clifford Davidson of Western Michigan University [57] . He stresses the inconographical, mythical and religious models which he feels underlie Shakespeare's play, claiming it is in large part ... based on archetypal patterns which appear to have their basis in literature, thought, and tradition of his own time [58] . These traditional models, as Davidson elicits them, trace back to the time of Christ and indeed earlier, and thus Davidson's linking of them to Shakespeare's play may indicate a form of continuity of idea between the actual times of the catastrophes and Shakespeare's day. In general, Davidson's essay, like Lee's, seems almost to have been written about Velikovsky's theories, so often and so consistently do his observations apply. I hazard the guess that this is primarily so because the background which Davidson delineates - myth, icon, religious parallel - is only one step removed in literality from the events which gave rise to it. Thus, when I apply his discoveries to my approach, I feel I am simply carrying his materials back to their true source. Cleopatra, says Davidson, is given traditional sets of qualities which relate her, among others, to The Whore of Babylon, a brilliant Queen, the temptress Circe, a provocative gypsy, and the goddess Venus. To this list we must add Velikovsky's Venus, for she is also given the qualities of a fiercely disruptive celestial body. For instance, Davidson describes her as . . . active and hot - so hot that the seeming Cupids on her barge with their fans only make her "delicate cheeks" glow with their sensual warmth [59] . She is portrayed as a disturber of natural order. She stands for excess, since she will not pause at the limits set by nature [60] . Her object is to disrupt a pre-existing scheme. Thus she usurps the phallic role, Shakespeare suggests: of course, such usurpation is an attempt to achieve a reversal of the natural order, which was, after all, the object of the serpent in Eden [61] . Because she is associated with serpents, notes Davidson, Cleopatra's Egypt is hideously fertile, full of snakes, and poisonous. She lives in a world which is reminiscent of Spenser's Bower of Bliss and which is fully as poisonous, especially to male visitors from Rome [62] . The poison affects Antony, who ... admits to Caesar that he had "neglected" his duty when poisoned hours had bound me up/ From mine own knowledge (II. ii. 90-91). This poison is obviously to be identified with the great Satanic enemy of life who in the guise of the serpent conveyed death into the fertile Garden of Eden and hence into the whole world of human beings [63] . Here we have the serpent, a poisonous Cleopatra and the destruction of Eden in one passage. If we recall what Velikovsky says about the relation between mythological serpents and the tail of Comet Venus, and about the poisonous consequences of Earth's contact with that very tail, and about its effects on the planet Mars, which might poetically be said to have neglected its duty in being forced to follow a new or errant course, the parallels are suggestive, as if the appearance of what seemed to be a giant serpent in the sky marked the apparent end of celestial stability. This also accords well with Cleopatra's role as Eve to Antony's as Adam, which Davidson also establishes. She is also Circe, as described in Chapman's translation of Homer, holding out a cup of sensual pleasure which transforms men into beasts - or stable planets into unstable bodies - and we are told her poison is associated with sweetness. Not surprisingly, Chapman's translation describes Circe disguising her "harme full venoms" with honey as well as with other nourishing food and drink [64] . We might think of the connection Velikovsky makes between the poisonous atmosphere of Comet Venus' tail and the sweet honey-like manna produced by its hydrocarbons. From Circe, it is but a short step to Venus, both in her earthly form, where she was considered a planetary prostitute [65] , and in her heavenly form, which taught men to prefer eternal reality to immediate pleasure. She is also equated with Isis, just as Velikovsky has done, but the most prevalent image she projected for the Renaissance, Davidson tells us, was as a universal troublemaker, for ... though not true in every sense, the claim may be provisionally made that Venus ought to be seen in terms of discord ... Cleopatra likewise is in one sense also-viewed by Shakespeare as a major source of discord within the ancient Roman world [66] . If we apply the celestial equivalents which I have tried to establish earlier in my analysis of this play, we can see that the Renaissance picture of Cleopatra is much like Velikovsky's picture of Venus. Next, we look at Cleopatra's effect upon Antony. It was generally considered, Davidson tells us, that Antony's attraction to Cleopatra debilitated him. The image Shakespeare uses is martial, but it could also be considered Velikovskian. Thus Antony's sword is "made weak" by [his] affection [67] . The cause of this weakening, in medieval terms, is the sin of Idleness, or Sloth, and it is curious that Davidson refers to an illustration of Idleness by Cesare Ripa, in which an old woman, weak and poor, holds a fish. He quotes Ripa: Fish, it was believed, when touched by a net or by hands become so stupefied that they cannot escape. Idleness affects the idle in the same way; they cannot do anything [68] . It is interesting that idleness, which traps Antony, is pictured as a fish immobilized in a net, which recalls Antony caught in Cleopatra's strong Egyptian fetters, 1.2.113, and also the net of Hephaestus trapping and immobilizing Ares and Aphrodite as they make love illicitly. This last is a major point in Alfred de Grazia's The Torrid Love Affair of Moon and Mars, where he draws a direct relationship between the celestial events of -780 to - 687, as described by Velikovsky, and the Song of Demodocus from Book Eight of Homer's Odyssey, where the Ares-Aphrodite-Hephaestus love triangle is narrated [69] . Antony was of course identified with Mars, Davidson points out, and thus, when he rebels, it is described in geometrical terms as a rebellion against order - he does not keep his square, he does not act by the rule. instead, he is drawn erratically to the East, to Cleopatra, and the result is pictured as a startling disorder in the sky, with celestial objects appearing where and when they should not. By his lack of control, he will gain mirth and another chance "To reel the streets at noon" [70] . At another point, Davidson brings the love story even closer to the events described by Velikovsky, when he tells us that Shakespeare was familiar with the Ares-Aphrodite rod - Hephaestus triangle which de Grazia has seen as a mythological retelling of the Velikovsky scenario [71] . In this case it is the Roman version, involving Venus, Mars and the jealous Vulcan, as narrated in the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Mars' excessive attraction to Venus, or Antony's to Cleopatra, is given explicitly catastrophic dimensions by Davidson through reference to Shakespeare's own words, already quoted in another instance some pages earlier. The greatness of this love can only be measured in terms of the degree to which Antony will neglect his duty. He will "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/ Of the rang'd empire fall" (I. i. 33-34) [72] . Venus and Mars become hot when they join, but they are cooled by Vulcan. Such an interpretation of the myth would seem to have been an important element in Shakespeare's depiction of Antony and Cleopatra [73] . Cleopatra is thus pictured as the Fatal Woman who destroys the male, and the image which Davidson uses bears an eerie resemblance to Velikovsky's own words. Through her instrumentality, he loses his manhood and gives himself over to blind and irrational Fortune, who then flings him from her wheel [74] . When the warrior-like Mars came into conjunction with the seductive Venus, the result in Renaissance myth was that he was emasculated, he lost his warlikeness, but we must also think of Velikovsky, describing the celestial event, and saying enigmatically that Mars was thrown out of the ring [75] . This must lead us to wonder whether the role of Comet Venus as described by Velikovsky underlies the religious and mythological figure pictured variously as Eve, Circe, the Whore of Babylon, an evil temptress, a celestial prostitute and Cleopatra. In political terms, which parallel the celestial events Dr. Velikovsky described, Antony- Mars should be master because of his status in the Roman Empire, for Cleopatra-Venus is a captive ruler, but he is subdued by Cleopatra, and ... as a result of his submission, he loses his potency. Hence there appears to be justified male bitterness when Candidus exclaims that his "leader's led/ And we are women's men" (III. vii. 69-70) [76] . Cleopatra is described as ... the debilitating queen - the fatal woman - who in the end will sap all his warlike heat and power ... - What could be more like Velikovsky's picture of Mars and Venus? - ... and thus will lead him to utter defeat at the end of a mismanaged war [77] . Davidson at this point refers to a painting by Botticelli. Mars, like Antony, has put aside his plated armor; nude and debilitated, he sleeps as if nothing could ever wake him [78] . We think of the planet Mars now, shorn of most of its atmosphere, terrain and hydrosphere, of its brilliance, nude and bare as in the photographs, and weak, meaning with little effect upon Earth or the stability of the Solar System. Dr. Velikovsky has called it a flying graveyard [79] . There is no question, says Davidson . . . that Venus was the active agent: in other words, what Venus did with Mars was to render him her slave. As Ficino asserts in his astrological discussion of these divinities, "Mars never masters Venus." [80] Yet, despite Venus-Cleopatra's role as a disrupter of order, despite her deleterious effect on Mars-Antony, Davidson emphasizes that the Renaissance saw a very positive conclusion to their affair, for ... the Renaissance generally remembered that the love of Venus and Mars was a discordia concors which led originally to the birth of a daughter, Harmony. The value of Venus' dominance over Mars will thus be found in the mitigation of the god of war's ferocity, for only through such dominance can conflict and war be reduced to harmonious peace ... in the end, the love of the martial Antony and wanton Cleopatra will lead historically to the end of the conflict between the triumvirs and to the harmony of "universal peace" into which will be born the Prince of Peace [81] . That is to say, the Venus-Mars turbulence, which appears so potentially troublesome, actually precedes the coming of a new order. This is certainly the case in Shakespeare's play, for Davidson refers to Octavius Caesar's prediction of future peace as Antony and Cleopatra are close to their destruction. "The time of universal peace" . . . is perhaps the most significant single line in the play. This will be the "universal Peace through Sea and Land" which, according to Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," prepared the scene for "the Prince of Light" to begin "His reign of peace upon the earth." [82] It is at this point that Davidson's analysis of the classical and medieval background to Shakespeare's plays merges virtually directly with my Velikovskian interpretation of it. He calls our attention to the apocalyptic nature of the imagery with which this positive result of the Mars-Venus disturbance is dressed, and, in so doing, he gives it precisely the universal relevance which Velikovsky sees. The old order is coming to a close, and the effect will be to reorient* men who believe in a Christian message to the "new heaven" and "new earth" which will be ushered in after the Second Coming. . . When the guards discover the fatally wounded Antony, one of them exclaims: "The star is fallen," while the other one adds, "And time is at his period" (IV. xiv. 106-107). In the Apocalypse, we read: "and there felle a great starre from heaven" (viii, 10); and "time shulde bee no more" (x. 6) [83] . [* italics the writer's] If we transpose these last three quotes into literal solar-system terms, they apply to the situation in the heavens from -779 to -686 as described by Velikovsky, especially if one were trying to put a hopeful positive interpretation upon these terrifying events. If Rome is Earth, then the Mars-Venus turbulence is indeed a discordia concors, creating conflict in the skies, but then leading to the destruction of that conflict through Venus' mitigation of Mars' ferocity. It is a catastrophe in the ancient Greek sense - a turning down before a new and better age begins. What it leads to, in religious terms, is a time of universal Peace [celestial stability] through Sea and Land - no cataclysmic floods, earthquakes, upheavals of land mass which prepares the way for the Prince of Light. We might wonder whether the pattern of darkness to light, the idea that it is always darkest before it becomes light, has its origin in the Velikovskian catastrophic events. Lastly, this transition is described as a reorientation, caused by a great star falling from heaven and stopping time, after which there is a new heaven - a different configuration of stars relative to Earth's new axis - and a new earth, new lands thrust up and others submerged, new poles and equator, new cardinal points relative to the rising and setting of the sun, new seasons, new topography. In sum, disaster leads to survival. All is changed, but it is for the better. It is to the artistic ramifications of this hopeful attitude that I now address myself, for they provide us with a clear insight into what might have happened between the occurrence of the events and their emergence into art. It is an object lesson in how human nature can make the unpleasant palatable and even helpful. Towards the end of his essay, Davidson observes To be sure, Cleopatra, like Venus and her protégé Helen, contributed to the fall of a city and/ or empire because of a passionate attachment, but nevertheless may not be seen only as a symbol of a passion which ought at all costs to be resisted. For, had not Antony yielded to his passion, his life would hardly have appeared as appealing or as suitable for being mirrored in art [84] . This is a form of having one's cake and eating it, which Shakespeare, as a great artist representing mankind, achieves on our behalf. By depicting the planets as humans, he makes them weak, even despicable; this is our revenge for what they did to us; but the humans, no matter how much we revile them, are based upon planets, great and terrifying stars which once moved erratically in the skies, and we fear they may do so again, and so we must also placate them, which we do by giving them - planet and surrogate - a final greatness quite different from their earlier pettiness. This is what happens to the disruptive lovers, for, when they are dead, Octavius Caesar praises them, and Caesar's attitude reflects quite clearly the sympathy and wonder with which the audience is encouraged to look upon the tragic events at the end* of the lives of Antony and Cleopatra [85] . [* Italics the writer's] Cleopatra is transformed, apotheosized, but the key element in her transformation is that she is rendered safe. She longs no longer for any earthly man, but strongly desires immortality. She shall never again taste the earthly wine from Egypt's grapes, nor may she participate again in any earthly revels ... Her baser elements are purged away so that her love may pull her up to where her desire rests upon the spirit of Mark Antony in bliss [86] . In celestial terms, Venus is being forever separated from any connection with Earth. She will not be like mankind, which tastes wine and participates in revels, and is mortal. She will be immortal, but distant. She will be revered and honored because mankind can now afford to do it, because Cleopatra is no longer a wandering comet, which might be dangerous, but a planet in a fixed orbit. This is a triumph of the mind and imagination of man, for . . . the immortality which Cleopatra, under the guise of the goddess Venus, achieves, is after all the immortality which art, not religion, has to offer [87] . Art, and myth, the concealing and transforming processes of the human mind, make the best of what had at first been a rather terrifying situation. The common Venus, who stood behind the Cleopatra whose mind always had been focused on the delight associated with generation, in the end by contraries melts into the heavenly Venus who sets forth to take her last immortal journey [88] . Who, we should read instead, by setting forth on this last journey, which implies that she will not return, is rewarded with immortality. Like Tasso who attempts to convert his witch Armida after Rinaldo is rescued from her power, Shakespeare insists upon transforming the destructive passion which Cleopatra represents into its seeming opposite [89] . The same occurs with Antony. He ... at last is lifted up to a new and greater heroism by his martyrdom and by the miracle of love. At the death of "Herculean Antony," Cleopatra laments that the gods have "stol'n our jewel" (IV. v. 78); but he is set as a star in the heavens toward which Cleopatra may now steer her course [90] . That is to say, he too has been rendered distant, and safe, and so now mankind can afford to grant him the awe due a primitive god. Because of his acts, he ironically* will become the immortal object of wonder and the subject of art [91] . [* Italics the writer's] Both of them are in fact repelled, exiled to new orbits, and the vision is cosmic. Shakespeare at both ends of his drama is echoing the Apocalypse, xxi. 1-2: "And I sawe a new heaven, and a new earth ... And I John sawe the holie citie newe Jerusalem come downe from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride trimmed for her husband." Thus Cleopatra, who has been imaged forth in the play even as the great Whore of the Apocalypse, in the final portion of the play is portrayed as analogous to the "bride" of the great bridegroom, Christ, who indeed when he returns for the second time will usher in a new heaven, a new earth, and an eternity of love which is not diminished by illusion [92] . We must remember first that, at the beginning of the play, Antony and Cleopatra had wanted to create their own private new heaven and new earth, 1.1.17, which would have benefited them alone, whereas now a new heaven and new earth have indeed been created for all of mankind - new stars, new planets, new directions - out of their diminution, and second, that Velikovsky has identified certain angels with comets, for now, when they no longer threaten earth, the lovers are made angelic. The imperial spirit of Antony, generous and great, is placed at least in imagination among the angels. Mark Antony indeed will be remembered thus, for he has been miraculously converted into angelic substance as a result of the gnosis of Shakespeare's art [93] . If we look at the process in celestial terms, trying to decipher what the human motives are behind this artistic transformation, we can see a transition from menace to safety. Antony and Cleopatra have been made to exchange dangerous mortality for safe immortality, a gangster's notoriety for a statesman's or benefactor's fame. This is the only kind of greatness they can be permitted, an abstract, disembodied magnitude, for greatness on earth proved too dangerous. It is true that they were tremendously influential on earth, both as human personages in a worldwide political battle and as Planetary personages in a cosmic battle, but they were also destructive, and so by proxy the planets for which Antony and Cleopatra stand are being punished through their human representatives, who are vilified and defeated, and then, like all scapegoats, trimmed like monarchs before their death and expulsion and subsequent glorification. It is a form of revenge upon the planetary powers, and a satisfying one too, for, by exhibiting desire but making morality triumph, it lets us experience vicariously and for a controlled time the secret desire to be as free-flying and destructive as the planets, but then, because we know that such behaviour is harmful, and therefore wrong, it lets a pair of scapegoats suffer for our brief wildness. The best of this experience applies to us, and the worst to Antony and Cleopatra, who carry our earthly evil away in their destruction and then have a distant celestial greatness conferred upon them for it. I said at the outset that my paper is intended to be a beginning, not a body of rigidly- proved propositions, and so, in this last section, I wish to step back from the plays themselves and look at some of the larger implications of what I have just said. First, let us explore the relation between individual and collective human nature. Not all psychologists accept the idea of a subconscious or unconscious, but, for the sake of this paper, I will assume that it exists. if we go further and accept Jung's concept of a collective unconscious, which he defines as a racially-inherited set of paradigms, of master plans for dream, myth and narrative, then it seems to me, pace Jung, that this must necessarily imply collective memories, transmission of collective knowledge, and thus a collective mind, which I take to be the sum or repository of man's noteworthy collective experiences. In the knowledge-assimilation process, it is the long-term storage sector. Now, taking this assumption as a starting point, we then consider the possible effects of the Velikovskian cataclysms. If such horrible events have occurred - and indeed there appear to have been more than two instances - can we not imagine them causing collective traumas on each occasion, one reinforcing the other, burning their imprint onto the collective memory? Looking at mankind as a collectively traumatized being, we may then wonder what collective defense mechanisms man might erect so that the horrible memory of the catastrophes, the conscious realization of which would make our living unbearable, is suppressed. How would we bury the memories, and then, what collective neuroses or delusions would we produce in their stead to let us cope with existence? Dr. Velikovsky has argued that, unconsciously, the result is a collective amnesia, which is the theme of this symposium, and he has also urged that, as a byproduct of this collective amnesia, most of our religion, myth and folklore are an unconscious attempt by man to sublimate repressed unbearable fact into conscious bearable illusion. The common purpose of these illusions, he says, which are produced universally, is to describe, and thus render friendly and controllable, that which would otherwise remain unknown and therefore apparently uncontrollable. Through them, an explanation is offered for everything' from the sparrow's fall to the largest disturbance. In this way, our fears are assuaged, for we feel we are placed in a benevolent relationship with forces which would otherwise appear too powerful for human influence. I then ask, can we not apply the same dictum to narrative art? What I suggest is that, if we do possess unconscious collective memories of enormous natural catastrophes, then the collective function of the narrative artist may be to calm our fears by creating narratives in which the catastrophes may be let loose in disguise, examined in all their horror and then overcome. That is to say, just as, in a neurotic traumatized individual, some part of his mind creates the delusions which permit him to cope with his existence, so the artist, as a part of a collectively traumatized society, creates collective delusions for that society [94] . Thus, it may be that the enduring artistic narrative endures, remains permanently relevant, because it provides a medium for expression and thus release of collective apprehension. It is a collective defense mechanism against enduring collective fears, and a comparison may be made with children's fairy tales. It seems to me that a chief function of these stories is to diminish a child's apprehensions about huge, uncontrollable forces, represented in the stories by a giant, bear, or wolf. The fairy tales actually speak of these huge figures, and make them playable, even defeatable. Without wanting to oversimplify great works of art, I suggest that they are in a sense adult fairy tales, and that they perform the same function at a more sophisticated level. They imply a rational and sometimes beneficent order in the huge and otherwise irrational universe. That may be why the enduring narratives of almost every human society are so similar in structure and intent - each collectively neurotic society, suffering from the same catastrophic trauma, must produce its own artistic delusions, tailored and adapted to individual circumstances, but of common, universal origin. There is, however, a very significant difference between a traumatized individual and a traumatized society. When an individual appears to be psychotic, or neurotic, the aim of society is to cure him, to rid him of his excesses, so that he may become like other men. With a collective neurosis, however, there is no such aim, because the patient, society, is also the judge of acceptable behaviour, and a neurotic who thinks he can only survive behind his delusional defenses is hardly going to set out to cure himself. Instead, where the neurotic condition is communal throughout society, the creators of illusion for society are not eliminated, but honored and encouraged. That which is feared by a group in a neurotic individual is admired by the neurotic group in itself, and thus, the more an artist, as a member of a neurotic group, calms its fear with his fables, the more it applauds him. I therefore wish to propose a new interpretation of what happens when man reacts to art. I suggest that it occurs at two levels, the second being caused by the first. The first level of response, of course, is conscious. It is intellectual and emotional, being the product of the artist's technical expertise in his metier, and the ideas, themes, feelings and suggestions which the work stimulates within us as a result of that expertise. The quality of both these factors determines how deeply we respond to the total work in a personal, conscious way, which I prefer to call aesthetic involvement. Virtually all literary criticism must restrict itself to this, as it has done since Aristotle. It is only with the advent of psychological and anthropological criticism that we have considered looking beneath the surface, beneath the conscious, to try to discover whether there are subterranean reasons why man creates art, and why his fellow men are moved by it. I suggest, of course, that there are indeed such subterranean reasons, that we are moved by deep, unconscious factors, as I have just outlined, and therefore I feel that these produce a reaction to art rather different from the aesthetic involvement which I have described above. To distinguish what happens at a subterranean level, I shall call it racial involvement. Where aesthetic involvement is personal and conscious, racial involvement is collective and unconscious. The first is as old as one's age, the second is as old as the mind of man. I feel that, if a work is to affect us profoundly, then aesthetic involvement must occur first, or we are simply turned. off by a work's ineptitude; but, once we are gripped and involved and reacting aesthetically in a positive way to a great narrative, that is when a deeper level of response, racial involvement, is able to be awakened and called into play. The element of the narrative which calls forth aesthetic involvement is its literary and dramatic excellence, as described above; that which calls forth racial involvement is the structure of the narrative, by which I mean the extent to which the catastrophic pattern and details are embedded or embodied in it. The closer this structure comes to the catastrophic events, the more powerfully will the work affect us at a subterranean level, because the real events have been fixed in our unconscious memories as part of our racial inheritance, and thus we will respond deeply, albeit unconsciously, to a narrative which contains them to a high degree. As a result, I feel that only when racial involvement occurs will a narrative endure as a human statement meaningful to other men in different times. It talks to the future because it tells of the past. To be more precise, it is not simply the catastrophic parallels in a narrative which grip us, but, even more, the way in which the narrative is resolved. When it recalls the terrifying events of the past, but then moves to a unifying, harmonizing, stable conclusion, we accept and approve and applaud, for in such a narrative we have seen the racial fears exposed but then controlled, which means that we have not simply been reminded, but comforted. The fear has been brought forth only so that it can then be put away again in tranquility. It must be understood, however, that the artist who does this for us never has the slightest conscious inkling that this is what he is doing. if he did, he might never create at all. When he reproduces catastrophic patterns, in a process which no one yet understands, it all occurs at a level which, for want of a better term, I call unconscious, or pre-conscious, or transcendental, or instinctive. Somehow, without his being aware of it, the great artist's creative faculty can tune into the wavelength of our racial memories to find there the grand schematic designs of his art. This is what makes him an enduring artist, for, when the design is there, we respond to it subconsciously because it is also racially in us. Only the artist can produce the pattern, but all men can respond to it. Yet, there is a curious rider to this point. We are comforted by a great narrative, but we must never let ourselves consciously recognize that this has happened. We must act as if there were no anxiety, which needed comforting, and, therefore, as if such comforting could not have occurred. This is the ultimate in both having our cake and eating it - to use a great narrative to comfort our suppressed collective fears, and yet pretend there are no fears to be comforted. it is a game that we play with ourselves, so that we can endure the memories of the past. It is our way of feeling that we have the past - and thus the future - under control, and thus, when a certain work of art permits us to play this game as we want it played, we respond very positively. Yet neither side, creator nor receiver, knows that the game is being played; neither side consciously knows that such a game exists; but that is what is going on when a work of art remains meaningful to many generations of mankind - we are responding unconsciously to the catastrophic patterns and comforting resolution in it. It is a transaction between creator and receiver carried out entirely at an unconscious level. In presenting this; theory of literary creativity and response, I am not breaking ground, for, in one sense, I am following a path first set entirely new ground out by the advocates of archetypal criticism. This approach centers first of all about the ideas of Carl G. Jung, and in particular his concepts of the collective unconscious or racial memory and the archetype in dream, myth and literature. To Jung, all three forms of expression are rooted in the same ground, the universal human psyche, and so The great artist ... is the man who possesses "the primordial vision," a special sensitivity to archetypal patterns and a gift for speaking in primordial images, which enable him to transmit experiences of the "inner world" to the "outer world" through his art form [95] . In trying to explain both literary inspiration and literary function, Jung decides that ..... the artist is "man" in a higher sense - "collective man" - and that "the work of the poet comes to meet the spiritual needs of the society in which he lives." [96] A second major source has been the work of a group called the Cambridge Hellenists, who, early in this century, applied anthropological insights into myth and ritual to literature. Their inspiration was Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, and it is from these two roots - social psychology and cultural anthropology - that archetypal and mythic criticism have grown, in such landmark works as Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God. All of these people are concerned to discover the identity of the universal attraction in literature. For it is with the relationship of literary art to "some very deep chord" in human nature that mythological criticism deals. The mythic critic is concerned to seek out those mysterious artifacts built into certain literary "forms" which elicit, with almost uncanny force, dramatic and universal human reactions. He wishes to discover how it is that certain works of literature, usually those that have become, or promise to become, "classics," image a kind of reality to which readers give perennial response - while other works, seemingly as well constructed, and even some forms of reality, leave us cold [97] . They, and all serious students of the topic, unanimously assert that myth is truth, powerful and meaningful, and that it is somehow magically alive in literature. Concerning the origin of these archetypes, however, different schools of thought exist. For most traditional anthropologists, the images derive from natural phenomena, in particular the recurring seasonal and solar events, and are passed from generation to generation in ritual and myth. They are poetic, imaginative explanations of the world, inherited through cultural instruction and designed to promote fertility and thus life. For the Jungians, and, more recently, for anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, the archetypes are inherent in, or a product of the structure of, the human mind. Myth is therefore described as a sort of collective dream, built of universal, nonrational human components. As Jung says, ... these psychic instincts "are older than historical man ... have been ingrained since earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche." [98] Levi-Strauss seems to be arguing along the same line when he claims We are not, therefore claiming to show how men think the myths, but rather how the myths think themselves out in men and without men's knowledge [99] . It is here that I must part company with both schools, with the Frazerians because they derive myth and literature predominantly from vegetation cycles, and with the Jungians and Levi-Straussians because they are merely content to note that a tendency to produce archetypal images or patterns exists in the human mind, or psyche, and that such images or patterns exert a perennial and universal power over human imaginative response. They never seek to discover why our minds or our psyches, are set up in this manner. I feel, of course, that Dr. Velikovsky has shown us the answer, or at least one answer. if he's correct, then the archetypes are neither coded vegetation symbols nor natural manifestations of the constitution of the psyche or the brain, bur repressed memories of catastrophic events, which manifest themselves in disguise as the master elements in narrative art. for their continued power to affect us may emerge - they talk to us about our grandest conceptions, and comfort us about our deepest fears, fears we could not otherwise look at. Shakespeare is the most universal of narrative artists; his fables appeal to more men, in more different societies, from the most primitive to the most advanced, than any other body of created art. I have felt Or some years that this is partly because Shakespeare ' s works touch a number of universal chords, to which all men respond at a primitive, subconscious, almost instinctual level, but I have never been able to formulate with any satisfactory precision what those chords might be. Dr. Velikovsky may have supplied lied us with the answer. Now, if this be true, the implications go much further. In an address to the symposium on his work herd at Lewis and Clark University in 1972, Dr. Velikovsky referred to his early detractors - whose names are justifiably dirtied by history - as 'guardians of the skies. ' I'm not sure what he meant, but the phrase has intrigued me. Guardians of what? Or rather, from what? From the truth, I suggest, and this is the next point I wish to make. I am proposing that such people, recognized authorities in their field at the time, astronomers in the main, were not as interested in seeking for truth as in preventing certain truths from becoming known, and that the way they sought to achieve this was by present' partial truth which omitted so much that the resulting distortion did not approach the whole truth, but was virtually an untruth. In pretending to reveal, their intention was to conceal, and, most important, I suggest that all of this happened at a subconscious level. They did not consciously know why they behaved in this way. To grasp why they may have done this, we must compare these guardians of the skies to a psychotic or neurotic who has constructed successful delusional strategies against reality because he has no desire to face reality truthfully. He must therefore reject tune out, even attack, whatever conflicts with his delusions. In classical psychiatry, I am told, one of the most delicate steps in the process of cure is the way in which the doctor communicates to his patient the actual causes of his disturbed behaviour. If this is not done successfully, the patient will react with hostility and reject the truth outright. If we accept that collective man has produced various delusional defenses against the fear engendered by the collective trauma, as I have argued earlier, then he obviously has little wish to have the trauma revealed. He will fight tenaciously to retain his world of delusion, to conceal reality from himself. He will hate those who try to show him otherwise, and he will fool himself into ignoring the truth whenever he happens to come close to it. But man is a rational animal, even though part of him may be collectively disturbed, and so he must be very clever about fooling himself or he will see through the attempt. Furthermore, he will hate anyone violently who tries to show him what he is really doing. Now, it seems to me that the attacks upon Dr. Velikovsky have been basically irrational. An irrational act as I define it is one which appears to have no intelligent, reasoned motive, but seems to be performed upon deep inner emotional compulsion, against reason, and the attacks on Dr. Velikovsky seem to me to have been insanely compulsive. It is apparent that the normally intelligent and self-disciplined, even liberal people who suddenly became possessed by the fierce, total, unrelenting hatred which Dr. Velikovsky's ideas can provoke in certain cases were violating the most fundamental principles of order of their own professions. They were behaving like blindly hostile neurotics and never seemed to know it. In case after case the reaction was the same, as if all were suffering from a common madness, betraying their own selves. The cause of this phenomenon, I suggest, is that these people were not acting as scientists, or academics, but as people, man, frightened and neurotic man unwilling to face the truth, trying desperately to keep it concealed from himself. I would thus label the hostility to Dr. Velikovsky not so much an irrational reaction as an unconscious reaction - against the truth which their own theories had kept safely hidden, but which Dr. Velikovsky's theories threatened to reveal. I must emphasize again that these deeds, and the reasons for them, all originate subconsciously. Velikovsky's fanatical detractors did not and do not consciously know what they were doing, nor why, any more than a neurotic can recognize the basis of his hatred for the doctor who seeks to show him the truth about himself, but each type is nevertheless driven subconsciously to attack the truth in order to retain the lie which gives him comfort. And so they attacked him, to try to kill his ideas before they spread, before enough susceptible people would be infected by his plague. Their common madness on this point, so unlike what these people otherwise were, suggests a common cause - that Dr. Velikovsky was about to let a terrible skeleton out of the closet, and they were rushing desperately to try to shut the door. It is as if there were an unwritten, unspoken and indeed unconscious taboo against dealing with the possibility of catastrophism, and thus celestial instability, and Dr. Velikovsky, who had broken it, must be destroyed. That is why they are 'guardians of the skies. ' The astronomy and geology and biology which they had constructed was apparently true, but, being uniformitarian, it was only a partial truth, revealing enough to keep man happy, but concealing what man should not know. The implications go further, for, if we consider man in this light - striving to erect what appear to be perfectly rational intellectual disciplines, but which are actually carefully-disguised half-truths designed to suppress the whole truth from himself - then all areas of human endeavour become suspect. Is science the supreme disinterested search for truth, or a principal weapon in the fight against truth? In the play Macbeth, the two victorious Scottish generals Macbeth and Banquo are accosted by the Witches and given tempting predictions, some of which instantly come true. Macbeth appears to be succumbing, and so Banquo warns him But 'tis strange; And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's In deepest consequence. Perhaps it is the same, for example, with Newton and Darwin, whose descriptions of the cosmos and life respectively appear to explain all, but may in fact only explain enough to keep us from suspecting there is anything more, winning us with trifles while betraying us indeed where the consequences are deepest. The pictures these men paint have a very pacifying effect. They tell us that the universe runs like a clock, and that life on earth has been developing in an equally bucolic way. There are occasional lapses from form, like comets or tempests, but these, we are told, are minor aberrations, hardly noticeable in the long run against the slow, steady clockwork of the cosmos. Are these men purveyors of truth, or 'guardians' of celestial and biological mechanics? Are scientists unconsciously structuring their discoveries, not to give us the truth about our world, but to foster the illusion that we control it? Is science a collective delusion too? It may be that certain types of literary criticism function in the same way, for most criticism has been kept within safe bounds - character, plot, style, tone, theme, image, language - none of which will lead to the taboo question of catastrophism. It is perhaps not a coincidence that New or Formalist Criticism which is a desire to study a literary work in a vacuum, so to speak, has emerged in the last few decades coincident with our questioning of uniformitarian science. Formalist criticism looks at a work without reference to who wrote it, or when, or where, or what else he wrote, or what type it fits its into, or what else was being written at the time, or what traditions seem to have influenced the author, and so on. It may be that the closer we get to recognizing the truth about catastrophism, the more arduously has Formalist criticism tried to steer us onto purely aesthetic paths. I do not say it is wrong, any more than Newton or Darwin are wrong, but I do suggest that what Formalism excludes is more important than what it includes, and so the final picture which it offers is untrue. The Formalist critic may be the 'guardian of the fable. ' What I propose instead, in the realm of literary criticism, is a Velikovskian aesthetic, a full, multi-disciplined, completely honest approach to narrative art, and to drama in particular, the most public narrative art. Each instance must not continue to be judged exclusively as a private individual artifact, but, like war and government and myth, as a product of collective man in response to our collective nature and experiences; not simply in terms of what we consciously discover about what the author has consciously created, but in terms of unconscious collective motives which may drive artists to create and the unconscious collective ways in which we may respond to them. This is becoming more acceptable in the social sciences, where we admit the possibility of unconscious motivation in various fields of human behaviour, but we are not as willing to allow unconscious motivation, much less unconscious collective motivation, in narrative art. The result is a very limited approach to literature and drama. To analyze a novel, for example, strictly in terms of its purely literary characteristics, may be to miss the forest for the trees. It is like an opera teacher analyzing the purely vocal quality of a person's scream for help. The novel is of course a privately fabricated work of art, but it may be other things as well - a product of a certain group or time or culture or race, a reaction to certain common events or conditions, a product of man bearing a relation to other different human products - and therefore it must be analyzed not simply by a literary approach, but by a nonliterary or superliterary approach as well, one which is based upon historical and scientific and cultural insights in addition to purely literary concerns. Like war and the generals, narrative art is too important to be left strictly to the professors of English. When I say this, I do not mean to downgrade art, nor to imply that all examples, of good, bad or indifferent quality, are ultimately the same because they perform the same function. The work of art is one of the chief glories of mankind, one of the greatest products of the human spirit, but to say that, no matter how true, is to look at art in conscious aesthetic terms alone, to see it only with reference to deliberate artistic creativity and those standards relevant to that domain. What I have been discussing makes no attempt to undermine that type of approach, for narrative art can be many things at once, but rather tries to suggest that there may be other approaches, equally relevant ones, which see a work of art in different contexts. If art is judged as art, then questions of evaluation and interpretation are in order, for these are indeed some of the main functions of criticism. However, when art is considered anthropologically, as a human activity among other equally significant human activities, questions of relative artistic merit among different individual works are no longer relevant. Instead, one is concerned with the activity's function, its social purpose, to see what it can tell us about human nature, about what constitutes man. This sort of approach is neither better nor worse than the others, it is merely different, and equally legitimate. It does not seek to detract from one's enjoyment of, or admiration for, a great work of art, nor does it attempt to diminish the stature of created art. It rather hopes to enrich one's experience of the work itself by using the work as a key to gain insight into the nature of man. If we are indeed rational creatures, we must do no less. {S : Notes (Shakespeare and Veliovsky)} Notes (Shakespeare and Veliovsky) 1. See, for instance, Man and his Symbols, ed. with introduction by Jung, Carl G., (Dell Publishing Co., 1964) pages 56-71. 2. All quotations and line numbers from A Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the Signet Classic Shakespeare edition, ed. Clemen, Wolfgang, (New American Library, New York, 1963). 3. "Collisions and Upheavals", Pensée 2( 2): 8-10 (May 1972). Publ. Student Academic Freedom Forum, Portland, Oregon. 4. Ibid. 5. Welsford, Enid, The Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1927). 6. Young, David P., Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1966) Page 95. 7. Ibid 8. Young, op cit., Page 29. 9. Ibid, Pages 76-81. 10. Barber, C. L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1959) Page 148. 11. Sewell, Elizabeth, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1960) Pages 139-140). 12. Young, op cit., Page 153. 13. Ibid, Page 91. 14. Ibid, Page 90. 15. Ibid, Page 18 16. Barber, op cit, Pages 18-19. 17. Young, op cit, Page 20. 18. Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, Abridged edition (London, 1954) Pages 643 ff. 19. See, for example, Velikovsky, Immanuel, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950) Pages 305-311; (Pocket Books, 1977) Pages 309-315; (Abacus, 1972) Pages 292-299. All subsequent page references to Worlds in Collision will refer to these three editions. 20. In an interview recorded shortly before his death, the American folk singer Woody Guthrie related how, during a particularly severe dust storm in Texas at the time of the Depression, it once became so dark that daylight was virtually obliterated and the frightened farmers who had gathered in a flimsy shack feared that the world was about to end. He may have been speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but truth may be conveyed in jest, and the folk connection between anomalous darkness and the fear of worldwide cataclysm seems to be universal. 21. See, for example, Juergens, Ralph, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," Pensée, 2( 3) (Fall 1972) Pages 6-12 22. Worlds in Collision, Pages 259; 264; 251. 23. Worlds in Collision, Pages 160; 169; 161. 24. Young, op cit, Page 56. 25. All quotations and line numbers from Antony and Cleopatra refer to the Signet Classic edition, ed. Everett, Barbara, (New American Library, New York, 1964). 26. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Everett, Barbara, lntroduction xxv. 27. Worlds in Collision, Pages 176; 184-185; 176. 28. Velikovsky, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955) Pages 50-55; (Laurel Edition, 1968) Pages 56-61; (Abacus, 1973) Pages 46-51; (Pocket Books, 1977) Pages 46-61. 29. See, for example, Worlds in Collision, Pages 96-100 and 274-278; 110-114 and 274-278; 104-107 and 263-267. 30. Worlds in Collision, Pages 166 and 180-182; 175-176 and 188-191; 167 and 180-181. 31. Worlds in Collision, Pages 120-125; 132-137; 125-129. 32. Worlds in Collision, Pages 256-258; 261-264; 248-250. 33. Lee, Robin, Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. Studies in English Literature (Edward Arnold, London, 1971). 34. Ibid, Page 10. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid, Page 13. 37. Ibid, Page 11. 38. Ibid 39. Ibid 40. Ibid, Page 29. 41. Ibid, Page 20. 42. Ibid, Page 21. 43. Ibid, Pages 30-31. 44. Ibid, Pages 31-32. 45. Ibid, Page 33. 46. Ibid, Page 34. 47. Ibid 48. Ibid, Page 35. 49. Ibid, Page 36. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid, Page 41. 52. Ibid, Page 36. 53. Ibid, Page 51. 54. Ibid, Page 52 55. Ibid, Page 56. 56. Antony and Cleopatra, Introduction xxxv. 57. Davidson, Clifford, 'Antony and Cleopatra': Circe, Venus and the Whore of Babylon. Unpublished manuscript, Chapter V1. 58. Davidson, op cit, Page 150. 59. Ibid, Pages 152-153. 60. Ibid, Page 155. 61. Ibid, Page 154. 62. Davidson, op cit, Pages 154-155. 63. Ibid, Page 155. 64. Ibid. Page 158 65. Ibid, Page 165. 66. Ibid 67. Ibid, Page 152. 68. Ibid. 69. De Grazia, Alfred, Unpublished manuscript. As well, these ideas are treated in Professor de Grazia's paper in this volume. "The Palaetiology of Fear and Memory." 70. Davidson, op cit, Page 151. 71. See de Grazia, Palaetiology of Fear and Memory, especially pages 42 and 43. 72. Davidson, op cit, Page 167. 73. Ibid 74. Ibid, Page 154. 75. Worlds in Collision, Pages 259; 264; 251. 76. Davidson, op cit, Page 154. 77. Ibid, Page 167. 78. Ibid, Page 168. 79. Public address at the Symposium Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, June 16-19, 1974. 80. Davidson, op cit, Page 168. 81. Ibid, Page 170. 82. Ibid, Page 156. 83. Ibid, Pages 156-157. 84. Ibid, Page 170. 85. Ibid, Page 171. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid, Page 172 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid, Page 173. 90. Ibid. Page 172. 91. Ibid, Page 151. 92. Ibid, Page 174. 93. Ibid, Page 175. 94. For support of this concept from a different quarter, see Parry, Thomas Alan, "The New Science of Immanuel Velikovsky," Kronos 1( 1): 3-20 (Spring 1975). Parry explains the process of collective amnesia from a neuropsychological point of view. Recent discoveries concerning the nature and functions of the right hemisphere of the brain, he writes. support Dr. Velikovsky's holistic, intuitive, psychiatric approach to myth and religion. Parry's conjectures upon collective memory and forgetting also relate to de Grazia, op cit, and to the contention of this book that art is a sublimated retelling of terrible history. 95. Guerin, Wilfred L. et. al., A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (Harper and Row, New York, 1966) Page 136. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., Page 116. 98. Ibid, Page 135. 99. Leach, Edmund, Levi-Strauss. Fontana Modern Masters (Fontana/ Collins, London, 1971) Page 51. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 6: } {T CATASTROPHISM AND UNIFORMITY} {S : A Probe Into The Origin of the 1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology*} RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER SIX CATASTROPHISM AND UNIFORMITY A Probe Into The Origin of the 1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology* George Grinnell History Department McMaster University [* This article has been subsequently published in Kronos: A Joumal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis (Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J.) 1( 4): 68-76 (Winter 1976).] "I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself," Charles Babbage wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell on May 3,1832, "would only injure the cause, and I therefore willingly leave it in better hands." Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1828-1839) at the time, a dabbler in geology, theology and manufacturing, who had recently made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in Parliament. In 1837 he was to publish his The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, an attack on the theology of the Anglican establishment, and in 1851 he was to carry the attack into the Tory camp in his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, the purpose of which was to argue that wealthy Tory amateurs had a stranglehold on science policy and were discriminating against socially less well positioned scientists, who were more deserving of support. Charles Lyell (1797-1875), to whom he was writing, had just published the second volume of his Principles of Geology (Volume 1, 1830; Volume 11, 1832; and Volume 111, 1833), a work written in support of political liberalism although ostensibly it was an objective work in science free from any political implications. In his letter of May 3rd to Lyell, Babbage was explaining why he would not write a favorable review of the book. Quite wisely, the Whig scientists, like Babbage, Lyell, Scrope, Darwin and Mantell, did not want the public to know that what was being promoted as objective truth was little more than thinly disguised political propaganda. The purpose of this paper is to explicate what Babbage means by the word "radical," and the word "cause," when he writes, as quoted above: "I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself would only injure the cause, and I therefore leave it in better hands." The first part of this paper investigates the political implications of early 19th Century Geology. The second probes the nature of Babbage's and Lyell's "cause," and the last part of the paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this investigation for Velikovsky's theory of collective amnesia. {S : PART I: } {Q THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF EARLY 19TH CENTURY GEOLOGY} PART I: THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF EARLY 19TH CENTURY GEOLOGY In 1807, Humphrey Davy wrote to his friend William Pepys: "We are forming a little talking geological dinner club, of which I hope you will be a member." Of the original thirteen members, four were doctors, one was an ex-Unitarian minister. Two were booksellers; another, Comte Jacques-Louis, had fled the French Revolution. Four were Quakers, and two - William Allen and Humphrey Davy - were independently wealthy amateur chemists. Only one, George Greenough, had any training in geology or mineralogy. He had paid a visit to the Academy at Freiburg some years earlier along with Goethe, but did not by any stretch of the imagination pursue the subject for a living. He was a Member of Parliament. Indeed, what is extraordinary about the London Geological Society is that none of the original members were geologists. "The little talking dinner club" as Davy put it was a club for gentlemen given to talk, not to hammering rocks. The following year twenty-six Fellows of the Royal Society joined, including Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Philosophical Society, and the year after the number of members had jumped to 173. The "little talking dinner club" concept became unfeasible; apartments were rented instead; there was talk of publishing transactions, and Sir Joseph Banks, fearing that the Geological Society would soon grow bigger than his prestigious and ancient Royal Philosophical Society, 'resigned in protest. By 1817, only ten years after its founding, the Geological Society had more than 400 members, and in 1825 it was incorporated with a membership of 637. The founding and early growth of the London Geological Society is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Earlier scientific societies, like the Royal Academy in France and the Philosophical Society in London, had a much broader base. There had been a few abortive attempts to start specialized scientific societies in chemistry and botany, but they had come to nothing. The Geological Society of London was really the first specialized scientific society and its early growth was unprecedented, and, in fact, very difficult to account for, especially when one recalls that its early members were almost all doctors, lawyers and Members of Parliament instead of persons actively engaged in what we would now consider to be geological pursuits. Of the first Presidents (Greenough, Buckland, and Murchison), George Greenough was a Member of Parliament, the Reverend William Buckland was Dean of Westminster, and Sir Roderick Murchison was an independently wealthy retired Army Officer. That is not to say that there were no persons in England actively engaged in what we would now consider to be geological pursuits, for indeed, England at the time was going through a crash program of canal building and mine exploration and was about to enter the railroad age, but one is hard-pressed to find these working geologists on the membership list. William Smith, for instance, the most famous drainage engineer of the age, who discovered the technique of correlation of strata by means of fossils, and is generally mentioned in modern geological texts as the key geologist of the era, was not invited to join the London Geological Society. Perhaps he was too busy doing geology to have time to talk about it, but if the truth be told, the London Geological Society was a group of talking amateurs whose interest in Geology was not for its application to mining and canal digging, but for its theological and political implications, which were crucial to the social stability of England and were thereby by no means irrelevant to the early development of geology. The term "geology" had only recently been introduced by the Swiss Diluvialist, de Luc. In the Medieval University curriculum one finds no place for the study of the earth, which was deemed corrupt, a product of the devil, and therefore not worth studying. The Medieval Catholics believed, following Plato, that geometry, numerology, harmony and astronomy better reflected the wisdom of God than did the study of things of this world, but the Protestant Reformation had changed all that. Between the years 1680 and 1780 some five hundred books and articles were published on geology ranging from Bishop Burnet's popular Sacred Theory of the Earth, which ran through seven editions between 1681 and 1753, to J. T. Klein's scholarly monograph on a single class of fossils, Dispositio Echinodermatum (1732). The Protestants were keen to demonstrate that God's handiwork was as easily seen in this world as in the next, and particularly they were eager to demonstrate the literal truth of the Bible which declared that God had not only created all the creatures of the earth, but had also brought down the Deluge to punish man for his sins. Shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Catholic monarch was driven out of England, a rash of works appeared eared reconciling the book of Genesis with the new research into Nature. Most successful of these was John Woodward's Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth, in which he explained the stratigraphic sequence of rocks by supposing that during Noah's flood, all the surface rocks of the earth had been dissolved by the sea, later to be gradually precipitated out into the stratigraphic sequences which now comprise the secondary formations. Because the Woodwardian idea preserved the theme of Genesis, that the flood was caused by divine decree to punish men for their sins, it was favorably received by the Anglican Church and later became, at the hands of the Tories, a major bulwark in their defence of monarchy. In 1728, the Woodwardian professorship was founded at Cambridge, the first academic recognition of the field of what is now called "geology," and his ideas were articulated not only in England, but also on the continent, particularly in the popular classes of Abraham Gottlieb Werner at Freiburg later in the century where Greenough, von Buch, Maclure, Jamieson, Berger, and most of the other founders of geology studied. In pursuit of Woodwardian Geology, a number of anomalies occurred, in particular a lack of correlation between New and Old World strata, as well as overlays of basalt and granite in what were supposed to be secondary deposits. As a result, Leonard von Buch and Georges Cuvier modified the early diluvial theory into a more general catastrophic theory of the earth in which the earth was seen as not having suffered one catastrophe, but numerous catastrophes of which the Deluge was but the most recent. To deny catastrophism altogether was to deny the truth of the Bible, and hence the theological implications of early geology were quite clear. In 1673, Bishop Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin of France, had drawn up his arguments in favor of kingship into a treatise: Politics drawn from the very Words of Holy Scripture argued that monarchy was the most common, the most ancient, and the most natural form of government. The key word there was "'natural." He argued that Nature provided evidence of being ruled by a divine monarch, God Himself, King of the Universe, and that a King was then emulating God when he ruled with absolute authority: "Thus we have seen monarchy take its foundation and pattern from paternal control, that is from nature itself" Bishop Bossuet writes, and the British spokesman for monarchy, Robert Filmore, echoed Bossuet's words. Monarchy was natural, because all of nature was ruled by a divine absolute monarch, God himself. In the course of the 18th Century, as democratic sentiments grew not only in America but throughout all of Europe, the political theory of Bossuet and Filmore was seriously challenged. John Locke in his Treatise on Government and Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Discourses argued against the naturalness of monarchy in favour of a social contract theory of government. But to prove that monarchy was unnatural, it was necessary to prove that the Bible's description of the Deluge was inaccurate, that God had not created the animals and the plants of this earth, and that he had not introduced catastrophes to punish man for his sins, for these were the biblical and geological models upon which monarchial theory was based. In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, accompanied by Erasmus, Darwin, and later by Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Simon LaPlace, the Scottish liberal geologist, James Hutton, published his Theory of the Earth, in which he attempted to demonstrate that Nature was not governed by a divine monarch, but by fixed geological laws of volcanic uplift and erosive weathering. Hutton's friend, Adam Smith, was at the same time arguing in favour of a laissez-faire economic policy, in which paternal monarchical power was again eliminated in favour of a free-ranging liberalism. "Some Judicious persons, who were present at Geneva during the troubles which lately convulsed that city," the Reverend William Paley writes in a counter attack against the new liberalism in his The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (5th edition corrected 1793), "thought that they perceived in the contentions there carrying on, the operation of that political theory which the writings of Rousseau, and the unbounded esteem in which these writings are held by his countrymen, had diffused amongst the people. Throughout the political disputes that have within these few years taken place in Great Britain, in her sister Kingdom, and in her foreign dependencies, it was impossible not to observe, in the language of the arty, in the resolution of popular meetings, in debate, in conversations, in party general strain of those fugitive and diurnal addresses to the public, which such occasions call forth, the prevalency of the ideas of civil authority which are displayed in the work of Mr. Locke. Such doctrines are not without effect; and it is of practical importance to have the principles from which the obligation of social union, and an extent of civil disobedience are derived, rightly explained and well understood." Paley then went on to explain them not only in the ensuing 567 pages of his Moral and Political Philosophy but also in the two volumes of a much longer work on Natural Theology in which the' cosmological foundations of monarchy were once again reiterated. The "cause" then to which Babbage was referring when he wrote to Lyell: "I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself would only injure the cause" was that of discrediting Paley and the other Tory Monarchists through an attack on its geological and theological foundations. {S : PART II: THE CAUSE} PART II: THE CAUSE After the Napoleonic Wars, England had fallen into a severe depression. Governmental demands for military supplies ceased and there was no market for British goods overseas. To add to the distress and general unemployment, nearly 400,000 troops were demobilized with no place to go. in order to protect the British farmer from imports of cheap grain, the corn laws were instituted in 1815 preventing the import of grain until the price had reached 80 shillings a quarter, a price so high that laborers were starving without being able to pay for it. Although the corn laws were passed to protect the British farmer, they had a devastating effect on British industry and on the towns of the industrial midlands. High food prices drove not only the workers into starvation, but also small businesses into bankruptcy. The Tory solution to the problem was to advise the lower classes not to breed so copiously. Still the towns of the industrial midlands continued to grow mostly, as it turns out, from an influx of the younger sons and daughters of poor farmers. Manchester, for instance, was a small town of 4,000 in 1688. A century later it was ten times that size, and by the time Lyell published his Principles of Geology, it was approaching half a million, most of whose inhabitants lived in wretched conditions. Malthus classified towns like Manchester, along with wars, famines and plagues, as a natural check on the population because the death rate was so high. On August 16, 1819, a crowd of unemployed, underpaid, and underfed inhabitants of Manchester gathered at St. Peter's Field to hear a speech on Parliamentary Reform and repeal of the corn laws. The local militia from the countryside, fearing a rebellion, attempted to arrest the speaker. In the fight that ensued, several were killed and many injured. The monarchist Tory government instituted the "Six Acts" which curtailed the right of free speech and forbade the training of persons in the use of arms. England was on the verge of revolution - the Liberal industrial midlands versus the Tory monarchists - but the memory of the French Revolution was still fresh among the middle class. They wanted reform in Parliament, not riots. But to reform Parliament meant answering Paley's arguments, and this entailed destroying Paley's Natural Theology. Paley had argued that sovereignty descends from God to the King; the people are his subjects. Because Parliament is an advisory body, if the king is content with its advice, then there is no need to reform it. The fact that Parliament did not represent the present distribution of people in England, Paley argued, was irrelevant since sovereignty did not stem from the people to begin with. Sovereignty descended from God. Paley's arguments were amazingly effective. His treatise on Moral and Political Philosophy, in which he argued that "it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed" was required for memorization before students could graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. The only way the Liberals from the midlands could get Parliament reformed was to demonstrate that the scientific foundations of Paley's Natural Theology were false, and this meant destroying diluvial geology and catastrophism. In 1825, Lyell's Liberal cohort George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876) published his Considerations on Volcanoes in which he transformed the arguments of the Tories by which every time they ascribed a natural event to God, Scrope ascribed the same event to a Volcano, and thereby attempted to revive the geological theories of James Hutton. So perfect - were the laws of volcanic uplift and erosion which God had created at the beginning of time eons ago, Hutton and Scrope argued, that no more had been seen of God since, nor was there any need of him to run the affairs of the universe, any more than there was need of a king to interfere with the natural and intrinsic laws of economics and of society. Scrope's book was too radical for the London Geological Society at that time, and it was dismissed without a hearing. Scrope, the son of a wealthy London merchant, bought himself a seat in Parliament and pursued the cause by more direct means. But without a cosmological proof that monarchy was unnatural and that sovereignty belonged to the people, the Liberals remained relatively powerless. Undaunted by Scrope's failure the young Whig lawyer Charles Lyell now tried his hand at destroying the geological foundation of monarchical theory. In his Principles of Geology he took a much more subtle line than had Scrope. In the 100-page introduction to the Principles, Lyell argued not so much that the diluvial theory was wrong, as that it was mythological and impeded the '. 'progress" of geology. In the first volume he went on at great length concerning the forces of erosion and the effects of volcanic uplift in what was a brilliant avoidance of all evidence of catastrophism. it was just what the moderates were looking for. They rallied around Lyell and elected him first Secretary and then President of the Geological Society. "By espousing you," Scrope wrote to Lyell on April 12, 1831, "the conclave have decidedly and irrevocably attached themselves to the liberal side, and sanctioned in the most direct and open manner the principle things advocated. Had they on the contrary made their election of a Mosaic geologist like Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox would have immediately taken their cue from them, and for a quarter of a century to come, it would have been heresy to deny the excavations of valleys by the deluge and atheism to talk of anything but chaos having lived before Adam. At the same time I have a malicious satisfaction in seeing the minority of Bigwigs swallow the new doctrine upon compulsion rather than from taste and shall enjoy their wry faces as they find themselves obliged to take it like physics to avoid the peril of worse evils. I feel some satisfaction in this." In this day and age when geology is far removed from religion and politics, and when political issues are settled by election rather than at meetings of geological societies, it is difficult for us to understand the extent to which the social shift in world view which took place not only in geology but in astronomy and natural history, was related to the Great Reform movement of 1832. All were part of the far more general shift in world view from paternalism to liberalism, but the persons responsible for engineering this shift were very conscious of what they were doing. "It is a great treat to have taught our section-hunting quarry men, that two thick volumes may be written on geology without once using the word 'stratum'," Scrope wrote to Lyell on September 29,1832, after Lyell's second volume appeared. "If anyone had said so five years back, how he would have been scoffed at." Just as the Conservatives had refused a hearing to the Huttonian camp earlier, now the Liberals pulled the same tactics when they got into power. The stronghold of catastrophism lay in a stratigraphy where unconformity and nonconformities, to say nothing of massive conglomerates, told of wide-ranging geological disasters of the past. Lyell, like Scrope before him, simply suppressed the evidence which did not fit in with his doctrines, and once he was voted into power, the catastrophists found it increasingly difficult to publish their research. The Liberal take-over of the Geological Society, and the suppression of evidence favoring the catastrophic position did not come about overnight. Rather, there was a slow assimilation of catastrophic data until there was virtually nothing left to the theory as a whole. When, in 1839, Louis Agassiz attempted to argue in favour of catastrophism with his theory of ice ages, the uniformitarians simply adopted all his evidence, but reinterpreted it in uniformitarian terms. Thus the data did not change, but the gestalt by which that data was organized and given coherence was transformed from catastrophism to uniformitarianism just as the social structure of England was changed from Tory paternalism, in which sovereignty descended from God down to the King, to the new Liberalism, in which sovereignty ascended up from the people through Parliament to its Ministers. Ironically enough the political battle which underlay the catastrophist-uniformitarian debate of 1832 is now long over, but owing to the paradigmization of science, the uniformitarian gestalt is still assiduously cultivated at universities and in professional geological societies. The "cause" for which Babbage, Scrope, and Lyell were fighting is now long since over and we should feel free to look again at the geological evidence itself, which, if the truth be told, provides ample evidence for catastrophism as it always has. {S : PART III: CONCLUSION} PART III: CONCLUSION In 1905 physics had been in a dilemma, some of the evidence from optics indicated that light moved in waves, other evidence indicated that it moved in particles. The two concepts seemed contradictory, but Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were able to show mathematically that the two concepts were actuallv complementarv and provided us with a fuller picture of reality if we accepted them both. Perhaps today geology is in the same situation. We have inherited from our ancestors the idea that either catastrophism must be correct or uniformitarianism must be correct, but not both. The reason they put this as an either/ or proposition was political. Either sovereignty belonged to God and the King, or it belonged to the people; it could not belong to both. Therefore geology had either to go with the Tories to catastrophism, or with the Liberals to uniformitarianism; it could not go both ways. Today we no longer have to worry about that. From the evidence of geology, it seems quite clear that both theories are correct: the normal course of events is indeed as Lyell describes it (gentle uplift and slow erosion), but there is also ample evidence that Velikovsky is correct as well and that the earth has indeed been subject to some severe catastrophes as he has so convincingly argued in his Earth in Upheaval In this paper I have attempted to make five major points: first, the London Geological Society, which gave birth to the uniformitarian paradigm, did not originally consist of a group of practicing field geologists, but was comprised of gentlemen, Members of Parliament, clergymen and lawyers, who were primarily concerned with the political and theological implications of geology at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 when the concept of monarchical sovereignty was being challenged by the Whigs and defended by the Tories. Second, that the London Geological Society has been split into two camps, with the Tory catastrophists prevailing before 1832 and liberal Whigs, under the leadership of Lyell, Scrope and, later, Darwin, taking over in the second quarter of the century. Third, that "uniformitarianism" was promoted by the Liberals as part of "the cause" to undermine the theoretical foundations of monarchy and was not derived from-field research. Fourth, because the Tories were using repressive tactics in politics to prevent the reform of Parliament, the social tension spilled over into the geological debate causing the intense interest in geology in the 1820's and 1830's, and the exponential growth of the newly founded London Geological Society. The Liberals, by seizing control of the London Geological Society before the Reform Bill was passed, presaged what was soon to follow in the political arena. And, fifth, once in control, the Liberals attempted to cement their hegemony by repressing the catastrophists and by assimilating their data. In the ensuing years of the 19th Century, geology became fully Professional and dogmatic. It became a scientific heresy to believe in the catastrophic theory. The reaction of the scientific community to Velikovsky was one of instinctive repression, not because Velikovsky was wrong, but because it basically fears that he may be right. Turning now, in closing, to the question of cultural amnesia, I have found little evidence that the Liberals had "forgotten" the catastrophes of the past. Rather the evidence for catastrophism was politically embarrassing to them. At times they may appear to have repressed evidence, but actually they believed in their own liberal vision so strongly that they sought more to reconcile the evidence of catastrophe to this vision than to repress the evidence. If Liberal scientists and historians have remembered too much the peaceful times, it may be that their unconscious has been seeking more a reconciliation of the past catastrophic experience with their present experience of peaceful times, than a repression of those terrible ancient events. