CHAPTER FOUR
My project here is a kind of spectral analysis of religions - Egyptian, Hebrew, Christian, Islamic; Teotihuacano, Mayan, Hopi, Aztec - and since the subject of religion has traditionally involved polemic, I would like to begin by considering calmly for a moment the most effective means by which polemic can be avoided. We have had a taste of an ongoing scientific polemic at this symposium, and need only remind ourselves of the greater heat generated in the past by religious polemics to understand why both are best dispensed with. The work of Velikovsky is in fact susceptible to use in religious polemic as well as scientific. This has already been begun by the publication in Fall 1973 of a book entitled God is Red by Vine Deloria, a Sioux. I intend to take as a starting-point some of Deloria's ideas, but I would like to preface that with a Sioux tale he recounts on the subject of civility in the exchange of religious beliefs. The tale goes this way:
A missionary once undertook to instruct a group of Indians in the truths of his holy religion. He told them of the creation of the earth in six days, and of the fall of our first parents by eating an apple.
The courteous savages listened attentively, and, after thanking him, one related in his turn a very ancient tradition concerning the origin of maize. But the missionary, plainly showed his disgust and disbelief, indignantly saying: "What I have delivered to you were sacred truths, but this that you tell me is mere fable and falsehood !''
"My Brother," gravely replied the offended Indian, "it seems that you have not been well grounded in the rules of civility. You saw that we, who practice these rules, believed your stories; why, then, do you refuse to credit ours?" [1]
Dr. MacGregor [2] has drawn here a picture of the possibility that mankind is traumatized by catastrophic events, and of the more distant possibility that memory of them is phylogenetically transmitted. We should not let these possibilities make us entertain fatalism. Nor should we let a mechanistic account of mythological events lead to pure materialism, a rejection of all the spiritual values experienced and formulated by our ancestors obsessed with catastrophe. All religious systems contain with them the possibility of a broad spectrum of discourse, ranging from the oral tale to the sacred book, and from the practice of reconciling theology and philosophy to the techniques of mysticism. I hope this is kept in mind as I give some necessarily very broad accounts of several religions, for I consider each of them susceptible to the same variety of interpretation in the hands of their practitioners. What we need is a simple language that can describe religion by accommodating the catastrophic elements within a larger structure. This may be conceived as a prolegomenon to the reconciliation of religion and reason. We sometimes forget that such was the very effort in which western man was engaged in the century before the uniformitarian dogma took sway. In Eighteenth Century France the names of Voltaire and Boulanger stand out; in Germany there is the work of Kant; and on this continent we have the effort of Thomas Jefferson (usually neglected because he refused to consider it other than a private preoccupation). I say this by way of supplementing the account given by Dr. Grinnell of what happened once Darwinism began to be railroaded through [3] .
Deloria's book, which in some ways renews the tradition of reconciling religion and reason, contrasts Christianity with the tribal religions of North America in an effort to articulate a clear language by which religious systems may be measured. He argues that the content of the Judaeo-Christian religions is structured around their emphasis on the action of divinity through time, while the tribal American religions are more directed towards the presence of divinity in space. I would like to take up those terms to further the articulation of a comparative language. It is, of course, pointless to make the distinction between space and time without considering them together, and Deloria does not do this, though in simplifying his argument I have made him seem to. Space and time together are the necessary categories in which we experience events occurring. Whitehead has said that the event is the unit of things real; and it seems that modern physicists, in describing what they detect at the subatomic level, find it more convenient to formulate their observations in terms of events rather than locations in space and actions in time separately. if events are necessarily unfolded in space and time, this is also true of divine events, the central subject of every religion.
Catastrophes, as divine events, were experienced as alterations of space and time. The celestial bodies by which time is marked changed their courses, and therefore the units of time were altered; simultaneously, the face of the earth, the space in which we live, was transformed. The religious reaction to this kind of divine event is in almost all cases to see an imperative in it. The divinity, through reshaping space and time, gives some kind of imperative to mankind, and the driving question of ancient religions is: What kind of behavior does this alteration dictate?