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 7: } {T LIVING WITH VELIKOVSKY:} {S : CATASTROPHISM AS WORLD VIEW} RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER SEVEN LIVING WITH VELIKOVSKY: CATASTROPHISM AS WORLD VIEW Patrick Doran Department of Anthropology McMaster University In this paper on catastrophism and its consequences, I consider Velikovsky and "the new Anthropology"; this work removes the study of man from its present scientific, cyclical world view and places it in an apocalyptic cosmos. This is only a shift in perspective. The spadework, and most of the superstructure, have been done long ago at the formation of the world religions, as Velikovsky argues so convincingly. I will present evidence that the New World Hopis built their cosmology on catastrophism. For a present-day example, the authors of the Whole Earth Catalogue illustrate a prototype gestalt which lives with a consciousness of catastrophe. The pioneering effort in this paper lies in appreciating Velikovsky's contribution to an existing paradigm of catastrophism. My theologian friend, David Arnott, the Vicar of Roundshaw in London, England, read Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision while I visited him recently. His criticism: "The fact that a society is interested in a catastrophic understanding of the cosmos is more indicative of the state of the society than of the nature of the cosmos." This seems fair. We know that people seek world views which complement and support their own perception of reality. So to some real extent the participants of this symposium have already embraced the possibilities that earth exists in a cataclysmic universe, and that man already may have experienced global collisions. An historian of science doesn't have to look far for the roots of these perceptions. Western, industrial man, whose imperial grasp has embraced all the sources of information upon which Dr. Velikovsky draws (from the New World Codices to the extensive geological records), is the same man whose philosophy and religious tenets became bankrupt, as Nietzsche's madman proclaimed before the turn of the century. Although this announcement went unheeded, the same message assumed material form in the massive destruction of the World Wars, and by the more widespread trauma heralded by Black Tuesday in 1929. When we consider that this same Man devised the atomic holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can appreciate the setting for an understanding of a cataclysmic cosmos. As participants in a new paradigm, we need not disregard the societal grounds of our being. To those whose consciousness matured during the sixties, the fact of catastrophe becomes the gateway to understanding - the first prerequisite. This catastrophic consciousness even has its own annotated bibliography: the Whole Earth Catalogue, an already articulated paradigm which shouts "Rejoice! The apocalypse has already occurred." I shall argue that the Catalogue was conceived as a post-apocalyptic document providing the readers with a sketch of the new world which unfolds once global catastrophe has surfaced to consciousness. My own appreciation of this consciousness arose first from infatuation with Anthropology. My readings attempted to explore a basic canon of works dictated by Pope's maxim: "the proper study of mankind is man." I thought I was doing strictly exploratory work (Jacques Ellul and the nature of technological society; Lewis Mumford and his thesis of the symbiosis of man and his use of tools; searching for spiritual truths of the aboriginal natives of this continent, the James Bay Cree, the Oglala Sioux, the Yaqui sorcerer, the potlatch, the Hopi ceremonialism; learning to keep bees and not sell honey; Arthur Koestler; developing a detailed awareness of the ecological crisis from Rachel Carson to the politics of the 1970's, from Edward Hall's The Hidden Dimension to Buddhist meditation). All these seemed random pursuits, but to my great surprise they proved to be part of this articulated paradigm with annotated bibliography, the Whole Earth Catalogue. Both start with a cosmic view of disaster - the common "given" is a view of the eggshell fragility of Planet Earth and its delicate biosphere. But whereas I speak prosaically, the Whole Earth Catalogue sings. It is poetic. It quotes from The Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton: The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl set in spangled ebony. It was nacreous, it was opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness, I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake. The Whole Earth Catalogue began in 1968 as an ad hoc freak enterprise "Access" was its key concept - how to link up people with tools in a form that would promote the development of an ecological gestalt. Its editor, Stewart Brand, provided a clue to the precepts of this gestalt in an editorial entitled "Apocalypse Juggernaut, Hello": As if the spirits of our ancestors weren't trouble enough, now we're haunted by the ghosts of our descendants. Ken Kelsey claims that ecology is the current handy smoke screen for everybody's Dire Report... I tend to view the whole disaster as an opportunity to try stuff. If you take all the surprise-free projections for mankind's near future and connect them up, they lead neat as you please right into the dead-end meat grinder. The only Earth we had, used up. (Page 233) The devotee of the Whole Earth Catalogue's peculiar compendium of survival tactics assumes that the catastrophe has already occurred, or is now occurring. The agent may be seen as social unrest or the industrial poisoning of the biosphere. For example: the January 1971 Whole Earth Catalogue Supplement devotes one page to Albert Speer, architect, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production for Hitler, writing as a prisoner: I thought of the consequences that unrestricted rule, together with the power of technology - making use of it but also driven by it - might have in the future. This war (II) had ended with remote-controlled rockets, aircraft flying at the speed of sound, atom bombs and a prospect of chemical warfare ... A new great war will end with the destruction of human culture and civilization. The nightmare shared by many people . . .. that some day the nations of the world may be dominated by technology - that nightmare was very nearly made a reality under Hitler's authoritarian system. Every country in the world today faces the danger of being terrorized by technology; but in a modern dictatorship this seems to me to be unavoidable. Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology. According to Stewart Brand, the living experiment of the Alloy community was the setting in which the Whole Earth paradigm began to unfold. Alloy was held in the New Mexico desert between the Trinity Bomb Test Site and the Mescalero Apache reservation, March 20-23,1969 (the Vernal Equinox). 150 people were there. They came from northern New Mexico (communes), the Bay area, New York, Washington, Carbondale, Canada, Big Sur, and elsewhere. They camped amid the tumbleweed in weather that baked, rained, greyed, snowed and blew a fucking dust storm. Who were they? (who were we?) Persons in their late twenties or early thirties mostly. Havers of families, many of them Outlaws, dope fiends and fanatics naturally. Doers primarily with a functional grimy grasp on the world. World thinkers, drop-outs from specialization. Hope freaks. They left behind their proverbs recorded in the catalogue. Here's one: "There's a lot of people who want the Apocalypse. Instead of looking at it as the death force, there's a possibility of the emergence of something new, a reshuffling of the deck." The Catalogue looks around for what might be salvaged from the great midden-heap of civilization. According to proverbs from Alloy: "You're just saying that there is in reality no guarantee that life will continue. The right to live is a fiction. It's a pretense at a political reality." The Whole Earth Catalogue says: yeah-yeah, you thought the liberal democratic uniformitarian world system was bust, but you didn't know how bust. First, let's look at the big picture. You're too close. Back off and survey the big picture and old mysteries will clear up for you and other mysteries will arrive ... among the discoveries ... is that this lovely place Earth is scarcely inhabited and scarcely habitable. Stare into the void. (Page 7) The apocalypse has already occurred. And what might you want to know in order to live in this newly collapsed world? The massive information bank of the Whole Earth Catalogue aims to expand the capacities of each human individual so as to increase his survival potential. ... Surprises ... is what we (man) are here for. The standard Operating Law when a species is in a bind is to diversify. Multiply alternatives. If you don't know what's coming, the way to evolve ahead of the changes is to try everything. (S. B. - Page 233) The Catalogue redefines human potential, and provides access to tools for each to begin exploration in their brave new world; it acknowledges the godhood of humanity and challenges man to accept the responsibility. Although it may seem that only the selfish and egocentric would interest themselves in learning to survive while the rest of humanity perishes, that can be only the criticism of an outsider to this world view. Once the paradigm is embraced, adventure, joy and the drama of discovery, with its colossal blunders and momentary awards, provide the necessary spiritual tutorship - the centering knowledge to live in the present - to be here now. As one of the conscious inhabitants of this globe, Man is awakened from his lethargy by the sound of alarm bells: crisis. The veil of amnesia has been lifted, the result is the awakening of consciousness, whether the apocalyptic agent is perceived to be an extra- terrestrial jostling, or biospheric poisoning, atomic weaponry overkill, or overpopulation; or whether one has experienced the disintegration of his world view by chemical inducement a magical mushroom or the fabled LSD. The generation of the Whole Earth Catalogue has experienced the catastrophe and, consistent with Dr. Velikovsky's amnesia theory, they no longer itch to re-enact the primordial paroxysm that heralded our present age - the bomb has gone off. We acknowledge the Russian Roulette of the planetary system. People are dying all around us. We live in the now. Now what?! Much of the philosophy that the cataclysmic paradigm looks to is found in the eastern spiritual teachings. Eastern man has honed his consciousness as assiduously as we have developed our technology. He learned that to comprehend the cosmos, he must look into the void. "THE VOID?!" Western man declares, "Why there's nothing there." This is the most terrifying prospect for material man to envision. For centuries we have codified laws, erected structures and systems, and designed labyrinths to cushion us from even a hint of nothingness. Rational Apollonian scholarly Western man needs more than the ecstatic revelations of an Eastern mystic to reveal the nature of the cosmos. And this is the great contribution of Velikovsky. Velikovsky not only argues in consummate detail (in the finest of Western scholarship), he not only uses Western methods to illuminate his truths. He uses Western sources to prove his case! His work reinterprets our own canons of knowledge, the whole Hebraic heritage and the very precepts of the scientific tradition. These are the building stones of his new cosmology. From the genesis of Judaism, with the flight out of Egypt during catastrophic circumstances, to the frontiers of modern physics, his theory is revealed. Better than affirming the possibility of catastrophe, Velikovsky has provided an argument in Western terms for a catastrophic cosmology. This symposium is in fact a celebration of the acceptance of the legitimacy of Velikovsky's work. Far from being a crisis-induced scramble for an apocalyptic band-wagon (a revival in the scholarly world, as so many established academics regard it, of the gloom-and-doom popular hysteria fads about the end of the world) it is more the reaffirmation of much that modern, progressive, liberal democratic science has shunned or railroaded completely out of existence. Probably each participant to this symposium is attracted by a particular aspect of Velikovsky's work. Appropriate to the physician's calling, Velikovsky has provided the fragmented specialization of the multi-versity with the cool healing of an interdisciplinary synthesis. For my part, I celebrate the reaffirmation of an historic universe where unique events inevitably alter our course. This affirmation of the Hebraic side of our heritage counters science's preponderant influence from the Greeks and their cyclical cosmos, their search for harmony in the heavens. With an historic perception, the mysterious potential to life is reaffirmed. If we are in a paradigm shift of which Velikovsky is an integral part, it is partly as a reaction to the confining vision of man that science imposed. For science's cosmos operated by laws, and eminently knowable laws at that. The corollary: knowing those laws provides science with manipulative power over that which operates by the laws, whether people or principles of aerodynamics. Science has restricted too far the vision of biotic potential; it has obscured past, present, and even future with predictability, and hence monotony. The catastrophic paradigm celebrates that which is mysterious in the nature of life. This is Wendell Berry's Manifesto for the Mad Farmer Liberation Front in the Whole Earth Catalogue: Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything made. Be afraid to know your neighbours and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even the future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card, and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the World. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who doesn't deserve it. Give your approval for all you cannot under stand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant and you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested - when they have rotted in the mould. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion - put your ear close and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts..... As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. (W. E. C. - Page 25) The mysterious open-ends what is possible, unlinks the chain and rejuvenates the world. Velikovsky's thesis began with a reappraisal of the view that myths were founded on material reality. His cross-cultural comparisons argue for a common material reality for all the survivors of the last global upheaval. This interpretation acts as a great restorative to the effect of the sludge which the functional schools of interpretation have hardened over our understanding of world mythologies. Let us read the first revelation of the Hopi's historic and religious world view of life with this new acceptance of its validity. The Hopi hold that our planet has experienced three world ages and that this is the fourth. Each age has been terminated by physical apocalypse which has dramatically altered populations, bringing some to the fore and casting down others. Each has set fresh conditions for the possibilities of life on this globe, and dramatically altered the consciousness of survivors. In describing the end of the second world age, they first tell of moral decay and the inadequacy of man to hold up his part in the song of creation; then: ... as on the First World, so again Sotuknang called on the Ant people to open up their underground world for the chosen people. When they were safely underground, Sotuknang commanded the twins, Palongawhoya and, Poganghoya, to leave their posts at the north and south ends of the world's axis where they were stationed to keep the earth properly rotating. The twins had hardly abandoned their stations when the world with no one to control it, teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled over twice. Mountains plunged into seas with a great splash, seas and lakes sloshed over the land; and as the world spun through cold and lifeless space, it froze into solid ice. Quite clearly the basis for the Hopi cosmology is a catastrophic view of existence. They, like the Israelites, began this age amidst a violent upheaval which initiated their migrations in search of their chosen land. Their goal, on the bleak mesas of the American southwest, is ... to sustain forever responsibility for the well-being of the world. Theirs is the mysticism not of change, but of the stability of the yearly cycle of one winter's food at a time. Now you have experienced this paradigm travel full-circle; for these lines are from the review of the Book of the Hopi, contained in the Whole Earth Catalogue. Velikovsky argues for the integrity of the Hopi cosmology with material reality. The Hopi provide us with an archetypal response of life to a cataclysmic consciousness. Concern for the welfare of the earth unites the new anthropology to the wisdom of the Hopi. I have attempted to show that catastrophism is a current paradigm which Velikovsky provides with a Western mythology. Since the writings of Thomas Kuhn, we acknowledge that one of the properties of a theory is its contextual basis in an existing, but often unarticulated, cultural milieu. My prime concern has been to explore the implications of living with the knowledge of catastrophism. Here is the best statement of this calling my years of ecofreaking have uncovered, authored as "The Four Changes" by poet Gary Snyder, and, of course, contained in the Whole Earth Catalogue: Our own heads: is where it starts. Knowing that we are the first human beings in history to have all of man's culture and experience available to our study and being free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity - the first members of a civilized society since the early Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our self-hood, our family, there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are - which gives us a fair chance to penetrate into some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea of 'man's survival' or 'the survival of the biosphere' and to draw our strength from the realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process which is actually beyond qualities and certainly beyond birth-and-death. 'No need to Survive !' 'In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of kalpa what survives? ' - 'The iron tree blooms in the void! ' Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to move from. Patrick Doran {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C Chapter 8: } {T AFTERWORD} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA CHAPTER EIGHT AFTERWORD Immanuel Velikovsky The symposium draws to a close. I appreciate the effort made by the organizers on behalf of this University and the members of the faculty who participated as moderators; the dedication of those of you who came from afar to read the prepared papers, and of those who have followed my work with interest and devotion, some over many years since 1950, others who have become new adepts. I appreciate those who participated in this is symposium by listening to two days of papers on the subject of "Cultural Amnesia." My work has ramifications in many fields of knowledge. Once I had begun to understand that global catastrophes caused by extraterrestrial agents had occurred, I had to face problems in many fields. First I had to check in each field to determine the current situation and evaluate the prospects for revision. As soon as you accept that a global catastrophe has occurred, many problems thought to be insoluble solve themselves. In geophysics the origin of mountains is not established, nor is the origin of ocean salt. Palaeomagnetic changes and reversals create unsolved problems. The cause of dramatic changes in climate is not understood. Exactly at those times when I determined that the catastrophes took place there were records of unexplained changes in the ocean level. Since its inception in 1859 the theory of evolution has altered the ways in which we think to such a degree that even philosophy has become a branch of Darwinian evolution, and is helpless to solve the problems that it creates for itself. Before the theory of evolution emerged it had been maintained that our Earth was created in six days. Slow evolution replaced instant creation. But was Darwin's theory right? No, it was only partly so. This has become increasingly apparent in the last twenty years, and it should have been apparent early in this century when mutations were first observed. There are problems in astronomical cosmology where we attempt to explain how everything came into being and how it attained its present state. Neither the Nebular theory nor the theory of tidal disruption can fully explain the creation of the Solar System. Neither the Big Bang nor the Steady State theory explains the beginning of the Universe. No single solution exists, no one theory is flawless. In celestial mechanics the dogma persisted until very recently (and still persists today with some astronomers) that gravitation and inertia are the only forces that affect celestial motions. Yet many astronomical motions are more readily understood when electric and magnetic forces are included as the evidence now clearly requires [1] . Frequently, I am called upon to speak to gatherings of space-scientists [2] . 0n such occasions I ask the assembled physicists and engineers if there is anyone present who still claims that Jupiter with its magnetosphere can travel through the interplanetary magnetic field without being affected, or if the satellites of Jupiter can travel through the magnetic field of Jupiter without being affected by it. Thousands have heard me lecture, yet I have never seen one arm raised, whether I spoke at Harvard, Princeton, or NASA. In 1950 my claim that electric and magnetic forces acted in the cosmos was considered my greatest offense. Even before Worlds in Collision was published, Einstein warned me that the importance I placed upon electricity and magnetism in cosmic problems would be violently attacked by other scientists. But I stood my ground. Especially it appeared to me that sun-grazing comets are carried around the Sun by electric and magnetic forces in preference to gravitational forces. This is, of course, not yet proven. Other critics told me that the greatest minds of the past had established with exact precision the ability to predict eclipses centuries in advance on the basis of only gravitation and inertia acting in the cosmos. But I was not dismayed, I met the competition head on, whether the opposition criticized me fairly, as in the case of Einstein with whom I argued often for long hours and exchanged quite a few handwritten letters [3] . or whether the criticisms were attacks and defamation. The attacks do not help me to complete my work. Several other fields besides celestial mechanics must also be re-examined. How must global catastrophes affect the interpretation of ancient civilizations? What significance do the surviving relics of those civilizations have for the archaeologists and historians? We have to re-examine the meaning of mythology. The Freudian ideas that traumatic experiences cause the human race to be possessed by irrational motives, such as the urge to self-destruction, is of fundamental importance. In 1950, the appearance of my work created a new phenomenon in the politics of science. Never in the history of science has there been anything comparable to what has happened in the last twenty-four years. In the 15th and 16th centuries when there were no newspapers, radio, or television, wholesale repression of an idea was extremely difficult. Communication was slow, usually by exchange of letters [4] . But even when more rapid communication became possible, nothing occurred which could be compared to the violence and the dishonesty of many incidents in the "Velikovsky Affair." As a subject of discussion, of papers, and of graduate dissertations, the "Velikovsky Affair" has become a favourite subject on campuses across the country (although I speak about the United States I assume in Canada too) for sociologists and historians of science. No one can possess the knowledge required to be an expert in so many fields [5] . Equally, we cannot understand the happenings in various fields if those fields are examined in isolation. Nature is one: it is not subdivided into departments or separated compartments. No one can spend enough time to emulate the ancient philosophers like Seneca or Aristotle who discussed all of the knowledge of their day. Yet the understanding of nature becomes a question of interdisciplinary synthesis. Generalization is increasingly being favoured by the scientific press. It is clear that no progress can be made discussing an interdisciplinary subject as a whole. This is why I published different evidence in separate books, like Earth in Upheaval, where I deal with stones and bones and evolution. There is not a single reference to anything from our human heritage. There were many references in Pliny, Strabo, Herodotus, and the ancient Egyptian sources that I could have used profitably in that volume, but I resisted. The geological evidence had to stand on its own merits. Although we recognize the interconnection between fields, each field needs to be discussed within its own frame of reference. In defense of my theory I have had many confrontations. in particular, I remember one confrontation at Brown University, some seven years ago, when I was pitted against four specialists: one in Babylonian mathematics, one in astronomy, one in physics, and one in geology. I stood alone. At the AAAS meeting in San Francisco just two months ago I participated in a similar debate which lasted seven hours. The audience showed by their standing ovation that they took my side, the side of the heretic. I had shown that the very same problems which plagued scientists in one field were identical to the problems in the next field. Common problems plagued the astronomer, the geologist, and the historian of Babylonian mathematics. Each of these specialists spoke about the very same subject without recognizing it. This year there are five symposia discussing my work [6] . At each I will face assembled experts and defend my work in each separate field. I have now a more serious problem. The new idea which I have provided now spreads like wildfire. Discussion on one campus leads to invitations to other campuses, the invitations increase in geometric proportion. Just two hours ago I received an envelope containing an invitation to travel to Montreal for another series of lectures. I have much to do: I started late in life. I was forty-four when I arrived in this country for an eight-month sabbatical. I have remained thirty-five years, the prisoner of an idea. I did ten years of work before the publication of Worlds in Collision. Shortly thereafter, my second book, Ages in Chaos, Volume One was published. The second volume of this latter work was already in page roofs and I called them back for elaboration. For the past twenty- two years I have elaborated upon Ages in Chaos, making the original second volume into four new volumes [6A]. I must now ask the question, at my age, with only one short year and a month away from being an octogenarian, can I continue to attend meetings and debate these issues? Can I continue to answer questions which are sent to me? Can I advise scientists, and write articles for Pensée? Each task is a heavy load by itself. At the same time I will do my utmost while I am still physically able to finish those books which are now partially complete. I have a manuscript for a book which discusses catastrophes which precede those described in Worlds in Collision. I mentioned something of these catastrophes in my talk yesterday. Most important, I must complete the manuscripts for the four remaining volumes on ancient-history, Ages in Chaos [7] . would like this series, my Opus Magnum, to be as complete as possible. It is my Opus Magnum even though the main problems are in cosmology, psychology, and geology, and not in ancient history. When I asked the question, could the catastrophes that are described in the ancient sources be correlated between Egyptian and Biblical sources, I discovered a systematical chronological error in ancient history. To my amazement, I discovered that descriptions of' ancient history were confused; acccepted dates meant nothing. For the past twenty-four years scholars have debated whether the beginning of the reign of Ramses the Second should be moved from -1289 to -1303. As I show in Ramses II and his Time, this debate has absolutely no meaning if Ramses belongs at the end of the seventh or at the beginning of the sixth century before the present era instead of centuries earlier. Another volume deals with the Dark Age of Greece. In it I will show how the Homeric Problem can be eliminated [8] . No documents or buildings have survived from the Dark Age, the ancient Greeks never mentioned it and seemingly knew nothing of it. its removal gave me great satisfaction, and should exhilarate Greek scholars, because the last link to a misguided Egyptian chronology can now be severed from Greek history. The traditional Egyptian chronology was devised hundreds of years before the first hieroglyphics were ever read, and was based upon erroneous astronomical calculations. In a recent issue of Pensée [9] I published a paper discussing the astronomical basis of chronology. Can anyone who has read this paper seriously believe in the traditional chronology based upon fallacious astronomical calculations? Imagine twelve hundred years of ancient history as the span of a bridge. Though this span does not include all of ancient history, it does cover the period from the end of the Middle Kingdom to the time of the second Ptolemy. I tore down one abutment in Volume One of Ages in Chaos (which not every critic has seen or read) and now I am ready to do the same thing to the second abutment in my next book, Peoples of the Sea. How can the middle span between two abutments survive? It will topple down. Even with the revision chronological problems will remain, but their number will be greatly reduced. I need more of you to follow my path, I need help from those of you who can take my work seriously, read my books, consider what I say, agree with my principal thesis, but then dig a little deeper to find its flaws. I don't need more critics who never bother to read my books (like the critic from this University who obviously never read Ages in Chaos before speaking critically about it). I can't expect all critics to be positive, but critics who are negative should at least be constructive. Wherever in my studies I encountered an apparent difficulty on the way to a solution, experience has shown that the difficulty usually opened a doorway to a new pathway; beyond it lay a whole new vista. New solutions in one field provide the way to new understanding in other fields. Of course, I have left many problems unsolved, I am not omniscient. My work is not without error: I am dedicated, but I am only human. I realize the scope of what I have discovered and I have been fortunate to live to see parts of my theory confirmed. So many innovators have not lived to see any of their claims confirmed. The history of science abounds with such cases. All innovators are iconoclasts. They never start with a majority; always they begin as a minority of one. I believe that now is the time for me to go into seclusion and wait. When my new volume appears in print I must let the storm that may occur blow itself out. If I take time to visit universities I will do so only to find dedicated young men, capable of following new ideas: men of courage who are willing to consider ideas which are not very acceptable when they are first put forward. Such men must be prepared to drop their ideas when facts show them to be wrong. Here on this campus I heard to my satisfaction that my ideas have been seminal, that members of the faculty belonging to various departments that once had no common interest now have much to discuss. This evening at the Chancellor's Dinner 10 I will stress how my effort has provided a common coefficient for scholars in different 'subjects. I ask for help from the younger generation who have already educated themselves in one or another field which touches upon my work, to do those tests that I cannot perform, to supply me with literature that I have no time to find, and to give me criticism when I err. I want to hear from those of you who already do such research. I want to hear in what fields you do your research and how it is proceeding. I am interested in your work, whether it is the study of the ancient kings, geology, or genetics. In this auditorium I am probably the oldest in years, but in spirit I am among the youngest. I invite the younger among you, not just those who are young in age, but the young in spirit to add your efforts to my own. Don't just be listeners, don't just be autograph seekers. If you can, do your share. I have started, you must continue. I am not the best listener, my eye is better than my ear. Yet I am a very slow reader, but what I read I usually remember. Sometimes I quote from books that I read as a child and have not seen for seventy years. My memory is very selective, I can't remember telephone numbers, but I remember chronological data with ease. If I must memorize a telephone number because I call it frequently, I connect it with some chronological dates, and then I can retain it. I appreciate the efforts in preparing the papers for this symposium. Certainly something has been achieved. There are many new ideas included in, the papers presented here by de Grazia, MacGregor, Mullen, Wolfe, Grinnell, and Doran. And with these words, I repeat my thanks to President Beckel, Chancellor Oshiro, Vice- President Holmes, to the members of the Senate, to the members of the Faculty, to those who read papers, and to those who came to listen to somebody who was once a heretic, but whose prayer is that his works should never become a dogma. Again, I thank you all. {S : Notes (Afterword)} Notes (Afterword) 1. The importance of electric and magnetic phenomena in the solar system is not yet fully appreciated by scientists. The discovery of extensive planetary magnetospheres, the interplanetary magnetic field, the solar wind, the emission of radio noises by Jupiter, the existence of net electrical charges on the Sun and probably upon the planets, and the non- Newtonian behaviour of the solar prominences indicate that electric and magnetic phenomena occur in all parts of the Solar System. 2. Dr. Velikovsky has lectured recently at several scientific centres and universities. 17 February 1972 - Harvard University 10 August 1972 - N. A. S. A. Ames Research Centre 15 - 17 August 1972 - Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon 10 October 1972 - Graduate College Forum - Princeton University 15 October 1973 - Expanding Awareness Program, IBM San José Research Centre 10 December 1973 - N. A. S. A. Langley Research Centre He has participated in seminars and staff briefings with scientists working upon the Mars Viking, the Venus-Mercury Mariner, and the Jupiter-Saturn Pioneer Space Probes. 3. In 1921 Velikovsky and Einstein collaborated in publishing a series of monographs, later collected in two volumes, Orientalia et Judaica, and Mathematica et Physica under the common title of Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum. Velikovsky was the general editor and Einstein edited the mathematics and physics volume. 4. Dr. Velikovsky is implying that heresies such as Galileo's could spread outside the confines of the specific jurisdiction where they were published. Poor communications allowed the heresies to flourish elsewhere because the central authority was slow to hear that the heresy had spread and by then counter edicts would arrive too late to extinguish the heresies. [Ed.] 5. It took Dr. Velikovsky five years to acquire the knowledge necessary to interpret the evidence needed to write Earth in Upheaval. 6. In 1974 there were five separate symposia organized by separate organizations or institutions. At each a different aspect of Velikovsky's synthesis was discussed. Although Velikovsky participated at all five symposia, he was not involved in initiating or organizing any of the symposia. The five symposia were: Velikovsky's Challenge to Science, 25 February 1974. American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, California. Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, 9-10 May 1974, The University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta. Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System, 16-19 June 1974, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Velikovsky's Reconstruction of Ancient History, 30 October 1974, Pittsburgh Historical Forum, Dusquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Velikovsky and the Politics of Science, 2 November 1974, Philosophy of Science Association, Notre Dame University, Indiana. 6A. See note 7 below. 7. That these four volumes have taken twenty-two years to complete is indicative of the thorough scholarship exhibited by Dr. Velikovsky. Two of the four volumes Peoples of the Sea, which covers the Persian Period (-524) to the second Ptolemy (-279), and Ramses II and His Time, which covers the period of the Chaldean Domination (-611 to -524), had been typeset for printing at the time of this Symposium. The former volume is now published. The latter will be released by Doubleday and Company Inc. (New York) in April 1978. In the remaining two volumes Dr. Velikovsky discusses the Assyrian Dominations, the New Assyrian Empire to the fall of Ninevah (-829 to -611), and the Dark Age of Greece (see below). These two volumes have yet to be completed [Ed.] 8. The Homeric Question is a five-hundred year Dark Age interposed between the historical period of Greece and the Mycenean-Minoan eras. 9. "Astronomy and Chronology", Pensée 3( 2),: 3849 (Spring-Summer 1973). This article appears as a supplement to Peoples of the Sea (Doubleday, 1977). 10. 10 May 1974. See Appendix II. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C APPENDIX I} {T ABOUT THE AUTHORS} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA APPENDIX I ABOUT THE AUTHORS Brief biographical sketches of each of the authors are reprinted here. These sketches are adapted from the introductions given the speakers during the Cultural Amnesia Symposium. {S : IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY} IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY It is my honor to introduce tonight's speaker, Immanuel Velikovsky. A few in this audience know Dr. Velikovsky very well indeed and need no introduction. Some others know a good deal about him and about his work and very little introduction is required. So my remarks will be directed mainly at those who know something, of his work but perhaps not very much of the man himself. Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 in Vitebsk, Russia; the youngest of three sons of Simon Velikovsky, businessman and Hebrew scholar, and Biela Grodenski, a fluent linguist. Moving to Moscow he enrolled at the Medvednikov gymnasium where he excelled in Mathematics and Russian and graduated with a Gold Medal in 1913. He then proceeded to Montpellier in Southern France to study Medicine, sojourned briefly in Palestine, then enrolled for further medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Home for the summer vacation in Russia at the outbreak of World War 1, he graduated in Medicine from the University of Moscow in 1921. For the next three years Dr. Velikovsky lived in Berlin immersed in scholarly publishing, and attempting, among other activities, to establish a Jewish academy. There he met and married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist, who happens to be with us at this conference today. In 1924 the Velikovskys moved to Palestine where he practiced first as a general practitioner, and later as a psychoanalyst in Jerusalem, Haifa, and TelAviv. During this period he commenced research on Freud's heroes, Oedipus, Akhnaton, and Moses. To further his growing commitments to this research Dr. Velikovsky and his family visited New York in the summer of 1939. Influenced to remain in America through the forces of world events as well as the course of his own research, he became interested in the theme of catastrophes that he identified running throughout his studies of ancient records. From 1940 to 1950 he researched and wrote Ages in Chaos and Worlds in Collision. In 1950 the latter volume was first published by Macmillan; and in 1952 Doubleday published the first edition of Ages in Chaos. In 1955 Earth in Upheaval appeared, and in 1960 Oedipus and Akhnaton. Currently Dr. Velikovsky resides in Princeton, New Jersey, where more scholarly works are in various stages of preparation. But such a simple and sketchy recording of dates and places leaves so much unsaid about the distinguished speaker at tonight's session, and it lacks the basis for insight into his works. For example, it does not adequately describe a young lad maturing in a household steeped in learning; his mother-tongue Russian, mastering Hebrew at four, German at six, French at seven, Latin at twelve, and finally English - the eventual language of his famous publications. Nor the goals of his father, transmitted in part to the son, to recreate Hebrew as a living language, to redeem Israel, and to found a Jewish academy. Nor does the skimpy record reveal the ambitious youth repeatedly denied admission to the University of Moscow because of his Jewish ancestry, only to enroll in the Free University in Moscow maintained by dissident professors who had resigned from the Imperial University in protest against violation of academic freedom. Nor the rebel who once abandoned studies to explore with religious passion the ancient ruins of the Holy Land. Nor does it portray the young intellectual who with burning zeal co-published a series of volumes of the works of outstanding Jewish scholars, assisted by Albert Einstein, who edited the scientific section, and encouraged by Chaim Weizmann, later to become the first President of Israel. Nor the early papers on Freudian psychology written by the over-burdened practicing physician in Palestine. Nor does my sketchy biography depict properly the excitement and stimulation of the discovery of the Ipuwer Papyrus, the key that unlocked the Egyptian record of catastrophe. Nor the eleven years of persistent painstaking search for worldwide evidence of cataclysm; first into the library in the morning, last to leave in the evening, with no sabbaths or holidays permitted. Nor the laborious and meticulous recording of notes from more than 4,000 volumes for Ages in Chaos alone. Nor does it depict the reluctance to plunge into inevitable conflict with astronomers, but the equally inevitable conviction of the cometary origins of cataclysm. Nor the notorious attempts to suppress publication of his results and conclusions. Finally, neither does it begin to suggest the intellectual excitement that the examination of Velikovsky's works and ideas have engendered at this University of Lethbridge. The records do report this concluding remark by Dr. Velikovsky to a graduate college forum at Princeton University, and I quote Imagination coupled with skepticism and an ability to wonder - if you possess these, bountiful nature will hand you some of the secrets out of her inexhaustible store. The pleasure you will experience in discovering truths will repay you for your work; don't expect other compensation, because it may not come. Yet, dare. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. - Owen G. Holmes (The University of Lethbridge) {S : ALFRED DE GRAZIA} ALFRED DE GRAZIA It is not an easy task to introduce so eminent a scholar as the one I am to present now. To do justice to the excellent records and achievements of Dr. Alfred de Grazia would deprive you of at least half the time allotted for this session. For example, just some of the universities with which Dr. de Grazia has been affiliated at one time or another include: Chicago, Minnesota, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Bombay, Istanbul, and Gothenborg. So I will not go into detail. As a political scientist, Dr. de Grazia is well known for his work, Public and Republic, and more recently, Politics for Better or Worse, published last year. But Dr. de Grazia is more than a political scientist. His interests in other disciplines and activities are well attested by works such as he produced when publisher and editor of The American Behavioral Scientist; creator of the Universal Reference System; his book Kalos, which incorporates some of his own thoughts for future world order, and, of course, editor of the important volume The Velikovsky Affair, published in 1963. Dr. de Grazia is currently Professor of Social Theory and Political Psychology at New York University. Now, as to his personal data, I can tell you that he was born in Chicago and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The University of Chicago in 1939 at the age of 19. His military career began at the rank of Private and moved through to the rank of Captain. His family background, he has told me, includes an uncle by the name of Charlie, "Kid Lucca," who won the Canadian Boxing Championship in 1910 in nearby Calgary. While I could go on for quite some time adding interesting background points for you, I feel I should cut this introduction short and let the eminent speaker speak for himself. I'm sure all of you will enjoy his talk. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to present Dr. Alfred de Grazia. - F. Q. Quo (The University of Lethbridge) {S : JOHN M. MACGREGOR} JOHN M. MACGREGOR John MacGregor obtained an honours degree in Art History at McGill University. Following this, he went to Princeton, where he spent the years 1966 to 1971 qualifying for a Masters Degree and completing the course requirements for the Ph. D. degree. During these years Mr. MacGregor also conducted research in Morocco and in Germany. Mr. MacGregor's studies have included various aspects of Psychiatry and Psycho-analysis. In 1967 and 1968 he studied with Dr. Rollo May at Princeton. Following this he was a guest at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka. He underwent analysis with Jolande Jacobi at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, followed by intensive Freudian analysis in Montreal. Mr. MacGregor is a member of the American Society for the Psychopathology of Expression. His teaching activities give us some indication of his interests and of his competencies. He has lectured on the history of Chinese Landscape Painting, Chinese Art and Archaeology, Theoretical Investigations into the Art of Children, and Introduction to the Study of Art and Psychiatry. Without further introduction, I present you John MacGregor. - George Sanderson (Saint Francis Xavier University) {S : WILLIAM MULLEN} WILLIAM MULLEN I am very pleased to be here to introduce one of our speakers today. I am also pleased to take part in this conference as a member of the Department of History and the University of Lethbridge. This is not because I have come here either to praise Dr. Velikovsky or to see him buried, but rather because I Support an old tradition, which goes back to New Testament times at least. when en the matter of Christian preaching by the apostles was raised before the Jewish Sanhedrin, one member of that body, Gamaliel, made the point that if what the apostles taught were true, it would prosper; if it were not, it would fail. And I would say much the same thing: if what Velikovsky has to tell us is true, it will stand, if not it will fade away. But only through conferences such as this will we be able to ascertain what the truth is. John Milton once said: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties"; while John Stuart Mill pointed out in his famous work On Liberty that if only one among all men presents a new and novel idea, even though it be heresy to some, it should be given a full hearing. I hope, therefore, that we are within the spiritual tradition of those two great men when we examine the ideas of Velikovsky and not the man himself. I am proud that the University of Lethbridge has sponsored discussions respecting Dr. Velikovsky's ideas so that we will have the opportunity to listen, to evaluate and to reason. And, therefore, with that in mind, I hope you will give your attention and due respect to our next speaker, Dr. William Mullen. Dr. Mullen completed his undergraduate work at Harvard between 1964 and 1968, with a B. A. in Classics - in Latin and Greek - and his graduate work at the University of Texas, between 1968 and 1971, where he received a Ph. D. in Classics. Between 1971 and 1973 he taught as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, and in the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies. He now holds a post-doctoral Research Fellowship, and is at present Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University.* He has done work on the Pyramid Texts from the Pyramid of Unas in the 5th dynasty, he has publications on the Odes of Pindar and translations of Egyptian Hymns and Laments, as well as articles on Dr. Velikovsky's interdisciplinary syntheses and a reading of the Pyramid Texts in the light of catastrophisms. He is associate editor of Orion, a journal of Classics and the Humanities published from Boston University, and Associate Editor of Pensée Magazine. He will speak at McMaster University next month on the subject of the Meso-American Record Myth and the Science of Catastrophism. Dr. Mullen ... - M. James Penton (The University of Lethbridge) *Dr. Mullen is now Assistant Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Boston University. {S : IRVING WOLFE} IRVING WOLFE "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact." Thus the Duke Theseus in Act V Scene I A Midsummer Night's Dream concisely expresses his theory of the Springs of Art. It is a fortunate accident, I hope, that I lit on A Midsummer Night's Dream to introduce Dr. Wolfe, since he tells me that he is using the Dream as one of the central plays in his presentation this afternoon. Theseus goes on to elaborate his theory of the Springs of Art in a familiar passage which I would like to read to you. It goes on "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/ Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; /And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen/ Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name." Now in context in the play it is clear that Theseus is rather ambiguous; about this approach to art, ambiguous about the nature of the poetic imagination and about the nature of its products. The Velikovsky Symposium Committee is fortunate then to have found in Dr. Irving Wolfe, a person who has been working on precisely this question, and who is able to illuminate something of this ambiguity about the nature of the creative process, that elusive thing in which we students of literature are particularly interested, and, I think, the aspect of Dr. Velikovsky's theories, which particularly attracts people in literary disciplines, Dr. Wolfe was educated at McGill University and later at Bristol University where he took a Ph. D. in Drama; he is presently Professeur assistant, Department d'études anglaises, l'Université de Montréal; he teaches there Shakespeare and Drama, in particular, and his contemplation of Velikovsky's theories over the years has led to the formation of a theory about the sources of art, based particularly in his study of Shakespeare. And so I would like you to welcome Dr. Irving Wolfe. - LR. Ricou (The University of Lethbridge) {S : GEORGE GRINNELL} GEORGE GRINNELL It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Grinnell of McMaster University. Dr. Grinnell is an assistant professor of History whose special area is the history of science. He completed his Bachelor of Science at Columbia University in 1962, his Master's Degree at Berkeley in 1964 and his Ph. D. at Berkeley in 1969. He has had a colourful background. Prior to pursuing his academic career he tried to be a free-lance writer but, as he says, without success. After two, no doubt scintillating, years in The Signal Corps of the U. S. Army he joined the Moffatt Expedition which crossed the tundra by canoe in 1955, the films of which were shown on the T. V. program "Bold Journey". The next year, 1956, he was stage manager for the Downtown Theatre Association in Greenwich Village. Currently he is completing a book on the sociology of scientific knowledge. The history of science can give us, I think, a unique perspective not only of the past but also of the present. And by doing so can help us understand the present. Dr. Grinnell's paper tries to help us understand what has come to be called "The Velikovsky Affair" by, I believe, fitting it into a larger historical content. Dr. Grinnell ... - R. M. Yoshida (The University of Lethbridge) Patrick Doran I think it is fair to say that when most of us speak of catastrophism we do so in past or future terms, rarely considering the implications of our involvement in a catastrophe. Patrick Doran, on the other hand, I think might best be described as a present-tense catastrophist. He has notably been involved in a survival-day project in 1970, and was also national co-ordinator of a nationwide effort to bring to the attention of the federal government the ecological catastrophes in which we are presently involved. He was introduced to the ideas of Dr. Velikovsky in 1968 through a course given at Selkirk College, and has been personally involved with Dr. Velikovsky in the pursuit of the comet Kohoutek, which he subsequently followed to Hamburg, Germany. Presently Mr. Doran is, in his own words, "keeping bees and following the new anthropology". it is the latter subject on which he will speak today. Mr. Doran ... - Don Thompson (The University of Lethbridge) {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C APPENDIX II} {T HONOURARY DEGREE AWARDED TO IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA APPENDIX II HONOURARY DEGREE AWARDED TO IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY On 19 March 1973 the General Faculties Council of the University of Lethbridge passed a motion unanimously recommending "that Immanuel Velikovsky be granted an Honourary Degree Doctor of Arts and Science at the Spring Convocation of 1974". This motion was forwarded to the Senate of the University for consideration. At the Senate meeting, held on 7 April 1973, the recommendation from General Faculties Council was approved and the Senate voted unanimously to award Immanuel Velikovsky the degree Doctor of Arts and Science, Honoris Causa. In this appendix are letters and addresses relevant to Dr. Velikovsky's appearance to receive this honourary degree. April 12,1973 Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky 78 Hartley Avenue Princeton, New Jersey 08540 U. S. A. Dear Sir: The Senate of the University of Lethbridge recently voted to accept the unanimous recommendation of our General Faculties Council that you be awarded the degree of Doctor of Arts and Science; the degree to be conferred at the Spring Convocation in 1974. The presentation of your name stressed the quality of your life as a humanitarian, a humanist and a scientist. Many supporters among the faculty in the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Sciences came forward to speak on your remarkable books and your teaching generally. You were seen as embodying our tradition of humane values, of intellect, of aesthetic sensitivity, personal ethics and of the transcendental dimension of scholarship. The University wishes to confer this degree on you at its Spring Convocation in 1974, a year from now. We try to make decisions on the awarding of Honourary Doctorate degrees well in advance of conferring them. l will admit that we usually delay contacting the recipients until rather close to the Convocation at which the degree will be conferred. In your case we wanted you to know of the award at the earliest possible time, particularly as we are pleased at the prospect of honouring you and we are convinced that you have not been properly honoured in the past. Would you let me know whether you are prepared to accept the award of our Doctor of Arts and Science, and whether, all being well, you contemplate coming to Lethbridge to have the degree conferred on you in the Spring of 1974. 1 enclose a calendar of our University and some general information brochures to give you some familiarity with us. Sincerely, J. Oshiro, M. D. Chancellor April 30,1973 Chancellor J. Oshiro, M. D. The University of Lethbridge Lethbridge, Alberta Dear Dr. Oshiro: Your very amiable letter with enclosed printed material was unduly long in transit - I received it before the weekend. You may be aware that your General Faculties Council followed by the Senate of the University made a selection and an unprecedented decision in the Academia: I have not been yet honored with any honorary degree. This, however, was never a source of disappointment to me: I was aware of the revolutionary character of my studies and findings. Today these views of mine are no more so heretical much of what I wrote entered the textbooks and the curricula even if in some disguise. If everything goes well, my wife and I shall come to Lethbridge a year from now. I thank you, dear Chancellor, the General Faculties Council, and the Senate of the University of Lethbridge. Truly yours, I. Velikovsky {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C APPENDIX III} {T ADDRESS TO THE CHANCELLOR'S DINNER} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA APPENDIX III ADDRESS TO THE CHANCELLOR'S DINNER The University of Lethbridge Cafeteria Friday 10 May 1974 Introduction by Dr. Ian Q. Whishaw, The University of Lethbridge: When I came to the University of Lethbridge four years ago I found that the University was formed with a philosophy that it devote itself to a multidisciplinary approach to learning. A year later when we moved to this new campus, I found that the building was specifically designed to foster interaction between various academic departments. To go anywhere in the building one has to use the main concourse and this creates an interaction between people who would not ordinarily meet. Well, philosophy and architecture can help foster, but cannot completely guarantee, a and approach to learning. For someone like myself who has specialized for four years in the study of the hippocampus, the methodology which we were to use to foster a multidisciplinary approach to learning was not clear. Last year it became a little clearer to myself and others after reading Dr. Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision. We were struck not only by the imagination and scope of his ideas, but more specifically were profoundly impressed by the way in which he had gathered evidence from' such a vast number of academic fields as disparate as mythology, psychology, and physics. It was out of respect for his approach to knowledge and a belief that the ideals which he expressed were ideals which this University would like to incorporate that we proposed Dr. Velikovsky - for an honourary doctorate in Arts and Science. We were aware at the time, and became more aware as time went on, that the nomination would cause controversy. After looking at the architecture of the building, however, we felt that a little controversy would not shake it off its foundations. In regard to controversy, I have a story to tell. Cajal, a Spanish anatomist and Golgi, an Italian anatomist, through their studies came to quite opposite ideas about how the brain was structured. In 1906 they jointly received the Nobel Prize, although the evidence overwhelmingly supported Cajal. What is so interesting in this case is that Cajal came to, and could only have come to his correct understanding by using the technological and methodological procedures developed by Golgi, and it was the controversy between these two men which led to the neuronal theory of brain organization which is the foundation on which modern neuroscience is established. What I think this shows is that we should not fear controversy or turn our backs on controversy, for controversy may be an essential ingredient for the advancement of knowledge. I would now like to introduce Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, who has had such a tremendous influence on our thinking over the past year, and who, I am sure, will have a continuing influence on our ideas in the future. I give you Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. Dr. Velikovsky: Chancellor Oshiro, President Beckel, Members of the Senate, Guests. Originally I came to this University in response to the invitation from the Chancellor' who wrote explaining that the Senate had by unanimous vote invited me to accept an Honourary Degree in Arts and Science. I accepted this honour and responded that I would repay the honour by making this University the first and the only one from which I would receive an Honourary Degree. I announced earlier today at the Cultural Amnesia Symposium it is very questionable whether I accept any other Honourary Degrees in the near future if they demand appearances and participation in various ceremonies or dinners. Considering the time left to this mortal, considering the gift for procrastination with which I was endowed, postponing my work, postponing the publication of many volumes until this decade which will make me an octogenarian (in less than thirteen months), I believe I cannot permit myself the luxury of any more time away from my work, excepting to go to symposia. After I accepted the offer of the Honourary Degree, a second invitation came, asking me to participate in a Symposium dedicated to one special aspect of that revolution of which I was by chance the originator - Cultural Amnesia. This Symposium has produced much discussion over the past two days, including two long speeches which I have already delivered today, so I will not fatigue either you, or myself, with a third long speech; I will only say that it has been worthwhile coming here, because I have discovered that a greater honour was accorded me here than just offering me a degree of Doctor of Arts and Science. It pleases me to know that in this University the various departments, which have been separated from one another by the very nature of their disciplines, have suddenly found a common ground. They have started to communicate with one another: physicist to historian, historian to biologist, biologist to geologist, geologist to astronomer, and so on. They have found a common subject, a common theme, they have found a way to realize the purpose and idea behind the statement of philosophy for this University, which is to create an environment in which interdisciplinary synthesis can occur. And so here I have found that my work has brought ferment, and this is a great satisfaction to me. I was pleased to find that scientific research has already begun in some of the departments, based upon ideas that were expressed in, or that followed from, my own work. I heard of the work of Dr. Stebbins (Department of Biological Sciences) and of Dr. Parry (Counselling Centre). if the ideas that these men have in their minds can be substantiated, they will produce great revolutions in their field of endeavour, and I will be very happy if I have in some way contributed to their beginning. I asked myself the question: should I accept the Honourary Degree? If I agree to accept an Honourary Degree I lose my virginity. Until now, I had no Honourary Degree nor did I care for any; my only distinction was a gold medal from the gymnasium. I considered that my books were proof of my scholarship, my credentials. Those who read them can see from the references, which I give in the footnotes, the amount of work that has gone into my books. It is therefore of more satisfaction to me to know that in some universities there are special courses which discuss my work. I believe there are almost one hundred such courses. To me this is a distinction: Not every man who has an Honourary Degree (and some have fifty Honourary Degrees) will see his work studied during 'his lifetime. I thought I would die an iconoclast, and that the next generation, my children or grandchildren, would be privileged to see me honoured. It gave me pleasure to find truth, or at least to search for truth; and what I found gave me satisfaction. And sometimes I even found pleasure by being able to hold back my ideas for many years, knowing I was the only one to possess this knowledge. This is part of the reason why some of my books are still in manuscript form when they should long ago have been in print. And so I decided to come here to receive this Honourary Degree in the name of all those who were initiators, who followed their pursuits in solitude - the iconoclasts, the scientific revolutionaries who are always in the minority: actually a minority of one when they started. If it were a question of opinion, if it were a question which could be voted upon, they all would have been voted down. if it had been a question of authority, none of them would ever have reaped the harvest of their pursuits, because authorities always oppose new ideas. To cite an example: Lord Kelvin, who was the most eminent physicist in the late Victorian days and in the beginning of this century, staunchly opposed the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's theory is the basis of the quantum theory, of the theory of relativity, of all modern physical theory. Kelvin had the lowest possible opinion of Maxwell's scholarship. And when young Rutherford became interested in the new idea of radiotelegraphy, proposed by Marconi, it was the same Lord Kelvin who tried to dissuade Rutherford: Keep away, there is no future in it at all, the most that will be produced will be a connection between lighthouses where it is difficult to put in an undersea cable. It was Kelvin who produced the calculation which made feasible the installation of the sub- Atlantic telegraph cable. Most of you who watch television or listen to the radio never think of de Forest or Marconi or the other pioneers who made broadcasting possible. Kelvin also didn't believe Roentgen, the discoverer of X-rays. Not only didn't Kelvin believe Roentgen, but he accused Roentgen of being a charlatan. I cannot remember exactly in what year I broke my arm while doing calisthenics in a gymnasium, but it was probably 1907 or 1908. 1 remember being brought to a doctor who had the only X-ray machine in Moscow. I saw my broken arm on the screen for myself. This happened about the time when Kelvin died, he might still have been alive. Certainly Kelvin did not alter his view that Roentgen was a charlatan to the time of his death in 1907. I am here to receive this degree in the name of all those who started humbly, and who started alone, often working under very difficult conditions, who never received recognition or acclaim, unlike the pioneers I mentioned now. Somebody once said A man of talent is one who can, but a genius is one who must. Take the case of Dolomieu, the mountains in the north portion of the Adriatic Sea carry the name Dolomites in his honour. Dolomieu served under Napoleon during the French invasion of Egypt. He was later imprisoned in Napoli for several years. There he wrote his classic work on geology without having either pen or pencil, or paper upon which to write. The only object he was permitted to have was the Bible, and so he used the soot of a candle and the oil of a lamp, and he wrote his famous book on geology on the margins of the Bible. Even under difficult conditions the one who is possessed by an idea must follow it. It is not by desire, by caprice, by a need of some external goal, nor for fame, or for riches, but because something leads him so that he cannot stand still, he must follow the call. A man's name becomes great because of what he does, degrees do not make a man great. Darwin, who is not one of my heroes, had no degree, no doctorate in the sciences, no degree in geology or in evolution, or in paleontology, he had only a humble bachelor's degree in theology, nothing more. The lack of a degree did not mean that his ideas and his work could not become the dominant idea for four decades into the twentieth century. Since the middle of this century his ideas have started to give place to better ideas. I understand this University is not like other universities, and this is what made me accept its invitation. I understand there is a liberal spirit here, a spirit which is symbolized in this building. I attended several universities in the course of my studies. In my day, students wandered as they did in the time of Goethe, they spent two years at one university, two years at another, a year here, three years there, studying history, poetry, and philology, and politics, and other subjects, as they felt the urge. In earlier days it was even more so; but I do not intend to give you a long lesson in the history of scholarship. I understand that this University will soon have a bridge, a bridge crossing over this valley and river, connecting the University with the town, and so both will prosper. I think of the greater bridge that this University is already building. There are some innovators here, they are men who carry torches, who do not just repeat that which has already been repeated many times before. They are men who do not swear by Verba Magistri, the holiness of their school wisdom. They are men who do not say: this is what we were taught, this is what we will teach in passing knowledge from one generation to the next. They are men who do not avoid the sacrilege of questioning fundamentals. They are like the iconoclast, who, by his very nature, must question. Without questioning there can be no progress, and without progress we would remain stagnated. Scholarship is a matter of questioning. I understand that the policy of this University is to seek a bridge into the spiritual world, into the wider community, into other cultures. If it does, then despite the fact that this is a young University, scholars will flock here, and students will follow. The Senate, when it convenes, will not only have to advise wisely, but it will have to take some responsibility to see that things are added to the University that government and fee- paying students could not accomplish. Maybe not all of the Senators can, but some of them must. This responsibility should be 'a pleasant yoke because nothing can give more satisfaction than to know that you have helped to put together the material foundation for something that is growing spiritually. Accepting the Honourary Degree will not, I hope, deprive me of companionship within the circle of those who died not having seen honours for their many works and achievements in their lifetimes. And so in their name, I will accept tomorrow the honour of being proclaimed and admitted to membership in the Convocation of this University as a recipient of your Honourary Degree. For this I thank you. At the annual Spring Convocation ceremony held on 11 May 1974 Immanuel Velikovsky, M. D., was presented to the Chancellor of the University of Lethbridge, James Oshiro, M. D., by University President and Vice-Chancellor Beckel. W. E. Beckel. Dr. Oshiro conferred on Dr. Velikovsky the degree of Doctor of Arts and Science (Honoris Causa). Dr. William E Beckel: Mr. Chancellor - Immanuel Velikovsky was born it Vitebsk, Russia, in 1895. His early formal schooling began in Moscow. Following a brief period of study at Montpellier, France, and travels in Palestine, he began pre-medical. studies in natural science at Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1914. When his schooling abroad was interrupted by the outbreak of World War 1, Velikovsky enrolled in the Free University in Moscow and for a few years studied law, ancient history, and economics.. Meanwhile, in 1915 he resumed work simultaneously toward a medical degree at the University of Moscow, and in 1921 he received his medical diploma. The next few years Velikovsky spent in Berlin, where he was involved in the foundation and publication of Scripta Universitatis. In this series of volumes, conceived as a cornerstone for what would become a Hebrew university, contributions from outstanding Jewish scholars in all countries were published in their native languages and in Hebrew translation. The late Albert Einstein edited the mathematical-physical volume of the Scripta. In Berlin, Velikovsky met and married violinist Elisheva Kramer of Hamburg. Later the same year, the young couple moved to Palestine and the doctor began his practice of medicine. For fifteen years this practice - first as a general practitioner in Jerusalem, and later, after psychiatric training in Europe, as a psychoanalyst in Haifa and Tel Aviv - occupied most of Velikovsky's time. Nevertheless, he published a number of papers on psychology. He also conceived a plan for an academy of science in Jerusalem and started a new series, Script Academic, to which Professor Chime Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, and later first President of Israel, and a noted scientist, contributed the first monograph in Biochemistry. Velikovsky also had an idea for a book, and to complete the necessary research he decided to interrupt his practice for an extended visit to America. He arrived in New York in the summer of 1939, and plunged into his library research. The intended book had been conceived as an analytic study of Freud's own dreams, as recorded in his writings, and a comparative study of the lives of three personages - Oedipus, Akhnaton, and Moses - who had figured prominently in Freud's thoughts and works. The research was nearly completed by the spring of 1940, and Velikovsky began to make preparations for the return home. Then, at the last moment before an already-postponed sailing, he chanced upon an idea that was to completely alter his life plans and keep him in America for decades. Reflecting upon events in the life of Moses, Velikovsky began to speculate: Was there a natural catastrophe at the time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt? Could the plagues of Egypt, the hurricane, the parting of the waters, and the smoke, fire and rumblings of Mount Sinai described in the Bible have been real and sequential aspects of a single titanic cataclysm of natural forces? If the Exodus took place during - or because of - an upheaval, perhaps some record of the same events has survived among the many documents of ancient Egypt; if so, might not such a record be a clue to the proper place of the Exodus in Egyptian history? After weeks of search Velikovsky came upon the story he sought. A papyrus bearing a lamentation by one Ipuwer had been preserved in the library of the University of Leiden, Holland, since 1828. Translation of the document had disclosed an account of plague and destruction closely paralleling the Biblical narrative. Ipuwer bewailed the collapse of the state and social order during what seemed to be a calamity of natural forces. In the fall of 1940 Velikovsky traced in the literature of ancient Mexico and China events similar to those described in the Old Testament. This confirmed his growing suspicions that the great natural catastrophes that visited the Near East had been global in scale. Immediately he expanded his research to embrace records of all races. The next five or six years he spent developing parallel themes - reconstructions of ancient political history and recent cosmic history - and as month followed month, the intimate details of a new concept of the world emerged. Two manuscripts were the product of his labors: Ages in Chaos, reconstructing Near Eastern history from -1500 to -300; Worlds in Collision documented the evidence and sequence of catastrophes on earth and in the solar system. A few years later the book Earth in Upheaval was produced presenting geological and paleontological evidence to buttress Worlds in Collision. Only in 1960, many years after his first research, did Oedipus and Akhnaton appear. It would be an understatement to say that the Velikovsky hypotheses and theories convulsed the scholarly community with joy and enthusiasm. However, they did cause convulsions. Rarely has the scholarly scientific community reacted to revile and exclude an investigator or his investigation as passionately as it did in Velikovsky's case. But the integrity of the man and the value of his thinking and his careful research had their effect and slowly but surely a more rational and appropriate examination and acceptance of Velikovsky and his ideas has occurred. But this says so little about this remarkable man. Imagine, if you can, the incredible range of intellectual disciplines that had to be brought to bear on the development of his theories. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, history, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, ancient and modern languages, and philosophy. And Velikovsky was alone, an outcast. He therefore had to painstakingly develop intimate understanding and expertise in all the disciplines and to synthesize and distill their truths as they related to his ideas, his heresies. In a simple way it has been said of him, "He is a rara avis, a Benu-bird, that appears occasionally in the guise of a natural philosopher, attempting to shed a little more light on our ignorance." Mr. Chancellor, on the recommendation of the General Faculties Council, and on behalf of the Senate of this University, I request that you confer on Immanuel Velikovsky the degree of Doctor of Arts and Science, (Honoris Causa) in recognition of a man of intellectual vision and courage; a man who has indeed attempted to shed a little more light on our ignorance and who has challenged and stimulated in many parts of the world, the minds of philosophers, theologians, humanists, social, natural, and physical scientists in the constant search for the truth. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY} {P - } {Q VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : } {C APPENDIX IV} {T ADDRESS TO THE CONVOCATION DINNER} {S - } RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA APPENDIX IV ADDRESS TO THE CONVOCATION DINNER Lethbridge Exhibition Pavillion Saturday 11 May 1974 Introduction by Dr. William E. Beckel, President, The University of Lethbridge: We start this evening with an Honourary Graduate of the University of Lethbridge: Immanuel Velikovsky. Dr. Velikovsky: Today I joined the alumni. in the old country the usual way of celebrating the end of school was to sing Gaudeamus, which means: Let Us be Joyful, Let Us be Cheerful, Destroy our Notes, Burn our Books, and Listen no longer to anything which is serious or scholarly. But tonight I wish to, say something serious to you, I want to discuss Scientific Conscience. I direct my remarks particularly to those of you who intend to continue your career as a student, to the few among the two hundred of you who are considering an advanced career in science, or in the humanities. My words come from experience. Although this will be a very serious speech, I promise you one cheerful note toward the end. To be a scholar, or a scientist, means that you must dedicate yourself. Scholarship is not a part time job, it requires a lifetime of dedication. At some point in your career you have to specialize in some field that calls you, a field that leads in the direction that you desire to walk along the road of life. But do not specialize completely, prepare yourself by becoming acquainted with many other fields. Read widely, keep an encyclopedia in your house, keep a volume close to your bed. Often when I cannot fall asleep, I read from my encyclopedia. I usually choose a short article, something that I know a bit about, but I'm not acquainted with the details, or something that I have heard about and seek a first glimpse of its essence. When you read a book, studying for some particular purpose, make notes: preserve these notes, file them for the future. Don't seek to be original at any cost but also avoid trivial issues. It is of no value to walk the easy road trodden many times by those before you. Select your tutors from those who can guide you with an open mind, who will not demand that you only follow the accepted views in blind fashion. Because science progresses by trial and error, look for new ways to do old things. Learn to ask yourself questions, and if someday you come upon what seems to you to be an original idea, don't rush to make it public, preserve it, carry it around inside yourself, give it time to develop and to grow in your mind. But don't follow it blindly because it is your idea and you wish to be original. When you have perfected your idea, consult others who may give you good advice. if you find out that somebody has already proposed your idea, don't pretend that you were the first, give credit to those who were before you. But if you believe that you are original, try honestly to convince yourself that your idea is consistent with all the facts that you can collect. Don't hold on to an idea when the facts are against it, but do maintain your convictions if it is only opinions that are against you. Have courage, and by all means do not fear crossing the barriers between different disciplines. Do not trust everything to memory, keep notes even as you develop new ideas. Keep a diary, it could be useful to you some day if you have to establish your priority to an idea. Think of the Chinese proverb The Palest Ink Is Stronger Than The Strongest Memory. And remember, ideas have their time. When it seems appropriate to retreat, retreat. When it is time to advance, advance. When haste is necessary, rush, for the appropriate moment is often short. But if the time has not yet come, stand back and wait for your time. To illuminate this last point I will tell you a story: Once, at a railway station the stationmaster in charge of starting the train observed a group of three scientists returning from a scientific conference. They were intentively discussing something of great importance. They seemed to be there to board the train, nevertheless they weren't paying attention to the stationmaster who was impatient to signal the train's departure. Finally the stationmaster could wait no longer, and so he signaled to the train, and the train began to leave the station. At this moment all three people ran after the train, two boarded it but one could not make it. The stationmaster turned to the one who was left behind and said: "Well, it's not so bad, two out of three made it", and the man answered: "But they came to see me off". End of Recollections of a Fallen Sky {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P - } {Q SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE} {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE by Alfred de Grazia (Editor) With contributions by Ralph Juergens, Livio C. Stecchini, Alfred de Grazia, Immanuel Velikovsky Metron Publications Princeton, New Jersey Copyright © Alfred de Grazia, 1966, 1978. All rights reserved. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P - } {Q SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR Scientism Versus Science TABLE OF CONTENTS TITEL-PAGE INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION by Alfred de Grazia INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION by Alfred de Grazia 1. MINDS IN CHAOS by by Ralph E. Juergens 2. AFTERMATH TO EXPOSURE by by Ralph E. Juergens 3. THE INCONSTANT HEAVENS by by Livio C. Stecchini 4. CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS AND CELESTIAL INSTABILITY by by Livio C. Stecchini 5. ASTRONOMICAL THEORY AND HISTORICAL DATA by by Livio C. Stecchini 6. THE SCIENTIFIC RECEPTION SYSTEM by Alfred de Grazia 7. ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF CORRECT PROGNOSIS by by Immanuel Velikovsky APPENDIX I: On Recent Discoveries Concerning Jupiter and Venus APPENDIX II: Velikovsky 'Discredited': A Textual Comparison {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P - } {Q SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION TO THE 2ND EDITION} {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE Alfred de Grazia January 1978 INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION We dedicate this book to people who are concerned about the ways in which scientists behave and how science develops. It deals especially with the freedoms that scientists grant or withhold from one another. The book is also for people who are interested in new theories of cosmogony - the causes of the skies, the earth, and humankind as we see them. It is, finally, a book for people who are fascinated by human conflict, in this case a struggle among some of the most educated, elevated, and civilized characters of our times. These lines are being written a few weeks after the launching of a carefully prepared book attacking the growing position of Immanuel Velikovsky in intellectual circles [1]. The attack was followed promptly by a withering counter-attack in a special issue of the journal, Kronos [2]. The events reflect a general scene which, since the first appearance of this volume, has been perhaps more congenial to the temperament of war correspondents than of cloistered scholars. The philosophical psychologist, William James, who once proposed sport as a substitute for warfare, might as well have proposed science and scholarship for the same function. Scientific battles also have their armies, rules, tactics, unexpected turns, passions bridled and unbridled, defeats, retreats, and casualty lists. All of the motives that go into warfare are exercised. In the present controversy, the minds of the combatants must also carry into the fray images of a distant past when the world was ruined by immense disasters, whether or not they deny the images. Unlike sport, the outcomes of scientific battles are as important, if not more so, than the results of outright warfare. At stake in the controversy over Velikovsky's ideas is not only the system used by science to change itself - which is largely the subject of this book - but also the substantive model of change to be employed by future science - whether is shall be comprehended mainly as revolutionary and catastrophic or as evolutionary and uniform. The controversy has had many striking facets. One has been the large participation of the public. It continues to increase. Velikovsky has managed to talk to people about mythology, archaeology, astronomy, and geology, without doing injustice to those disciplines, in an amazing and unprecedented manner. Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Freud, and Einstein - to name a few thinkers who were implicated in 'crowd phenomena' - were not public figures in the sense here taken. His public - a well-behaved, educated, well-intentioned and diversified aggregate - has supported Velikovsky on every possible occasion. That he was a foreigner with a Russian accent, a psychiatrist, unequivocably a Jew, denounced by some of the most respected scientists of America and Britain, unbending in his person and in his allegiance to science and in refusing every opening for support from demagogic or religious quarters: these facts hardly disturbed the favourable reception granted him by a large public. That he is a charismatic figure is obvious: fourteen hundred people attended his talk and awarded him a standing ovation at a critical scientific symposium in San Francisco in 1974. But 'charisma' is a bit of jargon; the question remains 'why. ' Although I must reserve the answer until another occasion, I would here suggest that his ideas have represented all the legitimate anxieties about present-day 'knowledge' that educated people possess, whether it be their own knowledge or that of their scientific tutors. I have lived with 'The Velikovsky Affair' for fifteen years. Often I have been asked how I came to be involved. Sometimes the question comes from my colleagues, who, like myself, have wondered how a million, perhaps two million, serious readers can find that a book like Worlds in Collision makes sense, while a great many scientists and scholars cannot even come to grips with the book, turn away from it angrily, and irritably consign the whole lot of favourable readers to the ranks of religious revivalists who have received The Word. But there was little heroic, charismatic, revelatory, or even extraordinary about my initiation. The year 1950, which saw the publication of Worlds in Collision, was a busy one in my younger life; I had several infants, a new professorship, and a more than passing engagement with psychological operations in the Korean War, then raging. So the scandal over the book's suppression and success left only a faint scratch upon my mind. However, in 1962, when I was publishing and editing the American Behavioral Scientist magazine in Princeton, Dr Livio Stecchini, a historian of science also resident there, spoke to me more than once about a man named Dr Velikovsky who also lived in Princeton and had been victimized by the scientific establishment. I listened without enthusiasm to Stecchini, for the annals of science and publishing, like politics, are crowded with cases that are falsely or ineptly brought up, of hopeless theories trying to engage public attention, of feelings of persecution. Then, one evening, as I was saying my goodbyes at the home of my brother, I espied a book entitled Oedipus and Akhnaton, by one Immanuel Velikovsky. The residual stimuli precipitated a gestalt of curiosity. I borrowed it. I read it from cover to cover, brooking no minor interruption. I thought that it was a masterpiece of true detective literature (a judgement that I think is now confirmed), and telephoned Dr Stecchini to arrange a meeting. As I talked with Dr Velikovsky - an impressive experience in a person's life - I was introduced to his archive of materials on the case. It was astonishingly rich and ordered. I concluded after several long meetings and much reading among his materials that the history of science had few, if any, cases that were so well documented. I decided to devote a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist to 'The Velikovsky Affair. ' It was this issue, finally appearing is September 1963 after prolonged, gruelling, and enlightening sessions with Dr Velikovsky and my co-authors, Ralph Juergens and Livio Stecchini and after long hours spent amidst the archive of Velikovsky itself, that formed the basis for the present book. I would not go as far as some commentators in saying that the books brought the great controversy to life when the cause seemed lost; my concept of history is more Tolstoian. Still, the response to the issue was immediate. Eric Larrabee, a publicist, who had a long-standing contract with the Doubleday Company publishers to write a book on the subject, was spurred to publish an article in Harper's magazine about the Velikovsky case. The American Behavioral Scientist issue was expanded, with new contributions by Juergens and Stecchini, and published by University Books two years later. (In the present edition, Dr Stecchini has revised and added much new material to his contributions.) With notable exceptions, to be described in the pages to come, the book was well received. It was resented by many in the underground of science, which includes the mysterious realms of foundations and government agencies. There, any association whatsoever with Dr Velikovsky is likely to provoke discrimination and reprisals. But the distinction of the panel of readers who endorsed my decision to publish its materials no doubt acted as a formidable obstacle to public assaults upon it. It is difficult for someone, in the face of the evidence offered, to contradict the book's two main ideas: that Dr Velikovsky was unjustly treated, and that he maintains a set of propositions that must be seriously considered by the sciences and humanities. A reading of the book apparently positions one reasonably to annoy many scientists encountered in classrooms, professional meetings and cocktail parties. When my attention was first drawn to the sociological and legalistic aspects of The Velikovsky Affair in 1962, my interest in the substantive problems of catastrophism and uniformitarianism, or revolutionism and evolutionism, was that of a charmed spectator. However it was not long before a question began persistently to intrude upon my mind: 'Was there only misguidance and foolishness in the jungle-buried history of catastrophist thought or was there lurking in it an alternative model of cosmogony? ' I have pursued now for over a decade the substance of what, for lack of a better term, I sometimes call 'holocene cosmogony' and at other times 'revolutionary primevalogy, ' and am much more committed intellectually to Dr Velikovsky's approach than I was when this material was first published. With the encouragement afforded by others who were travelling the same route, I have achieved a measure of confidence in a two-part reciprocal answer: there is no 'fact' in the great and varied growth of today's science that is 'true' enough to block a complete cosmogonic model that is antithetical to uniformitarianism; there is enough of 'fact' to supply the construction of a revolutionist model. Dozens of pertinent incidents have marked my association with the realm of Velikovsky politics and science over the years. One of the neatest, and of course indirect and noncommittal, testimonials to the validity of the present book occurred lately. The new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has recently appeared. In its vast uniformitarian and evolutionist terrain there is set a biographical article upon Velikovsky, which I discovered to be on the whole acceptable in the general frame of the Encyclopedia. Nevertheless, two years or so later, Lawrence K. Lustig, the Managing Editor of the Encyclopedia's Book of the Year, was possessed to write an article there containing an orthodox, negative pronunciamento upon Velikovsky in the course of a general attack upon pseudoscience. I wrote to Dr Lustig, decrying his position; he replied without retracting his position by as much as a centimetre. Yet, on the same day as the proposal to publish the present book arrived from Sphere Books, Ltd, in England, there arrived also a letter from Dr Lustig, now Editor-in-Chief of a large, new encyclopedia-in-the-making at Princeton, New Jersey. He asked me to write for the encyclopedia the articles on 'Freedom, ' 'Freedom of Religion, ' and 'Freedom of Speech. ' If this story may be taken as a compliment to integrity of the present work, it may also be heartening to those scholars, young and old, who fear that their advocacy of the philosophical principles of the book would deny them certain fruits of their long and arduous studies and careers. Professor William Mullen and I have separately published articles 'indexing in advance' the fallout of Velikovsky's ideas upon the many academic disciplines [3]. In the politics of exploiting this fall-out, the scholar-aspirant or scholar-turncoat can be shown two paths. For the cautious soul, who would evade controversy and is shy of ridicule, it will be relatively easy, now that many barriers are down, to introduce revolutionary hypotheses into scientific areas where the ruling order is evolutionary, provided that one avoids citing the works of Velikovsky and his school. One can, for example, speak of a revolutionary turn of mind on the part of homo sapiens without mentioning Velikovsky, and be applauded, as was Jaynes this past year [4]. One can discuss the catastrophically deposited layers on the ocean bottoms as has Worzel, with only a tiny escape hatch for 'the fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin'[ 5]. One need not cite Isaacson [6], either, in disposing of the century-old concept of the Greek 'Dark Ages, ' especially since Isaacson does not exist, it being the nom de plume of a young scholar in fear for his career; one might criticize the concept without mentioning Velikovsky, given the new climate of thought. A scholar can play safe in elaborating the evidence for hundreds of hypotheses in the Velikovskian literature that are already clearly stated and buttressed by evidence, and do so without mentioning him and with the indulgence of authorities who are ordinarily fanatic about the citation of sources. Scholars may now indulge in the heady alcohol of revolutionary theory, so to speak, provided that they label their brew as medicinal because, after all, the police are in cahoots, if indeed they have not already taken to drink themselves. There comes to mind the chemical geologist and Nobel prize winner, Harold Urey, who has on occasion reprimanded Velikovsky's supporters even though he has himself speculated that errant celestial bodies might be the great age-breakers in geological morphology and paleontology [7] (just as the ancients said that the ages were made and broken by the birth and death of the planetary gods). Alternatively credit may be given where credit is due. A scholar may virtuously confess his research sources, hoping that the courts for criminals such as he will soon be too crowded for him to have to worry about being brought to trial for a long time, trusting that before that time occurs the rapidly changing climate of belief will have transformed his crime into a propriety. When will this Great Day befall? By 1973, a decade after The Velikovsky Affair was first published, his group was cheered by the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) would stage a symposium upon his work. On February 25, 1975, the symposium took place before the greatest audience that this convention of the largest American scientific organization produced. A full volume about the activities preceding the symposium, of its proceedings, and of its aftermath would be a worthy objective of a sociologist of science; it is yet to be written. However, the two works alluded to at the beginning of this essay have already appeared, the one sharply anti-Velikovsky and the other just as strongly pro-Velikovsky. Both works related mostly to the substantive theories about the Venus and Mars scenarios that had been presented in Worlds in Collision [8]. Without presenting a mass of evidence, it would be improper for me to pass judgement here on the complicated hassle. I shall, however, go so far as to say that the reader of this book will experience few surprises should he happen finally to hear the full story. All the actors who were involved, both pro and con, including the group actors - the AAAS and the press -performed true to type. The Scientific establishment, I should add, was now more subtle in preserving proper forms and a correct public posture - as if they had read the present book and were trying to conduct themselves accordingly. There was even some familiarity with Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision evident among the five panel-members (I include the Moderator) who opposed Velikovsky, he standing alone. As it developed, the establishment advocates were in a state of 'partial assimilation; ' so Professor Harold Lasswell has termed the process by which a political revolution like the French or Russian is in part absorbed by its conservative opponents as a defensive measure. Indeed here was an interesting development. Little cordiality was exhibited among the panelists. And no happiness was displayed at exploring new realms of scientific inquiry. But apparently, without admitting so much, the critics of Velikovsky were being forced to move into combat upon his terrain. Science as a whole cannot help but benefit from this. For, as Adam Smith long ago pointed out, private competition may result in public gain. Velikovsky has enlarged the scientific marketplace, J. S. Mill's marketplace of ideas, by designing a new product. So we encounter the first halting steps of the so-called 'hard sciences' to deal with the 'soft' materials of legends, myth, psychology, archaeology, and history. Scientists cannot any longer remain specialists and hope to deal for more than a moment in this marketplace with its changed conditions. I recall the weeks of intensive study that Velikovsky put in, not long ago, to master several points of chemistry for an article in reply to chemistry Professor Albert Burgstahler. Hence, we should add that the same is true of the 'soft' scientists - the Graves, the Schliemanns, the Freuds, the Jungs, the Campbells and the Eliades: these must treat of oceanography, geophysics, and celestial dynamics. Also, and merely as one of 'the halt leading the blind, ' I would suggest that scientists and scholars repair to the philosophical foundations of science and humanism upon which the disciplinary structures rest; upon reading and reviewing Plato, Hegel, Dewey, Bridgman and the like, and understanding the critical decisions of Galileo, Newton, Marx-Engels, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and the like, they may prepare new footings and erect new structures. The history of science and natural history are composed of psycho-social- empirical problems, inextricably intertwined, approachable by a science that is neither 'hard' nor 'soft, ' but malleable. If few persons can master learning of such scope and depth, does not such learning then constitute a principal goal for that vaunted 'collective enterprise, ' science? It is not that the broader view will only help understand and give support to Velikovsky's work; the broader view is also needed to criticize it adversely. I do not refer to his manner and style as worthwhile targets. His writings are vigorously assertive. He does not indulge in the polite and evasive mannerisms of most social scientists and humanists. Nor can he rightly employ mathematics where the variables cannot be fixed or the data measurably assembled. He has granted that he is dealing in hypotheses - and what empirical scientist is not? I mean that should one reasonably and incredulously ask: 'Is there nowhere an anti- Velikovsky treatise of serious consequence? ' the answer, regrettably, is still 'no. ' Not in general nor even in a special discipline such as astrophysics or archaeology. Thousands of scientists and scholars have impugned his work. A few have stepped up to bat against him or one of his team: they put on airs; they dance about; they come up unprepared; they take blundering swipes at the ball; they strike out. When all is done, they say that it was not a real professional ballgame. In two cases major intellectual projects have been directed against Velikovsky. The aforesaid Cornell Press book was promptly shredded by the aforesaid special issue of Kronos. The second attack, indirectly launched to contradict Velikovsky and not even mentioning him, came earlier; it was Hamlet's Mill by G. de Santillana and H. von Dechand [9]; it concentrated upon mythology and the earliest scientific knowledge; its structure is mysterious; it is useful largely because it indeed goes to show that proto-historic mankind could be disciplined and scientific, and that mythology everywhere derives from the behaviour of the planets. Both books received ample support. Both are being cannibalized by the revolutionists, who are resource-starved and have become quite adapted to feeding upon the evidence and criticism offered by their opponents. Writing at end of 1977, a historian of science, A. M. Paterson, declared [10]: Actually, the battle is over. Dr Velikovsky has emerged the victor because his scientific hypotheses that there have been physical planetary catastrophes in historical times has been proven to have enormous predictive power. For example, a few from very, very many may be listed: Radio noise from Jupiter, strong charge on Jupiter (1953); Earth's extensive magnetosphere (1956); an extensive magnetic field in the solar system extending to Pluto (1946); the Sun is charged (1950); Venus is very hot, has a heavy atmosphere, and was disturbed in its rotation and may have an anomalous rotation (1950); Mars' atmosphere contains quantities of argon and neon (1945); Mars is moon-like, battered and geologically active (1950); there have been many reversals of Earth's magnetic poles (1950); Some of Earth's petroleum was deposited only a few thousand years ago (1950). And successful deductions about the Moon: Hydrocarbons, carbides, and carbonates will be found (July 2 and July 21, 1969); strong remanent magnetism in rocks (May 19, 1969); pockets of radioactivity (March 14, 1967); excessive argon and neon in the regolith (leading to incorrect age estimate) (July 23, 1969); steep thermal gradient under the surface (July 2, 1969). Perhaps Professor Paterson would be quick to agree that her first sentence was the hyperbole of an enthusiast. As she points out elsewhere in her article, 300 years of science may be used up in conflict over a great paradigm. Furthermore, we have to contend with the possibility of real explosive warfare, occasioned by the inane and insane politics of the age, which would foreclose the warfare of science. Dr Velikovsky has been acutely aware of the threat of nuclear missiles. On the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate of philosophy at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, in 1974, he speculated that the threat to humanity as a whole could be traced to suppression of the memory of early catastrophes and the unconscious, typically neurotic urge of persons in power to recapitulate the terrible ancient scenes [11]. Here, however, we must assume that such a catastrophe will not occur. Then, if only because the present world, unlike the past, rushes into the resolution of issues, a vindication of Velikovsky's theories and hence a major shift in the ruling paradigm or model of science may take place in a fairly short period of time. The challenge of the revolutionary to the evolutionary view is sharp and clear, no matter what synthesis evolves in the end. There are now available, yet unassimilated to either model of the world, hundreds of studies of catastrophic import performed by uniformitarians who shrink from drawing appropriate conclusions. Hence when the philosophical and ideological barriers are dropped, and an archway of revolutionary theory is erected over the cleared roadway, empirical studies will enter in veritable troops. The changeover-time from one to another model of holocene and early human history might not be long. Notes (References cited in "Introduction to the Second Edition") 1. Isaac Asimov et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky, (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). 2. Velikovsky and Establishment Science, Vol. III, no. 2 (1977). Kronos (Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N. J., U. S. A.) and The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, which published the SIS Review (c/ o T. B. Moore, Central Library, Hartlepool, Cleveland, Eng.) carry continuously information on the controversies surrounding Immanuel Velikovsky, as well as publishing articles by him and associated scholars on substantive concerns of revolutionary primevalogy. 3. Mullen, 'The Center Holds' in Velikovsky Reconsidered, by the editors of Pensée (Abacus, 1978), p. 239-49; A. de Grazia, 'The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences and Humanities, ' in Nahum Revel, ed., From Past to Prophesy: Velikovsky's Challenge to Conventional Beliefs, Proceedings of the Symposium held at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, January 10-12, 1975. 4. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). 5. J. L. Worzel, 'Extensive Deep Sea Sub-Bottom Reflections Identified as White Ash, ' Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 43: 349-55, March 15, 1959, 355; B. Heezen, Ewing, and Ericson, 'Significance of the Worzel Deep Sea Ash, ' ibid, 355-61. 6. Israel Isaacson, 'Applying the Revised Chronology, ' Pensée, IV: 5-20 (1974). 7. 'Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods, ' Nature 242: 32 (March 2, 1973). 8. With what seems a comic touch, the science fiction author and popular science writer, Isaac Asimov, was brought in, very much after the fact, to introduce the book of the 'serious' scientists and the 'non-commercial' Cornell University Press. Also added was a paper of Professor Donald Morrison, that had been tempered by earlier heated encounters with Velikovsky's associates. Cf. R. E. Juergens, 'On Morrison, ' in Kronos, loc. cit., 113. 9. Boston: Gambit, 1969. 10. 'Velikovsky versus Academic Lag, ' in Velikovsky and Establishment Science, Op. cit., pp. 121-31, p. 126. 11. 'Cultural Amnesia, ' in Earl Milton, ed., Recollections of a Fallen Sky (Lethbridge, Can.: Lethbridge U. Press, 1978). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P - } {Q SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE } {C - } {T INTRODUCTION TO THE 1ST EDITION} {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE Alfred de Grazia, 1966 --- INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION In 1950, a book called Worlds in Collision, by Dr Immanuel Velikovsky, gave rise to a controversy in scientific and intellectual circles about scientific theories and the sociology of science. Dr Velikovsky's historical and cosmological concepts, bolstered by his acknowledged scholarship, constituted a formidable assault on certain established theories of astronomy, geology and historical biology, and on the heroes of those sciences. Newton, himself, and Darwin were being challenged, and indeed the general orthodoxy of an ordered universe. The substance of Velikovsky's ideas is briefly presented in the first chapter of this book. What must be called the scientific establishment rose in arms, not only against the new Velikovsky theories, but against the man himself. Efforts were made to block dissemination of Dr Velikovsky's ideas, and even to punish supporters of his investigations. Universities, scientific societies, publishing houses, the popular press were approached and threatened; social pressures and professional sanctions were invoked to control public opinion. There can be little doubt that in a totalitarian society, not only would Dr Velikovsky's reputation have been at stake, but also his right to pursue his inquiry, and perhaps his personal safety. As it was, the 'establishment' succeeded in building a wall of unfavourable sentiment around him: to thousands of scholars the name of Velikovsky bears the taint of fantasy, science-fiction and publicity. He could not be suppressed entirely. In the next years he published three more books. He carried on a large correspondence. And he was helped by a very few friends, and by a large general public composed of persons outside of the establishments of science. The probings of spacecrafts tended to confirm - never to disprove - his arguments. Eventually the venomous aspects of the controversy, the efforts at suppression, the campaign of vilification loomed almost as large, in their consequences to science, as the original issue. Social scientists, who had been generally unaware of Dr Velikovsky's work, and its importance, and who had been almost totally disengaged, now found themselves in the thick of the conflict. The involvement of the social and behavioural sciences in the scientific theories of Velikovsky was higher than had been earlier appreciated. The social sciences are the basis of Velikovsky's work: despite his proficiency in the natural sciences, it is by the use of the methodology of social science that Velikovsky launched his challenge to accepted cosmological theories. No one pretends that this method is adequate. New forms of interdisciplinary research are needed to wed, for example, the study of myth with the study of meteorites. Nor does one have to agree that Velikovsky is the greatest technician of mythology, even while granting his great conceptual and synthesizing powers. Whatever the scientific substance, the controversy itself could not be avoided or dismissed by behavioural science. The politics of science is one of the agitating problems of the twentieth century. The issues are clear: Who determines scientific truth? Who are its high priests, and what is their warrant? How do they establish their canons? What effects do they have on the freedom of inquiry, and on public interest? In the end, some judgement must be passed upon the behaviour of the scientific world and, if adverse, some remedies must be proposed. It was in this light that, in a special issue, the American Behavioral Scientist published three papers dealing with the Velikovsky controversy. The first by Ralph Juergens, recounts the story of Dr Velikovsky from its beginnings to the present; tells something of the man and his works. The second, by Livio Stecchini, analyzes the roots of the controversy in the scientific past. A third, by the editor, searches for means by which new discoveries may be brought into the corpus of science, and offers suggestions for reform of present procedure. The American Behavioral Scientist did not enter the Velikovsky controversy heedlessly. The papers were read by a number of respected scientists and scholars, who did not necessarily share, of course, all of the views expressed by the authors, nor necessarily subscribe to Dr Velikovsky's views. They agreed, however, to the usefulness of their publication; their general help and encouragement in the original studies is now again gratefully acknowledged as the studies go to press in book format. Our thanks are owing to: HADLEY CANTRIL, Chairman of the Board, Institute for International Social Research; past president, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA, Honorary Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford University. LUTHER H. EVANS, Director of International and Legal Collections, Columbia University, former Director General, UNESCO. MOSES HADAS, Jay Professor of Greek, Columbia University. R. H. HILLENKOETTER, Vice Admiral, U. S. N. (Retired); former director, Central Intelligence Agency. HORACE M. KALLEN, Research Professor of Social Philosophy, New School for Social Research; past President, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. HAROLD D. LASSWELL, Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University Law School; past President, American Political Science Association. HAROLD S. LATHAM, former Editor-in-Chief and Vice-president, Macmillan Co. PHILIP WITTENBERG, Partner, Wittenberg, Carrington and Weinberger. Publication of the papers brought immediate response. Numerous scholars, both in the natural and social sciences, have written to the American Behavioral Scientist, commenting favourably, on the whole, upon the presentation of the matter to the scientific public. All documentation is being preserved, in the hope that the archives will be of use to future discussion. The new material in the present book is considerable. Ralph Juergens has brought the story of the Velikovsky case up to date in a new paper. There is also a new paper by Dr Livio Stecchini, carrying on from his first paper, this time on the uses of historical data for astronomical theory. We publish here, too, Dr Velikovsky's own paper from the special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist. The Velikovsky case is in no sense closed. There is no reason why it should be. Undeterred by the attacks upon him, and the obstacles placed in his way, Dr Velikovsky is pursuing his studies, and now has several books nearing completion: three on the substance of his theories, others of a general autobiographical character. He remains a faithful and indefatigable correspondent, and his letters point to new challenges. It is our hope that the publication of these papers in the present volume will make it less easy for his new work to be suppressed, or lightly dismissed. We hope, too, that they will help scientists and interested laymen everywhere to rehearse the problems and to reform the errors of the vast enterprise of science. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 1: } {Q MINDS IN CHAOS } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE PART ONE by Ralph E. Juergens MINDS IN CHAOS Seventeen years ago the appearance of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision precipitated an academic storm. Prominent American scientists, roused to indignation even before the book was published, greeted it with a remarkable demonstration of ill will that included a partially successful attempt to suppress the work by imposing a boycott on its first publisher's textbooks. The reading public witnessed the unique spectacle of a scientific debate staged not in the semi-privacy of scientific meetings and journals, but in the popular press, with scientists - in rare accord - on one side and lay champions of free speech on the other. With the might of authority all on one side of the issue, the debate was resolved in a predictable manner; Velikovsky and his book were discredited in the public eye. From the start there was more to the controversy than the simple question of a dissenting scholar's right to be published and read; the atmosphere generated by scientific consternation was charged with a peculiar emotion that Newsweek termed 'a highly unacademic fury. ' Even if Velikovsky's books were, as one astronomer put it, the 'most amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record, ' the violence of the reaction against it seemed all out of proportion to the book's importance if, as most critics insisted, the work was spurious and entirely devoid of merit. Many nonscientist observers concluded that Velikovsky's work was not run-of-the-mill heresy, but a thesis that presented a genuine threat to the very ego of science. It seemed that Worlds in Collision was being attacked with a fervor 'reserved only for books that lay bare new fundamentals. ' Caught up in this fervor, more than one scientist-reviewer of Velikovsky's book adopted tactics even more surprising than the overt and covert deeds of the would-be suppressors. Before attempting to trace the course of The Velikovsky Affair, we might first recall the unsettling message of the book that initiated that strange chain of events. In Britain, where Worlds in Collision was also rejected by almost all scientists, but with a lesser show of emotion, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, the later Royal Astronomer, summarized its thesis this way: The central theme of Worlds in Collision is that, according to Dr Velikovsky, between the fifteenth and eight centuries B. C., the earth experienced a series of violent catastrophes of global extent. Parts of its surface were heated to such a degree that they became molten and great streams of lava welled out; the sea boiled and evaporated;... mountain ranges collapsed, while others were thrown up; continents were raised causing great floods; showers of hot stones fell; electrical disturbances of great violence caused much havoc; hurricanes swept the earth; a pall of darkness shrouded it, to be followed by a deluge of fire. This picture of a period of intense turmoil within the period of recorded history is supported by a wealth of quotations from the Old Testament, from the Hindu Vedas, from Roman and Greek mythology, and from the myths, traditions and folklore of many races and peoples... These catastrophic events in the earth's history are attributed by Dr Velikovsky to a series of awe-inspiring cosmic cataclysms. In the solar system we see the several planets moving round the sun in the same direction in orbits which are approximately circular and which lie nearly in the same plane. Dr Velikovsky asserts that this was not always so, but that in past times their orbits intersected; collisions between major planets occurred, which brought about the birth of comets. He states that in the time of Moses, about the fifteenth century B. C., one of these comets nearly collided with the earth, which twice passed through its tail. [The earth experienced] the disrupting effect of the comet's gravitational pull,... intense heating and enormous tides... incessant electric discharges... and the pollution of the atmosphere by the gases in the tail... Dr Velikovsky attributes... oil deposits in the earth to the precipitation, in the form of a sticky liquid (naphtha), of some of the carbon and hydrogen gases in the tail of the comet, while the manna upon which the Israelites fed is similarly accounted for as carbohydrates from the same source. This comet is supposed to have collided with Mars... and, as the result of the collision, to have lost its tail and to have become transformed into the planet Venus... Further catastrophes... ensued... Mars was shifted nearer to the earth so that in the year 687 B. C.... Mars nearly collided with the earth. These various encounters are supposed to have been responsible for repeated changes in the earth's orbit, in the inclination of its axis, and in the lengths of the day, the seasons and the year. The earth on one occasion is supposed to have turned completely over, so that the sun rose in the west and set in the east. Dr Velikovsky argues that between the fifteenth and eight centuries B. C. the length of the year was 360 days and that it suddenly increased to 365 1/ 4 days in 687 B. C. The orbit of the moon and the length of the month were also changed... [1] In short, Velikovsky's research among the ancient records of man - records ranging from unequivocal statements in written documents, through remembrances expressed in myth and legend, to mute archaeological evidence in the form of obsolete calendars and sundials - and his examination of geological and paleontological reports from all parts of the globe led him to conclude that modern man's snug little world, set in a framework of celestial harmony and imperceptible evolution, is but an illusion. Velikovsky's reappraisal of world history ravages established doctrine in disciplines from astronomy to psychology: universal gravitation of masses is not the only force governing celestial motions - electromagnetic force must also play important roles; enigmatic breaks in the geological record denote, not interminable ages of languorous erosion and deposition gently terminated by cyclic submergence and emergence of land masses, but sudden, violent derangements of the earth's surface; the remarkably rapid annihilation of whole species and genera of animals and the equally remarkable, almost simultaneous proliferation of species in other generic groups bespeak overwhelming catastrophe and wholesale mutation among survivors; the mechanism of evolution is not competition between typical and chance- mutant offspring of common parents, but divergent mutation of whole populations simultaneously exposed to unaccustomed radiation, chemical pollution of the atmosphere, and global electromagnetic disturbances; ancient cities and fortresses were not brought low individually by local warfare and earthquakes, but were destroyed simultaneously and repeatedly in worldwide catastrophes; calamities described in clear-cut terms in surviving records of the past - records almost universally interpreted allegorically by late- classical as well as modern scholars - were common traumatic experiences for all races of mankind, and as such have been purged from conscious memory. The author of this strange new concept of universal history was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1895. His formal schooling began in Moscow at Medvednikov Gymnasium, from which he graduated with full honours. Following a brief period of study at Montpellier, France, and travels in Palestine, he began premedical studies in natural science at Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1914. When his schooling abroad was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, Velikovsky enrolled in the Free University in Moscow and for a few years studied law and ancient history. Meanwhile, in 1915 he resumed work towards a medical degree at the University of Moscow, and in 1921 he received his medical diploma. The next few years Velikovsky spent in Berlin, where he and Prof. Heinrich Loewe founded and published Scripta Universitatis with funds supplied by Velikovsky's father. In this series of volumes, conceived as a cornerstone for what would become the University of Jerusalem, contributions from outstanding Jewish scholars in all countries were published in their native languages and in Hebrew translation. The late Albert Einstein edited the mathematical-physical volume of the Scripta. In Berlin Velikovsky met and married violinist Elisheva Kramer of Hamburg. Later the same year the young couple moved to Palestine, and the doctor began his practice of medicine. For fifteen years this practice - first as a general practitioner in Jerusalem, and later, after psychiatric training in Europe, as a psychoanalyst in Haifa and Tel Aviv - occupied most of Velikovsky's time. Nevertheless, he published a number of papers on psychology, some in Freud's Imago. In one paper, to which Prof. Eugen Bleuler wrote a preface [2] , Velikovsky was the first to suggest that pathological encephalograms would be found characteristic of epilepsy; distorted and accentuated brain waves of epileptics were later found to be important clinical diagnostic symptoms. He also conceived a plan for an academy of science in Jerusalem and started a new series, Scripta Academica, to which Prof. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and noted scientist, contributed the first monograph in biochemistry. This series was dedicated to the memory of Velikovsky's father, who had died in Palestine in December 1937. Velikovsky also had an idea for a book, and to complete the necessary research he decided to interrupt his practice for an extended visit to America. The Velikovskys and their two school-age daughters arrived in New York in the summer of 1939, and the doctor plunged into his library research. The intended book had been conceived as an analytic study of Freud's own dreams as recorded in his writings, and a comparative study of the lives of three personages - Oedipus, Akhnaton, and Moses - who had figured prominently in Freud's thoughts and works. The research was nearly completed by the spring of 1940, and Velikovsky began to make preparations for the return home. Then, at the last moment before an already-postponed sailing, he chanced upon an idea that was to completely alter his life plans and keep him in America for decades. Reflecting upon events in the life of Moses, Velikovsky began to speculate: Was there a natural catastrophe at the time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt? Could the plagues of Egypt, the hurricane, the parting of the waters, and the smoke, fire, and rumblings of Mt Sinai described in the Bible have been real and sequential aspects of single titanic cataclysm of natural forces? If the Exodus took place during - or because of - an upheaval, perhaps some record of the same events has survived among the many documents of ancient Egypt; if so, might not such a record be a clue to the proper place of the Exodus in Egyptian history? After weeks of search Velikovsky came upon the story he sought. A papyrus bearing a lamentation by one Ipuwer had been preserved in the library of the University of Leiden, Holland, since 1828. Translation of the document by A. H. Gardiner in 1909 had disclosed an account of plague and destruction closely paralleling the Biblical narrative, but the similarities escaped Gardiner's attention. Ipuwer bewailed the collapse of the state and social order during what seemed to be a calamity of natural forces. Mention of Asiatic invaders (Hyksos) made it appear that the sage Ipuwer had witnessed the downfall of the Middle Kingdom (Middle Bronze Age) in Egypt. For nearly 2000 years scholars have conjectured and debated about the proper place of the Exodus in Egyptian history. But the end of the Middle Kingdom which is conventionally assigned to the eighteenth century B. C. had never been considered; it seemed much too early according to Hebrew chronology. All efforts have been directed towards finding a likely niche in New Kingdom history. Velikovsky, however, felt confident that his method of correlation was valid; he resolved to establish the coevality of the Exodus and the Hyksos invasion as a working hypothesis and pursue the inquiry through subsequent centuries. He discovered so much apparent substantiation for the novel synchronization that he was soon compelled to face up to its inherent dilemma: either Hebrew history is too short by more than five centuries, an inconceivable premise - or Egyptian chronology, a proud joint achievement of modern historians, archaeologists, and astronomers, and the standard scale against which all Near Eastern histories are calibrated, is too long by an equal number of centuries. The latter alternative seemed just as inconceivable; all the excess centuries would have to be found and eliminated from post-Middle Kingdom history, that portion of Egyptian history considered by all scholars to be unalterably reconstructed and fixed in time. But soon Velikovsky found the apparent explanation for the discrepancy: certain Egyptian dynasties appear twice in conventionally accepted schemes - first, their stories appear as they have been pieced together from the monuments and other relics of Egypt; then in history gleaned from Greek historians, the same characters and events are given secondary and independent places in the time table. 'Many figures... are "Ghosts" or "halves" and "doubles". 'Events are often duplicates; many battle are shadows; many speeches are echoes; many treaties are copies. ' In the fall of 1940 Velikovsky traced events similar to those described in the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua in the literature of ancient Mexico. This confirmed his growing suspicion that the great natural catastrophes that visited the Near East had been global in scale. Immediately he expanded his research to embrace records of all races. The next five or six years he spent developing parallel themes - reconstructions of ancient political history and recent cosmic history - and as month followed month the intimate details of a new concept of the world emerged. Two manuscripts were the product of his labours: Ages in Chaos traced Near Eastern history from -1500 to -300; Worlds in Collision documented the evidence and sequence of catastrophes on earth and in the solar system. The late Robert H. Pfeiffer, then Chairman of the Department of Semitic Languages and Curator of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University, read an early draft of Ages in Chaos in 1942 and conceded that the revolutionary version of history might well be correct. He felt the work should receive a fair trial and objective investigation. He also read subsequent drafts of the manuscript and made efforts to help find a publisher for it. To one prospective publisher he wrote: 'I regard this work -provocative as it is - of fundamental importance, whether its conclusions are accepted by competent scholars or whether it forces them to a far-reaching and searching reconstruction of the accepted chronology. ' Notwithstanding Pfeiffer's endorsement, eight publishers returned the manuscript. Before seeking a publisher for Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky tried to enlist the help of scientists in arranging for certain experiments that would constitute crucial tests for his thesis, which was essentially three-fold: (1) There were global catastrophes in historical times; (2) these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and (3) these agents, in the most recent of the catastrophes, can be identified as the planets Venus and Mars, Venus playing the dominant role. All three postulates would be largely substantiated if it could be shown that, contrary to all conventional expectations, Venus (1) is still hot - evidence of recent birth, (2) is enveloped in hydrocarbon clouds - remnants of a hydrocarbonaceous comet tail, and (3) has anomalous rotational motion - evidence suggesting that it suffered unusual perturbations before settling in its orbit as a planet. The first two of these points were selected by Velikovsky in 1946 as the most crucial tests for his entire work. THE EVIDENCE FROM MARINER II He was confident of ultimate vindication for his conclusion that Venus is hot despite the fact that the outer regions of its envelope were known to have a temperature -25 deg C. Even as recently as 1959 astronomers believed that because of the great reflecting power of its clouds, the ground temperature on Venus could differ little from that on earth. Venus orbits closer to the sun, but more solar radiation is reflected away from Venus than from the earth. Nevertheless, Velikovsky argued that the seeming contradiction in evidence long available - apparent slow rotation, yet nearly identical temperatures on shadowed and sunlit surfaces of the envelope of Venus - is illusory because the planet is young: it is hot and radiates heat from day and night hemispheres alike [Fifteen years later, in 1961, radio astronomers announced that radiation from Venus indicated that its surface must have a temperature of 600 degrees F. And in February 1963, after analyzing data from Mariner II, scientists raised this temperature estimate by another 200 degrees Ref. [3] No convincing explanation has yet been advanced to square this evidence with orthodox cosmologies.] Velikovsky thought his second deduction about Venus - hydrocarbon dust and gases must be present in its atmosphere and envelope - might be investigated spectroscopically. To this end in April 1946 he approached Prof. Harlow Shapley, then director of Harvard College Observatory. Without going into detail, Velikovsky explained that he had developed a hypothesis about recent changes in the order of the solar system and that his conclusions might be checked in part by spectral studies of Venus. Shapely pointed out that sudden changes in the planetary order would be inconsistent with gravitational theory; nevertheless, he agreed to consider performing such experiments if another scholar of known reputation would first read and then recommend Velikovsky's work. At Velikovsky's behest, Prof. Horace M. Kallen, co-founder of the New School of Social Research and at that time dean of its graduate faculty - a scholar already familiar with the work - wrote Shapley to urge that he conduct the search for hydrocarbons on Venus if at all possible. But to Kallen's plea, Shapley, who had refused to read the manuscript, replied that he wasn't interested in Velikovsky's 'sensational claims' because they violated the laws of mechanics; 'if Dr Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy. ' Nevertheless, Shapley recommended that Velikovsky contact either Walter S. Adams, director of Mt. Wilson Observatory, or Rupert Wildt at McCormick Observatory. In the Summer of 1946 Velikovsky directed identical inquiries to both Wildt and Adams, stating that he had a cosmological theory implying that 'Venus is rich with petroleum gases and hydrocarbon dust. ' So strong were these implications that he believed the presence or absence of these materials in the atmosphere and envelope of Venus would constitute crucial support or refutation for his thesis, and therefore he wished to know if the spectrum of Venus might be interpreted in this sense. Wildt replied that the absorption spectrum of Venus shows no evidence of hydrocarbons. Adams pointed out that the absorption bands of most petroleum molecules are in the far infra-red, below the range of photographic detection, and that hydrocarbons known to absorb in the detectable range are not apparent in the spectrum of Venus. All this notwithstanding, Velikovsky elected to defer once more to his historical evidence; he left in his manuscript and later in the published book the statement that a positive demonstration that petroleum-like hydrocarbons are or are not present in the envelope of Venus would be a decisive check on his work. [On the basis of an apparent ability to condense and polymerize into heavy molecules at a temperature near 2000 F in the atmosphere, the clouds of Venus must consist of heavy hydrocarbons and more complex organic compounds; thus concluded Mariner II experimenter Lewis D. Kaplan in February 1963.] Ref. [4] . At the end of July 1946 the late John J. O'Neill, science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, agreed to read Velikovsky's manuscript. O'Neill was immediately impressed, and he devoted his column for August 14 to the work. In his opinion, 'Dr Velikovsky's work presents a stupendous panorama of terrestrial and human histories which will stand as challenge to scientists to frame a realistic picture of the cosmos. ' Between June and October 1946 Velikovsky submitted his manuscript to one publisher after another, but the consensus was that the heavily annotated text was too scholarly for the book trade. Eventually, however, the trail led to Macmillan Company, where trade-books editor James Putnam saw possibilities in the book. In May of 1947 an optional contract was signed and then, after another year in which various outside readers, among them O'Neill and Gordon Atwater, then Curator of Hayden Planetarium and Chairman of the Department of Astronomy of the American Museum of Natural History - examined the manuscript and recommended publication, a final contract was drawn and signed. By March 1949 word of the book Macmillan was preparing for publication had spread among people in the trade. Frederick L. Allen, editor-in-chief of Harper's Magazine, sought authorization to present a two-article synopsis of Worlds in Collision and had Eric Larrabee, then an editor on the Harper's staff, prepare a tentative condensation from galley proofs. Allen wished to submit this for approval, but Velikovsky did not respond to the proposal for more than six months. In the fall, however, after more urging, he agreed to see Larrabee to discuss a one-article presentation of his theme; Larrabee then rewrote his piece completely. Larrabee's article, 'The Day the Sun Stood Still, ' appeared in Harper's for January 1950. The issue sold out within a few days, and so great was the demand from readers that a number of dailies both here and abroad reprinted Larrabee's text in full. In February 1950 Reader's Digest featured a popularization of Velikovsky's findings prepared by the late Fulton Oursler, who emphasized their corroboration of Old Testament history. Collier's Magazine, in February and March 1950, published two instalments of an announced three-part series. Velikovsky, who had agreed only to serialization - not adaptation or condensation, was so dismayed by the cavalier treatment being accorded his work in the highly sensationalized manuscripts submitted for his approval that he threatened to make a public disavowal of the Collier's articles unless each was severely revised. After long, stormy sessions, the first two manuscripts were approved; Collier's abandoned the third. Early in February 1950, when Worlds in Collision was about to go to press, Putnam called on Velikovsky to show him two letters Macmillan had received from Harlow Shapley. In the first, dated January 18, Shapley expressed gratification over a rumour that Velikovsky's book was not going to appear, and astonishment that Macmillan had even considered a venture into the 'Black Arts. ' In his second letter, written on January 25 after Putnam had answered the first, discounting the alleged rumour and assuring him that the book would appear on schedule, Shapley, who had still not seen the manuscript, remarked: 'It will be interesting a year from now to hear from you as to whether or not the reputation of the Macmillan Co. is damaged by the publication of, "Worlds in Collision". ' At the very least, release of the book would 'cut off' all relation between Shapley and Macmillan. He also announced that, at his request, one of his colleagues who was also a classicist was preparing a 'commentary' on Larrabee's article. He concluded with an expression of his hope that Macmillan had thoroughly investigated Velikovsky's background; however, 'it is quite possible that only this "Worlds in Collision" episode is intellectually fraudulent. ' This second letter apparently struck close to home for Macmillan president George Brett, for he personally answered Shapley to thank him for 'waving the red flag. ' Brett promised to submit the book to three impartial censors and to abide the majority verdict of the three. Apparently the majority again voted thumbs up; the book was published on schedule. The identities of the last-minute censors were never officially revealed, but one of them, Prof. C. W. van der Merwe, Chairmen of the Department of Physics at New York University, later disclosed to John O'Neill that he had been enlisted by Macmillan and had been one of the two who voted in favour of publication. Meanwhile, the February 25, 1950, issue of Science News Letter, a publication then headed by Harlow Shapley, printed denunciation of Velikovsky's ideas by five authorities in as many fields: Nelson Glueck, archaeologist; Carl Kraeling, orientalist; Henry Field, anthropologist; David Delo, geologist; and Shapley himself, speaking for astronomers. This medley of protest came forth just as Worlds in Collision went to press - none of the critics had seen the work. On March 14, the commentary on Larrabee's article by Shapley's colleague, astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, appeared in The Reporter. (An earlier draft of the article had been mimeographed and circulated widely by direct mail to scientists, science editors, and publishers.) Stringing phrases from three sentences appearing on as many pages of Larrabee's article into a sentence of her own, Gaposchkin set it in quotation marks and introduced it as 'Dr Velikovsky's astronomical assertions. ' The gist of her thoroughly abusive article was that electromagnetic phenomena are of no importance in space, and in a purely mechanical solar system the events of Worlds in Collision are impossible. The March 25 issue of Science News Letter, in a 'Retort to Velikovsky, ' who had as yet not been heard from, cited Gaposchkin's critique as recommended reading for all scientists - 'a detailed scientific answer to Dr Velikovsky. ' On April 11 The Reporter reproduced letters to the editor from Larrabee and Gaposchkin. Larrabee challenged the propriety of her attack on a book she had not yet seen, and Gaposchkin acknowledged that her review had been based on popularized preview articles only; she remarked that she had since read the book (published April 3, 1950) and found it to be 'better written... but just as wrong. ' The last few weeks before Worlds in Collision made its appearance were spent in strategic manoeuvring by the leaders of the resistance forces. The late Otto Struve, then director of Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago and an ex-president of the American Astronomical Society, penned letters to both John O'Neill and Gordon Atwater, requesting them to abandon their earlier positions with respect to Worlds in Collision. Atwater, unaware that he was facing an inquisition, replied that he believed Velikovsky's work had great merit, and although he did not accept all its conclusions in detail he was preparing a favourable review of the book for This Week magazine. He was planning - indeed had already publicly announced - a planetarium programme to depict the events of Worlds in Collision. O'Neill composed a heated reply, but then destroyed it. He let it be known that his earlier appraisal of the book had not since been altered in any way. Atwater's planetarium programme was scuttled immediately. During the last week of March he was summarily fired from both his positions with the museum - as Curator of Hayden Planetarium and Chairman of the Department of Astronomy - and requested to vacate his office immediately. Thus, when his review in This Week appeared on April 2, an article in which he pleaded for open-mindedness in dealing with the new theory, the credentials printed alongside Atwater's name were already invalid. Last-minute attempts to influence This Week not to publish this cover story failed when the editor sought and followed O'Neill's advice. THE OPPOSITION TAKES ACTION O'Neill's prepared review for the Herald Tribune had been scheduled to appear on April 2. But instead of O'Neill's article readers of that Sunday's issue found a review written by Struve. No concrete arguments were presented by Struve to justify his rejection of the book; 'It is not a book of science and it cannot be dealt with in scientific terms. ' He went on: 'It was necessary for readers to wait until a recent issue of the "Reporter" to learn, through Mrs. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin... that the observations of Venus extend back five hundred years before the Exodus, thus refuting the absurd theory of a comet that turned into a planet. ' Velikovsky, however, had specified no date for the eruption of Venus from Jupiter, except that it had occurred some time before the Exodus. And, as Velikovsky pointed out in his book, the Babylonian tablets (Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga) cited by Gaposchkin to support her claim ascribe such erratic motions to Venus that translators and commentators have been baffled by them ever since they were discovered in the ruins of Nineveh in the last century; he also pointed out that even if the apparitions and periods of Venus recorded on the tablets date from early in the second millennium, which is disputed among scholars, they prove only that Venus already then moved erratically and quite unlike a planet. Reviewing Worlds in Collision in the New York Times Book Review, also on April 2, the late chief science editor of the Times, Waldemar Kaempffert, followed Gaposchkin into the same territory and falsely accused Velikovsky of suppressing the Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga. Kaempffert seemingly had not read the book very carefully before condemning it, for not only did Velikovsky describe the tablets and quote the complete texts of observations from five successive years out of twenty-one, but he discussed opinions written by various orientalists and astronomers who had studied the tablets (Rawlinson, Smith, Langdon, Fotheringham, Schiaparelli, Kugler, Hommel). In the next few months, 'a surprising number of the country's reputable astronomers descended from their telescopes to denounce Worlds in Collision, ' to quote the Harvard Crimson of September 25, 1950. Newspapers around the country were barraged with abusive reviews contributed by big-name scientists; some of these writings were syndicated to ensure better coverage. Ignoring Velikovsky's alternate explanation that, perhaps in the grip of an alien magnetic field, a 'tilting of the (earth's) axis could produce the visual effect of a retrogressing or arrested sun, ' Frank K. Edmondson, director of Goethe Link Observatory, University of Indiana, wrote: [5] 'Velikovsky is not bothered by the elementary fact that if the earth were stopped, inertia would cause Joshua and his companions to fly off into space with a speed of nine hundred miles an hour. ' This argument, first formulated by Gaposchkin, is at best disingenuous, for the all-important time factor - the rate of deceleration - is completely ignored. Paul Herget, Director of the Observatory, University of Cincinnati, derided the ideas expressed in Worlds in Collision [6] , but advanced no specific counterarguments on scientific grounds. Nevertheless, he concluded that all the book's basic contentions were 'dynamically impossible. ' Frank S. Hogg, director of David Dunlop Observatory, University of Toronto, and Oregon astronomer J. Hugh Pruett both reiterated the erroneous Gaposchkin- Struve notion that observations of Venus made before the time of the Exodus refute Velikovsky's theme [7] , [8] . California physicist H. P. Robertson chose the easy path of invective: 'This incredible book... this jejune essay... [is] too ludicrous to merit serious rebuttal. ' [9] Atomic scientist Harrison Brown disdained to list the 'errors in fact and conclusion' that he estimated would fill a letter 'thirty pages in length. ' Instead, in his review of Worlds in Collision in the Saturday Review of Literature [10] , Brown assured his readers that 'the combination of modern astronomy, geophysics, geochemistry, paleontology, geology, and physics can state the following: 'The earth did not stop rotating 3,500 years ago. [Brown, too, disregarded Velikovsky's alternative explanation for the visual effect of an arrested sun.] 'Venus was formed much earlier than 3,500 years ago. Indeed, it is probably about a million times older than Dr Velikovsky suggests. 'Venus was not formed from a comet emanating from Jupiter (or, for that matter, a comet emanating from anything else). ' The balance of Brown's review was devoted to 'book-and magazine-publishing irresponsibility. ' Despite the vigour of the protracted campaign to discredit its author, Worlds in Collision was heralded enthusiastically by many science writers and reviewers, and the book topped the best-seller lists of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune for twenty successive weeks in 1950. [By a strange oversight, however, the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year covering 1950 failed to note the existence of Velikovsky's book in its recapitulation of the year's bestsellers.] On May 25, 1950, when sales of his book were at their peak, Velikovsky was summoned to Brett's office and told that professors in certain large universities were refusing to see Macmillan salesmen, and letters demanding cessation of publication were arriving from a number of scientist. Brett beseeched Velikovsky to save him from disaster by approving an arrangement that had been tentatively worked out with Doubleday & Company, which had no textbook department. Doubleday, with Velikovsky's consent, would take over all rights to Worlds in Collision. As evidence of the pressure being brought to bear, Brett showed Velikovsky a letter from Michigan astronomer Dean B. McLaughlin, who insisted Velikovsky's book was nothing but lies. On the same page Mclaughlin averred he had not read and never would read the book. While Velikovsky pondered his next move - whether to approve the transfer of rights to Doubleday, or to make an independent search for a new publisher - his scientist-critics apparently began to see their problem in a more serious perspective. Inability to dismiss the events of Worlds in Collision, gleaned from a multitude of sources, suggested that a substantial assault upon his method and sources was in order. The June 1950 issue of Popular Astronomy carried another attack on Velikovsky by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Her words were prefaced by a few lines from the magazine editor, who explained, 'We are giving greater prominence to this analysis of "Worlds in Collision" than is usually accorded to book reviews... for two reasons. 1. This book has been brought to the attention of a large reading public by having been mentioned favourably in several popular magazines. 