It comes to a question of syntax. The basic proposition is something like this: "Heaven and earth are being remade" - a statement in the present tense. When this is then transferred into the past tense, several deductions can be made. The simplest and most unquestioning is, "Heaven and earth have been remade; great destruction was caused, and this we lament." It is actually a lament, the papyrus of lpuwer, which Velikovsky uses as the starting-point for his reconstruction. The alternative to lament comes by making the same statement, "Heaven and earth were remade," and then adding to it, "Stability has now been achieved, and this we celebrate." What follows on the ritual level is a celebration involving reenactment by human beings on earth of the events which took place in the sky, and the logical end of the ritual is the triumph of stability. So far, so good. it is when theories of divine motivation come into play that the syntax becomes more complex and more dangerous. One can say, "Heaven and earth were remade because of something the gods suspected or decided in regard to man," or, "Heaven and earth were remade because of something man did." In either case, obsession begins to grow with preventing reoccurrence of the catastrophe by acting differently towards the gods. Syntactically the proposition becomes transferred to the future tense: "Unless the gods feel thus and so, unless man does this or that, heaven and earth will be remade." Finally, once obsession has reached the pure stage where propitiation seems hopeless, the proposition becomes absolute: "Heaven and earth are going to be remade; act accordingly." And that is the apocalypse.
Let me now apply these simple terms to some real cases. The religions I have chosen to analyse are simply those which we, as inhabitants of this continent with a certain tradition behind us, find most imperative. Through our language and culture the Judaeo-Christian religions keep a hold on us, and they cannot be ultimately understood without the Egyptian elements they react to or incorporate. Through our habitation here the archaic American religions also have a kind of authority over us.
To start with Egypt, then, The Old Kingdom precedes the catastrophes reconstructed in Worlds in Collision, and Velikovsky has promised a separate volume dealing with the earlier catastrophes [4] which Egyptians in the Old Kingdom were concerned to memorialize. All the religions I am using as examples make references to these earlier events, particularly the Deluge, but in none of the others are there religious texts available in materials which actually predate -1500. (Other cultures, such as the Sumerian, do possess such texts in abundance; Old Kingdom Egypt will suffice ice for one example here.) The events with which the Egyptians were obsessed from the beginning of their civilization were those of the Deluge, and it can be shown that there are three distinct words or phrases in hieroglyphic writing for a flood of water; one designating the annual inundation, a second the primeval waters beyond the sky, and a third "The Great Flood which comes from 'the Great Lady" ' the great lady being heaven [5] . The Deluge events in Egypt, as Velikovsky has pointed out in some of his talks, were translated into the story of Osiris, Isis, Seth and Horus. Osiris was great kings whose brother Seth murdered and dismembered him, whereupon his wife Isis reconstituted his body and conceived a child to avenge him, the god Horus. Velikovsky takes these as events involving Saturn and Jupiter. The primary Egyptian reaction to these events was a massive effort to create political and agricultural stability by coordinating all activity along the Nile, and at the center of this stability was the institution of divine kingship. The living king was conceived to be the planetary divinity which had won the struggle in heaven: the planet Jupiter was the god Horus, and the living pharaoh was the god Horus. The king's activities were largely dictated by the rituals reenacting these events, and the reenactment was meant to celebrate, ultimately, the stability that succeeded them.
Now the only flaw in such a system is that the king is mortal. The experience of the incarnate god's death precipitated a catastrophe on the ritual level which had to be resolved. This was done by conceiving of the dead king as the god Osiris, who had been reborn and instituted as king of the underworld. The living king who succeeds him and honors his cult then becomes the god Horus. At the time of the king's death, his body was embalmed and kept aside for a ritually correct date of entombment. The new king acceded to the throne, but before he could be crowned he had to move throughout the land of Egypt performing a mystery play which reenacted the struggle between Horus and Seth. The dead king was then entombed at the end of the prescribed period with a solemn ritual of resurrection. It is carried out in the pyramid built as his tomb, and the so-called "Pyramid Texts" are the words inscribed on the walls of the pyramid's inner chambers and recited during it. They are extraordinarily complex because the dead king is in fact reborn as many different gods, but his identity as Osiris is one of the primary among them. This ritual has a living descendent in the Christian Easter midnight liturgy. Like the Old Kingdom entombment rite, the Easter liturgy memorializes the death and rebirth of a god who once lived on earth and then descended to the land of the dead; occurs at the season when vegetation returns; and consists of the reenactment of a passion followed by the celebration of a resurrection.