2. The analysis here given is by a recognized authority in the field of astronomy, the science with which the book comes into closest contact, or sharpest conflict. ' Gaposchkin's 'analysis' was divided into two parts, first place being devoted to 'the Literary Sources. ' By the simple ruse of ignoring both contextual material and corroborative references, she purported to show that Velikovsky had misrepresented his sources. Her 'Scientific Arguments' included restatements of undemonstrable dogmas and a highly sarcastic synopsis of Velikovsky's thesis. Prof. Otto Neugebauer of Brown University, a specialist in Babylonian and Greek astronomy, in an article for Isis [11] that was mailed far and wide in reprint form, accused Velikovsky of wilfully tailoring quoted source material. To support this charge, Neugebauer specified that Velikovsky had substituted the figure 33°14' for the correct value, 3°14, ' in a quotation from the work of another scholar. When Velikovsky protested in a letter to the late George Sarton, then editor of Isis, that the figure given in his book was correct and the 33°14' was in fact Neugebauer's own insertion, not his, Neugebauer dismissed the incident as a 'simple misprint of no concern' that did not invalidate his appraisal of Velikovsky's methods. And the reprint was circulated by an interested group long after its errors had been pointed out. The fundamental position of Neugebauer is that the voluminous Babylonian astronomical texts from before the seventh century B. C., all of which are inconsistent with celestial motions as we know them, were composed in full disregard of actual observations; Velikovsky regards these records as representing true observations of the heavens before the last catastrophe. Four Yale University professors collaborated in preparing a rebuttal to Velikovsky for the American Journal of Science [12] , which was edited by geologist Chester R. Longwell. Sinologist K. S. Latourette acknowledged that Velikovsky 'has combed an amazing range of historical records for evidence to corroborate his thesis, ' but apparently Latourette could find no specific arguments to refute that thesis. George Kubler, mexicologist, derided the suggestion set forth in Worlds in Collision that the Mesoamerican civilization must be much older that scholars then conceded; 'The Mesoamerican cosmology to which Velikovsky repeatedly appeals for proof did not originate until about the beginning of our era. ' [In December 1956 the National Geographic Society announced: 'Atomic science has proved the ancient civilization of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older than had been believed. '] Rupert Wildt took Velikovsky to task for doubting the validity of celestial mechanics based upon gravitation and inertia only, to the exclusion of electromagnetic forces. Longwell scorned the notion that petroleum might have a cosmic origin. [Prof. W. F. Libby, chemist of the University of California, has since suggested that petroleum may be found on the moon. Prof. A. T. Wilson of Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, in 1960 produced high molecular weight hydrocarbons by electric discharges in a methane- ammonia (Jupiter-like) atmosphere; in 1962 he, too, suggested that the earth's petroleum may be of cosmic origin and that oil may be found on the moon.] The article authorized by the four Yale professors and signed by Longwell was given a preview run in the New Haven Register on June 25, 1950. A seven-column banner in blue ink above the text proclaimed: '4 Yale Scholars "Expose" Non-Fiction Best-Seller. ' After receiving assurances from Doubleday that it was immune to pressure from textbook writers and buyers, Velikovsky approved the transfer of rights on June 8, 1950. On June 11, columnist Leonard Lyons spread the news, and on June 18 the New York Times noted: 'The greatest bombshell dropped on Publishers' Row in many a year exploded the other day... Dr. Velikovsky himself would not comment on the changeover. But a publishing official admitted, privately, that a flood of protests from educators and others had hit the company hard in its vulnerable underbelly - the textbook division. Following some stormy sessions by the board of directors, Macmillan reluctantly succumbed, surrendered its rights to the biggest money-maker on its list. ' Leonard Lyons reported that the suppression was engineered by Harlow Shapley. When queried, however, Shapley told Newsweek, 'I didn't make any threats and I don't know anyone who did. ' The late George Sokolsky also discussed the case in his column, and shortly afterwards received a letter from Paul Herget, who was apparently disappointed that all the credit was going to Shapley. Herget wrote, and Sokolsky quoted: 'I am one of those who participated in this campaign against Macmillan... I do not believe that [Shapley] was in any sense the leader... I was a very vigorous participant myself... ' Dean McLaughlin wrote to Fulton Oursler: 'Worlds in Collision has just changed hands... I am frank to state that this change was the result of pressure that scientists and scholars brought to bear on the Macmillan Company... ' On June 30, Fred Whipple, Shapley's successor as Director of Harvard College Observatory, informed the Blakiston Company, then owned by Doubleday, that, rather than continue to be a fellow author in the same house with Velikovsky, he would turn over to charity future royalties from his Blakiston-published Earth, Moon and Planets and would make no further updating revisions in the text so long as Doubleday controlled Blakiston. Dumping its offensive best seller, however, was but the first step in the re-establishment of Macmillan's reputation. There remained matters of purgatorial sacrifice and public recantation. James Putnam, a 25-year veteran with Macmillan, had been entrusted with making the arrangements to contract for and publish Velikovsky's manuscript. His judgement in urging that Macmillan accept Worlds in Collision had been confirmed in spectacular fashion when the book became a best seller. Nevertheless, the negotiations to transfer publishing right to Doubleday were carried on without his knowledge, and as soon as the transfer had been consummated, Putnam's good friend, editor-in-chief H. S. Latham, was delegated to inform him that his services were being terminated immediately. [In January 1963 Latham expressed in a letter to Velikovsky the great regret he still feels for Macmillan's capitulation.] At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Cleveland in December 1950, a Mr. Charles Skelley, representing the Macmillan Company, addressed the members of a committee specially appointed to study means for evaluating new theories before publication. He pointed out that, as a contribution to the advancement of science, his firm had 'voluntarily transferred' its rights to a 'book that the panel regarded as unsound... ' His remarks were duly recorded and reported by panel chairman Warren Guthrie [13] . Harvard geologist Kirtley Mather was the main spokesman before the panel, discussing possible methods of censorship. The British edition of Worlds in Collision was rushed into print within two months of a contract between Doubleday and Victor Gollancz, and in September British scientists began to publish reviews. Spencer Jones, quoted in part at the beginning of this account, concluded: 'It is a pity that so much erudition should have been wasted in following so false a trail. ' However, he was mistaken in arguing that, if there had been catastrophes such as Velikovsky described, 'we should find that, at a certain epoch in past time, the positions of Mars and Venus were identical. ' Velikovsky, in a letter published in The Spectator on October 27, 1950 called attention to the Royal Astronomer's error; the last catastrophe took place not between Mars and Venus, but between Mars and earth. He also pointed to the present close approaches of the earth and Mars every 15 years, the similar axial inclinations of these two planets, and the similar lengths of their days as vestiges of near contact and magnetic interference in the past. Evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane, author of Science and Ethics, reviewed the book in the New Statesman and Nation for November 11, 1950. Haldane misquoted Velikovsky, then ridiculed the misquotation; he mismatched dates and the events Velikovsky had associated with them; he concluded that book was 'equally a degradation of science and religion. ' THE ARTICLES IN HARPER'S In the fall of 1950 Frederick Allen sought a scientist to participate in a debate with Velikovsky in the pages of Harper's Magazine. Shapley and Neugebauer, among others, declined the opportunity, but Princeton astrophysicist John Q. Stewart accepted. The debate appeared in Harper's for June 1951, introduced by several background paragraphs prepared by the editors, who noted that 'there has been a remarkable lack of explicit criticism of the book based on careful reading. ' Given the floor first, Velikovsky presented an 'Answer to my Critics. ' One by one he described and analyzed fallacies in the principal physical or historical arguments that had been advanced against his book. Among these points were the matters of ancient eclipses, early observations of Venus, the substance of comets, electromagnetic forces and effects in the solar system, and the consequences of stopping the earth's spin or tilting its axis in space. Stewart's article was titled 'Disciplines in Collision. ' He relied heavily on Gaposchkin's earlier writings, quoting in full her synopsis of Velikovsky's theme - a passage filled with parenthetical sneers. Stewart charged that records of ancient solar eclipses contradict Velikovsky's thesis of changes in terrestrial and lunar movements in the second and first millennia B. C. But Velikovsky, in his rejoinder, printed in the same issue of Harper's, showed that the alleged eclipses, in the original sources, are accompanied neither by dates nor by locality specifications. Moreover, of the three mentioned records, the text of one (Chinese) referred to a disturbance of celestial motions which had prevented the occurrence of a predicted eclipse, and commentary about a second (Babylonian) by Kugler, the greatest authority on Babylonian astronomy, called attention to the fact that an eclipse would not be possible at all on the indicated day of a lunar month; Kugler conjectured that the phenomenon reported might have been a darkening of the sky due to passage of the earth through 'an immense train' of dust and meteorites. [In 1959 Prof. André Danjon, director of Paris Observatory, established that there are abrupt changes in the earth's rotational speed following solar flares; this he ascribes to electromagnetic influences. One implication of this discovery is that eclipses cannot be dated by retrospective calculation.] Stewart also claimed that the geographic position of the terrestrial axis could never change; but since the debate of 1951 the idea of wandering of the axis with respect to the crust of the earth has gained the acceptance of science. According to Stewart, 'Tombs dated from the fourth millennium B. C. were not destroyed by ocean floods in Ur (of the Chaldees). ' But Velikovsky, in his rejoinder, quoted Sir Leonard Wooley, the excavator of Ur: 'Eight feet of sediment imply a very great depth of water and the flood which deposited it must have been of a magnitude unparalleled in local history... a whole civilization which existed before it is lacking above it and seems to have been submerged by the water. ' The August 1951 issue of Harper's carried a letter to the editor from Julius S. Miller, professor of physics and mathematics at Dillard University. Miller cited what he called a 'glaring paucity and barren weakness of explicit criticism' on the part of Velikovsky's critics. He concluded: '( 1) The Velikovsky notions are not altogether untenable; ' and '( 2)... not yet refuted. ' Laurence Lafleur, then associate professor of philosophy at Florida State University, brought a new argument to bear against Velikovsky in the November 1951 issue of Scientific Monthly: '... the odds favour the assumption that anyone proposing a revolutionary doctrine is a crank rather than a scientist. ' Lafleur itemized seven criteria for spotting a crank. Examples: Test 6. Velikovsky's theory is in no single instance capable of mathematical accuracy. Its predictions, if capable of any, would certainly be so vague as to be scientifically unverifiable. Test 7. Velikovsky does show a disposition to accept minority opinions, to quote the opinions of individuals opposed to current views, and even to quote such opinions when they have been discredited to the point that they are no longer held even as minority views. For example, we may cite the notion that the earth's axis has changed considerably. So Lafleur concluded that Velikovsky qualified as a crank 'perhaps by every one' of these test. But having established this 'we must still deal with feeling, first, that scientists should have attempted to refute Velikovsky's position, as a service both to him and to the public... ' Thus the professor acknowledged that much of earlier criticism - thousands of words printed in the span of more than a year and a half - was denunciation rather than refutation. But in his own attempt to perform the recommended 'service, ' Lafleur, even with the aid of astrophysical theorems contrived for the occasion, fared no better than the scientists. On the assumption that an electroscope would detect it, he denied that the earth carries an electric charge. (No scientist corrected, in print, this mistaken notion or any other wrong statement by any critic during the entire Worlds in Collision controversy.) Lafleur also claimed that an approach between two celestial bodies close enough to bring their magnetic fields into conflict must inevitably bring about collision, evaporation, and amalgamation of the bodies. The American Philosophical Society met in Philadelphia in April 1952, and as part of a symposium on 'Some Unorthodoxies of Modern Science, ' a paper, 'Worlds in Collision, ' by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was read. Once again Mrs Gaposchkin repeated most of her earlier arguments, prefacing them with an account of her 'Herculean labour' in ferreting out the alleged fallacies in Worlds in Collision. She chose to disregard the great mass of Velikovsky's evidence and isolate certain quotations from their context, making it appear that Velikovsky had read into them ideas of his own. (See comparison of texts, Appendix 2.) Her audience could conclude only that Velikovsky had been guilty of the most heinous disregard for the rules of scholarship. Towards the end of her address, which was read in her absence, Gaposchkin professed bewilderment: 'Why is it, if scientists are really the open-minded men they think themselves, that they are under so much criticism of the "Science is a Sacred Cow" variety? I confess I do not understand why the revulsion against science takes this form... ' Velikovsky was in the audience at the same meeting, and he was permitted to come forward to offer a rebuttal to arguments presented earlier by archaeologists astronomers, and geologists. The audience listened attentively and responded warmly. But when he requested that his remarks be reproduced along with Gaposchkin's in the society's Proceedings [14] , his bid was rejected. Appended to Gaposchkin's paper, however, was a 'quantitative refutation of Velikovsky's wild hypothesis' by Donald H. Menzel, also of Harvard Observatory. '... let us make the assumption with Velikovsky and try to determine what would happen if the sun and the planets suddenly acquired gross electric charges. ' Menzel calculated that for electric forces to contribute ten per cent of the gravitational attraction between earth and sun equally charged, but of opposite polarities, each must acquire a voltage of 10 19 volts (10 raised to the 19th power); the energy necessary to place such charge on the sun would be 5 x 10 43 ergs (10 raised to the 43rd power), 'as much energy as the entire sun radiates in 1, 000 years. ' Menzel then purported to show that the greatest charge a positive sun could retain was 1800 volts. Now, the specification of suddenly acquired charge, which Menzel apparently sought to ridicule by calculation of the energy required to emplace it, is wholly arbitrary and misleading; nothing in Velikovsky's thesis suggests that solar and planetary charges are acquired suddenly. Furthermore, Menzel's necessary assumptions as to the dielectric properties of the sun, earth, and space were wholly gratuitous and unsupported by observational evidence. (It has been established in space probes since 1960 that interplanetary space, especially close in to the sun, is filled with plasma. Thus Menzel's assumptions are inapplicable to the situation. Furthermore, in 1960, Prof. V. A. Bailey of the University of Sydney, Australia, reported [15] : 'It has been found possible to account for the known orders of magnitude of five different astronomical phenomena... by the single hypothesis that a star like the sun carries a net negative charge... ' Bailey calculated that the necessary charge on the sun would produce an electric field with a potential at the surface of the sun on the order of 10 19 volts.) Walter S. Adams, director of Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories, was a rare exception among astronomers who participated in discussions of Worlds in Collision. In correspondence with Velikovsky, Adams complimented him on the accuracy of his presentation of astronomical material, though he could not accept the premise that electromagnetism participates in celestial mechanics. Whenever Velikovsky requested information or explanations pertaining to astronomical phenomena, Adams answered courteously and in minute detail. In February 1952 the author of Worlds in Collision visited the California astronomer at the solar observatory in Pasadena and discussed with him at first hand some of the problems raised by the historical evidence. Constructive criticism came also from Professor Lloyd Motz, astronomer of Columbia University, with whom Velikovsky on many occasions discussed problems of celestial mechanics. Motz holds conventional views. S. K. Vsekhsviatsky, director of Kiev observatory, has corresponded with Velikovsky on problems in solar system phenomena and has cited Velikovsky's works on numerous occasions in support of his own positions in theoretical matters. Volume I of Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos appeared in March 1952. Proceeding from the premise that Egyptian and Israelite histories may be synchronized by equating the upheaval described in Exodus with the catastrophe that befell Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom, Velikovsky worked down through the centuries from the fifteenth to the middle of the ninth, highlighting contacts between the peoples of the two lands -- Egypt and Palestine. The synchronization is carried almost to the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt, to the days of Akhnaton, who thus is revealed as a contemporary of Ahab and Jehoshaphat in the ninth century rather than a precursor of Moses, as in orthodox chronology. Unpublished portions of Ages in Chaos must dispose of six apparently superfluous centuries in conventional Egyptian history, and Velikovsky promises that in doing so, his work will show that no enigmatic half-millennium-long 'dark ages' need to be inserted in Aegean, Mesopotamian, or Anatolian histories. William F. Albright, Spence Professor of Semitic Language at Johns Hopkins University, reviewed and rejected Velikovsky's second book in the New York Herald Tribune for April 20, 1952. Albright's only specific argument was that Velikovsky had mistaken the cuneiform plural sign, mesh, in some of the El Amarna letters for the name of the Moabite King Mesh (a) But in his text Velikovsky twice called attention to the fact that in several instances in these letters the conventional reading cannot apply, since the grammatical construction definitely pertains to an individual - a rebellious vassal of the king of Samaria (Sumur), well known from the Bible. Professor Harry Orlinsky of Hebrew Union College echoed Albright's remarks [16] , thus documenting his unfamiliarity with the book he purported to review. The scientific press did not devote space to analyses of Velikovsky's reconstruction of history, but as Albright described it eight years later in the Herald Tribune [17] , there were 'howls of anguish' among the historians. The Velikovskys moved from New York City to Princeton, N. J., in 1952, and the heretic began to make the acquaintance of scientists in that university community. In October 1953 he was asked to address the Graduate College Forum at Princeton on the subject, 'Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent Finds in Archaeology, Geology, and Astronomy. ' In the course of this address, in which he was able to cite many items in support of his thesis among discoveries made since the appearance of Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky suggested that earth's magnetic field reaches sensibly as far as the moon and is responsible for certain unaccounted-for libratory, or rocking, movements of that body. He also suggested that the planet Jupiter radiates in the radio-frequency range of the spectrum. (In April 1955, Drs B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution startled their audience at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society when they announced their accidental discovery of radio noise emitted by Jupiter. However, when a Doubleday editor wrote to call their attention to the fact that Velikovsky had anticipated just such a finding, one of them replied that even Velikovsky is entitled to a 'near miss' once in a while.) The text of the Forum address was published as a supplement to Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval in 1955. From about the time of the 1953 Forum address, through 1954, and into 1955 up to the time of Einstein's death, he and Velikovsky carried on private debate oral, and written, on the issue of colliding worlds and the merits of an electromagnetic solar system. Einstein remained adamant in his conviction that sun and planets must be electrically neutral and space must be free of magnetic fields and plasma. Yet when he learned only days before his death, that Jupiter emits radio noise, as Velikovsky had so long insisted, he offered to use his influence in arranging for certain other experiments Velikovsky had suggested. It was too late. When Einstein died, Worlds in Collision lay open on his desk. At the same Philadelphia symposium where Gaposchkin's attack on Velikovsky had been read in 1952, I. Bernard Cohen, Harvard historian of science, also spoke. In an abstract of his address released before the meeting Cohen expressed foreboding that the reaction against Velikovsky might signify that his work was of great importance; it appeared that Velikovsky and his book were to be the principal topics of discussion. By speech time, however, Cohen's theme had been altered considerably, and in the printed version of the address in the Proceedings [18] Velikovsky was referred to but once, in an off hand conclusion that Gaposchkin had already discredited him. In July 1955, Scientific American published Cohen's tribute to Albert Einstein, whom he had met on just one occasion, for an interview. Cohen took the opportunity to ridicule Velikovsky with isolated adjectives allegedly quoted from Einstein. In an exchange of letters with Otto Nathan, executor of Einstein's estate, in the September 1955 issue of Scientific American he conceded that Einstein had compared the reception of Velikovsky with that accorded Johann Kepler and had noted that contemporaries often have trouble differentiating between a genius and a crank. Cohen ended by saying .'... There is no basis for concluding that Professor Einstein might not have had a friendly feeling for the author in question or that he might not have had some interest in his work... Professor Einstein sympathized with the author when he was attacked and disliked the methods used by some of his attackers. ' 'EARTH IN UPHEAVAL' During the same period Velikovsky himself was completing the manuscript of Earth in Upheaval, a book presenting the evidence of recent catastrophes on earth. Einstein had read portions of the manuscript and contributed suggestions in marginal notes; before his death, according to Helen Dukas, his secretary, he was intending to write a letter requesting the curator of the Department of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to arrange for carbon-14 tests that might check the thesis of Ages in Chaos. Despite her transmission of this appeal, and decade-long efforts directed to the British Museum and other institutions by Velikovsky, the New Kingdom and late periods of Egypt, which span more than 1,200 years in conventional chronology, generally have been left out of testing programmes. In more than one instance, however, relics from this period have been adjudged 'contaminated' because they yielded unexpectedly low ages. Earth in Upheaval appeared in November 1955. Velikovsky examined the century-old principle of Lyellian uniformity by comparing its tenets with anomalous finds from all quarters of the globe: frozen muck in Alaska that consists almost entirely of myriads of torn and broken animals and trees; whole islands in the Arctic Sea whose soil is packed full of unfossilized bones of mammoths, rhinoceroses, and horses; unglaciated polar lands and glaciated tropical countries; coral and coal deposits near the poles; bones of animals from tundra, prairie, and tropical rainforest intimately associated in jumbled heaps and interred in common graves; the startling youth of the world's great mountain chains; shifted poles; reversed magnetic polarities; sudden changes in sea level all around the world; rifts on land and under the seas. Then Velikovsky took up the question of evolution, arguing that Darwin had rejected catastrophism in favour of Lyell's uniformity because the catastrophists of his day would not acknowledge the antiquity of the earth. But in reality catastrophes suggest the only plausible mechanisms for the phenomenon of evolution by mutation. Thus Darwin's contribution to the theory of evolution, which dates from Greek times, consisted only in the as-yet undemonstrated hypothesis that competition can give rise to new species. In the controversy that followed the publication of The Origin of Species, the issue revolved around whether or not evolution was a natural phenomenon, and it was resolved quite properly in the affirmative. But what was obscured in the uproar, argued Velikovsky, was the inadequacy of Darwin's hypothesis; 'if natural selection... is not the mechanism of the origin of species, Darwin's contribution is reduced to very little - only to the role of natural selection in weeding out the unfit. ' Velikovsky proposed in Earth in Upheaval that evolution is a cataclysmic process: '... the principle that can cause the origin of species exists in nature. The irony lies in the circumstance that Darwin saw in catastrophism the chief adversary of his theory... ' It appears that at first scientific journals and reviewers, aware of the adverse effect of their earlier agitation against Worlds in Collision, chose to ignore Earth in Upheaval. But a few months after it appeared a New York radio station presented a 'Conversation Programme' in which Jacques Barzun, then newly appointed to the position of Dean of the Graduate Faculties at Columbia University, and Alfred Goldsmith, president of the Radio Engineers of America and vice president in charges of research for Radio corporation of America, discussed the book, with Clifton Fadiman as moderator. All three participants were enthusiastic and affirmative towards Velikovsky's method, scholarship, and convincing manner of presenting his evidence; they considered that his work may be a beginning towards important new concepts in science and history. All agreed that his work deserved objective treatment from scientists. From this favourable discussion of Earth in Upheaval may have come some pressure to discuss it in other scientific media. In March 1956 Scientific American presented a review by Harrison Brown. His words, however, were devoted to an apology for the misbehaviour of scientists who had suppressed Worlds in Collision and to a restatement of his own earlier position with respect to that book. In a seven-column article, Brown dismissed Earth in Upheaval without challenging one of its points. He dealt with the new book in a single paragraph, then reverted to the old controversy. But he again refrained from producing any of the arguments against Worlds in Collision which he had claimed would fill thirty pages. [In 1963, Brown declared in a letter to one of Velikovsky's Canadian readers that his review of Earth in Upheaval had been directed against the 'abominable behaviour of scientists and publishers. '] In December 1956, when the International Geophysical Year was in the planning stage, Velikovsky submitted a proposal to the planning committee through the offices of Prof. H. H. Hess of Princeton University: '... It is accepted that the terrestrial magnetic field ... decreases with the distance from the ground; yet the possibility should not be discounted that the magnetic field above the ionosphere is stronger than at the earth's surface. ' Also, 'an investigation as to whether the unexplained lunar librations, or rocking movements, in latitude and longitude coincide with the revolutions of the terrestrial magnetic poles around the geographical poles' might well be included in the programme. Hess was notified by E. O. Hulburt of the committee that should the first proposition be proven right by experiments already planned, the second might be investigated later. [As it turned out, the most important single discovery of the IGY was that the earth is surrounded by the Van Allen belts of charged particles trapped in the far reaching geomagnetic field.] Earth in Upheaval came to the attention of Claude Schaeffer, professor at College de France and excavator of Ras Shamra in Syria. Schaeffer's independently conceived theory that ancient Middle Eastern civilizations had suffered simultaneous natural catastrophes on five occasions in the third and second millennia B. C. had been set forth in a 1948 volume, Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidental. [Velikovsky published an abstract of his own thesis in Scripta Academica in 1945.] Schaeffer wrote enthusiastically to Velikovsky and the two began a correspondence that has continued ever since. In 1957 Velikovsky met Schaeffer in Switzerland and again in Athens. Oedipus and Akhnaton, a book that presents Velikovsky's identification of Akhnaton as the historical prototype of the legendary Oedipus, appeared in 1960. It was an outgrowth of the originally planned work, Freud and His Heroes, which had been set aside almost twenty years earlier. [' Dreams Freud Dreamed, ' a reinterpretation of the dreams of the founder of psychoanalysis, was published in the Psychoanalytic Review for October 1941.] This work also met with silence on the part of most scholars, although Prof. Gertrude E. Smith of the University of Chicago, one of the nation's leading classicists, wrote a favourable review for the Chicago Tribune [19] . In the New York Herald Tribune [20] . Albright opposed the thesis on the grounds that it was improbable that at such an early time there could have been cultural intercourse between Egypt and Greece; yet Mycenaean ware was found in abundance in the capital city of Akhnaton, and a seal bearing the name of Akhnaton's mother turned up in a Mycenaean grave in Greece. The London Times [21] attacked the book anonymously, using a method familiar from the campaign against Worlds in Collision in America - discussing the book together with one of doubtful value to establish guilt by association. Ten years after the abrupt cancellation of Atwater's plans to dramatize Worlds in Collision in Hayden Planetarium, U. S. space probe Pioneer V was launched. This experiment was destined to destroy the idea that the earth and other planets are electromagnetically isolated in a near-vacuum space -- the position Einstein could not abandon. After Pioneer had been in solar orbit about six weeks, NASA called a press conference to report its findings. As Newsweek relayed the news on May 9, 1960, 'In one exciting week, man has learned more about the near reaches of the space that surrounds earth than the sum of his knowledge over the last 50 years. Gone forever is any earthbound notion of space as a serene thoroughfare for space travellers... a fantastic amount of cosmic traffic (hot gaseous clouds, deadly rays, bands of electricity) rushes by at high speed, circles, criss-crosses, and collides. ' Among the discoveries credited to Pioneer V are space- pervading magnetic fields, electric currents girdling the earth, and high energy charged particles from solar flares. Between 1954 and 1960 Velikovsky appeared repeatedly before the faculty and students of the geology department at Princeton University at the invitation of Prof. Hess, who recognized the importance of exposing his students to a dissenting view. On April 12, 1961, Velikovsky again addressed the Graduate College Forum, this time on the subject 'How Much of the Great Heresy of 1950 Is Valid Science in 1961? ' and offered an extensive list of confirming finds from celestial and terrestrial spheres. Later that same month American radio astronomers announced that the surface temperature of Venus must be 6000 F, and scientists began an energetic search for an 'acceptable' explanation of this new aspect of the solar system. About the time Mariner II approached Venus, late in 1962, Princeton physicist V. Bargmann and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz wrote a joint letter to the editor of Science [22] to call attention to Velikovsky's priority in predicting three seemingly unrelated facts about the solar system -- the earth's far-reaching magnetosphere, radio noise from Jupiter, and the extremely high temperature of Venus -- which have been among the most important and surprising discoveries in recent years. They urged that the Velikovsky thesis be objectively reexamined by science. Also at that time it was announced [23] that ground-based radiometric observations at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and at Goldstone Tracking station in California had shown Venus to have a slow retrograde rotation, a characteristic that puts it in a unique position among the planets. Feeling vindicated by these developments and encouraged by the publication of the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science, Velikovsky sought to publish a paper showing that the points brought out in that letter were but a few among many other ideas set forth in his books that have already been supported by independent research. The attempt was in vain; Philip Abelson, the editor of Science, returned Velikovsky's paper without reading it and published instead a facetious letter from a Poul Anderson, who claimed that 'the accidental presence of one or two good apples does not redeem a spoiled barrelful. ' Mariner II, when its findings were revealed, confirmed Velikovsky's expectations, showing the surface temperature of Venus to be at least 800 deg F and the planet's 15-mile-thick envelope to be composed, not of carbon dioxide or water as previously supposed, but of heavy molecules of hydrocarbons and perhaps more complicated organic compounds as well. Retrograde rotation, organic molecules in the envelope, and extreme heat on Venus find no convincing explanation, though they have already caused much deliberation; yet in Worlds in Collision two of the three phenomena were claimed as crucial tests for the thesis that Venus is a youthful planet with a short and violent history, and the third (anomalous rotation) supports the same conclusions. In spite of the clamour against the heretic, his books have found an enthusiastic following in every country of the world. Here and there small study groups have sprung up; Velikovsky's books are required reading in the courses of professors in a number of universities. Letters from enthusiastic readers have poured in upon the author through all the years since Worlds in Collision appeared. The British edition of that book is now in its fourteenth printing, and the American edition is regularly reprinted. A German edition went through five printings at the hands of its first publisher, then was attacked and suppressed in 1952 by theologians (Kirchlich-historische Kreise); after being unavailable for about six years, it is now back in print at the hands of a Swiss publisher. Seldom in the history of science have so many diverse anticipations - the natural fallout from a single central idea - been so quickly substantiated by independent investigation. One after another of Velikovsky's 'wild hypotheses' have achieved empirical support, but not until December 1962, in the Bargmann-Motz letter to Science, was his name ever linked in the pages of scientific journals with any of these 'surprising' discoveries, and never yet by the discoverers themselves. A platitude, repeated on various occasions, has it that any one who makes as many predictions as Velikovsky is bound to be right now and then. But he has yet to be shown wrong about any of his suggestions. Prof. H. H. Hess, who is now Chairman of the Space Board of the National Academy of Science, recently wrote to Velikovsky: 'Some of these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them; all of them were predicted long before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely, I do not know of any specific prediction you made that has since proven to be false. ' This record would appear to justify a long, careful look at Worlds in Collision by the guild that not only refused to look before condemning it in the past, but actively campaigned to defame its author. Notes (References cited in "Minds in Chaos") 1. The Spectator, London, September 22, 1950. 2. Zeitschrift fuer Gesammte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1931. 3. Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1963. 4. Newsweek, March 11, 1963. 5. Indianapolis Star, April 9, 1950. 6. Cincinnati Inquirer, April 9, 1950. 7. Toronto Globe and Mail, April 22, 1950. 8. Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1950. 9. Engineering and Science, Pasadena, Calif., May 1950. 10. April 22, 1950 (Saturday Review of Literature). 11. Isis, Vol. 41 (1950). 12. Amer. Jour. Science, Vol. 248 (1950). 13. Science, April 30, 1951. 14. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., Vol. 96 (1952). 15. Nature, Vol. 186, May 14, 1960. 16. Jewish Bookland, September 1952. 17. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, May 29, 1960. 18. Proc. Amer, Phil. Soc., Vol. 96 (1952). 19. Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1960. 20. New York Herald Tribune, May 29, 1960. 21. London Times Literary Supplement, January 20, 1961. 22. Science, Vol. 138, December 21, 1962. 23. Science, Vol. 139, March 8, 1963; The National Observer, December 31, 1962. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 2: } {Q AFTERMATH TO EXPOSURE } {C - } {T - } {S - } PART TWO THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE by Ralph E. Juergens AFTERMATH TO EXPOSURE: 'Minds in Chaos, ' reprinted here from the pages of The American Behavioral Scientist for September 1963, chronicles more than a decade of controversy over the works of Immanuel Velikovsky. But the story does not end in 1963. Events that have followed - set off in large part by the Behavioral Scientist study - shape themselves into additional chapters, and the image of objectivity so cherished by scientists loses even more of its luster as these later events begin to take on perspective. The story has bright facets as well as shadows, but in the glaring light of new knowledge from many fields the shadows cast by acts of repression and vilification seem darker than before. To place these events in their proper setting, it is necessary to backtrack a bit. In August 1963 - the month before the appearance of the Behavioral Scientist's Velikovsky issue - Harper's Magazine printed 'Scientists in Collision, ' an article by Eric Larrabee, whose 1950 article in the same magazine marked the beginning of the controversy. Now, writing 13 years later, Larrabee chose to point up the case for Velikovsky by citing recent discoveries in astronomy, space science, geology, and geophysics that bring support to the thesis of Worlds in Collision. Like the authors of the articles in the Behavioral Scientist, Larrabee called attention to a letter in Science (December 21, 1962) in which Valentin Bargmann, physicist of Princeton University, and Lloyd Motz, astronomer of Columbia University, urged their colleagues to recognize Velikovsky's priority in predicting three highly significant discoveries: (1) the high temperature of the planet Venus; (2) the emission of non-thermal radio noise by Jupiter; and (3) the vast reach of the earth's magnetic field in space. The Bargmann-Motz plea for scientific good sportsmanship won no response in the journals of science [1 and 2], even though almost simultaneously Venus-probe Mariner II eliminated all doubt about the reality of the high temperature of Venus and gave strong support to Velikovsky's further suggestion - offered as early as 1945 - that the envelope of Venus consists largely of hydrocarbon gases and dust. After verifying that the editorial lid on discussion of such matters was as tight as ever, Larrabee sought access once more to Harper's. 'Science itself, ' wrote Larrabee, 'even while most scientists have considered his case to be closed, has been heading in Velikovsky's direction. Proposals which seemed so shocking when he made them are now commonplace... There is scarcely one of Velikovsky's central ideas - as long as it was taken separately and devoid of its implications - which has not since been propounded in all seriousness by a scientist of repute... His dismissal and suppression by the scientific community require of scientists an act of agonizing reappraisal. ' Almost immediately a reply issued from Donald Menzel, Director of Harvard College observatory. This highly emotional essay turned up as a free-lance manuscript in the editorial offices of Harper's. Hardly had it arrived, however, than it was recalled by its author and replaced with a version less abusive to Larrabee and more abusive to Velikovsky. It was so abusive that before printing it (Harper's December 1963), the editor of the magazine struck one sentence, which read: 'Velikovsky has been as completely discredited as was Dr. Brinkley of the goat-gland era or the thousands whom the American Medical Association has exposed as quacks, preying on human misery, by purveying nostrums or devices of no beneficial value whatever. ' Menzel was angered by the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science, considering it to be 'uncalled for. ' He seemed infuriated that Larrabee in one noncommittal passage had called attention to an ironical situation: in 1952, in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Menzel had offered calculations to show that if Velikovsky were right about electromagnetic forces in the solar system, the sun would have to have a surface electric potential of 10 19 (10 raised to 19th power, 10 billion billion) volts - an absolute impossibility, according to the astronomer; but in 1960, V. A. Bailey, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney (Professor Bailey died December 7, 1964, in Switzerland - he was en route to the United states, where he hoped to see experiments carried out in space to test his hypotheses), claimed that the sun is electrically charged, and that it has a surface potential of 10 19 volts -- precisely the value calculated by Menzel. Bailey, at the time his theory was first published, was entirely unaware of Velikovsky's work and of Menzel's repudiation of it. The idea that his 'quantitative refutation of Velikovsky's wild hypothesis' - Menzel's own description of his contribution to the Proceedings in 1952 - should now be brought to Velikovsky's support was intolerable to the Harvard astronomer. So, when he mailed his paper to Harper's in 1963, he also sent a copy to Bailey in Sydney and asked him in a covering letter to revoke his theory of electric charge on the sun. That theory was casting doubt on the continuing efforts of Menzel and other American scientists to discredit Velikovsky, and Menzel pointed out what he conceived to be an error in Bailey's work. Professor Bailey, taking exception to the idea that his own work should be abandoned to accommodate the anti-Velikovsky forces, prepared an article in rebuttal of Menzel's piece and submitted it to Harper's for publication in the same issue with Menzel's. Bailey had discovered a simple arithmetical error in Menzel's calculations, which invalidated his argument. The editors of Harper's evidently taken aback by the heat of the controversy generated by Larrabee's article, rejected Bailey's offering, but agreed to print some of his comments if he would submit them in a brief letter. At the same time, however, Menzel was permitted to correct the arithmetical error pointed out by Bailey, and he did so without acknowledging the effect of the correction on his argument. Larrabee objected to such a use of Bailey's rebuttal paper, and at first Menzel was not permitted to extirpate the evidence of his carelessness; but after more pleading the correction was made. Insight into the frame of mind of the Harvard astronomer at the time he wrote is to be gained by noting his remarks about Velikovsky's score on predictions. In connection with the radio noise of Jupiter, Menzel wrote that, since scientists for the most part do not accept the theory of Worlds in Collision, 'any seeming verification of Velikovsky's prediction is pure chance. ' In regard to the high temperature of Venus, the astronomer argued that '" hot" is only a relative term. For example, liquid air is hot [196 deg below zero, centigrade], relative to liquid helium [269 deg below zero, centigrade]... ' Later in his article Menzel referred to this comparison: 'I have already disposed of the question of the temperature of Venus. ' This is all Menzel had to say about the temperature of Venus, although in 1955 he himself revoked his own estimate of two decades earlier that the ground temperature of Venus would be 50 deg C. The revocation was explained by saying that the temperature must surely be much lower. In 1959 the ground temperature of Venus was still estimated to be 17 deg C. Mariner II found it to be at least 430 deg C, or about 800 deg F. As for the extent of the earth's magnetic field, Menzel wrote: 'He [Velikovsky] said that it would extend as far as the moon; actually the field suddenly breaks off at a distance of several earth diameters. ' More than a year before Menzel took it upon himself to answer Larrabee, satellite Explorer X had detected the earth's magnetic field at a distance of at least 22 earth radii and gave no indication that this was its limit. Recently the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform satellites - especially IMP I - have found that the tail of the earth's magnetosphere extends 'at least as far as the orbit of the Moon' (Missiles and Rockets, January 18, 1965). Larrabee, limiting his reply to one page in the same issue of Harper's, pointed out that 'where Dr Menzel touches on points of fact he is either misleading or misinformed. ' The summation that followed stands as a classic example of the demolition of a scientist's arguments by a non-scientist; it is particularly noteworthy in as much as Menzel's main theme was that non-scientists do not understand scientific issues and the scientific method, and therefore should be rebuked for entering into scientific debate before the general public. Just how successful Larrabee's counterattack proved to be is shown in the examples given below: Menzel claimed that astronomers recognized the presence of electrified gas and magnetic fields in interplanetary space long before Velikovsky. Larrabee quoted Menzel's own words written in 1953: 'Indeed, the total number of electrons that could escape from the sun would be able to run a one cell flashlight for less that one minute. ' Menzel asserted that the earth's Van Allen belts contain equal numbers of positive and negative particles. Larrabee noted that Dr. James Van Allen, who discovered the belts, admits that this is an assumption for which there is no experimental evidence. Menzel attempted to calculate the electric field in space near the earth that would result from a charge on the sun of the magnitude suggested by Bailey. Larrabee, in reply, observed that the calculation was based on the erroneous assumption that space is a non- conducting medium. Menzel claimed that satellite motions are not disturbed by electromagnetic forces. Larrabee cited the publications of a number of space scientists to show that both orbital and rotational motions are affected by the presence of charged particles and magnetic fields. Menzel argued that the disturbance of the earth's rotation by solar flares is attributable to temporary heating and expansion of the earth and is not an electromagnetic effect. Larrabee pointed out that Professor Andre Danjon, who discovered this phenomenon, evaluated the thermal effect and found it altogether inadequate; Danjon concludes that electromagnetism is the only likely cause. Menzel insisted on his own earlier position that the envelope of Venus is made up of ice crystals and ridiculed Velikovsky's suggestion of 1950 - actually expressed as early as 1946 in letters to astronomers Harlow Shapley, Rupert Wildt, and Walter S. Adams - that hydrocarbons must predominate in the envelope. Larrabee referred the Harvard astronomer to a number of publications, including the official report of the Mariner II flight to Venus, in which it is stated that the clouds of Venus consist of condensed hydrocarbons. Summing up, Larrabee wrote: 'Velikovsky offers evidence from numerous other sciences, in particular geology and archaeology. Breaking the barriers between disciplines, he arrives at conclusions which no discipline had reached independently. This is the real nature of his challenge, and it is fundamental. ' In the limited space allotted his letter (Harper's January 1964), Professor Bailey expressed surprise 'that Professor Menzel totally ignores the impressive testimony to the worth of Dr. Velikovsky's predictions contained in the recent letter of that outstanding scientist Professor H. H. Hess of Princeton. ' Bailey noted that Menzel's challenge to the theory of electric charge on the sun 'is unconvincing since it involves certain out-of date views about the material contents of interplanetary space as well as the unproved assumption that the earthly laws of the electrodynamic field can be safely extrapolated to bodies such as the sun of unearthly dimensions and temperatures. ' In Bailey's view, 'important [new] facts must compel scientists to adopt a cautious attitude towards the astronomical ideas on which they were reared until the powerful new methods of observation developed by space scientists have accumulated more knowledge. ' Earlier, Larrabee's article brought response from astronomer Lloyd Motz, who emphasized that his purpose in writing (Harper's, October 1963) was to make clear his own disagreement with Velikovsky's theories. Nevertheless, he stated: 'I do support his right to present his ideas and to have these ideas considered by responsible scholars and scientists as the creation of a serious and dedicated investigator... His writings should be carefully studied and analyzed because they are the product of an extraordinary and brilliant mind, and are based upon some of the most concentrated and penetrating scholarship of our period... ' The debate in Harper's went on in the August, October, December 1963, and the January 1964 issues. During the same period another effort failed to break the editorial barrier. In the spring of 1963, Velikovsky had reason to suppose that confirmation of so many of his once-heretical predictions, and the even more impressive fact that none of his predictions had gone wrong, might have altered his standing among scientists - that finally he might be granted space in their journals. Despite the fact that a paper, 'Some Additional Examples of Correct Prognosis, ' had been rejected without being read by Philip Abelson, the editor of Science, Velikovsky now prepared an article on 'Venus, a Youthful Planet. ' H. H. Hess, who served that year as President of the American Geological Society, offered to transmit the new paper to the American Philosophical Society with his recommendation as a member of the society that it be published in the Proceedings. This simple act of contribution seems to have generated a storm that nearly spilt the society before calm was restored. The fortunes and misfortunes of Dr Velikovsky's paper during the half-year it was held by the Philosophical Society are revealed, in part, in statements made by two men - George W. Corner and Edwin G. Boring - both of whom played earlier, and thus far unrecounted, roles in the Velikovsky story. In 1952, Corner was chairman of a symposium on Unorthodoxies in Modern Science at the annual meeting of the Philosophical Society. It was he who permitted Velikovsky to mount the platform and offer comments of his own following the reading of a paper in which Harvard's lady astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin attacked Worlds in Collision in a most violent and irresponsible manner. This bit of fair play on Corner's part later was repudiated by the society's publications committee; Velikovsky's correction of Gaposchkin's misquotations were rejected for publication in the Proceedings. (See page 231 for a comparison of texts - Worlds in Collision versus Gaposchkin's alleged quotations from the book). By 1963 Corner had become Executive Officer of the Society and Editor of the Proceedings. Velikovsky's Venus paper therefore came directly to the hand of Corner. For several months following the submission of the paper by Hess there was no word as to its disposition. In the meantime, Larrabee's article in Harper's appeared, as did the special issue of the Behavioral Scientist devoted to 'The Politics of Science and Dr Velikovsky. ' Both documents surely came to the attention of at least some of the members of the Philosophical Society's publications committee. At last, in a letter dated October 15, 1963, Corner reported to Hess. The publications committee, after several sessions in which Velikovsky's paper was discussed 'at great length, ' was stalemated by 'divided opinions. ' The committee split into two belligerent camps, each unwilling to yield to the views of the other. Corner informed Hess that he had been 'directed to seek the advice of several responsible scientists and scholars, all members of the society' but not of the publications committee. He promised to keep Hess informed of later developments. Along with Cecilia Gaposchkin and I. Bernard Cohen, professor of the history of science, Edwin Boring - a professor of psychology - was a scheduled speaker on the programme of the 1952 symposium on unorthodoxies. Thus the panel was dominated by Harvard professors. Boring, in his talk and in the version later published in the Proceedings, did not neglect to make sport of Velikovsky. Two years later, in an article published in the American Scientist for October 1954, he classed Velikovsky with those who, bolstered by ego alone, hold to ideas long after evidence turns against them. Now, however, Professor Boring altered his position. On a visit to the campus of George Peabody College in Nashville in the fall of 1963 he made known his new-found feelings about 'the whole sordid mess' retold by the Behavioral Scientist. He was particularly critical of the role played by Harlow Shapley. Boring disclosed at Peabody that in stormy meetings of the publications committee there had been heated discussion whether or not to print Velikovsky's paper. Further, he let it be known that he was to be put in charge of a new Letters column in the Proceedings. Such a column would provide what Boring described as an 'appropriate vehicle' for the controversial paper, which would be the first item to appear in the column. Handling the matter in this way would permit publication without implying approval by the Society. As it turned out, however, even this face-saving compromise failed. In a letter dated January 20, 1964, Corner reported to Hess that 'the Committee on Publications... completed a long and careful study of the problem raised by the short manuscript of Mr Velikovsky... During the past couple of months, at the direction of the committee, I submitted the paper to an eminent historian of science and an equally eminent sociologist, and an astronomer of very high standing completely outside the circle of Mr Velikovsky's critics. 'After extremely thoughtful discussion, at which every possible way of dealing with this matter was considered, the committee decided that the Society should not publish this paper... ' 'The Politics of Science and Dr Velikovsky' appeared in ABS in September 1963 and quickly became a subject of intense discussion and debate on college campuses around the country. For the first time the story of the suppression of Worlds in Collision had been documented. The initial printing of the issue, itself larger than usual, quickly became exhausted in the face of a surge of orders for additional copies, and a second printing was made. Reader reaction was predominantly favourable. A number of scholars and foundation officers wrote letters of commendation to the editor, Alfred de Grazia. Others wrote directly to Velikovsky, expressing hope that recognition for his contributions to human knowledge soon would be forthcoming. One of very few expressions of disapproval appeared in a letter to the present writer from Warren Weaver, a vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Weaver asserted that he was 'amazed, disappointed, and in fact appalled that this serious journal [ABS] would devote so much space and effort to a series of articles of this sort. ' This was only the first of several occasions when the Sloan Foundation executives constituted themselves a Committee of Public Safety against Velikovsky's ideas. Professor Bernard Barber of Barnard College, Columbia University, reported within a few weeks of publication that 'I have already used your Velikovsky issue to very good teaching purpose in my Sociology of Knowledge course in connection with my general article on resistance by scientists to scientific discovery. ' Charles Perrow, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, expressed the conviction that the ABS Velikovsky issue 'should be required reading in social science courses. ' G. A. Lundberg of the University of Washington wrote: 'It seems to me that the A. A. A. S., not to mention individual scientists and groups, must now prepare a detailed answer. What is really at issue are the mores governing the reception of new scientific ideas on the part of established spokesmen for science. ' Indeed, it was tempting for spokesmen of science to take up the charges made by ABS. Even though Professor Menzel, taking it upon himself to reply to Larrabee's article in Harper's had, in the opinion of many of his colleagues, fared very badly in the exchange, a more cautious and cleverly calculated reply to the Behavioral Scientist might have a telling effect. Since the issues raised against the behaviour of the scientific community were essentially questions of ethics, a seemingly natural choice of vehicle in which to pursue these issues was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal which prides itself on being a medium of expression for 'the conscience of science. ' The Bulletin has a readership of more than 25,000, including most of the leading scientists of the world. It has prestige among such people and an obligation to undertake inquiries into the politics of science - to demand objective self-analysis on questions of scientific behaviour. Being a platform both for confession of error and for expression of ideas for improving the image of science, it is ideally suited as an arena in which to come to grips with the issues of the Velikovsky case. Unfortunately, however, the Bulletin chose to take up arms against the suggestion of fair play for Velikovsky. As Eugene Rabinowitch, the editor of the Bulletin, later acknowledged in a letter to Professor H. H. Hess (September 8, 1964), a widespread reawakening of interest in Velikovsky's theories, and his being championed as a great savant by the Behavioral Scientist, required remedial action. Clearly Rabinowitch took it to be his first duty to close ranks with fellow scientists whose conspiratorial acts in suppression of Velikovsky had been publicly charged against them. Rabinowitch assigned his Washington reporter, Howard Margolis - no part a scientist - the job of wielding the hatchet against ABS and Velikovsky. Margolis resurrected techniques employed with devastating effect during the earlier outcry against Worlds in Collision. His vulgar and thoroughly irresponsible article, 'Velikovsky Rides Again' (Bulletin, April 1964) is filled with misrepresentation and misquotations, jeers and sneers, bald statements of unfounded charges, and dogmatic presentations of received theory as fact. Margolis chose to discuss matters of philology and Egyptology -- fields unfamiliar to him, but having intrinsic appeal in that most Bulletin readers could be expected to be little oriented in them and hence dependent upon the integrity of editor and author. Displaying ignorance even of the elementary French required to read one of Velikovsky's sources, Margolis resorted to bravado - 'Now if you look up the actual inscription... ' - and launched into a totally confused discussion of Velikovsky's interpretation of a hieroglyphic text found at El Arish in Egypt. This is an inscription in stone telling of storm and darkness and the death of a Pharaoh in a whirlpool. The place name Pi Kirot appears in this inscription, and the name Pi ha-hiroth is given in Exodus as the place where the tribes of Israel crossed the Red Sea; Velikovsky suggested in Worlds in Collision - and amplified the argument in Ages in Chaos, unbeknownst to Margolis - that both references are to the same place. The name appears only once in the Egyptian monuments and only once in the Bible. And in context, both sources tell of storm and darkness, and of catastrophe befalling a Pharaoh overwhelmed by water. From the confused arguments presented by Margolis the only facts to emerge are that he does not understand that Egyptian was written without vowels and that he is not even aware of the use of 'ha' in Hebrew as the definite article. Ironically the Bulletin's Washington reporter elected to challenge Velikovsky on a philological conclusion which had won the acceptance of Professor William F. Albright, one of the world's leading orientalists and a harsh critic of Ages in Chaos, as early as 1946. Rabinowitch printed Margolis's vainglorious essay without comment. At the appearance of this diatribe in the estimable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Eric Larrabee - a past contributor to the journal - contacted the managing editor and was promised space for a reply in an early issue. But when he met the assigned deadline, he was informed that the space was not longer available. The mere vulgarity and unscholarly quality of Margolis's article did not deter its eager reception in quarters dominated by organized science. For example, L. H. Farinholt, another vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, sent a facsimile of the article to Moses Hadas, Jay Professor of Greek at Columbia University. Hadas had remarked in a published book review that 'in our time Immanuel Velikovsky... appears to be approaching vindication. ' Farinholt thought Hadas should find the Margolis essay 'of interest and perhaps amusing. ' Hadas replied that he had no opinion about the validity of Velikovsky's astronomical theories, 'but I know that he is not dishonest. What bothered me was the violence of the attack on him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another of the reviews misquoted him had then attacked the misquotation. So in the Margolis piece you send me... [Hadas gives several examples of Margolis's misrepresentations of Velikovsky's correct quotations] It is his critic, not Velikovsky, who is uninformed and rash... The issue is one of ordinary fair play. ' On May 12, 1964, Alfred de Grazia, as publisher of The American Behavioral Scientist, wrote to Rabinowitch and demanded that the Bulletin editor repudiate the many distortions in Margolis's article. 'Our contributors and our advisors have urged us to take action to remedy the wrong done us. We hesitate to do this since we prefer to rely in the first instance on your scholarly good will. ' Rabinowitch replied to de Grazia on June 23, in a long letter urging him not to go to court; 'the magazine cannot disclaim legal responsibility for any defamatory statements, but I do not see in the article by Mr Margolis any statements of such nature with respect to yourself or to the contributors of your journal. ' Thus tacitly admitting that Velikovsky had been defamed, Rabinowitch suggested that 'since Margolis brought up paleographic evidence, fairness requires the Bulletin to give space to a letter disputing this evidence (provided this letter is not more abusive than Mr. Margolis's criticisms). ' He offered to print an article presenting the views of Velikovsky, should it be written and submitted by a scientist of standing. Rabinowitch concluded: 'It is in this spirit of scientific argumentation that the whole problem should be resolved. ' Velikovsky, informed of Rabinowitch's stand, would not consent to enter into debate with Margolis on matters of Hebrew and Egyptian philology and paleography. The author of the Bulletin article had amply demonstrated incompetence in these subject. But since Rabinowitch had written of the 'spirit of scientific argumentation, ' Velikovsky thought he might be willing to publish a paper expressing a positive point of view. Professor Hess agreed to submit for publication in the Bulletin 'Venus, a Youthful Planet, ' the paper by Velikovsky which the American Philosophical Society had returned earlier. On September 8, 1964 (in the letter already quoted in part, above), Rabinowitch replied to Hess: 'I am afraid I cannot offer publication in the Bulletin [for Velikovsky's manuscript] - not because we are "afraid" of publishing it, but because the Bulletin is not a magazine for scientific controversies... 'I am not qualified - and have no time - to study Velikovsky's books, or even his article (which I return with this letter), but I know enough of the absence of dogmatism in modern science and its easy acceptance of revolutionary new ideas - including the relativity of time and absence of exact causality in the world of elementary particles - to trust qualified astrophysicists with an unprejudiced judgment about Mr Velikovsky's theories - and so far as I am aware, not a single qualified scientist has raised his voice in favour of [them] (even if you and one of your colleagues from Princeton have felt in their duty to point out in Science the remarkable correctness of some of Velikovsky's specific conclusions). ' It is interesting to compare this expression of complacency with comments made by Robinowitch in his 1963 book, The Dawn of a New Age: 'As scientists, we have a common experience - that, in science, free inquiry and untrammeled exploration by individuals are the ultimate sources of the most important progress. The greatest scientific discoveries have come through efforts of non-conformist individuals who have asked heretical questions and boldly doubted the validity of generally accepted conceptions... ' (p. 222). 'I believe that the responsibility of scientists in our time is to bring into human affairs a little more of such skeptical rationality, a little less prejudice, a greater respect for facts and figures, a more critical attitude toward theories and dogmas, a greater consciousness of the limitations of our knowledge, and a consequent tolerance for different ideas and a readiness to submit them to the test of the experiment... For scientists, there should be no final truths, no forbidden areas of exploration, no words that are taboo, no prescribed or proscribed ideas... ' (p. 223). 'A scientist must always be prepared to submit his beliefs, findings, and generalizations to the never ending test of observation and experiment. Not that he is entirely without resistance to new theories that would overthrow the principles which he has become accustomed to accepting as valid; but of all groups of men, he belongs to the most open- minded one, the one most ready to accept change. He would be a poor scientist who would refuse to consider new facts and to change ideas to accommodate them. The only thing of which science is intolerant is intolerance itself - claims that certain concepts are sacrosanct, true beyond doubt, and protected from the test of logic and experience. ' (p. 323). In his correspondence with de Grazia and Hess, Rabinowitch admitted that he had not read Velikovsky's books. Furthermore, he displayed an imperfect memory: to de Grazia he expressed a vague recollection that Shapley and Menzel had analyzed Velikovsky's theories, yet Shapley never published any arguments or articles on the subject; in his letter to Hess, Rabinowitch gave evidence of confusion about more recent events, for he mistook Hess for one of the writers of the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science. Still, on the basis of no acquaintance with Velikovsky's work, and of hazy memories of what others had said and done, he undertook a campaign against Worlds in Collision and put an unqualified journalist in charge of the operation. Professor de Grazia reproduced the Margolis text in full in the Behavioral Scientist for October 1964 and appended an extensive commentary pointing out in detail -54 examples - its many points of ignorance and misrepresentation. This elicited a letter from Margolis: 'May I merely suggest that before your readers reach a judgment on the matter, they take the trouble to check Velikovsky's assertions, my assertions, and de Grazia's rebuttal against at least one source. I suggest Augustine's City of God... Unlike the El-Arish manuscript... the book is available in any library... ' In a covering letter, Margolis offered to meet de Grazia to establish harmony. Margolis, still uninformed - many months after his article appeared in print - that the El-Arish document he purported to interpret is an inscription in stone and not a manuscript, suggested that de Grazia's readers inform themselves of what Velikovsky has to say about 'Minerva, Deucalion, Varro, Ogyges, Venus, and so on' by checking references to those names in St Augustine. Clearly he hoped no one would follow through on his suggestion; otherwise he would not have risked such innuendo. De Grazia replied: 'You claim that Velikovsky misquoted St Augustine's City of God, but do not submit any specific reference. In a matter of accuracy in quotations no issue can be settled except by referring to the concrete texts. In the matter of quotations from St Augustine, in your own article, you gave only one example, and on that point your charges were unfounded... If you know of texts of ancient literature that contradict the thesis of Dr Immanuel Velikovsky, you will do a service to knowledge by publishing them. But as long as you do not quote them, any debate would be built on air. The solid fact is that the ABS proved that you have misquoted or misrepresented the writers of ABS, the works of Dr Velikovsky, and the two ancient texts mentioned in your article. Please do manifest your professed concern with accuracy in quotations by taking steps to correct this matter. 'Since you are wrong in fifty-four ways already, it ill behooves you to increase your score. ' The issue of irresponsibility on the part of reviewers was brought into focus again in the summer of 1965. Book Week, a Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Examiner, published (July 11, 1965) a review of Worlds in Collision by Willy Ley, author of popular works on rocketry and space travel. The occasion for this review, 15 years after the first publication of the book, was its appearance, along with Earth in Upheaval, in paperback form (Delta, 1965). In his essay, Ley wheels to the firing line almost every device used by the earlier reviewers: he dismisses the arguments of Worlds in Collision by summarizing them in a manner calculated to make them appear ridiculous; he categorizes Velikovsky's works with those of Hans Hörbiger, a long-discredited catastrophist whose speculations never led to verifiable predictions; he indulges in the same false generalizations about Velikovsky's handling of source materials (. '.. half the time the Bible does not say what it is supposed to say'), but disdains the opportunity to be specific; he objects to a method of scholarly deduction that he does not even attempt to understand ('... references to old writings... is a peculiar way of establishing proof of physical events'); he flaunts his own ignorance of material Velikovsky assembled in Earth in Upheaval (. '.. animal life went through the fateful years of 1500 B. C. without any disturbance'); and he outlines his own mathematical proof of 'the complete impossibility' of the eruption of Venus from Jupiter -showing himself unaware that cosmologist R. A. Lyttleton recently demonstrated mathematically that Venus must have originated by eruption from Jupiter or one of the other major planets. Velikovsky was invited by the editor of Book Week to write a rebuttal to Ley's accusations. Taking the opportunity to answer his uncritical critics in general, he prepared a long article, which appeared in Book Week for September 9, 1965. Professor Horace M. Kallen, after reading the rejoinder, wrote to Velikovsky: 'I think you have put Ley in a position he will find it very difficult to wriggle out of. ' The appearance of Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval in soft covers occasioned another episode that bears recording. In March 1965 a modest advertisement announcing the Delta editions was submitted by Dell Publishing Co. for publication in Science and Scientific American. Both periodicals turned down the ad, but were unwilling to put their refusals in writing. Eventually, however, Robert V. Ormes, managing editor of Science, wrote to Franklin Spier, Inc., the ad agency: 'As Mr Scherago [advertising manager of Science] told you on the telephone, the advertisement you submitted has not been accepted by Science. ' As the agency reported in a memo to Dell: 'We insisted on a letter giving some reason for the rejection. So far, just this "answer" from Science - which brilliantly avoids mentioning the books that are involved. ' Perhaps inadvertently, Science listed the paperback edition of Worlds in Collision under 'Reprints' in its occasional department 'New Books' (May 7, 1965). Throughout the story of Velikovsky's reception by science, one phenomenon occurs over and over again. One prominent scientist after another undertakes to criticize and ridicule the author and his theories; having done this, he states - not without a trace of pride - that he has not read the books. This trend was established early, when Harlow Shapley, in interviews, and Cecilia Payne- Gaposchkin, in print, spoke out against Worlds in Collision before the book appeared. Astronomer Dean McLaughlin of Michigan boasted that he never would read Velikovsky's book, yet he felt no compunction against proclaiming it to be 'nothing but lies. ' Philip Abelson rejected Velikovsky's article in 1963 without experiencing any compulsion to read it, and Rabinowitch did likewise with another article, at the same time throwing the weight of his journal's prestige behind a renewal of the campaign to brand Velikovsky as incompetent. Another phenomenon is the alacrity with which scientist-critics of Velikovsky proclaim their own objectivity by citing their acceptance of Einstein's theories. Again and again the name of Einstein or the theory of relativity has been brought forward in comparisons of Velikovsky and Einstein which are intended to justify the different receptions accorded their works. Einstein's theory, held in highest esteem in spite of the fact that even after half a century there is no indisputable proof of its validity, is held up as a model scientific theory; Velikovsky's theory, on the other hand, although many predictions based upon it have already found vindication, is rejected as unscientific. The logic in this stance - adopted most recently by Rabinowitch - is elusive. Still another approach to the problem posed by Velikovsky's heresies is to depreciate the evidence or ignore it altogether when it tends to support him. This technique averts discussion and acknowledgment of his successful predictions. Sky & Telescope, a journal for amateur astronomers published by Harvard Observatory, reported the findings of Mariner II by reprinting the summary from a book, Mariner, Mission to Venus, written by the staff of Jet Propulsion Laboratory - the group which conducted the experiments aboard the spacecraft. Minor ellipses in the text are noted by dots in the reprinted version, but four major deletions are unacknowledged by any sort of mark. Restoration of the mutilated text requires reinsertion of the following: (1) 'The rotation might be retrograde... ' (2) The clouds of Venus 'probably are comprised of condensed hydrocarbons held in oily suspension... ' (3) 'No water could be present at the surface, but there is some possibility of small lakes of molten metal of one type or another. ' (4) 'Some reddish sunlight... may find its way through the 15-mile-thick cloud cover, but the surface is probably very bleak. ' Is it just coincidence that these points - which (1) suggest anomalous behaviour in the past, (2) lend credence to a specific prediction made by Velikovsky, (3) challenge long- held motions of water clouds on Venus, and (4) cast an insurmountable barrier across the path of the theory that Venus is heated by a greenhouse-like trapping of sunlight - fell by the wayside in an editorial office at Harvard? Does Harvard University have any responsibility for inquiring into such matters (the question asked by de Grazia in 1963)? Influential scientists continue to exert pressure against any sort of favourable mention of Velikovsky in popular journals and magazines. The easiest ploy is to impress upon editors that only scientists - and preferably selected members of the establishment - are competent to judge scientific theories. And since science is an important source of news of interest to the general public, editors are not inclined to reject such advice. An article planned in 1963 by Newsweek to call attention to Velikovsky's predictions and their fulfilment by Mariner II was abandoned following a telephone conversation between a Newsweek editor and Harlow Shapley - the astronomer to whom Velikovsky wrote in 1946 that a crucial test of his theory would be a search for hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Venus. In the Soviet Union, a journal of popular science, Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life), in a series of articles continuing since 1962, has been casually presenting Velikovsky's theories, even the parenthetical speculation that in the legend of the sinking of Atlantis one too many zeroes crept in to the traditional dating of the event. Velikovsky's name, however, has not been mentioned in the series. The Italian multi-lingual journal Civiltà delle Macchine, in its issue for May-June 1964, underlined the need for eternal vigilance to preserve the spirit of the scientific method, which had been discussed at length in an earlier issue commemorating Galileo's fourth centenary. Professor Bruno de Finetti of the Instituto Matematico of the University of Rome contributed the lead article for the May-June issue. To illustrate a theme presented by the journal's editors - science must continually guard itself against scepticism that tends to limit its perception to a series of unrelated hypotheses just as it must guard against dogmatism - Professor de Finetti expressed the opinion that the refusal of the large majority in the academic community to even discuss Velikovsky's ideas imparts 'one great teaching above all others; ' professionalization and departmentalization in science has become a major obstacle to the continuous renewal so necessary to science. Thus, according to de Finetti, scholars refused to discuss the merits of Velikovsky's studies because their attentions were diverted by a more personal issue - the fact that he challenged 'the right of their fossilized brains to rest in peace' with the skills and problems already established. The defence of such vested interest in the preservation of comfortable interdisciplinary boundaries may transform 'each clan of specialists and the great clan of scientists in general into a sort of despotic and irresponsible mafia. ' Although American scientists and science editors continue to ignore - or rail against - Velikovsky's ideas, impersonal science itself continues to explode its own more conventional theories by turning up new evidence. Much new evidence tends to support Velikovsky; some of it is simply compatible with his views; up to now none of it has refuted them. In April 1964 an announcement by radio astronomers of evidence that the planet Jupiter suddenly changed its period of rotation made front-page news. The correspondence between the rotational period of radio sources and the rotational period of the body of the planet is entirely inferential, but the time of sudden change noted for the radio sources coincided with a similar change in the period of rotation of Jupiter's red spot. In this connection, it should be noted that in a memorandum of proposed space researches sent by Velikovsky to Professor H. H. Hess at Hess's request in September 1963 the following suggestion is made: 'Precise calculations should be made as to the effect of the magnetic field permeating the solar system on the motions of [Jupiter] which is surrounded by a magnetosphere of an intensity presumably 10 14 times that of the terrestrial magnetosphere. This is basic to the impending reevaluation of electromagnetic effects in celestial mechanics. ' At a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Hamburg (1964) the planets Mercury and Venus became topics of intense interest. Australian astronomers reported evidence of temperatures near 600F on the dark side of Mercury, where temperatures far below zero were expected. According to Scientific American (October 1964), 'The explanation advanced for this surprisingly high temperature provides another surprise: that in spite of Mercury's small mass and its exposure to solar radiation pressure... it has enough of an atmosphere to transfer some of the sunlit side's abundant heat ration to the dark side. ' Perhaps a more reasonable explanation will be found some day in the sequel to Worlds in Collision, which deals with earlier catastrophes, at least one of which the human record ascribes to Mercury. New radar studies of Venus have confirmed its retrograde rotation, first detected at about the time of the Mariner II flyby by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Goldstone Tracking Station. Radar Work at Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Puerto Rico by scientists from Cornell University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology pinpointed the period of rotation at 247 +/-5 days. The planet orbits the sun in 225 days. British and Soviet workers also have verified the retrograde rotation. The U. S. Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) Satellite - Explorer 18 - has detected a magnetosphere around the moon --a teardrop-shaped region reaching at least 68,000 miles into space on the side away from the sun. The same probe has discovered a region of high- energy electrons fanning out and trailing off like a wake on the night side of the earth. K. A. Anderson, who first reported this discovery, believes it likely that the moon encounters this tail on its monthly passages around the earth. Dr N. F. Ness of Goddard Space Flight Center believes the earth's tail may extend well past the orbit of the moon. The earth's tail is believed to be an elongation of the geomagnetic field in the anti- solar direction. In 1953 Velikovsky suggested that the earth's magnetic field may reach as far as the moon, causing certain unexplained libratory, or rocking, motions of the moon. In Book Week for September 5, 1965, Velikovsky claimed: 'in July, Mariner IV confirmed my picture of Mars as more moon-like than earth-like: "The contacts of Mars with other planets larger than itself and more powerful make it highly improbable that any higher forms of life, if they previously existed there, survive on Mars. It is, rather, a dead planet"( Worlds in Collision, page 364)... That Mars has crater-like formations, as the moon does, follows from the way these formations were built. Mars was heated and it bubbled; it was pelted by interplanetary bolts; some large meteorites pelted it, too. These events are described on many pages of Worlds in Collision as having taken place mainly in the 8th century before the present era... the sharp outlines of the formations, in the presence of an atmosphere, speak for their recentness. ' Velikovsky's efforts of more than a decade to induce radiocarbon laboratories around the world to test objects from the New Kingdom of Egypt have yielded their first fruits. The test results are compatible with Velikovsky's chronology and quite incompatible with the conventional timetable. In 1963 three small pieces of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen were delivered to the radiocarbon laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The Director of the laboratory, Dr Elizabeth K. Ralph, performed the test, using all three samples (total 26 grams). In Radiocarbon (1965), a Yale University publication, she reports that the date of the material, based on Libby's estimate of the half-life of radiocarbon, is 1030+/-50, B. C.