Most of the spells in the Pyramid Texts have as their direct goal the transfiguration of the king into one or many celestial divinities. Because Egyptian tenses are not easy to reconstruct, the tense in which these texts are composed may be taken as either the present, the subjunctive, or the imperative: "The King lives as Osiris", "May the King live as Osiris", or "Live, O King, as Osiris". But there are also spells, often inscribed on separate sections of the pyramid inner chambers, in which we find the first trace of apocalyptic syntax in Old Kingdom Egypt. They take the form of a threat by the king; if he is not permitted by the celestial gods to be reborn as one of their company, he will cause a celestial catastrophe. Here is one such passage. The priest reciting for the king addresses the supreme god and then the sun, and makes the following threat:
God whose name cannot be known
make a place for this single lord!
Lord of the radiance of the horizon
give place to the King !
If no place be made the king shall curse his father Earth,
Earth speak no more,
decree no more!
Whom the King finds in his way he will eat limb by limb !
The Pelican shall prophesy,
the company of nine come out,
the Great One rise,
and the gods in their nines cry:
"A dam shall dam the land,
cliffs crumble and banks unite,
ways be lost to the wayfarer,
steps of the land collapse on those who flee it!" [6]
It should be stressed that this is a text inscribed inside the pyramid. It is not a mode of thought accessible to the general population of Egypt, but rather, if you like, an esoteric text. In Old Kingdom Egypt it was celebration of stability that constituted the public experience, and this kind of apocalyptic syntax was held in check.
In turning to the Hebrew experience one must begin with the Scriptures, and since Wellhausen it has been agreed that to work with the Scriptures intelligently at all one must be able to distinguish the times at which different strata were composed. Unfortunately, it is impossible by this method to determine with any certainty when the central Hebrew concept of monotheism emerged. The earliest remembered moment in the specifically Hebrew religious experience seems to have been the covenant of Abraham with the god of a nomadic desert people, and the nature of this god is difficult to make out. The major moment thereafter was that of -1475, and it was passed on in memory as a law giving at Sinai by the god who "caused" the catastrophic events of that time. We cannot easily say whether he was himself originally a planetary god or was rather conceived of as a god who controlled the planets, since the latter conception had already been developed before the rescension in a text of the present account of the lawgiving. The next major episode is the attempt to institute kingship in Israel. This was not destined to last long, possibly because the king was not conceived by the Hebrews to incarnate a divinity who walked on earth or even to be the high priest of the Hebrew religion. He was a strictly political creation, the result of a demand by the Hebrew people to have a king like other nations. What follows the unsuccessful attempt at kingship is described in the second part of Worlds in Collision, which analyzes the writings of those prophets of the eighth and seventh century who were contemporary with the last series of celestial disturbances. The great phrase of these prophets is "The Day of the Lord." Again, we cannot say with certainty if the Lord is a planet or a god manipulating the planets, but the day of the Lord is in either case an experience of the reshaping of heaven and earth. Velikovsky has indicated in some of his talks that it may be only in the later prophets, Ezekiel and deutero-Isaiah, that a clear monotheistic and transcendental concept emerges. He has stressed that this is a very speculative line of thought, certainly not one which he wishes to introduce as an integral part of his work.
The only way to organize such a multileveled experience is to say that, for the Hebrews, Yahweh acted over a long period of time for the benefit of his chosen people. He remade heaven and earth for them; he altered space and time for them; and he did so in a series of events so qualitatively differentiated from one another that there could be no hope to telescoping them all into one ritual. Rather, the people that conceives of itself as chosen must sustain the tension of this operation of their god through time intellectually, and thus they become the people of the Book, whose existence is organized around the scriptural record of the different events in their sequence. The concept of their chosen-ness denied them the security of living in a world of immanent deity where the acts of the gods could be reenacted in a yearly cycle. Rather, they had constantly to keep in mind the entirety of their varied history. It is this sustaining of a tension that produced the rabbinical tradition of elaborate interpretation of the Book.
The difficulty of sustaining such tension also in due time produced an apocalyptic literature among the Jews, but the rabbinical tradition worked against it, and it remains peripheral to the Jewish religion. Nevertheless, when Jesus of Nazareth entered his public ministry the apocalyptic notions were at his disposal; and in some sense the gospels may be characterized as a teaching of the ethics of the last days. if this historical figure was convinced of an imminent end of the world, he must also have been passionately concerned to tell people how they should act in regard to it. There is a different aspect of Jesus, though, which may have been available to the minds of his contemporaries, and was in any case soon developed by Paul into an essential part of Christianity. That is Christ in the ancient pattern of a dying and reborn god whose death and resurrection promise salvation to mankind, whether salvation in the form of the return of vegetation in the yearly cycle, or salvation in the sense of life after the human death, or finally salvation as survival during the process by which heaven and earth are next remade. Consider for instance, a passage like Mark 13, where Christ's apocalyptic warning and his connection with the cycle of vegetation are present together. He says:
For in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light. And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors [7] .
The passage is remarkable because the first part of it can be read in the traditional thundering apocalyptic voice, while the second is a tender parable from the realm of vegetation, of the kind used throughout the gospels. Here two identities are present which need not necessarily have been well integrated in Jesus' actual conception of himself or in the perception of him by his contemporaries.
When Jesus died and Paul propagated the gospels, the apocalyptic literature of the Jews was ready to hand for imitation by Christians. The remaining history of the West has been deeply stamped by the fact that one such apocalyptic book was canonized, that of John the Divine, which has become our symbol for apocalyptic feeling in general. It is unnecessary to quote representative passages to give the tone, since even in our present culture it is impossible to escape exposure to it in the course of one's upbringing. But one passage in John is particularly remarkable for what it reveals about the syntax I have described.
And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven. And swore by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer [8] .
The last phrase is appallingly simple, for it represents the logical termination of apocalyptic thought, a psychological state in which endurance through time in fear of cataclysmic events becomes intolerable. What is left is only an utterly irrational desire that time shall cease. This reluctance to accept the temporal world, this demand that time end, has been with the West ever since. Yet the apocalypse did not come, and the shape Christianity took depended on that fact. With the failure of apocalypse in the generation succeeding Christ it was inevitable that the cataclysmic imagery be counterbalanced. Thus it was only a matter of time before the uniformitarian cosmology of Aristotle, diffused already through the Hellenistic and Roman cultures, should be grafted onto Christianity. Aristotle's entire view of the world is predicated on the assumption of an unending cyclical repetition of time in the natural world and among the celestial bodies. To use Aristotelian "reason" for the interpretation of apocalyptic "revelation" is therefore nothing less than to attempt to synthesize two diametrically opposite views of the solar system.
In the Islamic experience it is remarkable that all the phases of Christianity are telescoped. Islam begins with the preaching of Muhammed at Mecca, in short fervent recitals or warnings called Surahs in the Koran, whose message is entirely that the world is about to come to an end and that when this happens the elect will be saved and the evil will be damned. After the Hegirah, in which he moved to Medina, Muhammed's preaching becomes legislative and longwinded, concerned with working out codes of existence. The world had not come to an end, and his apocalyptic fervor waned. Within a few generations after his death, schools of jurisprudence cropped up; debates were held on juridical interpretation of the Koran; theological controversies became heated; Plato and Aristotle were again grafted onto the apocalyptic message; and finally, in Sufism, there appears a mysticism concerned to transcend space and time altogether.
I now invite you to move across the Atlantic. In doing so I must admit from the start that what I have learned about the religions of the New World has inevitably been shaped by analogies conceived with those of the Old. As long as this is recognized it is possible to proceed. One cannot encounter something utterly strange without bringing analogies to it; on the other hand, one cannot make genuine progress in understanding until the power of the analogies has been separated out from the material itself.
In the New World there are no cultures that have left extensive evidence of religious beliefs actually held before -1500. There are many Deluge legends, but no archaeological remains from before -1500 to substantiate them. The archaeological starting-point is conventionally put between the 16th and 14th pre-Christian centuries, which see the emergence of the great cultures of Mesoamerica, pre-eminently that centered around the site of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City, where the so-called "Pyramids of the Sun and Moon" are located. Legends of many different cultures in Mesoamerica speak of a prolonged night following a celestial battle, during which the tribes and peoples gathered at "Tula," and it is simple to conclude that Tula was the name given to Teotihuacan. There is a later Tula in Hidalgo modeled after it, but this was the original and central one [9] . After that gathering during the period of darkness, which lasted months or years, the tribes dispersed to wait for the sun each in a different place. They felt sorrow that they could not be with their brother tribes when the sun finally appeared, but they remembered their first unity at Tula. The civilization erected at the site of Teotihuacan in time became the dominant empire of Mesoamerica, and its capital city Tula can only be compared to Rome in the history of the West. Its earliest strata are from -1500, its great period of building is in the centuries immediately before Christ, and it was destroyed by invading armies in the fifth century. This is a very long existence for an empire with hegemony, both political and cultural, over the peoples around it; and the myth of the original gathering at Tula during the long night was undoubtedly one of the sources on which its claim to hegemony was based.