( based on the Washington estimate of the half-life, the date is 1120+/-52, B. C.). These dates are clearly at odds with accepted chronology, which places Tutankhamen in the fourteenth century. Velikovsky places him in the ninth century. The test results do not confute Velikovsky's chronology because radiocarbon in wooden objects indicates the time when the cells of the wood were actively growing. Only wood from the outer parts of a log yields dates close to the time of cutting, whereas wood from the interior of a log may yield dates hundreds of years earlier. Almost half the wood tested in this case was of Lebanese cedar, a tree famed for its longevity and not usually cut as a sapling. Therefore it is possible that heartwood grown about 1030 (or 1120) B. C. was cut in the ninth century to make objects for Tutankhamen; it is not possible, however, that wood grown centuries after his death furnished objects for a fourteenth-century pharaoh. No hard and fast conclusions can be drawn on the basis of a single test of this kind. But perhaps now the door has been opened for the further testing that is so urgently needed in the 13 centuries whose chronology Velikovsky has challenged. Up to now this entire period of history had been left out of radiocarbon programmes. Because of the eminently successful campaign of defamation in the 1950's the name Velikovsky became anathema among editors and science writers of newspapers and mass- circulation magazines. In large degree this situation is still unchanged. But the article by Larrabee in Harper's for August 1963 and the special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist in September 1963 initiated a fermentation process in scholarly circles and on college campuses which, up to now, has been unreflected in either the general or the scientific press. Students and young professors are making known their desires to understand the implications Velikovsky's theories and of their non-reception by science. The October-November 1964 issue of Quadrant, published in Sydney by the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, carried a ten-page article, 'Velikovsky in Collision, ' by David Stove, senior lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University. Stove offers objective criticism of the evidence advanced by Velikovsky in all his books: '... the most striking evidence for Velikovsky's theory remains the historical. The Earth spoke, at least to my ear, very equivocally for him... What, then, of the skies?... it is the Evening Star herself who has responded to two of Velikovsky's antecedently improbable predictions with an audible and astonishing "yes"... [The weight of this evidence] should not be overestimated... but I do not see how it could be denied that these two confirmations substantially raise the probability of...[ the entire thesis] above the value it had in the light of all the previous evidence; and this was by no means negligible. ' Stove attributes the violent reaction to Worlds in Collision among astronomers to Velikovsky's forceful reminder 'that astronomy is not a theoretical science, but a branch of natural history... The uneventfulness of the history of the solar system is an assumption on which astronomers have placed a tacit reliance it by no means ever deserved. In the house that they knew so well, they had never noticed this door. And Velikovsky did the most infuriating thing in the world: he - a stranger - walked through this open door... We should not withhold the highest possible admiration for the first man to suggest that the earth is not only not the centre, not only not still, but not even safe. ' Notes (References Cited in "Aftermath to Exposure") 1. In a letter to Science (Vol. 140, p. 1, 362), Australian radio astronomer Grote Reber charged that Velikovsky's prediction Had trouble resolving dest near word action type is Launch of the earth's far-reaching magnetic field was 'more in the nature of ad hoc guess. ' His authority for this is science-fiction writer Poul Anderson (Science Vol. 139, p. 671), whose childish and facetious comments on the Bargmann-Motz letter (Science Vol. 138, p. 1, 350) caught the fancy of Editor Philip Abelson. On the basis of his own 1955 speculation that the earth's atmosphere has a disc-like equatorial bulge (not yet discovered), Reber claims prior prediction of the magnetosphere. How this follows is not clear. 2. Normal D. Newell, curator of fossils at the American Museum of Natural History and professor of paleontology at Columbia, offered a theory of 'gradual' catastrophism in Scientific American for February 1963. Here Velikovsky's name appears - almost as if it were a late editorial insertion - with that of Charles Hapgood (Earth's Shifting Crust), and together the two men are exemplified as writers who 'continue to propose imaginary catastrophes on the basis of little or no historical evidence. ' The timing of this reference to Velikovsky suggests that the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science may have prompted it. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 3: } {Q THE INCONSTANT HEAVENS } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE PART THREE by Livio C. Stecchini THE INCONSTANT HEAVENS The modern system of astronomy is now so much received by all inquirers, and has become so essential a part even of our earliest education, that we are not commonly very scrupulous in examining the reasons upon which it is founded. It is now become a matter of mere curiosity to study the first writers on that subject. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part II. Only a few years ago astronomers were unanimous in dismissing as preposterous Velikovsky's contention that the movement of the heavenly bodies is affected by electromagnetic fields. Today creative astronomers are immersed in the study of electromagnetism. The historian finds difficulty in explaining how radical is this change that has challenged three hundred years of cosmological thought and has brought us back to the arguments of William Gilbert (1544-1603) and Johann Kepler (1571-1630) [1] . The newness of the revolution is evinced by the Einstein-Velikovsky correspondence wherein the former soon accepted as tenable the hypothesis of global catastrophes and, though originally quite opposed, at last became sympathetic even to the hypothesis of a recent origin of Venus as a planet. However, he persistently rebutted to the end of his life all argument that electricity and magnetism affect the motions of heavenly bodies. Whereas astronomers are perplexed at the implication of the new picture of the universe as derived from the space probes, Velikovsky has been clear from the very beginning. In one of the first conversations I had with him ten years ago, he summed up this thinking by stating that one of the implications of his work is to reinstate Descartes as a rightful contestant of Newton in the understanding of the texture of the universe. Velikovsky quoted the following summation by Herbert Butterfield of the results of the famous contest between the two views of celestial mechanics: 'The clean and comparatively empty Newtonian skies ultimately carried the day against a Cartesian universe packed with matter and agitated with whirlpools, for the existence of which scientific observations provided no evidence. ' [2] . Velikovsky was confident that this evidence would be found, and it has been found. There is reasonable ground to hope that the new investigation which takes electric charges and magnetic fields into account will, first of all, succeed in explaining the behaviour of comets especially in the proximity of the Sun. The current explanation, according to which the pressure of solar light drives a cometary tail as a rigid rod at enormous velocities when the head is close to the perihelium, is not much more satisfactory than the one proposed by Newton when he said that the tails of comets turn away from the Sun for the same reason that the smoke from a fire ascends perpendicularly, or in the case of a moving body obliquely, in the atmosphere [3] . Thereafter, the case of planets like Earth or Jupiter, which are surrounded by a magnetosphere and move through the magnetic field permeating the solar system and the plasma winds that sweep through it, will come to quantitative analysis, too. With new claimants to participation in the mechanism of the solar system, the problem of its stability is brought into new light. PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES Because of his psychoanalytic training and experience Velikovsky was able to realize that men tend to shunt off as fables the accumulated memories and records of cosmic cataclysms. Even biblical fundamentalists do not accept at face value what is told in plain language in a book that they purportedly interpret to the letter. A few hundred years after the last upheaval, as dated by Velikovsky's thesis, Aristotle struggled to refute the cosmology of Heraclitus; and Cicero, when other writers of his century such as Lucretius or Ovid were describing in detail what had happened, proclaimed ita stabilis mundus est atque ita cohaeret ad permanendum, ut nihil ne excogitari quidem aptius possit - ' the world is so stable and it holds together so well for the sake of permanence that it is impossible even to imagine anything more fitted to the purpose' [4] . Planets are gods, and because of their divine nature they keep a perfect and immutable order. In another passage Cicero expounds the same view in terms that became a creed both for medieval scholastic natural philosophers and, as I shall indicate, for the followers of Newton: In the firmament, therefore, there is no accident, no chance, no aimless wandering, nothing untrustworthy; on the contrary, all things display perfect order, reliability, purpose, constancy... Wherefore, that man who holds that the astounding orderliness and the incredible precision of movement of these celestial bodies, upon which the support and safety of all things are wholly dependent, are not directed by reason must himself be considered to be utterly devoid of the rational faculty [5] . But this was a reversal of the older beliefs in the Theomachy, or the struggle among the planetary gods. Critias, the cousin of Plato's mother, in his drama 'Sisyphus, ' stressed the opposite view, defended by Democritus and his followers, that the belief in the planetary gods was linked with the worst of all human terrors. The following quotation illuminates also the question, with which I shall deal below, that the organization of the heavenly bodies came to be considered the foundation of ethics: He [Sisyphus] said the gods resided in that place Which men would dread the most, that place from which, As he well knew, mortals have been beset With fears or blest with that which brings relief To their tormented lives - there, high above, In that great circuit where the lightnings flash, Where thunder's baleful tumult may be heard, And heaven's starry countenance is seen (That lovely work of Time's skilled joinery), Where molten stones of stars descend ablaze, And wet rain starts it journey to the earth. Such were the consternating fears he sent To men, and such the means by which the gods Were settled in their proper dwelling-place (A pretty trick, accomplished with a word); And thus he quenched out lawlessness with laws [6] . Modern writers have suspected as much. John Dewey opens The Quest for Certainty (1929) with a chapter titled 'Escape from Peril. ' He points out that fear is the spring of the search for immutable perfect entities, for the glorification of regularity and invariance at the expense of diversity and change. By rationalizing the beliefs in the heavenly bodies as gods and making them the expression of a higher realm (higher physically and morally) which is rational, regular, and unalterable, Aristotle set up the foundations of classical science. In a similar vein, Freud [7] asks on what foundation does 'man build the feeling of security with which he armours himself against the dangers both of the external world and of human environment. ' In answering he declares: 'Think of the famous dictum of Kant that mentions in one breath the starry heavens and the moral law in our heart. This combination sounds odd - for, what could the heavenly bodies have to do with the question whether a human being loves or murders another - but it touches a profound psychological truth. ' The passage of Kant (1724-1804) to which Freud refers is the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason: Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. But does the starry heaven inspire us rightfully with the feeling of stability, while it inspired the ancients with an all-pervading fear? RENAISSANCE COSMOLOGY Nicolas of Cusa (1401-64), in his De docta ignorantia, denied the qualitative difference between heaven and earth. He also rejected the rest of the related propositions of Aristotelian metaphysics and revived the heliocentric theory, and he stated that the earth is not perfectly spherical and that the orbits of the planets are not perfectly circular [8] . He claimed that heavenly motions do not have stability as an inherent quality, and formulated the hypothesis that some statements of ancient writers may be explained by their having seen a sky different from what was seen in his time. He defined science as 'learned ignorance, ' because it is impossible to formulate an exact, eternal, and absolute description of the physical universe. The position of Copernicus (1475-1543) was relatively conservative in that he combined heliocentrism with the traditional conception of circular movements (around the sun) and of a limited universe bounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. The opposition to Copernicus was determined by the realization that by giving mathematical structure to the heliocentric theory he lent support to the subversion of metaphysics that had been associated with it by Nicholas of Cusa. Questioning of the text of Genesis began as a result of the Copernican theory: if the Earth is nothing but a planet revolving around the Sun, one may doubt that its creation was the result of a providential dispensation. A son-in-law of Osiander, the editor of Copernicus, uttered the first frank challenge to the divine authority of the biblical narrative: neque mihi quisquam Judaeorum fabulas objiciat [9] . Scholars began to doubt the notion that the universe had been created once and forever. They started to investigate ancient chronology, and laid down the foundations of geology and paleontology. In the age of Reformation some religious apologists argued that a distinction must be made between the creation of the universe as a whole and the creation of the Earth: the biblical text referred to the latter creation. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), in his last and greatest work, De immenso et innumerabilibus, published just after his imprisonment, made clear the meaning of the assertion of the principle of indifferenza della natura. He denied the existence of a providential order in nature and hence of the stability of the solar system which is linked with the doctrine of circular movements; declared that only their imperfect astronomical observations permitted earlier scholars to believe that the heavenly bodies move in circles and in the long run return to their original position (de vanitate circulorum et anni illius mundani phantasia platonica et aliorum) [10] ; and pointed out that astronomical movements are bound to be infinitely complex (differentias et singularum differentiarum irregularitatem) [11] . The belief in the simple and regular motion of the planets, he continued, is a delusory product of astrological thinking sub fide vel spe geometricantis naturae; it is necessary to free mathematical astronomy from Platonic and Pythagorean metaphysical accretions. From the relativity of motion follows the relativity of time; since no completely regular motion can be discovered, and since we possess no records which can prove that all the heavenly bodies have taken up exactly the same positions with regard to the Earth as those previously occupied by them and that their motions are rigidly regular, no absolute measure of time can be found [12] . The new conception of nature is epitomized in John Donne's poem, An Anatomy of the World (1611): And new Philosophy calls all in doubt... And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his Atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone... So, of the Stars, which boast that they do run In Circle still, none ends where he begun. All their proportions lame, it sinks, it swells. Velikovsky has been scorned for blending the study of astronomy with that of geology, ancient traditions, ancient chronology, and ancient science. But in so doing he has followed the path of Renaissance scholars, since such a course is inevitable once the dogmatic belief in the incorruptibility of the solar system has been questioned. The new astronomy brought forth a series of studies on ancient traditions and chronology, and effected the birth of interest in Egyptian and Mesopotamian science. For instance, Father Athanasius Kircher (1601-80) founded the study of geology with his Mundus Subterraneus, while he initiated the study of Egyptian science with his Oedypus Aegyptiacus. In Vicissitudo Rerum (1600) John Norden refers to these speculations that have been revived by Velikovsky: The antique Poets in their Poems telled Under their fondest Fables, Mysteries: By Phaeton, how heaven's Powers rebelled In Fire's force, and by the histories Of Phyrrha and Deucalian there lies, The like of water's impetuity, In part concurring with divinity - The Priests of Egypt gazing on the stars, Are said to see the World's sad ruins past, That had betide by Fire and Water's jars: And how the World inconstant and unchaste, Assailed by these, cannot alike stand fast. Earthquakes and Wars, Famine, Hate, and Pest, Bring perils to the Earth, and Man's unrest. Sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World (1616) wondered how it could happen that the phases of Venus just discovered by Galileo seem to have been known to ancient authors. He listed the authorities who state that at the time of the flood of Ogyges 'so great a miracle happened in the star of Venus, as never was seen before nor in after-times: for the colour, the size, the figure, and the course of it were changed. ' The catastrophe associated with the name of Ogyges, a time mark for ancient Greeks, took place simultaneously with Venus' complete metamorphosis. This statement made by Varro, 'the most learned of all the Romans, ' on the authority of earlier scientists should have provoked interest in the time of Newton, when the working of the solar system was elevated to the state of a most exact science. But, whereas the gleaning of information from ancient authors contributed to more than one discovery of the new age of astronomy (the very heliocentric theory had been advanced on the authority of Greek and Roman writers), Newton pulled down the curtain on the use of ancient sources as an inspiration for astronomical research. The notion that the solar system may have a history, became (in the name of the new religion of science) as sacrilegious as it had been for the scholastics (Saint Augustine, A. D. 354-430, had taken a different position on the authority of classical authors). On the eve of the establishment of Newtonian cosmology, the speculation on cosmic cataclysms had become so commonplace that in 1672 Molière, in his satire on the ladies who, captured by the new passion for science, studied astronomy, could make a joke of it (Les femmes savantes, Act IV, Scene III): Je viens vous annoncer une grande nouvelle: Nous l'avons en dormant, madame, échappé belle, Un monde près de nous a passé tout du long; Est chu tout au travers de notre tourbillon, Et s'il eût en chemin rencontré notre terre, Elle eût été brisée en morceaux comme verre. (' I have come to tell you a great piece of news. We have, Madam, while sleeping, had a narrow escape. A world has passed by us, has fallen across our vortex, and if it had on its way met our Earth, it would have broken it into pieces like glass. ') NEWTON The Renaissance view of life and of the world, which can be summed up by the word mutability, was created by personalities of heroic stamina and required the leadership of such personalities for its preservation, for indeed, it is not easy to live in a world where the only divinity is Fortuna and nothing is certain beyond measurement and probability. As Freud contends, neuroses originate from the failure, due to inferior biological endowment combined with stunted psychic growth, to face the burden of the human condition in a world that owes us nothing. Some contemporary thinkers were frightened, for the relativism and decentralization of the Renaissance found expression not only in astronomy but in political theory; furthermore, the impact of thinkers such as Machiavelli was compounded by the geographical discoveries that gave birth to the doctrine of ethical relativism. In England the herald of reaction against Renaissance thought was the theologian Richard Hooker who imagined that a new conservative position could be justified by appealing to nature's laws linked with an absolute reason and an obedience of man to absolute ethics. In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593-97), he examined the views current at his time: Now if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, thought it were but for a while the observation of her own laws; if those principal and mother elements of the world, whereof all things in this lower world are made, should lose the qualities which now they have; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should as it were through a languishing faintness begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother no longer able to yield them relief: what would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve? See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world? He proposed the comforting solution that was accepted by Newton and the scientists who followed him: But howsoever these swervings are now and then incident into the course of nature, nevertheless so constantly the laws of nature are by natural agents observed, that no man denieth but those things which nature worketh are wrought, either always or for the most part, after one and the same manner. Helène Metzger has shown that Newton developed his theory under the influence of this spirit of reaction. She is certainly right when she judges the overall effect of Newton's work which devait vite devenir une aliée de cette piétJ bienséante et bien pensante [13] ; but she has not analyzed in detail what caused Newton to arrive at his conservative conclusions nor what is their technical significance for science. Her pacemaking investigations were cut short by the gas chamber at Auschwitz. One of the precursors of Velikovsky as to the general thesis of the catastrophic past of the earth, to whom he refers in his work, was William Whiston (1667-1752). In 1964, seven years after the first edition of Principia, Whiston, then a fellow of Cambridge University, became a devoted pupil of Newton, and two years later submitted to his master the manuscript of a book entitled New Theory of the Earth. The book was intended to replace the then popular Theory of the Earth (1681) by Thomas Burnet, and dealt with a theme with which Newton had been concerned for more than a score of years. This book contended that the cataclysm described in the Old Testament as universal Deluge was caused by the impact of a comet at the end of the third millennium B. C., and that up to the Deluge the solar year had the duration of 360 days only, yet the new calendar of 365 days had to wait to be introduced by Nabonassar (in 747 B. C.). These contentions were based mainly on historical evidence, whereas astronomical considerations were the main ground for suggesting that comets may become planets: Yet comets by passing through the planetary regions in all planets and directions... seem fit to cause vast mutations in the planets, particularly in bringing on them deluges and conflagrations, according as the planets pass through the atmosphere... Tho'indeed they do withal seem at present chaos or worlds in confusion, but capable of change to orbits nearer circular, and then settling into a state of order and of becoming fit for habitation like the planets; but these conjectures are left to further enquiry, when it pleases the divine providence to afford us more light about them [14] . Newton was so impressed by Whiston's work that from that moment he established a close scientific relation with him. The book was highly praised also by other contemporaries, John Locke among them. Two years later the Savillian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, John Keill (1671-1721), dedicated a book to the evaluation of Whiston's hypotheses in comparison to those of Burnet, in which he expressed the following judgments: ... Yet I cannot but acknowledge that Mr Whiston, the ingenious author of the new Theory of the Earth, has made great discoveries and proceeded on more philosophical principles than all the theorists before him have done. In his theory there are some coincidents which make it indeed probable, that a comet at the time of the Deluge passed by the Earth [15] . Keill approved also of the contention that before this upheaval the solar year consisted of 360 days, divided into 12 lunar months of 30 days. In 1701 Whiston was appointed as a temporary substitute for Newton at Cambridge, and in 1703, when Newton resigned permanently from the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, he recommended Whiston as uniquely worthy to be his successor. By 1713, when the second edition of the Principia was published, Newton's feelings towards Whiston had changed radically. When in 1720 the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and others proposed Whiston as a member of the Royal Society, Newton threatened that, should the members vote for Whiston's admission, he would resign from the presidency of the Society. Whiston, who was deeply devoted to Newton, suggested that his candidacy not be pressed; he felt that the aging Newton was so violently disturbed by the issue that he might die [16] . Halley who one year and a half before the publication of Whiston's New Theory of the Earth had read a paper before the Royal Society in which he had explained the Deluge by the impact of a comet, but had not printed it 'lest by some unguarded expression he might incur the censure of the sacred order, ' reacted to Newton's gesture by publishing with thirty years of delay a memoir in the acts of the society [17] . Historians of science gloss over this incident, which is vital for the understanding of the evolution of Newton's thought. After 1710, when Whiston was dismissed from his teaching position because of heresy and then formally brought to trial before the body of bishops of the Church of England, he assumed more radical positions and came to disagree with Newton who was becoming more and more conservative. Whiston's contention was that the creation story told in Genesis should not be interpreted literally, but as referring to a process of progressive creation through several cosmic stages. Newton, who was at first sympathetic to Whiston's religious and scientific views, came to be shocked by his radicalism, and turned towards a fundamentalist position. The concluding words of Opticks indicate that Newton, like others of his contemporaries felt that, if the traditional views of cosmic order were abandoned, the foundations of morality would be undermined [18] . Furthermore, Newton felt that Whiston's hypotheses would end by eliminating what he considered the chief argument for the existence of God, the argument from design, namely, the wise adaptation of the present frame of nature to the needs of living creatures, especially man. In Opticks he rebutted Whiston in these terms: For it became who created them [the celestial bodies] to set them in order. And if he did so, it's unphilosophical to seem for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature; though being once formed, it may continue by those laws for many ages. For while comets move in very excentrick orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbs, concentrick, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted, which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this system wants a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice [19] . Whereas the first edition of the Principia (1687) is essentially rationalistic in spirit and follows a positivistic method, theological preoccupations dominate the second edition (1713). Newton is bent on proving that the machinery of the world is such a perfectly contrived system that it cannot be the result of 'mechanical cause, ' but must be the result of an intelligent and consistent plan. In order to support further the story of Genesis that the world was created by a single act, he argued also that the world is stable and has remained unchanged since creation. But he could not prove this point, since he admitted that, according to his own theory, the gravitational pull among the several members of the solar system would tend to modify their orbits; hence, he begged the question and claimed that God in his providence must intervene from time to time to reset the clockwork of the heavens to its original state. This point of Newton's doctrine is well known, for it was the object of sarcastic comments by Newton's great rival in the mathematical field, Leibniz (1646-1716). As the letter observed, Newton cast God not only as a clockmaker, and a poor one at that, but also as a clock-repairman [20] . Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862), the chosen pupil of Laplace, agreed with his teacher in considering the second edition of the Principia as highly objectionable. He argued that Newton had ceased to be a creative thinker in 1695 and suggested that this was the result of his mental illness of eighteen months duration [21] . But in truth Newton was hampered by religious preoccupations and not by mental deterioration. The only external evidence that Biot submits for a psychic collapse is Newton's 'infantile' antics in his dealings with Whiston in 1714. In my opinion, the proof that Newton had become fixated on the religious problem, but had not lost any of his intellectual flexibility, is that the few additions that appear in the third edition of the Principia (1726), disclose that he came to believe that God reveals himself not in the appearance of things but in the ways of mankind [22] . Scholars have failed to notice that the refutation of Whiston's doctrine was of major concern to Newton. In the Principia, he maintained that comets, far from being a disruptive element, contribute to the providential preservation of the original order: since a certain amount of the water of the Earth is steadily consumed by chemical combinations, the seas would not be preserved in their original state unless new water was provided by the exhalations of comets. The notion of the providential purpose of comets was further expanded in Newton's time: the comets exist also for the purpose of supplying new fuel to the Sun which otherwise would gradually consume itself. One of the important popularizers of Newton's ideas stresses that comets can perform these providential functions, but at the same time are providentially prevented from striking the Earth: In the next place, the reason why the planes of their [comets'] motions are not in the plane of the ecliptic, or any of the planetary orbits, is extremely evident; for had this been the case, it would have been impossible for the Earth to be out of the way of the comets' tails. Nay, the possibility of an immediate encounter or shock of the body, of a comet would have been too frequent; and considering how great is the velocity of a comet at such a time, the collision of two such bodies must necessarily be destructive of each other; nor perhaps could the inhabitants of planets long survive frequent immersions in the tails of comets, as they would be liable to in such a situation. Not to mention anything of the irregularities and confusion that must happen in the motion of planets and comets, if their orbits were all disposed in the same plane [23] . The writer follows here the reasoning of Newton, who argued that the providential order of the universe required that the comets have beneficial characteristics. In reality, the planes of the orbits of some comets are at a small angle with the plane of the ecliptic, and the chance of collision exists. Biographies of Newton usually dismiss in a few lines his book The Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), to which he dedicated the last years of his life. They consider it the product of an irrelevant side activity; yet its purpose is clearly that of refuting Whiston's hypotheses. Newton argues that evidence for the years of 365 days is as old as the year 887 B. C., and that even though this year was 'scarcely brought into common use' before this date, it was as old as the first astronomical observation of the Egyptians. However, these would have started only quite late, in 1034 B. C. The main purpose of the book is to contend that there was hardly any reliable history before the First Olympic Games in 776 B. C. In the first page the point is made that the ancient legends and traditions (the basis of Whiston's argument for a cataclysm caused by a comet) are not a reliable source of information. Newton believed that his cosmology, which he had summed up in the famous General Scholium of the second edition of the Principia, could not be accepted unless Whiston was refuted. For this reason, about three months after the appearance of the second edition, he wrote an essay (that lies unpublished at the British Museum) in which he answered the criticism advanced by William Lloyd (1627-1717), an intimate friend of Whiston, on the ground that the oldest calendars of the ancients are based on a solar year of 360 days. From what is known about this document it can be said that Newton gave a lame answer [24] . He argued that if a calendar of 360 days had been in use without a system of intercalation for the five extra days, the official beginning of the seasons would have moved around the full year in a period of 70 years; since there is no trace of this 70 year cycle, this calendar cannot have existed. But the argument of Whiston and Lloyd was exactly that the solar year was about 360 days long and that therefore no intercalation was needed. Newton was begging the question by assuming that the solar year must have always consisted of 365 days. In the works of Newton the doctrine of the eternal stability of the solar system is clearly presented as an assumption based not on scientific data but on faith in a providential order. But the flood of popularizations that made Newtonianism the basic doctrine of the eighteenth century claimed that Newton had provided scientific mathematical proof of the marvellous order that he accepted on faith. Carl L. Backer, who has examined this development in The Heavenly City of Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932), concludes that the thinkers of the Enlightenment, while they believed themselves to be anti-Christian or even irreligious, were, in the name of Newton's mechanics (though not his religion), returning to the tenets of medieval theology along with Newton. Not since the thirteenth century had there been such as alliance between faith and reason. It was again possible to lift up one's eyes to the changeless movements of the sky - signs of divine perfection and eternal laws. As Becker remarks, Newtonianism was an immediate success with the educated public, because 'the desire to correspond with the general harmony springs perennial in the human breast' [25] . Every good textbook of history points out that Newton's astronomy precipitated a religious revolution. Newton was perfectly aware that he had expounded the religious view that was called 'natural religion agreeing with revealed. ' The new religion was called theism and its Nicene Creed was the General Scholium of the Principia: The six primary planets are revolved about the Sun in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same place. Ten moons are revolved about the Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those planets; but it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions, since the comets range over all parts of the heavens in very eccentric orbits; for by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detained the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and hence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful system of the Sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. In the popularizations of Newton theism became deism, and the letter evolved into the mechanistic atheism of La Mettrie (1709-51) and D'Holbach (1723-89). All these views of religion had in common the belief in the perfect regularity of the universe, expressed by the analogy of the mechanical clock. 'The ideal of a clockwork universe was the great contribution of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth-century age of reason. ' [26] There is no doubt that several of our contemporary natural scientists would object that these are metaphysical preoccupations that do not concern an observational science like modern astronomy. But there are no more hardened metaphysicians than those who believe that they do not have any metaphysics, and this can be proved by a timely example. Venus is the planet closest to the Earth and has a size very similar to that of the Earth, so that it is a sort of twin sister of the Earth. Hence, those who agreed with Newton in believing in the regularity of nature presumed that Venus must rotate in about 24 hours and must be encircled by a moon similar to our Moon. In the eighteenth century a number of astronomers claimed to have seen and tracked this moon; after the solar transit of 1769 Lambert (one of those who advanced the nebular hypotheses) computed the orbit of this moon and its size (28/ 27 that of our Moon). The subsequent progress in the construction of telescopes made it impossible for astronomers of following generations to see what was not there. According to Newton, Venus has a period of rotation similar to that of Earth, 23 hours [27] . Jacques Cassini revised the figure to 23 hours 20, ' and by the end of the eighteenth century the accepted figure was 23 hrs. 21' 20". One more century of observations made the figure of 23 hrs. 21' acceptable, but in 1877 G. V. Schiaparelli concluded that Venus rotates very slowly, probably once in a Cytherean year. Still, many astronomers published reports of decades of observation that proved the correctness of the Newtonian view that Venus rotates in about 24 hours. In spite of the further support provided by the absence of Doppler effect and of polar flattening, Schiaparelli's view that if Venus rotates, it rotates very slowly, was not accepted by many astronomers until 1963. Whereas it took two and a half centuries for astronomers to realize that they had been looking into the telescope with the eyes of their mind, the philosopher David Hume (1711- 76) recognized the epistemological problem involved in the study of Venus. He presents a Newtonian who declares 'Is not Venus another Earth, where we observe the same phenomena? ' And to this Hume in his imaginary dialogue counterposes, by appealing to the authority of Galileo, 'When nature has so extremely diversified her manner of operation in this small globe, can we imagine that she incessantly copies herself throughout so immense a universe? ' [28] The case of the rotation of Venus is a minor example of the intellectual confusion that results when scientists accept all the astronomical doctrines of Newton without discriminating between what is mystical and what is scientific in the modern sense of the term. In a brilliant and penetrating essay on 'Newton the Man, ' written for the Royal Society Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge, 1947), Lord Keynes declared: In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and the greatest of modern-age scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untutored reason. I do not see him in this light. The main contention of the essay is that Newton had 'a foot in the Middle Ages and a foot treading a path for modern science. ' This contention had been advanced earlier by other scholars, but this time it met with the approval of outstanding historians of science, because Keynes had gained access to the unpublished manuscripts of Newton. In the case of Newton we meet with the unique occurrence that for three centuries his admirers have fought battle after battle in order to prevent the publication of about nine-tenths of his scholarly work. Whiston was one of the first to clamour for the publication of Newton's manuscripts, since he wanted to have an opportunity to refute his historical theories. Only recently have the efforts to lift the curtain begun to be successful. If all the manuscripts were published, what had been claimed by some scholars and was granted by Newton himself in some of his letters, would become evident: that science was not his main interest and that he conceived of it as an auxiliary to theology, as ancilla theologiae. That he was unusually successful in his scientific endeavours does not disprove that his main aim was to reconcile astronomy with religion. Newton believed that the astronomical revolution linked with the names of Copernicus and Galileo had destroyed the foundations of religious belief and that it was necessary to return to the medieval world view. He was a biblical fundamentalist who tried to prove, among other points, that the Bible contains prophecies of future history. His interest in science was a by-product of his effort to prove that even science does not conflict with biblical religion, conceived by him as the medieval synthesis of biblical religion with Platonic-Aristotelian cosmology. The voluminous unpublished works of Newton deal with many topics from alchemy to politics, but theology has the lion's share, followed next by ancient history. These unpublished works cannot be dismissed as occasional efforts. To them he dedicated more time than to his scientific writings. They are just as accurately argued and well finished. All his writings constitute a unified stream of thought of which the scientific production was only one aspect. Recently, Frank E. Manuel in Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, 1963), has informed us of the contents of Newton's unpublished historical manuscripts. Manuel has made clear that at the time they were written they dealt with topics that were intensely debated among scholars. But he has not grasped that their purpose was to refute the historical researches of the Renaissance and those of Whiston in particular. Their main object was to discredit all the historical evidence presented for changes in the solar system. For instance, he tried to prove that in Mesopotamia astronomical science did not begin before the era of Nabonassar (747 N. C.). In substance, Newton was trying to refute the kind of historical evidence that has been brought again to public attention by Velikovsky. It is rather amusing that in the effort to prove that the observation of the heavenly bodies began only at a very late date, he argued that accepted chronology must be lowered and anticipated the conclusions reached by Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos. Like Velikovsky, he claimed that Greek chronology must be shortened by four hundred years, eliminating what today we call the Dark Ages of Greece. Like Velikovsky, he claimed that some dynasties of Egypt have been duplicated in chronological schemes. A main contention of Velikovsky is that the Pharaoh Shishak of the Book of Kings, a contemporary of the successor of King Solomon of Israel, is the same person as Thutmosis III of the XVIII Dynasty. Newton, using a similar line of argument, identifies Shishak with the Pharaoh called Sesostris by the Greek. In giving an account of Sesostris, Greek historian confused the deeds of Thutmosis III with those of Sesostris III of the XII Dynasty. It may be noted that Velikovsky, after a ten year struggle with the committees that administer the carbon 14 tests of archaeological material, has finally succeeded in obtaining at least some tests to prove or disprove his theory and Newton's. These few tests support the contention that the currently accepted dates of Egyptian history must be substantially lowered. All the pursuits of Newton in theology, history, and science had one purpose. I. Bernard Cohen, the foremost authority on Newton in the United States, concludes (Franklin and Newton, Philadelphia, 1956, p. 66): 'Of course, Newton had one real secret, and concerning it he did his best to keep the world in ignorance. ' The secret is that he intended to uphold the theology and the cosmology of Maimonides. Cohen agrees with Keynes that this medieval synthesis of biblical religion with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, constituted the ideal of Newton. He kept it a secret because he wanted to influence scientific thought without putting the admirers of the new scientific method on the alert. Velikovsky, too, has recognized in Worlds in Collision that through Newton he is fighting Maimonides. Maimonides expressly declares that in accepting the story of creation he disagrees with Aristotle, but that he agrees with Aristotle that the cosmos, once created, is permanent and indestructible. In order to reconcile the cosmology of Aristotle with the text of the Old Testament, Maimonides asserted that all the passages that have been understood as referring to cosmic upheavals and to changes in planetary motions, must be understood as metaphors, not as factual accounts. Velikovsky reports that Maimonides re-examined a long series of biblical texts, establishing thereby a new trend in exegesis. Newton pursued the same line of argument as Maimonides in his exegesis of Greek texts and of what was then known of Oriental documents. In his scientific writings Newton tried to prove that natural science does not contradict this exegesis and corresponding theology. LAPLACE Among those few who had more keenly critical minds than Voltaire and the other so-called philosophes, the metaphysics of Newton created an opposite reaction. By questioning it, his contemporaries, Berkeley (1685-1753) and Hume, established scientific empiricism and laid the foundations for our contemporary scientific method. Just as the leading philosophers of England (soon followed by Hegel, 1770-1831) pierced Newton's metaphysical fog, so the leading scientists of France refused to climb the bandwagon of popular Newtonianism and kept in mind the distinction between what Newton had proved and what he had not proved. Historians usually ascribe the reserve of the Academie des Sciences towards Newton to an obscurantist clinging to Cartesian tradition; but these strictures of the French scientists gave the impetus to the studies of Laplace, the greatest genius in mathematical astronomy since Newton. With the emergence of Laplace, gravitational celestial mechanics was more firmly established and the role of providence in sustaining the immutable order was abrogated. Laplace (1749-1827) was cited throughout the nineteenth century and also has been quoted by opponents of Velikovsky as having provided the mathematical proof that the solar system, and hence nature, is built like a mechanical clock. But this is only one side of his total view. In the Exposition du système du monde he uses two pages to argue that mankind should learn to accept without obsessive fear the likelihood that a comet may strike the Earth [29] . In his other major work, Theorie analytique des probabilités, he insists that the motions of the Earth are not unalterable, being subject to several unpredictable forces, among which is the impact of meteorites [30] . He realized that the resistance to accepting the alterability of the sky springs also from the fear that thereby moral law may be destroyed. For this reason he continues the discussion of this topic by delving into psychology and arguing along lines similar to those of Hume's ethics, that a feeling of sympathy among men can exist without traditional metaphysics [31] . It is worth noting that his treatment of psychology touches upon the importance of childhood memories and upon the role of unconscious thinking [32] . Laplace observed that from his mathematical formulas it was possible to draw the conclusion that 'nature has arranged everything in the sky to insure the permanence of the planetary system, with the same purpose that it seems to have adopted on Earth for the preservation of individuals and the perpetuation of species' [33] , but added that such a conclusion was wrong, even though 'we are naturally inclined to believe that the order by which things seem to renew themselves on Earth has existed at all times and will exist forever' [34] . In reality, the stability of the present order 'is disturbed by various causes that can be ascertained by careful analysis, but which are impossible to frame within a calculation' [35] . He summed up his views in the words: Le ciel même, malgré l'ordre de ses mouvements, n'est pas inaltérable [36] . He warned specifically that in his mathematical formulas about the solar system he had not taken comets into account, stating just as specifically, that the motion of the Earth might be affected by meteorites, and one should therefore study the historical evidence, even though this evidence covers only a few millennia. Laplace stressed that the human race is beset by a great fear that a comet may upset the Earth, a fear that manifested itself dramatically after Lexell's comet in 1770 had passed at only 2,400,000 km from the Earth. Shortly thereafter Lalande published a list of the comets that had passed closest to the Earth [37] . Men should be free from this fear, Laplace argued, for the probability of one striking the Earth within the span of a human life is slim, even though the probability of such an impact occurring in the course of centuries is very great (très grande) [38] . He proceeded to describe the possible effects of a collision with a comet, painting a picture that is in close agreement with that outlined by Velikovsky. Much in the geology of the Earth and in human history could be explained by assuming that such an impact had taken place. However, if this is true, it must also be assumed that the colliding comet had a mass similar to that of the Earth [39] . Velikovsky conjectures that this comet was Venus, which had the required mass. Laplace summed up his hypothesis in these words: The axis and the movement of rotation would be changed. The seas would abandon their ancient positions, in order to precipitate themselves toward the new equator; a great portion of the human race and the animals would be drowned in the universal deluge, or destroyed by the violent shock imparted to the terrestrial globe; entire species would be annihilated; all monuments of human industry overthrown; such are the disasters which the shock of a comet would produce, if its mass were comparable to that of the earth. We see then, in effect, why the ocean has receded from the high mountains, upon which it has left incontestable marks of its sojourn. We see how the animals and plants of the south have been able to exist in the climate of the north, where their remains and imprints have been discovered; finally, it explains the newness of the human civilization, certain monuments of which do not go further back than five thousand years. The human race reduced to a small number of individuals, and to the most deplorable state, solely occupied for a length of time with the care of its own preservation, must have lost entirely the remembrance of the sciences and the arts; and when progress of civilization made these wants felt anew, it was necessary to begin again, as if man had been newly placed upon the earth. Laplace also wondered whether heavenly bodies might not be affected by forces other than gravitation, such as electric and magnetic forces [40] . He did not exclude such a possibility, even though according to available calculations their effect was not noticeable. Yet, when Velikovsky stated that the members of the solar system have strong electric charges and that these affect their motions, some astronomers objected that this had been proved impossible by Laplace. The first empirical evidence of the present effect of electromagnetic forces on the motion of the Earth is now available. Scientific literature never mentions the Laplace statements listed above. He won immediate fame for having provided the mathematical proof of the stability of the solar system that was missing in Newton, despite the fact that he had emphatically warned against such an interpretation of his conclusions. The interpretation of Laplace's theories was influenced by a minor point he made. He felt the need to refute Newton's argument that the fact that all the planets and their satellites rotate counterclockwise is proof of divine providence [41] . After calculating the statistical near-impossibility that such rotation may be a chance arrangement, he concluded that it must be the result of a common mechanical phenomenon [42] . Hence, he proposed the nebular hypothesis which had already occurred independently to the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg( 1688-1772), to the philosopher Kant, and to the astronomer Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-77). But Laplace did not yet know of the satellites that revolve clockwise. He would have been pleased by the evidence submitted in 1963 which suggests that Venus rotates clockwise. The uniform direction of the rotation and revolution of the planets and their satellites, far from being a key point of his view, was considered by him to be a stumbling block to his probabilistic view of the universe. The following quotation indicates to what distortions Laplace's theories were subjected by the interpreters: We are naturally led to ponder on the great truth of the stability and permanence of the solar system as demonstrated by the discoveries of Lagrange and Laplace... The arrangement, therefore, upon which the stability of the solar system depends, must have been the result of design, the contrivance of that infinite skill which knew how to provide for the permanence of His work. How the comets, whose motions are not regulated by such laws, and which move in so many different directions, may in the future interfere with the order of the system, can only be conjectured. They have not interfered with it in the past, owing no doubt to the smallness of their density; and we cannot doubt that the same wisdom which has established so great a harmony in the movement of the planetary system, that the inequalities which necessarily arise from their mutual action arrive at a maximum, and then disappear, will also have made provision for the future stability of the system [43] . Since Laplace was concerned with eliminating providential order, he proved (within the limits of the formal rigour that was considered sufficient by mathematicians of his age) that the mutual gravitational influence of the planets cannot disrupt the system [44] . But this is an empirical, not a metaphysical, conclusion which is valid only if other factors are excluded, that is, if it is assumed that the solar system is isolated in the universe, that the Sun does not suffer alteration, and that no other matter and no other forces beside gravitation and inertia are present in the space where the Sun and the planets move. Interpreting Laplace as supporting the theological assumptions of Newton has destroyed the scientific achievements of the Renaissance. We are back at scholasticism, and Aristotle is again il maestro di color che sanno on an issue that Galileo considered central to the new thought. In the First Day in the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, which is concerned with the refutation of the concept of the immutability of the heavens, the great astronomer formulated his creed in these unequivocal terms: I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it being attributed to natural bodies as a great honour and perfection that they are impassible, immutable, inalterable, etc.: as, conversely, I hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable, etc. It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable by reason of the many and different alterations, mutations, generations, etc., which incessantly occur in it... I say the same concerning the Moon, Jupiter, and all the other globes of the Universe... These men who so extol incorruptibility, inalterability, etc., speak thus, I believe, out of the great desire they have to live long and for fear of death... [45] . Galileo is in precise agreement with Dewey's argument and with Velikovsky's psychological assumption. Laplace was interpreted to meet the psychological need to believe in the eternal stability of the solar system. The following quotations from An Analytical View of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia by H. P. Brougham and E. J. Routh are a good example of a general tendency. The other changes which take place in the orbits and motions of the heavenly bodies, were found by these great geometricians [Laplace and Legendre] to follow a law of periodicity which assures the eternal stability of the system. These changes in the heavenly paths and motions oscillate, as it were, round a middle point, from which they never depart on either hand, beyond a certain distance; so that at the end of thousands of years the whole system in each separate case (each body having its own secular period) returns to the exact position in which it was when these vast successions of ages began to roll [46] . The religious tone of the presentation is obvious. Laplace is construed to be saying that heavenly bodies can have only two types of movements: cyclical movements and uniform rectilinear movements; that is, movements that are equivalent with a state of rest. It is a full return, with some added sophistication, to the Aristotelian doctrine that the heavenly bodies can have only circular motions, motions reconcilable with immobility. FEAR AND TREMBLING When one examines the reviews of Worlds in Collision written by some one hundred luminaries of our age, he observes that the civil liberty aspects of the affair (the effort to prevent the printing, the academic pressure exercised to keep reviewers in line, and the refusals to publish corrections of misstatements) recede in the face of the frightening realization that the experts to whom is entrusted the human inheritance of scientific thought, our most precious possession, can be the victims of collective hysteria. Scientist after scientist declared that the edifice of science was threatened with destruction by a book which, to hear a number of them, is full of transparent contradictions, written by a 'complete ignoramus' who ranks with the proponents of the flat-earth hypothesis. The atmosphere of panic was somewhat better justified by the opposite contention advanced by a minority of reviewers, that Velikovsky is a hoaxer so unusually well-informed in all technical details and so deft in the subtleties of scientific thinking, that the normal professional expert cannot detect the flaws of his arguments, although these must exist. The emotional upheaval was such that the New York Times Book Review ten years later, in reviewing the literary events of a decade, dwelt upon the fate of 'a book which most contemporary scientists regarded as a publishing catastrophe. It stirred up all sorts of vituperation, especially among astronomers who, it may be recalled, behaved as though they had been stung by a hornet from outer space. ' [47] . One should peruse the literature of the hundred years that followed Copernicus's work, to assemble an equivalent collection of bizarre and ridiculous arguments used in the refutation of a theory. To cite one of the best publicized instances: a popular argument against Copernicus was that if the Earth moved, human beings would be thrown into space; similarly, the mimeographed memorandum distributed by the Harvard Observatory, and later several other astronomers, contended that if the Earth's rotation had been arrested, as Velikovsky suggested, human beings would have been projected into space along with all objects not anchored to the Earth [48] . This argument completely ignores the possibility of gentle deceleration and attributes gravitational effect, apparently, to the constancy of the Earth's rotation. The natural scientists who gave Velikovsky's evidence the benefit of objective examination were few. Some reviewers, after boasting that they had not read the book, delivered themselves of Catilinarian orations against the crime of Velikovsky. In spite of the variety of emotional expressions, the greatest number of reviews written by natural scientists, when reduced to the scientifically significant points, repeat monotonously the same general arguments. They appeal to the 'laws of nature' without any further specifications, and keep iterating the names of Newton and Laplace, as if they were an incantation, without referring to any specific passage or section of their works. The stereotype is varied only by the late President of the American Astronomical Society, Otto Struve, who in a review entitled 'Copernicus, Who Was He ?' (New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 2, 1950), declared that the trouble was that Velikovsky had never heard of Copernicus and was refuted by the Copernican doctrine. The psychological assumption that gave Velikovsky his original subjective stimulus to investigate ancient traditions, namely that mankind lives in subconscious fear of cosmic cataclysms, could explain the panic and the emotional irrationality of many reviewers. A valuable clue to the cause of such a reaction is given by the professor of philosophy at St Louis University [49] who, while associating himself with the efforts of the scientists to suppress the book, complained that they did not fully realize the enormity of the crime committed by the publishing industry, for the book destroyed the foundation of Judeo-Christian beliefs. The article concluded that the Catholic Church should come to the rescue by placing the book on the Index. But, after the painful experience with Galileo, the Catholic Church has accumulated more wisdom in scientific epistemology than that revealed by our scientific community. The Cardinal Bellarmine of this case was Professor Harlow Shapley who was indefatigable in his campaign, started before the publication of the book, to alarm the scientific world of the impending catastrophe. How similar are the two personalities! Cardinal Bellarmine was the epitome of the bureaucratic personality and Shapley has devoted his life to the new Leviathan of scientific bureaucracy. The spirit of the new bureaucracy was revealed by the A. A. A. S. meeting (Dec. 30, 1950) held in response to Velikovsky's book. At that meeting it was proposed that henceforth any publication that presents new scientific hypotheses should not be allowed to be printed without the Imprimatur of a proper professional body [50] . Every bureaucratic organization that wants to be accountable only to itself attempts to base its power on a transcendental absolute, and Velikovsky was threatening the transcendental absolute of the church of scientism. The reaction against Velikovsky's book confirms once more the common observation that the great mass of natural scientists has not yet assimilated the implications of the great scientific transformation that started at the end of the last century (on the foundations laid by Berkeley, Hume, and Hegel), and clings to scientism, the crude mechanical determinism of the eighteenth century, with insufficient awareness of all the knowledge that has been accumulated in two hundred years on the problem of human perception [51] . What has happened is that when science was still operating on scholastic premises, there were developed mechanical clocks. Since early clocks were connected with astronomy and often took the form of orreries, they influenced the interpretation of the cosmological revolution brought about by Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo. The recent book, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, 1962), by the philosopher Colin Murray Turbayne, who explicitly appeals to the arguments of Berkeley and Hume, examines the pervading influence of the metaphor of the mechanical clock and observes, in the Introduction, that as a result of it there has been 'founded a church, more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to re-allocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy; he is opposing scientific truth. ' In the Velikovsky-Shapley correpondence of 1946, when Velikovsky offered to submit to crucial tests before publishing his book, Shapley took a position similar to that of Bellarmine: one should not test Velikovsky's hypotheses about the physical characteristics of Venus, such as high temperature and atmosphere of hydrocarbon gases, unless he first agreed to frame them within the proper scheme of metaphysical presuppositions. What Shapley had in mind was the dogma of the absolute stability of the solar system [52] . Velikovsky forced the scientists to become well aware that proof of this postulate does not exist. Scores of reviews were remarkable for the violence of expression and the jejune poverty of the contents. Often columns of denunciation were not followed by a single argument. The case of Harrison Brown is a good example of those who proclaimed that they had peremptory arguments galore, but did not submit a single one. Only a few scientists of note showed a spirit of scholarly cooperation by providing friendly criticism and additional information. Among them were W. S. Adams, G. Atwater, V. A. Bailey, V. Bargmann, A. Einstein, A. Goldsmith, H. H. Hess, H. S. Jones, J. S. Miller, P. L. Mercanton, C. W. van der Merwe, L. Motz, and S. K. Vsekhsviatsky. In contrast with the rational attitude of these men, several other great names affixed their signatures to statements that competent scholars know to be incorrect. In order to prove the eternal stability of the solar system, scholar after scholar insisted that records document that planetary motions and eclipses have conformed to the present pattern from the origin of writing at the beginning of the third millennium B. C. But this is known not to be so: records proving such assertions do not exist for the period preceding the year 747 B. C. The aforementioned claim is so manifestly incorrect that, when it appeared for the first time in the New York Times Book Review (April 2, 1950), Velikovsky for once obtained the satisfaction of a retraction, but the assertion continued to appear in scholarly publications. The most serious effort to prove the basic postulate of Velikovsky's opponents was that of the astronomer John Q. Stewart of Princeton University, who debating with Velikovsky in the pages of Harper's Magazine (June, 1951), argued that Venus could not have entered into orbit after the creation of the solar system because this would contradict Bode's Law. What this so-called law amounts to is a mnemonic formula which gives with rough approximation the planets' distances from the Sun, and which has no basis in gravitational theory. The almost childish misrepresentations of the available scientific evidence can be explained by the circumstance that many scholars associated Velikovsky's book with their worst personal fears. Astronomers saw the book as a defence of astrology; professors linked it with the McCarthy investigations; a professor at Southern Methodist University declared that it would subvert our traditional way of life more radically than would communism and prostitution combined; and J. B. S. Haldane saw it as fitting into the plans of the American warmongers to start an atomic war [53] . Leaders in science accused Velikovsky of encouraging belief in sorcery, witchcraft, and demonic possession. Since, however, a good number of his postulates, especially those listed as crucial in the final pages of Worlds in Collision, have been confirmed by subsequent discoveries, the new strategy of retreat is the assertion, heard with increasing frequency, that these predictions were lucky guesses: it follows that Velikovsky has gambled and won the longest shot in history. It could therefore be argued that the accusation of witchcraft stands. On the issue of what constitutes or does not constitute superstitious thinking, natural scientists have had their signals crossed for a long time. 'A true son of the Enlightenment, ' the great naturalist Buffon (1707-88), in 1749 opened his monumental Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, the most comprehensive effort since Aristotle to gather in one body all scientific knowledge, with a condemnation of Whiston [54] . This ferocious onslaught put the tombstone on Whiston's reputation, whereas up to that point it had been Newton's view of the history of the solar system that had been on the defensive among scholars [55] . Since he believed that the mechanism of planetary motions is so well contrived that its origin could not be ascribed to a series of accidental events, Buffon suggested that it came into existence as the result of the impact of a comet on the Sun; for this reason he could not object to Whiston on mechanical grounds, but resorted to theological arguments. After having presented a mocking summary of his hypotheses, Buffon declared: I shall make only one remark upon this system, of which I have given a faithful abridgement. Whenever men are so presumptuous as to attempt a physical explanation of theological truths, whenever they allow themselves to interpret the sacred text by views that are purely human;... they must necessarily involve themselves in obscurity, and tumble into a chaos of confusion like the author of this whimsical system, which notwithstanding all its absurdities has been received with great applause [56] . Whiston was ridiculed for quoting the Old Testament in matters of astronomy and at the same time, condemned for not having taken literally the story of creation in Genesis: 'He says that the common notion of the work of six days is absolutely false, and that Moses' description is not an exact and philosophical account of the origin of the universe. ' On the first point Buffon declared that the true naturalist must leave the interpretation of the Scriptures to the theologians, and on the second point he agreed with Newton that the solar system is so exquisitely designed to operate 'in the most perfect manner' that it cannot have changed since its creation. Modern interpreters of the thought of Buffon are perplexed because he appears to be a rank mechanical materialist, whereas he put at the head of the fourth volume a letter to the Faculty of Theology of Paris that begins with this profession: 'I declare that I do not have any intention of contradicting the text of the Scriptures, that I firmly believe all that they report about creation, both in relation to time sequence and to factual circumstances' [57] . In his writings he delved at great length into problems of scientific method in order to maintain that hypotheses must be built solely on the painstaking gathering of facts, monuments, experiences: but apparently, the narratives of mankind's history do not fit into any of these categories, whereas Newton's adaptation of the creation story of Genesis does. Buffon's intellectual confusion persists among our contemporary scientists: Kirtley F. Mather [58] , Edward U. Condon [59] , and J. B. S. Haldane [60] alleged Velikovsky was a rationalist and an enemy of religious faith; many, among them Otto Struve, accused him of trying to subvert science for the sake of religious superstition and biblical fundamentalism. Obviously, odium theologale is not a monopoly of the so-called dark ages. Frank Manuel came close to the truth in his book, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, 1959), where he acknowledged that Newton was deeply involved in controversies about the significance of ancient mythology (pp. 85-128). Newton championed euhemerism, the theory that myths were based upon the lives of historical personages, for by this doctrine he hoped to discredit the references to astronomical and other natural events in myths - aspects of mythology so frequently cited by his opponents. Manuel has elegantly summarized (pp. 210-27) the ideas of a prominent antagonist of Newton whose views Velikovsky has revived: Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-59). Author of the entry 'Deluge' for the Encyclopédie, Boulanger also wrote L'Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages, ou examen critique des principales opinions, cérémonies et institutions religieuses et politiques des différents peuples de la terre (Amsterdam, 1766). In this work he analyzed the cosmogonies and mythologies of several farspread peoples of the Earth, such as Germans, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvians, Mexicans, and Caribs, concluding that rites, ceremonials, and myths reflect the fact that the human race was subjected to a series of cosmic convulsions for which he also considered the geological and paleontological evidence. He argued that these catastrophes shaped the human mind, causing among other things a deepseated psychological trauma: We still tremble today as a consequence of the deluge and our institutions still pass on to us the fears and the apocalyptic ideas of our first fathers. Terror survives from race to race... The child will dread in perpetuity what frightens his ancestors. (III, 316) Boulanger explained by these fears the human tendency to ideological intolerance, and his hypothesis seems to be confirmed by the reactions of the academy to Velikovsky's work: We shall there see the origin of the terrors which throughout the ages have alarmed the minds of men always possessed by ideas of the devastation of the world. There we shall see generated the destructive fanaticism, the enthusiasm which leads men to commit the greatest excesses against themselves and against their fellows, the spirit of persecution and intolerance which under the name of zeal makes man believe that he has the right to torment those who do not adore with him the same celestial monarch, or who do not have the same opinion as he does about His essence or His cult. (III, 348-49) When the 'Velikovsky affair' is considered in the light of the history of science it loses its puzzling qualities. Velikovsky saw what other scholars were not able to see because he relied on pieces of evidence that they had chosen to neglect, namely the accumulated records of human experience. Natural scientists who scorn these records put themselves in the position of the early astronomers who held that no truly respectable scholar should resort to the telescope. In only thirteen years a number of fundamental discoveries, predicted by Velikovsky, have demonstrated the value of his method. And one could have predicted that the academic world would react to his thesis with a most unscholarly fury, even with personal vindictiveness: the record shows that astronomers hold to a peculiar dogma akin to the biblical story of Creation, that the solar system has remained unchanged since it was created eons ago, and their assumption has of necessity determined the views of geologists and historical biologists. This dogma, being basically of theological and not scientific nature, is grounded itself on fear, as Galileo and Laplace have pointed out. The evidence is that the dogma is groundless but the fear real. This was the principal reason for the prolonged emotional outburst in which almost the entire scientific community of the 1950's took part, an outburst of what Soren Kierkegaard termed 'fear and trembling. ' It is now time for a sober and factual reconsideration; William James properly called 'tough minded' those who can face reality and who do not believe a priori in uniformity and regularity. The scholars, the learned societies, the professional journals which violated, in some cases quite outrageously, the canons of proper scholarly procedure in evaluating Velikovsky's hypotheses, should undo the foolishness of the past by promoting a systematic study of what the records of antiquity can contribute to the natural sciences. Newton himself, by his extensive investigations of ancient accounts and records, recognized that his contention that the solar system has no history stands or falls on the historical record. The crux of the matter is not the validity of Velikovsky's particular historical interpretations, but whether an entire body of scientific evidence can be rejected on dogmatic premises. Notes (References cited in "The Inconstant Heavens") 1. The position of Galileo on the question of magnetism is summarized in the following way by Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (New York, 1960), 142: 'Galileo at one time was prepared to adopt the more general theories of Gilbert in a vague kind of way, though he did not pretend that he had understood magnetism or the mode of its operation in the universe. He regretted that Gilbert had been so much a mere experimenter and had failed to mathematize magnetic phenomena in which we have seen to be the Galileian manner. ' 2. Op. cit., 158. 3. Principia, Ed. by Florian Cajori (Berkeley, 1946), 525. This peculiar explanation is already presented in the first edition of the Principia, 505: Ascendit fumus in camino impulsu aeris cui innatat. 4. De natura deorum II, 45, 115. The source of this passage is Posidonius. Whereas the cosmology of Cicero has received great attention and its sources have been traced, the cosmology of Ovid, which is an even richer source of information on ancient scientific theories, has been neglected; but the gap has now been partly filled by Walter Spöerri, Späthellenistische Berichte uber die Welt (Basel, 1959). 5. Op. cit., II, 21, 56 (Transl. Hubert M. Poteat). 6. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1952), II, 387-88 (Transl, Edward S. Robinson in Werner Jaeger, The Theology of Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947), 187.) 7. Freud's essay has the untranslatable title 'Uber die Weltanschaung, ' Gesammelte Werke (London, 1946), 176. It is Lecture XXXV in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. 8. Of Learned Ignorance, Transl. by Germain Heron (New Haven, 1954), Bk. II ch. XI-XII, 107-118. 9. Johannes Funck, Chronologia cum commentariis chronologicis ab initio mundi (Nuernberg, 1545). 10. Opera latine conscripta, Ed. by F. Fiorentino (Napoli, 1879), I, 1, 367. 11. Op cit., I, 1, 372. 12. Cf. A. Corsano, Il pensiero di Giordano Bruno nel suo svolgimento storico (Firenze, 1940), 249-64. 13. Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de Newton (Paris, 1938), 4. 14. Quoted from William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion Natural and Reveal'd (London, 1717), 23. John C. Greene, when he was writing The Death of Adam (Ames, 1959) and was my colleague at the University of Chicago, called to my attention, before the publication of Worlds in Collision, the crucial significance of Whiston's writings in the development of scientific thought. 15. An Examination of Dr Burnet's Theory of the Earth with Remarks on Mr Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1698), 177-224. 16. William Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr William Whiston (London, 1760), I, 293. 17. Philosophical Transactions XXXIII (1724-25), 118-25. 18. 2nd ed. (London, 1718), 381. 19. Op. cit., 4th ed. (London, 1730), 378. 20. Letter to the Princess of Wales, November 1715, in Correspondence Leibnitz-Clarke présentée d'après les manuscrits originaux, Ed. by Andre Robinet (Paris, 1957), 22. 21. 'Newton, Isaac, ' Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, Published by L. G. Michaud (Paris, 1821), 127-94; cf. Journal des savants, April 1836, 216. 22. Cf. 'An Historical and Explanatory Appendix' by Cajori to his edition of the Principia. 23. Bernard Le Boyier Fontenelle, Conversation on the Plurality of the Worlds, Transl. from French, 2nd ed. (London, 1767), 466. 24. Quoted in Gentleman's Magazine, XXX (1755), January, p. 3. 25. (New Haven, 1932), 63. 26. Butterfield, Op. cit., 118. 27. Principia, 534. 28. Loc. cit. 29. Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1884), VI, 234. 30. VII, p. cxx. 31. VII, p. cxxiv. 32. VII, p. cxxx. 33. VI, 478. 34. VII, p. cxx. 35. VII, p. 121. 36. Ibid. 37. VI, 235. 38. VI, 234. 39. Ibid. (The following translation by Kenneth Heuer, The End of the World, New York, 1953). 40. VI, 347. 41. VI, 479. 42. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Transl. by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory (New York, 1951), Part II Ch. IX, 97. 43. David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855), Vol. 1, 359-60. 44. Several reviewers stated or intimated that the Newtonian theory is absolutely confirmed by the ephemerides. But, as every student of astronomy is taught, the Newtonian theory, in spite of the contributions of Laplace, is only nearly confirmed. The discrepancy between the predictions and the events may be explained by the inadequacy of our mathematical equipment in matters of three-body or n-body problems, or by the inadequacy of the theory, or by the possibility (which is extremely rarely mentioned in the texts of celestial mechanics) that a third factor may be at work besides gravitation and inertia. 45. Dialogue on the Great World Systems, Ed. by Giorgio de Santillana (Chicago, 1953), 68- 9. 46. (London, 1855), 122, 124. 47. Russell Lyne, 'What are Bestsellers Made of?, ' November 27, 1959. 48. C. Payne-Gaposchkin, The Reporter, March 14, 1950; F. K. Edmondson, Indianapolis Star, April 9, 1950. 49. Thomas P. McTighe, Best Sellers, August 15, 1950. 50. Science, April 30, 1951. 51. Most leaders of science, except for the very top layer, reveal themselves as being naive realists without any knowledge of scientific epistemology. An expression of this is that some of them declared that Velikovsky's earlier activity in neurology and psychiatry disqualifies him from discussing questions of cosmology. However, it was just from an interest in neurology and psychiatry that Kant moved to his investigation of the phenomenology of space and time, which is the foundation of non-Euclidian geometry and Einsteinian physics; Cf. F. S. C. Northrop, 'Natural Science and the Critical Philosophy of Kant, ' The Heritage of Kant, Ed. by G. P. Whitney and David F. Bowers (New York, 1962), 37-62. The fruitfulness of Kant's background is indicated by the circumstance that, in his very first essay published in 1753, he declared: 'A science of all the possible kinds of space would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the world of geometry, ' and continued by considering the possibility of conceiving a space of more than three dimensions. 52. Shapley, Flights from Chaos (New York, 1930), 56-7, declares that the Earth has 'a quiet predictable behavior' and that 'not many catastrophes happen to the Earth, except those of its own making, like floods, earthquakes, and sudden continental shifts. ' According to him the destruction caused by the impact of a small comet in the Tunguska uninhabited area of Siberia on June 30, 1908, was a unique event in history. On this occurrence, Cf. V. G. Fesenkov, Meteorika, XX( 1961), 27-31. In the introduction to Of Stars and Men (Boston, 1958), 2, Shapley sums up his philosophy in these terms: "It is a good world for many of us. Nature is reasonably benign, and good will is a common human trait. There is widespread beauty, pleasing symmetry, collaboration, lawfulness, progress - all qualities that appeal to man-the-thinker if not always to man-the-animal. When not oppressed by hunger or cold or manmade indignities, we are inclined to contentment, sometimes to lightheartedness." Like other militants, he seems to have identified dialectical materialism with the optimistic mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century, which rehashed the position of the most dogmatic among the scholastics. Such a position would have been too extreme even for the more critical of the scholastics, such as the nominalists. It would have been too extreme even for Plato and Aristotle. It occurs only in the more literary passages of Plato, as Gorgias 508 A: Friendship, orderliness, harmony, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and Gods and men, and because of this the whole is called an order (kosmos) and not disconnected chaos. Cf. G. P. Maguire, 'Plato's Theory of Natural Law, ' Yale Classical Studies, X (1947), 178, John Wild, Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago, 1957), 117, observes how these passages of Plato inspired The Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy by the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, a work which, as I have indicated, framed the foundations of the Newtonian ideology of the eighteenth century. But Plato deals at length with the astronomical changes and related physical disasters that have befallen the human race. 53. William A. Irwin, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, April 1952; Haldane, New Statesman and Nation, November 11, 1950. 54. Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1858), I, 96-100. 55. The last time that Whiston's view was given serious consideration was in 1754 when the Berlin Academy of Science offered a prize for an essay on the question: 'Whether the Earth since its origin has undergone a change in its period of rotation, and whence this fact could be established. ' Kant submitted an essay for this competition (Werke, Ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Berlin, 1912, I, 189-96); but, since he was an ardent Newtonian, he refused to answer the question as it was stated: 'One could investigate the question historically by considering the documents of the most ancient period of the ancient world that concern the length of the year and the intercalations.... But in my proposal I shall not try to gain light with the help of history. I find these documents so obscure and so little trustworthy in the information that they could provide on the question before us that the theory that would have to be built on them in order to make them agree with the foundations of nature, would sound too much like an artificial construction. ' He then proceeded to outline the nebular hypothesis which implies the stability of the solar system. 56. Transl. by William Smellie (London, 1791,) I, 108. 57. Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, Ed. by Jean Piveteau (Paris, 1954), p. XVI. 58. American Scientist, Summer, 1950. 59. 'Velikovsky's Catastrophes, ' New Republic, April 24, 1950. 60. Loc. cit. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 4: } {Q CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS AND CELESTIAL INSTABILITY } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE PART FOUR by Livio C. Stecchini CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS AND CELESTIAL INSTABILITY To prove that there are ancient records which document that in recent times the earth underwent a cataclysm of extraterrestrial origin which is precisely described and should be taken into account as an empirical datum by those whose task is to construct astronomical and cosmological theories, I shall quote the opinion of a recognized major authority on Babylonian and biblical astronomy, chronology, and mythology, Father Franz Xavier Kugler (1862-1929). Kugler had a strictly scientific bent of mind. He started his academic career as a university lecturer of chemistry, but, after the death of Joseph Epping (1835-94), a fellow member of the Jesuit order and the founder of the study of cuneiform astronomical texts, Kugler decided to take over and continue his work and to this end became an outstanding expert on ancient astronomy and cuneiform philology. Most of his life was dedicated to the interpretation of cuneiform texts dealing with astronomy and with the related topics of chronology and mythology; the main characteristic of his method was a mathematical rigour for which he is considered still unsurpassed today. In the latter part of his life he applied the knowledge developed in the field of cuneiform documents to the solution of related problems of biblical interpretation. His greatest contribution to the study of ancient astronomy was his approach, by which he built only from the most painstaking interpretation of specific texts and thereby cleared the field of a priori presuppositions and hasty generalizations. The decipherment of cuneiform materials had produced from the very beginning an overwhelming mass of novel data which compelled thoughtful scholars to question most of the accepted notions about the development of civilization in ancient times. However, this wealth of revolutionary evidence drove a number of highly competent specialists of cuneiform philology to raise too many general questions at the same time and, in their enthusiasm for the new data before their eyes, to commit themselves to general theories without adequate empirical backing. It is true that many of these general theories were presented as merely tentative, with the purpose of stressing that most of our assumptions need to be totally revised; but the concrete result was that the debate shifted to controversies about generalities, obscuring thereby the more meaningful aspect that cuneiform texts provide a new exact historical documentation, more reliable than most of those that had been hitherto available. Kugler insisted that one should suspend judgment and concentrate on the careful study of specific groups of documents. For this reason, only at the end of his life did he feel ready to come forth with a general theory, and less than two years before his death, he published a rather slim book entitled Sybillinischer Sternkampf und Phaëthon in naturgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung, 'The Sybilline Battle of the Stars and Phaethon Seen as Natural History, '( Munster, 1927). He who rested his fame on tomes which, in spite of their intrinsic clarity, are comprehensible only to the few who can understand both mathematical astronomy and cuneiform philology, issued this book as part of a series called Zeitgemässige Beiträge, (' Essays of Current Interest'), because, as he explains, he felt that he had a message that should affect contemporary society, since it had a great meaning for the history of culture. Kugler well understood that great innovating ideas can be made to prevail by presenting them to a public wider than the narrow specialists, who have a tendency to become prisoners of the general conceptions they have learned together with the technical routines that they have spent their lives to master. But even though Kugler intended to address himself to the general public, he could not help following his usual method, which consisted in proving a general point by concentrating on the exact technical interpretations of a few texts. Werner Jaeger was fond of repeating to us students that the most important rule he had learned from the great Wilamowitz, was that in philology a few univocal texts have more compelling force than one hundred ambiguous ones. The trouble with this method is that it leads to the formulation of conclusions meaningful only for the wise who can understand that the revision of the interpretation of a single text may automatically imply the revision of a host of similar ones. What Kugler submitted was intended to be dynamite that should have shaken the entire field of ancient chronology and historical astronomy, but the fuse was not lit because the general public did not understand what was implied, and those who were competent to understand the implications were not psychologically ready to draw the inevitable conclusions. The 'pressing warning' that Kugler wanted to communicate to the public was summed up by him as: the momentous doctrine that ancient traditions, even when they are dressed as myth and saga, cannot be dismissed lightly as fantastic, or worse, meaningless fabrications. It is particularly proper to avoid this pitfall when dealing with serious reports, especially those of religious nature such as those that occur in large number in the Old Testament. He applied this general theory to the interpretations of the ancient texts that deal with the Battle of the Stars. He observed that these texts have been dismissed by scholars as: completely nonsensical and that nobody has succeeded in explaining them as a meaningful allegory, if it is not possible to interpret them as references to true cosmic occurrences... I have to confess that in my first occasional attempts I did not succeed any better. But many years of experience with the decipherment of cuneiform documents that concern the astronomical and astromythological conceptions of the Babylonians have taught me that, in the system of ideas of the Easterners and of the ancient Orientals in particular, there is much that seems nonsensical to us Occidentals, but is in reality within the realm of factual foundations and sound logic. When in 1966 I published a first version of the present essay, I stressed that pronunciamentos such as the two just quoted, were intended to sum up an entire life of research on ancient astronomical documents. It was the intention of Kugler that they should be taken as statements of fundamental importance for the understanding and the gathering of actual empirical data of astronomy (which is relevant to natural science). After this brief, but final and comprehensive publication of Kugler was rescued from oblivion, it was quoted by several supporters of Velikovsky. Yet it has been ignored by his opponents, which is regrettable since I heartily desire to hear their interpretation of the astronomical records submitted by Kugler. My essay of 1966 stimulated a writer friendly to Velikovsky's theories, Malcolm Lowery, to dedicate a learned article to the contents of Kugler's book. This article is a valuable contribution. First published in England, it was then published again in the United States in a revised form [1] . It is remarkable that the latter version of Lowery's article (which is the one I shall quote), in spite of its effort to summarize what Kugler intended to convey, had to dedicate 25 compact pages to Kugler's 52 pages. In spite of this, Lowery missed several points made by Kugler. This is not to be taken as a reflection upon Lowery's learning, which is of the highest level: for instance, he has translated well some Greek texts of astromythology which have challenged even the professional classicists. The root of the problem is that, although Kugler meant to address himself to the general public, he knew that he was uttering momentous statements and therefore tried to document every single step: for this reason, in many cases, instead of presenting an argument in his own words, he limited himself to citing the text of ancient documents. The result is a booklet that is comprehensible only to those who are familiar with his previous publications of an extremely specialized nature. Kugler published his booklet when he was sixty-five years old, because what he intended to issue was actually a manifesto announcing a new line of solutions for problems which had been debated since scholars first began to read the astronomical clay tablets found in Mesopotamia. Kugler had wrestled with these problems all through his scholarly life. A manifesto is a declaration of opinions and of related objectives to be pursued. In his manifesto Kugler was considering what had developed in the study of ancient astronomy in the preceding half century, and was setting aims for future research to be pursued by the next generation. Unfortunately Kugler's manifesto was ignored by the generation that immediately followed it. This is not a unique case. Thomas S. Kuhn (The Copernican Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1957, pp. 185-6) relates that Copernicus had been 'widely recognized as one of Europe's leading astronomers' for twenty years, before he published his revolutionary book on point of death (A. D. 1543): Many advanced astronomical tests written during the fifty years after Copernicus' death referred to him as a 'second Ptolemy' or 'the outstanding artificer of our age; ' increasingly these books borrowed data, computations, and diagrams. Authors who applauded his erudition, borrowed his diagrams, or quoted his determination of the distance from the earth to the moon, usually either ignored the earth's motion or dismissed it as absurd. Today, if what Kugler stated in his booklet was put into the hands of a writer with some journalistic talent, it would be the source of a runaway bestseller. It would be expedient that this writer reserve to himself the copyright to the film version, because Hollywood would be most likely to make a bid for it. But Kugler belonged to a different generation and a different world: he spent most of his life within the walls of Jesuit training institutions, carrying on, as a practical sideline to his reading of Sumerian and Assyrian tablets, the teaching of mathematics to his brothers of the Order. The pivotal idea in Kugler's book is that the myth of Phaeton, one of the best known but also oddest Greek myths, was based on an actual physical occurrence which can be dated historically around 1500 B. C. According to Kugler it was at this time that there appeared in the sky a body which was more brilliant than the light of the sun and finally made an impact on the earth: 'There really were at one time simultaneous catastrophes of fire and flood. ' The myth narrates that Phaeton (The Shining One) borrowed and drove the chariot of the Sun, but was forced by the steeds that were pulling it to drive it off course through the sky and finally to drive it disastrously close to the surface of the earth. The gods had to put an end to the calamity. Phaeton was struck by a bolt of lightning and fell to earth dead. Kugler concentrates upon this myth in order to establish the principle that, if such a 'highly fantastic' story must be taken as scientific truth wrapped 'in the veil of poetry, ' there are other ancient myths which must be understood as having a similar basis. Before Kugler many scholars had recognized that the myth of Phaeton refers to an event of physical nature, but they had tried to explain it as an ordinary recurring phenomenon. Some had maintained that it describes the fiery glow of particularly brilliant sunsets, and some, as the coming out of Venus as the morning star. Lowery has translated in full from the original German the pages in which Kugler lists these interpretations, in order to show how forceful Kugler was in scorning them as preposterous. This is a quotation from Lowery's translation: So simple, ordinary and peaceful a phenomenon as the evening sky could not provide the basis for a legend which patently describes complicated extraordinary and violent natural events. And yet neither, on the hand, could the appearance of Venus as the morning star awaken the idea of a universal catastrophe - even in the wildest imagination. According to Kugler, the reality behind the myth, is that the earth was enveloped by a stream of meteorites, a stream of 'enormous width' and containing meteorites of such 'giant' size that they could cause 'great fires and violent flood waves. ' He also indicated that the impact must have been preceded by the appearance in the sky of a body larger and more brilliant than the sun. He left the definition of this body open for reasons that I shall explain later. According to Kugler, the fire of Phaeton which according to the Greeks had its main impact on Africa (some poets claimed that it caused the Africans to turn black), refers to the same event which in Greek mythology is called the Flood of Deucalion (the name by which the Greeks called the man who supposedly survived it and repopulated the land). Having identified the Fire of Phaeton and the Flood of Deucalion, Kugler proceeded to document that ancient chronologists had assigned specific dates to these two events, such as 610 years before the founding of Rome or the 67th year of Moses. Actually, Greek chronologists state that the period for which we have certain dates begins with this event. They date as contemporary the Flood of Deucalion or Ogyges in Greece, the Fire of Phaeton in Africa, and the Plagues of Egypt. Kugler left out of his account of the ancient information the detail that the foundation of Athens, that is, the city of Athena (who was the planet Venus), was made contemporary with these events. In the chronology set up by the Greek historian Ephorus (fourth century B. C.) the cataclysm took place in the year 1528/ 7 B. C. [2] . This chronology was accepted in the chronological studies of Eratosthenes (third century B. C.) which in turn were incorporated into those of Castor of Rhodes (first century B. C.). Varro quotes Castor as his source for the information that at the time of the Flood of Ogyges 'so great a miracle happened in the star of Venus, as never was seen before nor in aftertimes: for the colour, the size, the figure and the course of it were changed. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges' [3] . Kugler concluded his quotations of the chronological texts with these words: 'Even though we do not get the notion of ascribing certain chronological value to these dates and of accepting the old chronological tables based on them (e. g. Petavius, de doctrina temporum), we do not have any right to deny that these traditions have a core of historical truth. ' Like Velikovsky, Kugler studies both the ancient writers of chronology and the chronological investigations of Renaissance scholars. Velikovsky quotes a number of Renaissance writers who stress that ancient sources make the cataclysm contemporary with the appearance of the comet Typhon, and observe that, although this was called a comet, it had a circular shape. These Renaissance writers quote, among others, a passage of Pliny (II, XXIII, 91-92) from which one can gather that it had been disputed whether Typhon was a comet or a planet. The passage reads: Some comets move like planets, but others remain stationary ... A terrible comet was seen by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon the king of that period gave his name. It had the nature of a fire, twisted like a spiral, but it was dismal in appearance. Rather than a comet it was some sort of conglomeration of fire. Occasionally both planets and comets spread out a coma. Wilhelm Gundel, a specialist in Hellenistic astromythology, in his review of Kugler's book sharply rebuked Kugler for not mentioning that all the texts similar to those examined by Kugler ascribed the catastrophe to a comet, and specifically to the comet Typhon [4] . Gundel denied to Kugler the merit of originality by remarking: Kugler arrives at the conclusion that the saga of Phaethon has as its historical core the appearance of a comet that was followed by a partial world fire and a flood. In support of this Kugler provides a complete detailed analysis of the saga. I can observe that this interpretation has been already offered several times in antiquity. Probably it is based on an old Pythagorean theory of comets. The first references to it are in Plato and Aristotle, but it is presented in detail by later commentators. It would seem that Kugler refrained from using the term comet because he was puzzled by the role of Venus and because the texts mention a globular body similar in apparent size and brightness to the sun. He used the term 'sun-like meteor' which sounds strange except to those who are familiar with ancient terminology. Aristotle, in order to defend the immutability of the heavens, distinguishes astronomy from meteorology and defines the latter as the study of 'the appearance in the sky of burning flames and of shooting stars and of what some call torches and horns' (Meteor. I 341 B). It is significant that, after having described the general topic of meteorology, Aristotle begins the treatment of it by refuting those who say that 'the comet is one of the planets' (342 B). Gundel's criticism is not justified, because even though it is clear from Kugler's explanation of the ancient accounts that he was suggesting answers in terms of the appearance of a comet and of the impact of the comet's tail, he refrained from committing himself because he was puzzled by the role assigned to Venus in the entire event. Having dealt with the myth of Phaeton, Kugler, in order to prove further that ancient texts that touch upon heavenly occurrences and are dismissed as fantasy or gibberish contain precise scientific information, picks as a test case the last lines of the Fifth Book of the Sybilline Oracles. He chose these lines (512-31) because F. W. Blass, the editor of the text of the Sibylline Oracles, had referred to them as 'the insane finale' of the Fifth Book, and the historian of ancient science, Edmund Hoppe, had declared that, no matter from which angle they are examined, they prove 'entirely nonsensical. ' Kugler concluded that to him, as an expert on ancient astronomy, these lines have a clear meaning, since they contain 'an elegant dressing of real natural events according to a fully unified plan' [5] . The lines purport to describe the circumstances of the coming end of the world; they were written in the century before the birth of Christ by Greek-speaking inhabitants of Egypt, when the ancient world was agitated by the Messianic expectation of a cosmic upheaval. But the lines give an account that is so exact and technical that it must be something more than a mere mystical vision of coming destruction. Such precise astronomical details are given that, calculating by the position of the constellations around 100 B. C., the crisis began in September and reached a climax in seven months and 2.7 days, after the 7th or the 8th of April. Velikovsky has concluded on the basis of the agreement of Egyptian, Hebrew, Athenian, and Aztec traditions that the earth was hit by the tail of a comet on April 13. According to Kugler, the crisis described as the Battle of the Stars began with the appearance in the eastern sky of a body as bright as the sun and similar in apparent diameter to the sun and the moon. The light of the sun was replaced by long streams of flame crossing each other. After the mention of these streams of flame that replaced the sun as a source of light, there follows the line, 'the Morning Star fought the battle riding on the back of Leo. ' Kugler observed that this association of Venus with Leo must have had a momentous meaning for the ancients, since the several goddesses that represent Venus, such as the Phrygian Cybele, the Greek Great Mother, the Carthaginian Coelestis was portrayed as riding a lion while holding a spear in her hands. In Babylonian mythology Venus as Evening Star was a goddess of love and motherhood; but as Morning Star she was a divinity of war, leader of the army of the stars, associated with the lion 'as a symbol of a power that overthrows everything. ' The Battle of the Stars ends when the attacker is defeated, falling into the ocean and setting the entire earth on fire. Kugler explained these events by bringing to bear another prophecy of the same book of the Sibylline Oracles (line 206-13) where, after mentioning the same positions of the stars, warning is given to the Indians and the Ethiopians to beware of a coming 'great heavenly fire on earth and a new nature from the fighting stars, when the entire land of the Ethiopians will be destroyed in fire and wailing. ' The emphasis on Ethiopia is comprehensible when one considers that these texts were written in Lower Egypt. Kugler concluded that the details of the world disaster prophesied in the Sibylline Oracles are materials taken over from the reports of past events, which among the Greeks were presented as the story of Phaeton. Lowery has stated that in dealing with the Sybilline oracle Kugler retreated from his former position that some major catastrophe of extraterrestrial origin took place at the middle of the second millennium B. C., because Kugler analyzes the oracle according to the normal movement of the heavenly bodies in the year 100 B. C. In spite of his diligence and familiarity with the Greek originals, Lowery has missed the drift of Kugler's argument. First of all, it is a good guess to assume that this oracle was written in the first century B. C., the age in which the Mediterranean countries were most agitated by expectations of a messianic end of this world [6] . In the second place, Kugler wanted to indicate that the writers of the oracle were so preoccupied with solid astronomical facts that they described the successive phases of the episode of Phaeton according to what they knew about the position of the heavenly bodies in the several months of the year. It is his contention that the writers of this oracle, far from being maniacs breathing gibberish, were trying to make their prediction (based on a past historical occurrence) credible by framing it in an accurate astronomical timetable. Kugler left no doubt that he was not thinking of an ordinary movement of the heavens according to the yearly unfolding of the seasons, when he put emphasis on the line of the oracle that reads, 'the Morning Star fought the battle, riding on the back of Leo, ' and linked this line with the fact that, in several ancient cults of the planet Venus, the goddess was portrayed as riding on a lion. Followers of Velikovsky may find fault with Kugler for having left the role of Venus hang loosely as an unexplained item. They do not understand that Kugler did not intend to compile a treatise of cosmology : he was broadcasting a manifesto on how texts of astromythology should be interpreted. Perhaps one can explain his approach by referring to his first academic position as a teacher of chemistry : by testing two pieces chipped out of a mountain, he proved that there was an entire gold mine to be dug out. Lowery criticizes Kugler for not having raised the issue of catastrophism versus uniformitarianism; but Kugler was not trying to construct an astronomical theory : he was stating less and stating more, in that he was arguing that there was an entire world of astronomical knowledge to be explored. In any case, Kugler was more clearminded on the theoretical aspects of the problem than Lowery has proved to be. The latter regrets that at the end of his presentation Kugler took a stand against 'catastrophism; ' that is, he dismissed as without historical significance all those passages of Greek philosophers, from Plato in his late writings to the Roman Stoics, in which mention is made of universal destructions by fire and flood, despite the fact that these passages take some elements from the myth of Phaeton. Kugler was scientifically correct, but in a peculiar sense : these ancient writers failed to see the episode of Phaeton as a unique event. This group of philosophers was fathering modern uniformitarianism, because they were fitting the historical tradition of 'catastrophes' into a cyclical pattern of phenomena recurring at fixed intervals of time, past and future, according to an absolutely unchangeable and predictable order of the heavenly cosmos. It was their way of moving from a disorderly universe, now often admitted, to an orderly progression of disorders, which was a first step towards dropping disorders entirely and leaving the history of science with simple orderly progression of the ages. PANBABYLONIANISM Since Kugler's booklet on the myth of Phaeton has been ignored, his reputation rests on his monumental work Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel, 'Astronomical Science and Astronomical Observations at Babylon. ' The first volume was published in 1907 and the second volume in 1909 ; supplements were issued up to 1914. The contents consist essentially in the edition, interpretation, and numerical analysis of cuneiform astronomical records. Even today it is quoted as an invaluable source of data; but those who draw from it do not mention that it was written in order to solve problems of astromythology. The two published volumes were intended to be followed by a third volume dealing with mythology; but this volume was not issued for reasons that I shall explain. In the period that goes from the beginning of our century to the First World War, the field of ancient studies was agitated by debates about the value of a theory to which there was given the misleading name of Panbabylonianism. In order to explain how their theory came to be formulated, one would have to review the entire history of the decipherment of cuneiform languages, but here I shall limit myself to a few points. The reading of the clay tablets that were excavated in Mesopotamia after 1842 provoked a revolution in biblical studies, since it was found that many of the accounts of the Old Testament had close parallels in cuneiform narratives. A typical example is the story of the Deluge and of the Ark. To explain these parallels was a complex task which was rendered even more arduous by the circumstance that the Old Testament is sacred literature to Jews and Christians (divine revelation to the more conservative ones). The problem became extremely difficult and at the same time of utmost importance when it was realized that episodes which are common to the Old Testament and to cuneiform literature occur in the mythologies of the most diverse areas of the globe. The case of the Deluge story is the best known one. To this day Scholars have not yet agreed on an explanation for these astounding parallels. Velikovsky's hypotheses constitute an effort to arrive at the solution of the problem, which obviously is central to the understanding of the development of any civilization and of civilization in general. The decipherment of the cuneiform signs (particularly of the original Sumerian ones) had relied in part on the study of mathematics; documents dealing with measurements had been particularly useful. In the process it was found that, at the time the Sumerians were developing the art of writing, they had already established a scientific system of measures linking length, volume, and weight; the very fact that these units were sexagesimal indicates their connection with time units. Even before one began to read cuneiform tablets, it had been surmised that the measures of the ancient world derived from Mesopotamia. A highlight in the growth of cuneiform studies was a paper submitted by C. F. Lehmann-Haupt to the International Congress of Orientalist held at Stockholm in 1889; 'The Old Babylonian System of Volume and Weight as the Foundation of the Ancient System of Weight, Coinage, and Volume. ' Since the notion that a single system of measures spread through the world by diffusion from Mesopotamia was then generally accepted, it was reasonable to infer that scientific thinking spread from the same area by diffusion. Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922) thought of applying these notions of diffusion in the mathematical field to the solution of the problems of the similarities between the mythologies of the world. This scholar who was one of the most powerful minds in the field of cuneiform studies, developed a comprehensive theory which centres on two main contentions. The first is the common elements of mythologies. The second is that very early in Mesopotamia there was developed an advanced astronomical science which was carried by diffusion to the rest of the world in the form of mythological stories. In substance mythology would have been used as a medium for coding astronomical information. According to this interpretation the mythological dress would have helped in remembering. (According to Velikovsky's interpretation the memory of some astronomical occurrences would have been clothed in a mythical dress because a direct recollection was too traumatic.) The reason why the Panbabylonists were hurrying to formulate a comprehensive theory, even before all the available evidence was gathered, was that cuneiform scholars were under pressure to answer to statements made by students of the Old Testament; this category included a broad range of writers, from biblical scholars to religious zealots. The discovery of the similarities between Old Testament narratives and cuneiform accounts had caused a commotion among interpreters of the Bible, whether scholarly or not; much of what was published was irrational or irresponsible, and there was some outright exploitation of the interest of the general public. The excavation of the Tower of Babel which was then being planned by German archaeologists, seemed to be symbolic of the situation; in Germany one spoke jokingly of Babel und Bibel, a phrase which in English was expanded into 'Babel, Bible, and babble. ' The German scholars, who were the world leaders in developing the new field of cuneiform studies, felt they had the responsibility to come out with some clear- cut formulation that could put an end to this confusion of tongues. Delitzsch and his many supporters among the experts on cuneiform philology would have been on solid ground if they had stuck to their own area and investigated the assumed high level of early Mesopotamian astronomy. Instead they over-extended themselves in a sort of imperialist enthusiasm for their own discipline. For instance, they engaged in an unnecessary, and in my opinion misguided, campaign to belittle the achievements of Egyptian mathematics and astronomy. They rushed to explain the great riddle of the similarities among the mythologies of the world. Panbabylonianism became so well established among German scholars that in 1902 Delitzsch was asked by them to present his ideas in two solemn public lectures in the presence of the Emperor. The latter was so impressed that he asked Delitzsch to repeat them for the Emperor and his court. The text of these lectures was immediately translated into English: Babel and Bible, Two lectures Delivered before the Members of the Deutsche Orient- Gesellschaft in the Presence of the Emperor, (New York and London, 1903). In England too the Panbabylonist theory received so much public attention that the London Times of February 25,1903, printed a letter in which Wilhelm II answered those who wondered whether he had performed his imperial duty of upholding the Christian faith. THE ERA OF NABONASSAR Kugler at first was sympathetic to Panbabyloniaism, but later rejected it, because he became convinced that any serious astronomy could not have existed in Mesopotamia before the era of Nabonassar. Late Mesopotamian and Hellenistic astronomers reckon the years by a chronological system called 'era of Nabonassar, ' which begins on February 26, 747 B. C. This era gets it name by the circumstance that, in the initial centuries, the years are counted according to a list of the years of reign of the Kings of Babylon; the first of the kings included in the list, is Nabonassar. At the time of Nabonassar, Babylon was under foreign rule and the power of its king was only nominal; in any case, as Kugler observed, no significant political event occurred during the reign of Nabonassar. Nevertheless, starting with the reign of Nabonassar there began to be kept a yearly record of outstanding political events, known as the Babylonian Chronicle. Since Ptolemy calculated the years by the era of Nabonassar, it continued to be used by astronomers until the Julian era was adopted as the scientific era during the Renaissance. The common explanation for the adoption of the era of Nabonassar, which is still repeated today in standard textbooks, is that at that time in Mesopotamia there was introduced a new luni-solar calendar, which gradually was adopted in the neighbouring countries, including Greece. But Kugler realized that the introduction of this calendar was not the cause, but the result of whatever caused the adoption of the new era. In the very first pages of the introduction to his Sternkunde, Kugler states that only with the beginning of the era of Nabonassar did Babylonian and Assyrian astronomers feel the urge 'to ascertain and record the heavenly motions according to space and time by measurement and number. ' Before this era the astronomers of Mesopotamia would have been only 'stargazers' (the German word Sterngucker has a humorous connotation which may be rendered by 'starpeeper') who were 'exceptionally inclined to fantasy' (ausserördentlich phantasiereich). This is indeed a strange claim, but Kugler dedicated the entire body of his Sternkunde to justifying it by facts and figures. In the supplements to it there is a chapter entitled triumphantly, 'Positive Proofs for the Absence of a Scientific Astronomy before the Eighth Century B. C. ' The proofs are basically of two types. First, after the beginning of the era of Nabonassar, the astronomers of Mesopotamia, for a period that lasted about two centuries, worked laboriously to ascertain some basic pieces of numerical information without which any rational study of the heavens is impossible, as, for instance, the exact day of the spring equinox. Second, the earlier astronomers of this group developed elaborate calculations which begin with basic figures set through a rough approximation. For instance, computations of the appositions and conjunctions of the sun and the moon, made for the purpose of calculating the beginning of the new moon, would have been based on a value of the longest day which is in excess by more than ten minutes. Since some of these data could have been obtained by a minimum of diligent observation, he concluded that these astronomers liked to play with numbers and enjoyed calculations that had little to do with reality. Still he had to admit that at times one comes across figures of breathtaking accuracy. According to Kugler there are two specific pieces of proof that astronomy began to be based on exact calculations in the era of Nabonassar. The first is that, because the list of eclipses available to Hellenistic scholars begins with the year 721 B. C., one can infer that Mesopotamian astronomers had not kept a record of eclipses before this date; any serious study of the heavens would start with such a record. Kugler was not aware of the fact, called to our attention by Velikovsky, that the Chinese list of eclipses begins at the same point of time. The second is that before the age of Nabonassar the Mesopotamian calendar appears to have been based on irregular lengths of the year and month; obviously the establishment of a reliable calendar is a prerequisite even of elementary astronomy. Kugler fails to provide a consistent evaluation of the method of pre-Nabonassar astronomers: at times he describes them as totally oblivious of numerical data and at other times as occasionally careless. At the beginning (p. 25) of the second volume of the Sternkunde he hedged the statement he had made at the beginning of the first volume, by declaring that the collecting of observational data 'at least was not administered systematically. ' Kugler tried to establish why at the time of Nabonassar there would have been a striking change in the attitude towards astronomical records. At first he suggested that 'perhaps Nabonassar promoted it; ' but later he recognized that Nabonassar contributed only a name to the dating system. He concluded that observers must have been influenced by some momentous astronomical occurrence. Kugler could not trace anything more significant than that, at the time, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars were in conjunction. On December 12, 747 B. C. Venus and Jupiter were at a distance of 1'30" and on February 26, 746 B. C. Mars and Jupiter were at a distance of 23". In reality these conjunctions do not provide an explanation for a total reform in the art of astronomy. If they prove anything, they give some support to Velikovsky's hypothesis that Venus, having been originally ejected from Jupiter, came to interfere with the orbit of Mars on February 26, 747 B. C. According to astrophysics, if there was a near collision, the present orbits, retrojected to the assumed time of the near collision, should indicate proximity. Kugler had his doubts about the meaning of the era of Nabonassar, but these were assuaged by the statement of the Byzantine chronologist Syncellus that, 'Beginning with Nabonassar the Chaldeans made precise the times of the movements of the heavenly bodies. ' What Kugler did not consider is that Syncellus drew on the Greek chronologists that I mentioned in the first chapter of this essay. These chronologists indicate that whatever change took place in the methods of measurement was not limited to Mesopotamia. In my doctoral dissertation I studied the role of Pheidon, King of Argos, in Greek chronology [7] . Greek chronologists divide their system of dates, which begins with the Flood of Deucalion, into a first period called mythikon (period of the myths) and a second period called historikon. The dividing line is the date of Pheidon of Argos which was originally set in 748/ 7 B. C. [8] . Other dates of early Greek history, such as the supposed date of the First Olympiad (776 B. C.), were calculated from this assumed date of Pheidon, who would have interfered with the Olympic Games (Cf. Herodotus VI, 127). According to Greek tradition Pheidon of Argos would have invented measures of lengths, volume, and weight; but this tradition puzzled the same Greeks who reported it, since, as they say, 'measures existed even earlier. ' However, I proved to the satisfaction of my academic readers that Pheidon was an imaginary character whose name is derived from the verb pheidomai 'to reduce. ' The earliest texts do not speak of Pheidon, which in Greek is a nickname for one who gives scanty measures, but of pheidonia metra, 'reduced measures. ' Since in successive investigations I established that the basic units of length, volume, and weight were not changed from the Mycenean age, the only units that could have been changed would be time units. Greek historians report that the first basis for a yearly record of events was the list of the priestesses of the Temple of Hera outside Argos. Excavations show that this temple may well have been founded in the eighth century B. C. One point can be accepted as proven, namely, that Greek chronologists set a break in the calculation of time at the middle of the eighth century B. C., independently of anything that may have happened in Mesopotamia, and that this break was connected with the units of measurement. Possibly similar developments had occurred independently in Rome. The foundation of Rome is dated by the earliest annalist, Fabius Pictor, in 748 B. C. The foundation of Rome was ascribed to an imaginary character called Romulus after the name of the city, Rome. Romulus was followed by another imaginary character called Numa; this name is derived from an Italian modification of the Greek word nomos, 'norm, standard. ' We are told that Numa was the second founder of Rome; his birthday was April 21, which was the supposed date of the foundation of Rome by Romulus. Numa was the first to establish a calendar 'according to exactness' [9] : he would have calculated a luni-solar calendar according to the correct length of the solar year and the lunar month. Before him the Romans would have used erroneous figures for the length of the year and month. Finally, it must be observed that, up to the second century B. C., the Roman year began on March 1, and hence we say September, October, November, December. The beginning of the era of Nabonassar has been calculated as beginning on February 26, 747 B. C., at a point which, as Kugler related, had no particular significance in the Babylonian calendar and which does not mark any turning point in the unfolding of the seasons. Kugler probably did not know that Newton too had argued, on the basis of the Greek and Latin authors available to him, that the science of astronomy began with the era of Nabonassar. The purpose of Newton was to silence those who disputed the stability of the solar system since creation. Newton's contention that astronomical science was a late historical development, was challenged by a scholar who anticipated some of the views of the Panbabylonists, Nicolas Fréret (1688-1749), the first permanent secretary of the Academie des Inscriptions. Fréret, who is properly described as l'un des savants les plus illustres que la France ait produit [10] , in a series of monumental studies published in the acts of this academy, foresaw the immense advances that could be made in the study of ancient history by combining linguistics, mythology, chronology, geography, astronomy, and history of science in general, taking into account the information that was beginning to be available concerning the civilization of Mesopotamia, Persia, India and China. He realized that with this material there could be obtained conclusions that not only are revolutionary, but also particularly reliable. This point is summed up in his essay, Réflexions sur l'etude des anciennes histoires et sur le degré de certitude de leurs preuves. He saw that the data of ancient history were in conflict with the theory of Newton. He challenged Newton's views about mythology and ancient science by which the latter tried to dismiss the evidence for changes in the solar system before the era of Nabonassar. A number of scholars of the time wrote heatedly for and against his Défense de la chronologie fondée sur les monuments, contre le système chronologique de Newton (Paris, 1758). The strongest argument, however, against Newton's contention that the ancient evidence on astronomical events is unreliable, is contained in Fréret's essay on ancient geodesy, in which he maintained not only that the length of circumference of the earth was well known in early times but also that the Egyptians knew the length of their country almost to the cubit [11] . In 1816, Jean-Antoine Letronne (1787-1848), after reviewing the entire Academie des Inscriptions concluded that, given the precision of the Egyptian methods of geodetic surveying the declaration of Fréret 'is verified or at least ceases to be too exaggerated' [12] . In 1972, I published the figures used by the Egyptians in calculating the length of their country at the beginning of the dynastic period and showed that they calculated the size of the earth according to a polar flattening of 1/ 297.75 [13] . At present, I have ready for publication the Mesopotamian figures for the size of the earth, which are based on a polar flattening of 1/ 298.666. There are accounts that concern the discrepancy between the two sets of figures. In our own age, before the launching of satellites, it was believed that the flattening is 1/ 297.1. With the help of satellites it has been established that the earth flattening is 1/ 298.25. Using this figure and an equatorial radius of 6,378,140 metres, it has been calculated how each area of the globe is above or below the level indicated by a geometrically perfect spheroid. It happens that Egypt and Mesopotamia are among the few areas in which the actual sea level agrees with the spheroid of reference. Even before the figures of our space age were published, on purely empirical grounds I had reached the conclusion that the ancient calculations of distances within Egypt agree best of all with a flattening of 1/ 298.3. In conclusion, Kugler was right in documenting that a new age in the reporting of astronomical data began with the era of Nabonassar, but the aberrant astronomical data reported for the earlier period cannot be explained by a lack of interest in precise measurements. VENUS IN CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMY Kugler's criticism, which concentrated on the specific issue of the era of Nabonassar, had a sobering effect on some leading members of the Panbabylonist school. Hugo Winckler (1863-1913) and Alfred Jeremias (1864-1935) withdrew from the emotion laden debates about the value of the biblical testimony. In 1907 they began to publish a series of monographs aimed at refuting Kugler. This Series was entitled Im Kampfe um den Alten Orient; Wehr- und Streitschriften, 'On the Field of Battle about the Ancient Orient; Writings of Defence and Attack; ' but in spite of their flamboyant heading, these monographs concentrated on what their authors knew well, cuneiform philology. General questions of comparative mythology were introduced only as far as it was necessary to interpret cuneiform texts. In their counteroffensive Winckler and Jeremias tried to prove their case by focusing the attention on one specific item : 'the entire manner in which Venus is handled by mythology. ' They observed that all the astromythologies they considered reveal consistently three features: there is a paramount concern with Venus which is described as the Queen of Heaven; the planets are listed as four, whereas Venus is grouped together with the sun and the moon; mention is made of the phases of Venus. In their opinion the last feature must have been the determining one: Venus was grouped with the sun and the moon because it has phases like the moon and was the object of particular attention because of these phases. Only advanced astronomers would have been able to observe the phases of Venus. Hence, it should be inferred that an advanced level of astronomy was reached so early in Mesopotamia as to have an echo in the mythology of distant countries. The phases of Venus became the kingpin of Panbabylonist theory. Winckler stated that one should not be surprised at discovering that the astronomers of Mesopotamia were acquainted with them since unquestionably these astronomers had seen four satellites of Jupiter, 'which are much more difficult to observe than the phases of Venus. ' At this point Kugler felt that he could score a crushing victory over his opponents. In March of 1909 he published in Anthropos, an international magazine of anthropological and ethnographic studies, an article entitled 'Auf den Trümmern des Panbabylonysmus, ' (' On the Wreckage of Panbabylonism'). The following year he expanded it into a book [14] . His main contention was that to assume a knowledge of the phases of Venus was a patent absurdity. He remarked sarcastically (p. 58 of the book) :'The phases of Venus! If this discovery is authentic, then, oh Galileo Galilei, your fame is turning pale. ' According to Kugler the Panbabylonist should have refrained from any further publication until they were ready to submit a special excursus on the physiology of the eyes of the Babylonians. In reality Kugler was treading on slippery ground, because when in 1611 Galileo announced the discovery of the phases of Venus, some of his contemporaries immediately remarked that they seem to have been known to the ancient Greeks (I have mentioned what Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in 1616). The contemporaries of Galileo who were familiar with classical literature wondered whether Greek mythology hinted at the four satellites of Jupiter, which Galileo saw in 1610 with a telescope that enlarged thirty times. For this reason the four satellites were given the name of four mythological figures closely associated with Zeus: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. For that matter, the contemporaries of Galileo did not know that in Babylonian mythology the god Marduk is accompanied by four dogs. They did not know that the planet Jupiter is portrayed with satellites in the art of the Near East. Kugler did not deny that the Babylonians were acquainted with the satellites of Jupiter, but he dismissed this point as unimportant (p. 61): 'Only this is true: in most rare cases and under most favourable conditions one could have observed the satellites of Jupiter - in any case they could have been seen only for a few minutes. ' They would not have been seen well enough to permit listing their appearances in astronomical tables, and only such a listing could be a proof of scientific astronomy. On the central issue of the special treatment of Venus, Kugler granted readily that this planet forms a 'triad' with the sun and the moon. He even submitted pictures from Babylonian monuments in which Venus is grouped with the sun and the moon. But, according to Kugler, all of this can be explained by the elementary fact that occasionally Venus is bright enough to cause a pointer to cast a shadow, as the sun and the moon do, and often is bright enough to be seen during daylight. In reality, neither the Panbabylonists nor Kugler could account for the cuneiform texts in which Venus is referred to by phrases such as the 'diamond that shines like the sun' or 'lordly miraculous apparition in the middle of the sky. ' The very title of the book that Kugler published in 1910 indicates how confident he was that he had succeeded in laughing his opponents out of the scene of cuneiform studies. But their ranks received reinforcement in the person of a young recruit, Ernst Friedrich Weidner (born 1891), who was not only like them a master of cuneiform languages (he was respected as an authority throughout the following half century of his life), but was also well versed in astronomy and mathematics. Winckler and Jeremias, like other distinguished Panbabylonists such as F. E. Peiser, had declared that they were philologists whose task was merely the deciphering of the texts and that they intended to leave the task of solving the problems of astronomy to experts of that discipline. The arguments lined up by Weidner hit Kugler so hard that in reacting he lost his balance. He stated that the texts that mention that a star was seen as being near the 'right' or 'left' crescent of Venus, really referred to the crescent of the moon (waxing or waning moon) behind which Venus was concealed at the moment; then, a short time later, he printed a special sheet in order to withdraw this interpretation. The debate between Kugler and Weidner had become so heated that their publications were dated not only by the year, but also by the month and the day. In March 1914 Weidner published a monograph entitled Alter und Bedeutung der babylonischen Astronomie und Astrallehre (' Antiquity and Import of Babylonian Astronomy and Astrological Conceptions'), which was intended to be a refutation of Kugler's main contention, as stated in the Preface. Weidner felt so sure of himself that, in spite of his young age, soon after, in 1915, he issued the first instalment of a comprehensive manual of Babylonian astronomy [15] . In the mentioned monograph Weidner saved his best argument for the last pages where he refuted Kugler on the interpretation of texts which mentioned the 'crescent' of Venus. The very last sentence of the book reads: 'Henceforth nobody will try to shake the solid fact that the Babylonians were acquainted with the phases of Venus. ' But this forceful and positive statement is followed, at the bottom of the page, by the following elusive footnote: 'One may also mention that well-known staffers of astronomical observatories have assured me that, in the clear sky of the Orient, it is definitely possible to follow the phases of Venus with the naked eye. ' The quarrel between Kugler and the Panbabylonists had reached a dead end. Kugler could not deny that the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter had been observed; but his opponents could not explain how this feat had been accomplished. It was pointless for them to cite alleged expert opinions, unless they could produce living individuals who had actually seen such features of the heavens with the unaided eye. Both sides had declared that they were interested in establishing the textual record and that they did not intend any personal rancor, but in fact their exchanges had deteriorated into unconstructive vituperation. Kugler, years later, expressed regret for the asperity of his attacks on the Panbabylonists. Both Kugler and his opponents took advantage of the pause forced upon them by World War I to drop the matter entirely. However, although silence about what had been aired in the controversy may have been advantageous in terms of academic respectability, it did not contribute to the advancement of knowledge. ON THE WRECKAGE OF PANBABYLONIANISM Since the 'Panbabylonists' were the innovators and Kugler proved that some of their contentions were incorrect, their silence was interpreted by the academic community as a confession of defeat. But Kugler too had been forced into a corner, and kept silent after 1914. Scholars who chose to avoid thorny problems on their way to achieving academic prestige acted as if the 'Panbabylonists' had been totally refuted. Yet, even assuming that Kugler had made a 'wreck' of Panbabylonism, one should ask whether in this wreck there were pieces of valuable salvage. A distorted view of the status of the controversy was created by the circumstance that Delitzsch, in 1920, at the age of seventy, two years before his death, aimed a Parthian shaft at his religious opponents, in which he reiterated and broadened some of the original positions of Panbabylonism. The claim that many of the most striking accounts of the Old Testament must be interpreted as astronomical information and that this information was derived from Mesopotamian scientific astronomy was presented in the context of a book entitled Die grosse Taüschung; The title 'The Great Fraud' refers to Old Testament religion. This book stirred a furor in Jewish and Christian religious groups and aroused all sorts of suspicion in less committed circles. Delitzsch even felt compelled to write an article in the popular press, in which he reviewed his life in order to prove that he had not been motivated by antisemitism [16] . A standard German encyclopedia, Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, in the edition of 1972, in the entry 'Panbabylonismus' states the following: 'Today Panbabylonism survives only as a subject of historical interest, because in a one-sided manner it reduces the history of religion to diffusionism. ' This evaluation may be justifiable in relation to Delitzsch, but not in relation to the other 'Panbabylonists' who tried to avoid theological topics and concentrated on the interpretation of cuneiform records. In 1914 they withdrew from the battle because they did not know how to respond to Kugler's documentation of the 'gross errors' in early Babylonian records. Weidner tried to answer by pointing out that there are errors of a few degrees in Ptolemy's list of the positions of fixed stars [17] ; but this is a poor way of defending the high scientific level of early Mesopotamian astronomy. He might have made his point, if he had had the courage to infer from the records that Mesopotamian astronomers made use of some means of optical enlargement. But the Panbabylonists were intimidated by Kugler's statement of 1910 that, 'At the start one must relegate to the realm of illusions the assumption that the Babylonians were already acquainted with the telescope. ' They appeared ridiculous when they ascribed unusually good eyesight to the Babylonians. There is a consensus among those who deal with measurements, that the human eye cannot perceive intervals of less than a minute. It has been argued that this practical reason explains why the degree was divided into 60 minutes. An object which, because of its size and distance, subtends an arc of less than a minute of degree is perceived as a point without any recognizable shape. The apparent diameter of Venus varies from less than 10" to 63" when she is closest to the earth (inferior conjunction); but at the latter point she shows us her dark side (being between the Sun and earth like a new moon), so that she is hard to observe even with a telescope. For an amateur astronomer the best time to observe Venus is about a month before and after inferior conjunction, when she appears as a thin crescent. The four satellites of Jupiter per se would be in the range of visible objects, since they have a brightness of stars of the fourth or fifth magnitude, but what is decisive is their angular distance from the body of Jupiter. We perceive as one light two stars that are less than 3 minutes apart. Supporters of Velikovsky could argue that the phases of Venus were seen because there was a time when Venus came closer to the earth. In this spirit Lynn E. Rose, with the help of mathematicians and astrophysicists, has been conducting investigations aimed at establishing what may have been the orbits of the earth, Mars, and Venus before the age of Nabonassar [18] . He has gone so far as to consider the possibility that there had been a period of time in which Venus was an outer planet and Mars an inner planet. But, even if these investigations were to arrive at a wellgrounded conclusion, they could not solve all the problems raised by the Panbabylonists. There has been a general neglect of one problem which in my opinion should be the first one to be asked in dealing with ancient astromythologies : how could Jupiter have been conceived as ruler of the gods, when the planet Jupiter, although by far the largest of the planets, appears to the naked eye as a not particularly brilliant point. However, with an enlarging tool of modest power one can see that Jupiter surpasses all other planets in apparent diameter; this diameter varies between 30" and 50". I do not claim that the apparent diameter of Jupiter is the only explanation for the role assigned to Jupiter by mythology, but I suggest that it may be a part of the explanation. Since the great debates of the period that preceded World War I scholars of ancient astronomy have avoided difficult problems. Father Johann Schaumberger in 1935 published an addition to Kugler's Sternkunde based upon the notes that Kugler had left unpublished at his death. Upon noticing that Kugler did not reply to Weidner's statement of 1914 about the phases of Venus, he supposed that Weidner had been refuted by implication [19] . The argument of Weidner was that cuneiform documents refer to the left and right 'horn' of Venus, using a Sumerian symbol which is used to refer to the shape of the waxing or waning moon. Schaumberger observed that there have been found texts in which the same symbol is used in relation to Mars; since the phases of Mars undoubtedly cannot be observed with the unaided eye, the symbol should not be understood as referring to a moonlike shape. He left out of consideration that Mars when in quadrature (that is, just before and after its closest approach to the earth) shows a contour similar to that of the moon in second and third quarter, and that this face was first noticed in 1636 by Francesco Fontana with the help of a poor telescope. The total evidence suggests to me that the astronomers of Mesopotamia made use of some sort of enlarging device [20] . But, even if one chooses to let the investigation of this possibility hang suspended in limbo, it remains that the astronomers of Mesopotamia were acquainted with the phases of Venus and Mars and with four satellites of Jupiter, and must have had some notion about the huge size of Jupiter. The question whether Mesopotamian astronomy had an influence on the astromythology of other countries may also be ignored for the time being. The essential point is that the early astronomers of Mesopotamia cannot be dismissed as fantasts who had no concern with empirical reality and lacked scientific spirit; here the Panbabylonists were right. But, on his side, Kugler was right in pointing out that in the early cuneiform records there occur figures which seem to be gross errors, and that after the beginning of the era of Nabonassar Babylonian astronomers were conducting investigations aimed at ascertaining basic data without which any scientific study of the heavens is impossible. It must have occurred to Kugler that the explanation of these discrepancies may have been some shift in the heavenly motion in the period preceding the era of Nabonassar. It is a fact that after 1914 Kugler suspended the publication of his major work which had given him a world wide reputation. From the beginning he had announced that the first two volumes, which dealt with observational data, would be followed by a third volume dealing with mythology and cosmological concepts. This third volume was never published, and one must understand that the booklet of 1927 on the myth of Phaeton, in a real, if limited, sense, replaced it. The message of this booklet is not so much that the myth of Phaeton refers to a cosmic catastrophe which took place at the middle of the second millennium B. C., but that in general astromythologies are based on astronomical occurrences. Kugler would have granted to Velikovsky that it is perfectly legitimate to use mythological materials as a source of information about astronomical events. In substance Kugler accepted one of the major contentions of the Panbabylonists. It may not be true that Mesopotamia was the center of diffusion of astromythologies, but the Panbabylonists were right in pointing out that in Mesopotamia one comes across data which are superior as sources of astronomical information. The information is not only couched in the form of mythological stories, but also in the form of numerical records. The cuneiform astronomical tablets dating before the era of Nabonassar must be taken at face value. It is no longer possible to speak of careless measurements. Since the publication of Kugler's writings these tablets have been almost completely neglected, with the result that only a fraction of what is available has been published. The collections of cuneiform astronomical tablets that are stored in some museums have been gathered from the excavation of entire astronomical libraries of Mesopotamia. The wealth of material that is available is such that it should occupy scores of scholars for several generations. But the effort would be well justified, because these tablets contain more than general accounts of the events, such as those studied by Velikovsky; they contain exact quantitative data on the basis of which it will be possible to establish on empirical, not metaphysical, foundations the history of the solar system. Notes (References cited in "Cuneiform Astronomical Records and Celestial Instability") 1. The article first appeared under the title 'F. X. Kugler - Almost a Catastrophist, ' in the second Newsletter of the Inter-disciplinary Study Group, now I. S. G. Review. It appeared in revised form under the title 'Father Kugler's Falling Star, ' in Kronos, II (1977), No 4. 2. Felix Jacoby, Das Marmor Parium (Berlin, 1904), 136-37. 3. Augustine, City of God, XXI, 8. 4. Gnomon, 1927,449-51. 5. The Greek text of this particular oracle with an English translation and commentary, has been now provided by Lowery in Appendix I to his mentioned article. It must be noticed that, although the academic world has generally ignored Kugler's book, when Alfred Kurfess, Sybillinische Weissagungen (Berlin, 1951), published an authoritative translation with commentary upon the entire body of Sybilline Oracles, in relation to this particular oracle he followed Kugler's interpretation. 6. Lowery objects that Kugler was arbitrary in choosing the date of 100 B. C. for the composition of this oracle. Kugler would have just chosen a point of time in which the sky fitted the text of the oracle, although the book called the Sybilline Oracles most likely was put together in the second century A. D. but the date of the gathering of the oracles in a collection has no relation with the date of composition of this particular oracle. 7. The Origin of Money in Greece (Harvard, 1946). 8. Jacoby, Op. cit. 93, 158. 9. Plutarch, Life of Numa. 10. Grand Dictionnaire Universel, ed. by Pierre Larousse (Paris, 1866-90), VIII 818, s. v. 'Nicolas Fréret. ' 11. Mémoires, Académie des Inscriptions, XXIV (1756), 507-522. 12. Recherches critiques, historiques et géographiques sur les fragments d'Héron d'Alexandrie (Paris, 1851), 133. 13. Noted on the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid, published as Appendix to Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New York, 1971). 14. In Bannkreis Babels: Panbabylonistische Konstructionen und religionsgeschichtliche Tatsachen (Munster, 1910). 15. Handbuch der babylonischen Astronomie, Vol. I (Leipzig, 1915). 16. 'Mein Lebenslauf, ' Reclams Universum, 36 (1920), Heft 47, 241-46. 17. Alter und Bedetung, 13. 18. A good sample of these investigations is provided by Lynn E. Rose and Raymond C. Vaughan, 'Velikovsky and the Sequence of Planetary Orbits, ' Pensée IV (1974), No. 3, 27- 34. Cf. also Velikovsky Reconsidered, by the Editors of Pensée (Garden City, 1976), 100- 133. 19. Ergänzungsheft 3, 302. 20. One of the few Orientalists who pays attention to this problem is H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon (New York, 1962), 432. But Saggs assumes that the solution must of necessity be the discovery of lenses in excavations. Saggs indicates that some lenses were found. Sir Flinders Petrie too was always on the lookout for lenses in his excavations in Egypt, and reported that once he found an object that might have been a lens. I must observe that a simple glass container of the right shape, filled with water, can perform the function of a lens. Furthermore, the written and archeological evidence suggests that in the ancient world enlargement was obtained by the use of mirrors. Mirrors provide simple and powerful enlarging devices. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 5: } {Q ASTRONOMICAL THEORY AND HISTORICAL DATA } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE PART FIVE by Livio C. Stecchini ASTRONOMICAL THEORY AND HISTORICAL DATA Jupiter: 'Ah Venus, Venus! Is it possible that you will ever consider our condition even once, and yours in particular? Do you think that what humans imagine about us is true, that he among us who is old is always old, that he who is young is always young, that he who is a boy is always a boy, and thus we eternally continue as we were when first taken into heaven; and that just as paintings and portraits of ourselves on earth are always seen unchanged, so likewise here our vital complexion does not change again and again? ' GIORDANO BRUNO, Spaccio della bestia trionfante, First Dialogue, first Part. Translation by Arthur D. Imerti. (New Brunswick, 1964), 98. In the September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, my essay, 'The Inconstant Heavens, ' dealt with the Velikovsky controversy only tangentially and intended to limit itself to a mere gathering of its historical antecedents. The substance of what I said was that the doctrine of the eternal stability of the solar system since its creation eons ago is a theological dogma for which there has never been presented scientific evidence and that, hence, it must be concluded that the 'contention that the solar system has no history stands or falls on the historical evidence. ' Yet my essay, in spite of its antiquarian intent and tone, happened to touch a most sensitive point, since it dealt with a controversy about the nature of science that has been fought for more than two thousand years. In his last treatise, the Laws, Plato declares that the most dangerous and subversive doctrinaires are those who deny the eternal regularity of the heavenly bodies. According to him, no intellectual, political, or moral order can exist unless it is believed that the stars (in Greek the terms refer to the heavenly bodies in general) 'behave always in the same way according to rules of action established long ago, at some distant time beyond human understanding, and that these rules are not altered up and down, so that the stars at times change nature and now and then act in a different way with wandering and change of orbits. ' (Epinomis 982 C.) Although Plato here states his general principle, his choice of words intimates that he had concretely in mind the contention which Aristotle too (Meteor, 1343A) tries to refute, that a planet may become a comet or a comet may become a planet. On the basis of this view of astronomy Plato states that there are two conceptions of science, one that we may call noumenic and the other that we may call phenomenic. According to the first, the physical order is the manifestation of an ordering mind, a nous; he sums it up in these words (X 903 C): 'the ruler of the universe has ordered all things with a view to the excellence and preservation of the whole. ' The essential proof of this is the system of heavenly motions. The opposite view, which was represented by Democritus's theory of atoms and celestial bodies in collision, is summed up by Plato in these terms (X 889 B): They say that fire and water and earth and air, all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art, and that as to the bodies that come next in order - Earth, and Sun, and Moon, and Stars - they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate entities... After this fashion and this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in heaven, as well as all animals and plants, and all the changes of seasons, having had their origin not by mind, not from any god or art, but, as I was saying, by nature and chance. For those who uphold this second view of science, Plato recommends (X 909 A) that they be imprisoned for five years in a House of Better Judgment to be brainwashed and that, if they do not change their minds within that period, they be put to death. This recommendation was not lost to history, for, in fact, Giordano Bruno was subjected to such treatment for seven years and, when it was seen that in spite of the repeated tortures he would not agree even to a partial recantation, he was finally put to death. It must be kept in mind that in the famous passage (De immenso, VI, 19; Op. lat. I, 2,229) in which Bruno sums up his cosmology with the motto veritas temporis filia (a motto that was later adopted by Galileo), he refers to the mentioned passage of Aristotle about comets and takes his stand with the opponents of Aristotle. In the work entitled Spaccio della bestia trionfante (which means 'The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, ' that is, Platonic and Aristotelian cosmology) Bruno propounds an interpretation of ancient astromythology that is similar to that followed by Velikovsky. The reactions to the publication of Velikovsky's books prove that those who agree with Plato are still with us. The case of the curator Gordon Atwater, who was summarily dismissed without trial from his position as Chairman of the Astronomy Department of the American Museum of Natural History and prevented from ever practising his art, indicates that the supporters of the perfection of the solar system went as far as they could in the use of repressive measures and missed only the help of the secular arm of the state. Animistic thinking will always be with the human race and, therefore, the battle for the defence of phenomenic science will never be ended. This is well documented by a letter that the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Eugene Rabinowitch, wrote (September 9, 1964) to professor H. H. Hess, in which he tried to justify the attack of his magazine against the contributors to the American Behavioral Scientist. In this letter he condemns Velikovsky, while boasting, as other scientists of his faction have done, of having never studied any of his writings, and dismisses those who advocate a free discussion on the value of Velikovsky's hypotheses as being 'behavioural scientists' who do not understand the nature of science. The fact that Rabinovitch claims a monopoly on the definition of what is an abomination, indicates which kind of science he is upholding. Behaviouralism is a movement which aims at introducing the scientific method propounded by Galileo, the phenomenic method, in the area of the so-called social sciences, an area infested with dogmatic, theological, metaphysical, and rhetorical thinking. Against the behaviouralists, Rabinowitch resorts to arguments ad hominem, imputing to them malice and obscure ulterior motives; it is a variant on the old Platonic accusation, repeated today even by many social scientists, that the use of the behavioural approach destroys necessary human certainties and subverts moral values. One could have expected from Rabinovitch, at least for the sake of rhetoric, a statement to the effect that, having examined the arguments of his opponents, he found reasons for not accepting them. But he felt the need to state that his condemnation is based on major premises and not on the study of the evidence. The alternative to such medieval scholasticism would have been to accept the method of phenomenic science. The editors of ABS well know that, by dealing with the attitude of some scientists toward Velikovsky's hypotheses, they were risking the wrath of well-entrenched academic power organizations. What they wondered was whether raising this issue was worth the trouble in relation to their general aims of scientific enlightenment. The results prove that, in publishing the special issue, they made a wise decision, in that they struck at the roots of the opposing position. NEW METHODS AND DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES Since this year marks the fifth centenary of the death of Nicolas of Cusa and the fourth centenary of the birth of Galileo, it is timely to remind the reader that the preservation of the scientific method established by them requires eternal vigilance. The same need for eternal vigilance has been underlined by an international magazine written in several languages and published in Italy, Civiltá delle Macchine, which is concerned with the problem of the role of science in contemporary society. In celebration of the fourth centenary of Galileo, this magazine came out with a special issue (May-June 1964) dedicated to the problem of scientific method. In presenting the special issue the editors stated on the first page: Precisely today, because the progress of science seems to shine with particular brilliance, there is a tendency to neglect some obscure forces that affect scientific progress from the inside and the outside. If it is easy to identify, at least historically, the external obstacles to scientific research (the case of Galileo is just an obstreperous example of it), one often forgets that some resistances come from the inside of science itself... To the obstacles that are often set by the closedmind attitude of the humanists there is added, with more harmful consequences, the immobilism resulting from a priori and absolutist tenets held by some of the very people whose task is to cultivate science. This problem is treated with breadth and profundity of analysis in the article by Bruno de Finetti, who reminds us that scientific thought is 'unitary and in perpetual renewal, not fragmentary and final. ' The main article is by Professor Bruno de Finetti of the Instituto Matematico of University of Rome, a specialist in probability theory whose main contribution to scholarship has been the analysis of the interplay of mathematical method with psychological attitudes in the structure of quantitative science. The editorial of the magazine [1] , under the title 'Truth in Expansion, ' remarks that modern science was born by proclaiming the independence of science from theology and metaphysics, but that this claim of science to be a complete and autonomous source of knowledge 'has two enemies that are never tired and never defeated: on one side, there is dogmatism, which may come from inside science itself, that pretends to give absolute value to what has been already acquired to such a point as to make difficult or even impossible the introduction of new concepts, and on the other side there is scepticism which pretends to limit the cognitive aspect of science to a series of unrelated hypotheses. ' In order to illustrate this point, Professor de Finetti, in his article 'Brakes on the Path of Science' [2] , gives a good deal of attention to the Velikovsky case. In his opinion, the refusal of the large majority of the academic community to discuss objectively how much is acceptable about Velikovsky's hypotheses, in the light of the present state of the empirical evidence, imparts 'one great teaching above all others, ' namely, that the professionalization and departmentalization of the several branches of science have become an obstacle to the necessary continuous renewal of science itself. Scientists forget that the division of science into disciplines exists for the sake of science and come to think that science exists for the preservation of the boundaries of the several disciplines and the related academic organizational structures. In de Finetti's opinion, the uproar against Velikovsky resulted from his trying to relate the art of interpreting historical memories and documents to astronomical and physical research. What was felt as a threat was the possibility, for instance, that the space probes might help to solve problems in the field of the history of ancient civilizations. Scholars refused to discuss the merits and demerits of Velikovsky's studies, because they were concerned with a larger issue, the fact that he challenged 'the right of their fossilized brains to rest in peace' with the skills and problems already established. The defence of this vested interest in the preservation of disciplinary boundaries may transform 'each clan of specialists and the great clan of scientists in general into a sort of despotic and irresponsible mafia. ' Here we are reminded of one of the distinctive contribution to behavioural science made by Harold D. Lasswell, who has demonstrated that the conflict for money, power, and prestige among different skills, and in particular for the preservation of old skills against new skills, can be as explosive in society as the class struggle is according to Karl Marx. AGAINST HISTORICAL SCIENCE Professor de Finetti makes us realize that the ideologists who planned the opposition to Velikovsky, even before his first book was published, were successful in their efforts to mobilize the academic community because they were raising what politicians call a bread- and-butter issue, the fear of natural scientists that they might be compelled to learn something about historical evidence. The ideological issue of denying that the solar system has a history becomes intertwined with the issue of denying the significance of historical evidence. As I demonstrated, the scientific evidence for the non-historicity of the solar system does not exist: if this evidence existed, the opponents of Velikovsky could simply point to it and the debate would be closed. But, since this evidence does not exist, the supporters of the stability of the solar system have been forced to carry the battle into the field of history itself. They are engaged in the strange manoeuvre of denying the historicity of the solar system by denying the value of historical science. This is clearly indicated by the fact that, in the campaign against Velikovsky of fourteen years ago, at the meeting of the American Philosophical Society which was intended to dispose of the issue forever, the performer was the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who did not discuss astronomy, but made a mockery of historical science. Rule number one of this discipline is that one must quote the texts correctly and she demonstrated ad abundantiam how this rule can be violated. Similarly, the renewed onslaught by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was concentrated on the field of historical science. In the field of physical science the supporters of the Newtonian theology of the solar system not only cannot find proofs, but find themselves confronted with a steadily increasing number of discoveries (many of them predicted by Velikovsky) which flatly contradict it. The space probes have an effect on this theology that is as devastating as that exercised by the telescope on the similar theology defended by the opponents of Galileo. Therefore these dogmatists are forced into the position of defending scepticism. As de Finetti observes, they are forced to deny the unitary character of science. In the area of natural science they have to claim that astrophysical data, such as magnetic fields, radio noises, hot temperature and geological data, such as Worzel layer, tektites, the recent origin of at least some oil deposits, the results of paleomagnetic analysis, are isolated phenomena. In the field of historical science they have to prove that this discipline is not science and cannot provide reliable data of any sort. This is the reason why Margolis in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists followed in the footsteps of Madame Payne- Gaposchkin in presenting an outrageous caricature of historical documentation. He showed his contempt by stating that in a few hours of study of Egyptology he could contradict an interpretation laboriously arrived at by Velikovsky and supported by the authority of William F. Albright. Margolis trampled on the most precious tenets of historical research: he misquoted passage after passage, referred to statements that did not exist, submitted erroneous translations, and subverted the most elementary rules of linguistics. But his quarrel is not with Velikovsky, not with me, not with the American Behavioral Scientists; it is a quarrel with an entire scientific tradition that dates from the revival of scientific learning in the Renaissance. In my essay, having assumed that any person who enters into discussions of scientific method is familiar with at least the main work of Galileo, I limited myself to quoting the complementary opinions expressed in less known works of other major figures of science. But, since there has been an effort to muddy the waters, I am willing to rest my case on this passage in which Galileo expressed, with superb lucidity of thought and expression, the epistemological conflict between his spokesman and his Aristotelian opponent: Salviatus: But to give Simplicius yet fuller satisfaction, and to reclaim him, if possible, from his errors, I affirm that we have in our age new occurrences and observations and such that I doubt not in the least that, if Aristotle were here today, they would make him change his opinion. This may be easily gathered from the very way he argues, for when he writes that he esteems the heavens unalterable because no new thing was seen to be born there, or any old one to be dissolved, he seems to imply that, if he were to see any such accident, he would then hold the contrary and put observation before natural reason (as indeed is right); for, had he not made any reckoning of the senses, he would not have then argued immutability from not seeing any change. Simplicius: Aristotle deduced his principal argument a priori, showing the necessity of the unalterability of heaven by natural, manifest, and clear principles, and then established it a posteriori by sense and the traditions of the ancients [3] . The astronomical question, whether the solar system is unalterable, cannot be settled a priori, but must be settled a posteriori, by examining 'the traditions of the ancients. ' Galileo stated that astronomical theories about the structure of the solar system must stand or fall on the historical record. I have shown that even Newton, although he did not like what he found in the historical records, granted as much. One cannot defend Newton's cosmology without defending also the conclusions of his historical studies. Hence, the astronomer who wants to pronounce himself today on the mechanics of the solar system cannot ignore the historical documentation and must depend on the result of historical scholarship. The writer of the Bulletin tries to reduce a controversy on the nature of scientific method to arguments ad hominem. He asserts that Velikovsky is a person of dubious morality, a peddler of hokum, and hence those who advocate investigations in the same direction are equally tarnished. Similarly, Eugene Rabinowitch, on the one side, in his letter to Professor Hess explaining the editorial policy of the Bulletin, accuses the 'behavioural scientists' of unconfessed invidious intents, and, on the other side, in his letter (June 23, 1964) to the editor of ABS, asserts that historical evidence is 'inevitably tentative and often controversial matter. ' Indeed, any phenomenic science, any science which is not based on noumenic premises dogmatically accepted, is bound to be 'inevitably tentative and often controversial matter. ' If one reads the record of the trial of Galileo, one sees that this was the main argument against him. This appears to be the reason why he chose to sign a recantation; he granted that to those who were asking for absolute certainty his science was of no avail. History (unless one believes in a dogmatic and scholastic Marxism which today is outmoded even in the Soviet Union [4] ) is an empirical science, a behavioural science, indeed, cum pace Rabinowitchi. As such it cannot produce the apodictic certainty to which the Bulletin, with Plato, would like to restrict the name of science; but it can be shown that history can produce a body of information that is specific and positively significant, even in the area of celestial phenomena. Historical science, properly used, achieves the same results as any other science. The only limit that is specific to this discipline is that it depends on the records of the past that happen to be preserved and it cannot manufacture them if by chance they have been destroyed. Hence, the problem is the factual one of assessing how many and which kind of documents are available. In the following pages I shall address myself to this problem, relying on the opinion of scholars other than Velikovsky and stressing the significance of documents that do not constitute the major element of his argumentation. Notes (References cited in "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data") 1. Page 17. The editorial is signed by the Director, Francesco d'Arcais. 2. Pages 19-24. 3. Dialogue on the Great World System, ed. by Giorgio de Santillana (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 59. 4. The likelihood of recent shifts in the structure of the solar system, with resulting catastrophes upon earth, has been discussed over the past three years in the general science magazine, Nauka i Zhizn' (Science and Life). The articles quote both physical and historical evidence, similar in kind to, and at times identical with, material adduced by Velikovsky. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 6: } {Q THE SCIENTIFIC RECEPTION SYSTEM } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE PART SIX by Alfred de Grazia THE SCIENTIFIC RECEPTION SYSTEM When a scientist writes a book of his controlled experiences, a publisher ponders its audience, and a colleague weighs its value, the special order of human relations called science is in being. Their patterns of motive and behaviour emerge from and return to the larger sphere of social behaviour. They are different from, yet the same as the general social order. Perhaps then never can it be said that 'this could only happen in science': in a scientific sense science cannot follow laws uniquely its own. Also it would be exceedingly risky to reason that, though possessed of a basis of generally understood behaviour, science receives from somewhere a unique moral code that cannot be evaluated by general moral codes. THE CONCEPT OF RECEPTION SYSTEM There is, in every social order, a reception system. In the sub-order of scientific behaviour, the reception system consists of the criteria whereby scientists, their beliefs, and their practices are adjudged by scientists as a community to be worthy, true and effective. The importance of a reception system in every social order is manifest. The reception system shapes the character of new recruits to the order and therefore forms the product of the order. If the term itself is new, the reception processes in themselves are well known. Whenever a scientist concerns himself with the training methods and the curriculum of his field, or with its system of publications and the criteria for evaluating work, he contributes to the building or enforcement of the order. Political parties and mass movements, religious groups, business enterprises, bureaucracies, and a host of voluntary associations have similar reception systems, and of course there is little difference between the natural and social sciences in this regard. The principal elements of the reception system are doctrines and an operational formula with typical tactics of acceptance and rejection. Thus, 'truth according to empirical principles' constitutes a doctrine of the science reception system. It is generally believed that some criteria satisfying this goal must be extracted from those who contend for acceptance. The operational formula sets forth a number of methods by which behaviours are to be tested to determine the degree to which they fulfil the obligation of 'empirical truth. ' And a set of tactics is employed to admit or reject offerings determined to have succeeded or failed according to the formula. For instance, a journal will return a manuscript with a polite note of refusal or fit an article meeting its criteria into its publishing schedule. Ultimately the social and scientific consequences of this reception system must be discovered and analyzed in order to pass judgment upon the system and to enable an applied science of science to revise and reform doctrines, formulae, and tactics. Such a reception system may be postulated to operate when a person, belief, or practice is projected upon the perceptive and cognitive screen of scientists with an implicit or explicit demand for acceptance. We therefore view Dr Velikovsky, his theories, and his practices as a case relevant to the study of the reception system of science. The interpretation of the science reception system may be facilitated by fitting its activity to assumed models. Models of social behaviour in a given setting can be numerous, since the construction of any single model depends only on the perception of a patterned dynamic of actions, and since the validity (and utility) of such models is theoretical and statistical, not absolute. The number of principal models may be reduced to one in the case of purely-motivated and purely-acted behaviour, or to several in the case of the usual complicated performance of social institutions. In the case of the scientific reception system the problem is to determine what postulated pattern or complex of motives and behaviour best accounts for what happens in most cases coming before the reception system for consideration. What accounts for the favourable or unfavourable reception of men, beliefs and practices? The historical sociology of science is obliged, in the long run, to provide materials and analysis in a large enough number of cases to verify empirically that one or several given models explain in great part and usefully the vast majority of relevant actions. A single case, as the one of Velikovsky, can contribute to an ultimate historical sociology of science, but cannot in itself prove the validity of the models used. However, if there is support from materials already known to us, and from such writings as the preceding article by Livio Stecchini, we would be inclined to credit the hypothetical model with somewhat more validity than the single case would warrant per se. Moreover, in order for a rule of law to characterize the behaviour of social groups, justice has ultimately to be defined in relation to singular parties. Therefore a finding of injustice in a single case is sufficient to provide grounds for remedial action then and there, without resort to laws of averages, or the 'long run. ' If a postulated model of the scientific reception system fits a case well, and is believed to be either personally unjust [1] or socially (scientifically) harmful, then the question will naturally arise whether the case should be reheard, as well as whether this condition is typical, this model is normal, and the public or social policies (rules) of scientific behaviour should be revised. Four models appear to explain a good deal of scientific reception-system behaviour. They may be called the Rationalistic Model, the Indeterminacy Model, the Power Model, and the Dogmatic Model. THE RATIONALISTIC RECEPTION SYSTEM The rationalistic reception system is openly displayed by scientists in general as the 'scientific method. ' It is considered in proto-thought [2] to be the exclusive determinant of admission policies to the corpus of science. Its goal is truth, enlightenment, knowledge, or just simply 'science. ' It postulates a purity of science, namely that the propositions and methods of scientists are arrived at only by efficient, logico-empirical operations. Personal animosities, psychopathology, politics and other social conditions are ignored, reduced in importance, or denied a place in the scheme of science. The rationalistic model, defender of the purity of science, requires that the 'scientific method' be pursued in validating fact and proposition. It demands control, prefers quantification, and honours prediction as marks of scientific work. It asserts that new material offered for scientific examination and appraisal will be fairly and openly dealt with, will be communicated freely to whoever may be in a position to judge its merits, and will, upon approval, convey credit to its author. It resembles the rule of law in court systems in that a set of procedures for arriving at truth are to be required of all men regardless of their degree of authority, their previous record, and the resources they command. These are some of the doctrinal, procedural, and tactical elements in the rationalistic model. The socio-scientific consequences that are deemed valuable are 'truths, ' by the operation of this process more and greater 'truths' will be discovered. The truth will be communicated. As its value becomes apparent, the truth will be used in all applied fields that are related. Those who operate in the name of this model tend to deny a sociology of science. The concept of sociology implies that men are conditioned in their behaviour by social factors lying outside of the intellect. The scope of the psychology of science is similarly reduced, creating a constant tendency to believe in absolute realities. Furthermore, since those under the rationalistic spell claim that after all 'there is an objective method of testing reality and any reasonable person can see the truth when it is presented to him, ' they tend to dismiss political problems as irrelevant, and to dismiss power as a factor in the building of the corpus of science. In detailing the rationalistic model, some of the behaviour of scientists in the Velikovsky case that exemplify the use or non-use of the rules of the model can be described. To be noted first of all is that the model is itself used as a mode of attack upon Velikovsky. This is immediately apparent when articles and correspondence dealing with his work are examined. Perhaps the most indignant published attacks against Velikovsky occur at the hand of Professor Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. She precedes them, however, with a statement of the rationalistic doctrine of science, for she says: In these days of loyalty oaths, scientists may congratulate themselves that they are not, as such, required to swear to anything. Nonetheless, every scientific man, every man who devotes his life sincerely to the advancement of knowledge, commits himself to certain loyalties. His loyalties are to principles, not to dogmas; to respect for evidence - all the evidence, not merely such as fulfills his expectations, respect for those formulations that embody the evidence. We who are engaged in research are not concerned in preserving the existing framework of theories. We spend our lives searching for the wherewithal to modify and supplant them. The discovery of discordant facts is cause for rejoicing, not consternation. If Velikovsky had adduced any real evidence that compelled a revision of the laws of celestial mechanics, astronomers would have accepted the facts, and the challenge, with delight. His supporters imagine that we are shaking in our shoes. This is partly true: we are shaking, but with laughter... Our critical faculties have not been developed only by dealing with cranks, for there is plenty of loose thinking and misinterpretation of evidence within the fold. The outsider might be surprised to learn how little mercy we have on, or ask from, our fellow scientists [3] . The Scientific Monthly, which was later incorporated into the magazine Science, also printed an article by a professor of philosophy that endeavoured to explain to the public the criteria that distinguish scientists from cranks. We quote the rationalistic doctrine as carried there: We have already said that there is hardly a scientific theory that is not questioned by some scientist of repute. This is so because science is unfinished business, an inquiry into the habits of nature where all the evidence is not in and where much of the evidence that is in has not been digested. Under these conditions there is room for minority opinions, some of which will, no doubt, turn out to be correct. There is a parallel here, though, with horse racing: long shots run in the races, and some will no doubt win. But a sports commentator who expected a long shot to win in almost every race would be open to suspicion. In the same way, the man who accepts one or two scientific 'long shots' is perfectly reasonable, but when a man accepts too many of them, his scientific standing becomes suspect. The crank is one who tries to force nature into his own selected pattern; the evidence of strain resulting from this practice is divergence from currently accepted views [4] . Harrison Brown, reviewing Velikovsky's work in the Scientific American, similarly asserts several rules of the science reception system: ... In the world of science the individual research worker usually subjects his results and theories to his fellow scientists for searching criticism and checking before making his results known to the public. If he is at a university he first solicits the criticisms of his local colleagues, following which he shows his results to scientists in other institutions. When he has thus satisfied himself that his results or ideas make sense, he submits a paper to a scientific journal. The paper is sent to anonymous referees for criticism, and if they judge it worth publishing it is published in that journal [5] . Earlier, writing in The Saturday Review, Brown had this to say about the Velikovsky hypotheses: ... Modern science can... marshal far more convincing evidence - evidence which possesses mathematical rigor as distinct from interpretations of what human beings may or may not have done, observed, or said thousands of years ago [6] . In each case, following upon or included in the doctrinal statements are assertions that Velikovsky has failed to fulfil the conditions. The doctrinal statements reveal how aware the scientific community is of the need to precede strong criticism by a credo. In the rationalistic doctrine the rule of publication holds primary importance. It says that any would-be scientist should make known the result of his investigations, and, by inference, should have the right to publish his work. It also is expected that a scientist's work will be discussed before publication by those capable of evaluating it. These obligations were, of course, fulfilled by Dr Velikovsky. He consulted many specialists, among them the historian Pfeiffer and astronomers Adams and Motz. The book was examined carefully before publication. Macmillan held it for three years, and then was subjected to pressure from leading scientists not to publish or stop selling it after it was brought out. His work was subjected to double the regular scrutiny by experts prior to publication because of these pressures. It was read by at least six experts and emerged with a favourable verdict. His book was removed from one firm and transferred to another because of the threat to the publisher of loss of reputation and sales. Whereas the first article by Larrabee in Harper's was a responsible piece of journalism, and those of Atwater and Oursler were respectable presentations, a portion of the popular press distorted some of the features of his work, creating an image of it that many scientists could use to discourage other scientists from writing about the work seriously. The scientific journals would not subsequently publish articles by Velikovsky which adduced further proof of his thesis or responded to criticism. A second canon of the rationalistic model is that works will be read before a judgment is passed. This promise is not always fulfilled. Yet the principle of reading offered material must be upheld lest the whole rationalistic model collapse. If the new work cannot be guaranteed some degree of expert reading it must naturally fail to make its mark. Science is a communication system as well as a method of advancing truth. Several of the most severe attacks against Velikovsky can now be shown to have been made by scientists who had not read the book. Perhaps as many as half a million American have read Worlds in Collision. Among them are relatively few of the scientists - astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, historians - who are directly affected by the ideas treated in the book. Reviewing is one step beyond reading. The review is necessary to pinpoint the audience of a book, to enlighten others as to its contents, and to suggest considerations of its truth or falsity. Hundreds of reviews were written of Velikovsky's book, Worlds in Collision. The popular reviewers tended to be favourable. The scientists were hostile. If there is such a thing as an ideal book review, whether favourable or unfavourable, it is not to be found in the story of Worlds in Collision. The question may be raised whether not only Velikovsky but also other scientists are subjected to the same inadequate treatment of their work and whether thereby this principle of the rationalistic model is continually being violated. Another rule is that theories offered should be tested, not only by the author but his critics. This rule again turns out to be unobserved in many instances [7] . Velikovsky, whose behavior throughout the controversy was that of person committed to the rationalistic model, began to ask for tests of his theories four years prior to publication of his work. He reasonably claimed to have performed all tests within his power (the historical tests) but sought other tests requiring the use of equipment that he did not have access to. For instance, over a ten-year period he corresponded with several institutions - universities, museums, laboratories - trying to persuade someone to perform radiocarbon tests on Egyptian artifacts of the New Kingdom, without success. He also sought unsuccessfully to have the spectrogram of Venus analysed for heavy molecules of hydrocarbon. One wonders here, as in the case of other 'folk heroes, ' whether a condition of accepting with grave seriousness the rationalistic doctrine is to be innocent of experience of the world wherein the doctrine operates. Velikovsky, having had no university appointment or foundation grant, was more tenacious in his adherence to the rationalistic myth than his detractors. Honesty and fairness are cardinal tenets of the rationalistic credo. Unless scientists are willing to admit the source of their knowledge and theories, and willing to grant a fair hearing and test to ideas brought forth, they contribute to the collapse of the rationalistic reception system. The honesty of Velikovsky was frequently called into question by natural scientists, in a manner so strong and unbalanced as to constitute libel. Yet no single case of mis-stated fact was proven in any of the four books of Velikovsky, and it would be untrue to assert that his works are too vague to assail; they are, in fact, exceedingly detailed and specific. The 'ruthless honesty' that both Gaposchkin and Brown asserted as the hallmark of science in relation to self-criticism and appraisal of new works was quite ruthless, it is true, but directed entirely at Velikovsky. The degree of honesty in the appraisal of Velikovsky's studies can be judged in some of the evidence presented in these papers. The appraisal of works by specialists, we have said, is a necessary ingredient of the rationalistic model. And specialists were brought to bear upon the work of Velikovsky. However, it would appear that the specialists' functions in the Velikovsky case were primarily to proclaim their competence and to disperse the vulgar masses who claimed to see revelations of value in Velikovsky's writings. Instead of specialism being used as a positive weapon of analysis, it tended to be used as a negative weapon of destruction: 'Anything un-narrow must be bad. ' Professor Boring wrote in an article on unorthodoxies of science that agreement by trained scientists is the critical determinant of truth [8] . His theory, itself unorthodox, and not part of the rationalistic model, was used to show why Velikovsky was wrong even by those scientists who were operating in the name of the rationalistic credo: since the specialists said Velikovsky was incorrect, he must be incorrect. Open discussion is supposed to characterize the rationalistic model. The social setting provided for the discussion of Velikovsky's work were mostly arranged for and administered by hostile critics or intimidated moderators. He was excluded from discussions of his own work and, when he succeeded in participating under a special dispensation, his words were not subsequently published. Several scientists and intellectuals who attempted his defence were silenced or sanctioned severely. I. Bernard Cohen, Professor of history of science (Harvard University), wrote sympathetically, almost enthusiastically, of Velikovsky's work in the advance summary of his address before the American Philosophical Society in April 1952, but changed his approach markedly in the published version of his address in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (October 1952). Radical innovation, declared Dr. Gaposchkin, is no bar to the reception of new science. This is part of her testimonial to the rationalistic reception system. More in keeping with the facts of the reception of Velikovsky by herself and the scientific order is the statement by Bernard Cohen that 'Any suggestion that scientists so dearly love truth, that they have not the slightest hesitation in jettisoning their beliefs, is a mean perversion of the facts' [9] . Nor should radicalism in method be a deterrent to the recruitment of ideas. Yet one of the glaring features of the Velikovsky case is the humanistic ignorance of natural scientists. A reading of the Velikovsky record should be part of the proceedings of any group considering the revision of curriculum for students of the natural sciences. Soon a century will have passed since the beginnings of the scientific investigation of myth, folklore, and primitive psychology. It has been many years since a theory of the unconscious has found a place in the instrumentation of social science. The science of linguistics, of symbols, of the sociology of communication, has progressed. It would appear that a more broadly educated or at least philosophically trained scientific class would have been able to perceive the relevance, validity, and unique capabilities of Velikovsky's method to key problems of natural science. But the passage of time has relegated the natural sciences principally to hardware instrumentation. The natural scientists are still dwelling mentally in the hollow rationalistic universe of the 19th century. Indeed such a statement is unfair to the 19th century, which was far richer in mental constructions than its impoverished and dependent epigoni. They were victims of the fallacies that the present writer came to list in a previous article as common among natural scientist [10] . The rationalistic model naturally assumes that sincerity is a hallmark of scientific work. Harlow Shapley called Velikovsky a fraud [11] , without having read the book. Thereupon Shapley engaged in collective action to prevent the publication and use of Velikovsky's book, actions which he then denied upon being accused of them. He declared in the Harvard Crimson (Sept. 25, 1950): The claim that Dr. Velikovsky's book is being suppressed is nothing but a publicity promotion stunt. Like having a book banned in Boston; it improves the sales. Several attempts have been made to link such a move to stop the book's publication to some organization or to the Harvard Observatory. This idea is absolutely false. The model of rationality demands that the populace be barred from scientific proceedings. Sales of a work to laymen does not disprove the validity of a work yet this seems to have been indicated by critics of Velikovsky. We even note that Velikovsky was criticized negatively for having found people to buy his book, the implication being that unless a work has the previous blessings of the scientific establishment, it has no right to exist [12] . The rational model holds that imprecision is a defeat of scientific work. An ideal is quantification, though many of the sciences fall short of this ideal in most of their propositions. Without foundation in fact, Gaposchkin says of Worlds in Collision: 'It contains no scientific arguments; not a formula, not a number (save for arbitrarily assigned dates) presents itself for analysis. ' Dr Donald H. Menzel's appendix to her critique, sturdily entitled 'The celestial mechanics of electrically-charged planets, ' goes on to show quantitatively that a planet or sun charged to the potential demanded by equations based on Velikovsky's theory, amounting to 10 to the 19 th power volts, 'would be violently unstable... trying to put such an electric field on the sun resembles trying to hold back the entire mass of water in Lake Mead by a Boulder Dam made of tissue paper sheets' [13] . Recent space probes led Professor V. A. Bailey to the conclusion that the sun must hold a net negative charge with a potential of the order of 10 to the 19th power volts [14] . The coincidence is only that, for even Menzel's arithmetic was faulty. The main point is that in astronomy and other sciences, natural and social, to make quantification a rigid condition for the admission of new theory, even in areas where qualification today rules, can promote dysfunctional rigidities. 'Reject appeals to authority, ' affirm the rationalistic rules of procedure. Presumably, nothing is made true or false by the character of its supporters. However, science has not yet discovered a set of techniques for superseding authority, and the corpus of science would be a skeleton if this rule were seriously followed. We have more to say about that shortly, but meanwhile it is well to note that in no respect was the scientific movement against Velikovsky so much at variance with the rationalistic model as in its reliance upon authority. The rationalistic model, when it is sociological at all, remembers history, warns against the blind opposition to new science, and as insurance that it can no longer happen in our secular and non-magical age, offers the assertion that when at first, ideas are rejected, they may return with additional proof for admission and will be cordially re-examined. On December 21, 1962, Prof. V. Bargmann of the Department of Physics of Princeton University and Prof. Lloyd Motz of the Department of Astronomy of Columbia University published a letter in Science magazine claiming Velikovsky's priority of prediction of the hot surface temperature of Venus, of the existence of the magnetosphere around the Earth, and of the radio noises emanating from Jupiter. We quote from their letter: 'On 14 October 1953, Immanuel Velikovsky, addressing the Forum of the Graduate College of Princeton University... concluded the lecture as follows: "The planet Jupiter is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be investigated."... In April 1955 B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution announced the chance detection of strong radio signals emanating from Jupiter. They recorded the signals for several weeks before they correctly identified the source. ' 'This discovery came as something of a surprise because radio astronomers had never expected a body as cold as Jupiter to emit radio waves (1. see also the New York Times for 28 October 1962.) ' 'In 1960 V. Radhakrishmah of India and J. A. Roberts of Australia, working at California Institute of Technology, established the existence of a radiation belt encompassing Jupiter, "giving 10 14 times as much radio energy as the Van Allen belts around the earth". ' 'On 5 December 1956, through the kind services of H. H. Hess, chairman of the department of geology of Princeton University, Velikovsky submitted a memorandum to the U. S. National Committee for the (planned) IGY in which he suggested the existence of a terrestrial magnetosphere reaching the moon. Receipt of the memorandum was acknowledged by E. O. Hulbert for the Committee. The magnetosphere was discovered in 1958 by Van Allen. ' 'In the last chapter of his Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky stated that the surface of Venus must be very hot, although in 1950 the temperature of the cloud surface of Venus was known to be -25 deg C on the day and night sides alike... By 1961 it became known that the surface temperature of Venus is "almost 600 degrees [K]" (4. Phys. Today 14, No. 4, 30, 1961). F. D. Drake described this discovery as "a surprise... in a field in which the fewest surprises were expected". "We would have expected a temperature only slightly greater than that of the earth... Sources of internal heating [radioactivity] will not produce an enhanced surface temperature. Cornell H. Mayer writes (5. C. H. Mayer, Sci. Am., 204, May 1961), "All the observations are consistent with a temperature of almost 600 degrees," and admits that "the temperature is much higher than anyone would have predicted". ' They urged 'that his other conclusions be objectively re-examined. ' Following the publication of this note, Velikovsky on January 29, 1963 submitted to Science magazine a more complete presentation of recent empirical evidence of the correctness of some of his statements. On January 31, the article was back in his hands with a formal letter of rejection. In connection with reports of the Venus probes, Newsweek magazine was independently developing a story about Velikovsky at the time. The Editor of Science, Philip Abelson, stated to the Newsweek reporter in the course of a telephone inquiry that he had not read the Velikovsky manuscript before returning it. Both as a document in the present case and for its intrinsic significance, the Velikovsky note, as submitted to Science and rejected, is printed below (see page 215). In the months since its submission to Science, additional corroborative finds have occurred. The paper was written and submitted before the results of the Mariner II probe of Venus were announced on February 26, 1963. The probe further confirmed Velikovsky's claims concerning the great heat of Venus (800 deg F) and the hydrocarbons (or organic compounds) of its envelope. It was upon an occasion shortly after reviewing the memorandum of Velikovsky that Professor H. H. Hess, Chairman of the Department of Geology of Princeton University, wrote to Dr Velikovsky: I am not about to be converted to your form of reasoning though it certainly has had successes. You have after all predicted that Jupiter would be a source of radio noise, that Venus would have a high surface temperature, that the sun and bodies of the solar system would have large electrical charges and several other such predictions. Some of these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them. All of them were predicted long before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely I do not know of any specific prediction you made that has since been proven to be false. I suspect the merit lies in that you have a good basic background in the natural sciences and you are quite uninhibited by the prejudices and probability taboos which confine the thinking of most of us. For nearly a decade, Professor Hess has encouraged a hearing for Velikovsky and a testing of his ideas. On February 15, Science carried a letter by Poul Anderson that lampooned Velikovsky and criticized the Bargmann-Motz letter on grounds that jokers and science-fiction writers had also made fantastic assumptions that were later verified. When Eric Larrabee, managing editor of Horizon magazine, protested to Dr Abelson against the exclusion of Velikovsky's article and the publication of Anderson's letter, Abelson thanked him and replied that: Velikovsky is a controversial figure. Many of the ideas that he expressed are not accepted by serious students of earth science. Since my prejudices happen to agree with this majority, I strained my sense of fair play to accept the letter by Bargmann and Motz, and thought that the books were nicely balanced with the rejoinder of Anderson. When the Reverend Warner Sizemore, a Philadelphia minister, wrote to Science to show that the very cases that Anderson cited might be construed in favour of Velikovsky he received in reply a letter from Dr Abelson that declared: Science can exist and is useful because much of the knowledge in it is more than 99.9 percent certain and reproducible. If science were based on suggestions that were true 50 percent of the time, and all were free to make predictions which were only that reliable, chaos would result. I have repeatedly seen men of brilliance with fertile imaginations make all kinds of suggestions. Ideas are easy. They are cheap. It is the proving of a suggestion beyond a reasonable doubt that makes it valuable. At least half of Velikovsky's ideas have been proved wrong and he has done little to substantiate the remainder. In view of this, he is not to be taken seriously. Yet, a few months earlier, Abelson was proclaiming the role of ideas in a Science editorial: The synthesis of xenon tetraflouride and related compounds... makes necessary the revision of many chemistry textbooks... For perhaps 15 years, at least a million scientists all over the world have been blind to a potential opportunity to make this important discovery. All that was required to overthrow a respectable and entrenched dogma was a few hours of effort and a germ of scepticism. Our intuition tells us that this is just one of countless opportunities in all areas of inquiry. The imaginative and original mind need not be overawed by the imposing body of present knowledge or by the complex and costly paraphernalia which today surround much of scientific activity. The great shortage in science now is not opportunity, manpower, money, or laboratory space. What is really needed is more of that healthy scepticism which generates the key idea - the liberating concept [15] . We must question whether the P. H. A. who wrote these lines stands for Philip H. Abelson. This was not the first time Dr Velikovsky had difficulties entering the pages of professional journals. The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, which in 1952 carried extensive attacks upon him, would not suffer his reply. In 1956, the Scientific American carried a strong attack on both Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval by Harrison Brown. (The magazine had refused to carry advertising of Velikovsky's book.) When Velikovsky asked for permission to rebut, the Editor Dennis Flanagan, wrote: I think you should know my position once and for all. I think your books have done incalculable harm to the public understanding of what science is and what scientists do. There is no danger whatever that your arguments will not be heard; on the contrary they have received huge circulation by scientific standards. Thus I feel that we have no further obligation in the matter. This quotation reveals that the Editor has picked up a common sociological misapprehension among scientists. It is that the media of the general public can substitute for the media of science. They cannot. Furthermore, most scientists, when they reflect, realize that they themselves insist upon a distinct separation of the two types of media. Science magazine has a subscription list of 90,000. Its sponsoring body, the A. A. A. S., includes 71,000 individual members and 298 affiliated scientific societies, academies, and other professional organizations. The Scientific American sells a quarter of a million copies. They can reach fully the diversified audience of scientists who are concerned with Velikovsky's work. Or they can serve as a block to the admission of new material. If the American Behavioral Scientist prints accounts of Velikovsky's theories, it does so in the pursuance of its commitment to treat with the sociology of science and scientific freedom. If Science magazine carries or does not carry the developments of the substance of Velikovsky's work, it acts out of its obligation to present new scientific propositions and theories to the scientific world. At this point the discussion of the rationalistic system of science may be concluded. Its doctrine, formulas, and tactics have been only feebly exercised in the Velikovsky case. It has furnished a poor fit. A few scientists - in conversation, by letters, and rarely by public statement - asked for the rules of rationalistic science to be observed. The behaviours of almost all scientists involved, with the expected exception of Dr Velikovsky who acted in accord with the rules of seeking admission, must be fitted to some other model. Perhaps it will be that which is called here the indeterminacy model. THE INDETERMINACY MODEL The Indeterminacy Model postulates a scientific order that is not replenished according to any scheme that is instrumentally rational. Rather it almost randomly absorbs or refuses. The lightning of discovery can strike anywhere. The pattern of science forms and becomes recognizable out of a vast collection of accidents. The truth value of the scientist and his product are alleged to have very little to do with their chances of success in being incorporated into science. Nor are they kept out by skillful managers of power and arbiters of claims. The indeterminacy model differs from the rationalistic in that it postulates deliberate activities that are distributed so as to nullify and cancel out each other, thus giving the total system an unplanned effect. Its rules therefore are not rules of conduct but rules of effects. The very first rule of the indeterminacy model is that 'truth' about reality has as much chance of rejection as of acceptance. Truth is an irrelevant trait of candidates and material. Let us pause for a moment to contemplate this radical expression. It does not say that truth is non-existent. It can still hold to the theory that statements can be distinguished as to their relative correlation with facts, patterns of fact, predictions of events, and control of events. However, for truth to exist does not imply truth will be admitted - even to its own domain of science. Like the proverbial prophet, it can be without honour in its own land. To conceive of this situation, let us assume that all men are scientists, even if some are more so than others. They have problems that might be solved by logico-empirical procedures. Taking into account all that men allow into their body of convictions, all the statements about the world and about the future to which they grant their assents, can it be said now, or ever, that the bulk of these statements are true? Perhaps not, at least not by logico-empirical standards. Now, moving from the common man to the scientist, can it be said that scientists take in more correct statements than incorrect ones? To affirm such, one would have to believe that they have attained omniscience. He would say, as men usually have said through history, that those who went before had mental closets packed with the shabby clothes of superstition, wrong theories, and unempirical ideas, whereas today, most of what men know is true. If pressed, one would be forced to justify his pride by the known effects of specialization. A worn witticism says that the scientist as specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less. This may be granted, in which event one would have to resort to a collectivist theory of knowledge: knowledge is a corporate possession; apart from the question of whether most of what is known is true, more is true today than before, despite specialization, because science is a set of wonderful pools connected by communicating pipes. If this is so, then everything depends upon communications. If the pipes are not working, truth is forever partial and in a worse condition than when the lesser sum of it was more generally distributed. Is this the case today ? It may be. It may be becoming so. The indeterminacy model postulates that it is so. Error is not only as common as truth; but truth is fragmented for being uncommunicated. When a truth is admitted only to a small part of the realm of science, it does not exist except for that portion of the realm. Probably the extent of the admission of error into science is underestimated by those scientists who have high morale or rigid unconscious self-doubts. Probably also truth today does not enter a reservoir of science but only a separate pool. Therefore the indeterminacy model can affirm that truth does not enter as a matter of course not because it is deliberately excluded, but from logical, social, and psychological conditions beyond current means of control. The model suggests that the spirit of the times and customs dictate what will and will not be science. Few or many people will acquire the habits of inquiry. They will produce results, theoretical and practical, and they will be accepted or rejected partly by chance, partly by favour or patronage, partly by publicity, partly by the use to which their work may be put. Scientists operate under the indeterminacy system by various myths - primarily of rationality, of causation, and of power of choice - but in fact do not know what they are seeking, what is available, or what are solutions. That their compensation, whether in esteem, position, or money, is related to performance is only an illusion. What is accepted and what is rejected are therefore only a product of chance encounters of purpose and provision. Under these circumstances, scientists follow the laws of nonrational collective behaviour. They think in stereotypes (e. g. the eternal harmony of the spheres, uniformitarianism, catastrophism). They circulate ideas via popularization and texts [16] . Thus have Newton, Galileo, Darwin, Freud and Einstein been conveyed. Scientists are at the mercy of popularizers. Their own minds are formed by simplistic ideas, try as they will to evade their grip. A new theory spreads as a rumour, simplified, overly precise, and success comes as a surprise. No two persons understand its extended meanings quite alike. It is resistant to rational counter-argument. And it persists until it is stale and a more vibrant report originates. It seems to be specific and operational until it is shown to be blind and vague; such is the fate of most past statements about the universe. We would expect more scientists to dislike the indeterminacy model than the rationalistic or power models. It negates the rationalistic model. And the power model, though disliked, entrusts judgments to 'qualified authorities, ' as we shall see. The indeterminacy threatens the whole order. It can be fully expected that among various kinds of scientists, statisticians and sociologists will be least offended by it, astronomers most offended, because of their own methodology. Physics and individualistic psychology, it may be noted, have in recent years been prone to demand complicated systems of priorities in giving scientific credits. Quarrelling over datelines of reports and property in 'findings' has sometimes occurred. This, it may be assumed, is in part a reaction against surrendering to indeterminacy. Much greater nervousness, verging on trauma, is approaching as scientists will consign their work to the anonymous maw of the electronic information storage apparatus of the future. Under the indeterminacy model, in the jargon of avant-garde statistics, the man/ material 'takes a random walk. ' The random walk signifies that for control purposes (including predictive and tactical behaviour) there is no pattern except randomness. Only behaviours of a low level of typicality can be discovered, and these are too weak to determine directions. In the light of this theory, the Galileo case reads understandably. One cannot escape the feeling that the treatment afforded Galileo was produced by a host of non- rational, inconsistent incidents and intrigues leading up to his condemnation. A hierarchical or power system was at work, but its instrumental rationality was inept. The Church did not behave as a fully-aware, clearly organized, accurately aimed body. Galileo's punishment seems in retrospect almost to have been an accident, though an understandable one. The following rules prevail: (1) There are no prescribed scientific procedures. The rule of creative hypothesis is great and scientists 'monkey around. ' Science fiction, magic, astrology, and half- rationalized ideas are joined to logico-empirical procedures and facts, creating an environment from which practical accomplishment emerges. There is a chaos of communication. A person working in science applies himself to whatever comes to him through his peculiar interests and situs, and casts forth a product whose destination and fate are unknown. The indeterminacy model stresses the chance reception of discoveries. Poincare recites how he solved a theorem of Fuchsian functions while walking across a street [17] . Karl Gauss after working for years on proof of a theorem succeeds and writes: 'At last, two days ago, I succeeded, not by dint of painful effort, but so to speak by the grace of God. As a sudden flash of light, the enigma was solved. For my part, I am not in a position to point to the thread which joins what I knew previously to what I have succeeded in doing. ' Where is Velikovsky's method, more than one of his reviewers asks in anguish. There is a method, not highly selfconscious, not always exposed. It is much more clearly recognizable to social scientists than to natural scientists. Sometimes the method is concealed by an easy style that separates empirically-tied ideas while allocating them to short sentences. Of course, a number of the rational propositions, which lend the work its distinction, are only as explainable as the leaps of Poincare and Gauss. The social psychology, much less the neurology, of such events is little known. The indeterminancy model, in this regard, offers in place of the rationalistic model a description of 'normal' science as a quasi-administrative routine [18] . It affirms the idea over the process, as in the letter from Professor H. H. Hess to Velikovsky (2, Jan. 1957) that refers to the memorandum he was sending to IGY: ... I will pass your ideas on to Dr Kaplan in the IGY organization.. Scientific discoveries and ideas are produced by the intuition, creativeness and genius of a man. Dollars of themselves don't produce this any more than they could be expected to produce another Mona Lisa. This is something which I believe you can readily understand... (2) There are no rules for the form in which material is submitted, nor rules for publication. Whatever is offered is admitted or rejected for reasons largely mythical. The works of Velikovsky are actually high in the scale of adduced proof and formality, by the standards of all past useful scientific production. Much of science is passed down as lore. The procedures are habitual and not rationally and consciously prescribed or learned. Much that is communicated passes via devices and hardware inventions that elude the literature of science. The true inventor has to be dissociated from the accredited inventor. Every famous scientist rests on the back of hundreds of unknown inventors. Even if credit were to be assigned by a laborious objective research process, it would not be well enough informed to do justice to the process of discovery. The indeterminacy model fits the inefficiencies in maintenance and replenishment of the corpus scientiae. Much more is discovered and forgotten than is known. Much that is known is unused or known in a partial form. In Velikovsky's works are found numerous discoveries of the past that became essential parts of his theory. The theory that a comet created destruction of Earth was itself once propounded in various forms by distinguished scientists, as Dr. Velikovsky and Professor Stecchini have shown. Whenever a new scientific discovery or invention is made, its predecessors can be unearthed. Sometimes the ideas may be shown to be in a causal sequence. At other times they are apparently aborted and unrelated. And occasionally they are independently invented in the same ideological epoch. (3) A work penetrates into the body of science by the machinery of publicity, through acquaintanceship circles, by accident, by unconscious exposure and the creation of frames of mind (subliminal stimulation). It enters also by parallel practical operations independently derived from the same sources or from the same, different and related sources. It joins science by 'creative misunderstanding' or by 'anticreative misunderstanding. ' (4) The rationalistic modes of presentation, as treated above, become unreliable and the scientific establishment turns out to be wicked, foolish, or ineffectual. There really are heroes, whom the people adore as the Heroes of Science, but the scientist does not learn from the heroes and cannot know the origins of their knowledge. The heroes are really hallucinations arising from the troubled mass mind that cannot rest with an anonymous and uncontrolled world. Subscribing to the ideal system of rational science, the public performs rituals and makes obsequies to an order which they believe to exist (but which is only fantastic and invisible) and which they believe guides the destinies of science. The representatives of the public act like the member of Parliament in J. H. Poincare's story who, when asked about the value of geodesy, would answer, 'I am led to think that geodesy is one of the most useful of sciences, for it is one of those that cost us most money. ' To conclude, a reasonably satisfying history of science and of the Velikovsky case might be written from what might be called a purely phenotypical perspective. This would decommission all the personalities of science. It would consider only the massive output of symbols. It would reveal the patterns by which certain applied operations, of considerable practical value, emerged from the nodules or clusters within this communicative system. It would conclude that there is little control over the reception of new science. It would conclude that other models for organizing and incorporating new knowledge are either practical myths sustaining the morale of scientists, and/ or weak determining systems having at best a mild effect on scientific advance and almost no effect on the use to which science is put. This set of problems is familiar to history, if not to the history of science. Did Napoleon win his battles or did the French Revolution pre-conquer Europe for him? Would science be largely the same if Newton or Galileo or Einstein had not lived? Does not the readiness of people - few in the case of science and many in the case of politics - to perceive, to believe and to use new materials, ideas and instruments constitute the deterministic, inevitable, and overpowering structural force? Are not all the actions of the powerful in the personalized drama of science, like the personalized drama of political history, a glossing upon reality, a personalizing of events not less natural for being human? The documents of the Velikovsky case explain in this light some of the behaviours that take place. They point to the immense practical impact of science while revealing the chaotic conditions of the reception system. Scarcely any scientist appears to have read Velikovsky properly. Practically all of the mechanisms for appraisal of his work failed. Yet his findings appear to be increasingly validated, if not recognized. The science of the future may be heavily conditioned by the existence of Velikovskian natural and historical science, even though many of the sources of that science might have been incubating independently of Velikovsky. Probably some thousands of natural and social scientists might have been among the readers of Velikovsky's works - which are written clearly, deal with important problems, and are controversial - were it not for the curse of superstition and fakery called down upon it. Nevertheless, through the indeterminacy system, Velikovsky's works were kept alive and read. His ideas could become part of a frame of thought among a mass of people, and to some unknown degree, help them develop a new vision of history, science, and nature. THE POWER MODEL Still a third reception system presents itself for consideration. It is the power model. Its pure dynamics posit as an exclusive goal the admission of scientists and their works to the establishment and corpus of science only as means to the preservation or enhancement of the power and prestige of the ruling group. In this model science is organized as a hierarchy operating by power principles in the name of the rationalistic myth. The rationalistic doctrine is embraced, formulated, and controlled as dogma by the hierarchy, which employs it as circumstances dictate. As keepers of the sacred corpus of science, the hierarchs define ethical practices. They accept or reject men and material, and inflict sanctions, all according to their own power interests. The power model presupposes one or more power elites. It foresees a possibility of factual conflict among elites and also of dissension through ineffective control systems. It also admits the possibility of economic and political alliances that may be employed to affect the internal power structure of a science. In the beginning are the hierarchs of the scientific establishment. As in all political situations their existence can be proven by observation of their activity, by effects of their interventions and by correct prediction, either in the present case or by transfer of evidence in other similar situations. Thus, if Professor X, head of a famed University department and incumbent of numerous professional and public specialized offices, agitates against Dr V. and sways others to do so; if typical sanctions of non-appointment, non- promotion, non-discussion, non-publication, and negative prestige result from this for Dr V. and friends; if certain correct predictions are made about the negative response of the establishment to projected actions of Dr V.; and if the impressive positions, connections and behaviour of Professor X in other situations are of a nature similar to his behaviours towards V.: then Professor X is a hierarch and the setting in which he operates can be said to be hierarchical and those with whom he cooperates are co-leaders and those to whom he delegates the same power tasks are subordinate hierarchs, and the whole establishment is a power structure to the extent to which all of these behaviours are typical and exclusive. An authority-sanctioned doctrine is called dogma. It is the set of beliefs about how events occur and their rightness or wrong-ness. In science, the major dogma of method is the rationalistic model. And a minor dogma about authority is contained here in the power model, so that it is permissible to claim 'authority' even if authority must bow down before the 'proof' of the rationalistic model. If a doctrine prevails in a social order, such as is science, it cannot be ignored by the holders of power. They must rule in its terms. They must control it. Naked power is difficult to achieve and hold. Man can no more live by power alone than by bread alone. This is especially true of ruling groups such as scientific ones, that lack the sanctions of physical coercion. The control of dogma or doctrine rests on an original legitimacy of rule and then upon control of means. In science, appointment to leading universities, designation to honours and esteem by prior designees (co-option) confer legitimacy inside and outside the establishment. The control of dogma enables the hierarchs to dominate a controversy in that correct dogma may be attributed to oneself and violations of dogma, hence illegitimacy, to the opposition. As indicated above, the establishment leaders were not remiss in their tasks; Gaposchkin, H. Brown, Lafleur, Stewart, et al. enunciated the code before passing judgment upon Velikovsky and his works. At the same time, they were equally careful to state, even if without confirmation, that Velikovsky violated the code of science in salient respects. He was accused of writing for money [19] . He was accused of a hoax. In numerous varying terms, he was labelled as incompetent to discuss his topics. Velikovsky's detractors were vulnerable, actually, on dogmatic grounds. But only in the public press could they be attacked thereupon. Newsweek and Harper's carried the chief pro-Velikovsky statements, alleging the failure of the hierarchs to conform to their asserted belief-system. Naked power is a shameful thing in science. Members of the establishment, realizing the vulnerability of naked power, were quick to defend themselves against accusations of arbitrariness, suppression, and censorship. One reason why their reviews and letters seemed short on literary and scientific quality was that in them they were conducting a three-fold operation - they had often to assert their control over dogma, effectuate their power, and act out the model of a rationalistic reception system, all at the same time and in the same place. There can be no ruling group without an institutional base. The preferred situs is a university of high prestige, funds, fellowships, staffs, and expensive, collectively controlled apparatus. Holding the chief position in astronomy at Harvard is in these regards like controlling the New York State delegation at a Presidential nominating convention. From such a position come honours and other positions as well. In the 1952 Who's Who in America, Harlow Shapley, Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Lowell Observatory at Cambridge, listed himself as an officer or member of 41 professional associations. In this case, as happens in most power situations, the network of influence extends outward through former students, new appointments, and professional rewards, and also overlaps and is reinforced by affiliations of other kinds - sometimes of a political and ideological nature, at other times of family, of money, etc. The tactics of power normally operate to suppress undesired opinion and manipulate favourable opinion. In the scientific reception system, this involves action in two spheres, professional opinion and public opinion. The points where control can be exercised are in the specialized and public publishing media, and in regards to individuals. The suppression or influencing of professional opinion in the Velikovsky case occurred in the following ways: (A) By word-of-mouth communication before and after the publication of Velikovsky's book. This is an evanescent kind of material, now consisting largely of recollections of scientists and publishers' representatives. (It would consist of items such as: Dr. Conant, then President of Harvard, meets the Editor of Harper's magazine at the Century Club; he says 'I have only one thing to say about your current issue: "Really!" ') (B) By letter and 'committee of correspondence. ' Item: Before Velikovsky's book is published, Madame Gaposchkin on the basis of Harper's article writes a violent review at the request of The Reporter magazine and Dr. Shapley. This is accompanied by a hortatory message prior to publication [20] . (C) By seeking recantations. Shapley asked his colleague at Harvard, Dr. Robert H. Pfeiffer, to confirm the genuineness of his statements supporting Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos: Pfeiffer, Lecturer in Semitic Languages, did so. Atwater was asked by professor Otto Struve in a menacing letter to reconsider and perhaps clarify his favourable disposition towards Velikovsky. At an A. A. A. S. meeting called especially to deal with problems of publishing ethics growing out of the failure to suppress completely the Velikovsky book, the Macmillan company was permitted to recant and state a safe position. (Boards of review for scientific publishing were suggested and considered by the panel.) (D) By depriving opposing persons of positions. Their support of Velikovsky's right to be heard and/ or of his theories appears to have played a significant part in the forced resignation of Gordon Atwater, Chairman of the Astronomy Department of the American Museum of Nature History and Curator of the Hayden Planetarium, and of James Putnam, a Macmillan editor for 26 years. The converse, promoting the useful allies, is found in Lafleur, of whom Scientific Monthly, in heralding a second article a few months later, reported that he had been appointed to a new university and promoted to a departmental chairmanship following his article on Velikovsky. (E) The techniques of denying and avoiding public discussion, of refusing access to scientific fora and a denial of access to scientific publications - via articles or letters of reply, or even advertising - are amply illustrated elsewhere in these pages. In additions, the power model of the reception system operates to restrict credentials. Velikovsky did not possess orthodox credentials. This was made clear in the review of his work. He was of course, well trained in many fields as, one by one, his readers came around to admitting. At that time, he had few friends, although among them was Albert Einstein. Shortly after Einstein's death, Professor Bernard Cohen reported that Einstein had spoken in humorous disparagement of Velikovsky. Einstein could not respond, but a number of personal meetings and a good deal of reading by Einstein of Velikovsky's material would refute the surmise. (Cohen himself retracted. Cf. the Cohen letter above, p. 15.) We note a handwritten letter in German from Einstein to Velikovsky, 30 days before the former's death, in acknowledgement of a gift of Ages in Chaos. I look forward with pleasure to reading the historical book that does not bring into danger the toes of my guild. How it stands with the toes of the other faculty, I do not know as yet. I think of the touching prayer: 'Holy St Florian, spare my house, put fire to others! ' I have already carefully read the first volume of the memoirs to 'Worlds in Collision, ' and have supplied it with a few marginal notes in pencil that can be easily erased. I admire your dramatic talent and also the art and the straightforwardness of Thackeray [Thackrey] who has compelled the roaring astronomical lion to pull in a little his royal tail yet still not showing enough respect for the truth. Velikovsky made attempts to conciliate the powers, partly in conjunction with his attempts to satisfy the demands of the rationalistic model of the reception system. He appreciated that Shapley and Einstein, along with others, to be sure, were two heavily influential figures on the scientific scene. Einstein was a source of comfort, if not of theoretical support. Shapley was approached in the typical honest manner of 'cranks, ' that is, in the course of a public forum, without introduction, and then by letter assuming naively the rationalistic operational code that 'to test a theory, you go to a testing specialist who has the required apparatus. ' It may be inquired why Velikovsky chose Shapley and Einstein, and why he engaged in other actions directed at impressing the gatekeepers of science. This behaviour is in the first place 'normal. ' It indicates only that he himself was no enemy of authority, but remained throughout a naive and quixotic believer in the symbiosis of the rationalistic and power models. One might pursue farther the psychology of this set of incidents. The strongly controlled but nevertheless necessarily and typically great self-confidence of Velikovsky, which enabled him to be a 'normal' man who could still pursue tremendous hypotheses through many thousands of hours against many adversities, had a side of unconscious intellectual presumption: 'The Lodges speak only to the Cabots. ' The establishment has a final weapon against hostile innovators. It is the concealed incorporation of their ideas. The best-known manifestation of the techniques of secret information is sometimes called the 'silent footnote techniques. ' Credit is given in sources, footnotes, and forewords only to those who are members of the establishment in good standing. Also there is a rule of the highly specialized to not cite anyone less highly specialized for fear of being thought too general, too popular. As a clique device, selective footnoting costs an aspirant nothing (except possibly self-respect) and shows that he belongs to the group, and he is 'advanced. ' It also lets him grace the patronage chiefs and the powerful. It is a vote. A less expensive, less discernible, and more vitriolic tactic is hard to imagine. To this day, despite a great deal of corroborative evidence and the passage of thirteen years, no scientist has admitted in a work of his own that any glance that he may have given towards the skies, nor any peek into ancient documents, has been provoked by an objective and calm desire to examine Velikovsky's evidence. When relevant findings have occurred, they have not been associated with the name of Velikovsky. Then, too, using the partially respectable and partly true doctrines of the indeterminacy model, the leaders claim that the innovator plucks his ideas and facts from the air of the times. Examples are the 'ideas are cheap' statement of Philip Abelson. Or Harrison Brown's assertions that 'Velikovsky apparently looks upon himself as an original thinker... ' and 'He quotes some data which we know to be true, some which we know to be dubious and some which we know to be false. ' Brown gives not a shred of evidence for this statement. It is baseless, yet a widely circulated canard among scientists is that Velikovsky made so many predictions that some are bound to be true. Or, using the rationalistic dogma, the establishment propagandists claim that 'there are predictions and predictions, ' meaning that correctness is not the hallmark of good predictions. Science works only on proper, methodical, laboratory work, it is declared. This mysterious science is, of course, only the power and indeterminacy procedures at work. So Velikovsky's catastrophes 'do not upset' scientists: Madame Gaposchkin goes out of her way to express the attitude, 'See how we have accepted the much greater catastrophes recently demonstrated empirically and mathematically by members of the establishment! ' ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL NETWORKS The tactics used to enhance power within the scientific establishment include bringing in power from the outside. The most obvious external networks activated in the Velikovsky case were the economic and the political. Here is Dr Velikovsky's description of the fatal interview in May 1950 with the President of Macmillan Company, when the latter requested him to free Macmillan from its obligation to continue publishing Worlds in Collision. Mr Brett said: Seventy per cent of the business of this company is in textbooks; it is the real backbone of our firm. Therefore we are vulnerable. Professors in certain universities have refused to see our salesmen. We have received a series of letters declaring a boycott against all our textbooks. Please realize how it works. (Here Mr Brett picked up a pencil and drew some circles.) Academic circles are not isolated groups; they are united in local organizations, or in professorial associations that are incorporated or represented in larger national organizations. (And he drew larger circles.) The American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. The American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences are groups of national importance where scientists in many field are represented. In this way the academic pressure may become widespread. The conversation is pursued and becomes difficult. Velikovsky notes again: Mr Brett, though very polite and trying to be pleasant, was definitely committed to his decision to free his house of a book that was arousing wrath among the powerful of the textbook world, and he began again to draw a pattern of circles to show me how the scientific groups are interlocked; how they are centred, and how they can damage a publishing house. The most readily available economic instrument of the scientific establishment is the 'boycott. ' It is well-known but not sufficiently appreciated that the leaders of the scientific field wield a triple influence over publishers. They are authors or sponsors of the leading works in the field. They influence opinion about books; this in turn affects purchasing. And they and their subordinates and followers in other colleges purchase an important part of the books and materials sold in the field and used as texts and required reading. When a publisher's contact men find the doors to the mighty suddenly closed to them, this is more than pressure - it can be a mortal blow. The establishment moved with speed and vigour to block professional support for Velikovsky's book and to boycott it and its publishers. The following occurs in a letter from Shapley to Macmillan Company prior to the publication of the book. And frankly, unless you can assure me that you have done things like this frequently in the past without damage, the publication must cut me off from the Macmillan Company. And on February 20, one month later, and still before the book was printed, in a letter to Ted Thackrey, Editor of Compass, Shapley writes: In my rather long experience in the field of science, this is the most successful fraud that has been perpetrated on leading American publications... I am not quite sure that Macmillan is going through with the publication, because that firm has perhaps the highest reputation in the world for the handling of scientific books. The book was published after clearing the hurdle of a board of censors instituted by Mr Brett but pressure continued. Macmillan prevailed upon Velikovsky to release it from its contract with him, presenting him with a contract with Doubleday (the book was already on the top of the best-seller list and over 50,000 copies of it had been sold) and making clear that he had no other course to take if his book were to be promoted and marketed. Indeed, the company had already stopped publicizing the book. As every bookman knows, this could be construed as a breach of faith with the author. Subsequent correspondence indicated the nature of Operation Boycott. D. B. McLaughlin, University of Michigan astronomer, in a letter of June 16, 1950 to Fulton Oursler, Reader's Digest, said in part: Worlds in Collision has just changed hand, from Macmillan to Doubleday. I am frank to state that this change was the result of pressure that scientists and scholars brought to bear on the Macmillan Company. It is our duty to the public to prevent such fraud insofar as we can. Paul Herget, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cincinnati and Director of its observatory, wrote to the columnist Sokolsky, early July 1950: I do not believe he [Shapley] was in any sense the leader in this campaign. I was a very vigorous participant myself... For your information I enclose copies of some of my correspondence. After the transfer was made, pressure was brought upon the Doubleday Company. On June 30,1950, David C. Grahame, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Amherst, wrote: Macmillan company abandoned it [Worlds in Collision] because of the storm of protest it aroused among informed persons, and you, too, may find yourself kept busy answering letters of indignation from scientists the country over. Scientists are now engaged in an active boycott of the Macmillan books, their opinion should be heeded by any publisher who intends to publish a book which purports to be science. I trust that you can be dissuaded. The Harvard University group was relentless. Professor Fred L. Whipple, who had been Shapley's chief assistant and had relieved him as Director of the Harvard College Observatory, took up the cudgels with Doubleday. On June 30, 1950 he wrote to the Blakiston Company, which was the publisher of his book, Earth, Moon, and Planets. Commenting on an article that Newsweek magazine had just published on Velikovsky's case (called 'Professors as Suppressors') he says: Newsweek has unwittingly done the Doubleday Company a considerable amount of harm. They have made public the high success of the spontaneous boycott of the Macmillan Company by scientifically minded people. This in turn amounts to organizing a boycott of the Doubleday Company by the thinking people who buy books. My guess is that Doubleday Company will never publish Volumes 3 and 4 [21] ... In any case, since I believe that the Blakiston Company is owned by the Doubleday Company, which controls its policies as well as the distribution of its books, I am now then a fellow author of the Doubleday Company along with Velikovsky. My natural inclination, were it possible, is to take Earth, Moon and Planets off the market and find a publisher who is not associated with one who has such a lacuna in its publication ethics. He would instead, he declared, give the royalties to charity and bring out no new edition. Indeed the entire popularly-written Harvard series on astronomy was soon withdrawn from Blakiston. Whether a political network became engaged along with the scientific and economic ones is quite unclear. It may even be questioned whether so controversial a subject should be raised. (Perhaps if mere Democrats and Republicans were the participants, one might not hesitate.) And yet, the evidence suggests that an informal left-wing network might well have been in operation. This would help explain the intensity of emotion and activity exhibited by Professor Shapley and various supporters. The political affiliations of Dr Shapley during this period were under scrutiny by official agencies. The 'normal' threats posed by the Velikovsky work might have been intensified by the political attacks Shapley was undergoing. Velikovsky could have been a convenient, fairly helpless target of displaced aggressions. Yet Shapley was not alone. He was supported by others who were under the same kind of political attack, for example, Kirtley Mather and Edward U. Condon. Were they all displacing aggressions? Was the British evolutionist, J. B. S. Haldane, several thousand miles away, subject to the same collective disorder? In Britain and on the Continent of Europe, Worlds in Collision was received differently. Not accepted in many quarters, neither was it vilified. On the other hand, Haldane, an old friend and political ally of Shapley, wrote an exceptional diatribe against Velikovsky, even associating the book with those in America who wished to use Britain as a base for atomic warfare. If a political network theory were to be assumed, the reasons might be several. The work of Velikovsky could be assumed to defend Jewish nationalism. It could be assumed to defend fundamentalism. It could be considered anti-materialist, anti-determinist, and obscurantist. An attack on it might also give a political apparatus, with its associated branches, some needed exercise, and, what is more, a needed victory at its lowest moment in history. The conflict could moreover serve to bind to the group unsuspecting sympathizers in a common cause of science. This is conjectural, yet it would be improper to eliminate it entirely from consideration, even at the cost of arousing hostility in readers who, until this page, might have been in full sympathy with our presentation. To illustrate further, there occurred a strange incident that can perhaps be best understood as a network problem. Shapley was among a group of progressives and more extreme left-wingers who, when the New York newspaper PM failed, backed its successor, Compass. On February 19, 1950, it reprinted the original Harper's article on Velikovsky's book, the very article which, appearing before book publication, caused an immediate hostile outburst from the Harvard group. On February 20, Harlow Shapley, on the stationery of the Harvard College Observatory, wrote to Ted Thackrey, Editor of the Compass. 