Unfortunately the symbolic language of the religion which unified the Tulan empire is not yet fully intelligible to us; we keep having to work back through later strata to get any glimpse of it at all. Certain themes can be isolated. The myth of the long night in which the peoples waited for the sun to rise involves the critical concept of sacrifice, to which the pyramids at Teotihuacan themselves are monuments. The original sacrifice was not of a man but of a god. The gods were in council at Tula in the darkness, and each offered to give himself in order to make the sun rise again. The legend of Quetzalcoatl is one version of this original sacrifice, and it is said that in his case, after the sacrifice, he became the planet Venus. The model of sacrifice was then practiced by the peoples ascribing to the various branches of the original Tulan religion. it should be observed that the practice of penitential blood-letting and other forms of self-mutilation was no less widespread than the practice of human sacrifice to the celestial deities. The compulsive logic of imitating the sacrifice of the god led to masochistic as well as sadistic expressions.
Given the lack of detailed knowledge of this first Tulan civilization, like to turn to the most highly developed and sophisticated Mesoamerican religion, that of the Mayans. It has been speculated that their rise to brilliance followed the fall of the Teotihuacano-Tulan empire in the fifth century, and their classical period is known to be from the fifth century to the ninth. The signal feature of Mayan religion on is the way it deified not only the planets but also the cycles of time and religion numbers 1 to 13. Thus time in different manifestations - as a planet that changes time, as the cycle of time that results, and as the numbers by which that cycle is measured - all became divine. Time itself seems to have become the essence, or if you like, the substance, of divinity; insofar as divinity was incarnate it was incarnate in space, but its essential nature was as time. But these are western terms, and we had better stick to simpler preliminary statements.
The Mayans were clearly aware of the possibility, or inevitability, of repeated world destructions, and like the other Mesoamerican peoples, they spoke of four earlier "suns" or ages, thought of themselves as living in the fifth "sun," and expected that "sun," too, to perish by some celestial agent. But the remarkable point is that this expectation produced so little apocalyptic frenzy or fervor in the Mayans. On the contrary, they developed their system of time until contemplation of the beginning and end of a world age was held completely in check and acquired no obsessive force whatsoever. Using units of four hundred years, they speculated that the cycle between the destruction of suns was thirteen four-hundred-year periods, thirteen baktuns. Steles from their classical period refer to them as living in the eighth and ninth baktuns, and the date they gave for the last destruction of the world has been computed as -3113. But they also computed in smaller units. They worshipped the year in its present length of 365 days, and computed the quarter-day error with greater precision than their contemporaries in the Old World. They also worshipped two other sacred years, one of 360 days and another of 260. The simplest interpretation in the Velikovskian context would be that these were extended back before the last celestial disturbances; but it is also possible that they are different celestial cycles of other bodies than the sun. The 260 day year was the most sacred, and the obsession of Mayan numerology became to reconcile the cycle of 260 days with all longer cycles. This they did by conceiving of the simultaneous journey through time of different divinities who were themselves units of time and who also bore time on their backs as they walked along the road. When a cycle ended, its god came to a restingplace and set down his burden. For the Mayans it was a sacred event when more than one such burden-carrying divinity arrived at their resting-places simultaneously.
The rituals developed for units of time smaller than the baktun must have played an especially significant role in reducing apocalyptic anxiety. Most effective was that of the Katun, the twenty year period, for this was the ritual by which time could be experienced in a single human lifespan. They conceived that each twenty year period had a god presiding over it, who bore it on his back. Ten years before that period began, they welcomed the god as a guest in their temples, propitiating him and the god of the present katun at the same time. This is a very civil process, a matter of good manners to the arriving god: it is also a religious experience easily accessible to the imaginations of those who live long after catastrophes, for it accords with the length of our own lives. It is thus a magnificent check against obsession with that distant day when the "sun" would come to an end.