'Dear Ted, ' he began, 'Somebody has done you dirt. ' The rest of the letter was smoothly persuasive to Thackrey and derogatory to Velikovsky. He referred to Worlds in Collision as 'a successful fraud, ' 'rubbish, ' and 'astrological hocus-pocus. ' Einstein was later to read his letter and call it 'miserable' in a marginal notation. However, Thackrey, far from cringing, sent back a stinging retort. He stated well the rationalistic ideal, and accused Shapley of trying to suppress Velikovsky's work. Another exchange followed. The Compass was not long for this world, however. Thackrey's views on issues such as the Korean War threw the communists and fellow travellers into deadly opposition to him. Eventually, key backers withdrew their financial support, and Compass folded. But the main struggle over Worlds in Collision was not waged in the associated arenas of business and politics. It occurred within the ramparts of science. Furthermore, it was a fairly clear engagement of the one with the many. The hierarchs were not riven by dissent. There has been no revolt. The natural resort of the denied and dispossessed in a power system, factionalism, was not exercised. No faction within science attempted in the name of rationalism to substitute its interest, theories and facts for the prevailing ones. A different kind of power behaviour within the dynamics of the model is visible. Dr Velikovsky has been more of the hermit scientist than of the hierarch, cabalist, or rebel. The model of this behaviour has the gates of scientific recognition being forced by the single-minded dedicated scholar and a small group of disciples. They create a disturbance that cannot be ignored. The whole picture is one of a power struggle where the odds against innovation are great but the addiction of the innovator to truth is supreme. In the end, it is the outcome of the power struggle that determines whether the truth is admitted, not the rationalistic tests. Just as a soldier or a bureaucrat will exclaim in amazement over the gargantuan capacity of the collective organism to ingest irrationality and inefficiency, the scientist with any degree of historical perspective must often be shocked at the frequency with which power determines what the laws of human and natural behaviour 'are' and how a corpus of science survives. THE DOGMATIC MODEL A final model, the dogmatic, requires exposition. Professor Stecchini has given ample reason to believe that the resistance to the astronomical theories of Velikovsky was motivated by sheer ideology, a dislike of challenge to an orderly universe. Much evidence can be brought forward from other fields of knowledge - archaeology, biblical studies, paleontology, geology, physics and biology - to the same effect: the theories of Velikovsky operating against the prevailing dogma are repulsed vigorously. Every weapon is brought into play against the new ideas - authoritative denunciation, arguments ad hominem, tricks of logic and evidence, suppression, denial of rewards, and stony silence. By the rules of the dogmatic model, what happens is explained solely and adequately by the fact that all believers in the state of present knowledge unite to resist the innovator. New material and men are accepted in the proportion to which they conform with prevailing theories and norms. Several tests of the dogmatic model may be proposed. (1) Is there a universal agreement against a work on grounds other than rationalistic? If so, a dogmatic model may fit the case. The spontaneity and generality of denunciation of Velikovsky's work is compelling. The power apparatus is simply not strong enough to explain it. The rationalistic model certainly does not. Nor does the indeterminacy model. Yet the concept of a collective obsession spread among a great many persons on all scientific levels and in all scientific fields would fit the dogmatic mould. (2) Does the power elite reject new and correct ideas even though the effects of the ideas may be expected to enhance their power? If the answer is an unambiguous 'yes, ' then the dogmatic model fits. The Velikovsky case is here ambiguous, however. Partly this is owing to the lack of agreement over the correctness of his theories. But other factors could cloud the issue too. In 1950 the throne of astronomy, the queen of sciences, was shaky. It could have been bolstered by consideration of the Velikovskian theories. The weakness of classical studies was evident. They could have been rejuvenated. Biology was not in such a poor condition, but it too could have been aided by vigorous re-examination of evolutionary theory. Geology was vigorous, physics too. They needed no great prestige. All rejected the ideas. Thus power (prestige) was not a determinant, it would seem. However, power outside is not the same as power inside the disciplines. Time after time in history, power elites succumb because they are more intent of gaining or holding internal power than in maintaining or extending the scope and intensity of their power vis-a-vis the outer spheres. Cavalry generals have been known to risk their country's safety in order to protect the power of their outmoded arm within the military establishments. An authority in the classics might readily sacrifice the chances of his discipline to retain his personal position within it. We do note a perceptiveness of the larger power issues among fundamentalists and other belief-groups that held a fringe position with respect to modern science. They could see a movement back into science from which they had long been displaced by evolutionary and anti-scriptural doctrines in science. (3) Do conflicting power factions within the power elite take the same attitude towards plausible innovation? If so, then the dogmatic model is indicated. In the Velikovsky case, whatever general scientific leadership could be said to exist was either antagonistic or silent towards him. If factions existed, then dogmatism can be assumed. The answer is in doubt. The factions may not have existed or perhaps they did not perceive their 'objective interests' (indeterminacy) or perhaps they were in fact dogmatically opposed. Going into the autonomous fields of science, the situation is somewhat clearer. In no scientific field, of the half dozen involved, did a faction seize upon the issues. In astronomy, for instance, Struve, who might have opposed Shapley, took a dogmatic position in opposition to Velikovsky. The West Coast empires of astronomy were less unanimous in opposing him. Again, the query: indeterminacy? A cancelling effect between dogmatism and factionalism ? (4) Is there in fact a high correlation between opposition and novelty, where truth is a constant ? If so, then the dogmatic model fits. The Velikovsky case alone cannot serve for this test. The measure of truth of the numerous theories is not yet agreed to. The opposition has treated the books wholesale; hence, opinions of one proposition are intertwined with opinions of another. (5) Where there is awareness and interest in a work among several disciplines that are autonomous power groups, and where the rationalistic code is not applied, is agreement in the appraisal of the work conditioned by the degree to which its theories and approach are novel to the individual fields? If so, then dogmatism, rather than other behaviours, is manifest. Here again, a sure answer is impossible in the Velikovsky case. Several fields were interested, but each suffered radical assaults. The only group that might have received the findings of Velikovsky without shock would be psychoanalytically-oriented anthropologists of folklore. But there are few of these, and they seem scarcely to have been alerted (again the indeterminacy model). (6) Are statements purporting to be empirically proven propositions of science bluntly made and repeatedly hammered home? If so, the dogmatic model would apply. Time after time, the same simple assertions were made against Velikovsky. This is a well-known rhetorical and propagandistic device, and would fit the power model as such, but it is likely that the assertions were sincerely meant as facts. Examples: The earth cannot stop suddenly without disintegrating. (Literally true but the affirmative was never asserted by Velikovsky.) The sea levels did not change in historical times. (Incorrect) Temples and dwellings from before 1500 B. C. are still standing. (Incorrect) Excavations in Ur show no signs of flooding. (Incorrect) Eclipses are checked to 3000 B. C. (Incorrect) Clear records of Venus as a planet with orderly movements exist from before 1500 B. C. [22] ( Incorrect) Velikovsky is not scientific. (7) Is the language of the reviewers and commentators heavily dogmatic and authoritative rather than rationalistic? If so, then the dogmatic model is operative. In fact, this is the most obvious aspect of the Velikovsky case. In the New Haven Connecticut Register of June 25, 1950, there appeared a collective review of Worlds in Collision by four Yale professors who were shortly to republish the same review in the American Journal of Science. I attempted a crude analysis of the contents of the four successive reviews. Putting aside the question of the validity of empirical statements made by the authors, I attempted to discover the proportions of various kinds of formal statements that appeared in the reviews. Using the sentences as the unit of measure, I fitted each statement into one of five categories by its form: a descriptive statement purporting to carry information about the contents of the work; an empirical statement presenting a factual proposition about the scientific material; a logico-empirical statement containing a prosition of factual or conceptual relations; a dogmatic-authorative statement affirming a belief or a consensus of experts; and miscellaneous statements dealing with the personal motives of the author and publisher. I emerged from this little exercise with 27 statements purportedly descriptive of the work, 4 purportedly empirical statements, 12 purportedly logico-empirical statements, 27 dogmatic-authoritative statements and 8 statements dealing with the character of the author and publisher. A separate summing-up of the evaluative loading of each statement resulted in a total of 2 favourable sentences, 31 neutral sentences and 46 negative statements about the work. In the Velikovsky case, then, rationalistic criticism was heavily subordinated to dogmatic-authoritative criticism of a negative character. This kind of material, if pursued through the Velikovsky case and also through many other scientific case studies, might lead to a complete overhaul of the machinery of scientific evaluation. At the very least, it would position the review function on a low level in the order of merit for the rationalistic appraisal of science. The language of the academic reviewers is unequivocally harsh, strident and hostile. The question arises, however, whether this might not also be an indication of the power system at work. The language of power and the language of dogmatism are often similar: established power is conservative. Furthermore, we note that the popular reviewers, numbering into the hundreds, are more disposed to rationalistic argument with the Velikovsky ideas than the scientists. This might indicate power, not dogma, to be the issue. The conclusion may be that motives of dogmatism and power are both in evidence. An unnecessary excess of abuse reveals that Worlds in Collision struck at dogmatic and moralistic defences as well as at existing power structures. REFORM OF THE SYSTEM The documentation of the Velikovsky case cannot be completed here. Much remains to be said. It is enough, however, to the immediate tasks, if it is shown that the Power Model, the Dogmatic Model, and the Indeterminacy Model describe and explain far more of the behaviours observed in the Velikovsky case than the Rationalistic Model. In the early stages of the Velikovsky case, numerous 'wrong' cues were given. Lacking a conscious, regular system for the reception of new materials, the scientific establishment was governed by intrusive psychological forces organized irrelevantly by ideological and power networks. The frequent, remarkable misreadings of plain textual material are merely one of various indications of a perceptual system operating psychopathologically. An original spate of publicity was the red flag to the bull. It warned the authorities that an outsider was seeking entrance with strange credentials. In some scholars and scientists, a high level of political anxiety (this was the period of McCarthyism) could join with intellectual anxieties produced by 'strange' and 'discredited' forms of data and proof to form a highly combustible mixture. The rationalistic system was suppressed and the power system and dogmatic systems were activated. Once events had taken this course, little could be done to evade the conclusion. All involved were fully committed. There was no higher court of scientific appeal, or other checking or remedial agencies. The adjustment thereafter had to occur through unmobilized elements - young, sceptical students (from time to time Velikovsky mentions the young as his justifiers) or dissident scientists or outside intellectuals. Interestingly, the engineering profession is one of the best represented among Velikovsky's adherents. The problem that many thought had been solved ages ago - that of recognition of new contributions - turns out to be ominously present. Actually little was solved by the great historical cases of Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo and Pasteur, for the problem has always been conceived as one of improving rationality rather than as one of the applied sociology of science and institutions. It is in every respect like the central problems of political and governmental organization; there, however, a long history of scientific attention focuses on the need for more than personal goodwill and sweet reason to preserve and promote desired behaviours. Also like the political order, the scientific order consists of a set of sub-universes each with its own goals, routines, organization, and, hence, particular problems. Generalizations about science as a whole and subsequent policies must be based on averages and parameters, and a priori could provide less than the total need for policies governing the individual disciplines. That is, a few policies may work for all fields, but each field needs its own; and all such policies should be based upon extensive behavioural research. Few scientists can be immediately useful in the policy process of science. Most are uneducated to the tasks. They do not understand the nature of ideology. They seem not to know their own psychology or their patterns of social behaviour. They do not know how their organization works or what its policies are. In the end, how can scientists be trusted to fashion solutions to a wide range of social problems to which their special 'hardware' competence must contribute? The answer is that they cannot. Unless and until there is the equivalent of a Copernican revolution (or a Velikovskian revolution) in the form of a sociological revolution in science, natural scientists as a group will constitute a dead weight in public and professional policy, or worse, a potential force of evil. The beginning of such a revolution must be in scientific self-knowledge. At present, scientists appear to study everything but themselves. An institute for research in scientific procedure is needed to initiate and conduct a wide variety of research projects on the behaviour of scientists. This institute should be amply supported by numerous individuals and groups and should be beholden to none. In its own structure it should predicate the goals that brought it into being. Its activities might be based on the recommendations for reform that are put forward in the passages that follow. ON THE EDUCATION OF SCIENTISTS The education of scientists must be broadened to include a knowledge of the aims and methods of the humanistic and behavioural disciplines. The average scientist needs to know more of the history of science, but especially of an analytic sociological history of science. Unfortunately, the history of science is largely old-fashioned chronological recitation and rationalistic technical analysis. The sociology of knowledge, epistemology, and pragmatic logic should be regular instruments of all of the sciences and philosophy. The education of scientists should include ethical training. The cynicism normally provoked by analysis of the type undertaken in the present article can have a destructive effect upon creative and sustained work unless there appear to be social and professional forces working towards rationalistic ideals. The rationalistic model of science itself needs reformulation and reinforcement. Despite its failures in the Velikovsky case, it remains the most acceptable of the model reception systems of science presently conceivable. The more frequent employment of psychiatric techniques to give specialists insight into their motives and behaviour would help to prevent destructiveness, exclusiveness, and other unconsciously provoked behaviours. Efforts at unified interpretations of science should be promoted. Presently, the rewards for scholars who work on bridges across the sciences are unattended chairs in philosophy. The largest expenditures, and professional prestige go to the masters of disciplinary secrets. ON REPORTING ABOUT SCIENTIFIC BEHAVIOUR Periodic surveys, assessments and agendas of scientific work in every discipline are needed. A clear and frank set of observations about what is and is not going on in science can help prevent a slump into the chaos of indeterminacy and into the evasive and irrelevant actions of the power-hungry. For science and all of its parts, regular reports should be prepared on the costs of maintenance, and on any imbalances between scientific and other social costs and among the various sub-sciences. The sociology of science should focus upon the new communication systems that are rapidly developing, including linguistics, information storage and retrieval, mechanical translation, and rapid large-scale publication. The invention and control of these systems will soon force decisions that will critically affect power relations within science and society. The existing organizational structures of the sciences are inadequate to deal with such issues. Most scientific journals are organized along lines of power; scientific controversies are often conducted like political campaigns. The journals lack serious intellectual goals; and they command few resources and skills for the massive tasks of providing free and easy communication. Their reviewing procedures need reform. Professional reviewers' associations might be set up within each scientific association; their members would engage to improve the science of scientific reviews and to use explicit agreed-upon procedures in reporting on new works. Their reviews would carry their associational 'trademark. ' ON THE CONTROLS OF SCIENCE The associations of science are still among the primitive and puerile mechanisms of modern life. The annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has perhaps as much to do with the advancement of science as a state fair with the advancement of agriculture, but not more. Yet it is not atypical of the associative activities of science. At present, and perhaps indefinitely, awareness of the non-rationality of scientific behaviour should favour old-fashioned means of promoting scientific freedom. For instance, the semi-independent scientific establishments that have resulted from nationalistic separateness may be preferable to an international establishment with semi-coercive powers. On the same grounds, a pluralism of support of scientific endeavour is desirable. A multiplicity of foundations, associations, well-equipped universities and other supportive agencies may appear costly, but brings about a larger efficiency through increased initiative and varied development. In this connection, the role of non-governmental companies engaged in research and development, and of independent publishing firms, should not be understated. It would be well to inquire whether existing institutions have any inherent capacity for trying and sanctioning unprofessional practices among professionals. Two types of problems occur: those of ethics and those of non-rationality. Most contemporary scientists, and the public, perhaps believe that scientific freedom is achieved when outside lay authorities are forbidden to rule on questions of functional ethics and scientific truth. Inquisitions are scorned. Legislative investigations are hateful. The considerable powers of lawyers and medical practitioners for self-government are regarded as inappropriate to scientific affairs. Is there then no recourse for the scientist who has been damaged by the means detailed in these papers? Perhaps Harvard University has within its authority the right to inquire into the scientific behaviour of its faculty. Its officers might make a determination 'on the merits' that one or more members of the faculty were so irrelevant and destructive in their scientific work as to violate plain standards of scientific competence. They might as a result take remedial action, as, for example, to require apologies, re-tests, re- examinations, discussion in open forums, suspension, reprimand, resignation, or dismissal. Lacking any of these forms of action, can a University be said to be responsible to its own and to the greater community for the quality of the particular activities it performs in the name of the community and of knowledge? Scientific associations might conduct the same kind of inquiries. Their sanctions might be lighter; their responsibilities, however, are no less heavy. They could extend their authority to questions of apology, hearings, open forums, open journal pages, and suspension or withdrawal of membership. The machinery and practices so envisioned might be self-defeating. The unorthodox voice is likely to end as the defendant, not the plaintiff, in most proceedings. The rank and file are likely to follow their leaders more than the dissident. Research is needed, therefore, into the conditions under which a hearing procedure and its consequences can be structured independently of the organization as a whole, very much as an independent court system operates in civil law. The question arises also whether the larger society should ever take a hand in professional affairs. The investment of the public in the Velikovsky case is not inconsiderable. The scope and importance of the knowledge involved are great. Beyond them lies the public concern in how scientific scientists are. And the education being conveyed to the young is of public interest. Nor is it immaterial that a part of the nation's resources is being spent each year to solve technological problems, some of which are connected with national survival. If the public concern is present, what public machinery is to be brought into play - congressional investigations, a national science board to hear and investigate complaints, a congress of scientific associations with a judicial branch? Such questions warrant intensive study followed by new policies. It is this writer's belief that independent hearing and reporting mechanisms should be invented for use by associations and by joint scientific-public-governmental organs. Legislative and executive machinery should be avoided as far as possible, but quasi-judicial machinery encouraged. Scientists have on the whole tender sensitivities. A mild exposure and embarrassment usually have great corrective value for them. These then are the conclusions reached. They are as far from the original incidents engendering the case of Dr Velikovsky as were his astronomical, geological, and historical conclusions from his early thought that Freud misjudged Akhnaton. Immanuel Velikovsky propounded a synthetic theory of the highest order. He reordered classical chronology. He derived important truths from ancient sources that science had abandoned. Profound experiences of man's ancestors are revealed anew. He therefore has given us new understanding of man's nature. He has shown that the present order of the solar system is quite new and that unaccounted forces help govern it. He has struck at a great part of the Darwinian explanation of evolution. He has upset several major theories of geology and offered substitutes therefore. He found space a vacuum and has made of it a plenum. A great many of his truths are to be found scattered in the historical and contemporary byways of science. As bits of information and fragmented theories, they meant little or nothing to the many scholars and scientists who may have glanced at them and turned away. With rare imagination and consummate skill, he fashioned them into theories of great scope, compactness, and integration. While his ideas are not at all beyond criticism, as a cosmogonist he appears in the company of Plato, Aquinas, Bruno, Descartes, Newton and Kant. What would therefore be only the duty of the critics of science - to defend ordinary or even mistaken scholars - becomes, by accident, an occasion to defend a great savant of the age. Notes (References cited in "The Scientific Reception System") 1. A person may be favored 'unjustly' by the reception system Thus, many irrelevant elements may enter into rewarding undeservedly a scientist for his behaviors. Whatever principles may be established to correct 'unjust unacceptance' should also be observedly operative in cases of 'unjust acceptance. ' It also may occur that 'unjust acceptance' is correlated with 'unjust unacceptance. ' 2. Proto-thought is a level of assumptive prejudiced thought midway between unconscious 'thought' and self-controlled thinking. It is prominent in ideological and stereotyped thinking. 3. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, 'Worlds in Collision, ' Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 96 (October 15, 1952), pp. 519, 523. 4. Laurence J. Lafleur, 'Cranks and Scientists, ' The Scientific Monthly, Vol. LXXIII (November, 1951), p. 285. 5. In a review of Earth in Upheaval, Scientific American, Vol. 194 (March, 1956), p. 127. 6. Harrison Brown, 'Venus and the Scriptures, ' The Saturday Review, Vol. XXXIII (April 22, 1950), pp. 18, 19. 7. In a recent article in Science, M. King Hubbert has shown how an erroneous formula existed in various books over a half century without detection. ... the equation cited was for twenty-five years the most widely used equation in the petroleum industry ... it was ruefully discovered that the equation in question was neither physically correct nor a valid statement of a result established a century earlier by a Frenchman named Henry Darcy. (Science, March 8, 1963, p. 8856.) 8. Edwin G. Boring, 'The Validation of Scientific Belief, ' Proceedings, Op. cit., pp. 535-39. 9. 'Orthodoxy and Scientific Progress, ' Proceedings, Op. cit., p. 505. 10. American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. VI, December, 1962. 11. Harvard Crimson (September 25, 1950), p. M2, and infra, p. 59. 12. Cf. James V. Conant, in Science and Common Sense (1951), Preface and p. 278, and in New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1951. 13. Proceedings, Op. cit., p. 525. 14. Nature, May 14, 1960; January 7, 1961; March 25, 1961. 15. Science, Vol. 138, October 12, 1962. 16. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), p. 164. 17. Science and Method (London, Nelson, n. d.), p. 54. 18. Cf. A. de Grazia, Science and Values of Administration (Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, reprint series, 1962), on science as administration; T. S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 10 seq. 19. A fair estimate of Dr Velikovsky's wage rate considering his total royalties from writing and his total research time on his books, including Worlds in Collision, would be $1.35 an hour. He held no university or foundation appointment at any time. The typical Harvard professor could be said to be paid the equivalent of royalties on sales of 30,000 books every year. 20. It was in the transition from the mimeographed to the printed version that a clear ethical test was presented and failed by Dr Gaposchkin. We quote here the passage from the mimeographed text and that of the printed text: The mimeographed version: 'If the biblical story which Mr Velikovsky seeks to establish is to be accepted at its face value, the rotation of the earth must have been stopped within six hours. All bodies not attached to the surface of the earth (including the atmosphere and the ocean) would then have continued their motion, and consequently have flown off with a speed of 900 miles an hour at the latitude of Egypt. ' The printed version (later): 'Let us assume, however, that Dr Velikovsky is right - that the earth did stop rotating. In that case all bodies not attached to the surface of the earth (including the atmosphere and the ocean) would have continued the motion, and would have flown off with a speed of nine hundred miles an hour at the latitude of Egypt. ' Nota Bene. If the earth, as she says first, decelerated within six hours, the inertial push in objects on the earth's surface would be 500 times smaller than their weight. A man of 160 lbs would experience a forward push of 5 ounces. Dr Gaposchkin now had a clear choice: Someone had called the quantitative error to her attention. She might choose to recalculate the inertia of the slower stop. She chose the latter. She took out the reference to the six hours and all other qualifications Velikovsky had introduced and kept the 900 m. p. h. reference. 21. An incorrect prediction. Doubleday Company has published, in addition to Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, Earth in Upheaval, and Oedipus and Akhnaton. A fifth volume, forming a sequel to Ages in Chaos, is in page proofs. 22. We note such phenomena as the following triple play among reviewers: Dr Edmondson of Link Observatory obviously copies in a review from Kaempffert of the New York Times who had copied in his review from Gaposchkin's preview that (1) the Venus tablets from before 1500 B. C. describe regular motions of this planet 'exactly as we see it, ' and that (2) Velikovsky suppressed both this fact and the very existence of the tablets. Both statements are untrue. The tablets describe very erratic motions of Venus, and Velikovsky presented the Venus Tablets in his book to support his concept. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P PART 7: } {Q ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF CORRECT PROGNOSIS } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE PART SEVEN by Immanuel Velikovsky ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF CORRECT PROGNOSIS In 1950 - as it is still largely today - it was generally accepted that the theory of uniformity must be true and that no process which is unobservable in our time could have occurred in the past. It was also believed that celestial bodies, the Earth included, travel serenely on their orbits in the void of space for countless eons. In Worlds in Collision (1950), however, I offered these theses: '( 1) there were physical upheavals of a global character in historical time; (2) these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and (3) these agents can be identified' (from the Preface). These claims were termed a 'most amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record' (Payne- Gaposchkin). The consequences of the theory affected almost all natural sciences and many social disciplines. Especially objectionable was the assertion that events of such magnitude took place in historical times. Worlds in Collision describes two (last) series of cataclysmic events that occurred 34 and 27 centuries ago. Not only the Earth, but also Venus, Mars, and the Moon were involved in near encounters, when the Morning Star, then on a stretched elliptical orbit following its eruption from the giant planet Jupiter, caused turmoil among the members of the solar system before settling on its present orbit. The description was derived from literary references in the writings of ancient peoples of the world. The archaeological, geological, and paleontological evidence for the theory was collected and presented separately in Earth in Upheaval (1955). In order to explain how certain phenomena could have taken place - how, for instance, Venus, a newcomer, could obtain a circular orbit, or the Earth turn over on its axis - the theory envisaged a charged state of the sun, planets, and comets, and extended magnetic fields permeating the solar system. This appeared even more objectionable since celestial mechanics had been solidly erected on the notion of gravitation, inertia and pressure of light as the only forces acting in the void, the celestial bodies being electrically and magnetically sterile in their inter-relations. Worlds in Collision, in its Preface, was acknowledged as heresy in fields where the names Newton and Darwin are supreme. The only quantitative attempt to disprove one of my main theses was made by D. Menzel of Harvard College Observatory (1952) [1] . He showed (' if Velikovsky wants quantitative discussion, let us give him one'), on certain assumptions, that were I right the sun would need to hold a potential of 10 to the 19th power volts; but, he calculated that the sun, if positive, could hold only 1800 volts, and, if negative, it follows from the equation, no more than a single volt. In 1960-61, V. A. Bailey calculated that to account for the data obtained in space probes (Pioneer V) the sun must possess a net negative charge with the potential of the order of 1019 volts [2] . In 1953 Menzel wrote: 'Indeed, the total number of electrons that could escape the sun would be able to run a one cell flashlight for less than one minute. ' [3] My affirmation of electromagnetic interactions in the solar system became less objectionable with the discovery of the solar wind and of magnetic fields permeating the solar system. My thesis that changes in the duration of the day had been caused in the past by electromagnetic interactions was rejected in 1950-51 [4] . In February 1960, A. Danjon, Director, Paris Observatory, reported to l'Académie des Sciences that following a strong solar flare the length of the day suddenly increased by 0.85 millisecond. Thereafter the day began to decrease by 3.7 microseconds every 24 hours [5] . He ascribed the fluctuation in the length of the day to an electromagnetic cause connected with the flare. His announcement 'created a sensation among the delegates to the General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics' that year in Helsinki [5] . V. Bargmann of Princeton University and L. Motz of Columbia University claimed for me the priority of predicting radio-noises from Jupiter, the existence of a magnetosphere around the earth, and the high ground temperature of Venus [6] . They stressed also that these discoveries later came as great surprises, though I have insisted in my published works, in my lectures, and in my letters that these physical conditions are directly deducible from my theory. These claims were not made casually or in a veiled form. Some of my arguments for Jupiter sending out radio-noises can be learned from my correspondence with A. Einstein. I could add that if the solar system as a whole is close to neutrality, and the planets possess charges of opposite sign to that of the sun, Jupiter must have the largest charge among the planets. Rotating quickly the charged planet creates an intense magnetosphere. In the last chapter of W. in C. (' The Thermal Balance of Venus') I insisted that ' Venus is hot' and 'gives off heat' as a consequence of its recent origin and stormy history before settling on its orbit. In 1954, R. Barker suggested that a layer of ice on the night side of Venus is responsible for the ashen light [7] . It is more probably a visible sign of incandescence. When in 1961 the temperature of Venus was found to be ca. 600 deg K, it was admitted that neither radioactivity nor greenhouse effect suffices to explain why Venus is so hot. Several of the sensors of Mariner II were beyond their capacity to report temperatures before the nearest point to Venus was reached, 'because temperatures beyond their designed scale were encountered, ' as reported by C. W. Snyder to the meeting of the American Geophysical Union, December 28, 1962 [8] . On December 15, 1962, a day after Mariner II passed the point of closest approach, the 'temperature had inexplicably started to drop' [9] . It is interesting also to know why the temperature of the upper cloud layer of Venus measured in the 1920's by Pettit and Nicholson (-33 deg C for the dark side, -38 deg C for the bright side) [10] was found in the 1950's by Stinton and Strong to be a few degrees lower (ca. -40 deg C for both sides) [11] . Could it be that Venus cools off at this rate ? It would point, too, to its youth as a celestial body. In 1950 the critics of W. in C. emphatically objected to the notion that Venus is a young Planet or that it erupted from Jupiter. R. A. Lyttleton (1959-60) showed why the terrestrial planets, Venus included, must have originated from the giant planets, notably Jupiter, by disruption [12] . W. H. McCrea (1960) calculated that no planet could have originated by aggregation inside the Jovian orbit [13] . R. M. Goldstein and R. L. Carpenter reported to the meeting of the American Geophysical Union at Palo Alto, the last week of December 1962, that radar probes from Goldstone Tracking Station between October 1 and December 17, 1962, confirmed earlier indications that Venus rotates very slowly and retrogradely. According to the press, this led to the following surmises: 'Maybe Venus was created apart from other planets, perhaps as a second solar explosion, or perhaps in a collision of planets. ' [14] To this, compare W. in C., p. 373: 'The collision between major planets... brought about the birth of comets. These comets moved across the orbits of other planets and collided with them. At least one of the comets in historical times became a planet - Venus, and this at the cost of great destruction on Mars and on the earth. ' In the section 'The Gases of Venus' in W. in C. (1950), I concluded that Venus must be rich in hydrocarbons. This theory was termed 'surprising' (H. Shapley, 1946) when, a few years in advance of the publication of my book, I requested that Harvard College Observatory make a spectral search for hydrocarbons in Venus's atmosphere [15] . In 1955, Fred Hoyle proposes, on theoretical grounds, that Venus is covered by oceans of oil and that its atmosphere is clouded by hydrocarbon droplets [16] . I, however, wrote: '... as long as Venus is too hot for the liquefaction of petroleum, the hydrocarbons will circulate in gaseous form. ' (W. in C., p. 169). The extraterrestrial origin claimed in my book for at least part of the petroleum deposits, notably those of the Mexican Gulf area, was scorned (C. R. Longwell, 1950) [17] , and it was asserted that petroleum is never found in recent sediments (J. B. Patton, 1950). [18] However, soon thereafter, P. V. Smith (1952) [19] reported the 'surprising' fact that the oil of the Gulf of Mexico is found in recent sediment and must have been deposited during the last 9,200 plus or minus 1,000 years. Hydrocarbons were subsequently found on meteorites, a fact termed by H. H. Nininger (1959) [20] also 'surprising': 'These resemble in many ways some of the waxes and petroleum products that are found on the earth. ' Several months ago, A. T. Wilson (1962) [21] postulated an extraterrestrial origin of the entire terrestrial deposit of oil. In W. in C. (p. 55), presence of hydrocarbons on meteorites was anticipated. The experiment in which high molecular weight hydrocarbons were compounded from ammonia and methane with electrical discharges (Wilson, 1960) [22] supports the view that the planet Jupiter (rich in ammonia and methane) was the source of the hydrocarbons on Venus, on meteorites, and in some of the earth's deposits (W. in C., 'The Gases of Venus'). My contention that Mars's atmosphere must be rich in argon and neon and possibly nitrogen was made early in my work (lecture titled 'Neon and Argon in the Atmosphere of Mars'). A few years later, Harrison Brown, on theoretical grounds and independently, arrived at the same conclusion concerning argon: 'In the case of Mars, it might well be that argon is the major atmospheric constituent. ' [23] But he thought that rare gases 'are essentially non- existent' on meteorites. In recent years neon and argon have been repeatedly discovered on meteorites (H. Stauffer, 1961) [24] , as anticipated in W. in C. (pp. 281 ff, 367). Concerning the Moon, I asserted that its surface had been subjected to stress, heating (liquefaction) and bubbling activity in historical times. 'During these catastrophes the moon's surface flowed with lava and bubbled into great circular formations, which rapidly cooled off ... In these cosmic collisions or near contacts the surface of the moon was also marked with clefts and rifts' (W. in C., 'The moon and Its Craters'). H. Percy Wilkins (1955) described numerous domes that might be regarded as examples of bubbles which did not burst. ' [25] . Signs of tensional stresses have been detected on the Moon (Warren and Fielder, 1962) [26] ; volcanic activity has been unexpectedly discovered by Kozyrev (1958) [27] . Sharp outlines of lunar formations could not have persisted for millions of years in view of the thermal splintering due to great changes in temperature, over 300 degrees, in the day-night sequel and during the eclipses. H. Jeffreys (1959) [28] drew attention to this evidence for the youth of the surface features, but made it dependent on the presence of water in the rocks. Since there seems to be volcanic activity on the Moon, water is most probably present in the rocks. Assertions that the Earth's axis could not have changed its geographical or astronomical position constituted one of the main arguments against Worlds in Collision [29] . They gave place to the theory of wandering poles. Th. Gold (1955ff) [30] shows the error in the view of G. Darwin and Lord Kelvin on the subject, and stresses the comparative ease with which the globe could - and did - change its axis, even with no external force applied. Confirmed is also the conclusion that advanced human culture would be found in the today uninhabited area 'on the Kolyma or Lena rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean' in northeastern Siberia (W. in C., p. 329) in the region where herds of mammoths roamed. Already in 1951, A. P. Okladnikov [31] making known the results of his research in northern Siberia, wrote: 'about two to three millennia before our era, neolithic races... spread to the very coast of the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Kolyma in the east. ' Twenty-five hundred years ago copper was worked in the taiga of Yakutsk. Under the heading 'The Reversed Polarity of the Earth' (W. in C., pp. 114ff.) is written: 'In recent geological times the magnetic poles of the globe were reversed. ' The phenomenon that could cause it was described, and the question was asked 'whether the position of the magnetic poles has anything to do with the direction of rotation of the globe. ' Complete and repeated sudden reversals of the magnetic poles were postulated by S. K. Runcorn (1955) [32] and P. M. Blackett (1956) [33] . Runcorn wrote: 'There seems no doubt that the earth's field is tied up in some way with the rotation of the planet. And this leads to a remarkable finding about the earth's rotation itself... The planet has rolled about, changing the location of its geographical poles. ' Complete reversals would change the rising and setting points, west becoming east, as described in many ancient sources collated in W. in C. The pioneers in paleomagnetic studies, G. Folgheraiter and P. L. Mercanton [34] , found a reversal of the earth's magnetic field in the Central Mediterranean area in the 8th century before the present era, recorded in the magnetic dip of the Etruscan and Attic vases; their position in the kiln is learned from the flow of glaze. This find is in harmony with the events described on pp. 207-359 of W. in C. Radiocarbon analysis, besides disclosing that some petroleum is of recent origin and deposit, verified also the claim (W. in C., 'The Ice Age and the Antiquity of Man') that the last glacial period ended less than 10,000 years ago. One of the first and most important results of the new method was the reduction of the time of the last glaciation. 'The advance of the ice occurred about 11,000 years ago... Previously this maximum advance had been assumed to date from about 25,000 years ago, ' reported W. F. Libby and Frederick Johnson in 1952 [35] . Later this figure was still more reduced; furthermore, it refers to the advance, not the end of the retreat of the ice cover. Possibly the most clear-cut case of vindication concerns the antiquity I assigned to the Mesoamerican civilizations (Mayas, Toltecs, Olmecs). G. Kubler of Yale University wrote (1950) [36] : The Mesoamerican cosmology to which Velikovsky repeatedly appeals for proof did not originate and could not originate until about the beginning of our era. Kubler showed a discrepancy of over 1,000 years and asserted that events I ascribed to the 8th-4th centuries before the present era could not have taken place until rather late in the Christian era. But on December 30, 1956, the National Geographical Society, on its own behalf and that of the Smithsonian Institution, announced: Atomic science has proved the ancient civilization of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older than had been believed. The findings basic to Middle American archaeology, artifacts dug up in La Venta, Mexico, have been proved to come from a period 800 to 400 or 500 A. D., more than 1,000 years later. Cultural parallels between La Venta and other Mexican archaeological excavations enable scientists to date one in the terms of the others. Thus the new knowledge affects the dating of many finds. Dr Matthew W. Sterling, Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, declared the new dating the most important archaeological discovery in recent history. P. Drucker and his co-workers have elaborated on the subject in Science (1957) and in the report of the excavation (1959) [37] . H. E. Suess, because of an accumulation of certain discrepancies in the radiocarbon dates, assumes that natural events caused a radical change in the intensity of the magnetosphere and in the influx of cosmic rays sometime in the second millennium before the present era. Several other researchers came to the same conclusion [38] . This is also in harmony with the story related in my book. Oceanographic research brought several confirming data. H. Pettersson of Goteborg found so much nickel in clay of the oceanic bed that he inferred that at some time in the past there had been a prodigious fall of meteorites [39] . In W. in C., the descent of enormous trains of meteorites and meteoric dust and ash (pp. 51ff) of land and sea is narrated, with reliance on ancient sources. In 1958, J. L. Worzel found a layer of white ash, 5 to 30 cm thick, very close to the bottom, evenly spread over an enormous area of the ocean bed in the Pacific, and he thought of a 'fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin' [40] . M. Ewing cites evidence that the same ash layer of 'remarkable uniformity of thickness' found by Worzel in the Pacific underlies all oceans and assumes 'a cometary collision' [41] . It could hardly be without some recorded consequences of global extent, ' Ewing concluded. To this a line from W. in C. (' the Darkness') can be quoted: 'The earth entered deeper into the tail of the onrushing comet' with its 'sweeping gases, dust, and cinders' and 'the dust sweeping in from interplanetary space. ' In 1950 a past collision of the earth with a comet was denied, and comets were also regarded as very tenuous and light masses incapable of causing much damage [42] . R. Wildt claimed that the largest comet would have a mass equal to one millionth of that of Venus [42] . But N. T. Bobrovnikoff (1951) [43] Director of Perkins Observatory, took a different view. Several comets seen in the 19th century moved in very similar orbits and 'in all probability, are the result of decomposition of one single body. ' He estimated that: 'If put together' these comets 'would make something like the mass of the moon. ' Before Ewing, a cometary collision was postulated in 1957 by H. Urey to explain the tektites and their distribution [44] . G. Baker insists that Australian tektites (australites) have lain in place no longer than 5,000 years [45] . 3,500 years ago the oceans suddenly evaporated and the water level dropped about twenty feet, a fact first noted by R. Daly and later confirmed by Kuenen [46] . Rubin and Suess found that 3,000 years ago glaciers in the Rockies suddenly increased in size [47] . Scandinavian and German authors date Klimastürze at 1500 and 700 B. C. - the very period of great perturbations described in W. in C. [48] . In the ocean floor B. Heezen discovered (1960) [49] a ridge split by a deep canyon, or 'crack in the crust that runs nearly twice around the earth. ' He wrote: 'the discovery at this late date of the midocean ridge and rift has raised fundamental questions about basic geological processes and the history of the earth and has even had reverberations in cosmology. ' Prof. Ma (Formosa) claims that there was a sudden and total shift in the crust only 26 and 32 centuries ago, as evidenced by the shift of marine sediments (1955) [50] . It was argued that in global catastrophes of such dimensions no stalactites would have remained unbroken, but within one year after the atomic explosion, stalactites grew in the Gnome cavern, New Mexico: 'All nature's processes have been speeded up a billionfold. ' [51] Claude F. A. Schaeffer of College de France, in his Stratigraphie Comparée [52] on which he worked not knowing of my simultaneous efforts, came to the conclusion that the Ancient East, as documented by every excavated place from Troy to the Caucasus, Persia, and Palestine-Syria, underwent immense natural paroxysms, unknown in modern annals of seismology; cultures were terminated, empires collapsed, trade ceased, populations were decimated, the earth upheaved, the sea erupted, ash buried cities, climate changed. Five times between the third and the first millennia before the present era the cataclysms were repeated, closing the Early and the Middle Bronze Ages in their wake. The number of catastrophes and their dates relative to historical periods coincide in Schaeffer's estimate and in my own. From source material of a different nature - archaeological - he found that the greatest catastrophe terminated the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (Middle Bronze). Thus we are in agreement to a day. The catastrophe that ended the Middle Kingdom in Egypt is the starting point of Worlds in Collision (and of Ages of Chaos, my reconstruction of ancient chronology). The recent finds in astronomy, especially in radioastronomy (sun, Venus, Jupiter), have given confirmation from above; oceanography, radiocarbon, paleomagnetism, and archaeology have carried their shares from below. Notes (References cited in "Additional Examples of Correct Prognosis") 1. D. Menzel, Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. (October, 1952). 2. V. A. Bailey, Nature, May 14, 1960; January 7, 1961; March 25, 1961. 3. Menzel, Flying Saucers (Harvard University Press), 1953, p. 236. 4. J. Q. Stuart, Princeton University Observatory, in Harper's, June, 1951. 5. A. Danjon, Comptes rendus des séances de L'Académie des Sciences, 250 #8 (February 22, 1960); 250 #15 (April 11, 1960). 5a. New York Times, July 30, 1960. 6. Science, December 21, 1962. 7. R. Barker, J. B. A. A., 64, 60 (1954). 8. New York Times, December 29, 1962 (West coast ed.). 9. U. P. I. dispatch from Washington, D. C., in Philadelphia Inquirer, December 16, 1962. 10. E. Pettit in Hynek (ed.) Astrophysics, McGraw-Hill, 1951, revised by Pettit and Nicholson, Publ. Astr. Soc. of the Pacif. 67 (1955), p. 293. 11. Sinton and Strong, Science, 123, 676 (1956). 12. R. A. Lyttleton, Monthly Notices, Royal Astr. Soc. 121 #6 (1960); Man's View of the Universe, 1961, p. 36. 13. H. H. McCrea, Proceedings, Royal Society, Series A, Vol. 256 (May 31, 1960). 14. The National Observer, December 31, 1962. 15. H. Shapley to H. M. Kallen, May 27, 1946. 16. F. Hoyle, Frontiers of Astronomy, 1955, pp. 68-72. 17. C. R. Longwell, Am. J. of Science, August, 1950. 18. J. B. Patton quoted by F. E. Edmondson, Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky., April 23, 1950. 19. P. V. Smith, Science, October 24, 1952. 20. H. H. Nininger, Out of the Sky (Dover Publ.), 1959, pp. 89-90. 21. A. T. Wilson, Nature, October 6, 1962. 22. Ibid., December 17, 1960. 23. H. Brown in The Atmospheres of the Earth and Planets, ed. Kuiper, 1949, p. 268. 24. H. Stauffer, J. Geoph. Res., 66 #5 (May, 1961). 25. H. P. Wilkins, The Moon, 1955, p. 42. 26. B. Warren and G. Fielder, Nature, February 24, 1962. 27. N. A. Kozyrev, November 3, 1958. Cf. Z. Kopal, The Moon (1960), p. 96. 28. H. Jeffreys, The Earth, 4th ed.( 1959), p. 377. 29. C. Payne-Gaposchkin, Popular Astronomy, June, 1950. 30. Th. Gold, Nature, 175, 526 (March 26, 1955); Sky and Telescope, April, 1958. 31. A. P. Okladnikov, in Po Sledam Drevnikh Kultur, Moscow, 1951; Russ. Transl. series of the Peabody Museum, 1, #1( 1959). 32. S. K. Runcorn, Scientific American, September, 1955. 33. P. M. Blackett, Lectures on Rock Magnetism, Jerusalem, 1956. 34. G. Folgheraiter, Archives des sciences physiques et naturelles (Geneva), 1899; Journal de Physique, 1899; P. L. Mercanton, Archives des science phys. et nat., 1907 (t. xxiii). 35. F. Johnson in W. F. Libby, Radiocarbon Dating (University of Chicago Press), 1952. 36. G. Kubler, Am. J. of Science, August, 1950. 37. P. Drucker, R. F. Heizer, R. J. Squier, Science, July 12, 1957; Excavations at La Venta (Smithsonian Institute, 1959). 38. Cf. a series of articles by V. Milojcic, Germania, 1957 ff, E. Ralph, Am. J. of Sc., Radiac. Suppl., 19559 (note to samples p-214, p-215, p-216). 39. H. Pettersson, Scient. American, August, 1950; Tellus, I, 1949. 40. J. L. Worzel, Proc. Nat. Acad. of Sc., Vol. 45 #3 (March 15, 1959). 41. M. Ewing, Proc. Nat. Acad. of Sc., Vol. 45 #3. 42. R. Wildt, Amer. J. of Science, August, 1950. 43. N. T. Bobrovnikoff, in Astrophysics, ed. Hynek, McGraw-Hill, 1951, pp. 310-311. 44. H. Urey, Nature, March 16, 1957. 45. G. Baker, Nature, January 30, 1960. 46. P. H. Kuenen, Marine Geology, 1950, p. 538. 47. Rubin and Suess, Science, April 8, 1955. 48. H. Games and R. Nordhagen, Mitteil. der Geograph. Ges. in Munchen, XVI, H. 2 (1923), pp. 13-348. R. Sernander, 'Klima-verschlechterung, Postglaciale' in Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte, VII (1926); O. Paret, Das Neue Bild der Vorgeschuchte (1948), p. 44. 49. B. Heezen, Scient. American, October, 1960. 50. T. Y. H. Ma, Alterations of Sedimentary Facies on the Ocean Bottom, 1955. 51. Dispatch by W. Hines of the Washington Star from Carlsbad, N. M., in The Evening Bulletin, December 18, 1962. 52. C. F. A. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie comparée, Oxford University Press, 1948; Im. Velikovsky, Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana), 1945. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P APPENDIX 1: } {Q ON THE RECENT DISCOVERIES CONCERNING JUPITER AND VENUS } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE APPENDIX I ON THE RECENT DISCOVERIES CONCERNING JUPITER AND VENUS In the light of recent discoveries of radio waves from Jupiter and of the high surface temperature of Venus, we think it proper and just to make the following statement. On October 14, 1953, Immanuel Velikovsky, addressing the Forum of the Graduate College of Princeton University in a lecture entitled 'Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent Finds in Archaeology, Geology and Astronomy: Refuted or Verified? ' concluded the lecture as follows: 'The planet Jupiter is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be investigated. ' Soon after that date, the text of the lecture was deposited with each of us [it is printed as supplement to Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955)]. Eight months later, in June 1954, Velikovsky, in a letter, requested Albert Einstein to use his influence to have Jupiter surveyed for radio emission. The letter, with Einstein's marginal notes commenting on this proposal, is before us. Ten more months passed, and on April 5, 1955, B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution announced the chance detection of strong radio signals emanating from Jupiter. They recorded the signals for several weeks before they correctly identified the source. This discovery came as something of a surprise because radio astronomers had never expected a body as cold as Jupiter to emit radio waves [1] . In 1960 V. Radhakrishnah of India and J. A. Roberts of Australia, working at California Institute of Technology, established the existence of a radiation belt encompassing Jupiter, 'giving 10 to the 14th power times as much radio energy as the Van Allen belts around the earth. ' On December 5, 1956, through the kind services of H. H. Hess, chairman of the department of geology of Princeton University, Velikovsky submitted a memorandum to the U. S. National Committee for the (planned) I. G. Y. in which he suggested the existence of a terrestrial magnetosphere reaching the moon. Receipt of the memorandum was acknowledged by E. O. Hulburt for the Committee. The magnetosphere was discovered in 1958 by Van Allen. In the last chapter of his Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky stated that the surface of Venus must be very hot, even though in 1950 the temperature of the cloud surface of Venus was known to be -25 deg C on the day and night sides alike. In 1954 N. A. Kozyrev [2] observed an emission spectrum from the night side of Venus but ascribed it to discharges in the upper layers of its atmosphere. He calculated that the temperature of the surface of Venus must be + 30 deg C; somewhat higher values were found earlier by Adel and Herzberg. As late as 1959, V. A. Firsoff arrived at a figure of + 17.5 deg C for the mean surface temperature of Venus, only a little above the mean annual temperature of the earth (+ 14.2 deg C) [3] . However, by 1961 it became known that the surface temperature of Venus is 'almost 600 degrees (K) ' [4] . F. D. Drake describe this discovery as 'a surprise... in a field in which the fewest surprises were expected. ' 'We would have expected a temperature only slightly greater than that of the earth... Sources of internal heating (radioactivity) will not produce an enhanced surface temperature. ' Cornell H. Mayer writes [5] , 'All the observations are consistent with a temperature of almost 600 degrees, ' and admits that 'the temperature is much higher than anyone would have predicted. ' Although we disagree with Velikovsky's theories, we feel impelled to make this statement to establish Velikovsky's priority of prediction of these two points and to urge, in view of these prognostications, that his other conclusions be objectively re-examined. V. BARGMANN Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey LLOYD MOTZ Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, New York Notes (References cited in "Appendix I - On recent Discoveries Concerning Jupiter and Venus") 1. See also the New York Times for October 28,1962. 2. N. A. Kozyrev, Izv. Krymsk. Astrofiz. Observ. 12 (1954). 3. Science News 1959, 52 (Summer 1959). 4. Phys. Today 14, No. 4, 30 (1961). 5. C. H. Mayer, Sci. Am. 204 (May, 1961). {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: } {P APPENDIX 2: } {Q VELIKOVSKY 'DISCREDITED': A TEXTUAL COMPARISON } {C - } {T - } {S - } THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE APPENDIX II VELIKOVSKY 'DISCREDITED': A TEXTUAL COMPARISON The various writings of Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin against Worlds in Collision (The Reporter, March 14, 1950; Popular Astronomy, June, 1950, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 96, October, 1952) provided a convenient reservoir of damaging testimony from which her colleagues as well as lesser critics drew freely in formulating their own opinions and in preparing further commentaries on the book. Reproduced below are passages from Gaposchkin's paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and the material in Velikovsky's book that she purportedly discredited. The reader may judge for himself who is guilty of faulty scholarship and purposeful misrepresentation. THE CRITICISM: I Gaposchkin: The thesis of the book is scientific, but the evidence is drawn from an immense mass of biblical evidence and Hebrew tradition, myth and folklore, classical literature and the works of the Church fathers. A critic is faced ... with the herculean labour of laying a finger on the flaws in an argument that ranges over the greater part of ancient literature. [But] when one examines [Velikovsky's] sources, his argument falls to pieces... He has not only chosen his sources; he has even chosen what they shall mean. Let me give one example. [Gaposchkin quotes from Worlds in Collision:] 'One of the places of the heavenly combat... was on the way from Egypt to Syria. According to Herodotus, the final act of the fight between Zeus and Typhon took place at Lake Serbon on the coastal route from Egypt to Palestine. ' But Herodotus says nothing about the battle, or even about Zeus, in the passage quoted. [The dots denoting an omission and the italics are Gaposchkin's. She next quotes Herodotus in Greek and translates:] 'Egypt begins at the Serbonian shore, where, they say, Typhon is hidden. ' [Gaposchkin makes it appear that Velikovsky invented the battle and its participants, because Herodotus speaks only of Typhon's place of burial, not of a battle.] THE TEXTS: I Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision, pp. 78-81): [The quoted sentence in Worlds in Collision follows almost three pages of a description of the battle between Zeus and Typhon, quoted from Apollodorus: 'Zeus pelted Typhon at a distance with thunderbolts... '] The Egyptian shore of the Red Sea was called Typhonia (Fn: Strabo, vii, 3, 8). Strabo narrates also that the Arimi (Syrians) were terrified witnesses of the battle of Zeus with Typhon... 'who... when struck by the bolts of lightning, fled in search of a descent underground. ' [Restituted in full, the passage quoted by Gaposchkin reads as follows:] One of the places of the heavenly combat between elementary forces of nature - as narrated by Apollodorus and Strabo - was on the way from Egypt to Syria. (Fn: Mount Casius, mentioned by Apollodorus, is the name of Mount Lebanon as well as of Mount Sinai. Cf. Pomponius Mela, De situ orbis.) According to Herodotus, the final act of the fight between Zeus and Typhon took place at Lake Serbon on the coastal route from Egypt to Palestine. (Fn: Herodotus ii, 5. Also Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica, Bk. ii, says that Typhon 'smitten by the bolt of Zeus... lies whelmed beneath the waters of the Serbonian lake. ') [Actually, the Harvard University edition of Herodotus (Loeb Classical Library) connects the quoted sentence about the place where Typhon is entombed with his defeat by Zeus.] THE CRITICISM: II Gaposchkin continues: A cosmic encounter, we read, was responsible for the destruction of the army of Sennacherib by a 'blast of fire. ' But none of the three biblical accounts of the event mentions a blast: each one ascribes the defeat of the enemy to an angel. (Fn: II Kings, xx, 35; II Chronicles, xxxvii, 2; Isaiah, xxxvii, 36). We do find a blast in the prophecy made by Isaiah before the event: 'Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour, and shall return to his own land. ' (Fn: II Kings, xix, 7). But the Hebrew word used here means 'wind or spirit' rather than 'fire. ' [Thus Velikovsky is accused of suppressing the 'angel' as the agent of destruction in the story of Sennacherib's debacle; of incorrectly interpreting 'blast of fire, ' which words do not appear in the biblical narrative] [Next, Gaposchkin implies that Velikovsky suppressed Herodotus's version of Sennacherib's defeat:] Herodotus gives a very different account of the defeat of Sennacherib's army, which does not suggest any catastrophe on a cosmic scale. [The passage in Herodotus is printed in Greek, and a translation follows it (Gaposchkin's dots):] Afterwards... Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, marched his vast army into Egypt.... As the two armies lay here opposite one another, there came in the night a multitude of field- mice, which devoured all the quivers and bowstrings of the enemy, and ate the thongs by which they managed their shields. Next morning they commenced their flight and great multitudes fell, as they had no arms with which to defend themselves.( Fn: History, iii; Rawlinson translation.) [Gaposchkin concluded:] If all readers had complete classical libraries, and could read them; if every man were his own Assyriologist and habitually studied the Bible in the Hebrew and Septuagint versions, Dr Velikovsky would have had short shrift. [When Velikovsky submitted to the editors of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society evidence that he had not misquoted the Biblical passages, had not ascribed 'blast of fire' to a Biblical text, and had not suppressed Herodotus's version, he was refused access to the pages of that journal for a rejoinder. As a result, more than one irresponsible writer was misled into echoing Gaposchkin: 'Thus when Velikovsky quotes Herodotus about a battle between Zeus and Typhon and Isaiah on the destruction of Sennacherib's army by fire, you have only to turn to the books cited to learn that Herodotus... and Isaiah said nothing of the sort' - this from an article by L. Sprague de Camp (' Orthodoxy in Science, ' Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1954.)] [As late as the fall of 1962, the reader information service of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in answer to inquiries about the validity of Velikovsky's theories, mailed out a five-page-long compilation of excerpts from critical reviews of Worlds in Collision. More than three pages were filled with Gaposchkin passages in the same vein as, and including, those set forth here for comparison with Velikovsky's text.] THE TEXT: II Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision, pp. 230-231): The destruction of the army of Sennacherib is described laconically in the Book of Kings: 'And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred four score and five thousand; and when the people arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt in Nineveh. ' It is similarly described in the Book of Chronicles: .'.. And the Lord sent an angel which cut off all the mighty men of valour.... ' What kind of destruction was this?... It is explained in the texts of the Book of Kings and Isaiah that it was a 'blast' sent upon the army of Sennacherib. 'I will send a blast upon him... and [he] shall return to his own land, ' was the prophecy immediately preceding the catastrophe... The Talmud and Midrash sources, which are numerous, all agree on the manner in which the Assyrian host was destroyed: a blast fell from the sky on the camp of Sennacherib. It was not a flame, but a consuming blast: 'Their souls were burnt, though their garments remained intact. ' The phenomenon was accompanied by a terrific noise. (Fn: Tractate Shabbat 113b; Snahedrin 94a; Jerome on Isaiah 1: 16; L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vi, 363.) Another version of the destruction of the army of Sennacherib is given by Herodotus. During his visit in Egypt, he heard from the Egyptian priests or guides to the antiquities that the army of Sennacherib, while threatening the borders of Egypt, was destroyed in a single night. According to this story, an image of a deity holding in his palm the figure of a mouse was erected in an Egyptian temple to commemorate the miraculous event. In explanation of the symbolic figure, Herodotus was told that myriads of mice descended upon the Assyrian camp and gnawed away the cords of their bows and other weapons; deprived of their arms, the troops fled in panic. [Velikovsky also drew attention to the neglected fact that both versions - in the Scriptures and in Herodotus - include a story of a disturbance (reversal) of the sun's movement in immediate sequence with the above narratives.] [In a chapter dealing with the folklore of the American Indians, Velikovsky relates a tale preserved by the Mnemoni tribe of the Algonquin nation. The sun had been caught in a noose and restrained from proceeding on its path:] .'.. The Mouse came up and gnawed at the string... the Sun breathed again and the darkness disappeared. If the Mouse had not succeeded, the Sun would have died. ' (S. Thompson, Tales of the North American Indians, 1929)... The image of the mouse must have had some relation to the cosmic drama... Apparently the atmosphere of the celestial body that appeared in the darkness and was illuminated took on the elongated form of a mouse... This explains why the blast that destroyed the army of Sennacherib was commemorated by the emblem of a mouse... Thus we see how a folk story of the primitives can solve an unsettled problem between Isaiah and Herodotus. End of The Velikovsky Affair