The Hopis of northeast Arizona also trace their culture back to the great Mesoamerican complex of civilizations, even though they live far north of the area normally attributed to it. In them, one finds a conviction strongly parallel to that of the Jews, for the Hopis too conceive of themselves as a chosen people. They claim that during the last destruction of the world they, as a people, were chosen to survive, and that the divinity who reshaped heaven and earth instructed them to preserve a yearly cycle of rituals reflecting the pure pattern of creation, in order to prevent future catastrophes. Their theodicy also resembles the Judaeo-Christian, in that they believe that it was some fault in man, some moral failing, that precipitated the earlier world destructions. They are therefore concerned to bear themselves with both ritual and ethical correctness, in order to survive the next destruction as they have survived the previous ones. This ritual attitude is developed in the most minute details; even the steps of their dances reflect it. Here is a description of one such dance in which the cosmological symbolism is evident. It is the dance for Niman Kachina, a festival after the summer solstice, when the spirits from the sky who have visited the Hopi for half of the year are sent home.
The pattern of the dance embodies the familiar cosmological concept. The dancers first enter the plaza in a single file from the east and line up on the north side, facing west. As they dance, the end of the line slowly curves west and south, but is broken before a circle is formed, just as the pure re pattern of life was broken and the First World destroyed. The dancers then move to the west side, the line curves to the south, and is broken as was the pattern of life in the Second World. Moving to the south side and curving east, the dancers repeat the procedure at this third position, representing the Third World. There is no fourth position, for life is still in progress on this Fourth World and it remains to be seen whether it will adhere to the perfect pattern or be broken again [10] .
This concrete example gives a sense of what Deloria is talking about when he emphasizes the spatial nature of tribal American religions. The great events in time are transformed into the position of dancers in a plaza.
Finally there is the Aztec religion, easily the most barbarous aberration from the Mesoamerican civilizing norms. At the time when the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs' obsessional fear that the sun would collapse if not fed by human blood had grown so great that as many as twenty thousand people would be sacrificed in a single rite. Human sacrifice existed in Mesoamerican culture before, but it was used with great reserve, if one may speak of it that way; only in times of dire necessity would one person be sacrificed. Among the Aztecs, apocalyptic feeling had dislocated the syntax of the sacrifice and become obsessional in the highest degree. Scholars have reconstructed from Aztec chronicles the possibility that there may have been one particular king who initiated the idea of a ritual war for the purpose of gaining prisoners for sacrifice, and they have speculated that this idea was manipulated by the skillful politicians of the Aztec empire. In other words, these men were fabricating a kind of ideology or propaganda to justify their conquests. This would be merely one among many cases in which an ancient mythical obsession with preventing cataclysms falls later into the hands of people ready to use it quite differently from the original intention, and the result can clearly be termed a barbarization. The Aztec culture itself was in such tension as it continued to witness these spectacles of mass sacrifice that when the Spaniards arrived it seemed to be experiencing a desertion by its own gods. it may be this experience more than any other which explains the immediate evaporation of such a large empire.
At the beginning I suggested that this talk might be some kind of prolegomenon to the reconciliation of reason and religion. Hence it is not intended to be normative. And yet inevitably when I come to something like the Aztec cult of sacrifice I call it a barbarization, and when I come to the spectacle of the Mayans courteously welcoming the god of the twenty year period I call it civilized. Such characterizations come instinctively from my concurrence with the thought on which Mr. Doran ended his paper [11] . That is, that the mind most definitely has the power to relieve itself of its apocalyptic syntax. We can become aware of it when it is used or manipulated, when it becomes part of either the conscious or unconscious behavior of others. And we can, whether by an attitude or a rite, celebrate the fact that we live in stability now. In submitting religions to spectral analysis, this last capacity is the wavelength to watch for.
2. See behind, MacGregor, "Psychological Aspects of the Work of lmmanuel Velikovsky", page 47. (Ed.)
3. See ahead, Grinnell, "Catastrophism and Uniformity", page 131. [Ed.]
6. Pyramid of Unas, Utterance 254, Spells 276-279; my translation.
7. Mark 13: 24-29; King James Version.
8. Revelations 10: 5-6; King James Version.
11. See ahead, Doran, "Living with Velikovsky", page 146. [Ed.]